Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  A few years before, one of these rough spectres caught Guy by the handlebars as he rode along the footpath and bulldogged him to a standstill, and asked loudly, for his spectral co-workers to hear, ‘What’s the difference between an orange and a soldier’s cock?’ ‘I … I don’t know,’ Guy said. ‘Suck ’em and find out,’ he laughed. We rode on the other side of the road after that. The question had become a niggling concern to us in the years since. Why a soldier? Why an orange?

  After a kid got maimed by a cement truck on The Boulevard we were forbidden to ride that way anymore. So we rode along Quinlan Parade, up Knight Street into Erskine Street and into Dans Street, where two warmongering mongrels lingered drooling at the visions of us that played in their heads. One was a heeler cross and the other a lurcher of the sort used to pull down roos.

  If I was riding with Debbie and Vicki and Pigsy all talk would cease as we got close to where the dogs lived. We were hoping to sneak past in silence while they slept. But they were devoted to ambush and most mornings would burst from a gate or through a hedge and launch themselves at us, a tirade of threat and fang. You needed to have picked up speed before they hit so you could take your feet off the pedals to kick and wage a mobile war while moving away. The girls lifted their feet onto their handlebars so as not to be bitten, and wobbled and screamed, drifting down the road to neutral territory. I lashed out with my foot and sometimes, on rare perfect mornings, I lifted a dog beneath the chin with the point of my shoe and jacked it yelping onto its back in my wake and I’d boast about that all day. But more often I was bitten, or fell off my bike and had to climb a fence or tree until they lost interest or were called home by a rough voice whose owner lay on a couch inside.

  When Guy came home on holiday from boarding school I complained to him about these dogs. Next morning he rode with the girls and Pigsy and me and when the first dog emerged Guy’s face lit up. He didn’t kick at it or stop to fight it. He urged it on, hissing and meowing and reaching down offering his hand as it leapt at him, shouting, ‘Sool onto ’im, ya bastard. Reeoow … Sool, sool onto it.’

  I regretted telling him about the dogs, then. With his love of danger and mayhem, his regard for the interplay of fang and bullwhip, he was pouring petrol on my fire, goading grudge-bearing predators to frenzied acts of vengeance. He was fifteen and could fight off large dogs. The rest of us were likely to be badly mauled. But that didn’t concern Guy. He joked about what chickens we were and said he thought the dogs that bedevilled us would be big dogs not lapdogs with stumpy legs and teeth like a canary. He chided us all the way to school, where he looked grandly across the playground and told us the only lesson this shithole taught him was how to fight.

  That night he told me he had reasoned with the pooches and they had reached a détente and I needn’t worry about canine hostilities anymore. ‘Did you shoot the dogs?’ I asked hopefully. ‘You don’t rate me as a diplomat, do you?’ he asked. Which was answering a question with a question and the sort of trick I saw interrogated villains on Homicide do all the time. ‘Bayonet them through the gut?’ I was quite taken with war comics, in which snarling Japanese were bayoneted amidships on every page. ‘Détente,’ he said. ‘It’s French for sorting shit out.’

  The next day, when Pigsy and the girls and I rode to school the first dog was missing altogether. No sign of the blue-furred brute. This was a good start. I figured it had probably found détente alongside a couple of bricks in a sack in the river. A few houses on and there was the lurcher sitting behind his chain-link fence with his head low, all his property rights null and void and his sinews stilled and his fangs secreted away behind a pout.

  You’ve seen those black-and-white shots of conquered Parisians looking sullenly at stormtroopers as they frogmarch along the Champs Elysées. That’s how this lurcher looked at us riding past; hate radiated from his pupils through the fence, but that optic insinuation was the extent of his hostility. He who had once gamboled alongside children airing fang and rhapsodising threat was conquered and forlorn. He remembered the good days, and maybe they would come again, a liberation whereby he could reignite his passion for mauling small humans. But for now Nazis like Guy marched the street and he was a surrendered and broken dog.

  It was a short-term solution. There were always new angry dogs in Shepparton, owned and primed by angry people who couldn’t make ends meet and whose lives were hard. And dogs were encouraged to bite children then. As a trespasser and thief I was constantly mottled with Mercurochrome and tattooed with tetanus shots.

