Old Growth

by John Kinsella

  The trapeze. The high trapeze. I whispered that in Horrie’s ear just after I caught him pushing a stick into Cynthia behind the bike sheds at school. I was always catching him out, because I knew who he was and what he’d be up to. He couldn’t keep me quiet with a corky in the arm. And I wasn’t interested in his … amorousness. The look on Cynthia’s face: she was so uncomfortable and perplexed that she fixated on me with quizzical angry eyes. She staggered off, confused.

  We’re going to practise the act after school, I said to Horrie.

  I’m going to footy after school, you know that.

  Not today, we’re training. I mean real training – trapeze training.

  You can’t make me.

  After school, at my place. Mum took the net and the ropes down from the trees so we’ll have to rig them up again. She’s locked them in the shed but I know where she’s hidden the key. And she’s not in from work until six tonight. I told her I’d go to Cynthia’s place after school.

  We both laughed. Really, we laughed. And I added, Don’t think Cynthia’s up to it today. I don’t want to suggest we were complicit; we weren’t. I wasn’t interested in his petty cruelties and conquests. I had in mind success, glamour and defying death. I had already started to excel at gymnastics at school. The PE teacher was overwhelmed by my new enthusiasm, saying, You, girl, have got a future if you learn discipline, discipline, discipline.

  So Horrie turns up, and we fumble our way through the trapeze. Really, at this stage, it’s low-flying and we don’t do much … the net touches the ground when we fall to our feet and there’s more a risk of us getting entangled than anything else. Though Horrie can swing on a rope and I can hold onto his hand, scrunched in a ball. Like a pendulum. He’s a strong little bastard for his age. That’s what Mum would say.

  *

  You’d expect me to be part of an act now: to have a grip on the profession. But I am not. I never amounted to much in that way, for all my enthusiasm. When Horrie broke his leg falling onto the net, twisting his leg in the mesh and falling backwards so the greenish bone still managed to go snap, I was ruined. Horrie’s parents were rich and powerful and even tried to take legal action which they couldn’t or didn’t do, because I told my mother a little about Horrie’s sexual predilections and after some yelling at our front door the threats diminished and vanished and we moved suburb. I gave up gymnastics but developed an interest in photography, my mother giving me an instamatic camera in the hope that I might develop a new ‘skill set’, a change of direction. And I was getting near high school, where photography was an optional subject. Big hopes.

  *

  And what a photographer I became. An aficionado of more … esoteric imagery. It has become my profession. I aim for grace and eroticism. I aim for drama … and humanity. I grip the moment, the incidental, but as pure art. I have become famous for capturing death throes, for last breaths. The unplanned-for loss. The tragic. Three or four photos like that across a career and you define yourself. But I have worked in war zones for years now, and such moments are to be expected – I have seen many but photographed few. I am not gratuitous. For every hundred I’ve witnessed, one has been ‘captured’, and fewer taken into the public sphere. I have seen dreadful atrocities and declined to record them. I have kept knowledge and witness to myself. I have had my telephoto lens trained on a scene of torture with the perpetrator full-faced in shot, and not clicked. I have later talked with the very same perpetrator and told him I could have had him, could have meant an end to his wickedness. Why didn’t you? he asked. Because I didn’t feel threatened. Like Horrie, he wasn’t going to do anything to me. They like their badness to be known.

  *

  Out of war zones, the moment of death or, even more vitally, just before death, is harder to capture. Unless one goes into a hospice, which doesn’t seem right to me. People deserve the dignity of dying in privacy and peace if they have been able to prepare for it, if they know. Rather, what I have pursued is the surprise, the absolute suddenness of fate. I have desired to capture the fall of an acrobat, of a trapeze artist, the highwire without a safety net, the grip failing, the plunging … no, the slipping to a violent death.

