‘And let me guess, you’re too big for it?’
I nodded, and the arrogance inflamed him. He punched me in the bloody wound beneath my ribs then shoved me off the roof of his car. It hurt in jolts, my face and ribs crashing into the asphalt bridge. I felt faint now, and confused, my vision failing in sections.
‘Fuck off then, wonder boy,’ Gordon said, crying, looming, above me.
Gordon drove off with a skid, the sound of The Breeders’ ‘Cannonball’ moving away, fading off on that bouncy baseline.
I finally got to my feet, blood pouring out the side of me. I dipped my index finger inside myself, and then licked it. My own blood, it tasted so sweet. The sun was up now and Botany Bay was busy with boats and windsurfers. I heard a truck. I held my arm out. I needed to go to Sutherland Hospital immediately; I was born there after all.
11
The next few weeks were a torturous brand of limbo, waiting for our first-round offers to university, then second- and third-round offers. None of us saw much of each other in this period. Stuart went surfing, fucking and para-sailing in Bali, while Gordon seemed to always be working. I saw him a few times, of course, but it was only brief, on our bikes, at Coyotes for a quick beer, or an even quicker jam in the garage where neither of us quite committed to the repertoire. His restless leg was back, and I knew I was the reason. It took years of love and friendship to stop that thing shaking, then just one crazy night, and it had returned.
While Gordon was ignoring me, I was ignoring Courtney. I knew if I saw her all the feelings would come back and I’d rethink my decision to go, and I knew that wouldn’t be right: I had to go. But still, she kept calling – even Nina called once or twice to ask me over for a fruit whip – but I never called back. I just nodded at Agatha as she delivered the messages and said, ‘yeah, cool, thanks’. And sure, maybe I was a little, or let’s call it a lot, embarrassed. And if anything is going to hold a man back, it’s that.
So after dozens of unreturned calls Courtney appeared on my front lawn in jeans and a t-shirt, and we walked to McDonald’s Caringbah. On the way up Telopea Avenue she picked a rose off a tree and asked me why I didn’t think to pick it off and give it to her.
‘I simply didn’t notice the plant,’ I said.
She picked the petals off the thing as we walked, leaving a melodramatic trail of broken romance behind us.
We ate Chicken McNuggets in silence then went to see Cousins at the Miranda Greater Union, which starred Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini, it was kind of a stupid and predictable movie, but I liked how everyone was sleeping with everyone. Towards the middle Courtney and I kissed a bit and I tried to finger her but she said she had her period so we just fixed ourselves up and watched the end. On the home we stopped by McDonald’s again and got a sundae – I didn’t want one but I got one anyway – and we sat out in the children’s play area and ate slowly, watching fat kids rock back and forth on plastic dogs.
‘How are you?’ I asked her.
‘Okay,’ she said, licking her plastic spoon.
‘Good,’ I said. I wished we were outside in the adult area so I could smoke, but instead we were here with the kids and it was all about setting ‘good examples’ and bullshit.
‘Why have you been avoiding me?’ she said, which was a stupid fucking question, but perhaps the only way in to this.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Didn’t realise I was.’
‘It was mean, what you said.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘You can’t just say something like that and then go off and not ever call me or anything, I mean you’re an intelligent person Neil, but you’re so narcissistic, haven’t you ever heard of human decency?’
Haven’t you ever heard of fuck off?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I felt stupid.’
‘You felt stupid? I was the one called “desperate” and left there on Murray Kirkwood’s bedroom floor completely naked!’
I wanted to laugh.
‘Neil? Are you listening to me?’ she said, like how Mum would.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Then what? Anything to say about that night?’
‘If I could have it over again… I would do it differently,’ I said and left it there. It was true I would have it over and when I had it over I’d stay home and read The Celestine Prophecies instead of going out at all.
‘It’s ok. It’s just drugs. And timing…’
‘We were pretty smashed.’
‘The Es were strong,’ she said, and it was over, all of it forgiven, well at least on the outside.
