Boyhoodlum Read online

  If I was downstairs first I would have the crust, toasted crisp, covered with melted butter and piebald with Vegemite. And the cream, yellowly pyramided in the neck of the bottle of milk. Froot Loops, Frosties, Coco Pops – cover guano with sugar and I’d scarf it down.

  Some mornings I would find Dad in the kitchen sitting on his stool at the marble slab running an electric shaver across his face absently, its teeth grinding on his bristles while he read the paper. I would climb up on his knee and we would turn to the comic page where Lil’ Abner, outrageously muscled, would crush a robber before trying to evade the congratulatory kisses of a blonde girl with enormous, mesmeric breasts; and Little Sport, a local dumbo, would lose out on a pretty girl; and Ginger Meggs and Dennis the Menace would, coincidentally, end up in the last panel of their different strips across a parent’s knees having their bottoms spanked with a spoon or brush and great poufs of dust rising off them like sin. On days when these two were beaten I turned the page quickly so Dad couldn’t see how the parents of famous, ne’er-do-wells dealt with them.

  I would turn around in Dad’s lap and wrap my arms around his massive head and take a few good whiffs of him, because in the morning he combed Yardley English Lavender Brilliantine through his hair. This delicious smell faded through the course of the day, so it was best to smell him early.

  On Friday nights he would come home from drinking with his friends at The Shepparton Club. He’d lie in front of the TV with us and laugh at fatheaded movies. Francis the Talking Mule, Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, these were nothing for a man of Law to laugh at. They were slapsticks and goggle-eyed misadventures designed to break kids free of circumstance and sensibleness. Dad would laugh at our laughter, getting a kick out of our crazy giggles. Nobody had a better dad than that. Red-faced and laughing – poking me in the ribs amping my hilarity off the charts. Nobody. As a family we were gifted at fleeing into hilarity. Dad gave us that licence. Dad gave us that gift.

  Dinner has been eaten, the washing-up done, and we are in the living room. As the opening credits to Rawhide rise across the black-and-white screen and Guy and Debbie and Vicki settle in for Western adventures, negotiations with my mother are lost. She will not have a six year old witness gunplay. Nor does she admire the low-cut blouses of the floozies who inhabit cowboy Arizona. I trudge from the living room in my orange seersucker shorty pyjamas and chains of self-pity on my way to bed.

  But, wait. There is one sanctuary before that upstairs exile. The crack of light under my father’s study door. In there, I know, he sits at his desk in a cone of lamplight glum before the Law; applicants and affidavits and appeals and heretofores and extra-judicial proceedings, and plaintiffs and summonses and subpoenas populating the range of open books across his desk.

  During World War Two he had gone to Melbourne University. The Law faculty there was a gilded finishing school that readied bright minds for a worthy life where the future was wide and well lit. The Law must have seemed a purposeful, bountiful calling then. One sees that faculty’s alumni carrying their chins high. But now, here he sits in midlife, mired in endless human contention. The Law, it turns out, is an infinitely barred cage built to contain the seven deathless beasts of Sin.

  I open the door slightly, quietly, and peek in at him before I knock, because this way I get to see his face light with smile when he hears the knock and knows I have come. He is always glad to see me. And I feel important rescuing him from the Law for a brief ride with the Geebung boys. ‘Hello, Boyboy. You want me to read a poem?’

  ‘“The Geebung Polo Club”.’

  ‘Okay.’ I climb into his lap and he pushes back the Law books and reaches for the red clothbound hardback volume of Banjo Paterson’s Collected Poetical Works. As he opens it the sarcophagal whiff of a venerable obsolete world coils forth. Together we flip past ‘The Man from Ironbark’, past ‘Saltbush Bill J. P.’.

  ‘It was somewhere up the country in a land of rock and scrub.’

  I listen to the poem and am fascinated again; a moth drawn to light always, by the way those players will sacrifice all for glory. And I’m mortified as the Captain of the Geebungs strikes at goal and misses and tumbles off and dies. Though I knew he would do exactly that, because he always does exactly that.

  But the drama inside the poem is nothing to the changes it rings in Dad. And it’s these changes I come looking for every night. As he reads his eyes shine with a passionate light and his voice lowers tone, and even so young I recognise that tone is involuntary, it is tracking and elucidating some unbounded adult wonder he is taken by. How does this happen? How can these little rhyming stories bring a man so easily from the greyland of Law to this wide wonderful plain dotted with heroes and gravestones?

