Slice

by Steven Herrick

  Finally, a man among minors!

  The blokes at school kept asking when I was going to remove the caterpillar.

  Adrian Vaughn in Art class called me Frida Kahlo.

  Tim Harris used Stacey Scott’s eyeliner to draw a moustache on himself. He yelled across the room before Maths began, ‘Look, I’m just like Walker.’

  I answered, ‘You’d need to grow a penis first!’

  Harris scowled and shoved his chair back, knocking Marcus’s neatly arranged pens on the floor. Marcus looked distraught, leaning down to pick them up and toppling off his chair in the process. Stacey giggled. Tim wasn’t sure if she was laughing at my joke or Marcus.

  Mr Clegg walked in and told Tim to go wash his face. He looked at Marcus still on the floor and rolled his eyes. Harris brushed past my desk, whispering, ‘Dead man, Walker.’

  ‘But with a penis!’ I shot back.

  Clegg exploded. ‘Walker, did you just swear?’

  ‘“Pens”, sir. I was worried about Marcus losing his “pens”.’

  At home, I ask Dad if I can borrow his razor.

  A look of horror crosses his face.

  ‘Sit down, son. We should have a chat.’

  He pats the lounge, folds the newspaper and makes room for me.

  He leans sideways. ‘How long have you been having these thoughts, Darcy?’

  ‘All week. Every time I look in the mirror.’

  Dad winces and takes a deep breath.

  ‘It’s okay to be a little concerned about looks when you’re young, son.’

  He laughs to himself. ‘I was convinced my nose was too long and thin when I was your age.’

  He pats my knee. ‘You’ll grow out of it.’

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  ‘So you’ll give me a razor?’

  ‘Darcy, suicide is...’

  ‘...when someone ends it all. I know, Dad. I just want to shave!’

  The tension releases from his body.

  ‘I thought you meant...’ His eyes cloud over. He smiles and leans forward, a look of utter false sincerity on his face, ‘Don’t do it, Darcy.’

  Maybe I chose the wrong time for a chat? The newspaper is open at the football section. Australia qualify for the World Cup trumpets the headline.

  ‘I want to shave, Dad. Not kill myself.’

  He flinches at the word ‘kill’.

  ‘Yes, I know. But, don’t do it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because once you start, you’ll never be able to stop.’

  Are we talking about masturbation, or shaving?

  ‘I started when I was your age, Darcy. It was fun – for a while. I felt like a man. But then, every second day, I had to waste my time in front of the bathroom mirror.’

  I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to waste time in front of mirrors! And shout obscenities at pensioners in shopping malls. And ride skateboards over stairs outside public libraries.

  Dad sighs. ‘And when you get a job like mine, you’ll have to shave every day.’

  An accountant! I’m never becoming ... The words are on the tip of my tongue.

  ‘Come on, Dad.’

  He picks up the paper, a picture of the Australian team celebrating under a huge banner.

  I stand there, waiting.

  Dad sighs. ‘I’ll buy you a razor tomorrow.’

  It’s amazing how much blood can come from such a tiny cut. Maybe I’ll tell Tim Harris I got into a fight with a gang from another suburb and they cut me with a knife. Slashed across the chin but I still pummelled them. All four of those razor-wielding skateboard-riding acne-covered maniacs from Blackheath.

  Number Two: DRINK

  Every parent tells their offspring not to drink alcohol, usually over dinner as they pour themselves a glass of wine.

  ‘It’s dangerous. It impairs your judgement. It’s bad for your health.’

  Dad’s stomach expands over his trousers and I wonder if I should carry a hidden tape recorder to play back when he’s senile in an old people’s home, a brown woollen blanket covering his knees as he sits in threadbare pyjamas on the garden seat and I’m enduring one of my monthly visits.

  Dad takes another sip and reads the label.

  ‘Twelve per cent alcohol. Do you know how much damage that can do to a young liver, son.’

  What? His liver has developed an immunity!

  Mum quickly adds, ‘We’re not perfect examples, dear. I had a glass of beer on my eighteenth birthday and didn’t touch another drop until I met your father.’

