Blue Moves

I am fourteen years old and I can't stop listening to Elton John.

I need to write this down because I'm confused about a few things I think have happened.

I have memories mixed up with other memories; images of people and places that look different to the faces and places that I know now.

For example, I remember picking chestnuts in a park full of tourists with a couple of friends of mine and we collected them from among the rusty, orange leaves on the ground.

But now I learn there are no chestnuts where we live and never have been, so I don't know.

The chestnuts fell just before it got really cold and it snowed and I remember the snow because my friends were surprised at how early it came that year.

But it doesn't snow here, well, in some parts yes, but only in the high mountains they say.

Places that I've never been.

Oh, and I remember the squirrels too in the park and the tourists tried to feed them peanuts.

I'm writing this on holiday. My dad has me and my brother for ten days and the three of us are in a caravan park by the beach. The place is packed with a lot of fat, ugly, sweaty people. It's hot, so hot I feel sick after breakfast and I'm supposed to go out with them for a swim. I don't want to go. I want to lie on my bed and listen to "Honkey Chateau" on my Walkman. They say I'm a spoilsport and that I never want to have any fun with them.

Sometimes I hate them so much. It's probably not a very nice thing to say, but when they come into the van to tell me we're going for a picnic, I want to shout and scream at them to leave me in peace.

But I have to go. I decide to take two tapes: "Tumbleweed Connection" and "Don't Shoot Me".

Outside, some drunk bloke’s passed out in front of the public toilets and a couple of security guys are trying to pick him up. There's the sickly smell of coconut oil mixed up with the reek of vomit and prawn heads left lying in the sun in garbage bins. The bins are crawling with blowflies and maggots.

I feel sick again. I want to find a shady tree, close my eyes and press the headphones deep into my ears. I don't like the heat. I don't think I ever did. It was better picking chestnuts till my pockets bulged, when it was cool and watching the wind whip the fake fox fur across my friends' noses.

That winter, Reg swapped his large, black-rimmed glasses for a pair of small, dark, rectangular ones he found in Trafalgar Square. He looked so cool. Just like a pop star, we said. We were sitting on the lions and there was a guy playing the guitar. A group of hippies had gathered and were swaying with their eyes closed and arms outstretched, reaching for the pigeons as they settled down around them.

I think the glasses belonged to one of the hippies. Bernie was making up words in his head - weird images that reminded us of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". How do you do that man? Just make up words like that?

Bernie thought of a title of a song while we watched the pigeons lined up on the tops of the buildings. One of the pigeons in the square was short of a leg. Reg suggested we make little crutches for it out of sticks. It always hung about under Nelson's Column so we decided we should call it "The Admiral's Pigeon" and dress it up in neckerchief and eyepatch and of course a wooden leg to replace the missing one.

We are driving slowly because there are too many cars on the road. The cars have their windows wound down with music blaring and there are bicycles and surfboards strapped to the roof racks.

But I don't see them because I'm hunched in the back seat with my eyes closed.

My father is talking to me but I'm pretending that I don't hear him and I turn my music up a bit higher. From half an open eye I see him shake his head.

Elton John is singing “Where to Now St Peter?" I know his voice so well, better than I do my own. I know this song like I know all his songs inside and out. This album suits the heat; it's a summer record and makes me think of summer in America - hot long highways and large, red Dodge trucks filled with black farmhands in blue overalls, roadhouses with run-down jalopies, petrol pumps, Coca-Cola machines, torn fly screens and ancient advertisements, a countryside full of barns with farmers stacking hay.

But I've never been to America either.

All around us there is dry, yellow grass. My father's saying something about the bushfires that are everywhere this summer and that's why people aren't allowed to have open BBQs during the day.

We have to use the brick gas BBQs in the picnic sites. I hate those places; bunches of whinging kids, babies crying, everyone being domestic. There's always sloppy coleslaw, soggy bread and stinking

sausages and for some reason it reminds me of the smell of a freshy-ironed school uniform on a Monday morning. I wish I was a bird. A pigeon. Free to fly around Nelson's Column.

I had been thrilled with the idea of picking wild food off the ground. I didn't know chestnuts fell like that, in little green spiky balls that split apart to reveal a beautiful, deep-brown jewel. I had picked blackberries down the side of our driveway as a kid, gorging myself on their purple juices, but I was told later by a neighbour's father that the council sprayed them.

