Holding the Man

by Timothy Conigrave

  Penguin Books

  HOLDING THE MAN

  Timothy Conigrave was born in Melbourne in 1959 and educated at Xavier College and Monash University. He trained as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1984. He appeared in such plays as Brighton Beach Memoirs and As Is and with The Fabulous Globos. He initiated the project Soft Targets, seen at Griffin Theatre in 1986. His other plays include Blitz Kids and Thieving Boy. Timothy Conigrave died in October 1994, shortly after completing Holding the Man.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by McPhee Gribble 1995

  This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2007

  Copyright © Nick Enright 1995

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228406-4

  Life is nothing if not change.

  my friend Laura

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The publishers acknowledge the editorial contribution of Nick Enright. On behalf of the author the publishers would also like to thank Timothy’s friends and colleagues, with particular thanks to Tony Ayres, Nellie Flannery and Morna Seres.

  The song lyric on page 46 is from ‘Dreamer’ (Hodgson/Davies), © Delicate Music (Almo Music USA). Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Publishing Pty Ltd.

  PART ONE

  A Head Full of Boys

  Chapter ONE

  Me

  At the end of the sixties the world seemed very exciting for a nine-year-old. Things were changing at an incredible rate. And most of the changes seemed to be for the better, like the afternoon we all sat in the library watching a man take his first step on the moon of planet Earth. Even schooling was changing. My Grade Four teacher at the state school treated us like adults who were able to think for ourselves. He was open to all forms of learning. My last year at this school was spent drawing, writing poems; building Aboriginal humpies, dams and watercourses. We discussed space travel, pot and why boys should be allowed to have long hair.

  In contrast was Miss O’Leary who gave us Catholic kids our injection of religion, all five of us in a cupboard at the end of the hall. At Christmas she gave each of us a crucifix made of foiled glass. As she handed me mine she said, ‘You don’t deserve this because you’re wicked.’

  She got into my head at the age when I was loading the operating system that forms self-image. Sure, the software was a mix of creativity, sunshine and games with the girls, but I was also becoming a Catholic. And looming large was the awareness that I was about to take a leap into Catholic manhood: an all-boys school, Kostka. Footy, cricket, smelly socks, and Jesuits in cassocks.

  Even though Kostka was at the end of my street, all I knew of it was the high pale-orange brick walls and large copper gates, beyond which I occasionally glimpsed a concrete playground lined with oleanders and yew trees, and a whirlpool of boys in grey uniforms.

  After I’d sat an entrance exam my mother and I were interviewed by the headmaster, who wanted to know whether, since she had married a non-Catholic, her children went to Mass. My mother’s face was scrunched up as we walked back to the gates. ‘That stuck-up bully sitting in judgement of me! Surely it’s obvious that I want my children to be brought up in the Church, or we wouldn’t be wasting our money putting you through a Jesuit school.’ I found it odd that she was so vulnerable.

  This was to be my first experience of dressing exactly the same as everyone else. The first time I heard ‘fuck’, ‘shit’ and ‘arsehole’. The first time I had textbooks: the Jacaranda atlas; a catechism full of groovy drawings of doves, wheat and a Jesus who looked like a hippie; my first dictionary, and a book called Roget’s Thesaurus with the words ‘Find, Seek, Search, Discover’ on its cover. Learning at Kostka was going to be a different experience. I spent hours writing my name on the title page of my books, covering them in sweet-smelling soft plastic, filling my drink bottle with orange cordial and putting it in the freezer.

  The first day all the new boys met in the library. The headmaster’s secretary drilled us on punctuality and compulsory sport. We were taken to our classrooms where boys were lined up waiting for the door to open. I tried to be inconspicuous, aware that everyone was looking at me and the other two new guys.

  At the front of the line was a good-looking boy wearing sunglasses. From the other boys’ gibes I learnt that he had almost poked his eye out in a sailing accident. They didn’t bother him. He looked really cool.

  My first year at this school was a big shock. I was keenly aware that these boys had a different life from mine. They were fulfilling expectations that they would be doctors and lawyers. ‘Play’ for them meant football. What I knew about footy you could have written on a piece of toilet paper. In order to survive I learnt to know which team was on top of the ladder and to say things like ‘carna Saints’. But as for what ‘holding the man’ meant or which team Jezza played for …

  Grade Five Red was in the neglect of Mr Geddes. His idea of teaching was to write on the board ‘Page 13, Exercises 4–9’ and make us do them in silence. He’d sit on a desk and order one of us to scratch his back. He liked to terrorise us, picking his nose and wiping it on us, knocking our books off the desk, opening someone’s bag and eating his lunch.

  One day a boy called Kevin asked to be allowed to go to the toilet. Mr Geddes made him stand on the platform and sing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. Kevin did so, his legs jiggling in an attempt to stop pissing himself. ‘Now with actions.’ None of us laughed. We were just glad it wasn’t us. Kevin did the nursery rhyme with actions and then ran for the door.

