Free The Vintage and the Gleaning by Jeremy Chambers Page A

be any style at all, some with feathers in the hatband, cockatoo, galah, whole budgerigar’s wings of all colours, others pinned with metal and enamel badges. The older men mess up the young men’s hair and sniff them under the armpits.
    Jesus Christ, they say.
    Roy belches and picks up the jug. He empties it into the boys’ glasses.
    Drink up, he says. You’re holding me back.
    The boys drink.
    Roy gets up and stretches his legs. He is wearing his pub shorts which are white, tight and obscene. Roy wears those shorts to attract the women though he’s never said it straight out and everybody jokes about Roy’s pub shorts behind his back. He takes the jug and goes into the crowd and the noise.
    You’ll get used to it, says Wallace. Few years.
    Not me, says the other boy. Not once I got enough for a car.
    Roy has gone over to the pool table where the girls are playing. He is trying to talk to them, leaning against the table with his beer in his hand and the empty jug in the other. The girls keep playing around him as though he is not there and Roy keeps on talking.
    Wallace turns around to look.
    Christ, he says.
    I am looking at the back of one of the girls’ jackets where a butterfly has been sewn in electric colours. I watch as the butterfly disappears when the girl turns from the hanging lamp and then the dazzle of the thread as she bends to take a shot, the light flowing and settling as she walks around the table, the brightest points following the swirl of the pattern until the girl turns away again and the butterfly is gone. I wonder whether she sewed it herself.
    Once I get a car I’m going to Sydney, says the boy. Bondi beach. Go on the dole. Learn how to surf. Get a girlfriend. Surfer chick.
    He grins.
    Surfer chick, he says grinning. No tan lines.
    Wallace is looking hard at the boy over his tilted pot. He drains the suds. He looks over at Roy, who has moved in close to one of the girls, talking to her while she smokes a cigarette, watching another girl take her shot. Wallace looks back at the boy.
    Where’s your self-respect? Wallace says.
    Better than working, says the boy. Making the rich man richer.
    Wallace swears and looks back at Roy. The girl is bent over the felt, her cigarette smouldering in the ashtray at the edge of the table. Our empty jug is sitting next to it and Roy is trying to show the girl how to work the cue, pressing himself against her. He has his hand on her arm. She shrugs him off and moves away around the table.
    Well, you’re not going to hold on to a woman bludging, Wallace says to the boy. Not once you’re hitched. Soon as you’re hitched your old lady’s going to be sending you out to work. That’s a lesson in life, boy. Once a man gets married it’s the woman calls the shots. That’s true as I’m sitting here.
    Why buy the book when you can borrow from the library? says the boy, grinning.
    The other boy guffaws. He’s got the smile of an idiot.
    That’s easy enough said at your age, says Wallace. But you want to end up like Roy Thompson over there?
    He points his thumb behind him where Roy is following the girl around the table, leaning against her every time she tries to line up the cue, talking, pretending he’s trying to teach her how to play pool. He is holding his beer in one hand and has a cigarette in his mouth. The girl keeps pushing him away.
    You know what Roy Thompson is? says Wallace. He’s a small-town Casanova.
    He says it again.
    A small-town Casanova.
    He’s said it before, plenty of times.
    He’s a grown man, says Wallace. But he never growed up.
    Wallace holds out a scarred and callused hand, dirt tracing the deep creases and round the nails. He counts off fingers.
    Still lives with his parents, grown man. Still chasing women. Still scared of the dark.
    Bull, says the boy.
    No bull, says Wallace. Grown man, still afraid of the dark. Scared of spiders too.
    He looks over at Roy