The Family Law (11 page)

Later, after we'd stewed for hours, my sisters and I reconvened in the onsen's reception, looking for Mum. She had fallen asleep, sprawled shamelessly on a bench with her mouth open, one hand clutching her handbag, the other holding her digital camera.

‘Mum?' I said, nudging her. ‘Mum? We're back. You've fallen asleep.'

‘You should have just come in with us if you were going to fall asleep,' Tammy said.

Mum sleepily smacked her lips, then, disorientated, made a clicking motion with her fingers: ‘Take a photo of me.'

On the ride back to the hotel, Mum slept a little more. I asked Michelle and Tammy whether it had been weird, seeing one another nude. Naturally, it had turned out to be a shame-free bonding experience. Tammy said that at one point, Michelle had been bent over a particularly hot onsen tub, her hands grasping the edge, reluctant to get in.

‘Michelle, your
udders
!' Tammy had said. ‘Get them away or shield them!'

When they'd started laughing uncontrollably, elderly Japanese women silently arched single eyebrows in their direction.

‘We basically have the same body,' Tammy said. ‘Except Michelle's tits are bigger.'

In response, Michelle put her hands on her hips, leaned back like a Western sheriff and spoke in a Texan accent. ‘And Tammy has a
narrrrce
cunt.'

At that point, I was glad Andrew hadn't joined me. Because as pro-nudity as I'd become that day, I don't think I could have brought myself to compliment his genitals. As a family, we still had some boundaries.

Like a Hole in the Head

The summer my friends and I turned fifteen, we started getting casual jobs. Some of us already had gigs laid out for us, like my friend Brooke, whose family operated an independent ice-cream company. Every weekend, she'd man the stall attached to her family's house, where a cartoon cow told passers-by that their ice cream was ‘udderly delicious.' There was something about the cow and slogan I instinctively found gross, though I could never explain what. Maybe it was how the cow's udders stood out: erect and firm. They looked aroused; I think that was the problem.

Other friends worked in retail or hospitality, in franchised businesses that don't exist anymore in Queensland, like Cop-perart and Franklin's. A lot of them ended up working at McDonald's. These were the guys who'd come to school with work stories that made me gag, like how they dared each other to drink concentrated Coke syrup, or held deep-fried apple-pie eating competitions on their lunch breaks. Because I grew up around restaurants, I couldn't think of anything more foul than hanging around deep fryers and grease all day.

After taking my limited resumé around, I got a job doing night-fill at Big W, the giant department store across the road from my house that stocked everything from sodastreams to industrial-sized bags of horse shit. It wasn't difficult work: night-fill was a fancy word for moving stuff around, pulling stock from the back of the shelves to the front. At night, we'd line up outside the enormous metal doors at the back of the store, all wearing the same navy polo shirts, warming our hands like dockies on the wharves. We'd insert our time codes and clock on, before being led to our departments for the evening.

‘Cassie, Jessica and Zoe: you're all in manchester with Kerry,' our supervisors called out. ‘Brendan, Chris and Rick: you guys are in petcare with Susan. Benjamin, Sally and Ryan: you guys have home improvement with Mark.'

Mark was a stout man in his forties who had worked at Big W all his life. In those first few weeks, he'd hover over me as I stacked rows of
100
-watt light bulbs side by side.

‘No
no
!' he said. ‘You're doing it
wrong
. You don't do
right-to-left
,
out-to-in
. It's the other way around. You have to work
methodically
, Benjamin.
Methodically
.' He rolled the word in his mouth like someone who'd just discovered it. ‘
Methodically
,' he said again, squatting down to demonstrate the art of moving light bulbs. ‘Left to right, in to out.'

After a few weeks of this, I swapped my position for the more glamorous checkouts and excelled straightaway. I counted change quickly, mastered the computer system in minutes and made sure all the notes in my till faced the same way. After a few weeks, I was scanning and punching in item codes so quickly that I crashed the entire system: a flurry of quick-moving fingers followed by a violent, satisfying thump on the ‘SUBTOTAL' key. Instead of getting the subtotal, all I got was a giant mechanical squeal that rang out through the store. Everyone else's systems shut down with mine, and they started ringing their help bells, raising their hands for our supervisor. I like to think she was impressed by my efficiency.

Chinese relatives I hardly knew came and visited me at the checkouts, drawn to my aisle for my speed. I'd power through queues of customers in minutes.

‘Oh, your boy is so fast at those machines,' they'd tell my dad when they ran into him. ‘Have you seen him work at those machines? Zoom-zoom-zoom. Your son is like a robot!'

He'd beam with pride. It was such a small thing, but the fact that his son was hard working and speedy was a good sign. Clean-cut, polite, friendly and efficient: clearly, his son was destined for great things.

 

*

 

Because we all had jobs, our parents assumed we were disciplined and motivated. The truth was, we were saving money towards new and exciting ways of mutilating our bodies. All my Big W co-workers had pierced labrets or lips, and I started flirting with the idea of getting a tattoo: a barcode on my lower back or upper arm, something edgy to symbolise that I was a misunderstood cog in the machine of society, a number that didn't mean anything to anyone. I backpedalled after I saw someone else at Kawana Shopping World with exactly the same thing, an overweight plumber who'd had a barcode tattooed on his arm. It turned me off the whole idea. The point of being branded with a barcode was to stand out as an individual, after all. Or something.

All the girls I knew were going out on covert missions to get their navels skewered without their parents knowing. Afterwards, they would buy cheap midriffs and parade along the beach, revealing their newly pierced stomachs: angry red welts of flesh healing over a metal hoop, framed by a powdery crust of weeping, yellowish plasma. Others would get their tongues done, a form of piercing which was discreet enough to hide at school.

