Underdogs (3 page)

During th
e next week the weather turned a corner to a more intense kind of cold. The mornings at our place were pretty hectic, as always.

In her room, Sarah put her makeup on for work. Dad and Steve shouted out good-byes. Mum cleaned up all the havoc we’d caused in the kitchen.

On the Wednesday Rube gave me a dead leg and then dragged me into the bathroom so Mum wouldn’t see me writhing around in agony on the floor in our room. I laughed and whimpered at the same time as he dragged me.

“Y’ don’t want Mum hearin’ this.” He covered my mouth. “Remember — she tells Dad and it won’t be just me who gets it. It’ll be both of us.”

That was the rule at our place. If there was ever any trouble, absolutely everyone in it copped it. The old man would come down the hall with that look on him that said,
I’ve had one hell of a day and I didn’t come home to mess around with you lot.
Then he’d pull out his backhander — either in the ribs or across the ear. There was no mucking around. If Rube got it, I got it. So no matter how bad a fight was, it never went further than us. We were usually in enough pain as it was. The last thing we needed was Dad getting involved.

“Okay, okay.” I slashed my voice at Rube once we were in the safety of the bathroom. “Bloody, what was that for, anyway?”

“I d’know.”

“I can’t believe you.” I looked up at the stupid sap. “Ya give me a dead leg for no reason. That’s shockin’, that is.”

“I know.” He was grinning, and it made me push him in the bathtub and try to strangle him, but it was no use — Sarah was banging on the door.

“Get outta there!” she thumped.

“All right!”

“Now!”

“All right!”

When we were on our way to school we met some of Rube’s mates. Simon. Je Cheese.

They were invited around in the afternoon for a game of what in our household gets called One Punch. It came about because we only have one pair of boxing gloves in our garage, so the game is pretty much a boxing match where both fighters have only the one glove. One Punch.

We played it that same Wednesday, and we were keen. Very keen. Keen to hit. Keen to get hit. Keen to get away with it, even if it meant not socializing with the rest of the family. I mean, you’d be surprised how
well you can hide a bruise in the darker corner of the lounge room.

Rube’s left-handed, so he likes to have the left glove. I get the right, which is my good hand. There are three rounds and the winner is declared fairly. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who wins. Sometimes not.

This particular afternoon was a pretty bad one for me.

We took the gloves out into the backyard and first up was Rube against me. Rube and I always had the best fights. It was no holds barred. All it would take was one good punch from me and Rube would really try to knock my head off. One good punch from Rube on me would send the sky into my head and the clouds into my lungs. I just always tried to stay up.

So “Ding, ding,” went Cheese with no enthusiasm, and the fight was on.

We circled the small backyard, which was half concrete, half grass. It was an urban box, not much bigger than a real boxing ring. Not much room to get out of the way. Hard concrete as well …

“C’mon.” Rube stepped in and went for my head, faked, and cracked my ribs. He then took a shot at my head for real and just skimmed my ear. That was when I saw him open up so I slammed one right in at his nose. It hit. Brilliant.

“Yow!”
Simon cheered, but Rube remained focused. He walked in again without fear and didn’t worry about my cocky bouncing around. He leaned in and whacked
me over the eye. I blocked it and aimed up myself. He swerved me and turned me around and rammed me back against the wall, then pulled me out. He pushed me back. He hauled me onto the grass and crashed his fist into my shoulder. Yes. He hit. Oh, it was okay. It was like an ax had burst open my joint and next thing my head was rocked by his left hand. It flung forward and jammed onto my chin.

Hard.

It happened.

The sky came down.

I breathed in the clouds.

The ground wobbled.

The ground.

The ground.

I swung.

Missed.

Rube laughed, from under that increasing beard of his.

He laughed as soon as I fell down to my knees and got up a little just to crouch there. The count came, with delight. Rube: “ — two — three —”

Once I was up again and the cheers of Simon, Jeff, and Cheese were no longer mere blurs, there were only a few more punches and Round One was over.

I sat in the corner of the yard, in the shade.

Round Two.

It was much the same, only this time Rube went down once as well.

Round Three was a dog fight.

Both of us came out throwing hard and I recall reefing at Rube’s ribs close to seven or eight times and copping at least three good shots on my cheekbone. It was brutal. The neighbor on our left kept caged parrots and had a midget dog. The birds screeched from over the fence and the midget dog barked and jumped at the fence while my brother and I fought each other senseless. His fist was this big brown blur that kept driving forward from his long arm, pumping out at me and singing as it pushed my skin into my bones. All was mirrored and shaky and shivery and getting orange-dark and I could feel that metallic taste of blood crawling from my nose to my lip, over my teeth and onto my tongue. Or was I bleeding inside my mouth? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything until I was crouched down again and dizzy and feeling like I might throw up.

