Dad threw his cigarette into the fire. He got up, crossed the yard and went through the fence. Me and Kirk and Steve stood on the bottom rung and watched him. We never took our eyes off him, as if he was a movie and we didn’t know what would happen, who would win and who would be killed. We were waiting to see.

Dad bent and picked up a stick and when he came back to us, waiting along the fence, we saw he was holding a slingshot much bigger than Kirk’s. The handle was as long as his arm, and the sides were in a perfect V. It was as if the slingshot had been left there for him. Dad walked out the front to his truck. He came back with a piece of rope that stretched the same way elastic did, and he tied it to the sides. He picked up one of the stones from around Pop’s fire and went to the fence. Magpies bounced from the wire to the ground, looking for worms and beetles. There was one magpie separate to the rest. It pecked at the ground, then looked up at us, head on the side. Dad lifted his slingshot. The bird didn’t move, watching us. Dad aimed his slingshot. My tongue went in and out of the hole. Kirk looked at Steve, then at me. Dad pulled back the elastic until it was tight, then he let go. 

We walked to the bird lying on its back. My mouth felt dry. The magpie was opening and closing its claws, as if it were trying to take hold of something. There was blood from its eye. Dad walked back to the fire and sat down in his camp chair. He tossed the slingshot onto the ground. There was nothing left to matter to my dad.

AFTER FIVE YEARS of high school the final November arrives and leaves as suddenly as a spring storm. Exams. Graduation. Huge beach parties. Biggie and me, we're feverish with anticipation; we steel ourselves for a season of pandemonium. But after the initial celebrations, nothing really happens, not even summer itself. Week after week an endless misting drizzle wafts in from the sea. It beads in our hair and hangs from the tips of our noses while we trudge around town in the vain hope of scaring up some action. The southern sky presses down and the beaches and bays turn the colour of dirty tin.

Somehow our crappy Saturday job at the meatworks becomes full-time and then Christmas comes and so do the dreaded exam results. The news is not good. A few of our classmates pack their bags for university and shoot through. Cheryl Dutton gets into Medicine. Vie Lang, the copper's kid, is dux of the school and doesn't even stay for graduation. And suddenly there we are. Biggie and me, heading to work every morning in a frigid wind in the January of our new lives, still jeans and boots and flannel shirts, with beanies on our heads and the horizon around our ears.

The job mostly consists of hosing blood off the floors. Plumes of the stuff go into the harbour and old men sit in dinghies offshore to catch herring in the slick. Some days I can see me and Biggie out there as old codgers, anchored to the friggin place, stuck forever. Our time at the meat-works is supposed to be temporary. We're saving for a car, the V-8 Sandman we've been promising ourselves since we were fourteen. Mag wheels, a lurid spray job like something off a Yes album and a filthy great mattress in the back. A chick magnet, that's what we want. Until now we've had a biscuit tin full of twos and fivers but now we're making real money.

Trouble is, I can't stand it. I just know I won't last long enough to get that car. There's something I've never told Biggie in all our years of being mates. That I dream of escaping, of pissing off north to find some blue sky. Unlike him I'm not really from here. It's not hosing blood that shits me off it's Angelus itself, I'm going nuts here. Until now, out of loyalty, I've kept it to myself, but by the beginning of February I'm chipping away at our old fantasy, talking instead about sitting under a mango tree with a cold beer, walking in a shady banana plantation with a girl in a cheesecloth dress. On our long walks home I bang on about cutting our own pineapples and climbing for coconuts. Mate, I say, can't you see yourself rubbing baby oil into a girl's strapless back on Cable Beach? Up north, mate, think north! I know Biggie loves this town and he's committed to the shared vision of the panel van, but I white-ant him day after day until it starts to pay off.

