How it feels

by Brendan Cowell

  ‘I really shouldn’t be drinking but fuck it. My best friend’s engagement!’

  ‘I didn’t know you and Courtney were so close,’ I said.

  ‘Neither did I till recently. But I love the bitch – she’s such a spunk!’

  We went inside and Nina took the baby for a while. Sarah and I walked around the party, dodging old classmates and teachers. Sarah was smart and spontaneous, her mind jumping from thought to thought like an electrocuted frog, but the course it took was corrupt, her mind unravelling at a rate of knots then questioning its own patterns constantly.

  ‘I was working at the UN for a while, which was intense. But I gave that up when I had Dylan. Now I’m working for Channel Nine News three days a week and it’s really quite whatever, some of the men there are disgusting though I do like television, it killed the radio and it will probably kill me too!’

  ‘What do you do at Channel Nine?’ I asked, hoping she would stay near me tonight and ramble on, for the sound of her head dropping thoughts was the best music I’d heard since I saw Radiohead play in Victoria Park with Swanna. And I didn’t want to face my old friends alone; I hadn’t even really spoken to Courtney or Gordon yet, but I could see them by the pool.

  ‘I help run the news department. It’s a long way from the UN but it’s here and I’m only part time which is great with Dylan.’

  We drank more and followed each other around, bouncing in and out of conversations with uncles and aunties and friends from school. But we did not leave each other’s side. If anything, we fed off each other, knocking down the obligatory catch-ups as a team, then happily returning to our own, more fascinating, yet oddly normal connection out front.

  ‘The last time I saw you –’ we were smoking again, the rain was hitting her long forehead but she seemed to like it ‘– you were necking my girlfriend Chandra in the bathroom at Gordon’s twenty-first!’

  ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ she cooed. ‘My lesbian phase!’

  I was about to ask Sarah if I could stay the night at her place when Courtney came out and grabbed my elbow.

  ‘Dance with me!’ she said, and hauled me inside and away from good old Sarah Kirkwood, the single mother with a son.

  ‘We bought some speed,’ Courtney said, directing me up the stairs with her hand on my back. ‘You want some?’

  I didn’t want some at all, I was happy getting drunk and smoking with Sarah Kirkwood. But Courtney was so fired up I bumped a couple of lines off her dresser drawer (adorned with elephants) and felt like dancing too.

  ‘Gordon’s being boring because he has to go away on business tomorrow, so you have to get fucked up with me, ok? And stay up all night!’

  I hadn’t seen Courtney like this for ten years, all scatty and high, talking madly at people and dancing with sharp, rabid movements in front of her friends and relatives, but she did not seem to care, and man, did she let me know how proud and happy she was that I had come, telling everyone in her speech how I had flown in from England especially, and just how important it was for her to have me there. Seriously, she mentioned me more than she did Nina, and nearly more than Gordon – it was kind of embarrassing, with half the people in the room not having a clue who I was. The emails had made us closer than ever, and drugs were spilling this out into the air. I hadn’t told her yet that Swanna had discovered our correspondence; I knew this wasn’t the time or place. Courtney was so happy at the party, but something told me it wasn’t the party itself that made her this happy. She was buoyed by something, and she kept turning to me to acknowledge it; I had lit something in her and she would see it out.

  Michael Shoes dealt out more speed in the laundry as the oldies filtered out to their cars and Gordon signed off for bed. Gordon and I had hardly spoken all night but he looked well and proud of his engagement. He told me he would see me in the morning before he left for Kempsey. I said ok, hugged him, and then watched him climb the stairs to Courtney’s bedroom, where she would sleep next to him once more – if she got to sleep at all.

  ‘Look what Dad got me!’ Courtney screamed, holding a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Grandfather Port in the early morning mist.

  ‘Wowee,’ I said, ‘that’s expensive shit.’

  ‘He told me not to drink it until my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, nodding.

  ‘Let’s drink the motherfucker now.’ She started ripping the foil off the top.

