Kissing a girl was a risky manoeuvre. It was known to be a dishonourable and effeminate thing to do. But like a drag on a smoke or a gulp of beer, it gave off a blurry hint of some distant but possible buzz. Behind the shelter shed I struck at her like a taipan with its lips puckered. The deed was done. Her downy cheek brutally caressed. We were lovers and pledged for marriage and children of our own.
For a few days we lived happily in thrall to each other. Sitting side-by-side every playtime and lunchtime, I fed her jelly babies and spearmint leaves and she gave me a stainless steel cupboard catch. We swung our legs back and forth and thought of things to say.
Despite the weight of the steel cupboard catch in my shirt pocket reminding me of love’s validity, my mind ran. Across the grounds I could see boys climbing trees, and throwing stones at boys who were up trees. I could hear a game of British Bulldog on the small oval and the shouts and roars of this combat made me itch and writhe.
Neither was Debby so faithful. I saw her stealing glances across the playground at groups of girls forming new skipping allegiances, trying out new rhythms with the ropes, singing new songs, attempting new tricks, setting new records. Her less-gifted rivals were getting uppity now that love had taken her out of the game.
We were secretly nettled that love and our obligations to each other had shrunk our worlds so small. I was a warrior who constantly heard the bugle and she was a hummingbird that only came to life in a rope cage. And as the brutal wars and grand ballets of the playground were fought and danced, our love bound us to this bench seat behind the shelter shed and made us swing our legs and had me ask silly questions like: ‘Do you like coconut ice?’
And had her tip her head this way and that before answering, ‘Sort of.’
‘My sister can make it. Next time she makes some you can have some.’
‘All right.’
By Thursday of the week after the kiss I was back playing British Bulldog, running flat out and leaping knees up at the surprised faces of boys who had thought me moved on from violence to the world of romance. And Debby was skipping again, floating weightlessly inside her shadowy ellipsis of rope as her friends sang
Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
There sat Debby pretty as a rose.
Up came Darryl and kissed
Her on the cheek,
How many kisses did she get this week?
And they sang it loud. There seemed to be no place in the schoolyard I could go and not hear them. Forty-six is the answer to the question in the song. An impossible number of consecutive skips. I had a vision of Debby and her friends sitting on the bench behind the shelter shed cupping their hands around their mouths and shouting the song at the air and giggling while they counted slowly to that improbable number. Maybe she wasn’t skipping at all. Maybe it was a fraudulent forty-six, a myth made in song.
But I didn’t believe that. I knew she skipped forty-six consecutive skips to grant herself forty-six fictional kisses from this Darryl. Whether to make me jealous, because she still loved me, or for love of him …? That was the question. And who was this Darryl? There were too many tough Darryls at school for me to take revenge on. Again, I retreated from flesh-and-blood girls to find love among the pretty housewives laying their hands atop tumble dryers in magazines, those steadfast beauties who stared at you smiling no matter what face you pulled or what appendage you showed them.
Not long after the death of love, Beckwith came riding past my place. When I think of Beckwith I bite my lip and nearly feel regret. Beckwith, lying there, is further proof of my nature. Beckwith explains plenty. Beckwith was a boy so pure he whistled Prokofiev while riding his bike. His mother loved Prokofiev, and though he preferred Mahler, he whistled that Russian’s tunes to please her. He was adept at long division and helped others navigate its degradations. On Sundays he sang in the Saint Augustine’s choir, rising early to bake biscuits for his fellow falsettos. He invited all thirty-six of his classmates at school to his birthday party because he wasn’t into exclusion. He had rosy cheeks and curly hair and … do you hate him yet? I did. Fucking Beckwith.
Beckwith was selling us out. The very notion of capriciousness, selfishness and hostility as core traits for boys was being refuted by Beckwith’s goodness. The guy was wrecking our gig and rewriting the possibilities of boyhood in a way that was going to place nasty obligations on us all.
