Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  3

  I tell Feral and Harley about my gang, The Wreckers, back in Greenvale, all the masterful adventures we pulled off. I make it sound tough and romantic. I intend to persuade them to join my new gang – for protection, racketeering and general mischief, I say. They laugh at me. They belong to a posse, since way back in Grade Six, where they met. They reckon I seem pretty cool and have a good reputation and all, but they’ve never seen me do anything reckless or admirably illegal like their posse leader, Gigolo.

  Everything in Townsville seems to have Gigolo written on it, and HBK, Heart Break Kids. I want to join Gigolo’s posse but the boys say you can’t join; he has to like your tag. You have to have a killer tag and know how to do proper graffiti writing or you get called toy. Also, you have to tag in rad places that command attention. I don’t have a tag and have never tried to write graffiti style. They say I sure better learn how to do it and come up with a rad tag and get tagging if I hope to get noticed by Gigolo. Gigolo, the master of graffiti, breakdancing, and breaking and entering.

  Since I arrived in this city my childhood freedoms have eroded. Greenvale had no Friendlies. I didn’t realise the power the cult has over my parents, besides the odd glimpse into Mum’s mental state and her obsession with knotting her hair. Cars don’t even have to pull up outside our house anymore; she always wears her hair up in that bun which pulls her face tight as a face you make at your sister. Mum has turned stern and paranoid and vicious, and her migraines never go away. She has rictus smile. I imagine she doesn’t sleep with her hair knotted, but she has it up when she goes to bed and she has it up at breakfast. Every Wednesday night and every Sunday morning I have to dress in over-starched long pants and a shirt and tie. A bloody tie! We have to go to this old couple’s house for meetings. They look in their late hundreds. Their house smells like lavender, Old Tawny port and bones. Old people smell like bones. You can smell their bones through their thinned-out skin. The old coot stands up and he drones on about Jesus and the disciples. He rubs his palms together like a vacuum-cleaner salesman. Us kids sit there bored to death.

  The bible provides me with fodder for my poems. I sit up in my room for weeks on end reading the bible for the good bits, writing wicked scenes of my own. I have a new hero: Lord Byron, even above Tom Sawyer. How I wish for a life like his. A genius, a ladies’ man, a bare-knuckle fist-fighter. I hate getting into fights. I always end up bleeding the most. Mum says: You’ll ruin your good looks with all this brawling. I don’t have enough good looks to go losing any. I can talk my way out of a fight most times. Except with Muddy. Muddy doesn’t follow any established patterns of aggression – not that I can determine, anyway. Most kids have a reluctance somewhere within them. They hesitate before smashing your nose flat. Not Muddy. He has all the reluctance of a snake you’ve stepped on in the bush. In between writing poems and reading I practise graffiti. I still need a tag.

  ——

  The old man pipes up at dinner and says we have to go to Convention down in Brisbane, whether we like it or not. Of course the arseholes who organise this thing have scheduled it over Christmas. Dad says we shouldn’t celebrate Christmas anyway. He says if you take away all the tinsel, Christmas belongs to the world of men, a cynical excuse to sell stuff to people. The Friendlies make their pilgrimage from every crag of Australia. If they don’t go, then the Devil himself has held them back. I remember attending a few times in my single-digit years, before this habit I’ve developed of writing everything down in my notebook. I’ve looked into the hole sometimes, but those memories have funnel-webs. I’ve had enough of these fundamentalist apocalyptic freaks. Mum has our letter of invitation up on the fridge. Typed out with zero flourish: Welcome Friends: Annual Convention December 23rd–27th 1984, Skyview Avenue, Rochedale, Brisbane. It has a list of tramp preachers who’ve come from all over the world.

