The HeartBox Narratives

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 9: FINIS

2009-06-09T23:10:00.000+10:00

Over the river past Crocodile Island, above the slopes of the Big Hill, pale slate creeps across the sky. The floor is cold and hard and I ache awake. The world looks the same through the tattered vintage-car print curtains, but the night plays back and tells me things are maybe very different indeed: I ran away, I left Owen alone on the floor, dead to the world with a raging drunken ball of muscle and mayhem tearing his caravan apart. By now anything could have happened, the chimpanzee must be loose out there somewhere, anywhere, scared-confused-dangerous. Any scenarios I invent to have been able to save Owen and secure Charlie involve braver boys than I, who did not have what it would have taken.

Six in the morning, a round number, as good a reason as any other; rifle raised I make my way back into the menagerie through the cold light to see what I will see.

Animals are hungry. They’re fully aware I’m the one out of place here, now is not the time for strangers, they relay and relate the news to each other, the noise swells as I disturb their fields of vision, my scent offends them, the gravel-grinding of my feet is the sound of a tin drum to a tippler’s morning-after. Cold grey light, caravan door grating softly on those rusting hinges, no sign of life or of death, no way of knowing without looking, closer, closer, whisper, whisper, “Owen, Owen?”, six feet, four feet, two feet, face in the door, no Owen on the floor, “Owen, are you there, are you OK?”

Rush of colour and presence, my field of view is completely swamped, the stale smell of animals, big-as-a-bear it’s Owen in my face bellowing “What the fuck d’ya think, I can’t hold m’piss?” and he’s outside now towering over me as I stumble backwards, he’s bleary, bombastic, blustering.

“Wot the fuck-are-ya doin’ wiv that rifle, ‘oping for a comeback? ‘Libra Lavengro rides again’? The goys’ll be here soon for the mornin’ show, gotta go fire ol’ Charlie up and get ‘im fuggin goin’!”

Sure enough, prostrate in the straw, Charlie has put himself back in captivity sometime in the early hours, closed his own cage from the inside and is slumbering, drooling, snoring-sick with whiskey while his old brow-beaten wife Cheetah preens his threadbare head.

So, it’s actually Owen who has the strength of a beast. He’s hale’n’hearty and the show, as we all know, must go on.

---

FINIS

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 8

2009-06-06T10:16:00.000+10:00

By some kind of trick I’m inside the door, the right side of the door, safe side of the door. As rough a home as it is, it smells right to me, and I need no light to feel my way to the 1893 Winchester that survives from my sharpshooting career. I have one soft nosed target cartridge left and I load it. So it’s come to this. Any other day I’d walk a snail across the street, and tonight I’m huddled in the dark ready to kill a drunken monkey for the fearful way he makes me feel.

But nothing so much as stirs, save the shadows in the macrocarpa hedge that rings the paddock. First my eyes ache from the searching, but then there is a nagging notion that my hand is wet, alien, different somehow. By the light of the moon I see the glint of my own white bone, like a secret revealed the middle finger of the left hand is laid bare. There is purple flesh, there are rivulets of blood and between skin and bone I’m fascinated by the Wattie’s Baked-Bean patterns of severed fibres. The V-shaped flap of flesh can be pushed back into place, the irony is not lost on me, I am more danger to myself than is the object of my fear. I’m cold, I’m tired, alone, hungry and without comfort, more than ready to wallow and now I have the chance. I take it, greedy sobs rack me, ten minutes of this and the hyperventilation sets in, oxygen-crippled fingers curl and lock and I must breathe easy or lose it altogether. Exhaustion crawls over me like a stiff grey prickly woollen blanket but without the warmth, ignores my anger, erodes my adrenaline.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 7

2009-06-04T16:24:00.000+10:00

Each time I inch along the wall towards that door, Charlie rushes me and stops an instant from my face, wild-eyed enough to paralyse me again. He challenges me to move, I drop my gaze, he swings back to the bottle and slams down another dram. Then the heat rushes through him again, he’s on his feet, literally bouncing off the walls, now throwing the drawers of cutlery across the floor, now tearing open the wardrobe door and swinging it wildly on its hinges. That’s when he sees his reflection in the dressing-mirror, for a split second the shock stops him dead, then galvanises him to action. The intruder must be made to turn and run. Charlie’s enraged displays and screams absorb him totally, and I see my main chance. I slide along the wall and dissolve through the door, a glance at Owen confirms he is still and still unconscious, I turn and run into the cool blackness with panic on my heels and salvation somewhere ahead.

