But it was his tales of the shearing sheds I liked most. He would often tell me about working with Indigenous men who invariably had nicknames like ‘Vanilla’, whose lives he could never comprehend, but with whom he would play football and share tobacco. He would tell me of the mad alcoholic chef who resided on the sheep station year-round, who would eventually go blind in one eye from drinking metho.
Some of his tales were grotesque and harrowing. They involved maggots writhing in the rotten guts of sheep’s corpses, or men burning and scarring themselves with hot tar.
Others were funny. Crockery was scarce on the station, so he had to clean his plate before dessert by soaking up the gravy with bread. But on his first night he didn’t know this was customary. A mound of trifle, with many layers of cold custard and cream, was poured into the middle of his gravy-stained plate; the sight turned his stomach, but he was hungry enough to eat the sweet and savoury mess.
By far my grandfather’s best story had nothing to do with the shearing sheds, and instead was the origin of the scar that divided his tongue – a ropey line of puckered muscle flesh running through its centre that fascinated me as a child. He had fallen to the bottom of a footy pack after a missed mark, and beneath the bodies of the other players a boot had smashed into his mouth and a stop, a metal screw-in, had torn through his tongue.
By every measure my grandfather was a man’s man and a successful one, but his ascension from his working-class country life into a middle-class professional career had caused a lot of friction between him and his country friends and family. As I watched him age, I saw a man who wished with all his heart that he’d not lost his connections with the men he’d spent his formative years beside on the footy field and in shearers’ quarters; a man who had sacrificed the comforts of approval and inclusion in order to provide more for his future family and for himself. I understood the feeling of being pulled in opposite directions, caught between St Anthony’s – and that violin – along with my desire never again to see my family shamed as they’d been by my father, and a sincere wish to sink into the recklessness of nights out with Moose and my old footy mates. I could see the results of such compromises etched into every wrinkle of my grandfather’s face.
Party Bus
When Dougie and I arrived at the party, we discovered a congregation of teenagers in their best jeans standing on the nature strip outside Ellie’s house. The boys had on singlets or tight tank tops in an effort to show off the muscles beginning to take form. Heavy silver chains hung from their necks. The girls all wore tank tops, too, with one colour layered over the top of another, and some wore miniskirts over their jeans – a trend that did not look good. With their blonde streaks and bare midriffs, displaying shiny, dangling navel piercings, they were mostly fashioned after one of a handful of pop stars: Shakira, J.Lo, Christina, Britney.
I wore skinny black jeans and battered brown boots and, always, a checked shirt, usually a flannelette. I liked cowboys, and my entire aesthetic was modelled on them. In my bedroom, among the collage of cut-outs from gig guides and sports magazines on my walls, I’d Blu-Tacked a large ad for Marlboro cigarettes that depicted the Marlboro Man riding a horse along a snowy ridge.
Spotting my arrival, Moose made his way over to Dougie and me. ‘Ford! What’s up, man?’ Despite the balmy evening, he was still wearing his hoodie.
Beside him was Ellie. Her huge mouth was stretched into a wide smile as she said hi. She pulled me in for a hug, seeming both stunned and inexplicably happy to see me. ‘We have your violin,’ she said.
‘Aw, thanks so much, yeah.’
‘Yeah, it’s in my room. You can get it after.’
‘Fucken fag instrument,’ Doug added. ‘Ya know that’s what my fucken sister plays, ey.’
Ellie didn’t respond. Unlike the other girls, she was wearing a dress – a small cocktail number she’d most likely picked up from Valleygirl or Dotti, but to me it might well have been a high-end designer piece. She looked stunning. As we hugged on the lawn I glanced down, taking in her open-toed heels and painted nails. Between her round bum, small breasts and the sweet smell coming off her chest, I was lost to my arousal. Ellie was the dream.
‘So, what the fuck’s up with tonight?’ Dougie wanted to know.
