The Promise (8 page)

‘Get stuck into that. The old fella next to me can't eat a thing. They cut part of his tongue out because of some cancer. He's ate nothing, but they keep bringing him stuff.'

I unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. It was real ham, not the fake stuff you get in a tin.

‘You don't look sick, Bung. Fatman here said you were about to drop dead.'

‘I didn't say he'd dropped dead,' Fatty defended himself. ‘I said he might be dying. It's not the same thing, idiot.'

‘Well, I'm not dying. I had to have this infection cut out and they've given me pills to help me get better.'

‘Cut out? Where'd they cut the infection from?' Fatman asked. ‘I asked Mum what was going on. She wouldn't tell me. “Ask your father,” she said.'

‘I'll show you. Take a look at this.'

He pushed the blanket to the bottom of the bed, undid the ties on his pyjama pants and pulled them down to his knees. The four of us were staring at the knob of his dick. It was bloodied and bruised and bandaged in yellow-stained gauze.

‘Shit. What happened?' I asked.

‘The foreskin bit got all infected. The doctor said I'd gotten germs in it because I've been playing with it too much, so they had to snip it off.'

‘Foke,' Scratch whispered.

My father appealed to the Victorian Junior Marbles Board on our behalf and the grand final was put back two weeks. It was another week before Bunga could move around on his own and piss without too much pain. By early in the week before the final he was just about back to his old self, giving us orders down at the marbles ring. We were back in full training a couple of days later.

On the morning of the match Bunga reminded me to call up to Sparrow's flat and organise the music. I had to knock at his door three times before somebody answered. His mother said he wasn't home.

‘Where's he at then? Sparrow's in charge of playing the music for the marbles final.'

She lifted her bottom lip and sneered at me.

‘Play his music? So you cheeky bastards can give him hell again? You and your cross-eyed mate.'

Bunga wasn't cross-eyed. He had a lazy eye. Just one.

‘We're not going to abuse him. We want him to put some songs on. I already asked him and he said he'd do it.'

‘Well, he can't do it, because he's not here.'

She tried closing the front door on me.

‘Where's he gone?'

‘Where would you think? To the record shop. I'm sure he's got a bed there.'

‘When he gets back can you ask him to put the Beatles on? Loud.'

‘I'll be out doing the shopping. You see him, ask him yourself.'

Back at the ring the team was warming up.

‘You got him organised?' Bunga growled.

‘Yep,' I lied. He was always grumpy before a big match. I didn't want him losing concentration worrying over where Sparrow might be.

By the time the Kensington team arrived, in a Salvation Army minibus, a large crowd had gathered, including teams from the other estates. A few of the dads had turned up, but kept their distance from the ring, enjoying a smoke and an early beer under a scraggy gum tree across from the ring.

Before each match the regulations governing the game of marbles were read aloud by a Salvation Army Major. Although he was forever encouraging us to call him Major Bob, most kids knew him as Dr No. He called the event to attention.

‘There shall be
No
swearing –
No
raucous barracking –
No
spitting on or near the ring –
No
walking through the ring –
No
coaching from the sidelines –
No
oversized or overweight marbles –
No
unacceptable attire to be worn by team members.'

We won the opening lag, with Bunga lobbing his alley only a freckle short of the line. We would be shooting first up. Bunga handed us our earplugs and looked up at Sparrow's closed window.

‘Is he ready with the music?'

‘Should be,' I lied again. ‘His mum said he'd be ready.'

‘His mum? She hates me. You were left in charge of this.'

‘Don't worry, he'll be there.'

I eyeballed three of the Ken team across the ring, all of them scabby-faced runts.

‘Don't worry, Bung. They look beaten before the start. One of them's a pinhead.'

We decided to run with our standard order. Fatman would lead off, followed by me, then Scratch, and finally Bunga, to bring home the win.

