Chapter 4
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.