AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR | Free Book | 'Clown Club: Chapter 4' by D. M. Wright
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VOLUME 1
CHAPTER 4. >>
I., II., III., IV. & V.
Earlier that year, Dad and Ryker had started Clown Club.
Nothing formal.
No constitution.
No membership cards.
No secret handshakes.
Just a handful of blokes meeting every four weeks on Friday at the Modbury Tavern to take the piss out of each other and complain about life.
I suspect none of them felt particularly qualified to solve their problems, but all of them felt qualified to mock them and not take life too seriously.
Somehow, that was enough.
That arrangement suited Dad.
And because he got me every second weekend, the club was scheduled on the weekend in between.
For him, it was Friday me.
Friday by himself.
Friday with me.
Friday at Clown Club.
Those two weekends across four weeks belonged to us.
At least, they belonged to us on paper.
That’s the strange thing about separated parents.
The parent with primary custody gets the ordinary moments and all the milestones.
The other one gets a stopwatch.
Every visit starts with a countdown.
Every goodbye arrives too soon.
Before I was old enough to understand it, Dad had already figured that out.
So, he didn’t spend our time together worrying about my grades.
He didn’t spend them chauffeuring me around either. I didn’t have many mates. I had no hobbies. I didn’t play any sport that he could come watch.
He was missing too much of my life already, so the last thing he wanted was to waste what little time he had acting like a principal.
Instead, every second weekend became a campaign of ideas.
Fishing trips.
Movies.
Backyard cricket.
Homemade pizza.
Chess.
Barbeques.
Anything that might manufacture another memory before Sunday afternoon arrived and stole me away again.
Yet most weekends followed the same pattern.
Mum would pull up outside Dad’s place after school on Friday.
She’d kiss me on the cheek.
There’d usually be a tear in her eye.
Then I’d climb out with my bag.
I had my own key.
Let myself in.
Dad would hear the front door from somewhere in the house.
“Jimbo?” he’d call out. “I’m making steak. Wanna help me cook?”
I’d carry my gear down the hallway.
Walk straight into my temporary bedroom.
Shut the door.
And just like that, another one of Dad’s ideas would disappear into a puff of smoke.
* * *
It always took time to coax me out of that room; let alone out of the shell I’d crawled myself into.
Dad tried everything.
Long drives through the Hills.
Trips to different rural bakeries.
Most of it wasn’t really about the activity itself.
He was just searching for a crack in the armour.
A way in.
We’d spend hours in his ute together on Saturdays.
Dad would drive.
I would stare out the window.
And he’d tell the same stories over and over again.
Not because he’d forgotten he’d already told them.
Because I wasn’t giving him much else to work with.
If conversation was a tennis match, I was a brick wall lying face-down on the court.
So, Dad supplied both sides of the dialogue.
The punchlines.
The commentary.
The audience participation.
Occasionally, he’d try sneaking in one of life’s great lessons.
“There’s only one right way to eat a custard tart.”
Now, for those unfortunate souls who never grew up in South Australia, a custard tart is one of humanity’s great achievements.
A shallow pastry shell carrying a slab of bright yellow custard.
It’s something like an above-ground pool in structural integrity.
The top wears a dusting of nutmeg like formal attire.
The pastry flakes at the slightest provocation.
The custard simultaneously wants to hold its shape and abandon it.
Every bakery in the state sells them.
Every old bloke thinks his local bakery makes the best ones.
And every father over the age of forty apparently possesses deeply entrenched philosophical views regarding their proper consumption.
At least, according to Dad, who treated the subject with the seriousness of constitutional law.
“The first thing you’ve got to understand about a custard tart is that God didn’t design it to be eaten as it stands. You don’t just pull it out its alfoil tray and bite, bite, bite ‘til it’s gone.”
That was the wrong way employed only by complete savages uneducated in the fine arts of bakery-goods etiquette.
There was a right and only way to enjoy a tart for all its worth.
You start with the rim.
One bite.
Pastry and custard together.
But the edges only.
Not the entire outer wall.
You have to keep the structure from imminent collapse.
Then you move around onto the next section of rim.
Then the next.
Working your way meticulously along the circumference like the ocean chipping away at coastline, eroding the backyards of rich fuckers’ mansions hogging public beaches.
“See?” Dad would say. “You’re reducing the overhang.”
The overhang?
As though he were explaining bridge engineering rather than bakehouse treats.
Eventually, the entire rim disappears, but the outer wall – still intact – maintains the waning structural integrity.
Your bites have turned it from one of those cone-trapezium-vortex things with the wide bit on top into one of those cone-trapezium-vortex things with the wide bit on the bottom.
Or whatever shape you call it.
To this day, I’ve no bloody idea what shape it’s supposed to be.
Dad didn’t either.
Every explanation then involved a lot of hand gestures and words like funnel-ish.
So…
Once the outer rim has gone, you bend down one edge of the foil tray.
Just enough.
A small bite is exposed.
You eat that.
Then fold the foil a little further.
Eat another.
Then another.
The tray supports the custard from implosion.
The custard supports civilisation.
The entire system remains stable.
“No collapses,” Dad would say. “No casualties.”
Eventually, you reach the final five-ish-by-two centimetres.
This is the advanced stage.
The dangerous phase.
A custard-pastry finger.
Not for the weak hearted.
Both hands by now are required to maintain the foil’s balance, preventing the remaining custard and pasty finger from rocking and rolling right over the edge.
Concentration is key.
Using your top lip only, you slowly rotate a section over the edge of the tray.
Too little overhang and it’s a wasted bite.
– Or you bite into the foil out of sheer necessity and hate life for the feeling of crunching metal. –
Too much overhang and the whole thing can tip and topple like a car over a cliff.
Get it right?
Bite.
Swallow.
Now, you become like dog trying to reach the final scrap stuck to the bottom of its food bowl.
Push more over the edge with your lip.
Bite.
Swallow.
Then comes the grand finale.
One perfect bite remains.
– But so do all the crumbs dislodged from earlier phases. –
So, you tilt your head back.
Raise the foil tray above your mouth.
Let gravity deliver victory.
Every crumb.
Every flake.
Every speck of nutmeg.
Nothing wasted.
But if even a single crumb escapes?
Failure!
Instant disqualification.
You’re required to purchase another custard tart and start again from the beginning.
Dad enforced this rule with unwavering consistency.
Oddly enough, he seemed particularly prone to dropping crumbs himself.
Sometimes, if I had become skilled enough not to drop anything, he’d bump the table during the final lift.
And a crumb would fall down my shirt.
“Ahh, bugger!” he’d say. “You were right there.”
Another pair of tarts would need to be bought.
Once, we went through six rounds.
Stomachs bursting with custard, the ride home felt sickening.
Worth it, but sickening, nonetheless.
Mum wasn’t too impressed that Sunday when she surprised me with a tart for dessert and I turned it down with a dry vomit.
But one thing you absolutely can’t do at school, as I discovered, is follow Dad’s custard tart rules.
If you want to stand out, get shoved back in your box and then mocked for having been shoved into the box in the first place, this is one way to do it.
High school has its own laws.
You need to be a grey man.
Well…
A grey boy.
The trick is surviving unnoticed.
So naturally, while I was quietly conducting textbook-compliant custard tart consumption procedure one lunch break, I looked up and found the last person in the world I’d ever want standing right in front of me:
Taytum Brooks-Wheatcroft.
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