Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  I was hurt by Frida’s lack of attention after waiting so impatiently to regain it. ‘It’s nice to see you again too,’ I said.

  Frida lifted a finger to her lips. The reporter buzzed with the possibility of murder, before the coverage cut to an ad for life insurance. ‘I’m grieving!’ she said.

  The conspiracy theories continued on a different channel. Frida sensed my contempt. She launched an impassioned defence of MJ’s artistic legacy. ‘He changed the way singers sound and look,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’ve never understood why someone that rich would want to change the way they look.’

  ‘Of course not. You’re white.’

  Frida told me about the nasty comments before and after September 11, and how an Anglo mother caught a hyphenated daughter scrubbing at her limbs with exfoliating gloves.

  Frida, she asked. What are you doing?

  I’m trying to wash the brown off.

  ‘You don’t need to be a freak to wish you were white,’ said Frida.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m an idiot.’

  A tanned hand with long fingers touched my arm. ‘Sorry for the lecture!’ she said. ‘Great start to the date.’

  We drove to the CBD. I parked on Margaret Street, named after the Queen’s self-destructive younger sister. The Strand Theatre was maligned for rigid armrests that prevented teenagers from reaching second base.

  I bought two tickets to Disgrace, an adaptation of the J.M. Coetzee novel – trying to prove that I was cultivated enough for Frida to date me – plus an extra-large popcorn and two frozen Cokes.

  ‘Hey, big spender,’ said Frida. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine.’

  I was soon quite certain that I wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any pleasure from Frida, that night or ever again. ‘A movie about rape on our first date,’ she whispered. ‘Such a sweet guy.’

  ‘Coetzee won the Nobel Prize!’

  ‘That’s not going to get you laid.’

  Afterwards, we stopped at McDonald’s to buy McFlurrys. Then we drove to Picnic Point, where a floodlit flag hung limply over a kingdom of tennis courts, swimming pools and teenagers receiving patriotic BJs.

  Frida squinted at the static flag through the misted windscreen. ‘I love a sunburnt country!’ she said.

  I leaned over to kiss her, our lips still salty from popcorn and tongues sweetened by ice cream. But the romantic atmosphere was eroded by a Subaru WRX ripping a burnout.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Frida. ‘Before my parents get back.’

  We returned to the eastern hinterland. Frida led me to her bedroom by the hand. Vinyl albums were stacked against a record player, Lauryn Hill and 2Pac adjacent to Patti Smith and Bach. Frida put on ‘Graduation’ by Kanye West and lowered the volume.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Listen to music?’

  Frida peeled my polo shirt off and pushed me against the linen sheets. Now her t-shirt and jeans were off, revealing a cream bra, and then no briefs. I went down on Frida, who was proudly unshaven. This was more exhilarating than sex, because I got the endorsement of her desire without the performance anxiety.

  ‘Do you have a condom?’ she asked.

  Her confidence astonished me. I’d assumed that Frida was a virgin. She’d assumed that I wasn’t. We were both wrong. I’d never been undressed in front of someone while sober.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think …’

  Frida pulled one from a drawer. She turned the lights off before removing my chinos and jocks and guiding me inside. I thrusted, too quickly, for a few minutes. Frida climbed on top.

  ‘Slow down,’ she whispered.

  Frida directed me at different angles and speeds to those in the pornos I’d grown up studying. But I was too distracted to climax, a Romeo who lived and fornicated in the third person.

  Afterwards, we lay together touching and kissing, grinning like we’d just invented sex.

  ‘I hope you don’t think that I’m clingy,’ said Frida, with uncharacteristic sincerity. ‘But I love you, Lech Blaine.’

  ‘I love you too,’ I said, slightly irritated that Frida put into words what I was saving until it was a slam-dunk.

  ‘Great,’ said Frida. ‘I’m officially dating a St Mary’s boy. My mother will be mortified! Which reminds me: you need to go.’

  Her parents weren’t due home for another hour, but I was happy to leave, believing I’d bridged the distance between a solicitor’s daughter and a publican’s son.