  I have been a habitué of highwire performances around the world. I have become as famous a photographer of trapeze as I was a war photographer. I have studied the movies and artworks, the earlier photographers of the trapeze, and have made the imagery my own. I capture their vulnerability and sureness – the artists … I have their lives in my hands and they all express their gratitude at being taken seriously enough to be captured by me. To be eternally airborne in my images.

  I do not frequent amateur acts where the risk of falling is prevalent but also guarded against. I follow the best, those who are so skilled they risk all as a thrill and an art, those who fly highest without a safety net.

  *

  I married late. I’d never intended to marry at all. But when the Flying Marconis broke up I was at hand to photograph a forlorn Mario. A beautifully built man. And though I was past my litheness, really past my prime, as we became more enamoured it was inevitable our sexual appetites and fetishes would become interwoven with the trapeze. I begged him to let me try, low, and with a net … if I practised swinging and flying … for him to capture me just once. Both naked would be something, but clothed would do. I wanted the thrill of his grip, of being suspended and swung, of falling to the net.

  Astonishingly, we managed. Nothing spectacular, nothing worthy of the record books. But I could fly and be caught. It was a fulfilment – I wanted to show off. Mario had found himself another partner and was doing the highwire without a safety net again, and I will admit to being jealous of the brilliant flexible young thing he was catching. I asked for a favour, just one night, in front of his public, as a novelty act, if, low down, with a safety net, he might catch me. We could advertise it as amateur and famous professional. The Flying Married Couple. It might create interest for the main show … a curio. Mario was full of largesse. Why not? Our sex life was good.

  *

  When I fell to the net and flopped off onto the ground, breaking my collarbone, I was there to photograph the occasion. It was an ugly break and a traumatic image. Certainly near death. I had set the cameras up on time delay, then continuously shooting, to capture my own death. I had loosened the fastenings on the safety net, yet perversely the knots slipped but held. Disappointing. Maybe I had been half-hearted when I tampered with the net, but I will say, when push came to shove, I didn’t resist his grip when I felt it grasp harder, fighting to latch onto my oiled hands and wrists, struggling to keep hold, not to lose me. And I wanted him to hold … to try and hold … as I made dead weight and twisted, forcing the awkward fall, the net-defying low-level spill resulting in … I hung on to the fact I loved this man who was no sadist. I wanted to live though this was the photograph I had to capture. To feel that death was at hand, almost there. My expression changing as rapidly as the auto-sequence of photographs said it all, and went right back to my origins.

  If I had died and Horrie had just happened to be at the show, maybe with his wife who just happened to be Cynthia, he could have pulled my costume aside and poked a stick right up into my corpse, bringing them both to the point of convulsive laughter, and then I would be living my childhood all over again in the distant, isolated city of Perth, with death gripping my every scheme, my every hope.

  THE COFFIN

  Soapbox cars. Two best friends who weren’t fully friends, one of whom had an even better friend, really, and the other who preferred the company of a distant cousin. But they were friends, friends in oddness. And they were academically competitive, comparing marks, though they would never admit it. Both were known to throw maddies if stirred up enough by goaders at school. One of them spied on the other getting changed during a sleepover; the other was oblivious.

  Where they got the idea of competing in a soapbox derby down the long hill path to the river, neither could remember It was a w
ide slabbed path so the two could run side by side, and the whole way would be jolting and jarring with the uneven slabwork. The whole path, the whole suburb, all the bush, was built on grey sand. When the banksia candles shed their lights to the ground, they mingled with leaf litter and glistening grey sand. Everything ran through the sand to the water table where it probably, eventually, merged with the river.

  But the idea had cropped up somehow -- they would make soapbox cars and race. They would co-opt the assistance of a couple of school associates who lived on the street and weren’t entirely inimical, to help give them a running start, and then gravity and engineering and driving skill would take over. They set about being declared champion of B, a riverside suburb of Perth that included the wealthy and the poor. The long slow hill on which you’d gather such speed on your bike that you risked crashing through the fence of paperbarks into the marshy cul de sac, the polyp of the Canning River, because of speed and impetus. Momentum.

