by Steve Bisley
I’m in the cow paddock with Dukey and I’m trying to teach him to work cattle.
‘Git here, you black bastard!’
All the shearers call their dogs ‘black bastards’ regardless of the colour.
He looks at me like I’m a stranger.
He is part labrador and part dalmation, which means he is fat with spots. He isn’t black, though, which may be the cause of his confusion.
‘Come here to me!’
Dukey looks dreamily at a cow.
‘Skitch ’em!’ I yell.
He moves sideways on his broad bum and snaps at a fly.
‘Git behind!’
His tongue falls from the side of his mouth.
The cows eat themselves forward.
‘Skitch ’em up!’ I yell again.
He farts, and his tongue retreats and falls from the other side of his mouth.
I sit down heavily in the soft clover.
He comes to me, everything behind his head wagging, like he’s suddenly recognised me in a crowd. I hold his head softly in my hands; he’s no kelpie, that’s for sure, and for now the cattle are safe. He rests his head on my shoulder and snuffles into my ear. He’s glad I’m home and so am I.
We all have our places, the ones that speak to us when we’re alone.
Big school
I started at Wyong High with a reputation as a killer, a knuckle man, someone not to be taken lightly; a man to be feared. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. The reputation belonged to my brother who had finished high school the year before I arrived.
In Richard it was all true and deserved. He was undefeated. He didn’t ever go looking for a fight – he was by nature gentle – but they came to him. Box-headed, big-boned kids from vacant farms. All the would-bes used to test their skills against him. One by bloodied one they were dispatched, done and dusted.
So here I am, on my first day of high school, with a new Globite case full of sharpened pencils, a wooden ruler, neat exercise books, a protractor, a peanut-butter sandwich and a bad reputation. I am wearing grey shorts, with sharp creases. I have a short-sleeved sky-blue shirt, and a burgundy-coloured school blazer with a crest on the pocket. The crest has a shield on it with a ladder that runs on the diagonal with the Latin Tentando Superabis across the top.
I am standing in the boys’ toilet block.
I take a sip of water from the tap over the stainless-steel basin.
I pretend it’s lemonade.
My stomach somersaults.
I look at myself in the mirrors above the basin and, even if I squint, there is nothing about me that says ‘killer’ – nothing.
I clench my buttocks tightly and make my way to the exit with my too-big case bumping against my knees.
I bump down a crowded corridor. Everything smells like chalk. I reach into my pocket and feel the knot in my hanky that has my bus money in the corner of it. Mum put it there early this morning. I think of Mum and the awkward warmth of her, of Dukey the dog and the cows eating themselves forward at home.
In the glare of the quadrangle, I haul the Globite into a space in the line among the jostling group of 1Bs. The crowd quiets as Mr Egger, the headmaster, coughs into a black microphone. I feel a little sweaty. He welcomes everyone back to the start of what he thinks will be another great year for Wyong High. I hear nothing of what he says. I finger the bus money again and think of Mum. Maybe I’m coming down with scarlet fever and I’ll have to have six months off school, and I’ll come back a hero having survived it.
I cough into my hanky to see if it sounds real, which causes the bus money to fall out and bounce in several directions at once. I bend over and lurch forward in an attempt to catch the coins. The sudden exertion caused by a rapid sequence of cough, bend and lurch causes my bowels to loosen and something warm squirts into my undies. Meanwhile the coins have disappeared under a sudden heap of excited kids.
I’m about to cry when somebody shouts, ‘What’s that smell? Poo!’ and ‘It’s him, he’s shat himself!’ Suddenly the neat lines have dissolved into a frenzy as kids retreat from the source of the stench – me. The stress of it all has now caused the small stain in the rear of my shorts to widen, as several more squirts have now formed a stream. The commotion has caused the prefects and teachers to descend. I am now standing alone with a widening moat of emptiness around me. Kids are pointing at me with outstretched arms like spears, chanting ‘Pooey! Pooey!’
