Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  —They won’t fucken hear us, man.

  He says this like I should somehow know his parents won’t hear us, and then it dawns on him:

  —Ah, my parents built a fucken huge house up in the Ormeau foothills, right near this place called Old Ormeau Town. My dad has pots of money.

  When he says pots of money, his British heritage shines through. Fulton hadn’t realised until now that Harley comes from Pom land. He suddenly blurts:

  —Ya fucken Pom, and throws a drunken mock punch.

  Harley instantly drops Fulton to the ground and gets a knee on his throat.

  —Fuck, dude! I shout.

  Two security guards lingering near the gate, waiting for us to cause trouble, come rushing over. Harley gets off Fulton’s chest. Fulton lies in the car park gravel and broken taillights blubbering like a two-year-old who’s skinned his knees. I don’t know about Fulton. Harley and I look mega rad, like proper Greasers right out of The Outsiders. Fulton doesn’t look right. His Doc Martens shine, he doesn’t lace his boots properly, his leather jacket looks like something a mobster wears to a wedding. Also, he looks young for his age, because of his puffy cheeks.

  I feel bad I haven’t warned Fulton about Harley. I didn’t get a chance, though, since Fulton and I ran into him in the city earlier today. He’d long gone when Fulton arrived at school. Harley’s violence started in infancy. It only took one kid on his very first day of primary school to ask if he’d had a dick chopped off his scarred forehead for Harley to start studying martial arts. It takes nothing to set him off. The slightest breeze of aggression and you’ll find yourself drinking steak dinners with a straw threaded through your wired-up jaw.

  Dusting himself off, Fulton says he’ll get his own cab back to the caravan park. I say to tell Dad I’ve run into my old school mate and I’ll come back in the morning. I know my dad will have some sort of conniption, but what does he expect letting me out alone in a big city? Fulton speeds off in a taxi.

  5

  Harley and I walk for about an hour, until we find a train station. Onboard, Harley finds a seat and kicks back, his legs stretched out, taking up at least three standing spaces. People keep tripping over his eighteen-hole Doc Martens. Full and rowdy, the train trundles to the Valley, where a rough prison-escapee-looking dude boards. He has spider-web tattoos on his elbows and one of those teardrops inked on his face. I read somewhere that a teardrop on your face means you’ve killed someone. The prison-escapee dude stumbles his way down the aisle and trips right over Harley’s boots. Harley must have dozed off behind his Ray-Bans or something, because it takes him a second to react. He sits up and lowers his sunglasses, and the rough dude taps him right on the forehead scar and blurts in a whisky mist of spittle:

  —Ya get a cock chopped off, ya cunt?

  Harley punches him so hard and fast the dude vomits as he doubles over. As he splurts foamy-looking shit everywhere, Harley stands and smashes the dude’s face right on his kneecap. The dude lies there, unconscious, in a pool of vomit and blood.

  No one stops us getting off in the city. We walk down the ramp, where not too long ago I stood in uncomfortable silence with Billie-Jean. Instinctively, I look for her face in the crowd. A pretty girl catches my gaze and smiles at me. I say out loud, Billie who? The city pumps at night. Cars tooting horns, a thousand different tunes tumbling out of cafes and pubs, dudes busking, drumming, playing guitar. We soak it all up. After a while Harley says:

  —Fuck it, man, let’s just get a cab. I reckon a hundred bucks will cover it. He pulls out his huge roll of cash to check if he has a hundred bucks. He easily has a thousand bucks there.

  ——

  Harley wins the understatement of the year award for saying his parents built a huge house. This place resembles the Lodge mansion from Archie comics – an actual mansion, built right back into an excavated cliff. Rain sheets down as we alight from the cab. Inside his home’s cavernous interior Harley says Let’s go down to my level. He doesn’t have a bedroom; he has a level. And on it he has a bar and a full-size pool table.

  About halfway through a bottle of Monte Alban Mezcal and about a quarter ounce of weed, I swear the worm comes alive. We run out of smokes. Harley suggests we go buy a pack from the servo down by the freeway. We drag ourselves away from MTV as ‘Orange Crush’ by R.E.M. starts playing and float down the hall to the front doors of the house. Harley pushes me out and tells me to wait down by the gates. He dead-bolts the door behind me. The rain has cleared. I stagger down to the gates and hang out in the cool hinterland night, digging the view across the range with a perfect full moon rubbing its Buddha-belly up against the mountains.

