Sushi Central

by Alasdair Duncan

  it will be *cooooooooooooooooooooooooool* to finally meet u, hahha!

  I’d better go … stuff to do. love yur work dude

  cu then?

  jeremy.

  184

  From : Calvin

  To : Jeremy

  Subject : Saturday

  Hey hey Jeremy

  Saturday morning will be sweet. I’m looking forward to it, hehhe.

  I’ll see ya then,

  Calvin

  185

  Wednesday afternoon. It’s overcast, and I meet Anthony in the city. I see him and immediately my stomach starts to hurt. He looks blank, as always. I can’t read him. I don’t know what he’s thinking. But I want him. Insanely. Completely. We just kind of walk around for a while, directionless. Stop at this cafe, still in our school uniforms, and we both order long blacks. Sit at this table near the window. He pours two sugars into his coffee but only drinks half of it. I watch the raindrops as they slide down the glass, the people as they hurry by outside.

  I turn, look right at Anthony. He’s looking right at me.

  186

  Anthony: This sucks.

  Me: I guess.

  Anthony: I have some pot at my house. You want to go back there?

  Me: Okay.

  187

  Blur: Getting stoned and watching a DVD The Fifth Element. Anthony and I kissing as though we’re both incredibly hungry, as though we’d both die if it weren’t for this one kiss. Sinking further and further into it. Knowing that at this point, right now, Anthony is the only thing that matters to me in the world. I want him so badly it’s like a physical pain. Kissing. He is leading me upstairs. Still kissing, and I’m sucking him off, now he’s sucking me off, and we’re both totally lost in one another, and he asks me if I want to, and I know what he means, and I do, and he’s inside me, and we go from kissing to just, I don’t know, staring at each other, eyes closed, eyes open, and it’s like this red wave of desire and I can’t even explain it, he is consuming me and I’m consuming him and we’re kissing and we’re consuming each other’s body, but that same blank look is on his face the whole time.

  188

  Cut ahead: Saturday morning. I am meeting Jeremy in the city this morning, but it’s cold, foggy, and I don’t feel like walking anywhere.

  Cold days: I only really feel right on days when it’s overcast like this. I feel safe, insular, like being in a cocoon or something. When the sky’s grey and the whole world looks as though it’s underwater, this incredibly calm, warm feeling comes over me. It makes me want to be all by myself, warm, forever; it makes me want to move to, you know, a lighthouse or something on a small island at the end of the world, and hear the waves roaring, the cold air on my skin. Look up and see nothing but grey clouds in the sky. Always. The idea of disappearing forever, nobody knowing where I am except for the seagulls, the ocean roaring at me and me roaring back at the ocean. The idea of that just seems so … peaceful.

  189

  Dad’s going into the city, to one of the hospitals; I swallow my pride and ask him if he’ll give me a ride.

  Luckily Dad’s in a bad mood, so we don’t talk a lot on the way. I am in the front seat of his Saab, staring out at the houses shut up against the cold.

  We stop, waiting to turn onto the main road, and Dad looks across at me, as though he has something on his mind, as though he’s planning to ask me a significant question or something. I really wish he wouldn’t.

  Dad: I know I haven’t asked you this in a while, but … how are you Calvin?

  Me: I’m fine.

  Dad: Are you really?

  Me: I really am. I’m fine.

  Dad: There’s nothing that you’d like to …

  Me: No, there isn’t.

  Dad: Because if ever … I mean … I’m always … there, for you to … if you ever …

  Me: I’ll keep that in mind.

  Dad: Please do … Because if there is something on your mind …

  Me: I will.

  We never talk about my brother any more, ever. We never mention him. It’s as though he never existed. Since Jonathan, all Dad ever does is work. He’s let himself be subsumed by it, to escape or something, which is fine. I don’t have a problem with that, it doesn’t bother me, because everyone has their own way of dealing with things. Mum takes her pills, and Dad works, and we never talk about it, ever. Which is fine. It bothers me, however, when Dad tries to reach out to me, tries to relate, or whatever. It seems deliberate, forced. It seems false, and I won’t play along with it. We get along just fine when we leave one another alone, and I refuse to let him make me feel like the bad person, feel like I’m the one who doesn’t care.

  190

  I’m meeting Jeremy at this cafe just near Eagle Street. As I’m stepping out of Dad’s Saab, saying goodbye, as I’m stepping into the overcast morning, as I’m walking down George Street, people passing either side of me, I’m wondering about the terms of this meeting. I mean, are we just meeting as friends, or is he assuming that I asked him out because I was interested in him? It doesn’t really matter though — Jeremy knows Anthony; therefore he has the information I need.

  191

  Riverside: The morning has grown progressively denser and colder. The city is wrapped, choking almost, in cloud and smog. The pinpricks of light that occasionally cut through the clouds seem too intense; they hurt my eyes and make the familiar sights of skyline and river into hyper-real versions of themselves.

  192

  Jeremy is sitting at a table out on the cafe terrace, overlooking the river. There is a cup of coffee in front of him, an espresso, and he sips it and occasionally looks up, like he’s looking for me. He is wearing a tight red T-shirt; his hair is bleached, messy, but an intentional kind of messy, and he is too fucking cute for words.

  Jeremy grabs a sugar packet, rips it open, pours the whole thing into his coffee.

  This guy walks past, older guy, about forty or so, greying hair but fairly good-looking, charcoal suit, you know. Not so strange for around here. He walks right past Jeremy; Jeremy looks up. It’s almost impossible to describe, but it’s like:

  193

  Interplay between Jeremy and the man in the suit: The man turns his head to look at Jeremy. Jeremy looks up, meets his glance, doesn’t look away. The man hesitates for a fraction of a second. To an observer, it’s almost as though Jeremy is daring him. Jeremy still doesn’t look away. The man turns, keeps walking, walks faster.

  I wonder what the man must be thinking as he hurries away. Maybe: My life could have changed forever. If I’d stayed, if I’d stopped. If I hadn’t kept going on my way to work, if I’d stopped and sat down with this kid. Bought him a coffee, talked to him. I could have done things with him, if he’d let me. I could have …

  194

  The man keeps walking. Walks away. Jeremy smiles. Looks back down at his coffee.

  I consider turning around.

  Fuck it.

  Jeremy looks up, spots me. Smiles, sort of. Animal smile. You know, I’m young and hot and what the fuck are you going to do about it? kind of a smile.

  ‘Calvin,’ he says.

  ‘Jeremy. Hey.’

  His gaze stays locked on me. ‘Dude, it’s fucking cool to meet you finally.’

  ‘Been looking forward to it,’ I say.

  He’s still sitting down, but he offers me his hand to shake and I take it. His palm feels kind of, I don’t know. Dry. Strange. It doesn’t feel like Anthony’s hand. It makes me feel weird for a fraction of a second. Uncomfortable or something. When we stop shaking hands, I sit down.

  ‘You feel like a drink?’ he asks. ‘Feel like a coffee?’

  ‘Sounds good. I could use a strong coffee.’

  He laughs. ‘Hahaha, yeah. Fucking caffeine! It’s all good.’

  195

  Jeremy: Caffeine … I need as much of it as I can get.

  Me: Did you go out last night?
r />   Jeremy: Ohh yeah.

  Me: Was it good?

  Jeremy: Fuck. I’m wiped out. Fucking trashed, totally. Last night was massive. Like, completely. Big night. Fucking huge night. It was a blast.

  Me: What happened?

  Jeremy looks at me, smiles kind of. Then he launches into his story.

  Jeremy: Well, okay, like, there’s this friend of mine, Joe. He’s a few years older than me. Kind of an ex-boyfriend but not really. I don’t know what you’d call him really. He’s a lawyer, and he’s like thirty. We still get together and fuck sometimes, like, when he’s bored. I guess I’m his fuck buddy. Haha, I never really thought of myself as a fuck buddy before, but anyway …

  The waiter — ‘Stephen’ — interrupts. I order a long black; Jeremy asks for one too, even though he hasn’t finished the one he’s drinking. Stephen pulls this little pad out of his apron, writes it down. Like it’s such a difficult order to remember. Two long blacks.

  Jeremy: Yeah, so we were out in the city, Joe and me and a couple of other friends of ours, just getting trashed and stuff, and he was wearing this shirt, like, it was totally revealing, you fucking had to see it, and yeah. And we went to Fridays. Can you believe it? Fucking Fridays. I hate those city clubs …

  Me: They suck.

  Jeremy: Hehhe. Fucking, totally. So yeah. We were at Fridays and we were already totally drunk — I mean totally, we all were, especially me cuz he was buying me these tequila shots, you know, I think he was trying to get me drunk. Like, he hadn’t gotten any for a while and I think he was trying to hit on me so we could go back to his place. Which would have been okay, but you know. We were all drunk and I started dancing to this song …

  Jeremy namechecks this particular trashy pop song I only half recognise but I nod my head and make this little mmm sound and he continues.

  Jeremy: I hate the city. They’re always playing trash like that, but I always dance to it. Especially when I’m drunk, you know, so I’m dancing and Joe’s dancing really close to me and sort of feeling me up a bit, which is okay, but I wasn’t really sure if I was in the mood to fuck him or not, you know, it was all a bit weird and I didn’t really feel like it, so I was sort of hinting for him to get away from me, and I think he was getting the picture — he was kind of pissed off, I mean, because he’d been buying me tequila shots all night …

  Should you fuck a guy because he’s been buying you drinks all night? Is it, like, polite or whatever? That’s the reason I let Adam do me.

  Jeremy: … and we sort of drift off to the side a bit, out onto the balcony, you know, because you can see the river and all the buildings in the city and everything and it was a totally beautiful night so I figured we could just go out there and get some fresh air, so we were sitting out there down on one of those bench things and we spotted this one particular guy. He was pretty hot, just standing near the bar out there by himself, and … well, okay, imagine a cross between Billy Idol and that guy from, oh, you know, Buffy… my sister used to pin pictures of him up, and he was, like, English, with the cheekbones and everything — and anyway … Where was I going with this?

  Jeremy’s acting as though he’s on speed. I hope it’s not just the coffee doing this to him. I couldn’t do anything to fuck up the flow of the conversation even if I wanted to.

  Stephen is back with our coffees. He sets them down on the table in front of us, carefully so he won’t spill any. Some of mine spills over the rim of the cup, leaves a mark down the side. I stare at it, hypnotised, as it slides down over the cafe’s logo — some kind of stylised fish — cutting it in two.

  Jeremy picks up his cup, blows on it. Drinks some. Stephen asks if we’re right. We are. He walks away, slowly. Looks back over his shoulder, like he’s trying to confirm something, then he keeps walking. Fucking … weird.

  Me: So you saw a guy by the bar.

  Jeremy: Oh yeah. So Joe was fully checking him out, and I was like, Joe, you can’t pick up here, dude, it’s fucking Fridays … It’s like, a city club … jocks come here, they’ll fucking beat you up, and he was all, yeah, I think I’ll go and talk to the guy and I was just like, fucking, Joe, you don’t pick up guys in the city, it’s just not done, and I think he was doing it half to get back at me because I was refusing to give it up for him, you know, which is just typical of Joe, so he goes up to talk to this guy and I follow him, I guess just to keep an eye on him or whatever …

  Me: So what was the guy like?

  Jeremy: The guy? Like, okay. This is where the night got really interesting. Joe went up to him and I was following pretty close behind, so we start talking to him, and he was like … Okay. His name was Søren, you know, with that thing through the ‘o’ — he explained that to us about three times — and he was a backpacker or something, didn’t say where he was from, might have been Sweden; I mean, he looked Swedish, like really sleazy though, and he said, I mean, he and Joe had moved away from the bar by this point, off by themselves, and I just sort of followed but I felt pretty, you know, excess to requirements or whatever …

  There are two women sitting at a table near us. They look like mother and daughter and they are both blonde; the younger looking one has this scarf tied in her hair and the older one is wearing sunglasses, and they’re both looking at us in what might be disbelief. I don’t know whether they can even hear us. Something seems to have offended them anyway. I stare at them until they look away.

  Jeremy: … but the guy kept shooting me these looks like he might be interested and I thought, why let Joe have this guy if I can? Fucking, just to prove a point or something. I’m screwed up like that. So I went over with them, and he was talking to us, he had this full-on accent, and he was explaining about his country and stuff, and that thing with the ‘o’ in his name, and then he tells us, cuz he’s bought Joe this cocktail and I don’t know what was in it but it was really fucking strong, and Joe was very very drunk, and the guy was telling us he was an inmate in one of the European Big Brother houses …

  Me: What the fuck?

  Jeremy: I know. Like, seriously. And I’m thinking, that can’t be true, I mean, there’s no way we can tell for a fact if that’s true or not, but he has this really serious look on his face, and I wonder if it actually might be true, but then I started to think no way, he’s just trying to get Joe to fuck him, and Joe was all, ‘Oh, why would they evict you?’, like this Søren dude was just the most attractive human being in the universe and why would anyone toss him out of the Big Brother house, and he’s totally flirting with the guy, and it’s like …

  Me: That’s really gross.

  Jeremy: It’s disturbing, I know! But then, the thing is, he keeps looking at me, and then he sort of moves around so he’s almost touching both of us, Joe and me, and he’s telling us he made all this money after they evicted him from the house, from doing ads and stuff in Sweden or whatever country he was from, and he told us he was on a world trip, and like, this was his first night in Australia and he loved it except he was all alone and didn’t have anybody to stay with and it was like, hint hint, seriously, he was fully cracking onto the both of us, he could not have made it any more obvious, and I actually thought, you know, this might be kind of all right. I mean we didn’t know if he was bullshitting or not, but he bought us another round of drinks, and I was almost too drunk to care by that point, I just wanted to see what would happen, and then the Søren guy asked us back to his hotel room.

  Me: Did you go?

  Jeremy: Well … Yeah. I thought, what the fuck? I just wanted to see if it was true or not. So we leave Fridays and we’re getting all these stares from all the fucking jock types who hang out there, and their girlfriends, you know, that was pretty funny, and then we’re walking back up towards Eliza-beth Street, his arm around both of us, and I realise, you know, maybe he’s not kidding, and so yeah, he takes us to the Hilton, and we’re going through the lobby and everything, up in this elevator, and he’s kissing Joe and then me and the whole thing suddenly becomes hilarious
ly funny, and I’m laughing and laughing and we eventually get up to his room, and I mean, whether or not he was telling the truth about the Big Brother thing, he certainly had, you know, the means to obtain a room at the Hilton, which isn’t exactly the most obvious backpacker place to stay, so Joe was asking him all these really stupid questions about what it’s like to be famous and stuff like that, and he told us he’d been in this ad campaign for energy drinks or something, and he was thinking about making an album or whatever, ‘cutting a single,’ he said … ‘cotting eh seengle’, whatever, and Joe was totally eating it up, you know, and then he asked us if we wanted to get stoned …

  Me: So you did, I’m assuming?

  Jeremy’s gaze slides away from me for a second. I follow his eyes and see that the man in the charcoal suit is walking past again. In the second that he allows himself to look at us, I give him this menacing look. I’m not sure why. He probably assumes Jeremy and I are together. I don’t know why I want him to assume that, any more than I know why I give him the look. I’m not really into Jeremy. I don’t care about Jeremy one way or the other, but suddenly I want it to appear as though I do. The man walks away, embarrassed. Or something. Good.

  Jeremy looks back at me.

  Jeremy: Well, yeah, totally. We got fucking smashed. We had to use a pipe or we would have set off the smoke alarms. And he had this really good pot, like total bodyfuck pot, I was really stoned after just a couple of cones, and whenever I’m fucked I get really, you know, touchy-feely and stuff, and then Søren starts kissing me, like, full-on kissing me and he drags me towards the bed, Joe’s sort of following, and we all collapsed on one another, and you know … Let’s just say, I’ve never fucked two guys at once before but it was a totally amazing experience. I mean, seriously … It was really fucking cool, you know. We were all so wasted. It was fucking unbelievable … It lasted for hours. Totally. I think we finally fell asleep at about four or something. Fucking exhausted.

  He looks right at me. Smiles at me.