by Peter Twohig
So that was what this lady wanted, and I wasn’t surprised when, after sighing a few times and putting her beer down with a glassy clunk, she made this quiet little speech.
‘Look, love, I know you don’t want to see your wife again, but sooner or later you’ll have to, if you want to see your son, and that’s something you have to do. He’s been getting into all kinds of mischief, and he spends a lot of his spare time with Archie at the races, hanging around pretty unsavoury characters, like that standover bloke of his. It’s all bound to end in trouble. Saw it with my sister’s kids. That’s how it starts off: a flutter here, a few bob there, and before you know it you’ve been nicked for consorting. So, during the week, go over and have a talk to him; tell him what’s going on over here, and say anything you need to say to Jean. Then come back. And don’t be too long about it.’
There was relative silence for a while after that, that’s if you count the sound of beer drinking as silence, and we did at our place. I said to myself: Looks like I’m here for the duration — that was one of Mum’s favourites — and settled down to think. On the one hand, I wasn’t all that happy about her summary of the lives of Granddad and myself, which made us sound as if we were a couple of common crims — I say nothing about Blarney Barney, who had, after all, been in and out of jail — but on the other hand, I was pretty surprised to hear that she cared about me. I half expected her to turn on the wireless, and to hear the Teddy Bears singing ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’. Oh, what the hell — I hummed a few bars to myself anyway.
So I stayed and listened for what I knew I’d hear eventually: the sound of two people who’ve been on the turps, having a snooze on a lounge suite. Then I left, knowing that I didn’t even have to sneak out: I could have walked out in a pair of football boots. In fact, I reckon I could have pulled out a couple of their teeth without waking them, if I felt like it.
But I did need to take something with me, a souvenir for the map — the Cartographer always does that: it’s his signature move. Of course, the map already had quite a few things stuck to it: tram tickets, which I couldn’t get enough of, and newspaper clippings of Guess Who, and the photos that I’d taken with Mum’s Brownie Box and a few that she had taken of me and Biscuit. There were betting tickets from the track, and a playing card, the deuce of hearts, that fell out of a punter’s pocket after he was chucked out of the Greek casino. It was one of two that he had, but the blokes who chucked him out said they only needed to see one, and let me keep the other, because I asked for it ‘for luck’, which made them all laugh themselves silly, I guess because it hadn’t brought the bloke who had it much luck. I heard that after I left, that bloke fell off the Collingwood tram. And I’m not surprised, him not having his lucky cards on him.
It was evening when I switched on the light in the main bedroom and looked around. In the end I decided to souvenir a photo of Dad and the lady, whose face I hadn’t seen until that moment. There was a big bunch of photos in a kind of silver boat on the mantelpiece in the bedroom, and most of them were better than the ones Mum and me got out of our old camera. After sorting through them, I settled on that particular one because it was taken at a place I’d been to, St Kilda Beach, one of those places you went to when you wanted to have a day out. I especially liked that place because Luna Park was there, and I especially liked Luna Park because it smelt of a mixture of fairy floss, dairy whip and hot waffles. You can’t make smells like that — I give it a nine.
The lady was the same height as Dad, and in the photo wore her hat tilted to one side, the same as him. Her face was relaxed and kind-looking, like a lady who worked in a milk bar. Her eyes seemed to be laughing, even though the rest of her wasn’t. She had her arm through Dad’s, as though that was their normal way of standing, and not just to have their picture taken. Dad had on his serious face. He looked like he wouldn’t have smiled even if he’d had a skinful and Jimmy Durante was singing ‘Inka Dinka Doo’ right there in front of them. I looked hard at the picture, trying to find a clue in it, you know, a clue as to what had happened to Dad, but I got niente. So I turned it over, because most people write things on the back of their photos, you know, like: The kids’ birthday party, or Biscuit getting licked by Abbotsford — I made that one up; it never happened — or Uncle Hank on his Norton.