  It was in this same stretch of Dans Street that I found Ricky Pavlidis beating up two black kids a few years later. They weren’t indigenous kids. They were racial rarities who had appeared from Africa or Papua New Guinea or somewhere. No one else looked like them around here. A small curly-haired alien walking his tiny curly-haired sister home hand-in-hand from school.

  They’d been caught and backed up against a roller door by Ricky, a boy my own age who spat deftly and had a few hard mates and a few fistic victories to his name and was capable of wisecracks, all of which made him about mid-tier tough at North Shepp. He had the little boy by the shirt and was in his face shouting at him when I came riding round the corner. Seeing the action I slewed sideways with a gravel spray, dropping my bike and stepping off in my signature cowboy dismount. ‘What have the little pricks done?’ I asked. Ricky smiled – he was a generous boy, happy to share his prey.

  ‘Arseholes,’ he explained.

  Their fear was accentuated by their eyes blaring doubly white in such black faces. Tiny kids crying soundlessly and about as far from home as you could be. The boy was trying to hide his sister behind himself.

  ‘Which one you going to smack up first?’ I asked Ricky.

  He shook the boy by a fistful of shirtfront. ‘This one. Then the little black mole.’

  ‘What’d they do?’ I asked.

  ‘Hangin’ round, staring and shit. They’re going to get it now.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if they did it they got to get it.’

  ‘Yeah, I might even kill one. For a lesson. Haven’t decided which one yet.’ The small boy pressed into Ricky’s fist, offering himself.

  ‘Know who I like beating up best?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuzzy-wuzzies. Or poofs. Poofs are great to belt up.’

  ‘Dickheads.’

  ‘Yeah, dickheads,’ Ricky agreed. He shook the boy and shouted ‘dickheads’ into his face.

  ‘Dickheads who belt up little kids,’ I said.

  ‘Dickheads who …’ Ricky turned to look at me and I grabbed him by his collarbones and slammed him against the roller door alongside the black kids and punched him in the stomach.

  ‘You think you’re so fuckin’ tough, eh? Pickin’ on little kids, eh? You ever touch these kids again and I’ll go through you like a dose of fuckin’ salts. You get me?’

  ‘Hey … Urggh … I was only …’

  ‘You fuckin’ get me?’ I shouted, pushing him into the roller door and it giving off a warlike rattle that incited me to slap his face. He cowered against the door holding his face with one hand and his stomach with the other. ‘Fuck off,’ I shouted, hauling him toward his bike. ‘And don’t come near these kids again. Dickhead.’

  The kids were standing there blinking, adrift in the drama, not quite knowing what had happened, not quite believing the day had flipped in their favour, that they were free, they had a champion. We watched Ricky ride away. ‘You kids’ll be okay now. He won’t come near you again. You okay?’

  He nodded and she nodded after him. ‘I like you kids. But don’t tell anyone about this. Okay?’ The boy nodded, starting his sister nodding again. Their eyes were wider now than they had been when Ricky was assaulting them, suggesting kindness might have been a greater wonder in their world than assault.

  I felt good about saving those kids for a long while. The way I’d led Ricky on, then suddenly reversed the direction of the scene and unleashed justice and goodness. It was like somet
hing I’d read in a book. It didn’t become a habit, though. It didn’t set me on a course or anything.

  The school day began at ten-to-nine when the assembly bell rang. Kids would run from all points of the playground and line up in their classes, from preps to grade six. A grade six boy would pull the Australian flag up the flagpole while the school band stood out front of us and played. Two military drummers would alternately flail and caress drums hung athwart their scrawny chests and a bugler would fart dejected half-notes while a few kids tooted recorders and a reluctant cymbalist winced and staggered backward with every clash of his cymbals.

  This, amazingly, assembled into a lurching ‘God Save the Queen’, to which we sang along in deliberately spastic soprano. None of us knew what ‘Send her victorious,’ meant. It was only years later I realised we were singing a propagandist jig that invited Her Majesty’s troops to go forth and invade, slaughter and subjugate various pre-industrial hunter-gatherer societies around the globe in order to make said woman smile, happy and glorious, at her morning tea.