  Brakes would be an important part of their designs. Brakes and wheels and axles and ball bearings. The run down the pathway was flanked by untrammelled banksia and marri– jarrah woodland on one side, and a row of houses that went from state housing to luxurious mansions across the six-block run to the T-junction opposite the river. Before the race, they would sweep the wide path with long spines snapped from the heads of native grass trees. There were wallabies in that bush, the bush that ran to the highway, then starting again like a spine all the way out into the country where paperbarks crouched over wetlands and cows trudged through muddy paddocks in winter and dust clouds in summer. It was the river and the bush that bound the lives of all the area’s kids to each other, and to their aloneness.

  Andy was a messy, slipshod builder with a good sense of physics, prone to understatement. Roger was precise with a good sense of physics, but burdened by an enthusiasm bordering on grandiosity. The rises and falls in their friendship could be attributed to the major difference in their humours. Both were twelve going on twenty, going back to six. They were in and out of kilter with their age.

  The basic difference in their vehicles, aside from quality of workmanship, was design itself. Andy’s was minimalist; Roger’s was massive and overblown, like an early long-bonneted racing marque. In fact, as soon as Andy saw it up on blocks in Roger’s back shed, he nicknamed it The Coffin, and burst out laughing.

  That old tank is going to be left on the blocks! Must weigh a ton. And Roger, who had seen Andy’s effort but refrained from commenting, which had really annoyed Andy, came back with, And your masterpiece will be lucky to hold together. It’ll disintegrate before it goes five feet.

  Better than getting nowhere, spat Andy.

  *

  Both were single children. Both copped, Something wrong with ya parents, hasn’t your old man got any more seed in ’im? Did your mother get pox and that stuffed her up from having any more kids? Did you block up her cunt with your shit when you were coming out? Did you come out of her shithole? Both of them had thrown maddies about this sort of stuff. It had started in Grade Three and increased in quality and depth over the years. A shared narrative. Are you two brothers? Did your mum get fucked by his dad? And, for no reason, if they were together, they’d be surrounded by a gang of footy boys chanting, There’s a place in France where the ladies wear no pants and the men walk around with their doodles hanging down, followed by, Not that either of you have dicks! So, if they weren’t friends, they had certain things in common, and circumstance suggested an alliance of sorts was a sensible thing.

  *

  Andy’s true best friend was a rich kid who went to a private school and lived in a mansion with its own riverbank and its own jetty. Alistair was a year older than Andy, and Andy worshipped him. He had an entire room dedicated to a massive Scalextric track and collected model cars. Not just dinky toys, but proper die-pressed model cars. He also had his own speedboat, which lived on a trailer down the bottom of the yard and was moored up against the jetty in mild weather. Alistair was intending to be a Rhodes scholar. He was top of his classes and an A-grade hockey player. Andy’s parents knew Alistair’s parents, and they were almost friends. Andy’s parents had been to three drinks parties at the Rawleys’ place over the ten years they’d known them. Andy’s father ran a car yard and had sold Mr Rawley a Holden Statesman years back, though Mr Rawley claimed it was a beast, and moved on to a Mercedes sports from the luxury car yard in the city.

  Andy got it in his head that he wanted Alistair as referee for the race.

  No way, said Roger, He’s always going to favour you. He’s not my friend. He’s as honest as you’ll get, said Andy. My father says Alistair’s a good sort. No way, said Roger.

  But Andy pushed and pushed, and thought he’d get around the problem by asking Alistair to invite Roger over to go on his boat one Saturday afternoon so Roger could see what a perfect ref he’d be. Alistair was keen because though he was indifferent to Roger, and Andy as well – he only spent time with him on weekends when his better friends were busy elsewhere – he liked to keep an eye on what went on in his patch. Andy was his access to the rough world of the state primary school. He kept away from those low-class kids who were dumber than animals, all coming from broken homes and having mothers who wore tracksuit pants to the shops.

