After dinner they crowd around the sink, helping to wash the dishes, with their fake sincerity and pious conversation. I slip out and climb up on the roof of the garden shed, to exhale in the breeze. The two Bruces know I smoke. Bruce the Younger, a balding thirty-something who owns an awesome pushbike, encourages me to take rides with him along the river. To increase your fitness, he says, flicking his blonde comb-over as he flexes his biceps while changing a tyre. He favours ten-speed bikes, racing style, with thin tyres. I like BMX bikes. If I bunny-hop a gutter on a ten-speed, the rims buckle.
His electric typewriter with disposable ribbons piques my interest. Despite its name, my Remington Noiseless 8 typewriter, which I got from a second-hand store, makes me pretty unpopular with my family, and the neighbours. If I sit in my room hammering out a poem past midnight, people three houses away scream for me to shut the fuck up. Bruce loans me his typewriter when he realises I favour intellect-based machines. I can sit out in the lounge room and write all night, with only a dull clack which disturbs no one. He says:
—When the ribbon runs out, simply throw the cartridge away! He hands me a packet of spare ribbon cartridges.
I love the writing of William Burroughs. He used what they call an aleatory literary technique. He’d get a sheet of typed-up writing and cut it into strips. Then, relying only on chance, he’d rearrange the words into an entirely new text. When you use an electric typewriter with disposable ribbons, the words appear on the ribbon in a continuous stream, no spaces. I go through a couple of the ribbons typing up poems from my notebook. Then I break open the cartridges and cut the plastic ribbons into ten-centimetre strips. I arrange the ribbons into an A4-size block on the carpet and hope for some genius sentences.
I notice a couple of times that Bruce the Younger smells like my Yves Saint Laurent signature scent, not his regular Old Spice, which means the bastard has gone through my cupboards. He comes into the bathroom while I shower, saying he needs to comb his hair, that his room has no mirror. I get ready to punch his face if he peeks around the curtain. He strikes masculine poses and acts all manly, flexes in the mirror, grabs at his balls. I tell Mum I feel pretty uncomfortable. She says Workers have right of way in our house. They speak for the Lord.
Feral alights from his bike in front of my house and says:
—Don’t let Bruce the Younger take you camping, even if your mother makes you.
—Why? I ask.
—Trust me, he says and rides away.
——
Tonight I sneak out later than usual for a cigarette and climb the shed.
A sliver of light like Sauron’s eye shines across the lawn. The Bruces haven’t shut my bedroom curtains properly. I adjust my position and expect to catch sight of a couple of old dudes with skin like curdled milk on their knees praying. Instead, Bruce the Younger, indeed on his knees, has Bruce the Elder’s cock in his mouth. I shake my head in disbelief. My cigarette drops from between my lips, down into Mum’s roses. I shut my eyes, open and refocus in time to see the Elder’s sperm hitting the Younger’s glasses.
—Mum, I say, at breakfast: Last night I saw the two Bruces sucking cock.
Her wedding ring leaves a tear-shaped mark under my eye.
I seek refuge at Feral’s house. We sit in the backyard, trying to sneak a cigarette. I say:
—I saw the two Bruces sucking cock.
Feral looks nervous. His mother comes into the garden with a jug of Coke. She chirps at me while looking at him:
—Have you gone camping with young Bruce yet? Joe went last weekend and had a fantastic time … Didn’t you, Joe?
He looks interested in something on the ground, ears like sunsets. His mum puts the jug down on the garden table and disappears among the plants.
—What the fuck happened, Feral? I ask, concerned.
—Nothing, man, nothing! Why would anything fucken happen? Fuck. We camped, swam, rode bikes. He talked God at me the whole weekend. He lights a cigarette, sucks half of it down in one drag. Pales.
—I reckon that sick fuck likes boys. Even younger than us, I say.
—Naaaw … doubt it … ya BS-ing me … You reckon ya saw em sucking cock? How d’ya make the leap from him blowing the dong to him liking young boys?
