Shepparton’s ailments were barked by old Beneforte as if he were paid by Big Pharmacy to create panic and suspicion. You had no choice. You had to go and see him for medicines. There were no medical secrets in our valley with Beneforte on his soapbox working his mortar and pestle and screeching of our boils and bodily malfunctions. No lurking fevers or hidden epidemics could creep up and scald our district. They would be caught at inception and their presence broadcast as Beneforte brandished the pestle above his head. ‘Hello, young Cameron. How’s that tinea? Confined to your feet yet? Or still heading north?’
I delivered drugs on my bike in the dark after school to the homes of people wracked by coughs and beset by fevers. Others were in urgent need of rubbery prophylactics. Those pounded by coughs or standing slick with sweat in their pyjamas would thank me in fervent mumbles for the medicines I brought. The men waiting on frangers would snatch them from my hand and tell me, ‘Took your time,’ and slam the door in my face and I’d jump on the bike and pedal away before the howls could begin. Being a chemist boy I gained free jelly beans, frequent illnesses and dark dreams of priapic men.
I was also made to enrol in a judo academy and tasked with hefting fat boys gently onto spongy mats. Bidden to stand on one leg, hands cocked like cobras, while white youths gave off anecdotes of Eastern spiritualism in which scrawny old Japanese beat the shit out of foul-minded armies. The parameters of judo were overly civilised and I was constantly cautioned for punching my opponents in combat.
Tennis was essential to a rounded education. So they bought me whites and on Saturday mornings when summer was warping our world with heat I became a D-grade player for St Augustine’s alongside other clumsy kids who whaled away at thin air while lobs soared over us into the backcourt and our fathers guffawed at new idiocy.
And I was forced to join the Shepparton Chess Club. I liked chess and was a major force at it – in the chess-phobic Cameron household. I’d nag a sibling or a parent to play with me, and eventually they’d sigh and say, okay, one quick game. Whoever it was then let me win pronto so they could get back to whatever they were doing before I began hassling them to play chess. Being unbeatable at home led me to think of myself as a Spassky in utero. A grandmaster in the offing. And I still think I might have developed well, had I not run into the Chinese boy and, worse, the autistic boy so early in my dash to the top.
At the Shepparton Library on Thursday evenings effete men in cardigans and snide smiles were waging mute battles. Sitting opposite each other at small tables, one would run a forefinger across the bridge of his nose before moving a rook and lolling back in his chair like a Bond villain who’d just snapped out an evil masterstroke, caressing his own forearms in lieu of an albino cat. Chess was an egalitarian and empowering passion. Ice makers and cannery workers and Hungarians and clerks and, preposterously enough, women, were freed this one night a week to become Napoleon.
Benjamin Sheridan, a friend of our family, played here. Benjamin was an obese egotist and laughing stock in his late twenties, temping as a bus driver until the confusion about him not being a QC or an MD or the CEO of a major company was cleared up by his mum writing letters to people begging them to give him a go. He sat way back from the chess table to accommodate his obesity and smug postures.
One night, in his caftan-and-sandals stage, Benjamin leant back in his chair and put an ankle on a knee inadvertently exposing himself to his opponent, a boy who froze and was timed out. Whereupon Benjamin set about boasting of his easy victory and speculating that seeing his opening moves the boy probably realised he was totally outmatched and a goner, though he might have had the good grace to surrender by upending his king rather than freezing like a rabbit in the headlights of Benjamin’s excellence.
His next opponent that night was a dairy farmer who, when Benjamin leant back and his left ankle went to his right knee, took an elastic band from his pocket and made a slingshot between thumb and forefinger and fired the black queen up the gaping caftan where, wearing her pointy crown, she head-butted one of Benjamin’s testicles, causing him to collapse onto the carpet tiles and moan, ‘Holyfugginchrist,’ which was decoded as both a swearword and a blasphemy and cost him two dollars into the swear jar. A new code of dress was drawn up for the Chess Club that prohibited caftans and made underwear obligatory.
