Muck (5 page)

The Duke stands wedging the fly-screen ajar with his shoulder, bewildered by Churchill’s fury. He looks up over Churchill’s head to where I make my slow, slinking way to explain myself. He signals with a quick arch of his eyebrows that I’m to come to him at once.

I should have spoken to The Duke in the first place and there never would have been such trouble. I should have made it clear to him that Churchill’s darling-talk soon turns to hate-talk and whip-waves, and when I tried to stop the behaviour in
his
name, as his deputy and heir to our dynasty, I was assaulted and spoken to like common dirt.

Yes, I should have let The Duke do the punching if punching was the thing to be done.

But I am not going to cower just because of a disappointed man, a cowboy and a Gunna. I have dealt with the matter myself, in my own way. The Duke will hardly think less of me for that. Quite the opposite. If I put my hands behind my back, breathe deeply through my nose to make my chest swell out, he’ll see how worthy a deputy I’ve been.

He steps from the house to the concrete in his stockinged feet. He wants to speak to me, just me. Churchill, if he wouldn’t mind, should stand over there so that we two, father and son, can talk in private.

Churchill folds his arms and grunts that he’s said his piece. He has no intention of repeating himself. He has said his piece, and he has made his position clear. He has laid down his terms and won’t be talked out of them. No father can be blamed for having a mad son. “It’s only out of respect for you, old sport, that I haven’t left the property already. It’s time to take that mad boy of yours in hand.”

I tell The Duke that Churchill was one minute hate-talking and whip-waving at horseflesh and then for no reason simply turned on me. “Turned on me for no reason,” I say, or venture rather than say, to test if what I’m telling him is being accepted as fact. I put plenty of puzzlement in my voice. Plenty of frowning on my face. I shrug, offer up my palms during the telling.

Churchill wants The Duke to know that the crux of the issue is respect. Respect for him, his skills and services as a horseman. But he has said his piece and awaits The Duke’s response which he hopes will be firm action against this mad son he spawned.

The Duke asks me in a whisper, “Does he have a snitcher on you, do you think?”

“That must be it,” I reply.

Churchill pulls his bottom lip down to show a bleeding wound. He mumbles, “Respect. Not a punch in the face.” He spits blood-spittle to the ground. “Not deliberately throwing a hard-working man over a horse when all he wants to do is mount it and earn his living.”

The Duke turns his back to Churchill, and whispers, “Did you do what he says you did?”

“No,” I say, as if offended.

“No?”

“No,” I assure him. “
He’s
the mad one.”

“The blood in his mouth came from where?”

“He fell off Sensible. He was probably drunk.”

Churchill snaps his arms to his sides. “I heard that. That’s a lie.” He quick-steps up to The Duke. “Smell my breath. Not a whiff of alcohol, I can promise you.”

The Duke turns his face away, grimacing.

Churchill speaks now in his toffiest style, a straight-backed stance, a proud pucker of the mouth: “Call your good lady out here, if you please. Let her smell my breath. Let her discover her son’s mad, mad, mad.”

The Duke says he will do no such thing. “Just calm down and drive away home for the day. Let the dust settle.”

Churchill bows his head and spits onto the concrete. “So that’s it. Blood’s thicker than water. Believe
him
over me. Fair enough. If that’s the way it is. Goodbye. To hell with the lot of you.”

He swivels on his toes and stoops toward his car, muttering that I’m a mad, useless good-for-nothing, and he doesn’t know why he bothers lending his services to people without an ounce of respect for his talents or a brain in their fucking heads.

The Duke takes a long, sighing breath and lets it out and says, quietly, slowly, “You
should
have hit him one.”

“Should I?”

“Serve him right with all his to-do.”

This could be a trap. Is he trying to trick me into confessing? He has just lost the man who breaks his horses. What a fuss in a small town to find a new one. I best say I kept my temper no matter how much Churchill provoked me.

Or would The Duke prefer to hear I held my own? If so, now’s the time to say so. And to say it I will need an ashamed look to me for having lied. Innocence in the eyes, a bowed head and a soft pleading in my voice: “It all happened so fast. I hope I didn’t hit him.”

The Duke stares at me. His jaw bones grind in his face. Then he raises an eyebrow, amused.

I don’t remember the details, I tell him, and rub my forehead in a sham-confused state.

Churchill’s car wheezes without starting. Does it again. When the engine catches, it belches like a mock animal. It has to be let moan and fart to get going.

Feet has come from the house to see what the commotion is. She’s been disturbed reddening her toenails with the mini brush that smells like sweet petrol. Her hair is bound in a checked scarf that is tied at the front because of a one-woman experiment she has undertaken. She wants to find out if there’s a way to turn those old plain scarves that dairy farmer’s wives turban themselves with to milk their cows into a fashion item of some un-peasant description. One she can transport to Sydney. A silk scarf would be easy—it’s a given that it’s snazzy. But what a challenge this check cotton is. And yet, with dangly pearl earrings it goes from peasant to pleasant.

