by Michael Earp
“No, no, I wouldn’t, actually,” Drew says, calmly. “I know you don’t believe me, but this isn’t about thinking that dating you, or another disabled person, is a step down and dating an able-bod or that having sex with them would be better or hotter. I just don’t want to mess with this.” She goes quiet for a second. “I want to settle into being in this town. And I really wanna be mates. Hanging out together has been awesome.”
“Yeah, I’m so awesome. Look at me. I don’t know why I thought you’d even want to be seen with me. I mean I’m such … I’m such a loser!” I choke out. “I wanted to feel like someone actually wanted me for once. Just once. I wanted to know what it felt like to be wanted and to want someone back … and to kiss a girl. To kiss you. I’ve never met anyone like you, anyone as unashamed, as out there, as proud, as comfortable in their own skin.”
Drew tries to catch my eye. “Look, I could kiss you, right here. I don’t give a toss what anyone would think. It just wouldn’t be for the right reasons. You’re a babe, honestly. And I’m not saying never. I’m just saying not now.”
“Oh, whatever!” I say. “You’re only saying that to make me stop balling in the street when the truth is you can’t even stand to have my hand on yours!”
“That’s totally not true. I’m saying how I feel, honest. I get that you’re upset. I hear that. I see that.” She looks at my legs. “Mine shake too, when I’m feeling big emotions. See?” She takes her hands off her knees, which she had been holding up till now, and they shake, just like mine.
This. This makes the tears finally come. I’ve never seen someone else’s legs do that before.
“It’s okay to cry,” Drew continues. “You don’t have to be tough all the time. Hell, everyone walking by will think we’re shaking and crying because we’re not dealing with these bodies of ours, but to hell with what they think! It’s radical to feel, to really feel, and to allow our bodies to move and be how they need to be, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say, wiping my tears with the back of my hand. “I feel like a tool. I’m … I’m going to head home ’cause I need some time to think.”
“I hope we can hang again soon.” She gives me a smile. “Now get out of here before people start asking us what’s wrong.”
As I wheel away, she yells after me, “You really are awesome! Just as you are. Don’t let the bastards get you down!”
I wheel down the street and around the corner before I call Dad. He answers the phone with, “Taxi service, what’s your pick-up location please?”
I scroll on my phone to calm myself down until Dad pulls up. I wheel to the passenger side and open the door, not looking at him. My legs are still shaking and he knows that means I’m upset. He doesn’t say anything as I climb in, he just goes and picks up my chair, puts it in the boot and then gets back in and starts the car.
“Your movie ended early,” he says.
I don’t reply. Hold it together, Jem. Don’t cry.
“The moon is beautiful tonight. Want to go for a drive up to the lookout for a bit? Mars is in retrograde right now, so everyone’s feeling a lot at the moment. The energy of the planets is pretty powerful, Jem,” he says, looking down at my jiggling legs. I usually find Dad’s love of astrology super dorky and boring, but at the moment I’m grateful for it.
“Sure,” I say as he turns the radio on so we don’t have to drive in awkward silence.
We get to the lookout and it is beautiful. The moon is full and the night sky is still and clear.
“Want to get out and look at the constellations and eat an orange?” Dad says, already opening his door.
He brings my chair around to me and I hop in and wheel over to a wooden bench. Dad sits down and begins peeling us an orange.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” he says. “I love you and whatever it is, you are one of the strongest people I know, Jem. You’ll be okay.” He leans over and pats me on the back then hands me an orange, lovingly segmented.
We sit in silence, looking down at the lights of our little town under the glow of the full moon. I think about Drew and how it will be super awkward to hang out again. I know I will be okay, even if we only ever stay friends. Although she did say never say never …
The streets were full of people who formed great jams wherever I tried to walk, blocking my path, brushing against me as I passed. Nothing I could do would make them move, make them get the hell out of my way so I could get where I needed to go. I needed to go there fast, needed to run, but there was nothing I could do, they were everywhere.
I was obviously far from up-to-date with the latest fashions, the voluminous, wispy nothings everyone was wearing. I could make no sense of the floaty, gauzy things. Everyone was covered but uncovered at the same time, their clothes catching the wind and floating away then back, almost, but never quite, uncovering the wearer.
They ignored me, my dress like a knee-length T-shirt, the logo of a band I was certain none of them had heard of on the front, my ancient lipstick-red leather cowboy boots and mismatched knee-length socks (one hot pink, clashing with my boots, and the other black-and-white striped). I was so unfashionable they could not bear to look at me. I was so unfashionable I didn’t even care if the people, everywhere, knew that it was intentional.
A businessperson, their brightly coloured attaché case appearing and disappearing in and out of the dancing fabric of their clothes, squished past me. They would have knocked me over but they were not quite heavy enough and we passed each other touching, chest to chest, like dancers in a waltz. A police officer in a utilitarian one-piece, all black and chrome, pushed past me roughly, I had to stagger to avoid falling over. I was in a hurry and did not have time for this kinda push-me-shove-you crap. I dodged away from the crowd and into a narrow alleyway.
They would be too scared to enter the alleyway, those people from the day-lit streets. It smelled like piss and spilled wine, like sweat and rotten food, like poverty and fear. I dived past a homeless person, destitute, filthy, their clothes ragged, leaped over the outstretched legs of another.
“Hey cuz,” a voice overflowing with red dust and spinifex hollered, “spare a couple of bucks?”
Without even slowing I touched my phone to theirs, heard both phones beep a transaction confirmation. They seemed too poor to have a hack on their phone, it should have only been able to take the ten bucks I allowed beggars to take. I was not particularly worried, there was nothing really in my account to steal. If I am to be honest I was little more than good luck and good looks away from ending up in the street myself.
My phone sang, I lifted it to my ear, heard Ziggy’s voice.
“Heya, Roxy, bub, I got a message from Sweet, they were headed to Underground. I’m at Underground, just got here,” they said.
“Deadly, Zig,” I replied, “I am on my way already, got a message from Sweet too.”
The message had woken me. I hated my room, a six-foot squared, seven-foot high box carved from the warehouse a big mob of people were using as studios. Walls of shipping pallets and scrap canvas did not give much privacy. Desperation for living space had changed the place; there were no individual studios any more, what was once our studios were homes instead. We all worked in the cavernous common area, not too arduous for the painters, a bit more difficult for the musicians. Except me, I made my soundscapes wearing noise-cancelling headphones using a twenty-year-old computer. They don’t make them like that any longer.
The message was from Sweet and had simply read Meet me Underground.
“I can’t see Sweet yet, don’t know if they are here yet,” Ziggy’s voice purred over the phone, barely intelligible over the roar of thrash in the club. Sweet had been missing for weeks, not at the club, not in the streets, not home, not even at their parents’ house. It had been painfully difficult to build up the courage to go there and check, a job left to me because Sweet’s parents liked me for some reason I could not begin to understand. We – Sweet’s friends – had all started
to get really worried. I had even been forced to ask for Sweet by name, a name I will not repeat here, nobody would answer if you called it out anyway. Sweet had been Sweet since high school, the same time our friends started calling me Roxy.
Underground was way the hell over on the other side of the city, in an old part of town that was mostly abandoned warehouses and shops and a few tall office buildings that had seen better days. Any building that was still usable was squatted. Small businesses, both legitimate but unable to pay rent and those on the spectrum from grey-legal to downright black-market defended their spaces with locks and sometimes force. People lived there too, those too downtrodden to get a squat anywhere better but still fit enough to fight for somewhere off the streets.
Underground was a nightclub, in the sub-basement of one of the worst buildings, most of the real estate above basement level too raggedy, tumbledown, damp and cold for even the most desperate to stay there. The basement above was a street food market, one of the most unhygienic in the city but also home to the best food. Funny how that happens. That’s how we found Underground, we saw the down arrow on the stairs while eating our mystery-meat tacos, followed the arrow and there it was. It was safe enough, they didn’t object to no-hopers like us who could barely afford to eat, and were not particularly concerned with checking IDs. It never closed and the home-brew made out the back was almost drinkable if we decided to drink.
Perfect.
We rarely drank there, even though they couldn’t care less we were all underage. It was just a place to hang out where the authorities and our parents would never find us. A place we could disappear, where we would not be found even if someone bothered to look.
It was a little too far to walk but I couldn’t afford a taxi or even the sort of car-share that had only about a fifty per cent chance of landing a passenger dead in a gutter somewhere. A long walk, then again I was used to walking. All my friends had homes or squats closer to where I was headed. Ziggy was closest, lived with their parents in a squat in virtually the building next door.
My phone bleeped a message, I pulled it out, checked it, hoped it was Sweet. It was Slade: I got a message from Sweet, they are headed for Underground. Just got off work, on my way there now.
Slade was the only member of our little gang who had a real job, waiting tables at a relatively respectable cafe. We had mocked them for it, taking a dead-end job when all we wanted to be was artists. The mockery was only half-hearted, the rest of us also half wanted some decent income. Ziggy was still at school, trying for the marks needed to go on to a fashion design college, and was already a kick-arse painter. Sweet was a game designer for a small indie studio theoretically after school, but it can only be after school if you actually make it to school. They would be broke until the company “makes it” and the share options pay out.
Bolan was a lead singer, and second lead-guitarist, in a thrashlectro-reggae band always on the verge of their first big hit but mysteriously, to anyone who had heard them, never quite getting there. Bolan had asked me to lay down some soundscapes on their next album. The rest of the band was not convinced; my sound was trippy and weird, artistic and awesome. It was not, however, thrashlectro-reggae.
I exited an alleyway and was almost run over by a black car with the badge of the Metro Police Social Crimes division on it. They looked a little too interested in me, but at least they were not the underfunded Truancy Squad, looking for people who were, like me, avoiding school. I faded back into the shadows, getting ready to run. They must have decided I was not all that interesting after all, they drove off down the street looking for other trouble. I could never work out whether they were looking to cause trouble or prevent it, because they always found some wherever they looked. I was just glad to not be the trouble they were looking for today.
They would say I should be in school, they would say I had no business being out there on the street, living away from my parents. I would never go back to school. There were two choices in life: go to school and never leave, or get out there and take a risk, do whatever I wanted to do. You need a PhD, at least, to be competitive even when applying for retail jobs, education was not worth the time. I had decided a year ago at fourteen all I wanted to do was make sound. No school could teach me what I needed to learn. I learned more in clubs talking to DJs, to producers, to synth gurus. I learned more by doing.
I was getting bullied at school anyway, all of us were, perfectly normal for the only black kids. It was that, the bullying that had drawn us together, the racist taunts and need to form a circle, back-to-back, fists outwards in the schoolyard.
My parents, black academics who had fought all their lives to be heard, had not approved of my career choice, of my dropping out of school. That was why I was living in my studio, not with them.
I snuck onto a train at a quiet, poorly secured station, travelled a few stops, dived off at another station, vaulted over the barriers and ran for it as the guards in super-ugly jumpsuits, all probably too old and arthritic to chase me, shouted with laughable futility. I stopped running a few blocks away, wondering why they still bother to have barriers and smartphone ticketing on the trains when nobody seemed to pay any more.
I was finally in the trashed neighbourhood where we had found Underground. It was early in the day and the street food stalls were open but not yet busy. I grabbed a mystery-meat taco. The stall owner seemed to trust me enough to give me credit; or what can I say, they must think I’m cute. I was eating as I took the uneven, poorly repaired stairs down into Underground.
