Collected Stories

A Schoolboy Prank

1.

It is Monday morning and the prank will not be played until seven o’clock tonight. The backyards are quiet: paling fences, trim grass and gum leaves floating in suburban swimming pools. In the middle of this a man stands crying, gulping in the blue early summer air in huge desperate breaths.

The noise is frightening, like curtains rending in temples, ancient statues falling, the woes of generations in pyres of lace curtains and tinder-dry wood.

A neighbour stands peering from his back steps, standing with the shocked uncertainty of those who witness motor accidents.

Turk Kershaw is weeping.

Turk Kershaw is a large man, hard, gnarled, knurled, lumped like a vine that has been cut and pruned and retained and restrained so that he has grown strong and old against the restrictions placed on him. He has grown around them like a tree grows around fencing wire. He has grown under them and his roots have slid into rock crevices, coarse-armed, fine-haired, searching for soft soil and cool water.

He is red-necked, close-barbered, with a gnome-like forehead, a thick neck and a strong pugnacious chin. The noise he now makes is strange and frightening to him and does not seem to be his. It has erupted from him out of nowhere.

Turk Kershaw is sixty-six years old and his dog, old and worn as a hallway carpet, lies beside his foot, dead.

When Turk wept for the dog he wept for many things. He wept for a man who had died five years before and left his bed cold and empty. He wept for parents who had died twenty years before that. He wept for lost classrooms full of young faces, prayers after meals, the smell of floor polish, blue flowers in a pickle-jar vase. He wept because he was totally alone.

At seven o’clock in the morning Turk Kershaw began digging. The ground was dry and hard, too hard for a spade. He walked slowly back to the house to get a mattock.

2.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon. He waited at the Golden Nugget Bar to see what time had done to his pupils. They had idolized him and wished to please him with their success. He had had meetings like this before and he had always enjoyed the display of their triumphs, achievements as smooth and predictable as hens’ eggs.

But today, in the gaudy darkness of the Golden Nugget amidst the cufflinks and the high-heeled shoes, all he could think was that his dog had died. He took a large gulp of the expensive whisky, gritted his teeth and swallowed hard. He was terrified that he might cry again. It was ridiculous. It would be seen to be ridiculous for him to cry because his dog died. It would not be acceptable to these bright young men who would shortly arrive. Yet he could think of nothing but the emptiness of the house without the dog. There were too many empty things in the house anyway: a bed that was now too large, a pottery kiln that was no longer used, a dining room that had been vacated in favour of the chromium table in the kitchen. And now there was a metal food bowl which the dog had nightly nuzzled into a corner as he had eaten his food. There was an old chipped porcelain bowl still filled with water and, on the kitchen bench, a half-empty packet of dry dog food. He should have thrown them out.

It was ridiculous, it would be seen to be ridiculous. He had loved his dog. A man can love a dog. There was no one to explain this to.

Turk Kershaw was a legend and a character and tears did not form part of his myth.

The waitress who brought him his second Scotch, a Scotch he couldn’t afford, did not treat him as a myth or a legend. She saw only a seedy old man in a tweed sportscoat who might once have been good-looking. He was a large man and his leather-patched sportscoat was a little too small for him. He counted the money for the drink from a small leather purse and as she waited for him to add up the coins she wondered if he was an old queen. Whatever he was, he didn’t belong here and she managed to let him know it, tapping her foot impatiently while he provided her with exactly the right money. No tip. Fuck you, she thought, you’re going to wait a long time for your next drink. She left him disdainfully, an old man with dandruff on his shoulders who ate Lifesavers with his Scotch.

Turk Kershaw barely remembered the students who would meet him today, yet he missed them dreadfully. Somewhere in the midst of the smells of tobacco and perfume he smelt the very distinctive odour of floor polish and he ached for the comforts of boarding school where floor polish was the dominant perfume of innocent romances, crushes and night assignations. He had, of course, not participated in any of this but had enjoyed being amongst them, feeling like an old bull in the midst of nuzzling calves.

It had made him soft, he reflected, reliant on the company of others, left him ill-equipped to handle life on his own, made him place all his weight on a dog so the death of a dog was like the death of a lover or a parent. He could see the craziness of it. He had seen it this morning whilst he dug the grave and placed the body of the little fox terrier in it. But seeing the craziness did not stop the pain.

He needed a drink. He caught the waitress’s eye but she turned the other way. He didn’t feel up to this meeting. He didn’t feel he could be the Turk Kershaw they wanted him to be.

Turk Kershaw had been a rough old bastard and had been loved for it. He had taken thousands of boys through the junior school and changed them from pampered little rich boys into something a little better. He had been obsessed with teaching them the skills of survival. He had taught them how to exist in the bush for a week without fire or prepared foods. He had shown them how to build shelter from the shed bark of giant trees. He had forced the weak to become strong and the strong to become disciplined.

