Authors: Niall Griffiths
The smell of the forest and the mysterious sounds behind the leaves. It’s April 1978. Elvis Presley dies. The boy’s mother, long a fan, is upset on the telephone. A dance is held in the campsite hall. Our boy gets invigorated on sugar and additives and watches a girl he knows, dressed as a squaw, doing the hokey-cokey. She’s in his class at school and he’s suddenly looking at her in an entirely new way. She spins around with her hands in an inverted steeple, cupping her chin, and the tassles on her skirt and the warpaint on her face draw and keep the boy’s eye. He is eleven years old, not far off twelve, and is growing not smoothly but it seems in a series of jerks and jolts. When he walks across the dancefloor to the drinks table for another glass of orangeade of
amphetamine-strength
sugar content, he notices that he’s walking in a new way, too – the rolling shoulders, the head back all haughty, the rippling hips. He’s swaggering. Why is he walking in this way? He doesn’t know. But he likes it. Thinks he might start walking like this more often.
Is this Guilderton? This is nothing like I remember it. Nothing at all. Where’s the lake and the trackway? Where are the cabins? I go into the visitor’s centre and explain what I’m doing there and I’m given a number and told to ring it so I go outside to a callbox and do and a lady answers and I explain, again, what I’m doing in Guilderton and she tells me that the log cabins have long gone and the place is given over now to caravans and holiday cottages. I thank her and go for a walk around. I’m by the sea, and I don’t recall the place being anywhere near the sea. I remember it inland, with thick green trees and big foggy lakes. I don’t recognise this at all. I’m struck, here, by how erroneous our memories can be. How events can mutate, with time, in the mind. And if that’s true, then how certain can you ever be about yourself, given that you misremember drastically the events that made you the person you are? This is a little bit alarming. So I don’t think about it. I remember Guilderton. The dancing girl and the new way of walking.
We drive down to Quinn’s Rocks. Rain and an angry sea. Man-made rock outcrops on which I’d sit as a kid next to a beach on which I’d walk with my dad. We don’t stop long – the weather’s foul. But it sets us off singing ‘The Mighty Quinn’, which becomes ‘The Mighty Hig’, made amusing by insulting lyrics: ‘He’s got a penis / But it’s not very big / You ain’t seen nothing like the Mighty Hig!’
–Get fucked, says Higgy.
We return to Wanneroo. Go into the Wanneroo Tavern, where my dad and grandad once got drunk thirty years ago. We play pool. Rain batters down outside. I think of my grandfather
here, still alive, and my dad, younger, younger even than I am now. As I’m outside smoking I receive a text. It’s from my mum, 12,000 miles away, and reads: REMEMBER THE
LAMP-SHADES
FALLING OFF THE CAR ON THE NULLARBOR? I don’t, no. Christ how peculiar this is; I’m here at forty in a pub where my dad and his dad got drunk and my dad was younger then than I am now and my grandad’s been dead for twenty years and my mum’s sending me a text message from the other side of the planet and time and space expands and shrinks quickly like a panting chest. How peculiar this is. This cannot be measured. I don’t know what to do with this. I go back into the bar and drink a lot more.
The pains in the mother’s legs get worse. They become crippling. The doctor can find nothing physically wrong with her.
Tony throws a pen up into the air one day and it lands
nib-first
in baby Nicola’s fontanelle. She screams and holds her head and cries and shrieks uncontrollably and Tony collapses around his guilt. Nicola recovers, quickly.
Linsey has a friend, Nicola Crook, with whom she shoplifts from Cole’s supermarket. Ten pairs of knickers and a jumper. They show their haul to Linsey’s mother who is immediately suspicious. The boy watches.
–Where’d you get these from?
–At Cole’s. They were throwing them away.
–Did you steal them?
Linsey thinks and frowns and then points at a pair of knickers. –We stole that.
Nicky Crook says –Tell the truth, Linsey, we stole them all.
The girls and their plunder are marched down to the supermarket. The booty’s returned. The girls apologise to the displeased manager. Who remains displeased and mutters about the police although he doesn’t actually contact them.
Children do this. They push and poke and prod at the world, at the limits of their location in it, they test the elasticity of their bonds to other people both known and unknown. This is healthy. This is what children should do. It is them stamping their personality on a world incomprehensibly vast and confusing. The boy understands this, even at that age, although it’s not yet a thing he can articulate beyond the abilities of his body.
