Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar

by D. J. Connell

  I was still thinking about the television when I turned into Echidna Avenue and heard a loud screech of tyres. The screech was followed by a thud and then the revving of a car engine. A moment later, a Tip Top taxi swerved into view, travelling at high speed. As the car flew past, the driver glanced my way and I recognised what Carmel called a ‘Tickworth Flush’. The man’s cheeks were bright red and his eyes were bloodshot.

  Mum and I were in the dinette when Dad came home. He was earlier than usual and didn’t smell of beer. His face was serious. He sat down at the table and propped his chin on his fists, clearing his throat before making an announcement.

  ‘There’s been a hit and run up the end of our street.’ He hesitated and held his bottom lip between the small crumbs of his teeth.

  Mum walked over from the sink, drying her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘A boy’s in hospital with a broken leg. It’s a compound fracture. They say the bone was poking out of his leg.’

  ‘What kind of animal would leave a boy in that condition?’ Mum pulled up a chair next to me and squeezed my forearm.

  ‘Probably some drunk idiot.’ This was rich coming from Dad.

  ‘He could’ve hit one of our kids.’ This was the most I’d heard Mum say to Dad in months. She ran a hand through her hair, exposing a nest of grey hairs near the temple. ‘What time did this happen?’

  ‘About six or so.’ Dad banged his fist on the table Kojak-style and let out a hiss of air between his tiny teeth. He was doing an impression of a concerned father and clearly enjoying his performance.

  ‘Dad!’ I’d come home from Frank’s place at six. The screech of tyres and thud suddenly made sense. ‘I saw who did it.’

  My father gave me a look. The hit and run had been his moment of glory. He wasn’t about to give it up without a struggle.

  ‘It was six on the dot when I came home. I heard a thud, then a terrible noise, a blood-boiling scream. A Tip Top taxi flew out of our street with blood on its bumper. I’d swear I saw hairs in the blood. I thought he’d hit a Labrador.’

  ‘Julian, this better not be one of your stories.’ Dad was frowning.

  ‘The taxi driver was drunk and swerving all over the road like a maniac. He could’ve hit Carmel coming home from hockey practice. They could’ve been her hairs on the bumper.’

  Dad’s eyebrows shot up. ‘All right, all right. We’d better get you down to the police station.’

  Information was currency at the edge of the cricket pitch. I lit a cigarette and made sure the usual suspects were assembled before casually mentioning the accident. Someone had procured a bottle of sweet cooking sherry and the boys were passing it up and down the fence. No one else had eye-witnessed an attempted murder. I had them eating out of my hand.

  ‘The bone of his leg was sticking out like a chopstick. You should’ve seen the blood. Buckets of it. They had to physically scrape him off the road with a butter knife.’

  ‘A butter knife! Jesus wept!’ Wayne’s face had a rapt expression. ‘Was he an Abo?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The perpetrator.’

  Wayne wasn’t only interrupting a good story but he was also displaying his ignorance. There were virtually no Aboriginal people in Tasmania. The early white settlers had hunted down and murdered nearly all the original inhabitants. Mum called it genocide. She said it made her ashamed to be a white Tasmanian.

  ‘He was white and stupid.’ The only non-white person I knew was Mr Patel and he wasn’t stupid. People said he’d been a brain surgeon in India before moving to Ulverston.

  ‘Just asking.’ Wayne looked surprised, even hurt by my answer. ‘You can’t trust them black fellas.’

  ‘You’ve only ever seen them on TV.’ Christine Kandy was looking directly at Wayne. ‘And your TV’s not even colour so you don’t know what they really look like.’

  ‘Piss off, Kandy pants.’ Wayne hunched his shoulders and stopped bouncing on the fence.

  Christine had gone too far with the TV comment. Showing someone up for being a bigot was one thing. What you couldn’t do was expose someone without a colour TV. Wayne remained silent for a few minutes before leaving with the other boys trailing after him. Cherie said goodbye and headed for the bus stop. Christine sat down under a gum tree and patted the ground next to her.

  ‘Wayne’s just thick, you know.’

