Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  —I consider myself a lover, not a fighter … but I’ll stab any cunt who picks me. He spits on the ground in their direction as they huddle together, plotting his murder.

  To dispel the situation we both walk off to the tobacconist to get some smokes. Reuben smokes Gudang Garam cigarettes, from Indonesia. The cloves laced with the tobacco crack and pop. Reuben has no problem buying smokes because he looks a lot older than I do. Street wisdom shines from his eyes when he talks. And can he talk! He reckons he studies game theory as a philosophy, a way of living. He says all human interactions conform to rules of games, which, in turn, mankind invented to make sense of reality. He talks for an hour about how our systems of living need subverting. About then I notice the way he walks, tilted back on his heels, in a kind of shuffle. You only notice after a while because of his charisma, and the fact that he looks exactly like the spaghetti-western actor Terence Hill, including those piercing blue eyes that always look amused. And his clothes. He dresses like a hippy punk, a real stylish character. He sees me notice his strange walk and says:

  —I have no toes.

  —Fuck. I pause. He keeps walking. I catch up: What happened?

  —Burned, brother, right up to my knees … look.

  He stops, puts his left hand on my shoulder, stoops over and pulls up a jeans leg. Above the Doc Martens his calf looks like Freddy Krueger.

  —Don’t ask me how it happened, okay, man.

  ——

  I’ve spent the last couple of months of school sitting under Reuben and Maz’s house listening to AC/DC blaring on a tinny cassette player and reading Reuben’s library. I’ve heard multiple stories about what happened to Reuben. It hasn’t come up again. He spends hours under the house shaving calluses off his scarred feet with a butterfly knife. He massages sorbolene cream into them from an enormous tub. I stop noticing his feet, like you stop noticing someone’s huge nose after you’ve known them for a while. He rolls perpetual joints from a stash of weed he keeps in a hollowed-out dictionary.

  We catch a bus into the city and go to Cafe Nova. We play chess and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and read the magazines they leave on the tables. Gigolo arrives at Reuben’s house unannounced – an unusual thing, as Gigolo always plays the host, never the guest. Maz’s dad has a three-quarter-size pool table down there in the cool, and a bar fridge and a bunch of couches.

  Reuben and Gigolo get along very well. They out-boast each other, talking big numbers of chicks each of them has fucked. I’ve spent a lot of time studying Gigolo’s method with girls. At a dance, or a party, he picks a girl, stares at her until she gets the idea, then he walks up, grabs her and starts kissing. Nine out of ten kiss back, after the initial shock. I put this down to twenty per cent style and eighty per cent celebrity status. I modify it somewhat. Talk to the girl – then I let her notice me get all distracted by her mouth, like I want to kiss her. She either gets all hot and bothered or not. If so, we kiss awhile, then I say what a shame you have stockings on. Reuben just goes right ahead with his silver tongue and charms girls out of their panties. He dead-serious tells them how attractive he finds them. Right in front of their boyfriends, too. Sure enough, at a party or whatever, the chick’ll rubberneck Reuben all evening. As I said earlier, the dude has handsome on his side. The boy can fight, too, and his swagger subtly points this out to potential aggressors.

  When Reuben came around to my house, my mother took one look and instantly despised him, forbade me to keep his company. She now acts all interested in my whereabouts. Before I met Reuben, darkness could easily have fallen before I got home from school and she wouldn’t question me. Now I keep getting the why so late, boy? What mischief will we hear about from your teachers next, son? Why do you stink of cigarettes, boy? If I simply say I stopped to talk with Reuben, she hits the roof and screams that she forbids me to associate with that criminal. She reckons Dad made enquiries at work and found out he means nothing but bad news.

  —A no-hoper crim, says Mum and folds her arms.

  I know the truth of it, though. Reuben smiles with his eyes. You don’t need to see his mouth. That disarms people. Everybody knows Aussies swear. No one swears more than Aussies. And no Aussie swears more than Reuben. Every adult instantly despises him.

