We have a way to walk, through the suburbs and parks, to where Reuben stashed his worldly possessions at a state-run halfway house for wayward youth. Reuben only walks a few hundred metres before his feet act up. I haven’t slept in four days, have a raging hangover and feel half-starved. I can’t piggyback him for more than twenty metres before we have to sit down and rest. Sitting there at a bus stop, sharing his last Gitane with me, Reuben says:
—Have you ever wanted to kill someone?
—Not really … A few people I’d like to scar for life.
—You should never say you want to kill someone unless you mean it … and even then, you shouldn’t say it. You should just do it.
I glance up to see if he has a smile on his face. He doesn’t. The Saturday-morning traffic rumbles around us.
—I wanna kill one of my stepfathers. Blow his head off with a shotgun. He flicks his cigarette lighter like a trigger.
—What’d ya stepfather do, the fucker, to make you wanna kill him? … Or shouldn’t I ask?
—He raped me.
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
—He crushed my balls, destroyed my left.
I audibly choke. Still can’t find any words. A bus hisses to a stop and the doors open. The driver looks at us sitting on the bus-stop bench in the side mirror. We don’t get up, though I’d sure like to get on the bus and away from Reuben’s story. He sort of curls up, like an apostlebird dying in a gutter.
—He then held me over a stove and dipped my feet into a pot of boiling potatoes … He lives in Cairns now. I found out recently.
The bus doors slam shut and it roars off. Reuben looks at me, sitting here, feeling sick:
—C’mon, brother! He slaps me on the back: Let’s get the fuck outta here. The island awaits!
We amble down the path a bit. I still don’t have any idea how to react to what happened to him. I want to change the conversation but I don’t want to seem like I don’t care. We come across a welcome distraction in the form of an old beat-up suitcase leaning against a fence. It has a red sock sticking out of the zip. It looks like an exhausted square brown-vinyl dog.
—Perfect! Reuben grabs the suitcase. He opens it up and it has some old-person clothes and a couple of paperback books by Stephen King in there. The Dark Half looks like a swollen bruise.
—Let’s find a cab, he says, zipping the case back up.
He stands out on the kerb, waving down taxis. A couple pass by, and then one pulls up with a massively obese man sweating in the driver’s seat. Reuben leans in the window:
—We need to get to West End. Can you help us put my suitcase in the boot?
The cabbie grumbles and fumbles around and the boot pops and he heaves out of his collapsed seat and grabs the suitcase and throws it in with zero ceremony. I go to throw my duffel bag in there but Reuben kicks my foot. Reuben gets in the front and the driver squeezes himself in and groans like he climbed Everest.
—Havin a good day, mate? Reuben says to the stinking rhino of a driver.
—Yeah.
—Drivin all night?
—Yeah. Busy as fuck, too. Where you boys comin from: clubs?
—Good! Busy night, huh? Lotsa cash. Yeah, a couple of clubs, a few parties … My girlfriend threw me out this morning because I came home reeking of pussy. Reuben slaps the dude on the shoulder.
The cabbie lets out this blokey kind of laugh. Reuben charms him like this as we head into the deep suburbs, looks over his shoulder and winks at me in the back. The fake pine-needle-fresh smell taxis stink of gets right up my nose.
West End in Townsville you could compare to the Bronx, I guess, without high-rises. Recently a tourist had a puncture here and some Aboriginal kids smashed the dude’s face in with his tyre-iron. It has share houses and safe houses and halfway houses and cheap motels and illegal brothels and bikie gang headquarters. All the shops have roller doors and caged windows. Shifty characters stand around on the street corners with hands in pockets. Graffiti murders everything with a flat surface. I see my tag more times than I remember tagging it.
Reuben directs the driver to pull over somewhere deep inside West End. The driver hauls himself out to get the suitcase from the boot. I get out, but Reuben lingers in there a second. Next thing I know, Reuben yells Run! and the cabbie slams down the boot to see Reuben sprinting up the street on his heels, clutching a cash box. I bolt and jump right over a wood panel fence. Figuring the fat bastard won’t follow me, I peer over and see the driver trying to force himself back into his cab to make chase. No sign of Reuben. I sneak through some yards and over the fences of some factories and circle back around to see if I can spy him.
Nope. Nowhere. Gone.
I find him as the sun starts bleeding out, after wandering around West End all day trying to not get stabbed. He sits on the fence outside a huge derelict house. The whole place looks deceased, a heckle of crows calling from the vacant lot next door, busted umbrellas and junk along the bottom of the fences. A few kids hunch like victims on the sagged veranda. Reuben has his army duffel and a pile of books on the fence beside him. Everything he owns in the world he has in that bag, and probably half of it he acquired only recently.
—What took ya so long, brother?
—You didn’t give me the address.
He offers me a smoke from a fresh packet.
—Cabbie had three hundred bucks, man! Let’s get a ferry over to the island tonight. The cops’ll have our description by now. We should lie low.
We cut out of West End and into the city and stop by a dealer’s place to score an ounce of weed. Reuben reckons if we split the bag into twenty-dollar deals, we can triple our money. He borrows a roll of aluminium foil and sits there while I make small talk with the dealer, who I think shot up heroin not long before we arrived. The couch has absorbed him and he keeps missing his mouth with his cigarette. Reuben hums in the kitchen, splitting up our ounce into one-gram foils.
We make it down into the city and onto a ferry and we sit out on the bow and spark up a joint. Soon I feel pretty good. We disembark at the main ferry terminal on the island, at Picnic Bay. We walk off the jetty and through the little township and find a shop on the beach so we can buy cigarettes. We catch a bus around to Nelly Bay. I feel exhausted, awake for four days straight.
The chick at the backpackers’ hostel doesn’t ask to see ID or anything, just gives us a key to a bungalow and disappears. The bungalows have two double-decker beds. They don’t have showers or cupboards, only a square of carpet and two chairs. I expect to find some dudes already in there but we have the place to ourselves.
——
So I spend a month partying so hard I don’t get a chance to write anything down. We drink Cinzano, smoke a fuckload of weed and veg out on the beach all day. We share our bungalow with two British dudes. The Poms have a huge clippie bag of this new drug they smuggled over from London. X they call it, short for ecstasy.
—No one back in London can get enough of this shit, mate! They call it the Second Summer of Love over there … Acid-house music, mate … Dancing to those mad beats on X with a fit bird shaking her buttocks, bruvver … Bliss has arrived, here on earth … Take some.
I don’t dig it much, makes me anxious. I play with the hair on my arm for about six hours one night. Then I see a possum and get all serious about trying to give it a rub, but those varmints will take your face off and piss in the wounds for good measure. Reuben gobbles down handfuls of ecstasy, swaps some of our weed for the pills.
I can’t remember the British dudes’ names, on account of perpetual intoxication. I want to see Candy. Reuben has forgotten she exists. I try to talk him into going over to the mainland and hitting the clubs, because I hope to see her, but he reckons the cops will still have our wanted dead or alive posters in their cruisers. I don’t get lucky at all the whole time.
Reuben sleeps with parades of backpackers, but he has his heart in it.
I have a fantastic tan.
2
We packed up our stuff this morning, left it in the bungalow and hung out on the beach all day. As night tripped over the kerb of the ocean, we returned, grabbed our bags and caught a bus to the ferry. No one chased us or anything. Six weeks of free accommodation – what a bargain. At midnight we boarded this Greyhound bus to Cairns. The green electric clock above the driver says 3.43 am.
Rumbling to Cairns. We roll through banana plantations and sugar-cane farms and fig trees on the beach in Cardwell. The rainforest fans up the ranges in a mist. After staring into space through rain-streaked glass, I get out my journal and write down some of the Magnetic Island adventures. Reuben watches me, scribbling away under the reading bulb. He grows curious when I get a flow on, don’t stop writing for half an hour or so. Leans in.
