We sit watching Rage on television. The film clip for ‘Paint It Black’ by The Stones plays and I swear Mick changes into a lizard. I turn to look at Jim, and it must’ve taken me about an hour because everything has morphed into some sort of viscous liquid marble. I open my mouth to say Jim, holy fuck, Mick turned into a dragon, but Jim says:
—I hear you write poetry. Spits out a hair ball: I write poetry too. He turns to me, flickering television on his impossibly pale skin.
—Really? I say, a three-sixty-degree band of light emanating from everything at about waist level.
—Yeah … listen: If the shoes I really want to wear hurt my feet … should I walk at all?
—Beautiful! Marvellous!
We each watch our own private lightshow for a while.
—I envy you, he says then, out of nowhere.
—Really! Why the fuck would you envy me?
—You seem … so, alive … and free.
—My freedom comes at a price, man.
—I’d pay it. How much?
—Love … forever.
He laughs.
—Seriously, I say, trying to figure out why I can’t light my cigarette: Think about this, right: no one alive gives a flying fuck about you.
—Thanks! He looks hurt.
—No … I mean you, me, any person.
—Really? Do you believe that? Don’t you love Candy? He spreads his hands a bit and his fingers split into rainbows with little birds pissing on them. I shake my head some, which doesn’t help at all.
—I almost love her, but I broke it … on purpose. Anyway, people hold themselves back because of love, or some other incarnation of dread and hopelessness that comes in the lonely hours. People think other people care what they do … they don’t. Everyone plays the game for themselves. Most of the time no one notices if I get up and leave the room. You can spend your life living right on the edge of the blade while everyone bashes their brains out against the blunt of the handle trying to impress other people. In that realisation lies a tremendous amount of personal freedom.
—I wanted to live on the edge … but I went and got fucken married, before I turned twenty, man. He sighs, shrinks three feet and then rotates somehow.
—Brother, I have a motto. I made it up one night stranded on a highway somewhere west of Neverland, with my friend Josef.
—Yeah? Cough it up then.
—Huh? Thinking he meant one of the phantom chunks of Fat Freddy’s Cat in my mouth.
—The motto, man.
—If you want to live on the edge, learn to balance first.
At this point I realise I’ve spent the entire time trying to light my lighter with my cigarette.
—I like that, he says, the boy with far-away eyes.
——
Five days on the train across to Perth rattles something loose in my brain: seven thousand kilometres of clack-clack clack-clack. To drown it out I have all three Mazzy Star albums. I’ve used half a pack of twenty double-As in my Sony Discman already. Playing ‘Wasted’ on repeat. Candy and I sit in cattle-class, right down the east coast of Australia. Townsville to Brisbane on The Sunlander, a landscape I long to escape. We change trains at Roma Street in Brisbane and board the XPT down to Sydney. Familiar territory. At Central Station in Sydney we board the Indian Pacific to Adelaide. West, across inland New South Wales through the Blue Mountains to Broken Hill, to the other side of the range, where the real outback starts, where the history of boom and bust imbues the dust. All alien territory to me. Slightly south-west to Adelaide then the great southern deserts, the Nullarbor Plain, thundering through mallee scrub. Here the ghost gums and eucalypts have an eerie symmetry, like battalions crowded along the tracks.
The train stops, for reasons unknown, at Maralinga, where, in the late fifties and early sixties, the British government dropped nuclear bombs on the Dreamtime. Everyone crowds off to take photographs of themselves posing in front of a huge sign announcing the brutal past. We stop then in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, the end of the Great Eastern Highway and home of the Super Pit, a huge mine that operates around the clock. Then onward, off the edge to Perth, a city built on sand.
6
Perth, not knowing what to expect. This apartment that Candy’s mother and stepfather rent for us, on the proviso we care for their dogs six months of the year … nothing more than a converted carport under an actual house on Scarborough Beach. Beneath some rich-looking arsehole who drives a collectible BMW. We live opposite the dog beach. We can’t run Candy’s parents’ dogs out there, though. The wind from the Indian Ocean blasts the sand like a machine. You could buff a car down there. I reckon the pair of retarded guinea pigs they call dogs would get blown clear to the desert.
Invited to Uncle Mike’s for dinner. An apartment on the beach. Next to the pampered fluff of Candy’s mother, Uncle Mike looks like a bikie. I know he already hates me. He thinks I pimped out his niece to the Home Girls pages of The Picture magazine. I sit down beside him at the dinner table and he strokes his Chopper Read moustache, aggressively cracks me a Jack Daniel’s and cola premix. Candy looks nervous. I sip the Jack. He rumbles:
—Tell us about yaself, mate. Takes a mighty slug of his premix, looking at Candy’s mother.
—Sure. I write, and now I study philosophy too.
—Poetry, I’ve heard. He drains the can, crumples it in one hand.
—Yeah.
—You look like a faggot.
—Uncle Mike! Candy yells across the table.
Her mother titters. Brian looks concerned.
