by Linda Jaivin
‘Is it working?’
‘Not really,’ Tristram admitted.
‘Maybe they take a while to kick in.’
‘That’s what we’re hoping.’
‘Where’s Henry?’ The twins grimaced in unison.
‘Here.’ What was that? The others looked to see where the very small voice was coming from. ‘Over here.’ Henry was on his hands and knees in the doorway, looking like something a dog wouldn’t even consider for dinner.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Jake.
‘I’ll be right,’ said Henry. ‘I just need a Panadol.’
After the soundcheck, the twins left to score some over-the-counters for themselves and Henry, whom they left chilling out on the side of the stage with his sunnies on and the carrying case for a drum over his head. Lati and Doll headed up Jonson Street to look for an automotive repair shop—the little drama in the pub had only sharpened their appetites.
‘What do you want to do?’ Jake deferred to Baby. They still had some time before the gig was scheduled to start.
‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘It’s been quite an afternoon. I wouldn’t mind staying here and shooting some pool, actually.’ She dropped a coin into the slot, and began to set up. Baby had become addicted to pool. On Jake’s advice, she’d taken to flubbing a few shots now and then so that she wouldn’t scare the other beans too much. He strolled over to the doorway, squinted into the sunshine, put his sunnies back on and joined her in the side room. ‘Yeah, I reckon it’s best to stay inside,’ he said. ‘I think it’s possible to overdo this outdoors thing. Sunshine’s a bit overrated. Don’t you think?’
‘Absolutely,’ she agreed, replacing the triangle on the green lamp above the table and chalking her cue. ‘I prefer the light from white dwarfs myself. It’s a hell of a lot softer, more romantic.’
God, he liked this girl.
So why don’t you do something about it, Jake? I’m getting bored already. I mean, foreplay and buildup are one thing, but it’s been, what, nearly 250 pages already—in My diary, anyway—and you still haven’t made a move.
Who’s that? Jake looked around him nervously.
God. You called. Remember?
Huh? Fuck, those space cookies were full-on. That’s it. No more drugs. Ever.
It’s not the space cookies, My handsome little dreadheaded one. I thought you were a thinking girl’s crumpet, Jake. I’m a bit disappointed in you. I don’t detect much thinking going on at all. If you don’t mind My being frank, I’d suggest you lay off the chemicals just a wee bit and concentrate on the chemistry.
Sorry?
Kiss her, you fool.
Kiss her? Now? Just like that? Hello? God? Mate?
Where’d He go?
(He hadn’t gone anywhere; He was watching.)
Jake swallowed. ‘Uh, Baby.’
‘You wanna break? What is it?’ Baby looked at Jake. He had a tulip sitting on his left ear. She went to pluck it, but it wasn’t there after all, and her hand stroked the bouncy matted pipes of hair that were there. To say that Jake shuddered would be less accurate than to say he vibrated. From head to toe and back to head again. Jake’s heart was beating fast. Digitidigitidigiti. He stared at her full red lips, the corners of which were curled upwards, and noted how close the top of her lips were to the tip of her nose. Jake always loved that in a girl. Jake imagined himself shrinking and climbing into the bow of her lips as if it were a deck chair, danging his legs down one side, tickling her teeth with his fingers and blowing soft breaths up her nostrils at the same time. He imagined bouncing on the soft hammock of her thick blue lashes, swinging from her adorable earlobes, and rolling around on the springy mattress of her magnificent cheeks.
Baby pulled his head close to her own and sweetened her lips against his. The turquoise velvet of her tongue insinuated itself into his mouth and found a willing playmate in the fat pink organ that lived within. Her antennae were humming ‘What a Wonderful World’ (the Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan version). Breathing unevenly but very deeply, she let go of her cue, which clattered to the floor.
Neither of them noticed Brian the Bouncer come into the room. After that business with the drunks, Brian had satisfied himself that nothing much was happening in the bar. He was in the bog laying a cable, checking the growth on his mullet and thinking about Shareen’s pasty thighs while that scene with Ratface and Doll was going on in the bar. Now he emerged to find the place weirdly sedate. No fights. No arguments. Nothing. Just a hippy dippy happy atmosphere of love and peace. It made him damn uncomfortable. Something was afoot. He checked the backroom. He checked the bar. He looked up and down the street. He leaned against the wall and waited. When he heard the clamour of the cue striking the floor, he strode into the pool room.