‘Have you decided?’ I asked her, as a blond child spilt his icecream cone and went into a psychotic tantrum beneath the slippery slide.
‘Decided?’ she asked, and she sounded so innocent, all the power was mine and I abused it, never looking at her or colouring my voice – just cold – cold and equivocal.
‘University,’ I said. ‘Where will you go?’
She didn’t say anything for a while. She just stared down into her sundae cup painted where the dregs of gone strawberry ripped up the sides. Then she rose and walked over to the entrance gate, popped the dessert in the bin and returned to her position beside me on the steps.
‘I’m going to Sydney still,’ she said, and in her voice there were tears but the tears had a hand on them, pushing them back behind a gate.
‘Where will you live?’ I asked.
‘At Mum’s,’ she said, and I scoffed. ‘I can’t abandon her Neil! My father is going to live in New Zealand with my grandmother, they’re separating – Mum and Dad. I have to stay with her or she’ll be alone.’
‘Ok,’ I said, passive as a table.
‘Sometimes you have to look after people, and anyway, I can get the train in, it’s only forty minutes to Redfern station.’
‘Cool, makes sense,’ I said, and there was more silence, unless you count that tinny, life-affirming musak.
Six minutes passed and I told her I’d auditioned for the Bachelor of Arts communications – theatre/media course at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst and somehow I had been accepted.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d tried out?’ she asked me.
‘I never told anyone, didn’t think I ’d get in.’
‘Of course you’d get in,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Are you going to go?’
I shrugged. ‘The whole place felt magic when I was there.’
She took my hands in hers and rubbed them like they were frozen and she was trying to thaw them out.
‘Look at me, Neil.’
I turned towards her for the first time today; her face was flushed and open, she had no make-up on at all except for lipstick, she was not hiding from me, she was asking me to see her.
‘How long is the drive to Bathurst?’ she asked me.
‘Three and a half hours.’
‘That’s not much!’ She smiled.
‘It is if you’re doing it all the time,’ I said.
‘Do you think we can handle it?’ she said, in a high and bright voice, and all I could think was how right it was to call her desperate.
‘No, I want to be free,’ I said, and took my hands away, feeling for my pouch of tobacco and looking around at anything but her. I knew I was being childish but still I couldn’t stop; it was easier to make things clear to her by being all petulant and aloof.
‘It’s so hurtful to have you discard me this way, after everything that has happened between us, Neil.’
‘Nothing happened,’ I said.
‘I’m not talking about sex,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about then?’ I said, rolling a cigarette. I didn’t care about the future generations, I needed the hit now.
‘You hurt me, and you hurt Gordon,’ she said.
‘Gordon’s a big guy, he’ll bounce back.’
‘Who the fuck have you become? You’re like this totally different guy – and in only two weeks!�
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I explained it to her. ‘In order to grow, we have to unchain ourselves from the past.’
‘I didn’t realise we were chains.’
I sighed. ‘I just need to go and find myself, and I can’t do that with the people from my past judging me as I go.’
Courtney could’ve been anyone she wanted, but instead of reaching out into the great unknown she cowered, the invisible ties of guilt and family hauling her in like a dumb fish.
‘You’re pathetic,’ I said. ‘You’re all pathetic.’
She stood and said, ‘You’re up yourself!’ and stormed off past the fibreglass statue of Ronald sitting on a bench.
The day I left for Bathurst Gordon came over and we all had some champagne and orange on the front lawn. Me, Agatha, Mum, Gordon, Stuart – even Dad was there, not saying heaps, but he was there in shorts and a penguin t-shirt, sipping Fosters out of a can.
I rang Courtney the night before to invite her and Nina answered. Her voice was colder than usual but I could still hear affection in it, something in the way she said ‘Mmmm’ before ‘I’m not sure if she wants to talk to you.’
‘She’s mad at me still?’
‘Yes, she is. You hurt her very deeply Neil.’
‘I’m just honest Mrs G,’ I said. ‘That’s who I am now.’