Churchill’s car-animal groans into a sudden, angry slide. The back wheels skid and kick up a spray of sods. Feet gasps, hand to her mouth, at what’s happening to the driveway lawn of her future showpiece.

The Duke yells out, “Oi, steady on there!”

But Churchill makes the car skid and slide away leaving two gouged tracks which Feet calls out is “vandalism.” She hurries to inspect the damage. Vandalism and grass murder, she calls it. “Nothing but utter loutish vandalism.”

The Duke, however, is not concerned with lawn and wheel marks. He orders me to raise my fists, hold them mid-air, for his inspection. Not the fists so much, the knuckles and any signs of scarring and scratching. Signs of combat.

He identifies a red discolouration, a definite sign of trouble. A chip of skin he describes as “very admirable” and the sort you would expect to get when you connect, not flush but off centre on someone’s chin. He smiles to the entire width of his top row of white dentures. “Goodness me. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Feet wants me to get a rake and repair the vandalism before it has time to dry out and be permanent. But The Duke tells me to stay right where I am. “He’s had enough for one day I think, love,” he tells Feet. “He’s learnt a few things today. About leadership. About taking no nonsense. He’s got leadership qualities.”

He smiles the whole white width again. More than smiles —his eyes, always so deep-set and dark, have a wet glow to them. A pooled lit quality that as he moves close to place his hands affectionately on my shoulders I see myself reflected in, in miniature as in two blurry mirrors.

I would never normally allow this physical move to be made on me, my shoulders embraced by him in a mother-like or love-like way that people do. A father should be a stone figure, twin of myself in looks and gesture. An older me whom I’m awed by but must secretly fight against and eventually overthrow.

But this mirror lock of our eyes is paralysing. The love-pride of a human for his next in line. The Duke can never feel this way about any other. I see it now—this power I have, that I, and only I, can be allowed by this man to have over him.

T
HERE IS AN EXAMPLE
to set where the basics of hygiene and presentation are concerned. If the two head men of Tudor Park run around the place unshaven, what example does that set? Feet accepts that shaving is a horrible activity, scrape, scrape, scrape first thing in the morning. But if
she
can bear a blade across her legs for twice as long as we men take for faces, we should bear it too.

She accuses The Duke of not having shaved for two days.
Two days
. If he’s attempting an impression of a rough diamond man of the land, he is doing a damn good job of it. The grey growth he has let age his face ten years stops her giving cuddles.

As for her son, he has such long strands of that granny-hair on his chin. He needs to become acquainted more intimately with the razor. She tugs the granny-hair and calls it “bum-fluff.” I flinch away, but she has time enough for one twist and roll in her fingers.

Please, she beg-tells The Duke. Please get him into the bathroom and teach him to shave properly and more regularly. “I haven’t seen his face smooth and clean in weeks. You’re both letting yourselves go.”

She sighs, “My son will be shaving every day soon. Ah, milestones.”

It galls me that there is no point to argue here. When she put it the way she has—that we two men of Tudor Park must set an example, that we shouldn’t run around like rough diamonds, I can only agree.

Where’s the little farce of fury we always perform? Where’s my instinctive “No” or “Why?”

I must say it anyway: “No.”

She responds with her usual narrowing of eyes, a suck of air through her clenched teeth, the bottom row of which overbites the top in yellow anger. She slumps into a chair. Her sharpened fingers make a galloping sound on the Formica.

For the little farce—the procedure and pleasure of it—I narrow my eyes back at her. I stick out my own defiant bottom teeth. I gallop my fingers, a more padded gallop than hers given her advantage of long filed nails.

Her twitching chin and tearless sob will be on display next. She will say, “What have I done to deserve this from my own son?” And, “After all I’ve done for him!”

Then The Duke will raise his voice to me, “You show your mother some respect.”

He will put his hand on her knee and let her lean in under his arm. At that point the little farce ends. I do as he asks, because
he
asks it, not her. The chain of command has been restored.

The ceiling light hangs from a frayed, brown plait of rope. The only light for seeing in this toilet, bathroom, mirror place. Dim for shaving, but The Duke says he knows tricks. Tricks a father hands on to his son that makes the dark, when shaving, easy.

He steers me, hand on shoulder, to the pink sink where cracks in its bowl are so fine and grainy they could be hairs shed from washing. I’m to bend at the hip, bend forward like so, till close enough to the mirror to see cheek pores.

Off with my shirt, off with my singlet so when we wet the soap it only splatters onto skin.

On the sink ledge his shaving brush with worn wooden stem. Its dried hairs candle-flame shaped with the foam of his last using it. Beside it his razor—a steel cross-bar whose miniature roof opens for blades, the ones he calls the Safetys.

He opens the cross-bar to show how a blade is more like paper than blade, being so thin and therefore so sharp. It lies flat in its slot with the merest edge protruding for cutting.