You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (9 page)

When during those early days of courtship my father escorted his intended through the crowd of leering wharfies in duffle coats trying to surreptitiously look down her dress, he was fretting somewhat. My mother was a nice girl from Glen Waverly who enjoyed musical theatre and the odd game of netball. He feared it would only take one call of ‘PICK THE FUCKING PIGSKIN UP YOU FUCKING FAGGOT' or ‘SOMEONE TELL THESE CUNTS THERE'S A FUCKING GAME ON' to make her turn very pink in the cheeks and inform him in a rather tight and small voice that she'd quite like to be taken home now thank you and to please not bother calling again. I think it was about fifteen minutes into the game that a poor umpiring decision was made close to the boundary line, at which point my mother propelled herself to the fence, hoisted herself up to eye level with both little gloved hands, and screamed at full volume ‘UMPIRE YOU FUCKING WHITE MAGGOT WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU CALL THAT THEN' and my father sighed happily and decided then and there that this was indeed the woman he was going to spend the rest of his life with.

My mother went to Fitzroy games while heavily pregnant, a time during which I am told other mothers decorate nurseries and apply lanolin to their bosoms and pat the Dulux sheepdog or other such gaily maternal activities. She would pace up and down the stands, pausing occasionally to kick out at passing children or hot-dog sellers. If Fitzroy were falling behind in the scores she would shout firstly at the game, then directly into my father's face. His long, thin frame would be swaddled in an enormous sheepskin coat, as though to cushion the brunt of her fury.

‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING OUT THERE, ALAN?' my mother would bellow, running her hands over her baby bump in an agitated fashion. ‘THIS IS A FUCKING SHAME, NOT A FUCKING GAME.'

In utero I soaked up her demon song and emerged from the womb inextricably devoted to the Fitzroy Football Club. It ran through my veins.

Fitzroy were always the joke, the patsy, the fat kid up the back of the bus who wore dental headgear and a Sugar Ray t-shirt and referred to his parents' car as ‘the vroom vroom machine'. Tell a group of strangers that you supported Fitzroy and you were openly mocked, often to the point of physical violence. Following Fitzroy was the equivalent of wetting your pants at speech night and then having to perform ‘Hakuna Matata' from
The Lion King
in ensuing squelchy torment.They hadn't won a premiership in so long there were club bumper stickers that implored hopefully ‘Let's roar like 1944'.

My family was of course completely obsessed. While the leisure activities of other families revolved around cheery greeting-card bonding-type affairs such as Monopoly or It's a Knockout, ours centered utterly on the club. We went to what was known as the ‘Ins and Outs Night' which, despite its vaguely pornographic name, was less about standing around cheering as Barbara Windsor took on all comers and more guessing which players would be picked in the team for the weekend's game. We went to training, where we'd stand in the freezing cold watching thirty sweating men running around frantically in circles and jumping over orange witches hats. As a child I would dutifully bake a chocolate cake for these sessions, wanting to reach out and nurture in some way. The players would hold a slice in their meaty paws like a delicate little flower, mumbling thankyous and regarding me with no small amount of curiosity.

Saturdays were game day. Hour-long drives to VFL Park or Whitten Oval were fairly common, the relentless tedium of the traffic only relieved by endless games of ‘Name That Show Tune'. Sundays were sacred. We'd spread out the newspapers and hold Hardy family round-table post-mortems on who had played well and who had let us down, physically and emotionally.

‘Richard Osborne was fucking wasted on the back line,' my mother would lament as she sipped her Earl Grey and we would all nod glum assent into our muesli mix.

I had a recurring dream where I would play in the forward pocket, like Bernie ‘Superboot' Quinlan, and every time the opposition tried to return the ball to play I would interfere, manipulating my way into yet another goal, another triumph. I would lead Fitzroy to another victory single-handedly. My dreams allowed for no reasonable efforts on behalf of my opponents. In my subconscious, I was king.

Before I hit puberty I was allowed in the Fitzroy changing rooms, likely due to the fact that I used to hide my long hair up under the Commonwealth Bank cap I inexplicably wore everywhere and had about as much bosom as a Cruskit. Some geriatric trainer with a whistle around his neck and a tired expression would wave me in, presumably too exhausted/drunk/glaucoma-stricken to notice that I was a girl, and there I'd be, darting about among legs and shorts in the hallowed surrounds.

