Muck (20 page)

That command has strengthened my digging, for I’m powerless under that command, the chain of command, the natural order. My twitch self is here. Yet there is no-one to pass the powerlessness on to.

“Go and tell her you do give a damn. Do it now!”

I am silent, and intend to stay that way. Let it be a twitch silence that twists Feet’s face into an angry face and brings on the dry weeping.

The Duke stands and puts his fists on his hips. “Look, you’ve got
300
acres to sing to your heart’s content. And you’ve got your mother to sing to, to give her a lovely song.”

No, no, no, I dig. “I don’t want to sing like that anymore, from the throat.”

Feet’s face twists tighter, but I am not trying to twitch her now. I want to explain about the
me
kind of singing as opposed to the other kind.

The Duke points and jabs that that kind of talk—the not wanting to sing to your own mother talk—is hurtful and nonsense. “Stop all this having tickets on yourself business. Singing to your mother is what you’ve been given the gift for. Not for having tickets on yourself. Not for putting a play before your own mother, before family and Tudor Park.”

I dig and sneer that one minute they want me away from Taonga and its gold-diggers. And the next thing I’m being made to go there.

Feet scratches the static in her scalp. “He’d bloody well sing for that little slut who wrote him letters. She’ll put her claws into him with her ‘Such a wonderful voice you have’ and ‘I hope to hear it again soon.’ Sing for a little peasant bitch, but not for me.”

“What letters? I never got letters.”

Feet throws back her head triumphantly. “You certainly did not, I saw to that. Some little bitch, Bettina.” She shivers and pulls a face as if the very act of naming her brings a bitter chill. “I dealt with her. Those letters found their way straight to where they belonged—the bin. I thought we’d had our talks about urges and gold-digger peasants. I thought we were safe. But obviously not. To hell with it all then. We
should
stay in Sydney. Not some shit bastard place with bitches who write love letters on paper with cheap shitting perfume sprayed on.”

I step left, then two steps right. My nails so deep in my thighs my finger bones ache. I bite down hard, teeth into teeth, an electric shock jolts me from a filling. “Fuck,” I yell.“Fuck, fuck. They were my letters.”

Feet screams “Language!” and presses her hands to her ears. “How dare he say language in my presence. Language in front of me.”

The Duke leaps over the coffee table, fists clenched, a fury-face. “Take that language back or so help me!”

Feet pants and spits, “Language. The bastard uses language in front of me.” She sweeps up the manor house plans from the table and crushes them against herself. She rips them, flings a handful to the floor.

The Duke heel-spins from me to hurry to her. He grabs her ripping hands and prises out shreds of plans, rescues paper balls of them and pushes them into his pockets. He demands she “Stop this” but his bellowing only makes her scream for me to get my bastard, filthy mouth out of her hearing. “Shitting bastard using language in front of me.”

I
F BLOOD IS RED
, why are veins blue?

Water is clear but the grass it falls to green. Feet and The Duke—how is it they made me? A natural order exists that turns such ordinary people into my new breed.

Nor is silence a way of finding a way out of silence. It is a language all its own. The language of
distance
between The Duke and Feet and me. If I must speak, I would demand they provide me with what money I need. Clothes, food, and submit to the new breed that supersedes them in me.

However, if I am to find the me voice, I must not let sound die in me from unuse in silence. Die even before it is born.

They have won. Those two ordinaries. I am here on this farm. I must give up my determined silence. I put it in place because the twitch self insisted I punish them.

This blank mask of resentment, I cannot keep it up. It is the blank mask of a fraud. For the manor house thrills me too much. Its front door like the vast slab entrance of churches. Staircase rising eighteen steps to a little landing. It bends there for seven steps more. On the left my bedroom, vast enough for a dozen Queen beds. Bathroom with gold taps called Pharaoh’s Fingers. Main bedroom beside it with a wall made of window. Window too at the end of a wardrobe you walk through. The patchwork of paddocks spreads below. Window in the ceiling to let in the sky. The ceiling sprayed in a gravel-paint known as frosting.

Downstairs beyond the gallery, two guest rooms we’ll call the South Wing. The nook for billiards—red walls with redder velvet flower patterns to set off the table’s green baize. A long, low light with tassels just like professionals. A step up to a viewing area. Cane furniture where Feet can watch over games.

The Tudor façade outside with its skinny strips of timber, brown crossed over white. Tin roof fringed with shaggy wood for an effect of faux thatching.

The twitch self orders me to be silent when Feet asks, “What do you think of your room?” It demands I confine my answer to a shrug, an “It’s OK” at the most, and look down, not around me, admiringly. This I do.

The Duke says, “Is that all you can say?” He shakes his head exasperated that he cannot
reach
me. I do not wish him wounded or soul-sick whether he’s an ordinary or not. But the twitch tells me I should wish it. It says, “Ignore his hurt and soul-sickness.”

Feet is looking to the heavens and wondering where did she go wrong to deserve such an ingrate for a son. The second self is coming for her. She greets it with her bared teeth, her usual claw of fingers.

I do something the twitch self mocks as weak. I feel a poisoning in my stomach which the twitch self dismisses as nothing but guilt. Guilt is a bug not potent enough to make me throw up, but one that sends up waves of mild nausea.

After what Feet did to my letters, guilt is the last bug I should let into my system. Hated is more like it. The twitch agrees. Yet, just as the ghost train is ready to rush her away, I tell her the bedroom is beautiful. Such a view—the great grin of the mountains. I am its audience of one. I feel I should offer it applause. The ghost train leaves without her.