By the last weeks of February Biggie's starting to come around. He's talking wide open spaces now, trails to adventure, and I'm like this little urger in his ear. Then one grey day he crosses the line. We've been deputised to help pack skins. For eight hours we stand on the line fighting slippery chunks of cow hide into boxes so they can be sold as craybait. Our arms are slick with gore and pasted with orange and black beef-hairs. The smell isn't good but that's nothing compared with the feel of all those severed nostrils and lips and ears between your fingers. I don't make a sound, don't even stop for lunch, can't think about it. I'm just glad all those chunks are fresh because at least my hands are warm. Beside me Biggie's face gets darker and darker, and when the shift horn sounds he lurches away, his last carton half-empty. Fuck it, he says. We're outta here. That afternoon we ditch the Sandman idea and buy a Kombi from a hippy on the wharf. Two hundred bucks each.

We put in two last weeks at the meatworks and collect our pay. We fill the ancient VW with tinned food and all our camping junk and rack off without telling a soul. Monday morning everyone thinks we're off to work as usual, but in ten minutes we're out past the town limits going like hell. Well, going the way a 1967 Kombi will go. Our getaway vehicle is a garden shed on wheels.

It's a mad feeling, sitting up so high like that with the road flashing under your feet. For a couple of hours we're laughing and pointing and shoving and farting and then we settle down a bit. We go quiet and just listen to the Volkswagen's engine threshing away behind us. I can's had let on to anybody these past couple of weeks we'd never have gone through with it; we'd have piked for sure. "We'd be like all the other poor stranded failures who stayed in Angelas. But now we're on the road, it's time for second thoughts. Nothing said, but I can feel it.

The plan is to call from somewhere the other side of Perth when we're out of reach. I want to be safe from the guilts - the old girl will crack a sad on me - but Biggie has bigger things to fear. His old man will beat the shit out of him when he finds out. We can't change our minds.

The longer we drive the more the sky and the bush open up. Now and then Biggie looks at me and leers. He's got a face only a mother could love. One eye's looking at you and the other eye's looking for you. He's kind of pear-shaped, but you'd be a brave bugger calling him a barge-arse. The fists on him. To be honest he's not really my sort of bloke at all, but somehow he's my best mate.

We buzz north through hours of good farm country. The, big, neat paddocks get browner and drier all the while and the air feels thick and warm. Biggie drives. He has the habit of punctuating his sentences with jabs on the accelerator and although the gutless old Volksie doesn't exactly give you whiplash at every flourish, it's enough to give a bloke a headache, "We wind through the remnant jarrah forest, and the sickly-looking regrowth is so rain-parched it almost crackles when you look at it.

When Perth comes into view, its dun plain shimmering with heat and distant towers ablaze with midday sun, we get all nervous and giggly, like a pair of tipsy netballers. The big city. We give each other the full Groucho Marx eyebrow routine but we're not stopping.

Biggie's a coun through. Cities confound him, he can't see the point of them. He honestly wonders how people can live in each other's pockets like that. He's revolted and a little frightened at the thought. Me, I love the city, I'm from there originally. I really thought I'd be moving back this month. But I won't, of course. Not after blowing my exams. I'm glad we're not stopping, it'd be like having your nose rubbed in it. Failure, that is. I can't tell Biggie this but missing out on uni really stings. When the results came I cried my eyes out. I thought about killing myself.

To get past Perth we navigate the blowsy strips of caryards and showrooms and crappy subdivisions on the outskirts. Soon we're out the other side into vineyards and horse paddocks with the sky blue as mouthwash ahead. Then finally, open road. We've reached a world where it time, where nobody knows us and nobody cares. There's just us and the Love Machine. We get the giggles. We go off; we blast the horn and hoot and chuck maps and burger wrappers around the cabin. Two mad southern boys still wearing beanies in March.

I'm laughing. I'm kicking the dash. That ache is still there inside me but this is the best I've felt since the news about the exams. For once I'm not faking it. I look across at Biggie. His huge, unlovely face is creased with merriment. I just know I'll never be able to tell him about the hopes I had for myself and for a little while I don't care about any of it; I'm almost as happy as him. Biggie's results were even worse than mine - he really fried - but he didn't have his heart set on doing well; he couldn't give a rat's ring. For him, our bombing out is a huge joke. In his head he's always seen himself at the meatworks or the cannery until he inherits the salmon-netting licence from his old man. He's content, he belongs. His outlook drives my mother wild with frustration but in a way I envy him. My mother calls us Lenny and George. She teaches English; she thinks that's funny. She's trying to wean me off Biggie Botson. In fact she's got a program all mapped out to get me back on track, to take the year again and re-sit the exams. But I've blown all that off now. Biggie's not the brightest crayon in the box but he's the most loyal person I know. He's the real deal and you can't say that about many people.

