Seasonal guests of friends at their holiday rental, we watched an autistic female detective brave the dark side in a popular TV series probing shadowy secrets, her innate honesty bared, sometimes creating crawling discomfort for her colleagues. When it finished, our hostess suggested a kind of parlour game, taking turns confessing shameful secrets. My mind hovered over how dishonesty rather than honesty is often regarded as proper behaviour. While she brewed more coffee before leading the way I vetted my rap sheet of daft behaviour to admit when my turn was due.
I told them how I buried valuables in the ticking bush above a dry gully where we wallowed in angry misery on my father’s latest failure, a chicken farm. In a tin I stashed tobacco and addresses with money stolen incrementally from a shop where, woefully underpaid, I worked long hours every weekend after enduring school’s day-to-day brutality. So, no time off. My boss, that king of contempt, sneered at my sweaty shirt’s grubby collar, ignorant of future white-collar crime, the takings artfully rung up on the cash register back then always satisfying his tallying at day’s late end.
Teased for using extreme youth and circumstance, also villains, as chastity shields – as if the others weren’t defensive, only in different ways – I didn’t admit that soiled shirt now embarrasses me more than my juvenile theft. When my second, and final, turn came I told of haphazard adulterous meetings, both of us mature-aged students. In a grassy glade, birdsong bittersweet under a wan sun, our cars left parked at the end of a rutted track, we writhed in rapture. Her guilt made her jumpy, and I was in crazy love. Anything could frighten her off, especially an unseen but heard trail biker beyond our treed bower.
BANG! I made them jump, and we laughed as I proceeded with my tale about silence detonated like a machine-gunner taken out by a mortar, her alarmed expression troubling me when I said I must go to offer aid. Helping a slim boy immobilised by shock to support a broken wrist, I reassured him, pushing his bike to his family home secluded some distance away. My lover’s emergence, buttoned and hooked up again, seemed to surprise him, but she was a woman every man noticed, and when his father, suspicious, referred to her as my wife, she glanced at her rings. Had he seen our separate cars? Did he think his son hit the tree because he spotted us?
Lacking a priest in a wee cubicle to absolve us we zoomed along a rollercoaster of adventures, conversation overrunning confession: epic glory overdone, understatement, simulacra due to omission, braided humour, self-contradiction, the creased maps of our past unfolding grandly once more. The subject exception with the others, I noted, was sexuality which they tiptoed around. Though slightly reluctant to begin with, I seemed the most forthcoming. The luminosity of those days, the haul of knowing, is my treasury, not my error. Our hostess, eking out this archaeology of the earlier us, challenged: would you do it all again?
A mopoke observed me disinter my meagre stake, my chained dog that my brother told me howled, still chained as our father later slaughtered it using several bullets, barking at my betrayal under the pockmarked moon. I was fourteen, school-leaving age. After hitch-hiking to our end of the line station I caught the last train to the city, smelling steel, watching squares of light go by. On that train to freedom I nursed fanciful hopes inspired by reading, watching my face’s reflection, fantasising about my future’s stunning success.
The love affair that suffuses me with sadness whenever I recall it ended badly like that boy’s bent trail bike ending our tryst. I try to imagine the boy older now, not so slim. Does his wrist sometimes ache, catching him off-guard, reminding him of us, faceless now, ghostlike, perhaps once the butt of coarse remarks? Did his father sense a charged atmosphere about us? Is that boy aware of risks’ consequences that take years to understand, the rush he felt, energy once pulsating beneath him? Does he yearn to have that time again?
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