My feet are pounding, legs piston, the suckling sounds are my own lungs as I give it all I have. Throwing my head back over my shoulder to rearview it all I see the caravan windows are hotly lit by the bare bulbs within, the whole flimsy structure shakes so wildly the patches of light seem to smear and replicate, the noise is unholy. But the doorway does not fill with Charlie’s low hulking silhouette, it’s not for me that he rages, I have a head start and I use it. Adrenalin fuels each leaping bound across the rough ground. Filling my view and blocking the stars is the eight-foot perimeter fence of corrugated iron, but the fenceposts and the luck are both on my side, and in one swing I am perched on the top ledge. I must appear similar to the animal I flee from. One last look back, but no thatch-hairy shadow pursues. My fear is the heady high-octane mix of the same fear we live from infancy to adolescence - that of the dark and what might come out of it – and that belonging to those too young to die, going into the dark for the very last time. I face the drop on the far side of the fence and launch myself from the lip of metal, my hand slips, I lay flesh open, feeling nothing bar that suspicion that I have done some serious damage. My priorities lie elsewhere, I’m scattershot, erratically firing from hillock to mound to anklebreaker with one goal in mind, the safety of the old schoolbus on the marsh. I can hear my heart and ragged spittling breath heavy in my head, filling the spaces between the sparks of panic. The bus isn’t getting any bigger and there’s a nightmare quality coming through now, but then with a burst I have hit the door, depth perception distorted by my loss of reason and the deep blue of the night.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 6

2009-06-02T20:40:00.000+10:00

Locks. Chains. Screeches. Curses. No-one swears like a circus man, it’s a natural stream of release that purges, cools and consoles if he’s alone, or more often fires and forces confrontations in company. But tonight Owen swears for the pleasure, it’s all a rich jest to him, but I cannot make out the joke from within my dim-grey pall of apprehension. Gates clatter open, closed; the ground throbs a time or two as something stronger than a man moves about excitedly while I move not at all, I’m weak, I’m wishing myself away. Do you remember the rules? Wither small, inside yourself, let the game go on outside you, hide the part that will survive.

And then it’s happening with a rush and a roar, the figure bursting through the door isn’t human, it’s too fast, low-hulking, all power and prescience, blunt-headed bruin and thick-haired thrust, flashing eyes and brute strength, primitive and unformed. Emotionally a bestial walking wound, every feeling raw and exposed and expressed. It smashes against the table, feels nothing, rights itself and spins-on-a-sixpence to take in the situation in an instant, disc-eyes searching, nostrils flaring and sucking the air in analysis. At first my heart has stopped, now it’s restarting under the strain of adrenalin turbocharging the same muscle to flap and fibrillate wildly, urging blood to my sinews, fight or flight, triumph or die trying, what-the-hell-is-happening? It’s no contest, the bull chimpanzee knows everything in an instant, I’m still reeling and roiling in confusion. Owen hulks into the doorway bellowing, puffed with pride at his own wit and genius. He slams the door shut hard, falls to the settee, brandishes the whiskey bottle and roars with laughter; the bull chimp ricochets from one end to the other of his new enclosure, excited beyond his primal dreams to be honoured this way, with this freedom, with the exalted company of his semi-simian best friend.

