Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  ——

  I go to Charters Towers with Dad. He wears his police uniform with the formal hat, not his bush one, so I know he has official business. Whenever this happens, he forgets I exist. I can go off into the town by myself and spend my money on whatever I damn well please. I find a store called Ye Olde Magic Shoppe. I love magic tricks. I purchase a fake pen that comes with a bottle of disappearing ink. On the label it has a picture of a bloke squirting ink on a tablecloth in front of a horrified waiter. I wander around Charters Towers for several hours, pushing my absence from Dad’s watchful eye as far as possible. When I get back to the police station, he stands on the veranda talking to a cop with a whole bunch of stripes on his sleeve.

  —Hey, Dad, check out the pen I bought. It has real ink and everything.

  I aim the nib at him and squirt the whole chamber on his police shirt. It splashes over his shoulder and collar and runs down inside. The other cop looks like the horrified waiter on the label. Dad’s face becomes a detached mask for a moment. As the ink evaporates, the mask wrinkles into a grin and the other cop laughs.

  A policewoman runs down the veranda and says:

  —Bob, an emergency call came in from Greenvale!

  Dad hurries off and leaves me here with the head cop.

  —Funny little bugger! he chortles and slaps my back.

  Dad emerges and says we have to go. I have trouble keeping up with him as he strides to the Toyota. We speed off. He starts the siren to get through the town traffic. Out on the highway as we barrel towards Greenvale, Dad wears that mask again.

  —What happened, Dad?

  He stares ahead, ignores me, concentrating on the road.

  —Dad?

  —What? he says, fussing with the dial on the radio.

  —Has something bad happened at home?

  —Right now, I dunno.

  —You don’t know what happened?

  —I don’t know, he says and then sighs.

  Nothing, for the next hour and forty-five minutes. I watch the minute hand on the dashboard clock turn all the way around as the trees and road signs flash past and the dull hum of four-by-four tyres on bitumen sends me into a trance. As we cross the Redbank Creek Bridge on the outskirts of Greenvale, the radio comes alive. Among the fuzz a shaky voice says:

  —We can confirm that, Bob. The boy, David, from Greenvale Station has died in an accident.

  Dad glances at me in time to see my face fall. As we pull in to the driveway of the police station, I try to imagine what Jaz will say to her donkey.

  Jaz sobs her heart out for hours, her arm around Smudge’s neck. Soon after, Jaz stops talking to her donkey and she stops skipping everywhere. She spends countless hours down the side of the house, bouncing a ball off the wall, talking to herself. She starts fighting with her friends at school. She comes crying to me in the playground with some story or another about what such-and-such a girl said to her.

  We go to David’s funeral in Charters Towers – the first time I’ve set foot inside an actual church. They’ve closed the casket. David fell off the back of a truck and broke his neck. I try to imagine what he looks like. Mischief gone from his eyes.

  I don’t want to ever love anyone … in case they die.

  ——

  Change. Like the dread I feel when alone in the bush. Mum and Dad have spent the entire year drawing up blueprints for a house they want built in the city. This change feels like the finality of death that surrounds David’s chair at the back of the class. Mum and Dad explain we have no choice but to pack up, say goodbye to Greenvale and return to Townsville, so I can go to high school. None of my friends have to leave town to start Year Eight. They have rooms reserved for them at a boarding school in Charters Towers. Most of them have already left, laughing and excited, making plans for all the capers they intend to get up to with their parents hours away.

  ——

  We leave Greenvale forever today. I dreamed last night that JJ died in a solo gunfight. I went to his funeral. The whole gang huddled around. Charlie cried. In my dream Daryl stood for an eternity, staring down into JJ’s grave. He had his long hair cut because he moved to the city and his new school wouldn’t let him in class with his greasy locks. All of us boys chucked our old Wreckers gang jackets down onto the coffin. Those glorious jackets, filthy and loved, our gang name on the back in black Hobbytex.

  As we roll out of town, the removal truck behind us, and strike out for the highway and a new life, I see JJ fishing off the Redbank Creek Bridge. I look out the back window as we pass. He gives me the finger, his mad orange hair like the setting sun.

