Flesh Wounds Read online

  I think most children have this experience at some point. It’s only when they spend time in someone else’s house that they realise the spectacular oddity of their own: ‘Oh, I get it. This is what normal people do.’ And Bette (I don’t want to get maudlin here) showed real affection for me. She was very pleased to have a new, young son to replace her grown-up boys; she even, in defiance of the times, supplied the odd word of kindness and praise. And because the school was just over the road, she suggested I come home each day for lunch, at least while I was settling into my new surroundings. She’d make daily treats of tuna bake and shepherd’s pie, all cooked in ancient Pyrex dishes, Bette looking at me fondly as I ate, an apron tied around her waist, a wisp of hair escaping her scarf, like an image from a pancake packet . . .

  Hang on, I promised not to get maudlin. What can be done? At this point, I may need a humorous tale to lighten the mood, perhaps something involving my testicles. Ah yes, that’s right, it was around this time that my testicles decided to tie themselves into a knot, much in the way of the old song:

  Do your balls hang low? Do they dangle to and fro?

  Can you tie ’em in a knot? Can you tie ’em in a bow?

  Can you throw ’em o’er your shoulder like a regimental soldier?

  Do your balls hang low?

  The testicle thing happened a couple of months into my stay with the Hutchinsons. We were driving out of Canberra, headed for Cooma. My fill-in parents were in the front of the car and I was in the back. Suddenly I became uncomfortable in the trouser department. Worse than uncomfortable. I felt this searing pain. I squeezed my legs together, willing myself not to say anything. While the Hutchinsons were lovely people, this was just too embarrassing. At twelve years of age, it can be difficult to work one’s testicles into the conversation. Trying not to draw attention to myself, I gingerly prodded at my pants. I squirmed in my seat, hoping the agony would pass. Weirdly, I can still remember the view from the window. I could take you back to the exact stretch of road, the pain having branded the view into my memory.

  I rely on Wikipedia for a description of what was happening inside my body:

  Testicular torsion occurs when the spermatic cord (from which the testicle is suspended) twists, cutting off the testicle’s blood supply, a condition called ischemia. The principal symptom is the rapid onset of testicular pain. Irreversible ischemia begins around six hours after onset and emergency diagnosis and treatment is required within this time in order to minimize necrosis and to improve the chance of salvaging the testicle.

  Necrosis? Salvaging the testicle? I’m not a doctor, but that doesn’t sound good. Little did I know it, but my twelve-year-old ball was hanging by a thread; a thread that had tied itself in knots.

  From this distance I want to shout to my twelve-year-old self, squirming as he was in the back seat of the car, heading up the Cooma road, in a direction that led away from the nearest hospital: ‘Hey, Richard: say something! Get over the embarrassment. Necrosis could be minutes away.’ But my twelve-year-old self doesn’t hear. He just squeezes his legs tighter and grinds his teeth together and stares out the window, hoping this will pass.

  ‘Irreversible ischemia begins around six hours after onset . . .’

  Perhaps I should enlist the help of any possible future children and get them to shout out to him: ‘Hey, Dad, you really should say something, otherwise your balls will die and with them any hope of us being born.’

  ‘. . . diagnosis and treatment is required within this time to improve the chance of salvaging the testicle . . .’

  Back in the car my twelve-year-old self sweats and squirms. He comes close to saying something, but his face flushes red with the thought.

  Perhaps his future wife, should he ever have one, could intercede? ‘Come on, Richard. The day will come when those balls, absurd though they may be in appearance, will be considered with affection by someone, perhaps even by me, so don’t let them turn black just because you are here with these people you don’t really know, having been abandoned by your somewhat peculiar parents.’

  Ah, that seems to have done the trick. Back in the car the twelve-year-old boy overcomes his embarrassment with a sudden yelp of pain. Bette looks around in concern. Stan stops the car. They can see how the blood has drained from the boy’s face. He tells them where it hurts. They turn around the car and head for Canberra Hospital. At the hospital, the doctors administer a general anaesthetic and the pain drops away as the boy counts back from 100: 99, 98, 97, 96 . . .

