MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 10 B.A.R.
We spent another year in Goulburn, although I remember it as forever. My life had an almost dreamlike quality to it as all the hours and days blurred into a Dali-esque landscape of disjointed memories.
At school I developed a crush on a freckly girl with big glasses by the name of Jodi Mellar. I was genuinely smitten in a breathless kind of way, even though my feelings were unsophisticated. I was nowhere anywhere near vaguely being in the vicinity of having any concept of sexual feelings. But I expressed myself in these moments of excitement by pulling my fingers and rubbing little circles on the palms of my hands. In what I can only describe as a prelude to adolescence - a kind of infant masturbation - I would frequently find myself immobilised in a fit of finger epilepsy as my two hands thrashed together like octopii trying to kill each other. If things got really intense, I rubbed my knees together. I am grateful that I never had to look at myself. I liked it when she looked at me and when she spoke to me it was a kind of delirium. I liked to hold her hand when we paired off to march across the playground. This was very generous of her, considering my recently attained reputation in relation to my self-immolation at the urinal. Lesser girls would have refused.
One day during assembly, she let me touch a plastic ring on her finger. This was the generally accepted universal sign that you liked someone. I was the only boy to cross that barrier. It seems nothing now, but I still remember the almost paralysing euphoria of that moment. I even composed a suite of poems to her, which my mother still keeps in a vertical file in her cupboard. They are written in a childish scrawl, gigantic and messy, using a variety of gaudy textas. There are hearts and various attempts at writing her name in different styles. But the sentiment was clear. Even at that age, you can tell I would grow up to be a wordsmith, and a passionate one at that.
“Oh Jodi, Jodi, Jodi, You are my love and I would cross the seven seas for my Jodi. Let the guitars play to my love Jodi Jodi who is a princess. Sing to my love. The birds sing Jodi Jodi Jodi. Everybody in the world knows the name of Jodi. Oh oh oh."
I even had elaborate fantasies about her… not kissy breathy pressed up against each other fantasies… but interesting nonetheless.
In one, the entire population of Goulburn chased the two of us up a giant tree in the back paddock which for some inexplicable reason, no-one except us could climb. So we had to spend the rest of our lives there in a Tarzanesque tree-house while the population of Goulburn spent the rest of their lives waiting angrily below for us to come down. She spent a lot of time falling off a branch but I was always there to dive and grab her in the knick of time and then hold her close while she cuddled into the crook of my neck with gratitude.
My favourite fantasy had Jodi and me and an assortment of pretty girls (plus select boys who owned good Matchbox cars) sitting in a circle having our lunch in the school playground. Suddenly I notice the enormous brick wall of the primary complex is falling down towards us, again for a totally inexplicable (and let’s face it, immaterial) reason. It falls in a single piece as if hinged at the base, like that great old Buster Keaton gag. I immediately raise the alarm and in a miraculous feat of physical impossibility push the entire group out of harm’s way, only to have most of my body crushed by falling bricks. The rest of the fantasy involves me dying in a generally protracted manner while the boys and girls crowd around and say nice things about me. Jodi rests my head in her lap and cries, her tears falling all over my face.
(I had another fantasy where I spread dog crap in kid’s sandwiches while no-one was looking, but that had nothing to do with Jodi.)
Over the subsequent years, I developed a string of fantasies of this ilk, all of which basically followed the theme of me rescuing girls while throwing myself into peril. I usually got wounded in some horrible way, but in doing so was rewarded with scores of women crying over me. As I got older, I also introduced elaborate awards ceremonies and tv coverage which declared my heroism to the world. In something of a macabre and slightly disturbing twist, many of these daydreams involved my own death. I composed long epistles of self-praise in the eulogies given at my own funeral, usually delivered by a string of my favourite girls or women. In some, I even woke up in the coffin and burst out of it, much (as you can imagine) to everybody’s surprise.
In primary school, I had an elaborate and complex daydream, the essence of which revolved around the evil cybermen (from Dr Who) taking over our classroom. While all the other kids quivered and cowered, I threw myself at them to the admiration of my classmates. In a scene reminiscent of the closing moments of Kevin Costner’s The Bodyguard, the climax was me launching myself in front of my teacher, thereby taking the lazer pulse intended for her. It must have come as quite a shock to the cybermen (who were up till that moment the most fearsome, destructive and unbeatable creatures in the universe) to finally meet their match in a freckly kid wearing shorts with zip-up pockets armed only with a 12 inch ruler. But there you have it. I lay there singed and writhing while Mrs Howard stroked my hair and cried all over me saying that she wanted to marry me, despite the fact that she was 32 and I was only nine.
