by Liam Pieper
Mum and Dad called each other names. They blamed each other for ruining their lives. They blamed us kids for ruining their lives. We siblings responded in different ways. When they fought, I would rush to the piano and bang out an up-tempo ‘Moonlight Sonata’, thinking they might be dazzled by my unique interpretation of Beethoven and stop arguing to come in and applaud me.
Hamish had it figured out the best, despite being all of four. He would wait until the raised voices reached their crescendo before running full bore into the kitchen table, smacking his forehead against the wood. From my piano stool I would hear a terrifying crack, then a moment of shocked silence before Hamish started wailing, and Mum and Dad scrambled to comfort him. Full marks, little brother.
Ardian was more resilient. He was older, tougher; he had an undercut. One time my mother came into the lounge room where we were watching TV, yelling, ‘Your father and I are getting divorced. Are you happy now?’ Ardian just fixed her with a withering look from under his fringe. ‘Yes, Mum. I’m very happy. That was the plan all along.’ Or he would flick his hair out of his eyes and sneer, ‘Why don’t you just have a fucking joint and calm down?’ This was actually the best thing for it. After a day of screaming histrionics, my parents would roll a joint and start cuddling on the couch.
Having been ingloriously stranded in the suburbs, my parents hung on to the time they could spend stoned as a link to the old world. Pot smoke was our matzo ball soup. After work, on the weekend, whenever friends came around, they would roll pinched single-paper joints, made with Tally-Ho papers, Drum tobacco and sticky home-grown. ‘Numbers’, they called them, as in, ‘Let’s have a number,’ or ‘Roll me a number, honey,’ as in, Number One, Two, Three, Four.
Dad refused to believe that marijuana could be anything other than a treasure of Olympus, brought to him at Promethean cost, and he thought it should be treated with according respect. Specifically, he would not be shaken from his conviction that weed was ambrosia for creative minds and sent the muse bouncing like a gummy bear. He scoffed at the idea that weed hindered artistic ambitions, or any ambition, for that matter. To him it was inconceivable that smoking weed every day could be a bad thing.
‘Everyone knows that weed makes you more creative,’ he would say, opening a bag of Doritos. ‘It’s been proven by science.’
Dad was widely read, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of art spanning highbrow and low: he could tell you anything you needed to know about French existentialism or Britpop or the links between them. When I was small, he’d help me brush my teeth and get into my pyjamas, then play me a song on the guitar, which would lead to a discursive monologue: what I ought to know about the history of bluegrass, steel string and Steely Dan, how Steely Dan was named after a steam-powered dildo in a William Burroughs book, whether I wanted him to read me some Burroughs, and did I know what a dildo was?
He’d at last completed his degree with honours, which rendered him both unemployable and capable of wielding critical theory to cut down dissenters or dismantle any arguments that ran contrary to his lifestyle. The latter is a trick many Australian baby boomers mastered: they’d had free education and weren’t afraid to use it. The seventies had been a perfect storm of apologist philosophies used to justify terrible behaviour. If you could think of a buzzword like ‘sex addiction’ or ‘workaholism’, you could get away with pretty much whatever you wanted, even decades down the track. ‘I have an addictive personality,’ Mum would explain, skinning up.
I should be clear: provided you are reasonably sane, I don’t think smoking pot around your kids is necessarily that big a deal. At worst, it makes you kind of vague when it comes to matters of discipline. I mean, who smokes a joint and then has the energy to yell at their kids for stealing a block of chocolate? Especially since the kids have just brought home a delicious block of chocolate. In our case, Mum and Dad’s fondness for pot didn’t derange us – they got up every morning and worked to make us a home, and we weren’t cold or neglected or in any way ill-treated as a result of their recreational drug use.
