months after my birth, in Mother’s beloved Baptist church, I was christened Travesty. In hindsight, I’m glad I was christened in a Baptist church by a minister. Knowing what I know now, it may have been a risky affair being christened anywhere else. Although I was only twelve months old, I still don’t think I would have taken too kindly to being touched up by some dirty old priest. At least Baptist ministers have a healthy reputation for not being ‘kiddie fiddlers’. I’m none too sure about them other mobs.
During the baptism, Mother asked the minister to hold my head under water for an hour or so. She wanted to make my christening more akin to a sacrifice to God. Thankfully, the minister refused.
I was at the beginning of my teenage years, thirteen, when I dropped out of school in grade four. I use the term ‘dropped out’ loosely, as it was more a case of being asked to leave. That, or be expelled.
‘The boy is as thick as a tree, thick as a forest full of trees,’ Mother would say. ‘Damn disaster he is. Nothing good will come of him.’
Father was more understanding. He remarked I’d tried for a number of years to crack a pass level in grade four.
‘Ten out ten for the effort, son.’
I found Father’s comments positive and uplifting.
‘Perhaps learning is not your forte in life,’ he said.
My schoolteachers agreed. They couldn’t see the sense of me learning either. From my perspective, I didn’t care a hoot about some bloke Pythagoras running around bleating about his theorem. I’m betting he was a relative of that other bloke Euclidean. He did stuff with geometry. They both probably lived in a house looking like a three-sided right-angled triangle. Perhaps Hypotenuse lived with them?
Father thought it better if my résumé stated I had left school voluntarily, as opposed to being expelled. Hence he agreed with my leaving. You have to give credit where credit is due; they didn’t come much smarter than my old man. No flies on him.
Mother was not a happy camper because my school career had come to an end. One of my aunties wasn’t happy either. The woman did nothing but complain. I called her the Whinging Aunt from Whining Hill.
‘Oh, the shame of it,’ she would wail. ‘How can it be, leaving the education system in grade four? People will talk about it, you know. I’ll never be able to show my face in town again.’
Father believed the Whinging Aunt from Whining Hill was a certifiable loopy loopy control freak. He also thought she needed a good root.
‘People who have good roots don’t complain. You can tell! I’ve never complained in my life,’ he would say. ‘Remember, son, for later in life, always surround yourself with good roots. It’s what keeps us men happy and contented and stops us from complaining. Whenever you need solace, compassion and understanding just go pull a good root. There’s your solace, compassion and understanding, boy, right there.’
Later in life I understood what he meant, and what sound advice it was!
As payback for me dropping out of school, and to ensure I wouldn’t have the entire family fortune to myself when my parents became dearly departed, Mother adopted two others. What escaped Mother’s attention was the family fortune she was trying to protect fitted nicely into a small tuna can.
Father didn’t like the adopted ones. So much so, he never spoke to them.
Sometimes I heard him mutter, ‘It is not possible people exist as stupid as those two. Fuck me; there isn’t a brain cell between the pair of them, not one.’
My adopted brother became Mother’s favourite. He could lift heavy weights, but that was all he could do. I called him Speed because he was so quick on the uptake. In reality, he wasn’t. Speed was never accused of being the quickest cab off the rank.
My adopted sister was not gifted with any form of intelligence – whatsoever. She was as dumb as dog shit. I called her Wind Between Ears. I felt the name did her fair justice. She annoyed me so much my arse would bleed when she came near me. Other times, just the sound of her voice would send me to the toilet with the bleeding shits. If you were scrapping the bottom of a barrel of stupid people, she wouldn’t be there. She’s so stupid she couldn’t even get a gig at the bottom of a barrel full of stupid people. If all the stupid people in the world held a party only for stupid people, Wind Between Ears wouldn’t be invited on account of her superior stupidity. She was never accused of being the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer. But, she did have a unique personality – one similar to a house brick.
Wind Between Ears often referred to Centrelink, the local unemployment office, as her little Happy Reservation. It was here on Fridays, she gathered with like-minded people to collect their social welfare payments. They would dance and yell whoop-whoops together, and then rush outside to buy cigarettes, track suit pants, and go to MacDonald’s.
‘How’s good’s this shit?’ Wind Between Ears would say as she spun around the Centrelink floor on her stupid head attached to her stupid body. ‘They gimmee money for doing nuthfing, not a fing. This is the land of the free, orright. Free freaking handouts, man! Why would youse want to live anywheres else? Not me. I know which side of the road my bread is smeared with butter on.’
I’d throw rocks at her and she’d go tell on me. She’d sob in Mother’s arms exaggerating the entire incident. At times, she became emotional because her unemployment benefits didn’t last her long. Once, I tried to play the caring brother role. I took it upon myself to ease her pain, to console her.
I told her I knew of a way out of her misery. A place she could go to where she could get as many cigarettes, track suit pants, and big Macs as she wanted – all free. She broke into a burst of excitement as I slowly, but thoughtfully, suggested suicide to her. I explained it would end her suffering.
As Wind Between Ears thought about my kind suggestion, I solemnly added, ‘You know I can get a rope, and you could use the tree out back.’
Three weeks later, Wind Between Ears cottoned on I was pulling the piss, when she caught me drawing a hangman’s noose on her bedroom door. She told her obedient Speed to beat me up. He did everything she said. Speed ducked, weaved, threw punches, and finally broke the mirror. Dumb prick thought his reflection was me. With Wind Between Ears and Speed, Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had failed. They had not evolved.
Who hated me the most? Depended on the day of the week, and who could blame me the most. They blamed me for everything. The war in Afghanistan, climate change, global warming, too little rain, too many floods. They blamed me for the government and for taxes. They even blamed me for ‘Home and Away’ being on TV. They all wanted me dead.
Speaking of blaming me, Mother blamed me for her having to get married. Early in her relationship with Father, they both threw caution to the wind and played doctors and nurses. You know the game? Similar to hide the sausage or letting the python out for run. Before premarital sex became par for the course, and having children out of wedlock became a norm of society, Mother and Father rattled one off, they did. I was born because Mother and Father failed to control their primal urges of mating. They failed to quell the flames of their passion, and most importantly, they failed to practise safe sex.
By the time the smoke had cleared from Mother and Father’s heated, wild and crazy, screaming, sweating, pulsating, doing it this way, doing it that way, doing it any old way, getting their rocks off, ‘was it good for you’ lovemaking, I was swimming towards the womb of life.
Father would have been pounding his chest, bragging how his magical flute hadn’t missed a note, because it was so highly tuned. Mother would have been lying there with her skirt up over her head and her ankles in the air, thinking to herself, how the Hell did that happen?
At the same time Father would have been saying, ‘Yeh, that’s