DON’T BE SO DOWN on everything all the time. Get into the swing of things, Heels says. Give things a go, join in. If the regatta is the event of the school calendar then of course you must go, besides it sounds very glamorous, a regatta. It conjures images of very toffy English gentlemen with monocles and ladies with lacy parasols and pretty bonnets. “You’ll even be wearing a boater like you’re on one of those punting things, punts. A boater is the perfect hat for a regatta,” she trills in a sing-song voice, placing it, a thatch of scratchy straw, on my head and setting it square then straightening my tie, smoothing the suit pads of my shoulders. She takes a step back to look at me in my smart grey uniform before farewelling me out the door for the bus to the train station. No she does not know why the regatta is called Head of the River but if that is what it is called then that’s what it’s called. No need to make snide comments about beheadings and savages with spears. There are no savages with spears left in Australia, least of all on a river at or near Sydney.
But I’ve heard there is headhunting at the Head of the River. There are headhunters, not so much at the river itself but on the trains going there. It’s a secret, that’s the rule, that’s the tradition. Headhunting is a tradition that’s no business of teachers or parents or prefects or police. It’s between us and the other us’s of each school. No one dobs, and if they do, they’ll be history, they’ll be got.
The Jew tribe will not go to the Head of the River. If there’s trouble, won’t they be the first to attract it? Nor can I see anyone from the Asian tribe. Perhaps they fear they would be second.
Throughout Saturday morning the trains pull away from Town Hall Station for Penrith. Carriages crammed with boys and pimply almost-men blazered and scarved in the blues, browns, greys and blacks of their particular school. Each school has its own carriage. On the platform boys assemble excitedly, waiting for their turn to board. They queue, not commanded by anyone to do so—there are no masters, parents or prefects present—but out of some innate conformity.
Gary Blackwood’s at the front of my queue. He is jostling us with his elbows to “make room you fucking plebs” as members of the bush tribe arrive. Plebs must give up their place and move to the back of the queue. Carlos Toyne is there—a friend of Gary Blackwood’s though not a member of the bush tribe (his father’s a chemist at Bondi) but a weightlifter, rumoured to be good at maths all the same. His red scalp shows through his hair from early balding. His shoulders are so hunched with muscle they touch his earlobes. He takes off his blazer and rolls it into a ball for stowing under his arm. He folds up his sleeves into tight cuffs for his hairy biceps, biceps so thick he must hold them out from his body as if carrying bags. He walks a few steps out of our queue towards the neighbouring queue, Enemy One. He sucks in deep breaths through his nose as if preparing to lift a bell-bar. He bares his teeth at Enemy One and gives out a gargling growl, thumps his chest with his fists like an ape, growling louder, hoarser. Veins in his forehead and temples squiggle to life like worms. His eyes bulge in a madman’s glare.
The older boys in the Enemy One queue clap and jeer. They mock him with muscle-man poses struck with an effeminate flourish, a bent wrist, a blown kiss. This only makes Carlos Toyne beat his chest more ferociously and roar with strings of spit between his lips. The next Penrith-bound train grinds towards the platform. The school queues burst into song—their school songs—arms slung over the shoulders of the boys next to them. Gary Blackwood punches the air and leads the school anthem. Senior boys, the almost-men who reek of aftershave, those who usually push we plebs aside or to the ground as soon as look at us now fling their arms over our shoulders, hug us to their sides. Even the bush tribe embraces us and does not let us go as the train squeals to a halt. Gary Blackwood has his arm over me and is holding me close. “OK you fucking plebs, let’s see what you’re fuck-ing made of,” he yells. He jerks at the train door to slide it open. Carlos Toyne charges in to claim the empty carriage. The rest of us follow to fortify the carriage, locked in the chain of arms and shoulders unable to wriggle free of the crush. For that’s what Gary Blackwood is instructing us to do, “Fortify.” We are like his troops now, he is our self-appointed commander.
Carlos Toyne has won the first battle against Enemy One: he has opened our rear door, the one that leads to the Enemy One carriage door. He has reached across and grabbed the Enemy One carriage door-handle. On the other side, two Enemy One almost-men push against his hold, a test of strength Toyne is winning single-handedly. Whoever wins this contest gains control of the door and will open it, shove an arm through and grab an opponent by the hair, clothes, wrist and drag him through the opening into their carriage. They will have scored a victim.
