The Vivisector (4 page)

‘Eh?’ she asked. ‘Are you deaf then?’

‘Reading,’ he said, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, but he made it sound very low.

Though Mumma was on all fours he could tell the shock she got. ‘Readin? You haven’t ever learnt. You’re still too young to read, love.’

He didn’t answer, but ground his boots on the rail of the chair. She ought to have known he had been reading all this while, but Mumma was often too busy to notice.

As she went on scrubbing and puffing, she asked in a tone of voice to please her little boy: ‘Whatever are you readin’, Hurt?’

‘The Bible,’ he had to admit.

Mumma too, read the Bible, or liked to sit with it when she was tired.

‘Well, well,’ she disbelieved, scratching at the board with the brush which was almost bald. ‘There’s a lot of the Bible. I wonder what’s taken your fancy.’

He said, even lower than before: ‘I’m reading how she smote him with the tent peg.’

‘I never ever read
that!
’ It made the handle of her pail clank.

Her joints were what she called ‘set’ as she clambered up.

‘’Ere,’ she said, ‘run along out inter the fresh air. Play with the others.’

He looked up, and saw she was afraid of something.

‘Eh?’ she almost whimpered.

He put down the book and went outside, in case she started touching him with those wet, swollen hands, when he didn’t want to be drawn into any grown-up person’s whimpery mood.

 

Not long after that she came to an arrangement with Mr Olliphant. Mumma already cleaned the church. Now she agreed to scrub out the hall in return for the lessons Mr Olliphant would give her boy until it was time for him to go to school. Mrs Burt and other ladies in their street kept quiet, but breathed heavy.

It was certainly most unusual, not to say peculiar, the treatment young Hurtie Duffield was getting. ‘But don’t you see, he’s an unusual child?’ Mumma called over the pailings.

No one but Pa dared criticize to Mumma’s face. ‘Let’s hope “unusual” don’t mean “useless”.’ Because Pa had experienced Granpa Duffield.

Anyway, the visits to the rectory began, and if they didn’t always result in lessons, Mr Olliphant offered books between attending to his parish duties. You could sit in the parson’s study and read, without anyone suggesting you were unhealthy, or mad. The rector himself was a regular dry biscuit of a man, who seemed, for that matter, to live mostly on biscuits, him and Mrs Olliphant. They had had a baby, but it soon died.

Sometimes on dashing in, and before dashing out on further parish business, Mr Olliphant would mumble a biscuit over arithmetic. Arithmetic was too dry; you couldn’t care much about that.
Amo, amas, amat:
that was better. It seemed to make Mr Olliphant laugh, the way you said it. And
Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché:
that was from the
Fables.
The
Fables
were best, because of the pictures. He made a copy of the fox, with a tail like on a lady’s fur. But Mr Olliphant came in and said he hoped you weren’t going to develop a frivolous nature. You had to learn to be conscientious and not do things behind your master’s back.

So you copied Mr Olliphant’s voice instead, whether in multiplication or division, in French fables or Latin verbs, and became so successful at it, you could hear yourself like a book talking.

Of course you never turned the voice on at home; or not unless you wanted to pay somebody out.

Once he said in Mr Olliphant’s voice: ‘Perhaps I shall soon be so well educated I shan’t need to go to ordinary school.’

‘Edgercated! When you can’t even learn to stop scribbling on the walls.’

‘That isn’t scribble, it’s a droring,’ he said in what was his own voice.

There were times when Mumma didn’t exactly love him less. It was like as if he made her nervous, as if she had lost control of him, worst of all, control of his thoughts. She would look at him as though he was sick. Till he brushed up against her. He had learnt that this worked with his mother, and with Lena and the girls. He had never tried it out on his father.

Pa didn’t encourage you to touch him. You never ever saw him touch Mumma, unless when they had got into bed. Pa was at his gentlest, his most loving, when working with the things he seemed to like: their brown, wall-eyed mare, Bonnie; the spring-cart he brought the empty bottles home in; bits of old harness; tools and things. Perhaps he loved the shapes of those empty bottles. He was never tired of handling them.