“Charlie! Charlie! Pour’ush a drink, Charlie!”, and it’s really happening; the gnarled and knotted opposable thumb grasps the neck of the bottle, hoists it deftly into the stale air, neatly fills Owen’s peanut-butter-jar glass with amber liquid. “Pour y’self one while y’ur at it, matey!” And he does. Both man and beast down their drinks, Charlie immediately sets up another without waiting to be asked. Owen slowly drifts even further away from whatever passes for his reality, Charlie becomes ever more intent on the whisky bottle, I am sitting very still, trying not to sweat, to smell, to reveal myself as the old tin alarm clock on the pelmet tinks away an hour more and Charlie’s physicality swells to fill all available space. The dentist-chair anticipation of potential violence and Charlie’s chalkboard-scraping screams are acidic, corrosive.

Drowsy soon, slurring, snoring, slipping, under the table, gone. Owen is out of the picture, I am still eyeing the door, but Charlie is the undisputed king of the caravan. He periodically shocks awake from his torpor and throws himself from one side to the other of his new man-cage, smashing against each thin wall in turn, shattering the glass of cabinet doors and screaming guttural animal oaths. He’s damaged by years of stress like all us circus creatures – denied any safe haven and living an unnatural life, performing unnatural acts.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 5

2009-06-01T20:40:00.004+10:00

But not yet. Owen and I, an odd couple indeed, worked our way through the darkness and the animal enclosures to his caravan – he instinctively able to navigate the blindness of his drunken state, me with the puddles and ankle-breakers all mind-mapped in the manner of the physically aware adolescent. He gave the door that especially tough tug it needed to open, and lurched his bulk through the narrow portal. A gust of mildewed carpet and stale clothing, displaced by Owen’s immersion in the atmosphere of his half-scale home, made me miss a step. I grimaced inwardly before pressing onward, pushing the air apart to gain entry. He searched for the clean cup that he was sure was hanging on the hook just last week, but eventually surrendered to the entropy of semi-bachelorhood and slid me a crazed enamel mug and a curvaceous bottle of Coke. I hate Coke, even more in the metallic tang of a dirty tin cup. But while I’m nursing that, I’m safe from the suggestion I drink anything stronger.

We talk about the day’s paying guests. Owen analyses in the way of all showmen, amateur anthropologists every one. After all, human nature is our bread and butter. Human weaknesses, foibles, knee-jerk reactions, known sets of emotional responses ripe for exploitation. And so we love the rare surprises, the extra-indignant, and the supremely weak; they are the story-fodder of the circus raconteurs, each competing for the tallest tale, their eyes wet with tears of mirth…

“Ya shouldah seen that fucka’s eyes pop out when I got his missus to kiss ol’ Charlie’s chimpanzee arse! I swear I can make the goys do anything if I can just get’em up on the stage” …

“So I says to this mug, ‘Ahh, I dunno, this is a genuine Rolex mate. It’s not a block for just any bloke – ah, forget it, it’s not for you, you wouldn’t be interested. It’s a top-notch watch for the big boys, this one. It says to everyone who sees ya wearin’ it, “I’ve arrived, and you haven’t”…

“Never mind about the price, son, just tell me… how much money would you have about your person, right now like? Really? Well, how much have you got at ‘ome then? How long would it take ya to get there and back?”

“Did ya see that arster an’ ‘is fuggin’ ugly bird just let their snorkies throw their toffee-apples into Sid’s pool? Little bastards. So I deck the prick and next thing I know his missus is hitting me over me sherro with ‘er shoe screaming I’m an animal. ‘Fuggin right’’, I says, ‘and you should be so lucky yourself, you ugly slut’.” …

“This snotty young buck is givvin’ me shit, right? Says I’m a cheat, the little prat. So I look ‘im right in the eye, an’ I says, ‘How old are you, son?’.

‘Eighteen’, he says right back, like ‘ee’s proud of it.

‘Oh yeah’, I says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s about right then. You shouldn’t be talkin’ to me like that then. You should be showin’ me a bit more respect.’ An’ ee’s lookin’ at me strange, tryin’ tuh figger me out.

‘Why?’, he says.

‘Cos I was passin’ through this town about then, eighteen or so years ago.’

