The Life

by Malcolm Knox

  I get it all lined up: Ride in on a wave of radio words, legs over the bed, past Mo’s room out the diagonal grille door, down the steps (don’t touch the rail!), in the garage, past the oldies’ cars, Oldsmobiles yeah, out through the shrubs and toy roundabouts, over the causeway, stink of frogs and mangroves, pedal my chopper to my bush, down chopper, pick up stick, wade in the lagoon and

  and water’s warm as soup left to go cold. The phosphorus lights up to greet me, fairy lights.

  Can sit on my board now. Wobbles but holds. I’m not tea-bagging. Can hold my head high. The nose points up out of the water like a great big prong and it hits me how dickly the whole thing always was.

  Never hit me at the time but

  but yeah

  how it always was. How it never was.

  I didn’t realise.

  Must of been obvious to everyone else but. The way I sat. Big nose at ten o’clock while every other kept his down under the water . . .

  But I can sit up on the damn thing, flap round big meaty paws scare them mangrove birds into the air.

  Least you can still scare someone.

  Get the stick back in the bush, meself back onto me chopper, back onto the track, back on the road, back over the bridge, back through the sleeping streets, back in the sleeping house, back in me sleeping trench.

  Radio still on.

  And it’s still dark.

  Then the morning when the BFO is already here and she’s with Mo and they’re having a cup of instant coffee and laughing.

  Real laughing.

  Long time since that.

  I come in the kitchen in sleeping T-shirt and sleeping boardies and aviators. They look up at me like I’m just this feller who lives there who’s got up out of bed.

  Not like I’m me, and yeah they’re laughing.

  I say nothing. Get my muesli into the bowl, fill it with milk, sit me end of the melamine table. Starving.

  Every day same big bowl of muesli, same brand filled with milk. It’s not there, I go nuts.

  They didn’t have that brand in Hawaii . . .

  Mo telling her about Joe.

  Joe Blow, Mo’s bloke, Rod’s dad. Joe was a racing identity, a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, a travelling salesman, a colourful character.

  Joe give her a home.

  Joe always creeping off from it.

  Joe no good to anyone, cept when he come home he get her up the duff again.

  ‘Could of been more,’ Mo says, ‘he got me duffed every year after Roddy but they wouldn’t take.’

  The last ones standing, Rod and Mo. Yeah and DK don’t forget DK.

  Laughing like a pair of old girlfriends:

  She’s telling the BFO:

  ‘Everyone wanted me to get rid of Joe. Give Joe Blow the throw! Like an advert jingle it was. But you know what? I couldn’t get rid of him cos he was never around to get rid of!’

  What they’re laughing at.

  And then she goes Joe liked her pregnant cos he liked the look of her, you know, and she cups her hands round the chest of her house dress round the pale green floral print and I’m sick to me stomach and the BFO giggles behind her hand, and now I know as I mow down my muesli that they’ve forgot I’m here at all, I can’t believe it, the BFO must of put something in Mo’s instant coffee get her yammering away like this, I’m embarrassed and disgusted and I get up and take my muesli and try to find somewhere else to eat it but the unit this hellhouse is too small and I don’t like anywhere else can’t sit anywhere else but my end of the melamine table and so yeah, I sit back down to listen to this girlie talk about how hardscrabble Mo’s married life was moving from one place to the next, every year up the duff, Joe off doing his whatsit wherever he was, not being got rid of, denying her the pleasure, all round the countryside, and she’s getting pregnant in boats, on the dinette of a caravan, in a raging thunderstorm, none of them taking but, and lucky too cos she’s got her boy Roddy and never enough to feed him with . . .

  . . . yeah . . .

  She worked. She worked in pubs. She worked in laundries. She worked behind the desk of a SP bookie counting his money. She worked doing typing for a mayor. She always worked. When she needed someone look after Roddy she dump him on her friends, always the same:

  Chainlink, cracked concrete, fibro, buffalo grass, fibro, lino, fibro, terry towelling, damp and mothballs.