This one said: At St Kilda Beach on our anniversary.
When I left I decided to take the tram down Church Street. But it still involved a bit of a walk, so I decided to do some more exploring on the way. I was feeling very strange after everything I’d heard. I felt as if I had run out of energy, the way I did before I ‘disappeared’, as I now called it when I had one of my turns. As I’ve said, it wasn’t the disappearing that tended to get me down so much as the waking up. So that’s how I was feeling as I walked along. It wouldn’t have surprised me — not that anything did any more — if I’d suddenly woken up lying on the cold concrete looking up at the stars and thinking … well, not thinking anything at all, actually, just having a big question mark in the place where my mind used to be. It’s at times like this that if someone came up to me and told me the biggest porky ever, like: Your Dad worships the ground Bob Menzies pisses on, I swear I would have believed him, and probably thought to myself: What a nice bloke, and he knows so much, too!
I was in a daze, like Our Gang when they nicked all the dogs — I made a mental note to myself to go into the dognapping business — and walked along without paying much attention to what was going on around me. The first thing that happened was that I came across Granddad’s two plainclothesmen mates down the lane behind the Masonic Lodge putting the boot into some poor bastard, except they weren’t just teaching him a lesson, they were killing him. When they were finished, they got a rope out of the boot. One of them tied one end to the bumper bar, and the other bloke tied the other end to the bloke’s feet — I don’t know why they bothered really. I just stood in the shadow against the wall and watched, not wanting to be next. I’d seen blokes giving other blokes a little tap before, and I knew which side my bread was buttered on — none of my business. They hopped in and drove down the lane as fast as they could. It was a long lane.
The bloke’s hat was still lying on the ground, so I picked it up and bunged it on, and it fitted me perfectly. When I got to the end of the lane, I looked over the edge of the canal, because that’s where I was guessing they had dumped the body. But there was nothing but darkness. Dad says that the last thing a bloke’ll give away is his hat. I want to say thanks for the hat, but I can see there’s no point.
Back at the other end of the lane I took a kind of zigzag around the back of a few streets, and ended up behind the Gala picture theatre. There was a kid behind the Gala busily stacking cardboard and paper against the wall in the near darkness. The Gala was painted a kind of maroon in the front, but not at the sides, and maroon was the colour of the back wall as well. It already looked lurid even without the fire, because that’s what was going to happen. Flame Boy — it was he — turned around and saw me and I could tell that he recognised me. It looked as though the electric shocks hadn’t done him any harm: he was still determined to set fire to something. He stopped what he was doing — he looked as if he could use a break — and looked at me, and I at him, and when he noticed my new hat he smiled that shy lopsided smile of his, and I could see that he was impressed that a kid was wearing a bloke’s hat.
We didn’t have a conversation: we were both busy. I was busy being in a daze — my eyes were kind of locked in front of me, like when you find yourself staring and you have to shake your head, or blink to unlock your eyes. I had been like that since leaving the house in Eden Park, but I didn’t feel like unlocking them. And Flame Boy was busy building a bonfire, which he now turned back to. I don’t like to interrupt a person when they’re flat out like a lizard drinking, much less a fellow superhero, so I kept on walking. It did occur to me that I had seen some damn good pictures at the Gala over the years, but the only one I could think of just
then was The Treasure of Lost Canyon. Oh yeah, and that other one William Powell was in: Mister Roberts, but it wasn’t a patch on The Treasure of Lost Canyon.
A little further on I came back to the canal. The bit of the canal I was looking at was about fifteen feet wide, and just appeared from under one building then disappeared back under another. I looked down into it, but it was too dark to see the bottom. But I could smell it: it wasn’t too bad as canals go, like a cross between the toilet on Richmond Station and the tip, though I knew that it would have rats in it — all these canals did. My first thought was that the canal needed exploring and needed it bad, but it was dark and the rats … well, I was unarmed, and for rats you needed a lump of wood at the very least.