  She held out the dregs of sherry to me. I took a mouthful and handed it back. I didn’t think Wayne was just thick. I’d seen a flash of something else when she’d mentioned the TV.

  ‘Ever kissed a girl?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Of course I hadn’t kissed a girl and neither did I want to start. I was thinking of an excuse to leave when Christine suddenly leaped on top of me and planted her lips on mine. Her tongue was in my mouth before I could say Jimmy Budge.

  ‘What did you say?’ She pulled away.

  ‘Nothing.’

  We kissed hard for five agonising minutes, long enough for it to seem normal, before I pulled away. I told her I had to finish a police report and walked home on hollow, shaky legs. Christine Kandy scared me but I wasn’t the only one. I’d seen fear on Wayne’s face when she’d confronted him.

  I was still shaken up when I arrived home. The back door was unlocked and I could hear cursing coming from the lounge. It didn’t sound good. Lifting my heels, I tiptoed through the dinette to the lounge door. My heart leaped.

  Dad was on his knees next to a pile of cardboard packaging. Next to this was a big fake mahogany box with a twenty-inch screen. I was looking at a brand-new colour TV and it was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’d seen since Peter Grubb’s frill. I could watch Dick Dingle in colour and invite Frank home. We were one of the lucky families. We had a colour TV and The Ensuite. The Corkle family was on the up and up.

  ‘Thanks, Dad. You don’t know what this means to me.’

  ‘What?’ Dad grunted. He was bent over, tugging at the antenna wire.

  ‘The TV really means a lot to me.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it means to me, fifteen bloody dollars a month. That includes the chair, of course.’

  I turned and saw a large brown vinyl reclining chair wedged next to the couch. It had a wooden lever to work the footrest. Fifteen dollars seemed an extremely low repayment for two large purchases.

  ‘It’s worth it Dad. Now we can watch everything in colour.’

  ‘That’s why I rented it, you idiot.’

  ‘Rented?’

  ‘You don’t think I’m stupid enough to buy one, do you?’

  I couldn’t believe my father. You didn’t rent colour TVs. You bought them. You were still unfortunate if you rented. I walked over and took a close look at the set. At the bottom of the dial panel was a small Rentascope badge. It wasn’t something you’d notice if you were watching the news or passing through the room to get a cheese sandwich. You’d have to look really hard; squint your eyes and look really, really hard. I heard the back door slam.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Carmel stood in the doorway of the dinette, removing her muddy hockey boots on the lino.

  ‘It’s the colour TV you’ve all been whining about since Adam was a cowboy.’ Dad stood up and wiped his hands on the sides of his corduroys. He was wearing his Carmel smile.

  ‘Ugh, it’s from Rentascope!’ Carmel hesitated for a moment then stalked off to her bedroom.

  The smile disappeared from Dad’s lips. He turned back to the TV and pointed to the rusty tools scattered over the carpet.

  ‘I don’t want to hear another ungrateful word from you, Julian. Clean up this bloody mess and put these tools away.’

  16

  Colour reception completely transformed television viewing for me. I couldn’t get enough of it. Colour made everyone look better, even the likes of old Val Doonican and Andy Williams. Mum and I were delighted with the new TV. She now rushed home every night to watch Coronation Street with me. Len Fairclough had never looked more lively.

  S
adly for us, the joy of colour didn’t escape the notice of my father who began making an effort to leave the pub earlier. It didn’t matter what Mum and I were watching, once he parked his bum on the recliner and took the remote control in hand, the television was tuned to sports. There was certainly plenty of it on television. Sports were a Tasmanian obsession. Even Dick Dingle got in on the act, occasionally reporting on youth athletics and swimming events.

  At Waratah High it was impossible to get out of sports. If you didn’t do phys. ed. you were a poofter and this was one label I definitely wanted to avoid. The best and worst thing about our weekly hour of violence on the playing field was the dressing room afterward. Showering was compulsory but the showers had no curtains or partitions, a cruel arrangement for boys with sparse pubic hair or small penises. These were no longer pressing issues for me but I’d developed another problem, one a lot more hazardous to my health. I was suffering from the spontaneous erections of youth. I could get a stiffy packing Tiffany biscuits at Cobber’s or watching Danny in The Partridge Family. More often than not, there was neither rhyme nor reason to them.

