TIM, ALICE, SUNDANCE AND ARIA
The Rider
The rider is no fun these days: peppermint tea and Cheezels. Nothing worth drinking, snorting, injecting, smoking, sticking up your arse. You love the lows as much as the highs, maybe more. Transcendental nothingness, then a conscious desire to stop breathing. Chasing the dragon even looked beautiful – the fiend’s dirty tail smoking up into a delicate twist as the gaudy, flamboyant flame licked the foil. There was glory in that.
It’s not good to think about this stuff, but sniffing the peppermint tea makes you ache for a hit of damn near anything and your head is in that glamourised lie. You can hear them out there, getting fired up for the gig. The band is hanging out in the corridor, because everyone knows not to bring that stuff into the green room. They are your personal addiction support group – the band, the roadies, the pub management. You’re known all across this wide brown land. One slip and you’re snowboarding to oblivion. Or drowning in stormwater run-off. You’re a precarious soul. They stroke your artistic temperament with a peacock’s feather. It keeps them employed. They dance around you like you’re gonna break. Because they know you will. Sooner or later.
Out front, the crowd is yelling over Eliza, the support act. Poor girl. A folk singer, pretty and small, faded blonde hair to her waist with just a guitar between her and the hundreds of drunk bastards who have come to hear you scream your anguish into a mic. She needs toughening up. You’ve had fifteen years of getting bottles hurled at your head in grungy pubs, all the punters judging you on whether you’ve given them a pound of flesh or a pile of shit. They want flesh, every time. And blood, they want to see you sweat it out of your eyeballs. They want to puke in the carpark afterwards and tell their mates they’ve never seen anyone be such a God awful fuck-up, but hell the songs kick arse.
That’s you – a God awful fuck-up with kick arse songs. Just ask your wife and kids. No need for a crystal ball.
There you go again. Your brain connects dots you’re trying to rub out. Now you’re thinking about meth.
The tea tastes like flavoured dirt, you’ll never get used to it. People who like it are lying to themselves. You spent years drinking cheap flyblown homebrew, Christ, you’d lick the dregs off the floor. But peppermint tea. Hell.
These days you like to start the gig with some spoken word. Sounds cracked, but you’re trying to get them to see things are different now. If you’re truthful, you’re begging them to see you anew, and still like you. You make the poem funny, of course, throw in some local references so they feel loved, and recite it over a lazy drawl from the band so that they think it’s a song, not a fucken poem. You tell them that tonight’s gonna be different. By then they’re restless. Shuffling, skolling, sniggering. They’re wondering whether they can get a refund. False advertising; Sweeny ain’t what he used to be.
Tonight’s poem isn’t going too well. It’s hard to rhyme anything with ‘Adelaide’.
City of churches, city of beaches
Wine barrels for Bordeaux, bodies
And sulphuric witches
But Ad-el-aide you give me the shits
I love you and hate you equally to bits
You are trash, you are treasure
But where’re you hiding all my pleasure?
It’s rotten and you know it. And if you crap on this town they’re gonna want to kill you – even though it’s technically your town too. And despite it all, you still want to wake up the next day. Something primal in you needs to see what’s on the other side. You punish yourself so you have half a chance of waking up cured.
Then, one especially big night, to breathe or not to breathe was no longer your choice and it stopped being fun. It hadn’t been fun for years, but you’re a slow thinker and it took a while. You’d wake up and there was more that was lost than was there. People stopped pardoning you. You were no longer the happy rogue drunk, the artist whose indiscretions would be expunged with a chart-topper; who could laugh off incidents that mere mortals would be ashamed of. Of course your wife had stopped forgiving you long before everyone else. And to your kids you were just the drunk who slept it off in the back room in between tours.
Now you’re awake and the days are long. The nights never end. The breaths keep coming and sometimes you wish they didn’t. Days, nights, breathing is colour free, additive free, preservative free. No MSG. There’s no sharpness to anything – no sunlight after a bender. Now it’s just life in a blender: grey slop and a dull whine.
Wine.
You hear schooners clinking through the door. For all their support, they don’t know what that sound does to you. You start to shake.
You pick up the pen and force your grip. Adelaide is not going to get the better of you. There are so many bad jokes, some of them must rhyme. But tonight you can’t make them funny, they only sound mean. They already hate you and they don’t even know it yet.
There’s a knock on the door.
‘Timmy, the natives are restless, Eliza is dying out there.’
‘Yeah, mate. Hang on.’
You know you could write this fucker if you had a drink in your hand. You know you could rock the gig if you’d had a hit. But tonight you’re gonna suck and they’re gonna know it. They’re gonna go home saying Tim Sweeny’s a has-been. They won’t even want you on Rise and Shine. You’ll get a job producing artists who are on the way up, or down, but never at the top. They’ll slap you on the back and say ‘I grew up listening to you, you were great,’ without thinking about what that actually means. And they’ll be snorting and smoking and injecting and doing stuff that hasn’t even been thought of yet and you’ll be gritting your teeth. For the rest of your life, gritting your Goddamn teeth, wishing on a beautiful dragon.
Suite 5, Bundaberg City Motel
In the letter you tried to tell her. There were no excuses for why you couldn’t do it for her or the kids. Just explanations. They say the truth sets you free, but that’s bullshit, the truth’s a prison. You’ve told her the truth and you know it will lock her away.
The funny thing, the thing you never expected, is that everything is dull except for Alice. It’s the one thing that seeps through, a kind of punishment, a repentance for all of it. Nearly twenty years of it. You should be buried under the weight of it and sometimes you think you are but you still breathe when you wake up in the morning, rolling over and looking at the bedside table, looking for the taste, knowing it’s not there, then there’s the fits and sparks of energy through the mental aerobics of needing it, knowing it’s not there and finally convincing yourself you can actually keep going without it.
And that’s when Alice seeps in. Alice being locked away forever is even worse than knowing there’s no taste waiting for you. You can smell her, somewhere in the membranes of your respiratory system is a piece of her, stuck there, a piece of her forever in you. You curl up and make yourself smaller than you already are and focus on feeling Alice in your nose, imagining it’s all of her, buried in you waiting for you to say the magic words like she’s a genie in a bottle, ready to materialise next to you. You cradle her there, her memory, her smell and you catalogue all the things you did together. You start from the first time you saw her, jumping around at a gig, covered in sweat, hair matted and making her head look too big for her body. You offered to take her backstage to meet the band. She said no, but she talked to you instead and that moment, when she said no, you fell in love. Then you remember the first time you touched, the first time you kissed, the first time you made love. Each of those memories is a layer of skin, protecting you from the world. You remember moving in with her, taking your pathetic possessions to her place and feeling like you didn’t have enough stuff to make an impression on her life. It never really looked like you lived there, and you never really did. There was always a gig, there was always a late night and a couch to sleep on. Then the babies. Those moments of finding out together: this week the fingernails grew, this week the eyes opened, and your favourite: this w
eek your baby can hear you. From that week on you sang to them both, it was all you had to give them. Their births were horror stories. Blood, screaming, panic, pain - torture of an ancient, ancient kind. Something in you broke with both of them; you got a little bit more lost. You floated, you flew, you did everything you could to keep your feet off the ground that she walked on. You had nothing of substance to give those kids, apart from wretchedness. Alice became their everything.
You curl up and remember all this, and all the while you smell Alice and you want her back, but then you get up and reread the letter. You’ve told her you’re straight, have been for six months. You put a cheque in the envelope, a meagre amount, but something. You breathe slowly into the envelope, seal it and post it. You imagine it travelling to Alice. Her surprise when she sees the cheque causes her to inhale sharply. She breathes in a part of you. You enter her mouth and are a part of her.
