Story for performance #520
webcast from Sydney at 07:43PM, 22 Nov 06

‘He’s a maverick,’ that’s how the boy who lived around the corner and was always in trouble with his mother was described to me. We were new in town and lived on the corner. One road went from the primary school to the high school with us in the middle. The other road led to more houses up over the hill. He lived in a weatherboard house at the top of the small slope of Highfield Street. He wasn’t bad though. He was kind, at least to me, slightly chubby and thoughtful. He had beautiful,thick, black, curly hair. He was in my class and we were in our first year of high school. On Saturdays and Sundays he was always working in the fruit shop, serving at the cash register or stacking the cauli’s, potatoes and zucchinis. He was strong from all the lifting.

He didn’t seem such a maverick to me. He didn’t chat at the shop, he was quiet, polite and respectful. He was older than the rest of our school year and worked hard, though study didn’t come easily for him. In the evenings, on weekends, he rode around town with his older brother, driving up and down the main street. It was a smallish town, built for the timber milling industry and it only took three minutes to drive from the fruit mart corner at one end to the timber museum at the other end, ten minutes on foot. If there were no cops around, ‘chucking a lap’ of the main street would take about one minute. Mostly it was better to drive slowly and check out the pedestrians and show off your ‘wheels’, listening to ‘Slade’ at top volume.

The town was surrounded by orchards, market gardens and tall karri and jarrah forests. There were about five timber and wood chipping mills in the area. When the local boys left school most of them would work in the timber industry or drive trucks carrying logs. Those with land might go in for farming. Later I found out the money was in the cash crop, secret ‘dope’ plantations in the National Park or uncultivated land. The soil was rich.

His mother was on his case: every day at about 5.30 we could hear her shouting his name—‘Dominic, Dominic…’ and other indiscernible words. Then the fly-screen door would slam. If he was at the oval half way down the street toward the primary school, about 200 metres away from their home, he could still hear her. He would jump on his bike and cycle like mad up the hill. He never looked at us, even when we were playing hockey in the front yard. Mrs G. was one of those mothers who always wore a clean apron. Even at the shops. Sometimes it was as though she had changed into a clean apron to go to the supermarket.

Around the corner on the other side of the road was Mrs D. She never wore an apron. She drove her V8 LTD the five minutes to the shops in only her fluffy slippers and glamorous sateen dressing gown. She’d pull up outside the shop and wait for her daughter to run in and get the milk or bread or whatever it was she wanted.

Dominic’s brother left school when he was fourteen to pick fruit. When he was seventeen, he bought a hot car with the money he had saved. We never heard his mother calling out to him. He appeared to be a fully-qualified maverick. The police knew him by name. Fruit picking started early in the morning and so the silence of the dawn would be interrupted by the thudding of his car. We often heard him drive around the corner, engine thumping. It made the kelpie across the street go crazy.

In 1974 Dominic’s brother disappeared. We heard there was another brother, ‘the rogue maverick’, whom we had never seen along with the absent father. Rumours abounded. With Dominic’s brother gone, it was quieter in the mornings and the kelpie often looked wistfully through the fence at the time he would normally drive home in the afternoon. Mrs G. began to call Dominic into the house earlier, keeping him on a tight rein. He seldom smiled now when working the cash register at the fruit mart. On those rare occasions he did smile, his deep, dark, black, eyes would light up his sad face. The police were often parked outside their house up the hill.

Our mother, not very good at paying attention to small town talk, couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us what had happened. Mrs D. had heard but wasn’t telling. We were just told to study hard and keep our noses clean.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Jan Idle.