Whole Wild World (36 page)

Wally had a mate in Byron Bay in northern NSW, so we planned an end-of-school getaway. I had no idea how far it was except that it was not possible for Wally to drive his Kombi. We took the slowest, cheapest option: the mail train from Central on a Sunday night, getting us to Byron around noon the next day. My parents weren't keen on me going – at odds with their iron law of ‘sleeping over' as the precursor to the louche life. But the fact I wasn't asking for a cent, and non-stop pleading, won them over.

One of our other mates Rob was also coming. We met on the platform at Central. Wally and I carried backpacks. Apart from his surfboard Rob had a tiny disposal-store knapsack, packed with extras to improve the experience of a long rail journey. Not books or Minties. Things got blurry and slurry just after the train chugged through the Central Coast.

We'd never done anything as a trio; Rob didn't know I called Seneka Wally. But the chemistry was good, individual connections were sound, the mood promising: low-key, loose, ‘too cool for Benilde'. Wally and Sharlene had spent two years as an idealised couple, viewed as floating above the usual blips and catastrophes of high-school romances. Two mature kids against the world. History and affection kept me close to Wally, but it felt from the outset this trip was going to be our last tango. Wally, now nineteen, was contemplating a shift north to go to college in Lismore. I was hoping to get a taste of the freedom I'd longed for when I turned eighteen in January – a job, maybe even a move out of home to be closer to the city.

Byron was remote, sleepy and scuzzy. I had little experience of country towns but it felt down at heel, slightly hippy and over-ripe. Byron had spent too long in the sun, but nobody cared. In
those days, the town was off the map, except for dole-bludgers, surfers and well-off young people far from parental homes in the south. Wally's mate Dean was a few years older than us, living with his girlfriend Susie and a pet owl in his mother's beach house at Belongil, a couple of kilometres north of the main beach. From town, we walked past a rank-smelling piggery and dank farms to a tiny house sitting on top of dunes. We would crash on the floor, delighted to sleep rent-free over plush cushions in a heap of sweaty bodies and dirty clothing.

Dean took us in a Mini Moke to a beach under the lighthouse. As we hit the sand he dropped his shorts, commando, trippy naked among regular beachgoers, carried into the surf by a celestial force, the god of cones and tabs. It was a clothes- optional house. I failed the cool test, unable to look without drooling at naked women, who were often ten years older. Susie was in the fashion industry and the house attracted models and the town's gorgeous people. One afternoon, coming in from the surf, Rob and I heard an operatic family stoush. The sozzled owner, originally from Eastern Europe, was in a foul temper.

‘Za little f-f-f-fuckers can fuck the fuck off. It's my house. Get them out. Out! Out!'

Rob and I were already out, having been warned by Wally not to enter the storm. Even the owl was perturbed. We couldn't see her but nobody inside the house could get a word in. When she stopped speaking, there was silence. Rob looked at me, mock terror. No, it was real terror. The wind speed was rising. Somehow the interlopers had been drawn into one of the woman's cyclonic turns. So we were banished to a supposedly safe haven, some distance out of town.

Covered by spiders' webs spun between soggy-barked trees, a house is being repossessed by forest and its traditional inhabitants. Bob was the sole human occupant of the place and worked as a bouncer at one of the drinking holes in town. He'd get home
at 2 am, smoke heroin, settle in for several hours of reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott. There were two dozen antiquarian little volumes stacked in a low bookcase:
Waverley
,
Rob Roy
,
Ivanhoe
and so on.

The books had been an
It's Academic
question. Who wrote the
Waverley
series of novels?

Yes, Tom.

Walter Scott.

Correct!

That's all it was to me: a factoid to store until needed, with no context or other content. One night I opened one of the books while Bob was at work and was taken aback by the archaic writing, a mush of epistles and heroic voice. Maybe you needed to be high to get into it. By the time Bob was on the nod, we were waking up but had to remain quiet for most of the day; if we were booted out of this place, there was nowhere for us to go in Byron on our budget. Bob would move about at three or four in the afternoon and head to town for work around dinnertime.

It wasn't easy to sleep in the house. Frogs gurgled, daintily woven heli-bugs buzzed overhead. The damp old place attracted every known species of annoying insect: bitey-diversity. We used bug spray and mosquito coils more in hope than actual conquest. But you couldn't do anything about the magisterial funnel webs, Lepkes at the top of the kill chain or sly redbacks in the dunny – except stomp and scream to get off their own land. Listening to the Doors and Van Morrison made the place spookier.

Lying awake, so far from home, I tried to think and see clearly what I would do if I missed out on the Fairfax job, given my less-preferred options had been exhausted. I'd be getting a letter any day; no mail had arrived for me when I rang home.

After the HSC some of my friends vowed never to read a book again, or for at least three months. It was study fatigue talking. I was relatively fresh and had not lost desire for
off-the-syllabus reading, the farther off-Broadway, the better. In one of the houses I'd picked up Tom Wolfe's
New Journalism
and a Hunter S. Thompson collection of gonzo reporting. I'd also brought along John Kennedy Toole's
A Confederacy of Dunces
, set in moist New Orleans with its oddball protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a slob like Jack Falstaff, obsessed with his innards, Fortuna and her wheel of fortune, and beatnik ‘minx' Myrna Minkoff. I needed a dictionary to follow it. After several rejections from publishers, the author committed suicide before it was published. The book won that year's Pulitzer Prize.

It was a long walk to town, and the beach. Torrential rain kept us in Bob's lair. Wally and Rob were bored. Dope was impossible to score in Byron. We hired a car to take in the retail opportunities of Brunswick Heads (false advertising), Nimbin (no one was awake), Mullumbimby (try mullin' up elsewhere) and Bangalow (too clean, always).

