The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  ‘Just wanted to talk.’

  ‘You know I don’t do credit any more.’

  ‘Nah, that’s okay.’

  ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘Just wanted to know if you wanted to hang out some time?’

  ‘Sure. I’m busy for the next few days but I can do something this weekend.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Rad. See ya then.’

  ‘Liam . . .’

  ‘Yeah, what’s up?’ I said. Sunny tooted impatiently outside.

  ‘You’ve been a good brother.’

  ‘Sure, man. Whatever. You too.’

  I hung up and went out for the evening. That night at one of the parties I met a guy who asked if I could help him out some time. He was muscled and skin-headed, and I got a bad police-y vibe from him but he promised me he wasn’t a cop. He had money and I was greedy for clients. I gave him my number and address and told him to pop by any time.

  The next morning I was startled out of sleep by someone pounding on the door, which was just a few metres away from my bedroom. I was slightly hungover and lay swaddled in my sheets, wondering who would be around this early on a weekend. The knock came again, each purposeful thump reverberating around my room. I heard Mum walk up to the door, slide back the latch on the peephole, and then swear. She burst into my room and hissed, ‘It’s the cops! Hide your stash!’

  It took me all of half a second to bounce across the room and grab my bag, scales and cash. I cast about frantically for a minute before deciding to shove everything down the back cushion of the sofa at the foot of my bed, and then sat down on top of it to hyperventilate. I waited, trying to calm my breathing, while I heard my mum open the front door. A muffled exchange was followed by the sound of the police moving past my door to the kitchen.

  This was good. If Mum could keep them distracted long enough, I could sneak out of the house to dispose of the contraband. I was plotting the escape course in my mind, thinking of a route that would avoid the line of sight of any police cruisers parked on the street, when Mum started screaming. She screamed and screamed and screamed. It took me a moment or two to work up the bottle to enter the kitchen, where an older policeman was awkwardly hugging Mum. As it happens, they weren’t there to arrest me but to break the news that Ardian was dead.

  9

  Not long after Ardian was born, Grandma and Grandpa Pieper left the family. Grandpa had never approved of his son’s bohemian lifestyle and the birth of a bastard was just too much for him. He sold the milk bar he’d run on Hawthorn Road, wrote Dad out of the will, cut his ties with Melbourne and took off with Grandma in a campervan to see Australia. The plan was to drive around the country until they found somewhere they wanted to live out their twilight years. They ended up in Kalbarri, a small town seven hours’ drive from Perth, where they bought a tiny museum called Fantasyland.

  I had the impression that Grandpa was never great with kids. He strove to be your typical postwar Aussie bloke, fond of war stories, folk songs and sport. His one great ambition in life was for his two sons to become VFL footballers, and when my uncle became an artist and my dad a pot-smoking, guitar-playing poet-type, he despaired that he’d raised a pair of queers.

  Grandpa had a certain world view, one that fitted nicely over the neat suburban lattice of Melbourne in the sixties. Dad, for his part, was convinced that the world had more to it than could be seen from behind the counter of the Caulfield milk bar. He found clues that there might be things more wonderful and terrible than orderly rows of lollies and canned beans, in the waves of Greek and Italian immigrants who annexed the city’s corner shops, in the British and American pop that flooded the radio, in the disturbing realisation of what the numbers tattooed on the forearms of their ageing Jewish customers meant.

  Dad went looking for that wider world and, as the seventies happened, he experimented with drugs, literature and music, none of which pleased his father. Grandpa was mulishly utilitarian: he went to church, for example, but only as a civic duty, eschewing the spiritualism and changing denomination – from Methodist to Baptist to Presbyterian – whenever he and Grandma moved town or decided they just didn’t like the minister.

  When his and Grandma’s travels took them to Kalbarri, they took a tour of Fantasyland. As Grandpa wandered through the eclectic mess of exhibits, he fell in love with the place. Behind glass cases there were chunks of meteorite, a melted jug from the Hiroshima bombsite, an aviator’s cap from World War One that was thought to have belonged to the Red Baron. In the backyard was a long-defused naval mine, on which some prankster had painted an atomic symbol before floating it down the river into town shortly after World War Two ended. In the basement was a simulated opal mine, a life-sized diorama of men at work digging up precious stones. The museum, a cobbled-together collection of beautiful junk, was a celebration of the Australia that Grandpa had always yearned for, blokey and wholesome but also twee and manageable. He even liked the ‘Dolls of the World’ exhibition, which, with its porcelain geishas and gollywogs in Fijian grass skirts, confirmed his view of the world.

  After the tour, my grandparents got talking to the owner. Fantasyland was founded in 1970 by a local called Cliff Ross, who used to drum up business by feeding fish to the pelicans that gathered on the beach every morning. When tourists driving through the town would stop to check out the pelicans, Ross would delicately nudge them over the road to Fantasyland. He was very persuasive. By the end of the conversation with my grandparents, they’d agreed to use their retirement funds to buy the museum.

  They stayed in Kalbarri, with Grandma running the museum while Grandpa enjoyed the retirement he’d always wanted: fishing, jogging and playing tennis with the local fishermen. The latter had typically made a fortune in lobsters and spent their days drinking homebrew and smoking weed, which they grew in secluded groves further down the coast. If my grandfather, who had decried all forms of drug abuse, understood why his new friends were so red-eyed, relaxed and easily amused by his jokes, he didn’t let on. After a lifetime of wanting the Australian idyll, he’d ended up in a Tim Winton novel. He lived there very happily during his final decade. In 1990, on his doctor’s orders, he’d gone to Perth to have a heart operation. Contrary to medical advice to take it easy, he drove back to Kalbarri a couple of days after going under the knife, and he was playing tennis when he had a fatal stroke.

  Dad travelled across the country to bury him. I went with him, as Hamish was too young, and Ardian was too old to take time off school. We flew to Perth, then took an overnight bus to Kalbarri, where I saw Grandma for the first time since I was a toddler. She met us at the bus stop and drove us to her flat above the museum. Pelicans whirled overhead as she helped us unpack our bags.

  While she and Dad handled the grown-up end of things, Grandma brought me a chocolate milk, which I sipped as I wandered through Fantasyland. Some rooms, like the small dank chamber filled entirely with those cracking porcelain dolls, filled me with a visceral dread.

  Grandpa was cremated and his ashes scattered into the river that ran through town. Dad and I returned to Melbourne, and Grandma stayed on in Kalbarri for a few more years, until she was overcome with loneliness and returned to Melbourne to be near her sons. Before she left, she went down to the river to scoop up a jar of mud so that she would have some reminder of her husband.

  Fifteen years later, we scattered her ashes in the ocean where she and Grandpa once loved to snorkel.

  Ardian’s ashes are stored in an urn at my parents’ house. He was cremated the day after the funeral, and about a week after they found him where he’d overdosed on his share-house couch. Our optimism about his new leaf was misplaced, as it turned out. We didn’t know that some of his friends dabbled in heroin, but, to be fair, we hadn’t known about Ardian’s half decade–long flirtation with it either.

  He’d first tried it in high school, in a house on Centre Road where teenagers went to shoot up and listen to records, although I only found that out man
y years later, from those teenagers who are now grown and have children of their own. It was the nineties and that’s what you did to be edgy: go to town to take in a matinee of Eraserhead, score a cap at the arcades on Russell Street and head home to shoot it. Since then, he’d been on and off it, using less often when things were good, more when things were bad.

  Shortly before his final night, he’d bought a bunch of smack with the idea of weaning himself off it for good. He was piecing his life back together and that meant getting off the gear. He had a long-running promise to Callie, with whom he was trying to patch things up, not to touch the stuff, and he’d been clean for a month. He decided to give the last of his stash away to his housemates, who’d never tried it before. He got out his works – needle, spoon, syringe – then they chickened out and went to bed.

  Ardian, who’d already had a few bourbons, sat for a little while. He called me to chat, but I was racing out the door on a job. He hung up. In the end he decided not to let the cook go begging and shot up what he had left. Waste not, want not.

  This is how heroin kills you. Opiates are, among other things, respiratory inhibitors. The more opiate in your system, the shallower your breathing becomes until you stop altogether. It’s worse when you’ve consumed both alcohol and heroin, as alcohol works to repress the excitatory signals that tell you to keep breathing. Most of the time, the pulse is not affected and if you give an overdose victim an opiate blocker or even mouth-to-mouth until their lungs start again, they’ll snap out of it.

  None of this helped Ardian. He was drunk and doped, with a bronchial infection left over from pneumonia, which he’d contracted before he was fired from the care facility and had been fighting since. His lungs, weighed down by the overdose, couldn’t clear the fluid building up in them. He drowned in his own vomit, alone.

  He was long gone by the time his housemates woke up to find him, lying dead on the couch. One of them called the ambulance service, who called the cops, who told us. I got on the phone and started calling around with the news and slowly the house filled up with mourners. Friends and relatives came in weeping, or silent, or they stood around awkwardly, making sympathetic noises.

  People kept offering me cigarettes. I didn’t want them but I took them and puffed them down anyway. It seemed appropriate somehow, in the weird, stilted half-world I found myself in suddenly – something to keep my hands busy. I needed a job to do.

  And I had a job to do. Someone had to identify the body. Still in shock, my folks and I left the party, climbed into the Pintara station wagon and drove to the morgue. We filled out a couple of forms and stood around. I remember everything being grey, the washed-out colour of concrete after rain.

  They walked us into a viewing room, a tiny adjunct with a big glass window in it. On the other side of the window, Ardian was lying on a steel examination table. My parents went up to the window, holding hands. That detail stuck with me. They weren’t terribly affectionate and they didn’t hold hands often.

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said, her face crinkling, ‘that’s him.’ She turned away sobbing, and Dad led her back into the other room. I went up and pressed my nose against the glass.

  There are a lot of writers who try to dress up death in pretty words to make it more palatable, but I can’t do that. Death looks like what it is, and Ardian looked dead. I could see where he’d bled, trickles had dried on the side of his face from his nose and mouth, two rivulets that merged in a fork that ran down his cheek, black blood on blue skin. His skin was starved of oxygen, a choked-off purple-blue that whitened as it moved down his body. I could see every bit of sparse chest hair, every follicle of his beard, or at least as much of a beard as he could grow. He was twenty-one.

  I turned away from the window, and we went home.

  We held the funeral at a Buddhist temple in Springvale. Hamish and I helped carry the coffin and, as we loaded it into the hearse, my little brother burst into tears. I didn’t really know what to say so I just kind of shook him by the shoulder, feeling completely out of my depth. I’d just given the eulogy. The night before I’d sat staring at the cursor blinking against the screen. What could I write? What could I possibly say when nothing would ever be right again in a future that stretched out forever, barren and empty?

  At the wake, held in our backyard, I got quietly drunk and tried to stay away from the hippies. Ardian had been fond of ConFest, a bi-annual alternative lifestyle festival, or, as one jaded attendee described it to me, ‘A bunch of old hippies who have tricked you into paying a hundred bucks to show you their penis,’ and the backyard was filling up with alternative lifestylers. For every old friend of Ardian’s who came up to me and collapsed wailing in my arms, I would get some dreadlocked neophyte who would sidle up and stroke my shoulder with a sweaty palm, murmuring, ‘Your brother had, like, a really special aura.’

  I’d decamped to the pavement out the front of my house, leaning with my back against the fence. I had a beer and some kind of cake, but I couldn’t eat so I broke up the slice and threw the pieces to some seagulls that had gathered around. I was so absorbed in watching them fight over the crumbs, I didn’t notice the hippie appear next to me, in a flurry of bangles and flowing skirts.

  ‘You like birds, huh?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Ardian liked birds.’

  ‘I don’t think we ever talked about birds,’ I said.

