I pleased.
Some of these earnings I invested in a joint project with Jimmy: a fort based in the overgrown conifer hedge of an abandoned house. Only we didn’t call it a fort. We were too mature for that. It was a club. Using Dad’s chicken chopper, we’d hollowed out the hedge to create a spacious inner sanctum. This we furnished with a boat tarpaulin we’d found at the dump and some old cushions my mother was throwing away. We’d then created a ceiling with black polythene and hung some sheets from Jimmy’s house to create a Lawrence of Arabia effect. Our club was both private and secret. The only way to access it was by crawling underneath prickly conifer branches. We made sure no one saw us enter or leave.
The club became a busy nude and leisure centre after I recruited two boys from school, David Perk and Grant Humber. I’d figured these two out on the sports field. Like me, they regularly forgot their sports clothes and spent the phys. ed. hour in punishment, doing laps of the cricket pitch with a weighted medicine ball. Brother Punt was too stupid to realise that some of us preferred this activity to the real punishment of regular sports. It certainly beat kicking a leather bladder around a football field with a bunch of thugs on our backs.
As club founders, Jimmy and I got to make the rules. The first thing we did was appoint ourselves to executive posts and give the club a name: the JCJB Club. The next rule was another of my ideas. An entertainment hour was established and club members were obliged to either participate or listen. I got to sing Frank Sinatra and Jimmy did Sammy Davis Jr. Grant Humber could whistle but the only thing David Perk could do was make fart noises by pressing a palm into his armpit and pumping his elbow up and down. A smoking-only policy was also established. I suggested we smoke French brands. Jimmy seconded my motion and we learned to smoke the hard way, choking on filterless Gauloises.
I was inside the club, dividing a packet into four piles, when I heard David Perk arrive.
‘Corkle, let me in.’
A large, spiky tree branch functioned as the door to the club. It was easy to move from within but almost impossible from outside. This made the club impenetrable to intruders. One intruder I was particularly keen on repelling was John. I didn’t want his sort making reports to Dad.
‘Who goes there, fiend or foliage?’
‘Corkle, you know exactly who goes here. It’s me.’
‘You know the rule. Say the code.’
‘I forgot it.’ He was starting to whine.
‘No code, no entry. That’s the rule.’
‘Pore kwah?’
‘That was last week’s.’
‘Pore kwah pah?’
‘That was also from last week.’
‘It’s not fair, you change the code all the time. How can I remember French?’
I knew by now he’d be hopping from foot to foot with frustration. I’d let him hop a little longer. Perk was our least-appealing club member. He had a sneaky, unconvincing personality and had been cursed with the reddish curly hair and large dollopy freckles that were part and parcel of life as a gingernut. What Perkie lacked was panache. This was almost the same as pizzazz but with the added quality of French sex appeal. Jimmy and I used panache to rate boys at school. On the sexual panache scale I was nine and a half and Jimmy was nine. David Perk was somewhere between zero and one.
‘French confuses the enemy.’
‘What enemy, you wanker? You’re just trying to be posh.’
‘Grow up, Perk.’
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Jimmy had arrived and was waiting for the branch to be moved. He was the only one who remembered the passwords. Jimmy Budge understood the French Way. He read Celebrity Glitter and even looked like Alain Delon in Girl on a Motorcycle when he pouted.
I pulled back the branch and let them in. Perk came in scowling but Jimmy crawled up to me and kissed me on the lips. Jimmy couldn’t get enough of my panache and I didn’t blame him.
All the JCJB Club members were thirteen years old except for David Perk who had been held back a year and just turned fourteen. It was an exciting time to belong to a boys’ club, especially one with a nudity theme. Fascinating things were happening to our bodies. We monitored each other with enthusiasm, noting growth spurts and key developments.
Our activities were conducted in utmost secrecy according to the golden rule: ‘What goes on in the club, stays in the club.’ I found this rule surprisingly easy to obey. My parents never asked what I did after school or noticed that I didn’t bring friends home. They were too wrapped up in their own misery. My mother shuttled between Tassie Textiles and home and was always tired. The only real quality time we spent together any more was The Dick Dingle Hour when Mum joined me on the couch to eat her dinner off a tray. If I worked hard enough at it during the commercials, I could get her talking about me.
It was during a commercial break that Mum mentioned the changes taking place in my body: the down on my upper lip and unpredictable voice. There was something else, too, she said.
‘You’re glowing these days.’
‘But I glowed before.’
‘Yes but now you glow in a different way. What’s going on with you?’
‘Just warming up for the Tassie Wallaby. I’ll need all the glow I can get.’ I knew what was going on with me. It was Jimmy but this was not something my mother needed to know.
Mum’s eyes lingered on me for a moment. Her hand reached out and swept the hair off my forehead as if to see me better. It was too much, her look. I turned back to the TV.
With a sigh, she got up and went to the dinette, closing the door behind her. I knew she was going to call Norman. She did this at least once a week, always in the evening and always before my father came home.
Dad shuttled between the newspaper office and the pub and only came home to eat, sleep and watch sports programmes. He’d become even more uncomfortable in the role of husband and father and was incapable of maintaining a consistent standard in either job slot. His efforts came in rare bursts of activity followed by long periods of disillusionment and apathy.
One night I was woken by a series of loud thumps that made the bed rattle against the wall. The thumps sounded dangerous, like an earthquake or a volcano blowing its top. I left a sleeping John to his fate and ran into the hall. Mum was running toward the lounge in her nightdress. We stopped at the doorway.
The floor was covered in rubble. The lounge suite and my mother’s ornaments were white with plaster dust and bits of mortar. My father was standing with his back to us with a sledgehammer in his hand. He’d knocked a hole in the wall between the lounge and the sunroom. This small room had begun life as a veranda and been glassed in by the previous owner. It was the storage room for things that were never used like the barbecue and the beach umbrella.
‘What on earth are you doing, Jim?’ Mum laid a protective arm over my shoulders. I leaned into her to make the most of it.
