The treachery of Tina’s arrival broke a long and loving bond between my mother and me. We were never the same after. And she was not rewarded for turning her adoration to the new toy. The child turned out to be an ingrate. As I knew it would after only one month’s acquaintance when, trying to cram a sherbet bomb into its mouth to stop it squealing during Get Smart, it choked and went blue out of spite and had to be rushed to the doctor. My decade-long reign as the apple-of-every-easily-fooled-adult’s eye was over.
Before Geelong Grammar there was high school in Shepp. With Tina a baby on her hip, Mum took me down the street to Lunn and Fordyce Menswear to buy a new school uniform and, most portentously, to try on long pants as part of that uniform. Long pants for the first time. The light mufti of childhood was being shucked off and I was donning the solemn, pleated tailorings of manhood. Long, grey slacks. Say goodbye to scabbed knees and other scars of the warrior. Say a happy goodbye to startled people staring at my inordinately skinny legs.
The school was huge. You couldn’t know everyone. There were forbidden corridors and off-limits rooms, laboratories and gymnasia. In cul-de-sacs and forgotten triangles of space there were pimpled teens from surrounding towns smoking cigarettes and heavy-lidded long-hairs choofing dope. The school’s oldest students were adults. The males wore beards and rock ’n’ roll hair and baggy jeans, the females were as hipped and made-up as real women, wearing baggies and bangles.
You didn’t confine your learning to one room here. Every hour, at the sound of a bell, classes fractured and the students dashed in monochromatic white and grey to other classes that studied specialised subjects. A bell would ring and off you’d hustle to Mlle Michailovich. This tactile young woman with a dark European face and rich brown eyes and full lips made me fall briefly in love by wantonly uttering patient reiterations of ‘Un, deux, trois …’ and speaking much other equally sex-laden French. But then, it wasn’t uncommon for me to believe a young female teacher was in love with me, only held back from a whispered declaration and a kiss by strings of propriety pulled by heartless goons in the Education Department.
A second bell and you’d cross the campus for maths, into a portable classroom where enfilading sunlight made it impossible for the innumerate to hide. Mrs Cooney was Methuselah with a vagina. Presumably. A hag born of Dahl. Bent and warlike and known to be around at the invention of mathematics. There was a rumour Pythagoras had taken her virginity while she screamed the value of pi to the three hundredth decimal place. I started it.
She clearly hated the young, and took delight in maths as an instrument of legal torture with which she could gouge and scald them. And was particularly tickled by my excruciations with numbers.
I saw quickly that any mathematical solution was only a platform onto which she could unload another, more iniquitous problem … infinitely. Thus triumph was not only short lived and Sisyphean, the mathematical rock you had to push up the hill got bigger, more irredeemably foreign, each time. Mrs Cooney surveyed the class for a bamboozled face hungrily, the way a lioness eyes a flock of wildebeest for a gammy leg.
She lit on mine. ‘Cameron, what is the square root of sixty-four?’
‘Oh, Mrs Cooney, don’t ask what is the square root of sixty-four. Better to ask, “Why is there a square root of sixty-four?” Why invent that type of root and then seek to know what it is for sixty-four? Why make such trouble? Why, Mrs Cooney? Why? Why?’
‘You foul-minded little twerp. Haven’t we just spent the last week learning square roots?’
‘Again, Mrs Cooney, the clear thinker, the fair and reasonable citizen, wants to know why.’
‘Answer my question or you’ll have detention.’
Stowey, whose mind was mush in all other fields, was strangely mathematical. He was holding up eight surreptitious fingers. ‘Eight,’ I said.
‘And what is eight squared?’ She leaned toward me, her whiskery mouth gaping like a Venus flytrap threatening to clamp my head. Stowey wasn’t showing any digits. He didn’t have (I’ve since Googled the answer) sixty-four of anything.
‘Eight squared, Mrs Cooney? But this is another question of the square-root type I’ve counselled you against. The fair and reasonable …’
‘Five seconds to answer or you will complete chapter three of Springer-Verlag on Mathematics by start of class tomorrow.’
‘Am I allowed to get it wrong? Is trying, sort of, like, nearly as good as being right?’
‘This is mathematics, not some history written by victors. Two seconds.’