Fatman got us off to a poor start. He missed shots he'd usually nail blindfolded; such is the pressure of a grand final. He trailed by three with only two alleys left in the ring on the second-last pair. He got lucky when his opponent over-hunched on the shot, lost his balance and fell into the ring – an automatic two marble penalty – leaving Fatman a marble down but controlling the play. He was about to shoot when Bunga noticed his hand shaking and a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face.

He called time-out and ordered Scratch to go fetch Fatman some water.

‘Fatty, you need to take the pair with one shot. But forget about this being the final. It's just another game and you're gonna win it.'

Fatty hadn't heard a word he'd said, and pulled his ear plugs out.

Scratch handed him a milk bottle full of water. He took a long gulp. Bunga repeated his order.

‘But you've been saying all along at training that if I lost my match you'd skin me alive and cook me in a pot.'

‘Yeah, well, I might do that even if it was just another game. Do your job and take out the pair.'

Fatman did as Bunga asked. His taw clipped the first alley, which cannoned into the second, knocking both marbles out of the ring. Game over.

Bunga ordered me to warm up. He started barking orders at Scratch.

‘Scratch, run upstairs and see if Sparrow's ready. We need the Beatles on.'

He grabbed hold of my shooting thumb and loosened it for me.

‘You seen their number four yet? They can't back up with a player who's already shot, can they? I'm going to speak to Dr No.'

I looked across the ring at the Ken team. The three runts were busy talking to a couple of girls. One of the girls lit a cigarette. They shared a puff. They were as good-looking as the boys were ugly. I couldn't take my eyes off one of them. She was wearing a Harlem Globetrotters singlet and cut-down jeans. She had long, long legs and beautiful tanned skin that glowed like honey.

‘Hey, Bung. What do you think of her?'

‘Concentrate on the game, dickhead.'

But I couldn't concentrate. Each time I hunched for a shot the golden-skinned girl positioned herself across the ring from me. She didn't seem to mind me staring at her. She might have smiled at me, although I couldn't be sure. By the time I got my game on track it was all over. I'd been slaughtered, six marbles down and out. Luckily Scratch wasn't distracted by her and played beautifully. He had the best long shot in the competition and didn't disappoint, wiping the ring with the third of the runt brothers. We were two–one up, with our best player still to come and no sign of the Ken number four.

When Dr No called for the ‘final player of each team to present themselves at the line' Bunga raised his arms above his head like a champion boxer, thinking it was all over. Cheering broke out across the crowd. Dr No took a small brass bell and stopwatch from his side pocket, rang the bell and announced a ‘two-minute warning'. If the Ken number four didn't step forward before the bell sounded a second time the match was all ours.

With just seconds left on the Major's stopwatch the golden-brown girl stepped up to the line and offered Bunga her hand. He screwed his nose up at her.

‘What do you think you're doing? Only registered players are allowed to come to the lag line. Piss off back to your girlfriend.'

‘Piss off yourself, fuck-face. I am the player.'

‘You can't be the player. You're a girl.'

‘Yeah. I'm a girl. Not that you'd know. And I'm the player, so let's get on with it.'

‘This is bullshit.'

He called on Dr No for a ruling.

‘Hey, Doc. They must be stalling for time or something. Tell her she can't play.'

An argument broke out between the teams and some in the crowd as Dr No went to the rulebook, with Bunga looking over his shoulder. Fatman pulled him aside.

‘Who cares that they've fronted with a girl? Kick her arse and it's over.'

Bunga focused his good eye on Fatman.

‘Are you fucken kidding me? I'm not playing a girl. 'Course, I'll beat her. So what? Any of us could beat her. I'll cop shit over this for years.'

Dr No went through the book twice before announcing to the crowd that there was ‘no rule or sub-clause governing the sex of a player'.

He ordered both players to the line.

