—Look … nothing happened, just a bit of drunken stupidity. I shouldn’t have said anything.
—We have to leave, first flight in the morning. Massages her temples.
—Shit, that bad?
—What did you expect?
—I dunno. Doesn’t she show everyone her boob job?
—She kissed you!
—So?
—Do girls’ mothers always throw themselves at you … like some kind of fucken Lothario?
—Ha, The Impertinent Curious Man.
—See? I can’t help but like you. Candy sighs and slumps her shoulders.
—What do you mean?
—Last guy I called a Lothario said, I don’t come from Italy.
—I’d prefer you called me a Don Juan. Lothario doesn’t cut it as a literary character, in my opinion, anyway.
—Great. She unzips her suitcase: Mum wants me to dump you … says you’ll never amount to anything, not to mention the age difference.
—Fuck her. She didn’t think me too young earlier.
—You should date Marie. You two have a lot in common.
—What?
She doesn’t reply.
—What a strange thing to say!
Folding clothes, putting them in her suitcase.
—You want me to date Marie?
—You like virgins, don’t you?
—What?
—You like virgins, yeah?
—Marie, a virgin? No way!
—I’ve only fucked one guy before you.
I shake my head, not sure if I’ve heard right:
—No, I don’t have a thing for virgins, in particular, but you casually tell me you wouldn’t mind if I started going out with your little sister … because your mother has a problem with our age difference?!
—I turn twenty-four in May!
—So-fucken-what?
—Blyth told me you two had sex.
Shit.
—Um …
—I don’t care.
—We didn’t!
—Blyth just turned sixteen, the self-discovery phase. She tries it on with every male I’ve ever shown interest in.
—Well, didn’t work on me.
—Don’t lie.
—I blame alcohol.
Banging at the bedroom door. The door opens. Her mum shoots me a look like she intends to get a hit man to take me out.
Screaming, until dawn, with the occasional softly spoken, reasonable interjection from Brian.
——
I’ve packed up all my stuff and resorted to smoking with my head out the window, waiting to see what happens. Soon, with the flames of dawn lapping at the night trees, I see a cab pull up at the gates of the compound. The bedroom door flies open.
—Get your things. Your cab has arrived, Margot screams at me.
Candy pushes in from behind her and slams the door in her mother’s face.
—She took my passport, wails Candy.
—What?
—Won’t let me leave with you.
—Fucken hell!
The cab horn blasts outside.
7
Only a week away and everything’s changed. I visit Reuben at his father’s place in bogan land. Poor bastard, his legs swollen so huge he can only wear a bathrobe. He chain-smokes. He has a bottle of whisky on the table with his Weet-Bix. He sees me looking at him.
—Yeah. Fucken sucks, brother. Not groovy, at all. I can’t even wank.
He looks really sad. But he doesn’t need sympathy; he needs to tell me where the fuck to find Gigolo. He shows me the newspaper from a couple of days after I left for PNG. Graffiti gang busted after break-in, reads the headline. Gigolo told Reuben the whole story. Gigolo has gone underground, police on his tail. The cops caught one of the posse kids tagging government property. They searched his bag and found his notebook full of practice tags and cans of the exact brand of spray-paint from the robbery. When they searched his house, they recovered one of the stolen giant bins full of cans, and he’d tagged the front of the bin THC33. All of them caught except Gigolo … and me.
—Fuck! Did Gigolo mention if they know who drove the getaway car? I push past his wheelchair and look out the curtains, paranoid.
—No. They had a car?
—Where can I find Gigolo? Do you know?
—Nope. Reuben shrugs.
I look at him for the second time since I arrived.
—You sure he didn’t mention if I should go on the run too? Didn’t give a hint where I can find him?
—Nah. Love Lane, maybe?
——
I get off the bus. Approaching the posse house, I see cop-tape fluttering in the breeze. Run back to the bus, trying to hide under my hat. At Redpath Street I find Candy’s sisters packing up the house. They seem hesitant to talk to me at first. Their whole life has changed because their mother hates me and won’t let Candy return from PNG.
When I track down Gigolo, he tells me the cops haven’t identified Mr Risk. He says I didn’t even come up in the interrogation, probably because I haven’t tagged in so long.
—I’d get the fuck out of Dodge, though, bro, he says, with a frown.
——
I accidentally slept with Marie. I feel pretty sore about it, really; it just happened. I cried afterwards. The tears welled up out of nowhere. Candy has decided to defy her mother and come back. Yet still the sins of the flesh seduce me. I walk home in the rain to disguise my pain.
——
A year after my dad handed in his cop badge, he finally received his long-service-leave payout. Now he’s decided on a trip to America for a white Christmas with Mum and Fliss. Best thing, he gives me two grand! Says here ya go and hands me a cheque for two thousand dollars. Melbourne, here I come.
