Whole Wild World (20 page)

‘Does it ever stop raining?'

‘Probably not,' Tata speculated. ‘The water collects in the pool and is recycled back to the top.'

‘But it's so quiet, you can't hear the motor going.'

‘That's because of the noise of water trickling into the pool.'

‘Wow.'

Shopping for us was secondary to people-watching, observing the faces and movements of families riding an escalator for the first time. That, too, seemed like an engineering feat as metal steps flattened out perfectly – then disappeared – and riders had to make sure they weren't caught flat-footed to hop off without a stumble.

Sam and I quickly outgrew Roselands. Our cousin George had given us a thirst for the city, a tour of arcades and subterranean record stores, and the confidence to explore it on our own. The West Indies were touring that summer and six hours of cricket was really a ten-hour haul considering the walking and rail journeys involved. The night before we froze a couple of two-litre bottles of cordial to last us the whole day. We weren't big eaters but still packed two days' worth of food. At the SCG we sat in the Sheridan and Brewongle stands, which were general admission, in shade the entire day.

We avoided The Hill. The previous year at our first Ashes Test, we'd watched Lillee and Thommo – okay, they were so quick you couldn't actually see the ball – demolish the Poms. We wandered around the ground. On The Hill, shirtless, sunburnt men went ape when girls walked past. There were drunken fights with cans and fists atop a shanty town's garbage heaps. In this series, which we'd already won by the SCG Test, the Windies were off their game.

For my twelfth birthday we went to see
Jaws
, bringing to a close a season of disaster movies starting with
Earthquake
(whose Sensurround sound at the Forum had sent people scurrying from the theatre into the street according to the
Sun
) and the
Towering Inferno
(which we went to twice in a week). On these jaunts I put myself in Sam's safe hands. After all, he was a world traveller, guiding Teta in distant lands. Being a follower meant I didn't bother with the details of which bus to catch or what side of the platform to wait for a train. Sam was not only a film buff – a penchant for movies with a classification several years ahead of his age – he knew the precise location of every cinema: Lyceum, Plaza, Regent, Rapallo, Barclay, Paris, Century, Ascot and State. He'd mastered the walking routes from Central, away from the hordes, through the back streets of Surry Hills to the SCG, Hordern Pavilion and Showground.

I'd been given the gift of the ideal big brother. I wasn't going to waste the opportunity. It gave me licence to daydream and gaze, get lost in my head, knowing Sam would lead us to where we had to be, buy tickets, ration our money, get us home on time. Such matters never entered my head.

The first occasion we went to the Royal Easter Show on our own, we lost track of time and arrived at Belmore station after nine on a Saturday night. Teta Danica was waiting at the top of the steps for us. Not a lovely surprise; she'd been there for hours after pestering our parents to mercy-dash into town to find us at the Show (they stayed put). She walked behind us all the way home, yammering in the dark – no more Easter eggs, you're the worst kids ever made, I've been sick with worry – yapping at our heels like an angry farm dog, until we were inside the door.

‘You never should have had children if you don't know how to discipline them or know where they are,' she yelled at Tata.

‘Next time just call to let us know you'll be late,' our father said, half-heartedly, knowing the likelihood of us forfeiting money on a payphone when we were maximising our spending money, or even thinking about home while we were on a mission to see every display at the Showground, was extremely low. I think he was just relieved to have missed out on twelve hours of Show time.

Joza and Zorica were our last tenants. We had the house to ourselves. The extra bedroom became an office for Tata to do subscriptions and advertising invoices for the Croatian newspaper. Teta annexed the second kitchen as a sunny sewing room at the back of the house. She'd hurt her back and neck at the White Wings factory, and doctors and therapists only seemed to make her condition worse. For a time, the fire went out of Teta; she was
a wraith in white socks and slippers around the house, shuffling out of her bedroom at odd times, wearing a purple dressing gown over a long white flannelette night dress, and layers of cardigans and jumpers, forever complaining about feeling frozen in the house.

Before she got sick, Teta would commandeer the house on a Saturday. The sisters would do two days of chores because Sunday was the Lord's day of rest, a quaint practice they had grown up with in the village and which they adhered to, religiously. If we were having a special Sunday meal or expecting visitors, Saturday afternoon was their time for baking cakes, colouring hair and making complicated recipes. My favourite foods were
sarma
, several varieties of spiced mincemeat in cabbage leaves, and
paprika
, same deal, except the meat was stuffed in a hollowed out, plump capsicum. These dishes required laborious preparation, using a pantry's worth of ingredients. Industrial-grade tools for mincing meat by hand would be brought out of storage and reassembled. The Lukin sisters never worked in a hurry, filling out the available time, like batsmen playing out the overs for a draw before bad light stopped play.

Teta made marvellous cakes, but her expertise extended to anything sweet from an old recipe book she'd kept from the domestic school she'd attended in Croatia. Everything was made from scratch, probably because Teta worked in a factory that made cake mixes. The bonus for us from her time at White Wings was offcuts of Space Food Sticks, a delicacy of the Apollo era, with clay-like consistency in caramel and chocolate. We had cake, doughy
frittoli
or sugar-dusted
krostoli
every weekend.

The other Lukin ritual was doing each other's hair. Mama was in her fifties, Teta in her sixties. They set up brushes, dyes, the rollers, smocks and dryer in the sun room and went at each other in a sullen way, the world's least cheery hairdressers. Either Danica was better at this than Milenka, or Teta complained more
than Mama. To my eyes, they emerged from that fog of ammonia exactly alike: same colour, same style. I'd never seen the entire production but having been present at different stages of the hair cycle, I came to know the burden of keeping the grey at bay.

