by Jock Serong
But as the wheel of the mower rolls over and flings the chopped grass at my shins, landing once again on the scar Wally gave me, I have a sense of consequence.
Later that same day Wally’s at the wheel of Mum’s dinged-up hatchback with his P-plates up and Mum issuing directions from the passenger seat. She takes us through the bottom half of the city and down past Albert Park Lake and the Junction Oval, between perfect rows of palm trees.
The sun’s out over the Junction, and a groundsman’s pushing a heavy roller over the centre wicket. Wally’s got his window down and he’s sniffing the air like a happy mutt. Grass cuttings.
Along Fitzroy Street and round past the Esplanade Hotel, where ten years later I will put my tongue in a bouncer’s ear and he will repay me with two broken ribs. Into Elwood, the streets named after poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats. Mum’s slowing as she checks street signs. She gets us lost twice, even though the map is on her knees and she’s rotating it every time Wally turns a corner.
Eventually we wander down a bluestone laneway to a small tin shed with a peeling timber door. A hand-painted sign above the door reads: Hope Sweeney, Bootmaker.
The small man who ushers us in reminds me of Burgess Meredith in Rocky: the pugnacious creasing of the jowls, the big knotty hands. Hell, he’s even got a cardigan on. He greets Mum like she’s his daughter. The walls are covered in old shots of cricketers—Wes Hall, Ray Lindwall, Lindsay Hassett, even Dennis Keith Lillee. This man we’ve never heard of, who’s currently dunking a teabag for our very own mum, is obviously Someone Important.
At first I think he might be one of Mum’s barflies, but he’s too vigorous for that. He’s got a bulbous nose, but as far as I know all old codgers have bulbous noses.
He takes an A4 notebook from a pile on the bench, places it on the floor, says to Wally, ‘Find a clean page, son.’
His voice is pure backyard Strine. Not the Brooklyn patois I was half listening for.
Wally starts leafing through the pages. Around us are piles of rolled-up fabric and materials, spools of thread, sewing machines, hammers and abstract cut-out shapes. The tumble of these things is just short of chaotic, a busy man’s light-handed organisation.
Wally doesn’t appear to have noticed his surroundings at all. He’s still flipping the pages of the notebook, each of which has a traced pencil outline of a foot on it. Inside each foot, in sharp, spiky cursive, is written the name of the foot’s owner, and his special requirements. Charlie Griffith, calfskin, removable stops. Bruce Laird, ankle boot, rubber lining.
And then a page with only two-thirds of a foot on it, a giant foot. Joel Garner, long stops for wet grass. Kangaroo hide. The top third of the foot, toes included, turns up on the following page. Wally’s stopped breathing.
He finds a clean page and Sweeney hands him a pencil. Wally carefully draws around his foot and hands the pad and pencil back when he’s done. His foot is only worth about three-quarters of a page, a short story among the great novels he’s just passed. Sweeney looks at the outline over his heavy half-glasses.
‘Is the other one the same?’
Wally, the literalist, can’t see the joke. ‘Y-yes sir.’
‘Now, stand on the outline and press your weight down for me.’
Wally does as he’s told. Sweeney makes some cryptic marks with a stubby pencil of his own, the gristly fingers clenched.
‘Lift up on the ball of your foot’.
More hieroglyphs on the notebook.
‘Good. Now you.’
He hands the pad and pencil to me. Mum’s watching, pleased as punch, from a small cane chair near the door. A blade of dusty sunlight falls on her shoulders, and I can see stray hairs lifting away from her ponytail. She’s beautiful.
I place my foot on the pad and watch while Sweeney makes his scratchings.
‘Hey, Hope,’ I say. ‘You can just give me what Border takes. He’s my man.’
Sweeney gradually straightens and peers into my eyes for a long time, seeing something in there he doesn’t like at all. I find myself looking from him to Mum and back again.
‘Fine, okay.’ I mumble. He’s grimacing.
‘None of this is instantaneous, son. Doesn’t just happen, you know. People put lifetimes into these things. Making boots. Batting…’ He points at Mum. ‘Raising children. Stuff that’s worthwhile doesn’t just…turn up.’
