Davey Darling, page 2
The Old Man loved this. He had the copper all set to light with newspaper and kindling. By the time they came by with their flagons, their hams to cure and their women each carrying a snack of some kind, the Old Man and me had the brine on a steady simmer.
The Old Man poured a beer for everyone, a little one for me included, and started going on about the beautiful simplicity of the copper. He could be a complete crank, the Old Man could. He mouthed off about ‘spatial densities’, and how, as it was so deep, you could get half a dozen hams in at a time. It was the spatial density, how the copper hung like an inverted bell in the concrete casing, which meant that the entire surface was heated. ‘And besides, it’s the only bloody thing big enough to get hams into,’ he laughed.
All his mates cheered this of course and the Old Man stoked the copper up and soon had flames dancing out of the chimney in a burst of bright orange sparks, shimmying in the night, blowing through the backyards of Paget Street.
With his offsider Bryce, the Old Man tasted the brine. They both pursed up their mouths and scrunched up their noses, taking a long snort of the scent filling the backyard off the steady rolling boil. Bryce added more vinegar. Me and my friend Blair Fitzroy stoked up the copper some more. The Old Man added pineapple. The ham, according to him, had to be boiled with pineapple.
He shooed me and Blair off down to Cy’s dairy to do a run for cigarettes, matches and milk. Pineapple for me was something you added yourself – if you wanted it.
WHEN WE GOT back the men were standing around drinking and smoking and talking about Big Norm dying. And not from an ingrown toenail, I might add, but something much more serious. Old Jack from next door was arguing the point as usual along with Davey Cousins, one of the younger guys from the Old Man’s work. But it was Bryce I heard, telling the Old Man this story of how he’d seen Mr Kirk just the other week at the opening of that plastic extrusion factory at Harewood.
‘He wasn’t the big joker he was,’ said Bryce. ‘He’d sort of shrunk, like he didn’t fill out his shirts around the neck any more, sad really.’
The Old Man looked down and made me remember the night when he’d been elected – they were both beside themselves. He’d come and woken me up at two in the morning to tell me the news.
‘We’ve got a new prime minister, Davey. Norm won, we’re home and hosed.’
He leaned over me, pushing his hand against the wall to hold himself up, to steady the ship, then leaning away said I should get some sleep. Mum appeared at the door with that sleepy drunk look on her face and leaned languid into the door frame.
‘He’s our youngest prime minister ever.’
That has always stayed – the fact that he was younger than anyone else before. The Old Man thought there was finally a man big enough to handle the job because Norman Kirk was a huge man. He spilled around his guts and was broad through the chest, but he still had a big frame to hang it on and a sort of way within himself that you didn’t see all the time. He was larger than anything except Tiny himself.
Jack, not being entirely regretful, started ribbing them all about the ‘poor man’s curse’ of the Labour Party.
‘With Kirk gone they’ll be shown up as the one-man band they are,’ he said. ‘They’ll be given the shove at the next election.’
Jack grinned and put his hand on the Old Man’s shoulder.
All he could do was agree. ‘Yep … country’s buggered,’ he said. ‘Norm’s gone and we’ve got the Arabs holding the world to ransom.’
THE WAY THAT copper was roaring, we could’ve heated all the houses in our block and even though it was already full of burning logs, we stuck more in, me and Blair Fitzroy. Jamming them in so they poked out the front of the grate. If I told him to put the logs in the water to stop the hams floating he would. I left him stoking, and when the Old Man yelled to ease off, he was the one in the firing line.
‘Watcha do that for?’ said Blair, squinting up at me.
‘Do what?’ I said.
‘Let me keep putting wood in there.’
‘One of us had to.’
‘You’re a bastard, Dave.’
He leapt at me, dishing a sharp little kick to my shin, but I landed a good one back, swiping him with a hooked left foot on his tailbone. He turned around and swatted me again with a jab to the leg and I grabbed the limb as he swung back, upending him in the grass. The Old Man suddenly took notice.
‘No boy calls my son a bastard. Now piss off,’ he said, waving around his long tongs and towering over the little shrimp. Blair looked up at him and leaned back to dodge the tongs as if touched by them he’d melt and dissolve into a steaming puddle of ooze on our back lawn.
