‘I’ll tell you what, you little yobs, you’ve shot my car with a shanghai. That’s a dangerous act of vandalism. And you’re going to pay for it.’ Strangely, he wasn’t fired up like a sharpie P-plater should be. He was speaking coolly, like someone a lot older, like a parent or a teacher, laying out a fully realised adult repercussion rather than making a wild threat. I would have preferred he swore at us and gave us each a thick ear and kicked our arses and be done with it. He was about twenty years old, sporting all the accoutrements of rebellion, and it would have made sense for him to belt us. We could tell our parents we’d been attacked by random drunks. Italians who sprang from behind trees. But this bloke was talking about police. This was way beyond normal consequence for an eight year old. Langdo’s old man was an electrician, but my father frequently cross-examined and made public mincemeat of the cops of this town. This would play badly for me.
‘We didn’t …’
‘Shut up.’ He slapped Langdo across the face with the rubber tendrils of the shanghai. Langdo was three years older than me, and I was shocked to see him start to cry. It gave me licence to cry as well, but looking at Langdo, big wet tears and scrunched face like he was begging, I found myself hardening against the idea.
‘What you’re going to do is, you’re going to go to the police station and tell them what you’ve done. You’re going to confess. I’m going to follow you the whole way. I’ll be watching, so don’t try to get away.’ He pointed back to town. ‘Turn around. Go. And tell them everything. I’m following to make sure you do.’
‘We’re sorry,’ I said. ‘We shouldn’t have done it. We were aiming at a magpie.’
This contradictory nonsense cut no ice with the vengeful sharpie. ‘You will be sorry … attacking a motor vehicle. The police regard that very, very seriously. You might well get a custodial sentence. Turana Boys Home is full of kids who shot drivers.’
Turana was a mythical prison for children in the faraway Gomorrah of Melbourne. Boys who had turned too bad for Shepparton to contain went there. Boys who had stolen cars or started fires or perpetrated lurid acts with their near relatives disappeared to Turana and reappeared only in brief rumours of Dickensian torment. Brett Sewell, who set fire to our school three times, was in Turana, being burnt daily by the other boys. ‘You like to burn things, do you, Brett? Try this then.’ And they’d stub their cigarettes on his arms and stomach and neck. Garry Wilson had visited him and came back saying he was all motley and welted pink and had begun to stutter hopelessly.
We started pedalling back to town with visions of our imprisonment in our heads and the vengeful sharpie behind us in his HR. Then he disappeared. ‘Let’s go down here.’ Langdo began to steer down a side street. The electric-green HR was sitting there, with its driver glaring at us. We chucked a U-ey and got back on course.
Discussing our options we were terrified. Maybe we go in there and pretend the shot had slipped and the guy was making a big thing of nothing. Or that we didn’t even fire a shot, the guy was confused by a stone off his own tyres. You couldn’t send a boy to prison because a stone flicked up off a car tyre.
None of this sounded like anything cops would go for. Then Langdo came up with a pretty good plan; we’d go into the cop shop and ask if shanghais were legal, because we were thinking of making one, but we wouldn’t make one if it was against the law. No mention of shooting the vengeful sharpie’s car at all. If the vengeful sharpie didn’t come inside the cop shop with us, how would he ever know what we told the cops? That wasn’t such a bad plan. And I let Langdo think it was what we were going to do. But I didn’t trust the cops to go along with it. And I wasn’t going to go to Turana and be burnt alive by criminal boys.
The vengeful sharpie shepherded us the whole way to the police station, appearing out of side streets, coming up behind, overtaking and waiting as Langdo pedalled us slowly south to our doom. When we got there I got off the bike and Langdo laid it down and we looked around for a last-minute escape. Maybe the guy had been bluffing. Maybe he was wanted by the police and wouldn’t come near the station. But he drove up and parked right outside the twin glass doors and pointed us inside.
How had a young man, probably still a teenager, dreamt up this punishment? Self-confession was a tool right out of the Education Department playbook. Schoolteachers and parents used it to make you consider, in a deeper, more meaningful way, the crime you had committed. And how did this young guy think this would pan out for him? I gave him a little wave as we went inside. Look. Here is us. Here is us about to go inside and face justice. He nodded slowly, righteously. This was evidently panning out just like he thought it would.
