Dog Days

by Keith Goh Johnson

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Shortlisted Finalist Best Australian Yarn 2023

And there was always Digby, with his scuffed shoes and dirty hands. A fat kid from the wrong side of the train tracks that divided Nullawulla into good and bad. Digby, who couldn’t do anything right.

‘Digby!’ Our teachers sensed his vulnerability as we did, like sharks sense blood in the water.

It was always the same, like watching a car crash on endless loop. They asked him questions and Digby would flush and stammer while the teachers grew impatient and we all started sniggering.

‘I’m waiting, Mr Digby…’

He never had the right answer. He would inevitably get some punishment in return: Saturday detention, pulling weeds on the oval, or scrubbing out the boy’s toilets.

Sometimes, I felt bad for joining in. It was too easy.

*

That last school term, me and Bernadette still went to our place, a lookout crowned with granite boulders on one of the bare hills that surrounded the town.

Bernie had changed in the holidays. Grown up, her face more defined. A woman, not a girl anymore.
 

‘I’m thinking of going to Sydney, Danny,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘They're offering a scholarship to the convent my aunts went to.’

‘You with nuns? Go on.'

It was hard to imagine, Bernie with the nuns flapping around her in their black robes like bats. She sensed I was unhappy. ‘Well, we can’t stay here forever and I’ll be back for the holidays. Besides, I might not get it.’
I think she added the last bit for my benefit. Bernie was too smart for Nullawulla, I always knew something would come eventually to take her away from here.

‘Well, I don’t blame you leaving. Nullawulla's a frickin' dump.'

She gave me a sharp look. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Go on the dole, I suppose. You know, I always dreamed we’d be a couple of deadbeats together, getting drunk on the porch, with a bunch of snotty kids.’

‘It’s only an idea,’ she said quietly.

*

Our school’s First XV played the team from the neighbouring town once a year. Neither Bernie nor I were into footy, but it was compulsory to attend. Bernie brought a book and I brought a Cuban cigar to smoke under the stands afterwards. We sat up in the back, as far away from all the heaving and grunting on the muddy pitch as it was possible to get. The popular girls blew kisses at their boyfriends.

If there was anyone who was a god in our school, it was the Todd Henry, the fullback.

Todd Henry leapt high and caught the ball. He blazed up the pitch with the crowd cheering. He outpaced the heavy boys running with all their might in pursuit after him. Even with my studied apathy, I knew beauty when I saw it. Always out of reach, he looked like he was flying. I couldn't believe this was the same Todd Henry, whose bully's face was always twisted in a snarl, whose thick murderer’s hands wedged Digby’s underwear tightly into his butt crack or pressed Digby's head down into a toilet bowl in the boys’ lavatories. When we won 21 to 13, with the other school’s team battered and cowed and slinking away, the boys lifted him up on their arms and carried him around the field.

We went down from the stands as the other kids started moving away and passed by the changing rooms as he was coming out.

‘Hey Bernadette!’ he called out.

I had no idea he knew who she was.

‘You saw all that?’

She grinned. ‘Your moment of glory? Yeah, who didn’t?’

I didn’t understand why she didn’t move or why she had that stupid grin on her face.

He still had a towel in his hand and rubbed the back of his head with it.

‘You don’t hang round the other girls much.’

‘Nah, that gaggle of broody hens? Not my sort.’

He laughed and shook his head.

‘You’re different, Bernie.’

And he walked away.

                                                                                                      *
 

They started hanging out. I found him in my place in science class. They were giggling together and she looked guilty when she saw me.

‘Sorry, Bateman,’ Todd Henry said, ‘But look on the bright side, you get to meet someone new.’

I looked around and saw that the only place that was available was next to Digby, who moved his untidy stack of books to make room for me.

Mr Treloar, our science teacher, introduced the project for the next couple of weeks: germinating beans in test tubes and charting their growth.

‘I-I-’ stuttered Digby, red-faced, ‘I guess we’re partners.’

He wasn’t as bad as I expected. He softly cracked jokes while we placed the seeds, wrapped in damp cotton wool, in the test tubes and found a sunny spot for them in the storeroom. I was less gracious, answering his questions with laconic grunts, still fuming about Bernie. But he was trying his best, and I wasn’t the type to punish someone for my own troubles. We checked the beans every day at the end of final period. He was trying to get to know me and I didn’t care he was a fat kid who couldn’t kick a ball, or what the others thought.

After a few weeks, he rustled up the courage to ask me the question.

‘You want to come over?’

My afternoons were free now that Bernie was busy elsewhere.

‘Sure.’

We set off after final bell. The pair of parallel metal tracks ran through the cracked earth. The trains passed through every day but never stopped. When we were younger, Bernie and I used to play by the disused silos that used to store grain, but we always made sure to stay on our side. It was the border, where my town ended and Digby’s began.

He was lagging behind.

‘Come on!’ I called out.

‘Hey wait! You got be careful!’

But I was bounding along towards the road crossing, with the weatherboard guard box, its paint peeling and always empty, the rusty gates raised permanently in the air.

‘Come on!’ I said and hurtled forward. Suddenly, I felt him yanking me back, pulling me to the ground just as the goods train to Sydney thundered past, its whistle reverberating shrilly in Nullawulla’s dead air.

He stared at me. ‘You gotta be careful, Danny.’

I spat out dust thrown up by the train, still breathless from the shock. The strength Digby had in those flabby arms surprised me.

‘Thanks, Digby. You saved me.'

'It was nothing,’ he said.
 

I imagined a dump, but Digby’s house was better than I expected, sandwiched between a toolmaker and a car yard.

He led me around the back of the house and inside. ‘I Remember You’ crooned from the radio in the living room.

‘Do you wanna drink?’ he asked me.

‘Sure.’

He started rummaging around in the cupboards for a clean glass, holding each one up to the light to be sure and looked in the fridge.

‘No juice left,’ he said, tipping the carton upside down in case I doubted him.

‘Water’s fine.’

He filled the glass from the tap and we sat on the back step, looking out over the paddock filled with dead gum trees with their bone white trunks.

‘You got plans for next year?’ I asked, still thinking of Bernie and her nuns.

He looked confused, like he hadn’t thought of anything beyond Nullawulla. Out of all people I knew, I thought he would have been one who dreamed of leaving.

‘No, you?’

‘Get out of his shite town as soon as possible.’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said without conviction.'

We heard someone inside, and Digby’s mum popped her head out the window. I had seen her in town before, coiffed and trussed up, going about her business. My mother complained she wore an immodest amount of lipstick. She was attractive. No one could believe that she and Digby were related.

‘Who’s this?’ she said with a bright smile.

‘Danny,’ Digby replied and she smiled back warmly.

‘Hi Danny. Do you boys need anything?’
 

I saw Digby’s mother again a few weeks later at a Bingo night run by the Rotary club. My parents made me go and we sat at a table while old Mr Stephens with his white brylcreemed hair read out the numbers through the loudspeakers in a whistling drone.

She appeared, looking hopeful and I thought that everybody seemed to hush as she made her way from table to table, asking if she could join them until one felt sorry enough to let her. The women of Nullawulla shot her daggers.

Afterwards, when the lights were on, she saw me with my parents and came over and beamed her lipstick smile.

‘Danny! It’s nice to see you. Thank you for being Robert’s friend. I'm glad he's made a school friend at last.'
 

It took me a while to realise who she was talking about. I only knew him as Digby. But she seemed genuinely grateful.

‘Well, I hope you and your family have a nice evening,’ she said, sending a shy, flickering look in my parents’ direction.

Walking home along Nullawulla’s dark main street, the summer moths swarming around each streetlamp, my mother called me out.

‘I don’t want you associating with that woman, Danny,’ she said.

‘I don’t associate with her. I know her son.’

‘Nevertheless. They’re a bad influence.’

‘Town bike,’ my dad said. ‘God knows, who’s kid that is.’

‘I hope you’ve never had a ride,' Mum said.

*

I suppose it was always going to come to a head. My friendship with Digby didn’t change any of his circumstances. But what could you expect? This was Nullawulla, and nothing ever changed. I learned that at Bingo. You were born into your role and you played it out: town tart, footy star and bottom of the barrel. If you changed, Nullawulla would turn on you.

