by Scot Gardner
‘What do you mean, Boxing Day?’ Her lips were pulled tight. ‘We are all going up to Shepparton, until the New Year.’
I can remember her mentioning it but it must have slipped my mind. I told her it would be okay, I’d just go around to the Humes’ place early and stay over and she could go up by herself. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
‘What about Christmas?’
The thought of sitting with all the old farts and my cousins (Jenelle is the oldest and the smartest) didn’t turn me on at all. Christmas had lost its appeal for me years ago.
‘We can have Christmas here before you go,’ I said, and she slapped the arm of her chair and sent her ashtray flying.
‘You’re so bloody self-centered, Wayne. You’re like your bloody father—you don’t give a shit unless it concerns you.’
She went on and on. Gave me a big lecture about how I don’t pull my weight around the flat and don’t respect her or all the effort she puts in.
My eyes just glazed over and from the corner of my eye I could see what looked like a thundercloud hanging over her and coloured bolts of lightning, red and orange, shooting into the lounge room from the top of her head. If I looked right at her, I could see little bits of spit flying out of her mouth but if I looked beside her I could see the heavy cloud and the lightning hovering over her. Bizarre.
‘No. You can’t bloody go. You’re coming with me,’ she said, and started coughing.
I stomped off to my room and slammed the door. We gave each other the silent treatment until Christmas Eve.
I came home from Game Zone at about two o’clock to find Dad’s ute in the driveway.
‘Wayne!’ Dad shouted as I pushed through the door. They were in the kitchen with two empty bottles of champagne, grinning at each other like little kids.
‘Merry Christmas, mate. Like a glass? Here have a glass of champagne. You’ll need it,’ Dad said stuffing a bubbling flute into my hand.
I sipped at the glass and nearly spat the stuff back. It was sucking my mouth inside out. Carbonated camel’s piss. Maybe I could mix some Milo with it to take the edge off . . .
‘Sit here,’ he said, and pulled out a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘I have insurance, right? You know what insurance is?’
I nodded.
‘Yes? Good. I have health insurance,’ he said again and looked at his hands on the bench. Mum had a drag on her cigarette and nodded, waiting for him to continue. He sat like that forever and Mum started laughing.
‘Shut up, Sylvie. Where was I? I have health insurance. My insurance company paid all the hospital bills after the accident and because I employed you, Workcover are making a payout to you. One hundred and four thousand dollars. It’s in a trust and we can only access it to buy prosthetics and that sort of thing until you’re eighteen. But it’s yours, mate. Just like a flash-and-where’s-your-grandmother. One hundred and four thousand dollars,’ he said and slapped me on the shoulder.
I drank my glass of camel’s piss like it was Coke and motioned for Dad to fill it up again. ‘Tell me you’re bullshitting me . . .’
They both shook their heads. So this is what it’s like to win Sale of the Century. What a buzz. Suck on that Phillip Baxter!
‘Yes!’ I shouted and nearly rocked off the stool.
‘Yeah, hang on a minute mate. It’s in trust for you, right, until you’re eighteen. That means you can’t use it until you’re old enough unless it’s to pay for a prosthetic.’
‘What’s a prosth . . .’ The camel’s piss was working already.
‘Prosthetic. Fake hand,’ Mum chimed.
Nah. Don’t need a fake hand. I’ve got a hook. I’ll just save it all up and when I’m eighteen I’ll buy a shit-hot car like a Porsche or maybe even a Subaru. My mind went wobbly with the possibilities, so much so that I didn’t notice Mum hugging me and kissing me on the head.
‘I’m sorry about the other day, love. Caught me on a bad trot. I’ve made arrangements for you to catch the train back to Melbourne on Christmas afternoon. Of course you can go with the Humes.’
‘I know you only love me for my money.’
She slapped me as I got up—had to tell Den.
I got back to the flat at about five, starving hungry and still buzzing. Mum was coming into the lounge from the hallway, smoothing her clothes down. She was surprised to see me and unsteady on her feet.
‘Oh, hello love,’ she said fluffing up her hair like she’d just been to the toilet. Her face was flushed and she fumbled with, but eventually lit, a fag. I told her I was hungry and the toilet flushed. Dad came out, fluffing his own hair and Mum said the magic word: ‘Pizza.’
