Louis Beside Himself Read online

  Maybe the thing that happened to my dad was so awful it burned into his heart and stayed there. Maybe it was like being branded with a red hot poker, only from the inside. I get an ache in my abdominals whenever I think of it.

  ABOUT a year ago, Dad came home all excited one night because he’d just had a visit from his new client, a famous old wrestler called The End. The End was about to retire and he’d asked Dad to manage his millions. But Dad wasn’t excited because he saw dollar signs glowing up there like neon lights. Oh no, he was ECSTATIC and EBULLIENT because The End had shown him how to do the Discus Leg Drop.

  ‘Look at this!’ Dad cried. He jumped in the air, spun three hundred and sixty degrees and shot out his leg, which was supposed to land on some poor guy’s chest. Instead, his leg hit the kitchen chair, which stabbed into the wall leaving a big dark mark and a golf-ball-sized dent.

  ‘Well, needs a bit of practice,’ he panted. ‘If you want to be good at anything, Louis, if you want to be best at something, you’ve got to practise. The End was just telling me about it. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘success is ninety-nine per cent perspiration, one per cent inspiration.’ He sat down and rubbed his knee.

  ‘Do you want a nice cup of tea?’ I asked, going over to the kettle.

  ‘Love one,’ he said, picking up his newspaper. ‘You need to know how to do the Discus Leg Drop, Louis. Really, everyone does. Hopefully you won’t ever have to use it to defend yourself, but you never know. Look at this headline, for instance – a teenage party in Melbourne last night – two hundred gatecrashers, a fight. Oh, it’s enough to give you nightmares. They say if you have a party these days you have to hire security, and register with police . . . gatecrashers, what is the world coming to? That reminds me, have you started on our gate? I showed you how to fix the screws in the latch, remember? A boy needs to know how to get his hands dirty, Louis, I’m always telling you . . .’

  I brought the tea over and casually glanced at the book I’d been reading (about a pirate who hated weevilly bread and longed for a soft bed and a good story) but I nodded at Dad and smiled to show him I was listening. I wished sometimes people would do the same for me.

  Dad took just one sip of his tea before he leapt up and started in again. ‘Okay, take up your position opposite me. Get a spin on you before you swing your leg.’

  Half-heartedly, I twirled around a couple of times.

  Dad let out an uff! of frustration. ‘You look like a ballet dancer with a bad back.’

  I stopped, struck. ‘Hey, that’s alliteration, Dad – you know, when words start with the same letter? Bad, back, ballet – very good!’

  ‘Oh for crying out loud,’ said Dad. ‘How can I get through to you? Look, there’ll come a time when you’ll have to stand up for yourself, Louis. Say one of those thugs comes after you or your sister – what will you do, advise him on his vocabulary?’

  I sat down again. This was going to take a while. I thought wistfully about the apple cake that Rosie had put in the fridge.

  ‘A fight can spring up anywhere – you think you know someone, Louis, and then wham – they can turn on you. You have to be prepared. Practise a move enough, you’ll see, it’ll become a reflex.’

  ‘Do you want some cake with your tea?’ I couldn’t resist any longer. ‘I’m getting some.’ I found some cream at the back of the fridge to go with it. ‘In my opinion, Dad, good communication is underrated as a survival tactic. At least in this house,’ I muttered.

  Dad shook his head. ‘Oh yeah? And what would you do in the ring, talk your way out?’

  ‘The whole world isn’t a boxing ring, Dad,’ I reminded him. ‘See, right there is your problem.’

  Dad looked at me gloomily, not bothering to answer. When the cake was finished, he left the room in silence.

  You see? This is what I do. I don’t mean to. It’s just the way it is. I disappoint people. Simply by opening my mouth.

  The memory of Dad’s drooping shoulders as he walked away hung in the doorway. I pictured him floating there for a while, like a permanent ripple in a pond. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I wandered off into Rosie’s room.

  I knew she was busy. She was doing a big assignment on Shakespeare’s Hamlet – a tragedy about a guy who’s MAJESTICALLY disappointed in himself. Right then, I reckoned I knew how he felt. Maybe I could give her a few tips?

  ‘No thanks,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Or just a loan of some tragic-type adjectives?’

