by Liam Pieper
‘I think it’s a ghost!’ I whispered.
‘Of course it’s a ghost,’ he chirped. ‘It’s the ghost of the old man who was murdered in your room before we moved in. That’s why we got the house so cheap, and that’s why we aren’t allowed to open the shed door. The ghost is trapped in there for now but if we let it out, it will skin us all while we sleep.’
To prove his point, he sneaked me out of bed that night and we commando-crawled past the adults watching TV in the lounge and out to the shed. He motioned for me to scuttle up to the door and peer into the crack beneath it, from which the otherworldly glow seeped.
I didn’t sleep that night. Or for quite a while after. Instead I would lie awake and shiver, convinced that if I closed my eyes the ghost would get me. Throughout that winter, as the sleepless nights added up, I campaigned for my folks to do something about the haunting, only to be rebuffed. I couldn’t understand how they could be so blasé about the evil undead spirit living in our shed, the supernatural but nonetheless clear-and-present danger. I tried to explain this to Mum and Dad night after night, but they just wearily told me to go back to bed. They broke eventually and at the end of that season they dismantled the hydroponic rig they’d been running in the shed and started growing their crops out in the open. Given that our neighbours were almost exclusively elderly Greeks who only ventured outside to water their concrete, my parents figured we’d be safe.
They didn’t count on Francois, the fifteen-year-old kid from across the road who, about a year after we moved in, kicked his footy into our yard and jumped over the fence to retrieve it, to find himself standing in our pot crop. He came back later that night to steal a couple of plants, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if he’d been a little smarter about it.
I can’t remember Francois that well, so I won’t impugn his character by stating that he was a fucking idiot, but I will say he came from a region in rural France infamous for its inbreeding. There were fifteen or so plants in our backyard. He stole two and stripped them in the backyard of the old lady who lived behind our place. Thinking someone was vandalising her garden, she called the cops, who peeked over the fence and noticed the dozen-odd weed plants dotting our backyard.
Meanwhile, Francois had been caught trying to sell our pot in the playground. When the school handed him over to the police, he told the cops that my folks had sold him the weed, and that they had much, much more. The grass he’d stolen was immature, uncured, unsaleable: no self-respecting dealer in the world would have peddled it, not even to someone like Francois, whose intellectual faculties were blunted by a storm of defective genes from generations of furtive incest, probably. His story was clearly horseshit, but it was enough to secure a warrant to raid our house the next morning.
Dad was feeding the cat when they arrested him. Ulysses was a sweet, stupid animal and all he wanted from life was to eat. From the second he got up to the moment when he fell asleep, he would stand in the kitchen mewing with the polite, steady rhythm of a gondolier’s cry. My dad, a light sleeper, was usually the first up, and he was shaking out the contents of a Whiskas box into a tray when he looked up to see a detective holding a weapon on him.
Ulysses dashed away as the plainclothes officers tackled and cuffed Dad, returning a moment later to dine after surmising that the Armoured Regional Response Team swarming through the house was not interested in his breakfast.
When it comes to raids, there are two kinds of cops: the old and sensibly jaded, and the young and dangerous. Every raiding unit has a few surly youths who find it just as unbelievable as I do that someone has armed them, and they charge into the situation like extras from a crime drama, all fired up on the adrenaline of kicking down a door.
These cops were the excitable kind, running on the intelligence they’d extracted from Francois that painted my folks as drug lords. So, as the response team dashed through the house, they were dismayed to find it full of children. They stomped about for a while, crunching Lego underfoot and tripping over stuffed toys in their search for contraband, until they realised they weren’t going to find a secret meth lab on the premises.
You could tell they weren’t sure how to interact with us kids. We were too young to push around and our tiny wrists couldn’t hold bracelets. After a while they just ignored us and went about their business, turning the house upside down while we howled for Weet-Bix and for someone to turn on the cartoons.
In the end, a kindly older cop took us outside and let us ride in his patrol car while my parents were being rounded up.
‘Can I play with the siren?’ I asked.
‘You’re not supposed to sound the siren unless there’s an emergency.’
‘Isn’t this an emergency?’
‘Oh, go on then.’
Weeeeeeeeeee!
He leaned over and switched it off. Outside my dad was being put in the back of a paddy wagon. I turned to the cop and implored, ‘Please? Just one more?’
Weeeeeeeeeee!
What fun! It was like being inside the Ghostbusters car, and I imagine that doing the same thing today would be as wicked fun as it was then.
My uncle was summoned to look after us while Mum and Dad went down to the station for processing. The cops were decent enough about it. The only brutality my parents endured was from one disappointed senior sergeant who clucked his tongue, shook his head and gently berated them: ‘Come on, guys! You’re too old for this shit.’
After Mum and Dad had been dragged outside in their pyjamas and arrested in front of the flashing lights, the neighbours turned frosty. People jogging by and those collecting the morning paper had stood and gawked. It had never been the kind of neighbourhood where we used to pop over to each other’s houses to borrow sugar, and after the arrest many in our street ended up perfecting the constipated half-smile and quick look-away whenever they encountered us.When both my parents and the family across the street were in the front garden of a Sunday, they would studiously ignore each other, pruning their rose bushes with immaculate concentration.
