I got the cuts. A leather strap hissing and biting and hissing and biting. I showed my hand around to the lads at lunchtime, casually, with a hero’s disdain for fuss when a limb was lost. ‘Nah, didn’t hurt. Lawson’s too fat to swing hard.’ Then I showed it to Gayle who laid that superheated palm against her chest, proving women complicit in the foolery of agitators and egomaniacs.
But the bushy beards were on to me. In a room somewhere with ‘Bushy-Bearded Staff Only’ on its door they had decided war was declared on Anson John Cameron. And that letting me finish a sentence was as dangerous as letting the Russians go nuclear. Whenever there was a hassle and I would try to state my case the wonderbeards would appear and lean in close and shout me down. ‘But Mr …’ ‘I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ONE WORD FROM YOU YOU LITTLE CREEP YOU ARE THE MEAT IN EVERY SANDWICH IN THIS SCHOOL BUT WE’RE ONTO YOU AND IF YOU THINK …’ ‘I didn’t even …’ ‘… A SELF-CENTRED EGOTRIPPER WHO IMAGINES WE’RE ALL HERE FOR HIS AMUSEMENT, WELL LET ME TELL YOU …’ I couldn’t get heard. My days of smart-arsery and disruption were over. The tough guys were gunning for me and this was only going to end one way.
They began to haul me in and grill me. Long sessions in closed offices with loud bearded men leaning at me shouting questions whose only answers were that I was bad and going nowhere. The other beards stood around grim, watching, thinking, waiting to get tagged and take their turn up in my grill. Giving up their lunch hours for the divine mission of breaking me down. Who did I think I was? Where did I think this would end? Further you fall the bigger the splash, the greater the disgrace. Your father’s a lawyer and you end up working at the cannery, the explanation isn’t that you’re too cool to conform, it’s that you’re a cretin, too dumb to know what dumb is. You’re a retard that thinks he’s a genius. Probably all retards do. I’m happy for you … being so stupid, so blind. Because if you could see what you really were you’d shoot yourself.
I realised they weren’t just trying to reform me … they hated me. Making me pale and wordless was fun.
I’d been leading a double life, anyway. By day I was a hoodlum. At lunchtime we’d be over the back of the oval, smoking, carving our names in seats, chucking rocks at passing trains, smashing the odd window, pooling money to buy Marlboros, pants riding low and shirt buttons mostly gone. Transgression was the only way to manhood and honour. The pale cats over the school side of the oval were slaves to an adult world of fraud.
The tough life, the life of the hoodlum set against authority, was to be ours. We swore, shoplifted, spat continually, punched each other, and others, about a hundred times a day, handed in half-arsed schoolwork, bullied introverts and shrimps, vandalised indiscriminately, and spoke a nihilist patois. ‘You fuckin’ lookin’ at?’ I’d typically ask a boy I’d never met before.
At night I went home and talked in refined polysyllable without dropping my Gs and was a different boy. Dad and I spoke of Napoleon at Borodino and of Burke and Wills. Mum and I did the cryptic crossword. And when I went to bed I read novels and nodded my head quietly in appreciation of exotic cultures and heroic deeds until the neighbourhood slept. And this, it sometimes occurred to me, making me blink and pout, was me.
Out at Kialla I don’t think anyone was as happy as they used to be. Mum and Dad now spoke to each other with the careful diplomacy of nations covertly spending half their GDP on armaments. You felt every sentence was a moment away from breaking into truth, and from there … unveil the new munitions.
Guy had left home and was somewhere in New South Wales jackarooing. He’d show up once a month in an electric purple V8 ute wearing a claw-hammer tuxedo jacket and a wide-brimmed akubra, cracking a stockwhip and denouncing Victoria as over-civilised and overrun with irrigators. He bought an elephant gun, a .458 Weatherby Magnum that fired a round like a railway spike, and he sometimes blasted bullets through steel power poles to win bets.