I heard the ragging, even before I came on it. I had decided to scoot across to Digby’s as usual. The kids must have followed him after class. Near the crossing where Digby had saved my life, I could hear them chanting. Todd Henry leading all his friends in a circle like a pack of wolves, and Digby trapped inside, running this way and that. Once, I had seen a fox trapped in a snare when my father took me hunting. I remembered it flailing helplessly in the trap's metal teeth, its leg, bloodied and broken. My dad turned to me and said, ‘It’s OK, Danny. It’ll be dead by morning.’

‘DIGBY!! DIGBY!!’

They didn’t need any insults; Digby’s name was enough. I saw Bernie with a sickened look on her face standing amongst them, but a little behind, not chanting. But she was Todd Henry’s girlfriend, after all. And there was Todd Henry himself, big, and red, his bully face flushed in triumph as it had been on the field. But he was far from beautiful now.

‘Oi!’ I called out. ‘Leave him alone!’

He turned to look at me, surprised to see me.

‘Oh, look it’s Digby’s girlfriend. We’re just messing, Bateman. You should keep out of this.’

They were giggling.

‘You’re a prick, Todd Henry, and nothing is going to change that,’ I spat.

‘I’m a prick, am I ?’

I didn’t see it coming. The punch knocked me to the ground. I heard ringing in my hears, the kids laughing at me, and tasted blood in my mouth. I saw Bernie turning away.

It was some time in those moments that it must have happened. They were all distracted at my expense. They didn’t see Digby sneak away, leaving his bag with all its books like a sad sack in the dust. They were laughing too hard they didn’t hear the train whistle as it rode up the tracks. They didn’t notice he was gone until someone asked, ‘Where’s Digby?’

None of the grown-ups wanted to contemplate the possibility of suicide; they said it was a terrible accident. The old men in Rotary refused to believe someone could live in Nullawulla, with its strong men and good women, its bingo nights and cake runs and afternoon socials, and want to end their lives. Least of all a child. They couldn’t believe children could be killers or that the town itself could break someone so completely. But us kids knew it, who had been slowly suffocating away even before our lives had a chance to begin. Their story became truth over time, just as the real Digby was slowly forgotten. He became a myth the schoolkids told each other: the kid who got knocked down by a train.

In the last days of that long hot summer, those endless dog days, Bernie came to see me at last.
She looked at me sheepishly. ‘Are we still friends?’

‘What about your boyfriend?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Turned out it wasn’t what I wanted after all.’

She didn’t say that it was the only decent thing to do.

‘I’m going away to Sydney,’ she said.

‘Term starts tomorrow.’

‘Different dates. Private school starts a week later.’

‘Us public school dummies must need the extra time to keep up,’ I said. ‘I’ll miss you, Bernie.’
‘Yeah, me too, Danny. I’ll miss you.’ She said and turned her distant blue eyes away from me. ‘I didn’t really want it to turn out this way.’

She promised to come back in the holidays but she never did. She left like all of us would eventually. Someone said she became a doctor. That was the last I heard of her.

*

Years later, I was driving down the highway back to my home in the city when I decided to take the turn-off and drive through the old town. Nullawulla looked the same from a distance, nestled in its hills that glowed in the dying sun. It was unexpectedly beautiful, looking at it with my adult eyes. A sleepy country town, with an old pub on the main street and a war memorial at the crossroads with its lists of dead carved in stone. It was only when you looked closer that you noticed the main street was filled with empty shops and dusty displays. The electrical store, where people used to gather on the footpath outside to watch the black and white television sets in the window, was shut up. There was no one, apart from a stray dog snuffling in the grassy verge.

I didn’t stop. I drove through and then looped back around in the direction of the highway. As I turned, the sun shimmered, momentarily filling my car with golden, diaphanous light, reflected off the bare hills. A fleeting moment of beauty where you least expected it, like Todd Henry flying up the rugby pitch. We all grew up and moved away. It was Digby who would never leave.

© Keith Goh Johnson 2023