The Bubble had a secret language, an impenetrable dictionary full of in-jokes and songs and nicknames and lewd tales.We played Gin Rummy and the Italian card game Scopa with shrieks and slaps and our own set of rules. There was a vaguely abhorrent period where we chanted every time we were in public. We took Polaroid photographs of each other and stuck them to toilet walls.
In retrospect we were probably the most obnoxious people in the universe. But in your twenties being in the Bubble was the sort of thing that kept you breathing.
Everybody is, at that age, a refugee from another friendship group, another time. We somehow fell in with each other, an unspoken contract in unspilt blood. It never seemed to be a choice. It was accepted as fate.
Two of the boys in the Bubble played in Dallas Crane and it was the done thing to show up at every gig, waving beers in the air and singing along to all the songs. After one week-long party refused to end, I clambered into a stranger’s van and followed them up to the Broadford Bike Bonanza. Enormous bearded men in leather vests howled at the moon. There were fires, women who spat. The echoed revving of powerful engines, mating calls of a desert wolf. The band took to the stage, all skinny denim and zip-up Beatle boots from Roccos. They looked, in the eyes of their hard-bitten audience, like flamboyant homosexuals, possibly five minutes away from bursting into an upbeat rendition of ‘YMCA’. Pat, the bass player, instantly started to regret wearing white pants. His party trick involved falling asleep before anybody else. We called it ‘Bernie-ing out’ because once he was unconscious we acted like he was the lead role in Weekend at Bernie’s and took photos of him doing things like eating cigarette butts and sticking his finger up Dirty Derek’s arse.
Someone threw a tinny at the stage. Someone else threw a spider. A spider? I could see the look on Shannon’s face. He turned to me in confusion and panic, shrinking behind the drum kit.
‘Someone threw a spider,’ he mouthed.
I didn’t really think before I stripped off. It was an oddly auspicious occasion where I just happened to be wearing matching underwear. Dallas Crane played a very loud rock ’n’ roll song. I ran on with them and jumped around like an idiot only recently released from an asylum. I had been awake at that point for three days and would stay awake for at least a couple more. People stopped throwing spiders. Maybe there were no spiders in the first place.
Dallas Crane were essentially the focal point of the Bubble. If they were playing somewhere it was an unspoken meeting place; somewhere you would go and know without question half the people at the bar. Ted Danson was right, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. None of us would think twice about following the band to Ballarat and watching them play a show, or spending eight hours at the Espy from soundcheck to last drinks. We would help carry out Shan’s drum kit to his mincy-looking Vanette, hoisting the snare above our heads and weaving about in the car park. At an after party in Collingwood the lead singer—the Denim Sausage, an ex-boyfriend of mine once savagely referred to him as—spent the night cowering in fear in a bedroom while his girlfriend raged through the house trying to hunt him down. I wish I’d seen him climb out through the front window and onto Sackville Street to make his escape. It must have looked like Meatloaf trying to flee from a mineshaft. You couldn’t blame him, though. Dave was on the run from reality like the rest of us.
Four little boys used to come to every Dallas Crane show too, crammed down the front of the stage, whooping and hollering and gazing up at the band with open-mouthed expressions of adoration. They formed a band themselves eventually, and called it Jet. We watched from the sidelines, graceless and sore as hell, as their startling career trajectory took them in what seemed a matter of minutes from Tuesday night gigs at the Duke of Windsor to the life of international superstars. They played the Fuji rock festival and supported the Rolling Stones. When one of them bought a summer home on Lake Como we set to badmouthing him so hard it’s a wonder his ears didn’t turn to ash.
Everybody in the Bubble lazily slept with everybody else. It was gluttonously sexual. Too young for the Grim Reaper commercials to have any real impact, we indulged in promiscuity with fervour. I had begun to fall in love with Sime while he was half dating somebody else. We tried to have serious conversations about love in the backyard on overcast mornings. A pair of apostrophes on the concrete, coffee in hand.
‘Do you think I’m a hussy?’
It was laughable. We were all hussies. It was why we got along so famously, probably.
‘I hope not,’ I said, ‘because that cheapens whatever this is with you and me. And I don’t think it’s cheap.’
‘Cheap, no. Confusing, yes,’ he replied, pulling his trucker’s cap down over his eyes.
Women were hitting him over the head with things at that stage. At parties he would face infuriated ex-girlfriends with violence in their eyes. Ice-cube trays and blocks of wood. He was having a bad run. We decided on a whim, somewhere in the midst of that perfect entropy, to have a pine forest wedding. The Bubble stood around us and threw confetti and for a while at least he escaped the routine of being smacked around by past lovers. I loved him as much as I was capable of then, which was with everything I had left after devoting every inch of my waking life to my friends. He was subsumed into the Bubble and acquiesced gracefully. We barely paused to take a breath for long enough to sign the marriage licence.
It was probably the fog of acceptance that allowed that glorious period of The Bubble to stretch out for so long, a morally ambiguous vacation without calendar or close. The more time we spent together the more people had trouble telling us apart, as though we were just a braying mass of arms and legs and joy and flesh.
Gabi and I, being of similar build, being dark, being fond of neckerchiefs, would often be mistaken for the other. We didn’t discourage the confusion. I would titter graciously when complimented on my spastic burlesque dancing, she would grin bashfully when congratulated on her work with The Age. We tried to have a threeway once (‘wouldn’t that be a scream’), in a bedroom beaded with sweat above an Indian restaurant. Outside the room, a party throbbed. We kept seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of the other and ended up laughing so hard we couldn’t go on, much to the obvious displeasure of our rapidly deflating contender.
On mornings after we would drag ourselves from sleep, heads rattling like dice, and look in dismay at our to-do list. There were family lunches to go to. A work meeting. Some breeder was holding a baby shower.
‘We can’t just say we’re hungover and can’t make it,’ Gabi once lamented. ‘It’s not a decent enough excuse.’
‘We need another excuse, then. Something they can’t argue with.’
‘Just strange them out. Invent a really messed up reason.’
‘Fine.’
Which is how, I guess, we once texted a girlfriend with apologies regarding her afternoon tea party.
Dog shat bed, the text read. Not coming.
We bought a bottle of wine and a wheel of white Castello cheese and sat in the backyard squirting each other with Super Soakers. Everybody came over and told us we’d done the right thing by not going. We were staying in the Bubble.
The Bubble put on an art show. We drew names out of hats and created a secret art piece based on another member of the group. For weeks everybody worked tirelessly, sheathed in giggles and whispers. Upstairs at a bar on Smith Street, we showed off the results of our labours and congratulated ourselves on our cleverness and unshakeable friendship. It couldn’t have been more self-absorbed and beautiful. ‘Look at us,’ we were saying. ‘Look at how much we love each other. Look at how funny and interesting and devoted we are. This can never change. This will never change.’ Dirty Derek made stickers featuring a wicked looking child holding a big ball up to his face. SMELL THE BUBBLE, it said, with details of the exhibition printed beneath. ‘Everybody is showing tonight.’
It never felt exclusive but people inevitably started feeling left out. The high fashion Fitzroyals despise
d our pack mentality and one of them kicked a window in at the gallery on the exhibition’s opening night. Drunk, we suggested a street duel, like in West Side Story, to be held on Johnston Street. Them in their Lush wide-legged pants and asymmetrical haircuts, us in Miller shirts and cowboy boots. Last person left dancing gets dibs on the Napier Hotel. They took one look at us, boorish and ridiculous, and walked away.
‘The Napier is ours!’ cried Spicer, in skittish triumph.