I remember picking strawberries on a farm once, but we ate more than we collected and were sick in the car on the way home. Picking nuts off the ground was something I'd only read about in books; mushrooms in dark woods, herbs and edible weeds in fairytales, oranges and apples in gardens of Enid Blyton. But these trees glowed green and gold, the dry leaves crunching like breakfast cereal beneath our feet.

As we pull into a picnic area, there is no breeze in the gumtrees and the cicadas are trilling loudly and monotonously like power tools on a Sunday morning. There are kids kicking a ball around. Dad wants me to lay the blanket and set the plates and stuff. I go for a walk instead. I hear him say that damn music and I want to tell him to go to hell.

I find a quiet spot to lie down and melt into the mellow song "Come Down in Time". I love this album, but it's not my favourite. My favourite still has to be "Blue Moves" because I have heard it a thousand times and never get tired of it. Also, "Madman Across the Water", but I save that record for when I'm in bed at night, when it's dark and totally quiet. When I listen to that album, I remember other things....

...like when me, Bernie and Reg went to Warwick Castle. I think it was Warwick Castle - some strange name like that. We got there early so went and had an ice-cream. He didn't like being called Reg by then. He'd already decided to change his name but we kept forgetting and called him Reg anyway.

We didn't think his new name suited him much.

Inside the castle, everything smelled serious and heavy and old. Reg had us laughing all the time when he imitated a guard or posed in front of the huge, painted portraits. We were told to be quiet a few times, then finally asked to leave. I don't think the guards liked our clothes. Then we went back to London and listened to records - records from America with strange covers and groups I'd never heard of. It was the first time I'd heard a Leonard Cohen song and I loved it. They were pretty keen on The Band too. And Reg loved Little Richard. Sometimes he'd play his songs on an old upright, banging away at the keys till a neighbour complained.

I can hear my father calling my name. He's sounding angry. Shit.

I emerge from my hiding place. Just looking around, I say, but he says go help your brother get the rest of the stuff out of the car. My brother's kicking a footy so I go pull a coke out of the Esky and sit on the boot of the car.

Dad's trying to get the grill working but I think it's one of those you have to put money into. He looks ridiculous banging away at the nobs and buttons. He starts raving and calling me lazy then I start screaming at him telling him he's stupid and boring and he says you've been nothing but trouble on this holiday, then my brother comes over and yells at me too and says he's gonna tell mum. I say shut up brat. Fuck. I can't stand this family.

Other families are staring at us and I give them the finger and dad hits me. I run off blubbering like a fool and hide in some bushes, sobbing into my headset. I wish I'd brought "Empty Sky". It always

helps me when I'm really upset.

I remember when he wanted his music to sound American; Blues, Rock and Roll and Bob Dylan all rolled into the one perfect song.

Hey man, just be yourself. Do your own thing. I was older then, I could say things like that to him 'cause he listened to me. He trusted me. We were friends. Wouldn't it be groovy if we sang together?

We travelled everywhere on the red buses. We'd sit upstairs so we could see the city and try to spot famous people. He reckoned he saw Mick Jagger once but another time I know he saw Eric Burden 'cause I saw him too.

Everything was alive then, the music, the colourful clothes. There were movies and shows and concerts, but we never had much money to go to places like that. Man, I could live here forever. We could make music together, you, me and Bernie. Bernie could write me some lyrics too. Then we could go to America and be famous.

Well, why don't you stay? Hey girl, don't cry. Fuck, What's wrong? I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta be born somewhere. Shit. I'm sorry. The tears kept coming, deep gulps of pain pouring out through my eyes, nose and mouth.

I'm gasping, my hair is wet, my face presses into the grass, my fists tear at the leaves and branches that stick into my arms and legs. The hurt is so great in my chest that I feel like I'm going to burst.

I sob from self-pity, from frustration, from being someone and somewhere that I don't want to be, for being 14 years old, for containing so much emotion I cannot express in words, for hating and loving so profoundly. I want to die.

I lie there sighing deeply and wretchedly. My headset is on the grass beside me and a small boy with surprised, blue eyes is staring down at me. A woman's voice calls him and he leaves me there, thinking of chestnuts.