Hoi Polloi (8 page)

“This is a big moment for him. Let’s not spoil it.”

“This miraculous bang on the head, has it cured him from writing left-handed? Has it?”

I skipped in circles, chanted my Ss and Ps. She grabbed my left hand—“Stop that ridiculous dancing. Stop it and shut up!”—and pinched the string tied to my index finger and held up my hand by this thread. “Has it cured this? Has it? Has it?”

She pointed me to the chair at my corner desk by the window. “Sit. Sit. Pen. Get a pen.” She pushed me aside, fingered out a slip of paper from the desk pigeonhole and snapped it down in front of me. I held a pen in my hand waiting for instructions. “See?” she hissed to Winks. She gripped my hand, my left hand which held the pen, and shook it. “He still picks up the pen with his left hand. He hasn’t been broken of it.” She snatched the pen out of my hand so fiercely that saliva bubbled in front of her bared teeth and I flinched expecting a blow. She prised the pen into the fingers of my right hand. “Open your paw. Open your paw.” She took a step backwards.

“Now write. Go on. Write.”

“Write what?” I said.

“Don’t you talk back to me. Do as I say and write.”

“But I don’t know what to write.”

“If you don’t write something right this moment you’ll never write a damned thing again, so help me.”

Winks groans, a long groan of frustration, “Just write your bloody name: ‘Hello, my name is,’ just to make her happy.”

My hand looped and dragged the pen as best it could until a spindly, unreadable scrawl was completed.

“Exactly what I thought,” Heels said victoriously. “This miraculous bang on the head doesn’t extend to handwriting. What
does
extend to handwriting is telling him over and over again until it finally sinks into his thick skull that he must never write with the hand with the string on it. And practising over and over to write with his right hand will eventually work. Just like, as far as I’m concerned, and I won’t be contradicted, the elocution lessons have fixed his stutter. In fact I want it known throughout Heritage that I’ll be paying Mrs Daley a fifty-dollar bonus for her wonderful efforts.”

Now that I’m standing before the class, all those eyes watching, I wish I could stutter again. Mrs Quigley would never have got me to stand if I stuttered.

“What country are you headed for?” she persists.

“Aust-st-st-stralia.” Is this tempting fate? Will pretending to stutter bring the stuttering back forever? I quickly sit down. “Australia. Australia,” I say under my breath, testing each syllable in my mouth. “Australia. Australia.”

Mrs Quigley knows I was pretending. Look at her eyebrow cocked into an upside-down U. Those ripples of skin the same shape above it. My classmates snigger that they know I’m pretending.

“Up. Up. We haven’t finished with you yet, have we children? Tell us why you are headed for Australia.”

“Because he’s a drunk,” someone shouts—a girl, maybe Bronwyn. Maybe Sandra. The children, all of them, giggle and shout, “In a phone box. Drunk in a phone box.”

Mrs Quigley shushes them. “Alcohol and its harmful effects are no laughing matter. I will not have jokes of that nature in my classroom.”

“He was so drunk he fell and it fixed his stoppage, Mrs.”

“It was elocution lessons,” I counter, a feeble protest against the class’s glee.

“I said shsh,” Mrs Quigley says and claps her hands until the noise ceases. “I was hoping to have an intelligent few minutes but clearly that is beyond you. Our newspaper has deemed the sale of the Heritage Hotel worthy of inclusion in its pages.” She picks up a copy of the
Chronicle
from her desk and shakes it inside out to the relevant page. “I would have hoped that this article might prompt among us a discussion on what, if anything, the sale might mean for our town. I read here in the paper that the hotel will be pulled down and replaced by a department store. That will be a big change for Tui Street, I’m sure. Quite a boon perhaps. But such a discussion is of no interest to this class it seems.”

“He’s rich,” someone calls out: Peter, the accountant’s son.

Mrs Quigley claps her hands. “Enough. Enough. Money does not equal happiness, children.”

Arms go up, repeatedly bending and stiffening to be noticed. “Mrs Quigley, Mrs Quigley,” the class pleads. Mrs Quigley orders them to be quiet and to keep their hands in their laps, but they ignore her and blather three or four at a time desperate for a say about money, which they refer to as my money—“his $
400
,
000
”—as if it represents all the money in the world.

“My mother says what a lot of mouths that would feed.

She says what a lot of shoes for little feet.”

“Mine wants to know how such a lot of money could come out of Heritage.”

“My dad reckons it shouldn’t be allowed to leave town. It should be put back into the town because it comes from here.”

“My dad says if it’s grog money it’s dirty money.”

“Your dad’s a Salvo.”

Mrs Quigley stomps her feet. “I don’t think we’re old enough to discuss these matters properly. We shall do our times tables, please. I said we’ll do our times tables, please.” She gives an exaggerated nod of the head, a signal for me to resume my seat, which I do though immediately I regret it because the class’s laughing presses down on me. I should have stayed on my feet. I should say—Heels would say it— that they aren’t worth worrying about, these low-grade types with their sniggering. She would stand up and say right this minute that it was elocution lessons that cured my stuttering. She would say it over and over until they shut their mouths and either believed her or she was forced to tell them how disgraceful and insulting it is that they don’t believe her. If they don’t want to believe what she’s telling them, that’s their problem, even if what she’s telling them is a lie, because there’s no such thing as a lie if you believe the lie is truth the way Heels has the trick of doing. Elocution lessons cure stuttering if you believe it’s true and state it definitely enough like she does.

