Regarding King Kong and the Risdon Vale Mental Hospital

 

   Barry Kelvin (not his real name) was a boy in my class at Claremont High School, Tasmania. It was 1969. I was eleven, he was twelve. He was shorter than me, with light brown hair, which was usually styled in a crew-cut. He had a nervous tic whereby he constantly twitched his nose in the manner of a rabbit. We became kind of friends by virtue of the fact that we were both quiet boys who were bypassed socially by the other students.

     Barry lived in Chigwell, a northern suburb of Hobart. Chigwell had a reputation as being, in the words of my mother, ‘a bit rough’. I knew of only two other people who lived there: a brother and sister in their mid-teens, who were rumoured to be conducting a sexual relationship with each other; they could be observed leaving school at lunchtime each day, and walking home, hand in hand, or with their arms around each other’s shoulders.
     As Barry’s house was fairly close to the school, he also used to go home every day for lunch. One afternoon, he invited me back with him. It was summer and hot. The shrill din of grasshoppers rang through the dry suburban streets; they flicked themselves up madly into the air before our dusty shoes. One of the little creatures landed on my white school shirt; I admired its tiny brown face, which consisted, basically, all of eyes, with tiny, delicate mouth-parts beneath; when I attempted to introduce my index finger beneath it, it jumped, disappearing into the hot void.

     Barry Kelvin’s house was a low, wooden bungalow, identical to the other white council-built houses in the street, except that it was painted a pale green. There was a concrete driveway that led down the side of the house to a small garage at the end. I thought of my own house, situated on the side of a precipitous hill overlooking the Derwent River, and the table-topped Mount Wellington: our driveway was so steep that on the one occasion that my father had driven our car down to the house it could not be driven back up, and had to be winched up to the street by a tow truck.

     At the front door, Barry pulled his key out of his pocket: it was on the end of a long silver chain, connected to a dark-brown leather tab, which slotted over one of his school blazer buttons – this was an accoutrement possessed by many kids at the school; but as my mother hardly ever left our house I had not been given a house key, as it was viewed as an unnecessary expense. After some jiggling in the lock, Barry managed to open the door. We stepped into a neat, tidy hallway, and then entered a spick and span kitchen. I was unused to such a clean home environment: this was a far cry from the untidy and, frankly, squalid living conditions I came from.
      An elderly woman was sitting at a small Formica kitchen table, smoking; there was a half-empty glass of beer at her elbow. She had a large head and a big red pulpy nose: she rather resembled Sid James. Her wet bottom lip hung from her face like a glistening piece of liver.
     “Hello, love,” she said, “Have you brought a friend home? Would you like some lunch?” Barry introduced me to his grandmother. I said I was very pleased to meet her, in my best polite-guest manner. She said we should go and play in Barry’s bedroom while she made us some lunch. As we walked through the tiny living room, I was struck by a fantastic item that sat on a white doily on the television. It was a large, finely-detailed plastic model of King Kong, striding over a rocky landscape and holding a small, struggling Fay Wray in his right fist. I had a good knowledge of movie monsters because for the past few years, whenever I visited a library, I would pore over books on cinema, and in particular, horror movies; and, while I had never yet seen any of these films, the black and white stills that appeared in these books cast a dark spell over my childhood which was thrilling. I identified with, and pitied the poor creature that Dr Frankenstein manufactured from dead body parts; I wanted to be the Phantom of the Opera, as played by Lon Chaney, with his bulging eyes and terrible shark teeth.
      Barry held the model up for me to look at, but I was not permitted to hold it myself, and he put it down again. I briefly entertained the fantasy that I might successfully steal the King Kong model and keep it for myself.

     Barry’s bedroom was, amazingly, as tidy as the rest of the house. We sat on his bed and looked at some books. Some model planes had been affixed to lengths of cotton anchored to the ceiling with drawing pins; they slowly turned in the warm, stuffy air. The grandmother could be heard shuffling about in the kitchen, banging plates and saucepans and talking to herself as she heated up some baked beans.

     I knew that Barry’s mother had ‘gone away’, a couple of years before, but I had not asked him for the exact details. He now lived with his father and his grandmother. He was the only child. He now began talking about his uncle, who, I later found out, had been sent to the mental hospital in Risdon Vale – a darkly-legendary suburb of Hobart that also housed the prison. This suburb evoked the same horrible fascination as the forest in The Wizard of Oz.
     “Uncle Bill used to live here with us,” he said, “But he got sick. And one day he was in the shower, trying to shave off the hair around his willy with one of those cutthroat razor thingies, and he slipped and cut his willy off, along with the balls… I remember when the ambulance came, but I don’t remember much else about it ‘cos I was only little.”
     Even at the time, I was not convinced by this rather lame-sounding explanation for complete self-emasculation, but I let it ride. Just then Barry’s father arrived home and pushed his head around the bedroom door. He gazed suspiciously at me through the very thick glass of his spectacles.
    “Hello, Barry,” he said, “has someone touched the King Kong on the television? It’s not on the doily properly.”