I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  The afternoon passed in much the same way. I was rubbish, Peter was amazing and we both ended up covered in sand. Peter took his shirt off but I didn’t. He had pecs and abs and biceps and I was just a pasty, skinny little white boy. And pasty, skinny little white boys didn’t take their shirts off in public if they could help it.

  Eventually I had to say something, well, other than “Good kick, Peter!” and “Sorry, I’ll get it, Peter.”

  “So, um, I kind of have to be home for dinner,” I said. My face would have turned red if it weren’t already crimson from playing in the sun all afternoon.

  “Oh yeah, right, sorry, lost track of time a bit there, Hamish. I’ll drive you home.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Peter put his shirt back on before we walked back to his car. I brushed the sand off my feet, but he didn’t bother. It was all caught up in the cuffs of his jeans anyway.

  Back in the car, he didn’t turn the music up full blast so I started to worry that he might want me to make conversation.

  “So,” I said, “did you hear about Charlie?” I wasn’t sure if he had, seeing as he hadn’t been at school that day to hear the announcement from our year advisor. Lucky for him, he missed out on having to sit in that damn common room full of crying people.

  “Oh,” he said, and then paused for a particle of a second. “Yeah I heard.”

  “I didn’t really know him, did you?”

  “I guess. I mean, everyone knew him, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I kicked myself for using the word ‘sure’ again.

  A silence blossomed between us. The kind that you can only break with an awkward conversation starter.

  “So, what’s your plan after the HSC then?” I said. Nailed it.

  “I’m getting the fuck out of this town.”

  “Sounds great.”

  He laughed, but again, not in a mean way. “Seriously? I thought you were a farm boy?”

  “Well yeah, but that doesn’t mean I want to be. I can’t stand farming, but our farm is my dad’s baby. He loves his fucking cabbages more than he loves me, the bastard. I could never sell it.”

  “Shit,” he said, laughing again.

  “Yeah, anyway, where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “I dunno, Sydney, Melbourne, just anywhere that isn’t here.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I dunno, I don’t have much of a choice really. There isn’t much chance of me ever getting out of this town.”

  “But surely you enjoy doing something? Like, I can’t think of much that’s better than kicking a footy around.”

  I cringed. Could I tell him my favourite thing to do was photography? Would he judge me? Would he laugh?

  “I guess I like taking photos.”

  “What, like, of trees and shit?”

  “Yeah, whatever really, I don’t really care what. But yeah, if I could take pictures for a living, I’d be pretty happy.”

  “Why don’t you, like, do weddings or whatever?” he asked.

  “Yeah well, there isn’t much call for a photographer in this town.”

  “Fair point.”

  He had a gruff, sort of gravelly voice whereas mine was high and whiney, like the annoying little sister in a cartoon.

  “What will you do once you get to Sydney? Play football?”

  “Yeah or soccer, cricket, anything they want me to.”

  “God I wish I was good at something.”

  “Everyone’s good at something. Aren’t you pretty smart?”

  “Yeah but that doesn’t count.”

  “Fuck off, ‘that doesn’t count’! I’d give anything to be smart, but all the teachers in that fucking school have it in for me. They all think I’m the shit beneath their feet.”

  “It’s not hard, you just have to sit there and shut up and they’ll kiss your arse.” Okay fine, I was trying to sound cool.

  “Yeah but it’s not that easy. I get bored so quickly, especially when I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. And all they do is send me outside or up to the principal and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is that supposed to teach me?’”

  “I guess you’re not planning on going to uni then?”

  “Fuck uni. You’re going I suppose?”

  “I guess so, if my dad doesn’t need me to help out on the farm. I might have to come home on weekends though to tend to those fucking cabbages.”

  He laughed again. “You know what, Hamish? You’re all right.”

  “I do what I can.”

  God damn I was a pansy.

  “Well, anyway, where the fuck am I taking you?”

  “Oh right, sorry, I’m just down here on the left.”

  He pulled the car up so suddenly that I nearly hit my head on the windscreen.

  I gathered together my shoes and things and got out of the car.

  “Hey, thanks for hanging out with me today, Hamish.”

  “No worries,” I said. “Thanks for the lift.”

  As he drove away in a cloud of dust, I wondered if I should have invited him in for dinner.

  My mother was at the stove when I walked in the front door. She didn’t look up.

  “Where on earth have you been?” she said.

  She had uncanny powers for knowing who was in the house even when she couldn’t see them.

  “Oh sorry, I was just, I mean, I just went down to the beach for a bit.”

  “Down to the beach? And you didn’t think to call to tell us where you were?”

  “Well I don’t have a mobile phone do I?”

  It was worth a try. “It’s funny – before mobile phones existed I still managed to let my parents know where I was.” Yep, she was still trying that old line.

  “I didn’t have any change for the payphone.”

  “Look we’ll talk about this later, just go and call your father in, will you?”

  I called out to my dad from right where I was standing. It was usually a running joke with her, but my mother gave me one of her looks, one of those I’m-not-at-all-in-the-mood looks, so I went out the back door in search of him.

