The Crown prosecutor, trying his damnedest to convict Reuben of the attempted murder of the dickhead in the box, fails to disguise the mortified look on his face. The crowd starts up mumbling. The lawyer turns around and shrugs to his learned friends at the prosecution’s table. The judge starts banging his gavel, looking all bullish and explosion-faced.
—Order! he screams over the murmurs.
The defence calls me to the witness box again. Reuben’s lawyer reminds me of my oath and asks:
—Have you ever had a fight with Muddy?
—Yeah, a few hundred, I mumble, looking at Muddy squirming over at the Crown’s corner. The Crown lawyer has his mouth right up to Muddy’s ear and I can see the anger writhing around in his face.
—Excuse me … Can you repeat that?
—I’ve had a couple hundred fistfights with Muddy, at least.
—A couple hundred?
—Yeah … at least. He put me in hospital once … Well, my parents had to take me to the hospital. He punched me so hard in the guts I couldn’t piss … sorry, urinate, right for a month. And once, at a biology camp, he split my lip so bad I thought I’d have a deformation for the rest of my life.
—Ya fucken dead, cunt! Muddy yells from the prosecution’s corner.
10
—Let’s get the fuck outta here, Reuben says, stuffing a duffel bag.
I gather up my notebooks, a few pairs of jeans, a spare pair of bootlaces for my Doc Martens, my Sid Vicious tee, a bottle of Yves Saint Laurent signature cologne and a bunch of raggy-looking letters from Billie-Jean I can’t bear to part with. I stuff it all into my antique canvas mailbag and we cut out, up the street, as night sets in like the curtain of a final act. As we stand beside the train tracks in the West End of Townsville, we realise we don’t have a dollar between us. That, mixed with the weed and adrenalin from knowing that Muddy wants to kill us, makes us both sick with paranoia. The first freight train that comes along, we’ll jump right on, but then I remember Reuben can’t run.
I suggest maybe we hitch the thirteen hundred ks south to Brisbane, instead of trying to jump a train north to Cairns. Reuben agrees. We set to walking south out of the city, plotting ways to get cash, reminiscing about the court appearance, making plans, deciding on a destination, keeping one eye out for Muddy and his gang.
——
We’ve spent a week getting nowhere. Both so hungry we begin to hallucinate. Reuben’s run out of weed; every hour that passes sees him all the more antsy.
—Fucken DTs! he says over and over as he shuffles up and down in the dirt in front of me, where I sit trying to write everything down into my notebook.
No one wants to pick up two chain-smoking skinny punks wearing torn jeans, Doc Martens and Sex Pistols t-shirts, two lost apostles of freedom, holding a sign that says Now or Bust. A couple of cars pull over and we huddle up to the window to get some of the air-conditioning that pours out into the mercurial heat, straining to hear a few riffs of music to counteract the ringing in our ears from the cicadas in the gum trees. Each time, the driver takes one look at Reuben and assumes he escaped from an asylum. His stunning blue eyes, when his pupils disappear into tiny pieces of nothing, look too far spaced apart. When this happens, his silver tongue gets stuck like he ate a bottle of clag. The driver of this car assumes the same, hits the accelerator and showers us in gravel and dust that reeks of sump oil, diesel and eucalyptus. A box of fishing tackle dislodges from the roof rack. It explodes on the bitumen and the lead sinkers melt into the road.
We’ve happened on a phone box, by itself, out in the middle of nowhere, between nowhere towns. I go through my mailbag, hoping I have a butter knife to jammy out some coins, but I don’t have a butter knife. Neither does Reuben.
—We don’t need fucken shrapnel. We need a fucken bunch of real cash! he snaps.
—Sometimes you can get a hundred bucks out of a phone box, I say into the glare and the shrieks.
—Only a dickhead would think that you’ll get more than five bucks out of a phone box by the highway in the middle of fucken nowhere. He spits and it sizzles on the road.
