Red, p.1
Red, page 1
DEDICATION
For Dad
What follows is a fictionalised version of the Central Coast of New South Wales. Details have been invented. Geographies altered. Liberties have been taken.
CONTENTS
Dedication
First Off
Next
And Then
So Now You Know
Acknowledgements
A Note on Sources
About the Author
Copyright
FIRST OFF
Sid had promised that Datsun was gold to be honest it wasn’t even bronze but what did I care I must’ve only been four or five years old the day we collected Sid’s car from Wyoming and drove it the long way home just the two of us Sid and me in the full dazzle of summer sun and the whole time Sid’s singing ‘Hi-Yo Silver’ though that Datsun’s supposedly gold yeah we drove home in the sunshine singing ‘Hi-Yo Silver’ it’s the earliest memory of my dad that I’ve got.
Sid let me ride shotgun probably even called it that in that daggy way he used to say howdy pardner and saddle up and you ride shotgun even though I didn’t know what a shotgun was wouldn’t have known one if it bit me on the bum I still don’t if you want to know the truth yeah despite what they say about me.
And so what if Sid let me ride in the front passenger seat sure there were probably laws against that kind of thing but still there’s me sitting up next to him yeah perched like royalty on his balled-up jacket just so’s I could see over the dash. And through the windscreen on the bonnet the sun’s yolk sat fair and square like the whole world was served up for us.
That Datsun was a two-tone white-brown number like riding round in a block of Cadbury’s Top Deck. Yeah the 180B was Sid’s first car and they say you never forget your first sure there were other cars before the Datsun and there’ve been other cars since like the Sandman that Sid was just minding for a mate and later the Torana that showed up and then shot through so quick it gave a kid whiplash to witness but that Datsun was the first car that Sid paid good money for probably the only one if I’m honest with you and who cares that it was used and that it came with used cigarette smoke and burns on the bucket seats to boot because that Datsun was ours it was mine and Sidney’s.
Sid was tickled pink with the shit-coloured thing.
And as we drove home that day Sid sang that’s right he was hi-yo-silvering his mangy heart out and ignoring the fact the car wasn’t silver and not even copper no truly it wasn’t metallic. Coast air rushed in through the open windows and the Datsun cantered along and the song of that drive was whirring tyres and whistling wind yeah that plus the strains of Sid’s song.
But just as Sid got to the hi-yo-silvery part yeah as soon as he hit the bit that I knew up came the cops behind us blue lights flashing high beams blinking and their siren drowning out Sidney’s tune. They directed us to pull over so Sid slipped off the highway and into an emergency bay and we sat silent in that shoulder of the Pacific Highway yeah waiting to learn our offence.
And didn’t the cops take their own sweet time getting out of their patrol car that day. I guess even at that age I must’ve asked Sid what we’d done wrong but if he answered I don’t remember his reply. Fear had swooped in and stolen Sid’s voice or maybe it was anger hard to say.
I remember those cops though there were two of them there at Sid’s windowsill all swagger and smirk yeah all scorn. Asking to see Sid’s licence and is this you Mr McCoy as if Sid might be anyone else and where did you get this vehicle Mr McCoy and can we see your rego papers Mr McCoy we need to make sure everything’s in order Mr McCoy ensure you’re the rightful owner you know make sure you’re the real McCoy as if they were the first ones to joke about our name yeah like they invented that gag.
They were probably only young probably just shit-kicking junior officers but when you’re not old enough to see over the dash without a cushion everyone seems like a monster especially if they’re in a uniform. One of them was skinny while the other was giant he looked like he should of come with his own moons seriously you’d of thought they were cartoon cops if you didn’t know how dangerous those pigs could be.
The skinny one had a high-pitched voice and an Adam’s apple that wobbled in his throat when he talked he leaned on the windowsill of Sid’s new Datsun and pushed his face so far into the car that Sid had to recoil or risk getting pig spit all over himself. The big one stood behind him and glanced around from time to time I don’t know if he was supposed to be standing guard or what but the way his gut oozed over his belt he would’ve had a battle on his hands if he needed to access his holster in a hurry yeah hardly what you’d call Quick Draw McGraw.
Outchagetmate the skinny one said his voice dripping with false reluctance like he hated the position that Sid put him in oh he hated to have to do it.
Stay put Red Sid instructed.
And I knew he meant business because he’d gone and called me Red. Red meant listen here kiddo Red meant now. Red was what Sid said when he wasn’t mucking around if he called me Ruby I’d pretend I hadn’t heard.
Because you can give a kid a name but you cannot make her drink Sid undid his seatbelt warily. He went to open the door but the skinny cop refused to move so now their foreheads were almost touching and Sid was forced to ask permission just to open his own door it’s the small injustices that burn the worst. And I might’ve only been small myself my sandals barely scraped the plastic mats but already I hated those cops with a vengeance my five-year-old fury stretched sky-high.