Aw, Christ. Didn’t these feral birds ever wash? She was green. And that bloke she was canoodling. Skinny fucken wimp. Brian watched till he could stand it no longer. He strode over and slapped Jake on the shoulder. ‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Feral face.’
Quick time out for the tonsil hockey team.
Jake and Baby blinked uncomprehendingly at Brian’s leering mug.
‘Oi’ve bin watchin’ youse,’ he scowled. ‘And youse makin’ me sick, mate. You wanna do that shit, you do it outsoide. And woipe that smoile off yer doile,’ he further advised Jake. ‘Unless ya want me to do it for ya. Pubs,’ he informed them in a voice that brooked no dissent, ‘er fer sinkin’ piss.’
The main compu-tron on Pop crackled into life. ‘Mes. sage. re. ceived. “Hel. lo. Pop.” Over.’
Qwerk quickly checked the co-ordinates. Parkes? Where in Quagaar was that?
Standing in the doorway of the pool room, Lati could hardly believe her oculi. She’d come back for the Abduct-o-matic, which was with the rest of their gear next to the stage, just in time to witness the big kiss. Lati couldn’t understand why Baby and Jake allowed that big oafy bloke to interrupt what had obviously been, for them—and everyone else in the pool room including Lati herself, who’d grown a little cunt between her eyes just from watching—a rather sensational moment.
Those two were fucken hopeless. Baby should have turned the bouncer into a barstool or zapped him off to charm school in Perth. Instead, she just stood there awkwardly, not even daring to lift her eyes and look at Jake. Brian smirked. He turned and, examining his fingernails, headed back towards the bar. Finally, Baby picked up her cue and began to shoot pool as though nothing had happened, except she was hitting all the wrong balls. Jake was affecting an equally absurd nonchalance. He’d picked up someone’s empty schooner from the table next to him and was pretending to drink from it.
Well, if Baby wasn’t going to follow through with Jake, then Lati figured she could pretty much do as she liked. And she liked to cause a bit of trouble.
The gig went down smashingly with the Byron crowd. Even Brian jumped up on a table to dance with Shareen. Poor things had to be carried off when it collapsed underneath them, but that’s rock n roll.
After the gang had lugged out, they all whizzed over to the Epicentre for the full moon party. Scrambling down the dunes to the beach, they discovered maybe a hundred people in feral finery dancing under the silvery light of the moon, skinny dipping, twirling firesticks and passing pipes and tabs. Torquil and Tristram joined the large drumming circle. Henry, mumbling something incomprehensible about ‘graphic EQs’, passed out on the sand. Doll got involved in tattooing some woman’s breasts, and the little goddess of the floral essences from that afternoon whisked Baby off to meet her cosmic family.
Jake sat on the cool sand, hypnotised by the waves and the drumming and thinking about Baby’s lips. He’d scored some Mullumbimby heads and had a pipe. Or two. It definitely wasn’t three. Maybe three. Yeah, please, do, kiss me again. Mmmm. That’s wonderful. That’s the most wonderful thing in the world. Mmmmm. I’m in heaven. Let me open my eyes and look at you, my gorgeous alien girl.
Shit! Jake jumped about a metre backwards in the sand and covered his mouth with his han
ds.
Baby didn’t see Jake recoil. All she saw was him kissing Lati. That was enough. She turned and walked straight into the surf. Swimming furiously through the water, she dived to the bottom and punched the sand as hard as she could. The ocean floor shifted under the impact and a new sand bank formed that, surfers would later swear, created the filthiest swells they’d ever seen on the north coast.
By the time she emerged from the waves again, Jake was frantic. He stumbled over to the water’s edge and shouted, ‘Baby, it’s not what you—’ but before he finished his sentence she dived in again. He turned to stare straight into Lati’s unrepentent eyes.
‘Christ, Lati,’ he moaned, raising his hands to the sides of his head. His tattoo ached.
‘Jake,’ she shrugged. ‘You know that Dave Graney song? “You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel”? Think about it.’
With that enigmatic comment, Lati turned on her heel and tripped off to join in the dancing. Jake waited for Baby to come out of the water, but she didn’t re-emerge till dawn when it was time to hit the road again.