‘Eight.’ The laughter was pretty widespread. Rob Godden fell out of his desk.
‘Are you telling the class your answer to eight squared is eight?’
‘No. Not anymore. Fifteen.’ More laughter.
‘You are the stupidest student I’ve ever had in my class. And I taught your brother Guy and both your sisters.’
‘Hey! Mrs Cooney, you can’t say I’m stupider than Vicki.’
The bell again and I ran for Mr Maynard’s Australian history class. Mr Maynard knew less of Australian history than I did, but for some mysterious reason that may have approximated compassion, I couldn’t press home this advantage.
He was a large man with short back and sides and a slow military bearing that would have made him a general in any war fought among sloths. He made me think of Big Bad John, a character in a song of the time who, at the cost of his own life, held up a collapsing mine so all his workmates could escape. This seemed to me the most likely way Mr Maynard would make good. Certainly his teaching of history wasn’t going to get ballads composed in his honour. He talked with laboured precision, making a terrible, visible effort to keep grammatical error and mispronunciation at bay. He went red with the speed and predictability of a traffic light, and could be embarrassed, sidetracked, confused and flummoxed by even the least gifted reprobate.
His conception of Australian history was that the real fun began when Irish bushrangers took to gunning down cops from behind rocks. While he was giving us a lesson on the Kelly gang’s shootout at Glenrowan, Sandy McCormack, a girl of lean Arabic beauty, asked him how Ned Kelly took a piss while wearing his armour. Mr Maynard blushed and turned away and wrapped his great shoulders around himself (oh, for a collapsing mine to hold up at this moment) and said huskily that that sort of thing wasn’t history. Ned Kelly’s toilet habits. That sort of thing wasn’t anything to talk of in class and probably he walked off behind a tree and kept the procedure private like a man of dignity naturally would, and not even Dan Kelly or Steve Hart or Joe Byrne knew the true answer to that question and it was lost in the mists of time and he didn’t want to hear any more about it and, gosh, the relevant thing about Ned Kelly was the injustices visited upon him by malicious English coppers for his Fenian pride and the crimes he understandably committed as a result of these injustices. Not … not the urinary problems that assailed a man decked out in amateur armour. He said all of this with his back to us because of the unmanly redness of his face.
I felt an unsettling compassion for Mr Maynard and decided I wasn’t going to make his teaching life harder than it had to be. But other, less gifted anarchists stepped into the breach. Kids who were usually too afraid to speak to a teacher began to riff on him and backchat him. Stutterers and shy boys and goody-goodies began to heckle like inbred dukes at a puppy hunt. Front-of-class smilers who didn’t know a joke from a fence lizard began to make him the butt of malformed, clichéd humour.
He was the red-faced bull’s-eye of the mangiest jokes ever composed. Occasionally, as the class laughed and honked, Mr Maynard would give off a whimper of despair like a brontosaurus who’d cottoned on to the coming troubles.
Danny Caccavo was an uncool kid with a stutter, the blunt-minded son of a sharp Italian entrepreneur. A victim of much derision, he had finally, happily, found a victim for some derision of his own. His special subject was Mr Maynard’s clothes. ‘Mr Maynard, why are you wearing a yellow shirt? Only par … par … poofs wear yar … yar �
� yellow shirts.’
Poofter, poof, homo, this was our catch-all insult. If a kid showed timidity, weakness, hesitation, style, obedience, compassion, thoughtfulness or difference, he would be accused of, and taunted with, being a poof. A homosexual. The most venal ghoul in the whole cast of adulthood.
None of us knew a poofter; at least, none that were admitting to it. And none of us knew anything about them. Apart from their thoroughly deserved contaminated status. Which was a truth handed down to us and enhanced by us.
I secretly dreaded that I might have had the rank acorn of poofterism growing in me. I think we all feared this. How did one know? How did it show itself? Adults had recently told us that appetites were forming in us. Intense lusts and desires would soon be the elevator music that attended our maturation. What if these appetites zeroed in on another boy? How could you stop this? I didn’t want to die. But you would surely have to kill yourself if you found you were a poofter.