  She tried going back to live with her mother and her father but they were still all tied up in each other they were lovers, they still drunk and drunk and shot through on the spree together, they were old ones now pickled in drink, but pickled together, together, no room for their sixth and her nipper.

  Their grandson.

  No room for Rod, no time for Roddy.

  So Mo gone back to Joe. Or back to the place where he’d find her when he come back. On again with the Mo-Joe Blow show.

  This is where my muesli is done and I walk out the house, and the BFO doesn’t even notice I’m gone.

  . . . yeah . . .

  •

  I go for a walk round town, my town. All the park benches been replaced by wooden seats shaped like surfboards. Everything round here that could be shaped like a surfboard, is. Signs, plaques, letterboxes, outdoor showers, even windows: all the same shape, like the place has some kind of surfboard-sickness on the brain. Seems the only things that aren’t shaped like surfboards anymore are surfboards.

  I go for a walk to my milk bar. Don’t need to say, don’t need to pay. Pine-lime Splice and a bottle of orange Tarax. Ta, Bob.

  ‘No worries, DK.’

  ‘No worries, Bob.’

  I don’t mind this new Bob. They’ve changed over the years, folk who own my milk bar, changed too fast for me, but the first one was Bob back when I was a grom, and I can’t keep up so whoever they is they’s all Bob to me.

  Two groms and this bird ask me for an autograph.

  I do me usual. Low growl like a mangy mongrel—

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  Smaller of the grommets holding out a bit of newspaper, today’s paper that is, and a Bic biro.

  ‘Like, can you sign this Mr Keith?’

  I look at it like he’s asking me to do the Su Fricken Doku. I look at him but he can’t know that; my trusty mirror aviators on.

  The same aviators I had when . . .

  ‘Sign? What’s sign?’

  Low mongrel growl. How cranky old dogs get.

  He nods holding his nerve. They can hold their nerve with this fat old man they can hold their nerve looking over the falls of an eight-foot face sucking up behind Snapper . . .

  I draw breath waiting . . .

  The bird steps forward and I think she’s gunna say ‘Please? Pretty please with sugar on top?’

  But instead she lifts up her singlet. Just like that. She got a bikini on. With her thumb she points to the brown V on her chestbone . . .

  . . . yeah . . .

  The Enigmatic Legend, the King of the Point, The Man, The Great Man, drops their Bic biro on the cracked concrete footpath.

  Chainlink, cracked concrete, fibro, buffalo grass, fibro, lino, fibro, terry towelling, damp and mothballs . . .

  ‘Me Splice’s melting,’ I go.

  They watch me waddle off. No laughter no laughing no giggling. Grom’s getting mad at the bird.

  They aren’t seeing his royal fatness wobble up the hill. Me knee-free tubes lopsided.

  He’s going off at her for cruelling their chances.

  ‘No respect! You gotta have respect!’

  His barking at her, last thing I hear.

  I love the youth of today. They don’t know a fricken thing and if they were told it they’d turn their back on it. Cos they know everything already. The rumours about
Lisa belong to their parents and cos they belong to their parents the rumours is just that, bullshit to the kids.

  I love them kids.

  Except for the fricken BFO who’s set up camp at the red melamine table with Mo when I get home and now they’ve got buttered slices of white bread, a plate of wet iceberg lettuce leaves, slices of tomato, processed cheese, chicken loaf, Peck’s Anchovette Paste, help yourselves ladies, sure, be my guest, don’t mind me

  and the thing is they

  I wash hands, plonk down at the head of the table, the man of the house, The Man of the Point, the Legend, the King, the one three kids are down there now in the break telling stories about, new stories about King Dennis The First down the bush telegraph, the surf telegraph, the coconut wireless, up the coast on the salt breeze, all of them talking about me, about me, about me . . .

  And I’m listening to my Mo on about herself:

  ‘Ah the sixties. Not much fun them years, not much “Sixties” happening for the Keith family.’