So when Beckwith came wobbling past the mouth of our crescent on his electric-blue Peugeot it never occurred to me not to fell him. That letting him ride happily into his future with phrases of Peter and the Wolf playing on his lips might be a thing to do. No. Look at the curly hair. Notice the unscabbed knees rising and falling provocatively as he tootles along. Beckwith must be crushed for the good of those for whom long division is a pipe dream and Prokofiev a snide adult negation of Suzi Quatro. You are mine, Beckwith. The falcon is no surer of the bilby than I am of you at this moment. Did I mention Beckwith’s first name was Darryl?
I had a beautiful left arm from throwing hundreds of items a day. I only had to heft an object in my hand to have the kinesthetics innately sussed. I didn’t need conscious thought – heft twice and the trajectory was set. I rarely threw balls. Normally rocks, clods and shards of masonry, at fragile or living things like windows or trees pretending to be Beckwiths.
There was a bin of rotten pears near our gate waiting for rubbish night. I grabbed one and threw it in a high parabola with a preordained pay-off. Somewhere down the road Beckwith would find himself on the other end of this arc and he would be changed forever.
I felt a primal thrill of biomechanical perfection as it landed on top of his head. In the language used to describe burns victims: he sustained third-degree rotten pear to ninety-five per cent of his body. He squealed and his hands, for some stupid reason, went to his ears. His front wheel naturally jackknifed and he went over the handlebars to the bitumen.
He had a most surprised look on his face as he hit the bitumen. Why? If you don’t want to be knocked sprawling onto the road, why, in the name of God, steal my girlfriend and then ride past my house whistling Prokofiev?
As I squatted behind our low brick fence wracked by Chaplinesque hysterics, Beckwith lay glistening, reeking of fructose, attracting wasps. There was blood too. But the blood wasn’t as instructive as the pear-mash, so let’s forget the blood.
The pear-mash was important as first proof of evil. After a while Beckwith sat up and touched a finger to his shirt and tasted it and shook his head sadly and lay back in the gutter staring up at a suddenly curdled universe. Someone had definitely thrown a rotten pear at him while he was riding his bike. A new darkness had entered his rosy little life; the devil was loose in his garden.
Sitting there ten minutes later with my laughter thinning I thought to myself that some day, some way future day, when I’m fifty maybe, and writing of myself as a boy, I will have to confront the kid who knocked Beckwith flat into the tar. I suppose that kid will disgust me, I thought. And I was disgusted at the future man for being disgusted at that kid. How many selves are there, I asked myself. Through the course of a lifetime? How many?
Darryl Beckwith, meanwhile, was being hauled up from the gutter by a young couple with a toddler at foot and a baby in a pram. The toddler was holding his nose and pointing at Beckwith and shouting, ‘Poopoopoo …’ Would it be wrong to bombard a young family with rotten pears? Could they tell where they were coming from?
When we went into the CBD of Shepparton, only a short walk from our house, we were ‘going down the street’. The centre of town with its grid of streets lined with shops set in the shade of verandahs was ‘down the street’. Larrikins, idlers, sharpies, fruit pickers down from Queensland, gangs of tough kids from other schools, big women lugging wicker baskets … down the street was a pose-off, a dance, guys leaned on parking meters claiming a slice of street as their own. Look down as you walk, count the lines in the footpath. Don’t give ’em cause to shout out at you.
Saturday morning, loaded with twenty cents of pocket money, we kids would arrange an expedition. Little fish heading out among groupers.
From Talinga Crescent I’d set out with Pigsy and Langdo. Langdo was Vicki’s age, three years older than me, and one older than Pigsy. He was a thoughtful kid, often asking adults questions he knew they couldn’t answer, just for the joy of watching them perplexed. Some of his questions couldn’t be answered by adults on grounds of propriety, and some on grounds of ignorance. Being endlessly cheeky, he enjoyed both types of non-answers, both methods of stymying an adult. But his favourite way of snaring one of these giants inside a minute of confusion and embarrassment was by ambushing them in a pincer movement made of rosy innocence and explosive vulgarity. He would blink and twist his lips and a look of loud puzzlement would come onto his face and he’d ask, ‘Mrs Pigott, can I ask you a medical question?’
