We arrived at Sydney Harbour in the early afternoon, with thousands of other Australians, grabbing the best possible spot for the fireworks. Gordon had suggested we go down there, the four of us, and drink some wine on a rug and watch the light show and ‘see the new year in with style’. It was a nightmare finding a park but with the news we had received via a plastic pregnancy stick this morning, the world was a glorious place, and nothing could deter us.
Unlike our friends in London, talking with this couple, with Gordon and Courtney, well it was a two-and-two affair, usually restricted to gender. Gordon handed me a beer and we stood to the side of the rug discussing his business and the infiltration of the Cronulla community by Lebanese people. It was the curse of being the last train station apparently; they all ‘got out and had a look around, and who would have fucken thought, they liked it!’ Courtney and Swanna lay on the rug eating pineapple and chatting away. I didn’t notice it then, as I was doing my best to stay with Gordon’s tirade against the fundamentalist Muslim, but Courtney did not ask Swanna a single question. She merely spoke of her own doings: graduating into family law, signing with a firm in Sutherland, renovating the top floor and gutting the bottom floor of their mansion – just rolling on to subject after subject, never coming up for air. Swanna didn’t mind though, she was amused by Courtney, she liked her spunk and the obvious big brain, but still she could not work out why she didn’t seem the least bit curious about Swanna’s own life, and her life with me. I had never seen this in Courtney; vanity and self-interest were not part of her makeup – at least, not the make-up of the girl I once knew. The only conclusion I could draw was that she was nervous, and this made her babble on mindlessly. Swanna looked at me glumly when I said this, as if I had said something stupid, and I knew then she was not entirely comfortable about Courtney and me, as if she sensed there was something still moving there.
Gordon, on the other hand, always kicked off talking about himself, but quickly shifted to friendly interrogation, hounding me for details on The Scream People, life in London, rental prices and such, always placing my achievements and adventures up on a pedestal so much higher than his own, which was silly, because this bloke had made so much from so little. Gordon’s blinds company was franchised in Wollongong and Newcastle now. Then he and Albert had begun a little property and construction side project, only to see it prosper into a million-dollar business and growing. They bought big, daggy houses anywhere from Sans Souci to North Cronulla, did them up and sold them in record time, boasting a tidy profit which they then invested in the next house, and the next, with each new project growing in size, splendour and, of course, resale profit. After a few beers Gordon admitted to me that the quality of the work, and the price and standard of the materials, were mostly low, frighteningly low, but no one every complained or noticed, and nothing had fallen apart yet, ‘Touch fucken wood!’
Gordon and Courtney seemed genuinely happy, and as the fireworks exploded and the light show began on the bridge, a rainbow of spears shooting out into the universe, I wished the four of us would be friends forever, with adjoining houses decked with barbecues and day beds, tennis on Sundays even, together in love with kids and dogs hurtling and chomping about our feet. Grow old and fabulous in each other’s lives, in each other’s differences, in each other’s in-ground pools. It was a dream and I was having it, my arms in the air and my pregnant girlfriend beside me, smiling widely as all the colours shifted about her gorgeous half-Sri Lankan face and hair.
When we returned to London I received an email from Gordon which said:
N, how was your flight back?
Nice girl that one, keep your dick in your pants.
G-funk
Swanna threw up in tech rehearsals for The Caretaker, and Mum flew over to help her out, even though we didn’t ask her to. Swanna’s dad sent us money, but then he asked for it back a month later; he was spending more and more time at the RSL playing the pokies now that Rhonda had left him for some guy she met at a Planets Conference in Brisbane.
Every morning we woke up I kissed my girlfriend’s expanded belly-skin and sang some sort of lullaby to it. I wanted the baby so much I lost all interest in other things. My production of The Caretaker was pretty average and quite poorly received, but I didn’t give a fuck, where before I would have thrashed and wailed, and written aggressive retorts to the journalist cunt.
