‘That girl you brought with you from Bathurst is a piece of work!’ Courtney said, a rare scowl taking over her mouth.
‘Her name is Chandra.’
‘Right.’ Courtney seethed.
‘What did she do that was so bad?’ I was aggressive back; I hated her clothes.
‘She is in there pashing Sarah Kirkwood! Who is blind drunk and cannot stand up. Your friend is mauling her, fingering her in public! Disgusting!’
I laughed out loud. ‘She’s just having some fun.’
‘Isn’t she your girlfriend, man?’ Gordon asked.
‘We kinda got an open thing going,’ I said, feeling the immediate need to elaborate. The drugs were in the house now, well and truly. ‘Society created these rules and imposed them on us. Society invented “the relationship”, but we are choosing to define our own union.’
‘Right. Amazing.’ Gordon nodded, passive-aggressively.
‘She is off her tits on drugs and really I just want her out of here.’ Courtney looked at Gordon, looking for solidarity.
‘Since when have you been anti-drugs, Courtney?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t had an E since the results party actually. They disgust me, to tell you the truth, Neil.’ Courtney made sense in her new clothes.
‘Well there’s a turnaround,’ I said, trying to keep my buzzing face from releasing the news of the two ecstasy tablets I had dumped not forty minutes ago. Courtney wasn’t wearing a bra so I could just make out the top half and middle of both her breasts. They looked older, longer and less pale. But still I wanted to reach out and touch them, to put one in my mouth even and show her everything I knew. It wouldn’t be like Sarah Kirkwood’s party this time. I could take her to a hotel and show her the whole cabaret now. All the weird, wild and unfathomably gentle things I had learnt about the art of pleasuring women.
‘I told your slut friend to get a hotel and that Gordon’s aunties and his aunties’ friends shouldn’t have to come in here… to the toilet . . . and see two dykes mauling each other!’ Courtney was going full tilt now.
‘And then your friend Chandra turns to me and calls me “homophobic”! I mean, me? Homophobic? My uncle runs an interior decorating shop in Rockdale.’ Courtney took a deep breath. ‘Then Sarah Kirkwood passed out in the sink and your fucking slut whore girlfriend starts painting the word “cunt” on the wall with her lipstick, she is a fucking idiot, like if that’s the people you choose to hang out with Neil, then…’
‘Where is she now?’ Gordon asked, pushing me aside with his elbow. ‘I’ll throw the bitch out.’ And off he went to throw the bitch out. Then my E kicked in tsunami-style.
‘Seriously, Neil,’ Courtney said, turning to Gordon’s beer.
‘Seriously, Neil,’ I mocked her, grinning insanely as she sipped.
I reached out and touched Courtney’s earlobe, the bit beneath her earlobe, and then the bit where it corners in and goes neck. She quivered in her skin but she did not stop me. Both Es were crashing together like two enormous waves. I want to fuck you, Courtney, and be fucked by you. Let me show you how great I am at sex now. Let me take you from here, let me breathe life back into your clothes, your tits, your cunt, your mind, your soul, your cunt again.
‘Take your hands off me, Neil.’
I had one hand on her breast and one finger on her mouth. So much so quick I didn’t even see. Everyone watching!
‘Take your hands off me!’ Courtney screamed, but it was just her and me.
I had called Courtney half-a-dozen times over the separate years. Usually, well mostly, actually, always when I was drunk. Once, when she answered, she was drunk too and we spoke like old and excellent friends. We compared university tales and observations, and she was particularly dry and hilarious as she described some of the more earnest law students she was studying with. Often I called and got Nina. Well, I nearly always got Nina because Courtney was always ‘out with friends’ and now I knew why. Nina was always so happy to hear from me she would put a reggae album on and pour herself a scotch. I could hear the clink-ice chink away, every time she filled and refilled it. The last time I called I got Courtney and she said, ‘You are bad,’ and yelled at me for never calling Gordon. I told her I still loved her and she said something horribly clichéd like, ‘You’ve changed, Neil.’ I may have said, equally clichéd, ‘I just got out of the Shire is all.’
