by Steve Bisley
We had three market days a year. A market day was like a mini fete and was used to raise money for each of the school’s four colour houses: Baker, McKimm, Allen and Rose. I was in Baker. Each house would have a number of stalls or events and the house that raised the most money was given a pennant and was applauded at the school assembly.
I created a sort of psychedelic club in one of the classrooms. We all sat around in what we thought were hippy-type clothes, with bare feet and flowers in our hair, and said, ‘Peace, man,’ a lot. We decorated the walls in wild fluoro colours from the art department. We charged two bob to come in. We played sitar music and sold watered-down cordial in cups. We were a huge hit and raised the most amount of money on the day. I had the best time!
I threw everything I had into the social side of school. At the committee meetings I was full of ideas of what bands we should have, how the hall should be decorated. I worked for months on plans for the end-of-year dance. In the final week it was a mad rush to decorate the hall and make sure we had done everything possible to make the night a success. On the night I was standing in the wings to one side of the stage as the band was playing, making sure that everything was all right backstage. I remember looking out at this sea of writhing teenagers and thinking to myself that this was something I would love to do with my life: to entertain, to move people somehow.
Chuck
I’ll remember this day forever.
I’ve got a good memory. Sometimes it’s a curse.
I remember what the light in the room was like the first time I heard Van Morrison’s album Moondance.
I remember hearing the news of JFK’s assassination on the school bus and how we were all completely numbed by it, even in Lake Munmorah.
I remember the taste of burnt cocoa on a camping trip.
Memories of kisses and love and rejection and loss and regret. Of bliss and hangovers and powder on old skin and my first car and the smell of it. Of fresh-mown grass and milk straight from the warm cow and a fart under a blanket leaking out. Chalky classrooms, wet dogs and the tingle of champagne on my tongue the first time. The smell of brass, sawn timber, burnt toast and the sweet smell of death and new shoes and shit and fear.
I’ll remember this day forever.
It’s late November 1963 and in less than a month I’ll be a teenager.
The school bus stops at my road.
The smell of grease and diesel and dust.
It takes a thousand steps to get to the farm; I’ve counted every one of them. I start to the sound of bees in the new wattle and cicadas: black princes, green grocers, yellow Mondays and floury bakers droning in the bush. I walk on. There’s been rain today and the clouds are in puddles in low spots on the road. I walk through two of them to feel the water flood my shoes and soak my feet. I smell the sweet sap from the gums in the steamy heat, halfway home now, five hundred steps to go. Sandy’s house on the left, bare fibro walls and quiet, they’re away doing God’s work. Horse floats in the Nickelsons’ yard and a black stallion cropping new shoots at the fence line pauses to watch me pass.
Uncle Roy, up a tall ladder spraying early peaches in the Carters’ neat orchard, waves with a free hand. Nectarines yellowing at the three hundred mark. Aunty Vi wrestling flapping sheets at the clothes line and it’s all downhill from here. Through the gate into the yard and Dukey coming, wagging everything behind his head. Through the screen door into the cool of the kitchen for arvo tea.
‘Mum?’
No answer. I know she’s here; I can smell the chalk.
‘Mum!’
Vegemite on a Sao.
‘Mum!’ Nothing.
Something has begun. Something dark.
I find her in her bedroom, perched on the end of the bed, a yellow manila envelope beside her. She looks straight ahead into the falling afternoon and the orchard. ‘Your school report came home today … You’d better read it before your father comes home.’ She leaves the room without a look.
I hear the pop from the sherry bottle opening and the liquor gurgling into a glass. She’s already battening down the hatches. I pick up the envelope and carry it to my room. I take out the two white pages and read.
STEPHEN BISLEY 1B
English: Credit
Art: Pass
Geography: Fail
Maths: Fail
History: Fail
Science: Fail
COMMENTS
Stephen’s results are disappointing. He has the ability to do much better, but needs to apply himself in all areas.
There’s a man in a black Jaguar heading south on the Pacific Highway. He’s been teaching others the things he can’t teach us. He has a large silver handgun in the glove box of the car. He pulls over to the side of the road. The Jaguar idles in the falling light. He takes six brass-jacketed bullets from the pocket of his coat. Each bullet has my name etched deep into its bright casing. He feeds the bullets into the gaping chamber of the gun. He places the gun carefully back into the glove box and closes it. He hauls the sleek car back onto the road. He’s coming.
I feed the death sentence back into the envelope.
Mum sits at the kitchen table.
I sit in my bedroom.
Mum sips the warm sherry.
I sit in my bedroom.
Chuck Yeager was an American pilot who tested the first jet-propelled aeroplane over the Mojave Desert in Southern California. They didn’t quite know what was going to happen when they rolled it out of the hangar, pointed it down the runway and lit the wick. Sure, they had tested it on the ground and in wind tunnels and the like, but that’s not the same.
Chuck’s now at about fifty thousand feet above the ground, blistering the sky with the jet screaming, when the aerodynamics go all pear-shaped and the plane starts handling like a bunch of falling car keys and he runs out of options and finally has to eject. He wrenches open the canopy and hits the big red button on the dash. The canister under his seat explodes like it’s meant to and blasts him clear of the plane.