  Her back hunched with irritation. Any minute her shoulders would droop too.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said quickly. But somehow, I couldn’t quite leave. I stood hovering near her desk, trying to breathe quietly. Her fingers clacked steadily at the computer.

  Next to the desk was the yellow plastic crate that used to be her toy box. I trailed my fingers through her old picture books, birthday cards, artwork from kindy, and picked out a photo album. At the second page a loose photo, a little dog-eared, fell out.

  Dad, Mum and Rosie. They were standing in the garden, all three beaming into the sun. Dad’s arm was around Mum’s shoulders, and Rosie was wrapped around her leg. She only came up to Mum’s thigh – she would have been two, maybe, nearly three. Dad’s face looked startled as well as happy. I bet he’d placed the camera on the table and clicked the Get Ready button, dashing back into place for the click. The sunny day, Rosie’s toys scattered about, the bright grass . . . they all looked so pleased with each other, so close, they could have been three beads threaded on a string.

  I turned the photo over. ‘The Montgomery Family’, said Dad’s neat printing. Even his writing looked happy.

  I groaned.

  ‘What now,’ said Rosie. Her voice didn’t go up at the end as if she really wanted to know.

  I pushed the photo under her nose. ‘Look at this. Happy families – you couldn’t get a happier snap, could you? See, before I was born everything was rosy. Ha! And then – it’s like . . . I’m a jinx or something, a CURSED CREATURE.’ ‘Oh put a sock in it,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t know what it’s like. You’ve never been a disappointment. School captain in primary, maths champion last year . . . you got the swimming medal in Grade 4 – same day I had to be rescued from Singo’s paddling pool.’

  Rosie snorted. ‘You just need to try harder at things that don’t come naturally, that’s all. Like algebra. You know what Dad says, ninety-nine per cent and all that.’

  ‘Yeah, but what if the things don’t come at all? I mean, I try to do things, but right from the beginning I know I’ll mess it up, so I get all tense and my brain freezes and then I do it badly . . . so I don’t want to try it again . . . if you know what I mean.’

  Rosie smiled. ‘Funny, that’s Hamlet’s problem – he thinks too much, too.’

  ‘Well, but nothing seems a problem to you!’

  ‘Fat lot you know.’

  ‘It’s like, I’m so different to everyone in this family.’

  Rosie rolled her eyes. ‘What, so now you’re gunna say you’re adopted? Well, you’re not, okay?’

  ‘I know. But you and Dad are so good at maths and sport – it runs in the family.’ I turned away, heading for the door. ‘Just think how much Dad would’ve loved a wrestling champion for a son . . . instead of me.’ I glanced back at Rosie to see if she agreed, but she didn’t look up.

  ‘Close the door behind you, Lou, I’ve got a heap of work to do.’

  SINCE I was about five, Dad has tried to train me and my reflexes by leaping out suddenly from behind doors at any time of the day or night, pinning my arms and folding me over like an envelope. When he’s got me down, he does a Walls of Jericho or a Five Star Frog Splash, which is a specialty of the wrestler Rob Van Dam, who has shoulders like boulders. Actually the Frog Splash is about the only move I’ve ever enjoyed.

  When I was smaller, Dad would lie on the bed in just the right plank position, with his arms by his sides (that’s very important). I’d start at the end of the hallway
, to get a good run up, and when he shouted Go! I’d hurl into his bedroom and jump on him. You have to do this sort of curled-up spring in midair before you actually land, like a pogo stick gaining extra bounce. When you land, your arms and legs splay out and your chest hits theirs. Of course, you take most of your weight on your arms. You wouldn’t just arrive on your dad’s chest like a bomb. Afterwards, we got to lie there a moment, without wrestling. Sometimes there were enough moments for me to tell him about a new word I’d found, or a story, if it was short.

  It’s not like Dad never reads, though. He buys Did You Know? books and lots of books about how to bring up boys. There’s Don’t Worry, He’ll be Fine and The Trouble with Boys and If You’re Okay, He’s Okay. Ever since Mum died he’s tried to be both Mum and Dad to me and Rosie. Books tell him what kids need, and also other useful facts like how the pupil of the eye expands as much as forty-five per cent when a person looks at something pleasing, and how Queen Cleopatra of the ancient Egyptians sometimes wore a fake beard while performing her duties. He tells me this kind of information when I’m down on the ground in a Jericho hold, and it helps pass the time while I count out the seconds.