I am bundled away at arm’s length to the sick bay. I am cleaned up, my new shorts are washed and I am given a replacement pair from the lost-property bin. I lie on the bed while the school nurse is summoned.
There is a figure of Jesus on the wall opposite; he doesn’t look well either. His thorny head is turned to one side and something is leaking out of the side of him. I know how he feels.
My stomach clenches and I dive for the bucket that has been placed beside the bed. There is sudden confusion in the hall outside the sick bay and now the room is filling with other kids in various states of distress. The nurse arrives with a local doctor in tow. I am joined at the bucket by another kid, whose spasms seem to be equal to if not worse than mine. Now there are kids hurling all over the place as every container halfway suitable is being used to contain the spill. I shoot a glance towards Jesus, who seems to be looking at something in the sky or at least on the ceiling. The nurse now looks like she’s been hit and the doctor is doing his best to restore some order.
One hundred and twelve kids went down that day when an epidemic of gastroenteritis hit Wyong High School. It may not have been scarlet fever, but after a week off to recover I did come back a hero – because of the twenty-eight kids who’d shat themselves, I was the first, and I wore it like a prefect’s badge, a badge of honour.
Back to school
I really don’t know if I returned to school a hero but it felt like I had survived something. No one ever mentioned the poo episode, no one. I think it was one of those things that was too in your face, too big. If I had been the only one involved, the bullies would have had a field day. But as it stood, they were quietened by the sheer size of it and the weight of numbers of the victims. Occasionally I’d bump into someone in the playground who had been affected on that day and there would be something that passed between us, a silent recognition of something that we shared, another secret.
So here I was, turning another page in my book.
Despite my inauspicious start, after a week at high school I loved it.
I loved being in 1B. 1A was full of eggheads and geeks. Too much intelligence can make a person dull and unattractive. Geeky boys with big heads and glasses and pale skin from too much time spent indoors reading. The girls in 1A were the same: big brains, straight hair and a bit gawky. They seemed so concerned with the pursuit of knowledge that it drained them of spontaneity and life.
1B was different. We may have sat a few rungs lower on the IQ scale, but we excelled at the unbridled pursuit of fun.
I don’t know how it happened, but over time I became part of a gang. By gang, I don’t mean tough guys; we just sort of gravitated together. What a bunch! There was Gary Attenborough, with the biggest smile in the world, a fierce fighter who would never back down, a major defender of the gang. Robert Ehlein, a smooth operator, a leader with the gift of the gab, a lady-killer. Dicky Dunn was like a gunslinger without the guns: a cool guy, funny, and the first to try everything. I don’t know what I was doing there – just telling stories as usual, I suppose.
We hung out at recess and lunchtime, played handball, mucked around down the oval, combed our hair a lot. There were lots of fights, country boys blowing off steam. You could feel it in the playground: a push, a shove back, the wrong word and – bang! And the chant would go up: Fight! Fight! No one ever got really hurt. At worst someone might end up with a bloody nose or a black eye, but it was mostly over quickly. I wasn’t a good fighter. I was scared of the blood and I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
Subject mat
ter
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
I hated maths.
To make twelve-year-olds sit in a classroom for six hours a day is criminal enough, without subjecting them to the sheer lunacy of logarithms, algebra and the square root of anything.
In my adult life I have never had cause to put x over anything or y over anything else, nor do I have the slightest interest in finding out what would happen if I did. What a waste of precious time! Why not teach us something we could actually use, like foreplay? I could add and subtract, multiply and divide, but the moment the word pi was written on the blackboard a switch in my head would click into the off position and the one beside it that said ‘daydream’ would flick on and I was off somewhere, far away from the classroom, only to return when the large bell in the hall outside rang and put an end to the lunacy. I had better things to do with my time!
Science was more of a laugh. We thought quarks were the noises ducks made when you shot them.
Dark matter lived in your sister’s armpit.