To add to his problems, some of the burning propellant from the canister lodges inside his helmet and now he’s falling to earth, struggling to get his chute to open with one side of his face on fire. Meanwhile the multi-million-dollar aircraft he has just abandoned crashes into the desert about a mile below him, making a hole about the size of the Superdome.
I sit on the bed with Chuck.
I’ve run out of options too.
Chuck leaves. I would too, but I’ve got nowhere to go.
It’s too early but I change out of my school uniform into my pyjamas. They’re blue and white and they make me look vulnerable and I think that might help. I hear the sound of the big black car on the downgrade into the yard, its tyres crunching on the gravel as it arcs into the carport.
I think of the revolver in the glove box, the bullets with my name engraved on them. I hear Mum rinse the sherry glass in the sink and busy herself at the stove. I hear the driver’s door slam shut and the sharp gravel shifting as he walks towards the house. The screen door creaks on its worn hinges and he is here, inside the house. Muted voices from the kitchen and the fridge door opening and the fizz from the beer and the clink of the bottle top spinning on the bright metal of the sink. The weight of him settling into his chair at the head of the table.
Kookaburras laugh in the falling light and crickets drum in the darkening earth.
I wait.
Maybe he’ll laugh at the results of my report, pat me on the head and tell me that I need to try harder.
A pig flies past my bedroom window.
I rise from my bed with the bright envelope in my hand and leave the safety of my small room. I stop just outside my bedroom door. My body feels light and distant from me. A thousand steps from the blue-black highway to where I stand. Ten more steps will etch this day into my memory forever. I know it like the certainty of breath. I take the first step and the other nine follow in a blur of time and space till I’m standing before him, already beaten. I
offer the envelope.
My mother starts to sob; it’s a ploy, a diversion – she hopes that the tears might soften him.
‘I failed four subjects!’ I say, hoping that the honesty might help.
He slides the pages out and scans them. Pins drop in the quiet.
‘Wait in the shed,’ he says.
‘No, Bruce!’ Mum whispers through the tears.
He slams the beer mug on the table, his face already flushing with the anger and the disappointment.
‘Get out!’ he roars.
I’m already through the screen door and into the yard. I run past the shed and head deep into the dark bush. I’ll run away and never come back. I hide deep in the undergrowth with the night things rustling around me.
I hear shouting from the house as Mum pleads with him. More yelling and then the unmistakable sound of a slap and my mother screaming and my blood surging through my heart.
I race back to the house, stopping just outside, where the light doesn’t reach. ‘Leave her alone! Leave my mother alone, Dad!’ I wait there, afraid, but desperate to save Mum.
I know he’ll come for me, and he does. If I was only bigger I’d stop this now, but I’m not, I’m only twelve. I wait like a sacrifice. There’s no stick in his hand this time; he doesn’t need one. It’s not about my failure in the exam; it wasn’t about my behaviour or even the price of fruit when I was young either. He tells himself that these are the reasons. No, he just wants to hurt me, plain and simple. He wants to feel my young flesh bruise under his fists, he wants to see my blood and feel the terror in me. The first punch splits my bottom lip open, the next one bruises my nose at the bridge and the third one is like the next ten or twenty or pick a random number and you might be close. It must be good to have such an easy target. I don’t duck, I don’t weave, I stand for as long as I can and let the punches find their chosen marks. One of my eyes is closed already and my pyjamas are torn and shredded from the fury of the attack.
When it was over I got myself to bed somehow. I remember worrying about Mum till the night claimed me. The next morning I was told I could have a week off school. The damage had healed by the time I returned and I told anyone who asked that I had been away with the flu.
Another secret.
Fifteen
My father never hit me again. He made the mistake of challenging my brother not long after he had assaulted me. My brother was eighteen at the time. He took the abuse for as long as he could stand it and then knocked my father to the ground with a single, sharp jab to the chin. My brother was banished from the house and was gone by nightfall. He stayed away a year. My father went to bed for a week.
My sister left home the moment she finished high school and was accepted into teachers college in Newcastle. Her time at Stillways was harder even than my brother’s or mine; as a girl she was more vulnerable, and the abuse she suffered was relentless, physically and emotionally.
It was the start of the fall. My father had run out of opponents to vent his rage on and his demons were circling in the dark, but that’s enough of him now – we can move on. From my father and first loves and ripe tomatoes.
It’s 1966 and I’m fifteen now.
I’m taller, without being tall, solid build, blue-eyed.
I am still generous of spirit, though maybe not as much as when I was younger, when I thought that everything was possible and everyone was sane.
Stillways has changed as well. Two years ago, blokes from the electricity company swarmed up the greying poles, strung the thick black cables, and with the flick of a switch, power surged through the old house like new blood and finally woke us. We cleaned the soot from years of gloom and lamplight, and suddenly there was nowhere to hide, now that the shadows had been driven out.
We have appliances. We have whitegoods. We have a Scandinavian-designed lounge that can best be described as modular. There’s an oil heater where the open fire used to be and a television where nothing used to be.
