Homebush Boy (22 page)

I felt sorry for the girl too, who was shamed in front of me. She was fearful I'd spread gossip about this.

‘What are you bloody looking at?' the supervisor asked me, as if in that fairly prudish age he could do what he was doing and not be looked at. A pained and dangerous smile took over his face. He was beginning to feel a bit silly, and threatened too. The girl straightened herself and left.

So this was sex – shame, awkwardness, reluctance, bullying and fear. Not such a big thing to miss out on. Better to be St Francis and St Clare.

Like the packing supervisor, however, I would soon enough make a fool of myself. It was towards Christmas, marked by high temperatures and high humidity. And yet Christmas must have counted for a great deal in the celebrations of Scottish, Irish and English settlers to the country, since it has always been robustly celebrated there, the heat bringing forth a profoundly-based, primordial Australian hedonism.

Even in the devotional goods business, there was a tremendous overload of packing to be done to mark all the torrid bush and suburban Yules.

The normal after-hours way out of the packing department was via a door which locked shut behind you, down a stairwell and through another self-locking door into George Street. But we were told one Friday that if we were working very late, that was not the way to take, since the door at the head of the stairs had been somehow set to lock after us, and the door to the street would be unopenable from the inside. I don't know why this was so – perhaps management had got word of some proposed devotional goods heist. In any case, that night we were told to exit by a back laneway into Kent Street, and make our way around the back of all the businesses, and so by Liverpool Street to George, and then to the Town Hall underground station.

Leaving last after an overtime packing spree, I put out the lights, entered by habit the main building and exited the normal way, closing the door at the head of the stairs behind me and so finding myself trapped. I went down to the outer door, but it was immoveable. If I had broken the glass in that outer door, it would have left all the riches of Pellegrini's devotional warehouse open to plunder. I went back to the head of the stairs and contemplated staying the night. It was at this point that I ran out of stamina, and all the dark shadows of the manic exhilaration in which I'd spent the year struck me. A night is easy to wait through for a spiritual heir of GMH, but all at once the exhaustion from that feverish year seized me and I was unwilling to wait through this one. Using as a buffer a book I was reading – I believe it was Conan Doyle's
The White Company
– I punched a pane out in the upper door. So I let myself through into the body of Pellegrini's, and out by the laneway to Town Hall station and home.

I remember that this act of damage to property worried me greatly, and I lay awake thinking of excuses. What sort of person would the sage manager of Pellegrini's think I was?

The next day I turned up to work and absolutely nothing was said. Towards lunchtime, the packing supervisor came up and said, ‘Are you bloody cut?'

I showed him the few grazes I had from the pane-breaking exercise.

‘Next time, bloody sort it out in your head before you leave, will you?'

I bought plenty of Christmas presents (even a Graham Greene novel for my mother), and books and ties for my father. My mother laid special stress on its being my last at home. I would of course be back the following year, but she rightly knew I would be another kind of child by then.

That morning I made a brief visit to the Tierneys with a present for Matt, to the Frawleys with a gift for the Frawley girls. Mr Frawley was wistful. Rose would
not
be back next year, unless she fled the novitiate, which for some reason seemed unlikely. Though I had posted a fulsome Christmas card, I did not go to the Currans. Eloise and Abelard severely apart at Yuletide.

In the middle of January, just before Curran went away, we got our Leaving Certificate results. I had received two second class Honours and four As, even an A in the awful General Maths. This was what was called in those days a maximum pass, even though first class Honours would have been the
real
maximum. Matt had got three As and three Bs. The
Daily Mirror
came out to photograph him, and all of us gathered at his place – Larkin (who had done badly in Maths but got a first class Honours in History), Mangan (two second class, two As, two Bs), Dahdah come home on holidays, and myself.

The
Sydney Morning Herald
and the Frawleys had let me know that Curran had done dazzlingly. Like me she only received second class Honours in English, but first class in History. Rose had acquired a more pedestrian pass.

I remember a telegram from my father's cousin, Pat the lawyer, expressing amazement at how well I'd done. For some reason I still remember it with secret delight. It was soon followed by a letter from the Federal government informing me that I had won a scholarship to university. I could postpone it in case it was needed at a later date, of course. Mangan was also uselessly offered a scholarship.

