Mandy
We head from the milk bar to his place, across Parramatta Road and down the backstreets. We turn down a narrow lane off St Johns Road that’s covered in bad graffiti and link up with a wider road where huge trees form an arcade over the street, and jump the back fence to get to his place.
A pale-brown greyhound looks at me from its fenced area, its eyes gleaming with excitement and its tongue hanging out. His name, Spirit, is carved into a piece of wood hanging above his kennel. There’s paint peeling off the walls at the back of the tiny house, and the verandah looks like it might blow away in a fierce storm. I realise that Tim and his uncle are … what’s the word I’m looking for? Well, poor.
Ned is washing dishes in the kitchen when we arrive and he quietly comes out into the living room to see us. I recognise him from the band comp night. He is dressed in the same clothes he wore that night, a checked shirt rolled up at the elbows and jeans with a hole at the knee. He looks tired and a little wary and smells of coffee and aftershave.
‘This must be your new missus,’ he says, holding out his hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Ned.’
‘Oh god, “missus”, nobody talks like that any more,’ Tim says.
Ned smiles at him with a glint in his eye. I get the feeling they’re used to taking the piss out of each other.
In the living room, there are some old trophies sitting on a display case with engravings that I can’t read in this light. Some have little pictures of greyhounds in full flight. I ask if Spirit won them and Ned says that the dog’s ‘never won a bloody thing, but at least he’s had two places from eight starts’. Not knowing if that’s good or not, I give a nod that I hope conveys considered approval, like I’m not easily impressed by any old greyhound but have decided I like this particular one.
I can see Spirit’s curious little face peering in the back door, looking from Tim to Ned to me, and I swear it’s like he knows that we’re talking about him. Tim tells me Spirit was a stray that Ned found whimpering out the back of the race track a few years ago, abandoned by his owner after he apparently gave up during a race. Ned, it seems, has a thing for taking in strays.
Conversation dips for a bit and I look around the room for inspiration. Tim sits there with his hands in his lap, comfortable in the silence. I see what looks to my untrained eye like a bunch of betting tickets on the breakfast table and I ask Ned if he bets on Spirit when he races.
He laughs. ‘I’d bet against the little bugger if they let you do that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They don’t let you bet on any race you’re involved in. But it’d be great if you could, because I could never lose then, could I? Either Spirit doesn’t win and I make a few dollars, or he actually wins for a change and I’ve done my money but I’m laughing.’
There are a couple of second-hand records placed on the mantleshelf like paintings. On display.
‘Can I get you a cup of tea, or a coffee?’ Ned says.
‘Coffee would be good.’
I see Tim make a face like I should say no, but it’s too late. Ned moves off to the kitchen.
‘You don’t have to drink it all,’ Tim says under his breath.
‘How do you take it?’ Ned calls.
‘Strong, black, four sugars.’
‘Four sugars? I don’t know anyone apart from young Tim here who has it that sweet. Tom, this mate I know from the greyhounds, has two sugars and when we were down at the club the other day the bloke making coffees there said it would rot his teeth away.’
‘That’s an awesome story, Ned, sure she wants to hear all about that,’ Tim says, rolling his eyes.
Ned grins and comes out of the kitchen, leaving a kettle burbling away on the stove top. They look through their tin of seven-inch records together.
‘We haven’t played this one in a while,’ Ned says, taking out a record in a plain brown paper cover.
He passes it over to Tim, who nods enthusiastically and carefully places it on the player and lifts the needle into the groove. He tells me it’s a Four Tops song.
It’s not one I’ve heard before. I tend to listen to more recent stuff, or things with a bit more punkish energy and grit. But this is beautiful. The music fills the room and grips me with its passion.
Ned and Tim start singing along, in perfect harmony, like it’s something they always do, moving around the kitchen, packing things away efficiently, like workers in some Disney musical version of a factory line.
When the song gets to its crescendo, Tim throws his head back and sings into a wooden spoon: ‘I need you … TO LIVE!’
It’s like an icepick to the heart. Forget emo, I think, this is the real emotional music.
Tim
I’m surprised when I find it’s after seven. I head off Ned’s offer to cook for us, knowing how such offers have, in the past, led to dangerous attempts to temporarily move the TV onto the top of the fridge, smoke billowing from the kitchen, a lot of swearing and the eventual grumpy eating of takeaway pizza in front of the TV. This time I decide to skip straight to ordering the pizza. I still feel slightly like I’m performing for Mandy and I don’t want Ned to mess things up by trying complicated shit like cooking us dinner.
After a completely excellent margarita pizza and rocket salad from a place down the road, we watch the news together, then Ned goes into the kitchen to wash up the plates. He puts on the radio and waves us away when we try to help.
Mandy asks me if I have the Jimi Hendrix record I’ve forgotten she mentioned earlier. We go out to the back balcony and I dig it out of the crate and pass it to her. This is probably my favourite part of Ned’s place. The roof is made of a piece of almost-clear corrugated plastic, and when it rains, it just hammers down and you can sit here and look out over the tops of the houses down the hill and watch the storm crash over the city skyline.
We sit cross-legged on the floor and, almost without thinking, I inch closer to Mandy, close enough to smell the traces of perfume on the nape of her neck, close enough to lean over and kiss the freckle just below her collarbone.
As she leans back into me and looks at the record, I notice, as I always do, that someone called Andy Jarvis once owned it and wrote his name and phone number in biro across the top. She turns to the famous picture of the naked women. It’s pure decadence, rock mythology. She points out one of the women, long-haired and dark-eyed, voluptuous and confident-looking.
‘That’s my grandmother,’ she says.
‘What? That’s insane.’
‘I know. It’s weird, but kind of cool, like I have some little link to this bit of rock history.’
‘Wow, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know whether I should look at her now.’
‘I’ve got something else to show you,’ she says.
Mandy
I think my voice shakes for a second and sounds distant but serious.
Tim nods, and I take him by the hand and we get up and slip out the back door, past a now-sleeping Spirit and into a darkening night dense with moths buzzing under streetlights.
I lead him to the secret swimming pool. I try to remember if I ever made a promise with Alice never to bring anyone here, or whether that was some unspoken understanding. I pick up a crooked stick and hurl it onto the wide balcony at the back of the house.
‘What are you doing?’ he says.
I put a finger to my lips, warning him to be quiet.
Nobody stirs in the house after the stick strikes the balcony. Again, it is empty and waiting. I guide Tim into the shadow of the tree at the back fence. I feel scared. Scared like you do in the front seat of a roller-coaster as it hangs over the top of a peak, not scared like I feel when a creep comes into work. Is this too soon, I wonder. Maybe, but it also feels like I’ve waited forever. It doesn’t seem right to measure time since when I first talked to Tim. Before we met, I knew I wanted someone like this. I was aching to be, dying to believe, looking for someone to justify my faith. Looking for something more. So
mething like this.
A warm kiss above the pale green underwater lights of the pool.
His fingers under the buttons of my jacket, in the tight pockets of my skinny jeans. The practicalities are a bitch.
The water feels shockingly cold but the night is surprisingly mild as I stand on the step and shrug off my jacket.
The owners might come home at any minute.
Spiders might crawl into our clothes.
Hell might freeze over, but I don’t care.
Sirens wail in the distance, drowning out my panicked thoughts. I realise I’m wearing my most sensible underwear and pray the darkness and shadows will be my friends.
Tim
Before I know what’s happening, I’m unbuttoning her shirt like I’m unwrapping a Christmas present. Part of me races with excitement and wants to rush, but I don’t want this moment to end. The anticipation is divine.
I slide her shirt down her arms and she stands there before me, more beautiful than I could have imagined, and looks at me with so much tenderness I feel I could die. My heart thumps against my ribs. I swear I see her shiver, just a little.
I slide off my sneakers and place them carefully by the edge of the pool. I don’t want to make a mess. I want to leave here with absolutely nothing out of place.
‘Do you bring all your boys back here?’ I ask. I’m joking.
‘No, I’ve saved this place for someone as special as you,’ she says. She’s completely serious.
Mandy
Time speeds up, or slows down, I don’t know which. The feeling is ticklish and almost too good, so good that I can’t stand it any more. Our eyes meet, our lips graze, skin brushes on skin, we slip into the piercing embrace of the water, feel a heavy jolt as it crushes against our lungs.
I softly push my mouth into his. He kisses me slow, then fast, tracing a finger from my shoulders to the base of my neck, a new sensation that almost makes me jump with surprise. The din of the city fades into the distance. I close my eyes and hear the breeze against the leaves of the trees, the hum of a whole army of hidden crickets.
I feel like I’m falling, falling into something without end.
He doesn’t let me go when it’s over.
I pull him close and feel him breathe in and out, in and out.
We lie on the side of the pool, breathless and exhausted and invincible.
We look up at the stars, twinkling through the smog of the city.
I get a cigarette out of my satchel and light up.
‘Ah, have you got any tissues in there by any chance?’ Tim asks as I return to earth. As I said, the practicalities are a bitch. Suddenly I’m freezing and pull my heavy, waterlogged jeans on over wet, goose-bumped legs.
‘Hey, I’m playing a gig at this little town down the Pacific Highway next week,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be a total road trip. My mate Seb is coming and it’ll be fun. I’d really like you to be there.’
He rolls onto his side and looks up at me and his eyes plead, plead for me to say yes.
I kneel down and kiss him. A kiss that says yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tim
When I finally get home that night, my clothes still wet and my hair dripping, I find Ned asleep in his chair, the day’s papers spread across his lap.
My phone’s on the floor by the crate of records and when I pick it up I see a couple of messages that Jane sent a bit earlier, wanting me to come out with them on a ‘Slurry Hills’ drinking session. I reply and say that I’m sorry to have missed them, but have been with Mandy, who she still hasn’t met.
She instantly replies, wanting all the details, which is kind of weird, I guess, but hardly unexpected coming from the nosiest person I know. She can gossip and speculate all she wants, but she’s getting nothing. The secrets of the swimming pool are safe with me.
