The first wave lifts me off my feet and puts me down again. I hear it thump behind me but I don’t look ’cause this other one’s coming. And two behind it. The second one makes me kick like crazy to climb over. The third one drops on me like the side of a house. There I am on the bottom, with sand in me gob and water thumping me up and down on the back, turning me in circles so I don’t know me left from me right, and me lungs saying: ‘Get up, Morton Flack, you dill. Get out of the water or you’ll die!’ And in the end, without doing anything, I pop up, head-first, with all this white stuff around like the soap bubbles from the washing, and Tegwyn is laughing her box off next to me. It tastes funny. Like blood. It’s crook water!
Everyone else catches the waves when they come. They swim with them and shoot along to the beach. But I stay put. I get run over by surfboards. I get run over by fat ladies with prickly legs. I get run over by bigger waves. I get run over by my own sister. And then I reckon I’ve had enough. I think all the knocks have ruined my brains, ’cause I turn around and catch the next wave that’s coming. I kick and go freestyle like mad. The wave comes up behind me like a brick wall. Then I’m flying. Really flying. Most of me isn’t even in the wave. I’m hanging out over a sandbar that’s a long, long way down and I hear me own voice going: ‘Oooooohhhh!’ Like jumping out of a tree. Onto your head. Hohh! I come up with more sand down my throat and music in my head and another wave tumbles me over. Another one fills me up with water and sends me along the bottom. The last one drops me on the beach. I get up and then I know. Me shorts! Here I am standing in the middle of the city with nothing on. Henry Warburton is there, laughing.
‘Had an accident, old son?’
There’s people everywhere, looking. Never seen so many eyes in all me life. I walk. My legs are all wobbly. Feels like I been run over by a truck.
‘Here.’ Henry Warburton takes off his shirt and ties it round me. We walk up the beach and sit on the towels. I kind of feel numb. For a long time I sit watching more waves come. Water runs out my nose. Next to us, a girl rubs oil on her boobs and makes them move in funny ways and it gives me goosebumps, like when you scratch a blackboard with your fingernail. Henry Warburton is looking too. I can feel it.
‘Dirty old sods.’
I look up real quick. It’s Tegwyn, dripping, wiping snot from her chin. I get up off her towel, and then she looks at me and sneers.
‘Got a rock in your pocket, Ort?’
I look down. Out the front of the shirt Henry Warburton lent me, there’s the outline of my old fella sticking out like a handle. The girl next to us is smiling.
Then Henry Warburton takes a step, and slap! across Tegwyn’s face and her eyes go wide and full and then she’s off, running up the beach towards the carpark, kicking sand all over people, her bum jiggling; people whistle and hoot and Henry is after her, calling: ‘Tegwyn, Tegwyn, listen, I —’.
So here I am standing in the middle of a million eyes with this thing sticking out like it’s made up its mind to point rudely at people for the rest of its life.
‘I wanna go to Kings Park,’ I say as we drive along in the traffic, still wet and salty. Tegwyn isn’t saying anything. Since Henry Warburton caught her out in front of the hamburger place, in front of all them people, and said how sorry he was and everything, she has not said one word.
‘Why Kings Park?’ he says, looking at me kind of strange.
‘Oh, I just wanted to see it. I dunno.’
But he takes us. He’s in a kind of mood where he has to; we could make him take us anywhere.
From Kings Park you can see the whole river and freeway and buildings and parks and causeway. This is where Mum and Dad got to know each other. This is a bit of the reason I’m here. This is a bit of me. I s’pose it’s different at night, more . . . romantic? I can just see Mum and Dad coming out of them trees back there and coming onto this bit of grass with all the cannons pointed out towards where we live behind the hills, and him saying, ‘You know, Alice Benson, when we get married, we’ll go and live near trees like them. And our kids’ll be called Ort and Tegwyn, and it’s gonna be great.’ All the lights, all the . . .
‘Ort!’ Henry says. ‘Are you with us? Time to go, mate. Back to Flack country.’
I walk back to the 1958 FC Holden Special with a big grin on me face that a doctor couldn’t get off.
