The Legend of Kevin the Plumber

by Scot Gardner

  Scot Gardner lives with his wife and three feisty offspring in the hills near the Victorian town of Yinnar. He started his working life as an apprentice gardener with the local council, where he learnt the fine art of looking busy, a skill he has refined over many years in many jobs. He likes battery drills, digging holes and kayaking in the ocean.

  Also by Scot Gardner

  One Dead Seagull

  White Ute Dreaming

  Burning Eddy

  The Other Madonna

  SCOT GARDNER

  This project wouldn’t have been possible without the generous assistance of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts

  First published 2004 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Scot Gardner 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Gardner, Scot.

  The legend of Kevin the plumber.

  ISBN 0 330 36498 7.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Aldus Roman by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  These electronic editions published in 2004 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  The Legend of Kevin the Plumber

  Scot Gardner

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  For Dad and Mum

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my trusty agent, Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown Australia. Anna McFarlane, Brianne Tunnicliffe and Simone Ford at Pan, who were literary mechanics par excellence for this beast. Big thanks also to the clique of angels (Ruth Codlin, Tara Harle and Tania Zerafa) for helping me tickle a handscribbled manuscript into submission.

  Thanks to Darren Pilcher (my almanac of cars), my brother Liam (the letter of the law), Dionne Sharman (the guru of counterculture) and Dr Darra Murphy (a dashing encyclopaedia of medicine). Thanks to Christian Alvear for the electrocution story.

  And the plumbers . . . Darren Smith (The Bold Bearded Beauty from Blackwarry), Graeme and Leslie from Geraldton, David Reggardo, Bruce Mongan, Jim Greening, Kevin Meese, DJ Nicholls, Mike Turra at Reece Traralgon, Gary Watts and the apprentices at Gippstafe Plumbing. Enormous thanks to Jeff Patchell at Plumbing and Mechanical Connection magazine and all the talented tradespeople who contributed stories . . . you’re the real legends. Thanks.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Scot Gardner

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Start at the Beginning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The End Bit

  More Bestselling Fiction Available From Pan Macmillan

  Start at the Beginning

  How far back should I go?

  I pissed on Telford’s desk.

  I know that sounds like I’m big-noting myself and if you were a school counsellor then you’d say I was freaking out with some bullshit attention-seeking behaviour.

  You’d be wrong.

  I wasn’t being a rebel, I was taking a piss.

  I was in grade three. Telford wouldn’t let me go to the toilet and I was seriously busting. I needed to go when I snapped Christina Chalk’s ruler over her head (the little incident that got me sent up to the office in the first place) and that was hours before. My grade three thinking went:

  (Me) — Excuse me, Mr Telford, may I please go to the toilet?

  (Telford) — No, Gary. You can stay right where you are.

  (Me) — But, sir, I’m busting.

  (Telford, getting up from behind his desk) — You can stay there until your mother gets here.

  (Me) — But . . .

  (Telford, leaving his office) — Don’t move!

  (Me, holding my dick, almost in a whisper) — It’s urgent, sir.

  (Telford closes the door)

  (Me, alone in the principal’s office. Alone and busting. I jiggle) — I can’t piss my pants. Mum will kill me. The pot-plant on his desk!

  (Me, squeezing my dick) — I think I’m going to explode. I can’t reach the pot-plant.

  (Me, spinning) — I’ll piss in the corner. No! It’s carpet. Pissing on carpet makes your room stink for months.

  (Me, spying a plastic rubbish bin with one screwed up piece of paper in it) — Nah, it’s got holes in it everywhere. It’ll just leak onto the carpet.

  (Me, funny little noises leaking from behind my clenched teeth) — I’m going to die.

  (Me, pulling my shorts and undies to my ankles in one panicked action) — Sorry. Sorry, I have to.

  (Me, leaning back and aiming for the pot-plant on Telford’s desk) — Ahhhhhhhh . . .

  (There’s a drumming sound and I realise I’ve shot straight over the pot-plant and landed on the diary that’s open on Telford’s desk. I correct my flow and I’m pissing higher than the filing cabinet but it’s now at least landing in the pot-plant)

  (Me, relief beyond belief) — Ahhhhhhhhh . . .

  (The door opens)

  (Telford, screaming) — My God, Gary! Stop! What are you doing? My God. My God.

  (I jump and piss on my hand. My shorts. The carpet. Telford. I pull up my shorts before I’m fi
nished and the piss is warm in my sock)

  (Telford, growling, hand full of paper towel) — You are sick, Gary Sleep. You are sick. Sick in the head. You should be in jail. Save the community the trouble of doing it when you are in your teens. You, my boy, will never amount to anything. If we lived in a sensible society, you would have been smothered at birth. Get out. Get out! GET OUT!

