by Tim Winton
‘Some days,’ said Lockie.
‘But not today?’
‘That’s past death.’
‘That’s pulveronic engulfment.’
Lockie stared at him. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘It’s like decibelic heat-thrash.’
‘What?’
‘Voltageous chordage.’
‘What language are you talking?’
‘Me own, mate. Eggleston’s Heavy Metal Dictionary, Part One.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nope. I’m developing a new way of talking.’
Lockie stood there a moment. This kid with the Olympic pimples was in Year 9 and a bogan, and he was making his own language? A boofhead who was also a genius?
‘You’re not going in, then?’ asked Egg, looking uncomfortably at the sea.
‘No,’ said Lockie. ‘You?’
‘Me? I can’t even swim!’
Lockie scratched his blond mop. This kid was a phenomenon.
It was a bit of a walk back to Lockie’s place, so Egg and Lockie talked to pass the time. They had weird things in common. They were city kids whose fathers got transferred here to the country. Without admitting it, they were both a bit bummed-out and lonely. Their dads had kooky jobs. Lockie and Egg both liked talking, too, and cracking dumb jokes.
Lockie started to like this kid, but he was dead nervous about being seen with him. I mean, the golden-haired surfrat walking along all matey with the black-shirted grunge-monkey. It was definitely bad for his reputation. Well, to hell with his rep, but it was still major culture clash. Lockie looked ahead and tried to see who was coming. He looked for familiar faces from school. He flinched when cars passed. Face it: Egg was a bogan and bogans were the other tribe; they were the enemy. Just why they were the enemy Lockie couldn’t quite recall, but he was loyal to his surfing mates, even though he had none just now. Since Vickie Streeton dropped him like a hot spud, his friends had disappeared.
Lockie and Egg walked along in their different ways. Egg had that mean walk that bogans practise in the mirror. His black DB’s were all over the footpath and his stick-on tattoos were starting to melt. Lockie swung along in his beachbum bounce that surfers polish up in their own mirrors, trying to look like an ad for muesli and Clearasil, but his one stubborn pimple gave him away. His ski-ramp thongs slapped and whumped up the hill. Together they were pretty funny to see, and of course everybody saw them, everyone knew. Angelus was a small town. Word gets out.
At the swamp, Lockie and Egg stopped to look at the shambles of a house the government had generously supplied the Leonard family. It looked like teachers had once lived in it.
‘That’s your place?’
‘Yep.’
‘Wow.’
‘What would be your word for that?’ asked Lockie.
‘Floatatious.’
‘One day it’s gonna be a submarine. The TV aerial will be our periscope.’
‘Wanna come to my place?’
Lockie shrugged. ‘Orright.’ He looked up and down the street. He stuffed his board deep into the reeds of the front yard and threw his towel in after it. Home was giving him the yips anyway.
gg’s place was a bomb site. Lockie didn’t know what to expect, but it sure wasn’t this. The house looked fairly normal from the outside, but inside and out the back it looked like a terrorist attack. Everywhere you looked there was sheet-metal, steel, copper pipes, angle iron, aluminium tubing, rivets, tanks, car parts.
‘As you can see my mum’s into heavy metal as well,’ said Egg sighing.
‘Metal? This is junk.’
‘Ssh! Are you nuts?’
‘Ow!’ winced Lockie. ‘Don’t even say that word!’
In the backyard, past the huge rusting racks that held steel sinks and baths, car bodies and parts, was a big open shed full of sparks. Someone was welding in there.
‘That’s my mum.’
‘Welding?’
‘Women weld too, you know.’
‘I know that,’ said Lockie, lying through his teeth.
‘Come and have a look.’
They stepped into the shed where blue sparks sprayed across the floor and died at their bare feet. Mrs Eggleston threw back her helmet and looked at them. Her face was all red and sweaty.
‘Mum, this is Lockie.’
‘Hello,’ said Lockie, looking at the hissing torch in her hand.
‘How’s your privates?’ She was dead serious.
Lockie looked at Egg, dying. Aaagh!
Egg shrugged.
‘Fine,’ choked out Lockie. ‘Thank you.’
‘You wanna be careful,’ said Mrs Eggleston.
