Little Stevie

   “Here,” said Mick, tossing me the keys. “You drive.”

   You drive. Magic words to a fifteen-year-old boy.

   I caught the keys and ran to the driver’s door, yanked it open and slid in behind the wheel. Mick opened the passenger door and got in.

   From the driver’s seat I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, my eyes aglow with excitement. My hands gripped the steering wheel. I pumped the pedals with my feet. I clenched my buttocks. 

   I was ready. 

   I depressed the clutch and selected first gear. 

   But nothing happened.

   “Don’t you think you had better turn the motor on first?” asked Mick, more patiently than sarcastically. 

   But still with plenty of sarcasm. 

   “Yea-ah,” I replied. “Haha. I thought she was soundin’ pretty quiet.”

   I turned the key and the motor rattled into life. 

   I again depressed the clutch and selected first gear. 

   “Easy,” whispered Mick. “Easy does it.”

   I worked my feet. Gas, clutch. Feather it out. Somehow I did it and the car moved forward.

   “Good lad,” said Mick.

   Good lad. More magic words to a fifteen-year-old boy. 

   “Not so fast!’ Mick ordered. “Slow down! Blast it all! Do you want the blasted wheels to come flying off?” 

   “Okay, Mick,” I breezily replied. “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

   I felt very grownup to be in command of a car. This was no little kiddy-car either, but a sixteen-foot long, six-cylinder, 4000cc elephantine behemoth with suicide doors, radial tires and chrome-tipped running boards.

   “How’s the brakes?” asked Mick.

   “How would I know?” I replied with a grin. “I haven’t used them yet!”

   “Well, let’s use them now, shall we?” answered Mick sarcastically. He changed his tone and added, “Blast it all! This is supposed to be a test drive!” 

   We were in Mick’s car, a 1951 Humber Super Snipe Mk III, driving it around the block for a test drive after replacing some parts on the brakes. We’d worked on the Humber together all afternoon. Now, with the work done, Mick was teaching me how to drive. Every time we worked on the Humber, Mick gave me a driving lesson. 

   Which, with the Humber, was every weekend. And sometimes more often.

  “Slow her to a stop,” Mick quietly ordered. “Yeah, right here in the middle of the road. It’s okay, there’s no one about. That’s right. Push in the clutch. Easy.”

   I stalled it.

   “That’s okay.”

   “Sorry.”

   “It’s okay. Push in the clutch. Find neutral.”

   Mick gave the appearance of being a rough and tumble workingman, which he was, but inside he was kind and patient and understanding. He was a good teacher, too. He didn’t make you feel like a dunce or a failure, like he knew it wasn’t easy and that you were trying your best, if you didn’t happen to get the hang of it right away. I admired Mick tremendously, and in my eyes he could do no wrong. Eventually, after I married his daughter Ethne, we became as like a father and son as any two men could get.

   But that was in the future. 

   I finished the test drive without much more ado, if one doesn’t count the few moments of ado stalling it twice more or the handful of ado where I lost control a little and allowed the Humber to jump the curb. Or the funniest ado of all when I switched on the lights and the car went totally dead. Just stopped. No power, no lights, nothing. 

   We were stalled in the middle of the road. A car went round us honking and calling out where’s your lights, dumb-ass? 

   I salute you, fellow travelers of the road, responded Mick, only not so politely as that. Mick fiddled with some wires under the dash and soon we on our way again, headlights ablaze, the smell of burning electricity thick in the smoking air behind us. 

   Not much ado about anything, as I said. 

   I even managed to park it right where Mick indicated, or would have if the brakes had continued to work properly after we had foolishly tested them two corners back. 

   When the time came, instead of stopping where desired the giant Humber continued coasting forward, scraping its fender on the neighbor’s wooden boundary fence. 

   That brought out the neighbor’s faithful dog, whose name I later learned was Little Stevie, to see what was up. He darted past in the glare of the Humber’s headlights. 

   Stevie was a Yorkshire Terrier. 