  ‘When Joe left us without the keys to whatever house we was living in and we stayed in the Salvos hostel for six weeks till he showed up again.’

  ‘When we had no rent money and live in a fishing shack on The Other Side, dirt floor, no electricity, no stove, no running water.’

  ‘When Joe turned up late at Rod’s christening and the priest sang out, “What’s the name of the nipper?” and Joe’s meant to say, “Rodney Brian Keith”, but instead he forgot the nipper had a middle name and he sang out, “His name’s Rodney Keith, isn’t it!” so that my boy gets christened “Rodney Keith Keith”.’

  ‘When we was living in the country and Joe’s trapping roos and Rod put kero on the open fire and singed all his hair off. In hospital—’

  —loads of hospital stories—Rod with meningitis, Rod with hepatitis, Rod with an infected tooth, and Mo, Mo had to go in a lot for herself, with mysteries, mysteries, always mysteries that left them in some stranger’s home for a few weeks Rod fighting with their kids till it all got too rough and Mo come out in the nick of time—

  Rod causing trouble with a capital T—

  When Rod sconed some kid with a hammer.

  When Rod scalped some kid with a crowbar.

  When Rod flayed some kid with a sander.

  When Rod got some kid with the back of a knife.

  When Rod pushed the bar heater onto a kid.

  When Rod pushed a kid off a high fence and that kid got mauled by the neighbour’s standard poodle.

  When her and Rod live in a caravan in someone’s backyard.

  When they live in someone’s granny flat. (Chainlink, cracked concrete, fibro, buffalo grass, fibro, lino, fibro, terry towelling, damp and mothballs . . . )

  When they pitched a tent in someone’s backyard and live in that.

  When it blew away.

  When Mo give up and left Rod at an orphanage, a Catholic boys’ home, just like she been at one years earlier, and when she realised she’d went full circle, orphanage to orphanage, shot through on to shooting through, nuns to priests, she raced back and took her boy out of there and the paperwork took her best part of the day but it taught her a lesson, taught her the final lesson, and this is when she scrounged up the deposit—Whack!—bang down on a house.

  The House.

  Bang, she smack her hand on this very melamine table, here it is, a deposit, on a house, and it happened to be fifteen minutes’ walk or four minutes’ ride on a chopper from the finest point break on the east coast and finest point break in the known fricken universe. You ask me.

  Bang. Down goes the deposit.

  Her and Rod got the house. The House.

  Rod didn’t know nothing about nothing. When he asked Mo did they own the house now she said, We’re all in debt to the bank, we owe all our money to the bank now, and Rod didn’t get it, he couldn’t sleep he was so scared, he had nightmares about pipes and factories and darkness and noise, factory noise, cos he thought she owed so much coin she never pay it back and they’ll come take the house away.

  And then young Rodney Keith Keith discovered that point break and stopped thinking about the bank.

  And he discovered someone else for a change.

  When her and Rod move to the seaside, the Gold Coast, the coast of gold, the salt air up their nostrils, allowed at last to go to the pound and get what Rod always wanted which was a dog, and the dog she got him was this beagle cross called Sam . . .

  And Mo worked peeling and veining prawns.

  And Rod collecting bottles from the beach rubbish bins to trade in for twopence each, making ten bob on a good day which he’d then take to the butcher and buy a bag of bones for Mo to make a week’s soup with . . .

  And . . .

  And . . .

  And . . .

  When . . .

  When . . .

  When . . .

  The BFO come all this way to listen to my life story and instead what she’s getting is Mo and Rod. I’m hardly even in it. I’m the King of the Point, The Man, the Legend, the Enigma, and the BFO isn’t even listening to me or asking me ONE SINGLE QUESTION . . .

  But she is. I catch the sly flash of white under her black eyelash, not so much awe now she’s over the awe, and I can see, I see, how she reckons she’s setting me up, bringing me to the boil, where I’ll be so jack of listening to Mo on and on about herself and Rod and their flaming hardscrabble that . . .

  How brain damaged you think I am girl?

  The BFO, trying to make me jealous.