The Bubble used to make an annual visit to Lake Eildon, where we would hire out houseboats and spend the weekend cheating death by writing ourselves off and racing speedboats in the nude. We weren’t allowed to commandeer a speedboat without a licenced driver, so Blair simply went and got his licence on the morning of the trip. He was nicknamed ‘GTD’ with good reason. He didn’t get a question wrong in the exam, just walked out grinning and waving his new boat licence over his head. We made him personalised business cards to celebrate. Gold, with a cartoon of his capable face gracing one side. ‘Get Things Done’ it read simply, with his mobile number beneath.
The houseboat trips were exercises in heedlessness. Cath’s sister broke her leg in two places and was forced to sit on the back of the boat in abject agony while eight people high on drugs told her not to worry, it was probably just a scratch, here, have some Panadeine Forte and a red wine. Her face was etched with pain and the Panadeine Forte pulsated through her bloodstream and made her vomit. Dirty Derek, who had been watching over her in a fatherly fashion, took one look at the ice cream container full of upchuck and vomited too. Somebody else passing decided all that vomiting seemed a great lark, and heaved lavishly into the water. It was like that scene in Stand By Me where the fat kid makes an entire community of rednecks puke. I kept waiting for Richard Dreyfuss’s voice to say something pithy and poignant about all that we were going through. In the end the poor girl had to wait til morning, when somebody was finally sober enough to take her into town and ferry her to a doctor. Word trickled back to the boat that she was alive and in plaster and we toasted her health and good fortune.
Inspired by the Eildon surrounds we would strip off and roll around in the mud, feral with drink. I formed an army with Derek and Larkis and we stood for hours in the shallows, naked skin burning, jabbing oversized sticks at anybody who dared attempt to pass. Somebody took a photograph of us from behind, standing there, backsides grazing the water. Dirty Derek ultimately turned it into a painting. You can see it now, hanging over a bar in High Street. At the time, we wanted to document everything. Art shows and videos and paintings and Polaroids. Perhaps even then we knew it wouldn’t last forever.
It was on one of those Eildon trips that we saw a light plane dip across the lake. Afterwards, everybody swore they caught the moment it clipped the power lines and fell, but mostly we remembered when all the emergency services vehicles started circling the water. Four people were missing. We watched from the shore as a helicopter buzzed overhead in vain hope of finding life.
‘Fuck,’ somebody said.
We did not want this reminder of our mortality.You could sense the pull of pain and real life.
Jarrod opened another beer and we turned our backs to the water.
‘How did we not die?’ I said to Blair, years later. ‘All that riding around in the speedboat . . . everybody was so fucked up.’
‘I don’t know. We just didn’t.’
‘Yes, but how?’
After the crash I started leaving parties early, tasting the hangover even before I’d taken my first drink. That front-row ticket to death had shaken me. I became famous for my sneak-away act, perfecting the art of being mid-conversation with somebody and then disappearing as they turned to refill their drink. ‘The Hardy Slip-Off ’, the Bubble would call it, annoyed by my cunning. I hated goodbyes at parties, hated once I’d decided to leave being strongarmed into staying for one more drink, one more pill, one more investment in tomorrow’s hangover. If I was caught picking up my bag and sliding out the front door I would lie and say I was just going to the 7-Eleven to buy a mixer, or Pringles. If the person who caught me called my bluff I would be inevitably dragged back into somebody’s bedroom or other, where the rest of the party all lay in a big messy pile, and find myself talking about Alex Chilton records until morning.
One time it was Gabi who caught me. She had stepped off the living-room dancefloor for a rare moment and was getting a glass of water. I froze, guiltily, one arm in my dufflecoat.
‘You’re not going.’
‘It’s five-thirty in the morning!’
Gabi came close. Pointed to the living room. I could hear the delighted rodeo of fun, of a room crammed full of everybody we knew and loved at that moment. Nobody was missing. Everybody was in. All hands on deck.
‘All this,’ she said solemnly. ‘It’s not going to last forever.’
‘Please don’t try and guilt trip me.’
‘It won’t.’
She was right. This permutation of people, the comradely ‘all in’ mentality, couldn’t last. It would break and scatter, little pieces of glass. Somebody would decline a party invitation due to a work function and then someone else would get pregnant and the Bubble would pop. It was bound to happen eventually. At the time, though, it felt endless.
Gabi likes to remind me of this story.
‘You took your coat off and ran on to the dancefloor,’ she smiles. ‘For once you came back. I bet you’re glad you did now.’
The Bubble parties grew more debauched, the need to behave in a fashion more brutal and urgent. We would wake up, not remembering coming home, not recalling who we’d been with or what we’d done with them.
Over afternoon drinks recently I was told about a girl who went through a terrifying stage of getting blind drunk and going home with strange men and shitting somewhere mysterious in their houses.
‘She’d wake up knowing something terrible had happened,’ my friend said solemnly, ‘but not know where she’d done it.’
‘What sort of places did she shit?’
‘Oh, everywhere. Behind the couch or the curtains, mostly. Once she did it on a pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. Then she went to see a psychologist who told her it was a direct result of father issues.’
I found this intensely funny and strange and frightening. And then remembered that one day, in the thick of Bubbledom after a long bender, when Gabi appeared in the doorway of my bedroom.
‘You have to see this,’ she said with a shocked expression, beckoning me into the bathroom.
Someone had shat in a drawer.
‘Did you do this?’ I asked her.
She looked horrified.
‘No! Of course not. I mean . . .’ she paused. We looked into the drawer again. ‘I was pretty out of it when I came home. But I think I’d remember . . . this.’
We agreed that yes, one would probably recall doing something as significant as rising from bed in the middle of the night and going to the toilet in a drawer full of makeup and hairpieces, which thankfully ruled us both out. We further agreed that it was probably Matty, who was still at this moment passed out in my bedroom and seemed overall capable of such an act. But the fact remained that for a moment we had doubted ourselves. Our brains were so fried with drink and night there was a chance that in the brume of sleep we had stooped that low. Did I really do that?
‘And on top of your favourite scarf,’ I wailed to Gabi sympathetically, conveniently ignoring the fact that a soiled neckerchief was probably the least of our problems given that we were now getting so fucked up somebody in our house was shitting on furniture.
The unfairness and acceptance of adulthood and responsibility kept creeping upon us, piece by piece. Shannon and his girlfriend Jonesy broke up, then Sime and I did. Gabi and her feller danced a few torturous rounds before she left him for the American guitarist who would become the father of her child. Our Scottish friend Danny, who had led the immigration department on a merry chase for years, was eventually tapped on the
shoulder and sternly asked to leave the country. We trooped out to the airport as one to say goodbye, dressed in idiotic costumes, chanting, making a racket. Someone was passing a hipflask full of whisky. Danny kept his split-melon grin for most of the day before it fell apart, in a big mess of wet washing, right at the departure gates. As he waved goodbye, the fare-thee-well smiles faded from our faces too, and the gravity of our loss began to sink in.
He didn’t come back for four years.
Eventually everybody started throwing the word ‘depression’ about like ‘drug comedown’ or ‘period pain’. It was used as an excuse for cheating, for the most part. One untidy night in the toilets at the Tote, when revealed in a blister of finger pointing and recrimination, was credited entirely to depression.
‘I’m so sorry I had sex with that bartender in an alley off Little Lonsdale Street,’ we pleaded through sobs and curled up, agonised fingers. ‘I think . . . I think I have depression.’
Depression was the reason we had such long and torturous affairs, sneaking guiltily off to the beige surrounds of the City Crown Hotel while unassuming partners toured the country. Depression was the reason we ingested chemicals and chased tail at music festivals. Depression was the reason I had another three-way which ended in a huge fight complete with hair-pulling and the spat-out, accusing question why don’t you two just stay here and fuck each other then?
I asked my father about my Great Aunty Mary, who shot herself in the head when I was eight years old. I remember walking to the milk bar with my friend Amanda and seeing the story spread-eagled across the front page of the Sun. MARY HARDY SUICIDE.
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