Whole Wild World Read online

  Many of the adults I knew, including Mama, had an assortment of gold and silver teeth. Perhaps it was a hedge against inflation after the oil shock. Still, I wondered if the metallurgist who did the teeth for Jaws in the Bond movies also looked after Croatians. I had never visited a dentist. But after toothache and cosmetic concerns, Tata asked around for a suitable practitioner. He settled on a guy called Boris – that’s how desperate we were.

  On a Saturday, Tata took me to Boris’s surgery, a corner house, on a street not far from Mascot airport. The brass plaque had an unfamiliar surname. No ‘ic’ to be seen.

  ‘Isn’t this guy Croatian?’ I asked with trepidation.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s really good.’

  The receptionist showed us into a dimly lit space, much larger than a doctor’s surgery, more like a den. A large, wolf-like man, resplendent in a pure white smock, was sitting at a desk, smoking a cigar. What’s he doing? Is this the right place?

  ‘Dobar dan.’

  Yet Boris didn’t sound like a native speaker, not even one from the islands. My enquiries revealed he was actually from Bulgaria, a country whose mere mention would set my mind off with intimations of spies, dissidents, assassinations and my own trauma with a pointy black umbrella at Adelaide Street.

  ‘Sit in chair,’ he said, still holding the smouldering stogie.

  Even though the room had a clubby ambience, I was shaking. Boris had all the equipment I imagined they used in Soviet torture chambers. I sat down and fell back in the reclined chair. Boris turned on a lamp, blinding me. I’d lost track of Tata, who was showing the piss-weak deference my parents had in the company of all professional people. Boris, now a slow-moving silhouette, wasn’t exactly rude, just firm, like he knew what he was doing or how to get his way.

  ‘Open mouth.’

  He put the cigar in an ashtray and dispatched a long, robust index finger as a scout. I could taste the cigar: spicy, bitter and strong. But there was also a pungent antiseptic on his fingers. I tried not to gag or bite his digit as he rummaged around in my teeth locker.

  ‘Hmmmm. Very bad. Hmmmm. Okay. No problem.’

  Working fast, he further prised open my mouth and then started knocking teeth out with a pneumatic finger. Bang. Bang. Bang. Out they came, one by one.

  ‘Goodbye to baby teeth.’

  He’d taken half a dozen out, then switched method. Was this how dentists worked? Using his thumb and forefinger like a pair of pliers, he began wiggling and jiggling the surviving teeth, huddled in a dark corner of my mouth. He yanked out a few more. Dink, dink, dink, they went in a metal bowl, forming a bloodied heap of pearls.

  ‘Drink. Spit here.’

  It felt like I was in hospital again, disoriented and wracked with pain. Holes everywhere. How would I ever eat again? Boris grinned and came in close, his cigar breath all over me. He jammed cotton between my lips and gums to soak up the mess.

  ‘Next Saturday come again. Bring his brother.’

  Boris refurbished our mouths over six blood-soaked weeks, giving us needles, using proper drilling and extraction tools. Still bleeding when the anaesthetic wore off mid-afternoon as we watched the VFL on TV, we’d cry for hours. Every Saturday, Tata bought us Pizza Hut, a non-Croatian delicacy we gummed like infants.

  One summer evening when my godparents were over with their sons, we played hide and seek outside, well past dark. On a run back to the ‘B-A-R, bar’ one of the boys said he saw a man hiding in the hedge at the front of our house. Clearly strangers weren’t part of the game so we bolted inside to tell the adults.

  Tata, my kum Ante and an uncle came out to investigate.

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘Under there, near the fence.’

  We’d brought a flashlight.

  ‘There. There, there he is.’

  Like a possum we’d caught the man’s dark eyes in the light. He was scrunched in tight under the branches of the hedge.

  ‘Jozo’. The man was clearly calling Tata, even though my father’s name was Joso.

  ‘Go inside now, boys. Leave us out here.’

  After fifteen minutes the men came back in the house.

  ‘Who was it? Do you know him? Why is he hiding? Is he a prisoner on the run? Are the police coming?’ I wanted answers and action. There was murmuring among the adults, farewells, and then our visitors went home.