Benjamin’s opening gambits were strong and as his position on the board became more promising he wore the showy aura of invincibility I recognised from cartoon villains – coyotes and cats and such. His pomp was so blatantly jerrybuilt and transient, and his comeuppance so obviously nigh, that I sat and waited in delicious expectation
When his opponent announced ‘Checkmate’, which every opponent who hadn’t been defeated by the Medusa gaze of his tossil always did, Benjamin collapsed backward twenty years into childhood and pouted and grumbled and whispered, ‘Oh, jingoes. Oh … crap. Crap, crap, crapola.’ For which quadruple expletive he would be tapped on the shoulder by the club president and told, ‘Language, Benjamin … chess, not football.’ And made to pay a tithe into the swear jar. It was a lesson, watching men swell with hubris as their black knights slayed white bishops, only to be grumpily jamming coins through the slot in the lid of a swear jar ten minutes later.
Into this field of serially-usurped Napoleons steps young Anson. Never beaten. In my first few bouts, against other newcomers, I muddled through to victory, sweaty-browed and chewing my lips. Next they put me up against what was then known as a ‘Chinaman’. His name was Bernard. Name a Chinese boy anything you want, if he’s yours. But I didn’t think Bernard much of a name for one.
Chinese boys, it turned out, were being selectively bred for chess. China placed great importance on chess, in those days, and any boy child not a Candidate Master by the age of seven was euthanised and his parents told to try again. In this way they had changed the nature of the Chinese psychology until it was able to rampage heroically inside the sixty-four-square battleground just as successfully as we Aussies had changed the colour of the budgerigar blue to delight the aesthetic of the suburban retiree. Playing chess against a Chinaman, I discovered, was like sword fighting a Three-Musketeer. The whole assault was bewilderingly rapid and I could take no lesson or sense from it.
I played Bernard seven or eight times. Which didn’t take long. His chubby little hand kept snaking out for my pieces so frequently, so rapidly, in the end I didn’t know if he was taking them fairly or just snatching them at random on spec that he would have them shortly anyway. After only minutes he would quietly and solemnly say, ‘Checkmate.’ Then, a few seconds later he’d break into a grin and, much louder and several octaves higher, say ‘I do it’, with genuine surprise and delight. Always in the brief span between him saying ‘Checkmate’ and ‘I do it’, I hoped he wouldn’t say ‘I do it’. But he always did.
When I went home and told Dad I’d been whipped by a Chinaman called Bernard he fell about laughing. Next Thursday he came along to watch me get beaten. There was something hilarious to him about me being beaten by a Chinese boy. As we walked home, between bouts of laughter he chided me. ‘You’ll get him next week, Boyboy. That last game you got two of his prawns.’
‘They’re pawns.’
‘A Chinaman,’ he laughed. ‘Bernard the Chinaman.’
Chess-wise, things couldn’t get any worse than being beaten by a Chinaman. Until they did. Until Randall. Randall was a very different kid. He could neither talk to you nor look at you and pulled nervously at his fingers, ears and buttons and made strange noises while saliva ran freely from his lips. He probably went on to design rockets or carve out a biodynamic nirvana from deep scrub and grow perfect peaches. But I was scared he might do something really strange, possibly violent or disgusting, at any moment.
We knew nothing of autism. Kids in that place at that time who were mentally or behaviourally unusual were known as ‘retarded’ or ‘retards’ by those of us with no medical knowledge and not much compassion and no reason not to dump every
one who was different into the one collective category. This shy, internally focused boy came across as a lunatic to me. Potentially violent, liable to vomit or strip … hell, I didn’t know. The president of the club sat me opposite Randall and set the game clock ticking. And inside this architecture of tics and tocs a world was created in which Randall became omniscient, omnipotent, a perfect predator … God.
Dad was sitting in an armchair with The Herald up in front of his face when I got home. From this papery cul-de-sac he asked, ‘How’d you go, Boyboy?’
‘Mmm … not too good.’
‘Who did you play?’
‘The retard.’
He lowered the paper and looked at me. ‘A retarded boy beat you?’
‘The retarded boy is … He’s … You couldn’t beat the retarded boy, Dad. Nobody in this whole family could beat the retarded boy. Not even the Chinaman can beat the retarded boy.’
