by Scot Gardner
‘It’s the walking wounded. How are you, Wayne?’ Uncle
Ted went to shake hands, then hesitated.
‘Oh, er. You can still shake hands all right? Good. Sorry mate.’
He shook my hand until I thought that one was going to fall off then Auntie Penny did the kiss-cuddle thing. Jenelle just stood there with her mouth part-open, staring through her Coke-bottle glasses. Auntie Penny’s always going on about how well Jenelle does at her grade three work but I think she’s thick. Penny and Ted went into the kitchen but Jenelle sat on the side of the bed and stared at my stump. I was pretending to watch the telly but I could see her out of the corner of my eye, straining to have a good look at it. I did a low monster growl and slowly lifted my stump towards her. Her mouth dropped right open and the blood drained from her face. She was frozen to the spot for a second in sheer terror then she burst out the bedroom door squealing. Mum stomped in and asked me what I had done to her.
‘She saw my stump and she freaked.’
I thought I did well not breaking into screaming fits of laughter. Mum rolled her eyes and closed the door.
Something in my head must have popped in that incident with Jenelle. Instead of being ashamed and embarrassed about my stump I looked at it and I thought it was cool. No-one else had one. And I could freak little kids out. A slightly retarded nine-year-old had set me free.
I got dressed in my black tracksuit pants and an Adidas jacket with pockets. It took me about five minutes of juggling but it wasn’t that hard. But all of my shoes had laces. From my Nikes to my shitty Doc Martens, I would need help to get them on. Then I remembered my good old elastic-sided Blundstones that live in the laundry cupboard.
Mum nearly choked on her biscuit when I walked into the kitchen and past her into the laundry. Jenelle started a fresh bout of howling.
‘Wayne. Are you all right? Where are you going?’
‘I’m fine, Mum. I’m going for a walk.’
I slipped my boots on like I’d been doing it one-handed for years and strode out the back door like it was the end of a prison sentence. Well it was, only I’d locked myself up.
The sunlight was fierce and it hurt my eyes as I walked across the shaggy lawn to the shed. I couldn’t find my bike. Some bastard had pinched it. I ran back inside and told Mum that my bike had gone.
‘Your dad’s got it. He’s fixing it,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t busted.’
She shrugged. I walked back out to the shed and grabbed my smokes and lighter from above the flimsy metal door.
I’ve got to say that walking up Merrimans Creek hill sucking on my first Holiday Extra for two months was not easy sport. By the time I’d made it to Garrison Street I was stuffed. Puffing and panting, I flicked my cigarette butt at a car turning into Howard Avenue then crossed over to the shops and dawdled to Game Zone. I had my stump stuck a little uncomfortably in my jacket pocket. No-one even looked at me sideways. That was cool. I didn’t hang around long. I thought about walking up to Den’s place but after our last little encounter it seemed too far to walk.
I crossed Garrison Street and went down Howard Avenue. I don’t really know why, it was a shining day and I didn’t feel like going home, I guess. Howard Avenue would take me past the front of the school. Would, but I didn’t get there. Two doors down from where Howard Avenue intersects with Pilberton Street, I met Richo on the road, washing his BMW and whistling. At first I felt like I wanted to hide but he saw me and froze like he’d seen a vision of Jesus. Then his face cracked into a huge smile and he tripped up the gutter coming over to shake my hand.
‘Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. Very good to see you,’ he said, almost shaking my wrist apart, his other hand planted on my upper arm. He asked me how I was going and looked right at my stump still shoved in my pocket. I nodded but before I got to speak he was talking at me again.
‘Damned horrible accident by all accounts. Not fit for an old bloke like me let alone someone as young as you. Got time for a cup of coffee or lemonade? Good. Come in.’
I looked up and down the street and followed him inside. I chose coffee and sat at the table in his kitchen while he made it. He spoke about my accident like he was excited about it in some morbid way.
‘Do you have much pain now?’
‘No. My stump gets uncomfortable when I sleep sometimes,’ I said looking at the yellowing dressing Mum had put on that morning.
‘Has it changed the way you think about your future?’
‘Nah. Not really.’
