Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  I crept into the Hoffmans’ backyard where Hoffy’s footy sat under the verandah in a cane chair like an egg in a nest. I poured a bottle over the footy slowly, giving it time to sponge up the piss, making it sodden, dark and rainy-day heavy to handle. An hour later when I saw Hoffy come home I went to the fence to listen. It was training night. I was behind the fence when he came outside to get his footy. ‘Hey?’ I heard him bounce it soddenly on the concrete path. Then he must have smelt it. ‘Hey? What? Urgh. Urgh. Man!’ He dropped the ball and began shouting, ‘Mum … Mum … Ohpa’s gotta go. The senile old bastard. Mum. My Sherrin.’

  We’d started with the girls’ bikes. We next went to Hoffy’s football. But then we found ourselves with another ninety bottles, and as war was declared and battle come down, we began a scorched-earth, or doused-everything, policy. Mrs Mansell’s doormat, then every doormat in the neighbourhood including, strangely, our own; Mrs Quickly’s labrador; Mr Sargood’s Torana; the business shirts that hung on the Riordans’ washing line; Mr Kelly’s golf bag; Dad’s Victa mower; Mrs Pogue’s mail; Mrs Hoffman’s tomatoes; Nanna Langdon’s verandah setting; Peter Langdon’s motorbike …

  We became meticulous. We dribbled it up the arms of chairs and down the handles of golf clubs, we coated dogs’ beds as if eradicating fleas, Peter Langdon’s Suzuki was painted top to bottom, carburettor and throttle, piston and pillion, Nana Langdon’s sun bonnet was more meticulously immersed in piss than Achilles in the Styx. It had no heel. We lay hidden in her begonias thrashing and chortling when we saw her wearing it next day in a cloud of coiling air.

  During this fluid fusillade we were astounded to discover girl wee had no odour. What type of stainless robots were my sisters? We sniffed deeply, but their piss was heartbreakingly inoffensive, worthless as a weapon of chemical warfare, and we poured it down the gully trap while shaking our heads at this final proof of the irrelevance of girls.

  Hours later, when our stockpile of piss was finally exhausted, there hung over Talinga Crescent a toilet block miasma, the smell of a dark ward, the smell of old men en masse, the smell of a black soil swamp. It remained and sharpened until rain came the following week. Adults speculated on what variety of phenomenon the neighbourhood was experiencing: the sewage system had ruptured and was venting ruined air; a plague of possums had descended; someone had covered their garden beds with chook shit; a dog lay dead and green in a corner of someone’s garden; Stuart’s Meatworks was excreting illegal nocturnal pollutants; Mr Sargood had passed on and was getting ripe. Dad went to knock on his door to check on him. ‘Hello, Graeme, would you like some eggs?’ he shouted.

  ‘You smell anything, Angus?’ Dad shouted.

  ‘Urine,’ he shouted. ‘But I always smell urine.’

  For a while I did charitable work with Mum. Raising four kids ought to have been a full and rewarding enough life for any woman. Mothering was known to be a sacred mission that fit a woman’s psychological appetites so snugly she was either left wholly contented or she was some sort of revolutionary freak who wanted to destroy democracy and God. They seldom asked for more from life than a kitchen full of kids and any one of them who did was thought greedy and self-absorbed. Suspicion greeted the few female malcontents who wanted a job, or to open a business, or who aspired to anything other than the constant applying of Band-Aids to scraped knees.

  What type of bra-burner needed to be on the town council or a golf-club committee or to open up a frock salon or see live opera in Melbourne? What was wrong with a day spent in the house and garden with a walk to the butcher and green-grocer, a round of gossip here, and then the school pick-up and a round of gossip there, followed by the loving construction of a casserole? Women didn’t know how good they had it.

  A man, hearing a woman had just opened a hair salon or bought her own car would open the side of his mouth and say, ‘Bad case of the “I wants”.’ And the men listening to this would nod stoically as if hearing another country had fallen to communism. During the sixties and seventies women were infected with a sweeping plague of the ‘I wants’, an epidemic that confused and saddened the men who sat at bars documenting its advance.

