by Malcolm Knox
And so yeah it was one night Sam barking his head off in the graveyard. Mo says her and Rod come running, they think Sam’s scoped some zombie or what have you.
‘So me and Rod creep out there, it’s twilight hour, not dark but not light,’ she goes, Mo to the BFO this is, ‘and I’ve got a torch. We’re creeping so light me knees are knocking. Sam’s growling away at this little stone crypt, you know, bone house thingy, and Sam’s no growler I’m telling ya, so it’s strange all right. He’s off his rocker. There’s a doorway half open. Rod’s whimpering behind me, saying “Don’t go Mo, it’s zombies in there.” And then so I go first with the torch and poke it through the doorway and I see something move and I scream the top of me lungs. There’s a pair of eyes shining in the torchlight. I turn to Rod and say, “Don’t worry love, it’s a possum. Go back to the house.” But I know it’s not a possum and so does Roddy. Me hands are shaking like a leaf. I say: “Hello?” And the eyes move towards me. I’m ready to run when I feel a hand on me back. I jump a mile in the air, but it’s only Rod. He hasn’t gone nowhere. He’s rooted to the spot. “What is it, love?” I go. And Rod’s looking at the eyes. He can see better than me. Or he recognises. And he goes: “It’s him, Mo.” “Who?” I say. “It’s him. The sea urchin.” “The what?” And Rod starts pissing himself. Hard to tell if he’s laughing cos it’s funny or it’s a reaction to the nerves. “I seen him down the beach,” he goes. “I tried kicking shit out of him but he run away. He lives in The Pit.” “Eh?” I go. “What you on about? What Pit?” And Roddy just starts laughing, not nasty but kindly, like, and moves past me into the entrance of the bone house and goes: “Come on, matey, come out here!” And I look back into the bone house and I can’t describe it, how filthy he was, how shrivelled and pathetic and frightened, he was feral, you know? People use the word feral but they don’t know what it means, or they wouldn’t use it anymore if they saw a kid like this. Feral. He was an animal. He couldn’t talk, only grunt. But when Roddy calls him, like he’s calling a pet animal, the dirty little thing shuffles out half cripple half sideways. He won’t look at me. He looks at Rod or Rod’s ear and there’s something in the pair of them, I can’t put it in words love, but you knew something was up, something like . . . yeah nah, I dunno, but they’re in cahoots eh, I can just see it all in that look of theirs, he come out of the bone house and that’s it, I remember telling meself, this is us, this is our family, me and Roddy and Sam and this little sea urchin thingy, is it a boy, is it a mar fricken supial, Lord knows. I know I’m meant to find out whose he is and that, and do the paperwork and what have you, he must be someone’s eh, but this other little voice is telling me he’s mine. That’s what he is. He’s mine.’
Love for the first time. First love. I can sit in any spot of that House and I have me diagonals and me perpendiculars all lined up. Window casements to doorframes. Doorframes to chair legs. Chair legs to mouse holes. Mouse holes to bedheads. Any room of The House, I had all me lines worked out.
I knew exactly where it was safe to tread and where not
yeah love.
No more chainlink, cracked concrete, fibro, buffalo grass, fibro, lino, fibro, terry towelling, damp and mothballs. No more for her no more for Rod. No more for me.
The House was the end of Joe, the beginning of DK.
That House was the first place Joe wanted to settle down and stay with Mo and Rod. Once he seen it. Joe dug QUEENSLANDERS too. He dug the sea air. Dug the beach, a few minutes away. Began to dig Mo again.
But then he sees me, huddled in a corner, can’t speak.
Joe didn’t dig the sea urchin.
‘What’s this?’ he goes.
Mo tells him I’m her foster kid.
‘Where from?’ Joe goes.
‘Business is it of yours?’
‘You’ve had another?’ goes Joe, jumping to the wrong conclusion as always. ‘Whose the fuck is he?’
And then it’s on, young and old.
