—Bullshit! coughs Rose’s mum: No one acts outside of personal interest.
—I don’t fucken care, I reply.
—If you really believe what you say, you’d get up and go over there and kick that window in. She laughs at me.
—Why would I do that? I don’t want to hurt my foot.
—If you have real conviction in your beliefs, you’d go kick it, she challenges.
—Nah. I know that tactic: demonising my argument. Most people say, What, so you can just kill someone if you feel like it, with no repercussions?
—Exactly! says Rose’s mum.
—Yeah, but you can rape and murder someone now. What stops you? Not just the law, I hope!
—What then? she huffs, annoyed now.
—Predators have walked among us since the dawn of time. They always will, hiding like tigers. If one has sized you up as prey, or one wants to randomly attack you, they will do it, laws and cops or not. You know, their animal has taken over, stamped out the little angel on their shoulder, like a cigarette butt, or a spider.
—Don’t get him started on a rant. I warn you, says Sando.
—Smart-arse. She shakes her head, studies me a moment: Do you believe in God?
—Not particularly.
—Either you do or you don’t.
—Why?
—Why what? You can’t sit on the fence about these things.
—I know I don’t believe in Man.
—Huh?
—God specifically forbade following the laws of man … you should only observe the laws of God. I chuckle at her confusion.
She stubs out her cigarette, wipes some hair from her face with the back of her hand, regards me with those old worn-wise eyes hippies of her generation have. Says on an exhale:
—Did you just use a religious defence for anarchy?
—I guess.
—Clever.
—Don’t patronise me.
—I didn’t mean to patronise you. Why do you think that?
—You put yourself in a position above me by commenting on my ingenuity.
She shoots Sando an accusing look, before saying:
—You don’t need to get aggressive, darlin. She scrapes at the milk-scum cappuccinos make when the froth goes hard on the edge of the coffee cup.
—Me, aggressive! You suggested I kick in a window to prove my beliefs.
—Look … I didn’t mean to offend you. Obviously I have. I have no problem with people who believe in God.
—I don’t believe in God. Not today anyway.
—You talk a bit like a Christian … like someone who had fundamentalism beaten into them. She slurps her coffee.
—Told you: psychic! Rose cuts in.
Sando blushes. He knows all about my upbringing in the cult. I told him this last month while sitting in his boarding-house room, writing my novel on his computer. Obviously he has told Rose. This pricks her mum’s ears and she appears proud and suddenly interested.
—You grew up in a cult? She starts rolling a cigarette.
—Yeah … I don’t really like to—
—Oh? Which cult? Sparks her durrie: I’ve studied cults. I actually work with some victims. I bet I’ve heard of it.
—The Truth.
—Well, I’d like to know, but total personal freedom and all that … You can lie if you want. She shrugs, sarcastic, sits back.
—No … They call themselves The Truth.
—Never heard of them.
—Spiritual Israel, The Way, The Light.
—They sound Calvinist.
—Exactly … worse.
—Like Amish? says Rose.
—Far stricter.
—Bullshit! says Vincent, finally adding to the conversation.
—You kinda sound like you still believe in God, man, says Rose.
—You do believe in God, when you find it convenient, gloats Rose’s mum: You still have extremist views, not much better than a Christian. Pffft, disregard man’s laws … If you really believe what you say, you should kick in that window.
—Nah, fuck that, I say, annoyed now: Who cares if God exists or not? I prefer the possibility of God, rather than the self-appointed authority of man. Man calls himself an intelligent animal, and, sure, I agree, but these two parts conflict unlike any war ever waged before. Man, prone to animal fits of passion, will never find the stability his intelligence seeks. I see man as more than an ape who figured out how to light fires and build wheels. I see us as part animal, part angel. Why? Well, because I have a bizarre fascination with the Romantic poets, but also because it seems logical to me we didn’t get here on our own. I lived in a house with a baby, and, from my observation, humans would never have survived in a cave with a screaming kid when sabre-toothed tigers roamed the land. Anyway, sure, people make fun of Christians and other devotees all the time, myself included … but if you live by the fundamental teachings of the holy books – don’t steal other people’s shit, don’t trespass on their person and don’t kill anyone, whether they deserve it or not – you can live peacefully with your neighbours.