I've thought about what happened next many times. Sometimes I almost convince myself that the whole day was a dream; there was never any beautiful girl with golden-brown legs; and there was no grand final held at our ring. Whenever I find myself overcome with doubt I'll ask Fatman or Scratch if they remember the final game of the CMC that year the same as I do. They do, although Fatty remembers her legs being even longer and browner and more golden. For a reason that escapes me, Scratch claims not to recall her legs at all. But he is sure that she was able to play equally well on both sides of her body, and could shoot left- and right-handed, a rare skill in competition marbles.

With Bunga continuing to complain to Dr No, the girl won the lag and chose to shoot first. She catwalked around the ring, picking off alleys with ease, for the following ten minutes. Those who weren't fixated on the game were hypnotised by her legs, including Dr No, who was wiping his brow with a damp hankie. After taking out four alleys in a row, the crowd was cheering for her. By the time she'd knocked out eight marbles people were going crazy. When she was down to the last alley standing, a black eye, which according to marbles folklore was a curse upon the shooter, the crowd was silent.

In possibly an act of desperation, or an involuntary nervous twitch, Bunga dug a hand into his jeans pocket – the one with the hole in it – and reached for his lucky foreskin. But of course, there was no foreskin to be found. All he could do was revert to religion and began praying for a miracle, by way of a Hail Mary, as the girl hunched on the far side of the ring.

I forgot all about Bunga and the game that was at stake. I smiled at her and peeked a look at her thighs as they caught the sun. She winked at me and played her kill shot. The taw slammed into the black eye with so much power the marble split in two. I'm sure I saw smoke rising from the ring. The Ken team and their supporters went wild and the runts threw their arms around her. One of them tried squeezing her tits.

According to the rules, Bunga was entitled to shoot at a second set-up. If he could miraculously match her lockout, a sudden-death shoot-out would decide the winner. But he was already beaten and he knew it. He dropped his favourite marble in the dirt without playing a shot and walked away from the ring without looking back. Fatman and Scratch ran after him, but I disloyally hung around for the presentation, hoping to talk to the girl. The winner's trophy was awarded and the team were hurried back onto their bus before a fight broke out; another tradition of the CMC tournament.

When the bus was about to leave I walked over and knocked at the window.

‘Hey, will you be playing marbles again next year?'

‘I don't reckon,' she shrugged. ‘This is boring. Maybe you'd like to play a different game,' she laughed, as the bus took off.

I chased it along the street, yelling at her, ‘What game? What game?' until the bus had disappeared around the corner at the end of the street.

The four of us sat in silence at the ring for the afternoon. Scratch tried offering words of support but Bunga would have needed an interpreter out of a Glasgow slum to make sense of what he'd said. Just before the sun went down Sparrow came walking across the grass towards us. He was carrying a brown paper bag from the record shop.

‘How'd the grand final end up, Bunga? You win?'

‘Get fucked, Sparrow.'

Sparrow had bought himself a new record. He'd want to tell us all about it, and wouldn't be put off by Bunga's rudeness.

‘Do any of you want to see the new album I bought?'

‘Get well and truly fucked,' Bunga screamed.

Sparrow ignored him and took the record from the bag. A photograph filled the album cover, showing some bloke's crotch in a pair of Levi's jeans.

‘Another Beatles album?' I asked. ‘I thought they were rooted.'

‘It's not the Beatles. I think it's time to move on.'

‘You're right it is,' Bunga yelled. ‘You should start now. I told you, fuck off.'

‘You might be cured, Sparrow,' I laughed. ‘Who is it?'

‘The Rolling Stones. Wait here and I'll go upstairs and play it. Let me know what you think.'

A couple of minutes later his bedroom window went up. The opening guitar riff hit me like a thunderbolt. By
halfway through the track even Bunga was tapping his foot to the beat, and when the song was over he was smiling wide enough to swallow his ears.

THE PROMISE

Carol had warned me often
enough that she was going to leave, so when I got home late from playing cards and a big drink at Winston's and found her gone I wasn't surprised. She'd taken off to her folks' place, dragging the boys with her. She'd done the same three times in the past year. I woke up the next morning with a sore head expecting she'd be back by the end of the day, but she didn't turn up.