  My Mum was English. She had grown up during the Second World War amid the drone of the Luftwaffe and the wail of air-raid sirens and the red fog of brick dust and fear and the neighbours’ DNA. After the war she worked for Sir Norman Hartnell at his mirror-lined art moderne salon in London. Sir Norman was an icon of new couture and dressmaker to the stars. He had the Royal Warrant as dressmaker to the royal ladies and they would pop in whenever they needed a new frock – the Queen Mother, the Queen and, most princessly beautiful, Princess Margaret Rose.

  Mum was Princess Margaret’s body double. That is, they were the same size and shape and Mum was measured for and fitted with the Princess’ new dresses and when they were finished and Princess Margaret came in to inspect them Mum would model them for her, walking up and down and twirling and glancing coquettishly over her shoulder as if at a nude matinee idol as the Princess was wont to do. While Mum acted out being a Princess in the dresses, the real Princess Margaret lounged on a rose-tapestry divan sucking languidly on a Rothmans.

  If the Princess liked the dress she would say, ‘Yes. Norman, yes.’ Or sometimes, ‘Gorgeous. Linda, I hope I look half as good as you in the thing.’ Mum would go red and wriggle out of the dress then, and standing in her petticoat and heels help the Princess wriggle into it and zip her up.

  These dresses then appeared on the front pages of newspapers stumbling from nightclubs, perhaps with a Count’s hand on their derrière escorting the Princess from the casino at Monte Carlo in the small hours, and were, presumably, unhitched and unlaced by her infamously inappropriate beaux at one debauch or another that threatened to bring the royal family’s reign to an inglorious end. So my mum had the vicarious thrill of watching some of the great scandals of the day play out in dresses she’d been wearing the day before.

  My dad, a Shepparton boy, was over in the UK on holiday with friends. England was a rite of passage every ex-private school boy from Australia had to take. It was the only other country in the world. It was our own glorious history represented in architecture, plaques, music and high-stepping Queen’s Guards. And all of this was, happily for an Aussie, populated by a runtish, ignorant and insular people that an antipodean, with his perfect teeth and straight back and travel plans, couldn’t help but feel superior to. You were at once humbled by history and superior to the present. It was a good time to be an Australian in England.

  Mum was sharing a flat with two other girls when a mob of young Aussie blokes called around to visit and there ensued a locking of the gazes, hers and his, that unravelled life plans and leached alternative paths of all colour and bound them in a shared fate. He was an extraterritorial lawyer/sportsman with a pointed moustache. She was the double for the world’s most beautiful and dissolute Princess.

  They were married on 26 April 1953 in Findon, the village in Worthing where her parents lived. At their wedding reception on the Sussex Downs, when the reverend proposed a toast to Anzac Day the revellers hushed, not in veneration, but in confusion. What, after all, was an Anzac? And how did it deserve a day?

  Soon after, the couple embarked on the Strathaird from nearby Tilbury for Australia and docked at Station Pier in Melbourne on 18 July 1953. My mother remembers being overwhelmed by Camerons and Furphys. She and Dad spent their first night at the Windsor. No food after five o’clock in Melbourne, but my grandfather rustled up some macaroni cheese from the kitchen.

  Then a three-hour drive up a broken road through a landscape that couldn’t be understood. To Shepparton, which was about as distant from the milieu of Norman Hartwell’s haute couture as a stone orbiting the Pluto that was Melbourne is from the sun that was London. And Shepparton had an equivalent culture to that stone if you’d come from London.

  You can hear the sounds of home from a long way away for a long time after leaving if you go to a foreign enough place.
And London continued to morph into the swingingest city on the planet. Its prettiest birds began to sing an American slang after a long winter of war and penury. The place began to rebuild using foreign money and freedoms and a backbeat the Beatles stole from black America and used to make a sweet blameless love all up and down Carnaby Street where the young wore ribbons in their hair. A lot to be said for not dying in a war.

  News of this breathtaking new London being born must have left Mum with a kind of spiritual tinnitus in the cultural silence of Shepparton. Even the great joy of tying little Anson’s shoelaces couldn’t deafen her to the opening chords of ‘Please, Please Me’ or blind her to the twin-set suits of Mary Quant, to Sidney Poitier’s smile as he melted schoolgirls in To Sir with Love, or Emma Peel in her leather catsuit emancipating all women by kicking hoodlums over settees.