I wait a week to draw on it, get some cash and kit myself out with some city-worthy clothes: new Doc Martens, new leather jacket and a rad new trilby. I go down to the bus station and price a one-way ticket to Melbourne: a hundred and forty dollars. Daylight robbery. Then a call from Blyth. Candy has escaped and will touch down at the airport in twenty-four hours! Like characters in a book, Blyth arranged the plane ticket and Candy convinced her parents’ guards to accompany her to the airport under the guise of a shopping trip to the markets. So I go back down to the bus depot and buy another one-way ticket to Melbourne in Candy’s name.
——
—We have to disappear, Candy says in the afterglow of her first night back. You do realise my mother will actually pursue me after this, and you … She’ll figure out I’ve run off with you.
Candy makes me change the departure date, twice, while she packs up her stuff from the house on Redpath Street. This makes sense because my parents have gone away for six weeks, so we have their house to ourselves. She has a huge refugee bag full of antique plates and vases and shit she intends to take on the bus. I’ll end up carrying the damn thing right across three states.
For two weeks we party non-stop. Blow the entire budget my parents left to look after the house expenses and to feed Jaz and me as they trek around America. Jaz has a heap of punk friends from school, and they pretty much move in, trash the place, pig out on everything in the fridge.
Harley comes to stay. Haven’t seen him since he wrecked the Porsche. We sit around drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes, reminiscing about our school days until Candy’s sister, Marie, comes to stay for a week while she waits for the keys to a new apartment. Right away Harley falls in love with Marie. She laps up his attention. Do you mind if I fuck him? she asks me, for reasons unknown. Since that night we accidentally slept together a few weeks back, I’ve seen her with at least a dozen different dudes. I guess she thinks it polite to ask if she can fuck my friends, given our history. Um – should I? I say, yawning. She shrugs.
> —Cock yourself out.
—Ha ha! she sneers.
The whole house hears them, like you can hear everything in this house.
—How did you go? I say to her over our morning cigarette.
—Not so good. He has a hang-up … poor bastard.
—What hang-up? I say, surprised. I know of no hang-ups that Harley has.
—He has a big purple scar all around his cock. Childhood accident, he said, amputated by a wooden toilet seat … sewed back on. It works, it feels good. Dunno why he stresses.
—What? Holy fucken shit!
—Huh?
—Now it all makes sense. The scar he has between his eyes … kids used to tease him at school. They’d say he had a dick cut off his forehead, and he’d lose his shit.
—No fucken way!
—Shh! He’ll hear us and beat me to death!
Marie claps her hand over her mouth, exhales smoke through her nose.
——
My parents arrive home from the States. They don’t want us here. Mum makes Candy sleep in my little sister’s room, to piss me off and get me out quicker. We now stay at Marie’s new place, a converted garage with one room, a tiny shower and a huge king-size bed. Everything goes okay; we only have to spend a week here until Candy and I leave.
Saturday morning, days from departure, Candy goes off to get her hair done and Marie pulls out a bottle of Bénédictine. She belts a couple of shots and says:
—Do you mind if I paint in the nude?
As much as I don’t want to, we end up having sex about a dozen times.
So I have to sleep in this bed with both of them. To make it worse, Candy starts rubbing up against me in the night and we have sex while Marie pretends to sleep. I think Candy does this because of some pretty bad feelings she has about the fact that her mum gave her car to Marie the day she worked out Candy had escaped. Marie didn’t have any qualms about taking it, either. I like the car swap, because now the registration has changed, and the number plates, just in case anyone did see me driving an infamous graffiti artist sitting perched on a pile of spray cans.
Part Five
Lethe
————
I used to imagine adventures for myself,
I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1
Haven’t slept for two thousand five hundred kilometres. Feverish writing in my journal and looking out the window at the never-seen-by-me-but-totally-the-same-as-the-rest-of-Australia landscape slip by between Sydney and Melbourne. A girl gets on with that hippy, feral, slightly unwashed look and you can see her nipples through her top. Candy wakes up and notices me checking out her tits. She acts pissed off for the next hundred ks, refusing my advances, arching further away, until she falls back to sleep.
I’ve destroyed any hope for a long-term relationship with Candy. I can rationalise my indiscretion with her sister Blyth to myself. I slept with at least thirty chicks that summer – you know, one-night stands and stuff – before Candy happened. For all I knew, Candy would send me packing too. Blyth figures as an honest mistake any red-blooded eighteen-year-old male could make.
But Marie. Fuck. Last week we both went at it just because we could, just for the kicks. Real passionate sex too, and adventurous, no hang-ups. How do I explain that one? I can’t. It simply happened. Besides, you didn’t hear Byron or Kerouac complaining about women wanting to sleep with them. Like my heroes there, I have no complaints. But my relationship with Candy will die as soon as she finds out. You wouldn’t blame any woman for calling someone who slept with both her sisters and pashed their mother the biggest bastard who ever lived. You’d walk right out. Love does it all the time, turns on her heel and leaves. I’d walk out on me if I could.
Look at it the other way, though. What kind of sisters do that to each other? Like the way Marie accepted Candy’s car. Didn’t argue the point. Didn’t say Mum, calm down. You can’t just give me Candy’s car. Candy’s sisters have it in for each other. Candy has no one in her corner. Her mum has disowned her for choosing me, and she doesn’t know where her dad lives. I may as well do my best to stay with her and have some adventures. I have no one else either.
