by Scot Gardner
‘Gary!’
‘What do you think I am? A fucken no-hope loser and a fucken paedophile?’ My hands had rolled into clubs and I stared at the floor in front of Mum’s feet, the air whistling in and out of my nose.
‘Well,’ Mum said, her voice was calm and even, ‘I didn’t say that, did I? You said that. All I said was keep it in your pants.’
I felt like putting my fist through the door. Through the wall. Through Mum. I turned into the kitchen and towards the back door.
‘It’s probably genetic,’ Mum said.
The slam echoed around the neighbourhood like a gunshot.
It was shame I felt. It clawed under my skin and slithered into every cell in my body. Telford had been right when I was in grade three. Total fucken loser. Waste of fucken space. Totally fucken useless. What I wanted to do was blame someone else. Blame my old man. Blame my mum. Blame fucken Telford for my cursed life, but something had changed. The wind had changed. It was blowing in my face. If I tried to slag on Dad or Mum or Telford or anybody, it would slap back on my own forehead.
Twelve
I rode my bike to work on the Monday. I wished I could have set up a camera to capture the look on Muz’s face when he came in to wake me up and I’d already gone. Made my lunch and tucked it in my old school pack. I decided, with a new day colouring my knuckles gold, that I’d just not say anything or do anything at home. Just keep my mouth shut, lay low, save my bucks and then vanish. They could think what they liked about me.
I coughed up half a cup of grey shit on my way across the Kellep River flats. I kept riding and hacking, spitting and thinking. They couldn’t give me a job that I wouldn’t be able to handle. Even if they had me shovelling trenches for three full weeks, I’d handle it.
It didn’t seem to take as long to do the fifteen k’s from Mullet Head to Christmas Bay. I arrived early. Only Phil Wasser’s black SS ute was in the car park. I rode my bike right to the front door of the office but the door was locked. I looked across at the ute and I thought I saw a body moving. The heavy tint on the window made it hard to be sure. There was a quiet clunk and the driver’s door opened. Phil levered himself out of the car using the open door as a crutch. His hair was all fluffed up and his belt was undone. His shirt was untucked and he stretched like he’d slept in the car.
Heh, heh, I thought. Even beat the boss to work this morning. I watched him take a peek into his undies before he tucked himself in and tightened his belt. I watched him do his hair with his fingers in the curved mirror of his window.
I watched the passenger’s door open.
I watched Pip the office girl climb out. She shook the hair off her face and adjusted her bra strap. She sprayed perfume on her wrists and neck and looked around. They couldn’t see me clearly from where the ute was parked but I ducked anyway. I’d seen a lot more than anyone was supposed to. I pushed my bike beside the office and out of sight, crouching down beside it. I could hear them talking as they approached the office.
‘Need to order another hundred half-inch nipples today sometime,’ Phil said.
‘They’re on my list,’ Pip replied, and I couldn’t work out if they were talking sex or plumbing.
I sat there with my bike for a full five minutes, my heart rattling inside my rib cage, waiting for someone else to arrive. A car pulled into the lot. The other Commodore. Homer’s car. I could hear the fat prick wheezing as he thumped up the path to the office door. I gave it another minute then locked my bike and went inside.
‘G’day, Gary!’ Pip sang. ‘Can’t believe you’re still turning up to this madhouse.’
‘Huh! Yeah. I think I’m a bit sick in the head,’ I said.
She smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘It helps.’
Nobody would guess, I thought. Nobody would guess that Pip and Phil — Philthy Phil — were at it. I looked at Pip with different eyes. Somehow the fact that she was probably humping the boss made her seem hotter. Maybe it was just that she was humping someone.
Phil came out of his office and my body straightened automatically like someone had stuffed a broomstick up my arse. The boss was in the room and I wondered what Pip could possibly see in the podgy forty-year-old with acne scars on his neck and hair in his ears. Maybe he had a thumping great . . . bank balance.
‘G’day, Gary,’ he said. ‘You’ll be out with Homer again today. How’s it going? Keeping up with him?’
‘Yes. Easily,’ I said.
‘Easily? Can’t have that. Have to have a word to Homer. Get you digging a few trenches or something.’
‘That’s all I’ve been doing.’
Phil raised an eyebrow, looked me up and down, then nodded. ‘Keep up the good work.’
‘Kev left a message on the machine, Phil,’ Pip said. ‘Said he’d be back this week sometime and that he’d give us a call after he’d been to the doctor’s today.’
‘There’s my lackey,’ Homer said. He was standing in the door to the shed, grey stubble on his chin and a bright yellow glob of something from breakfast hanging on the corner of his moustache. Mustard pickles, I thought.
‘Give us a hand to load up the van,’ he said.
I gave him a hand and didn’t say a word. We drove over the bridge where I’d taken the short flight off my bike and up to a massive new house with about six bedrooms and a view of Mullet Head and the bay.
Another trench. I dug and sweated while Homer banged around inside the house. He’d left the radio on in the van and cranked it up so he could hear the adverts and the shitty boy/girl radio bands.
That day I saw something that may well have scarred me for life.
Homer was working on a spa and I could see him through the window. He was bending over, with five centimetres of bum crack poking from the top of his shorts. Five centimetres of sweaty, hairy arse cleavage, complete with a little tuft of blue lint.
Looking at that coin slot was like seeing Sharon’s spew when she had gastro in grade five. I knew it was disgusting and I knew that just looking at it was going to make me feel sick, but I had to look at it anyway. And it was so disgusting that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Until Homer moved. He stood up slowly and I dropped to my knees, digging at the bottom of the trench with my bare hands, hoping that he hadn’t seen me staring at his butt. There’s only one thing sicker than looking at a fat plumber’s bum crack and that’s being caught looking at a fat plumber’s bum crack.
There was a knock on the window. I looked up.
‘Brew time,’ Homer yelled at the glass. His brow was shiny with sweat and the gob of mustard pickles from breakfast still hung in his moustache. Maybe it wasn’t from breakfast?
I know it sounds like bullshit, but every trench is different. The dirt is a different colour. Sometimes the dirt will have three different colours in the one trench. Sometimes there are rocks and sand and clay, sometimes it’s muddy, sometimes it’s dry. Sometimes the dirt stinks like rotting fish, sometimes it smells good enough to eat. I came to a mad understanding later that morning. I realised I liked digging trenches. My body got hot and sometimes it ached. My green Australia cricket hat had a tidemark of salt inside the front. When I sat in the shade of the carport at lunchtime that Monday, the whole brow of my hat had been darkened with sweat, my dreads were still damp and my scalp was itchy. I wolfed down my sandwiches and sat there staring at my hands. Homer had taken his little esky inside. I guessed he’d eat like a hyena then snore for a good half-hour before he’d come back out to the van. I still had twenty minutes of my official lunchtime to go. I remembered the little scandal I’d seen that morning. Pretty sick. Mum reckoned I was a paedophile. Vanessa liked me. I didn’t like her. She’s only four years younger than me. Pip would be twenty years younger than Philthy Phil. Dirty old bastard. Vanessa wanted my body. I couldn’t help that.
Thinking about it made my knob buckle in my undies. I decided to get back to my trench. I was well over halfway finished and Homer could hardly tell me off for going back into it.
I c
ouldn’t find the yellow-handled shovel. I was certain I’d left it pushed into the soft stuff I’d dug out of the trench but it had gone. I checked the van and the front yard. No shovel. The bright yellow handle wasn’t exactly camouflage. I doubted Homer would have taken it inside. I thought he was allergic to shovels anyway.
I found the shovel on a lap around the house. On the shady side between a concrete water tank and the house, Homer was using it as a crutch. He was squatting, back towards me, bare-arsed, preparing to crap in a hole he’d dug with my shovel. The shovel that he leaned upon as he strained. I backed away holding my breath. Holding my hand over my mouth. Holding my lunch down.
It’s one thing to see a bloke’s hairy arse cleavage, but to see it in action . . . Like I said, scarred for life.