  4

  After thirteen hundred kilometres we roll through the front gates of an old farm on Skyview Avenue on the southern outskirts of Brisbane. I see about five thousand pretty girls milling about in sundresses and my interest picks up. A mayhem of cars have parked up on a grassy hill which looks down on the farm. The old man parks there, right by this fucken-­rad-looking purple Cadillac, one of those with the huge fins and white leather seats. We lug our suitcases and sleeping bags and stuff down to the sheds. They’ve erected a giant circus-style tent in the middle of a field surrounded by trees. Off to the left sits a huge shed full of tables and chairs and people cooking at massive gas burners. A stable at one end of the grounds houses the females, a coop at the other for the males. A third shed, which looks far more comfortable, houses the Workers. So the old man and I say sayonara to the old lady and my two sisters, and go to find our beds.

  Our shed looks like a dilapidated chicken roost. The windows don’t have glass; they have chicken wire. The middle of the cavernous interior has king-sized double-decker beds. Dad and I pick one, on top near the end, clamber up the ladder, stretch our sheets across the huge mattress and lay out our good gospel clothes. Dad says he wants a shower so I take the opportunity to cut out and find a spot to smoke. I walk around the sleeping sheds, and the eating sheds, but can’t find a suitable place, so head up to the car park. One end of the car park has a grove of shady trees that look pretty climbable.

  Weaving in and out of the cars I notice one of the cutest girls I’ve seen in my life sitting in a tree. She has skin like marzipan and acres of chestnut hair. I walk right up to the tree and see her trying to hide a cigarette. I swagger some and pop a cigarette into my mouth and light up, winking at her.

  —Hey, gorgeous! I say, and take a nice deep drag.

  Bruce, the goddamn tramp preacher from back in Greenvale, raptures out of nowhere and grabs me by the scruff of the neck.

  —Why, Brentley, he says with a sick chuckle: What a surprise … Still in the express lane to hell, I see … A black eye, too. How’d you get that? Fighting, I bet, like a mongrel dog. And he frogmarches me through the car park down the knoll to the sleeping shed, all the way saying:

  —Sin originates in the thought. Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.

  We find my old man at the foot of our bed strangling himself with a tie.

  —Caught your boy smoking, says the tramp preacher.

  —Boy resists all attempts to control him, Dad grunts, clipping me on the head.

  —Well, friend, we have missions planned in Townsville. We’ll stay with you for a few months in the new year. I’ll sort him out for you then.

  ——

  Day one of five days of sermons. Nothing to look forward to. Maybe I’ll run away. In a city this size they’ll never find me. Mum and Dad hustle us out of the breakfast shed to the church tent to get some good seats before the rush. The tent has a thousand benches in it, arranged in concentric circles. The olds choose one near the middle, close to the stage where the damn preachers will stand and yack on about the end of everything.

  —Thank god I brought a cushion! I say: My arse’ll cave in on these damn benches! And I blow a bubble with the gum in my mouth. Pop.

  Mum slaps me in the mouth, making the scab from where Muddy split my lip recently open up all over. I mop at the blood with the collar of my shirt. Mum says, with total ferocity between her teeth:

  —You better not use the Lord’s name in vain ever again, or so help me I’ll smite you myself. Dabs at my collar and then my lip with a tissue.

  We sit down and before long people mill in like willing victims. Here comes the family of that hellishly beautiful chick I saw sitting up in the tree yesterday afternoon. She sees me gawping at her and flashes me a little smile. Her family sit two benches in front of us. The tent fills up and a hush settles in as the Workers march down the aisle like they represent the coming of the Lord himself.

  Sure enough, they drone on clear to lunchtime, on and
on about Jesus for the whole morning, preaching against the seduction of indecent curiosities. Each word falls like a hammer on an anvil and rings in the air. Occasionally everyone stands and sings from The Book of Hymns. One thing makes the whole situation bearable: the cute chick keeps turning and smiling at me, and she doesn’t care that everyone can see her. She keeps right on, turning and smiling, every five damn minutes or so.

  At lunch, when everyone rises and bolts off, I pretend I’ve lost my favourite pen in the world and I lag behind. I slip a poem I wrote in the third hour when I felt ready to commit suicide from boredom into the pink notebook I saw the hot chick scribbling in. Her notebook has one of those This Belongs To stickers in it. She has written her name, with a love heart for the dot on the ‘i’s: Billie-Jean. Get fucked! Just like the song! As I lift the fly to get out of the church tent, I bump right into Billie-Jean.

