The driveway connecting our house to the street had been tar-sealed once, but the weight of Dad’s work ute, heavy with concrete and/or machines that cut and hammered and welded, had torn the surface apart into gravel, craters and clumps of tar that went as soft as scone dough in the summer.
Jamie, the older ginger kid from round the road who I’m going to tell you about, and the time he did that thing with his penis, he used to help Dad fill in the potholes every now and then, using a shovel in sharp, metallic scrapes you could feel in your teeth.
Mum would stand at the window with her wine in a tea cup, and even if Dad and Jamie had fixed up the driveway, say she hated having to look at that mess. But for Christ’s sakes woman, it’s not like you can unload a tonne of damn gear out the back of the ute for the sake of a pretty driveway every time you want to park in the bloody shed.
Me and John and Andrew and sometimes Jamie found the meanest use for that crusty, pakuru driveway.
What we would do is, we’d ride our bikes from along the footpath on the opposite side of the road and down the driveway so fast the wheels would make the sound of frying luncheon. A split second before you hit the garage door, you would twist the handles to the ground and slam your foot on the brake so the back wheel would gouge crescent scars, stones hitting the tin of the garage door like shotgun pellets.
Sometimes you would skid too far and grind the gravel into your skin, black dots you had pick out with a knife from the kitchen. John used to go home if that happened and bathe his leg or knee or the palm of his hand in Dettol, but Jamie would call him a pussy, so me and Andrew, we’d just keep going. A few days later, the grazes and cuts would turn the bright glaze of wood sap, and then yellow.
If Mum was awake during the day, she’d lean out the window with a trace of dried vomit on her chin, telling us to knock it off you bastards, you know damn well I’m feeling sick today.
If Jamie was with us he’d say that it was her time of the month. He said that if a man broke into our house and found my mum passed out sick he’d do whatever he wanted with her.
I didn’t know what he meant, but I did ask Dad if that was true one night when he was making dinner, slamming a knife through luncheon meat on the chopping board and throwing it into the stew pot with big, wet slaps.
Dad said probably. It was all the useless bitch was good for.
Dad hated cooking, but stew, fry-ups, Rice Risotto, he could use luncheon for anything.
In winter, when the tourists from the backpacker’s up the street complained the most about the smell of sulphur, the driveway was a series of lakes you could smash your bike into, coming up with diarrhoea-coloured water streaming off your face and us all laughing.
John and Andrew were my best mates.
Jamie is who I’m going to tell you about really, though.
Andrew lived sometimes with a cousin and sometimes with his grandma who had had a ‘mastectomy’. That means both her tits were cut off, but it was real stink to say it like that.
Andrew had a Mega Drive he could play as much as he liked, and his grandma would come into the living room to watch us, shaking her head at bouncing hedgehogs and people getting their spines ripped out. She liked it better when we played outside using sticks for swords, rocks and a plank of wood for a cricket set, an old fallen-down fence for a diving board and a hedge for a mattress.
Instead of keeping up with her ‘treatment’, she’d watch us playing and say goodness, you boys can think of a use for everything. After the cancer spread to her spine, Andrew went to live with his cousin and we got three days off school before the funeral. (That’s me, John and Andrew, not Jamie.)
We sometimes rode over to Kuirau Park because there was always something we could use for a game.
At the entrance to the park, there were white signs with big black writing and thick red lines under words like GEOTHERMIC AREA and DO NOT CROSS and greenish-black sulphur stained wooden barriers with nets stretching to the ground, separating walkways from the great plumes of steam wafting up from the boiling pond and mud hotter than burning tyres.
But someone from Finland or Japan or America would walk right past those signs and cross the barriers to get a better photo. The hospital on the hill had special doctors that could cut the skin off someone’s back and sew it over the burnt flesh on a foot or leg. I liked the steam and mud, but not enough to want a photo that bad. Jamie said no cop would ever get your fingerprints off a wallet that was thrown into the pond.