I rode into town with him to buy Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Deep Purple’s Machine Head. I treasured our time together because I knew he was doomed to die in a car crash. Recently he’d missed a turn doing one-eighty and sent his ute end-over-end off a bridge and landed in a dam and nearly drowned. Some nights he’d come flying down our gravel road with all his lights out and the cops not far behind sweeping the paddocks with a spotlight. He was, at eighteen, so loaded with risk Mum could hardly look at him without tears welling. She was right too. Before long he dived off a bridge in Deniliquin into the Edward River. Like most Australian rivers it was over-named. It should have been called a creek, or a dribble. It was only a metre deep and broke his back pretty thoroughly.
Debbie had disappeared into the wilds of Melbourne and was working for a major company in a skyscraper. She moved in some sort of society where it was acceptable to wear cork-soled platform shoes and arse-hugging satin flares and a matching silvery satin waistcoat. She had the zephyr-teased hair of a Bee Gee and another tough boyfriend. Half an hour after you met him you would be smoking a bong or explaining your inability or reluctance to do so. ‘No, Cliffo, I’ve got a throat infection.’ ‘Cliffo, I feel a bit sick today.’ Cliffo, I’m twelve, man.
Vicki was back from all the private schools, finishing her last year in ignominy in Shepp. Demoted back to a provincial facility she’d been freed from years before. How could she care about this life when she’d seen the other? She had a friend called Fat Harris, also an expellee, and they’d sit at the milk bar outside school smoking and going halvies in a hamburger contriving plans to get back to Melbourne ASAP while egg yolk dripped from their chins.
Halfway through the year she exploded into romance and freedom by eloping with an Italian chosen from a field of mulish applicants with sufficient spare cash for hamburgers and smokes. She was so romantically blinded she couldn’t see the difference between high-school fellatio and lifelong happiness and had chosen to flee with a youth named Vince who, judging by the love letter we found, had to grit his teeth to write actual words and shake his head and growl like a hound to put those words one after another into a near sentence on a page.
Mum picked the hundred or so pieces of this torn-up love letter out of the wastepaper bin in Vicki’s bedroom when she didn’t come home one night. Mum and Dad grimly pieced them together while drinking whisky and breathing accusations at each other. It was no sonnet. But it was legible enough for us to find out that Vince thought Vicki was real cool and wanted to show her the good life in Quinlsand, which, according to Vince, was just forty miles away across the border where the VicPigs couldn’t follow. I think by Quinlsand Vince meant Queensland and he had that state mixed up with New South Wales, which he mistakenly thought of as a type of Canada from which you could poke your tongue across the river at mainland Australia’s southernmost cops with impunity and holler threats and taunts.
I was wearing a resolute pout as Mum read the letter aloud, showily affected by the gravity with which Mum and Dad were treating the emergency. But I secretly wanted Vicki to elope successfully. Ever since coming back from the last of her boarding schools she had been a sullen presence in the house and the mood could only lift with her gone. But this Quinlsand nonsense didn’t fill me with any hope that Vince could elope with any efficiency. And as I suspected, they never got to make their run at whatever garbled version of Canada he carried in his head, because the lovelorn fool also included the intel in his love letter that he lived with three cousins on probation in a weatherboard rental on an orchard out at Shepp East – he gave its address so she could find him there.
Dad and I piled into the Fairlane. It was night and we travelled dirt roads cutting through small orchards that made a sea of apple trees. We pulled up outside a house shedding its weatherboards and sitting in a halo of junk and Dad said, ‘You wait here, Ans.’ I knew this was dangerous. Dad had silver cups from Melbourne University for boxing but … three Italians on probation. Probably hopped up on grappa and about to make an orgy of a white girl who aspired to the romantic heights of elopement.
‘I�
��ll come with you?’
‘No. You stay here.’ He walked into the darkness toward the house. Loud knocking and low voices and he came back out of the dark with Vicki in tow clutching a handbag puffed with the necessaries for life on the lam in no-star motels. She sat in the back, pretty morose to have her lifelong bliss nipped in the bud. From the front seat I stared over the back of the seat at her all the way home. I’d never seen anyone who’d eloped before. As we pulled into our driveway I said, ‘You didn’t get far.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You going to try again?’
