Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘Anyone home?’ called out Baby, her heart racing.

  Silence.

  Oh, how foolish of her. She hadn’t even checked the Locate-a-tron. Quickly, she punched in the code.

  ‘Did you fart?’ Jake’s case manager wrinkled her nose. ‘No wonder you can’t get a job,’ she said.

  Masking her disappointment, Baby led the others into the lounge. ‘Did you do that, Lati?’ she chuckled, fingering the bite marks on the stereo speaker. ‘What a naughty little ayle you are.’

  Lati burst out laughing. ‘You should’ve seen their faces,’ she chortled, wiping away tears of mirth. ‘Shock-o-rama.’ She picked up Torquil’s bass.

  ‘I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,’ cautioned Baby. ‘I don’t think he’d be very happy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t eat a bass,’ Lati resiled. ‘What do you take me for?’ She twangled the strings while Doll dragged Tristram’s drum kit out from the corner and seated herself on the stool. Picking up a drumstick, she twirled it in the air and attacked the drums. Digitidigitidigiti. Baby discovered Jake’s guitar behind the sofa. She threw on the strap and struck a pose. ‘One two three four!’

  Revor and Iggy were in the midst of a little game called the Gerbil and the Movie Star (Iggy being the Movie Star and Revor the Gerbil) when the girls began to play. Iggy’s ears pricked and a smile widened his bullie jaw. His tail began wagging furiously, the movement of his backside evoking muffled groans from Revor. Finally, Revor’s little head appeared from its salmon-coloured collar. He blinked a few times. Wriggling out, he landed on the floor, shook himself and galloped after Iggy into the lounge, where they positioned themselves in front of the babes and listened with total absorption, tapping their tails to the beat. ‘You said they were good,’ whispered Iggy excitedly, ‘but you didn’t say they were this good.’

  The girls ran through their entire repertoire, including ‘Comet Karma’, ‘Close Encounter You’, ‘Warped Drive’, ‘In the Sexual Experimentation Chamber (Anything Goes, Everything Cums)’, and, of course, the seminal ‘Hangar 99’. They were so absorbed in their jam that they didn’t even see Torquil and Jake come in until they’d been standing there for some time.

  ‘That was filth,’ Torquil exclaimed, awed.

  ‘Fully,’ agreed Jake. He grasped the doorframe to prevent himself from floating away.

  On Saturday night, Jake had promised to do the door at the Sandringham for two Canberra bands, Prik Harness and The Angel Pygar. He’d gone to school with the drummer of Prik Harness. He thought Baby might enjoy hearing them and suggested she go too.

  Doll was accompanying Skye and Saturna to a CD launch by Pitch Bitch, a new all-woman Goth band. No one was sure where Lati had gone. While dropping acid with the twins on Friday night, she turned into a giant chicken with sparkling blue feathers, flew straight into the television set and was yet to re-emerge. The twins felt they ought to wait for her to return.

  About an hour before Baby was due to arrive, Jake tried on all his shirts. He settled finally on a purple paisley polyester number. Being a tad too tight, it looked excellent on his lean frame. He considered striped leggings but opted in the end for red jeans. He gathered his dreadlocks into a ponytail, and studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Nup. He shook out the ponytail and swept his dreads up on top of his head, where they fanned out in a magnificent geyser of yellow piping, but decided he wasn’t feeling enough in touch with his feminine side at that moment to carry it off. He let them flop back down au naturel, and examined the result. He tweaked one or two till they stood out at interesting angles, and applied a dab of Fudge to ensure they stayed that way. He then rummaged through Saturna and Skye’s considerable collection of makeup, smearing concealer on a zit, experimenting with a smidgen of eyeliner, and painting one nail black. He tweaked another dread. He unbuttoned the bottom button on the shirt, buttoned it up and then unbuttoned it again.

  It took just over an hour, but by the time he was finished, Jake managed to look like he’d just rolled out of bed and pulled on the first availables.

  Knock knock.

  Who’s there?

  Allie.

  Allie who?

  Alien.

  Jake opened the door and was almost blown backwards by the sight of Baby in a silver lamé shift worn over purple tights and basketball sneakers. She’d tied a velvet ribbon around her neck and stacked black and silver bangles on her long green arms. She’d wrapped her plaits around her antennae so they stood up in a giant V from her head like a TV aerial. She was the most stunning thing Jake had ever seen in his life.

