The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  The women treated the Dutch lady baker with respect, too, considering she was a foreigner and slim-legged and made her bread deliveries wearing short shorts all year round. (Although, being Dutch and fair, and on our side in the war, she was regarded as only semi-foreign.) I admired her after she told me one day about her wartime years. When she was twelve years old, during the Nazi occupation of Holland, she’d crept out every night after curfew, past armed German soldiers, to fossick through garbage heaps for vegetable peelings to feed her family.

  ‘We ate potato peels every night for six months,’ she said. They seemed to have done her good. She never stopped running.

  She and her husband had bought the bakery in Waratah Avenue. He made the bread and pastries and she did the deliveries. She urged Dutch macaroons and almond pastries on us. I wanted to like her macaroons and pastries because of the Nazis and the potato peels, but even though I kept urging my mother to buy them I thought they tasted strange and I never finished one of them.

  When the Dutch lady baker and her husband acquired the bakery business the deal had included the horse and cart. The old draught horse knew the baker’s route well but perhaps she didn’t know draught horses. One day it went mad at a particular flick of the reins and bolted down the Adelma Road hill, carrying the cart and the Dutch lady baker across Waratah Avenue, and through the window of the grocery store. The horse had to be put down, and she ended up in hospital. When she was better she and her husband sold the bakery, got out of bread deliveries and concentrated on their macaroons. They sold them to people who appreciated them more than I did, and they prospered.

  The back door had a sort of tyranny. At the front door the householder was in charge, in a stronger position to decline what was being offered. But the common belief was that locking your doors was ridiculous and showed an untrustworthy, inhospitable nature. It could prevent friends from walking unexpectedly into your home with armfuls of beer.

  Not only was the back door never locked, it was rarely closed. Only the swinging fly-wire screen door kept out the world. People appearing at the back door caught the householder unawares, maybe only partly dressed. While the front door was public, the back door was more intimate. The caller was almost over the threshold. A back-door caller couldn’t be seen from the street. Any lurker could bowl up to the back door.

  The greengrocer was a lurker, but he buttock-bumped the door open with the confident energy of the lover. Wide-bummed and five feet three, with an Errol Flynn pencil-moustache, he bandaged wedges of lemon to his arms and neck to treat his chronic boils, and he lusted after my mother.

  I didn’t like his chances. He’d stood too close to her for comfort a couple of times, squeezing her hand as she paid for the fruit and vegetables, calling her ‘beautiful lady’ and brushing his grubby bandage lumps against her.

  Fortunately he telegraphed his arrival. Now whenever she heard him grunting up the back steps, wincing as he bumped a boil on the door frame, she dropped what she was doing and broke into a run. I was sent to deal with him and she lay low in the bedroom until he was gone.

  I almost felt sorry for him. The proud way he lifted the box of greens from his shoulder and set it down on the kitchen table, it could have been an elk or wildebeest he’d killed himself. He stood there panting, wiping his dripping face on the most convenient of his bandages and waiting with beaming anticipation for something wonderful to happen.

  As the seconds ticked by and his spiky breath and body odour filled the kitchen, his smile slowly faded as he realised that the cash in my outstretched hand meant the transaction was over. There would be no appearance today of the desired one.

  Lovelorn, he peered abjectly around me into the recesses of the house, craving to enter. ‘Again she’s not home?’ he’d say accusingly. ‘Always she’s out! I have special present for her of strawberries. She like mushrooms? Rockmelon?’ He was desperate now and agitatedly twisting the lemon wedge on the back of his neck. ‘Tell me what she like best and I get it! Anything! Tell me and I bring it next week!’

  I was quite proud that my mother was attractive to men but one night at Perth’s Luna Park it unnerved me, too. We were all enjoying ourselves at the funfair when a young man stepped out of the crowd, touched my mother’s shoulder and said, ‘If you’ve already got a fellow it’s bad luck for me.’

  He was courtly and half-drunk but she was a good sport, laughing and saying, ‘Yes, I’ve got three fellows, and here they are.’

  ‘Well, you’re still the best-looking woman in Luna Park, and I’m the best shot. None of these buggers can shoot!’ He presented her with the box of chocolates he’d just won at the shooting gallery. ‘I want you to have these.’

  She smiled blithely. ‘Thank you, but I couldn’t.’

  We ignored him and kept moving. But her declining the chocolates only prolonged his attentions. ‘I want you to have them! A girl like you deserves presents. Come with me and I’ll show you how to shoot.’ I thought: A girl? Doesn’t he realise she’s getting on?

  Our progress was jerky now. He was following us, poking the chocolate box at her and paying her ardent compliments. He was jarring our nerves. Billy looked worried and took her hand.

  And now my father turned and took in the young stranger with a quizzical look, as if he were trying to place him. The boy was tall, red-skinned and rangy, with angry acne across his cheekbones, and the look of a farmer or a serviceman in unfamiliar city clothes. My father had a tense half-smile on his face but he was still giving the boy the benefit of the doubt. He said quietly, ‘She said she doesn’t want them. Thanks, anyway.’

  ‘I’m talking to the young lady, not you,’ the boy said.

  My father’s face went pink. ‘But I’m talking to you, son,’ he said. His voice was still quiet but his eyes bulged alarmingly. ‘My wife’s here with her family, trying to have a nice time. Don’t spoil it for her.’

  The boy was young and big, and in his face you could see his brain ticking over. The cogs were whirring slowly. His jaw clenched and then he gripped the box of chocolates like a weapon. He shifted on his feet while he weighed things up.

  Billy whined, ‘What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, dear,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll have fun again in a minute.’

  The boy blinked and drew a long breath. ‘Whew!’ he said. He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Hah! I get the picture!’ He dropped his shoulders, and the chocolate box almost dragged on the ground. ‘Sorry to have bothered you, lady. You too, sir.’

  ‘Forget it,’ my father said, and moved us off.

  ‘Have a nice evening,’ my mother said.

  ‘I don’t get down to town much!’ The boy’s voice trailed after us. ‘Still learning the ropes!’

  I’d hated him a minute before and now I felt sorry for him.

  My feeling about the woman at the bus stop was more complicated. My father was about to drop me off at school one morning on his way to work when he pulled in to a bus stop and picked up a woman. He often stopped to give lifts to people he knew and to friends of mine. Because they’d been expecting a crowded bus, not a comfortable car ride, they were usually pleasantly surprised and grateful.

  I thought it was strange this woman didn’t seem surprised. She took the lift for granted. I was sitting in the back seat. She gave a small smile as she opened the car door and slid into the front seat beside him. She was buxom and looked quite old to me, but she was probably my parents’ age. It was obvious she knew him but they didn’t call each other by name and he didn’t introduce us.

  That evening for some reason I remembered the lift and chattily mentioned it to my mother. I would have forgotten about the woman if it hadn’t been for the row that night. He never forgave me.

  One morning a man I hadn’t seen before appeared in our back yard carrying two dining-room chairs and said to me, ‘You’ll get warts doing that.’

  It was the August school holidays and I was kneeling on the back veranda fixi
ng a puncture in my front tyre. (I’d discovered Dunlop bicycle tyres weren’t totally invincible.) I had the bike turned upside down, resting on its handlebars and seat. While I was waiting for the rubber-cement to set on the patched tube, I was pumping the bicycle pump against my wrist so it made a squeaky farting noise.

  I couldn’t understand what he said. I just looked at him, so he said it again. I felt uncomfortable. When I did hear him correctly, I thought: What sort of stupid superstition is that? Warts from a bike pump?

  Apparently he worked for Dunlop, and he was smiling, so I couldn’t contradict him. Especially because of his appearance and voice. He was about five feet six or seven. He had a harelip and the talking-through-the-nose voice that went with it. You were polite to people who looked like that. No one would have guessed right off he was saying ‘warts’. I thought he was saying ‘horse’. But then ‘warts’ wasn’t a word you expected to hear from a clear-speaking stranger either.

  I pumped out a couple of lesser fart-squeaks on my arm while I considered all this, and then I said, ‘I thought it was frogs that gave you warts.’ I didn’t really think that either.