Reruns
Like reruns of a bad show on telly, his habits came and went. I counted them like the hours on a clock. One would pass – though it took longer than an hour or even a day – and then come back again. I knew the people he was with when he was on a habit, and that he would return to me when he was off. Those teeth rotters are fair-weather friends, there for him when he’s got a taste to share and off looking for someone else when he doesn’t. They came to the house and sometimes smiled apologetically when they saw the children, fatherless and floating. But they still asked, they always asked for him.
He writes when he’s on a habit and tries when he’s not. When he comes home to me, to the kids, trying to get straight, he doesn’t remember who to be, or how to be. How to even hold them. Maybe he thinks they will break, but he looks more breakable than them. Skinny as tin foil, grotty as an unwashed dog. They hug him like he’s fragile or maybe like he’s smelly, because he is, and he hugs them like they are fragile, because he is. I ache when I see it; every cell in his body is a pin and the kids are the pin cushion, only they push the pins deeper into him. Between it all, no one gets a decent hug.
There’s damage that can’t be undone. I count it up like the seconds on the clock. They tick past too fast, and just when I get back to 12 and think that maybe he can change – ’cause there’s nothing he hasn’t done yet and he must be running out of time to live like this – the damn red hand keeps going around, around, around.
Now I’m a catastrophe of responsibilities and exhaustion. Trying not to snap at them when they pine for him, the man who would turn up to sleep it off and then play with them for half an hour before it got too much to be strung out with noisy kids.
It’s impossible to hate him, in amongst it all. He’s a good man. I still love him. He told me he’s gone straight and he’s touring. He sends cheques from time to time. He used to pride himself on being bad at managing his finances, like it was a badge. Used to say that it made him a better artist to be shit at everything else. Like being my husband, their father, for example.
I look at other men. None of them measure up to his five feet ten of skin and bones. His oily hair and no-longer cool retro clothes. His pointy shoes – always shiny. And yellow, bloodshot eyes. No one else has that thing he has, that ability to see through life like he’s x-raying it. It’s his superpower. But it burns a hole in him. No one can live that way and not get scathed by it. The thinness of him; he’s been shaved away.
Jacob is just like his dad. Annabelle is like me. She’ll be fine. Unless she marries someone like her dad, God help her. But Jacob. I’d been too busy telling his dad to fuck off and not come back that I didn’t see that Jacob was a living breathing replica. From his skinny limbs to his highs and lows. Jacob probably knew he and his dad were peas in a pod and I was pushing one of the peas out.
Last week there was a letter with the cheque. The bastard didn’t have the guts to talk to me. I read the letter then food-processed it with a dash of oil, wishing it was him. There are gaps, white lies, but I can fill them in without too much trouble. We remind him of his other life. Going straight was a roller coaster that always ended up where it started. I want to shred what’s left of his skinny carcass, but there is an echo in my head: he’s gone straight, he’s gone straight… He would never have bothered to write to me while he was high. Then, nothing really mattered.
Someone else will get the straight Tim Sweeny. I got the crap one, the one who was always high or always low, never just right.
Into the Rain
He swirled his lemonade inside the sweaty glass. Bubbles spilled over, dribbling down and wetting his fingers. Aria took them off the glass and licked them clean. Withdrawing his hand, he tipped the rest of the drink into his mouth, swilling it around. He stood and walked away.
‘It’s done, you know,’ she called, her voice spiking with hurt.
He flicked his collar up against the cold. Rain spat on his glasses. He took them off and put them in his pocket, tucked his chin into his chest for a while, then decided it was pointless. He pushed his collar down, unbuttoned his shirt. Let it in, what the hell, he thought.
A busker sheltered in an abandoned doorway, plucking his recycled guitar, his toes resting on the peak of the baseball hat he used for donations.
The song stopped Tim in his tracks. He found a note in his pocket and placed it in the hat, under a coin so it wouldn’t blow away.
When the song was finished, he spoke.
‘You like that song?’
‘Nah, it’s just easy to play,’ the busker said.
Tim was tempted to take the note back, but he just walked away.
