Whole Wild World (24 page)

The robust
Lists
furnished you with essentials that would never be raised at the dinner table at my place, or any place. There was a list about the most common sexual positions, although no diagrams of how to engineer them; a sexual folklore section listed people who had died during intercourse. I'll never forget artist John Ruskin failing to consummate his marriage, shocked by the sight of his wife's pubic hair. My own concern was the exact opposite, fearing I would not sprout a reasonable forest in time for my own wedding night. There was no elixir, as far as I knew, for baldness down there.

But up here, facts simply tumbled into a reservoir without limit. At the start of Year Nine, Mr Fernandes settled the squad for
It's Academic
, to give it a lengthy run-up to the competition the following year. I made the cut and we began filling our heads with the material on the cards after school. At night, we were expected to add to the Q&A stockpile by typing up cards or sheets of ten questions. We were free to choose any topic, literally anything; it would all be absorbed. I viewed
Britannica
's twenty-four volumes as a world without end and switched to slicing facts from newspapers – full of facts in those days – to give my questions a contemporary flavour.

We practised most days after school, fitting it around our sport and part-time jobs. The five of us would take turns at being Andrew Harwood, getting quick on the buzzers and zipping through ten questions in a minute. We devised corny routines amid the grind. For instance, the pretend Harwood would ask: what is the simplest living thing?

Answer: A retarded amoeba. And on it went.

‘What is the smallest living bird?

‘The hummingbird.'

‘More information required.'

‘The bee hummingbird.'

‘I need a little bit more, please.

‘The Cuban bee hummingbird.'

‘Can you be more specific?'

‘The infant Cuban bee hummingbird.'

‘Correct!'

This was not the traditional approach to attracting girls or avoiding getting rumbled. But we did it to cope with the slog of getting to the finish line. After an hour we'd pack up, then play handball or basketball until dark, getting home around 6 pm. Month after month, never losing pace, implanting those boxed-card facts into our heads.

Near the end of the year, Mr Fernandes entered us in a local quiz competition against older students. We reached the final, held at the Raindrop Fountain at Roselands. I wasn't sure why, but Coach Fernandes organised a team of three cheerleaders from MacKillop, popular girls who went out with boys in the Firsts. The girls wore red T-shirts, blue shorts and yellow ribbons in their hair. They had dance steps and performed the St John's war cry. Zoomba Zoom. It's possible a worldwide women's fitness craze was started right here at the Raindrop Fountain. Zoomba Zah.

At school that year we did careers testing. I already had clear intentions. My first preference was sports reporter (newspaper or TV), followed by ‘sports shop owner', as I was fond of sportswear, particularly the Adidas line of products, appreciating the way the stripes rolled over your shoulders or kept your tracksuit pants straight and the tactile wonder of the perfect marriage of polyester and cotton in a sky-blue hoodie.

‘How much did you pay for that T-shirt?' asked Tata.

‘Twenty bucks.'

‘Twenty bucks, my God you could have bought a new one!'

‘But it is new and it's better than the stuff you get at Lowes.'

Okay, here we go.

‘You know,' he says, shaking his head, as if I were on a crazy binge, ‘you're just like old Ivanac from the village. One time he had to buy a pig from us. We told him the price: fifteen dinars. He said to your grandfather, “Okay, here take twenty, just so it's a better one”. That's you with your clothes.'

My fallback job was barrister. I knew the first two careers depended on luck or succeeding in sport. Law was a safety option. I wasn't entirely sure what a barrister did, but I'd read NSW Premier Neville Wran – known as ‘Nifty', his election victory so emphatic that year it was called a ‘Wranslide' – had commanded \800 a day in the early 1970s when he appeared in court as a QC, a sort of prince of lawyers. I did the calculation in my head. It was a preposterous sum. Nifty was earning squillions. Even at \100 a day, what he earned as Premier seemed a fortune in 1978. Wran was my man.

Journalism was coming into clearer focus. Despite the holiday lifestyle I thought our old neighbour Mr Corless enjoyed, I wasn't interested in the turf. Our year had an excursion to John Fairfax & Sons at Broadway near Central station. As an avid reader of the
Sun
,
Herald
,
Sun-Herald
, even the
National Times
, a serious and dense weekly, I was going to the chocolate factory. I was well behaved in class, saving my worst impulses for excursions.

Part of it was boredom. At museums, for instance, I'd visited them all many times with Tata and Sam. There was also an animalistic freedom away from school. In the familiar terrain of the city I could show off my knowledge to boys and teachers who didn't know their way around. I rushed through the assigned worksheets and spent the rest of the time distracting everyone else or ducking into shops.

Going to Fairfax, however, was a pilgrimage; I expected others, on such an occasion, to show the same degree of reverence. I walked with the tour guide, a young woman, and unself-consciously bombarded her with questions.

‘Tom, please let someone else have a turn,' said Mrs Haddock, our English teacher.

I pulled back but no one stepped into the space. The rest of the boys may have been going through the motions; I had a sense I was touching a possible future.

We were shown the hot-metal composing area where printing plates were made, the photographic dark rooms, the vast presses and newsprint stores. The first editions of the
Sun
were being printed; a gnarled printer in inky blue overalls made a hat from a printed ‘spoil' for Mrs Haddock.

The highlight for me was the newsroom. Even then I knew some of the bylines. A few journalists had their pictures in the paper. I saw Mr Corless working quickly at a typewriter and recognised the man who did the fruit-and-vegetable specials column, Cliff Ryan, the ‘Housewives' Friend'. There was an Asian woman in the business section.

‘Is that Florence Chong?' I asked the tour guide.

‘Well spotted, young man!'