  I had one more life-or-death question to ask before departing. ‘So I was w-w-wondering …’ I stuttered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frida.

  ‘And you can definitely say no.’

  ‘Are you proposing to me?’

  ‘Whether you wanted to come to my formal.’

  ‘What took you so long to ask?’

  On the way home, demisters whispered against the windscreen. ‘Billie Jean’ played from the MJ vigil on the radio. I was alone but no longer lonely.

  As my tyres hit the driveway, I got a text from Frida.

  damnit, Lech Blaine. you tricked me!

  how do you mean?

  I wasn’t supposed to fall in love before QCS exams

  My mother was snoring like a chainsaw on the couch in the lounge room. The coffee table was cluttered with empty rum cans.

  ‘Tonight: the world is crying tears for Michael Jackson,’ said a reporter. ‘After the ad break, we count down the ten most tragic celebrity deaths of all time.’

  I turned it off and kissed my mother on the cheek.

  Nothing could encroach on my romantic momentum.

  lucky I’m such a catch, I wrote to Frida.

  I do feel lucky, she said.

  likewise. you make life happen more to me

  that’s a nice thing to say. talk to you tomorrow xxx

  In my bedroom, before sleep, I scrolled through Frida’s Facebook profile to keep at a safe distance all the other things I couldn’t bring myself to think about.

  Guilty Parties

  And then the seasons changed. Everyone forgot about swine flu and Michael Jackson. Toowoomba homeowners began their preoccupation with botany, competing for the attention of a fickle audience with rationed H2O. The Garden City was famous for two things: voting no to recycled water, and wasting millions of kilotons of the stuff on the annual Carnival of Flowers.

  ‘Spring is sprung!’ my mother sang.

  That day, at exactly the same time statewide, Grade Twelvers would begin forty-eight hours of Queensland Core Skills testing.

  Dom texted in the morning. Did you see the front page??? he asked.

  A newspaper was on the kitchen table. The headshots of Henry, Will and Hamish grinned above the headline.

  Chilling new evidence on Downlands tragedy: POLICE SEIZE VIDEO FROM DEAD BOY’S FAMILY

  Beneath each half-Windsor knot was the word DEAD.

  Page three featured a photo of the wrecks above a portrait of the driver, who wore a smile.

  Police have seized a chilling video depicting the final seconds before Downlands College student Dom Hodal lost control of his car, leaving three of his best friends dead. It is believed Henry, who was sitting in the back of the 1989 Ford Fairlane, recorded video footage which cut out just seconds before the fatal head-on crash at Highfields.

  According to unnamed sources, police executed a search warrant on Henry’s family home, confiscating his mobile. They sent the SIM card to the forensic examination unit in Brisbane.

  On the opposite page, three high achievers from Grammar held pens above textbooks, cramming for exams, forming a juxtaposition of youthful innocence and annihilation.

  ‘It is really important we feel well prepared,’ said the prefect, ‘but we have a lot of other work to do.’

  Inside the St Mary’s hall, everyone was gripped by the existence of the video. It was the Zapr
uder film of a municipal tragedy. Rumours circulated that the footage confirmed all of the most far-fetched innuendo. The biggest crackpots claimed to have seen a leaked copy.

  I was saved from distraction by a caveman response to the late-capitalist struggle for social mobility. I wanted to get into the same sandstone campus as Frida: the University of Queensland.

  ‘You may begin the test,’ said a teacher. ‘Good luck!’

  There was a reflection task and a short-response task. The topic of the reflection task was ‘time’. I was only seventeen, but I had time enough for seven people.

  The next day brought two multiple-choice exams. I remained in a state of flow, focused only on the questions and the answers.

  On Wednesday afternoon, as my classmates skylarked in the car park, I drove to the police station to give another statement about an event that I was expected to remember and then forget, to forget and then remember again. A detective had called the day before. It was to be my sixth interrogation.

  The law-and-order precinct sat opposite Queens Park, the botanical heart of the Garden City. The station was bigger and shinier than the courthouse. We sat in a larger interview room than normal. A laptop was plugged into an LCD television. The screen showed the opening still of the seized footage. The contrast had been adjusted, clarifying the shadows into recognisable faces.

  The cop said, ‘Are you ready to roll?’

  ‘Yeah, mate. I’m sweet.’

  ‘Just let me know if it gets too much.’

  Henry panned around the moving vehicle. We were singing ‘Wonderwall’. From the boot, Nick stuck his hand through a speaker hole, waving the red tip of a cigarette.

  The karaoke petered out. Henry aimed the lens towards the front, where the mood was more subdued. I was looking at my iPhone. The speedometer showed that Dom was driving five kilometres an hour under the speed limit.

  The video blacked out abruptly. Within the next fifteen seconds, our gold Ford Fairlane had careered across the median strip and collided with the blue Holden Viva.

  ‘It makes you wonder,’ said the police officer, ‘what made him stop filming. Like he knew something was about to happen.’

  I disagreed with the cop. Life’s biggest moments generally occur when we aren’t trying to capture them. If something dramatic were about to happen, Henry would’ve kept the camera going. He filmed what seemed like the most memorable sequence of the evening.

  The detective replayed the footage three more times, frustrated by a gun that wouldn’t smoke. Each rewind made me feel more dead inside. The video was so close to solving the mystery that marked my survival with an asterisk, but instead it muddied the waters: how does life transit so quickly from innocence to obliteration?

  Frida and I had slept together half a dozen more times. Yet as she fretted about exams and final piano recitals, the chemistry between us hit the skids. I blamed her lack of interest on my continuing inability to orgasm.

  sorry for being such a flake, Frida wrote after another last-minute cancellation. don’t take it personally.

  The fickleness of her attention made me lovesick.

  I won’t, I wrote. I know you’re under the pump.

  The truth was that my entire nervous system had caught fire, incandescent with a fear of abandonment. This made me morose whenever Frida called, and even more physically distant when we saw each other.

  ‘You need to relax,’ she said, after I accepted a hand job with the enthusiasm of a tetanus shot.

  Then Frida was prohibited from driving with me late at night. Her parents – whom I still hadn’t met – introduced a 9.00 pm road curfew until graduation.

  why? I asked. what did you do?

  I didn’t do anything, she wrote. my parents realised that their daughter’s new chauffeur has a few black marks against his name

  because I was in the crash???

  it’s a combination of factor

  what are the other factors?

  A: you don’t go to Grammar, and B: a Real Housewife of Rangeville told my mother that you smoke crack and belong to a gang of drag racers

  Now, during any delay in communication, I visualised the six-pack of the camera-friendly mannequin from Grammar that Frida’s mother wanted to replace me with.

  what do they think I’m going to do with you? I asked. drive us off the quarry? Romeo and Juliet meets Rebel Without A Cause?

  they just don’t want me to get pregnant before university. and you don’t strike them as a celibate

  For a week after the QCS, the longest I slept was three hours. On Friday morning, I rose and resisted having a cigarette before showering and swapping cars with Dad.

  ‘Just don’t be too smart by half,’ he warned. ‘This girl will know who you are soon enough. And no one likes a pretender.’

  ‘Right. That’s why your love life is booming.’

  ‘How about ya fill the tank for once?’

  Fuck you, cunt, I thought. Then: I’m the cunt.

  That afternoon, I idled behind European SUVs while trying to spot Frida at her private school. The rear windscreens of four-wheel drives were plastered with sporting emblems featuring Roman numerals.

  Frida dumped her bag on the back seat and climbed in the front. She stank of stale sweat and fresh deodorant. A baggy dress veiled any hint of skin above the knee. Face make-up free, black hair in a ponytail. Her laughter was a password from the past to the present.

  ‘Your parents have done me a favour,’ I said. ‘That’s hot.’

  ‘Thanks, babe,’ she said. ‘But am I hawt, or just hot? ’

  ‘My sincere apologies. H-A-W-T, definitely.’