Upside down. Gordon had Chandra by the throat. She was laughing, smeared in lipstick, as he dragged her across the dance floor. The party was torn between looking at me and Courtney, or Gordon and Chandra. Gordon had a great suit on too, may I add. A grey pinstripe number with a mauve shirt and flamboyant vintage tie. He really looked handsome that night, especially when he was dancing – the suit seemed to shimmer. The suit was moving through light. The suit disappeared with Chandra into the elevator shaft.
‘Come with me!’ Courtney took my hand and led me away from the ogling aunties, grandmothers, uncles and all those peers I used to have Winfield Blues with on the oval. She led me into a dining room that could have easily been a 1940s film set. The chairs were creamy leather, and the chandelier twinkled in a subdued way.
‘May I have this dance?’ I asked, stepping over a chair onto the floor.
‘Neil, you have to go now. There are some stairs at the back of the restaurant. Go now before he comes back.’
Courtney was pushing at my shoulder blades, looking back at the party, which was burning bright with the garrulous many.
I could see what a great lawyer she would be, the split focus and the hard intent – the all-seeing, all-knowing eye.
‘Why do I got to leave, sugar tits?’ I lifted up my mohair vest and scratched at my torso.
‘Neil, please – you’re so wasted.’
I sat down and bellowed at her. ‘What did I do? What did I do to you people?! What did I do to make you see me like this?’
There was a space in time in which neither of us spoke. Then Courtney started to cry. She wiped her eyes with the sharp of her wrists and then she looked at me like I was a boy she was looking after – after school.
‘You went away, over the mountains,’ Courtney said. ‘And now you sit on that mountain and look down on all of us.’
I stood up and walked towards her. She said, ‘No, don’t do this,’ reeling back at a rate. She was against the wall when I kissed her, my hands between her knees and thighs, before two hands found my ears and a knee dug into my back and I was on the floor and nowhere in this world could I find breath. My pink jacket slid off me as I was lifted up to discover Gordon before me, panting like a psycho husky. He slapped me in the face twice, once with the back of his hand, then Courtney told him to let me go, but he wouldn’t, he kept on barking at me, telling me how low I was to cause such a scene, how desperate I was for an audience, how pathetic I was, and finally how weak.
‘You got your little prize?’ I asked him, smiling.
Gordon headbutted me in the face, and blood dribbled into my mouth. I spat my blood into his open mouth, grinning madly; blood tasted good on drugs. Gordon moved back, and was seemingly about to launch a series of leg-and-arm assaults on my frame when Stuart arrived, dressed in a big puffy jacket and matching puffy MC Hammer pants. He had a bum-bag on his front groin and he just looked so big, like a blown-up, pumped-up version of my old friend from Grandview Parade. He was moving towards us and at the same time bellowing directions at Gordon to halt. Stuart was accompanied by two other enormous guys who were identically dressed, and with them two short Mediterranean women with long legs – one blonde, actually. The girls had a David Jones level worth of make-up on. I could smell it from my place against the wall.
‘This is not your deal,’ I remember Gordon saying to Stuart.
‘Step off, Braithwaite,’ Stuart warned, and Gordon did. In stepping off Gordon had conceded two things: that even though he had a brown belt in karate, Stuart was the superior force, and, in an even more savage blow, that I was more important to Stuart than
he was. I had gone away to Bathurst, disappeared right up inside my own ego hole, whereas Gordon had stayed here and remained in the friendship, riding Stuart’s light and dark, his rage and his arrogance, his chest-beating tales of sex and his brother, mother, father issues. But still, I was Stu’s boy. And Gordon knew it, shaking his head at us as we filed down the stairs, the audience looking on.
On the street Stuart lit me a cigarette and we had three laughs before I realised I had left my pink jacket inside. Stuart sent one of his Massive Friends to collect, the one with the head like Steve Roach, while he and I chilled on the corner of Macquarie and whatever streets, smiling and shaking our heads at each other. With some friends it doesn’t matter how much time you spend apart, the thing between you stays awake, in waiting.
The buses were loud at this hour. The drivers seemed keen to get home. Sick of the drunken louts from Scruffy Murphy’s and the junkies sleeping under the seats in fresh sick.
