by Linda Jaivin
‘Week Saturday then.’
‘Week Saturday.’
Slipping back into bed, Jake found it hard to fall asleep. He sat up, rolled his dreads for a while, and surveyed his clothing kingdom. He leaned over the side of the bed, searched for the least filthy pair of underpants, examined them briefly, turned them inside out and pulled them on. One of these months, he really needed to do his laundry.
Maybe not. The Newtown Festival was not far off. Two years ago, at the height of their sewing phase, Torquil and Tristram had made up a huge swag of clothes to sell there, and stuffed them into one of those big green garbage bags the night before. But on the morning, being not much better at mornings than Jake, they accidentally grabbed the wrong bag, the one with all their laundry. As it turned out, they sold every last piece, even items of underwear so crispy they crackled, and socks that not only were capable of walking down the street on their own, but had developed full-blown personality disorders. As it turned out, the twins were able to keep for themselves the clothes they’d sewn, and still made enough profit to buy new daks, a case of beer and a dozen CDs. They never looked back. In fact, they looked forward to a Golden Age when all the people of Newtown—for only in Newtown was such a thing conceivable—simply passed on to each other their old clothes, and thus regularly acquired new wardrobes without ever needing to wash them. The following year Jake had chipped in his clothes as well as his sheets. Shit. He still hadn’t replaced the sheets. He’d have to get some new ones if Baby was to…if they were to…
Jake considered this possibility in detail. He pushed and pulled and rubbed and stroked it. Mmmmm. Those antennae. Oh, man. Mmmm. Where were the tissues when he needed them? He noticed the clock. Twenty past twelve. He really ought to get up. Yawning, he pulled the covers back over his head. Just ten more minutes and he’d be outta there.
Running feet thundered on the bridge overhead. A door slammed. An eerie quiet pervaded the Earth-bound craft. Suddenly, screams rent the air. Qwerk jumped. He could feel his ichor run cold. More screams.
‘Not the liquid oxygen!’ someone squealed. ‘Don’t stir the liquid oxygen!’
What in Quagaar was going on? Preparing for the worst, Qwerk signalled to two of the borgs. They took the stairs three at a time, hooves clattering on the metal rungs, council truck meets Pablo Percusso. The screaming stopped as suddenly as it began. He threw open the closed door only to be greeted by a roomful of guilty, grinning faces. The aliens were watching a video of Apollo 13 that some Alpha had abducted from Video Ezy on his last trip to Earth a year ago. Aliens, as a rule, found Tom Hanks devastatingly attractive. Most of them had already seen the film at least fifty times and could recite the dialogue off by heart. It was second in popularity only to Independence Day. They’d put the vid on pause at Qwerk’s approach, and now all sat contrite, waiting for his upbraiding to finish so that they could return to their film. ‘OK Houston,’ whispered a Zeta Reticulan solemnly, ‘we’ve a problem here.’ Someone giggled, and then someone else did, and soon the whole room was pffpffpffing with suppressed laughter.
Qwerk sighed, a shimmering little vibrato of a sound, exited the room, and closed the door behind him. The video resumed and, shortly afterwards, so did the screaming. Qwerk returned to the control room, and put his head down on the console.
God, this was trying. Wasn’t there any way to get the other aliens to behave themselves?
God, this was trying. Wasn’t there any way to get the other aliens to behave themselves?
God, this was…
Qwerk sighed again. God clearly was not going to come to his aid on this one. Sometimes he thought God didn’t like him very much. It was a depressing thought. His eyes darted to the speedometer. Phew. Just under the limit.
‘Jake, mate, that gig went off so much it went on again.’ The second gig at the Sando had proved even more of a triumph than the first.
‘Cheers.’ Jake clicked his glass against Tim’s. After the Sando closed, they’d all moved up the street to Sleepers, a pub for those who weren’t, not at night anyway. From his position leaning on the bar, Jake was able to keep an eye on the swell of admirers around Baby, Doll and Lati. There sure were a lot of them. Why couldn’t Baby be with him and him alone?
‘Sorry?’ Jake realised that Tim had been speaking to him.
‘Mate,’ Tim was saying, ‘you angsting out over something?’
‘Angsting out? Me? Nah,’ said Jake, thinking, is it that obvious?
