Calypso Summer (2 page)

I haven't forgotten that picture of the Caribbean. There is a palm tree bent over the sea with a hammock beneath it. In the distance is a cruise ship and I can see the passengers chilling out by the pool. The water is so clear and the sky so blue. That picture is still there in my mind.

‘What would you do fuck ya?' Run growled.

‘I'd take my woman on a cruise,' I mumbled.

‘What?'

‘A cruise.'

‘A cruise, but you ain't even got no car, bruz!'

Run just sat there laughing, like I was an idiot. Thing is though, there's no way he will buy a car before me. And it was stupid trying to talk sense to Run, so I just went and jumped in the shower.

2

The next morning, I arrived at work at 7:30, way before opening, to stack the shelves of Henley Beach Health Foods and Products. I call it Mystic Dolphin Health Foods and Products 'cause it's kind of like a hippie joint. We sell some organic fruit and veg or what they call transition to organic foods, foods that haven't been sprayed with chemicals. We also sell a whole heap of different herbs and even beads that women put around their neck to help them know when they won't get knocked up.

I sat on a Coca-Cola crate, placing containers, bottles and packets of garlic tablets, eucalyptus oil, lavender extract, dried seahorses, and shark fin powder on the shelves and hooks. My boss and owner of the store, Gary, lit incense sticks and watered all of the pot plants around the shop, mostly palms, before sitting behind the counter to drink a cup of coffee and read the newspaper like he does every morning. Then Gary took his shoulder length grey hair and pulled it back in a ponytail before opening the shop for business.

I was getting into the swing of things but I kept thinking about Run going on about me thinking any blackfella could get a job just because I have one. I don't think that at all because getting a job was near impossible and a bit of a fluke in the end. Sure there's a whole lot of uni courses and jobs promoted to Aboriginal kids but they're not the type of jobs that I want. At school there were always people coming from the universities, mining companies and the defence force to speak with us about studying this and that. Lots of kids licked their lips, dreaming of their future flash
house, car, motorbike, jet-ski and boat. Good luck to 'em. Some of the Nunga kids took information from the uni and my friend Tiara is even doing some science health thing at uni now. But working for a mining company, that's just crazy. Some of my Nunga friends like Thommo and Vince are working in the mines. But even though I didn't know much about my culture then, I'd done enough Aboriginal studies to know that you don't go ripping big holes in people's country.

I did alright at school 'ey. Even better than a lot of the white kids. And I don't mind reading sometimes, especially books about famous people. I read the
Rolling Stone
a lot after picking up a copy about Bob Marley and the golden age of reggae. And Mum was always making me do my homework before I could go out and stuff. She was tough like that.

But I still had a hard time finding work, the type I wanted anyway. See, I just wanted to work in a sports store, selling sneakers, clothes and equipment. Apart from the Caribbean thing, working in a sports store is like my everyday dream. I like sports shoes and know every pair of Nike Air Jordans ever made. Michael Jordan is too deadly and Usain Bolt is the deadliest. He is the fastest man in the world.

When I finished school, with my flash report card photocopied and tucked away in a nice little folder, I went straight to the Nike shop in the mall. Mum helped me to buy the deadliest shirt, tie, slacks and trendy black shoes I could afford. I even pulled my hair back with a band. Mum was real happy. I even noticed some women checking me out in my deadly clothes on the bus so I was game. I felt confident that I was going to get a job for sure.

I smelled all those new shoes and clothes when I walked into the Nike shop … lovely, and smiled knowing that I knew every– thing about every shoe in the store. I was standing there checking out a hoody when this real tall fella asked me if I needed a hand.

‘Can I see the manager?'

‘If you want to exchange a product, I can help you.'

‘Nah, it's not that. I want to apply for a job.' The fella just stood there gawking at me like I was speaking alien or something. ‘I have my school report and things here,' I said holding out my folder.

‘There's a form you can fill out and if anything comes up, you'll be contacted.'

