The swimming carnival wasn’t far away. The boys could hear the crowd yelling and shrieking and carrying on. Three schools from neighbouring districts were competing. The school champion, a classmate of theirs, mocked them just before the school marched off in its files according to factions: You don’t look too sick, you two sissy bludgers. His body rippled with pride and self-love. The two stay-behinds looked at each other and smirked. Another thing in common.
Des was the bigger of the two, and slightly lorded it over Garry, the elder by two months. Garry was a nervous sort, but that was more of a ploy, like the snail retreating into its shell at times of threat, but probably quite happy and secure in its own fluids and ecology. If threatened, Garry had a litany of interest-piques up his sleeve, like: I flicked Gabrielle’s dress up with my ruler and saw what colour knickers she’s wearing. And if the reply came, So what, everyone’s seen Gabrielle’s knickers, he’d retort: But she doesn’t call them knickers, I’ve heard her say ‘panties’, and everyone knows that means she’s a slut.
Des and Garry did art. They drew rank cartoons of their teachers having sex with sheep and goats. The headmaster was turned into a goat, having sex with a sheep, which might well have been their teacher, Miss Morris. And they drew Nev, the school champion, swimming with a flagpole up his arse, the flag flailing in the water. It had to be said, they both had talent and possibly a future as cartoonists for the state newspaper.
It was a stinking hot day. Garry mused that even with factor 30 sunblock, all the kids would be cooking. Chlorine and that chemical that changes the colour of the water when kids piss, and those lemon-scented gums they’ve got planted in strategic places so the limbs fall and kill the kids stone dead. You can smell those trees when it gets this hot. I can smell them from here, said Garry. Nah, said Des, that’s the gum trees around the school you can smell. Garry looked at him, bemused, not knowing how to tell him that he was making a joke; but he sniffed hard, and could smell the lemon-scented gums through the school gums and over all that distance.
The day wore on. The carnival kids would either go home straight from the pool, or line up out front for the buses back to school. Visiting teams would be collected by their buses outside the pool. Garry and Des talked this over, ate their lunches early because the headmaster was nowhere to be seen (they didn’t bother hiding their cartoons), and out of boredom resorted to bragging.
Des bet Garry that he could shoot ten pieces of paper into the rubbish bin from where he was sitting. Garry bet he couldn’t. What’ll you bet? asked Des. I just bet you can’t, said Garry. Des shot the ten pieces into the bin.
Garry told Des he’d taken Miss Morris’s birth control pills from her bag, and fed one of them to the guinea pigs in the science lab. Des, not knowing what the pills were, bet him he hadn’t. What’ll you bet? asked Garry. Nothing, said Des, it’s not worth anything.
This went on for a while until they got bored all over again. As the afternoon wore on, they went repeatedly to the toilet, sprayed water from the fountains over each other, packed up their cartoons, planning to plant them on the school champ the next day, had an arm wrestle which Garry lost and Des crowed over, and farted so loud that the room resonated and Des punched Garry repeatedly in the arm for ‘letting off’, though he’d done the most, the loudest and the smelliest.
They discussed shooting through, but as they were about to go, the goat of a headmaster poked his head into the classroom and asked if all was well, boys, using the time constructively, I hope. And if their hearts faltered at the thought that he might ask to see their work, they underestimated his supreme indifference; he vanished as fast as he appeared.
Des said, I bet you can’t shoot ten pieces of paper into the bin from here. Garry, thoroughly tired of Des now, and hoping to never have to talk with him again after that day, looked at him carefully, screwed his eyebrows, eyes flickering, and said, You’re on. What odds will you give me?
Des said, as per their earlier games, I won’t bet you anything … it’s just a dare.
Nah, said Garry, let’s bet proper. You name your odds.
Des thought of whacking Garry, but laughed. Garry was a dope. Slow or somethin’. Odd. Peculiar. A weed. A joke. He’d pants him. He wasn’t sure what was meant by ‘odds’, so he replied, If you lose I’ll pants ya in front of Gabrielle.
And if I win? asked Garry.
