by Mark Dapin
‘My first job here lasted twelve days,’ I said. ‘How do I explain that?’
‘Blame Jake Mendoza,’ he said. ‘Everybody else does.’
We arrived back at the La Fontaine. Lazarus stopped to let me out.
‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ said Mendoza. ‘Let me see what I can do for you, Anthony. I’m having lunch with the premier, but I’ll be free again at around four o’clock. Why don’t you join me here, and we can go for a drink.’
Helen was awake and dressed, sitting at the table, running her fingers through brochures. She didn’t ask where I had been, because we didn’t do that any more. I looked into her eyes and saw everything I wanted to leave behind, then she smiled at me, showing pink lipstick smeared across cream teeth.
She poured me a mug of tea from the pot. She had even bought some milk.
‘You’ve been out,’ I said.
‘Out and about,’ she replied, which didn’t add anything to the conversation.
I sat next to her, dropped one hand on her soft thigh, and she opened a catalogue of tours to Alice Springs and the red centre.
‘I was thinking maybe we could get away,’ said Helen, ‘Go off into the desert and ride kangaroos.’
She leaned into me. I breathed vanilla perfume.
‘We could sleep in a tent,’ she said.
‘I’ve slept in enough tents,’ I said.
‘But not with me.’
Our forearms crossed as she stroked my leg. She kissed me, like I had hoped she would. I lifted her loose white T-shirt over her head and noticed, for the thousandth time, that one of her breasts was bigger than the other. I wondered if she examined me this way, weighing and measuring, judging me against the promise.
I took one of her big brown nipples in my hand and squeezed it softly.
‘Let’s get a pet koala,’ she said, ‘and teach it to chase boomerangs.’
‘There’s no point,’ I said. ‘They always come back.’
‘That’s okay. Koalas don’t move. He’ll be there to catch it on the rebound.’
She tickled my belly.
‘Like me, you mean?’ I asked.
My phone rang. She told me to leave it. Her phone rang. She tried to roll me onto my back and pin me down. My phone beeped with a message. Hers did the same. Then mine rang again.
‘It’s the Jedi,’ said the caller, and I could hear him munching on his lunchtime pizza. ‘What’re you doing with Jake Mendoza, Slick? Are you working for him now?’
‘I’m not working for anyone,’ I told him.
‘We need you back on the team,’ he said.
‘There is no team,’ I said. ‘There is no “we”. There’s just you and your pizza-eating head and your tiny, withered, other-people’s-girlfriends-shagging cock. Get fucked. By a trannie. With AIDS.’
I cut off the call, but Jed rang me back.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘whatever you’re doing might clash with what I’m doing.’
‘That would be ironic, then, wouldn’t it?’ I said.
‘Tony,’ said Jed, ‘this isn’t the Aldershot news and weekend Advertiser. You don’t know your way around. There’s some serious people involved.’
I turned off my phone.
Helen tried to get me back into a submission hold. I pushed her away.
‘That coke you had the other day,’ I said. ‘Where was it from?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Columbia?’
‘Where did you buy it from?’
‘That bloke in Newtown,’ she said. ‘The one who used to be in that band.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, buttoning up my jeans, and I stood up, stormed out of the apartment and slammed the door.
Mendoza wanted to have a drink at the Hamilton Private Hotel on Bayswater Road. He said he liked it there because he had no business interest in the place, so he didn’t need to worry that the staff were stealing. He walked down Darlinghurst Road, with Lazarus by his side, like a prince among his subjects. He told a spruiker to button up his collar and asked a prostitute not to smoke in the street. The bouncer fiddled with his shirt and the girl stubbed out her cigarette. Mendoza laughed.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with that whorehouse,’ he told me. ‘But the workers on the strip respect me. If it wasn’t for Jake Mendoza and the Coca-Cola sign, there wouldn’t be a Kings Cross.’
