—You’ve lost me.
—I mean we shouldn’t differentiate. Class ideology divides everything.
—Weird cunt. Josef shakes his head.
—Humans hold their values high, but they’ve gone off the rails. You know, black cockatoo or scummy city-square pigeon; national icon or flying rats; prince or homeless pauper: it pisses me off.
—You’ve gone on a rant, man.
—I reckon if you want to kill a bird, who gives a fuck what kind of bird? For example, here the law protects possums, but NZ considers them pests, right?
—You can get paid to kill em.
—Right, see! And I stalk outside with the rifle and Josef follows me out.
Smoke billows all around. The construction crew dug a huge ditch and filled it with all the unusable wood from the trees they cleared and set it alight. It still smoulders a week later. Lazy flames crawl up the sides of the ditch, licking the burned dirt.
—Look! A fucken possum. Fuck the possum, man. Fuck the laws!
I take aim at a possum which makes its way along the bough of a giant eucalypt preserved for its aesthetic stature. Can’t quite get the angle right so I climb up on the tracks of a bulldozer, pump the air rifle, take aim and squeeze. An audible thwack as the pellet hits the possum high in the ribcage. It drops dead-weight from the tree and sends up a cloud of dust in the clearing. Still alive, it comes out of shock and scurries about in the dirt, wounded grievously. I pump the gun again and fire a shot into its skull. It only wounds the possum more, bone too thick for the brass ball bearing and I only gave the gun half a dozen pumps. It makes it to the foot of the tree and groggily attempts to crawl up. I grab a sapling and bash the possum to death.
Josef comes back into focus. He stands there, kind of frozen, his silhouette against the flames rising from the ditch behind him.
—Deranged cunt, he says, scrubbing out his cigarette butt with a beaten-up Chuck Taylor: What’ll ya do with the corpse?
—I guess, throw it in the fire pit.
—Burn the evidence, he says, with a nod.
—Or it’ll burn you.
4
Townsville, August 1991. We sit in Gil’s shed drinking rum. I figure the rum may have something to do with why I feel despicable and as each day passes I grow to hate myself more. I remember this feeling from school, where everyone actually did hate me. I could feel animosity emanating from the crowd. Even I hated me. Some kind of strange freedom comes from that, though: hating yourself – not giving a damn if Consequence ever catches up and takes out your heart.
I’ve joined Josef’s neo-punk band. The guitarist, Bolton, a friend of my sister Jaz’s from school, has an obsession with a band named Nirvana. He has their album Bleach on repeat as we sit here in the shed in the blistering Townsville heat. Bolton says Nirvana have a new album out in September and he preordered it already. Bolton has his back to us, headphones plugged into his amp, trying to get his new guitar riff right, to show us. I didn’t agree on calling the band Quadrophenia, but Josef already visited a copyright agency or something way back in Melbourne and trademarked the name.
Bolton and Josef hit it off straight away. Not as well as Josef and my sister, who started fucking as soon as we moved back, secretly they thought. The shitbox my parents designed way back in the eighties has flow-through acoustics. Fart in the kitchen and you’ll hear it in the spa out by the carport.
Bolton told us about this dude still in school named Gil who he reckoned could out-drum anyone else in the whole town, so we aimed to convince Gil to abandon school for rock stardom. A funny guy, Gil. The day Josef and I met him, we turned up at his place, the only house at one of the busiest intersections in the city. We got by all the junk on the lawn and up the side of the house to find Gil’s mum, a portly smiling woman, drinking a Four X on the steps.
—Sweetie! she sang out: You have friends visiting.
—Aw, Mum! came a voice from the window above us: Don’t call me that in front of me mates! And then a stream of piss followed out the window.
As we bedlamed from the window, we saw a naked chick trying to cover up, and this dude with a Mohawk and a glistening dick pissing and laughing. His mum also laughed, shook her head, disappeared inside. Bolton didn’t look shocked.
—Like I said, crazy. Bolton shrugged.