  And I feel it happening to me too. A shortening of breath in my awe at the evils and braveries and beauties and sad endings. We are travellers together in a hallowed place. And Dad knows I get the wonder and am there with him, and I know he knows I get the wonder, which makes me proud, and there is no better place to be.

  As he reads the poems of Paterson and Lawson a holy mood settles over us. ‘One more, Dad. Pleeaase,’ I whisper. And before you know it he is reading all the favourites covering the laughter and lore of men.

  ‘What about Dan McGrew, Dad? Read Dan McGrew. Last one. Dangerous Dan McGrew.’ And Dad takes up that small black volume of poems by Robert Service, and a stranger whose day is done staggers into a Yukon saloon from the great alone and sits at the piano and plays a music that opens up a vast emptiness to the listeners. When the song is finished the stranger tells the bar, ‘… one of you is a hound from Hell … and that one is Dan McGrew.’ And the lights go out and guns blaze and when they come back on The Lady That’s Known as Lou, Dangerous Dan McGrew’s lover, has taken the dead stranger in her arms, and Dad’s voice has now thickened, lowered to its profound vocal nadir, a husky quavering whisper, and again this isn’t voluntary, there is some wonder awash in this man causing this, and it crosses from him to me and I’m thrilled at the duplicity and complexity of people but even more thrilled by the eventual (so eventual as to be post-mortem) faithfulness of The Lady That’s Known as Lou.

  ‘Dad, was The Lady That’s Known as Lou the stranger’s wife?’

  ‘Almost certainly, Boyboy.’

  And by now Rawhide is over. I hear the voices of my siblings as they wrestle and race up the stairs for the bathroom, the girls protesting that Guy has shoved them and hauled them back by their hair. Mum finds us in the study and says, ‘Oh, come on, you two.’ Then to Dad, ‘He should be asleep by now.’ And the tinkling music of the saloon goes silent and that world falls away. But I know it is there. I know Dad and I can go back.

  Later, lying in bed, oblongs of light thrown up on the wall through the grapevine lattice by a downstairs bulb, with the thrill of the reading gone, but the vivid memory of that thrill a thrill itself, I think about the little worlds inside the poems and begin to see the silhouette of the god that stood behind each. A writer made these. A writer got each of these worlds to play just as it did. What other thing could a grown-up person do that was more beautiful than this? Or more important? I had seen the plaintiffs and subpoenas of the Law hunch my Dad into a low morbidity. And I had seen poets draw him up and make him big again and reanimate his smile. The timbre of his voice was proof enough of the magic of stories. I would be a writer.

  The first time I remember my imagination taking me beyond the normal behaviour of children was when I assassinated the Cisco Kid. He was a TV vaquero, a Mexican cowboy in skin-tight black suit and wide sombrero all set about with fancy silver stitching. He rode with a delightfully jovial sidekick named Pancho he had clearly stolen from Don Quixote. For a half hour each afternoon, out there among the cactus, he righted wrongs, made fools of robbers, and shot rustlers’ hats off from unlikely distances. Sometimes he ran his gloved fingers down the quivering cheek of a homesteader’s wife.

  One night, while I lay in my bed in a comfortable slumbe
r hugging my companions – Dog Scotty, a stuffed pooch with a fetching tartan saddle, and Raa Raa, the mangy remnants of a cot blanket that I constantly stroked on my upper lip – that immoral vaquero made off with my mother. That thin-hipped greaser. He enticed her from our house with a secret call like that of the brushtail possum. Shkrar … krar … krar … krar … She rode on the back of his horse to his hideout, where she lay by his campfire as he stroked her elfin hairdo and the willy-wagtail called into the New Mexico night. She loved him, it was clear.

  I woke next morning with my first broken heart. Our world, our happy family, was revealed as a fragile shell, liable to be crushed by the first showboating gunslinger to come along, such was my mother’s wanton character. She had ditched me for a pretty boy on a dancing horse. As I dressed, my sorrow turned to anger. I had been a good son. I sliced the beans when she wanted the beans sliced. And Dad had been a good husband. Yet she rode off with the first filigreed vaquero to enter my dreams. Hussy. Deserter.

