We were their shame. But we were their children too. They wouldn’t abandon us. We would move, as a family, to live in a humpy made of flattened kerosene tins down by the river. I would beg for food from town boys who were once my friends and who rode out on their bikes to taunt us on weekends. With my gift for faking pain I would be an effective beggar and would share my bounty of half donuts and cold chops with my family.
Then, one Sunday, a straitlaced old lady called Marny came doddering down to the back of the garden calling our names in an aged and broken voice that sounded like the end of all things. This woman was a churchgoer, harbouring the unfeasible values those people are regularly infested with. ‘Hello? Debbie? Anson? Vicki? Hellooo …?’
I knew the sight of our warehoused wee would upset her dangerously, and hoped, briefly, the shock of it might kill her. We could bury her flaccid corpse in the sandpit and deny she ever visited us. Her disappearance would be a great mystery we would work on side by side with detectives in fedoras for years to come.
‘Hello? Debbie? Vicki? Hellooo …’ Marny was our Dad’s mother. She grew up a Furphy in a town where that name rang with the grandeur of famous water carts and classic novels. As a girl she and her siblings rode in a buggy behind a horse while the rest of Shepparton walked. I had seen her in browned-off photographs looking young, but hoarding a prehistory of her vast age in her sharp features, and not a car or a clean-shaven man yet in the world. The Furphys still owned a foundry and ironworks in town and Marny had been, and was still, the daughter of a local dynasty.
She married Frank Cameron, a boy from Orbost, who returned from the First War and finished his law degree in Melbourne before coming to Shepparton to do his articles. He joined the law firm of a man named Sutherland and outlived him, and the firm went on to become Cameron and Cameron when his sons joined. He smoked three packs of Viscount a day with trembling hands, clacking his false teeth on them happily as an infant.
Either age or Passchendaele, or both, had made Frank, who we called ‘Pa’, a quiet man by the time I met him. He never talked of that war to me, but as an addicted and adept eavesdropper I overheard him tell another man at a party that he once walked up a hill in France without stepping on anything but dead Frenchmen the whole way. In bed at night I tried to see that hill and the Frenchmen. It seemed a very grand thing to have done. I saw him striding out for the summit, sad but determined, keeping his chin high so he didn’t have to discomfit the dead by making eye contact with them in their embarrassing and unusual circumstance. Standing on faces and in crotches as he went. This was not the sort of stuff women or shirkers had to do. It was the dread price of heroism. And I knew full well I would have to walk up a hill paved with men, probably Frenchmen, myself one day.
Marny, though she didn’t boast about it over games of bridge with Lady Fairley, was my grandmother. Her hands were covered with liver spots and her face was painted white and in her calf-length frocks a massive bosom lurked like an unholy anachronism. She had seen sufficient generations come and go not to be excited or duped by mine. And had reached that pious longevity where people either see no need for subtlety and diplomacy or the facility for both just withers like one’s ability to make love or run a marathon. She didn’t like me and it wasn’t uncommon for her, on first seeing me, to reel back and say in the most outraged way, ‘Whatever do you look like?’
It became a catchcry around our house. If I had a cool new shirt or shorts or bathers or slightly edgy sneakers, to bring me down my sisters would ask incredulously, ‘Whatever do you look like?’
Being a religious woman, the only joy Marny ever got from me was when she recognised in my conduct a bright and undeniable refutation of evolution. Look at this newest, youngest member of the family trying to glimpse his own buttocks. Mankind is surely heading helter-skelter back in among the apes, rather than away from them. I think she and her minister flashed polaroids of me to each other on Sunday and laughed at Darwin.
The passion had leached from our Wee Club by now. Debbie, Vicki, Pigsy and I were all there in the dark shed trying half-heartedly to gloat over our monopoly. Debbie was plinking her fingernails on the bottles making pretty tunes. ‘No one else has got a shed full of wee like us.’ ‘No. No one.’ ‘Everyone would be jealous if they knew.’ ‘Yeah, wouldn’t they.’ ‘Hoffy hasn’t got any.’ ‘No way.’ ‘No one has. ‘’Cause no one else thought of it.’ ‘Yeah. We thought of it.’
