Old Growth

by John Kinsella

  Joel’s interest in electronics at the age of twelve was not usual in the district, especially in 1974. Guns and sport were the mainstays of the local boys and surrounding farms. Hanging around the linesman renewing the powerlines through the town, Joel got a taste for electricity. The powerlines reached out over the paddocks and vanished before reappearing alongside the road to the next Avon Valley town. Though their town was small, it had a phone exchange, a transformer and streetlights. All of this excited and inspired him.

  When he placed a ladder against the wall and window frame of Nina’s room, Mr Scalpini roared at him. What are you doing there, son? Peeking at Nina?

  No, sir, sorry, I’m just feeding these wires through the broken corner of the flywire. The window will still shut and everything.

  And then Vaughan stuck his head out of the open window, through an even larger hole in the wrecked flywire panel, and said, It’s okay, Dad, Nina said we could, and she’s down at Vicky’s place.

  Mr Scalpini scratched his beard and said, Well, I guess it’s okay. Just watch those damn asbestos panels, they crack just like that! He then vanished around the front of the house, and probably down to the pub. Joel was actually more astonished to see Mr Scalpini at home on a Saturday afternoon than at getting a blast from him.

  Okay, Vaughan, pull the wires through and anchor them under a book or somethin’ and I’ll be in in a jiff to rig up the handset.

  It’ll be neato being able to talk in the middle of the night, Joel. I’ll sneak in when Nina’s snoring and we can whisper.

  Yep, neato, neato.

  The ‘handset’ consisted of two parts strung together – an earpiece ripped out of an old phone, and a mouthpiece made from a built-in mike taken out of a cassette recorder. On the Scalpini side of the network, these pieces were it – bound together with tape and wire, liable to disconnect if care wasn’t taken. Joel ran Vaughan through the steps, and through them again. The ‘exchange’ was on Joel’s side, naturally – the powerpack (consisting of two nine-volt batteries), the on/off switch, and a secretive little package of solid-state electronics which Joel insisted were key to the network’s success. He was designing a switchboard that would allow other neighbours to be added to the network if the prototype proved a success and some extra dosh came his way to buy bits and pieces. He had lots of stuff already – people were always giving him their broken electronic items. My electronica, he called it.

  Vaughan was bursting to give it a go, but got stuck on why he didn’t have a ‘switch’ on his side as well. You need to be trained, said Joel, and there can only be one central exchange.

  Okay, Vaughan, you wait here, keep your ear to the phone, and I’ll nip over to mine and give you a call.

  Vaughan placed the earpiece so hard to his ear that he nearly pulled the flimsy wiring away. Come on, be careful. Gentle. You’re like a bull in a china shop. Vaughan giggled at this, and stared out his sister’s window, across the grey picket fence that divided the quarter-acre blocks, at Joel’s window, which was a precise replica of his sister’s but with the entire flywire panel removed. Both windows sat in a pale blue sea of painted asbestos.

  Joel’s head appeared in his window, with earpiece and mike at ear and mouth (his were a little more sturdy and looked as if much more love and care had gone into their making), and he waved his hand, which was followed by a crackling sound in Vaughan’s earpiece and then a HELLO! so loud from Nina’s room that it was heard four houses away.

  I can hear you, Vaughan – no need to yell. This is sensitive ’quipment.

  And so it began. They gibbered for hours. About nothing. They played their transistor radios ‘over the line’ for hours. Nina, wary and slightly disgusted as if this kid boys’ stuff was in some way contaminating, nonetheless talked stiffly with Joel’s younger sister about nothing. Mrs Scalpini got on the line to talk to Joel’s mother about the next P&C meeting. On Sunday just after lunch, Mr Scalpini asked Joel’s dad if he wanted to go down to the session together; they were drinking mates who didn’t fraternise at all outside the pub.

  On the first night, Joel switched the system off because the batteries were running down and he wanted to save enough juice for talking on Sunday. But on Monday after school he went to the co-op and spent his remaining money on a bunch of new batteries.