Out of the car Sid stood as directed facing the Datsun his legs parted his arms spread wide his palms were raised to the sky it was a blisteringly hot day yeah early December must’ve been thirty-eight in the shade. And I can’t relay their exact conversation it were like a decade or so ago but trust me when I say those cops they were feeling loquacious that day Sid barely said a word it’s hard to believe I know but the pigs did all the talking you can take it from me.
Then those dogs they made Sid press against the car door he was head and shoulders above the metal roof heat radiated off it. I could see his square of lemon shirt at the window two dark patches blossoming under each short sleeve silence then a dull thud when his cheek was forced down on the roof.
When Sid got back in the car afterwards he’d left part of himself behind. Sure he was a gangly motherfucker yeah Sid had plenty of length to spare. But before the cops pulled us over he drove with his head cocked sideways to stop it touching the car-roof lining but now as he sat back down in the driver’s seat Sid was shorter than when he’d got out. Somehow he fitted easily his shoulders drooped and his mouth did too yeah something inside his chest had shrivelled Sid lost actual centimetres that day he got stopped by the cops he left them on the F3 southbound I swear.
His cheek was red where it’d kissed the car roof a blotch stretched from his eye socket to his jaw as if the blood was simmering too close to the surface blood boiling or more likely shame. Sid never said if they charged him with anything who knows maybe they got him for having a kid in the front passenger seat I’ve heard worse but charging us wasn’t the point no the point was to make our lives a misery as if that might make up for theirs.
And so it goes day in and day out and no time and a half on Sundays yeah there’s no rest for the wicked no rest from their Sisyphean mission. What I know all about Sisyphus just like I know about those cops oh they bully us into submission and so we say nothing and so the cops bully us again. And when those cops drove past the car yard in Wyoming that day and saw Sid chewing the fat with the dealer well then they simply waited yeah they waited until we were driving away in Sid’s spanking-new-but-really-second-hand rolled-gold beige-tainted Datsun and then those bastards tailed us.
And then having rattled old Sid like they did they went and left us in the midday sun in the lay-by on the side of the road. There was no sound no ‘Hi-Yo Silver’ from Sid no nothing only the sad seagull squeal of metal against metal as that fat cop keyed the side of Sid’s car as they sauntered away.
Everyone knows how it ends what people are less interested in hearing is how it all got started. Nobody cares that we never asked for it that we never asked for anything let alone trouble we didn’t put up our hands for police persecution but we received it all the same.
And the newspapers they never mention the fact that my mum died when I was only three weeks old that she bled out as a result of complications from my birth the kind of complications that don’t occur in the rich yeah they strictly afflict those on the dole.
And even though she died in the main street where she was picking up something for a friend you get the feeling that no local councillor or funds manager no fucking court judge rushed over to help her yeah bet their kind never haemorrhage to death ahead of the lunchtime rush in the middle of Mann Street Plaza.
So that’s the first hole in the story a glaring blank space like a censorship mark a hole where my mum should have been but nobody takes that hole into account when they’re telling my story for me.
I had Sid of course and he was hardly a hole you could accuse Sid of heaps and plenty of people did but you couldn’t level that particular crime at him. My dad was the opposite of a hole he was a long lean beanpole of a thing full of life full of beans a skinny streak of kinetic energy who could drive a tinny or fix a fence or fell a tree or pick a lock but who had to physically sit on his hands in order to keep them still.
Sid’s family were from this place so he grew up knowing the Central Coast like the back of his quick-fingered hand. He knew to wet his line at Juno Point for j
Sid used to say they’d have to carry him out in a box he warned you he wouldn’t go willingly the problem was neither would Sergeant Healy he was stuck to this place just as much as Sid was. Two barnacles on the same pissy rock. Not that you’d know it from the public record mind you the sergeant’s role barely rates a mention his name rarely crops up in the court transcripts you never hear about Sergeant Healy’s sins on the nightly news but that’s an oversight of the highest order yeah that’s a mistake right there his role is hardly marginal hardly what you’d call immaterial and for the court not to hear about it is to have a great gaping hole in proceedings big enough to drive a road train through yeah it’s because of him that I’m in here.
Our first offence was being too smart for those Healys let me tell you something for nothing yeah I’ll give you this for free: dumb fucks like the Healys hate being reminded how stupid they are especially by plebs like us it was Sid’s dad – my grandad – that got the ball rolling. Sid’s dad was made in the same mould as Sid or more accurately the other way around yeah they say my grandad was as fidgety as Sid. He was slower of course by the time I knew him he was pushing sixty when I was born but we still called him Pep instead of Pop yeah that man was perpetual motion.
Pep’s people came from Broke if you really want to know. That’s northwest of here more than an hour away by car and longer if that car’s a Datsun. And so there’s Pep sitting in class one day keeping his head down when the school inspector arrived he decided to teach an impromptu lesson. Why do we learn history the school inspector wanted to know but nobody in Pep’s class could tell him. Alright the school inspector said I’ll tell you we learn history so we’re not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and Pep liked that yeah he was taken with that answer so he wrote the school inspector’s words down on the inside back cover of his book you know for a rainy day.