These evolved into even more elaborate fantasies in my teenage years. These featured me landing a 747 after the entire flight crew had been struck unconscious with a mystery illness, or pulling a family out of a burning building.
Even today, I see my fantasy-self in the closing moments of any film where the hero dies nobly in front of an adoring crowd, like in Spartacus, Gladiator, Braveheart and any movie starring Jesus. I admire their heroism, selflessness and brave deeds in the face of oppression, usually with boldly spoken words of defiance. Pathetic really in the context of the hell I unleash when I am smitten by wounds like paper cuts and mouth ulcers. I am less like the heroic Henry V and more like the thieving Nimm who gets stabbed and dies a lonely death.
I thrived in infants school, quickly evolving into what teachers refer to, with raised eyebrows, as a Super-Eager Kid. I hung around teachers when they were on playground duty and stood like a flag-pole during assembly. When told to sit-up I would almost snap my spine. I threw my hand up at every teacher’s question, and had a variety of compelling facials and strained verbal utterances usually reserved for extreme toileting situations designed to convey the urgency of my response.
In these moments, my hand, arm and shoulder would shoot up as if hoisted on an invisible wire, one bum cheek lifted off the chair to gain extra precious inches of enthusiasm and I would groan and grunt as if giving birth to a rambutan. The word humility was not yet in my vocabulary and so I would often deliver my answer with outstretched arms in a grandiose manner more befitting a doctor announcing the cure to cancer to an auditorium of the world’s press rather than a bean-pole kid declaring to a class of disinterested peers that orange was the colour produced by combining red and yellow.
There was always plenty of fun to be had in the playground. I had lots of friends, although it’s a wonder, considering the way we treated each other. There was very little conversation and a lot of teasing. We expressed our friendship by communicating through such witticisms as “I know something you don’t know”, the sing-song “ner-ner-ner-ner-ner”, “My Dad can beat your Dad” or the poetic magic of “David and Suzy sitting in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g., first came love, then came marriage, then came baby in a baby carriage.” Whoever was “in” in a game was selected through the politically incorrect process of standing in a circle and chanting, “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo, catch a nigger by the toe, if he screams let him go, Eeny-meeny-miny-mo”.
For the first part of lunch, there was compulsory sitting and eating. Lunch came in a plastic lunch box from my bag, lovingly packed by mother. There was a frozen drink bottle wrapped in a tea towel, a peanut-butter and sultana sandwich, some thinly sliced celery sticks and a Zac biscuit. The Zac was a chocolate covered wafer, each individually wrapped in garishly coloured metallic alfoil. I licked the melted chocolate off the wrapper and collected them in a shoe-box next to my bed.
After food, we ripped thorns off the rose bushes hanging over the school fence, licked the backs and stuck them on our foreheads, then marched around the playground in long lines with our arms locked over each other’s shoulders. There was a sense of camaraderie in the line, which developed an intelligence of its own, magnetically drawing kids in from everywhere and sweeping this way and that around the school, encountering other lines of boys similarly marching around in long lines with their arms locked over each other’s shoulders. At various intervals, someone would suggest that we all become trucks or spaceships or tanks, causing a spontaneous outburst of random sprinting around the playground making the appropriate breeehhhm- breeehhhm (truck changing gears), Bbssccceeeewwww (rocket taking off) or rapid tfff-tfff-tfff-tfff-tfff (machine gun fire) noises.
We gave ourselves nick-names. Daniel Cantor - in a feat of no imagination - declared himself to be Truck-Man. Glen Reston was the Pink Flyer and Paul Barber was the Super Sub. I was the impressively swift Silver Rocket although my secret alias, Blubbering Boy, emerged every time I fell over on the asphalt and lost bits off my knees and elbows.
Glen Reston had an older brother and so he was always the one to introduce us to the latest jokes, quips and modifications to games. One day he turned up and taught our little gang of boys a new trick. We each put our hands together, splayed the fingers and then spliced our hands with another person at right angles so that the skin web between the second and third fingers were touching. Taking it in turns, you then put your head down and peeked through the gap in your own fingers at the stretched skin of your partner’s fingers. This, Glen proudly told us, was a vagina.