‘Yeah,’ said Lockie. ‘What’re you building?’
‘I don’t build, I create,’ she said and flipped her mask back down and went back to work.
Lockie leapt back from the sparks and the evil hiss of the flame and looked at Egg.
‘She’s a sculptor,’ said Egg. ‘Look.’ He pointed at a pile of Holden wheelrims all welded together with hunks of steel bedframe. That’s called “Autumn”.’
Lockie stared at it. Next to it were two old baths stuck on top of each other. A little sign said, ‘Bathmates’.
‘Is she okay?’
‘Some of the time.’
‘Geez, I’ve got a horrible feeling the Sarge would like this stuff.’ There, just behind, was the clutch plate of a ’67 Cortina stuck on a shopping trolley full of housebricks.
‘Is your dad a welder too?’
Lockie laughed. ‘Sometimes he wishes he was.’
Lockie’s dad saw himself as the last arty policeman. The Sarge said that if only people read poetry and washed their hands after going to the toilet, then the crime rate would fall away. He bored his prisoners into changing their ways.
Egg’s room was the original Heavy Metal den. Across the door was a scrawl in felt pen: BON SCOTT LIVES! The walls were black and smeared with posters of Anthrax, Steve Vai, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and his bed was strewn with CDs and tapes of bands Lockie had never even heard of: Living Colour, Alice in Chains, Fishbone, Galactic Cowboys. In one corner on a silver stand stood a guitar, and beside his bed was an amplifier all kicked and scuffed and black. He wondered if Egg could play it. The room stank of socks and lost undies, underarms and zit cream. Kind of like his own, but more severe.
‘Nice,’ said Lockie, trying not to wrinkle his nose.
‘Well, it’s parent-proof. They hate it in here.’
‘Too cheery for ’em,’ said Lockie, looking at the posters full of black leather, studs, steel, and leering weirdos with guitars and hip boots. He pawed over the CDs sitting on Egg’s swampy bed. All the songs were about war, suicide and the end of the world. Really optimistic – not!
‘Heavy Metal,’ said Lockie, shaking his head.
‘I s’pose you like Madonna,’ said Egg.
‘Wash your mouth out,’ said Lockie, deeply offended. ‘I’m into Van Halen, actually,’
Egg laughed. ‘That’s Easy Listening, mate, mum-and-dad music. You’re a real surfer.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lockie puffing up.
‘It wasn’t really meant as a compliment.’
‘Oh.’
‘I guess you like Midnight Oil, though. They’re okay when they’re a bit grungy.’
Lockie shrugged. ‘I just think of Metal as boofhead music, you know? Panel-van noise.’
‘Snob. Metal is a historical movement. You’ve heard of Jimi Hendrix, maybe? Deep Purple, Led Zep, Black Sabbath. It’s the sound not the uniform.’
‘But Anthrax? Megadeth?’
‘Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere. I was nine. I’m into progressive Metal these days. You know, King’s X, Living Colour and some of that Seattle grunge.’
Lockie just stared. He had absolutely no idea what Egg was on about.
‘Think of it as coffee. Van Halen is coffee with three spoons of sugar. This stuff is having it straight. The real thing.’
Egg slapped a tape into his deck and the most horrendous sound blasted out. It was like being sucked into the engines of a jumbo jet.
Someone appeared at the door. A little guy in a cardigan with an earring. He smiled briefly at Lockie and hammered on the doorframe but it was something you could only watch, not hear. This little bloke with the earring had a sort of slumped over defeated look about him, a sad look. In the end he went away.
‘Who was that?’ Lockie mouthed across the music.
‘My dad,’ mimed Egg.
Lockie’s eyes widened. What a family.
Out of the window, propped up against the fence, Lockie saw a long, cigar-shaped piece of tin. Another sculpture, he guessed. But it had two holes in it. Lockie went over to the window and looked more closely. It was a kayak.
Egg turned the music off. ‘What?’
‘A kayak.’
‘Yeah, Mum made it.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘It’s called a kayak that Mum made.’
‘I’ve got an idea . . . ’
‘It’s got a trailer, a bike trailer to tow it.’
‘Does it float?’
‘Never tried it. Mum was going through a phase, you know, trying to please me.’