You won’t believe it but two weeks later Pep’s family they left Broke to move closer to the coast and they settled in a white weatherboard house in Wyoming and honestly I’m not making this up but in Pep’s first week at his new school who should walk in but the school inspector he was there to teach an impromptu lesson. Why do we learn history the school inspector wanted to know and the boys stared out the window yeah they watched the peewees perched on the playground fence and counted divots in the cricket pitch until finally Pep took pity and he opened up his workbook and he read out loud what he’d written in the inside back cover just over a fortnight before – so we’re not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Didn’t the school inspector look like a stunned mullet yeah like he’d been slapped in the mouth with a wet fish.
Get yourself down to the school office son and wait for me there oh he was massively impressed with Pep. And when he’d finished teaching the rest of the class (who were doomed to thirty-five more minutes of history with the school inspector) then he went down to the school office himself and there he informed Pep that he was a bright kid yeah a bright kid with a bright future and that Wyoming State School was no place for a kid like Pep and he was transferring Pep to a school in the city. So now it was Pep’s turn to look like a stunned mullet his family had only just moved to Wyoming yeah here was Pep in spitting distance of the ocean for the first time in his life and the school inspector wanted to send him away? Pep didn’t think so.
But when Pep explained all this to the school inspector how he’d only just moved to Wyoming yeah from Broke and how with respect the school inspector had taught the exact same lesson only a fortnight ago in Broke and how Pep had copied down the school inspector’s answer word-for-verbatim yeah it wasn’t like he came up with it himself but that only made things worse.
A kid who wanted to learn and who recognised top-shelf teaching when he saw it? The school inspector’s mind was made up and Pep’s fate was sealed and so you see how we’ve always lived according to the whims of the powerful and Pep was shipped off to school in Sydney the same week he never got to live in the white weatherboard in Wyoming worse he was separated from his family.
But if you think that’s the end of Pep’s problems well saddle up and settle back as Sid always says because Pep’s strife was just getting started.
You see Sergeant Healy’s old man Howard was also in class the day the school inspector arrived and it was a visit that Howard Healy had anticipated yeah he’d spent months waiting for the school inspector to show up. Howard Healy had big plans he had his eye on a career in the law starting with a superior education down in the city. That’s right he was getting the hell out of Wyoming he was going to finish his schooling in Sydney before progressing to some degree at a sandstone university before being admitted as a lawyer and passing the bar and making partner and becoming a flipping courtroom judge how the hell should I know. All I know is that Sid said that Pep said that Healy Senior talked about his law career like it was fucking preordained like he may as well of received his degree already that’s how supremely sure of himself he was yeah Howard Healy had so many tickets on himself he could of run a chook raffle he was so far up his arse he could see out his own mouth. But what he hadn’t anticipated was Pep arriving at school and stealing his future out from under his stuck-up fucking nose no Howard Healy hadn’t banked on that. He hadn’t banked on us McCoys yeah Pep’s intelligence was his curse oh it was our whole family’s curse.
And maybe it would of been alright if it ended there with Pep going off to school in the city and that. But as soon as Pep had done his time in Sydney he got on the first train back to Wyoming where he was turned around at Narara station and sent back to Sydney it was World War II and Pep was given his marching orders. That’s right Pep was conscripted into the Australian Military Forces having just spent all those years filling his head with education now they wanted him to get it blown off he served in Sydney for two years until he was told in 1944 he was being sent to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. Pep had no beef with the Japanese he had no beef with anybody much and he sure as hell didn’t want to fire a rifle so he found himself a frock yeah Pep became Bernice they never thought to give Bernice a gun.
What you’re telling me you wouldn’t do the same? Be a better world if there was less war and more cross-dressing but the military authorities didn’t see it that way no they hold a different view. They call people like Pep deserters and criminals they call you an unpatriotic dog Pep was discharged in absentia for misconduct because of illegal absence.
That was our family’s first run-in with the law and all because Pep was averse to killing and murdering that’s right look out for us wild McCoys watch out for us pacifists with our dangerous peace-loving ways it wasn’t until 1948 that an amnesty for deserters was declared and Pep was pardoned or whatever they call it but the damage had been done. Yeah God help a man who refuses to be an ANZAC and doubly if he does it in a dress.
What a threat Pep must’ve been to the authorities back then what with him all unarmed and them with their Glock pistols and their batons no wonder when they worked out what he was up to they were forced to beat him so badly he was hospitalised for a month yeah no choice but to assault him like they did. Sure Pep might’ve avoided violence in the jungles of New Guinea he might’ve dodged the bullet that was Bougainville but Pep saw his fair share of hate and hostility yeah Pep saw the wrong end of plenty of bloodied batons without laying eyes on the enemy.
