Boy on a Wire

By Jon Doust

Depicting the full spectrum of adolescent alienation, this engaging, coming-of-age narrative is a humorous blend of novel and memoir. A sensitive, quick-witted boy from a small town, Jack Muir adores his mother, yearns for affection from his father, and lives in the shadow of his accomplished brother. Sent to a boarding school at a young age, Jack must quickly decide what sort of person he will be—the type that succumbs to the pressure of bullies and the school system or the type that fights back, using clever banter and intellect to get by. With a unique and authentic voice, this darkly humorous tale portrays the road to depression as seen through the naiveté of youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fremantle Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9781921696183

Book preview

My brother’s fist

Up north where the land is long and flat we shoot parrots in stumpy, straggly trees, cook them over open fires, dig holes to shit in, and then go out and shoot some more. Thomas’ finger on the trigger never shakes, his face sits tight and still along the barrel. He kills so many birds with no show of emotion, no tears, not even a flicker of a smear on his cheek, just a small, smart smirk when we arrive back at camp with dead birds dangling from our raised hands. It isn’t like that for me, everything that dies with my gun dies with a nervous, anxious finger and a face full of almost-fear because it is evil and God has told me to kill it or because we are hungry.

Thomas plucks and guts and gets the soft bodies ready for the pan while I climb a tree and see if I can see China, or God, but I can only see Thomas. Here, away from home, I see our differences more than ever, in the way we shoot and in everything. Getting here meant Dad had to write another of his long lists listing all the things that go on a list: powdered milk, cheddar cheese, salt, pepper, toilet paper, shovel, soap, greaseproof paper, bread, matches and on and on it went and even included the list of where he kept his lists. Thomas helped him with the list and even added some items of his own: Monopoly, road map, spare film for the camera. While they were making up their lists I was up the back of the house chopping wood so when we came home there would be a nice stack waiting ready to stoke up the kitchen fire.

I sit in the tree and don’t come down until Dad calls out and tells me off for not helping Thomas, or forgetting to do item seven on the list of things I have to do each and every day even though we are on an adventurous holiday.

I don’t like killing birds but there are people I want to kill. Like Luke Wilson, the fat bastard who whacks the side of my head whenever I walk past him. Like Mr Thomson, the newsagent who yells at me in his shop when I drop a Phantom comic on the floor. Like those Russians on the ABC radio news who cart Hungarians away in cattle trucks as they piss and shit all over themselves and the people standing next to them. I hate those Russian communist bastards and every time I think of them or read about them in the morning paper I cry and wish someone would kill them and let the Hungarians out of the trucks. But I’ll never kill anyone, because God said, Thou shalt not kill.

I can only kill with a purpose and Jesus Christ is my best friend. My first superhero. The Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, is great but he only saves people who go into his jungle, or people he hears about on the tom-toms and he only saves people from bad people. Jesus wants to save everyone and everything. I am the youngest ever altar boy in the history of Genoralup. Our local priest, the Reverend Frederick Ball, reckons I will be Australia’s first ever pope. That the Anglican Church does not have a pope at its head, merely an archbishop, does not stop him – the Reverend – or me. We are High Church. Not all of us, just Mum and her mum and me. Thomas only goes to church when Dad goes because he and Dad don’t like the kneeling or the singing and they only do it with their mouths barely open and with a sort of croaking noise. Mum and I sing loud and clear and sometimes I can see water slide down her cheeks.

I can’t lie, there is no way, because God will punish the liar. I know there are liars walking around, free to lie again and it bothers me, but I believe God will get them, eventually.

If someone says, Did you do that? and I did, I say, Yes.

Did you burn the cat’s tail?

Yes.

Did you take the block of chocolate from the fridge?

Yes.

Didn’t I tell you to tidy your room?

Yes.

Haven’t I told you before not to speak like that?

Yes.

Did you make that scratch on the back of the new car?

What? No, but I did shoot the little robin redbreast you found in the garden last week.

I did. The shame. Blew his guts.