  When it was my turn for the shower nozzle, I followed Brother Punt’s soap and flannel routine. I also kept the water dial turned to cold and fixed Carmel with a hockey stick in my mind’s eye. These precautions usually did the trick and I could be in and out of the shower with the best of them. There were days, however, when even the vision of my sister in shorts wasn’t enough to prevent nature taking its course.

  ‘Corkle, you queer bastard!’ Paul Lamb had watched me scuttle out of the shower sideways like a crab.

  I had a towel around my waist but my erection was jutting out like Sir Edmund Hillary’s tent pole.

  ‘Corkle’s a pooftah, Corkle’s a pooftah.’

  Paul Lamb circled me, chanting, with his hands balled into fists. Blood surged up my neck and into my face. I fought my damp legs into underpants and jeans with my heart slamming inside my chest and my eyes on the floor.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Wayne’s command cut through the chant.

  Everyone heard it and froze. Paul Lamb dropped his arms and unballed his fists. He moved away and started rifling through his bag. I quickly put on my shirt and left the room, breaking into a run once I got outside. I didn’t stop running until I’d left the school grounds. In those few terrifying seconds of torment, I’d seen hatred in Paul Lamb’s eyes. He was itching to get his hands on me.

  I got home and flopped on my bed with the door closed and the curtains pulled. I had to make a decision. I could go back to the benches and risk being dragged off or I could return to the gum trees and face the possibility of more immediate violence. I filled my lungs and looked at David Bowie. It was dim in the room but I knew the poster so well I could fill in its details. I focused my eyes and tried not to blink. David Bowie’s face blurred and then seemed to move. The hint of a smile appeared on his lips; then it vanished. It was a sign.

  The boys were the same as usual the next day. No one mentioned the erection, not even Paul Lamb. They were talking about ‘stink finger’ and paid me no attention as I sat on the grass below the fence and removed a bottle of Jackaroo from under my jumper. Stink finger was something boys did to girls and then discussed with their mates. Christine Kandy’s name came up. Wayne turned to me.

  ‘I hear you were pashing up Kandy.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘You want to watch yourself. She’s one of them sexual maniacs.’

  The boys laughed and jiggled on the fence.

  ‘Did you cop a feel?’ Wayne had raised his eyebrows. The boys went quiet.

  It was a Ralph Waters moment. If I said no, I was a chicken or a poofter. If I said yes, I might be asked to describe the lady hole. Wayne was looking at me.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Yeah?’ He raised his eyebrows.

  I shrugged again and handed him the unopened bottle of Jackaroo.

  Wayne hesitated and then took the wine with a nod. Ross Gibb put two fingers in his mouth and gave a sharp whistle. I’d seen sheep farmers use the same whistle on TV to control border collies. The boys used it to indicate the presence of undesirables such as teachers and prefects. Christine and Cherie were approaching.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Christine went straight for the weakest link, Paul Lamb.

  ‘Nothing.’ His face flushed.

  ‘So we’re nothing then?’

  The other boys laughed nervously. They were intimidated by Christine Kandy. She didn’t need a gaggle of weaker kids to prop her up. Neither did she filter her opinions to please the fence-sitters. The boys said things about her behind her back but never contradicted her in person. She was too fierce.

  Christine sat on the grass next to Cherie and took a few swigs of the wine. The boys started talking about Kawasaki motorcycles. Their voices became a soft buzz as I lay back and looked up at the sky through the leaves. I’d hardly slept the previous evening and soon dozed off in the shade of the gum trees.

  It was quiet when I felt someone lay down beside me. I opened my eyes and realised with a shock that I was alone with Christine. My chest tightened. Smiling, she took hold of my hand and guided it into her underpants. She kept pressure on the hand until I began to feel around. My fingertips moved but met no resistance. There was nothing inside her underpants apart from pubic hair. Her hand was on top of mine again, forcing it further down into a rubbery moist crevice and then pulling it up again. She moaned. I was rubbing an empty humid strip of flesh but Christine was moaning, pushing and pulling at my hand.