   Seeing his master’s fence in jeopardy, Little Stevie began to madly bark, setting up a terrific noise especially if one considers his size, finally letting loose a prolonged, earsplitting howl. A howl from hell, if ever I heard one. 

   (Which of course, I haven’t. But you get my point.)

   A terrible noise it was, causing me to wish that my assaulted ears had ceased to function immediately after they had heard the beautiful blaspheming while brake-bleeding that Mick had brayed from beneath the behemoth earlier in the day. Some hot brake fluid had got him in the eye and he’d cussed without repeating himself for five full minutes. Man, could he curse!

   We didn’t curse in my home. It was particularly frowned upon. I had tried it once when I was a kid and boy, did I get a spanking! Mick’s family probably didn’t have a rule like that because he was an expert curser. His profanity was music to a schoolboy’s ear, and my own cursing had improved tremendously since meeting him. Every Monday the other boys in my class would gather round and see what new imprecation or insult I had learned over the weekend.

  Now the brakes weren’t working at all. Was there some connection, I wondered? What commandment was the one about blaspheming? Wouldn’t you know it, the only time in my life when I could actually use any of the Ten Commandments, and I couldn’t remember even one! Oh, I lamented, why hadn’t I studied harder at Bible School? What punishment did breaking this one, whichever one it was, promise? It couldn’t be death in a car crash, we were going too slowly for that, scraping along the fence as we were. Lightning bolt from above? It had been sunny all day, not a cloud on sight. A devouring by the Hounds of Hell, or more accurately, a devouring by a single little Yorkie from H-E-double hockey sticks?  He was so small he couldn’t possibly eat much, even with Satanic encouragement. It would probably take weeks to consume both Mick and myself. 

   That promised to be a slow, grisly death.

   I never felt a thing, sitting in the giant Humber with both my feet jammed down on the brake pedal, so I refuse to believe that the howling Little Stevie was crushed by one of the Humber’s big, nasty pneumatic tires. It’s a fact that Little Stevie wasn’t seen in the neighborhood for a while after that, giving some credence to the rumor that he had been squashed, but personally I believe that he ran away in terror, his little canine head unhinged by the sight of the elephantine Humber attempting sexual congress with the master’s fence! 

   Little Stevie eventually returned home to the elation of his owners, who loved him dearly and spoiled him terribly. He was none the worse for it they said, except that after that night he would never let a full moon pass without rising up from the warm rug by the fire, trotting purposefully outside to the suburban backyard, sitting his little canine posterior down on the silvery lawn and howling like a hound from hell!

  The Humber scraped to a halt against the fence. I looked at Mick, who nodded at me to switch the motor off. 

   “Should I put on the handbrake?” I asked.

   “Are you joking?” was Mick’s incredulous reply. “We’re jammed against the blasted fence!” 

A Load of Undeserved Crap

   At the bell announcing lunch, I gathered up my schoolbag and hurried out of the classroom, down the hallway and through the doors outside to the open fields in the sunshine. 

   I was having another bad day at Avondale College.

   I’d only been in New Zealand a month. I’d only been at Avondale College two weeks, but I was a miserable, lonely little schoolboy. 

   I didn’t want to speak to anybody or see anybody. I was sick of their taunts and insults. I was tired of being the foreigner they all laughed at. I wanted to be by myself. Finding a secluded place on the fields at the far side of the cricket pitch, I lay down in the grass, on my stomach, and tried to read. 

   I was reading a James Bond novel. I was reading them avidly at the time, having acquired all the cheap paperback editions I could find at the bookshop of the SS Oriana. They were ridiculously cheap, marked down to three-and-six and dumped into rotating wire racks which stood twirling in front of the ship’s little bookshop. What a wonderful pleasure to read the thrilling stories in the beautiful, sun filled lounge at the stern of the Oriana. I’d sit in an oversized chair with the sun streaming through the large windows and read for hours and hours. Now and then I’d look up from the book and admire the frothing wake the huge ship left behind. 

   It stretched all the way back to the horizon. 

   Bond, James Bond. 

