Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  ——

  Back in Townsville. My darkest days in one of Australia’s sunniest cities.

  A month sitting here in the dark by myself, caretaking a building full of everything but residents. I sit around with the curtains drawn and only venture out to buy tobacco. I think the darkest depression ever has descended on me. That lingering perfume of Despair in every corner of every hallway, trapped between the fire doors on the escape staircase. I have bad dreams every night. Bellies with mandibles. Scabs on walls. Petal couches and suede flowers. Nightmares of outback highways curling like burned cassette tape. I sweat so much I awake dehydrated. Afraid to sleep. I can’t stop thinking about Candy, like Joan of Arc leading her own personal sexual revolution.

  The phone ringing. The first time in four months. Candy on the line. She in Perth, me in North Ward, not three blocks from Redpath Street, where it all began.

  —Hi! Pleased to hear from her, despite myself.

  —Hey. Very flat.

  —I miss you. Mentally punching myself in the face.

  —Do you? Incredulous, sarcastic.

  Silence. A humming on the line.

  —Why did you call? I say, cold now too.

  —Where do I send your stuff? You have a bunch of shit here you left behind. Icy crackles in her voice.

  —You mean everything I own in the world. You told me not to come back. I only had my duffel for the residential. I’ve worn the same clothes for months now.

  —Gross.

  —Thanks.

  —Where do I send it? Your books will cost a fortune.

  I give her the address on Landsborough Street in North Ward and she says:

  —I know that building. I used to walk Demeter by there. You live at a boarding house for retards?

  —Not retards … mentally disabled. They all moved out to live in the community, a new initiative by the foundation.

  Candy yawns:

  —Anyways, send me money for the removalist.

  —Okay. So, you all good? I sniff.

  —Like you care. She sounds far off, distracted.

  —I asked, didn’t I? Now I sound resigned.

  —I had the best sex I’ve ever had last night. This French guy I met at a party after the Blur concert. She sounds truly happy about it.

  That did it for me, just there. Since limping back, licking my wounds, to my parents four months ago, after nearly dying of cold on the streets of Sydney for three weeks, hitching north to Brisbane, sleeping in parks and on friends’ couches, drinking too much with a belly dancer whose boyfriend showed up to one of our drinking sessions and threatened to gut me. Then seeing Gerhard, Yuri’s old friend, smiling in the mall with a gorgeous woman, in love and getting married. Another bus trip north, the same old route, up the coast, through numerous towns you can never imagine living in and then further and further up the coast into the dry tropics, where the tourists don’t get off. Then the Warning Estuarine Crocodiles Roam These Waters road signs and the Warning Irukandji and Box Jellyfish Infest These Waters signs picketed along the beachfront, the mosquitoes getting thicker on the bus windscreen as the mangrove swamps start.

  Followed by my parents with the I told you sos choked back with their sarcasm because they can see the pain in my eyes and hear wounds on my sighs as I drag myself around their house, looking for somewhere warm, hoping the block of ice in my chest will thaw and let me breathe. And then sitting out in the middle of nowhere alone on my parents’ farm for weeks on end while they travel abroad, drinking all day and crying with each sip. Feeling totally, fucken, lost.

  Now, after sitting in the dark for so long, trying to remember myself, nose full of the stink of despair, mind crowded with visions of myself strung up in a cupboard in this abandoned boarding house … fuck her. I put the receiver in the cradle. I get up, shower, put on my jeans, my boots, a decent shirt, and walk right into the city, into the Exchange Bar, order a pot, and throw it back before I’ve even exhaled from slamming down the phone.

  I’ve barely left the building, only a couple of times when Fliss’s husband, Jim, came by and we went driving around the suburbs, trying to score weed. He drives too fast. Tool’s Ænima album on the stereo at a minimum of eighty in the dark. I have flashbacks, Harley and the Porsche, crumpled like the poker cards an outraged cowboy throws in the face of a cheater. Not that I care if an enraged cowboy empties his Smith & Wesson into my chest. I feel dead already. I simply stare ahead while Jim barrels down the streets in his marital chariot, my little sister at home, cursing me for taking her pale angel out into the storm.

