The Naked Drinking Club

by Rhona Cameron

  ‘Yes, it was a good home, and there were loads of nice caravan holidays …’ I petered out at the end, suddenly feeling great sadness for the pain I had caused my adopted mother over the years, and the hatred I had for my unhappy and bitter father.

  ‘Well, then, I did what was best.’

  I said nothing and helped myself to another of her cigarettes. She lit me up and I touched her hand briefly. I was desperate to go to the toilet but was afraid to leave in case she was gone when I returned. In the end I would have to risk it, trusting that the aunties were too understanding of both our sides to let it end abruptly.

  I sat on the toilet peeing, thinking about the Bobby Darin songs I knew, and my love of the jukebox. Someone else came into the cubicle next to me and peed just after me. Outside, I stared into the mirror trying to imagine a male version of me. I looked at my nice mouth and pressed my fingers to it.

  The toilet flushed and my mother walked out. I didn’t know what to say now that we were alone, so I compared our heights. We shared the hand dryer, both standing there after our hands were dry, moving them around. I strained over the noise of it.

  ‘I’m slightly taller than you – how tall are you?’

  ‘Five three,’ she said.

  The dryer stopped.

  ‘I’m five five.’ I stood close to her, comparing heights.

  ‘They made us do it, you know, there was no choice.’

  I held the door open for her and we walked back to our seats.

  ‘Right then, how you both feeling?’ asked Carol.

  ‘I have to get going,’ said my mother.

  We all sat down but my mother put her cigarettes away, which meant my time with her was nearly up. I drank down the remainder of my wine, and considered taking my mother’s empty glass as a keepsake in case I never had another drink with her, but thought it would probably get broken during the journey home.

  She fixed her smudged mascara with a handkerchief. ‘I have to go, pet, sorry.’

  This was the first time she had said ‘sorry’. I was expecting more.

  ‘Can I have a contact number or address?’

  ‘No, sorry, this is all I can do, and I wish you the very best, really I do.’

  I started to feel slight panic. The sisters got up like bodyguards, in case things got out of hand, no doubt.

  ‘OK, then please can I have something of yours? Anything?’

  ‘I haven’t got anything.’

  ‘Please, could you all look in your bags, and give me something, anything.’

  They all rooted around. My mother went into the small zip compartment in her handbag.

  ‘I’ve only got this. It’s just a stupid thing I’ve had in this bag since Christmas, I think. It’s just something stupid from a cracker.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  She handed me a tiny silver alien, like the robot thing in the seventies Smash adverts; it was just bigger than my thumbnail.

  ‘And this.’ Then she passed me a small silver aeroplane the same size. ‘I got them in a Christmas cracker and they’ve been in my bag all this time.’

  ‘Just stupid things, like,’ said my auntie Carol, offering me a small pillbox from her bag. I put the plane and the alien in the pillbox.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re wanting with them,’ said my mother.

  ‘Just something to keep,’ I said, already attaching massive meaning to them. The alien, of course, was me, and the plane was what brought me to her, and what took her from me, and what would take me away from her. The pillbox was for the bitter pill she’d had to swallow all these years. (Plus, ‘The Bitterest Pill I Ever Had To Swallow’ by The Jam, a song I fixated on when I was at school.) These items were perfect. ‘I want to say something important to you.’

  She looked afraid again, like when she first entered. ‘All right, but then I’ve got to go, I’m sorry.’

  My mum stood up.

  ‘If I can’t get in touch with you after this, I want you to know you can with me. One day I’ll get my shit together and do something, and I’ll be someone, famous maybe, and you can come to me. I won’t mind, OK?’

  ‘I know you wouldn’t, but I don’t want to get your hopes up. Let’s just get on with our lives. It’s for the best, really.’

  ‘And maybe now you know who your mother is, you can get on, Kerry,’ said Auntie Deb, trying to end things on a positive note.

  ‘Why did you name me Joanna?’ I asked, getting some last-minute questions in.

  ‘No particular reason,’ she said, my auntie Deb guiding her out. Auntie Carol stretched out her arm for me to follow them.