She’d have none of it yeah getting up the duff and all that getting the crud beaten out of her. With Joe it was either kick him out or let him get her all pear shaped again.
She was peeling and veining prawns, typing, counting money, then working at the hospital, not even a nurse, not trained, she was kind of an orderly, poo carrier.
But still that was better than having Joe around.
She give Joe Blow the throw.
He didn’t go quiet. Made a racket and went to hit her but she started screaming blue bloody murder and so did me and Roddy, not on our Mo you don’t, and so we’re hoeing into him yeah, and maybe this is the first thing I ever remember, I’m only five or something and it’s me and Rod going to work on this Joe, Mo helping us, we’re a team right, and the thing about QUEENSLANDERS is the neighbours know pretty much all of what’s going on and Joe’s sober enough to figure out it was better to take the hint than be drug off by the boys in blue.
Mo heard he went out west, inland to work the races and married some bird out there. Mo didn’t care. Well shot of him.
Full name Joseph. Joseph Bloseph.
Mo sit us down, me and her and Rod and Sam, and she goes, Well yous lot it’s just us now, and that’s the way it’s always gunna be, just us, me and yous, and I promise yous that yous are my whole life, won’t be nothing else for me, yous my whole life yous lot. Okay? So don’t let me down!
Sure she was joking. She didn’t mean Sam. Didn’t mean Rod really. Reckon Rod reminded her too much of the dreaded Mr Blow.
What she meant when she said her whole life was, she meant Yours Truly. Her boy Den.
Was that night I woke up with the nightmare, went in her room, stood at the end of her bed.
Mo?
Huge mountain in there, tuft of brown hair at the pillow. She didn’t say nothing.
Mo I had a bad dream.
Still didn’t say nothing. For a second I thought she was dead and I started to cry. Soft swallows like I’m choking on milk. I take a step towards her and the mountain stirs and a big fat white arm, the underside white and wobbly like a raw oyster, it comes up.
Moey? I’m shivering there, it’s not cold but.
Still didn’t say nothing. I’m looking at her arm which is up like one of them boom gates.
So I got in under it and but
yeah and it
you can’t say
yeah a big flower folding me in, her little bee hiding in her petals.
•
‘You had to take him to the children’s services?’
Mo’s had enough of this questioning now.
‘Course, love, course. The children’s services.’
She’s getting up and cleaning the kitchen all of a sudden.
‘And where was he from? Whose was he?’
‘Ah love, me back’s giving me hell today, all that sitting and talking, women’s pains eh.’
‘You adopted him or fostered him? There’s a bit of difference in—’
‘Listen love, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, right? Tomorrow? Me head’s splitting open and I’ve got a million chores to do. And Den’ll be getting hungry.’
And so here’s how I get shot of the old BFO: I offer full cooperation.
She’s perched in front of me in the kitchen, drinking Mo’s tea and eating Mo’s Vo Vos. She come in from a surf or so she reckons. Big round brown plate of a face, eyes the green of afternoon sea. Hanging off DK’s every word.
And so I cut back on her:
‘Where ya staying? In a motel or what?’
She nods, eyes on her notebook.
‘Lonely there?’
She shrugs her pineapple shoulders in a way tells me I’ve hit the nail. What is it with these birds? Why’s it they have to wreck themself trying to fight it out in the blokes’ world? Sure they can win, bu
t winning kills em. Kills em of loneliness. Cos blokes isn’t worth mixing with, blokes isn’t worth beating. Specially surfers.
‘No place for a lady,’ I go respectfully.
‘Salright.’ Short. She doesn’t want me getting personal on her. Like she’s behind that one-way glass stuff. Wants it like she can see me but I can’t see her.
‘Carn,’ I go. ‘Don’t ya come and stay with me and Mo? I give ya full open access. Save some coin. Get out of that lonely motel yer in. Come sleep on the fold-out. Can have me twenty-four seven.’
This old man, he played twenty-four seven, he played knick-knack on my devon/on my heaven/on my Kevin . . . Bugger it get your feet between them diagonals Den and oh no here come the parade of them you have known . . .
