Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  ‘It’s a braw nicht the nicht – ya ken whit I mean, laddie?’ he’d say as I walked through the door.

  ‘Aye, it is. It’s a bonnie night oot there,’ I’d say and he’d almost smile at me but never did.

  I would think of funny things to say on the way to my lesson, to try to make him laugh, and have them ready to go as I walked in the door.

  ‘That’s a bonnie pair o’ pyjamas yer pipes are wearin’ the night,’ I’d say. Nothing. He never once reacted.

  He also refused to say anything that was remotely Australian. I sort of liked it. He couldn’t afford to go home so he kept home in his heart. He would probably die whispering ‘Scotland’ with his last breath.

  His family sat down at the table and ate together. He spoke civilly with his wife and they even appeared to care for each other’s feelings. This was all new to me. He didn’t drink at all whenever I was at his place, in fact; I didn’t see signs of alcohol anywhere in the house. Everything seemed to be orderly and in its place. Nothing was broken or falling apart and the house was clean and tidy. I wanted our place to be like this but it wasn’t.

  I liked him a lot and was sorry he had to stop teaching me. I never actually made it to the full set of pipes or into the band, as things got too rough at home and I had to quit.

  We all loved music. My sisters and I would pretend to be in bands like The Beatles and stand on the porch and mime songs along to the radio. Like the music my parents listened to, the music we listened to reflected how we felt. Songs about wanting to hold someone’s hand were like cries for love coming from the radio. We were crying out just like that. Songs where the singer was begging for help – I’m not even going to go there.

  One day while John was playing music in his room, I saw an album cover and whoever it was, was playing a square guitar. This really caught my eye because the girls and I had been trying to cut guitars out of cardboard for a while. But we found it way too hard. Bo Diddley, the guy playing a square guitar on that cover, changed everything. That was it – we only made square guitars from then on.

  The girls were all good singers and we worked out a few routines we could do at parties to make all the adults think we were cute. We would sing something about having fun in the car with Fred. I always had to be Fred. I hated it. I wanted to sing the main vocals.

  * * *

  I was sitting watching an old black and white movie called Imitation of Life with my dad one day. I was not that interested. It was a good movie but I was only about seven and I would rather have been watching a cowboy movie or a cartoon if the truth be known. But I was with Dad so I was happy.

  The movie was basically about a young black girl who had very fair skin and when she grew up she left her family and pretended that she was white. She, like me later on in my life, was running away from her real life. This worked out for her for a while but she had problems, especially when her mother died. At the end of the movie she attends her mother’s funeral. I can’t remember that much except for the end of the film, when she was in the church at the funeral. There was a woman singing and I remember being stunned by this woman’s voice. I sat straight upright and was immediately glued to the screen. Even as a kid I could hear that there was something exceptional about this voice.

  The movie finished and I waited for the credits to roll to find out who this woman was. Her name was Mahalia Jackson and I made a mental note to myself that when I had a child, I was going to name the baby after this singer. Luckily for me, my wife Jane and I had a baby girl first and I named her Mahalia. If she had been a boy he would have had to learn to fight at a very young age.

  Mahalia Jackson singing in the church in this movie made me think for a minute that there might be a God after all. No one sang with that much power without a little help from somewhere. If he was up there he should’ve looked down on us a little more often; things might have been better. Now it’s too late; I don’t need him.

  The paddock across the road was the scene of many of life’s lessons for us. We would run and hide there when we were in trouble, which was often. And we would run and hide there when home got too much for us. Unfortunately, that was more often. I spent many a night hiding there as the sun went down, scared because it was getting dark but too scared to go home. Afraid Mum and Dad would be fighting or drinking or both. Not wanting to see the state the family was in. We were falling apart and every day things got worse. There were more fights. If there was no fighting it normally meant that Dad had not made it home and Mum would be angry and frustrated and once again we would be scratching for something to eat. Mum would end up crying in her room and we would all be left looking at each other, wondering what was going to happen next. I was afraid of everything in those days.

  I also had big fights with other kids in that paddock and I laughed and cried in that paddock. That paddock was a huge part of my life. I spent more time there than in our house.

  The first naked girl I ever saw, not in a bathtub with me, was in that paddock. A friend of one of my sisters took off her clothes in front of me when I was about seven. She was a lot older than me and I didn’t know why she did it but I knew it was taboo. It scared me too.

  There were all sorts of things to do. There were ants’ nests to disturb and hills to run up and down and even the odd animal to hunt. One day I caught a blue-tongue lizard and decided to keep him as a pet. He would be my friend and I would teach him amazing tricks to impress the family. I found an old cardboard box and put some grass in there so he would be comfortable. I wasn’t even sure if lizards worried about comfort, but I wanted my lizard to have all mod cons. I decided that he had to be a guy because he was so ugly. I never saw any good-looking ones so I could have been wrong. I took him home and snuck him into my room. My sisters found him, while they were looking for something else they said, but I know they were just snooping through my stuff.

  ‘Mum, he’s got a filthy wild animal in his bedroom and it smells really bad!’ They exaggerated a lot. He looked clean to me and he hardly stank at all.

