Scoundrel Days Read online

  The other boys we let into our gang have to bring something to the table. We let Charlie in because his dad owns the pub and his mum owns the supermarket. Daryl can join because he says he can get us the green tobacco all the bikies like to smoke.

  Here comes Ren, sweating from the climb to our gang headquarters on the hill behind the medical centre. Breathless, Ren says:

  —Can I join The Wanderers?

  —Wreckers! Dip-shit, JJ snaps: And no, fuck off, ya dome-head poofter! Ren has a dome-shaped head with stringy mouse-brown hair sticking up like fairy floss and a sore-looking welt above his left eyebrow from his habit of rubbing his face. He has episodes where he rocks back and forth saying no-no-nooo, swatting at the air around his head. Ren remains calm, but a darkness clouds his eyes.

  —We should let him join, I say, watching his still face and stormy eyes.

  —Fucken … why? JJ looks confused.

  —He can take a beating.

  Ren smiles. I’ve never seen him smile until now. I know him better than the other boys. Ren lives across the road. He comes over every day with his toys and doesn’t take them home. Every day he has a black eye or a busted lip or bruises on his chin. An enormous collection of his Tonka trucks and Matchbox cars, marbles, even an expensive-looking telescope, overcrowd my bedroom.

  —Ren, why do you leave your toys? I ask.

  He sits there building a Lego supermarket, complete with shoppers pushing little trolleys. As he ploughs a red fire truck with real flashing lights through the shopping centre, mashing the plastic housewives into the carpet, he says:

  —So I can play with them longer.

  I know what he means. I climbed a tree to see into his yard one night. I saw Ren crawling around bleeding on the kitchen floor. A shadow moved, his dad smashing a collection of Matchbox cars with a hammer on the back steps.

  ——

  A concrete driveway, suffering under the Australian sun, yawns like a cracked tongue between our house and the police station. You have to walk up the driveway to the front door. If I hear the rusty gate swing open, I stick my head out of my window to see who has come to visit.

  The creaking gate wakes me. A pair of feet slap on the concrete. Wailing and banging on the side of the house.

  —Help. Help! Officer cop, he raped and bashed me. Help! Rape! The voice chokes. I stick my head out of my window, trying to get a look at her in the shadow cast by the house. She sees me peering out and starts up some hellish wailing, bashing the wall with her fists. My parents stir and a strip of light blinks under my door. Footsteps down the narrow hall. A loud thump and much cursing as Dad cracks his shin on a table or something which Mum moved without him noticing. The veranda light comes on and reveals an Aboriginal woman wearing a white nightie splattered with blood, both of her eyes swollen shut. A strip of eyeball flickers around under one drooping lid, trying to focus on me as I look down on her. Dad emerges.

  —Officer? Help. Me old man raped me with a bottle. Fucken broke inside … Help!

  —Slow down … Let me get a look at you, Dad soothes. He leads her by the arm into the light.

  Dad spies my head sticking out of the window, whispers to the woman and then shouts for Mum to call the doctor and an ambulance from Charters Towers. Dad and the bleeding woman disappear up the path into the police station.

  I wake to the sound of water hitting the wall. I drag myself from my bed and look out. Dad has a hose, washing blood off the house.

  —Dad, what did the screaming woman mean by rape?

  —Rape? he mumbles, not looking up: The unlawful compelling through physical force, or duress, to have sexual intercourse.

  —Unlawful. Sexual. Intercourse?

  —Illegal fucking.

  3

  The phone rings. Mum picks up, listens awhile and says:

  —Huh? Oh, okay, why don’t you come over here? Oh … okay. She hangs up and says Dad wants to see me in his office. I drag myself over there. This hasn’t happened before, ringing the house from ten paces away. I wonder what he caught me at. I find him in the courtroom, sitting in the judge’s chair.

  —Bren, I’ve got to talk to you about something important.

  —Okay.

  —I have to go and catch some deer poachers in the Maryvale Reserve.

  —Oh.

  —Most people consider this quite dangerous, so I have to tell you I mightn’t come home. He looks into my eyes, puts his hands on my shoulders: Until I get home, you have to act as Man of the House. And if I never come back, you have to look after your mother, and your sisters.

