Bugger

by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The devastating and gritty fourth novel from Miles Franklin shortlisted author, Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Some scars can never be seen, but will always be felt . . . long after the damage is done.

Hamoodi may only be ten years old, but he already knows that to speak out is dangerous. Lessons from the mother-land have taught him that standing out can see you lose everything. Or disappear. In a new place, he has learned to be quiet, contained. He carries the wisdom and knowledge of his mother and father. They have told him to trust no one - except family.

Alooshi understands first-hand the hurt words can bring. As a teenager, he's learned that knowing how to wound someone gives him power. But words can only give him so much. And when his younger cousin Hamoodi is bullied at school, Alooshi sees a way to get something else he wants.

Over one day and one night, Hamoodi will come to understand how vulnerable he is. He will discover that family is complicated and trust is a cruel weapon. For him, there will always be a before and an after. He will forever struggle to un-know. But maybe, in the knowing, he will find a way to take back his power. Maybe . . .

With a devastating poignancy and gritty tenderness, award-winning author Michael Mohammed Ahmad's new novel, Bugger, reveals an uncompromising representation of abuse and explores the impact one day can have on a lifetime.

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 224

Sample

Um. Wait. Stop. No. Wiping my bum. Look up. A bark-skinned kid with his eyes bulging out of their sockets. ‘Jeez, that’s the biggest s-word I’ve ever seen!’ he shouts, but he actually says the s-word. Up next to him appears a paper-skinned kid. Eyes bulging. Out of their sockets. Cackling; teeth snipping my flesh as he sniffs the air and scoffs, ‘God, that s-word stinks.’ And he, too, actually uses the s-word.

Both boys slip their heads down from the cubicle, their laughter echoing off the concrete slabs of restroom walls. I’m squatting, heart thudding and hands scrambling to finish wiping myself before they return. I place the tissue in the toilet bowl and, too ashamed to suss out my own waste, which may or may not be any bigger than any other ten-year-old’s waste, turn my head and flush quick; finger tapping down again and again and again and again on the flush handle. It loses all its weight once the water tank is empty, and then it’s just metal on metal and my mouth swallowing my lips.

The water sounds like a stomach-ache as it sucks down the stuff in the bowl — a mixture of gunk and rag and whatever came from the person before me — and then it’s clean again, except for this ring of yellow where the water ends, like pee, but it can’t be my pee, because I didn’t pee. It’s like old pee, like someone else’s pee, like everyone else’s pee. Which reminds me, my dad always said I did a big wee when I was a new baby and the doctor had to cut the skin off my thing. I asked him why, why did you let the doctor cut me, and he said, ‘We don’t call it cut in the mother-tongue, we call it purify.’

I slowly turn the lock on the cubicle door and open it an inch; the bark-skinned boy and paper-skinned boy are gone, but their bulging eyeballs are still in here, taking what’s mine: that secret deal we make with the toilet every day: ‘Hey, toilet, just between you and me, on the inside, we humans are disgusting.’ I am un-purified.

Has it been twenty seconds yet? Maybe eleven seconds? Or ten? Or two? My face between the space between the door and the wall between the other cubicles, and all I see are the metal taps, and the metal tubs beneath the taps that catch the water. Then the grey wall behind the taps, and on the grey wall, words that have been written in six-buck-fifty black texta; the kind of texta that never rubs out: f-word mr brown. Only it actually says the f-word.

Count one more second and I creep out quietly and walk towards the exit, which is an open space in the middle of yet another grey concrete wall. Wait. Stop. Mum says do not forget to wash: ‘No, they don’t rinse their back-sides here, but at least rinse your hand-sides.’ Turn towards the tap, pump the soap pump; and out squirts the sticky white goo that comes in ten-kilo buckets from the No Frills factories that my mother says are cheaper than Woolworths, which is already pretty cheap. I scrub my hands hard, and before me, my flesh turns pink and my nails turn clear, and the dirt between them slowly disappears.

