Something for the Pain (4 page)

I found so much meaning in Bernborough finishes that I looked for them in fields other than horse racing, although with little success. At the Bendigo Thousand professional athletics meeting each year, I watched the tailenders in the last lap of every long-distance race, willing them to sweep around the field and to gather in the leaders. I sometimes persuaded my brother and a few of the children from next door to take part in a race of several laps around our house. Early in each race, I dropped far behind the second-last runner. In the language of racing commentators, I was going to come from nowhere or from the clouds; I was going to descend on the leaders or to drop on them in the shadows of the post or to do a Bernborough; but I was mostly an also-ran.

Of all the Melbourne Cups that I've watched, I recall most often that of 1983 when Kiwi (Dark blue, white crossed sashes, red armbands, pale-blue cap) trailed the field into the straight and won running away. The Oakleigh Plate is a sprint of 1100 metres, and yet I've been twice fortunate to see the winner come from last at the top of the comparatively short Caulfield straight. New Statesman (Blue, red striped sleeves, yellow cap) did it in 1962 and Woorim (Black-and-white quarters, orange cap) in 2012.

Perhaps I was trying to arrange a Bernborough performance for myself in 1957. I had passed the matriculation exam with honours in every subject but, rather than go to university as all my friends did, I hid myself for three months in a Catholic seminary, then worked as a junior clerk, and then enrolled in a two-year course at a teachers' college. I buried myself in the ruck of primary teachers for the next ten years and used all my spare time to write a work of fiction of nearly two hundred thousand words with horse racing as one of its major themes and a section with the title ‘Bernborough comes down from the north'.

4.
We Backed Money Moon

PLENTY ROAD IN
Bundoora comprises nowadays six lanes of motor traffic and two tram tracks, but in the early 1940s it was a narrow bitumen road leading through open countryside north of Melbourne. A medical centre of several storeys stands today on the north-east corner of the intersection of Plenty Road and Kingsbury Drive, and nearby is one of the entrances to the vast campus of La Trobe University, but in the early 1940s Kingsbury Drive did not exist and on the site of the medical centre and the university car park were farm buildings and workers' cottages. My parents and my two brothers and I lived in one of those cottages during my third and fourth and fifth years, and I have numerous memories from that time. One memory is of my mother's calling me, on a certain warm afternoon, to the wireless set, as we called it, and telling me to hope that the horse Dark Felt would win the Melbourne Cup, which was about to be run. Dark Felt (Pink, black bands and cap) duly won the Melbourne Cup of 1943, and my father bought from his winnings the first motorcar that I recall having travelled in.

My father was assistant manager of the farm attached to several mental hospitals, as they were then called. Larundel, Mont Park, and Macleod hospitals were known to me only as huge buildings in the distance, but some of the trusted inmates—shabbily dressed old men who muttered to themselves—sometimes brought milk to our door or did odd jobs around our house and garden. Our house was one of a long row of such houses stretching north from near the Preston Cemetery to somewhere out of my view. The houses faced westwards, towards a rudimentary golf course on the other side of Plenty Road where the suburb of Kingsbury now stands. The leading male occupant of each house worked on the farm or in the hospitals. The men were employees of the state government and their pay would have been modest, but their being provided with low-rental houses would have helped them to live comfortably. I can call to mind a few names: Joe Hall the electrician, Percy Pinches the carpenter—a hard name to forget!—Dave Speedie, whose occupation I've forgotten, and George Kelly who was, I think, a gardener. I cannot recall the appearance of the first three but George I remember well, probably because he lived next door to us.

George and Bernadette Kelly were a childless couple then aged, perhaps, in their late forties. George was lean and leathery, with a face I recall as suntanned, although his having died only a few years later makes me wonder today whether he might have been permanently flushed from drinking. Bernadette was taller than George, thin, dark of hair and complexion and, according to a set of standards that I had devised even as a small boy, good-looking. She was the first woman that I recall seeing in make-up and smoking cigarettes. I surely saw Bernadette often, given that she lived next door, but now, as I write, my only clear memories of her derive from the one Sunday morning that I'm about to report. Did my mother avoid Bernadette? Or, more likely, did my father discourage my mother from mixing with a woman who smoked and drank and wore make-up?

I recall from my three years at Bundoora only two Sunday mornings. On one of the two, my father and I spent a half-hour or more with George and Bernadette Kelly in their lounge room. On the other Sunday morning, my father and I attended mass in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Preston. My parents were good Catholics, to use an expression of those times, and would never have missed Sunday mass for any light reason. Our house on the hospitals' farmland, however, was six kilometres from the nearest church, which would have excused us from attending mass if we had had no other means of getting to church than by walking, which was mostly our situation. A Catholic family from the neighbourhood, whose name I've forgotten, sometimes found a place for two of our family in their large motorcar. I have no recollection of the family or of travelling in their car to and from Bell Street, Preston, but I seem to have gone there to mass sometimes with my father while the older of my brothers went sometimes with my mother. My only memory of any sort of religious observance during my years at Bundoora is as follows.

The morning is warm and sunny, and the side doors of the church have been left open. From my seat beside my father, I can see across Bell Street into the front gardens of several single-fronted cottages. Bell Street has long since become a six-lane major road, but passing cars are so few in the early 1940s that I am able to hear from my seat just inside the church the whirring of a hand mower pushed by a bald man in his shirtsleeves backwards and forwards across a tiny patch of buffalo grass in front of one of the houses opposite. The man and his mowing must have attracted me more than the ceremonies in the church; I recall my father's elbow several times digging into my side and his finger pointing me back towards the altar.

On the other of my two remembered Sundays, I am seated in a comfortable armchair while my father and the Kelly couple, all three of them seated and at ease, discuss the race meeting of the previous day, which would have been at Flemington or Moonee Valley or Mentone, given that the courses at Caulfield and Williamstown served as army camps throughout the Second World War. All three adults in the room attended the race meeting, wherever it was. My father would have gone alone, as always. George and Bernadette Kelly, like thousands of other working-class couples in that era, would have dressed in their best clothes, he in a suit and tie and she in a coat and hat, and would have considered the outing their chief social event for the week. In the trams and trains that they travelled on, most of the passengers would have been racegoers or, if the season was winter, a mixture of racegoers and football followers, and the Kellys and their like would often, on their homeward journey, have had with strangers the sort of conversation that they had with my father on the Sunday in question.

I cannot account for my father's and my being where we were on that morning. My father never visited anyone for merely social purposes, and I don't recall his being especially friendly towards George Kelly, who would have seemed to my father no more than a mug punter obliged to read form guides for lack of the inside information that my father was able to obtain. Anyway, there we were, and I've remembered for more than seventy years what was almost certainly my only visit to that lounge room.

While I loll on floral-patterned velvet upholstery, I take more interest in what I can see around me than what I can hear. The floor of the room is covered, most of it, by a carpet square, something that I have never previously seen. The space between the perimeter of the carpet and the skirting board has been stained the same colour as the soft drink that I am sipping. When Mrs Kelly served me the drink, she told me it was sarsaparilla. The word is new to me, and I try to persuade myself that the flavour of the stuff in my glass is as strange and exotic as its name. Each of the other three persons in the room has a drink in hand, and each drink is a different shade of golden brown, as though all four of us have been served according to a scale of colour, with me being the possessor of the richest gradation. (Not that it matters, but I decided just now that Bernadette would have been drinking beer and George whisky, while my father had some sort of ginger-coloured soft drink.) George and Bernadette smoke cigarettes continually. George rolls his from a yellow and red tin of tobacco, while Bernadette draws hers out with her fingertips from a packet showing the silhouettes in black and white of an elegantly groomed man and woman. Standing on the carpet halfway between George and Bernadette is the item of furniture that tells me more eloquently than anything else in the room that the Kellys are more privileged than my own family. Was it called a smokers' stand? It was made of stainless steel and some early variety of plastic. It had a circular base and an ornamental top and, halfway between, ashtrays and fixtures for holding packets of cigarettes. George annoys me by flicking his ash carelessly into the tray nearer him, but Bernadette wins me over with her way of uncrossing her legs and then leaning forward and tap-tap-tapping the end of her cigarette with her index finger. This she does time and again, and I never fail to watch her every movement.

The three adults discussed one after another of the races on the previous day's program. Being still too young to understand the business of betting, I failed to follow much of the conversation. If my mother had happened to ask me afterwards for details, I could not have obliged her. And yet, I've remembered for more than seventy years a short statement made by Bernadette Kelly on that long-ago Sunday morning and have remembered also some of what I felt on hearing the statement.

A certain race and its winner had been mentioned for the first time, probably by my father. Before anything else could be said, Bernadette Kelly delivered the sentence that gives this section its title, and I like to think that she delivered it while tapping her cigarette ash into one of the trays on the smokers' stand that I so admired. Her emphasis was on the first of the four words, as though to tell my father and, perhaps, myself that he or we would have been foolish to surmise that two punters as shrewd and successful as she and George could have wavered for an instant in their determination to back such a certainty as Money Moon (colours unknown). If she said more than this, I never afterwards recalled it and probably failed to hear it while I leaned back against the headrest of my chair and sipped my sarsaparilla and began to assemble the details of a daydream scene in which the words
money
and
moon
denoted much more than a successful racehorse.

Just above the horizon of a faraway picture-book landscape of fields and hills and woodlands and spires in distant villages, a huge orange-gold moon is rising. The moon has the same rich colour as the liquids in the glasses of the inhabitants of the landscape: fortunate folk who sit at leisure in their lounge rooms. Or the moon has the same colour as the tobacco in the cigarettes that the fortunate ones lift to their lips or tap into their elaborate ashtrays. This is the landscape not only of Money Moon but of Honeymoon, for I have heard that word already and am able faintly to conjecture what a man might feel on being alone with his good-looking dark-haired wife in a richly lit landscape. The landscape of my vision is remote from me, and not just because of my being still a child. Before I can hope to enter the territory of Money/Honeymoon, I must devote myself to learning the immensely complicated lore of horse racing.

I lived for about three years in Bundoora. Let's say, in round figures, that I spent a hundred and fifty Sunday mornings there. Let's suppose further that my father and I attended mass in Preston every six weeks, having been taken there by the family that I've wholly forgotten. That amounts to twenty-five masses in the Church of the Sacred Heart. But my father surely drove us all to mass every Sunday during the few months while he owned the Nash sedan that was paid for by Dark Felt. (He owned the splendid car only briefly before having to sell it during a run of losing bets.) So, in round figures again, I attended forty masses while living in Bundoora. Of the forty hours that I spent in church I recall only the few minutes while I watched the man mowing his lawn. I recall no sight of altar or vestments, no tinkling of bells, no word or gesture from the pulpit. Perhaps I visited the Kelly lounge room on more than one Sunday morning, although I suspect not. The question, however, is irrelevant. On the scoreboard of memories from my Sundays in Bundoora, the Kelly lounge room has easily defeated the Church of the Sacred Heart.

During the fifteen years after I left Bundoora, I attended mass faithfully every Sunday and was much affected by my Catholic beliefs. On a few brief occasions, I experienced a sort of religious fervour, and for six months in my eighteenth year I even supposed I was called to be a priest. My writing this account of my Sunday morning with boozy George Kelly and chain-smoking, dark-haired Bernadette has convinced me, though, that my religious faith rested on foundations that were flimsy indeed by comparison with my faith in—what should I call it?—the dream-world brought into being by the sight of richly tinted drinks and the sound of mellifluous horse names.