It’s Saturday afternoon. Lunch is eaten and the debris cleared away. We bring out the table tennis table. Some of the blokes go up to their rooms to read, write home, or wank. I toss up the options. I decide to play Haines again. I thrash him again. When the final point is mine Haines throws his bat into the kitchen.
Easy, Hanno, I say. It’s only a game.
Get fucked, Muir, he says, then he trudges up the stairs to his room for a wank, to read Mein Kampf, or to rip the wings off small birds, I have no idea, but it is becoming clear to me that Haines is not like the rest of us. Neither am I, but he inhabits some other place where none of us wants to go. Paterson and I play each other until we collapse in a heap of sweat and laughter. Paterson is good. We hear a commotion outside. We jump up to see Tarbo beating his wife. She is not happy.
Hey, Tarbo, yells Paterson.
Tarbo turns and as he does his wife picks up a bottle and smashes it over his head. He falls to the ground screaming, head in hands, and by the time Paterson reaches him his hands are full of blood. I run to the phone to call Watkins because we don’t have a car. Paterson and I do what we can to stop Tarbo bleeding, while his wife cries and smacks her head with her fists. When Watkins arrives I get in the car with him and Tarbo. As we leave I see Haines on the veranda outside his room, watching, laughing. At the hospital we take him in the wrong entrance, the white entrance, and have to take him around the back to the black entrance. It isn’t called the white entrance, or the black entrance, there are no signs, but the nurse in the front office says we have to take him around the back.
That’s where the natives go, she says.
We leave him there and Watkins drives me back to the bank mess. When I walk in no one seems too worried about Tarbo. I have a beer with Paterson and ask him why he is such a good table tennis player.
I played competition table tennis back home, he says.
Serious? I ask.
Do I look serious?
No.
Well I am. Played for Glenelg in the city league.
You’re joking? The city league?
Yeah, we take our table tennis seriously in Adelaide.
Along with your footy, your churchgoing, wanking, drinking and probably because there’s nothing else to do in Adelaide.
You bloody sandgropers can’t get over the thrashing we hand out in interstate footy.
Having your hand in sand isn’t anywhere near as primitive as eating crows.
And so it goes, back and forth, one after the other, along with the ping-pong ball, because after the beer we decide to play one more game and the blokes who are left stand back and marvel at the skill of a Glenelg league player and a wiry little bastard who learnt to play in a boarding school. Paterson doesn’t ask me why I am so good but if he did I would tell him it is because in boarding school I hated losing to big kids who thought they were good at everything, and in the highlands I hated losing to South Australians, Victorians, anyone from over the other side of the black and burnt stump.
Tarbo walks into the kitchen with a large bandage on his head.
Fixim pretty good? asks Paterson.
Yes, masta, says Tarbo.
I look at the makeshift bandage and think: Probably wasn’t a doctor who stitched and bandaged him, more likely a nurse, or some old woman out the back who had a ball of string.