  ——

  Yuri comes to Townsville to visit, just as I fall headlong into debauchery of Sadean proportions. I spend all my wages on weed, chartreuse and cigarettes, in that order. I can’t afford to eat. You can only drink a quarter bottle of chartreuse before your frontal lobe starts to misfire and you end up biting your tongue and poking yourself in the eye all the time. I drank half a bottle one night and woke up naked on the beach. I have no idea if I walked the four blocks nude or what happened to my clothes. They say alcoholism starts when you drink alone. I started drinking alone at nine years of age, swigging Charlie’s rum in our fortress on the hill behind the Greenvale medical centre while I waited for The Wreckers to come for a midnight jaunt, if they ever came at all.

  I haven’t seen Yuri in a year. He has a new confidence in his step as he bounds off the bus in Townsville. I hail a cab out the front, where years ago I left Reuben after our spectacular Cairns adventure and he went off and tried to permanently stop his pain. I think of finding him near death in the cupboard. That whole scene pushed Gigolo over into whatever abyss he’d stood on the edge of for so long. Yuri runs an art gallery in Brisbane now with his artist friend Gerhard and another painter I’ve not met named Niko. He tells me this in the cab on the way back to the complex I caretake.

  —You? Yuri says, winding down the window. The cab driver smells like a dead whale on a beach.

  —I landed a job caretaking an abandoned building. It has forty rooms.

  —Abandoned? Why?

  —It housed intellectually disabled people … run by the Endeavour Foundation. They all moved out, something to do with not wanting them to feel institutionalised. Now street kids and park people try and break in all the time.

  —Park people?

  —Abos, interjects the cab driver.

  —What do you do there all day? asks Yuri, leaning forward.

  —Writing, drinking, smoking and fucking … in no particular order.

  —Ha! he says from the back seat.

  I turn around and give him a grin. The cab driver shoots me a look.

  —I’ve got a girl … serious … marriage material, Yuri says.

  —Yeah? Megan?

  —No, we split up after she found out I slept with Marie.

  —How’d she find out?

  —Read my journal.

  —Bitch.

  The cabbie chuckles.

  —Hey, you remember Gerhard?

  —Yeah!

  —Gerhard asked this chick he only just met to marry him … a super hot babe, so I don’t blame him.

  —Yeah. Natalie?

  —Natalia. How’d you know?

  —I ran into him in the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane, right after I came out of that pub under the mall beneath the Wintergarden. I got smashed down there with this chick I met on the bus back from Sydney. I get on the bus in Sydney and she has the seat next to me. Before I even sat down she said I will never cheat on my fiancé, so don’t even try. I didn’t even want to try, until she told me she belly dances for a living. Anyway, yeah, I ran into him and Natalia and he looked happy … too happy. He looked pinned.

  The cab stops at traffic lights outside the old Townsville General Hospital. It has a construction fence around it now.

  —Look
at that. Twenty-six years … full circle back to where I started. Changing the subject.

  —You born there? says Yuri, looking up at its art-deco balconies.

  —Yup … right after Cyclone Althea. The whole roof got blown off … most of this whole town pretty much decimated.

  —Maaate, says the cab driver: Christmas Eve, 1971: the whole sky screamed like a fighter jet in a tunnel. Eighteen-foot waves crashing through the estuaries. I remember the news saying over six hundred thousand tonnes of roofing and signage got dumped in Platypus Channel!

  —Platypus Channel? I say.

  —Yeah … off the port, says the cabbie.

  —Never heard of it! I grew up here and I’ve never heard it even said?

  The cabbie shrugs as we turn onto Redpath Street.

  —Candy lived there when I first met her.

  I point to number ten, now overgrown, and it looks a lot smaller concealed beneath the trees.

  —You heard from her? She still in Perth? Yuri leans a fair way out the window, checking out the old Queenslander as we roll past.