—I warned you, says Sando to the now silent table: Don’t get him started on a fucken rant.
—Pah! says Rose’s mum, with one eye squinted because she got smoke in it and that stings: I smell bullshit, son. All words. I’ve heard it all before. Action: now that speaks louder than words.
—Fuck your cliché, I yell, smashing my coffee mug on the pavers before I get up, skip over to the sliding glass door and give it a real hard kick.
——
I met Yuri at a poetry reading at Zane’s Cafe in the basement of the Metro Arts building. He emulates the Beats but he has his own style about it. As we try to navigate the Story Bridge under the influence of some particularly potent LSD, I say:
—Yuri, you sum up the living embodiment of a neo-beatnik … I mean, you even hum jazz when you write poetry. Look at you, man!
The damn bridge has gone all soft, and halfway across we both freak for no real reason and can go no further. We hide behind a balustrade because no one feels more paranoid than us right now, except maybe for Josef. Josef has a double doctorate in paranoia. He sleeps fully clothed, wearing sneakers, in case he has to bail in the dead of night.
—What? says Yuri, trying to look at himself, twisting like a tongue trying to taste itself.
—I mean … look at you, man. You look like a short homeless Kerouac.
—Fuck you, man! He looks all sore for a second.
—No, brother. I mean it as a compliment.
—I don’t feel great, he says, suddenly taken with his hands: Oh, man … I haven’t had a very fantastic diet this past month … mainly Midori and nachos … and the fucken room above the pub in … man … I dunno even what town … somewhere that has sugar cane and the ocean nearby … the fucken room near killed me with this draught and Soph … the chick I lived there with while I tried to write a novel … man, what just happened to the moon?
—What about her?
—Who?
—The chick … Soph.
—Um … did I say that out loud?
—I dunno.
—Fuck.
—What happened, with the chick?
—Man … we knew each other from school. Her, my old friend Gerhard and me … We also hung out with Soph’s brother. We dated awhile, me and Soph, and then one afternoon her brother died in a car crash. We went to the funeral and later that night, real bummed out and shit, Soph says Let’s have sex, my brother would have wanted it.
Yuri smokes two whole cigarettes while he tells me this story and, as he flicks the butt from his second off the bridge, he looks pretty sick with memories.
Recently Yuri took over running the Chalice House poetry gig from Rey. I go to Chalice regularly and Yuri com
es to the Valley for the Rose Croix at The Zoo. About twenty poets show up, and we have a captive audience. The Zoo puts on free Spanish wine for us and not a sober soul leaves the building after the final poet has torn out their heart and doused the crowd in arterial bliss. I bought a book of vintage erotic bondage photography, wrote Rose Croix – Poetry at The Zoo on a few of the images, photocopied them and hung them on every lamp post and in every bookstore window in Brisbane. One image had a woman getting spanked by another woman, and had a plinth with an open book on it in the background. I modified the page to read Thou Shalt Not Read Poetry.
Now that we both run separate poetry readings, Yuri and I start a third poetry reading together, at Bitch Cafe. We envision a reading every night of the week. This way, we have a good reason to get drunk every night, not that we need one. Yuri and I keep the monks who make green chartreuse in alms for the next century. I see Yuri pour it on Weet-Bix one morning, instead of in his coffee. He realises, shrugs and puts some in his flat white too. He makes me laugh. If he gets into an argument while drinking wine, he always ends up smashing his glass to emphasise some point or other.
4
A knock on the door of our apartment at Ravenswood and my sister Jaz stands there, distraught. I haven’t seen Jaz in over a year, nor spoken to my parents or my little sister Fliss.
—Bren, she says, grabbing me: I feel like death. I don’t know what to do. Her heart breaks right on my doorstep.
I get her inside and Candy hugs her while I make coffee, and we calm her down enough for her to begin the story. Jaz doesn’t say anything about us having no couches and she eases herself onto the floor. Most people give us shit about having no couches.
