How it feels

by Brendan Cowell

  A barrage of cutlery and clapping rose up and then collapsed, just like that, as my father fell into the tree with the hawk in it, then found balance with the help of Duc and the Golden Dragon Statue.

  ‘I reckon we could all agree tonight was a real beauty bottler of a show. Not your everyday thing that you see every day… thing… but excellent anyway. Unreal stuff from everyone. Confronting at times, but my son… always been bold – even as a kid he was… No, it was top-notch… stuff. So yep, tuck in to some tucker – have we fucken ordered? Let’s drink up; it’s all on me. Duc here is going to look after us so don’t hold back… Alright you lot!’ Dad slapped Duc on the back, said, ‘You’re it, mate, sort us out,’ and returned to his seat. Then he poured himself a beer, drank the beer, and went over what he had just said in his head. From the cracked tank of my perception: Julien’s mum and my mum were deep in talks about Cheryl Kernot defecting to the Australian Labor Party. ‘What’s the difference anymore?’ Mum asked. ‘They’re both right wing!’

  Gordon and my father were arguing joyously and with vigorous arm movements about the Super League and its effect on rugby league as a code.

  Courtney placed her left hand over her beer glass when Gordon went to pour more beer into it. Gordon said ‘Come on’ and she said ‘Let’s just take it easy for a bit’, then Gordon said ‘It’s a Chinese restaurant’ and Courtney said ‘We have to go out after this’, then Gordon said ‘Yeah, to a party!’ and my dad said ‘Women are all the same’ and poured beer into Gordon’s glass and ordered another four jugs of VB. Courtney picked at her rice and honey chicken, grinning in the general direction of my chair but not at me. Swanna was busy mingling, introducing herself to Agatha, who, true to form, immediately unleashed a condensed version of her Big Life Plan in Swanna’s ear: ‘destination weddings’, the business partner bitch who left her high and dry, the debt, the court case, and now the horror of living back with Mum in the Shire and her plans to open a star academy for talented kids in Penshurst. Gordon and Dad and Swanna’s dad moved to spirits. Dad’s new girlfriend said nothing, just sat there smiling at her purse. I considered throwing a dumpling at her open mouth.

  I ate everything put in front of me, spinning the lazy Susan for more and more, and drank red wine out of a teacup. I must get to Mongolia one day. Such glorious beef they have. Bursting with product and hurt I got up. The table stopped talking and stared at me.

  ‘Gotta piss,’ I said into the silence.

  Standing over the circle, piss came out my dick. Then I put my dick back in my pants and opened up the bag of speed I’d bought from one of the dwarves. I unpacked some of the sticky, off-white powder onto the cistern and pressed it with my student discount card. Then I carved it up with the edge of the card and pressed again. The line was

  that long.

  I rolled up a twenty-dollar note and snorted the fucking shit up. The gear was glassy, cutting at the sinews of my nostrils – basically it moved into my face with brazen disregard for the surroundings. I half-spewed some lemon chicken and punched the wall. My fist hurt because I had just punched the wall with it. On the way out of the bathroom I looked in the mirror and in the mirror I saw my reflection. On top of my neck an oval-shaped thing called ‘my visage’. Dry lips. Small receding hairline. Long hair like Jesus. Sockets with blue water in them. No meaning. Nothing to say. Floppy skin the colour of camel. Skin for ripping off. Replaceable. Cover your books with it. Ears pink and small. The grand total: a twenty-one-year-old male from Cronulla. I sniffed and the gack fell down the back of my throat.

  Hell sat pregnant in my face. Something beautiful had left the building. I was a shell of a man. The scallop of my soul had been sucked out and I couldn’t help but think the cliché: I could have saved him.

  ‘Who are you?’ Chandra demanded from the corridor, her face red with jilt.

  ‘What…?’ I managed, barely out of the Little Boys’ Room.

  ‘What the fuck is going on with you, Neil? You haven’t even kissed me tonight. You won’t look at me. You won’t even speak! You just sit there staring at that Courtney girl and stuffing your face! What the fuck is going on?’ Chandra was roaring now. I’m sure people could hear. I’m sure she wanted them to.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, but something about her earnestness made me laugh. Then more laughter escaped, building and fattening. I was laughing in her face and everything inside me was encouraging more of it.