‘What just happened?’ I asked, blowing smoke into the city.
Stuart shook his head and kicked bits of asphalt with his Adidas.
‘Fuck,’ I added, to the nothing zone.
‘G loves you man. More than any cunt,’ Stuart said, meaning it. I couldn’t look at him and I couldn’t not look at him.
‘When did they get together?’ I asked.
‘I dunno, man… while back.’ Stuart stepped on and off the road.
‘Fuck. No one told me.’
‘I haven’t seen a lot of them, eh.’
‘What happened? Like, I go away and… Aren’t there like other chicks Braithwaite can drag into his web? Like fuck. Courtney, man. How did this…’
‘I don’t know what happened. I’ve been in the city mate.’
Stuart was being uncharacteristically sheepish. Like he didn’t want to let on about it. I knew this bloke and the way he went when he hid things.
‘What’s the fucken deal Stuart?’ I asked, the drugs and the night in focus now, making me see and feel the rain I had been left out in.
‘Nothing,’ Stu said, the worst actor in history.
‘Why is everyone hiding shit from me?’ I said, smoking at him now.
Stuart shrugged, high up into his neck. Then clapped his hands shut and punched the air a couple of times. He couldn’t hide from me and he knew it.
‘Fucken tell me man.’ I walked over to him.
Then Stuart’s Blocker Roach pal came down the steps with my pink jacket. ‘Pink Jacket!’ he exploded, and I realised we went to school together also.
‘Blackmarket!’ declared Stuart, ripping the moment away.
I put my pink jacket on and shook my head, recalling who I came with.
‘I don’t know where my girlfriend is,’ I said, looking around Wynyard for her, as if she might just pop out of Hungry Jack’s.
‘She and Sarah Kirkwood got in a cab.’ Stuart snorted, ripping open a packet of Extra and one by one slotting the whole lot in his mouth.
‘Here for a good time not a long time,’ Stuart said, handing round large yellow tablets to his friends in the car. We were travelling through the city in Stuart’s clones’ four-wheel drive. I was wedged between the two buxom Mediterranean party girls and I was grateful. I knew I had made something dark back there, and maybe I was not the one who had changed and grown up after all. The sloppy artist, the pretentious joy destroyer. The teething, screaming toddler.
Stuart winked at me in the mirror and we dumped, passing round a warm bottle of aloe vera juice to wash the tablet down. Stuart’s nose was pecking to the happy-house, warning me of the joys to come, of green lights and corners.
When we arrived at Blackmarket there was a line of people dressed in black. They were all older than me and damaged-looking. Crazy committed to this. Most of them had some kind of leather item attached to their bodies; some had the bottom of their leather pants cut out. Some had bulldogs on chains, dribbling. They all looked worn, drained, with painted white faces. I wondered if they had jobs. Did they work in administration? Or were they in sales? One older man wore a sequined g-string and a leather vest with a heart-shaped burn mark in the middle of his chest and a tattoo on his neck that said Hatred. Across the lane there was a set of imposing transvestites and a boy on a chain. One woman had no top on at all, just two Nazi ribbons on her hairy pink nipples.
As we moved past the circus I spotted Malaki, standing at the entrance in a cut-off Lonsdale tank-top, radio ear-pieced up. He made a big open-mouth shape when he saw me. Followed by a warm display of golf applause. And then, like never, Malaki was hugging me, his enormous frame gripping my thin, shaking body. My ear was bent in his chest and it hurt. ‘Welcome to hell!’ Malaki roared, and a handful of black souls droned ‘Yeaaahhhh!’ in acknowledgement.
Blackmarket was widely considered a day-club: a nightclub for those who felt the night experience was not near long enough. It specialised in S&M, drug abuse and hardcore techno fantasia. Those who braved the cement steps that led up to the ominous cauldron would more than likely lose days, sometimes weeks, in the place. The windows were blacked out with thick velvet curtains, gaffer-taped to the sills, and no one asked the time. There was no time. Just black. And the human stalls of this market coloured up the inside. Blackmarket. This was where dads’ and mums’ imaginations stopped, at the foot of these cages.
