Old Growth

by John Kinsella

  They were on him. On him. On him. Simon wondered why things always happened in his head in threes. Why he repeated actions three times. Why he heard two echoes of the one important thing. Time always slowed at such moments. And amid these echoes he recalled seeing a jewel beetle early that morning, out in the sun, on a geranium leaf. Before heading off to school on his ten-speed racing bike, which was helping him keep fit, helping him be of ‘sound mind and sound body’, the ten-speed bike that had twice been vandalised in the bike racks, the first time reducing him to tears, but his mother had it fixed.

  The second time it made him throw a maddy in public, kicking other bikes, so he was for the first time in his life in trouble, and even threatened with suspension, and having to use all his savings to pay for the damage. Simon’s perfect record at the school was tarnished, but he knew it was only a perfect record because he’d never complained about the daily torture meted out under the eyes of teachers who wanted the easiest lives they could get.

  But that was before the weights, and his project to become an Adonis who would have sex and kick goals and … whatever. The jewel beetle rainbowed in the sun and he was, momentarily, caught in its colours, part of its exoskeleton. This is what God is, he said aloud, full of joy. I don’t really get depressed, he told the doctor his mother took him to. I am really quite happy, he insisted. The jewel beetle went to the edge of the leaf like a rhino, clumping across a spongy world, and then amazingly and beautifully angled itself around the leaf’s furry and serrated edge, and was walking upside down in defiance of all, the sun shining through the leaf like skin and lighting the inner life, the shadow upside-down world, the jewel beetle soul.

  They were on him and he was struggling, his biceps and triceps trying to hold them at a distance, his quads and calves bracing as he pushed back with the g-forces of lift-off onto the bench. Simon would not be moved. He’d been doing squats with his weights, and he re-enacted them, suddenly forcing himself up, the weight of the bar on his chest. A quick decision to burst free, to run. Which is fatal – it spurs dogs on if they sense fear. Dogs. He was disgusted with himself for thinking this. Girls weren’t dogs to him. His mother had brought him up knowing it was wrong to think like this. But he literally meant dogs, not that girls were dogs. They were on him and brought him down with a sickening thud of skin and bone, the hangover headache he’d only had once before, but was heading towards as prophecy might have it as a state of being, a default setting. His head bounced.

  They were pulling at his trousers. Simon hated trousers but the school had a ‘no jeans’ policy. The trousers were firmly latched in place, so they were at his crotch, grabbing and squeezing and hurting him. Listening to him squeal like a little piggy, one of the girls screamed. They had all become a blur of brown and blonde and black hair of varying lengths and densities – he had never been so close to a girl before. So much hair smelling of lavender and apples in his face. Simon swooned and gagged and maybe passed out. But then he snapped to, his legs either side of a pole that was helping support the upper-storey classrooms, and a couple of girls on each leg tugging him, jerking him towards the metal. He crunched into it and screamed out, his genitals mashing together. He started to cry.

  Cry baby! Cry baby! Little sissy perv shit!

  Then the girls were calling him a crying little girl. They relieved the pressure and tugged him into the metal again and again. He looked up towards the ceiling of the open-tothe-weather corridor, up into the heaven of the schoolyard – always staring at the ceiling, seeing other worlds on the big screen of emptiness. And there was the footy player. Greg Fall – Greg ‘Gunja’ Fall, they called him. Simon remembered now. He remembered all that Greg had done over the years, and grew hysterical.

  It was the girls who had done this, not Greg, yet Greg was there, goading them on. Now his big body was close to Simon’s face, and Simon looked up though a screen of tears straight into the giant bulge of Gunja’s trousers, a potency pulsating and showing Simon what power was. Simon’s damaged genitals retreated back into his body, and all the strong colours and sensations were extinguished deep inside his head, the periodic table a senseless, confusing jumble of protons and neutrons performing in illogical and reactive ways. Ever-expanding atomic radii.