  —Never come back, Dad?

  —Some persons do desperate things to avoid getting caught. They might kill me, boy.

  —You mean, they might murder you, Dad? I say, my voice breaking.

  He gives me a huge hug. Dad never hugs me. I don’t remember another time he hugged me.

  —Now go, help your mother. I need to get my weapons ready.

  —Dad …

  —Yeah?

  —How do you define a person?

  —The books you read, and the people you meet, he says, oiling his gun.

  The next morning Dad has already left. Mum sits in the early light at the kitchen table. She doesn’t hear me coming down the hall. Rays through the curtains catch her face; tears stream down her cheeks. She looks ten years older.

  ——

  No JJ meowing tonight. I strike out alone into the sleeping town. Everything sparkles, covered in dew. Fog swirls around the fences. Owls and night-birds screaming in the gardens. Toads on the footpath. Outside the pub on Redbank Drive I see a figure slouched in the phone box. I recognise Ren and knock on the illuminated booth.

  —Ren!

  He doesn’t acknowledge me. I push the door of the booth. It folds inwards, hits him in the back. He turns on his heel, facing me eyes wide, vacant, pupils flickering like insects.

  —Ren? I say, startled.

  Nothing but the soft thud of moths hitting the bare neon bulb in the box. The bulb buzzes, responding to dusty wings. He thrusts an arm out of the phone booth. A dead cat hangs from his fist, knuckles white, squeezing hard on its neck. Intestines balloon from its mouth, along with some white stuff, like cauliflower. I run like a poodle encountering a wolf.

  The news rolls through the town in the morning. The groundsman fished a tabby from the pool, every bone in its body smashed, guts out like someone squeezed it.

  ——

  Dad comes home from the deer-poacher gig with a gaggle of scruffy, shirtless, tattooed men. He’s chained them together with their arms tangled around each other. Dad drags the whole group of six out of the back of his police Toyota by pulling one of the men by the beard. I taunt the shit out of them as they sit glaring at me from the cells. I skip up and down, singing about the glory of freedom while going through their bags.

  Dad has piled the men’s belongings on the concrete outside the bars. He sits in the office typing. They have an armoury of weapons, sleeping bags, radios, and the skins and antlers of about twenty deer in various stages of stink and preservation. They have a huge plastic container of the green tobacco my gang likes to smoke. I call them a bunch of scumbags and criminals as I help myself to a handful. They also have a couple of dirty Orchy orange juice bottles with bits of garden hose stuck in the sides. It all looks pretty sinister. One of the lengths of hose has an aluminium-foil funnel full of green tobacco stuffed in the end. This must work as a pipe of some sort. We use corncob pipes, like Tom Sawyer. I steal a whizzer-looking bowie knife: a full-sheath blade with a stainless-steel bust of an Indian chief’s head on top of an antler handle. One of the foul-looking men, who has no front teeth, snarls at me as I make my exit:

  —Little cunt, I’ll wring ya fucken neck for nickin me shit.

  I turn back to the bars to ask him what he means by cunt, but as I turn
I kick a rolled-up swag. My toe hits something hard. I stick my hand in and find a pistol. I figure Dad hasn’t seen it, so I nick that too.

  I show the gun and the knife and the green tobacco to the other boys in my gang. I say my gang, because I beat Daryl fair and square in a fistfight for the title. Daryl’s dad belongs to a bikie gang. I don’t know which gang – not that I’d name them if I did; Daryl and I steal stuff from their headquarters all the time. Anyway, Daryl stands a bit taller than me. He has long black hair parted in the middle. He also has a hard head – you can smack him full knuckles to the chin and he doesn’t blink. I beat him by resorting to trying to choke him to death. I near broke my hands. Daryl respects me now. Says he thinks that I carry the crazy gene, one of those freaks born without fear. I want to take him along one night to follow Ren, show him what crazy means. I think I will tell him, but I bet he won’t believe me.

