Mum took me down to Lunn & Fordyce where I was measured up with a tape measure and, according to the lady with the beehive hairdo taking the measurements, was beautifully proportioned, even manly. She was lying through the coloured pins she had clamped in her teeth.
I was fitted with a sports coat made of the type of triple-check tweed American ventriloquists favoured for their dummies. A Comanche at the Court of St James dressed in this vestment couldn’t have looked, or felt, any sillier. I was a boy from a town, and now that they were fitting me up in raiment apt for a city I was sickened with the sudden knowledge that this better-life thing wasn’t going to go as well as I’d always believed.
Looking at myself in the long mirror surrounded by caramel-coloured wood panels I was taken with the audacity of my fraudulence. I was so clearly not a boy who belonged in a sports coat … or to the life and tribe that wore sports coats. ‘Oh, doesn’t he look splendid? A gentleman,’ the woman with the beehive hairdo comforted my mum. I was Mowgli in a petticoat. Malcolm Fraser was the Prime Minister at the time. He had a sports coat exactly the same as this. I was wearing the same sports coat as the fucking Prime Minister. The next life was going to be a fuck-up just like this one.
I needed to pack my suitcase carefully. I was never coming home. I had to leave behind all the stuff that wasn’t appropriate for a future in manor houses riding to hounds. Leave out the boyhood and the bogan, the toys and tools needed to live in a town that couldn’t support an opera company. Just pack the stuff I’d need for a gilded adulthood. The world in which I’d befriend knights, ride with princes, romance actresses, beguile tycoons, catch planes and own tall buildings – possibly without even knowing it, because … who can keep track of all one’s real estate?
I snuck in a bottle of Dad’s aftershave, though I didn’t shave. One day it would be needed. I put in a stick deodorant, though I had no more body odour than a marble Medici. Before coming back here I would be a man, giving off a heavy musk like Dennis Lillee after destroying a top-order of hapless Pakistanis.
Mum was in a black-and-white print dress, lipsticked and nervous, breaking into hammy howls of grief every now and then and covering her face with her hands to be losing another child to the faraway schools that a child was required to go to if he was going to be a real adult appearing in newspapers and at ceremonies. Dad was in a checked sports coat and the old school tie; hair laid flat and swept over his head in a slurry of his lavender brilliantine. He would be meeting school friends he hadn’t seen for years who would be dropping off their own sons and daughters. He was happy I was going to the place that had made him what he was so I could be made into whatever might be possible with the paltry ingredients provided. He knew I was wild, possibly mentally unstable and immoral. Now, let’s see what the big school could do about that.
I hauled my tan suitcase out to the cavernous boot of the Fairlane and hoisted it inside. I left my guns and knives and my Alistair MacLean novels in the house. I guessed it would be Shakespeare and backgammon from hereon in. I bent down and scratched the dogs, under their chins, behind their ears. Goodbye, Snuff. See you, Sam. You, being Cameron dogs, being free and road-prone dogs, being snake dogs, will be dead before I return for holidays.
We drove with Mum periodically asking if I’d remembered this or that. Did I pack my runners? My toothbrush? ‘Did you bring your toothbrush?’ That was a question I’d heard a magistrate ask a burglar while watching Dad in court once. Mum asking it now made me feel as if I were headed for prison, an innocent man facing brave exile. Yeah, I brought my toothbrush. But I knew the other kids would have better toothbrushes. From the back seat I shook my head at my parents for their financial shortcomings and pictured myself brushing my teeth in a bathroom alongside kids with toothbrushes made of gold.
Forty years ago Dad had made this trip and he wanted to prepare me for what he’d encountered, for what I’d surely encounter. ‘The other kids won’t speak like you do. They won’t drop their Gs. They’ll say ‘going’ not ‘goin”, ‘coming’ not ‘comin”. ‘I beg your pardon,’ instead of ‘What?’ ‘Carstle’ not ‘cassle.’ But you’re a chameleon. You’ll soon adapt.’
‘I beg your pardon; I’m going to the carstle. No way,’ I laughed tightly, without humour.