Swanna, on the other hand, became even more brilliant as we moved to two and then three months in. She painted madly every day, filled the house with flowers from Columbia Road, baked like a madwoman, and made mixed CDs for the baby with tracks from Air and Chopin, Fleetwood Mac and Moby. We made love with hilarious difficulty, and spent our evenings on the couch dreaming up names and occupations for our child. We were sliding in heaven’s slipstream, and it would only get better.
But the sun goes down so early in London, especially in winter, and on 16 March at 4.14 pm it was pretty much pitch-black, which was why nobody saw what happened on Valentine Road, behind the Tesco, when a young black Rude Boy with a hood over his face held a machete to Swanna’s hip and threatened to slit her open if she did not hand over her purse and phone. Being Swanna, she attempted to talk him down, but he mistook her long words and clear pronunciation as patronising and racist, so he cut her side, opening up her abdomen, and she fell and lost a gallon of blood to the gutter. And in the blood our first child too, there or at the hospital, on the way, I still do not know. All I know was that it was not there anymore. Not there anymore. Not there at all.
A quarter after midnight before I heard of this. I was in Berlin at the time, checking out the Schaubühnes F.I.N.D. festival, searching for new plays from around the world. An old couple had found her in the gutter, her purse long gone and the Rude Boy too. The old bloke drove her to the hospital and she was ‘doing fine’ they said to me when I called. But she was far from fucking ‘fine’, she was never anywhere near fucking fine ever fucking again.
There were no more shows for The Scream People that year, we were on hiatus, as Swanna went on with recovery, walking large parks and seeing small films. She said very little to me, to anyone, the only time she would open up was grocery shopping, where her eyes bloomed and her shoulders straightened as she went at it, furrowed brow, hunting down every last ingredient for the entire week’s meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner all the way to Sunday. Her intensity was piercing and somewhat disturbing, but who was I to ask for calm? This was the only place she showed signs of life, even if it did include her fossicking through every branch of broccoli before she found the right one for Thursday’s stir fry.
We slept in the same bed but we never touched. The therapist said it would take time, and not to ask too much of her. I fucking knew that, it is called being a decent fucking human being. Fuck’s sake, thirty-five quid an hour to tell you not to force a girl who just got stabbed and lost a child.
After a while I started spending less time at home, socialising with some of my old mates from the Arcola, and often came back drunk, which occasionally brought out some loud, boozy snoring. Swanna suggested I sleep in the study on these nights, so I did, on a fold-out couch. I moved into the study soon enough, it was just easier that way, and I felt that was what she wanted.
One night Swanna came in and told me if I needed to be with someone I could see Ivana, she had talked it through with Glenn and they were ‘cool with it’. We’d all been there before and she knew I liked sex, and that pretty soon I would do it with someone else anyway, so she might as well be in on it and approving, she said. So twice a week I rode my bike to the Dalston house on Ridley Road to fuck Ivana. Early on Glenn would ask, so courteously, as if wanting to contribute to the recovery, if he could get ‘involved’ or ‘help’, but I just wanted the girl, and he respected this and let us have the afternoons alone. It was good for a while, the agreement, and Swanna seemed genuinely cool with it too, asking a question about it here and there but pretty much leaving me to it. And I enjoyed it, I will
admit, Ivana was fucking beautiful and our bodies moved well together, even more so now we were one on one, but she was tiring of how hard and direct I would approach things, and how I never looked at her or kissed her during, so I slowed things up and tried to connect with her, to be intimate and stare into her eyes when we got there together. But then I’d just start crying, convulsing on top of her, so we closed up business and I took to masturbating furiously in the study, or fingering the odd actress in the toilets at Jag Shoes. ‘Fingering is not cheating,’ Stuart once said.
It was February when Stuart started visiting me in my sleep. He’d appear in a burst of new light, standing on the end of my fold-out bed in a white linen suit and red dancing shoes, smirking ruefully, but then all bashfulness was gone as he peered down at me and said, ‘Why do you lie?’