  *

  Simon did not tell his mother that girls had done it, but he did tell her he’d been assaulted. He didn’t even mention Greg ‘Gunja’ Fall’s name. He had long understood the safeties of silence, of playing dumb.

  That was it! She was ringing the school and the police. But Simon threw the biggest tantrum he’d ever thrown, so that she took him to the GP’s instead. Just like treating a cut foot or the common cold. Looking at it like this, as matter-of-fact, Simon discovered he could ‘confess’ – tell the whole story. He dumped it on the doctor, and was surprised that he could recount details he didn’t know were in his head. He hadn’t noted them at the time – it was all a rush of flashes and noises, followed by darkness and emptiness, but in the telling he felt he reconstituted himself, brought the table back into line. He had never liked the idea of variant ways of presenting the table. He liked facts and order and toned muscles, muscles fed and sculpted and doing what they were told to do.

  The doctor listened without moving any part of his face. That made Simon comfortable. But then the doctor said, I think it will be better for your mental health and social growth if you move on from this.

  Simon was fixating on a photo on the doctor’s wall of his family and there, looking a little younger but just as spunky, was the coolest girl of all, his main tormentor with her boyfriend, Greg ‘Gunja’ Falls. The cool girl, the doctor, and someone Simon assumed was the doctor’s wife, the girl’s mother.

  He wanted to ask the doctor what he thought of his daughter’s boyfriend smoking marijuana. But he said nothing.

  Simon skipped school for the last three days of term, and then went into the holidays with a determination to build build build himself up. He was going to acquire potency over the two-week break. He stopped reading fantasy novels because he decided it might be draining his power, his male force. He tore down his periodic table poster. He did weights, and ate, and dug holes in the backyard which his mother made him fill in. On television, he watched only sports.

  Late at night, he imagined himself into scenarios with women in the porn mags he’d taken from the ‘returns’ at his uncle’s newsagency. He wondered if he was weird for never having had much interest till now, despite the fact that one of his jobs had been to tear off the covers of the unsold stock and package them for sending back to the distributor. Sure, he’d taken a look and had erections and even pulled himself off in the shop toilet, but it didn’t occupy a big part of his imagination.

  Simon had a lot of other things to think about. But last time he was at the shop, he’d smuggled out a pile of dirty magazine returns, and now studied them closely. He went into the picture with the women and did things to them and had them do things to him. They were violent with him and it made him scared and excited. And then he hated himself and couldn’t sleep.

  In the morning he strained his back doing the clean and jerk. His head was stuck in snatch and clean and jerk and the cross-wiring of words and actuality, of innuendo and who he was and what he should be doing. He was lifting naked and trying to watch his penis shift around. He lifted in front of the mirror and no longer heard the wattlebirds outside his window. He tried to fill his penis with blood without getting an erection. He had no friends but his own dick, which he hated and blamed for everything. He wondered about his absent father and decided this monster was to blame – a genetics of inadequacy. His father had been an accountant, and was jailed for embezzling. Simon hadn’t seen the man since he was five, yet strangely remembered him as a very big man. He went to photo albums to study his father’s bulge, look for signs of what might evolve.

  *

  Simon’s first encounters went smoothly enough. Gunja walked past him and didn’t say anything at all – didn’
t even ‘accidentally’ bump into him. In class, he wriggled uncomfortably in his chair, adjusting to his new manhood. But he felt good and bold and energetic and focused, and answered questions he’d always known the answers to, but rarely ventured in public. A girl spoke to him without rudeness, and he felt it was a sign.

  At recess he walked to his spot, and noticed out of the corner of his eye the cool girls pointing and whispering. But he could tell they weren’t going to come for him. He felt confident. Yet he was so uncomfortable. He went to the toilets and waited until he knew for sure it was empty and went in to sort himself out. His new body was all in place, working like a Ferrari. He flexed a bicep inside the cubicle – he never went to the tray. And then he was out of there before he could be cornered. Recess passed, and lessons went well.

