Candy sits bolt upright and says:
—I have an idea! Come with me to PNG!
PNG sounds like a good place to hide out while the shit goes down with Gigolo’s posse.
6
At the airport in the duty-free Candy buys a couple of bottles of Frangelico, a hazelnut liqueur made by monks. The bottle kind of resembles a monk. I shouldn’t have insisted on sitting in the smoking section on the plane; Candy’s allergies flare right up. I put out my cigarette, but you can’t go asking a bunch of fierce-looking Papua New Guinean tribesmen to put out their cigarettes when you sit in the smoking section. A couple of them have long thick cigarettes rolled with newspaper. Smoke, thick and acrid, cloys in the cabin. Last time I flew, I came home with a broken arm, from falling off a tank stand while trying to escape an oddly amorous cousin who insisted we touch tongues because it felt funny. I tell Candy the story, hoping to distract her from sneezing fits.
—Kinky bitch! When did this happen? Sneeze.
—Just kids … About nine or so.
—You haven’t flown in a plane since then?
—Or before then.
—Wow! I’ve flown a million times.
—Dunno if I like it much, I say, looking out the window.
—Why? Sneeze.
—Trapped in an aluminium tube with jet engines attached, ten ks up, travelling at eight hundred kilometres per hour. Makes me paranoid.
—Statistically [sneeze] more people die in car wrecks than plane crashes. At uni every cadaver I cut up died in car wrecks, none from planes.
—You cut up bodies?
—Yeah … You get kind of detached after a while.
Sneeze times three.
—I’ve gutted animals … heaps of em.
—What?
—Yeah. Growing up in the bush, hunting: pigs, kangaroos, rabbits, birds.
—You killed birds!
—I ate em!
—Did you eat the kangaroos?
—No. Well, I’ve tried kangaroo and possum, goanna, snakes, wild rabbit, horse, donkey, and turtle, and crocodile. In fact I’ve eaten pretty much every native Australian animal.
—You have not eaten wombat. What sick fuck would eat a wombat?
—Okay, I haven’t eaten wombat. You win.
——
As we touch down in Port Moresby, poor Candy has eyes like fertilised eggs and she looks like she used an angle-grinder on her nose, thanks to the aeroplane-grade tissues. We alight and walk across the tarmac into an airport shed. The customs officer has red-stained lips and teeth. When he asks me how long I intend to stay, he drools a long spittle of red down to the desk.
—From the betel nut, whispers Candy.
Candy’s stepdad, Brian, waits on the other side of the rope. He has two locals with him.
—Bodyguards, Candy says under her breath as we approach.
Brian has strange eyes: brown, with a blue ring.
We walk outside to the car park and get into the back of a Toyota four by four which has caged windows. The two locals get in front and the passenger produces a rifle from between the seats.
—Why the bodyguards and the gun and the caged windows? I ask Candy as we roll through the centre of Port Moresby.
She doesn’t need to answer. The place looks like a war zone, with ruined brick buildings, collapsed walls, rusted vehicles and fences buckled like soccer nets full of garbage. We stop at an intersection. I see a man walking on all fours. He has shoes on his hands, head down and swinging like something out of a Lovecraft novel. He looks up and he has an elephant-man face.
—See this, says Brian.
He sits opposite me, watching my horror with an amused look on his face, rolling up his sleeve. His forearm has a horrible purple scar from wrist to elbow.
—This happened last time I dared go out without guards. Machete. Shit has got worse lately, look! And he points out of the caged window at a line of about a thousand people jostling one another: About a month ago PNG got dollar scratchies for the first time … see that!
We slow as the throng spills onto the street. An old man clutching a goat hammers the bonnet of the Toyota with his walking stick. Brian points to a mountain of scratched-off tickets on the pavement. The bin next to the pile overflows too. A Papua New Guinean with a tusk through his septum and wearing a Nike tee pushes his face up against the glass as we crawl through the crowds.
—Crime has jumped three hundred per cent. Every bastard thinks they’ll win on the next ticket. Gangs of rascals everywhere. Brian sighs.
—Rascals?
Candy pipes in through her sniffles:
—Here they call gangs of raping murdering thugs rascals.
—Full-on!
We motor through a few suburbs, past burned houses and smashed shopping trolleys, a juxtaposition of urban and tribal, poverty like I’ve never seen. Everywhere, looking down on this, giant billboards read:
7 Up
Drink Coca-Cola
Take the Pepsi Challenge
Candy’s mum and stepdad live in a compound with an armed guard dressed in full tribal regalia.
—An ex-cannibal, Brian leans forward and whispers as the armoured gate squeals on its tracks.
The compound looks like a mini suburb of townhouses inside. At the front of one of them stands a stunning platinum-blonde woman with hair like Princess Diana’s. We get out of the truck. A thousand dogs bark all over the place. Candy shouts something at me about the Frangelico. Her mum soaks me up, gives me a look like a judge at a pony show. Her gaze lingers on the duty-free bag.
——
I get the usual third-degree at dinner. Candy’s mother, Margot, has the coldest eyes I’ve seen. She bores them right into me. They reflect the candlelight like facets from the hundred stones that glitter on her fingers. She made rice with some sort of leaf in it and I say, meaning it:
—Wow, this rice tastes incredible!
—Haven’t you had curry-leaf rice before? she demands.
—Nope.
—Tell us about yourself, mate, says Brian.
—Um …
Candy cuts in:
—Brentley writes poems, has had a few published.
—Really? Where? Margot shows genuine interest.
—Two poems published, so far. One in a student magazine and another in an independently published anthology.
—Can you recite them? Do they have clever titles? I love clever titles! Margot titters.
—Um … ‘Trotsky on Acid’ and ‘Opera of Destruction’.
—Trotsky? Margot snaps at me.
—Yeah, you know: the Russian revolutionary?
—I know all about Trotsky! She turns to Candy, who has sunk in her chair as if she intends to slide under the table: Have you brought home a fucken communist, Candy?
Candy glares at me, rises and disappears out of the dining room.
—We own quite a portfolio of property, you know! says Brian, his weird eyes like a dead eclipse: Don’t we, darling?
—I don’t have a problem with people owning property. If anything, you could call me an anarchist. I think people should have to utilise what they own, ya know, and not exploit other people’s inability to own property … like landlords … I hate landlords.
Silence.
Brian stands, starts gathering up dishes. Margot watches him a moment and then says:
—Let’s go into the living room.
No sooner do we get in there than, bless her, Candy calls down from atop the stairs. I apologise and get up the steps, probably too quickly. I thought Candy would reprimand me for stirring up her old lady, but instead she says:
—She had breast cancer, you know. So young too, only forty-three.
—God.
—You wouldn’t know she had a double ma
stectomy.
—Full-on! I thought she looked well stacked and quite perky – for her age, I mean.
—She had a complete reconstruction, by the best plastic surgeon in Perth.
—Wow. Did they get all the cancer, though?
—It looks like it. Candy starts feeling her breasts for lumps.
We have really quiet sex.
——
Doing the tourist thing. Getting driven around in this fucken armoured car through ruined city streets. Everyone stares harder. We go to the markets in the centre of the city. As we get closer to the sprawling tents, we see more and more white people.
—Market safe, says the local guard sitting opposite us: Police, army, expats everywhere.
At the gates of the market sits one of those elephant men I saw yesterday. I try not to stare but holy shit. He sits there in rags with worn-out sneakers on his hands. A giant hunch thrusts up the rags, which fall over part of his face like a cowl. The various shades of filth on the rags and the way the peak juts reminds me of a Chinese landscape painting. As we pass, he looks up with a hideously deformed face, worse than Sloth from The Goonies. Candy chucks a one-kina coin into a cut-off Coke bottle he has clutched in his claw.
—Don’t stare! Candy hisses under her breath.
—I can’t fucken help it! Christ in a car crash.
—The poor bastard had leprosy.
What a burst of colour, like a crumpled-up rainbow deflated in the mud. Strange fruits I’ve never seen. Bows and arrows for sale, souvenir spears. Carved heads. The markets circle a sports field and a carnival has started up. Tribal music and singing. We wander down aisles of tourist crap: painted masks and etched pig tusks and postcards. Under every tree stands an overflowing barrel full of red spit from the locals’ betel-nut habit. I want to try betel nut. Candy says she tried it the first time she came here and it made her sick and wired, like she’d drunk a thousand coffees.
We come across a woman sitting on a huge rug. She has a piglet suckling her left breast, and her wares laid out in front of her: a fan of those cigarettes rolled with newspaper and a bowl of betel nuts. She sits there chewing, red drool waterfalling. Some juice drips on the pig. I buy a betel nut and one of the weird cigarettes for one kina. When I choose the nut from the bowl, she snatches it out of my hand and with a rusted filthy knife expertly splits the husk. Inside it looks a bit like a hazelnut, but softer. She licks the knife, sticks a little seed on her spit and dips it into a jar of white powder. Then she makes a motion suggesting I put the nut in my mouth and lick the powder off the knife.
—What the fuck? I say to Candy, who stands there laughing.
—You have to do it now!
Fuck this. I squat down and take another seed out of the clay bowl shaped like a turtle, lick my finger and dip it in the jar of talcum-powder stuff, and cram the lot – nut and all – into my mouth. Not looking at the lady, or the pig on her tit. When I do look at her, she shakes her head. Candy laughs again.
—What?
—You have to chew the nut until pulpy, and then take the mustard seed and lime and chew it into the nut.
—Mustard seed? My mouth starts burning like hell.
—You’ll burn your mouth with the lime straight on your tongue!
—Lime? I chew like crazy, trying to dissolve the fucken lime, and the thing grows larger with each chew.
—Probably builder’s lime, too!
—Do you fucken swallow it? I ask, spluttering red stuff all over the front of my Boys Don’t Cry t-shirt.
Candy laughs her arse off.
—Spit out the pulp as you go … Hahaha … The stringy stuff!