‘So what’ he says.

‘So you could be talking to ya father, that’s what’ I says! Well fuggme, it floored him good an’ proper!”

And so on it goes, no love lost between hunter and prey, victor and victim, gypsy and villager, since the dawn of time. As he talks, I laugh in the all right places and hungrily eat more of his brittling bread, draining my Coke to dissolve the butterless feast. Then, there, and untrue to his word, Owen insists I share his second, newly-broached bottle of whiskey. And I am compelled to say no, his ghosts and mine driving us in different directions. And Owen becomes by turns insistent, offended, insulted, angry, just plain ugly.

“Fuggyu, yurno fun at fuggin’ all!” he bellows.

We sit in silence, I study the cracked linoleum - not because it is more interesting than his face, I’m sure – but because it’s a safer alternative than eye contact. A deathly eternity passes, Owen gathers himself up, rises unsteadily to his feet and aims for the doorway, muttering “I’m gonna get me a drinkin’ buddy who isn’t a fuggin’ girl”. The draft licking my bare feet is chill while he is out there stumbling in the darkness, cursing. The caravan door is stuttering on its corroded hinges, the animals are stirring as Owen weaves his way out of our dim pool of 12-volt light on his I’ll-teach-him-a-lesson mission. I’m feeling faintly ill. It’s the nausea of dark expectation and the paralysis of childish obedience. I find all I can do is sit, very, very still - and wait.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 4

2009-05-30T21:16:00.001+10:00

I fit only one of his criteria – I’m within his staggering distance. Like Owen I’m alone, my father has been on his own drinking spree in the big smoke for several days now. I’ve been living on the proceeds of midnight-lit orchard robberies and I’m hungry, for Owen’s white bread and Vegemite, for the company, I’m lying awake for the stumbling return of a drunkard father, and so what the hell. Owen’s bigtop-sized voice booms from within the corrugated iron fence:

“Fawfuck’sake cumminhavadrinkwimme”
“O.K… but I won’t drink your booze, Owen”.
“Yeah, whadeverthuhfuckyasay, mate. Jus’ com’ an’ sit wimme, fahChris’ake. I’got nahwun tahtalktuh. Havvalemonade fawfuck’sake, Idon’care”

So I crawl from my pungent sleeping bag and pull on my three-day tee-shirt and a pair of holey jeans, run sure-footed with youth’s primal nightvision on my erratic path, muddy mound-to-mound through the swamp, circumnavigate the big blue fence. Owen is waiting at the gate, barking “Where’z ya dollah then?” in his whisky-roughened basso rasp, slapping me on the back as I pretend to skulk through without paying; a side-showman’s in-joke. We walk in the moonlight past the shadowy enclosures; the animals smell him, hear him, sense him coming, and respond with interest and affection. The dolphin spout their breath in a noisy display, the tiger stirs and rises to observe, but it is the immense bulk of a bizarre creature lumbering its way to the barrier that provokes the most awe. With dinnerplate eyes constantly fixed in an imploring puppy-dog stare at his beloved master, the sea elephant half drags, half propels his dripping wet tonnage along the railing to be as close as he can be to his hero. The man acknowledges this bovine adoration with a few kindly but guttural throaty sounds and a loving pat on the wrinkly deflated blimp of a head; the beast emits a long rumbling bellow of appreciation and fishy halitosis in return.

Now, now we pass the chimpanzee house and I know enough to hold my breath. Once for the acrid scent of raw hormonal urine and once again for the fear, the once-bitten-twice-shy unreasoning. Once upon a time, the 1960’s in fact, Charlie and Cheetah and the Chimpanzee Tea Party were the darlings of the schoolshow circuit. But for me, as the child star of the Lavengro Gypsy Sharpshooters in the sawdust circle of Ridgeway’s Circus, Charlie the Chimp had been my very own personal bogeyman.