  I doubt I’ll ever meet a better thief than Daryl. He’ll nick anything not nailed down. He lifted a bottle of tablets from his dad’s gang headquarters. They have a rickety busted-up shed in the scrub surrounded by rusted barbed wire and guarded by two docile Dobermans. Our hideout up on the hill behind the medical centre has far superior engineering. We built it out of stones, old sheet-iron and wrecked car doors, and we call it a fortress. The Wreckers meet at the stroke of midnight, either in the fortress for drinking rum, smoking and eating crap, or down on the school oval for general mischief.

  Daryl turns up with these pills. He calls them salt tablets, claims that truck drivers use them so they can drive for days without falling asleep and killing themselves. I take a green one and a red one. Charlie takes two green ones. JJ refuses, even after we call him a poof. He says he tried them before and they made him not shit for a year. Daryl chews up five, two red and three green. He washes them down with a huge swig of Bundaberg Rum. Daryl. The wildest boy I know. I mean, besides Ren, but in a different way.

  We whoop up hell in the town, smash some windows at the theatre, break into the school canteen and eat all the potato chips, plus about a dozen boxes of sultanas each. We break the lock on the school caretaker’s gardening shed and mess up his tools and piss into the lawnmower petrol tank. Charlie finds a toolbox with a padlock on it. He breaks the lock off with a hammer and goes quiet over in the corner. The curiosity kills me. I feel like I can fly. I go over and find Charlie poring over a glossy magazine with photographs of two women licking each other between the legs. I grab the magazine from Charlie. He snatches it back and pushes me over.

  —Get ya fucken own. The box has heaps! Eyes glued to the photos.

  I get myself a magazine from the toolbox. It has a title in bubble-type writing: New Cunts, No. 12 – October 1976. Underneath the title, a picture of a woman sticking her tongue into another woman’s …

  —Hey, what do ya call a girl’s bits again? Charlie breaks into my thoughts.

  —My mum says you call it a sninny, I say.

  Daryl, who has a copy of a magazine called Oui, says, laughing at me:

  —A fucken sninny! They call it a cunt, ya gaylord! Look, on the front of the fucken magazine: New Cunts. Christ. Shakes his head: My dad has a couple of these, Daryl adds: I saw my uncle jacking off through the window. He had one of these too.

  —Jacking off? I look up from a picture of a woman sticking her whole hand into another woman’s cunt. Both women look at the camera, tongue on teeth.

  —Yeah, I know about jacking off, Charlie says: I do it all the time. Feels good, man.

  Daryl laughs, loud, and it echoes across the school oval, disturbs a flock of plovers sitting around in puddles from the sprinkler. He claps his hand over his mouth. We listen for a bit. Only the chhk chhk of the sprinkler and an occasional squawk.

  —You actually admit to wanking! Daryl whispers.

  —Jacking off … wanking … what? I ask.

  —Wanking, or jacking off … Same thing, man, Daryl says.

  Daryl says man a lot since he started hanging out with his uncle.

  —My uncle Johnny told me, in the city, in Townsville, you can pay a woman and she’ll let you growl her out. He said you can pay em and they’ll rub you all over with erotic oil and then jack you off. He called it a happy ending.

  —Growl out? You still didn’t tell me what wanking means, man. I call him man to see if he notices. He doesn’t notice, so I say it again:

  —Man, tell me what the fuck wanking means, and growling out, now, cunt.

  —Don’t call me a cunt, man. You call women cunts, Daryl snaps, angry, glaring at me.

  —Why do you call women cunts?

  —Uncle Johnny said so, says you call women cunts coz they have cunts. He even told me a joke. It goes: What do you call a woman?

  Charlie and I look at each other then back at Daryl. Charlie shrugs.

  —A life-support machine for a cunt! He laughs out loud again, echoing across the oval. The joke goes over my head. I’ve never heard the words life, support and machine said together, until now.

  —What about growling out? I ask.

  Daryl thinks for a moment, lights a cigarette, shrugs:

  —I dunno, man … I dunno. I’ll ask Johnny and let ya know. Then, opening a centrefold: Look at this, man. Sweet as a nun’s cunt on Sunday.

  We realise JJ hasn’t said a word for ages and look over. JJ sits on the lawnmower, one of those ride-on ones with the big comfy vinyl seats, with his penis out of his jeans, tugging at it furiously.