  My parents must have come down to Canberra to see me in hospital, but I don’t recall their visit. I just remember the doctor as I came out of the anaesthetic. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘I don’t know if you understand what I’m talking about, young man, but if you had been just an hour later then you might have missed out on children of your own.’ I have since checked this with a specialist and his diagnosis may have been overly dramatic, as you’d still have one good ball. Still who wants to look like Hitler?

  Oh, glorious chapter that has an opportunity for two testicle-related ballads:

  Hitler has only got one ball,

  Göring has two but very small,

  Himmler is somewhat sim’lar,

  But poor Goebbels has no balls at all.

  I don’t know why my parents left Sydney and bought the newsagency; in retrospect, it makes little sense. The explanation given at the time was that my father was sick of working for others and wanted his own business. Yet both my parents had good jobs and seemed to relish being part of what passed for high society in Sydney. Perhaps my father’s drinking was starting to build in a way that gave him trouble at work; maybe my mother was having an affair. I have some recollection of angry words between my parents, centred on a particular man, a famous businessman. More likely, though, it was just the allure of money: a couple they knew had a newsagency in Sydney’s Double Bay and had installed their 25-year-old son as the manager. He earned so much money he’d purchased a suit worth $200. That sum of money – $200 – was such an incredible amount for a suit. My parents talked about it endlessly. The newsagency business must be a goldmine to allow the purchase of such a suit. Life twists and turns on the smallest of things and, in all likelihood, it was that suit which sent me to Canberra – and thus to my particular adolescence, my particular school, my particular teachers.

  And, in a way, to a right ball that, ever since, has hung rather low.

  Chapter Two

  After a few months my parents arrived in Canberra. I said farewell to the Hutchinsons with a stab of regret, moving my stuff from the upstairs bedroom, saying goodbye to Honey the dog, the overgrown garden and the snug kitchen. My parents rented a large house with a separate wing – consisting of two rooms and a bathroom – into which I was installed. There was even an intercom to the rest of the house, via which I could be summoned to dinner. This was fun at the time but, as I type this, does seem a rather obvious metaphor for my emotional separation from my parents. I apologise, dear reader, for constructing my childhood from such heavy-handed literary devices. In my next life, I will insist that reality expresses itself through more subtle tropes.

  Sitting in my separate wing, I began to develop a passion for Elvis Presley, bordering on monomania. Looking back, it seems entirely clear that I was reaching out for some sort of father figure, and found one in the most unlikely place: inside a white jumpsuit spangled with rhinestones, satin straining around the belly. With access to a newsagency I would bring home great piles of newspapers and magazines and search out the merest mention of the King. I’d cut out the paragraph and Clag-glue the clipping into a massive scrapbook. Elvis, by this time, was past the height of his fame, so the clippings were meagre: tiny mentions of his films screening at midday on Channel 7, the scraps so small that my painstaking annotations – ‘TV Week, June 26, 1971, page 34’ – took up more space than the clipping itself.

  By the end of that first year at school, my report card put it bluntly: ‘W
hen the adulation of Elvis Presley diminishes (the sooner the better) and Richard’s energies are channelled to more constructive ends, his overall performance will improve further.’

  I’m aware you’ll think this is an attempt at comic exaggeration, so I’ve scanned in the report so you can see for yourself:

  Alas, by the start of the second year of school, my obsession with Elvis had grown even stronger. The walls of my separate wing were papered over with Elvis posters and record sleeves. I insisted on completing a school project on Elvis in which I displayed photographs and text around the headline: ‘1954 to 1972 – 16 great years of Rock and Roll’, my skill at Letrasetting proving superior to my talent for mathematics.

