Whole Wild World (15 page)

St John's was variously a low-security prison, vital football nursery, exuberant Middle Eastern bazaar and dream factory for striving scholars, such were its abuses, contradictions, inconsistencies and joys. At morning assembly our class lined up next to the non-prefects of fourth form, who looked liked men. Although they were fifteen at most, I suspected some of those boys had grown beards during the school holidays.

While waiting in the car one Saturday evening in winter as my dad nipped into the Belmore bottleshop for Reschs Dinner Ale, I saw some older boys slipping into the pub, dressed in cool Amco jeans, bulky lumber jackets and desert boots. They'd be lucky to be in trades when they left school at the end of the year, and most likely be unemployed, the world having been hit by an oil crisis. Petrol was rationed in Sydney, with long lines at pumps. Tata feared not being able to get to work.

Some of the 5 Blue boys knew fourth formers, who would talk to us at line-up, egg us on to be silly. It was risky behaviour. The Master of Discipline – no kidding – was in charge of assembly, six-hundred boys huddled in a valley the size of two basketball courts. His forte was detecting illicit behaviour from his watch-tower on a first-floor balcony. Unpolished shoes, a tie not done properly, even a whisper to a classmate would land you in strife.

‘Hey you, no, YOU,' the MoD, tall with an atrocious comb-over, would interrupt himself reading notices at the microphone. ‘Yeah, curly, that's right, YOU. Up to my office.'

There was a certain shame in being admonished in front of the whole school – with a flogging to come. Some mornings the line
outside the MoD's office resembled a junior remand centre. In a mere ten minutes, he'd busted talkers, late-comers, guys without combs, poor-posture slackers, those who had forgotten to bring a note for an excursion, boys who had missed the deadline for raffle money, those without PE gear on a Thursday, kids reported for mucking up on public transport and those who'd become distracted during the MoD's address. It was a democratic line-up though, miscreants all in this grand clearing house of corrections, including boys taught by females and strap-shy males. Flogging at St John's was as prevalent as blue shirts, as unvarying as the bell between forty-minute periods. Everyone believed the MoD went easier on footballers.

Mr Castagnet's discipline swung between non-existent and unhinged fury. Every morning we had unorthodox rituals after prayers. They began in Lent, the six or so weeks before Easter. We took up a copper coin collection for the Missions every day. There was the return of Project Compassion boxes, in competition with other classes for the highest return.

Sir took charity to the epitome of fun, not content to simply collect and count and send a boy to the office with the spoils. He devised ways to get us to part with money we might other- wise have spent at the tuckshop. In 5 Blue we had a series of raffles, with prizes determined by the pool of money collected, thus preceding the NSW government's lotto by five years. We'd start with a high-rollers' five-cent raffle: one kid would distribute tickets and Sir would declare the prize pool, with half going to the Missions. There was banter, cheering, commentary and coin moving in Sir's mini-casino. We had several rounds; the last would get you buy-in for as little as a cent. He explained the odds of winning and how the prize pool was structured – a maths exercise, boys, should Egor walk in on us. We kept at this creative compassion for a full year; no other class came close to us in fundraising. By the time the Melbourne Cup rolled around
we were borrowing Sir's form guide and looking at the odds and recent racing rather than going for sweeps – which were raffles anyway – like the other classes.

I'd been elected class captain for a term, an office of many duties but no pleasures. Sir would duck off to the shops on Haldon Street to get his lunch or place a bet at the TAB. I would be told to sit at his desk, take down the names of talkers and maintain order. At first, I tried to instil some shoosh. Yet there was little point, given I couldn't use the strap on them. It was mayhem. One of the boys thought it would be hilarious to hide Sir's long black bludgeoner. Who was I to stop him?

We were so noisy the teacher next door did not protest with a knock on the wall or door. She sent a boy to Egor's class to alert him. Most of us missed Egor's arrival. He was a fleshy volcano set to erupt, a blood boil about to burst, Al Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon
at the end of his tether.

‘Where's Mr Cast-aghhh-net?'

An abyss of silence opened up.

‘Um, he had to go, um, um, out for a bit,' I said.

‘Where?' that one syllable echoed in a still valley.

The question was still ringing when Egor demanded to know why I was sitting at the teacher's desk.

‘Sir told me to stay here and take down the names of talkers.'

‘So, where are the names of the talkers, Thomas?'

‘Um, I was trying to get them to be quiet Brother, but …'

‘Every one of you will be staying behind after school for detention.'

Mr Castagnet came into this maelstrom, sheepishly, telling Egor he had just gone to the toilet for five minutes and had asked Doo-savick to watch over us. They went outside to speak on the landing; in total silence, we strained to hear what was said.

Sir came back in, shaking – was it fear or anger? – a rodent's eyes darting around the room. He said we would be on detention
for an hour, which meant he was on detention, too.

‘Doo-savick, come here. You were supposed to keep the class in order and now all of us are in trouble. You will take the punishment for the class and you are no longer the captain. Six!'

Sir went back to his desk to get the strap. Not there. He checked all three drawers. Gone. Sir became more agitated, his rage rising.

‘Where is the strap?' he asked me.

I shook my head.

Sir turned to the class. ‘Where is the strap?'

He moved around the room, opened a cupboard, bent over to look on the floor. But his temper was up. ‘Who took my strap?'

No one said a word, a show of solidarity worthy of a parable.

‘Okay, okay,' he snarls. He retraces his steps, pulls out a dustpan and brush from a cupboard. I'm confused but far from relieved. Sir has the short-handled wooden brush in his hand.

‘Hold out your hand Doo-savick. Six!'

Surely he's not going to use the wooden brush on me? I'd got the strap for small things like talking and knew the hot sting of leather, but this is insane.

‘Hold out your hand.'

