‘Hey, I know sometimes it’s really hard to forget people,’ I say.
She nods.
It is really hard to forget people.
Even people you’ve barely met.
Tim
I’m working in Ned’s newsagency again this afternoon, and it’s pretty quiet until Bree and Jane turn up to scab chocolate bars off me. I try to tell them no, that it comes out of my wages, but eventually I cave. I always do with them. Pretty girls are my weakness.
It’s quiet in the store after they go and I try to look busy by tidying up all the magazines, but really I’m using the time to try and finish off this song I’ve been writing. The word ‘caress’ has been in my head since someone used it in a poem in English last week, and Mandy has been in my head since last night. Somehow it feels like a year ago.
I think I’ve even got this chord progression to go with it too. It starts in C then I jump to an A before sliding to an F. Originality is overrated.
I guess it seems weird to write a song about someone I don’t know, but that’s kind of what songs are: they’re secrets made public. They say things you can’t say to your mates, things you can’t say to anybody when you’re just chatting, stuff you can only get out through a song. I hope one day she hears it and knows it’s about her.
I want to caress you.
I want to … something, something, something … impress you?
Hmm, the words will come later. Probably when I least expect it, like during a boring maths class. Or at 3 am, when I can’t get to sleep but would really like to.
To get over my writer’s block, I amuse myself by making a mental list of my least-favourite customers:
An older guy who comes in and buys weird porn. He always looks around vaguely for a few minutes and flicks through the international finance and business magazines before grabbing what he wants and shuffling to the counter, as though he’s genuinely got an open mind about what he’s going to buy and just decided to purchase extreme porn after extensively considering his options. He never, ever looks me in the eye.
This little shit that came in once, grabbed a copy of a magazine with a lot of boobs and motorbikes in it, and ran off. I chased him down the street, but he was quick. He pissed me off, mostly because he had muddy shoes and it took ages to get the mud out of the carpet.
A cranky old woman who always wants me to check her lottery tickets and seems to hold me personally responsible for the fact she never wins. Once she did win the cost of her ticket back and used it to buy a scratchie. She didn’t win anything with the scratchie and wasn’t very happy about it.
A guy with a massive bushranger beard and a hat that looks like it has some kind of lizard skin around it who comes in about once a month and looks around in this really bewildered way, like he’s never been in a shop before and everything is new and scary and confusing. He usually buys something like Australian Knife or Bacon Busters, and he has a lazy eye so I never know where to look. There’s something very unsettling about him. I think it might be all the weird staring and the knife magazines.
I can’t think of any others actually. Most people that come in are pretty OK.
Mandy
After hearing Alice talk about how much she was enjoying her classes a couple of days ago, I decided to cancel my deferred degree and enrol in winter school. I thought that because I haven’t made any travel plans, and at this rate I won’t have the funds to go to Roskilde or Glastonbury, or to see the Northern Lights or Route 66 or anything cool, I might as well get stuck into study. But it turns out it’s too late to enrol, so I have to come up with another plan. Preferably one that gets me as far away from wiping tables and making sandwiches as possible.
I think part of why Russia in the nineteenth century seems so appealing is that it’s so far away from here. I wonder if I would have been cool if I’d lived then. Maybe I was just born in the wrong time. I should have been in Paris when the Moulin Rouge was kicking off, or New York in the jazz age, or Amsterdam when all the world’s greatest painters buzzed around in its cafés, slamming down coffees after another all-nighter in front of the canvas. Would it have made a difference? Or would I still be me, adrift in some other time, waiting for my life to begin, wondering when inspiration will strike?
Maybe there’s some great cultural movement going on now that I’m missing out on. Maybe one day people will look back on these times and wish they could be in my shoes. Maybe.
During a quiet moment at work, I get out my phone and start looking through this newsletter that lists jobs in the creative industry. I subscribe to it more so I can get a feel for jobs that I might be able to apply for one day, but there’s an ad for a gopher at a big record company that catches my eye. Even though my resumé at the moment basically consists of my school results in really big font, I feel like gophering is something I could do. Unpaid, but great experience in a fun environment! Must love coffee runs! it says. Working somewhere I actually want to be, I feel like I could really learn to love the coffee run. Unpaid sucks obviously, but maybe I can use it as a stepping stone to something else.
Thora gives me a ride home after work and she tells me some long-winded story, the point of which seems to be the singer of Death on a Sunday added her on Snapchat, but hasn’t responded to any photos she’s sent him. I barely get a word in.
Tim
I’m up early on school mornings to check my emails while we have fast internet. It normally cuts out at 8 am and from then it’s painfully slow.
There’s nothing very exciting in my inbox: a bunch of Facebook friend requests from friends of friends and acquaintances; a travel email from one of my old Glebe Point Road skateboard buddies, Chuck; and a couple of random links Sebastian sent me, including a video of a girl applying her lipstick while holding it between her boobs. Seb has bursts of internet activity where he sends everyone funny pictures and all this random porn he’s found, then he won’t check his Facebook for weeks and gets mad because he thinks he’s being left out of the loop. He’s weird like that.
