Detours

by Tim Rogers

  And dammit, Violent Femmes and The Cure songs were the soundtrack: forever in my mind the accompaniment to the toothy grins, clear skin and easy ways of boys with lopsided haircuts and a style best described as ‘preppy’.

  Skulking against a wall, to the right of a table-tennis table that was home to little islands of luminous orange crunchy snacks amid an ocean of sickly sweet drinks, I sipped a Southern Comfort and ginger ale, and prepared lies about how many times I’d seen The Stems or Beasts of Bourbon. The night was yet to have its first vomit or fight, and I was trying not to obviously direct my attention to the four girls to my left, also affixed to the wall but laughing with each other in a way that was neither boisterous nor dismissive of anyone else. Holding the sweet mix in my hand and scouring the backyard for anyone smoking pot, I was as composed as a finger painting by a two-year-old.

  Gulping the rest of my drink, I pulled my hair askew like a florist and approached the girls.

  I’d noticed them at school. They had a way of positioning their jumpers over their bums, which accentuated a swagger in their step. Had a way of walking slowly at all times, with arms folded across their chests, swaddling books and stationery, that could have been a protective armour, but they looked agelessly stylish to me, completely at odds with the action surrounding them, which was predominantly boys resembling goldfish newly released into a tank. Yes, these girls had a way.

  At the party, the girls’ cool mettle was evident even among the green and red glow of the festoon lighting. Though the names would have meant little to me at the time, it was like seeing Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, Sarah Bernhardt and Virginia Woolf sharing Island Coolers and swapping confidences and conquests. They didn’t seem of this time. I couldn’t reconcile them with the decade we were actually living in.

  As we shared a drama class, I moved towards Terese. I had been bemused and charmed that the song she had proposed for a theatrical dance piece was Joe Jackson’s ‘Cancer’, as far removed from the other students’ suggestions of lightweight contemporary pop hits and well-trodden musical theatre as my own insurgent suggestion of ‘Shout at the Devil’ by Motley Crüe.

  I presumed she wasn’t a fan of the Crüe, so as I approached, by way of introduction, I threw out ‘Joe Jackson, huh?’ in her direction. She needed to turn ninety degrees to look at me, from toe to tousled hair then to my eyes, a movement that appeared exaggerated as we were so different in height. I was approaching six feet and change, she was five and an IOU. My greeting was deliberately free of braggadocio – I figured that the combination of my perforated face and chutzpah wouldn’t be tolerated. Terese’s response was in a voice that was sonorous but a little theatrical: ‘I . . . beg your pardon?’

  When I was eight I was introduced to several acquaintances of my parents. I remember greeting each adult politely, but kissing the hand of one woman because she had a way of sitting that seemed refined, though I can only imagine that my knowledge of what refined might mean had come from a single viewing of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or a Roger Moore Bond film. And although everyone laughed at my pre-pubescent pluck, I had walked out of the room only a little embarrassed. My cheeks a little hot, I’d hoped her spirits were a little tickled. My reverence for Terese and her friends had been so swift to rise, I hadn’t formulated a script yet. I was still a scarecrow of a boy in an ill-fitting jacket trying just that little too hard to impress sophisticated members of the opposite sex. The conversation was brief, but my habit of using language I hadn’t yet fully understood took over like a hot flush, words tumbling out like porridge from a baby’s lips.

  ‘The . . . um . . . cancer song. Joe Jackson. Was . . . master . . . stroke choice. “Shout at the Devil” was . . . y’know . . . um . . . ironical?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sure, thank you,’ Terese replied. ‘You know the song, yeah?’ Leaving the vowels to hang like smoke exhaled through carmine lips.

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Pause. ‘I like “Real Men” too.’

  ‘Well, that would have been a controversial choice, don’t you think?’

  Terese, a girl who barely reached my chest, had reduced me like a woollen jumper in a tumble dryer. I imagined our class of twenty – mostly young boys who took drama to talk to girls – choreographing a dance piece to Mr Jackson’s ode to homosexual awakening, and looked around for a merciful exit.

