Playing with fire

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Bille Brown

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Bille Brown's biography and other articles by this writer

 

“Nothing much" was the usual reply when asked what was going on. Nothing much went on in the summer of my twelfth year, the twentieth year of drought in our valley across the Great Dividing Range, which our geography teacher said did not divide anything and by standards of the world was not that great.

School broke up, which meant there really was nothing much to do. Both Mum and Dad worked at a couple of jobs and so we didn't go away until the last week of the holidays. It was so hot that even Mrs Phelan, who disapproved of bad language, agreed when Mr Hooper said "bloody hot". I had been hit for using that adjective – correctly, I thought – to describe Custer's last stand as a "bloody mess". But I was a smarty-pants, too big for my boots, and had to watch myself.

Watermelon. Carols by kerosene light while farmers and miners and meatworkers watched their flock, or the films at the Broadway Theatre, by night. Nothing much different from other bush kids. Except in my twelfth summer I had my first kiss and it nearly burnt down the town.

 

RONNY WAS BIGGER AND A BIT OLDER than me and had no freckles. He was advanced for his age. This wasn't a compliment in Bilo where any advance was considered dangerous. He was from out Valentine Plains way, and could drive since he was fourteen. Rumour was he had "lost it" with Denise. What had been lost, I discovered later, was his virginity and her cherry. Behind the shelter shed at school. When I went there hoping to find it for him, there was no sign of it.

His father didn't come into town but Ronny and his mother, Ailsa, worked at the Broadway Theatre, canvas seats downstairs and velvet lounge above. She sold the tickets from the box out front – a space she completely filled. He tore them. I helped at the Candy Bar and watched the films.

We saw everything, on screen and off. Mostly we sat up the back and not down the front in the canvas with a "certain element". Ailsa often patrolled the aisles with a torch. She would whisper harshly: "I have a torch and I know how to use it." Mainly it was shone in faces to stop two-fingered whistling and stamping.

Once, though, the behaviour revealed by the torch was so bad the film was stopped, the lights turned up and Polar, who we all feared and admired, was prodded with it and forced up the aisle and out. He went with applause from the lairs holding one finger victoriously above his head. Up another aisle, Denise left in tears, adjusting her frock. Ronny told me later that Polar had "got a bit" and Denise was the "town bike". As the lights were dimmed again, we went back to Fort Apache.

On these hot nights, the huge sides of the cinema were opened and fans whirred. My mother sometimes sat in the back row. Dad stayed in the pub next door. Mum loved the pictures but often fell asleep. She had a condition – "sheer tiredness" – which had other symptoms, but sherry and a cry seemed to cure. Mum went to the pictures for a good laugh and a good cry. It amazed me how they happened together. But only ever in the dark. Like Polar and Denise, some things could only happen in the dark.

 

MY FIRST KISS AND CRYING AND LAUGHING at the same time happened at the peak of summer, in full noon light.

Ronny wore his shirt collar done up without a tie when he was tearing tickets, but one day after seeing a movie with Sal Mineo, he started undoing his button and wearing his collar up until his mother ticked him off for being a lair and two bob lout.

To my twelve-year-old eyes, Ronny was good at everything. He was my sun, my moon and my stars. Well ... at least my light by night. When Ailsa could not be bothered to drive me home, she dropped me at their drive and Ronny would walk me the last mile home. We covered the dark path recounting that night's picture, acting out the good bits – mainly the funny bits.

If Dad came for me and took me home early, the walk the next night was lit by bits of the picture I had missed.

I loved Westerns. I always played Sioux or Cheyenne because I was very good at dying. But by the time I was twelve, Ronny stopped killing me and I stopped dying. One day I came with my bow and arrow and lipstick on my nose and waited at the fence but his mother told me to get home because Ronny was working out at the farm, helping his father with the branding.

Talk with Ronny only happened on the dark walk. By day, he treated me with indifference, even contempt. Though he did stop his friends throwing rocks at me in the pool because I had white skin and my broken teeth inspired Denise to call me a shark. With more wit, she could have dubbed me a dugong, in my baggy second-hand togs.

One night as we walked the dirt road home, there was silence between us. As we got to the rise and the track from which the yellow glow of the veranda lamp made it okay for me to run along by myself. He stopped. We stood in silence. Wordless. Nothing to report. Something was meant to happen. It didn't. He didn't twist his foot in the dirt, like kids do in movies when silence expresses deep unspoken urges. It was a little hole in which the nothing happening was the remarkable thing. I turned at the veranda and waved. He was not there. I turned the yellow lamp, speckled with mosquitoes and insects, off and after a moment looked back. He was there. Barely visible.

I went back and asked what was up. And for the first time he hurt me. He snorted back: "Brownie, you know nothing." He was right.

I knew that Ailsa had deemed that night's picture unsuitable. Even Ronny was not allowed to see it. The poster had caused a sensation and had been taken down. It featured prominent bosoms on a red-haired slut and a cruel, lusty, black-eyed hero who looked like he was a bad element. Passion and something never seen before were on a screen near us. The obscene promise was so threatening that Ronny was told to wait in the car across the road and on his honour not to get out of the car or he would suffer the consequences.

The vagueness of the dire warnings made them so dreadful and so tantalising. Ronny knew that Aub, the projectionist, always came out for a smoke on the landing just a reach from the fire escape after the picture started. At that moment Ronny ran up the fire stairs, that no one used because they were so wonky and you might do yourself an injury. He reached across and Aub, who had tattoos and a lick of the tar, hooked him into the theatre. Ronny took a drag on Aub's rollie and disappeared into the projection booth.

I sat outside watching the façade. It was painted like a wedding cake, white with pink and blue trim and bits of gold. Light bulbs flickered, but not all of them worked, two Doric columns held up the sign that Aub, who was a bit artistic when he wasn't on the turps, had painted. Behind the façade Ronny was seeing what had never been shown on that screen before. I was outside banished to the car in the vomiting heat, listening to the drunks at the bottom pub sing Running Bear Loved Little White Dove adding their inane chant, "in the raw".

What Ronny saw that night rendered him silent, and lingering in the darkness on the slight rise beyond the reach of my veranda light. And he was right. I knew nothing, but he did. Now he knew something.