I decided to see where the canal turned up next, and went around a few corners, following the sound of rock’n’roll music. During the day, I could take or leave rock’n’roll music. It didn’t have the sadness the part of me that hurt seemed to like. Figure that out! It wanted to force me to be disrespectful to the way I felt. But at night it drew me like a magnet and the quick dark bits of it shot into my body like a lot of little frights and made me want to be a bad kid, just the way lots of people thought I really was. It made me feel like I could do anything or be anyone. It reminded me that I was a secret superhero. It was about me. So I let it draw me.
I came to a small patch of grass that might have been a lawn, but I could tell straightaway that it was actually one of those back yards on the corner of two lanes that only had a fence on each side to separate it from the neighbouring houses. The people who lived in those corner houses sometimes tore down their back fences so they could get their cars in. This was one of those little back yards, and very comfy it looked too. It contained three things: an old lounge suite, a green and white Ford Customline, and a crowd of bodgies and widgies having a party. The car radio was going flat out, and I reckon you could probably hear Eddie Cochran singing ‘Summertime Blues’ in Alice Springs. On the top, the bodgies had elephant trunk haircuts, brushed back at the sides, and on the bottom, bright socks and long pointy-toed shoes. The widgies had ponytails, petticoats that stuck out, and blue and white gym boots. Some were dancing, but most of them were just lounging around drinking, and brushing their hair.
I knew the bloke who owned the car. It was Gary Turner, though everyone except me called him Chain, because he always kept a bike chain in his glove box — just in case. Granddad told me he was going to end up in jail, but I liked him, because the year before, when he got his car, he took all us kids for a ride, and Tom and me had sat in the front.
I entered the yard as if I belonged there, and no one stopped what they were doing and made a face at me or told me to fuck off. A few of them saw me — must have — but did nothing. The breeze was warm and the cigarette smoke was not like Mum’s and Dad’s, but in the fresh night air and combined with the gorgeous scents and aromas was more like meeting a good friend. I placed my hand on the car and seemed to be able to smell the very colours of it, to feel it humming to the music, even though its motor wasn’t running.
While I was standing there, taking in the blokes’ socks, which seemed to come in every colour except dark anything, and wondering where I could get a pair for myself, a car swung into the lane, lighting up half of the yard. I took a quick peek around the corner and saw the car lumbering down the lane towards us. It looked like the car I’d seen pulling the bloke along. Jesus, it was.
‘Shit, it’s them!’ I yelled at the crowd, without knowing why. I guess I just assumed that if the coppers were after anyone, it was probably Gary. He didn’t hear me, so I ran up to him, and grabbed his sleeve. It was a moment made of sensations: excitement that stung inside my nose, the smell of Gary’s girlfriend’s perfume — Tabu, the same as Mum’s — the unexpected softness of Gary’s coat sleeve, his perfectly Brylcreemed black waves. There was no movement, just a long still look between us. It was me who broke it. I pointed. ‘Gazza, p’lice.’
That’s all I had time for. I turned and ran, wildly, almost blindly, across the lawn and across the lane, in the only direction I could: straight over the rails of the canal.
24 The Outlaw
It was a long, dark drop and I half expected to land on something nasty at the bottom, like the chopped-up remains of some old brain-shocking machine — the joke would have been on me. Instead, I landed on a huge pile of rubbish; I would never speak harshly of rubbish again. Then I was off like Betty Cuthbert. That night I set a new world record for the Underground Handicap, being both underground and handicapped and, as far as I could tell, the only starter; I was certainly the only finisher. I had my torch, so I got it out and followed its light.
Matthew Foster once told me that he rode his bike along this same canal, from his place right down to the river. I thought that if he could do it, so could I. But it soon became obvious that he couldn’t have because the canal was chockers with rubbish, including a car bumper bar, which I tripped over. So much for Matthew Foster. I picked myself up and rubbed the sore spots and kept scurrying along the underground part of the canal. I could hear nothing except the heavy rumble of trams passing somewhere overhead. When I shone the torch above me I saw the underneath part of a building, with a trapdoor in it. Five minutes later, I was through.