Except, perhaps, for when it came to the food, which, if what was served on our dinner table can’t legally be considered child abuse, was at least morally inexcusable. It isn’t fair to say my folks didn’t fulfil our nutritional needs: they’d go out of their way to prepare vegetarian, karma-neutral foods. It’s just that your palate has a different bent when you’ve had a sly toot on the old hash pipe. Mum and Dad made an effort to prepare healthy meals: squares of apple and cheese, carrot sticks, and a signature dish that was a brave Anglicisation of dhal. The recipe, picked up from the hippies, involved boiling a bag of red lentils until they liquefied, heaping the results onto bowls of microwave-cooked starchy rice, and topping the lot with White Crow tomato sauce. Dessert was often a dish we called ‘butter balls’. The recipe was basic: take a spoonful of margarine and roll it in a jar of sugar until it is crusted in a half-inch of crystalline diabetes.
For a long time I didn’t really understand the link between the special tobacco my folks smoked and the rhythms and quirks of life at home. I learned how to predict my parents’ moods based on the time of day and how much they’d had to smoke. Dad had found work teaching at a TAFE, which brought in more money but sent him home stressed, and I knew well enough to stay scarce until he’d made a cup of coffee and had a couple of joints. If Mum plopped down at the kitchen table and called for Dad to ‘roll a number, honey’, that meant dinner was half an hour away, and it was a good time to lightly bring up the idea of ordering pizza. Late at night, when the light coming from my parents’ room was hazy and warm, and you could hear them laughing at the television, was the perfect time to hit them up for pocket money.
I also knew that I wasn’t supposed to talk about their ‘green tobacco’ outside the house because it could get not only me but also my parents into trouble. This was a rule I filed away alongside others that I appreciated without completely understanding, like saying please and thank you when at a friend’s house, or not telling Grandma that Mum had once screamed, ‘Fucking shitfuck’ when she stubbed her toe.
Mum and Dad didn’t subscribe to a lot of traditional child-rearing techniques. We were disciplined sporadically and with varying degrees of harshness, depending on the time of day, how much they’d had to smoke, and how worn down by the process of raising a family they were. Ardian bore the brunt of new-age parenting books, which instructed Mum and Dad to encourage him to pursue his artistic inclinations. I got less of that. While I was allowed to indulge my imagination, I was also given earnest lectures on the merits of hard work, and the occasional scolding.
By the time Hamish came along, they were like, ‘Whatever. Karma will sort it out.’ He was left to explore the world at his own pace, piecing together a moral code as best he could. On a daytrip to the mountains, for example, he wasn’t keen on the snowshoes we’d hired and insisted on running around barefoot. He suffered frostbite but, you know, he’s never run around barefoot in the snow since. The approach seemed to work out pretty well: from time to time he’d drink a bottle of white-out or something and need to be rushed to hospital, but apart from that, he did a fine job of raising himself.
My parents had done their best to raise me free of the constraints of hegemonic ideology. Instead they tried to educate me in the plurality of cultures and religions of the world, so that, if and when the time came, I would be able to choose the religion or philosophy that best suited my spiritual development.
My Catholic maternal grandmother was cool with that, but even so she had me secretly baptised one afternoon. In between visits to the zoo and the park, we ducked into the Catholic church down the road from her house, where the priest gave me a clandestine sacrament. Then she bought me ice-cream, and I completely forgot about being doused in holy water by a nice man in a gown. She did the same to my brothers, and only told my parents about it after all her grandchildren were safe from purgatory. I also picked up bits and pieces from other religions – Buddhist
parables from my Malaysian godparents, scraps of Hindu and Jewish wisdom from my parents’ friends – and by the time I started primary school I was a fizzing mess of confused, contradictory hippie bullshit.
On my first day of kindergarten I ruined afternoon tea by loudly lecturing Theo, an older, much bigger kid, on how he shouldn’t eat the salami sandwiches his mother had made for him, because the Buddha strove towards Nirvana by abstaining from meat, and if he finished that sandwich, he was probably going to hell.
Culture shock aside, we kids learned to be happy in the suburbs. Beaten old weatherboards clad a cosy place kept warm with gunmetal heaters that we’d ‘borrowed’ from Labassa. My parents had one bedroom, my brothers and I the other. Hamish and I shared a bunk and Ardian slept on a fold-out bed underneath a 6-foot mural of Voltron we’d painted on the wall. At night, after we had gone to bed, Mum and Dad would have friends around for weed and instant noodles. Even now, whenever I smell the sharp chemical tang of chicken-flavoured two-minute noodles, I’m back in that overheated room in Oakleigh, listening to the ping of the bar heater cracking the darkness as my brothers snore and laughter rattles in from the living room.