Dad wasn’t going to miss me being clobbered by a retarded boy. He came along the following Thursday night to watch. And if you think he enjoyed watching the Chinaman beating me, he was in seventh heaven now I was being thrashed by a boy who could neither talk nor unwrap a biscuit. He couldn’t hide his hilarity at my perturbation, anger and powerlessness. Perhaps he thought the experience was teaching me a lesson – was a form of karma, payback for my treatment of Mr Sargood.
A game would start and Randall, looking down at his own lap, would somehow see the board and the future there and be able to shape it. Defeat is always a mystery. If you knew how it happened it wouldn’t have. But clearly this kid was smarter than I was at this game by a snail-versus-Beethoven type distance.
On the walk home in the dark Dad made jokes. ‘You had him worried, Boyboy. He opened an eye during your second game. He might have even been awake for a moment.’
‘Shut up, Dad.’
It made it a little harder to consider myself evolution’s largest trophy when I was getting beaten by a Chinaman one week and a retard the next, while believing both to be inferior life forms. It took some explaining away.
These days I know more about autistic people and the Chinese than I did then, and think a lot better of them, and don’t feel bad about being beaten by either of them at anything. But back then I had a pretty low opinion of both, which meant I was doubly down on myself for being man handled by both.
I escaped from this mess by convincing myself chess was a pointless pastime for people who were either mentally sick or had undergone a program of eugenics targeted at making chess players and were thus nothing but board-game automatons who wouldn’t know how to steal, fight, vandalise or set a paling fence on fire with a magnifying glass.
‘Dad, I don’t want to go to chess anymore. I don’t like it. It’s stupid.’
‘Is that right, Boyboy? It’s not just because of Bernard and Randall?’
‘Who? No.’
Debbie looked up from the Dolly magazine she was sneering at. ‘Maybe you’d be better off playing Twister against quadriplegics. You might be a Grandmaster at that.’
I told myself that Dad taking delight in me being walloped at various activities by flawed minorities must have meant he had faith in me to be really good at something else … something important.
In 1969, while I was still amazed by coloured pencils, small-bore rifles and confectionary, mankind landed on the moon. There’d been a lot of talk leading up to the day. By men, mostly. Men with the veins on their foreheads standing proud and their voices dropped basso profundo and their hands opened flat and sweeping across the heavens beseeching us kids to rise up for a moment from our infantile bemusements and behold an epochal wonder. The Yanks, these men told us. The bloody Yanks are going to the moon.
I tried to find this as amazing as the men did. But when you’re eight it makes perfect sense to care more about a mother’s mood or the tensile strength of a new bubble gum than about a moonshot. And Black Cat bubble gum had recently been launched, so I was pretty maxed on mankind’s latest and greatest accomplishments. The Black Cat was licorice-flavoured bubble gum that stuck to your face like tar when a bubble burst, disfiguring you and making women paw and fuss over you as if you were a returned soldier.
When the day of the moon landing came they led the whole school, class by class, into the school hall, a booming room of raw wooden floorboards with a corrugated-iron roof. We sat on rows of benches pointed at a black-and-white TV in the distance high atop a spindly steel frame. It was winter but the room was hot and we couldn’t keep still, but had to poke our neighbours and whisper and eat lollies and pull the hair of the kids in front.
The whole moon thing took ages. From what I could see halfway back in the hall a sort of water tank with ears was lowered inch by inch onto an ash heap. Slowly decoding the information given off by my new seventeen-jewel Timex wristwatch I worked out this took forty-five hours. During which every third kid had to wriggle and writhe and whimper and put up their hand and yell out, ‘Please, Mrs Roberts,’ to be allowed to go to the dunny. Except the prep graders who were too dumb and just wet themselves splashily right onto the parched boards and took to bawling amid concentric rings of hilarity.
Then this Armstrong fellow – who all the boys had been pretending to be in the playground for weeks leading up to this day, and had imagined as a Marvel Comics figure, bull-muscular in a skin-tight costume – he appears in a fat suit gargling and joshing in a silly robotic voice and gamboling around as slow as a sloth in syrup. This Armstrong was no heroic figure, no Hulk, no Flash, no Green Lantern, no showman. Then he compounds the insult of his fatness and slowness by trying to talk up his dreary act, saying, ‘That’s one small step for a man. But a giant leap for a mankind.’ No way was it a giant anything. It was a small, slow step, no matter what you said about it. A sluggish descent of a small ladder. No more exciting than a home movie of a groundsman fetching a cricket ball from a roof gutter. The mood in the school hall was pretty flat. The whole day stunk of anticlimax with an aftertaste of piss.
