—See! says Rey, to no one and everyone: I told you all! Brentley, as bad as everyone says, actually has a post-romantic soul. Beautiful reckless boy, he says and uncorks a bottle of wine, pours it in a tin picnic cup and toasts me across the car.
—Cute, says Vesna, turning around from the front passenger seat: You made the woman-hater blush.
—I don’t hate women!
—Like fuck you don’t, she snaps.
Vesna has that way about her. I don’t know her story, but I bet she has reasons for her extremism. Someone once said her family had to flee atrocities in Serbia, so, you know, I don’t blame her.
—Feminazi, I mumble.
—See, she laughs back, looking triumphant.
—Seriously, though. Why do you think I hate women?
—Really? You want to know my opinion? Wow. He wants to know a woman’s opinion, everybody!
Laughing.
—The way you treat women like … like fuck-toys! She had a hard time saying that, I know, because the last time we argued, one afternoon at Sando’s house, we all sat around talking about poetry and I said she should say vagina or cunt or pussy in her poems instead of referring to her genitalia as her woman-hood. Vesna did her nut at me, saying I have no right recommending she use oppressive patriarchal language, and I, with serious intent of pure comic irony, said No need to get hysterical, and she all but smashed me in the face with her fists, her hatred of me came out so strong.
—What do you mean how I treat women? What did I do?
—The way you treated Masha, for instance.
Both Masha and I squirm right there, because of our fear that Vesna has constructed a giant road sign to point at the elephant in the room: our recent indiscretion. I see Rey’s ears burn and he turns to look out the window, very interested in the pine plantation outside. When I first arrived back in Brisbane, I went out drinking with the poets. Masha and Rey had lived together for a while by then and planned to get married. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about the letter Masha wrote me, the one Candy read, which effectively ended us. That night, back at the old haunt at Ric’s Bar in the Valley, we all drank too much, and Masha and I got talking about that letter.
Rey and Masha had an argument, something that if you ask me had brewed there for some time. Pre-wedding jitters, I reckon. Rey stormed off; Masha could hardly walk. I took her home to Harcourt Street. We didn’t fuck, despite what everyone might assume. We got down to our underwear. We cuddled under the sheets, drunk as Hemingway. I fingered her awhile. I remember not much else, but her waking, looking embarrassed, horrified, mortified even, at what Rey would have woken up feeling like without her there, alone in the late-morning light. She rushed off. We never spoke of it.
Thankfully, though, Vesna brings up the night I supposedly tried to hit on her but ended up making out with Masha and she called me a misogynist. Yuri pipes in at this point, saying that, on the morning after that party, he walked in on me getting a blowjob from my girlfriend’s sister, which doesn’t help the scene with Vesna at all but outrages everyone else enough to draw attention away from the fact that Vesna hates me and always will.
—What about what you said to Dorothy Porter? Vesna cuts in again.
—What? says Sando.
—At the regional poetry festival in ’95, Brentley told Dorothy Porter to go fuck herself!
—It had nothing to do with gender! I scoff.
—Tell me about that! said Sando, looking for the first time away from the road, long enough to glance at me in the rear-view mirror.
—Okay. A bunch of us had readings lined up in the New Voices section, and right before our part Porter gets up on stage and talks about us. You know, saying how we should have the support of the older generation of poets, signifying our importance, yadda yadda.
—Yes, says Sando, somehow impatient.
Look at him there, crouched over, one with the steering wheel now. His corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches conceals the tension in his fishbone-thin shoulders. I like Sando, but we never gravitated towards each other, instead circling each other like opposing magnets. I spent a month in his living room, awake all day and night. I broke his keyboard trying to write my novel, but he never said much, about anything. He looks like someone built him out of Meccano, thin and flexible as a sheet of tin punched full of holes. He reminds me of an anorexic Atlas, holding up a planet-sized burden in his head, but he has the surprising strength of Meccano, too. He holds the world there, on his shoulder, gazing down into the universe below. No one else says anything, so I continue:
—Then … at the break, right before our readings, I see Porter getting on her motorbike in the car park. I wander over and I say Hey, you not sticking around for the important new generation of voices you just spoke about? She says – no paraphrasing here – Fuck no, I need to get to the pub. So I said Why don’t you go fuck yourself, then.