‘Of course, Langdo. Go ahead.’ She’d be thinking tinea, or cramp.
‘Have you ever had anal sex?’ He had a thousand variations on this theme and adults were wary of him.
He was an inventor. His father was an electrician with a shed that smelt of grease and was full of electrical gear and tools, nuts and bolts and fuses and naked women on tyre calendars. Langdo was always out there winding something into the vice, crimping wires together, soldering, or unscrewing the backs off radios for parts and cannibalising blenders to make robots that performed no more robotics than a clod of earth.
For one of my superhero personas he filled a backpack with batteries and ran some nasty amps down a line into a pair of rubber-handled barbecue tongs so I could take a pinch of whatever archenemy was currently threatening mankind and lay that son of a bitch low, squirming in a straitjacket of voltage and despair.
To test this weapon I sauntered up to the Langdons’ Siamese cat Hex who looked a little, if you squinted your eyes and said, ‘Hey, Catwoman,’ like Catwoman. I brandished the wondertongs above my head silently to give her full warning justice was nigh, then grabbed her by the tail. She meowed as if trying to lighten herself of her lifetime supply of meows in one go and lit out for heaven using the freeway of a nearby liquid amber, bursting out the top of the tree and scratching at blue air. When she hit the ground she re-enacted the perpendicular launch horizontally, a honey-coloured smear of cowardice. She forsook her family. That’s cats for you. There’s a traitor in every one, only awaiting concentrated voltage to bring it out.
So the wondertongs apparently worked on dozing cat-sized fiends. But would they work on life-sized villains, opponents with a heftier biomass? Would they fry lizard-featured humanoids?
Langdo’s mum wasn’t a lizard-featured humanoid. She was quite pretty, malingering there in her small kitchen at an endless chain of minute tasks. She’d taken the pre-sliced, processed cheese from the fridge and unwrapped the white bread from its waxed paper to delight the husband and sons of the house with grilled cheese on toast for lunch. Again.
These staples lay on the table, their status as food so dubious there was no need for a fly net. In my experience grilled cheese on toast was the only foodstuff ever prepared in this kitchen. The Langdons only ever ate grilled cheese on toast or large tin buckets of ice cream so white it looked like snow. And despite my mother blackmailing me into eating every bitter absurdity in the whole food pyramid, the Langdons seemed no less healthy than me. I loved their grilled cheese on toast. It had all the blandness a boy needed.
Langdo’s mum had turned to the sink and was washing dishes in an uninspired fashion. She seemed to be looking out the window at what might have been. At a life that wasn’t. To me she had the look about her of a woman who, if given the opportunity, would embrace higher purpose. I saw the languor that cloaked her face as a form of silent yearning for greater responsibility. This woman hadn’t been put on earth to wash dishes. She was, with her dull look, showing disgruntlement and begging to speed the course of scientific warfare against super-villains, offering herself up as the first human test pilot of the cat-launching wondertongs. But maybe I just saw her disenchantment with her lot in life because I needed to. ‘Hello, Mrs Langdon.’
‘Hello, Boyboy. Do you want some ice cream?’
‘Maybe later … after the …’
‘After what?’
‘After nothing.’ I sidled up behind her, stood there awhile eyeing her buttocks like a deli customer torn between smallgoods. Or in this case rather big goods. The gypsy ham or the mortadella? The left buttock or right? They were dimpled as scoria, stretching her lemon-coloured rayon house pants beyond the maker’s recommendation or imagination. Left or right? Eventually I went left, clasped a hefty tongful of that buttock and held on tight.
Mrs Langdon was generally a placid woman lost inside a halo of hair curlers, sheepishly shuffling room to room avoiding the rolling household wolf pack of male dominance. Who’d have thought she’d set up such a wailing and contrive such expressions of pain? Not me. I felt let down. This wasn’t scientific. Better to make her observations on the wondertongs verbal, concise. ‘Boyboy, the new instrument gives off a mighty zing. It started my pubes smoking.’ Something like that. Factual, informative. But she offered nothing valuable, nothing I could take on board and integrate into the next generation of wondertong.
