I do this for six months, getting more tired and angry as the weeks roll by. Incrementally the Nazi adds more work to my duties. Originally I’d start at three and get home around midday – that stretches out to 1 pm, and a couple of times even 2 pm. Other dudes say think of the overtime you’ll get. An extra hour, when you begin at three, for twelve lousy bucks doesn’t incentivise me. I have huge dark circles under my eyes. I find myself yelling all the time.
One morning the boss screams more than usual. He throws an old dried-out ball of dough at one of his apprentices and it clocks him right under the eye – opens him up, too. The apprentice staggers around wailing and sheeting blood, which turns pale pink as it hits the flour-covered floor. Blood rain in moon dust. The Nazi yells at us, standing there gawping, to get our arses back to work or I’ll fire ze lot ov youz.
He tells me, when the sun passes midday and I go to clock out, that I’ve fallen down on my duties.
—Huh? My cigarette drooping in my lips.
—Zeus haz nit scrabbed ze potz! he bellows at me.
I’ve never had to scrub the pots in the last six months. Another dude clocks in every day as we all leave.
—I don’t …
—SCRAB ZE FARKUN POTZ!
—Fuck you, you Nazi cunt! I scream back.
Uh-oh.
He comes at me in a stride, left arm out shoulder height, elbow bent like in a parade, and he gets me in a headlock somehow. His forearms hard and cold as steel rails on a staircase. He drags me out of the kitchen and into the cafe. We burst out behind the counter and scare the shit out of the chicks. The customers recoil in horror as the door bangs open. He drags me behind the glass cases full of pies and sausage rolls and croissants and custard slices and lamingtons and gingerbread men. We knock over a wire bread stand with a crash. A bunch of families sitting around tables up in the window scream and trip over each other. He goosesteps me through the crowd, kicks open the door and throws me out into the street. The door slams behind me.
——
The rest of 1988 sees me back on Fulton’s couch and reading fortunes. I have a great future just waiting to happen to me.
——
The first few months of the new year don’t seem like the future yet. Rejected job applications pile up on my desk. Dad suggests I join him on a canoe trip he organised for a local Adventurers’ club, down the Burdekin River, from Greenvale to Charters Towers. He gets out these huge maps of Australia and lays them across Mum’s precious lace tablecloth, and then, when she shoos us out of the living room, we lay them out on the carpet in the lounge. We pore over them, trying to work out from the scale how many kilometres the river flows between departure and destination. It gets difficult because the river doglegs and turns back on itself in a couple of places, passes between hills and through valleys.
—I reckon it’ll take about five or six days, Dad says. Then he rubs his chin and looks at me with a hint of disappointment, like he does a lot lately.
Sometimes I feel pity for my parents – not often, but sometimes – sorry they have a child like me. I said to my mother once during an argument that I’ll never forgive her for getting me circumcised, that my recalcitrant attitude results from her karma. I can’t wear the blame for her wanting to bring a child into the world, because she wanted a baby, without consulting me. Of course she doesn’t know what the word karma means, or recalcitrant. She accused me of swearing at her, in Latin or something.
The prospect of returning to Greenvale for this canoe trip, the first visit since I left a few days short of twelve years old, fails to stimulate me much, but to keep the old man happy, and to take a break from the daily routine of hunting for work, I agree to go.
As soon as he starts looking pleased, I ask if I can take a friend. I owe Fulton a favour. I’ve smoked about two hundred packets of his cigarettes, because I have no money. Fulton hasn’t seen any more of Australia than the drive from the airport and the pushbike ride to school and Coles. I’ve entertained him countless times with tales of my wild boyhood in Greenvale. I invite him; he gets excited.