It was another two weeks before she'd come to the phone when I called her at the farm. She told me that she wouldn't be home again unless I showed
commitment.
Just for a start she wanted me signed up for a rehab program.

‘Is that all I need to do, honey?'

‘Is that all? How many times have you promised, Luke, and done nothing?'

‘This will be different, Carol. This house is like a morgue without you and the boys here. This is a real promise.'

I could hear her mother's whining voice coaching her in the background.

‘You sign up for a program before I come back. And I want to see proof. One of them authority notices the government's put out. All right?'

I had a chuckle after I put the phone down. Rory Collins, a mechanic at the garage on the main street, an amiable man I drank with from time to time, had a brother-in-law who'd worked as a drug-and-alcohol counsellor with the City before he'd fallen off the wagon himself. He'd gotten the sack from his job, having gone near blind on homemade firewater he'd cooked up in his backyard. On his way out of the counselling service he'd lifted a fat pad of pledge authorities and had been selling them for twenty bucks apiece ever since.

The biggest business in town was grog. Always had been. Closely followed by the church, and after that, since the government crackdown, came drug-and-alcohol counselling. None of the charities in town would give a man as much as a cup of tea without a signed authority note. The dole office was likely to cut off your cheque if you were an identified pisshead and not in a program. The counsellors ran the show, so they benefited most from the graft – cash, grog or girls. Sometimes the unholy trinity, if they were particularly greedy.

Three days after the phone call and Carol's demand, I was ready to head over to the in-laws' with a signed authority in my pocket. I'd forged the signature myself.

I'd picked up a suit jacket at the Salvation Army, had a shave and spit-polished my only pair of leather shoes. I'd even thought about a haircut, but decided against it, calculating that the twelve dollars would be better spent on a six-pack of Rebel Yell. I settled for some ancient hair oil I found in the back of the medicine cupboard in the bathroom before heading off.

The oil had belonged to my grandfather, Abraham, a mission black who'd found God as a young man and who'd known the Bible, Old Testament and New, word for word. He'd bought our two-
room
weatherboard, on a low rise in the middle of town, with the money he'd earned
over twenty
backbreaking
years
as a ditch worker for the Water Board
.
Abe had a plan to set up his own church in the back room of the house, but as he got older and hunched over
,
the idea slipped away from him.
Even then
he never stopped reading his
Bible, and slept with it under his pillow.

He had taken good care of me after my mother ran off with some whitefella. My father had been white, too, a cattle worker passing through town heading west for a run; he'd stayed long enough to woo my mother back to his hotel room one night and send her home pregnant. When her belly got too big to hide under a dress, Abraham prayed for her and explained that she could stay in the house as long as she promised to get down on her hands and knees every night and pray with him. Dulcie, my mother, didn't have much choice. Back in those days, if a pregnant black girl didn't have a safe roof over her head and someone decent to speak for her, she'd have the baby whipped from her breast soon after it was born. She knew that Abraham's word was the Gospel itself, and kept her promise until I started crawling around on the floor and making demands of her that she wasn't interested in meeting. She got the wanders and eventually travelled far enough from us that she didn't bother finding her way home.

For a while I reckoned my father must have been an albino, because I was the fairest-skinned blackfella in the history of the town and could have easily passed for white. Abraham showed no prejudice towards me and tried steering me on the right path, but as soon as I was old enough I drifted out to the lake, to the ruins of the Christian mission, and quickly learned to love the drink and the smell of a girl's skin after it had been dipped in water and wine.

Abraham left the house to me after his death. It wasn't much of a prize, but it was enough to impress Carol, a farmer's daughter who worked at the bank in town and knew all about the value of private property.

‘It's a start,' she said softly, when she first saw the place, as rundown as it was.

I met her during one of my brief periods of sobriety, a time when I went around town in a clean white shirt and talked about reviving Abraham's dream of a church of his own. I'd even dressed the story up for Carol, in an effort to get her into his old brass bed – I told her I'd sworn to him, on his deathbed, that I would build his church and fill it with believers.