  ‘Meeting Dad drove you to drink?’

  Dad finishes his glass and reaches for the bottle, then thinks better of it.

  ‘Look, son. On your eighteenth. We’ll have a big party to celebrate. You can have a few then.’

  Mum and Dad feel confident promising things that won’t happen in the next year. They hope I’ll forget. But I have all my brain cells. I haven’t destroyed them with alcohol.

  Not yet!

  Number Three: VOMIT

  No, Dad didn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to vomit ‘ever’. Just not last Saturday night at midnight, in the Camry, on the way home from Stacey Scott’s party. I’d drunk too much punch. It was a lovely shade of pink.

  No-one told me there was alcohol in it.

  No-one told me there was too much alcohol in it.

  No-one told me I shouldn’t drink six glasses of the stuff.

  Stacey had mixed one part cranberry juice to two parts vodka. She said it was a healthy alternative. Dad looked quickly over his shoulder when I groaned, just in time to yell, ‘Darcy. Don’t vomit!’

  I would have been more than happy to obey him. Alas, a pink fountain spurted from my mouth all over the leather upholstery.

  I bet Shakespeare never wrote a line like that!

  I’ll repeat it.

  Alas, a pink fountain spurted from my mouth all over the leather upholstery.

  Incidentally, I learnt something interesting about toads yesterday. When they’ve eaten something really toxic, they vomit up their entire stomach, not just the food. They use their right arm to remove the toxic meal from their stomach lining. Once it’s clean, they swallow their stomach again.

  On Sunday, I used a mop, bucket and twenty-five paper towels to clean up the mess.

  I understand why the word ‘chunky’ is often used in the same sentence as ‘vomit’.

  See, I just did it then.

  That’s the last time I’m drinking this month.

  It’s August 28th.

  Number Four: FIGHT FAIR

  It would have been much easier if Dad told me not to fight, no matter what the circumstance. I could have said to Tim Harris that I’d love to beat him to a pulp, but, you know, I promised my dad.

  Dad is one of these old-school types who think part of manhood is fighting honourably. He’d prefer Tim and I wear boxing gloves. To go three rounds in the school gym. No low blows.

  It didn’t work out like that.

  You wouldn’t even call it a fight. It was an unfortunate disagreement.

  Tim pushed in front of me in the canteen line.

  Yes, this is high school, not kindergarten.

  Normally, I wouldn’t care. Anyone eager to eat canteen food deserves all they get. But as Tim muscled his way in, I saw Audrey glance our way.

  Being only a few thousand years removed from my cave-man ancestors, I pushed him and yelled, ‘Hey!’

  Normally, that would have been it.

  Except Tim was leaning forward and he fell, face first, at the feet of Audrey.

  Note: I’d be quite happy to fall at the feet of Audrey.

  But, for footy-Tim this was ‘a loss of face’. No, he didn’t have his face smeared across the concrete. It’s a metaphor.

  Tim jumped up quickly and threw a punch, roughly in my direction.

  I dodged his fist much better than I dodged the soccer ball when I was a kid. His fist missed me ... and hit the side wall.

 
I dearly wanted to yell something suitably antagonistic like, ‘Try again, Tim. The wall didn’t fall over.’

  Tim was still holding his damaged fist when the canteen lady called, ‘Next!’

  This was too much, even for me.

  ‘Please, Tim. You go first. You can eat it on the way to hospital.’

  Anyway, to cut a long and embarrassing story short, Harris jumped on me and we rolled around on the concrete together, him swearing and trying to throw a punch with his good hand, me clinging on for dear life. Maybe it looked like I had him in a macho bear hug, vigorously squeezing the life out of him?

  If I were a toad, boy, my guts would have jumped right out all over Harris.

  People describe our principal, Mrs Archer, as a ‘consensus type’.

  Tim and I were quite willing to agree to hate one another. Mrs Archer wanted us to apologise and shake hands. Tim reluctantly held out his good left hand, I extended my right hand. We stood in Archer’s office, trying to work out how to shake. I compromised and offered my left. Tim gripped tightly, wanting to snap my wrist.

