Our asymmetrical war on Mr James reached its furious zenith at the Battle of the Lost Lobe. The sound of the mower, and the fact he needed his job, meant it was as easy to sneak up on him as on a deaf slave. My brother Guy, riled by Mr James’ bovine tolerance of pain and insult, snuck through the grevilleas to within a car length of him and drew back his shanghai until the rubber bands thinned like string and his hands quivered with the stored power. When he released, the stone curved past Mr James’ head leaving a comet trail. He didn’t blink. And we let out a sigh of relief that this giant-killing shot had missed.
Until he turned the mower at the end of his row and started pushing back toward us and we saw part of the man’s left earlobe was gone. He always held the mower’s throttle between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to keep the engine running evenly through grass of variable thickness. As Guy fired the shot the engine might have given a slight mewl of discontent above its normal run noise as Mr James’ hand twitched with pain. But if I did hear that trifling and momentary and involuntary crescendo then that was his only reaction to the shooting off of part of his ear. He apparently didn’t feel entitled to protest at such a crime.
None of us felt good about it. We were all disappointed in Mr James. He clearly lacked dignity if we could trounce and wound him without him making a fuss that might jeopardise his dollar-an-hour gardening job. We lost the appetite for the bombardment of Mr James after he failed to lament his ear in any meaningful way. I mean, I don’t think any of us wanted to shoot his earlobe off. But what we wanted from Mr James, and what we figured he owed us, was his fury after his earlobe was shot off. We wanted him to rise up in mutiny against his lot in life, against our parents and us and his own ugly subservience. We wanted to see him kicking at our perennials in speechless rage and wanging the grass catcher through a window as smoke blew from his nostrils and explosions went off in his forehead that kinked his veins and stood his hair. We wanted him yelling through that broken window at my startled mother that this wasn’t damned Russia and he wasn’t a damned serf and she could shove her job and her little bastards up her arse.
But if the guy didn’t have enough dignity to react like a bad-tempered cartoon duck when you shot his ear off, then, quite frankly, we didn’t want him working for us … we didn’t want anything to do with that type of menial menial at all. He was the type of guy who might let you sell his molars to a dentist for a box of beer.
An hour later, when he came to collect his money from Dad at the back door, I was hiding behind the boiler watching, so I’d know what sort of repercussions to expect. He was handed a five-dollar note by my father. He left his hand outstretched with the note lying in it. Dad looked at his ear and gave a small nod. His first born was Attila the Hun. He took another five dollars from his pocket and laid it on top of the first. ‘Thanks, Mr Cameron.’ Mr James tucked the notes in the chest pocket of his bib-and-brace overalls and walked away as if the selling of a body part was a normal daily transaction, as if the James family sold parts of themselves to the Camerons on a weekly basis. Which, I suppose, they did.
Watching from behind the boiler I learnt a working man’s earlobe was worth five bucks in late-sixties rural Australia. Valuable knowledge for a boy who aimed to vivisect the proletariat.
We had endless cleaners. All of them thieves, until, later, after their dismissal, we found the thing they had stolen under a sofa or in a wardrobe in the spare room. Housemaids came and scrubbed our place and drank tea with Mum and told her to give me a Tic Toc biscuit when I’d jammed my finger in a drawer. Mrs Macarthur lasted longest. She waddled about the house as rapidly and stiffly as one of those Corn Flake horses you pulled from the pack and assembled and hung a weight off the breakfast table to make it giddy up to the edge. She had a pushy, aspirational daughter who ensnared me in a romance that ended with me becoming a pornographer and that girl’s name and vulva thoroughly blackened.
Though I was young, only six, I was an experienced lover of full grown women, having kissed many attractive, though bitter-tasting, housewives in magazines. But my first real love affair was with Mrs Macarthur’s daughter who, Dad said later, should have been put in the village stocks and pelted with fruit and anvils. The whole affair, though done in a day, had indelible aspects.
Mrs Macarthur came twice a week to clean our house and sometimes brought the heavy-limbed Suelynne, who should have been at school, but who looked so sickly that feigning illness was a cinch and her education sporadic. Suelynne was a year older than me, carelessly freckled, her face parenthesised by the ears of a cape hunting dog and her mind brimming with sufficient opinions for a pack of them. But she was brave enough to put these shortcomings aside and tell me we were in love.
