My bed was near the door and above the foot of it I had a poster of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini that was a great distraction to Dad when he read me stories at night. Guy’s bed was across the room in shadow. He had a fox skin above his head on the wall. Lying in the dark with the truck brakes on the highway whining through miles of bush and possums on the roof outside breathing as ragged as robbers, I would puzzle over the stuff of my day while watching occasional chips of reflected car light moving across Raquel, hoping to divert their trajectory with concentrated desire so they might light the valley of her cleavage for a moment.
‘What’s hotter, a red-hot poker or a coal?’ I’d ask.
He’d weigh the question a moment, then answer, ‘That all depends.’ It was an expression that bewildered me and led me, reluctantly, on.
Every night I had a brace of philosophical stumpers for him. Who was worse out of Hitler and the devil? Could Dad belt up a VFL footballer? Who would win a fight between a wolf and a bear? Would a Spitfire shoot down a Messerschmitt or the other way? Who was the fastest draw out of the Sundance Kid, the Cisco Kid and John Wayne?
Guy would let me wait awhile in the dark ogling Raquel’s dim silhouette, until my hope grew and I knew he was going to come up with a good, satisfying answer. This time he would set the question to rest with a definitive truth. A bear. A Spitfire. John Wayne.
But in the moonlight I’d see him put his hands behind his head and his eiderdown rise as he sucked a big contemplative breath and I’d know he was getting ready to be wise and I was sunk. Then he’d say ‘Hmmm … well, that all depends.’ And ‘that all depends’ was an infinitely long tunnel. If I said, ‘That all depends on what?’, he’d answer, ‘That all depends on if Cisco is at the height of his powers and using his preferred Navy Colt, or is he in his declining years and using that fancy light-framed silver revolver given to him by the Countess Valverdé for saving her ranch from low-life greasers.’
‘He’s at the height. Using the Navy one.’
‘Well, then that all depends if Sundance is drunk or not.’
‘Sundance isn’t drunk.’
‘Well, then that all depends if he’s horny and distracted by women.’
‘He’s what? He’s not … There are no women. It’s a gunfight.’
‘Well, then that all depends on who’s in the right. Who’s got justice on their side.’
‘Justice? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to sleep.’
I knew there was some sort of grown-up profundity behind ‘that all depends’ and it made me scared of growing up and losing the certainties I owned now behind an adult fog of deeper considerations.
Once, at school, after Guy had stonewalled me the night before with upwards of twenty-five ‘that all depends’ when I asked him if it was better to be a lawyer or a doctor, Miss Stoddard singled me out of our routinely dumbfounded class and asked, ‘Anson, what is three times five?’ And I told her, ‘Hmmm … that all depends, Miss Stoddard.’ In its ignorance the class laughed at this, thinking it idiocy rather than a prelude to adult rumination. Miss Stoddard held herself expressionless through the uproar and when it died she asked me, ‘All depends on what, Anson?’
‘On whether a doctor gets to make women strip off so he can see them nude.’ The class went wild enough for Mr Smith to rush in from the adjacent room to see that the roof hadn’t collapsed and to frown at Miss Stoddard awhile about her lack of control.
‘Mr Schatz?’ I asked her. And she nodded slowly with a sorrowful look like she was becoming doubtful about punishing me because, really, what type of riot played in my head?
But I didn’t mind being strapped by Schatz. I would rather Mr Schatz strap me a hundred times than Mr Deasey whip me once. In grade three I had Mr Deasey for a teacher and he had me to despise. He was a Seventh Day Adventist or a Jehovah’s Witness and frequently whipped me. Chewing gum in class, backchat, pinching girls, oinking like a boar, fencing with imaginary enemies … I never worked my way through the full list of whippable offences, and it seems to me I never could. I think the list was being written on the fly to answer my hijinks. I was often surprised by what turned out to be whip-worthy, though. Hiccups? Hiccups, Mr Deasey? Surely you’re not going to whip me for hiccups. Oh, hiccups flagrantly amplified. That’s okay, then. Flail away.