“One — two —”

The count meant nothing this time. I ignored it.

All I did this time was sit down against the back fence till I recovered.

“Y’ okay?” Rube asked a bit later, his rough hair swinging down into his eyes.

I nodded.

I was.

Back inside, I surveyed the damage and it didn’t look too good.

There was no blood in my nose. It did turn out to be
in my mouth, and I had a black eye. A good one. No hiding it. Not today. No point. Mum was going to kill us. She did.

She took one look at me and said, “And what happened to you?” “Ah, nothin’.”

Then she saw Rube, who had a slightly swollen lip.

“Ah, you boys.” She shook her head. “You disgust me, I swear it. Can you not go one week without hurting each other?”

No, we couldn’t.

We were always hurting each other, whether it was boxing, or playing football in the lounge room with a rolled-up pair of socks.

“Well, stay apart for a while,” she ordered us, and we obeyed the order. We tried hard to listen to our mother because she was tough and she cleaned rich people’s houses for a living and she worked hard to let us have an okay house. We didn’t like it much when she was disappointed in us.

The disappointment was

It really got bad throughout the next day because some of my teachers became a bit concerned about the state of my face and the way that every second week it seemed to have a bruise or a scab or a graze on it. They asked me all these weird questions about how things were at home and how I got on with my parents and all that kind of thing. I just told them I got on pretty well
with everyone and that things were just as usual at home. Pretty good.

“Are you sure?” they asked. As if I’d lie. Maybe I should have told them I ran into the door or fell down the basement stairs. That would have been a laugh. Mainly I just told them that I did boxing as a recreational sport and that I hadn’t really become too good at it yet.

They clearly didn’t believe what I told them because on Thursday afternoon my mother got a call from the school, requesting a meeting with the principal and the head of welfare.

She came on Friday at lunch and made sure Rube and I were there as well.

Outside, just before she went into that welfare office, she said, “Wait here and don’t move till I say you can come in.” We nodded and sat down, and after about ten minutes, she opened the door and said, “Right — in.” We got up and went in.

Inside the office, the principal and the welfare officer stared at us with a kind of amused, measured repugnance. So did Mum, for that matter, and the reason for this became quite clear when she reached into her handbag and pulled out our boxing gloves and said happily, “Okay, put them on.”

“Ah, c’mon, Mum,” Rube protested.

“No no no,” insisted Mr. Dennison, the principal. “We’re very interested in seeing this.”

“Come on, boys,” my mother egged us on. “Don’t be
ashamed….” But that was the whole point. Embarrass us. Humiliate us. Shame us. It wasn’t hard to see what was going on, as each of us put our glove on.

“My sons,” my mother said to the principal, and then to us. “My sons.”

The look on our mother’s face was one of bitter disappointment. She looked ready to cry. The wrinkles around her eyes were dark-dry riverbeds, waiting. No water came. She just looked. Away. Then, with purpose, she looked at us and seemed ready to spit at our shoes and disown us. I didn’t blame her.

“So this is what they do,” she told them. “I’m sorry about all this, to waste your time like this.”

“It’s okay,” Dennison told her, and she shook hands with both him and the welfare woman.

“I’m sorry,” she said again and walked out, not even looking at us again. She left us standing there, wearing those gloves, like two ridiculous beasts in winter.

Don’t ask me why, but I’m in Russia, sitting on a bus in Mo

It’s crowded.

The bus moves slowly.

It’s freezing.

The guy next to me has the window seat and he’s holding some kind of rodent that hisses at me even if I so much as look at it. The guy nudges me, says something, and laughs. When I ask him if this really is Moscow (because of course I’ve never been there), he starts having
this long drawn-out conversation with me, which is a miracle because I can’t even say a word to him on account of not knowing the language.

He’s unbelievable.

Talking.

Laughing, and by the end of it, I actually like the guy. I laugh at all his jokes by the lines they make on his face. “Slow bus,” I say, but of course he has no idea. Russia.

Can you tell me what in God’s name I’m doing in Russia?

The bus is freezing as well — did I mention that already? Yeah? Well, trust me, it is, and all the windows are fogged up.

Shiver.

I shiver in my seat until I can take it no longer. Stand.

I try to get up but I seem pasted down. It’s like I’ve actually been frozen to the seat.

“Get up,” I tell myself, but I can’t. I can’t!

Then I see someone amongst the crowd in the aisle hobbling toward me.