‘Look, I know what you’re going through.’
‘You do?’ Jake seriously doubted it.
‘They’re just pop, man. It’s good pop—don’t get me wrong—it’s cool, it’s sexy, it’s indie, it’s got some cred. But, like, ten, twenty years down the track, who are people gonna remember?’ Tim answered his own rhetorical. ‘Bosnia, man. Bosnia.’
Jake forced a smile. ‘Thanks, Timbo.’ Right. His male ego had been suffering so much that his rock star ego had forgotten that it was being mortally wounded as well. For fuck’s sake. Thanks a lot, Timbo.
Jake turned so he wouldn’t have to look at Baby, and found himself staring straight at a leggy girl with short hair, a shorter skirt, and a twinkle in her eye. Jake snapped automatically into flirt mode. ‘What are you drinking?’ he asked suavely, nodding at her nearly-empty glass.
She grinned. Jake took encouragement and grinned back.
‘Sorry, mate,’ a deep voice rumbled from just behind him. The fellow who owned the voice edged between Jake and the girl, who threw her arms around his neck in greeting. Jake realised with embarrassment that she hadn’t been smiling at him after all.
Jake had always maintained that if you couldn’t chat up someone at Sleepers, it was time to hand in your membership in the Newtown tribe and move to…move to…Where else was there? Like most people who lived there, Jake almost never left Newtown and therefore had only a hazy notion of what else was out there, Sydney-wise. Now it looked like he was going to have to hand in his membership after all. Never mind, he consoled himself. No one had been watching.
Wrong. Tim had seen the whole thing. ‘I think you’re losing it,’ he teased.
‘At least,’ Jake replied dryly, ‘I once had it.’ He wasn’t, like, totally devastated or anything. The girl was cute, and he wouldn’t have Kicked Her Out Of but his heart wasn’t in it. What his heart was in was standing about two metres and a million miles away sponging up the vile attentions of all manner of untrustworthy and insincere flatterers who had less than honourable intentions and whom she should be warned about, if not protected from. Well, that’s how Jake saw it anyway. Christ, he knew all of them, and they were just like him!
There was a whole slew of new faces at breakfast on Galgal the following afternoon. Two gigs down the track and the girls had discovered groupies. Groupies, they found, were almost as much fun as abductees. Sometimes more so. And wasn’t it fabulous how they all got along? Earthlings were so easy.
Well, most Earthlings anyway. Baby was sitting on the lap of a rather distinguished-looking older man abductee who had managed to coax five tiny cunts out of her side, one for each finger. She was also nibbling at a handful of nails offered up by a gorgeous young groupie with pert breasts and waist-length purple hair who was kneeling at her feet. Ebola was a respectful metre or two away, on his hands and knees, ready to do whatever his mistress commanded. But was Baby happy? No. Baby was thinking about Jake, wasn’t she? She knew he desired her. But something was stopping him from doing anything about it. And that, in turn, was stopping her from doing anything about it. Was it because she was an alien? She couldn’t help that, could she? And why would she want to? Mmmm, those fingers felt good. Mmmm. Jake. Why hadn’t he come over to her last night at Sleepers and taken her away from those other people?
No, she wasn’t obsessed. That was ridiculous. She was just, oh, curious. Intrigued. Attracted. Perplexed. Infatuated.
Obsessed.
‘Jake! Why didn’t you stick around last night?’ The twi
ns, closely followed by Saturna and Skye, burst noisily into the house. ‘We all ended up back at their place. Oh, man,’ exhaled Torquil, ‘you should see where they live.’ He plonked himself down next to Jake, who was seated on the brown sofa tracking the tennis on telly with morose eyes. ‘It was, like, this flying saucer? On top of the Sebel Townhouse?’
Jake raised one eyebrow. He kept his eyes on the tube.
‘Yeah,’ enthused Tristram. ‘Can’t believe we’d never been over there before. It’s cool as. You, like, look out the windows and there’s Bondi in one direction, the city in the other. Fully viewsome. And what a night. You’d never believe who was there. You know how Ebola Van Axel announced that he was staying on in Australia? Well, guess where he’s hangin’ out?’
Jake’s head whipped round. ‘No,’ he denied, horrified.