  At lunch Simon ate his chunky sandwiches without the usual embarrassment – the cool kids always bought their lunch at the canteen, but Simon’s mum economised. He hated ‘economised’. He gazed out onto the school oval, at the boys kicking footies, and said to himself, Soon I will be one of them. He wondered what kind of music these happy, fit and attractive boys listened to. Then Gunja was there, right next to him. Where had he come from? And the girls, his gaggle of geese.

  And now it was Gunja pinning Simon in a neck hold while the doctor’s daughter shoved her hands into his trousers, down into the zone of Simon’s masculinity, his fight against genetics and fate, and there she was pulling out his … socks … his bulge … and holding it over her head like Predator ripping the spinal cord and skull out of its human victims, trophies of its hunt. She made a strange hooting animal noise and Gunja grunted and exhaled stale bong smoke over Simon like a glissade that hung above the Lady of the Lake’s resting place.

  And as he fainted, Simon knew he was having a religious moment, just as he had had before confirmation, as he had once cherished before refusing ever to go to church again, and knowing that he would hate neither the girl nor the boy nor their followers, that he wouldn’t even hate himself, that he would love all with such force that he would annihilate them and all those like them. And he knew why girls had periods and how he would always be part of their lives. On the screen inside his head he projected the periodic table, loud and bright and full of everything that was stable and unstable in the universe. All there, for him to see and understand.

  THE BOY WHO READ MARVELL TO THE SHEEP

  He made his way down the long driveway, over the cattle grid between the gateposts nailed with hubcaps, over the gravel road under the skyscraper salmon gums, over the barbed-wire fence, up over the stubble into the Top Bush. Walking through the thinned-out undergrowth under a wandoo canopy, he came to a small, stubble-free clearing tinged with green because of seepage from the hill, though it was still hot and only early autumn. He took out his Penguin edition of Marvell which his mother had given him a few days earlier, on his twelfth birthday, and started reading to a small flock of sheep. He read in a loud, declamatory style:

  My mind was once the true survey

  Of all these meadows fresh and gay,

  And in the greenness of the grass

  Did see its hopes as in a glass;

  When Juliana came, and she

  What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

  He paused, and made lamb noises to the sheep, which replied. Looking back to his book, he repeated the last two lines of what he’d just read, but this time under his breath, musing over them. He crouched, the book between his knees, and continued on, reading the whole poem.

  Then he placed the book in the dirt, open at the page, spine up. He slipped onto the dirt himself, and started gathering leaves and twigs and making a mini-shelter – a model sheepfold. It’s for the little creatures, he told himself, as a large but harmless sugar ant wandered by. The sheep should have their own shed. He had seen relatives’ pictures from European holidays of sheep tucked together in stone and tin and wooden sheds, sheltering from harsh weather. Out here, in Australia, sheep are left exposed to the elements and just get battered by wind and sun and rain and die on ‘sheep weather alert’ days.

  He had the whole weekend to himself. Mother had dropped him at his uncle’s before heading off, before heading deeper into the wheatbelt to sing at a small town hall that night. Then she was to stay with her hosts before picking him up and driving back to the city, and to school. He hated school. He loved books. He loved the sound of his own voice. He loved listening to his mother sing, and resented her not taking him along with her. Though he also loved the farm – he really did. We depend on each other, his mother was always saying. Then why dump me in a place I love and ruin it? he said. The farm is a beautiful place and you’ll make it lonely and rotten! he shrieked. You’re behaving like a toddler, his mother would say. He knew it was true. Then in some ways, she said strangely, confusing and bothering him, You are too precocious for your own good! He grabbed at her for reassurance but she shrugged him off. This was something new he would never get used to. She gave him books of poetry and art and took him to classical music concerts. What other way is there? he wondered. How can I be different? She makes me this way.