No.

Oh, no.

It’s an old woman, and since being in Russia, I’ve realized that these old women really get into the thick of it. And worse still, she’s looking right at me. Right, at me.

“Help me up,” I say to the guy next to me. I beg, but he does nothing. He even turns away to sleep, squashing his rodent up against the window. It gags.

She’s still coming.

No.

A nightmare.

She grimaces and fixes her eyes on mine, silently telling me to get out of the seat.
Get up!
I shriek inside me. I can’t, and she — Arrives.

“Yah!” she begins, and from there, there is no stopping her. She spits her Russian swearing right in my face and gives me a barrage with her fists. Her tiny ferocious hands try to lift me by my clothes to throw me from the seat.

“I’m sorry!” I wail, but this old lady is like furyified, sending flurries all over me.

Later, I’m sitting down in the aisle, with the seat of my pants still stuck on the seat. A middle-aged man who speaks English tells me, “Shouldn’t offend the lady, old boy.”

“No kidding,” I agree, trying to keep my bare skin off the frozen floor.

The old lady smiles down at me, with disgust.

This is an important chapter.

I think so, anyway.

The bruises on my face healed pretty quickly and I spent the next while of my life just hanging around. A happening was looming. It was out there somewhere beyond the regular enclosed life that I had been living. It was out there, not waiting, but existing. Being. Perhaps it was only slightly wondering if I would come to it.

Maybe I’m just talking stupid.

Anyway.

The happening that happened was that I met this girl when I was working with Dad on a Saturday.

She was something, I promise you.

I’d spent the whole morning digging a trench under the house at this job in a district maybe five kilometers away from ours, and I was dead. Dead by lunch.

There was dirt all over me and my neck was straightened and stiffened from bending over and digging. When I came out from underneath, she was there. She was there with her mother and father and she was so real I nearly choked on the nothingness in my mouth. My height, she was, and calm and real in the face. She smiled at me with real lips and her real voice said “Hi” when we met.

I wiped my right hand on my pants and shook all their hands. Mother. Father. Girl.

“My son, Cameron,” my dad told them when I crawled out, shaking the dirt from my hair. He even sounded like he remotely liked having me around.

“G’day,” I said when I faced up to them, and Dad kind of took the parents on a tour of what we’d done on their property. They were having pretty massive extensions done, which were cramping up the yard a little. It was a nice house, though.

The girl.

“Rebecca,” her mother had told me. When Dad was doing the grand tour I was alone with her.

What was I meant to do?

Talk?

Wait?

Sit down?

All up, all we did was stand there a while and then sit on these deck chair sort of things. I looked away and looked at her and looked away again

What an animal.

I sure had a way with the ladies, didn’t I?

Finally, when it was almost too late and the old fellas were coming back, I said to her in this crazed quiet voice, “I like workin’ here,” and after the silence, we both laughed a bit and I thought,
What a weird thing to say.
I like working here. I like working here. I Like. Working here. I. Like working here.

As I repeated it over in my head I wondered if she knew what it really meant.

I think she did.

Rebecca.

It was a nice name, and while I liked the calmness in her face, I liked her voice better. I remembered it and let it chant across me. Just that “Hi.” Pathetic, I know, but when your experience with women is as minimal as mine, you take whatever you can get.

All afternoon, it lasted. There was even very little pain in the work I did because I had Rebecca now. I had her voice and the realness of it to numb everything. It numbed the blisters forming at the base of my fingers and blunted the blade seeking my spine.

“Hi,” she’d said. “Hi,” and she’d laughed with me when I said something stupid. I’d been laughed at before by girls, but it was rare for me to laugh
with
one. It was rare to feel okay with a city over my shoulder and a girl’s face so close to mine. She had breath and sight and she was real. That was the best thing. She was realer than the dental nurse because she wasn’t behind a counter being paid to be friendly. And she was definitely realer than the women in that catalog thing because there was no way I would ever tear this girl up. There was no way I would dare to hurt her or curse her or hide her under my bed.

Eyes. Alive eyes. Light hair falling down her back. A pimple at the side of her face, near her hairline. Nice neck, shoulders. Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones.

She was real.

She played music later on and it wasn’t anything much that I liked, but that made her realer still. The whole situation even made me smile at Dad when he told me off for digging something in the wrong place.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.

“Dig over there.”

I wonder if he knew. I doubt it. He didn’t seem to catch on when I asked if we’d be back here next week.

“Yeah, we’ll be back,” he’d answered bluntly.

“Good,” but I said it only to me.

A bit later, I asked, “What’s these people’s last name?”

“Conlon.”

