Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  —Shit!

  —What?

  —Your come leaked out all over Mum’s blanket … Shit … How much did you come? She holds up her fingers into the light, showing strings of silver.

  —Um … I didn’t even know I could come like that. When I jack … err, normally I only get clear stuff, not much.

  —Wow, you near drowned me, from the inside! She stands up to reveal a huge wet patch on the blanket. More of my sperm streams down her inner thighs: Shit. I hope I don’t get pregnant!

  —Pregnant? The last time I felt such horror, a damn yowie roared in my face. Seeing myself as a thirteen-year-old father makes me ill in the stomach. But it would make me a hero in school if I got a girl pregnant. So I compose myself and say:

  —What would we call it? If a boy, I reckon Byron would rule.

  —Like fuck! I’d have to get an abortion before my parents found out. They’d kill me, and you too, probably.

  —Abortion? I haven’t heard that word before.

  —Maybe I’ll go see a doctor and get the morning-after pill, she says, chewing the inside of her mouth, looking worried now.

  —The what? I light a St Moritz, hands shaking.

  —It kills the baby before it starts growing, or something.

  —How d’ya know this … stuff? I say, searching for the right word but only coming up with stuff.

  —My friend got pregnant … from her dad … I mean, her dad’s friend.

  —What?

  —Yeah, she says, looking sad.

  And we talk on, until the sky starts bleeding and birds come down from the trees and shit on the cars.

  I swap addresses with Billie-Jean. We swear frequent letters and undying love. The Convention ends in a blur. I can’t eat; I can’t sleep. I only want to hang out with Billie-Jean.

  5

  January 1985. Back in Townsville but happy I chose to live my life like this – an endless series of adventures with no plans, no place in particular picked for a destination. I drift along, digging everything floating by. I’ll keep writing everything down as it happens.

  I find Feral at the corner shops playing Space Invaders and smoking. I tell him I lost the old virginity and he can see from the sheer pride in my swagger I tell no lie.

  Harlan left today. Lucky bastard’s dad got a new job down in Brisbane. I miss the dude because I never have to worry about getting beaten up while in his company. I’ve seen him take out a group of nine, and they fought dirty, too – tried to hold him down and get on his chest.

  Feral and I go out every other night murdering government buildings – graffiti speak for leaving no wall untagged. Schools, toilet blocks, parking garages, shop windows. Feral and Mr Risk sprayed everywhere.

  Gigolo has noticed. Feral came around and told me the secret address of Gigolo’s posse pad. He has a party on and he wants me there! Apparently Gigolo found a whole house, complete with furniture, television, kitchen stuff and everything. Every kid in Townsville treats Gigolo like a rock star. Everyone over the age of four and under the age of a hundred knows his tag. Every teacher and every cop in the universe wants to know Gigolo’s real identity. But the kids keep it quiet like a wizard does his magic word. Kids say his parents met in an institution for schizophrenics. His father has a reputation as quite a fine painter of landscapes and his mother, an Aboriginal Australian, paints traditional-style dreamscapes. He became a ward of the state from birth and got passed around dozens of respectable government-approved families until his mischief, or his sexual escapades with their daughters, saw him moving on again. Everyone agrees no better thief exists. Once, so the story goes, he waltzed right out of an electronics store with a ten-piece stereo in a box the size of a refrigerator.

  I arrive at one in the morning, which I hope looks hardcore, but in reality it took ages for the olds to fall asleep. I expect a dive, but the street, named Love Lane, has huge sprawling houses with well-kept lawns – except Gigolo’s lawn; you could get lost in there, come to grief tripping over an abandoned mower or a lost tribe. Feral, who also had to sneak out, beat me here. He points out Gigolo. He looks like the pop star Prince. He wears a purple Sergeant Pepper vest over a white shirt with black lace cuffs, and leather pants with three pairs of braces: one hanging at his sides, one over his shirt how you usually wear braces, and the other pair wrapped around his legs and clipped onto silver ten-hole Doc Martens boots. He has a slightly hooked nose, which gives him a cut-out-of-marble look, and full lips. Kohl cakes his eyelids, and he’s plucked his eyebrows, so they look elegant above his brilliant hazel-green eyes. Gigolo has serious star power. About a dozen girls crowd around him, where he sits at the head of a long table, holding court, smoking cones out of a skull bong. The stereo belts out ‘Uprock’, by Rock Steady Crew, as I walk right up.