  —Oh … hi, Billie-Jean, I say, stunned at her beautiful mouth, the way her lips part, showing her teeth. One of her front teeth has a bit of an angle to it. She licks her crooked tooth.

  —How d’ya know my name, Brentley?

  —Well, shit. I asked … around. Wait! How do you know my name?

  —Your sister told me.

  —Which sister?

  —Jaz.

  Then Billie-Jean’s dad comes into the tent and she goes with him over to their bench.

  ——

  At dinner I can’t see Billie-Jean anywhere, so I go back up to the car park, hoping to find her. I smoke about two thousand cigarettes and listen to Mondo Rock’s ‘Come Said the Boy’ cassingle on my Walkman. The damn batteries run flat from rewinding it over and over. I get up to leave but then see her coming up through the car park. I hate that: I sit around for a month waiting for something and no sooner do I give up and rise to leave than it happens. I take off my headphones as she approaches. Heart racing.

  —What ya listening to? she says.

  —‘Come Said the Boy’. I sound all breathless, dammit.

  —I love Mondo Rock.

  —Yeah, well, that song anyway.

  —Gotta smoke?

  —Yeah. I give her a St Moritz. Stupid hands shaking.

  —Oh, I love St Moritz!

  I light it for her.

  —Wanna sneak out tonight? Give me another smoke? she says, eyeing my fresh packet.

  —Sure! Damn lump in throat.

  —Let’s meet here, by the tree … No, even better, see that purple Cadillac over there?

  —Yeah, coolest car I’ve ever seen.

  —My dad owns it. He loves that thing. Mum says more than he loves her.

  —Very cool car!

  —Meet me there. We’ll sit between the cars. I’ll bring a blanket.

  —What time? Sounding like I don’t give a fuck.

  —Um … midnight?

  —K.

  —K. See ya then, then, she says, and skips off.

  I chew a piece of gum, and with my heart light in my chest go back down to the sleeping shed. I decide to have a shower and make myself presentable for later. About fifty naked fellows in there, all showing they’ve taken the knife for Jesus.

  ——

  Dad knows I have a plan up my sleeve. I keep fidgeting and looking at my watch. He asks me why I’ve hung my jeans and jacket on the ladder. I say in case I have to go to the toilet in the night, which sounds pretty thin, and he says I can go to the toilet in my boxers. I move my jeans off the ladder, fold them up and leave them at the foot of the bed, before he does it himself and discovers my Walkman and packet of smokes. I’ve gone through three Walkmans, because every time my parents find me with one, they smash it up, saying they have the Devil all over them. You need some serious skills to steal a Walkman. Most stores have them in a glass case.

  The old man gets out his bible and reads a bit, and then a bit more, so I get out my Collected Works of Byron and read awhile and fall asleep! Dad’s snores jolt me from my slumber. Some weird shit, sharing a bed with your old man. I get down the ladder and put on my jeans. As I sneak out of the shed, some ancient fellow eyeballs me from behind his torch as he reads the bible, but I ignore him. I get outside and have a look at my watch with my lighter and it says 12.24! I sprint up to the car park but can’t see a thing in the dark. After a bit of hunting I spot the tail fins of Billie-Jean’s dad’s Cadillac silhouetted like a memorial of grandeur against the sky. I skip over and find Billie-Jean sprawled on a blanket between the cars, looking at the stars.

  —Hi! I say.

  —Hi yourself. Thought you’d chickened out.

  —Chickened out? An adventure like this, with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met? I’d’ve shown up if God himself told me not to come!

  —Okay … Mr Risk! She giggles: I love your poem. I read it over and over. Why did you call it ‘Fleeing Eden’?

  —Because the protagonist runs from love.

  —Why?

  —Because her youth and beauty makes him fear age and death.

  —Oh … and you call me Paradise?

  —Um … yeah.

  —And what do you mean by my garden?

  —Ah … I kinda ripped that off from the Song of Solomon.

  —The song of … who?

  —Solomon … You know, the porno chapter in the bible?