  Somehow Roger ended up at Alistair’s. Andy played the know-it-all show-off, and Alistair strutted around like an adult. The boat was an old speedboat that wouldn’t speed anywhere. Alistair drove it slowly up and down the Canning, its outboard motor downsized by his father to prevent any ‘whooping it up’. It wasn’t a warm day, so Roger turned up in old jeans, gym shoes without socks, and a skivvy. They had to lower themselves from the jetty into the rocking boat. Alistair went first, then Andy, and Alistair told Roger to cast off, then quickly step down into the boat. Roger did his best, but as he lowered himself into the boat, it somehow pushed away and he went straight into the river. Though the river was not deep there, it was muddy. So when he stood up, it was up to his waist, and he sank into the ooze and yelled, Fuck! You bastards. The other boys were laughing like anything.

  Mrs Rawley, tending pot plants way up on the patio, had seen Roger come in through the back gate, and had looked over the top of her glasses at him and said a very round-mouthed hello, then looked across at Alistair and stared him down, before returning to her peat moss and seedlings. She called out from up top, Watch your language, young man!

  A bedraggled Roger watched her as she walked briskly down the terraced slopes of the designer garden and lawns. He was hauling himself to the bank and out of the water, and then he was on her shoe tips. Her shoes were silver, and glistened as he dripped onto them. He turned back and saw the boys fussing about something in the boat and taking no notice of him. Mrs Rawley said, Well, look at you! You shouldn’t go boating if you’re inexperienced. I doubt you’ve ever seen a boat, never mind been in one. You’d better take yourself home right now. You’re a lucky little boy going out in the big boat, and now look what you’ve gone and done.

  *

  The day of the soapbox race approached, and after much argument it was decided that Alistair would ref, because there was no one else. Roger tried to gain the upper hand through psychological warfare, by describing the boys who would do the pushing to get them going as their ‘seconds’. You know, like in a duel. Andy didn’t know, and didn’t like the sound of it. Neither would tell the other who was going to give them the push: let all be revealed on race day.

  Race day was a Saturday afternoon when their fathers were at the footy and their mums were doing whatever they did on Saturday arvos. Both boys towed their machines with ropes along the footpaths, past barking dogs, all the way to the hill. The Coffin was heavy, but Roger’s place was uphill, and Andy’s down, so it worked out fair. Andy arrived with Alistair, who was going to be his second and ref. Andy and Roger argued for a while, but that was the way it was going to be. And where’s your second? asked Alistair, all superior and snooty. He’ll be
here in a minute, said Roger, just as a huge rough kid came out of the bush. Sorry, Rog, was havin’ a smoke.

  Don was oversized for his age. He was Roger’s second cousin and lived in one of the new houses established on a sandy mound hacked out of the bush just a year or two earlier. He went to a special school. He had a homemade tattoo of a heart on the back of one hand, and a spade on the other. Roger said, Hi, Don, this is Andy and it’s his cart I’m racing with mine, The Coffin – Andy’s doesn’t have a name, and this is Alistair, who goes to a posh school.

  Right, said Don, I go to a special school too. And hey, Andy, your little bus looks shit. Hey, square eyes, whaddya staring at? he said to Alistair, who had fixated on the square lump under the left sleeve of Don’s black T-shirt. You wanna Winnie Red, do ya?

  Sorry, no thanks, I’m okay.

  Well, keep your eyes to yerself then. And Don turned around to show Freo Rocks in white lettering on the back of his T-shirt. You know, you little sissy shit, members of the Rocks get promoted for bashing up dickheads like you. Who the fuck do you think you are? I’ve seen you riding your poncy racing bike around the streets. One day, me and my mates are gunna take that bike offa yer hands. What ya staring at? I just spoke to ya, moron. You gotta problem? Alistair kept staring, shook himself, rubbing his hands down his beige trousers, and said, Okay, let’s get this show on the road!