  Instead she gets me upset.

  I lock meself in me room.

  When she come back the next day I don’t come out.

  Mo has to keep her entertained.

  When she come back the next day I don’t come out.

  Mo has to keep her entertained.

  When she come back the next day I don’t come out.

  She gets tired of Mo.

  And that’s what makes me real upset.

  BFO’s mistake: kidding herself she has an open mind, that her story isn’t already wrote.

  What makes me upset?

  When she goes:

  ‘So Mrs Keith there’s this bit you’ve skipped over.’

  And you can hear a pin drop but it’s not a pin, it’s the BFO’s heart.

  Through the wall between my bedroom and the kitchen I hear Mo scratch round and save the day.

  ‘Ah then love, you mean Shangrila.’

  . . . yeah no, don’t want her to get me started on The House, I start I won’t finish, and that wouldn’t be fair on me would it.

  Every inch. Every square cubic inchlet of The House I knew

  nah know.

  It was a QUEENSLANDER House, I remember the word. Me first memory. Even though I was a Queenslander I never heard there was houses with the same name. QUEENSLANDER. And it has a name on a plaque by the front door: Shangrila. Mo said Shangrila is Chinese for This Is It We’re Set.

  The Queenslander was wooden on stilts with lattices downstairs round the stilts and big airy rooms with fans and a sleepout veranda surround the kitchen and heaven on twelve sticks. It was half a house really, this boarding house that been down on Kirra beach and the owner had sawed it in half and put one half on a truck and send it up the hill. Cos it was a boarding house it had lots of tiny crooked rooms upstairs and down. Mo didn’t like them but Rod thought it was a ripper all them rooms nobody needed, scuttled through like a rat, like a dirty little possum, every square inch. Eventually Mo begin knocking out a few walls with her bare hands to make bigger rooms to live in.

  In the backyard there’s banana trees and rubber trees and palms and big tropical flowers, hibiscus and whatnot.

  Shangrila didn’t have no views of the beach. It had a view of the
neighbour’s house but that was also a QUEENSLANDER so nobody didn’t mind.

  It had a view of the cemetery over the back fence.

  Sam loved the QUEENSLANDER except being a beagle he was always following his nose first asking questions later. Mo built this big wire fence round the backyard but Sam dig a hole under it. Her and Rod filled in the holes and Sam get his nose under the gate and push the latch up and get the thing open and he’s off, down the road, sniffing foxes or whatnot. Her and Rod called him Houdini.

  It was like he didn’t want to be with them.

  But then he gets tired of wandering and plonk himself someone’s front doorstep and they read the phone number on his tag and he had a name, Samuel J. Keith, and then the phone call and it’s Christmas all over again.

  Cemetery wasn’t strictly Catholic or Jehovah’s Witnesses or whatever, it was allsorts. Buddhist, Hare Krishna, Church of England, you name it. Only place on the Gold Coast where all them minorities could go and be left in peace. Dunno where they come from, there wasn’t none at the local school cept for a couple of Chinese, they must of been trucked in from all over south Queensland. They all had separate sections, like it mattered to the Hindus to give the Muslims a wide berth even if they was all pushing up the same daisies.

  Sam got off on rooting round the gravestones and mausoleums. Thought he’d died and went to heaven. Why he was always pulling the Harry Houdini under the back fence: he liked sniffing among them zombies.

  Sam and Rod was always in that cemetery. Played chasings and hide-and-seek and always laughing and clowning round. Played in there at night heaps. At first it was a bit scary and Rod creep the crap out of the mourners who come in there by jumping out behind a tombstone. But laughing and horsing about was his way of getting over the spookiness. The louder he was, the less chance the undead had to come crawling up his spine. Sometimes people’d shoo him away there was a funeral or whatnot going on, but Mo said he brought new life to the graveyard. It was filled up with mango and avocado and banana trees and them coloured flowers, hibiscus and frangipani and that. Pretty nice place if you weren’t dead. Great view of the ocean if you can stand up to see it.