Lazarus left us at the hotel steps and crossed the road. Every afternoon, said Mendoza, Lazarus liked to visit the New York restaurant on Kellet Street and sit in silence with men his own age. Mendoza waved me into the Hamilton. The hotel’s receptionist was asleep in his chair. Mendoza rang the desk bell, just to wake him up, then walked past him and into the public bar. A butter-blonde barmaid served me a beer and Mendoza a glass of shiraz. At the pool table a man with an angry moko played silent eight-ball against another Maori, whose colossal fists were mottled and ridged like seashells.
Moko stepped in front of Mendoza to line up his shot. The old man raised his hand and swatted the cue away.
‘Watch it, snake face,’ said Mendoza.
‘Sorry, Mr Mendoza,’ said Moko.
Mendoza caught me looking at the barmaid. ‘Do you like young girls?’ he asked.
I pretended not to hear him.
‘How was the premier?’ I asked.
‘How are any of us?’ said Mendoza. ‘He is my age. His cock died before he did. He’s not going to be climbing on top of Cecilia Preciosa Bong Bong McCoy any time soon.’
‘I thought the premier was in his fifties,’ I said.
‘Not that maggot,’ said Mendoza. ‘He doesn’t deserve to be called premier. He doesn’t run fuck all in this city. The bloke I’m talking about left office in 1975, but I still call him “the premier” and I always will. But that’s the problem with me, isn’t it, Anthony? I live in the past.’
He lit a small cigar.
‘I live in the past,’ he repeated, ‘but I can’t tell the truth about it. And when I do, I make some poor young bloke eat the tape. What do you think about that, Anthony?’
‘I think you’re a complicated character,’ I told him.
He laughed.
‘I’ve lived for money and cunt,’ he said. ‘It’s not fucking rocket science.’
He smoked distractedly.
‘I always knew that I would be the one to grow old,’ he said. ‘My lieutenants turned on me, my enemies became my allies, but everyone who goes into this business is in it to die – except me. I wanted to live, so I knew I would survive them, but I never thought that when I grew old I would have nobody to talk with about the past, because I’d killed them all. No one can share my war stories, Anthony, because I won the war.’
He swirled sediment around his glass.
‘I have become lonely in the company of women,’ he said. ‘All my life I’ve been able to lose myself inside them, now I am a thing apart. I’ve lost my solace, Anthony. And I have too many secrets. I used to cherish them, but now I want to set them free. They are cords that bind me to this life and I need to cut them. Do you understand?’
I said I did.
‘I want to write a book,’ he said, ‘an autobiography, not an excuse. But I can’t do it alone. I need a writer. I had hoped to dictate my life story to my daughter, Sharon, but she is only interested in propagating lies about her father. She has not been trained to recognise the facts, like a British journalist from Fleet Street, where the news stories are every bit as true as the comics, and even the horoscopes are unfailingly correct. I’m thinking of asking you to help me – you have the qualifications, you have the experience, and you have the spinelessness that might make it possible for me to trust you – but I don’t know yet if you’re right for the job.’
FIVE
Like Spiegeleier, Mendoza left me in the pub alone. Everybody had places to go but me. The barmaid was prettier than I first noticed, although a bit plump. She leaned across me to take my empty glass, and the stiff cup of her bra brushed against my shirt. She said sorry. I think I b
lushed.
She asked where my accent was from.
‘The same place as the rest of me,’ I said, like a twat.
She went to talk to the Maoris but came back to my table for her break. She said her name was Leah, and she came from the country. She said it was hard to meet nice people in Sydney. She was used to pubs where the drinkers were friendlier. She had pixie eyes and a fairy nose, and the more I drank the more I liked her. She said she had dumped her boyfriend when she found out he was seeing another of the barmaids behind her back. He was the drummer in a band, and she had only got talking to him because she fancied the singer, but it turned out that the singer was gay. Leah thought most single men in Sydney were gay.
Leah had only been in love twice, and neither of them had deserved her. She liked strong men who reminded her of her father. She planned to go to England one day, probably with her mate Caitlin. It would be part of a ten-year round-the-world trip, and she would also visit friends in America, Spain and China, although she didn’t have any friends in China yet. People told her she talked too much, but that was just the way she was. She wasn’t always going to work in bars. One day she would be a singer, or an actress, or a housemate on Big Brother. She felt like she was full of potential, at the edge of her future, and anything could happen.
