Scoundrel Days Read online

  ‘Can’t remember the last time I read anything this gritty and compelling. Frazer doesn’t write like an angel. He writes like a demon. Scoundrel Days is one of the finest Australian works in years.’ Brett D’Arcy, author of The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks

  ‘With a poet’s eye for locating the marvellous within the commonplace and a novelist’s ear for the nuances and rhythms of natural speech, Brentley Frazer has crafted a unique narrative from the myths and rumours of life and a wild imagination. Scoundrel Days is fiercely original, inspirational, and will no doubt find a wide, varied readership.’ Anthony Lawrence, author of Headwaters and Bark

  ‘A true artist’s journey from blindness (or, what we call youth) into glimmerings of sight (coming of age). The writing is transcendent, and the writer lives in the tradition of the Beats, yet has managed to create something new through his use of the E-prime constraint.’ Venero Armanno, author of Black Mountain and The Dirty Beat

  ‘Brentley’s unconventionality, radicalism, aggression, schizophrenia, non-adaptability and sublimity with hallucinogenic scenes and pornographic moments is a bizarre mix of elements of neo-symbolism and post-romanticism, wrapped in a form of hypertext prose, and finds itself somewhere at the intersection of Burroughs, Breton, Rimbaud, Salinger and Ian Curtis.’ Tribuna Magazine

  Brentley Frazer is an Australian author whose poems, prose and academic papers have been published in numerous national and international anthologies, journals, magazines and other periodicals since 1992. He holds an MA (writing) from James Cook University and authored Scoundrel Days as part of a submission for a PhD in creative writing at Griffith University. He is also a lecturer at Griffith University and the editor-in-chief of Bareknuckle Poet Journal of Letters.

  www.brentley.com

  For my only Sunshine

  ~ ens causa sui ~

  Contents

  Part One: The Wreckers

  Part Two: Deadly Nureyev

  Part Three: Aftermath

  Part Four: North of Vortex

  Part Five: Lethe

  Part Six: Untitled Plane Crash

  Part Seven: Collapse

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  The Wreckers

  ————

  Go! if your ancient, but ignoble blood

  Has crept thro’ scoundrels ever since the flood.

  Alexander Pope

  1

  —January 1972. Soldiers. Blue heavy sheets flapping in the wind.

  Mum ignores me awhile, fussing with a brush, and then says:

  —The hospital had no roof. The cyclone blew it away. The army slung blue tarps across the rafters … But a newborn remembering birth? Impossible!

  I watch her reflection comb her long auburn hair.

  —Cyclone Althea destroyed Townsville, says her mouth in the mirror.

  She wears her hair out now. Back in the city she wound it in a bun, spent hours smoothing down strays with lacquer. When Mum swims, she wears it loose. She doesn’t swim often. Diving gives her migraines, since Dad ran her over with a tractor.

  On the corner of Cassia and Acacia. Our house and the police station side by side, separated by a driveway and a narrow dead patch of lawn choked with bindii-eyes and goat’s-head thorns. The white brick police station has a huge open-air skylight. The Acacia Drive side has a reception area, an office and a courtroom. The house side has a prison cell, two bunk beds with grey government-issue blankets, a sink and a stainless-steel toilet with no lid and no door. My bedroom window looks out to the reinforced wall of the prison. The shouts of drunken miners and the moans of sunburned truck drivers seep through the bricks.

  Our house on stilts. Seven steps up to the veranda. We moved here right before my fifth birthday. The town has only one policeman: my dad, posted here from Townsville by his sergeant. Imagine hills of rolling grass and wild horses grazing on the banks of a slow-flowing river. Limestone mountains bursting up from the earth. Blue jagged rocks reaching into the heavens, shrouded by gentle mists. Now picture the opposite: a stopping point for tired travellers with dusty caravans on their way to Undara Volcanic National Park, a service town, two hundred kilometres inland from the coast.