Gary Blackwood and two bush tribers are gaining control of the carriage’s forward door that joins to the carriage claimed by Enemy Two school. Other bush tribers divide the sprawling scrum of us into two packs to lend weight at each door. The carriage’s main doors slide shut for departure. The train creaks away from the station, quickly gathers speed and twists double-jointedly on its snigs. Bodies are being squashed in the door-scrums, boaters are toppling to the floor, crushed, there is barely enough air to breathe but everyone is excited nonetheless to be a part of this game. We plebs are shoulder to shoulder with almost-men and bush-tribers. We are honoured to have a role to play, this bond with them, this common cause.
Gary Blackwood yells a command. How many stops till we get to Redfern Station? We must hunt a head before Redfern Station so we can feed it to the Abos. After Redfern Station we must do our best to hunt heads from an enemy carriage and feed them to the Westies at every station we slow down through through the Western Suburbs. He begins a countdown. One. Two. Three. Heave. The two scrums press forward at their appointed doors, plebs in the middle of the pack, bush tribers and seniors behind ordering us to heave, heave, heave.
I’m in the Carlos Toyne scrum being shoved forward while around me other plebs are forced sideways. My arms are pulled backward to the point of dislocation. Boys who a second ago were laughing begin to cry, terrified. I am terri-fied. Hysterical voices scream for the shoving to stop, please, stop because an arm is hurting, a leg, a foot. But the scrums edge on. The Enemy One door is barged open far enough for Carlos Toyne to grip an enemy collar and try to pull it through the gap. Enemy One fists poke through the gap to punch Toyne but he withstands the blows with guttural grunts and refuses to let the collar go. The captive’s head is now in the crook of Toyne’s arm. He punches the head. A senior boy punches the head and asks a pleb near him if he’d like a turn to punch the head. The boy says No but the senior demands that he does. The boy punches the head weakly. “Harder,” the senior says. The pleb shakes his head: No.
Enemy One seniors attempt to pull their boy back into their carriage. They lift his feet off the ground to recover him in a tug of war. The boy’s trouser leg rips exposing his underpants. Rips further. The trousers tear from his legs and tangle around his ankles. Enemy One has lost him. Carlos Toyne passes him like a prize over his shoulder onto senior shoulders, onto plebs. The boy’s neck-tie is still knotted in place but his shirt has been stripped from beneath his jacket. His underpants are pulled down to his knees. He cups his hands over his privates. Here he comes, passed my way face purple with struggle, cheek grazed raw, blood across his teeth, snot and tears smearing his lips.
“One nil. One nil. One nil. One nil. One nil,” the seniors chant. “More weight,” Toyne cries as Enemy One counter-surges. My scrum suddenly shoves forward. I’m helpless in its tide. Someone has lost his footing, is sinking to the floor and dragging my section of the scrum down with him.
“Heave, heave, heave,” the seniors order.
“Stop, stop,” I plead.
“They’ve backed off,” Toyne cheers. “They’ve backed off.
Good job, good job.”
The scrum goes slack. At its crumpled sections bodies roll clear. The train jolts, slows. Gary Blackwood calls out, “What station? What station?
”
“Redfern. It’s Redfern,” a voice replies.
Blackwood leaves his position at the Enemy Two door and swims against the tide of his scrum to the centre of the carriage where the captive lies pulling up his underpants. “Man the main door,” Blackwood orders.
“Don’t, please,” begs the captive. Blackwood tells him to shut up and drops his knee into the boy’s back and chants, “Redfern, Redfern, Redfern.”
The seniors join in, “Redfern, Redfern, Redfern.” They clip plebs’ arms playfully with their fists to let them know they’d better do what they’re told. Everyone must take turns to drop the knee into the captive. “Go on, fucking do it,” they command. Blackwood drops his knee again. “That’s how you fucking do it,” he boasts, grinning. He drops his knee once more into the sobbing captive.