Debbie was still addicted to the power of her presidency. And though it was clear the club was faltering in intent, she was still making plans for future expansion. ‘We should use flagons. Flagons can hold gallons.’
‘Debbie? Vicki …?’ The desiccated voice of doddering doom. The catch on the shed door began to rattle as Marny tried to get in. ‘I know you’re in there. Whatever are you doing?’
Debbie was wearing an embroidered felt bolero waistcoat made for her by Marny. She took it off and whispered to me, ‘Strip off your clothes and put this on. You’re going to be a decoy.’
‘A what? I don’t want to …’
‘It’s like being a hero. A greater-love-hath–no-man type of hero. You know … Lest We Forget. It’s honourable.’ Seeing my reluctance she turned to look at Pigsy. ‘Hmmm … maybe I’ll get Pigsy to do it. He could probably do it better. It being so honourable.’
‘No. He couldn’t be a decoy. Only I could. I’ll do it.’
Debbie whipped my shorts down and in the half dark I stripped naked and put on her blue felt waistcoat. All the while the door was rattling. A voice from a thousand years ago. ‘Let me in. Whatever are you up to? Let me in. I’ve come to visit. Vicki? I can hear you.’
Debbie whispered, ‘Just say “Hello, Marny’ and walk straight past her as if you’re fully dressed and everything is normal. She thinks you’re mental, anyway. She’ll chase you back to the house.’
‘Mum will be angry.’
‘No way. Tell Mum your clothes got wet and I lent you my waistcoat so you wouldn’t be cold.’
This made sense to me. Not only was I not affronted by my own nudity, I had heard other people call me cute while I was naked and was eager to exploit this admiration whenever I could.
Debbie opened the door just wide enough for me to slip out. When Marny saw me she put a hand to her mouth and one to her ribs to brace herself against the abrupt descent our once-respected family was taking with me as its newest and most disgusting member. ‘Whatever are you up to now?’
The president of our little club had given me instructions to walk straight past this old dame and on into the house, my near nudity inevitably luring her along lecturing and hectoring in my wake. But, seeing the horror on Marny’s face, I began to awaken to the power of my performance. The role of decoy was a heroic one that surely needed to be played a little more fully than Debbie had imagined. As I got to Marny I put my left hand into my left armpit and began to flap it as if it was a broken wing; a mother duck, you see, being a decoy, luring the fox from her ducklings. I began to dance around the old woman flapping my broken wing, as her disgust alchemised into horror and fear. ‘Hello, I’m Porky Pig’s cousin Walter,’ I announced.
In hindsight, it was an oblique reference. It is unlikely this old woman watched daytime cartoons or had any idea who Porky Pig was, or that he and his confreres got about in blue felt waistcoats and nothing else. ‘Oh …’ she said. And repeated herself twice as I flapped my broken wing and, playing two roles simultaneously, said, ‘Quackquackquack … yibbedahyibbedah … that’s all, folks.’
Debbie, seeing me veer off script, came out of the shed at a hustle. She needn’t have. I had the situation under control. With my unbroken wing I waved her back.
‘He’s disgusting, Marny. He did wee on his own clothes on purpose and then said he was going to wee on us all if I didn’t give him the waistcoat you made for me. Yuck, Marny.’ To my amazement she began to cry at the tragedy of her concocted circumstance; a foul lunatic brother set loose amid her innocent girlhood. Vick
i emerged from the shed also crying and began pointing at me. I stopped flapping my broken wing.
I was not trained for the role of decoy. And was, at this moment, clueless as to my next move. It seemed, with Debbie saying all this crazy stuff, and hooting like a heartbroken owl, and Vicki copying her and validating her misery and her wild claims, that the part might end up with me in deep shit. I didn’t like being accused of stealing the waistcoat Debbie had just tricked me into wearing, nor could I bear the slander that I had deliberately urinated on myself. I was opening my mouth to protest when there was a loud noise close by and stars began to flare and swoop. Someone had hit me hard on the head with something bigger than most things you would consider hitting a boy with.
