The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  There’s a ride-on mower cruising up and down the park, and the air is full of the smell of cut grass. I was expecting to sweat at canoe practice, and now I’m going to the ABC studios in gym pants.

  I’ll be home in three days, Monday morning. It feels a lot closer now. It’s hard not to wonder what I might find when I get there, when I get home and open the front door. When I think of our flat, I can only see it with a mixture of Murray’s things and mine and ours. I don’t want that to have changed yet. But that’s really just the first part of not wanting it to change at all.

  Felicity walks me to the door of the ABC building and makes sure that I’m expected. The receptionist takes a look at the list on her clipboard and then calls the Master Controller to let him know that I’ve arrived.

  ‘No worries,’ she says, when she puts the phone down. ‘He’ll be here for you in a second.’

  I sign in and stick my visitor’s name tag on my chest, and Felicity checks that I’m okay to do the two interviews without her. I tell her to make sure she wears the jacket when she picks Richard Stubbs up from the airport, because he’s done a lot of TV and he’s got his own radio show and it’s made him very fussy.

  ‘Very funny,’ she says. ‘What’s he like, really?’

  I let her know that she needn’t worry. He’s a nice guy. He’ll be nothing but pleasant company, cruising Perth with her in a cab this afternoon. As long as the banana situation’s sorted out, the eight bananas a day he requires to be delivered to his room.

  ‘He’s convinced he’s got some problem with his potassium,’ I tell her, as though he’s a madman but must be indulged. ‘And bananas are the only potassium source he’s happy with, apparently. He always lets people know and they forget it all the time, and he can really turn then.’

  Felicity is on the phone to the festival office in a second, before I can stop her and tell her it’s a joke. The Master Controller is swiping his tag on the other side of the glass security door, and then telling me to come on through.

  Felicity’s waving to me, waving me to go ahead, while saying, clearly and firmly, into her phone, ‘Where you’ve got “no special requirements”, does that mean he actually told you – like, definitely told you – that he’s got no special requirements, or does it mean that you don’t have a list of his special requirements?’

  I take two steps towards the studios and she turns away, still talking. The security door shuts behind me and, as Felicity leaves the building still deep in damage-control mode, I’m being led down the corridor to the green room, the Master Controller talking through what we’re about to do and telling me he’ll be back in five minutes, plenty of time for me to have a glass of water and a sit down.

  He leaves me there, with the local radio station turned up loud. There’s a faint smell of incense, and the walls are covered with black-and-white portrait shots of local presenters and certificates from cancer charities thanking the ABC for their support. There’s no water in the water cooler, though someone has left a half-full cup on the coffee table, with a fat lipstick mark along the rim.

  There’s an interview about healing under way, someone talking about a healing expo with teepees and Hopi ear candles. That’s the incense smell, and the lipstick. The room’s last occupant is now on air.

  The Master Controller appears in the doorway again and says, ‘Bunbury’ll be ready for you in a couple of minutes. You might as well come in and get settled.’

  He pushes his steel-framed glasses back up his nose, though I don’t think they’d slipped, and he leads the way to the booth. He opens the door for me, and tells me we shouldn’t have any problems, but he’ll be in the next room monitoring everything just in case. The booth is about the size of a walk-in wardrobe, with a cork board on one wall crammed with the business cards of previous inhabitants. I sit in the only chair, facing a window with closed blinds on the other side. As I put the headphones on, I notice the sign he’s written that says ‘Please switch off all mobile phones and pagers.’

  I have Felicity’s number keyed in, and I take the headphones off my right ear and call her. She’s in a cab on the way to the airport. There’s engine noise and static and she sounds like she’s in a tunnel.

  ‘Okay, I don’t know what to believe now,’ she says, when I tell her I invented the Richard Stubbs story. ‘I think I’m going to get one bunch of bananas just in case. I’ll get him four. That’s half a day. Then I can ask him if he wants more.’

