Muck (12 page)

The Duke shakes his head that he doesn’t like hearing me talk about leaving school and not wanting his legacy. Feet is sobbing against his chest and he winks that he needs to comfort her.

“I want to leave now. Right this minute,” I purse. “That’s what
you
want, so I might as well leave.”

There, that’s brought him from Feet. Even so, just to be sure, I walk away from him.

He follows: “I don’t want you to leave. I’m building this place up for you. One day it will be yours. I want you to have it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Please don’t say that. This is all for you.”

Feet’s crying becomes louder. Her I’m sorrys more sniffly and shrill.

But I haven’t finished with The Duke. I hunch my shoulders and pretend to cry. And pretending causes my eyes to wetten. I can now turn to him and look at him with truly wet eyes. “You say I should go out and work. But I
do
work. Look at my hands. They’re all scarred from working for you. This O shape one, it makes me sick it’s so painful.”

The tears and the talk of sick puts me in such a swoon that I begin to sway, collapsing. The Duke steps in to hold me and take my weight and says how proud he is of me for working so hard. We’ll put some Dettol on that cut right away because I’m precious, I’m his boy and with us as a team Tudor Park will be a showpiece. Us as a team will be his life’s joy.

W
HEN
I
FLY
, the pilots are pleased for me to visit and stand behind them. They are important men. I gape at their dashboard of instruments. I admire their white shirts and name-badges. They are like doctors of the air world. Their dials, switches, valves and buttons are the wind’s gauges, the sun’s vital signs, preparing a medical report of sky-blue health, the fits of turbulence, the off-colour clouds of storm.

They turn around in their dashboard chairs to look at me, narrow moustaches like an eyebrow over their smiles.

But on this trip back to Sydney there is a difference. When they extend their hands for shaking I notice their arms are tanned from sitting so much in front of the sun. It is not work to sit in front of the sun. Their tan might as well be a beach browning. Their tan is not from stepping out of milking-shed shade to slap cows into the jaggings. It’s not from lifting new-made rectangles of hay from paddock to truck. The green twine that binds the hay blistering the fingers so that they bleed water.

Nor is there sweat showing through the doctor-pilot’s underarms and collar. Is it work to
sit
? Can these two things, work and sitting, be done together? And to wear a uniform. A uniform as schoolboys wear uniforms.

I’ve begun to think as an employer of men thinks. I would not employ these men on my Tudor Park, so neat and clean, thin-armed from no toiling. How could they touch the privates of cows? They are too educated for cow touching. They would always be thinking they could have done better in life. How could they be a Norman, Bill or Jim?

I’m certain they smell the cowness on me. They did not rise in their seats to greet me, formally, as an equal. Don’t pilots usually do that with me? Yes, I’m sure of it. I’m sure they used to.

A hostess brings them coffee. They sip and wince at the brown heat. Or is it a smirk they’re suppressing that makes them close one eye and blow? A pulled face of how I’m not one of them. I am from a place called Tudor Park, a toucher of cow parts, a mere man of the land for all my being an heir.

I must not become too educated or I might want to leave Tudor Park. I might learn too far beyond it. I would become like those pilots for whom the very air is not nature but maths on a screen. I would make my own way in the world, turn away from my legacy and break my father The Duke’s heart.

In Sydney a real doctor with stethoscope for a necktie. Cold hands and questions. “This wound,” he asks of my bandaged O shape. “It’s a stubborn little healer. How did you do it again?” He peels the gauze back to its antiseptic slime.

I proudly say a cow. The hoof of an angry cow.

And how long ago was that?

Over a month.

And does it hurt?

Only when he squeezes it and a yellow dot of pus pops out.

I ask him how many times a day he washes those hands of his to make them so unnaturally cleaned of all contact with the world. I mean the question as a sneer, an insult that a man should have such sterile-pink fingers.

He answers “plenty” with a long exhaling, wise and weary. He asks if I have taken the bandage off, against orders; if I have played sport with the O bared to the elements because how else could grains of dirt deposit in the O’s edges? He’s going to have to call Feet from the waiting room. He can’t have me ignoring explicit instructions not to remove the covering and thereby waste his professional time. “Don’t you want this to get better?” He asks this in a tone I don’t like. It’s an admonishment for one. But is it also clever prying? Whether by accident or science he has asked a question I answer yes to when I mean no.