  A crunch of tyres on gravel reveals Harley slowly rolling from the shadows in a blue Porsche Carrera, the kind without the air-scoop on the back. I jump in and we spirit down the hill. Harley fires up the engine.

  —Dad’ll never know, he says: We’ll just go get some smokes. Too far to walk.

  We pass million-dollar dream homes with boats in the driveways and manicured lawns with lit decorative fountains out the front. We roll through streets that have no name, barren cul-de-sacs not on the map yet, new housing estates, gated communities that have broken away like little feudal kingdoms.

  We pull in to a Caltex and park near a dumpster. Harley leaps out through the window. I follow. We swagger in through the diner and buy a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of Coke. We linger in the air-conditioning, then head out the electric door back into the humid night and the smell of spilled oil, petrol and ozone from rain in the pine forests by the freeway. Between the Porsche and the dumpster rumbles an early-model Chrysler Charger, all scraped up and beaten to hell. A skinny kid, younger than us, with scars worse than Harley’s, leans on his elbow out the driver’s window. Above the V8 rumble he drawls in a thick south-eastern accent:

  —Hey, ya rich faggots wanna drag? He makes this disgusting sucking-back-snot sound and spits at the Porsche.

  Harley laughs, and then stops abruptly, madman style:

  —You look damaged enough, cunt.

  The boy slides out of his window like a bogan Starsky, wiping blonde matted cobwebs from his eyes. He looks older in the neon, late puberty or fifty, I can’t tell. He takes off his denim jacket with a badly drawn scorpion on the back, revealing an Iron Maiden t-shirt with both armsayes cut out. He drops a cigarette butt and scrubs it out under his thong.

  The dark shapes behind the tinted windows of the Charger rearrange themselves and, as the chopstick-thin driver barks Wanna go then, ya filthy fucken poofter, five other boys and two girls, all wearing jackets with the same badly drawn scorpion, emerge from the car. Harley’s eyes light up. He reaches into the Porsche and the hood pops. His hand comes back in view, holding an aluminium baseball bat with a black rubber grip. The girls get back in the Charger. The ratty, drunk, cobweb-headed man-kid steps forward, his shoulder coiling for a punch. He swings his arm in a giant arc. Harley drops down, dodges the fist and expertly ends him in the stomach with the bat. The man-kid falls up against his car, attempts to stand, but falls again, coughing blood on the passenger window. The girls inside scream. The five other scorpions scuttle away towards the servo.

  —Get in the car, man! Harley yells.

  We both scramble in and he opens it up. The tyres squeal on the asphalt. A hundred faces press against the glass of the diner. Vacant tourist faces glued like travel stickers on the back window of a caravan.

  ——

  We roar through the dark. The light of the dashboard glows orange on Harley’s corrugated face, his jaw set hard and unforgiving like the freeway beneath the tyres. The headlights reflect off road signs and flame up his glacial eyes. Moths explode on the windshield like thrown mulberries.

  —I love speed! Harley shouts: Yeah, baby! and he punches the roof of the car.

  I pretend to hunt through my pockets for a lighter, cast a furtive glance at the sp
eedometer. The needle hovers just below a hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. I hunker down in the racing seat, clutch the belt across my chest, light a cigarette and muse on German engineering. I wind down the window and flick my cigarette butt out into the wind as the Charger comes up beside us like a rusted rocket on mag wheels. The front-seat passenger throws a beer bottle and it smashes on the driver’s door of the Porsche. A blush of rage plays across Harley’s face. His eyes drink up the road, fierce determination wrinkling the scar on his forehead. He stomps harder on the accelerator. The Charger cyclones beside us, inching slowly forward. Bogans hang from the windows hurling abuse. The Chrysler leaps in front, cuts dangerously close. Heart pounding. Harley eases back on the gas, and then the driver in front slams on his brakes.