Mandy
Mid-afternoon. I’m at home, sitting on the couch minding my own business and watching Passions (a delicious blend of hammy acting, cheesy plots and, unbelievably, witchcraft) when Heather randomly storms into the room. I have come to predict Heather’s mood by the way she moves around the house and when she flies into a room like she’s been propelled out of a slingshot, you can bet an angry finger-pointing rant is only seconds away. This one involves her accusing me of stealing some money that she’d left lying around. I had nothing to do with it of course, but whether I’m at fault or even vaguely involved with what she’s talking about is always a complete irrelevance when she gets in one of these moods.
A couple of commercial breaks later, when I’ve totally lost track of the episode I’m watching, she comes back and apologises (sort of) and then confesses that she’s been spending way too much money lately, wasting it on pills and cask wine. In a completely unwelcome moment of sharing, she pulls from a backpack a neon purple dildo with weird pretend veins on it that she and some random acquaintances bought ‘because we were all maggoted and it seemed really funny’.
I find myself giving her some life advice on saving and budgeting that I realise I actually heard on morning television. I get a vague feeling that life wasn’t supposed to be like this and go back to watching TV, where Judge Judy is just starting.
Heather’s good mood lasts for about half an hour, then I hear this angry yelping coming from the balcony and find that she’s kicked over a bin after getting an email from the pathologist’s office where she works to say they won’t have any shifts for her for a while.
Tim messages to say nothing in particular. Just seeing his words on a screen, his distinctive way of talking, takes me back to last night, to that creaky door swinging open to the secret swimming pool. Not just an entry into a strange new world, but a way out of a million pointless days like this.
Tim
I think I underestimated how long and hard this school year would be, how difficult it would be to refocus. There are always lots of little things that need to be done, and even though I’m not the world’s most devoted student it’s hard just to keep afloat. Any time I slip, Mrs Bardsley’s there to remind me.
I’m realising this as she yells at me again. ‘You’re a recalcitrant, Tim. Always will be.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ I say.
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
‘I thought this was a geography class, not a pretentious words class.’
‘Principal’s office. I won’t be talked to like that.’
I’ve been trying to do better, and I felt pretty calm when she started having a go at me and probably would have been fine if I’d just kept my mouth shut. Next time …
I start to put my things in my school bag, and I can feel her glaring at the class, daring someone else to speak.
‘You’re a slack bitch, miss!’
I turn around to see Kiera, face like thunder, staring at Mrs Bardsley.
‘And I definitely won’t be talked to like that! Get out!’
‘To the principal’s office?’ Kiera says.
‘What do you think?’
I wait for Kiera outside the classroom.
‘Thanks for sticking up for me —’ I say.
‘Of course, she’s a bitch.’
‘I mean, thanks, but it’s not a good idea. I don’t want to drag you down with me.’
‘I don’t care.’
We decide to take a detour on the way to the principal’s office and end up sitting by the basketball courts, throwing stones and vaguely watching kids shoot hoops. Kiera takes a small, shiny hip flask out of her skirt pocket and takes a swig, then passes it to me.
‘I don’t drink at school,’ I say.
‘You used to.’
‘C’mon, you didn’t even know me then.’
‘You might not have known me, but everyone knew you,’ she says.
‘That just makes me feel bad.’
‘Don’t feel bad, you were a fun guy. Everyone thought you were cool.’
‘Yeah, well, things are different now.’
‘What, you’re n
ot fun any more?’
‘No, I am, just not like this.’
She takes another swig, winces a little and wipes her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt.
‘Give it here,’ I say, and I pour the contents of the flask onto the grass. It smells like cheap whisky.
‘What the hell! What did you do that for?’
She flops sideways, as though knocked over by a gust of wind, and feels the liquor sinking into the dirt. She can be a bit dramatic, I guess.
‘This is bullshit, Tim. You owe me a drink.’
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘but not in school.’
When we get to Miss Mailey’s office, she splits us up and I go in first. The conversation’s a bit of an anticlimax, but in a good way. I resolve to do some damage control and not say anything stupid. I try to explain what happened calmly and it seems to work.
‘I’ll talk to Mrs Bardsley,’ she says. ‘I don’t want this happening every time you have class. Some of the teachers don’t relate to students as well as others do, you know?’
‘Yeah, I get that. Thanks, miss.’
‘What about your partner in crime out in the hall?’
‘She was just trying to stick up for me — I don’t want her getting in trouble.’
‘She’s a good kid, she just doesn’t have much common sense sometimes.’
I wonder why she’s telling me this, and then it occurs to me that she’s trying to treat me like an adult, or at least trying not to treat me like a dumb kid. Respect.
Mandy
ROLLER DISCO! I see a photocopied flyer glued to a wall on King Street and I’m sold. A bit of digging on the internet reveals that someone’s rented the basketball court under Broadway shops and turned it into a skate rink for one night to raise money for charity. I’m not quite sure why or how, but frankly it’s an eighties-themed roller disco, so who cares?
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 9