When you were left alone with Pa he got the frightened look. The lines looked deeper that ran from his yellow nose almost to his blue chin, the eyebrows bristled worse, and the chocolate eyes began to flicker. You could tell that Pa was thinking of something to say. Not that, for most of the time, you could think of anything yourself, but it was up to a father to think of something.

So you waited, not exactly watching, while Pa’s thoughts chased one another, and his Adam’s apple wobbled.

‘Well,’ he might sweat it out at last, ‘how many lessons’ll the parson take to turn you into a gentleman?’ And once he added, as a surprise: ‘The parson wouldn’t like to admit, but you might get more of it from your dad. It’s the blood, see?’ He didn’t usually become excited, but when he did, the spit would fly.

Pa softened his voice in explaining his paraphernalia. ‘Watch this, sonny—how you apply the soap.’ He was standing in the yard, soft-soaping the mare’s old black, mended harness, his thin mouth grown watery.

‘Old harness is better than new.’

‘Why, Pa?’

He didn’t want to answer that.

‘It’s been tried out,’ he said, flicking a strap as if to test it some more.

He hung the dismantled harness to dry on long, rust-wire hooks attached to the boughs of the pepper tree. The softened leather had a soothing smell.

‘Let me polish the brass. Eh, Pa? Can’t I?’

Pa wouldn’t say at first. Then he would give in, grumblingly. His hands trembled handling the things he respected.

You weren’t all that interested in the old brass medals from off the harness, but liked to bring out the light in them. You got pretty good at it, and Pa began to drool, suspecting that his son might, after all, have been born with a skill.

‘Apprentice yer to some good honest tradesman,’ on one occasion he said. ‘Learn a trade. It’s all very well to read and write. But you can go too far.’

Because you didn’t know what to answer, you went away. You didn’t love books all that much, but wouldn’t have known how to tell Pa you neither loved an ‘honest trade’. You loved—what? You wouldn’t have known, not to be asked.

He loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping. He could do nothing about it, though. Not yet. He could only carry all of it in his head. Not talk about it. Because Mumma and Pa would not have understood. They talked about what was ‘right’ and ‘honest’, and the price of things, but people looked down at their plates if you said something was ‘beautiful’.

So Pa looked frightened when you met, unless there was some old tackle you could hold between you. It was easier for Mumma, who wasn’t ashamed to chatter, and touch, and kiss.

All this while Mumma continued taking in washing for the well-off people in neighbouring suburbs. Their coachmen would drive up and leave the baskets of dirty linen. Almost always there were fancy things hanging on the lines in the back yard. He used to imagine the people, particularly the ladies, who belonged inside such flimsy clothes.

In the outer kitchen at night Mumma would be ironing while the kids played around.

‘Leave it, Winnie!’ she would say. ‘Mrs Ebsworth won’t thank you for fingerprints on her good muslun.’

There was always a steam, a smell of ironing filling the outer kitchen at night, and Mumma’s exasperation, for some article she had scorched, or her hair uncoiling out of its bun.

‘Arr dear,’ she said as she put up her hair, ‘it’s plain enough we’ll die poor!’

It was on such a night that Mumma told about an offer a Mrs Courtney had made her. He came in from the yard, and already some kind of strife had begun. Pa was sitting with his elbows on the table from which he had just eaten his tea. Pa was looking as black as the stove. While Mumma kept stamping with the iron on the ironing-table in the outer kitchen.

‘But the money’s not to be sniffed at, Jim.’ She very seldom called him by his name. ‘Washing Mondays, ironing Tuesdays. Courtneys is one of the best families. Money to burn. Do you hear? And Mrs Courtney won’t allow her things to be laundered outside her own home. Only Mondays and Tuesdays, Jim.’

Pa sat, the corners of his mouth turned down, as if he felt it was him to blame.

‘Jim? Mrs Burt ’as said she’ll keep an eye on the little ones. Lena’s at school.’ Silly Lena tried to look important. ‘Hurtle ’as Mr Olliphant.’

So it was arranged, not then, but you knew it was as good as.

The mornings Mumma set out for Rushcutters where these Courtneys lived she seemed to walk different, as though she was trying to live up to the wealthy people she worked for. She stepped out with more style, even now that she was far gone, usually humming or singing, as she avoided the ruts along Cox Street. She carried her belongings tied up in a clean towel: a comb, a piece of extra special soap, family likenesses, something for headaches and something for breath and a purse for the wages Mrs Courtney paid.