The Old Man put his thick sweaty arm, draped in the steam coming off the brine, over my shoulder and muttered that I should’ve kicked him harder. Blair just had to limp away, back to his house down in McFarlane Crescent. I watched him go, thinking he’d been a bit hard done by. But then he could be a real little dick sometimes.
Then again the Old Man could be terrifying. If you’d never met my Old Man before his stature was imposing. I could only pray that I wouldn’t be that big after I was a full-grown man at eighteen. He towered a full head and shoulders over most people and weighed, oh, he must have weighed a lot because he was starting to run to fat.
Tonight he was having a great time. In his bloody element. Fagging away continually, yarning and carrying on, slapping the side of the copper with his hands hardened like boot leather – the Old Man, Jack and Bryce lording it over the copper. As it got towards dark they poured beer in with the hams.
‘A bit of brown for flavour, eh?’ said the Old Man.
‘Should tidy it up, Tiny,’ said Bryce.
They clinked their handles together and the Old Man laughed his deep belly-wobbling giggle and kept on turning the hams, pissed as a bloody newt.
I RAN INSIDE to try and take my mind off Blair having to limp home and complain to his father about the rough treatment he got at the Ardsley’s. But that’s what we were, rough. ‘Rough as guts,’ said the Old Man. Sure showing it again that night. I knew Mum didn’t abide it but she was, like the adults said, oblivious to it. ‘Making a twelve-year-old boy limp off home like that,’ would be what she’d have said, but there she was, completely oblivious, sitting at the table with the rest of the women, drinking tea and gin, ensconced in some discussion I couldn’t pick up on. I found that whenever Mum talked to her friends, she always said things she never said around me and the Old Man, like she had a private language she shared with them. They talked like they might as well have been chatting with aliens. Either that, or the way they all talked together at once made them sound like aliens. Couldn’t make any sense of it.
So I skated outside again. The copper was really blazing now. It was boiling like crazy. Big long flames shooting out of the chimney, rushing to the stars. The Old Man said you had to be careful about the temperature of the copper but now he didn’t seem to care. Hams were going in all over the place. Bryce had the big pink rubber glove on used for grabbing and hanging while the Old Man chucked in more pineapple and old Jack stood back no doubt admiring the effect all the beer was having on him.
‘More wood there, son. Can you get us some more wood?’ yelled out the Old Man.
‘Ah yeah, OK,’ I yelled back and bent myself towards the shed. I pulled up short in the dark just inside the door. The air was clammy with the stink of the steaming hams. I turned to where the wood was and felt around. I could hear low breathing but I thought that must be outside. And then as I leant forward, I felt my hand touch skin, a leg. I twitched back in shock, heard a scream and then, banging my head on a couple of sweaty hams hanging behind me, saw that there were two of them going at it on the wood pile.
They stopped now and all I could see by the dim glow of the moon spilling in the door was some guy’s arse with a woman’s legs poking out. Before I had time to see who they were, the Old Man had stormed in and yanked on the light.
It was Davey Cousins with Mrs Bryce Darling.
The Old Man’s face filled up like blood rising in a thermometer.
‘Bryce matey,’ he yelled out. ‘We’ve got a problem here.’
Bryce arrived at the shed door. He leaned in with his head bent slowly around the door like he knew there was something inside he didn’t want to see.
The Old Man pointed to Davey and Bryce’s wife uncoiling themselves from each other. Bryce turned his head away in as much of a hoity-toity fashion as he was capable, sucked his gut in and slid the air out of the rubber glove with his bare hand. Everyone went silent.
‘Shirley, come out here please,’ he called.
She stood trembling and started hitching up her panties from below her knees. Then I saw it. Her great forest of minge. Her big black bush. Kerrr-ist. I knew girls at school didn’t have hair like that. That big black patch made me feel tiny with my sporadic sprinkling of pubes. I respectfully stepped back towards the tool rack to let her past. She stood at the door, putting on this pleading kind of face.
‘It was just a bit of fun, Bryce,’ she said.