And today, he knew, his success with these boys would frighten him as it had sometimes frightened him on other such meetings. They would appear to him as iron men who control companies and countries. The sons of the rich, the rulers, whom he had equipped so skilfully to defend what they had. He had misunderstood the realities of power and had taught them as he would have taught himself. It would have been better to soften them, to teach them to touch each other gently, to show compassion to the weak, to weep shamelessly over losses. Sometimes it occurred to him that he had been a Frankenstein, obsessively creating the very beings who had the power to crush him totally. For he had not been honest with them. He had tried to remake them so that they wouldn’t suffer what he had suffered when there was no likelihood they ever would.

They would not shed tears over the death of dogs. He had taught them how to despise anyone who did.

3.

Sangster found the drink that Turk couldn’t. He attracted the waitress with one careless wave of his arm, ordered a Scotch for Turk and a bourbon for himself and, after a few polite inquiries about Turk’s retirement, proceeded to chronicle his success as a husband, father, and newspaper proprietor.

The newspaper had, of course, been his father’s and had become his with his father’s death. Turk hardly listened. He had read it all in the papers. The boardroom battles. The takeover bids. The fierce sackings throughout the company after the younger Sangster took the chair.

He was busy trying to defeat waves of sadness and loss with his third Scotch. He tried to remember Sangster before dark whiskers and expensive lunches had forced their attention on his slender, olive-skinned face. Turk recalled the early battles they had had, when Sangster, who was fast and skilful in using his mind and his body, had refused to try. Sangster had wanted to be liked and had feared excellence. Turk had taught him, painfully, to ignore that fear. He had pushed him and bullied him until fear of Turk was a more serious motivating force than fear of his friends’ envy.

Looking at the new Sangster, he missed the old one, who was languid and lazy and imbued with an easy grace.

4.

Davis and McGregor arrived together. They shook hands eagerly and laughed too much. Turk sensed their disappointment in him. He was different from how they’d remembered him. He was not what they wanted to meet. He remembered the dandruff and brushed his shoulder. McGregor saw him do it. Their eyes met for a second and McGregor got him another Scotch.

McGregor, stocky, red-haired, no longer blushed as he had when his name was mentioned in class. He still had his bullish awkwardness but it was now combined with a drawling aggressiveness that Turk found almost unpleasant.

McGregor, now the marketing director of a large company, had no idea what to say to Turk Kershaw. He was shocked by the seediness of the man, his sloppiness, his age, the strange puffy eyes. There was also something funny, almost effeminate, about the way he held his cigarette. And those bloody Lifesavers. He turned to Sangster and began to question him about a case that was being heard by the Trade Practices Commission. It had some relevance to the way advertising space would be bought in newspapers.

Turk Kershaw had no interest in the subject. He felt vaguely contemptuous of McGregor and wished the meeting to be over soon.

Davis, short and meticulous, seemed the one who was most as he had been. His good looks had not become overripe as had Sangster’s. Neither had success made him as disdainful of Turk as it had McGregor. Whilst Sangster and McGregor continued their conversation with earnest exclusiveness, Davis talked quietly and modestly to Turk about his hospital work. And it was Davis, pointedly ignoring the other conversation, who asked Turk about his dog, a different dog who had been less important to him.

The question almost brought Turk undone.

He had another swallow of Scotch before he answered.

“It died,” he said.

Davis nodded, sensing the pain, but not understanding it. “How long ago?”

“Ten years,” Turk said. “You would have been at university by then.” He remembered a story that Davis had written in first form. It came to him then. The ten-year-old boy standing beside his desk reading aloud a work that verged on the erotic. He had read it to a tittering class without embarrassment. Turk had said nothing about the story. He had given it an average mark, yet it had touched him, it had been a strange eruption from a sea of mediocrity. Why had he given it an average mark? Had he been embarrassed too? Why had he wished to discourage him?

McGregor was talking about some ideas he had to stop the problem of dole cheats. Sangster was obviously bored with the conversation. He was staring intently at a Malaysian air hostess who was drinking alone at the next table.

“Did you get another one?” Davis asked.

“Another what… I’m sorry.” Turk had been watching the air hostess smile at Sangster and had been pleased to note McGregor’s annoyance when he saw the same thing.

“Another dog.”

The word cut into him. He thought, I must not think of the metal dish. And then immediately he thought of it, and the chipped water bowl and the small grave, and the shed hair on the bedclothes, and the weight of the dog when it came to lie on his bed after the fire had gone cold at night.

He swallowed and sucked in his breath. “It died too, I’m afraid.” He looked at Davis. He wondered if Davis understood anything. He had a sensitive face. It was a face his patients would have trusted. Davis listened to Turk, and his dark-brown eyes never left his face. “This morning … I… had to bury him.” Turk tried to smile, but he was too distressed and didn’t trust himself to say more. He could handle it. He would handle it. He had drunk too much, but he would handle it because there was no way not to handle it. Turk Kershaw did not weep.

