My brothers fall onto their beds adjacent to each other, while our mother beats into them with sticks and chains that are usually worn by the dogs. Dale is the squealer. He squeals like a piglet caught by its hind leg. Brendon simply grinds his teeth together, locking his jaw and looking up at her with his killing eyes. He is spiritually superior and waits for her to finish what she must do. It must have been terrible to watch your sibling being beaten, knowing that your turn was coming and that nothing, not even your eyes or your own small whimperings of fear and frustration, would stop that terrible force that swept down through those arms to lash. Dale said, 'Me first!' It was sad when he said it like that. I believed in winning and challenging what the future had in store for us, but the words 'Me first' had this sad inevitability about them.
Years later Dale was to put his hand out at high school requesting to be caned, rather than be given a lunchtime detention, so he could get it over with. He said to me that he never felt the cane. 'It doesn't hurt,' he said, 'I have strong hands,' as if by magic this pain and all other pain to his hands had now been extinguished. Hands are spiritual places that can turn upwards and open to god like sunflowers to the midday sun. Dale survived and was capable of self expression. The first two confident things that Dale said about himself were 'I have straight eyes,' being for throwing rocks at neighbours rooves and windows, followed by 'I have strong hands.' But from my perspective it seemed like wishful thinking to end all nerve endings in the tips of his fingers. I knew that his hand felt the stinging wooden ruler as all the Liverpool Primary West Public School children's hands must have. But where he didn't feel it was the great tragedy of Dale. He never felt it inside his heart.
All through his shaky adolescence his legs never stopped moving. His eyes flashed bright marsupial brown alight from tears, as his feet ran wild beneath the kitchen table. Even when he was sitting still, he determinedly outran all the trains to Parramatta to Wynyard and utilised his body's sugar reserves in odd and tremendous ways. There was nothing I could do to stop those running legs. Dad called them 'sparrow legs' and every time Dale appeared, it was as if a little brown bird hopped mechanically across the back lawn, its beak held together by nuts ad bolts, pecking at breakfast crusts thrown out by my mother for sparrows and starlings in the mornings.
A few times I remember thumping him in the back and pulling his bleached brown hair, but I was young and under tremendous stress. I was being overwhelmed and smashed into the sandy banks of death without love, by internal tidal waves that my mother only dreamed about. I spent my time trying to belong to colonies of ladybirds, turning over black beetles trapped on their awkward backs in the broken sloping gutters and uncovering the eggs of skinks with the hot excitement of grey lizards in my blood. The greatest moment was when Guenther found a huge blue-tongued lizard in the vacant block where his mother fed it a hard boiled egg which it swallowed whole. 'It's not from here,' Melanie said. Of course it wasn't. It was from the age of the dinosaurs.
The dirt of the block next door was unstable, the landscape risky, subterannean and mysteriously bush. It had been vacant for many years covering its suspect profile with the long buffalo grass imported from Africa. I was on the edge with my plastic bucket and spade frightened to dig too deep. The cats went there often edging off into dusk with hunter's eyes and a wild determination as if the vacant block said, "tonight as all other nights, you must kill or be killed." Yet each dawn they were rarely satiated by what they'd caught, dragging in the mutilated bodies of nondescript animals covered with thick grass and saliva. Our dog companions were more boisterous and innocent regarding their outside activities. They barked and yelped at the "postie" and "milko" and broke out of our backyard to show us the meaning of challenge and success, but like our father to our mother they came back every weekend. They were all desexed in the end.
Rusky the kelpie-cross particularly liked jumping the slim grey palings of the back fence and headed straight towards old Girt's paddock in order to roll in the horse shit. A very old brown horse with no name lived out its retirement on old Girt's paddock. He seemed to form part of a streetscape and stood there like an old statue. He was always in the same position with only his long jaws working in their deep brown fashion, as though he were injesting a haystack or working on carefully trimming up a prickly fence hedge. In the mornings I liked to learn from him, eating raw rolled oats and working my jaws like a horse at a chaff bag. He was solid and peaceful, a permanent fixture on the shrinking suburban block. One day I could see him turning into a stone and remaining there. The giant brown horse was the last of his kind in Liverpool. He was kind. He was old. He had no name. He was alone. He did the dogs in the area a great service by providing them with enough shit to roll their backs in. Several local dogs or more could easily share a nice piece of horse shit as all they required was the sensation of scent combined with their own good fur and knowledge of the delicious.