  —Gigolo … Mr Risk, I say. Calm, I sit.

  Gigolo holds up his knuckles. I punch his knuckles.

  —Where did you get the name Mr Risk?

  —A nickname from a chick I rooted.

  —I like it, he says and takes a hit from the skull bong. Then on the exhale he says, a slight static of menace on the edges of his words: You got smarts, bro? Taps out the cone, repacks and pushes the skull across the table towards me.

  —Sort of, I say, toasting him with the skull: Nothing society will celebrate … a genetic system criminal. I have anti-authoritarianism in my genes. I pull a cone, do my damnedest not to cough.

  Then Gigolo says, in a different voice, like putting a single on longplay:

  —Despite what people may think of me, I have an agenda. They say graffiti, I say self-expression. They say vandalism, I say protest for my abandoned generation, defining my own style … forget everything the fucken establishment taught us, man.

  —Yeah. Like Mods. I love Mods, making art, living free, dressing rad and getting kicks. Have you read that book Generation X?

  The chicks look bored. I offer my packet of Saint Moritz.

  —Generation sex? Gigolo lights a cigarette.

  —No … X … potential not yet determined, like X in an equation.

  —Sounds like maths … I fucken hate maths and why do you read books? Also, I hear you have a fucken pig for an old man. He stares at my eyes.

  —Yeah … so, I have a pig dad. I get away with shit because I know what they look for … I see it as an advantage.

  —Exactly, says Gigolo: Can you get pig stuff? Leans in.

  —Like what? Trying not to lean back.

  —Dunno … Nightsticks, cuffs, guns and shit?

  —Fuck … no … He only has one gun and doesn’t bring it home.

  —If you can get some weapons, I’ll make you my Sergeant at Arms.

  —What does a Sergeant at Arms do?

  —Looks after all the posse’s weapons, gets bonuses, chicks, drugs-n-shit.

  —Fuck … sign me up … I’ll try … but why guns?

  —I wanna start a proper gang. Proper gangsters have guns.

  —My old gang had a bunch of guns. Wish I still had them.

  —What gang?

  —The Wreckers. Back in the town I grew up in. This dude named Daryl stole a couple of guns from his old man’s bikie club. Also, I nicked a pistol from a poacher.

  —You still got the pistol?

  —Nah. We got busted on amphetamines in class and they raided our fortress and found all the stuff and the protected animals we’d shot and I got locked up.

  —Locked up … what, in a boys’ home? Gigolo looks real impressed.

  —Um, nah. My old man’s jail. He locked me in every night, for three years, to stop me sneaking out and causing havoc.

  —Really? In an actual prison?

  —Yeah, between seven at night and seven in the morning … because my gang got busted on drugs and with guns, and shit.

  —Fuck! Guns and drugs, ay. You c
an join my posse.

  Gigolo believes me, and that matters. People get belief and truth mixed up all the time. When people believe things, you know, inside of their heads, it makes stuff happen outside their heads.

  —So, who does own this place? I ask, looking away to contain my excitement, admiring the graffiti on the walls and the unhinged debauchery, like no one has a care in the world.

  —I found it, Gigolo says.

  —Yeah, I heard … but how d’you go about finding a house?

  —Couple of the homies and me came across it while scouting to do some B-and-Es. The joint had a pile of mail at the front door and I had a peek and some of em dated back more than a year, so I tried the door, and it opened right up. It looked like everyone just got up and bailed … plates on the table, fossilised food, wine glasses with moss sprouting out. The fridge had living shit in it.

  —Sounds pretty sinister. Electricity and all? I say.

  —Nah. I got it put on, in the principal of my old high school’s name, the fucker.

  Much laughter then from those listening in.