I’d stand out front of the hushed class and pull my sleeve up above my elbow, presenting the full length of my bare wrist. Every other teacher who ever whipped me used a flat piece of leather across the hand. A strap. They strapped me. The strap stung and made a blood-curdling thwack in the hollow of the palm that echoed like a gunshot – but it pushed air before it and bounced on a thin pneumatic cushion and didn’t bite muscle and vein. The skin-deep welt left by a strap was a trophy that had to be shown fast, because it faded by day’s end.
Mr Deasey didn’t favour the flat strap. He used a rounded piece of leather as thick as a child’s finger, like a skipping rope … or a whip. He used a whip. And he didn’t go across the hand. He went right up the full length of the wrist. He’d swing at me with his whole arm, bringing the whip from behind himself over the top in an arc with his face grit like an axeman making sure of his Boleyn. The sound of the whip tearing air made the class wince. If I moved and Mr Deasey missed, and was made to look foolish, the number of strokes doubled.
When it landed it didn’t make a sound that could be heard above my whimper. It bit hard and stuck, momentarily embedded, him and me conjoined, tyrant and vassal, executioner and doomed. Then that moment fell away into pain and the fight with my jaw and lips and eyes not to cry.
After school I’d go home and watch Hogan’s Heroes, a TV show where two Germans named Schultz and Klink ran a POW camp during WWII. They were such smiling jovial dolts, one chubby, one bald, both caught in foul circumstance and serially upended by the show’s American hero, stung by his witticisms and confounded by his schemes. Colonel Hogan was a good-looking cool cat, and he reminded me of myself.
So next day I’d go back to school and, leering and leaning like an American wise-guy who had his own TV series, I’d try a few of his barbs and tactics on Mr Deasey. By morning playtime there’d be a range of purple blood blisters the size of Christmas beetles along my wrist. It was a confusing time – our German was so much nastier than the Nazis.
Only in hindsight can I make the black kids black. They were just kids, then. To me, anyway. And to all of us kids, I think. But maybe, without me knowing it, those kids, those black kids, had heavy knowledge of their blackness in that white place.
In class, aged eight, a Yorta Yorta kid named Ronnie Scott sat alongside me while Miss Robertson taught us that Captain Cook discovered Australia. On the blackboard she had drawn kangaroos and spindle-legged natives spooked by his landfall and helter-skeltering with fear-whitened eyes into the bush. There it was laid out in coloured chalk. Honour and bravery and gold buttons arriving on our island continent and our proud country born in this moment, thanks to this hero with the braid and white girly plaits.
We were asked to draw our own versions of the landing. Ronnie and I copied her picture of kangaroos and blackfellas stampeding into the scrub. The brown pencil with which Ronnie coloured those folk in could have been a sixth finger on his right hand so closely did it match him for shade. Being easily tempted and having itchy trigger fingers we added glorious gouts of flame leaping from the muzzleloaders of Cook’s commandos as they spooked the blackfellas into the bush. Australia had to be created. So with delight we drew blooms of blood on the blackfellas and kangaroos.
There might have been four Yorta Yorta kids in the class. And in truth I can’t remember too much about Miss Robertson apart from the remarkably detailed pictures she drew on the blackboard before class, which made every morning a visit to a gallery where some new masterpiece was unveiled. She was young and likely a Melbourne girl straight out of teachers’ college waving a new degree and unlucky enough to be given the far-flung nowheresville of Shepparton as her first posting by the De
partment of Education.
The history she taught was given to her from on high and couldn’t be questioned. But it must have seemed to her a strange truth to be telling, that the world had begun with a triumph of British navigation and the people who lost out, by a hairsbreadth, were the French. Particularly with four Yorta Yorta kids blinking happily at her. And a strange thing to be conducting us while we sat at our desks, twenty small whitefellas and four small blackfellas, our arms out straight and our hands folded neatly one into the other on the desk in front of us, while we sang ‘God Save the Queen’ to celebrate Cook’s discovery.
They would be running a long time yet, those natives who had just taken flight in our drawings. Running back off a frontier of farmers with firearms, leaving behind Ronnie and his brother Moody and their sister Sherry in the new world that had come.