  In a hot panic I registered the familiar sweet tang of weed being smoked nearby, mumbled another non sequitur and sought sanctuary in the company of Pete and Paul. There was a boisterous talk around the consecrated bong, comparing the drumming merits of jazz giant Art Blakey versus Neil Peart of Canadian progressive rockers Rush. Ah, Pete and Paul. Music was the only thing that could be talked of without defilement. I loved them just as surely as I knew I was drifting away from them.

  I’d been blowtorched by something deeply unfamiliar, but as the bubbling of the bong overwhelmed the crackling of embarrassment, I began to construct a way forward. I was the eight-year-old again. I would impress them with decorum and win their favour with a budding vocabulary – slowly but surely ascending to their milieu. It became my goal to be regarded by them at the very least. To be someone they would consider. I had neither the looks nor the language, but I now had purpose: I wanted a seat at north-western Sydney’s Algonquin Round Table. I shook off the detritus of my previous sixteen and a half years – a childhood of fast bowling, torpedo punts and Keef Richard’s right hand – and buried it, desperate to forge a new self in the shadow of what I imagined was worthier counsel. A papier mâché creation, in an ill-fitting corduroy jacket.

  Was every other boy my age going through a similar transformation? Hoisted by the heartstrings from the quagmire of mucky puberty to the dizzy thin air of adolescence? No wonder it was so easy when my experience was so thin.

  In Adelaide when I was twelve and Duran Duran was touring Australia, three friends and I slicked stolen hair gel through the sides of our barnets in a vain attempt to appear ‘New Romantic’ to the many girls from school who were actually attending the show. A year later, on a family holiday in Coffs Harbour, from behind rough-hewn hotel drapes, I spied a girl my age who sat outside her hotel room on the other side of the car park. For an entire day, while the rest of my family were down at the beach body surfing, I tried to muster the courage to say hello and release her from her obvious boredom. She would occasionally look up to the sky between long leaves of auburn hair and smile as if she knew she was being watched. My dad encouraged me to talk to her, but I was convinced that my incapacity to suntan and my prevailing opinions on the current Australian cricket team and the magnificence of Steve Jones’s guitar sound on ‘Holidays in the Sun’ would not persuade her to join me in a summer romance. I retreated to a slender single mattress to listen to Physical Graffiti on my Walkman, all crunching guitars and thunderous drums over caterwauls about Kashmir and custard pies. I daydreamed about Jaclyn Smith from Charlie’s Angels beckoning me to her California bungalow, and left a pretty, lonely young girl sitting outside her family’s hotel room wondering just why boys were so weird and uncommunicative.

  When we returned home from Coffs Harbour, I resumed my interest in smoking pot and drinking, the perfect complement to making music. So I was surprised when Jen, a girl in my class, invited me to her house on a Saturday. Her method of asking was as flat and free of hyperbole as a question from one of my guy friends, so I imagined a lazy afternoon of watching movies and listening to records. Instead of the ubiquitous teenage girl’s long, straight mantilla-like curtain of hair hanging lankly over her shoulders, Jen’s was a short, cropped style, with thatches of hair to mess with. I thought we could talk about music, particularly about punk stuff – the haircut was like an advertisement.

  Jen wasn’t girlishly enthusiastic, and at the age of thirteen she responded to everything with a measured appreciation. My sincere admiration of her, however, cannot explain why I chose to walk around to her place at midday that Saturday wearing Stubbies shorts and a World Series Cricket T-s
hirt. It wasn’t until she opened the door and looked me up and down that I realised my sartorial blunder. She was dressed to go out, in jeans and a checked long-sleeved shirt and boots. My toes leapfrogged each other in my purple sneakers, like salmon fighting their way upstream. She smiled with munificence but also with a realisation. I came to a realisation too: there was to be no discussion of Joan Jett, no watching films on the carpet with our legs scissoring as we recognised a shared love of spaghetti western films like They Call Me Trinity.

  As the screen door shut behind me with an unappreciative clap, and her mum appeared to greet me with the same look, up and down, I noticed a stack of records in the living room to my left. I would have talked about ‘Tusk’ by Fleetwood Mac if she’d wanted. But we ate a salami sandwich, had a glass of lemon squash and washed the dishes, and then she went into town alone while I walked home. No explanation need have been given. I was a kid, and she wanted to grow up. I’d disappointed her. I’d disappointed myself.