She asked me if I was happy. I told her I had lost my job. It was stolen from me, I explained, by a notorious criminal.
‘You’re funny,’ she said, playing with loose curls in her hair.
She taught me how to put songs on the video jukebox without paying, and I watched her as she walked back to the bar. I was thinking of all the things I would like to do to her, on the counter, on the pool table, in the cellar.
She brought me another beer and, when I tried to pay, waved my money away.
One by one the afternoon drinkers slipped out of the pub. For a few minutes we were the only people in the bar. She ignored me and concentrated on wiping the tabletops and emptying the ashtrays. I found it hard to breathe when I looked at her. I felt like I was being dragged towards her on the end of a rope.
A rugby team on a bucks-night crawl scrummed up around bar. They ordered their drinks, then the captain blew a whistle and they each shotgunned a rum and coke.
A scrum-half shaped like a photo booth beckoned Leah over. When she smiled at him he leaned across the bar, grabbed one of her breasts and twisted it. The captain pulled him back, and they all drank a beer. In London he would have got a slap for that.
I got up to use the toilet and I was standing in the urinal when the tit-grabber came in behind me. He stood a step back from the trough, reading a newspaper framed on the wall. You know, really, it had nothing to do with me.
I wondered if he could fight.
‘What are you staring at?’ he asked. ‘Are you queer or something?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
He flushed.
My heartbeat, my breathing and the tension in my head and my hands told me I should go. Leave. Go.
He jabbed me in the chest with his index finger – once, twice, three times. He said ‘Get-the-fuck-ou-’. Then I grabbed the finger and twisted it back on itself, and held him while I punched him twice in the face. His head bounced off the tiled wall, so I hit him again. He tried to twist out of my grip, but I swept his legs from under him, and he had to throw out his hands to try to stop himself from falling into the piss. He turned around and I caught him with a right hook just under the ear. I grabbed him around the neck, pulled down his head and kneed him in the face – one, two, three times. His nose exploded, and showered us both in blood. I changed knees and struck him again.
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.
There were two doors out of the toilets. One led to the poker-machine lounge, the other to his mates in the bar. I opened the first and told him to fuck off home.
He started to cry. He was only about twenty years old.
Oh Jesus Christ. I’ve done it again.
‘We’ll back up and fucking kill you,’ he said, struggling with his sobs.
Don’t say that. Don’t make me.
‘You’re fucking dead,’ he said.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to be somebody better, you end up acting like the person you’ve become, and it seems like there’s nothing you can do but give in to the voices in your head and hope that hell is a story told to frighten little children. So I pulled out the little American Derringer sub-compact pistol that Lazarus had left in his coat pocket and pointed it at the kid’s teeth.
‘No, you won’t,’ I said.
He shook his head and sobbed with fear. I picked him up and marched him through the pokies, behind fat people blinded by hope, and delivered him to a cab outside.
I saw the kid into a taxi and told the driver he’d been fixing up the stage for the DJ when an amplifier had fallen on his head. I was left standing under the Coke sign in a polo shirt soaked in blood, but I felt like an airman in Trafalgar Square on VE Day.
I stripped off my top and stuffed it into a bin, and walked bare-chested down Darlinghurst Road, behind another half-naked man who scrambled screaming into an alley when we reached the tattoo studio. Outside Ink, two restless bikers from Cannibals MC were scowling around their Harleys: the bearded guy who guarded the place every night, and a younger, clean-shaven man, who wore a sergeant-at-arms patch below a thin strip with the word Devil.