  Mum was her usual calm self. She shrieked, ‘Get that scabby lizard oot ma hoose before I kill the both o’ ye,’ in a voice that even scared the lizard. He probably still has nightmares about it.

  That meant he had to live outside. I was very disappointed. I made up my mind that if he wasn’t going to live in my room he was better off in the paddock where he came from.

  So in a scene reminiscent of Born Free I said my teary goodbyes to my scaly, slightly smelly little friend. ‘You’ll forget about me soon, Bruce.’ He looked Australian and needed an Australian name. ‘Don’t worry about me. Just run and be free with all your other wild friends.’

  Then I took him back to the paddock to let him run free with his mates. He didn’t really run at all by the way, so I was going to let him walk very slowly to freedom.

  I reached into the box to pick up my dear insect-eating friend as gently as I could when suddenly, ‘Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhh!’ He bit me, grabbing onto my finger like a vice. ‘Ahhhhhhh! Somebody help me!’ I screamed again, sounding like a little girl. And I ran around the paddock waving my hand, with the lizard attached, in the air. He wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Oh God, get him off me.’ Suddenly I believed in God again. If I wasn’t in so much pain, I would have prayed. But this was no time for kneeling. Panic was setting in.

  ‘Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhhh,’ I screamed again. It must have sounded a lot like my Tarzan impersonation but still no one seemed to be coming to help me.

  ‘Jesus Christ almighty,’ I screamed at the top of my voice but he didn’t hear me either it seemed.

  I had read about Gila monsters in a book at school and how their jaws locked and could take off a finger and I thought my time was up. A budding career as a piano player was disappearing out the window. Hang on, I never played piano. Oh well. I ran up to a tree and proceeded to bash my dear old friend, who was now my mortal enemy, against the tree as hard as I could. He let go, and then, without so much as a glanc
e back at me, he very slowly walked away into the bush. Friends can be so fickle.

  The main department store in the Elizabeth shopping centre was a place called John Martin’s. As kids we would see the John Martin’s Christmas parade rolling through the streets of town. It would be on the news and in the papers. Every Christmas, kids and parents would line up to go into Santa’s magic cave. Not us though. It wasn’t just that we weren’t taken there. We didn’t want to go. It seemed stupid to me. Some big fat guy in a red suit promising things that never arrived. But the shop did hold a place in the hearts of most of the community, especially the ones who could afford to buy things there.

  In the shopping centre there were small gift stores and a hardware store. Various clothes shops and a coffee shop. The coffee shop would end up being a meeting place for the youth of Elizabeth. Gang members sat and drank coffee in there along with mums and dads and kids just out of school.

  The shopping centre also housed a pool hall. This was a place where we would all congregate as we got older. But as little kids we weren’t allowed even to stand too close to it. We used to walk by it or stand outside watching the older guys going in and out of the place, with girls on their arms, acting cool. Then the guy running it would tell us to piss off. We wanted to be in there too, playing pool and banging pinball machines. Just like the big guys.

  * * *

  My friends were all stealing what they could from the centre shops and they all thought that they were really tough. Most of the time they never stole anything they really needed. I couldn’t work out why. Why would you risk getting caught for something you could live without? I had pinched the odd thing from the local shops in Elizabeth West when I was hungry but what my friends were doing seemed stupid to me. But they kept doing it and teased me for being a coward because I didn’t steal. Eventually I buckled under the pressure and four or five of us went into one of the big shops at the centre with the intention of taking something – anything would do.

  We must have looked suspicious: four or five skinny kids with no shoes and dirty clothes walking around pretending we were deciding what we were going to buy.

  ‘Yes, this looks good. Maybe I could purchase one of these?’

  We spoke this way because we looked guilty, and the way we acted or spoke just confirmed our guilt. No one spoke like that in Elizabeth unless you were stealing something or in the back of a police car. I have heard adults speaking this way as they are being led to the back of a paddy wagon, drunk, after belting their wives.

  The fact that we walked in together and then split up made us all the more guilty-looking. I was walking down the aisles looking at nothing in particular. What do you steal when you are trying to be cool in front of your friends? There was nothing to eat in this shop; that was all I wanted. Every time someone came towards me I would panic and look to the floor. I don’t think I looked anyone in the eye from the time I walked into the shop. I must have looked like I had a big sign over my head saying, ‘I’m a thief. Grab me and lock me up, quickly.’

  Every now and then one of my friends would pass me in the aisle, walking the other way. I could see things bulging under their shirts or down their trousers. Surely someone in the shop had spotted these guys? They looked guiltier than I did but they didn’t seem to care. They would look at me and snigger a little and nod their heads, sort of motioning me to get on with it.

  After a couple more laps of the clothing section, I selected my target. I was going to take a T-shirt. I had seen one that I might wear if I had to; it was a plain-looking T-shirt that I could wear underneath something else so no one would ever see it. I thought that anyone seeing me wearing such a thing would know it was stolen. I couldn’t have bought it and I had no other new clothes. So I looked around quickly; my head turned nearly a full circle in one move. I grabbed it, and stuck it under my shirt then walked on casually, trying to look like I hadn’t seen anything I wanted. Everything was going well. Then I realised that none of my friends were left in the shop; they had all bolted.

  As I walked to the door I could see out of the corner of my eye a man sort of tracking me from the other side of the shop, closing in on me with every step. I picked up the pace as I was approaching the door. I had already made up my mind I was going to get out and run as far from the shopping centre as I could, as fast as I could. As I reached the door and was just starting to feel that I’d got away with it, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I think you’d better come with me, son.’ He turned me around. There, staring right into my eyes, was the man I had spotted tracking me from across the shop – the shop’s security guard.

  He took me into the office at the back of the shop and sat me down. My heart was pounding. I could see it all: I would be sent to reform school and wouldn’t get to see my family ever again. It would be the first step into a life of crime that would see me in and out of reform school until I was old enough to do hard time. Then I’d be breaking rocks for the rest of my life. I was terrified. Then suddenly I had a much worse thought – my mum was going to kill me.

  I was alone. My mates got away and I was the only one caught. ‘Please, mister, don’t tell the cops. My mum will kill me,’ I pleaded.

  ‘You should have thought of that before, son,’ he said, frowning over his glasses as he scribbled something down onto a piece of paper.

  ‘I didn’t mean to steal it. Honestly. I was going to put it back when you caught me.’ I was desperate.

  ‘That’s why you were headed out the door, eh?’

  I was guilty too.

  ‘If you let me go I’ll go and get some money and pay for it, I promise.’

  The guy had heard it all before. He had probably read the book. I could tell by the look of disbelief on his slightly red and irritated face. He had obviously caught many kids just like me and I was a goner. ‘Just sit where you are and be quiet.’

  He just kept writing away. I was trying to see what was being written but he kept covering it with his arm. This was surely a note for the police. Some sort of report. Then he left the room.

  He made me sit there for an hour. I went through a million scenarios why I needed that T-shirt and why I should go free. ‘I was stealing it for my sick brother. My mum was cold.’ No, that wouldn’t work, it was a hundred degrees outside. Finally I just sat, resigned to the fact that I was going to the big house.

  After what seemed a lifetime, he came back and said, ‘Today’s your lucky day, boy.’ I don’t know why. Maybe the major crime squad were tied up and couldn’t come to get me. ‘I’m going to let you go this time.’

  I looked at him and swore, ‘I promise I will never do this again, mister.’

  The colour must have been slowly coming back to my cheeks because he took his time looking at the paper before he dropped the bomb. ‘I’ll need your address because I’m going to come over and tell your parents about the incident. They can deal with you.’

  ‘Please don’t do that. I promise I won’t do it again. Please. I’ll tell them if you want. I know I’ve done the wrong thing.’

  He lifted up his hand and stopped me talking and said in a voice that chilled me to the bone, ‘It’s not a problem for me to do it, son. That’s my job.’

  I got the feeling he liked visiting kids’ parents and telling them how bad their children were and ruining their lives forever.

  My world came crashing down again. I would rather have to share a cell with a serial killer than face my mum. Maybe he would reconsider. I was sure the cops weren’t that busy, but no, he had made up his mind and my fate was sealed. It was a fate worse than death – the wrath of my mum.

  He let me go and I walked from the shop with my shoulders slouched. My bottom lip must have been dragging on the ground by this point and I headed for home and certain death. Halfway home, as I crossed the paddock by the railway line, I considered jumping onto a train and running away but they were going too fast. Then I thought I could chuck myself under one. That would have to be better than
facing Mum. No, too painful. I sat down in the red dirt in the middle of the paddock and cried. I stayed until dark, hoping to see if he turned up, but he didn’t come that night.

  Next day I got up early and escaped to the relative safety of the paddock again and waited for him to come. Still no one showed up. He was dragging it out, I was sure, just to make me suffer even more. I would sit out there in the snake- and spider-infested paddock until he showed. After a week I realised he wasn’t coming. He had already punished me more than even he expected, I had suffered enough. I went back to my life knowing that there was an axe hanging over my head. I would just have to wait and see. I had learned my lesson, for now anyway.

  * * *

  Linda’s two best friends lived down the street and round the corner and to say they were wild would be an understatement. That’s why they got on so well with Linda, I think. They were close to the same age as her. The brother was a year or so older than the girls. But they were all crazy. The brother had a strange collection of things in his room including odd books and magazines and a pile of dead animals. There were bits of cats and possums and anything else he could hunt or find lying dead on the road. They were all in various stages of being skinned or drying out under his bed. This was very creepy to me. It is what I would imagine to be the early stages of becoming a serial killer.

  Walking into his room was like walking into a tannery. It smelled very bad, and I wondered how he got away with it. Didn’t his parents care or were they potential killers too? I don’t think he let his mum into his room but he was young and you would think she had to go in there at some point. If she didn’t know what he was doing she would have got a big shock when she found out, I would imagine. They were a very strange mob.