Cold Skin (3 page)
hands me my towel.
He’s a gentleman,
he’s my friend.
Eddie
I found the necklace beside the train tracks
and knew that someone rich
and spoilt,
or angry,
had thrown it from the train window.
It shone in the grass
and I rushed across the line to pick it up
and polish its shiny-metal smoothness.
I opened the heart-shaped locket.
The inscription read
‘To my Beloved’.
That’s all.
No signature.
Maybe he was embarrassed to sign his name.
Or he didn’t mean it,
didn’t have the guts to commit.
Perhaps that’s why it got tossed by a girl
who couldn’t stand to wear it around her neck
and be reminded of his lies.
When I got home
I hid it in my drawer,
stuffed in the oldest pair of socks.
For safe keeping.
For Sally.
Sally
I don’t know what came over me.
When Eddie held the rope
as I walked towards him,
dripping wet and trembling from the cold water,
well,
when he handed me the rope
and smiled in his relaxed way,
I leaned forward and kissed him.
On the lips.
I closed my eyes
and I’m sure he closed his.
We stood there together
with our lips touching
for a few seconds
and I stopped shaking.
I gripped the rope tightly
as I drifted back from Eddie
and flung myself
as far into the river
as the swing would take me,
and just before I dropped
I looked back towards the bank.
Eddie was gone.
Eddie
Sally has a tiny gap between her two front teeth.
I get lost in her smile.
That’s what I was looking at
when she walked up to me
all wet and shivering,
and I wasn’t ready for what she did.
Bloody hell.
Would I ever be ready?
At school, when it comes to Friday games,
like tug-of-war,
I’m the first picked
and the other side always asks for an extra player.
When deliveries come in from the city
they get me to unload the truck
and I toss the boxes into the storeroom.
Sometimes I lift three at a time
just to see how much I can carry.
I tell the driver this is better than school work.
Nobody in school is stronger than me.
But when Sally Holmes kissed me,
I never felt so weak in all my life.
Eddie
I do the washing up for Mum
same as every night,
because Larry says he has to study.
Aren’t we in the same class?
Don’t we do the same homework?
Larry sneers when I say this.
‘My homework is nothing like yours.’
I know what he means
but I don’t argue
because someone’s got to do the dishes
for Mum,
who’s done all the cooking.
Tonight I wash real slow
because I’m looking out the window
down to Jamison River
and I’m thinking of Sally Holmes
with her red lips wet,
brushing mine,
and I figure
it’s worth it
in my little life
to stand here
dreaming.
Larry
Yeah, my brother
hangs around with Sally,
but I reckon
she’s just taking pity on him,
on account of her too-good ways.
I don’t care.
She ain’t that pretty.
Give me Colleen O’Connor any day.
She’s as attractive as any movie star, I reckon.
That’s why every morning
I go to the library
and sit at the same desk as Colleen.
She don’t say much
but I don’t care
because I work on reading my book
and looking at her white blouse
and imagining what’s underneath.
I’m getting so good at it
sometimes
when the bell rings
I can’t move for a few minutes
until it’s safe to stand,
if you know what I mean.
I watch Colleen walk out of the library,
her fine legs and ankles,
and I sit here
getting the courage
to ask her out,
one day,
when I think the time is right.
Me and Colleen.
Eddie
In the backyard of our old house, before the war,
Dad built us a cubby
out of cast-off fence posts and rusty nails.
Me and Larry would play in it most of the weekend,
pretending to be cowboy scouts
waiting for the Indians to attack.
Dad carved us guns out of pine wood
and coloured the barrels with charcoal,
drilling a hole where the trigger should be.
He taught us how to twirl the six-gun.
Me and Larry would face off across the grass
until Dad called ‘shoot’.
We’d both fling ourselves to the ground
pointing the guns at each other,
yelling, ‘bang, bang, bang’
until Dad would wink at one of us to play dead.
He did it in turn so Larry and me
each got to blow imaginary smoke from our barrels
and be a western hero
while Dad carried off the body of our brother
to the far corner of the yard
where the compost heap steamed.
Dad called it Tombstone Hill.
That was when we were young.
Before Dad signed up for the war.
Long before the war.
Mr Butcher
I have ambitions
for teaching in the city.
At a Grammar school,
where everyone,
I mean everyone,
addresses you as ‘Sir’.
Where they have servants
preparing lunch for staff,
served in a dining room lined with pictures
of the school history.
They have linen on the tables,
leather chairs,
and the only sound you hear
is the clink of fine bone china.
A school where you can dedicate your life
and become a History Master.
And the students sit up straight
in spotless, pressed uniforms,
listening.
And they all have plans.
Solicitors.
Doctors.
Managers.
A school where they play rugby,
serve tea and scones
on the sidelines every Saturday,
with the parents asking after ‘young Harold’
and whether his homework
is up to standard.
As if it isn’t anything but perfect.
Mr Butcher.
Master Butcher.
Sir.
Mr Butcher
I stroll to school down Main Street,
listening to the groaning freight train
pulling the night-shift coal load to the coast.