—Sorry, mate … just joshing ya! And he slaps me on the back, hard.
I finish my can and he cracks me another. I say, into the silence and the stares:
—You work the mines, yeah?
—Yeah … drive big rigs.
—Cool. Getting real interested in the can of Jack Daniel’s.
—Why cool?
—You know, a valid profession.
—Look out! Big words. Why don’t you elaborate, sport? He laughs his arse off at his own funny cunt-ness.
—Someone has to do it, drive the trucks. I smash half the can in one gulp, try not to burp.
—You havin a go at me, mate? Better drivin trucks, I say, than a useless poofter profession like yours!
—Don’t call me gay, man! Instantly regretting saying that. The pain bottled up from where he near broke my shoulder blade came out as a hiss in my voice, like a cornered kitten standing up to a werewolf.
—Fuck you, you … cunt! He leaps to his feet, chair screeching on the faux wood floor: I oughta belt ya one for what ya did to Candy!
—You fucken … degenerate! screams Candy’s mum, spilling wine everywhere, eyes boring into me.
I look to Brian. I don’t know why. He avoids my gaze, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. Candy bursts into tears, stands, screams at her mother:
—Great! Now you hate him again! And she storms off to the balcony, slams the sliding glass door.
—Get the fuck outta my house, you faggot, says Uncle Mike with real menace on the edges.
I raise my hands, stand, drain my third can, try to catch Candy’s attention on the balcony but she has her back to the room, looking like Virginia Woolf out over the Indian Ocean. I stumble out of there, drunker than I realise, and find a bar down on the beach.
In a window seat, smoking and drinking a chartreuse. Perth feels like another country. The wind rips across the Indian tonight.
Hundreds of rabbits on the beach, where the grass meets the sand and where Love first punched me.
——
Candy enrols at the University of Western Australia, to study palaeoanthropology and forensic archaeology. She went from chef, to fashion designer, to nude model, to Indiana fucken Jones in five years. Our relationship strains to breaking. I busy myself smoking ma
rijuana grown by a botany student, sitting on the esplanade, exhaling into the Fremantle Doctor.
——
On my way to university. Away from Perth and five months of nights punctuated with shouts and breaking crockery. The middle of winter in Armidale. Josef offered me a couch. He lives with another black metal band now.
I get off the bus from Sydney and Josef fails to show. I walk around in the freezing Armidale night looking for a phone box and finally get his address. When I arrive, a real sombre mood has the place in a grip. The day before, an electrician, come to fix their roof after a storm, died right in front of them – fell into their car park, fried.
I pick up a sexy Greek woman named Miki in the student refectory on campus. She says she has to sleep in a tent for the whole residential. Back at Josef’s place after drinking whisky. Just as she finishes giving me head, Josef walks in and loses his shit. Screams at me about disrespecting him and his friends, that I shouldn’t treat Candy like that. I consider Candy one of my closest friends! he snaps at us as we leave. Miki and I get a room above a pub. I watch her piss in the sink. I cry as she blows me again.
——
A nightmare. Awake in a sweat with the feeling someone has died, or something has ended. Down the hall in this flophouse hotel, Despair’s perfume lingering in every corner. I walk in the dawn and, after smashing off ice from the telephone receiver, call Candy. No answer. It rings out five times. I walk until I find an open cafe, drink a coffee, call again. She picks up:
—Hey, I stammer, a feeling of dread rising up my oesophagus.
—Oh … hi.
—Why didn’t you answer earlier?
—Huh?
—I called, five times, half an hour ago.
—Oh … I guess I fell asleep upstairs.
—What?
—I went to a party upstairs last night.
I vomit on the phone box.
—You okay? she asks, meekly.
—Yeah.
A motorbike roars by on the road behind me.
—I slept with James, if you want to know.
—Who? And I don’t wanna know.
—James who lives upstairs … He has some moves!
—I thought we agreed on the train over to give monogamy a go … try and save our relationship!
—But I wanted sex.
—Did you use a condom?
—Yeah. He went to put it in and I remembered you said to use one.
—You only used one because I asked you to?
—Why else would I?
—Um … disease?
—You get so paranoid.
—You got that serious thrush that time!
—Yeah … from anal, probably.
—Did you do anal with this guy?
—Private … none of your business.
—That prick owns the collectible BMW, right? Didn’t I see him in an army uniform?
—Reserves. So?
—Says a lot … You had sex with a trained killer.
Silence.
—I don’t think I should come back, I say with an actual heavy heart.
—Yeah.
—Yeah … what?
—Yeah … maybe you shouldn’t … Unless you tell me the truth. Perhaps we can save us then. But I sincerely fucken doubt it.
—The truth about what? I cough there, trying to smoke my cigarette like Reuben, without touching it once, because I have both freezing hands in my pockets and the receiver cradled between my achingly cold neck and seized-up shoulder.
—About my sisters. Do you have anything to tell me?
