Ten Pound Pom (17 page)

He’ll keep this card forever. The organisation has a code, too, to which members must pledge to adhere, and which reads:

The last point puzzles him a bit; the bush he knows, the patch of it at the end of his road, could never be described as ‘tidy’. It is chaotic and crazed and that’s why he likes it. It contains a burnt out tree with a hollow in its trunk against which he leans branches to make a den, in which he sleeps for a couple of days after reading a book called
My Side of the Mountain,
about a boy who runs away from home into the American wilderness and survives by building his own shelter and growing his own food etc. The fictional boy adopts a raccoon as a pet; the real boy adopts a grasshopper, which whirs away from him the first time he opens the matchbox. The fictional boy survives, at first, on hedgerow and woodland salads; the real boy eats a flower and has to spend a day in the school
sickbay, throwing up (the headmaster is very amused at the boy’s declaration that he thought the flower was ‘quite edible’). The fictional boy roasts a trap-caught possum over a fire; our boy cooks some sausages in the aboriginal way, eats them
half-raw
and, again, is violently sick. When he’s found, the fictional boy is healthy, muscular, almost a man; the real boy, when he returns home to his worried-sick parents, is dirty, bedraggled, upset, stippled with ticks and crusted in crap and vomit. But he thinks he spotted a platypus in the billabong in the bush and a big part of him remains pleased with that, above all else.

Other animals: Georgie, the cockatoo, given to the family by the Macleod family because it was too noisy. After a couple of weeks, the Griffithses give the bird to someone else, their ears ringing. TC the cat, who gets run over, and which they bury tearfully beneath the black boy bush in the garden. Two other cats, Bonnie and Clyde, which both have kittens in a Liverpool sports-bag in the laundry room, one of them accidentally killing two of her babies and developing mastitis, so the remaining kittens have to be put on the other cat, who rejects them, so the boy’s mother then has to feed them by hand, from a minuscule bottle. The boy adores the kittens. His favourite is an all-black one which he calls Midnight. He’s upset when they have to go to the pet-shop.

He catches a cane-toad and keeps it in a box under his bed. A highly dangerous animal, bright red fiery belly. His mother flips understandably out when she finds it. Tony puts a rubber snake in the parents’ bed. The children huddle together in the room next door, giggling, waiting for the screams.

They find a huge spider in the garden, span of a spread hand. It’s made a nest in a hole in the ground. The boy gingerly
puts a twig into that hole and can feel the spider attacking it; the stick’s movement vibrates up his arm like a shock-wave. And a bobtail lizard, a large, squat thing with a triangular head and blue tongue and pronounced scutellation which the cats are intrigued by. The children make an enclosure for it, which of course it escapes from, after a couple of days.
I knew it was going to run away,
Tony says.
It gave me a sly look this morning.

And parrots and wasps and flying ants and locusts and wallabies in the bush and a hundred other wonders. Blowflies, too; the boy tries to make amends with blowflies. He makes a deliberate effort to regard them as wonderful things, and one day he studies one, buzzing angrily against the windowpane. He looks closely at its jointed legs, the compound eyes, the exquisite lacework of its wings. As he watches, it falls on its back and begins to thrash madly. He’s about to catch it and let it out when, from where he imagines its arsehole to be, a worm begins to emerge; a long, white worm, filament-thin, a hideously wriggling thread which keeps coming and coming until it’s three times as long as the fly itself and still it squirms out, writhing, the fly buzzing and spinning in what seems to be enormous distress and the worm twists and coils and uncoils and grows longer and thinner and the boy, his skull bulging with horror, picks up a heavy book and drops it onto the vile mess and then runs to the bathroom to be, once again, sick. Another lesson learned. Effective, if harsh, teachers, blowflies are.

We’re talking about Georgie on the way to Yanchep. The incessant screeches he made.

–You ever had a cockatoo, Higgy?, I ask. –I bet you have.

–Get fucked.

Laughter.

Yanchep is big in my memory. It was the name of a national park and an attached village. I’d go there a lot, with the family and the school, swim, go out onto the lake in a rowing-boat. In the village, there was a chippy run by a British couple. Again, I think of the importation of food to a tropical climate from a climate in which that food was used as a kind of internal radiator. Is this daft or endearing? Neither, really; what it was was uncomfortable.