‘You guys should check out magic mushrooms,' said Darren, a guy who lived at the beach house. ‘There are plenty on the farms near where you are staying. You'll be able to find them early in the morning, golden tops, growing out of the cow dung. The ones you want have blue-coloured stalks.'

‘And then what?'

‘You boil them up to make tea. It will blow your mind. But just make sure you don't pick any of the poisonous ones.'

We hired bikes and headed south out of town, looking for properties where we could jump a fence and not be seen by a farmer. There'd been rain overnight. The sun was high, the air humid. Foraging wasn't easy, given we couldn't see any mushrooms from the road. At a few properties big, lone bulls were in charging range.

But we found a fresh sprouting, out of dried dung, having been advised to avoid anything that looked more than a day old. We filled a bag with about two dozen of them and went back to the house.

Never do this at home, kids. The cook-up was pungent and meaty, delivering a brown brew of tea-like clarity. Never do this in
any
home. The taste was horrible, you felt like gagging. It's poison, really, and simply wrong, likely to lead to a lifetime of hazardous dieting and swing-voting. Again, never,
ever
do this.

The buzz was sufficient to warrant the hunt and keep us away from other terrible things, like alcohol, golf and hot-chip sandwiches. We refrigerated the golden potion, drank it cold, morning and night, holding our noses to avoid remembering its origins.

After the nausea, there are gut-churning cramps – then a hint of euphoria, kept in check, dosed low. More like winning a race on the beach or sinking a long basket than being in the audience at the Hordern. I'd vowed to drink a bit more, perhaps a lot more, next time.

Now. Lying in an open field, I hear the clouds above me, swooshing across the sky, fluffy sheep and Caspar ghosts in a soothing frolic. Ohhhhhhh, the perspective changes. With no other reference points in a narrow band of vision, I feel above the clouds, looking down on them from space. Closing my eyes, fractal colour patterns play out a kaleidoscopic game of electronic ping-pong. I float off towards an exit, no weight at all, no body, in pure womb light like the day I was born. I need to feel the clammy ground with my fingers.

Wally and I had been in the same force field for a long time but whatever had been holding us together was losing its grip. A couple of times on the trip he'd become irritated with something I'd done, more than the usual bickering of old mates. I'd found the forlorn chase for substances, the all-consuming urge to get high, tedious and a waste of good surf conditions. I'd been jealous of his easy bonding with Rob and withdrew.

On a Sunday night we went to see a ska band at a hall in Broken Head, south of Byron, an event that brought out every fiend in the district. Wally made friends easily in this milieu and
was going to stay in Byron with Dean over Christmas and maybe even longer. To a girl – she could only have been fourteen or fifteen – he'd just met, Wally introduced me as ‘Tom, a friend from school'.

It wasn't like the jolt that woke me, in a sweat, a few nights earlier, a psychotic bull chasing me across a slippery paddock. I can't get enough traction to get away. But the downgrade to schoolfriend irked me, played on my mind.

A truculent seed implanted. School was never the basis of our friendship; it was everywhere but there. Okay, if that's how it is, we're now done with school. The war is over, baby. Lone, dark thoughts quickly spawn into a fast-swimming shoal of resentments. I gave myself permission to let go of him and grab things I'd ignored. Years earlier we'd had an ugly fight playing footy in Frank's yard; the game getting nastier, tempers in flight. After I put in a niggling cheap shot, Wally pinned me to the ground, rubbed my mouth into the bitter, straw-coloured dry grass and dirt, twisted my arm to submission. Conquered.

‘How'd you like the taste of that?' Wally said, wiping his hands in disdain.

That distant moment, buried, rushed back, sour and gritty on the lips and tongue. A few weeks later on a road trip north with two other mates we dropped in at the beach house to say hello.

‘You can't stay here,' Wally said.

‘We weren't planning to.'

The spell had been broken. Gutter rats, milk runs, wheels and fine ladies, and countless nights under the stars receded into an immature past. It was obscene how our friendship was hurriedly buried, the ecstasies and intimacies entombed cold in memory, covered over by distressed pride. Yet it was liberating and vital.

When I got home from Byron there were two pieces of news: a letter for me, and a telegram from Croatia – never a good sign. Tata's oldest sister Matija had died. Death rarely encroached into our family, grandparents having died long, long ago. There were not many elderly people in the local Croatian community either, save for a handful of robust
babas
and
bakas
. Funerals, then, were rare.

Teta Matija's death affected Tata as you'd expect, but there was a twist. His eldest sister had been an ardent
partizanka
. After the war, Matija had been part of the local communist ruling clique that sentenced Joso to nearly four years in prison, first in the Palace of Justice in Zadar and then the Lepoglava
zatvor
for political prisoners north of Zagreb.

‘She brought food to me every day I was in the Zadar prison,' Tata said, bereft, at this moment longing for what was in Matija's pot.

‘How come?' I ask. ‘Didn't she put you away?'

‘We were brother and sister. That never changed. Somehow the food made it easier for our parents to cope with it all.'

‘Why was she a Commo and you a Ustaša?'

‘Why? Who knows why? They made you pick a side, on the spot.
Rat
.'

Rat
, pronounced ‘rut', means war. It was the answer to many, if not all, of my questions about the past.

To Mama: ‘Why did you come to Australia?'
Rat
.

To Teta: ‘Why didn't you ever get married?'
Rat
.

Although that war was so long ago, it lingered dimly in our house like the light from a memorial candle. For those three survivors,
rat
was deep within, a separate organ composed of more than flesh. The war had written the story of their lives. Joseph Brodsky once described an ‘ironic curtain' between generations, a see-through veil allowing almost no passage of experience. It took me a long time to understand them and half a lifetime to
put it in words. As the late Russian émigré poet said, ‘articulation lags behind experience'.