Whole Wild World by Tom Dusevic

Author:Tom Dusevic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

The money I earned on the milk run was spent on clothes at sports shops, at the movies and on records, which we played loudly while Teta Danica was at work. I didn’t expect Mama and Tata to buy special items for us outside the Christmas– birthday cycle, which for me was so cramped I could not realistically expect two big presents. Tata was a tough nut to crack, when all I’d ever wanted was a snooker table, table-tennis table, bike, surfmat, surfboard, guitar, drums, record player, tape recorder, footy boots and shoulder pads.

Never all at once.

‘Please Tata please, pulleeeeeez Tata.’

‘Police?’ he’d reply, every single time, his head jerking around as if to spot imaginary cops. ‘Where are the police? Why are the police coming? Did you call the police?’

It taught me self-reliance through exasperation. I’d often wondered if Tito had fast-tracked Joso’s exit from Yugoslavia for bad jokes and annoying ditties. In any case, with cash hoarded in my cigarette box, I should have been in a pre-teen’s nirvana. But I wanted more, just as Wally described it one day while we were sitting in the gutter at the front of the flats.

‘Man, I’m set,’ he said, having taken delivery of a racing bike to replace his Brumby dragster. ‘I got wheels, I got bread, now all I need is a fine lady.’ He spoke unselfconsciously in a kid’s mash-up of a beatnik daddy-o and Barry White.

Sam and I didn’t have the wheels or fine ladies, but we had restless feet and a ticket to roam. Even before I’d turned ten we were free to explore the city during the school holidays or go to Roselands shopping centre, about 3 kilometres away. Roselands was the first multi-level mall in Australia, over three storeys with a food court that had outlets such as London Roast, Red Dragon and Chuck Wagon. We thought people from all over Sydney, maybe even the world, went there because the PA announcements would never feature any place we’d ever heard of – and we’d been everywhere: ‘Mrs Hogan from Allambie Heights, your son is waiting for you at the information desk on the ground floor’.

The locus of spirituality at Roselands was the Raindrop Fountain, a tropical open-air diorama with beads of liquid falling down taut nylon fishing lines into a pool against a background trill of birdsong. It was the ‘closest thing to Disneyland in the Southern Hemisphere’, I heard a woman say, speaking with the authority of one who must have seen the original. Tata and I would sit and study this marvel of the imminent leisure society, this conveyor belt of repose, each of us with a childlike wonder; the combination of artifice and tranquillity was mesmerising. It was art and science, as if God were market-testing a new feature in nature.

‘Does it ever stop raining?’

‘Probably not,’ Tata speculated. ‘The water collects in the pool and is recycled back to the top.’

‘But it’s so quiet, you can’t hear the motor going.’

‘That’s because of the noise of water trickling into the pool.

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