Hoi Polloi (20 page)

Parents are waiting for their sons at Penrith. They’ve rugged the high, grassy ground above the river bank. They’ve laid out a fine spread served from the boots of their cars—roast chicken, lettuce salad, bean salad, pickled onions, breads, crackers, cubes of cheese and flaps of ham rolled like hollow cigars, mustard. They sit on canvas furniture and walking sticks with tops that open out into a seat. They drink champagne from fluted glasses. Their fathers know what’s been going on in the trains but say nothing. They were boys once too. They themselves took the same train ride when they were young. They too had to explain to their mothers why buttons are missing from their shirts. Why there are rips in their trousers. Why skin is scuffed from their knuckles, elbows, knees. They too shrugged “I don’t know” and had their fathers wink at them knowingly.

I
’M AMAZED THEY’RE ALLOWED TO
teach Shakespeare and his plays. “Excuse me Sir,” I address the master. I’ve got my hand up. I’m frowning and scratching my head with my other hand. “What is Macbeth meaning in his tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech? I’ve never heard anything like it. ‘Creeps on this petty pace from day to day’ and ‘all our yesterdays have lighted fool the way to dusty death’. Life signifies nothing, is what he seems to be saying.”

The master replies that Shakespeare is saying that life has no meaning and all human endeavour is futile and sheer vanity. It’s a sobering notion, the master admits, it’s a philosophical jolt to one’s system.

“It’s like a suicide note,” I say.

“It is indeed that,” says Sir.

“Just as the to be or not to be speech in
Hamlet
?”

“Indeed.”

Shakespeare is saying there is no God? He’s saying that the hope the bible offers—an afterlife, a whole series of second chances that give you every opportunity to get into Heaven—is an illusion?

“Effectively,” says Sir.

That means all the study we do in our lives, all the learning of rules and manners, maths, parade-ground marching for cadets, it all signifies nothing?

“Yes. Ultimately.”

I contemplate the pointlessness of reading books, learning geography, preparing for a career, for an adult life when a great playwright and philosopher such as Shakespeare has reached the conclusion, albeit once removed in the form of play characters, in this case Macbeth, that all our efforts and days amount to nothing, futility.

I might as well get it over and done with now, my death. I might as well bring it on myself and short-circuit the futility. The next time something goes wrong, the next time I’m confronted with a trouble I consider insurmountable, I will commit suicide. It’s a comforting thought. A relief. I have the ultimate power over my destiny with this thought. I lie awake at night and pretend to be dead. I hold my breath, close my eyes, feel my face slacken over its bones. I hear with my mind’s ear Heels and Winks grieving for me, see the peoples of the world stop their petty routines in cities, in deserts, despairing that I’ve departed this earth.

How would I kill myself? There are only so many ways that I, a boy, an almost-man of fifteen can take my own life. I have no gun. I could ask Winks to buy a rifle so I can join the school shooting team as a cover. That’s something to keep in mind though the urge to kill myself is likely to come over me so quickly, much too quickly for the rigmarole of joining a team, buying a rifle, learning to load it, cock it (if rifles are cocked)—
Fire
. Too long a procedure.

Of course, there are trains and cars and trucks to jump in front of, but that would be unfair to the driver, that would make an innocent man a killer. Hanging myself with a rope is an option. Rope is cheap—my bedhead money would be more than enough to pay for it. There are hardware stores everywhere for the buying of rope. The bathroom curtain rod would break under the strain of me hanging from it. The balcony rail? It’s a possibility. The school’s rugby goalposts on the main oval, or the trees behind the scoreboard, would provide the perfect purchase as well as witnesses, plebs, seniors, the whole tribe of us, to make me more famous than any honour board.

What about poison! Poison would allow me to die in my own bed. But where would I get poison? The school science laboratory. Heels’ pill drawer. Yes, it’s comforting, it cheers me, my dying. But there is no need to die today, a Sunday morning, a day of do-nothing. The sun lies in silver flakes over the sea. The air on the balcony where I eat breakfast toast is cool and blowing soft on my skin. The boy who throws a tennis ball for his midget dog to fetch is out on the green at Rosa Gully. He tosses the ball straight up, high, high until it loops back down. Up goes the ball again and with it the dog, its stumpy legs dangling in mid-air like a circus trick. Three times the dog catches the ball on its way back down. Four times it fails, the ball bouncing off its snout and across the grass. Now it fails once more, the yellow ball arcs towards the edge of the cliff and the dog barks after it. The ball bounces to the cliff face. To the very edge. Over the edge. The dog scampers and yaps after it, over the edge. “Pee Wee!” the boy screeches and sprints to edge. “Pee Wee,” he pleads, and runs over the edge. His echoing voice rebounds once around the rock walls then the gully resumes its flops and gushes of ocean below. A thin mist swirls.

I grip the balcony rail, eyes shut, thinking, thinking: have I conjured this in some imagination place inside the eyes? Somewhere in the neighbouring apartment block a woman is shouting “a boy, a boy”. A man, tea-towel and plate in hand, his shirt off, his belly round as pregnancy, steps out onto his balcony. He points down to the cliff and beseeches someone inside his apartment to believe him, believe there really was a boy there and he ran over the cliff.