Back then, our highly strung precision-shooting act was on directly after the Chimps turn, and in the narrow confines of the tentfly we would await our introduction, skip into centre ring. Owen would exit moments before, a chimp clinging to each arm as he sidled to pass us – round brown eyes would fix on the bright blonde hair of my mother and I, and Charlie would stretch and stretch and s-t-r-e-t-c-h his endless hairy arm out towards us and snatch a painful pinchful of our locks, no matter how far back into the canvas we pushed ourselves and no matter how Owen would scold him. My father would mutter his threatening oaths and challenge him man-to-monkey with baleful glare. Then, smiling the smiles of smalltown heroes, we would skip out to take our bows before a thousand people and proceed to shoot cigarettes from each other’s mouths with live bullets. Under these madhouse conditions not one of us could afford to acknowledge our nervous, artistic or temperamental dispositions, and Charlie’s scalpings weren’t exactly a soothing pre-performance influence.

But the chimp was a playful youth then, just the same age as myself; now five years on he was too powerful, too belligerent to be trusted outside of Owen’s parental thrall. With the strength of eight men and the attitude of a bull chimp at full maturity with only one superior on earth to answer to, he no longer performed his perverse isn’t-he-just-like-us party tricks for the children and instead spent his days bullying his long–suffering female companion and throwing shit at the punters. Like any natural leader he could smell fear, and that smell was all my own. With Owen, he had a kinship that went far further than trainer and trainee, they were soulmates, they spent quality social time together, they were deeply bonded. Without Owen in control, where were Charlie’s brakes? Tonight (with all due apologies to Ian Anderson) God would steal the handle.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 3

2009-05-29T18:23:00.002+10:00

An old circus banner rainproofs his roof even as it creates its own shower of crusting mural paint, autumn-leaf flakes of the old show life tumbling around the tandem wheels. Sift through these pages of paint and separate fact from fiction: You MUST See the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - the lump of fluorescent-coated coral in the hammock of black polythene and blacklight. The Dog-Faced Boy and the Giraffe-Necked Woman – nothing more than yellowed newspaper clippings of dubious journalistic integrity, recounting that old Guiness-recordbook tale of Mexican twins of hursuit heredity; a National Geographic article about African neck rings – what’s that? – You paid good money to see the real thing – don’t you get it? - It’s a game... The International Swimming Matches - American and Russian battling for supremacy in our clear-sided pool - the fishbowl and its two matches floating in six inches of water, one American match, one Russian - as promised – “and they’re safety matches what’s more because after all, this is a family show and the management cares about your safety, dunnit?”. Watch the Feast of the Man Eating Shark. “Keep your children close by, Ma’m, lest you disturb the man eating the shark – sorry – Lemon Fish - it’s all local produce too Ma’m, we believe in supporting the community we prey on”.

Cracked and faded paint-peel memories these. This little country’s Fair Trading Act may well have been invented to close Owen and Jasper’s partnerships down. The fantasies they concocted to tease half-a-crown from the pockets of the populace, the goys, mugs and muffins, have all died in the glare of honest daylight. No more Girl in the Goldfish Bowl – Can you believe what you see? Half-Man-Half-Woman - Which is it? You decide! No more Gorilla Girl – Direct from Darkest Africa - See Her Transform Before Your Very Eyes as the Beast Within Must Out! No more hysterical late-night sessions of invention where the more outlandish the concept, the more wet-eyed laughter and incredulity each idea induced, the more likely the joke was to appear on the line-up board hoardings next show season. So, in search of an honest dollar ever since decimal currency became de rigueur, Owen ballances banality with booze in his newly land-locked existence, swallowing the anchor and more besides.

