Narrative

“Just whatever you can get your hands on.” O’Reilly looked at us, lowering his voice. “Just don’t get caught.”

“And if you do...you dob, you die!” Sack grabbed me by the shoulder. “Oh, and I want two watermelons.”

“Watermelons! How are we supposed to get them back?” As the words came out, I realised too late that they included a little too much attitude.

“Float with them, dickhead!” Sack replied with a punch to the chest. “And remember, you dob, you die.”

“You dob, you die!” I mimicked as we walked towards the ‘flats’. 

“Shut up man, he’s watching.”

Sack was the least of my concerns as I moved towards the darkness with Tim, each of us holding both a plastic bag and the fear of what lay ahead.

Of all the traditional initiations we had been through, this was the big one, the ‘shopping outing’. 

Joneses was the market garden across the river. Although I had never been near it, I felt I knew what was there. The narrative of what you would find there was certainly flowing back at the boarding house. Lines upon lines of vegetables, bursting from the ground. The biggest watermelons you will ever see. Jonesy was an elderly man, “easy to out run”, who apparently, hated intruders, had a temper of a leopard and a shotgun the size of himself. And then there was his dog. No one seemed to know his name, but they could describe in detail how ferocious he was. Rumour was that he had rabies or an equally undesired infliction, and that this had led him to try to kill anyone who dared attempt to trespass onto his master’s property. Worst still, the dogs preferred method of attack was to bite your balls and never let go.

Although I knew that most of this was school boy over exaggeration and that those retelling these stories had probably had as little interaction with Jonesy and his dog as I had, as I walked closer to the river I imagined laying on the ground, holding a watermelon the size of a small car, staring at the barrel of a shotgun with a massive dog chewing away at my testicles. The image was not a pretty one.

The swim across was pretty uneventful. On reaching the other side my initial concern was that we were actually no where near any vegetables and that we would spend a cold, wet night looking for a carrot or something to take back. Tim signaled for me to move further up the bank and on reaching him, it was pretty clear that, if not Jonsey’s, we had arrived at some vegetable oasis.

 “Right, Let’s go!” I whispered as I pulled up the first plant I could find. I was in no mind to hang around and as I figured our shopping list was pretty vague apart from two bloody watermelons, Grabbing a couple of carrots or whatever would do. Tim followed and we each had a handful of root vegetables within a few seconds.

“Where the fuck would the watermelons be?” asked Tim. I couldn’t see more than a couple of metres in front of me so the thought that we may be able to find the isle containing them was out of the question. We ran down one lane and then another, all the time waiting for either the bark of a ball eating dog or the cocking of a shotgun. On turning again I instantaneously felt joy and complete fear. Just as I noticed a large, roundish shaped object on the ground, surely a watermelon, I heard the distant sound of a dog. Barking.

“Shit, Shit!” called Tim. We each grabbed a watermelon and ran towards the bank. The barking was getting closer and I could swear I could hear the sound of a man’s voice. 

We each ran straight into the river, using the just gained produce as a form of buoyancy as the bank dropped away from us. There we were, in the middle of the night, two 12 year old boys treading water across the river, holding onto an assortment of vegetables. Thoughts ran through my head. Dogs can swim. A guy can shoot a gun across the river. Why did a decide to keep my shoes on? This is a fucken rock melon!

We made it to the other side and scrambled up the bank that led to the boarding house. There were no gun shots and the barking seemed to have stopped. Safe. 

At the top of the bank we fell down onto the grass, due both to exhaustion and the need to regroup before the next phase of the mission- getting back without being caught. Tim had realised our discrepancy in the melon species and was muttering under his breath. Rock or water I didn’t really care, I was simply relieved that my balls were still present and accounted for. Without a word we began the walk back up the hill. We were pretty confident that it would not be until we were closer to the buildings that we were at risk of being caught by one of the masters. This area was in shadow and was a long way from anyone’s bed. So we simply walked side by side back along the path that led away from the river. 

I blame the cold swim for not hearing anything. I’m usually good at hearing things; footsteps, broken sticks, the inhaling of a cigarette. I would usually have seen the shadow ahead, displaced along the row of bushes. I was always pretty good at noticing things that appeared out of place. But on this night, I didn’t.

“Gentlemen, what brings you out here on such a chilly night?”