  We drove downtown to Grand Central Shopping Centre. Inside the cinema, the scent of popcorn evoked a generalised memory of the Thursday nights I spent there hanging out with Tim.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Frida.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You seem a bit far away today.’

  Frida mistook my silence for indignation that she had chosen to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We’d recently debated the literary merits of J.K. Rowling.

  ‘How have you never seen a Harry Potter?’ she asked in the queue. ‘Like, I can understand not reading the books. But not seeing the movies? That’s not even remotely cool. It’s just weird.’

  ‘I had an old-fashioned childhood. No PlayStations or Xboxes. And none of this fantasy bullshit.’

  ‘What did you do for fun in primary school? Watch the football and horseracing? Play the pokies?’

  ‘No!’ I snapped, recalling my father’s warning.

  ‘Excuse me for picking what I wanted to see. After you took me to a rape movie. You were lucky to get a second date.’

  I wanted to flee from the disagreement.

  But during the movie, Frida was gripped by a religious experience. A bookworm virgin underwent puberty and confronted first love while battling against a terrorist cell of genocidal wizards and witches called the Death Eaters, who kept hijacking his attempts to be a normal teenager.

  Afterwards, Frida linked arms with me like nothing had happened. We streamed out with kids dressed as wizards.

  ‘So, Roger Ebert,’ she said, ‘what’s your verdict?’

  ‘That was pretty good,’ I said.

  ‘Pretty relatable for a bunch of wizards, huh?’

  We had roughly two hours to kill before Frida’s curfew. Unlike me, she had given some thought to the window of opportunity for sex. ‘How about we go to your place?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Why?’

  I realised with horror there was absolutely no logical reason why I couldn’t take Frida home. I’d been banking on an unspoken assumption that she suffered from an allergic reaction to the western suburbs.

  ‘It’ll take ages,’ I said. ‘We won’t make curfew.’

  ‘Our houses are fifteen minutes apart.’

  ‘I haven’t cleaned my room.’

  ‘Seriously, Lech. Start
the car. We’re going there.’

  We drove past St Mary’s, the garage and the unlit racecourse. ‘This is nice,’ said Frida, and a rational part of me knew that she was right. Glenvale was a perfectly liveable aspirational suburb. But I’d become so paranoid about class that I couldn’t unsee the lack of Range Rovers in the driveways.

  The door to the house was open, but I nudged Frida towards the flat.

  ‘Aren’t we going to say hi to your parents?’ she asked.

  ‘They’ll be asleep,’ I said.

  ‘It’s pretty much dinnertime,’ she said.

  ‘They’re early risers.’

  ‘Let’s at least check.’

  I was overcome with frustration. It had been a sleepless week and a draining date and now there was this hunt for the existence of my separated parents.

  ‘Fuck me, Frida. Mind your own business.’

  ‘Okay,’ she whispered.

  In the musty granny flat, my queen mattress was covered in unfinished novels. The fraying carpet was littered with dirty clothes and empty packets of cigarettes. I stacked the books on a bedside table and rushed to dispose of the laundry.

  ‘I didn’t realise you smoked so much,’ said Frida.

  ‘I’m quitting,’ I said. ‘I just haven’t tidied up in ages.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed. My plastic CD player was designed to look like a gramophone. Frida selected The National’s Boxer. The sparring pianos of ‘Fake Empire’ oozed into my inelegant suburban bedroom.

  ‘I can play this,’ she said.

  Frida turned the light off. She unzipped her dress and slipped it to the floor, revealing grey briefs and a black sports bra. Then she unknotted the tie from my collar.

  ‘Am I leading you into temptation?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  For a while, I did a credible job convincing Frida I was in the same frame of mind. We played games of cat-and-mouse with lips and fingers. I had a condom proximate. On a purely acrobatic level, the sex seemed better than usual. But I felt nothing except a crushing sense of frustration.

  Frida broke her own rule against giving head jobs. Ten minutes felt like three hours. Eventually, I rolled over and sat naked on the edge of the bed. It was as if my brain and body had been drained of the capacity for pleasure, and instead saturated with shame.