Muck (15 page)

Now salt-spray has glued the internals so the ivories stick. There it stands, its only friend is Mr Sheen. A constant reminder to her that young people want everything too easy these days. If they can’t play a tune automatically, they whine that it will take years to practise. “That’s an attitude you never inherited from me. It must be your father’s side. But that voice of yours, your way with a song—my musical gifts have obviously been passed on.”

The Duke reminds her that his father could belt out a tune on the piano. Jazz of all things. But he was too drunk ever to take it further. “I’ve always hated the sound of a piano because of his bang, bang, banging, playing drunk after pub-time,” he says, pointing to our piano as if levelling an accusation. “He should have provided for his family instead of all his bang, banging. He had whisky. We had mouldy bread.”

“Well we have fresh bread now,” Feet says impatiently. “Frankly I resent the notion that a drunken barber would have contributed to our son’s talent, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“What’s wrong with barbers?
Your
family were butchers. Is that better than barbers?” he says sarcastically, raising his voice.

Feet refuses to have a depressing conversation involving butchers and barbers. “Butchers and barbers—why don’t you yell it out louder! Why don’t you tell half of Vaucluse our every secret!”

She curses that he has such a typical man’s fog-horn voice, but at least she has an antidote to it in mine. “Sing
He’ll Have to Go
as Jim Reeves. Please do. It sends me,” she swoons and says
Please
again. Please let her have one pleasure in life. She can’t bear to go
out
anymore.
Out
means there’ll be people, and people equal snide. If cow people spy and laugh at her and name-call, what are real people out there in Sydney doing? “I can’t face them. Wouldn’t waste my time with them. Shit bastards, all of them. Bastard bloody rude.”

She leans back into cushions, her right leg stretched straight along the suede tan sofa. Her white sandal dangling from her toes. A cool breath has risen from the ocean and puffed the balcony drapes open. Feet pulls the hem of her orange house-coat up over her ankles, her shins, over her knees. It lets out a static crackle. She lifts the house-coat higher so the air can blow breeze between her legs. She scratches at a hot spot on her calf where a blue worm of vein has buckled into a varicose sore.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.

Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone.

She lights a cigarette and takes a long kiss of her wine, her head swaying as she swallows. Her foot follows the rhythm of my singing. Her sandal drops to the carpet.

I’ll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low,
and you can tell your friend there with you he’ll have to go
.

Why does it send her so, this song of men competing for a woman? Or,

Please release me let me go, for I don’t love you anymore,
To waste our lives would be a sin. Release me and let me love
again.

Does she want that for herself, The Duke gone, a new man for suitors, lovers?

“Sing it holding my hand,” she asks. “Sing into my eyes. Kneel down. Sing it like you mean it from your heart.”

I tell her I’m doing my best. But the very act of saying that breaks the spell for her. “You’re quite hopeless. You’d think it wouldn’t be much to ask, a little song that makes me feel womany again and the kind who can still turn heads, who could walk down the street and attract ‘Oooos.’”

Sometimes I deliberately sing off key for a few notes and it frees me for days from her wanting to risk another broken swooning.

Just a Closer Walk with Thee
, sung with the Ray Charles negro rasp. That sends her too, though Jesus is there in the verses. Does she imagine Jesus loves more than just her spirit, or would do given the chance? She sway-sighs as if he is the ultimate catch to have.

I only need to hear them once and my body moulds me to the song. My tongue and throat match the singer’s sound to my own, narrowing the airways for correct pitch and drone.
An automatic process I hone by listening to the
45
s on the lounge-room gramophone. I copy their manner too once I’ve seen them on TV.

With Nat King Cole the smile is so splayed my lip-corners ache, but the effect of such relentless happiness is to strain the voice so it rises into my nose. From there it is trapped, released and swallowed back down into myself with Cole’s tender vibrato fade.

Jim Reeves is a deep moan, soft, sweet to the ear but if I toss my head whimsically with every word I lengthen the phrasing, stretch each note more darkly.

These are not songs for someone my age. What more proof do I need that I am old, not in years, not fully in body, but in those other ways: the way I accept my duties as heir to Tudor Park so good-naturedly, enthusiastic. I’m responsible before my time.

Old too in the way I know that safe-signs are found in women, not in girls.

Women listen to the old songs. I should have sung for Genevieve.

I fall to pieces, each time I see you again.

I fall to pieces. How could I just be your friend?

My Jim Reeves would have prised opened her door. Would have swooned her inside to her lounge, her body holding my body, her bed taking me in.

Where will I find a replacement?

At the races with The Duke. Putting my arm around the waist of the girlies in the Members Bar. Girlies, not girls. Girlies of the flirting men, string dresses low-slung so their skin is more obviously seen and offered. They look children alongside the ugly men who rub hands in their back’s hollow, grandfather-old with leers white as dentures and shirt ends bulging loose over their belly belts. But they are safe-sign women to me—over thirty, armpits beginning to wrinkle and dimple at the sides; the first cheek-veins appearing, powder holes of open pores. Freckled shoulders from so much tanning, but not yet sagged to a crack between their shoulder blades.