Much laughing, but the scene ends with Vesna snapping:
—Some of your attitudes belong back with the dinos, and then she hisses vagina dentata at me, which I know – because, believe it or not, I do read quite widely – implies that I have a fear of the vagina, which, of course, I don’t. I’d go swimming in a tank of them, no worries at all. Instead of saying that, though, I shout, probably because of the LSD:
—Arggh, a Vagosaurus … help me! with mock terror in my voice, but I must have yelled it too loud because no one laughs much after that.
Then we arrive in Newcastle, to perform at the National Young Writers’ Festival. Eight of us – Masha and Rey, Sando and Vesna, Yuri and I, and another poet, Bodhi, and his girlfriend, Mary, who travelled separate to us – all crammed into a cold, damp, concrete broom closet full of creaking lumpy bunk beds. Bodhi towers over everyone. He has a giant beard and waist-length dreads and he wears oversized clothes. His poems have a nice mix of beauty and depravity. A lot of them portray his sexy girlfriend, Mary. I’d never make a pass at her; Bodhi looks like he’d demolish any bastard who tried. Anyway, if you ask me, Mary and Bodhi look like they have long-term written all over them. If I did get suicidal and make a pass at Mary, she’d not even notice. That happens when couples devote themselves to each other.
I don’t know if Rey wants me dead or not. He never says much, but you can tell by the way he watches everything like a bird enthusiast, with the slight curl of a smile they get when they see something rare. You can tell he soaks up the world as material for his poems. Rey reminds me of a Junior Woodchuck from Donald Duck comics. The Junior Woodchucks hang in the forest, still as the stump they sit on, and after a while the animals pay them no mind and get up to their antics. The Woodchucks watch everything, noting down behavioural abnormalities.
Tonight Masha defused the tension between us, anyway … perhaps I imagined the whole thing. Everyone bails out in a big hurry to eat but I stay behind to shower, feeling a bit shaken by Vesna’s outright hatred of me. As I get my jeans halfway up, Masha walks into the room, obviously to retrieve something forgotten, and sees me standing here in my boxers – the very same boxers I wore that drunken night when we stripped down and got under the sheets. She makes this sort of involuntary titter, blushes and hurries back out. Obviously she finds her memories of that night amusing.
I try hard to party, to pick up chicks, to get drunk and stoned and dig everything like the future holds any real hope for lost wastrels like me. But I had a terrible dream last night. Love herself came to visit, and I ran away. Love and I sat on the porticoes of an old slumped mansion in Hades, invincible to fire, and Love told me secrets, about the ancestral animals, our body and their knowledge. I dreamed fitfully about the aristocratic-looking gallery assistant Sunny, listened for her laugh in the crowds at the bars and on the Newcastle streets, staggering in the dawn with drunken poets.
Damn hey, Sunshine, what a name. I’ve spent countless hours inventing new metaphors for the moon and the night, the dawn so
metimes but never for the sun. Half my mind on poetry and half on her green eyes. Half my heart in a bottle of whisky and half in her palm. What if D-day has arrived? I slam the door shut in Love’s face and she might never visit again. What have I gained anyway, running from her? Sitting here in a bar in Newcastle while all the other writers of my generation from this part of the world get along like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I’ve had it this way all my life. Treated like an outsider. But then, just now a pretty girl asked me to dance and I shrugged her off. All my own doing, all of this. I feel pretty damaged at the moment. See myself in preschool, sitting on the outside of the ring. Not singing along. I feel too damn self-conscious for that.
4
Dusk all the way back from Newcastle. Shops closed in every town we pass through. No one says much for the whole trip. Sando drives painfully slow, like he feels no hurry to return to Brisbane. I guess we all went within, reflecting on the events of the festival. Yuri and I got drunk with a few real-life published writers, up-and-comings. We initiated Nick Earls into the wonders of green chartreuse. We had a long conversation about the New Decadence with Luke Davies, a writer from Sydney. My gig went okay. I read my poem ‘Plastic Daffodil’ and the artist Ben Frost came to compliment me on my use of metaphor to describe killing native fauna for fun and profit.
