Ishmael and the Return of the Dungongs

by Michael Gerard Bauer

  Why – can’t we ever do stuff together?

  Why – will I never see you again?

  Why – couldn’t I help you like you always helped me?

  When he’d finished, Danny shoved his index finger in his mouth and pretended to throw up. Danny Wallace was a master of mime.

  ‘Leseur, I am seriously moved to vomit. What is this crap? Writing about one of your bum buddies, are you? I guess you …’ Then something caught his eye behind me. He lifted his chin a little and called down the corridor, ‘Hey Bazz, over here. We’ve been looking for you.’

  Barry Bagsley had just come up the steps at the far end of the corridor and now he was heading our way. He still had his bag over his shoulder and a folder with pages sprouting from it clutched in one hand.

  ‘Check this out-Le Spewer’s been writing love poems to a special friend.’

  Danny read the poem again with extra passion and expression while Doug Savage snuffled and snorted beside him like a bulldog with sinus problems. I watched Barry Bagsley’s face darken and harden. Only his eyes revealed any real emotion.

  ‘Geez, now I know why you’re called Le Spewer,’ Danny Wallace said when he’d finished his second recitation. ‘You got any more of this puke?’

  He started to turn the page over to look on the other side, but before I really knew what I was doing I had grabbed it away from him. ‘Give it here.’

  ‘Wooooo – bit touchy are we, Leseur? So it is yours, eh?’

  ‘What if it is?’

  ‘Well, we’re huge fans of your stuff and we’d just love to read some more, wouldn’t we, guys? Come on, hand it over. We want to hear more of Manure’s manure.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hey, Barry, Le Spewer isn’t sharing. What do you reckon we should do?’

  Barry Bagsley eyeballed me for a long time before replying in little more than a whisper. ‘Nothing … He’ll keep.’

  ‘What? But …’

  Barry shifted his cold eyes on to Danny Wallace. ‘I said … he’ll keep. You got a problem with that, Wallace? What about you, Savage?’

  Danny and Doug remained silent. Then Barry jerked his head towards the steps and they were both forced to tag along behind as he led them away.

  I waited till they had all disappeared from sight. When I knew I was finally alone, I looked around me. Everything seemed the same – same corridor with classrooms on one side and windows on the other, same scuffed tiles on the floor, same class photos along the wall, same playground out the window, same sounds, same smells. But I knew there was something much deeper that just wasn’t the same any more.

  I walked to the end of the corridor and sat on the steps that led down to the ground floor. In my mind I replayed everything that had just happened trying to make some sense of it all, but no matter how many times I worked my way through it, there were always three things that just didn’t seem to gel together.

  First, there was the poem that Danny Wallace had read out. Second, there was the strange swirling mix of anger and fear I had seen in Barry Bagsley’s eyes as he listened to it. And the third thing? The third thing was the twenty or so signatures scrawled on the back of the sheet of paper that I still held in my hand.

  The ones that said B. Bagsley.

  22.

  A GOD THING TO KNOW

  My second encounter with Barry Bagsley occurred that same day after the end-of-semester assembly, and it would make all our previous meetings seem like discussions about the weather.

  I was on my way home, halfway down the cement path that ran between a creek and the row of five football fields imaginatively referred to by everyone at St Daniel’s as ‘The Fields’, when a cold voice called from behind me.

  ‘Leseur.’

  I froze, then turned around. Barry Bagsley was leaning against one of the large pine trees that lined the path. I did a quick survey of the surrounding area. Usually there were heaps of boarders mucking about with a football or something, but not today-they had all escaped home for the break. It suddenly struck me how quiet and empty it was. What was it Razza had said about Barry being more likely to biff someone when it was deserted? My nose started to tingle as if it was trying to find a place to hide.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you want, but …’

  Barry Bagsley cut me off. ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘What …’

  ‘I want to know why you did it.’

  ‘What do you mean? Did what?’

