MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au
Copyright ©Tobias McCorkell 2020
First published 2020
Transit Lounge Publishing
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover image: Maria Ehlers/Alamy
Author image: Thomas Holst
Cover and book design: Peter Lo
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
A cataloguing entry is available from the
National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN: 978-1-925760-63-7
To my only family – Mum, Nanma and Pa.
And for Coburg.
So much beauty; so much love.
‘As I get older I put more trust in what happened, which has a profound meaning if you can get at it. But what you invent is important, too. Flaubert said that whatever you invent is true, even though you may not understand what the truth of it is.’
—William Maxwell
‘With the letting down of this final barrier between myself and the truth I seemed to welcome back those images which used to throng my mind.’
—Anita Brookner, Look At Me
ONE
Coburg
Mini Moto
I was about fifteen when I got sent away to a new school on the other side of the Yarra River. It was one of those schools where they make you wear a tie and a blazer and you have to stand whenever any teacher enters the room. One of those places where the adults talk about turning boys into men. A Rah! Rah! Rah! type joint. A Christian Brothers venture. A real cunt of a place. St Anthony’s College. In Toorak.
I wasn’t from Toorak, though. I was from Coburg – north of the city, working-class, and full of the kinds of people suburbanites had the habit of referring to as ‘ethnics’ – and it was only through the grace of Queenie McCullen, my paternal grandmother, that I’d been shipped off across town when she and her husband had become overnight millionaires up in the bush, in Shepparton, after selling off their expansive peach orchards to be turned into a housing development.
This story starts on a Friday night, when I was coming home from St Anthony’s on the tram. I was sixteen, in Year 11. I was carrying my violin case, because after a year at my new school I’d become a violin player at my family’s behest. I played it at Christmas masses and at school recitals and even in a hospice for a dying relative one time. My family had the hots for violin playing and piano playing, and they adored my instrument because it was beautiful and German-made and expensive as all get out, thanks again to the McCullen peach orchards. They’d even manufactured a gold plate embossed with my name and secured to the black canvas by tiny, delicate screws.
I’d get really anxious coming home with the almighty violin on the tram after school, because my stop, the last one before Bell Street, a few blocks from the defunct Pentridge Prison, was a nightmare at peak hour when the thick traffic flowed rapidly along Nicholson Street. The drivers were all pissed-off tradies or pissed-off office workers or just pissed-off people, all desperate to join the sweeping grey arc of Bell Street that sent them outoutout to the east or west, to the freeway, to home, to freedom. I’d discovered that an after-work driver in Melbourne could not be trusted to navigate a tram and its disembarking passengers with any care at all. Even when the doors opened and the little red STOP sign jutted out into the street, cars in the outside lane would continue to fly past and it was on you not to find yourself the victim of some horrendous wreck.
But on this night, as I peered out the tram door and readied myself to take my precious cargo across the road, shielding the violin case with my body, I caught sight of something spectacular. A mini motorcycle was hurtling towards me. It barely came up to the height of the tram’s lowest step, its driver pitched so far forward he was practically lying down, his legs trailing behind him, toes hovering just millimetres above the bitumen. Following the minibike was a quad bike loaded with three teenage boys, hooting and howling.
Just before the minibike reached the front of the tram, it doubled back, pulling up to the rear exit where I was standing on the bottom step. The driver said, ‘Ford!? What’s up, man?’
‘Moose?’
I hadn’t seen Moose in ages, not since breaking my arm before the start of the footy season the year before. The injury had put me out for the year, though Noonie’s only concern at the time was that I couldn’t play the fiddle at Easter Mass. But now, here he was, straddling that ridiculous minibike purring between his legs and shouting above the tinny engine. He waved for me to jump on the back of the quad with the other boys and, without thinking, I did.
