Ten Pound Pom (4 page)

The trip is getting interesting.

Back on the highway, heading up to Noosa, Higgy drives us through Moorooka.

–D’you remember the advert, boys? We all used to sing it together. D’you remember it?

And we do, suddenly, and we all three sing it, thirty years on from when we last did, two forty-somethings and one
fifty-something
now and less fingers and less hair and greyer hair and more scars and tattoos and muscles and height and bones and so much more living done since: 

The boy and his family travel to Noosa Head for a day out. On the way there, they pass a giant pineapple by the side of the road and at Noosa the car begins to cough and splutter like an ex army major watching a documentary on glam rock, so it is taken to a mechanic in the town.
Watch this kids
, the mechanic says, and puts his finger to a spark plug and his tongue on the propped-up bonnet and blue sparks leap between the two. The boy’s father roars with laughter. The boy stares at the fire that dances around the older human. They’re of the same species.

On the beach called Squeaking Sands, the boy loves the sound the beach makes as he walks on it. His dad explains that all the grains are the same size so they produce a high-pitched
noise when rubbed together. The boy likes this very much. Squeak, squeak. Men can make flame and a seashore can whistle.

–Look! There’s that bleedin’ pineapple! Still there!

And it is; house-high pineapple by the side of the road. Exactly the same. I didn’t know what it indicated in the seventies and I don’t want to know now but I’m happy that it’s still there. Bloody stupid thing and what good is the world without such things?

–Noosa, says Higgy, who’s driving. –It won’t be like you remember it. Round about the time you boys were last there a mate of mine bought a house for eight thousand dollars and he sold it about ten years ago for ten million.

We drive over the Blackall Range Mountains, promoted on a map I pick up at a filling station as ‘the Calm Behind the Sunshine Coast’, which I sincerely hope it is, and can believe that it is, observing the seemingly-empty immensity that we pass through. So much space here. I’m knackered, today, very tired, after sleeping badly for three nights; I sleep better on the balcony than I do in the fiendish orchestra of apnoea inside the unit but I’m still woken early every morning by the dawn cacophony. It’s a long drive to Noosa Head and when I get there I don’t find it very exciting; money, beaches, tourists, big houses, usual stuff. Dull, except for the bush turkeys which wattle and scrat everywhere; them, I like. Funny little busy blue birds with velociraptor feet. I buy a take-away coffee from a kiosk on the beach and the guy takes the lid off the cup and shows me the liquid inside:

–That okay for ya, buddy?

–Grand, I say, and think:
Course
it’s okay. It’s black and hot and no doubt tastes of coffee. It’s what I asked for. Why’s he showing me my drink? –Thanks.

I sit with Higgy on a bench at Laguna Lookout. I came here too, as a child, but don’t remember it. Uncle Higgy, as he once was to me, was also a Ten Pound Pom, landed in Oz in 1974 at age twenty-four. Went back to the UK in ’76 but came back to Oz in ’85, to Melbourne, because his sister lived there. After eight years there, he moved again to Brisbane in 1993, ‘fell in love’ (his words) with the Sunshine Coast in 1994 and has been there, in Mooloolaba, since. He’s been a site manager for 14 years and makes a decent living; his brother, back in Auldum, a civil engineer, makes the same money as Higgy but ‘it goes a lot further in Oz’. He got Australian citizenship in 1989 but he’s ‘still a Pom and a Pom right through’, and if he
had
to – if he was forced to make the choice – he’d return to Britain. But he doesn’t have to make that choice so he’ll ‘die in Oz’. He left the UK in the first place simply because he had the opportunity to see other parts of the world for a tenner – ‘just adventurousness’.

Ah, Uncle Higgy. Now just a mate. I remember him with a bubble perm.

Curtiss Falls on Tambourine Mountain. Rainforest. The boy and his mother and siblings stand on a flat rock across a stream and the father takes a photograph and then the boy’s mother starts to scream, terrible shrieks that set birds frantically exiting the trees and bounce back off the thick and stone-like trunks. The
boy’s mother is kicking her flip-flopped feet in a loud panic and the father is exhorting her to keep still so he can ‘get it off’. The boy looks and sees the leech protruding from his mother’s toe, it appears to be half-sunk in her flesh and wriggling its way further in and it gleams blackly sleek like a seal and a deep disturbance begins to writhe in the boy that such things could exist and his father whacks the leech away with the side of his fist and holds his mother and comforts her, laughing softly, not unkindly, at her hysterical reaction.
It’s just a leech
, he tells her.
Just a leech. It’s gone now.