  My brother and sisters and I were a counter-fascination that might have got Mum through breakfast without dreaming of life in that cool Brit city of beehives and minis that she had forsaken, but not much deeper into the day than that. Shepparton was an odyssey from home and a long way from anywhere that mattered a whit.

  She first showed her discontent at having every day of her life eaten whole by insatiable and alien piccaninnies in a one-bowser town by signing up to deliver Meals on Wheels. It was a trivial rebellion against housewifely constraints, and cunningly disguised as charity. My father couldn’t, in good conscience, whisper, ‘Linda’s got the “I wants”,’ to his friends about her delivering sustenance to senior citizens. But he wrinkled his brow and rubbed his face, recognising it as a breakout of some sort.

  So, after Mum picked me up from kindergarten, we’d drive over to the red-brick hospital in the neighbouring town of Mooroopna, biggest building in my world and rumoured to be full of the diseased sucking their final breaths and whispering prayers. We’d go round the back to the kitchen to pick up the meals. In this vast industrial space of linoleum and stainless steel and rising steam and robotic stirrings and blue flames and people shouting, the air was heavy with the braided olfactory incarnations of fifty different simultaneous attempts at passable meals.

  A selection of these attempted meals was placed hot in metal containers in the back of our station wagon and Mum and I would drive back to Shepparton and begin to go among the hungry old with their wrinkly heads leaned back and their little beaks clapping open and closed as they chirped for food.

  Old people were disgusting when I was a boy. They’ve become much more palatable since. But back then, oh … The thick fug of faeces garnished with mothballs in which they were domiciled has diluted and their homes are perfumed these days by candles scented with begonia and jasmine; surgeons have tautened their epidermises making them less like eased bladders, less visually horrific; their conversation isn’t so portentous and indecipherable now; the darkness of their homes has become less the wanton dinginess of the bomb shelter, illuminated now by a bluish enfilade of cheap LEDs. It is as if a primitive and foul race has been discovered and civilised – Tierra del Fuegans captured and bathed and clothed and taught grammar; a whole country saved, brought back from a dark ethos.

  But the old were a frightening species when I was young. Rather go among the Zulu painted for battle, or the Germans on holiday. If you think I exaggerate when I write of the base lunatic squalor of the aged, then I can only say you never encountered a 1960s octogenarian gurning toothlessly at you and asking what you wanted to be when you grew up.

  A boy’s nose is a delicate, untested instrument. An olfactory lamb. A fart that might flare a rosy grin of reminiscence on a man’s face will cause a boy to reel and gag and blink in a rush of disorderly thought, and in that queasy moment his known world might be undone. Truths might be made plastic and warped permanently by this intestinal hallucinogen escaped into bright air.

  By the time your hair has greyed and your children have abandoned you and you are living in the darkening, shrinking circumstance of your evening, your nose, through the million scented explorations and indignities that have been visited upon it, will have become inured to the fog of mould spore, the faecal miasma and the myriad other grey smells of crocheting and the crypt that accompany the bent and infirm. But mine was a Romanesque virgin. So large on a small boy that people sometimes laughed at it outright. Thus the homes of the old were like a physical assault to me.

  My mother was a beautiful woman. And it puffed a boy’s chest to have a beautiful mum; so lithe among the bevy of maternal dirigibles who came to pick their kids up from school. She had high cheekbones and mod-cut hair and pretty eyes like the women who looked out of magazines while caressing fridges and boxes of self-raising flour.

  Mostly I enjoyed her beauty for its effect on men. And the most unguarded of these, the most simple-minded and vulnerable, were the pensioners to whom we delivered Meals on Wheels. Seeing my mother at the door with a steaming casserole, First War veterans would focus out of their glassy-eyed haze into pointed, libidinous reminiscence. Would suddenly hear the bugle of sexuality again and their nostrils would flare, they became confused and aghast, having thought those appetites had decamped and those urges were irretrievably lost. Old blokes, seeing Mum, mumbled nonsense and stammered and ushered us inside their squalid homes.