‘I know.’ I’m not sure why he’s decided to pick on me.
He’s scowling at me now, the canyons of his face all snaking south. ‘I don’t think you do.’
Wally’s got his back to me, looking up at the photos. I know he didn’t miss a word.
Half an hour later, old Sweeney’s guiding us out the door. Mum gets a hug, Wally gets a firm handshake, eye to eye. The handshake offered to me is short and cursory. Our boots will be ready in a month. As we drive away I know this tough little man has read me clearly.
Rather than taking this as an indication that perceptive people can see my faults, I take it as a warning to avoid perceptive people at all costs.
In the winter of 1986, I know that school and I are about to part ways.
I’m halfway through year eleven. Wally’s finished year twelve, is studying some shopkeeper’s accounting course at TAFE while he works for Brewer’s Sports and Leisure, two blocks from home.
Though I ridicule him about the job, which requires him to dress like a VFL trainer every day, we both know it’s a splendid lurk—he gets to handle bats all day long, swishing them for customers, sometimes just shadow-batting under the fluoros. The times I go to visit him, he picks up a brand-new four-piece ball while we talk, flicks it from hand to hand. He’s developing a sideline in leg spin: each flick of the ball involves a complex rolling of the wrist which I’ve tried (in secret) but never mastered. He shows me things around the shop—new gloves, helmets, training shoes. He gets to handle cash, even order stock.
But the highlight of any visit to the shop is when Bobby Brewer’s out and we can slip into the indoor net.
The net is there so people can try out the gear—kick footballs or swing racquets, maybe face a cricket ball or two. But mostly it lies empty. I’ll be at home, sometimes faking an illness or not even bothering, and the phone will ring. I race down there and Wally puts Hunters and Collectors’ Human Frailty on the tape deck behind the counter. We slip into the net, resuming our endless hurl and crack as though it’s the backyard.
The Brewer’s job is a holding pattern for Wally, nothing more. So is the accounting diploma. In everything he does, he’s waiting for fate to come and knock. Not in a passive way, but in the absolute assurance that his time will come; he merely needs to be available to answer the call.
But that’s him: I was telling you about school.
History is dull but tolerable. Taught by a small, sad man in a vee-neck jumper with thick glasses and a moustache that says I’ve given up.
English I understand from my years pressed into the crook of Mum’s arm. Melville, Verne, Conrad and Steinbeck. I know stories. What my classmates call my bullshitting—even while they laugh along with it—is just storytelling.
I have a tale in my head that’s me and Wally and our future and it fits neatly with the contempt I feel for the sat-down life. Every time I relax into the tale, I’m adding chapters—the adulation, the beautiful girls. Centuries in Adelaide and Sydney and walking off the ground to rapturous applause in the golden light of a dying scorcher. Baggy greens on both our heads, lots of trips on planes. The public bar talk of us breaking records, of who’ll get there first. And in my head, it’s always me.
Hungrier, faster. More fearless. The Keefe brothers, they’re a phenomenon. But that young Darren, he’s just got the edge.
These are the things I dream about as school starts to slip away from me. The abrasive flats of Sunshine Tech reflect the winter light back at me, day after day.
Trigonometry brings on the first wave of despair. The zombie groans of sine, cosine and tangent would have
chased me out earlier, if not for the intervention of the wonderful Emma Maric: a girl who wears jeans perfectly, who’s got the accessorising swagger to sling her father’s hunting belt round them, the little leather bullet loops vacant as though she’s just emptied a magazine into a rhino.
Emma Maric understands trig as I never will but has the decency to despise it as I do. Or at least the tactical nous to fake it. When I tell Mum Emma’s coming over to help me with my maths, she looks at me with pity. Really? she says, having looked Emma up and down.
The effectiveness of these tutorials depends on your point of view. We make progress on trigonometry if Wally and Mum are in the house. But if they aren’t, or if they’re preoccupied, we chance it on the bottom bunk, rolling and grunting and mashing our faces together until a desperate glance at her watch or mine forces us to disengage.