  ‘He liked all living things.’ She nodded and smiled, agreeing with the thing she had just said, and then took my hand. ‘Can I tell you something? This morning, I was sad about the funeral but then, when I was sitting meditating on Ardian’s spirit, a sparrow came up and landed on my windowsill, and I knew that was Ardian’s soul visiting me with a message.’  The flower child paused and looked deep into my eyes. ‘I hope that makes you feel better.’ She finished by smiling at me and squeezing my knee reassuringly, and all at once I was angrier than I’d ever been.

  ‘He’s dead!’ I hissed. ‘You daft fucking hippie! What do you think is happening? That he died so he could come back as a bird? That instead of travelling the cosmos or reincarnating or whatever the fuck, he became a fucking sparrow so he could visit you, and let you know that tie-dye is a good choice for you? Go fuck yourself,’ I shrieked, and stormed past her and back into the wake, shaking with rage.

  My dad came up to me. ‘You look angry,’ he said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’m angry too,’ he said. ‘What the fuck was he thinking?’ And we stood, being angry in a room full of sad people.

  There was plenty to be angry about. A few days after the funeral, Dad, Hamish and I headed out to clean up Ardian’s house. When we’d identified the body the mortician had given me Ardian’s wallet, which was in his pocket when he died. Inside it was a one-dollar coin and a necklace he used to wear fastened with sticky tape: those were the only things he owned that couldn’t have been traded for smack. In his house all his CDs and musical instruments had disappeared.

  A stained mattress lay bare on the floor, with a pile of clothes and blankets strewn across it. I stared at it for a minute, and an image of Ardian coughing and spluttering his last came to me. I turned away and made myself busy.

  Apart from the mattress the only furniture was a coffee table covered in old mugs, and milk crates and cardboard boxes full with his possessions. He’d never unpacked. We browsed through his books and magazines, sorting those we would keep into boxes, those we would discard into bin bags. I found a copy of The Great Gatsby and sat for a moment holding it. He’d told me a couple of weeks earlier that he’d finally read the book and was going to throw a mint julep party to celebrate. Up on his wall, on a little shelf built into the alcove, stood half a bottle of whisky and an untouched bottle of crème de menthe. I guessed he’d never had that party. The bottles went into the bin bag.

  It didn’t take long to pack up Ardian’s belongings. I took the books and clothes; Hamish took his magazines and VHS tapes. My dad took a few keepsakes, school IDs, a box of
love letters, those worthless sentimental things you cart from house to house but never look at, content just to keep them safe until you grow older and take them out to find they’ve appreciated through the years. We left the mattress for the next punter.

  A week after the funeral, one of Ardian’s friends came around to give us some videotapes of a holiday to New South Wales he’d taken a year earlier. The tape opened with Ardian and his friend talking shit in a hotel room, and then cut to a series of adventures around Sydney. We saw him chatting up some girls, walking across a fence like a tightrope, playing hacky sack, smoking a joint on the seawall of Circular Quay. He wandered the streets of Kings Cross looking for a light and finally asked a bemused welder to spark his cigarette with a blowtorch. It was funny; we were all surprised by how little it hurt. Then it hurt a lot. ‘Oh, God, I need a joint,’ declared Dad. He hit pause and went to the kitchen to roll one, leaving Ardian frozen on the screen, smiling at something over the camerawoman’s shoulder that only he could see.

  The dead are not static. Long after they are gone, your relationship with them remains, grinding on, as relentless and world-changing as tectonic plates. Every night for months, I would dream about Ardian suddenly walking through the door, or picking me up from school, or calling me on the phone, with some simple explanation for how his death was a mistake, that everyone could stop worrying, that he’d been living on an island in the Philippines, that he was fine. ‘Of course I didn’t die of a heroin overdose,’ he told me in one dream. ‘As if. What a cliché!’

  The turning points in life, the really important decisions, are rarely dramatic. The first time someone tries heroin isn’t life-altering, but the three-hundredth time, the time their heart stops, sure is. Every human is an unwieldy vessel, weighed down with hopes and dreams. We turn so slowly that we don’t even realise we are moving at all. We creatures of habit, our momentum is all-consuming. For every action there are consequences we could never anticipate; it’s how we grow, each of us, from worms into butterflies, flapping our wings and making tornadoes on the other side of the world.