Then she took a deep breath and said something she had clearly been thinking of saying if she was ever presented with the chance.
‘Remember to chew what’s in your mouth. Where you are going there will be many temptations and many reasons to look over people’s shoulders for what else is on offer. But chew what’s in your mouth Neil, be where you are and never anywhere else. If you do this, then the rest of them will come your way soon enough.’
I could hear Courtney in the background asking who she was talking to – Nina must have told her it was me because she didn’t ask again. Then the call was over and with it that part of my life, in that haunted house, with those stoic women and those insane fruit drinks.
I wasn’t expecting gifts but they came at me. Mum bought me a yellow mattress that I could tuck under my arm. She sobbed, handing it over to me in its plastic pop-wrapping. She also bought me a year’s worth of underpants and socks, handkerchiefs and lanolin hand cream. Agatha gave me Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda; she said his teachings had really helped her through her long-term unemployment. Agatha kissed me and I nearly combusted; I could not remember her ever kissing me – not once in our eighteen-year tenure – and then she remembered she was coming along with Mum and me on the drive to Bathurst and so she got heaps embarrassed and went inside.
Stuart had bought me some extra-small ‘flavoured’ condoms and laughed his fucking nut off as I unwrapped them.
Dad handed me a pair of binoculars. He said something about ‘looking at things’ and then he shut up again, sipping on his Fosters and disappearing behind the shrub.
Then Gordon stepped forward. My heart was racing a million miles an hour. His grey eyes were glassy and his hands were shaking as he handed me a long box, almost as tall as me, wrapped in newspaper. I opened it to find a sword, a long, slender silver sword that had been engraved:
Cronk,
Don’t forget us
Gordon and Stuart, 1995
Stuart came forward, a stretched chocolate condom in his hands blown up to resemble a poodle.
‘Poodle penis!’ he said, hugging me with a set of slaps on the back.
Then Gordon approached me again, holding out the face of the blade. ‘Sixteenth-century samurai,’ he said.
I hugged him and started crying.
‘Take care of Courtney for me, won’t you?’ I asked Gordon, and he nodded into me, warm tears gathering in the bowl of my collarbone and neck.
‘The sword is to protect you,’ Gordon whispered, holding me tight as hell. Then we broke apart in a push and I was left with the sword and twelve hundred feelings. Gordon put some sunglasses on and wiped his nose. Stuart punched him in the arm and called him a ‘faggot’. I took the sword, held it out like Excalibur, and bowed to my two mates. They bowed back to me, and that was that, we were connected forever.
The last thing I remember about that morning is driving away from that house, the house I grew up in. And Gordon’s body diminishing in the rear-vision mirror, his chubby white arms waving at me from the front lawn of my life; he was all I could see. He was all I could feel. He was all I thought about for the entire drive, and then we got to campus.
Part 2
12
Seriously, things are better when you’re skinny. T-shirts look more awesome, you can bend over or sit down shirtless in the sun without having to worry about how you’re looking, because you’re always looking skinny – from every angle. It’s truly liberating.
I had been wonderfully skinny for three years now, which was wild considering my diet consisted of beer and sausages, potato wedges and wine, beer and wine, chocolate biscuits, spaghetti bolognese and wine and sausages, and my favourite dish, microwave penne pasticcio from the all-night Coles in South Bathurst. (They had just done up the all-night Coles and I can tell you it was a fucking joke. They put palm trees in it. Palm trees! In a Coles. In the Western Tablelands of New South Wales. What were the intentions behind this? More pineapple sales?)
I looked especially thin in the mirror that morning. My weird poking-out ribs and my six-pack. My long brown hair and my goatee. I wish Courtney knew what I was capable of now. With my rhythms and my cock, my thin agile frame, fuck, I could really fuck now. I missed that girl mad-style, and when I thought of her it was like being ripped open, whereas Gordon, he could go and get fucked, on so many levels.