I think an electrician (and, remember, her husband, Roy, was one) might tell us the wattage of the wondertongs was amplified by her having her hands in a metal sink filled with water at the moment of application. More fool her for being trapped on a domestic treadmill. I can only imagine the havoc the wondertongs would have wrought on sea monsters if they hadn’t been confiscated and I had got to grips with those sodden creeps.
Langdo’s mum gurgled and headed for the linoleum as if bullets were cutting through the kitchen at hip height. Once there she convulsed and shuddered and set to screaming the same scream over and over. By the time she’d screamed three times Langdo was living in a share house with Lord Lucan and Ronnie Biggs. Goner than just gone. Miraculously gone.
So when Roy Langdon burst his normally sloth-slow arse through the kitchen door to find what variety of catastrophe was mauling his missus, he found her on the wood-patterned lino screaming that scream and me standing there, delighted by the wisps of smoke curling off the wondertongs, but also chagrined by his wife’s refusal to answer, as I asked her, again and again, ‘How did that feel?’
I was thrown out of the house and kicked in the arse all the way down the front path to the gate and from there shoved for home and told I was a dangerous idiot. Mr Langdon then decommissioned my wondertongs by helicoptering them over the fence into Mr Sargood’s yard. It was not uncommon in Talinga Crescent to launch jerrybuilt devices packing unknown wattage over one fence or another, thereby making them some other sucker’s problem. I guess they lay in Mr Sargood’s hydrangeas hissing at his chooks until the batteries went dead. Super-villains everywhere flexed their biceps and smiled.
The wondertongs had fused Mrs Langdon’s rayon house pants to her left buttock. And these unfashionable pantaloons had to be coerced off her haunch by her mother-in-law, Nanna, using tweezers and lanolin and, knowing that old bitch, gleeful roughness. I guess I was defamed by both parties during the whole process. It wasn’t an era that valued scientific research.
Drugs sent Langdo to jail early. Vicki visited him there, which was like her. I didn’t, which was like me. And while we were all still flexing our dispositions to see who and what we might be I heard he was dead.
To go down the street with Langdo we would cut through his nanna’s house which was out the back of his own. Her garden was dark with high greenery and we crept down her driveway hoping not to be caught, because she was a shrivelled widow in black with greasy grey ringlets, prone to pop up out of the ferns like a Viet Cong with bursts of angry, unanswerable questions. Our standard defence against her existence was to sneak around her or run from her. Langdo wasn’t scared of her, though. Once she shouted at us, ‘What are you children up to?’ An
d he burst into loud song, ‘And I wonder, I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder …’ This was a recent Del Shannon tune and his use of it in this moment seemed genius to me.
First stop was usually Halpin’s Sports Store. It was a cave made of wood, dark with a wooden floor and a wooden counter and wood and glass display cases, all of which made the garishly chromed racing bikes that stood in ranks inside appear like UFOs that had come crashing through the roof of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Behind the counter was a wall of dark wooden drawers and if I told old Bunger Halpin, the small and bald owner, that I was here to buy a Ferrari Matchbox car he would roll the wooden ladder along on tracks and in his long grey dust-coat climb to that drawer and pull it out and pluck from it a small yellow box sided with plastic windows in which sat an electro-red auto-morsel. He’d hold it between his thumb and forefinger, smiling like a miser with a widow’s pacemaker, and before coming down the ladder he’d demand I lay out the forty cents I’d stolen from Mum’s golf-change cup on the counter.
Boyish morals melt like ice in the fierce blaze off a red Ferrari. Every time I stole from her I made a pact with myself to repay the money once I’d saved enough. The Me that was promising to repay the money knew I was lying and the Me I was lying to knew I was lying but we both nodded our heads, or head, in rank complicity and affirmed it was a done deal, that the money would be paid back to Mum if it was the last thing I, we, did … which it still might be, I, we, suppose.
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