‘Did it work?’
Egg shook his head. ‘Can’t swim. Neither can Dad. And she’s too busy with her own stuff. What am I s’posed to do with a two-hole kayak on me own?’
Lockie grabbed him by the arm. ‘Let’s go!’
ll the way through town, Egg towed that huge silver rocket of a thing on his trailer made of pram wheels and a bedframe while Lockie followed up behind, laughing all the way. People nearly drove off the road perving at them. It looked like two kids with an Exocet missile. Mrs Eggleston certainly built things to last. Egg’s kayak was solid as a nuclear submarine. Going down hills, Lockie hoped Egg wouldn’t have to brake suddenly. If that thing got going . . . He imagined it launching itself off the trailer, cutting Egg in half like a watermelon, and blasting into space.
Lockie thought about that so much he didn’t notice Egg stopping in front of the town hall, slamming on the brakes to let some old lady make it over the crosswalk. He didn’t even have time to brake. He ran up the back of the kayak, buried the wheels in the seat holes and left the bike altogether. Egg passed below him in a blur of pimples and Lockie collected the poor old lady on his way down. She broke his fall, you might say. Saved him a broken arm. He lay on the zebra crossing wondering if he’d killed an old age pensioner. Was he a granny slayer at thirteen? Imagine his joy when the old girl got up and started flogging into him with her handbag.
‘Once a torpedo, always a torpedo!’ someone familiar called.
Lockie looked around. Horns were parping at them now and the old lady was running out of puff on him. He knew that voice. His heart sank. There across the road in front of the town hall was Vicki Streeton. He wanted to dig into the asphalt and keep going till he got to Siberia but he had to get up, pull his buckled crate out of the kayak and clear the road.
They rode down to the harbour on the sheltered side of the peninsula where there were no waves and where the water wasn’t quite so blue. Some kids fishing at the jetty saw them pass and Lockie flinched a bit, hoping they didn’t see him.
At the water’s edge, Lockie sat in the kayak and pleaded.
‘Come on, Egg, it’s safe. See, no leaks. Your mum’s an artist.’
‘I just can’t.’
‘There’s nothing to be nervous about. You can’t fall out of this. See, you’re tucked into a hole.’
‘What if it rolls over?’
‘This is the harbour, Egg. We’re not going surfing on it. There’s no rapids. Besides, you couldn’t roll this thing without a winch anyway. This is a naval class craft. This is the original poo barge.’
‘I’ve got this thing about sharks.’
Lockie clanged the side of the kayak. ‘Mate. What sort of shark would try this on? This could be an icebreaker, a mine sweeper.’
‘A coffin?’
‘Geez, you’re real cheery, Egg.’
‘What about just in the shallow, then? For a start?’
Lockie sighed. ‘Orright, jump in.’
‘Just in the shallow.’
‘Mate, if you fall out, I promise all that’ll happen is you’ll hit your head on the shore.’
Egg stood there a moment, his zits inflamed with worry, and then he finally sat down and took off his black ripple-soled desert boots.
That’s when Lockie saw his toes for the first time. On each foot there was something not quite right, there weren’t enough toes. No, now that he looked – stared more like it – he saw that two toes of each foot were joined together.
‘Hammer toes,’ said Egg blushing till his zits went neon. ‘I’m a Friday model.’
‘Friday?’
‘You know, like cars. A car built on a Friday is always junk. Everyone’s always in a hurry to get it done and knock off for the weekend. I figure God was a bit distracted.’
Lockie looked at Egg and saw how miserable he was with himself. He really liked him.
‘Get in.’
Egg got in with all the excitement of a sack of spuds, and Lockie pushed off. He passed a paddle forward to him and realized that Mrs Eggleston wasn’t exactly a total genius. The paddles were made of steel. Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t paddle with these things.
They got going somehow and Egg seemed to relax. The shallow end of the Harbour was dotted with half-sunk dinghies and riverboats with mountains of bird poop growing on them. Here and there was a submerged pram or a few tyres. On the surface, schools of plastic bags floated gracefully. It really stank. Angelus Harbour smelt like the boys’ toilets in any school across the world.
Lockie steered them out into deeper water, looking for something alive. There were no fish down there darting like sparrows way beneath them, that was for sure.
