by Lech Blaine
‘I live around the corner from here,’ I said.
We shook hands for the second time in quick succession, chuckling at the odds, two grown men who knew everything and nothing about each other.
‘Well, bloody hell,’ he said. ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it?’
‘Small world!’
I drove us to a café across the road from Grammar in my brand-new
Mitsubishi Outlander. Schoolboy rugby union was underway across the road. I ordered a chicken caesar wrap and strong flat white. Nick got the same.
‘I need to lose some weight,’ he said. ‘What’s your secret?’
‘I started running marathons,’ I said. ‘It clears my head.’
‘From what?’
I told Nick that I was writing a book about the accident.
‘Why?’ he asked. Not angry or defensive, just intrigued.
The truth was that I’d been born a writer, and this was the most important story I could tell at the present moment. I told Nick that I also wanted to raise awareness of depression.
‘You’re still depressed?’ he asked, gobsmacked, mentally comparing that disclosure with Facebook images of me grinning at black-tie balls in Brisbane.
‘Well, yeah,’ I said. ‘I still see a psychologist once a month.’
Nick kept looking over his shoulder at the upper-class mums. I paid for lunch and suggested a stroll around Queens Park.
The peonies loosened Nick up. He filled in the gaps since high school. He got hooked on pot and video games, blowing out to 110 kilograms, so anxious and ashamed that he didn’t make it outside for his twenty-first birthday. The quickest fix for the endless cycle of lethargy and self-loathing was crystal meth.
‘Ice stopped me from dreaming about death,’ he said.
We walked back to the four-wheel drive, and talked more as I drove up to Picnic Point. Nick kept trying to quit meth cold turkey. But the problem with getting in so deep was that he didn’t have any friends left who weren’t addicts or dealers. Relapse was accompanied by the adrenaline rush of belonging.
‘It’s scary,’ he said. ‘These people were scared of me.’
We drove around for over an hour. I lifted the handbrake outside Nick’s house. He asked for my advice.
‘Mate, I’m pretty sure you’ve got depression,’ I said.
‘Do you think so?’
‘If it walks like a duck. And quacks like a duck.’
‘But I don’t want to go on those drugs, man.’
In some ways, I was lucky I’d flamed out so young and publicly. A judge forced me to get the help that I might’ve otherwise sidestepped. My sister’s psychology degree destigmatised a process that had once seemed disgraceful.
‘I’ve been on a medication called Pristiq for eight years,’ I said. ‘And now I’m on another antidepressant called Valdoxan that helps me sleep. They don’t fix all of my problems. But they give me the ability to address them.’
Nick nodded. There was less tension in our goodbye handshake than in the first two. I moved back to Brisbane, and didn’t see him in person for another eighteen months. But he started on Citalopram a few days later. I’d given him permission.
thanks mate, he messaged me. best thing I’ve ever done.
Two weeks before the ten-year anniversary, I was cruising at 100 kilometres an hour on the Warrego Highway, heading to be the best man at Vincent and Anna’s wedding. The ceremony was to be at Downlands, where I had given a eulogy for Henry a decade ago.
The Commonwealth Bank – where my father used to launder gambling profits through my Dollarmites account – had been renovated into a strip club called The Vault. The Metropole Hotel was about to be demolished. The Country Club Hotel had burnt down in suspicious circumstances after the owner, a former rugby league player, was arrested for cocaine trafficking.
That nuptial morning, I idled beside the house that my father and I had renovated. A sign announced it was due to be replaced by luxury villas.
Around the corner, Vincent pushed a green-lidded wheelie bin filled with offcuts from the floral archway. He’d barely added a wrinkle since high school, and had the same quizzical grin.
‘Hey, Blainey,’ he said.
‘Hey, Vin Diesel,’ I said. ‘It’s great to be here.’ I said, though I didn’t feel that way.
I had completely missed the planned rehearsal.
‘You know why they call you Blisters?’ asked Vincent.
‘No. Why?’
‘Because you turn up after all the work is done.’
Vincent had no idea that I was dying inside. Today was just a wedding. Downlands was just a high school. The looming anniversary didn’t trigger physical trepidation for him. He knew pretty much everything about me, but the strangeness of my return hadn’t occurred to him. I wasn’t just a survivor.
We walked inside. Tiny footsteps thudded down the hallway. A blonde two-year-old named Billie jumped into my arms without asking for permission. I was her atheist godfather. She had Vincent’s dimple in her chin. I always felt calm when I was with Billie, even when she pinched my skin or punched me in the nuts. She didn’t compare me with a lost version of myself.
‘Lech!’ she said, a mouthful of teeth now.
I spent the next half-hour trying to help Billie locate items that she apparently needed with some urgency: MY HAT! MY BALL! MY BOOK! When we found the coveted object, she lost any desire to have it.
‘Mummy, Daddy and Lech!’ Billie sang with a secret logic.
‘Lech’s not getting married to us, honey,’ said Anna.
Anna kissed me briskly on the cheek. She whisked a screaming Billie away to get ready with the bridal party. Vincent handed me the rings. The rest of the groom’s party arrived. We showered and fumbled with each other’s bowties. Spotify played ‘Streets of Your Town’ by the Go-Betweens.
Outside, it was a dark afternoon. Everyone fretted about the prospect of a wet wedding. The groomsmen filed into an Uber. Vincent rode shotgun with me. Drizzle fell on the Mort Estate, and we glided towards a fog-swamped
Mount Lofty. Not everything had changed: Downlands still looked like Hogwarts; I still felt like an imposter.
‘Are you all right, Blainey?’ asked Vincent.
‘I’m hanging in there,’ I said.
The grieving process is eternally incomplete. My defences were still undone by the smallest triggers: the smell of Lynx deodorant, the taste of cheap beers, the opening chords of ‘Wonderwall’, breaking news about traffic accidents, doppelgangers at shopping centres.
I noticed the gaps at eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays. Now, at baptisms and weddings, I glimpsed the grinning faces of children who’d never understand the wistfulness crippling their guardians when reminded of Will, Hamish and Henry, who’d eventually be gone for longer than they were alive.
Vincent and I walked the naked acre to join everyone else. The crowd migrated from the dining room to the lawn. Elders claimed seating at the front. The young and unmarried hovered at the back. We were the best and worst parts of our mothers and fathers, a mixture of dimples and addictions. The dresses and suits were more expensive, but the emotional landscape was basically the same as at a high-school formal.
Rain pitter-pattered on the umbrella that I lifted above Vincent.
‘Put it away,’ he said. ‘It’s not even raining that hard.’
The bride arrived in a convoy of Range Rovers. The hipster celebrant cued ‘Into My Arms’ by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds on Spotify. Billie jumped from the back seat. She squeezed a white rose.
An unassuming bride and groom were pronounced husband and wife. The sky was silver and slightly orange in the west. I scribbled my signature as a witness.
I carried Billie from the lawn to the courtyard for refreshments. The tails of her white dress were streaked with mud. We walked along the driveway beside the Garden of Remembrance. I listened to the trickle of water from Henry’s fountain.
‘Lech!’ said Billie. The sound of her v
oice pronouncing my name without tripping over the silent h was a gift from Vincent. My guilt was eclipsed by gratitude.
The reception was in the same building as Henry’s wake. After dinner, the MC called me to the podium. I told a simple story about human evolution: two oversensitive youngest children, who became best friends after a car crash.
‘Vincent made me braver by being an individual,’ I said. ‘And he gave me permission to grieve by setting an example of vulnerability.’
The audience laughed and cried. Nobody seemed freaked out by the admissions of imperfection. We all run from ghosts that no one else can see.
After the slow dance, the audience stormed the floor. Men waltzed with men, women with women. Discs slipped attempting limbo. Wine splattered across the linoleum. Mops were fetched from the kitchen.
‘I love you, mate,’ said Vincent during a quiet moment.
‘I love you too,’ I said.
The reception ended at midnight. Floodlights illuminated the gloom outside. We waited for Ubers on the New England Highway. Fog blew from the dining room to the roadside shrine.
How does someone keep confronting this abyss without succumbing to nihilism? I built a tapestry of attachments to people whose voices were louder than the pessimistic head noises whispering that no one would miss me.
For the tenth anniversary of the crash, I organised dinner with Tim. That afternoon, under glum skies, I went for a run around the Brisbane River. The Story Bridge was lit green. Peak-hour traffic rumbled above me. I sprinted smugly past the suits drinking knock-off cocktails on Eagle Street Pier.
At 7:00 pm, I became one of them. Frida and Big Red waited at a table. Frida wore a short black dress with red lipstick, her brown hair in a bob.
‘You have short hair,’ I said.
‘You have grey hair,’ she said.
‘Touché.’
‘At least you have hair,’ said Big Red.
His head was clean-shaven. Big Red had retired from contact sport due to concussion. He worked on a gas mine out west. Frida was a left-wing staffer for the Labor Party, taking the career path that I’d mapped out in school. And she was better at it, more attracted to policy work than ego fulfilment.
‘I always thought you were the political one,’ Big Red said to me.
‘So did I,’ I said.
‘His skin was too thin for politics,’ said Frida, who was dating a thick-skinned solicitor. I got along with all of her boyfriends like a house on fire.
My mixed emotions were halted by Tim’s arrival. Laughter followed him from the entrance to the dinner table, intensifying when he spied Big Red across the room. Tim still couldn’t walk or talk, but he had the same bright blue eyes, wide smile and mouthful of straight teeth. A male disability worker pushed the wheelchair to the table before decamping to get his client a Corona and lime. Tim was here for a good time.
‘You look so handsome, Tim,’ said Frida, kissing him on the cheek.
Tim locked my palm in a handshake that would have made my father blush. He pulled me into a bear hug that I couldn’t break free from, proving once and for all who remained the alpha male.
‘Ring the bell!’ I shouted. ‘I submit!’
Big Red gave his first child – a ginger-haired behemoth like him – the middle name ‘Timothy’ as a tribute to one of his best mates. Now Tim tried to physically overpower the biggest person in the room as he had me.
‘I’m sick of your shit, Timmy,’ said Big Red, rolling his sleeves up. ‘I’m here for a civilised evening. But I am willing to put you in a sleeper hold.’
This brought a fresh round of howls. We ordered pizzas. Tim signalled for another round while listening intently. He frowned when the subject matter grew more serious, and cracked up at punchlines. Tim had six nieces and nephews. I had twelve of them. We were both the funny uncle: he was funny ha-ha, and I was a bit funny sometimes. Would I have been so forgiving if it were me in the wheelchair and him living freely? But Tim didn’t want pity. He went to Broncos games on Friday nights and Pentecostal church on Sundays. He owned a home in the suburbs with a pool and had travelled to twenty countries. All he needed was me to spin him a yarn.
I retold the story – how many times now? – of the night a drunken Big Red was led from my granny flat to the house by Tim, who noticed that my mother was in the toilet. So he promptly directed Big Red into her empty bedroom.
‘It was an absolute stitch-up,’ said Big Red.
I sat at the dinner table with my oldest friends, winded by the blissful follies of youth, while ignoring the holy disappointments of adulthood.
‘This has been the best night in forever,’ said Frida.
Tim yawned through the laughter. His carer called it a night. We did a farewell round of handshakes and hugs. Bolder stories were told. It came up that Frida had recently broken up with the solicitor. This was news to me. Her knee knocked on mine like a locked door. Pretty soon, it was just the two of us and Big Red at the table, as the bar passed closing time.
‘Catch ya later, legends,’ said Big Red.
Frida and I caught an Uber across the Go Between Bridge to her art-deco apartment in West End. In the living room, there was a painting on an easel of a topless woman sucking a lollipop. ‘It’s me,’ said Frida. ‘Self-Portrait at Twenty-Seven.’
Throughout our twenties, Frida and I occasionally became single at the same time. We would hook up and idly contemplate giving it another crack, until one of us met someone else, where the stakes weren’t quite so high.
‘I’m glad I became a writer,’ I said, continuing my inner monologue from dinner. Frida didn’t need me to provide further context.
‘You were always a weirdo,’ Frida said. ‘Chasing ya dad’s dream. And taking for granted all of the things that actually make you so great.’
I got myself a beer. Frida changed into pyjama shorts and poured a glass of wine. We kissed without impatience. Neither of us was going anywhere. She let me borrow her electric toothbrush, replacing the taste of pizza with Colgate before bed.
Afterwards, we lay next to each other, pleasantly empty.
‘I wish I enjoyed sex that much when we were together,’ I said.
‘That’s what everyone thinks when they’re single. Sleep on it.’
But I was no longer gripped by the deep conviction that I’d recapture the past by being with Frida. This was it.
Around the corner from Downlands College, I sat with Nick and Dom at the start of January 2020. It was the halfway mark of Australia’s Black Summer. The three of us hadn’t been alone together since we were seventeen. Nick, now a ripped tradie, had been clean for eighty-six days, the longest dry spell of his wet twenties.
‘It’s a mantra: om mani padme hum,’ he said, explaining the seven chakras of Hinduism, and the new tattoo of a Kundalini serpent twisting along his tanned forearm. ‘I repeat it to myself every morning.’
Nick had got out of rehab the day before. He was bright-eyed and 20 kilograms lighter than when we had met at Queens Park. The former high-school football star had gained a sense of Zen from a program of weightlifting and group therapy.
‘Rehab’s just a bunch of blokes talking about their demons,’ he said.
Dom was a born-again communist with a blond ponytail and twin nose piercings. He showed Nick the tattoo on his skinny wrist of a Dreamtime rain spirit, passed onto him by an Aboriginal mate named Sam.
‘I stopped ignoring what happened,’ said Dom, who rarely drank anymore. ‘And I accepted it.’
The unpatriotic American wore a hammer and sickle t-shirt given to him by a Vietnamese violinist at an ashram in southern India. For two years, he had consumed magic mushrooms and learned the language of self-compassion.
‘Well, I feel like a real conformist,’ I said. ‘I’ve never meditated or done psychedelics. And I don’t have a single tattoo.’
‘I’ll give you a tattoo,’ said Dom, who had ten of them.
‘I promised my dad that I’d be a cleanskin
,’ I said.
‘Pussy,’ said Nick.
I watched Dom etch Nick’s middle finger with the tattoo of an arrow. The Department of Defence was about to start subdividing the rifle range and koala sanctuary into 342 quarter-acre blocks, and the roadside shrine was about to get displaced by a cycle path.
‘You need to carve out some inner peace,’ Nick said to me.
‘That’s why I went to India and Iran,’ said Dom. ‘Australians are so uncomfortable talking about pain. Other cultures confront it. We just go to the pub and get smashed together. How is that the definition of toughness?’
Nick shadowboxed to prove that he’d got the knack back. He confessed to suffering a recurring nightmare about getting bathed in hospital by strangers.
‘I feel like I woke up from the coma yesterday,’ he said. ‘Nurses wiping my arse for me. It was so embarrassing. But I couldn’t tell anyone that.’
Dom, a vegan, cooked tofu and pineapple on a barbeque. He flipped them onto focaccias with avocado, spinach and kimchi. At the tipping point of the Great Dividing Range, we sat on the front patio, chewing the fat about depression and post-traumatic stress disorder without breaking eye contact.
‘I finally forgave myself,’ said Dom.
Nick offered us cigarettes. I stopped smoking when I became a runner, but I lit one up for old time’s sake. My lungs didn’t digest the relapse with dignity. I coughed harder than the first night Nick and I did shots of Dad’s Scotch and fleeced some Longbeach Menthols from my snoring mum’s bedside drawer, thirteen-year-olds determined to become grown men overnight.
‘I’ve missed you guys,’ he said.
Nick took a call from the mother of his children, a subtle reminder that he had much more on his plate than either of us. He hugged Dom and me without any trace of discomfort.
‘Does writing about it help?’ asked Nick.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I’ll be psyched to finish the book.’
‘Why?’ asked Dom. ‘So you can wake people up?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘So I can go back to sleep.’