by Nick Earls
‘Think about the poor bloody shark,’ I told him. ‘Think how it’d be if you were the shark, trying to swallow that. A full-on human thigh in your mouth, with the knee bumping away at your tonsils, and then suddenly you’ve got this hook in your cheek as well.’
So he spewed his Vegemite on toast up into the garden, but I made him a fresh batch and we both got to have a laugh about it in the end.
Actually, the Mars story came then, after the shark story, when Wayne was having his second shot at breakfast. Something about a NASA mission looking for signs of life and how, if you’re a very early riser, you can see Mars right now coming up in the east, a while before the sun.
I’d quite like to see that. I’d quite like to see Mars because you’ve got to wonder if the redness is overrated, but no way could I get up that early to do it.
The ‘Today’ show’s good for information, even if not all of it’s useful right away. There’s quite a bit of political commentary, and I’m going to need some of that this year since I’ll be getting to vote for the first time. There was a phone call a couple of weeks ago at home and they said it was a survey company and was I over eighteen? Yes. Was I eighteen to twenty-four and male because that’s what they needed in my area? Yes. And did I have five minutes to answer some important questions? And I gave that a big Yes too, thinking it’d be political, but it turned out to be only to do with which brands of cleaning products you’d heard of. But I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t eighteen, and maybe it’s no bad thing not to start with questions about the government straight up. And I am the guy in the house who buys the cleaning products, so I had it pretty well covered.
Okay, I’m a bit bored with the Whipper Snipper-ing, but it’s fine if your mind drifts onto other things as long as you don’t totally forget and run the Snipper over your boots. Not that it gets all the way through to your toes, or anything, but you do look like a bit of a dickhead.
We’ve made the morning news a regular habit at our place. Wayne and me at least – Mum’s not always up in time. It’s best when it’s all three of us, all three of us at the table, striking up a conversation about tax reform or murder or a house that burned down somewhere during the night.
If you look at a lot of TV shows that feature good families, you’ll often find that they have breakfast together. Usually with a newspaper, but we go for the televised version instead. It’s totally up to the minute, updated every half hour, and it costs you nothing.
You see the same kind of families in ads as you do in the shows. Better versions of them, even. Smarter, a bit more beautiful, and really together. We don’t exactly push the beauty aspect in my family, but it’s not the most important. Vanity is a luxury we can’t afford, Mum says. And she’s right. We can afford the essentials, and Mum has a card that covers medical creams and lotions. Which are nothing to do with beauty, but are really your only chance when a bad rash gets truly set in and it’s summer. That’s what Mum says, and for her it’s rash season about nine months of the year, but February’s the worst of it so there ends up being more rum drinking to take her mind off it.
‘As long as it doesn’t go to pus in the chafed areas,’ she says, and if she says it at a meal time there’s a fair bet we get to see some reverse stomach action from Wayne. And if we don’t I can always come out with a line like, ‘And you know the pus is really bad when it makes that sticky noise between your thighs when you walk, hey Mum?’
So, we’re not exactly your cereal ad family. Maybe, if they ever got round to making a cereal called Very Unspecial K, it’d be us they’d come to. But the message from the ads – apart from the obvious: ‘buy our cereal, it does wonders for your bowels and makes you beautiful and happy’ – is that the family breakfast, with some sort of news input, is a good thing. Cereal companies wouldn’t do it if people didn’t see it as good. And why wouldn’t they? If I had my way, I’d do it all, right down to the chopped strawberries on the cereal and the blue-and-white stripey milk jug. The three of us sitting there, neat and tidy and charming, talking through the cloud story, the shark story, the Mars story.
My father went up north a while back. Ten years or so ago. And he went crewing fishing boats up there so it’s hard not to wonder, at least for a second, when you hear a story about a shark being pulled in with a thigh bone inside it. But he did other things too. He picked bananas and mangoes, he worked on the roads, he even packed parachutes for a skydiving company. And that’s not so much co-incidence – it’s just that, eventually, he got to do every job going. But he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever get so attached that he’d hear about the finer points of any of them, the precautions you’ve got to take, the laws for clouds and things like that. He never liked detail. Detail held him back.
