The Ice Age (13 page)

The new house was surrounded by a ratty collection of grasses, ferns, banksias, and little bush-plants that grew white flowers. It certainly wasn't the lush, wet rainforest. From a distance it was a mess, but when I walked Daisy through it, it was surprisingly diverse, with lots of interesting nooks and crannies. It was so dense you couldn't see far ahead of you, and it gave the impression that the yard went on forever when we sat down among it.

Scared by how close the Ash Wednesday bushfires had come to our first house, Mum and Dad went quickly to work, and got the local fire brigade to burn off all the undergrowth on the property. Mum also regarded the undergrowth as ‘untidy'. I didn't want my parents to burn down the scrub, though. I knew — for instance — that it was full of lizards, and 13-year-old me felt particularly sad that they would all fry to death just before Christmas.

I have since had hundreds of dreams about attempting to replant this space. In some dreams, even the remaining eucalypts were gone and replaced by pine trees, with barren ground; in others, everything had been levelled by modest and monotonous portable classrooms. Something had been destroyed and not allowed to grow back; other things weren't allowed to grow at all, or looked unnatural in that setting. In my dreams, I had all sorts of ideas — and subsequent regrets — about setting it all right again. Other times I have that dream, the entire house has been overgrown by the bush, but I am no longer living there. The people inside look at me with confused horror; I am wondering why I never left.

Just before we moved into this house, my parents sent me to a (relatively cheap) private Christian high school, instead of to the local public school in Emerald. I was always getting into trouble there, mainly for not doing any work and for yelling at the teachers. I failed every single subject except phys. ed. in Year 8. We had some strict, old-fashioned teachers at that school — one in particular never let us utter a single word in class. One day, with a water balloon in hand, I walked into a class he was teaching, threw it into the fan, and then ran down the hall, giggling ecstatically. Another day I stood up and told our keyboarding teacher she was a ‘stupid fucking bitch'. I was eventually expelled in Year 9 after — on the way to a school camp, and in the middle of nowhere — I stole a bunch of chocolate Big Ms and threw them at a house. A teacher saw me, and as I was already on my last legs there, I was expelled. I was then sent to the local public school.

During my time at the private school, I had tried to climb the social ladder and break in with the popular boys. They were at first a bit iffy with me, and I didn't always get invited to parties. At one party I went to, though, I got really drunk — I was soon able to outdrink most people — and did all sorts of silly things, such as putting baked-beans tins in the fire, and squirting people with tomato-sauce bottles. From then on, I was in.

I am not sure why I was such a little shit when I was that age. I really just wanted to entertain myself and make people laugh. My school counsellor said it was a combination of ‘boredom and low self-esteem'. My mum said I ‘lacked self-control'. Indeed, the ‘self' was all-important to my family back then — my parents thrived in the new capitalism. Appearance was reality back then, and reality was composed of what we imagined others might be thinking of us.

Mum said she remembers going for drives, away from her alcoholic, abusive household in housing-commission East Malvern, to the big houses around Chadstone Shopping Centre, and daydreaming about how elegant, proper, and peaceful life must have been inside them. She loved the new house; when we moved in, she didn't really need to work. She never really cooked, and we had a cleaner. She spent ten to sixteen hours a day on the computer, playing solitaire. We had no family get-togethers, no traditions, not even a bookshelf; we each had our lounge area, and we never ate dinner together. I no longer had neighbours to run around with. But I did get an expensive tutor who my parents spent thousands of dollars on and many hours driving me into the inner suburb of Camberwell to see each week. This woman — Gillian — was a massive help, without a doubt, and introduced me to books and ideas and writing. She was a psychologist, too, just like I wanted to be.

Mum was often very upset by the things I did. For example, one day she asked me to make her coffee after I got home from school and I said no, because she hadn't been doing anything all day. The next day she told me that I was a horrible person and that this made her cry; she looked at me as if I had thrown her out on the street with no money and nowhere to go. She cried a lot back then. She cried when she and Dad went through months without speaking. She cried for months on end when we found Daisy on the back porch, her jaw in an awkward position, having died of old age when we weren't home.

After the bushes were burnt down, I could see the portable classrooms of my new school from the back fence. From my lounge room, I could see my classmates waiting for home group in the morning. They were hard to miss — they all had bright-red windcheaters on, which we had to wear with blue trousers and Blundstone boots.

This was the school that was preparing tomorrow's labourers, tradies, and small-time crims — ‘access to excellence' was its motto.

My ‘friends' were always quick to acknowledge my presence once I got over the fence.

‘Luke the disgusting faggot is here.'

‘Poofter, poofter, cock-sucker,' and so on.

Every morning for three years.

This was the dawn of a new era in my life — I would know now what it was like to be the lowest-ranking male. To use the metaphor of a diseased tree, the problem was that I was blossoming into an adult that some considered to be threatening to the population; an adult that needed to be cut down, turned into sawdust, and buried in a hole to ensure it didn't spread weakness, perversion, and infection. I am, in fact, talking here about the life of a gay teenager in post-AIDS 1990s country Australia.

Mind you, I didn't even see myself as being gay at the time. The trouble had its origins in grade five, before anybody knew what gay was. I had earned a reputation for being able to make guys ejaculate using my hands. Every second guy in my grade was shown this magic trick. Years later, when we all figured what this meant, not a single person came and patted my back in the gym change-rooms and said, ‘You gave good hand jobs for one so young, do you want to come to a party on Saturday night?' Rather, it was seen as transgressive and abject — an act of faggotry — and suddenly, like magic, I had no friends: a dangerous proposition at a working-class bush school, where boys liked to start wars.

‘Hi, Luke' wasn't something I heard very much in those formative years: the years in which it's generally considered healthy and necessary for a person to have a peer group, which is the first step in a natural and incremental flight from the nest. But I did hear plenty of other things, in high-pitched whiny voices from the grotty little shits at our nondescript public school filled with eucalypts, portable classrooms, and the petty criminals of tomorrow. Every lunchtime and recess I heard myself called a ‘cock-licker', a ‘poo-pusher', a ‘girly-boy', and a ‘faggot' because I ran on my toes. For the sake of variety, a group of boys would often call ‘poof-poof-poof' to emulate the sound of a chicken as I walked — quite ingenious, really, and quite remarkable the extent of cruelty's entertainment value. Perhaps more amazing was how many derogatory words there were for a boy who liked boys — and how just one of these words could leave the target feeling utterly isolated and defenceless

Here are some of the other highlights:

One morning in Year 9, I found my two best friends amid the sea of red jumpers and the rotten, salty scent of cheap canteen noodles. I had known Leigh and Todd for six years by this stage. They had come to every one of my birthdays, and me theirs. They were an old reliable pair — smart and sensible without being stuffy, low maintenance, and generally pretty easy company. On this morning, they were both sitting in silence, staring ahead, when I put my pencil case down next to one of Leigh's. Without raising his eyes to look at me, Leigh knocked my case to the floor. When I went to put the pencil case back on the table, he picked it up and threw it across the room. A few snickers echoed around the room — though, for the most part, nobody really seemed to be paying attention.

‘Don't sit next to us, poofter,' Todd said. When I picked up my pencil case and placed it next to a group of boys down the other end, they said, ‘Yeah, don't sit next to us either', and my pencil case once again made its way to the floor.

Once the ‘populars' deserted me, the middle-ranking males joined, then the lower-ranking boys, and finally even the lower-ranking girls joined in, on occasion, with choice impersonations of my voice taken straight out of 1980s Hollywood depictions of limp-wristed, constantly horny gays.

One day, I was standing in line during phys. ed. when I felt a thud on my back. I turned around to see the offending basketball bouncing away, and a kid with muscular dystrophy explaining, ‘I fucking hate faggots'. I stood there confused, shocked, and horrified as I saw the boy, barely able to stand up from his neurological condition, looking at me as if I was the biggest turd nature had ever produced.

There was one particular group of no less than 15 strapping young lads who lived on farms in the backend district who loved to torment me, and at least half-a-dozen smaller packs who joined in. I was not only without allies — I was a late bloomer, one of the smallest in my year level by height and frame. Defence was futile, attack was unthinkable, and dobbing them in would have just made it worse.

Seeking even greater thrills, their attacks became more theatrical. Sneak attacks were the favourite. One day, I was standing outside a classroom when I felt a strong push in the back, and ‘thud' — I went straight into a metal pole upholding the corrugated-iron roof. I turned around to see a little bully henchman with spiky, light-brown hair and a small neck, his glowing grin slowly becoming a light cackle.

‘Look at how red his face gets! Fuck, I could do this every day, just to see how red your faggot face gets,' the henchman said.

Funny indeed. The fact that I had red hair, glasses, braces, and acne — the fact that I was one ugly little bastard — probably just added to the comedic display. Unsurprisingly, those watching laughed raucously; others not privy to the group tried not to laugh, but couldn't help cracking a smile. These were human kids tormenting a disgusting little insect caught in a jar, fascinated by the reactions to their own cruelty. Had it not been me getting thrown into metal poles, perhaps even I would have quietly cracked a smile about how ridiculous it all looked; helpless creatures can react in quite spectacularly pathetic ways when they are attacked.

Teachers often loved the spectacle as well. I never got along well with teachers — though I was often scared to say ‘boo' at the new school, when I did act up, I made sure it hit its mark, and the teachers responded with even greater force. One day, I was taken into an office where three middle-aged male teachers took turns in telling me what an awful student I was. I had accused one teacher of being negligent, and refused another when she told me to stop scratching my nuts in class. One told me I would be better off leaving school ‘because your work is so crap', and another said, ‘I would say most of the staff room hates you, and if I was ask three-quarters of the people in your level, they would say the same thing. Yet you sit here, high and mighty and sanctimonious, like you never do anything wrong.' This went on for about half an hour until tears fell down my cheeks, and the three sat around me, glowing with self-satisfaction at how, despite my ‘big mouth', I now didn't ‘have anything to say'. About six months after this, I'd left my school bag in a classroom and when I went back to retrieve it, the male teacher whispered under his breath, and then said very sarcastically, ‘Sorry, I'm homophobic', at which a group of students broke out in hearty laughter. The same teacher had taught me English in Year 9, and announced halfway through the term, ‘It doesn't matter how your good work is, I am not giving you an A.'

There comes a point when you must draw on your reserves to get through things.

Remembering what a war-hungry little shit I was, I decided that I could wage war without any close allies. Why not? I had nothing to lose.

Then came my idea. I listed the seven people who had picked on me the most, and asked people to sign a petition that said, ‘If you don't like X, Y, and Z, please sign here and give your reason.' The petition was my attempt to not only enlist a few allies, but to also shame the perpetrators. I had managed to collect dirt on all seven of them over the years — girls who had rejected them, abusive fathers, physical deformities, etc. — all of which were stated on the petition. I collected 80 signatures, and I put copies all over the school. When three of them saw me with a couple of surveys, they snatched them out of my hand. The no-neck henchman said, ‘We've got the muscle-power and the evidence — you're fucked.' The second he finished his sentence, I punched him straight in the face. The other two joined in to help him, and kept throwing punches. After about thirty seconds, a teacher came over and broke it up.

By this stage, I was growing into my body, and doing athletics training nearly every day. I became enraged, yelling that they had ‘shit for brains', and that it would take ‘less than an hour to get another 80 signatures' and that they ‘should just mind their own fucking business from now on'. The bullies were incredulous; they rang me at home threatening to stab me, and lined up along my fence. I shouted, ‘There's fuck-all you can do about it — I have 80 people backing me up now.'