Amongst the dogs who shared was "Prince", the golden retriever up the road, and "Snowy", the dangerous black labrador a street away who had torn Rusky's chest in a serious fight. Next door lived "Jack" the dopey setter, whose red fur whistled through the air as he flew like a kite, his slobbery jaw and noble forehead touched by royalty. Then there was "Glen", a quiet tawny pup who spent long periods of time in shady places where snails curled in their moisture on dry days. He was a warm and timid dog, as non-evasive as an old straw broom. 'He's a good watchdog,' dad said, 'because he watches everything.'
Glen never even barked out a warning when the first dog in the street was poisoned by the glass dog baiter. In fact I never heard Glen bark at all. Then there was "Buffy" and "Scamper" the two maltese terriers, indoor companions to Guenther's parents, Melanie and Evol, who invited us over and showed us slides of German factories in exchange for boxes of Macadamia nuts. Both Buffy and Scamper (and several years later "Teddy") were dogs who were carefully combed and who stayed inside like well-worn slippers. Often their shaggy sharp-clawed feet went skidding down the polished wooden floorboards of the hallway to snap, snarl, strangulate, grope and choke on slobber and barking, and then biting into each others backs in the frenzy to sic-em and all within ten seconds. They prepared to attack at the merest hint of the somewhat hesitant shoes of any visitors. There were not many visitors to Melaine and Evols, as this could be heard from their front verandah.
After a few of the dogs in the street disappeared and Glen still hadn't barked, we were told that someone had fed them glass baits. Jack the setter in his puppy-like stupidity was the first to go. It was suddenly, as if someone had thrown their kite away after we had all enjoyed it sailing in the wind gusts. I imagined Jack found dead on the lawn, his tongue hanging from his mouth, with the bloody raw meat and crushed glass butchering his stomach lining. I had never seen a dead dog, but I kept seeing Jack on the lawn as dead, rather than never seeing him again. I wondered if his owner Gary Leech had wheeled him away in the wheelbarrow or if the angels had taken him. There may be angels for each dog type and so I imagined silly angels for Jack. Angels would claim him with wings tinged by the red of his coat, for Jack glowed with or without them. Unlike anything that existed on earth, they would gladly forgive a silly kind of dog like Jack for succumbing to the temptation of taking the glass bait. With a dog baiter in the street there seemed no room for mistakes and there were no second chances.
In Liverpool (on the outskirts of western Sydney) the pretty striped cats like Tiger who fell asleep under the rims of car tyres had only one chance, not nine. Tiger yawned through his broken spine and the only fear I saw in his eyes was when he tried to walk again, but he soon dismissed the idea. He was taken to the vet on Hoxton Park Road and that was the end of his short life and all his pretty stripes. I thought of all the different dogs ending in their yards and each morning we had to check our backyard for glass baits. I wouldn't know what to do if Rusky had eaten a bait. We had grown up together. It was a strange street for a while after that, a mean dog-hating street with smashed glass inside everything we ate. Yet, while flying above all the suburban backyards with god, I was shown many things that might normally evade me and that did not touch me. I believe that they were the very same things as witnessed by a giant red kangaroos with outback remoteness, or from an intelligence that existed only inside stars, or from the decks of boats that sailed past moons, held up by hot air balloons with perhaps luckier boys and girls inside, who swept the cobwebs from the skies with their imaginations.
This is how I saw the street as the dogs disappeared and died, and as the big brown horse from Old Girt's paddock quietly chewed up the scene, and as Dale slobbered along his jerky knees as he waited for dad to come home by the front wrought iron gate, and as mum reached for the dog chain from on top of the fridge. I was fighting off alien forces and striking out. Soon it was poor Dale's skinny back that I struck and I think we may have loved one another but it was a lot easier to strike out at something your own size or preferably smaller. We had no hope of taking on the tremendous forces inside our parents that we thought were trying to stub us out. So when we scratched and kicked at one another and fought over who got the biggest bag of chips, or the purple and blue mugs, or dobbed each other in for throwing rocks, it really had nothing to do with evil or wanting to destroy each other's lives. Instead it had to do with our own survival and we felt that one another was the only thing we could survive against.