Mum put it another way, as she would: ‘He’s a reckless bloody bastard who never listens and never thinks things through and only ever thinks about himself.’
Dad put it down to detail. I asked him some questions in a letter once. He said he wasn’t suited to answering to people, and when they crowd him out with stuff (which I’m taking to mean excessive facts, responsibilities, a long-term view) he can’t stomach it and he has to go. That’s just him, not us. That’s what he said. ‘You’d be worse off if I was around, mate.’ That’s what he actually said. That’s the quote, though he said the other stuff too, all of it in a few lines written small on the back of a card with a view of a sunny day in Innisfail.
But it’s been years since I last got anything from him, and I always wondered if one day there’d be news. Thigh-bone-in-a-shark’s-throat kind of news. He’s not the sort of guy we’d hear about in a normal way. No one’d ever go, ‘Hey, your dad, he’s mayor up this way now,’ or ‘Sure, he owns two Maccas and a servo, he’s a pillar of the community.’ No, it’d be the cops coming to the door, telling us guess who they just pulled out of some big fish.
So I had that second when I wondered if it was him, but I know it wasn’t. It was just a thought. And Mum was up by then but not properly awake, and she was staring at the screen – at the guy reading the prepared statement – and I knew it was a thought that no one but me was having, and that I wouldn’t be taking any further. Not with Mum just sitting there gazing at the screen kind of bug-eyed, like a shark with a gobful of thigh, and taking nothing in.
‘How’s your day looking, Kane?’ she said when she noticed me looking her way. She’s good when it comes to asking about people’s days and how they might be.
How’s my day looking? Pretty damn fine, to be honest, as it’s turned out. Sure, it’s hot out here buzz-cutting the roadsides back to something respectable, but the day’s had its moments. Moment One: 11.15 a.m., ‘Performance, Planning and Review’ talk with Steve, my boss on the road crew, and Tony, the unit manager. Tony’s quite senior. He doesn’t wear a tie, but the next guy up does.
I have to say it went well. Tony even said we could get some coffee in, but I settled for water. And it seemed to send the right kind of signal. It’s a council that respects a sensible attitude to hydration among its outdoor workers.
We do PP&R once a year. Everyone does it now, to identify strengths and weaknesses (which are actually ‘opportunities for further development’). I wasn’t sure how I’d go, since I didn’t get the job I went for in Parks in December, but they said that was down to the bozos in Parks. Well, okay, they didn’t quite say ‘bozos’, but I can read between the lines. ‘Their loss, our gain.’ That’s what they said.
And how did it go? I got an upgrade. I was a level one before, now I’m a level two. That’s significantly more senior, and way better than increments. Up till now I’ve just had increments, which is a small increase you get each year as long as everything’s going okay. And they said it was pretty rare for an eighteen-year-old to make level two and ‘there’s a future for you here, if you want it.’ And maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but it’s good that it’s there. Not that I get stressed by the idea of taking a long-term view but, when I take one, I’m not
totally sure what I see there. I’m pretty sure that’s a different thing, and all it means is I don’t see myself spending my whole life with a Whipper Snipper in my hands.
But Tony and Steve are good guys, and they know all that. And they said that, now they’d bumped me up to level two, I was up for some training if I wanted it. Maybe a truck or heavy vehicle licence. But since I get around on my bike and I don’t even have a regular driver’s licence, they said maybe I could start with that. And that’d be a step up in the world.
And they asked me if there was anything else I’d be up for and I said, ‘Plants. I could do a course that’d teach me a thing or two about plants. For verges, and that.’
‘That’d be horticulture,’ Tony said. ‘No worries.’
And he wrote it in my file, so it’s on the cards as well.
And then, on the way out, Steve said maybe we should have a few drinks tonight. It’s not every day you make a new level.