—He put the make on me a couple of times … Real subtle, but unless you have the brain of a fucken plebeian, you get the picture. I saw the Elder dump his load on the Younger’s glasses, and the creep licked them clean … No way I would bullshit you about it. My fucken mother won’t believe me … Slapped me right in the face when I told her what I saw. I’ll have to run away. I mean … man … I feel like I’ve lost trust in my own family.
When I get home, intending to pack some bags and bail, my mother sits waiting for me on the porch. Straight up she rips into me, demands to know why I’d say such evil things about the tramp preachers. I shove past and kick open my bedroom door, not giving a single damn if they sit in there with God himself. I have the room to myself. I storm about, gathering up my prized possessions: books, pens, knives and letters from Billie-Jean. I shove Bruce the Younger’s typewriter across my desk to get my pencil tin, and then I see it. On the ribbon in the typewriter, this sentence:
Iwanttogiveyouabirthdaypresent.Howoldnow?8,right?IlovehowyouloveitwhenIcuminyourmouth
I eject the cartridge and smash it on the carpet with a wooden horse-head bookend. I reel out the sentence, revealing more pornographic musings:
well,nexttimeIwillshowyouwhatitfeelsliketotakeitinthearse.TheenclosedphotosofmycockshowhowexcitedIgetwhenIthinkofallthetimeswegotnudetogether.
I go to the kitchen, where my mother has pulled up a chair and strains on tippy toes, trying to get down the Discipline Stick from the crockery cupboard. I read. Her shock turns to disgust as I drone on and on, wheeling out the filth on the ribbon cog. She puts up her hand and I stop. She looks drunk, or sick. She leaves the kitchen. I follow, taunting her:
—Do you believe me now then?
She storms into my room and starts tearing Bruce the Younger’s cupboard apart. She pulls out a grey vinyl briefcase, tries the clasps. Locked.
—Mum … I can pick that lock.
But she ignores me, smashes it on the windowsill, the end of the bed, the doorframe. It bursts open the same time the handle comes off. An arc of photographs, glossy magazines and letters fan across the room.
—I knew … I felt it … something not right about him! she says to herself.
—Both of em, Mum. I saw the Elder getting his c— Well, what I told you I saw. But, as I say this, Mum’s already made it halfway down the hallway, looking ready to kill Bruce the Younger. She grabs the telephone. Hands shaking, she dials while standing there snatching horrified glances at the polaroids of little boys on the kitchen bench.
—Sue? Her voice quakes.
Sue, a fellow Friendly, and, as far as I know, Mum’s only actual friend.
—Sue, can you come over? … I … I can’t explain. No, no one hurt. Just come over, please.
—Mum, both the Bruces have some explaining to do, I say while she paces up and down in the lounge room: I saw the Elder perving through the window at a boy way back in Greenvale! The Younger comes into the bathroom when I shower. I think he raped Joe.
She keeps pacing, looking out the curtains. Sue’s car roars up the gravel driveway.
—Go to your room and wait, she says, hand on the doorknob.
Mum and Sue murmur in the kitchen. I hear Sue say:
—I knew it, but I didn’t have the gumption to raise my suspicions.
The screen door at the front of the house slams and I hear Bruce the Elder say:
—Evening!
An audible silence. Crows on the clothes line out back. Mum, voice shaking:
—Bruce … do you know about this?
Silence. A television somewhere.
I ca
n’t resist the scene any longer so I go down the hall to the kitchen. Mum holds a fistful of the polaroids and she waves them like a schoolmistress waving a secret note in the face of a student. The Elder’s face freezes, his eyes terrified.
—What? Disgusting! Where did you get those? He turns his back on us, opens the fridge. Mum swoops around and gets right up under his chin, tense as a prize-fighter. Sue also closes in. I stand in the kitchen doorway.
—He had them in his briefcase. Bruce. Do you know about this?
—Um … I suspected, but … I never … dreamed … I never imagined …
—MUM! I shout: I know he knows! I saw him getting his cock sucked!
Mum’s wedding ring splits my lip.