  ‘You know. Why’d you let Wallace and Savage think you’d written that poem … when you knew it was me?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  I didn’t either. I could have easily told them it wasn’t my poem. I could have shown them the signatures on the sheet. Even Danny and Doug would have had just enough brains between them to work out who it belonged to. So why didn’t I? Why did I protect someone who had made my life and Bill Kingsley’s life a misery? Someone who had used my face as a punching bag?

  Barry Bagsley continued to stare at me in silence.

  I didn’t know what to say or what to do. Then I remembered that I still had the poem in my top pocket. I took it out and held it towards him. ‘Here.’

  He pushed himself off the tree and moved slowly towards me. There was less than half a metre between us. He took the folded sheet of paper, held it briefly in his hand and closed his fist tightly around it. My eyes began to sting as I recalled the searing pain that fist was capable of. He spoke without looking up from the wad of paper in his hand.

  ‘It’s stuff Devlin made me write.’

  I think that was the first thing Barry Bagsley had ever said to me that didn’t contain an insult. But there was more to come … much more.

  ‘It’s about my brother,’ he mumbled. ‘… Older brother … He died …’bout four years ago … Leukaemia.’

  My head was spinning. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t the way things went. Barry Bagsley was talking to me and he wasn’t sneering or swearing or putting me down or mashing my name into pulp. He was telling me about his brother … his dead brother. I thought about Prue. What if something happened to her? What if … I looked at the mop of blond hair and the broad shoulders in front of me. I wanted to say something, but my thoughts wouldn’t form into words.

  ‘That’s … I … I’m …’

  ‘That’s why I hit you.’

  At first I didn’t understand what he meant – I couldn’t see any connection. Then I remembered what I’d said that day – about how I’d kill myself if I was his brother – and it felt like someone had put their fist through my stomach.

  ‘Look, I … I didn’t mean … I’m sorry … about what I said … and about your brother.’

  Barry remained still and the muscles in his jaw tightened. I could hear him breathing. Then he lifted his head and clamped me with an icy glare. ‘If you tell anybody … anyone at all …’

  ‘I … I won’t … I wouldn’t do that … I wouldn’t tell anyone … ever.’

  He scanned my face like an X-ray machine.

  ‘I didn’t tell about the poem,’ I said finally.

  We stood facing each other like inhabitants of different solar systems. Then Barry Bagsley moved away, collected his bag from beside the tree and hoisted it over his shoulder. He was leaving, but I had my own question to ask.

  ‘Barry.’

  He looked back at me.

  ‘Lay off Bill Kingsley?’

  ‘Or what?’ he said as he pushed the poem into his pocket.

  ‘Or nothing. I’m asking you … please.’

  He looked hard at me. ‘Why is it such a big deal to you what happens to Kingsley, anyway?’

  ‘Because he’s my friend … and he doesn’t deserve it … Nobody does.’

  Barry Bagsley’s eyes drilled into mine. ‘We’re even, then,’ was all he said before turning and setting off across the field.

  He kept his word. From that day on, Bill Kingsley stopped being bullied and started to remember how to smile. A
nd something between Barry and me changed as well. Don’t get me wrong-it’s not like we became best mates or anything, but at last I found that I could breathe in his presence and I didn’t have to be invisible any more. I could just be me.

  As I continued my journey home that day it felt like the weight of my school bag was the only thing keeping me from floating away. After all the facts and theories and ideas my teachers had tried to cram into my head, the most important thing I’d learnt from my first semester of Year Ten was this: Life can change. Sometimes it gets better. It was a good thing to know.

  During the mid-year break life changed again. My father kind of disappeared.

  Track 5:

  Memory Sea

  One day I turned around and you were gone

  They said that’s how it is, life must go on

  But every now and then I float away

  And find myself adrift in yesterday

  Chorus

  And I’m drowning in a memory sea

  I’m drowning in a memory sea

  I’m drowning in a memory sea

  But no one there can rescue me.

  From The Dugongs: Returned & Remastered

  Words & lyrics: R. Leseur

  23.