  ‘It’s late,’ Tata said. ‘You boys go to bed and we’ll talk about it in the morning.’

  ‘But who is it? Has he gone? Why does he know you? Can’t you just tell us who the man is and why he was hiding in the bushes?’

  The next morning a small, tanned man was sitting at our kitchen table, wearing one of Tata’s shirts, which fit him like a tent.

  ‘Dobro jutro Tommy.’ The man who said good morning knew me as well. ‘Do you remember me?’

  I looked hard but he was out of context, so I shook my head.

  ‘Rudy,’ he said, putting out a small, rough hand and unfurling his weathered face and eyes. I knew that name, but not this man, who was shrunken, a scraggy marsupial.

  ‘Mary and Ineska’s father. We lived next door to you at Adelaide Street.’

  The voice was defeated, his eye sockets missing spark plugs.

  ‘Hello.’ I sensed asking about the girls was the wrong thing to do. I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Okay,’ Tata said. ‘Get ready for school.’

  In the car Tata told us Rudy didn’t want to come in the house last night, so he slept outside. They’d given him cushions and a blanket; Mama cooked eggs for his breakfast. He’d slept rough in that tight spot a few nights but no one had seen him until one of the boys tried to hide in the hedge. Rudy wouldn’t take money at first, so Tata asked him to do odd jobs around the house and insisted on paying him. By the time we got home from school Rudy was gone.

  ‘He said he was going to Queensland where he could get work because he knew people there,’ Mama said.

  ‘What about Ineska and Mary?’

  ‘I don’t know where they are and neither does Rudy. Eva kicked him out of the house years ago because he drank too much.’

  There was no joking about the way Rudy used to sway. I tried to take it all in but I was haunted by the image of how haggard Rudy had become, and that he was sleeping on the streets and didn’t seem to own anything. But there was pride in the way he wouldn’t accept money. I found an odd comfort that he chose to shelter at our place, that my parents had a stable home.

  A few weeks later, I answered the phone. A police officer asked to speak with my father or mother. I froze, wondering if I’d done something to warrant a call from the law. Tata spent a few minutes talking to the officer. When he got off the line Tata was serious but wistful. Police had found Rudy’s body near the railway tracks. Dead, probably hit by a train. Our phone number was in his wallet; the police were trying to fill in the gaps and to contact his loved ones.

  9

  Employed at last

  On Friday evenings our milkman collected money from customers who took their dairy on weekly credit. Daylight saving time meant we were still playing cricket when Stan came calling at 7.30. Noticing us in the backyard, he asked Mama whether the bigger boy would like a job with him. They called us over and asked Sam.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said, too quickly it seemed to me.

  ‘Can I do it?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eleven, but I’ll be twelve after Christmas.’

  Stan looked at Mama, who looked at me, and I looked at him, standing up at my full height.

  ‘Okay, let’s give you a try. Wait out the front of your house tomorrow morning at 6.30.’

  Mama woke me at 6.15. I wasn’t a swimming squad kid, but in an instant I’d changed into a 1974 World Cup Socceroos T-shirt, tracksuit top, black Stubbies, running shoes without socks. Stan parked at the front of our place, opened a roller door on his truck. Dressed in a brown V-neck jumper with holes in it, shorts and no-club footy
socks, he looked older and smaller than he did last night. I wanted to make a good impression, suppressing a yawn. He unloaded a buggy with dragster wheels that was hanging at the rear, and stacked it with milk crates.

  ‘Follow me.’

  He charged through the front gate of the flats, carrying a rack of eight 600-ml glass bottles.

  ‘When you see an empty bottle replace it with a fresh one and take the empty away. If people want an extra bottle they’ll leave a note, like this one.’

  It said: ‘2 btls pls’. Who could be in such a hurry to send the milkman a telegram? There were people who paid every day and left coins under the empty.

  ‘Some people put the money inside the empty so keep your eyes open,’ he said. ‘It’s not hard, just keep moving, but don’t run. Ask me if you’re not sure of something.’

  We did the two levels of the flats and the units behind.

  ‘Okay, now do your house and the place next door.’