  At this point I moved into a class with a new English teacher: Mr Phillipps. In a Canberra private school in the 1970s, he was everybody’s image of an old-fashioned British academic. The final two ‘p’s in his name seemed to pprove it. He would address each student as ‘old boy’ and endlessly read aloud from his collection of ancient Penguin paperbacks. In retrospect, I can see he was pretty delighted by his own sonorous voice and upper-class accent. Mr Phillipps certainly gave his voice, and his credentials, a real workout. Rather like my mother, he was a ‘lavatory’ man. And a ‘sofa’ man. And a ‘spectacles’ man. He had wiry dark hair and a clipped DH Lawrence-style beard, like it was copied from the photo of Lawrence on the back of the Penguin paperbacks he was reading. Summer and winter, he would wear an ancient blue jacket onto which was stitched the crest of the Oxford college he had attended decades before, teamed with fawn trousers and an Oxford tie. He would mention, quite often, that he had been personally taught by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Occasionally, on a sports day, the jacket would be exchanged for a white cable-knit jumper, also bearing an Oxford logo – one which, he said, indicated he had a ‘blue’. In the Australian schoolyard of the ’70s a ‘blue’ still meant an argument, normally involving fists, but we did our best to look impressed.

  He was precise in all things. He’d move slowly, deliberately, whatever the task, as if he was enjoying his own body and the elegant way it moved. I remember watching him, one day after school, approach his car. First he placed his briefcase on the bonnet. Then he opened the latch of the briefcase. Each of these was a separate movement, with a conscious and deliberate beat in between. Next he fished down into the briefcase – separate movement – located the keys and pulled them out – separate movement – set them on the bonnet – separate movement – relocked the bag – separate movement – and finally reached for the door. It’s not that it took him ages to drive off, just that every stage was somehow self-regarding.

  For all that, he was passionate about his subject. An example: when I was thirteen, he became concerned about my progress with Shakespeare. In the middle of Year 8, he suggested he could give me extra lessons. He offered to meet me each Saturday morning in a small office close to our classroom. I agreed. For all my difficulty understanding Shakespeare, I loved reading and I loved writing. And so our arrangement began: I would cycle from home on Saturday mornings, arrive at school at nine, and be treated to a couple of hours of free, private tuition. Canberra, in midwinter, was cold. Cycling meant a scarf wrapped around my head, a slit for my eyes, like I was wearing a hairy burka. My hands would sting as they gripped the handlebars, my eyes streaming with the cold. I was a martyr to literature. Yet I felt lucky to have been offered this doorway into a sophisticated, literary world.

  Mr Phillipps was a patient teacher, encouraging me to recall and explain Shakespeare’s plots. After a few weeks, we naturally moved on to a study of Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist of the seventeenth century. Pepys famously detailed the Great Fire of London as well as the bubonic plague of 1666. For a thirteen-year-old, his diary was a revelation. He wrote so vividly, the personal and the political in perpetual collision. Building on my enthusiasm, Mr Phillipps suggested I write my own diary. I loved the idea, scribbling my thoughts day by day into a small exercise book. On subsequent Saturday mornings Mr Phillipps and I would critique and analyse what I had written. Had I made the same decisions as Pepys? Was my writing as powerful as his?

  It was only later, a lot later, that I realised the whole thing had been a ruse. Actually, quite a cruel one.

  Meanwhile, in a piece of perfect timing for my parents, the Whitlam government was elected. The public service grew in size and Canberra boomed. The newsagency was raking in money. My father could have bought $200 suits every day. We moved from the rented house with the separate wing and bought a smaller but very chi-chi house on the same street as The Lodge, the official residence of the prime minister. The house had been owned by the man who ran Canberra’s Lobby restaurant, a favourite haunt of politicians and journalists. It looked like a decorator had been hired to fit out both business and home. The interior design hovered in some weird 1970s combination of hippy retreat and upmarket brothel. Several of the doors featured sheets of heavy, patterned glass, covered in ruby-coloured swirls. The wallpaper was burnished to look like metal and there was white shag-pile carpet throughout. Later, when things turned nasty and bloodstains became an occasional problem, this turned out to be a poor choice of floor covering.