For the drive back to Sydney, Doll took the wheel. Baby sat in the front with her, staring out the window and not speaking for the entire trip, except to tell Lati in an annoyed voice to shut up when she sang the Foo Fighters’ ‘For All the Cows’ for the hundredth time after passing yet another fucken paddock. Lati didn’t care. She snuggled up to Henry, who was still feeling very delicate. Jake, mortified, horrified, crucified, and drug-fried, huddled behind the passenger seat, torturing himself with the sight of the back of Baby’s head. The twins, unaware of any psychodrama, lay side by side, trying to recall exactly where they’d misplaced their brains. ‘Somewhere between Kalbarri and Brisbane,’ Torquil was saying. ‘Definitely somewhere between Kalbarri and Brisbane.’
‘Couldn’t you be more specific?’ groaned Tristram. ‘Otherwise we’ll never find them again.’
‘It’s for you, Jake,’ Saturna called out. She hadn’t actually answered the phone. As educated guesses go, however, it was a PhD. The phone had been ringing nonstop for days—more even than the time last year when the dozen or so girlfriends that Jake had accumulated suddenly found out about each other and felt compelled to share with him in detail their feelings on the subject of his general desirability as a member of the human race. As before, every call was for Jake. This time, however, they were the sort of which every musician dreams—venue and festival bookers, scouts for record companies, producers offering their services, journalists begging for interviews. Kwong José Abdul Foo wanted to do gigs together and Nick Cave was hoping for a duet. Countless fans volunteered their sexual services or just pleaded for scraps of clothing or locks of hair. None of the callers was the least bit interested in Bosnia.
The career of the Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space had taken off at warp speed. The word was spreading faster than warm butter on a hot toaster (the girls’ current breakfast of choice). Radio Triple J, which was running on a shoestring now that the government had cut 95 per cent of its funding, had snapped up the Babes’ single ‘In the Sexual Experimentation Chamber (Anything Goes, Everything Cums)’. They put it on high rotation despite government threats to razor the final 5 per cent unless the station started playing healthy music. When the Babes launched their LP Come to Mothership, the Js defiantly made it their featured album of the week, as did Triple C, which billed itself as the alternative to the alternative. The commercial stations put several tracks from it on their top ten, and even the Christian community stations played a couple of their songs. (God had had a word in their ear.)
They continued to play live, to sellout crowds all around the country. The unresolved tension between Baby and Lati over what had happened in Byron only added to the heat on stage.
One day, Jake, who’d by now become the Babes’ de facto manager, headed over to Elizabeth Bay to discuss the upcoming No Way Out festival, where the Babes were to be supporting top international acts. Arriving at the Sebel with Iggy, he took the lift up to the pool area, just in time to see Ebola laying his daily offering of roses at the foot of the water tower. ‘Hi there, Jake,’ Ebola gurgled ingratiatingly.
A shiver of disgust ran up Jake’s spine. ‘Uh, g’day,’ he replied with evasive eyes. The man was aesthetic offence. Jake couldn’t even bring himself to greet Ebola by name. For his part, Iggy looked at Eb and growled at him, as he always did. Iggy hated death metal.
‘Gonna see our Baby?’ Eb asked.
Our Baby? The man was a fucken outrage. Iggy’s growl deepened. Jake ignored him and called up to the saucer. ‘Baby?’
She looked out the window, waved, and let down the steps. Jake and Iggy couldn’t believe it when Ebola, uninvited, followed them up.
As Iggy scampered off to find Revor, Jake pulled Baby aside. ‘How can you let this guy hang around like this?’ he whinged. The mobile phone that the babes had abducted for him rang. As Jake took the call, a flash of annoyance lit Baby’s features. Jake had some nerve telling her who she should or should not be seeing.
She hadn’t gotten over the Lati incident. Doll, who saw the whole thing, told Baby what had happened as soon as they returned to Sydney. Baby had confronted Lati, and there had been a bit of antennae-pulling and name-calling, but at least they’d faced up to it. What still irritated Baby was how Jake avoided all attempts on her part to raise the subject. Was he guiltier than Doll made out, she wondered. If not, what was his problem? Earthlings, obsessed as they were with primitive toys like mobiles and e-mail, still couldn’t communicate to save their lives.