  We took one bottle a day, sometimes two. I went next door carting a full rack and soon learnt I could leave it at the front gate.

  ‘You keep going down this side of the street and I’ll do the blocks of flats. I’ll bring the truck down later.’

  We did the rest of Chalmers Street, then Kent and York Streets, which had a dozen blocks of flats. I had the knack and began taking two steps at a time in the flats. A sweaty bottle slipped through my fingers and shattered in a stairwell. I told Stan.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll use the broom to clean it up, you keep going up this side of the street.’

  Stan didn’t have time to talk but he was patient. We got in the truck and he drove me around the corner back to my place. I’d not been in a car with a stranger since my zebra-crossing tumble but I wanted to show him I was mature, even though I wasn’t.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, handing me a 2 note. ‘And help yourself to one of those.’ There was a crate full of flavoured milk. I grabbed a 300-ml Peter’s chocolate carton, the standard size in those days. I’d completely forgotten about getting paid.

  ‘Same time tomorrow morning.’

  Employed at last!

  It was just before 8 on a Saturday morning. I sat on the porch and opened the milk, two bucks tucked into the buttoned front pocket of my Stubbies. I’d graduated from being a kid to someone with a job, in an economy with double-digit unemployment. It was the school holidays and I kept up the pace, getting better, knowing where to find the money, anticipating demand door-to-door.

  Wally asked Stan if he could have a job, too. We started doing the run together. Stan couldn’t cope with Seneka, so he called him ‘Santa’. Wally was a name used only by boys in our street. Rather than halving our pay Stan paid us 1.40 each (plus a flavoured milk); it meant we’d finish earlier. By the time school started and we moved into Year Seven, as it was now called, we arranged solo shifts to alternate days, getting home just in time to change and make it to school.

  I was peering into other lives. I would soon learn which people were thoughtful (washing out the bottles), on a diet or away on holidays. I got to know about skim milk, sour cream and yoghurt, and why the Lebanese people down the street would often order a dozen bottles of milk (they were making their own delicacies). This snoop’s window was a bonus whenever a young woman, still waking, came to the door in a nightie to collect milk. Or my clinking noises brought one into the hallway with a purse. A couple of times I glimpsed a boob, imagining I had seen more as soon as the woman was gone. It was early-morning Number 96.

  When it came to selling school raffle tickets or getting sponsors for the walkathon I had a running start. I knew the people who splashed out on luxuries and where the spunky women lived. It was exciting, too, given I wasn’t afraid to go cold-calling. I was recognised and it gave me an edge.

  ‘Are you the milkman’s son?’ asked a semi-dressed man, wallet in hand when I disrupted him mid-afternoon, a woman’s voice calling from within the flat: ‘Who is it, love?’

  ‘No, I work for Stan. But would you like the chance to win a holiday to Queensland?’

  The money I earned on the milk run was spent on clothes at sports shops, at the movies and on records, which we played loudly while Teta Danica was at work. I didn’t expect Mama and Tata to buy special items for us outside the Christmas– birthday cycle, which for me was so cramped I could not realistically expect two big presents. Tata was a tough nut to crack, when all I’d ever wanted was a snooker table, table-tennis table, bike, surfmat, surfboard, guitar, drums, record player, tape recorder, footy boots and shoulder pads.

  Never all at once.

  ‘Please Tata please, pulleeeeeez Tata.’

  ‘Police?’ he’d reply, every single time, his head jerking around as if to spot imaginary cops. ‘Where are the police? Why are the police coming? Did you call the police?’

  It taught me self-reliance through exasperation. I’d often wondered if Tito had fast-tracked Joso’s exit from Yugoslavia for bad jokes and annoying ditties. In any case, with cash hoarded in my cigarette box, I should have been in a pre-teen’s nirvana. But I wanted more, just as Wally described it one day while we were sitting in the gutter at the front of the flats.

  ‘Man, I’m set,’ he said, having taken delivery of a racing bike to replace his Brumby dragster. ‘I got wheels, I got bread, now all I need is a fine lady.’ He spoke unselfconsciously in a kid’s mash-up of a beatnik daddy-o and Barry White.