——
The more I think about it, the more this canoe trip down the Burdekin River sounds cool. It’ll do me good to get out from under the wires of the city and de-static my brain. Fulton has worked himself up about poisonous snakes and spiders and shit in the Australian outback. I explain that they sense people’s fear – if you don’t even think about them, they’ll not bother you at all. Then I throw some stuff in there about karma. If you don’t have bad karma, then the snakes’ll leave you alone. Fulton doesn’t buy this, however, and mouths off at me that snakes don’t give a flying fuck if you have a clear conscience. He might have it right, but I prefer to believe in karma. Worst thing that ever happened to me in the bush, that fucken yowie near scared me to literal death. I better not tell him the yowie story. At least until we get out there, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, as the fire dies and the dingoes circle in.
Fulton spends the night before we leave at my house, and we spend most of it fussing about with our canoe and duffel bags. He smokes a whole packet of cigarettes in about two hours, and paces nervously around the backyard. I fill up the canoe with water on the lawn, to see if any leaks out. It all seems pretty shipshape.
We get out on the highway at dawn, after stopping by the TAFE College to pick up the Adventurers. Most of them look about thirty, apart from a couple of older women and one real old dude who acts all sprightly but you can tell it exhausts him. Out of earshot I exclaim to Dad that the old dude looks like he might drop dead at the first hint of exertion, but Dad reckons the dude just looks old because of his alcoholism. Besides, he won’t join us on the water. He will drive the bus back from the river to the end of our journey at Charters Towers.
Dad has rented a bus that fits all thirteen people on board, and he has a huge trailer hooked up with six canoes and about eight hundred pieces of luggage strapped to the sides. Fulton and I don’t talk much – not that we could above the excited clamour of the tourists. The landscape starts looking all too familiar to me after a couple of hours. The eucalypts crowd in over the single-lane highway. The insect-screech rips through your head.
About four hours later we pull in to the servo at Greenvale to fuel up the bus. Then we roll into the town and all pile out for a counter lunch at the Three Rivers Hotel. When we’ve finished our schnitzels and chips, my old man says we have about half an hour, so I rush Fulton out of the pub and up the street towards the old police station and the house I grew up in.
The nickel mine has since closed down and the town looks dead – everything brown and crinkled, the chain mail fences all rusted and sagged in, signs creaking in the stifling wind. The supermarket has an open sign, but as we approach we see through the glass that only a couple of shelves in the cavernous space have anything on them. An ancient bored woman sucks on a cigarette in the doorway. I expect the old familiar welcome blast of the air-conditioning in the supermarket mall but it feels even hotter in here. The Fish-n-Chip Shoppe now offers only a black shape in the wall with dust and cobwebs up against the door. The mall smells like fetid cooking oil and stale potatoes. A sign leans up against the window. Out of Business, it reads.
We cut out the back and through the car park to the old school oval and the tennis courts. Now only a brown circle welcomes us. Someone has bulldozed the courts. We walk across the oval, growing taller with the billion prickles that attack our sneakers. We stand out on the old cricket pitch in the middle of the oval and I scuff around in the oiled dirt, surveying the horizon. The whole place has died. A crow crows from atop one of the lighting towers, which sags dangerously. We go through the gates, which hang off their hinges, and up the path towards the school. A tramp has fallen asleep on a bench in the shade underneath the building. Everything has shrunk. I feel sure it used to take at least five minutes to walk from the oval, but now we cover the ground in ab
out twenty steps.
The quiet blankets us. Fulton shudders, though the temperature has reached about a thousand degrees. This place once teemed with kids, green everywhere. Even the sky in my memories looked brighter. I rub the dirt off a window and peer into the classroom I spent seven years of my life plotting to escape. The room now looks about the size of a broom closet.
—See that aluminium siding there? I say to Fulton, who joins me at the window: I kicked it all the time, by my desk right there, and one day it sprung up and this teacher tripped over it. She broke her arm!
—Brutal, says Fulton, out of the corner of his mouth, sucks on a cigarette.
