Muck (11 page)

I tell him that yes, I’m sure they are related. The two Jims nod indifferently.

Feet purses, “Indeed, it must be nice to have a talented family. Never mind. We can’t have everything.”

She is digging her nails into the upholstery, so deeply the red of them disappears in the folds. If she were standing she would be close to her two steps one way, two steps the other way stage. The Duke has read the signs too. He sits up straight, slaps his hands onto his thighs and says we mustn’t hold these good people up any further—milking-time must be getting near. “Yes it must,” he confirms from his watch.

“Indeed. We best be going I think,” Feet digs, and stands, and is already walking along the hall before The Duke and I have finished handshaking the Jims and Christine.

The Duke says he is delighted to have finally met some of his neighbours. He hopes they have a good milking season and make plenty of money.

I add my thank-you for showing me their photographs.

The Duke says that when you’re new to a place it’s a boon if you meet people you can rely on to help you out once in a while. And vice versa, of course. He says it’s lovely to have a good old-fashioned cup of tea with neighbours, and he hopes we can do it again.

“Amen,” I say. Devout types like these will appreciate an Amen from a younger man. An Amen makes you seem plainer as a person. My scarred hands are their kind of hands, they’ll be thinking. That and his Amen—he is just like us.

Feet is already in the passenger seat of the Monaro, window wound up, rear-vision mirror twisted her way for any lost lipstick, for any make-up smudges or flakings.

As soon as The Duke slides into place behind the steering wheel she starts: “I’ll give them
fancy pants tart
. Who the hell do they think they are! Bastards with their cups of shitty tea. As if I’d be interested in photos of bloody cows. Invite people around and that’s all you get. Too lazy to even put on a pair of shoes. They make me sick, the bastards, the lazy pricks. I’ve got a good mind to go back and get my champagne and they can stick their
fancy pants tart
up their arse.”

The Duke tells her to quieten down unless she wants them to hear but Feet says she couldn’t care less if they hear. Let them hear. They’re
nothing
to her.

The Duke reminds her that we invited ourselves into their house, and in that case we have to take what we get.

Feet snorts her contempt for such a notion. “Be on their side if you want. If that’s the way you feel. To hell with you too. I can’t bear it. Sell bloody shitting Tudor Park is what we should do. Or burn it to the ground, the lot of it, every blade of grass. To hell with it all.”

The Duke brakes the car with a gravel-skid. “Go back and get it then,” he yells, thumping his palms on the steering wheel. “You want your champagne then go and get it for Christ’s sake.”

Feet sucks in a seething breath. “Don’t you talk to me like that. Drive the car. Get me out of here.”

“You’re full of hooey.”

“How dare you. I have to get out of this car this minute,” Feet seethes, head in hand.

“Well get out.”

“And let
them
see me, the bastard shits with their spying eyes? See me thrown out of our family car like common filth and made to walk home? Oh Christ, what have you done to me? You’ve lowered me to this, this mixing with cow people. Get me out of here. Get me out of this shit bastard place.”

I
T HAS BEEN FOUR HOURS
. Four hours, and the second self has not returned her safely from the ghost train.

She curses and digs, grabs her hair and curses but has not arrived home up her rattly vertebrae to her washed and whistling mind.

We call and call, The Duke and I. He that it’s getting well on into the evening and we should have a meal and play Euchre perhaps, the three of us, for something to do, and she can be the dealer to start with. And even though we should be four not three to play it properly, it passes away the time with its trump plays and left bowers.

Impossible, Feet digs: how can she be expected to play a silly game when those bastards over there are laughing at her with their
fancy pants tart
talk and
her
bottle of champagne they’re probably feeding to a cow.

I call to her that I walked down the road and retrieved her Wedgwood plate from the woman in a hair-net. I lie that the hair-net woman praised her scones and admired them being presented on such a lavish dish.

Feet seizes the plate from me. Holds it up for inspection. She finds a flaw immediately. “There!” she gasps. “The bitch has ruined my Wedgwood. Shitting bitch like all the other bastards. She’s cracked my beautiful, beautiful Wedgwood.”

No she hasn’t, The Duke says, inspecting the plate under a light.

No she hasn’t, I agree with my eyes that are young. Reliable younger eyes.

But her eyes are all that matter. What do
our
eyes know about her beautiful Wedgwood?
Her
eyes see a crack and that crack means
our
eyes are just trick eyes deliberately not seeing cracks in order to drive her mad and stick horrible, hateful pins into her. “I’m not fooled by your trick eyes.”

She stomps to the kitchen door, out through the fly-screen and flings the plate to the concrete. It cracks open down the middle, surrounded by the shattered white and gold shards of its edges.

In she comes through the fly-screen to fetch the broom and rubbish bin. She is muttering through a slit in her lips, words of no clear sentence for understanding.

Out she goes and sweeps the clacking pieces. “My parents wanted more for their daughter than this, sweeping up Wedgwood because of cow people and snide hatred from shits who spy and call me names.”

The Duke steps onto the concrete to say, “Let me do that” and “You go pour yourself a wine” and “You go lie yourself down.”

But Feet holds the broom at arm’s length from him so she cannot be accused of shirking her duties, of not keeping this ugly little farm cottage clean like women should.
Her
instincts always told her to marry into money but no, she had to fall in love instead and start with nothing and work to get ahead. For what? For name-calling shits and bitches who defile her possessions.

