Hoi Polloi (2 page)

Heels is adamant: “I won’t have him visiting Sir Thomas Goodes looking like riff-raff. He will wear his goat-hair coat.’’ But I’m not visiting Sir Thomas Goodes. I’m going on a school excursion to the Goodes cannery, I tell her. I’m going to observe how they process vegetables. But Heels raises her voice that she doesn’t care whether it’s a school excursion or not, put on the goat coat and do as you’re told you ungrateful so-and-so. “If I’m going to accompany you, you’ll look smart in my presence.”

Heels has volunteered to be a parent helper at the excursion. She never does that sort of thing. She did not, I suspect, volunteer simply to be a helper. She wants to size up the class, the girl named Sandra I’ve been caught watching pee in the girls’ toilet. Sandra invited me to. She invited all the boys in the class into the girls’ toilet. She pulled up her skirt, pulled her white undies down and sat astride the bowl facing us and peed out through the bare mound with a split in it between her legs she showed was her cuntie. She said we could touch her pee as it came out the split and then poke a finger up inside her as far as it could go before hurting. It smelt watery sour.

I felt excitement doing this, excitement that wasn’t the normal kind that made me run about. I was standing absolutely still. The bag of puffy skin below my cocko shrivelled and prickled. We touched her pee, put in a finger and agreed to pee in front of her and let her put her finger under the stream. But after I pulled down my pants, going second after Damien, aiming to pee on top of Sandra’s and Damien’s pee while Sandra sat on the cistern to watch, Mrs Quigley walked in. “Stop it. Stop it at once,” she yelled, clapping her hands to hurry us out of there, clipping me across the back of my head as I ran doing up my zipper.

She rang the parents of the children involved. That night Heels was in a rage. When she’s in a rage her eyes flare open to their whites. Her jaw juts forward till her yellow real bottom teeth overbite her false clean top ones. She sucks the air like a person about to lift something heavy. She flexes her fin-gers, scratching the air with her red nails. That night she was able to speak. Sometimes she’s too involved in her rage to speak, but that night her sucking and scratching produced a question as she circled me. “What can you tell me about this girl, this Sandra?” When she hates something she puts “this” before its name. “Is she a hori? I heard her grandfather had hori in him.” She nodded to herself the way she does when she’s about to say, “I should’ve known.” And that’s what she did say. “I should’ve known. The little slut’s a hori.”

Winks spoke up from outside the circle she was walking: “Language, love. Slut’s strong stuff.” She didn’t acknowledge his presence. She said she refused to believe that a child of hers would be involved in such filth. She demanded the heavens tell her why there are no private schools in Heritage. Someone should have started a decent school and I could have gone there. She made Winks take his belt from his waist and stand by with it looped into a whip. She told me to list everyone who was in the toilet at the time of the disgusting episode.

I began with Damien. Heels shook her head. “Damien’s father is a respected orchardist. They’ve just built a house. You expect me to believe Damien was a part of this depravity?” Next was Peter. She shook her head again. “The accountant chappy’s boy? I won’t believe that.” Next, I said Tamoa. Heels slapped her hands on her knees: “I knew it. I knew it. A hori would be in this. I bet he was the ringleader.” She softened her voice. “Is that right, dear?” I gave her the answer she wanted: “Yes.” She sighed. She smiled at me, kissed my forehead. She said I could not possibly understand how embarrassed she and my father were, in their position as leading business people in Heritage, with a son who associates with horis. Winks threaded his belt around his trousers. Heels was still smiling and talking softly. I felt it was a good time to speak up. “B-b-but
you
m-m-mix w-with h-h-horis.” Heels’ eyes widened to their full whites again. Winks stopped threading his belt. I said, “H-here. In the h-h-hotel. Th-they’re in h-here all th-th-the time.” Heels let out a scoffing breath. So did Winks. “That’s business, dear,” she said. “They come in here. We take their money. And we’re glad to see the back of them until tomorrow. It’s a profitable business or else we wouldn’t put up with them.”

Heels says horis are not like pakehas in the following ways: they are drunkards, uncouth, violent, that’s their natural state of behaviour, look at what they do to your father, they’re nothing but animals.