  Another time Mr Geddes told us to read a chapter about Cromwell and the Roundheads and left the room. We were doing as we were told when his head suddenly appeared through an open window. He ordered Kevin up on the platform to get the strap.

  ‘But I wasn’t doing anything, sir.’

  ‘Exactly. You should have been reading about Cromwell and the Roundheads. Get up there before I make it the full six.’ Heavy with persecution, Kevin sloped up to the platform and took his punishment.

  The other regular victim was Andy,
a milky fat kid with a skin rash and a permanently running nose. Geddes would tease him until he was in tears and then would get us all to sing a version of a folk song: ‘Oh Andy, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.’

  When the bell went we would tumble out into the playground and rough-house each other, asserting our strength so that we would never become the milky fat kid who was so loathsome.

  Damien

  Out of this landscape appeared a boy called Damien. He was from a working-class family; his father and brothers were in the army, but he was a rebel. His hair was long, his attitude defiant. He thought football was stupid. With a shock of glossy black hair tumbling into his eyes, he looked like Mowgli from The Jungle Book. Our point of contact was born of this rebelliousness: smoking.

  I had already been experimenting. One Friday night I sat on my parents’ bed watching a St Trinian’s movie. Two girls were smoking in the toilets. I lit a match, blew it out and drew back the fumes. I felt sophisticated despite the sulphurous burning in my throat. Another time I filled a paper straw with lawn clippings and nearly set my lungs on fire as I drew back the burning grass.

  Damien and I were going up to the park when I spied a cigarette butt on the ground and put it in my mouth. He pulled out a whole pack of Craven As and some matches.

  ‘You smoke?’

  ‘Der.’

  ‘Wow. What’s it like?’ He offered me one.

  ‘Not here!’

  ‘Where?’ He was testing me. I showed him a couple of hollow pine trees that were hiding places for local kids, their branches smooth from years of polishing by children’s bums.

  This sanctuary was to become ours. We were partners in crime, a secret society in our secret headquarters. Our ritual always started with a cigarette. The smoke provided safety as we talked about school, what a dickhead so-and-so was, or the time Gilligan built that car out of coconuts.

  I liked Damien, and I was happy that he liked me. Although we weren’t in the same class we always found each other at breaks and played handball in the concrete squares of the playground, practised tricks with Coca-Cola yoyos or climbed over the back of the green shed to have a cigarette.

  The bench I was sitting on was slowly being torn from its place by the roots of the liquidambars that surrounded the lunch quadrangle. All around me the broken asphalt said that these trees were winning a war. I was trying to finish my lunch before English. I hadn’t done my homework and had spent the break composing a poem about ‘scraping away to the inner essence’.

  Sitting nearby was the sunglasses boy. I was thinking about his looks. What makes me think he’s handsome? I like the way he is. Calm, and cool. Would the other guys think he was handsome? As I lobbed the soggy remainder of my lettuce-and-Vegemite sandwich into the bin, I spied Damien walking across the playground. He’s really good-looking. Even the way he walks is really good. He walked towards me, smiling.

  He sat on the bench, opened his hand and revealed a superball. ‘It’s Andy’s.’

  ‘God, he’ll be spewing!’

  He put his arm around me. There was a kind of stirring, a buzz coursing through me. I wanted to break away from him but I also wanted to put my head on his shoulder. The electronic bell pealed.

  I headed off to the toilets. Damien said he’d save me a place in the assembly hall.

  Friday afternoons were a bludge. Mr Steed the science teacher would show us documentaries – about Campbell’s attempt at the land-speed record in his futuristic Bluebird, or the development of the Merino by CSIRO. It was a strategy to stop us sleeping our way through the last period of the week, but it gave us a chance to play up as the excitement of the weekend loomed.

  The assembly hall was a fibro hut, painted pale green like a public toilet. The carpet was a splotchy synthetic red. It resembled pizza and smelt like pizza. Black curtains were drawn across windows that were wide open. The roof was corrugated iron and even in winter the heat could be smothering. On this summer day the room was an oven filled with boys basting in their own juices.

  I could make out the short figure of Mr Steed fumbling at the projector. We sat totally still until he squatted down beside the machine, and then the room became a snowstorm of paper balls and planes. Mr Steed stood up and the storm abruptly stopped.

  The projector threw a white square of light onto the screen, which immediately came alive with rabbits, dogs, thumbs-up, and peace signs. Someone did the VO-5 symbol from the television ad. The rabbit became a two-finger salute.

  Where is Damien? I heard a whispered call and turned to see him on his own, up the back behind the projector. He patted the seat next to him.

  Mr Steed was agitated. As he lifted an arm to brush his oily fringe off his thick glasses I could see the sweat stains in the pit of his mustard-coloured shirt. The projector jumped into life and the screen read, The Prickly Menace.