  There were often a great many large flies in the homes of the old, their fly-wires having fallen rattling from the window frames into the weeds in their yards. Mum had become, by necessity, professorial re Australian entomology within a year of stepping off the boat. If a certain variety of large iridescent green fly was blundering sleepily through the rooms like a gorged vulture, she would grab my arm and pull me behind her into the backwater of her skirts and tell me, ‘Wait in the car, Boyboy.’ But I would sneak around her and rush forward. Those green flies usually meant death. A venerable husk of womanhood sitting in an armchair reproachfully awaiting the steaming casserole that might have saved her, but which would now go to Mr Smith at number twenty-four. Sometimes, I fancied, these cadavers tapped their feet to reprove us. ‘Okay, Boyboy, out to the car. Now.’ But I had seen enough, I had seen death in all its inglorious untellability and would tell it at kindergarten next day to a fear-hushed circle of tots in whom I planted recurrent nightmares like rows of lettuce.

  Usually, the free-mealers weren’t dead when we arrived. And when Mum went into the kitchen to put the meal onto a plate, or do the washing up, in the dim sitting room we males would enter a conspiracy. ‘Your Mum’s a good sort, isn’t she,’ the old guy would say. ‘A real good sort.’

  ‘Yes,’ I’d agree. ‘She uses hair spray.’

  ‘Does she? My God. Does she? Good boy. Good boy.’ He might clap me on the knee as if I’d done something wonderful. Or nod at me and give me a two-fingered V for Victory sign like Churchill. It was gratifying, being praised for having a beautiful mother. It was as if I’d done something no other boy in town could.

  I sensed there was something a little off about it, though. Something a touch dirty. I didn’t really know what we were talking about, or why we were so agog at her tight skirt or thin ankles. But I detected some dark cathedral of unspoken, unspeakable veneration or yearning in these men’s whispered platitudes. I felt, at times, I should carry the meals inside by myself, making her wait outside.

  He leant toward me in his deep chair and whispered tuberculently, ‘What a … what a set of pins, eh?’

  ‘Yes. What?’

  ‘Legs.’

  ‘Orr … yes. She has nice legs.’

  ‘Horhor, as hot as a stove,’ he wheezed.

  Afterwards, outside in our Holden station wagon I broke confidence with the old bastard. ‘Mum, that old bloke was talking about your legs.’

  ‘Was he, Boyboy? That’s okay. He doesn’t see many people now. He forgets what they look like.’

  ‘He says you’re a good sort.’

  ‘That’s friendly of him.’

  ‘But … but it’s like … a copliment.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s a compliment, but
it’s not a really big compliment.’

  ‘He says it like it is. “Whoo, your mum’s a good sort,”’ I mimed his husky lust.

  Her face came down out of laughter when I copycatted the old man’s tone. ‘All right. Mrs Fitzpatrick is next. She has the apricot chicken, I think. Did you draw her a picture? Remember she wanted a picture of our house?’

  ‘“Horhor, as hot as a stove …”’ I wheezed.

  ‘Stop that.’

  On my first day at North Shepparton Primary School Mum led me into the classroom and introduced me to Miss Stoddard, who took my hand and showed me to a desk and told me I was to share it with another student. Mum then bent down and gave me a hug and told me she’d see me after school. As she walked blithely out the door I realised my childhood had ended. Our partnership was broken in that moment. I had been sold and was now the chattel of an institution.

  I felt the air go cold around me, watching her walk away. Until this moment I had had no presentiment that life had an ending – and yet here it was. Our world, the perfect workaday symbiosis of Mum and me, was over. And our love apparently hadn’t even been symbiotic. I’d needed her, but she hadn’t needed me. She went out the door without looking back. I tried to imagine tears running down her face, but giggles and glee flashed from her imaginary mouth and my first five years felt like fraud. I should have known. She had form. She’d sold three children before me into the clutches of scholarly servitude – unto this very grimy school.

  This crushing revelation of my abandonment may have coloured my view on the new companions. Or perhaps they were just ugly. I looked around at my fellow students and saw girls with runny noses, boys with grey shirts tucked hard into shorts that belonged to much bigger boys. Boys with crew cuts, and others maniacally hirsute. Some kids were smugly pink, having been brutally washed for their educational debut. Others, shoeless and in buttonless shirts, smelt sour and stray. Some few were ironed and portly, and some were all dotted about with scabs and freckles, underfed, silent and bruised. A few black kids showed flit-eyed suspicion of this room decorated with letters and numbers cut from shiny coloured paper, with the seated rows of boys and girls unnaturally silent, stilled by fear.