  I didn’t understand and didn’t want to know. As soon as it was politely possible, I stopped moving my fingers and removed my hand.

  ‘Let’s go a bit further next time.’ Her voice was low and velvety.

  ‘Sure, Christine.’ I pushed myself up into a sitting position and discreetly wiped my fingers on the grass behind me. If that was the lady hole, the ladies could keep it. It was tragic. I glanced down at Christine and felt something between guilt and pity. ‘There’s something you should know.’

  ‘What?’ She sat up, defensive.

  ‘You’d look so much prettier without all that foundation and eye make-up. Try a lighter lipstick, peach or pastel pink.’

  Christine’s eyes widened. Her smile was incredulous. ‘Anything else I should know?’

  ‘If you stopped pinning your hair back and let it fall forward naturally, you could look like Margaux Hemingway.’

  ‘Who the hell is Margaux Hemingway?’

  ‘Probably the world’s most beautiful model.’

  In the end, it wasn’t Paul Lamb who put the cricket pitch out of bounds for me. It was Christine Kandy. The threat of having to repeat the crevice experience was more frightening than a Jackaroo bottle over the head and a knee in the testicles. I didn’t understand how girls worked down there and didn’t want to find out. The horror show I’d encountered inside Christine’s underpants terrified me. I started spending my lunchtimes in the library and did extra afternoons at Cobber’s. I even invited Frank back to our house.

  ‘You’ve got a Relaxator Recliner chair. My dad’s got one in the same brown leather.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t about to tell Frank it was vinyl.

  ‘Nice colour telly.’

  Frank made a move toward the Rentascope but I threw myself in front of him. He frowned and tried to move around me. I moved with him, blocking his path.

  ‘I just want to see the news, Julian. They caught that hit-and-run driver.’

  ‘The mad dog from Tip Top Taxis?’

  ‘That was some crank’s fantasy. The driver was an eighteen-year-old. He was joy-riding in his father’s Ford Falcon.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was glad I’d been avoiding the cricket pitch. ‘Then I definitely don’t want to watch TV. Those media vultures thrive off people’s misfortunes. They love blood and guts.’

  ‘The kid just broke his leg. I doubt there was any blood. Anyway, isn’t your father a journalist?’r />
  ‘Editor.’

  ‘Same difference if you ask me.’

  ‘I didn’t, Frank. Let me show you The Ensuite.’ I pronounced ensuite the French way, lingering over the last syllable. I knew Frank’s parents didn’t have an ensuite and it made me feel good. I opened the door of the bathroom and immediately tried to close it. One of my mother’s bras and a pair of underpants were drip-drying on a coat hanger from the shower nozzle. The door hit Frank’s foot.

  ‘Nice foundation garments.’ Frank’s eyebrows were raised. He smirked.

  I looked at the underwear and felt like slapping Frank. The bra itself was passable. It was coral pink with lacy cups and satin straps. Its relative prettiness made the old cotton underpants look overworked and unhappy. They were vaguely beige, with a hole at the top where the elastic stitching had come undone. Poor Mum. She deserved better.

  ‘Want to see my room?’ I grabbed Frank by the arm and spun him around. My face was burning as I opened the door to my bedroom. I propelled him through the doorway with a shove. He stumbled inside and gasped.

  ‘That’s jacquard on your bed, isn’t it?’

  My resentment evaporated.

  ‘I wanted the jacquard but Mum thought Dad would say it was for…you know.’

  ‘It’s aqua blue.’

  ‘It’s wonderful. And your curtains. What are they, jersey silk?’

  ‘Royal-blue brocade. There are little highlights.’

  ‘I can see the dragons from here.’

  I could’ve kissed Frank then and there. He looked adorable, smiling at my fabric. The room was warm from the afternoon sun. Frank’s neck was giving off the smell of Bird’s Beauty Savon. It was the same brand of soap that Jimmy used. Something stirred.

  ‘You’ve got a David Bowie poster.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s such a weirdo with all that make-up. You should listen to Eric Clapton.’