I’ve also noticed they have missing teeth but wear no dentures like pakehas. They are twice as big as pakehas except very big pakehas. They are brown even in winter, a dappled bruise-blue brown. They have much thicker arms and legs, and noses and lips. Their eyes are closer together on their face. They laugh with a high-pitched giggle but have deep voices. Though they speak English it sounds low and growling as if they’re really speaking Hori but are speaking English at the same time. Pakehas have red, black and blue tattoos of snakes and knives, curvy women in tight dresses, anchors and flames. Horis have faded blue handwriting tattoos, including on their fingers,
Love, Mum, Hate, Death
like the tattoos Tamoa scratches into himself at playtimes with a safety pin and ink bottle. Horis have runny noses like Tamoa. I have a runny nose in winter but
they
have them all the time. I use a handkerchief, white or chequered and ironed into a square. Hori children use their thumb and tongue. They go barefoot and wear rugby shorts in all weather or workman shorts that are too baggy. They have long strips of skin on the end of their cockos and pakehas have none.

“The things they do to their women,” Heels says with a shudder. “Belt them and make them do terrible things.”

“What things?” I ask.

“Never you mind. Terrible things.”

Terrible things. She also says that about Mr Chipper-field, and Mr Chipperfield is a pakeha and works at the bus company a few doors down on Tui Street. Mr Chipperfield does terrible things, she says, you are not to talk to him anymore.
“Why not?”

“Just don’t.”

“Why not?”

“He likes children.”

I like Mr Chipperfield. Mr Chipperfield always has time to wonder aloud, How are you? Come and sit down and tell old Chips what you’ve been up to.

“Mr Chipperfield’s
like
is not
like
in the usual way. He has never asked you to do things, has he?”

“What things?”

“To go for a drive in his car?”

“Yes.”

“He has?”

“Yes. Into the countryside.”

“Oh God, the bastard. You must never, ever speak to him again. He likes to do things to children. To touch them. And for them to touch him. Did he ever ask you to do that?”

“Yes.”

“The bastard. What exactly did he ask? To hold him, down
there
? His John Thomas?”

“Yes.”

“And did you?”

“I was going to but a bus drove in and Mr Chipperfield had to go.”

“You must never ever touch anyone’s John Thomas but your own.”

“What terrible things do horis do to their women? As terrible as Mr Chipperfield’s things?”

“The same. Worse. Oh for God’s sake, what a dreadful topic.”

The grade is told to form two lines for the excursion and hold hands with the next child. Everyone except me is shivering in the morning chill, pulling their jumper arms over their fists. It’s quite an occasion going to Goodes cannery. Tamoa and the horis are wearing shoes. Shoes that flop on them too big and don’t look right without socks. I’m wearing the goat coat and pretend to shiver, sniffle and cough so the coat might seem a lesser thing in Heels’ eyes and pointless to have forced me to wear it. She’s dressed like always as if going out to a ball. Her face is pale with powder. Her hair, tinted blond with a pink haze through it, is swirled into a cone. She wears a white trench coat over her blue frock, her favourite frock that goes down to near her ankles. Around her neck there’s the stole she likes to show people is mink from George Street, Sydney. Her high heels are less high than usual because she has a long walk ahead of her, but high all the same.

Everyone wants to touch and stroke the goat coat. Their lips are pursed holding back laughter. They don’t want to hold hands with me and I become proud and say I don’t want to hold hands with them either. I stand with my chin pointing up in the air and make it plain that at least I’m warm and not shivering and chattering my teeth like them. I even hold my breath so no mist will escape from my mouth. Sandra touches the coat, pulls its hair-ends out to their full length and snorts a small laugh with her fingers up to her mouth. But she also takes my hand to walk off, out of the school playground, across town to Goodes.

