Hoi Polloi (7 page)

They blur and shout past, blur and shout. I can’t keep awake any more. But I can’t quite fall asleep because of the awful cold. I sit on a slat bench, I lie on it but it’s just a damp bed of cold. I curl up in the doorway, pull up my legs. My eyelids keep closing, so heavy, they’re so heavy.

“Wee fella. Up you go, wee fella.” The Senior Sergeant. His pyjama collars poke out from his scratchy-wool jumper. His breath is sleep-smelling breath, the way breath gets in the mornings.

The hotel corridor. My eyelids open and close on Heels. She is kneeling, chin twitching with tearfulness. She is sucking and jutting, rifling through my satchel, the cigarette packs it contained stacked at her feet. The higher the stack grows— three storeys high—the louder she sucks the air.

“Boys will be boys,” the Senior Sergeant says and thanks Winks for the crate of beer at his feet. Winks is holding me. He tosses me tighter into his chest for a better grip. His chest is warming me.

Weaning? What’s all this nonsense about weaning?, Heels wants to know. It is morning. She’s jutting and scratching, saying that no one could be so stupid as to expect her to believe such tripe. You’re not a half-wit, are you? You’re supposed to be a clever boy for all your stutter speech. Too clever for your own good. Your weaning story is just that—a story, a cock and bull story, a load of hooey. They have never turned you against others, she says—horis or otherwise. They, as responsible parents, have simply told you the facts as they see them. Don’t try and make your own mother and father feel guilty for opening your eyes to the world. And never ever accuse them of driving you away—this so-called weaning business. As for your stealing, you are a little thief, young man, someone who stole cigarettes and then got it into his head that he should run away from home which is a kick in the teeth for her and a kick in the teeth for your father. No one could know what pain
is
till they are a mother who nearly died having their child and then are kicked in the teeth by that child running away from home. What shall they do!

Perhaps a word with Dr Murchison is called for, merely to enquire about seeing someone, one of those psychiatrist types, Winks suggests.
Never
, Heels flares. Never, never, never. “I’d die from embarrassment. No son of mine needs a psychiatrist,” she says. No use in thrashing you, though she’d like to see it. What good has it done? They’ve decided to do the following: you will go to work after school with old Hugh McPherson washing bottles in the liquor store. You will learn some responsibility. You will learn to pull your weight. You want to make your own way in the world? Start at the bottom and work your way up. Start by washing bottles and flagons with Hugh McPherson. Now, give your mother a hug and say how sorry you are. A bit more convincing please. Now a kiss. A bit more meaningful please. That’s better. Eat your breakfast.

Start at the bottom and work my way up. I have no intention of starting at the bottom. I’m better than that. I have been given every advantage in life and have been given that advantage so that I would not have to start at the bottom like Heels and Winks. They themselves have always made that clear. Washing beer bottles and flagons for refilling—that’s old Hugh’s job. That’s all he’s good for. How can
he
be in charge of
me
?

“Don’t go easy on the boy,” Winks orders Hugh, old Hugh with his gargling Scottish voice and purple scribble of veins on his nose and cheeks. He’s
staff
. He’s so bald I can see the thin brown baby-hairs sprouting on his shiny crown. Yet he’s telling me what to do, this old man with a solitary black strand of hair swept over his head and hooked over his ear and around his earlobe. He sweats and loses his breath just from saying hello to customers coming to the counter past the buzzing robotic eye.

I sit on a crate in front of the bottle-washing contraption in the backroom. The air reeks of washed-out beer. Hugh instructs me to push a beer bottle onto each brush claw then to push this little button here and set the water awhisk. The glass is washed, rinsed, dried with a blow of hot air. When this red light here lights up, pull the bottles from the claws and place them upside down in this rack for refilling with beer.

At first Hugh resents my presence. “Are they saying an eleven-year-old can do my job?” he grumbles. Yet clearly he enjoys bossing me. “Well don’t just sit there like the landed fucking gentry, get to work,” he orders because I work slowly, sulkily, in protest. After attaching each bottle to the contraption I pause, day-dream. I read the labels on cartons and crates stacked halfway to the ceiling and blend them with racehorse names from the newspaper to make more poems:

Storm draught dashes the ragtag walker and the white horse that
was Napoleon’s honour.

“For Christ’s sake speed up lad. You’ll get me into fucking trouble with your go-slow,” complains Hugh.

This man I’ve barely said a word to, who is neither my father nor a teacher nor a relative, is ordering me about.
Ordering.
He takes his red tartan thermos and stands at the counter pouring himself a lidful.

I speed up my work as if in a race to fill the drying rack the fastest it has ever been filled. It will show Winks what a slouch shuffle-footed Hugh is as a washer and how cheerfully and efficiently I go about my job so that it’s hardly a punishment at all and therefore there’s no point in keeping me at it.

“Slow down,” demands Hugh. “Do me out of a fucking job, would you?” But I don’t slow down. “Slow down,” he demands again. “Play the game lad.” I don’t slow down. “Lad-die, laddie, play the game. Play the game, lad. Come on, take a break. Take a break. Come have some coffee.”

I’ve never tasted coffee. Hugh sits down on an upturned crate and pours splashes of coffee into his thermos cup-cap. The liquid smells and tastes sourly of liquorice yet has been heavily sweetened. My lips are sticky with sugar. After the first few bitter sips the flavour becomes more palatable.

“Bet that fucking well slows you down,” Hugh sniggers with his jiggling belly. I take longer sips. Heat rises in my face not unlike the feeling I get from the trays in the phone box. I say as much to Hugh. “I f-f-feel like I d-do when I d-drink the d-d-dregs in the ph-phone box.”

