Human Torpedo Read online

  Contents

  Before

  Truly Packin’ Death

  It’s Time We Thought About Sex, She Said

  Everybody’s Favorite Spread

  Another Big First

  The Invisible Man

  Church

  True Torpedoism

  Trouble-Free Zone

  During

  I Should Be So Lockie

  Somebody

  Yer Outta Ya Depth

  This Awesome Woman

  Gettin’ Serious

  Youth Group

  It’s Not My Problem

  Trying To Fly Straight

  Swamp Rat

  Sadder Than Dog

  A Thin Flickering Light

  Why Didn’t You Hit Him, You Idiot?

  Police Corruption

  After

  The Situation

  That’s Politics

  A Pretty Cherry Scene

  Ocean Beach

  I Accept The Mission

  Seven Suns

  Tim Winton learnt to surf on a Coolite at Scarborough Beach when he was eight. He fell in love at nine with a girl who lived down the street, and twelve years later he married her. Tim now lives with his wife and three children by the sea in Western Australia. He spends time fishing, diving and surfing, and to pay for all this fun he writes books.

  ALSO BY TIM WINTON

  Jesse

  Lockie Leonard, Legend

  The Bugalugs Bum Thief

  Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster

  Blueback

  The Deep

  for Michael, Sharyn and Andrew –

  dags, all of them.

  This book was written with assistance from the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council and, as always, with the help of Denise Winton.

  Every ripple on the ocean

  Every leaf on every tree

  Every sand dune in the desert

  Every power we never see

  There is a deeper wave than this

  Swelling in the world

  There is a deeper wave than this

  Listen to me girl

  ‘Love Is the Seventh Wave’

  STING

  Lockie Leonard fell in love last term. No one in school knew who the hell he was before it all happened, but he ended up more famous than AIDS. He was the most in-love kid in the whole of Year 8. That’s if you don’t count Vicki Streeton, the girl he was in love with; she’s always been known in this town. It doesn’t take much to get famous, but it takes a lot to stay in love.

  he first day Lockie Leonard saw this town it was raining. The old family Falcon had been loaded down like a refugee boat as they rolled into this little place fresh from the city. The whole family tried to be cheerful about it, but the place looked awful. The town was small and crummy-looking and when they saw the house the police force had organized for them, everyone in the car went quiet. Lockie’s little brother looked at him, pegging off his nose with his fingers. His baby sister squirmed on the front seat. His dad left the motor running. His mum just started bawling.

  Funny thing is, Lockie got to like that place. It was a big old fibro joint with a rusty tin roof, and it went all higgledy-piggledy inside, like whoever built it kept having more kids and just bunged on a room every Christmas. It was on swampy ground next to the showgrounds. The whole street was just reeds and factories. It was the worst street in the whole town. Not even the poorest people and the Aborigines in town put up with that street; people have their limit, I guess.

  Lockie’s room smelled like a German shepherd had died in it. He shared it with Phillip, his brother, who was ten and always wet the bed, and some people would blame the bedwetting for the terrible pong, but the truth is, it was always there. You really had to think DOG before going in.

  He got settled in the best he could in those last rainy days of the summer holidays. Lockie was twelve and three quarters, and for the first time in his life he was truly packin’ death. It was one thing going to high school for the first time; but it was a whole different hockey match going to high school for the first time in a town where you didn’t know a single soul, not a single poxy face. Not a man, woman, boy, girl, cat or dog who was familiar. Even the lousy southern weather was kind of unfriendly to him.

  That first few weeks in town, Lockie lay on his bed getting up a sweat, or went out walking around the swampy drains behind the house. He played his Van Halen tapes and stood in front of the mirror with his tennis racquet, giving it vibrato and thrash chords and feedback to forget his troubles. He really hammered that old Slazenger like it was connected to a million watts of distortion.

  In the mornings he woke from the nicest dreams. He dreamt he was back in the city, in Perth, where everything seemed bigger and better and warmer and full of friends and good memories . . . and then he woke up. The Leonards called Lockie the Human Torpedo because he took so long to get out of bed in the mornings. Actually Lockie was slow at almost everything, but the mornings were his worst time. When he eventually got up, he helped Phillip out of his piddly PJs and went for breakfast.

  ‘You’re gonna hafta grow out of this peeing in the night boy,’ said Lockie. ‘It’s flamin’ disgusting.’

  Phillip bit his lip. He was a small kid, soft-looking and sensitive. ‘I didn’t drink since five o’clock yesterday.’

  ‘You need a tap on yer dick.’

  Phillip laughed and Lockie was glad because he knew it stopped him from going further and getting cruel. It was easy to cut a kid like Phillip. But sometimes he wanted to tie those stinking PJs around Phillip’s neck and sling him out into the rain. As well as wetting the bed, Phillip snored and smacked his lips like he was at a barbeque. Ten hours of lip-smacking. It sounded like a snogging marathon – a snogathon like – someone being kissed to death by Mick Jagger.

  Lockie had shared a room with Phillip all his life. People say kids think they’ve got no future, nothing to hope for. But I tell you, Lockie Leonard had something to hope for – his own bedroom, dammit! A quiet room with a lock on the door as big as a TV. Well, it was a longshot the way things were going, but it was something to dream of.

  Mrs Leonard put the Weetbix packet in front of the boys and hoisted the baby on her hip. The baby was called Barbara, but Lockie called her Blob.

  ‘G’day, Blob,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ock-ock-ock!’

  ‘She wants to sit on your lap, love,’ Mrs Leonard said.

  ‘Here, then.’ Lockie reached up and took Blob under the arms. She settled into his lap and then he went stiff all of a sudden.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘What?’ said Phillip.

  ‘Moisture. Your trademark.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Wet nappy, mudbrain. I must be the only person in this house who’s heard of the toilet. Aaarrgh! Mum, get her off!’

  Phillip laughed. Lockie cooked inside.

  ‘This is a disgusting family.’

  ‘You’re lucky you only got a disgusting one,’ said Sergeant Leonard coming in, buttoning his uniform. ‘We could have been putrid, vile or scrofulous. You’re dead lucky, Lock. Disgusting is about the best you could have hoped for.’

  ‘Yes, Sarge, anything you say.’

  They got on with their breakfast as the pale grey sunlight bent in through the window. Frogs garped away in the swamp outside.

  At twelve and three quarters, Lockie Leonard was a pretty decent-looking bloke. He was generally polite and knew how to keep himself clean and tidy. The mums of this world would have called him a ‘nice presentable sort of boy’, but most of them wouldn’t have seen what he could do to a Weetbix at breakfast. Lockie’s method of eating Weetbix was truly, awesomely foul. I won’t get you gagging with the details, but let me just say that it involved a lot a mi
lk, an overripe banana, and a spud masher.

  While he was going to work on the poor old Weet-bix his mum reminded him of the date.

  ‘Enrolment day, Lockie. Ten o’clock up at the school.’

  Choke, gulp. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Would that be HIGH school by any chance?’ the Sarge asked.

  Lockie rolled his eyes, trying to look cool about it, but inside he wished he could borrow a nappy from Blob. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, write your name nice and big on the roll: LACHLAN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON LEONARD.

  ‘Dad, you must’ve been drunk when you thought that up.’

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘It’s longer than a book,’ said Phillip who was lucky enough to be just Phillip Leonard.

  ‘It should be a book,’ sighed Mrs Leonard. ‘Most of it’s an author’s name.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, tell us about it.’

  The Sarge was the sort of copper who reads books. You know, clean books, the old kind. How he got to be a copper we’ll never know. He didn’t have a beer gut, he didn’t beat people up, and he even went to church. He made the whole town nervous, the moment he arrived. Books!

  ‘Another time, cobbers. I’m off to work.’

  ‘You didn’t brush your teeth,’ called Phillip.

  Lockie groaned. ‘He doesn’t have any, thickwit,’

  That was another embarrassing thing: the Sarge didn’t have a chopper, not a peg in his gums.

  •

  Lockie and Phillip and Mrs Leonard walked up the hill towards school, taking turns to push Blob in the stroller. The sky was grey but the rain held off while they trudged.

  ‘This is going to be hard for you, I know,’ said Mrs Leonard.

  ‘Mum, we’re only enrolling. Term hasn’t even started yet.’

  Lockie’s mum was the serious sort. She liked to be involved; she was concerned, conscientious. She’d even gone to Parent Effectiveness Training a year ago, and for a few weeks after that she was just a flaming nuisance. She was a good egg, but sometimes Lockie wished she’d just shut up and be insensitive for a while.

  ‘You won’t know anybody, I suppose — ’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it, Mum,’ said Phillip.

  ‘Well, then.’

  Phillip winked at Lockie. They all walked on.

  The school wasn’t anywhere near as ugly as the high schools in the city. City schools looked like those concentration camps you see on movies. This place was old. It looked kind of dignified, like it wasn’t going to fall down next Monday (worst luck). Out the front, at the edge of the sloping lawns, there were hedges clipped in the shape of animals.

  ‘Cor,’ said Phillip.

  ‘That’s artistic,’ said Mrs Leonard.

  ‘Just like on “Play School”,’ said Lockie.

  Mrs Leonard laughed, and Lockie knew she could see through the tough act.

  Just walking down the corridors, just signing his own stupid name for the little old registrar, Lockie Leonard was truly packin’ it. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  •

  After work, the Sarge drove Lockie down to the beach for a surf. He sat in the Falcon reading James M. Cain, or somebody, and Lockie waxed up his board and checked out the beach. There was a good side to this new town – the south coast had a lot of good beaches, and some great surf.

  About fifty yards out, there were a few kids sitting on their boards at the edge of a sandbar. A little rip was running alongside it, and a decent wave broke left and right from it. Lockie paddled out, shivering. He wished he had enough money for a wetsuit.

  A big, hairy, country-looking kid with bad teeth swooshed past him on a wave. He was a pretty slack surfer, but confident. And big. When you’re twelve and three quarters and a new kid, everyone seems a bit on the mega side. There were four or five other kids out at the break, all decked out in full trendy surf gear, in every fluorescent colour: Ripcurl, Billabong, Quicksilver, Lightning Bolt. Lockie guessed that even their undies were 100 per cent Mambo. They eyed him off and his nerves shot all over the place. He didn’t hassle for the first few waves. Instead, he let them go.

  The big, hairy kid paddled back and pulled up beside him. ‘You’re here on holiday.’ It wasn’t even a question.

  Lockie shook his head. ‘Just moved here.’

  ‘From Perth, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘City boys always think they can surf.’

  ‘I can surf.’

  No joke. Lockie Leonard could surf. He was lousy at football. He could be counted on to entirely stuff up a cricket match, and he wasn’t even any good at Monopoly, but he could sure ride a board. Genuine surf rat, grommet extraordinaire.

  ‘You’re all piss an’ wind, youse blokes. City boys’re up ’emselves.’

  Lockie shrugged.

  A set came. Lockie let them all scramble for the first wave and he put himself right at the peak and picked off the second without any trouble. He took the drop loose-kneed and casual, taking out a wide, leaning, bottom turn before hammering back up at the lip. As he swung round off the top again, he saw the big, hairy kid dropping in from the shoulder. You rotten mongrel, he thought. The wave walled up and the other kid streaked away out in front, hooting and cutting up Lockie’s wave. Lockie dropped into a crouch, held an edge and came powering down the line, getting speed from each hit at the wave’s lip. It was like a roller-coaster and he could feel his hair streaming water as he closed on the other kid who looked over his shoulder, suddenly startled. Lockie just couldn’t stop himself. He pulled a big re-entry and came floating down right across the guy’s leg-rope. TWANG! The guy was off and cursing. Lockie weaved in to the beach and climbed up onto the sand the moment the other kid’s board drifted in alone.

  ‘Yeee-haaa!’ No more radical moves today. One wave was enough. Two might get his head punched in. He sprinted up the beach and threw his board into the back of the Falcon.

  ‘Dja see that?’

  The Sarge put his bookmark in place and grinned. ‘I think you just made an enemy. You actually were a torpedo there for a minute.’

  ‘Well, it was worth it.’

  ‘Used to ride like that myself, once.’

  ‘Pull the other one, Dad. It plays the anthem.’

  he day before term started, it rained like hell, and the ground around the Leonard house turned to soup. Frogs congregated under every window. When Lockie looked out, the sky was low and nasty. It was a foul day, no argument. Southerly wind, no surf, and school tomorrow. He stuck on his Joe Satriani tape, ‘Surfing with the Alien’, and sprawled back on his bed with an old issue of Guitar Hero that he’d swapped back in primary school for five Mad mags and a cold meat pie.

  Mrs Leonard came in, twitchy and nervous. She laid a little green booklet on the bed and looked out the window.

  ‘It’s time we thought about sex,’ she said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I mean, I mean, it’s time we talked about it. You’ll be mixing with all kinds of — ’

  ‘Mum — ’

  ‘No, listen, I — ’

  ‘Mum!’

  She stopped and looked at him. ‘I suppose you know all about sex then.’

  ‘Of course! Geez, Mum, I’m practically on the pension.’

  Mrs Leonard looked relieved all of a sudden, like all the air went out of her. ‘Oh, well. You can just keep this for reference, then. I just didn’t want you being at a disadvantage. Well, that’s it, then.’

  When she was gone, Lockie pounced on the booklet. He was the full bucket on sex (naturally), but there might have been one or two (or thirty or forty) details he’d like to clear up. Besides, there might be pictures!

  But it was a rotten little booklet, with the kind of pictures you see in the Good News Bible. And a lot of really gross-sounding and unsexy words. Vulva – ugh, it sounded like a Swedish taxi. Urethra, Gonad, Secretions, Orgasm. I
t was very tacky stuff. It was a relief to get back to Guitar Hero. He bet Joe Satriani never had a urethra secretion in his life.

  t was a long walk up the hill. Lockie did it alone; there was no way he’d let the Sarge drop him off on the way to the cop shop. The big, old school seemed to hang over the town.

  Before he’d even reached the car park, they were coming for him. He decided, as those Year 9 goons came charging in with their zits on fire and their ties flapping, that there wasn’t much use in fighting. He didn’t believe in violence.

  ‘Ah, city boy!’ one of them yelled.

  Lockie recognized him. He was big and hairy, the wavehog with sideburns down to his chin like some rockabilly jerk. He looked like he’d been shaving since he was six. Another one, a little skinny runt, had a big jar of Vegemite and a paintbrush.

  ‘In the dunnies, then!’

  They grabbed him by the arms and hair and walked him into the boys’ toilets. Boys’ dunnies smell the same anywhere – city, country, new, old, summer or winter. It’s not one of the world’s best pongs, and for a moment Lockie thought it might be worth fighting after all. A bloke’s principles will only stretch so far. But they had him on the concrete floor before be could say ‘Bono Vox’. Someone got his jeans down and someone else got his jocks, and then out came the paintbrush and everyone’s favourite sandwich spread, and he started to kick. It didn’t do any good.

  ‘You bunch of yellow vulvas!’ he yelled.

  That cracked them up. They gave him a second coat for good measure.

  •

  Maybe you’ve never had your tricky bits painted with Vegemite – maybe you won’t understand – but I tell you, Lockie Leonard had a very uncomfortable first day at school. That stuff feels like it tastes – tangy to the max. Everyone who sat next to him that day was wondering whether he’d had a bath since 1979. He smelled like his jocks had turned to raw yeast, riboflavin, niacin and iron.

  •

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ Old Squasher rumbled in Maths.

  ‘Leonard.’

  ‘You may call me sir.’