I reckon I’ll remember that afternoon for eternity.
Christmas Day was a stinker. It was thirty degrees by eleven o’clock and Mum’s little Hyundai was as hot as a chip vat by the time we’d made it to Shepparton, even with the air-conditioning on flat out. Hugs and sickly smiles all around. Only Uncle Don was any fun.
‘Hey Dickhead,’ he said to me and pulled my arm so I had to bend down to where he was sitting. He looks much more like an Aborigine than Mum does. His skin is darker and he has brown eyes instead of Mum’s blue—just like his dad. He stunk like that greasy shit he uses to cake his hair flat and hissed beer-breath at me.
‘Silly bugger. What did you go and do that for?’ He grabbed my stump for a closer inspection. ‘Cut off a perfectly good hand! Silly bugger.’
I laughed and he flashed his gums at me. He gave up wearing his false teeth ages ago but he always carries them in his shirt pocket. It was a sit-around sort of day and I was allowed to have a couple of beers. I sat in the shade of the lemon tree with Don while the barbie sizzled and popped.
‘When Sylvia was young . . . bit younger than you . . . maybe seven or eight . . . the three of us, me and Sylvia and Ted, all slept in the same bed. Anyway, one night, Sylvie climbs over the top of me in a real hurry, right? I think she needs the dunny real bad, right? Next thing I hear this tinkle, tinkle like she’s having a piss, right? And I think oh, she made it to the dunny, right? Then the light flicks on and I hear my old dad shouting, “Sylvia, what the bloody hell are you doing?” And Sylvie says “Just going to the toilet, Dad.” Still asleep, right? And she pissed all over the chair in Mum and Dad’s room. Gawd it was a funny one, that one.’
Uncle Ted and Auntie Penny gave me a book. The cover looked stupid but I flicked inside and there were heaps of swearwords. Maybe it’ll be more interesting than I first thought. Don gave me a card with twenty dollars in it. The card was one that he’d made himself. When he was working he was an architect and he still loved to draw and paint. The picture was a blackfella sitting by a smoky fire at the foot of a huge waterfall. The image was misty, like a dream, and I stared at it for quite a while before opening it and reading:
Dear Wayne,
You can do whatever you want to. Best wishes,
Uncle Don
It was the nicest card. I thought it had the proudest message of all until I thanked Uncle Don for it.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s all right little bloke. Made the card myself, eh? Not bad. Like I said in the card mate, you can do whatever you want with the twenty dollars.’
He pulled me close and whispered, ‘Come down to the brothel with me on Monday and that twenty dollars will buy you a head-job. He, ha, ha, ha.’
Baz, Kerry and Den came to the station to pick me up in Gracie’s little Honda. It was almost dark and Kerry couldn’t believe that I had everything I needed in one pack, even my sleeping bag. I realised why she thought it was a miracle when we got back to their place and I saw their blue station wagon. It was loaded like a pregnant hippo. The roof rack had duffel bags laced onto it with octopus straps and the boat—cleaned and newly painted—was piled full as well.
‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’ Gracie asked and shook me by the shoulders. I nodded.
We spent that night playing ‘silly Scrabble’ where you make up words on a
Scrabble board using as many letters as you can. The rules were a bit tricky for me to begin with. It’s not allowed to be a real word. The word has got to follow the rules of English, like a ‘u’ after a ‘q’, no triple letters and that sort of stuff. The hardest bit for me was that you have to explain what the word means, convincingly, to the other players. They didn’t keep score but I reckon I would have won the third game with words like ‘barstola—an umbrella that covers a seat in a Spanish bar’ and ‘dircult—a small Iranian sword worn behind the ear’. Once I got the hang of it, it was sensational.
Den and I went to bed early that night but we didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. We kept ourselves awake talking about the girls at school. Giving them a mark out of ten at first until that deteriorated into discussing what we liked about them. I think Den must have got a bit hot because he started talking about the girls’ boobs, bums and hair. He doesn’t usually talk about stuff like that. I liked it.