Look at Candy snoozing there: fine-featured, scowling, stunning little Audrey Hepburn replica. She has on ripped fishnets and a red and blue plaid skirt and you can see the straps from her garter belt peeking out because she has her knees up to her chest trying to get further away from me in her seat. She has on a Cocteau Twins t-shirt and one of the leopard-print fur coats you see hookers wearing in movies. This dude across the aisle has noticed Candy’s suspenders and he strains to look sideways while pretending to look straight ahead.
Everyone stares at her all the time. That will probably doom us anyway. Love hangs around with chicks like Candy. I slept with her sisters to destroy any chance of it. I loved Billie-Jean and that faded like a polaroid left on a dashboard. Fuck you, Love, you middle-class fantasy. Just like rock stardom, you kill those who embrace you. In reality, people rarely attain you. Not people who have to fight to survive every damn day, anyway. As soon as some rich, better-looking, smarter, already successful and not just destined-for-greatness dude comes along, she’ll disappear.
We steam and hiss into Spencer Street Station on the Greyhound. We soon find ourselves on our first Melbourne footpath, with our pile of luggage and Candy’s huge bag of antique crockery. The city clangs around us. All I can see from where we stand: hotels, adult bookshops, bars and cafes. We walk about a block and check right in to a room at The Great Southern Hotel. We shower and fall into bed, and when we wake up twenty-four hours later we fuck and dress and head out into the city like excited children. We have about two grand between us and a credit card Candy received when she worked at the bank, with some special staff rates or something. We need to find a place to live and then we need to buy shit to set it up.
——
February 1991. We’ve rented this studio apartment on the third floor of 787 Park Street in Parkville. Right across the road sprawls a giant park, split into a sports oval with a tram rail going right through and, beyond that, the Melbourne Zoo. You can hear lions roaring in the night. You can also hear all of Melbourne roaring at football games at nearby Princes Park Stadium. The landlady of this place stinks like gin and her British accent slurs as the shadows of the day grow longer.
We live in one room, which has a bed alcove with curtains across it and a little private bathroom attached to it. It costs us eighty-five dollars per week. Melbourne has an anxious air, the trams and the frozen sky. I feel smaller here, invisible in the smog.
Down the road from our apartment we find a huge old pub called the Sarah Sands. Candy and I go and drink Flaming Lamborghinis whenever we can afford to. Other times we go into the city and eat pancakes. At home we live on noodles and soup. We both get the dole. It just pays our rent and electricity and gas. I need to get a job. Candy has an expensive habit of putting things on lay-by. She has more shoes than Imelda Marcos. I put a suit on lay-by at Myer. Every second Thursday we feel alive because we get the dole, and the night before we feel restless. Tomorrow we eat and get to drink coffee and spend the day hanging out in the city. I always run out of cigarettes; I can barely make a pack last three days.
——
My attempts to find work come to nothing, probably because of how I look. Not many people wear Doc Martens with a suit. I guess skinheads do mostly, but I have this rad new haircut, graded up the back and longer on the top and my fringe hangs down to my chin.
This actually seems to work in my favour today, though, because this old dame comes up to me on the street and flips me her card:
Melbourne Modelling Agency
School of Grooming and Deportment
I laugh.
She says:
—I think I c
an find you some work. You look great in a suit, and you have that alternative look everyone wants right now.
I figure why not? and agree to turn up to the agency’s open night a week later.
At Melbourne Modelling on Queen Street. A bunch of dudes shuffle around in the foyer, hunching down into their collars. I get where they come from, trying not to look too confident. One dude has an interesting look – he has this whole Ian Astbury thing going on: shoulder-length black hair, denim jeans, leather jacket and Chuck Taylors. The others look like someone cut them out of a Country Road catalogue: too clean, too much cologne.
—Hey, man, I say to the rocker-looking dude, and I point to his James Dean belt buckle: Cool!
He shuffles about, getting deeper down into his shoulders.
—Cool Docs. They twelve hole? he mumbles.
—Yeah.
The old dame enters and she starts declaring our luck in getting discovered by her.
—I thought so, I say out of the corner of my mouth to the rocker dude.
—What? he hisses back.
—She wants us to sign up at her school here, man. This will cost us – pretty much a fucken scam.
—Ya reckon?
—Watch! Excuse me. Yes, I have a question.
—Yas, dahling? She looks at me like a slaver.
—How much does this training cost?
—We’ll talk about that later, dahling … after I’ve told you everything I can do for you.
—Yeah, okay … but I, sort of, ya know, feel like I don’t wanna waste your time because I don’t have any money to give you.
—Only eight hundred dollars, dahling, for the full six-month course, two nights a week.
—Well, thanks anyway for the opportunity, lady, but see ya later.
I scoot out the foyer door, down the fire-escape stairs and up the street, and stop to light a cigarette. Behind me comes the rocker dude.
—Hey, man. Fuck that, huh! I say.
—Yeah, bro.
—Hey, you a Kiwi?
—Yeah … from Christchurch.
Scoundrel Days Page 20