Last night, after dress rehearsal, I’d gone to Swanna’s house. She and I had been having an affair for three months – since she had started working on my major work. She was practically a virgin when I met her but now she was in tune with nearly all of it. I had broken her in – kind of like what Michael Hutchence did to Kylie Minogue, I guess. Taught the young thing. She loved wax.
It all started when I began the audition process for my major work. Naturally everyone wanted to be a part of it. She came into the studio in a floral dress with a slit up the side, eating from a bag of birdseed, with a lost look that could only be described as ‘Please help me, third-year man!’
I didn’t give her the part, but she was so mesmerising to look at it was impossible not to ruin her life in some way. Tiny and exotic with these dazzling eyes, a curious angel sent from Sri Lanka or God. I had the straightaway stir and quake in my gut and knew that my relationship with Chandra was in jeopardy. Well, maybe that is too strong a word. Chandra and I had lived through a lot in our three years together. A small dalliance with a first year was not going to shake the foundations. At least, that was my justification for firing the starter gun.
I found Swanna in the library later that week, bent over the microfiche absorbed in the bright blue stencils. I told her about this thing called ‘intranet’ that was kicking off in the computer centre. It was this wild and new way of sharing information across campus. Like sending a letter but the recipient gets it within seconds. She explained that she wasn’t really an actor but wanted to be involved in my piece as she found my work… well I believe she said ‘deeply inspiring’. Not to worry, I told her. She said it was meant to be hot this weekend, a rare thing round here. And I said to myself ‘tell her about the swimming hole’, so the next thing the library knows I’m telling her about the swimming hole called White Rock, out near the Oberon abattoirs.
Was it a Wednesday? We jumped in my Magna and drove out to the humble little lake between two vacated deer farms. It was the world’s most peaceful place, except when there were snakes, but even the snakes at White Rock seemed relaxed, slithering about all groovy.
I took off my ‘No Jabiluka Mines’ t-shirt and my flares and threw myself naked into the green excellent water. Swanna stalled by the car in her singlet and fisherman pants, sheepish.
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��Does anyone ever come down here?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes this dude on his kayak but like, nah.’
She had an irregularly hairy bush for her size – it was so bushy it seemed to blend in with the surrounding shrubbery – and her small, dipping breasts housed massive red nipples the size of LPs. Being from Cronulla, I had hardly seen an Indian-looking woman, let alone a beautiful one, and naked, in a lake, before me: Swanna was a swan no doubt. After a nervous, painfully slow submergence into the water she was soon swanning about in it. She had no issues with her body or its involvement with the water or all available nature for that matter, and I knew right then the fucking would be good and she would let me take photos of her region – anything in the realm of ‘deeply inspiring’.
She splashed about then did graceful things, then spent whole chunks of minutes on her back, floating down the flow so trusting. Akimbo and glorious – there were reasons you met people.
The first time we made love was the second, no, third visit to White Rock. It was clearly her intention to make things move along, as she brought wine and a yoga mat. She laid the mat down by the car and told me about growing up half-Sri Lankan in Australia. How her father, on a business trip to Colombo, had met her mother at a cricket match, fallen instantly in love and brought her back here. Her father was an agricultural scientist and they were married in Canberra, where Swanna lived before uni. Her mother died of breast cancer when Swanna was fourteen, which she admitted she was still not entirely over. Her mother was her best friend and not a day went by where she did not think of her, often wondering what her home town was like, for Swanna had never been to Sri Lanka.
‘My father remarried,’ she said, her singlet all wet from the swimmers inside it, as she popped open the wine and poured it into teacups. ‘But the woman he remarried, Rhonda…’
‘Rhonda.’ I smiled, sipping the cheap chardonnay.
‘Rhonda.’ She smiled back. ‘She is a scientist as well, and this, well, I think two scientists together, it makes things very cold and detached in the house. Sometimes I feel like they don’t care if I exist or not, they just go on talking about their work as if you’re not there, as if you are a lesser thing.’
How it feels Page 9