A few months afterwards my parents went to court and emerged with a conviction for possessing and cultivating a drug of dependence. This wasn’t ideal, but we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that things could have been much worse. Things would get worse, as it turns out, but not for a while, and until then we had other things to worry about. We had school in the morning, for one thing, at a campus where all the teachers now thought my folks were drug dealers.
4
After the arrest, Ardian got a hard time from his teachers, who had decided he was a bad seed. Hamish and I were still in primary school, he was just starting, I was about to leave, but Ardian was in the middle of high school. His school, while state-run, regularly turned out graduating classes with grades consistent with those of private schools, which meant an awful lot to families of limited means. They achieved this, year after year, through judicious Darwinism, by expelling troublesome students before they could affect the median grade of graduating classes.
It’s not that the teachers themselves were particularly inspiring. There were a few good ones but the faculty was largely a gallery of alcoholics and aspiring novelists who had washed up teaching high school after their other dreams didn’t pan out. Chief among these was Ms B, who had a fling with Ardian and tried to get him to elope to Sydney days before his final exams. He called us in the morning from the airport and casually mentioned that he was going to skip town with his English teacher.
‘There’s nothing weird about it. We’re going to get a hotel and visit John Marsden!’ My dad thought that wasn’t a great idea, and drove up to the airport to drag him back home.
My parents complained to the school, but, whatever discipline they handed down, she kept her job, she kept on fucking her students, and, when I was old enough to be in her class, she went on to take it out on me. She had a hard time demarcating between my older, Jeff Buckley–esque brother, and me. Years after their affair ended, for the semester I had her f
or English, she would often give me detention, then wait until we were alone and tearfully ask me why I continued to neglect my homework ‘after all we’ve been through together’. I still see her sometimes when I head out to the suburbs to visit family, standing in line at the supermarket, or shoplifting from the chemist.
Ardian was five years older than me, and he had the perfect combination of good looks, intelligence and utter lack of ambition that makes kids nightmarish students. He spent his time fighting, smoking and chasing girls, and put more effort into his immaculate undercut than his studies, but still managed to get decent grades. The formative part of Ardian’s youth had been spent in the bohemian era of our family, and he wore that influence pretty heavily. He played music: grunge guitar before Kurt’s shotgun, jazz piano after. He’d been a ladies’ man long before he was old enough to drive, and he was always pulling off outrageous stunts. When his girlfriend had to go to school on her birthday, he went out the night before to spray-paint a billboard that her bus passed by with ‘Ardian ♥s Callie’.
Rumours were always circulating about him, about the way he romanced his girlfriends by taking them hitchhiking up to Sydney, where they’d break into expensive hotels to use their spas, mini-bars and beds. At our high school, which had all the soul of the town from Footloose, he was legendary, for his free spirit, for his fondness for women. To this day I can be drinking in a bar anywhere on the east coast and some beautiful stranger will come up to me to tell me that she knew my brother.
He was particularly keen on hallucinogens. These were objects of sweet nostalgia for my parents from their Labassa days, which they encouraged Ardian to take instead of going out drinking and getting into fights. When he and his friends had gone mushrooming in the countryside or scored some LSD, they would take it and hang out in the lounge room, while Mum bustled in and out with sandwiches and glasses of cordial, and my dad put on a Cat Stevens video and held court about how he’d done acid once but ‘it never really did anything for me’.
I looked forward to the times when Ardian would return from some hippie festival devoted to nudity and djembe drumming to drop the last of his LSD in the house. He would coax a couple of teenaged girls back home with him and they would sit on the roof, watching the clouds and taking photos of each other’s feet. Mum took this in her stride, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Whenever one of the girls would stumble inside to show Mum a Polaroid of her ankle or whatever, Mum just smiled encouragingly and made her some fairy bread.
Years later, when I would come home strung out after staying up for days on pills and coke, wide-eyed and gibbering, Mum would knock on my bedroom door to ask if something was the matter. ‘I’m okay, Mum!’ I would yell. ‘I’ve just taken some bad acid!’ Mum would have been mortified to know that I’d been dabbling with powders – she has a trenchant distrust of all drugs besides pot and hallucinogens – but she knew what to do with a bad acid trip, and would prop me up on the couch with a cup of tea and a Star Trek video.
I adored Ardian and emulated him in everything he did, taking pains to model my speech and vocabulary after his. The jumpers and jeans I received as hand-me-downs were treasures, and I wore them until they were hanging off me in strips of tie-dye and corduroy. When he had girls over I would hang around in the lounge room, surreptitiously flexing my muscles, or rushing to the piano to play Doors covers to try to get them to notice me. I adopted my family’s counter-cultural rebellion and artistic leanings early on, or at least my interpretation of them: I was sure that if I could just smoke dope I would somehow absorb some of that cool.