‘Yes,’ Trist affirmed. ‘Oh, yes.’
Jake suddenly noticed that Torquil was wearing one of Baby’s frocks, the lime green one with the diamond-shaped cut-outs in the sleeves. Couldn’t his world fall apart a little at a time, like everyone else’s? Did it have to happen all at once? ‘Nice frock, Torq,’ he said, hoping those weren’t really tears that he felt in his eyes. For fuck’s sake.
‘Yeah,’ Torq smoothed the stretchy fabric over his legs. ‘Lati just shredded what I was wearing and I had to have something to come home in.’
Jake was feeling thoroughly alarmed by now. ‘Did you guys, did you—’
‘Did we what?’ Tristram asked, looking suspiciously innocent.
Jake decided he didn’t really want to know any more about last night. He hadn’t been there. Whatever happened, it hadn’t happened to him. On a need to know basis, he didn’t need to know. He blinked rapidly a few times. ‘I think it’s time,’ he declared, changing the subject, ‘that Bosnia moved up in the world. I’ve decided to call the Annandale to see if we can get a gig there. With the Babes, of course.’
‘Cool,’ said Torquil, staring hard at Jake. Was that a tear in his eye?
The Annandale Hotel was considered a notch higher than the Sando in the feeding chain of Sydney pub rock, if only because it had a stage that wasn’t constructed from milk cartons, its bar was in a logical place, and it could hold more people.
Old-timers compared the Bosnia/Babes night at the Annandale to the famous gig played by Midnight Oil at the Stagedoor Tavern in 1980 at which nearly 2000 people crammed into a space licensed to hold 129 while 500 more rioted outside. No one could estimate how many people managed to get into the Annandale that night—the bouncers, like everyone else, had fallen under the Babes’ chaotic-erotic influence and were go-go dancing naked on the pool tables.
‘I reckon it’s time to hit the road,’ Jake observed to the twins afterwards. They were leaning against the Kombi, waiting for the Babes to extricate themselves from the boisterous cluster of fans who’d besieged them the second they emerged from the backstage door and were still surrounding them now, an hour or so later. All the boys could see of the Babes were their bobbing antennae.
Torquil looked at Jake in disbelief. ‘You don’t want to wait for the girls?’
‘You’re not, like, jealous or anything.’ Tristram was shocked as well.
Jake treated them both to a look of disdain. ‘I’m disappointed in you both,’ he sighed. ‘Deeply disappointed. As if. What I meant—obviously—was that it’s time we took this show on the road. Tour time. I am looking into the future and I see Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Byron Bay. Any prior commitments? Speak now, or hold your peace.’
The twins’ faces lit up like a pair of spotlights. ‘Let’s do it,’ enthused Torquil. ‘I think I’m overdue for long service leave from the dole anyway.’
‘And I,’ announced Tristram, ‘will check my diary but I don’t think I have anything planned for, oh, the next twenty years or so. So, like, whenever’s good for me.’ He jumped up, punched the air and whooped, ‘Rock n fucken roll!’
Kate the Kombi grew alarmed. They weren’t planning to drive to all these places in her, were they? At her age, just trundling off to the shops could be traumatic. She broke out into a cold radiator sweat. The more she thought about the toll such a trip would take on her aching joints and old starter motor, the more she became convinced she was on the verge of a breakdown.
Two cute girls with bindis on their foreheads, feathers in their hair and lust in their eyes fronted up to Jake. Now this was more like it. Jake let rip his killer smile and snaked his posture into a sensuous, relaxed curve. He raised his cigarette to his lips, cocked an eyebrow and looked from one to the other. ‘Hi there,’ he drawled.
‘Uh, hi,’ said the one with the green glitter on her cheeks. ‘We’re, like, really big fans?’
Jake puffed with pleasure.
‘Of the Babes?’ the girl continued. ‘And we were wondering if you could get them to autograph…’
It was deep into the wee hours by the time Baby, Doll and Lati finally bubbled up to the Kombi, high on performance and adulation, and full of apologies for the delay.
And then they still had to jumpstart poor Kate. Baby did it with the tip of her little finger.
‘Erotic,’ sang Eros tunelessly.
