Chapter 1
He sat alone at the back of the classroom. Brown shoes and school socks were squashed beneath his feet as his toes wriggled to some distant rhythm. While his eyes were staring remotely at the blackboard, he let his ten-year-old mind cavort with his fantasies.
‘Rane! Dream Child! Are you there?’
From way up at the front, a face peered through the twisting heads. A gallery of inquisitors. His cerebration broken by the shrill voice of Mr Marx, Rane returned reluctantly to the classroom, to the stage, to his audience.
‘Are you quite aware of your surroundings, young man?’
‘He’s gone bloody walkabout again!’ sneered the freckled blond boy behind a chalky hand.
‘Keep your snide remarks to yourself, Jason.’ admonished the teacher, whose pockmarked rodent features reddened as Rane suddenly rose from his seat and made for the door. ‘And where do you think you’re going?’ Mr Marx whined pathetically as the young student walked through the door and along the corridor to the stairs.
*
The spring sun was wan upon the Tasman Sea.
Flat surf lazy white at the edge of the blue.
Rane dabbled long legs in the careless wash, and sent his melancholy gaze across retreating ocean to the horizon. He saw the container ships at anchor, big blocks of steel hobbled to the floor of the sea.
Suddenly the ships disappeared. Was it a menace, this three-mast ketch with the ache of a marathon voyage? It sailed toward the shore. Then broached and displayed her guns of war.
The vision melted and Rane was again staring out at the cargo vessels of the twentieth century. He had seen other ships at other times, their canvas sheets stained and torn, sitting offshore like uncertain visitors. He had often wanted to swim out there and poke about but a strange inertia had roped him to the beach.
In the distance, like some shocking memory, the lunch bell pealed. Rane turned his back on the ocean and, like a frightened emu caught too far from the flock, sprinted toward his school.
As he crested the long stretch of sand hills, the roar of the playground became a threat, a war cry from his hostile schoolmates. Despite himself, he slid down the sand and crossed the road and entered the school through the front gate. Older boys with ribald mouths mocked him; squads of hecklers jeered at him on his way to the classroom where Mr Marx sat prim and alone with the empty seats.
Rane closed the door softly behind him and stood to attention in front of his teacher.
Like a character from Dickens, Leonard Marx vested himself with watch-chain and pince-nez. His three-piece suit had a strict, correct, green tweed and his shoes the rounded, polished look of Public schools. He was fifty-four and his seedy blue eyes squinted miserably at the book on his desk.
‘I’m back.’ Rane stammered as he looked toward the top of the teacher’s head, his attention concentrating on the way the sterile pate was covered by wisps of heavily dyed hair grown long at the sides. The meandering strands of greased hair stuck like stubborn snakes upon the skin, snakes rooted by their tails above the saucer shaped ears.
Mr Marx leaned back in his chair and his eyes warped horribly as they slid behind the thick lenses of the pince-nez. Two large fish eyes stared from the portholes in his face while the mouth below fumbled with its words. ‘You little bastard!’ he shrieked and laughter chorused from behind the door.
‘Who in the name of God do you think you are?’
Rane tried to answer with his name. The cane thudded its meanness across the desk. Rane waited, and then said evenly, ‘You know who I am.’
‘Drop your trousers, young man! We’ll see how funny you are after a good caning!’ Marx exploded with foam forming about his mouth.
Rane hesitated and stepped back in disbelief. The mad eyes of Mr Marx were following the cane around the desk, as if possessed by the Corpus Christi of Discipline. Suddenly the atmosphere dimmed and Rane was standing in front of the bark hut where the smoke of cooking drifted easily over the grass. The crouched form was woman, fossicking about the fire with a thin stick. He saw her face as she turned and her mouth opened in a dreadful toothless cry.
‘Drop your trousers, I said!’
Rane felt the sting of the cane about his arm. His reaction was fast. Dropping to a squat, he kicked his right foot deep into his teacher’s groin. The pince-nez popped in an arc to the floor as Leonard Marx crumbled in agony. The cane flew into a corner and rattled to rest in a waste paper bin.
Disconsolately, Rane looked at his teacher who was writhing in a hump, then decided it was enough. He walked smartly to his desk at the back of the classroom, gathered his possessions and packed them into his case. He clumped his shoes and socks under his arm and shook his head sadly as he passed the groaning teacher.
By now the throng outside the classroom had drawn the principal from his study. A large professorial man arrived in time to see the miscreant pupil battling his way through the taunting but wary mob. A trickle of blood crept out of the boy’s nose and dripped from the end of his chin as he clutched fiercely at a swinging fist.
‘Come on, break it up ... ’ the principal’s weary and pompous contralto was lost among the hubbub.
‘Jesus, Sir, look what the mongrel did to poor old Mr Marx!’ cried a voice in the mob. It was followed by agreement, like sheep heard from a distance. The principal poked his head through the door and saw the wretched figure of Leonard Marx vomiting into the pail that held the cane.
But Rane wasn’t waiting. As he was leaving the school grounds, a younger boy leaned out from a classroom window and shouted ‘Don’t come back without your slut sister, darkie!’
*
Behind the schoolyard a nature reserve spread to the lake, a fjord-like circle of deep waters, and wound around the shores until it bumped against the cliffs of bush and rock. Rane idled through the trees until he could see the lake’s edge. There, he waited, undecided.
He could hear the silence. A smothered and mottled silence.
After splashing bloodstains from his face, he perked up and wandered off toward the cliffs. The farther he moved, the thicker the bush became, and mangroves took over from cedars and gums. An obscure trail led him through the twisting mangroves, past bamboo thickets and on to the base of the escarpment. He set his foot into the wall and climbed.
The rock was granite and as ancient as time. It extended along the eastern coast as a fortification against the tide of the sea. As he climbed the sometimes slick, sometimes jagged rock face, he thought of his Dad’s bed-time giant, playing like a child by the coast, scooping a chunk out of the coastal rock and laughing a giant’s laugh as the sea rushed in to fill the gap. During later millennia, his Dad had explained with a straight face, the coast had repaired itself by building a peninsular between the lake and the sea.
As Rane reached a point where the ledge veered from the trail, he looked down. He saw how the peninsular rejoined the northern beaches via a long cement bridge, under which the waters of the lake ebbed and flowed with the tide. He surveyed the agitation of the early afternoon traffic as it moved along the coast road and then over the bridge and homeward to the northern beaches. He could clearly see the tiny figures of old men dangling their fishing rods from the bridge, seemingly undisturbed by the roar of the fuming vehicles.
‘Shit.’ he said without passion and leaned into the cliff as his knees took him along the ledge, behind the camouflage of a web of lantana and onto a porch enshrouded by vines.
He stood and brushed the dirt from his knees and palms. Peering through the lantana, he saw his father’s wooden house, sitting alone and comfortable at the base of the cliff. A dirt track led from the house through the bush to the southern side of the lake and trickled out into the congestion of flats and houses along the peninsular.
Parallel to the coast road, his school stretched in phallic allegory, trying to reach the girls’ school farther north against the beach. His playground was empty now, except for a stooped old man named George who wandered around picking up scraps of paper and plastic wrappings.
It was old George who had told him of tales of the other people who had inhabited this land. ‘Lookout for their markings, lad ... ’ the old man had warned gently, ‘ ... and you’ll discover an unbelievable culture that has existed here, long before the whitefellas ever thought of the place.’
Since then Rane had covered the trails and poked his head into every cranny. And now as he watched the tiny image of the stooped old man, he wondered if he should have told him of the rocks.
*
The cave did not welcome visitors. Its lips opened in a tight smile, behind a lantana beard and when Rane slid through, it was a hairy lizard sucking in its tongue.
Rane steadied himself for a moment. He closed his eyes until the white in his mind’s eye darkened to shadows. Then he moved blindly into the colon of the cave and stood up. Feeling the cold, damp walls, he picked his way deeper, along a narrow tunnel until his feet touched the steps. Certain of his night vision, he opened his eyes and looked into blackness. He then wormed his way still deeper, every now and then he felt steps that descended farther into the earth.
Almost imperceptibly a faint glow, green, filled the inner regions and Rane was able to walk unaided down the slope. Many metres further the corridor ended. He reached up and caught his fingers in the opening of a smaller shaft in the wall to his left. He heaved himself up and crawled in. The air was cold. At the end of this tiny shaft he saw the brighter glow of the tabernacle. His slim body eased through and dropped lightly to the floor of a Gothic-like chamber.
Within the two metre high tabernacle at the far end of the sanctum were three luminous rocks. Each was the shape of a football and as large. They emitted no heat; only a phosphorescence of soft green which imparted an Ed Wood atmosphere to this crypt beneath the world above.
The ten-year old boy stared at the rocks and immediately recognised the calm seeping through his being. He squatted and wrapped his arms around his knees. Soon the silence was interrupted by a shuffling sound, like a nightmare moving across his mind. The music of sticks played against the walls of the chamber and voices like crickets filled his ears.
Then the face of antiquity looked into his eyes and slowly the torment dissolved and he entered the ethereal state of the dream where he raced through the confusion and riddles of his astral world.
*
The September afternoon had purpled into evening and the beach suburb sparkled. A salt mist had swung in from the sea and the aurora of twilight had an unearthly delicacy of substance. Rane appeared at the mouth of the cave and blinked his eyes at the afterglow of one of Sydney’s sunsets. The crimsons and yellows stretched far out to sea and under the clouds of pink and softness the mists evaporated. Then he climbed down the cliff, in awe of all around him.
*
‘The warrior returns!’ remarked Max from behind a tangle of tackle. ‘Hungry, son? Here, have some prawns. Put some meat on ya dick.’
Max Hollard pushed his strong, tanned, hairy arms across the rough, wooden table, pinched a couple of red King prawns and passed them over to his son. ‘Where ya been, for Chrissakes?’ he asked without expecting a reply.
They sat in a contented quietness for a while on the front verandah. Rane was absorbed in darting his tongue into the cavity of the prawn’s head. Evening sounds advanced like the beginning of applause. Night birds and fruit bats were zinging past in precision.
Max had built his timber home high above the ground, almost perching in the greenery of the cliff side. Stone steps descended beneath an opening in the floor of the verandah and visitors were prevailed upon to pass through this rite of passage, as it were, before they could enter his home.
Rane stood and walked to the railing and stared out at the night. Even though Max had fashioned sight zones through the vines and tropical trees, the young boy could distinguish nothing under the mantle of dusk. Max had laid his foundations where the winds were deflected and soft, delicate flora flourished. Thick, impenetrable greenery submerged the house in a wealth of perfume and insects.
The verandah opened back onto a stone-walled lounge with a stone fireplace set squarely in the middle of the carpet-less cedar floor; the smoke from winter’s fire would flow through a shell-covered canopy built into the ceiling. Strong red gum chairs retained the shape of the trees they were cut from. Magazines and newspaper formed piles about the wooden floor.
The house had been built in stages. Each room had its own level so that the building was a series of steps and corridors leading to each person’s domain. The kitchen and bathrooms were located centrally, as in a boarding house.
‘Have some more, son.’
‘Aren’t the others home yet?’ Rane asked as he grabbed a handful of prawns.
‘You just tuck in there, son. Don’t you worry about them. They’ve had theirs.’ Max had lit a joint and his eyes removed his attention to the night and its sounds. He was a huge man who carried the style of the sixties; long, unkempt hair and beard and the attitude of the biker. Close to two hundred and fifty pounds he seemed indestructible within his muscular frame. His face was broad with brown eyes set apart by a hawk-like nose jutting out of his face.
As he drifted with the smoke he remembered when, on a warm day earlier in his life he took the hand of his wife and walked toward the building that housed the state adoption board. The box that was a lift had a nervous start as they moved up into the building. The austere walls of smoked and aged cream followed them along the way to the room where the letter had directed them for the purposes of adoption.
A remarkable quantum leap from the austerity of the post-war era to the frantic pulse of social liberation in the sixties had permitted Max and his woman to take home and to rear two toddlers who otherwise may have lingered for years in the orphanage. It had, however, taken patience to coax the authorities from their perch and come down and open the cage. Their little dark haired daughter, cherubic and shy, became Dali. The son they adopted, with his dark skin and fair, almost white wavy hair, became the reincarnation of the Polynesian God, Rane.
After the adoption they roamed the country in company with others who deemed Bike a god. The kiddies were bundled securely into a sidecar that Max had appended to his Triumph. It was unfortunate that one lovely day the lady who was wrapped around a tree when she left the seat of her borrowed bike had been his wife. Before she died her womb had delivered their child.