9
I leave home. I go to the house that Gigolo found on Love Lane. Gigolo lives somewhere else now and Reuben has already moved in. His dad and his new mum kicked him out the week of the stabbing. A naked girl lies sleeping on the floor and Reuben has passed out on the couch, also naked. I shove his shoulder to wake him up. He hugs me. The girl goes right on sleeping as I fill him in on all the stuff that’s gone down in the past few weeks. He doesn’t look surprised when I tell him I have to act as witness for the prosecution. He reckons this plays to our advantage; we can collaborate on our stories. I muse that the cops must have newt brains; they haven’t figured out our association. I tell him about the tramp preachers and how my parents didn’t report them to the cops. This makes him disgusted.
—Your parents didn’t believe you? Sent you right out into the ever-welcoming arms of the street, brother. There you will learn truth … capital T, Truth, about weapons and predators and living by your wits. I’ll go right over to your place now, brother, with that cricket bat over there, and I’ll turn those tramp preachers’ skulls to red mist on their pillows, if you want me to.
He has actual hatred manifested in his eyes, sneering his mouth.
——
The cops come and take me to court. I feel pretty glum, having to testify against my best friend.
We arrive at the courthouse in the city. The cops escort me up a flight of stone steps. We walk by a brass statue of Justice holding up the scales, blindfolded, upon which a billion pigeons have shat.
—Blind Justice. How can she examine the evidence? How does Justice know the scales balance if she can’t see the scales? I say to the cops.
They look at me. Both roll their eyes, laugh. Inside, the public prosecutor says to me:
—Tell me your statement.
—No fucken way. I already told the principal, the cops at the school, the cops at the cop station, my parents, my parents again, and you, four times. If you want to hear the story again, refer a couple of chapters back.
—You’ll have to tell it again on the witness stand, before the judge. If you fuck it up, or change it, you’ll make me look like a dickhead, mate, says the barrister.
—We wouldn’t want that, I intone.
I find the whole thing a relief actually – and not only because of the air-conditioning. Reuben looks real smart in a suit. He cut his hair, removed his piercings and dug out his walking stick, which he rarely uses, on account of his general pride. Muddy has done nothing to improve his appearance. His hair looks even greasier. He has a packet of cigs wrapped up in his t-shirt sleeve so it sits atop his shoulder, like regalia on the shoulder of the Bogan General.
The day drags on. They won’t let me sit in on the proceedings until after I’ve appeared. Finally they break for lunch. Reuben walks down the corridor towards me with his lawyer and winks. Muddy comes out with a bunch of Aboriginal people and cops, bringing with them the perfume of a cold library, walnut desks with vinyl tops, linseed and biro ink. Muddy wanders up to me where I sit waiting in the hall outside the courtroom.
—Wanna go play spacies down at Crime Zone? We got two hours for lunchbreak … fucken ace.
He means this place by the city mall called Time Zone, which buzzes with the opera of a thousand pinball machines. Bored kids spend countless Friday and Saturday nights stealing people’s milk change from front steps and meeting up at Crime Zone. It stays open twenty-four hours, the only place in the city that never closes. But I kind of fall into a bit of shock right there. Muddy acts like an old mate, with no bad blood! He has that way about him. Last year all us Year Ten kids went on a biology camp. The first day of the camp, sitting out there in the mangroves, I got on with sketching a big old crab that busied itself dragging a bit of seaweed into a hole, when Muddy walked up and punched me in the face, knocked me out. Then he helped me up and tried to wipe the blood off my acid-free drawing notebook, but it soaked right in there. All the while surveying his handiwork with a damaged look in his eyes, he said:
—No one else’ll pick on ya this camp … okay, mate. And he walked away.
I compose myself, stammer something and walk awkwardly out of the court building. I feel like an ibis who’s had one of its legs cut off with secateurs, half-proud that I walk beside the most deranged and famously bad kid in the whole city, but hobbled with fear that a mega-beating will rain down on me at any moment. We walk in silence out into the ringing heat, down the hill into the city mall. Then Muddy says:
—Ya mate, deadly cunt, ay … Fucken near killed me, the cunt, eh. Fucken … doctor … fucken … said, couple more millimetres and the blade woulda cut me heart clean in fucken half, ay.
—Fuck, really? I offer.