  Part Two

  Deadly Nureyev

  ————

  ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’

  Mark Twain

  1

  January 1984, a week after my twelfth birthday. We roll into Townsville to our new house in the wet. Pouring rain for an entire month. We turn into Hazel Street in the middle of a new estate in the suburb of Rasmussen. Dad points out our new house. You can’t miss it, though you can barely see through the belting rain. Our house and two more stand in the belly of an empty cul-de-sac. We gasp in surprise – on our new front mud puddle huddles a crowd of about forty people. We pull up as the removalist truck booms around the corner right on our tail. Mum winds down her window to get a good look at the crowd. Dad swears through his teeth:

  —Shit, every bloody Friendly in town, come to welcome us!

  He slinks out of the car, not bothering about the rain at all. Mum near has one of those conniptions I read about in Regency romance novels. She has her hair down, wearing a big floppy hat and sunglasses. She scalps herself trying to get her hair up under her hat. These apocalyptic nuts have come to judge her every move.

  I jump out of the car and take off up the street. I have zero desire to get pawed at and hand-pumped by a bunch of religious zealots. I get away around the corner and hunch up under the eaves of a half-built house all abandoned and forlorn in the haze. I pull out a wet bent smoke and stand there cursing at the rain and the sky and God and everything because my matches have sogged through. A figure looms out of the mist, jumping puddles, puffing away on a cigarette.

  —Oi! I yell into the wind. He comes closer, looking for my voice. When he spies me, he gets up under the eaves. I recognise him, one of the gaggle of Friendlies from our front mud puddle.

  —Lookin for you! he says, lighting my cigarette for me with a wicked-looking zippo.

  I take a puff and measure him up. We smoke in silence for a few minutes, and then he says:

  —I heard a Worker talking about you. They say you get up to some real delirious shit, mad adventures and stuff.

  I swell with pride.

  —Joe, says the kid, sticking out his hand, but my mates call me Feral.

  —Cool name! I say, jealous.

  —Yeah, I chose my own tag.

  —Your tag?

  —Yeah. You don’t have a tag?

  —I dunno. What do you mean?

  —What? You don’t know this? Ya graffiti name. You know, ya tag … ya tag it on walls and shit.

  —I’ve never graffitied … wait, no, I’ve carved stuff into desks and library chairs. You know, like girls’ names.

  —Yeah, like that, but ya use spray-paint or Nikko pens, or whatever, and ya tag ya name all over, and you get treated like a hero. Plus ya get to act all mysterious and shit, and listen to people wonder on about who has such balls, to go tagging up the place like that.

  A car slushes around the corner, slow, an eye out for someone.

  —Fuck! says Feral, panic in his voice: Me fucken dad. Cunt’ll smell me smoking again. Fuck, man, ya got any gum?

  I shake my head. He lurks on the other side of the waterfall sluicing off the eaves, gives me a slap on the shoulder, and then darts away into the rain.


  I head back across the flooded cul-de-sac. I have to get myself a good tag. I pause to smash a couple of windows in a new house going up, and linger in the mud, dreading the Friendlies. This cult doesn’t make friends for themselves; they make friends for Jesus. I don’t know much about it; no one will answer my questions. I’ve asked Dad a hundred times why he believes these people but he always answers with behave yourself or don’t act the fool. They act like saints and ridicule worldly sinners. They have secret meetings in the house of an Overseer on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, and public gospel meetings to welcome the lost. Each region has an Overseer, a man or woman on the verge of sainthood, someone who does everything right but has succumbed to the ways of the world, like having wealth or falling in love.

  Around Easter the tramp preachers descend on the flock. They come and live in the Friends’ houses, make themselves right at home while they fish the neighbourhood strangers. Fishers of Men, they call themselves. During this time they hold missions to drive out devils and to impress those they’ve hooked. Then they test the meetings, call on their flock to take the final step and profess to follow no other than Jesus the King.