Genes were what you wore to the disco.
And a fossil was someone over forty.
Don’t get me wrong – I really enjoyed science. Making rotten-egg gas in the lab, Bunsen burners and beakers with strange vapours leaking from them. Dissected frogs with electrodes clipped to their tiny bodies, which twitched when we hit the switch. You didn’t need a book to tell you that man had descended from the apes. You could see that down the oval when the A-grade rugby team practised.
Atoms splitting, amoebas, the distance of planets from the sun, from us, from each other, lunar phases, Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, origin of the species, biodiversity, biosphere and on and on.
The biggest challenge I found in science was lugging the two huge blue textbooks around. They weighed a ton and just getting them to and from school was a major achievement, one guaranteed to turn you from Homo erectus to Homo bentoverus before you could say, ‘Quark! There goes another duck!’
But if I was to get anything worthwhile out of my education, I needed to find something I was good at, something that would sustain me in the school years ahead. English saved me. My first poem was printed in the school magazine of 1963, my first year at high school.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAR
The sickle lies idle.
No laughter rings pure.
The dead all lie lonely,
Mind bent.
The clash of cold steel rings loud in the soul,
The fury of battle echoes the fear.
It was my reaction to the war in Vietnam. I think the best thing about it is the title.
Love on the silver screen
From the age of ten, I was allowed to catch the bus to Wyong to go to the Saturday matinee at the pictures. My parents would give me ten bob, which covered the return ticket on the bus, the admission to the theatre and a drink. It always felt special, going to the movies in the middle of the day. It felt like a guilty pleasure. I’d meet up with some mates and we’d all sit together, close. It was one of the first experiences I had when I really thought my parents were allowing me some independence. That they trusted me.
There would always be a newsreel to start with, covering some major events from home and abroad. The voice of the narrator was British and proper and made everything sound really important. Then there would be the cartoons, Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny. The serial came next. My favourite was Flash Gordon. Ol’ Flash would get into all sorts of trouble, usually trying to help a girl. Some villain would have tied her to the train tracks, the train would be coming fast, or she’d be tied to a bench in a sawmill with the giant blade inching closer and closer, then Ol’ Flash would arrive, his dark eyes smouldering. At the very last moment, as the train was bearing down or the blade was about to tear into her milky white flesh, the words we knew were coming would flash across the screen: to be continued! And we’d be back again next week to see how Ol’ Flash was going to get out of this one. After the serial had finished there would be an intermission and then the feature would start.
I loved the westerns. John Wayne as Davy Crockett in The Alamo, with Richard Widmark as the legendary Jim Bowie, who had a hunting knife named after him. Leading a bunch of Texan volunteers, they defended a mission just outside San Antonio against the Mexicans. I don’t know how many westerns I saw, but not one featured a nice Mexican. They were all bastards! They had huge moustaches with bits of their last two meals sucked through them. They grinned like fools and they were all a bit on the tubby side (it was probably the beans). All they ever did was rape and pillage. John Wayne and the other Texans shot about a million of them, but they just kept coming, grinning like fat fools.
Westerns generally ran along the same lines. Most times it was the Indians who took a beating. They’d be whooping it up at night, dancing and drinking fire water and painting their bodies, preparing for the next day’s battle against some cavalry outfit. They’d have a white woman tied to a pole in some chief’s sweat lodge, the rawhide biting deep into her porcelain skin. A really ugly Indian brave with blue-black hair and a tomahawk would lurch into her teepee, eyes blazing and crazy drunk, and just as he was about to have him some of that white ‘poontang’, there would be the unmistakable sound of a Winchester rifle being cocked as Big John Wayne stepped out of the shadows. Later that night, as they made their getaway on stolen Navajo ponies and as the big ol’ Texan moon shone down over the panhandle, she took him between her sweet thighs. It was her way of saying thank you. She thanked him a lot over the coming days.
