Once Matchbox cars lost their allure there were the cases of knives and guns and hunting bows and fishing gear. Sometimes Mum would leave me with my nose pressed to the glass of the knife cabinet while she went shopping. Like tying a terrier to a parking meter, she knew I would be there when she got back. You could track the greasy wanderings of my nose tip across the scratched glass countertop and know which knives I coveted most.
The nationalities and characters of the knives made the knife cabinet a geopolitical theatre. It was filled with villains and heroes, dark racial stereotypes and clean-lined saviours. All covetable in their own way. The folding Pumas with their Germanic geometries, the rustic English Barlows with handles of horn and antler, the futuristic American Gerbers made of hard steels and covered with space-age materials, sheath knives such as Tarzan wore, and Bowies large enough to kill grizzlies that made me lament Shepparton’s lack of dangerous giants.
I often bought knives. But it wasn’t easy. It was an excruciating deliberation. Only one could be mine, and to choose one was to unchoose ten others I wanted badly. Bunger Halpin, once I told him I was here to buy a knife, would go about his business, knowing I would prevaricate until right on closing time at midday, when he would say to me, ‘Very well, young Cameron, come back on Monday. I’m closing up.’ And I’d grimace and thrust my finger at a knife. ‘I want the Puma Cadet with the green handle.’ Every beautiful knife I ever owned, every killing trinket, was haunted by the ghosts of all those knives I rejected to own it.
One Saturday morning I ogled Bunger’s knives so long and got home so late Mum burst into tears as I walked in. She’d thought me kidnapped, run over and drowned.
Next stop was Darveniza’s Newsagency, where fresh editions of Archie and Donald Duck and Phantom comics had to be handled and considered. Mr Darveniza knew me as an undecided shopper. ‘Are you buying that? This isn’t a library.’ And the half-understood college humour of Mad magazine, which always left me feeling empowered and enriched by the half I got, and ripped off by the half I didn’t.
Then, and I would break away from the friends for this, Every’s Bookshop. Right next to Bunger Halpin’s Sports Store in Fryers Street. Shepparton wasn’t awash with bookworms then and a bibliophile in baggy shorts blowing fist-sized pink bubbles of Bellboy gum was a rarity. So they treated me kindly in Every’s. I think they thought me a boy who, like the boy bibliophiles in books, was outcast from his generation and seeking comfort in fictional worlds.
In here was the ecclesiastical hush that accompanied reading, the vow of silence taken with each book, a sly whispering that suggested reading’s secret getaway, the deft slip from this world into distant, compelling realms.
I knew Mum and Dad wouldn’t object to expenditure on books, as they did when I splashed ridiculous gouts of cash on lollies, knives, fish and chips, arrows, ammunition and incense. I understood books were exempt from fiscal logic because they had a long-term unknowable but undeniable pay-off. You became a better boy if you read. And somewhere down the line when I became a lawyer or school principal or scientist, Mum and Dad could nod wisely about their policy of letting me go hog wild in Every’s. It’s also likely they recognised my every other enthusiasm was so venal, so wrong, so immoral, so likely to lead to jail or ruin, that they promoted my love of books in the manner believers cascade Bibles onto natives and infidels – to save them from Hell.
Anyway, I played havoc in this financial free state. We had an account in Every’s Bookshop. We had accounts all over town and Guy was given to buying rope, lengths of chain, guns, and, once, a racehorse, by telling the sellers to put it on the account. The racehorse went back, Dad yelling down the phone, ‘What type of moron sells a thoroughbred on credit to a clearly unstable boy of fourteen?’
I didn’t often put things on the account. But I did in Every’s. I had no idea what an account was apart from it meant I could sign for books rather than pay for them. I had a vague idea we were getting stuff free because we were Camerons. A sort of tribute paid to a sort of nobility. And, despite having no signature, I signed a showy splash of gobbledygook in front of shoppers who looked on in awe as if I was an antipodean Onassis, the type of gilded individual who could buy sports cars using just his face as capital.
Being the youngest of four I had access to hundreds of hand-me-down books. And the older three siblings being devout illiterates almost all of these books were new, most unopened. This gave me the whole series of Secret Seven adventures and the Famous Five. But the books that live unloved in your house are rarely the books you want to read.