After these sessions we sweep through the dark streets on my ten-speed, Emma dinking on the rack above the rear wheel with her hands on my ribs. Sometimes we pass a quiet joint back and forth and sing to each other, the hedges and fences flying past, startled cat here, possum there. The ten-speed’s got a bell on the handlebars—one of Mum’s weird insistences—and sometimes I just let it rip, over and over, as we careen down the footpath.
Thinking of them now, they’re all winter nights. Cold air on the face, knuckles burning. One night there’s a hard rubbish collection on the nature strips, and we loop from house to house, sifting through their piles until we find a wood-grain television. We swap seats and I perch on the rack with the TV in my arms as we wobble all the way to her house. In ten minutes we’ve got it working perfectly, and in twenty minutes we’ve forgotten it’s there, twisted in her doona and groping happily with our clothes on the floor.
And just down the hall from her room, the front door opens.
By the time the latch has finished clattering and her rhino-shooting old man has called helloo, I’m in the wardrobe and she’s dressed. I can hear her greeting the folks, feigning boredom while I’ve got dry-cleaners plastic pressed against my screaming teenage balls. She boils the kettle for them. Asks them sweetly about their night out. Christ, they’re talking about school.
At some stage she’s said goodnight and closed the door softly behind herself. I don’t recall it because I’ve fallen asleep in there among the coats. But she’s with me all of a sudden, her soft mouth and the gentle skittering sounds of the hangers.
Our movements are small and charged now, perfect stealth, and I’m inside her, a secret place inside a secret place, her fingertips tracing electricity on my shoulders, and the world is ours alone for those golden fleeting minutes.
I suppose it ends with Emma in the way that teenage things usually do. One of us just forgets we owe anything to the other and moves on. At that age you understand that everything is alluring and everything passes. The colours are brighter, the music hurts like it’s real. No one stays together long.
So Emma gets me through maths until my own selfishness or maybe hers undoes our arrangement, costing me a mid-year fail in year eleven and sealing the deal. I’m not repeating year eleven. I’m not going to be one of those nineteen-year-olds who finishes school with a driver’s licence and a fiancée, for God’s sake.
All this time, our new mate Craigo hovers in the wings. He has a way of placing himself side-stage in our lives, just there, just in the background. Emma’s departure inches him into the frame without me even noticing it’s happening.
We’re standing in a nightclub queue, each of us clutching the birth extract certificates we’ve made out of blue ink and craft glue.
Mum doesn’t know we’re here. She knows Craig, but never inquires about his life. It’s a surprising intuition of hers: Craig seems born of nowhere and no one. His garrulous nature subtly pushes any discussion of his origins into the background. So Mum thinks I’m staying with a kid from school I nominated, a reliable one. I don’t know what Craig told his parents, whether they’d care, or even whether they exist.
We’re both wearing Doc Martens and op-shop trench coats. I can hear The Cure thudding out from deep within the building. There are girls in the queue dressed like women, heavy makeup to put a few years on their eyes. Craig’s disappointed Wally hasn’t come, but it never feels like I’m second-class company.
I don’t want the conversation to come around to school, but somehow it does.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ he’s saying. ‘Keating left school at twelve and he’s the fucking treasurer.’
Like a moron, I correct him. ‘I’m pretty sure Keating was fourteen.’
‘Well you’re sixteen. What the fuck’s holding you up?’
Craig’s been working for the bookies at Flemington since he left school at the end of last year. He’s a lackey of some kind, talks in turf dialect, laced with old-bloke terminology. We had a thing in the fifth, got a rails run. He even affects the trackside nasal twang, like he’s holding a pair of binoculars under the brim of a trilby. He’s verifiably a teenage kid with fistfuls of cash, bursting with impatience for adulthood, generous and secretive in equal measure. For my sixteenth birthday he buys me a top-shelf Gray-Nicolls bat. I check with Wally—he confirms with horror that it would be worth three hundred dollars, but it certainly didn’t come through his position at Brewer’s.
Craigo shrugs it off when I ask, and I begin to wonder. Has he bought me a bat, or has he got me a bat? The difference is slight, but carries a tiny edge of moral uncertainty.
Those moments of doubt are only fleeting. Being the objects of Craig’s fixation makes us proud and confirms us in our belief that we’re something special. It’s the Big Guy who sets us on the paths of our own typecasting. Wally as responsible, grave: a leader. Me as a force of nature: a talented freak with no mooring.