I have watched The Duke do it himself, whispering, smiling close to their hair. Closer still when that hair is hooked behind the ear like a forefinger invitation. Taking care to place his hand only lightly against their hip when ordering a drink. Removing the hand when the drink is ordered. A polite moment of keeping his hand away, then placing it back and leaving it there if the girlie approves by moving more his way.

How disgusted I’ve been to see him like that. Him thinking with that thing between his legs, as he tells me not to. I felt ashamed, betrayed, brooding for Feet’s sake that his hands touch hollows other than hers.

But there has been no “Gotcha” from a girlie to take him away from us. Feet has her song-swoons of other men. I’ve had my safe-sign Genevieve and no blame for the lechery.

If the girlies let those old men touch them, then a younger man, a me, would meet much more welcomed surrender. The Duke’s copper-brown suit fits me, the one that goes shiny in sunshine and is made of such cloth that to sit down leaves no creases. The legs are a half-inch shorter on me than him, but I have brown socks to bridge the distance. My black school shoes, nugget-scrubbed are fine. Cream shirt, blue-dotted tie from The Duke’s tie drawer. Not his hair oil for my side-part, but a dry, natural flick-away style.

While he is leaning over the birdcage rail. While he is matching race-book names to parading horses, I will light a cigarette. I will order a drink, a whisky and soda or a seven-ounce beer. The barmen are like bookmakers: they know to serve me without questioning my age. A near-man in a good suit is a full man at the races.

I rehearse my next day at the races. “Excuse me Love,” I say. The
love
said roughly and manly in the manner you speak to girlies, so they know their place as a girlie. “Buy you something? Champagne? Something queer, a cocktail?”

I will then put money on the bar before she has had time to answer. I do not look in her eyes until I have glanced the length of her—toenails, legs, hips. Never breasts until last. I then say, “That dress, it’s very fetching.”

But I have no money. Ten dollars only from the last Don-caster meeting. The Duke knows the winners. He has contacts. He knows the losers. He knows the favourite which someone somewhere says must “bomb.” By Race Three ten dollars can make fifty. That’s more drinks than I need for twenty girlies.

“What do you do?” she will ask.

Student. No—some prize I would seem. “I am heir to Tudor Park, my family’s rural interests. Hence these old scars of mine.”

She will feel my hands. She’ll say, “Hard hands, a soft heart.”

Feet has towels to fade and so has no time for races. Even though The Duke has his new horse, Bazza, racing. Even though the big fellow should run the Randwick mile out well today. She no longer can be bothered with friends. “When you’re young, you don’t see it,” she says. “But when you get a bit of age on you see your glamour’s gone out the door. No-one wants people to feast their eyes on that and risk comments.”

Instead she must follow the sun around the balcony for hours, keeping the clothes-horse of towels in front of shadows. When the towels’ blues and pinks have paled from three weeks’ washes and sunshine—wash, sun, wash and more sun—she returns them to the department store to complain they’ve lost their colour. “It says in the guarantee, if they fade within the first three months of use then the company will replace them,” she tells the assistant, and points to what she calls “the literature.” She says she has only used them a handful of times and barely washed them and yet all the colour has bled out. It’s disappointing to spend good money on products that simply fade.

The assistant presents her with a new set and apologises for the bad batch and bother.

Another shop, another set of towels. And sheets sometimes, their pretty, bright flowers mere ghosts of when she first bought them.

On arriving home she toasts her triumph. She clinks glasses with The Duke and jigs, “I’m very proud of my little system.”

What system? I ask. Why do towels need a system?

Feet sip-kisses her glass and wonders why, if I’m at all smart I haven’t worked it out for myself. Or indeed, didn’t come up with the system my smart self. “Nice towels are, let’s say, $
10
each. If we buy them, get two months’ use. Then three weeks of intensive fading on the balcony. Voila! We get fresh, brand-new ones, free of charge.”

But why do that, I want to know. “Do we need to—are we poor?”

We’re certainly not poor, Feet laughs. But of course she’d deny it. “Protect the boy,” The Duke would say. “Financial strife would worry him sick and make his father a failure in his eyes. Not only have I failed him with oil in Western Australia, I have failed him in a worse way now. We are poor and his legacy is gone.”

My lunches make sense suddenly. Cheese and jam sandwiches, though I can’t bear to taste them. No lunch money for me like The Mansions boys have money. Cheese and jam. That way I’ll learn the value of a dollar, and not slip into spendthrift ways. Because where we come from the world’s not a restaurant. You eat what you’re given. I too must inherit that age-old code.