Luck in the Greater West (20 page)

Whitey parked his lorry two streets away from the school and legged it the rest of the way to the gate. It was futile to try and do battle with the polished four-wheel drives that congested the street Plumpton Primary was on. Wednesday was his day to pick up his daughter, to spend some time with her.

The bell the children had been hanging out for since lunch sounded, and the clamour to exit began. Whitey mooned around at the gate, aware of his maleness. He couldn't remember parents crowding the gate of the school when he was a young bloke, but it seemed the custom now. Kids, not all that anxious to be enclosed into the family off-roaders, began their games cut short by the end of their lunch break.

—Spot the bloody Aussie, isn't it? said a guy standing next to Whitey.

Whitey smiled and nodded at the guy — initially comforted that he wasn't the only bloke there picking up his kid. He looked in the direction that the guy pointed. At the multiculturalism that was truly at work in a game of handball. The kids were intent on
the ball and its trajectory inside the hand-drawn court, perfectly oblivious of their variegated ancestries.

—There was none a that goin' on when I was a nipper, the guy continued. I never even seen an Arab or a Nip 'round 'here when I was growin' up.

Whitey smelt the sweetness of the guy's beery breath, and a pang of envy sped through him. He wished he was able to be drunk at three in the arvo but he couldn't risk a middy because of his job.

He saw his daughter coming towards him — a tiny version of Sonja. She was hand-in-hand with her best friend, Tuyen. The western suburbs his daughter had inherited were unlike the ones Whitey had grown up in. The Commission estates Whitey had known were being sold off and levelled and transformed into uniform manors. There was a drive to be middle class in the west that was lost on Whitey but he did hope that his daughter would learn some of it. Not so much so she would have material success, but so she would have an understanding of how her world operated. There was little hope for Whitey and the bloke standing next to him; they'd be left behind. Even the once benevolent government was cutting their ilk loose into the increasingly free market economy at every opportunity. Not that any of this really bothered Whitey. I'm a lucky bastard, he thought as he hugged his daughter hello.

They piled into the cabin of the truck — off to drop Tuyen off and get a free feed at her family's Vietnamese restaurant.