I pass the guilt down to Bettina. If only that peasant gold-digger knew the trouble she had caused. Sending me letters, causing a rift between a mother and her son.

But when Feet asks me if I think her plastic flower arrangement is lovely, and her new flower-stands—Roman columns made of metal that appear to be of stone—I answer No. No too to the fabric hydrangeas that never die or shed a leaf, that need no water, just washing.

I want Feet arrested for stealing my letters. A thief mother. I dig my nails beneath my shirt to go deep into skin. I reinstate the silence.

But then the guilt recurs. Police? A thief? Look at the woman’s pleasure, I demand of the twitch self. “Look at it.” So simple a pleasure in humble plastic flowers.

“Did you say something?” asks Feet.

“Yes. Those columns are quite nice.”

She bought a novelty lamp in Sydney. An ancient naked Greek figure standing in a cage with bars of light. “That’s nice as well,” I say.

But an hour later, seething silence because I think of her reading Bettina’s pages. Pages that might have had crosses for kisses on them, hand-drawn sunshine and hearts. I seethe through dinner. I eat in small mouthfuls as if the food is not to my taste.

By now Feet is exhausted, confused. To be on the verge of many ghost journeys all day and every journey cancelled by me just in time—I have the timing down perfect.

“Will you sing to me?” she asks, wearily, flopping on the new blue three-seater to doze. “Singing would block out that dreadful whoosh-whoosh sound of the washing machine.”

I certainly will not sing for her. Robber and reader of letters. Singing for the sake of clothes washing.

Let her swoon all she likes at the thought of a serenading.

Sung to sleep as if drugged by me, a snake charmer for humans. I will not sing for her.

I sing
Love Me Tender
.

I sing
Embraceable You
.

I
AM NOT ASKING FOR
the plum job at Tudor Park. I have no desire to drive those deformed humans to milking for instance. Let Norman have it. Let William if he wishes, nudging and prodding them forward like a chain gang without chains.

Nor do I want the bottom rung—hosing muck from the shed yard after milking is done. The grass gone to liquid, green custard curdled in stinking bowels. An hour it takes. The hose water so icy my fingers swell and itch with chilblains as if the skin will any second split.

Poached Eye and Sensible have been sent away to trainers with reputation. Churchill gets his five dollars now to paint our post and railings for half a morning. No need for me to oversee him. Let him hate-talk timber. He can curse and kick the woodness all he likes. Fences feel no rancour. They have pine for ribs and eyeless knots for eyes.

No, the job I covet is feeding the new-weaned calves. The females kept to feed up into milkers. The males, called Bobbys, are reared a few days and no more. They are crowded into a tray on the tractor for driving to the roadside. There a truck collects them to be veal meat. The driver checks that the birth cord dangling from under their fur has wizened healthily like a stick of pizzle. He weighs them for the abattoir’s over-
58
pounds rule.

When feeding the calves I can sing.

I bolt a vat on wheels to the Massey Ferguson tractor. It has a boom of fat rubber nipples. I pour milk into the vat, add buckets of water to string the milk out, a lukewarm sick-smelling brew.

I drive this sloshing load up the race to where calves are gathered at their paddock gate. Hooves sunk in the mud of their waiting. A steam rising from their mooing moans. Their eyes rolled back with the effort of the noise.

Especially Miss Beautiful. Her eyes go white and shut to moan the loudest. Miss Beautiful. I have named her so for her tawny coat, white socks and matching face-blaze. Taller than a normal Jersey, she shoves her way to the front to greet me and sing her one long note. I mimic the note in reply. Again. Again. As if common meaning has suddenly crossed between species.

I unlatch the gate. It swings out, grates across the race’s stones. The calves dash forward to suck the vat’s edges, tyre nuts, the boom’s nippled elbow, my gumboot toes. I have to shoo them with a wild yell, slap them on the nose. I hold the note of the yell by tensing my stomach. I think it is a
C
I’m making, which when I squeeze out the last of my breath, peters out and becomes a lower note, a
B
, a
B-flat
.

I wade through the calf-wave singing, counting to check there are thirty creatures—counting the numbers in song. I have to protect my groin from their butting mouths. I fend off Miss Beautiful—she sucks my fingers, the ends of my jacket, my walking knee though only dry comes out. Once the boom is lowered she scurries in the scrum of them all towards a free teat where milk sprays and tongues poke to the side and foam as they suck.

There are fewer nipples than mouths so I must distract loose suckers until a feeding calf is full. The sign for full is when the bloat of enough drinking puffs out the triangle-dent in front of their hips. Too much bloating and it dies. I let the calves suck my fingers, two fingers at a time—fore-finger and middle for one calf, little finger and its neighbour for another. Twisting the fingers deep past their lipless pout and into their mouths to feel the hot serrated gums, sandy tongue and hard seam where no teeth have formed. The pads of my fingers wrinkle from the wet pull. Heat seeps into me from the frenzied feeders who are certain I have milk on my insides.

That heat and that pull! I bend my groin away from it, out of reach of the suckers because when they push close and touch me with their dripping noses and tongues I can imagine it is a real human doing it, making my penis tingle and swell until it is no longer a penis but a cock.
Cock
because the senses want a rougher language for lust than penis, a mere medical name.