‘A what?’ My mother’s alarmed voice.
‘A psychiatrist.’ More silence. I imagined them shaking their heads guiltily. No. They had never had me looked at by a psychiatrist. They had neglected me. They had let this ‘joy of delinquency’ grow in me like a tumour, when they could so easily have intervened. They were off playing golf, going out to dinner, laughing with friends while this malignant thing assailed me.
I immediately recognised this as a season of forgiveness. With my parents made temporarily penitent by the news I might have some dreadful mental disease they had neither diagnosed nor acted on, and mortified that they’d punished me for mischiefs beyond my control, now was the time to come clean on a couple of outstanding crimes.
I sat on the back seat of our HD Holden station wagon as we drove home. My parents sat in the front, heavily silent. ‘Mr Kelly might be coming round to see you this afternoon.’ Dad’s eyes flashed at me in the rear view. Mum smiled sympathetically over the back of the seat at me, her ill son. ‘A mirror I was holding accidentally flashed sun in his eyes and he crashed his truck into his fence.’ She reached over and took hold of my knee and squeezed it and said, ‘Silly old goat shouldn’t be driving.’
‘What were you doing with a mirror?’ Dad asked. She looked at him darkly, aghast at his heartlessness.
‘And … we …’
‘Who’s we?’ he asked.
‘Langdo and Pigsy and me. We picked all Mrs Hoffman’s tomatoes to help her because she’s old and can’t bend down.’
‘Did she ask you to pick them?’
‘It was initiative.’
‘Initiative. Not theft.’
‘Graeme.’ She silenced him.
‘Then, we thought, well, she would probably want money more than tomatoes, so we sold them to Mrs Selvey.’
‘But Mrs Hoffman didn’t get the money,’ Dad said softly.
‘No, because Langdo and Pigsy and me were thirsty from picking the tomatoes and we thought if we bought lemonade and lollies that would freshen us up to do some jobs for Mrs Hoffman instead of giving her the money, which she probably didn’t want as much as some jobs done anyway.’
‘But you didn’t do the jobs.’
‘Well, we were going to. But when Mrs Hoffman found out about the tomatoes she shouted at Mrs Selvey she was an actress Mary after the act.’
‘Accessory after the fact.’
‘Yes. And then Mrs Selvey called her a rotten old bag and threw the tomatoes over the fence at her. So, Mrs Hoffman got them back anyway. And Langdo said no way known do we have to do jobs for that old bag now because she’s got her tomatoes back, even if they were, well, he said “rooted”. But some weren’t.’
‘Did Mrs Selvey get her money back?’
‘Remember the lemonade?’
‘And Mrs Hoffman’s tomatoes are “rooted”?’
‘She could make sauce with them. Or chutney.’
‘Chutney. And old Mrs Selvey and old Mrs Hoffman are fighting?’
‘Well … yes. Some of the tomatoes hit Mrs Hoffman when Mrs Selvey threw them back. Then they yelled at each other until Mrs Selvey got dizzy and had to go and lie down.’
‘Some tomatoes hit Mrs Hoffman? Did you help Mrs Selvey throw them back over the fence?’
‘Well … Mrs Selvey is about three hundred and she needs help to do stuff now. That idiot son of hers Peter should help her more.’ Dad scowled at this. I was quoting him.
‘You pelted Mrs Hoffman with her own stolen tomatoes …’ He was getting hotter.
But to Mum this episode was further evidence of my illness, and deeper cause for pity. ‘Graeme!’ she looked across at Dad in the most meaningful way. If he was going to persecute a sick child then he wasn’t the man she knew and loved.
‘I think they’re both coming around to see you. About the mix up,’ I mumbled.
‘Why not? One has been robbed and assaulted and the other defrauded and defamed. Why wouldn’t widows seek legal advice about that?’
‘Graeme!’ Mum massaged my knee and smiled sadly at me. The world was an unspeakably cruel place if the escapades of feuding hags could be blamed on a mentally ill child. I moved away along the bench seat. None of her wan ministerings could ease the trauma of being me.