‘The breeze is in,’ says Henry Warburton looking at the trees bending as we creep along towards the hills.
‘Fremantle Doctor,’ I say, and just the words make me feel good and sad at the same time.
All the way up through the foothills, no one talks; it’s a kind of sleepy, tired feeling, listening to the 1958 FC Holden Special squeaking and popping in second gear.
Chapter Fourteen
HIGH SCHOOL’S GETTING closer, you know. Not that I’m worried about it, but. Bad enough going to high school at all, but there’s not going to be one person there that I know. Fat is gone and he was the only kid in my school who’s in my year. Last year I knew every single kid in our school (there’s only ten). There’s a thousand at Outfield High – that’s what Tegwyn says. Three weeks. That’s all. All I do now is muck around on me own, walking in the forest, playing armies, finding little creatures in the bush, talking to myself and sometimes to God. Funny when you talk to God. He’s like the sky (well, he is the sky, kind of). Never says anything. But you know he listens. Right down in your belly, even in your bum you know.
Yesterday I took the car roof down the creek to the bridge and back, but there was no fun in it. Fat’s fatness was the best part of it – you didn’t know when he was gonna capsize you. And it was someone to talk to and see things with. When you see something, a rabbit running away, a dugite in the grass, a fox watching you from a long way off, you say ‘Look! Look at that!’ Even when no one’s there, you say it. Sometimes I hang around the back of Cherrys’. Sometimes I chase Margaret around. Sometimes she chases me. Sometimes I stay inside and read Mad comics.
Out there today Henry Warburton is walking Dad in the wheelchair, up and down the yard, all day, talking talking talking about I dunno what. I reckon Henry’s got something crook that makes him yell out at night and go quiet sometimes. And there’s those fits, and that speech thing that’s gone away now. And his glass eye. He’s taught us how to pray the Lord’s Prayer. He teaches us little things. He’s not that bad. He says things that are right. But he hit Tegwyn. Maybe he did it for me. She was ragging me in front of the whole city. But he never said anything. My heart works better than my brain. Me brain says Henry Warburton was sticking up for me, but me heart doesn’t believe it, and when me heart makes up its mind, that’s it.
Mum is kind of different these days. She doesn’t seem so sad any more. You don’t see her sitting out on the verandah crying over Dad and combing his hair with her fingers. She’s wearing all her bright dresses with feathers and things in her hair. She wears the shell earrings she used to wear a long time ago. She looks young. She washes her hair a lot. She lets Henry Warburton have Dad to himself all day. It’s good to see her happy, I s’pose. Can’t tell if it’s Jesus or Henry Warburton she’s happy about. I wonder how long it will last.
Days and nights are the same for me now. Both kind of lonely. There’s no one to hang around with.
Out there, Henry Warburton walks Dad up and down and Dad has this no-frown-no-smile look on his face like he can’t do either. There’s wheelmarks in the dirt that get deeper and deeper.
Some new people have moved in over the road. Makes you feel sorry for them, moving into that sad place. The man and lady came across this morning and said hullo. She had big teeth like fenceposts; they looked like they could chew steel. Her hair was all frizzy and grey and she smelt like lemons. He was tall and had a loopy back and he looked at you out the top of his head which was small as a softball. He didn’t stink of anything. I thought he was alright, but she talked like she thought she was the king’s bickies.
‘Hel-loo. We are the Alfred Wat-
sons. Wee have as-sumed proprietorship of the traaans-port establishment o-ver yon-der.’ I dunno why she talked so funny. They look just as daggy as us. She said:
‘Those previous owners must have been a tri-al for you people. Everything smells awfully of u-rine.’ Mum and Henry talked with them a bit. Mum looked cocky again, like she used to. They looked at us like they were dead sure they weren’t as daggy as us.
February. School tomorrow. And here I am out on the dunny for the sixth time tonight. My teeth chatter even though it’s hot as hell. I sit here till it all runs out. Going past the bathroom I hear Henry Warburton talking, and stop.
‘Hell, Sam, how can you listen to me day after day? Guess you don’t have much choice. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not here for my own sake more than yours. You’re the perfect priest, Sam. You don’t believe, you listen, and you don’t say anything. You . . . what the hell am I saying?’
