Whole Wild World (18 page)

These eruptions were usually related to domestic issues, especially meals. Sam and I were fussy eaters, to be kind, used to the laissez-faire of weekdays when we did as we pleased. But sit-downs on Sunday could be fraught. We moaned about the
food, asked why we had to have roast chicken every Sunday. We began meals with
juha
, a clear broth made from veal or chicken. On summer days it was the last thing you felt like eating; we knew there was no alternative but Sam and I would carry on and complain, especially if the soup had Mama's signature oily sheen, with a hundred little globules of gag-inducing fat that had not been skimmed off; Tata regarded this heart-endangering element as the best bit, nutritionally.

Salad was another faultline. I liked cucumber, hated tomatoes; Sam was the opposite. Instead of being able to free-trade our way out of this dilemma, we were forced to eat both. There was a root vegetable called
blitva
, or chard, cattle food, the leaves boiled for an hour (to get rid of all the bad stuff; our mother did that for all veggies) then drenched in oil. One taste, you'll never try it again.

‘Don't they teach you manners at that school?' Mama would say whenever we failed her at meals or misbehaved. We'd break out in stitches, as if it were the most preposterous thing in the world.

‘Manners isn't even a subject.'

‘I wonder what you get up to at school if you're like this at home.'

As both Sam and I were well behaved at school her follow-up point seemed equally ludicrous.

‘Nothing,' we chorused. ‘We're really good at school.'

‘Then why can't you be good at home?'

‘But we are. You should see what other kids get up to.'

‘What do other kids do?'

‘Nothing. But we're angels. Our teachers would be really surprised to hear us having this conversation.'

My sixth-class teacher Mrs Gannon was the antithesis of Mr Castagnet: a graceful swan to his hapless dodo. She had an even temper and her classes were disciplined. Healthy competition was the way to advance learning, to her mind, rather than the free-for-all of the previous year. Mrs Gannon ran impromptu tests for times tables, spelling and other skills and kept the progressive score on a leaderboard. At the end of every term she would give the top-placed student a \10 prize.

I was quick out of the blocks and won the first-term prize. On Holy Thursday she took me to a toy shop in Lakemba and I chose a globe: the whole wild world, right there in my hands. It wasn't large but it felt chunky and solid, with a firm wooden base, the colours set deep. Around the Himalayas, which were a deep purple with white ice streaks, it was slightly raised. The distance from Yugoslavia to Australia was several spans from index finger to thumb, a very long haul. What were they thinking?

The globe was handy because my favourite subject, by a long way, was social studies: it combined history and geography with people and culture. We learned about the great deeds of men and women, even then largely forgotten – inland explorers and heroines like Grace Bussell, Florence Nightingale and Mother Mary MacKillop. Each week Mrs Gannon assigned a country project of several pages in an exercise book. We were required to set out vital statistics, draw a map of the country and its flag, and stick in pictures of their exports, animals and leaders. You never knew which country Mrs Gannon would choose. They sold kits to help with these projects but I relied on the
Britannica
, the most authoritative source I knew, followed by Sam and TV.

George's family had been the first to buy the twenty-four- volume set (they had brown leather, we chose white) and it was only a matter of time before the salesman made his way through our entire extended family. My favourite section was ‘ANATOMY, GROSS' (volume 1), featuring what were known as
‘anatomical chromographs', a series of clear plastic plates you worked through, fourteen views, anterior and posterior, which revealed both male and female body parts, plus their English and Latin names.

The next term I dead-heated for first with my mate George, so the prize was \5 a piece. I bought the new Skyhooks album
Ego is Not a Dirty Word
. I don't think Mrs Gannon approved of my choice, especially as George had chosen a book. Because we had
Britannica
I was in a shameful, post-book phase. Mrs Gannon perused the LP's cover, opening the gatefold; on the back was an image of a severed finger dripping blood, stuck to a fan's letter from Denise, ‘not a bandmole', but who ‘would love to be all your girlfriend'.

At the start of the third and final term my luck came in. The USA was country of the week. I was obsessed with America, our ally in the Cold War, home to Ali, the Fonz and JJ from
Good Times
. As part of our induction into the
Britannica
family we received an atlas and a photo-heavy USA book, with sections on every region. There were pictures of George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

I vowed to produce a fifty-page project, which no one had ever done. I buried myself in the reporting, came up with an ‘America the Beautiful' concept, from sea to shining sea. There would be statistics, a history of great events, sections on Hollywood, sport and national parks, all gleaned from the
Britannica
. Such an epic required ten times the work I'd usually do. This was a labour of love, a test of endurance.

It was a publishing and planning debacle worse than the Seven Seas Stamps crash of the previous year when my love of exotic stamps with a sporting motif exceeded the means of paying for them. The best stamps were from micro states I'd never heard of,
doubted they even existed, tiny isles and dodgy tax havens, unlike those solidly real ‘captive nations' I knew all about. I'd hidden this debt exposure from my parents, fearing the Dubbo-based giant of philately would send debt collectors. I was doubly suspicious of clean-cut Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, convinced they were Seven Seas repo men about to confiscate my stamp album and take my soul.