If the blackfella kids in the class knew the startled natives Miss Robertson had drawn on the blackboard could be placed ten rows above them in a family tree then it was a secret they kept, while laughing along with the rest of us at the white of their panicky eyes. None of us linked those first-contact natives on the board with our friends. Ronnie and Moody and Sherry were part of the here and now with no hint of the past.
Did they know it was them being chased into the scrub by Cook? Did they know that for a long time there was another world that had been swept away for this one? I didn’t know I was white. And I don’t know what consciousness of loss the Yorta Yorta kids brought to school from their homes. We were kids, and the world was born when we were born and all of this Cook and First Fleet business was a bunch of colourful stories to sit alongside Red Riding Hood and A Christmas Carol.
If Moody and Ronnie and Johnnie Dale and the Bambletts and the Atkinsons and Briggs knew that the rascals Cook’s men were firing at in the drawings on our classroom blackboards were, essentially, them, wouldn’t they have trudged the grounds sullen and aggrieved?
They didn’t. They weren’t that way at all. The Yorta Yorta kids were anything but deadened to the sparking and sparkling moments of a kid’s day. They were shy with adults, but lively away from them. Always breaking out into offbeat ideas and making wild suggestions. Like me they were slightly tipsy with humour and likely to erupt into laughter any time at all. They had a capacity, an itch and an urge, to break from po-faced actuality to a place where everything was coloured hilarious. I could laugh like few other people. I found jokes in the patterns of tree bark or the gait of a minor official. I considered myself a brave laugher. But I couldn’t laugh as well as the blackfellas. I could only stand back and envy them when they got right down to binging on life’s absurdity. They claimed that glorious luxury as theirs.
This lesson, Cook On The Beach, was the only point at which I remember blackfellas ever touching our learning at North Shepp. We studied of England and her kings and queens and wars and explorations mostly. When we learnt of ourselves we met bushrangers like Ned Kelly, or the explorers Burke and Wills and Sturt and Stuart and sundry other misanthropes. No women. Hume and Hovell, the first men to discover our district. MacGuire who set up a punt on the Goulburn River which became the start of Shepparton. The only blackfellas we met in our lessons at school were those startled few who ran away from Cook’s party at first contact. They must have run a mighty long way, because we never saw hide nor hair of them again.
Ronnie and I were best friends for a year. If I had no money for lollies we would sit on the oval and eat yam-yams, a small seed pod of a wiry grass. They were sweet and crunchy and if the Bellboy and the Metro Gum and Sherbet Bomb hadn’t been invented, yam-yams would have been a passable delicacy. But an array of wondrous confectionaries, for which I pilfered Mum’s golf money from a small pewter trophy, had made the yam-yam a sweet of last resort.
As we sat on the oval nibbling them I told Ronnie that soon I would be leaving this place and going away to a proper school and I would live there and have my own bed to sleep in. A big famous school called Geelong Grammar made of red-brick castles with a high tower, a place where princes were taught.
Ronnie stared at me, blinking like a small owl. Then he nodded. He knew all about it. He was going there too. He’d see me there. We’d still be friends, us, at this royal court for specially chosen boys.
I was excited at the thought of a friend being there with me. But I was disappointed too, that such an illustrious school would accept a poor boy like Ronnie. It lowered the tone of the fabulous institute I had built in my head, where I had been expecting to befriend a cast of minor royals and hyphenated surnames. When I told Mum that Ronnie was going to Geelong Grammar and at least I would have one friend she said, ‘Well, we’ll see, Boyboy. Ronnie might be confused about going away.’
His big brother Peter, known as Moody, had a name as a fighter and boys were scared of him. He was called in to settle disputes. We went at it one day and I ended up on top with him flat on the ground beneath me, his arms up beside his head and me holding his wrists. I had him pinned. Total control. But I was as trapped as he was. I was riding a tiger wondering how the hell I was going to get off. I wouldn’t get this lucky twice. He’d kill me if I let him up. Boys had gathered and he had lost face and I’d have to get a good belting for him to get it back.
Usually when a boy had another boy pinned beneath him he would hang spit from his mouth over his captive’s face in a long pendulous drip before slurping it back up into his mouth, allowing it to emerge again and letting it hang, lower this time, almost to breaking point, the tension frightful, before sucking it elastically back. This torture would go on for many minutes while the boy beneath writhed for release and made threats of revenge or offered bribes. Until the boy on top let the slag stalactite hang too far and it snapped and its bulbous, quivering payload landed on the captive’s face, most effectively in his mouth or eye.