‘And there’ll be snobbery. The kids of Toorak don’t know or care where Shepparton is. They’re rich and they’ll think you pretty strange for not having a beach house and skiing in winter.’ Snobbery had been my prerogative till now. But our future King had been schooled at this place, suggesting my opportunities for future snobbery would be slim. I was starting to dislike my new schoolmates already. ‘I’m just letting you know it’ll be different,’ he said.
The road we drove toward the Alps was bordered by box trees, the remnants of the great forests that had covered Victoria’s central plains. The February countryside was shimmering straw yellow. After an hour we began to climb into the high country and the paddocks tinged green. I’d travelled this road many times before, heading for the shack we stayed in on the Goulburn River outside the village of Jamieson in the mountains. This time we didn’t turn south to that fibro hamlet. We followed the road toward Mount Buller and turned off at a place called Timbertop.
A camp-out campus of wooden barracks littered across a mountainside beneath towering eucalypts, all joined by gravel roads and walking tracks. Above it all sat an A-frame chapel, its triangular glass altar a diamond of modernity set in terra nullius. This place was where the plutocracy sent their offspring to toughen them up. To teach them the stuff the workers know; of cold nights under wet skies, and long distances and heavy weights and forking tracks and choices and blisters and a world without adults. But I figured I already knew all that. I’d been living as Lord of the Flies all my life. What did I need this place for?
We did a quick tour of the campus with a young rosy-faced Oxbridge master named Mr Polly. Dad shook hands with a few old friends and they fired reminiscence and laughter at one another. Mum smiled bravely through the coming loss. Guy used to bring brown snakes home from this campus in his suitcase, so she was watching where she trod.
The staff wanted the parents gone, so they could set about becoming the new parents. I kissed Mum quickly and broke her hug, not wanting my goodbyes to stand out as especially soppy among the many goodbyes that were going on around me. Veteran boarders waving parents away with faces that said ‘Get gone’ so they could re-meet friends after the long summer break. I shook Dad’s hand. ‘Righto, good luck,’ he said.
‘Yeah. Righto.’
When they got in the car – that was the end of childhood. My ride back to that world was gone. The nooks and crannies in which my imaginary self had thrived suddenly vanished. No privacy anymore. Now I will sleep and shower in a dormitory alongside other boys. Strangers. I must start again. And hide my past.
I stood on the gravel turning circle out front of the dining room watching as their silver Fairlane wound out of sight downhill along the gravel driveway. And I must have stood there a while because everyone else was gone when a tall boy approached me and put out his hand. In his Harris Tweed sports coat he looked the sort of kid a filmmaker would choose to play a hick on holidays in the big smoke.
‘G’day. Anson, is it?’
‘Yeah. Yes.’ We shook hands.
‘My name’s Will. Call me “Bum”. Everyone calls me “Bum”. Your old man and my old man were mates at school. You want me to show you round?’
‘Yeah. Yes. Okay … Bum.’
I listened hard for the giveaway hint of grand houses in gilded suburbs, but heard none. Bum was straight off a farm. He had a farmer’s drawl, which was somehow comforting. I felt a flush of gratitude. He was an old hand and had offered to show me around.
But Bum didn’t seem much of a name for the first person I was to meet in this dignified world I’d waited so long to join. He was clearly a dag. And, you know … a farmer? Weren’t farmers the sort of people I’d come here to get away from? I’
d read my Unit list and knew I’d be sleeping alongside a Marquis. I wondered if mixing with Bum might handicap me with the cool kids, Marquises and the like, who probably smoked French cigarettes. Perhaps I ought to make some excuse, step away, scan the joint for some guy leaning up against a wall wearing a body shirt and flared jeans slung low and a Gauloise on his lip. Perhaps I should start again.
As I was weighing the value of Bum as an entry point to the New Big Life I heard gravel-crunch footsteps accelerating toward us and a boy came running from behind and launched into the air and hit Bum in the middle of the back with both knees, sending him sprawling face down across the gravel. The attacker lost balance in the collision and fell, coming to rest sitting, leaning back on his arms on the gravel in front of me. He was big and pale skinned with a bent nose, smiling happily with the outcome of his assault.
Everything I’d ever learnt told me I should kick him in the head. Here I stood above him. I could easily kick him under the chin and lay him out sobbing on his back in the gravel. It was normal schoolyard practice.
Or I could introduce myself to him. So, was Bum my friend or not? Mum and Dad weren’t even off the mountain and already I was on the banks of a fairly frothy boyhood Rubicon, having to decide whether to assault this pale assailant or befriend him.
But I didn’t come here to be that boyhoodlum. To be the prick I had been. I came here with a lifelong knowledge that metamorphosis was possible, and that this was it. Right here was the place, signposted from the beginning, where I turned from larvae to butterfly, from a grubby little solipsist to a gilded child who could parse Latin.
Yet … there sits the pale assailant, smiling at me as if we’re conspirators. He will rise and introduce himself if I let him. Bum, my new friend, is sprawled and torn on the gravel. So all I’ve got to do now is all I’ve ever had to do – decide whether it’s best for me to step forward and kick this guy in the face … or not to, and by letting him get away with an assault on a friend thereby signal an intention to ditch that friend and become his friend. To trade up to a tougher accomplice, as it were. Maybe this place isn’t so different to where I‘m from, I thought. Maybe metamorphosis is a myth. Maybe in a carstle the same wars are fought using better elocution.
From here, from this northern side of this mountain, if the day is clear, I can look across Victoria’s central plains a hundred miles and detect a flaw in the horizon’s light. A slight, perhaps imaginary, bruise on the far plain that lets me know I’m looking in the right direction.
It’s a long way, and only a small clue to the past. But my yearning gaze, powered by all the memories I have, cuts through the intervening space and time and descends on that town. It flows down Wyndham Street and up Fraser Street into Cameron and Cameron where Dad is sitting at his desk, wrinkling his brow, nodding his wry pout to a new widow, sympathising with her that her dead husband had debts he hadn’t owned up to. He surreptitiously checks his watch beneath the lip of the desk as the new widow catalogues the husband’s failings as a man of business.
Then along Fryers Street to where Mum, having dropped Justina Gaye at kindergarten, is opening her new shop, ducking next door to get a cappuccino from the Taverna Café, batting away rude compliments from the round tables of Italian men gathered there in white singlets to play cards and backgammon.
Arriving late then for school, the bell for class already rung, everybody already seated, creeping in, listening to Mr Murray ask, ‘Now, where did we leave off last week? Can anyone tell me?’ Stowey makes a joke that the class, my audience, half laughs at. ‘We were talking about the rebellion at … during the Gold Rush … Ballarat …’
Gayle Simmons, lithe, white socks cupping loose around sharp ankles, regally straight-backed, aware she’s watched, on show, sitting up the back pulling the glances of boys who will never reach epiphany kissing her behind the lockers up against the wall of the school reverend’s office.
Wallster passes her a note that flares a smile on her pretty face. Then his hand drops to her leg and he draws a heart on her thigh with a ballpoint pen and writes their initials inside the heart. She lets him. The heart is high enough above the hem of her dress to be invisible when she stands. That tribute drawn, Wallster begins stroking her thigh while Mr Murray asks for the two root causes of the rebellion at Eureka. How can I control this now? How can I take my friend’s hand off my girl’s thigh? How can I prevent this next step? How can I stop the excision of me from their lives?
Here on this mountainside, watching them in that town, in that class without me, I’m resenting them for going on living when the light, consciousness, raison d’être and puppeteer of that world has packed his tan suitcase and gone. They should have dropped like marionettes, those people I thought I could live so easily without. They don’t seem to know I conjured them into being – that they don’t exist without me.
Staring out through the vast air between us, between the me of now and the me of then, I feel the pulse of the town and realise with horror that it still lives, grows, loves, forgets … is drifting away with everyone on board beguiled by their own tomorrows.
