beer.
At first Hugh resents my presence. “Are they saying an eleven-year-old can do my job?” he grumbles. Yet clearly he enjoys bossing me. “Well don’t just sit there like the landed fucking gentry, get to work,” he orders because I work slowly, sulkily, in protest. After attaching each bottle to the contraption I pause, day-dream. I read the labels on cartons and crates stacked halfway to the ceiling and blend them with racehorse names from the newspaper to make more poems:
Storm draught dashes the ragtag walker and the white horse that was Napoleon’s honour.
“For Christ’s sake speed up lad. You’ll get me into fucking trouble with your go-slow,” complains Hugh.
This man I’ve barely said a word to, who is neither my father nor a teacher nor a relative, is ordering me about. Ordering. He takes his red tartan thermos and stands at the counter pouring himself a lidful.
I speed up my work as if in a race to fill the drying rack the fastest it has ever been filled. It will show Winks what a slouch shuffle-footed Hugh is as a washer and how cheerfully and efficiently I go about my job so that it’s hardly a punishment at all and therefore there’s no point in keeping me at it.
“Slow down,” demands Hugh. “Do me out of a fucking job, would you?” But I don’t slow down. “Slow down,” he demands again. “Play the game lad.” I don’t slow down. “Lad-die, laddie, play the game. Play the game, lad. Come on, take a break. Take a break. Come have some coffee.”
I’ve never tasted coffee. Hugh sits down on an upturned crate and pours splashes of coffee into his thermos cup-cap. The liquid smells and tastes sourly of liquorice yet has been heavily sweetened. My lips are sticky with sugar. After the first few bitter sips the flavour becomes more palatable.
“Bet that fucking well slows you down,” Hugh sniggers with his jiggling belly. I take longer sips. Heat rises in my face not unlike the feeling I get from the trays in the phone box. I say as much to Hugh. “I f-f-feel like I d-do when I d-drink the d-d-dregs in the ph-phone box.”
Hugh stops sniggering and swigging directly from his thermos. “So it was you after all, you little cunt. Folks nearly got fired over that.” His mouth purses into a grin. “Well there’s good Scotch whisky in that coffee lad, not fucken dregs. Good Scotch whisky.”
I try to stand but my legs won’t let me. Hugh’s voice seems very distant and sometimes heard only in my left ear. Sometimes only in my right. “That’s slowed you down, hasn’t it lad? Ay, you sit there quietly and be at peace with the fucking world.”
I hear buzzing—the robotic eye is buzzing. Hugh hobbles off in its direction. I must go up the stairs to bed. Are these my stairs? This ladder is very like my stairs. Up I go to bed. This is a landing with crates and cartons, it’s not my bedroom. Back down the ladder. Forget the ladder. I can make it to the ground in one stride. I step out. The ground is lifting up. Dark.
Winks is slapping my face with his fingertips. I’ve woken to his crying and slapping and laughing that I’m not dead, that I’ve fallen all this way and barely have a mark on me. He is feeling my arms and legs again for breaks. None, he says. There seems to be no blood on my head, just a blue bump in my hairline.
He bends forward to embrace me. Hesitates. Smells my breath. “He’s drunk. He bloody stinks of the stuff. He’s drunk,” he says, muttering at first then almost yelling.
“There’s your mystery of the phone box solved,” Hugh is desperate to explain. “Little bugger stole my flu toddy right from under my nose.”
A USTRALIA IS AN ENGLAND OF New Zealand. If you sell a hotel for $ 400 , 000 and you are a pakeha, naturally you will want to leave Heritage. You will want to live somewhere else, want to graduate to a place that is bigger, more serious in the world scheme of things. A city, a great city. Is Sydney a great city? From Heritage
At first Hugh resents my presence. “Are they saying an eleven-year-old can do my job?” he grumbles. Yet clearly he enjoys bossing me. “Well don’t just sit there like the landed fucking gentry, get to work,” he orders because I work slowly, sulkily, in protest. After attaching each bottle to the contraption I pause, day-dream. I read the labels on cartons and crates stacked halfway to the ceiling and blend them with racehorse names from the newspaper to make more poems:
Storm draught dashes the ragtag walker and the white horse that was Napoleon’s honour.
“For Christ’s sake speed up lad. You’ll get me into fucking trouble with your go-slow,” complains Hugh.
This man I’ve barely said a word to, who is neither my father nor a teacher nor a relative, is ordering me about. Ordering. He takes his red tartan thermos and stands at the counter pouring himself a lidful.
I speed up my work as if in a race to fill the drying rack the fastest it has ever been filled. It will show Winks what a slouch shuffle-footed Hugh is as a washer and how cheerfully and efficiently I go about my job so that it’s hardly a punishment at all and therefore there’s no point in keeping me at it.
“Slow down,” demands Hugh. “Do me out of a fucking job, would you?” But I don’t slow down. “Slow down,” he demands again. “Play the game lad.” I don’t slow down. “Lad-die, laddie, play the game. Play the game, lad. Come on, take a break. Take a break. Come have some coffee.”
I’ve never tasted coffee. Hugh sits down on an upturned crate and pours splashes of coffee into his thermos cup-cap. The liquid smells and tastes sourly of liquorice yet has been heavily sweetened. My lips are sticky with sugar. After the first few bitter sips the flavour becomes more palatable.
“Bet that fucking well slows you down,” Hugh sniggers with his jiggling belly. I take longer sips. Heat rises in my face not unlike the feeling I get from the trays in the phone box. I say as much to Hugh. “I f-f-feel like I d-do when I d-drink the d-d-dregs in the ph-phone box.”
Hugh stops sniggering and swigging directly from his thermos. “So it was you after all, you little cunt. Folks nearly got fired over that.” His mouth purses into a grin. “Well there’s good Scotch whisky in that coffee lad, not fucken dregs. Good Scotch whisky.”
I try to stand but my legs won’t let me. Hugh’s voice seems very distant and sometimes heard only in my left ear. Sometimes only in my right. “That’s slowed you down, hasn’t it lad? Ay, you sit there quietly and be at peace with the fucking world.”
I hear buzzing—the robotic eye is buzzing. Hugh hobbles off in its direction. I must go up the stairs to bed. Are these my stairs? This ladder is very like my stairs. Up I go to bed. This is a landing with crates and cartons, it’s not my bedroom. Back down the ladder. Forget the ladder. I can make it to the ground in one stride. I step out. The ground is lifting up. Dark.
Winks is slapping my face with his fingertips. I’ve woken to his crying and slapping and laughing that I’m not dead, that I’ve fallen all this way and barely have a mark on me. He is feeling my arms and legs again for breaks. None, he says. There seems to be no blood on my head, just a blue bump in my hairline.
He bends forward to embrace me. Hesitates. Smells my breath. “He’s drunk. He bloody stinks of the stuff. He’s drunk,” he says, muttering at first then almost yelling.
“There’s your mystery of the phone box solved,” Hugh is desperate to explain. “Little bugger stole my flu toddy right from under my nose.”
A USTRALIA IS AN ENGLAND OF New Zealand. If you sell a hotel for $ 400 , 000 and you are a pakeha, naturally you will want to leave Heritage. You will want to live somewhere else, want to graduate to a place that is bigger, more serious in the world scheme of things. A city, a great city. Is Sydney a great city? From Heritage
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