Jarvis 24
David Metzenthen lives with his wife and two children in Melbourne and is one of Australia’s top writers for young people. He has received many awards for excellence, including a 2003 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Wildlight, and a 2003 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Boys of Blood and Bone. In 2004, Boys of Blood and Bone also won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and was an Honour Book in the CBCA Book of the Year Awards: Older Readers.
David’s latest novel, Black Water, was an Honour Book in the 2008 CBCA Book of the Year Awards: Older Readers.
Penguin Books
Also by David Metzenthen
Black Water
Boys of Blood and Bone
Wildlight
Stony Heart Country
Finn and the Big Guy
Johnny Hart’s Heroes
Falling Forward
Gilbert’s Ghost Train
For younger readers
Tiff and the Trout
The Colour of Sunshine
The Really Really Epic Mini-bike Ride
The Really Really High Diving Tower
The Really Nearly Deadly Canoe Ride
Anton Rocks On
Fort Island
The Hand-Knitted Hero
Spider!
Jarvis 24
David Metzenthen
Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2009
Text copyright © David Metzenthen, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74-228517-7
Acknowledgements
My appreciation to the many car sales people who shared their experiences, good, bad and bizarre, with me. Also, ten years of gratitude to Christine Alesich for listening, and editing, most graciously. Jane Godwin, simply, thanks.
In memory of the real N W Vincent Gates:
Licensed Land Surveyor, gentleman, and more.
1
I tend to worry, I know I do, but only because I think there is lots of things to worry about. For a start, I think I should’ve said there are lots of things to worry about, which would worry my English teacher, Ms Inglis, more than me – and I worry, for instance, that I lose crap all over the place, and that I have to find some kind of Work Experience for next week, and that my mother’s new second-hand car’s number plates are CISSSY, which she refuses to change.
I mean, imagine if some girls saw me, totally innocently, get out of a red Ford Fiesta outside school, registration CISSSY, with my mother screaming out that I’d forgotten my lunch, how that would look?
That’s right. It would look rubbish.
‘Well, Jarvy,’ says Travis, as we walk down Barclay Road after football training, ‘I could not give a stuff.’
This interrupts my thinking. For a moment, I even stop worrying.
‘About what?’ Not that it really matters, because Trav doesn’t give a stuff about much. Or that is what he pretends.
‘Work Experience.’ We turn into Glenferrie Road. ‘I could not care less.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘Me, neither.’ But I do, and I’ve been so worried about trying to find something to do for Work Experience that I haven’t actually done anything about it.
‘Did you find your footy boot?’ Trav asks me. ‘How about your mouthguard?’
About half my life is spent trying to track down things I’ve lost, and the other half is spent trying not to lose any more. I lost a drink bottle today. I even lost a girl once; no, I didn’t leave her anywhere – well, I did, at a hospital and a church, but for once, it wasn’t my fault. Trav knew her, too. Her name was Amelia-Anne Sorenson. It still is, of course. She was a great girl; no, she was a great, great, great girl. I thought that when I didn’t even really like girls. And I think it now, when I like just about every girl I see.
‘Nup. I’ve found nothing,’ I say. ‘I’ll go to Lost Property tomorrow and see what turns up.’
Trav shakes his shaggy head. He either has the most complicated haircut in the world, or no haircut at all. I can’t work it out.
‘Still, Jarvy, you trained all right. Even I was impressed.’
I did run hard; mostly because there was some chick with long shiny brown hair watching, which is unusual at an all-boys school. Well, she wasn’t watching; she was sitting reading a book, which hacked me off a little – as if I was at an all-girls school, I would not be reading. In fact, I would not be reading wherever I was.
‘So you’re a boot short?’ Trav raises a blond eyebrow. ‘This could present the perfect buying opportunity. Sack white. Go red.’
‘I’d kill myself first.’
Trav wears red boots. He’s just lucky he’s tall, wide, and bad-tempered. And he’s lucky he lives in a house where lost things are generally just replaced without too many questions – whereas my house is more like the Lost Property Department, Gestapo Headquarters, run by my mother, storm trooper Pam.
‘You find that boot, Marc.’ Blinding light right in the eyes. ‘Or you vill pay!’
Of course, I can’t possibly pay, not with the amount of shit I lose, and the amount of money I don’t have. So she’s wasting her breath there, which is what parents do, I suppose, to make themselves at least feel like they’re doing something to fix the situation.
We stop at Trav’s street. It’s filled with extremely large, extremely renovated houses, the type of houses that people drive past and say, ‘Sheee-it, look at that.’ Some have palm trees. Most have tennis courts. One has a bowling alley. All have pools.
Trav’s house doesn’t have a tennis court. Well, this one doesn’t. But his Blairgowrie house does.
