Boyhoodlum

by Anson Cameron

  The pact to meet at three made, fraudulently on my part, Mum and Dad would enter the pavilion, where cool drinks flowed among Shepparton’s select. Shepparton had a select. Australia isn’t as egalitarian as advertised. There is a class system here. But not one where the lower class feels inferior. It’s a happy peculiarity of this country that both the gentry and the proles feel superior to each other. The gentry have two or three generations of property ownership to boast of and someone in the family has made good at something and they are educated and visit the rellies o/s and spend the summer down the coast.

  The ‘working people’ have a battler’s pride. A battler’s vanity. They have fought the class war and the marketers and demagogues of socialism have told them they are worthy, proud warriors, who know ennobling pain and have tasted real things that the middle class, the leeches who live above, haven’t known or tasted. They might not have beach houses, but they are real people. Everyone’s happy.

  And we would blast away from the pavilion, into the crowd of battlers that stunk thrillingly of sweat and sugar, toward sideshow alley. I’d undo my top three buttons and untuck my shirt and break my hair from the undignified combed moulding Mum preferred. Within minutes I’d find a posse of mates and we’d brandish our money at one another and begin to boast of the things we were about to do. How we were going to gyp the simple-minded travelling sideshow people and ride their rides and shoot their ducks and win their prizes.

  Hard rock songs were played at each attraction along sideshow alley and they clashed and interwove into a demented multi-level bray of pompous power riffs – The Kinks and Slade and Led Zep and the Stones and the Easybeats. Now and then, we’d hear a piece of a tune we knew and lean back at the waist and jut our chins and play an air-guitar riff on our shirtfronts, caught in the sensory overload of the alley.

  The Octopus was first. An eight-armed ride that gyrated in a wavering ellipsis and at the end of each arm spun a metal booth holding six unrestrained, screaming people. Anyone who’d paid the surly man besmirched with blue-blurred tattoos to ride the Octopus was soon caught in a vicious small orbit working at the end of, and powered by, a larger yawing orbit, and after five minutes these two revolutions jangled the inner ear of the rider and made his lips go numb and his jaw ache.

  It’s probably worth noting that these rides were bolted together by toothless itinerant alcoholics suffering delirium tremens and working below minimum wage who didn’t give a pharaoh’s fart for the life of a future National Living Treasure whose forthcoming worth to the country was, presently, disguised by maniacal face-daubings of fairy floss and dirt. That is, when I stepped up to the ticket booth of the Octopus and laid down my dollar note and, playing smart arse for my friends (you can, by now, just assume that when I’m with friends I’m packing my own portable audience and it is thus dictating my behaviour), told the toothless Joe who ran it, ‘Make it hum, Mister. I rode this one last year and kept nodding off.’ My friends laughed. He looked at me with muted delight and said, ‘You go to sleep today I’ll give you a full refund, dickhead.’

  You will have noticed in this memoir that I have a predilection for … mouthing off. And noticed that very early in life I decided that the splash-back of adult vengeance was a price I was prepared to pay for the laughs I got from my mates. But here, in essence, I’d just taunted an amoral drunkard who almost certainly beat his women, before climbing aboard the derelict death jalopy he was piloting. The zenith of stupidity or the nadir of common sense? And it was only mid-morning.

  Each ride on the Octopus lasted about five minutes, in which time you travelled the larger orbit about thirty times and the smaller orbit about one-eighty. By which time you’d closed your eyes on the blurring world but the maelstrom of g-forces continued to snatch at you and nauseated you and stretched and warped your balance, and dizziness had grown from a titillation to a major assault. Your lips and fingers were numb and a pre-nauseated ache in your jaw was making you waggle it side to side.

  After that ride I was hyperventilating but smiling. I’d made it. It wasn’t so bad. I waved at my mates. The toothless Joe smiled blackly up at me. You think this is over, kid? One by one he stopped the other seven tentacles at the disembarkation platform and released their payload of captors, who then stepped down and tottered drunkenly across the dirt mouthing relieved blasphemies to their families. He filled each tentacle with new riders. He didn’t unload our tentacle. He started the ride again.

  Another one-eighty fizzing orbits wrapped inside the yawing thirty. Shepparton and its surrounding orchards torn and smeared and lifted and tossed. My stomach queasier now. But, again, I survived. He stopped the ride and unloaded the other seven tentacles and shouted up at me and the other five white-faced collateral victims alongside me who were shouting down weak protests, ‘You sleepy yet?’

  ‘Sleepy? Did he ask if we were sleepy?’ a young woman who was teetering on the edge of tears asked. And around we went again.

  I held on until the fourth ride. Buzz Aldrin would’ve thrown his hands up and wrecked his career by soiling his pants during the third. I had earlier hogged down two sticks of fairy floss and the vomit rained pinkly across the crowd in pretty epitrochoidic patterns as a swathe of earthbound show-goers that corresponded to my overhead transit reached up Mexican-wavelike to pat their hair or their baldness or wipe their arms and faces and then began taking off their glasses to stare in wonder at the lenses spotted … pinkly. Pinkly? They began to dab their fingertips in the pink stuff and edge their noses toward their wetted fingertips to check out what this was and after this they began to swear and cast about for the villain who had carpet-bombed them with rosy bile.

  I had finished vomiting by the time the hundred or so people I’d spattered figured out what had happened and started staring moodily skyward looking for the culprit.

  The toothless Joe was baring his gums happily when he landed our tentacle at the disembarkation platform and opened the little tin door of our booth to let us stagger forth. Several of the people I rode with swore at him. He ignored them and grabbed me by the collar and shoved me this way and that and shouted at the crowd, ‘’Ere ’e is. Ere’s the little dickhead that spewed on youse all.’

  Maybe in Bendigo a lynch mob of sorts could have been got up. Maybe in Seymour. But a rain of vomit in Shepparton, with her many grand corner hotels skirted by first-floor verandahs, was a relative banality. Vomit was just another form of weather in Shepparton. Rain, hail and vomit. Baptised once more by the downpouring upchuck of a fellow citizen, people shrugged, smeared it into their skin, and moved on to the ghost train or the dodgem cars.

  Using guy ropes to support myself I staggered down an alley made by two marquees and lay out back in the dust hyperventilating at the blue sky with the thumping mélange of rock riffs and the screams of the riders fading.

  Ten minutes later I was right to go again. Think of a honey badger bitten by a black mamba. A quick nap and I stood and shook my head and dusted myself off, flattened my hair, and checked my funds. I had had four rides for only a dollar. Sideshow folk were about as dumb as fence lizards and it was no wonder they limped from town to town in sinful cohabitation with freaks and dwarves immersed in laughable gap-toothed poverty. Four rides at twenty-five cents a ride. I’d stung that toothless Joe for three dollars.

  I nosed my way out between the marquees back into the crowd. And the first friend I bumped into was Stowey.

  I had thought I might keep Stowey out of these memoirs, but like a circus banned from town for its past excesses, he sets up camp on the outskirts and we can hear his lions roar and blaring horns and barkers hollering through bullhorns and snippets of his archive of idiocy and mishap drift in on the breeze. Better to include him, let him have his romp and then go away and grow up to become a disappointment.

  Stowey. Okay … Stowey, if we must. It is said of some people that ‘they won’t die wondering’, that is, they’ll give anything a try to see what it’s like and thereby appease the c
raving to know. But ‘wondering’ is too grand a term for what Stowey did. He was more in the mode of one of those hunting terriers that have been bred to a point of perpetual mental frisson where they’ll bung their head in any hole, no matter if it looks like it harbours Beelzebub’s sourest brother. It wasn’t anything as grand or thoughtful as ‘wonder’ that made him drive a golf ball at a speeding VW Beetle, or punch a large Russian in the ear. As often as not it was me betting him he wouldn’t.

  Stowey was a sportsman of note. He could play any game well. Far better than I could. But if we squared off at twenty paces in a rock fight, which we did often, I would hit him between the eyes with a chunk of scoria every time and lay him out while his first rocks were still airborne, zinging wide, ricocheting off houses and cars. I had a concentrated excellence at bringing pain to others, or preventing my own, which is the same thing if you live in a combat zone.