Mr Schatz, that hateful zeppelin caroming around his school in slo-mo and a waistcoat, was right. The moment I overheard him question my sanity I recognised in his words a new scam to be worked on the adult world. My eyes widened at the beauty of the dodge. I can hornswoggle the town with this sick-in-the-head shtick for a year at least. Man, I’ll limp, gurgle and drool like a boy brought up by dysfunctional wolves. The town will cry for me and set up charities for me while I struggle along under the hump of my feigned illness.
But Schatzy knew better than me. I didn’t have it under control. Mine wasn’t a normal reaction to serious allegations of mental abnormality. The reaction itself suggests he was right. It wasn’t a con. My boyhood was defined by lurid and fantastical delusions that enticed me beyond boyish hijinks into criminality, politics and totalitarianism. I had an imagination that constantly overwhelmed reality. I couldn’t believe in my fellow townsfolk as important or real. I couldn’t get beyond a deep suspicion that life, the world, the town, the red-faced authoritarians who bent low to offer me advice, the pear-shaped ladies who gave me apricot slice and encouragement, they were all players in a farce. It was all a one-leg-in-the-air pantomime and none of it mattered. Life was plainly a joke the exact size and duration of life, and once the laughter stopped, well, that was death. Death was the end of the joke. Early, I realised everyone else thought this world and life was a serious place. But they were nuts.
Mr Sargood was as deaf as a post. A big old man in a sweat-stained fedora and a white shirt yellowing at the armpits with its sleeves rolled and his pants hitched to his tits and held aloft by braces. He would get into his Torana in the morning and put it in reverse and rev it like goading a Rottweiler, unable to hear its screaming engine. Dad would mutter, ‘I’m telling you, if he slips the clutch he’ll go straight through our house. Come out of the street, kids.’
He lived alone, all his family and friends and indeed everyone he ever knew or loved was dead of old age centuries ago. A last citizen of Ancient Rome or Dickens’ London, doomed to live on after all his world had perished beneath the sod. A man to wonder at and weave stories around and drape in dark juvenile rumours. He had made a pact with the devil. He had hidden beneath the bodies of dead women when Nazis were scouring his village to finish off survivors; the barking of their Mausers as they butchered the women had made him deaf. He had been the first white man in the Shepparton district and had fathered an entire half-white tribe that was genetically susceptible to exotic influenzas and died out in some dago epidemic started by Italians through their crazy use of garlic. The dying sighs of his caramel-coloured tribe had turned his ears to stone and made them useless evermore. He was all these things, this lonely old man.
But he was disarmingly friendly for a neighbourhood spook. This friendliness continually doused and confounded our red fictions. When you met him he smiled and boomed hello as if to the man in the moon. He’d never learnt to lip-read, so he took your side of the conversation on faith with a grin and a set of nods and shouted at you about the beautiful day or the crisp morning and offered you free eggs from his chooks. And he knew you were agreeing with him about the morning’s crispness and the day’s beauty, and yes, you would come around and get the eggs tomorrow morning – though you never did. That’s the way conversations went with Mr Sargood. He shouted stuff at you and then nodded and smiled, because in his silent happy world there long ago ceased to be disagreements. But I wasn’t going to let an old man get away with that.
Having a deaf neighbour was as cool as owning a monkey or a corpse. It was a thing boys wanted to see, and gave me the ability to bestow favours, to take my friends on a tour of the halt and the handicapped. Using Mr Sargood, I made myself a curator of human curio
sities. I became a P. T. Barnum to rival Daryl Scott, a boy in the Commission who owned a carpet snake with two heads. Kids would point me out, ‘He has a deaf neighbour. Some old giant who couldn’t hear a cannon if you fired it in his kitchen.’
Langdo and Pigsy and I had worked out early that conversations with a deaf adult allowed you a creative freedom and an outrageous opportunity for transgression that normal conversations did not. And it turned out I was better at this than either of them. I could ad lib humour and insult into a dialogue with this smiling deaf man that would make my friends flinch and have them choking back eruptions of mirth.
I loved to show off my conversational dexterity, and would cross the road to speak with Mr Sargood if I had friends in tow. And, deafness being an invisible disability, my friends would be spellbound with my brutal use of this towering, seemingly flawless, adult.