  Sam and I didn’t have the wheels or fine ladies, but we had restless feet and a ticket to roam. Even before I’d turned ten we were free to explore the city during the school holidays or go to Roselands shopping centre, about 3 kilometres away. Roselands was the first multi-level mall in Australia, over three storeys with a food court that had outlets such as London Roast, Red Dragon and Chuck Wagon. We thought people from all over Sydney, maybe even the world, went there because the PA announcements would never feature any place we’d ever heard of – and we’d been everywhere: ‘Mrs Hogan from Allambie Heights, your son is waiting for you at the information desk on the ground floor’.

  The locus of spirituality at Roselands was the Raindrop Fountain, a tropical open-air diorama with beads of liquid falling down taut nylon fishing lines into a pool against a background trill of birdsong. It was the ‘closest thing to Disneyland in the Southern Hemisphere’, I heard a woman say, speaking with the authority of one who must have seen the original. Tata and I would sit and study this marvel of the imminent leisure society, this conveyor belt of repose, each of us with a childlike wonder; the combination of artifice and tranquillity was mesmerising. It was art and science, as if God were market-testing a new feature in nature.

  ‘Does it ever stop raining?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Tata speculated. ‘The water collects in the pool and is recycled back to the top.’

  ‘But it’s so quiet, you can’t hear the motor going.’

  ‘That’s because of the noise of water trickling into the pool.’

  ‘Wow.’

  Shopping for us was secondary to people-watching, observing the faces and movements of families riding an escalator for the first time. That, too, seemed like an engineering feat as metal steps flattened out perfectly – then disappeared – and riders had to make sure they weren’t caught flat-footed to hop off without a stumble.

  Sam and I quickly outgrew Roselands. Our cousin George had given us a thirst for the city, a tour of arcades and subterranean record stores, and the confidence to explore it on our own. The West Indies were touring that summer and six hours of cricket was really a ten-hour haul considering the walking and rail journeys involved. The night before we froze a couple of two-litre bottles of cordial to last us the whole day. We weren’t big eaters but still packed two days’ worth of food. At the SCG we sat in the Sheridan and Brewongle stands, which were general admission, in shade the entire day.

  We avoided The Hill. The previous year at our first Ashes Test, we’d watched Lillee and Thommo – okay, they were so quick you cou
ldn’t actually see the ball – demolish the Poms. We wandered around the ground. On The Hill, shirtless, sunburnt men went ape when girls walked past. There were drunken fights with cans and fists atop a shanty town’s garbage heaps. In this series, which we’d already won by the SCG Test, the Windies were off their game.

  For my twelfth birthday we went to see Jaws, bringing to a close a season of disaster movies starting with Earthquake (whose Sensurround sound at the Forum had sent people scurrying from the theatre into the street according to the Sun) and the Towering Inferno (which we went to twice in a week). On these jaunts I put myself in Sam’s safe hands. After all, he was a world traveller, guiding Teta in distant lands. Being a follower meant I didn’t bother with the details of which bus to catch or what side of the platform to wait for a train. Sam was not only a film buff – a penchant for movies with a classification several years ahead of his age – he knew the precise location of every cinema: Lyceum, Plaza, Regent, Rapallo, Barclay, Paris, Century, Ascot and State. He’d mastered the walking routes from Central, away from the hordes, through the back streets of Surry Hills to the SCG, Hordern Pavilion and Showground.

  I’d been given the gift of the ideal big brother. I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. It gave me licence to daydream and gaze, get lost in my head, knowing Sam would lead us to where we had to be, buy tickets, ration our money, get us home on time. Such matters never entered my head.

  The first occasion we went to the Royal Easter Show on our own, we lost track of time and arrived at Belmore station after nine on a Saturday night. Teta Danica was waiting at the top of the steps for us. Not a lovely surprise; she’d been there for hours after pestering our parents to mercy-dash into town to find us at the Show (they stayed put). She walked behind us all the way home, yammering in the dark – no more Easter eggs, you’re the worst kids ever made, I’ve been sick with worry – yapping at our heels like an angry farm dog, until we were inside the door.

  ‘You never should have had children if you don’t know how to discipline them or know where they are,’ she yelled at Tata.