The noise of Bolan’s band, a fusion of nineties electro-industrial, eighties thrash metal and Alice Springs desert reggae, hit me in the face as I got to the door to our club. It was so loud it hurt, so fast it shook my eyeballs. I had always been too ashamed to tell Bolan how much I loved their work.
Bolan was over by the stage, too tall and far too skinny, in shiny lycra leggings, the design eye-bleed bright, and a blackfella flag hoodie. It amused me that even after years in the city they considered our autumns cold, still wore a hoodie when I was virtually naked. They had clearly just managed to convince the DJ to play their track. That DJ was swaying and nodding, visibly enjoying the song. Bolan had just got one step closer to “making it”.
They had come to our school from the desert out near Papunya, on some sorta blackfella scholarship. Their only luggage was a battered, vintage electric guitar and a plastic bag of desert reggae CDs. Everything else, they had said, was nothing, was pointless, material goods they would find when they needed them. When the local thrashlectro band heard those CDs at one of my parties, unknown and ancient stuff that nobody else knew, the whole mob of them had completely lost their shit. They had invited Bolan to bring that sound into their band.
The others weren’t in sight so I walked over to Bolan who enveloped me in a hug that said “I still have the hots for you but am cool with you not having the hots for me”. I tried to say “you are still one of my best friends but you are just not my type” with my hug. That was our game, it seemed, trying to talk to each other in our hugs, a game that Bolan was winning from my reckoning.
“Deadly track,” I shouted in their ear. I was pretty sure it was too loud in there to say any more. Bolan simply nodded. “Have you seen anyone else yet?” I virtually screamed to be heard.
They indicated a direction with a sideways head flick. I invited them to join me with a head flick in the same direction. They took my hand and started dragging me away.
Our friends were in one of the back rooms, down a corridor, even more trash-strewn than the rest of the place. I kicked my way around a corner and through an empty doorway. It was one of our favourite rooms to hang out in, when we were lucky enough to get it. It was as quiet as it got there and had seats, the old wooden door from that doorway was now the table my friends were sitting around. Ziggy was eating a taco from upstairs and drinking a glass of sparkling water. Good water in that place, they filtered the entire input into the building for the
ir home-brew then carbonated it behind the counter. Best fizzy water in the city.
Slade looked half asleep, if not actually all the way there, eyes closed, leaning back precariously in a chair. Half-drunk glass, the liquid that special piss colour of an energy drink, sitting in front of them. I hated those things. They tasted to me like they just collected the piss of coffee drinkers and concentrated it to make that stuff.
Bolan’s track had finished and the DJ was blasting the place with thrashlectro so fierce and fast it must be the blackest of black-market sound. I could not make out the lyrics at that distance but they were probably about sex, outlaw thrash normally was. If the soundproofing was not good enough or if the owner had not paid off the Social Crimes cops they would be pounding down the stairs to raid the joint. Like most things regarding sex, songs about it were illegal, therefore everybody sang about sex in the illegal music. It was only logical.
It was just quiet enough, in that room, to be heard clearly if you shouted loudly. “Is Sweet here yet?” I shouted into the room.
Slade shouted back without even opening their eyes: “Not yet. A bit annoying making us all come here and then not being here.”
I walked over, Ziggy stood to greet me. We were about the same height; we would always argue which of us was the shortest in the gang. Zig was wearing black jeans patched with hot pink satin and a T-shirt advertising a band called “Tjintu Desert Band” so full of holes they had to wear another shirt under it to not be arrested for public obscenity. It was too big and must have been stolen from Bolan at some point. Those two kept stealing each other’s clothes even though there was no chance they would fit. Bolan was at least twenty centimetres taller.
We hugged and I felt that feeling, that affection that turned me to rubber. I knew that Ziggy must have known how I felt, must have felt me melt. They did not melt themself but did not stiffen either. I still did not know what they felt about me, or if they shared my affection. I had been in love with Zig for about a million years, or that was how long it had felt. They had never told me what they felt, had never rejected my advances either.