  Mum hates him even more since I let him pierce my ears. Reuben has both of his ears pierced, unlike other boys, who only pierce their left. Reuben pierced both of mine, like real punks wear them. Mum offers to pay me if I take out the sleepers. She also offers to pay me to quit smoking.

  ——

  The school holidays have arrived and I’ve lost my freedom. I have to hang with my father. He has this notion that he’ll keep his eye on me the whole time. I figure he must have his bullshit hat on because he can’t take me to work at the police station. But on the first morning of the holidays he says he’s changed to the graveyard shift! I have to hang out with him all day, mowing the lawn a hundred times and fixing whipper-snippers and crap in his shed.

  At 8 pm we get into his police cruiser and go on patrol. If you’ve ever ridden in a police car, you’ll know how they smell. Police cars smell like the system, and nightmare factories. Cop cars don’t have carpet, only industrial vinyl, which gives off a petrochemical perfume that creeps up your nose and deep into your clothes. I have some fun, though, riding around in Dad’s patrol car. He lets me cuff myself when he busts kids who’ve snuck out to vandalise stuff or fuck in supermarket car parks. When he piles them into the back, they see me already in there, handcuffed. I look pretty bad.

  Tonight I outdid myself. I rubbed the label off a whiteboard marker with sandpaper in my dad’s shed. The whiteboard marker wipes right off the vinyl-clad seats. At a corner store my dad whoop-whoops a couple of kids from the housing estate throwing up tags on the phone box. They get in, swallowing hard, and see me, hands in lap, cuffed. After a while I produce the marker and tag the back of the driver’s seat. My real tag too, MR RISK, because by now everyone knows my tag. Damn well never seen more-impressed kids.

  Most of the time, though, I get bored as a worm. My dad and his partner, this fake jerk named Baz, talk in cop code or something, muffled, ignoring me.

  Tonight, a horrible motorbike accident on an overpass. You can see where the two dudes hit the guardrail. I sit in the car, staring at a helmet lying on the road. I gaze at it for about twenty minutes before noticing this Day of the Triffids–type stuff bleeding on the white lines of the road. Well … you get the picture. Dude’s head came right off. My dad spent most of the night there on the rail overpass and he forgot about me, sitting in the front seat, blue and red flashing on my paper face.

  ——

  We’ve driven carousel style around this city for five nights and over the radio a voice requests we return to the station. Palm Island needs cops in a hurry. A dispute has come to blows. For one glorious moment I smell freedom, my dad’s long arm letting go for the rest of the holidays. Nope. He tells me to pack enough undies for a week and off we go to the docks.

  On board the police boat. Seasick. I throw up the Big Rooster I had for lunch a month ago. Trying to read the last letter I received from Billie-Jean. You shouldn’t read on choppy seas. We only have to sail about sixty ks north-west of Townsville, but it’ll take easily a week to get out there with waves this big. The police boat lurches so the propeller comes out of the water. I hear Palm Island has nothing to do with paradise. For about a hundred years the government banished people out there: Aboriginals they considered troublesome, people of mixed blood.

  After a couple of hours the water calms down and turns cornflower blue, as clear as Billie-Jean’s eyes. The sun comes out, revealing little islands with no trees on them. Then we sail through an oil-rainbow and a haul of dead fish. The hull of the boat hits something and I rush over to have a look. A dead white goat swirls in the slip, one horn above the water like a cynical fin.

  Palm Island looks like a
ghetto built on a rubbish dump sticking out of a cesspit. Everything smashed and neglected in this world has come here to die. I lag to have a smoke. I pull out my pack and about a dozen Aboriginal girls materialise.

  —Gis a durrie, cuz. Carn, bro, a few say in unison.

  I offer my packet and it empties instantly.

  —We don’t see many white-boys here, cuz, says a thread-of-cotton girl with a serious bruise under her left eye.

  I manage to smile and then she says:

  —Wanna scrape, white-boy? Garn … gis a scrape.

  The girls titter and giggle. I feel pretty glad my dad and the other cops ahead on the boardwalk wait for me to catch up.

