Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  Ride up a back alley and stand on your bike’s crossbar and you could lean over a fence and steal peaches and catch a glimpse of a svelte mother in a petticoat and be away, pumping the pedals, shirt tucked in and bulging with fruit, wondering at the emerging skerrick of fascination you felt at a bare-legged woman.

  These days I can think of no good reason for joining a club whose only stated purpose is to collect and store urine in bottles. Maybe no such clubs exist anymore. Perhaps they have gone the way of gentlemen’s clubs, hunt clubs and Masonic Halls. But if they do exist I wouldn’t become a member. I’ve paid my dues. Urine has no real value. You can corner the market and still not be king. It is not rare, it has no medicinal properties, nor is it an additive, a taste enhancer, a fixative or a cleanser. Apparently you can drink it if you’re lost in a desert. But I wasn’t lost in a desert.

  Many times I’d heard Dad’s friend Lucky Simson say about various people, ‘I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, Lucky.’ He called everyone ‘Lucky’. And he said this so often I developed a notion his acquaintances routinely burst into flame and required his hydraulic ministrations. The way he told it, there was some line of demarcation visible to adults, and the people you would piss on if they were on fire were on one side of it, and the people you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire were on the other.

  But as a boy I didn’t know who to piss on if they spontaneously combusted. This worried me. But I wasn’t a good-hearted boy, and I think I would have let most people who weren’t family burn.

  Through long contemplation of my second-grade teacher, Miss Scott, I realised people’s salvation depended largely on how they were treating you at the moment of combustion. If she was making me do my seven-times table I wouldn’t piss on her if she went up in a ball of blue flame. But if she was reading us a story in which the Three Investigators were deducing their way to victory over greasy horse thieves, then I would have hosed her head to toe in a trice and told her to mop her brow and read on. At such times I was often holding my dick unconsciously through my shorts, just so as to have my equipment ready. I guess Miss Scott will never know what a state of grace she lived in, that my benevolent reservoir was always hovering, at her disposal should a vengeful Lord light her up.

  I joined the Wee Club because my eldest sister, Debbie, told me to and said boys were the most important members of wee clubs because boys had dicks and could wee more accurately than girls could, and that made them, she said with Darwinian acuity, ‘especially well adapted’.

  Weeing in a bottle wasn’t a skill I’d given much weight to before Debbie declared it a God-given male dexterity. I hadn’t, to that point, been especially enamoured of accuracy and could hardly care if I hit the toilet bowl or not. After she complimented me on my marksmanship, though, I considered myself a sharpshooter to rival the Sundance Kid, who could hurry a rock across a corral with six consecutive bullets. Little did I know signing up to her Wee Club was like signing up to a voyage with Captain Cook – as his ship’s goat. I was force-fed fluids until I bloated and bleated with the need to exude and extrude. Debbie, once her stocks of urine began to build, became insatiable.

  We had a large garden and down the back behind a hedge was a shed that had become an aviary and then become a shed again after our finches were eaten by a snake. Dad was at work when the snake ate the finches. On hearing our screams and me, at five, yelling, ‘A fucking snake,’ Mr Quinlan came over with a shovel and put me on his shoulders and told me to quieten down. He lifted a sack and killed the snake, which had gorged itself torpid on our beloved pets. He cut off its head and ran his hand down its length in a choke hold from the tail end to the bloody neck as dead and drenched finches popped out one by one: Goldy, Rankin, Tweets, Small One, Big One, Zebby, Whitey … This snake had caught and swallowed twenty finches. We buried them in a mass grave, a tissue box, in the empty block next door, and I threw the snake over Mrs Spivey’s fence. When she found it days later I guess she thought it was alive, because she yelled the same thing I had when I found it swallowing finches.

  Now, in the time after finches, we put on amateur theatrical productions in the shed, and it became HQ for clubs we formed for the same reason people always form clubs, to deny membership to persons we were down on. We probably started three or four clubs a month that had no purpose other than the pleasure of telling Pigsy he wasn’t allowed to join, because he didn’t understand the finer duplicities of international espionage, or because he couldn’t empathise with Superman’s heart-wrenching loss at leaving his parents and planet so young, or he didn’t know just how much salt was needed nor what technique required to tan a tiger-snake skin. One club we denied him entry to because he had a foreskin, which, in hindsight, seems very adult of us.