I head to YouTube to check out a song I uploaded a while back. It’s a video of me playing Elliott Smith’s ‘Between the Bars’ on an old acoustic. Is it sad to check on how many people have watched your video? I doubt Lorde gets up every morning and looks at how many people have downloaded her album, but I guess by then you know you’ve made it, you know there’s always someone out there listening to your song at any point in time. Imagine that. If I ever write a song as good as ‘Tennis Court’ I swear I’ll never check my statistics on YouTube again.
Anyway, a couple of hundred people have watched the video and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad or what. It’s a pretty simple recording, just me playing into Jane’s camera phone and the quality isn’t all that flash, but as it starts playing I think my voice sounds kind of alright, and I have this sly, proud kind of feeling for a second.
I look at the new comments, and they’re mostly spam and some weird chain email thing, but there’s one proper comment from someone called Miss Lizzie, who I think might be the little sister of one of my mates.
I love it! Your such a great songwriter Tim! <3 xoxo Lovely. I might have to tell her one day that I didn’t actually write the song. Maybe. But then I see the next comment.
This was a total waste of my time. Your a gay fagot.
Well, you can’t win them all.
I see the buffering symbol onscreen. Slow internet has kicked in. It’s time for school.
I get in for orientation, which is this totally pointless class we have every morning for half an hour. It’s supposed to be where the teachers give us guidance and inspiration to get through the day, but Mrs Gregory, who’s equally apathetic when she takes us for maths, never has much wisdom to share with us. She mainly just rolls her eyes at us from behind her New Idea magazine. People listen to music and throw things at the unpopular kids in the corner. It’s basically a day like any other.
I have geography first class and I have a bad feeling ab
out it straight away. Things start going downhill pretty quickly. It’s always a bit of a rowdy class but today is particularly hectic, and some smart-arse kid down the back keeps turning on this little TV he has in his bag and cracking everyone up.
Mrs Bardsley asks me some question about ecosystems at risk that I don’t understand. I haven’t done my homework, so I have to admit that I don’t know.
‘Well, Tim,’ she says, all melodramatic and offended, ‘this stuff isn’t that hard. I thought maybe it would have sunk in the second time around.’
That makes me angry. So unfair.
I feel the blood throb in my head as I sit and stare at my desk, not wanting to respond.
But the teacher embarrassing me has got the attention of some of the kids up the back and one of them yells out: ‘Look at this retard! He’s repeating and he still doesn’t get it!’
There are hoots and laughter and yelling and chaos, and some people start supporting me and some are just laughing at me and I can’t tell who’s who.
I remember a few years ago, there was this massive kid here who had what the teachers called ‘anger management issues’. A psycho, basically. One time he bailed a kid up against a fence and Mr Taylor came up behind him, shaking and all serious and yelling out, ‘Walk away! Walk away!’ That’s what you have to do sometimes, I realise. I shove my things in my bag and walk out. Walk away …
‘All a bit too hard for you, is it?’ Mrs Bardsley says as I leave.
I know what she’s doing, I’ve seen teachers do it before. It’s just never been me who’s the brunt of the joke.
I breathe deeply and tell myself to keep going, and I don’t stop until I’m in the park at Broadway, where I sit in the grass and throw stones into the pond. It’s been all of an hour since I left home.
Time passes and the anger floats away.
I start to realise that there’ll be consequences for this, that I’ll probably have to go and see the principal, and catch up on all the work I’ve missed from this class, and that Bardsley’s just going to be an even bigger bitch to me next time. That’s the thing though: sometimes all you can do is get yourself out of a bad situation.
I know I can’t walk away from things forever. I’m reminded of the past every day. Even in trying to make it better the second time around, I still can’t get away from all the reminders of last year. It follows me around. It’s part of me now.
I find a bigger stone on the grassy hill and lob it into the pond. I watch as the uni students lying on the grass look up, startled, and the water ripples out to the edge.
Mandy
After a day of getting up at midday, watching some episodes of Judge Judy and True Blood with a hungover Heather, and doing some intense sitting around and some hardcore email reading, I find myself at our favourite music venue, The Rose, with Alice. The toilets have been broken ever since we started coming here when Heather got us fake IDs two years ago, and it’s kind of weird how you always get stuck to the floor, but we love the place to bits. We’re here to see a band that I saw described in the street press as sounding kind of like My Bloody Valentine. They don’t. It’s all a bit disappointing.
There’s not much of a crowd, just some friends of the band and a couple of sad-looking kids and Jimmy Two Beers, a middle-aged man who seems to attend every gig here and who is known for standing by himself directly in front of the stage, a beer in each hand. There is no atmosphere at all and the sound is so muddy I can’t make out any vocals. Bored and uninspired, I start reading the collection of gig posters along one wall, reminders of nights much better than this one.
The guy at the door is really rude when I go out for a smoke and don’t display my stamped wrist prominently enough for his liking when I come back in. Dude, come on, I think, I must have been here a hundred times. You must know my face by now.