  I step over two dead dogs on the road outside the general store. Kids clop by on horses without saddles and kick cans in the street. I ask one of the cops what the girl meant by scrape and he laughs and reckons I made a good impression. Inside the general store the cashier sits in a cage with everything you can carry away without assistance. I ask for St Moritz but they don’t have St Moritz, only Longbeach menthol, and I hate Longbeach menthol. I settle for a twenty-pack and the dude says:

  —Six bucks, cuz.

  —Fucken six bucks! You only pay two dollars ten for a pack of thirties back on the mainland.

  The cashier goes to put the pack back on the shelf but I slap down six bucks.

  I leave the store and get in a police Land Rover with the others. We drive up a potted road past buildings which look like someone fought a war in them. The walls have random bricks missing or disintegrating, every space murdered with terrible graffiti. The police have a compound on a hill surrounded by thirty-foot-high fences with the tops leaning out and coiled with razor wire.

  I have to stay here all day, in this cop fortress. A cop named Gary shows me his video collection. Dude must have some cash, owning a video machine. After they leave, it takes me about thirty seconds to find his porn collection. I watch a couple of Color Climax videos. They star a dude named Long John Holmes, who has a monster cock. He looks bored most of the time. I can’t concentrate due to the noise from the pub down on the beach. I go out on the balcony to have a look but can’t see much on account of the palms. I go back in and watch some more porn but feel paranoid because they could come back any second and it’ll take me at least five minutes to get the videos back in the box and arranged how I found them under the bottom drawer in his bedroom. So I stash away the porn and go back to the balcony and smoke about ninety cigarettes before the Land Rover returns.

  The pub rocks all night, top-forty shit from the jukebox filling the air along with animal sounds, gunshots, screams and police cars roaring around. As our side of the planet turns back towards the sun, the pub still rages on. After hearing Billy Ocean sing ‘When the Going Gets Tough’ for the five thousandth time, I jump at the opportunity to have a look around the island.

  I truly wish I hadn’t. The rainforest has me in awe but I see extended families living in garden sheds, the kind you find in the suburbs for storing lawnmowers and pushbikes. Scattered through the trees, the corrugated metal gleams. When I get back down into the town, a riot has started at the pub because they’ve sold out of alcohol and a bunch of locals have made threats about burning the place down. I’ve spent all day worrying that I haven’t got a letter from Billie-Jean for several months. I write to her even though I risk crossing letters. When you cross letters, shit can get confusing.

  ——

  Back in Townsville. A week remains of the school holidays. I check on my bike and have a smoke and notice new green and gold school uniforms hanging on the line. They have Thuringowa High written in a circle with a green jumping kangaroo in the centre. I go inside, furious because this new school will have every pleb from the nearby housing estate in it. My damn parents and their obsession with convenience have again reduced my social status.

  7

  The first day of school, 1987. Reuben and I walk together. I piggyback him half the way. We stop about a dozen times so he can toke on the joint he has that won’t stay lit. He swears weed fixes his pain. He says a few days without weed and he catches fire inside. Then his lighter craps out. To make it worse it starts to rain. We arrive stoned as gargoyles, about twenty minutes late, and get sentenced to detention in the library. We sit. Presently I notice a face peering in with hands cupped up to the glass, trying to see through the tint. My heart drops clear down to my Vision Street Wear sneakers. Muddy! Muddy, the half-Aboriginal kid, who looks like an anorexic leather jacket dragged through broken windscreens and thorny interpersonal relationships. He sees us both notice him and mouths Fucken faggots. I knew that every kid on the Thuringowa side of the tracks would end up at this new school.

  At first break we come out of the library to find the entire school around our bags. Muddy stands over Reuben all filled up like a toad. I warned Reuben the notorious Muddy would pick a fight with him as soon as their paths crossed. Reuben shrugged it off. After all, he spent five years leading a gang on the streets of Sydney. Muddy steps forward and hisses:

  —C’mon, faggot new kid with ya poofter hair and ya faggot wristbands … Wotchya gonna do, cunt? Fucken slap me with ya fucken limp wrist, faggot? I’ll fuck up ya gaylord pretty-boy faggot face, faggot. And he takes an awkward swing at Reuben.