  ‘Fuck you. You’re a pig, do you know that?’ Chandra spat.

  ‘Are you enjoying your time at the Marigold Garden Chinese Restaurant?’ I asked, guffawing now – pissing myself. ‘Please come again!’

  Then she slapped me. And slapped me again. In the corridor between the door with the little Chinese boy on it and the door with the little Chinese girl on it.

  ‘My period pain is agonising,’ Chandra said in a state of tears and fury. ‘And I come here for you. And you ignore me. Just because you think you’re the King Shit. Well you’re not. That piece of theatre was pretentious and it lacked a through line and I am not the only one who thinks this! So shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Wonder Boy! I’m going home. Have fun with your fucken sluts!’ Chandra slapped me again, and then she was gone.

  ‘Stuart’s dead,’ I said. But it was too late. Just the little Chinese boy and the little Chinese girl on the toilet doors to hear me.

  ‘My dad’s gone for a little holiday!’ To the dismay of Courtney, Gordon was opening up to my father about his father: a man and a topic he had always been reluctant to acknowledge in daylight. Night after night in Gordon’s bed, Courtney would appeal to him, trying to find out what happened, and if not the details just how Gordon felt about it.

  ‘No joke?’ Dad said, sipping on his beer.

  ‘Yeah, he’s off to the great dugout in the sky,’ Gordon said, turning to face the raw surprise of Courtney. ‘What?’ he exclaimed to her.

  I walked over to the table and sat down on my mother’s lap. She patted my collar and kissed my cheekbones and whispered in one breath ‘Shhhhh… it’s ok’. It felt good and like I was ten again. If I was ten again I could meet Stuart and I could launch a campaign of life affirmation, starting in 1986 and continuing all the way to this moment.

  Agatha said, ‘Neil, everyone’s looking over,’ but I didn’t care.

  After a while Mum said, ‘Son, get up now,’ and so I did and the whole table stopped talking and looked up at me, like I was a priest and this was prayer group. I felt how I felt because this is how it feels and we feel what we feel; there is no way around it. So I spoke, quietly and truthfully, about the time Stuart and I went to a birthday party at the Chinese restaurant on Cronulla Street in Cronulla.

  ‘Sarah Kirkwood’s sixteenth birthday party and me and Gordon and Stuart were going. We rode our skateboards. When we got there Stuart said try these. Pills. Avils, they were called. Hay fever tablets. You were only meant to take one a day, but Stuart said if you took five you saw things. So we all took ten. Stuart took fifteen. Then we sucked on an aerosol can and went in.

  ‘There was a fat Asian woman singing karaoke in the corner. Sarah Kirkwood’s parents were there and they told us, as we walked in, to put our names down for some songs, but make sure we wrote “English” cos if you didn’t write “English” then the song would “come up Asian”. The table was a lot like this one. Round and full of people. We sat down and Mr Kirkwood let us have a beer each and so we had a beer and felt pretty good, Stuart made some jokes and charmed the aunties and grandmas, as he did.

  ‘Then the Avils kicked in. I went to pick up my chopsticks but there were thousands of them, and if I lifted one up, thousands more would fan out before me, like cascading sticks. Then the waitress had thousands of bees buzzing round her, and the rice had an army of little men in it, waving up at me in workers’ helmets. Then, just as I was reaching the point of freak-out, Stuart leant over and asked us if there was a snake coming out of Sarah Kirkwood’s ears. We looked over to Sarah Kirkwood and
, no joke, a massive python was crawling out her ears! Then another one! Then, when she spoke, a collection of small, oily snakes simply rushed out her mouth. The next thing I knew Stuart had lunged across the table and grabbed Sarah Kirkwood’s throat. He had a knife and was cutting the snakes up as they exited her mouth and ears and nose.

  ‘Then Gordon yelled, “Stuart! Look at the singer!”

  ‘We looked over at the singer and sure enough she had snakes coming out her top and her ears too! Stuart rushed over and crash-tackled the singer to the ground. Which was when the police were called and we made a run for it. On the way home thousands of silver bins rolled towards us but somehow they all missed. Then we went to Cronulla station and sat in an old broken train until the visions stopped and Stuart said, “Well imagine if those snakes were really there and none of us did anything.” Stuart is dead now.’