  Was he trying to be funny? He had an odd, half-smiling, half-frowning expression, probably caused by his dark eyebrows almost joining in the middle. ‘Don’t know about frogs,’ he said seriously, ‘but a bike pump’ll do it.’ He trotted nimbly up the stairs in his thin-soled shoes, as soft and as soundless as dancing pumps, and put down the chairs. ‘It’s the concentrated air pressure on the skin.’

  It took me a while to understand that, too.

  Then he winked. ‘I’m Eric. What do they call you?’

  I told him my name and we shook hands. Then he said, ‘Back in a sec,’ and pattered down the stairs, his wide trouser cuffs flapping. In a minute he returned with another two chairs. ‘Phew,’ he said. ‘Throwing a big dinner party, eh? Where are you off to on the bike?’

  ‘The beach,’ I said. Actually, what my friends and I did was ride our bikes up to Stirling Highway, leave them leaning against the fence of Christ Church, and then hitch a ride down the highway to the ocean.

  ‘Which beach?’ he asked. The eyebrow and mouth combination was disconcerting. It made his face look apologetic and angry at the same time. I told him North Cottesloe.

  ‘Really?’ He looked at me accusingly but still smiling as well. ‘That’s a Neddies’ beach.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Where the Nedheads go, the snobs from Nedlands.’ Still the smile.

  It was just a small ocean beach enclosed by reefs and two wooden ramps, a place to bodysurf. But now I felt uncomfortable that I swam there. I didn’t want to do anything snobby or conservative. On the contrary, I was cultivating a rebellious teenage image. I was growing out my Kramer cut. At that moment I was barefoot and wearing tightly pegged jeans with a pink shirt hanging over them.

  ‘It’s the closest beach,’ I muttered. I was embarrassed and self-conscious, and annoyed that I was.

  ‘Get yourself a motorbike then. Get a Harley like me.’

  ‘Sure.’ I hoped it sounded sarcastic. ‘I’m thirteen.’

  ‘So?’ While he was talking he was taking in his surroundings. We’d finally moved out of Leon Road. On being made State manager my father had bought a block of land in Circe Circle, half a mile away, and built a house. After the crumbling Sefton bungalow my mother was desperate for a ‘contemporary home’. Its design had appeared in the architecture section of the West Australian. It had pinkish-coloured bricks and a skillion roof and was shaped like an H, with the letter’s crossbar, the veranda terrace where Eric and I were standing now, connecting the living and the sleeping sections of the house. My mother had insisted on big ceiling-to-floor windows.

  The boss’s house, eh. He looked interested but not overly impressed. It was just a suburban house, built in the modern style. After a moment, he said, ‘Scarborough Beach’s the best,’ and added nonchalantly, ‘I’m in the surf club.’

  I wasn’t too happy with the drift of the conversation although being a ‘clubbie’, a Scarborough lifesaver, was pretty impressive. The beach was bigger at Scarborough, the surf was better and often more treacherous. That wasn’t all. Scarborough was the centre of Perth’s teenage myth. It was the home of the legendary Snake Pit, a notorious patch of beachfront cement where older, tougher, more reckless and even more extravagantly dressed teenagers jived to a jukebox. It was where the motorbike gangs congregated at the end of a satisfying sweep of intimidation along the West Coast Highway or Scarborough Beach Road. Rumours had also filtered down from older boys that it was the best pickup place in the whole city.

  Naturally the only time I’d seen the teenage-evil side of Scarborough was in the embarrassing company of my mother. During a hot Sunday drive we’d gone into a barn-like milk bar on the beachfront for drinks and icecreams. Inside, a chunky lout was amusing his cronies, impressing girls and outraging older customers by sauntering among them while combing his hair and repeating in a falsetto voice, ‘Rape! Rape!’

  The word was like an electric shock. I couldn’t believe someone was saying ‘rape’ in public or that I’d heard it in the company of my mother. I hadn’t got over seeing the word in print – in my friend Stephen ‘Sten’ Gunn’s father’s law books. When Sten’s parents were out we pored over them, searching for real-life sex crimes. You had to wade through a lot of boring pages about torts and jurisprudence but now and then there was a payoff.