  Once a year, around Christmas, they hold a mass gathering called Convention. Friends come from thousands of miles away and they all gather in a huge tent somewhere, to worship at the feet of the saints. Last holidays my grandma answered some of my questions. She said a man named William Irvine started his Ministry of Truth way back in eighteen-ninety-something, and he rejected all churches and established doctrines and all the laws of man. Grandma said God spoke to Mr Irvine direct, inspired him to preach the gospel. Grandma said Mr Irvine set about condemning the ways of the world, and everyone alive who hadn’t heard his word faced an eternity in hell. Sure, she said, you can go right on reading the bible your whole life and you can primp up and wear your best Sunday silks and pray until your knee-bones end up flat as the good book itself, but unless you hear one of God’s chosen Workers speak the living word with your own ears, you’ll find yourself drinking a cup of hot bile with Satan himself in no time.

  Grandma said I shouldn’t call the chosen ones tramp preachers, because people say that as a term of derision. She said those who understand our path use the word Workers to describe the saints. She said I should pray to Jesus and thank him, for those born into the fold have a path to heaven less fraught with worldly vices. I asked Grandma what I should call the church with no name, to make it easier to explain to my friends. Even though she has spoken English most of her life, my gran sometimes struggles and reverts to the German she spoke as a child. Die Namenlosen, she whispered: Die Namenlosen.

  ——

  I’ve made friends with a kid named Maz. I can see his two-storey house across the empty cul-de-sac. His mother looks pretty worn out all the time. Maz and I stay out late, shoplifting and raiding unlocked cars for change. We play Space Invaders. He says his stepdad has a son named Reuben who leads a street gang in Sydney. Maz says he met Reuben last Christmas holidays and Reuben blew his mind. Reuben’s dad wants to get him off the streets and bring him north for a new start. Maz feels pretty proud he has a rad stepbrother.

  2

  Dad drives me to school the first day because of the rain. He dumps me at the gate. I swagger into the school grounds. I’ve never seen so many kids in one place in my entire life. Some of them look real rough buggers. Older kids, some with beards! I turn tail and saunter back out the front gate, check the old man hasn’t clued on I plan to wag my first day.

  I hightail it off in the direction of the skating rink down the street. I get about halfway along the outside of the fence and a car sharks over to the kerb. The door opens; Feral looks out. I peek in the car to get an eye at his old man: the creepiest fucker I’ve seen in my life. I’ve seen some creepy, real bad fellows too: deer killers, rapists, wife-bashers and assorted psychos. Feral’s old man resembles a vulture. A vulture with massive pot-lid ears that stick so far out they appear translucent. You can see all the veins in them, like a mess of red electrical wires dangling in a wine flagon full of petrol. His eyes have a tangible reptile quality about them, not to mention the pink business shirt. What kind of man wears pink? I go to call him a poofter out of instinct and shock at seeing a grown man, hell, any man, newborn or nine hundred, wearing pink. But before I get a chance to do or say anything, Feral alights from the car, looking pretty eager to get away from his father.

  Then, like someone poured him out of a grease-trap into a drain, his father slips out of the driver’s seat, grabs Feral in a half-nelson, and smashes him down on the hood. He stands close enough for me to smell Old Spice aftershave, even older old-man stink and … roasted chicken? His flabby skin hangs under his eyes like burned cheese and his forehead looks mega greasy like he’s scrubbed himself down with a roast chicken.

  —You got cigarettes in your bag, boy? Give me your bag, boy, he demands in a sleazy rasp. He rips Feral’s bag off him, busts the zip as he yanks it open with his drumstick fingers. Sure enough, Feral has a pack of smokes in there: Marlboros. His dad snatches them out of the bag, his hand like a claw from one of those damn arcade games where you always lose. He gives Feral a real hard smack in the ear, drips back into his car and speeds off, showering us both with mud.

  —Don’t worry, Feral. I’ve got smokes and ten bucks. Let’s go play some pinball in the city. This cheers him up. My apt private use of his secret tag-name in a moment of crisis to remind him of the important stuff gets well rewarded. He has a clippie bag of weed in his shoe.

