The two girls who got into a scrag fight would be robbed blind while they fought. The friends of each would accuse the friends of the other of stealing all the cards that had been lost. This could lead to new scrag fights. Swap cards erupting into the blue sky like geysers as a contagion of violence and a redistribution of wealth swept the schoolyard. A Siamese kitten fetchingly tangled in pink ribbon might change hands half-a-dozen times in a day, leaving a trail of bedraggled and bruised girls pouting in its wake.
The girls at North Shepp, like the boys, had an established ranking as fighters. Cherry Baker was the best in the school. Followed by Julie Britain, who could punch like a boy, and then Debbie Carlos, who had nails like an aardvark. But these were unusual girls with a rare gift for combat. Scrag fights were designed for stalemate, pinching, hair-pulling, face-slapping affairs in which no decisive blow was ever landed. They would go on with the girls getting closer and closer, almost becoming one, until they were locked together in a hyperventilating confusion, their insults become winded whispers, ‘Fkn mo …’ ‘Fkn scra …’
The fight would be ended by a teacher bursting through the chanting ring of students and taking hold of the exhausted girls and pulling them apart and demanding to know what on earth was going on. Our teachers always appeared astounded by girls at fisticuffs, though they broke up scrag fights as a matter of routine. When they were asked what on earth was going on one girl usually burst into tears and the other, a Scott, or a Knight, or a Baker, would reply, ‘Mole was askin’ for it.’ A mole was always asking for it, if you were a Scott, or a Knight, or a Baker.
Fighting was infectious. When a fight ended it left residual aggression in the air, which would be inhaled by hair-trigger types. The hair on our backs was up. Boys with grudges would call out other boys. Boys who wanted to climb the ladder of toughness would front boys above them on that ladder and put out their chin and ask, ‘You wanna go?’
The other boy would ask, ‘You pickin’?’
‘Yeah, I’m pickin’.’
‘I’ll job ya.’
‘You couldn’t job me sister.’ And the fight would begin. We had twenty-nine fully-fledged rumbles in one day via this martial infection. I was involved in two. The first was with Phillip Marshall, who I picked. This began as a good and graceful fight for me. Mainly because he was too scared of me to punch me back. Once I cottoned on to his catatonia I danced around him punching him in the face with jabs and hooks, an uppercut to the guts, putting together three-punch combinations while my friends urged me on. But after a while I gave up, not feeling too good about his lack of response and the fact he was crying as I punched him.
Half-an-hour later Johnnie Dale picked me. He shouldn’t have done it. He had no right to. He didn’t have the rank to call me out, and I was pretty angry about it. Unspoken rules of station said you couldn’t just pick anyone. What was he thinking? He was a year younger than me and much smaller. But he was a blackfella. And I hadn’t met one who couldn’t blue.
Fighting was serious, stomach-churning stuff. You didn’t do it lightly. You could get your nose broken or eye blackened. But, far worse, your whole carefully earnt and nurtured status could be ruined by defeat at the hands of a lesser boy. Great social demotion could come from losing a fight. But blackfellas fought with laughter in their eyes as if it was the least earnest part of their day. It was just another type of game, and they’d learnt it earlier and more fully than we had.
A chanting ring of boys formed. Rumble, rumble, rumble. I hoped this chant might bring a teacher before something went seriously wrong. Before I took a blow I couldn’t talk my way out of.
The first thing every fighter learns is that to throw a punch is to open yourself to a punch. So most fights start with an arm’s-length pas de deux and each fighter taunting the other, ‘Come on. Have a go. What’s up with you?’ The ring of spectators, getting tighter, baying, blood high as Coliseum clientele, begins to taunt both fighters. ‘Get into it, you weak pricks.’ ‘Come on, Camo. Knock the little mongrel out.’ ‘Flatten ’im, Johnnie.’ Until someone becomes bored and shoves one or the other fighter in the back and sends him reeling toward his opponent.
Someone shoved me. And as I lurched forward I dropped my hands, opened my arms for balance, and Johnnie Dale must have seen my head served up like a Christmas turkey on a silver salver. He punched me in the mouth with a crisp left hand. I saw stars and went deaf and I grabbed at him so I didn’t fall and we went Greco-Roman for a few moments as I hung on until the world stopped yawing and pitching and the baying of the spectators came back to me. I slipped an arm up around his neck and got him in a headlock and dropped to ground, leaning forward as I did so to wham his face into the bitumen.
From there the fight degenerated into a wrestle with me slowly choking Johnnie. But choking had no value as a spectacle, so boys kindly stepped in and pulled us apart and stood us facing each other so we could punch each other again. My mouth was full of blood, so I was comforted to see Johnnie had gravel embedded in his forehead and skin off his nose. Blood would count for much when the story of the fight was told.
Over the next few minutes, and each minute is a deep cul-de-sac filled with demons when you’re fighting, Johnnie and I stood facing each other, fists high as our eyes and resting on our cheekbones, ribs flaring for breath, punching each other when we could. But the dream of precision as witnessed on TV Ringside, the dream of consecutive blows landed from opposing angles, of dancing combinations, that glorious vision of being able to taunt a defeated but still standing opponent like Ali did, that dream was gone.
We both wanted a way out. I could see it in his eyes and I knew he could see it in mine. But there was no way out. We were exhausted and our moves had become a clumsy mime of combat. Single, looping, heavy-armed punches easily blocked, then a grapple and a shove. The connoisseurs watching knew all hope of an entertaining Armageddon had ebbed from the fight, there was no chance now of a knockout, no chance of an upending or a surrender, no big result coming. The event had tailed off, like they mostly did.
The bell for class rang and boys began to drift away. Johnnie and I fought on, with a couple of close friends watching. All were disappointed their man hadn’t jobbed the other outright. They were hardly even barracking now.
It ended when some spectator, one of his fans or mine, tired of watching our docile hostilities, and looking around at the deserted schoolyard and knowing we’d all be in trouble for being late to class, asked, ‘Are you guys done?’
‘Maybe,’ I gasped.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Johnnie said.
‘Yeah, then. If he is,’ I figured.
‘Okay, yeah, if he says so,’ he agreed.
We stood there staring at each other sucking air and running ideas through our heads to work out what this grey status quo meant. Most fights between boys don’t have a clear winner. The lust for annihilation is rarely fulfilled. A fight is the physical version of a quiz, a series of rapid-fire questions barked with the clock ticking and you firing back clumsy answers you conjured in a moment. The answers are never right. To have the right answers would be choreography, or adulthood.
Boy fights end in confusion. And a skilful storyteller can take this confusion, these unnarrated moments, and shape them into a tale of personal victory. Boy history doesn’t belong to the victor. It belongs to whichever liar is quick enough to write it before counter truths take wing.
And that’s how I beat Johnnie Dale to a pulp. By lying well enough about the fight in its aftermath; fibbing into the dust and hyperventilation, until my lies became the thing itself.
I looked at Johnnie’s bleeding forehead. ‘You better get that gravel scrubbed out. It’s bitumen. Bitumen’s got gangrene.’
‘Bullshit. What grangene is, anyway?’
‘Gangrene’s poison. It rots you. You can even smell the stink of yourself. My brother had it and he stunk like a polecat. He nearly died.’
‘Only a bit of bark off.’ Johnnie touched his foreh
ead and looked at his bloody fingertips. He was starting to look worried. ‘Ain’t nothing, eh.’
‘Well … okay. But if you wind up in hospital you tell ’em you did it falling off a monkey bar or a bike. I don’t want to be blamed. I don’t want to go to jail.’
‘Blamed? Jail what for?’
‘Gangrene. For whatever might …’
‘I could go the sick bay … If I want.’ His nonchalance sounded brittle. ‘Might not, too.’ He spat drily. ‘Graangeene,’ he mocked the disease and laughed. ‘Fuck graangeene, eh.’
But Johnnie’s mates could see adventure in a visit to the sick bay with a gangrenous friend. ‘Come on, Johnnie. Don’t be a idiot. Let the sister get on that gangrene.’
‘You don’t wanna rot, Johnnie. ’N’ stink like a polecat. Or any cat either.’
‘Come on, Johnnie. I smell something bad.’
Johnnie sniffed, shook his head and tried to smile. But he’d smelt something bad too, something festering on the backlot of his imagination that made his smile collapse. He and his mates walked away and before they’d gone twenty steps each had taken one of his elbows, promoted themselves to medics in the service of a diseased comrade. Johnnie suddenly felt the importance of his role, gangrenous and giving off a deathly reek as he was. His head sank down and he began to shuffle as though he might keel over at any step. Psychosomatic gangrene was spreading through his tiny frame.
The fact my stomp-arse, iron-fisted fighting skills had sent Johnnie Dale to the sick bay made me a clear winner of the fight. Even boys who had been part of the ring of spectators yelling rumble ad almost infinitum and had seen that the fight was no better than a draw for me started telling the tale of how I’d sent Johnnie Dale to the sick bay with either gangrene or grangene, depending who you listened to, and saying it was a blessing for me the kid didn’t die because I’d have been sent to Turana Boys Home with the school-burners and the other killers. I was a budding propagandist, and the Johnnie Dale fight, and his near death of gangrene, was a great lesson to me. I lost no status from fighting Johnnie Dale to an inglorious draw, though he was younger and smaller.
At sick bay the sister laughed at Johnnie and washed his forehead and told him to go to class. So he naturally enough snuck out of school and went down to the Raymond West Pool to swim while a rumour I started ran through the students at North Shepp that Johnnie’s body had been smuggled out of the school and was lying right now on a slab with his family around it squealing and moaning and pointing the bone at me.
Summer was ending and the first footballs were out. During afternoon recess we played kick-to-kick, a recreation where two packs of boys kicked a football to each other and tried to take speccies and then wrestled for the crumbs until someone had legitimate possession of it and could kick it back to the other pack so they could fight over it in their turn. Some kids would ‘wax’, which meant forming a partnership with another kid and taking alternate kicks when they won the ball. When waxing it was wise to choose a partner better than yourself. Not hard for me. We scragged each other and pulled each other by the shirts so everyone lost buttons and felt grand as soldiers with our gaping, ruined clothes. Each pack smelt of sweaty, unwashed boys.
Being no good at footy, and not getting many kicks on my own, I usually chose a good partner to wax with and kept up a loud smart-arse commentary that made me seem an integral part of the combat.
But this afternoon I had an excuse for my ineptitude. Every time I was beaten for the ball I groaned a small groan that I hoped sounded like a brave suppression of a much larger groan, and I took a few wobbly steps so all the boys knew I was under attack by blackfella magic. The bone had been pointed, but I was soldiering on, weighed down by the voodoo but still determined to live my life, still smiling, clamping down on the involuntary groans.
Strangely, before long I was taking mark after mark. Space cleared for me as other, stronger boys fell away. My judgement was perfect. For a change no other boy was at the fall of the ball before me. I was suddenly faster than everyone else and could cut through the pack with a swallow’s fast broken flight. Baulking, taunting other boys, showing them the ball before kicking it away. I had become a champion. ‘Cameron takes another speccie! How good is this young Shepparton lad?’ I began to commentate my success.
If you asked these boys about the power of blackfella magic they would have scoffed and laughed. But that afternoon no one wanted to risk getting too close to me. The bone had been pointed. (Well … it hadn’t. But I’d told them it had.) And while they didn’t believe in curses and bone-pointing, they all stood back and gave me space in case lightning came from the blue sky, gripping me and shaking me back and forth in a vast wattage and x-raying me transparent, my skeleton blinking neon as the skeleton of a cartoon cat with its claw in a socket, then dropping me black and smoking to the earth. When I realised why I had all this space, that the other boys expected I’d be exploded by Dreamtime death-weapons momentarily, I began to feel frightened too. And I knew Johnnie Dale had gone swimming.
My world was way bigger than the world of any other kid I knew because I was a bookworm. Guy and Debbie and Vicki continually told me I was a bookworm and not only would I be blind before I was ten, I would deserve my blindness. If you were going to go reading books all the time you deserved the bubonic plague and a foot in the arse, besides.