In Every’s the skin-prickling thrill of reading a catchy blurb on the back of a new book promising mystery and escapades, then flipping it over to eyeball the gunslinger or laughing boy or fighter ace on the front cover, this was how great adventures began. An unread story is the best ever written and my hands would shake as I turned a new book over and over. I’d lift it to my nose and inhale the inky vapours of a new place. Then I’d walk quickly to the counter and grandly tell Mr Every, as if he were a porter helping a great explorer cross a small stream into a new land, ‘Put it on the account.’
Every’s was all dark unpainted wooden shelves forested with book spines. A mezzanine balcony ran right around the shop and you could climb to it and browse more books up there while looking down on shoppers below. It was a private and cosy place, like a loved library it affirmed an endlessly interesting world.
Every’s also sold fireworks, and in October, with Guy Fawkes Night approaching, the shop would fill with boys buying penny bungers and halfpenny bungers. All the pretty pyrotechnical hues, the Catherine wheels and rockets and roundels and starbursts and glittering concentric fires raised in the night sky over these few weeks were just tinsel on the gift of war to us. We admired explosives, percussion, concussion, destruction and the ballistic power that was a byproduct of detonation. We wanted crackers. Amid the smell of gunpowder and the rustle of red cellophane, boys with smirks hiding schemes for wild pyrotechnical vandal-isms came and went.
But for the rest of the year I wouldn’t meet many kids in Every’s. And I was suspicious of those I did encounter. Readers were known to be effeminate and clumsy; mummy’s boys retreating from sport, and girls who shot their hands up in class when a question was asked, huffing, ‘Me … me … me …’ I read stuff that took me to wonderlands and badlands. They read How, When and Why texts because they were housebound by their own lack of sociability or because they were budding know-alls. They didn’t read like I read.
Every’s had to be monitored keenly. What new books had arrived? What favourite famous author had crept into town and humbly taken up his or her half inch of space on the shelves? What new adventure was standing quietly there leaning on older, known neighbours? Was Roald Dahl jousting with new giants there? Had Enid Blyton set up another two-hundred-page run of dominoes for me to knock down in slo-mo revelation? Had an undiscovered J. M. Barrie miraculously appeared?
In Every’s, ogling the latest dun-coloured hardbacks in their garish dust jackets, I promised myself that when I grew up I wouldn’t be one of those writers who turned their backs on real fiction by writing for adults. I would write for children my age, people whose minds were open to time shift and who knew a beach was a veneer of sand atop the bones of the brave and treasure chests bursting with rubies. I would write clear moods and honourable acts for a readership that believed in straight-up happy endings without all the obfuscations, justifications, considerations and Janus-faced sentences which were the grey atoms that made adult literature. I would, in my own books, find kelpies lost a hemisphere away, and save poor but pretty girls from arranged fates with deranged princes. I would never abandon the young to write for adults. In Every’s, running my hand along the vivid spines of books written for people my age, I told myself I would never leave this children’s section, this wondrous tumult of tales.
We sauntered through Coles and Fairleys, the large department stores, chiefly to steal. The things we w
anted to steal – bubble gum, pocket knives, firecrackers, Matchbox cars, model planes, water pistols, cigarettes – were kept behind the counter or under glass. This left us having to steal stuff we neither wanted nor needed. Which was all right because we stole so we could be thieves – for the bravura of shady doings, for the status of saying to each other, ‘I hooked some superglue this morning. If anyone wants to glue something.’ ‘Superglue … okay, cool. I hooked a whole pack of paper clips, if anyone wants to …’ The loot was worthless but the thrill of shoplifting was addictive.
In Coles I sauntered blatantly, casing the joint like a pro, before subtly sliding a screwdriver down the front of my underpants. I had no need of a screwdriver but had calculated, correctly, that it would fit comfortably in my underpants.
‘You put that back. You put that back right now or I’m taking you to the store detective.’ In the aisle watching me was a little woman, tense and angry with having to confront a thief. I saw a long wreckage stretch before me … a shoplifter, shamed family and ruined schooling, and a prodigy sentenced to a lifetime on a production line.