  Who was Juliana? he asked a sheep that had wandered close, curious. What has she got to do with the meadow and the grass? With a paddock and the stubble, with this little bit of green grass that shouldn’t be here because it’s all dry and there’s no aftermath and that you’re eating down to the roots! He reached out to stroke the sheep, which had not long been shorn, but the sheep bleated hard and backed away and all the other sheep turned to him and bleated as well. Baaa! Baaa! they yelled, and he turned his book, grubby now, back up, glanced at the poem again, then replaced it where it’d been. He inhaled the oily eucalypt deeply. The wandoos were weird and bent and he called them ghost gums, though Uncle said they were not ghost gums – that’s the name of a tree in the east. Uncle was very particular about such things.

  The boy closed his eyes, trying to imprint the words he’d seen, but pictures of the sheep coming closer and staring at him with red, glowing eyes interrupted the transfer from page to mind, and his eyes shot open, frightened. The sheep had lost interest and were turning away, rustling through the stubble. He pulled at his clothes, which didn’t seem to fit right even if he was told they were ‘a good fit’. It was uncomfortable growing – he still wanted to be a small child, though he also wanted the world at his fingertips. Uncle said his mother cosseted him and made him girl-like. Uncle went on and on till Mother said, Shut up!, and Uncle would come back with, He’s like … from a different generation. Nineteenth-bloody-century!, adding, He’s cosseted.

  Let’s have a look to see if you’ve got any hairs down there. That’s what a girl – an overdeveloped girl, his mother said in disgust when he reported it – had said to him in front of a pack of other girls, one of whom he had a small crush on. Fleeing made it so much worse. Even boys at his own stage of growth got behind the bigger boys with mockery and derision. There was nothing subtle about it. Fairies don’t have hair down there, said one. Nah, they don’t, said many others.

  The girl he liked half smiled at him, but then it might have been a smirk. Her name was Julie. Julie … Juliana … Julie … Juliana. What had it to do with mowing and grass? Would she cut him? Chop him down, chop it off? He thrust the book away and it flipped and closed, and the cover glinted through specks of dirt under the boiling sun, which was edging its way around the volatile eucalyptus leaves. He could ask his mum for more info – she was ‘right out there’ … she would answer anything … no secrets … she was what his uncle called a modern woman. But not, it seems, when it came to her boy. It was confusing and annoying. He would never ask her anything like that, ever again – she wasn’t modern when she replied, she was just boring and old-fashioned and, he could tell, frightened.

  I will stay out all day and all night under the trees, near the sheep, he thought. But he was dehydrating and Uncle said dehydration out in the bush was a death sentence. I can see sheep and s
tars from my bedroom window. Uncle, with no children of his own, kept a room for the boy stocked with age-appropriate toys and books the boy had no interest in.

  *

  Just after his nineteenth birthday he started a relationship with an older woman – a much older woman; he wasn’t sure what he could offer her that she hadn’t already experienced. He felt anxious, disturbed, even embarrassed. He wanted to be special, not just like any other. He wanted to imprint himself on the woman’s mind, on her soul. His mother told him that the woman was cradle-snatching, and that ‘the old girl’ was getting much more out of it than he was. He told his mother that she was twenty years older than his girlfriend, but as usual, she just talked right over him … Caught herself a fresh one! Cradle-snatcher. His mother had become more and more like that as the years went on and her voice started to fade – Uncle said she was growing jaded and bitter. She no longer made a living out of singing but rather teaching, and with it came more and more instructions, more advice on how to live life. My way or the highway, was a favourite, though every time he said he would leave she threw a fit and collapsed panting like a sick cat. She’d been disgusted, really d-i-s-g-u-s-t-e-d when she met his new girlfriend. Girlfriend? She’s no girl, she’s closer to my age than yours! She’s not, Mum, she’s thirty and I’m eighteen, for God’s sake! On and on it went. Same thing day in, day out. She’s been married once and divorced and doesn’t have any kids! She has a good job and could have any guy she wants. On and on he went too. Says you! said his mum, and then went back to practising a scale on the piano out of anger more than need.