‘Have you ever been suicidal?’ Cynthia asked.
‘Not yet. What about you?’
‘No. Never. I’m terrified of dying.’
We got off the bridge and into the backstreets of New Farm. We paused every now and then and kissed, good kisses, leaning up against trees and fences. Life was strange. Only a few weeks earlier I’d seen people doing exactly this and I’d hated them for it. And now here I was. Doing it myself. And it didn’t feel as ugly as it looked. Or as beautiful.
‘Let’s find a park,’ I said. ‘Let’s fuck on the grass.’
‘Not in New Farm. People die in the parks around here. People get their heads cut off.’
Which was true. We went on home.
When we got there, we found Leo and Molly sitting in the couches, watching TV and sipping on beer.
‘How’d you get in?’
‘The old guy up the hall opened it for us. We told him we were friends of yours.’
Leo and Molly seemed as drunk as we were, or maybe they were stoned. We sat down and watched TV for a while. Leo wanted to know all about the heroin. He was annoyed I hadn’t told him about it, brought him in on the deal. I described it as best I could. Molly offered the opinion that heroin was a dangerous, evil drug. It wasn’t natural. She was only into natural drugs. Marijuana and sometimes mushrooms.
I started drinking Leo and Molly’s beer. Over the TV we could hear a fight building in the flat next door, the new neighbours again. Mostly it was a woman’s voice we could hear. Cathy’s voice. Raymond’s was indistinct. They were arguing about money. I told the others about the cut on her face.
‘It’ll be a good-looking scar, though,’ I said, ‘when it’s healed.’
Things next door began to get violent. Something heavy smashed against the wall. Cathy was screaming.
Vass came running into the room. ‘You gonna call the police?’
‘Is there any point?’
Raymond was yelling now. There was another crash on the wall. It sounded like the phone. The bells rang.
‘I don’t think he’s hitting her yet,’ Leo suggested.
We all listened. There were muffled sounds, but no more yelling or screaming.
‘He’s a mean bastard,’ said Vass, ‘and he steals too.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘I’d do something about your door, if I was you. It’s the easiest to open in the whole damn place.’
He went out.
‘He’s the one who let us in,’ said Leo.
Things quietened down. Leo and Molly stayed on. I mentioned that Cynthia and I had seen Rachel.
‘I saw Rachel not so long ago,’ said Leo, ‘she was depressed. Her life isn’t going too well. I think she misses you.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Jesus, you guys were friends for years. And then you just stopped seeing her.’
‘It wasn’t just me. What’s wrong with her life, anyway?’
‘Men, mainly. She keeps falling for arseholes.’
So some things hadn’t changed.
Leo and Molly left about two in the morning. The house was quiet. Cynthia and I undressed and climbed into bed.
‘I like them,’ Cynthia said. ‘I thought you were going to ask them to stay, but I’m glad you didn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t ask them to stay. They’d end up in bed with us. And I’d have to watch them fucking again. It wasn’t much fun the first time.’
‘No. (God. Leo fucking. Leo coming. It’d be evil.’
‘Everyone looks evil when they come. The animal is out.’
‘You don’t look evil. You look like you always look. Your face doesn’t even change.’
‘Really? That’s alarming.’
‘Yes. It is. Do you have any porn around here?’
‘Magazines, you mean?’
‘That’s what I mean.’
I explained that porn of any extreme sort wasn’t legally available in Queensland, except by mail order or on the black market. I didn’t have any black market connections. Nor did I ever have the twenty or thirty dollars the mail order firms were asking. I did, however, have a friend called Harry in Sydney, where certain magazines at least were legal. Non-violent erotica. Harry was a porn fanatic. He toured the shops regularly and collected hundreds of volumes. And sometimes he’d mail me three or four issues that he was tired of. He thought I needed them. And they were always in mint condition. Crisp and clean. If he’d ever masturbated over them, he’d done it very carefully.
‘So you’ve got some? Here?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Well, c’mon, let me see.’
I climbed out of bed, turned on the light. I dug the magazines out of a box. There were about twenty of them. Things like ‘Teen Sex’, or ‘Cum’ or ‘Anal — Volume Three’. I wasn’t like Harry. I used them to masturbate all the time. I hadn’t treated them well. The covers had fallen off and the pages were bent.
Cynthia sat up and started going through them. ‘I love these things,’ she said. ‘Some jerk offered me a role in a porn film once. The money was good, but not that fucking good.’
‘No. And you were a serious actor.’
Cynthia had been involved in theatre at one stage. Amateur productions. It’d gone on for three or four years. She secured an Actors Equity card. She made it as an extra in a film called ‘Windsurfer’. She auditioned for ‘Neighbours’ and missed out. Then she gave it away. Her skin hadn’t been so bad in those days, she said, and she was a lot thinner.
‘Problem is,’ she said, turning the pages, ‘if I think about this sort of thing too much I get turned off. The exploitation and all that. The thing with porn is not to think too logically. You just have to look. And make up your own fantasies.’