I was in a workshop of some kind, surrounded by the yummy smell of oil and grease and petrol and vehicles. I could see enough to work out that I was in the army workshop in Church Street — the same one I had visited some time ago. It had everything, that place, including lots of tools. Also it had light switches, but thanks to Barney, I knew a few things about these s orts of situations, and one of them was: Never turn the light on. In fact, it was a rule, like: Look to the right and look to the left and look to the right again. Barney told me that he once switched on the light in a house that he wouldn’t have known his way around in the dark, and the door opened and several coppers walked in and said: ‘Thanks, Barn, we couldn’t see a bloody thing.’
So you see, it pays to remember these basic rules as you go through life. Anyway, there I was, surrounded by khaki vehicles. I hopped into a Ford ute and reached down and turned the ignition key. It started instantly and sat there purring like a cat. That car made one hell of a beautiful sound — smelt good, too: I gave it a six, though I think I might have been a bit biased; I just love all those workshoppy smells. So I just sort of leaned back and let the motor run while I considered my position.
One time, I went fishing off Port Melbourne with Dad and a boatload of uncles, all hell-bent on getting as pissed out of their brains as was humanly possible in one morning and hoping to catch a flattie or two for lunch. Well, I won’t award any prizes to anyone who guesses what happened, but I will say that a couple of my uncles, Uncle Maury being the worst offender, got so rotten that they chucked all over everything, and the only reason they didn’t get heaved overboard was that they wouldn’t have lasted two minutes once the sharks got a whiff of them, and believe me, you’d have to be one of those sharks that has a really rotten cold or something not to get a whiff of them. I reckoned I was doing pretty well until the chucking began, then I felt this really bad feeling coming over me, until eventually I felt like I just wanted to die, and I started begging them to throw me to the sharks; I really couldn’t have cared less.
Well that’s just how I felt when I woke up and found myself lying on the floor of the workshop. What I really wanted was for some kindly army motor mechanic to come along with a shifting spanner and put me out of my misery. The motor had stopped, and I had had some kind of attack — the usual, I guessed — and had fallen out of the ute and landed on my head on the concrete floor and was now dribbling into a pool of blood and vomit. I noticed without caring that something was licking my head and face as if I was a Dairy Queen in a Dixie Cup. ‘Good boy, Biscuit,’ was all I could manage for a while, and I heard my voice sounding pretty slurred and soft. It was ages before I was able to look up and see that it was not Biscuit but an Alsatian the size
of Phar Lap.
I expected him to start hopping in for his chop as soon as he saw that I was awake, but he seemed to prefer a lick of fresh blood to a mouthful of Leg of Boy, and I put that down to the possibility that he might have been out for a night on the grog with the army mechanics, and, feeling a little fragile, was planning on giving brekkie a miss.
So there I was, feeling about as bad as you can feel without having just had lunch at my place, and getting licked by a dog that was probably a sergeant or something, and therefore the kind of dog that other army dogs are scared of, and stuck in some place where, if I didn’t get my arse into gear, I was going to get into about two and a half tons of trouble — again. It was dawn and the sun was starting to come through the tops of the windows, and turn everything a golden colour, even things that had no colour of their own.
Dog or no dog, I climbed to my hands and knees and looked around for a bathroom. I needed to take care of a few things unless I wanted my appearance to start World War III. The dog was okay about me, and I wondered if that was because he knew I’d been in that place before, and had even talked to one of the mechanics. He let me do whatever I wanted to do, and then leave by the back door. The army definitely does not buy its dogs at the same place junkyard owners do. Dawn was early at that time of the year, and it would be a few hours before anyone would be at work. Also, I would be able to sneak into the house without waking everyone up. At least, that was the theory.