So I filled out the form and left it with him. I went to store after store that day and the fellas working there also asked me to leave my details with them. I waited a few days thinking they were going to call me for an interview but nothing.

I went looking for work at West Lakes Shopping Centre the next week. One of the fellas in the store said there was work coming up but I had to go through a recruitment company. The fella wrote down the name of the recruitment company for me.

I jumped on another bus to search for jobs at Tea Tree Plaza Shopping Centre that week too and everyone kept telling me the same thing, I had to go through a recruitment company. So one day, sick of waiting, I went to the library and went online to check out the recruitment company.

I had to register with these recruitment companies and there was this questionnaire with hundreds of questions ... true, it was worse than filling out Centrelink forms! Was I cool under pressure? Did I have cash register and money handling skills? Did I have customer service experience? These were some of the easier
questions. I didn't really know how to answer them because I was straight out of school.

After months of looking there were a few interviews, if you can call them that. There were like fifty kids going for two or three jobs. At the interviews, they asked us all a few questions and gave personality tests to weed us out, like contestants on a reality television show or something! I was always among the first to go and it wasn't hard to work out why. Even dressed up flash, those bosses looked at me like I was going to rob their shop.

I tried and tried, I really did and I applied everywhere too, not just sports stores. After months of interviews and not getting anywhere, I just gave in. No one in Adelaide was going to give me a job … not Calypso the blackfella. I felt like a real no-hoper. Most of my friends from school were doing apprenticeships, or going to uni or working. I started to see less and less of them. They were getting cars and girlfriends and I wasn't doing much at all. Even the special kids had special places to go.

One night after getting knocked back again, I went to Mum's and almost drank a whole bottle of rum. I hadn't drunk before. The next morning, with the first hangover of my life, I called the work agency and told them to just let me know if anything comes up.

Centrelink kept hassling me though, making me fill in a jobsearch diary and go to more mob interviews. That's when I started smoking heaps of ganja. And I grew ganja between Mum's tomato bushes and sold what I didn't smoke to people I know around my suburb. With whatever spare cash I had, I bought all the albums and tracks by reggae and dub artists that I could find. Evelyn got me into reggae when I was a kid. She listened to it when she was a teenager you know. I've got the biggest mobs of albums by
Third World, The Ethiopians, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Burning Spear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and of course Bob Marley.

I spent a lot of time down the beach. I took my five-year-old niece Millie and seven-year-old nephew Vance swimming. Sometimes I imagined Adelaide beaches like Henley Beach and Semaphore were Jamaican beaches like Montego Bay or Negril that I'd seen in a copy of the
Lonely Planet
. Occasionally, if the sun hit the water just right, my local beaches looked like the turquoise Caribbean waters I dreamed of … These things made me happy.

I even taught myself Bob Marley songs on an old nylon stringed guitar. In the summer, when I wasn't filling in my job-search diary or writing stupid applications, I was glued to the cricket. One day when I was watching Australia versus the West Indies, Mum came in and said, ‘Still want those blackfellas to win?'

‘Of course I do,' I said.

‘When you were little, you always wanted the West Indies to win. That's how you got called Calypso. Granddad started calling you Calypso after the famous tied test match between Australia and the West Indies in the 1950s. They called that time the Calypso Summer. Granddad was a proper old Englishman, he knew all that stuff.'

I still want the black teams – India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies of course – to beat Australia. It makes sense to me. My real name is Kyle.

3

I almost dropped the packets of chia seeds I had in my hand when Gary called out, ‘Hey Calypso,' in his deep voice from the counter.

‘What up man?'

‘Did you know Usain Bolt was running in the Korean 100 metre World Championships final?' Gary asked, peering at me over the top of his glasses.

I nodded. ‘What was his time?'

‘He didn't get one.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He was disqualified.'

‘For real – what, for breaking the sound barrier?'

Gary adjusted his glasses and read slowly from the paper, ‘With Bolt disqualified, it was his Jamaican teammate and heir apparent to his throne, Yohan Blake, who took the gold medal in 9.92 seconds.'

‘How was he disqualified?' I asked, not believing Gary.