She looks up at me with eyes big as her shoulders, like she’s got everything she wished for but it scares the pants off her.
Then shakes her head slow.
‘I can’t do that, Dennis.’
. . . Kevin Levin/Devon Nevin/Steve Neave/Merle Thurle . . .
‘Don Conn,’ I go. Lisa/Lisa McGeeza/Exmire Sexwire . . .
The BFO giving me a funny look. Her brown face white as a sheet and that. Her fear more real than yours.
I push the aviators back up me nose. ‘How come? We won’t bite.’ Thanks love. Got me out of a pickle there.
‘Um, I’ll think about it,’ she goes in this way that says she’s already thought about it, thought it right through.
And so that day’s the last I see of her for a while. She checks out of the motel too.
I outsmarted her again. Pure natural genius.
See—that’s how I find out:
She does know.
Mo get her sense of humour back when Joe get the throw. But also she meant what she said. Never looked at another bloke. Never had another friend when you think of it. It was all us and her yeah
nah me and her.
Poor old Mo she put all her eggs in this one basket and before long must of thought Rod keep turning up like a bad penny she couldn’t get shot of.
Strange thing when your Mo don’t really like her own boy so much. Even to us, the Keiths, where strange was normal, even to us we got it deep down how she was with Rod and it was strange.
How do I remember why I was there when they found me eh. I was too little. I was five or what have you, how do I know. They said I live on the rocks at the point, under the surf club and in the bone house, but don’t ask me love, I don’t remember nothing. DK was rubbish dumped illegally. There’s signs telling you you can’t do that.
Joe kicked it a few years later, when we was teenagers. Rod asked Mo can we go to the funeral somewhere in outback Queensland (no way was she letting them bring him home to lie behind our back fence; she’d had enough of him looking over her shoulder and down her front when he was alive). But Rod wanted to go to the funeral. Joe was his dad and that after all.
‘Nah,’ she goes. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘Even send flowers?’
‘Nah,’ she goes. ‘I don’t know him.’
Real edge in our family.
Rod took years to forgive her.
I didn’t give a fart. Joe wasn’t my dad was he.
•
Mo tried to make us work. Good luck to her! We go round scrounging glass bottles from rubbish bins and all over the place. You get twopence refund. I couldn’t be buggered. Then Rod come up with this idea. He was the ideas man Roddy: more efficient if you go straight to the source and raid them crates of lemonade and Coke behind the shops before they send them out, or bust into the milkman’s truck, swipe some bottles, drink them and score the refunds later. So we go swiping them and but Mo caught us cos so she banned that racket and put Rod on hard labour. She pulled strings and got Rod this job at the hospital for a while: cleaning up poo. Scrubbing dunnies. Nepotism isn’t it, the way people can get jobs for their kids.
Me I ended up with the easy work, this paper run before school, up at four, on me brand-new chopper I got for my tenth birthday, delivering papers round town. Not too bad in the end. I was an early bird anyway and
yeah the beach
had a good arm. Used to aim at their flowering plants. Rolled-up paper like a spear . . .
Sam run along beside me, no lead or nothing. He just wanted to run.
Coolangatta wasn’t big but it was all on hills, paper run good exercise for me lolly legs with the big tray of papers on the back of me chopper, and I get to the top of Greenmount Hill and look down on the dawn patrol, the surfers out with first light, little dots of them on Rainbow Bay up Snapper Rocks down Coolie Beach to Kirra. Only ones in town up that early was fishermen, surfers, garbos and yours truly.
Never got out of the habit. Didn’t have clock radios then just knew when to wake up.
Long way down the hill, on the grey pink morning glass. Surfers eh. Mo dug them figurines in a model shop, would of collected them if she had any coin, and these board riders from a distance were like them. Trim waves on their longboards, big wooden planks like doors, I stood on my chopper on that hill dreamboating so long I was always late to finish my paper run and late for school
•
yeah, I watched
them old-time surfers, they went the way the wave took them. Trimmed a smooth line from peak to shoulder, one direction only, strolling up and down their boards dropping their knees into a half a turn, hang five hang ten, cruisy, pretty, like drops of water sliding down a windowpane.
