‘Cheeky bastard!’ the adults called Boogie, but with an amused, charmed lilt to their voices. He was hauled by his lapel to the principal’s office for liberating the tick-riddled ram from the agriculture department, but avoided punishment just by flashing his excessive dimples. And they were excessive – he had three, one in each cheek, and one in his chin – and he flaunted them shamelessly. Girls were mad for him. A couple of them surrounded him at recess and pretended they needed to settle an argument.

‘Tanya says her tan line is the darkest, but she’s so full of it,’ they said, pouting and flicking their hair. ‘I reckon mine is way better. You’re going to have to judge, Boogie, and tell Tanya she’s wrong.’

Then they giggled and lifted their school shirts for him to judge, revealing taut, brown bellies, and they lowered their skirts down just an inch to show the white skin that their swimmer bottoms usually covered.

‘Virgin skin,’ said Tanya.

‘Not bloody likely!’ laughed the others, and they threw flirty, knowing smiles Boogie’s way.

He had gypsy-black hair that grew unrulily down to his collar, and the kind of green eyes that were made for bewitching. He walked with an easy sort of slouch, caused by years of ducking low through the barrels that run down into Rainbow Bay, sharing the waves with surfing legends Rabbit Bartholomew and Peter Townend. The husk of adolescence was falling away, and he hoped that the man who stepped out from it would be like those legends. He was fourteen and six months, and with all the confidence of the charmed and the charming, he couldn’t imagine that he might not be anything he wanted.

That he might always be fourteen and six months.

He wasn’t perfect – far from it.

‘See these grey hairs? They’re all because of you!’ the teachers told him, but behind their scowls you could tell they secretly liked him best.

While bobbing on the horizon between sets, an older surfer spun him tales of the waves down at Bells Beach, near Melbourne.

‘It’s fair dinkum, the closest thing there is to dancing cheek to cheek with God, those waves,’ promised the man.

That weekend Boogie hitchhiked down with a snaggle-toothed truck driver, and slept on the beach for a week while the adults pulled their hair out. He wasn’t what you’d call an easy child, but he was an easy child to love.

It was 1979 when Boogie was fourteen and six months. The age of disco music.

‘Your name is Bobby!’ insisted his exasperated mother and teachers, but the way he spilt his groove on the dance floor had earned him the nickname ‘Boogie’, and that’s the only name he answered to.

He could move.

He lived in a house a block back from the beach. It wasn’t much of a house, a one-storey red-brick thing, but it had a giant jacaranda that presided over the front yard and dwarfed all the buildings in the town. Boogie would swing up the branches and sit there on the highest bough, perched like a panther, and he’d watch the ocean over the rooftops to figure out whether the surf was good enough to skip school.

Most days it was.

When he was fourteen and five months he was sitting in the tree while the branches danced softly beneath him, and when he looked over to a nearby, parallel bough he had a fit of whimsy. He imagined making a platform up there, just a few pieces of wood between the two branches, and he could sleep there some nights, with the wind rocking him like a cradle, and the first shards of daylight waking him up to illuminate the waves of the day.

That’s what brought him to McGinty’s.

McGinty and Boogie were no strangers. There was the time that Boogie stole the principal’s underpants from his clothesline and hoisted them up the town’s flagpole. And of course, Boogie’s habit of hitchhiking across the country without letting his frantic mother know. She’d filed missing person reports so many times that the local station had a ready-made template for her. Boogie stood respectfully while McGinty waved his purple birthmark in his face in an attempt to put the fear of God in him, but Boogie hadn’t learnt how to be afraid yet, and that made the other side of McGinty’s face turn almost as purple in frustration. Although McGinty disliked Boogie, that wasn’t enough of a reason to make him a murderer, otherwise, half the teenage boys in the town would probably have had their throats slit. It all had to do with Margery.

Margery McGinty was the superintendent’s wife. She had a beaky nose and eyes like shrivelled sultanas in a doughy face. Her thin lips were used to pursing, and when they weren’t pursed she was shouting in that shrill voice of hers. She was the kind of woman who was born so plain, and looked so unfortunate, that nobody ever took any notice of her, or bothered to be kind. Even if she was born with a sweet soul, it had been ground away by years of bitterness, and her temperament was now just as unattractive as her features. She wouldn’t survive McGinty either.

It was a day in April, one of those Indian summer days, as though the weather hadn’t got the memo that it should be cooling down by then. It was a dry sort of heat, and as Boogie trekked through the bush on his way to McGinty’s hobby farm to pick through the scrap wood, the sun sucked on his skin like a child with a mango. He was thirsty as all hell. The pickings were pretty good. Boogie tossed aside some broken chairs and rusted corrugated iron to find a few planks of wood that weren’t too rotted. They were the right length, and with a bit of sanding and some nails they would make a perfectly functional platform to drag a sleeping bag up to, and fall asleep with the sounds of the crashing waves floating to the top branches of the jacaranda tree. He had the wiry strength of a kid who was always swimming, running, surfing and wrestling about with the other town runamoks, and he could easily lift the planks and balance them on top of his head to make the trek home. Except he was thirsty. That was his mistake.

Boogie sauntered over to McGinty’s house, tossing his black hair out of his eyes. He didn’t feel like facing up to old Plum Face, but the kitchen window was open, revealing a linoleum floor, appliances that could do with replacing, and a blessed tap that Boogie could stick his head under and drink from without ever bothering to take out a glass. He was steadying his hands on the windowsill, and was just about to leap up, when he heard a shrill shout from the living room, followed by a crash. Boogie’s eyes glinted wickedly, and he forgot his thirst as he ducked along the side of the house to spy on the domestic row going on through the living-room window.

This is what he saw. A smashed vase, the pieces scattered next to a wall that was dented from where the porcelain impacted. McGinty was crouched, picking up the pieces, while Margery stood at the other side of the room, next to a coffee table that looked as though it once was the resting place of the now utterly broken vase. Her face was a blotchy red, and her voice could be heard from through the thick windowpane.

‘I don’t give a damn about the vase, you worthless piece of shit!’ she shrilled.

‘Quit it, Margery.’

McGinty’s voice was edged in malice as he continued to pick up the broken porcelain.

‘I won’t quit it. You’ll listen to me if I have to rip that ear off your ugly purple face!’

McGinty’s eyes were bulging now, especially the one that peered imposingly through his birthmark.

‘I said, quit it.’

Margery waddled over to him with the heavy footsteps of a woman who looked like someone had taken her thumb between their lips and blown her up like a balloon. She started pounding at his ears, at his birthmark. He stood, flinging the pieces of shattered vase from his hand, and pushed her backwards. Her mouth swung open in shock.

‘You worthless piece of shit!’ she repeated, and she charged at him, with all the force of her obese frame, clawing at his skin. McGinty gripped her shoulders, tipping them both onto the couch with a thud. She continued to hit at him.

‘You make me sick. My parents told me not to marry you, and it’s not like you’d ever find anyone else with that face of yours. I should have listened to them, every day I wish I’d . . .’

Margery stopped then. Or rather, McGinty stopped her. He gripped his stubby fingers around her neck.

‘I told you to shut up!’ he roared.

Margery kept hitting him.

She was hitting him, and hitting him.

Until she wasn’t.

Boogie held his breath.

McGinty released his grip, his face ashen. He stared at his fingers, as though they were strangers and weren’t attached to him at all, then he shook his wife.

She didn’t move.

He wrestled his arms around her bulky frame and shook her. Her head lolled lifelessly back, all floppy, like dough before you bake it. He banged his head against the cane frame of the couch in a primal sort of gesture, and then shook Margery again so violently she fell off the couch and lay face down on the floor, heavy and still.

Dead.

Boogie’s heart was thumping so fast he was sure McGinty could hear it.

Still ducking low, Boogie walked backwards towards the junk pile, eyes fixed towards the window, but nobody returned his stare. Not looking where he was going, he kicked a piece of corrugated iron.

It clanged.

The sound of it echoed through the silence of the bush.

Boogie’s heart jumped right up into his mouth, and he felt like he could taste it. Springing like a cat, he jumped behind a pile of old wood and peeked through a small gap, just large enough to press his eye against it. McGinty’s head peered through the living-room window, all jittery and wild-eyed. Boogie stayed hidden. After a few minutes McGinty sprang from his spot at the window and headed in the direction of the front door. With all the ease of a kid who’s used to running, Boogie sprinted. He sprinted past the clearing and into the bush, and with a few swings he climbed high up the branches of a nearby tree. From this vantage point he could see McGinty bluster out the front door and stand, looking around for a moment, ear cocked, before he slowly stalked his way towards the scrap pile. In jagged movements he pulled the pieces of wood off each other. He circled the pile, picking at old pesticide barrels and tractor wheels.

Nothing.

After a good fifteen minutes, when the pile was utterly scattered, McGinty stood there, chest heaving, sweat gleaming off the bald patch at the top of his head and trickling down his birthmark, so it looked like grape juice had been thrown onto his face. He scanned the trees with a furious intensity, but he never bothered to look up. He just stared at the brush with his eyes squinted for another few minutes, before he slowly turned on his heels and walked back inside.

Boogie stayed up that tree for an hour. He’d had practice staying up trees, and slowly, once he was certain that McGinty wasn’t coming back out, he swung down and then made his way through the track in that quick, quiet, panther-like way of moving he’d cultivated over the years.

That should have been the end of it.

The town was filled with whispers that Margery had had a heart attack. This is what the papers said in her obituary. McGinty played the part of the grieving widower, and Boogie held his tongue and let the people talk in sad, hushed voices, and bring casseroles over to McGinty’s house. Weeks passed, and Boogie’s life went back to normal. He continued to swim out past the bombies, kiss girls, and skip school whenever he felt like it. He continued to climb to the highest branches of the jacaranda tree, and the longing to make a perch up there grew stronger and stronger. That was his last mistake.

He was fourteen and six months when he decided to brave McGinty’s scrap pile again, swelled with the knowledge that McGinty hadn’t seen him. Except he had seen him. In the moment he jumped behind the mound of old wood, McGinty had seen his black, tousled hair and lithe frame, and McGinty had had enough encounters with Boogie to know that boy anywhere.

It was dusk. Boogie had spent the afternoon surfing, and he still had salt crystals dried stiff on his skin. He trod carefully through the clearing, and he noticed the wood he wanted, buried deep beneath the other scraps. Leaning low, he wriggled the planks to force them out. He hunched down, and had almost set the first one loose when he felt it.

It was like a punch, but sharper.

Much sharper.

Right between his shoulderblades, which were jutted outwards as he leant over the wood.

McGinty had stabbed him.

Boogie didn’t die straight away. When McGinty wrenched the knife from his back, Boogie spun around to spit in his attacker’s face. He’d never forget that face. It was wild, behind the purple smear. He would never forget McGinty’s expression as he raised the knife to slit Boogie’s throat.

To kill him.

It was unlike the look he wore when he strangled Margery.

There was a hint of triumph in his eyes.

A flash of primal violence.

McGinty liked it.