I nod to Calder, the butcher,
and Old Man Wilson
who runs the hardware.
He spends most of his day
sitting in his office,
looking down on the store
as he sips his tea
and watches each customer,
tipping his hat to the ladies,
but rarely getting up from his
expensive swivel chair,
letting his son do the work.
I say ‘Good morning’ to Mr Carter,
editor of
The Guardian,
who keeps an eagle eye
on Main Street early morning,
as if the news is just waiting to happen
outside his shopfront.
Mrs Kain sits on her bentwood chair
at the front of Sunset Café,
having her first tea of the day.
She calls to her husband,
‘Is the grill ready yet, Ernie?’
I raise my hat and keep walking to the corner,
past Paley’s Emporium,
with the staff already busy
sweeping and dusting
because Paley doesn’t employ cleaners.
He gets the staff to do everything.
Mr Carter
I’ve had some front-page stories,
let me tell you.
Our boys marching to war in crisp uniforms,
eyes forward,
the click of heels down Main Street.
The day our football team won the Shield
for the first time in a generation, by Jove.
They mounted the trophy in the window at Paley’s
and the young children stood admiring it till sunset.
The collapse of number two shaft
at the end of the day shift.
A pall of dust settled over the town
while we waited for the bodies to be brought up.
The following Sunday the church was full
for the first time in years.
A week later, Mayor Paley unveiled the memorial
for two family men lost.
In the paper the next day
was a photo of the grieving miners,
arm-in-arm at the ceremony.
I gave a paragraph to Paley’s speech.
The rest of the page was devoted
to the brave souls lost
and the Union Appeal for their families
with an anonymous one hundred pound donation
to get things moving.
Never you mind who it was.
I’m careful with what I put on the front page.
No rubbish or gossip.
I don’t print what people think,
only what they say.
If they say it, I quote them.
I’ve studied awhile on who to believe in town,
and how to check on those I don’t.
I run a newspaper,
not the town diary.
And those who don’t like it,
well,
they can listen to the gossips
at Paley’s Store.
Mayor Paley
Dr Barnes said it was ‘fluid on the knee’
and he wrote a letter to the Army
dismissing my chances of serving.
I wanted to enlist.
I craved to go with the rest of the men.
But, my knee.
It was cruel to watch them leave.
I made a rousing speech at the farewell parade
and decided to serve at home.
I ran for mayor to improve my town.
Not for myself.
Lord.
Didn’t I already have enough to do with my store?
But we all must make sacrifices,
and so I put my name forward
and won.
In a landslide.
It’s the fluid that makes me limp
but I don’t complain,
even when a youngster from school,
some little tyke, asks me,
‘Did you get that in the war?’
Bloody cheeky kid.
No respect for my efforts.
I do it all for this town.
Mayor Paley
I didn’t approve of what Carter wrote
when I was elected mayor.
He didn’t have to print ‘unopposed’
as the headline,
implying that there was no one else to vote for.
I was elected because of what I stood for,
what I had to offer,
because the whole town,
all the women
and the men not at war,
everyone believed in me.
I call that a landslide.
A lesser man would have cancelled
all advertisements from the paper,
in protest.
But I like to think of myself as a big man,
a trifle overweight,
but big in spirit and generosity.
I don’t have much time for the likes of Carter.
My father always said
to remember your enemies
as well as your friends,
and don’t trust either of them.
Mr Carter
Mr Butcher walks by each day
with a shallow ‘Good morning’.
That’s all.
He thinks I’m looking for a front page.
Tell me,
how can a man employed as a teacher
be so clueless?
What I am doing is watching the kids
wandering ragtag to school,
and even though I dare not,
I’m writing their stories.
The freckle-faced boys,
future miners.
In five years time I’ll be nodding to them
as they come coughing up Main Street.
A few will leave town to work in the city,
in an office,
with clean clothes
and a determination to forget
where they came from.
The rest will bide their time on farms,
or in the shops in town.
Some of the girls will fall pregnant,
choosing their life
by what goes on down by the river
one Saturday night.
Except Sally Holmes
and Colleen O’Connor.
Those two,
they’ll make their way.
They won’t let Butcher’s pedestrian teaching
ruin their chances.
So I answer Mr Butcher with a firm nod
and I keep vigil on those two girls
because I know
there’s always hope.
Sally
This morning I see Eddie
taking the short cut to school,
along the riverbank.
He swings his bag from side to side,
hand to hand,
playing some intricate game only he knows.
I wolf-whistle as loud as I dare
and quickly duck behind a bush.
Eddie stops and looks around,
the hint of a smile on his face.
When he starts walking away
I try to whistle again
but nothing comes except laughter.
He’s seen me!
I grab my bag and run to meet him.
He’s carrying a sprig of mountain wattle
and he offers it to me.
I push the stalk into my top buttonhole.
‘Thanks, Eddie.’
He smiles back
and I’m pretty sure
we’re both thinking of what happened by the river,
even though neither of us is going to say
a word about it,
today,
or the day after.
Colleen
Larry scares me with his wandering eyes
and greasy hair.
I know he’s looking at me,
sitting across the desk every morning
in the library.