‘Why would you pierce your tongue if people can't see it?' I asked.

‘Guys say it really feels good when you're
you know
,' they'd say. They'd ball their hands into fists, motioning towards their mouths, then jab their tongues against their inner cheeks. They'd raise their eyebrows as if to ask,
Do you get it? Do you get it
?

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I get it.'

While girls did their stomachs and tongues, boys did their eyebrows. This was during that brief period when eyebrow rings weren't just for council workers, ageing homosexuals and football players, but a trend that had spread into the general community. Everyone knew there were risks involved, but risks were part of the appeal. We'd heard of guys getting their eyebrow pierced, only for the entire left-hand side of their face to collapse like an undercooked cake. That seemed awesome.

At Big W, older male co-workers with names like Josh and Jackson started coming to work with bandaids on their faces, since exposed piercings were against our dress code. To get around this, they pretended they had head wounds that wouldn't heal. In time, the bandaids themselves became a fashion statement, a mysterious and sexually suggestive accessory: everyone knew what was under there, but all you could see was a large, protruding bulge.

‘Wow,' I said to Josh during our lunch breaks together. ‘Can I touch it?' He'd peel back the bandaid, and I'd run my finger over the hoop in his face, more slowly than was absolutely necessary. I was close enough to smell his Decoré-lathered hair and Norsca-infused armpits. Right there and then, I knew that what I wanted more than anything else was a hole in my head. All I needed was the money, and to move out of home.

 

*

 

Once I was living in the city, my friends surprised me with a gift voucher for a place that not only sold bongs in the shape of skulls and mermaids, but also pierced every body part imaginable. My piercer's name was Mick. He had a five o'clock shadow and was covered in tattoos, but didn't have a single piercing himself. When I pointed this out, he laughed.

‘Well, none that you can see, mate.'

Mick told me he'd grown up in Logan, a shire an hour or so outside of Brisbane, which people took as shorthand for boredom, suburbia and youth suicide. As he disinfected his equipment, Mick told me there wasn't much entertainment out in Logan for young people, so when he was a teenager, he and his friends killed time by piercing each other with sewing needles. They'd start with earlobes and cartilage, before moving on to other body parts: noses and lips, that sort of thing. Later, he lived with a nurse who taught him about anatomy: where the nerves were, how to avoid infections, which bits of the body could and couldn't be punctured. Armed with this knowledge, Mick had built an impressive portfolio of piercings. Anuses were his specialty at the moment, although they required a lot of disinfection, care and the use of hand-mirrors.

‘Right,' I said.

‘But the most sensitive place to get it done,' Mick said, swabbing my face with alcohol, ‘is your Achilles tendon.' He pointed to a photo on the wall, showing a young man's foot. Shot from the side, it showed the soft corner between the ankle and heel, impaled and studded in a line. Seeing this, I squirmed. ‘I
know,
man,' Mick said. ‘That's a normal reaction. There are a lot of nerves back there, and you can't run fast afterwards. Otherwise you'll
tear
that ankle apart like a perforated sheet of paper. You know what
perforated
means?'

I nodded.

It didn't take very long. Mick clamped my eyebrow with a stainless-steel device that resembled an oversized eyelash curler and flattened my eyebrow down like a waffle. He shoved a small metal rod through my flesh, leaving a single line of blood trickling down my face. He caught this with a sterilised tissue.

‘Got it,' he said, as he fed a brown metal hoop through my brow, before squeezing it shut with a pair of pliers. ‘Check it out.' He held up a mirror. My face looked pale and sweaty, and my eyebrow was smothered in a layer of fresh blood. All things considered, I thought I looked pretty good.

 

*

 

On that first semester break, I took the train back to the Sunshine Coast to work at one of my dad's new restaurants. When my mum opened the door, she flinched a little before putting her hand to her mouth. She peered at the ring on my face with the intensity of an entomologist. Eventually, she reached over and touched it lightly, then shuddered. She couldn't believe what she was seeing, and asked me whether it hurt. I shook my head.

‘So, has your father seen this yet?' she asked.

‘No.'

She laughed darkly to herself. ‘Well, I'd like to hear what he thinks.'

When Dad came and picked me up for the night-time shift, I opened the passenger door of his Honda and hopped inside. It had been weeks since we'd seen each other and he was beaming. When he saw the eyebrow ring, the smile on his face evaporated instantly.

‘That,' he said, ‘had better be fake.'

He leaned across to give the ring a tug, then recoiled. He rubbed his finger on his shirt, as if he had touched something rotten and was anxious to remove the smell. When he looked at me again, he made a sound I'd never heard before: a cross between a sigh and a grunt
.

‘Why would you put a hole in your
face
?' he said. ‘It looks like you've been in jail for dealing drugs.' He sat back and assessed me, shaking his head. ‘Or a pig,' he said finally. ‘You look like a pig. Or maybe a cow. An ugly cow.'

‘Cows get their
noses
pierced,' I said quietly, rubbing my eyebrow. ‘Not their eyebrows.'

The rest of the car ride was silent; my dad stewed in fury while I scowled out the window, slouching and picking at my eyebrow ring. Dad kept shaking his head, a Tourettish tic his body seemingly couldn't control.

You just don't get me, man
, I thought, hooping the ring through my eyebrow, over and over again.
No one understands me at all.

‘Stop playing with it!' Dad said. ‘You're going to give yourself an infection.'

There was no way of knowing then, as we drove on towards the restaurant, exactly how mad he was.

 

*

 

A few days later, I had a call from Tammy.

‘
Sam-Gor
,' she said, calling me by my proper family title.