Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  —Man … he says, shaking his head: I thought you and Sunny had it going on? Not two nights ago you got drunk and ranted at me about finding love and her not wanting you. This won’t help.

  —Yeah. I feel like I cheated on Sunny and we’ve never even kissed.

  —Weird, man, sighs Yuri, turns a page.

  I want Tiffany out of my house, gone, out of my life. And she shouldn’t take it personally. She sleeps until early afternoon. I wake her, pry her out of my bed saying Starving … let’s eat! She takes about an hour to shower and dress, and I get her down the hall and out the front door and Sunny’s face rises over the open boot of a parked car. Like the light of truth, catching me there, in the shadows of my old ways. I want nothing more than to prove I can change, to myself, to Love, in case she ever comes around again.

  Sunny sees Tiffany and me coming down the steps and through the gate and she looks hurt, but proud, and the hurt runs away to the edges of her face and hides under her red curls, along her jawline smooth and beautiful as a marble bust of Helen of fucken Troy. She puts the artist portfolios or whatever she has in the car and says:

  —Hi!

  —Hi, I stammer. Red, then sickly pale.

  ——

  As I pick through my Fatboy’s Cafe all-day breakfast and Tiffany chit-chats happily about her plans and aspirations while in Brisbane, I remember, as a teenager, fishing on a beach somewhere with my father’s brother. He hadn’t spoken for hours when he suddenly said Sorry, kid … lot on my mind … real dark days, depressed … But hey, look on the bright side, my psychologist told me, she said you don’t have to believe everything you think. And I dumbly said, like any teenager who knows everything, What, you only just realised that? Obnoxious? Maybe, but true enough, at least for me – because I’ve never believed my own bullshit, positive or negative. People do, though; I can’t imagine why. Walking around thinking themselves important, treating friends like paupers and strangers like kings, in case said stranger can help them get higher up on people’s heads. Or they walk around with saddle-sore shoulders, wisdom-aching through their days and dreaming of dying. I resolve right here, sitting like some clown in a sitcom of errors, I won’t lie to myself and I won’t expect Sunny to believe my bullshit either. I’ll tell the whole unabridged truth of it, or die trying, dammit.

  ——

  Later that day, at the gallery, somehow I manage to get Sunny alone on the balcony. A bunch of artists and collectors and well-to-dos have come together to eat risotto and tapas and to celebrate the new showrooms. I say to Sunny, above the clamour of the party:

  —Can we please go on a date?

  —Hmm … she says, sipping champagne.

  —Please?

  —What about the chick I saw you leaving your apartment with?

  —Look … scout’s honour. I make the scout three-finger-sign thing: That chick means nothing to me … simply a dark corner I turned while fleeing my shadowy past.

  —Fucken poet, Sunny laughs. She takes out a cigarette, taps it on the packet. She lights up, exhales: I think, if we do this, check out each other and see what happens, I think we should agree to make it exclusive … until we know how we feel.

  —Absolutely fine by me.

  —Shake on it … and I might read your poetry tonight. Winks.

  I put out my hand, laughing, nervous.

  —No … spit! she says, and she spits into her palm. Challenges me with that blue-green sparkle which makes me feel like I struck it rich, like a famous actress asked for my phone number, or I got more than I paid in change.

  I understand it now, beautiful ideas that kill, the spiderwisp of promise pregnant with morning regret. The elegant agony of Truth you can never articulate. I understand Love – Love doesn’t care if you don’t want her. Love didn’t come searching for you, either. Love looks just as surprised as you when you bump into her on the escalator, rushing to the game of life, lost in your preoccupations, afraid to miss the kick-off. We all sit alone in a cinema behind our eyes, dreaming of at least a walk-on part, rehearsing our lines so we don’t disappoint our viewers, while outside Life runs past laughing. I understand Love now. She came along as literal sunshine and brushed aside my Svengali act like webs across a garden path. I see her and I smile, relax inside, give over to the ebb and flow, spit in my hand – and surrender, for the first time, ever.

  Author’s Note

  I have changed people’s names in this true story to protect their privacy.

  Fliss’s husband ‘Jim’ died from a heroin overdose in Melbourne, 1999. RIP, brother.

  In the year 2012 ‘Reuben’ received a life sentence for murder in the state of Tasmania, Australia. The news stated that the killing happened during a fight over an eighteen-year-old girl.

  I composed this book, in its entirety, using a literary constraint known as English Prime. No tenses of the verb ‘to be’ (am, are, be, been, being, is, was, were, plus contractions) appear in the text (excluding attributed quotations). For more information on this constraint refer to my doctoral research paper, ‘Beyond Is: Creative Writing with English Prime’, published in TEXT journal, April 2016 (available online).

  Acknowledgements

  Love and gratitude to these beacons in various dark harbours: Sún, Jack and Vivienne. My parents and my sisters. Everyone I journeyed with. Lindsay Simpson, Nigel Krauth, Anthony Lawrence, Annette Hughes, Maggie Hall, Martin Edmond, Caroline Overington, Cheryl Akle, Lou Johnson, Alexandra Payne, Kevin O’Brien, Ian See and University of Queensland Press. Thank you.

  First published 2017 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  Copyright © Brentley Frazer 2017

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design by Josh Durham, Design by Committee

  Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher, and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.

  Lyrics quoted from the song ‘Some Kind of Stranger’ by The Sisters of Mercy, 1985: songwriters Andrew Eldritch and Gary Marx, published by Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

  Extract from the poem ‘Untitled Plane Crash (For Jet)’ © M. Abbott 1993

  Untitled poem quoted by the character ‘Jim’ © The Estate of A.C. 1977–1999

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN

  978 0 7022 5956 2 (pbk)

  978 0 7022 5892 3 (ePDF)

  978 0 7022 5893 0 (ePub)

  978 0 7022 5894 7 (Kindle)