The thing that hit me most was that I suddenly started praying. I started saying these prayers for Rebecca Conlon and her family. I couldn’t stop myself.

“Please bless Rebecca Conlon,” I kept saying to God. “Just let her be okay, okay? Let her and her family be okay tonight. That’s all I ask. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and I crossed myself like the Catholics do and I’m not even a Catholic. I don’t know what I am.

During the next week, I kept praying, and I kept making sure to remember her face, and her voice.

“I’d be good to her,” I kept telling God. “I would.”

I was actually torn between the love I had for her face and her body and the love I had for her voice. Her face had character all right. Strength. I loved it. I definitely loved her neck and her throat and her shoulders and her arms and legs. All of it — and then there was the voice.

The voice came from somewhere in her. It came from somewhere that didn’t show itself, I hoped, to just anyone.

The question was,
Which part of her was I interested in most?
Was it the look of her, or the inner realness I could sense slipping out?

I started taking walks, just to think of her — just to imagine what she was doing and if by any chance she was thinking of me.

It became torture.

“God, is she thinking of me?” I asked God.

God didn’t answer so I just didn’t know. All I knew was that I walked parallel to urban traffic that laughed as it went past me. Crowds of people dropped out of buses and trains and ignored me as they went past. I didn’t care. I had Rebecca Conlon. Nothing else meant a whole lot. Even back home when I bickered with Rube I didn’t worry. I just kept not worrying, because she was somewhere near it all in my thoughts.

Joy.

Is that what I felt?

Sometimes.

At other times I was shouldered by thoughts of doubt and a kind of truth that told me she hadn’t thought of me at all. It was possible, because things never work out how they should. It was most likely that a sweet girl like that could do a whole lot better than me. She could do better than a fella who plotted ridiculous robberies with his brother, got thrown out of newsagencies, and humiliated his mother.

Sometimes I thought about her naked, but never for long. I didn’t want her only like that. Honestly.

I wanted to find the place where her voice came from. That was what I wanted. I wanted to be nice to her. I wanted to please her, and I begged for it to happen. Begging gets you nowhere, though. I knew that was true, but I did it inside me anyway as I counted the hours till I was going back to her.

Things happened during the that will follow in the next chapters, but now I should tell you at the end of this one here what happened when Dad and I showed up at the Conlons’ the next Saturday.

This is what happened.

My heart beat big.

One of them’s back.

Can you believe it?

The nerve of her.

Do you know who I mean? It’s one of the women from that swimwear catalog, and she comes to me in our kitchen.

Seductively.

It’s musty and half-dark. Sweaty. “Hello, Cameron.” She keeps coming, and she pulls a chair over to sit right opposite me. Our knees touch — that’s
how close she comes to me. Her smile is one of definite something. Danger? Lust? Eroticism?

How can I dream this now?

Tonight?

After what’s been happening lately?

I’ve gotta be kidding me.

Is this a test?

Well, whatever it is, she leans closer and licks her lips. Her swimsuit is a bikini and it’s yellow and it shows a whole lot of her. Can you believe this? She lets one of her fingers touch my neck and she strokes her way down with it, and her fingernail is just light enough not to scratch. It’s smooth, and something tells me to make the most of it, to never let her stop. Then something else screams silently somewhere in my feet that I must tell her to stop. It rises.

She’s on me.

Breathing.

I smell her perfume and feel the soft thrill of her hair.

Her hands undress me and her mouth takes me.

I feel it.

Gathering.

Pushing.

Against me.

She falls, letting her teeth touch the skin of my throat. She kisses, long, with her tongue touching —

I jump.

“What?”

I’m standing.

“What?” she asks. Ohh …

“I can’t.” I hold her hand to tell her the truth. “I can’t. I just can

“Why not?”

Her eyes are fire-blue and I almost allow her to go on as she begins stroking my stomach and searching for the rest of me. I stop her, just in time, and I wonder how I do it.

I turn away and answer her.

“I’ve got someone real. Someone who isn’t just —”

“Just what?”

Truth: “Something I only lust for.” “Is that all I am? A thing?”

“Yes,” and I see her change. She is ghost-like, and when I reach out to touch her, my hand goes through. “See,” I explain, “look at me. A guy like me can’t really touch someone like you. It’s just the way it is.”

When she disappears completely, I understand that my reality isn’t the catalog girl or school beauty queen or anyone like that. My reality is the real girl on her left.

On the table, the swimsuit model has left her purse. I go to pick it up, but I don’t open it for fear of it blowing up in my face.

The beauty queen, I long for.

The real girl, I long to please.

Dream complete.