We drive out to Yanchep, north from Perth city. Outside Wanneroo, for miles, there used to be just bush, but now it’s built on – long low estates which my dad would’ve worked on, had we stayed. Perth is expanding exponentially. In contrast, Yanchep Sun City hasn’t changed much, from what I remember, but then I don’t really remember a great deal about it; the approach road to the place is just an approach road, then and now. It’s a seaside village. There are dunes. Some construction is going on amongst the dunes. The chippy at the Two Rocks Shopping Centre has gone so we eat pies instead. I ask for ketchup and the guy gives me a little plastic box of the stuff, matchbox-sized, in two conjoined halves. No lid, just the plastic box. I’m baffled by it. The guy takes it from me, holds it between his thumb and index finger, and squeezes; it snaps in the middle and releases the sauce onto the pie. What an unnecessarily complicated way to get ketchup.

–You wouldn’t believe the amount of accidents with these things, the guy says. –If you were a Yank I wouldn’t’ve helped ya.

I laugh and take my pie outside. Oz pies are great pies, even though the amount of them I eat will boost my lipid levels
hugely and unhealthily. But they’re everywhere; so many different varieties all over the place, and each one tasting great. I’m surprised that Australia isn’t a particularly obese or
heart-diseased
nation. If you’ve a weakness for pies, and a propensity to weight-gain, don’t go to Australia. Or wear blinkers if you do. Or come fitted with a gastric band.

The shopping centre is as I remember it; the same beige breezeblocks, the blue sea in front, the same small harbour. I remember looking out over that harbour, sitting at one of these tables, eating fish and chips in the baking heat with my family. Yanchep National Park itself is, too, very familiar. There’s the lake on which we’d go out on a rowing-boat to watch the turtles beneath us. Is that the same bench my dad sat on when the kookaburra swooped down and nicked the sausage off his fork? The
exact
same bench? Surely not. But it does look familiar. Tony recognises the tree under which we’d sit and picnic. Did I use the word ‘picnic’ as a verb, then? I hope I didn’t. I’m slightly embarrassed about using it as one now. There’s a koala compound, which wasn’t there then. The koalas are all asleep. Curled up fluffily at the tops of trees or in the Y’s of branches. Absurdly cute. Huge moorhens stalk about, pecking at the grass. Mewling little ducks with fluffy mohawks running down their necks. The Chocolate Drops café is doing a passable job of looking like an English tearoom and I buy some coffee from there and drink it on the veranda.

I would situate the moment at which I lost my fear of water here, in Yanchep, but the waiter tells me that the pool’s gone, now. Its lining had eroded and the water was leaking into the basement of the nearby building so it was drained and filled in. Likewise the aviary; it was taken down to let the birds fly free. Which is pleasing news. The only animals in captivity
here are the koalas, and they’re happy in their trees, smashed out of their minds on eucalyptus. It comes back to me, suddenly, that Georgie the cockatoo was eventually given to this park. Is he still about? How long do cockatoos live for? Is that him there, up in that tree, screeching his beak off?

The tall trees roundabout, I remember them as saplings. They might be remembering the same thing about me. Yet another place that rings and echoes with the boy I was. Sometimes, here, it seems as if the older me on the other side of the world, in Wales and in Liverpool, needs revisiting; as if I’ve properly regressed, and the me that I am in Wales is becoming more and more distant. This isn’t just touring Australia, this is touring a large and formative part of my life. I’m a tourist through my own childhood. Strange jaunt, this; I become more alien to myself with each passing day.

And people:

The Penns, with whom the boy’s family has a feud, after his sister, Linsey, has a fight with their daughter. The Penn father tries to run the boy’s father down when the boy’s father is holding his tiny baby.