  When I went downstairs to the kitchen she said, ‘Morning, Boyboy.’ I didn’t answer. I objected to her familiarity – carrying on as if nothing had happened. She probably interpreted this as my normal early-morning sullenness. She was in a yellow dress, looking pretty, a sparkle of new love in her eyes.

  ‘What will you have for breakfast? Weet-Bix? Patty on toast?’ Patty was paté, but we called it patty because paté sounded stupid. ‘What about an egg? Hello … Hello …’ She tickled my earlobe with the redly painted nail of her index finger.

  I didn’t speak to Mum for a week. Slowly the dream was wearing off. My heartbreak had begun to ease and my hatred of the Kid was waning. I didn’t really want to do it. But I had made a pact with myself. A man had his honour. There were lines that, once crossed, could not be recrossed without a debt of blood being paid.

  Guy was away at boarding school. His room was a museum of boyish idiocy; of self-tanned snakeskins and fox and rabbit pelts, weapons, whips, war books and cowboy hats. I found his Webley & Scott air rifle in his wardrobe behind an ammunition box filled with what looked like cat skulls. To cock its mighty spring I had to put the end of the barrel on the floor and fold my hands on the butt and place it against my chest and pitch my whole body weight on it, lower and lower, bending the gun beneath me until the spring caught at full stretch. Huffing with exertion I pinched a slug between thumb and forefinger and inserted it into the top of the barrel and slammed the gun closed. It was cocked and loaded and fully as tall as I was. I hefted it and smiled, knowing I held my adversary’s life in my hands.

  I sat on my yellow vinyl pouf in front of our TV, a wood-bodied behemoth on skinny legs, a twenty-four-inch colourless window into post-war America. I laid Guy’s air rifle across my lap and slid my left hand up and down its wood stock nervously, in a noble gunfighter’s purgatory, waiting for Cisco to make the first move.

  I wouldn’t shoot him in the back and I wouldn’t shoot him while he was talking to a storekeeper or flipping silver dollars to Mexican waifs. But there would come a moment for gunplay. There always came a moment for gunplay. It was all the West had by way of justice or story endings. Clinical gunplay was the gift Cisco offered that world … when he wasn’t spiriting mothers away from happy homes.

  He appeared disguised as a fancy gambler sitting in a stagecoach, pretending not to be the greatest gunfighter in the West and a scourge to dishonest scum. Pancho sat beside him in a bonnet disguised as an ugly widow. Whenever disguises were required Pancho promptly frocked up as a hag. I found this vexing. He could just as well have donned overalls and been a farmer or got into a silk waistcoat and sold some wonderful new snake oil to suckers.

  Anyway, the coach stopped at a stream to water the horses, and the robbers, whooping and yelping like the Indians on this show whooped and yelped, galloped down from a pass and Cisco pulled his gun from the back of his pants. But I pulled mine first. ‘Have this, greaser.’ I pulled the trigger and the gun flinched and gave a mechanical yap. I think I got him in the breadbasket, and would have been gratified to see him pirouette on his bootheels and gasp, ‘Ahhh … right in the breadbasket.’ But the screen vanished before he could flinch.

  The TV imploded. Interestingly, it turns out that a TV implosion is only the first act of a TV explosion. A collapse that ricochets back from itself radially, rejuvenated and nasty. Shit flew everywhere. And I remember thinking, as my reflexes flipped me backward off the pouf, that maybe my marksmanship wasn’t so good, maybe I hadn’t hit Cisco in the breadbasket, maybe I’d hit the stick of dynamite one of the whooping robbers was brandishing. If I had, and if I had been aiming at that stick of TNT, then my marksmanship was really something. I began to suspect I had, secretly, been aiming at it. In months to come I knew I had.

  But now the TV stood gutted on its skinny legs wrapped in the smoke of its own history, all its many stories and programs wreathing about it in a glittery dust. I saw Wilma Flintstone’s face in the air, Jeannie reclining with her bare midriff, Rin Tin Tin leaping holographically at a shimmering wolf, Max Smart frowning at me in vague recognition, as if I was a kindred dolt. Glass was all across the floor. Pretty shards of electricity were caroming around the empty innards of the set.

  When Mum burst in I was under the dining-room table hiding in a copse of chair legs. I pushed the gun back against the wall with my feet and spread Raa Raa on top of it. I didn’t think it was needed now that Cisco and his compatriots and enemies were dead and the whole state of New Mexico lay in ruins. She found me there stunned and wordless and stood me up and looked me up and down for damage and finding none picked me up and hugged me to her. ‘What happened, Boyboy?’