I run over to one of those teeming drums and spit it all out. Candy, behind me:
—You just wasted it. You don’t spit it all out; you keep the centre bit and it slowly dissolves. The lime aids digestion, or something. They use cheap stuff, though, often not food grade.
—Fuck, I need a Coke or something!
—The Coke here tastes weird.
—What the fuck do you mean it tastes weird?
—I dunno, weird.
Margot and Brian arrive with the two bodyguards laden down with stuff they’ve bought for a picnic up in the highlands. On the way out I score a carton of Kool cigarettes for two kina and a bootleg cassette of a Prince album I’ve never heard of before.
Candy knows all about the Prince album, though. His third album, Dirty Mind, released in 1980, she says. She loves music. Her record collection weighs about three tonnes. What she doesn’t spend on alcohol, she spends on records, clothes and shoes. She knows more about music than you’d think possible for one person. I spent months going through her collection while she worked at the bank. I’ve listened to everything recorded by Joy Division, the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, Cabaret Voltaire, Clan of Xymox, The Birthday Party, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The Wolfgang Press. I’ve never had any money to spend on records. Stealing LPs and Walkmans: two of the hardest things.
We drive up into the forest along roads about an inch wide. I don’t feel well at all: a hard-edged rush comes on from the betel nut as the air thins out on Mount Hagen. To make it worse, at the picnic they have tuna in tins. My stomach turns. I get up and walk away into the forest to take a piss. Birds in the canopy. Crisp mountain air. On my way back I light up the cigarette I bought at the market stall. I take a deep drag and instantly vomit. Tobacco spins wrack my brain. I feel green and sweat like rain. Spitting like I sucked on the exhaust of a diesel train and washed it down with a chaser of sump oil, I vomit again and it comes out my nose.
——
Later that night my throat feels ruined. Trying to look at it burned and ulcerated in the mirror. I can hardly swallow. Candy has one of her infamous migraines. She lies in the room in the dark. I get one of our bottles of Frangelico and go downstairs. Smoke a couple of cigarettes down by the guard hut, but the cannibal doesn’t make for good conversation. Back inside, watch television for a while. For one kina you could live like a king! says the Scratchie King. Rummage around the kitchen looking for a glass. Enter Candy’s mother.
—You have Frangelico! Where did you have that hidden? Her words have a hint of mania on the edges.
—I didn’t have it hidden!
—I would love a little drinky!
—Sure.
She gets two whisky tumblers from a shelf and a tray of ice from the fridge. We go into the living room and sit on the couch. I pour two double shots, spilling a few drops on the glass table. I rise to find a rag or something but she pulls me back down.
—Don’t worry about it. She sniffs her glass.
Toast. She slams back her glass and SNAP. A fuzz happens behind her eyes, like television static, and then they sharpen again but she looks drunk.
—Did Candy tell you about my breast cancer? Her voice husky and intimate now.
—Um.
—Of course she did. Do you want to see?
—Huh?
She yanks open her blouse. I sip my Frangelico, trying to politely look. She has on one of those lacy low-cut bras that do up in front. She pops her bra open, slurs:
—Want to feel them? They still feel completely natural.
Her tits look fantastic, but I don’t want to feel them, I don’t think. She grabs my free hand and sticks it on her left tit.
I try to act nonchalant and take another sip of my drink at the same time but when I do you can see my damn hand shaking. The ice clinks. Her tit feels exactly like a tit. But then, completely by instinct, a subconscious sin, I drag my thumb across her nipple, and back, before I know what I’ve done. She gasps. I yank my hand away.
Leaving her tits out, she pours herself another drink, about five average shots. She smashes it back and stares at me with lust and hatred blended as perfectly as the hazelnut and the vanill
a in the Frangelico. She leans forward, cocoa on her breath, and says, softly:
—I can’t believe this … I shouldn’t do this, and she puts her lips on mine.
My animal takes over and I kiss back, groping her breasts, and she gets hotter, climbs on top of me.
—Babe? Candy’s sleepy voice rolls down the stairs: You down there?
Her mum looks like a five-year-old busted stealing chocolate, which morphs into sheer disgust. She gets her breasts back into her bra and her blouse done up and leaves the room in a blink.
Upstairs Candy has already crawled back into bed. I lie down next to her and sigh.
—You smell like alcohol!
—So?
She leaps up:
—Fuck me! Did you give any to Mum?
—Ha, yeah.
—You fucken what! she screams, stamping her foot.
I sit up.
—What … why?
—You don’t give alcohol to a recovering alcoholic, you fucken idiot!
—Ouch! I guess she did act a little strange.
—What do you mean?
—Well, oddly amorous.
—Great … she tried to kiss you?
—After the breast thing and a few drinks she might have got confused. Nothing happened, though!
—What? What do you mean breast thing?
—She showed me them … You know, to show off her surgery, I guess?
—Fucken what?
—They feel totally natural.
——
So I started a war. Candy and her mother scream at each other until 3 am. When Candy comes back into the room, something has come over her. She seems resigned and distant. I say:
Scoundrel Days Page 19