Heels puts her hands on my shoulder and pulls me away from Sandra until our grip breaks. She marches me down the line looking for a suitable hand. Tamoa’s hand is free but she pushes past him and past the hori girl Bronwyn, and another hori girl, Aroha. “There seem to be no free hands,” she says to Mrs Quigley and pushes me a little further towards the front where Damien is holding hands with Leeanne Bright-ways, her with the lovely yellow hair plaited down her back like so much fine rope. Heels breaks their grip and puts Lee-anne’s hand and mine together and tells Damien to hold hands with Leeanne’s twin sister, Adele, who’s standing right behind and has rope hair as well. The boy Adele is holding hands with has to hold hands with whoever is behind him. On it goes down the lines until the holding hands matter is settled and we all file up the street in a cloud of breathing. Tamoa holds hands with Sandra.

The factory clatters and wheezes like a giant car engine. Workers wear white overalls and caps. They smooth labels onto cans with a quick roll of the hand and send the cans away on conveyor belts. The factory manager gives a speech about how the company began in a cottage in Ranfurly Street more than thirty years ago and at first only turned out
20
,
000
cans a day but it’s twenty times that now. It makes $
60
million a year. Heels gasps at the figure. Mrs Quigley follows her lead and gasps. Everybody begins gasping repeatedly until hushed. The manager holds out a plate of raw greens for us to sample. String beans, peas, broadbeans puffy in their pods. At the hotel it used to be Tia’s job to shell these things and cook them. She made me milkshakes and gingerbreads in between shellings while I sat in the kitchen near the door with a round window in it for waitresses to peep through before carrying out steaks to the dining room.

Tia often did something secretive as she worked behind saucepans at the bench. She slipped a handful of greens into her apron pocket. Sometimes she did the same with lumps of butter or a rasher of bacon wrapped in a paper serviette. She emptied her apron pocket into her flax carry bag. I wondered why on earth she did this—why be so secretive about a handful of beans and some butter? But I said nothing to her because it was obvious she never intended me to notice. One night I asked Heels what Tia might do with the food in her apron pocket. I certainly didn’t mean to get Tia into trouble over a few beans, but Heels sucked and scratched the air in that way she does and said, “I’ll put her on notice tomorrow.”

Winks shrugged that that’s probably wise. “It’s not as if we don’t pay the woman.”

“Horis are hopeless with money,” said Heels.

“I thought she was a good one.”

Tia made no more milkshakes or gingerbreads. She turned the radio on whenever I tried to talk to her. If she’d have done this only once, maybe twice, it wouldn’t have hurt me so. But through the next week my hurt hardened to resentment that she should ignore me over and over. How dare she refuse to speak to me. What makes her think she can treat me this way. She should be grateful to have the son of the people who hire her want to talk to her at all and keep her company. I began to see how blue and swollen her ankles were, how red her fingers. She had dots of sweat in her curly black hair and ugly black hairs coming out the tops of her toes. She smelt too, a man’s sweating smell. I no longer wanted to be near her unless it was to bring a book into the kitchen, those thick thrillers Winks keeps by the bed, and pretend I could read it fast, nodding and smiling as if the story amused me. Tia couldn’t read or write, she once told me. Surely she watched me enviously. Surely she was thinking how I’d grow up to do a job that involved lots of reading the way important people do, while she would stay a cook, a hori cook.

One day she never turned up for work in the morning. She never turned up again. Heels said that was typical of horis.

I take a pea pod from the factory manager’s plate and cut it open with my fingernail for eating. Tamoa selects a string bean. He turns it in his hand like a brilliant stone, stares at it, blinks. Heels is over talking to Mrs Quigley so I move closer to Tamoa. “Haven’t you eaten a bean before?” I ask him, meaning it as a joke not a question.

“No,” he says.

I have to laugh at that and Tamoa glares at me and calls the bean fucking pakeha shit. Pippies, puha from the roadside and the mussels his relations get from the beach, that’s
his
kind of food, he says. Sometimes lamb when someone has a hangi. Lamb was pakeha food too, but not when cooked as a hangi. Aroha tells Tamoa to shut up because the reason he didn’t eat beans is because his parents don’t have enough money for food after they’ve paid for beer. She says she’s had beans and peas for years because her father has a job at the freezing works. He can buy and steal good meat whenever he wants.