Crazy like Reuben those last days in Brisbane. He said groovy with expressionless eyes. Man, I found a hundred bucks! and he’d reply Groovy. Dude, your son tore up your first-edition Kerouac! Groovy. A few months after we moved in with Reuben and his new family, I arrived home to Abingdon Street in Brisbane one afternoon to find a woman sticky-taping an eviction notice on the front door. We paid our rent direct to Reuben every two weeks, and he’d dutifully go off to the real estate to pay, or so we thought.
Getting evicted didn’t bother me; I’d gone through it heaps of times. The fact he went off to get wasted without me, now that bothered me. I wondered why he looked so happy on rent day. I don’t know where he went or what he did with our cash, but he sure as fuck didn’t pay rent.
Also, his business partner, Sean, started to blatantly sell speed over the counter at the cafe, and I expected the place to get raided any day. Sean became real creepy, too. He’d furtively slip you a bag of speed and you’d pick it up and he’d say Two hundred and fifty bucks. You’d go to hand it back and he wouldn’t take it. Cash only, he’d say. Sean lived in the Rio Grande in West End, a run-down 1930s-style apartment building. Someone spray-painted apostasy on the gate. Sean owned a Triumph Dolomite and some nights after he’d snorted an entire bag he’d take us driving, his jaw set like a hood ornament, speeding through the backstreets of Brisbane with the headlights off.
That three months happened so fast I didn’t get a chance to write any of it down until now. Candy and I, and Josef, decided to bail on the whole situation. We waited for Reuben to leave one morning, and for Jo to gather up the baby and go for a walk, and we hastily packed our suitcases, called a cab and skipped out to the bus station. We bought tickets to Airlie Beach. Sitting around in the bus station, I had the guilts real bad and decided to go down into the city to the cafe and tell Reuben I had to leave. As I walked in, he looked anxious to see me, standing behind the counter like a tired cowboy slumped against the saloon bar.
—Hey, brother, I said, sad.
—Hey.
—Man, we have to leave. I hate to do it like this, but …
—I know … Jo rang and said you’d all packed up and bailed.
Silence. His blue eyes too far apart, like somehow his lower face had sunken and his upper widened.
—Sorry, man. My voice broke a little.
I really did feel sorry. I cleared my throat to say something else – I don’t know what: something – but a crowd of people came into the cafe.
—Groovy, he said, shifting his gaze to the patrons.
About six hours into the bus trip north I realised we’d left behind my television, which by now, for sure, the company I rented it from would have reported stolen. Candy curled in on herself like a nautilus shell again. She had a mental breakdown during a foursome with Reuben and Jo. Stood bawling in the shower for two hours. On the bus all the way north her hand felt like a birdclaw.
——
—Right! says Bolton, throwing off his headphones, yanking the plug out of his amp: Got it. Listen to this shit! He cranks it to ten and starts with some melodic picking and then launches into a jangly storm, furiously stomping on his distortion pedal. The shed shakes and stretches.
—Fucken-A, screams Gil above the roar, and leaps onto his drum kit. He has a Besser brick in the bass because he kicks so hard it keeps slipping off the piece of astroturf he has his kit perched on.
Josef slowly rises, takes off his shirt, ties it around his waist, lights a cig, picks up his bass, and starts playing along. Before long I start singing, making up lyr
ics as I go, shouting through Josef’s bass amp, which he convinced my sister to buy for him with a university loan. My voice sounds fucked, but who cares. The song sounds a lot like Nirvana, only with a shit singer. Neon Jesus shine on me, neon Jesus set me free … plastic churches coloured lights you can pray day or night …
We jam like this for hours into the night, until Gil’s alcoholic old man comes shuffling into the shed and tells us he will murder us unless we stop right away.
——
The days of my fucken life. Shit has turned sour again: what a surprise. My dad kicked us out of the house in Townsville because we didn’t pay rent for the whole five months, and a dude turned up and served me a court-attendance notice for a stolen television. I had to convince Josef to sell his prized 1968 Gibson twelve-string sunburst for six hundred bucks to pay the TV rental company to stop proceedings.