  ‘Court, are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘I fucking love port,’ she said, screwing into the cork. ‘Don’t you?’

  We sat out by the pool, smoking and drinking port amid the detritus of the engagement party. The port tasted like cherries and lacquer, it was groovy, and watching Courtney savour it in her mouth amused me no end; she really was a lawyer, with a judge’s palate.

  ‘You and Sarah were getting along well?’ Courtney noted.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, grinning, ‘she’s cool.’

  Michael Shoes had fallen asleep in his banana lounge, which left just the two of us awake, free to say what we needed to, free to speak of the dead and the living, free to angle in on what the hell was moving here.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said, her mouth painted red with Penfolds.

  ‘What is, my dear?’

  ‘That we never fucked.’

  ‘Wow, ok,’ I said, sitting up.

  ‘We never did, and now we never will.’

  ‘That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Of marriage. To not fuck anyone else?’

  ‘Are you angry?’ she said quietly, and directly.

  ‘Angry?’ I asked her.

  ‘That I’m marrying Gordon.’

  ‘No, C ,’ I said, ‘you’re not the prize.’

  ‘The prize?’ she said, alerted to something here.

  ‘I’m glad you’re being looked after properly, I am glad it is him,’ I lied.

  ‘It wasn’t him,’ she said, exhaling smoke out her nostrils. She was wearing a blue chiffon number with a single strap on the right shoulder. The dress ruffled out above her cleavage and dragged diagonally down her long slender back. On anyone else I don’t think I would have liked it, but on her, tonight, it looked divine.

  ‘What wasn’t him?’ I asked, a new brand of headache settling into the side of my skull as the birds announced the first signs of a new day.

  ‘It wasn’t Gordon,’ she said, slurring her words.

  ‘Wasn’t him what? I don’t know what you’re saying now.’

  ‘Gordon didn’t have me first,’ she said, and Michael Shoes got up out of his banana lounge and walked inside and out the front door in one swift sequence as if controlled by remote.

  ‘What are you telling me here, Courtney?’

  ‘That night, the night of the results party…’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my whole body starting to shake.

  ‘Well I lost you at the squash courts,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’ My voice thinning out to almost nothing.

  ‘I went back to Stuart’s house that night,’ she said, and his name hung in the air. ‘I’m sorry, Neil, but I had to tell you this. I had to say it before I get married.’

  I put my twenty-five-year-old port down and stood up in the shock stream. ‘You had to tell me this before you get married? Why me? I’m not marrying you… Jesus, Courtney – you fucked Stuart?’

  ‘Neil, please don’t flip out on me,’ she said, following me to the pool.

  ‘Fuck!’ I said, flicking my cigarette over the fence.

  ‘It just happened,’ she said, placing her hand on my back. ‘He took me back to his place for a shower, after that awful riot out the front of the squash courts? He said we should wait there until we heard from you guys. But we didn’t. So I lay on his bed and watched him inject steroids, we chatted. And then I took my top off and asked him to touch me.’

  ‘No way, and what’d he do?’

  ‘He hesitated, but then I pleaded with him. I said I wanted it over. I ask
ed him for a favour and he obliged me.’

  I moved away from her, ducking under vines to get to a spot where she could not reach me.

  ‘Obliged. Fucking hell what kind of word is that!’

  ‘Shhhh…’ she pointed to her mother’s room just above us.

  ‘Oh, man,’ I said, ‘this is way bent.’

  ‘I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Yeah, “Hey Neil, fucked your girlfriend last night!”’

  ‘I thought he might have admitted it to you,’ she said. ‘Now or then! Now that he comes to you, in your dreams I thought he may have.’

  ‘Who knows if it’s even him?’ I wanted to hurt her now. ‘Maybe Stuart’s just a projection, like you said, and everything he told me, of then and now and Tommy…’

  ‘Don’t you do that.’

  ‘All the shit he said about Tommy is my sick brain making it all up!’

  ‘Don’t be cruel, Neil. I know I have hurt you.’

