Hoi Polloi (9 page)

My bedroom has a double bed for my bed as if I were an adult, though not an adult like Heels and Winks who have never slept, as far as I’ve seen, in a double bed but in single beds pushed together to make a vast bed with a gap in the middle. The reason the beds are pushed together is not simply to create one vast bed. The reason, they tell me, is that it benefits Winks’ heart. Winks has a defective heart valve and always has had since a bout of something called rheumatic fever that he suffered as a boy. The pushed-together beds allow him to stretch out and sleep without being scrunched up in a way that would mean his heart would be scrunched up and not pump properly and kill him. I’m told a lot of things. If horis are not really animals and a fall from a ladder is not a cure for stuttering but elocution lessons are, if … if … I could go on and on, then why would Winks become a dead man if the single beds weren’t pushed together? Winks looks fine to me. He is yet to have more than fifty-seven grey hairs growing through his black hair. I’ve counted them secretly at dinner: fifty-seven exactly. A paltry number in among the black. His arms are solid with muscle and meshed with plump veins. When he walks I need to skip into a run to match his pace. Surely a sick man would never have been able to withstand those hotel beatings and deal out beatings of his own.

“That life would have killed me sooner or later,” he con-fides, shaking his head slowly. “It’ll be a better life here. Here’s the type of place to raise a boy. A clean slate.”

A clean slate. Those words, the mix of disappointment and hope in his tone, make my stomach sink and throb as if vomit is about to curdle towards my throat. I wish, oh how I wish, I could have the clean slate I was born with, not this shameful one at twelve years old.

“Even so,” he continues, “you never know. I might only live another five years, if that. So be a good boy. Be a good boy because we don’t know how much time we’ll have left together.” He says the last sentence while patting his chest like a patient.

Of course I will be a good boy. I will make the most of this clean slate moving to Australia has given me, I promise. Five years sounds like a long time but it’s not really. I would be sixteen and have no father. That’s a terrible thing to look forward to at the end of five years. Every day of that five years will be tainted by that knowledge. I don’t know whether to reach over to Winks and hug him, my temporary father. Should I begin to cry? Is that what he would want at this moment, to comfort him and him comfort me? No. He holds out his hand for me to shake. “Deal?” he winks, cheerily for a dying man. “You be a good boy and we’ll both be happy.”

“Deal,” I reply.

“That’s the way.” He slaps me playfully on the knee just as Heels opens the flat’s door letting in a farty smell of boiling vegetables from the rest of the building. She has been shopping and carries two packages. One very fat, its brown paper bound by blue stringy ribbon. She throws the packages onto the pouf and begins picking the fat one apart.

“I found the perfect thing,” she says almost singing the sentence in her excitement. “Perfect, perfect, perfect.”

Winks tells her that we’ve been having a man-to-man talk about being a good boy. He winks at her.

“I certainly hope you
are
going to be a good boy. In fact I’m positive he will be. Especially after this coming Sunday.”

Sunday? What’s happening on Sunday? Sunday is always lie-in day. It’s do-nothing day. Here in Sydney there is a beach at Coogee where last weekend we ate a cut lunch on the hot sand and got burnt watching the waves curl over onto the shore as if being sliced. I swam in the foam and swallowed salt water. Let’s do that again this Sunday. Please, please.

Inside the ripped-apart paper is a navy blue blazer, its sleeves folded neatly like arms. Shiny gold buttons stud the cuffs and front. A red and yellow bow-tie is pinned to the lapel. Heels tears open the other, smaller package—a white shirt in a plastic sheaf cover, a pair of white walk-socks.

“
This
is what’s happening on Sunday,” Heels says holding the blazer against my body to test the length. “On Sunday you are going to be christened.” She stops still a second, stares and frowns into space. “Or is it baptised? What’s the term we’re supposed to use?” She leans her chin on her fingers, wondering if there’s a difference between christened and baptised. Are they the same thing? She doesn’t know, nor does Winks. I certainly have no idea. She will have to ask Aunty Dorothy.