The driver of the quad bike revved the engine, before putting the vehicle in gear and launched us toward the intersection of Bell and Nicholson. A handful of passengers making their way from the tram to the footpath looked on bemused as I clutched the violin with one hand and hung on desperately to the back of the quad with the other, watching as we hurtled straight into traffic, all those cars rolling down and flowing out, a forceful torrent of metal-rubber sludge.
We mounted a kerb, Moose leading the way, and shot down to the bike track that ran below the road and snaked alongside the Merri Creek, out of view. When we stopped, I let fly with a flurry of excited expletives. It took me only a fraction of a second to accept the odd situation. I dismounted the quad and found myself lighting up a Winfield, settling in beneath the underpass to chat with old friends.
‘My cousin got this for Christmas,’ Moose said. ‘Pretty sick, ey?’ He dragged the bike up onto its back wheel and gunned its engine, the rear tyre squealing against the smooth, fawn-coloured track, a black smear emerging beneath a thin trail of smoke. The other boys, all toting Winfields now, laughed hysterically – laughter that turned quickly into coughs and splutters. In the chamber of the underpass, steel and concrete, the echo was deafening. Pigeons fled from the support beams above, flying out across the creek to the parkland.
‘Where ya been, man?’ Moose asked.
‘Oh, ya know … around,’ I said, shrugging, embarrassed by almost everything about my appearance. In addition to the violin case, I was sporting a candy-striped blazer in a nausea-inducing combination of navy and fluoro green and yellow, and I kept my hair in a shock of ginger waves that shot up off my skull, what I called my ‘red afro’. It wasn’t just the speeding cars I watched out for coming home from school each night: my hair and blazer were more than enough to incite vehement hatred wherever I went. Errant McDonald’s cups filled with flat soft drink were a constant threat; on several occasions I’d been doused in sticky cola, warm from a day left sitting in a hot car. Names, too, were hurled at me:
‘Faggot!’‘Cunt!’
‘Skip cunt!’
‘Ginger cunt!’
‘Ranga!’
‘Ranga cunt!’
‘Redknob!’‘Fanta pants!’
and, of course,
‘Ronald!’
‘You don’t come down to the ground no more,’ Moose prompted.
‘Yeah, just, like, school and that, ya know.’
‘You still playing?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. A bit.’ Strangely, I felt guilty. Not playing footy in Coburg – not playing for Coburg – felt like a betrayal. I missed it. I missed a lot about what I’d given up to attend St Anthony’s.
Moose was wearing a big hoodie. He had stubble. I assumed he was still the premier athlete he’d been when we’d run together years earlier.
‘You?’
I asked. ‘Still playing?’
‘Yeah. A bit. You should come down and try out. You can always come train, if ya want.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Look, man,’ he said, ‘you got any weed?’
‘Yeah. Only a couple grams, though. Why?’
The second I said it, I regretted it. Although I liked Moose, he still made me nervous. I was acutely aware of the way this innocent encounter could go wrong. The main difference between him and me was that if I uttered the words ‘I’m gunna kill ya!’ it meant I would, drunkenly and in anger, attempt to land some blows while getting my arse handed to me. If Moose said it, it meant he’d take out the thin fishing knife he kept in his back pocket and jam it into your throat.
‘Can you get it? We wanna smoke.’
‘Ah …’
‘I’ll buy it off ya.’
‘I can’t. Sorry, man,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Ya know, my folks are home and shit.’
‘Don’t wanna deal with the olds? I understand. My old man’s the fucken same. Gives you a belting when you’re up to no good, huh?’
‘Exactly,’ I lied. I didn’t have a dad, but Mum had thrown plenty of crockery. Close enough, I figured. ‘My dad can be a real fucken head case,’ I added.
Moose’s old man was six feet tall, about 180 kilos and bald. He looked like Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now, and it was widely understood that his plumbing business wasn’t his only source of income; that he did, in fact, a roaring trade supplying the northern suburbs with speed and ecstasy.