  With all the grace of Nureyev, Reuben sidesteps the punch and produces his butterfly knife, demonstrating some impressive handling skills.

  —He has a knife! about two hundred kids yell in unison.

  —Welllll, faggot cunt … Fucken tough cunt … Gonna fucken stab me, cunt. Go on then, ya cunt. DO IT!

  He throws a straight left arm into Reuben’s face, but, as he does, Reuben pulls his chin down and the fist connects with his forehead. Muddy’s knuckles crack and he screams. Then, in that instant, Reuben drops to one knee and drives the knife into Muddy’s ribs. A dull THUNK cuts through the stunned silence of the crowd. Everyone gasps. Muddy steps back and looks down at his Sweathog t-shirt. A tiny drop of blood appears. Then, like when you drip ink onto blotting paper, the blood spot swells to the size of a dinner plate. He lifts his shirt, pales. A spray of blood arcs from below his left nipple and disappears into the dust left by five hundred kids running away as fast as possible.

  From the opposite direction come the teachers, sprinting with ashen concern. The principal arrives first. Muddy rolls in the dirt, screaming he doesn’t want to die. Reuben sits cross-legged, watching. I stand there, not sure what to do. I don’t know why I didn’t run. The principal bellows:

  —WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

  Sirens closing in.

  The cops take Reuben aside and pretty soon they handcuff him. He does the perp-walk past all the shocked staff and assorted teachers. One of the cops says as they pass:

  —We intend to charge you with assault with a deadly weapon … and, mate, if I can determine any premeditation in my investigation of this matter, attempted murder.

  I get marched into the school office too. I watch Reuben from across the room, his face unmoved. A cop asks me what happened. I say:

  —Muddy always picks fights, and Reuben carries a knife because of his feet.

  The cop has no idea what I mean, so he ignores me.

  —Muddy’s beaten me up at least a dozen times!

  I show the cop a scar above my left eye, which I did not get from Muddy, but it adds effect. Then the bell rings and they let me go. At the front gates the entire school waits for me. Muddy’s little brother launches out of the crowd and punches me in the face.

  —Ya gave that cunt a knife to try and kill me big brother, ya faggot! he screams at me as I roll in the gravel. A couple of stinky sneakered feet kick me in the ribs.

  —I didn’t give him the knife! I say, trying to rise.

  —Ya did, cunt. Ya threatened to stab Robbo, with the same fucken knife, ya poofter.

  I did in fact threaten to stab Robbo, a non
descript slinky waste of space three years ago, in Year Eight. He punched me as the starter gun fired for a fifty-metre freestyle race. I could have drowned. But I never pulled a knife on him.

  Despite the obvious trauma in my countenance – the fat lip, a black eye and the way I favour my ribs – I hope my parents will remain none the wiser about the day’s events. But as I drag myself through the front door and throw myself on the couch, my mother’s face betrays otherwise. She looks vindicated. She claims she had a mother’s intuition all along. Reuben comes from the Devil. Again she expressly forbids me to ever spend another second in the company of that delinquent. She doesn’t notice my beaten face.

  ——

  A cop car outside our house. It doesn’t park where Dad parks. Two policemen knock on the front door and serve me a summons, to appear as witness for the prosecution against Reuben. How did I end up a witness for the prosecution, considering the rumours that infect school that I gave the knife to the dude who almost killed Muddy? The court date looms only a couple of months away. Now my parents and the police expressly forbid I seek Reuben’s company. I just want to write poems and have sex. A poem for each girl.

  8

  Two tramp preachers come to stay. They get my room, because it has two single beds. Both of them go by the name of Bruce: Bruce the Elder and Bruce the Younger. This first Bruce, the year I fucked Billie-Jean, promised my dad he’d put the fear of God in me. The same creep I saw in Greenvale watching a boy in the shower. The smile of the Devil, he said about me. I hate this man. But my hatred for him soon pales, eclipsed by my hatred for Bruce the Younger. They put their bibles on my desk and hang their suits in my wardrobe.