It was all right for Langdo or Pigsy to get caught shoplifting. But I had family status that might be undermined and brought down by this sort of scandal. I was vulnerable because of my name. Slowly I pulled the screwdriver from my underpants and put it back on the shelf. Not knowing what came next I just looked at the small woman sheepishly. She didn’t know what came next either, so she just looked at me angrily. After a while I turned slowly and walked away, cringing that she might call the law.
Just up Fryers Street, in an arcade branching off to the south, acting as a vortex for long-hairs, ne’er-do-wells, itinerants, dole bludgers and other shifty types, was the Star Bowl. Standing on the roof over the mouth of the arcade was a box-light sign spangled with box-light stars that read ‘STAR BOWL’, topped by a box-light pin and ball. The Star Bowl. Even now a thrill of truancy attends the name. It was a place for the town’s ill-fated young to loiter harbouring an incommunicable intent to turn out differently to their parents. We were forbidden to go there.
So we went there. When I was seven Mum and Dad travelled to the Mornington Peninsula to play golf for the weekend and left us in the charge of a waddling babysitter named Mrs Flanagan who smelt of camphor and unwashed rodents. (I had a white mouse named ‘Hey’ who smelt sweet as pie when washed regularly, but gave off a spoor like Mrs Flanagan when not.) They told this large woman not to let us go down the street and certainly, under no circumstances, to let us go to the Star Bowl. The Star Bowl, all adults understood, was a place where children might be set on a path they shouldn’t be set on by people they shouldn’t even meet.
Mum and Dad left on Friday night. Come Saturday morning Debbie began womanly preparations upstairs in her room. She donned her tightest purple t-shirt and a pair of arse-hugging bell-bottoms and raided Mum’s beauty case, and though the beau she was trying to fascinate went more for the reek of engine oil and Camel Turkish & Domestic Blend cigarettes, she sprayed on a flowery scent and pocketed a lipstick.
Then she came downstairs and brought forth a week-old chicken carcass from our round-shouldered Frigidaire and laid it before Mrs Flanagan who was sitting at the kitchen bench giggling with her ear up to the radio. The wreckage of the bird bedazzled the woman and the aforesaid parental guidelines came all asunder in its gravity. She corralled the thing inside the fleshy parenthesis of her arms and was leaning close, sniffing and studying to ascertain what type of assault to launch on it, when Debbie mentioned she was going down the street to buy Mum a birthday present.
Tapping the pooled jelly in the dish with her little finger and leering at it as it wobbled, Mrs Flanagan said that buying a present was all right but stay away from the Star Bowl.
‘Ya … uck,’ Debbie said. ‘What type of girl do you think I am?’
We might have been much younger, but Vicki and I were onto her. Mum’s lipstick was silhouetted against her arse-cheek in her bell-bottoms. A dead giveaway. We caught her in the garden. ‘You’re going to the Star Bowl, aren’t you?’ I asked her.
‘No. I’m going to buy Mum a birthday present.’
‘You smell pretty good.’
‘Just let us come,’ Vicki begged. ‘We won’t get in the way.’
‘Piss off.’
‘I’m dobbing to Mum and Dad if you don’t take us,’ I said. ‘But if you take us I can’t dob, ’cause I’d be in trouble too.’
‘Jesus, you shit me, Anson.’ This was the declaration with which Debbie invited me on many of her little adventures. ‘Okay. But don’t hang around me when we get there. Piss off and play the pinnies, okay?’ Vicki and I agreed. We loved the Star Bowl; the rattle of the balls busting through the pins, the tolling of pinball machines, the serial asphyxiations of the cappuccino machine, the harassed woman on the loudspeaker telling lane three their time was up, and the shouts of the teenagers telling her to stick lane three up her arse. The Star Bowl was a small piece of a big city smuggled into town.
Outside the Star Bowl Debbie ran Mum’s lipstick around her mouth, making herself a woman. She was fourteen, and as set to burn herself on a boy as any girl ever was. Seeing her, red-mouthed, a woman, I knew this was a serious day and wondered if I could close my eyes, go back to sleep, open them and start again.