  Slow motion. The windscreen implodes. My head snaps forward with tremendous force. As I recoil, my knees smash into the dashboard, or the dashboard smashes into my knees. The freeze-frame spectacle of the front end of a Porsche crumpling like a broken slinky. Pale opera. A nebula of blue paint and sparks. Chorus of a compacting fuselage. Ecstatic song of metal bending in unplanned directions. The engine block of the Carrera drops down and shrieks as it bites into the asphalt. The steering column spears forward and Harley’s forehead hits the wheel. Blood sheets from a gash on his hairline. Steam from the destroyed radiator clears and the back wheels of the Charger, which now rest on the roof of the Porsche, grind to a halt. A brake pad falls down onto the remains of our hood. Moans and metallic creaks and the hiss of a punctured tyre. Someone scrambling in broken glass. Horrified silence on the edges.

  A vision. Curtains stirring in a breeze, a wind chime tinkling. Reaching out for the curtains. Tiny hands.

  ——

  Standing off the freeway on a rise, looking down at the melancholy wrecks, I watch Harley and the other driver stumble about, taking swings at each other. Screams and shouts for help from the Charger. I can’t move; my legs feel numb and my neck aches. The chorus from a hymn the cult nailed in my mind plays, complete with organ accompaniment, clear as if I sat in a church tent, with a thousand lost souls singing out of tune for salvation:

  Tell me the story of Jesus …

  I hear myself praying:

  —Lord … God, can you hear me?

  Clearer than ever I see.

  —First let me apologise for telling you to go fuck yourself because I have a shit singing voice. I didn’t mean it.

  Stay, let me weep while you whisper …

  A girl falls out the door of the Charger, her arm bent all the wrong way. Several cars on the freeway slow for the spectacle.

  —Lord … I don’t know how I survived. No man alive knows more repentance.

  Love paid the ransom for me …

  Part Four

  North of Vortex

  ————

  Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.

  Henry Miller

  1

  Spent the last month recovering, lying around reading Dante’s Inferno. Damn my neck hurts. My mother begrudgingly lets Reuben come to visit. I tell him about the car crash and that I now believe in miracles.

  —Did you find God on the highway? he says in an over-the-top patronising voice: A hundred and thirty ks when you hit the Charger. No one could survive that.

  I let it go. He won’t let it go. He wants to know what the doctor said. I didn’t go to the doctor. My dad doesn’t know about it. Reuben says he can hook me up with a crooked quack who’ll prescribe me the good stuff without needing parental consent.

  Cali comes by and takes me out. I don’t have much spirit for socialising. She kind of drags me around to parties and to the movies.

  I try to avoid noticing the charms of beautiful women, but for some reason they get right in my line of sight.

  Adrift on the ocean of life, gybing with the wind.

  Another year begins. Rains come with Cyclone Ivor.

  The election. Bob Hawke wins again. I didn’t vote.

  ——

  Standing in a window at Sebastian’s place and looking out at the ocean, I’ve decided nothing matters. Sibby strips for a living at a pub named Miner’s Right. They have a ladies’ night there. Sibby says it gets rowdy and a few times a pissed chick has near torn his cock off. Reuben met him a while back, at Cafe Nova. I think he has a thing for Reuben. Far as I know, Reuben doesn’t have a gender preference; he just likes sex.

  Last night, out with Sibby and Reuben, I pointed out the little chick I see everywhere. She butterflied around the room, because she knows everyone now. I tell Reuben I have a thing for her and he glides right on over and starts working his silver tongue. He starts up buying her drinks and then dancing with her, and before you know it they hide over in the corner, pashing. I watch in disgust as they leave.

  Sibby and I stagger out at last drinks and clamber up the thousand stairs to his top-floor apartment. I’ve had about enough of this town, the mangroves and the mosquitoes, box jellyfish and dead brine on the wind.

  ——

  Dawn now, the fourth I’ve seen without sleep. My ears still ringing from the club. Here comes Reuben shuffling up from the beach. I don’t see the little chick with him. He looks pretty pleased with himself. He comes up the path five floors below. I imagine dropping a piano or something on him. I look around the room. After a while he slaunts through the door and spies me looking out the window. Sebastian has this huge apartment right opposite the beach. The windows go from about waist height up ten feet above you.

  —You right? Flops down on the sofa.