  Our house was literally falling apart at the seams. We didn’t have air conditioning but we did have ceiling fans in every room that made ominous clicking sounds if you left them on for too long. The cladding was falling off in some places and the flyscreen on the front door had a huge hole in it from when my dad accidently put his foot straight through it after Australia lost the Ashes.

  I found my dad at the well, and before you picture a cute little wishing well with a rope and bucket, don’t. Our well was a huge tank in the ground with a big heavy pump you needed to push back and forth to get the water to run. There was this tube that released the water and to get it to work you had to pour water into the tube first. Ridiculous, right? Something to do with suction. Anyway, so Dad was at the well filling a bucket with water – something I had endless trouble with. He always seemed to know the exact moment to start pumping after he’d poured the water in.

  “Hey Dad,” I said, sitting beside him on an upturned bucket. We were very classy in my family.

  “Hi Son,” he said. “Just getting some water for the cows.”

  One thing to say about my dad: he loved to tell you exactly what he was doing. I liked that; he never hid anything.

  “Well, dinner’s ready when you are,” I said. “I can take them the water if you like.”

  “Thanks, mate,” he said handing me the bucket. “I’ll be sure to leave you some potatoes.”

  I heaved the bucket over to the cowshed; it weighed more than my house, I swear. When I got there, the fat old cows didn’t even look up to thank me for the effort. Some gratitude. Back inside, Mum and Dad were already at the table ladling carrots and peas onto their plates. I sat down.

  “Your mother tells me you went missing this afternoon.”

  “Hardly missing, I was just down at the beach.”

&
nbsp; “Well, you should call before you get into any more shenanigans, all right mate?”

  “Noted.”

  My mother pursed her lips, something she did when she thought my father hadn’t disciplined me enough. I don’t know why she didn’t just discipline me herself.

  After dinner, I excused myself and took a book out to the front veranda. Part of me wanted to see Peter’s car pull into the driveway, and it was a big part. There was something about hanging out with him that had made me feel really… I dunno… cool, you know? And I wished I could have thought of a better word to describe it, but I felt safe when I was with him, like no one could hurt me when he was around, like all the bullies in the world couldn’t touch us. But I doubted very much that I would be seeing Peter Bridges again.

  I was wrong.

  2.

  The next day at school, I found myself looking for Peter everywhere I went. I didn’t know why – it wasn’t as if we were suddenly friends and he was going to tell those jerks to stop picking on me. But I had a quiet sort of confidence knowing that Peter Bridges had chosen to hang out with me. Little, weedy, nerdy me. And somehow the fact that I knew that, and no one else did, gave me a strange self-assurance. I found myself standing up straight, which I never did, and walking with a little spring in my step. Although once I realised that I looked like a skipping pansy, I stopped.

  But I didn’t see Peter that day. He didn’t show up for school again and he wasn’t there at the bus stop. I guessed he was probably picking up someone else. Some kid who was actually good at football and fun to hang out with.

  I did see Martin though. Poor old Martin. If you thought I had it bad, I had nothing on Martin. He was bullied beyond belief. He never told anyone though, not his parents nor his teachers. He didn’t even really talk to me about it. But… he was incapable of being serious. It was like he thought that if he didn’t tell on them, they’d eventually think he was cool and leave him alone. Poor guy. He was kind of overweight, had acne, asthma, braces and he had thick glasses for his slightly lazy right eye; the lot. He had it all. Martin’s family also had more money than anyone else in the school. His parents owned the only dental surgery in town. His father was the dentist while his mother was the assistant and receptionist. He always had new mobile phones, computers and video games. I think people were somehow repulsed by him and envious of him at the same time. And that didn’t make for a good combo.

  I saw him first period for English that day. He was sitting where he always sat near the front, next to where I always sat, but still he yelled out, “Hey Hamish, over here! I saved you a seat!” as if everyone in our class had been fighting to sit next to him and he had to fend them off with his protractor.

  “Thanks, man,” I said as I sat down.

  “Look at this,” he said, holding some kind of trading card in my face.

  “What’s that, a Yu-Gi-Oh! card?”

  “Wash your mouth out with soap, Hamish Day! This is a limited edition, mint condition, rare-as-rare, Mizu Katatsumuri bubble power card!”

  “Jesus Christ, Martin,” I said, rolling my eyes so much I could see the spitballs stuck to the ceiling and threatening to drop on my head at any moment.

  “I’m serious, man, this card is an antique. It’s worth all my other cards put together.”

  “I’m very happy for you,” I said, taking out my book, ruling a line down the page and writing the day’s date in the top right-hand corner. Hey, I told you I was a nerd, okay?

  When our teacher finally came in, she handed out a context sheet about the Cold War era for us to read through quietly and highlight ourselves.

  After a few minutes, Martin turned to me and said, “Look Hamish! I just highlighted this whole paragraph!” And he wasn’t lying, he had just highlighted a whole paragraph.

  “Hey, we can’t all be superstars, Martin.”

  He had a very cheesy grin, my friend Martin.

  My teacher was a terribly old lady who had lost most of her vocal chords a long time ago. She couldn’t yell anymore so she just hit her desk with a ruler when she wanted her class to be quiet. The class was actually quite good because we were in Advanced English. Peter’s class was probably a nightmare. Maybe that was why he never came to school.

