THE ROCK
The tingling in his crotch aroused a memory of his latter primary school days, the first time he ever felt that mysterious movement down under. Back then in the seventies, most ten and eleven year-old boys were getting rocks in their pants over the sight of Olivia Newton John’s gyrating skin-tight leathers at the end of Grease, or listening to Deborah Harry’s sexy crooning of In the flesh. Not him. The first time his rock raised its head and threatened to peak between his zipper had nothing to do with leather clad Australian pussy or scratchy vinyl records—it was the presence of death.
He remembered as a kid wanting nothing more than to be a grown-up. He hated being small and weak, and he especially despised being told what to do. It was the year of ’78, when music lines were drawn deepest and longest in the schoolyard. Could’ve called them trenches, in fact, dividing the world into Swedish and Scottish halves: those who worshipped ABBA on one side, and those who’d kill anybody who hadn’t sworn their allegiance to The Bay City Rollers on the other. Problem was (if it were a problem at all), he couldn’t stand either; couldn’t stand the sight or smell of meatballs or haggis. Hell, he didn’t even like Elvis, and was even kind of glad when the fat bastard had finally bitten the bullet the year before, too. But that probably had more to do with his old man than the burger king himself. In fact, he knew it did.
The day that sprung to Max’s mind was blistering hot. Wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and a tired yellow T-shirt, the boy he once was and had tried so hard to forget (Ah the memories, there they were again, shadowing him from the past, watching, silent) had begun the long, slow cycle on his second-hand dragster up the gravel road from Serena to the hidden clearing behind the Johnson’s farmhouse.
My God, the older Max thought. That was over thirty years ago. Three fucking decades. What the fuck have I done with my life?
For the next eight kilometres, the road moved like a stuttering conveyer belt beneath the dragster’s wheels. To make matters worse, the A131, as it was known back then, hadn’t been graded for well over a year and the bike jarred so badly on the ruts and potholes his innards felt as if they were about to drop onto the road through his arse.
If dad heard me use that word, the boy had thought at that moment, cycling around another large pothole, he’d clip me around the ears and make me wash my mouth out with soap.
He didn’t care, didn’t give a blue razoo. The stinking German bastard wasn’t around. Most probably propping up one end of the bar at The Griffin’s Head with the other stalwart of Serena’s watering hole, Rhys Fynn, and so he could say Arse! as loud and as many times as he wanted. He shouted it this time, “ARSE!” There, what could the useless bastard do about it? Noth’n. Absolutely noth’n. It felt good, like a pig wallowing in his own shit. And that was another word he liked but daren’t say in front of him: Shit! It was great to get out of the house and do and say whatever the hell he wanted.
“Shit! Arse! Shit! Fuck!”
But, as good as he felt, he had a problem. One hell’uva problem. When the old man’s newest bitch had insisted he wear a hat (It’s scorching outside, lipstick lips had shrieked, you’ll burn to a crisp!), he had disdainfully shrugged her off and ran out of the house, slamming the door in her god-ugly face. What the hell did she know? She wouldn’t be around long enough to see his sunburn anyway. None of them ever were.
Now, riding uphill along a dirt road shimmering with heat heat haze, he wished he’d taken her up on her offer. It was as if he were viewing the surrounding scenery over the top of a sizzling barbeque plate and he now knew what it was like to be one of those ants he’d fried to death with a magnifying glass on the driveway. Rivulets of sweat trickled off his face in gluey streams, evaporating in the oppressive heat and leaving sticky trails of salt crystals on his skin. Worse, his skull felt like it was about to explode any second, as if the useless old bastard in the sky was teaching him a lesson, focusing the sun’s rays on top of his head until it burst into flames.
What’d you expect, he said to himself, trekking out so bloody far from town on a day that pushed forty?
He put his foot down to catch his breath. His legs had long ago started to tire and go to jelly. The hard work was almost done, though. Not much further until he’d reached the top of the hill, then the road would plateau a little before it dropped, then rise, then drop again before it hit the main road to Adelaide, skirting the edge of the old billabong. Not that he had any intention of going for a swim, despite the heat. He had other things on his mind. Plus, though he had the shit bad luck to be a fool’s son, he weren’t no fool himself. The old billabong was well off limits, even to him, who liked to think he was more daring than most kids in his class, even the older kids at high school, but even that place was beyond his dare. Why the local yokels called the Myponga Lake the old billabong he didn’t have the foggiest, but, if he could guess from the drunken filth that spewed from his father’s mouth, it was most probably a way of rat-bagging the Aboriginal myths about the place and pretending the Bunyip’s curse didn’t really put the shits right up them and make them tell their kids never to go anywhere near that place without an adult, Never! Not that he ever did, ‘coz he believed the curse, like all the kids in town, and that was good enough reason to stay the hell away. ‘Till he was older, of course. Then he could do and say what he liked, anytime, anywhere.
“Shit! Arse! Shit! Fuck!”
He cast his vision beyond the old billabong to maybe fifteen or twenty kilometres away, to where the hills rose in undulating curves. The grass slopes were browned from another summer of relentless sun and through the heat-shimmers they were like waves rising and falling on the swell of a muddy sea; and for a brief, giddy moment he actually felt the ground lifting him up, like a fishing buoy. Behind him, Serena and the beach at the bottom of the hill were well out of sight. Even the now vacant edifice of Prince Albert’s School for boys looming over the town from Victor’s Ridge was hard to make out from this distance (“Prince Albert’s School for rich bitch poofs,” his old man would always sprout, even in front of Rhys Fynn, its caretaker). Closer, to either side of him, now that the last of the houses on the outskirts of town had fallen away, all that was left was grazing farmland dotted with scrubby bushland.
“C’mon,” he said to himself, closing his mind to the heat-shimmers dancing over the road ahead. “The worst is over.”
He was surprised at how sticky his voice sounded. Every word clung to his throat like salt crystals on his skin. God, he was thirsty. And hot. Way hot. Shit, he should’ve put on that hat! Nothing was going to make him stop, however. He was on a mission. Not even if the farmhouse waiting for him up ahead was as spooky as the old billabong, not even if the going was incredibly slow and was murder on his elbows and knees, not even if his guts fell out between his arse, nothing was going to prevent him finishing his plans.
He drew a deep, hot breath and began cycling again.