Almost simultaneously with it came a letter from Sydney University addressed to Matt and his parents, indicating that the University Senate was powerless to alter the ordinances to allow Matt to undertake a degree. This decree fell like an axe across his triumph, but he seemed almost composed, as he had when Basher refused to let him run against his own age group. He and his parents had a valiant conviction of ultimate success and were sure the ordinance would be revoked in a year or two. (Their confidence in this was, I am happy to say, justified, even though Mr Tierney would not live to see his son graduate.)

My mother was already sewing my name to shirts and underwear for the seminary. My parents seemed almost happy and I had begun going to the bottom of the garden to chat directly with my father about radio programmes and Beethoven and poetry. ‘Too bloody deep for me,' he told me jovially when I tried to explain sprung rhythm to him. ‘Give me Banjo Paterson any day.'

I presumed that at the Mangan household, rather more disorganized than mine, similar preparations were afoot. I happened to run into Mangan one afternoon in Rochester Street and asked him again when it was that Trappist novices were supposed to turn up at the monastery in Victoria.

‘Oh,' he said. ‘I've been meaning to say something about that, but what with the exam results …'

‘Yes?' I asked.

‘The friars have actually recommended that a person should go to university first to learn how to deal with timetables. So I'm going off to university to study Arts for a year or so.'

I kept walking with him, but was pole-axed. We had been going to tread together back to an earlier, more mystical time, and now he was not going to keep stride with me. Rose Frawley and Bernadette Curran would go together, but I would be on my own.

‘My parents would prefer it that way too,' said Mangan, who had rarely mentioned his parents before, given that he was a phenomenon, a bolt from the blue, a manifestation rather than someone's statistical child. I was astounded that he had listened to his parents. To what extent did I listen to mine, and to what extent flummoxed and harangued them?

I saw him go in the gate of his house, down the side to the disorganized Viney back yard. We were no longer troubadours. We weren't singing the same song.

I thought, So, I'll go alone. That was suitable. GMH had gone alone into the thickets of sprung rhythm and half-rhyme, tying his thick knots of imagery.

I stood alone in Rochester Street, ennobled by purpose.

It was still the height of summer, the middle of January, and Sheffield Shield cricket was in full cry at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The turning of the year race carnivals my father went to and modestly wagered at had barely subsided when Mangan, Matt, the Frawleys, the Currans and myself travelled to Newcastle, to the new location of the Dominican novitiate Rose Frawley and Bernadette Curran were about to enter. It had previously been in the northern suburbs of Sydney but had now been moved to this grimmer locale. The Frawleys, mother and father, were in their best, and looked as transformed, as drenched in new light as people we know on a daily basis do when extraordinary circumstances descend on them. But I could tell, even from the viewpoint of the cock-eyed planet I occupied, that the Frawleys were more at ease with their daughter's destiny than were the Curran parents. I now know that the Currans would have preferred we were not there, in the parlour of the vast nineteenth-century Gothic novitiate, saying goodbye to their daughter. To Curran whose hand would go unheld
ad eternum
.

While the Frawleys looked proud, the Currans looked bereaved, and their bereavement – I wanted to say to them but thankfully didn't – would not be final. They too would enjoy the ultimate pride of the accommodation their daughter was making with the more real, the only important world.

The Currans it seemed were going to stay overnight with relatives in Newcastle, that fairly dour mining town part-way up the New South Wales coast, drab itself but named for a drabber town in Northumbria. I can imagine them now, how they might have stood by the convent walls the next day, Mr Curran inconsolable, looking at the bare brick with longing, wondering whether their daughter was thinking, ‘Dear God, why am I here?'

‘When do you go in?' Curran had been kind enough to ask me in the parlour at Newcastle as we waited for her and Rose to disappear utterly.

‘Middle of next month,' I told her.

She smiled the smile which I now know could have got her into the movies.

‘Some people have it easy,' she said.

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Copyright © 1995 by Serpentine Publishing Company Propriertary, Ltd.

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