  ‘Fighting never gets you anywhere.’

  Mrs Archer didn’t expect an answer.

  Inside I was screaming, It’s got Tim to hospital!!!

  ‘Do I have your agreement this antagonism will cease?’

  Tim answered, ‘No, Mrs Archer.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘She means, we should stop fighting, Tim.’

  Harris scowled at me. ‘I know what she said.’

  Mrs Archer rose abruptly from her chair, her face red and flushed.

  ‘Stop saying “she” in my presence!

  ‘If you boys fight again, it will result in suspension!’

  So much for consensus.

  I quickly answered, ‘Yes, Mrs Archer,’ just in case Tim got confused again.

  Mrs Archer fired a few more verbal arrows our way then sent me back to class and Tim to the doctor.

  Sprained, not broken.

  Number Five: MASTURBATE

  No parent in their right mind wants to discuss ... self-love, shall we say, but...

  Do you know the newsreader on SBS? She’s got lustrous dark hair and skin the colour of coffee – latte, not cappuccino. She wears elegant low-cut blouses and shiny silver necklaces and, instead of listening to her report on the fighting in Afghanistan or the floods in China, sometimes my focus wanders.

  Or becomes a little too obsessive.

  She smiles in between segments and sometimes, before speaking, she takes a long breath, her shoulders lifting imperceptibly. It’s a short walk from the troubles of the world on SBS to my bedroom.

  I should have locked the door.

  Dad should have knocked.

  Mercifully, it was a quick conversation. Dad told me to ‘limit the activity’.

  And I do.

  The teenager on the roof

  My parents have an amazing bedroom. They climb a ladder in the lounge room and push open a little trapdoor through the floor to enter their loft.

  I thought only poets lived in lofts – alone with their fountain pens and bad haircuts, writing about trees and rivers before dying young of misadventure or some incurable disease.

  Did you know that Shelley, the Romantic poet, drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Italy? He was twenty-nine years old. He and two friends were enjoying a quick sail across the water when a sudden storm blew up.

  Romantics couldn’t swim and refrained from wearing life jackets.

  What would an eighteenth-century life jacket look like? Maybe a pig’s bladder, leftover from an opulent banquet in a medieval castle, inflated by some poor peasant and strapped to your back with twine.

  When Shelley’s body washed ashore, it was burnt on the beach in a funeral pyre.

  Before cremation, his heart was removed by a friend and given to his wife who kept it with her until she died. His poetry became even more famous, only he was too dead to reap the benefits.

  Dad taught me to swim when I was ten.

  Every Saturday morning at the pool, Dad stood in chest-deep water holding both my hands, dragging me forward, telling me to stick my head under the water and blow. I learnt quickly because I was embarrassed holding Dad’s hand in public.

  Mum and Dad were hippies long before I was born and they promised each other when they got married, they’d sleep in a loft, their bed pushed close to the window.

  If you open their bedroom window and remove the flyscreen, you can climb out onto the roof and look out over the whole suburb and the distant cliffs in the National Park.

  When I was a kid, me and Dad would sit up here for hours and he’d tell stories about climbing trees, tree houses and birdwatching when he was young.

  I can see everything up here on the roof.

  To be more precise, I can see Audrey Benitez’s back garden.

  Audrey is the most beautiful girl in school.

  There are more popular girls.

  Girls that Tim Harris would eloquently describe as ‘hotter’.

  Miranda Fry.

  Claire Rusina.

  Stacey Scott.

  They are not Audrey.

  Let me describe her.

  Mid-length oil-black hair. Not curly, just full and heavy. You want to touch it and see if any of the shine rubs off on your fingers. It never looks combed. Permanently messy and amazingly beguiling. I just swapped the word ‘attractive’ for ‘beguiling’ – it has a nice ring to it. I love my thesaurus.

  Audrey has slightly crooked teeth. When she smiles, you can’t help but smile back because those teeth seem to have a life of their own. They ask you to join in on the fun.

