by Tanya Moir
In the shelter of the gully the rising sun pooled and grew hot. Winstone caught five small crawlies and that was too many for the tin and by the time he got back to the beach he’d lost two of them over the side. He sat on the powdery silt with his legs stretched out in the sun until they were dry and made a mental note to steal a bucket. Then he dusted the sand off his legs and levered himself back up the bank and wiped his feet on the short green rabbit-cropped grass and found his clothes and put on his shoes and scrambled back up to the cave, by which time he was thirsty.
On the way the crawlies kept climbing out of the tin and he had to keep stopping and picking them up and one of them caught the skin of his finger in its pincers and drew blood. It had been a fair fight but grilling them one by one on a flat rock under the Zippo flame Winstone still felt a bit sorry.
When they were nice and pink he pulled off the tails and peeled the shells and sprinkled them with little campervan sachets of pepper and salt and dipped them in Danish butter. They weren’t exactly KFC Crispy Strips but they tasted pretty good.
He put the heads back in the tin for trout-bait and covered the tin to keep off the flies and carried it off aways and left it in the deep shade at the base of another rock tor. Then he went back down to the creek and washed his hands and had a drink and after that there wasn’t much left to do except steal a bucket. By his calculation it was Monday, which wasn’t a good day for going up to the huts. So Winstone lay back with his head in the shade of the bank and let his eyes close. The sun shifted overhead and through his eyelids the light on the Rough Ridge Range grew soft and took on a more docile hue.
JUST HOW LONG we fixin to be up here Coop?
Cooper was riding ahead and he did not turn. The Kid watched the set of his shoulders and the jog of the rifle butt at his thigh and the sway of his horse’s rump and the swish of its silver tail and their saddles creaked and the horses’ hooves thudded in the grass and still Cooper didn’t speak and the Kid began to think he wouldn’t reply.
You tired of the saddle Kid?
Nossir.
A spur jangled. The wind gusted.
Then we keep ridin.
They rode. They rode until the gold flank of the Kid’s horse was the only thing to be seen in the world and it faded into distant grass and a coyote’s-eye view of the range from some high rock tor and there they were, still riding. And as they rode they faded again and there was the range spreading wide and far as an eagle could see and the Kid and Cooper were just a dark smudge in the centre of their old selves, far off and moving away. There was no place behind them and no place ahead and if the Kid and Cooper rode for ever and a day the next morning when they got up and drank their coffee and pulled on their boots they’d still have some riding to do.
EAST
For a while, Young Guns had been Winstone’s favourite film. It was the story of a good man called John Tunstall who took in At-Risk Youth and cleaned them up and taught them how to behave and it was the very first DVD that Winstone watched at Zane’s place. Winstone was only nine at the time but he understood it straight away.
Am I Billy the Kid?
Do you want to be Billy?
Winstone shook his head.
Who then? Dick? Chavez?
Winstone said nothing. He would have quite liked to be Chavez the Indian brave but that didn’t seem terribly likely.
Doc?
Winstone’s breath caught.
Ah. Zane raised his eyebrows, considering. Doc, eh. He looked Winstone up and down. Yeah I can see that. You look like Kiefer Sutherland a bit. Okay. You’re Doc then.
The At-Risk Youth in the DVD were supposed to protect John Tunstall. But they got distracted and they were off shooting pheasants instead of looking when the men in black hats came and gunned John Tunstall down. The boys were very sorry then. But it was too late for good John Tunstall who’d looked after them and without him they all went bad again. Except for Doc. Doc tried not to shoot anyone and he was smart and he rescued a girl so pretty and fine they called her a china doll.
Winstone didn’t know why the men in black hats had hated John Tunstall so much. There was something about beef and the government but it had been a very short part of the film and he hadn’t really understood it. It didn’t matter. That was just the way things went. Suddenly people hated you and there was no rhyme or reason to it and they tried to destroy you and you didn’t know what you’d done and there you were face down in the dirt never knowing why.