My friends are there, now gripped in barter, now sliding free in laughter, now finding secrets in each other’s eyes. My family is there in its hustle and pain and routine. And I can scream from this mountaintop till my lungs catch fire and those people won’t stop living, dying, growing up, old, away, alien … Tomorrow they will be unrecognisable as the commemorated cast I hold captive in my boyhood head. Tomorrow the people who are living in that town will smile at, laugh at, sneer at, and regret those younger selves I hold in memorial stasis. The place I know and love is being razed by a banal blur of days. There’s no past to go back to. To leave is to destroy the place you leave.
It’s alive for minutes at a time in the first year – the past. The rooms, sounds, sayings and smells. Purpled with yearning, but real. On your bike you ride that bare path through the vacant block dodging potholes to the pool, where you see that girl, her way of walking and smiling, marvel at her little revelations, the taste of a spearmint malted milkshake on her lips, the first rain of autumn called in by the currawongs, a new emotion, the arc of jealousy when a friend turns away from you to another friend, the proud moments alone underwater after a perfect dive from the three-metre board when your world was watching … then the laundry truck shifts down a gear to climb the mountain to the school and its engine snarls and the past yields all and the here and now is cruelly true again. And, lying in your bed with the old world lost again, you reach upward into the dark of the dormitory for those waning times.
In the second year the past is rarer and its lifespan shorter. Its moments are as infrequent, unplanned and disconcerting as meteor-strike. Dad’s beer-laugh watching TV movies on Friday night. The triangle of streetlight that hung above my boyhood bed. The knothole in a fence through which we passed coded notes. The scream of Pigsy falling from the silky oak. The tiny wart on Debby Neeld’s thumb as she ventured her hand to be held.
And the intrusions that drag you back to the present are heartbreakingly small … a boy coughs in his bed, a car passes, time-beeps mark the hour on a radio somewhere … and that gust of past has passed.
Eventually there is only an occasional ephemeral image, surfacing greyly in the coloured tumult of now, igniting a throb of reminiscence. A peripheral glimpse of a half-known somebody such as you might see when running past a warped mirror. That boy was tangled in that town as it crossed the frontier moment of now into the past. That kid is dead for all but a few unplanned flashes a year, and even in those moments of reincarnation is a stranger.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is made to Fairfax Media, in which the initial incarnation of some of these episodes appeared. Also to Martin Summons for permission to reprint my, somewhat changed, Endnote to his historical work, Water: The Vital Element.
About the Author
Anson Cameron has written six critically acclaimed novels, Silences Long Gone, Tin Toy
s, Confessin’ the Blues, Lies I Told About a Girl, Stealing Picasso and The Last Pulse, as well as two collections of short stories, Nice Shootin’ Cowboy and Pepsi Bears and Other Stories. He was born in Shepparton, Victoria in 1961 and lives in Melbourne where he currently writes a column for The Age.
Also by Anson Cameron
Nice Shootin’ Cowboy
Silences Long Gone
Tin Toys
Confessing the Blues
Lies I Told About a Girl
Stealing Picasso
Pepsi Bears
The Last Pulse
ALSO BY ANSON CAMERON
THE LAST PULSE
A blackly funny novel about an unlikely hero, and his misadventures on the flood he has created
In the drought-stricken Riverland town of Bartel in South Australia, after the suicide of his wife, Merv Rossiter has an epiphany. He trucks north with his eight-year-old daughter, Em, into Queensland. There he blows the dam at Karoo Station sky high, releasing a surging torrent through outback New South Wales into South Australia.
As the authorities frantically search for the culprits, Merv and Em ride the flood south in a stolen boat, rescuing a bedraggled Queensland Minister from her floating portaloo, and an indignant young blackfella who fancies he sang the river to life all by himself.
Meanwhile, in Canberra, the political flotsam carried by Merv’s renegade ocean brings the Federal Government to its knees.
Wryly humorous, poignant, timely, The Last Pulse is one of Anson Cameron’s finest works.
PEPSI BEARS
Daring and provocative short stories from one of Australia’s best comic writers
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