Her death did not deter him. He had taken her hand and filled it with his word. He would continue to raise the three children as one in a montage of social enlightenment, building their world in the bush at the base of the cliff. And the ward full of sick people watched as he wept like a madman.
‘What are you thinking of, Dad?’
‘I was just thinkin’ about the time when ... ’ The pause which allowed a giant prawn into his mouth shut the gate on his memories. He continued, ‘Where did ya get to, Rane?’
‘Dad!’ Rane stood and grabbed his plates. ‘I’m going to have to do some homework. See ya later.’
Max followed his son with a quizzical look.
Rane showered and went to his room. Comics littered his bed and a single poster proclaiming VOID IS BEST was pinned to the wall above the window. He lifted the comics and took a Spiderman and a Gothic Horror Special and placed the rest under his bed. He fell asleep with both unopened. Ten minutes more and he was into his dream.
They formed a line and Rane passed them by. He knew who they were. He saw his ancestry in vague figures, hollow-eyed phantoms come to say hallo and to sit and stare. In his dreams Rane jumped from one generation of his people to another, passing back in time to the beginning.
And always that cave!
‘Wake up, son!’
The language was out of place in this world of hot mists and red, burning rivers of mud. The narrow line of naked men halted on a rise above the sylvan plains, the weapons of the hunt dangling from sinewy arms. As they turned to him to speak their bodies shivered and shimmered and Rane gaped in confusion at the face at the end of the bed.
‘Come on, boy. Your principal’s out on the verandah. I think we’d better go out there and join him. Wash your face first. You ... look ... simply... awful.’
*
His bulbous buttocks hung over the sides of the bench. He sat with his knees apart like an unfit wrestler after the bout. His University of Sydney eyes wandered critically about the verandah while his nostrils quivered with the remnants of marijuana in the air. As Max strolled from the lounge, the principal let go with an enormous fart.
‘Ya’ve been to China, Mr Wentworth?’
‘Oh, please do excuse me, Mr Hollard. My wife insists on giving me bran with my meals. I do hope you are not offended.’
‘I don’t think so, pal. I know ya won’t be offended if I sit over here. Will you!’ Max said as he pulled his bench away from the florid faced educator and plonked it near the corner under the fecund tree fern.
They spoke little.
Then Rane sauntered out with a face that hadn’t come back from holidays. He looked from his Dad to the hefty principal and waited. Finally Mr Wentworth wobbled from his bench and assumed the air of a lecturer. He was about to deliver his harangue when Max interrupted. ‘Look fella, if ya gunna talk with us you’d better sit down. I don’t take too kindly to blokes standin’ over me. OK?’
‘Hrrrmmmf! Well, certainly, Mr Hollard. I did not mean to give umbrage.’
‘Ya can give as much umbrage as ya want, pal, but ya can do it sittin’ on ya bum.’
The principal sat awkwardly while trying to adjust his rump to the hardness of the rough-sawn bench. He retrieved a yellow handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the spittle from the corners of his mouth.
‘Has your son told you of his behaviour at school today, Mr Hollard?’
‘No! But you’d better.’ Max retorted.
Stafford Wentworth drew himself a picture of his own importance and position and, satisfied with how he saw himself, continued: ‘Your son was formally instructed to address his father about today’s ugliness and, until an hour ago, it was expected that you, Mr Hollard, would accompany your son to school to redress the wrongs ... ’
‘Just a bloody minute, pal! What’s this?’
‘Well, it appears that your son and his teacher, Mr Marx, had a violent disagreement and the upshot of it all was your son’s unwarranted attack on ... ’
Max rose and crossed his massive arms. His mere movement ceased the principal’s homily. ‘Hold ya bloody horses, pal!’ He turned to Rane. ‘Son, what happened?’
Rane told his story briefly, without embellishment.
‘And that’s bloody-well unwarranted?’ Max inelegantly cross-examined the uncomfortable form across the verandah.
‘Look here, Mr Hollard. As I said, it was my decision to await your appearance at our school tomorrow but I had doubts as to whether the message would be transferred appropriately. Your son’s behaviour is altogether unsatisfactory. Besides the vicious assault, and in my mind it was an unprovoked attack on a State public servant, your son’s attitude is not conducive to success in his studies. At this rate, Mr Hollard, he’s not going to make it at our school. I may even feel the need to recommend his transfer to a special school.’