  School had been something – Vaughan, who was much more popular than Joel, had bragged to all the farm boys about how cool the phone was. Some of them said they’d like to give it a go, and Vaughan invited them, until Nina got wind of it and squashed it fast. As she was in second year at the District Junior High School, she scared even the tough twelve-year-old boys shitless. They gawked over her and made lewd jokes to her brother, which he encouraged, but if she actually spoke to them, which was rare, they quickly melted away. Grubby little sods, she said, they’re not going into my room!

  They talked after dinner. Joel switched the exchange on and heard Vaughan saying, Breaker, breaker … You there? … Breaker, breaker … How long have you been on there, Vaughan? Ten minutes. Nina said she wants me out of the room asap, whatever that means.

  Come off it, we’ve just got on. Hey, you’re using CB language when you say breaker, breaker.

  Yeah, it’s what Dad says during harvest when he’s driving the truck. Citizen Band Radio. Ten-eight. Or is it ten-nine? Whatever.

  Gee, Vaughan, you’re getting pretty smart in your old age.

  Think so? Hey, did you see Jenny Harris fall on her bum today and flash-a-gash?

  You’re disgusting, Vaughan!

  Yeah, I am, ain’t I? Whoo, I can hear Nina heading this way. Vampire alert! She’s yelling at Mum about the dishes and homework.

  That transducer …

  That what?

  That mike is pretty good, pretty receptive … I mean, I can hear her carrying on. It picks up everything.

  Neato! Anyway, I’ve got to scoot. Hangin’ up now! Catch you on air after school tomorrow. Be good when you get more wire and it reaches my room. Then we can talk all night. It’ll be grouse, mate, grouse.

  Joel went to say, Right, but heard the phone clunk to the ground and get pushed aside – sounded like a shoe across the carpet. Jeez, Vaughan, be careful! But Vaughan was gone with a Scram! from Nina. And then there was walking and a click, and crappy music started playing. Joel listened for a while, then worried about the batteries and switched the set off. He messed with the set a bit, wondering about improvements, and wondering why Vaughan used words like ‘grouse’ when he was going on about nothing. But Mr Scalpini spoke like that. Little wonder, Joel’s mum would have said.

  Late that night, Joel woke to yelling and carrying-on from next door. It wasn’t unusual. Mr Scalpini had come in from the pub and was telling everyone what was what. Sometimes at school, away from the ears of their homes and street, Joel would quietly ask Vaughan what his old man’s yelling in the middle of the night was about, but Vaughan would say, Ah, nothin’, really … just Dad lettin’ off some steam. He always gave the same response.

  And if Joel mentioned it to his mum or dad, they said in their curt voices, Mind ya business, Joel, and others will mind theirs. But it keeps me awake, he’d complain. And they’d say, Put the pillow over your head. Or, Invest in some cotton wool.

  It went on and on. Normally, when he was woken and couldn’t sleep, he thought up new inventions, or what he would hint at for birthday or Christmas. And then, when it all went deathly quiet, which it always did, he strained his ears to listen. To what, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he could hear a fox bark, and imagined it running through the shining crops that came right up to the back of their house. He could identify all the living sounds of the dark. One day, he’d record them.

  Joel wasn’t a stickybeak by nature. He kept pretty much to himself, other than mucking around with Vaughan, and that was only because they were neighbours and had a kind of deal whereby Joel helped Vaughan with difficult schoolwork and Vaughan kind of kept the farm boys off his case. Actually, Vaughan alw
ays let them go at Joel a bit, and giggled if they wedgied him. But eventually he would step in and say, ’Nuf’s e-nuf, boys. Vaughan was huge. Mum says I’m overgrown for me age, he said fact-like to Joel.

  Not a stickybeak, but for some strange reason, suddenly curious. Scientific-like. Investigative. He reached up for his torch, his ‘faithful companion’, slipped quietly out of bed and went to the phone set, switched it on, heard the low crackle of electric current and the workings of magnetism and coiled wire loud in the speaker, in the earpiece, then held his breath knowing the same sound would emerge across the fence in Nina’s room. He placed the earpiece to his ear and a hankie over his mike to muffle the sound of his breathing and listened.