‘I don’t care. I’ll give the little bastard fun. No one plays around with my wife. Dave Cousins, get out here.’
Davey was starting to hitch up his own pants and put his own hairy old ballbag and dick away when Bryce ripped into the shed, grabbed him around the neck, marched him right over to the copper and stuffed his head in that boiling brine for as long as he could.
‘None of the girls will think you’re pretty now, pretty boy,’ he muttered.
We stared at Bryce, not believing what we’d seen him do. I thought he was going to beat him – you could tell that from the look on his face, so riled up as to want to thrash Davey to bits, but stuffing his head in the boiling copper, it was beyond giving the man a thrashing. It was, as they’d say about savages, barbaric.
Before anyone had a chance though to do anything about it, Davey Cousins’ head came out of the copper all red like a massive welt covered in boils.
Then Bryce pushed his head back down again and held it, pushing on Davey like a maniac. The Old Man yelled out that he was a mad bastard and let the poor fella go. He’s learned his lesson. Bryce just laughed. Then Davey’s legs went limp and Bryce let him drop.
The Old Man and Jack pushed Bryce out of the way and laid Davey on the ground, steaming from the neck up. His whole face was boiled pink, with welts around his nose, mouth and eyes. Jack stood back shaking. The Old Man yelled out for cold towels and tea. I ran inside just so I could stop looking at Davey Cousins, boiled like a beet on our back lawn.
There were a million things going on in my head as I ran to the kitchen down the other end of the house. The women looked at me like I was from another planet. Planet Bloody Flipped-out. Mrs Bryce Darling was weeping on Mum’s shoulder and going by the looks on the faces of the four other women they knew what was going on. They knew that Mr Bryce Darling had stuck Davey Cousins’ head in the copper and boiled it. They just didn’t want to believe it.
‘I’ve got to get cold tea,’ I yelled.
‘Grab what’s in the pot and put some water in it,’ said Mum. I did as she said and didn’t hang around. It was worse than a hospital waiting room, that kitchen.
Meanwhile the Old Man had been out to the Morrie wagon and pulled out Mum’s expensive travelling rug for Davey to lie on. The men all stood back as far as they could yet still maintain a view of the proceedings – like they were at the footy. But they were so deliberately quiet it was like he was carrying the plague or something equally dreadful. They were all arched, bent over and stooped, trying to pick out the sound of Dave’s wispy breath. Jack was clutching his chest like his heart was going to fall out, and having to brace himself to stay upright, his mouth open in shock. The Old Man lit a fag off the end of one he’d just smoked and coughed up a gob of phlegm that landed inches from Davey’s head. His head may have still been his head but his face was now all bleeding and pus-raw.
‘Jesus, Bryce. You didn’t have to do this,’ muttered the Old Man through a stream of smoke.
He took the tea from me and poured it on the towels that Jack handed him, huffing as he was like an old chook. I thought he too was going to cark it there and then. Behind him Bryce was staring into the copper brine, now hardly stirring. Even though he was the Old Man’s best mate, I’d always had him figured for a bit of a dickhead. He gave the impression that he was the one with girlfriends everywhere. Only now it looked like his wife had pulled a swifty on him. That’s what must have made him so angry – Bryce couldn’t have that. If anyone was going to be doing any adultering in the Darling family, it’d better be Bryce.
The wail of a siren broke the silence that was heavier than a good coating of cooled roast fat and this ambulance threaded around the corner with all the women gathering by the back door. They huddled in the porch like it was the last refuge, like the backyard was poisoned or the grass, sparkling with dew, was a live electrical field. But no, it was the sight of Davey Cousins lying there covered with our ratty old towels that made them stiller than a rabbit in a spotlight. It was a good decision on the Old Man’s part to cover him. His face made you want to belch. Mrs Bryce Darling, who looked like she’d been smacked in the face with a shovel, held on to Mum, drinking gin.
‘Christ,’ said the older ambulance man as he pulled back the towels over Davey’s face, ‘aoookkkhhhhhh.’