You won’t. You can’t get ten pieces of paper in the bin from here. They won’t even go that far. Even I couldn’t do it, never mind a dope like you.
I bet you five hundred dollars. So you give me five hundred if I win, and you can pants me if I don’t.
Sure!
We’ll write it down and sign it.
What? Why? Well, why not.
Garry wrote it up and they both signed it. Des joked, It should be signed in blood! He looked at Garry, trying to intimidate, but Garry said, Sure, why not. Thumbprints of our blood. We’ll prick ourselves with compasses. And they did, thumbprinting next to their signatures,
Garry scrunched the paper as hard as he could and shot ten out of ten. He was good at it, having whiled hours away in his room doing the same thing. When his dad was on the piss, he had to keep out of the way if stuck indoors, this was as good a sport as any.
That’s five hundred bucks, please, mate, said Garry, who had filed away the betting slip in his back pocket without Des registering.
Piss off! said Des, and pummelled Garry’s arm so hard that Garry whimpered and leapt out of the room as the school siren rang, echoing through the emptiness of the classroom, the school.
Though Gary’s father was a violent man, he strangely doted on his son as a chip off the old block. But Garry detested his father, and carried out secret errands for his mother to undermine his dad’s authority. He poured booze down the sink; he snuck out to the shop to buy food not cigarettes.
Riffling through his son’s pockets for a fifty-cent piece (pocket money his mum gave from housekeeping) to make up the price of a bottle of sherry, Garry’s dad came across the betting slip.
What’s this, boy?
Nothing, just a joke, Dad … a pretend bet I won at school … shooting bits of paper into a bin … you know, just muckin’ round with a mate. The father looked cockeyed at the boy, thirsty and shaking already. He was in no mood. Five hundred dollars and signed in blood. That’s a legal document.
No, said Garry, we’re under-age. Garry knew about such things; Des would have been well-advised to look deeper into what made Garry tick. He was no dope.
We’ll see about that, said his father. Des Bailey. I know his old man.
Don’t do anything, Dad! It was just a joke. Garry shuddered. Every pummelling of his arm ricocheted through his body, and he found it difficult to play dumb any longer. But he did. Don’t embarrass me, Dad! Which was a red rag to a bull, and, what’s more, impossible, given Garry’s humiliations at the hands of his father were legion, and he was pretty well immune.
Des wasn’t at school for a week. When he turned up, he avoided Garry. He was a changed boy. Quiet, deferring to any challenger, diligent, polite. When Garry came near, he cowered, looking down at him with large eyes. Why do you keep following me, Garry?
What does your dad do for a crust? asked Garry.
Des’s eyes grew even wider. Saucers. Windmills. None of your business, he snapped, finding a bit of his old bluster.
Lives off your mum, like my dad, said Garry.
Des mumbled something like, Maybe.
I learnt from my mum. How to get through. You’ve got to do the same. Watch out, take the opportunities, keep your head down. If not, you’ll get picked on every time. My old man is full of shit. Mum says, what goes around comes around. Your old man will get one up on him next week when Dad’s hanging for a drink and needs a mate.
Des stared, half computing.
Strange we haven’t got to know each other better. Our dads are in each other’s pockets. It’s not a big town. I tell you, Des, I bet we’re both sh
ot of the place as soon as we’re old enough to leave. And no forwarding address, not even for our mums, who’ll always tell their old men when the pressure’s on. Really on.
It was stinker of a day. Soon the long Christmas holidays. The odour of gum resin was enough to make you throw up.
Des said, Meet you down the pool when it opens after Christmas?
Sure, why not, said Garry. We can compare gifts.
THE TALE OF FERGUSON’S FOLLY
Since he was a small kid he’d dreamt of the ocean but rarely ever saw it. Whenever he could he’d book vacations down south by the sea, but something always intervened, and he’d end up only spending a couple of days every few years by the grinding waves of the Southern Ocean. He loved the way the ocean smashed away at the granite and made white foam of black rocks.
