I liked Mr Vagg. He wasn’t so tangled in the mysterious decencies other oldies were tangled in. If I had knocked a girl off her bike with a yonnie, there would be Mr Vagg sniggering philosophically over his verandah rail, sipping tea, and eagerly awaiting Act II in which I was hauled inside by an ear leaking excuses. I’d sometimes look over at him imploringly, like he was a chorus in a Greek play and had the wherewithal to sort my problems. ‘You’d better go for it, Boyboy,’ he’d shout. ‘They’ll be coming.’ He called me ‘Boyboy’. I think he liked me. This was a jarringly unusual condition in an adult.
Having seen me with my arm shoved down a roof gutter feeling for blackbird eggs, he took me into his house and showed me his egg collection. It was a worldwide accumulation of wonders set out in trays of cotton wool, divided and labelled with Latin and common names. Australian raven. Corvus coronoides. Wedge-tailed eagle. Aquila audax. This gave them the legitimate scholastic tang of the museum. Every size and pattern and colour and texture of egg a bird ever laid was surely here. I coveted his egg collection so hard my throat ached and I asked him, ‘Can I have these when you’re dead?’
He laughed. ‘I have two sons.’
‘Well … are they in Vietnam? Or are they sick?’
‘No,’ he ruffled my hair to help me through the bad news. ‘They’re both fighting fit and farming at Congupna.’
Next to Mr and Mrs Vagg lived a dustman. Old Jeremy Kelly. He didn’t have anything to do with dust. ‘Dust’ was the word Shepparton used for ‘rubbish’. He collected the town’s rubbish and took it to the tip. He wore sand-coloured bib-and-brace overalls and a cap made of the same cloth. He seemed always sad, but I often confused age with sadness. It was always a surprise to me to hear an old person laugh. And I never got their jokes because I wasn’t sure they were jokes, or sure they should be telling jokes, so close to death, oblivion and rot as they were.
Mr Kelly drove a truck shaped like an airplane hangar, its rounded iron roof supposed to seal in the badness he carried around. It didn’t. In summer it acted as an oven to stew the foulness therein. The truck was the same tan colour as his overalls and cap. His sheds were the same colour too. His wife was about the colour a wife ought to be, but bigger.
At the back of the truck was a running board on which Mr Kelly and his men stepped to empty the dustbins into its gaping black rear. The truck dripped dark juices that neighbourhood dogs would trot to the road centre for, and would sniff until their eyes rolled back and they became dreamy as mathematicians listening to Beethoven, and they would set to licking the bitumen until their tongues were raw or they were run over. Quite a few dogs lost their canine perspicacity and their lives while tracking the drool of Mr Kelly’s truck from pool to pool along the town’s roads. His road-daubings were a known hazard to dog owners.
The truck was a Bedford and it gave off stunning smells like a piece of Hell broken off and set adrift from the mother-ship. When it went past we’d flop to the ground moaning and holding our noses shouting, ‘Kelly smelly.’ It was often followed home by crows that then sat on the fence posts around his yard.
We were pretty sure the truck was full of the recently murdered, because our friend Langdo had read a book in which a French murderer used ravens to dispose of the bodies of his victims and they’d become so partial to the meat they followed him around cawing for mouldering Parisians. Ravens were French crows, Langdo said. And they gave the game away and the French murderer was scooped up by gendarmes, which were cops.
According to Langdo it wasn’t likely to be mouldering Parisians in old Kelly’s truck. It was more probably the town’s drunks passed out in our parks and murdered and crammed into it before dawn. Mr Kelly was a notorious teetotaller and it seemed believable he disappeared drunks as a demonstration of alcohol’s evil. Langdo’s sensible moments gave a frightening veracity to his fantasies.
He had announced Pigsy and I were detectives about two hours before he decided we needed a groundbreaking case to make our reputations and get us recognised alongside the household names like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. He had given us walkie-talkies made of wood and we’d crept around the crescent spying on our mums hanging out washing and on the old folk gardening and talking, ducking down when they glanced our way and creeping away behind fences and talking in a code that neither they nor we could understand.
Pigsy and I knew Langdo was right. We needed a big case. We’d detected that our mums hung out washing and we’d deduced it was because it was a sunny day. Other than this our morning as detectives had been pretty meaningless.
