Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally

an ordinary Brothers school and was an ordinary boy like you.’
    We had seen Cardinal Gilroy distantly, proceeding in his scarlet cap and facings and accompanied by auxiliary bishops and monsignors in purple, and by clergy of lesser plumage, at the opening of new churches and new schools. It was the truth! He was native born. He had a slightly beaky but identifiably Irish face which you might have found on a parent, but he had gravity as well, and he would vent his resident Australian voice in a pulpit orator’s delivery, which elevated its tones far above the utterance of ordinary people. Since his nomination as a Cardinal a year or two past, the newspapers ran occasional pieces about the likelihood of his being the next Pope.
    Again, a daydream! ABC Radio returning to ask aged Brothers and grownup former students what they remembered of the new Pope. What sort of boy was he? Asking the girl in the blue dress, who in her grief had scarcely aged, but was fixed in her blue adolescent loss. Asking Bernadette Curran and the Frawley girls. ‘There was something about him,’ Bernadette Curran would say. I saw her in this fantasy as barely aged too and wearing still her maroon Santa Sabina uniform.
    After the priest had gone again, non-Celestials of the kind who hung on the Paragon milk bar in the Boulevarde in Strathfield, who sang the latest pop songs and had never heard of Mahler or GMH – fellows that is like genial Freddie Ford – would come up to Matt and pretend the priesthood was an option for him and say, ‘Gunna break all the sheilas’ hearts, Mattie?’
    And Matt would frame the answer with his handsome white lips. ‘Aw, don’t think they’d want me, Freddie. I think I’d bring down the tone in the seminary.’
    Freddie Ford was the sort of boy who went to the Stockade, the big combined toilets and changing rooms, at lunchtime with his mates. They would stand in turns in front of the one mirror and work frankly on their hair, slicking it lovingly back, as if it wasn’t theirs but someone else’s, as if they were barbers enjoying their work. Freddie was a boy of a different kind of honour and daydream, a boy kindly, mocking, sensual, deliberately neither a prefect nor a scholar, and happy with his age and surroundings. Mangan called Freddie and the others narcissists . But you couldn’t call any of this public lunchtime hairdressing narcissistic, because they did it in front of their mates, communally, trying to look like Farley Granger or Montgomery Clift. Slyly and secretly at home, I tried to make mine look like Chatterton’s, Viney managed to make his look like Beethoven’s, and on top of that we felt morally superior. For we worked in guilty and exhaustive secrecy and wouldn’t have confessed under torture to caring about these things.
    At the start of the year, when Father Byrne came around to canvass us, the idea of the priesthood for me seemed preposterous. University would be the good thing. I would join the Newman Society and talk about scholastic philosophy, and perhaps Curran or the recurrent girl in blue would be there. Despite the splendour of the vestments and sacraments, I couldn’t see much sense in being a plumply irascible, suburban priest like Monsignor Loane of St Martha’s of Strathfield – Pop Loane the school kids called him – who played golf on Mondays and worried a lot about the Silver Circle, the numbers-like betting game on which St Martha’s depended for a lot of its income. You wouldn’t have ever heard Father Hopkins S.J. mention any Silver Circle! Father Byrne himself was quite a suitable model, but a threatening one, in that there seemed no flamboyance in his nature, no room for Hopkinsian poetry or broad gesture.
    But although I didn’t want to be a priest as far as I knew, and did not wish to occupy some Curran-less pulpit from which the Silver Circle results fell, I still queued up