  A voice comes through the headphones into my left ear. Bunbury is ready to start talking.

  It’s the email from Elli that I open first when I see what’s waiting for me at the Internet cafe. And it says:

  hello annoying one,

  well i AM sad.

  this is cr@p and i am angry with both of you :-((((((

  will you still always be my friend like you said?

  simple question

  e

  It’s an email that leaves me forgetting to breathe, stuck between breaths and dizzy. It sits there on the screen, with all the starkness of typed text. I wish she were here. I could type all day and not manage a whole reply. Two things I shouldn’t do: send her five thousand words, and collapse in a heap.

  I should keep it short, or write as much as I like then cut it back to the message at its most straightforward, deal with her simple question. Next week, I hope, we’ll talk face-to-face.

  Years ago, when I was working on some new material, I had a bit pencilled in in which I talked about adjusting to being Elli’s father’s new partner and being ‘in loco parentis’ to Elli every second weekend and some weeknights. The joke centred on the apparent literal translation being ‘in madness, a parent’, but I never used it. There was no madness about it. It’s been great. And if I’d run that material once and she’d heard about it, it would have been very unfair. It’s been a privilege to watch her being every age from three to ten.

  Friendship perhaps describes our relationship best. ‘Will you still always be my friend?’ It’s no throwaway line. By the time Elli was six we both knew that I couldn’t simply explain her away as my partner’s daughter, so the answer to the question ‘Is she your daughter?’ had naturally become ‘No, she’s my friend’. And if more was needed – if there was a new teacher involved, for example – I could add ‘We’ve known each other for years. I live with her father, so that means Elli and I get to live together some of the time too.’

  I’ve been in close proximity to two-thirds of her life – there when she broke her arm, there while she’s learned a lot, there through that proud stage of newly being able to read aloud, a stage that came with its own regular highlights.

  We were in adjacent toilet cubicles once at an airport, and I heard her small voice drifting over the partition as she said to herself, ‘No matter where you are going and where you are from, always use a condom. Whatever you’re into.’ There was a long, long pause when I wondered if we might be about to cross into a new phase of knowledge, and then she said, ‘Going to Sydney, from Brisbane, into McDonald’s, chocolate and sometimes glitter. And I’d like a horse.’

  I don’t want to write this email. I want to have a conversation with her instead.

  Suddenly, today, I feel as though I’m on the margins. She’ll live with her mother Laura some of the time and with Murray the rest, just as she has been doing, but I won’t be with Murray.

  I hope I can still see her. I don’t know what happens in these situations. She reads a lot, and I’ve always liked reading her books with her. ‘We can share this one,’ she’ll say, ‘if you want to. It can stay here and we can share it.’ It’s a gesture of friendship, and not required by anything else. We would be two friends who shared the books they read together and talked about.

  I never wanted children. I never thought I could work out how to parent. There were years when I would have been dreadful at it. I was too selfish, too erratic, and no one would even have me back as a babysitter a second time. Toddlers would scream and screa
m, six-year-olds would refuse to go to bed and we’d still be in the lounge room dancing to Abba when the parents came home at midnight. I didn’t have a clue, and I didn’t want one.

  Elli brought some child-bonding need to the surface, and met it at the same time. Murray wanted another, he wanted her to have a sister or brother. He said he’d like it if it happened, but the idea seemed to go quiet eventually. I travelled more, he got promoted and travelled more, and we settled into an arrangement that seemed to work for everyone involved.

  We share a lot now, Elli and me. I can’t imagine life another way. I’m nose-diving towards the ‘collapse in a heap’ option. Don’t go there.

  My dear E,

  Simple answer: always. Always your friend, and that’s the deal.

  And I’m sad too, but we get what we get sometimes.

  And sucked in that you’re using the school library computer

  and need to w@tch your l@ngu@ge.

  Back very soon. Missing you lots in the meantime.