‘And what did he say?' she'd pleaded, tears in her eyes, as we sat in the only tearoom in town, drinking Earl Grey out of flowery cups.

‘Well,' I said, as I took a long gulp of the tea and stalled for an answer, ‘he looked up at me with that wrinkled old face of his, and even though he was in a mess of pain he said to me, “I know you can do it, Luke. You're a strong boy. The Lord will be pleased, and I'll rest easy.” '

Carol leaned across the table and rested her head against my chest. I put my arms around her and pressed her body into mine. She smelled so clean and soapy and pure, I was sure we'd be happy together.

The days of scandal, of a white girl marrying a half-caste, weren't quite over. The town whispers followed us wherever we went. But when I met Carol's parents in Abraham's dusted-off black suit and told them of my plans for a church, they seemed satisfied.

‘Land,' her mother gushed to her husband, almost in disbelief. ‘He has
land
.' Meanwhile the old man looked over at Carol and thought, to my reckoning, that she was a bit of a wallflower and this might be his best chance of marrying her off. He took her by the hand and told her he was happy for us.

They lived far enough out of town to have no direct experience of my reputation, and never made inquiries, which would have turned up trouble for me. To this day I think that maybe they didn't want to know.

I did love Carol, then and now. But not as much as I loved the grog and the good company of them old boys. I loved the stories they told about the old days, when there was just a handful of whitefellas on the horizon. I also loved the town girls who drifted out to the lake to lie by the water of a night and look up at the stars. After a time, of course, the boys died away, and the girls grew into women with a tribe of kids of their own and an old man for each of them. If one of them fellas caught his wife out at the lake he'd kick her arse all the way back to town and throttle any man caught jazzing with her.

Before leaving the house for the farm I downed my first can of Rebel Yell at the kitchen sink and threw another couple onto the passenger seat of the old Datsun, then set out to lay my claim on Carol and the boys. Along the way I stopped at the cemetery out of town, sat on a gravestone, drank another can and plucked a bunch of flowers from the grave to present to Carol as a peace offering. I shook the dust off them and sat them on the seat with the last of the grog.

A couple of minutes' drive away from
the turn-off into the
farmhouse I pulled over to the side of the road, under an old peppercorn tree. I hopped out and took a piss and
then
sat under
the
tree and sipped at the third can of bourbon and cola while I enjoyed the peace and quiet of the afternoon.
When I'd finished
I shook the last dregs out of the can, crushed it in my hand and threw it way off into the bushes. I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out the half pack of XXX mints I'd planted
there
earlier, and then went to the side-view mirror to look at my face. I checked my bloodshot eyes and sucked and crunched on those mints and then I spit in my hands and tucked my wild head of curls behind my ears. I winked at myself in the mirror, pleased that I'd scrubbed up okay, all things considered.

My head didn't feel too good. In the car I rested my chin on the steering wheel and focused as best I could to keep to my side of the road. I took the turn into the in-laws' long driveway a little too fast and managed to clean up the mailbox, which shattered into kindling. I held my hand down on the car horn so the boys would hear me and come running to see their dad. But they didn't come running at all. I pulled up out front of the house, with its long wide verandah and boxes of pretty flowers. There was no sign at all of Carol or the boys. Just Ma and Pa, old Martha and Ted, waiting to greet me.

I fell out of the car, landed on my hands and knees in the dust, and looked up at them.

‘Heya, Teddy,' I said. ‘Can you tell Carol I'm here? To pick her up, and the boys. She got her things packed?'

Ted was wearing his bib-and-brace farmer's overalls and a straw farmer's hat. He hadn't done any fieldwork for as long as I could remember; he hired in blackfellas on the cheap to do the slog while he sat on the phone nattering to his big city stockbroker. Martha was wearing one of her pretty floral dresses and a ton of make-up. She never got out of bed of a morning without doing her face. Probably wouldn't recognise her if I came across her sleepwalking. They were full of disgust, both of them.

