Cannily, Cannily

by Simon French

  He made a face. “I guess Fuller just doesn’t want me around.”

  “He’s always like that.” Martin added with the voice of a hardened veteran. “You should know that by now. We’re the only team in the whole town that has to train three times a week. Other teams only train twice. And we always train by ourselves here at school, not down on the town oval like everyone else.”

  “Why? Because you win so much?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Me and my stories, Trevor thought angrily to himself, knowing he was caught well and truly now. He was a mixture of emotions. He almost wanted to forget the whole thing, but his pride wasn’t going to let his stories of football expertise down.

  Slowly, a routine established itself.

  Each day, five days a week, Buckley went to work on the building site at the club. He came home in the evenings with stories of the men he worked with, cynical local contractors who considered Buckley odd because he didn’t go with them after work for drinks at the Lindsay Hotel.

  Kath’s “break” from a paid job seemed to be no holiday. During the day she busied herself making clothes or spinning wool for future knitting projects. She went for long, rambling walks around the township and its fringes, and as the days passed her insights into the workings of this particular country town collaborated with Buckley’s to form a telling picture of the people who lived there.

  Inconveniently distant from larger places, the town had assumed a stifling lifestyle of its own. For entertainment you went to the Lindsay Hotel, or better still, to the club, a place where farmers, timber mill workers and the general adult population congregated to drink, talk and gamble away money on the poker machines.

  The club, ever mindful of the younger population, ran its own little network of sporting teams for the local kids, which was where Fuller’s Under Twelves fitted in. Sport wasn’t a full-time affair, however, and there was often little to do after school hours, unless you paid money to play the pinball machines at the local milkbar, or saw the occasional movie at the small, museum-like cinema. Groups of schoolkids wandered aimlessly about at the weekends, and carloads of teenagers stationed themselves outside the life-support of the milkbar.

  Buckley and Kath maintained a quiet distance from these social offerings. Trevor, of course, did not.

  “What d’you do in a caravan all day?” Martin wanted to know. “I’d be bored silly.”

  Somehow, Trevor had always found something to do. He explored, like his mother. He played solo card games and sometimes Monopoly with his parents till all hours of the night. He helped Buckley when the kombivan needed servicing and repairs. And he daydreamed a lot. Impossible thoughts and imaginary stories found their way into his mind all the time, and he projected himself wholeheartedly into such fantasies, which more often than not were about anything but living in a caravan and being the son of two slightly crazy seasonal workers.

  But now, the life of the town had engulfed most of these interests, such as they were. A new routine had settled itself upon him, and three afternoons a week he trained with Fuller and the team, reluctantly determined to put some truth into his stories of football glory.

  It was a process that exhausted him.

  Seeing so much of Fuller during the week was tense stuff and he had been unprepared for the sudden, exhausting exercise of training. Buckley and Kath remained unconvinced of any benefits to be reaped by Trevor from being a part of that gruelling little institution called the Club Under Twelves. The judgement was based on their own sharp intuition, but it was a decision they allowed Trevor to make for himself.

  Kath took him shopping one day to buy the necessary football gear.

  “Hope you don’t mind not getting new stuff,” she said, as they sorted through piles of second-hand clothing in the local church-run opportunity shop.

  He shook his head. It didn’t matter in the slightest.

  Eventually they found several pairs of shorts and woollen footy socks, the correct team jersey and miraculously, a pair of proper football boots that actually fitted him.

  He changed into the ensemble and looked at himself, sports-clad, in the shop mirror. He stared for several moments at the reflection in the glass, not out of vanity, but purely out of interest and curiosity.

  “What are you thinking about?” Kath asked with a faint smile, well knowing his daydreaming habits.

  “Nothing,” he answered slowly, wishing silently that he was somewhere else, away from this town and its people.

  SIX

  His own family, of course, was different.

  It was something he had started to put a lot of thought into, because the differences had suddenly become clearer against the background of the town and the school.

  There were the obvious things such as the caravan, the kombi and the moving around, but that wasn’t all. For a long time he had been able to see that Kath and Buckley were intrinsically different from a lot of other parents that he saw, and that was no means a conclusion based on appearance alone. He considered his gaggle of city cousins who were mostly younger than he, and whom he rarely saw. Their parents seemed to spend a lot of time bossing them around and telling them not to be silly. Their parents seemed to have lots of rules for behaving and always went slightly mental if these rules were not strictly adhered to. There were other things as well that Trevor couldn’t readily identify, but that he knew set his own parents apart from others.

  Buckley and Kath, he finally decided, were more like people and less like parents.

  But now, there were vague dissatisfactions looming about him. The town had put him out of his depth, school was demanding and intimidating.

  The past had a sudden, urgent attraction for him, and he had to find out more.

  “There were houses everywhere, no bush at all, one or two small parks …” Buckley told him.

  Trevor tried to imagine his father as a child, this person now stranded in a country town.