Can’t stop myself, want to, but once the gun is level, and he is in my sights, and I know I can’t miss, a cold calm like Thomas has comes over me, then the movements take over, bypass my conscience. It’s Satan. He is in me. I don’t even bother to say, Get thee behind me. There is no room. The calm has left, I am up against a wall to stop my body shaking, to steady my aim, then pop, his guts go, disappear.

I stand over the little fella, his bright red breast wet with blood and guts, the tears run down my face and my own guts jump and what will God do now? He sees everything. Will he get me, make me pay, punish me? Or will Mum, who loves robin redbreasts more than any other birds that fly into our garden?

Mum says it is because I have pinks disease. Dad says I have a salt deficiency and makes me start every day with a spoon heaped high with it.

When you were a baby you were nervous and angry and cried all the time and I had to hold you and even then you fought, says Mum.

What’s pinks disease?

They’re not sure.

How do you get it?

Nobody knows.

Dad says, He has to learn self-discipline, like Thomas.

Self-discipline? What’s that? Do I have to smack myself when I’m naughty?

They laugh. I like it when they laugh.

We are back from up north. Mum is busy. Dad is at work. The day is the first warm day since we got home. I have filled all the woodboxes in the house. Thomas has a book I’ve been reading. He won’t give it back.

It’s my book, he says.

I know, but I was reading it.

I grab it. He grabs it back. I yell at him, push him, then he leans back and throws his fist into my nose and it splatters blood all over a wall and Mum comes running and, guess what, she takes one look at us both and then she attacks me. Not him. Not the one who throws the fist, not the one who is holding his hand, hiding it, the red knuckles, no, not him, but the one who is bleeding all over furniture, the floor and the wall too, yes, me, the screaming one, the one with the voice.

I scream, Mum screams, but Thomas remains calm, as though life is a thing outside of him and plunging his fist into my nose was on a list he had written down last night before bed and now he can cross it off because the job is done.

I yell, inside my head, I wish you were dead!

And Mum says, You wait until your father comes home.

Dad comes home, walks in the front door and she tells him. He laughs and says, Boys will be boys.

Mum doesn’t like that, runs upstairs to her bedroom, slams the door and sobs so loud we can hear her even though Dad turns up the radio for the ABC news. And I sit next to him while we eat dinner at the kitchen table and inside my head I wish my brother was dead.

My brother’s head

My brother’s head gets broken and it’s my fault because of the things I say, not out loud but privately, inside my head, the place where I say those things that can never be spoken. But how? How can it be my fault that my parents sent the nose-splitter away to Grammar School and on his first trip home his head crashes into the back of a truck backing up South West Highway and breaks into pieces and nearly kills him forever?

No-one says it is, but I take the blame anyway. Like I always do. Because of the things I think. Because people tell me: It’s the thought that counts. And: God knows everything, even what you’re thinking.

The people in the car behind find Thomas in the front passenger seat with his head caved in. The driver is the father of a girl from Grammar School’s sister school, St Joan’s. They take Thomas and the mother to the Bunbury hospital. These are the days when people stop to help and don’t bother to wait for an ambulance. Everyone just gets on with the job. They pick up the kid with the crushed skull, put him on the back seat, and drive as fast as they can.

Dad takes the phone call.

Thomas has been badly hurt in a car accident, he says. He’s in Bunbury Regional Hospital and they are transferring him to Perth.

Dad puts the phone down and keeps talking in his way, as though life is a thing that goes on outside of him and he is simply giving voice to a list he has inside his head.

They ran into the back of a truck, just out of Dardanup. No-one else is hurt badly.

