Whole Wild World (19 page)

‘Drink. Spit here.'

It felt like I was in hospital again, disoriented and wracked with pain. Holes everywhere. How would I ever eat again? Boris grinned and came in close, his cigar breath all over me. He jammed cotton between my lips and gums to soak up the mess.

‘Next Saturday come again. Bring his brother.'

Boris refurbished our mouths over six blood-soaked weeks, giving us needles, using proper drilling and extraction tools. Still bleeding when the anaesthetic wore off mid-afternoon as we watched the VFL on TV, we'd cry for hours. Every Saturday, Tata bought us Pizza Hut, a non-Croatian delicacy we gummed like infants.

One summer evening when my godparents were over with their sons, we played hide and seek outside, well past dark. On a run
back to the ‘B-A-R, bar' one of the boys said he saw a man hiding in the hedge at the front of our house. Clearly strangers weren't part of the game so we bolted inside to tell the adults.

Tata, my
kum
Ante and an uncle came out to investigate.

‘Where did you see him?'

‘Under there, near the fence.'

We'd brought a flashlight.

‘There. There, there he is.'

Like a possum we'd caught the man's dark eyes in the light. He was scrunched in tight under the branches of the hedge.

‘Jozo'. The man was clearly calling Tata, even though my father's name was Joso.

‘Go inside now, boys. Leave us out here.'

After fifteen minutes the men came back in the house.

‘Who was it? Do you know him? Why is he hiding? Is he a prisoner on the run? Are the police coming?' I wanted answers and action. There was murmuring among the adults, farewells, and then our visitors went home.

‘It's late,' Tata said. ‘You boys go to bed and we'll talk about it in the morning.'

‘But who is it? Has he gone? Why does he know you? Can't you just tell us who the man is and why he was hiding in the bushes?'

The next morning a small, tanned man was sitting at our kitchen table, wearing one of Tata's shirts, which fit him like a tent.

‘
Dobro jutro
Tommy.' The man who said good morning knew me as well. ‘Do you remember me?'

I looked hard but he was out of context, so I shook my head.

‘Rudy,' he said, putting out a small, rough hand and unfurling his weathered face and eyes. I knew that name, but not this man, who was shrunken, a scraggy marsupial.

‘Mary and Ineska's father. We lived next door to you at Adelaide Street.'

The voice was defeated, his eye sockets missing spark plugs.

‘Hello.' I sensed asking about the girls was the wrong thing to do. I didn't know what else to say.

‘Okay,' Tata said. ‘Get ready for school.'

In the car Tata told us Rudy didn't want to come in the house last night, so he slept outside. They'd given him cushions and a blanket; Mama cooked eggs for his breakfast. He'd slept rough in that tight spot a few nights but no one had seen him until one of the boys tried to hide in the hedge. Rudy wouldn't take money at first, so Tata asked him to do odd jobs around the house and insisted on paying him. By the time we got home from school Rudy was gone.

‘He said he was going to Queensland where he could get work because he knew people there,' Mama said.

‘What about Ineska and Mary?'

‘I don't know where they are and neither does Rudy. Eva kicked him out of the house years ago because he drank too much.'

There was no joking about the way Rudy used to sway. I tried to take it all in but I was haunted by the image of how haggard Rudy had become, and that he was sleeping on the streets and didn't seem to own anything. But there was pride in the way he wouldn't accept money. I found an odd comfort that he chose to shelter at our place, that my parents had a stable home.

A few weeks later, I answered the phone. A police officer asked to speak with my father or mother. I froze, wondering if I'd done something to warrant a call from the law. Tata spent a few minutes talking to the officer. When he got off the line Tata was serious but wistful. Police had found Rudy's body near the railway tracks. Dead, probably hit by a train. Our phone number was in his wallet; the police were trying to fill in the gaps and to contact his loved ones.

9

Employed at last

On Friday evenings our milkman collected money from customers who took their dairy on weekly credit. Daylight saving time meant we were still playing cricket when Stan came calling at 7.30. Noticing us in the backyard, he asked Mama whether the bigger boy would like a job with him. They called us over and asked Sam.

‘No, thanks,' he said, too quickly it seemed to me.

‘Can I do it?'

‘How old are you?'

‘Eleven, but I'll be twelve after Christmas.'

Stan looked at Mama, who looked at me, and I looked at him, standing up at my full height.

‘Okay, let's give you a try. Wait out the front of your house tomorrow morning at 6.30.'

Mama woke me at 6.15. I wasn't a swimming squad kid, but in an instant I'd changed into a 1974 World Cup Socceroos T-shirt, tracksuit top, black Stubbies, running shoes without socks. Stan parked at the front of our place, opened a roller door on his truck. Dressed in a brown V-neck jumper with holes in it, shorts and no-club footy socks, he looked older and smaller than he did last night. I wanted to make a good impression, suppressing a yawn. He unloaded a buggy with dragster wheels that was hanging at the rear, and stacked it with milk crates.

‘Follow me.'

He charged through the front gate of the flats, carrying a rack of eight 600-ml glass bottles.

‘When you see an empty bottle replace it with a fresh one and take the empty away. If people want an extra bottle they'll leave a note, like this one.'

It said: ‘2 btls pls'. Who could be in such a hurry to send the milkman a telegram? There were people who paid every day and left coins under the empty.