‘He fell in the copper. Bit too much to drink,’ said the Old Man, guts-dragging on his cigarette.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the ambulance man, looking around. ‘Fell in, right …’
He turned away, rubbing his hand over his eyes trying to tell himself that he shouldn’t be seeing what he was seeing but seeing it nonetheless and us all maimed by it. I had the feeling most of them thought Davey deserved it. At least that was going by the reaction of everyone to the Old Man’s pronouncement. It was like all the air was suddenly sucked out of the night and we were gagging, holding back the truth. Right into that vacuum stepped Bryce Darling, marching up to his wife, a weepy mess on Mum’s shoulder.
‘Come on, Shirley. We’re going now,’ he said.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ wept Mrs Bryce Darling.
The ambulance guys were exhibiting concern, but only briefly. They had to get Davey quickly onto a stretcher.
‘The bugger’s barely alive,’ said the older ambulance guy. ‘We need some gas down here,’ he barked. The younger one ran inside the ambulance and came out with a little cylinder and a mask attached and stuck it over Davey’s nose. The hiss told us he was pulling oxygen. They wheeled him in.
Mrs Bryce Darling was getting more wound up and she pulled herself away from Mum.
‘It’s all right, Thelma,’ she said, going with Bryce across the lawn in front of me.
‘Look what you did, Bryce. Poor Davey – it wasn’t his fault. It’s all yours, you bastard … don’t you see?’
Bryce looked confused. He stared at his wife like she was no higher on the scale of things than plankton in the ocean.
‘Listen, woman, I’m not the one whoring myself around the party here.’
‘That’s not the point, you … lunk,’ she said, spitting on the lawn.
‘Well, if it isn’t then I don’t know what is,’ said Bryce.
‘That’s just it, isn’t it? You don’t know because you don’t really care. You just like having me there. Your little doormat to wipe your feet on. Well, blow you, you prick, you might as well just get a housekeeper because I’m probably carrying Davey’s baby now.’
‘Now look, Shirley, let’s forget about that. I can forgive you for rooting that little prick, but you can’t carry his child … Jesus Christ, woman! You don’t even know if you’ve conceived. What the hell are you talking about?’
Staving off an even bigger scene, Bryce grabbed his wife by the hair. The ambulance lights started back up, bathing the backyard in a nuclear kind of glow for a few seconds. She yelled to be let go and Bryce kept marching her, like he had Davey Cousins, towards his car, the Golden Holden, parked outside the front gate. We watched the agony on Mrs Darling’s face reflected in the red-and-blue glare of the ambulance and the stunned wail of its siren. Mum looked at the Old Man as if to say, well, help, and he stood there ignoring her, like he was saying, It’s their business to sort out. Not mine. He wouldn’t step in. Not even when Bryce pushed his wife into the Kingswood and she folded against the dash, a broken-down mess. Before the Old Man could figure out what to do, Bryce had his foot down and was tooling it up Paget Street as fast as he could go.
Mum huffed and charged off inside. I suspected tea wasn’t going to sort this out.
The Old Man and me agreed it’d be best if we saw everyone off. We didn’t need to. They’d all gone, evaporated into the night, except for Jack, who was lying on his back just like Davey. He said he was having a rest.
WE WENT INSIDE and saw Mum sitting in the dark down the end of the kitchen in our little dining alcove – ‘Vestibule it’s called, Davey’ – with a candle burning in front of her.
‘What are you doing sitting in the dark, woman?’ asked the Old Man.
‘I’ve lit this for Shirley and Bryce’s marriage,’ she said and then got up to start on the dishes. Not even asking me to do them. That was weird.
The Old Man wasn’t sure how to take all this and made me turn on the lights. Then he planted himself at the table and got me to grab him a beer.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Bloody well earnt this.’ He asked Mum to come and sit down with him. ‘Have a drink.’ When she wouldn’t, he went over to the bench and started sliding his hands over her hips and rubbing her backside while Mum was washing the plates. She was trying to make him stop but the booze had really got the better of the Old Man. He was flirting! With Mum! And saying things like, ‘Had rendezvous in motels too, I suppose, have you, Thelma?’
‘Look,’ she said, turning around angrily and waving the pot scrub at him. ‘You’re skating on thin ice …’