Ellie, about to respond, was interrupted by the arrival of a double-decker bus. The crusty-looking piece of shit trundled down the narrow, crooked street, barely avoiding the cars parked on each side. The exterior of the bus was black, with hot-pink sprayed in a crude illustration of the city’s skyline and onto the hubcaps. Each tyre looked bald and not fully inflated, and you could just imagine the thing hadn’t been serviced in years, that the axel and driveshaft underneath were rusted to fuck. Behind the bus, a Nissan Skyline came roaring to a halt, cloud-white and with a blue racing stripe off-centre across the bonnet, the hood, the boot and spoiler.
Moose and his tough little crew of Lebanese Catholics, whom I’d met on the back of the quad bike, directed the bus driver to where all of us could board easily. Moose shouted for people to jump on, and soon a mass exodus was set in motion with thirty or forty amped teens filing past the stringybarks outside Ellie’s front fence.
I’d scrounged twenty-five dollars from Mum, having made up something about needing money for a new shirt, and I held the cash as I approached the bus, glancing back at the Skyline to figure the connection. But then the driver got out, a big guy, all muscles, and pointed right at me. ‘Hey, big man!’ said Steven, spreading his arms wide and coming over to wrap me up in a hug. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Steven Mousali was Moose’s older brother. Amongst our tribe, he was a local legend. He’d won Best and Fairest every year he’d played down at the club, and he made every girl in our neighbourhood swoon – and most of our mothers, too.
‘Tell me you’re playing this season, mate. Tell me you’re fucken playing.’ He tapped my chest hard with an index finger.
‘I dunno, man. I’ll see.’ This was another reason for me not to go to a party like this. People in my neighbourhood knew me, and I internalised their expectations just like I did those of my family.
‘Your arm’s awright now, though, yeah?’ he asked.
Steven had been at training the night I’d broken my arm. He’d been the one to crouch beside me and tell me I was tough, and not to cry. I hadn’t, but I’d badly wanted to.
‘Yeah, I’m all good now, man.’
‘Good. Then you’re coming to bloody training, no excuses,’ he said. ‘They’ll need ya.’
The command made me sick with pressure, but the words ‘They’ll need ya’ changed everything.
‘Awright. For sure,’ I said.
‘That’s the way.’ Steven ruffled my hair before turning to shake Dougie’s hand real quick. He walked across the lawn, said something to Moose at the door of the bus, then something to the driver, then walked back to his Skyline and drove off.
When Dougie and I entered the bus, we handed a twenty each to Moose. As it turned out, you needed to be of legal age to enter the Party Bus, but Moose had skirted this issue by using his older brother to organise the pick-up time and location. Ordinarily, one of these buses would’ve driven down Swanston Street, through the CBD, over the St Kilda Road Bridge and past the War Memorial so punters could take in scenic views of the city at night and snap photos. But Moose’s tour would take a course through the outer suburbs. His scheme was to overcharge his passengers so he could pay the driver enough to turn a blind eye, while shelling out a little to Steven for his troubles, and still manage to pocket a healthy profit.
The old double-decker had been stripped bare and re-kitted. On either side were these church-like wooden pews stretching from the front to the rear. Four gleaming chrome beams, like stripper poles, ran from floor to ceiling. Large plastic bins were scattered throughout the old junker, each lined with garbage bags and filled to the top with ice, UDLs and stubbies of VB. It was an alcoholic’s paradise. On wheels.
Once Moose had paid the driver, we were away. After the bus swung off Ellie’s street onto Bell Street, the lights inside went out, and for a few seconds the interior was pitch-black. Everyone ooh-ed like their mate had been called out over the PA system at school. The windows were so heavily tinted you could barely make out the world beyond. Then, randomly, strobe lights flickered on, accompanied by revolving coloured lights that glinted off cheap disco balls strung from the ceiling and a fraction of a second later Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ came blaring out of the speakers. Everyone reached into the nearest bin for their first drink.