It’s tough getting the leaving-school idea past Mum.
She has a belief—I’m not too self-absorbed to see it—that me being in school is a form of insurance against a fate like hers. But where self-absorption takes over is in my unshakeable belief that I’ll do better. I know that a buffer of education might have saved my undoubtedly clever mum from having to pour beer for rheumy old bastards. But I don’t accept the third plank of the syllogism. I’m convinced it won’t happen to me.
So she puts it back on me.
‘If you’re going to join the adult world,’ she says, ‘you can live like an adult.’
And living like an adult means moving out.
It might be some kind of bluff, like she’ll spook me into staying a few more years. Or maybe she just knows in her heart that the small and perfect sanctuary she built for us against the world is outgrown now.
I discuss this earnestly with my fat turf-accountant mate. He assures me it’s a piece of cake, the living out of home business, and he will find us a place. Somewhere a little closer to the great dormant dreamscape of the Eastern Suburbs.
We’re deep into spring by the time he turns up with a rented trailer to collect my single bed and milk crates full of LPs. He’s recently acquired a newish Commodore with a spoiler and mags, and the interior feels just like the nightclubs he likes. He’s building a habitat around himself. This impression falls away a little, however, when we reach the destination—Cubitt Street, Richmond. It’s a forgotten industrial laneway running north from the garment factories of the riverbank to the cluster of railway tracks that run out to the suburbs. Trams rumble in the distance. Aside from our place, a small timber cottage with its door on the street, there’s a cluster of dark terraces across the road, screened and fortified with shards of broken glass in the cement and huge sheets of steel over the entrances.
I point it out as we draw up outside our future abode.
‘Dennis’s joint,’ says Craigo. ‘Don’t think we’ll drop in for a beer.’
As he backs the trailer, tongue-poking with concentration, I realise that our place has a little fortification of its own—a roller door to one side of the house, concealing a short driveway and a garage. It’s n
ot the sort of place you’d leave a car on the street.
In the first few weeks Mum visits often, bringing roast chooks and taking away my washing in baskets. It stings me occasionally when I see her struggling to let go. Wally’s transition into adulthood is more staged, more structured and painless. Mine is a rending of the fabric—I just left—and it’s simple maths. The population of the Fernley Road house has dropped by a third.
But as the days go by she turns up at Cubitt Street less and less often. She doesn’t like the place. Never says so, but you can sense it. She’s seen a thousand losers and petty crooks, and she’s looking at Dennis’s joint out of the corners of her eyes when she comes and goes. Never sees him, thank God. He’s a sight—short, fat, covered in blurry blue-green ink and heavyweight gold chains. Yellow eyes, carnivorous grin. Craigo disconcerts Mum sometimes, but Dennis is like Craigo dipped in hell.
Gurgling motorbikes turn up across the road deep in the night. There are fights, squealing tyres, even occasional gunshots. When they have parties over there, they manage to do it without a trace of festivity: it’s grim and lewd, like dogs fucking. Each time the police visit, someone turns up on the fortifications afterwards with a welding rig to improve the barriers. Craigo reckons they’ve got an escape tunnel out the back onto the tracks.
I’m coming to a new understanding of the Big Guy through living with him.
There are aspects of his daily routine that are surprisingly spartan: he will eat only muesli for breakfast, hoofing it down between gulps of black coffee. His room is impeccably clean. He reads newspapers obsessively, reassembling their various component sections afterwards and stacking them by the kitchen door. Every week on a Friday afternoon he walks down to the old Italian nonna’s place and gives her the stack. She thinks he’s a good boy. The newspapers go on her tomato patch or something. He returns with jars of pomodoro, sometimes dried fruit.
He’s tuned the kitchen radio to some classical station. If he can chance upon some opera while he’s tooling around with the nonna’s sauce, then that’s about the happiest he ever gets. Given that Pacino’s Scarface is running on almost constant loop on the VCR, I should be more alert to the nascent gangster fantasy: the opera, the charade of being a good boy for a nonna. Easy in retrospect, isn’t it?