For those that did detect that acorn of poofterism within, the blind hatred that was abroad for their true, unrevealed selves must have been a staccato torment. Because the accusation that someone was a poof was never more than a few minutes in the past or future at high school. Often as a careless jibe to a mate; less frequently, but more seriously, as an accusation to any effete or silent student. A gay kid at school would have been amazed to witness the terrible, inexorable metamorphosis of himself from a normal boy into a fiend over a few appalling years of puberty, such was the way we made our world.
So Cacca went at Mr Maynard with claims of poofterism. ‘Mr Mar … Mar … Maynard, only par … par … poofs wear cardigans.’ The jibes were always this light and pointless and a normal man would have been unaffected, but Mr Maynard had to blush and shuffle and roll his head this way and that in embarrassment and straighten creases from whatever article of clothing had been maligned as if to make that rag a little less reprehensible. Whenever Cacca publicly tagged an article of clothing as poofy, Mr Maynard presumably stowed it away in his wardrobe, because it never reappeared. By spring the big man was running out of shirts, ties and patience.
It was September, pollen in the air and Mr Maynard in long white socks and tight shorts. After two terms of being shot with blanks by tongue-tied teens the man was edgy and barely spoke in class anymore. He was stabbing at the blackboard with a stick of chalk, perpetrating there a calligraphy exclusive to epileptic giants, when Cacca launched his latest bar … bar … bon mot. ‘Mr Maynard, only par … par … poofs wear war … war … white socks.’ Our history teacher stepped slowly backward in among the desks and slapped Cacca on the side of the head and the class dropped from its habitual rude hubbub into silence.
My first feeling was regret that a great opportunity had been missed. It wasn’t a man-killing blow, but it was going to bring the man down as surely as if he’d clubbed that pockmarked stutterer with a haymaker mid ‘par … par … poof’. And if this slow-moving giant had to go down I wished he’d gone down popping the kid’s eardrum or blacking his eye.
Mr Maynard was the lion that, after endless taunting by its tamer, had taken a desultory swipe at him and pulled a golden thread from his brocaded jacket. This momentary lapse implied a larger, perhaps man-eating, appetite. Mr Maynard could no longer be in the circus.
He knew it too. He turned from us toward the blackboard and lay his chalk in the gutter that ran beneath it and without looking at us waved an apology, a goodbye, and walked from the room while Cacca stuttered about just who his father was and attempted, through his elocutionary jam, to describe the vengeance his father was going to bring down on the man. ‘He’ll kar … kar … He’ll abs … abs … He’ll fir … fir … fix you, you dog.’
We never saw Mr Maynard again. I hope he went on to a long career holding up collapsing mines for his comrades.
That year we moved out of town to Kialla. Our house in Talinga Crescent, a castle when I was young, had shrunk and become shabby and my parents’ marriage seemed to have gone stale and cantankerous in it. Or, perhaps, with the passing years I was becoming more observant. Though I doubt I could have missed a whole Cold War as a toddler.
In those days all professional couples aspired to build their own house. Lots of Mum and Dad’s friends had done it. So Dad, dressed in his suit and gumboots, wandered around a straw-grass paddock on the riverbank a few kilometres out of town, looking at it from every angle. It had once been part of a dairy farm. I wasn’t at all sure about living out here. How was I going to see my mates? There were no shops. No neighbours to spy on and vandalise and run secret missions and incursions against. A Blue Heaven milkshake was a three-mile bike ride away.
They built a tan-brick house with three wings carpeted in 1970s shag pile. Five acres of lawn that ended in a cliff that dropped to our own stretch of river. All around was bush. No blue heaven, but it was Eden and I was a hunter. I threw away my clothes and became a native. Stowey and, later, Sherm, and I wandered around in footy knicks carrying air rifles or bows, endlessly hunting snakes, hares, foxes, cats, rabbits, ducks and carp. I had a dinghy and when the river flooded we’d row out into the forest and hunt the snakes that were curled in trees. Enormous logs would come washing down from the hills and we’d strip off and ride them like submerged hippos for miles, walking back through the forest.