  Love

  M

  Ballystewart — 1972

  MARK MACLEISH LIVED on a farm that had a two-storey whitewashed house with a big barn opposite it, and high walls on the other sides making a kind of courtyard. He bought Commando war comics for 5p a time. A few of the others at school did too, but Mark never missed one. I read his, because I didn’t usually have the 5p and it would have taken too much talking if I’d brought one home.

  That’s how my parents were, and it was one of the many ways in which they weren’t like everyone else’s. They weren’t local, for a start. My father was from Carrickfergus, but he worked for years in Scottish shipyards and then ports in the south of England. My mother had travelled too and lived in London for a while, but they’d met in Scotland. They’d agreed to live not too far from Belfast, but on the water. Ballystewart was where they’d ended up, and my grandmother – my mother’s mother – had moved nearby, to a small house in Donaghadee, around the time I was born.

  My parents weren’t like other people in the village, I could tell that. They were seen as all right, but separate, and therefore not to be told certain things. And it doesn’t matter if you’re seven or eight, you still know what those things are. We didn’t talk about the Commando comics. I thought they wouldn’t like them, but it was more than that.

  I liked them though. Commando comics were set in World War Two, and no one read them with the eye for detail that Mark Macleish and I did. Mark was skinny and he got asthma sometimes, and he had big round glasses and a bowl haircut. He was no good at football, but he was smart and his eye for detail got him respect. His father was a big man and his brother Paul was broad-shouldered and strong, so no one knew how Mark fitted into that family.

  Mark wanted to be an astronaut, even though not a lot of astronauts came from round our way and his mother said it’d mean going to school practically forever. She also said he’d have to take a much more responsible approach to his asthma if he wanted to be an astronaut, and I think he did after that. Paul wanted to run the farm, but he was taking ages to learn how you keep the books, and he didn’t much like that side of it. He said he’d just do what his father did – marry someone good with numbers and bills and all of that.

  It was Commando comics that taught Mark and me about the Thompson and the Sten, and no Tommy gun in a Commando ever came with one of those gangster rotary magazines. They came with a thirty-round box mag, and the Sten with thirty-two rounds but a magazine sticking out to the left. The details were in the stories, but also on the inside front and back covers, along with pictures of football players. We followed Manchester United, but if you did that you called them Man United. We all followed them, round our way. Or most of us. My father followed a team in Scotland but they played in a different competition, and not one that we heard much about.

  There were guns on the news too, of course, and soldiers. Guns were banned, fireworks were banned, every day we saw footage of soldiers in the streets. Commando comics read like another part of the news to us.

  Then Mark Macleish got some new school shoes and they came in a camouflage box with a booklet of commando hand signals. We started learning them that same afternoon. It also had information about military ranks and survival skills and battlefield techniques.

  It’s only now that I realise how poorly I must have fitted in when we moved to Australia. I must have seemed like a weird kid sometimes. I felt like a weird kid, but only because of my accent. That’s what the others at school focused on, and they’d keep coming up and telling me to talk so they could hear it. I didn’t like being the outsider. In my family, I’d been the one insider where we’d lived before. I knew it was a privilege, and I resented losing it. But I got rid of the accent and the problem went away. It made it seem as if it must have been the only different thing about me.

  Once, not long after we arrived here, nits or lice or some other hair infestation ripped through our class and a lot of us got short hair. Mine stayed that way. I kept telling my mother it was what school told us to do. I got shorter and shorter hair. Don’t-mess-with-me hair.

  I did well at school though, much like before, and that seemed to be the main thing. Good marks were the best measure of a healthy adjustment. Good marks and having a good time, which I did even though I felt a bit adrift. It wasn’t a feeling I could put into words. It wasn’t just about missing what I’d had before, and all my friends. I could talk about that, and I did. I felt uneasy, and I kept that feeling in my head and it took years to let it go.