We spat on each other a lot. There were different methods of spitting and different viscosities of saliva and some boys gained reputations as ballistic virtuosi who could summon pinpoint oral cannonades such as an orca might drench you with at Marine World.
Spitting was, as often as not, a reply to a casual question asked of one friend to another. I would ask Stowey if he was going to the pool after school and he would turn around and spit point-blank in my face. Everyone would laugh and I would wrestle him to the ground and spit close up in his ear, that mucosal payload accompanied by a fearsome pneumatic roar that would make his eardrum ring for hours. All the rougher boys smelt of rancid saliva by day’s end.
Moody and I stayed on the ground a long time. Threatening, bargaining, repeating the snippets of script boys remember from TV stand-offs. My exhaustion got deeper and deeper until I had to let him up or collapse on top of him. I released him and we stood, me tensed to fight or run, and he smiled and put his hand out and we shook. Moody was a good kid. I don’t know what the country Captain Cook discovered offered him as an adult. I don’t suppose it was much.
A year later, in the small shaded asphalt playground before the shelter sheds, I finally found real love. Two girls held a rope while a third, with the kind of perfectly straight blonde hair I admired, skipped at its centre as nimbly as a cat. The rope swingers sang:
Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
There sat Debby pretty as a rose.
Up came Nuttsy and kissed
Her on the cheek,
How many kisses did she get this week?
Then the rope swingers began to count the kisses, one kiss to each cycle of the rope, ‘One … two … three …’, getting faster with each rotation.
Debby Neeld’s pretty face focused harder and harder as the rope orbited her faster and faster. Despite the concentrated effort she was graceful. Her red-and-white checked dress flounced at the hem each time she landed, mesmerising me with staccato flashes of her brown knees. But each skip was another kiss from Nuttsy. ‘Seven … eight … nine …’ Each time she successfully avoided the rope a piece of my heart died.
It is li
kely I was standing so close by the time she glanced at me, and looking so wan, so flagrantly moribund, that she got a fright that broke her rhythm. But to me it seemed when our eyes met she instantly renounced the kisses of Nuttsy by letting the rope whip her on the ankles and its transparent oval orbit shatter and fall around her like a scorned world, freeing herself for me.
I said ‘hello’ and meant it more than I ever had. And she said ‘hello’ back in an evocative way, and love’s intuitive treaty was thereby signed and within minutes she was skipping again, her friends making my heart sing by singing
Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
There sat Debby pretty as a rose.
Up came Ansy and kissed
Her on the cheek,
How many kisses did she get this week?
Twenty-three. On her first attempt. Hovering like a hummingbird in that cage made of moving rope. Twenty-three fictional kisses from that new Romeo in the skipping song. Her swayed back squared her shoulders and made her bottom jut prettily, giving her a strong, athletic air. A gymnast with straight blonde hair.
Nuttsy, otherwise known as Norm Almond, was a friend of mine. And though I’d never noticed Debby Neeld before, I was astounded to find him kissing her in song behind my back and hated him for it. I picked a fight with him at lunchtime and jobbed him. Ended up on top of him punching an ear. I didn’t tell him why because that would have blown the fact I was head-over-heels in love. I told him I’d seen one of my pencils in his desk.
I couldn’t stop thinking of her. I’d drift toward her at recess and lunchtime moving my friends with me until they mingled with hers and we became a mess of refracting romances. We began to play kiss chasey. When I was ‘it’ the more cumbersome girls were invisible to me. I’d take off after Debby, peripheral figures moving in grey slow-mo around us as I chased her, red, white and blonde, through the school, down the centre aisle, across the main oval, round the shelter shed, ducking and weaving through the monkey bars. Glancing back over her shoulder now and then, she squealed with laughter and burst away. She could run like no other girl. I couldn’t catch her. But, sensing the danger of not being caught, she’d slow with a subtle grace that feigned fatigue and, finally, I’d tag her … and thus she’d owe me a kiss.
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