  Greenvale belongs to the nearby nickel mine. Queensland Nickel Industries laid it on for the miners and their families when they built the entire town in the early seventies. Golf greens and tennis courts. Olympic-size swimming pool, a library, a theatre, a school, a shopping centre and a pub. Kerbed streets and channelled gutters, sports oval with fifty-metre-high lighting towers, eighty-five houses, a police station and a drive-in movie cinema. Before that, nothing but the cattle which still roam through town, kangaroos, and yowies that roar in the night above the cacophony of the galahs. The galahs sound like your neighbour falling down the stairs forever, with an entire crockery set filled with boiling water.

  2

  The kids at Greenvale State School wear the same shirt. Pale blue, Greenvale State School – Mining for Knowledge written in white letters around an excavator bucket-wheel. My first day, in a big dumb hat with stupid shiny shoes and a huge bag with a plastic lunch box containing an orange which thumps and annoys the hell out of me when I walk. Inside I have a chocolate tin full of pencils and a ragged copy of Tom Sawyer with missing pages. The other kids wear jeans with dirty knees and go barefoot. They slouch and yawn as the teacher introduces herself as Mrs Crisp.

  —Now, children, Mrs Crisp says, arranging some papers: Get up off the carpet and pick a desk. You’ll sit there all year. I’ll go into what you can, and what you cannot, keep in your desks later.

  A mad scrabble of dusty kids in an eager fit bump and fight over the desks. I grab one as close as possible to the window, beside a strip of linoleum and a room-long stainless-steel sink which separates me from the bush and the creek through the glass. A boy with a crazy mop of orange hair slumps down at the desk next to me.

  —Hello! I say, offering to shake.

  —Fuck off, with ya pretty gaylord shoes, he says, rolling his eyes at my extended hand.

  He has odd eyes. In the left, two colours fight for dominance, bleeding into each other like the edges of shadows: orange, matching his hair, and green, like the greenest blade of grass you’ve seen. His right eye, cold and black as a shadow itself, swallows the light from the window behind me.

  So I stop wearing shoes to school. Walking home across the park, I kick a broken bottle and cut the webbing between my big and second toes. Another memory flashes like a punch in the liver. The slice through skin. A man wearing a green cloth hat tied under his chin and a white face mask with a wet patch from his breath. Someone holds me down with rubber hands. The man mumbles for a while. My mother’s voice. The man wipes at me with a cold yellow liquid and with a pair of scissors cuts my penis.

  At home from the park. After cleaning up the trail of blood that follows me through the door, Mum produces a box of cotton-wool balls, a sticking plaster and a bottle of the same yellow liquid, marked Iodine. As she dabs at the cut between my toes, I ask:

  —Mum, what happened to my penis?

  Picking up the bottle of iodine from the table and studying the label, I press on to fill the silence:

  —I remember a doctor cutting me with shiny scissors, and a bottle of this iodine stuff. I remember screaming!

  Ashen-faced, she tut-tuts at my foot, dabbing at the wound.

  —In the showers at the pool you can see the whole tip of mine. The other boys have a hood-type thing. It wrinkles in the water.

  Still fussing with my toe, she says:

  —We believe in different things than those o
ther boys. Dad has the same … She falters, trails off, composes herself: Jesus said those who truly believe will make the covenant to circumcise our sons.

  —Circumcise?

  —Ask your father about it. She rearranges the kitchen chairs to dismiss me.

  Walking with a studied limp out through the screen door, down the steps, I stick up a middle finger to my little sisters, Jaz and Fliss, on the trampoline and cross the yard to the police station. I find Dad sitting at his desk, typing with two fingers, his police hat on a pile of papers. The air-conditioning circulates the smell of ink stamps, typewriter ribbons, boot polish and copy paper. My head swims. Dad never can spare time for anyone when he has paperwork to do, and he only does paperwork when someone sits rotting in the cells.

  —Hey, Dad. I poke his shoulder.

  He ignores me, tap, tap, tap, ding.

  —Dad! I shake his arm. Nothing but the shouts of my sisters outside on the trampoline and a truck roaring by on the distant highway. I poke his ribs.

  —Buzz off! he yells.