We were all drowning in a sea of rage and despair. Occasionally we would push the other sibling under by the shoulders in order to get a breath of air. I regret that I hit into Dale when I was bigger and I also forgive him for hitting into Brendon and myself when he was bigger. As far as the bashings went, I was partially brainwashed and hence thought that it was all part of a punishment, which we all must endure for being bad. Well, for not only being bad, but for being who we were which was the same thing, and to this day if I say, 'You bashed us with sticks and chains,' our mother proudly corrects me. She says that they were palings that she had ripped off the trellis with white paint still on them. She says, 'Don't forget to include the nails. There were nails sticking up out of those palings.' Then she laughs. She used to break the sticks across Dale and Brendon's legs. But we resisted and still we lived and would be angry and would throw stones at every adult house in the street. Until soon we were throwing stones upon our own rooves and our hearts were born again as mineral. Our psyches hardened into outcrops and crevasses, becoming the cliff faces and coastlines in the western suburbs of Sydney. Our minds were full of intent. Our personalities were angry and violent stones.
I would say, 'No mum, don't do it! Don't do it!' My brothers couldn't understand why I would want to protect them. They didn't care about me. Having already grown normal, they only cared about themselves. This sudden outburst even shocked our mother a bit, so that once she stopped momentarily. It was almost that moment of someone else entering the house and saying this was unacceptable, as if indeed god had came into the house from a spaceship and spoke through me. My mother never bashed me. Perhaps to her it would have been like bashing a smaller version of herself. Although she often got pleasure from my ugly duckling un-cinderella-like ways, my tubby tartan trouser waddling towards shovels and buckets lodged in the winter sandpit and towards plastic animals and especially the backyard insects. She told me that she could have been a ballerina or played the piano if it weren't for her miserable and barren life and looking after us all the time. As a child I felt dismayed that I had impinged upon her beauty and destroyed her dreams, or as dad had put it when he was drunk and howling mad at her, how we had made her hips as big as a water buffalo's and her legs all veiny and blue. As an adolescent I wasn't as easily convinced that it was my fault. I said, 'I didn't ask to be fucking born.' I always felt I had to defend my own existence and I often crumbled into a grey void of no worth. The important seeds had been planted when my psyche was most delicate. A very young child has a mind full of butterflies.
Perhaps she didn't hit me like she hit my brothers because she knew that dad took care of me. When he knocked me down she was 'never around' and he did a good job. It was hard and swift like a clap of thunder against both the skin and the psyche. Inside me it created a world of unpredictable and threatening places, a time of darkness and striking down, mental corridors where I was followed by footsteps, disembodied hands and bursts of pain and sudden light. Often my brothers were hit so much by our mother, that they flared back at her actions from the darkness of their boyhood rage, like the spark of an ignition, or like a Campbelltown sky on firecracker night, all lit up for an instant and then gone all weak and smoky. Brendon finally broke his silence and flared up. He was the last human being in the world that I would expect to flare up. It was like the shock of a lawn sprinkler that you thought was off, suddenly spraying into the air twenty feet high, or extinct fountain water miraculously shooting from the mouths of Cupids with their mossy old bows and stone-bound brows. But it may as well have been the end of the world.
In amongst the chaos of pain there was the runt cat named "Baldy" who hid under Brendon's bed. Baldy started every time the mattress springs came down on top of his protruding spine. He was a shaky old cat by now, prone to long spells of gentleness and sunlight. He was a cat on his way back to kittenhood. It was risky to stay in a crouched up cat position under Brendon's bed while the beatings were in progress. But he would not leave my brother to escape out into the frontyard. I heard the movements of the springs as my brothers shifted positions while they were being hit and their purple-dyed tassle-bottomed bedspreads got all messed up. It was as if the shifting might miraculously thwart the blows, or at least allow it to fall onto an area of skin or clothing above skin, previously unharmed and not as sensitive. If you strike a child's skin for long and hard enough it dies. Meanwhile the psyche becomes like those exotic circus animals who flare their teeth at the animal trainers with the iron bars, civilised entertainment industry monsters who had bashed them senseless behind the scenes over and again, until their small sad flares were seen as a display of fierceness to an applauding crowd.