Saturday was our day for jobs with Tata. Washing the car was mandatory ahead of a wedding or a family gathering. If there were a problem with one of the flats my parents owned at Adelaide Street, Sam and I would be there, miserable, in dirty work clothes. Tata insisted on us helping out, except when painting, possibly because it looked like fun. We had to watch Tata work and learn. It was unbearable when these working bees happened during the school holidays.

I enjoyed seeing Tata do complicated tasks like carpentry or plumbing, his mind ticking to sort out a problem, asking him questions about why he was doing something in a particular way. As a child he'd been curious to know how things worked and he'd figure out how to fix things by trial and error with whatever was at hand on the farm. The other bonus was going to the timber yard or hardware store, where order seemed paramount: everything in its right place. I admired the precision of the tools, liked handling them. There was something for every job and I pondered the biggest question of all: what came first, the task or the tool?

I'd taken Tata's methods into my own experiments in the shed, making toys and elaborate pieces of furniture for the cubby houses we constructed. We had a South Pacific islands themed house, with long palm branches providing shade and allowing airflow, ensuring a lovely, light structure. There was the shearer's shed aesthetic, using old corrugated iron to make a bunker-strength hideout. When we had tried every variation, including carpets of the Middle East and Native American Indian teepees, we took things into the Space Age. After a new washing machine and another appliance were delivered, we used the cardboard
packaging to make a
Skylab
space station, which we plonked on the nature strip in front of the house. It was your basic, prefab, three-pod arrangement in a line, including two separate air vaults, with interconnecting rubber laundry tubes for communications. We bored out peepholes to watch the action on the street and made noises when people went past, giggling at their reactions as if they'd been caught on
Candid Camera
.

One of the regular jobs was mowing the lawn, but we didn't own a lawnmower; they were expensive, a few rungs below the cost of a motorbike. Our next-door neighbour Jack owned a powerful Victa and Tata paid him, in cash and beer, to do all our mowing. He was hard drinking, single, a garbage man and it was impossible to understand him. Jack spoke as if he had once swallowed a nasty insect, near fatally, and would never again take the risk of opening his mouth. Naturally I added him to my mimicking repertoire. I could get in all the swear words I knew under the pretence of being Jack.

‘HowthefuckareyayoungTommmmmmy!'

Jack didn't say fuck to me, he was mindful of his Fs and Cs that way. But I did when I was being Jack.

‘Chrisssssalmighteee! Imdyinoffarkenthirsteeersonneeee.'

It was difficult to know if he was talking to himself or asking you to do something. He often stuttered.

‘Yeahyeahyeah! Comeyeeerranemtythebluddeeething.'

I eventually learnt to follow dipsomaniac Jack's jerky body rhythms, count his sorties over the grass, nod and smile.

When we needed to get to Adelaide Street, Tata would put the back seat flat in the Holden wagon. Sam and I would squeeze in on either side of the mower in the back. Our task was to empty the grass catcher into the compost or a designated spot in the veggie garden the tenants kept. Sam and I did only ten minutes' work but it was spread over two hours as the house had two yards and was on a corner with wraparound nature strips. Freckled and
fair with a potbelly, fading blue-ink tattoos on his forearms, Jack worked like a demon. He wore fitted shorts with a belt and long socks. In those days men didn't dress like teenagers or fat versions of little boys. Jack would begin the day in a short-sleeved shirt but the big Victa was demanding, summoning a striptease down to a meshed white singlet, chest hairs popping through the fabric after the second load. He'd sweat profusely and mumble as he heaved the Victa, his workhorse; both laboured bloody hard and required ample lubrication and fuel.

‘Comeorn. Getgoin. Mmooooveit. Yeahyeahyeah,' Jack said as he tried to start the Victa for the first time.

‘Goorn, getoutofit,' he'd say when he got stuck on an uneven ridge.

Still, Jack looked content in his reverie, happiest as soon as his cracked lips touched the icy Reschs Dinner Ale my dad provided. He'd put the Victa on idle, take off the top of the DA with a pocketknife, steady himself. He'd make eye contact before the first swig.

‘CheeerzyoungTommmyyyy!' All was right with the world. He'd finish half a long neck in a few gulps.

Jack lived in a house of unmarried siblings, aged in their forties and fifties. I think they were originally from the North Coast of NSW, around Kempsey. They had loud dogs and, for a short time, a pet kangaroo, kept on a chain. When we returned to Chalmers Street in 1971, a big grey bull peered over the fence at me, roo and fences the same colour. Surely it was standing on a box?

There was shouting at night from Jack's place, adults on the drink having family arguments. Jeanie, one of Jack's sisters, was kind to us, buying raffle tickets and fetching the ball when it was hit square over the fence – six and out. But she was harder to understand than Jack. There was old Bob, who got off the bus at the same time each night, twenty minutes after closing time.
He wore a shabby suit jacket and grotty pants, tied with rope. Drunk, he shuffled as slowly as possible, wobbled without falling, the way a bike gets tippy when it hasn't got any speed at all. Bob's specialty, and Frank did a marvellous mimic, was grunt-swearing at the world whenever he passed us.

Sam hated mowing almost as much as he hated getting a haircut. The Italian barber Tony always asked him first up, ‘How's your girlfriend?'

I didn't have a girlfriend but was studying
Australasian Post
and
Pix
to find my ideal one while waiting for my turn. Sam was of the ‘let's quickly get this over with' school of chores, most likely thinking about what he was missing on TV. Waiting around infuriated him. Instead of both of us doing the work of one, Sam put forward a log of claims to our father about taking turns.

But Tata was adamant. There was a bigger picture. Jack served as exemplar of what not to be for our parents.

‘Work hard at school or you'll end up a garbage man, like Jack,' Tata often said, half-joking, half-serious, judging and not judging.