‘He jumped the gun, some new false-start rule.'

‘That's crazy man. Bolt is running 9.58s, he would of won the final jogging.'

‘Well you can't blame it on him being black. The other Jamaican won the race.'

Gary is always saying stuff like that about black people to make me believe the world is a great place or something. Sometimes he says that we're like Vegemite and toast, but I'm not so sure. I hate Vegemite.

Apart from my Dad who died when I was nine and my Granddad, I haven't really spent much time with whitefellas.
Gary was about the same age as my Dad too. I guess he was probably in his fifties with his skinny tanned body and little beer gut, grey hair and wrinkles. Sure I had white mates when I was a little fella but when we got older things changed. Don't know why. They just did. And teachers, bus drivers, sport coaches, they've all looked at me like I am about to steal or break something at any second.

Not Gary. Even though he said weird things sometimes, he was different to other whitefellas I knew. He didn't suss me out, my dreads or anything, but encouraged me to play up on how I look Rasta and can kind of talk like a Rasta.

When I first met Gary, it was a crap Adelaide autumn day, the kind that drove me mad when I had nothing to do. I was still living at Mum's. I woke up, saw Run snoring in the bed across from me and then looked out my bedroom window at Mum's backyard. Rain spat down against the corrugated iron fence, patchy overgrown lawn, fruit trees and garden. I sat on the edge of my bed, rolled a joint, smoked it and lay back down.

After a while I decided to go get a DVD. So I threw on some track pants, a jumper, my red, green and gold crocheted beanie, slipped on some thongs and made my way down to Gary's Showtime DVD Store. Mum's is like a kilometre from Seaview Road so it took a while and the rain almost froze my toes off.

I looked at the grey all around me – the old style brick cottages lined up along Seaview Road. They all looked the same, painted brown, maroon, or cream – boring. Although some of the houses were run down with paint cracking and peeling and verandas caving in, I realised that it was weird that we lived near this flash part of the city. There are double-storey houses and that along the
esplanade too. Mum was lucky to get an Aboriginal housing place when Dad died. I remember it being all shiny and new when I was little but it's a bit of a mess these days because Mum is only on the pension you know. Dad did something with the railways for a while, so for a time there, we had things pretty good I guess. We went on a holiday and the photos of Mum and Dad's wedding look pretty flash.

Beyond the garages and the houses with their lookalike gardens, I could see the Ramsgate Hotel through the drizzle, towering over Henley Square. There are a whole lot of businesses around the square like a deli, a laundrette, a couple of hairdressers, some restaurants and cafés. It gets pretty busy around there on a nice day. Families picnic there all the time or take strolls along the jetty licking ice-cream. The Henley Surf Life Savers Club is there too. The place is crawling with rich whitefellas.

Gary was taking DVDs from two trolleys and stacking them on shelves when I stepped into his store. I stood quietly and watched what he was doing. Basically he was just grabbing the DVDs and placing them on the shelf in alphabetical order. I didn't have anything to do so I just started giving Gary a hand, stacking the shelves.

I could tell that Gary was surprised but he didn't seem to mind. After all, Gary didn't really know me. I'd only been going to the store for a few weeks. He knew my name though because when I filled out the membership form, he said, ‘Calypso Summers, hey? I won't be forgetting that name in a hurry.'

Gary stopped what he was doing to watch me. ‘You're pretty good at that, Calypso,' he said.

‘It's not rocket science, mahn.'

‘Of course not, but I didn't have to tell you how to do it either. Work experience kid last year, he was bloody hopeless. Why are you helping me out anyway, mate? Do you want some freebies or something?'

‘Nah … just bored.'

‘Bored, really, a young bloke like you?'

Gary made his way over to the counter and I continued placing the DVDs on the shelf.

‘Well, if you want to make yourself useful, there's something you can do,' said Gary grabbing the middle section of his paper.

‘Yeah, what?' I asked pulling my beanie firmly over my dreads. ‘I need to go out for a while. Do you reckon you could look after the shop?'