  Astonishing as it seemed, we discovered that women were occasionally convicted of sexually assaulting teenage boys. (We shook our heads in disbelief. The boys complained?) And, according to some judge or other, thirteen-year-old boys were too young to be charged with rape. Interesting stuff, although Sten and I were mildly indignant – and personally flattered – at this particular legal decision. We were thirteen. And, boy, were we technically convictable, we told each other.

  The boy in the milk bar had more words in him yet. ‘Breast!’ he said loudly. ‘Breassst!’ His hair was thickly oiled and he tousled the front of it so it fell down over his forehead and then he looked up through the greasy curls and brayed, ‘Raaape! Breassst! Sexsss!’

  I was in awe of his mad confidence. How could those loaded words be flying around the room without something drastic happening – his instant arrest or the immediate closure of the milk bar? When he’d finished saying them they didn’t go away. They had so much thick, sly power they hung in the air like dog farts.

  ‘See what I mean?’ my mother muttered, her lips tight, as we fronted the counter. ‘Did you see?’

  What I could see, through a smoky haze, was tough youths with greased hair and girls indeed with breasts, breasts so pointed they might have had pencils in their bras, all smoking cigarettes and slurping milkshakes. They were also belching competitively like eight-year-olds, shoplifting chocolates, mock-punching, swearing profusely, pawing each other exhibitionistically, jigging to the jukebox and shoving forward to the counter so they could hoot orders to the harassed proprietor.

  ‘What?’ I said. The din was incredible. I couldn’t credit that I was with my mother in this place. The air stank of body odour, hair oil and sex – smells of danger and excitement. I was self-conscious, embarrassed and generally awestruck. I stared straight ahead and for the first time in my life hoped I looked younger than my age. A welcome thought from primary school flashed back: No one hits you if you’re with your mother.

  ‘That boy is wearing desert boots,’ she said. She rested her case.

  For some reason I wanted to regain lost ground now. I wanted to impress Eric the Scarborough lifesaver. ‘I’m going for my bronze next year,’ I blurted. I was a good enough swimmer for the surf swim but you had to turn fourteen to be eligible to be tested for your bronze lifesaving medallion. ‘I’ve done the drills.’

  ‘That so?’ He eyed me up and down. I was taller than he was, but I was skinnier. He’d rolled up his sleeves; his forearms and biceps had mature muscles. He must have been in his
late twenties, older than the run-of-the-mill Scarborough bad boys. And, in those elastic-sided shoes and flapping cuffs, a laughably out-of-date dresser. He didn’t seem to care. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Hope I’m never drowning. Just joking.’

  It was on his third journey up the stairs that he gave my shirt the once-over. It was an old business shirt of my father’s, previously white and now dyed shocking-pink. I’d concentrated the dye so it was almost fluorescent. The shirt swam on me; the shirt-tail nearly touched the backs of my knees. My father had said, disapprovingly, ‘He looks like a lampshade.’ Nevertheless until this moment I’d thought that wearing a billowing hotter-than-pink shirt was a good idea. It was the fashion, the popular rebellious colour. It was the look I was after.

  ‘Fill me in, boss,’ he said, confidingly, setting down the chairs. ‘What’s the deal with the shirt? Are you a commo or what?’

  I could feel my face go hot. I felt young and dopey. I thought: You don’t look big enough to be a Scarborough lifesaver, but I didn’t say it. I muttered, ‘It’s just a shirt.’

  He blinked, or maybe it was another wink. ‘I don’t suppose you could spare a glass of water?’ he said.

  When I came back with the water he was sitting on my bike although I hadn’t replaced the wheel yet. He’d turned it right side up, so it was resting on the front forks. He was straddling it and gripping the handlebars. ‘Vroom, vroom,’ he said. ‘Here I come. Look out, you little North Cottesloe molls!’

  ‘You’ll break it!’

  ‘I’m not putting any weight on it. What do you call this flash sort of bike anyway?’

  That uncomfortable feeling again. ‘A dirt-tracker.’