She sweeps and mutters to the concrete. “I’ve tried to remain an attractive woman but I can see I needn’t of bothered. Who’d want
him
now! Ears tucked up in his silly bloody cap. His underpants poking over his belt. Who would want him! I should have let myself go and had him divorce me. At least I’d have money instead of filthy cattle.”

The Duke raises his voice and points angrily. “You just shut up. You’re not Greta Garbo anymore yourself.”

“I won’t be told to shut up by you.
You
, who if you’d had any gumption would have made us oil millionaires many times over.”

The Duke swats the air to signal he is not going to listen to her anymore because she’s just a typical woman who loves to make a scene and isn’t satisfied unless regretting something and being bitter.

He says to me, “Women love these games and arguments.”

Feet sweeps the concrete so hard the pile of swept crockery is re-scattered. “Gumption,” she says, spit spraying from her lips. “He didn’t have the gumption,” she wants me to know.

The Duke sits on the back step to pull on his gumboots and tells me not to bother with her.

But
she
tells me not to bother with him. She says that all it would have taken was a bit of gumption and instead of buying Tudor Park we could have bought an oil well for a song. An oil well that as we speak is making millions for some other man because that man had the gumption to be the winning bidder. “Imagine the life. We’d be building a house not here but smack dab on Sydney Harbour. Invitations to all the best dinners in Australia. It doesn’t bear thinking about. ‘Oh yes, we’re in the oil business,’ we’d be able to say. Instead of ‘milk.’ Hardly has the same ring.”

Oil? Never have I been so proud of The Duke. My own father was going to be an oil millionaire. This man of mine with his tucked-in ears and Jockey underwear always showing. His greying fuzz of hair. This uneducated doer, one who came from nothing but has built himself a legacy for his son to prize.

“We could have owned oil wells?” I ask him, awed.

“Perhaps,” he says with a groan of not wanting to discuss the matter.

But buying oil wells is not a subject to be mentioned and in the next minute forgotten. “Where were the oil wells? Why didn’t we buy them?”

The Duke doesn’t reply. If he was merely remaining silent out of modesty, I would leave questioning for another time. But his silence is a frowning, uncomfortable, hiding-something silence.

Feet answers, “In Western Australia. An acquaintance of your father, one of his horse-racing contacts, was starting up an oil company and invited him to bid to be a partner.”

“Why didn’t we do it?”

Feet sighs, “Gumption.”

The Duke stands, stamps his gumboots into place.

“Can we still buy them?” I ask, excitedly. “Can we change our mind?”

“No,” says The Duke sharply. He raises his voice to Feet to remind her that he knows nothing about the oil business, and even if he could change his mind he wouldn’t because the oil business is out of his league. “It’s the big time.”

I step away from him. He has shocked me. He has disgusted me with his “out of my league” talk. Talk he would call
defeatist
in me. The talk of a weak man, a disappointed man. A Gunna.

He moves towards me, but I don’t want him close at this moment. I certainly don’t want his hand to touch my shoulder. I see him extending his arm but I take a step away.

He says, “We can only go so far in a lifetime.” His voice is soft, no, it is weak. The weak voice of a disappointed man with no gumption. “Perhaps with your education you’ll get your own turn to do such things and you’ll be able to say ‘Yes Sir, that’s for me.’”

“When would I get that opportunity? You just passed up the perfect opportunity,” I say as disrespectfully as possible by closing my eyes, shaking my head and slapping my palm against my forehead. My father has let me down and now I have deformed humans instead of oil for my legacy. Norman and son instead of blackened men in hard hats on great steel rigs, drilling into the earth to fuel the world. How could I ever have been proud of this defeatist? I can’t look him in the face. And because he has let me down this way I feel justified in calling him a Gunna. Which I do: “You’re a Gunna.”

I still can’t bear to look at him. Let him be offended. Let him be angry. His son is telling him he’s a Gunna. And I’ll tell him again if he disputes it.

“You make your own way in life then.
You
do better. You go out and work at your own thing, you ungrateful, spoilt little …” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

Now I look at him. His chin is quivering with rage, no, with holding back tears. Tears pool at the bottom of his eyes. He quivers to Feet: “What kind of ungrateful bloody son have you bred?”

Feet lets the broom handle drop. She begins to quiver back at him. “I’ve done my best. I’m sorry, but I’ve done my best. If my best isn’t good enough, then I’m sorry.”

I say to The Duke. “I thought you were building a legacy for me. That’s what you told me. Now you tell me to make my own way. To go out and work at something else.”

Feet begins her pacing right to left, right to left. But instead of digging into her scalp and boiling spit in her lip corners, she kneels and weeps. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tearless crying at first, but then The Duke goes to her, kneels, hugs her and says that he is the one who should be sorry. Sorry for saying she had bred such a son, such a terrible thing for him to say. Tears drip from her, spotting the grey ground.

Feet tells him she’s sorry for saying such hurtful things. For raising the oil-well nonsense and getting so worked up as she’s given to do.

I have no legacy now? Am I on my own?

I probably went too far calling The Duke a Gunna. He

has after all provided Tudor Park. It could be worse. He could have nothing.

Fortunately I’ve learnt a trick or two from Feet in my sixteen years. I know how to get my legacy back. “All right, I’ll go out and work,” I announce. “I will leave school and I will get a job and work. You want me to make my own way in the world, well if that’s the way you feel, that’s what I’ll do. I don’t want your legacy.”