To this day I don’t know if it was Debbie who thumped me, or Marny. I can make a case for either, and it is likely whoever did it only just pipped the other at the post. They were both fond of hitting me. And though they never actually high-fived after landing a good one, I had, from the vantage of the floor, seen their gaze lock in congratulation, had seen Marny license Debbie for future violence via a tiny nod.
I lay sightless and near naked on the nail-bed of our buffalo grass and heard Marny say, ‘Quickly, now. Step on him while I pull the waistcoat off. Hurry, before he comes to. How disgusting. Ohh …’ The waistcoat was hauled off me with no respect for my broken wing and I was thrashed with it a few times, its gilt embroidery scourging me like lead pieces in a cat-o-nine-tails will scourge a pirate. I heard Marny consoling Debbie and Vicki, both crying in loud counterfeit misery, as they hurried back to the house to rail at Mum about the new shame I had nearly brought on the family until they saved the day by beating the shit out of me.
I went to the shed and began to dress. In the half dark, surrounded by the galaxy of our winking wee, Pigsy was silent, solemn, not knowing what to make of how this had played out. He was unsure if I had saved the day, or was a ham actor who had almost led the Wee Club to ruin. As I was tucking my shirt into my shorts he told me, ‘Porky Pig doesn’t have a cousin Walter. But he does have a brother in Pennsylvania called Peter … if you’re ever being a decoy again … in only a blue waistcoat …’
‘Get rooted, Pigsy.’
I crouched beneath the kitchen window, eavesdropping to see if it was safe to go in. Marny was railing and reminiscing, trying to get Mum to see the seriousness of the situation. ‘Well, whatever will become of him I just don’t know, Linda. He’s a fool. And I know you run a good house, but he behaves like he’s been brought up by dingoes or Englesens.’ The Englesens were a shoeless family that lived in the Commission and sometimes came to our house to beg groceries from us. Mum had recently given them an unopened tub of creamed honey, so I had sworn to get even with them, and had to bite my lip when Marny compared me to them.
The incident came to nothing with Mum. My stepping out naked in the guise of a cartoon pig and talking nonsense was no big deal to her. I think, in the way of mothers, she even saw a spark of creativity, some artistic future, in such harebrained propensities.
Later that day when I complained to Debbie about the lies she’d told and the thrashing I’d been given she said, ‘Hey, you were the dimwit who started quacking and quoting pigs. Just say “hello” and walk inside, I told you. Do you even know what a decoy is?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, is Porky Pig a decoy or a major star?’
‘I wasn’t Porky. I was his cousin Walter.’
‘You are so dickless.’
Years later I speculated that, given Buenos Aires is five hours ahead of Melbourne, then, every day, as Adolf Eichmann was at his lunch, regaling his compadres with tales of a concocted boyhood in Zurich, Deborah was dropping her children at school, swapping tales with other mothers at the school gate, and occasionally vacuuming her living room to disguise her true nature.
When anyone mentions Eichmann, or other famous Nazis who camouflaged themselves in the great cities of South America, I think of Debbie and say to myself, ‘Ho, ho … none of us know the blood-and-urine-steeped yesterdays of our neighbours. None of us are alive to the monster shuffling in sync with the more blameless elements of the supermarket queue.’
The thrashing of Porky Pig’s cousin Walter brought the Wee Club to civil war. Pigsy and I came to believe a tyrant had used us as mindless bladders. But we were too scared of that tyrant to take any action against her. As was routine when vengeance was necessary, I started a fight with Vicki so as to have an enemy I could rise heroically against and vanquish.
Vicki was a sweet girl without the dark energy to maintain unpleasantness. In the face of the worst insults, blows, thefts and injustices I could heap on her, she would go silent and brood for perhaps two hours before her stock of bile was depleted and she came out of her cocoon with new ideas and pretty thoughts unfurling like a butterfly’s wings. So when the Wee Club went into its vicious decline she was bound to take the rap.
On Monday she brought two friends, Fiona Greeves and Melissa Gribble, to our house after school to talk of love. All three dropped their bikes on our lawn and went inside the house and up the stairs to the girls’ room. I snuck into the room with them, staying quiet so as not to attract their attention. They were girls, older girls, and they were contemptuous of me, and their contempt was more powerful than anybody else’s because they were vaguely, girlishly, spookily … cool.