  I walked back to the banana lounge and sat. She followed, crouching down and forward before me. Finally she spoke, like a social worker not a lawyer, like a friend not a lover.

  ‘I asked him to do it,’ she said. ‘I just wanted it done and over.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said, sardonic as all get out.

  ‘It was,’ she said in a whisper, ‘it was very beautiful.’

  Her hand rested on my neck and I began to cry. Was I crying at how pathetic I was back then? How frigid and scared of such intimacy? Or was I crying over my friend’s betrayal? For so long I had tortured myself at the loss of him, only to discover he wasn’t the loyal and true mate I thought he was. In the end, I think I was crying because I was beginning to believe that no one was worth loving in this world, that everyone was evil and self-obsessed in their truest hour, and so I cried in the knowledge that I would never let a soul in again, I would go cold from now on in and shut the world out, it was the only option. These were my final tears and the rain was joining me.

  ‘I spoke to him,’ she said, ‘after we made love on that night.’

  ‘Oh you made love now, did you?’

  ‘He said that you and I should be together forever.’

  ‘As he pulled his cock out of your pussy?’

  She did not laugh nor miss a beat. ‘I asked him why you’d never wanted me enough,’ she said, ‘I asked him if he knew, if you had ever told him why…’

  I looked up at her for Stuart’s answer, and as I did she stroked my cheek, and her green eyes filled with salted water, swirling about with ten years of concealment and guilt.

  ‘He told me you wanted my mother more than me,’ she said.

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, and she started laughing. ‘Was it true?’

  I couldn’t help myself either. I started laughing big and loud and full.

  ‘Yes, it was true,’ I said. ‘It seemed easier to me, the idea of that.’

  ‘She’s upstairs,’ she said, and we laughed together as the birds fired up a big song and dance about this brand-new Sunday they were all so fucking proud of.

  With the yellow light of reality upon us, Courtney took me by the hand and led me through the kitchen to the living room.

  ‘You can sleep here,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a blanket from upstairs. Set the cushions up on the floor.’

  I did what old Courtney had told me to do. I set the cushions up on the floor behind the couch. The living room of the Gonzales’ house was one of those beautiful ‘presentation rooms’ no one ever entered. They had dinner in here twice a year and most things were covered in plastic. I looked around the room at the glass cabinet filled with Tommy’s trophies and further sadness fell upon me. I had never felt so displaced and ugly. What had any of my wondrous life come to? The love, the art, the travel. Here I was at twenty-eight, in my ex-girlfriend’s house, sleeping behind a couch in a room no one ever entered. I had no place to live, no girlfriend, and no ideas in my Moleskine notebook. All I had was the fresh knowledge that people were pain, and this excluded nobody.

  I woke up with her above me, grinding back and forth on my centre, my hand in her hand on the outside of her left breast sliding about on the chiffon. For a moment there I wasn’t sure this was truly happening, I was seriously half asleep and dreaming, but I knew it was real when she came down and my lips met hers and the taste of her gums and teeth brought me back to her, and forward, propelled into this passion unknowingly. I peeled the hair back from in front of her eyes but she did not want me to take her in as she moved herself down and around my cock, mocking the act, fucking me with her dress on, hiding on an angle in my neck and face. I parted her hair once more, but again she dived back into my lips and resumed her veiled, fervent kissing of me. When she paused, when she allowed my rhythm to be a player in this, I fell into things as participant mutual, opening my mouth to receive her tongue and teeth, gripping her neck from the back and getting her as close as gravity and flesh would allow, and she made sounds, sharp gasps of horror and joy in harmony as we turned the corners of each other’s bodies and found ways to get nearer, and obtusely so. She kissed so differently now, she kissed like a woman, with certainty and intent. She knew what she wanted and how to get herself there, but also, inside this kiss there was punishment; I could feel the self-loathing in every gasp, but still I pushed on, too far gone now to consider my best friend asleep in the room above me. I lifted her out of the blue dress, and she removed my jeans then led my penis out of its home.

  ‘Just fuck me,’ she said. ‘Please fuck me.’