—Writin an epic?
—A novel.
—What about?
—A true story about smut and crime and poetry and life. About running from Love.
—Groovy … You writing me in?
—Nope.
—You gonna do anything pretentious with your grammar?
—What do you mean?
—Ya know. Pretentious. He shrugs down in his seat: Like fucken Joyce … I can barely read that shit. He breaks the rules of written language … like, imagine if a guitarist said, Nah, fuck using established musical notes, don’t fucken expect me to tune my instrument.
—I might try something like that. Have you heard that album Psychocandy by The Mary Chain? They don’t even know how to play guitar.
—Yeah, they bend the rules. I don’t mind writers who bend the rules.
Reuben goes through his jacket and produces a decayed soft-looking copy of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night:
—Listen to this, man … just listen to this, my favourite passage from my favourite book in the world: In the corners of all parks there lie forgotten any number of little coffins garlanded with dreams, thickets charged with promises, handkerchiefs full of everything. All a big joke.
—Wow! Can I borrow that?
—No. Never leaves my person, bro.
Strange, I’ve never seen him with it before. That doesn’t surprise me, though; he has all sorts of shit secreted away in his hustler’s jacket. Reuben slumps right down in his shoulders then. He has on a pork-pie hat that he can’t quite get over his eyes, but he tries to anyway. I drift off somewhere and dream of the Aboriginals standing on the beach in 1770, watching the British ships gliding like Irukandji up the coast. Terra nullius, ownership by occupation, to the victor the spoils. I write:
Australia, land of brazen scum.
Come one, come all and get a sunburned bum.
I chuckle out loud.
—You laughing at yourself again, man? Reuben tries to get deeper into his seat.
—Yeah.
Shakes his head, stretches out.
——
Australia. Most times I hate this island. I’ve spent ages figuring out ways to get deported. I wouldn’t mind if they sent me back to Denmark or Prussia – or Wales or Scotland or France, or wherever the hell my ancestors hail from. My nana, my dad’s mum, she told me her ancestors originally came from Palestine, before they emigrated to Wales and eventually on to Australia. Grandma, my mother’s mother, told me her family emigrated from Prussia. Once she said she had relatives on her side who broke off from a band of Latvian gypsies. I don’t know where to find my history. Does Prussia even exist anymore? I don’t think it does.
I find it surprising how little I think of my family history. I guess that happens to most Australians. We’ve had to build our own culture. We don’t have a single lineage to guide us in our infancy. The British came here two hundred and two years ago, and in that time a lot of history can fall off the pier and get swept out to sea.
Dark outside. Late June moonfruit oozing nightnectar in a blue garden. Dawn will break soon, like an egg on the edge of night. The bus slows as we cross Mulgrave River. We’ll pass through the township of Gordonvale soon. I’ve travelled this road a thousand times, felt it beneath my boots, marvelled at the way it simultaneously offers promise and dread, demonic one moment, an angel the next.
I wonder what happened to Albatross and Uncle Parky? I called Uncle Parky sir sometimes – he never seemed to mind. You would too, because he commands respect without asking for it. You’d really like him. We should all call the Aboriginals sir and miss; they deserve it more than the fools we call teachers at school. The first people here, like Parky, they deserve reverence, not some fops from England. He taught me some real knowledge. How to quieten my mind, to let in the dreaming. How to see in the dark. I have nothing but respect for Aboriginals anyway. I’ve sat around in parks and on beaches with those dreaming souls. They have a fucken grand old time, mostly. Sure, I mean, when I visited Palm Island I had the shit scared out of me by the unhinged drinking and the violence which holds its hand. The cop stories of generational rape and incest haunt me, but the same shit goes down inside the walls of castles. Look at the whites with their royal fixation. They stand around on their own side of their picket fences saying things like Oh, the Abos, they don’t participate … if only they’d stop drinking and integrate. You see the irony, people talking about integration over fences.