  Dad likes to read so that he can learn about places in the world he can’t see, whereas I like to read to see if anyone else is like me. You can find heaps of family in books – brothers and mothers and cousins and aunts – and see people living in all kinds of different ways. Take my favourite book of all time, Gus Attack, which is about this orphan boy, Gus, who lives in a tent with his flatulent brother – just the two of them. Gus hates the winter and the leaking canvas roof and the fact that he can’t get away from his flatulent brother’s gas. Just that word, FLATULENT, makes me and my friend Singo crack up. I love it when we laugh at the same time. It’s REASSURING, because when other people find the same stuff funny, you don’t feel so alone.

  3

  THE FRIEND RAP

  Do you want to know what I think? I think everybody feels lonely sometimes, even if they do have a mother. That’s something my best friend Singo says.

  Singo says his mother is obsessed too, like my Dad. Not about wrestling but about Germs.

  ‘Did you wash your hands, Louis Montgomery?’ is the way she has greeted me ever since I was four. According to Singo’s mum, germs are our invisible enemies, and thus even harder to strangle than serial killers. Singo reckons he prefers my dad’s kind of enemies, because at least we have fun trying winning moves to conquer them.

  ‘Your only defence is the singlet,’ Singo’s mum reminds him each morning. She sees the singlet as a bulletproof vest, the only barrier between her son and the wicked wind bringing cold and flu germs. That’s where Singo got his nickname. His real name is James Brown, but think of him as Singo, if you like. I do.

  Watching Singo, I can see how a mother’s worries can get passed on, just like her brown hair or blue eyes. All during Grade 2 Singo used to fret about the coming of another ice age. He grieved for the dinosaurs that got stuck right in the middle of it – so unfair, he said, when their poor mothers hadn’t evolved enough to knit them singlets.

  Singo and I met way back in preschool. I was extremely impressed by Singo’s laugh, which starts off silent, then explodes into strange sounds, like he’s laughing in a foreign language.

  By the way, imagine how spectacular it would be to know a real second language with, say, another three hundred words to put in your notebook? Rosie says it’d be tragic if I took up another language, as with such an EXPANDED vocabulary I’d never shut up so she’d have to kill me and it would ruin her whole life having to go to jail, where she couldn’t ever learn to be a disc jockey.

  It’s funny what people worry about, and what makes them happy. For example, old Singo was so happy the year he found out about the fungus Penicillin. But he was SHATTERED the next year, when he heard about Cryptococcus neoformans, the fatal fungus. ‘Cryptococcus lurks in our very own bush!’ he told me, his voice breaking with terror. ‘It’s a microscopic yeast-like fungus that hides under the bark and in the hollows of eucalypt trees. You can breathe it in and get tumours!’

  I wrote TUMOURS down in my notebook. Then I went home and looked up the fatal fungus on the internet. It was bad, but not nearly as bad as Singo thought. I told him, ‘Only about twenty cases of illness a year, and hardly anyone ends up dying. There’s just the REMOTEST possibility. Singo?’ But I could tell he’d stopped listening after the word dying. ‘Listen, Dad says you’d be more likely to get killed by a lightning strike while being mauled by a shark in a swimming pool. Just look at the statistics! And if you wash your hands before you eat, you can avoid practically every germ that ever lived.’

  After that Singo got interested in science, and STATISTICS. When his father gave him a microscope for his birthday, he began collecting all kinds of disgusting stuff and smearing it onto the little glass plate that sits under the lens. He studied strands of his hair, pus from my scab, the crust of my scab, the dead beetle that climbed into his sock to expire. He did little squiggly line drawings and recorded what he saw in a special book. I tried to read it once but nearly got RIGOR MORTIS from boredom. That’s because there weren’t many words, mainly statistics.

  Talking of numbers, I actually have not one but two best friends. Hassan is my other best friend. If you want to, you can feel sorry for Hassan – I did, before I got to know him. I mean, I’ll always have EMPATHY for his situation, but after you’ve been with him a while you just feel kind of happy. He’s the sort of person who will always find the good bit when something bad happens, and make you laugh. Like, his sandwich is snatched by Bobby Thornton, and Hassan just shrugs, saying, ‘Lucky he didn’t know about the cake in my bag!’