The excursion may have been a superficial view of the news game, but I had a connection on the inside. My cousin Zdenka, five years ahead of me at school, was a cadet journalist on the
St George & Sutherland Shire Leader
. A born storyteller, she glowed with confidence and charm. I'd sit enthralled for hours as Zdenka recounted house fires, car accidents, court cases, hospital visits, council meetings and press conferences at Mascot airport. She told us about the events she attended, such as parties and the theatre. Zdenka knew everything going on in that local community and she had a licence to be impertinent, if that was required. Free stuff and asking rude questions, variety of scene,
meeting people, reading the paper, plus being paid, seemed a good fit for me.

Another cousin Blanka, a decade older, fierce, bossy and bold, was now a lawyer and her work seemed a grind – years of university, long hours in the office, endless paperwork and preparation at home. For all that toil I hoped she was earning squillions like old Nifty or seeing drama up close. If I ever got in trouble I'd face a dilemma: I'd want Blanka defending me but I'd be afraid of the consequences if she knew I'd been mucking up.

I admired Blanka and Zdenka, both of whom were born in Croatia. Blanka was tiny when her parents escaped by boat to Italy, while Zdenka had migrated with her parents and sisters near the end of her primary schooling. My cousins had flown out of a traditional orbit, building careers in areas where few Croatians had ventured in our new homeland. Nothing seemed out of reach for Blanka and Zdenka, and because of them, for me.

Deputy principal Mick Keeble was coach of the 16As basketball team. As many of us were fourteen, to prepare us for the next season he entered us in a summer competition in another district. Mick was a disciple of rugby league's enigmatic Jack Gibson, having once been a coach in the lower grades at Eastern Suburbs, when the Roosters were winning premierships under the ‘Supercoach'.

Mick was our Supercoach and his training method suited my style and sense of play; we played games and he joined in. His signature move was the no-look pass. Although he'd been Sam's coach for two seasons, I didn't know him well. To get a better view of the action when Sam played I sat on the bench and listened to what Supercoach had to say. His teams had won the main competition the past two seasons. No matter what the
state of the game, the slender, almost gaunt mentor showed no emotion. He was calm in the face of poor calls or deficits late in the game; it was an act of self-control, a strategy that expressed confidence in his team's ability. On a mini flip notebook, he'd write the name of the opposition, then the names of his players in numerical order. He kept a tally of our goals and free throws: 2, 2, 1, 1, 2 and so on. I was looking forward to playing in his team and getting to know him well.

At one of our early training sessions he zeroed in on a common aspect of my game: dribbling aggressively through heavy traffic to the hoop.

‘So Dusevic comes wombling along and instead of passing it to Salem or Carroll in better positions, he goes himself and misses.'

‘The
Wombles
, my little cousins watch that show,' said one of the boys.

Wombles stuck. I had stopped growing up but not out, on a home diet of soft drinks, chocolate, biscuits and chips and the tuckshop's banquet menu of pies, sausage rolls, Twisties and Wagon Wheels. For a complete meal at school, we'd put a sausage roll inside a buttered roll, sauce being an optional, no-cost extra. The jelly belly had gone but I'd built up extra comfort above my hips, wombling free when I played sport.

With George ‘Harpo' Salem and Phil ‘Sticks' Carroll I'd made the Western Suburbs basketball representative team. Basketball was a five-day a week commitment covering training and games. On Saturdays we trained for reps at Dulwich Hill High School's gym, the same venue as our Friday-night competition games. On Sundays we played all over Sydney, driven around in a mini-bus by coach Brother Jeff from Christian Brothers Lewisham. Brother Jeff 's coaching was sophisticated and intense; he was organised and analytical and we played to patterns on a whiteboard, involving endless practice drills. He kept a record of
missed shots, baskets and fouls. Brother Jeff provided individual analysis of each game; we were asked to write evaluations of our performance and mail them to him before the next training session. I enjoyed competing at this level because the refereeing was superior, timekeeping stricter and we were playing against the best talent in the state. What I liked most, however, were the long trips to the outlying parts of the city and beyond in the mini-bus, where we niggled each other, cracked jokes and bonded with Friday-night rivals.

On Friday I often did refereeing or bench duty for cash, jobs that rep players had an inside track on. We'd miss dinner altogether or make a dash to Dulwich Hill milkbars and hamburger joints. The coaches told us to avoid being alone as it was a rough area, with older boys and men gathering in groups for drinking, dope- smoking and car-hooning.

I tended not to leave the gym because I liked watching other teams. Sticks, tall, flexible and super skinny, enjoyed fast food even more than I did. One night, he asked Harpo and me to walk with him to the shops on the main road. In a side street, we passed a dozen guys in their late teens and early twenties drinking outside a shop. They were listening to car stereos, making noise and jostling among themselves under a dim streetlight. We crossed to the dark side of the road to avoid them.

On the way back, we caught the attention of a short guy in the rowdy group, who approached us in the dark.

‘Hey boys, what about some of this,' he said, having undone his fly and sticking out his dick. ‘Oi, you,' he said to me, the closest. ‘I said how would you like some of this?'

We ignored him, kept walking.

‘Come on boys, come on,' he taunted, still holding his dick.

‘No, thanks,' I said. ‘We're not that type.'

Bam. The back of my head's just hit a wall.

Where did that come from? I'm dazed, wobbling at the knees.
Bam. An invisible force strikes just below my ear, knocking me sideways. Have I been hit by a flying car? Another blow blasts the other side of my head. I stumble the other way.

It's the little prick in front of me, bouncing on his toes. It's a foot, not a fist he's using. Disoriented, these eyes without cues for depth, I can't see what's coming. He's not saying anything now; behind the group of men cheer every blow.