Standard disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters are aged 18 or over (by the time anything sexual occurs). Also, let that little parenthesis be your clue that this is more of a coming-of-age story than a happy-ever-after, and adjust your expectations accordingly...
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It started with a lawnmower. More specifically, it started with a lawnmower that wouldn't start...
My folks gave me a decent allowance and didn't make me work like Dobby the house-elf to earn it, but ever since I turned twelve it had been absolutely non-negotiably my job to mow the grass every fine weekend.
The mower was old and arthritic and cranky - it was a bitch to start, it bathed me in clouds of bluish smoke as I stalked around behind it, and one of the axles had got bent, meaning I had to fight to keep it running in a straight line. To add to the fun, the lawn wasn't small and wasn't flat, and one of the neighbours' cats was incontinent.
But it was my only chore, and after a year I was plenty familiar with the mower's quirks and moods. I thought I'd developed a enough tricks of my own to combat them, but one Saturday it started to putter and sputter mid-lawn in a dramatic and non-rhythmic way, and to actually smoke
less,
and I got a weird sinking feeling a second or two before it coughed itself into nothingness and absolutely refused to respond to all my attempts to re-start it.
What am I gonna do? I thought. I had a distinct sense that Dad would be more displeased about a half-mown lawn than an unmown one, and I knew the problem wasn't a lack of petrol or oil. I hauled the mower over to the concrete strip by the side of the garage, got Dad's tool-case, unscrewed the engine cover, and started removing things and laying them aside.
I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, but I figured if anything had broken it'd be obvious, and if something had burned or shorted out, I'd see evidence of that as well. I was just at the point of concluding that nothing was broken or shorted and nothing was up with the spark plug either when Dad stepped out onto the back porch.
"Declan! What the
hell
are you doing?"
"It stopped going," I said, by way of explanation.
"Then it needs to get taken to a mechanic, doesn't it?" he barked. "What are you about, boy? You'll ruin it!"
"How can I ruin it?" I countered. "It's
already
not going."
"What if you can't put it back together right?"
I shrugged. "Then...I guess it can go to a mechanic?"
He dug his fingers into his scalp. "Well - okay - so long as you don't lose any bits, I suppose," and he disappeared back inside the sliding door, back to the racing channel.
I was pretty sure I hadn't lost any bits, and also fairly confident I'd be able to put it back together. I'd laid the pieces down in order as I removed them, and anyhow, the way things connected to each other seemed to make sense.
Everything was completely encrusted with black filth, and I wondered whether maybe it just needed cleaning. I had some notion that you cleaned engine-type things with petrol, so I fetched an ice-cream container and half-filled it with petrol, then found a discarded toothbrush and set about giving things a scrub.
That took me nearly forty-five minutes, and maybe another twenty to reassemble everything and screw it back together, then I primed it and yanked on the starter cord. It roared into life on the third pull, which was good going for this machine, and stood there proudly thrumming away, sounding (to my ear, anyway) better than it ever had, and barely smoking at all.
Dad came back out on the porch and stood there looking confused as I walked toward him.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said when I got close enough to hear. "If you were five years older, boy, I'd buy you a six-pack for that."
"Feel free," I told him.
"Like hell!" he snapped. "You're thirteen! Get on and finish the lawn."
Although I didn't get so much as a cold coke for fixing the mower, let alone six beers, there was some good came out of it. About a week later, Dad leaned against the doorframe of my bedroom as I was sitting in bed with my knees up and homework spread about the covers and waited for me to notice him.
"Did you
actually
take that whole thing to bits and put it back together cold, like - without the manual?" he asked.
"The mower, you mean? Uh-huh. I cleaned all the pieces before I put them back. I think maybe it was just dirty."
He scratched at his neck. "It probably was. A while since I had it serviced. Guess I don't need to anymore, seeing as you apparently know how to do it."
Clearly this meant there was now another chore on my list, but I didn't mind. I'd enjoyed solving the puzzle.
"Anyhow," Dad continued, "I was talking to Scott yesterday. I asked him about that bike of his in the garage. He said if you can get it going, you can have it."
I instantly forgot about all other things in the glory of that moment. "Oh my god! Oh my god, yes!"
"You can't
ride
it until you're sixteen, remember," Dad warned, "and getting it running won't be the work of a moment either. It wasn't going when he left, and it's just been sitting idle for what, six years, now? That sort of thing's not great for engines. And you'll likely need to buy parts - but if playing around with machines is your bag, there's plenty of entertainment there for the taking."
It took me nine months of fiddling and watching videos on YouTube to get so much as a cough out of Scott's old bike, and another six of saving up for parts before it actually ran properly, but even so, I had a functioning motorbike to my name before I was old enough to ride it on the road.
Along the way I sort of eased into some loose coalition of other gear-heads at school, and spent a good portion of my remaining free time with them, either standing around a popped bonnet poking at an engine from above, or lying on my back on a cold concrete floor tinkering with something from below.
By the time I was in my last year of school I was the go-to guy for anyone whose car was acting up, but in between times, I was
bored.
Most of my mates had covered off the basics on their own cars and were moving on to modifications, and I just couldn't manage to give a shit about airhorns or spoilers or intercoolers or bodykits or custom shocks - I was still roving around on my brother's second-hand motorbike, and what I liked best was being in amongst the
guts
of an engine, but I wasn't getting the same opportunities any longer.
