clive alive
what i liked about him (let's call him clive shall we? what with it being his name and all) is that he was exactly the Wrong Type Of Boy. Ferret notwithstanding.
He was a high school dropout. He didn't have a job. He smoked. Everything he could lay his hands on. He had long, lank hair. He wore flannos and jeans. He shoplifted. He was - in Canberra parlance - a Hood.
I was none of the above. Though on reflection I could probably have washed my hair more often. I was in college (I was 16 - it was like 6th form college only of a hippier persuasion - I got to study social psychology, and short literary forms, and eight different drama units and sod all else really). I came from a nice middle class family with high expectations and massive dysfunctions kept firmly swept under the persian rug. I was attractive in the sense that all 16 year old girls are attractive. I rode horses and did long distance running and achieved. Just generally. Achieved.
Clive did not Achieve.
It was perfect. A match made in Cooma.
He was looking for his ferret on the land that my parents had bought near the snowy mountains in NSW. They bought it to make up for the fact that they had uprooted 4 kids from a big rambling house with stables and a field in country northern ireland and dragged us all kicking and screaming to a government issue shoebox in suburban canberra. To be fair I think they hated it as much as my siblings - I was only seven and not much bothered. So 160 acres with a mountain and a river and an old farmhouse with no electricity or running water was the pay-off. And every friday evening we would pile into the car with the dogs and seventeen boxes of food and drive 2 hours for our weekend away.
Did I mention it was the seventies?
It all went perfectly until the eighties, when my dad, realising he was no longer in the decade of family love and digging a hole to shit in , discovered he was in the decade of success, wealth and doing what the fuck he liked as long as it made him happy. He left. Which apparently made him happy. It pretty much screwed up the rest of us. Still, what are families for?
So our farm at Cooma fell into a Coma.
Then my older siblings began staying there. Then their druggie friends. Then their druggie friends' druggie friends. Then their druggie friends' druggie friend's younger brother. Avec ferret. And finally me. Not all together - no one can dig to shit for that long. So by the time I started going down regularly with my mates, my siblings had long vanished along with the first two generations of druggies.
And there we were on a hillside with a ferret to find. And there was my mother at home praying this moment wasn't about to happen.
It lasted 3 months. He didn't DO anything. Every afternoon he would be at the school doors to meet me and take me back to my house. We had to hitch as he had neither a car nor a license. Or any bloody other thing to do. Often he stayed over at my house, crammed into my single bed. My mother thought that was preferable to me being Out somewhere fearful. And I'm sure she was right, but towards the end of the three months I wished she'd say he couldn't stay.
She didn't, so in the end I had to. There were many tears (his) and bored stares (mine - 16 is a cruel age). And finally, many months later, he stopped calling and begging me to take him back. Which was a blow to the ego, but it was due a bit of denting by then.
I've never forgotten our first proper kiss though - on the banks of the murrumbidgee river, on a piece of land that is more home than anywhere else in the world, a cold winter night with a startling moon.
Pretty bloody romantic. No wonder he couldn't live up to it.
He was a high school dropout. He didn't have a job. He smoked. Everything he could lay his hands on. He had long, lank hair. He wore flannos and jeans. He shoplifted. He was - in Canberra parlance - a Hood.
I was none of the above. Though on reflection I could probably have washed my hair more often. I was in college (I was 16 - it was like 6th form college only of a hippier persuasion - I got to study social psychology, and short literary forms, and eight different drama units and sod all else really). I came from a nice middle class family with high expectations and massive dysfunctions kept firmly swept under the persian rug. I was attractive in the sense that all 16 year old girls are attractive. I rode horses and did long distance running and achieved. Just generally. Achieved.
Clive did not Achieve.
It was perfect. A match made in Cooma.
He was looking for his ferret on the land that my parents had bought near the snowy mountains in NSW. They bought it to make up for the fact that they had uprooted 4 kids from a big rambling house with stables and a field in country northern ireland and dragged us all kicking and screaming to a government issue shoebox in suburban canberra. To be fair I think they hated it as much as my siblings - I was only seven and not much bothered. So 160 acres with a mountain and a river and an old farmhouse with no electricity or running water was the pay-off. And every friday evening we would pile into the car with the dogs and seventeen boxes of food and drive 2 hours for our weekend away.
Did I mention it was the seventies?
It all went perfectly until the eighties, when my dad, realising he was no longer in the decade of family love and digging a hole to shit in , discovered he was in the decade of success, wealth and doing what the fuck he liked as long as it made him happy. He left. Which apparently made him happy. It pretty much screwed up the rest of us. Still, what are families for?
So our farm at Cooma fell into a Coma.
Then my older siblings began staying there. Then their druggie friends. Then their druggie friends' druggie friends. Then their druggie friends' druggie friend's younger brother. Avec ferret. And finally me. Not all together - no one can dig to shit for that long. So by the time I started going down regularly with my mates, my siblings had long vanished along with the first two generations of druggies.
And there we were on a hillside with a ferret to find. And there was my mother at home praying this moment wasn't about to happen.
It lasted 3 months. He didn't DO anything. Every afternoon he would be at the school doors to meet me and take me back to my house. We had to hitch as he had neither a car nor a license. Or any bloody other thing to do. Often he stayed over at my house, crammed into my single bed. My mother thought that was preferable to me being Out somewhere fearful. And I'm sure she was right, but towards the end of the three months I wished she'd say he couldn't stay.
She didn't, so in the end I had to. There were many tears (his) and bored stares (mine - 16 is a cruel age). And finally, many months later, he stopped calling and begging me to take him back. Which was a blow to the ego, but it was due a bit of denting by then.
I've never forgotten our first proper kiss though - on the banks of the murrumbidgee river, on a piece of land that is more home than anywhere else in the world, a cold winter night with a startling moon.
Pretty bloody romantic. No wonder he couldn't live up to it.
posted by spindleshanks at 8:34 AM
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