—No. Trying to spit the butt out but finding it frozen to my lip.
—Why keep lying? I just told you I fucked someone last night and you still won’t fess up! She sounds angry and over it.
—What do you want me to say?
—A normal male would try and hurt me right there … but you keep up the lie, you … you cheating piece of shit.
I imagine myself there as a pile of steaming shit, getting stepped in, waiting for her to slam down the phone. She doesn’t.
—You know which chicks I fucked … you helped me. I haven’t gone out on my own!
I could’ve thought of something better to say, but it fell out of my mouth. I feel pathetic saying that. It sounded pathetic, a lie. She knows – I know it. Pretty soon I’ll freeze to death in this phone box. The sky’s gone green. It looks like it might snow. I’ve never seen snow.
—Does the sky go green before it snows? I say.
—You fucked that chick Louisa … and Chrissy!
—I didn’t fuck Chrissy. I only went down on her!
—So you did fuck Louisa.
—You asked one of my best friends for sex!
—What … who?
—Yuri.
—He told you!
—Yeah.
—He rejected me.
—Bruise your ego, did it? I say, not hiding my sarcasm.
—No more bruised than yours right now.
—Seriously, sometimes your inner moll comes crawling out, hey.
—Fuck you, she says, tired and resigned.
The early-morning traffic drifting in.
—We spent so many years together, running from our families, I say above the din.
—Yeah, you know … She sighs again, the way you sigh when you feel hesitant about sharing something: I realised recently that for seven years we never spent more than a couple of nights apart … we rusted together.
An old man shuffles up to the phone box and stands behind me, breathing heavily. I spark another cigarette. Striking the lighter hurts my frozen fingers.
—So you wanna break up then … get it over with?
—I don’t know. She takes a deep breath and sighs: Sometimes I think we broke up ages ago and we stay together out of habit. Will you ever learn to reel in your sex addiction? She sighs again, sounds tired.
Banging on the phone box. The war veteran attempts to bounce on the spot but his old-man hips have frozen up.
—You still there? She sounds kind of sad now.
—Yeah. Some old dude banged on the phone box. I don’t have a sex addiction. Does that even exist?
—Yes you do. You have a compulsion around attractive women … some of them not even attractive, like Louisa. You fuck any woman who aims her vagina at you.
—No I don’t … though every woman does have something beautiful to offer the world.
—Why do you cheat on me so much? You make me feel ugly and inadequate.
—I don’t want to wake up one day all beat and grey and regret what I didn’t do, all the art and drugs and poetry and beautiful women naked in the morning light. I’ll never turn down an adventure, a title, or a free lunch.
She doesn’t reply. I can see her on my private screen, clear as a Swarovski swan, thousands of miles away on the west coast, on Scarborough Beach in Perth, in our shittily converted double garage, that rich soldier naked next to her in our bed. She raises one of her sculpted eyebrows and does this pout which means she wishes I’d disappear.
—Ya know, she says: nothing can save us now.
—Yeah, I saw what you said.
I sound far away to myself, my words down the line like zeros lost in static.
—Huh?
—Nothing.
Silence.
Then she says, angry now:
—I’ve met some damaged people in my time, hey … but you—
I run out of coins there. As I walk away, a VW Beetle rolls past, Iggy Pop’s ‘Candy’ blaring crazy lyrics on the wind, like her last angry sigh.
7
Not a single person on earth gives a damn about me. Returning from the University of New England I get off the bus at Central Station in Sydney.
I call Candy a dozen times and the phone rings out in our converted garage. Candy doesn’t want me home. I throw my return plane ticket to Perth in a bin outside the terminus and sit in Belmore Park. The storm in my soul rages and the revolution in my heart becomes a pogrom against Love. Love writes Despair in cursive on the cafe window as she passes. You have to feel it, to feel it. I sit here for about ten hours, without thinking anything at all. A poet without hope, running from Love. Through the lies of our dreams we find ourselves alive with gorgeous tears. How like the little monsters to come now, regret interloping on my resolve. I must face the Beast alone and never surrender to her charms.
As Sydney crashes and rumbles around me, I feel totally and utterly alone in the universe. I can’t feel a single person out there who has a spare thought for me. The sun vanishes beyond some menacing-looking clouds, rumbling in from the ocean. People rushing past but no one there, only bodies, minds elsewhere, rehearsing interviews, troubling over chores and bitching inside. I don’t care anymore. All along and probably since the dawn of time no humans have given a shit about each other, only one-sided egotistical attachments, like love, and family. A hundred years ago an entirely different set of people lived out their lives right here and no one alive now gives a damn they’ve all gone.
Thunderclap and cloudburst. Under a shop awning now as the heavens open up and rain squalls across Railway Square. Pigeons unbind their tongues.
We need the idea of God to fill the void, to hide the truth: that we can never connect with one another. Souls sealed in bone and touching with no contact. I feel zero pity for fools who pray for rapture when the bible warns of slaughter.
Scoundrel Days Page 25