  I stood at the end of the table in the silence. My story was finished and I had nothing more to say. To anyone. So I left the Marigold Garden Chinese Restaurant.

  22

  Stretching all the way from Peace Park to campus, Rankin Street was notorious for its high-quality pie shops, big houses and indiscriminate rapes. But tonight, tonight it would be privy to a different mix of meat and violence. My show was the last of the shows, confirming the University Calender as officially over. The third years were off into the world. Like Stuart’s lemmings, the edge was near.

  Across the road from the party Swanna and I sat in my wagon watching the tribes funnel in. She presented me with an orange pill. I didn’t think to ask what it was – I merely swallowed it.

  ‘Courtney and Gordon will be looking for pills,’ I said.

  ‘They sold me these.’

  ‘Gordon did?’ I asked, taken aback.

  ‘Yeah, and some pot,’ Swanna said, pouring mull onto a Ventti.

  ‘The guy won’t call me to say my friend is dead, he’ll forget to do that, but he won’t forget to bring some pills up for the party!’

  ‘He didn’t know what to do,’ Swanna said, all compassionate.

  ‘Is that right?’ I replied, lighting a fag.

  ‘He said he didn’t want to disturb your show. He knows how much you loved Stuart – he said it would ruin you to hear the news.’

  I scoffed; yeah that’s the fucking truth.

  ‘He knows how much work you put into your art. He loves you, Neil, you have to know that.’

  She kissed me and I’d never hate her. Just him.

  Julien fancied himself as a bit of a DJ, and even before we entered the front yard I knew he was behind the wheel of sound because the Red Hot Chili Peppers were dissolving into an anthem of happy techno.

  With the newness of drugs and love in our pockets, Swanna and I swanked into the hovel, passing the buoyant welcome of the tie-dyed first years, tunnelling through the tunnel of second-year coolies breaking up tabs from an A5 sheet of acid, by the kitchen where a polite collection of staff members and associated ‘modern adults’ inserted trays of frozen dumplings into the oven, sipping on soave with a smoke. Like Royce Simmons, I kept my sights down for fear of eye contact slash connection leading to conversation. Reaching the summit of the backyard was relief in bulk. Swanna and I mingled by the tool shed with Gemma and the second-year dancers and their brothers and sisters, passing the joint around, embarking on trivial, brilliant threads of chit-chat that warmly led nowhere. The dancers were thrilled to report back on some of the wilder and weirder responses from tonight’s audience, especially those ‘morons from Blayney’ who ‘didn’t get it’.

  In the bathroom papered with photocopied portraits of Frida Kahlo and John Howard the dartboard, I inhaled a lump of speed which split my brain in two. In four. In eight. In sixteen. In thirty-two. In sixty-four.

  When I returned to the backyard there was little or no room to move, both in my thoughts and in the yard. The university had arrived en masse. Regurgitator’s master-blasting ‘Kung Foo Sing!’ jumped out of the speakers and into my brain, kick-starting the kick inside me. I yearned to let loose! Let loose with some karate dancing. I advanced my frame and person out the screen door and towards the hopping throb of dancing students but I never quite made it, for by the door was Swanna, talking with Gordon and Courtney. I made an immediate tack to the left but my shirt was in her clutch and I was in the square – just like that.

  ‘Hey, Neil!’ Courtney said, her eyes big and pupils dilated with E. I thought this girl was ‘drug free’ since Results Party. Whatever.

  ‘Hey, Courtney,’ I replied, kissing the rosy patch of her cheek. She had left it out for me, as the royals do, offering no path to lip.

  ‘Nelly,’ Gordon said. He had a beer in his left hand and another tucked under his arm to allow his right arm to do some shaking. ‘Cool show.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Courtney agreed. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘We really fucking dug it,’ Gordon continued.

  ‘Yeah, it was such a feast!’ Courtney’s eyes did a lap of her sockets. ‘Everywhere I looked! I really liked it.’

  ‘What did you like about it?’ I asked Courtney, her eyes easier to grapple with than the grey windows beside her.

  Courtney took a moment to formulate exactly what it was the show did to her. ‘It reminded me of like… Peer Gynt or something… But like a lot more surreal and David-Lynch-fucked-up show. Do you know what I mean? I need some time to sit with it, actually.’