  I first met Hassan in Grade 4. He came out here from Afghanistan with his uncle – he’d lost his parents in a bomb explosion. He didn’t say much back then, just looked pinched and exhausted as if it took all his energy to get through the minutes in each day without crying.

  He’d been here only a few weeks when our teacher told us that we should each bring in a dish from home for Around the World with Food Day. Hassan brought in a lamb dish, and he was up there at the front of the class trying to explain what was in it and how it was made, peering at this little smudgy list his uncle must have written out for him. He was trying to read and not cry, and duck Bobby Thornton’s moronic comments, when he got stuck trying to pronounce a particular word. He was talking about a spice, I understood that much, and suddenly I knew what he was trying to say.

  Rosie had talked about spices all the time when she was into cooking curries, and I remembered her favourite. ‘Cumin – is that the spice you’re thinking of, Hassan?’ I called out. ‘It’s great in curries, right?’ Hassan suddenly smiled, making his face look so different.

  We were both grinning away, and then Elena, a new girl in our class, called out, ‘Spezia, that’s the Italian word for spice!’ Mr Mainprize echoed ‘spezia’ with a very bad accent, opening his mouth wide as if he was at the dentist. Elena laughed, and quick as a blink, Mr Mainprize came out with some rhyming words like basil/dazzle, thyme/sublime. We all started to have a go then, even Bobby Thornton, yelling ‘Elena Spezia, can I sit next-ta-ya?’ And we invented a mad rap about food, with Mr Mainprize never letting us drop the beat, keeping our words running, like stitches sewing up a seam, sewing up the silence, connecting everyone from all around the class, all around the world.

  After that day Hassan came and sat with me. I learned that his uncle, Mady, washed dishes at a restaurant but had actually been a chef back in Afghanistan. Mady didn’t mind about doing the dishes here – he said he was grateful to be alive and well and able to look after his nephew in a safe place where people weren’t fighting and dying.

  Talking of fighting and dying brings me back to the night of the PERIL, when I could have been slain, torn to shreds, and beaten to a bloody pulp. But before I go into the details of this heart-stopping story, you need to know the one significant PHENOMENON that caus
ed it. Well, maybe caused is too strong a word. Let me explain.

  4

  THE PHENOMENON

  It was a Friday night and we were sitting around the table having dinner: me, Dad, Rosie, Rosie’s boyfriend Miles, Singo (whose mother sent him out because his father had a suspicious, possibly infectious cough) and Hassan. We’d just started on our chicken and rice when Hassan suddenly brought up the topic of arm-wrestling.

  Hassan and I have a lot in common, like being mad about his uncle’s dinners and video games and racing Elena to the bus stop and, well, Elena, but one thing we don’t share is a passion for Indian arm-wrestling. Hassan can’t get enough of it when he comes over to our place. And he wants to learn all kinds of moves and holds and slow lethal strangulations. Not that he wants to use them on anyone, he just wants to have the knowledge inside him. He is INSATIABLE, which is a truly wonderful word whose sound goes on and on as if it never wants to end, just like its meaning.

  ‘Mr Montgomery, when you’ve finished your rice, do you think we could have an arm-wrestle? I’ve been practising.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dad, and looked at me meaningfully. See, said his eyebrows, someone is interested.

  ‘Then I’ll give you a go, Monty!’ Miles told Dad, flexing his biceps. ‘Check out these guns!’

  Miles grabbed any opportunity to wrestle with Dad. Maybe this was because he lived with his mum and his Grandma Agnes, who used to be an Ancient History teacher but now believed she was once a cook in ancient Roman times. Miles says Agnes has some kind of old-timer’s trouble that makes her forget who she is in the present, leaving her free to make herself up from the past. Singo and I have discussed this, and I said I thought it might be fun to be Agnes, inventing yourself like a character in a video game – you’d never know what adventure you were going to leap into next. Singo doesn’t agree – he thinks it would be very scary to wake up in your own bed and wonder whose house it was and who was that person snoring next to you. I guess he’s right. ‘But at least,’ said Singo, ‘the disease is not infectious.’