by Nikki Buick
The idea of being a writer like Hunter S Thompson appealed on some fantastical level. I could drive in an open-top convertible around the Nevada desert swigging tequila from the bottle while writing incredibly razor-sharp, mind-altered novels that dealt with existential angst. But that was a stupid dream. After seeing how much Mum struggled as a writer, I knew it would never be more than a hobby. I’m not tenacious or driven enough to be a writer. I loved reading but didn’t make a big deal of it at school. Katie Ford would think I was a nerd if I always had a book tucked under my arm. My art was good but making money as an artist was possibly even more of a struggle. And teaching kids English or Art at school? Well, I couldn’t think of anything worse.
Teachers were always carrying on about not making enough money. Once a term they seemed to strike for better pay. I didn’t mind of course, because I got the day off. But if the job was so badly paid, why did Step want to be a teacher? He should be doing Law or brain surgery or something so he could contribute something worthwhile to our family. He said it was because he loved kids and wanted to make a difference. He was not in it for the money. What a load of crap. He was only saying that to impress Mum. I didn’t like kids and didn’t want to make a difference to their lives. I didn’t know what I was going to ‘be’ but I knew it was not going to be a teacher.
‘I just want a job to pay the bills so I can write and sketch in my spare time. Any job. But not teaching. I know what kids are like in class and it’s not pretty,’ I snorted.
‘Someone’s got to teach you kids,’ Step moved into the conversation. ‘It’s not an easy job. It’s underpaid and unappreciated but teachers are the backbone of our society. Teaching kids discipline and preparing them for life is tough. You kids think you’re tough but you’ve got no idea.’
‘So, why are you doing primary teaching, Step?’ I asked him with a snide drawl in my voice. ‘Teenagers too scary? You feel safer telling all the little infants what to do? You wouldn’t last a week in a high school.’
Step shut his mouth and held his jaw tight.
Mum pulled the geometry book out and began reading aloud in a robotic voice. At least it put an end to the career advisory session. It didn’t take me long to drift off into a trance where her voice became a hum, a drone. It was like being in class.
*
‘Look for a motel and a pizza place,’ Mum said as we cruised into the main street.
That woke me up. I rubbed my eyes and pulled my hair back into a ponytail in my fist to stop the wind whipping it about my face. Mackay was a big, dull town. It was just a smaller version of Brisbane with all the interesting bits sucked out. My bum was numb and I had pins and needles in both feet, so when I got out of the car, I nearly fell over. I bunny-hopped about until the circulation woke up in my body.
We finally found a motel that had a cheap room available. No frills. There was a fridge but all it offered was a container of long-life milk to go with the tiny sachets of coffee and tea. Mum ordered a portable cot for the spotted Ranger.
‘You and Pippa can sleep top and tail on the single bed,’ said Mum.
Great! There’s nothing like waking up with your sister’s feet up your nose and she was a restless sleeper, like a giant convulsing bedbug. I was too old to sleep with my sister. Geez.
‘I’ll sleep in the car,’ I announced.
‘Whatever …’ Mum just shrugged.
Ham and pineapple pizza, meat lovers, garlic bread and a bottle of Coke. Life didn’t get much better than that. Pippa and I watched The Simpsons on the tiny television in the corner of the room, while Ranger banged his toys together like a deranged percussionist. My bloated belly grumbled from the dough-fest and I was burping thanks to the Coke. Mum’s mobile rang and she looked at it and slammed the ignore button.
‘Prize Home people. Damn it.’
‘Why don’t you just throw the bloody phone away,’ I said. ‘It’s not like anyone else ever rings you, and you won’t answer it. Or just buy some tickets. We might win a luxury house or something. Be better than the shoebox we live in now!’
She ignored me.
Mum and Step ate a vegetarian pizza. Mum was a vegetarian – about every second day. If there was bacon, she was suddenly a carnivore who could eat a whole pig. She was one of those hypocritical animal activists who was extremely passionate until they were hungry.
‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ Mum said nodding, looking around. ‘We might stay here for a couple of days and recharge, hey?’