I sat with my back to the door and ran a Matchbox Thunder bird up and down my thigh, pretending not to listen as they began to talk of the interminable conjoining and division of grade five students; the who liked who and who was going with who and who had dropped who and who was thinking of dropping who. It was an endlessly echoing and amplifying record-keeping and speculation, this newly found topic of love. They talked about it with the passion and certitude of proselytes. ‘If Wendy drops Barry it’ll break his heart.’ ‘Break his heart.’ ‘He’ll be soooo heartbroken.’ I was fascinated by the breaking of hearts. I had only just learnt of this fatal epidemic. It seemed like a new and subtle form of gunplay to me.
I stopped driving the Thunderbird along my scrawny thigh. I couldn’t help myself. I blew my cover. ‘Will Barry die?’ I asked. ‘How does she break it? Is there blood?’
‘Don’t you have windows to lick, or something?’ Melissa Gribble asked.
‘I hear the Flintstones calling,’ Fiona Greeves said, putting a hand to her ear. ‘Ooh, I think Betty Rubble might be doing a striptease.’ This was tempting, but I was almost certain Betty Rubble wasn’t that sort of woman.
‘Be quiet or get out,’ Vicki warned.
They went back to love. ‘Sharon likes Tim.’ ‘Yeah. I don’t know why.’ ‘Yuck. She’s too good for him.’ ‘Way too good for him.’
Deciding who was too good for who was one of the most important undertakings of the love conversations. Sometimes they would argue over whether someone was too good for someone else or not. But mostly they knew and agreed. They had some ineffable way of measuring goodness I could only wonder at. And someone who was going with someone else was almost always too good for him or vice versa. No couple ever turned out to be perfectly suited to each other once my sisters and their friends got to measuring goodness.
‘But … how do you know Sharon is too good for Tim?’ I asked. I genuinely wanted to know. They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. How could a grade two kid be expected to get any of this? You might as well recite psalms to a slug as explain love to me.
Fiona Greeves hung her bottom lip out and slit her eyes at me as if I was dangerously stupid. ‘What is he even doing in here, Vicki?’
‘I’m allowed,’ I said. It was a declaration I made frequently. An early summation of the universal rights of man. The universal rights of me. But it wasn’t effective. ‘We’re talking about stuff you don’t understand,’ Vicki said. ‘Get out.’
‘I’m allowed.’ They grabbed me and threw me out of the room. The door cracked open and my Thunderbird went flying down the stairs, then the door slammed c
losed. Vicki turned on her portable record player and began playing ‘Nowhere Man’ by the Beatles in case I was at the door eavesdropping. I listened the song through, but she put it on again.
Pigsy came over and found me angrily gorging Tic Toc biscuits in the kitchen. ‘I’m going to get Vicki,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to get her bitch friends too.’
‘How?’ he asked.
‘The wee.’
He looked solemn and thoughtful. This was a big step. After a few moments he asked me, ‘What did they do?’
‘I spied on them and heard them. They’re going to pour it on our bikes.’
‘My bike? What have I done?’
‘Pudding bowl haircut.’
He put a hand to his head. ‘Bitches.’
We went to the shed and took bottles off the shelves and laid them gently as grenades in Dad’s wheelbarrow, perhaps thirty in all, wheeling them across the lawn to the girls’ bikes. We unscrewed a cap each and chugged the piss up and down the framework of the bikes, along the handlebars and soaked the seats. One bottle was more than enough to douse each bike, but we were rich in piss so we opened more and poured until the machines lay in a frothy puddle and a fog of foul odour. Neighbourhood dogs began to gather, standing at a distance with their noses twitching and their heads aslant in wonder. Some walked in circles, wanting to leave, but fascinated. Ours was the most emphatic marking of territory they had ever smelt.
And once we started we couldn’t stop. Cry havoc and let slip the pints of piss. The size of our stockpile of armaments was for us, as it has been for the Americans, a reason to declare war on everyone. How else were we going to get rid of the stuff? It seemed, by its very potential to bring a tyrant down, to make tyrants of everyone. It was its own justification. Piss was a silver bullet and we were surrounded by vampires.
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