In the evenings Ardian would have friends over to sit around a campfire in the backyard, punch cones and talk nonsense. Normally Ardian got a bit shitty if I tried to hang out with his friends, but when they were baked they seemed to enjoy my company. I savoured those occasions, talking to the older boys about grown-up things like girls and Nirvana and whether David Lynch was a genius. My jokes got laughs, and I would flit around Ardian’s mates, asking questions or trying to scab cones. I knew from the Life Education caravan that visited my school, with its slightly creepy giraffe puppet who warned us about the dangers of alcohol and casual sex, that smoking cigarettes was bad for me. But the impression I got from my family was that marijuana was harmless, and smoking sticky hydro in a bong made from a juice bottle seemed impossibly grown-up and glamorous.
‘You’re a bit young, Liam,’ Ardian would grin, breathing out a lungful of smoke and clearing the chamber by blowing on the shottie. ‘You have to be old enough not to want to play at the park any more. Then you can start going to the park to get stoned.’ That was a long-running, corny joke within the family: every time I got on my pushbike and announced that I was going to the park, my parents would roll their eyes, nudge each other and stage whisper, ‘Guess we’d better get a burrito in the microwave for when Sir Munchenstein over there gets home,’ which would make me flush red and ride off in a huff. I was actually going to the park to play on the roundabouts, and it embarrassed me that I wasn’t old enough to smoke yet.
The first time I got high was with my best friend Sam, who I’d known since I was eight. Sam was the youngest brother of my brother’s best buddy and so we became friends by default. I met him when the whole family came over for a play date. The adults pulled out joints and beers and guitars and set up in the lounge room, while Ardian and his friends went off to smoke in the backyard. To shake me from tailing him all day, Ardian introduced me to Sam, who was milling about shyly out the front of the house. He was kind of sporty, a jock kid, but we bonded over a shared love of throwing rocks at cars and then running like hell.
We were about twelve when, on a sleepover, we stole some of Ardian’s weed and rolled it into a clumsy joint. Together, Sam and I stuck our eager little faces out of the bedroom window and passed the blunt back and forth, watching as the smoke billowed out into the night and the universe opened up for us. Suddenly we understood all those foreign, esoteric, grown-up things that until now we’d only pretended to like: art-house movies, anime, jam bands, endless guitar solos. Getting high was like finding a pamphlet that explained how to get the most out of our leisure time, and that was all we did for the next couple of years. Weed around my way was exceptionally strong: a demonic ultra-grass bred over decades of sinister experimentation in hydro labs. It was potent, sticky gear, covered in tiny brown hairs that glistened with psychedelic menace. Unscrupulous drug dealers who sold inferior hydro used to spray their crops with Pepsi to mimic the texture.
I was shy, and filling my head with anaesthetic-strength cannabinoids didn’t help. While other kids our age were playing sport and going to films and fingering each other, Sam and I stayed in his room and watched videos. It turns out that weed isn’t glamorous, but that’s the problem with getting stoned all the time: you forget how to be bored and start enjoying things like Pink Floyd films and Australian hip-hop. Looking back at it now, I’m surprised no one told us to go outside and play. Actually, Mum did once, after she’d busted me hiding a bag of pot in my bedroom.
‘What’s this?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Are you smoking pot now?’
‘Ummm . . . Yes?’
‘Right . . . Well, be careful. And remember that some people are going to judge you for smoking pot, and not want to be your friend. And don’t forget to keep friends around that don’t smoke. And don’t smoke it before bed because it’ll keep you up thinking about bullshit. And do your homework. And never fucking touch my stash, okay?’
It was good advice but it came far too late. By the time I started high school, I was already a wan, shiftless burnout, suspicious of authority and unconvinced that school could teach me anything I hadn’t learned from hanging out with older kids. On my first day of Year 7, the vice principal collared me in the hallway and examined my face.
‘Ah, shit,’ he lamented. ‘Another Pieper.’
5
I was a very strange little teenager, and smo
king weed didn’t help. I liked girls and rock and roll and Pokemon, and I had no idea where to draw the lines between them. Sam had gone to another high school and I was a cripplingly shy kid, the kind who spent lunchtimes plodding lonely circles of the oval. I would have liked to play Dungeons & Dragons but couldn’t find anyone who was into it. This was pre-internet, before people could easily meet like-minded weirdos and get their kinks seen to.
My words came out in choked-off half sentences that made no sense, even to me. These stillborn communiqués broke across the faces of people I tried to talk to in waves: confusion, incomprehension, dismissal. I was a nice enough guy but my nerves made me creepy, clumsy – forever stumbling about, mumbling nonsense. The first time I heard Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ it was so cathartic it broke me open and scraped me out like I was some angst-ridden lobster. Of course, back then I wasn’t hip to Radiohead; I was just a creep.
I had no idea how to talk to people, even other misfit lads, let alone girls. I used to hang around at parties and then take over the piano to sing one of my ballads, which were just plagiarised Leonard Cohen songs with the names and location references switched up.
In the first week of high school I developed a crush on a classmate, Lilly, which was as spectacularly profound as it was unrequited. I would spend close to a decade trying to woo her, and fail. She wanted nothing to do with me, and she had her reasons.