  We hide at the back of the oval, under a new building construction. Feral shows me how to make a bong out of an apple. We smoke a couple of cones each, and, feeling pretty tripped out, I lie down, listen to the rain on the leaky roof. I need a girlfriend. I need a tag. I think I’ll tag with blue paint. I love the smell of blue paint.

  A bell clanging in the school wakes me with a start. I passed out! Feral has already left. I scrabble around in the shadows for my bag and climb out of the building site. Then I scoot around the corner, shaking off concrete dust, and bump right into a stern-looking old woman with a bent-up nose and piercing, demon-keen eyes. She sniffs the air around me. Straightens her trousers.

  —Name, she snaps.

  —Name? I answer.

  —NAME! she shouts in my face. I reel back, stunned.

  —You fucken old … crow! I yell at her.

  —WHAAAT! she screams, even louder, so that at least half the suburb hears. Vicious glee sparkles in her eyes as she grabs me by the ear and twists so that I buckle at the knees, physically at her mercy.

  Turns out that I’ve just called the school’s deputy principal a fucken old crow to her face. Mrs Hudson searches my bag, finds my pack of cigarettes, my Barlow knife and a copy of New Cunts. She rifles through a fat file and pulls out a sheet, smooths it on her desk. She reads my enrolment form and raises an eyebrow. My dad wrote his profession on there. I guess she saw the word Constable and got a thrill. She reads my dad’s work number out loud to herself, picks up the receiver, hands it to me, dials the phone. It rings a couple of times. I hope he won’t answer. He answers:

  —Hello.

  —Um … hi, Dad.

  —What have you done now, boy? he sighs down the line.

  —Erm … Mrs Hudson caught me smoking.

  —Tell him about the weapon, Mrs Hudson grunts from her desk.

  —Mrs Hudson says to tell you that I have broken the rules because I have my Barlow.

  —What’ll we do with you? Dad says, resigned.

  —Tell him about the filthy magazine I found in your bag also! barks Mrs Hudson.

  —Dad … I also have a porno mag.

  Mrs Hudson grabs the phone from me and says into the mouthpiece, not even putting the receiver up to her ear:

  —In plain English, sir, considering your son has done all this on his first day … well … twelve-year-old boys, in my ye
ars of experience, they don’t do that sort of damaged stuff until much later, at least fifteen. Your son, sir, must classify as the worst, most despicable outright delinquent boy I’ve come across! Any parent who raises a boy like yours ought to just bow their head in shame.

  Then she listens awhile, says uh-huh a couple of times and hangs up the phone. I don’t know what my old man said to Mrs Hudson. She stares at the phone for a bit, then looks at me, sort of weary-eyed, and says as she shoos me out of her office with a dismissive wave:

  —You better get along to class.

  ——

  I’ve learned a lot this first week. Having a cop for a dad in high school doesn’t make you cool like it does in primary school. It makes you the sworn enemy of every teenager by default. I resemble a walking bruise. Two boys try to pole me – a half-Aboriginal kid nicknamed Muddy and another kid named Clint, who has a pointy face like the foxes on my grandma’s farm. Muddy has a tattoo of a marijuana leaf with a script which reads, til death do us part. He rolls up his shirtsleeve so you can see it. To pole someone you need three dudes: one grabs you by the arms and the other two grab an ankle each. Holding you horizontal and spread-eagled they run you at a pole. I say:

  —You two fuckheads have mental problems. You need three dudes to pole someone.

  I come to. Muddy knocked me unconscious with one punch. A full-on fistfight has happened. Feral and another boy with a spike haircut stepped in to help me. The spiked kid introduces himself as Harlan – Harley to his mates. Harley has a magnetism which makes him seem much older, and wiser. I feel like a moon in his orbit. Just as the moon keeps its distance from the earth, you shouldn’t get too close to Harley. He brawls at school because of the deep scar he has right in the middle of his forehead. He told me his dad in a drunken rage one night smashed his face into a table. He also told me he fell over when he first learned to walk. Kids at school taunt him by saying he had a dick cut off his forehead, and he explodes.