Mum and Step hit the red wine again and after a glass or two, Mum had those purple lips that made her look like a zombie. Two or three more and she started talking like one. Whenever those two drank red wine, they got all lovey-dovey and that was my cue to drag a pillow to the back seat of the car. If I had to watch Step play with Mum’s hair and give her a foot massage for another minute, I swear the pizza would have made a reappearance. The thought of those two getting it on made me gag, literally. She was my mother! I guess I was guilty of being hypocritical because, to be honest, I thought about sex quite a bit. I was keenly looking forward to getting to final base. In particular, I kept thinking about making that touchdown with Katie Ford from school. Her black hair and the way her skirt hung over her bum and … Sorry, I got off track. The point was, my mother was like … over 40 and the thought of … I was just going to stop right there. Enough! It gave me nightmares.
We had breakfast in some greasy café. I ordered bacon and eggs, Mum had a fruit salad, Pippa asked for cereal and a soy milkshake and Step had the gall to order baked beans on toast. The guy was sent into my life as some awful karmic torture devise for something evil I’d done in a past life. Baked beans! He looked at me and blew a raspberry.
After breakfast we wandered around town. There wasn’t much happening. I asked Mum if I could call Jesse. It was a Saturday and he’d probably still be asleep but I felt like talking to him. I missed his stupid laugh. She gave me the phone.
‘Don’t be long,’ she frowned.
I walked down the street and dialled Jesse’s number as I window-shopped, looking into empty banks, a chemist and a bookstore.
‘Hmmm,’ Jesse gave his trademark morning growl.
‘Hey, Jess, it’s me!’
There was a rustle of noise like he’d dropped his phone.
‘Hang on, hi, Fox, is that you, man, hi,’ he mumbled. ‘Dropped the phone. Where the hell are you ringing from?’
‘Dunno.’ I laughed. ‘Some outpost. Mackay or somewhere. It’s all the same after a while.’
‘Seen any crocodiles yet?’ he asked.
‘Nah, just a whole lot of nothing. What’s new?’
‘Katie Ford and Mack the dickhead broke up.’
‘No way!’ I shouted down the phone.
‘Way,’ he answered. ‘And Kelly’s pregnant.’
A sonic boom of silence imploded.
‘Say what?’ I half barked.
‘Really,’ Jesse whispered. ‘And she’s having it.’
All the air whooshed out of my lungs and I could smell my bad breath in a halo around the phone. Kelly was Beggsie’s girlfriend. They’d been together for about a year.
‘No way!’ I said again. ‘That’s just … that’s just … what’s Beggsie saying about that?’
‘Well, he’s freaking out, his folks are freaking out. Everyone’s freaking out.’
It was going to take some processing, this news.
‘She’s only 16 and Beggsie’s only 16.’
‘Nearly 17,’ he retorted as if that somehow made the whole thing more acceptable.
‘Beggsie’s going to be a father? A dad?’ I said, still in disbelief.
‘Seems so, my man,’ Jesse said back.
All the news of my trip, what little there was, was swallowed up because this bombshell was all we talked about from that point. My mate, since we were abo
ut ten years old, was going to be a father. To a human baby. I knew Beggs and Kelly were ‘doing’ it, but I knew Beggsie was not a total fool and he was always safe. It made no sense. My heart went out to him. Poor dude. Sixteen and you’re lumped with something like Ranger. That was just unthinkable.
And while Kelly was nice, I knew that she wasn’t necessarily ‘forever’ material. At our age, no-one was. The concept of Miss Right didn’t exist for us yet. There was just Miss Right Now. Not that I’d even had a Miss Right Now yet but I was always working on it. I had Katie Ford staked out for that. But in those few minutes talking to Jesse, girls suddenly sounded very dangerous. It was all fun until something like this happened. My mother was going to have a meltdown over this.
‘Just give him my best, hey?’ I told Jess. ‘Tell him I’ll be there for him as soon as I get back. I’ll try to get him on Facebook the second I can. Tell him to hang in there. It’ll be alright.’
‘You want me to say hi to Katie for you?’ Jesse asked teasingly. ‘Tell her you’re missing her?’