I had sex with Candy’s sister Blyth in the spa one afternoon and I think Candy saw us, but she never said a thing. Frosted over, went shopping. A chill in the space between us, like a dead park between two skyscrapers, a place the sun forgets to touch. Blyth only spent one night with us, en route from Port Moresby to Sydney for a job interview. Mad chick wants to join the air force. Josef and I picked her up from the airport. I smiled and waved as she walked through the arrivals gate. She looked Josef and me up and down and said: Jesus, you dudes look like junkies.
5
A few weeks drag by. We busy ourselves looking for a new place to live. We look for two-bedroom apartments, but we can’t find anything. Discouraged by this, and because the band has fallen apart, Josef decides to go back to New Zealand. He calls his mother, she buys him a ticket and he leaves. I’ve never heard anyone talk to their mother like Josef talks to his mother. He doesn’t even listen. He holds the phone away from his ear, even puts it down sometimes. You can hear his mother’s thick Slavic accent buzzing on the line. He sits there slapping his bass while watching television or something and occasionally says Yeah, bitch, or Whatever, you silly hag, and then, when you hear the poor woman say Eh larve yah, Josefzzy, he says Yeah … fuck off … bye, and drops the phone on the cradle.
—Dunno if I’ll ever see you again, you weird-kneed cunt, he says at the airport: Have a nice life.
Crazy bastard. I don’t know why, but I love him like the brother I never had.
——
Candy and I move in with two chicks we met at a nightclub. One has moved in with her boyfriend, but she signed a two-year lease with her mate, Trina, a dental assistant. Trina says they have a room for rent in an older-style apartment building on Fryer Street, up on the hill right above the city. Cheap, moderately stylish. I set up my typewriter in the sunroom, looking out to the ocean, and feel right at home. I only have to walk three hundred metres to hand in my dole form.
Candy hangs out topless, wearing only a sarong around her hips, because of the heat, and pretty soon so does Trina. Self-consciously at first; her breasts look easily double-D. I don’t mind.
Hanging out in the cafes, I run into Bolton. He has this smoking-looking hippy girl named Angel with him. I keep running into Angel, at the shops, at the library, randomly in the mall. We flirt with eyes and smiles. Today I stop. She likes that I have written a collection of poems and I like her photographs.
—Want to come to the cemetery and take photos of the tombs as the afternoon shadows wash over them? she says.
Then, hours later, after sharing a joint in the cool of a broken family crypt, dew sparkling on the grass between the graves, Angel says:
—Want a blowjob?
——
I’ve avoided her for several weeks. Then, this afternoon, out of nowhere, Candy answers a knock on the door.
—Hello? says Candy.
—Hi … Angel … Candy, right? I see a hand stick in the door. Candy shakes the hand.
—Yeah. Do we know each other? She turns to look at me coming down the hall.
Angel spies me and says:
—Hi, Brentley!
Candy’s face starts to contort.
—Hi. Bolton with you? I say, innocently.
—I came to introduce myself to Candy. I hate everyone in this town and you look interesting, says Angel, and she sounds pretty damn genuine.
I listen awhile and then I make an escape to my typewriter. About two hours later, as the darkness comes and shouts of patrons en route to Friday night stop my poem mid-stanza, I walk into the bathroom and find Candy and Angel naked.
—Um … I say, as I notice both of them no longer have pubic hair, and they giggle at my surprise.
—Just exfoliating, says Angel.
Angel has something written in runes tattooed under her left breast and a sun tattooed around her belly button, and she has both her nipples pierced. Both of the girls, naked, like a Norman Lindsay painting, with the late-afternoon Queensland light dappling shoulders through louvres. I try to not look interested at all and make my exit.
Later they both emerge fully dressed, all made up with nice hair and everything, and announce they want to go drinking.
—Wanna come? says Candy.
—Holy-fuck-yes! and I rush to throw on my jeans and boots and catch them halfway up the street already.
We go to The Bank and inside they immediately hit the dance floor. I stand around watching, because I don’t dance, and then I see this dude who visits Trina sometimes. He invites me to join him. He has a jug of special house-mix spirits. We find a table and he says:
—Mind if I spice it up some?
—With what? I shout above the music.
—Temazepam, he shouts back.
—The pharmy?