From that point on, a good deal of playground time was spent “doing that vagina thing” and laughing hysterically. I laughed along with them, even though I had not the faintest inkling of what was so funny, nor of what a vagina was or what is was supposed to look like anyway. Throughout my life, I have maintained this ability to laugh at jokes I don’t understand or nod knowingly at conversation topics of which I have no knowledge. The main difference now is that I know what a vagina is.
It was Glen who introduced our little playground gang to the previously unheard-of concept of B.A.R. (pronounced bee-yay-are). All of a sudden, parts of the playground became sanctuaries of immunity. Paul “Super Sub” Barber never fully grasped the small but significant idea that BAR was supposed to be a pre-arranged piece of generally agreed-upon map reference like a bench, tree or fence. As you closed in on him – he wasn’t very fast – he would bend down and pick up a blade of grass and thrust it out at you with all the desperate enthusiasm of a virgin shoving garlic at a vampire, all the time yelling BEEYAYARE-BEEYAYARE-BEEYAYARE! in your face. The ensuing convoluted explanations and arguments of the legalities of BAR always ended in tears.
It was Glen who also introduced us to the phrase “Can’t tip the butcher back,” meaning that in a game of tip you couldn’t tip the person who had just tipped you. I had no idea what the intrinsic qualities of the butchering profession were as to make them basically untippable; nor did I have any idea why a butcher was more untippable than a baker or chemist. Regardless, this little rule revolutionised the game. No more would two rivals stand face to face in the playground tipping each other in a blur reminiscent of a nordic fish-slapping dance.
It was also Glen who taught me my first poem: “Mummy’s in the kitchen cooking fish ‘n’ chips, Daddy’s in the dunny bombing battle-ships.”
When not zooming around the imaginative intergalactic world of the playground at break-neck speeds or pulling each other’s fingers, the most popular game was Cocky-laura, also known as Cock-o-lorum, British bulldog or Pole-ax the kid running across the playground while he is not looking.
The rules were simple. A huge number of kids would line up along one fence line. There was one kid who was “in”, who stood in the middle of the playground. When that kid yelled out “Cocky-Laura 1-2-3” (or “Bullrush”), the entire assembly of kids would charge forward, their job not to get caught by the kid in the middle.
They would invariably catch someone, a feat performed by throwing their arms around them and yelling out “cocky-lora- cocky-lora- cocky-lora” while the runner writhed like a stuck pig. Then the two of them would be “in” for the next round and they would in turn catch two, then the accumulated four would catch four and take it up to eight and so on and so on, until eventually the numbers had swapped and everybody was in the middle except for a few kids left standing at the fence with a look in their eyes like a rabbit caught in high-beam.
I soon developed a good strategy for this game. I realised that the pack who are “in” will, like a pride of lionesses stalking a herd of wilderbeast, tend to focus their attentions on the weak, the slow, the sluggish, the kids with thick glasses, runny noses and bandaids on their knees… not that you get too many of those kids on the plains of the Serengeti… although it sure would spice up those wildlife documentaries.
It was here that I learnt about the circle of life and how the weak must die so that the strong can survive.
It is a sad indictment on my personality that like some scabby jackal of the playground, I tended to run behind whoever was targeted as the weakest of the runners (invariably Bertie), and then when he went down in a cloud of lionesses yelling out “cocky-lora!” I would casually trot through the gap to the far fence. Each round was simultaneously tragic and exhilarating; tragic that my peers had gone down in a screaming heap, but exhilarating that it had been them and not me. I have read of soldiers speak of the same horrific dichotomy of emotion; something I am glad to say I have never had to resolve in the adult world.
But eventually I would have to take my place in the circle of life and face the fact that my time had come. Like a Corporal waiting for the whistle to go over the top, there would be a few anxious moments before the cry went out and I launched myself off the fence toward my destiny. I would watch with an ironic sense of betrayal as others trotted in my footsteps while I was brought to ground by the pack.
But moments later, I rebirthed like a phoenix, quickly swapping allegiance as quick as the hero of a vampire flick who in the seconds before the credits roll flashes his fangs at his friends who happen to be locked in a combi-van with him at the time. And so the hunted became the hunter.
Unfortunately, the only “hunted” remaining invariably ended up being Scott Cripps, a monstrous kid with a massive forehead and deep-set eyes who represented the entire universe in junior rugby league or some such sporting exploit. Not only was he massive of stature, he also had perfected the “palm off” whereby he stormed through virtually the entire population of the school parting us as if he was a combine harvester charging through a wheat field. We were dragged behind him like the tassles of a kite.