Next to the normal hospital was the mental ward, where Jamie would go and tidy the gardens sometimes to watch the crazies talking to themselves. We once got to watch firemen throwing ropes to a lady who had escaped the ward down into Kuirau Park, where she jumped into the mud. We could see her up to her chest, cooking away, an outline in the steam ignoring the firemen until she did a gentle, sleepy slump forward, face-first into the grey. The nurses at the mental ward were real careful to keep the doors locked after that.
The parents were always talking about how the cops should make themselves useful and dish out a proper hiding to the hookers and homos and teenagers who drank and fornicated in the park on Friday and Saturday nights, but we didn’t mind. There were empty bottles to smash and vomit you could smear onto a stick and chase someone with.
A lost shoe for a boat, an old cigarette packet to keep butterflies caught with a net made from lost pantyhose, these little rubber water balloon thingies left on the ground outside of the toilet block that made a screechy, squeaky whistle when you put them to your lips and blew—we could find a use for anything.
Jamie was older than us but not as old as those teenagers. We would see him with them and they’d call us faggots, sometimes nick one of our bikes or give us a hiding and Jamie would just laugh, as if he never played on the driveway or smashed bottles with us when those older kids weren’t watching.
But this one day, not that long before he did that thing I’m going to tell you about, those kids found a use for Jamie.
We found him by the bamboo on the far side of Kuirau Park, stripped down to his undies, his ginger chicken-claw fingers wringing ten different types of piss out of his clothes, and a group of those kids walking away toward town and laughing so hard you’d swear they were going to piss again.
After that, he mostly hung out with us because we never, ever talked about that. Not for a joke or nothing.
Never.
He was a rake, big flakes of freckles across a round face, topped with bushy hair that stuck out at angles like an old broom you would clean mud off a ute with.
He lived with an uncle he spoke of in words as quiet as breath and as quick as you take a plaster off a scab.
He could score free Cokes out of machines and get into locked cars. Jamie, he could find a use for anything when it came to coat hangers.
We’d be playing pirates, and Jamie would give up hitting the stick you were swinging and belt you. On the ground, your eyes leaking and hand clasped on the puffy streak on your arm or throat, he’d say let’s go check out that street with mostly old people who don’t remember to lock their doors.
You’d be holding the knot on the back of your head from the rock he’d thrown when we were playing war, he’d say let’s go to the dairy with that Indian fulla who was too busy to watch everyone who walked in.
But wiping the blood off your nose from when he shoulder-charged you into a hedge, you wouldn’t feel like playing anymore. No one would. And everyone would go home.
Jamie never went home.
We’d drift off in separate directions and Jamie would either go ask the nurses at the ward if they wanted him to tidy the gardens, or find a house with no cars in the driveway and plenty of big trees shielding it from the road.
Andrew and John and me, we had to be home by dark or we’d get in trouble.
Sometimes you could look out your window and see Jamie doing big circles on his bike in the middle of the street, slow and wide like a seagull circling a picnic, making cars slow down and beep their horns and tell him to get off the bloody road. He would do this long after the street lights had come on and my mum would be singing to her music or telling my dad she couldn’t stand the sight of him.
Because Jamie got us Cokes, because playing with Jamie meant you let off flares from boats that people parked up by the lake and didn’t watch properly, because sometimes we wanted a real rugby ball or skateboard, the bloody noses and rope burns and stones turning your knee or chest a deep purple were soon forgotten.
And because we were always doing what we wanted and never anything Jamie wanted, and because bullrush sux with only this many people and why don’t we do something fun for once, we followed him across the park into the bamboo, using the path as a dragon’s tongue and trying to shove each other into the fire below.
We never said we wanted to go, we never said that. It was just Jamie said he never got to choose a game, but that’s only because he couldn’t think of any good games in the first place. So, we never said that.
Crawling into the bamboo after Jamie into a clearing he had flattened out, he got Andrew, John and me to sit in a circle, dumped a crinkled cardboard box with ‘Maggi 2 Minute Noodles’ stamped on the side, and pulled open the flaps.
He looked around at us, the corners of his lips turned, as if we’d just caught a rock in the chest and he was waiting to see if we’d cry or not.