  —The bible has porno?

  —You should read it.

  —I hate God … I hate this whole Convention … fucken hypocritical pervos.

  —Wow. I think I love you.

  She kisses me, hesitates, says:

  —How far have you gone before … with a girl?

  —Um …

  —I’ve kissed a few boys, and I let one finger me at school camp last year.

  I realise I have my mouth hanging open and feign a yawn. Billie-Jean thinks a bit, puffs on her cigarette and says:

  —I’ve never had a boy do it, but I let my best friend growl me out once.

  I swallow and in the quiet it echoes off the Cadillac fender. I manage to find my voice:

  —Wow … I’ve seen pictures in magazines of girls doing that … but my dad said girls don’t really do that stuff, only for money.

  —Pffft … your dad knows shit. She snorts: Parents always lie, anyway.

  Silence, for a while. An owl above us. Clouds shift and the moon flickers, paints the sleeping farm below the car park in a misty silver palette.

  —I’ve never had a head job, I say.

  —If you growl me out, I’ll give you a head job.

  —Deal!

  She giggles and fumbles with buttons in the dark and slips off her jeans. I beg the moon to come out, so I can get a better look. The moon complies, reveals Billie-Jean looking self-conscious on the blanket. She has blue undies with a big pink and white butterfly on the front. She spreads her knees, looks a little embarrassed. I lie down, put my face right up close to her and take a nice deep sniff. She smells like rock melon! Like when you go out into the field and pick one early in the morning. Intoxicated I pull aside the butterfly and lick her for a bit, put in a couple of fingers, finger and lick, pushing my tongue as deep into her as I can. She bucks against my face. She tastes a bit like rock melon too, salty sweet. She has some pubes, a fine honey down. Some hair in my mouth, but I don’t care. I look up for a second and she has her t-shirt bunched between her teeth, biting. She pinches her left nipple. She has tiny tits, but – tits!

  —Lick my clit, she says.

  —Clit? I say, my voice muffled.

  —Yeah, my clitoris. This bit. She opens herself up, pulls back. A little shiny thing like a parrot’s tongue pokes out. I lick her clit. She squeals and, giggling, pushes me away.

  —I could stay here for eternity and not give a damn about the rest of anything, I say and she laughs.

  —Your turn! Sits up, tugs at my belt
.

  Now, this hasn’t happened before. I’ve never shown a girl my cock, let alone put it in her mouth! This whole scene feels forbidden. I have a crazy anticipation coming over me. What if a saint sits up in the trees watching? She has me out of my jeans before I finish thinking that. She coos a bit, which makes me feel pretty good, and then she says:

  —You have a beautiful penis!

  Which sends me reeling, and I feel her breath on me and the warmth of her mouth and this solves everything. I feel alive, for the first time ever. She sucks me for about five minutes, stopping only a couple of times, to ask me if I can let her know before I come. I mumble:

  —Uh-huh, sure!

  Then, she stops and says:

  —Wait.

  —Huh?

  —Do you wanna do it?

  —Huh?

  —Let’s have sex. We’ll say goodbye to our virginity together!

  I wilt in pure shock.

  —Oooh … don’t go soft now! She looks disappointed.

  —Let me lick you again then, I say, blushing.

  —Sure! She lies back, pulls her knees to her chest.

  The moon, the sweet, gleaming moon, lights up the entire scene and I spring to attention again. She giggles:

  —Just stick it in. Let’s do it.

  She pulls me on top of her. She has her hand around me, guiding me into her. I feel the warmth and the wetness as she thrusts her hips up, pushing herself onto me. I melt into her, thrusting slow, trying not to let the top of my cock shoot off like a released balloon. She moves against me, our breaths becoming one.

  —Oooh! she moans: Oooh …

  I thrust like the Devil gone mad, overwhelmed at the sensation and the smell and the heat and the sounds and the wetness of it all. I explode and lose myself entirely, deep inside my new girlfriend, her nails clawing at my back. For some reason, about now I wonder where she got all her experience. I pop out of her with a loud farting sound. We both laugh until Billie-Jean says: