The Summer of ’82 Page 17

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘Well … my dad was in the air force for a long time,’ I said eventually.

  He looked at me like I was an idiot, and fair enough. ‘But that’s airplanes …’

  ‘And helicopters,’ I added.

  I didn’t get the job.

  I kept telling myself that it didn’t matter if I failed. I could repeat the HSC. I could get a job. I could go to TAFE. I could just stay on the dole and rock and roll. Still, when I thought about opening the envelope containing my results, I felt sick.

  It seemed crazy that someone – well, quite a few people – already knew my results. The people who marked the papers, the people who printed out the certificates and put them in the envelopes – they all knew. The envelopes had already been posted; in fact, they were probably in a sack of mail at the Mitcham post office, waiting to be delivered. The last ten weeks had been great fun, but tomorrow would put a full stop on this part of my life.

  ‘Please God,’ I prayed, ‘please just let me pass. Please God, I’ve never asked for anything before.’

  And then God answered me. ‘That’s because you don’t believe in me, remember? And you only came to church on Christmas and Easter, and even that’s dropped off lately.’

  He was right. It was a bit late for me to be getting the Good Lord on my side.

  ‘You’re on your own, son,’ he added.

  And so I was, but I realised there were thousands of teenagers around Australia exactly like me. Lying in bed in the dark, completely alone.

  Except that I wasn’t alone: I’d forgotten about Glenn, and he had Liz in his bed.

  ‘God, when am I going to get a girlfriend?’

  No reply – he’d hung up ages ago.

  ONE PERFECT DAY

  I woke up about ten a.m. – early for a dole bludger, which I officially now was. Maybe current affairs reporter Mike Willesee could come and do a story on me, as I relaxed beside the pool. ‘This is a dole bludger,’ he’d say. ‘Sucking on a Razz iceblock while sucking the government and taxpayers dry!’

  I’d been sacked from my job at the hot dog shop. As well as the weekends I had been given the plum Monday night gig. It was the easiest shift: there were never any customers and we closed at midnight. Unfortunately, Dudley was secretly counting the hot dog rolls, and it turned out I was usually several rolls out. And so one morning he had rung me up.

  ‘David, it’s Dudley here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The owner of Electro Hot Dogs.’

  ‘Oh, right. How’s it going?’

  ‘Not very well. There’s a problem with my rolls.’

  ‘Yeah, my dad reckons you should stay away from those foreign cars.’

  ‘No, you idiot, my hot dog rolls. I know you’ve been stealing them!’

  ‘Why would I steal your hot dog rolls?’

  ‘You’ve been selling them to an opposition hot dog shop.’

  ‘What? How many rolls are you missing?’

  ‘At least three to five, every time you work a shift. So I’m sacking you. You are no longer an employee of Electro Hot Dogs.’

  ‘But I—’

  It was too late; he had hung up.

  The truth of the matter was, yes, rolls were disappearing after every one of my shifts. But I wasn’t stealing them – I was eating them. Mmmm … I can still taste that sauce, cheese and mustard.

  Not to worry. As the summer had progressed, my friends had infiltrated the hot dog shop. Glenn was working there now too, and Wookey was also pulling some shifts. But Glenn wanted to leave as he was overworked, what with his Brashs job, his love-life and all the volunteering he’d been doing for the Red Cross and other charities. So I simply took on his shifts. We were identical twins, and we still looked pretty similar.

  ‘Didn’t I sack you?’ Dudley asked me on several occasions.

  ‘Nah,’ I would say. ‘That was my twin brother, David. Yeah, he’s a shocking thief.’

  But maybe I would have to find a full-time position in the hot dog industry, because today, just after lunch, the postie would be delivering my results.

  The other area where there were zero results was my love-life. ‘Surprise, surprise, surprise,’ as Gomer Pyle – a character from one of the military-based sitcoms my dad loved – would say. Put a man in a uniform and give him a few bad jokes and Dad was happy. Even better, put the man in a dress – like on It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – and Dad would be in hysterics. But there were no laughs for me with my failed romantic life.

  Ever since our near-death experience in the Orange Rocket, my budding romance with Cindy had stalled. I felt like she didn’t trust me anymore. Maybe she saw me only as ‘the guy who tried to kill me that day on the way to the penguins’. But like a penguin, I was willing to mate for life, given half a chance. That made me wonder: Are penguins swingers? I was eighteen and would have been up for anything Cindy wanted.

  I was hoping that the arrival of my results would show her I was going to be a big success in life, and that she should lock me in early. But then I was pretty sure I was going to fail, and I had no plan for that. Maybe some kind of sympathy case …?

  I got up and had breakfast. Glenn was feeling confident and kept talking about what course he was going to do. Mum and Dad had gone to Cape Paterson; they were going to call us from the public phone box at about three o’clock to check whether we had failed or not.

  It was always put like that – not whether we’d pass but whether we’d fail. Dad had jokingly said he would give either of us a hundred dollars for every A we got. Talk about an easy bet on his part; I had no hope. Then again, Glenn did expect one or two As. I tried to get Dad to agree to fifty bucks for a B and twenty-five for a C, but he wasn’t having it. I even tried splitting the difference with Glenn, saying we’d take fifty each for either one’s As, but he wasn’t interested.

  We had agreed with the guys who lived near us – which was just Noddy – that we would hang around the street and wait for our results. After that, we were planning to go to the pub and either celebrate or commiserate.

  My expectations weren’t high, but Noddy was convinced he was going to fail. Actually, we were all convinced he was going to fail. By the last term of school he’d basically stopped going to classes and was just turning up for the social aspects. It was a constant cat-and-mouse game with the teachers, trying to avoid being dragged to class. At lunchtime you would see him and some others across the road, outside the front of the milk bar. They would do stuff like buy a bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine and go and drink it in the cemetery. They thought that was cool.

  The leader was a guy called Tim Turner, whose mum was a teacher at the school, which made it all the worse that he was such a bad boy. When it came to the art of wagging school, this guy was Da Vinci. I assume his mum gave him a lift to school and he just said, ‘Thanks, Mum, I’ll just go to class now.’ And then he’d jump the fence, go to the bottle shop and end up in the cemetery again.

  Tim was the guy who, when the premier of Victoria, Dick Hamer, turned up to open the new mall at the Mitcham shops, yelled out, ‘Get me a job, Dick!’

  To his credit, Hamer stopped cutting the ribbon or whatever he was doing and said, ‘All right, young man, give me your name and address and I will get you a job.’

  Tim was flummoxed; this was not the response he was looking for. He sheepishly gave Mr Hamer’s aide his details and, sure enough, a week later he was working in some warehouse thanks to the premier of Victoria. Of course he only lasted a few days; he had too many other important things to do, like getting drunk at the cemetery.

  Noddy, Glenn and I assembled at about eleven o’clock out the front of our house. Noddy had studied the postal route: he reckoned the postman did our street first and then his street.

  The postie generally came to our place around one in the afternoon. I knew this because waiting for the postman used to be a big deal. You would send away for something from the back of a comic, like Sea-Monkeys – what a letd
own! – or you’d be waiting on a letter from your pen pal, a girl in Japan, or that birthday card from your grandparents that had a five-dollar note slipped inside. You would wait anxiously in the front room, where you had a good view of the letterbox. This was before the popularity of eBay caused a fleet of white vans to be sent out on a permanent circuit around the suburbs. Back in 1982 the only person who delivered stuff to your house was the postman.

  The postman was aware it was a big day, but he still had to do his normal route. There were no special privileges for anybody, despite the fact that Mum had given him a nice pair of socks as a Christmas present every year. Poor postie. The garbos always got beer, the paperboy got money and the postie got socks. No wonder he wasn’t going to do us any favours.

  We passed the time by guessing what HSC scores we would get. If you were doing five subjects, which was the norm, you got marked out of 100 points for each subject. But you only got ten per cent of your score for your fifth and lowest subject. So 410 was the perfect score. Some complete brainiacs did six subjects and tried for 420 points, but no one ever got close to that.