Anyway, I’m washing and staring up at f-word mr brown, and wondering: when they say ‘f-word so-n-so’, does it mean you want to f-word them, or does it mean you want them to f-word someone else, or does it mean you want them to f-word them-self?

F-word so-n-so means this, f-word so-n-so means that, but Mr Brown shouldn’t be f-worded ever. Back when he was my year two teacher, before he became vice principal, he was kind enough to teach me the meaning of the word ‘condom’. It was raining outside so we were all stuck having lunch in the classroom, and Mr Brown was supervising. For the very last time since we got here, I was eating a Nutella sandwich wrapped in the flat circle bread of my mother-land, and my best friend, Thomas Smith, was eating a peanut butter sandwich in the fat square bread of his mother-land while picking at this red pimple on the tip of his nose. ‘The Green Ranger smashes the Red Ranger,’ he slobbered at me, mouth full of brown mulchy goo. ‘He has a gold shield.’ I would never do this, but I swear I swear I swear I wanted to punch him in his freckled face. Green Ranger started off as the evil creation of Rita Repulsa; he’d never ever even have been a real Power Ranger if the Red Ranger hadn’t saved him. ‘You only like Green Ranger because his name is Tommy,’ I spat, bits of chocolate flinging from my mouth. This argument went back and forth for the next twenty minutes; two of us weighing up the Green Ranger dagger versus the Red Ranger sword, the Green Ranger Dragonzord versus the Red Ranger Tyrannosaurus Zord. Thomas finally screamed, ‘Red Ranger is a con!’ and having recently heard the word on an episode of Melrose Place, but not knowing what it meant, I shot back at him, ‘Well, you’re a con-dom!’

In my anger, the words came out way louder than I meant them to, and straightaway, all twenty necks in the classroom spun in my direction. Mr Brown said, ‘Hamoodi, go to the corridor now.’ I stood up and walked outside, waiting for sir. I must have said a bad word, but I honestly had no idea what it could mean, and kept thinking through all the words I knew that started with ‘con’: con-dor, pretty sure that was a bird; con-cord, pretty sure that was a plane; con-flict, pretty sure that’s where my dad went; con-fused, knew for sure that was me.

When Mr Brown finally appeared, he had a half-ish smile on his face, like this situation was funnier than I could ever have imagined.

‘Do you know what a condom is, son?’ Mr Brown asked; pinching the plastic tip in the centre of his glasses; holding back a laugh.

‘Is it some kind of scam?’

Without correcting me, sir just straight-up said, ‘Condom is a small balloon that Daddy puts on his penis when he doesn’t want to get Mummy’s vagina pregnant.’

Everyone knows teachers aren’t allowed to curse. Mr Brown would not have put a sentence like that together if ‘condom’ and ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ were filthy for the sake of filthy — that was the difference between ‘adult words’, which could not help being what they were; and ‘swear words’, which chose to be the worst version of themselves. But the image Mr Brown had just imprinted on me left my skin feeling icky and gross and slimy and gooey and ekh bro. Even ‘adult words’ became too much for me, too much to say out loud, too much to think inside my head. Returning to my desk, rubbernecking the raindrops outside the classroom window as the other kids played thumb wars, I corrected the language: from now on, down there, women and girls would have a ‘v-word’, because it was shaped like a v; men would have a ‘p-word’, because pee came out of it; and we boys would just have a ‘thing’, because what else was it, what else could it be, what else could it become?

Anyway, going back to the bathroom wall, where someone has written f-word mr brown, I remember the hundred-and-four times I’d spotted Mr Brown in the corridor with some other snotty kid; pinching his glasses, explaining the true meaning of some horrific word to them. How ungrateful of us …

By the time I finish washing my hands, there’s all this noise coming from outside the boys’ bathroom, like hyena laughter. I check my hands one more time, inspecting all the spaces under my nails: all the dirt has disappeared and my hands are now red in the flesh space and white in the nail space that’s crooked at every tip. My mum used to be like, ‘stop biting your fingernails’, but not anymore. Now she always inspects my nibbled hands before I go to bed, smiles a sad smile, and says, ‘Your dad’s biting his fingernails right now.’ My toenails, on the other hand, are a no-go: I can’t bend over far enough to bite them, and I’ve heard that piercing scream from my baby sister when Mum cuts the nail too deep and draws blood. No way, just let those claws dig into my shoes!

I walk towards the boys’ bathroom exit — grey stone doorway without a door — staring at the floor — yellow rings of old pee in the concrete — staring at my No Frills black left shoe, which has a tear at the tip where the fabric meets the rubber. My mum has promised she’s gonna buy me a brand-name pair if I can just hang in there until the end of the year. It’s hard to believe her. A month ago, just before her doctor’s appointment, she tried on a woolly blue jumper at Kmart, and decided to buy it. Keeping the jumper on, with the twenty-buck price tag hanging loose at the back, she wandered around the store searching for the counter. Raising her eyebrows and separating her mouth wide open in surprise, Mum suddenly realised that she’d accidentally led both of us at least ten metres beyond the store exit. At this point I expected her to turn back, but instead, she grabbed me by the shoulder and began running, her soft compact body joggling as she scurried with me and all her shopping bags to the other end of the mall, to the first public toilet we could find. ‘Wait here,’ she said, going in then coming out five minutes later, wearing the original old baggy grey jumper she had on. ‘I threw it out,’ she mumbled at me in the mother-tongue, her entire face droopy like a melted pie; so regretful that I genuinely believed it was an accident, and that she’d rather throw out a stolen jumper than keep it. But half an hour later, while we were sitting in the overheated doctor’s waiting room, drops of sweat started appearing on my mum’s forehead. She could take it no more and removed her old grey jumper, revealing the blue jumper she had accidentally stolen underneath, twenty-buck price tag still hanging from the collar. Mum never said anything to me about it, and I never said anything to her; we just stared at each other awkwardly, like I was saying, but you stole that, and she was saying, in pain did your mother bear you, and in pain did she give you birth.

Now, stepping out into the quadrangle, sunlight hits my face, squint. The hyena laughter is loud. Stings my ears. Open my eyes. The bark-skinned boy and the paper-skinned boy are in front of me, looking down at me — they’re a stack of ten chicken nuggets taller than me. They’re pointing, and saying, ‘This kid. This kid.’

Behind the two boys are four other pupils, three more paper-skinned boys, two I don’t know because they’re in the bigger years, and one I do because he’s my best friend, Thomas, whose nose is sun burned. Wait, I mean, sunburnt. The fourth kid is this girl from my class named Martina who everyone calls Miss Piggy, because she’s chubby and always wears pink hairclips. At the beginning of the year, she spent a full lunchtime trying to teach me to fold my tongue so I could whistle. ‘Like this, like this, like this,’ she kept on saying, but all I did was make spit-sounds at her, until finally she said, ‘I don’t think your kind of people can do it.’

So all six of these kids are cracking up really hard at me, showing me the gaps between their old baby teeth and their new grown-up teeth, and Thomas bellows, ‘Huh-ha. Skid-mark!’ Then Martina jumps in, her hands folding over her basketball belly, as she squeals, ‘Skid-mark!’ The paper-skinned boys from the older years, and the bark-skinned boy, begin chanting, ‘Skid-mark! Skid-mark! Skid-mark!’

It’s like pins, like they’re poking pins in my skin, and it hurts, it hurts a lot, it hurts outside like pins, and it hurts inside like my blood is being sizzled, and suddenly I’m screaming, ‘But why? Why are you calling me Skid-mark?’ It doesn’t even make sense; I thought ‘skid-mark’ is what you name someone when there’s poo left on their undies, but they haven’t seen my undies, and if they had, they’d know I wiped really well; we even wipe with water at home, and the. . .