  Upon recovering his breath and balance, Jake searched for the right words to tell her how beautiful she was, how magnificent, how totally fantastic, but also that it wasn’t just that, it was her talent, her energy, her intelligence, her confidence, her style that made him want to lie down and die at her feet. He wanted to carve the pounding heart from out of his chest and present it to her on a platter. He rehearsed all these thoughts in his head before finally managing to speak. The words came out like this: ‘What d’ya reckon? Should we just head straight to the Sando?’

  Baby smiled happily. She’d read his thoughts. ‘Yeah, sure,’ she replied.

  At the pub, Jake dragged a small table and two stools over to the doorway. Before he had a chance to fetch the small tray with the stamp and the $100 float from the bar, Gregory, noting Baby’s presence, sailed over with the tray in hand. ‘Hi, gorgeous,’ he greeted Baby, offhandedly passing the tray to Jake without even looking at him. ‘Filthy frock,’ he added, giving her the once-over.

  ‘Thanks, Greg,’ Baby purred. ‘Nice shirt, by the way.’

  Gregory patted his authentic seventies nylon black-and-white op-art shirt and smiled with intent. ‘It is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nice to see you too, Greg,’ Jake interjected, trying not to sound as sour as he felt. She hadn’t said anything about his shirt, he thought petulantly.

  ‘I like your shirt too, Jake,’ Baby said, turning her dazzling smile upon him. ‘I like it a lot.’ It was suddenly as if there was no one else in the room. As if there had never been anyone else in the room.

  ‘Cool. Well, I’ll just get back to it, then,’ Greg said, giddily, weaving his way back to the bar.

  A tall boy with the hair of an electrocution victim and an Unsane t-shirt shuffled up to the door. ‘How much?’ he said, doing a double-take at the sight of Baby.

  ‘Three dollars,’ Jake answered.

  No reply. Unsane was in love. You can’t talk when you’re in love. Unconsciously, he moved ever so slightly towards her, drawn into her orbit at just the precise moment that, way up in the outer, the asteroid Eros shook himself a wee bit further out of his. Unsane’s mouth opened. His tongue rolled out. His eyes drooped at the outer corners and his cheeks flushed pink.

  ‘Three dollars, mate,’ repeated Jake. He looked at Baby to see if she was in any way encouraging this moronic display. She appeared oblivious, happily tapping her feet to the music—they were playing Songs in the Key of X over the PA—and watching the bands set up.

  Unsane tried to remember where he was and why. Curiously, he took in the orange walls of the pub, the stage, the mammoth bar, his own feet. That’s right. He pulled in his tongue. Speaking slowly, as though coming out of a dream, he asked, ‘Any concession?’

  ‘Sorry, mate.’

  Unsane pulled three coins out of his pocket, one at a time, farewelling each individually with tragic eyes. He held out a skinny wrist and Jake stamped it with a little picture of R2D2. He gave Baby one last look of pure devotion and disappeared up the back of the bar.

  Next to front up was a sophisticated-looking girl with sparkles on her face and cartoons on her stockings. She was handing over her three dollars when the bouncer stepped in. ‘ID,’ he demanded.

  ‘Tosser,’ pouted the fifteen-year-old, turning on her heels and walking off.

  ‘Friend of the band,’ announced the next comer, a skinny fellow in a huge Prik Harnes
s t-shirt that said ‘Choose Satan’ on the front and had a cartoon of giant mutants on the back.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Fizzer.’ He pointed to his name on the list.

  ‘Cool.’ Jake crossed off the name and stamped his wrist.

  ‘Sorry.’ Fizzer apologised as he squeezed past Baby and into the venue. His leg accidentally brushed against hers. He jumped as though shocked and, if Jake’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, the mutant on Fizzer’s t-shirt suddenly grinned and winked its one eye. Fizzer gulped and hurried on inside.

  The person behind Fizzer had been straining to read the list. ‘Friend of the band,’ he mumbled, eyes darting every which way.

  ‘Name?’ Jake demanded.

  ‘Uh, Chomper.’

  ‘Three dollars, mate. Chomper and I are like this.’ He held up intertwined fingers. ‘Better luck next time.’