We argue and he gets all aggressive and I hate him a little. Then a couple of hours pass and I feel like I could drink diesel out of the road dust, and I say sorry and he says groovy. Out of desperation I ring home, reverse charges, hoping my father will agree to at least talk, or maybe even put some cash into my bank account.
—Dad? I say as the phone clicks up.
—Mate! We’ve worried ourselves sick! You okay?
—Yeah, alive.
—Have you come back?
—Not yet.
Silence.
—Standing in a phone box out on the Bruce Highway, near a place called Gumlu.
—About an hour or so south of here, Dad says, mirth rising in his voice.
Silence.
—Um … yeah.
—But you left a week ago!
—Yeah.
Silence.
Fits of laughter from Dad.
—Fuck you, Dad … Muddy wants to kill us; we had to get away.
—Yeah, but, mate, why has it taken you a week to get a hundred and forty clicks?
—Reuben can’t walk, Dad, and I’ve piggybacked him this far and I feel fucked and I haven’t eaten in a week and no cunt will pick us up. I cry. Looking around I see that Reuben stands a safe distance off, kicking at the side of the road. I sob, audibly.
—You with Reuben, huh?
—Yeah.
—I’ll come and get you.
—What about Reuben?
—I’ll come and get you.
—I can’t come back, Dad. Muddy threatened to kill me.
—Muddy got busted stealing money from a Telecom phone box. This’ll see him in prison, mate; that problem has gone. Just lie low for a while, come home.
—I won’t come back to the meetings, and if a single tramp preacher comes near me, I’ll—
—Bruce the Younger got sent overseas by the Head Workers.
—What? He should get locked up!
—We’ll talk about it when I come get you.
I agree, hang up and walk over to where Reuben busies himself kicking the living shit out of the lip where the asphalt curls over onto the dirt on the roadside.
—Ya goin home, right? he mutters at me, flicking a cigarette butt into the blistering wind.
—Man …
—You do what ya gotta do. Groovy … no problem. Don’t fucken worry about me.
—I do worry about you, brother. I feel real bad that my olds hate you so much. If I had my way, we’d both go back, eat till we vomit, have showers, ya know. I just dunno if I can go on another day without …
But then I realise how it sounds, and I open my mouth to say fuck it – let’s keep going as a car swerves off the road and skids to a halt. The Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ blares out the windows of a beaten Holden Kingswood with shiny mag wheels and doors either blue with rust or rust with blue. A skinhead sticks his head out the front passenger side and says:
—Both ya cunts wanna lift? Sorry, fuckers, we only got space for one … ay.
Reuben doesn’t look at me, spies the back driver’s side seat has a vacancy, checks for traffic, walks around and climbs in, still not looking at me. The car roars off, backfiring in a black cloud.
About an hour later Dad pretends to not see me on the highway and drives on. Then, about five minutes later, he pulls up coming the other way, winds down his window and says:
—Need a lift, mate?
We sit in silence for about half an hour before Dad starts on about maybe going back to Kirwan High.
—After all, he says: the bullies have all gone to Thuringowa. He says bullies real patronising, like I’d cried in the sandpit. He grins awhile, which pisses me off.
We roll up the gravel driveway and I see Mum looking out through a gap in the curtains. I go into the house purposefully not looking at where I saw her standing and straight to my bedroom. I sleep for two days in my filthy clothes. The first thing I realise as I awake, Dad never said a thing about why he didn’t report the tramp preacher to the cops! Perhaps another form of justice awaits him. Maybe Dad didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t think I want to talk about it either.
Part Three
Aftermath
————
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamoured of danger.
Jean Genet
1
December 1987. On the Greyhound, en route to Brisbane and Billie-Jean. Sitting at the front above the steps, on the highway somewhere south of Rockhampton, the rain belting down in the dark, cars screaming right at us out of the howling black. The driver hunches forward, jaw of stone. I feel alone among the mumbling and snoring of the other passengers behind me. Put on my headphones: Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Trying to picture Billie-Jean in her bed in Brisbane, her breasts, her lips in the moonlight by a Cadillac on a grassy knoll.