‘What d’ya reckon, mate?’ Max asked his son.
‘I’m hungry, Dad. Think I’ll grab some more prawns. Any left?’
There was something indignant in the way the principal squeezed his rubbery body through the manhole in the verandah floor and stumbled his way to the parked car.
Max laughed as he ambled into the kitchen after his son.
‘They never learn.’
‘They never change, Dad.’
‘Yup!’ Max piled the plates into the sink and ran cold water over them. ‘They choof ‘em out of the factory like sheep shit. Round stinkin’ bits of poop.’ He dried his hands on the kitchen towel and led Rane back into the lounge. ‘Tell me, why did ya boot the creep? Wouldn’t it’ve been easier to just walk out of the dump?’
‘Dad, I couldn’t help it. I just felt the pain and the next thing I knew was old Marx groaning in a heap.’
‘Probably sufferin’ from a bad case of Uriah!’ said Max as he reached into the vase on the mantelpiece and extracted a small joint.
‘Why do you smoke that stuff, Dad?’
‘You didn’t get it?’ Max lit his face up behind the fierce glow of the cigarette. Still chuckling at his private joke, he let go of his muscles and relaxed into his redgum chair. ‘Dunno, really. Like to get out of myself sometimes; you know, when the heavies come knockin’ at my head. I like to be out at the time. It’s the same as whackin’ a great big DO NOT DISTURB sign on my brain ... then I can get on with some real thinkin’. And that, my boy, is what life is all about.’
‘Do you have daydreams, Dad?’
‘My whole life is a dream, mate.’ said Max as the heavy volume of Kant came into his lap and his fingers flicked through the pages to the bookmark. He briefly looked up from the book to meet Rane’s eyes across the room. The boy was standing near the fireplace.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, Dad.’ Rane said as his earnest young face wrinkled in a fanfare of worry.
‘What’s that, son?’ asked Max as his eyes searched the book for meaning.
Bit by bit, Rane told his story of phantasmagoria, of being unnerved by the abrupt arrival of beings in his mind and the aberrant sounds that came and went. He had been visited upon by psychic intruders who cast nets and drew him back through the ethereal gateway. Without wishing for it, without warning, he would become in another time, and would be imbued with the essence of that time. Then, shedding the nets, he would become as Rane again, whole, and with the memories of his voyage. In ten minutes Rane gave a young boy’s inarticulate version of a mysterious journey to madness.
Max had gone to the verandah to peer at nothing through his sight zones. Rane was leafing through Kant.
‘I don’t understand this, Dad.’
‘I don’t either, son.’
*
Dali Hollard graciously thanked her hosts and ran smartly up the driveway and down the track to her home. She hopped up the stone stairs and burst upon her Dad like a Roman Candle on bonfire night. Her jet black hair was long down her back and her eyes disappeared in her smile. She carried a party hat and some birthday cake in foil.
‘Hallo sweetheart! How’s the party?’ Max hugged his daughter gently; she was so frail against his mammoth bulk.
‘Aw, just great, Daddy.’ replied Dali with her eyes on the cake. ‘Laurie was there with her puppy and Jimmy Best got pushed in the pool and I brought you some birthday cake. See!’
She held out the cake like it was a prize for coming second and pushed it under her Dad’s nose.
‘Hmmmm! Smells good.’ Max scanned the cake and then his daughter’s face. ‘Hallo’ You been playin’ rough stuff?’
He laid the foiled cake on the bench and touched Dali’s hair from her cheek. A stubbled patch of dirt and skin, the size of a postage stamp, covered the bump near her ear.
‘It’s nothing, Daddy.’ she said with finality. Her good humour was restored as she picked up her party hat and skipped into the lounge and kissed Rane on his forehead. ‘I’m going to wash.’
Dali vanished into the corridors of the house. Rane sat for a moment more then walked quietly through the sliding doors and onto the verandah. ‘Some bloke thumped her, Dad.’
‘Is this Uriah Heap speakin’?’
‘It’s a lot worse.’
‘Yar in riddles, kiddo.’
‘Go and see for yourself, Dad. Why would I change my nature all of a sudden?’