  He could hear murmuring and rustling. He put the phone down gently, lifted out his seat, flicked the torch off, carefully pulled the corner of his curtain out, and looked across to Nina’s window. There was a dull glow coming from around the curtain. It was a sickly orange colour. That’ll be her bedside light. Maybe she’s reading. He let his curtain fall back into place and with the torch, searched his desktop for his watch. It was 1 am.

  Jeez, that’s late to be reading, he thought. Maybe she’s as good as Vaughan at reading and pronounces each word with her finger following underneath. Then he felt ashamed and shook his head.

  He went back to the phone and almost switched it off, but heard a little cry and a clear Don’t!, kind of sharp but quiet. He listened close. It’s such a grouse patch of fur, it’s so soft … it’s lovely. It wasn’t Nina speaking. Joel felt sick and then just stopped himself yelling out, Leave her alone, Vaughan, you sicko! When he heard Mr Scalpini say loud and clear, Stop trying to block me, you silly little slut! Joel instantly switched off the phone, turned off the torch, and slunk towards his bed where he shivered wide-awake, owl-eyed, through the rest of the night.

  *

  When Joel dismantled the phone because the batteries didn’t last long enough and it wasn’t a very good phone anyway, he didn’t even ask for the wire and the handset to be returned from across the fence. Nah, Vaughan, you have them. Mementos. Vaughan looked disappointed and nonplussed, then grinned and said, Like souvenirs?

  Yes, Vaughan.

  Well, neato. Thanks – you’re a real friend. A mate. I’ll stop the boys giving you a wedgie, next time.

  Joel was sitting alone in a shady, dull corner of the quadrangle eating his lunch as usual, yet not as usual, reading a comic book instead of an electronics book from the library, when Nina came up to him. She stood close, looked around to see who was watching, and said quietly, He heard that phone of yours crackle when you turned it on to eavesdrop on me.

  Joel wanted to protest but his tongue wouldn’t work properly.

  He’s got ears like a dog, even when he’s drunk, she spat. I whispered to him, You better watch out because they’ll know now, all of them will know what you’re up to. I said to the old pig, Don’t you know Joel tells his little sister everything and she tells her mum and dad everything. And then he tried again but I stopped him and he started to throttle me, Joel … you didn’t hear that, did you? You’d gone, hiding.

  And with this she lifted a velvet band around her neck, which Joel had thought she wore because it made her look sexy, and he saw a livid purple ring going right round. I call it my halo, she said, laughing, smarter than her brother by a mile. Anyway, he’s stopped, he’s stopped everything. He got off me and went out and hasn’t been near me since. He just grunts when spoken to. Oink oink! I know he won’t be back.

  Nina kicked at a bit of stone that had eased from the asphalt quadrangle during the summer and settled into no-man’s-land over winter. She said, I know you think I’m a slut, but I’m not. Joel started to splutter fragments of sandwich over his book, his lunch box slipped out of his lap, and he stammered, No, never, no, I don’t, I am really sorry.

  And then Nina leant down, kissed Joel on the top of the head, turned, walked off, and did not speak to him again.

  BUILDING THE BRICK BARBECUE

  Why don’t ya get off your arse and do something, for once, ya bludger!

  He would normally laugh and take another swig of his beer, but she had that look on her face that warned against his usual response. Instead, he looked anxiously at his bottle, waiting for it to be snatched away.

  He was out of work at the moment. Jack-of-all-trades. Make your own work! Advertise, she’d say. But he was looking for the right kind of opening. Been like that for a while now, he’d admit. Tough job market out there. Fact. Look at the unemployment figures. Why should he be better off than the next fella out of work?

  She laboured in the hospital canteen from eight till four, sometimes five, and often for six days a week. She was always at him, but gave him his drinking money. He’s better drinking it than hanging out for it, she’d explain. But then she’d threaten to cut off his supply. Only grip I’ve got over the bastard. Wouldn’t do a thing round the place if I didn’t control the purse strings.

  Their boy was watching television in the corner of the room, up close, not looking around, blocking it all out. It was a small black-and-white television with a coathanger aerial that couldn’t hold onto a signal. But he didn’t care. He was ten.

