Muck (18 page)

In this mist there is no affliction of fear. I can lean back on the bar and say, “Buy you one?” Again taking two goes. I can hold up a money note and not look at what amount it is— amounts are all paltry to me. I can wave the note around and not care that I drop it.

Madeleine picks it up. “Sweetie, you should pace yourself. Are you sure you’re old enough for drinking whisky anyway?”

I stand stiffly at attention to display offence at the question. But my feet are too heavy for standing at attention. They stomp rather than stand. I tip to one side. My elbow tries for a purchase on the bar but slides. The whole of me slides onto my rear. I scramble back up with Madeleine helping. Behind her a girlie giggles, “Who’s he?”

“Some political guy or heir or something,” Madeleine answers.

The giggle continues. It is a safe-sign girlie—those sagging, deep smile cracklings. A safe-sign girlie is betraying me with the giggle of a child-girl. There is an intense prickling of heat around my eyes. I am in a trance of deadening tiredness, of entering sleep. I am being handled on to a stool and told “to sit there, Sweetie. Sit there.”

The Duke demands that I walk. “Embarrassment. That’s what you are.”

He insists I walk and not lean on him for balance. Walk all the way out of here, out of the Members bar. Off the course to the carpark. I’m to concentrate on what is directly in front of me. Pick out a point just up ahead and aim to reach it. Just shut up and walk alongside him and don’t be a laughing stock who embarrasses him in public ever again. “Girlies using you for laughing practice! Men use
them
, not the other way around.” This on the day Bazza wins of all days. The day we win the mile at Randwick and then
this
. “Don’t stagger,” he growls, or else I can expect a hiding.

At the car I vomit. Vegetables, tomato skin, carrot and brown brine.

“Don’t you dare do that in the car,” he warns.

When emptied of vomit a chill of wellness enters me. I stand chilly and sweating. The Duke grabs my lapels and pulls me lower to get into the car. I push his hands away and tell him I can get in the car, this car or any car, by myself.

“Don’t you push me,” he says with narrowed eyes. He holds me by the lapels against the car door. I grab his lapels and pull at him, pull him off balance. He forces his forearm under my chin and heaves. My head is wrenched back. I push at his jaw with my palm and slip to the side to escape his hurting hold. He falls to one knee and roars “Jesus bloody Christ.” His hat tips from him, drops upside-down on the gravel.

I kneel to help The Duke stand, saying “Sorry, sorry.” But he repeats “Jesus bloody Christ” and crabs sideways to avoid kneeling in vomit.

He grips my lapels in his fists and shoves me, a punch-shove into my neck. I punch the top of his arm. He punch-shoves again. I punch his arm. Punch it again. He lets go of me and staggers to his feet, heaving. Such a stare to his eyes. Bloodshot anger. A hating stare. He shakes his head to rid the stare from his face. He wipes his open hand down his forehead, across his nose, cheeks, jaw. “Get in the car before we’re thrown off the course.” He picks up his hat. Spits it clean, pokes out the dents and curses, “It’s stuffed.”

I don’t clip up my seatbelt because I want to put my hand on his shoulder. I want to embrace his shoulders and say sorry. I reach over and begin to say it but he unpicks my arm from where it has landed across his chest. “Come on,” he says. “Enough of this. I said enough. Sit up. You want to play at being a man then play being a man who sits up and doesn’t embarrass himself or me. Now, sit up.” He pats my forearm. I am relieved to have that patting.

He starts the car. “I go in to bat for you at school and this is how you reward me on the day we won the mile. I’m referring to lunches in lockers. That’s right. I took a call from your school. They were concerned about the episode. I promised them it’s just a passing fad type of behaviour.” He shakes his head, scoffing: “World in famine. Don’t want to be wasteful.” He points at me and places the end of his finger on my chest and taps it there in instruction. “You think about yourself. You think about
you
. You can’t help famine people. And what are they ever going to do for you? Nothing. But you can help you. You should concentrate on
you.

He puts the car in reverse and steers it on to the exit path. “You’ll end up being seen as having peculiarities. We all have peculiarities. Even your mother has peculiarities with her towels and funny moments. But we keep them to ourselves. We’re a small family, son. Just the three of us. Remember that. Remember who you are. You’re a man who shook the Prime Minister’s hand today. Your mother will be thrilled to think we know him.”

A
FIRST YEAR
, a pleb, stands before me chin out in an authoritative pose. His brassy-haired head is tilted back, his hands are in his pockets. His knee is bent forward and to the side. He is only a pleb, used by teaching staff to relay messages to boys, and yet he stands there like that as if superior to me. I am wanted by a master. I am to wait outside the staff room.

“Who exactly wants me?”

“I don’t know exactly. A teacher whose name I don’t know. You’re to wait outside the staff room immediately.”

I do not like that tone in his voice. Immediately. As if a pleb has the right to order
immediately
to me.

“Were you told to say immediately? Or was it just you adding it now? Your Chinese Whispers duty is designed to make you more servile to masters, not impertinent to me.”

“It was them.”