The rain clears around dawn and I stare out the window, hardly blinking. Reuben might appear out here somewhere, by the side of the road with his thumb out, or at a servo trying to hustle travellers for food and smokes. I don’t see him.
I spend four or five hundred kilometres of the trip worrying that Billie-Jean will no longer find me attractive, or that she has an actual boyfriend. Not that I can claim sainthood. Since Billie-Jean I’ve had sex with at least a dozen girls, I figure. I busy myself trying to remember them in chronological order, writing a list in my journal, but I keep getting stuck because I don’t know some of their names. Reuben says you should never kiss and tell, though he tells all the time. Reuben also says that oral sex counts on his tally sheet. I growled out a chick who lives across the road the week before I slept with Billie-Jean, and before that I growled out three of my sister’s friends when they came to stay.
I listen to Echo & the Bunnymen on my Walkman, rewinding ‘Bring On the Dancing Horses’ over and over, while I spend the next six hours drilling into my memories, trying to complete my list:
Sixteen girls! I feel kind of ashamed but a bit proud. Should I hang my head and sigh or shout with joy and punch the sky? I ponder this for a while. Dawn strobes through the trees as the bus passes factory outlets and freeway overpasses. My batteries run flat.
The bus wheezes into Roma Street Station and all the broken-looking travellers get out like Jonahs from the belly of a silver whale. I notice Billie-Jean’s mother first, in front of her daughter, holding her back. Billie-Jean peers over her shoulder with a big beautiful smile on her perfect face. Billie’s mum has a space helmet of silver hair piled up on her head, lacquered like a Caravaggio masterpiece. Part of me knows that my parents and Billie-Jean’s mother plotted this whole trip to try to get me back to the fold of Friendlies, but I don’t care. Won’t work on me. Billie-Jean’s mother has a rank high up the food chain of religious freaks who belong to this cult. I guess she feels pretty confident about her evangelical skills if she thinks she can convince me to believe in crazy.
I kiss Billie-Jean on the cheek, real polite like, but, unseen to her mother, I poke her cheek with my tongue. Chicks love that shit. I also notice she now has rather large breasts! We ride in silence for a while in her mum’s Peugeot back to her house in the suburb of Nundah on the city’s north side. Billie has three sisters and a brother. Her mum leads me up the stairs to her brother’s room, which has two single beds in it. I feel pretty shy right about now. Her mum has a real intimidating stare and one of those letter-slot judgemental mouths. She points at a towel on the foot of the bed over by the window and grunts:
—That … ugh … perfume. You should have a shower, Brentley.
—Cologne, I say: Yves Saint Laurent, signature … You don’t like it?
She sniffs through one nostril and her horizontal mouth goes about forty-five degrees east. Her tongue sticks out like a pink telegram as she crosses her arms. I wonder how Billie turned out so beautiful. She leaves. I scope out the room.
The possessions of a downtrodden and restricted kid. Including two bibles. Kids who still dig sandpits shouldn’t have bibles. The kid doesn’t have anything to nick the batteries out of. The room has an air-conditioner and a fancy remote control, with double-As. I nick those, stick them in my Walkman, get my cigarettes and INXS’s Kick cassette from my duffel bag and go out on the balcony to have a look. I check out which way the wind blows, light up a cigarette, pop my headphones on and hit play. ‘Devil Inside’. I drum on the railing, head banging, lost in the music, and a hand comes down on my shoulder. I spin on my heel and exhale smoke right into Billie-Jean’s mother’s face. She snatches the phones off my head and spits:
—Really into it, huh? The Devil’s got you, boy.
——
I stammer through dinner, anxious to get some time alone with Billie-Jean. Her old man asks me a bunch of boring questions about school and my plans for the future. He doesn’t say much else, just hunches like a vulture over the head of the table. Her siblings stare at me.
Then I have to act all polite and amiable as the whole family crowd around the sink doing the dishes. Soon her parents say we all have to go to bed – at eight fucken pm? Billie gives a little sad pout and dutifully heads off up the stairs with her sisters. I go up to her brother’s room and sneak a smoke out on the balcony. I sit in bed reading Byron for a while. I must have drifted off, because, as I awake to Billie-Jean shaking my shoulder, the light still burns overhead.