  *

  The boy watched his father transfer the old bricks stacked alongside the shed into the wheelbarrow, fag hanging from the corner of his mouth; he’d pick up a bottle – always a longnecked bottle – and take a good swig. Thirsty work, boy, thirsty work. He often repeated himself – Mum said it was because the ol’ man was losing his marbles and would forget saying something the first time. I’ll show her … I’ll knock up a barbecue and she can show off to her family. None of them have a barbecue – none of them.

  His father was actually highly skilled with his hands. He could build the barbecue in a day – Saturday, and his wife wasn’t due back till six. It was a hotter than usual summer so the boy sat in the shade but he still felt himself burning, watching his dad and drawing whatever with a stick, drawing in the black sand where the lawn had died under a tree. His mother would’ve had kittens seeing him digging up the lawn that wasn’t even there anymore, but his dad didn’t care. The boy didn’t think his dad better for it – he knew that if his dad were in a different mood, he’d be tearing strips off him for messing up the ground. But the boy knew it was safe, and he wanted to do it because he was bored, and only half-fascinated by what his father was up to; he was sure there was something to it, and not just family gatherings around the barbie. Maybe his father wanted more money out of Mum. The boy was canny – wary and street smart (too many arvos in the beer garden at the pub not to be) – but he was still perplexed. He went in and out of the shade to the wooden fence and gently prised cicada shells away from the rough pickets. They shone and glistened, and it looked as if the eyes were still there. Weird. Taking them back to his perch, he made a little pile on the sand. His father, looking up, said, Sixteen years underground, then they come up to the light. To the light.

  Removing a flat packet of bubblegum from his top pocket, the cardboard backing barely keeping the flat pink sticks in place, the boy took the wilting, flopping, sugar-dusty strips out with dirty hands, and popped them into his mouth. He didn’t really like bubblegum, and would only blow a few bubbles before sticking the gum somewhere obscure. Today they’d go back into the wrapper and into the bin, his father building and smoking and drinking and occasionally looking over to him. What he was really after was the fake tattoo packed between cardboard and oily outer wrapping. It was a pirate tattoo you soaked and held onto your skin. He used spit, bubblegummy dry hot spit, and it sort of worked. The colours glinted in the sharp splinters of sunlight coming through his leafy bower.

  His father was talking to himself, Yes, yes, this will do nicely, madam, nicely indeed!

  *

  She had people round to see her barbecue, with the promise of a cook-up real soon. She rang her family and a few of his rellies as well. She was impressed. They had a barbecue arvo one Su
nday and it worked well and he drank plenty … in fact he drank so much he disgraced himself by pissing onto the firebricks and driving everyone away. The boy cringed and hid from his cousins under the house, wrapped around the dirty stumps like a snake. Mum yelled at the ol’ man so loud she ‘ruptured’ her ‘voice box’ and said she was cutting off his beer for a week. At such times the ol’ man would usually vanish, doing the rounds of mates’ places and cadging drinks wherever.

  But on this occasion he stayed, resolute in the face of danger, crashing out in the backyard; the boy put a grey blanket over him that had Albany Woollen Mills sewn into its corner. The boy could throw the old stained blanket and have it settle on his father all in one movement, as he’d done on many occasions before. And the next morning the ol’ man was still there, looking not too bad considering he didn’t have any hair of the dog, Mum having poured it all down the drain. The boy thought, There’s something going to happen, but he still got ready for school and put his arm around his mother as she looked out the window, tears dripping from her chin. I love the bastard, she told him. And I hate him. She rubbed the boy’s hair and drove him to school – he always walked, good exercise and gives you independence, by God, you’re gunna need it … but she clung to him that day. He arrived an hour and a half before the school bell, and the playground was deserted and frightening.

  *

  The boy slipped quietly through the back gate and caught a glimpse of his father at the barbecue, and it all clicked. I’ll be fucked, the boy whispered to himself. And then he went inside and had a few dry Saos because his dad had eaten everything else and his mother was bringing the shopping home after work. He thought he’d wander down to the shops, hang out a bit, and meet up with his mum and get a treat.