Mount Tambourine is a hilltop settlement of huge houses with startling views across the plain below and out to sea miles away, the Surfer’s Paradise towers glittering in the far distance like upright shards of glass. Signs everywhere read DROUGHT AREA – SAVE EVERY DROP. Curtiss Falls is little more than a dribble, really, and not at all like the pacey mini-river I remember it as being, but that could be due to the drought. Still, I like the hanging hairy vines and the prehistoric ferns and the trees that loom huge and the bush turkeys and the humidity and the steam and the vivid flashes of lorikeets between the plate-leafed wrestling branches. And we find the flat stone on which we stood for the photograph and by which the leech attached itself to our mother’s toe. I stand on the stone, in roughly the same place I’m standing in the photograph. Still here; three decades of the world’s turning has not shifted that stone and has spun me around the globe back to it. Mighty magnet. I start to think about numenism, and how subjective
that necessarily is, the impossibility of an unknowable localised ur-spirit when that very thing plays and wonders and worries like a younger self, how emotional attachment and investment must always mould the numen to one’s own shape, but these are the thoughts of a man of forty and one of the opportunities I need and want, very much, to exploit here in this steamy jungle is a re-acquainting of myself with the boy I once was so I pretend he’s standing by me, holding my hand, looking down into the clear and rolling water underfoot.

We stop at a bar for some food, driving back. I take an information leaflet and a cigarette onto the decking outside. A hawk, nearby, hovers in a thermal. His feathers are white. ‘Tamborine Mountain Sanctuary’ the leaflet says (no ‘u’, I notice), ‘between the coast, the clouds and the country’. The Curtis Falls walk (no second ‘s’, I notice) is praised as having ‘an enormous strangler fig’ and a ‘causeway [that] takes you over the creek and little fishes are usually visible in the clear water’. The ‘
Quick-Facts
’ column tells me that Tamborine Mountain ‘is a remnant of deposits laid down by volcanic eruptions 225 million years ago… Bush Turkeys and their eggs, Wallabies, Yams, Tamarind and Macadamia nuts are just some of the abundant bush tucker sort by aboriginal peoples for thousands of years on Tamborine Moluntain… At 550 metres above sea level it can be 5 degrees cooler than adjacent lowlands. It pays bring a jacket any time of year. With an average per year of 131 days with some rain, it is wise to bring a raincoat or umbrella’ (
sic
throughout).

I wouldn’t mind staying in this area for longer, really; the mountain towns with their restaurants and bars seem interesting, and I like Surfer’s Paradise being at this distance, all those miles over there on the horizon. How wee it looks, at this remove. How puny.

A school trip to Early Street Pioneer Village – wells and log cabins and people wearing Victorian attire. How the settlers lived. Being led around the village the boy notices some large movement in a tangled bush and he crawls in there, no thought of spiders or snakes, no regard for the thorns that rip his skin. A dragon is hiding in the leaves. Small dinosaur, a spiked ridge of flesh on its back and a green wattle at its throat. Its claws curl like nail parings and its yellow eyes turn to the boy and a pulse beats lightly in its throat and a heavier one beats in the boy and he slowly removes an Opal Fruit from his packet and offers it to the lizard. Ridged nostrils sniff. A tongue flickers out. Rubber lips open and close and teeth bite. The boy is absolutely absorbed, completely rapt. There is no thought in his thudding skull other than the assimilation of what he’s doing, what is entering his eyes, this lizard chewing on the sweet, and the boy takes in the tiny chasms between every scale and the fine mesh of the skin and the silvery claws and the sickle-shaped shadows that mackerel the back and flanks and he wants nothing more in the world, just this.

–GRIFFITHS! Is that you, boy?

The teacher, glimpsed through leaves, jigsawed by twigs. Round red face and a muzzy and shorts and a shirt a bit too tight.

–Geraht of there now! That’s a bearded dragon! Yer mad, lad! Take yer bladdy fingers off!

The teacher’s bellow has set the lizard scarpering. No point, now, in remaining here, in these thorny bushes.

Saturday night in O’Malley’s, the only pub worthy of that name on the Sunshine Coast. Mock-Oirish place in a shopping centre, all dark wood and green upholstery. Caffrey’s on tap. Chris, a friend of Tony’s from home, who is yearing-out in Oz and has arranged to meet us here, stands six foot eight tall, and I crick my neck talking to him. His girlfriend, Nickie. Another feller called Paul, from Sheffield, with a shaven head and arms so heavily tattooed that they look like colourful sleeves, a decent and friendly bloke whose appearance nevertheless riles the Aussie uniforms. Last week, he tells me, he was returning home with a bag of shopping, two guys grabbed him, one arm each, lifted him off the ground and ran him towards another guy who was holding a dog.
Sniff him! Go on, good boy, sniff him!
The dog sniffed Paul, turned away, the guys dropped him and walked off. No apology, no explanation, nothing. Plain-clothes policemen and ignorant bastards.

