Knuckles is back with Charleville’s finest, Trev 966, and this time the big banger yarns take a detour into posties, planks and pure fear of heights.

It starts light – Knuckles giving a shoutout to his gun postie Jeffro getting CTC hats overnight – then Trev drops a proper true yarn about the local postal manager Tom, a paint job, and a fall straight out of Cliffhanger.

At 14, Trev’s up on trestles helping Tom paint his house when something goes horribly wrong. One second they’re cutting in around the windows, the next Tom brushes past Trev, falls from the plank, and locks eyes with him mid-air on the way to the ground. Broken ribs, an ambulance ride, and the sound of that “oof” has stuck with Trev ever since.

Asked to go back and finish the job, he climbs onto the same plank, feels it rock, climbs straight back down and quits on the spot:

“You can tell Tom to paint his own fucking house. I’ve quit.”

From there it’s a lifetime of being no good with heights:

• Boys on site stirring him up because he’s “terrible on roofs”
• Walking sheets on a high roof in Mackay, promising if he falls, someone’s coming with him
• Ass cheeks “like suction caps on the roof” if he slips

Just when he thinks he’s getting better, he’s back on a school job walking trusses along a fully extended plank. The boys grab the truss out of his hands and Trev suddenly realises he’s got nothing to hang onto. Frozen in the middle of the gap, he watches a mate fall off the top plate and break his neck on the ground below. That’s it. Line in the sand.

By the end of it, Trev’s made peace with his fate:

“This is me. I’m a concreter now. I’ll just stick to the ground stuff.”

It’s a dark, funny, very real look at how one bad moment can turn a 14-year-old Charleville kid into a lifelong ground-dweller – even if he still climbs into the big bangers for a living.

#propertrueyarn

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