Coral Hull: Prose: I Will Never Live In Mosman: Dale Smashes Trucks

I MACKENZIE KNIGHT I A CHILD OF WRATH A GOD OF LOVE I FALLEN ANGELS EXPOSED I

CORAL HULL: I WILL NEVER LIVE IN MOSMAN
DALE SMASHES TRUCKS

Dale had no qualms about destruction and its place in the world. He experienced the world through the perception it gave him. It had expected little more from him than that. He would watch his own bones smash and that would keep him occupied. Later on he bought fast cars and murderous guns, but before that he was smashing all his toys around the side trellis with a hammer. He smashed in the faces of dolls as fast as he could unwrap them. Then he smashed the wooden petrol station bowsers so the matchbox cars couldn't get a refill. He even smashed the tow trucks so that they couldn't tow the broken cars away. Then he smashed the tugboats before they could arrive at the quay, to tow away the wreckage in the backyard swimming pool and he smashed all the lighthouses so that we were all lost at sea.

Dale wanted complete annihilation often, but especially during school holidays, come his birthday in November or at Christmas time. He was with that hammer and his skinny legs and his hyperactivity, waiting for the delivery of things to smash and in the process taking everything within his own small power to the point of no return. The family would give Dale everything but love for Christmas and tell him not to smash it. 'Now don't break this, will you?,' my nan said. But it was pointless. They hid the hammers in sheds and drawers but Dale would always find them again. He could smell out a good hammer behind wood or stone. Sometimes he would be found standing exhausted and satisfied amongst the ruins. At other times the smashed objects were gone and he was alone.

We were beginning to think he buried them in the backyard like the dog would bury a bone and that we were all living in a house built on a landscape of hammers. Dale hoarded hammers deep inside the wardrobe or behind the bed. His bony knees rattled like hammer heads beneath the kitchen bench as he eyed off the glass tabletop and all the bedroom mirrors and the neighbours' kitchen windows. We were all as angry as a bag of hammers. Dale was particularly agitated around toys and stones. He liked the toys for awhile then something would just snap inside him. Then he would be out there creating hell with the hammer, smashing it all to buggery and back.

The minute he got the opportunity he grabbed pop's old war hammer and smashed it straight down onto the middle of my nan's glass-topped dining room table. It was his first time there during school holidays and his last. I knew that it was all at once a great and terrible sensation for him, as the hammer was lifted and struck again and again. After the smashing little pieces of toys, plastic debris, matchbox cars and twisted rubber littered the concrete. It became his own small apocalypse that he calmly walked away from. It was silence from then on for the rest of the day. The job done, Dale just went off to lie beneath a tree at the farthest end of the yard.

Once on his side in the paspalam grass with the skinks and ladybirds, the flush would fade from his cheeks and he would be at rest. So restful, in fact, that the starlings and sparrows mistook his legs for twigs and tried to collect them for their nests. Do you believe that? Undisturbed by anything at all, Dale broke off a tiny twig from the tree as he would always do and started twiddling it. Either that or just sucking his thumb and twirling his hair around his fingers. What else was there for any kid to do at the end of the long destruction, but to go back to the basics? The greatest evolution was, 'I want love' therefore 'I need to love myself'. But how?

We said it amongst the toys that were still intact and we would be saying it amongst ourselves and our imaginary friends and we would build tree houses that were more like fortresses and be shouting it across to the complex rubble, our small battlefields, battalion hearts now maneuvering into position. The neighbours were the carefully considered and much awaited enemy, strangers approaching from every direction and there were buckets of new white council marble for ammunition. 'More ammo! We need more ammo!' Dale knew that rocks were simply flying hammers and for this reason he loved them. Then came the sensation of smashing windows and police sirens. The rock attacks grew more vicious after nightfall and the shit bombs more pungent. No neighbour's house was left unstoned.

The whole tragedy was that, from the very beginning of time or at least of Dale's brief life at Rose Street in Liverpool, it was all so unnecessary. The suburb was a hammer that flattened us all. I know that I am partially treacherous and that treachery is weak. I remember hiding around the back trellis with one of my mother's good ornaments from her sacred dressing table. It was a thin sphere of fragile blown glass and I held it there and just wanted to squeeze that little bit harder to see if it did break, my life superb and indestructable for all time and the pure glass ball left in the balance. I stopped, suddenly fearful of going beyond the point of no return. I put it back inside the dusty room that no one ever entered again.

But it always felt like some big dream left unaccomplished or some job left incomplete. Maybe I simply hadn't gone far enough. A bit later on, I accidentally killed a baby budgerigar using the same methods. I was chasing it around with my hand on the carpet, pretending I was a big cat with a muff claw and that the bird was a 'poor defenceless little peewee'. It was a 'runner' from the aviary who would never grow wings, a mutant with a tiny flustered tail bound for life to the aviary floor. It had been perched inside a cage in my bedroom all weekend. I thought I would stop in the nick of time and haul that bird back in, but I got carried away and went too far. I was meant to be taking care of it.

Soon the peewee stopped running and lay down at my socks with its heartbeat now as large as itself. All the heaving inside its feathered breast made me think of how desperate we were. I was suddenly fearful and worried for the bird, who looked as if its chest might cave in with terror. But it was too late and when I stopped in order to return it to its cage, the little peewee was already gone. Initially it had felt like play. But no matter how hard I tried to revive it, the terrified 'peewee' didn't respond and died on my bedroom floor. When animals turn into toys and trucks into tiny terrified birds, all children shake hands with their own small treachery. They stagger away from the scene of the first crime, realising that another has died while they survived, empty and confused inside. It now becomes a harder world to live in.

    

This website is part of my personal testimony that has been guided by The Holy Spirit and written in Jesus' name.

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