Spaghetti Legs Read online

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  Spaghetti Legs

  9781742754116

  To my wife Jacqui. For all her love, encouragement, support, and cups of tea during the writing of this novel.

  Thanks to Mark Macleod for his priceless editorial assistance.

  Random House Australia

  an imprint of

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  Sydney New York Toronto

  London Auckland

  and agencies throughout the world

  First published in 1993

  Reprinted in 1993, 1995, 1997

  Copyright © John Larkin 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Larkin, John, 1963-

  Spaghetti legs.

  ISBN 978 0 09182 7472

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Mark Hand

  Cover illustration by Craig Smith

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Imprint Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Toongabbie is the sort of suburb that you would ignore, unless your house happened to be in it. Just as you would overlook the house at number 15 York Crescent, unless you happened to live in it. And you would have gone out of your way to disregard the leg that held up the sheet and doona in the third bedroom of number 15 York Crescent, unless you happened to be attached to it.

  Eric Underwood was attached to his leg, as he was to the other bits of his body. But his left leg held a special place in his heart. When he combined it with the other one it could propel him along fast. So far his left leg, helped along a bit by the right, had earned him a couple of gold medals for sprinting and an absolute bummer of a nickname.

  It would have to be a strange set of circumstances that would force a serious athlete, such as Eric, to use one of the tools of his trade as a tent pole. But when Eric was upset he would retreat to his bed and let the world pass him by while he was tucked safe beneath the covers. His mother knew when he was coming out of the deep-blue-funk-zone when he started reading comics under the bedclothes with the aid of a torch and a leg.

  The reason for Eric’s gloom was the combined effect of spending his last day at primary school and losing his girlfriend.

  He was looking forward to going to high school with a mixture of excitement and dread.

  At primary school he was a fairly anonymous character who was only ever noticed at the school’s athletic carnival once a year. For a week after the carnival he was a cult figure. The sort of guy that the other kids were proud to know. Some even pretended to know him just to impress their friends. He enjoyed it.

  Because Eric was hopeless at football, couldn’t swim for peanuts and hardly said boo to a mouse, he drifted back into obscurity for the rest of the year. But for one week, one mega-fantastic week each year, Eric was famous.

  Now there would be no more Toongabbie Primary School athletic carnivals, just as there would be no more Toongabbie Primary. It was time to move on. And while Eric was prepared to take on what he thought would be the stronger and faster guys of high school, he was not prepared to do it without Sunflower Fox by his side.

  Sunflower Fox was the most beautiful girl in 6-Red. No, let’s go out on a limb here: the whole of year six.

  When Eric first saw her, way back in second grade, he thought he had died and gone to heaven, it was so easy for him to imagine her sitting on a cloud, plucking a heavenly melody out of a harp.

  Eric’s parents had moved the family from Georges Hall during the summer holidays of that year. But the heartbreak he felt at having to leave his old school and friends behind was soon forgotten as he fell headlong into the emotional whirlpool of love.

  Their eyes had first met over a Vegemite sandwich and her beauty was so amazing that Eric felt as if his heart was going to melt. There was something so haunting about her smile that it was easy to see how people got religion. Every time he looked at her he felt himself at one with the universe.

  She was absolutely faultless. There was even something charming in the way she allowed chocolate Moove to dribble down her chin at recess, and she wore her sari with such poise and dignity that Eric half expected the principal to declare it standard school uniform.

  Despite the fact that Eric felt his life could not go on until she was by his side, he kept his feelings well and truly hidden for fear of rejection.

  Every day he walked dejectedly home from school and picked a flower while reciting the age-old mantra ‘she loves me, she loves me not’. And he would grind any flower that informed him ‘she loves me not’ into a green, mushy pulp, his feelings were so intense. This practice went on for about two years until he got in trouble from Neighbourhood Watch for destroying the flowerbeds in his street. Every night after that he poured out his feelings to his cat. They were just too intense to trust to another human.

  At the start of year six when the teacher, Mr Finn, was deciding the girl-boy seating arrangements, Eric prayed to any god prepared to listen that his seat would be next to Sunflower Fox.

  Eric’s stomach did cartwheels and his mind a forward three and a half somersault when Mr Finn decided that it would.

  However, having Sunflower next to him made it worse. It made him feel sick to be so near and yet so far.

  The intensity grew to the point where, whenever he took his place next to her, he felt he was going to throw up. Hardly the feelings normally associated with love. If he had bought her a card at that point and poured out his true feelings, the card would have read something like: ‘Dear Sunflower, every time I see you I feel like sticking my head down the toilet, love Eric’. Not exactly words to make her want to leap into his arms, but that’s how he felt. He wasn’t sure exactly where these emotions came from, but the mere sight of her made him want to puke.

