The Kid
It's been the wettest week we've had for years. Normally, Frank would be itching for it to ease off so he can get out on a tractor, but we've just been to his funeral. A crowd of us are down at the family beach shack with several cousins' caravans and a couple of adventurous tents. The rest of us are looking at a long and cautious drive back to a Moonta motel later on. I've come outside and seen that we finally have a decent bonfire going after copious amounts of kerosene have burned the wet off the wood.
Three old boys are on the far side of the fire, two sitting in a tailgate, and the other one on an old twelve gallon oil drum. They sound like they've moved on from beer to Bundy's, and the fucks and bloodys are flowing. And the kid is across the fire in a camp chair, watching and listening.
Suddenly he says,"Why would you use language like that in front of me? I'm eleven years old."
The old boys look at him with some surprise and then one says, "Well, when you've had to put up with as much bloody shit as we have, a few fucks is all you've got left to deal with it." They all chuckle, pleased with themselves.
I say to the kid, "Ignore them. They're just trying to wind you up." There's the smallest twitch of a shoulder that might mean "Butt out," and he says,"My dad runs a building company, and he doesn't use language like that."
The old blokes consider their position. I say to the kid's mum, just coming outside, that I think they might be giving him a bit of a rough time. She says, "He... will be fine," as though it's the old blokes who might have a problem. So I go back into the shack where a group of us are skirting around the realisation that not only are we now the elders of the family, but that we have also started to die.
I come out forty minutes later to get some food off the barbecue. The kid has pulled his chair over to the old boys, and they are all deep in conversation. "Yeah, I got cancer," says one of them. "It's terminal, too." "How come?"says the kid. "Apparently, it's really aggressive. Or something..."
"Oh... right," says the kid. And somehow, in those two words is all the compassion in the world.
Andrea Prior 2026
The dialogue is as I heard it. Everything else is changed.
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