But I don’t have much dirt left. I filled three jars from Tudor Park before we left—from the paddocks closest to the stables: two small Vegemite and a large one of Vicks. I scrubbed them out with iodophor for the black soil of my legacy, the moist earth of me with its lace of grass roots and brook that trickles underfoot when you walk it.

I rub it on me, press it under my nails like dry soap, an unwashing. I lick my tongue onto the soil for its metal-blood taste, and always keep a few pinches folded in my handkerchief for emergency unwashing if my hating the city becomes too much, its harbour seeming hideous, the useless slow-coach yachts like proud flags of leisure and laziness.

The beaches too, where people get out of their real beds only to go back to bed in sand. They buy ice-cream. Do they know where the cream came from? Do they know that someone was up at five in the morning to get it from cows? Do they know that tonight’s steak comes out of the ground, from grass that passes through the cows until the cows are then put down and cut into pieces? Do they know that cows are just deformed humans and so we are really eating ourselves?

Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage. He must have known that this is the cow’s revenge, this process, this great cycle of birth and death on a stage like Tudor Park. He must have known that the most important of all places is a farm. Not a church. Not a parliament, a court, an office or school or hospital. But the farm that puts food in your mouth. That milks a cow or kills it. And all the while, what is happening to you? Your hours are ticking away too. All the Tudor Parks of the world are feeding you up for slaughter by disease or accident or old age.

When the O started to heal I rubbed the soil in. The first rawness of the wound came back to me, red and lumpy.

I don’t bathe anymore. In the evening at shower time I don’t stand under the water. I birdbath between my legs and my underarms if Feet complains I give off smells. When I shave once a week I use The Duke’s electric razor not the candle-flame.

I keep soil smeared under my shirt, my socks. I squeeze a tennis ball to build the muscles of my hands, to swell them oversized like a mitt. I expect it will take years of this for them to be like Norman’s.

At The Mansions I keep my hands especially grimed. When The Citys remark on the state of them, I say it’s due to work, real work that you can’t wash out so easily as their fathers can with their doctor scrubbing, or the big-wig ink from their barrister fountain pens that soap and water rubs away.

The Scrubbers return from holidays with similar dirty nails and work wounds to me. But theirs fade. Why don’t mine? they ask. I reply that where I come from soil doesn’t fade. It is so strong and fertile a mix that it leaves a lasts-forever stain.

“Liar,” they call me. “You’re no farmer. You’re City. My old man says no
300
acres ever made a dollar as an enterprise.”

I calculated the soil would last three months, till next term’s holiday when I would return to Tudor Park.

But there is bad news. We will be staying here in Sydney next break, and the one after too. The new Tudor Park house is being built and Feet has no intention of inhabiting rooms without a roof. What civilised person would live with no toilet connected, no kitchen stove, no nothing! We are certainly not going to pitch a tent or hire a caravan. That would really get the binocular people looking down their noses: “There goes fancy pants tart. Reduced to living like a gypsy.”

We’ll remain in Sydney until the new house is livable and beautiful and it’s
we
who do the looking down our noses, and do it from a second storey which means
they
have to look up at us.

What’s more, it’s one worry off her mind to know I’m out of the clutches of the town’s available girls. “Oh wouldn’t they love to get their hands on you. You’d be a prized catch, mark my words,” she says, lowering her puckered mouth to kiss the wine glass’s lip for as long as it takes to sip. A prized catch indeed, she repeats, and she is not talking about whether I’m handsome or not, or wide-shouldered and tall and speak well. She is not talking about whether I have a brain between my ears. Those attributes I possess in spades, she says. I inherited well from her. Even though country life has coarsened me, compromised my hygiene and given me a rough, arms-out, monkey-male walk, it cannot kill off her genes in me. No, what she is talking about is the subject of money. “I can just see it,” she sneers. “They’ll start sniffing around. They’ll start throwing themselves at you with their big udder breasts. And suddenly there you are at sixteen with a little bastard baby. Oh yes, the little sluts would be set for life is what they’d be scheming.”