by Linda Jaivin
His intuition told him that all was not quiet on the alien front. For one thing, the papers were full of signs that the end of the world was nigh. The government had recently announced it would service the national debt by selling off most of the country’s environmental and cultural resources—including all World Heritage areas, the Opera House, Uluru, half a dozen dance companies and a stand-up comic or two. It was directing shipments of nuclear byproducts through urban electorates in which there were too many artists and homosexuals and women who used words like ‘chairperson’. It had cancelled reconciliation with Aboriginal Australia because it was considered a ‘politically correct’ thing to do, and the government didn’t want to be caught doing anything that could be misinterpreted as correct. It was also turning the ABC, the national broadcaster, into a commercial enterprise cum hamburger franchise. Elsewhere, American teenagers were swearing to remain virgins until marriage while their parents pledged to kill gays for Jesus. The one ethnic group left in the world that was not trying to kill off another ethnic group had all perished in a bus accident. Barges of toxic wastes were drifting aimlessly on the oceans, occasionally tipping over into the mouths of whales. And that was just last week.
Tick. Tick. Tick. The good news was that there had been a flap of UFO sightings around the world with at least a dozen reports from all over New South Wales the day before. General Jackal somebody-or-other in the Pentagon had issued a formal statement blaming errant weather balloons, lubbock lights and other IFOs. He’d failed to comment on an international bumper harvest of new crop circles in the shape of CDs, vinyl records and cassette tapes.
Then there was the matter of that strange dream last night. In it, George was strolling through the bush when he came upon a large flat stone. He bent down and turned it over. A beautiful sylph lay there, smiling and fluttering her wings. I’m the girl from Mars, she’d said. If you don’t believe me, just ask Jake.
I believe you, George had replied.
Well then, she’d challenged, gonna go my way? George had woken up bolt upright in bed.
Just ask Jake. George waved Jake over.
Jake wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. All things considered, however, having one required less effort than avoiding one. He ambled over to where George was unloading pulley-like gadgets from his pickup truck. ‘Whatcha got there, George?’ he asked.
‘Tummy toners,’ replied George.
‘Fair dinkum,’ nodded Jake. He thought that would probably do it for neighbourliness. He yawned. ‘Sorry,’ he apologised, covering his mouth. ‘Had a bit of a big one last night.’
When Jake raised his hand, George’s sharp eyes zoomed straight in on his wrist. ‘New tattoo?’ He tried to control the tremor in his voice.
‘Uh, sort of,’ Jake mumbled.
‘Is there a story behind it?’
‘Not really,’ Jake replied. ‘Well, maybe. I dunno. Can’t really talk about now. I’m shagged. Catch you later.’
George shrugged, hiding his disappointment.
Jake dragged himself over to the ramshackle terrace next door where he lived. He pushed open the squeaky gate, and stepped over the overflowing carton of bottles and tinnies that, one day, they were going to put out for recycling. Heading for the door, he just avoided putting his foot down into a fresh cigar of dog poo. Jake felt for the leather thong that held his keys. It wasn’t there. Shit! This was too weird. He did a quick stocktake. Lost: a sock, his keys, a night. Gained: a tattoo and one whopper of a hangover. Surely, a night to remember. Now if only he could remember it.
He banged on the door. No answer. His flatmates would all be asleep. He could hear Iggy Zardust, his bull terrier, come running to the door, claws clicking on the unpolished floorboards in the hall. Iggy was doing his Unbelievably Happy to Have Master Home routine, scratching at the door, wriggling and wagging his tail and whining with an enthusiasm that wasn’t entirely feigned, but which did not go a long way towards letting Jake into the house. Jake sighed and shuffled round the block to the back, clambered over the fence and excavated the spare key from its hiding place underneath a deformed garden gnome.
Inside at last, he scratched Iggy behind his pink floppy ears, and breathed in the familiar smell of the sharehouse—a comforting musk of stale beer, unwashed dog, overflowing ashtrays, sleeping bodies, dirty dishes, and the legendary Missing Banana. Aromatherapy. It felt good to be home.
Jake crept up to his room. It looked like an explosion in a laundromat. Soiled and clean clothes coupled promiscuously in piles on the floor, or lazed on the precarious, three-legged chair he’d salvaged from the Tempe tip. The only thing in the room that wasn’t covered with undies, t-shirts, old suit jackets, retro shirts, socks and jeans was the clothes rack by the wall where half a dozen hangers dangled in a state of long-term unemployment. Jake shovelled a path to the mattress with his feet. He fell heavily on his bed, distressing whole colonies of dust mites, frightening a pair of mating cockroaches, annoying a flea who’d been in a bad mood since misplacing Iggy two days earlier, and generally disturbing the room’s delicate ecological balance. Jake completed the outrage by kicking off his boots. The ensuing odour sent all the life forms racing out the door.
Jake’s head was spinning like vinyl on a turntable. A ‘45 on ‘78. Alvin and the Chipmunks on speed.
Ever since finding himself on King Street all he’d wanted was to sleep. The second his head hit the pillow he’d be out like a light. But the light wasn’t turning off. Hallucinatory fragments replayed themselves in his brain. Yet, as sobriety slowly percolated through his system, something told Jake that what he was recalling was not just a hallucination. All right, he conceded, it was real. It happened. I’ll deal with it in the morning. Afternoon. Now can I get some sleep?
Why yes, replied the frankly relieved Sleep Fairy who’d been hovering impatiently over his bed. All you ever had to do was ask. Looking at her watch and shaking her head, she sprinkled sleep dust in his eyes and flew out the window to her next appointment, for which she was already late. Beans. Why did they make this such a complicated business? And then, she thought huffily, you get people like that guy on the street earlier. Doesn’t believe in fairies. Hmph. Just see if he ever gets to sleep again.
In Jake’s dreams, he reclined in a verdant field under an emerald sky. Baby’s soft mouth hovered in the air like a daytime moon and her sexy drawl floated in a dewy mist around his head. As much as he strained to understand what she was saying, he couldn’t make out the words. He reached out and caught one of her feet in his hand. It was exquisitely small, plump, pink and seven-toed. Jake stiffened, moaned, and came in his sheets.
About two-thirty that afternoon, Jake, his head feeling like one of Iggy’s well-masticated tennis balls and his gut like it had found the Missing Banana, wrapped a towel around himself and hirpled down the hallway and into the toilet. He sat down on the seat and reached automatically for the copy of War and Peace that lived on the toiletries shelf. He put it down again as soon as he noticed a copy of the zine Skills of Defensive Driving under the sink. He still hadn’t made it past page two of W&P. Never mind. He’d read it when he was old. For now, he was content to lose himself in the SODD editor’s ruminations on why he was a dud root. Jake was beginning to feel slightly better now. Without removing his eyes from the page, he groped at the wall and pinched a cardboard tube between his fingers. ‘Guys!’ he bellowed. ‘Cooee! Anyone home?’ He paused and sighed. ‘Why’re there never any shit tickets when it’s my turn to have a crap?’
‘Whinge, whinge, whinge,’ commented Tristram, who happened to be passing by the toilet door at that moment. ‘Keep yer pants off. I’ll see if we’ve got any spare cobs in the closet.’ Tristram wandered off, walking straight into the wall and bouncing off it, walking into another wall and careening off it in turn, thus angling his way towards the closet. He was pretending to be inside a pinball machine.
This was not unusual behaviour for Tristram. He and his identical twin Torquil were what y
ou might call Self-Amusing Units. The progeny of a Scottish mother and Egyptian father, they were phara’onic of eye, proud of nose, and slight of build. Their skin had a latte hue and their hair was the colour of the week. This week, Tristram’s was purple and Torquil’s was blue. He was wearing a salmon-coloured frock with a lace collar that he’d found in an op-shop. Tristram’s personal hero was Kwong José Abdul Foo of the Brisbane band Chunderer. Kwong José was another multiculti rock n roll lad who liked wearing frocks. Tristram thought Kwong José was cool as.
Eventually, Tristram returned with a roll of loo paper. Just as he was about to open the door, Tristram noticed that Iggy appeared to be standing guard. ‘What’s up, Iggy?’ said Tristram. Iggy acknowledged Tristram’s presence with a wag of his tail and a throaty little sigh. His pink piggie eyes were fixed on a spot about halfway up the door. Tristram now saw that Iggy was eyeballing a large cockroach that was slowly scaling the door. He wondered how long Jake had been in there. Tristram smiled and patted Iggy on the head. In his weird bullie way, Iggy smiled back, showing teeth.