He blew his nose and caught Sangster looking at him warily. The air hostess had left. McGregor was talking to the waitress.

Then Davis did something which he had not expected. He put his hand on Turk’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.”

It was because of the concern, the kindness, the surgeon’s understanding of the total emptiness that he now felt that his defences crumbled. It was because of this that he now cried, very quietly, holding his snot-wet handkerchief to his eyes.

It did not last long. But when he had put his handkerchief back in his pocket the table had new drinks on it, there was a clean ashtray, and everyone seemed uncomfortable.

The awkwardness of the situation summoned up reserves in Turk that he had thought long gone. With red eyes and a blocked nose he fought his way out of his sentimentality, his loneliness, his empty house, and began to ease the conversation back to normality by helping them talk about what they wanted to talk about: the school, its characters, the people they had all once known.

He was impatient and in a hurry to settle things, and it was this haste which made his first choice such a bad one. For he turned to McGregor and said, “Tell me, Mac, do you ever see Masterton?”

It was only when he saw McGregor redden till his face was the bright crimson he had shown so readily at the age of twelve that he realized what he had said and how unacceptable the memory must be to McGregor. Masterton had been several years younger than McGregor, a blond boy with fine exquisite features, long lashes, and a prettiness of a type that is more commonly admired in females. McGregor had loved him hotly, chastely, with puzzled intensity. Their friendship had been one of those small, delightful scandals but one which had lasted longer than most. Turk had known all this but had never thought anything of it, had enjoyed it all, had watched the young lovers with the protective happiness of a parent. In his haste it had not occurred to him that McGregor might wish to forget it.

Nor had it occurred to him that talk of Masterton and McGregor might make Sangster and Davis more than a little uncomfortable. For they too had had their affairs of the heart and simpler more obvious releases of adolescent lust.

So they found themselves, all three, confronted with things they had no wish to remember. They did not wish to know that they had sucked the cocks of boys who had grown up to be married men or that they had loved other boys in the peculiarly intense way that the marketing director had loved Masterton.

Davis’s foot accidently touched Sangster’s leg and he withdrew it quickly as if stung.

Sangster, the newspaper proprietor, had no wish to remember that he had coated his cock with Vaseline hair tonic and slipped it gently into Davis, the surgeon’s, arse. Nor did Davis wish to remember the hot painful wonder of it, the shameful perplexing door of a world he had not known existed.

None of the young men who sat at this table with Turk Kershaw wanted to recall the euphemistic way they had come to proposition one another by saying “Let’s inspect the plumbing”, which was delightfully ambiguous for them and meant, on the simplest level, crawling beneath the locker rooms, the dark damp space beneath the floor where they made love from curiosity and Sunday boredom and hot adolescent need.

It had been another world, another time, with other rules.

Now in the Golden Nugget they experienced the fear of dreams where you walk naked into crowded churches.

They looked at Turk Kershaw and saw that he was, in spite of his obvious discomfort, smiling. There was a twinkle in his red eyes. And they knew that a hundred pieces of gossip and scandal were contained in that great domed head. He was ridiculous in his dirty old sportscoat. His sleeves were too short. His shirt was not properly ironed. He moved his hands in ways which were not conventionally masculine. If he had not been Turk Kershaw they would never have spoken to him. But there he was, sitting across the table, a glimmer of a smile betraying the dirty secrets he still carried with him. They looked at Turk Kershaw and could not forgive him for being their past.

5.

It was McGregor who was most angry with Turk. He had been made to look a fool and he could not forgive that. He had become the master of both the cudgel and the stiletto, using both of them with equal skill. He had learned the art of the lethal memo and knew how to maximize its effects: who to send copies to and how to list their names in orders both ingratiating and insulting. He had become an expert in detecting weaknesses and never hesitated to hit the weak spots when the moment was right. He had had his predecessor fired and he would be managing director within two years. He no longer remembered that it was Turk himself who had first shown him the benefits of intelligent analysis of your enemies’ weaknesses. It was Turk who had coached McGregor’s bullish bowling, and had made him look at each batsman as a separate problem. “Pick the weakness,” Turk had said, “everybody has a weak point. When you’ve found it, pound away at it.”

So now McGregor waited while the others played “remember when”. And when he was ready he took advantage of a natural pause in the conversation. He smiled at Turk and said, “Remember how you used to get the kids doing exercises in the morning, in front of your bedroom window?”

He drew blood. He watched with satisfaction as the colour came into Turk’s face. He reacted to the colour like a shark tasting blood in the water. He attacked politely, never once abandoning his perfect manners.

“Why did you get them to do it in front of your bedroom window? Frankly,” he smiled, “I find that curious.”

Turk watched him warily. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Sangster grinning broadly. “I saw no reason to get out of bed simply because you lot couldn’t behave yourselves. The punishment was for you, not me.”

He looked at Davis. Davis looked away. He looked to Sangster. Was Sangster for him or against him? McGregor folded his arms and smiled complacently.

“Come on, Turk,” said Sangster, “you’ve got to admit, it’s a bit strange when you look at it. Lying in bed watching twelve-year-old boys doing their exercises. In their underwear.”

Even as they spoke they began to wonder if it wasn’t true. Was it possible that Turk Kershaw was an old queen? They watched for other clues now, although the thought itself shocked them. For now they remembered how Turk had wrestled with them at night when he had come round to put the lights out, how they had attempted, four or five at a time, to overpower him. They thought of themselves as boys wrestling with an old queen. They felt foolish and disgusted with themselves and it was finally Davis (you too, Davis, thought Turk) who said: “You used to like wrestling.”

Turk reddened again. He watched their smiling faces and detested them. He thought of their wives, whom he had seen in the social pages of Vogue, which he bought for just this reason. He saw the wives, one as beautiful as the next and almost identical in their style, each reduced to a charming doll in the small black and white photographs. While the men came to show the marks of character and experience on their faces, the women paid fortunes so that their experience and pain didn’t show, so they looked, each one, like people who had discovered nothing. And when, finally, their lives burst out through the treatments and the creams and showed on their faces they would feel it was the beginning of the end. He felt pity for the wives with their swimming-pool parties and charity balls and anger at their husbands, who displayed their deeds and emotions so proudly on their faces yet refused to allow their wives the same privilege.

“No,” he said slowly with a quietness they all remembered with not some little fear. “No, it was you who enjoyed the wrestling.” He watched them, one by one, saw their anger and apprehension, hesitated, and finally decided it wiser not to say the words that were already formed in his mind: your little dicks were stiff with excitement.

They paused then, aware of a new strength in him. They watched him carefully and found no weakness. The wound had closed.

Sangster had none of McGregor’s political sense. It had never been necessary for him to have any. So now he continued where the other held back. “Tell us,” he said, toying with his drink, “where you buried your dog.”

Turk looked at him with narrowed eyes. He felt Davis shift uneasily in his chair. “I buried the dog,” he said, “beneath the fig tree in the backyard of my house.” His head was perfectly clear now and he would not weep. He was vulnerable to pity or love but not to a crude bullying attack like that.

There was silence at the table then. At other tables the habitués of the Golden Nugget conducted their business, boasted, made assignations and confessions and went to the telephone to tell lies with complicated plots.

The attack on Turk had lost its momentum and the three students were temporarily marooned in the midst of battle, nervous, embarrassed by what they had done.

But McGregor wouldn’t give up. While Turk was looking for his matches McGregor looked across at Sangster and made a limp-wristed caricature of a homosexual.

Turk saw it.

McGregor smiled back insultingly.

Turk stood, slowly, feeling the weight of the whisky for the first time.

McGregor waited.

“McGregor,” Turk smiled, “surely, if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you miss Masterton. He did have such a firm little arse.”

He walked from the bar before McGregor could recover, full of rage yet not for a second denying the pleasure he felt in saying the unsay able.

In the bar three successful men in their early thirties stayed to plan their revenge.

It was not a revenge at all, the way they discussed it.

It was a prank.

6.

Sangster’s Mercedes arrived at the house before Turk’s bus could hope to. Davis, unsure and worried, lost courage at the last moment and sat in the car. He was beginning to feel sick and had no appetite for what was planned. He remembered a childhood afternoon when he had fired air-rifle pellets into a large, slow-moving lizard, only realizing the atrocity he was committing after he had fired twenty slugs into the slow body and saw the blood spots and the open eyes of the terribly silent being which stubbornly refused to die.

He waited in the dark street, fearful of both Turk’s arrival and his friends’ activity. He considered leaving but he lacked the courage, just as he had lacked the courage to speak against the prank.

In the gloom he saw Sangster and McGregor carrying something. Their laughter was sharp and clear.

They were on the porch now. He heard the giggling, and then the hammering as they nailed the muddy body of Turk’s fox terrier to his front door.

They made him come then, to admire the work.

The surgeon in the dark suit walked up the steps of the house where he joined a marketing director and a newspaper proprietor in looking at the body of a dead dog nailed to a door.

At that moment they were not to know that they had made an enduring nightmare for themselves, that the staring eyes of the dead dog would peer into the dirty corners of their puzzled dreams for many years to come.

For the people they continued to make love to in their dreams did not always have vaginas and the dog looked on, its tongue lewdly lolling out, observing it all.