Hugh stops sniggering and swigging directly from his thermos. “So it was
you
after all, you little cunt. Folks nearly got fired over that.” His mouth purses into a grin. “Well there’s good Scotch whisky in that coffee lad, not fucken dregs. Good Scotch whisky.”

I try to stand but my legs won’t let me. Hugh’s voice seems very distant and sometimes heard only in my left ear. Sometimes only in my right. “That’s slowed you down, hasn’t it lad? Ay, you sit there quietly and be at peace with the fucking world.”

I hear buzzing—the robotic eye is buzzing. Hugh hobbles off in its direction. I must go up the stairs to bed. Are these my stairs? This ladder is very like my stairs. Up I go to bed. This is a landing with crates and cartons, it’s not my bedroom. Back down the ladder. Forget the ladder. I can make it to the ground in one stride. I step out. The ground is lifting up. Dark.

Winks is slapping my face with his fingertips. I’ve woken to his crying and slapping and laughing that I’m not dead, that I’ve fallen all this way and barely have a mark on me. He is feeling my arms and legs again for breaks. None, he says. There seems to be no blood on my head, just a blue bump in my hairline.

He bends forward to embrace me. Hesitates. Smells my breath. “He’s drunk. He bloody stinks of the stuff. He’s drunk,” he says, muttering at first then almost yelling.

“There’s your mystery of the phone box solved,” Hugh is desperate to explain. “Little bugger stole my flu toddy right from under my nose.”

A
USTRALIA IS AN ENGLAND OF
New Zealand. If you sell a hotel for $
400
,
000
and you are a pakeha, naturally you will want to leave Heritage. You will want to live somewhere else, want to graduate to a place that is bigger, more serious in the world scheme of things. A city, a great city. Is Sydney a great city? From Heritage it seems to be. Other people leave for England—the
real
England. Everybody leaves at some time, though
they
leave temporarily, a year or two of what is called O.E.—overseas experience—in the land where their grandparents or great-grandparents were born, rickety paupers, housemaids, labourers, miners, dockers, those we call ancestors.

Ancestors. What do
our
kind, Heels, Winks and me, care about ancestors. Ancestors is hori talk. Only horis and snobs who want to trace themselves back to the Earl of somewhere or other care about ancestors. “What did ancestors ever do for us?” is our opinion of ancestors.

Australia is
our
England. Ancestors left England for a better life, and we are going to Sydney where I myself was born. I am my own ancestor.

“Someone’s leaving for greener pastures,” Mrs Quigley announces on my last day at school. She asks me to stand up in class and explain where, when and why we are going. She hasn’t warned me she would do this and surely she knows I hate standing up in front of people.

“Up. Up,” she motions with her fingers as if stroking something. “Up. Up.”

I get to my feet, hands clasped in front of me, trying to close myself off. Mrs Quigley repeats the question. “Now, where are you departing our fair shores for, and when and why?”

After the fall from the landing a remarkable thing happened. When I sobered up from the bang on the head and the fog of the drink and said my first sentence—“Sorry. I’m sorry.”—the words came out of my mouth clear, with no false starts. The two sorrys had one Seach, not three or four. No stutter. My stuttering disappeared. It’s cured. Dr Murchison has never heard the like. The only trace is a vague, whistly lisp. I’ve never known such happiness. It’s probably not even happiness but a feeling far greater. I can be happy eating the crisp rind from bacon or on Sundays when the hotel is closed and the bars and rooms are silent and empty and mine all to myself. But this is a feeling that swells inside me with such pressure it takes my breath away, it makes me want to laugh though nothing funny has happened, and cry as if suffering from sheer pleasure.

On the day my stuttering died I vowed to speak as often and as loud as possible all those once feared words with the Fs and Ths, Ss and Ps. I rattled off “feather, father, system, slice of pickled pepper” to Heels and Winks, running on the spot with excitement. Heels hugged me so tight into her bosom my new, pure speech was momentarily muffled and I strained impatiently to get away. And Winks’ eyes—I’m sure they were wet. He turned his face from me and gripped the back of a chair. His shoulders quaked. I skipped around my bedroom saying, “fans and farmers thick as thieves in sport and pirates” as Heels and Winks settled into bickering.

Her: “We all have me to thank for this. If I hadn’t insisted on elocution lessons he’d still be jabbering.”

Him: “It was his fall.”

“I’m not interested in any fall thank you very much.

Elocution lessons
.”

“He’s been having those lessons for a bloody year.”

“And now they’ve finally paid dividends.”

“He was drunk from stealing from Hugh’s flask and fell off the landing, love.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“And it was him in the bloody phone box.”

“I can’t bear it. The embarrassment. It’s all around town.

As far as I’m concerned none of it ever happened. My son no longer stutters because of elocution lessons.”

Her eyes had narrowed as if fighting back tears. No tears came. She buried her fingernails deep into her stiff hair-do and scratched it in time with her heavy breathing. The scratching made a static sound come crackling out of her scalp. She spoke to Winks through clenched teeth. “If you’re so clever then, then, then … what else has the bang on the head cured? Has it cured his being ungrateful? Has it cured his foul-mouthed manners? Or just singled out his stuttering? How nice for him.”

Winks: “Leave it out, love.”

“When have you heard him ever thank me? Thank me for elocution lessons, for the lovely clothes, for slaving my guts out in this God-forsaken place? I’ve done everything
for him.”