—He might die, man. I can’t have the anti-hero die so early.
—Anti-hero? Bro, you’ve lost me, ay.
A doctor comes out to the quadrangle, looks at his clipboard:
—Reuben will live, though he had major organ failure and his lungs collapsed. Because of the way he died sitting up in a cupboard, he cut off his circulation and possibly, but hopefully not, he might lose his legs.
—He died? Gigolo jumps down from the fountain ledge.
—Yeah, mate. The nurse who revived him says she has no idea how long for, though … We worry about that. He scribbles something on his clipboard and leaves.
5
September 1990. I’ve moved in with Candy. Her sisters don’t seem to mind. In fact Blyth keeps making it known her earlier offer still stands. Candy works at the Commonwealth Bank. Both of her sisters still attend school, the rich-kid school. After Candy leaves for work, I go and see Reuben at the hospital. They’ve kept him there for a month now. The first two weeks he drifted in and out. I sit there reading Kerouac’s On the Road to his unconscious ears. When he wakes up, he sometimes asks for me.
—Has Brentley visited? he says in a half-dead murmur.
I cry when he does that. I don’t see a single member of his family come to visit. This makes me feel like crying also. It makes me think about my family. I know they’d come for me. This envelops me in a dark place. When I go there, I cannot withhold my imagination from the abyss. The images come, vivid and sonorous, films on my inner horror channel. Remember, Brentley, harden your armour against Love.
Soon as they let Reuben up, I push him around the hospital grounds in a wheelchair. I bring him things: weed, smokes, books.
——
When Candy arrives home from work and her sisters home from school, we get drunk and dress to go out to the clubs. We go out every night. I have to steal from unlocked cars and phone booths to pay my way.
I go home to get my typewriter so I can type up a bunch of poems I’ve written. The days feel empty. At least Candy and I have a fantastic amount of sex. I classify as one of the horniest people to ever have lived and she keeps up with me.
In the suburbs my mother yells at me for not calling for a month. She thought I’d died or something. She gives me a huge list of all the times Cali has called wanting to speak with me. I feel pretty bad about that so I give her a call. She answers right away and asks if I can come and see her.
I turn up at Cali’s house with my bags and my typewriter and she gets curious. I tell her I’ve moved in with a chick. She cries and begs me to give her another chance. We fuck a few times and as I leave she tells me she stopped taking the pill and she hopes she doesn’t get pregnant.
Doing my best to hide my panic from Candy.
——
They let Reuben out of the hospital today! I call from the foyer and order a cab that can take a wheelchair. A regular cab shows up. Reuben calls the driver a wanker. Reuben hates cab drivers. This makes me happy because it means Reuben’s soul stayed in his body when he died. I felt worried he might have split and left this swollen glum-looking shell for me to wheel around. Anyway, I get him out to the suburbs to his dad’s house, this ugly duplex piece of shit deep in bogan territory. This place has clades of bogans. Without leaving the porch, you can trace their family tree right back to the first inbred who stole along the river and impregnated his sister.
I help Reuben into the house. We smoke a couple of bongs and play a game of chess that lasts about nine seconds because everything goes psychedelic.
Off the bus down at the beach, I decide to linger and sit on the rocks and smoke a cigarette, watch the pretty girls swimming. You can’t go and jump right in the ocean here: you’ll get killed in a few seconds by the Irukandji. These jellyfish can hide on a postage stamp and they shoot you with stingers from their bell piece. I read somewhere they have poison a hundred times more toxic than a cobra’s. The beach has this thing they call a stinger net, developed by the university. It floats like a huge blue horseshoe inner tube, large enough for hundreds of swimmers. It also means that everyone swims in one spot. You never have to wander up the beach hoping to see a beautiful woman. Of course, you can’t sit gazing forever without going into the water as you risk crossing the line between people-watching and perving. I sit awhile watching Venus and Suadela play volleyball. As I get up to leave, Gigolo comes along with his spray-can posse.
—Bro, he says, noticing the volleyball chicks. He gets tennis eyeball, trying to look at least two ways at once. His posse stands around, grabbing their balls and posturing.
—They let Reuben out.
—Seen him?
—Just now. Dropped him out at his dad’s.
Gigolo bums a smoke off me. Struggling to light it in the wind, he takes my beaten-to-shit trilby off my head and uses it as a shield.
—Don’t fucken burn that!
—Fuck … Looks like it died, he says, trying to straighten it out.
—I think I need a new hat.
He takes a few drags and, with one eye on me and one on Venus bending over for the volleyball, says:
—I need some help.
—Doin?
—Tonight me and the boys have planned a heist and we need a getaway driver.
—What kind of heist?
—Spray-paint.
—Where from?
—Don’t worry. I just need you to drive.
—Bro, I dunno … I stopped this shit when I turned eighteen. They’ll never get me in a prison cell alive and I don’t wanna die just yet.
—You’ll do it, bro. I know I can rely on you.
—Can’t one of your dudes drive?
—Do you think Candy will let them drive her car?
—Candy’s car!
—Yeah, bro. I dunno anyone else who has a car.
—She won’t let me borrow her car to use in a heist.
—I already asked her if you can borrow her car tonight to take me to score some weed out in the burbs.
—You did?
—Yeah, bro. I’ve hung with these chicks for ages before you started shagging one of em.
We both get distracted when Venus loses her bikini top as she shunts the volleyball.
Candy has a gold Daihatsu Charade. She has super-rich parents, from what I can gather, so she can afford to have her own car. Her dad lives in Cairns, she thinks. Her mother and stepfather live in Papua New Guinea. Her stepdad works as an engineer on some new highway going through the jungle. Her mum used to own restaurants in Perth – a real social butterfly, one of those who gets involved in stuff so long as she doesn’t get shit on her hands. You know the type: Charity, dah-ling, the lifeblood of society life – titter titter – look at us collecting cash for retarded children while we swill thousand-dollar champagne and pretend to eat fucken risotto. So they send their girls to live in Townsville because it has the most expensive private school in the state and they expect Candy to live here to keep an eye on them. They pay the rent and all the bills and tuition and shit. On top of this, Candy works at the bank and her sisters help her drink most of her wage every week.
I worry about Candy, though. She gets migraines so bad I have to take her to the emergency room because I think she might die. During an attack, she gets even tinier and squeezes herself into a foetal ball, and her lips go white as her clenched fists shake in agony. They always shoot her up with pethidine and renew her script for Panadeine Forte. She has developed an addiction. So much as a twinge of head pain and she swallows a couple of pills.
Gigolo arrives at 8 pm and Candy gives me her keys. We get in the Charade and head down to the beach to pick up Gigolo’s posse. Six kids cram in the back.
—We have to make a stop, Gigolo grunts beside me.
We go to a smashed-up house in the Aboriginal part of West End. The place has wine-cask blad
ders for pillows on the couch. The carpet has cigarette butts dating back to 1930 crushed in there. The tongue-in-groove walls have fist holes and exposed electrical wires. The posse smoke about five thousand bongs each and drink a bottle of rum. I don’t drink because I don’t want to crash Candy’s car. We get ready to go but before I know it the whole lot of them start examining a bunch of guns.
—Why the guns? I say.
A young Aboriginal posse kid who goes by the tag THC33 says, waving around a pistol:
—In case of guards. We’ll have to shoot the cunts.
They busy themselves picking weapons. I say to Gigolo:
—Bro, that kid looks ten years old, waving around a fucken gun like a toy.
—You sound a bit toy, bro. Living with those three Witches of Eastwick making you a bit pussy, bro? He laughs: I’ve heard when chicks live together they synch up periods … Your rags synching up, bro? He says this loud, in contrast to my whisper. The posse piss themselves laughing at me. I jingle Candy’s keys.
—Let’s just do it then.
The now drunk and thoroughly stoned heavily armed kids bounce and sway in Candy’s car as I drive them to the outskirts of town. Gigolo looks ready for anything, sitting there next to me. He had such potential. Years ago every other kid treated him like a star. He had style, flamboyance and charisma, and he could breakdance like Douglas Fairbanks could swashbuckle. But now he looks craggy and tired, and his eyes have a cornered desperation in them. I’ve noticed lately that when he smokes weed he gets paranoid and fidgety. He can’t focus, and this makes him angry, or something, because he gets all aggressive and dominant.