  Outside at the water, it had become muggy and cloudy. Some slight rain was starting, and it thundered in the distance.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said, looking up.

  Auntie Deb stood by her car beside my mother, and Auntie Carol by her car behind them. I was close to tears, so pressed the pillbox into the palm of my hand as a distraction.

  My mother and I hugged in silence, and then broke off.

  ‘Take care of yourself and good luck,’ she said, before walking back to the car. I couldn’t speak. My auntie touched my arm and I turned away.

  ‘WAIT!’ shouted my mother, just as the sky emptied enormous spots of rain that drummed on the car roofs. She ran back to me, in tears.

  ‘Listen to me. I need to tell you this. There is never a day that goes by, never a day, when I don’t think of you, you remember that, OK? Never a day when I don’t wonder what you are doing and how you’ve turned out, and your birthdays are hell for me, do you understand?’

  I nodded but couldn’t speak for crying.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry, I had no money and I couldn’t keep you, I had no choice! You’re a lovely girl, and I wanted what was best for you. I would have loved things to have been different but they’re not, so we just have to get on with it. I hope you find happiness, really I do, and I’m sorry.’ She grabbed both my arms and we hugged and cried, then she got a paper handkerchief out of her bag and blew her nose. ‘Never a day, remember that.’

  I nodded manically, still crying, moved in a way I had never quite felt before.

  Yet, as I watched her getting into the car and driving off, I didn’t feel torn away from her, or as though half of me was with her or anything; after all, I had no memories of her, before today, nothing to miss. I had longed for something always, since I could ever remember anything, and had always felt an emptiness I didn’t understand. I hoped my emptiness would go now, now I knew that she was real, and that I was made like everyone else, and that I came from a body and a face that I had seen with my own eyes.

  I just felt I’d see her again, maybe a long time from now. I just knew it. I watched the car go out of sight, my auntie letting me stand there for ages, looking up at the dark clouds, getting soaked, loving the totally appropriate rain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  THERE WAS A freshness in the air now that the rain had cleared the mugginess, and the sun was already getting bright. You could tell it was going to be a scorcher of a day. We crept around the wooded undergrowth.

  ‘I don’t understand, where are they?’ asked Karin.

  Jim was in front with a stick, prodding and poking at the ground. ‘Don’t want a bloody snake bite.’

  ‘Mate, the snakes can hear you comin’, they’re more bloody scared than you are.’ Scotty limped along, aided by a stick, still recovering from his injuries.

  ‘Maybe the kangaroos are still asleep,’ I said, following Jim, agreeing with his snake caution.

  ‘You’ll see some, don’t worry, Uncle Scotty’s not going to let you down.’

  It was just after dawn. Jim and I stayed up all night talking when I got back from seeing my mum. It was so good to see him, and the others. We sat out on the porch at the backpackers’, watching bouts of fork lightning. The others had gone to bed around midnight. I didn’t want to talk to them much, or to drink much, or go anywhere. I wanted to be quiet w
ith thoughts of my mother, and replay her words in my head. But Jim was good and easy to be with. He listened to me telling the whole story initially, then just sat with me quietly and hugged me when I became tearful.

  It was fair to say that the trip was a wash-out from a selling point of view, and we’d all decided that evening that we should return to Sydney the following morning. Just before sunrise, Jim and I woke the others up and told them that we couldn’t go back until we had seen some genuinely wild and roaming free kangaroos. The man on reception had told us that we were near a forest, where if you got up before sunrise, you could see hundreds of them running around. From where we were standing, however, it looked extremely doubtful. There was nothing for miles but charcoal trees, grey and brittle, and scarred ground from previous summer fires.

  ‘I’m going home in two weeks, to start back at uni,’ said Andrea, slowing down to walk with us.

  ‘We won’t talk about leaving just now.’ Karin put her hands on top of her head and held them. Jim responded by putting his arm round her waist.

  ‘What about you, Scotty?’ I asked.

  ‘Me, well I’ll probably kick around at my mates up here for a week, until me bruising goes down.’ Scotty’s face was still badly swollen, and he had stitches above his eye, and a nose that was broken out of shape. ‘Then, I reckon, I’ll do this until the end of the summer, if it’s still going, or I’ll get some work on the prawn boats up in Darwin. Winter, I’ll go up to the ski resorts.’

  ‘Yeah? Jesus, I didn’t even know there was snow here,’ said Karin.

  ‘Oh yeah, we got the whole lot. What about you, mate?’ Scotty asked Jim.

  ‘I’m not going back, no way. I like it here, it’s easy.’

  ‘I think it’s too easy,’ I said. ‘I think there’s something missing.’

  Scotty laughed, then sneezed, tripped over a log on the ground and fell. As we laughed, out of nowhere hundreds of kangaroos of all sizes ran in packs up ahead where the edge of the woods met a field.

  ‘SKIPPY!’ shouted Jim. They kept on coming from everywhere around us, from out behind trees up ahead: small ones, huge ones, like dinosaurs on the horizon, some with little Joey ears sticking out their pouches.

  ‘WOW! GO, GO, GO, GO, BABY!’ shouted Karin.

  We all cheered them on. Scotty howled and whooped. Andrea was frightened and clung to Scotty, which he loved. Whichever way we turned, there were kangaroos leaping and darting to join the others up on the field. It went on for ages until the woods were emptied.

  ‘Fuck me!’ said Scotty. There was a crack of dry wood behind me.

  I span round, to find an enormous kangaroo staring right at me, its tail a good five feet long. I was terrified, knowing nothing about how to approach them.

  ‘Don’t move, just be still, take it easy,’ said Scotty.

  It towered over me and began clicking. A tiny little baby ’roo popped up from its pouch, its ears longer than its little face. It stood rooted to the spot. I moved towards it with my hand out.

  ‘Easy,’ said Scotty. ‘Take it nice and slow.’

  ‘It’s all right, no one’s going to harm you,’ I whispered.

  It looked at me again, and then skipped off in the direction of the fields to join the others. Everybody blew out and sighed with relief.

  ‘Jesus, you were lucky,’ said Scotty. ‘They can be vicious, especially when they’re carrying a Joey.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  * * *

  NO SALE IN one week was my all-time low. I was bored and had hit a wall with the whole thing. I sat in the dark on a kerb on Dawson Hill, in the suburb of Manly, smoking and listening to some bird sounds, hoping that I’d catch Scotty circling the area. I’d had some possible interest from the last house on the corner in a pair of Blue Mountains, but couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to push it towards a close. I put it down to losing some of my magic, but Jim said it was simply a job that nobody could do for very long without burning out.

  It wasn’t just me who’d become slow. Karin had moved nothing much since returning from the trip, and even less since Andrea left a few weeks back.

  Scotty parped his horn, which was completely unnecessary given that he and I were the only two beings in the street. He pulled alongside. I didn’t get up.

  ‘Nothing happening, uh?’ he said, leaning over to the passenger window.

  ‘Nup, sorry, nothing.’

  ‘Wanna beer, mate?’ He drummed on the dashboard.

  ‘How about the others?’

  ‘Yeah, new guys did OK. Dirk’s rounding them up.’

  Dirk, a tall thin humourless South African guy, had taken over Greg’s job, after he became just too out of it to function. We had arrived back in Sydney to find him drunk out of his mind, claiming that Anaya had left him, perhaps for Cairns, or Darwin, with a considerable amount of the company’s money. I wasn’t surprised, and wondered if my path would ever cross with hers again.

  When Greg told us the news, Jim said nothing to him about her visit to me. As soon as Greg left, Dirk was quickly dispatched from another team in Melbourne, swiftly springing into action, advertising for new recruits and training up two teams at once. Scotty was elevated to supervisor and drove a bunch of new young hopefuls around, with me reluctantly sandwiched in the middle of two German boys, and Justine, an annoying, uptight English girl who worked in the tennis world.

  I was glad Scotty and I were alone and away from the new recruits, and a beer sounded as good as ever.