The fact is I didn’t think about my future much anyway. Not much further than my next smoke or my next meal. Or my next root. Well, my first root.
Richo gave me my cup. Snow white and two dwarfs, he said. He led me into another room adjoining the kitchen that smelled of leather and had books instead of walls. He motioned that I sit down in one of the deep black chairs and I did so as politely as I could with a hot coffee. The chair farted and groaned. Richo sat down then shot up again and grabbed a framed photograph off the bookshelf behind him and handed it to me.
‘See if you can pick which one is my dad,’ he said.
I looked at the photo; yellowing and old like the happy snaps of my grandmother. It was a footy team in long-sleeved black and white tops and knee-length shorts. It looked like there were fifty blokes in the photo and I scanned it for any faces that resembled Richo. Nothing. Maybe one bloke, third from the left in the second row.
‘No. Guess again.’
Dumb game. How was I supposed to know? I looked at the photo again and saw his dad. The bloke squatting in the front row. The bloke with the beard that made him look like a bear. The bloke with the stump of his left arm resting on the footy.
Richo laughed when I showed him and nodded until I thought his head was going to flop off.
‘Played one hundred and eighty-seven games of senior football. Had his pilot’s licence until he was seventy-four and died three years ago aged ninety-one. He lost his hand in a flourmill when he was thirteen and he always said to me that if anything it made him more determined.
He was very keen on showing people that his injury was never much of a disability.’
He shot up from the couch again, this time back into the kitchen.
He’d brought in a leather-bound photo album and showed me a few more pictures of his old man.
‘He played footy because his mum, my grandmother, said he couldn’t do it.’
I finished my cup and told him I had to go. On the front doorstep I asked him how he was going. He shrugged.
‘I’m okay. Still a bit up in the air. How are things with you at school?’
He offered his assistance in any way. I told him that things were going fine, that the accident hadn’t been a big setback. I don’t know why I bullshit like that.
I was awake before Mum on Monday. I told her I was going to school.
‘I don’t know, Wayne. I think it’s still a little early. You’re probably not ready for it yet.’
‘Yeah, I’ll be right. I can walk home if my stump gets sore.’
I’d made up my mind.
It wasn’t until I made it into the breezeway near the lockers that I felt like I’d made a mistake. At first I thought it was going to be like when I went to Game Zone— everyone just going about his or her business—but at school everybody knew me. I almost kept walking. Right across the faded paint on the quadrangle. Right down past the science wing and the woodwork room and through the back gate.
‘What the hell are you doing here? You could have had the rest of the year off at least. Dickhead,’ Den said. He’d crept up behind me at my locker. He was smiling and he offered me his hand. I think it was the first time in our lives that we’d shaken hands. Carlson and Shane Lee were standing behind him looking up and down the breezeway like they were in trouble. Kerry came out of nowhere and wrapped herself around me, jumping and giggling. I felt like a hero and it only got better.
In the common room at recess I was swamped b
y people, asking stupid stuff like ‘What happened to your hand?’ for the thirtieth time and ‘Did it hurt?’ I made up a few great stories and Den played along with them all. Some year eight girls at the canteen left with the sure knowledge that my hand had been bitten off by a crocodile while I was saving a Japanese tourist. Yeah, we were holidaying in Cape York. Den lost the plot at that one and covered his laughter with a fake cough.
I had a smoke with Den at lunchtime. We’d just lit up when he saw Griz coming and stubbed his smoke out before running into the quadrangle. Griz came straight up to me—like he was going to have a go at me—and said he was sorry to hear about my accident.
‘Hope it . . . you know . . . gets better and all that. Well ... you know... not get better, just doesn’t hurt and all that,’ he mumbled at his boot. Then he walked off.
My mouth was hanging open when Den returned. He grunted and called Griz a wanker.
At the end of lunchtime, Fay the office lady announced that Piggo Johnson wanted me in his office. Den sucked air through his teeth and shook his head.
Mr Johnson was on the phone when I got there and there was an electrician in his office playing with some wires beside his desk. Half the electrician’s bum was hanging out of his work shorts and his bum crack looked like a coin slot. Piggo was talking quietly on the phone but he invited me in with a wave of his hand. I looked out of his office window back to the administration desk. A queue of kids was waiting at the counter for Fay. She was talking on the phone, her head bowed and her bright red hair hanging across her face. She hung up and Mr Johnson’s phone clattered back into its cradle.