And when they jumped off you wouldn’t even know the wave been ridden.
The wave was the thing not the surfer.
Like flies on a horse’s arse, along for the ride.
You watched the waves and turned your face to look along the headlands: the pull-offs and car parks and overlooks.
Always there was cars parked, nose to the break, engines running—
Always a man inside—
Watching—
Just this one man per car, maybe having a smoke or just concentrating—
Watching—
Like you.
It was that important yeah.
Late fifties. Everyone knew everyone else, the Goldie a string of small country towns back then, and soon me and Rod at the public school was known as the ragtag nippers of Mrs Keith the lady peeled prawns at the fisho and carted poo at the hospital. Nice lady well respected best prawn peeler and poo carter there was, you need your prawns peeled and your poo carted, Mrs Keith’s your lady, and all them other parents did their bit taking up the slack so we weren’t left alone in the afternoons or with no mates or no lunch or no afternoon tea. I don’t remember but there must have been a fair effort to keep us out of strife and
and yeah they thought me and Rod was brothers, both Mo’s boys, why wouldn’t they.
I knew I was adopted but.
Cos every time we had a blue Rod gets purple in the face and shouts at me: ‘Yeah ya little scumbag, yer adopted.’
Rod tells everyone at school I’m adopted, but nobody believes him, they all think that’s just Rod being Rod.
•
Mo was always home for breakfast and dinner. Breakfast a huge bowl of muesli and milk. Dinner always meat: chuck steak, shanks, bone marrow, offcuts, offal, didn’t matter, once in a while a real T-bone or lamb chump chops. Always meat. We was starving. She always says she found me hungry and I never changed. Once I got my hands on a bunch of stale spring rolls they were throwing out from the milk bar down on Marine Parade, Bob’s it was called. I scarfed twelve of them. When I get home Mo asked me why I stunk of grease and dim sim.
Scored twelve spring rolls, Mo.
And what ya do with them?
I knew she didn’t like them so there was no harm saying:
Ate them.
; She looked at me a while like she didn’t know to believe me or not.
You save any for Roddy?
I shook my head.
Mo sort of trying not to grin.
So, I said to break the silence. What’s for tea then?
And when it was over I was still hungry so I have another bowl of muesli and milk and then a loaf of sliced bread spread with butter and Vegemite and peanut butter and lemon curd. Roddy had a big tank too. Mo always made sure I got a bit more than Rod, but it’s not what you get it’s how you use it, and with Rod you could see where it went, it all went into his big chest, big arms, big thighs, while for me I just had hollow legs, dunno where it all went cos I ate and ate but took my own sweet time with the growing part of the bargain.
Then if it was dark me and Rod fly out in the cemetery with Sam, play hide-and-seek or spot-the-zombie.
My first schoolteacher was Mr Turner who got called Mr Turnip which was a saviour for me because I was sitting in class going Turner/Sterner/Burner/Churner/Learner and even Nurnur-ne-Nurnur and would call him whichever one was in my head at the time he asked me a question, like my brain was a pokie machine and it was random the way the words spun round and where they stopped. It was only just starting to happen back in those days, not happening much at all really, just now and then, but when it did it got me into trouble, like when Mr Turner picked me out for one of his questions and I went, Um, I don’t know, Werner Furner!
Once I could focus on Turnip I was in the clear.
But he was a good one and president of the clubbies, the surf lifesaving club down at Rainbow. He got me and Rod enrolled in the juniors, the Nippers, and he come and get us Sunday mornings, me only morning with no paper run and Rod’s with no poo carting, and walk us down the club.
Flag races, tug-o-war, wading, boards, pillow fight, three-legged races, sprints, mouth-to-mouth . . .