Love was new to me and I was prepared to see where it led. So while her mother vacuumed our living room we slunk away to be in love alone in my father’s study. To Suelynne, who lived in a Housing Commission cottage, being in love meant sizing up all my household chattels for a future in which we married, I died, and she inherited. She was quite open about it. ‘I’m going to put in a swimming pool. You’ll probably be dead. Your mother can live in the shed. I’ll have her room. But she can’t swim in the pool.’
While I was trying to come to terms with the rotten luck of dying just before we had a pool, and the thought of Mum living in a shed, Suelynne began to fiddle with my father’s belongings, eventually picking up a bottle of black India ink that, its label boasted, was indelible.
I told her it was serious adult ink for writing laws and I wasn’t allowed to play with it and thought she probably wasn’t either, even though, I had to admit, she would one day, upon my death, own it. But my love wouldn’t listen. She sat on the floor and grunted and scowled while twisting the lid until it popped open and she dropped the bottle into her cross-legged lap and the contents gushed down between her legs, dyeing her vulva (whether indelibly or not I can’t say, as I never saw any part of her again after this day) and leaving a semi-lewd silhouette of her small bottom on my father’s study carpet that no amount of her mother’s elbow grease or apologies could shift.
Some weeks later, after he’d cooled down, Dad started referring to this silhouette as the Shroud of Suelynne, as if it were a miraculous representation of a crucified messiah instead of a potato-stamp of a naughty girl’s buttocks. I began to bring boys to the house to see it. Money changed hands. Mum bought a burnt-orange Afghan rug and laid it on the study floor covering the mark and forbade me to lift it on pain of losing my pocket money. No matter. The Shroud of Suelynne was a good little earner. I smuggled boys into the house and spruiked the wonder of her buttocks like the top-hatted impresario of a canvased freak show, before lifting the rug and revealing all.
The complete devaluation of Suelynne’s posterial profile as a curiosity took two weeks. But I made fourteen dollars in that brief season. And, yes, I now feel somewhat ashamed. There was the whiff of the pornographer about me, a boy-Hefner peddling his paramour’s parts to perverts. I can only say in my defence that the Shroud of Suelynne wasn’t explicit, it was a meagre and confusing cleavage, a mere hint filtered through underwear, which had half my clients stamping their little sandalled feet demanding a refund and calling me a fraud. This got them nowhere. I had a ‘No Refund’ policy clearly advertised with a sign that read ‘ON FERUNDS’ stuck with a drawing pin to my father’s cork board.
Suelynne was forbidden to visit our house after staining her vulva and our carpet. Of what avail a cleaning lady who scrubs all your dunnies and mops your kitchen floor sparkling clean if her daughter is all the while indelibly staining your carpets with her bottom? No. We might as well have had Mr James scattering triffid seeds behind him as he did the mowing.
There is constant blather re absence making the heart grow fonder, but I can say our love didn’t survive more than a day of Suelynne’s exile. Perhaps it was the ears of the hunting dog that made her so easy to forsake. Perhaps the blackened vulva, or the fact she had plans to exile my m
other to a shed. I don’t know. I suppose the spectral silhouette of her young behind still haunts that room in that house and is, perhaps, a mark of wonder to a new family.
I went back to kissing housewives in magazines. It seemed safer. They doted on me, no strings attached. Though, in a perverse reminder of that keen inheritor Suelynne, they always tasted sourly of ink.
Suelynne held no real fascination for me. Romantic love was not a thing I understood or craved then. But within a year my friends and I found, to our surprise, we wanted to see naked women. We knew they existed, theoretically and momentarily. And we knew each woman – Mrs Gunn, Langdo’s aunt, Miss Austin from school, Steve Meredith’s mother, my Dad’s secretary – was only ever a minute away from being a naked woman. Their daily ablutions, or a doctor, or some moment of sinful abandon, must make them naked. But we were not doctors. Nor did we know, despite endless speculations and a sneaking regard for Cinzano (having heard my Uncle Jim say, ‘That Cinzano’s a real leg opener’) the trigger for sinful abandon. Women always remained that minute, and a world, away from nakedness.
The naked woman was a rumour, a sphinx, her pointed breasts and thatched bifurcation a Chinese whisper passed from one boy to the next, causing her to undergo a panicky evolution from mermaid to Valkyrie and back.