But Mum can’t hear him anymore. She screams and falls on the floor. I run. I can hear Dad talking to her and I’m pretty sure he picks her up and puts her in their bed, probably with an Aspro. I run to my bedroom, crying and asking: God, forgive me for wishing my brother dead and now he nearly is and why did you have to do this to prove your point? I only wished him dead, God, I didn’t try to kill him, or even hit him with the furniture covered in my blood. Don’t forget, God, that he was the one who broke my nose. Yes, says God, but he didn’t wish you dead. Are you sure? Were you listening to him at the same time you were listening to me? Yes, you were? You mean there are three billion people in the world and you can listen to all of them at the same time, even those who don’t believe in you? Were you listening to the Russians when they dragged the Hungarians out of their homes and into the cattle trucks? Why didn’t you stop them? God? You there, God? It’s about now that God stops talking. He’s angry. Why didn’t you stop it, God? I am afraid of his anger, of what he can do, the fire and brimstone and pestilence, even though I don’t know what pestilence is. But I don’t doubt him.

I can hear a car and voices and Dad is knocking on my bedroom door.

Your mother has gone to be with him. You and I will hold the fort.

Will he be all right? Will he...?

Live?

Yes.

Yes.

And then we go off and cook dinner, me peeling potatoes and dropping tears on the skins, licking salt from a spoon, while Dad writes a list of things to do the next day: take Jack to school, call Grammar School, notify President of Inner Wheel Club, grocery shopping, pick up ironing, organise house cleaner, call Doctor Arthur. Because that is the sort of people Dad wants us to be: organised, disciplined.

Inside my head, for days, I scream: God, let him live, please. I beg you. I’ll never think anything like that ever again, ever, never, even if he breaks both my legs and cuts my bum into tiny pieces and feeds it to the chooks. And I reckon God is listening, because he lets my brother live and lets me keep my bum.

God makes Thomas stay in hospital for six months and undergo all kinds of nasty surgery after peeling the skin back off his head like you would peel a peach and then God makes him go back for regular visits and wear a skull cap to hide his baldness and the long scar that runs around his hairline and the one that sits on his forehead that looks like he has run into the back of a truck. Maybe God puts him through all that to make me suffer and make sure I always make room behind me so Satan will go there when I say: Get thee behind me, Satan.

All that time Mum stays with Thomas and I live with Dad as though life is a thing that isn’t what we are going through and everything is well planned and written down in a precise order including my daily spoonfuls of salt. And all that time Thomas goes, when he can, to Grammar School, and everyone makes way for him, stands aside and lets him through and I’m not sure but I imagine that they place cushions around him as he walks just to make sure he doesn’t fall and hurt himself.

And not once, in all the time that Thomas suffers, do I think it is because he broke my nose, or because he once pushed me off my bike so his friend who was over for the weekend could grab it and they could ride away sniggering at me. No, and not because he embarrassed me in the sandhills with his friends and their erect dicks and me with my tiny floppy thing that understood nothing of my attempts to make it rise and be proud to be a man. Did you see that, God? Did you? What was all that about? What’s it for? All this stiffness? How can that be fun and why am I not stiff like them? And is that the kind of thing you have on a list of things to do when you get older?

Not once do I think that.

One final spit before Grammar School

I know I have to go. It’s a family tradition. Dad went. His dad went. Thomas is there now. I’m next on the list.

My last year in Genoralup Primary School is memorable for a couple of reasons. For one, I play football for Genoralup Primary against Boyup Brook Primary and we lose and Dad says, You’re useless. Why didn’t you kick it when you had it?

I was looking for someone to kick it to.

And that’s when that big kid dropped you. You should have kicked it. Waste of time being out there.

Then I fail spelling for the first time ever and the teacher, Mr Harris, humiliates me in front of the entire class.

This is not good, Muir, he says. Do you think this will stand you in good stead when you go to Grammar School next year? They won’t put up with this sort of shoddy work up there. They will eat you like a minnow.

I take it in the guts and ask God for forgiveness. I know I haven’t studied as hard as I should. I have been distracted. Girls are writing me love notes and they confuse me.

Dear Jack, I love you more than anyone I’ve ever seen before.

This one is from Sally Bryant. I don’t believe her. There is another one from Barbara Mitchell and it is even more ridiculous. Something about me being the handsomest boy in the universe.

All the fast-maturing girls are doing it and running out of sexy boys to write to and so they write to me. I’m not sexy, have no idea what sexy is, looks like, feels like. I play along at first, then I’m confused and disgusted. If I get another note, my head might explode.

Okay, all that isn’t enough to fail spelling, but I can’t believe I failed. When the other kids go out for morning recess, I stay behind, ponder my spelling exam and God, in his wisdom, guides my eyes to the fatal error. It stares at me. Mr Harris has miscalculated and I have not failed, there is no failing; indeed I have passed, not passed well, but I have passed. Mr Harris has marked me at forty-five percent instead of fifty-five percent.

I seek him out in the staff common room, show him his error, he huffs, says he’ll look at it, tells me to leave him to his cup of tea, returns following recess, admits the error, says nothing in front of the class, no apology, not even a correction. I sit still at my desk, the heat works its way up my body, I suppress the things inside my head that Satan is tempting me to say and

Reviews for Boy on a Wire

[lynleys-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was obliged to read this book for bookclub this February.

I really enjoyed it at first. I warmed to the main character: a rural boy struggling with religious guilt, trying to find his way in the world.

Boarding school turned him into a man, in the worst possible sense of the word: a physically rough, thieving type of man. And that, of course, was the point of the story. But I couldn't enjoy it. By about page 100 I no longer empathised with the boy.

I found his smart comments to authority figures jarred somewhat, because with this being part story, part autobiography, it felt to me as if the author were revising his own childhood injustices and writing the witty comebacks he'd wished he'd been able to think of at the time. I suppose the boy's wit is the reason for the 'triumphantly funny' tagline on the front cover.

'Searingly honest' must refer to the multiple references to masturbation. I wondered if it's possible to write an authentic summary of teenage boyhood without talk of wanking, but what I found even more interesting is how I'd heard it all before, in other boarding school books, or whatever. How is that I know all about the male experience of wanking, yet hear virtually nothing of the female experience? I wondered why it's still taboo for women to include mastubatory rites of passages in *their* memoirs. Instead, it's still fairly groundbreaking to write honestly of menstruation.

This book came across as a young adult novel in many ways, but with the short, present tense sentences reminiscent of Paul Jennings. As masterful as Jennings is, he writes for eight year olds. After an entire novel of this style of sentence, I felt a little patronised. I might recommend this book to teenagers, but I'm not convinced it offered me much to mull over.

While it's good, I suppose, to have some Australian boarding school stories, I didn't think there was much in this story which made it uniquely Australian. This is both a good thing and a bad thing; good because it's a universal story, and bad because it doesn't seem to add any insight into the boarding school experience of yore.

I wonder if the boarding school memoir will continue into the next generation, or if boarding schools are less damaging these days. That'll be interesting to see.

[chrispash · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

beautiful piece of writing

[twitham_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For country kids in the 1960s, the only real opportunity to go to High School was at a church-run boarding school in the city. Our parents wanted us to Do Well. Either like my three older brothers, the expectation was to Do Well and Come Back to the farm with the experience of the world wider than our tiny farming community. Or, like my younger sister and me, it was to Do Well and Go On to Uni and become a teacher or agricultural adviser.This opportunity came at a cost. My parents rarely spoke to us of the pounds, shillings and pence they sacrificed to educate five children at boarding school. It was what you had to do. Similarly, nobody spoke of the emotional costs.The first of these costs was unavoidable: being wrenched from the free lifestyle of our country upbringing to the strange military-inspired a community of boarders in the city. Homesickness among boarders is real and powerful. The narrator in Jon Doust's witty, poignant boarding school memoir describes homesickness well, but it is secondary to what he sees as an unnecessary and scarring cost: bullying.The bullying described in Boy on a Wire is mainly between boys, perpetrated especially by those just a little bigger.Narrator Jack Muir has a more complex relationship with the masters. His puzzlement at their lack of intervention is patent throughout his story, as is their lack of support for the Christian faith his mother had taught him.The masters, in their turn, don't seem to know what to make of young Muir. He doesn't live up to his brother, that's for sure, but they think he is being cheeky when he simply states a view. These exchanges provide much of the humour of the memoir.Father Fred, the chaplain who turns mid lesson from Divinity to sex education also puzzles young Muir, who delights us with his version of male sexuality. "Then he turns to us and says, This is a boy's brain, boys, and it is housed in this section of the head, along with a storage area. For what, you may well ask? Boys, in this section of the brain that the male seed is stored.I look around. There are smiles and hands over mouths. I am confused. Jonesy makes big eyes and taps his head. Father Fred continues.This section of the brain is connected to the male reproductive organ via a hollow tube that runs down the centre of the spine. When a male engages in sexual activity, of any kind, manual manipulation in particular, seed is carried from the cranial compartment, down the tube and out here...Be still, boy. This is important. Every man has to know this. In the brain is stored just the right amount of seed required for the production over a lifetime. And if the boy or man over in cultures in practices such as minute manual manipulation, or extravagant sexual activity, then he will be rendered bereft of seed and the cranial compartment will be emptied, thus creating a vacuum in his brain." (P. 63 - 64)The context for the bullying is the residential throwing together of boys becoming aware of the tug of their developing sexuality. Jack shows us this ever present tug becoming an obsession with masturbation.A particularly nasty form of bullying was "nuggetting". This savage attack consisted of holding down a boy and scrubbing his genitals with shoe polish (for colour) and Dencorub (for pain). A perverse democracy made it law for every boy to be nuggeted. The experience was exacerbated by the waiting: "When would my turn come?"Jon Doust describes boys reacting in four ways to being so degraded. Most endured it, and survived – but with scars. Some turned the tables on the perpetrators by a witty word or surprising attitude, which should have shamed the bullies. In my experience, it never did. Some boys detached themselves from their bodies and coped by pretending they had floated away.A fourth group of boys were so terrorised and humiliated that they did not recover. One, indeed, at least in Doust's narrative, commits suicide.The treatment of this fourth boy in particular, outraged the young narrator, Jack Muir. He singles out three of the bullies and takes his revenge on them one by one as the opportunity presented.The memoir is fictionalised. I declare my interests in the story. I was in the same year in the same boarding house as the author. In fact, we were prefects together in The Bunk, until Jon had himself demoted. I can reveal that Dousty’s nickname was not ‘Coco’ (for ‘Coco the Clown’) but ‘Goof’ for his naive but sharp wit.Some years later I returned to the school as chaplain, determined to make the school a more humane and nurturing environment. Jon's memoir reminds me that my challenge was always to rise above the scars I carried , which were mainly a dangerous naivety about sex, and covert anger, which could sneak out at times, hot and unexpected. I learned that the experience Jon describes was real, but also that bullying at some other boys' schools was even more deeply ingrained and reinforced from the top down.Jon Doust's Boy on a Wire is an important witness to a particular problem in a particular time. He has dared to speak about taboos, and in so doing, may name them for others of us still living with the scars, and so encourage us on the road to becoming more human.I laughed and winced at the memories evoked in this tightly written and deeply felt remembrance of times past. I know that boarding is a much gentler and more humane experience than our experience; however, parents and school administrators may find lessons to learn for today's children also wrenched from their country towns and farms to the alien world of the church-related boarding school.Reviewed by Ted Witham

[tedwitham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For country kids in the 1960s, the only real opportunity to go to High School was at a church-run boarding school in the city. Our parents wanted us to Do Well. Either like my three older brothers, the expectation was to Do Well and Come Back to the farm with the experience of the world wider than our tiny farming community. Or, like my younger sister and me, it was to Do Well and Go On to Uni and become a teacher or agricultural adviser.This opportunity came at a cost. My parents rarely spoke to us of the pounds, shillings and pence they sacrificed to educate five children at boarding school. It was what you had to do. Similarly, nobody spoke of the emotional costs.The first of these costs was unavoidable: being wrenched from the free lifestyle of our country upbringing to the strange military-inspired a community of boarders in the city. Homesickness among boarders is real and powerful. The narrator in Jon Doust's witty, poignant boarding school memoir describes homesickness well, but it is secondary to what he sees as an unnecessary and scarring cost: bullying.The bullying described in Boy on a Wire is mainly between boys, perpetrated especially by those just a little bigger.Narrator Jack Muir has a more complex relationship with the masters. His puzzlement at their lack of intervention is patent throughout his story, as is their lack of support for the Christian faith his mother had taught him.The masters, in their turn, don't seem to know what to make of young Muir. He doesn't live up to his brother, that's for sure, but they think he is being cheeky when he simply states a view. These exchanges provide much of the humour of the memoir.Father Fred, the chaplain who turns mid lesson from Divinity to sex education also puzzles young Muir, who delights us with his version of male sexuality. "Then he turns to us and says, This is a boy's brain, boys, and it is housed in this section of the head, along with a storage area. For what, you may well ask? Boys, in this section of the brain that the male seed is stored.I look around. There are smiles and hands over mouths. I am confused. Jonesy makes big eyes and taps his head. Father Fred continues.This section of the brain is connected to the male reproductive organ via a hollow tube that runs down the centre of the spine. When a male engages in sexual activity, of any kind, manual manipulation in particular, seed is carried from the cranial compartment, down the tube and out here...Be still, boy. This is important. Every man has to know this. In the brain is stored just the right amount of seed required for the production over a lifetime. And if the boy or man over in cultures in practices such as minute manual manipulation, or extravagant sexual activity, then he will be rendered bereft of seed and the cranial compartment will be emptied, thus creating a vacuum in his brain." (P. 63 - 64)The context for the bullying is the residential throwing together of boys becoming aware of the tug of their developing sexuality. Jack shows us this ever present tug becoming an obsession with masturbation.A particularly nasty form of bullying was "nuggetting". This savage attack consisted of holding down a boy and scrubbing his genitals with shoe polish (for colour) and Dencorub (for pain). A perverse democracy made it law for every boy to be nuggeted. The experience was exacerbated by the waiting: "When would my turn come?"Jon Doust describes boys reacting in four ways to being so degraded. Most endured it, and survived – but with scars. Some turned the tables on the perpetrators by a witty word or surprising attitude, which should have shamed the bullies. In my experience, it never did. Some boys detached themselves from their bodies and coped by pretending they had floated away.A fourth group of boys were so terrorised and humiliated that they did not recover. One, indeed, at least in Doust's narrative, commits suicide.The treatment of this fourth boy in particular, outraged the young narrator, Jack Muir. He singles out three of the bullies and takes his revenge on them one by one as the opportunity presented.The memoir is fictionalised. I declare my interests in the story. I was in the same year in the same boarding house as the author. In fact, we were prefects together in The Bunk, until Jon had himself demoted. I can reveal that Dousty’s nickname was not ‘Coco’ (for ‘Coco the Clown’) but ‘Goof’ for his naive but sharp wit.Some years later I returned to the school as chaplain, determined to make the school a more humane and nurturing environment. Jon's memoir reminds me that my challenge was always to rise above the scars I carried , which were mainly a dangerous naivety about sex, and covert anger, which could sneak out at times, hot and unexpected. I learned that the experience Jon describes was real, but also that bullying at some other boys' schools was even more deeply ingrained and reinforced from the top down.Jon Doust's Boy on a Wire is an important witness to a particular problem in a particular time. He has dared to speak about taboos, and in so doing, may name them for others of us still living with the scars, and so encourage us on the road to becoming more human.I laughed and winced at the memories evoked in this tightly written and deeply felt remembrance of times past. I know that boarding is a much gentler and more humane experience than our experience; however, parents and school administrators may find lessons to learn for today's children also wrenched from their country towns and farms to the alien world of the church-related boarding school.Reviewed by Ted Witham