Careful not to disturb the cockroach, Tristram opened the door a crack and tossed in the toilet paper.
‘Torq! My man!’ cried Jake gratefully from his porcelain perch.
‘It’s Trist. I’m the purple one this week. Remember? Hey, where’d you go last night, dude?’ asked Tristram through the door. ‘We saw you do this hell stage dive and then, like, you disappeared. We looked for you after the gig but couldn’t find you anywhere. We thought you might’ve scored with some chick.’
‘Actually,’ Jake said, cautiously, as an evanescent vision of himself strapped to a table winged into his consciousness, ‘I think I was kidnapped by aliens and made to have sex with them in their flying saucer.’
Tristram jerked open the door. The cockroach lost its grip, fluttered its mahogany wings and fell backwards in a perfect arc, right into Iggy’s open and waiting mouth. The dog’s wide jaws clamped shut and his smile widened. Shaking his head, he trotted off to the kitchen to play with his snack. Tristram, meanwhile, fixed Jake with a sardonic stare. Sex in a saucer? ‘Yeah right,’ he said, poker-faced. ‘And my mother’s a Klingon.’ He whipped around. ‘Don’t you dare say that about my mother!’ he snapped.
‘Do you mind?’ huffed Jake, pulling the door shut. ‘Can’t a man get some privacy around here?’ He regretted saying anything.
‘Well?’ Tristram demanded through the door.
‘Well what?’
‘Were they cute?’
Jake considered the question. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring to mind a single detail of their appearance. ‘Yeah,’ he ad-libbed. ‘Cutest little aliens in the whole yoon.’
‘Yoon?’
Jake frowned. ‘Dunno where that came from. I meant to say “universe”.’
‘You know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘We ought to go out more on Wednesday nights.’
‘Wednesday nights?’
‘I think you’re watching too much X-Files.’
‘Wait, wait.’ Jake struggled to recall something that was being chased around his brain by an eager little particle of Memocide. ‘They, uh, they watch the X-Files too,’ he said tentatively. His arse suddenly itched very badly.
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Tristram. ‘You were abducted and sexually experimented upon by a bunch of aliens who also happened to be X-Files fans.’
‘Yeah. I think so.’ Jake shook his head. He wasn’t so sure anymore, now that he thought about it. He had been tripping.
‘What’s their phone number? 0055-Space Cadet?’
‘Actually,’ Jake said, ‘I think they said they’d be in touch.’ He regretted saying anything at all. It had probably just been a hallucination. Now Tristram—and no doubt Torquil as well—would be paying out on him on the subject of aliens for days to come. Maybe he should just have a few Panadols and a big glass of water and go back to bed. He emerged from the loo, knotting the towel around his waist. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ he added, scratching his head, ‘and I was scabbed by a Planet Rescue Bear.’
‘No way.’ Tristram really looked shocked now.
‘Way. He got my last two dollars. Said he needed a beer.’ Jake frowned. He shook his head again. His hand was stuck. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he cursed.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Ring’s caught,’ said Jake, waggling his wrist. His dreadlocks occasionally took prisoners: rings, small particles of food, the stray beetle. ‘Give us a hand, will ya?’
Tristram rolled up the sleeves of his frock, grimaced theatrically and dove in heroically. After he liberated Jake’s hand, they meandered downstairs and into the kitchen. The reasonably spacious kitchen, with its mixed antipasto of found plates and scavenged cutlery, its bread-crumbed floor, sautéed walls, butter-basted table, flambéed stove and sugar-dusted benchtops, was the warm and nourishing centre of sharehouse life.
Their housemates Saturna and Skye, who were sitting at the table, didn’t even look up at the boys’ entrance. Saturna and Skye were drinking coffee out of black bowls and talking about the end of the world, which, along with George, they believed was imminent. Whereas it worried George, it rather excited them. Doom and gloom were their favourite topics. They were Goths. They were also lesbian lovers and business partners. They ran Phantasma, the one-stop Goth shop and hairdressers where they sold everything from white face-powder to futons tailored specially for caskets. They also specialised in purple, scarlet and black hair-dyeing. The petite Skye wore layers of scarlet and black lace; the voluptuous Saturna was a pur-purate creature with a particular fondness for velvet, even in summer. They covered their skin with slabs of ghoulishly white foundation makeup, shaved off their original eyebrows so that they could paint on more dramatic ones and tinted their lips the colour of aubergines. They lived in the basement of the house, in a room that was way too dark for anyone else even before they’d painted the walls matte black.