See him now in your mind’s eye, those drinker’s elbows spread on the red Formica table in the ancient heavily-built Australian caravan, his tent-canvas jowls draping heavily on his face, his bulbous red-black-and-blue nose pocked by blackheads, eyes rheumy, rimmed with red but always alight with a trace of mischief. ‘Fuggoff, I’m jus’ finishin’ off this ‘arf-empty boddle, jus’ tidyin’ it up’. They’re a match, the man and his turtle-shell home; scruffy but strong, purpose-made yet aimless, no longer fully operational either one. It’s lonely when you’re the only one who gets the joke, the only one who realises that real life isn’t a life at all, only a hum-drum that passes to pacify. So this one night, he goes searching for the company of a kindred soul within staggering distance and that soul is myself, the adolescent in the old housebus nestled into the back stretch of the marshy Marineland property for the winter.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 2

2009-05-28T08:08:00.000+10:00

Retired from the road, showman, knock-about, a whore-mouthed hustler with a heart of gold. Owen loves animals and shuns people because he knows who he can trust. He’s affable enough when he has to be, which is often, because he chooses to entertain children with the choreographed antics of his menagerie in order to keep it alive and kicking.

But at the end of the day, when the children and their enablers have gone home to their own brand of normality, Owen flip-flops his way around his own personal zoo with his open shirt parted by his beer belly and puts the tiger and the sea elephant and the dolphins and the chimpanzees to bed. Then he drinks himself to sleep under the patient and loving supervision of his good wife, lean and handsome, the quiet and even-tempered woman with bones in her face that carve her out from the more comfortably-covered mothers of Polynesia. Grace the Gilbertese Islander lives in a real house two miles up the road, perhaps even right next-door to the ex-farmer I told you about. And who can blame her after all her years on the road in old caravans, the lugging of fresh water in jerrycans for the washing of the clothes, the children, the dishes, the floors, the crazy-crazed mirror on the dressingroom door, the harsh glare of the circus life unearthing every crowsfoot flaw?

Of course Owen lives there too, eats heartily and drinks determinedly, falls heavily into his bed, snores sonorously while Grace finger-combs his tousled mop of hair. If he makes it home before the distraction of a couple of whiskeys at the closing of the day, the counting of the take. Tonight, the night of our story, he doesn’t make it home. One night, but not tonight, he doesn’t make it home ever again, doesn’t make the narrow bridge at the bottom of the big hill, but that’s a different story and a sadder one, no redemption, no lessons learned. Tonight is a whiskey night just like the fatal night yet to come, but he’s smarter altogether, not driving, choosing to stay at the Marineland, in the old caravan huddled in the back corner. So no social drinking. It’s the drinking of a logical man, the logic being that drinking feels better than not drinking.

Alcoholanimalism: Chapter 1

2009-05-25T21:23:00.002+10:00

A crash zoom from outer space whisks us South of the Equator and halfway around the world from the ‘Home’ of the homesick ex-pats. Wind back your watch and watch the years fall away. Today is 1971, good taste is in hibernation by anyone’s standards, and this little country pocket-mirrors the world torn as it is at this time between violent change and cloying mediocrity, between it’s very Britishness and the encroachment of Americana. But this is no historical overview, no broad brushstrokes here; the story is more of a freak specimen, a microcosm, it takes place on the outer edges. You need the luck of a flea-market early bird in order to find it at all.

So, home in on the far North of the imaginatively named North Island, look for a bright swath of sand backed by scrubby hills; planted between the roughly-formed parentheses headlands is a seaside village before the nearby city’s insatiable appetite swallowed it whole, back when a local farmer could make a little money and retire to a newly-built two-story-plus-carport hollowstone box and enjoy his view of the ocean. Perfectly useless ocean, not safe to swim in, not suited for sail. You could fish on a good day, I suppose, catch a small shark if you had the courage. Lay it thrashing interminably in the bottom of your tin dinghy. Keep your feet up on the thwarts, because you can never be sure the buggars are dead, and later (but not too much later, you understand) take it to town in the boot of the Belmont, trade it for mussels, paua, or oysters with the corner fish-n-chip shop. Re-christened “Lemon Fish” and slapped on sale, an immediate improvement in marketability - if not taste - could be perceived.

