Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  I said, ‘Don’t know me, hey? Well I know you. You’re the prick who bashed me up and tipped over my cereal and beat me with a broom at Camp MacKay. And do you know what I’m going to do right now? I’m going to take you out into the car park and I’m going to thrash you to within an inch of your life.’

  The guy started shaking like the jellies on the frozen confectionery counter. His mouth moved but no words came. His eyes, which moments ago showed fear, now betrayed abject terror. ‘Please, leave me alone. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please … ’ Of course I had no intention of hurting him. But I did want to terrify him, as he had once terrified me. Mission accomplished, I turned on my heel and continued shopping.

  Camperdown was a suburb boxed in by busy Parramatta and Pyrmont Bridge roads, a wasteland of concrete apartment blocks and factories. There was nothing much to do. Nowhere to swim, no big grassy parks to play in; just Camperdown Playground next to the public school, a little space with swings, a basketball hoop, an area to ride your bike and jagged glass lurking in the sand waiting to rip your feet to shreds. We were forced to make our own fun, and not everything we did was legal. Kids from other neighbourhoods surfed, played footy and tennis. We broke into factories.

  And that’s how I damn-near killed myself.

  Not far from our flats was an old factory that manufactured perfume. Of course, having nothing and making do, we neighbourhood kids transformed that factory into Never-Never Land. Once you scaled the cyclone fence that butted against the building, breaking in was a breeze.

  One day I was perched on the fence and I reached for a light fixture to steady myself, grabbed a live electrical wire and was electrocuted. Even today, nearly forty years later, I can feel the terrible jolt, the burning pain and the acrid smell of my own burning flesh. All I could see was red and my body was jerking and shaking like a fish on a hook as the electricity surged through me from my hand to my head and down to my toes. Suddenly the power stopped, leaving me atop the fence trembling and traumatised. I looked at my hand where I had gripped the wire and there were holes burned in it. I felt like I’d been fried. I wailed to my mates, ‘I’ve been electrocuted. I think I just nearly died.’

  I tumbled from the fence onto the ground, picked myself up and ran home, screaming ‘No! No! No!’ I banged on our door. Mum rushed me to the emergency department of the children’s hospital where a doctor examined me. When he took off my sandshoes there were big marks on my feet from the electricity burn. The rubber-soled shoes had saved my life.

  There followed four months in and out of hospital, enduring a series of excruciatingly painful skin grafts – my fingers are still scarred – to repair my burned body. I shared my ward with other kids who’d suffered serious accidents or had long-term illness. It was summer and at night the hospital staff would push our beds out onto the balcony so we could get some fresh air and listen to a radio. Away from the watchful eyes of the nurses we got up to mischief. One boy, who was in with a badly broken leg, was a particularly nasty piece of work. He terrified some of the other boys into being his henchmen, and they ganged up on me and wheeled my bed up beside the nasty kid, close enough for him to raise his plaster-encased leg on its pulley-frame and bring it crashing down on me again and again. It was heavy, and by the time he’d finished with me I was black and blue.

  Less painfully, a bunch of us got a bit of a gang going and we would have pillow fights and creep around at night and draw beards and moustaches on sleeping patients with black felt pens.

  It’s hard to talk about it, even now, but one of the after-effects of being electrocuted was that I was incontinent at night when I slept. I’d wake up and to my horror I’d have soiled my pyjamas. I’d be distraught with embarrassment, and it didn’t help when the nurses would come upon me and loudly declare, so everyone else in the ward could hear, ‘Oh, James Dack has disgraced himself again!’

  The skin grafts were painful. But even harder to heal were the psychological scars. Frankly, the hospital didn’t have a clue how to deal with the mental trauma I had suffered. Being electrocuted brought on anxiety attacks. It literally reconfigured everything inside of me. I had to get up each day and reassure myself that I was not going to die. I was often edgy and nervous, sometimes about nothing. The streets of Camperdown had been a second home to me but now I was scared to go outside. I refused to walk under overhead electrical wires or turn on a light switch. For the next three years I had trouble sleeping. I played endlessly with toy soldiers and became obsessed with cutting up cardboard boxes and making shelters for my little plastic warriors.