We crammed in the car after a tomato and eggs breakfast that filled me to bursting, dropped Jesus off at the cattery and then we were on our way. Kez stared out the window. Heavy blue— grey clouds chased us along the highway into the sun. They eventually overtook us, putting on a show of lightning, rain and thunder that had Baz hunched over the wheel. I watched the countryside change and I realised how long it had been since I’d been into the mountains. I’d forgotten how green the hills were and how soft they were on my eyes. Every so often we’d move through a stretch of road where I could scan the horizon and see no living being except a few birds, a cow and maybe a sheep.
‘Did you see that?’ Den asked.
I craned my head to look out the back window.
‘That sheep back there ... it had exploded.’
Yeah. A few ribs and vertebrae scattered in the centre of a circle of wool. Kaboom.
We had lunch in Bairnsdale. The storm had overtaken us and left a bright, steamy day in its wake. The air, heavy and smelling like metal, made me hungry. Baz explained that the name of the town came from two old English words
‘bairns’ meaning kids and ‘dale’ meaning valley. Kids valley. He was a good tour guide and he knew where the bakery was. Gracie bought vegetarian pasties for everyone except me—she asked me what I wanted and in a fit of madness I ordered a kangaroo-meat pie. Kerry nearly chucked and Den started talking like he was Aboriginal.
‘Good tucker, that one. Old Skippy. Good tucker after you burn all the hairs off in the fire,’ he said.
It was good.
We sat on the side of the highway near the shadow of an enormous church. Spooky-looking joint of smooth red brick. We had a look inside and a funny little man told me off for bringing in my can of Coke. There was a whole wall you couldn’t see from the highway panelled in stained glass like a smashed-up rainbow. It was pretty but I kept thinking about all the dead people that had probably been carted up and down the aisles and I got a bit freaked. Den loved it.
Ten minutes back into the drive, Kerry and Den started fighting over a water bottle. I was in between them. Gracie pleaded with them to sort it out and they both huffed and crossed their arms like two-year-olds.
‘When will we get there?’ Den moaned.
‘Yeah, I’m hungry.’
‘I’ve got to go to the toilet.’
Kerry said, ‘I think I’ve just pooped my pants . . .’ A few seconds later I remembered it.
‘Can we go back?’ I asked.
‘What for?’
‘I forgot my fishing rod . . .’
They groaned and Barry pulled over like he was going to turn around.
‘Nah, nah. It’s all right. I’ll get a live goat and we can hang it on your hook, Wayne, and you can dangle your arm out of the side of the boat,’ Den scoffed.
‘You’re sick,’ Kerry said.
Soon the farmland disappeared and we were travelling through heavy forests of huge furry-barked trees. We saw wildlife everywhere: three dead wombats, one of them on its back in the gutter with his chunky little legs pointing to the sky like an upturned coffee table; a dead wallaby lying in a pool of blackened blood; and the carcass of a big old kangaroo that filled the car with the heavy smell of rotting flesh as we zoomed past. I thought I was going to bring up my pie. We left the highway for a rough dirt track, pot-holed and dusty, with green wooden signs that told us we were only a kilometre from Mars Cove National Park. I wanted to get out and run. I started jiggling. We were fighting in the back seat and I elbowed Kerry in the boob. I felt my face get hot and I apologised quietly.
‘Muuuum. Wayne just elbowed me in the breast and it really hurt,’ she moaned with a smile on her face.
I apologised a bit louder.
‘Now kiss it better, Wayne,’ Den ordered. ‘Come on.’
Kerry pulled her knees up to her chest and buried her head. ‘Get stuffed,’ she said and I laughed it off.
Around the next corner we burst into another world. The wall of trees on the right side of the car abruptly fell away to reveal a steep slope of blue–green bushes studded with massive granite boulders that had been blasted smooth by winds straight off the sea. The winds had groomed the bushes neatly till they blended with one another like Uncle Don’s greasy slicked-back hair. And the ocean. Brittle, dark and inviting, it stretched to eternity where it had been sliced cleanly with a good sharp knife so it would fit neatly with the cloudless sky. My brain ached, from the vastness, beauty and the brightness of it. All I wanted to do was dive into it and swim out so far that I couldn’t touch the bottom.