‘The most important work for a detective is solving murders,’ Langdo told us. ‘Murders are the top of the tree for detectives.’ Being older than us, Langdo was able to walk Pigsy and me into all sorts of traps. He didn’t make us detectives to solve crimes of family clothes washing. He’d made us detectives to solve murders, because that’s what detectives did. So it was more or less our duty to climb into that infernal truck and search for the bodies of the drunks old Kelly was touring around.
We were sitting rib deep in our compost heap, enjoying the warmth of decomposing lawn clippings, breathing the fungal musk and peering through the wooden lattice at old Kelly’s truck parked across the road in his yard.
Great swathes of our days were routinely taken up with arguing over who had to do what. If there was a theft or crime in the offing an argument had to be had over whose turn it was. We’d go and squirm into the compost heap where it was warm. ‘I blew up old Rogers’ letterbox,’ I said, when it had become clear a detective was needed to crawl around in the collected filth of the town looking for bodies.
‘So what? He wasn’t home,’ Pigsy replied. ‘I rocked the Gribbles’ roof.’
‘We all rocked the Gribbles’ roof,’ I said.
‘But I got caught.’
‘That was your stupid fault for running on a dry footpath with wet feet and getting followed.’
‘I threw that plumber’s wrenches down the drain and got belted.’
‘He was at your house unblocking a drain. No one else knew he was there. We didn’t have a chance. So that doesn’t count,’ I said. ‘Anyway, my dad took us all up the river last week.’
‘So what. That doesn’t come into it. Your dad takes us everywhere.’
‘I’m just saying, if I get in trouble Dad won’t take any of us anywhere.’
‘That’s not fair to bring up.’
‘Okay, but neither is your plumber.’
The argument went on for about an hour until I remembered I’d shoplifted two Violet Crumbles a few days before and had made Pigsy beg for one until he said I was his best, best friend and he would do anything for me. This small theft, and gift, tipped the ‘missions completed’ tally in my favour, and the job of snorkelling for cadavers fell to Pigsy.
He pouted and said he didn’t want to be a detective and that a Violet Crumble wasn’t worth climbing into the Kelly smelly truck for. But Langdo told him Violet Crumbles had two different values. If you were begging for one as a friend was eating his, then they were treasure. But if you’d already eaten one and were full, and maybe even a bit sick, then they were worthless. Pigsy shouldn’t forget that I gave him the Violet Crumble when he was begging for it and so I’d given him treasure. Langdo, being three years older, was a kind of boy-philosopher. He was also part Chinese and could knit his brow and enter a cogitative freeze that approximated deep Oriental ruminations. We thought him wise.
Pigsy could see he was surrounded by justifications and reasons. He stripped to his shorts. We told him we’d make sure the coast was clear and would give him our secret whistle if we spotted danger. We followed him as far as our fence and squatted down there with our wooden walkie-talkies as he ran crouching across the road, holding his wooden walkie-talkie, into the Kellys’ yard. I loved to watch Pigsy running in a crouch. It almost always meant he was only minutes away from getting his arse kicked.
The truck hunkered there pinging metallically in
the sun, an upwelling of noxious fumes shimmying above it as if it was about to birth an outsized genie. Mr Kelly didn’t lock its rear, probably assuming nobody was likely to break in and rifle through tons of detritus. Rubbish wasn’t parcelled up in plastic bags then. It mingled and flowed loose and wet and gooey and rotten and sharp and broken like the whole cast of Hell in a rugby scrum.
Pigsy, once you convinced him of the virtue of a cause, was a brave kid. He swung the top half of a door open and climbed up on the step and then hoisted himself up and flopped in. Gone. A boy sunk in a black void of rubbish and bodies and fumes. I was awestruck. It was a courageous thing to do, and I knew, had I lost the argument and got the job, I would have found some way out, some excuse. I just flat out wouldn’t have done it. It was also the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen anyone do. And it made me momentarily sad that Pigsy was so easily sucked in by us – and that he was so yellow-dog dirty as to cavort in shit of this sort. The boy was snorkelling in the world’s most disgusting substances with who knew how many dead drunkards.