‘Yeah! Why would ya’ Okay, my Clark Kent of a son. You hang on here. I’ll go and see.’
Max went to his daughter’s room. He found her sitting on her bed with her Teddy bear hugged to her cheek. Her room was a world of Disney and fairies with floral curtains and colourful carpet. Above her bed was a sketching of Max which she had done during the long nights of a spent winter.
‘Come on, chicken, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, Daddy.’ she looked at him with black, watery eyes.
‘Hey! Did I bring you up to fib to your old man?’
Dali laid her Teddy bear primly on her pillow and placed her hands clasped in her lap. She was a choir girl at recital. ‘Daddy?’ she said uncertainly, like a terrier testing murky waters with its paw.
‘Go on, sweetheart. It’s alright. We’re mates, remember.’
Max avoided the soft springs of her bed and sat on the floor with his huge thighs drawn up to his chest. He wrapped his tree-trunk arms around his knees and smiled at the pretty young girl.
‘We were playing games in the bush, as usual, and ...’ she began with effort, ‘ ... and the boys were chasing the girls. They were supposed to take us back to their spaceship and sell us as slaves on their planet. When I got caught this big boy pushed me to the ground and hurt me.’
Max moved his position slightly. An uncomfortable anger was developing. ‘Ya didn’t lose your cool, did ya?’ He grunted through a forced smile. A darker tone had entered his eyes as he blinked abnormally.
‘Not at all, Daddy.’ she replied proudly, and grinned.
‘Tell me what this big boy did to you. Exactly.’
Dali absently touched her bruised cheek with her fingers and a look of loss appeared on her face. ‘He was friendly to me in the beginning. I thought it was part of the game. But I bit him and lots of blood ... he got all angry and his lip looked horrible. I could taste it in my mouth. I said I was sorry but he grabbed me very hard and rubbed my head into the dirt. He kept on calling me silly names. I don’t think his parents would be very happy to hear him say all those things.’
‘Who is he, sweetheart?’
‘I don’t want to know his name, Daddy. I want to pretend nothing happened. That’s the way you said, isn’t it, Daddy?’
Max grasped his daughter’s sallow hand and gave it a warm, endearing squeeze. Then he got up from the floor and bade his little girl an early night.
*
Stafford Wentworth was a proprietary person, quite suburban and besotted with regulations and petty worries. He had tabulated his life so that uncommon disturbances might skip past without effect. Although he realised that Marx’s erratic and often cruel nature bestowed upon his classes an atmosphere of buffoonery, he could not afford the subjugation of his school system by acts of uncouth rebellion. He had gone to the Hollard home fully expecting the father’s compliance in getting young Hollard to return penitent to school.
‘Hello, darling.’
His doting wife greeted him at the door. His castle was secure. During dinner, he expostulated with his wife about the disturbances to his life. ‘If the child cannot cope here in the civilised world, then his father, or step-father, or whatever he calls himself, ought to jump into a truck with him and head straight back to the bush. The little bugger would be more at home with lizards and grubs than with ordered and decent children.’
‘Yes, dear.’ replied his wife as she ladled the sauce onto his plate.
‘I go out of my way to control a situation and what do I get? A ratbag of a man hellbent on revolutionising the country with his social experiments, and I get a child who sits in the clouds all day, and, to put the icing on the scholastic cake, hrrmmf hrrmmf, I also persevere with an idiot Jewish anachronism, swishing his cane in an orgy of over-discipline.’
Stafford Wentworth tucked into his lamb chops, evidently pleased with his dinnertime oratory.
‘Yes, dear.’
He looked over at his wife and thought of better things.
*
Dali became a teenager a month after Rane, and although her brother had forsaken his party for a stroll in the bush, she insisted on inviting a small group of friends to celebrate. She became more excited as the afternoon drew close. Her first brassiere fitted her shy breasts as she pirouetted in front of her bedroom mirror. Bundling up the handcrafted presents she had worked on for weeks, Dali conscientiously had wrapped each in gaily-coloured paper with pink and blue twine.
‘Why should I be the only one who gets presents today?’ she muttered happily to herself.
‘Won’t be long now, sweetheart.’ greeted her Dad from the doorway. ‘Happy?’