—Yeah. I’ll get him yet, he says, lighting a Winnie Red.
I let him beat me at Double Dragon multiple times, but I get bored and beat him a couple of times in a row. Expecting at any minute a fist that doesn’t come puts me in a stressed state and I sweat a lot. We drink a couple of Cokes and smoke his Winfield Reds. Presently we run out of twenty-cent coins. Usually when this happens I head off and jammy a Telecom phone box for change. To do this you need a simple butter knife. Not one of those old-fashioned ones with the faux bone handle and the flimsy blade, but a sturdy stainless-steel butter knife with a good handle. You jam the knife into the coin slot and, with your fist bunched over the handle, you hit it with your other fist, like a flesh hammer. Coins come bursting out of the return slot like a poker machine. I don’t know how it works and I don’t care. I learned this from Gigolo, who has it down to an art.
Countless nights I’ve snuck out with a butter knife and a football sock and hit half a dozen phone boxes on my way to having an adventure. Most of the cash goes on Double Dragon, Galaga, peppermint Aero bars, soft drink and smokes. Arcade machines give you three lives for twenty cents. A one-litre bottle of Coke costs eighty cents, and you can get twenty back if you don’t end up smashing the bottle.
So I open my mouth to suggest we do some phone boxes, but Muddy walks over to a group of young kids, obviously wagging school, all striking tough poses and smoking all wrong, crowded around a seat console playing Moon Patrol.
—Oi, cunts! hisses Muddy: Give us ya fucken money now, ya fucken little cunts. He randomly throws his fist into a kid’s face and knocks him back into his mates.
I make it to the door and up the street before Muddy comes flying out, a look of sick glee on his face, hauling a load of change in his t-shirt bunched up to his chest. The coins bounce and jangle and fall out the sides, clanging on the pavement as he runs. Muddy buys more Winnie Reds and two Cokes. He drinks them both.
We make it back to the court and into the fantastic air-conditioning. Before I know it, my turn has arrived. I walk down the rows of people sitting in silence in the courtroom and it feels like church – priests up the front, except they have stupid wigs and black robes, like a satanic mass. I feel a little worried. I get up and position myself in the box. The marshal comes over, clutching a bible.
—Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
—Yeah.
—I do! humphs the judge.
—I … I do.
The defence sizes me up, a gaunt-looking bloke with an Adam’s apple like he swallowed a gavel. His grey suit has yellow sweat patches under the arms. A pen leaked in the breast pocket once, a long time ago. What hair I imagine remains on his balding scalp under his lawyer wig he has bunched up into a grey mangy-looking pigtail. It lies like a deceased mouse across the collar at the back of his neck. I want to say I think his wig looks totally homosexual, but I refrain. He circles in, cheap stink, hands shaking.
—Who owns the knife with which the defendant stabbed the boy known colloquially as Muddy?
—Reuben owns the knife.
—I have heard otherwise … that in fact the knife belonged to another boy from Thuringowa State High School.
—Nope.
The judge clears his throat, which sounds like someone smothering a budgie in their armpit.
—I will establish, your honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my learned friends, the knife in exhibit A belongs to no other than the witness who now sits before us! He spins dramatically around as he addresses each group, and now he looks all sick and woozy. He takes a breath, exhales through his nose. I can see thick shiny hairs waggle like silver anemones in the salty caves of his nostrils.
—Nope, I say: Reuben had the knife when I met him. He uses it to shave the calluses off his feet.
We’ve arranged all of this, Reuben and I. Reuben, the game-theory expert, has determined that naturally the defence will try to prove he doesn’t own the knife. I’d implicate that he does own the knife, but for legitimate reasons. Following this Reuben meant to get his feet out to show the jury why he carries a knife, to shave the painful calluses that build up, because he wants to walk, like everyone else. But none of this eventuates, because when Muddy climbs into the stand and the Crown prosecutor asks him what he likes to do on weekends, trying to establish the countenance of a regular young man, Muddy says:
—I go down the … fucken … skating rink, ay, mate, and beat up young kids for change to play … fucken … spacies and buy smokes.
Scoundrel Days Page 8