  We argued about what ‘Long to reign over us’ meant. I asked Debbie, who replied, ‘You are so dumb it’s unbelievable.’ I knew, then, she had been singing it for five years with no idea what it meant either.

  Dogs of every size and temper were drawn to the school to beg for or steal our lunches, and they roamed the grounds, singly and in packs. They were daintily fed crusts by girls and happily pelted with whole sandwiches by boys. You’d as soon leave your lunchbox unprotected on a seat as a wildebeest would abandon its calf on the high veldt among spotted hyena. One large black libidinous freak named Devil would clutch small children in his front legs and balancing on his hindquarters dance an ungainly, thrusting pas de deux while his human partner either joined in, singing and swinging along, or hollered for release as other kids gathered and laughed thrusting their hips at air and lolling their tongues in mimicry of this sexual predator.

  Now and then a kid would be bitten protecting a ham sandwich or cupcake and subsequently splashed with Mercuro chrome and given a tetanus shot. Then the dog catcher would arrive with a noose and a net. Followed by a posse of kids barracking in whispers he’d usually bag an entirely innocent pooch and extort twenty bucks from its owner to give it back.

  At least once a week a funeral cortege would drive along Balaclava Road, past the school on its way out to the cemetery. A slate-grey hearse, a Buick, with flowers blooming inside and speakers on its roof giving off sombre European death-music, was followed by thirty or forty cars all at walking pace with their occupants sombre as the music and staring straight ahead, ignoring the young, who were ranged along the school fence, hanging over toward the road ogling this macabre parade and wondering aloud who was dead. ‘Who’s carked it?’ ‘Who’s the dead one?’ ‘I heard it was a fella from Congupna who fell off a horse after it stepped on a snake and stampeded.’ ‘No. It’s a old woman they fished out of the lake after burglars threw her in.’ None of the horizontal inhabitants of the slate-grey hearse ever died of natural causes.

  Once I realised that the lead role in every solemn motorcade was as anonymous to the North Shepp students as Superman was to the citizens of Metropolis, I began to cast the role myself. ‘That’s your mother in there. Your mother was killed at work today,’ I told Terry Langley while we were watching a funeral cortege pass one lunchtime. ‘No it’s not.’ ‘Yes it is.’ He ran to the bike shed and got on his bike and caught up to the hearse and rode along beside it peering in through the windows, until it stopped, stopping all the mourners in their turn, and a window wound down. The driver of the hearse and Terry swapped a few words and Terry came riding back to school. ‘I told you it wasn’t my mum.’

  ‘Well, who is it?’

  ‘Don’t you read the newspaper? It’s the Queen of fucking England.’

  ‘It’s not the Queen. The bloke was just saying that. They don’t bury the Queen here.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my mum.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the Queen.’

  ‘Well, it’s not just between my mum and the Queen. It can be a … a … just a dead woman.’

  ‘The bloke’s a liar. A dreadful fibber. Have you been home to check?’

  Barry Marshall was a boy a few years older than me who had taken a set against me and vowed to get me. Some kid was always going to ‘get’ some other kid at North Shepp. On a Thursday Barry deliberately crashed his bike into mine, sending me tumbling through a bush into the school incinerator. So on Friday I leaned over to Natalie Oxley, who was balancing on the bottom fence railing watching a passing funeral, and said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret about this funeral if you promise not to tell anyone else.’

  ‘Oh, I promise. I double promise.’

  ‘Double promise? I don’t know.’

  ‘I triple promise.’

  ‘That’s Barry Marshall’s dad in the dead wagon. He was poisoned this morning.’

  ‘Oh,’ she put her hands to her mouth. ‘That’s terrible.’ Natalie broke the terrible news to anyone who would triple promise not to tell anyone else. They all triple promised. And the people they told also triple promised not to tell anyone else. So, soon everyone knew … which was good, because they’d triple promised not to tell anyone else, and now they couldn’t.

  Kids started to commiserate with Barry Marshall about his dad being dead. The first couple of times he called them dickheads and denied his dad was even sick. Poisoned, they told him, happened fast. And they patted him on the shoulder and laid hands on his arms and made other gestures of sympathy they’d seen on TV. They knew it was true because it had been told to them as a secret they triple promised to keep.