At school I developed a crush on a freckly girl with big glasses by the name of Jodi Mellar. I was genuinely smitten in a breathless kind of way, even though my feelings were unsophisticated. I was nowhere anywhere near vaguely being in the vicinity of having any concept of sexual feelings. But I expressed myself in these moments of excitement by pulling my fingers and rubbing little circles on the palms of my hands. In what I can only describe as a prelude to adolescence - a kind of infant masturbation - I would frequently find myself immobilised in a fit of finger epilepsy as my two hands thrashed together like octopii trying to kill each other. If things got really intense, I rubbed my knees together. I am grateful that I never had to look at myself. I liked it when she looked at me and when she spoke to me it was a kind of delirium. I liked to hold her hand when we paired off to march across the playground. This was very generous of her, considering my recently attained reputation in relation to my self-immolation at the urinal. Lesser girls would have refused.
One day during assembly, she let me touch a plastic ring on her finger. This was the generally accepted universal sign that you liked someone. I was the only boy to cross that barrier. It seems nothing now, but I still remember the almost paralysing euphoria of that moment. I even composed a suite of poems to her, which my mother still keeps in a vertical file in her cupboard. They are written in a childish scrawl, gigantic and messy, using a variety of gaudy textas. There are hearts and various attempts at writing her name in different styles. But the sentiment was clear. Even at that age, you can tell I would grow up to be a wordsmith, and a passionate one at that.
“Oh Jodi, Jodi, Jodi, You are my love and I would cross the seven seas for my Jodi. Let the guitars play to my love Jodi Jodi who is a princess. Sing to my love. The birds sing Jodi Jodi Jodi. Everybody in the world knows the name of Jodi. Oh oh oh."
I even had elaborate fantasies about her… not kissy breathy pressed up against each other fantasies… but interesting nonetheless.
In one, the entire population of Goulburn chased the two of us up a giant tree in the back paddock which for some inexplicable reason, no-one except us could climb. So we had to spend the rest of our lives there in a Tarzanesque tree-house while the population of Goulburn spent the rest of their lives waiting angrily below for us to come down. She spent a lot of time falling off a branch but I was always there to dive and grab her in the knick of time and then hold her close while she cuddled into the crook of my neck with gratitude.
My favourite fantasy had Jodi and me and an assortment of pretty girls (plus select boys who owned good Matchbox cars) sitting in a circle having our lunch in the school playground. Suddenly I notice the enormous brick wall of the primary complex is falling down towards us, again for a totally inexplicable (and let’s face it, immaterial) reason. It falls in a single piece as if hinged at the base, like that great old Buster Keaton gag. I immediately raise the alarm and in a miraculous feat of physical impossibility push the entire group out of harm’s way, only to have most of my body crushed by falling bricks. The rest of the fantasy involves me dying in a generally protracted manner while the boys and girls crowd around and say nice things about me. Jodi rests my head in her lap and cries, her tears falling all over my face.
(I had another fantasy where I spread dog crap in kid’s sandwiches while no-one was looking, but that had nothing to do with Jodi.)
Over the subsequent years, I developed a string of fantasies of this ilk, all of which basically followed the theme of me rescuing girls while throwing myself into peril. I usually got wounded in some horrible way, but in doing so was rewarded with scores of women crying over me. As I got older, I also introduced elaborate awards ceremonies and tv coverage which declared my heroism to the world. In something of a macabre and slightly disturbing twist, many of these daydreams involved my own death. I composed long epistles of self-praise in the eulogies given at my own funeral, usually delivered by a string of my favourite girls or women. In some, I even woke up in the coffin and burst out of it, much (as you can imagine) to everybody’s surprise.
In primary school, I had an elaborate and complex daydream, the essence of which revolved around the evil cybermen (from Dr Who) taking over our classroom. While all the other kids quivered and cowered, I threw myself at them to the admiration of my classmates. In a scene reminiscent of the closing moments of Kevin Costner’s The Bodyguard, the climax was me launching myself in front of my teacher, thereby taking the lazer pulse intended for her. It must have come as quite a shock to the cybermen (who were up till that moment the most fearsome, destructive and unbeatable creatures in the universe) to finally meet their match in a freckly kid wearing shorts with zip-up pockets armed only with a 12 inch ruler. But there you have it. I lay there singed and writhing while Mrs Howard stroked my hair and cried all over me saying that she wanted to marry me, despite the fact that she was 32 and I was only nine.