But for the most part, this ocean was only good for the gazing-at, for regaling a farmer’s less fortunate friends downcountry – ‘Aww mate, y’dunno wot yur missin’. I tellya , the missus ‘n’ I ‘r’ up at the crackadorn an’ owdon the warter wivva chillybin anna thermos annit’s fuggin boodyful’. Perhaps. But when I was there for all of a year at all of fourteen years old, walking the empty beach at midnight with Led Zep’s ‘Been a long Time since Rock’n’Roll’ blaring on the portable cassette-deck, the scruffy marram-grassed sand dunes were all my own.

So slip sideways now, away from the endless main drag backing the beach – no-one wants to miss out on that view – and out on a tangent to the fringes. There, the swampy land at the bottom of the big hill coming into town from the big smoke, not sound enough for sub-divisions, prone to flooding from the stony river and its sandflies, the land no-one wants to live on, lives a gentle giant of a man I shall name Owen.

Alcoholanimalism: Introduction

2009-05-25T20:26:00.001+10:00

Alcoholism: n. Condition resulting from addiction to alcohol.

Animalism: n. Belief that humans are mere animals.

Life on the sideshows and circus circuits gives a young boy all the insights of a grown man’s share of AA meetings. Boxed in with a violent alcoholic of my very own, observing the changeling adults in the other caravans around me drink and devolve from strong-humoured hucksters to hair-trigger harridans. Living inside a ballet of tent-peg murders, black-eyed wives and broken glass choreographed to a soundtrack of full-volume vitriol. By all of eight years old, I had laid claim to my own self-control, pledged myself to denial, and shored myself up against the disintegration of human-nature’s paper-thin barrier between sanity and complete loss of control. Drink frightened me with its power to degrade decency, the line between human and animal was too easy to cross. The story of this particular night, this unnatural company, this bizarre alcohol-driven mẻnage-ả-trois was to prove the analogical experience of a lifetime…

Live long enough on the fringes and eventually, life itself frays.

2009-05-25T12:30:00.007+10:00

Occurrences beyond the physics of normal experience become possible; not your satisfying fictions with their tidy or twisted endings, but a real life eked out in a surreal twilight world, peopled with characters you may never meet - you pray you never meet. This other world is not so much safely ‘out there’, it lies unnervingly right here, under your nose. It’s the twisted twin, the dark doppelganger, the flipside that stays out of the light, the underbelly of your reality.

I wasn’t there at the beginning, so I can’t tell you how it all began. By the time I entered life as the newborn of a strange and strained family, we were already dropping in and out of sub-societies of misfits, murderers, circus contortionists and confidence tricksters. It was the very stuff of which stories such as this are made.

My mother, frailly built and boyish, was a survivor, a refugee if you will – not only of the war but of events before and after; her finger-licking father, the blitz of bombs that fell on her childhood London, her exile to Ayr to ride out the war, her voyage across oceans of tears, her landfall on the shores of those antipodean islands at the far side of the Planet Earth. Last and not least, she survived the man she met there, the man who fathered me, the man who stood us all on the knife-edge of edge of reason and made us look down. Taught us to tumble. To leap without looking. To land with no net. By his own life examples, shining or malevolent, he taught me to survive him too.

My father was a five-foot-two-inch brick shit-house of energy, genius and malice, melding the Shetland Islander’s stolid strength with a London Cockney’s cunning streak. His name was Jasper. Visualise quartz; a sparkling, milky-clear crystal of promise, light and mystery. Jasper is a quartz, but opaque, mottled, blood-red, secretive, intractable, all agate falsehood. “The gates of Heaven are made of jasper” he’d say, then nail a man’s nerve-dead arm to a bench with a six-inch spike for a joke, or saw your neck on jagged shards of windowpane, hammer down your door at four-of-the-morning to level a score. No, Jasper was never going to touch the gates of Heaven.

