A Shaw Thing – part 2
A Shaw Thing – part 2
Marcus’ story
I don’t remember life with the internet. It had karked it before I was ten, and so it was one of those things from the past that old people loved to talk about, as if the talking would bring it back to life. ‘Remember when …?’ they’d start with each other after a few pots of brew. It drove me fucking crazy – it wasn’t my fault their lives were shit. I didn’t destroy their precious fucking internet.
Life sucked. For as long as I can remember we’ve lived in a shell house. Sometimes we’d have to move – Dad would get drunk and burn a house down after falling asleep next to a candle, or smash the place up in a rage after drinking too much brew.
But we never moved far. There was always a shell house ready for the taking – you just had to be lucky to find one not ready to fall down around your fucking ears. Dad would patch it up a bit, make it liveable with whatever was lying around. I didn’t know any better, so they all seemed fine to me.
I don’t know what happened to my mum. Dad never talked about her expect after too much brew, then she was just, ‘That fucking bitch’. I often wonder how she’d talk about him. He was always an arsehole to me, even if he did share food with me and make sure we had a shell house to live in. It was better than living in a car or truck. But I couldn’t do anything right. I was a lazy cunt, no matter what I did. Not my little brother. I don’t know why he was so fucking special.
So life was a series of a moves, of nicking whatever food we could from people’s garden farms during the night, or swiping shit off tables at the markets – then running like hell before we got caught.
There were girls in the village who spent their days with older women learning how to sew clothes, how to cook shit, how to make stuff. Some of the boys in the village worked with some of the men and learned how to nail shit together to make shelters and stuff like that. But my Dad wouldn’t let me go to any of those classes. He said they were a waste of time. But when he was drunk during the day, I’d hang around some of the classes and pick up what I could hear. In time, I learned enough to nail a couple of pieces of wood together. Eventually I managed to find some wheels from a rusty pedal bike – not the bikes that needed petrol, the bikes you had to work yourself – and I’d nicked some wood from a shell house down the road that had collapsed. With what I’d learned, I managed to make a seat with wheels attached. And then I added some handles that I’d made from railings on the stairs of the shell house.
I showed Dad, but he said I’d wasted my time. Nope. I hadn’t. I took it to the market the next day. Old Mrs Graham looked at it and said, ‘Is that a rickshaw, Marcus? Did you make that?’
I didn’t know what a rickshaw was – still don’t – but I did make it and she seemed impressed, so I said yes. I asked her if she’d like to sit in it and I’d take her home. She said yes, and when I got her home, she gave me a fresh apple as payment. A whole fucking fresh apple! I didn’t need to eat anything for the rest of the day – it was just brilliant. Juicy, fat, sweet – it was just the best. Sure beat Dad’s fucking choko soup.
Months went by and I started earning more food, and sometimes a little cash, by taking people home from market. One of the sewing women made a cushion for the seat so that it was softer on people’s arses and so they wouldn’t tear their clothes on the splinters.
The old pensioners were the best. They didn’t get much money from the government, but you didn’t get any money at all unless you were old, so they were happy to throw a dollar at me as they didn’t have the strength to carry their shit home, or to grow much in the first place. That was how things kept moving – old people were dribbled money by the government to pay for stuff that younger people made or grew. My Dad used to whinge about how unfair it all was, but it seemed to work reasonably well from what I could see.
Then one day I found an old bloke in the park on my way home. He looked like shit. Actually, he looked worse than that, like he was near to death. I stopped to see if he was still alive, and he was – just. It was fucking cold so I picked him up – he was so old and thin and I was so strong now from running my shaw that it was easy – and put him in my shaw to take him home. I couldn’t just leave him there. I’d been spending too much time with old people – I’d gone soft in the head.
On the way, we passed this house where this woman lived that I knew had taken a lot of people in before. I realised that there was no point taking him home – we had no heating and Dad probably wouldn’t let me bring him inside anyway – so I doubled back to this woman’s place. I figured that if I asked her if I could leave him, she’d probably say she couldn’t take any more people, so I park the shaw behind a tree in front of the house next door, picked the old bloke up, ran across the lawn and laid him on the front step. I’d heard people did it with babies all the time, so why not with an old fella? I banged on the door – then got the fuck outta there before anyone saw me.
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