—We have to adjust, bro, I say, above the beat of ‘Funky Cold Medina’.
—Huh? He turns to look at me, eyes blank like a dead TV.
—Shit changes, brother. We can’t cling to lost celebrity.
—What ya fucken talking about, bro? He shakes his head.
—I mean, bro, you outgrew this town … ages ago.
He looks out the window, pulling at his fringe. He used to spend hours doing his hair before we hit the city at night. Now it strings out from under his greasy baseball cap. His hat has SOX written on it. At first glance it looks like SEX.
—Fucken Tone Lōc. They should put on ‘Fuck tha Police’. He shouts this at the radio.
—Fucken NWA, gangster as fuck! says one of the rabble in the back.
Gigolo has fallen on his spray can. Looking in the rear-vision mirror: two Aboriginal boys, mean-eyed and malnourished; three half-Aboriginal kids suffering from foetal-alcohol syndrome, seriously just off trainer wheels (one looks about nine); and one fat white kid rebelling against his rich Catholic upbringing, clutching a boltcutter like a teddy bear. I’ve seen this kid in the more affluent part of town. White bricks, two cars and swimming pools. Affluent. Not wealthy. They have swimming pools but you still see their dads mowing the lawn.
We cruise into an industrial suburb called Railway Estate. Yes, the railway tracks go right through it. Factories and warehouses in various stages of construction and demolition crowd up against the lines. A few decayed houses the army built in World War Two lie scattered around, now inhabited by bikies and amphetamine cooks. A hardware shop recently opened out here, a huge warehouse full of everything the home renovator could desire. Gigolo claims it has a whole wall-length display, about twenty metres long and two metres high, crammed full of spray cans, five deep. I slow near the gates and they all jump out. I watch them dart up, and the fat kid fumbles a bit and cuts the lock.
I slowly drive up the road and in a couple hundred metres do a real subtle U-turn in front of a servo. I make another pass and slow by the gates, which now swing wide open. I hear a window smash in the shadows of the building. Back up the road and around again, trying not to look suspicious.
Now the posse stand out by the gates and they each have one of those giant-size plastic garbage bins full of spray cans. They look agitated and impatient. I pull up. They try to cram the bins into the back seat. It won’t happen. They get three in there and end up emptying the cans out of the other three right through the windows. No room for them now. Gigolo jumps in, perched on paint. The rest of them scatter into the shadows.
I drive back to the trashed house and help Gigolo unload. They have about five hundred cans. Back at Candy’s place, I lie awake all night. Then I pace up and down on her veranda, smoking cigarettes. I exist on the distant peripheries of stupid. These kids will get busted as quick as that gecko hanging around the light bulb taking moths. Looks like a curtain call on this act. Townsville days. Cut. Wrap. Applause. I lean up against the balcony and flick my cigarette out into the street. I imagine an audience out there clapping. I take a bow and shout:
—Yeah, clap, you bastards.
Demeter goes wild, her growls and snarls and barks rumbling the house like Cthulhu calling from the deep.
——
Next morning the phone rings in the house and Marie sticks her head through the door and says to Candy:
—Mum … for you.
Pretty soon Candy comes back in crying.
—Shit! You okay? Rubbing my eyes.
—Mum has demanded I go see her in PNG.
—What do you mean demanded?
—Well, at first she asked me, but when I said I can’t get time off work, she demanded.
—Huh?
—What she says goes.
—Why?
—What do you mean why? If I don’t do what she says, she’ll come here. Either way, my life has changed, again.
I sit up in bed. I must look confused because she starts telling me all about her mother.
—She went nuts, a while back, after her cancer scare, and from alcohol, and because of my dad. After the divorce she acted slutty, had troves of men visiting all the time. My dad used to have a fuckload of cash; he comes from a rich family. But after his brother died, he started drinking. He had a drinking problem in his youth but ended up fucked in hospital when he smashed a racing car, so he went off the piss for a while. Anyway, after my uncle died, Dad hit the bottle day and night. My uncle and my dad won all these prizes as kids, for maths. Both of them geniuses, worked for the navy for a while and then they made a fortune doing consultancy for engineering firms in Perth.