I read when other kids played footy. I read when other kids watched TV. I read when other kids slept. And I read when they went to Sunday school and boy scouts. I read in bed until my eyes ached. Then I read illegally under the sheets with a torch until books bled into my dreams.
This was the edge I had on almost all the other kids; I came to school equipped with gangrene. And mustard gas, and time travel, and sarcasm, and a sense of honour, and sacrifice and nobility. I could mimic the sounds of Madame la Guillotine at seven. And came to school knowing Lew Wetzel had finally seen Wingenund through the sights of his rifle but, most wondrously, let him live. Through Rikki-Tikki-Tavi I knew how a mongoose waged a cold war on a cobra. As well, having read of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree’s troubles, I knew mothers had to be watched – if you scratched the surface they were wanton, and given a chance would get coked to the gills and wander away into a life of sin and dancing, never to be heard of again. I came to school with visions of the Geebung Boys and the Cuff and Collar Team playing to an honourable draw/death, and the Drover’s Wife gazing long at the shimmering horizon in her infinite loneliness. I had heard Stonewall Jackson shout at his troops – when they were heckled by Barbara Fritchie – ‘Who touches a hair on yon grey head dies like a dog. March on.’ I shouted that line around town at various old people who looked back at me with lopsided grins, shaking their yon grey heads while my chest swelled with munificence.
Other kids’ minds weren’t coloured by these tremendous events and rousing stories. Their families had neither money nor use for books and they were suspicious of them. They turned up at school in the morning with the work-day curses of blue-collar fathers ringing in their ears and no idea that Tom Sawyer had suckered his friends into painting a fence by telling them they couldn’t. I came to school armed with the many worlds and ways that bloomed in books. I had galaxies and heroes in my head. Ideas and alibis plagiarised from masters, famous plots and surprise endings lifted from classics, I knew how to die properly, and could live in a palace, among its protocols and plots, at a moment’s notice if required. Having read so many stories that no one else had read made me seem wise, full of new ideas and brilliant schemes.
Reading not only gave me the many worlds contained in books, because famously and easily it does that, it also gave my thinking the impetus of narrative. I began to think in stories. An understanding grew invisibly in me that life’s moments and events fitted into a continuum, were linked, were related and interactive, and every now and then some Rosetta Stone moment remembered from a book led to the translation of life as it was happening now – it gave me the inside
running on the day’s events and the family’s troubles. It made me, relatively, wise.
I was a bookworm. A bookworm, hooked on the gobsmackingly multifarious life found in books. A boy as addicted to Princes and Lost Girls and Wounded Soldiers and intercontinentally faithful Labradors as Darwin was to his beetles and his finches. And a bookworm, in a village of the avowedly anti-literate, is as powerful as Jehovah. A bookworm has superfluous worlds at his inky little fingertips and is omniscient compared to the boys and girls who do not read and are thus imprisoned in the few adjacent streets and joys and fears of childhood. So I had advantages.
When very young it was my habit to try and sort out the many mysteries each day threw up by tapping Guy’s knowledge of the world as we lay in bed at night. If I was five he was twelve. If I was six he was thirteen. I couldn’t seem to catch him. And this enormous gulf naturally meant he was Hercules and Davy Crockett to me. He was a posse of wild enthusiasms that frequently needed reining in by parents and police. An owner of many deadly firearms and traps and bayonets and knives and clubs and poisons and theories. He owned all the country between boyhood and manhood that, to a young boy, is a region much more exciting and heroic than the land where a fully adult man lives tamed and sensible. And he was mine, a fact I constantly lorded over my friends. I have a cowboy big brother likely to burn your shed down or blow a hole in your fence if I give him the nod.
But, like almost anyone, when you flattered him by assuming he had wisdom he got stuck being wise and couldn’t be anything else even if he couldn’t be wise. He began to puff up and pontificate and lay it on like he was Solomon himself. He hid a lot of ignorance that way. And he hid most of it behind the phrase, ‘That all depends.’
Boyhoodlum Page 13