As the band file offstage, the singer looks like he’s unsure of whether to walk around me or not. We’re face to face and I don’t know what to say to him, and I kind of linger in his way just long enough that it becomes apparent I’m trying to think of something to say, or thinking whether I should say something, before shuffling to the side. It’s just slightly awkward and, after a moment of pure self-loathing, I slink towards the pinball machine to play while Alice slumps on the ripped leather couch.
The music is over and they’re calling last drinks, but I feel unfulfilled and restless, not tired nor satisfied in the slightest. Sometimes I feel like an addict, always searching for my next hit, scrounging through the ads at the front of the street press, scanning the names in the gig listings for the next big thing, a new band that’s going to hit my musical sweet spot. On nights like this, I wonder why I bother.
It’s past midnight and I’d love to kick on, but I don’t think that’s fair to Alice, who’s not complaining, bless her, but is now very close to sleeping on her feet. She’s propped herself up from the couch and is leaning against the brick wall in a grey cardigan and a black tulle skirt, her eyelids heavy and her chin resting on her skinny little collarbone. It’s time to go home.
Tim
I’m walking home from school and this girl called Kiera catches up with me and starts walking a few steps behind, not saying anything. I stop walking and she stops walking. She pretends to be looking at her phone, but I can tell she’s following me. It’s pretty obvious. I haven’t really talked to her much, but I’ve run into her at a couple of parties and things and she’s always been pretty cute, but now she looks a bit scared and uncertain in her school skirt and rolled-down socks.
I start walking again and notice that she’s following still.
Game’s up.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask her.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘You’re not following me or anything?’
‘Hardly.’ She’s slowly getting her confidence up, looking me over and taking control. ‘What are you listening to?’ she asks.
‘A band you’ve never heard of.’
‘Try me.’
‘Nah, they’re super obscure. Black death metal. You’d hate them.’
‘Do they sound like Parkway Drive?’ she asks, all serious, then she realises that I’m talking shit and laughs.
I used to love this kind of stuff, the unexpected turns the day takes as the shadows take over the streets. But lately I often feel like I can’t be bothered, that I’d rather just go home and work on a song in my bedroom.
She stands with her hands behind her back, her tits pushed out and her shoulders pinned back. I can see the outline of her black bra through her shirt. She tells me that she remembers me playing guitar at someone’s party and that she thought it was really good.
I take out my headphones and look at her again and think how this should be perfect.
She says that school’s boring and I should hang out with her friends, not keep to myself, and it was slack what that teacher said to me yesterday.
I’m nodding along.
I tell her I’m going to go practise guitar, and she says she wants to come and watch.
There’s nobody around. This should be perfect.
I dream for a second, some crazy fast-forward vision where we have sex on the couch out the back of our place, all drunk and young and stupid and having the best kind of secret to keep. But instead I tell her that she can come over some other time and I run off. I actually run. It’s becoming my thing.
I get home and jump the back fence into the little yard.
Ned has a greyhound called Spirit and he’s got an area to himself, with chicken wire around the fence and a hammock where he sleeps. He’s happy to see me. He always is. He’s all skin and bones and wiry limbs whipping into action. Greyhounds are pretty friendly dogs, but they’re kind of dangerous too, because if they get away from you they’re too quick to catch.
I take him for a quick walk around the suburbs, down past the old brickworks to the dog track, where he occasionally and not very successfully still races sometimes. These street
s are so full of history, you can just feel how old and lived-in and run-down every alley feels.
But Spirit doesn’t know anything about that. He’s so happy and simple, and sometimes he’s just what I need.
Mandy
Dad and June called the house tonight. Apparently they’re in a caravan park on the Central Coast. Heather is absolutely freaking out. ‘They’re getting close!’ she yells, as though they’re an approaching army crossing our borders.
The upside is that she decides to make a last-minute effort to lift our house out of the absolute skanky grossness it has fallen into over the last week. Dad’s an ex-policeman. He likes neatness and order.
He was a senior constable at the local station a few years ago, but I remember so little of it it seems like another lifetime. He used to be all stern and serious, sitting in his uniform at the breakfast table, frowning at the newspaper. I remember Heather and I almost trembled when we handed our school reports to him, and he’d put on his glasses and squint down at them.
That was the old days, before Sonya, our mother, started staying away longer and longer, and remembering fewer and fewer details of our lives. When I was young, she and Dad had started sleeping in separate rooms and I didn’t even realise that was that weird for a long time. I guess they were growing apart. Sometimes she used to come home still in her work apron and just sit out on the balcony and stare into space. Then, one day she rocked up on our doorstep with Scott, a young barman from the pub bistro she worked at, this much younger guy with Popeye forearms who was apparently now her boyfriend. Soon after that, she moved out. The whole thing basically ensured that I’m going to be sad and messed up for life. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Dad didn’t seem so fearsome after all that, and a couple of years later he started seeing June Pellew, who enjoys ballroom dancing, drinks sherry and likes going to small coastal towns and collecting those spoons with the name of the town on them and then storing them in a display case at her house. She’s a bit older than Dad, and even vaguer and more pleasantly out of it than he is. She’s one of those people whose name suits her perfectly because it makes her sound ancient and out of it and like someone who enjoys ballroom dancing and drinks sherry.
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 3