A tiny whitewashed hallway separated the bedrooms from the living room and kitchen. Beyond that a slim lounge room backed onto the sunroom, a semi-detached fibro-and-glass extension. Apart from that, most of the property was backyard, but that was fine because the backyard had its charms.
In their spare time my parents tooled around the house, painting or gardening. Dad planted a feature wall of bamboo that quickly went feral and turned the yard into a great, spikey forest. Using scraps of wood and a few massive pine logs, he built us a tree house. It sat on stilts and surveyed the swaying treetops and below that a Tonka truck–filled sandpit.
We grew a lot of our own food: tomatoes and butternut pumpkins and corn, apricots and lemons, in beds neatly separated by scavenged railway sleepers. I used to help Dad in the garden, turning over shovelfuls of compost or rooting around underneath the pumpkin vines for snails, squealing if I ever touched one and getting Dad to crush it.
During the summer there were leafy, fragrant plants in a corner of the yard that was cut off from prying eyes by a ring of bamboo. They smelled wonderful and had a ticklish texture. They were about as tall as I was, and on hot days I liked to crawl underneath them and watch the sunlight through the serrated leaves. If I lay on my back and reached up, I could just touch the foliage and let the leaves brush my fingertips.
Towards autumn Mum and Dad would uproot the plants whole and hang them upside down in the sunroom to dry. After that we weren’t allowed to play near them. This didn’t seem fair to me and I was forever trying to sneak into the sunroom to play among the drying racks. I complained bitterly to Dad until he explained that the plants were a special kind of tobacco that he and Mum were growing for themselves, and that I mustn’t disturb them.
‘Why do you have to grow it?’ I whined. ‘Why can’t you just buy the cigarettes that are already at the milk bar?’ It seemed to me that my parents wasted an inordinate amount of time rolling their fiddly little roaches. It seemed much smarter to go for store-bought darts, like the Holiday menthols that one gravel-voiced friend of Mum’s smoked when she came around.
‘We can’t afford to,’ Dad explained, truthfully. ‘And even if we could, this is very special tobacco.’
‘Why?’
‘Well . . . it helps grown-ups relax.’
‘Can I try it?’
‘No. Not until you’re older.’
Back then all that special green tobacco would last the family the year. Once it was dry my parents packed it up and stored it, and I’d quickly forget my fascination with the forbidden sunroom of mystery and move on to other pursuits, such as trying to convince the kid next door to lend me his Nintendo. The crop didn’t really register beyond my seeing it as a seasonal chore. The house wasn’t full of junkies or bong smoke; drug dealers never came knocking. Like millions of Australians, Mum and Dad just liked to unwind by passing around a spliff and giggling into a cheese toastie. The worst that could be said about them was that they were paranoid about the neighbourhood.
In the early nineties, Oakleigh, though sleepy during the day, could be sketchy come night-time. My folks worried about local gangs that were growing in power and influence – or, at least, that were tagging buildings closer and closer to our house. Ardian, who was just about to graduate from primary school, would come back from class telling horror stories about the Oakleigh Wogs.
The Wogs were a gang that had been around Oakleigh for a couple of decades before we moved there. They were scary as fuck and great marketers. According to urban legend they’d started as a soccer team. Not long after the huge wave of Aegean immigration following World War Two flooded Melbourne’s east side, those Greek families had first-generation Australian children who banded together after being victimised by the Anglo kids in the area. The team formed a bond that transcended the soccer field and eventually they started to stand up for themselves against the skippies. As the gang grew in numbers, the original members moved into low-rent extortion and drug peddling. In time the older generation groomed the new into becoming semi-professional criminals.
Everyone knew someone who’d been robbed or beaten or stabbed by a Wog. Their tag, a ‘W’ spray-painted inside a circle like the anarchy sign, cropped up on toilet walls, street corners and the backs of seats on the school bus.
