Floored

Nic Holas

This is a story about being on the edges.

*

In the mid-1990s, my family lived on the edge of a golf course on the Gold Coast. Large swathes of the town had been transformed into golf courses, in an attempt to cash in on the Japanese tourist market. Sliced into the curved perimeter of the golfing green were residential fence posts, easy enough to jump over but rarely did I dare to do so. The threat of being killed by an errant golf ball from some Gold Coast real estate agent trying to impress ‘Mr Takahashi-san’, or similar, was too great a risk. Anyway, I was not a risk-taking kid.

I was on the edge of adolescence, a slip of a boy, not quite twelve. I had just kissed my first girl, and I knew I was different but hadn’t yet named what that difference was. I lacked something other boys had. The deficiency was anxiety-inducing. A year later, I would know that I desired men, but for now I was deeply suspicious of boys my age, especially since I didn’t know how to interact with Australians.

My family was on the edge of one era, moving into another. After several years living in Malaysia, and having recently left my stepfather, my mother had brought my brother and me back to Australia so I could start high school here. To be close to family and friends, she chose to settle us on the Gold Coast. It was quite the culture shock.

Living abroad in Kuala Lumpur, where my mother worked in fashion and my stepfather was a pilot, had afforded me a relatively cosmopolitan upbringing. My mother’s job had exposed us to a network of designers, fashion buyers and local homosexuals. To my young eyes, they seemed like an exciting underground: part Parisian bohemia, part Chicago gangster. Given homosexuality was outlawed in Malaysia, I wasn’t entirely off the mark.

My white skin made me a valuable commodity as a child model, so Mum would often make my brother and me pose for the catalogues and walk the runway shows. My latently homosexual ten-year-old self took to this with gusto and aplomb. But weirdly, my new Australian classmates were not impressed by my portfolio or tales of stomping the runway.

In KL, I went to an international school in the heart of the embassy district; my classmates were the children of diplomats. Our classroom looked like a United Colors of Benetton ad had fucked the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland. It was so diverse, Peter Dutton would have accused it of making Melbournians afraid to go out for dinner.

When apartheid ended, our white South African teacher cried in front of us and then suddenly disappeared, never to return. I’m not sure if she was crying tears of joy or sorrow, but it stuck with me. Growing up white in a former British colony in South-East Asia affords you a degree of privilege that is different from growing up on the unceded land of what we now call Australia. Different, but not better or worse. In KL, we were ‘expats’, with all the terrible trappings that identity allows.

Back in Australia, nothing could prepare me for the shock of starting school on the Gold Coast. The shock was not just from seeing only white faces in my classroom, but also at the way the school seemed geared to appease freckled little Australian boys, with its endless sports activities beneath an unforgiving Queensland sun, sports that as a boy I was supposed to be familiar with. The choice given to me was rugby league or soccer, and for some ungodly reason I chose rugby league.

The only memory I have of my school football career is of the coach yelling at me to go play some sort of on-field position. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was too intimidated to ask, because all the other boys knew how to play. So I ran into the middle of the pack and pretended that this was exactly where I was meant to be – while he screamed at me, over and over.

They say masculinity is a prison, but mine was more like Nicole Kidman in Bangkok Hilton: a foreigner, overly proud and weirdly up myself, while simultaneously incredibly anxious.

So, come 1994, my family and I were literally and metaphorically on edge. Adding to this sense, for me, was my strong loyalty to my mother and my belief that I needed to protect her. There had been a time, before she married my stepfather, when it was just her and me: a bonding time as a little boy, made more intense by my latent queerness.

In my mind, my mother’s decision to leave my stepfather was irrevocable. I never dreamt of a Parent Trap–style plan to reunite them. I had been too young to experience my own parents’ divorce, and this meant that I believed that when Mum left someone, that was it. Marriages end; you move on.

My stepfather, however, was not of the same mind. Mum leaving him wounded him deeply, and he did not cope well with the separation. This was his third failed marriage, made all the harder by distance. He remained in Malaysia. When the boxes filled with our stuff followed us home, they arrived covered in handwritten notes to my mother, begging to be taken back.