One Saturday four of us sat in throbbing sunlight on our biggest shed roof pulling out roofing nails with a claw hammer to lay on Quinlan Parade and explode Mr Kelly’s truck tyres to get back at him for trying to kill Pigsy in his rubbish truck. Out of nowhere Pigsy admitted in a low voice, as he if were venturing something risky, that he wanted more than anything else to see Betty Rubble without her little blue dress. Barney Rubble’s wife. A wasp-waisted Flintstone character. A barefoot cartoon honey from the Stone Age, whose blue dress, come to think of it, had no visible means of support.
Langdo and Nuts Almond and I didn’t laugh at him or call him a sicko. This surprised us. We should have been assassinating him with a hail of abuse. The guy was hot for a pen-and-ink mum. But we couldn’t denounce him. Because, we realised, we were similarly afflicted. The idea sounded … sexy. But, Jesus, a cartoon housewife with a kid called Bam Bam? I was a lunatic. Suddenly, knowing Betty was naked under that blue dress, I was bewitched. In a low voice I told the boys, ‘I’d give my Malvern Star to Barney Rubble for a glimpse of her perky bazoomas.’ And they didn’t laugh. They just nodded reverently, weighing up the worth of their own bikes. Apparently we were a sick, sick crew.
What requirement a boy has for a naked woman I couldn’t say. Was some seed of need sending a shoot to the surface of our psyche, flaring momentary pangs of a future appetite? I don’t know. But we desperately wanted to see them. As mentioned, Pigsy and I often lay with torches in the dark cupboard under our stairs and kissed bra-clad housewives torn from magazines and stuck to the underside of the steps.
And now, with this Betty Rubble revelation renting our Saturday asunder, something had to be done. The four of us pooled our pocket money and came up with three dollars twenty. We sucked in Pigsy to ask Leah Houston to do a striptease for us for three-twenty. Leah was often over at our place. She was the current best friend of my sister Debbie and a venerable and voluptuous thirteen year old … tits and a sweet smile. If Pigsy’s suggestion met with outrage he’d be slapped and my mum would be told and he’d be sent home in disgrace and on his way my mum would ring his and she’d be waiting with the wooden spoon when he arrived. No downside there for Langdo, Nuts and me.
But Leah’s eyes lit up. She discussed the proposition in whispers with Debbie and they nodded and sniggered and the deal was on. She took the money and agreed to strip naked. My stomach began to flip and wonder and fear settled on me. My God. Women. Three bucks twenty.
The four of us boys perched in a tree outside Debbie’s room. We heard Shirley Bassey start up in there singing ‘Goldfinger’. Good. Good music to striptease by, we nodded at one another. When they pulled the curtain back Leah was wrapped in a sheet. This was apparently promising. ‘In a bed sheet,’ Langdo said, ‘is how one sort of strippers start off.’
She began to writhe beneath it, mugging sexy smiles at us, punctuated with little scowls as she struggled with this button or that catch. She and Debbie kept breaking from the sexy act into fits of giggles, which we found disconcerting, unprofessional. Leah’s hand would disappear beneath the bed sheet and reappear out from beneath its folds holding a piece of clothing, which she’d twirl before the window. This was more contortion than strip tease. It started to feel like a con. She produced her bra, unless Debbie had given her a spare one to hide beneath the sheet. Then she produced some knickers, which also might have been a plant, and twirled them on a finger point and slung them at the window. They sounded like a moth hitting a lamp. Then Debbie yelled through the glass that Luscious Leah was now totally naked under the sheet. Nude. Not a stitch on. And, as such, her contract was fulfilled.
They drew the curtain as we shouted robbery. In the window I saw a reflection of a nonplussed gibbon perched in a tree wearing my favourite shirt. I calculated I could have bought twenty Choo-Choo Bars with the striptease money. And, even gypped, felt right to have spent it this way.
Who do you go to when you’ve paid a neighbourhood girl to strip and the show hasn’t been as advertised and you’ve seen none of the morsels you coveted? You can’t complain to Mum. The ombudsman is a distant authority, unconcerned with frauds of teenage tit. So we hauled her bike up a tree with a rope and left it tied up there, twenty metres high. Ride that home, you fraudulent mole.