‘Tell me about it,’ Moose said, drawing on his cigarette solemnly before breaking out into a wide grin. ‘It’s good to see you, bro. Hey, come over to Ellie’s this Saturday. Ya know where she lives, yeah?’
That name, I thought. That perfect name. ‘Yeah,’ I said.
I’d had a crush on Ellie for years – a tall, slender half-Polynesian girl who lived around the corner from me. But she’d been with Moose a while now, since the days when he and my mate Dougie had been lifeguards at the outdoor pool on Murray Road.
‘Cool,’ Moose said. ‘Bring, like, twenty, thirty bucks. We’re gunna get a bus together. Booze all night!’
I wasn’t as quick to respond as I would’ve liked. Part of me wanted to say, ‘Sick! Thanks!’, because I was keen to go, mainly to see Ellie again and also because I liked Moose. But I hadn’t seen either of them since the move to St Anthony’s, and things were just different now. As much as Moose excited me, there was always a risk …
‘So, whaddaya say? Ya coming or what?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ I said, faking my resolve.
He smiled before stubbing out his smoke on the bike track, his shoe twisting the paper and tobacco into a brown-black smudge.
‘Good to see ya, Moose,’ I said, extending a hand.
He shook it in a firm, callused grip before offering me a lift home. I declined, thanking him for the ciggie and saying I’d see him on Saturday, at Ellie’s. I had no idea what ‘We’re gunna get a bus together’ meant.
I watched them rev up and roar off along the bike track. Then it struck me: My violin!
‘Moose! Hang on!’ I shouted, but my cries were drowned out in the din beneath the overpass.
I watched the expensive German instrument bouncing in the rear of the quad until it was out of sight. When I could no longer hear them, I turned around and trudged up the rise, back to Bell Street and west toward Sydney Road, then left onto my street before the empty gaol, unsure how I was to explain this to Noonie and Pop and Mum.
Frozen Pizza
At home I climbed the front fence and snuck down the long driveway, past the rows of meticulously manicured flowers my grandparents tended each day, past the first unit, where they lived, and into Unit Two, where I poured myself a stiff cordial and wondered how I was to explain the violin’s absence over tea. We were an unhappy family, and any minor fuck-up could return our hearts to the ashen quagmire in which they so often sank.
We lived on a subdivided block on the crest of a small rise along Barrow Street, where from the front of the property you could look out to the enormous bluestone walls that encircled the prison. It seemed to me our property wasn’t so different, surrounded as it was by high fences, along the sides and back, and a seven-foot redbrick wall at the front. Not to mention the paranoid security measures my three parents had installed over the years: the remote-operated metal gate at the entrance to the drive, the alarms, the motion-sensor lights in the driveway and on the back fence. Each new security measure had been added until the property had come to resemble a fortress. I’d taken to referring to our block as ‘The Compound’.
I walked down the passage and hung up my uniform in my room. I wasn’t allowed to leave my tie looped over the hanger the way some of the other boys at school did, but instead I was required to tie a fresh knot for Noonie each morning. And I especially couldn’t leave it looped over the weekend, or there’d be a crease and the tie would have to be ironed.
I got changed and lay back on my bed. I looked at the posters that covered my walls and ceiling, the miniature basketball hoop affixed to the back of the door, and waited.
When Mum arrived home, she drove too fast down the driveway. She pulled quickly into the carport between the two units and slammed the garage door several times on purpose, sending shockwaves through the walls. In Unit Two, her collection of Swarovski animals rattled on the mantelpiece in the front room.