  But I made new friends, and I adjusted. I could be funny, and that always helped. I hung out with boys. I learned to kick a ball that wasn’t round. I remember thinking they were weak, soft, unworldly. I didn’t know the word ‘unworldly’ then, but it best describes what I thought of them, that side of them. They were good friends, though.

  I think I first made friends with boys in Australia because that’s what I was used to. In Ballystewart none of the girls in my class lived anywhere near us, but some of the boys did.

  So, I took these four Brisbane boys, I taught them the hand signals, and I taught them how they should crawl if they ever carried a gun. One of their parents saw us doing it, so they took us to an adventure playground one weekend and we did the obstacle course so many times and drank so much cordial that Andrew Hailey vomited bright red.

  And my don’t-mess-with-me hair was soldier’s hair. It reminded me of where I’d come from. And no one knew.

  In 1972, we had Cubs and Brownies once a month in the Scouts’ and Guides’ hall in Ballystewart. We never went camping because it wouldn’t have been safe and, for the same reason, there were some badge activities we knew we’d never do. I did the art badge. I got it for gluing seeds on paper to make a picture. We didn’t mind really that we couldn’t do badges. We played a lot of games and we had a good time.

  The first time I saw a real gun was there, when Mark Macleish brought it along in a bag. He said he’d found a few of them at home, but the bolts were kept separate so this wasn’t the whole thing, and the ammo and magazines were kept separate, too. We didn’t mind. It was a big moment anyway. The gun was treasure in that bag, the best secret I’d ever been in on.

  I wondered if it had killed anyone yet, or been in a war somewhere and come home. I put my hand in scared, but the barrel was safe and hard, cold and precise.

  We were supposed to be doing something with flowers that night, but I’d already finished. Dried flowers and twigs, that’s what we had to work with, and instructions to make something decorative for hanging on a wall, a gift we were to give someone. I sprayed mine all gold and left it to dry and went down the back where there were drinks, and where Mark was waiting.

  When I got home on those nights, my mother would say, ‘Did you have a good time at Brownies? Did you learn anything?’ And often we didn’t, but we did our best to that week. We cross-referenced the gun with the diagrams in the Commandoes and we tried to teach ourselves to strip it and put it back to
gether. It might have been a Sten, that gun, and it was heavy but not so hard to take apart into its bigger bits. Not that we got much of a look at it, since we had to keep it in Mark’s bag as much as possible, but we could take it to bits all right, and he went home with his bag clanking as though it was full of tools.

  That sounds unlikely now, but it feels like a memory. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, or at all. My parents have always said that most of the province was peaceful, and made it clear that their views are more informed than mine. So it was easier to learn to believe a little less in what might have been my own life. It would have been harder to talk, and I’d always said I wouldn’t.

  Toy guns had been banned early that year, I think. Soldiers shot a kid in Belfast when he came around a corner with a plastic Tommy gun. They banned caps for cap guns, they banned fireworks. We had a box of sparklers from before all that, and my parents would still let me light one inside sometimes. We’d shut the curtains and turn out the lights, and the sparks would prickle on the back of my hand and the air would smell stronger than an old gun for a while after.

  I was always a bit scared though when we did it, because fireworks and toy guns had been banned at the same time as each other, and the boy with the plastic Tommy gun had been shot dead. We talked about it once at dinner at the Macleishes’, and Mark had asked why the soldiers couldn’t have just wounded him instead, but his father said they had no choice.

  ‘You can’t get too fancy about shooting someone,’ he said. ‘You just aim for the middle. The minute you try lining up a foot or a leg you’ll get shot yourself. Anyway, it was Ardoyne. He would have been out in the streets in a year or two with a real gun.’

  I knew about the first roadblock to go up outside the village. I knew days before that it would be on the weekend, even if I didn’t know which day and exactly where. It was Sunday morning, and we drove through without being stopped. No one said what they were looking for, but I figured it was something to do with Catholics, and probably the IRA. We’d talked about it at school, and that’s where we sang the songs about the Pope and Bernadette Devlin, after all.