  Barry’s denials of his father’s death became less and less emphatic as the commiserations mounted. Some had seen his old man’s funeral go past and could furnish details. Witnesses had spotted his relatives in various jalopies in the cortege.

  ‘Does your Uncle Reg drive a blue ute?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That was him, then. He was there.’

  ‘With your grandma in the passenger seat.’

  ‘And your mum went wild hanging out a car window screaming she wanted to drink poison too, she wanted to be taken up. Called heavenward like … what’s your dad’s name?’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Yeah, called heavenward like Peter.’

  In his first class after lunch, with the teacher writing on the blackboard and her back to the students, a girl leaned across from her desk to Barry’s and slipped him a heart she had cut from paper and coloured pink. It was folded down the centre and when Barry opened it he saw a picture of a scrawny bloke whizzing upward through clouds with his ears pinned back as if shot out of a cannon. The words ‘Peter … Taken Up’ were written beneath. This was final proof of his father’s death for Barry. And he went for home on the wings of tragedy, ricocheting off this and that in tragedy’s miasma.

  When he burst into his house and found his mother sitting on the sofa, made breathless by the Bellbird rerun she was watching and the Escort Special Filter she was sucking, rather than recognise all was well with the world, Barry called her a bitch with a heart of shit. She chased him around until her anger subsided enough for the pull of Bellbird to outweigh it, whereupon she sat and re-entered that pastoral drama and lit up again, shouting threats during the ad breaks. When his father got home he was alive sufficient to wallop Barry on twin counts of wagging school and swearing at his mother.

  No one could trace the labyrinth of gossip that killed Barry’s father back to its headwaters … at first. Too many triple promises had been broken in its distribution for kids to own up to having helped. To the teachers it seemed a schoolyard hysteria of the kind that was routine around Easter and Christmas when bunny and Santa sightings caused tides of students to wash this way and that across the playground toward the reported location of the close encounter with either mythical benefactor.

  To the pupils of North Shepparton Primary it had been a whole lot of fun
. Barry denying. Barry doubting. Barry believing. Barry absconding. Barry bawling through the streets. Barry’s mum having a heart of shit. Barry being beaten. How could we repeat this fine adventure?

  It became a commonplace at North Shepp, after I killed Barry’s father, to give an identity to the deceased. As the slate-grey hearse passed the school with its retinue of wet-eyed relatives trailing, kids would turn to other kids and say, ‘That’s your mum in there. She got a disease.’

  ‘It is not. It’s your dad. He slipped on a turd and fell into a sewer and drowned.’ Hundreds of kids would be telling each other some loved one had snuffed it in some exotic way.

  But it didn’t work anymore. No one believed. Since Barry’s embarrassing gullibility we’d become a cynical audience. We knew funerals were for strangers. Only old people who lived three streets away were driven in first gear along Balaclava Road in the slate-grey Buick.

  Eventually a portly old teacher by the name of Salter, in his suit and wide tie, smoking his Stuyvesant and patrolling the playground for litterbugs, bullies, fights and intruders, overheard this misuse of the dead. He stood there aghast awhile, sucking deep, eavesdropping as the slate-grey Buick crept by. ‘That’s your brother Ken in there. He was rolled over by a steamroller.’ Hahaha. ‘No it’s not. It’s my Aunty Bette. She died of being a bitch.’ Hahaha. ‘It’s Kevin McConkey’s mum with a sex disease.’ Hahaha.

  They held an investigation and somehow the whole phenomenon of a funeral as a revenge and an entertainment was sheeted home to me. Sitting in the waiting room outside the Headmaster’s office I could hear Mr Schatz struggle to outline the gravity of the problem to my parents. ‘No, no, no … Not normal boyish mischiefs at all, Mr Cameron.’ A frightening, distant behemoth, his voice a run of fat tuba notes. ‘No. In my thirty years in the department I’ve never encountered a similar … joy of delinquency. He seems driven, riotous, unable to help himself.’ There was a long silence. ‘I have wondered … since this last episode, this sad use of the deceased … if he’s … if he’s subject to some … Have you ever had him looked at by a … behaviourist?’