—How’d he die?
—Tongue cancer. A hair lodged in his tongue, from licking his moustache all the time. He’d always lick it; you couldn’t stop him. He complained about having a hair stuck in it, but he never went to the doctor.
I’ve got out of bed by this stage, pulled on my filthy jeans and gone to the kitchen to make coffee, walked back into her room and out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. She’s followed me the whole way, talking. She stops as I light my cigarette.
—Not much of a genius, not going to the doctor, I say, exhaling.
She looks shocked for a second, but continues:
—My dad pisses me off. Gambled away all the money. She sighs and throws herself onto the day bed: So they divorced. Before, when they still had money, Mum had the whole society-dame thing going on … Hung out with Alan Bond’s wife. We had a mansion in Peppermint Grove.
She glances at me to see if I look impressed. I guess she doesn’t think I take punk seriously. I despise rich people.
—Lemme guess, the hell-rich part of Perth? I shrug.
—Yeah. Filthy. Like, eat the rich, filthy. Mum drove a Jaguar and Dad a Porsche. My sisters went to the best school there and I studied medicine at UWA. She sighs again: I miss UWA.
—You studied medicine?
—Yeah, made it to fourth year. Mum made me drop out to come here and look out for Marie and Blyth.
—What! I cough smoke.
—Seriously. As I said, she calls, my life changes.
—Why didn’t you tell her to get fucked, or at least defer? I can’t believe you dr
opped out on her command! My parents have an Eskimo’s chance in the Sahara of getting me to do anything I don’t wanna do.
—She’ll cut me out of her will if I don’t obey her. You don’t raise your voice or act smart to my mother. No one dares. Anyway, I never wanted to study medicine; I want to study fashion design.
I really don’t know what to say in reply to that. I honestly have not ever once thought about my parents’ will. I don’t want to think about them dying. I busy myself listening and smoking.
—She gets worse when she drinks. She glassed a waiter at one of her fundraisers, for mixing up the order of her cocktail. She asked for a Long Island Ice Tea and the bartender put in the gin before the white rum, and she lost her shit.
—Bloody hell. Does it even matter?
Candy shakes her head:
—Now she lives in PNG with her new husband, this Dutch-Portuguese bloke named Brian. He inherited a shitload of cash, so she hooked him right after she threw Dad out. Dickhead blows all his cash on her, though. He took this job in PNG to pay off her shoes.
I laugh, but she doesn’t and I notice she has started crying again. I hold her awhile. She sniffles into my shoulder. What do you say to a chick who has a domineering mother as the worst problem in her life? Mind you, my mother suffered a similar fate. My grandmother subjected her to outright mind-control as she grew up. Mum told me once she had no choice but to devote her life to the cult because Grandma locked her out – emotionally, I mean, simply refused to talk to her or even look at her. My mum, the seventh and youngest, came along in Grandma’s late forties, a change-of-life baby, a rare thing in those days. Back then you didn’t want to get yourself abandoned by your family. They didn’t even have electricity. Poor as shit, my mum’s parents, like my parents now. Doesn’t bode well for me.
Jesus Christ I hate money. Coloured paper printed by some swindler. Everyone else dies or kills trying to amass it. People who have money believe themselves superior, like somehow you owe them respect because they have more coloured paper than you. They act dismissive of the poor, like the poor have a choice. You always see the fucken royals on telly and in the paper. The pinnacle of their achievements? Born into a family that millennia ago slaughtered their neighbours and stole the livestock. Every time I see my grandma, I have to eat cow’s tongue, and boiled chicken, and fucken pig’s trotters. Real poverty, eating boiled pig’s feet. I have poverty on every side of my family. Soldiers. Gypsies. Farmers. Convicts. I want to tell Candy about my life, I really do, some pretty personal stuff too. But whenever I talk about my life, growing up in a deranged apocalyptic cult that despises the world as the work of the Devil, no one believes me.
Scoundrel Days Page 18