The truth, though – and I can hardly bring myself to admit it – I feel like a husk, like a cicada shell discarded on a ghost gum. I’ve floated above this road on rubber so many times since 1987, when Reuben and I went hitching, without the kicks, that I feel like I’ve had enough. What have I learned? I mean, really learned? I don’t think I’ll ever find God. I don’t think God wants me to find him. I think God hates it when you look for him. I’ve denied that love exists, dismissing it as a fancy of the leisure classes, psycho-candy invented by aristocrats pretending at real poetry. Perhaps I have denied Love at my own peril? She may have come knocking, but I ignored the call, too busy writing a poem about her. What do I know? What do we as humans know about ourselves? Someone in my philosophy class pointed out, at university in Armidale, years ago, that our brains have no idea how they work. The same applies for our definition of ourselves. Who the fuck called me a human? Other humans! Who called them humans? And so on. Perhaps Truth doesn’t come pre-packaged, has no instant magic. Maybe Truth grows like a new puppy, a little every day – so you don’t notice. Other people do, though. They come to visit and they say Wow! How the puppy has grown! And you say Really? Because the puppy looks the same as it did yesterday, it shat on the rug same as yesterday, damn thing chewed my boots, just like yesterday.
I keep thinking of a poster Candy had in her room all those years ago, a large glossy photograph of The Sisters of Mercy. It had a quote from the lyrics of their song ‘Some Kind of Stranger’. It said: All I know for sure, and all I know for real is knowing doesn’t mean so much. I’ve listened to that song a million times and every time I cry. Candy, some kind of angel in the hall outside. Has anyone ever said a truer thing? Except for maybe Buddha, or Bill Hicks?
Yeah, emulating your heroes leads to heartache. I bet my heroes drowned in loneliness and cried into their absinthe as soon as the biographer looked away. I tried to live like I have the starring role in a film about my life. I treated other people like cameras and did my best to not look at them, listened only to their voices as cues for my own lines – always busy ducking dollies, aware of stage left, tempted to break the fourth wall – like a crazy person in a supermarket queue, demanding we all look at them, addressing the audience. For certain, the universe has rhyme, but you’ll never find any reason. I feel like I’ve graduated the School of Life with a PhD in ennui.
Then, as the last of the afternoon rolls itself out like a long child, Brisbane’s mercury-gas lights flickering on, Sando ghosts us to the kerb of Harcourt Street. As I exit the Falcon and stretch, I look up; I don’t know why. A psychology student once told me people hardly ever look up. Sunny sits up there in Jodie’s apartment window, smoking a cigarette. She beams down on me, bright as the tundra in an Arctic summer. I go right up to Jodie’s apartment without even dropping my bags, knock on the door, and Sunshine answers.
——
I told her everything, my whole damn life story, without even stopping at her reallys? and her bullshits! I opened up and ranted at her through the night and two packets of cigarettes. We went out as the pubs opened and sat in the back drinking beers while I kept on ranting. The whole damn story too, including realising I’d fallen in love with her on my way to Newcastle, right up to here and now. I even told her that I thought about her the whole time down there in Newcastle. I didn’t care if it sounded creepy.
I read Sunny’s tarot. The Lovers comes right up, inverse, which gives me a shock at first, because upside down it means two people will come together for purely earthly purposes, the Angel of Love chained to her own carnality. Sunny looks suspicious, like I rigged the deck of life. So I ask her to shuffle and choose different cards, and The Lovers comes up again, only the right way up this time, and I accidentally let out an audible sigh of relief.
—Did you rig this deck? she asks, checking for tells.
—Yeah. You don’t know this? Every night I have a show, The Great Brentovsky, the worst magician who ever lived.