She gave us money to play the pinnies and told us not to bug her and walked over to lane ten, the furthest lane, in the shadow against the far wall. She stood near a small posse of long-haired teenagers, wearing denim flares and western shirts run through with tinsel. They were years older than her. Youths. They were youths. Their arms tattooed with skulls, dice, flames and pythons.
One of them left the group and walked over to Debbie and flicked his head at her. I could see only a narrow slice of his face between two curtains of hair. To look at him you felt like you were spying into someone’s house from their garden. But I knew who he was. Everybody did. She smiled at him, held her hands out wide to show herself, to be appraised. He nodded and the curtains hiding his face shimmied. She took a smoke from him and he held a gold lighter up and they both leaned at the flame with a cigarette, sucking and then basking in each other’s exhalations.
Vicki and I began to play the pinnies. All around tough kids from the tech schools drank milkshakes and smoked and made strange noises that could only be understood by their friends. Wallster, a friend of mine happily freed from parental control by them becoming couch-bound alcoholics, was playing a machine, slapping its glass face and thrusting his hips at it, forefingers on the flippers cajoling it into hours of servitude. Wallster was good enough that, using a piece of wire, he only had to winkle one coin from one parking meter and he could play all morning racking up bonus balls and letting his mates take a turn now and then, until the score needed boosting for a free game and he’d take over and keep the silver ball aloft, like Bradman with a cricket ball and a stump, until the machine gave off the gavel-rap that signalled a bonus play.
You had to work the pinnies a lot to be as good as Wallster. I couldn’t keep the silver ball in play. I kept looking across to lane ten where Debbie and the known guy with the tattoos and the vertical stripe of face were holding hands. ‘Look. She’s holding hands with him.’
‘I know. Shut up. Don’t look,’ Vicki said. But she was watching them too. Her contortions at the Batman machine were merely cover for a wide-eyed surveillance, her fight with the silver ball a pantomime.
In the semi-circular booth of lane ten where the bowling balls appeared magically from a chute and the low-life slung them back down at the pins and catcalled and laughed at each other’s ineptitude, they sat side-by-side. He put his arm around her. ‘Look, Vicki. He’s got her. He’s hanging onto her.’
‘Shut up. I can see. They’re just hugging.’
‘Hugging? He’s her boyfriend then. Oh …’ A hollowness, a despair, came over me that Debbie had fallen this far, into this group, this fellow’s tattooed arms. Had renounced goodness and gone off
hugging notorious scum. Where was help? Mum and Dad had motored away golfing with high-tone friends while I fought a class war for the family’s honour.
I thought of the behemoth babysitter back at our house spinning a carcass in her hands like a corn cob with an eagle eye for some dried skerrick of flesh. Should I run back and get her? Tell her Debbie was embracing low and dangerous men? No. She was three blocks away and slow as the moon. Debbie would be gone the way of all young female adventurers, down the moral vortex of lane ten, before Mrs Flanagan hefted herself for rescue.
Soon they were kissing, their faces hidden in a meeting of hair. This was wincingly fascinating. It had all the emotional push-and-pull of watching a dog you dislike wander onto a busy road. ‘This is why she sprayed perfume. And the lipstick,’ I told Vicki. ‘I want to go home.’
‘We’re not going home. We just got here. Play the pinnies.’
‘I hate the pinnies. I hate the Star Bowl.’ I went closer and sat in the booth at the end of lane five, watching them. She sat in his lap. They kissed, head pivoting against head on a fulcrum of lip. I waited for police sirens. I waited for God to bring down the ceiling. I waited for the harried woman on the loudspeaker to speak out against this. ‘Will the couple in lane ten, the goon headed for Hell and the girl from a good family, stop kissing right now. Lane ten, your time is up …’ Tears came to my eyes. I knew there was no way back from this. That innocence, like Humpty Dumpty, once shattered was beyond the reparative guile of all the King’s horses and men and Mum and Dad.
Absorbed and disgusted by the horror of their kissing I focused my disapproval right at them. Pale and pouting and with my eyes wet I became a moral beacon. I beamed censure until my face ached. The young couple bowling in lane six looked at me, looked at what I was looking at, and back at me. Then the boy burst out laughing and was slapped on the arm by his girl and told not to be so mean.
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