  ‘What about Jim and Karin?’ I threw my folder in the back and got into the passenger seat.

  ‘Dunno, probably crashed early. Come on, let’s get going, there’s a schooner with my name on it.’

  The more I knew Scotty the more I liked him and admired him; he just kept at it the whole time. At first I thought I could see through his act, but lately, since the others arrived, I got the feeling that this was genuinely him. Jim had faded into the background a little, spending most of his time with Karin, organising their trip to New Zealand, where they planned to travel together for the rest of the year. Sometimes they helped out, giving demonstrations to the new sellers, but, like me, their hunger and love of it had gone.

  ‘Do you wanna know what I think?’ he said, beaming away at me.

  ‘Of course I do.’ I beamed back.

  ‘Think me and you should get a tattoo.’ He looked at me, waiting for my reaction.

  ‘I don’t believe this.’ I covered my face with my hands and slowly dragged them over it.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing.’

  ‘Now that I’m on the mend, could take it, I reckon, little keepsake of our adventure up north, eh?’

  I was excited by his suggestion. ‘Fuck!’

  ‘What do you reckon we should get?’

  ‘When were you born again?’

  ‘Sixty-five,’ said Scotty.

  ‘Yep, me too.’ I banged on the roof. ‘Year of the snake.’

  ‘Snake it is, then!’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said again.

  ‘Get it done tomorrow, if you like, I know a place down town.’

  I sat back smiling. ‘Where to now?’ I asked, as Scotty retuned the radio.

  ‘Usual.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ I searched in the glove compartment for the Billy Idol tape; it was at the end of the track that we often played on the drive back from a night’s selling. I rewound, hardly listening to Scotty rambling on about the new team and their recent selling accolades. I waited until we reached Sydney Harbour Bridge before starting the song that had become my latest number one.

  I slumped down watching the giant steel girders that they called the coat-hanger pass over us, playing a game in my head that involved us driving under certain parts of the bridge during certain breaks in the music. Scotty drove with one hand, thumping the other one on the roof.

  ‘Don’t you know that we’re hot in the city, Hot in the city, tonight …’

/>   Mac stood at the bar as usual, looking up at a muted TV. He had always looked the same since I first set eyes on him: tired, sad and uninterested. But tonight he looked particularly weary. Now I had got to know him, I failed to find him as mysterious and intriguing as the first few times I drank with him, and had come to the conclusion that he was maybe just a bored and broken old man. We exchanged words now and then when buying drinks at the bar, but never spent any other time together, since the night I stayed in his room.

  ‘Still here, then?’ he mumbled, smiling away as though there had been some huge irony or something.

  ‘You mean, since last night?’

  ‘Just still here, that’s all, still knocking around?’ He looked smarter than usual, in one of his three outfits I’d seen in his strange minimalist wardrobe that night.

  ‘You look smart.’

  ‘Funeral,’ he said, his elbow holding him up on the bar, with his front teeth resting on his thumbnail and a spire of cigarette smoke floating up from his nostrils.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, toasting his glass with my whisky.

  ‘Here’s to the goners,’ he said, clinking so hard that his drink spilled over his hand.

  ‘Now, before you start, you’re not getting a bloody free one,’ said Val, wiping the bar with a cloth. Scotty waved for me to hurry up with his drinks.

  ‘Visa is running out soon,’ I said, putting down our schooners and chasers.

  Scotty drank half of his down. ‘That’s better,’ he said, checking out a girl crossing the floor. Bruce Springsteen sang about fires and sparks in the background. ‘Yeah, how long you got?’

  ‘Month or so.’

  ‘What will you do if you go back?’

  ‘Don’t know. I’ve missed my records, though. If I go back, the first thing I’ll do is get them back off my friend, get drunk and play them for days.’

  ‘Good plan,’ said Scotty.

  ‘How long will you hang around here?’ I asked, finishing half my schooner to level with Scotty.

  ‘Dunno, fuckin’ new year or something, head up to Darwin, to my mate’s boat, money’s good.’