On a sudden impulse, she grabbed for Ebola, who was lying prostrate at her feet, a rose between his lips. Hauling him up by the collar, she plucked the bloom and planted a smacking wet kiss on his mouth, right before the astonished Jake. This caused Eb’s hair (which he’d recently cut back to his shoulders, as a sort of compromise with the Metallica thing) to stand on end and his ears to glow orange. Then she patted him on the arse and told him to go back to the pool and leave them alone. Stepping out of the saucer, the love-befuddled rock star fell straight down to the pool deck, for no one had activated the steps. He cried out as his ankle twisted beneath him. Sitting on the deck, he cradled the hurt foot in his hands, weeping tears of pain and gratitude.
Jake swallowed bile. He concluded the call and switched off the phone. ‘About the concert,’ he opened, a little harshly. They discussed details, neither looking the other in the eye, and Jake took his leave. ‘Iggy?’ he called. ‘IGGY!’
Iggy was hiding behind the door to the sexual experimentation chamber, his tiny eyes wide with vicarious mortification. He’d seen and heard everything. He couldn’t come out now. He felt terrible for Jake, but wouldn’t know what to say to him—‘ruff ruff’ somehow seemed so inadequate under the circs—and desperately wanted to find Revor so he could talk it over with him first.
‘IGGY!’
In a flat voice, Baby assured Jake that Iggy would be fine. He was probably having a good time with Revor. She’d return him to Jake’s the following day when they were due to go to Newtown for a meeting with some record company executives.
Feeling like he’d lost everything that had ever mattered—his girl, his dog—Jake fumbled his way back down through the Sebel and over to where he’d parked Kate. Kate was grumpy. They’d had to take a stressful detour to avoid a demonstration by workers protesting the government’s tough new industrial relations laws and demanding lunch breaks be made legal again. She’d further suffered the humiliation of being ticketed by a snotty Elizabeth Bay parking inspector who’d actually been so cruel as to mock the state of her paint job. She had every intention of giving Jake trouble on the road back to Newtown but, when she saw his expression of absolute dejection, she decided that probably wasn’t a great idea.
Jake couldn’t have known that this was the one and only time poor Ebola was to get his hot slimy lips on Baby’s, or that that was as far as it went, or that as soon as he left, she rushed to the saucer’s bathr
oom, threw Revor out of the spa where he’d been luxuriating, and took a bath in Dettol. Repeating ‘keck keck keck’ to herself, she pinched her antennae hard in punishment and regret.
‘Iggles? Iggles?’ Revor, his fur smelling like lavender bath oil, found Iggy in the chamber licking his crotch with an air of dejection. ‘What’s wrong?’ Revor poked his little snout into Iggy’s genitals, but Iggy swung his body away, and attended to an imaginary nit on his haunch. ‘Sheel ivvson luvs treat?’ Revor tested. No response. Revor scampered off to fetch a pair of sunnies and a spangled jumpsuit that a Sirian had once given to him. He stood on his hinds, stuck out his furry little gut and crooned, ‘Ahyay ntn uthin buttahow nd ogg,’ at which point the melancholy Iggy finally raised his teary little beadies. On seeing the outfit, he smiled, then barked and woofed with laughter. He rolled on his back, shook his paws in the air and finally collapsed onto his side, gasping for breath. That was more like it. Revor breathed a big sigh of relief.
‘What’s wrong, Iggy Poop? Was it something I said?’ By now Revor had snuggled up close against Iggy’s chest. Iggy flicked the sequins on Revor’s outfit with his claws.
‘It’s Jake.’ As Iggy explained, Revor took his snout between his front paws in horror. ‘I realise it’s probably hard for you to understand,’ sighed Iggy in conclusion, ‘but this whole overnight success thing…I mean, everyone in our house is delighted of course, overjoyed for the babes. But you have to understand. It’s not that easy either. I mean, how do you think Jake feels? If it was hard for him to make a move before, he’s completely paralysed now. I mean, let’s face it. He’s pretty cute by Newtown standards, but he’s basically just a clever young thing who lives in a dump, smokes too much dope, and plays music that’s not bad but will never be brilliant. She’s shot way out of his league.’