  The group of girls that was increasingly becoming my obsession in Castle Hill (after my Stubbies shorts had been discarded without ceremony or sympathy in Adelaide) had at its heart Madeline, who possessed a plume of brownish hair that shot out at all angles above the horizon. She was never caught looking out the window in the midst of a dream. She was forthright but funny and could zero her attention onto you, ensuring you chose your words carefully. I came to her bowing like an acolyte and was thrilled to be asked to her house one afternoon, and another two times after that, but was horrified that each visit, while reaching for a pot of tea or offering a hand to dry the dishes, I inexplicably brushed her mother’s breast.

  There was also Carla, whose tall, straight posture and dreamy countenance caused me great concern for her neck and head, which seemed forever in danger of toppling from her shoulders. Her bobbed dark, wavy hair was manipulated by either the elements or her reveries, and her head would wobble like a snooker ball on top of a well-chalked cue. She confided in me about her affection for the brother of one of her close friends, which if reciprocated might cause chaos. To be entrusted with this confession deepened the creases on my brow, but gave buoyancy to my hope. A suitor or a confidant. I had the wardrobe and the earlobes for either.

  Christine had a manner similar to the others in that she seemed adrift from time, and could have been living in any decade of the twentieth century. She was thoughtful, didn’t waste a word and had eyes as dark as a raven’s plumage that could draw you in like she’d cast a spell.

  When I think of them now it’s as if they were creations from novelist Donna Tartt. A conversation with them had the elusiveness of poetry to me – language and emotion that were neither brutish nor direct – and gave the same tantalising prospect of enlightenment.

  To be reminded of what kind of teenager I was I only have to look in the margins of the books we were studying at school. My attempts at replicating KISS’s makeup or The Stones’ tongue logo were replaced by crib notes on negative capability or religious symbolism in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Kenneth Slessor. Each scribble and quotation scantly comprehended is softer at the edges, less declarative than ones written by someone determined to understand the poetry or the prose. Spirals of thought around the ‘dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’ of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ or Robert Lowell’s drowsy New England have the decisiveness (and clarity) of formaldehyde. They’re the crib notes of a dilettante, written for a young, literate girl to see.

  Following two months of dedicated reinvention, to my enormous surprise, Terese asked me to join her on a day trip to the city, which was to include a visit to a synagogue. Knowing nothing of Judaism beyond a cassette of Woody Allen’s early stand-up routines, I was intrigued – and this time dressed with due diligence: long trousers, collared shirt.

  The city up until then was an adult’s jigsaw puzzle and I was a tiny ill-fitting piece. A day’s enterprise could be to catch the train from Parramatta, convince a lairy looking old guy to buy me a bottle, and then drink it in Hyde Park before scouring the record stores or lampoon around hoping not to run into skinheads or throw up on the train home.

  This day we wandered aimlessly, talking about her family’s Lithuanian heritage, about the little we knew of Judaica, and a lot about what we were expecting from life. Without having any idea of the Eleanor Roosevelt quote – or at least the one attributed to her – ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people’, we talked about the drift of ideas and very little about the movements of our contemporaries.

  There’s a trope about ‘a moment when life changed from black and white into colour’. On that day, I felt my previous life of colour morph to black and white, and sepia. What had surrounded me before felt garish and over-explained. Life now had new depths: elemental joys and plunging sadnesses.

  On the steps of the Opera House, as we counted the passers-by wearing brown clothing, I turned to tell Terese how surprised I was at her asking me out and found her gaze already on me. She asked if I would accept her calling me a different name, replacing the sharp and nasal ‘Tim’ with ‘Tom’. I nodded my agreement as one might when told they need immediate surgery or to accept imminent death. There was no hand-holding, no kissing. We talked and we didn’t. Sitting on those steps, I felt one of my shoulders ease into an open space in the jigsaw puzzle. Just a shoulder. Words didn’t flow out of me as planned, I was distracted as I became aware of a space opening up in my chest as I nuzzled into this new cleft. Though a world was revealing itself to me, I’d never been more aware of interiors.

  For two years (was it two years?), the last two years of school, it felt like an ocean of emotion swept into that space. So much jealousy, adoration, envy, yearning and bewilderment that there were times I longed for something as simple as sex. Though Terese and I kissed a few times, a physical relationship couldn’t be attained through the thick coats of angst that we painted around ourselves. We tried to construct what we imagined a relationship was, but I doubt we really understood each other at all. I was throwing buckets of acrylic at a brick wall while she was at a canvas with oils and brushes. I’d defer to her at every juncture, dozily following the trail left by her quiet intelligence, and then resent her for it when testosterone surged through me. I’d built her up as a Platonic ideal of the beguiling, bewitching woman and I can only guess I looked like the epitome of the boy who would twist and turn himself any which way for a root. We were opposites attracting then repelling.

  She asked me once to ditch a class and come with her to the hidden slope of a hill behind school. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t a prepared picnic lunch. Rye bread and tomato and olive oil and tea. The gentle buzz of insects the only noise besides our wandering little conversations, and then there was a kiss, a little awkward but tender, and interrupted by the caterwauling of a Jesuit Brother. The collusion and warmth of this stolen moment together was tainted, not by being caught, but by the resentment I felt later when my capricious hormones reasoned that if we were going to get caught, we should have been busted in a far more lascivious act.

  Many years later we talked on the phone and the subject detoured to our school relationship and the chaste nature of it. She told me that she’d been wary of my sexuality: that it seemed to be on high alert. High panic would have been a better summation. Though her recollection was churlishly welcome even after twenty years, it was so wrong: branding me as a kind of Lothario, imagining that my familiarity with some of the other girls at the school was due to past sexual liaisons rather than the affable goofiness that was the by-product of my peripatetic childhood. The truth was that my only completed sexual experience (not manually executed by myself) was with a piece of exercise equipment – a vibrating belt weight-loss machine in a lacklustre caravan park ‘gym’ – and despite further efforts over that weekend when I was sure I was not to be interrupted, I could never get the exact positioning right and my mechanised partner and I never again reached the same lofty heig
hts.

  I’d pashed, fondled and groped, and knew as much as any teenager back then could know after a dozen viewings of hard-core pornography in the company of six other neophytes. I’d read the list of contents but not the manual.

  Sex was only ever talked about obliquely between Terese and me. Obligingly following what I thought were her wishes, I kept my hands to myself and diverted that combustible energy into my education. Poor kids. If we’d leaped into a sexual relationship could we have returned to whatever it was we had, or would it be too much, too intense, too soon?

  Groping behind the agriculture sheds was given over in favour of notes passed between us in English classes. There were no declarations of love or desire, but they were highly decorative, absurd and coveted, and full of observations and banter that always tickled, and to me were acknowledgements of ‘us’. A comment on the apparel of a teacher was never cruel, nor our quips about classmates. The notes were our way of asking: ‘Do we see things the same way?’

  Heavy petting was replaced by brisk walks and furrowed conversations about aesthetics and religion, me nodding in uxorial accord about concepts I barely understood. Even my self-important musical opinions were shaken up when Terese asked me to see the Mancunian act New Order at Selina’s in Coogee Bay Hotel. I had regarded them as lightweight and soulless, yet their show that night remains one of the most exciting and emotional performances I’ve ever seen: crowd and band swooping like ocean waves among torrents of thunderous rhythm pattered with doleful rhyme.

  Around this time, I was invited to events with the group that included other boys, particularly two Roberts, who were both spectacular provocateurs under the guise of intelligent, magniloquent dandies. We were all the same age but they had vocabularies and charms that were, again, timeless. One Robert reminded me of US talk show host Dick Cavett in both appearance and manner; the other played the bagpipes. They were both excellent comic actors and my adoration of them was disastrously replaced by jealousy whenever I felt out of my depth. Their sexuality was not as forthright as most other boys and they were often taunted for a presumed homosexuality by the mouth-breathers of our year.