I was placed in the ‘capable hands’ of Stuart’s bouncy friend Nancy. Nancy was a buzzing small person in a figure-hugging black lycra one-piece effort. She was aged between seventeen and thirty-seven and one could easily imagine her releasing an album of sweet, hooky pop songs. She was sucking a Chupa Chup and smiling up at me. She took my hands and in a high yet surprisingly authoritarian voice said: ‘You’re with me.’
Through the main auditorium she yanked me. It was just filling up. Early days – it was still night (not ‘day’). Past the toilets, where a middle-aged duo were smoking pipes and lightly fondling an Asian man, and up two flights of dusty black steps I followed her pinecone bottom into a room that had a sign on it declaring Service Room 4.
Inside was a row of curtain-less showers. A tall man with a chainsaw tattoo on his stomach was showering with no water. He was naked from the waist up, rubbing and scrubbing himself. He nodded and smiled at me as Nancy led me into the corner of the room lined with long rows of lockers. I sat down on a long bench between the rows of lockers and felt the new yellow pill come to life in the back of my eyes.
‘I’m doing nursing at uni,’ Nancy said in a slight Irish accent, and then expertly assembled some sort of glass pipe, shoving a combination of white, green and brown substances into the golden cone that sat snug inside the glass straw.
Then five men with spray cans and skateboards arrived, slamming over the lockers, creating, with efficient craft, a small cell in which there was no escape. Nancy kept on with her administration; she seemed comfor table with the new punks. Even as they began spray painting the walls with tags like ‘skunk’ and ‘pussy wrestler’ and ‘dad,’ she raised not one of her eyebrows in concern. One of them angled in for a view up her legs, another tried to kiss her on the neck, but she just threw them off with short, sharp Irish sentences and looks of ‘this is my world too’. Three of the taller ones, who must have been brothers, lit a spoon. One of the brothers smiled insanely at me through yellow, fucked-up teeth. He said, ‘It’s ok.’ Like Mum did when I was eight and pissed my pants in Target.
Nancy kissed my hair and passed me the machine. I could hear the punk boys laughing. One of them was injecting the other. I sucked on the glass pipe and large static moved up my neck, and with an awful surge of pleasure I threw up on my ankle.
When I looked up, the punk boy with the gruesome teeth was mock-fucking a locker, two others were freestyle rapping about crimes they had committed in Mosman. The room was all air now but the air weighed a lot. Nancy handed me water from a Cottee’s cordial bottle.
‘You’re a cute little thing, you are, you are.’
I was walking now but I
had no management. There were other pilots in me, ones I had not yet met.
Down back down there now. Stuart handed me an ICY COLD BEER and took me into the men’s toilets. He was setting out some rules for me as he burnt up a spoon full of brown and yellow powder.
‘Don’t fuck her without a condom. If it’s not on, it’s not on,’ he said. ‘Enjoy the market but look out for the older guys, they’re sick cunts on wrong drugs and they prey on the new young cock. They’ll fucken bomb you with Normison and take you home and strap you to their mantelpiece and fuck knows what shape they’ll leave your anus, bro.’ Stu wrapped a ribbon round his bicep then popped a needle into his arm, pushing down on the butt of the syringe until the compound was inside his body and his brain. I had never seen someone shoot up, and as I sat there watching it, all I could think of was our Year 8 drama project, Don’t Drink the Water by Woody Allen, where Stuart played the Italian priest, handing out the Eucharist (Minties) to the entire audience. He was very funny in the part and got better each night of the small run.
‘There you go!’ He grinned, one hundred and forty percent, holding the half-filled syringe out to me.
‘Stu,’ I said, grinning, already so fucking charged.
‘Yeah, man?’ It was clear by the way his hands tapped and his eyes darted about the cubicle that he wanted out and into The Action.
‘What’s become of us?’ I asked.
‘Don’t look down,’ Stuart said, placing the syringe in my palm.
Stuart wrapped my arm in the ribbon but I pulled away, dropping the syringe into a puddle of water and piss on the grimy floor.
How it feels Page 12