Aunty Dorothy is my aunty in name but no relation. She’s been Heels’ Sydney friend from years before I was born. They met at the Randwick races in the Members near the Champagne Bar when Dorothy was with two forgettable friends who had horses with Tommy Smith that even he, the great trainer himself, couldn’t make win. Dorothy was wearing a gold and blue striped turban-style hat arrangement with the thinnest of gold chain banding fastened by a gold gauze brooch in the shape of a rose. “I just had to ask her where she got it,” Heels answers if people ask, “So how did you two meet?”

They have euchre nights and oyster mornays at Doyle’s where they spend whole afternoons saying, “Beautiful oysters. I can still taste those oysters they were so mouth-watering.”

Aunty Dorothy has never been married. She likes to be footloose and fancy-free and can’t be bothered with men, though she has been proposed to twice. She suspects they were after her money. She inherited a horse transport business from her father and would rather spend the money on herself and playing euchre with the ladies and going to Doyle’s than bother with men.

“She’s a ladies’ woman,” Winks winks.

“What’s a ladies’ woman?” I ask.

“Enough of that,” Heels reprimands him, but the winking continues.

“A ladies’ woman is …”

“Don’t you dare say such terrible things to the boy.”

“A ladies’ woman is a
ladies’
woman, son.”

“He means a lady who prefers the company of ladies in a closer way than usual,” Heels reluctantly explains.

“The way you two natter I wonder sometimes,” Winks mumbles.

“That’s a disgusting and terrible thing to say.”

“She likes to hold your hand when you’re walking. What’s that all about?”

“How dare you! Girls holding hands is as innocent and natural as men playing their sweaty games together and hugging and putting their heads and hands in all sorts of places in scrums. You don’t say
they’re
men’s men in that disgusting, terrible way.”

Aunty Dorothy will know whether the term is christened or baptised because she’s Catholic and Catholics are a churchy kind. We don’t want to get to church and make fools of ourselves and look like ignorants.

“Am I going to be a Catholic?” I ask.

No, I am not to be made into a Catholic, says Heels. A compromise has been worked out between being a Catholic and the fact that Winks’ mother, my grandmother, was a Baptist and Winks himself has been baptised, or christened or whatever it is, a Baptist, and Heels’ mother was a Presbyterian. “At least I think it was Presbyterian,” she says, chewing her lip.

This is the first time I’ve heard them mention religion.

“Are we religious?” I ask.

Winks screws up his mouth to one side as if biting back laughter.

“Of course we are,” Heels answers sternly. “We just don’t make a song and dance about it.”

“Do we really believe in God?”

“That’s a terrible question. Of course we do. Everybody believes in God.”

“We don’t go to church,” I say.

She blinks and admires the blazer, smooths it with her fingers. “It’s what’s in the heart that counts. Sunday is a diffi-cult day to get to church because it’s the day when I relax.”

“Do you pray?” I cannot ever recall her praying. I’ve never seen her kneel down and put her hands together or say “God” or “Jesus” except as a curse.

“Of course I pray.”

“What do you pray for?”

“Lots of things.”

“Like what?” I sense the possibility of catching her out.

“Oh I don’t know,” she sighs, fed up with the conversation. “When we’ve had one of our horses racing or backed a horse I pray for them to win.”

“But they don’t always win.”

“Maybe they’d lose a lot more if I didn’t pray.”

“But that’s not real praying. It’s not praying for forgiveness and peace and love like praying is meant for.”

She holds up her hand, sucks the air for me to stop pestering her with ridiculous questions. I say I don’t want to be baptised or christened because it’s for doing when you’re a baby. She says I’m still a baby to her and I will be made a Church of Englander because with the Church of England you get a lot of good old-fashioned ritual and the long robes and organ music like the Catholics and plenty of rules and dos and don’ts for life but without having to become a Catholic. To be a Catholic is to be another type of person altogether. No one can say exactly how being Catholic makes you a different type of person. They, Heels and Winks, are not experts on the ins and outs of religion and don’t pretend to be. But Catholics believe in all sorts of strange hooey and have to eat fish on Friday and have a king called a Pope. Being Church of England is in the middle of being Catholic and being Presbyterian or one of those Baptists who hold their services in halls for goodness’ sake. What’s the point of going to church if you’re not going into a nice church but into a common hall?