  —What the hell! Daryl laughs extra loud this time: JJ, stop wanking in front of us, man. Put ya cock back in ya pants. Jesus!

  —Cock? What do you mean?

  —His penis, his cock, you wanker! Daryl shouts at me.

  —I haven’t got my cock in my hands, so how can you call me a wanker? I’ve never heard that word. My mum calls it a diddle.

  —Diddle! What the fuck … kinda poofter word! Daryl yells, punching me in the stomach.

  I lie in the dirt and oil-spills on the gardener’s shed floor, winded, gasping for breath. I manage to stand again and see Charlie drooling over one of the magazines, trying to get his cock out. Charlie has the body weight of at least four normal kids. He eats stolen chocolate bars from his mother’s supermarket, and he drinks rum like a normal kid drinks Coke. He has a lot of trouble getting his arm under his belly. He grunts and sweats and pulls on his cock until he falls over, huffing like he’s run from the law. The wrinkled bit he has, which I don’t, looks red raw, poking out from under his belly like a rat’s nose peeking from under a stove. JJ, contemplating this scene, his cock hard and proud in his hand, says:

  —I told ya about them salt tablets. I couldn’t wank for a week, and, I swear, I didn’t shit till Christmas.

  After we finish laughing, Daryl, who’s eaten five tablets, gets his cock out of his jeans and it looks kind of droopy. He slaps at it a bit but nothing much happens. He glances over at me:

  —Maybe you should get yours out, man. Let’s see if the salties have affected you.

  So I pop it right out of my jeans through the fly and JJ gasps:

  —What happened to your cock? You got no beanie!

  —You’ve had a circumnavigation! exclaims Daryl.

  —Circumcisioned, ya fucken idiot. Charlie’s voice, shaking.

  —Circumcised. I correct them all.

  —They chopped off your beanie! JJ, exasperated.

  —Jesus told my parents to get me circumcised … because the Prophet whispered us the living gospel. It fucken hurt, I say, examining the scar.

  ——

  The next day in school we can’t sit still. We ping around the room from the salt tablets until Mrs Crisp clues on we’ve taken pills of some kind and searches our bags. JJ, the wanker, has the entire bottle in his lunch box. Amphetamines. A new word. Mrs Crisp says having my Barlow knife at school, and the drugs, constitute illegal acts. I�
��ve broken the law. People will call me a criminal. It feels fantastic. Dad will lay into me with the Discipline Stick for a good twenty minutes. He’ll lock me in the cell. As Daryl, JJ, Charlie and I sit in the principal’s office, waiting for him to come down from teaching Grade Seven and serve us the cuts for having drugs in school, Daryl says:

  —Hey, Bren, I asked Uncle Johnny what growling out means … He said it means licking a woman’s cunt.

  —Why would you lick a woman’s cunt? I ask, remembering the pictures from the glossy magazines. I can smell the paper.

  —Johnny said women love that shit.

  —So, if women like it, why pay them so you can do it?

  —I asked the same thing! Uncle Johnny says growling out a woman rocks your world. Then my mum screamed at him to stop filling my mind with filth.

  —So licking a woman’s cunt, women call that filthy, even though they like it? I say as the principal bursts in.

  We each receive six lashes with a bamboo cane across our palms. Well, I get seven as the principal heard me say the word cunt.

  ——

  Easter school holidays, 1980, I learn about hell. A huge rain monsoon makes it across the mountain ranges from the coast. All major bridges on the highway flood and Greenvale loses contact with the rest of the universe. The water level breaks every record, the town overrun by stranded truck drivers and busloads of tourists. The courtroom at the police station has seven families sleeping there.

  One family with a caravan full of kids introduce themselves to us as Friends. These Friends come from the mysterious meetings back in the city before we moved to Greenvale – the first Friends I’ve seen in the flesh since we moved here three years ago. They have a Prophet with them. An important man, Mum says, scalping up her hair tighter than I’ve seen it. Mum reckons this bloke speaks for God himself. The rain caught them out while heading north to Cairns, via the mountains instead of the coastal route, for the unfamiliar scenery. The Prophet, named Bruce the Elder, has a sick mother in Cairns and the family of Friends agreed kindly to drive him the six hundred and thirty-two kilometres to see her.