I go to my room. He talks that kind of stuff all the time, and then he cries at night. He doesn’t muck around much with me any more, doesn’t play french cricket or anything. He argues with Tegwyn and wheels Dad up and down the yard and leaves me and Mum to ourself. And sometimes Mum looks at him, kind of hungry.
For a while I lie here on my bed trying not to think about tomorrow. Then I get up and go and listen at the bathroom door again.
‘I know you’re waiting, Sam. God is too, I can feel it. I’ll do it, Sam. Soon. But I’m so scared, so . . .’
Talk talk talk. The other day Henry Warburton talked to Dad for so long the bath water went cold and Dad was shivering and blue and Mum came in and went crook something awful.
He only sometimes does the Lord’s Supper with us now; after meals he goes and sits on his own, or takes Dad for a walk, or tries to teach Tegwyn something on the piano, and Mum and me are left to do it on our own.
Talk talk talk.
I go outside, walk right into the middle of the yard and look back at the house. That cloud-light is still there. Now that’s a mystery. Little clouds that shine like moons don’t sit on everyone’s house. Or maybe they do and not everyone can see it. Mum can’t see it. Not even Henry Warburton can see it. If you chuck stones at it they go right through – nothing happens. Every angle, it looks the same. It’s like a dream that’s always with you. But it’s there – it’s my vision. I know God’s in it somewhere. He is waiting for something.
Bong! There goes that bell in the forest. Like a school bell. Yuk!
Not even the chooks are up yet, not even the birds, not even the sun, and here I am jogging around the house, lapping, going round like I’m tied to it, like I’m a model plane with feet going round and round on the same track. Jogging is the dumbest thing in the world to do. I can’t think of anything dumber. Except eating olives and going to high school. Round I go again. Can see my own footprints in the dirt now. As I come around past the back verandah I see Mum in her sleeping tee-shirt of Dad’s, standing there, rubbing her eyes. She looks at me and her eyes make me stop dead like there wasn’t another step left in me anyway.
‘Morton-flamin’-Flack, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Jogging, Mum.’
‘Jogging? From my bed it sounded like a bloody stampede! Get inside, you’ll give the world a fright.’
‘But I’m nervous.’
‘What the heck you wanna be nervous for? God looks after you, you know that.’
‘He doesn’t stop me going to the dunny fifty times a night.’
‘We’ll have to sew your bum up, then. Anything. Just don’t surround the house with yourself at four o’clock in the morning.’
‘I’ll go for a walk.’
‘Okay, do that, then.’
‘You wanna come ?’ I say.
‘At four o’clock in the morning?’ She steps down off the verandah with her thongs clacking. ‘I think the Lord must have been cracking a joke on us when he gave us children,’ she says as we walk towards the forest. There’s all crackly bits of sleep in her eyes, and her hair is all over. She knows how to love people. I can feel the warm from the bed still on her, and the smell of Dad, that Flack smell.
The forest has got the light in it that comes before the sun, and you can hear things moving in grass and bushes. We walk down past the creek and into the real thick part of the forest where it tumbles over the edge of the hill to a tricky slope where the loggers couldn’t cut trees down. You can see the edge of the city in tiny bits between trees here.
‘How come we live up here, Mum? Everyone else lives in the city.’
‘I dunno. It’s just where we are, I suppose. We liked the trees, your Dad and me. You know that.’
‘How come we stay here if Tegwyn hates it?’
‘Kids hate everything when they’re sixteen. Even themselves. It was like that for me.’
I think about that for a while as the sun makes a dot of pink through the trees behind us. Then we make a turn and come around with the little pink point of sun in our eyes.
‘What does God really look like, you reckon?’
‘Why all the questions?’
‘Get them all out the way before high school. Tegwyn said if you ask questions kids’ll think you’re a suckhole.’
‘But you don’t care what they think, do you?’
‘Oh. No.’ Funny how when you get older you can easy say things you don’t mean.