In 1992, as I was entering Grade 3 and Ardian was beginning high school, a group of former students, rumoured to be tied to the Wogs, jumped the principal of my primary school in the car park, beating him with baseball bats and taking both his wallet and his car. For some reason the school chose to announce the incident at assembly. They lined us up in neat rows on the asphalt forecourt and, in between singing the national anthem and reporting on the softball championship scores, the principal described in graphic detail how he had been struck from behind, knocked to the ground and beaten to a fine paste. After his attackers fled with his money and transport, he crawled across the playground and up the steps towards the school. By the time he reached the large double doors, his hands were too slippery with blood to work the doorknob, so he collapsed and nearly bled out until he was found by another teacher.
We talked about it all day at school, exaggerating the details as we went, until that night we breathlessly told our parents about the gangland hit that had taken place in the playground. That night the school was besieged by calls from angry parents, and not long after that my folks found me another school.
Though my parents were pacifists, Dad wasn’t a stranger to violence. When he and my mum first met he was working as a taxi driver, a profession he gave up after he drove a couple of guys to a remote street near the Tullamarine Freeway, where they brained him with a brick and stole his change belt. They caught the fuckers eventually, and Dad’s testimony put one of them behind bars, where he was later beaten to death. The other guy disappeared but they found him in the end, dismembered with a hacksaw and sealed in a barrel that had sunk to the bottom of the Yarra.
So my folks were rationalists, if not realists, and when the threat of violence in Oakleigh got a little too real, we upped stakes and moved a couple of suburbs over, where the local public high school had a reputation for getting public-school kids into good universities, the streets were clean and quiet, and people were happy to mind their own business. The neighbours were all reclusive grandmas and ambitious boomer families. Nobody bothered anyone else, and nobody knew what a dope plant looked like.
3
We acclimatised soon enough and mostly enjoyed a nice, wholesome suburban existence. There were moments when the veneer cracked, though, and the undercurrent of benign lawlessness welled up, such as the time Mum and Dad threw a dinner party.
Some workmates of Dad’s had come over and I’d been told to go outside and play. I was being Wolverine, crawling on my belly across the backyard and clumsily trying to pop my claws, whi
ch I’d fashioned out of satay sticks and a pair of mittens, when I noticed an odd sound coming from our shed.
The shed was always secured, a fact I simply took for granted, which was strange because I was the type of child obsessed by any kind of locked door. Ordinarily the idea that something was being kept from me would have lodged in my brain like a tick, eating away at me until I was nothing but a keening mess, scratching at the door until my fingers were bloody stumps. However, I’d been in the shed when we first moved in, and I knew there was nothing in there but dust and old paint tins. Now, though, there was this weird noise coming from inside.
I pressed my ear to the door. There it was: a low, crackling hum. Maybe a nest of wasps had made its home in there? I dropped to my knees and peeked under the door, then recoiled with a little shriek. Something was lighting up the room, creating a dull glow even in the daylight. I thought hard for a moment and then scrambled inside.
Mum and Dad had finished dinner and were standing around the living room with their friends, admiring one of Mum’s paintings. I ran up and tugged at Dad’s sleeve. ‘Dad! There’s something in the shed.’
Mum and Dad shot each other an alarmed look and then smiled uneasily. Dad did that thing where you muss a kid’s hair affectionately and move your palm across their face to manouevre them behind you. He smiled politely at his guests. ‘Nothing wrong with your imagination, is there, kiddo?’
I squirmed out of his grasp, indignant. ‘I’m not imagining things! There’s something in the shed and it glows white and it sounds like bees and you have to come to look now!’ Dad’s face darkened as he pulled me into a tight hug against his hip, muzzling me with a hand. ‘Too much imagination maybe!’ he said, laughing awkwardly, and everyone else joined in.
I tried Ardian, who was in his room, cleaning his gun. Back then he carried a hydraulic replica Beretta that fired little plastic pellets hard enough to penetrate walls, and I lived in terror of it. If I bothered him or burst into his room while he was with his girlfriend, he would wave it at me threateningly. While I wasn’t sure that kind of firepower offered any protection against whatever was out there, it couldn’t hurt to go in armed. I told him there was something in the shed, including the details of the strange light and the buzzing noise.