Muck (10 page)

Perhaps word has spread already through Taonga that I am one of their people now, but obviously above them.

C
HRISTINE, NOT
C
AROL
, says Face-ache.

Her mouth is bent up uncomfortably in a smile. Her eyes shyly avoid ours.

Feet apologises and says she doesn’t know where she got
Carol
from. “Wait a minute—yes I do. I was thinking of a woman I know in Sydney who is the spitting image of you.”

The Duke and I glance at each other and arch eyebrows because this woman, this Christine, is like no friend of Feet’s from Sydney. She has no peach-tinted or bleached salon-sculpted hair. Hers is brown with grey through it, cut below her ears like The Beatles. No make-up over the cracks and saggings of her face. Not a dab of red on her lips or fingers. Her clothes could be a man’s—khaki trousers, blue pullover shedding dags of wool.

No woman in Feet’s circle smells as Christine smells— stale milk. Not even fumes from Feet’s perfume can cover the cow-shed taint in the air.

The Duke touches Feet in the small of her back, his signal for her not to talk too much, not to speak for the sake of speaking as she has just done.

Feet taps his fingers away irritably. She does this as Christine leads us down the hall where now there is a faint piss-stink in the air. Piss of soiled human not soil-animal.

The lounge contains shades rather than colours. Through the west window a see-through stream of sun flows, squirming with motes. On either side of the flow, dark armchairs and walls, a settee with crochet coverings.

Feet has her sneer-smile on. She uses it when something is not to her taste, a house like this for instance which she would call dowdy. The Duke steps behind her and places his hand on her elbow.

“Ah,” she sneer-smiles. “Well, here we are.” She presents Christine with scones folded in a swag of grease-proof paper tied with a blue ribbon bow: “My mother’s secret formula.” She pokes The Duke’s arm for him to please pass Christine our gift of a bottle of champagne.

Christine blinks at the bottle with a sneer-smile of her own though she accepts the bottle politely enough, saying “You shouldn’t have done that” as she takes it by the neck.

She turns to two men sitting on the other side of the sun stream. They stand, one very old, skinny, tanned, who steps momentarily into the stream. He has a bald head, white where a hat would normally be. The other man is a younger he, identical in face but with a pale hair-mist over his crown and more flesh to his body. They wear short khaki pants, no shoes, just socks, the ends of which flop the way socks do when boots have been levered off heel-to-toe.

Suddenly from a room down the hall, an old woman’s ailing voice: “Who is it, dear?”

“It’s the new neighbours,” Christine replies and in the same breath introduces her father-in-law, Jim, and Jim junior,
her
Jim, her husband.

The Duke and I shake hands with the Jims. I offer a good grip, a three-second squeeze to make a manly impression.

The Duke has always advised that it’s not a tussle of strength, nor is it a standover ritual. A handshake says: I look you in the eye and greet you forcefully without force. Unless, of course, your fellow shaker is an
opposing
shaker, a challenger attempting to assert superiority over you. That’s when forcefulness is legitimate, as retaliation. Grip-pressure time may be extended in that circumstance well beyond three seconds to five seconds, seven, or even, if needed, nine.

On this occasion, shaking the Jims, I want to appear honoured to be in this house, their family home, the seat of who they are. I’ve decided I am especially honoured that they felt no need to dress up for our visit. They’re content for us to see them as they live, in their natural state, their garb of every day.

Feet, still sneer-smiling, will consider it offensive, disrespectful. But I am willing to see it as the purest form of welcome.

Yet, as honoured as I am, I must not appear too honoured or obliged to them. My being here is as it should be. This is only our first meeting but it’s a chance for them to realise their future depends on me.

Squeezing their hands that reach out across the stream is
not like squeezing human at all. More log of wood than skin and bone. Wood with rough, splintery bark. No pressure is returned by them in the finger and palm embrace.

Christine fans out her arms for us to sit. The Jims return to their side of the stream. We of Tudor Park stay on our side and sink between musty cushions.

“Who is it, dear?” the hall-voice inquires again.

“It’s the new people,” Christine answers, still not looking our way but pulling dags from her pullover, flitting from one section of the pullover to another. She informs us that the voice up the hall is her mother-in-law who is an invalid and frailer by the day.

Oh, we nod, sympathetically. There the conversation stalls. Stops. We sit in nodding silence.

Silence is for finding a way out of silence. Feet has deep breaths for trying to escape it. She crosses her right leg over her left, then changes to left over right and breathes heavily.

The Duke has his throat to clear. On this occasion he also has crochet arm-rests to pick and rub and admire.

The other side of the stream must be used to silence. The Jims sit motionless. One of them, I can’t work out which, has a whistling block in his nose.

I would rather not waste time in silence. I want to know what subject brings these men alive. What would make them, ordinary people, but men of property at least, feel at ease and willing to confide in me as their future leading citizen?

That hall-voice again. “The Van Hoots, is it?”

“No, the new ones,” Christine calls back.

A kettle puffs and squeals in the kitchen. Christine stands, stuffs a handful of dags in her pocket and asks, “Who has milk and sugar in their tea?”

“Oh, I see,” Feet says with a small laugh, confused. “I’d said to myself, ‘Champagne.’ I just assumed. I’m sorry.”

Christine picks off a dag and glances at the Jims. The Jims look at each other. They scratch their heads in identical timing and bite their lower lips as if confronted with a problem which must be solved this moment, now. Christine goes into the kitchen. The puff and squeal die away. She re-appears with the champagne.