My brain seizes up, can't find an escape clause, or appeal to him not to be so stupid. Solid wood. Yet to not take the penalty or to draw away when the chop came down risks disgrace plus pain.

You weak bastard, I protest to Sir with my eyes. I push my left hand towards him. He measures up the task, as the brush is 15 cm shorter than his faithful punisher. There is no hard slap sound of leather or the easy swoosh of a bamboo cane. Just the dull thud of a blunt cleaver hitting flesh and bone.

‘One.' It comes again.

‘Two.' The pain surges.

‘Three.' My hand is numb, dead meat. Some would change hands at this moment, but what's the point? I need one good hand.

‘Four.' Whose wobbly thing am I holding out here?

‘Five.' I'm rising out of my body, chased by terrified nerve endings that are being hunted by wounded, raging bulls.

‘Six.' Done. Don't cry. You won't pass out. There's a violence contained in this battered hand. I can make out Sir's blank, stupid face but not the other boys. I won't cry. Killer eyes back at him. Now what, you dodo?

‘Back to your desk.'

As if falling gently to Earth, dazed, I sit next to Carlo, the grim accountant of flogging. He is smiling, not because he is mean, but because he is a pro. On his oversized drawing book for art that sticks out from under the desk, Carlo keeps a tally of the hits every boy has taken each term. Six places me close to the medals. If Carlo could draw my pain in abstract it would take over a wall in his lavish bedroom gallery; if he went figurative, just drew my lifeless left hand, he'd have to use a dozen colours to get the trauma just so. Mr Castagnet's next captain-accomplice is welcome to this bitter ignominy.

We had cousins and family friends all over Sydney. The inner-city denizens of Surry Hills and Newtown had cleared out by the mid-1970s, making way for other migrants and university students. We knew several families with farms and market gardens on the edge of suburbia. A cousin of Mama's ran a fishand-chip shop in bohemian Balmain. A man from Ljubač had an apartment on the hill above Manly beach. Our Lukin cousins in Blacktown had a brand new house but it would be years before the inside toilet was connected to the sewerage system; a dunny man collected their ‘night soil'.

Tata knew his way around burgeoning Sydney. A quick look at the Gregory's street directory, then moving a slow, knowing
index finger across several pages as if reading Braille, and he was good to go in any direction. He favoured Holden station wagons, he said with a broad-faced smile, because you could park in loading zones. No matter how close to ‘empty' it said on the fuel gauge, Tata never bought petrol from Caltex; the red star logo was a communist symbol, a precursor to ruin and subjugation, not quite what the oilmen of California and Texas had in mind.

‘Are you sure you know how to get there?' I'd say, as we set off for a new suburb.

‘Doesn't matter, the car knows how to get there.'

I pondered the teleology of that for a while. Maybe that's why Tata sticks with second-hand cars when I'd really like him to get a new one; this light green EH was as old as I was. Was it possible for cars to have some kind of navigation memory? Probably not, but given the possibility of UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and disappearances inside the Bermuda Triangle, the meta-mysteries of the day, you had to allow for anything. On that principle, an old car was obviously better than a new one.

Sam and I didn't mind whose place we were visiting at the weekend as long as they had kids. Going to see people without kids was cruel, no matter how much soft drink they poured for you or the snacks they served. There were old ladies we visited who didn't even have a TV, which I'm sure was a breach of children's rights.

While Teta Danica was the only sibling of either parent that migrated to Australia, Mama and Tata had two dozen first cousins here. Tata was ten to twenty years older than his cousins, so they only got to know one another properly in Sydney. Joso had been sent away to trade school as a teenager, gone to war and then imprisoned. But the Dušević clan was tight and proud, perhaps excessively so.

‘Are you one of us from Ljubač, a real Dušević, or are you one
of those island people from Kali that speaks in a funny way,' my aunt Mila teased me every time she saw me.

Strina Mila was warm and joyful, the mother of George and blonde twins Anna and Maria, who were six months younger than me. I adored them. If I spent a whole day with Anna and Maria I could tell them apart, but it didn't matter because I'd be lost in the bliss of their company, as we played school, families and colouring in. Every family had a moulded plastic board game called Trouble, which had a space-age bubble in the centre that contained the dice; press down, let it pop, hope for a six to get started. It was a race around the board and a character test I failed when another player landed on top of my marker, sending me in a sook back to the start.

Stric Veseljko (another variant of ‘cheerful', like my aunt Vesela) was my dad's first cousin. He loved cards, a drink and a cigarette. Their place in Petersham was always full of people – the happy, buzzing home I imagined ours would be, if Teta went back to Croatia or, please God, one day got married.

For his birthday George got a drum kit and it became the centrepiece of his room. He performed for us and let us play it. Sam and I were tentative, not knowing how hard you could hit the skins and cymbals. When George played, they seemed indestructible. He was obsessed with music, had a record player in his room and carried a transistor radio with him all the time. When he came with us to the soccer he'd listen to Frank Hyde call the league game of the day, usually featuring Souths, Saints or Manly.

He got us on to 2SM, the rock station that dictated teen culture. Each week record stores would stock a printed copy of the Top 40 singles chart, showing how many weeks a song had been on the list, where it had been ranked the previous week, and so on. George typed out his own personal Top 40, tabbed out in neat lines on thin paper, moving songs up and down based on taste and mood. He did this for years.

The following Christmas Sam and I got a typewriter, a workhorse tool at a time when really only secretaries, typists and writers used them. While other kids relied on 2SM (owned, still hard to believe, by the Catholic Church) George was our personal pop-culture guru. We sat in George's room on a beanbag and listened to the whole Elton John double-album
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
, looking at the foldout cover art and studying the lyrics. George's favourite artist was David Bowie, and over the years his bedroom became a poster-clad shrine from glam androgyny to Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke.