The Red Rattler

Riverwood railway station was built in the classic 1930s art deco style popular at the time. I always thought Sydney had some great old station designs. It showed all the elegance and wisdom that age and survival bring. Riverwood itself, in contrast, displayed the bitter resentment and hatred that age and the terror of survival also brings.
A mixture of office workers and school kids lingered on the station. The defence personnel and trade workers would have caught the earlier trains.
I spied a kid that may be good for a conversation, ‘Hey Rod, how’s it going?’       
‘Not bad.’ A pause. An embarrassed shuffle. ‘I’m not supposed to speak to you after what you did on Friday night.’
‘That was Thommo, I was at the front of the bus.’
‘My sister dobbed you in.’ Oh, bother, I thought. ‘Mum and Dad said I have to steer clear from all you guys, anyway.’
Without any change in pace, the conversation was over. Rod left the scene as the ancient train, known as the red rattler, lunged in the station from Padstow, bringing with its government school students. This lot would be getting off at Narwee for the boys and Beverly Hills for the girls. Until they stepped off the train, I would behave as if these boys did not fully appreciate a smart-arse thirteen-year-old disturbing their morning bullying and dodgy dealings.
The fearful red rattler did what it said on the box. Built-in the 1920s they were durable enough to torture generations of Sydney residents, while the government refused to spend coins for obviously necessary upgrades or replacements of various squeaky bits and pieces.
Made of real wood and steel, these conveyors of the masses were equipped with windows that moved up and down which would not latch tightly. The doors were manually operated and so could remain open while the train was moving. It was an everlasting mystery of why they would allow school children of any ilk to travel on trains that moved with all the doors open. Even adults would hang out of the doors, cigarette in one hand with the other grasping onto the unmovable brass handles attached to the train.
The twenty or so windows on each side of the carriage would also remain open during the journey. These ancient windows sat imperfectly in their frames and were kept open all year round to mitigate the stench from tobacco and people that were not that interested in personal hygiene.
The pace of the train guided gusts of wind inside the carriage and let the air whistle along the train form on the outside. These two conflicting winds caused the glass to rattle giving the trains a mechanical almost industrial-era feel. The sharp redness and the horrifically recognisable noise helped the beast have its presence known across the landscape.
The open doors gave way to a few distinctly dangerous ideas that led to deliciously life-threatening options. These options split themselves into two immediate choices preceded by a question.
Was the bastard red on the move or at a resentful standstill?
The first option was that the rattler was standing still.
The rattlers would stop at signals near stations to avoid collisions with other trains or just to annoy passengers. No one ever knew why the red bastards would randomly stop. It was a part of the experience or maybe it was transit safety. Bolder people would jump off the train at these stops in between stations to avoid walking a few hundred metres extra.
Other people would take the opportunity to run from outlying positions and gain entry to the train via the ladder leading from the tracks to the vestibule area. This activity was not for the faint hearted and I never saw a school kid perform this routine, although many professed to have at least attempted it.
The second option was that the doors were open, and the engineered beast was on the move. This is the more dangerous, criminal, and inventive pursuit.
The possibilities were not only easily imaginable, but they were also just as easily enacted upon.
Being mature and a useful member of society, one would engage oneself in the daily newspaper or read the latest popular novel. The paperback of course, nobody from Riverwood had hardback books besides the library. The do-gooders of the school-age fraternity would discuss last night’s math homework hiding from the no-gooders.
Boys will most unfortunately be boys. Before you throw your arms up in a fury against the patriarchal society teaching boys to expose toxic behaviours from a youthful age, calm your farm. These times were different.
For all that we were, we were first. Just us. Dragging ourselves up the best we could. We knew no better. This fact will need to stay with you as this story unfolds.
Open doors meant you could throw things out of the train on the move and almost every kid did. ‘Watch this, fuckers,’ I heard a brave voice from behind me declare. The train rocked itself into approaching the bridge rising above the generally busy Bonds Road.
I was grabbed by my shoulders and punted aside by a gorilla in the same school uniform as myself. This lad was huge and had hair poking out of every part of his shirt. The shirt was far too tight and showed bulging, albeit hairy, muscles straining the shirt's very existence. Playing the safe card, I moved aside as this gorilla’s mate lunged past me.
The faint aroma of an unwashed armpit battled with my olfactory organ and overwhelmed it. I was reeling from this assault when I saw the release of the projectile through a haze of cigarette smoke and whirling scenery.
The gorilla became the spotter, who had an important and process-driven role in the whole affair. The spotter would take hold of the grainy brass handles on the inside of the carriage and swing as much of his body out of the train as his bulk and wavering constitution could manage.
Spotter’s job was to identify a suitable target for the thrower. This target of opportunity could be a moving or stationary vehicle or person. If none of these high-priority targets was available, then unmovable lower-priority targets could be called. These included trees, train traffic controllers or bridge parts themselves.
The highest value of all targets was the moving vehicle coming under the bridge. This would entail the spotter gauging the speed of the vehicle as it disappeared under the bridge. The opportunity for launch and target contact was limited to a few vital seconds. ‘A car coming, from the right’, says the impossibly ironic spotty, spotter. This motivated a movement from the highly motivated apple chucker, who shifted sides, pushing me and one of the inquisitive onlookers to the middle of the vestibule area.
I love the word vestibule. I only knew it was a vestibule area because at almost every stop you would hear on the station, ‘Please move into the cabin, and keep the vestibule area clear.’ No one ever did. The vestibule area was the best place to catch any ridiculous behaviour that may eventuate.
Apple chucker once again became the centre of attention as the train passed the bridge. ‘Quick throw the thing,’ spat spotter. The inadequate hunting party slumped their shoulders. The intended target drove off through the narrow chucking field that was afforded to apple chucker.
The groan of dismay from the kids outshone the rattler for a moment, as the lament for the ‘target of opportunity lost’ began. ‘Dead set! You’re a dumb fuck,’ declared the now failed apple chucker.
The spotty spotter responded that it was not his fault as they entangled themselves in an intellectual disagreement as to who should be blamed. I turned around to have an unsolicited glance at an older girl who I enjoyed looking at. The long-awaited opportunity where could talk to someone I fancied, was off into the future. I hoped it to be sometime soon as the hormones were indeed moaning.
‘Spewing,’ is a word designed to reflect one’s lack of happiness, which expelled itself from the disgruntled mouth of spotter. ‘Never mind we will get some dude on Narwee station then,’ chucker said interrupting my pubescent machinations.
Narwee Boys High School was notorious for housing some mean and very rough lads. If there was a fight or rumours of youthful criminal activity you could readily imagine a Narwee High School lad being somewhere high up in that group’s leadership ranks.
The boys wore grey school uniforms and the school generally admitted kids from the surrounding housing commission areas and other areas around Narwee. Narwee was different to Riverwood as it had very little government housing and was filled with what could be termed middle-class Australians.
I learnt later that the Australian middle class meant that there were three meals a day and that both parents were generally home for dinner most nights of the week. Narwee held a mixture of socio-economically created children causing a sweet-smelling concoction at one end a noxious puddle of aggression and hate at the other. I only ever saw the noxious end, leaving me in a permanent desire to always distance myself from the Narwee boys.
The train lurched, lurked, and then shook into Narwee station.
It was a typical two-hundred-and-fifty-point landing for the rattler as it hit the tracks arriving at least ten minutes late. The usual selection of suburban commuters got off the train followed by the Narwee boy’s crowd. The commuters would be retail, factory or domestic workers dressed in various hues of grey. Narwee was one of the stations where people could get buses into the industrial areas sprinkled around Narwee and Roselands making the station busier than the others on the line.
The fearless apple chucker was trying to build up a way to motivate his courage to build to a suitable level where his actions would follow the strange path of his mouth. It seems his mouth needed no assistance to get his courage into the deepest of all shit. As far as street credibility went, our talentless hero was beyond the point of no return if he did not follow through with his almighty announcement.
There were at least ten of us watching. Some youngish adults in tradie overalls were vaguely interested in puffing on roll-your-own cigarettes. The onlookers all wanted to know how the courage would be enticed into action and was fixed on watching the scene like they would watch the scene of a fatal accident. Did spotty have the moral courage, personal fortitude, and balls to go through with it?