—Let’s sneak out. We’ll go to Macca’s, she whispers with a sweet breath.
It takes me a couple of seconds to adjust but I heartily agree and get out of bed, still fully dressed. The clock in the hall reads 12.30 am. She expertly, silently, opens the front door of the house, despite the large deadlocks, which I tell her I find an admirable skill. We walk up the huge busy Sandgate Road and across a rail bridge, talking the whole way. I fill her in about Reuben and Muddy and the stabbing and the court case, and then we sit in McDonald’s drinking Coke and smoking cigarettes. I tell her about the posse and Gigolo’s house on Love Lane and all about Bruce the Younger. I skip the bits about the girls and the stealing and I get up to the part about watching Reuben roar off in a Kingswood with a group of skinheads when the manager of McDonald’s politely requests we buy more burgers or leave. We walk back up the road hand in hand as the first train trembles underneath. We kiss each other near to death in the hallway before going to our separate rooms.
At breakfast Billie says she will take me into the city. I feel pretty excited, and I busy myself getting dressed for an hour until Billie comes in and catches me in the bathroom stealing her mother’s hairspray. She doesn’t say anything and helps me tease my hair up more at the back where I can’t see it properly in the mirror. I’ve got on black jeans, tucked into my twelve-hole black Doc Martens, a James Dean t-shirt and a black duffel coat with Punk and Anarchy pins down the lapels. A small silver pistol that works as a lighter hangs from a keychain on my studded belt.
Billie says she wants to see The Lost Boys, a film about vampires, but her mother reckons vampires sleep with Satan, so we keep the cinema plan quiet. About then her little brother happens by the bathroom and informs me in this sweet-innocent-kid kind of way that only girls use hairspray. Billie says:
—Fuck off, ya little arsehole!
He scurries off to dob on us. We hightail it out of the house, back up Sandgate Road to the train station, and as we get down the stairs a train pulls up. We get right on and Billie tells me we will get off at Fortitude Valley. I go on about what Fortitude means, particularly in tarot cards.
In the Valley she takes me up into McWhirters shopping centre and shows me where she smokes after school on this covered overpass that crosses Wickham
Street. We sit awhile, watching the cars below, reading the street press piled along the window ledge, smoking cigarettes.
Pretty soon Billie-Jean leads me to the subway to catch a train into central Brisbane, to go see The Lost Boys. All these bummed-out scabby-looking tramps sit around in the subway, clinking bottles on their rotten teeth, walking back and forth along the concourse looking for cigarette butts people have stomped out as they board the train. It only takes about five minutes to get to Central Station. We go down the escalators and cross a little park into the city mall.
——
Billie-Jean sits by my side in the cool dark of the cinema. I should feel elated, but I don’t. And I don’t know why. I guess I built her up in my mind, as a goddess. Now I dunno. She seems more interested in the experience than the person she has it with. Her hand in mine should give me a buzz, but I only get static. My mind wanders like this all through The Lost Boys, despite the fact I really dig vampire films and develop an instant crush on Jami Gertz. I can’t suspend my disbelief. All the acting feels stilted, the actors like Mr Potato Head, the director shifting around their facial expressions. Before I know it, the end credits roll. We wait there until the credits finish and everyone else has left the theatre. We sit in silence until the overhead lights come on full strength and a bunch of people come in to pick up empty popcorn buckets and choc-top wrappers. Billie leans in and whispers:
—Let’s go fuck.
This picks me up a bit. I look at Billie under the cinema lights and the way her breath pushes her breasts against her Madonna t-shirt, and my cock throbs.
—Okay, I say, managing to suppress the tremble in my voice.
We go back out into the Queen Street Mall and sit on a circular bench. We smoke a couple of cigarettes. Then Billie rises and says:
—Wait here.
I watch her walk off. She goes into a chemist. Then she comes out, says:
Scoundrel Days Page 9