Waiting for the train one damp school morning with the same sad collection of people I'd being doing this with for the last four years and counting, I was taking in the ugly scenery and thinking of how much I was looking forward to getting out of this speck on the map, this used-to-be-a-town, this narrow wizened little settlement so inconsequential that it couldn't even boast a high school - which was why I was standing on this partially covered platform in the swirling drizzle waiting for a northbound train along with all the sons and daughters of the folk who lived this side of the crest, in the shade, in the damp, in a long echoey cleft through which the main trunk line also passed.
The kids standing on the
other
side of the platform waiting for a southbound train to their private schools got sunsets over the sea and to fall asleep to the sound of waves, not the roar of diesel engines and the skittering clatter of freight wagons. My grumpy thoughts were blasted apart by another one of those hurtling through, leaving a sucking vacuum and a tang in the air, and in its wake I looked across the rail-yard and saw something...
I mean, obviously I'd seen it before. I'd always lived here and it'd been there far longer than that. What happened was I joined the dots.
My hardly-even-a-place hometown boasted a rail-yard out of all proportion to any importance it could ever have had, because it'd been a coaling depot in the days of steam. I knew that. I'd always known that. The water-tank for filling the boilers was still standing only a hundred metres away, up on its stilts, oozy and rusting...but it was operational, I knew that too, because it got used occasionally when they ran exhibition-day trips on the restored steam train.
The restored steam train that was sitting in a shed
just over there,
alongside several other ancient locomotives in varying states of disrepair, that a band of volunteers worked on every weekend...
My own train arrived, modern and electric, and I shoved my way on board, slouching against a partition, projecting the correct amount of bored resignation, but the blood was rushing around my body at warp speed, my thoughts all over the place.
Trains...fuck, yeah...so complex, all shutters and pistons and valves and...dude, you can't, what if people found out? Yeah, railway enthusiasts? Next-level loserdom - I mean, I even thought it myself - but...if I wanted to be in the guts of a machine?
Now that the door was open a chink, I felt the lure of the place like an undertow. I tipped my head back to stare at the roof of the carriage and tried to do the math. Could I pull it off, having an ultra-dorky hobby?
Maybe, I thought, maybe...I wasn't in the herd's top tier where you can't make a single wrong move because there's so much to lose, so far to fall, and I wasn't one of those guys who's so socially unaware that people are just lining up to whale on you either. I did well enough academically, I wasn't a total failure on a sports field, and mostly I just passed under the radar, which was how I'd always wanted it...
I told myself I was still weighing it up when I got off the train at the end of the day, but already I knew I was gonna cave. I stood and stared yearningly across the tracks and sidings while everyone else jostled and bumped their way around me and away.
Why the fuck not? I thought. How bad could it possibly be? Even if it makes me loser of the year, there's only the remainder of this one year, and then I'm gonna leave - and once I leave, I won't have the opportunity anymore...
I don't know what they thought of me when I showed up that first Saturday, with my ripped jeans and metal t-shirt, my undercut and bro knot and my vaguely bogan air with a little injection of extra attitude to cover up the nerves I was feeling, but they were friendly and welcoming - I guess enthusiasts are always looking for recruits. As for me, that rail shed quickly became a haven, a greasy grimy dusty cobweb-infested wonderland that I slotted right into like I'd always been there.
Most of the guys were in their fifties or even older, and had the names to prove it. There was a Bill and a Pat and a Ron and a Don and a Ray, there was a Lekkie whose name was actually Alec, there was a Bazza whose name wasn't Barry, a Jimbo whose real name was Alan...and Steven. Steven, who was probably only in his thirties, slight and tight and ash-blond, with a prominent adam's apple and soon enough an even more prominent position in my spank-bank...
As for the others, I didn't exactly go home and fantasise about them the way I did with Steven, but despite the grey hair they were all strong and fit and
male,
and I was young and horny and gay, and honestly I would probably have gone quietly around the back with any or all of them, given the opportunity.
So I thought about it, yeah. Theoretically. I didn't expect it to actually
happen.
I didn't expect
anything
to actually happen.
What
did
happen was...Symon Ward-Mortlock was what happened. Yes, with a 'y'. And a hyphen. Maybe the fourth Saturday I went down to the sheds, he sauntered in and was hailed from all directions - "Symon, hey!", "Symon's back!", "How'd it go, mate?", and so on.
It seemed like he was well bedded into the fabric of the place, and he'd just been away for a bit. Probably bloody skiing with his family in Colorado or some dumb thing like that, because, yes, I already knew Symon-fucking-Ward-fucking-Mortlock -how's-that-for-fucking-hyphens. We went to primary school together. After which he took a southbound train, obviously.
Paekākāriki School is kind of a...well, it's in this little nook, this cute sunny dell protected from the southerlies. You can hear the trains, but they're not super-loud because there's a ridge in between. You can hear the sea if the wind's coming from the right direction, but it's muffled by the high dune. So it's the best of both worlds I guess, and in theory it's a melting pot because both the southbound types and the northbound types learn their abc's there before going their separate ways...