When it was time for him to go home, Winstone sat on the edge of Zane’s couch with his hands on his knees and he looked at the door and his jacket and schoolbag hanging out in the hall and he spoke to the blank TV.
I’m not Dirty Steve?
No mate. Zane put his hand on Winstone’s shoulder. Winstone flinched a bit but it didn’t hurt. You’re not Dirty Steve.
Winstone walked home down the verge of the gravel road in the dusk below the power lines and thought that he would always protect John Tunstall.
Before he came west Winstone lived on the outskirts of a series of eastern towns, a looped string between State Highway One and the inland ranges, moving like a shooed fly from one to the next in an untidy circuit of the district in which he was born. Some of the towns had a traffic light and shops and takeaway bars and other kids with holes in their shoes and pools of trouble it did no good to avoid, since no matter how far back Winstone stood he still got caught in Bodun’s backwash. Others were barely towns at all, just a short stretch of tarseal with a petrol pump and a memorial hall and a one-teacher school behind a row of silver birch trees and a sagging fence.
It was driving into the latter that made Winstone’s stomach tense up the most. Those non-towns with wide playing fields and nowhere to hide and fifteen kids who ran as a pack and had all stopped to watch Bic’s Commodore drive past with the furniture strapped to the roof and seen the mattress stains. The towns where everyone fitted together like a block wall and you’d think, from the fuss, that not a single kid in the world had ever had nits before.
Clintoch, where he met Zane, was a town of medium size, with no traffic light but a grid of named streets and a strip of small shops and a burger bar and an area school and a Four Square supermarket. Still, as far as the house down the gravel road he was walking to went, it might have been anywhere. No matter which town it was in, how big or how small, the Hasketts’ house looked much the same.
Each time they moved, Winstone recognised it, picked it out from the back of the Commodore before they even began to slow down, before Bic had turned the wheel or said a word. Two bare sash windows behind the gravel verge and long clumpy grass, green or brown according to the season. A two-tone house, always, the iron roof red and grey and growing weeds, bare boards showing through the coloured paint, dead yellow squares in the knee-high lawn.
He knew how it would smell. That there’d be a lean-to out back containing a kitchen with lifting linoleum tiles and sinking floorboards and two stiff taps sticking out of the wall and a toilet with a brown bowl and a chain and a spidery louvre window that didn’t shut and between those two rooms a space with corner mould and an iron laundry trough stained green and among the dead flies a thin piece of yellow soap with dirt-black veins. Winstone knew the shapes of the stains in the bath and the sink at the end of the hall and their fine black criss-cross crazing. He knew the carpet would have brown flowers and cigarette burns and sticky marks and sag over holes in the floor and how it would feel below his feet.
A couple of times he was wrong. A couple of times their house was just red and white and the grass was cut short and the inside smelled like a school toilet block first thing Monday morning. Before Bic parked on it, the lawn was all green. But they weren’t there for long. Not even a month. There was never much work for Bic in those places.
On that slow-falling Clintoch night, walking back the first time from Zane’s, Winstone arrived at his house on the edge of the dark, that moment when the last of the light has gone but you don’t realise it y
et, not until someone flicks on a switch and flattens all the shadows to black. The curtains, such as they were, weren’t drawn, and there were no lights on inside the house, just the glow of TV in the front room spilling out over the Commodore’s windscreen and hood and the uncut grass. Through the window he could see Bic asleep on the couch. The front door was slightly open, as it almost always was, since it didn’t have a latch.
Winstone went in and propped the door to with the brick. He was as quiet as he could be. But as he walked past the lounge, Bic opened one eye and raised the can of beer from his chest and waved it at him.
Where the fuck’ve you been?
A friend’s place. Even to Winstone, this sounded unlikely. His hands balled up inside his jacket pockets. He hunched his shoulders and tucked in his chin.
You got homework?
No.
Bullshit.
Winstone was silent.
Where is it?
I don’t have any.
Don’t fucken argue with me. Bic got him lined up with the beer can. I just had that teacher of yours, Miss Carruthers or whatever the fuck her name is, all up in my ear. She said she gives homework every night, and you’re sposed to write it down in some fucken book and give it to me to sign.
