Muck (23 page)

He does not want an ambulance. Feet is not to disobey him. I am not to disobey him. If his heart is giving out, he’ll be damned if he spends his days as an invalid who can’t even mount stairs. If it’s cancer, let it end here and now. Not some drawn-out miserable business.

His eyes half close in sleepy, weakening blinks. He mumbles to himself that if he is to die, let it be in his Tudor Park bed. Let it be on his land, his piece of Earth’s earth. Bury him in a paddock where the water below makes that wonderful trickle. He has made something himself, of his life. He can die a happy man.

Feet starts her left and right stepping. But no matter how much she scratches in her hair, no matter how much she tells him she is holding back a torrent of tears, The Duke mumbles that he couldn’t be happier to have it end right now with the two people he loves at his side.

But we are not at his side. Feet steps and scratches at the foot of the bed. I step and scratch too, dig my nails into my scalp. The Duke curls a finger for us to come closer and sit with him and be a family together. He wants Feet and I to fit into the top space of his S. “How can I sit and listen to you talk this way?” Feet stomps. “Such a cruel way to talk when I’m worried sick and you’re carrying on as if you haven’t a care in the world. You’re in seventh heaven while I’m sick with worry.”

The Duke has no interest in listening. He curls his finger for me to come closer. He wants me to know that he couldn’t be prouder to think he will leave this world with me in charge of what he has built up. Me, his flesh and blood, who is so young but a leader of men.

Feet chokes into weeping, real weeping with streaming tears. She yanks her hairdo free of its swirlings and sobs how she hates life, hates it. Life that’s condemning her to be alone, to raise a child alone. She has done all the right things—she has worked and saved, worked and saved, and now life has turned viciously on her and her shit bastard dreams.

The Duke says he expects me to look after my mother as
he
would care for her and make up in her heart for losing her husband.

Feet yanks her hair and asks God for everything to be in order. “Everything is in order, isn’t it?” she asks The Duke, but he is groggily chanting “Couldn’t be prouder, couldn’t be prouder.” Feet yanks that she has not paid attention to affairs as she used to. She has not been herself and has left things to The Duke. Surely all is in order with his will. Such a basic thing. Surely that is the least of her concerns. But where is a copy held? She steps left and right and curses this shit bastard day as the worst in her shitting life.

The Duke grimaces into a tighter S.

Feet scuffs in frantic static out of the bedroom and onto the stairs’ landing. She yells that she is too frightened and confused now to care what The Duke has demanded she do or doesn’t do. She weeps that she is going to call an ambulance whether he likes it or not. If she could only remember where the phone is. Where is the phone in this bastard shit of a house! You can never find a bastard phone in a new house! And what do you dial? “I can’t think! I can’t shitting bloody think!”

I sob such fat tears they land with a plop on The Duke’s sheets. I hold his hand. Chilled sweat has greased his forearms and flattened down their black hairs. I shake him to wake him up and tell him to vomit into the bucket by the bed and feel well again. I tap him with the back of my hand as if a joke might rouse him: “If you don’t get better, I really will think you’ve got no gumption.”

The phone’s bells ding and ding downstairs—Feet banging the receiver down to punish its not knowing what to do without her.

T
HE AMBULANCE DRIVER
straps The Duke into a trolley though he pleads to be left in his bed. Pleads that he be let stay curled in his soothing S and not straightened into a painful shape. The driver injects him into acceptance.

Feet pulls me close to her in time with saying that we must pull ourselves together, her and me. She lays her arm across my shoulders. She smells of fresh coatings of face powder and sprayings of perfume. Her eyes are newly ringed in brown from her bathroom pencils. Her hair bun is re-wound and stacked and sprayed erect. Chains snibbed to her wrists. Jewels clipped to her ears. She says we must pull ourselves together whatever the bastard of a future brings. We must not cry in public where people will see us and snigger that you can have all the money in the world but unless you’ve got your health. “The operator on the phone—she could tell I was rattled. She’s at the local exchange so you can bet the world she’s already spread the word: fancy pants’s husband is in trouble and she’s gone a bit funny.”

We will travel to hospital in the ambulance with The Duke.

Turning out of our driveway onto the road Feet notices the ambulance has dark windows and so if anyone’s got their binoculars out they’ll be sorely disappointed. She pokes her fingertips into her forehead. Red fingerprints smudge through the powder. She pokes her forehead and talks under her breath.

“Are you praying?” I sniffle.

She purses her lips and says, yes, she is. “The first and last time I will do it, I don’t mind telling you, because I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t know what I have done to deserve this. And I’ll be stuffed if I’m going to bloody well pray again if this is the way any shitting bastard of a God treats us.”

She takes her compact from her handbag and re-dabs her forehead. A square of lace handkerchief is tucked under her watchband. She flicks it free of its folds and blots The Duke’s greasy brow. She winces and shakes her head wishing she had not said what she just said about God, just in case there is a God. It will bring bad luck on us. It’s asking for trouble. She wishes she had brought her four-leaf clovers with her to make up for it. She may have a spare one in her bag. She searches, but no.