‘Neurotic,’ taunted a fellow ‘roid, zipping past and refusing to indulge in even a minor prang. ‘Quixotic.’
‘Despotic,’ hooted a second. ‘Idiotic.’ He slammed straight into the first, just to annoy Eros. Asteroidal fragments flew off in all directions and their screams of pleasure echoed through space.
If they weren’t going to play with him, why couldn’t they just leave him alone!
Wretchedly, Eros huffed and he puffed and he still couldn’t blow himself down. But he was having something of an effect. The Philippines experienced a series of minor volcanic eruptions, there was an intense gurgling in the boiling mud pools of New Zealand and Peking shifted slightly on its geological plate. Feel the Earth move under your feet?
Inside the secret bowels of the Pentagon, close to where the small intestine of Offensive Strategy met the large intestine of Military Intelligence, stood a recessed and relatively inconspicuous door through which few people ever passed and behind which things transpired that Fox Mulder would have given his right arm—and Dana Scully’s as well—to find out about. Upon the door was drawn a logo which to the uninitiated eye might suggest a ban on frisbees. Below the logo, stencilled letters spelt out CONSPIRASEE.
It was the headquarters of the highly hush-hush, much feared Central Organisation for the Non-civilian Secret Project Involving the Restraint of Aliens, Starpeople and other Extraterrestrial Exotics. The offices behind the inconspicuous door were far from humble. They featured an extensive library, a bank of computers and a well-equipped laboratory with a setup not dissimilar to the sexual experimentation chamber on Galgal. One of the things You Wouldn’t Want to Know was what lay in the smallish coffin-like containers stacked in the refrigerator cabinet that dominated an entire wall of the room. The only decorations were Wanted posters with pictures and descriptions of ET, assorted Klingons and Captain Qwerk.
When the phone rang the man in charge of CONSPIRASEE, General ‘Jackal’ Mikeson, was studying a television advertisement that appeared to feature actual alien actors. Putting the vid on pause, he hit the button on his speaker phone. He settled his big armyman’s frame into his leather swivel chair and jutted his enormous Roger Ramjet chin at the speaker. ‘Mikeson,’ he barked.
‘Bo Davidey. Public Relations.’
Mikeson was not particularly committed to a relationship with the public. He picked up a dart from an ashtray and threw it at the poster of Qwerk. It landed right in the middle of Qwerk’s bulbous forehead. ‘Yes, Davidey,’ he said. ‘What is it this time?’ He picked up another dart. ‘I haven’t got all day.’
‘Ever hear of a group called, uh, let me just check my notes, right, “Persons Aware of the Reality of Alien Networks for Organised Interplanetary Destruction”?’
Mikeson rolled his eyes. ‘PARANOID. Nu
tcases, the lot of them.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
Mikeson shrugged his broad armyman’s shoulders. ‘You can spell, Davidey.’ He picked his nose and examined the findings for alien spore.
‘I’ve got a journalist from Time who wants some comment on the group’s allegations that the military is suppressing information on alien contacts.’
‘Deny it. Completely.’ Mikeson couldn’t believe these guys in PR sometimes. That place was a real lights-are-onbut-no-one’s-at-home scenario. Duh, he mouthed at the receiver.
‘No other comment?’
‘No. That all?’
‘Well, there’s one other thing, actually. I don’t know if you really want to bother with this one. But there are some scattered reports from our spies in Sydney that a rash of green-skinned female aliens have landed and, uh, formed a rock band.’
‘Green-skinned female aliens. A rock band.’ Mikeson rolled his eyes again. ‘And you want a comment?’
‘If you—’
‘I don’t.’
‘All right. No problem. Thanks, General.’
‘Pleasure.’ A rock band for Christ’s sake. Where the fuck was Sydney anyway? And what kind of name was that for a place? ‘I come from Sydney?’
Gimme a break.
‘Hot as,’ complained Tristram, wiping his brow on the sleeve of his Karen Carpenter t-shirt. Summer was a sauna in Newtown. Goths suffered most in their unrelenting black. But it was not the done thing for anyone in Newtown to wear white, even in summer. Oh, sure, the yuppies who were energetically attempting to gentrify the place—they wore white. But they weren’t really Newtown. They didn’t count.