by Markus Zusak
With the words in my hands, that was how I felt.
I nodded.
At the prospect of it. “What?” Steve asked me. “Nothing.” “Fair enough.” The phone rang. Steve: “Hello.”
The other end: “Yeah, it’s me.” “Who the hell’s me?” It was Rube. Steve knew it. I knew it.
Even though I was a good distance from the phone, I could tell it was Rube, because he talks loud, especially on the phone.
“Is Cameron there?” “Yeah.”
“Are y’s goin’ up the oval
“Maybe,” at which point Steve looked over and I nodded. “Yes, we are,” he answered. “I’ll be up there in ten minutes.” “Right. Bye.” “Bye.”
Secretly, I think I preferred it when it was only Steve and me who went. Rube was always brilliant, always starting something and mucking around, but with Steve and me, I enjoyed the quiet intensity of it. We might never have said a word — and I might have only kicked the ball back hard and straight, and let the dirt and smell of it thump onto my chest — but I loved the feeling of it, and the idea that I was part of something unspoken and true.
Not that I never had moments like that with Rube. I had plenty of great moments with Rube. I guess it’s just that with Steve, you really have to earn things like that. You’d wait forever if you wanted one for free. Like I’ve said before, for other reasons, that’s Steve.
On the way down to the ground floor a few minutes later, he said, “I’m sore as hell from yesterday’s game. I got belted in the ribs about five times.”
At Steve’s games it was always the same. The other team always made sure he hit the ground especially hard. He always got up.
We stood on the street, waiting for Rube.
“Hey boys.”
When he arrived, Rube was puffing gently from the run. His thick, curly, furry hair was too attractive for its own good, even though it was a lot shorter than it used to be. He was wearing only a jersey, sawn-off track pants, and gymmies. Smoke came from his mouth, from the cold.
We started walking, and Steve was his usual self. He wore the same pair of old jeans he always did at the oval and a flanno shirt. Athletic shoes. His eyes took aim, scanning the path, and his hair was short and wiry and tough-looking. He was tall and abrupt and exactly the kind of guy you wanted to be walking the streets with.
Especially in the city.
Especially in the dark.
Then there was me.
Maybe the best way to describe me that night was by looking again at my brothers. Both of them were in control. Rube, in a reckless, no matter what happens, I’ll be ready when it comes kind of way. Steve, in a there’s nothing you can do that’s going to hurt me way.
My own face focused on many things, but never for too long, remaining eventually on my feet, as they traveled across the slightly slanted road. My hair was sticking up. It was curly and ruffled. I wore the same jersey as Rube (only mine was slightly more faded), old jeans, my spray jacket, and boots. I told myself that although I could never look the same as my brothers, I still had something.
I had the words in my pocket. Maybe that was what I had.
That, and knowing that I’ve walked the city a thousand times on my own and that I could walk these streetre feeling than anyone, as if I was walking through myself. I’m pretty sure that was what it was — more a feeling than a look.
At the oval Steve had shots at goal.
Rube had shots at goal.
I sent the ball back to them.
When Steve had a shot, the ball rose up high and kept climbing between the posts. It was clean, ranging, and when it came down, it rushed onto my chest with a complete, numbing force. Rube’s ball, on the other hand, spun and spiraled, low and charging, but also went through the posts each time.
They kicked them from everywhere. In front. Far out. Even past the edges of the field.
“Hey Cam!” Rube yelled at one point. “Come out and have a shot!”
“Nah mate, I’ll be right.”
They made me, though. Twenty yards out, twenty yards to the left. I moved in with my heart shuddering. My feet stepped in, I kicked it, and the ball reached for the posts.
It curved.
Spun.
Then it collided with the right-hand post and slumped to the grass.
Silence.
Steve mentioned, “It was a good shot, Cameron,” and the three of us stood there, in the wet, weeping grass.
It was quarter past eight then. At eight-thirty, Rube left, and I’d had another seven shots.
At just past nine-thirty, Steve was still standing behind the posts, and I still hadn’t got it through. Clumps of darkness grew heavier in the sky, and it was just Steve and me.
Each time my brother sent the ball back, I searched for a note of complaint in him, but it never came. When we were younger he might have called me useless. Hopeless. All he did that night, however, was kick the ball back and wait again.
When the ball finally fought its way up and fell through the posts, Steve caught it and stood there.
No smile.
No nod of the head, or any recognition. Not yet.
Soon he walked with the ball under his arm, and when he was perhaps ten yards short of me, he gave me a certain look.
His eyes looked differently at me.
His expression was swollen.
Then.
I’ve never seen a person’s face shatter like his did. With pride.
HUNGER AND DESIRE ON A FRONT PORCH NIGHT
Tonight, I sit on the front porwrite these words. The wind crawls up my sleeves and the pen wavers in my hand.
The city is cold and dark.
The streets are filled with numbness and the sky is sinking. Dark, dark sky.
Beside me, I look at the memory of twenty out and twenty left of the posts. I see a shattering face and the verge of something to become.
