Free Muck by Craig Sherborne

command?
    It is because I do want to make a manly statement with jeans in the country style. I have already checked for any sign of re-growth. Had there been whiskers on my cheeks and chin I would have watered the candle-flame and gripped the Safety in the limply way to respect my neighbours with a presentable face.
    For I don’t merely put my hands behind my back and walk with my twitch self to oversee Churchill. I don’t merely cat’s-cradle with Norman and son, perfecting my not-looking technique so they see that an education doesn’t deprive a man of hardy pride. I also gaze in all four directions at this grass and milk civilisation. I bring it up close to me with a lend of The Duke’s binoculars. There is blue sun on our mountains if a storm cloud covers it over. The milk tanker man puts his wireless to his ear and jigs while he milks the shed that milked the 500 deformed humans. I imagine I am duke of it all, the four directions, its commanding citizen. In time its mayor, its look-up-to man. Perhaps even one day, yes, its member of parliament.
    History would happen to me in this place after all.
    Such advancement would not be beyond The Duke were he a better-read man with a head for speeches. He’s the doer kind—he has no time for fancy speeches.
    What an achievement to crown his legacy I would be.
    Today I am going to meet my constituents, my neighbours. Perhaps word has spread from Norman and William that I am highly qualified in mind, a person of learning, who is adapting well to their way of life—I am clearly someone not afraid of manual toil. “Look at his forearm scar, the O shape,” they may have gossiped to others, having admired its purple blister.
    I also have added some scars to my hands. Lifting hay bales by the raw twine without gloves burns and swells the fingers till there’s blood. Bale prickles dot my knuckles and leave a puffy poison in the wounds. The blunt knife that cuts the hay twine also cuts well into skin. By using a chopping motion the rusty blade sinks where you aim it. Same with sharp rock—a chop, a grimace and the skunning’s done.
    When Feet and The Duke ask how I got these scars, I say from working. Plain hard work.
    Perhaps word has spread already through Taonga that I am one of their people now, but obviously above them.

C HRISTINE, NOT C AROL , says Face-ache.
    Her mouth is bent up uncomfortably in a smile. Her eyes shyly avoid ours.
    Feet apologises and says she doesn’t know where she got Carol from. “Wait a minute—yes I do. I was thinking of a woman I know in Sydney who is the spitting image of you.”
    The Duke and I glance at each other and arch eyebrows because this woman, this Christine, is like no friend of Feet’s from Sydney. She has no peach-tinted or bleached salon-sculpted hair. Hers is brown with grey through it, cut below her ears like The Beatles. No make-up over the cracks and saggings of her face. Not a dab of red on her lips or fingers. Her clothes could be a man’s—khaki trousers, blue pullover shedding dags of wool.
    No woman in Feet’s circle smells as Christine smells— stale milk. Not even fumes from Feet’s perfume can cover the cow-shed taint in the air.
    The Duke touches Feet in the small of her back, his signal for her not to talk too much, not to speak for the sake of speaking as she has just done.
    Feet taps his fingers away irritably. She does this as Christine leads us down the hall where now there is a faint piss-stink in the air. Piss of soiled human not soil-animal.
    The lounge contains shades rather than colours. Through the west window a see-through stream of sun flows, squirming with motes. On either side of the flow, dark armchairs and walls, a settee with crochet coverings.
    Feet has her sneer-smile on. She uses it when something is not to her taste, a house like this for instance which she would call dowdy. The Duke steps behind her and places his hand on her elbow.
    “Ah,” she sneer-smiles. “Well, here we are.”