  Olive skin? No. The only olives I know are green. Audrey does not have green skin. It’s smooth and ... skin-coloured. Kind of dark beige, I guess.

  What makes Audrey special is her eyes.

  Brown and bright, they look at you and seem to be talking.

  They’re expressive.

  When Tim Harris sprawled at her feet in the canteen line, the thing that gave me the most pleasure was not pushing Cro-Magnon man over, it was seeing the look of pity and scorn in Audrey’s eyes as she looked down at him. Her eyes penetrate deep into you. She has a bright future as a psychotherapist.

  As for the rest of Audrey?

  She has two legs that seem quite nice to me. And hips and breasts. She’s not fat. Or thin. She has no visible deformities. She doesn’t have a nervous twitch, no Tourette syndrome, she’s not given to spitting in public or excessive displays of hugging or screaming or saying ‘Oh my God’.

  She doesn’t sit on warm concrete at lunchtime.

  She’s sixteen and I love her.

  Okay!

  There. I’ve said it.

  So, let’s move on with my life.

  I’m lying on my back up on the roof.

  The sun warms the corrugated iron and radiates through my whole body. Spider-web clouds move east towards the city on the breeze.

  In the cedar tree beside the house, a white cockatoo pulls apart cones with his beak to eat the seed inside. When he finishes each cone he squawks, as if to say, ‘How’s that!’

  Audrey walks out the back door of her house and stretches a mat across the grass in her garden. She’s wearing black tights and a dark close-fitting sweater, her hair is pulled tight and tied in a short ponytail.

  She looks like a spy from a 1960s James Bond movie.

  She sits, lotus position.

  A little bead of sweat trickles down my temple.

  She places her hands on her knees, palms facing out. My hands are fist tight, the veins bulging on my wrist.

  She lifts her chin and takes a long slow deep breath.

  I sigh.

  Every afternoon, Audrey meditates. And I...

  She looks up quickly, through the gap in the trees towards our house.

  I duck.

  Did she see me?

  Maybe I should have waved, acted like I’m meditating as well. Sure I’m very interest
ed in Indian mysticism, Tai Chi and your body.

  I mean, Tai Chi and yoga.

  The bead of sweat on my temple is joined by one hundred and twenty-four cousins, all scampering down to drop sizzling onto the hot tin roof.

  How long should I stay hidden?

  Dad pops his head out of the window.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, son?’

  Perving on Audrey Benitez! What does it look like!

  ‘Nothing, Dad.’

  ‘Nothing can come of nothing.’

  ‘Is that Shakespeare?’

  Dad rolls his eyes. ‘Just don’t fall off. Okay?’

  He slides the window closed, but doesn’t lock it.

  Maybe you think I am perving on Audrey?

  I prefer to think of it as fifteen minutes of admiring great art.

  Fifteen minutes of quiet time.

  Fifteen minutes of sharing something with the woman of my dreams.

  Even if she doesn’t know it yet.

  I raise my head slightly, peeking over the gutter. Audrey is sitting, motionless. I can hear the faintest drone.

  A jumbo passing overhead?

  Or Audrey doing Yoga Sound Meditation?

  I read about it on the web. You release all the air slowly from your upper lung, followed by the middle lung and then the lower one. I never knew my lungs had three storeys. Audrey is so exceptional, her lungs probably have four storeys. And a loft.

  The sexual history of Darcy Walker

  I am leaning against the kitchen sink at Stacey Scott’s monthly party. Her dad is away on a business trip (on the weekend?) and her mum is floating off to a health resort ‘to get her head together’. How do I know that? Because Mrs Scott hasn’t left yet. The two of us are alone in the kitchen.

  Stacey’s mum points a bright red fingernail. ‘With me away, it gives Stacey time to explore her,’ she tosses back her hair, ‘personality.’

  ‘Personality?’

  ‘Her ... sexuality, if you like.’

  There are words parents should not be allowed to say in the company of teenagers. ‘Sexuality’ is high up on the list. Along with ‘condoms’, ‘orgasm’, and ‘homework’.

  I study the wonderful array of wine glasses on the counter behind Mrs Scott.