In the grip of the grand America project, I fell behind in all other work. The term's projects were all due towards the end of the year – just as I was finishing USA, which had become its own sixty-four-page book. I was out of puff, but nine countries behind, the deadline imminent. There was only one thing to do: fake an illness and play catch-up. I pumped out five countries on Day 1. Working round the clock actually made me sick. On Day 2, staying in bed until noon – faking illness is multitasking and tiring – I finished only three. Day 3, exhausted, the final project was a miserable two-page effort, unworthy of the feelings I now have for the good folks of Thailand. But I still had my opus to show Mrs Gannon: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

The whole venture had been an extravagance, an overweening experiment, driven by pent-up emotion and a bold declaration of my dependence on America. On the page, Project USA could never live up to my vision splendid. Beautiful, but a failure in the broader scheme. Which may have been how admirers of Gough Whitlam, who tried to soar like an eagle, but led a team of dodos, felt on 11 November. Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed the Prime Minister. The furies collided, the shockwaves reaching our playground, in uproar as news arrived during lunch.

‘Whitlam's been sacked,' said a bearded science teacher, fond of the brainy weekly
National Times
, who was listening to a transistor radio via an earpiece. This was bigger than Ali versus Foreman, with older kids speculating about what was happening in Canberra.

‘It's a coooo! A bloody coooo!' I heard a prefect say as I exited the school gate. A cooo, as if we were in Africa!

There was a sense of unease, but also relief and excitement. I shed no tears for Gough, having followed the unfolding cataclysm in the pages of the
Sun
. Labor had been reckless and the nation, the world itself, seemed off-kilter. Just outside of Sydney's suburbs were bushfires and flooding; beyond that cyclones, famine, hijackings and wars. None of this was Gough's fault, but the front-page stories about inflation, sackings of ministers and murky deals made it all seem like it was. The world was wild. There would be an election before Christmas.

Tata was thrilled, singing fresh couplets, ‘Bloody Mister Whitlam got the sack, There's no way he's ever coming back.'

I thought the Libs would be especially good for Croatians, given how often they came to support us and tried to even speak our language.
Dobar dan
, Mr Fraser. Libs never called us terrorists or
Ustaše
. Tata went to a function and brought home a blue Liberal badge. It had a funky design and fat lettering, like an album cover. I didn't dare wear it out of the house but tried it on with the same high spirits of lighting up a cigarette. I pierced my thumb. A blood blot elicited an exaggerated cry of faaarrk. False hope. Pain. Annoyance. It was an omen of things to come from Malcolm. Shame, Fraser, shame.

My father's retail mantra was not so much ‘buy local' as ‘buy Croatian'. No matter what the product – food, property, air travel or medical – Croatians banded together on this article of faith. Dentistry, however, was a problem as no one here had graduated in the field. Unlike haircuts or spirit distillation, pulling teeth was considered too fiddly to do at home, although Tata once yanked a small tooth out of Sam with cotton thread tied to a door.
Dalmatian engineering.

Many of the adults I knew, including Mama, had an assortment of gold and silver teeth. Perhaps it was a hedge against inflation after the oil shock. Still, I wondered if the metallurgist who did the teeth for Jaws in the
Bond
movies also looked after Croatians. I had never visited a dentist. But after toothache and cosmetic concerns, Tata asked around for a suitable practitioner. He settled on a guy called Boris – that's how desperate we were.

On a Saturday, Tata took me to Boris's surgery, a corner house, on a street not far from Mascot airport. The brass plaque had an unfamiliar surname. No ‘ic' to be seen.

‘Isn't this guy Croatian?' I asked with trepidation.

‘Don't worry, he's really good.'

The receptionist showed us into a dimly lit space, much larger than a doctor's surgery, more like a den. A large, wolf-like man, resplendent in a pure white smock, was sitting at a desk, smoking a cigar. What's he doing? Is this the right place?

‘
Dobar dan
.'

Yet Boris didn't sound like a native speaker, not even one from the islands. My enquiries revealed he was actually from Bulgaria, a country whose mere mention would set my mind off with intimations of spies, dissidents, assassinations and my own trauma with a pointy black umbrella at Adelaide Street.

‘Sit in chair,' he said, still holding the smouldering stogie.

Even though the room had a clubby ambience, I was shaking. Boris had all the equipment I imagined they used in Soviet torture chambers. I sat down and fell back in the reclined chair. Boris turned on a lamp, blinding me. I'd lost track of Tata, who was showing the piss-weak deference my parents had in the company of all professional people. Boris, now a slow-moving silhouette, wasn't exactly rude, just firm, like he knew what he was doing or how to get his way.

‘Open mouth.'

He put the cigar in an ashtray and dispatched a long, robust index finger as a scout. I could taste the cigar: spicy, bitter and strong. But there was also a pungent antiseptic on his fingers. I tried not to gag or bite his digit as he rummaged around in my teeth locker.

‘Hmmmm. Very bad. Hmmmm. Okay. No problem.'

Working fast, he further prised open my mouth and then started knocking teeth out with a pneumatic finger. Bang. Bang. Bang. Out they came, one by one.

‘Goodbye to baby teeth.'

He'd taken half a dozen out, then switched method. Was this how dentists worked? Using his thumb and forefinger like a pair of pliers, he began wiggling and jiggling the surviving teeth, huddled in a dark corner of my mouth. He yanked out a few more. Dink, dink, dink, they went in a metal bowl, forming a bloodied heap of pearls.