‘Wayne. Nice to see you up and around again. Sorry to hear about your accident. Everything okay?’
I nodded and looked at my stump.
‘I’ve asked you in to check up on what we can do from here. You’ve missed quite a bit of work and you’ll have a bit of catching up to do if you want to keep on into next year.’
We’d had maths in between recess and lunch and I had had to ask Mr Dobson to help me half a dozen times and I still ended up with brain pain.
‘I’ll be having a word with your teachers tomorrow morning and we’ll see if we can work out some sort of program to help you through—a sort of condensed version of the term’s work.’
This losing a hand isn’t altogether a bad thing.
Mandy was in the library when I got there and my gut flip-flopped. Maybe she wouldn’t notice me. Maybe she hadn’t noticed I’d missed school.
‘Wayne!’ she shouted, way too loud for the library. Mrs Kneebone told her to get on with her work. She was waving and patting the table in the stall next to her. Mrs Kneebone was sitting with Gary Reardon, engaged in some important discussion so I sat next to Mandy. All vanilla and smiles and flowing hair, she whispered that it was nice to see me and asked me how I was going. She asked about my mum, staring me in the eyes. She’s never met my mum. She lifted her arm to push her hair back and I saw her armpit—smooth and clean like the rest of her skin. And the curve of her bra-covered breast down the sleeve of her T-shirt. She told me that Kylie Simpson had had a girl on the 23rd of September, the day after her birthday, and that she’d got a job working in Coles after school and on the weekends. I apologised for forgetting her birthday and she laughed. Cheryl and Emma came over to Mandy’s stall and started chatting. Took it in turns to ask me how I was going and if I was feeling all right.
‘Good on you for coming back to school, Wayne. When Mandy told us what happened we thought you would have to go to, like, a special school or something,’ Cheryl said.
‘Yeah. We thought you wouldn’t be able to do school stuff like normal . . . well, you know, like people that . . .’ Emma said.
Mrs Kneebone interrupted us and told me to find a seat with my own form group. I found one—a seat where I could watch the back of Mandy’s head.
The miracles continued that day. Dad rolled up in the ute at about four o’clock. Back from Bermagui already? That didn’t last long. He didn’t say anything and I wasn’t going to ask him about it. He had my bike in the back. He’d taken it up to Pat’s shed and modified it. He’d taken the brake lever off the left side of the handlebar and put it on the right. He’d also mounted a road-racing armrest on the handle where he’d removed the brake. It was a padded rest and I could comfortably sit my stump on top of it and steady the handlebar. Probably wouldn’t be able to do a mono or bunny-hops up the gutter but I would be able to ride. Without thinking, I hugged him. He hugged me back—well, punched me in the spine like he was trying to burp me. He watched me ride until Mum came home.
Didn’t take long for the fact that I was different to wear off. All the extra attention eventually faded and my mates got cheeky. Carlson now called me the ‘one-armed bandit’ after it came out that I’d nicked Henderson’s porno videos. I must have watched them a hundred times and they got boring so I had stuffed them back in his locker. Hendo laughed and said that he knew I’d nicked them. He fessed up to being the one that had lit the pile of shit and paper on the front porch as revenge. I told him he was a sick bastard.
‘You haven’t seen anything yet. Me and Mandy are putting out a video next week,’ he said and rolled his eyes.
‘Makes these pornos look like Play School.’ Now that is sick.
Griz started calling me ‘Captain’ because he reckoned
I should have a hook like the dude in Peter Pan.
And he made me one. It was December. Maybe he was infected with the Christmas spirit? I dunno.
I was late. He stopped me in the breezeway and handed me a brown paper bag. I half expected it to have a dog’s turd inside it or something dead. I certainly wasn’t about to open it without some sort of facemask.
‘Go on, you wimp. Open it. It won’t bite you, I promise. You know. Cross my heart and all that.’
There was something black inside. Black fabric. Black fur. Something.