She titters. I do a coin trick there, so transparent she laughs her arse off. I probably told her too much, because even though she comes down to my apartment for the night and we talk up a tsunami, joke about The Lovers card, right after I tell her about Candy and her sisters, she says she has three sisters of her own. She remains clothed in bed, but lets me hold her.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Candy and Marie and Blyth, or sounded boastful when I talked about sex with them. I touch Sunny through her t-shirt and she turns her back to me, says:
—I can’t possibly sleep with you … not yet. I haven’t read your poetry. I’d never sleep with a terrible poet.
We lie here on the floor of my bare rented room on this old lumpy futon mattress Josef rescued from a factory dumpster, and I feel at peace, for the first time since I don’t know when.
The next morning we go to work at the art gallery, and Jodie, spying us arriving together, says:
—See, I told you … sparks!
——
Nothing happens for weeks. I see Sunny slave-driven by her boss, so busy she stops giving me smiles across the worksite from the office. I assume I’ve blown it with my story of anti-heroes, sex in overdrive and claustrophobic roads. I made it sound like I have an enormous sexual appetite, and that I feel pretty proud about making it known. Ha, call me insatiable but not proud. See, I can’t help but get hyperbolic and purple. Sunny doesn’t know this, though, that I often fall prey to exaggeration. I conclude that I’ve shocked her, due to her age. But this doesn’t make me feel better. What if she dismisses me as a dirty old man? I feel dirty and old at twenty-six. Remorse, get thee behind me!
A little beam of hope shone this afternoon. An attractive, intelligent blonde chick came up to Eliot and me in the gallery. I swear I’ve seen her somewhere before. She says:
—Brentley? Only she looks a little angry. Eliot and I point at each other and say:
—Him … he did it! and she laughs, not angry at all, and says she wants to meet me.
—Stella, she says, winking: Sunny and I go way back, old school friends. She told me to come say hi.
Later, on my way home, kicking up Brunswick Street, past the old boarding house where Sando used to live and I attempted to write my novel, past the doorway where the stranger who haunts me used to stand, I remember I have seen Stella before, at a Nick Cave concert, years ago. She had on a handmade t-shirt emblazoned with Lady, love your cunt. You see, I might suffer from a bit of name deafness, but I never forget a face, especially not a pretty one.
Then, because once long ago I cursed God, Tiffany shows up. Remember her? I do, from Townsville. I’ll have to read
back through my story to see if I told you what happened with her. I assume I didn’t, though, because of how embarrassed I feel about the whole situation. She came and sat down at my table at Ric’s Bar before I even saw her. I probably would have run if I had seen her. Last time I saw her in Townsville, I blew the scene. I hate that. I don’t mind when other people force an edit, because all the other players have their own director: who cares if they fuck up? When mine yells Cut! it really pisses me off.
Tiffany came around at two in the morning. I spent about three months smiling at her in nightclub queues. A chick way out of my league – you can tell she comes from generational wealth. Society warns girls like her about bum-poets and scoundrels before they’ve learned to talk. Upstairs, looking around for a bottle of whisky I stashed someplace, I’d turned to find her naked, closing curtains. She launched at me, knocked the bottle out of my hand, pinned me on the bed and sat right on my face. She could tell something went wrong. I spent about an hour in the shower until I heard the door slam as she left.
Now, here at Ric’s, right when I couldn’t give a flying fuck about any woman except the one who has crept into my heart like a lone sunbeam through a dusty curtain, here comes Tiffany.
Wasted. Going through the motions. At least this time I rise to the occasion. But the whole thing bores me. Tiffany feels rigid, like her rich-girl upbringing won’t let her go. She hardly moves. I don’t remember sex feeling this cold. I’ve got Sunshine on my mind. Tiffany manages to squeal as she comes. Enough to wake Yuri. I hear him moving around in the kitchen, trying not to listen. Poor little rich girl, come for an adventure on the poverty side of the line. She falls asleep after a while. I go out to the kitchen, find Yuri there, reading Rimbaud, puffing a cigarette, smoke rising in the morning as it breaks on the windows.
—Sunshine! Yuri whispers, giving the thumbs-up, jerking his head at my bedroom.
—No. Tiffany. I give the disappointed mouth shape.
Scoundrel Days Page 28