  6

  Gigolo and I go stealing. Clothes, cologne, watches, shoes, jewellery, sunglasses, cassettes. We walk into David Jones, on a school day, dressed like rich-kid tourists, reeking of hundred-dollar perfume, wearing designer shorts and sandals, five watches on each arm. We carry empty David Jones bags and we walk around, shopping casually, filling the bags with desired booty. Then we walk out like we belong there. I did research, spent hours poring over books on human psychology and body language, learning how to lie. I teach Gigolo these things and in return he teaches me how to graffiti, proper style, how to breakdance, and how to break and enter.

  We murder a lot of schools together. In the dead of night, while the baby-boomers dream of financial security, we meet up in backstreets, armed with Nikko pens and spray cans. Over the fence, to work. The next day everyone in the southern hemisphere talks about catching the little bastards responsible. What a feeling – a large crowd baying for your blood. The cops come to school. Newspaper reporters. Every kid’s parents try to get out of them the names of the evil vandals. For several months we go by the school again and watch the newly hired guards do their rounds with dogs. We have to wait out the budget. Before long, because they get no results, the guards disappear, and we go murder the place again.

  ——

  In school one morning in Year Ten the first bell rings and the teacher hasn’t shown. I feel pretty mopey because I haven’t seen Billie-Jean for an entire year. The temperature hovers around a billion degrees and the whole class sits in pools of sweat. The chairs, moulded out of this shit-brown plastic, stick right to your arse. The fans buzz and the blades creak. At any point one of the rickety blades could come off and decapitate some poor kid, hopefully not me. Soon I hear someone running and assume the teacher will rush in all flustered and sick-looking from the heat. Instead a kid speeds past.

  As he runs by, he grabs a schoolbag out of the row along the wall outside the door and hurls it through the open window. The bag smashes this chick right in the face, breaking her glasses. She starts up howling and bleeding all over her legal-studies textbook. I think some glass got in her eyes. The teacher arrives in time to see the aftermath. A couple of kids point the finger at me!

  The teacher puts me in a half-nelson and marches me to the principal’s office. I plead my innocence to the deputy principal, Mrs Hudson, who has hated me since my first day in Year Eight. She doesn’t give two farts for my story and goes right ahead and calls my father, which gets me angry because I’ve kept my nose clean for so long. I don’t deserve to take the rap for something I didn’t even have the pleasure of doing. I shake, feeling a madman fit coming on. She manifests a cane and holds it in both fists, bending it while she screams at me:

  —Violent worthless delinquent!

  —Fucken plebeian moll!

  She clutches at her heart like it stopped, and her toucan nose has a bead of sweat on it that trembles like a fly on a banana. Arctic cold now, she picks up the phone and calls the school nurse. A knock at the door and the nurse comes in. I hate this person. She talks to you like at toilet training, in a high-pitched ga-ga-goo voice. Hudson and the nurse huddle over in the corner of the office, whispering and glancing at me. The nurse takes me into the sickbay, directs me to sit down on this vomity-looking couch and starts asking me questions from a sheet of paper. She holds a red pen between her fingers and taps at the page.

  —Do you feel depressed? she asks in her patronising baby voice.

  —Yeah.

  —Do you feel as though, sometimes, the world works against you?

  —All the time.

  —Do you experience despair? She scribbles on the paper.

  —I will never surrender.

  —Do you think about taking your own life? Scribbling, again.

  —I read a lot of books by people who committed suicide.

  She stops scribbling and looks up from the page.

  —Like who?

  —Plath, Hemingway, Pavese, Crane, Chandler, Woolf and Berryman.

  —Hemingway? You read Hemingway? She ruffles through a file on her desk: You read Hemingway and Plath … at fourteen. That, what you said before: never surrender. Did Hemingway say that?

  —No … I read it in Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge. I shrug, distracted by a thread sticking out of a cushion.

  —Who?

  —The Russian anarchist.

  —Ahh. She snorts: Mrs Hudson said you have issues with authority … Do you have issues with authority, Brentley?

  —Authorities in what?

  She glares at me:

  —Authority! Police, priests, doctors, teachers, parents, adults.

  —Who gave them authority?

  —They have authority by precedence of age, and the law … You will do better in this world if you obey authority, keep your head down and pull your weight.