At the front counter we rang the bell with vivid humility and a cop sauntered out of a back room. Before I could speak Langdo freaked out, lost his nerve and dobbed us in. He started honking tears and blurted, ‘We shot that man’s car with a shanghai. We’re sorry. I can’t go to Turana. I do a paper round.’ He pointed at the electric-green HR parked out front. So much for his plan to enquire about making a shanghai.
‘You did?’ The cop, a self-important young man with a hook nose and a shaving rash, rested his arms on the counter. He slumped theatrically, made limp by Langdo’s blurted skerrick of wrongdoing. He made a shocked ‘O’ of his mouth and put his eight fingertips to his lower lip like Little Miss Muffet seeing a spider. It took me a moment or two to realise he was mocking the triviality of our crime spree. When I did realise it, I took it upon myself to sharpen his interest.
‘I shot his car because he showed us his thing.’
‘He what?’ The cop dropped his hands from his face and his eyebrows arched like cats offered an ultimatum.
‘Showed us his thing.’
‘He flashed himself? That bloke out there in the green HR?’
‘He’s followed us all the way here from the golf club showing … flashing it. It was shiny. And he was yelling rude stuff about it.’
‘Sh … shiny?!’ The cop’s voice choked. His eyes glittered darkly. Ambition’s crescendo played in his head. The more degenerate the crime, the more famous the arrest, and the guy smugly idling out there in the metallic-green HR was a sicko of the first rank. Maybe the cop thought he’d get a citation for removing a degenerate from our streets. Congratulations and a front-page handshake from the Commissioner.
He bent low over the counter to get a good look outside at the creep. The vengeful sharpie met his gaze and nodded, and did a double thumbs-up, essentially saying, I suppose, ‘You and I represent a telling lesson to these kids. You don’t need to thank me for the time and trouble I’ve gone to in bringing them in and making them confess. It was the right thing to do and will pay off by them becoming better people.’
But I guess to the cop, who knew what he knew about the guy, that blond mullet and that self-satisfied grin and that double thumbs-up said something more along the lines of, ‘I get off flashing my dick at kids and I don’t think it’s wrong and I’m not in the least scared of you.’
There was a skittering for traction that reminded me of a terrier sighting a kitchen rat, and when the cop got around to our side of the counter he’d turned red and blown up to twice the size he had been when Langdo was confessing to his paltry spree. He was a different cop now, for a different crime.
He went out the door fast and the look on the vengeful sharpie’s face began to ask why a policeman was running at his car. The cop wrenched his door open and reached in and pulled him out by his blond rat-tails and we heard the vengeful sharpie screaming, ‘Whatwhatwhat …’ like a pump starting up.
I said softly to Langdo, ‘Let’s fuck off.’ We went out the door and he jumped on his bike and rode one way and I ran another. Nothing is as fast across suburban terrain as a boy lit by fear.
When I reached the corner I looked back. The flasher and the cop were rolling around on the road wrestling and punching each other. One of them was yelling, ‘Fuck.’ The other was yelling, ‘Jonesy.’ I can make a case for either man yellin
g either word.
The Shepp Show came every year with the start of summer. One of the quartet of annual highpoints that made the long year endurable; the other three being my birthday, Easter and Christmas. On Saturday morning we would dress up. Guy and I in knee-length shorts and ironed shirts buttoned to the throat, and the girls in white dresses with gathered waists and white sandals. We would swallow toast throat-raspingly fast and suck down cold milk head-achingly fast and then mime the brushing of teeth and be out in the garage sitting in the station wagon by nine.
By nine-thirty I would be chewing on the red plastic upholstery of the seat back and calling Mum the worst words I knew. Guy would be sitting back coolly, all showy patience, playing the adults at their own game. Debbie would be teasing Vicki and telling her her friends were ugly and dumb, and Vicki, in order to work toward a truce, would be conceding her friends’ stupidity but saying they weren’t so ugly when set alongside some other people who were even uglier. She would begin to name these unfortunate girls, ‘Mardi Hopkins, Gabby Taylor …’ ‘No. Diane Matthews is uglier than Mardi Hopkins and Fiona Smith is uglier than Gabby Taylor. Your friends are uglier than everyone.’
Dad would emerge, actually sniffing actual roses on his way to the car, and stopping to mime a couple of chip shots, waggling his imaginary club back and forth while we screamed at him through the windscreen to come on and get in and he smiled slyly. He’d take his place behind the wheel, enjoying our impatience, and, I get the impression, using his slowly-slowly shtick to cover for Mum, trying to take the heat off her.
She was unreachable in her interminable dawdle, in a bubble of great protocol and theatre. She always kept us waiting. Perhaps as proof she was the cornerstone of the family. Or maybe it took her time to summon up the courage to go to public events. Many minutes later, as we whined and urged her on and asked Dad what was going on, he’d shrug and say, ‘You’re pretty thick kids if Mum hasn’t taught you how to wait by now with all the lessons she’s given you.’
Eventually Mum would glide out of the house with her hair in a green-and-white silk scarf and her eyelashes black as a senorita’s and lips tinted silvery-red. No other woman at the Shepparton Show would look this chic or lovely. She would be photographed for the Shepparton News, no doubt. And on Monday Mr Maclean, my fourth grade teacher, would have a copy of that newspaper opened on his desk and be slumped in close appreciation of her and he’d say to me, ‘Wow, eh, Camo. Your mum any relation to Princess Grace?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I’d tell him. ‘Who’s that?’
He would make comments about her all through the morning.
The streets around the showground were lined with parked cars and the footpaths filled with people walking toward the show, kids hauling parents by the arms, their steps made urgent by the screams of girls already hurtling in deformed orbits on rides painted with alpine scenes piebald with rust.
The air was hot and the braided smells of various animal dungs drifted from the showgrounds. Once you got inside this cloud you discovered within it banks of oily fog where foods were frying and sweet reeks of hot liquefied sugar, and, most pleasantly, each open-air bar gave off a cool estuarine smell of beer and mud, which became, in my young mind, the whiff of hilarity and bad language.
People were making their way to the front gate from every direction. Overhead, carved into the gate’s arch, ‘Shepparton Agricultural Society Est 1877’. And down each pillar a list of past Show Committee venerables. My Dad, Atticus-like, had to nod and chat with a lot of passing men and women off small farms wearing rare, senseless clothes in a panicked sartorial stab at formal festivity. He helped shape these people’s private affairs and they were nervous around him as you would be around someone who knew you supported a secret daughter from a previous marriage that your current wife didn’t know about.
In the centre of the grounds was a wooden pavilion overlooking a grassy arena where equestrian events were held and bulls as big as rhinos were led single file to be judged and bedecked with satin sashes of royal blue and gold. Beneath this pavilion women would be awarded wooden plaques set with many small engraved silver shields for baking and preserving and crocheting and needlepoint. Fire trucks passed beneath the pavilion with their sirens blaring while amateur firefighters waved at their families and gave the finger to their mates. I once saw a firefighter jump from a truck and pinch the first-prize-winning baker of the pineapple upside-down cake on her bottom during the presentation of her plaque as she was posing for the local news photographer. He jumped back on the truck as the crowd roared laughter and heckled and she reddened and held the plaque up and hid behind it. I was appalled at this outrageous assault.
Down a thoroughfare to the south, the way your parents led you, were arrays of agricultural machinery, ploughs and windrowers and the newest irrigation pumps lifting azure water from low pools to high tanks all day long. And corrugated-iron sheds, one loud with the territorial spruiking of outrageously plumed poultry, and the next flinching with harried and nervous sheep. Startling as they were, we got through these sheds as quickly as we could. We paid due, but speedy, homage to the machines and animals that Dad wanted us to know were the filaments of our economy, reaching out, each connecting with the other and forming a vast agri-web that held us all aloft.
And these things were interesting, in their way. It is always rewarding to see a chicken bred to sport a headdress worthy of one of Napoleon’s hussars, or a duck with a hairdo flagrantly plagiarised from Elvis. And if they’d come to town on any other weekend we’d have stared bug-eyed, firing endless questions of the ‘but why?’ sort at Dad.