  At school, my marks, which had been high enough to put me at the top of the class, plummeted after I was electrocuted. And the other kids kept their distance. They were unsettled by my new habit of humming loudly. In hospital I had whiled away the countless hours I was confined to bed by listening to the Top 40 on my tinny little transistor radio, singing and humming to the popular hits of the early 1970s. When I returned to school it seemed natural to keep on humming. In the middle of class, I’d be miles away in my head, existing in my own little world, and humming my favourite song: Peter, Paul and Mary’s ‘Leavin’ On A Jet Plane’.

  The teacher would shout, ‘Who’s humming! This is a place for work!’ And I’d reply, ‘Oh, it’s just me. Sorry.’ I’d stop and, without thinking, start up again soon after. This happened most days. It annoyed not only the teacher but my classmates. They’d all yell at me, and I’d look up at them and see them berating me, their angry faces, but I couldn’t hear a word they were shouting, just the words of the tune in my head.

  Only one teacher, Mr Ralston, realised I had a serious problem. He took me aside and asked me what was wrong. I tried but I simply wasn’t capable of putting all my anxieties into words. He helped me with my work. One exam, I only completed half of the questions. Later, Mr Ralston came to me and said, ‘Look, I can tell something is not right with you and that’s reflected in your schoolwork. I’m going to give you another forty-five minutes to finish the exam.’ I had a shot, but it was no use. Questions I could have easily answered before my accident were now beyond me. I handed the paper back to him and said, ‘Sorry, sir.’ I will never forget how disappointed he looked. Most of our teachers thought nothing of caning us, hard and often, but this man was a good bloke.

  I felt desperately bad for Mum. I had been chosen to sit for a bursary which, if I passed the examination, would have funded my secondary schooling. Because of being electrocuted, I was in no shape to take the test so my one chance of helping Mum out evaporated. Here she was working two jobs as a cleaner to pay my school fees, and I was now at the bottom of the class. She deserved better. I couldn’t help bombing out. I’d come home from school and she’d ask how I’d fared that day and I’d always reply that I’d done just fine. To ease her mind I pretended to read at home and when she asked me questions about my book I’d make up plots and characters. Even now, I have trouble absorbing information from books. When I’m reading for pleasure, unless it’s something totally absorbing, after twenty or thirty pages my head aches and my eyes go blurry and I have to put the book down.

  I had panic attacks. I’d literally go numb, my palms would sweat, my heart would pound wildly and I’d lose my hearing. Once after I saw a show on TV in which someone’s appendix had burst I became convinced that mine had too. I could feel my stomach explode and I screamed in pain. When I had these episodes, all Mum could do was take me in her loving arms and hold me tight until the attack subsided. Feeling would return to my limbs, my heart would stop pounding and I could hear her gentle reassurances that everything was going to be all right. Sometimes, she’d take me for a walk, but for ages we were not allowed to go near power lines.

  When I was in sixth class, my mother took me to a psychologist. Neither of us knew that my problem wasn’t psychological, it was just that the electric shock had knocked me around to a terrible degree.

  I didn’t begin to improve for more than a year. All I knew was that my anxi
ety attacks came less often, and I wasn’t quite as terrified as I had been of going outside and walking under the overhead electrical wires.

  After my tussle with the live wire, something else happened. Something odd. I developed an ability to mentally detach myself from my body, and observe what I was doing from a distance. Walking around the streets, I could look down from on high and observe how I walked, what I wore, my interactions with other kids. Still in fear of kids calling me dumb or stupid after my accident, I would ask myself, Are you looking good, are you doing the right thing, would Mum be proud? Later when I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs I would leave my body and coldly decide whether I was being a goose or drinking too much. Even today I can be in a meeting and suddenly I’m peering down at myself from the ceiling watching how I am doing business. The best way I can explain it is that I’m editing my life. I’m naturally self-critical, so it works for me.

  One other after-effect of my electric shock was that it gave me a sense that life is fragile and that death is often closer at hand than we think. When we’re young we feel we’re bulletproof and that we’ll live forever. Getting electrocuted left me in no doubt that this was not the case.