The door-slamming bit meant it was time for tea, so I drained the last of my cordial before setting my mind to venture into Unit One, where I could already hear the beginnings of a row. ‘NO ONE UNDERSTANDS! NO ONE UNDERSTANDS!’ Mum was shouting at the top of her lungs. ‘NO ONE’S EVER ON MY BLOODY SIDE!’ It sounded as though one of my grandparents had made the mistake of suggesting Mum was acting paranoid or, worse, that she was blowing things out of proportion. I didn’t feel like facing up to this. She’d been at it for months, swearing that her boss Mr Chapman, an enthusiastic recreational duck hunter and consumer of VB, was out to ruin her life, and all because he’d politely suggested she accompany a group of students and their teachers on an excursion to the zoo. Mum was a school secretary, but ‘It’s not my fucken job to deal with children!’ she’d sworn. I couldn’t think of someone who liked children and – most especially – their parents any less.
She’d been a muso for a bit and then a sculptor and pottery instructor at a small studio over in Preston, but since Dad left she’d stuck to the secretarial work trying to make ends meet. She even used to fill in at the library or pick up casual tutoring work here and there over the weekends to bring in some extra cash. But since I’d gotten my education paid for by the other side of the family, she’d been able to give away those gigs.
When I entered my grandparents’ place, I was knocked out as always by the technicolour carpet in every room. It was patterned with angels and stars and other odd symbols, but no one could look at it too long without getting motion sickness.
‘You are not listening! You are not list-en-ing!’ Mum was repeating.
‘We shoulda moved to Perth. What did I tell you? I knew it! We shoulda moved to Perth,’ Noonie was saying over the top of Mum’s mantra.
In tense moments, my grandmother brought out this line about Perth, for she had long ago, when Mum and Dad divorced, formed a plan for the four of us to relocate to the other side of the country, where we would adopt another surname and be spared both the eternal shame and humiliation she perceived us enveloped in and the fact of her daughter’s unspooling. I figured Noonie had watched too many episodes of Blue Heelers or NYPD Blue or all the other blue-titled police procedurals she liked; I didn’t see how this witness protection-like arrangement was supposed to resolve any of the nutty crap I’d become accustomed to observing. Besides, witness protection hardly worked if you were both witness and perpetrator. Who exactly would we be hiding from? Ourselves?
No one had noticed my en
trance. Mum and Pop were standing either side of the kitchen table, and Noonie was in her green recliner, looking back at them from the lounge. Above where she sat, and above the couch beside her, where she and Pop sat nightly to watch their shows on the ABC, hung two enormous framed photographs: one of Noonie and Pop on their wedding day, the other of Deidre and Robert McCullen on theirs.
Pop said, ‘I’ve had enough of this Mr Chapman bullshit. He’s not gunna do a bloody thing to ya, Deid, and you fucken well know it.’ As always, my grandfather was wearing a suit. After retiring he never broke the habit of wearing a shirt and tie and jacket, like he was always heading into work. He was holding a small glass of port, too, as was his late afternoon custom. ‘Now, that’s enough of all this strife. We’re gunna sit down now and eat bloody pizza. I’m starved. What is it, Noon? Hawaiian again?’
It was usually the same combo of Papa Giuseppi’s frozen pizza, Supreme and Hawaiian.
‘No one is LIST! EN! ING!’ Mum stormed out of the dining room and started walking up the passageway towards me.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Pop muttered and followed her.
‘For God’s sake, Mum,’ I said as she strode past me, ‘just calm down.’
‘You don’t like it here, why don’t ya just go and live with him then?’ she suggested, her back to me as she disappeared down the corridor.
‘Oh, hello, Ford,’ said Pop, shaking his head at Mum while he kept following her.
As I walked further into the house, I caught a waft from the oven. ‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Christ! The Papa Giuseppi’s!’ Noonie cried, launching herself out of the recliner and hurrying into the kitchen. I followed her as far as the counter between the orange-tiled kitchen and technicolour dining room. She put on a pair of oven mitts before lowering the door and pulling out the top tray. ‘Oh, blast! Look at those now, Deidre.’
Her voice was surely loud enough to penetrate the walls and register with Mum, still ranting in the study. I expected she’d poured herself a glass of Pop’s port from the drinks cabinet.
Everything in its right place Page 1