‘Fuck off!!’ She started crying. Some big collapse of some big romantic world she’d conjured up. From my experience of sisters their nights were pretty much a cacophony of collapsing romantic nirvanas. ‘Don’t you say another word,’ Dad told me. He poked me in the ribs as he said ‘you’.
Tina was, by then, the only spark of joy in the house and she was just a pot-bellied pet, a sort of self-glazing amphibian that drooled amply and smeared itself from hairline to toe until it smelt like a drunk licked by strays. You tickled it when you wanted it to laugh. You fed it when you wanted it to be quiet. You read it stories because, amazingly, kids’ stories were fun to read. You bathed it when the smell got too bad. Then, by early arvo, everyone was sick of it so they put it away for a nap and eavesdropped through the door while it firstly cried and then wittered to itself of puppies and swished bright swatches of spittle-covered silk about its own head – two early behaviours that would become lifelong habits.
I knew the wonderbeards at high school were going to throw me out. Their mission was clear. And I knew my transfer to the next big school was in jeopardy because of it. My destiny was threatened by my delinquency. So halfway through the year I detached from my gang, from my mates, from Gayle, and from the low road. I quietened down in class, bit my lip, a champ hanging up the gloves. Countless times during an argument or a fracas when our rights were being impinged, the class would pause, silently waiting for me, but I never showed up.
It wasn’t easy. I knew they needed my words, my shrill advocacy. When the shit hit the fan and big-faced adults were leaning close, shouting threats and vilifications, they needed my comebacks and deflections. They had none of worth themselves. They’d look across at me for deliverance, from the place it always came … but I just looked down at my desk and let the grown-up beasts roar on without stepping in. Let my friends lose the war. I was out of it. I wasn’t going to risk my future Big Life at the grammar school by getting thrown out of this school, or arrested, or by becoming so debauched by our wastrel ethos that there was no coming back.
I stopped going over the far side of the oval. I stopped meeting my mates at the Star Bowl. I stopped stealing and vandalising, and I stopped hanging out. It was treachery. I was renouncing my mates to save myself. But I did it.
Sherman was my only friend who wasn’t sold on daily misconduct, so I started hanging out with him. He read books and had a rare intelligence. His parents owned a pool and taught people to swim. His father had an Olympic bronze medal for water polo.
Being friends with him was a type of reform for me. He was a gentler soul than I normally hung around with, and we fell into a mutual awe of art. We discussed books and songs: Papillon by Henri Charrière, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, Jaws by Benchley. We talked about how the Creedence track ‘Long As I Can See the Light’ gave us goose bumps and hollowed our guts into the loneliest of feelings. How? We shared our enthusiasm for plots and lyrics. We both had insights to declare to each other. We both discovered strange and magnificent things authors and musicians did, conjurings and deceits and echoes.
Sherman’s observations were so good I started reading more closely so as not to miss what he might get. So as not to let him surprise me with his perspicacity, which he often did. We began to make each other good readers, good listeners.
Sure, when he came to visit at my place out on the river we shot at feral cats with broad-head arrows out of recurve hunting bows. Or if I went to his place at Bonnie Doon we’d roll rocks down hills to smash farmers’ fences way below. Given easy access to gravity, rocks, feral cats and hunting bows, what boy wouldn’t? But not counting these few run-of-the-mill atrocities, we were a partnership of the inner life.
He was the first person of my own age with whom I sat and listened deeply to music. ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ by Elton John. ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ by Gordon Lightfoot. We listened and sang along, annexing these stories and making them ours. Enjoying being us, newly shipwrecked and heartbroken. All sorts of beautiful, sad stories could feel like your own story if you gave yourself over to them. It was empowering to find a kindred spirit, to explore emotions and admit to having a heart. It wasn’t an act you could admit to in public in this town. It was clearly effeminate and wrong. But the last friendship I formed before I left was with a boy more likely to write an ode than vandalise a phone box.
At school, at the start of every recess or lunchtime, my gang broke away from the peaceable kids to go over the back of the oval and become grandees of rebellion. Over there moist packs of B&H that had nestled alongside scrotums all morning would be pulled from underwear and cigarettes so moist they needed lighting twice would be smoked.