‘Some people put the money inside the empty so keep your eyes open,' he said. ‘It's not hard, just keep moving, but don't run. Ask me if you're not sure of something.'

We did the two levels of the flats and the units behind.

‘Okay, now do your house and the place next door.'

We took one bottle a day, sometimes two. I went next door carting a full rack and soon learnt I could leave it at the front gate.

‘You keep going down this side of the street and I'll do the blocks of flats. I'll bring the truck down later.'

We did the rest of Chalmers Street, then Kent and York Streets, which had a dozen blocks of flats. I had the knack and began taking two steps at a time in the flats. A sweaty bottle slipped through my fingers and shattered in a stairwell. I told Stan.

‘Don't worry, I'll use the broom to clean it up, you keep going up this side of the street.'

Stan didn't have time to talk but he was patient. We got in the truck and he drove me around the corner back to my place. I'd not been in a car with a stranger since my zebra-crossing tumble but I wanted to show him I was mature, even though I wasn't.

‘Here you go,' he said, handing me a \2 note. ‘And help yourself to one of those.' There was a crate full of flavoured milk. I grabbed a 300-ml Peter's chocolate carton, the standard size in those days. I'd completely forgotten about getting paid.

‘Same time tomorrow morning.'

Employed at last!

It was just before 8 on a Saturday morning. I sat on the porch and opened the milk, two bucks tucked into the buttoned front pocket of my Stubbies. I'd graduated from being a kid to someone with a job, in an economy with double-digit unemployment. It was the school holidays and I kept up the pace, getting better, knowing where to find the money, anticipating demand door-to-door.

Wally asked Stan if he could have a job, too. We started doing the run together. Stan couldn't cope with Seneka, so he called him ‘Santa'. Wally was a name used only by boys in our street. Rather than halving our pay Stan paid us \1.40 each (plus a flavoured milk); it meant we'd finish earlier. By the time school started and we moved into Year Seven, as it was now called, we arranged solo shifts to alternate days, getting home just in time to change and make it to school.

I was peering into other lives. I would soon learn which people were thoughtful (washing out the bottles), on a diet or away on holidays. I got to know about skim milk, sour cream and yoghurt, and why the Lebanese people down the street would often order a dozen bottles of milk (they were making their own delicacies). This snoop's window was a bonus whenever a young woman, still waking, came to the door in a nightie to collect milk. Or my clinking noises brought one into the hallway with a purse. A couple of times I glimpsed a boob, imagining I had seen more as soon as the woman was gone. It was early-morning
Number 96
.

When it came to selling school raffle tickets or getting sponsors for the walkathon I had a running start. I knew the people who splashed out on luxuries and where the spunky women lived. It was exciting, too, given I wasn't afraid to go cold-calling. I was recognised and it gave me an edge.

‘Are you the milkman's son?' asked a semi-dressed man, wallet in hand when I disrupted him mid-afternoon, a woman's voice calling from within the flat: ‘Who is it, love?'

‘No, I work for Stan. But would you like the chance to win a holiday to Queensland?'

The money I earned on the milk run was spent on clothes at sports shops, at the movies and on records, which we played loudly while Teta Danica was at work. I didn't expect Mama and Tata to buy special items for us outside the Christmas– birthday cycle, which for me was so cramped I could not realistically expect two big presents. Tata was a tough nut to crack, when all I'd ever wanted was a snooker table, table-tennis table, bike, surfmat, surfboard, guitar, drums, record player, tape recorder, footy boots and shoulder pads.

Never all at once.

‘Please Tata please, pulleeeeeez Tata.'

‘Police?' he'd reply, every single time, his head jerking around as if to spot imaginary cops. ‘Where are the police? Why are the police coming? Did you call the police?'

It taught me self-reliance through exasperation. I'd often wondered if Tito had fast-tracked Joso's exit from Yugoslavia for bad jokes and annoying ditties. In any case, with cash hoarded in my cigarette box, I should have been in a pre-teen's nirvana. But I wanted more, just as Wally described it one day while we were sitting in the gutter at the front of the flats.

‘Man, I'm set,' he said, having taken delivery of a racing bike to replace his Brumby dragster. ‘I got wheels, I got bread, now all I need is a fine lady.' He spoke unselfconsciously in a kid's mash-up of a beatnik daddy-o and Barry White.

Sam and I didn't have the wheels or fine ladies, but we
had restless feet and a ticket to roam. Even before I'd turned ten we were free to explore the city during the school holidays or go to Roselands shopping centre, about 3 kilometres away. Roselands was the first multi-level mall in Australia, over three storeys with a food court that had outlets such as London Roast, Red Dragon and Chuck Wagon. We thought people from all over Sydney, maybe even the world, went there because the PA announcements would never feature any place we'd ever heard of – and we'd been everywhere: ‘Mrs Hogan from Allambie Heights, your son is waiting for you at the information desk on the ground floor'.

The locus of spirituality at Roselands was the Raindrop Fountain, a tropical open-air diorama with beads of liquid falling down taut nylon fishing lines into a pool against a background trill of birdsong. It was the ‘closest thing to Disneyland in the Southern Hemisphere', I heard a woman say, speaking with the authority of one who must have seen the original. Tata and I would sit and study this marvel of the imminent leisure society, this conveyor belt of repose, each of us with a childlike wonder; the combination of artifice and tranquillity was mesmerising. It was art and science, as if God were market-testing a new feature in nature.