Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (31 page)

"Are these right?" I asked. "We could use some music."

He started out rusty, but it only took about a day for him to loosen up, and then those spoons clacked out all kinds of songs, and he played better than I remembered. It was okay, seeing him slouched over the stool, banging those spoons against his knee. The girl, Majka, liked his playing, though it was hard for me to hear with all the moaning and hissing and tumbling of the machines.

Those were good days. I slept so well that even the twosies of little Beatrice didn't get me up.

The Pococurante fashion evenings became so popular that we got a half page write-up in the
Adelaide Telegraph
as the place to be if you want to be in mode, with a big photo of the window:

Pococurante Cleaners
Dressmaking & Fashion Advisory Service

The article was feisty: "A poke in the eye to all those who think of Adelaide as not able to hold its head up with the major cities, as far as style is concerned."

I framed the page and hung it in the window.

~

The next week Jiffy Cleaners closed., and within days, I told Majka to bring in an offsider, we had so much business, so she brought in her younger sister. Now there were two girls working in the back of the shop, and Po mainly playing his spoons.  It would of been odd if it were anyone but Po. And his songs were so full of life.

About a month later, I heard two screams and fought my way through a crush of cello'd suits to find Po holding up a red-bellied black snake with one hand and picking up a wedding veil with the other.

"It want kill me," Majka said, her hands on her heart. Her sister half hid behind her—their eyes big as oil stains.

Po dropped the snake into the middle of the wedding veil, pulled up the edges and knotted them. The snake squiggled but it couldn't get out. Po had bagged that snake so smooth, you'd of thought he bagged a snake a day before breakfast. I'd wondered before where Po came from. He never said.

He looked to me.

"Take it away!" begged Majka.

Her sister pointed. "No that."

I agreed. I pulled a set of Alfred Hotel drapes from their laundry bag and handed Po the bag.

He dropped his improvised sack into the laundry bag, gave the girls one of his ghost-smiles, and left out the back door.

The front door bell had tinkled several times and the counter bell was berserk, so I left the girls with a "You okay?" and their uncertain nods. As soon as I could, I joined them in the back and they told me the story. The redbelly had come out from a pile of musty woollens that looked like they hadn't been worn for years. "It want kill me!" Majka kept saying, and her sister acted like one of those jerk dolls where you pull the elastic to make its head nod. I didn't laugh. They wouldn't know that the snake just wanted to get away. I did say I'd never seen another snake in Adelaide, and then showed them from the style of clothes in that pile and their sheepy smell, that the customer was a cockie, and since they didn't know that word either, I had to say
farmer
, but they didn't understand till I said
Baaah!
And then they smiled.

Then I said so that they understood, regardless of whether they believed the rest of what I'd said: "You tell. No work." They both understood that. We couldn't have our lady customers thinking snakes were lurking in the Pococurante, eyeing their high heels.

Po didn't come back that day, but was security at the fashion night that night, reliable as ever.

The next morning when Majka and her sister arrived, they carried between them a huge old case made of something that looked like leather. They ducked to get it in the front door, and took it to the back. Po was already there, playing his spoons. The shop wasn't OPEN yet, thank goodness, or I would of had to close, I was so curious.

Po stopped playing. We watched as Majka undid the buckles while her sister held the case upright. They opened the hinged lid together and Majka brought out what looked like a taxidermied snake from some Land of Giants, but instead of fangs, it had a little brass cup for a mouth. Majka's sister laid the case down and stood beside her in front of Po.

"You take," Majka said.

"From us Papa," said her sister.

"Wahzsh" or something like that, Majka said, "Snake." She pointed to the thing.

Po nodded to them, no smile at all. He got off the stool and took it from their hands like it was a baby. He inspected it as thoroughly as I've seen him check a gun. It proved to be some weird musical instrument. Black, thick as an anaconda, and in the shape of an S that then snaked down into another S. He found finger holes in the horizontal places of the snake, and put his mouth to the mouthpiece. He moved his lips around experimenting like you do with a new girl ... and blew.

At first nothing happened, so he wet his lips again and stood up straighter.