Ten minutes later that’s what we did. Gracie and Baz insisted we go and swim while they set up camp in an alcove with a sign out the front that read ‘167b’. A short stone’s throw from the toilet and shower block and a five-minute sprint along a sandy track to the edge of the water. Brilliant.
God and his team of beach designers went all out with Mars Cove. The perfect quarter-moon of pale sand was hemmed on both ends by tumbled granite walls that stretched out until they faded into the ocean. Surfers bobbed on the crestless waves and the sand was home to a fair throng of people. Little ones painted in zinc with buckets and hats made out of material that reminded me of my mum’s dressing gown. Big people with sunglasses and beach umbrellas. Bulging muscles and beer bellies here and boobs barely contained by bikinis there. And there. And there.
I wear footy shorts when I’m swimming—my brown Hawks ones I’ve been wearing since I was thirteen—and jocks underneath because they have a tendency to fall off when I dive in. My body goes really brown in the summer, I reckon it’s my Aboriginal blood, but I felt as white as a snowflake when I stripped off. Maybe it was that feeling I’ve always had when I get undressed in full sight of people. Yeah, that was the feeling, only much stronger. One whole stumpy arm stronger. No matter how hot or cold I have my shower, my stump complains for a few seconds, throbbing and tingling like pins and needles. I’ve got to say that I was feeling a bit nervous about plunging into the sea. Den is a sight at the beach—bony white body and black Speedos. I felt like a blackfella when we dived into the wet sea together. My stump was fine; I was worrying about nothing, though I did tend to veer to the left like a wonky shopping trolley when I swam. Then I was a dolphin: arms by my side, kicking both legs together, going way out, opening my fuzzy underwater eyes and peering at the headless bodies floating around me. Still holding my breath, I saw past the bodies to where the water looks like the edge of a thick pane of glass with the gently sloping, rippled sand bordering the bottom and the sky at the top. I could hear the muffled whoosh of the waves as they broke near the shore. Looking into the edge of that glass made me feel small. I know what lives out there. I frantically kicked and flapped my arms—not quite swimming but it won me a green ribbon in the grade three dog paddle relay at Fairleigh Primary—until I touched the bottom. Then I was cool again, walking from the fizzing surf like an iron man. When I was waist deep, Kerry grabbed me roughly around the neck and dragged me down. I fought to stay upright until I had snatch
ed a breath then I buckled until my face was touching the loose, wet sand. In a few seconds, she let go of my neck and I struggled up for air. Works every time.
We did the lizard thing in the sun for a while. Kez had brought down a bag of chips and when she opened them a squadron of seagulls dropped out of the sky and began cawing and strutting at each other hoping to be in front if any food escaped.
‘Oooh. It’s a Wayne bird,’ she said pointing to a limping seagull that burst into flight at the movement. It only had one foot. The other leg ended in a lump at the ankle.
‘I know how you feel brother . . . I mean sister . . . whatever. I know how you feel,’ I said and waved at the bird.
Looking at campsite 167b, you could tell that the Humes had done this sort of thing before. Their big brown and gold family tent looked like it was brand new but I knew better. Den and I had camped in it a few times in their backyard. Once, Jesus came in and peed in the corner and it stunk like the mower shed at the back of our flat. The Humes kept their tent clean. A neat-looking square of flowery red carpet became the floor for an outside eating and cooking area, with a large square of canvas for the roof held in place by a cobweb of poles and guy ropes. The place could have been up for months but I’d seen the grass underneath it only a few hours before.
Gracie and Baz made a wicked meal for us all. Pinching each other’s bums and pressing their bodies together in between cutting onions and capsicum. The pasta was divine, even though the meat wasn’t really meat (I didn’t find out until after I’d finished). Better than a kangaroo pie.
After tea Baz and Gracie sat and read under a gas lamp that they probably didn’t need. I guess that quiet hiss and whistle was all part of the camping adventure. We had to do the dishes—Kerry washing, Den and I drying and flicking each other with the tea towels. Then Kez scrambled off up a track that led to the top of an enormous dune. The sand sucked at my feet.