“It better be. Do you know the punishment for getting Chinese Whispers wrong?”

“No.” That question has straightened his head and stiffened his knee.

“If the message is mis-told to the listener, you the Whisperer will receive the equivalent of a fine.”

“What sort of fine?” His hands are out of his pockets.

“A detention on a Saturday. Or several detentions, or the cane.”

He is standing up straight when he talks to me now.
Another lie and that brass head will sink lower, as good as be bowed. “So when the master wanting the pleasure of my company says to me, ‘What was the message you received? Word for word.’ And I say ‘Immediately’ and immediately was not in the original message—get my drift?” There goes his head. Sinking, bowing, sunk.

“For good measure I might tell Sir that your message was so confused it sounded as if you said something about a bike beaten blue, irradiantly.”

I have no idea what trouble I’m in, what punishment awaits me at the staff room. That is powerlessness worse than physical suffering for a sin. The fear of not knowing your fate. But powerlessness can be passed on down the chain. Passing down can halve the sense of it. Passing it down as I am now to this boy who is half my size. Better they piss their pants, the plebs, than enter the toilets and disturb a more senior boy who is smoking as I have been this lunchtime. Let alone render that senior boy powerless with a message. This ignorant pleb who has not yet learnt that he can be flicked with a lit butt. His face can be flushed in the bowl where paper is scrunched, paper with fresh brown wipings. I would tell him as much, say he was lucky his message was for a gentleman like me. I would take pity on him if he was not so stubborn. He is frightened. He is silent. His eyes are beginning to pop with pleading but he has not begged me “Please don’t.” He has not turned to me water-faced with weeping. The powerlessness has not been passed down the chain.

The twitch self is now in me. But I am not king of him yet. I am ashamed to want to be his king. And I am ashamed to have so far failed.

“Are you a boarder or a day boy?” I can read the answer on him. He is a Scrubber. He is a boarder. Nose and cheeks flecked with the sun’s dots. Hands bigger than boy-hands, a bent bone in a finger, pale paddock scars. “Why did your parents send you away from home? For an education? What do farm boys like you want with an education! No, they sent you away because they didn’t want you. They didn’t love you. They, in effect, got rid of you. Out of sight, out of mind. You’ll probably never hear from them again.”

He glares at me, grimacing. In pain, or hatred of me?

My cigarette hisses in the bowl water. I flush and push away from the wall where I have been leaning.

Out of the toilets we go. Along the wide porch-path towards the corridors and stairs up to the staff room. The boarder is a step behind me.

“Perhaps they are splitting up and want you out of the way. Or having an affair. Who’d want you around, perving? Perhaps your father realised you’re not really his son but the product of your mother fucking a shearer.”

Finally they have arrived, tears. In blinked drops, too many to be kept wiped dry. A snot string dangles, is sniffed back into his nostrils. He folds his arms and hunches over slightly as if from cramp. He turns his back to me. To hide his shame of tears, or the better for hating me in more solitude, reject me in order to draw me closer and get his revenge by causing me guilt.

Not crying now but a howling. All because of a few words, this weeping so loudly in an uncontrollable, shuddering manner. “Listen, I’m sorry for what I said. We all say bad things to each other. It’s normal,” I say trying to hush him. The strut-ters will gather around soon. They smell tears like a trail of blood. They will mock his cowardly nature, and my pitying him too.

I put my hand on his shoulder, lightly. “Shut up,” I implore.

He tells me to fuck off and shrugs away my hand.

The strutters must be near, so many tears for them to smell on the wind.

There is no point in talking to him if he is going to behave this way. A no-one, probably a shearer’s son.

It is the drama teacher who wishes to see me.

I have never spoken to him before. Why would I?—he is a drama teacher? A bushy black arch of whiskers beneath his nose. Hair parted in the middle and let to grow below his earlobes more than The Mansions usually permits.

Here comes his hand. He wants me to welcome-dance as if we’re to be friends, though he is a master. I have no choice but to link hands. “Good to meet you,” he says. I do not respond. How could I? His hand is so weak, limp-weak, it hardly wraps mine around. “They say you’ve got a terrific voice for singing. If that’s the case, I have a question.”

I set my jaw, clenched and jutting for admonishment, for some trick where a compliment is turned on me.

“Would you consider singing in a play?”

I keep clenched. “Is that a new method of punishment?”

He throws his head back to laugh with closed eyes though I meant no joke. “The school is adapting
Catcher in the Rye
as a musical. You have been suggested as a possible Holden by the staff.”

I am to take myself to the music hall and have Mr Birch listen if my register fits the music. “I presume you have read the book?”

“Oh yes. Of course.”

“What did you think?”

I am a chosen one among all the others. I stroke my neck, the beautiful Adam’s apple of its voice pipe so delicate but bony-hard. “What did I think about it? I thought it was a story of great truth.”

Where are the strutters now? I want them to ask me: “Why are you so smiley?” Where is the Chinese Whisperer? I want to remind him that he doesn’t say fuck off to me, someone mentioned by the masters to play a role in a play.