In May of that year, they go as a family to the television studios of Channel 7 to watch the gameshow
Family Fortunes
being filmed. Other families, friends, go with them. The boy finds it boring, but is excited when, during the interval, free Snickers bars are given out, but he’s startled to find that a Snickers is exactly the same as a Marathon. What manner of adult trickery is this? What vile breed of antipodean chicanery? He’s never thought that Marathons could be bought in Oz, and he’s missed them, and now, after three bloody years… Plus ‘Snickers’ is a stupid name. He’s gone without Marathons for three years now, and, as it turns out, needlessly so. Damn this bleeding country.
Back home, there’s a bundle of rags on the outside porch. The father asks who left them there and gives them a kick and they shout. It’s Terry Madigan, sleeping, another scouse feller come all the way from Brisbane to visit.
–You weren’t in, he says, –and I was knackered.
–Yer daft sod.
Terry stays for a while.
And one day the boy is watching the news. The bemused newsreader is talking about a ‘craze’ in the UK called ‘punk’ and a band called the ‘Sex… Pistols’. He fills the gap between the two words with a small smirk and a shake of his head and a bucket-load of contempt. A clip of the band is shown. The boy is enraptured in a second. They’ve made themselves look as ugly as possible but they’re singing about how pretty they are and the lead singer appears to be some kind of hunchback, snarling and leering and grinning and spitting. The noise they make is ferocious and enraged, a calculated affront to the kind of people who would call the police on little boys gazing at their goldfish. An electric charge blasts and crackles through the boy. He feels like he’s been woken up from a long sleep. Like a bucket of icy water has been thrown over him. He feels alive. The clip of the band is a short one and when the newsreader fills the screen again with his neat hair and trimmed muzzy and tie and tan and gob pursed and puckered like a dog’s arse with lemon juice squeezed into it the boy wants the band back, wants to see more of them, hear and feel more of the marvellous noise that they produce. He knows now, suddenly and in an instant, what he wants to be, what he wants to do, when he grows up.
The mother’s leg pains get worse.
It’s June 28th. We get on the Rottnest Island ferry at Fremantle dock and immediately on the boat I hear ‘The Mighty Quinn’ on the cabin’s radio. Haven’t heard that song in years and
now
look. This is a sign. Of what? Rottnest is a holiday island, once a colonial barracks and prison; its main hotel was originally the summer residence of the Governor of WA. It has bars and restaurants and little cute animals called quokkas, rabbit-sized kangaroos, and I’m excited about going. It’s that thing, again, about travelling over water. It exhilarates me and seems somehow to possess some mysterious depths of meaning and significance, even if the purpose of the trip is simply to get drunk and stroke small animals.
The ferry disgorges a load of students in sombreros and shorts and flip-flops, carrying boom-boxes and small barrels of Heineken. Loud and look-at-me-ish, like students the world over. I ponder on what might be a good collective noun for students; an arseache? A wick? A gobshite of students? Tony didn’t come to Rottnest with me when I was a kid – I went with the school, I think – so I tell him about the quokkas, and how they gave the island its name (the early Dutch settlers thought they were rats, hence ‘Rat Nest’ = ‘Rottnest’). Their defence against threat is to curl up into a ball; take that, and the employment of the island as a haven for pissed-up Aussies, and you get ‘quokka soccer’. Nice.
It’s a rough crossing. The ferry bucks and bounces on the sea like an angry stallion. Even this mad motion, I trust. Something about water, travelling over water. It feels right, to me. In the little harbour when we get off, a dolphin is throwing a big fish high into the air, catching it in its mouth, breaching out of the water, tossing the fish again, catching it again. Awesome and beautiful. This is nothing but play. The dolphin’s behaviour is just a revelling. He’s happy to be alive, that dolphin. A couple, older, are watching him with great glee and I get talking to them. They’re Ten Pound Poms too, been in Oz for
forty years, as long as I’ve been on the earth. He’s from Leeds, she Somerset, with a mother from Tremadog. I like them. We watch, with a shared joy, the dolphin exult. I exult too.
The tourist office offers me and Tony accommodation at $30 a night. This is amazingly cheap. A full-sized bungalow – a balcony, several bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, for thirty bucks a night. Even better, we’re next door to a gaggle of gorgeous women, who are on their balcony drinking and dancing and laughing and not wearing very much. A century ago, this was a high-security prison for aboriginal miscreants. Now it’s
karaoke-capital
. Some changes are to be applauded.
This is brilliant. I love this island. The quokkas are
everywhere
, and so accustomed to human company that they’ll approach you for a tickle. They swoop on the leftovers outside the cafés; I watch one pick up a chip in his wee paws and dip it into a bowl of ketchup before eating it. They hang around the bars, gazing longingly through the windows. They’re entrancing to watch. We get on a bus to tour the island. The driver asks where we’re from and we tell him that we live in Wales.
