Free Hoi Polloi by Craig Sherborne Page B

Is that what he would want at this moment, to comfort him and him comfort me? No. He holds out his hand for me to shake. “Deal?” he winks, cheerily for a dying man. “You be a good boy and we’ll both be happy.”
    “Deal,” I reply.
    “That’s the way.” He slaps me playfully on the knee just as Heels opens the flat’s door letting in a farty smell of boiling vegetables from the rest of the building. She has been shopping and carries two packages. One very fat, its brown paper bound by blue stringy ribbon. She throws the packages onto the pouf and begins picking the fat one apart.
    “I found the perfect thing,” she says almost singing the sentence in her excitement. “Perfect, perfect, perfect.”
    Winks tells her that we’ve been having a man-to-man talk about being a good boy. He winks at her.
    “I certainly hope you are going to be a good boy. In fact I’m positive he will be. Especially after this coming Sunday.”
    Sunday? What’s happening on Sunday? Sunday is always lie-in day. It’s do-nothing day. Here in Sydney there is a beach at Coogee where last weekend we ate a cut lunch on the hot sand and got burnt watching the waves curl over onto the shore as if being sliced. I swam in the foam and swallowed salt water. Let’s do that again this Sunday. Please, please.
    Inside the ripped-apart paper is a navy blue blazer, its sleeves folded neatly like arms. Shiny gold buttons stud the cuffs and front. A red and yellow bow-tie is pinned to the lapel. Heels tears open the other, smaller package—a white shirt in a plastic sheaf cover, a pair of white walk-socks.
    “ This is what’s happening on Sunday,” Heels says holding the blazer against my body to test the length. “On Sunday you are going to be christened.” She stops still a second, stares and frowns into space. “Or is it baptised? What’s the term we’re supposed to use?” She leans her chin on her fingers, wondering if there’s a difference between christened and baptised. Are they the same thing? She doesn’t know, nor does Winks. I certainly have no idea. She will have to ask Aunty Dorothy.
    Aunty Dorothy is my aunty in name but no relation. She’s been Heels’ Sydney friend from years before I was born. They met at the Randwick races in the Members near the Champagne Bar when Dorothy was with two forgettable friends who had horses with Tommy Smith that even he, the great trainer himself, couldn’t make win. Dorothy was wearing a gold and blue striped turban-style hat arrangement with the thinnest of gold chain banding fastened by a gold gauze brooch in the shape of a rose. “I just had to ask her where she got it,” Heels answers if people ask, “So how did you two meet?”
    They have euchre nights and oyster mornays at Doyle’s where they spend whole afternoons saying, “Beautiful oysters. I can still taste those oysters they were so mouth-watering.”
    Aunty Dorothy has never been married. She likes to be footloose and fancy-free and can’t be bothered with men, though she has been proposed to twice. She suspects they were after her money. She inherited a horse transport business from her father and would rather spend the money on herself and playing euchre with the ladies and going to Doyle’s than bother with men.
    “She’s a ladies’ woman,” Winks winks.
    “What’s a ladies’ woman?” I ask.
    “Enough of that,” Heels reprimands him, but the winking continues.
    “A ladies’ woman is …”
    “Don’t you dare say such terrible things to the boy.”
    “A ladies’ woman is a ladies’ woman, son.”
    “He means a lady who prefers the company of ladies in a closer way than usual,” Heels reluctantly explains.
    “The way you two natter I wonder sometimes,” Winks mumbles.
    “That’s a disgusting and terrible thing to say.”
    “She likes to hold your hand when you’re walking. What’s that all about?”
    “How dare you! Girls holding hands is as innocent and natural as men playing their sweaty