‘Hello, young Cameron. Are you going all right?’ he would shout, smiling and nodding.
I’d smile back at him as if my heart was a second sun built to manufacture bright days for geriatrics. And I’d shout, ‘Well, yes, Mr Sargood. Going all right apart from silly old fuckers who smell like shit keep asking me dumb questions. You haven’t seen any of them around, have you?’
‘Would you lads like some fresh eggs? My pullets are laying,’ he’d boom.
‘Why, oh why, would we accept eggs from a dreadful fatty who smells like a retriever?’ Not everyone can shout such a thing while smiling as if platitudes are blooming on his tongue. I could.
‘All right, then,’ he’d shout, smiling as if the deal were done. ‘I’ll leave a bag with two dozen on the back porch.’
‘You’ll be wearing the bastards if you do,’ I blazed my teeth at him and waved.
School friends and semi-friends and, eventually, kids who didn’t know me at all would come round to the crescent to see this David and Goliath show first hand. Sometimes I had a posse of a half-dozen admirers as I insulted the old fellow.
At first, as the shouted conversation began, boys who were new to this theatre would go stiff with fear and begin to cast about for hedges, low fences and other escape routes. No one could speak to an adult this way. They looked at me like I was the type of screw-loose fool to call down a shitstorm from on high. Watching their disbelief, their beamed astonishment, their fear, a wave of physical pleasure passed from my stomach to my scrotum as if I’d jumped off a cliff.
I was protective of Mr Sargood, as one might be of a rare beetle. I didn’t want to share, and when other kids muscled in on the act I quickly cut them out. Mr Sargood and I were shouting at each other one day. I hadn’t got too abusive yet, was just limbering up, booming meteorological facts, about to surprise my cohort of newcomers by asking him if his nuts had been blown off in the First World War, when Lawrence Abdul, an unwashed kid from the Commission who’d come to the crescent to witness the phenomenon of the deaf man, stepped up to Mr Sargood as if he was mentally shrivelled to idiocy and shouted up into his face, ‘You stupid old cunt.’ It sounded dirty and mean – really wrong. And he’d said it with anger in his face, beaming disgust at the old man. Mr Sargood smiled unsurely at him.
I grabbed Lawrence by the arm and spun him toward me. ‘Hey. You don’t yell stuff. He can read some people’s lips. He can read “cunt”. Anybody can read “cunt”.’
‘Then he must be one. Because he didn’t say he wasn’t.’
‘Fuck off. Get out of the crescent now or I’ll get Guy.’
Boys my age longed to see Guy from a distance, but no one wanted to meet him face-to-face; the mythical absentee big brother, gun owner and explosives expert who had left a dozen boys to drown in the floods. Lawrence wandered away slowly while Mr Sargood looked doubtfully after him.
I should have stopped then. Having been shown by Lawrence Abdul what I was, I should have just stopped, and let my sad use of that old man become a secret shrinking shame. But the lure of the footlights is strong. The stage and the adoration of a group of callous boys called. Just one more performance and I would put the act away forever.
It was Saturday and thunderstorms were skirting the town, lightning strobing a bruised sky. Stephen Newman had come to my place to play. Newmo was the first kid I ever talked about books with. We swapped our favourites. The Boy’s Own Annual, the Three Investigators, the Secret Seven – he seemed the only other kid in town who had discovered these worlds. It was like we were mediums, people with a rare and special gift for communicating with the unliving in all their limitless fictional glory.
Pigsy was over, as usual. The three of us climbed the lilly pilly and picked a bucket full of berries and were taking turns to stomp them barefoot to make wine. The juice was purple and the berries felt like panicking tadpoles between our toes.
Across the road Mr Sargood came out of his house and into his front garden, staring at the sky, at the lightning. ‘Go on,’ Pigsy said. ‘Show Newmo.’
I jumped over our low brick fence and crossed the road and swaggered halfway up Mr Sargood’s drive with my feet stained purple and my hands in my pockets. The other boys trailed a few paces behind, Newmo edgy in the presence of this fabled freak with the thousand rumours coiling about him making every awfulness likely.
‘Be a big rain before long, young Cameron.’ Mr Sargood shouted.