The Macleods – Nick, Tim, and Darren. The older one, Tim, our boy doesn’t much like, but, despite the odd falling out, he remains friends with the other two. One day at a beach, Nick paddles far out to sea on a surfboard, so far that his screams can barely be heard. He thrashes back to shore, his skin even paler than its usual bone-white hue, his ginger hair standing, literally, on end. He babbles hysterically about a
giant fish which swam up towards him with its mouth open and nudged the surfboard. His fear is infectious and our boy doesn’t go in the sea that day.

The Rickards, who live opposite on Elizabeth Road, and who are a big family; not in numbers, but in size. The children especially. Big kids. Hefty. The boy is friends with Glen, who shows him, one day, how to fire a gidgee, which is a small trident attached to a rubber strap, used for spearfishing. Glen shoots the boy in the ear. Blood flows. Mr Rickard is a very funny man, and our boy likes him. One day the children paint sheets of wood for a treehouse or a den or something and Mr Rickard admires it.
Hell of a job
he says, stroking one particular piece.
Did you paint this one?
No
, says the boy,
Glen did,
and Mr Rickard says:
Oh well he’s made a shithouse job of it.
The boy finds this very funny. Glen will often walk along Elizabeth Road singing ‘Hello Hawaii’ over and over again.

The Johnsons, of the half-albino mother. Frank Giovanni, who, during school swimming lessons in the sea, panics and tries to use Tony as a flotation device. The instructor has to rescue Tony, someone else has to swim out and rescue Frank. Tony’s first girlfriend, Mandy Knight, a West Ham fan. The boy and his brother and Gary Johnson would fish, with rods, for goldfish in the fountains outside the council offices. There’s a boy called Duncan, extremely dependent on his mother; ‘mummymummymummy!’ is all he seems to say. An Italian family move in next door, and invite the boy to tea. He eats spaghetti for the first time, parmesan cheese, etc. He loves it. A whole new exciting world of gustatory discovery and pleasure is opened up to him. He watches a western where a horseman rescues a damsel by snatching her up with one arm onto his horse; he tries to do this with the youngest Italian girl,
on his bike, and blacks her eye and bloodies her nose. There’s a family from Huyton, in Liverpool – Lily and Jerry. Jerry works with the boy’s father. He falls asleep in the sun one day and gets third-degree burns on his legs. Their boy leans on a table made from a log in our boy’s front room and the table breaks in half. Jerry’s son is upset and runs away home.

And our boy, one day, loses his fear of water. Up to now, he’d approached the stuff only when bedecked in armbands and rubber rings, but then one day, and quite without warning, it feels to him in some way like he is going home. It happens in Yanchep, in the pool, where he’s gone with the school. He’s snuck off to see Georgie the cockatoo in the aviary and then joined his class in the pool and without thinking he slips into the deep end, bobs for bit close to the wall, gets out and walks to the shallow end and slips in again. Their teacher is standing in water up to her chin with her legs wide and the children are plunging under, swimming through the arch of her legs and resurfacing; until now, the thought of such voluntary
submersion
would’ve had the boy terrified but now he’s under and through and up in a blink and rejoining the line of splashing kids to do it again. He’ll forget, instantly, his hydrophobia, and soon he’ll be snorkelling over reefs and rocks, marvelling at fish and squid. Soon he’ll be seeking water out. Soon he’ll wonder why he was afraid of it in the first place.

And places: The boy goes on a Boys Club trip to Guilderton, a campsite between the coast, north from Perth, and the Yeal Nature Reserve. The boys stay in log cabins surrounded by trees, the ideal setting in which to stay up late telling ghost stories, which they do, and in the early hours before dawn the boy and some of his friends creep over to the girl’s cabin and make
spooky noises outside the window and run away laughing when the girls start hollering. The boy discovers a large flattened area in the vegetation, as if some big animal had slept there, which gives rise to tales of beasts and bunyips in the woods.

He loves Guilderton, the boy. Loves the mist rising off the lake and the thick green woods. A steep hill runs down into the lake, down which has been built a small trackway; a kind of skateboard can be slotted into the trackway at the top and ridden down on. At the bottom it comes to an abrupt halt and catapults the rider into the lake. The boys ask the teacher if they can go on it. He says no, so they ask him until he says yes but the skateboard thing can’t be found so the boys just leap shouting into the lake from the jetty instead.