Langdo and I looked at each other and back at the truck. We were dumb with amazement. Amazement might be why, when Mr Kelly sauntered out of his garden gate and into his yard in his sand-coloured overalls and his sand-coloured cap, mooching and pooching his lips suggestive of an agreeable lunch, we didn’t whistle our secret whistle. Langdo whispered, ‘Shit. Old Kelly.’ I relayed the news into my wooden walkie-talkie. ‘Shit. Old Kelly.’ When Old Kelly climbed into the cab of the truck we also didn’t whistle our secret whistle. ‘Shit, Old Kelly’s in the truck,’ Langdo whispered. ‘Shit, Old Kelly’s in the truck,’ I whispered into the walkie-talkie.
He sat in there a while bobbing about, settling his nuts in his sand-coloured lap. Then he kicked the thing alive and accelerated out the gate and Pigsy’s head, wet with the juices and oozings of his murdered comrades, appeared at the back hatch of the truck with a sad expression as if to protest our lack of secret whistle. I held up my wooden walkie-talkie and looked angry and waggled it to show I’d been trying to get through to him – more or less accusing him of not having his unit turned on.
Forlorn men hung about at the Shepparton tip; veterans of wars and bad marriages and gamblers who, in another age, would have lit out for one gold rush or another. Scrounging there for cast-off pram wheels and planks of wood was akin to gold mining or fishing. It got them out of the house, killed time that needed killing, and there was always the chance of a leviathan or a nugget – a garden bench that only needed all its slats replacing, a briquette bag filled with shards of terracotta. Take these home and lay them out before your woman and see if she has the gall to accuse you of wasting your day and being a no-hoper.
They wandered there, every now and then lifting a hand and pressing a finger to a nostril and snorting a blowfly out the other nostril like a bullet. Lean individuals wearing wide-brimmed hats to keep off the sun that was distilling the rubbish to a noxious wonderment. Kicking at crap, bending to turn some promising item over, calling to one another to come and have a gander at this. And when Mr Kelly’s truck hove into view each day and pulled to a halt they gathered around it, feigning nonchalance, their hearts pounding like they were about to break the seal on a pharaoh’s tomb.
Mr Kelly was a kind of philanthropist here, at the tip, a Carnegie or a Santa. He sat in the truck, not needing to climb down, and men hurried to undo the swinging doors at its rear end, asking him how he was getting along and how was the missus. Good, he said. And good. Then he revved the engine and started the hydraulic ram and the front of the truck tray raised until the rubbish slid out its rear end making a festering hillock with no part of any murdered individual protruding anywhere from it, but a fully besmirched boy draped face down across its summit as if gripping it and claiming the whole rancid bonanza as his own.
This probably flared a territorial anger in a few of the scroungers. Here was a new player, monopolising Kelly’s largesse before they could get a look in. A couple began to call him a little arsehole and to tell him to piss off home before they gave him a kicking, which had no effect at all, him being unconscious.
But the majority of these treasure hunters stepped backwards from the new hillock into the rubbish field, mumbling ‘Jesus, Jeremy’ and ‘What the hell?’ Wondering, for the first time, what sort of man their benefactor really was.
When Mr Kelly climbed down to investigate what all the bad language was about, and why the men hadn’t fallen on his largesse, he half recognised Pigsy as a neighbourhood lad and half realised he might be all the way dead. He took off his sand-coloured cap and wrung it in his hands and said this was either an act of God or a catastrophe of the boy’s own making, but it couldn’t be sheeted home to a rubbish man going honestly about his business collecting rubbish.
Some of the scroungers agreed that it couldn’t. And some, who had never before called Mr Kelly anything but ‘Mr Kelly’ now became a pretty unanimous chorus murmuring, ‘Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy.’ Which was an accusation that must have stung.
Mr Kelly shuffled through the cans, bones and rinds to the tip-master’s hut to phone the police. The police arrived and called the ambulance and the ambulance woke Pigsy up with oxygen from what they called a ‘noxious near-asphyxiation’. Then they gave him a tetanus shot while he squealed nonsense.