‘Here. Give it to me,’ he said and snatched the bag. He pulled out a cylinder of heavy fabric and ripped it apart. It was joined with Velcro and he asked me to hold out my stump. He slipped it over the sock I’d taken to wearing over my bandages. It fitted neatly and felt comfortable—the inside was lined with black lamb’s wool. He reached back into the bag and pulled out a hook that screwed into the end. It was a classic. Ten centimetres of shiny curved steel.
He stood back and looked at my face. ‘What? Don’t you like it?’
‘No. Yes! It’s fantastic.’
‘Yeah, well . . . you know, I thought it would be useful as well, you know. For picking stuff up and all that.’
He kept shrugging his shoulders and I couldn’t stop smiling. He said he had to go and I put my hand out so he might shake it. He didn’t see it as he loped off to class.
‘Arghhh!’ I shouted and waved my hook at him.
‘Dickhead,’ he grumbled.
There were some savage rainy days before my birthday, and some hot ones. The bloke on the radio said it was already the wettest December in Melbourne’s history. I believed it. Mum paid for Den, Hendo, Shane Lee, Carlson and I to go to the pictures for my birthday. We saw Terra Firma VIII—awesome! Real footage of the most brutal sports stuff. Blokes totalling motorbikes and doing mad-arse things on skateboards. Every time one of the blokes did an awesome stunt and pulled it off, Hendo would say: ‘I reckon I could do that.’ Bullshit artist. He’s flat out pulling a mono.
Mandy got a boyfriend. We were sitting in front of the theatre and they came out with flushed cheeks. I wanted to ride straight home. Big ugly sucker from Chisholm Catholic. Bible-reading boy with bum-fuzz. Ponytail, earring and lots of little pimples.
Hendo knew him and hated his guts. ‘Yeah, Phillip Baxter. Arsehole. Keep your hands off her you big prick,’ he said to himself.
Looked like Phillip was a mate of Cheryl Bickerton’s boyfriend, Steve with the eyebrow rings. Ahh, good luck to him. It’s not as if I’ve kissed Mandy or anything. Hendo tried to jump his imaginary motorbike over
our seat and ended up on his guts in front of the two-dollar shop. That bloke is out of control.
Dad modified the lawnmower so I could keep the jungle at the back of the flat under control. For my birthday he bought me a fishing rod and reel—expensive Shimano job—and covered the bottom of the handle with Velcro. He stuck a patch of Velcro on the hook Griz had made me and it worked! I practised casting and reeling in on the road in front of the flat. Haven’t worked out how to bait a hook yet, or tie a sinker on. I guess I’ll just have to go fishing with someone who can do all that stuff. I’ll reel in the whales. The Humes were going to Mars Cove again after Christmas and I was dropping hints like crazy that I’d like to tag along.
I worked hard on my school stuff. It was as boring as lunch in an old people’s home but I kept at it. Johnson had organised with my teachers that they give me the bare minimum needed to catch up and that was fine, except for English: Mrs Leavey lumped me with two one- thousand-word essays. I hadn’t written one thousand words back-to-back ever in my life. Looked like I was going to bomb it but I wasn’t phased.
But Mrs Leavey turned into a monster in the last two weeks of term. She dogged me constantly about my essays, to the point where I almost told her to get stuffed. It was like she could read my mind.
‘Wayne. You may have lost your hand. There’s nothing I can do about that. You may have had a long period of time off school. There’s nothing I can do about that either. I’m your English teacher.’ She spoke flatly and moved closer to me, staring into my eyes. Her breath was stale and smelled like spew. Her eyes were milky brown where they should have been white.
‘It doesn’t matter how much work you do in the other classes . . . if you fail English you fail year ten. If you don’t complete those essays you will fail.’
I got a ‘B’ for one and a ‘C’ for the other. I passed year ten. Whoopee-do.
The last few days of term are like a blur now. I can remember the things that happened but I wasn’t really there. The Humes invited me with them to Mars Cove (surprise, surprise) and I agreed—barring accidents—to go. For one reason or another I forgot to mention it to Mum, until three days before Christmas. The Humes were supposed to leave on Boxing Day.