In my grandparents’ house, in Uncle Bruce’s old room, there was a poster on the wall of Marilyn Monroe lying in folds of red velvet with her breasts exposed. In the corners of vacant blocks, or down in the bush beyond the levee, we sometimes found an abandoned MAN magazine. Pastel women in soft focus with monumental breasts and, occasionally, a dark triangle as mysterious as Bermuda’s. If you look at anything long enough there comes a point where you don’t see more, you see less.
One summer night when we were sleeping in hammocks in our garden, Pigsy ran up the Mansells’ driveway and jumped up at a window and returned saying he’d seen Mrs Mansell in the shower and got a fat because of it. Pigsy was a stupendously barefaced liar. Perhaps, once, a digger sprawled at midnight in the trenches at Lone Pine had found lust blooming in his half sleep for Mrs Mansell. But that psychological phenomenon had not been possible for half a century. So if Pigsy had seen her naked it was a dubious triumph, and I’m pretty sure he’d have turned to stone, rather than got wood.
The winter I was eleven we went to the Gold Coast for a holiday. In an apartment across the street from ours, a young woman walked around naked all day in front of two men. She ironed and laughed and ate nude. The two guys didn’t pay her any mind. Seeing this I felt low. I swore I wouldn’t grow up to be a debased nihilist like that pair. I flattened my eyeballs against the glass and stayed there a week. And despite that state being beautiful one day and perfect the next, I came home pallid as a troglodyte. None of my friends believed I’d been further north than the local sewage farm.
Across the road from Talinga Crescent was bush that ran all the way to the next town, Mooroopna. It was cut through by the high-banked, muddy Goulburn River. This bush was where the blackfellas had lived. Some were still there, drunk now, frighteningly ungraceful, loud with whitefella swearwords, throwing bottles and abuse like it was their day job. Nothing like the lethal wraiths that had once drifted through the place.
The bush wasn’t as wild as when the whites arrived, but it was still a place beyond adults. Kids buried lead they’d stolen from building sites there. Poisonous snakes and covert fornications wound and unwound in the sun. Here-and-there, now-and-then, stolen cars were burnt there and their blackened carcasses became fortresses for our wars. And the scrawny bodies of abandoned dogs appeared, sporting a vestige of cuteness, before rotting away. Swagmen came and went, leaving humpies in which we’d find empty bottles and fatigued photos
of nude women. We saw a lot of Italians rutting in the bush by the levee, cries rising from their various grottos like drunks were beating spaniels with wine bottles.
We went to this bush to play. To build secret forts and make war on Nazis and to have rock fights and to take shallow drags on dizzying cigarettes. To walk about nude with our faces painted with mud and grunt in native tongues. To kill whatever we could. It was a monoculture ruled by a tribe of boys. There were no adult laws and no adult eyes and thus we became cowboys and pirates and secret agents and we saved maidens and declared love to them.
If childhood was an endless yearning to find new worlds, worlds removed from the known adult world, an active search for places beyond the control of grown-ups, then this forest was the Jupiter of the kid solar system. But there were many other places and planets. They were everywhere. Vacant blocks and abandoned houses, building sites, treetops and culverts, woodheaps and garden beds and roof valleys and dry channels. Places we could be protagonists. Places we could test the new things we’d learnt. In the private and wild places beyond adults we became condemned men and escapees and wounded soldiers, we were frequently gutshot and limped while friends applied poultices of dirt and stinging nettle.
A bike increased the world tenfold and joined all the wild places together. Throw yourself over the seat and pump your legs twenty times while standing and you were away, at speed, beyond earshot, beyond recall, a period of freedom stretching out in front and trees and fences whizzing past. Mine was a cherry-red Malvern Star and I rode it with the virtuosity of a circus chimp on a galloping pony.
A bike not only joined the wild adult-free swatches of our world, it meant you could escape any crime scene. How could an adult catch a kid on his bike? As long as you resisted the gravitational obedience to ‘Come back here’ when an outraged adult called, they either had to run after you, and with a twenty-yard start you could never be caught, or they had to chase by car. But the town was full of shortcuts and tracks where cars couldn’t go, gaps in fences and footbridges over channels and alleyways and steps and rough ground and the bush. When chased we vamoosed through secret tunnels into the geometric jungle of our neighbourhoods like pygmies through the vines.
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