‘She doesn't want to see you,' Martha said, laughing and crying hysterically all at the same time. ‘She's had enough, Luke. Carol wants a divorce.'

Ted shifted awkwardly on the balls of his feet, maybe thinking that Martha had played her trump card a little early. I dusted myself off and pulled the forged authority from my jacket pocket.

‘She won't need any divorce,' I said, waving the slip of paper in their faces. ‘I signed up for a program, just like she asked me to. I'm off the grog. And I'm staying off it.' I tried handing Ted the slip of paper, but he wouldn't take it. ‘You ask her to come out here and talk to me right now,' I went on. ‘She's my wife, they're my children, and I'm taking them home.'

Martha tut-tutted and shook her head, and silent Ted went red in the face with embarrassment. My story was so full of bullshit I think he felt sorry for me. I heard the screen door slam on the verandah.

‘You've got no right being here, Luke.'

It was Carol. She marched past her parents and down off the porch so we were standing toe-to-toe.

‘I don't want you upsetting the boys. Like Mum says, I'm not coming back. It's over.'

I pushed the authority slip into her face.

‘You told me, on the phone, if I went on a program you'd give me another chance. Well, I did. Read it, Carol. Read it. I am clean and working hard on this. I love you, Carol.'

She snatched the piece of paper out of my hand, screwed it into a ball and threw it to the ground.

‘Clean! You've never been clean, Luke. You're dirty, dirty, dirty! You and all your kind. Look at you. You're drunk now! I can smell it all over you. I got a call from Jenny Oakes, from the bank – she told me you were in there yesterday morning cashing a cheque, and by noon, when she was out getting her lunch, you were sitting up in the front bar of The Royal, half drunk. You're not in any program.' She pointed along the drive. ‘Leave here now. You shouldn't have driven out here as it was. That car's got no registration and you've got no licence to drive it. I hope the police get hold of you and lock you up.'

I took a step back. My legs started shaking. Ted walked over and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘Please, Luke,' he said. ‘We don't want any trouble here. I'll drive you back into town, if you like.'

Martha rested her arms across her flat breasts and pulled a face. ‘Have you anything to say to my daughter, Luke? Maybe an apology?'

‘Yeah, I've got something to say, Martha. To Carol, and to all of you.'

I did have plenty to say. I just couldn't remember what it was right then. I shook my head, trying to loosen the thought, but it wouldn't come. If
I'd
had a dollar for every time Carol had threatened to leave
,
I'd be the richest blackfella in the country
–
richer even than those boys working on the oil
rigs
off
the coast up north.
But this time
I could feel the pain deep in my gut because I knew there'd be no getting her back.

I got into the car, fumbled with the keys until I could find the ignition and drove off.

At home I went through the medicine cupboard again and grabbed hold of all the pills I could find. Sleeping tablets, antidepressants, painkillers, a few vitamins and even some cough drops. I shoved them all in my gob, stuck my head under the tap and drank until I'd swallowed the lot. I was desperate for another drink, but couldn't remember where I'd dropped the last cans of Rebel Yell. Rifling through the refrigerator I found a lonely can of beer at the bottom of the empty vegetable tray. I drank it, stuck my head in the pantry, came out with half a bottle of vanilla essence and downed that as well.

Abraham had kept a shotgun all his life. He'd never fired it, as far as I knew, but he liked to keep hold of it, claiming that one day he might be called upon to ‘protect the righteous from the sinners, black, white and brindle'. The gun wasn't hard to find; I crawled under his old double bed, the wedding
bed, and searched around until I found the loose floorboard, then fished around some more until I felt the cold steel of the barrel. I knew the gun was loaded without having to cock it. ‘Have it on the ready,' Abe had instructed me. The breech had held a .12-gauge birdshot cartridge for as long as I could remember.