Free Hoi Polloi by Craig Sherborne

to purchase and then we will buy an apartment, a proper apartment.
    She’s cleaning the stove, rubber gloves streaming with the wet black grime she scours with steel wool. When that’s finished, the bathroom tiles get the same treatment till the bleach fumes cause her eyes to run.
    “If we’re renting, aren’t we one of those who don’t care?
    Can’t we relax?” I ask.
    “You never know who was here before us,” she pants, then pats her hair-do in place with her wrist, then scrubs and pants.
    Now she’s doing subtraction from the original $ 400 , 000 out loud, mumbling something about a mortgage on the Heritage Hotel, something else about bringing a dollar from New Zealand to here and only getting 80 cents. She gripes about this to the floor, shoving the steel wool along the bath as if digging now rather than scrubbing.
    “What’s a mortgage?” I ask.
    Heels gives an extra shove across the bath at the very mention of the word. “A mortgage is a debt that the bank has over you.”
    “How can they do that?”
    “Because we ask them to,” she says impatiently. “And please don’t start harping on with ‘Why? Why?’ There’s a million things like mortgages in life.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like tax. There’s tax to be paid when you sell a business.”
    “Why?”
    “The government wants to punish you for making something of yourself. You’ll find out when you grow up and have businesses of your own.”
    “What else?”
    “Millions of things.”
    The good news is that the government in Australia is a hopeless Labor government and because of that interest rates are going up, up, up on the money we’ve got in the bank. That’s what happens with Labor governments, she exhales heavily, giving another wrist-pat to her hair. Labor governments don’t like our sort of people; get up and go sort of people. An interest rate is like a thank-you that banks pay you for letting them use your money. They thank you more when there’s a bad government. “Think of a piece of paper where there’s a right-hand column and a left-hand column. The thank-you goes in the left-hand column because that’s where the good news goes. The bad news goes in the right-hand column.”
    In the good news column we can put $ 10 , 000 for selling the Mercedes to Sir Thomas Goodes’ family. But we need to buy a new car now that we’re in Australia. Something that’s not too much of a comedown from a Mercedes. That will have to go in the bad news column. The bad news column is just a little too full for Heels’ liking. For that she blames Winks.
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s gone off and done a ridiculous thing.” She’s beginning to jut and scratch the air. She’s talking to me but intending the words for Winks because of the way she cranes her neck and raises her voice to aim it out the door.
    “What has he done?” I ask.
    “Before we left New Zealand he bought himself a yearling at the horse sales in Wellington. Not just any yearling, mind you. A $ 15 , 000 thing.”
    “Why did he do that?”
    “You go ask him. I’ve got my theories. It’s simply so he can big-note himself in Sydney with an expensive horse if you ask me.”
    I do go and ask him. He has spread newspaper on the kitchen table for nuggeting his good shoes. His race-day shoes. “Why did you buy an expensive horse?”
    He waves me away with a shoe on his hand like a boxing glove. “Don’t you start,” he says with complaining in his voice. “This colt’s by Pakistan out of a Star Kingdom mare. A champion in the making. I can feel it in my water.”
    Heels yells from the bathroom, “Feel it in your water? Who ever heard of such hooey! Besides the bloody thing won’t be a colt much longer. I don’t hear you mentioning that he’s more interested in mounting fillies than racing in races. He’s got to be gelded. So there’s vet fees to go in the bad news column. Along with the plane fare to fly the thing to Sydney, and training fees.”
    Winks is