LITMIR.BIZ

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now an active member of the girls’ cricket and hockey teams. She and her friends had budding breasts and thick arms. They openly smoked cigarettes and rode their bicycles everywhere in third gear. Boys were frightened of them.

      A couple of dismal months had to drag by before I could appreciate the benefits of not having parents around. Under the new arrangement, no one knew what time I came home and no one told me what to do when I got there. While I enjoyed this new freedom and the extra television-viewing it permitted, I still craved an audience.

      I’d started taking French at school. It was one of the elective culture lessons set aside for the last hour of every Friday. The choices were limited: debating, charity work, Bible study, crochet or French. When I discovered that boys were excluded from the crochet class, I chose French. It was not only the language of Brigitte Bardot but it also did something nice to the back of my throat. The lesson was taught by a big friendly woman with the unlikely name of Mrs French. Most of the vocabulary we learned was related to food and restaurants: my kind of language.

      Jimmy Budge had also chosen French. He lived around the corner from us in a notorious bungalow in Wallaby Place. People stopped at the Budge hedge and shook their heads. Jimmy’s father was a quiet-spoken widower but a sore point with the mothers of the neighbourhood because he bred and raced pigeons. His birds flew over our houses as a massive cloud to land on his front lawn in a grey flutter of feathers. People didn’t like the pigeons. There was talk of disease and droppings. My father said Mr Budge’s hacking cough was pigeon-fancier’s lung and warned me not to get too friendly with his birds. I liked Mr Budge. He was a vast improvement on Dad. He was a friendly man and never told kids off.

      Jimmy was probably the best-looking boy in our school. His sandy-blond hair was faultless and flopped perfectly over his eyes, which were slightly different colours. He told me that one eye was green with envy because the other was blue. ‘That’s what my father says. He’s got the same genetic defect. Bung eyes and lungs run in the family.’ I started walking home with him after school on Fridays.

      On the third Friday, I stopped in front of our gate and invited him into the garage. ‘You want to see my amphitheatre?’

      I had a feeling about Jimmy Budge. It was the way his eyes had shone when he repeated ‘La cuisine de la France’ for Mrs French.

      I’d created the amphitheatre behind the firewood in the garage. From the outside it looked like a normal stack of wood but inside it was a private chamber with bedding and other personal comforts. It was where I kept my valuables and ate contraband.

      The only way to get inside this secret chamber was to climb up the exposed timber framework of the garage wall and jump. I did this and disappeared from Jimmy’s view. He scrambled up the wall after me and watched as I stripped off my clothes. I was twirling my underpants in my hand when he jumped into the amphitheatre, peeling off his clothes with the efficiency of a German tourist.

      I’d learned all about the German enthusiasm for nudity while staying at the Bland holiday cabin. From a sand hill, I’d observed a couple of tourists prepare for sunbathing by removing all their clothing except for their socks and sandals.

      

      My father should’ve been happy that Mum had a job but he was more disagreeable than ever. Mum said he lacked pizzazz. He certainly had no interest in music or show business. The only celebrities he appreciated were famous thugs who played sports. At least since the Dent diagnosis he’d stopped harassing me about ball games. My Nana Mouskouris confirmed for him that I wasn’t quite right and he now avoided eye contact. This was fine by me. He’d diverted his attention to John who’d come up with the insane idea of becoming a doctor and started doing homework every evening after school. John thought this choice of career made him superior and Dad seemed to agree.

      They could keep each other as far as I was concerned. I had better things to do. Jimmy had put in a word with the distributor of The Bugle and I’d started delivering newspapers with him in the mornings. Within a couple of months I’d lost weight and looked almost normal when I held in my stomach. I had to get up at five in the morning but the job gave me freedom and power. For the first time in my life I had real coinage in my pocket and no longer had to play Dad like a fiddle to get a dollar. I could buy what I liked and be as thankless as I pleased.

      Some of these earnings I invested in a joint project with Jimmy: a fort based in the overgrown conifer hedge of an abandoned house. Only we didn’t call it a fort. We were too mature for that. It was a club. Using Dad’s chicken chopper, we’d hollowed out the hedge to create a spacious inner sanctum. This we furnished with a boat tarpaulin we’d found at the dump and some old cushions my mother was throwing away. We’d then created a ceiling with black polythene and hung some sheets from Jimmy’s house to create a Lawrence of Arabia effect. Our club was both private and secret. The only way to access it was by crawling underneath prickly conifer branches. We made sure no one saw us enter or leave.

      The club became a busy nude and leisure centre after I recruited two boys from school, David Perk and Grant Humber. I’d figured these two out on the sports field. Like me, they regularly forgot their sports clothes and spent the phys. ed. hour in punishment, doing laps of the cricket pitch with a weighted medicine ball. Brother Punt was too stupid to realise that some of us preferred this activity to the real punishment of regular sports. It certainly beat kicking a leather bladder around a football field with a bunch of thugs on our backs.

      As club founders, Jimmy and I got to make the rules. The first thing we did was appoint ourselves to executive posts and give the club a name: the JCJB Club. The next rule was another of my ideas. An entertainment hour was established and club members were obliged to either participate or listen. I got to sing Frank Sinatra and Jimmy did Sammy Davis Jr. Grant Humber could whistle but the only thing David Perk could do was make fart noises by pressing a palm into his armpit and pumping his elbow up and down. A smoking-only policy was also established. I suggested we smoke French brands. Jimmy seconded my motion and we learned to smoke the hard way, choking on filterless Gauloises.

      I was inside the club, dividing a packet into four piles, when I heard David Perk arrive.

      ‘Corkle, let me in.’

      A large, spiky tree branch functioned as the door to the club. It was easy to move from within but almost impossible from outside. This made the club impenetrable to intruders. One intruder I was particularly keen on repelling was John. I didn’t want his sort making reports to Dad.

      ‘Who goes there, fiend or foliage?’

      ‘Corkle, you know exactly who goes here. It’s me.’

      ‘You know the rule. Say the code.’

      ‘I forgot it.’ He was starting to whine.

      ‘No code, no entry. That’s the rule.’

      ‘Pore kwah?’

      ‘That was last week’s.’

      ‘Pore kwah pah?’

      ‘That was also from last week.’

      ‘It’s not fair, you change the code all the time. How can I remember French?’

      I knew by now he’d be hopping from foot to foot with frustration. I’d let him hop a little longer. Perk was our least-appealing club member. He had a sneaky, unconvincing personality and had been cursed with the reddish curly hair and large dollopy freckles that were part and parcel of life as a gingernut. What Perkie lacked was panache. This was almost the same as pizzazz but with the added quality of French sex appeal. Jimmy and I used panache to rate boys at school. On the sexual panache scale I was nine and a half and Jimmy was nine. David Perk was somewhere between zero and one.

      ‘French confuses the enemy.’

      ‘What enemy, you wanker? You’re just trying to be posh.’

      ‘Grow up, Perk.’

      ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Jimmy had arrived and was waiting for the branch to be moved. He was the only one who remembered the passwords. Jimmy Budge understood the French Way.

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