We wander past the quadrangle, where all the picnic tables have yellow umbrellas blown off them, the concrete mouldy from the rain and the heat. We go out through the front gates to my old house, which sits right outside the school. Obviously the new cop lives there. The grass shimmers all fresh and green, and we can see clothes on the line down the side. We get around to the parallel street and a shiny grey police-issue Toyota sits at the front of the police station. We cut across the park where years ago I sliced my toe on a piece of glass and had all those memories about circumcision. Back up the street we pass the swimming pool. The bushes and trees which obscured the pool beyond the fence have all wilted and died. The pool has no water in it but a shirtless man fusses about over by the diving blocks, doing something with the tiles.
—What a fucken dump! says Fulton, kicking a crumpled Coke can.
—Yeah, I offer to the murder of crows watching us from the lifeless electrical wires.
The tourists fidget in the bus, waiting for us. Frowns and grumbles as we board.
—Get me outta here, I say to Dad as he adjusts the driver’s seat.
The bus pulls out of the town and across the bridge over Redbank Creek towards the cattle station Lucky Downs, which nestles right up against the Burdekin River. Dad estimates it’ll take us five days to row all the way down the Burdekin to Charters Towers, where the three-hundred-year-old alcoholic will meet us with the bus. So we get to the spot where we will set off and start unloading the bus and getting the canoes off the trailer. The bus roars off in the dust, the old bony fellow perched up there in the seat like a skeleton in a chariot. A couple of the keener dudes get in their canoe and shove off, despite my dad’s massive talk about all sticking together for safety, blah blah blah.
——
We slink along the river. The water doesn’t have any rapids for the first part, so Fulton and I get out in the middle in our canoe and kick back, saying stuff like this feels like real living and fuck city life, generally talking shit. We smoke and yawn and laugh at a couple of the dudes who ram into a sandbar and get stuck there as we all drift down the river in front of them. Only occasionally do we have to get busy with the oars to navigate a bend in the river or a tree leaning out over the water. Fulton fusses about, trying to drag his knapsack from the bow of the canoe, complaining about hunger every ten damn minutes.
By and by Dad shouts back that we should break for lunch. We careen over to a sand island in the middle of the river. We break for about an hour and then prepare to get further downstream and set up camp before night sets in. Everyone pushes off. Fulton and I hang back to finish our cigarettes. We get in, last on the water. About fifty metres down the river the dudes in front of us shout back:
—Look out for the log!
—What log? I yell across the water, as Fulton says:
—Oh shit!
I look over his shoulder and see a limb sticking out of the water at a forty-five-degree angle from the depths. Only a small white crest reveals it. Fulton furiously paddles right as I madly paddle left. We approach the broken bough sideways, about midway on the canoe. This doesn’t feel good. The current slams us into it and it cracks right through the fibreglass. The strength of the river breaks the canoe in half, and we go under. I get my head above water and look back upstream as Fulton surfaces screaming. All of our supplies – our cigarettes and our food for the five days – vanish. Half the canoe bobs up. We drag ourselves out of the river and onto the sand, in shock. We see my dad paddling hard against the current, back to where we sit on the riverbank.
—Mates! Dad says, stepping out of his canoe, his travelling companion smirking at us from behind him: This ends your trip!
Feeling shocked as I do, I haven’t thought about that. A thousand kilometres from anywhere – how the fuck will we get back? Only room for two in each canoe. I shake my head, trying to get the water out of my ears instead of answering. Fulton looks ready to burst into tears.
—Mate, says my dad, looking back down the river as a faint shout of should we wait comes with the breeze over the water. Canoes like chaotic flies in the distance: Mate, he says again: about ten to fifteen ks through those trees you’ll find Greenvale Station … Keep the river behind you, walk in a straight line. Tell them your name, what happened and ask for a lift to Lucky Downs.
—But …
—No, listen to me, boy. When you get to Lucky Downs, call your mother. You’ll have to stay there until I get down to the bottom of the river. We’ll work out how to get you back to Townsville after that, okay?
And then he gets back in the canoe and pushes off.
—But … I yell after him.
—What? he yells back, cupping his ear.
