Leaving Home

The ocean sighed a warm, sticky breath that bellowed across the ocean brought with it the scent of seaweed and mangroves. The beach surrendered to the oncoming advance of saltwater. Under swaying casuarinas, near a campground among the tall blades of yellow grass, the magician lay dead, and I began to pick through the haze of thoughts of how I came to be here. 

I had never before left Rockdale. The laneways and alleyways around my Bay Street home were a part of me as much as the blood in my veins or the lines on my palm. Me and the gang had roamed those streets all through the night, and when morning came and we should have been getting ready for school, I’d sneak back in through my bedroom window and climb into bed. I’d pretend to sleep before Mum would come and knock on my door.

“Wake up time, Eric,” she’d say. “Breakfast’s on the table.”

I’d lay there for a minute or two and watch the morning light peek through the window breaking in through the folds and crevices in the dusty blue curtains. I’d make a point of leaving the house and then, when I was sure that she had left for work, I’d sneak back in and sleep all day. At least that was how things went after they’d nabbed Dad and sent him up to Trial Bay.

I never knew what Dad did for work, but I knew that when he came home, he often did so in a rage of alcoholic rage. I had a scar under my left eye he’d given me a couple of year’s back for my 12^th birthday because he’d come home from the King’s and found the hose running in the front yard. He had detached the thing from the tap and come inside swinging it wildly. It made a loud whipping sound as it sliced through the air, landing on my upper cheek. He said I ‘bloody well deserved it.’ Mum would usually cop it next. That night she’d been given a reprieve as he passed out on the couch with the hose snaking across the floor.

Rockdale was home and I never thought I would leave but then the mail came and said that Dad was being released on a good behaviour bond, and I knew that I had to get out. I’d once heard someone say that the north was wild and untamed. Sounded like as good a place as any to get lost and never be found. I packed a rucksack and stole eighteen pounds from Mum’s purse and hitched a ride with a truck driver the next day.

The first thing I noticed was that life in Rockdale was nothing like anywhere else. I’d thought that every place must have had the same chaos, the same smell, but it turned out that outside the city things were different. There was room to think. It was a strange idea that one’s mind could be constrained to smallness by the cramped city life, but the more the sky opened up so did my mind. I could have sworn I’d never seen the brilliance of blue like it was now. Freedom was intoxicating.

In Brisbane I’d stumbled upon a camp of out of work men on the river just outside the city. They called themselves ‘the River crew’ and they were made up of blokes who’d lost their jobs, or never had them in the first place, looking for a place to call home in a world that had forgotten them. At first they were suspicious of me. Asked me all sorts of questions. Where ya from? Where ya heading? They warmed to me when I told them about my Dad, and they took me in. One night we sat around the crackling fire as it consumed a log from a building site and they asked what my plans were.

“Dunno,” I said, scratching my head and looking up the river, “probably keep on heading north.”

One old bloke, Artie, rubbed his chin and spoke gruffly. 

“North, eh. I used to work up on a plantation in Atherton. Reckon a young bloke like you could make a quid up there.” 

Artie had lost his job in Atherton when the industry went belly up a couple of years back and they had to offload staff. He was first to go because he had a war injury that had meant he couldn’t keep up with the younger blokes, so he’d drifted south and ended up in the river camps.

“I stole a car once and headed north,” another man laughed, “only made it as far as Nambour before the cops dragged me back to do a year at Boggo Road.” 

Atherton. My mind was made up. I would hitchhike up the coast, or steal a car, and make my way to Atherton. I would work on the farms and save enough money to rescue Mum from Dad, and I’d get her to move up with me and we’d be happy. 

Stealing cars along the way and sleeping rough or breaking into a hotel room where I could. Sneaking into hotel rooms always reminded me of days skipping school in Rockdale and it was only when I was fully roused that I remembered where I was and that I’d have to find breakfast myself because Mum certainly wasn’t putting it on the table for me.

The sign on the outskirts of Atherton was a beacon of hope. A promised land. Green fields stretched out as far as I could see. For all I knew they went on forever and ever. The mountains in the distance looked like they reached up to Heaven, which would have been visible had it not been for the heavy cloud that clung to the mountains and veiled them from mortal view. I was a pilgrim seeking fortune and freedom and I had reached the holy land.