‘What’s she like?’

‘I never saw her yet. Mrs Courtney’s a very important person. Always busy with ladies’ luncheons, and balls, and committees. It’s Edith the parlourmaid who brings me the money before I leave.’

‘What sort of house?’

‘Ah—the
house!
’ Mumma sighed, and stamped with her iron.

‘Hasn’t she any kiddies?’ Lena had put on the voice you use when you first catch sight of a little baby.

‘One little girl. Her name is Rhoda.’

‘What?
Roader?
’ The others all looked suspicious of a name nobody had ever heard.

‘It’s in the Bible,’ he said.

‘Urrhh!
Hurtle!
’ Lena probably hated him as much as he now hated Lena.

‘Is she pretty, Mumma?’

‘Rhoda’s delicate,’ was all Mumma would say, as though they had taught her to be a lady down at Courtneys’.

But she was ready to talk about the ‘girls’.

‘What girls?’

‘Why, the girls Mrs Courtney employs.’ Mumma seemed to think it wasn’t fair to let on that anybody ‘worked’:
she
worked, certainly, she never stopped, and never stopped referring to it, but to accuse anybody else was a dirty trick.

The girls remained a mystery. He would have liked to imagine the grand mansion in which they lived, and Mrs Courtney in particular, but couldn’t. A muslin veil hung between them.

He felt so helpless he began playing with himself. He was playing with himself in Mr Olliphant’s study when Mrs Olliphant came in. She had the sniffles.

 

Mr Olliphant was sick. They prayed for him in church on Sundays. Mrs Burt said the poor soul’s bones were crumbling away. He was replaced by that Mr Ruffles, who was enthusiastic, but not much more educated, it seemed, than everybody else.

For some while it wasn’t known what to do with Hurt. ‘Better put ’im in the Infants.’ Mumma wouldn’t come at it yet.

One morning, it was a Monday, she began brushing at his hair, although he knew how to do it himself. She said: ‘Put on your cap, dear. I’m gunner take you down to Courtneys’ with me. Provided you behave good. You know how to be good, don’t you? Some of the girls are very refined, and wouldn’t put up with a bold little boy.’

He didn’t say anything, but stuck his cap on. She gave him a wet kiss.

She took him by the hand, and they walked through the streets, quickly at first, then slower because of the baby inside her. Mumma was humming out of tune. He was able to withdraw his hand.

‘This is my proudest day,’ she said. ‘They won’t believe what I tell them. Or if you show them a likeness they won’t no more than half look. They’re so taken up with their own ideas, you’ve gotter show them the real thing.’

‘I don’t want to be shown.’ There was a nail eating into his toe.

‘Some of those maids,’ she said, ‘don’t even listen to what you tell them about the weather.’ Then she began to advise: ‘You won’t go round in front, will you? Or into the toolshed. Or bush house. Or spoil Mr Thompson’s tuberous begonias? I dare say May, who’s a good soul underneath, will dish you up something nice for dinner.’

In spite of the baby inside, Mumma jumped a puddle. She was so excited at their outing.

He continued walking with his own thoughts, apart from Mumma, down through the street where the better houses began. He touched the leaves of some of the glossy bushes to find out whether they felt as fleshly as they looked. Some of the flowers had a scent of ladies’ powder. Birds rose and fell in the air like the notes of music out of the piano shops in Surry Hills.

When they reached the gate on which was painted

 

Mumma took his hand again. Going down the steps she was not so much leading as leaning on him. He could hear her breathing.

‘You won’t do anything, Hurtle,’ she breathed, ‘to make me ashamed. You’re what I’ve been trying to tell them about.’

He could feel his face swelling with shame.

‘You’re what Pa and me knows we aren’t,’ Mumma mumbled lower than before.

He would have liked to shake her off, but with all there was to look at, he forgot to try.

Everything at Courtneys’ had a look of new. Even the banana tree. The dead leaves must have been picked off; the live ones might have been varnished. The rubbish bins shone like silver. The banana tree was swelling and fruiting, very purple. He was reminded of his own paler one. Then of Pa’s wrinkled-looking, ugly old cock.