  PHILOPATRIDOMANIA

  Pad did his vanishing trick during the second week of the holidays after Mum called out, ‘Ron, you’ve got an email from Ray.’

  Ray was Uncle Ray, who wasn’t really our uncle, but a friend of my parents from their university days. He used to be around a lot when Prue and I were little, but we hadn’t seen him for years.

  I was having breakfast in the kitchen at the time when Dad wandered down the corridor in his pyjamas with his curly red hair sticking up at bizarre angles like a dried mop. I watched him enter the study.

  And that’s when he disappeared.

  Not that he was beamed up by aliens or anything really exciting like that. I mean, he did walk back out a bit later and he looked the same. But it just wasn’t the Ron Leseur I knew – not the one who loved to tell stories and pathetic jokes, the one who had dressed up as Captain Ahab when Mum was pregnant with me just because she said she looked like a whale; the one who made her laugh so hard she gave birth and the one who called me Ishmael after the narrator of Moby Dick.

  The man who came out of the study that morning didn’t say a word – just looked right through me as if I didn’t exist – like there was just a bowl of cereal at the table eating itself. At dinner that night he was still in zombie mode and afterwards he just sat by himself in the rumpus room clutching his acoustic guitar and playing his old Beatles records. That’s where I found him the next morning. He was still wearing headphones, and he looked up at me with bleary eyes and said in a croaky voice, ‘It was twenty years ago today,’ then drifted off to sleep.

  When I asked Mum what was wrong with him, she didn’t seem very talkative, so I decided it was time to seek expert help.

  ‘He listened to Beatles records all night and then he said that?’

  My little sister Prue was sitting cross-legged on the end of my bed. She looked at me over the top of her narrow rectangular reading glasses. ‘This could be serious.’

  ‘Serious? What do you mean?’

  She dropped her copy of A Brief History of Time on the bed and placed her glasses on the cover. ‘Well, it sounds like philopatridomania.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Philopatridomania – it means extreme nostalgia.’

  ‘Nostalgia? That’s not too serious, is it?’

  ‘It could be. I read a book on the history of medicine once, and do you know that in the seventeenth century nostalgia was treated as a legitimate medical condition? A Swiss doctor – I think his name was Hofer-identified it. He was the one who came up with the name philopatridomania. Anyway, that’s beside the point, but back then nostalgia was taken seriously. Hofer identified it as the pain someone feels when they fear they’ll never see their native land again. A lot of soldiers fighting in foreign countries were diagnosed with it – they claimed quite a few died of it.’

  Prue peered back at me. I tried to imagine how much information was jammed into that cute near-genius head.

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense – Dad’s in his native land.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not just about land any more – it’s about anything that you think you’ll never see again. And there are some doctors today who believe that maybe Hofer was on the right track, and maybe we should treat extreme forms of nostalgia as a serious medical condition as he did.’

  ‘What … so Dad’s suffering from a rare strain of Beatle nostalgia … because he’ll never see them again?’

  ‘Umm … Beatle-philopatrido-mania perhaps,’ Prue said with quick grin. ‘Look, it all fits, doesn’t it? First he goes all comatose, then he plays Fab Four all night and then this morning he comes out with, “It was twenty years ago today”. There’s a definite pattern going on here.’

  ‘But I don’t get that last bit. The Beatles were mainly around in the 1960s, right? So that’d be closer to forty years ago, not twenty.’

  Prue gaped at me. ‘It’s comes from a Beatles song, you dag. It’s only the opening line of the title track of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, possibly the most famous album of all time.’

  ‘Oh … right … I’ll take your word for it. But why’s he suffering from nostalgia now? Dad’s always had a thing about the Beatles and he was fine … until he got that email from Uncle Ray.’

  Prue picked up her glasses and sucked on the … well … whatever you call that end bit that you loop behind your ear … the handle, hooky bit thingy.