  “… by the time I’d finished school, I was sick of the whole polluted, populated mess. So I bought the kombi, packed food, clothes, guitar, surfboard and a toothbrush. And just drove away.”

  “Where to?” Trevor asked.

  “Up north.”

  “To where we lived?”

  “Much further still. Kath, and the house, came later on.”

  Delving into the past was piecing together a jigsaw.

  “I’m going to travel someday,” Trevor resolved then, “and go places we haven’t been to yet.”

  There were albums of photographs, pictures of landscapes crossed within Trevor’s lifetime. The places were different, the seasons coloured the Polaroid prints in a cycle of pages. Always, there seemed to be the backdrop of camping grounds and fruit pickers’ huts. There was the array of possessions carried in the caravan and the kombi, such as the surfboard, which Trevor could barely remember his father having used. To this one possession, he attached the most important of his vague recollections, because its links were closely entwined with a house that had once been home.

  “Kath taught for a while, of course,” Buckley said. “You’ve seen those photos, I guess.”

  Trevor nodded. “What were you doing then?”

  “Me? Fixing up cars and motorbikes. Bumming around. Surfing. Renovating your grandmother’s house …”

  “Oh.”

  Sometimes when in thought, Trevor would look up at Buckley pensively and quizzically, and find his father already gazing at him the same way – as though they had both stopped simultaneously to evaluate a common thought or feeling.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “You remember when I was, um, seven, and you told me I could have the kombi when I’m old enough to drive?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Well, are you still going to?”

  “Well, yes. You’ve got a while to wait, though.”

  “Are you selling it to me or giving it to me?”

  “That depends. No, I’ve just decided
to sell it to you.”

  “Aw, Dad!”

  “Ten thousand dollars. Take it or leave it.”

  “But it’s twenty years old.”

  “So?”

  “It might not be working by then.”

  “It’s been round the clock twice.”

  “So? Besides, ten thousand is a rip-off, I reckon.”

  “But it’s almost an antique,” Buckley said in mock protest.

  Pause.

  “Hey, c’mon Dad. You said you’d give it to me. No, not said, promised. I remember …”

  Buckley laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m pulling your leg, dummy. I did promise; what a dumb thing to promise in the first place. The kombi’s yours in about six or seven years time.” Then he added, “You’ve got a memory like a bloody elephant’s.”

  “Dad?”

  “What now?”

  “Can you teach me to play guitar some time?”

  Buckley shrugged. “What happened last time, though?”

  “I gave up. Because my fingers hurt from pressing the strings down.”

  “Mm. When are you going to find time to practise? Guitar is something you have to work at.”

  “I know. Can you teach me?”

  “Yes,” Buckley said with an obliging sigh, “I’ll teach you. Again. When would you like to start?”

  “Tonight?”

  “All right. Tonight. But will you have time to practise?”

  “Yes.”

  “In between football, school and homework from the beloved Mr Fuller?”

  “Er, yuk. I mean, yes.”

  “And while we’re at it, how was school today?”

  School.

  School was being trapped in the limbo of the classroom all day long while Mr Fuller alternately “taught” and shouted commands. It was avoiding the teacher’s gaze and attention. It was joining in the games of playground football, the benefit of which the other kids now reluctantly allowed him. It was being desk neighbours with Martin Grace.

  “Jeez, you wear queer clothes, Huon.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do. How come you don’t dress like everybody else?”

  “Because–”

  “Because why? I reckon you’re a pansy. Mum’s boy.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are so. Wish I didn’t have to sit next to you.”

  “How come you were sitting by yourself in the first place, then?” Trevor asked with impulsive cruelty. “Doesn’t anyone else like you?”

  “You think you’re smart, don’t you Huon?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m repeating sixth class. I’ve had Fuller for a teacher now for three years running. Bet you couldn’t handle that.”

  “How come you’re here for an extra year then?”

  “Because I wasn’t old enough.”

  “You look old enough,” Trevor said suddenly. “You’re taller than the other kids.”

  Martin’s aggression remained unabated. “Well, I’m not older, am I? And when Fuller let us choose where we wanted to sit at the start of the year, all the kids I was real good friends with had already gone to high school. And now I have to sit next to you. Bloody pansy.”

  And so it went on, day after school-bound day. Martin taunting and harping about the same things and Trevor usually giving up and keeping quiet, because Martin was mercilessly persistent. If it wasn’t in front of the other kids in the playground, it was in the classroom, in a furtive whisper that usually seemed to escape the teacher’s attention. Inside, Trevor fumed at the insults.

  What’s so good about being like Martin anyway, and living in a slack country town like this? he thought to himself. Buckley, Kath, the kombi, the caravan – he had a pride in them and stubbornly refused to change wholeheartedly to satisfy the likes of Martin Grace.

  “School?” Trevor replied to Buckley. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  He realised then that he had his own sort of secretiveness and that there was much of his life that his parents didn’t know about. The individuality and small measure of privacy was reciprocal.

  And then he thought about Mr Fuller.