There was a wreck house on the outside of the river bend upstream from our new place. It was rumoured that Old Shaw had trip-wired the windows with loaded shotguns. He had put up hand-painted signs that read: ‘TRESPASSERS SHOT. HOUSE BOOBY TRAPPED’. One Sunday when no other game was on offer Stowey and I shot out every window in the place. It took some doing, snipping off every fang of glass shot by shot. The bikies were blamed. The local cops somehow figured a bunch of Hell’s Angels came out from town and spent a day prone in devil’s heads laying siege to a deserted house. I think Dad implicated the bikies to throw the cops off the scent.
Flaring out west of the wreck house was a field of rusting junk. Car bodies and stock troughs and coils of wire and engine blocks and truck carcasses and ploughs and graders and sheets of iron and Ferguson tractors and horse-drawn buggies fallen to pieces and a Sunshine harvester and Furphy carts and swingletrees and drums marked with skull and bones, and water tanks holed by rifle fire and a mangle and the brightly silver innards of some freshly dead dairy.
I used to go there and sit in cars and trucks from my grandparents’ time that had brittle leather seats through which springs erupted. Places small and private enough that they could be the world entire. Soon enough I would be a Great Train Robber on the run. Or I would grip the steering wheel of a ghost-Holden and become an air ace gunning for Krauts and Nips. I sometimes went there to get out of mowing the lawns and I sometimes went there to be Tsar of all Russia. And sometimes I just went there to be away. To be unfindable. The only boy left in a world that had died. To explore the goose bumps and haunted, hollow feeling of being deeply alone.
A Saturday, and I was zigzagging through Old Shaw’s field of rotting machinery. I thought today I would be Tsar Nicholas II with Bolsheviks closing in. But I was stopped by the groan of a car door. I hunkered behind a little grey Fergie and watched as Robbie Brand stepped out of a car carcass and stretched his arms high, then opened his jeans and pissed rubbing his fingers on his face and combing them through his long hair. Emptied, he shook off the drops and zipped up and climbed back into the car and yanked the door closed and collapsed from view. It was like Keith Richards had come tumbling among the Corn Flakes into my bowl.
Robbie Brand, maybe nineteen years old, and the devil elect of every adult in town. He was the lead singer of a locally famed band. It was said he went shirtless on stage and became mesmerised by his own songs, locked in a shut-eyed trance with his head juddering and knees shaking. It was obvious to the adults there was some blue demon pulling the strings on this cat. Teenage girls who dreamed of throwing themselves from Parisian bridges screamed for Robbie Brand to point the way.
And here he w
as sleeping out in Old Shaw’s field of junk. Whether he had taken up residence here because he was in flight from the law, or he had read in Rolling Stone that Roger Daltrey had spent six months sleeping in a Humber before The Who hit big, I can’t say. Maybe some father of some screaming teeny-bopper who had subscribed to a bi-weekly delivery of Robbie’s brilliant seed had vowed to make him pay. I climbed a red gum and watched the car, waiting for him to resurface.
Late afternoon a thin girl with long sandy hair wandered the dirt road from town wearing the unbuttoned shirt and tight jeans of a fan. She picked her way through Old Shaw’s rust-brown field of extinct wonders and tapped her knuckles on the roof of the car carcass and Robbie Brand groaned the door open and got out shaking his head at her like she was a wonder too strong for easy thoughts and he took hold of her and they leaned against the car, their bodies pressing hard at one another, and they kissed while I said out loud, ‘Wh-what now? Man, what now?’ He broke from kissing and swept a chivalrous hand to the back seat and she climbed in and he climbed in overtop her and the split windscreen through which I watched flared yellow with setting sun.
I climbed down from my tree and crept forward through the dead machines and hid behind stacked spools of wire. Close enough to hear her urging a favourite to the post while Robbie Brand re-enacted the terrible sonics of a digger charging a Japanese trench. It had the ring of sacrilege to me. It sounded like noble soldierly energies being squandered on a low act. Him roaring fit to slay a Japanese with a bayonet … while smooching a girl. It made my heart sink. And soar.
After, when it was dark, they lit a fire beside the car and sat on blocks of wood naked holding each other, smoking, the flames orange on the car’s rust and sparking on its chrome scraps. Downriver I could hear Dad calling me for dinner. The girl leaned on Robbie Brand and he kissed her flaming breasts at their tip. Just one kiss each. And I got no dinner but I got a vision to keep forever.
Boyhoodlum Page 24