—Mum’s fallen seriously ill … probably an undiagnosed injury from when Dad ran her over with a tractor.
—Your dad ran over your mum with a tractor? Candy snorts into her Alessi coffee cup.
—What … you don’t know this? asks Jaz, looking at me.
—No! Candy exclaims, also looking at me.
—She fell off a tractor on our grandma’s pineapple farm, Jaz explains: She should have died, they said.
—For a while there I thought he’d run her over on purpose! Candy laughs.
—Put her in hospital for a year, I say, also laughing.
—Yeah, sniffs Jaz.
—You know how she … She turns to Candy, who’s pulled her knees up to her chest, sitting on the carpet: Mum’s always had migraines. Made her a real bitch as we grew up.
—Not to mention the no-holes-barred religious brainwashing she afflicted us with, I snarl.
—I still feel physically ill with guilt … to this day, says Jaz.
—Don’t you mean no holds barred? says Candy.
—Nope. No holes … no vagina, arse or mouth. Those tramp preachers fucked some kids in the ear, I swear.
—Anyway … I tried saving for a bit to get back to Townsville to see her. I’ve spent the last year in Melbourne, living with this guy Dad hates, so I didn’t call home much. She takes a sip of coffee, adjusts her position on the carpet.
—So, about Mum … Should we worry? I interject there, tapping a cigarette on its box. I go to light it and Jaz says:
—Can you not? She fumbles with her cup.
—Why?
—Pregnant.
—Holy fuck! Crushing my cigarette.
—Does your boyfriend know? asks Candy, sitting upright now.
Jaz starts sobbing all over, chest-heaving sobs from a place deep down where pain has brewed for a decade.
Poor Jaz. Pregnant, and she found out after she realised her relationship had all the chances of Tony Montana living to forty. Bastard fucked a stripper, she wails. A stripper! She fears Mum will kill her. Mum most likely will kill her, or publicly disown her, which Jaz probably finds worse.
We put Jaz in our bed and, sometime around four in the morning, Candy falls asleep in there too. I sit up until dawn, writing this down, drinking coffee, trying to remember where I put my old tobacco tin of weed when Jaz’s knock came so early in the morning. I’ve decided to take the plunge and call home, to see what I can find out about Mum not feeling well.
And just as I think this, someone knocks at the door again! Loud as hell this time, and I near fall over trying to find the tin of weed to hide before I realise that if I spent five hours searching for it unsuccessfully, no one else will find it. I answer the door to find, standing there, the dude I’ve seen following me! In a different suit this time, but with the same chambray shirt he wore when I last noticed him. He says:
—Brentley?
Honestly, I near shit myself. I just stand there, with my mouth open too, I bet.
—Do you live here with a young woman named Candy?
—Fuck, I squeak.
Then, over his shoulder, peeking around the red-brick corner of the foyer, out by the postboxes filled with glossy catalogues, crudely photocopied handyman flyers and leaves blown in from the street, I see platinum-blonde hair, in a Princess Diana cut, and the unmistakable fuck you, pauper glint of diamond earrings. Candy’s mother.
——
She hired a private detective to find us. I’ve seen him in my peripheries for over a year.
This all started because, somewhere, on a mine site in the deserts of Western Australia, Candy’s uncle, her mother’s brother, picked up a copy of The Picture magazine, leafed to the Home Girls section and saw Candy there, naked, explaining how good her clitoris piercing makes her feel. Her mother freaked, assuming I’d started whoring out her daughter to pay for my heroin habit, and she hired a private detective to track us down, so she could rescue Candy. I don’t have a heroin habit, but I have rent. If I stop paying rent, I could die. It happens for me like that. I open a door and my reality comes crashing down. Everything goes south, fast, like a 747 at full capacity, drifting in silence ten ks above the Pacific. Blue sky and the gentle rush of ice vapour over the flexing wings until, suddenly, the fuselage tears apart. Then the deep blue, divers recovering victims still strapped into seats, naked from the freefall, bodies all bloated and the same.
She starts with her evil right away, screaming at Candy about her behaviour. Finally, after inspecting the entire house and all the cupboards, she leaves with the private detective. Candy stands looking at the closed door and says:
—You know, she called me a lesbian, after seeing Jaz in the bed.