  Not like these days, when you see those annoying child prodigies getting perfect scores, posing for a photo in the paper with their parents, with a caption like ‘Mindy hopes to play her violin at the top of Mount Everest, where she plans to find a cure for alopecia’. We all know those kids burn out early and that photo ends up being the highlight of their life. You probably just got served by one of those guys at the Red Rooster drive-through.

  Getting over 300 points seemed a very high score back in 1982. Trev got 308 and had just missed out on getting into medicine, but was then offered a place in Law at Monash, which was considered the second-best uni in Victoria after Melbourne. It just shows that we expected our health professionals and legal eagles to be brainy, but the people who would teach our kids only had to get a few Cs and a couple of Ds.

  Most of my mates and I were aiming lower. We were hoping for scores over 250, because then we’d get into the courses we had chosen. Anything over 250 would get me into a Primary Teaching course somewhere, even if it was in Warrnambool, 300 kilometres from Melbourne. Glenn was extremely confident and had put down Politics at Melbourne University – which I believed was actually an Arts degree, but he liked to talk himself up. Noddy hadn’t even filled out a uni admission form because he was so sure he would fail. He had already started wearing a high-vis vest.

  We hung around out the front until twelve-thirty, by which time we were hungry so we headed inside and made toasted sandwiches and milkshakes. Some things never change with teenage boys: give them a jaffle machine, some cheese, tomato and a loaf of bread and they’ll be happy. We ate with one eye on the street.

  After lunch we headed back out there and sat on our BMXs. The suspense was killing us. We started doing different tricks on our bikes to distract ourselves. Who could do the longest mono? The highest bunny-hop? The best endo? (That last one was when you put the front wheel in the gutter and lifted the back wheel off the ground.) Yep, there we were, tomorrow’s hope, on bikes designed for kids four years younger than us!

  But it didn’t matter how good our monos, bunny-hops or endos were – we just wanted to see our HSC results. By now it was one-thirty and the postman was late. Then Noddy came up with a genius idea. ‘Let’s go and find the dickhead,’ he said.

  We headed off on our bikes, but then remembered we had our licences. ‘Let’s take the car!’

  We jumped into the Orange Rocket and cruised the streets, looking for the postman. We were like some really pathetic gang. We searched in a kind of grid pattern, looking for a man aged in his thirties, dressed in shorts, long socks (probably from Mum) and a bush hat, but somehow he eluded us. There was one false sighting when we spotted a bike, so I zoomed up and overshot the driveway, almost taking out half of a Mormon patrol.

  We drove around for what seemed like ages, and then at last we spotted the elusive postie. He had pulled over on the nature strip and seemed to have his bike in bits. The sacks of mail were put to one side and he had a spanner out.

  We jumped out of the car. ‘Mate, what’s going on?’ Noddy asked.

  ‘Bit of a disaster – my seat has fallen off.’

  What? This was like a bad comedy skit. And what is ‘a bit of a disaster’? An earthquake limited to half a block?

  ‘Can we have our HSC results?’ I asked.

  ‘Where do you guys live?’

  ‘Reserve Avenue and McGhee Avenue.’

  He didn’t look up and kept working on his seat. ‘Technically, I can’t give them to you unless you are standing outside your house. Even then I’m meant to place the mail in the letterbox.’

  Noddy started looking in his bags. ‘Come on, mate, they must be in here somewhere?’

  This was too much for the postie. He was hot, bothered and had a broken seat, and now some kid was rifling through his stuff. ‘That’s the property of the Crown until I deliver it!’ He began quoting chapter and verse of the Mail Act, and Noddy took this as his cue to dash off. He was back moments later holding a letterbox with the number twenty-seven on it.

  ‘What’s that?’ the postie demanded.

  ‘That’s our letterbox!’ said Noddy.

  Lateral thinking, and he’d never even heard of Edward de Bono!

  ‘Mate, relax,’ I said to the postie.

  ‘I will not relax until you young men get back in that car and leave me alone,’ the postie yelled.

  ‘So when are you delivering to our houses?’ I pleaded in my best whiny voice.