I’ve started to smoke. I don’t do it a lot, but when I do I enjoy it a lot. It’s the dark sulphurous taste on my tongue and the heat in my lungs and the heady buzz from the first hit that does it for me.
I masturbate a lot. We’ve got a masturbation club going at school. Chris Dodds is the current champion. The rules of the club are a bit loose and ill-defined, but it basically comes down to who cums first, wins. Doddsie’s got his dick in his hand more often than a biro, whenever and wherever the mood takes him, and it takes him a lot, and he doesn’t much care who’s around at the time. He has no shame. None of us do.
We’ve been known to sit around in a circle in the bush that borders the school oval. Eight boys under a tall gum tree, beating off. It’s just totally weird, given there is nothing vaguely erotic about the drab Australian bush. It would have made a great Tom Roberts painting, The Wankers at Noon. Put that in a gilt frame and hang it in the National Gallery in Canberra.
The perfect crime
Eddy Pitt was a rebel. He was small for his age with a shock of bright red hair. He was in my year but not in my class. He couldn’t read or write. He spent his time in class drawing pictures of horses in the one exercise book he possessed. He was mad about horses and wanted to be a jockey. He used to wag school on Wyong race days, when he earnt money running errands for bookies. If you ever wanted anything all you had to do was to ask Eddy and he’d get it for you, anything, and if he couldn’t get it he generally knew somebody who could. He was a thief, there was no doubt about it.
It was thought that he was responsible for a lot of break-and-enters around town but he had never been caught. He didn’t cause any trouble at school, just went quietly about his business and kept pretty much to himself. He used to sell single cigarettes to kids, and although it was common knowledge, he had never been busted and no one had ever dobbed on him. He had a dangerous air about him.
There was a rumour going around that his father was doing life in prison for murder, but like everything else about him it was just a rumour. His mother was a small, severe woman. They lived in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of Wyong River.
Eddy is on his way to school one morning when he sees two large green tree snakes entwined together on a low branch. He catches them both and puts them into his school case along with the one exercise book and the box of contraband fags. His first class that morning is science, so before the class starts he sneaks into the laboratory and leaves the case with the snakes on the teacher’s desk with the word Specimens written on the top in chalk. (He must have got someone to write it for him because he couldn’t spell.)
So the hooter goes off and everyone troops into the lab, including Eddy. Miss Knowles, the teacher, sees the case on her desk and doesn’t consider it unusual; kids are always bringing in things from their homes or their gardens, like silk worms and cicadas and the like, and she encourages it.
Eddy’s given the case a few decent bangs with a large stick just prior to placing it on the desk, so the big snakes are pissed right off. Miss Knowles marks the roll then pops the latches on the case with a sunny ‘What do we have here, I wonder?’
She doesn’t have to wonder long because the moment they see daylight the snakes are out and angry. They’re not venomous but they do bite and that’s exactly what the largest snake does. It slides up the inside of her left arm and sinks its fangs in just below the elbow, continues straight across her chest, over her right shoulder, down her back and slithers to the floor.
The other snake is so freaked out by Miss Knowles’s bloodcurdling scream that it bites her on the thumb that is still resting on the latch of the case.
Now all the girls in the class are screaming and half the boys as well. This further alarms the snake that has just bitten her, so it decides to fight on and rears into the classic S-shaped strike position, its mouth wide open and air hissing through its fangs.
The larger snake is still sliding around on the well-polished floor, looking for an escape route. Eddy is helping things along b
y yelling ‘Snake! Snake!’ at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile a distraught Miss Knowles, grasping her swollen thumb and attempting to nurse her punctured elbow while avoiding the advancing snake, has stepped back and managed to get one of her shoes wedged inside the metal wastepaper bin beside her desk.
Someone has finally flung the door open and the classroom empties in a heartbeat. The snake on the floor has found the replica human skeleton and is making its way up between two of the leg bones towards the pelvic region. Meanwhile, Miss Knowles, who has just about reached the end of her tether, drives her free foot deep into the wastepaper bin in a last-ditch effort to free herself. The second foot becomes wedged in beside the first and now she is teetering on the too-small base of the bin and has slipped too far away from the desk to support herself. The teeter becomes more of a sway, the sway becomes a lurch, till finally she is in free-fall, knocking herself out on the corner of the desk on the way down.
The scene now resembles something from an Agatha Christie murder mystery. There is a woman lying perfectly still on the polished floor of a science laboratory. A vibrant green snake slides through the ribcage of some human remains.
Eddy makes his way to the front of the room, picks up his battered case from the desk, and rubs out the word Specimens with the blackboard eraser. He crosses the quadrangle as the hooter sounds for the start of his next class, woodwork, the only subject he really enjoys.
Miss Knowles survives the ordeal with nothing more than a dull pain in her head and four puncture marks in her skin. No one ever finds out who brought the snakes to school. The only clue is the fact that there was a brown case on her desk when she entered the classroom, so that narrows it down to around eleven hundred suspects. Eddy is a suspect, but he’s always a suspect, and without proof it is, as always with him, just another rumour.