Whole Wild World (8 page)

My dad was working so I walked to school on the morning of my first match to get a lift to the game. Tata had taken me to the chemist to buy a mouthguard that we custom-fitted with scissors and boiling water. I could still taste the steam in it. Mama wasn't keen on me playing, though not because of any perceived danger.

‘Don't get dirty,' she said, eyeing the crisp white shorts. ‘My hands, nobody thinks about my poor hands.'

Footy clothes were an added burden to her compulsive washing ritual. As a first draft, so to speak, Mama hand-scrubbed
every item. She then placed them in the washing machine, mulling over its inadequacies. Once that cycle was complete, she got down to the nitty-gritty of washing by hand, copyediting if you like, to achieve a standard that time-saving technology could never match.

I didn't have footy boots but the coach said she'd fix me up. Mrs Ward had a bag of second-hand boots. The only ones that fitted were vintage plastic boots that came up to the ankle, not easy to put on or run in, but the loss of pace would make little difference. To pep us for big games, Mrs Ward would declare them a ‘Sunny Boy match'. If we won, every boy would get a triangular pyramid orange ice-block, encased in tetrapak, at the school tuckshop or – surprise! – straight after the game itself. The offer extended to the whole family of icy treats – Razz, Zap, Pow or Glug – wonderful names that seemed to come from the action scenes of Batman. Just asking for them at the tuckshop was its own fun: ‘Can I have a Razz please?'

The best player in any game was guaranteed a prize, which rarely went outside the power trio. I never got hurt but, much as I tried, it was impossible not to get dirty on the grassless paddocks, once garbage tips, that we played on.

Half-time oranges remain the sweetest fruit I've ever tasted, their magical qualities impossible to replicate at home. Being on the field was the best place to see live footy. The action was faster than on TV, especially when we had the ball. It was easy to forget to back up or chase, lost in that most splendid moment, watching a zippy kid weaving through a whole team to score a try.

4

Hit and run

At the beginning of second class, my third year of school, we began preparing for our first Holy Communion. The initial step was a first confession. To get to heaven – or at least, purgatory – you had to wipe the slate clean. Confess your sins, do penance, then return to go. I figured there might be a statute of limitations on my misdemeanours. Perhaps, like in maths, you could group like with like and confess to a general principle.

‘Not being kind to my brother' covered the dinky business. ‘Telling lies' was my omnibus in case something I needed to confess had gone missing or I had made a mistake in the telling. I was doomed. Here, I am thinking like a lawyer while my soul is crying out for salvation. You could go all out, fall on your knees, confess to absolutely everything and your soul would be as pure as Adam and Eve's before the Fall. Or like it was after being baptised as a baby. These were the calculations I was making before I went into the confessional to see Father Slattery, an old-school priest, serious and remote to a seven-year-old.

‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession, these are my sins.'

It went smoothly. Enough sins to be a decent catalogue of a life's work, not so many that Father would think I was a bad egg. The penance was five ‘Hail Mary's and five ‘Our Father's, which I thought was on the high side when I compared notes with others.

We went to 9 am Mass as a class once a week at St Joseph's, where we charmed pensioners with our hymn-singing. We also prayed for an end to the war in Vietnam, which I knew from newspapers and TV had been going for a long time and was about the spread of communism. My mother and aunt called the country ‘Vit-man'. The previous year, Denise, the smartest kid in our grade, had been called out of class. A little later I looked out and she was in the playground, crying uncontrollably, in the arms of two adults. Denise was inconsolable, fighting an invisible force, as if a furious demon had entered her body. Denise wasn't at school for days and we were asked to pray for her family – her brother had been killed in Vietnam.

The image of Denise in distress and the news of her brother's death were chilling as they triggered my deepest fear at age six: going to war. In my mind, some time after you left St Joseph's at the end of Year Four, you'd be off to Vietnam. From the news – violent street protests and men objecting to being put into the army by lottery – I knew you could be ordered to fight, even if you didn't want to. I didn't like my chances in a lottery, so I prayed to God to slow down the days, to lengthen the period before my time would come. Maybe the war would be over before I was called, but I didn't put a high probability on it.

My numbers were out by a long, long way but I felt the deadline pressing in. Running away was no good. I willed time to stand still and for my place in the universe to be the same. In my mind, the big boys in fourth class, ten years old at most, would leave at the end of the year for another stage of life. I wasn't sure where they went, but I knew it was another stop on the line of the cruel train that took you to war. To die. At St Joseph's, the big boys looked so strong and sure, in charge of the bottle drums and bins, that they could actually fight if required; they carried the morning milk crates and loaded the garbage incinerator while it was burning. I believed I was a good boy at Mass, praying for
Denise and her family. But God, who knew everything, knew I was praying for myself.

If I thought God or Sam had let me off scot-free for the unfortunate incident of the dinky and light tube, I was mistaken. After school Sam and I would get out of our uniforms straight away and put on our play clothes, then we'd eat whatever snack Tata had bought us, usually a packet of chips each. There was always Vienna bread to eat with cold, hard, scraped-on butter. We fought over the crunchy corner of the loaf if Tata or Mama had not eaten it at lunch. Then we'd settle in front of the telly, a square old Kreisler, to watch
Cartoon Corner
, hosted by Skeeter the Paperboy.