  I back away and slip through the courtroom. The heavy vinyl-covered oak desks stink of linseed oil. Out into the jail hall the sun beats down through the skylight. The hot cement burns my feet. I smell piss in the heat and my stomach rises. I blink and focus on a set of filthy fat fingers gripping the prison bars. I can’t see the rest of the man in the darkness of the cell. One of the hands disappears and then comes back through the bars holding a blue melamine cup. A gnarled mask scrunched around sharp predatory eyes aches out of the shadows. He opens his mouth to speak, revealing front teeth cracked, yellow and black:

  —Get me some fucken water, kid. Water, fuck ya!

  A string of drool oozes from his strips-of-liver lips, scabby and swollen. I stand out of his reach in the stretch of sun through the skylight and contemplate his blasted head. Clean shaven and traversed with scars, it lolls to one side like he has a broken neck. As he rocks back and forth, his head disappears from the light and reappears. He resembles a broken lamp, the bulb at an odd angle, flickering before it explodes. He reaches further through the bars to grab me. He drops the blue cup and it bounces on the concrete.

  Dad told me melamine doesn’t shatter. He showed me. He hit one of those cups with a hammer and said:

  —See! Criminals can’t commit suicide with the shards.

  Suicide? A new word to me. Dad said sometimes people decide they don’t have any reason to go on. Life gets too much, I guess. He told me suicide means someone intentionally takes their own life, a serious tone strumming in his voice. I pressed him of course and he said with a final full stop: the word derives from the Latin. A fancy word for self-murder. Dad rattles off definitions, like he memorised the dictionary:

  —Murder: the killing of another human under conditions specifically covered by law. Boy, my job involves catching murderers and rapists and thieves and drug addicts and other low-life scum who’d sooner stab you in the guts than help you with your groceries.

  The prisoner drools in the cage. I step further out of the gasping low-life’s reach.

  —Kid! Water, please, boy. The tap in here doesn’t work. The shape points at the blue cup. I kick the cup. It bounces off the bars and hits the courtroom door behind me. The man glares at me with his anti-matter eyes.

  —Get your own fucken water, scumbag, I spit at him.

  Dad comes out the door and catches me mid-sentence. Too late – my mouth runs its course. He slaps the back of my head.

  —Get the hell outta here, boy! he yells as I bolt from the jail block.

  ——

  At dinner I ask:

  —Dad, what does circumcision mean?

  Mum drops her fork. It clatters on the table. She glares at me. Dad clears his throat, reaches for the wine bottle.

  —Circumcision demonstrates to Jesus that us fellers follow the path, we know the truth, we’ve heard the living gospel. We know the way home. He takes a large gulp of wine, waiting for me to reply. I don’t, so he continues: All the men Friends, and their sons, have undergone circumcision. I guess you could say as a pact. A pact with Jesus.

  —Friends? A pact? None of my friends in school have it. You can’t see their whole tip-thing.

  Jaz laughs and baby Fliss flicks a glob of mashed pumpkin onto the tablecloth.

  Mum sucks wind through her teeth and jumps up, sending her chair flying into the kitchen wall. She makes a dash to the sink and comes back with a dishcloth for the table. Dad fills his wine glass again and says:

  —Those other boys won’t get saved. The Angel of the Lord hasn’t whispered the truth to them.

  As Mum sits again, Jaz pushes a baby carrot around on her plate and says:

  —Dad, do we know the truth?

  —Jaz! Mum says: Behave yourself.

  —Yeah, Dad! I pipe in: Who told us? And when? I don’t remember. Can you tell us again?

  —Don’t you remember the meetings back in Townsville? Every Sunday, every Wednesday night, with the other Friends? Dad says, draining his glass and refilling.

  —Yeah. I think so, but what friends? Jaz tries to hide the carrot under her fork.

  —Other believers, Dad says, examining the label on the wine bottle.

  —Anyway, I cut in: Today, when I sliced my foot, I remembered getting circumcision, and it bloody well hurt!

  —Language! Dad yells, slamming his fist down on the table. His wine glass spills over. The off-white linen gulps the red like when friends meet: And you say circumcise-d – past tense! Rights his glass.