These evolved into even more elaborate fantasies in my teenage years. These featured me landing a 747 after the entire flight crew had been struck unconscious with a mystery illness, or pulling a family out of a burning building.
Even today, I see my fantasy-self in the closing moments of any film where the hero dies nobly in front of an adoring crowd, like in Spartacus, Gladiator, Braveheart and any movie starring Jesus. I admire their heroism, selflessness and brave deeds in the face of oppression, usually with boldly spoken words of defiance. Pathetic really in the context of the hell I unleash when I am smitten by wounds like paper cuts and mouth ulcers. I am less like the heroic Henry V and more like the thieving Nimm who gets stabbed and dies a lonely death.
I thrived in infants school, quickly evolving into what teachers refer to, with raised eyebrows, as a Super-Eager Kid. I hung around teachers when they were on playground duty and stood like a flag-pole during assembly. When told to sit-up I would almost snap my spine. I threw my hand up at every teacher’s question, and had a variety of compelling facials and strained verbal utterances usually reserved for extreme toileting situations designed to convey the urgency of my response.
In these moments, my hand, arm and shoulder would shoot up as if hoisted on an invisible wire, one bum cheek lifted off the chair to gain extra precious inches of enthusiasm and I would groan and grunt as if giving birth to a rambutan. The word humility was not yet in my vocabulary and so I would often deliver my answer with outstretched arms in a grandiose manner more befitting a doctor announcing the cure to cancer to an auditorium of the world’s press rather than a bean-pole kid declaring to a class of disinterested peers that orange was the colour produced by combining red and yellow.
There was always plenty of fun to be had in the playground. I had lots of friends, although it’s a wonder, considering the way we treated each other. There was very little conversation and a lot of teasing. We expressed our friendship by communicating through such witticisms as “I know something you don’t know”, the sing-song “ner-ner-ner-ner-ner”, “My Dad can beat your Dad” or the poetic magic of “David and Suzy sitting in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g., first came love, then came marriage, then came baby in a baby carriage.” Whoever was “in” in a game was selected through the politically incorrect process of standing in a circle and chanting, “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo, catch a nigger by the toe, if he screams let him go, Eeny-meeny-miny-mo”.
For the first part of lunch, there was compulsory sitting and eating. Lunch came in a plastic lunch box from my bag, lovingly packed by mother. There was a frozen drink bottle wrapped in a tea towel, a peanut-butter and sultana sandwich, some thinly sliced celery sticks and a Zac biscuit. The Zac was a chocolate covered wafer, each individually wrapped in garishly coloured metallic alfoil. I licked the melted chocolate off the wrapper and collected them in a shoe-box next to my bed.
After food, we ripped thorns off the rose bushes hanging over the school fence, licked the backs and stuck them on our foreheads, then marched around the playground in long lines with our arms locked over each other’s shoulders. There was a sense of camaraderie in the line, which developed an intelligence of its own, magnetically drawing kids in from everywhere and sweeping this way and that around the school, encountering other lines of boys similarly marching around in long lines with their arms locked over each other’s shoulders. At various intervals, someone would suggest that we all become trucks or spaceships or tanks, causing a spontaneous outburst of random sprinting around the playground making the appropriate breeehhhm- breeehhhm (truck changing gears), Bbssccceeeewwww (rocket taking off) or rapid tfff-tfff-tfff-tfff-tfff (machine gun fire) noises.
We gave ourselves nick-names. Daniel Cantor - in a feat of no imagination - declared himself to be Truck-Man. Glen Reston was the Pink Flyer and Paul Barber was the Super Sub. I was the impressively swift Silver Rocket although my secret alias, Blubbering Boy, emerged every time I fell over on the asphalt and lost bits off my knees and elbows.
Glen Reston had an older brother and so he was always the one to introduce us to the latest jokes, quips and modifications to games. One day he turned up and taught our little gang of boys a new trick. We each put our hands together, splayed the fingers and then spliced our hands with another person at right angles so that the skin web between the second and third fingers were touching. Taking it in turns, you then put your head down and peeked through the gap in your own fingers at the stretched skin of your partner’s fingers. This, Glen proudly told us, was a vagina.
From that point on, a good deal of playground time was spent “doing that vagina thing” and laughing hysterically. I laughed along with them, even though I had not the faintest inkling of what was so funny, nor of what a vagina was or what is was supposed to look like anyway. Throughout my life, I have maintained this ability to laugh at jokes I don’t understand or nod knowingly at conversation topics of which I have no knowledge. The main difference now is that I know what a vagina is.