I hurry into the lounge room to the phone, pick up the receiver, but put it down straightaway. I go back onto the balcony to blink and be certain. The tea-towel man calls across to me, “Did you see him?”

“Yes. I saw. I saw,” I reply.

“Has anyone called someone?”

“I don’t know.”

“My wife’s doing it now. He just ran off the edge. Ran right off. The damndest thing.”

Ask this lad (me) here, the tea-towel man says to the policeman who is taking details, his notebook open on the roof of his car. “A boy just ran over the cliff. The damndest thing.” I nod that the tea-towel man is telling the truth. Abseilers crab-walk backwards over the cliff and swing out and down to the rocks below. A stretcher with straps and pullies is lowered. The wind has come up. Spray drifts out to sea like steam. People from the gully’s homes stand cross-armed. They curve their hands through the air to describe what happened: one hand for the dog, one for the boy. Then they stand cross- armed again. On balconies, binoculars flash sunlight as if taking a photograph.

A woman in a nightie sits on the grass beside an ambulance, her head buried in a man’s embrace. Her back shudders with weeping. A prancing dalmatian barks and lunges at a labrador and is told to get out, go home. The tea-towel man throws a pebble at it. Two children in pyjamas play tag then climb onto the fire engine to which the abseiler ropes are tied. They are told to get out, go home. They jump from the fire engine and run playing their tag.

It’s an hour before the winching begins. The men of the gully haul in time after the count of three. I haul on the end of the line. The stretcher ropes squeak on their anchor somewhere in the deck of the fire engine. Here he comes now, up he comes. He is tucked into his puppet-bed in a black sheet of polythene. We step forward to glimpse. His mother is helped forward. Her shaking fingers pry at the polythene exposing his face, a face my age, a face without a mark on it, pale and blue with half-closed eyes and mouth.

Heels is here to fetch me. I shouldn’t just stand around and gawk like that, she reprimands. It’s a terrible thing that has happened but gawking isn’t going to help. “It’s a place of death now,” she complains marching me home. “I’ll never be able to look out from my balcony again. My lovely view is spoiled forever.”

She decides a little breakfast jolly-up is called for, a glass of champers and orange juice as if we’re celebrating. Such an awful start to a Sunday but there’s no need to have the whole Sunday ruined. She closes the curtains so she doesn’t have to look out onto the spoiled beautiful patch of green and the spoiled ocean and the spoiled rocks. She tops up her glass and mutters that the dead boy must have been a silly boy: “I’ll grant you there was no fence there, but what sort of boy throws a ball over a cliff!”

“He didn’t. It just bounced,” I correct her.

“It’s his own fault,” she says, staring resentfully at the drawn curtains.

Her sulky indignation disgusts me, her cheeks flushing with the drink. But one part of her ramblings is true: the gully is now a place of death. And having seen death, a human death, my first human death, the fantasy of my own end, my suicide, my last resort, peaceful, proud, is spoiled like Heels’ view from the balcony. How alone it looked, death, dragged up from the blind ocean and rock, a pale and blue face so blank even a weeping mother’s fingers couldn’t reach it, wake it. Shakespeare’s suicide notes do not mention this. He speaks of sleep perchance to dream. But where was the sleep in this? Where were the dreams?

All is not lost for the day. Heels has made a plan. We’ve been invited to Genevieve Plant’s for afternoon drinks and nibbles. Is Mr Hush Hush going to be there for once? I ask. Of course he won’t be there, says Heels irritably. But why won’t he be there? I ask. He’s never there. Why not? I know very well he’s never there when Genevieve has visitors. That’s his policy. But I’m in the mood to argue out of disgust at Heels—those curtains being drawn on such a sparkling morning against a horrible death; that faint slurping sound she makes when she sips daintily from her glass; the clink of her teeth on the rim. Yet I’m no better than her. A boy has died and I feel no pity, no sadness other than for myself for my loss of death as a comforting companion.

Mr Hush Hush’s policy is absurd to me, I say. If she, Genevieve, is his mistress—“That’s the word, isn’t it?” I hiss to Heels who titters “Yes, I suppose that’s the word to use.” If she is his mistress and it’s common knowledge around the traps, and she has a son, Brett, to him and sends him to prep school at the Mansions as he would any other son, then why all the secrecy? Why not be open about it?

That’s not how it’s done. That’s not how the situation is dealt with when you’re one of the hoi polloi. Mr Hush Hush has a wife. His wife knows of the Genevieve affair. But he’s hardly going to leave his wife because for one thing she is a very wealthy woman in her own right and very well connected. She’s unlikely to leave him because he’s a very respectable Judge, and who wouldn’t want to be married to someone so high up in authority as him? Besides, the old girl’s Catholic, so they have a little arrangement: Mrs Hush Hush knows about Genevieve, Genevieve knows about Mrs Hush Hush. Mrs Hush Hush knows about Brett but Mr Hush Hush doesn’t rub the old girl’s nose in it by waltzing about town with Genevieve on his arm or treating the apartment he set her up in like a second home where friends can come and go for parties like a normal home. Mrs Hush Hush would not be amused.