Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Frida.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘I just want you to feel good.’

  ‘It doesn’t. Tonight. For some reason.’

  We were both humiliated.

  ‘Why would you let me do that, then?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t answer the question honestly without admitting to unfixable glitches. Cicadas hummed beneath the windowsill.

  ‘We better go,’ said Frida. ‘It’s getting late.’

  We headed for Frida’s place via the hospital that contained death and the cathedral that failed to explain it.

  ‘Can you stop at Picnic Point?’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘What about?’ I asked.

  Frida chewed her lip nervously, as if it was a high-school debate and she was worried about delivering the argument within the time limit. ‘Us,’ she said.

  I parked between the flagpole and the water tower. The silhouette of Tabletop Mountain soared across the unlit valley.

  Frida burst into tears. She delivered the predictable break-up script for a relationship that hadn’t existed long enough to be made Facebook official.

  ‘I can’t keep seeing you,’ she said. ‘It’s too much pressure.’

  ‘You’re breaking up with me,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Clearly, Frida couldn’t keep seeing me.

  ‘But you were in love with me,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So now you don’t love me?’

  ‘I don’t know! Not enough. Not right now.’

  The red fog light above the blue flag looked less like a beacon of possibility and more like a traffic light. You silly bastard, I thought, in my father’s voice. I was a latter-day Jay Gatsby, craving the saving grace of a giddy rich kid from the eastern suburbs.

  Frida seemed relieved to get the truth off her chest, but slightly offended by my lack of visible distress.

  ‘Are you upset?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really. I saw the writing on the wall.’

  ‘It’s terrifying. You notice everything.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Frida held my hand tenderly. ‘I still really want to come to your formal.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s if you want me to.’

  ‘Sure. It’ll be fun.’

  Now she looked at the time, adding insult to injury. It was quarter past nine.

  Outside the house, Frida kissed me weakly on the cheek. ‘I’m here if you need me,’ she said. ‘Remember that.’

  ‘No worries,’ I mumbled.

  I parked outside for five minutes, stalled in a loading zone of loneliness, until the shape of Frida’s mother appeared through the screen door.

  I started the car and drove home.

  In our lounge room, my mother sat on the La-Z-Boy reading a book. ‘Hey, baby,’ she said noticeably sober, which meant that she would have been highly capable of charming my ex-girlfriend.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ I said.

  I lay down on the worn-out couch.

  ‘How has your week been?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve had better,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like that sometimes.’

  She slapped her book onto the stack next to the couch. Mazda sneezed outside cobwebbed sliding doors, collar rattling as he scratched at fleas.

  ‘Having me as a mother might not seem like winning the lotto,’ she said. ‘But I won the jackpot with you. Twice.’

  ‘What was the first time?’

  ‘Your birth! It was the happiest day of my life.’

  I was suffocated by guilt for concealing her earlier.

  ‘I love you, Lech,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t trade you for all the diamonds in a mine, or all the money in a mint.’

  I stayed on the couch and wept, overcome with the drug of too much love at once after so many numb years of hunting around for something to feel that good.

  On the third Saturday of September, tourists ascended the Great Dividing Range for the Carnival of Flowers, eating dagwood dogs while smiling absently at mobile flowerbeds. In the holidays, as jacarandas spewed purple confetti onto the footpaths, a plume larger than Germany travelled rapidly towards Queensland. One-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds sucked up dust from the South Australian desert, bushfire smoke from Victoria and red dirt from farms in New South Wales.

  The Garden City was hit by a crimson mist, causing drivers to collide. Chemists were stripped of asthma puffers, while agile hypochondriacs recycled masks purchased for the aborted swine-flu epidemic.

  ‘Are the dust storms radioactive?’ wondered news.com.au.

  I stayed inside listening to Sufjan Stevens while watching TV footage of a disaster unfolding behind the blinds. The evaporation of the dust made no difference. I felt free and defeated, pretending the war was over, like a soldier decompressing before redeployment.