I had my first real date at the Wyong pictures. It was a Saturday night. I had asked Barbara Dunstan, a girl from my class, if she would like to come with me. Well, I didn’t actually ask her – I asked a friend of hers if she thought Barbara liked me. The friend thought she did but wasn’t sure how much. A couple of days later, I heard that she’d said to someone that she did like me, but wasn’t sure if she’d be allowed to come to the flicks. Messages were sent through trusted intermediaries and on the Friday morning at recess I was handed a crumpled note. It read:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
If you’re going to the flicks,
I’ll come with you.
Bingo!
I started to get ready on Saturday afternoon. I borrowed some of my brother’s aftershave (nicked it, actually). I washed my ears out with a flannel from the bathroom. I cut my toenails and tipped baby powder down my undies. I made sure I had matching socks on. I polished my shoes till my arms ached. I covered my acne with Clearasil. Mum had made me a new red jerkin; it was like a vest but groovier. I put on my best white shirt, black pants, a thin black tie and the red jerkin, and slipped a freshly ironed hanky (with ‘S’ embroidered in one corner) in my pocket. I was set to go.
I caught the bus that got me to Wyong on the dot of seven. The bus stop was right out the front. I took a deep breath and got off. There she is, exactly where she said she would be, and even at a distance I can tell she is blushing. I am too, my face hot and prickly. There are lots of kids from school mingling and adults buying tickets. I make my way over to Barbara. We stand together, sort of. Neither of us speaks.
I finally ask her if she likes maths; she says no. I ask her if she has a ticket; she says no. I buy two from the ticket window and a small bucket of popcorn, and we go in.
‘Hey, Bizo!’ yells a mate from school. ‘You and Barbara, eh? Woohoo!’
There are lots of couples. Some are pashing openly, some just lounging; they all look comfortable and relaxed. Barbara and I sit stiffly in our seats. Finally the theatre darkens and the newsreel begins. I know I have to do something, but I don’t know what. I rack my brains. I’ve got it! I’ll put my arm around her! I’ll do it when I see a red car on the screen. The next time I see a red car I’ll put my arm around Barbara Dunstan.
There’s a problem. The newsr
eel’s in black and white. I think some more. Okay, the next time I hear the word ‘yesterday’ I’ll do it. The newsreel comes to an end, two tomorrows but no yesterdays. I remember I have the popcorn. I reach for it on the floor, and knock the box over in my scramble to pick it up because my hands are trembling so much. By the time I come up empty the cartoons have started. It’s Goofy – not the one in the seat beside Barbara; the Walt Disney one, on the screen. The longer my indecision goes on, the harder it is to commit to anything. I know Barbara Dunstan wants me to put my arm around her, I can feel her whole mind, body and soul willing me in the dark of the theatre. ‘Do it, do it,’ chants the inside of me. ‘Do it, do it,’ answers the inside of Barbara Dunstan.
Suddenly I hear the word, as clear as a bell on a cow at dusk: ‘yesterday’. A call to arms! My brain has taken control, a miniature electrical spark lights up a corner of the hippocampus, the current courses through myriad spidery networks, things go crack and pop and the signal surges to the muscles in my right arm.
It may have been that the strength of the signal from the brain was too much, as rather than encircling her in a soothing embrace, my arm flung sideways and caught her on the soft curve of her jawline, travelled on unimpeded to hit the flesh of her ear, before my flailing hand shot straight past the back of her head to strike an elderly woman in the row behind us on the knee. My head snapped to the right and even in the dark, Barbara’s startled face shone like a beacon on a distant shore, and behind her and a little to her right another beacon, this one older, but no less startled.
My mouth had shaped to say something, but my brain was still struggling with the last bit and hadn’t caught up. I made a noise like harrumph, which meant nothing to any of us, and bolted to the exit. I didn’t stop running till I got to the milk co-op.
There were no buses to Lake Munmorah for another two hours, so I walked the fifteen miles home.