Them with their $
400
,
000
-talk—they’re just jealous. Their fathers aren’t worth a cent. They’re nobodies in a no-hoper town like Heritage. It’s not possible to feel shame among types like these. “Your name’s mud,” someone yells. But I forgive them because I couldn’t expect better from the likes of these. I smile at them, offer a snort of a laugh. I will never see these people again after this day. I want them to imagine that they and their opinions and ridicule mean nothing to me and never could do.

A
USTRALIA IS WHERE SYDNEY
turns off into Randwick and Randwick turns off into Dutruc Street and the khaki brick flats where a concrete path turns into a stairwell through glass swing doors, up three flights of steps to a cramped lounge with a spongy fake leopard-skin table-like square called a pouf in the centre of the room.

Why is this flat being called a flat when it’s in Sydney? Flats are supposed to be called apartments here like in Paris and America because they’re so much nicer than flats which is a depressing and dowdy name for a place to live. Sydney is not what I expected at all. Surely $
400
,
000
would buy a palace! Heels says the $
400
,
000
is no longer worth $
400
,
000
. Even if it was, $
400
,
000
would not buy a palace in Sydney. And what’s the point of a palace anyway if after buying it you don’t have anything left over to put food on the table? We are renting this flat to tide us over until a suitable business can be found to purchase and
then
we will buy an apartment, a proper apartment.

She’s cleaning the stove, rubber gloves streaming with the wet black grime she scours with steel wool. When that’s finished, the bathroom tiles get the same treatment till the bleach fumes cause her eyes to run.

“If we’re renting, aren’t we one of those who don’t care?

Can’t we relax?” I ask.

“You never know who was here before us,” she pants, then pats her hair-do in place with her wrist, then scrubs and pants.

Now she’s doing subtraction from the original $
400
,
000
out loud, mumbling something about a mortgage on the Heritage Hotel, something else about bringing a dollar from New Zealand to here and only getting
80
cents. She gripes about this to the floor, shoving the steel wool along the bath as if digging now rather than scrubbing.

“What’s a mortgage?” I ask.

Heels gives an extra shove across the bath at the very mention of the word. “A mortgage is a debt that the bank has over you.”

“How can they do that?”

“Because we ask them to,” she says impatiently. “And please don’t start harping on with ‘Why? Why?’ There’s a million things like mortgages in life.”

“Like what?”

“Like tax. There’s tax to be paid when you sell a business.”

“Why?”

“The government wants to punish you for making something of yourself. You’ll find out when you grow up and have businesses of your own.”

“What else?”

“Millions of things.”

The good news is that the government in Australia is a hopeless Labor government and because of that interest rates are going up, up, up on the money we’ve got in the bank. That’s what happens with Labor governments, she exhales heavily, giving another wrist-pat to her hair. Labor governments don’t like our sort of people; get up and go sort of people. An interest rate is like a thank-you that banks pay you for letting them use your money. They thank you more when there’s a bad government. “Think of a piece of paper where there’s a right-hand column and a left-hand column. The thank-you goes in the left-hand column because that’s where the good news goes. The bad news goes in the right-hand column.”

In the good news column we can put $
10
,
000
for selling the Mercedes to Sir Thomas Goodes’ family. But we need to buy a new car now that we’re in Australia. Something that’s not too much of a comedown from a Mercedes. That will have to go in the bad news column. The bad news column is just a little too full for Heels’ liking. For that she blames Winks.

“Why?”

“Because he’s gone off and done a ridiculous thing.” She’s beginning to jut and scratch the air. She’s talking to me but intending the words for Winks because of the way she cranes her neck and raises her voice to aim it out the door.

“What has he done?” I ask.

“Before we left New Zealand he bought himself a yearling at the horse sales in Wellington. Not just any yearling, mind you. A $
15
,
000
thing.”

“Why did he do that?”

“You go ask
him.
I’ve got my theories. It’s simply so he can big-note himself in Sydney with an expensive horse if you ask me.”

I do go and ask him. He has spread newspaper on the kitchen table for nuggeting his good shoes. His race-day shoes. “Why did you buy an expensive horse?”

He waves me away with a shoe on his hand like a boxing glove. “Don’t
you
start,” he says with complaining in his voice. “This colt’s by Pakistan out of a Star Kingdom mare. A champion in the making. I can feel it in my water.”

Heels yells from the bathroom, “Feel it in your water? Who ever heard of such hooey! Besides the bloody thing won’t be a colt much longer. I don’t hear you mentioning that he’s more interested in mounting fillies than racing in races. He’s got to be gelded. So there’s vet fees to go in the bad news column. Along with the plane fare to fly the thing to Sydney, and training fees.”

Winks is polishing his shoe so fiercely his hair that is usually Brylcreemed perfectly in place is falling loose over his forehead.

Heels keeps adding to the bad news column. “A business will cost $
300
,
000
at least. One horse for God’s sake is over $
100
a week to keep. It’s worse than a private school.” She says if you add up the bad news column at the moment, the $
400
,
000
has almost halved since we came to Sydney. Almost halved in only a few months.

But Winks tells me not to listen to her. He’d still be working in a gravel pit and eating one potato for dinner if he didn’t have the savvy to turn one dollar into two. “You’ve got to spend money to make money,” he says. “You’ve got to move in the right circles and there’s no better way to do that than by owning a well-bred horse.” He holds the shining shoe away from himself for admiring. “If you want to get to know the right people you’ve got to look the part,” he winks. He says there’s no easier way in this world to make money than to spend a sum betting on a racehorse and having that racehorse win and return you two or three times the cash. “There’s an art to punting. That art is for you, the punter, to be in the know.” He taps his nose with his finger as he says this. “You’ve got to know where the clever money is going. You’ve got to move in the right circles and know what horse is carrying the clever dough.”