–Wales, ey? Play much rugby there or are ya still learning?
–Learnt quite a bit in four hundred years or so, mate.
–Didn’t ya beat the Poms?
–Aye. During the Six Nations grand slam last year.
–In that case I’ll only charge ya Aussie prices. Seven bucks.
I like this feller; I like his openness, I like the way he understands that Britain is not all Pommie-land. And he shows us great things; huge and hulking wrecks on the beaches, astounding rocks and cliffs. And then he points out an osprey’s nest on a rock and asks us if we have ospreys in Wales and we tell him yes, there’s a few breeding pairs recently returned, and he says:
–Yeh, but we look after our birds here. It’s not like in the UK. Buggers don’t steal their eggs here. Our birds are under protection.
–As they are in Wales, I say. –Twenty-four hour CCTV. Armed guards, in some places.
He doesn’t seem impressed by this, or even convinced, and, even though I quite like this feller, I’m annoyed. Typical Oz attitude; everything we do is better. What, does he think that we have open season on our raptors in Britain? That we’re allowed to shoot them, steal their eggs? Does he not think that we revere and respect our ospreys, just as they do on Rottnest Island? And this from the place that gave the world quokka soccer. Don’t lecture me on how to look after our wildlife until you can look after your own. Jesus Christ.
And now I’ve had my fill of Australia. I’m sick of that general superciliousness, that smugness, and I’m sick, too, of the Brit ex-pats who have slavishly been taken in by it. I’m flying back to Brisbane tomorrow to catch a plane to Los Angeles and I’m looking forward to it. Want, now, to be out of Oz. I’ve had more than enough of the place. Glad I left when I did, at the age of twelve. Hate to think how I might’ve turned out, had I stayed. But I’m going to make the most of my night on Rottnest so I get drunk and tickle quokkas behind the ear until my index finger turns white.
The mother stays home with the baby and the father takes the three other children to a quiz night in the Wanneroo town hall. They come last, and win a cabbage. Tony’s friend from school,
Warren Arbuckle, comes first. Ponce.
A travelling fair visits the district. It has a dunker stall; a man sits on a retractable plank over a tank of water and if you hit a bullseye with a ball the plank is whipped out from under him and he falls in the water. Tony hits the target. The feller’s dunked. The watching crowd yell:
Give it to the Pommie with the dead-eye!
Out in the bush one day the childen make a fire and cook damper; flour and water and raisins mixed and wrapped in foil and cooked in the embers. Linsey calls this ‘spotted dick’, and sets her tracksuit top on fire and runs away like a comet. She’s unharmed, and the mother buys a patch in the shape of an ‘L’ and sews it over the burn-hole.
The father comes home from work one day with a mirror advertising Swan lager. A present, he says, because he’s leaving the job. A few days later, on June 6th and after some frantic jettisoning of belongings, they drive out to the airport and board a plane for London.
–It was that sudden, was it?
–Don’t you remember?, Tony says. –We were all shocked. No sooner had they told us we were going back and we were on the plane.
I have one last thing to do in Perth. I have to visit the Palm Court Reception Centre at the zoo on Labouchere Road, where we spent a Christmas day as kids. I don’t recall anything about it, which might be just as well because it doesn’t exist any more; it’s now the Zoological Gardens Functions Room. Same
building, though, and as I stand in front of it some recollections do trickle back; the plants, the huge and vivid flowers, the purplish colour of the building materials. I ate a Christmas dinner here, once. A long time ago.
We return to Fremantle. Get a room above a pub, a
shit-hole
of a room with half-drunk bottles of beer all over it and sheets that smell of someone else’s sweat, opposite a brothel which stays open all night. I’m tired, so sleep through the pub hubbub, and we take the van back in the morning and get my deposit back and meet up with Higgy and get on the plane to Brisbane where Tony meets up with his pole-dancer who will, in a few weeks’ time, reveal herself to be sadly approaching unhinged. I stay that night in a motel close to the airport and ask the owner where the nearest pub is and he answers ‘about 9 km’ and there is no taxi service in the area and even the external areas of the motel have signs saying ‘NOBODY SMOKES HERE!’, with a little smiley face, don’t be maverick, be like us and we’ll all get along just fine, do what we do and let’s all be nice except I’m there and I
do
smoke and I can’t believe there’s not even a bar within walking distance and no fucking taxis to be had either so I just go to bed and in the early morning I fly to Los Angeles and that’s it. I’m out of Oz. Sick to the gizzard of Oz.