I broke into a service station and spent the night sleeping on a piece of cardboard that I fashioned into a makeshift mattress that I wedged behind a tractor and some old beer crates. Cracking open a bottle of beer felt like a sacrament. I offered a toast to the river crew and to Mum, and I drank deeply to the future and fell into a contented sleep. 

Something stirred. The sun had broken through and the place was alive with the sound of jangling keys and a running engine. I rifled through my things and threw them into my rucksack. Standing up, I saw a police car outside the window I’d broken to get inside and the door that led out of the room was ajar.

Through the doorway I heard muffled voices.

“…don’t know where he’s come from…”

“…just a delinquent teen…”

“…have to take him in.” 

They put me in a tiny cell in the Atherton police station. I had only ever prayed out of desperation before, particularly when Dad was raging. I had prayed to whatever god was out there to save me from his fists. I had prayed for the pub to be closed when Dad knocked off work. For him to be sober. For him to be hit by a car. Anything. Now I prayed for a miracle to get me out of the mess I was in. Most of all I prayed they didn’t send me back to Rockdale.

I don’t want to put it down to divine intervention or nothing like that, but on the third day my prayers were answered. Christian, a forty-something old man who had a travelling entertainment gig around North Queensland was looking for a new apprentice for his magic show. He’d come into the police station to ask if he could put up a sign to advertise for someone. The cops said that if he was up for bailing me that I could go with him. I was keen to get out and saw my escape plan laid out before me. I’d be his apprentice for now, then escape when I could.

Christian was a traveling magician who did jobs in schools across the north under the name, Davo the Magician. Said he’d been working on a new trick that would put his name up there with Houdini. He wanted to disappear and he wanted to get back to Townsville to debut it. We set off from the tablelands and made our way south again, taking the highway down the coast road.

The town spread out around the base of a steeply sloping hill, a monolith that looked out to the sea towards an island sitting off the coast like a piece of land that had escaped the mainland. Goat-ravaged hills of granite, burnt sienna and orange, stood high and monolithic at the end of a broad sweep of beach towards a cape in the north. Several creeks, muddy and wide, blocked the passage out the campsite where we made our rest among the grass. 

“I reckon we should perform the disappearing act at Central first,” he said, placing his tongs down on a stump next to the pan of pork sausages that bubbled and spat at him as he wiped his greasy fingers on his overalls. “Give ‘em a show they’ll never forget.”

I sat on a large granite block that had been hewn from the hillside, drinking a cup of tea.

“How long we staying in this place?”

“I dunno, mate, I reckon we stay a few months and make our way down to Rocky, then come back north again in winter.”

I didn’t want to stay here. The air was too hot and though the sky was blue like it had been in the south, it was a washed out kind of blue that reminded me of a dead man’s lips. Like the life had been sapped by the intense sun that beat down upon the land. I wanted to run, to follow the freedom that called me north, to find again those green fields in Atherton. To look upon the mountains to the heavens and to enjoy the idea that one day I might be free. I thought of Mum back in Rockdale and the dream of a better life for her. And I thought of Dad and a piece of my soul died.

“I can stay a couple of weeks, then I reckon I will head north again,”

I said as he handed me a piece of bread and a pork sausage.

He laughed.

“You’re with me until you’re eighteen, mate. Conditions of your bail.” He turned and tended to the fire, which was beginning to die down now that breakfast was done.

A thousand thoughts of freedom slipped out of view, ebbing towards the distant horizon that shimmered under the harsh sun. Four more years! Four more years as a slave to this man all because he paid twenty quid to release me from a holding cell. Four years holding off on freedom. How could I go on? I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t give up.

His axe sat beside me on a pile of logs next to me. The haft was heavy and strong, made from American oak, and the axe head, though somewhat weathered and beaten, was surprisingly sharp. I ran my hand along the throat and up the belly, feeling the grain running lengthwise from the knob to the shoulder. I gripped it tightly and lifted it above my head as I stood and swung it down on the back of his head. He stumbled forward and I thought he was going to fall in the embers of the fire, but he managed to steady himself and turn to face me. I swung again and hit him across the face. He dropped like he was nothing and I threw the axe into the long grass. I sat down again and collected my thoughts. 

I was going north. I had left Rockdale and I was never going back. The green grass was calling.