Not now, though. This morning these exotic critters got up in their unnaturally selected glad rags were keeping us from the crux of the day – the gaudy, dangerous, semi-criminal wonderment of sideshow alley.
But before sideshow alley was the woodchop. The woodchop is one of the few things that, upon adult reflection, is as miraculous as you thought it was as a child. A daredevil’s ballet performed by brawny men in Dunlop Volleys and white trousers and white singlets. A fierce agrarian contest that showed men from the backblocks were artisans who shaped the rude world into weatherboard democracy. A PR tableau for a dying industry.
Their axe heads were as silver and sharp as scalpels. They would each stand on a short log as thick as a beer keg and an announcer in a suit and tie and felt hat would call, ‘Axemen … are you ready? One, two, three …’ The slowest axeman would start. The announcer would keep counting. Maybe on ten the next axeman would begin to chop, on fifteen the next and so on. It was headshakingly unreal how fast these men could chop wood.
The last to start was the backmarker, the champ, silver hair slicked with Brylcreem and ropey-armed, his axe head carrying the October sun on its edge, he stood waiting with a tycoon’s smile while the young colts whaled away at their logs, and chips of wood large as slices of bread flew at the crowd. ‘… twenty-two …’ The backmarker would begin. Unhurried and clean. He could never catch the others. One had already cut a deep V in his log and turned and begun chopping from the opposite side. Another turned. The backmarker was done for. ‘Dad, the old guy’s a goner.’
‘Never write off a champ, Boyboy.’
‘No. He’s a goner this time.’
The backmarker, sinews proud in his forearms, lips flared back off smoke-yellowed teeth, turned on his log. He hadn’t blurred with urgency as the younger men had. He was using fewer strokes. But those strokes were landing like laser beams and woodchips large as Bibles were leaping from his log. Maybe he could catch the others. He might even be going past them. As his log broke in two, ends falling away, he stepped gracefully off them and gave a slight nod to the crowd. The fight ebbed from the younger men, then. They continued to chop at half pace. One by one their logs broke apart and they stepped down, each shooting sly glances at the backmarker’s log and at the backmarker. Was he sweating? Red in the face? Perturbed at all? How many blows had he rained on the thing?
&n
bsp; For the next event they were to chop at logs that stood upright in a row, like power poles. Trees stripped of their canopy and bark and pulled from the forest and raised here for this high-wire battle.
‘Axemen, are you ready … one, two …’ The axemen cut a notch in the trunk about chest height and inserted a plank, sticking straight out like a spoke from a wheel hub. Then they leapt onto this plank, balancing more planks on it, and began chopping another notch at chest height. Insert another plank into this second notch, jump up onto it and cut another notch …
This skill came from the days when they were cutting mountain ash out of the high gullies of Victoria. These great trees flared at the base to a circumference that might reach fifteen metres. But if you climbed ten metres that circumference had dwindled to only five metres. You saved days of work if you felled them above their wide base.
The axemen rose swiftly on their precarious ladders, until, balancing on a plank they had just notched into the tree trunk ten metres above the ground, they began the race to chop through the trunk itself. Watching these men high against the sun pivoting on the balls of their feet on a board, attacking their tree to the limit of their balance, was like seeing a mediaeval battle fought on a cliff top.
Death was a byproduct of the working day in timber cutting then, and looked so likely in this sporty simulacrum that our fascination was never for the contest. We didn’t care who won. We were aghast at the house-of-cards architecture of the event, the slashing blades and high-wire nonchalance of the axemen. It was a swordfight in the rigging. Swashbucklers in singlets with small pot bellies. Who would die?
As soon as the woodchop had finished we made a pact with Mum and Dad to meet them at a certain hour, at the Main Pavilion to watch some ponderous parade of giant horses, or people dressed as pioneers in bonnets and hats re-enacting something that wasn’t, quite frankly, so distant or fascinating that it required re-enactment. ‘Okay, okay, three o’clock. But I won’t have time to do hardly anything.’ We would never honour this rendezvous. Some painted booth selling some fresh ghoul, a Bearded Lady or a Half-Man-Half-Woman, always prevented it. We would always be in trouble for not turning up at the appointed hour. But parental rage was a price happily paid for a day in the sour-smelling freak show of the alley.
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