27
The Camellia Gardens seemed so much bigger to me when I was a kid. My nan would take me there on weekends to feed the ducks with half a bag of old bread. It was the deadset highlight of my fucking week and I could not wait to get there and explore. The ponds were like big green oceans and the gum trees soared high above me, and the ducks – there seemed to be thousands of them and all so majestic and dainty as they fluttered and dived, quacking to each other in their own secret language. But now, as Gordon and I hauled out of the car with Albert and Rocky in tow, the place seemed uncomfortably small, with only a scattering of sad-looking ducks lurking in weed by the ponds’ perimeters, desperate for a hunk of bread to fall into their small, slimy little oval bed. What magic scale childhood does make of raw adult reality.
We walked under the overgrown palms to the bridge which led to the open green where the matrimonial rose garden lay, and it was at this precise moment it became abundantly clear to me just how fucking hot it was. My back was drenched beneath the blackness of my tuxedo jacket and my scalp dripped with sweat. I turned around to see Gordon’s face like a tomato blown up with a foot pump, a V of sweat already forming on his white shirt, which he tugged at, raising his eyebrows at me in fear and exhaustion. Carmen stood waiting for us in an enormous blue and black floral dress with high brown heels, smoking a Dunhill beside the white rose proscenium entranceway to the garden of love and trust. The rose garden was Courtney’s church of choice, she no longer believed in Jesus or God, not since the suicide of her brother and the voluntary, pathetic evacuation of her father Eric. She cared not to be married under any such doctrines; she wished only to be surrounded by flowers, and people whom she loved as much as those sweet petals which grew above the pricks and stems.
‘Long way from England, isn’t it?’ Carmen joked, as we hunkered into the shade, Albert kissing his lady on the neck and cheek.
‘This is fucken searing,’ said Gordon, accepting a handkerchief from Carmen and wiping his sloppy pink mouth with it.
‘Just put it off till the afternoon and we can all go to the pub till it cools down,’ said Rocky, wielding a cheeky grin. The boy had a point. Rocky was not long off the boat but he seemed firmly on the earth, a far cry from the monosyllabic, disturbed kid we used to know, scuttling into his room to eat tall packets of Doritos and play Commodore 64, Slayer on full bore in the tape player. The navy had saved him, although I was yet to see he and Gordon say a word to each other. Rocky was proud of his brother and you could tell he loved being in attendance, but even at the bucks’ night, drunk and high and full of spirit, they still circled each other with wide, sweeping arcs.
‘How’s Courtney?’ I asked Carmen, foot up on the bench by the duck pond where a few dozen guests began to mingle. ‘How does she look?’
Carmen’s eyes rolled back in her skull then fell forward like bouncing lotto balls, but wider, and rich with amazement and spilled yearning for that time in a woman’s life where you stop a room with the way you walk, and where you feel like anything can happen and most likely will if you simply believe it to be true.
‘She’s just stunning,’ Carmen said, grinding her cigarette out on the sole of her Diana Ferrari heel. ‘She makes such a beautiful bride.’ Carmen started crying, smiling with puffed mouth at her eldest son, who was still battling the oppressive hotness and endless river of sweat that fled down his spine then ran along the lane of his bum crack into his pants, where it pooled and gathered around his thighs.
‘I need a fucking bottle of water,’ Gordon said, handing the drenched handkerchief back to Carmen then trotting up the pathway towards the teahouse.
I shrugged at Carmen, who seemed bewildered by her son’s lack of interest in Courtney’s beauty as bride, but then Albert came in and held her, which must have made her understand it was different being a man, on this day, in the heat, and she smiled, then began a lap of welcome to those friends and family who now fell into the green in droves, wiping away the sweat with towels and fanning their faces with booklets.
Rocky and I followed Gordon to the teahouse, which sat innocently beside the gardens’ entrance just off President Avenue. Mothers and children were the majority of the clientele, chatting and chirping on the old timber deck which overlooked the twisting trails and creeks below. Rocky hung about on the bottom step, intending to smoke a joint before the ceremony – boy, this kid was relaxed. I told him to save a bit for me, and to wish me luck, for I was ‘going in’. He laughed and made some derisory comment about marriage which made me see just how gay he was, and perfectly smug with it.