No one saying anything, and he reached into the box and slapped a magazine with a naked lady on the ground.
All three of us grabbed at it at once and then he dumped out another magazine, and me and Andrew left John with the first one and I had my hand in Andrew’s face and shoved his head back into the broken bamboo, and it was so loud with all of us laughing that Jamie told us we better shut up if we didn’t want to get busted.
Did we have any idea how much trouble we’d be in if we got caught with these?
The pages were as slick as the steel basin in the toilet, the white on the paper so shiny that the sunlight stabbing through the bamboo branches made your eyes hurt, and some of them ripped when you tried to turn them.
Andrew wanted to know where Jamie had got them from.
His uncle.
They were all of ladies showing their private parts, some of them putting things inside themselves.
There is no way we would have ever thought of using lipstick for that.
Then Jamie, you could hear his breathing. He was on his knees, shorts around his ankles, hand gripping his penis and tugging at it like he had a really terrible itch.
We looked at each other, eyebrows as scrunched up as the damp box of magazines and at least I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what was wrong with Jamie.
I wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything, so I went back to looking at the magazines, but I’d had enough of them. They were boring and stupid and let’s just go play bullrush again.
Jamie was panting like a dog on a hot day, and though it was probably rude to look I couldn’t help but turn my head and see his dick in a hand moving so quick it might break off, and I started getting worried he was really hurt and maybe we should go get an adult. But Dad was working, Mum was probably sleeping, Andrew’s cousin didn’t like us asking for anything, and John’s parents might not let the three of us play together anymore if they knew.
John said he was going, but Jamie was in front of the tunnel we’d crawled through and he thumped the bamboo leaves covering the ground like ash with his other hand and told us to just wait, you eggs.
He was grunting louder and louder when Andrew dropped his shoulder and smashed into the bamboo with me and John right behind him, the branches snapping into our arms, chests, and spearing our T-shirts.
Jamie met us on the path, face the colour of blood, and asked where we were going.
In his shorts you could tell he had a stiffy.
Going to play bullrush, Andrew said, holding a cut on his arm. Jamie’s eyes were wide, inflamed the way burned skin turns red, and breathing as if he was biking uphill. Thought we were doing this? he said. You told me you wanted to do this, that’s what you said before.
No we never.
Yes you did, that’s what you said.
John spat. Nah it sux, go wash your clothes yeow piss-boy.
Jamie’s bottom lip quivered like he wanted to give one of us a hiding, or maybe he was going to cry.
We can go get someone, I said. You know, if you’re hurt? Like, an adult or someone?
Jamie’s mouth flopped open. What? And get in trouble for looking at pornos? You better shut up. You want me to tell on you? My uncle doesn’t care, I’m allowed to look at whatever I want. But you lot will get a mean growling. Probably get sent away to a home if I tell the cops.
He had a big, toddler glob of spit hanging off his bottom lip and I was almost really sure he was making it all up, but what if he wasn’t? Who could tell us otherwise?
John shoved him out of the way and we left him standing on the path, rubbing his face with the hand he’d been touching his penis with. He goes, my uncle lets me, I’m allowed.
I turned around to see if he was following, but he was standing there tying up the frayed white cord on the front of his shorts, having trouble with the knot because one side of the cord was really long and the other side was short, and when he pulled on it you could see the outline of his stiffy. Tugging on that cord and swearing, he looked up at me just before the path took us out of sight and he goes, gunna tell your mum? I can get in your house easy if I want, I’ve got a coat hanger. That drunken bitch won’t do anything if I come around when youse aren’t home. She’ll just take it.
I thought of the lady in the magazines with the lipstick.
After Jamie and his penis, none of us felt like playing bullrush, or using real estate signs to slide down the bank by the tracks, or planks of wood for cricket or even cutting up rubber inner tubes for slingshots.
All our games just ended in swearing at each other and a fight and us going home all lonely by ourselves.
I don’t know about John and Andrew, but I had a big, hot lump in my guts, like a chunk of luncheon I hadn’t chewed properly. It made my head ache with all the thinking I did, trying to figure out what I could use it for.