He eventually turned up on the Gold Coast, hot on the heels of those same boxes. It wasn’t a surprise. As with my father, her first husband, Mum was determined that a divorce would not prevent her son from seeing his dad. Maybe it was school holidays, maybe not.

One afternoon during his visit, my stepfather sent my younger brother and me out of the house. According to him, he and my mother needed to chat. By the time we got back to the house from wherever we’d wandered, Mum was gone for the evening, and he was looking after us.

Hanging thick in the air was something that made me feel uneasy, a child sensing the desperation of a grown man. I knew nothing of the complicated nature of marital heartbreak, but I knew Mum had left him and that her mind was made up. This was an edge that had to be leapt off. Divorce meant never turning back.

So there we were, my little brother, my stepfather and me. Apparently, Mum was over at her friend’s house, and would come home eventually. So I decided to stay up as late as I could to ensure I was still awake when she returned. A little moral guardian, like some sort of anthropomorphic Disney creature, there to cheerfully ruin my stepfather’s chances of a romantic reunion.

I’m not certain what prompted it, but when I was eventually ordered to bed I detoured to Mum’s room and declared that I would be sleeping in her bed that night. I was not a toddler. Here I was, on the edge of puberty, already kissing girls at blue-light discos, instinctively climbing into my mother’s bed in a ham-fisted attempt to protect her from my stepfather’s charms. Or her own choices.

Suddenly, the space between my stepfather and me moved from Disney comedic relief to full-blown Oedipal tragedy. He told me to go sleep in my room. I told him I wanted to stay there. When pressed for the reason I, a boy of my age, needed to sleep in my mother’s room, I had nothing. I had no words to describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that came out of my belly button via an emotional umbilical cord that was still connected to her, all gristle and blood wrapped up with the metaphorical apron strings we are told must be cut.

I will only state what I recall happening, what it felt like then, and how it feels now.

I recall his rage, volcanic and apoplectic. Breaking without warning, out of nowhere and directed entirely at me.

I recall his big hands on my bony shoulders.

I recall the feeling of being shaken, the sensation of being pinned to the mattress. It only lasted a moment, but during moments of trauma, time becomes heavy; black matter.

I recall him barking at me to return to my room.

I recall his desperate anger, a ploy designed to hurt and shock me out of her bed.

‘Your mother likes it on the floor anyway.’

That’s all I can recall.

I can’t recall who won the battle that night: I don’t know if I returned to my own bed or managed to stay in hers. I suspect I gave in to his commands, and I have no memory of Mum coming home that night, so in all likelihood I fell asleep at the post. A failed attempt at being her little moral guardian. Regardless, there was no place for him in that bed, with or without me in it. Eventually, I won the war: the divorce was indeed final. He moved on and remarried, and in time so did my mother. They are both still with these partners, and are happy.

That night was at the edge of many things, but more than the golf course or puberty or another divorce, the events of that evening kept me at the edge of ever feeling entirely safe around heterosexual men, from then until now.

It is possible to despise and fear the thing you pity. It is possible to understand that what my stepfather said and did to me as a child came from a place of utter weakness. I see it now as a pathetic move by a desperate man, so wounded from being rejected by his wife that he struck out at a child, her child. I think I saw it that way then too, but growing up queer is questioning how you see the world – because we are repeatedly shown it is their world, not ours.

We are expected to permit, forgive and make room for the behaviour of heterosexual, cisgendered Australian men. We are expected to understand that they aren’t to blame for how they are. We just rent space in the edges where they permit us to dwell, and when we try to stand up for ourselves, or others, we are just bony shoulders for them to shake.

But as my little bony shoulders grew broader, I learnt the value of standing with – and up for – others. For women, like my mother and my sisters. For my queer siblings. For my HIV+ siblings. For those whose tribe I am not a part of and whose shoulders have borne much greater burdens than mine. That little boy on the edge of the golf course grew up to dedicate his life to fighting with those tribes.

With every victory, every legislative win, every man who is shown he cannot get away with acting like his fathers and forefathers, our many bony shoulders knit into something stronger than all of them. And on those shoulders will one day stand younger queers, who will look upon that impotent, white, male, cis, heterosexual rage and do what I wish I could have done that night: laugh.