I stepped inside the men’s bathroom to find Gordon naked from the waist up, crouched awkwardly against the wall, desperately forcing his left armpit into the blaring wake of the hand dryer. His shirt was in his other hand, waving in the breeze of a second hand dryer, which he also had going. It was a vision of insanity, weirdness, and sheer balletic flexibility – even though Gordon had stacked on some kilograms since corporate life had taken over, the karate training was still very much alive in the way he had manifested his very own acrobatic Chinese laundry. I took my own jacket off and hung it on a cubicle door, airing my shirt by separating it from my body and blowing down into my chest and gut. I wanted so much to laugh but there was no perspective in my friend’s face, he was riddled with big frustration and sheer anxiety.
‘Hold this one for me,’ Gordon said.
I took up position before the hand dryer, and made sure his shirt was getting a thorough working-over. Gordon’s paranoia seemed to fall away as I brought his wet shirt back to drier, crisper life.
‘I’ve always been a sweater,’ he said, grinning now, as he swapped armpits beneath the blow and push of air.
‘If a man is going to sweat,’ I said, ‘today is the day for it.’
‘It’s not that. I’m all over that.’
‘You don’t look like you are.’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘No reason, mate.’
‘I know what I want. Today I get it,’ Gordon said, blunt, somewhat demeaning.
‘Good for you,’ I acknowledged, nodding smiling nodding.
‘Can you ask the chicks at the shop if they have any deodorant? Buy some if they sell any. I stink like a fucking pig,’ Gordon said, as it dawned on me: marriage was a type of societal elevation. Gordon had the licence to talk down to me, because I still remained with the paupers of singledom, whereas he was King in wedlock now, and I had much to do and learn from him.
‘I’ll try,’ I said, handing him his near-dry shirt and whipping my jacket back over my shoulder.
I was almost out the door when he said, ‘What, you think I should be sweating, Cronk? you think I got something to sweat about, do you?’
I shook my head. You fickle cunt. ‘No, mate. It’s your day.’
The fat ladies behind the teashop counter laughed loud when I asked them if they had any deodorant. I explained the situation, which induced further hysterics; this was clearly one of the most amazing things that had ever happened in the teashop. I took a seat at the long table by the entrance before the table of brochures and maps, wishing they served beer; I could rape and murder a fucking beer, any
beer, even a Tooheys New.
Gordon’s bucks’ party had kicked off here not two weeks ago. It was Rocky’s suggestion to begin proceedings with a tea party, he thought it would be really fun, and despite Gordon’s initial reticence, all the blokes loved it, sipping tea and devouring a collection of tasty delights as the chubby women wobbled around us, cleaning up and putting down fresh trays of goodies. Each of the twelve boys at the long table made a semi-erudite speech, and I put it down to the sweetness of the cakes and so too the occasion. Men only joined together on fields or with beer on soiled carpet, yet here we were sipping an old English hot drink for our old English friend, and I’d never seen a group of men more awake and surprised at how possible it was to have fun without smashing people’s faces in or downing ten hundred ales. This was sophistication, and all were willing, especially Gordon, who kept whispering in my ear just how great an idea this was, and how he would never forget the tea party at the Camellia Gardens. I told him to tell Rocky this, it was his idea, but I don’t think he did, he just kept saying it to me.
The contrast from garden tea party to animal bus was drastic to say the least, as we departed the garden respite and climbed up onto the deck of the musty animal-bus where Albert met us with a tall bottle each of cold beer and a set of rubber tits to wear. Gordon was made to demolish a yard glass of Coopers and a few random shots of green and blue liquid, then was pummelled into the back corner and the words I Love Cock were inscribed on his forehead in blue zinc cream. Then AC/DC came blaring through the speakers and we were off on our way to Heathcote, where the skirmish and paint ball fields awaited.
Gordon was hammered before we got to Engadine, which was around the time my face was painted in brown zinc cream, each of us a tribal colour of our own.
How it feels Page 20