‘You’ve picked up some pace over summer, Jarv.’ Trav and I are hanging at his corner. ‘I saw Tindale write it on his sheet. Number twenty-four. Good speed.’
I’m a semi-quick player, I guess. Plus I have a good leap, and kick pretty well off both feet, especially my left; although it freaks me out that I even think this stuff about myself.
‘And he wrote “good height”,’ Trav adds. ‘Although that’s stretching it a bit.’
At a hundred and eighty-seven centimetres, I guess I’m tall.
But at a hundred and ninety-two, Trav’s way taller; and I reckon if any of us has a future as a footballer, he’ll be the one. On a good day he’s a gun. On a great day he’s a freak. On a bad day he’s just angry, big, and dangerous – but funny to watch, if you’re on our side, go to our school, or aren’t related to any of the guys on the other team.
‘Yeah, whatever, I say, feeling not so bad. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And we split, Trav wandering off up the Grand Canyon, me wandering off down Glenferrie Road, worrying about that lost freakin’ boot and mouthguard, and as always, in some part of my mind, thinking of Amelia A. Sorenson, girl superstar gone from the world.
I also worry, when I have time, that I don’t know as many girls as I should; although what would be an acceptable number of girls to know would be hard to say. I also worry, now and again — perhaps because I often find myself comparing myself to other guys, their clothes and physiques — that I might be a bit gay.
Might I be?
I do have white football boots. Well, I have one. Then again, I always go straight to the ladies underwear pages of any letterbox catalogue to check the chicks, no matter how much sporting equipment I have to pass by.
Not that I have anything against gay people, of course. I mean, hey, I don’t even know any. Perhaps I should worry about that?
Anyway, I only have to look at girls to like them. Mostly, that is. For example, I really like that girl walking out of the used car yard across the road.
She’s tall.
She has long black hair.
She’s wearing black trackies and a white and yellow St Helen’s school top.
She’s a beautiful unknown girl. And I like her.
Yes, it’s that simple.
And, as I watch her walk off into the dark, it occurs to me that I could do Work Experience at that used car yard.
Why not?
I haven’t got any other better ideas.
2
There are alternatives to Work Experience: you can stay at school and do assignments, or you can go to an old people’s home and wash wheelchairs. I’m not doing either.
What I am doing is trying to cross Glenferrie Road, which in the dark reminds me of a painting of Paris I saw. The car lights are smudged and interesting, and there’s a lady sitting alone in a coffee shop, very romantic-looking – until I realise it’s a maths teacher from school who judges guinea pig competitions, and plays women’s cricket. I head for the car yard.
It’s not a big place or I guess I would’ve taken more notice of it before. Perhaps twenty cars face the road, surrounding a little white office lit up like a fish tank. Tattered yellow streamers hang like the skeleton of a sagging circus tent, and there’s a black sign on a blue brick wall that states:
GateWay Auto.
Quality Pre-Owned Vehicles.
Prop. V. P. Gates.
LMCT too faded to read.
Come in and see us!!!
So I do.
I walk up the driveway and knock on the sliding glass door. Inside, there’s an old guy at a desk. He’s wearing a white shirt, and looks a bit worn out to tell the truth. On his desk are a few bottles of pills, and on the fake timber wall behind him is a series of pictures of dark green English-looking racing cars, and one painting of brown-and-white cows hanging around some gum trees.
The guy comes over and slides back the door. I see his tie is just about as crooked as mine, although mine is lost at the moment.
‘I don’t sponsor walkathons.’ He grins, his grey hair combed over and back, sparse in the light. ‘Other than that, what can I help you with?’
I tell him my name before going into the entire dumb story about the five days’ Work Experience I have to find, and what it’s supposed to do for us, which I don’t actually know, but generalise about a bit.
‘You don’t have to pay me,’ I add. ‘Like, it’s only for school. It’s no big deal. It’s not important or anything.’
The guy laughs, which is fair enough, and tells me his name is Vin Gates.
‘Well, honestly, Marc – ’ Vin Gates scratches his head with a pencil. ‘I don’t know if the type of work experience you’d get here would be quite what your school has in mind. By the look of your blazer.’
I know it wouldn’t be, but this time I’m with Trav – I couldn’t give a stuff. Compared to doing a project on World’s Worst Slums, or mashing up vegetables for old people, working here would be, well, almost as good as being a cameraman at Miss World, preferably on location in California.
‘Euh,’ I say, which is a word from my French textbook you use when you need time to think. ‘No, it’d be great. And no one else’ll be doing it. Besides, I like cars.’ Well, I don’t dislike them.
‘Okay, Marc,’ says Mr Gates, extending a small, worn-looking hand, which I shake. ‘Come in. And let’s take a look at the paperwork.’