Flares go nowhere except back into the circus cages and the bodies of the crumpled monkeys, pigs and long-suffering ponies, or into the mind of a sixty-seven-year-old elephant with a large enough memory to house a growing insanity that takes root like a tropical plant strangling all goodness. Flares that accompany the performing tigers with the desire to feed their one great dream, that the trainer would somehow reach into that cage with his or her vulnerable arms, if only for a minute or a second. For much could be achieved under the acute and long-term surveillance of animal boredom and hatred.
When our mother hit into my brothers with the dog's leash, there was the dead presence of the leather part and the choker chain at the end. In her frustrated rush to connected to the target she often would not disconnect the chain. Dale would squeal, 'Not the chain mum! Not the chain!' He was hurt and betrayed after mum had miscalculated. I heard him choking on his own saliva. I saw his face as bright as a Woolworth's tomato. His tears streamed out long and wet, as if the rubber garden hose had been left to run across the path. He was stuttering out from between his bucked teeth, 'Youyouyouyouayou you hit me with the fucken chain! I want deadeadea-dad! I want daaaaaaad!' She was shocked this time and didn't bother to hit him again because he had said 'fucken.' We all waited for her to remember that we were her children. I wanted to say, 'We are your children,' but I didn't know how to say it when I was ten. Instead Dale called out to our absent father for protection. She hit them when dad was at work. I didn't want dad to come home as he was the one who hit me. I was worried that he might hear Dale crying out and that he'd come home from work earlier and that mum and I would get hit. On some nights nothing would shut Dale up. He bawled his guts out in an ode to the horror of his life. He wanted dad but I didn't. I didn't want our mother either. I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't think of who I could turn to, as this seemed to be just the way things were.
I didn't even know that my mind had been busily calculating the best way in order to survive, in a way that a child would learn their school times tables just before a big test. Survival just came naturally to me. Of course I wanted more. I wanted to live amongst all that was good and joyful, but survival was what my body needed for now. Dale eventually followed Brendon's example with more silences followed by intermittent flaring. Dad came home drunk to torment mum on Friday nights. Dale eventually stopped his tremendous wailing, for although it penetrated the walls of our next door neighbours, no one came to his aid. He saw the world for what it was and toughened up. When mum struck him with the chain, Dale became savage and I saw him recoil and hiss, adopting the position of the black snake in order to move back and strike. He almost bit her. At first he was focused on her chest and forearms but more and more it became her face. He was turning into a person who would focus on damaging the faces of adults, while never really seeing them. In reality he was simply locked into methods of self-defence and self-hate. He possessed little talent for discrimination. It was all about his own pain. It was his skin he was protecting. Like the escaping black snake, he never knew who would do damage and who would not.
Our parents said they loved us as they damaged us. Inside it was all flaring and we were all messed up. By this stage we were less than children. We were the inhabitors of dark corridors, moved in upon by child killers with chainsaws, or cannibal puppet dolls that grew teeth and jumped out of ovens on late night horror movies. We rocked unsteadily in our life rafts and bravely we sent our flares into our parents' lives. They were the only ships sent in to save us and we didn't know how to steer them in the right direction, in order to make them work for our well being. These flares accompanied by teeth baring and revenge formulas were our S.O.S. signals but who was receiving them? It was like a convict throwing a bottled message into the Tasman Sea to be lost and finally washed up on a desolate rocky beach excavated by the ancient Puffins. We soon learnt that the good guys weren't winning. Our flaring into this world rather than our living, our emergency signals received by no one. All we could do was send out flares with no expectation. The only light that touched the dead body of Jack was the moon. All the other dogs are gone. They live inside us now. This so-called-all-powerful-child-loving creator who looks down on the kids of Liverpool in Sydney's west, is now offering more tragedy and darkness than a child should know about and for some reason (s)he will not turn it into daylight.