  Despite their disregard for each other, my parents’ lives were working out in a material sense. They purchased a small rural property outside Canberra, my mother happily naming the cows and playing the gentlewoman farmer on Saturday afternoons. She was both an animal lover and a cleanliness obsessive and so took to wearing white cotton gloves whenever she went near the animals. In fact, she started wearing the gloves whenever she left the house. My father began dressing like a country auctioneer, in tweed jackets and a knitted tie. He saw himself as Lord Ted – a Lancashire man who’d done well and could jovially splash around his money. The extra-wide hallway in our new house was optimistically renamed the ‘Gallery’ and kitted out with outback oil paintings by people like Pro Hart and Hugh Sawrey. My father insisted on buying me a made-to-measure suit for my fourteenth birthday, even though my body was changing by the month. And he began purchasing sports cars so expensive they never worked.

  The main activity I shared with my father was helping him count the family cash: he’d bring home bags of coins each day from the newsagency and we’d sit together at the kitchen table, rolling them into batches so they could be presented to the bank. Despite my somewhat difficult childhood, this book is not Angela’s Ashes and here’s why: it’s hard to win sympathy from a reader once you’ve included the phrase ‘every night my hands were black from counting the family money’.

  When not counting coins, I spent a lot of time away from the house – either with my friends or walking on my own in a dreamy adolescent way, hands stuffed into the pockets of my overcoat, imagining myself a tortured intellectual. While walking, I would talk to myself. I enjoyed the chance, I suppose, to converse with someone whose intellectual ability I found so impressive. I was regularly stopped and questioned by the police. It was hardly surprising: I would be walking past the embassy of some troubled country in a padded greatcoat, mumbling inanities. After a few questions, the police would realise I was merely a self-involved idiot and send me on my way.

  I was bookish and effete and found a peer group of other would-be intellectuals. We were pretentious and ridiculous, of course, competing with each other as to who would be the first to claim they’d read Camus or Sartre. All I actually read, of course, was my own body weight in PG Wodehouse and Dorothy L Sayers, and yet we were the sort of boys who would give our bedrooms a makeover before the arrival of any visitor: positioning a copy of WH Auden’s poems by the bedside; propping some Brecht open on the desk; and idly dropping a copy of the New Statesman on the middle of the floor. I still have a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra inscribed by my friend Toby: my present for turning fourteen. What twats we were.

  Yet perhaps Toby was prescient in his choice, as a fair measure of Sturm und Drang was about to enter my life.

  David Phillipps had not only been
taking me for special lessons on a Saturday morning, he’d also, a year on, established a ‘drama reading club’, inviting me and my peer group to come to his home and read aloud a classic play. On one occasion it was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; another time something by Chekhov. I don’t recall how often we did this, but I do remember arriving once when Mr Phillipps’ wife was walking away from the house. She was dressed in squash gear, with a racquet in her hand and a pissed-off look on her face.

  It didn’t occur to me to question the point of these classes. Did Mr Phillipps hold these clubs for each age group, or only for those in Year 9? If for Year 9, why was it just me and my friends who’d been invited? We were neither the very top of the class nor the bottom: ‘Oh, yes, it’s those ranked third to fourteenth that I particularly like to help.’

  Equally with my private lessons: I used to come eleventh in English. In what strange world does a teacher suddenly recommend special private lessons for the kid who is coming eleventh? ‘Those kids who come eleventh, they are the ones in whom I specialise.’

  One night, Mr Phillipps appeared at our house for dinner, dressed in his usual Oxford jacket with crest, fawn trousers, blue shirt and Oxford tie. I don’t recall the dinner – tense, presumably – I just remember the explosive moment on the front steps as Mr Phillipps was taking his leave and my father began to warn him off. ‘Don’t come again. I don’t want you making contact with my wife.’ It got heated. A raised voice from my father; pomposity from Mr Phillipps: ‘I say, don’t you dare raise your voice to me.’ There was pushing. Mr Phillipps left and then my father shouted at my mother, grabbing her arm. I stepped between them but he kept yelling, his hand still on her. Effete boy me, I punched my father in the face. He stopped shouting and looked sad. He didn’t punch me back. The whole thing defused. I went walking.