Muck (7 page)

If I was asked to give a report to The Duke on Norman and son, I’d say they are a simple people. They are at home with cows. They don’t want trouble. They won’t talk back.

T
HERE IS OBVIOUSLY NO
such thing as rural hospitality, says Feet. We have owned Tudor Park for how long now? Eighteen months? And not so much as a scone, a cake, a sponge has been offered as a welcome. Not so much as a neighbourly knock on the door. You’d at least think someone would invite us for a drink. Or simply a cup of tea if they had any decency. It wouldn’t kill them to be civil. “I know they’re out there,” she shudders and gives herself a warming hug. “I can feel their eyes on me.”

She can feel the eyes when she stands at the front window trying to get a bit of heat from the sun. Out there, among all that green—green hedgerows, green trees, so many green paddock rectangles. She imagines neighbours’ eyes staring through their curtains. Across the road the old couple with the elbows out of their jumpers. Their son and his wife who live in a house the size of a garage. How can they possibly inhabit a house so small! Not fit for a midget to live in. The wife—what a face-ache, Feet shudders. Barely waves if she passes you on the road.

Even the mountains have a staring look about them. But a mountain’s just a mountain and can’t help it. Not like the staring treatment you get at the local store. Feet has never seen mothers so young. They are girls not woman, yet they wheel babies of their own
and
have one on the hoof
and
one ready to drop. Breasts so big you could put cups on them like cows. Not a skerrick of make-up. Lank hair you think they’d do something with, perm.

“Mind you, the man behind the counter always smiles when I come in. You know why? I’ll tell you. I pay cash, and cash is a man’s best friend.”

The district, so The Duke has heard, has a fair lot of Brethren. “Close knit,” he calls them. Feet calls them “cliquey.”

“Where are the binoculars?” she wants to know. The Duke’s racing binoculars that see to the earth’s end. His aftershave soaked into the rubbers from so much racing. They’re hanging in his wardrobe. They’ll be perfect for a little staring of her own.

“You can’t go doing that,” The Duke reprimands and laughs at the same time which only eggs her on. “No-one’s staring at us.”

He walks away shaking his head and laughing that she wouldn’t like the binocular treatment herself.

She says she doubts any of these types would own binoculars in the first place or even know what binoculars were.

She draws the front window drapes closed, leaving open just enough of their rose pattern to point the lenses through the gap and peer across the green outside world to search for eyes.

“Let’s see. Face-ache and family over the road? No. Can’t see any evidence there,” she mutters, squinting for better focus. “What about the mailbox people?”

The mailbox people are the others living along the road. Those Feet has never met in person but knows by their mailbox names. “Dutch and Yugoslav or one of those breeds— Van der this and Such and Such avich that.”

She lowers her arms for a short rest, hooking the binoculars over her wrist like a handbag. “Would you help?” she asks, a grinning invitation to join in on her fun.

“Your teenage eyes could see right into their lounge rooms.”

And they can. I can see Face-ache’s lounge blurred in the binoculars’ insides. A dark sofa, but no eyes.

Then there is Norman and son’s house which is our house really, one of three we own for staff. In the binoculars’ telescope its side window is open. A shadow-head passes it, a woman—Norman’s wife?—minding her own business, bending, perhaps cleaning or at prayer.

“What do you see?” Feet asks, anxiously.

“Nothing.”

She places her fingers across my fingers to take back the binoculars.

I resist and scan the mountain ranges where clouds are always foaming like great waves in the act of breaking. Clouds blank-white in these lenses. Rock grey and wrinkled with wet shine. Tree-tops so thick together they could be moss or slime.

Turned the other way around the binoculars are a micro- scope for squinting far off into the world to view its zero of horizon.

Feet tugs at my hand. “Stop playing with the damn things. You should be helping me. Look at the mailbox houses. Or at Face-ache’s again. Can you see anything?”

“Yes,” I say, pretending something has caught my eye at Face-ache’s.

“What is it? Let me look.”

She grabs the binoculars from me and leans through the gap to see for herself. “I can’t see a thing. What did you see? Was she staring from her lounge at us?”

“Yes,” I lie, clenching the muscles in my stomach to lock down laughter.

“I knew it. I can feel their eyes.”

“Do you think they try and stare through our windows while we’re undressing?” I clench.

Feet lowers the binoculars. “God, I never thought of that. Undressing. How disgusting.”

She hurries to her and The Duke’s bedroom and jerks the rosy drapes shut to make safe dark. If I’m to tell her I’ve seen no eyes, no staring from any lounge, it should be now. Before she gets “worked up” as The Duke calls it. Before the two steps one way, two steps the other she takes as if worried there is some place she must suddenly rush to but where it is, she doesn’t know. Dig all she can with her fingernails into her scalp, she doesn’t know. Have her headscarf fall free as she digs and scratches, still she doesn’t know. Her hair-bun sprayed solid as a bird’s nest can spill out its bronze pins but she just doesn’t know. And not knowing makes her mutter with spit on her chin. Makes her cry out and swear the coarse words she is usually appalled to hear from others—bastard, shit, prick, gutful, arseholes.

There is a dangerous pleasure I have watching her. She, my mother, has a second self behind the pinned, sprayed one I know. It sees what I can’t see—the eyes of others, for instance. Feels them chill her skin. It tells her to take a ghost train ride inside herself—I’ve come to think of it that way; her spine the narrow, plummeting tracks.

I want to join in and glimpse for myself what devils jump out of the darkness. There is no need to be scared: Feet always returns safe and happier than before, as when she steps from the shower whistling after an invigorating wash. She says she’s sorry for anything she said but it’s normal for people to let slip bad things and she vows never to do it again.

If I held her hand, could I ride down too? When I’ve tried in the past she pulls her hand away.

Quick now, it’s time to confess I didn’t see anyone: “It was just a speck on the lens.”

But it’s too late. She yells for me to shut up because she can see what I’m up to: I’m lying to her that I saw no-one when I really did. Lying to make her look a dill of a woman who feels people staring. That’s what I’m up to. She knows it. She can tell. “Get away from me you lying shit.” She waves her arms wildly and stomps.

The second self is taking her away.

The Duke has arrived to catch her hand, to hold her back, to keep her here. He calls her “love” and “dear,” but her hands are not for his hands now. They’re for jabbing in her hair.

“I won’t be snubbed and stared at by bastard pricks of peasants,” she sobs tearlessly. “I’ll do it myself, I’ll make my own welcome. You bastard shits, I’ll welcome myself. I’ll do it myself!” she screams at the window as if beyond it to people.

I
HAVE A TWITCH SELF
. Is that the same as a second self?

The minute Churchill returns, it comes into me. Barely forty-eight hours and here he is because he needs the money, can’t do without the work.

I don’t wish to stoop to his level but it’s obvious he is in my twitch. Not a twitch screwed on to his top lip or his ear. There is no rope-loop to subdue his body. It’s invisible, this kind of twitch, yet it has twitched his tongue into silence. Not like him to thread the driving reins through nervous Poached Eye’s stirrups and say nothing. There is no darling-talk from him like man-to-horse pretend love. No hate-talk once The Duke’s earshot has been cleared.

I am as good as having The Duke around when I stand near Churchill now. I am The Duke in lieu. I hardly need to keep my hands behind my back to demonstrate it. I don’t need to speak though I’m tempted to say “Work around him, not through him” as a test to observe if he fights against it.

I could be friendly, praise his skill as a horseman. Release the twitch’s grip a fraction to see if he expresses gratitude, says thank you with a courteous smile, or merely shrugs and goes about his business.

But it’s enough to have Poached Eye buck and mouth angrily at the bridle. He senses Churchill is not his king anymore. He is not the same king he was, this silent twitched one. He is weak and only commands with small rein flicks.

Given his weakness I am willing to forgive Churchill his insults and mockery, the deliberate surcingle grazing. I would take the twitch off him, but how do you remove what isn’t really there?

What is there is the natural order of things, and to remove that can’t be done. Churchill understands my superior place in it now.

It’s the same in the milking shed, with Norman and Bill.

I want them to feel they can speak to me as they would speak to someone in their vicinity. But nothing too private that might disturb the natural order.

My school as a subject or the books I’ve read are acceptable. The rugby position I prefer to play—blindside flanker. But no family prying. I would certainly never mention Feet’s second self. No “Do you wish you had some brothers and sisters? It must be lonely when you’re just the one” from them. The usual nosing of elders.

“No,” I would answer as always to that question. “I’ve never known different.” I keep to myself the truer answer: I would detest a brother or sister. They might steal my rank and rights.

It’s unlikely there would be tales of sex-fucking from them—a father and son in each other’s company. I’m willing to let on I have had sex chances, but stop short of admitting my virginity.

There is also the natural order of the smile.

I mustn’t smile too much in their presence. Especially if they attempt vulgar humour or foul-languaged jibes. That would simply reward their presumption that I wouldn’t be offended.

Feet has a particular way of pointing out the flaws in others. She does it to their face. Does it for their own good. Does it with a half smile while not looking them directly in their eyes because that would be too hostile. She looks somewhere past them, a little over their head, and says, “Where I come from we don’t do that sort of thing.” She says, “Where I come from we have saucers for our tea-cups and would never use a mug.” “Where I come from we have the TV turned off while we’re eating.”

The next time Norman lifts up a penis-tail I intend to say, “Where I come from we use our heads not our brawn. We work
around
them, not through them.”

I admit that Norman is probably right when he says it’s easier to milk cows if you look at what you’re doing instead of looking away in the hope your fingers can finger the cups into place. If you don’t look at what you do, you fiddle and fiddle and the cups miss their mark. But does he have to remind me of this over and over? I grit my teeth against reminding him that where I come from we don’t repeat ourselves, we don’t make the same obvious point more than necessary. Especially if we are only staff.