Thirteen
A few things happened on Tuesday that put me well on my way to erasing that image of Homer from my mind. I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it — like an ambulance driver or a nurse or those poor bastards in the war, the things they had to see — but a day had passed, I’d found an excuse to wash my shovel and I wasn’t working with Homer.
Kevin was back.
He had a limp and he wore the scowl he always seemed to be wearing.
‘You’re working with me,’ he said, and handed me a box of plumbing bits. ‘Put them in the van.’
Goodie, I thought. I get to work with the Sasquatch Yeti Yowie Monster. The one I put off work for a week.
I ran into Homer on the way to the van. Literally. ‘Sorry, Homer.’
‘Gary the lackey,’ he said. He looked at the box in my arms. ‘Shit, you’re well organised today.’
‘I’m . . . Kevin gave me these. I’m supposed to be working with him today.’
‘Oh, are you just. We’ll soon see about that.’ He stomped into the shed. I could hear him arguing with Philthy Phil.
‘Come on,’ Kevin grumbled. ‘Let’s get out of here before it gets ugly.’
Kevin drove like Grandad past the Mullet Head turnoff to an old dairy farm. Chooks tottered off the track as he eased the van along the potholed driveway, parking beside a red tractor that looked like it hadn’t moved in fifteen years.
I followed Kevin to the back door. An old lady answered and ushered us inside. It smelled like cooking.
‘The tap’s over here,’ the lady said, as she moved through the kitchen into a side room. The side room was a laundry with a concrete trough and an ancient washing machine.
‘Watch,’ the old lady said.
The tap over the concrete trough dripped.
‘There! Did you see that? Can’t get the blessed thing to turn off.’
The lady turned the tap off, her pointy elbows shaking like featherless wings with the effort.
Another drip.
‘There! See that one?’
‘Mrs Thompson,’ Kevin said. He spoke loud and the old lady jumped.
‘Nothing wrong with my hearing,’ she said.
‘Sorry. This is Gary, my offsider,’ Kevin said. ‘Could you show Gary where the tank and the pressure pump are? Turn the tank off at the valve and the pump off at the switch. We’ll have this fixed in two minutes.’
‘Righto,’ Mrs Thompson said, and led me out the back door.
The tank was a concrete job and the valve was covered in grass. The pressure pump was right next to the valve. Valve off. Switch off.
‘Righto,’ Mrs Thompson said again, and we went back inside. ‘I’ll leave you boys to it. Cup of tea and scones ready in the kitchen when you’re done.’
Kevin had produced a spanner and pulled the tap apart. ‘Have you replaced a washer before, Gary?’
‘Nope.’
He handed me a plastic disc with a stem. I’d seen one before. His wet fingers turned the disc on my palm.
‘They eventually get pitted and don’t seal. There’s a blue toolbox in the back of the van. Should be a new one in there.’
A door from the laundry opened into the yard. I followed a path past an old wind-up clothesline to the van. I found the toolbox and I found a washer, only it was white while the one Kevin pulled out of the tap was black. I turned the toolbox upside down in the back of the van and found six more washers. They were all white.
‘Find one, Gary?’ Kevin shouted from inside.
I ran back to the laundry and explained that I could only find a white one.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same these days.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t realise . . . ’
Kevin showed me where the washer sat then screwed the tap back together. I turned the water on and the pump on, as instructed. The pump squealed into life and I almost filled my undies. Kevin was at the van, collecting the tools I’d emptied and stuffing them back into the toolbox.
‘Sorry, I was going to pick them up and that . . .’
He kept stuffing the tools away. He didn’t look up.
I stood near the door of the van and waited for my next orders. Kevin hulked down the pathway towards the laundry and I wondered if I should follow. Like a bloody puppy. At least with Homer and his bum crack I knew where I stood. Dig the trench. Don’t think, don’t argue. Just do it. He’d do his thing and I’d do mine. With Kevin, I spent most of my time feeling like a useless knob and wondering what I was supposed to be doing.
‘Oi, Gary. You coming in for a brew?’
I dusted my boot soles on the doormat and found a place set for me at the kitchen table. Mrs Thompson was pouring tea from a pot that had been dressed in a rainbow-striped woollen rasta hat.
