Muck (13 page)

But no-one was sniffing around, I say. Feet kisses up a mouthful of wine and gulps it quickly in order to speak. “Not yet maybe. But one minute you start shaving regularly and the next you start having urges. And because all men are weak and all females conniving, there you would be at sixteen with a bastard baby. And there I’d be with a daughter-in-law like those pram-pushers at the corner store. It would kill me.” She closes her eyes and shudders what she calls “the shudder of the dead” where someone has walked over her grave. “Me a grandmother, at
my
age. I have no intention of aging any further at present. I have no intention of wearing the grandmother label.”

She says she’s going to leave The Duke and me alone. She wants him to have a good man-to-man talk to me. “I’ll leave you two to it,” she says, leaving the room and closing the hallway door behind her. Just before the door clicks shut she says, “Men. Weak, weak, weak. Little sluts would tie you round their little fingers.”

The Duke wants me to sit on the sofa and listen to him. “She’s right, your mother,” he says. “You’ve got to be careful, a boy like you with his life ahead of him and a Tudor Park to think of, and girls who might want to trap you by using that thing between your legs. That thing between your legs can get you in trouble. Is that clear to you?”

Yes, I nod.

He slaps me on the knee and winks. He stands and takes a deep breath of satisfaction, of a matter having been settled and solved.

He stares through our balcony’s sliding glass doors. Our apartment is three levels up above the park called Rosa Gully in Vaucluse. We can see north to the Diamond Bay cliff face and the shabby brown flats perched on it that Feet says shouldn’t be allowed to claim the postcode. The Duke likes to stand as he is now and admire the ocean below that sends a spray to our faces. The way it turns from the deepest green to white bits and pieces in this weather! The wind may make the sliding doors rattle through the night and would keep the dead awake but when you have the sun on full beam and those bits and pieces flickering away it’s a thrilling sight to see.

He puts his fists on his hips to survey the sea before him as if the proud owner of it, the duke of the waters off Rosa Gully. And all the yachts that sail there only sail with his permission. All the fish must trespass out of sight below the surface. His sea, his non-land, no soil, no grass. There is no work to do with it but stand, fist-on-hips and watch water.

I stand beside him in the same pose. I breathe that it is quite a sight.

The Duke leans towards me. “That thing between your legs is how a girl says
Gotcha
. Understand?”

Yes, I understand.

“Think with
this
.” He points to his head. “Not with
that
,”

he winks and points down to my groin.

I will, I will, I say. A whine of embarrassment in my voice.

The hall door opens. Feet is clipping her earring to her left lobe because that lobe will have been pressed to the door for listening. “It’s all very well saying
I will, I will
as if you’re being put upon. You haven’t stood in that corner store buying sugar. You haven’t suffered mothers of those pram-pusher types asking bold as brass if my son has a beau. ‘He’s a good-looking boy that son of yours. Has he got a girlfriend? Is he spoken for?’ One hideous cretin with a bum like a sack of porridge wanted you to go to her daughter’s birthday. I told her ‘No thank you, he’s busy learning his father’s business.’ I told her you’ve got a lovely girlfriend in Sydney, just to throw all them off the scent. See how your mother looks after you? I’m prepared to lie through my teeth to protect you.”

If only arranged marriages were an accepted practice to this day. Her mind would be more at ease then, she says. “I’d soon weed out the gold-diggers.
I
should be the one who decides these matters. I should choose who succeeds me as the lady of Tudor Park. But no, it will be left to a boy and his urges. And then the little slut leaves him and claims half of what is ours, us, mine.”

THERE WAS ONE
.

I have kept her as a secret until now. I must collect more secrets because secrets are mine, a thing
I
own.

But how could she, that skinny Bettina, think I would bother with her ilk? Her father’s holding is only a third the size of ours. It is close enough to Tudor Park for him to be classed a neighbour, and he was neighbourly in his offer to help make this year’s hay. But in return for what? For nothing? He could think of no favour The Duke and I might do in return?

“This is my daughter,” he said to us. “She brings good sandwiches. She can also drive a truck. She has plenty of grunt for lifting any bale size.”

The audacity to think
she
would ever catch my eye, her oily brown hair parted on the side like a man’s. Man-tall, surely six foot if an inch and her shoulders slumped forward to try and hide it, which made her chest mounds sag beneath her T-shirt.

She left school at fifteen—what had she done the year
since? Cooking and cleaning around the house like another wife for her father.

She ran beside the truck, matching me lifted bale for lifted bale. She threw bales around without gloves or any hay-wad padding between the twine and her fingers. She barely spoke, just smiled.

When we broke for lunch at midday, she served me salad sandwiches, served them with a little speech: “I made them myself. Hope you like them.” The gap between her front teeth showed pink gum and grey fillings.

Next day she served biscuits she called Dutch Bakes. The lemonade was also hers—her aunty’s recipe, her mother’s lemons. I squeezed prickles from my knuckle skin. She offered to cycle home for tweezers to extract them properly.

Then in one shy sentence she said my shoulders were the widest she’d ever seen. She made a mixture—castor oil and vinegar—for rubbing to stop them sun-burning.

She asked to be my pen-pal. I almost gave her my Sydney address. “I’ve never written to Australia before,” she said.

To think I would want to read a sentence of hers! Fifteen and left school. She would hardly know five verbs. I would feel duty bound to correct her spelling; send her mail back with many red cross-outs. I could give her marks from one to ten and say, “Stick to making sandwiches. Write back when you get an education.”

I deliberately told her the wrong number for my street—it was the safe thing to do.

But then I told the correct one. Why? Because she
flattered me, she complimented my singing. I am so weak I give way to one flattering remark.

Singing is easy. It is exaggerated talking. I try to do it under my breath which keeps the melody vibrating in my throat, around my teeth, cheek-bones, gums, rather than be emptied straight out of me by singing loudly. It used to be my secret, this singing, but the very act of singing lets the secret out. Someone overhears you. Feet overhears you and then you might as well shout.

Other people try a tune with nasally, off-key embarrassment. But
I
can sing to Elvis Presley and mimic his voice exactly. Same for Tony Bennett, and Louis Armstrong and his gravel-growl. The ones Feet called The Oldies, playing her
45
s when drink dances in her.

I can croon, but I can also reach Robert Plant’s high, hard-rock screaming. I have the cockney “only” down perfect in David Bowie’s
Sorrow
. And Bettina had an ear for it if there was little more to like in her.

“How can you sing while lifting hay? You must be so fit,” she admired, and asked if it was
Green Green Grass of Home
I was singing. If so, it sounded just like Tom Jones. She said she’d never known someone who sings as I do, in tune, not amateur, but a real voice like the radio.

This kind of comparing I accept with a thank-you, a puffed chest of pride, a closed-mouth smile that acknowledges the compliment but expresses how well aware I am of this, my talent for songs.

Other comparing I despise. I would never allow a girl to compare me to other males, as males compare females to females. How one’s breath reeks like off meat. One’s cunt smells too fishy. One has too hairy a crack but her father runs Treasury. One is too intelligent, another is not intelligent at all. On and on it goes.

Boys are told not to hit women because men are stronger and gentlemen moral. But a girl who compared me to other boys—how do I get revenge? I would want to harm the other boy if he was compared to me more favourably. I would want his more handsome face made uglier. His carved muscles crippled in him. His sharper brain damaged to dullness. His richer family made to live hand to mouth.

Has Bettina compared me with another? Some
catch
she has had her eye on from the local batch of farmers, truck drivers, shop keepers, nobodies? What is she thinking to herself about me these two months on? Is she giggling to a friend that I can sing and am an heir at least, but my ears are pointy wings? I’m so weak that a girl like her can match my bale lifts? My legs are so thin, mere sticks when the wind blows my trouser-legs around them?

If so, then she should know this: I think of how her sister delivered fresh sandwiches one evening. Her younger sister by at least a year, and pregnant and sweating from her bulging belly. But with thicker, shinier hair than Bettina. It flicked around her face in a breeze, stuck in the corners of her lips so that she had to hook it free with her finger. So much prettier, with a white gapless smile and copper skin. Forearms without blemishes of moles and dark hairs. No wonder she was already taken. I should say as much in a letter to Bettina. I could make her bawl with jealousy—her own sister her rival. Her sister took my eye more than her even though she was claimed by another man’s seed.
That
would punish her for giggling about me or comparing me to others if that’s what she has done. And if she has done that, it is typical of the children they call girls.

She should know this: I am too old for her. Not old in years, but in the rest of me. It is my most savoured secret: I have kissed a woman. A full-grown woman not a child, but someone forty. Her name was Genevieve. At night, before sleep, I play with myself to her memory. Not just the memory of the kiss itself. Of having the breath of another in my mouth. The smoke-wine tang of being entered by her spit, her breath and tongue. Nor what followed on from kissing— the fingering into one another’s clothes to our most private skin. Her jerky sob-sighing that surely was bliss, though it could have been misery for the sameness of the sounds. No, not just that, but the transgression: my lust is no normal lust. It prefers a face lined with laughs and frowns of the years, webs of eye wrinkles and shoulders sun-freckled, cleavage cracked with aging. I learned this because of Genevieve. My lust prefers the powders and perfumes applied to cover these shortcomings which are not shortcomings for me, but safe-signs. Arms hanging off the bone, soft and with a rubbery feel to the touch, yet not under-swaying as fat people’s do.

When Genevieve walked, her breasts quivered at the seam—a safe-sign. The child-girl Bettina’s breasts were male-hard as muscle when she stood up straight.

Genevieve’s voice was not a screech-girl’s, but a cigarette rasp. Genevieve would never giggle about me or compare me to others. I was her secret too. I was her taboo. She was a friend of Feet’s transgressing with her son, a lad, a mere fifteen.

What would farm girl Bettina say about that? People like me live by different rules. We take the day off school to go to parties at Melbourne Cup time. Proper parties with adults and gin, society people, Sydney faces from TV. We flirt with a Genevieve while our parents are in the other room. Never mind that her own son is at the same school as me. Never mind that her breasts are breasts
he
would have suckled, the bastard son of a judge and Genevieve the judge’s mistress. Genevieve called me handsome and swept my face and arm with her long, sharp fingers. Stared straight into my eyes and held the look like a dare.

Dear Bettina,

People like me use our father’s cologne and shave for the benefit
of a Genevieve not a plain, farm female like you. No unsightly hair
must repel her. No whisker-prickle when she sweeps her fingers.
People like me write poems for her. People like me return her lingering
looks and stares. When the Melbourne Cup is playing in the
lounge we two close the door into the laundry and kiss proper kisses,
feel to those places only lovers can see bared.

Of course I will never send this letter. I protect my secrets. And what would Bettina write back if I did? That people like me are disgusting? How dirty to be mixing with a woman like that, a female almost three times my age? How dreadful to be taken advantage of in that way?

Dear Bettina,

You are so innocent, naïve. What was dreadful is that it only
happened once. I thought my sweet Genevieve had felt pleasure, but
suddenly there were tears. She pushed away from me seconds after
our first kiss and feel. No more linger-looks ever followed. No more
hand-sweeps or skin-touch. No “We must do this later,” no “Skip a
class at school and come here.”