  ‘The seat’s broken, so I have to go back to the post office and get a new bike.’

  What? No! We protested long and loudly, but this guy was another example of a man in a uniform wielding his petty power over us. He was obviously in the same club as our stationmaster and Constable Darren Dewey. We watched as he wheeled his bike and our HSC results up the road towards the post office.

  What were the chances? On this day of all days! This never happened on Postman Pat – he had a friendly demeanour and occasionally bent the rules. Then again, in more recent episodes he’s also flown a helicopter and let Jess the cat drive, so he’s not the sanest person on the planet. Perhaps we should be thankful he hasn’t ‘gone postal’ on us.

  There was nothing we could do but wait. And what do three young men do when they’re in a car and bored? Well, burnouts, doughnuts and trying to get some air over a speed hump. Finally we decided to head to the 7-Eleven, where we cooled ourselves down with a Slurpee. The 7-Eleven had recently opened in the neighbourhood, and we had fully embraced it. Although it was just a dressed-up milk bar, it had brighter lights and a nice logo, and we did love their Slurpees. Originally there were only two flavours – Coke or raspberry – and if you were daring, you would mix them together. These days anything is a flavour; I’m sure I even saw cookies and cream as a Slurpee flavour the other day.

  We drove off and spotted the postie again, now with a new bike. Glenn and I headed home and waited, while Noddy took his letterbox home and nailed it back onto the fence. Eventually the postie pulled up out the front. We stood by the letterbox as he handed us an official-looking envelope each. Well, he actually did put them in the letterbox, as he ‘officially’ had to do. I couldn’t believe the moment had finally arrived.

  My hands were shaking as I ripped open the envelope. This was the closest I would ever get to Charlie Bucket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who opened that chocolate bar and saw that golden ticket. Okay, so this ticket might be for a one-way trip to a dead-end life, but it was still so exciting. Maybe I could get a job at Cadbury; the factory was just down the road, next to the Manhattan Hotel. I could ride my bike there …

  But I was daydreaming, so I pulled myself together. The blue certificate slid out of the envelope and I stared at it. I had seen Trev’s HSC certificate and this one looked identical. It had official-looking lettering that stated the year and then my name. My subjects were listed on the left
, with the results recorded as a letter on the right, and then the actual mark out of a hundred for each.

  The first letter I saw was E. I’d got forty-six per cent for Geography. Not good. I was relying on getting at least a D for Geography. I had failed for sure, and I started thinking about Cadbury again. Apparently you got free chocolate if you worked there.

  I looked down to the next subject: English – D, fifty-seven per cent. Yeah, well, I blamed my English teacher, Mrs Rafter, for that. She took at least a third of the classes off to go skiing. But still this was very bad news. English was one of my better subjects. I was failing, and I wondered: would I get sick of chocolate like I was now sick of hot dogs?

  Next I saw Legal Studies and my heart sank. But then a surprise: C, sixty-seven per cent! Wow, thank God I never gave this subject up like I was going to.

  Okay, I needed to pass the next two subjects to get an overall pass. And no pass meant no uni. And then it was Cadbury time. I’d be good at making Freddo Frogs, but I’d probably have no time for the band.

  English Literature. I took a breath. B – seventy-eight per cent. Amazing! I had Mrs Berthelson to thank for that. She was an awesome teacher. And Bill Shakespeare, who apparently made more sense than I gave him credit for.

  Okay, my last subject. Australian History … What? Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I got an A – eighty-one per cent! Oh my God. I wasn’t going to Cadbury.

  ‘I got an A! I got an A!’ I yelled. And then: ‘I won a hundred dollars!’

  Glenn grabbed my certificate and had a look. He probably thought I was lying. I grabbed his certificate. Was I seeing right – three Ds and two Cs? Had I actually done better than my twin brother? Maybe he’d be going off to Cadbury.

  ‘I did better than my twin brother!’ I yelled. Well, I didn’t, but that’s what I felt like doing. I also had the thought that Cindy was going to be very impressed. She had the chance to enter a relationship with some kind of genius. Okay, a genius who had failed Geography, but let’s focus on the positives.