The Iron Triangle
March 1st 2008 11:10
Nothing Land
(Novella version)
(Novella version)
Chapter 2
Mum and Dad.
Mum and Dad.
I’ll start with my dad.
Dad was born at a place called Whyalla in South Australia. Whyalla is part of what’s called ‘The Iron Triangle’ – three cities at the top of Spencer Gulf which rely on iron ore mining and BHP steelworks to exist. If you draw lines between the three cities (on a map. Don’t go out and try and draw them on the roads) they make a triangle. The South Australian Tourist Bureau probably stole the name ‘Iron Triangle’ from a primary school assignment on the area.
(I’ve always wanted to put pictures in a story. It saves a lot of explaining).
Whyalla is a shithole. The best thing about Whyalla is, it’s not Port Pirie or Port Augusta.
It’s surrounded by saltbush plains on one side. And a murky gulf on the other. Even the aboriginals won’t live there.
It’s a town full of Poms. The government talked the thick bastards into coming out to Whyalla. Promised them work. Didn’t tell them a thing about what a shithole the place was. Now it’s twice as bad. A shithole full of Poms. I was going to write whingeing Poms but ‘whingeing’ would be a redundancy.
If I hadn’t ended up doing what I did, and not become a philosophy lecturer, I would have made an excellent English teacher.
I could have taught at Whyalla High. Taught Poms the meaning of words like ‘cheerful’ and ‘redundancy’. It wouldn’t have been my responsibility to teach them how to experience cheerfulness. (That’s a job for professionals who rehabilitate people without social skills). Just the definition of the word.
And have nothing to do with them outside of school hours.
Teach in a pair of creams and a baggy green cap. Or an Australian one-day cricket team uniform. Buy one of Steve Waugh’s cricket bats on e-Bay to use as a yard stick. Dispense with books on the curriculum like the complete works of Shakespeare, and make them read books about Don Bradman. Books written by authors whom people believe wrote the books. Not get into arguments over who wrote this or that. Just read the bloody books. Or give the dumb bastards cricket magazines and get them to look at the pictures. Instead of making them write essays, they could draw pictures.
Yep. Whyalla is a shithole. My dad’s address was: Shithole C/- the arse-end of the earth.
Words mean more to me than most people. I think it’s all tied up with not speaking much. Or not growing up in a speaking environment. Communication was a dirty word in our house. I’d like to call the place I grew up in a home, but it wasn’t. It was a house.
Like I said. Words mean more to me than other people. That’s why I would have made an excellent English teacher.
I mean, a phrase like ‘Communication was a dirty word in our house’ is the type of phrase an English teacher could use to inspire students with a love for words and language and literature.
I would have been a more-than-excellent English teacher. Other teachers probably would have envied me, and wish they’d studied an Arts degree at university instead of Science.
Although, come to think of it. A creative phrase like that would probably be wasted on an English teacher. I’m far too creative to have been an English teacher. I think I’ll forget about having ever even entertained the thought of being an academic.
If I hadn’t ended up doing what I did, and not become a philosophy lecturer or an English teacher, I would have made an excellent novelist.
It must be great being born dumb. You’re not presented with so many choices.
Dad was an electrician.
It suited him. Playing with inanimate objects all day long. He might have been a born electrician for all I know. But how do you tell? When doctor’s can’t? About all they can tell is, ‘It’s a boy’ or ‘It’s a girl’. After the event. And where to smack it. Nowadays, most parents know its gender before it comes out of its mother’s cunt.
People want to know everything nowadays. Yesterday. They want to know tomorrow’s news yesterday.
One day, gay men will have babies. Out of their starfishes. At least they won’t need Caesarians. The baby will just fall out. Plop. (Hate the sin. Love the sinner. – St Augustine).
I’ve been Bibling up since I got here. Reading all sorts of religious books. Not just the Bible. If there’s going to be any chance of me getting paroled before the end of my 600 year sentence, I’ll have to convert to God sometime between now and then. And be repentant. Remorseful. Especially after the insanity plea failed. It’s nice to know society has judged me as sane. It almost makes me feel normal.
I’ll have to start reading legal books soon if I’m going to represent myself. I wouldn’t trust a lawyer again. He told me there was no way a court would rule me sane.
Dad’s father was the Whyalla street sweeper. When he retired, the Whyalla Council presented him with a mini wheelbarrow with a mini broom and mini dustpan in it. Rang him up about six months after he retired and said he could pick it up from the Council Chambers. It had a tiny bronze plaque on it, with his name on it, and something like ‘In grateful appreciation of 30 years service’. A pen or watch would have been more practical. He could have written back, Is that all I get? Or kept an eye on how much quicker the time went.
I sometimes wonder if the mice ever borrowed it to clean out the place behind the hole in the kitchen cupboard where they lived.
Dad kept it after his dad died. Dad liked collecting things. I collected people. I might have picked up some collecting genes from him.
Most people call their grandfather, Grandpa. Not ours. We called him Daddads. Dad’s dad, I guess. Yet no-one in the family had a speech impediment. It wasn’t like I couldn’t say, Grandpa, even as a kid. I struggled with Daddads more than I did with grandpa. As a word. Funnily enough dad’s mother wasn’t called Mummums. She was called Nana. I always found that strange as a kid. Why not go with Daddads and Mummums or Nana and Pops? Still at least one of my grandparents had a normal name. There must have been an element of sanity in dad’s side of the family somewhere, after all.
Maybe dad is insane. And he just needs a good session in court to determine it. The trouble is, if he does something criminal to get a court hearing, they’ll say he was sane at the time. If he murders someone they’ll just call him a monster. A sane monster. And say things like, Like son like father.
Daddads used to trim his nose hairs at the kitchen table after tea (in South Australia dinner is called ‘tea’) with Nana’s dressmaking scissors. Nana wasn’t a dress maker. But she did own a pair of dressmaking scissors. Most women did before they all went and emancipated themselves from domestic life. Edward Healey Thompson once said, “All the women said they wouldn’t be dictated to. Then all went out and got jobs as stenographers.”
Deaths, taxes, clichés and pithy sayings. Truer than the truth. More human than the humans. That’s a song by White Zombie.
Before women became emancipated from everything besides thinking with their womb, they used to use dressmaking scissors to cut paper. Not their nose hairs. Nana used to tell Daddads off. He’d go to his room and sulk. For days at a time. Which defeated the whole purpose of ‘keeping his nose clean’ so to speak. His nose hairs only got longer. I bet they sprouted in that dank room after he’d been fertilising them with his farts for three days. She’d ignore him. You can’t blame her for not wanting to go into a room full of nostril hair and flatulence.
When Nana died, Daddads used to trim his nose hairs in front of dad at night. Dad never told him off. They never spoke to each other much. It’s not like they were too busy eating, either. They were too busy mastering the art of ignoring other humans in close proximity. Not just blood-wise either. Distance wise.
All kids want to admire their dads for something. My dad mastered the art of ignoring people.
And that’s about all I know about dad’s parents. They were a one-pair-of-dressmaking-sciss ors couple.
| 58 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