  —Nope. Don’t care. We split up, over the phone. I never went back. Last I spoke to her, she told me all about a dude she picked up that gave her the best orgasm she’s ever had. Candy can go to hell. Right now I’ve got four chicks on the go.

  —Four! His head comes back in the cab.

  The cabbie shoots me another look.

  —Yeah, man. Mandy, Hayley, Tana and Tiffany. Tiffany I’ve only just started getting somewhere with. The other three … well, put it this way … a couple of weeks back we had a foursome.

  —Bullshit! says the cabbie and we all laugh.

  —Don’t make me show you the video to prove it, man, I say, as the laughing stops.

  —Video? says Yuri.

  —Mandy studies film-making at uni. She insisted on filming the whole thing.

  —I wanna see the video … Wait, do I? laughs Yuri.

  —Mandy has it, says we should take turns having it in our possession. But it starts in the pool, well before any of us even had a clue where it’d lead. Then it cuts to me naked pulling a bucket bong and then cuts to Mandy and Tana full-on going at it in the shower … I filmed that bit. Then it cuts to me reading from Juliette by Marquis de Sade and then it cuts to Mandy eating out Tana as I fuck Mandy doggy, which Hayley filmed, then to Hayley and Mandy and me, which Tana filmed, and then we set the camera up on a chair so all four of us could—

  —This the address? The cabbie cuts me off there, blowing the scene.

  —You live here! Yuri says, eyeballing the three-storey built into the cliff.

  —Yep … I get paid to live here.

  —Lucky bastard, says the cabbie, shaking his head.

  Part Seven

  Collapse

  ————

  Not all those who wander are lost.

  JRR Tolkien

  1

  Brisbane, February 1998. Josef works at a mattress factory. He gets home angry most nights. Last week I thought he’d died. I picked up this chick at an art exhibition and she invited me to see Derrick Carter, a DJ from Chicago, at a swish club down by the Botanic Gardens in the city. Josef said he’d come. I scored an ecstasy tab from this dude in the toilets. Josef begged to share. I didn’t mind. Only, after it came on, I realised we’d taken a tripstacy, an E with a drop of LSD on it. I’d wondered why it’d turned mushy in the clippie. I lost Josef. He vanished. I went home with the chick and we had sex in her bathtub, but I lost connection with my body. I felt dead. I worried about Josef. I didn’t think he’d taken LSD before, and drugs work on him weird. Give him a joint and he’ll bounce around, talking and excited. Give him some speed and he’ll curl up on the couch and go to sleep.

  He came home today, three days later. He walked to Byron Bay, tripping along the freeway. Says he went to visit Miki. I have no idea how he knows where she lives. Last I know that he saw her, he kicked us out of his house in Armidale, right after he walked in on her blowing me in his living room.

  ——

  Not long after Josef visited Miki, she visits us. Josef gave her our address.

  —Hi, I say as I answer the door, hesitant, because the last time I saw her she told me we shouldn’t see each other.

  —Thought I’d come visit you and Josef … needed to get away from Byron for a bit.

  —Josef’s gone away for the weekend.

  —Oh … Oh well. We can have some fun, can’t we?

  —Sure, I shrug.

  Phoebe, the chick whom I’ve spent the last month or so having sex with, only wants sex, which under normal circumstances I don’t mind at all. Except about a week ago I thought Death had come for me. My little sister Fliss, who feels strangely absent from my life, came to visit. We went out for kebabs and beers and hung around digging the Valley on a Friday night until the dawn, because I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. Soon as I got home, I started shitting lava, came down with the worst case of food poisoning imaginable. My organs had turned to acid and my stomach came up my oesophagus. The third day found me still so weak that Josef, concerned, had come home from the mattress factory with a brick he’d found, to hurl through the window of the kebab joint. For trying to kill my mate, he told me, with not even the spirit of a grin. Phoebe came around on her lunchbreak. I need a fuck! she demanded. I can’t even open my eyes … someone poisoned me! I said, attempting to rise on an elbow from my sweat-soaked bed. Oh, she said, and left.