  But if I was swooping on a cricket ball to effect a run-out by throwing down the stumps, the scorer, without waiting to see the outcome, would casually lower his black-lead and add four overthrows to the batsman’s score. Before the ball had left my hand the runs were recorded, so predictable was my ineptitude and so fatalist my teammates. Once I saw our team’s scorer draw a tiny bathtub-type duck against my name in the scorebook as I was preparing to walk out to bat against Tatura State Primary. I stood there leaning on my bat while their fieldsmen heckled and I made our scorer upend the pencil and bring the eraser into play, expunging the duck and thereby reinstating the possibility I might plunder infinite runs.

  I think it was the scorer’s lack of faith, his heavily pencilled duck, like a stigmata of preordination, erased but still indented in the scorebook, that froze me at the crease. He only had to reverse the pencil once more and run its tip around that indented silhouette like a slot car along its track to bring the scoresheet up to date. And that about sums up my sporting endeavours; everyone knew I would fail, and I knew I would too, except sometimes, occasionally, usually in spring with the first pulse of strengthening sun, I got a brave notion I might not … but did anyway.

  Now Stowey. At the Shepparton Agricultural Show. ‘Hey, fucknuts.’

  ‘Hey, dickbrain.’

  ‘What you been on?’

  ‘I rode the Octopus for an hour. Conned the dill who runs it out of three rides.’

  ‘Fair dinkum?

  ‘Fair dinkum.’

  ‘We should go back. Suck him in again.’

  ‘Umm … nah. I’m over the Octopus. It’s boring. How long you got?’

  ‘Got to meet the olds at four.’

  ‘Me too. Where’ll we go next?’

  Modern Science’s Most Terrible Wonder … The Headless Lady lay in a brocaded silk dress from another age, a garment Anne Boleyn herself might have worn proudly to the broadsword. A small paid-up crowd stood inside the marquee above the shallow, felt-lined sarcophagus in which she lay. A blurb on its side said her name was Ursula and she came from Romania and was beheaded in a ‘Revolution Threshing Machine’ there. Some wag had crossed out ‘Revolution’ and inked in ‘Threshing Machine’. Sans head she would never see that country’s beautiful capital, Sofia, again, nor hear the cries of its street vendors, nor smell nor taste its renowned cheeses. This blurb had me believe Sofia was the capital of Romania for a decade and that its cheeses were above the normal ruck of Eastern European stodge. Neither is true.

  The end of the sarcophagus where her head should have been was roped off, so we couldn’t see how her neck ended, but her head was definitely missing. A large laboratory beaker stood on a table nearby with tubes of bright green liquid going in and out of the stiff collar of her dress. Below that the dress opened and I could see her cleavage rise and fall, but figured this may have been some intricate bellows device rigged up inside a mannequin by a smarty pants. I guess similar doubt was rising throughout the crowd. Until she felt an itch – and her right hand flinched and lifted and crossed her body, ghostly slow, and her fingers scratched her left wrist just as deftly as yours or mine would. She was real. With no head. No hearing, no speech, no power of smell, nor of sight, nor, come to think of it, thought … How did she itch? How did she scratch?

  Stowey – being Stowey – ducked beneath the rope and stepped to the end of the sarcophagus to peer down the lady’s neck and debunk the mystery. What he saw there made him freeze and his eyes widen and whiten. The crowd, watching him, went silent, needing to know what he’d seen.

  ‘A fuckin’ wog … eating a donut,’ he said. We were all pretty amazed.

  Some arrangement of slanted mirrors was making the lady’s head show as pure pillow from where we were. But Stowey having got behind the rope and looked from another angle had seen, reflected in these mirrors behind himself in a canvas alcove, the impresario, a Mediterranean type sitting on a folding chair innocently enjoying a donut and astounded to be called a fucking wog at his own freak show by a kid with a pudding-bowl haircut. Stowey assumed it was a tiny fucking wog sitting on the Headless Lady’s pillow, whereas it was a life-sized one hidden behind him.