  Through all this, my father’s drinking worsened. So did his abuse of Mum and me. He shouted at me and menaced and shoved me. But he reserved his worst treatment for Mum. He barked orders at her, told her she was stupid and incompetent and that she wasn’t worthy of him. Never once in all the time he lived with us – unless he was feigning contrition in the queasy wake of a bender – did I see him treat her civilly, let alone with kindness and respect. Still, for the sake of Stephen, Alison and me, she endured this creep, and held her head high.

  At Camperdown, I became aware of my mother’s family, who lived all around us but always seemed to be on the move. Aunties and uncles, nephews and their friends and hangers-on; I seem to recall that just about every one was suffering from something, be it cancer, MS, depression, post-Vietnam trauma or schizophrenia, alcohol, drug or gambling addiction, or just a chronic inability to obey the law.

  Bad luck dogged them. Yes, bad things do happen to good people, but I’ve often wondered if sometimes we contribute to the unfortunate things that happen to us. Certainly more unfortunate things happened to my mother’s family than any other group of people I’ve ever known.

  I don’t think these people were crooks or even had bad intentions. A few actually prospered and went on to lead happy lives. But, by and large, they were who they were, victims of their circumstances, and from my point of view I tried to steer clear of them and just used them as reverse role models. They seemed to waste their days; I wanted to make every one count. (I decided that when I grew up I wasn’t going to slack about or take welfare cheques. I’ve never been on the dole. Having said that, I do believe that if people try hard to find work and genuinely cannot, they deserve assistance.)

  Not long ago I was at work when one of my relatives, whom I hadn’t seen for some years, arrived unannounced at the reception desk and asked for me. I went down to greet them and was met with the request, ‘Got a beer, mate?’

  I organised a job working in a hospital for another of Mum’s bunch when he was down on his luck, but he lasted less than a week.

  I’m not putting my relatives down; in my way I loved them. It’s just that I didn’t want to live the way they did. I built a wall around myself and my brother and sister.

  One morning when I was nine my old man went out for a drink and didn’t come back. Apart from a few episodes where he’d wheedle his way back into our lives for a week or a month until he perpetrated another drunken atrocity on us and Mum sent him away, he never lived with us again. Mum knew we would struggle without the money – not that it was ever much – and without the pilfered food from the docks that he brought home, but the threat of starvation was preferable to being bashed and degraded, so there was an air of, if not joy, then relief when he failed to return from wherever he had gone to seek alcoholic oblivion.

  Joy, however, was definitely our reaction when, in 1973, our application to vacate the wretched Camper-down apartment for a Housing Commission home in Woolloomooloo was approved. I knew the ’Loo pretty well, and I was ecstatic that we were going to live there. There was something about the ramshackle old suburb on Sydney Harbour with its noisy and clamorous street life, its larger-than-life characters, and its lawlessness, that struck a chord with me. And, as far as Mum and I were concerned, anywhere was better than grim Camperdown.

  The day before we moved, Mum, Stephen, Alison and I were sitting in the kitchen of the Camperdown flat amongst the boxes that contained our meagre possessions, thanking our lucky stars that we could finally say good riddance to the shoebox. Having performed the miracle of making the joint sparkle for the new tenants, Mum decided she and I should reward ourselves with a cup of tea. ‘You bet, Mum!’ I chimed. She filled the kettle and turned it on, then went to the cupboard to get the packet of tea. Suddenly there was a bang! and an enormous flame shot from the kettle and shorted every fuse in the flat. We didn’t get our cup of tea. We sat there laughing. It was as if the place was telling us, ‘You’re outtahere! Goodbye! Go!’

  [STEPHEN]

  spiderman of camperdown

  Naturally, I have no recollection of this, but Mum told me I was born at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Paddington and I lived in Liverpool Street for only a month or two before she and my old man bundled me up, kicking and screaming, and we all went to live in the Housing Commission block in Camperdown. My first memory locks in when I was three in 1968 and I was attending pre-school down the road from where we lived. Other kids, kind teachers, big drawings on the walls, running wild in the playground, devon sandwiches and warm milk for lunch. My joy when Mum would come to collect me at three o’clock.