  She fell upon me and I ripped off her underwear, a very thin g-string that would have weighed less than the lid of a pen. She was naked now as I spun her round and placed her on the cushions. She was beneath me as I lined my face up with her face, kicking off my socks; the last of the garments to go. She looked young again, her face all squashed and chubby, riddled with the same fear it spoke of when I got so close those ten, eleven, years ago.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked, with a catch in her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, massaging her clitoris with the tip of my index finger.

  ‘Do you love Swanna more than me?’ she asked, and I turned away. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Courtney…’ I said.

  ‘You love her more than me, don’t you?’ she said, and she held my face in front of hers, begging for this ultimate truth.

  ‘I’m in love with her, yes,’ I said to Courtney’s big green eyes.

  ‘Are you in love with me?’ she asked, through broken breaths, and I knew I could change our lives right then, I could place them together in brilliant controversy, I knew this was the moment, and again, again like every other time before, I faltered at the turn.

  ‘You’re getting married,’ I said, and that did it. She pushed me off and crawled to her feet. Then she simply walked out of the living room, through the white wooden doors and into the marble foyer with the high ceilings. Sweat glistened on her spine – she was as naked as the night, and the curves of her hips and shoulders danced in the bouncing light of the antique mirror which adorned the wall across from the entrance doorway. She climbed the stairs to Gordon, her eyes set dead ahead. Either not tempted, or too strong, she never looked back.

  *

  Nina’s voice was high in the morning and the sound of the vacuum low. Together they formed a perfect harmonic, which grew louder and louder, infiltrating my dream and then officially waking me from my sleep to reality: I am naked and Nina is but a few feet away, pushing the vacuum into the living room from the kitchen. The transition from linoleum to carpet was a relief in audio terms but terrifying in terms of my predicament. I pushed Courtney’s chiffon dress under the couch and reached for my jeans, sliding them on just as she appeared above me.

  ‘Oh, hello, Neil!’ Nina shouted over the vacuum, peeking down at my semi-nakedness. I spotted the g-string and bra at my feet and quickly plonked a cushion over the top of them as Gordon arrived in the room wielding two tall glasse
s of effulgent red liquid.

  ‘Berocca, my friend? Gives you back that b-b-bounce!’

  Outside the sweetest sea breeze lifted up off the coastal shelf and into my nostrils and soul, cleansing it all, softening it all, placating. Gordon had a coffee now, I was still halfway through my Berocca, smoking a cigarette on the welcome mat in just my jeans. The only other thing I wore was the stink of her perfume on my face and neck and the recent memory of her skin and tongue and mouth and tongue and cunt and tongue and skin on my mouth and hands and hair and face and neck and breasts and skin.

  Gordon seemed gallant as the light rain kicked off again, sentimental even, as if nothing could bump him from his spot at the top of the line, and it certainly would not be me, I would hide in the smoke until the car came with my mother in it and a ‘yoo-hoo’ and a ‘let’s go’ saved me from the bells of hell; please Lord keep Courtney up there in her bed, surrounded by elephants, and please may Nina not find her intimate apparel beneath the couch and cushions. Not while I am here at least, I cannot take one more of Gordon’s punches and kicks.

  ‘Courtney and I ,’ Gordon said to me, like an old bloke looking over his kingdom of wealth and plenty, ‘we’re so happy you came back for our engagement.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You heard her speech, she just loves having you back from London. She got so worried about you and all, with what happened with Swanna and shit…’

  ‘Yeah, she has a big heart, Courtney does.’ I waited for him to comment but instead there was silence.

  Then, out of the blue, he swung to me, with exultant eyes. ‘You know she really loves Elvis?’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Courtney!’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Yeah! Lately she’s been listening to him on her mini-disc player. She loves him, all the old stuff, “Jailhouse Rock” and “All Shook Up”, she sings it round the house and at the gym. She even bought me the Christmas Album last Christmas which is hilarious… a-ho-ho-ho-whiiiiite… Christmaaaassss.’