  Damien took my arm and put it around his waist, smiled and turned to the screen. The film was about a cactus getting out of hand somewhere and the moth that was helping to keep it under control. It could have been about Auschwitz. All I could think of was my arm around Damien’s waist. It felt like it had found its home. It felt right. It felt safe.

  We sneaked looks at each other and smiled. Then he put his lips to my cheek and let them sit there until I whispered, ‘Don’t!’

  He smiled and whispered, ‘I wish you were a girl.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant but said I wished he was a girl too.

  We stayed entwined until the film whipped out of the gate and slapped the projector, stirring Mr Steed awake. He fumbled to turn the machine off. Damien stretched and released me. The darkness was broken by boys pouring out of the assembly hall.

  ‘Come back here until the bell goes,’ barked Mr Steed. As if to make a fool of him, the bell went.

  A couple of Grade Fives stood on the footpath waiting for someone to pick them up. One grabbed the other’s bag and lobbed it over the wall back into the playground. The victim kicked his friend’s bag into the traffic and ran back into the grounds.

  ‘Got any durries?’ I turned to see Damien coming out of the school ground with his cap pulled to one side. He put his arm around my shoulder. I showed him the pack of Escorts inside my bag.

  ‘Are you two boyfriends?’ An older boy with carrot-red hair was leaning against a wall, hands in pockets, feet crossed at the ankles.

  Damien turned to confront him. He picked Damien’s cap off his head and threw it onto the road. Damien went to snatch the redhead’s cap but was gripped by the wrist and shoved. ‘Poofters!’ jeered the redhead and sauntered across the road in triumph.

  Neither of us said anything as we walked to the park and climbed our trees. We sat on the bum-smoothed branches and started our ritual. The smell of pine oil hung in the air. Damien said he was going off to get an Icy-pole. When my cigarette was down to the butt I took out another and did a donkey root. I could see his bag at the base of the tree. He’s going to come back.

  I felt I had done something wrong, and Damien was angry with me. I wondered what it would be like if Damien were a girl. Or if I were. Then we could be boyfriend and girlfriend.

  Damien reappeared and held out two Icy-poles. He tossed them up to me. I reached in my pocket but he shook his head. It was a present. We sat cocooned in our trees with dripping Icy-poles, dripping sweat, and burning cigarettes.

  I started to feel dizzy. I wanted badly to fart or burp but nothing happened. My throat felt scratchy. I had to lie down. I tried to do it on the branch but I slid down to the grass at the bottom of the tree.

  ‘How many cigarettes have you had?’ said the Cheshire cat from his branch. I’d had four or five. ‘You tonk, you’ve got nicotine poisoning.’ He slipped down the trunk and lay next to me. I didn’t have to look at him. I could feel him there beside me. We lay together with our hands behind our heads, watching the sky through the branches. Damien put his arm across me. I drifted on a cloud of contentment.

  The man in the kiosk was chatting up a g
irl while the rest of us stood shivering in the wind at Brighton Beach. The sun was hot but the breeze coming off the bay stung with cold.

  Casanova was taking so long that I dried off and was left with salty skin. I picked at the peeling sunburn on my shoulders. My turn finally. I asked for a pack of Marlboros. ‘For me mum,’ I lied, pointing to some fat lady asleep in a deck-chair.

  He didn’t believe me but he gave them to me anyway. Someone grabbed them from my hands. It was Damien. He jumped up on the rail and held the cigarettes high in the air.

  ‘I was grounded for calling my sister a slut,’ he said. ‘But Mum’s working at the TAB. Long as I’m back by four-thirty.’ He raised an eyebrow, smiling. ‘Have you seen who’s on the beach?’ He tilted his head over the rail at a Beaumaris surfie chick called Puck. ‘I think I’m in love.’

  My stomach gripped. ‘She’s nearly fifteen. Why would she be interested in a twelve-year-old?’

  He slipped over the rail down to the sand. I followed, feeling like the milky fat kid, all thumbs and not an ounce of cool. He opened the smokes, took out the foil and a couple of cigarettes and threw them on the sand. ‘Don’t want to look like we just opened them.’

  He walked over to Puck and a freckly girl I didn’t know. ‘Got a match?’ said Damien in his best Paul Newman voice.

  ‘My bum and your face.’ She was everything everyone said about her. Why does Damien like such a rough girl? My stomach gripped even harder.

  Damien took out a cigarette and lay down in the sand. ‘You gonna light it for me?’

  ‘If you give us one.’ He offered her the pack and she took one. She pulled out a box of matches, took his cigarette, lit both at once and handed his back.

  I asked Damien for the smokes. He threw them at me, not taking his eyes off Puck. When I asked for a light, Damien handed me his lit cigarette and I donkey-rooted it.

  Damien punched a hole in the sand to make room for his private parts. Every time I looked at Puck I caught her looking at me. This was all too much. I said I was going for a leak.