He loved all water. The sea was perfect, but a good river would do at a pinch. It was just so damn dry out where he lived and farmed. He had dug huge dams, which caught water from thousands of acres, but there was so little rain they rarely got even half-filled. But the Year of the Downpours had them brimming, and it was then he made the life decision that would evermore be known throughout the district as Ferguson’s Folly.
The Folly was a houseboat, and it had to come up from the coast on a big rig. Ferguson had actually called it Fiona, after an old high-school flame (she burnt him and his best mate), which seemed halfway to Folly anyway. It was a bloody big houseboat and, being on pontoons, would float on even a few feet of water. Ferguson knew his blissfully full dams would drop to a puddle, so he wanted to ensure that even in drier times his boat would float. His houseboat.
He settled it onto the biggest of his dams, and took up residence. He read Patrick O’Brian novels between chores. It was a lush harvest after all the rain, and everything was bumper and overflowing. His seas of wheat had becomes seas of money. He even thought of taking on crew. It’d been a long time since he’d lived with a woman. But he let the thought drift.
Some in town wanted to use whatever laws were available to make it a tourist attraction, but there weren’t any relevant laws, and Ferguson wasn’t about to let anyone onto his place to leer at him. Already he was having to cope with too frequent visits from neighbours and old friends who suddenly remembered he existed. He wouldn’t let them on board. One or two pissed shearers had tried swimming on, and as the water level dropped with what was turning out to be a deadly summer, one of his neighbours’ dogs made the swim and dragged itself muddy onto the deck, to draw its owner wading through the sludge to retrieve it. It’s said Ferguson took a few pot shots at motorised gliders that flew too close, though this is unlikely, because if Ferguson had wanted to hit something he would have hit it.
The water in the dam stayed relatively high given the rate of evaporation that summer, and his sea survived the climate. Autumn rains came early, and there’d be one or two summer storms to halt the drop temporarily. Really, he was sitting pretty. He loved the gentle slapping of the water on the pontoons when the wind picked up, carving over the ochre clay dam walls and creating cross-breezes that really made one feel as if the ocean were beneath the decks. He slept well.
An extreme winter storm was a delight. One night, buffeted by waves, brown-green waves of sediment and sheep-manured water, the wind ripping fittings from the roof deck, he thought he was going to sink. And with the water slightly less than two fathoms in the middle when the dam was brimming, at the centre where he had the boat moored most of the time, sinking would mean something. The storm threw up Sargasso over the decks. Hay and shit and God knows what else. The inland spirit of an ancient long-gone ocean. It was almost haunting.
And though the dam was big enough for Ferguson to break loose and sail around the edges, to travel the four corners, which he occasionally did – the sheep, down for a drink, would watch intently, baaing and throwing looks at each other with knowledge and wisdom – he preferred to remain out to sea, travelling to and from the shore in a rubber dinghy when need be. As he was a large man, the dinghy almost folded in on itself, often taking on silty water when the wind was up. As he paddled with his single plastic oar in increasing urgency, his matted hair and unkempt beard combined to create a spectacle that would have seemed disturbed, if not frightening, to a stranger; never mind the fact that his destination was a houseboat on a farm dam.
This was in the days before mobile telephones, but Ferguson, being a CB radio obsessive, kept in touch with the local chatter without having to leave his property. He had run a powerline out to the boat from the generator shed he’d set up near the dam, and there was a phone in the house if he ever needed to speak to the distant outside world. But mostly he stayed disconnected, and ran his wheat and sheep farm from the boat.
Ferguson had been married, but his wife divorced him after their toddler’s death. It wasn’t Ferguson’s fault, and the little house dam had been almost dry, but the boy wandered in and got stuck in the mud. Like animals going to the muddiest parts when the summer has gone and the rains haven’t come, sinking further and further down as they try to suck a drink out of the sludge, so the small boy had tired himself by working to get out. You could tell that. The coroner said all this in his report. Ferguson rarely went near that dam, which was too small anyway to think of as a sea. Too small for his boat.