‘Oh yes, Daddy. I really am.’ she chirped. ‘You know what? This is the best day of my life.’
‘Looks like it, sweetheart. But I’ve come to share a secret with you. Hang on! Ssssshh! Your brothers are outside with silly grins all over their silly faces. They’ve got something for you. For Chrissakes, don’t kiss ‘em, or you won’t see them for the rest of the day. Okay?’
By five o’clock on that autumn Saturday Max had led his tearful daughter inside where fire smoke drifted into the canopy of shells. McLuhan had tramped the afternoon up and down the dusty track and Rane sat quietly on the verandah, beneath the fluttering balloons and streamers. The coke grew warm as the ice dissolved and flies had found their way to the cake.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ Max said hopefully, ‘there’ll be other birthdays.’
The bearded man then spent the night outside, spitting venom through his sight zones.
*
‘Shit! I couldn’t make it, really.’ explained the orange-haired girl who sat next to Dali in class.
‘Why not?’ asked Dali innocently.
‘Look, mate. My mum said not to say anything, but, well, she’s sort of old fashioned, if you know what I mean.’
‘No. I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘Well, we’re mates, aren’t we? Well, I wanted to come but my mum, well, she reckons you’ve got a disease.’
‘What sort of a disease?’
‘Not that sort, silly. The other, you know, well, what all foreigners’ve got.’
‘Who’s a foreigner?’
Dali put down the phone. The streamers were long gone and the balloons were in tatters. Max and the boys were drinking the coke. Rane was sitting by the fire, his toes were wriggling to the flames, like ten midget conductors from Fantasia. A musty pile of gum cuts was stacked next to his chair, and every now and then he fuelled the fire. The room had an air of vagrancy about it. A tree stump from the surf rested near the sliding doors, paintings were hanging from wooden wedges in the stone walls and an old battered Harley stood majestically if not tragically beside Max’s bookshelf. It was an odd arrangement; a miniature library, antique motor bike and a bearded giant in a bushman’s chair.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘Apart from your three noses, nothing!’
‘Then why aren’t they the same to me anymore. I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Sweetheart, your brothers are goin’ through a bad time, just like you. They get bumped and bruised by life and they come home feelin’ sorry for themselves. But they get over it. Their mates, they come ta realise, aren’t worth the shit and the agony.’
‘Bullshit, Dad.’ said McLuhan, a little too automatically.
‘Bright boy here knows everythin’, sweetheart. Look, I’ve been at war with society most of my life. I’ve seen how it lives. There’s kids in this city whose parents couldn’t give a dried dog’s turd for ‘em. The littlies are sniffin’ glue and petrol and borrowin’ their oldies’ tranquillisers and shit like that and runnin’ about the world like lost souls in search of hell.’
‘So?’
‘You’ve got us.’
‘Oh whacko! I don’t go to school with you though.’
‘Change schools then.’ suggested Rane.
‘Will they call me a chinkor there too?’
‘A what?’ Max demanded.
‘A chinkor, Daddy. I don’t even know what it means ... nobody will tell me.’
‘And now you want me to, eh?’
‘And now who’s being inscrutable, Daddy?’
McLuhan puffed marijuana and grunted. ‘It’s just some ole clapped out arsehole echoin’ itself. It’s the bleat-bleat syndrome.’
‘The bleat-bleaters are alluding to the fiction that you are an Asian girl of ill-repute, sis.’ Rane suggested. ‘ They rubbish the shit out of any poor drongo they don’t quite get to know properly. You’re copping it right now. It’ll pass in about twenty or thirty years when you’re no longer a virile threat to them.’
‘When did ya learn to put on the eloquence, son?’ Max eyed his son with mock suspicion.
‘Eloquent? Dad, I was going to suggest that the mob around here aren’t capable of acting out of concert with the common herd.’ Rane replied. ‘One bloke in the mob pisses on a drunk’s head and the rest’ve got to stick their dicks out and do the same. The bleat-bleat mob are mongrelised morons. Our society is shit full of them.’
With the instincts of a threatened baboon, Max gathered his clan to his fortress by the cliff. He deftly picked up his pups, dusted them off and dropped them gently into more befitting schools along the coast. He was following his own destiny; in time, the scars of hurt would become salved, and his family would drift farther from the mainstream.