Yeah. We walked out of the council offices, past the potted palms and the typing noises and the phone calls, and I wanted people to ask me about it. To get up from their desks and ask me. Just go, ‘Hey, how were things with your PP&R? Some of them don’t go so well. How was yours?’
But they didn’t, and I knew they wouldn’t.
I also wanted to stop on the way out and borrow one of the phones and call Tanika. She’d get it. She’d know this counted for something. My guess is Mum and Wayne mightn’t but Tanika would. Mum might get the bit about it meaning more money, but that’d be it.
Then Steve talked about drinks, and he said, ‘You could bring your girlfriend, if you want. If she’d be okay hanging out with our lot.’
Our lot. It’s a fair point. Look at our lot. Laszlo, who’s a big bugger and not always polite and who doesn’t have the full complement of fingers, courtesy of work safety practices once being not as good as they are now. He’s known as Lurch to the others, because of some old movie or TV show and because of the strange way he moves. He’s like a series of lumps in a permanent process of rearrangement, but he says his wife Tina just puts it down to him never having found clothes that do much for him.
Then there’s Benno, who breeds kittens and reckons he hates cats and who trains his mates’ greyhounds in his spare time. And Trev, who lives to fish and who said they should make a bumper sticker that goes, ‘Live to Fish’. He once got so excited about a trevally that he caught, that the two of them did a video together – him and the fish (by then a bit dead ‘cause he couldn’t find a camera fast enough) – and he sent it in to the local TV stations, in case it might be the start of something.
‘I’m gunna wear ’em down, mate,’ he said to me once. ‘Every time I pull in a big ’un, they get the video within forty-eight hours. And I’m not stopping till I’m their fishing dude, hey? Till I’m the guy at the end of the news telling youse all what’s what about the tides and what’s bitin’ and that.’
Good on you, Trev. Good on you, Trev, for having aspirations.
‘This is Trev Neale with a stonking bloody big trevally, doin’ it for WIN News on Bokarina Beach, hey? So youse all get out there, slap a few yabs on your hooks and get on to it. They’re runnin’, and they’re runnin’ right bloody now.’
Enthusiasm’s got to count for something, so who knows?
‘Your girlfriend’ – that was the best bit of the conversation with Steve on the way back to the road. It was maybe the first time someone had said ‘your girlfriend’ and it had made sense straight away, sounded right. Sounded like the way it is. So, we got to sit in the truck on the way to Bokarina and talk a bit about Tanika Bell, me and Tanika Bell. The happening thing. Two people, going out. Me, and my girlfriend who’d probably be up for a quiet drink or two this evening.
And I wound the window down and the air blew in on my face, and it was hot but it didn’t matter because I could say to myself ‘This is the life’ and it felt true.
‘Yeah, she’s pretty good,’ I said to him. ‘Pretty good.’
And I said her parents’d be away for the weekend and Steve said, ‘Wah-hey, over to the chick’s place for a bit of the old horizontal dance of love, then.’
And I had to say, ‘Well, maybe not quite. It’s a complicated set of circumstances.’
Which was when Steve showed that he’s a good bloke, ’cause he didn’t say anything more than, ‘Oh, right,’ and then he let it go. ‘So, what does she do, hey?’ I think he said next. ‘Work-wise.’ Something like that.
‘She’s in real estate. Working for a bloke called Bob Kotter.’
‘The Most on the Coast?’
‘That’s the one. She’s the front office person, Tanika. The first one the public sees when they walk in off the street. Responsible for first impressions.’
And you can bet she’s good at that – that’s what I didn’t say. I’ve seen Tanika dressed for work, and she looks very business-like. Bob Kotter likes the idea of a skirt on his front office person, and skirts work out pretty well for Tanika.
Steve played one of his tapes after that. Shania Twain, I think it was, and he sang along to the bit about not being in it for love and the wind whipped in off the new canals and the wet dirt and the fallen trees, smelling musty and rank. It’s the perfect weather for growth and decay, both at the same time. It steams and rots and germinates and propagates till the weed plants grow so high they’re pulling on the branches of trees and bending them. Then making flowers – blue, yellow, red.