‘You girls were home? Didn’t you hear me calling for dunny documents?’ Jake affected outrage. Real outrage took too much effort and commitment. Without waiting for their answer, he yawned again, opened the fridge and stuck his head inside.
‘We always replace the toilet roll when we’ve used it up,’ Saturna remarked to his back, exchanging a conspiratorial glance with Skye. ‘Thought you boys could learn a lesson.’
‘Boys?’ Tristram objected, offended. ‘What did I do? Unfair as.’
Jake perfomed a quick inventory of the inside of the fridge: a small bowl of week-old lentil soup, some dubious tomatoes, a six-pack of VB, half a jar of Thai curry paste and a saucepan with some rice crusts stuck to the sides. Well, that accounted for the boys’ half, anyway. Saturna and Skye’s side featured a few pieces of reasonably fresh fruit and some vegetables, a bowl of chilli, a thick slab of tofu in a bowl of water, a loaf of bread, a jar of coffee beans and half a carton of free-range eggs. Jake pulled out a beer. ‘Protein breakfast,’ he remarked, patting his unreasonably flat stomach. ‘Where’s Torq?’ he asked. ‘We’re supposed to have a jam this afternoon.’
‘He took a walk down King Street,’ replied Tristram. ‘He had some idea about feather boas he wanted to follow up. Said he wouldn’t be long.’
Iggy, having finally swallowed the cockroach, slurped loudly and contentedly at the water in his bowl. Saturna and Skye exchanged glances. Iggy was such a boy. Despite his unaesthetic pink skin and his atrocious and seemingly inalterable smell, the girls were actually quite fond of Iggy. They weren’t about to let Jake know this, however. They only played with him when Jake was out. Iggy was quite cool about this. He seemed to understand the game rules, and kept clear of the girls until Jake and the twins had left the house, at which point he would dash into their room, roll onto his back and let them tickle his tummy as he wriggled and groaned and stretched his neck and batted the air with his legs. He licked their ears, instinctively careful not to wreck their elaborate makeup.
The phone rang
. Tristram picked it up. ‘Sam & Tony’s Pickled Pizzas,’ he said, earning a bored sneer from the girls. ‘Jake? Uh, who’s calling? Larissa?’ Tristram looked questioningly at Jake. Jake was shaking his head emphatically. ‘Uh, Larissa, he’s not here right now. How about I get him to call you? Yeah. Yeah. I will. No, I won’t forget.’ Tristram rolled his eyes at the others. ‘No worries. See ya. Bye.’ Tristram hung up and tossed Jake a look of exasperation. ‘I hate that shit, man,’ he griped. ‘From now on, you root ‘em, you take their phone calls.’
Jake shrugged. ‘You seen George’s new tummy toners?’ he said, changing the subject.
Skye sipped at her coffee. ‘Have you ever heard him talk about why he collects all that shit?’
‘Nup,’.said Jake. ‘What’s the story?’
‘He thinks that, just before the final apocalypse, flying saucers are going to appear in the sky and aliens will whisk off those of us who, as he puts it, are “prepared”.’
‘Prepared? You mean, like, with stacks of broken keyboards and cappuccino machines?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Far out. You know,’ Tristram remarked, watching Jake drain the last drops of beer from the can, ‘Jake told me he was abducted by aliens last night and sexually experimented on in their flying saucer.’
‘Great,’ approved Saturna vaguely. If he’d said Jake had been kidnapped by vampires or zombies she’d have been more interested. She noticed something on the kitchen table, and wrinkled her nose in disgust. Gingerly pinching the offending object between thumb and forefinger, she held it up for all to view. ‘Whose pubic hair is this?’ she demanded accusingly. ‘Jake?’
Jake shrugged and held out his hand. ‘Dunno,’ he replied, deadpan. ‘But I’ll take it. I’m one short.’