  The fellow scowled and walked away, muttering under his breath about how he’d complain to someone or other.

  ‘Who’s Chomper?’ asked Baby, pushing her stool a centimetre or two closer to Jake’s.

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ shrugged Jake, hoping she wasn’t just making more room for the punters. ‘But the list says “Stomper”. He read it wrong.’

  Next in the queue was a clump of crusties. They were standing so close to each other that it looked as though their dreads had all velcroed together. In fact, that’s exactly what had happened. A friend of theirs was supposed to have come over that afternoon to help separate them. But she’d had a few spliffs and forgotten all about it. So they were condemned to another day or two of deep communal living. Which was fine with them. They were into that anyway, even if it was slightly awkward when one of the girls had to go to the toilet. One of them handed over a five and a ten and the entire coagulation shuffled forward, holding out six wrists for stamping. Jake stamped five, and did some sums. ‘That’s another three dollars, mateys.’

  They grimaced collectively. ‘That’s all we got,’ a small voice piped up from the centre of the cluster. ‘And we couldn’t exactly leave one at home.’ Jake stamped the sixth wrist. Grunting gratefully, they amoeba-ed into the pub.

  At least three others who fronted up claimed to work at the pub, six said they just wanted to use the toilets, and four were ‘looking for a friend’. One explained she worked at the cafe next door: ‘We’ve got an agreement.’ Another alleged he just wanted to get a bottle from the bar. Like those who’d only come to use the toilets, he disappeared till the end of the evening.

  One young fellow, obviously a student, emptied one pocket of his oversized trousers, which hung perilously around the crack of his arse, placing eighty cents in ten and five-cent pieces on the small table in front of Jake. Then he emptied the other pocket. The total came to $2.20. He held it out to Jake with a mournful expression. Jake waved him in. He understood. He’d been there. He was there.

  ‘This,’ he explained dryly to Baby, ‘is the glamorous and exciting world of rock n roll.’

  Baby didn’t pick up on Jake’s sarcasm. She was entranced. Earthlings had such peculiar and fascinating rituals. Nufonians would have all just queued up, handed over their three dollars and gone in without a fuss. If they didn’t have three dollars, they’d have stayed at home. She was enjoying every minute.

  Prik Harness mounted the stage wearing macrame bikinis. The bikinis would have looked bizarre enough on any woman, but the band was all male. ‘Why is everyone laughing?’ Baby asked Jake. On Nufon, everyone wore macrame bikinis in the summer. Not only were they very practical, but they were aesthetically pleasing against silver skin shimmering under the stars.

  A girl with a cheeky grin came to the door, leaned over the table and whispered, ‘I have a very large pair of underpants for the band.’

  Jake waved her in.

  ‘Is underwear an accepted currency in the rock n roll world?’ Baby was curious.

  Jake considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘It is, actually.’ He’d turned back to the door to collect money from a girl wearing a baby doll nightie over woollen stockings, and sucking on a large carrot. Baby smiled at her and she smiled back, her lips stretching around the vegetable. Baby felt so at home at moments like this. Aliens and earthlings weren’t all that different when it came down to it.

  ‘We wrote this next song for our mate Jake,’ the drummer announced. Baby looked at Jake, impressed. He was pretty impressed himself. He had no idea they’d written something for him. He tried to look nonchalant, though secretly he was thrilled to death. ‘It’s called the “Slacker Song”,’ explained the drummer. A titter rippled through the crowd. Jake felt mildly alarmed.

  ‘What’s a slacker?’ Baby asked curiously.

  ‘Some bullshit term invented by the media,’ he replied. ‘I could never figure out what it means, myself.’

  Baby, reading his mind, understood that, whatever slacker meant, Jake privately feared he was a quintessential. This wasn’t something he objected to as a matter of principle, or found particularly offensive, but he did hate being a caricature. It offended his dignity. And even quintessential slackers have a certain amount of dignity.

  I need a cup of coffee

  but there isn’t any milk

  so I have some cordial

  and I’m feeling ill.

  Why am I so tired?

  Why am I so bored?

  I couldn’t get off my arse

  to save my own life

  I need a piece of toast

  but there isn’t any bread

  so I search through the fridge

  and eat a carrot instead

  Why am I so tired?