‘Nah,’ I scoffed back. ‘Tell her you talked to me and that I’m having a blast in the tropics with a bunch of surfer chicks, and don’t even mention that we talked about her. But with her meathead boyfriend out of the way, she’d better watch out when I get back. Just don’t tell her that, obviously!’
‘How’s your mum?’ Jesse asked, changing the subject.
Everyone knew Mum had wigged out and tried to off herself. No-one had ever talked about it directly to my face, not even Jesse. Only the school counsellor had.
‘She’s good. Great. Never better,’ I said curtly. ‘I’ll catch you laterz. K?’
‘Hey, Hunterz,’ Jess whispered, labouring the ‘zzzzz’ sound we put on the end of words for extra effect – a little more seasoning.
‘I gotta go,’ I hurried, not wanting to discuss Mum. ‘Yeah but what?’
There was a pause, a taut silence.
‘Ah, it’s nothin’,’ Jess grumbled. ‘See ya.’
‘Laterz,’ I said back. And I hung up quickly.
Leaning against the glass display window of the bookstore, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Beggsie’s girlfriend was pregnant. And I thought I had problems!
ON THE ROAD TO BOWEN
The homeschooling thing was not going well. My teachers back in Brisbane had given Mum a heap of work for me to do. The learn-about-the-world ideas my mother had were shrivelling up because most of Mum’s time was taken up with that baby. Her enthusiasm for my education had begun to sour, probably due, in part, to my attitude. But really, she was trying too hard. When she read from my Maths text it was like a boring, foreign lullaby. We’d discussed the novel I was studying. She’d read it and I hadn’t got past the first chapter so our discussions were pretty one-sided. So I was relieved when she’d given me all the modules from school and told me to work my way through them at my own pace.
‘I’m too tired to fight with you about it all, Hunter,’ she’d said. ‘It’s your work. You do it or you’ll repeat the year. I need to focus on my manuscript. I haven’t gotten past 5,000 words! And it’s been nearly two weeks.’
My idea of working through the modules at my own pace was possibly different from hers. I was still stuck on just contemplating the work I had to do, rather than actually doing the work. I needed to get into the right headspace.
We were driving through the endless monotony of flat, beige farmland and tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns when it all came tumbling down.
‘How far into your work are you, Hunter?’ Mum asked.
‘Not very far.’ I had to be honest. Mum had a lie detector wedged behind her ear like a hearing aid. A bull-crap detector.
‘I can’t read in the car or I’ll get carsick and when we stop for leg-stretch breaks, I’m still kind of hypnotised from the road. If we stop for more than two minutes anywhere, I might get a chance to actually do something.’
‘Have you finished that book for English yet? And what is the play you are studying?’ she asked, ignoring my excuse.
‘No I haven’t quite finished the novel. And it’s Hamlet. The play. You know, Shakespeare?’ My voice actually sounded pained.
‘Oh, brilliant,’ Mum cooed. ‘I love Shakespeare and Hamlet is so wonderful. So tragic and dark. You’ll love it.’
Yep. That’s me. The kid who’s into tragic and dark. I could write a tragedy. It’s called My Life.
‘What week are you up to in Maths? It’s about week three of the term.’
‘Ah … week …’
‘You were up to week one when we left. And we’ve been gone just over two weeks.’
‘Then I’m up to week … one.’
‘Have you done anything since we left? Anything? You had plenty of time in Mackay. We were there for nearly three days and you wouldn’t come on field trips with us. Just sat around in the motel room. What were you doing if you weren’t going through the Maths book or reading the novel?’
I couldn’t tell her that I’d watched bad daytime television for the most part and dozed in and out of dreams that featured Katie Ford quite heavily.
‘Have you learnt one single thing since we left Brisbane?’ she snapped.
‘I know that Captain Hook … I mean … Cook named a town 1770.’
She turned her head like something out of a zombie movie and her sunglasses slipped down her nose to reveal two eyes pulled together by a frown.
‘Next stop. Next stop, I’ll get Dad to sit down and go through all the work with you until you’re up to date. Dad can take over the supervision of your bloody schoolwork!’