  Eventually, for the sake of his health, he realised that he had to find a way of talking to her without looking at her. After experimenting briefly with a paper bag and a couple of air holes, he came to the conclusion that it would be easier for all concerned if he just used the phone. So one night, after calling the three or four other Fox households in the Toongabbie area, he eventually got the right
one and her liquid crystal voice was on the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello?’ said Sunflower.

  Eric’s hands were sweating so much that he had to hang up the phone before he dropped it. He went into the bathroom, wiped his hands and sprayed them with the type of drying powder normally associated with cuts. A short while later he’d built up enough courage to call her again.

  ‘Hello?’

  Eric felt the vibration of her voice all the way down to his feet and back up to his nose.

  ‘Hello?’ said Sunflower again.

  ‘H…’ said Eric so feebly that he sounded like a mouse with a sore throat.

  ‘Hello? Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.’

  Eric thought that this was a curious thing for her to say until he realised that she must have hung up. With trembling hands he put down the receiver too.

  To try and clear his thoughts, he took out the garbage, which he later got in trouble for, seeing it wasn’t collection night. An hour later he had rallied and decided to give it one more try, only this time it must have been her father who answered.

  Eric had no idea what a relic from the sixties was, but he was soon to find out.

  ‘Yes like hello?’

  Eric was too shy to speak, too stunned to hang up.

  ‘Look man is there anybody there, like? Are you the dude who keeps hassling Sunflower on the phone? Like man what’s up? And, while we’re on the subject of movement, what goes down?’

  Eric didn’t understand most of what Mr Fox said, but nobody had ever called him a man before, and despite the fact that he couldn’t get his mouth into working order, he felt rather grown up. But not quite grown up enough to speak.

  ‘What gives, man? You ring up people and then listen to them, is that how you get your thrills? Or are you a deaf guy who keeps ringing the wrong number or something? I mean if they had an abusive phonecallers club they probably wouldn’t let you join.’

  Mr Fox burst out laughing, and Eric had to admit that the picture his mind was starting to paint of his future father-in-law was not a very good one. At least the mystery of why Sunflower wore a sari to school was explained.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah that’s right, dude, if they had an abusive phonecallers club, they probably wouldn’t let you join.’

  Unfortunately Mr Fox’s amusing line didn’t get a follow up, so he merely repeated himself.

  ‘Don’t bother us again, dude, or I’ll call the fuzz.’

  At the thought of being a threat to the Fox family, Eric’s lack of self-esteem collapsed further inwards and he slammed down the phone, knowing in his heart that Sunflower would never be his girlfriend.

  The next day in class Eric sat at his desk totally dejected. Just when he was thinking of picking up his backpack and hurling it around the classroom to see the outcome, Sunflower passed him a note. It read: ‘Did you call me last night Eric?’

  His face turned a serious shade of green, but before he had a chance to vomit his Coco Pops all over the desk he grabbed his pen and wrote a large ‘YES’ under Sunflower’s message.

  Sunflower’s reply was just as quick: ‘I think you’re cute, and I want you to be my boyfriend’.

  The sun seemed to radiate new warmth. The trees whispered. The birds’ chatter seemed, well it seemed something or other.

  They became the talk of the school. The princess and the punk they were called, which did not upset Eric as he liked his older sister’s Sex Pistols records.

  That had been only two months ago, and it seemed like eternity. This afternoon, as they walked out hand in hand from Toongabbie Primary for the last time, Eric gave Sunflower a kiss on the cheek and said, ‘See you in six weeks, babe.’

  Sunflower said that she would not be going to Pendle Hill High but to Catherine McCauley Girls’ School and it cut Eric in half. She said that they would still see each other around, but they both knew that their lives would drift apart.

  Eric spent the rest of the afternoon, after leaving school, heartbroken in bed, and only began to rally when the ‘Bugs Bunny Show’ started. He felt a strange affinity with Pepe Le Pew as he chased a cat, with a stripe of white paint down its back, around a heart-shaped island.

  After the cartoons were finished, Eric sat up in bed, and came to the conclusion that he was too young to be reminiscing. So to console his broken heart, he slipped into the kitchen and ate a packet of Tim Tams.

  After his stomach settled down he decided that he would allow himself to spend the whole weekend in bed, or at least playing computer games. On Monday, the start of the summer holidays, he would go and hang out with his best friend Ian Champion, and get some philosophical insight from Iggy Suede. And with that resolved he turned on the Derryn Hinch show just so he could be in the company of someone who was more annoyed than him.

  Snaking its way through the outskirts of Toongabbie, near Eric’s home, is the cleverly named Toongabbie Creek. Loosely translated from the Aboriginal ‘creek of much toxic waste’, this stream becomes a raging torrent as it hurls its way through the suburbs and into Parramatta River in times of heavy rain.

  The creek had changed a lot in recent years. In the old days all you needed for a day out down there was a butterfly net and a friend. These days a Geiger counter would be useful. The radioactive grasshoppers in the area have been known to leap thirteen kilometres at a single bound, making the one time-honoured art of bug-catching virtually impossible.

  When the second wave of immigrants arrived in Toongabbie in the early seventies to settle into their brand new three-bedroom houses, the only accident they could possibly have imagined their families being involved in was if a cow from one of the nearby herds went on a homicidal rampage. But now in the nineties the only people likely to find any cattle in Toongabbie would be archeologists.

  Life, as they say, moves pretty fast. It’s just a shame that some of the chemicals washed into the creek did not flow out as quickly.

  Eric’s house was in one of the better areas of Toongabbie; that is the residents of this area zip-started a better class of lawnmower on Sunday mornings. Their houses, or so they thought, were tidier, their cars shinier, and their skins less tattooed than those of that rabble from across Fitzwilliam Road.

  Ian Champion’s house was a two-minute bike ride or a ten-minute slog away from Eric’s, depending on their mood or the transport available at the time. Apart from being Eric Underwood’s best friend, Ian Champion was a genius, a real paste-eating sciencehead, heavily into microscopes and equilateral triangles. The sort of kid who either ends up an astrophysicist or a bum. While most of the students at Toongabbie Primary were making things with play-doh, Ian was busy trying to work out its scientific properties.

  The Ian Champions of this world are usually born with glasses on. They’re hopeless at sport--usually too busy trying to apply Pythagoras’s theorem to a soccer ball to be bothered kicking it in the goal--and when they accidentally hit you in the groin with a loaded school bag, they can tell you exactly what is wrong with you and more specifically what treatment to apply in order to alleviate the pain.

  While sitting quietly at their desks, people like Ian will casually announce that they can find, at any given moment, the precise location of Orion’s Belt in the afternoon sky using a magnet and a toy compass. When Ian did this the teacher would casually adjust his stance and then fling a piece of chalk at the little smart alec. Ian would deflect the chalk with his glasses and comment on its beautiful flight, which invariably included a particularly attractive parabolic curve.

  The fact that Ian’s type end up being accountants rather than research scientists is a sad comment on our society’s way of thinking. A partner at a large accounting company earns a hell of a lot more than the guy who is trying to plug up the ozone layer.

  ‘Yeah sure the ozone layer is important, but is it cost effective?’ young stockbrokers would scream at each other in the pub near the Sydney Stock Exchange.

  When someone teased Ian about the thickness of his glasses, calling him
‘Jam-jar Eyes’, he would say, ‘Yes, well, my glasses might be thick, but they let me see objects that would be otherwise out of focus.’

  Ian didn’t have many friends, but Eric was proud to say that he was one of them. He was not particularly smart, not like Ian was anyway, but they did have one thing in common that made them friends--the creek.

  During the school holidays they would set off with their fishing lines, nets and a packed lunch and spend all day down there. Eric would be busy looking for insects and spiders while Ian kept looking for arthropods. Eric didn’t think for one minute that they were looking for the same thing, although they had quite different intentions in mind. Eric wanted his spiders and insects to beat each other up, while Ian was busy trying to create a new super insect by cross breeding.

  On the first Monday of the summer holidays, Eric got out of bed, washed his face, ate an industrial size bowl of Coco Pops and headed off with Ian, who had called right on nine o’clock.

  Unlike Sunflower Fox, Ian had mentioned that he wouldn’t be going to Pendle Hill High but to some science brain school. Neither of them knew the name. They knew, though, that this could be the last summer they would spend down the creek together and they wanted to make the most of it.

  They spent the morning catching tadpoles, wrigglers, and at one point managed to corner a frill-necked lizard, which is quite a neat trick seeing creeks are notoriously short of corners. But in the end it darted away between some rocks and into its hole.

  They were sitting on the bank cursing all things lizardy, and leafing through a nudey mag that they’d found stashed down there, when Eric noticed a wolf’s hole under a huge gum tree. Ian said that there weren’t any wolves in Toongabbie, so Eric said maybe it’s here on holidays. They both fell about laughing hysterically.