He told me, in his odd lilting low-slung voice: “When you sink in suburbia, cow tailing to a boss, marry yourself off to the one woman, nothing much ever has a chance of happening to you”. So fearing this, this numbing normality, we never did live in a house. He never did have a real job, whatever that may mean to you. Or monogamous relationships. My mother was there, of course, for a dozen years of my life at least; it’s just that her position was not exclusive. Women passed through our low lives in the manner of shooting stars, the hot focus of the moment until their sweetness soured. Thereafter their stellar glow quickly faded and fell, dipping below the horizon as they retreated fluttering like wounded birds, else it was us that dwindled from view as we rattled and rumbled away over the hill; we were always next-town bound, out of the harbour on the morning tide, gone.

At first, my cot was a drawer of dampness under the spring-base bed of crumbling boarding-house basements; rats and ‘roaches, drop a penny in the slot to fire the copper for the bath. I thought I was a dog, dug up bones, barked at passers-by. We traced the circus and sideshow routes in a wheezing vintage school bus; when life on land closed in we traipsed the ocean in a variety of unsuitable vessels. To avoid the dangers of regular employment, Jasper rekindled the arcane arts of the conman, stuntman, sideshow spruiker and three-ring thrillster. Four years old through to eleven, performing in a gypsy circus act, I’m shooting cigarettes from my father’s mouth every evening – ‘To astound the mind and stupefy the senses, you MUST see the most death-defying act of its kind in the world today – the internationally heralded Lavengro Gypsies, Sharpshooters Extraordinaire!’ “Ready Poppa?” – BANG!

Daytime I’m reading Dickens. There’s no more home-schooling to be had from a mother who left her own coalmine village classroom at thirteen, so I teach myself what I need to know. In this way, my mind expands and recognises more possibilities than limitations; this is fortunate, as life as I come to know it has it’s limitations strained indeed.

Circus life is sordid and surreal. We once won a Chinaman in a smoky back-room gambling den; he’d wagered a year of his life and lost, became our human target catching bullets in his teeth, convulsing, twisting-flying through the air with the impact. By the time I was ten my silverlining mother had finally shot my darkcloud father cold-blood before a thousand eyewitnesses. Yet he survived, and in a passion play played out in the sawdust rings of the circus and the oak-panelled palaces of the High Court, she walked free. Free at last.

At thirteen, I made my bed with an aging exotic dancer and lay in the toxic consequences. Fourteen and I’m walking tightrope, training a troupe of so-called Siberian Wolfhounds; one night I’m trapped by a demented and whiskey-crazed circus chimpanzee on a wrecking spree. Fifteen, I’ve entered my car-crash period in high-horsepower pony cars, E-Types and Lamborghinis, all extorted from a would-be millionaire entangled in my father’s tarot-card traps. Sixteen, and the love of my life is but twelve years old - we elope, but before I knew the price of the loss I let her slip away, breaking both our hearts.

Ten years after, Jasper and I are drifting on old boats along old coasts, hosting hoods, shoplifters, hold-up men and multiple murderers. Or wrestling with a shark in the dark, five miles out at midnight, counting our limbs when it was all over. Eventually I tired of these years of strange subjugation in this floating pressure-cooker. My father’s young girlfriend and I walked away in the clothes we stood up in, wandered, wondered where to sleep that night. We hit the road writing signs, painting murals; bought a beach bach from a bank robber and I became the cleanskin workaholic ever anxious to play catch-up with my peers. Applying circus-marquee madness to the world of TV I art-directed advertisements, fashioned myself as a fashion photographer and filmed Miss Universe and Rod’n’Rachel, would-bes and wannabes, Pussycats on Parade and politicians.

Infertility, infidelity, incompatibility, two hard-earned children later I walked away again or rather ran, this time with a torch-haired torch singer, the love of the rest of my life. Working a hundred hours a week in multimedia we made money, holidayed in New York, bankrupted ourselves, ran away to sea together. Sailed from South of the Antipodes to the South Seas in a seventy-year-old kauri ketch with two young sons; we’re older, wiser, but still dumb enough to come closer to dying than ever before in thunder squalls, lightning strikes, bar broaches and reef strandings. Whales and dolphins, sharks and rays, manatees and the Mermaid Bar, westward bound for as long as it works out. Living on the fringes. The underbelly of your reality.

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