I turn to Fulton. He sits there like a drowned lamb. The arid landscape closes in.
—Welcome to Australia, I say, trying to force a grin.
Nothing then. The river sliding by, bird calls, the fucken cicadas. We might die out here. Will notifying Fulton of this possibility goad him into action or freeze him with terror?
—Right then! I say, clapping three times.
Fulton squeals as I clap.
—Christ! I shout: Stop acting like a poof!
—We might die out here! he moans at me.
—Nah, I say: I grew up in this shit. Drink up, and let’s go.
Fulton drags himself on his bum over to the river’s edge and gingerly cups some water in his hand. Sniffs at it, takes a sip and screws up his nose.
—Dude, I say, gesturing at the river: water doesn’t come any fresher than this, for fuck’s sake.
He gulps down water like he has crawled out of a desert.
—Don’t fucken gulp it, sip it … But don’t take for fucken ever. The dark will come in a few hours and we gotta walk for at least that many.
I can’t wait until it dawns on Fulton that all our cigarettes drowned. No one I know smokes more cigarettes than he does.
This bush terrifies me. I feel one hundred per cent certain yowies live here. You get immersed in thickets of ghost-gum saplings, kilometres of them all crammed together like brigades on parade. Your eyes play tricks on you: flashes of light alternate with different densities of foliage. Sometimes you swear you see something dart between the trees and you feel smaller and more scared than a newborn. Your hands swell up from the heat and feel all stiff. We walk like this, single file through the bush, me in front, Fulton puffing behind. My old man said ten or fifteen kilometres, which I consider a pretty shithouse estimate.
After forever my eyes get dry and burny from looking out for yowies, snakes, spiders, surprise ravines, goannas and emus, in that order of concern. Although getting your face torn off by an emu should rate second after the yowies taking out your guts. If I see an emu, I’ll use this technique an old-timer taught me. If it looks like it wants to tear you a new arsehole, you pick up the biggest stick you can find and hold it above your head, so you look ten feet tall to the emu. It’ll back away, apparently.
Soon the shadows lengthen, the light gets red through the thickets and the cicadas shred the air.
—Fuck, I say.
—What?
—The darkness comes.
—Do ya hafta say it like that, ya cunt? splutters Ful
ton.
I laugh, but it feels forced. I swallow. Even though the cicadas shriek like stepped-on guinea pigs, the bush closes in still and eldritch. Fulton hears me swallow. He looks concerned now.
—I need a smoke, he says.
—Uh-oh, I reply.
—What? says Fulton.
I hold my hands up, framing where we stand, in the middle of fucken nowhere.
—Oh, man, says Fulton, realising we have no cigarettes.
We walk in silence through the trees. As I worry we’ll have to spend the night out here, I spot a gleam through the scrub. We push on. An old corrugated-iron drover’s shed stands in a clearing, ghost gums and paperbarks towering above. The iron has rusted and creaks in the breeze.
—A shed, out here? Fulton says.
—A drover’s shed … cattle musterer’s camp … It’ll have beds and shit. Hopefully no snakes! Might even find tinned food and water.
I creep up to the shed. I don’t know why I creep, but I do, and I peer through a split in the iron. My eyes adjust to the darkness and I see a body lying on a bed chained to one of the walls! I completely freak out. This rush of adrenalin, like someone strapped a rocket to my arse, has me flailing about like a madman. I turn on my heel and run headlong into Fulton, who, seeing the fear in my eyes, screams, Fuuuuuuuck … hellllllp! and bolts as fast as his fat little legs will take him. We get about a hundred metres through the trees, crashing through bushes, when we hear a man’s voice shout:
—Oi, oi, boys!
I turn and see a bent-over farmer standing in the doorway of the shed, laughing his heart out, rubbing his back. I return to the shed, ears burning. Fulton lags behind.
—Old man Davidson, says the farmer, and he juts out a gnarly beaten-up-looking hand.
We shake and I say:
Scoundrel Days Page 11