‘What does God look like then. Heck, Ort, you ask toughies,’ she says, picking up a stick with a fork in the end and a black leaf skewered on it. ‘Now. Henry was talking about this a while back. He said that no one has seen God except Jesus. No one else knows what he looks like. He always comes with something to cover himself up. Like people couldn’t handle it if he showed his real self. Remember that story about the whirlwind and the one about the burning bush? We’ll see him soon enough. When we’re in heaven.’
‘Are you still into it?’ I ask, squinting as that pink sun gets stronger.
‘Into what?’
‘This believing.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘I just wasn’t sure.’
Mum smiles. ‘We don’t know much about it all, do we? It’s made us different, Ort, this believing. It’s like we weren’t even alive before. It doesn’t stop us hurting. But . . . but you know the hurting’s gonna stop one day. Everything’s gonna make sense. One day we’ll understand.’
I break off a dead stick and suck the end. ‘Why don’t we go to a church? Is that what people do?’
‘I s’pose so. Never thought of it. There’s that sign in the drapery. Gospel meeting, they call it. The one the Watkinses run.’
‘But they don’t like us. I heard Mrs Watkins talking about us. Called us hippies. What’s hippies?’
‘It’s people who lived in the olden days. Don’t worry about it.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘You? Course not. It’s normal for you to go to the dyke fifty times a night. Morton Flack never worries.’
‘I don’t wanna go today.’
‘You have to.’
‘That’s why I don’t wanna.’
The school bus is an old tub. Fifteen kids all sit up the back. I sit up behind the driver. The bus crawls down the long hill in low. In my bag there’s a lunch box, a Mad comic and a tennis ball. Some kids up the back are smoking. Don’t they know it kills you? Big globs of slag come down the aisle. I read my Mad comic, or just make out I am, till the bus gets to Outfield High.
The school is down at the bottom of the foothills where the city has crept out to take over the country. There’s some parts with houses all together, and parts with chook farms or flower farms and some factories. When I see the high school me heart goes blah. Looks like a gaol. Two storeys high, all brown from bore water, people with bags walking around like they’re in for life.
Well, then it starts. Everyone is looking for melons. You can tell the melons. We all look scared to death, some of us have shorts on, and we’re all in little groups on the oval. I don’t kn
ow anybody. I’ve got no one to make a group with, so I have a look around, keep walking like I know where I’m going to, like I’m a group of my own. Girls with pink hair point at me. Classroom doors everywhere. I go up to the drinking taps and put my head under so it’s all wet. But it’s no good – further down the quadrangle four big kids yell: ‘Melon!’ and drag me in the dunnies and pick me up and shove my head in the crappiest bowl and flush. They pinch my Mad comic and my tennis ball and nick off. Another gang of kids push some melon into the pisser and I take off.
I’m late for five classes. I get lost seven times. Someone calls me a poofter and a teacher tells me to get me hair cut. I get flushed again just after the last bell.
Mum bawls when I get home and tell her. I stink like hell. Tegwyn laughs. I stay under the shower till I half turn into a prune.
All week it’s the same. I go for runs in the morning to get ready for being called a poofter and being told by old poopheads to cut my hair. The bus ride is awful, kids killing ’emselves up the back with smokes, pink-haired girls showing me their braces. I get everywhere late and have to do scab duty at morning recess. Scab duty is picking up wet tissues and brown apple cores in the quadrangle. Mr Frost sends a letter home to Mum telling her to get my hair cut. Mum writes one back telling him to mind his own business. I do scab duty a lot. I don’t listen much in class. It’s hot and flies sing you to sleep, and I always think about swimming in the creek.
The second week is the same. And the third week. The fourth week I’m used to it. And Mum gets me some long pants, so that’s something. Home at nights I do some of my homework and then sit out on the verandah with everyone else, but it’s not the same anymore. I feel different. I feel like I live out in the middle of nowhere. I pray to God and hope he hears me. All I get is deadly quiet from him. I’m kind of stuck. I don’t feel like a kid anymore. I’m not even a proper teenager. I’m not a grown-up adult. I’m not in the city. I’m not properly in the country. I dunno what the hell to do with meself.