  —Hello.

  —You pissed at me?

  —Did you fuck her?

  —We made love. He sniffs his fingers.

  —Did you get her name?

  —Candy! She moved here from Perth recently. Lives with her sisters on Redpath Street. I walked her home. She has this fucken giant Doberman.

  I turn and look at him finally. Handsome prick sure got lucky in the genetic lottery. Tight black jeans, a shirt and vest buttoned up, and his hair shaved back and sides, long on top and Brylcreemed. He has a fat filterless French cigarette. Sitting there he looks like a handsome bastard from a 1920s gangster film, even in this shitty morning light. He has this fantastic reckless charisma, with the perfect amount of facial scars. My hair sucks, wispy and sticking up like static.

  —You know what! Reuben joins me at the window, looking out at Magnetic Island: I wouldn’t mind living over on the island for a while, score with some backpackers … You know about German backpacker chicks, yeah?

  —I know that backpacker chicks like to get their kit off. I spent months over at Rocky Bay, the nudist beach, wagging school.

  —We should go over there and fuck like tomorrow might never come. He exhales in this authoritarian way he has, which makes him sound wise, like he’s said something of great importance.

  —Yeah … I have fuck-all cash, though, since the hotel closed.

  Reuben offers me a French cigarette, Gitanes. We smoke in silence.

  —We need cash. Let’s rob a few cab drivers. He exhales in his fascist way again and flicks his butt out the window. He takes the cig he always has behind his ear and lights it. It burns a little odd from the Brylcreem.

  —You find a pushbike, right, and let down a tyre, flag a cab, and when you get to your phoney destination you ask for help getting the bike out of the boot. Then, when he gets out, you grab the money tray, or whatever.

  —I want to go on a road trip. I really do. I light my cigarette.

  Reuben puts his hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off.

  —Still angry about Candy? He puts his hand back on my shoulder.

  —No.

  —Brother, sorry, but in love and war, I have no morals.

  —May the best man win, huh? Dragging heavy on my cigarette.

  —Nah, fuck that
… forget Candy. Let’s go to the island.

  —Dunno. Cali might get pissed.

  —You still seeing her? I don’t want her to come. We’ll clean up on chicks over there. You don’t want her hanging around.

  —But we need cash.

  —We’ll go to Nelly Bay. I met this professional vagabond who reckons that you book in there, pay a few days, then extend your stay. They start you a tab to pay when you leave … only you don’t pay. You piss off in the middle of the night.

  —Nelly Bay, huh? I think he might actually have a good idea here and my heart lightens.

  —Yeah.

  —You know what? Let’s fucken do it!

  —Great! We’ll stay free, fuck hot tourists, get drunk, smoke weed … live a little. Let’s go!

  —Now?

  —Yeah. After we go by the safe house where I left my stuff.

  —Okay. I left my bag at Cali’s house … Fuck. She’ll think I cheated on her or something. I didn’t go back there last night like I promised.

  —Man, you get all hung up on chicks. Do you need to buy tampons?

  —Funny.

  Just then someone shouts Oi, arsehole from outside the window. We both lean out for a look. A dude a couple of floors down stands on a balcony, shaking his fist up at us.

  —Ya fucken chuck any more cigarette butts down here I’ll smash ya fucken heads in, cunts!

  Looks a rough bloke, too, kind of scraggy and tatted like a bikie. I duck my head back in but Reuben grabs a little cactus in a glass bowl from the windowsill and pegs it down at the upturned face. We slam the door leaving Sebastian’s place. He’s slept through the whole last hour as we’ve talked shit and made plans and probably killed someone with a flowerpot.

  We go to Cali’s place first. I leave Reuben to hang out on the driveway and climb in her window. She sniffs the air around me and insists on having morning sex. She wants to cuddle awhile after we both come. She dozes off again. Then a ruckus from outside disturbs half the suburb. We look out. Her old man went out in his jocks to water the yard and found Reuben hanging around. He stands there waving a rake and shouting at Reuben to get off his property. I tell Cali about our island trip, kiss her goodbye, jump out her window and run past her shocked old man to catch up with Reuben. We split up the street, laughing at the spectacle of a furry beach ball in Y-fronts.