Then Egg got panicky and dropped his paddle. It sank like a brick and disappeared into the mud far below.
‘Oops.’ Oops? Flamin’ oops?
Lockie spent the rest of the morning chauf-feuring Egg around the harbour. His arms ached, but he enjoyed himself. Half the time they just floated about, lying with their heads on the warm tin casing of Mrs Eggleston’s creation, finding out how different they were. Lockie liked yoghurt, summer, fluoro yellow, ‘Northern Exposure’, dolphins and The Big Blue. Egg was into choc-milk, winter, serious black, ‘Roseanne’, dung beetles and This is Spinal Tap. But they both hurled at the thought of Whacko Jacko, organized sport, advertising and Reeboks. It was a freaky meeting of minds.
‘You still got the hots for Vicki Streeton?’ murmured Egg as they drifted.
‘Me? No. Yes. Well. I dunno. We had some fun. Didn’t work out, you know.’
‘You know I’ve never even had a girlfriend?’
‘Really?’
‘Fourteen, and I’ve never had a chick.’
‘They don’t like that, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Being chicks. And birds. And babes.’
‘How come?’
‘I dunno. Women. Who can understand ’em?’
‘Yeah. Absolutely.’
Lockie smiled. He figured he could tell this kid anything. Egg was a thoughtful kind of guy, a smart bloke. This kid might end up being the best friend he ever had.
‘I didn’t expect your old man to have an earring.’
‘Dad sees himself as a bit of a groover.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh, depressed.’
‘I thought ministers were sort of . . . jolly all the time.’
‘Oh, Dad has a hard time, I s’pose. Mum and him don’t get on anymore. She doesn’t wanna be a minister’s wife. The church isn’t too keen on him either. I reckon they’re tryin’ to get rid of him.’
‘Cause of an earring?’
‘No, he’s just not what they had in mind.’ Egg sighed and watched a mob of seagulls turnin
g in the sky above them. ‘And Mum and Dad just sort of hang together like two lumps of Play-doh. I think they’re waiting for me to grow up and leave home so they can split.’
‘What a bummer.’
‘Yeah. I guess.’
Lockie felt the kayak brushing into a bank of reeds where the water was really foul.
‘What about that music? Doesn’t it make you feel worse?’
‘No, not really. It kind of blasts you into numbness. It’s more voidage than drasticality.’
‘Voidage?’
‘Blank, you know.’
‘Oh.’ Lockie thought about it. He was an optimist. He couldn’t help it. Even at his worst Lockie still saw hope in things – he was that kind of kid. But he didn’t have hammer toes and world series zits and parents who didn’t like each other. Lockie didn’t feel awkward just walking in public (unless it was with Egg). He was reasonably good looking and the only zit he had moved around his face like a nomad, camping for a day on his chin, moving overnight to the corner of his mouth to get out of the wind. Lockie had it easy compared to Egg. He was no genius, but he knew how lucky he was.
‘What about . . . drasticality?’
Egg laughed. ‘It means topping yourself, you know.’
‘Suicide? Geez, Egg!’
‘Calm down, son.’
‘You don’t think about that do you?’
Lockie sat up and looked at him. Egg lay there in front of him with his eyes closed against the blue sky. After a long time, Egg murmured. ‘I have. Now and then.’
‘Geez.’ Lockie didn’t know what else to say. He lay back worried and thoughtful, looking at the sky, smelling the stinky water and hearing the reeds scrape by the tin canoe. A pouring sound, a kind of gurgling came from somewhere back in the reeds. It got louder all the time, and the water got smellier. Lockie eyes began to water.
‘Whew,’ said Egg. ‘Was that you?’
‘Get out of here,’ said Lockie. ‘Not even the Sarge could do that.’
The canoe began to snag in great slimy wads of algae. Lockie sat up and poled them through the green shallows where the reeds suddenly gave way to a paddock of floating grunge. It looked like a football team of giants had blown their noses into this corner of the harbour. Lockie began to feel queasy. He poled them right up beside a huge pipe that spewed into the waterway. On the algae-choked bank lay dead crabs and fish all snagged in weed so thick you could almost walk on it.