Walking home, I think about the girl I saw earlier. Man, she was striking, which is not a word I would use out loud. But she was. She was striking because of how she looked, and the way she walked, slowly and surely, with perfect posture. And that led me to think that perhaps she could do something athletic very fast or well, like swim, run, play tennis, or even do the damn pole vault.
How do I know this?
Because I have a TV and I’ve watched the Olympics.
Of course, I could be wrong.
I have been before, many times.
But what I do know is that she walked out of the same used car yard that I just walked into, and that I will walk into again next Monday for Work Experience. And I know she goes to school near here. So there’s a very good chance she’ll turn up again. Or maybe not. My theories on meeting girls have failed before.
Ask Trav.
Although everybody knows he’s one totally unreliable witness.
3
It’s a fine Saturday morning, and I’m stalking around my wing, watching some girls who are watching our intra-school football practice match. I’m also listening to Carlo, who’s telling me about his father’s illegally imported marble fountains and garden statues.
I stop stalking. ‘Carlo, why would they be illegal?’
Carlo is looking critically at his right arm, seeing how his Noosa tan stands up in the cool Melbourne sun. He wears yellow and black football boots that cost about a million dollars. I am wearing my old black boots as my beautiful new white Asics boot is still on walkabout, which gives me a stomach ache just thinking about it.
‘Because they are full of drugs.’ Carlo laughs, showing off whiter-than-white teeth in a dark face.
The thing about Carlo is although he’s not big and doesn’t talk tough, there’s something about him that tells you that he is. His dad owns a big black Merc, a restaurant, warehouses that occasionally catch fire, and an importing business. But one thing I do understand about Carlo is that his jokes are jokes, and so I laugh, but not too loudly.
‘Well, I look forward to seeing the photos,’ I say enigmatically, a word Ms Inglis used once to describe Travis, which means doesn’t quite add up or make sense, so points to me for using it correctly.
Then I resume my stalking, aware that I haven’t had a kick yet, which is worrying, especially if the girls watching know that one of the more important details of playing football is actually getting the ball.
It’s early in the second quarter and I’m pleased to say I’ve got a kick. But as I’m on the opposite wing, too far away for the girls to see me properly, and this is a practice match, I simply boot it to Travis. This, from what I can tell, doesn’t go down too well with Coach Tindale.
‘Wrong option, Jarvis! You dimwit!’
I hope the girls didn’t hear that.
‘Hey, Carlo.’ I watch the ball bounce out onto the road, which will keep everyone busy for a while. ‘Have you got this Work Experience thing sorted out yet? What are you going to do?’
Carlo is looking at his boots, which always manage to hold that sheeny-shiny fresh-from-the-box look. This could be
because he generally buys three pairs at a time.
‘Yeah, I’ll work with my dad.’
As I thought. ‘And what do you think you’ll be doing?’ This is a leading question. ‘Unloading the statues?’
Carlo looks at me, his black eyes like gun turrets.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I didn’t think so, either.’
We laugh, looking up the ground, seeing the ball coming our way, spinning like a falling red bomb.
With a clash of elbows, we take off.
Game on.
Carlo is quick but I am quicker. Carlo can leap but I can leap higher. And Carlo is tough but – no, he’s tougher than me, which I try not to think about as I smack his arm down, the two of us closing in on a ball that suddenly bounces sideways.
I swerve, grab the footy, and spear it forward fast and low just before Carlo puts me down, arms pinned, my head smacking the ground with a thump that I’m sure felt a lot worse than it looked – the type of hit that worries the player who’s been hit, and the parents of that player, but no one else in the slightest.
‘That’s good, Marc!’ Coach Tindale yells as I slowly get up. ‘I wanna see that twenny times today!’
I think it’s fair to say Mr Tindale is not a coach of the modern era. There is no next week as far as Mr T is concerned; there is only now, and quite often at halftime he brings up those kamikaze pilots. Once he showed us a DVD. I’m still not persuaded. There just seems better ways to fly a plane.
‘Anyway,’ says Carlo, waving a hand towards the car park as I try to work out what day it is. ‘Your mum’s car. What’s with those number plates?’
I walk home with Trav. Our parents have decided to do coffee, which bores me stupid. In my opinion, the only good thing about coffee is that there are plenty of nice waitresses who serve it, and plenty of nice girls who sit around drinking it.
‘What’ve you got lined up for Work Experience?’ I ask.
‘My uncle’s factory.’ Trav makes way for a lady walking a brown Labrador that has an L plate, strangely enough, on its coat. ‘They make vacuum cleaners. But it’ll be okay because I can have next Friday and Monday as rostered days off. It’s an individual workplace agreement I hammered out with Uncle Tony. We’re gunna play golf. So you’re still up for the car yard thing?’
Jarvis 24 Page 1