  Why am I so bored…

  How embarrassing. The crowd greeted the song with enthusiastic applause and howls of laughter. A number of people turned, mid-guffaw, to give Jake the thumbs up. He did his best to ignore them.

  ‘Are you often bored, Jake?’ Baby asked.

  ‘Nup,’ he replied. ‘I used to be bored.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got tired of it.’

  Baby cocked her head. She wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but she also suspected he was joking. It was hard to tell sometimes with Earthlings. Personally, Baby didn’t see how it was possible to be bored on Earth.

  ‘You should like this next song,’ he informed her. ‘It’s called “Space Food”.’ He drained the last drops from his bottle of beer and handed the empty to her. He watched as she greedily munched and swallowed it down. He was no longer shocked by her feeding habits even if they still scared him. Baby was beyond a doubt the most astounding woman Jake had ever met. Alien. Hybrid. Whatever.

  ‘Nup,’ he disabused two boys in grunge beanies. ‘No discount for Canberrans. Three dollars each, thanks.’

  He watched her now, listening to the band. He loved the way that, whether listening or playing, she threw herself into the music. It was so sexy.

  At the end of the evening, after repaying the $100 float by the bar, Jake counted out $265.30. The bands paid him $20. ‘I’m a wealthy man,’ Jake informed Baby.

  She shrugged. ‘Money can’t buy you love,’ she replied, without meaning to impute anything in particular. Jake felt as though he’d been stabbed in the heart.

  ‘Look! cried a Cherub, bouncing up and down on podgy feet in front of the Space Monitor. ‘It’s the Red Dwarf!’

  ‘Cool!’ Next to The X-Files, probably the most popular program in the outer was the BBC’s Red Dwarf, about a mining craft lost in deep space. The craft was populated by one surviving human, a hologram of a dead crew member and a character who had genetically mutated from a cat.

  A Sirian, who’d been lying on the floor of the control room asking Captain Qwerk, ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ leapt to his feet and gave the Red Dwarf salute, a particularly absurd gesture that involved extending one arm and making a limp-wristed circle with it before snapping it up to the side of the head, military style. Another Sirian, seeing this, laughed so hard he had to be given
resuscitation. Meanwhile, more Sirians were pogo-ing all around Qwerk, begging him to alter course so Red Dwarf wouldn’t see their spaceship. In the TV show, there were no aliens, no other spacecraft, nothing, just space. ‘You’ll ruin it if they see us,’ they begged.

  ‘We’ll lose too much time if we take a detour,’ argued Qwerk.

  ‘Please please please,’ they pleaded, swarming around him, stroking his pointy little chin, running tentacles over the thin slit of his silvery mouth, licking his funny little hooves and pinching his knobbly knees.

  ‘Get off me,’ exclaimed Qwerk desperately, swatting them away. ‘Off me, you mutants!’ This only encouraged them.

  ‘We love it when you call us names!’ chuckled a Sirian.

  ‘If you don’t let me go,’ Qwerk growled, ‘I won’t be able to swerve away in time and they definitely will spot us.’ The Sirians were off him faster than you could say ‘Start Me Up’.

  Baby, Doll and Lati practised every afternoon at the house in Newtown. The saucer had become too much of a zoo for them to concentrate there. Then there was the Ebola plague. At the close of his concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, Ebola Van Axel stunned his fans with the announcement that he’d be staying in Australia indefinitely. He took up what appeared to be permanent residence by the Sebel pool, leaving a daily tribute of red roses at the base of the water tower, writing ‘I luv U, Baby’ in whipped cream on the deck, and crooning endless love ballads to the saucer.

  Those weren’t the only reasons the babes hung out in Newtown, of course. They felt thoroughly at home there. Lots of people had weird hair and green skin in Newtown, especially the morning after a big night out. But mostly, the babes liked being in Newtown because that’s where Their Favourite Earthlings were. Doll had decided that she could easily have been a vampire in another life. Lati, meanwhile, had become the best of drug buddies with the twins who, while continuing to lust after her, were always somehow too slack or too stoned to do anything about it.

  As for Baby and Jake, they continued to circle each other like birds who couldn’t get beyond the mating dance. It had been, what, three weeks already. What was this, the 1950s? Baby, who coupled with complete strangers at the drop of an Abduct-o-matic, somehow couldn’t bring herself even to give Jake a proper kiss.