I’ll call Tanika when I get home.
We’re okay with Mum’s rum supply at the moment, so I figure we can go for a pizza splurge to celebrate my level two. I’m up for an extra forty-two dollars a week, back-dated to last pay, so I think it’s okay just this once. We usually go for the fourteen-ninety-five two-large-pizzas deal (pick up only), but tonight we’ll get the top-of-the-range family deal: three large pizzas, two bottles of Coke plus garlic bread for twenty-four ninety-five. Sure, there’ll be leftovers – we’re not the biggest of families – but that garlic bread’s special and today’s special, and we can heat up anything left over tomorrow. I’ll even go the extra buck sixty-five for Meatosaurus on one of the pizzas.
On the way to Domino’s, I can practically taste it. Meatosaurus – there’s nothing meatier. A selection of meats set in tomato sauce with a chewy pan pizza base, topped off with handfuls of mozzarella cheese.
Lucky Mum likes to eat early.
I’m at Domino’s by about six and there’s only a few people waiting so, in about fifteen minutes, I’ve got the boxes clipped to the back of my bike and I’m heading for home. Set to deliver a feast, and ready to watch them eat themselves sick. Because we can, because I’m level two and that’s worth noting. Worth a splurge, just this once.
part three: friday night
Steve says we should get a jug, a jug or two of Fourex or maybe VB, but I tell him that I reckon I’ll just stick to lites, maybe a couple of lites, just pots. ‘Drinking doesn’t always work out so well in my family and, you know, there’s that thing about it being in your genes.’
‘Oh, righto.’
‘So I’m kind of careful. If that’s okay.’
‘Sure. But you like beer, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. That’s not the issue. Who wouldn’t like beer?’
‘Yeah.’
He tells the guy at the bar we’ll have a jug of full-strength and a jug of lite and he says, ‘Gives everyone a choice, hey.’
The guy gets the pouring started and leaves the jugs sitting there to fill. The girl next to us orders two rum and Cokes.
‘Better make it rum and Diet Cokes,’ she says, and the guy says, ‘No worries. Diet Cokes it is.’
She’s by herself, I think, so maybe they’re both for her. Or maybe she’s got a friend off ordering food. She looks at me looking at her, and I hadn’t expected that. I think I felt invisible, not quite in the room yet, without Tanika here. I don’t want to be here like this, just me and the guys and beer. It’s suddenly clear. And t
he girl with the rum and Diet Cokes looks at me as if I might be checking her out, and all I’m thinking is I wish Tanika was here. I’m looking right through her.
There’s harness racing up on six screens, maybe from Albion Park in Brisbane. I’ve never really got harness racing – men on buggies hanging off the back of horses – but there are a few old guys standing round under the screens holding tickets, so they’re obviously into it. What with that and all the pokies, there’s quite a bit of betting going on in here tonight. The pokies built this place, probably. On the walls they’ve got photos of surf clubs before pokies – black-and-white photos – and they’re just old shacks and a few muscly guys with messy hair and one boat. Not now. This place has high ceilings and exposed beams and a long restaurant overlooking the sea, a carpeted floor – good carpet – and bars made of expensive timber. And uniforms for staff and a dress code applying to all three types of acceptable patrons (members, guests and bona fide visitors).
Mum knows that a lot of that’s got to be down to pokie money, and that’s partly what she’s on about. The money comes from somewhere, and some of it comes from people a bit like Dad, who didn’t mind a wager on whatever was going. And none of it – none of it – comes from me, and she should know that. And she shouldn’t get stupid about it because she should just know.
Steve and I each take a jug and a few glasses and we go back to the table. His fisherman’s basket’s arrived while we’ve been at the bar, and he sticks a few chips in his mouth as soon as he’s put the glasses down.
He starts pouring himself a full-strength beer and I pour myself a lite and he says, ‘Our young Mr Level Two’s pacing himself. Probably figures he’ll have more fun watching you blokes get pissed and stupid than if he got too far that way himself.’