We kept going through the pages, taking in all the big pricks and open cunts and jammed arseholes. We didn’t bother with the print. The stories were laughable. At least the pictures were just pictures. And they did what they were supposed to do. We pushed the magazines aside and started on each other. It was violent, pretentious sex. We were trying to match the photographs. Trying to make it hurt.
I ended up behind her, slamming it in. It wasn’t that good, but in our way we were better than the pictures. Pictures didn’t have sound or smell. They missed out on the farts and the bad breath and the wet sucking noises ... all the things about sex that you remembered.
And I was coming, despite all the alcohol. ‘Not yet,’ Cynthia said, ‘not yet.’ I held on. It never worked. ‘Stop,’ I said. Cynthia refused. She slammed her hips back. Then it was flooding through. Cynthia pounded her fist against the mattress. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ I kept on as long as I could, then it was just pain. I stopped. Pulled out. Collapsed.
Cynthia stayed there, face down.
I said, ‘No good?’
‘No.’
She coughed, sniffed. Rolled over to me.
‘We’re really going to have to do something about this.’
FOURTEEN
Cynthia started work. Twenty-five, thirty hours a week. Usually she took the car. Sometimes she walked. It was only ten or fifteen minutes on foot. I picked her up if she was finishing late. I’d sit in the bar and have a beer or two while she closed up. I didn’t see much of the manager, Brian, not at that hour. He generally started his drinking around ten in the morning. Scotch and water at first, then straight scotch.
Cynthia set about straightening out the house. The first problem was the lighting in the toilets and showers. The agents supplied new lightbulbs every few months, but the other residents usually stole them to replace their own. At night it was a matter of picking your way through the shit and piss in the dark. I’d given up. I pissed in the sink. It wasn’t so easy for Cynthia. So she bought a new set of bulbs herself, marked them with red X’s and installed them. She went from flat to flat threatening the old men with violence if she ever found one of her bulbs in their rooms.
They were impressed. The bulbs stayed. I stopped pissing in the s
ink.
We washed the walls of the flat, and went shopping for material to make curtains. We played Scrabble, cooked meals, watched TV and kept trying to work it out in bed. It was a pleasant life. And it’d come from nowhere. Luck was still with us. An eight letter word on a triple word score.
We saw a few people. Went out. Helen and Dave came over a couple of times before they went back to Melbourne. No one suggested heroin. We didn’t have the money any more, neither did they. Cynthia and I did buy some grass from Leo. We smoked it at night, fucked on it. It was better than doing it straight.
Cynthia’s skin got worse. It was all the alcohol and the dust in the flat. At night she rolled over and I scratched the disease on her back until she slept. She was a restless sleeper. As soon as I stopped the scratching she curled up against me and clung around my chest. I couldn’t sleep that way. I needed to roll around. After a while I’d pry her arms off and push her away. She’d come back, time and time again through the night.
She had nighmares. I woke up one night to find her moaning in her sleep, terrified.
‘Cynthia? Wake up. What’s wrong?’
‘Gordon?’ She was still asleep. She reached for me.
‘I’m here.’
She grabbed me, held on. ‘Gordon,’ she sighed. Her breathing relaxed. Her face was jammed up hot against mine, still sleeping. A little girl face. And my name, just my name had the power to fend off her bad dreams.
One night I too had a nighmare. I woke up screaming her name. Cynthia leapt up and started screaming back. We were thumping each other in the dark. Cynthia got to the light switch, flicked it on. We looked at each other.
‘Jesus, Gordon ...’
A door opened, someone moved in the hallway. ‘You okay in there?’ It was Vass. Hearing aid switched on.
‘We’re okay,’ I yelled.
‘Sounded like someone was dying.’
‘Nobody is dying.’
‘Okay then ...’
‘What were you dreaming about?’ Cynthia asked.
‘You’d fallen in front of a train. I was watching and I couldn’t get to you in time.’
It didn’t sound like much, but the train had been huge and ugly and evil. It was screaming down on her. Her legs were across the tracks, they were going to be sliced right off.
‘So you do love me,’ she said.
‘I don’t know about that, Cynthia. I don’t want to see you die.’
We lit cigarettes. Left the light on for a while.
‘This is pathetic, isn’t it,’ she said.
‘Who knows, Cynthia, maybe it was a warning.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Maybe I’m the train.’
‘You? Don’t panic, Gordon. I think I’m capable of getting off the tracks.’
On other nights Cynthia couldn’t sleep for the itching. Scratching her back wasn’t enough. She was in real pain. She clawed at her face and her shoulders and raised blood. I took her hands and held them behind her back just to stop it. She twisted and swore and cried. We struggled. We fucked for the sake of distraction. Next morning her face would be raked and livid. She kept her fingernails cut down to the quick just to blunt her fingers, but it only helped a little. She’d leave out the alcohol for a day or two. Leave out the soap when she showered. Take aspirin and panadol and chain smoke to occupy her hands ...
On one of these nights she sucked my toes, and four or five days later, rashes erupted on my feet.
‘That’s really some disease you’ve got there,’ I said.
‘It can’t be the eczema, it’s not contagious. I told you. Eczema is not even a disease. It’s a condition.’
The skin was peeling away between my toes. I rubbed tinea cream into it. It didn’t heal.
‘What is that?’
Talk to the old men,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones you share the showers with.’
Sickness was in the air. We talked about all the diseases we’d ever had.
‘What about venereal diseases?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever caught one? You must’ve at some stage. All those men.’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever checked?’
‘No.’
And I had to admire that. She was heading for death a lot faster than I was.
FIFTEEN
A couple of weeks passed. One of my brothers, Charles, was getting married. My invitation said ‘Gordon and friend’. I invited Cynthia. I said, ‘Are you ready to meet the family? All of them this time?’
She was.
The wedding was in a church in the Valley. The reception was in one of the Valley hotels. Cynthia wasn’t so sure about going to the wedding itself. It was a Catholic wedding, with an accompanying mass.
‘But you aren’t even Catholic any more,’ she said.
‘Charlie is — or even if he isn’t, that’s the way they’re getting married. Have you ever seen a mass before?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll love it, then. You’ll find it interesting. Catholicism can be very weird to the outsider.’
‘Okay, okay.’
We went. It was at St Patrick’s church in the Valley, three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. I liked weddings. Not so much for the ceremony, and not necessarily for what they stood for, but the receptions were good. Free drinks, free food. I’d been to a lot of weddings. Charlie was the sixth member of the family to go, with two more already engaged. And if people were happy enough to get married, then I was happy enough for them to do it.
We started walking down at about two thirty. I was wearing the best suit coat and pants I owned, and a white shirt. Cynthia had tied my hair back with a black bow. It would pass instead of a tie. Cynthia herself was in her least worn black and white outfit.
‘We need new clothes,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of these clothes. I’ve been in pubs too long.’
‘New clothes? From where, and with what?’
‘You’ve already got an account at Myers, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t think they like me there any more. Besides, how often do we go to weddings?’
We arrived. The crowd was waiting around outside the church. We felt shabby.
All the family was there, a few of them from interstate. I introduced Cynthia around. To Anne (my sister) and her husband Mitchell and their five children. To Mary (my sister) and her husband Edmund and their four children. To Stephen (my brother) and his wife Renee and their three children. To James (my brother) and his wife Ruth and their two children. To Elizabeth (my sister) and her husband Kevin and their two children. To Joseph (my brother) and his fiancee Pamela. To Louise (my sister) and her fiancee Patrick. To my younger brother Michael. Then to my parents, Tom and Margaret Buchanan, which only left Charlie himself, and Lucy, his prospective wife, but that introduction would come later, after the wedding.
Cynthia lasted through it all. We didn’t bother with the uncles and aunts. Three o’clock rolled round and we went in.
It was a small church and a big crowd. Cynthia and I sat at the rear of the family group. The children played, hung over their parents’ shoulders, made faces. Cynthia made faces back. She loved kids. I wasn’t so sure. I followed the mass. Sixteen years of Catholic upbringing were still in me.
Cynthia watched me from time to time. She leaned over. ‘Stop it,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t even believe in any of this.’
‘Maybe not. But it’s difficult. If you ever want to torture me, Cynthia, all you have to do is tie me up, stand in front of me and say “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen” — and watch me struggle to cross myself. The ritual dies hard.’
‘Great. Thanks. I’ll remember that.’
After an hour it was over. Charlie and Lucy were married. We filed out of the church, gathered for the family photographs, then hurried off to the pub.
‘Is that what Catholic masses are always like?’ Cynthia asked, on the way.
‘More or less.’
‘Jesus, no wonder you’re so fu
cked up.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Catholicism might have a lot to answer for, but then so do I.’
It was a good reception. Charlie and Lucy were a relaxed couple. No formal seating, just food being carried around by waiters and an open bar. I started up on bourbon and Cynthia settled into vodkas and soda. Double nips for the first few. I lost Cynthia in the crowd and various members of the family swooped in.
‘So who is she?’
‘I met her at work.’
‘But a heroin addict, Gordon?’
‘Who told you that? Anyway, she’s given it up.’
‘Yeah? For how long?’
‘Long enough.’
‘She’s pretty abrupt. You can’t talk to her.’
‘C’mon. She’s nervous about meeting everyone.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where’s she living?’
‘With me.’
‘With you. Do Mum and Dad know?’
‘More or less.’
‘So they don’t know you’re sleeping together.’
‘It is a one bedroom flat.’
‘Did you have to ask her to move in?’
‘Look, I like her. I might even love her.’
‘Love, Gordon? Love?’
‘I know. It’s a terrible thing to say ...’
I wandered to and from the the bar. The night dissolved into drunken conversations. The family drank well. They were a good family. They’d get used to Cynthia.
The next thing I remembered I was sitting next to the piano, listening to one of the guests sing a long and involved song about women. He seemed to know what he was talking about. Cynthia appeared, swaying and smiling. She said, ‘It’s time I took you home.’
I looked around. There were only about a dozen people left.
‘Okay.’
We staggered home, clutching at each other and kissing.
She said, ‘I heard what you said tonight. You said you loved me.’
Praise Page 9