–It’s crap, Paul tells me as we get drunker. –This part of Australia… wish I’d never come. It’s all clean and sterile. All of it’s to do with health and wealth but there’s no fucking pubs, no fucking music scene, no little bars to discover down dark alleys. Wish I’d never bothered. But I’ve got kids. It’s a safe place to bring up kids, I’ll say
that
for it. Nowt bloody else, tho.

We’re introduced to a gang of locals who someone – Nickie, I think – is acquainted with and they do the usual enthusing thing; lovely to meet you, what d’you think of Oz, etc., except for one stocky little feller who shakes our hands half-heartedly and says ‘yeh yeh, nice to meet ya, yer all cunts’, which makes me laugh, because I think he’s joking, and it’s a funny joke, in the context. Later, however, smoking outside with Chris, the
group pass us and say goodbye as they do so. Shortarse swaggers up to Chris, the point of his bullet head level with Chris’s navel, stabs a finger up at his face and says:

–You. I’ve just fucked your missus in the dunny.

Shocked, Chris says: –Not bothered. So’s he, and points to me.

–Yeh, I say. –And she told me that I was bigger and better than you.

Shortarse mulls this over. Mutters to himself: –Bigger… better…

I watch the ponderous thoughts porridge themselves through his echoing skull; Pom calls me small of dick and bad lover. Tall Pom is not biting. But shorter Pom has made insult. What I do? Smash Pom? Me not like be told him bigger and better than me as lover of ladies. Me not like
him
. Smash Pom? Smash Pom! MUST SMASH POM!

–Come on.

His girlfriend drags him away. Pugnacious little prick. Shortarsed fucking swaggerer, nobody’s fault that you were born to be small, deal with it. You’re not going to grow anymore. You’ll always be short. Cultivate some dignity and you’ll be a much happier man.

Paul joins us. –Was he giving you trouble, that copper?

–He’s a copper?

–Aye yeh. I know him. He’s not one of the worst, either.

Put a shorty with a hang-up about his height in a uniform and all you’re going to get is grief. Especially here, where whether you fit in or not is predicated on such narrow-mindedly tight criteria… I witness an arrest, later that night, not long after the episode with PC Shortarse; three big coppers pounce on a slight and dreadlocked young man, throw him to the
ground so hard that he makes a thudding yelp, sit on him, scrape his face across the concrete, cuff him. Killing an ant with a bomb, this is. I have no idea what the young man had done; had too pale a skin colour, perhaps. Or coughed too loudly. But I doubt very much that it warranted such treatment.

I get very drunk in O’Malley’s, because I must, and stop for a pie on the way back to my swag-bag and balcony. Eat it on a bench amongst pecking white ibises, facing the sea. This should be lovely. But it’s very far from it. Surfer’s fucking Paradise. This is a shite place. I can’t wait to leave it.

It’s a short boat ride to Coochie Mudloe island but the boy loves it. He loves travelling on water. He can’t swim, yet, and actually being in water scares him, but he feels an attraction to it, a powerful tug, that sits in him and which he likes to safely satisfy by being a passenger on boats. He thinks of the cold dark depths beneath the hull. He closes his eyes and envisions a vast blackness with a tiny boat on top of it and on that boat a tiny him. Giant sharks and squids and whales cutting across that unfathomable deep.

The boy’s family set up a little camp on the island, in one of the wooden huts on the beach. Sandwiches and crisps and lemonade. From this base, the boy explores the beach; he clambers over the shed-sized bleached-white treetrunk that the tide has carried in, he bodysurfs the waves close to the beach on a small piece of polystyrene foam that he clutches to his chest, he and his siblings build castles of sand and dig holes at the tideline. Many different types of bird catch his attention.
He bobs in the shallows on a rubber ring, spooks himself and his sister by pretending that a submerged rock with trailing weed attached is the severed head of a young woman. He searches for, and finds, crabs in the rockpools, and anemones and shrimps and small and colourful darting fish. When he’s alone in the hut, he pretends to be a shark-hunter, like the Quint character in
Jaws
, called to the hut by the island-folk who are trying to persuade him into killing the shark that has been eating them.
It can detect our blood from two miles away
, a worried villager says.
Correction
, says the great shark-hunter, chewing on a fishpaste sarnie, one foot up on the wooden bench:
Five miles.
The shark’s been terrorising the island for months; the islanders can’t swim, they can’t fish, even the supply-boat was attacked last week and overturned and all its crew eaten.
So you’ve got a big problem
, the great shark-hunter drawls.
What’s in it for me?