  One

  ‘Get out!’

  Mum was going ballistic and shoving me out the front door. I tripped on my shoelaces and landed elbow-skin first in a little squat of Trixie’s shit on the lawn. I washed it off at the front tap and tucked my school shirt in. I swung my bag on my back and walked across the road and three doors down to Ash’s place.

  I could smell incense coming from Ash’s bungalow window and I knew I was in time. Mum’s green Hyundai screamed past on the street. I still smelled like Trixie shit.

  Ash sat on the floor in a black bra and singlet. Her bra was like a dam for her tits. The rolls on her tummy had swallowed part of her singlet. She had her school pants on but they weren’t done up. She was packing a bong. She’d finished her standard breakfast milkshake and the red-pen lines in her eyes suggested that the cone was for me. I chugged and bubbled my way through it as she finished getting dressed.

  Eye drops. Bus stops.

  My sister Sharon was already there. She pulled her bag off the seat so Ash could sit down.

  ‘You stink like bong water, Gaz,’ Sharon said.

  ‘Nah, it’s dogshit from your mongrel,’ I growled.

  She laughed.

  Ash’s body shook and she smiled but no sound came out. ‘Should get a new aftershave, Gaz. That one’s a bit too earthy.’

  I started walking as the bus arrived. Walking along the street.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Sharon asked.

  ‘Home,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go to the dunny. And I stink like dogshit.’

  ‘Gaz, no. Mum’ll kill you.’

  ‘She won’t know, will she?’

  ‘Gaz, don’t. Come on!’

  I walked.

  Sharon swore at the dreadlocks on the back of my head.

  I did need to go to the dunny. And I’d deal with Mum when I had to.

  The public dunnies on Blaxton Drive were built when I was in year seven. I remember the smell of paint when I first had to use them and how amazing it seemed that there was no graffiti on the walls. I’ve learned stuff from those dunnies. Stuff about myself, like how I always need a bog one minute before the bus arrives. Those dunnies have saved me from having to use the cans at school. It may be hard to believe but the dunnies on Blaxton Drive smell better than the ones at school, despite the public using and abusing them over four years. Someone had drilled a hole through the wall between cubicles so you can watch the wanker next door getting off. If you were that way inclined. The backs of the doors don’t get cleaned. I’ve seen the fat guy from the council, Ruby, pushing soap bubbles onto the footpath with a broom, but he doesn’t clean the doors.

  Behind the door in the loo I use — the one with the seat — there’s a picture of a dick and some bum cheeks done in thick black texta. The shot spots have been collecting in the corner over the years. The dust sticks to them and they dry into crusty tear tracks. None of them are mine. I pray I never find a fresh one.

  I made a Vegemite sandwich after my shower. I stuck my video on and sat in front of the teev, couch springs twanging. My pirate of the original Mad Max. The movie that made two people famous: Mel Gibson and Darcy Sleep. Mel was a boy in that movie. So was my dad. Movie stuntman extreme. He didn’t hang around long enough to tell me which stunts he actually did so when I finally saw the video at the age of ten, I just filled in the gaps. Every stunt was my old man. He was ‘Mad’ Max Rockatansky, he was Toe Cutter, Night Rider and Cundalini, but Dad didn’t lose his hand. The film came out in 1979. Dad was eighteen. Mum was sixteen and an assistant make-up artist. They met on the set.

  They got married when Mum turned eighteen and I was born at Christmas Bay Hospital five years later. Dad went up to Sydney for work and didn’t come back. I still talk to him on the phone on my birthday and Christmas and that but he fell in love with The Slut — Bernie Clymo— and they moved to the Gold Coast. We never watched an episode of Sea Change in case Mum saw Bernie and . . . I don’t know . . . smashed the television.

  Mum runs a salon in Christmas Bay. Deep Skin Beauty. She lives there and comes home to cook tea and have a shower. She must sleep at home sometimes, too. That’s probably how she and Mario made my sister, Sharon. Mum met Mario when I was four and she fell in love with his long curly wog hair. She became Mrs DiMartino. I stayed Gary Sleep and got dreadlocks in year seven. We moved to Mario’s house in the shithole of Mullet Head. Mullet Head is the lump of rock, sand and beach houses that makes one end of Christmas Bay. It has one dodgy road in, one pub, two churches and a jetty. I don’t surf. Swimming and surfing are for the tourists. You reckon you’d get excited about theme parks if you lived next-door to one?