My mother won't chase me up; she's kind of preoccupied. She's in love with the deputy principal. He's married. He uses the school office to sell Amway. Both of them believe that Civics should be reintroduced as a compulsory course.

We get out into rolling pasture and granite country and then wheat-lands where the ground is freshly torn up in the hope of rain. The VW shakes like a boiling billy and we've finally woken up to ourselves and sheepishly dragged our beanies off. The windows are down and the hot wind rips through our hair.

Biggie must have secrets. Everyone dreams of things in private. There must be stuff he doesn't tell me. I know about the floggings he and his mum get, but I don't know what he wants deep down. He won't say. But then I don't say either. I never tell him about the Skeleton Coast in Africa where ships come aground on surf beaches and lie there broken- bellied until the dunes bury them. And the picture I have of myself in a cafe on the Piazza San Marco leaving a tip so big that the waiter inhales his moustache. Dreams of the big world beyond. Manila. Monterey. Places in books. In all these years I never let on. But then Biggie's never there in the picture with me. In those daydreams he doesn't figure, and maybe I'm guilty about that.

After a while we pull over for a leak. The sunlight is creamy up here. Standing at the roadside, with it roasting my back and arms through the heavy shirt, I don't care that picking guavas and papaya doesn't pay much more than hosing the floor of an abattoir. If it's outside in the sun, that's fine by me. We'll be growing things, not killing them. We'll move with the seasons.

We'll be free.

The class-room was hot, and outside the sun was hard on the dusty earth and the grass was going brown on the playing fields. The boy looked at his exercise book; at the figures and the red­ pencil corrections, and they were nothing, related to nothing in his experience. He raised his eyes very slowly and saw the hard light and the bare ground and the dying grass. Over the fence the two old jarrahs with the spread tops framed the piled houses of the suburbs. He had his hands to his head and he looked out of the low window and then back at the figures on the paper, and slowly the tears began to force their way on him. He made no sound and the others working did not know.

Now out beyond him were the wide fiat acres of wheat, heavy in ear, and the cut patches bare to earth dotted with the stocks. The wagon moved slowly out, and when they reached the stooks his father began to pitch hay. The sheaves thumped on the wagon. He helped Ted, who worked for them, to build the load. As the wagon started for the next stook he felt the jolt and looked at the load to see if it would hold. High up he sat when it was built and they drove into the stack. He got on the stack and Ted threw the sheaves to him and he passed to his father. The sun was hard on the paddocks and the dull scrub and the few trees. It made the wagon hot and the hay held the heat, and his clothes were hot. It was hard to say when the shadows first started to come on the ground, but they began to shift out from the stooks and from the stack and about the few shade­ trees. When they were tired with the mid-afternoon he saw his mother coming out with the tea. They sat in the shade of the wagon and he listened to the talk and he knew the people and the wheat and the town and the bulk bin and when he said something they listened and answered. The colours began to change slowly, to deepen, and shift from the smooth acres of the wheat and the fallow and old stubble, and from the dulling scrub that was making a dark edge about the paddock. The sun went from the hot ground and they left the wagon outside the stack and took the horses out. Ted led them to the yard, while he put out the feeds. In the quiet darkening stables, after Ted and his father had gone, he watched the heads in the boxes and listened to the noises the horses made, together, feeding. When the stables and the shed with the bags of the stored wheat became dark he pushed open the iron door and went across the yard. There was the light in the house and they sat at the meal and there was talk and if he wanted to say something they listened.

He could feel the tears and he was afraid to move lest the others see. He looked at the symbols on the paper and they blurred and made no pattern. His hands sheltered his face, and he looked slowly up and to one side and he saw the blackboard and the desk and shelves and the maps that were pinned to the walls.