Muck Read online

  Praise for Muck:

  “Excellent - it disturbs me to admit that Craig Sherborne goes deeper than the rest of us into the territory of impressionable immaturity. He writes beautifully, especially when the material is not beautiful at all. He can make the cruel truth poetic.”— CLIVE JAMES

  “Craig Sherborne’s daring, innovative prose is as exhilarating as his disciplined mastery of it is humbling. In service to an unnervingly sharp intelligence, it enlivens us to the comedy, the pathos, the dignity and the pain of life, as his characters live it. Muck is a masterpiece.”— RAIMOND GAITA

  “Mordantly true to life … One of the most interesting autobiographical projects on the go.” —J.M. COETZEE

  “A work of searing originality and part of an ongoing masterpiece.”—PETER CRAVEN, The Monthly

  “The prose is so taut as to be hieratic at times: one senses that the horror of what he has to tell is so great that, were he to relinquish his grip for even a moment, it would flare out and incinerate him.”—Times Literary Supplement

  “Riveting … Moral courage has propelled this book to the page. Its execution is sublime.”—The Scotsman

  Muck

  CRAIG SHERBORNE

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37-39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Craig Sherborne 2011

  First edition published by Black Inc. in 2007

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  e-ISBN: 9781921870286

  IF WE’RE ALL born equal, why are some of us only cowboys?

  I know why—an education.

  Trackwork cowboys have no education. No wonder horse trainers mock them for such hard hands on a thoroughbred’s mouth, a sack of potatoes the way they flap-flop in the saddle. Listen to the foul-mouthed fucks and cunts of their cowboy cursing, the mongrel-bastards of their horse-hating though it’s dark dawn and no horse wants to walk faster so early.

  They wear rodeo leg-chaps and Cuban heels. They put spurs out the backs of their feet like barbed wire. That’s the difference between types like them and people like me. My trousers are cream jodhpurs when I ride. My skullcap is black velvet with a black ribbon trailing behind. My boots go knee-high. They’re made of black leather, not gumboot rubber or fraying elastic sides. I’ve no spurs to stab with, I have a tongue to click-click up a rhythm.

  They kneel over their mounts as if they can’t do sitting. I have the straightest spine and join to the seat in my proper riding school way. I hold my hands down over the withers with reins threaded like so through finger and thumb. Like so over my pinkies to make a perfect U across the mane. My hips when I ride do little fuckings of the saddle and the horse rocks into me doing little fuckings back.

  Cowboys. That’s all they’ll ever be, that’s all they ever amount to my father says and I have no reason to doubt him, I can see it with my own eyes, even in Sydney at Royal Rand-wick— Royal before the Randwick like a king of names. But in New Zealand you expect it. Here they have no Randwick racecourse with its kingly name and Bart Cummings calling out the riding orders not some simpleton farmer. In New Zealand when you amount to nothing the nothing must amount to less.

  Yet in Taonga, Churchill gives himself airs as if a real race-day jockey. As if a man of style, not another 4am cowboy. That polo-neck, I bet he bought it at an Op Shop. That anorak too, that polka-dot bandanna. His dented helmet droops on a slant, deliberately set at that angle to give him a look more debonair. How can he afford those Wee Willem cigars he’s smoking as though he were an important man?One on the way out to the sand track for a canter. One every three horses like the smell of bad wood burning. He may have a scissor-thin moustache but that just makes him old-looking, not distinguished for all its greying. He’s not distinguished and never will be in his life. He’s a cowboy. He will always walk with a worried man’s stoop. He is only here in Taonga because he did no good in England. If that wasn’t the reason, why didn’t he stay where he was born?

  Taonga has only 3000 people but I have to admit those mountains are something—so higgledy with black-green forest and rockface when the cloud lifts from them by lunch. Forget the ugly mining truck tracks further to the south down Old Mana Road. Look at the mountains. They wall out the sky to the east. Somewhere deep inside them steamy artesian springs brew up and pour into the town’s public spas.

  Dairy farms everywhere. Pastures so greeny lush that cows can run two to the acre, and milk leaves a going-stale smell on the air. But Churchill is no farmer. He rides horses for a living in that hunched-over cowboy way. If you call his five dollars a mount a living even if he gets through ten horses a day, which he can’t.

  I know how much people earn. John, the manager of our liquor store in Rose Bay North, got $300 a week and that was Australian. On top of that he got a cash bonus when we sold it, and could always help himself to a good-will gesture of supplies. Five dollars is a pittance—this is 1977 not the Dark Ages. Churchill mustn’t have had a good education even though he is English.

  My father has the finest farm in all the district. Most farms in Taonga are only 100 acres, but ours is 300. Ours milks 500 Jerseys and Friesians and needs a full-time staff of at least two, which is unheard of. It has enough grass left over from the cows for two broodmares, two yearlings and two foals. It can make an income of over $80,000 if the manager’s modern, no peasant in his ways, no thinking cows are pets not money. That’s important because the farm is our main source of earnings. My father gambles on horses but gambling is just for play.

  The lurks you get with farming, that’s the beauty of it. My father says “right on to the write offs” where his taxes are concerned. Lurks can bring your taxes down to forty cents in the dollar.

  This place is why the liquor store was sold: what kind of legacy is a liquor store for a son! A father wants to pass on land. A father wants to create an estate and know that when he dies his son will have that same land under his feet. It’s a form of never dying. A dynasty will be born, from father to son, and son on to son and on it goes. A dynasty. Just like the families at that school I go to in Sydney. Though with us there’s a difference. At my school the farm boys are called Scrubbers because scrub is all there is west of the western suburbs say the Sydney boys, The Citys. When Scrubbers leave their grand boarding mansions to go home for holidays, they go home to drought and dust for all their owning 50,000 acres. What legacy is that to leave loved ones! What Scrubbers and their dustbowls earn our pretty sum!

  Our 300 acres has rain on a string. Reach up and give a little tug on the air and the weekly watering will descend. Walk into a paddock and jump up and down. “Hear that?” my father whispers, putting his finger to his wide smile for me to shush and listen. “Hear it?”

  Yes I hear it. Beneath our boots, beneath the very grass we stand on, the sound of water trickling like a brook.

  When I tell Scrubbers about the water, about our 300 acres and 500 cows, the broodmares, yearlings, foals, they laugh at me to my face that I’m a liar—no 300 acres could feed 500 cows. That’s a backyard size compared to their vast thousands. It’s not something worth inheriting.

  Because they all say it and none takes my side I worry that they’re right—I’m only one against a dozen. I worry: have I dreamed it, Taonga? Do I spend my days confusing dreams with the real things? No, I have seen it, and listened and smelt it for myself. I say to the Scrubbers how superior to theirs our land is.
But still they laugh.

  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 cavern
s 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.”