He got a gurgle out of it like a toilet in an apartment house. His eyes crossed, looking at the mouthpiece. He shut his eyes and took a big breath and settled his lips again.

"Bwaaaah!"

I hadn't heard that since I left the place where I grew up. Take a six-month-old calf away from its mum, and if it doesn't make that bellow right off, give it time and it'll blast you to the next shire with that sound, and if it doesn't, you're deaf, guaranteed.

The Pococurante is a small place. I stumbled back, holding my ears and would of fallen but for the press of hanging clothes.

The girls were prepared. They giggled but didn't take their hands from their ears.

Po grinned.

He took a breath and tried again, producing a more civilised sound. I looked at my watch. I had to open the shop. The girls tore their eyes from Po and the great snake, and turned their equipment on.

~

The day was punctuated with the call of the hungry calf. And it was funny, the reaction.

"You got a bull back there?" asked most.

I had a great time instructing city people on the particulars of bull calls compared to calf calls. "That's one hundred percent calf," I said. "You think a bull's got a great deep voice like that, don't you Mrs O'Brien? Mrs James? Mrs Braverman? No, a bull's got a soprano, beautiful and thin and high as a lady's. Like yours!"

"Get away with you," said Mrs Braverman, waving her hand with its flashy wedding ring. "You're pulling my leg."

"Po," I yelled, but he couldn't hear so I had to step back and beckon him through. His eyes were closed so I had to get Majka to put her hand on his shoulder.

He didn't come immediately but when he did, "I was telling Mrs Braverman here," I said, "that a bull's got a high voice, nothing like that calf-call you're making, isn't that true?" Ever since that redbelly, I reckoned he must of come from a place like me.

"Yar," Po said. His lips were curiously red and swollen and he had a faraway look in his eyes.

A little pleat formed between Mrs Braverman's eyes as she regarded Po. 

"Let's see you play," she said.

I bowed to her and turned to Po.

He went back and returned, struggling through the clothes racks with the instrument in his arms. At the look of it, Gloria Braverman's pleat deepened but Po's eyes were closed by then, his lips pressed to the mouthpiece.

"Bwaaaah!" yelled the giant snake with the voice of a hungry calf.

Mrs Braverman fled.

It was so funny, I laughed till I cried. But I didn't tell Syl.

~

From that day on, Po played only the snake instrument. All day. After a while, he could play like the wind in the grass, so soft that the equipment overpowered him, but the girls didn't like that. They liked him to make the calf sound. "Bwaah! Bwaah!" they'd urge, and  "Bookat!" or something like that.

So he made up songs that sounded like they were yelled by a hungry calf. They loved them and they accomplished so much work that they were oftentimes standing around with their hands on their hips, waiting. By the end of a month, I think he could of made that snake whisper, but he didn't. It only yelled.

The first intimation that I had of anything wrong was when I noticed that women had stopped asking for Po.

Then one day when I opened the door, I found an envelope that someone had shoved under the door. It was an article clipped from the
Melbourne Daily Courier
.

Adelaide Culture Taken to the Cleaners In a  Word
"In the mushroom culture that is Adelaide, your correspondent has come upon a delicious morsel of farce in the centre of town: The Pococurante, where those with fashion at heart come every week, and the crème of Adelaide have their clothes created and cleaned to a T. This centre of culture is run by two strange blokes, who must be laughing up their sleeves at the cognoscenti who don't know their pococurante from their frankly-Scarlett,-I-don't-give-a-damn. They serenade the beauties that flock to this denizen, with Mozart. Not quite. Follow the sound of the angry bull, and you'll hit the bullseye."

All day I drove myself insane. What was the article on about? Some nasty anti-Adelaide bit of snideness? That's something that Melbourne and Sydney do, but I was trying all day to figure out what to do about Po, who really had to stop playing that snake thing, at least like that.

I'd never read the
Melbourne Daily Courier
before, and don't imagine that any of our customers did. But that article could of been slipped with the ink still damp under the pillow of every Adelaidian, such was the response we got. We hadn't been this slow since the old days, and the people who did come in, came in with silly questions, not things to clean. I could
feel
the city's anger.