They really used to work the trainers hard in those days. They were like wizened little gnomes in tracksuit pants and windbreakers. Ancient ex-athletes, they'd spend half the game feverishly trying to keep up with the players—who either completely ignored them or accidentally elbowed them in the face during a moment of intense play—and the other half standing on the boundary line gasping for air and occasionally vomiting blood. I loved them, mostly because of their aforementioned lax security work and the fact that they occasionally let me carry the used mouthguards around in a little bucket.

There were naked men everywhere in the rooms, a fact that didn't daunt me in the slightest. I guess I was so used to seeing my father strolling naked around our house the idea of a penis parade of VFL players wasn't too bothersome. I would march up to nude twentysomethings as they towelled themselves off, holding out my autograph book and blithely ignoring the dangling manhood between their legs.

‘Excuse me, Mickey,' I'd chirp, unfazed. ‘Could you please sign my book?'

They'd sign it, unsettled by the sexless little pixieboy in the tiny dufflecoat gliding its way around the changing rooms at eye level with their genitals, and suddenly feeling the awkwardness of their nudity, as though I was a serpent offering them a shiny apple.

‘Here y'go, mate,' Ross Lyon would say, scribbling his autograph with a flourish and giving my hat a friendly pat as he shoved me in the opposite direction. ‘Stay in school eh?'

Fitzroy footballers in the 1980s were golden, brawny, glorious. There were the Osborne brothers—cocky, glamorous Richard and his shy, acne-scarred older brother, Graham. Enthusiastic, puppyish Duane Rowe. Toothsomely mysterious Gary Pert. They moved as a pack, all fleshy arrogance and pride. They slapped each other's arses and spat on the grass.

Tim Pekin was twenty years old when I first spotted him loping around the team, all stick arms and milky-spindle legs, with a terribly inconvenient fringe that fell over one eye whenever he found his way near the ball. My parents christened him ‘The Poet' as he looked like he belonged at a writing desk, penning lengthy soliloquies for wealthy dowagers with a quill, rather than sprinting around Kardinia Park covered in mud or standing miserably in the rain at Junction Oval waiting for David Strooper to kick a torpedo his way. He wore a guernsey with the number 24 on it and I thought he was utterly perfect.

I was the first kid ever to wear his number on my back. I loudly insisted to all who would listen that he was my new favourite, needling my parents to purchase the iron-on transfers ‘2' and ‘4' to attach to the back of my official VFL merch Fitzroy Cubs jumper. They duly complied, privately and disproportionately amused by my somewhat eccentric choice of heart-throb. I pasted over old pictures of Corey Haim with black and white photographs of Tim sitting on a bench with a towel over his head. At night I would talk to the pictures as though they were alive.

I saw him naked plenty of times, sneaking up on him in the change rooms and playfully squirting water on his exposed buttocks or just sitting next to his locker and staring silently and innocently at him while he rushed to get dressed. I used to force my way into the weights training room at Junction Oval and stand by admiringly counting as he did his reps. He was baffled by my sudden devotion, and was ribbed mercilessly by his teammates.

‘Peeks, your missus is here,' they'd snigger, flicking him in the testicles with wet towels and gesturing over to where I stood in the doorway, oblivious to anybody else in the room. I would write down topics of conversation in advance (‘You know, you were really outplayed by Michael Tuck last Saturday. I'm only saying that to be constructive') and follow him from the physio's office to the car park, where I would grin adoringly into the window of his Barina until he politely locked the car doors and drove away, being careful not to run over my foot.

We would circle warily around each other during my patented Thursday night chocolate cake handouts—he gawkily uncertain of how to handle a determinedly devoted pre-pubescent, me in my numbered jumper, plotting and planning the perfect marriage proposal (should I mention the age difference or just gloss over it as though it wasn't an issue?). Tim was a horrendously shy Colac boy who wore stonewash jeans with pleats in the front, raised a Catholic with umpteen brothers and sisters. I regularly invited him over to our house for dinner, pushing insistently every time he affably sidestepped my requests with friendly chuckles.