  So Miki and I venture out, but I can’t get my heart in it. Sitting at the bar, contemplating my drink and chain-smoking while Miki flirts with the bartender and the living dead dance around their handbags. Then, seeing my heart has already left the party, Miki says, Let’s bail … I’ll take you home and cheer you up. But at that exact moment Phoebe comes staggering into the bar, grabs me and sticks her tongue in my mouth.

  —Who … the … fuck? Phoebe demands as, embarrassed, I pull away: You fucken … She points into Miki’s face but she sways like a buoy on a wave.

  —Just a friend from uni, says Miki, calm in the swell.

  —I should take you home … to sleep it off, I say to Phoebe, trying to defuse the situation now that the entire bar has stopped staring at us.

  —Fuck, yes … cha cha CHA! yells Phoebe, attempting to do some sort of bebop dance mixed with house-music rave shuffling.

  Miki and I get her home as fast as we can because she gives lip to everyone we pass: cheeky, bitchy, a mix of both. I take off her platforms and lay her down on my bed and she vomits. Copious amounts too, an entire all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. Seeing she hasn’t choked to death but looks in a coma or something, I haul her out of there into the bathroom to put her in the shower, and Miki sees me from the living room, dragging an unconscious chick down the hall, trying to get her dress off as I go.

  Miki gets up and leaves, permanently, I can tell. Gorgeous woman, our ride in the same direction didn’t last very long. I disembarked in the Land of the Lost. She calls me foolish and shakes her head with a sad smile as the bus pulls away.

  Josef moves on again. He never stays anywhere long, kind of lily-pads his way around the country. His mother lives in Australia now; this time he moves in to her garage in Albion. He wants to save to buy a new bass guitar. I can’t afford rent, he said as he left.

  2

  I now share a flat with Yuri, on the corner of Harcourt and Brunswick streets in Fortitude Valley. From the front balcony I see a woman standing with her back to a twenty-four-hour laundromat across the street. She hunkers down in her coat, cold in the early-morning light, and sways there awhile. A car crunches over to the kerb. Taillights and exhaust fumes. She doesn’t move. The car pulls away. She squats down, knees apart, rocks on her stilettos. Removes one shoe and pulls off a fishnet stocking. Stands again, one leg naked, struggles to get her shoe back on. Another horny shark thunders
at the kerb. Fuck off, she screams and the car fucks off. She squats back down. Scratches her vulva. Wraps the fishnet stocking around her upper arm, tight, and pulls it with her teeth. She doesn’t look for voyeurs, doesn’t notice the cab driver watching her at the traffic lights, nor the bleached-looking dude in the laundromat folding his old-man pants. She shoots up, chest heaves, she vomits, loses balance from her squat, falls back against the glass, legs out, spread-eagled. She urinates; it streams across the footpath and over the lip of the gutter. Joins the refuse.

  Winter took me by surprise. Came with a mist of freezing wind across the Story Bridge. Like the stranger who haunts me now and again. He stands on Brunswick Street in a shop doorway, all day, every day. He has a beard down near his waist and a look in his eyes like he saw Hitler committing atrocities firsthand. Sando told me one day that this dude has stood there for twenty years, waiting for his wife to come home. I don’t know where his wife went, if she came home or if she died, or what. Anyway, this reminds me of Candy and the last time she telephoned me. I haven’t heard her voice since.

  An ambulance and some cops turn up to take away the dead junkie across the street. Red and blue flickers in cigarette smoke.

  ——

  Small world, miniature cosmos, or just the same old neighbourhood? On the staircase I run into the chick who runs Gilchrist Galleries, the art dealer I used to go and hassle all the time when I lived on Bowen Terrace, before my Perth misadventure. She looks at me in the dark musk of the old hall and says with squinted eyes:

  —Do I know you?

  —Nope … probably seen me around. I live in number two.

  —Jodie. Number three, upstairs. She sticks out her hand.

  —Brentley. I shake her hand.

  —Oh … I do know you. You still painting? When did you move here? Didn’t you go to Perth? I saw you in the Northern News a couple of years back. You write poetry, right?