  The life-sized fucking wog appeared to us from his canvas alcove behind Stowey, who was still watching him in the mirror thinking he was striding mousily across the Headless Woman’s pillow. The life-sized fucking wog put his donut in the Headless Lady’s hand. I saw her grip it. Only think how galling to be taunted with the reminiscent touch of a sugary donut when you have no head with which to ogle, chew and taste it.

  Stowey looked aghast at the man, now frighteningly full scale and standing beside him. How did this happen? How had a Barbie-sized bloke he’d felt safe to abuse for sitting on a lady’s pillow where her head should have been grown so big, so angry? The life-sized fucking wog grabbed Stowey by the shirt front and hauled him outside and pitched him into the dust of sideshow alley.

  He was still sitting in the dust, blinking, trying to figure out what had happened when I got outside. Sideshow alley was a place where magic was routinely performed, but Italians didn’t recover from advanced miniaturisation and throw you about as a rule.

  ‘That guy got big fast,’ he said.

  ‘It was probly mirrors,’ I explained. ‘She probly had a head.’

  There were a few intervening rides. There was the stand where you threw twenty-cent coins, trying to land them on packets of Wine Gums and Minties and sundry other delectables and if they stayed on top the pack was yours. But they always slid off and the bald man got to keep your money. Unless you spat copiously on the coin, making it land like a toad or a turd or a toad’s turd. The stall holder would then pick up your money between thumb and forefinger and stare at it like the toad or turd it was, dripping saliva from our Queen’s mouth, and he’d shout at you, ‘Deesgoost leettle poonk,’ and tell you, ‘No win speet. Speet no win. Fook of you.’ And that diatribe was well worth the money paid. Fook of you, too, with your unwinnable prizes, as we ricocheted off farmers and cannery workers into the depths of the crowd.

  The drum. The drumbeat. The very same bull-skinned echoes chosen by Rome to quicken blood in her citizens and conjure sweet gore in their minds to drag them to the Coliseum. The same set of endlessly adamant aural steps that reached into the dungeons and walked the gladiators red-visioned to glory … or death.

  You could hear the drum from a long way off. Beneath the rock riffs and the cliff-jump squeals of the Matterhorn riders and the calls of the barkers to come see come see and the moans venting from the ghost house, it was the funereal heartbeat of sideshow alley. Jimmy Sharman’s drum. Real war had come, for those that spoke its language.

  Certain boys, and certain men, too, pretended not to hear the drum. Walked on by in a mask of calm, looking this way and that for the next thrill; perhaps a coconut shy or the dodgem cars. These were cowards. The drum, being so frightening to them, they heard it louder than we did, but would as soon admit to hearing it as slap a tyrannosaurus on the arse. These people didn’t look up at the warriors as they hurried past Jimmy Sharman’s.

/>   The fighters stood on a running board above and facing the crowd, some in shorts and singlets and some in shiny robes. Behind them ran a long canvas mural on which were painted known champions wearing championship belts. These painted pros were dressed only in shorts and each crouched in his distinguishing fistic stance shaping up to some foolhardy invisible. Painted above them the boast: ‘Products of Jimmy Sharman’s Troupe’.

  The men on the running board hadn’t reached the pro circuit. The men on the running board were the level of fighter who could beat anyone in the crowd they were eyeing off, but no one on the painted canvas behind them. They didn’t fight a talent in a big hall once every few months like the painted champions. They were shift workers in a square-roped abattoir, poleaxing drunks and maladroit hulks and dancing away from the vivid assaults of gifted wild-men every night of the week.

  They glared down at the crowd. Half blackfellas and half whitefellas, they were hard, wiry men from low circumstance in far towns, from homes broken and institutions despised … the wrong side of the tracks. Well, in truth, no blackfella was born on the right side of the tracks. These fighters had biceps worth ten law degrees to me. Each year, after seeing them, I’d do twenty chin-ups for three days straight, then check myself in the bathroom mirror. Three whole days. But still those biceps didn’t come. The trick was to train on a strict diet of kangaroo and overproof rum like Jimmy Sharman’s boys did.