‘Oh, that's . . . that's sweet,' he would murmur, desperately trying to make eye contact with somebody across the room to come and save him.

I fixated upon the idea of dinners and wouldn't let it drop. I invited everybody. Michael Gale, Paul Roos, Gary Keane. Suddenly there was a new addition to our family's already busy football-obsessed week: Wednesday night dinners. My parents would cook up enormous platters of tortellini and spaghetti that would be inhaled in a matter of minutes by these bullish man-mountains. At first everybody was very shy. Our dining room resembled an odd sort of country barn dance, with three or four players crammed over one side of the table staring demurely into their laps, and my family on the other side attempting to coax them into conversation. After half an hour or so somebody would break rank and the room would exhale and talk would turn to sport and politics and music. And pasta. The players always liked to talk about pasta.

Tim Pekin finally came to one of these dinners. At first he was painfully bashful, and our overt attentions seemed to cause him distress. But then he came to another, and another, more regularly over time, until eventually his absence was a more notable thing than his presence. He got to know the layout of our house and would roam its perimeters more and more comfortably, running his long fingers over book spines and resting his drink on top of the piano in moments of quiet reflection while around him everybody chatted amiably. I followed him from room to room.

After my mother requested more Saturday afternoon white space in which to scream like Hasil Adkins in a voodoo froth and throw her boiling thermos at the opposition players, I was allowed to roam freely around the footy grounds unsupervised. To a child, this was heaven. I took up with a couple of broad-shouldered, smiling sisters named Cath and Jo and the three of us would duck and weave through the crowds, picking up half-eaten buckets of hot chips and trying to skeeze loose change from sentimental drunks. It was because of Cath and Jo that I was eventually inducted into the Fitzroy cheersquad, a motley collection of vocal bogans who gathered around the end of the ground behind the goal sticks and waved flags whenever Fitzroy kicked a rare goal. The cheersquad demographic ranged from three-year-old girls with earrings and bubble perms to hoarse middle-aged men sucking back durries. While the distant interstate code of rugby had rows of taut eighteen-year-old dames in butt-grazing skirts shaking little pom-poms and high kicking with excited squeals, Fitzroy had toothless slags and sporadic applause.

It was exciting being a part of something that was simultaneously so chaotic and so organised. The cheersquad would spend Tuesday nights in some freezing cold community hall, painstakingly putting together an enormous crepe paper banner celebrating Fitzroy's achievements of the previous week, all while eating Chicken Crimpies and drinking litre bottles of Solo. On game day we'd troop out onto the field and unroll our precious burden on the wet oval, shivering in the cold, and on some secret signal stagger into packs at either side of the banner and raise it up for the rest of the ground to admire. Moments later, the team would run out of the rooms and run through it, tearing it to shreds—after which point we would carefully pack up all the torn scraps into garbage bags and retire to our regular position behind the goals, knowing that we'd been a part of a special moment. It was all very thrilling.

These banners were enormous. Some weeks they'd feature a cartoon lion, snarling menacingly at the opposition. Other weeks they'd go for a solid message of congratulations along the lines of WELL DONE GRANT LAWRIE 150 GAMES. On the ground, even when crammed into a pack holding up one side of these enormous totems, my face in a random armpit, I'd still try to catch Tim Pekin's eye as he ran onto the field. I was for the most part ignored.

As I grew into my skin and became an irksome teenage runaway, keeping my parents awake at night with a persistent habit of slipping out of bedroom windows and hanging out at recording studios with morally bankrupt guitarists, I distanced myself with emotional jaggedness from my increasingly distressed family, becoming more convinced that the mysterious, elusive spirit-connections between drunken strangers were the only ones worth nurturing. I stopped going to football games. My family's slavish devotion to the sport, the humiliating way they shouted from the sidelines, the overly hopeful way they attempted each week to bring us all together again in the name of the club . . . it was twee. It was a childish relic of a past from which I was eager to disassociate. When my father watched me dress for a night out, all hotpants and teetering teenage platform high heels, he would say in a hurt and hopeless tone, ‘But I thought we could go to the game tomorrow.' I was cutting myself free from everything my parents loved, and the sacred, jolly ritual of football represented only a forgotten past.