The Duke’s eyes are half shut as if drunk in restless sleep. I whisper in his ear in my own kind of praying, my eyes squeezed closed as if to squeeze out thoughts from my brain into the atmosphere for transmission. “You can’t leave,” I say. “I am not ready for Tudor Park. I’m out of place here.”

I confess to him that his very sickness could well be my doing because of the calf killing. Just as strange things happen in Taonga such as water trickling out of sight when you tread the ground, there may well be a system of animal justice dealt to humans. Not any humans, but outsiders like us who do not have immunity from the terrible laws that nature spares its own. That is what we’re up against.

I transmit that there are other things I want to do with my days, not take over Tudor Park. Not now, tonight or even tomorrow or whenever he dies from this sickness that makes him want to lie hunched like a fetus. Does he want Tudor Park to be my blessing in life or my curse? Die now and it’s a curse, a dreadful burden and a curse. Live, and not die till far off in the future, then that’s Tudor Park the blessing. “I want to sing,” I pray-whisper. I have a script I will learn. I want to sing on a stage, in my stomach and chest voice that the more I practise becomes strong.

There is anger in my transmission now. Tonight my fate will be decided. If The Duke dies, would I have to leave school? Would I stay in Taonga, marry Bettina ? She is probably a gold-digger. She will leave me, and where’s his legacy then? What becomes of it if she takes half? “That’s what you are condemning me to. All because of my killing a calf and the justice that passed on to us.”

If he loves me, he will live. If he loves me, he will face down the justice, face down death. What kind of father would do anything else but
live
in these circumstances! “I promise this: I will leave Tudor Park if I have to. Walk off and say to hell with carrying it on. Let Norman run it. Let Churchill beat your horses till they’re broken and fucking cowed. It will be your fault. It will be because of you.”

I make this silent vow to him: if I must become the duke myself I will let my penis go to cock when feeding the calves.

I will let them suck and slurp it so when he drifts above me with the other curious ancestors I will have my revenge on him for how terribly I’ve been wronged.

In the emergency ward The Duke resumes his S.

A rugby-sized male nurse wrestles him open to change his clothes from pyjamas to paper smock. A doctor questions him loudly to penetrate the deafness of drugs. “Where exactly is the pain? Point exactly to where there’s pain.” He politely insists that Feet and I make ourselves comfortable in the waiting room down the corridor, or in the cafeteria to the right and follow the signs. He will visit us when more tests are done. Feet raises her chin as a challenge to bad fortune. Her lip corners turn up a smile of fake confidence. She puts her arm around me as if I might be too frozen to steer my own walking.

In rooms along the corridor humans lie with mouths gaping in snoreless sleep, yellow soles protruding from blankets. Tubes in their noses or the crooks of their arms as if creepers from the walls have got in under them. The paper smocks have a back-split that leaves people’s privates glimpseable. Feet refuses to look. She reprimands me that I shouldn’t look either. “Hospitals are so depressing,” she shivers in her graveyard way. “I can’t do anything but pretend I’m not here. The sickness just rubs off on you.” She wishes there was a private room we could go to. “I don’t mind paying for a little room away from people’s staring, people saying with their eyes, ‘What’s she doing here? She looks a cut above the rest of us, but cut down to size now. She’s just like the rest of us now.’”

She unzips her sunglasses from her bag. “I’ll be damned if I’ll have all these eyes see the state of me.”

Kidney stones.

“All the worry. All the fuss.” Feet slumps in the chair beside The Duke’s hospital bed. She removes her sunglasses. She says that we will be laughing stock of Taonga: an ambulance and all that fuss. “I’m even laughing at it myself. Well at least old fancy pants is lucky, they’ll have to admit.”

The Duke slides up onto pillows. His dentures aren’t in. He points Feet to where they are wrapped in tissue. A stalactite of skin hangs like a tip from his pale gum. He sucks the teeth into his mouth like a mouth-guard and boasts that he is not ready yet to push up daisies. He’ll push out kidney stones but not push up daisies—we can’t get rid of him that easily. He has unfinished business this side of the sod. Such as winning a Melbourne Cup. And seeing his son married to a woman as beautiful as his own wife. There are those grandchildren he wants to see mucking around in the paddocks. A boy and a girl each, please. A boy to take Tudor Park forward into the years. A girl to help out with the book-keeping. “I’ve got some big ideas. Buying up our neighbours some day. Expanding our operations throughout the whole of Taonga,” he says, sweeping his hand across the air. “Let’s make us the biggest agricultural operation in the whole of Australasia. No, bugger it. The biggest operation in the world. A scrape with death just gives me a bigger appetite for being alive and making a mark that says ‘I lived here.’”

He reaches for Feet’s hand. He clasps it in his.

“Not so tight,” she winces because he has crunched her fingers together painfully against her rings. She leans on his shoulder, careful to settle her hair on the edge of his pillow and not dent her comb-work: “The whole world! I like the sound of that. That’s more like the man I married talking.”