  Martin was going to town with his highlighting. He was whispering, “I’m on fire!” But I didn’t respond. I was distracted by the empty seat across the room in which Charlie’s girlfriend usually sat.

  I spent my recess in the darkroom developing photos. I liked being in the darkroom. It was safe. Hardly anyone even knew it was there seeing as you had to walk through the photography classroom to get in, so only us photography nerds knew where it was. I say ‘us’, but that didn’t mean I knew any of the other students in my photography class. I was just trying to make it sound like I was part of an ‘us’.

  I sat by myself in Photography because Martin had Chemistry. In fact, the only classes where I didn’t sit all by myself were English and Maths because Martin was in those classes. But don’t feel sorry for me. I didn’t mind sitting alone. I got more work done and I think I learnt more.

  Also, nobody could copy my work, which was good, because I frickin’ hated that.

  A couple of years ago, Martin asked if he could copy my English homework and I told him to piss off. That wasn’t very kind of me, because the reason he hadn’t done it was because he had lost the sheet, and he lost the sheet because some boys in the year above us threw his books out the window.

  I probably should have let Martin copy my work that day, especially since I was the only one in the class who did it. Our teacher made the whole class stay back except for me. I got my head flushed down the toilet for finishing that damn homework sheet.

  That happened to me a lot actually. Once, I was taking photos of the water tanks and it just happened to be as one of the girls in my year walked past. Her boyfriend accused me of taking photos of his girl and threw my camera on a classroom roof. I had to ask the school cleaner to get it down for me because I couldn’t reach that high.

  My camera was the only expensive thing I owned. My parents saved for months and months to buy it for me for my birthday. If I’d lost that camera, I don’t know what I would have done.

  At lunchtime, Martin and I sat and ate our food in silence. We both still got packed lunches from our mothers. You might say we bonded over that. Martin brought weird health food to school, like rice cakes and shit like that. I usually got a peanut butter sandwich. I don’t think it ever occurred to Martin that there were certain things he did that just asked people to pick on him. It probably never crossed his mind that telling his mother he was going to catch the bus to school and buy his lunch at the canteen would give the other kids a lot less ammunition against him. But what am I saying? This was a kid who went to the school disco in Year Seven dressed up as an alien from Star Gate when the theme was simply ‘green’. I had just worn a green T-shirt, but even that was probably too much. That was the first and last school disco Martin and I ever went to. He got trapped in the girls’ toilets for a good chunk of the night and I got covered in green paint. It took weeks to get that shit out of my hair.

  Would you like to hear how Martin and I became friends? Because I hadn’t always been like this, you know. I had other friends when I was a kid. Farm-kid friends who all went to the same tiny primary school as me. We would hang out on the weekends and play Home 44 or go swimming. One kid, Dane, had this sweet billabong on his family’s farm with a platform you could climb up onto and swing out over the water on a big rope. I was never any good at holding on because my arms were like toothbrush bristles and I always fell straight away. But the other boys held on until they reached the highest point possible before letting go.

  Anyway, Martin’s family moved to our town right before high school started. Before that, they lived in some flashy Sydney townhouse. The first time I saw Martin was during my first day of high school, but I didn’t speak to him then. See, for the first few weeks of Year Sev
en, I had friends. Honestly, I had about five friends. All farm kids. I wasn’t in any of their classes, but we sat together every recess and lunch, and sometimes we played handball. But the seniors hated it when we did that so we stopped.

  Then, slowly, they started to fall away from me, like crumbly pastry. Dane was the first to go – he got a girlfriend. Then the others started sitting with different people, but only sometimes, so that there was always at least one of them in our spot by the oval. And then one day I was alone. No one came to sit with me. And I wondered how this could have happened. I guess I hadn’t quite been myself then. I didn’t have a very good summer holiday and I must have been a bit of a dark cloud. Now that I think about it, I didn’t really speak much at all that year.

  Anyway, one day I was walking to Geography – by myself, as usual – and I saw this Year Ten boy going through Martin’s bag looking for money while his two friends held Martin to the ground. I didn’t try to stop them, that would have been stupid, but once they had found a twenty-dollar note (for the record, I was never in possession of a twenty-dollar note when I was twelve), they threw his stuff on the floor and walked away laughing. I really hated it when they laughed. Sure, take the money, but don’t laugh at him about it. That shit was not funny.

  So I helped him to his feet. And, god knows why, but I spoke to him, and back then, I wasn’t talking to anyone, not even my parents. I said, “Hey, I’m Hamish.”

  He was busy trying to collect his belongings from the hallway while other kids were still walking by and stepping all over them. There were muddy footprints on all his books.

  “Martin,” he said.

  I should have helped him pick up his things that day, but instead I left. I didn’t want to be late for class. I was still desperately trying to make a good impression on my teachers. I should have thought more about making a good impression on the other kids. Or a bad impression, actually.

  But later that day, at lunchtime, Martin came and sat with me.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  “Oh hey. Martin, right?” I knew his name was Martin, but I had nothing else to say.