It was Glen who introduced our little playground gang to the previously unheard-of concept of B.A.R. (pronounced bee-yay-are). All of a sudden, parts of the playground became sanctuaries of immunity. Paul “Super Sub” Barber never fully grasped the small but significant idea that BAR was supposed to be a pre-arranged piece of generally agreed-upon map reference like a bench, tree or fence. As you closed in on him – he wasn’t very fast – he would bend down and pick up a blade of grass and thrust it out at you with all the desperate enthusiasm of a virgin shoving garlic at a vampire, all the time yelling BEEYAYARE-BEEYAYARE-BEEYAYARE! in your face. The ensuing convoluted explanations and arguments of the legalities of BAR always ended in tears.
It was Glen who also introduced us to the phrase “Can’t tip the butcher back,” meaning that in a game of tip you couldn’t tip the person who had just tipped you. I had no idea what the intrinsic qualities of the butchering profession were as to make them basically untippable; nor did I have any idea why a butcher was more untippable than a baker or chemist. Regardless, this little rule revolutionised the game. No more would two rivals stand face to face in the playground tipping each other in a blur reminiscent of a nordic fish-slapping dance.
It was also Glen who taught me my first poem: “Mummy’s in the kitchen cooking fish ‘n’ chips, Daddy’s in the dunny bombing battle-ships.”
When not zooming around the imaginative intergalactic world of the playground at break-neck speeds or pulling each other’s fingers, the most popular game was Cocky-laura, also known as Cock-o-lorum, British bulldog or Pole-ax the kid running across the playground while he is not looking.
The rules were simple. A huge number of kids would line up along one fence line. There was one kid who was “in”, who stood in the middle of the playground. When that kid yelled out “Cocky-Laura 1-2-3” (or “Bullrush”), the entire assembly of kids would charge forward, their job not to get caught by the kid in the middle.
They would invariably catch someone, a feat performed by throwing their arms around them and yelling out “cocky-lora- cocky-lora- cocky-lora” while the runner writhed like a stuck pig. Then the two of them would be “in” for the next round and they would in turn catch two, then the accumulated four would catch four and take it up to eight and so on and so on, until eventually the numbers had swapped and everybody was in the middle except for a few kids left standing at the fence with a look in their eyes like a rabbit caught in high-beam.
I soon developed a good strategy for this game. I realised that the pack who are “in” will, like a pride of lionesses stalking a herd of wilderbeast, tend to focus their attentions on the weak, the slow, the sluggish, the kids with thick glasses, runny noses and bandaids on their knees… not that you get too many of those kids on the plains of the Serengeti… although it sure would spice up those wildlife documentaries.
It was here that I learnt about the circle of life and how the weak must die so that the strong can survive.
It is a sad indictment on my personality that like some scabby jackal of the playground, I tended to run behind whoever was targeted as the weakest of the runners (invariably Bertie), and then when he went down in a cloud of lionesses yelling out “cocky-lora!” I would casually trot through the gap to the far fence. Each round was simultaneously tragic and exhilarating; tragic that my peers had gone down in a screaming heap, but exhilarating that it had been them and not me. I have read of soldiers speak of the same horrific dichotomy of emotion; something I am glad to say I have never had to resolve in the adult world.
But eventually I would have to take my place in the circle of life and face the fact that my time had come. Like a Corporal waiting for the whistle to go over the top, there would be a few anxious moments before the cry went out and I launched myself off the fence toward my destiny. I would watch with an ironic sense of betrayal as others trotted in my footsteps while I was brought to ground by the pack.
But moments later, I rebirthed like a phoenix, quickly swapping allegiance as quick as the hero of a vampire flick who in the seconds before the credits roll flashes his fangs at his friends who happen to be locked in a combi-van with him at the time. And so the hunted became the hunter.
Unfortunately, the only “hunted” remaining invariably ended up being Scott Cripps, a monstrous kid with a massive forehead and deep-set eyes who represented the entire universe in junior rugby league or some such sporting exploit. Not only was he massive of stature, he also had perfected the “palm off” whereby he stormed through virtually the entire population of the school parting us as if he was a combine harvester charging through a wheat field. We were dragged behind him like the tassles of a kite.
Well... that's the first ten chapters of "Selective Memory". There's plenty more but that's probably enough for now.