I tell me:
Let these words be footsteps, because I have a long way to travel. Let the words walk the dirty streets. Let them make their way across the crying grass. Let them stand and breathe and pant smoke in winter evenings. And when they’re tired and have fallen down, let them buckle to their feet and arc around me, watchful.
I want these words to be actions.
Give them flesh and bones, I say to me, and eyes of hunger and desire, so they can write and fight me through the night.
CHAPTER 3
Faggot. Poofter. Wanker.
These are common words in my neighborhood when someone wants to give you some, tell you off, or just plain humiliate you. They’ll also call you one of those things if you show some sign that you’re in some way different from the regular, run-of-the-mill sort of guy who lives in this part of the city. You might also get it if you’ve annoyed someone in some inadvertent way and the person has nothing better to say. For all I know it’s the same everywhere, but I can’t really speak for anywhere else. The only place I know is this.
This city.
These streets.
Soon you’ll know why I’ve mentioned it….
On Thursday that week I decided I should go and get a haircut, which is always a pretty dangerous decisi
on, especially when your hair sticks up as stubborn and chronic as mine. You just have to pray that it won’t end in tragedy. You hope beyond all hope that the barber won’t ignore all instructions and butcher your head to pieces. But it’s a risk you have to take.
“Har-low, mate,” the barber said when I entered the shop, deeper into the city. “Have a seat, I won’t be long.”
In the scungy waiting area there was quite a good range of magazines, though you could tell each one had been sitting there for the last few years, judging by the dates of issue. There was Time, Rolling Stone, some fishing thing, Who Weekly, some computer thing, Black and White, Surfing Life, and always a favorite, Inside Sport. Of course, the best thing about the Inside Sport magazine is not the sport, but the scantily clad woman who is planted on the cover. She i
s always firm and has desire in her eyes. Her swimsuit is nice and open, her legs long and tanned and elegant. She has breasts you can only imagine your hands touching and massaging. (Sorry, but it’s true.) She has hips of extreme grace, a golden, flat stomach, and a neck you can only imagine yourself sucking on. Her lips are always full and hungry. The eyes say, “Take me.”
You remind yourself that there are some pretty good articles in Inside Sport, but you know you’re lying. Of course there are some good articles in the magazine, but that sure as hell isn’t what makes you pick it up. It’s always the woman. Always. Trust me on this one.
So, typically, I surveyed the area and made sure no one was looking when I picked up the Inside Sport magazine, opened it quickly, and pretended to scan the contents page for any good articles. I was (predictably) seeing which page the woman was on.
Seventy-six.
“Okay mate,” the barber said. “Me?”
“There’s no one else waiting, is there?” Yeah, but, I thought helplessly, I haven’t got to page seventy-six yet! It was futile.
The barber was ready, and if there’s one man you don’t keep waiting it’s the guy about to cut your hair. He’s all-powerful. In fact, he might as well be God. That’s the kind of power he has. A few months at barber school and a man becomes the most important person in your life for ten or fifteen minutes. The golden rule: Don’t give him a hard time or there’ll be hell to pay.
Immediately, I threw the magazine back to the table, facedown so the barber wouldn’t know right away what a pervert I am. He’d have to wait until later when he tidied the magazines.
Sitting in the chair (it sounds about as dangerous as the electric chair), I considered the whole woman on the cover situation.
“Short?” the barber asked me.
“Nah, not too short please, mate. I’m just tryin’ to have it so it doesn’t always stick up.”
“Easier said than done, ay?”
“Yeah.”
We exchanged a look of mutual friendliness and I felt much more at ease in the firing line of the scissors, the chair, and the barber.
He started cutting and like I said a minute ago, I reviewed the woman on the cover situation. My theory on this subject was and still is that I obviously desire the physicality of a woman. Yet, I honestly believe that that part of my desire for a girl is somewhere on the surface of my soul, whereas further and much deeper inside is the fiercer desire to please her, treat her right, and be immersed by the spirit of her.
I honestly believe that.
Honestly.
Still, I had to stop thinking about it and talk to the barber. That’s another rule of the barbershop. If you talk to the man and get him to like you, maybe he won’t screw it up. That’s what you hope for anyway. It doesn’t mean you’ll have instant success, but it might help, so you try it. There are no guarantees in the world of barbershops. It’s a gamble no matter which way you look at it. I had to start talking, and fast.
“So how’s business?” I asked, as the barber cut his way through the thickness of my hair.
“Aah, you know, mate.” He stopped, and smiled at me in the mirror. “Here ‘n’ there. Keepin’ my head above water. That’s the main thing.”
We talked for quite a while after that, and the barber told me how long he’d been working in the city and how much people have changed. I agreed with everything he said, with a dangerous nod of my head or a quiet “Yeah, that sounds about right.” He was a pretty nice guy, to tell you the truth. Very big. Quite hairy. A husky voice.
