Mum pointed to a package on the table.
My heart was thudding as I ripped it open. Inside was a cardboard box with a clear plastic cover. It was a doll and, according to the box, he was called Billy the Back-up Singer. I removed the cover and touched the miniature golden microphone wired to his hand. Billy was wearing a white shirt and black vinyl trousers. I would wait until I was alone before checking inside the vinyl.
‘He’s perfect, Mum.’
I put my arms around her waist and held her tight. She bent down to receive a kiss but I licked her cheek instead. I liked licking my mother. She tasted both chemical and floral.
‘Ugh, Julian. That’s disgusting.’
Mum giggled and wiped her face with the back of a crumby hand. She leaned against the sink and watched me remove Billy from his box. I put the doll up to my nose and breathed in the new plastic smell of his copper-brown synthetic hair. It was cut in a David Cassidy, just long enough to style with tiny doll curlers. Billy came with a change of clothes: a tiny pair of beach shorts and sunglasses. This was an odd outfit for a singer but I didn’t care. I’d make him something new to wear, a snazzy Liberace number for the spotlight. In my hands, Billy wouldn’t stay a back-up singer for long.
‘You know what to do, Julian.’ Mum laughed and ruffled my hair. ‘Go hide him in your wardrobe before your father gets home.’
‘Julian, have you seen the Companion?’ My mother was making her way down the hall toward me. She sounded irritated.
I was lying on my bed in my underpants and singlet reading a feature on Christiaan Barnard, the doctor who’d transplanted a heart into a grocer’s chest in 1967. The magazine had a photo of Louis Washkansky before he received the donor heart. He was smiling with a tube up his nose.
I knew the word ‘donor’ meant dead person and was fascinated. The heart would’ve been cold, like one of the defrosted chickens my mother stuffed on birthdays. I put my hand over my heart to make sure it was still beating. There was nothing happening. Panic knocked at the back of my throat as I moved my hand to the left side of my chest. My mother snatched the magazine from my hands and left the room.
Mum and I both enjoyed the Australian Ladies’ Companion. It didn’t have the glamour of Celebrity Glitter but it did keep us plugged into the Australian entertainment scene and even featured Tasmanian celebrities. Dick Dingle occasionally made it into the Companion for his work as patron of the state’s Little Aussie Rising Star awards. Mum told me to keep my eye on Dick Dingle. He was an impresario for talented young Tasmanians like me. The Little Aussie Rising Star was a stepping stone to the Golden Microphone which was an even bigger stepping stone to national television stardom.
Christiaan Barnard was a star even though poor old Washkansky had almost immediately died. The failed heart transplant intrigued me. I closed my eyes and tried to picture what was going on inside my skin. We were currently studying the human body at school. Brother Duffy had started at the top with the brain and was working his way down toward the interesting area. We’d got to the kidneys, which I knew were attached to the important bits. Duffy had more or less admitted this when he said the kidneys were responsible for producing urine. I understood what that meant and was looking forward to the next lesson.
I already knew how babies were born thanks to Ralph Waters. He’d led us into the Ladies’ toilet behind the Whipper Snapper fish-and-chip shop and pointed into the bowl where something brown and enormous was bobbing about in the water. It was three times the size of anything I’d ever produced.
‘The lady who dropped this A-bomb has had a baby.’ Ralph had raised one eyebrow and spoken with authority. ‘See the size of her floater. She’s stretched to buggery from giving birth.’
I hadn’t considered how babies got out from inside their mothers. If they used the same exit as number twos, they had to come out filthy. That meant I’d come out filthy. I asked Ralph the obvious question.
‘Don’t babies smell when they come out?’
‘Nah, they’re inside a kind of bag.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt the baby then?’ I knew nothing about the dimensions of ladies’ bum holes. Female bum anatomy had absolutely no appeal to me. This was not information I needed to share with the likes of Ralph Waters.
‘If it’s a lady’s first baby, the baby’s head gets squashed to the size of a lemon.’ Ralph cast an eye over our heads.
‘And if it’s the third baby?’
‘Normal shape and size.’ I let out a lungful of air. Ralph had two older siblings like me.
My brother was fixing a puncture on his bicycle when I got home. I stood for a moment examining him from behind. His head was definitely pointier than Carmel’s. He was trying to put the tyre back on his wheel by wedging two of my mother’s dinner spoons under the rim. A spoon fell out and clattered on to the concrete of the driveway. John cursed. As he turned to retrieve it, he noticed me. His mouth pulled downward in a sneer. John only had to look at me to get upset. There was something about the way I was put together that disgusted him. I suspected it was the same thing Ralph Waters felt about Gary Jings.
‘What are you looking at, poof?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Piss off then. Go and try on some of Mum’s pantyhose or something.’
There was no use explaining John’s condition. It would just alarm him. I went inside to examine my mother’s bottom.
The heart transplant article haunted me. I thought about it constantly. My version of the operation went something like this: I’ve had a major heart attack on Hollywood Boulevard. Christiaan Barnard is busy so they call in a trainee called Herb to do the job. Herb disconnects my heart before a donor can be found. He keeps the blood pumping through my body with a machine powered by a lawnmower engine, but time is running out. Still no donor can be found. Herb substitutes my heart with a defrosted chicken. The chicken refuses to pump. I regain consciousness with a Tender Choice broiler in my chest, still wet and cold from the defrosting process. Herb attaches electrodes to the chicken and turns on the juice. It jumps but flops back lifeless next to my lungs.
Dad regularly drank with a man called Herb. It was common knowledge that Herb didn’t wear socks. He simply blackened his ankles with shoe polish. This habit had been discovered when Herb crossed his legs and swiped the beige trousers of one of his neighbours. The owner of the trouser leg had then traced the origins of the black smudge back to Herb’s ankle. No one said anything about this habit, at least not to Herb’s face. They just gave him plenty of legroom in the public bar.
It was Herb’s socks that gave me the idea for the fishnets. I tried to tell my father this but he didn’t want to listen. He was too busy shouting at my mother about her brother Norman. I had performed the Olivia Newton-John show to cheer Mum up. Dad wasn’t even supposed to come home. It was race night at the pub. I was singing along to ‘I Honestly Love You’ into the handle of a hairbrush when he burst into the lounge and found me dressed in one of my mother’s frocks. It was when he noticed my legs that he started shouting. They were criss-crossed with ballpoint pen in the fashion of fishnet stockings.
I