A couple hours later, I was blind. I was so sweat-soaked it felt like my skin was rubbing off onto the inside of my jeans. To get from front to back or lower to upper deck you had to claw through a throng of sweating bodies. In the strobing dark vehicle, keeping balance was almost impossible; the floors were soon sticky with spilled booze. As the bus lurched from left to right, turning through the suburban blocks that fringed Melbourne’s north to north-west – first Coburg and Fawkner, then via Pascoe Vale and Essendon out to Keilor, St Albans, Sunshine – we crashed into one another as we danced and shouted above the house and techno anthems, the Party Bus devolving into an orgy of kissing and groping.
At the back of the second deck, Moose was holding court, sober, Ellie by his side. His arm was slung round her waist, and with his free hand he lifted his hoodie to show the fresh scar along his abdomen. The small group gathered about him looked on amazed as he told its history: a screwdriver had been driven into his gut by a Vietnamese kid at Footscray Station, where Moose had gone to collect money owed to him. Ellie traced an index finger over the scar. The way she touched his skin, she knew him. I longed to be known like that. I took her in again. She had to be in a cocktail dress – she was dating the neighbourhood’s Scarbelly.
When she noticed me standing there, she flashed me the same smile as before. I felt frightened and exposed, but returned the smile, certain the whole time that Moose’s eyes were boring into my head, interpreting that smile for what it really was, making a quick calculation to gut me with his fishing knife. I retreated awkwardly, dancing myself back into the sea of bodies.
When the Party Bus returned to Coburg, I said goodnight to Dougie and collected my violin from Ellie’s place.
Her and Moose didn’t make much sense, not when you saw the house she came out of. It was so nice and suburban, almost ‘cute’. And the people in it were practically the spitting image of a nuclear family. Her dad was around, unlike those of so many kids I knew, and she had a lovely, smiley mum. Her younger brother Kieran was an ace cricketer, and her baby sister Mischa was as sweet as ice-cream cake and as smiley as her mum. But, I figured, who knew what went on past the front fence – like at my place. Still, I reckoned Ellie could snag a better bloke, as much as I liked having Moose for a mate.
‘Thanks for this,’ I told her, taking back the violin case. ‘You’re a life saver.’
She laughed. ‘No worries. You any good with that thing anyway?’
Embarrassed and inebriated, I tried to hide the violin behind my back. If I could put it out of sight, maybe I could eliminate my playing as a topic for discussion. But the case was too large.
‘Not bad,’ I bragged, opting to take the offensive. ‘They have me in orchestra and that at school.’
‘The posh one?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. How did everybody know? ‘So, you’ve heard?’
‘It’s not like it was a secret, Ford. Was it? Anyway, Dougie told everyone the day after you left Northcote. Said your family struck rich or something. Why’ve you been so shy? I feel like I never see you anymore, no one does, and you live so close.’
‘I dunno. I just have to focus, ya know. Get good marks, play this thing.’ I shook the case at her.
‘How come you have to play that? You get a scholarship or something?’
‘Nah. I mostly just have to do it for my family, ya know.’
‘So, you did strike rich, huh?’
‘Nah. Not exactly.’
‘Why?’ She was still fixated on the violin. ‘’Cause your family like it, ya mean?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, somewhat defeated and slightly less pissed.
She laughed at me. ‘Why’s that?’
‘God, who knows. Ask them.’ She just stood looking at me, waiting for a better response. ‘Nah, I dunno. They’re into all that posh stuff, ya know. It’s a good school, so they’re really into it. It’s a bit sad.’ I didn’t like saying that. The truth always made me uneasy – uneasy or guilty. I didn’t like throwing my family under the bus, as much as they shat me up the wall with all their pressure.
‘But they’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s a good school, Ford. You’re lucky to go there. Wish I had the chance. You just get so distracted here, ya know.’ She pointed vaguely outside her house. I supposed she meant the neighbourhood, but I didn’t quite understand.
‘Oh. Yeah. Right. Cheers.’
Why did I always have to do that? Why did I always feel the need to take the piss or act stupid, or otherwise feel embarrassed or bitter about everything? Why couldn’t I just be proud? When after all I was, at least a little bit. I couldn’t ever let on to Dougie,though, or Moose. But I could to Ellie, because girls were like that, you didn’t need to bullshit half as much with them as you thought you did.