   How very English on this very English ship. I’ve never met a book I didn’t like and there’s always time for reading, but sometimes one is lucky enough to come across the right books at the right time. The Bond books were perfect to pass the time on the voyage. From them I was gleaning a look into the world of travel and glamour and sex. 

   Things I've found interesting ever since. 

   They were first books I ever read that were spelled in English English, by the way. You know, tyre for tire, colour for color, that kind of thing. These little things gave them great sophistication in my eyes. 

   To a reader little things can mean a lot, but I suppose, you being a reader, you knew that already. 

   Today though, it was difficult to concentrate on the book as I kept reliving the events of the past two weeks. What a mess my life was in! Ever since arriving in New Zealand, things had gone wrong. At school I was laughed at by the students and punished by the teachers. At home I confused and infuriated my parents while my younger brother and sister thought I was going cuckoo. 

  I closed the book and lay there, feeling the warmth of the sun through my clothes and on the backs of my legs. (The silly school uniform sported short pants, which looked absolutely ridiculous on me, for I was a tall, gawky kind of kid.) I lay on my stomach and cradled my head in my arm, using the Bond paperback as a pillow. I could hear the other schoolboys at play kicking a ball, shouting in fun. Closer by, I could hear the wind droning through the oleanders at the field’s edges. 

   Lying on the warm earth, listening to the boys play and the wind drone while the sun was beating down on my back, I fell asleep in the soft grass.  

   

   “Hey! Wake up! You asleep?”

   I opened my eyes. It was Hugh’s voice, coming from above. All I could see of him was a pair of black school shoes, just like mine, only scuffed and considerably smaller.

   “The bell’s gone,” said he. “Didn’t you hear it? Bloody hell! You’d better get moving, mate, if you’re going to class.”

   I scrambled to my feet. I was in a daze from the sleep and for a minute I didn’t know where I was, literally. 

   It had been a deep, black, dreamless sleep.

   “Right,” I said more to myself than to Hugh. “New Zealand. School. Avondale College.”

   “I’m not bothering with any more today,” bragged Hugh. “I’ve had enough of their crap!” He sniffed and rubbed at his nose, then pronounced, “I’m wagging school this afternoon!” I noticed he was smoking, a cigarette was dangling from the stubby, nail bitten fingers of his left hand. He raised it to his lips and puffed nervously. 

   “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.” 

   Now, while I truly believed that I had been dealt a load of undeserved crap over the last two weeks, as Hugh had just said, when I said ‘yeah, me too’ I meant it only rhetorically. I wasn’t going to skip school. I had never skipped school in my life. 

   That was what bad boys did. 

   Bad boys also smoked and cursed and left it for others to take the blame. 

   That very morning I’d been caned for smoking in the toilets, when it had been Hugh who was smoking in there, not me. He’d handed me the cigarette while he tired his shoelaces, then he’d hidden under the sink when Mr Hamilton had suddenly appeared. 

   Mr Hamilton caught me in a room full of smoke with a cigarette in my hand, and I was caned for it. 

   Now Hugh had stopped to find out what kind of trouble he was in, if any. He’d probably stumbled upon me accidentally while crossing the playing fields on his way out. The selfish little so-and-so, I thought to myself, he couldn’t even show human compassion at the misery of others, meaning me and my misery of course, when he was the outright cause of that very misery! 

   Hugh was impressively self-centered, I thought with admiration. I’d never met anyone quite like him. 

   “Ah, I wanted to, ah, ask you how it went with Mr Hamilton,” he stammered. He gave me a worried look. “You know. You gettin’ the cane. Haha. You didn’t mention me, did you?”

   “Your name never came up.”

   “Really?” His face completely changed, now creased by a big smile. “That’s great!”

   “Hugh, believe me, nothing I could have said would have availed me,” I said and I laughed as I said it. 'Nothing you can say will avail you now.' That was exactly what Mr Hamilton had said before he caned me. 

   I think the beginning of the dark, ironic side to my sense of humor was born that day.  

   “Bloody great, mate,” said Hugh, all smiles now. “I owe you one. Well, I’m off. Cheerio!” 

   Saying that, he turned and walked away, instantly forgetting that he owed anyone anything.