—Yeah!
—What does it do? Never tried it!
—Fucks ya up, man! he screams in my ear so it crackles.
I give the sure, why not shrug and he squeezes the liquid from half a dozen green gel caps into the rocket juice. Just then the crowd in the club get rowdy. The DJ says over the mic under no fucken circumstances will he play Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ in this nightclub so stop fucken requesting it. Half boo and half cheer, and the music starts up again, a dance track.
My glass of Liquid Ecstasy has a temazepam capsule floating in it. The cocktail alone creeps up on you: Bacardi, Midori, Blue Curaçao, lemon juice and pineapple juice in that order, eight serves of it, in a jug.
Probably six hours later, Angel and Candy come sweating off the dance floor to where we sit smashed out of our gourds. Candy leans over the table and yells:
—Two males, two chicks, we should all go home for group sex.
People from three tables away turn to gawp and the dude perks right up, not sure if he heard right, and shouts:
—What? Fucken oath. I’ll come!
—Just joking … funny bitches, I holler into his ear, and I scamper out of there with the two girls.
They make a show of it all the way up the nightclub strip, stopping to pash and grope. Right in front of a group at a taxi stand Angel puts her hand up Candy’s skirt, her fingers to her nose and says Mmm, pussy scented. Soon as we get in the front door, the girls lose their clothes and run into the bedroom. By the time I get in there, because I can hardly walk, I find them in a sixty-nine, getting very vocal. I slump onto the mattress on the floor and watch, at times fighting to remain conscious from the temazepam cocktail. The very air I breathe feels soft and scented. Then they turn on me. Candy pulls off my jeans and takes my cock in her mouth. Angel sits on my face. Then Candy rides me near to oblivion while Angel goes to the very verge of suffocating me with her cunt. Then Candy says Get on his cock and Angel says You don’t mind?
They both scream the house down, the most vocal sex anyone has ever attempted to describe.
Morning. I untangle myself from limbs and fuck-stained sheets and get a coffee off the stove. I sit on the front steps to smoke. Magpies
on the fence behaving badly. The chick who lives downstairs comes out, on her way to work I bet, and, spying me, says:
—Someone had a helluva time last night, huh! Laughs down the path.
After that, Trina moves out and Angel moves in. Candy and I never discuss this. We share a bed, each other and everything else. We don’t always have threesomes. Sometimes one of us might not feel like sex – well, one of the girls, anyway, because if I don’t feel like it, which means I died or something, watching the two of them has me feeling like it pretty quick. We don’t care who knows. In fact we revel in making it known. It lasts several months, until one morning, spontaneous as it started, it ends. Angel says she has to go, packs up, kisses us goodbye, and leaves.
And just now, as I sit on the steps, talking to this guitarist who lives downstairs named Simon, Marie walks up the garden path. My heart drops. She looks as hot as ever, but, honestly, I haven’t even thought about Candy’s family since Blyth breezed through on her way to the air-force interview.
——
Turns out Marie escaped from Port Moresby. Trapped for an entire year in one of the seven levels of hell. I have a phobia of jungle since visiting that place. Marie didn’t come to Townsville alone. She has Blyth in tow and also John, the girls’ biological father. My secret hopes of never meeting the man dash like a kid’s teeth on the edge of a swimming pool.
Candy claims her small stature results from a childhood disease which afflicted her while growing up. Her father, however, torpedoes her canoe when he turns up with Blyth not ten minutes after Marie trips up the path. Candy’s dad stands, at most, five feet short.
He also has this generic alco skin the Australian sun has beaten the living shit out of, a leathery deep-wrinkled look that would only flatter a goanna. And he has a super-skinny body, like Candy, but with a beer gut like a garden worm swallowed a marble some kid left on the lawn. On top of all this, despite the dried-up buffalo-turd skin and old-man hips, he has a weird youthfulness about him, a mischievous mouth, sparkling eyes, like Pan telling you a hilarious joke while pouring you another cornucopia of wine on a sunny mountain slope somewhere in Ancient Greece. He looks like an old kid. Sixteen or sixty?
Scoundrel Days Page 22