Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon Page B

got
me in his car?
    The stories that parents told; the lies and half
lies, the white lies and the grey lies and the black
black truth. They told their kids everything from
the generic 'hurt you', which was open to the most
benign interpretation, right through to anatomically
detailed descriptions of the act of rape.
    For many girls these were the first conversations
they'd ever had with their parents on the subject of
sex. It was the birds and the bees. Except the way it
was told down the Spit in late February of '81, the
bird is an insatiable black crow and the bee will sting
you again and again and again, and then leave you in
a ditch for dead.
    Through an informal network of neighbours, old
team-mates and drinking buddies, the local men set
up a community patrol. There were about thirty guys
involved, including most of our fathers. There was a
roster; four men each evening — there were enough
volunteers that each name came up only once every
couple of weeks. At the end of their working day, the
men found themselves in groups of four, cruising the
streets in a car, looking for anything suspicious. They
often didn't have time to eat dinner so their wives
packed food on plates covered with tinfoil. There was
always a Thermos of coffee that was shared around.
Normally there was beer as well. Everyone put in a
small sum of money so that whoever supplied the car
for the evening could have his petrol costs reimbursed.
You can eat through a surprisingly large amount of
petrol cruising slowly up and down the road.
    We'd see them drive past as we went about our
business. Their territory covered all of New Brighton,
right from the bottom of the Spit all the way up
past Thompson Park and into North New Brighton.
Sometimes the driver would pull the car over and
someone's dad would lean out the window to talk to
us. The patrols were always good-natured. The guys
would joke around and the smell from the plates
of food would waft out through the rolled-down
windows. More often than not the guy doing the
talking had beer on his breath. He'd ask us if we'd
seen anyone unusual hanging around. Sometimes we
had — a surfer we didn't recognise, or a guy with his
dog, down in the dunes. The patrol always took what
we had to say seriously, which we liked. They'd thank
us and ask us to keep our eyes peeled and then drive
off to check out what we'd reported.
    They were looking for someone lurking in the
shadows of the school grounds or a furtive peeper
crouching outside a girl's bedroom window. They'd
often pull over to talk to a stranger or a foreigner
walking down the street. A couple of the guys would
get out and have a chat. Officially, the plan was to call
the police from the nearest house if the patrol spotted
anything unusual. That was officially. But as we sat
on our bikes with our feet on the footpath, or stood
skateboard in hand and watched the car as it pulled
away from us, we could hear the rattle of softball bats
and golf clubs coming from the boot. None of us was
naïve enough to think that the men were planning on
fitting in a round of golf before they went home.
    Our fathers and their friends cruised the streets
until midnight and then returned home to get some
sleep before work the next day. As we lay in our beds
we would sometimes hear our fathers coming home;
the creak from the front door and then footsteps,
stumbly and slightly drunk, moving around the house.
Our fathers would inevitably be drawn to the kitchen
where they would muck around with bread and
jam and whatever else they could find. Our mothers
would often still be up and we would listen through
the walls to their voices muttering together.
    It was good to know that our dads were out there
keeping everyone safe. We would roll over in our beds
and try to get back to sleep.
    The main organiser of the community patrol was,
surprisingly, Bill Harbidge. Perhaps the attack on
Jenny Jones had shocked him out of his downward
spiral. Almost overnight Bill stopped drinking