  ‘It could be that Uncle Ray mentioned something about the Beatles in his email … or maybe what he wrote reminded Dad of something from the past, who knows? Anything could have triggered it off.’

  It was hard not to agree with Prue. After all, even though she was over a year younger than me and only in Year Nine, she was an official near-genius and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Beatles.

  I guess you might find that last bit hard to believe, but it’s true. In fact, according to Dad, it was the Beatles who were responsible for turning Prue into a near-genius in the first place. They also named her.

  And they saved her life.

  24.

  HOW–PRUE–GOT–THE–NAME–PRUE

  It all happened when Prue was born. Unlike me, she arrived early rather than late. Very early. Over three months early. As she lay in her humidicrib Dad says she looked like a little red doll trapped in a tangle of tubes. My parents were told to prepare for the worst – and I guess that’s what Dad did.

  While Mum recovered in a hospital bed, he set up a permanent camp beside Prue in the premature babies’ room reciting his favourite poems to her, reading from his favourite books and playing his favourite music-with Dylan and the Beatles on high rotation. Mum says Dad hardly slept for three days and then only when the nurses and doctors forced him to by promising they would keep the music playing.

  It was on the fourth day that things ‘took a turn for the worse’ and it was ‘touch and go’ whether Prue would make it through the night. The doctors said that they had done everything they could and now it was up to her.

  That night Dad played his entire Beatles collection and read aloud for hour after hour, until sometime early in the morning he must have dozed off. When he woke up he says everything was still and quiet except for the music. Then Dad leant forward and peered in through the clear plastic side of the humidicrib. Prue’s tiny heart was still beating – and if you believe my father, it was beating in time to the tune that was floating around the room. The Beatles were singing, ‘Dear Prudence’, and as Dad watched and listened, his baby daughter slowly opened up her eyes and greeted the brand new day.

  I’m sure Dad loves the ‘how-Prue-got-the-name-Prue’ story just as much as the ‘how-Ishmael-got-the-name-Ishmael’ story; he just doesn’t talk about it as much. I like it, too. I don’t know if
it all happened exactly like my father describes it – Dad has a tendency to ‘improve’ things when he tells them. But it doesn’t matter. The best bit is true. Prue did open her eyes and she got better.

  I was looking at those eyes now and wondering if Dad’s theory was right and that all those concentrated hours and days of reading and music had helped turn Prue into a near-genius. It was hard to argue against it. Prue certainly loved her books and she was probably the only thirteen-year-old girl alive whose room could double as a Beatles shrine. On top of that, she knew every Beatles song ever recorded and could play most of them on three different instruments. In fact, with her mop of dark hair, she was even starting to look a bit like one of the Beatles!

  ‘So what should we do now?’ she said.

  ‘Tell Mum.’

  That evening after tea, when Dad went to bed early feeling the effects of his all-night Beatle-fest, we went to Mum with our suspicions.

  ‘Look, I know you’re worried,’ she said as she handed me the last plate to dry. ‘Your father certainly hasn’t been himself lately, I know that … He’s got a lot on his mind … but it’s not what you think.’

  Then she wiped her hands with a tea towel and took a deep breath. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the Beatles,’ she said. ‘This is all about the Dugongs.’

  25.

  THE RETURN OF THE DUGONGS

  ‘What, you mean Dad’s old band?’

  I didn’t know much about the Dugongs except that they were formed when Dad was at uni and were only together for a few years before breaking up. That was about it. Of course Dad still strummed away on his guitar every now and then – he even taught me a few chords. But he never really talked much about his Dugong days. Mum neither.

  Once I Googled their name, and apart from a million sites about marine creatures, the only reference I came up with was, ‘The Dugongs: Rock band of the mid to late 1980s. Had strong local cult following but split when seemingly on the verge of wider success.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Mum said. ‘When I first met your father at uni he was always going on about this band he was in. We used to talk sometimes before or after our American Lit tutorial. That’s where we studied Moby Dick,’ she said with a wink at me.