But they refused to have so soiled a boy in their ambulance. They said Pigsy would defile an antiseptic environment, possibly permanently. So the police had to take him home. But they weren’t going to sit alongside a foul-smelling urchin like this either, so they laid him in the back of their paddy wagon in the manner of a Saturday-night plumber.
When the paddy wagon arrived in Quinlan Parade we were up trees silently watching, half expecting a hearse. But the fool had obviously been arrested rather than killed, which was an anticlimax, but still held some delights for us. A cop supported him as he walked inside giving off the twinned reek of detritus and criminality. Up our trees we itched for information. We began to curse Pigsy for having got a simple detective-based investigation of our own commandeered by the uniformed fuzz. If there were bodies in Kelly’s truck, the cops would find them now. Probably they’d get medals and promotions and newspaper photos. This is how sad and pointless it was to hang around with Pigsy. He could ruin almost anything.
The modus operandi of a detective might well look like idiocy to a normal citizen not versed in detective ways. Holmes was a coke-head. Poirot shuffled about in drawing rooms all day stroking duchesses’ cleavage for intel. If you didn’t know they were groundbreaking sleuths you’d have locked them up. And this is how Pigsy appeared to his parents, Myra and James Pigott, when he told them he’d been doing a grid search of Mr Kelly’s rubbish to dredge up executed drunks. An idiot, they said. He’s flipped, they assumed. Executed drunks? they asked.
Seeing their faces stretched in befuddlement and hearing their voices high in disbelief, it suddenly became apparent to Pigsy that Langdo’s theory of Mr Kelly being the leader of a hit squad that preyed on alcos was in error to a degree that made it laughable. He’d been suckered. This is how children learn – not by increment, but in enormous and unsettling waves of revelation.
Pigsy clammed up. He would give his parents no more information as to why he’d climbed into a half-full rubbish truck. The incident seemed like self-harm to all the adults around the crescent. A death wish. After it they suspected Pigsy was a kook and tracked him in their peripheral vision lest he climb into an incinerator or a car boot. I fed Mum and Dad snippets of invented kookiness about him. I found him licking Mr Sargood’s chooks. I saw him drink toilet water. He lit his farts and they burnt violet and smelt of gunplay. All of this made my own behaviour look sweet by comparison.
For the milkman, the baker, a tradesman of any kind, or a gardener, to enter Talinga Crescent was to accept a mission behind enemy lines. My brother and sisters and I knew working men by their overalls, their hair oil, their rough language when our parents weren’t around, and thei
r milquetoast deference to our parents when they were around. We didn’t rate blue-collar people highly. We were the children of a Lawyer, a professional man, and the repercussions of our bad behaviour were muted by our rank. This meant we were freer to be badder than normal children. Freer to ping yonnies off the poor. It was a freedom we took full advantage of.
Not too far from us lived the children of the Housing Commission, and black kids, shoeless kids, sore-ridden and spotted with ringworm. They enjoyed a different freedom. A freedom from responsibility. They could eat anything or nothing. They could wag school and never be hunted down. They were never going to need writing or maths, so the idea of chivvying them out of the broken homes and billabongs where they were swinging like scrawny Tarzans seemed pointless.
We didn’t have that freedom. We were going to need mathematics and writing where we were going. I resented the poor kids for having worthless lives ahead of them and thus not having to go to school or behave right. But I enjoyed our freedom to treat working folk with contempt. We were at liberty to treat blue-collar men like snot. If I shot every window out of an old house (and I did), then a scapegoat had to be rustled up and some sort of confession, no matter how blatantly counterfeit, biffed from him.
I didn’t know whether Mr James, who mowed our lawns, was simple or stoic. It is likely, in hindsight, that he simply knew his place. In the fugue and fug given off by his Victa mower, inside his cirrus of blue fumes and its waspish wail, walking back and forth in lines across our lawns, he was struck by fusillades of clods picked from garden beds. Our shorts hung low because our pockets were filled with the white gravel that covered our drive, and he was pinged by white bullets fired from our shanghais.
A shanghai was more or less a boy’s handgun. A vicious wire-framed catapult, a handle and two arms, between which were strung rubber bands knotted together into strands and attached to a leather swatch, into which I nestled the smooth white pebbles from our driveway that flew straighter than sharp-edged blue road gravel.
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