This wasn’t the first time NASA had disappointed us. There had been other overhyped adventures in which their rockets hung in space as perfectly immobile as the plastic Spitfires and Hurricanes that hung on fishing line from my bedroom ceiling; not blowing up, not exuding pointy-eared spacemen in silvery suits holding ray guns, not crashing into Africa and setting fire to a village. NASA was always doing boring stuff like this.
As we filed from the hall we were exhausted, hungry, feeling flat about being bullshitted by our parents and teachers. ‘This was their worst show ever,’ I said to Newmo.
‘Whose worst show?’
‘NASA’s. I’m sick of them.’
‘Me too. Nothing happened.’
‘Nothing.’
‘I like Disney. With Disney, stuff happens. Rats get whacked and there’s treasure and bombs and princes and it always ends in a big ending. How did that end? Armstrong just hanging round like Humphrey Bear with a big plastic head … not saying anything … same as Humphrey Bear … a show for babies.’
‘Yeah, and they’re telling us, “It’s a triumph. It’s a triumph,” and that’s it, it’s over. And I couldn’t work out who was who. Both the Armstrong and the Buzz Ordren dressed in the same white fat suits. That’s a silly mistake, dressing everyone the same.’
‘It was shithouse.’
‘If they do it again I’m not watching.’
‘Me neither. I’m not watching any more NASA shows. They’re a waste of time. I’m going to go to sick bay and read comics and chew Black Cats if they do it again.’
‘Me too. Neil Armstrong’s a boring fart.’
‘I’m sorry I even pretended to be him.’
‘I never did.’
‘You did so.’
‘Not anymore. I’m going to be the Human Torch from now on. I wouldn’t even want to see the Torch fight Neil Armstrong. It would be sad.’
For boys the schoolyard was a seasonal war waged with marbles in summer and yo-yos in winter and occasionally
these were laid down so two boys could fight. The girls carried long elastics that they hooked around their legs making geometric mazes for other girls to hop and jump through. When that season of elastic-calisthenics came to its end they took up chalk and drew hopscotch squares on the bitumen and numbered them and hopped from square to square, writhing and clawing the air for balance, before bending to retrieve the small tokens they had thrown.
After this there would be a brief season of swap cards. These were playing cards with pictures of kittens and fairies and lakes and puppies on them and the girls bartered them to and fro among themselves, each trying to best the other and end up with the largest and most treasurable collection of puppies and pixies. Some toted collections of cards as large as bricks. Swap-card season was a rising hum of covetousness, during which each girl slowly took on a miserly, slit-eyed, hunched deportment from guarding her own stash while trying to swindle cards from her friends.
The season ended in a campus-wide rolling rut of scrag fights. Negotiations over a card with a picture of a cartoon Princess would come asunder and an origami shitstorm of swap cards would explode into the air and two girls would go for each other, both taking a hank of the other’s hair and beginning to whirl as if about to throw the hammer. ‘Ya mole.’ ‘Ya scrag.’ We would begin to chant at the top of our voices, ‘Scrag fight. Scrag fight. Scrag fight.’ Until the entire student body had gathered into a tight ring around the combatants ensuring they could neither disengage nor escape. ‘Scrag fight. Scrag fight.’ What a happy clarion. During rare wonderful combats buttons might be popped or torn away and a training bra revealed. If the fight went to ground underwear was sure to be sighted.
Friends of the fighting girls would swoop on the flotsam of swap cards, pretending to be collecting for one combatant or another. For Jenny (nine years old and currently in a headlock and being called the town bike) or Grub (again, nine, her ponytail in Jenny’s teeth and Jenny snarling through it that Grub is a slack mole). But the friends, while feigning good intentions, were usually thieves. They squirrelled the prized cards away in their pinafores – Dalmatian puppies and incorrigibly cute kittens surrounded by golden nimbus like mediaeval saints were smuggled off campus hidden in knickers and admired secretly in small rooms in the Housing Commission.
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