They would ask me, ‘Camo … you comin’?’ ‘Nah. I’m just goin’ to hang here for a while.’ They didn’t abuse me outright. They shook their heads, spat, shrugged. What the hell was going on with Camo? Soon they stopped asking. One of their number had fallen.
Gayle would wait with me on the western side of the campus as her gang drifted over the back of the oval to join the hounds of rebellion, shouting at her to come on as they went. We held hands and talked, but the things we didn’t say were suddenly louder than the things we did. She was confused, and hurt. Why was I refusing to go over the back of the oval? Why was I giving them up? What was wrong? Was I giving her up too? I couldn’t explain it to her. I couldn’t tell her I had a different path. That this world wasn’t quite the real thing. That she wasn’t quite … the real … that there would be princesses.
After a while she’d remember she had to swap some homework with Ros or return a hair-tie to Kerryn, and she’d kiss me on the lips and drift across the oval. I’d watch her walk through the paspalum to those swirling distant figures, my friends. She could drag her feet in parodied sadness and still have more spring in her step than any other girl in school. It broke my heart to give her up.
It made me feel empty to give them all up. But they didn’t lug a deadweight of destiny like I did. They weren’t burdened by being chosen. I had the Big Future to protect, and staying on track with them to where they were going was the sure-fire death of that.
It’s nervous work having a Big Future hidden about you. It’s like being a spy. I couldn’t say anything to them about my unrevealed ethereal status. It would have come out wrong. They would have been jealous and stupefied. It would have been laughed at, remembered, repeated, used. Camo thinks he’s a Prince or something. King Cameron. King Fucking Cameron. Heavy is the head that wears the erroneous and pitiful assumption he is bound for glory.
I tried to say goodbye to them all. But my school friends thought my going no big thing. I’d already stepped out of their circle, shunned them, and lost membership of that unique clan. I no longer fit there.
Last day of school I found Rob Godden at the bus stop waiting for his bus to Katandra West. I put my hand out for shaking – an overtly adult gesture. He smiled at me to try and crack this joke open, to test if I was kidding. Because … I’d opted out months ago … hadn’t I? ‘See ya, Rob. I’m not coming back.’ He shook my hand half-heartedly, smiling, suspicious this was a pisstake, still not seeing the point. ‘Yeah, I know.’
It was that way all round. I found Stowey at the bike sheds about to mount his yellow racer for home. ‘See ya, knucklehead. This is it for me. I’m goin’ away next year.’ I held out my hand. He slapped it away. ‘You’ll be back. None of your fa
mily last long at those schools. See ya in second term.’ He rode away laughing. No one understood what a hit I was going to be in my second life. What they were about to lose. How much they’d miss me.
When young you think of your family as an immemorial compact of souls that will journey through the universe together, without addition or subtraction. The family is at once the world in miniature and the self in glorious extension. The cast is as inflexible as the cast of Hamlet. You do not exile or kill Hamlet in Act I. Nor do you add another Queen or make the King a Prussian with Tourette’s syndrome. The dramatis personae are unassailable, perfectly known, immortal. This wonderful world will go on forever, for there is no other world to come.
Yet all these additions and subtractions and transformations do occur. And year by year the range of your knowing extends and you see all the other possible worlds and realise this gallant symbiotic beast will soon die … must die, was born to die, is a convenience, a bunch of refugees who took shelter together from a storm. And now the sky is coming so blue …
I was ready to go. Damn these people. This world was played out and I was treading water, waiting for the next. I got the feeling Mum and Dad no longer believed in it. They had grim expressions and other projects. Dad took to breeding spotted horses. Mum opened a clothes shop. Guy was smirking from great days up north, reeking of girls and gun smoke. Debbie and Vicki had seen the El Dorado/Gomorrah at the south end of the Hume Highway and were drawn to it like boho pilgrims fleeing puritanism to party. You could fetch them back to Shepparton daily and they’d have crawled to the fleshpots of Melbourne on their knees by sun-up. They were gone even when they were at home.
Boyhoodlum Page 27