The bearded guy modelled the usual jumble of biker crap: swastikas and smoking skulls, iron crosses and runes, and a patch that said he was called Rabbit. ‘Rabbit’ didn’t seem like much of a name for a biker, but I would back him over Devil if it ever kicked off, from the dagger in his belt loop to the shottie in his saddlebag. But the bikers didn’t know what they were doing. There were enough of them to make a target but too few to defend the shop. I wondered if they had somebody guarding the back entrance. I guessed they were expecting a drive-by. The attacker would have to be another biker, because a car would get stuck in the traffic on Darlinghurst Road. I wouldn’t have staged the assault that way myself, but then I had no reason to do it, or to think about it at all.
Rabbit looked past me to a future threat. Devil stopped me at the tattooist’s door.
‘What’s your problem, mate?’ he asked.
‘No shirt,’ I told him.
Devil ducked into the shop and came out carrying a black T-shirt with a picture of a screaming white skull and the word Tattoo!
‘We’ve only got extra large,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘Twenty bucks.’
It was one size too big and ballooned out around the belly, and I wished I hadn’t hit that boy, or at least that I had only hit him once.
I went back to the Hamilton, where a bouncer pulled me up because I was wearing trainers. It was the brother with the mottled fists, and when he remembered I had been with Mendoza, he let me through.
‘New shirt,’ he said. ‘Nice.’
Leah said the footie team had passed around the hat and raised fifty bucks for her to get her tits out. She said the tips were better than the wages in this job.
‘Do you know who you look like?’ she asked me. ‘Rob Lowe – the movie star who made that horrible video.’
‘St Elmo’s Fire?’
‘The sex tape,’ she said, ‘with the underage girl.’
‘It’s not me,’ I said.
‘But you look like him,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the same eyes.’ I bought another drink and asked if she wanted one for herself. The bouncer was watching, so she took a dollar from my change and dropped it into a glass of grenadine beside the till.
‘Have you seen that video?’ she asked. ‘It’s very grainy. You can’t make out much, except for his cock.’
In the casino room, a machine sang a song of celebration for a small win.
‘He has a big cock,’ said Leah, ‘and he looks like you.’
Leah was working the lunchtime to evening shift and it was almost over. I asked if she wanted to go out after she finished.
> ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m too tired.’
Another heavy-hipped blonde with a pouty mouth and dimples came to relieve her. Leah picked up her clutch bag and painted on some lipstick, and took me by the hand.
‘There’s a room upstairs,’ she said, ‘that we sometimes use on our breaks. It’s got a bed and chair, and there’s a shower down the hallway.’
We were kissing on the second step. Halfway up I slipped my hands inside her blouse. She stopped and pressed against me. I buried myself into her jeans. She broke into a trot and I chased her to the top of the stairs, along a dingy corridor and into a windowless room that smelled of bleach and tobacco. The bed was a single bunk. I pulled her onto the soft mattress, she undid my belt. I kissed her and kissed her and held her tightly, because I hadn’t realised how much I needed to be with her, how completely alone I had felt since I found out about Helen.
‘Condom, condom,’ she said.
‘I haven’t got one,’ I admitted.
‘In my bag,’ she told me. ‘Take one.’
She wrapped her legs around my hips and said, ‘Oh, Tony. Oh, Tony.’
I was grateful and gentle and slow, but she squirmed and she scratched and she cried, ‘Go faster! Slap me! Pull my hair!’
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ I said.
‘Fuck me up the arse,’ she said. ‘Hard. Like you hate me.’
*
I wasn’t looking forward to going home. I didn’t know how I would explain to Helen where I had been, or what had happened to the polo shirt she had bought me. I was drunk, but all the lies I could think of seemed ridiculous, even to me.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the door of my apartment was that there was no TV on the coffee table. Then I noticed there was no coffee table. Our books had gone too. What kind of burglar takes a Lonely Planet guide? The fridge was empty, but the fridge was always empty. I opened the wardrobe, and all of Helen’s clothes were missing.
‘She’s going to be so pissed off,’ I thought, then I flopped onto the bed and fell asleep.
I woke up to go for a piss. I would have cleaned my teeth but I couldn’t find the toothpaste. When I came back to bed, I put my arm around Helen, but the ridge I thought was her body was just a lump in the quilt. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, but there were no glasses.