‘Build an ark, you old goat,’ I shouted back. ‘You and a few wrinkly old grannies can float away in a love boat.’
‘Ha ha … your feet are purple.’
‘Which would make your arse purple if I kicked it forty times.’
Behind me Newmo was big eyed at this exchange, on his toes, ready to go. Kids didn’t speak to men like this without a blitzkrieg of adult vengeance. Pigsy was grinning happy fear like a boy on a Tarzan swing. Behind them, standing in our yard beneath the lilly pilly with his hands on his hips, was my dad. The four-ball competition had been called off because of the lightning, so Dad had come home from golf early and, hearing shouting, had wandered around to the side of the house and found me misusing Mr Sargood.
I turned and saw him there, wearing the sporty mustard coloured slacks and paisley knit of a man dressed for victory. He and his partner, Lucky Simson, were both fine golfers and had won the four-ball championship that year. But the look on his face was at odds with his sartorial gaiety. A sort of blank enmity I had never seen before. He’d become a stranger. I’ve done this to Dad, I realised. I’ve done this.
‘Come here right now.’ His words were slow and his voice strained. ‘Newmo, Pigsy … get out of here.’
The thick ear only hurt for what it told me about Dad’s anger and my behaviour. He rarely resorted to corporal punishment. I had done something that had made him, for a few moments, someone else, someone worse, one of those angry, humourless fathers, ground down by life, one of those fathers from the Commission. I had turned him into one of those mythically low men. And I knew I had turned him into that by suddenly revealing myself as a far lesser boy than he had thought me. It seemed to me I had broken his heart.
As I lay in bed, early, banished, with remorse thrust upon me, but no less real for that, I wondered if Mr Sargood knew of my cynical use of him. Was he really so lost in his deafness? Maybe the way I treated him was how the world treated people with a weakness. Maybe he’d come to accept abuse as his due years ago. Was he always deaf? Had he come to expect no better, from strangers, neighbours, kids? Was he the butt of everyone’s jokes from such an early age he had come to find cruelty banal … except at night, in his bed, just a hundred yards from me now, where he wept loudly and wide-eyed at his ceiling.
For some time that night I tried to hate old Mr Sargood in order to make my use of him acceptable. To get that vision of him crying in his bed out of my mind. But when I thought about him honestly I had to admit I liked him. I was invisible to many adults – but never to him. And he seemed to like me, always told jokes he thought we could both laugh at, though only he ever did. Maybe he was a friend … of mine.
Yet I’d made him
a famous sideshow that attracted boys from right across town. Lying in bed that night as the wagtails nickered and the sprinklers ticked their watery second hand around themselves, I realised I was the type of person who would cause pain to a friend if the pay-off was right.
Okay, I said to myself, I will be very careful not to sell my friends anymore. Nothing will make me corrupt the sacred bonds of friendship from now on. I will maintain a code, like a knight does. I will become honourable. No price is high enough to sell a friend. Certainly not laughter. I crossed my fingers, I crossed my legs and my toes and made a pact with future friends. I tried to believe all of this, that night, with my ear hot and swollen. But even so young I knew what bounty the world offered traitors, and that I would be bought again.
For my misuse of Mr Sargood Dad forced upon me a number of self-improving activities. I was found a job as a chemist boy. Mr Beneforte, the pharmacist, stood at a raised counter at the back of his shop wearing a white coat grinding powders and stirring slurries to make potions and elixirs that fended off death, or fear of it, in the townsfolk.
A new mother might come in pushing a pram, hiding a prescription in her palm. ‘Ahh …’ Beneforte would shout from his vantage, ‘Morning, Mrs Johnson. Don’t tell me why you’re here. I can see by the way you’re hobbling the eucalypt salve didn’t do the trick. Piles are a bugger to get on top of … ha ha. A pain in the bum, we might say. Ha ha.’ Beautiful young Mrs Johnson would hunch and wince to have the travails of her anus broadcast and make damping motions with her hands before abandoning the babe and ducking red faced behind the shampoo spinner. ‘Come out, Mrs Johnson. Show me your script. What liniment has Doctor Ferguson prescribed for your ravaged sphincter now?’
Boyhoodlum Page 11