  ‘I was watching The Cis … The Flintstones and the TV blew up.’

  ‘Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.’ She was shaking, almost crying, with fear. Over her shoulder I looked at the smoking black husk and mouthed, ‘Arrivederci, Cisco.’

  She sat me at the kitchen table and made me a cup of Akta-Vite. Then she rang the office. Since Guy had gone away to boarding school, whenever she needed to speak to Dad during working hours it was usually about me.

  ‘Hello, Rhonda. Put me through to Mr Graeme.’ Cameron and Cameron was, at this stage, a partnership made up of three male Cameron lawyers. The employees could obviously only call one of them Mr Cameron, and that was naturally enough my dad’s dad, old Pa. They called Uncle Bruce ‘Mr Bruce’, and they called Dad ‘Mr Graeme’. But all their wives were called Mrs Cameron, sometimes necessitating a clarification such as ‘Mr Graeme’s Mrs Cameron is on line one.’

  ‘Mr Graeme’s with a client, Mrs Cameron.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s with a client, there’s been an explosion.’

  ‘Ohh … is everybody … I’ll put you through.’

  Dad came straight home, knowing that, even discounting Mum’s colourful amplifications, something dangerous had happened to the TV. He unplugged the set and spun it around and looked at it from every side shaking his head with his anger building. Then he loaded it into the ute and said, ‘Come on, Boyboy. We’re off to see Bloomsy.’

  We drove down the street and parked outside Bob Bloomington’s Electrical Goods. Bloomsy had a comb-over and a leer and a reputation for supplying midday infidelities free with white goods he delivered to white housewives whose husbands were at work and susceptible to white-anting. When we walked in to his store he was telling a couple how a particular tumble dryer leavened and massaged the fibres in cashmere.

  ‘Bloomsy,’ Dad called across the shop.

  He looked at us testily and waved a hand to say he’d be with us soon, he was about to close a deal. ‘Bob,’ Dad shouted, ‘That twenty-four-inch Hi-Fidelity National Panasonic you sold us just blew up like a landmine. Nearly killed the boy.’ He pointed at me and I hung my head like some shell-shocked veteran and leaned on a dishwasher, a consumer maimed and affronted by Japanese junk. Bloomsy winced and couched low under this unexpected and grievous vilification. He made his apologies to the couple he was curren
tly lying to and hustled over to us.

  ‘What’s going on, Graeme? What explosion? The NP’s the best set in the whole world.’

  ‘Jesus, Bob. The thing’s a bomb. The kid could have been killed.’

  We took him outside where the gutted husk of the TV stood in the back of the ute. Bloomsy stared at it in alarm as if it was the vanguard of some vast treachery among electrical appliances. ‘Bloody hell, Graeme. Bloody hell.’ He reached out and touched the TV as a man will touch a fallen comrade. ‘That’s no good. That’s no good at all. Goodness me.’

  ‘No good? I’ll say it’s no good. You’ll kill someone selling this Japanese rubbish, Bloomsy. You’ll burn someone’s house down.’

  ‘Orr … no, Graeme. No risk there, I don’t think. It’s fire-rated.’

  ‘Happy to hear it. We’ll rule out a conflagration. But a piece of shit like this could kill you about five different ways.’

  ‘I don’t get it. We’ve never had any trouble with NP, Graeme. NP’s usually right as rain.’

  Bloomsy hauled the exploded television inside away from passing eyes. We followed him. I had begun to mutter and shake by now, with shell shock and the desire for a free TV. Bloomsy looked at me, chewing his bottom lip, and he looked at the blackened National and then at me again. Something wasn’t right. But because the TV had clearly blown up, and because Dad was a senior partner in the biggest law firm in town, he gave us the latest top-of-the-range thirty-inch Blaupunkt Space-Tone Surround Sound. The best TV in the world and the only one of its type in Shepparton, he said.

  I felt proud. I had assassinated the Cisco Kid, would-be lothario who’d stroked my mum’s hair by a campfire in a dream. And been rewarded with a new TV. Driving back home with our new Blaupunkt, I recalled the many lumbering gunslingers who had tried to bring Cisco down and I smiled involuntarily and said out loud, ‘So he went for his gun, but I drew mine first …’ Which was a line I liked from a Johnny Cash song.