I am going to be christened or baptised or whatever it is and that’s that. There will be no arguments on the matter. No ifs and buts. Aunty Dorothy is quite right when she says, What can you expect of a child who has not been received into a church? It’s like jinxing them, setting them up for trouble. “You’ve certainly been proof of that,” says Heels.

What’s more, if I’m to get into a top school in Sydney, somewhere with genuine class that will open doors for me in the world, how will it look if I’m asked what religion I am and I can’t tick any box. They’d show us out the way we came in. I should have been done years ago but time just slipped away and besides, there were no nice churches in Heritage. None like the Church of England church up the road in Kensington, St Martin’s. It’s nice in there. It’s not too grand and not too gloomy as to make the whole occasion depressing. We want it to be a happy affair. There’s a lovely garden out front to take photos in. So I must look smart in my new blazer, and if the Minister fellow or whatever he’s called, the Father, the Reverend, asks if I’ve done Sunday School lessons and studied the bible I’m to say, Yes, because that’s what he’s been told. Now go try on the new blazer.

Greeks are pakehas but not quite, I decide. I inspect their skin, mine versus theirs. The pink-white-tan of mine on my forearms has no oily colour in it as in theirs. This effect on the skin, this oily colour, creates a grey misty smear under the surface where the dark hairs sprout, each hair spaced wider than the fine, red-blond hairs on my forearm. This grey misty smear makes the skin on Stephen Papadopoulos’s arms appear transparent for the first few layers like Vaseline or Vicks VapoRub. “Olive,” Stephen says. “The colour’s olive.” It’s a cloudy, grey-blue tinged whiteness that surely is close enough to pakeha to pass for pakeha. Winks’ skin is darker than Heels’. It has a permanent light tan but would never be mistaken for hori because it’s merely his tendency to go brown instantly a ray of sun touches him. “I wouldn’t have married him if it was anything else,” says Heels. But Stephen’s darkening, his “olive”, is certainly a different kind of pakeha tint.

“European,” says Stephen when I ask him, What’s a Greek, and where does a Greek come from? He’s as good as pakeha, definitely, I’m sure of it. Heels wants me to tell her about my new school. She hopes I’ve made a nice friend, someone nice and suitable that I can bring home to meet her and Winks and play with as long as we’re not too rowdy and can keep to ourselves because there isn’t much room. I answer by making a joke about trying to say Stephen’s name, how it’s just as well I don’t stutter anymore because how would I be able to attempt the name Stephen Papadopoulos if I stuttered. I can’t even pronounce it anyway and have to settle for Stephen With The Name No One Can Say. Stephen has been assigned by the teacher to be my guide and new friend at the primary school at Randwick until I can look after myself. He’s my Clean Slate Friend, I’ve decided, the first friend of my new, clean life. He’s my best friend because he knows nothing about me and therefore I don’t have to dislike him. For all he knows I’m equal to him. When I ask him slyly, just slipping it casually into conversation, what kind of bad things he has done in his life he doesn’t really know what I mean. His brown bulgy eyes dart left to right, right to left, confused by the question, by the idea of
bad things
. I asked him the question to make sure he isn’t like me. He’s better than me, and therefore he makes
me
better, he keeps my clean slate clean by his presence. If he knew about bad things, if he had done them himself I would have to find another friend whom I could look up to. I even single out particular bad things for Stephen to consider, a test, shrugging and sticking out my bottom lip as though these particular bad things, by complete chance, have only now leapt into my head: “Getting drunk for instance. Or thieving. Thieving from your parents.”