‘You have milk, Gary?’
‘Ah . . . yes please.’
Not that tea was something I’d ever drunk. Ever.
We sipped from fine white cups with saucers. I fed my teacup four sugars and downed about nine scones with jam and cream while I listened to Kevin and Mrs Thompson rabbit on about some distant relative they shared.
‘Your dad was Albert Daly, wasn’t he?’ Mrs Thompson asked.
‘Arch. Albert’s my uncle.’
‘That’s right. Arch was the tall one. I see you got his height.’
Kevin smiled. His beard opened and his mouth opened and I saw his white teeth. It wasn’t that funny.
‘How’s Dulcie these days?’ Mrs Thompson asked.
‘Mum died a few years back. She had some heart troubles. Died in her sleep. Died with a smile on her face.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Still, she would have been ninety, wouldn’t she?’
‘Ninety-three.’
‘How are your kids? You’ve got the one son and the younger daughter, haven’t you?’
Kevin lowered his cup into the saucer without making a sound. He swallowed. ‘Just the daughter.’
‘Oh. I could have sworn you had a boy as well. Maybe I was thinking of —’
Kevin nodded. ‘I lost my son the same year Mum died.’
Mrs Thompson slopped her tea on the table. Her cup clattered into the saucer and her chair scraped musically on the kitchen floor. She took a cloth from the sink.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I do remember that. I read it in the paper.’
Kevin stared at his huge mitt laying flat beside the saucer.
‘Fate’s cruel like that,’ Mrs Thompson said. ‘I’ve outlived two husbands and all three kids. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.’
‘No,’ Kevin said. ‘You’re right. Well, we’d best be off.’
‘Right you are. Thank you very much for that. How much do I owe you?’
‘Nothing, Mrs Thompson. Your company and your tea and scones are more than enough.’
‘Now come on,’ she said.
Kevin held up his hand.
Mrs Thompson stood at the back door as Kevin backed the van into an empty bay in the hay shed. She waved with one bony finger as we bumped along the drive.
I didn’t talk as Kevin drove back to the highway. In some ways I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t talk. I thought that maybe I’d b
e better off if I didn’t talk to Kevin again. Not to Kevin Daly the plumber. Not to the poor bastard who’d lost his son in a car accident. Not to Vanessa Daly’s dad.
Fourteen
Rock scissors paper.
The not-talking-to-Kevin-the-plumber got easier as Tuesday morning dragged on. It was going to be a hot one.
Rock scissors paper.
We’d driven up the Kellep River Road and into the bush, to a little cottage made of mud brick.
‘Nice place,’ Kevin said to the owner.
She was probably as old as my mum, slim but not totally titless. Short cropped salt and pepper hair. I’d seen her sitting at the cafe in Mullet Head. Gel called her Butch Dyke.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘My sister and I built it a few years back. Nearly killed us. Neither of us are game to move out.’
She showed us her piss-stinky overflowing toilet. She showed us where her concrete septic tank was buried. Grey liquid bubbled from the seam along the lid of the tank. Blowflies zinged around our heads.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Butch Dyke said, held her nose and left.
Kevin said we had to play rock scissors paper to decide who was going to lift the lid. ‘It’s fair that way.’
I chose rock. Kevin chose rock.
Again.
Rock. Rock.
Again.
I chose paper. Kevin chose rock. Paper smothers rock.
‘Damn,’ the big bloke said, and squatted over the lid.
I could see beach sand stuck to his scalp.
‘Hold your breath.’
The mess of shit sighed and bubbled when Kevin cracked the seal. I held my breath but I couldn’t hold it forever. When I eventually had to breathe in, I could taste the air. Thick with the essence of a thousand craps, it made me gag then spew. I didn’t have time to think or move. My guts clenched and I heaved. Up came a porridge of tea and jam and scones. I found a tree and ralphed until I was empty.
Kevin had his hand on my shoulder. ‘You right, Gary? Bit of a shock to the system. You’ll get used to it. Some are worse than others. That one’s a shocker. Are you okay?’