Bic rolled over and propped himself up on one arm and picked the last of a burning rollie off an empty beer can on the floor and dragged the smoke down to his finger ends and dropped the butt into the can. Then he raised his hand and beckoned, slowly, like a roadside cop flagging Winstone down. So come on you lying little shit. Hand it over.
Miss Carruthers is Bodun’s teacher, Winstone said.
Bic narrowed his eyes and stuck out his chin. You’re not Bodun? He tilted his head, considering. Fuck. Then he flopped back down on his back and started to laugh. No shit. Little Winnie. You’ve grown.
Bic wasn’t their old man’s real name. Grunt told them.
Good old Bic, Grunt said, one time back in Brownburn when their PrePower card ran out halfway through a Highlanders game and Bic kicked a hole in the wall below the meter. You kids know why he’s called that?
All three of them had been watching the game from the floor behind Grunt’s chair, and they looked up at him and they all shook their heads. Bodun, Winstone, Marlene.
Cos he goes red at the click of a button, Grunt said, and waited.
They stared.
Like one of those pens, you know? Push a button and you get a different colour. Bic-click. You know?
Fuck off you cunt. In the kitchen, Bic slammed the fridge door. How about you tell them how you got your name.
Suit yourself mate, said Grunt, but not very loud, and he picked up his smokes and his keys and knocked back his beer and stood up. You kids want to go for a drive?
Shotgun, Bodun said, and gave Winstone a dead arm.
Grunt backed out and fishtailed into the shingle road and they drove up past the McCutcheons’ place and turned left along Quarry Road and they passed the old transport yard and the closed-down service station and the Ford’s exhaust burbled low and nobody asked where Grunt was going.
Who called him that? Bodun said.
Bic? Grunt shrugged. Everybody did.
When did they? said Winstone.
We started in high school I spose.
Who did it first? Bodun wanted to know.
Shit I dunno. Some teacher I think. Yeah that’s right – this real old-school cunt we had for PE. Bic-click, he’d say, what colour are you today? How about we try a different button? Then we all started doing it and it stuck.
What did he do? Winstone asked.
He was stoked about it. Thought it was really cool. He used to dare people. You make me red, I’ll make you black and blue. He went round at interval grabbing Third Form boys, making them pick a colour. What’ll it be, turd, red black blue or green?
There was silence while they thought about this. Bodun twisted his neck to look at Winstone and Marlene in the back. He looked excited. What was green?
Green was the rubbish bins. He’d stand the turd up in one of the cans and they weren’t allowed to get out till after the bell rung. Grunt laughed. Shit man. That was their best option.
Bodun laughed too. He picked Grunt’s packet of tailor-mades up off the dash and turned it around and studied the photograph of a shrivelled heart on the front.
Can I have one?
No. Shit. How old are you?
Nearly thirteen.
You smoked one before?
Shit yeah. Heaps.
Yeah?
Yeah. Didn’t you smoke when you were my age?
Shit. Well I spose one more won’t kill you.
Winstone looked across at Marlene. She had her back to him, watching the side of the road go by, kneeling up among the empty cigarette packets and soft drink bottles and RTD shots and used serviettes and screwed-up burger wrappers on Grunt’s back seat. She hadn’t put on her shoes or brushed her hair and the soles of her ankle socks were black and the back of her head looked like a whole family of rats had made a nest in there and gone to sleep with their long tails hanging down all curled together and it smelled a bit that way too. Marlene hadn’t said a word since they got in the car but Winstone knew she was listening.
What was he called before? he asked Grunt. What did you call him before he was Bic?
Shit. I forget. Grunt laughed. No wait. I got it. Brian.
Brian, Winstone thought, through the bedroom wall that night. Your name is Brian. It helped a bit, but not as much he’d expected.
There was a lot in what people called you.
Winston. What a very illustrious name, said Mrs Clarke, the ancient relieving teacher, as she wrote it up on the board.
It’s got an e on the end, said Emma Lynch.