  Pigsy lived across a vacant block at the end of our crescent. He was an only child and his mother was lorded over and browbeaten by his tyrannous father. His father didn’t work. Nor did he have any friends. He owned flats and rode round on a rusty old girls’ bike to inspect them and collect rent and boss his tenants around. Whenever he saw me he’d say, ‘Hello, young Cameron. What have they been feeding you on, nuts and bolts?’ He drank champagne in his air-conditioned living room watching black-and-white TV alone, and he slept in an air-conditioned bedroom alone.

  Pigsy and his mother spent their time in the uncooled kitchen in a sullen conspiracy that never bore fruit. Mr Pigott drove a gargantuan American sedan with canvas covering the seats. Mrs Pigott didn’t drive and when she was allowed in the car she sat in the back, while Pigsy sat proudly up front next to his dad. If I went anywhere with them I sat in the back with Mrs Pigott.

  Pigsy played the game from both ends. He would damn his father behind his back while he sat with his mother in the kitchen, then join his father’s misuse of his mother when they were all three together. Partly he was mimicking his father, and partly he was showing off to me.

  Even I, a boy of six, a known sod with no rights, the lowliest of the low, was able to boss Mrs Pigott around if I wanted. Get me a banana Saturn with nutmeg grated on top. I want some ice cream. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I never felt anything but sorrow for her. My own mother was an unpredictable woman, important enough to have her hair built big in Hilda’s Salon; you treated her with the same caution you treated a drunk who’d dug up a grenade. I’d never seen a mother treated that way.

  Whenever Mrs Pigott and I were alone together, when Pigsy was in another room at a piano lesson, or outside mowing the lawn, I spoke softly to her and, though it was her habit to wait on people hand and foot, I never let her do anything for me. And, because you couldn’t say such things to adults, I spent a lot of time trying, with temple-throbbing concentration, to stare a beam of goodwill at her that would make her feel better and let her know she was all right and I liked her.

  The stare was mostly at the back of her head while she was ironing clothes or making pies, and it was supposed to seep into her brain and make it glow with a kind of holy contentment. Sometimes I’d get locked into the stare, my head would quiver and my eyes cross with concentration and I’d see a beam of care reaching out for her, irradiating her with happiness. And sometimes she’d turn around and catch me with this white-lipped trance on my face as I stared at her. At such moments she must have thought me a very strange boy. What did I want from her, ogling her as audaciously as a hypnotist skewers a chook?

  Pigsy, having no brothers and sisters, spent a lot of time at my place using mine. He was in our house most days. At private family times he would lounge silently as a lizard so as not to be noticed. Dad would see him in his sly hibernation and say, ‘Peter, we’re having dinner. Go home.’

  The Wee Club set up its HQ in the garden shed alongside the sandpit. Debbie was the president and Vicki and I were the members. Pigsy was permitted to join when Debbie realised that I, a scrawny boy, wasn’t going to be able to brew enough product for a clientele, or a war, or for whatever other reason the wee might be required.


  Pigsy was seven, becoming a man, and unsure about bringing out his dick in front of my sisters and filling jars with urine at their command. Being newly proud of my hydraulic dexterity I found his bashfulness perplexing. ‘Go on, Pigsy.’

  ‘Why do they have to watch?’ He pointed at my sisters.

  ‘Listen, Pigsy,’ Debbie told him, ‘if you want to be in the club you have to do it with witnesses. We know you, and we don’t trust you. You’ll probably go home and squeeze yellow crepe paper into water and bring it back and tell us it’s wee.’ I looked at Pigsy open-mouthed at this rank deception. What a sneaky kid. Later, after the break-up of the club, I found out all the wee Debbie and Vicki supplied was counterfeit, manufactured with yellow crepe paper squeezed in water.

  ‘The wee has to be authentic,’ Debbie told him. ‘Otherwise it’s not a proper wee club. So I have to witness it for authenticity.’

  ‘Witness for … But we don’t get to watch you. You just bring it out of your house already in a jar.’ He pointed at the house and then at a jar.

  ‘Are you a weirdo? Wanting to watch girls do wee?’

  ‘I don’t want to watch …’

  ‘Good, then wee in this jar and be quiet or you can go home and start your own wee club with just you and your stupid father,’ Debbie said. ‘I bet his wee is old and foul.’

  Pigsy’s face went red and he looked down at his feet. It was excruciating to have his father’s private bodily functions brought up in public, his father’s actual penis brought into the conversation by implication. Debbie was adept at psychological warfare. She held out a Vegemite jar. ‘Here.’

  Debbie and Vicki served us water, and when we couldn’t drink any more of that, they sweetened it with Cottee’s 50-50 cordial, which we liked more than water, and, even overhydrated already, could drink freely. We jumped up and down and you could hear liquid sloshing in our bellies. Eventually, we shook our heads at cordial, so Debbie fetched a large bottle of Marchants lemonade, which, the bright-teethed children in party frocks and Brylcreem on the TV ads sang, was ‘sparkle … arkle … arkling’ and which I wasn’t allowed to drink except one glass on Saturday morning, and which I usually traded to Guy or Debbie for them telling me I was their favourite brother. The catchy TV jingle and the fact we usually weren’t allowed to drink the stuff made it irresistible.

  Pigsy and I drank Marchants lemonade unto a sparkle … arkle … arkling belly ache. Not long after we’d skolled that bottle we began to holler for jars. Even with my noted marksmanship a jar was a more suitable receptacle for the panicky overture of this deluge than a bottle. We dropped our shorts and Debbie turned on a garden tap as a subliminal giddy-up.

  But I needed no subliminal giddy-up. I frothily filled a Vegemite jar as Pigsy stood alongside me and filled another. We boasted about what was to come. ‘I haven’t even started.’ ‘I’ve got lots more.’ ‘You maybe should time me with a stopwatch, this could be a record.’ ‘Bring me a bucket.’ ‘Bring me a bushfire.’ The deflation of our distended bladders was so palpable we laughed out loud as we pissed.

  Vicki decanted the contents of the Vegemite jars into a Vickers Gin bottle using Mum’s kitchen funnel, while we filled peanut butter jars. By the time these were full she had our Vegemite jars empty and ready to go again. She was a clumsy girl and throughout the life of the Wee Club her hands and frock were sodden with spillage and she gave off a stale fug that made me blink sharply.

  Debbie, being president of Wee Club, wasn’t hands on with the product itself. She stood back out of the spray with pride lighting her face and her hands cupped beneath her chin like a Krupp or a Ford whose many years of blue-sky thinking, meticulous design and precise engineering were finally paying off in the form of groundbreaking, next-generation merchandise. She had cornered the market on piss. She was its supreme mogul and monopolist and must have gone to bed at night comforted knowing that no girl for towns around had a vault of urine to compare with hers.

  Force-feeding Pigsy and me juices, cordials, pop drinks and flavoured milks in this way, it was only a little over a month before we had more than a hundred and fifty Vickers Gin bottles filled and capped and shelved and ageing sweetly in our shed. My sisters brought their wee from the house and placed it on the lower shelves away from ours. They seemed to lack faith in its vintage. I understood this. Ours was made with lemonade and laughter, shot gold and steaming into Vegemite jars on clear blue summer days. Theirs was smuggled shamefully from indoors beneath their cardigans. It was over-yellow and cool to the touch. Girl wee. Destined for the bottom shelves, never uncorked for its bouquet, nor held to the sun for its lustre.

  In our HQ my sisters walked along the shelves of urine admiring the way the sun caught and flashed on the limitlessly faceted glass of the Vickers bottles and flared a variety of yellows and golds that would have beggared Aladdin’s few baubles. Debbie would sometimes take a bottle off a shelf and unscrew the top and sniff it showily and pucker her lips in enquiry before announcing, ‘Boyboy … first piss of the morning … pot roast the night before.’

  She had the swagger of a connoisseur. I was amazed at how fast she had learnt the game. She’d uncap another bottle. ‘Pigsy … after beetroot for lunch.’

  Pigsy and I also took pride in the groaning shelves weighted with our water. But it came at a cost. She worked us hard, with barely a day’s rest. We took Vegemite jars to bed with us. We were run covertly round the clock like a couple of hillbilly stills, and our moonshine was warehoused for we knew not what. Some future in which piss might be myrrh? Some bright day on which the Prime Minister would announce the end of the pound and the introduction of the pint-of-piss as our new currency and thereby make us Midas?

  After a month Pigsy and I couldn’t see the point. My stomach was sore and I figured my bladder was now large as a li-lo. I felt wounded, gutshot. I checked myself in the mirror and was appalled to see I was developing a pot belly in miniature replica of some of the town’s infamous barflies.

  The Wee Club ran out of steam, as it were, after about a month and a half, when all the shelves were stocked and we gazed on it with waning pride as we began to realise our hoarded piss, though pretty as jewels, was valueless. We couldn’t show it off or boast of it, we had to keep it a secret. So there wasn’t even any real value in it as transgression. And wee is readily available if one requires it. There seems no need to store vast quantities against a rainy day or a nuclear winter.

  One morning out by the sheds as Pigsy fired his sudsy night-time micturition into a jar he said, ‘This is stupid.’ My doubts crystallised around his words and I realised it was. I could be inside eating toast and here I was screwing the lid on a jar of warm wee for Vicki to decant. Stupid. Debbie was stupid. She was mad with the lust for our golden water. But you crossed Debbie at your peril. When she said ‘piss’ we either produced a golden parabola a rat could run up, or an intricate vengeance awaited. Everyone was scared of Debbie.

  They became a brooding danger out there in the shed, those hundred or so maturing varietals. By the middle of that second month visualising catastrophe became routine for me.

  My Uncle Jim was a home brewer whose beer often exploded in his laundry, staining Aunty Norma’s petticoats and sending him to the doghouse. What if our wee exploded? My early-morning brews were as frothy as the pilsner that regularly wrecked his laundry and domesticity. What if it was as chemically unstable?

  At night as I lay in bed the bottles began to explode in my imagination. The first few were muted, like depth charges. Just enough noise to invite investigation, but not to cause alarm. Mum wandered down behind the hedge to the sheds in one of her thin flowery dresses to see what the ruckus was. As she swung the shed door wide, these vintages with military gravitas, the super-frothies orange with Coke acids, the viciously viscous varietals coiling sinister with dairy oils, these would be touched off by the rasping of the rusty hinges.

  She would be buffeted by shockwaves and gradually tanned orange by a hundred vintages washin
g over her in staccato waves. Her proud beehive swept into a sodden point behind her like a comet tail.

  This night-time anxiety had a sinister veracity while I lay in bed. In the daytime it faded. Wee could not detonate and dye Mum orange. I was sure of that. In daylight that fear was replaced by realer Armageddons ripe with shame and sorrow.

  By daytime my worries were clearer and nearer. Even at six I realised if our vault of piss was discovered by Mum or Dad they would be touched by a cold shock that wouldn’t turn into anger but would instead play out in a long and silent despair. The thought of this had me throwing sly glances at them over meals to see if they knew that something wasn’t quite right with us, that we were macabre kids who treasured urine. I began to be oppressed by the possibility they might catch on, and to feel sad that they would ever have to know.

  I imagined Mum and Dad after the story broke, revelations strange enough to make the Shepparton News: ‘URINE FOUND IN LAWYER’S SHED’. I imagined them having to face their friends, whose kids didn’t establish repositories of urine, but won scholarships and sang in choirs. Their friends wouldn’t speak of their own children’s achievements anymore, after the headlines. To bring up their darlings’ triumphs would be to usher forth a corresponding silence from our mum and dad that spoke of our bizarre proclivities and their shame.

  I knew that the world punished parents for the crimes of their children. And that what we were up to was a major and creepy piece of work that would ruin my parents socially and economically. Who seeks legal counsel from a man with a shed full of piss? How can a man debate with dignity in a court of law while shrouded in the ineradicable uric odour of his offspring and assailed by the tittering of school excursions?