‘It’s good to see ya, Ford,’ she said, touching my arm.
‘Yeah. Cheers. You too.’
‘Well, don’t be a stranger, ey.’
‘Yeah. Sure. Course not.’
I had nothing to add. Speaking to her made me nervous, and the river of sentences flooding my head found no estuary.
I left off and stumbled through the lanes back to my house. But I had to stop behind the church to piss and puke and then masturbate, thinking of Ellie, of her legs and cocktail dress and painted nails squeezed together in those open-toed heels. It took some time, but eventually I came over the bluestone bricks and staggered on up to The Compound with my violin.
Deities
The hangover was a bad one. Mum woke me up for Mass, and I rolled out of bed still in my clothes from the night before. I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans to Church, so I threw on my school pants and Clarks shoes and removed the flannelette to wear the white tee underneath; I was an altar boy, so it would be concealed by my gown when I served Mass.
But when I walked out of my room, Noonie was in the corridor where she often lurked to inspect me before I presented myself to the world. ‘You think this is presentable?’ She tutted. ‘That shirt, young man, is not a shirt, it’s an undergarment. And those trousers aren’t even fresh.’
‘It’s a t-shirt. Anyway, what’s it matter?’
‘Matter? Oh, dear lord. I know someone who might’ve asked the very same thing. At one time.’
There he was again, hanging in the air. Would they ever grow tired of coaching me out of becoming my father? I’d gotten the point, and these asides only ever put in mind the notion that I was somehow like him, when I felt nothing like him.
‘Turn around and find yourself a shirt, at the very least. Goodness me.’
I turned on my heel and went into my room to locate a button-down shirt from the back of the closet. It was imperative the oldies – who would, without fail, ask me about my school and admire my hair and say isn’thehandsome? aren’tyouhandsome? after Mass – be shown only the very best version of the me/I/Ford.
When I came out of my room wearing a collared shirt, Noonie instructed me to tuck it in. She approached me with her brush and beat the lint off my legs, and with her index finger and thumb corrected where the shirt sat across my shoulders. ‘There. That’s better. Respectable.’
As a family, we walked up the street for Mass, following the swollen congregation of Italians into the church. All this God nonsense seemed pretty nuts to me – blessing yourself with water, genuflecting in the aisles, bowing and kneeling and shaking hands and eating little flavourless wafers that were supposed
to represent some dead guy’s guts. What did any of it do? Certainly not much for us, I had to think. My family abused it mostly as a means of keeping face; my mother wasn’t divorced, she was annulled, which meant everything was okay.
While I wasn’t the greatest Church enthusiast, when I wasn’t hungover I genuinely preferred to serve Mass to sitting in the uncomfortable wooden pews passively observing the ritual. My role as an altar boy provided me with a small, plush leather chair and something to do. On that morning after the Party Bus, however, no chair, no matter how comfortable, would’ve cured my predicament. By the time I’d walked from the sacristy to the side of the altar and sat down, I was sweating bullets. The moisture had soaked through my shirt and the white gown over top, which was held together by a red cinch. I could see the outline of my belly button – a gaping O, like a tunnel into myself.
Between my sweating and nausea, the ritual passing in some faraway place, I was lost inside my body. I didn’t snap out of it until I noticed Father Vito hissing at me, holding the chalice aloft. I realised we were up to communion and that I was meant to be ringing the small bell that sat waiting on the altar’s step for this very moment. I hopped down to kneel and picked it up. The bell the church provided consisted of four miniature ones affixed to a metal handle. When I rang it, two of the four fell off; rather than ringing, they thunked down the stairs beside the altar. Parishioners looked up, and Father Vito glared down upon me from the big holy marble table. Where I knelt, I could see the tufts of hair sprouting out of his nostrils. This hair had made me so paranoid about ever looking the same that I’d gone and bought an electric nose-hair trimmer from the pharmacy at Barkly Square and had been using it in secret each week for a year.
Everything in its right place Page 3
