Dad put the photographs back in the box with a dark expression, as if he had wanted a trip down memory lane but when he got there he remembered it was his least favorite street.
“OK, that’s your grandparents. All you have to know about grandparents is that they were young once too. You have to know they didn’t mean to be the embodiment of decay or even want especially to hold on to their ideas until their final day. You have to know they didn’t want to run out of days. You have to know they are dead and that the dead have bad dreams. They dream of us.”
He stared at me for a while, waiting for me to say something. Now, of course, I know that everything he told me was merely an introduction. I didn’t understand back then that after a good, cleansing monologue, Dad wanted nothing more than for me to prod him into another one. I just pointed to the swings and asked him to push me.
“You know what?” he said. “Maybe I’ll throw you back into the ring for another round.”
He was returning me to school. Maybe he knew it was there I would learn the second part to that story, that I would inevitably discover another, crucial ingredient to my own distinctive identity soup.
A month into my new school I was still trying to adjust to being among other children again, and I decided I’d never comprehend why Dad went from ordering me to despise these people to ordering me to blend in with them.
I had made only one friend, but I was trying to accumulate more, because to survive you needed no fewer than two, in case one was away sick. One day at lunchtime I was standing behind the canteen watching two boys fight over a black water pistol.
One of the boys said, “You can be the cop. I wanna be Terry Dean.”
The other boy said, “No, you’re the cop. I’m Terry Dean.”
I wanted to play too. I said, “Maybe I should be Terry Dean. It’s my name anyway.” They looked at me in that snide, superior way eight-year-olds look at you. “I’m Jasper Dean,” I added.
“Are you related?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then piss off.”
That hurt.
I said, “Well, I’ll be the cop then.”
That grabbed their attention. Everyone knows that in games of cops and robbers, the robber is always the default hero while the cops are fodder. You can never have too much fodder.
We played all lunchtime and at the sound of the bell I betrayed my ignorance by asking, “Who’s Terry Dean?”- a question that made my playmates sick.
“Shit! You don’t even know who he is!”
“He’s the baddest man in the whole world.”
“He was a bank robber.”
“And a killer!” the other one said, before they ran off without saying goodbye, in the same way as when you go to a nightclub with friends and they get lucky.
That afternoon I went home to find Dad hitting the edge of a cabinet with a banana so it made a hard knocking sound.
“I froze a banana,” he said listlessly. “Take a bite…if you dare.”
“Am I related to the famous bank robber Terry Dean?” I asked. The banana dropped like a chunk of cement. Dad sucked his lips into his mouth, and from somewhere inside, a small, hollow voice I strained to hear said, “He was your uncle.”
“My what? My uncle? I have an uncle?” I asked, incredulous. “And he’s a famous bank robber?”
“Was. He’s dead,” Dad said, before adding, “He was my brother.”
That was the first time I heard of him. Terry Dean, cop killer, bank robber, hero to the nation, pride of the battler- he was my uncle, my father’s brother, and he was to cast an oblong shadow over both our lives, a shadow that for a long time prevented either of us from getting a decent tan.
If you’re Australian, you will at least have heard of Terry Dean. If you aren’t, you won’t have, because while Australia is an eventful place, what goes on there is about as topical in world newspapers as “Bee Dies in New Guinea After Stinging Tree by Mistake.” It’s not our fault. We’re too far away. That’s what a famous Australian historian once called the “tyranny of distance.” What he meant was, Australia is like a lonely old woman dead in her apartment; if every living soul in the land suddenly had a massive coronary at the exact same time and if the Simpson Desert died of thirst and the rainforests drowned and the barrier reef bled to death, days might pass and only the smell drifting across the ocean to our Pacific neighbors would compel someone to call the police. Otherwise we’d have to wait until the Northern Hemisphere commented on the uncollected mail.
Dad wouldn’t talk to me about his brother. Every time I asked him for details he’d sigh long and deep, as though this were another setback he didn’t need, so I embarked on my own research.
First I asked my classmates, but I received answers that differed from each other so wildly, I just had to discount them all. Then I examined the measly collection of family photographs that I had seen only fleetingly before, the ones that lay in the green shoebox stuffed into the hall closet. This time I noticed that three of the photographs had been butchered to remove someone’s head. The operation could hardly be described as seamless. I could still see the neck and shoulders in two photos, and a third was just two pieces clumsily stuck together with uneven strips of brown packing tape. I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable. Fortunately, Dad couldn’t erase the newspaper articles I found in the state library that described Terry’s escapades, his killing spree, his manhunt, his capture, and his death. I made photocopies and pasted them to the walls of my bedroom, and at night I fantasized that I was my uncle, the fiercest criminal ever to hide a body in the soil and wait for it to grow.
In a bid to boost my popularity, I told everyone at school about my connection to Terry Dean, doing everything to broadcast it short of hiring a publicist. It was big news for a while, and one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made. At first, in the faces of my peers, I inspired awe. But then kids of all ages came out of the woodwork wanting to fight me. Some wanted to make reputations for beating the nephew of Terry Dean. Others were eager to wipe the proud smile off my face; pride must have magnified my features unappealingly. I talked my way out of a number of scuffles, but one day before school my assailants tricked me by flouting the regulation time code for beatings: it always happens after school, never in the morning, before an eight-year-old has had his coffee. Anyway, there were four of them, four bruisers grim-faced and fist-ready. I didn’t stand a chance. I was cornered. This was it: my first fight.
A crowd had gathered around to watch. They chanted in their best Lord of the Flies manner. I searched the faces for allies. No luck. They all wanted to see me go down screaming. I didn’t take it personally. It was just my turn, that’s all. I tell you, it’s indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It’s a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it’s life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven’t yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn’t trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.
My enemies closed in. The fight was seconds away from starting, and probably as many seconds away from finishing. I had nowhere to go. They came closer. I made a colossal decision: I would not put up a fight. I would not take it like a man. I would not take it like a battler. Look, I know people like reading about those outclassed in strength who make up for it in spirit, like my uncle Terry. Respected are those who go down fighting, right? But those noble creatures still get a hell of a clobbering, and I didn’t want a clobbering of any kind. Also, I remembered something Dad had taught me in one of our kitchen-table classes. He said, “Listen, Jasper. Pride is the first thing you need to do away with in life. It’s there to make you feel good about yourself. It’s like putting a suit on a shriveled carrot and taking it out to the theater and pretending it’s someone important. The first step in self-liberation is to be free of self-respect. I understand why it’s useful for some. When people have nothing, they can still have their pride. That’s why the poor were given the myth of nobility, because the cupboards were bare. Are you listening to me? This is important, Jasper. I don’t want you to have anything to do with nobility, pride, or self-respect. They’re tools to help you bronze your own head.”