  That morning the teacher had been occupying his favourite spot beside the blackboard. His eyes scanned the classroom and finding no cause for reprimand he began to address them.

  It was the preamble to a lesson.

  “… and I’ve decided that our next class assignment will take the form of something creative. I know you’ve got imagination, at least most of you have. We manage to produce some good artwork one way and another. And lately, the written expression has improved. Michael O’Leary, stop talking! The compositions and poems you’ve written in your books have been … good. Therefore, your next class project takes the form of a written story. Not just a composition, but a story. It can have chapters if you wish.”

  “How long does it have to be, sir?” someone asked.

  “At least six pages.”

  Such lengths were unheard of and the kids made a few appropriately disgruntled noises.

  “Remember, it’s a story. Your own ideas and not something from TV.”

  “When do we start, sir?”

  “Today. To be handed in Monday fortnight. You’ll have two and a half weeks to work on it, which I tend to think is too long, but two and a half weeks it is. I’ll give you some time to think about it now. Written expression books out, everyone.”

  “Please, sir, can we talk about it?”

  “Yes,” Mr Fuller answered generously, “you may have ten minutes to discuss it amongst yourselves. Quietly.”

  “Sir, can it be something about magic?”

  “That’s imaginary, isn’t it Evans?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then. Do some thinking, son.”

  The classroom was lost to sudden informality. As the conversation buzzed around him, Trevor pondered the form his own expressive contribution might take.

  “Hey,” Martin said suddenly, “d’you like science fiction?”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said, “I’ve read a couple of my dad’s paperbacks.”

  “Well, I might write a science fiction story. What are you doing for a story?”

  “Dunno.”

  Martin looked at him for a moment. “I know what you can write about, Trevor.”

  “What?”

  “A fairy story!” said Martin and immediately doubled up giggling at his own profound sense of humour.

  Trevor grimaced, knowing that he should have expected such a comment from Martin, who was still engulfed in giggles. Then abruptly, it dawned on Trevor as remotely funny too, and he grinned.

  Much later, he lay awake on his bunk in the kombi. The fingers on his left hand smarted from the renewed efforts at learning the guitar. Inside the caravan his parents were playing familiar songs and he tried not to think about school, but to concentrate on these songs, that he’d known ever since he could remember.

  But somehow, images of Mr Fuller, Martin Grace and the kids at school kept coming to mind instead.

  SEVEN

  “I just reckon you’ve been sucked in.”

  “Why?”

  Martin’s voice was condescending, knowing. “I just reckon you have.”

  Trevor was defensive. “But how d’you know?”

  “Look, Huon, I know. You heard what Fuller said. You’ll be sitting on that sideline till doomsday. He doesn’t trust you, he doesn’t even like you.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up.”

  “I think you’re stupid.”

  “Am not.”

  “Nuts!”

  “You think I’m really dumb, don’t you?”

  “No. Yes, a bit. If I was you, I’d call it quits.”

  “Well, I’m not going to.”

  “You’ve really been sucked in, haven’t you?”

  The playing field was transformed. The goalposts had been wrapped in team colour streamers and everywhere there were people. It was Saturday afte
rnoon, a day in the very height of the football season. From first thing in the morning till well into the afternoon, the parents came to watch the progression of club football matches played on the two or three adjoining grounds behind the club premises.

  Each week, opposing teams of kids would arrive by bus or in cars to play the local teams. The spectrum of ages was wide. There were even teams of little four and five year olds, who struggled across the length and breadth of the field and occasionally stopped altogether, forgetting that it was a serious game they were supposed to be playing. Forgetting, that is, until eager parents yelled at them from the sidelines to get moving, or else.

  No other sporting events throughout the year attracted as much attention as the kids’ football matches. The girls’ matches of basketball, hockey and softball paled by comparison, because the sporting atmosphere of the town was arrogantly and almost exclusively, male.

  The noisiest members of the football-watching population were the parents, who took it in unconscious shifts throughout the day to provide a deafening commentary on what their respective sons could be doing to improve the score of each game. Parents arrived with younger children, grandparents and other relative appendages to sit a game out on collapsible chairs positioned along the sidelines. To make things even more comfortable they brought picnic lunches and liquid refreshments in eskys to last the spectating distance, while their sons laboured athletically after a football and an appropriately resounding victory.

  This mammoth gathering happened each Saturday, and its fervour was very near religious.

  Curiously, Trevor regarded the audience of parents. He wondered what it’d be like to have some of these as mother and father instead of Kath and Buckley, who looked slightly out of place at such an event. They sat cross-legged on the ground and looked around with interest and some amusement, occasionally making wisecrack remarks to each other about any unsuspecting person who happened to attract their attention. Briefly, Trevor felt glad that he had the parents that he did. The others he saw all seemed to have loud voices and an iron grip over their respective broods of children. With subtle glee, he gradually matched a lot of the parents up with the kids from Fuller’s team, wondering what it would be like to be Martin Grace or Bradley Clark.