People never made the connection when they called his boat Ferguson’s Folly. They seemed not even to think it. It was just a line never drawn. Other than one person; she didn’t call it his Folly, but his tragedy. His ex-wife, Hester, had never stopped loving him, but she just couldn’t be with him. Not there, on the farm. She’d even asked him to sell up and move to his beloved coast, away from it all, and start again, but he wouldn’t. We can holiday, he said, but the farm is tidal in a way that’s impossible to resist. He sounded ridiculous saying this, and as he murmured something about undertow, he dropped his eyes with embarrassment. It would have been his, all of this, as I inherited it from my father. And she left, angry and sad for him, tormented by their not having kept an eye on the boy. He’d never wandered down to the dam before. And how did he move so fast from the scrap of house lawn she’d watered religiously with red water pumped up from the very same dam? He was there playing on the sweet green grass; then he was gone.
Ferguson stopped bothering to visit the coast. He never did so again. Two summers later and drought had set in so severely that there was barely a puddle in the dams for years. He did not abandon his houseboat. He built a stone causeway across the sludge – the wretched stygian sludge, the murderous nothingness of mud: neither water nor earth – then the dust that followed. He waited it out. The oceans will rise, he said, they will rise and swallow us all. The flood is coming.
MISNOMER
I told her it was a powderbark and not a sammy, he said bitterly. I told her I told her I told her!
I tried to calm him with a hand on the shoulder but he shrugged it off. I noticed a tear in the eye of this rough man who was always proud to be in a blue singlet in summer and a red-checked shirt in winter. I mention this not gratuitously, not as a class awkwardness on my part, but because his wife always told me this by way of reassurance. I made no judgement, and make none, I think.
She insisted it was a sammy, even when I showed her in a book. Even when her friends, including one of her science teacher mates from school, told her. A powderbark wandoo. Similar colour, different canopy. They look different. They are different species!
He kept lamenting, and I let him. Strange, that a man of so few words could get so hooked on them now. Survival. Words had been her thing. An English teacher married to a shearer. Not that strange out in the country, I guess. And he had a point – I mean, a point about naming things properly.
He went back to the beginning, talking rapidly, which in itself was a sign of how hard he was finding it to cope – he usually spoke in a steady drawl.
The problem was that there was a great sammy a few k’s further down the road. One we both agreed was called Sammy,
and was a salmon gum. Not many left around here – cleared away for cropping back in the twenties. But you still get that edgy stuff where wandoo woodland meets stands of salmon gum, the land changing and not able to make up its mind. And that powderbark on one corner was massive for a powderbark – I suppose you could be forgiven for mistaking it. But I always called it the Powderbark, and she called it Sammy, even though the next big tree a few k’s on was called Sammy as well. I ragged her over that. She had such a way with words but when she was stuck on a point, she lost imagination. She could be bloody-minded, you know.
I wanted to ask why, when writing down directions, he’d not taken her idiosyncrasies, her terms and geography, into consideration. He’d left before she got up and hadn’t wanted to wake her. He’d forgotten to mention it the night before. Of course, discussing it would have sorted the potential problem there and then. The note he left on the fridge’s whiteboard didn’t say ‘the real Sammy’, or some other indicator or joke to show he actually meant the mutually agreed upon salmon gum, not the earlier tree we argue over. He simply said, Turn left at the sammy, drive three k’s and you’ll find me waiting by a farm gate. She was picking him up after a cut-out, a drinking binge to mark the end of a shed. They’d shorn five thousand sheep at that shed and the farmer had put on three cartons. He hadn’t wanted to drive that day, and the rest of the team were heading off in the bus in the opposite direction. Made sense. But she’d turned early, at the Powderbark, and driven on and on, thinking, probably, that he’d got the distance wrong; all the time, probably, scanning the side of the road for her husband.
And why did she drive so far? he pleaded, his great gnarled hands already twisting with arthritis from so many years of holding sheep and the hot vibrating handpiece. It looked like he was flailing in deep water, an ungainly fish that had suddenly discovered it has no right to swim, that it was all a trick up to this point. He was an alien in his own territory, his own world, his entire universe. He had nowhere else to go.
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