Muck (2 page)

I am beyond hating them. I don’t want to think of them as alive. I wish them ill and ignore them as if they are dead already.

The dynasty has started with my father as the founding father and me his only son, the founding son. He looks forward to the day when he can watch his grandchildren out there in the clover-covered paddocks frolicking among the cowpats. Playing with a pony, getting stung by bees. The most wholesome activities in the world. And then when they get older, they’ll chop a thistle or two, pull some ragwort.
Because it’s important to get dirt under your nails. To sweat, to learn to work with your hands like a working man. Like the man he once was years ago setting out in life as a boy, and that going into business where you wear a jacket and tie has never made him lose sight of. All men should own a farm and be able to stand with an arm around their son and stare out across their domain, their manor, like the duke of all they see. All city men with their pasty faces, their limp as lettuce handshakes, they’re not men at all. They’re honorary women.

“It’s all very well making a man of
him
, but you’ll not be making one of me,” my mother says. She’s scrubbing the doorstep, and what a terrible thing for her to be doing at her age, fifty-three, as if she were a common housemaid doing chores, to keep this strip of timber as pale as pumice. But the step must be scrubbed because she can’t be expected to put up with the muck that collects from paddocks, paths, what-have-you. The mud and cow dung ground into the wood grain like brown and green dye when staff knock to deliver the morning can of milk, or Churchill when he gets his fee. A stink to make your nose curl. A stink you cannot get out of the carpet when traipsed around on the soles of socks once we’ve bottle-opened-off our shoes on the doorstep edge.

She cannot believe she was talked into this farm. What on earth possessed her to be talked into coming back to where she started—New Zealand. Even if it is only part-time, in school holidays, it is still New Zealand. We left New Zealand four years ago. We made all that effort running a hotel among filthy-living horis, to make it a stepping-stone to a better way of life in Sydney. Somewhere where the “glamour” word had some meaning in the world with oysters at Doyles, with mink not mistaken for possum. With, with, with … she could go on and on. And yet here we are now back among peasants just so a man can pass on land to his son.

But it’s not normal complaining from her. It’s play-complaining. Pretend washer-women complaining while on hands and knees puffing hair strands from her eye with a phew of air. It’s the play-complaining of knowing my father has no intention of making a man of her. He wants to make a lady of her. A proper kind. A lady farmer to his gentleman one. “A duchess to my duke,” he bows like a regal fellow asking a dance of his ballroom bride. She places the rubber-gloved hand on his outstretched arm. They hold each other a little away from each other and sway this and that way, both singing a waltz of da-da-dums.

A duchess to his duke. She likes the sound of that. “Very fitting,” she curtseys and resumes step-scrubbing. She phews that it can’t happen fast enough, this duchess-duke business, or else he better buy her some curlers, cut her nails, take her teeth out permanently and go right ahead and call her the cleaner.

I’ve stopped calling her Heels in my head. Her Heels are bare and cracked now, chalky around the splits. Not teetering on their usual steeple but level to the ground, flat at the arches and rolled inward at the ankle like a deformity the high-heels kept in check. Her feet scuff along the carpet like static.

When did she ever bare her feet to me? Never. She was always Heels, like a cocktail glass for her feet. A glass that supported the whole of her, a glass she slightly spilled out of but was tapered into anyway.

She was Heels for that and her pantsuits—white, yellow,
mauve and blue-striped. Pads upon her shoulders to broaden
them. Legs not covered all the way past the knee but leaving a little of the tan shin showing. Collar turned up as if her neck
was flaring. Clown makeup that wasn’t meant to be clown yet
her frowns and laughs stretched out that larger way.

To make so much of being pretty! She, the pretty-maker, has never cared that I, the son of her, thought it wrong. The way it made men watch her. She is my mother not a glass for others and their eyes. I’m almost sixteen, so I know about eyes. Eyes aren’t just for looking, for reaching a destination in a room without tripping or falling, banging into chairs.Eyes are for finding the body parts you want to watch on others. The sex-watching of breast, legs, buttocks, groin, lips, fingers. Just as the mouth is not just a mouth, a loudspeaker for weather-talk or football scores. It’s for sex-charming and for pretending not to be by putting on a clean white smile as if merely happy to meet you. A smile that for all you know could be a silent punch, the leer of a killer.

Now she is just Feet to me. Feet I don’t want to see exposed with their yellowings. Toenails I don’t wish to glance down and notice so chipped, discoloured and splintery. Baby powder caked between toes. Shins that have itch-marks now, needing creams to stop them scabbing.

I blame the farm for bringing out this ugliness in her. Ugliness that must be in me as well, her flesh and blood, awaiting its time, its chance to show through. Will the farm do this to me next?

It’s happening to The Duke as well. I can’t think of him as Winks anymore. Winks for his way of saying “Just between you and me, son” with a blink of one eyelid, a man’s equivalent of a kiss on the forehead.