Margot has Candy’s sister Marie living in our spare room by the afternoon. It takes Marie two days to sleep with Yuri and three days to sleep with me, despite my resolve. I don’t trust Marie anymore, not since she told Candy all our secrets.
Then things get worse. When Marie moves in, she moves all the old manuscripts and paintings I had in the spare room. In there I had a letter this poet named Masha sent to me after we pashed one night at a party. I met her at the Hub poetry reading. A new face on the scene, she’d recently returned from studying in Europe. We argued about Joyce. She said:
—No better writer will ever live.
—Don’t count on it … but the dude did have the advantage of Idiot Savantism.
—What?
—No one can write like that unless they have a mental condition.
—Do you have any favourite writers?
—Yeah: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Byron, Twain, Genet, Miller, Burroughs, Kerouac, Céline, Salinger.
—Pfft. Joyce shits all over them.
—Like fuck! I said, and so on until later at a party I pashed her under the stairs, right after this other female poet named Vesna announced to the party exactly how much of a misogynist she finds me, for putting my arm around her during a conversation.
The letter had nothing incriminating about it, at first. Masha wrote about literature and poetry and stuff like that, but then, at the end, in this Joyce–Plathean metaphorical kind of way, she talks about ho
w wet she got when we kissed that night. The letter sends Candy over the edge.
——
Nightsweats in a dream. A thousand tortured angels chased me down in a fugue of sleep. A masquerade party in Hades. Agony dressed as Love. I fucked her under the drooping porticoes of a broken temple on the outskirts of grief. An angel in the hall said to me: If you look deep into my words, you can speak with me across time and space and we can laugh like old friends in a warm cafe on a cold day. The ancients lent me tragedy to hold as my own dying bouquet. Metaphysics and her breasts forming in the clouds. Day and night entwined like a killer’s laughter. Then who comes knocking at my door but Fortitude, wounded by her charge. I soap her wounds but she dies quietly in my bath. I awake in a clairvoyant dawn burdened with ancestry. The sempiternal Odysseus, an immortal and divine vagabond who dances in this cabal, but not to your music. Desire’s psalmodic eyes, her holy-oil covenant aching in a jaundiced sky. She toasts me with a glass of Melancholy’s blood. We drink like Pasiphaë the bull’s deathly seed. The serpents which lick my wounds turn blind like worms in the fallen clay of our ancestors. I have come to know Waiting and her many charms, the madpale garden of her skin. Only the blind can observe this burning, the epilepsy of the soul against creation’s cage. I lose myself in the ruins. The chartreuse moon, my green priest in a bottle, elucidates on his night-subject of loneliness.
Then comes the anticipated change. Candy’s mother says to us at dinner:
—You’ll come with us to Perth. We’ll rent you an apartment if you look after our dogs while we do our month-on shifts at the mine.
Candy wants to go. I ask Candy if she wants me to come. She doesn’t pause when she says Of course. If she’d paused, I would have packed a bag and left her that night.
—What about my university studies? Trying to find a way to excuse myself from going to Perth with Candy’s family.
—You can fly over to your residentials. You only have three a year, right?
—Yeah.
I dared walk with a wayward wolf, wandered into her company lair.
5
Fliss’s new husband has an air of beautiful doom about him. Obsessed with Jim Morrison. So much so, I call him Jim. He towers above me, skin pale as a gecko’s belly, masses of waist-length red curly hair, in keeping with his Scottish ancestry. You can imagine him in a kilt, blowing some crazy bagpipe on the shores of a loch. We take acid together in Townsville tonight. New Year’s Eve 1996, two days before Candy and I board the train to Perth. The trips have a cartoon on them, Fat Freddy’s Cat from the Furry Freak Brothers comic. I spit hallucinatory fur balls. Candy has a bad trip, says I hate myself over and over. Jim grins through the whole thing and sips wine from a pewter mug in the shape of a dragon’s foot. The LSD turns out the strongest I’ve had by far. Things start getting strange.
Scoundrel Days Page 24