  Mum stands, upsetting her chair again, strides across the kitchen and reaches down the Discipline Stick from atop a cupboard. A flat plank of pine with a handle shape cut into it, it has Discipline Stick painted in red capital letters, old homestead style, above a black and white cartoon of a boy bending over, his trousers around his ankles. The boy looks over his shoulder with tears in his wide comic eyes at a disembodied hand paddling his bum. Mum passes it to Dad.

  —Where did you learn that language, boy? Dad holds the stick in his right hand, slapping it onto his left palm. Jaz starts crying, which sets the baby off.

  —School! I shout above the racket. Sensing a beating anyway, I push my luck. Making a dash for the open front door, I yell over my shoulder:

  —I also learned bugger, shit and piss!

  —We’ll lose this boy, Mum wails as I run across the lawn and leap the fence.

  I pause on the other side and lean with a swagger up against the post. When I see Dad peering out the door, I shout:

  —And I learned fuck from the scumbag in the jail! You don’t like that, hey! Fuck. Fuuuuck!

  —Why, boy, I oughta … Dad rages from the veranda as I sprint up the footpath towards the park.

  ——

  At school I have a habit of stretching my legs out under my desk to kick at the aluminium edging which separates the carpet and the linoleum. Mrs Crisp yells at me a thousand times to stop. Soon as she leaves, I kick at the edging again. This day, as she walks back in across the lino, the edging springs up like a silver snake and she trips right over it, falls headlong into the desks. Her left arm slaps down on the floor with a loud crack. She screams the same way baby Fliss did when she pulled a cup of tea off a table and melted her chest into her onesie. JJ looks on enthralled as Mrs Crisp bawls on the floor.

  JJ and I hang around together now. It took him two whole years to talk to me. I don’t notice his odd eyes so much anymore. I’ve never met JJ’s dad. He drives trucks for the nickel mine. Mum doesn’t like me hanging out with JJ because I go around to his house after school to watch The Goodies. Because of the stupid cult, Mum and Dad forbid television, smoking, drinking, dancing, jewellery, watching movies, cutting your hair if female and having a normal penis if male. JJ’s mum has long straight black hair. She always goes barefoot, wears tight blue jeans with a wide flare at
the bottom and looks pretty. We steal cigarettes from JJ’s mum. St Moritz – King Size Deluxe Menthols with gold band of authenticity! it says on the packet.

  I saved up four dollars washing the car and oiling the courtroom desks every Saturday to buy a flash new copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. It has a picture of Tom and Huck on the front and a Mississippi riverboat behind them. I swagger and smoke, like Tom. I reckon I started younger than him. Adults at the servo sure stare hard when they see a gang of seven-year-old boys puffing away. I also bought an authentic Barlow knife, which I carry at all times, like Tom. I’ve read the whole book a thousand times, except the missing pages. My new copy fixed that. I show JJ.

  —Already read it, he says.

  But I don’t think he has. I have to explain to him, over and over, the motivations behind our escapades, which I base on Tom’s adventures. I convince him that if you want to have a fulfilling life you need to create your own adventures. I practise what I preach, and I write everything down as well. Why else have adventures? He gets it, comes meowing outside my window in the middle of the night. I scramble out of bed and we sprint down the path into the public gardens, breathless, heads reeling with plots. The next day at school both of us fall asleep at our desks.

  We start a gang one night in the park to protect ourselves from the prowler that heaps of people report to my father. This prowler, they say, also kills animals. A few people have reported finding household pets dead in bizarre circumstances. We call our gang The Wreckers, based on a film JJ loves called The Wanderers. He says if I think Tom Sawyer has clout, then I should go see this film. He asked the projectionist at the drive-in for the poster he has tacked up in his room. A bunch of mean dudes with greased-back hair all glaring into the camera, wearing beat-up leather jackets with cigarettes dangling from lips or tucked behind ears. A couple of them have shirts unbuttoned so you can see their chests. A few wear cool hats.