I asked if he lived upstairs from the shop and he said, “Yep, for the last twenty-five years.” That was when I pitied him a little, because I imagined him never going anywhere or doing anything. Just cutting hair. Eating a dinner alone. Maybe microwave dinners (though his dinners couldn’t be much worse than the ones Mrs. Wolfe cooked, God bless her).
“Do you mind me askin’ if you ever got married?” I asked him.
“Of course I don’t mind,” he answered. “I had a wife but she died a few years ago. I go down the cemetery every weekend, but I don’t put flowers down. I don’t talk.” He sighed a bit and he was very sincere. Truly. “I like to think I did enough of that when she was alive, you know?”
I nodded.
“It’s no good once a person’s dead. You gotta do it when you’re together, still living.”
He’d stopped cutting for a few moments now, so I could continue nodding without risk. I asked, “So what do you do when you’re standin’ there, at the grave?”
He smiled. “I just remember, that’s all.”
That’s nice, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I only smiled at the man behind me in the mirror. I had a vision of the large hairy man standing there at the cemetery, knowing that he gave everything he could. I also imagined myself there with him, on a dark gray day. Him in his white barber’s coat. Me in the usual. Jeans. Flanno. Spray jacket.
“Okay?” he turned and said to me in the vision.
“Okay?” he said in the shop.
I woke back into reality and said, “Yeah, thanks a lot, it’s good,” even though I knew it would be standing up within forty-eight hours. I was happy, though, but not only for the haircut. The conversation too.
With my hair congregating around my feet, I paid twelve dollars and said, “Thanks a lot. It was nice talking to you.”
“Same here,” and the large hairy barber smiled and I felt guilty about the magazine. I could only hope he would understand the different layers of my soul. After all, he was a barber. Barbers are supposed to have the answers to running the country, along with taxi drivers and obnoxious radio commentators. I thanked him again and said good-bye.
Once outside, it was still mid-afternoon, so Why not? I thought. I might as well head over to Glebe.
Needless to say, I got there and stood outside the girl’s house.
Stephanie.
It was as good a place as any to watch the sun collapse behind the city, and after a while I sat down against a wall and thought again about the barber.
The importance of it was that he and I were really doing similar things, only in reverse order. He was remembering. I was anticipating. (Hopeful, almost ludicrous anticipation, I admit.)
Once it was dark, I decided I’d better get home for dinner. It was leftover steak, I think, with vegetables boiled into oblivion.
I got up.
I slipped my hands into my pockets.
Then I looked, hoped, and walked, in that order. Pathetic, I know, but it was my life, I guess. No point denying it.
It turned out to be later than I thought when I finally left, and I decided to get the bus back to my own neighborhood.
At the bus stop there was a handful of people waiting. There was a man with a briefcase, a chain-smoking woman, a guy who looked like a laborer or carpenter, and a couple who leaned on each other and kissed a while as they waited.
I couldn’t help it.
I watched.
Not obviously, of course. Just a quick look here and there. Damn. I got caught.
“What are you lookin’ at?” The guy spat his words at me. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” Nothing.
That was my reply. Absolutely nothing.
“Well?”
Then the girl got stuck into me as well.
“Why don’t y’ go and stare at someone else, y’ weirdo.” She had blond hair, green eyes shrunken in under the streetlight, and a voice like a blunt knife. She beat me with it. “Y’ wanker.”
Typical.
You get called that name so many times around here, but this time it hurt. I guess it hurt because it was a girl. I don’t know. In a way, it was kind of depressing that this was what we’d come to. We can’t even wait for a bus in peace.
I know, I know. I should have barked back at them, nice and hard, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Some Wolfe, ay. Some wild dog I turned out to be. All I did was steal one last look, to see if they were about to level some final f
ragments of abuse at me.
The guy was also blond. Not tall or short. He wore dark pants, boots, a black jacket, and a sneer.
Meanwhile, the briefcase man checked his watch. The chain smoker lit up another. The laborer shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Nothing more was said, but when the bus came, everyone pushed on and I was last.
“Sorry.”
When I got on and tried to pay, the driver told me that fares had just gone up and I didn’t have enough money for a ticket.
I got off, smiled ruefully, and stood there.
The bus was pretty empty — the final insult.
As I started walking, I watched it pull away and shove itself along the street. Many thoughts staggered through me, including:
How late I’d be for dinner.
Whether or not anyone would ask where I’d been.
Whether Dad wanted Rube and me to work with him on Saturday.
If the girl named Stephanie would ever come out and see me (if she knew I was there at all).
How much longer it would take for Rube to get rid of Octavia.
If Steve clung to the memory of the look we’d exchanged on Monday night as often as I did.
How my sister Sarah was doing lately. (We hadn’t spoken for a while.)
Whether or not Mrs. Wolfe was ever disappointed in me or knew that I had turned out such a lone figure.
And how the barber was feeling above his shop.
I also realized as I walked, then began to run, that I didn’t even have any bad feelings toward the couple who’d abused me. I knew I should have, but I didn’t. Sometimes I think I need a bit more mongrel in me.