  I stopped the tape before it had finished and I pulled the cassette out of the VCR. For some reason I felt like chucking the thing through the window. I didn’t. I ripped the label off the spine and ate it. Something was going on inside me. Something a bit freaky. It was my seventeenth birthday in a few days and I should have been getting revved up. I couldn’t give a fuck. About anything.

  Two

  I had kicked my shoes off and was watching Days of Our Lives when Mario got home. He chucked his keys on the coffee table and it scared the crap out of me.

  ‘Hey, Gaz. Didn’t go to school today, mate?’

  I sat up. ‘Nah. I . . . I fell over in some dogshit and . . . and I missed the bus.’

  He poked his chin at me and said nothing. Stared at the telly. It broke to adverts and he sighed. ‘You watch enough of that shit it will turn your brain to pus.’

  I did a little pig-snort laugh and thought it was too late. My brain was already pus from not giving a shit. And all the dope.

  I heard Mum’s car pull up and two doors closed. Sharon had come home with Mum. I could hear her squealing like she always did when her old man came home.

  ‘Muzza, Dad! God, I missed you.’

  He was only offshore for two weeks. The way she goes on you’d reckon he’d been away for a year. She only calls him Dad when she’s really excited, otherwise she calls him Muz or Muzza like everyone else in the world.

  I put on my Ham Head CD and skipped the first track. The disc is so scratched that it jumps like a bastard on track one. The second song hadn’t finished and Mum was banging on my door. I unlocked it then picked up a sock and a pair of Spiderman boxer shorts that had been there since school started back. Two weeks they’d been lying there.

  ‘Do I have to hold your bloody hand?’ Mum growled.

  I shrugged and threw the socks and boxers on my unmade bed.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Gary,’ she said. She was speaking gently, with a fake calm that fizzed like the fuse on a bomb.

  She shoved me and I toppled onto my bed. ‘What can I do, Gary?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I wished I had a better answer. I wished I could have snuffed that fuse.

  Mum exploded.

  She had a handful of dreads and was slapping at my face. I had my hands up to protect me but a slap snuck past and made my ear burn and ring. I covered my ear and she busted my lip. Knuckles like hammers on my face and I tasted blood. My knees curled up to my chest. She was going to kill me. I saw her eyes and it wasn’t my mum anymore. She let go of my hair and gouged at my face with her beauty therapist’s claws.

  It was my turn to explode.

  I pushed with both my feet and roared, ‘Get off me!’

  Mum was airborne briefly. She spun across the room and smashed my window with her head. She squealed and thudded to the floorboards. A piece of glass crashed to the concrete path outside.<
br />
  Mario was at my door with wide eyes and strands of his hair in his mouth. ‘What the . . . Karen? Kaz, are you . . .? Jesus.’

  He was on the floor beside Mum and I was out the door.

  ‘Gary!’ he bellowed.

  The tar road bit at my feet through my socks, making me hobble as I ran. Ash wasn’t home. I ran across town to the caravan park near the beach. I sat on the jetty near the kiosk and shook and breathed until my body could shake no more. There was nothing left. Nothing except a feeling that I wouldn’t be hurrying home.

  I sat there until the sun had plunged into the ocean then picked through the caravan park to Aggie and Gel’s van. Their real home overlooks the inlet and, like a lot of people in Mullet Head, they rent their house out for about a zillion bucks a week over the summer and live in the caravan park. Their mum bought the van after their dad disappeared. He worked at the knackery until it closed down. He tried fishing from his tinny to make a few bucks. He caught a few flathead and a couple of gummy sharks, enough to feed the boys and his wife but not enough to pay the mortgage. During the summer school holidays at the end of grade six, his boat washed ashore on the inlet and he wasn’t in it. Aggie and Gel’s dad had been lost at sea. I went out with them on the search boats for two weeks. Towards the end, Aggie cried the whole time we were on the water and Gel just sat there like a dog on a chain, his eyes looking as deep and lonely as the ocean.

  They thought they were going to have to sell the house but something happened to Mullet Head. A wog bought the pub and took down all the old fishing nets and shark jaws and put in pokies. Suddenly the shitty old utes that owned the car parks in front of the pub were replaced by new BMWs and Saabs and the beach got packed on the hot days. Aggie and Gel’s mum was going to sell the house but the agent told her to hang on to it. I think the agent had the hots for her. Let’s face it, half of Mullet Head had the hots for Carole (including me). She got some money from superannuation or something and she bought the van. They locked all their extra gear in the shed behind the house and went to live in the van for the first summer. They rented the house out and got just enough to pay the mortgage. The following year they bought a tent, got seven hundred bucks a week for the house and two hundred for the van and went to Tassie for the whole holidays. All that money for doing nothing!