A crunch of gears there as the bus navigates a bend. We’ve left the coast now. Mountains on either side. Rainforest reaching up. If I ever get off this island, I’ll miss the various perfumes the most. The eucalypt soprano drops in, riding on the cicada screech, then the contralto of rotting mangoes, which grabs onto the skirts of the toad croak … then comes the baritone of molasses on the smoke from sugar mills. Above all of this, in the crescendos, the tenor, the stench of death, roadkill rotting on bitumen. It tremors in from the edges on the cry of crows.
The bus rolls into Cairns with dawn. We wander down the beach and find a cafe and sit drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Reuben says he has a granny we can stay with, but we have to kill a few hours before we go to her house.
Like Townsville, they built Cairns on cleared-out mangroves. Both cities stink like swamps. Cairns has a lot more tourists than Townsville, though, so the scent of coconut oil pervades. We go into a pawnshop and I hock my Walkman, buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a carton of Marlboro and pay for a cab.
I shouldn’t have smoked that joint on the beach before we came to Reuben’s grandma’s house. A vertical rain coming down as I stand at the bottom of the stairs and Reuben bangs on the door. I feel north of the vortex now, like an astronaut circling a black hole. His granny’s house sighs under the weight of mango-tree leaves choking the gutters. It looks unkempt, like a web when the spider’s left. The house creaks and the door swings open. An ancient lady in a wheelchair has this look on her face like when you fake feeling pleased to see someone. Reuben has a stilted conversation with her and she rolls down the hall in front of us and shows us the room where we can stay. It has a double bed. I don’t know how I feel about sharing a bed with Reuben, but we both flake out on there anyway, exhausted.
The next morning I find Reuben at the kitchen table. He sits there in a singlet, smoking and reading the newspaper. His grandma busily rolls about the kitchen, cooking toast and eggs. She asks about forty times how long we’ll stay. Reuben shows me an advertisement in the paper. The Cairns Show has jobs available. After we eat eggs and drink coffee and smoke about fifty cigarettes, we cut out to the showground. Reuben’s grandma lives quite close.
The place has a million trucks zooming around and thousands of show rides half-constructed. You can walk through the gates for free today … tomorrow it’ll cost at least ten bucks. Forklifts whiz by and brakes screech all over the place. People shuffle past with boxes of clown heads and teddy bears. Sledgehammers, shouts and that bee
p you hear when a truck reverses. We walk beyond skeletons of roller-coasters and gravitrons and men fixing dodgem cars.
We stop outside a huge dome tent going up with a sign leaning on the front of a ticket booth: 3D Cinema Experience. Reuben goes right over to the dude who looks like he owns the thing and strikes up a conversation. I shuffle around until I notice a trailer coming up the dusty road, consisting of a big cage with a trillion coloured balls in it. This withered-looking generic alco bloke alights from the truck and nods at me. He runs one of those kids’ rides that has all those obstacles in it, like rolling barrel hallways and nets to climb and a huge pit full of balls for them to wade through. When they get to the top of the ride, it has a spiral slippery slide to get back down to the ground.
—Ya lookin for a job, kid?
—Yeah.
—I need someone to sit up top there by the slippery slide and make sure kids don’t kill emselves on the way down.
—I can do that!
—Can you work the whole five days: 9 am to 10 pm?
—Yeah!
—We can do it two ways. I can do up this form – he waves a form in my face – which means ya’ll pay tax, or I can pay you cash in hand, off the books, like.
—I need as much cash as I can get.
—Start tomorrow, 9 am sharp. Now piss off, I have shit to do.
I meet Reuben coming back up the road. He landed a job selling tickets at the 3D cinema. He starts tomorrow too. We figure this means we can go into the city and get drunk with the last of our cash. Soon we’ll have a payday. We make it into Cairns city and find somewhere to play pool and drink beer. We run out of cash in the late afternoon and get ready to leave when a group of American chicks come pouring into the bar. A couple wander over and ask us if we’ve finished with the pool table.
Scoundrel Days Page 15