Watching TV at Dud's Place

When I was a kid I used to go over to Dud's place to watch TV.

My Mum didn't have a set. She didn't believe in all that. And Dad, he insisted on watching in black and white, on a crappy little thing the size of a lunchbox that could only get Channel One.

So I went over to Dud's place after school, and we lounged on the bean bags, watching until after sunset, until it was dinner time, until he had to eat and I had to go.

Dud. That's short for Douglas. And he hated the name. He thought it was an old man's name, and shortening it to Doug didn't make it any better. And so: Dud. But he was okay. He was a short kid, and chubby, with a face made for radio – big nose, buck teeth, an oddly shaped jaw. He didn't talk that much either, but when he did, he always had something to say. Never rubbish. Something unexpected. Something that might stick with me for years.

#

Sure, I got some hassling for hanging out with him. “Hey Jared, you going home to play with your friend?” “Hey Jared, you out walking your dog?” “I don't know about that one, Jared, he looks like a bit of a dud.”

“Well, you might have seen that one coming?”

“Don't matter. They'd find something to make out of any name.”

“Spose.”

We'd climb over the wall so we could walk along the river, skimming stones, sometimes looking for frogs. There was a time we built a complex for them – the frogs that is – a massive construct made out of sticks and mud. We caught them and set them up there, studied their bemusement with fascination, watched them hop away quickly once they lost interest.

I remember when a couple of the older boys caught us there. Bored and stressed – I don't know what'd happened to them that day. But they wanted to play at drowning Dud. They caught him and held his head underwater for about ten seconds at a time. They'd laugh at him struggling. They laughed at seeing him really terrified. And when I tried to stop them I was back-handed and kicked in the guts, shoved into a clump of unripe blackberry canes. “Don't worry Jared, we're just playing with your friend.”

“Assholes,” I muttered after they were gone, nursing some bruises and a long cut on my cheek, some smaller ones along the bridge of my nose.

Dud said coolly: “Imagine if they'd killed me.” He said that after a while; at first he was choking and trying to get his breath back, gasping on the riverbank for half a minute or so.

I answered him, “They weren't trying to do that.”

“Yeah, I know. But they might have done it accidentally. Their whole lives would have changed. Forever. Right? They wouldn't know what hit them.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What would they have done with you?”

I shrugged. This was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“Once they realised. I don't know if they'd have drowned you too.”

“I don't think so.”

“Would you have run?”

“Probably.”

“How soon though?”

“Um.”

“I'm sorry they beat on you.”

Shrugged again. “Used to that.”

My Dad, back then, he had problems. Most days he was okay. But now and then he'd rediscover his love for the bottle. And then you just had to be elsewhere or else.

#

They were rich. Dud and his family. Dud was the only child, and he was loved. He was clearly the centre of a gentrified, wholesome, parental world. He lived in a fairytale house with three storeys, with twinkly leadlight windows, a garden path hemmed in bright flowers. His parents owned hundreds of records, hundreds of books. Cassettes were new back then, along with cassette players, but of course the family had one. And a big TV. And plush rugs strewn all over the floor. The sun would come into their house through the so-many windows, and the sliding door, and it would just go everywhere. Textured wallpaper caught sunlight and shadow, turning the walls into saffron, jet black, pink, soft gold.

And they had all the best snacks. We ate salted, honey-roasted peanuts; bags of thick-cut potato chips; bananas, and home-made cheese covered pastries. Soda stream was a thing back there, and we came and went, filling up our bottles with syrup and water, injecting bubbles.

We lounged like we were cats in the sun: watching Road Runner; Littlest Hobo; Inspector Gadget; The Lost Islands.

Life was endless. There was nowhere to be.

#

“You think about girls?” Dud asked me once, one night when his parents hadn't come home, when it was dark, and I should be home, but wasn't going.

I shrugged. “Not really.”

“But you think about the fact that you're going to think about them?”

“Not really.”

“I do. I figure, maybe two years or three, and then that's what teenagers do. I'll be thirteen, and I'll want a girlfriend. I'm thinking about Vanessa Wood.”

“Why?”

“She's quiet. And she doesn't pick on me. She's too shy for most of the other boys, so she might look at me. Don't you think?”

“How would I know?”

“Well, who are you going to have for your first girlfriend?”

“I don't know.”

“You and Nicki Tollen, you'd suit each other.”

“Why?”

“Because she's calm and you're jumpy.”

“No I'm not.”

“Yeah you are. And she's pretty, right?”

“I guess.”

“Did you know that last week she offered me fifty cents if I'd kiss her?”

“She wanted to kiss you?”

“She had fifty cents in her hand, she was holding it out.”

“Did you take it?”

He nodded.

“Did you kiss her?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Nice. Kinda. She has really soft skin, and her hair tickled my forehead.” He knelt up and glanced at the windows, curtains open. Past dinner time, we'd raided the fridge, there was half-eaten ice-cream in front of us. Dud bit his lip. “I'm sure they should be home by now.”

#

Dud's Mum.

She was beautiful. She was small, reed-thin, with long hair that rested equidistant between light brown and blond. Her face was delicately carved, all the features in miniature, each of them perfectly rendered. And her smile could be radiant. But it was fleeting as well. And when it was gone there could be tears or tirades, or just a fixed, vacant staring into the glass of a kitchen window while her fingers tangled themseves in and out of a tea-towel.

She worked hard. She was a lawyer. And she worked with a ferocity that was fashionable back then. And yet, out of place on her. She occupied by day a world of conflict and tension – at least as I saw it, based mostly on TV shows – but was a silent, shy creature when she returned home. Usually soft-spoken, with even her bursts of confused anger typically dropping from screeching to whispers.

She was sick. Though I didn't really understand it at the time.

The day they'd been late, - Dud's father not returning until after eleven - that was the time she'd been sequestered away in some private hospital. Dud was told he couldn't see her for a while. He was told that she just needed to rest.

She came back different. As if she didn't really notice anything around her. She came back wistful and forgetful. She'd look through Dud as if she didn't see him, but would later wrap him up in her arms and not want to let him go.

Sometimes, we'd hear her screaming. She'd be upstairs, and she'd just howl and shriek. Doing so seemed to take her over, turn her into a creature other than human. The sound of it would come echoing through the walls, down the stairs, dissipating into the glass of the windows. We'd turn up the volume, we'd glance at each other.

Dud's father came down the stairs once, shaking his head. “I can't do this anymore,” he said to himself, his face greyed with age and effort. He took a glass, tumbled ice into, sat down in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey.

#

And then there was Great Aunt Lydia.

Dud confided in me that she'd died in this house. A very old lady, who'd lived with them, because noboby else would have her.

“She was batty,” Dud explained. “She didn't know what was going on. I was only little then, but I kind of remember her. She was grey, wiry grey, and her hair was all messy. She had tiny little eyes, but they were green, really dark, electric green. They were cool. I used to go up and listen to her, talking to herself. I can't even remember what she said, and anyway, if they found me in there they dragged me out and shut the door behind me, and told me I shouldn't be going in there and bothering her.

“She was meant to stay in bed, but she walked sometimes. This one time, she fell down the stairs. That was when she died here. They pulled up the carpet to get rid of the blood, but there's some still there on the floorboards, under the new carpet, but it's not gone. I've heard them talk about its sometimes, the way her arms and legs were everywhere, and her mouth was wide opening screaming.”

Maybe that's why she haunted the place.

Because we knew she did. She was the other screamer. When it wasn't Dud's Mum, up in her room, shrieking her pain into the fabric of the world, it was Great Aunt Lydia, with a different kind of screaming, ethereal and layered, all woven in with echoes, and with sounds that were not quite words.

There were times when we almost thought we saw her, when we saw a sliver of light, a breath of mist, and thought that perhaps there was a woman's shape in there; the halo of wild hair; the green eyes gone grey, but still staring out and out. Perhaps she favoured Dud, remembering those days of telling her stories and feelings to a child of about three or four. It was always with him that I'd see her.

“No such thing,” Dud's father might say.

His mother, resting her trembling hands on the kitchen bench: “She was an amazing lady, your Aunt Lydia. I wish you could have gotten to know her.”

“Nutty as a fruit cake though,” his father would say.

And his mother, she'd turn her eyes on him, hurt and cold, turning away as quickly. She'd make herself busy, try to occupy her restless fingers.

Dud would turn back to the TV; after a few seconds, I'd do the same.