A senior takes a turn. Another senior. A bush triber. Another bush triber. A pleb is pushed towards the captive and made to stand over him and take a turn with his knee. The pleb drops his knee and is made to step aside and let someone else, another pleb, have a go. Another. Then another. Gary Blackwood cheers and applauds them. The accolade spurs others to take a turn and win Gary Blackwood’s favour.
I want to win his favour. I want to take a turn. Nothing could be easier than to drop the knee into this pitiful captive and be rewarded with a cheer in my honour, applause. Instantly I would belong. But I do not, cannot take a turn. I slip behind watchers to avoid Gary Blackwood catching my eye and singling me out as the next who must drop the knee and prove he belongs.
The train doesn’t stop at Redfern Station. It slows to walking pace beside the platform. Gary Blackwood pulls the main door open. He and two bush tribers lift the captive to his feet but he refuses to stay standing. He collapses to the ground, writhing and swearing against being thrown from the train. Blackwood laughs at him and orders two bush trib-ers to grip the captive they call Scum under his arms and hoist him up and push him onto the platform. “Go,” he calls.
“Do it now. Quick.”
Out goes the captive, sent tripping and tumbling across the platform, his trousers and underpants around his ankles. Gary Blackwood chants, “Boong food, boong food, boong food.” He slides the door shut and gives the order for another head to be hunted, this time for throwing to the Westies. The scrums heave at the Enemy One and Enemy Two doors. Three stations later an Enemy Two boy is taken and kneed, his trousers and underpants pulled down to his ankles, his shirt stripped from him before ejection. Soon after, Enemy Two retaliates. It overpowers Gary Blackwood’s scrum which is low on numbers because of a need to defend Carlos Toyne’s door against a major Enemy One assault. One of the smaller bush tribers is captured. He’s fed to the Westies by Enemy Two despite a drive with a beefed-up scrum to capture one of theirs and make a trade.
Parents are waiting for their sons at Penrith. They’ve rugged the high, grassy ground above the river bank. They’ve laid out a fine spread served from the boots of their cars—roast chicken, lettuce salad, bean salad, pickled onions, breads, crackers, cubes of cheese and flaps of ham rolled like hollow cigars, mustard. They sit on canvas furniture and walking sticks with tops that open out into a seat. They drink champagne from fluted glasses. Their fathers know what’s been going on in the trains but say nothing. They were boys once too. They themselves took the same train ride when they were young. They too had to explain to their mothers why buttons are missing from their shirts. Why there are rips in their trousers. Why skin is scuffed from their knuckles, elbows, knees. They too shrugged “I don’t know” and had their fathers wink at them knowingly.
I’M AMAZED THEY’RE ALLOWED TO teach Shakespeare and his plays. “Excuse me Sir,” I address the master. I’ve got my hand up. I’m frowning and scratching my head with my other hand. “What is Macbeth meaning in his tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech? I’ve never heard anything like it. ‘Creeps on this petty pace from day to day’ and ‘all our yesterdays have lighted fool the way to dusty death’. Life signifies nothing, is what he seems to be saying.”
The master replies that Shakespeare is saying that life has no meaning and all human endeavour is futile and sheer vanity. It’s a sobering notion, the master admits, it’s a philosophical jolt to one’s system.
“It’s like a suicide note,” I say.
“It is indeed that,” says Sir.
“Just as the to be or not to be speech in Hamlet?”
“Indeed.”
Shakespeare is saying there is no God? He’s saying that the hope the bible offers—an afterlife, a whole series of second chances that give you every opportunity to get into Heaven—is an illusion?
“Effectively,” says Sir.
That means all the study we do in our lives, all the learning of rules and manners, maths, parade-ground marching for cadets, it all signifies nothing?
“Yes. Ultimately.”
I contemplate the pointlessness of reading books, learning geography, preparing for a career, for an adult life when a great playwright and philosopher such as Shakespeare has reached the conclusion, albeit once removed in the form of play characters, in this case Macbeth, that all our efforts and days amount to nothing, futility.
I might as well get it over and done with now, my death. I might as well bring it on myself and short-circuit the futility. The next time something goes wrong, the next time I’m confronted with a trouble I consider insurmountable, I will commit suicide. It’s a comforting thought. A relief. I have the ultimate power over my destiny with this thought. I lie awake at night and pretend to be dead. I hold my breath, close my eyes, feel my face slacken over its bones. I hear with my mind’s ear Heels and Winks grieving for me, see the peoples of the world stop their petty routines in cities, in deserts, despairing that I’ve departed this earth.
How would I kill myself? There are only so many ways that I, a boy, an almost-man of fifteen can take my own life. I have no gun. I could ask Winks to buy a rifle so I can join the school shooting team as a cover. That’s something to keep in mind though the urge to kill myself is likely to come over me so quickly, much too quickly for the rigmarole of joining a team, buying a rifle, learning to load it, cock it (if rifles are cocked)—Fire. Too long a procedure.
Of course, there are trains and cars and trucks to jump in front of, but that would be unfair to the driver, that would make an innocent man a killer. Hanging myself with a rope is an option. Rope is cheap—my bedhead money would be more than enough to pay for it. There are hardware stores everywhere for the buying of rope. The bathroom curtain rod would break under the strain of me hanging from it. The balcony rail? It’s a possibility. The school’s rugby goalposts on the main oval, or the trees behind the scoreboard, would provide the perfect purchase as well as witnesses, plebs, seniors, the whole tribe of us, to make me more famous than any honour board.
What about poison! Poison would allow me to die in my own bed. But where would I get poison? The school science laboratory. Heels’ pill drawer. Yes, it’s comforting, it cheers me, my dying. But there is no need to die today, a Sunday morning, a day of do-nothing. The sun lies in silver flakes over the sea. The air on the balcony where I eat breakfast toast is cool and blowing soft on my skin. The boy who throws a tennis ball for his midget dog to fetch is out on the green at Rosa Gully. He tosses the ball straight up, high, high until it loops back down. Up goes the ball again and with it the dog, its stumpy legs dangling in mid-air like a circus trick. Three times the dog catches the ball on its way back down. Four times it fails, the ball bouncing off its snout and across the grass. Now it fails once more, the yellow ball arcs towards the edge of the cliff and the dog barks after it. The ball bounces to the cliff face. To the very edge. Over the edge. The dog scampers and yaps after it, over the edge. “Pee Wee!” the boy screeches and sprints to edge. “Pee Wee,” he pleads, and runs over the edge. His echoing voice rebounds once around the rock walls then the gully resumes its flops and gushes of ocean below. A thin mist swirls.
I grip the balcony
rail, eyes shut, thinking, thinking: have I conjured this in some imagination place inside the eyes? Somewhere in the neighbouring apartment block a woman is shouting “a boy, a boy”. A man, tea-towel and plate in hand, his shirt off, his belly round as pregnancy, steps out onto his balcony. He points down to the cliff and beseeches someone inside his apartment to believe him, believe there really was a boy there and he ran over the cliff.
I hurry into the lounge room to the phone, pick up the receiver, but put it down straightaway. I go back onto the balcony to blink and be certain. The tea-towel man calls across to me, “Did you see him?”
“Yes. I saw. I saw,” I reply.
“Has anyone called someone?”
“I don’t know.”
“My wife’s doing it now. He just ran off the edge. Ran right off. The damndest thing.”
Ask this lad (me) here, the tea-towel man says to the policeman who is taking details, his notebook open on the roof of his car. “A boy just ran over the cliff. The damndest thing.” I nod that the tea-towel man is telling the truth. Abseilers crab-walk backwards over the cliff and swing out and down to the rocks below. A stretcher with straps and pullies is lowered. The wind has come up. Spray drifts out to sea like steam. People from the gully’s homes stand cross-armed. They curve their hands through the air to describe what happened: one hand for the dog, one for the boy. Then they stand cross- armed again. On balconies, binoculars flash sunlight as if taking a photograph.
A woman in a nightie sits on the grass beside an ambulance, her head buried in a man’s embrace. Her back shudders with weeping. A prancing dalmatian barks and lunges at a labrador and is told to get out, go home. The tea-towel man throws a pebble at it. Two children in pyjamas play tag then climb onto the fire engine to which the abseiler ropes are tied. They are told to get out, go home. They jump from the fire engine and run playing their tag.
Hoi Polloi Page 14