  ‘Yeah man, it was pretty good,’ Gordon affirmed, casting a spell of sudden silence over the pleasant review.

  ‘How was the drive up?’ I asked, taking the opportunity to finally take in Gordon. He looked beefier than I remembered, standing there beneath the porch light in his puffy North Face jacket.

  ‘The drive?’ Gordon mocked.

  ‘Yes, I’m asking you how the drive was.’ I straightened my posture in all seriousness. What the fuck was wrong with that for a question?

  ‘The drive?’ Gordon asked again, spitting out beer and launching wildly into a fit of hysterics. Swanna and Courtney followed close behind, crying in large, uncontrollable spasms of laughter, holding onto each other for balance. ‘We drove in the car!’

  ‘The car went forward!’ Courtney added.

  These people were clearly demented. I appealed to Swanna but she was way gone too, infected.

  ‘You didn’t pogo here?’ Swanna asked, like she was the old friend and I was the new friend locked outside the connection room.

  ‘No!’ Gordon ran with it. ‘We drove!’ And they fell about laughing again, guiltily, but then freely once more.

  Courtney took my forearm. ‘Sorry, Neil, we’re just a bit fucked up.’

  ‘I would agree with that,’ I said, face like stone.

  Their laughter dried up in a flash as I stared down the barrel of G’s cruelty. His beady little eyes in gridlock with mine. There was violence in the air between us but no flesh as yet.

  ‘You having a good time?’ I asked Gordon, both passive and aggressive.

  ‘Yeah, man. I am having a good time. You?’ Gordon replied, coolly.

  I stepped towards him thinking yes, I will palm his nose up into his face like Dick Hindmarsh taught me in stage combat, but real this time.

  ‘Neil, don’t…’ Courtney said, only to be moved aside by her big man.

  ‘Don’t, babe – I’ve got this,’ Gordon told her, all puffed up.

  ‘Ha!’ I did the laughing now. ‘Nice to see some good old-fashioned Cronulla gender balance still alive and well. “Step aside, little lady.” ’

  ‘Don’t be a cunt,’ Gordon warned me.

  ‘Me? A cunt?’

  ‘Yep,’ Gordon said. ‘There is one cunt here, and it’s not us three.’

  ‘Neil, we’re just a bit high is all.’ Courtney stood between us, smiling up with overt politeness. ‘The drive was really nice. This is such a beautiful town; you guys must feel so blessed to have been able to spend three years here. So pretty and quiet and creative too.’ Courtney stopped as the first progressio
n of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ arrived in four beautiful bars, changing everyone’s living thing inside out.

  ‘The town’s been good to me,’ I said, pushing off G’s chest and into the cliché nihilism of the mosh-pit. I thrashed and I burned! ‘YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH!’ Then I was picked up and lifted onto the stage where I ran laps for a verse and laps for a chorus, high-fiving Julien and his Luke, then launching myself into the air that lived and breathed above the forest of human heads below. I crashed onto the grass, taking skirts and beards and drinks along with me.

  Courtney appeared above like the angel she was, I clasped her arms and she pulled me back up from the ground and we danced together ecstatically, blazing joy and power – she was happy and I was happy to be near it.

  ‘I love Swanna, she is so great!’ Courtney said, and she meant it.

  ‘I miss him already,’ I said.

  ‘I miss him too,’ she said, and the scaffolding that time had built fell away. I kissed her on the mouth but then Gordon arrived with a soft warning palm to the throat.

  ‘So so so!’ Julien minced across the stage, mic in hand. ‘I know Luke and I are like the hottest DJ team this side of Cowra, but it is now my pleasure to welcome the greatest-ever karaoke band known to man… Ladies and gentleman, please welcome KKK – Karaoke Kool Kats!’

  The dense curtain of purple material bought from Lithgow Spotlight that morning was whipped away by the second-year dancers as the KKK band launched into their usual debut-punch of instrumental jive-bunny.

  Gordon was shaking his head at me but his hips and feet were grooving along inside it.

  ‘If you need to kiss someone, kiss me,’ Swanna whispered in my ear. And so I did, with roughness and teeth. Even in this kissing I wanted to make violence on Gordon’s head. That small man, that thieving cunt.

  ‘Where will we go?’ I asked her, ‘when this is all over?’