Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally Page B

remain in class, doing penance within cuffing reach of Brother English.
    Father Byrne was in any case not the only messenger from the spiritual world. There was still the free orchestral concert every Sunday afternoon in Sydney’s massive, nineteenth-century Town Hall.
    Sometimes the conductor was Sir Eugene Goossens, a bald, smooth-looking man. Quite famous, in a few years time he would be found with what Australian Customs said were pornographic items in his luggage and would be primly exiled for it. The awful thing was that some Australians would be oddly comforted that he was so found out. It just showed you! Artistic types.
    An Oxbridge aesthete could not have folded himself more interestingly into his seat than Mangan did, or laid a finger more ponderingly over his lips, or become more lost. I wanted to be able to do that, but my bones weren’t long enough. During the entire recital, Mangan would not once open his eyes. He was away on the plateau where Tchaikovsky, Bach and Debussy held discourse. The Frawley girls and Curran, with their nose for pretension, would nudge each other and point to him.
    Afterwards we would descend to the train, and walk each other miles home from wherever we disembarked. One night we all walked Curran to her home on the hill behind St Pat’s. The Currans lived in a standard brick cottage which was nonetheless rendered special by the cleverness and good looks of the Curran girls, Bernadette and her two younger sisters. Mr Curran, who worked for the State government, was as good-looking as a father in a film – a little like Fred MacMurray as a matter of fact. And there were plenty of older actresses that weren’t as impressive as Mrs Curran. The same could have been said for my mother, on whose looks everyone commented, though for some reason that caused me to squirm.
    As Mrs Curran gave us tea, I said to her, ‘I don’t know about becoming a priest. Mrs Curran, I wonder if all your beautiful daughters would wait till I find out.’
    Everyone laughed, Rose Frawley indulgently. ‘What a drongo,’ she said softly to her tea.
    Mrs Curran said, ‘I think you’d better stay at home with us, Mick.’
    I felt secure, and knew I was staying home at least until recognized by the world. But just in case, what I’d said would make a good story for her to tell the ABC should I win the Nobel Prize at twenty-three or become Pope.

III
    The upstairs flat in Loftus Crescent, which we had rented since the Second World Cataclysm, sat above a downstairs which had been rented for a similar length of time to a family called the Bankses. I did not realize it, since I took him for granted, that my father had startling ways of describing people. He was, in fact, a wordsmith comparable in his way to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a sort of bush poet who got not enough honour for it from his son.
    Instead of describing the unutterable – ‘Thou mastering me, God!’ – he described the Bankses. It would often be at night, while, say, wakeful in bed, I read Silas Marner as my parents listened to some despicable big band, far beneath the attention of a Mahler-fancier, on the radio in the living room. I would overhear my mother mention the Bankses, the struggle she had with Mrs Banks over the use of the one laundry and the clothesline, and then get my father’s response. It was easy to overhear conversations in our small flat and had been since I was a child. The two small bedrooms, narrow kitchenette, kitchen-dining room, living room and bathroom were jammed close together.
    Mr Banks was a hefty man, a railway guard, whom my father called a ‘flobble-gutted, wombat-headed garper’, an onomatopoeic combination whose inventiveness, if not its unkindness, GMH might well have approved of.
    I heard my father describe little red-haired Mrs Banks – with the robust political incorrectness of his day – as ‘silly as a gin at a