  In my mind’s eye I can also see Mum coming home from her work as a cleaner at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Missenden Road, Camperdown. She also cleaned at the stock exchange in Sydney’s CBD. When I was toddling, and later, bouncing off the walls as I careened around that little flat, there was always Mum, my big brother and my little sister, and occasionally my dad. James and I shared one of the two bedrooms and Mum and Alison were in the other. My father slept with my mother when he was home, and Alison joined James and me in our room. I didn’t know where he was otherwise and no one told me. I know today that he was off doing the heavy drinking that would kill him, but I have no memory of the raised voices, slurred shouting and violence that would rage each time he returned, nor of James’s and my mother’s tears. Consequently, while I can be very pissed off at my father for the things I have heard he did to Mum and James, I can’t hate him like James does. He called me ‘Sunshine’. I liked the name and it is still my nickname of choice for a mate.

  Mum was brave, kind and spoke beautifully. She always wore nice soft dresses. Can I tell you, her heart was made of gold. She taught all of us kids good manners and she was adamant that we use them at all times. I was so proud to go out walking on the streets of Camperdown, and later Woolloomooloo, with her. Once, Alison, James and I were strolling together along the footpath, possibly Pyrmont Bridge Road, possibly Broadway after we’d been to Grace Brothers, and a woman, a complete stranger, said to our mother, ‘Excuse me, but I simply have to tell you. You are so lucky to have such well-behaved children.’

  Mum replied, ‘Luck has nothing to do with it.’

  My mother was tough. By her example she showed me that no matter what stands in your way – an abusive and drunken husband, lack of money, your home a tiny flat in a terrible suburb, no connections, three young dependants – you can achieve. Maybe you cannot realise every dream, but you can nail the realistic ones. She taught me to never give up and so many times between then and now, when I’ve been on the verge of quitting, I’ve remembered her and knuckled down.

  As kids, we really did make our own fun at Camperdown. We played in the sewer that ran all the way to Balmain. Big logs floated through the underground passag
es and we tried to jump onto them and ride them like surfboards. A downpour of rain and we could have drowned. In the grounds of the Children’s Hospital there was a huge mountain of coal to power the place, and we’d dive into a pile and come out with our clothes and skin coloured a black that defied Solvol, pumice stone or any other scrubbing agent in existence back then.

  No factory was safe from us local kids. I can’t remember ever being defeated by a lock. We broke into the perfume factory. Bigger boys lifted me up and I climbed in through a narrow window, then opened it up from inside. We sold the bottles of perfume around Camperdown and those that we couldn’t sell we gave to our unwitting mothers, pretending that we’d saved up to buy them. Days later, Mum answered a knock on the door and was alarmed to find two police officers demanding to speak with her son. ‘James?’

  ‘No, Stephen.’

  ‘But he’s only five!’ Nevertheless I copped a stern warning.

  We busted into Grace Brothers’ Missenden Road storage facility, and no establishment that smelled as delicious as the Weston Biscuits factory was going to escape a raid. I pulled that particular job solo. Slipping through a gate that someone had conveniently left open, I sneaked inside the depot to where the biscuits were stacked ready to be loaded into the delivery trucks and snaffled a big box of Wagon Wheels. I took them home and hid them in my wardrobe. Over the next few days I ate them. James slept in the same room as me, but neither he nor anyone else saw or suspected a thing until I started breaking out in hives. Big red hives. Wagon Wheels were James’s favourite treat. I’m fairly certain that I didn’t offer him one from my secret stash.

  James was five years older than me, and hung out with his own mates around the streets of Camperdown or at the playground. He wasn’t keen on his little brother tagging along, and that suited me. I had an entrepreneurial streak (don’t ask me where it is today!) and made a little money picking up discarded soft drink bottles from the street and taking them to the corner stores for the five-cent cash refund they offered in those days. There’d be me, every afternoon after school, the kid who collects the bottles.