‘How’s Dad gonna do that? He hasn’t been around for a while, hey?’
Mum’s eyes stormed over and her lips twisted in on themselves. ‘That’s not called for. That hurts, Hunter.’ A tear bubbled up in the corner of her eye and she pushed the sunnies back into place.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, feeling the level of tension in the car rise like an electricity surge. I felt bad about having upset Mum. It had just slipped out. But it was kind of comforting to see that she still had some tears for Dad. It wasn’t just me. Sometimes that’s how I felt – that I was the only one who missed him. Life was better when Dad was around. That was my truth and I was sticking to it. Even if I didn’t say it out loud too often anymore.
The actual town of Bowen was another few kilometres up the highway. We set up camp at a busy park down by the water. Our site was wedged between two others and one of them must have had about ten backpackers sharing it. The accents were all over the place. I picked a French one and the others seemed to be a mix of Spanish and Italian. The backpackers were all tanned and loud. The place was like a circus.
‘I hope they don’t stay up all night, partying,’ Mum whispered to me as we pulled our stuff from the boot.
I kept watching them, wishing I was one of them. Only a few years older, but free and happy.
Step was getting better at constructing our polyester home. The awning covered a little alcove and behind it there were two ‘rooms’ separated by a flimsy, zippered door. I had started helping him. Together we could get it done in about 15 minutes. We’d taken to timing ourselves and were always trying to break our own record. There were moments, only brief and distantly separated, when Step dropped the whole stepfather act and seemed like just a normal dude. He could be okay when it was just the two of us. I think he tried too hard to be my replacement dad when Mum was around, trying to prove to her that he was some authoritarian figure. When it was just us, he seemed less of a jerk and friendlier without that weird tone he adopted around the others.
Mum and Step shared a double inflatable mattress and Pippa and I had two singles in the back room, which also had a zippered door. An escape hatch! Step snored most nights. I lay there entertaining thoughts of smothering him with a pillow. The baby slept between the adults. He snored too bu
t it was kind of cute. A little piglet noise.
After the tent was sorted, I went for a walk to get my bearings and to stretch my legs, which were getting really sick of these long road trips.
‘You can go and have a look at the bay. But come straight back. Don’t go swimming by yourself,’ Mum called.
Mum! Geez, she still treated me like a baby sometimes. All her over-protectiveness of Pippa had spilled over to me and my mother fretted constantly about bad things happening to us, like we were some glassblown collectibles. I hadn’t told her about Beggsie and his impending fatherhood. That might have been a wake-up call to her though, that we’re not little innocent kids anymore. I still couldn’t quite believe it – Beggsie was going to be a parent! I was determined to be at least 30 before I got anywhere near such a responsibility. I wanted to have fun first. Babies, as I can testify firsthand, were not fun.
We’d been gypsies for less than three weeks and yet despite Mum’s slip-slop-slap campaign with the sunblock, my skin was deepening to a definite bronze from its former pasty white. The singlet lines on my shoulders were vertical zebra stripes, like I was carrying a white backpack. Permanently. I looked like a redneck bogan who’d fallen asleep on a beach after a bender.
Mum was still a bit of a stress-head but she seemed better than she’d been. She wasn’t crying every day and curling herself into a ball on the bed, like she had been doing at home. I got the feeling that the new pills the doctor had given her were working. The fresh air and sunshine were obviously doing her good. I was hyper vigilant around her most of the time and so was Step, ever since that day when we’d nearly lost her. I kept a watch out for times when her mood changed. I’d watch her facial expressions and her body language, listening for odd changes in her voice. I was always just looking for some clue that there was something sinister beneath the surface. I hadn’t seen her turning point last time, and didn’t want to miss it if it happened again.
Even though she had seemed a little more relaxed and happier than usual, there were times when I was worried that it was a ‘fake’ kind of happiness. If there had been a trigger for that terrible episode at home that nearly took her away from us, she wasn’t telling. Maybe she told her shrink. I think it was just a build-up of everything she’d suppressed for years. The shock of Pippa’s diagnosis, the break-up with Dad. The accident and everything that happened after. Or maybe it was a post-baby thing.