In the back of the Pococurante, Po played his snake for the girls, who were getting through the work faster than it was coming in today. Po hadn't mentioned that I didn't call him to the front any more, but then Po never mentioned anything.

My one comfort that day was that Po didn't know about the newspaper article.

~

I didn't want Sylvia to find out about it either, but when I got home, she met me with "What's the bull? And what's this all about?" And she shoved an open book at me and pointed.

The dictionary. I didn't need her to point. On the left hand page, something was circled in angry red crayon.

I read it.

"Why didn't you just punch me in the eye?" I asked.

"Why didn't you look it up?"

"It was a name, not a word," I said. "He was
Pococurante!
I told you. Would you of looked up a name embroidered in gold on a bloke like that's shirt?"

"Huh!" she said and without taking her eyes off me, yelled "Beatrice! Get your teaset off the hallway floor this second or—"

I heard a scuttle and a whimper, while I looked at the thing in my arms and wondered what to do with it.

"I don't know," she said to me. "But honestly ... perhaps not."

Sylvia and I were just inside the front door. I walked past her and dropped into my chair. I couldn't decently strangle the dictionary, so it sat in my lap.

Syl walked over to me, picked it up and flung it against the wall. "There," she said, "You can put it in the bookcase later." She rested her hands on her hips.

"Now," she said, "I asked you about that bull."

"It's a calf," I said. Syl was born and bred in Adelaide.

"Get on with it."

"It's only an instrument that Po practices in slack times," I said. "Sometimes it sounds like a calf ...  only a calf."

After a while she said "Mmm," and then, "Must feed the kids."

She put them to bed as soon as they'd eaten. Then she fixed two tall, stiff drinks: brandy and water without the ice and without the water. She put the glasses on the table by my easy chair, shoved me into it, and sat on my lap.

"You can't change the name now," she said, "or everyone'll think they've got you. You must tough it out." Then she kissed me.

"I don't deserve that," I said.

"Too right you don't," she said, and kissed me again.

She talked, and we drank on empty stomachs, and I felt after another of her drinks, that I could tough it out. But then there was Po.

"You must face Po," she said. "Buy him out."

"Yar," I said, but we didn't laugh.

I knew I couldn't do it.

~

The next day we might as well of been closed as far as customers giving us jobs went. The ones who picked up jobs were cold as a witch's tit, excuse my French. But in the late afternoon, a reporter came in from the
Adelaide Telegraph
, just as Syl had told me to expect.

"They've picked a fight," she'd said. "And they'll get it."

So I was ready, I hoped.

I laughed at the Melburnians'
snideness
as Syl told me to call it, and shrugged my shoulders at
Pococurante
, saying that if Melbourne people didn't think that Adelaide people don't know what it means, that just shows Melbourne's unworldliness.

"We can snap our fingers to what they're obsessed with," I said (something else memorised from Syl). "We've got juh nuhsay quah." I added. That, I'd remembered from Gloria Braverman, who had said it alot once, and Syl said that I should repeat that, too.

"I bet the reporter will ask you to say that twice," she said. And she was right.

"And about those sounds of an angry bull?" the reporter asked.

"You ever been to an opera?" I asked the reporter, and he laughed out loud as he wrote that down.

I laughed with him, but didn't feel any too good inside. Po hadn't come in, and didn't pitch up all day.

~

The article in the
Adelaide Telegraph
came out the next morning, and it was a triumph. Melburnians were
"jealous sourpusses, as anyone would be with their weather ... According to Oxford professor W. K. Lister from the Royal Academy of Music, who is visiting his sister here in Adelaide, from descriptions of the instrument being played by Mr Pococurante"
(I distinctly told the reporter:
Clarence Braithwaite
, so I don't know how this mistake occurred)
"the instrument is a Schlangenrohr, otherwise known as a Serpent, invented hundreds of years ago to be played in churches as a choir enhancement. It is a credit to our city, and possibly of quite venerable age. It is extremely difficult to play. The professor said he would be honoured to meet ..."