One afternoon, Sam and I slipped into a silly game where we were whacking each other with our school shirts. It wasn't something we often did, cotton not generally regarded as weapons- grade material in our stoushes. But here we were, using shirts like whips. Take that! Zap! Pow! Moving into full-scale wrestling – escalation being in our DNA and, like Mario Milano and Killer Karl Kox, we are in our underpants – I put him into a full nelson. With my arms looped under his armpits, interlocking my fingers behind his neck, I feel a sense of triumph. Yet Sam shakes me loose, grabs his school shorts off the bed. He twirls them over his head, as if he is David and I am Goliath, except he's bigger than I am.

I move in to tackle him onto the bed. Bam! He's hit me. Hard. What? Are you kidding? I hit the floor, knocked out cold. Like a villain on World Championship Wrestling, Sam had two chunky D-sized batteries hidden in the pocket of his shorts. I actually saw stars, like in the cartoons. It was wonderful. If I milked this egg-lump on my head, said my vision was off, maybe I'd square the ledger on my crimes, at least with Sam and my parents.

One Saturday evening in winter we had cousins over: non-stop action, ball games, chasings, hide-and-seek. Empty Swing soft-drink bottles outnumbered the unopened ones in the crate; our boy noise was louder than the table talk of the adults, which was always raucous. A non-Croatian could walk in and think the gathering was on the verge of a gunfight but it was actually a sign of what a wonderful time everybody was having and how close we were. My dad loved nothing more than a house filled with the laughter of guests and a passionate political free-for-all.

‘Have you lost your mind? Tito is playing them for fools, all of them, the Soviets, China, America.'

‘Bullshit. Tito's not that smart, he's being used by everyone, especially the Serbs.'

‘Look at that rubbish country, everything to Belgrade.'

‘Tito has to beg everyone for money.'

‘Yugoslavia can't even feed itself.'

The kids had been warned to be quieter, but our spirits could not be dampened. We mixed soft drinks into heady, cloudy brown concoctions and introduced weapons into hide-and-seek – excitement being a vector for rising danger – so it became more like search-and-destroy. Arms being in short supply, we improvised. Sam pulled out a large black umbrella with a sharp metal tip at the end; in his expert hands it was now a fire- breathing bazooka.

Discovered hiding under a blanket near the bay window, my mission was to bolt to safety in the sunroom. I dashed for the ‘B-A-R, bar' shrieking with glee as my cousin gave chase. Coming the other way was Sam, locked and loaded. My open mouth, a vast virgin wilderness, met its destiny in fast motion, the collision as spectacular as a blood geyser in a slasher film. I'm down. My head has exploded. I'm dying. But the body, a testament to the human spirit, is still producing a torrent of tears. I generated so much wailing it was enough to stop Tata in mid anti-Tito tirade.

Did a plane just crash into the house?

After the umbrella was extricated – I suspect it was left in longer than necessary to shield bystanders from the hot gush of tears and to save the walls from crimson saliva splatter – it was banished, never again to be used in house skirmishes. A grisly future in poison-tipped encounters with double agents in the Soviet bloc now beckoned for the exiled brolly.

I must have stopped crying at some point because I'm smiling in my Communion photo four months later. Tata and I sat in the emergency waiting room for an eternity, longer than a school day, although not as excruciating as a Croatian national day speech-fest. I watched the clock, hour after hour, wondering when our turn would come. Here it is again, the big hand on the six, half-past something. There weren't many people waiting but there had been a car accident and I was stuck.

Midnight. I'd never been up so late.

I fell asleep on Tata's lap. I hadn't been back to this hospital since I was born but I knew instinctively what goes on around here amid the pervasive antiseptic odour and hush. The blood and spit flow have subsided but there's a voodoo-drum throbbing in my throat, a boulder lodged atop my head. A soggy mound of bloodied cotton wool and face washers sit beneath my chair.

Our turn. There is a needle from a nurse. I wince, but the sleep and pain have dulled my nerves. I'm asked to gargle and spit out the muck so the wound can be cleaned. It can't be stitched.

Sam put a hole in the roof of my mouth; there is a fleshy pothole at the back of a dark cavern, a place that will store mashed up food like a sump. I will play in that roughed-up nook with my tongue for years when bored in class or before I sleep at night. How lucky am I to have such a secret distraction? Only I know it is there. It's a too-simple tongue manoeuvre, backward roll, half-twist, to relive that wild night of noise and energy and blood. I was gathering stories of my own.

I hadn't been paying proper attention to family matters but Sam and Teta were off to Croatia for a three-month holiday. Apparently I'd been asked if I wanted to go but given my mother wasn't allowed to enter Yugoslavia – she was an escapee and my mate Tito would put her in prison if he got his hands on her – I'd declined the offer of an all-expenses-paid European trip and a bonus summer.

There was a tortuous paperwork path to get passports for Sam and Teta. Danica Lukin, born in 1915, Kali, Yugoslavia, had sworn allegiance to the Queen. No way would Tata consent to the Y-word on his documents. There were visits to travel agents and injections (as the route went through the Philippines and India). Sam had to get his hair cut as well.

‘In Singapore they put you in jail if your hair grows over your collar or if they catch you with chewing gum!'

As usual, Sam had done his research. He was taking Teta to Croatia, not the other way around. Still, the barber was always an ordeal for Sam, given his trauma as a toddler. Mama and Teta were convinced the best way to secure a good head of hair for life was to completely shave it bald at age two. They did this in summer and neglected to put a hat on him when they walked home in the noonday sun. Sam's little head was roasted. He suffered heatstroke and was rushed to emergency. Later, Tata vetoed the flawed hair strategy for me, arguing against such peasant sorcery in the child security council.