No, said Mrs Clarke. It hasn’t.
Why did you call me that? Winstone asked his mother, when they went to visit her in Christchurch.
Shit babe I dunno. I just liked the sound of it I guess. She leaned across the table and put both hands over his. Strong, you know. Rock-hard. Like concrete.
Then she sat back. I got to go now babe. Time’s up. You take care of yourself eh. All of you. You boys look after your sister. And the corrections officer came and opened the door and she went back to her cell.
Aunty Ruth drove them back to her friend’s flat a different way past the gravel pits and the diggers and hard-sided trucks mean-faced as Optimus Prime in a storm-trooper suit and Winstone was written all over everything and Marlene pointed and held his hand and even Bodun in the front seat couldn’t think of anything bad to say.
Winstone kept his mouth shut until Bodun wasn’t around, just in case. What’s Aggregates? he asked Aunty Ruth.
What?
The other word it said on the trucks.
Oh. Aunty Ruth thought for a bit. It’s what they put in concrete and roads and stuff, she said after a while, to make them stronger.
The next day Winstone counted four of his trucks down State Highway One and aggregates spattered the windscreen like rain as Ruth overtook and Winstone knelt up on the back seat and waved and three of the trucks waved back. The fourth just gave a blast on its horn and Ruth nearly ran off the road and Marlene got such a fright she fell off the back seat and she laughed until she cried. Then they swung off SH1 inland, and there were no more trucks, and after a while no more cars or white lines and the road grew paler and louder under their wheels until the seal ran out and Ruth was driving down the centre of it, straddling the gravel.
The red and grey tin roof of their house came up through paddocks of standing hay and a summer evening soft and purpling with rain. It wasn’t bright, but Ruth put her sunglasses on anyway.
I’m just going to pull in and drop you off, she said, watching the driveway ahead. You kids grab your stuff and go in okay? I can’t stay.
Winstone and Marlene looked at her big black plastic eyes in the rearview mirror and nodded. They didn’t ask why. There’d been a lot of noise the last time Rut
h had stayed.
Bic was sitting on the top step of the porch. He rose as Ruth’s car bumped up the drive.
Okay guys, Ruth said. Winstone had his backpack ready over his shoulder. He picked up Marlene’s and held it to his chest.
Bic padded over, barefoot through the lengthening grass, a can of beer in his hand. He looked like he’d just got out of bed and pulled on his jeans, his jaw jutting prickly and dark, his faded T-shirt crumpled. He leaned on the car, one big hand either side of Ruth’s open window, resting his tinnie on the sill, and he smiled.
Gidday Root.
Hey Bic.
Bic had a roof-mounted Hella lamp of a smile, and while he was giving it to Ruth, Bodun and Winstone opened their doors and Marlene shuffled across and they all got out the other side. Ruth kept the engine running.
So how was New Zealand’s hottest home baker? She getting on okay up there?
She’s doing all right.
Kids behave themselves?
Yeah they were good.
So. You coming in?
I got to get home.
Where’s the fire?
I got a friend coming over.
Oh yeah? What’s his name?
A girlfriend.
So call her. Tell her you’ll be late.
I can’t.
You could before.
I got to go. Ruth clunked the car into reverse. I’m late.
As the car moved off, Bic stood back, spread his arms and laughed. Aw c’mon Root, don’t be like that! I won’t hold you up. It’ll only take a minute.
Ruth, looking over her shoulder, accelerated towards the road.
Bic crumpled the can in his hand and lobbed it over the fence. What are you three standing there for? Get your stuff inside.
Winstone watched Ruth’s car disappear and the first fat spots of rain dampen the dust. He felt a lot more like aggregates than concrete.
Mrs Clarke taught Winstone’s class for a fortnight. She read them The House at Pooh Corner. They learned about honey and bees and blew up balloons and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Winstone quite enjoyed being Winston minus an e for a week and a half, but then he went off Mrs Clarke even though he knew that wasn’t really fair, because it wasn’t her fault. But he couldn’t help it.