The new songs were too miserable to be sung by buskers in doorways and laneways he thought; only sad folks alone in their bedrooms would attempt them. People searching for meaning amongst the overwhelming proof that there was none.
Street lights lit his way through the grubby urban tangle. He took a shortcut through the park, past the rotunda where people got married in sunshine and rain, and walked into the darkness and the bats. He found a spot under a tree, dryish, and sat.
Alice once told him he dreamed things into life, and she was right. Now it was real and had to face up to the world. How does something created from darkness live in light?
He picked up a fallen leaf and crushed it. The damp brown papier mâché stuck to his hand.
A little way away a bottle fell onto a path and smashed. A shuffle and giggle, then bodies crashed to the dirt.
He got up, walked to the tram. At the beach, he listened to familiar inky waves he couldn’t see. Leaning against the guard rail, he pushed into the wind.
Gulls flew against the weather in suspended animation.
‘Thought you’d be here. I s’pose this is your spot. Your Inspiration Point.’
He turned. Aria, her white skin almost aglow in the vague moonlight.
‘Something like that. I wrote the album here. Well, in my head I was here. Even when I was in a hotel room or a bus or at home on the Drive, or…’
‘You can say it. With Alice.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is this where it happened?’
‘Nah.’
‘I was sure it was here…“you stood at the edge of the land/ you wouldn’t take my hand”.’
‘That’s just a lyric.’
‘Oh. Hey, the rain’s stopped. I’m freezing, let’s go home. We can steal figs and peel them like grapes. C’mon, it’ll be fun!’
She held her arm out to him, wiped a spot of rain from her cheek and shivered before folding her arms around her waist.
‘C’mon, we’ll stoke the radiator, make some coffee and put on Otis Redding,’ she said.
Aria didn’t seem to care that he was broken. She still saw something left in him that could be coddled back. Perhaps she was right. Maybe another place and another person might feel like home again. Somewhere far away from Alice. His children. Reminders.
He stepped towards her and wrapped her up in his wet jacket.
‘Figs? Where’re we gonna find figs?’ he said.
Nearly forty. Husband Missing In Action. Body no longer firm. If only I’d known then what I know now. Now my traitorous skin gives me plenty to care about but I just don’t. I don’t care.
Break away. Rerun. Reinvent.
The kids are staying at Mum’s, although Annabelle is disgusted at the idea – she’s twelve and thinks she’s old enough to be on her own. She probably is, there was never an older twelve-year-old than Annabelle, with all that she’s seen. The older she gets, the more capable, the more I want to wrap her up. I never did it when she was a kid; I was brave then. Now I feel her slipping away and I want to pull her in.
Turning the Top 40 music up loud, I dress and dance around my room like a teenager. It’s a kick in the teeth to Tim. He hated that music, or anything that was designed to make you feel good, or at least not to think. Freedom wells, making my toes tingle. My house is a blur as I spin – the green silk cushions my grandma made when she was a young wife, the lacy sheers that I’ve always hated, the floral carpet that is so pounded down by feet that it’s almost as hard as floorboards. The vinyl couch Tim brought to our first shared house, the only piece of furniture he ever owned. We used to slip off it in the summer, our sweat pooling in the creases. Now one of the seams is torn and every day I poke the stuffing back in. It can’t be restitched and can’t be thrown out, and I get the analogy, really I do. I stop spinning and look at the tear. I touch it, run my fingers down the hard, shiny edge, feeling the indents scratch my finger where the stitching left gouges. In the winter Tim would pre-warm the vinyl with a blanket or a quilt. He always stretched out first, warming a patch and then moving over to make space for me. I grab at the torn bit of fabric and I rip it. It tears down the seam and stops. It won’t come off. I pull and tug and scream at it. I pull out the stuffing and throw it to the floor. He’s finally, actually, truly gone.
Outside the wind whispers secrets. It doesn’t believe me, it doesn’t believe that I can say goodbye.
Plane Tree Drive Page 5