The Duke leans over and whispers to Feet. She frowns and stares into the stream. Then, pressing her fingers to her throat as if to keep laughter down, says, “White with one, please.” She lets up two sneering chuckles, the way she does when she’s put out, cross. “I hope we haven’t offended you by bringing alcohol into your house.”

The Duke smiles across the stream to the Jims. “It probably wasn’t appropriate.”

Feet frowns an apology to the Jims. “My husband says this is a strong religious area—Brethren wasn’t it? We just presumed that since this is a special occasion.”

“We’ll know for next time,” The Duke declares.

The hall-voice this time is stronger, more insistent. “Who is it then?”

Christine ignores the question, puts the champagne bottle on the sideboard and goes into the kitchen.

That nodding silence again. Then Feet uncrosses her legs and says, “I admire people of religion. Not that I go for it myself. But my word, I’ve thought of starting a religion. What other business gets away with paying no taxes? Makes the lurks
we
can claim pale by comparison.” She lets up a hearty laugh.

The Duke laughs with her but tries to catch her eye to hush her.

Jim senior leans forward. “We had a bottle of beer in the house once. But we gave it to Rosie.”

Jim junior nods that he remembers.

“Rosie?” Feet inquires, pointing to the hall as if presuming the name belongs to the voice from down there.

“We drenched old Rosie with it to bring her gas up,” says Jim junior.

“Goodness,” Feet leans back, shocked.

“She had the bloat,” says Jim senior.

Jim junior gets up from his armchair and takes a framed photograph from the mantelpiece. He steps through the stream to show us Rosie, a palomino-pale Jersey. “Super milker was Rosie.” Another photograph. “This one here is her mother, Lil.”

The Duke and Feet perform admiration with muttered Ohs and “My word.”

This is the opportunity to display my scars and my new knowledge of Jerseys. If I take the photographs from Jim junior, make my movements very slow, leaning well forward into the sun stream, even my red prickle spots will be clearly in view.

That is exactly what I do. I reach out to take the photo- graphs, and I’m in luck. Jim junior doesn’t want to let either photograph out of his grasp. He actually hugs them away from me. My fingertips are allowed only to touch Lil’s frame, which they do, my scars held up right under Jim junior’s nose.

“I dip in iodophor. Is that what you do?” I blink at the two Jims, then blink downward so their eyes will follow mine to my scars for admiring the O shape and the white and purple infections.

Jim junior hasn’t a clue what I’m directing him to do. I give him a hint. “Your Jerseys probably kick less than our lot. Jerseys are much better natured, don’t you think?”

Jim senior nods, “Rosie was a gentleman.”

The scars are not attracting the attention I expected. Yet, I should take that as a compliment. My scars are so convincing they are considered little more than part of the everyday way of things by these two men with splintery wood hands.

Feet wrinkles her brow and shifts to the edge of her chair for a closer inspection of my scars. “You must be very clumsy,” she says.

I pull my hands back to my lap, my face suddenly so hot that surely it will split with blood rage.

I unclench my jaw enough to manage a sentence. “It’s from hard work.”

But Feet will not stop. “I know it is, dear. I’m just saying.”

Clumsy
. A word that applies to half-wits. Not a word for using about me in front of two experienced, hard-handed farm men.

Christine sets a tray down on the table by the settee.

Silence again. Filled with the chink and spoon-stirrings of tea poured from a large metal teapot and green cozy.

Now the whistling nose. Our swallowings make squelching sounds. Feet’s hard scones crunch in our back teeth.

“Personally, I like them like this,” she says. She lifts her cup and saucer high to read the maker’s name underneath. “These are lovely cups of yours, Christine. Who made them?”

“They’ve been in the family for years,” Christine shrugs.

Feet squints that no-one appears to have made them going by the blank space where the maker’s name should be. “I adore a good crockery set. I have Wedgwood, Royal Albert. You look at them and you sip and you feel like royalty.”

That hall-woman again. “Who? Tell me? Who?”

“I said it’s the new neighbours,” Christine calls.

Half-wit
. There is nothing remotely half-wit about me. What half-wit would ever know about the
other
Wedgwood? Does Feet know? Does The Duke? The Jims? I’m no halfwit. I know that Rosie and Lil made it into those frames because of Thomas Wedgwood. And I say as much: “Thomas Wedgwood had the brains to discover that silver salts darken in sunlight. From that we got photography.”

“That’s nice,” says Feet as if apologising for me. “But let’s not get too deep.”

This time the hall-voice is cracking with strain. “New neighbours? From over the road?

“Yes,” Christine replies wearily.

“You don’t mean that fancy pants tart, do you?”

Feet is motionless mid-sip, the cup rim between her lips.

The Duke has just returned his cup to the saucer. His fin-ger does not unpinch from the cup’s ear. He doesn’t swallow his mouthful immediately. He waits for Feet to swallow first.

Her throat finally squelches down her sip. Slowly she places her cup and saucer on the table.

Christine peers down at the floor. She picks a dag. Another and another. “Poor old thing she is. She’s not what she was,” she explains.

“Indeed,” Feet says quietly, her mouth going into its pursing position.

The Duke wonders, as cheerily as he can pretend, if that Thomas Wedgwood I mentioned is directly related to the crockery Wedgwood. “You’d think so with a name like that, wouldn’t you?” he asks of all the room and offers up his palms as if we might place our answers there.