The Summer of ’82 by Dave O’Neil

Author:Dave O’Neil [O’Neil, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nero

THE LUNATICS (HAVE TAKEN OVER ASYLUM)

Trev’s socialist republic was no paradise – it couldn’t have been further from Cuba. In fact it was more like Romania on a bad day. Unless you consider having canned spaghetti for tea every night and falling asleep to Trev jamming with his mates in the rumpus room some kind of paradise. And there was no escape in my bedroom: Glenn was there, and when Glenn was there, so was Liz. God knows what was happening under that doona.

I thought about going to sleep in Mum and Dad’s bed but discovered that Trev and Brenda were ensconced in there. Gross – but then where had I thought they would go? It was unlikely she’d share a room with Mark and Trevor in their bunk-beds.

Glenn had met Liz on the train while going to his job at Brashs. He had an Orange Juice badge on, and Liz started talking to him about the obscure Scottish indie pop band. She mentioned that she loved the graffiti just near Nunawading Station that read ‘I love Orange Juice – not the drink, silly’. Glenn had clinched the deal by saying, ‘Yeah, I did that.’ This was not entirely true, but he had advised on the grammar. He’d scampered when he heard a car, leaving Noddy and a few others to finish off the illegal artwork.

For some reason, along with bomb-making, we were quite fond of spraying a bit of graffiti along the train lines. We didn’t have tags; we’d simply write the names of bands we liked, like No Nonsense or The Specials. Mark had a penchant for writing smart-arse comments like the aforementioned ‘Mitcham the town of action – ha ha’, and also for quoting lines from Elvis Costello songs. He was quite poetic for an apprentice Telecom technician.

Sometimes our graffiti would be so personal that only a handful of people would understand it. We did one near the railway station that said ‘Zonk bucks cats’. Our absolute favourite was ‘Wang pisses in bottles’. That was about one of our friends, Dave Scott, a kid who was great fun to hang around with. He looked Asian but had Anglo parents, so ended up with the nickname Wang. He was quite small for his age, and it was this that always intrigued us. A rumour went round that Dave had been taken to a doctor to try to work out why he was so undersized, and as part of a series of tests had to urinate in a bottle. So we came up with ‘Wang pisses in bottles’ – hilarious to about five people.

So Liz and Glenn arranged to meet at the 24 Flavours café in Ringwood, where romance blossomed. Liz was a Mitcham girl, but it wasn’t surprising that we’d never met her before. She lived in one of the few mansions in Mitcham and went to a very posh private school. Her dad had made his money in parking meters; he claimed to have invented those plastic bollards that road workers used to block off roads – the orange ones that are filled with water.

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