He pulls a cap over his eartips to keep out the farm’s freeze-burn of foggy morning air. He tucks his Jockey underwear elastics over his shirt-tails for the same reason. Never mind that the elastics show to the world. Who will notice in
this
world where everyone does much the same?

No suits, no hair-slick of shiny oil like a square, black other skin. His scalp is salt-and-pepper grey, there’s a dry frizz at his temples. I blame the farm for him too. Hardly a duke in his trousers, once the lower part of a three-piece, now worn thin at the thighs and unthreading. His pockets ripped from hooking a hammer there because we have post and rail paddocks to build for the dynasty’s horses: Flying Symbol, four wins and six placing, gave birth to Denovo (which means “start afresh” in a foreign language) who gave birth to Anew, star three-year-old colt in Bart Cummings’s stable. Perhaps Anew, one day, when he finishes racing, will be foundation stallion in a post and rail corner of the farm which will be no ordinary farm. We will make it a showpiece.

We cannot quite afford to fence
all
the showpiece in post and rails, not yet. We are well-off certainly, but rich has its rungs. If we were the highest rung, then post and rails would be no object. But being the lower rung of rich means settling for fences we must make do with, fences made of wire that cuts your fingers when you staple it to the wood batons. The batons jab your skin because they’re so shaggy with splinters.

We are, however, rich enough for a new house for the showpiece. The old one isn’t falling down but at best it’s a quaint house, a house Feet pulls a face in for being old-worldly: “Who has fireplaces anymore! We are civilised for heaven’s sake. Every draught in New Zealand comes whistling down the chimneys. Who has frosted glass with flying ducks! Who has brass knobs and wood, so much dark wood the place is a mausoleum! As for floorboards—it’s like we’re too cheap to lay carpet.”

The new house that will stand in its place will have all the mod cons. It may have a Tudor-style façade—white with brown criss-crosses—the architect’s choice we’ve warmed to, but Tudor inside it is not. Houses come with more than one bathroom these days. Marble basins and vanities, or at least marble-patterned. Gold taps with your hots and colds in Italian.

Kitchens come with cook-top islands. We shall have a billiard room with red velvet wallpaper to go with the green felt of the table. A gallery with pink cane lounges where our descendants of the future can hang family pictures that will be there for all time. Not just stairs but a staircase. Central heating that you can’t see since it is buried in the walls. Axminster, sable-blue and off-white. Six bedrooms, walk-in caverns for our clothes. A separate wing for the visitors we’ll surely have. Relations will want to come and nose about. That’s the thrill of having a showpiece—you can show it off.

The Duke unrolls the draftsman’s drawings on the Formica table which will have to go for something better. He points out his favourite features: the entrance door will be a big swing affair. You’ll drive up into an undercover area through a brown brick arch-tunnel arrangement. A landscape person will make red scoria gardens with plastic sheets to keep down weeds. There’ll be lawns, but the smallest of the small of lawns to cut back mowing, lawns cool to stand on for Feet’s tired strolling. All with a white post and rail surround high enough to stop inquisitive stock, but low enough not to obscure the new house from the road in that second it takes to glimpse it between gaps in the road hedge when you’re driving past. If you’ve got a showpiece, why hide it?

“We must name the farm something,” Feet says, sweeping her hand over the drawings, and sweeping again in a wider arc. “A house like this, and the whole farm around it, needs a name. We can’t just go on calling it
The Farm
.
The Farm
is just for an ordinary old cow place, not a showpiece. Not the biggest in the district with a Tudor house for a homestead.”

She sweeps in an arc another time. “If we go to the trouble to name a racehorse, then surely we can name all
this
.”

That makes sense to The Duke. We could even have a plaque made for the entrance to the drive. Another one perhaps beside the front door. “Something that sounds—”He shrugs that he doesn’t know what that something is.

“Something grand,” sweeps Feet.

“That’s it.
Grand
.”

“Though it’s not very grand having your Jockeys sticking up above your trousers,” she says, eyebrows arched high and lips pursed to deliver a mild reprimand. “Trousers that really should be hung somewhere outside rather than be sat in inside, dirty and torn.”

But The Duke’s not listening. He squints down on a thought and mouths “grand” and “farm,” then “Grand Farm,”“Farm Grand,” “Park Farm,” “Park Farm Estate.” Another squint. “Green Park” and “Green Farm.”

Feet mouths what he mouths and tips her head to one side in contemplation, rejecting each name with a grimace like an unpleasant taste. Again she sweeps her arcs over the drawings. Slow arcs as if making a spell, eyes closed, with “Park ”and “Estate” as the spell’s magical chant. “Tudor” and “Tudor Estate.”

“Tudor Estate. I like that,” nods The Duke.

“Park Tudor. Tudor Park.” She opens her eyes. “That’s it.

Tudor Park.”

The Duke nods and mouths it over. “Tudor Park.”

“Tudor Park.”

“I like that. It’s perfect. I think Tudor Park it is.”

He bows and calls her “My lady.”