  Vincent – who was officially dating Frida’s friend Anna – knew all about the break-up. In an effort to improve my mood, he proposed starting a band. During winter, I had introduced him to Pavement and the Silver Jews. Now he was equally obsessed with them.

  ‘I wanna range life,’ I sang at Vincent’s mansion. ‘If I could settle down. Then I would settle down.’

  Vincent played guitar. I wrote poetry. I named the band Negative Gearing as an ironic nod to the tax loophole that turned my father into a real estate investor. Vincent started scouting a bassist and drummer.

  ‘We’ve got enough songs for an EP,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself,’ I said, but it was exhilarating to show the sensitive side of my soul to someone without editing the melancholia.

  Nick was offended by how much time I was spending with Vincent. After a miraculous recovery, he had gone back to school, and was drinking with more abandon than before, because in the short term he didn’t have a sporting career.

  ‘What are you two pussies doing?’ he asked.

  ‘None of your business,’ I said.

  Our relationship had always functioned on the basis that Nick was the alpha athlete, and me his beta sidekick. Now I got invited to parties without him, because people were uncomfortable about Nick drinking again, and his visible scars elicited awkward pauses.

  ‘You’re a dog,’ he said.

  On a Saturday night, I skipped pre-drinks at Nick’s place for a rival gathering in East Toowoomba. Eight passengers packed into a Maxi Taxi. All the parties that spring were out past the crash site in Highfields. The minibus rattled to the destination. Slammed doors and revving engines merged with the DOOF-DOOF-DOOF pulsating from the dance tent, which loomed like a lighthouse at the heart of a dark farm.

  I stormed into the party costumed as a normal teenager without gloom in my heart or doom in my dreams. Goon bags shone from the clothesline.

  There is no aphrodisiac like tragedy. Two hundred teenagers danced and tested the strength of attractions as faces flickered in strobe lights. We choked on artificial smoke. Skin touched skin. Eyes were lit up by the flames of raging bonfires, limbs shivering and tongues substituting spit.

  Around the bonfire, someone poured a medley of whatever drinks were at hand – XXXX Bitter, Jim Beam and Coke, pine-apple Vodka Cruiser – into one of his R.M. Williams boots. Someone else handed me a Gatorade bong, which I ripped before chugging the shoey.

  ‘Here’s to Blainey,’ sang the party, ‘he’s true blue, he’s a pisspot through and through, he’s a bastard, so they say. He was meant to go to heaven, but he went the other way. So, SCULL! SCULL! SCULL!’

  I planted the boot upside-down on my head and blew the residue from the bong hit towards the starlit sky.

  ‘What do we think of Blainey? He’s all right!’

  This was the bleak paradox of fame: my popularity and loneliness reached a peak at the same moment.

  The mood of the party edged towards aggressive. A boarder from Downlands headbutted a St Mary’s boy before peppering him with uppercuts. I stood on the Downlands
side during the brawl.

  Police showed up like morticians at a swingers’ party. Sirens spun across the tree trunks. The DJ switched the music off. Sergeants charged through paddocks and aimed torches at underage teens approaching third base.

  ‘Show’s over, folks,’ yelled a cop. ‘Time to go home.’

  Two hundred drunk teenagers flooded towards the New England Highway. An empty stubbie shattered against the blacktop, while a second fight threatened to erupt.

  My sister was already on her way to pick me up. I divvied out the three remaining seats. Nick recognised the getaway vehicle and intercepted me about to leave.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  ‘Sweet. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Sorry, mate. We’ve got a full car.’

  On the highway liable for the scar on his skull, Nick glared at a back seat packed to capacity without him.

  ‘You’ve changed, Lech,’ he said.

  ‘Since when?’ I said, smirking to cover the hurt.

  ‘Since the crash. You think you’re better than me.’

  He was right: I had changed. I was more popular and increasingly arrogant, a smokescreen for my sorrow.

  ‘Fuck off, Nick,’ I said. ‘Find your own lift.’

  In two months, I was relocating to Brisbane for university. Nick was an anchor to a tragic chapter of my uncouth youth that I needed to leave behind. He wasn’t blameless in the end of our friendship, but I let him slip away without a whimper.

  Going home, the roadside shrine flickered through a slit in the median strip, but my gaze didn’t stray.

  Rebel with a Stress Disorder

  Throughout a drought-stricken spring, as dams nudged towards empty, Tim remained in hospital. His parents had quit their jobs and moved to Brisbane. For months, medical experts worked tirelessly to reanimate the neural pathways between brain cells. Finally, Tim’s eyelids opened.

  When I visited, the patient was capable of answering yes to questions by blinking. His mother asked, ‘Do you remember Lech?’ and Tim blinked.

  Other visitors celebrated. I feigned elation, but eye contact caused an eruption of suffering. Tim could see the difference between us. The breakthrough ruined my delusion that once a patient wakes up from a coma, they go straight back to normal. This was the new normal: painstaking improvements to a permanent brain injury.

  ‘I’m not going to piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining,’ said Dad. ‘There aren’t going to be any miracles.’

  The St Mary’s Old Boys started a charity drive to raise money for Tim’s rehabilitation. On Saturday afternoons, I sold raffle tickets at the tavern, spruiking sporting memorabilia in return for small amounts of tax-deductible compassion.

  ‘How’s Tom doin?’ asked a Keno player.

  ‘Tim,’ I said.

  ‘I meant Tim! How is the bloke?’

  A silence was punctured by jingles from one of the pokies.

  ‘He’s hanging in there,’ I said.

  ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Remember that.’

  The fundraiser was held on a mild Saturday night. In Centenary Court, a string section serenaded dusk-lit tables. For once, there were no apples or muesli bars flying from one end of the courtyard to the other. Instead, students in navy blazers plied stylish patrons with premium beers and flutes of champagne.

  For the past three years, Tim and I had worked as waiters for the Old Boys Association, serving drinks and rib fillets at fundraisers just like this one.

  I went to the dinner with Dom and Nick. At a slight distance from the mingling adults, we sat on the same bench where I had met Nick as a ten-year-old, but the location didn’t rekindle the friendship between us.

  I filed inside for dinner with a fake smile and sat at a table near the heart of the packed hall. Onlookers regarded me with menacing levels of sympathy.

  Someone said, ‘Just imagine if Tim could be here to see this!’

  Photos of Tim were projected onto the screen at the front of a hall where the two of us had whispered to each other during assemblies for five years.

  Adults buttered bread rolls and prepared bids for rare collector items, hissing small talk to distract each other from the missing dinner guest. It seemed insane that all of these well-meaning people could keep their shit together.

  After dinner, the MC told the simple story of Tim’s coma. His dose of reality was designed to get the message across that Tim had a lifelong disability, and we needed to raise as much money as possible.

  Tim’s parents stood bravely beside the podium. Frank was a St Mary’s Old Boy. In a month’s time, his only son was meant to graduate. Something structural in my soul buckled under the weight of this reality. We wouldn’t be graduating together. He might never walk or talk again.

  Now, for the first time since the car crash, I sobbed uncontrollably in front of a public audience.

  A dinner guest rubbed my shoulder. ‘You’ll be okay.’

  No, I wouldn’t be okay, and neither would Tim, insofar as okay meant being the way we were before.

  The day before graduation, Dom was charged with three counts of dangerous driving causing death and two counts of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. The front page of The Toowoomba Chronicle was occupied by the latest twist in the tragedy.

  I awoke with a head-splitting hangover, eyes bloodshot from a six-month diet of XXXX Bitter and Winfield Blues, topped off with midnight binges of Four’n Twenty pies.

  ‘You can’t be late today,’ said my mother.

  For thirteen years, I’d craved freedom from painful routines invented to prepare me for fifty years of gainful dissatisfaction. Now youth was a speedboat leaving the pier.

  My parents kept up appearances for their final high-school graduation as legal guardians. Dad sported a tweed coat and a pair of speed-dealer sunglasses, a Band-Aid on his nose from another melanoma surgery. Mum wore pants and a loose cotton shirt. Her fingers were cocked for a quick cigarette on arrival.

  ‘How about this weather?’ she asked on the drive.

  Dad grinned forgivingly at the UV rays that kept attempting to kill him. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s a bloody ripper.’

  The ceremony was staged at St Mary’s new concrete cathedral. Clive Berghofer Arena was a gratuitously large basketball stadium funded by Toowoomba’s richest right-wing millionaire, after the Catholic faculty supported his anti–recycled water campaign.

  The senior cohort of 2009 filed onto the stage in reverse alphabetical order. Plastic pews were crammed to capacity with families and seven hundred boys in navy ties and pale blue shirts.

  ‘I want to mention a special person,’ said the principal, gesturing at the empty chair where my best friend was meant to be sitting. Our names were beside each other on the leadership board, but an invisible asterisk would affix itself to the house captain who didn’t graduate.

  I thought: DON’T CRY. Ever since I’d broken the seal of my tear ducts, I couldn’t stop weeping in public. I collected plaques for topping English, English Extension, Modern History, Geography and Drama, the most decorated pisswreck in the school. The principal testified to my never-say-die attitude in the face of adversity.

  The graduates flowed beneath green emergency exit signs onto an oval yellow from drought, converging in a horde of white collars and sunburnt necks. In the absence of Tim, I led the final rendition of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ alone. I flailed my limbs and strained my vocal chords. We all shoulder-charged one another with blunt force and ripped pockets from shirts that would never get washed or ironed again.

  The moment of catharsis was followed by a civilised morning tea. Seniors wrote promises to stay in touch on each other’s shirts with permanent marker, while parents entered into pissing contests about our career prospects.

  The rest of the day was spent anticipating the best night of our lives: the Grade Twelve formal. Girls had invested in Brazilians, teeth whitening, tanning
regimes and thirty-day lemon detox diets. Some had become temporarily bulimic in an attempt to fit into a smaller dress size. Guys had aimed to make their bodies monumental, ripping pecs and lats and biceps at 24-hour gym franchises, drinking protein shakes until their abs were visible.

  I hadn’t been so out of shape since I was an overweight primary-schooler, so I’d purchased a mirdle – a male girdle – on eBay to suppress my climbing BMI. After showering, I slipped into a tuxedo hired from Roger David, before tightening the bowtie around my neck like a noose.

  ‘You’ll be the most handsome man at the formal,’ said my mother, who wasn’t coming due to bad arthritis.

  After collecting me, my father presented a hip flask of vodka from his blazer pocket. The silver flagon was specially imprinted with the worst year of my life: 2009.

  ‘Congratulations, mate,’ he said. ‘I’m so bloody proud of you. You’re made of tougher stuff than me.’

  I was three beers deep when Frida arrived at the pre-drinks. It was the first time we’d seen each other since breaking up. She wore a white velvet dress. I introduced her to Dad and Hannah, my substitute mother.

  Vincent’s father had agreed to drop us at the formal in his black Mercedes-Benz. ‘Lech Blaine,’ said Frida. ‘Who knew you were so fancy?’

  I opened the door. We held hands as she stepped inside. In the back seat, I swigged from a half-finished Corona.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘No funny business,’ she replied. ‘My lipstick is mint.’

  This left open the possibility of funny business after the formal. In the meantime, I tried valiantly to forget that we would be sitting at a makeshift table without Tim.

  The route to the mock red carpet was blocked by a manufactured traffic jam. A cavalcade of limousines, luxury sedans, convertibles and hot rods ran five hundred metres up the main street. Traffic attendants in hi-vis directed our sedan into the final stretch of gridlock. At the exit, police sirens sent a warning to any overexcited chauffeurs tempted to rev their engines too hard.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Frida.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why?’