Homebush Boy by Keneally Thomas;

Author:Keneally, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

VI

In the same school, in the shallower levels of that ocean, my brother Johnny, seven years younger than me, went his way and did pretty well from it. He was a natural scholar, accomplished at Maths and a prodigious reader. He had been class captain since third grade, a blond little boy of whom Mrs Banks said that he reminded her of the settlers’ flaxen-haired son in Shane. He always caught the 414 bus to Homebush station, a sensible kid, no long mooning walks for him. Nor did he ever aspire to carry textbooks of any kind jammed in his breast pocket. In him my father had found an echo of his own nattiness, a consolation for the messy child I had been and still thought it fashionable to be. Sometimes Johnny would miss the bus and I would walk him home, stretching his patience by calling in at the Tierneys’ and the Frawleys’ for the good sport of posturing and orating. He couldn’t see the sense of that, would want to be home attending to his evening in an orderly way, listening to the few radio serials he cherished, doing his impeccable homework. Everybody predicted that he would be a doctor, and they were right. He had fine qualities: stubbornness and a soft heart. He got them both from people like our grandfather the engine driver, and like our grandfather he was temperamentally geared to take a special pride in some profession, in exactitude, in knowing technical matters backwards.

I boasted of him to Mangan and Matt Tierney, and I think he might have taken a certain bemused pride in my eccentric fervours. But our nearly eight-year difference made frontal exchanges between us more awkward than they had earlier been.

It is a truism which people, even memoirists, can’t forbear repeating: that to survive childhood is to have memories of non-recurrent chances for filial and fraternal solidarity, for crucial words which went unuttered, for concessions that went unoffered, for gestures which went unsignalled.

Those chances occurred with my father, who was like me in savouring solitariness, working in his vegetable garden in the back yard in Loftus Crescent, but who unlike me had little social life despite his capacity for social charm. It struck me he was mourning for something he couldn’t communicate, and something that as a Celestial and an heir to GMH I wasn’t interested enough in knowing about. By a happy chance we would both live long enough to become much better friends.

In any case, I was proving to be more of an Australian male than I knew. For I believed as well as he did that male companionship was not for the confession of weaknesses but for the exchange of jokes and bragging. We the sons of the Anzacs and the grandsons of the settlers! Our job to confess to no worries. That fact too stood in the way of a full communion between my father and me. Occasionally we talked of politics and running and Rugby League, and we told jokes, and all that was required to stand for the deeper code of our affection.

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