  —The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, I mumble.

  —Exactly!

  —Well, fuck that.

  She shoots a look at me and sniffs, either a suppressed laugh or something up her nose.

  —Mrs Hudson thinks you may have a psychological issue. Will I find drugs in your bag, Brentley? She gives me this look like she wants to put me over her knee and burp me.

  I have a brief moment of panic, not because of drugs, but because I have a sketchbook with all my Mr Risk practice tags in there. The game will end if I get linked to Mr Risk. I’ll get executed. Not three weeks ago we murdered the school. The place still stinks of fresh government-issue whitewash.

  By now I’ve picked the thread out of the cushion. The more I yank at it, the longer it grows. She grabs the cushion off the couch but I don’t let go of the thread and the whole damn front comes off, spilling millions of feathers and mank-looking shit all over the grey linoleum.

  —You know what, she says, derision curling the corners of her mouth: I think I will make you an appointment to see the Ward 10B psychiatrists. She stands up and towers over me, then scuttles out of the room, leaving me sitting on the vomity couch like an eagle in a budgie cage. I feel panicked because recently Ward 10B received a lot of bad publicity in the newspaper. A crap-tonne of psychiatric ex-patients started a lawsuit for mistreatment and abuse against the hospital.

  I watch the clock. Two hours pass. I fidget and sweat, despite the administration block air-conditioning. I convince myself they’ll give me a lobotomy. Then, like in a cartoon, a light bulb comes on in my head. This voice, deep like a grandfather, says: What can they do? In the worst possible scenario, son, kill you. I doubt they’ll kill you. So I grab my schoolbag and leave, walk right out of there, out to the bike racks, unlock my bike and ride away. Headphones on, Duran Duran blaring ‘The Wild Boys’, feeling calm.

  I go and ride my bike around Willows sh
oppingtown, jump bins until a guard comes and starts closing the roller doors in front of the stores and shouts piss off. That guard sums up this whole city. It crawls with arseholes who think themselves important. No one stops here, not even Captain Cook in 1770; he sailed right by, naming things from his ship. He named Cleveland Bay and Magnetic Island. Legend has it that the strange rocks of Magnetic Island sent Cook’s compass into a frenzy, hence its name.

  The teachers at school say this city hopped during World War Two. Fifty thousand troops and fighter pilots swarmed all over the place, staging battles out on the reef. A poster in that damn sickroom explained the Japanese tried to bomb Townsville, but they missed their target and blew up a palm tree. I’d miss the city too, if I blinked. When you look for the place on a map, your eyes skip right over it, gravitate instead a few hundred kilometres north to Cairns, or a thousand ks south to Brisbane, or out to the islands off the coast.

  I get home and find Dad sitting on the front porch. He says:

  —Next year, boy, you go to another school. These coming holidays, everywhere I go, you go.

  —Good, I retort: Send me to Pimlico, or Ignatius Park. All my friends go to those schools. Kirwan sucks.

  He shakes his head. Goes inside.

  ——

  In the Townsville city mall the council installed a public chess set, with pieces the size of a toddler. All around the chessboard, under the shade of a walkway that leads to the second floor of cafes and bookshops, we sit on the large benches that double-serve as lock-away cabinets for the chess pieces when the city shuts down for the evening. Most of the posse posture and hang about, hustling, comparing weapons and sketches of graffiti tags. A couple of us play chess. I do quite well, considering I’ve never studied it. I can’t remember learning to play. I beat a lot of people – everyone my own age, a couple of older men and a few German backpackers.

  Maz turns up with his new brother, Reuben. Reuben looks pretty wild. He has a Mohawk haircut, both ears pierced and a ring in his nostril, and he wears spiky wristbands. I like him right away, and equally as fast he kicks my arse at chess. Reuben outplays everyone. By and by he gets bored and starts to hustle these shady-looking travellers who sit about in the mall drinking out of wine casks. He bets fifty bucks he can get them in checkmate within ten moves. He pockets their fifty bucks. I tell him I can read people and they look like roving serial killers, or worse: wharfies! He says: