How it feels

by Brendan Cowell

  ‘Right, that is funny!’ I said, unsure of where this was going.

  And then he whispered conspiratorially, ‘At the wedding, I’m thinking, you know how there’s the wedding dance where the couple just do a really slow one-on-one thing? Well I’m going to mix it up! It’s boring and I hate dancing slow, so I’m thinking of coming out in an Elvis suit.’

  I waited for him to continue but clearly he was expecting me to jump by this point. ‘Ohhhh, right, nice idea,’ I said.

  ‘I know, right?’ he said, pounding his hands together. ‘We do a dance to one of Elvis’s pop songs, everyone will lose it!’ He slapped me on the bare chest and shook his head at the genius idea.

  Then Mum arrived and I drifted back inside to gather my t-shirt and jacket, leaving Gordon to catch up with Mum through the passenger window from his position on the trimmed gutter. When I entered the living room Nina was standing beside the couch holding Courtney’s blue dress and tiny underwear. I shrugged pathetically. Nina came over to me, holding the garments in her left hand. Then she kissed me softly on the forehead, ran the back of her right hand down the length of my nose, stopping on the summit of my upper lip, and left the living room, closing the doors to the kitchen behind her.

  31

  My best friend Gordon has a beer in his hand and he is welcoming arrivals. I am standing beside him taking old ladies’ coats and helping prams fit through the doors which usually means a forty-five degree angle is required causing shit to spill out onto the floor which keeps on happening, but I cannot stop it, the hipflask of bourbon I drank at the photo session mixed with the six beers that were on offer in Shoes’s esky have gone to my head and balance is absent. The DJ is playing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and the place is glowing, each round table dressed with name cards and daffodils and rows of shining cutlery. Having seen Wanda Surf Club in the daytime I am amazed at the transformation from seedy wooden hall to enchanting dreamland. But when Courtney is in charge, these types of things are entirely possible. The sea is out the big windows and it shimmers appropriately, the moon a three-quarter biscuit from which cool mauve light is made.

  ‘Helloooo,’ Sarah says, kissing me on both cheeks. The baby asleep in a pram – I help her wheel it inside to a quiet corner. I had first spotted Sarah at the photo session, stunning in her black ruffled bridesmaid’s dress with giant red rose on the left chest area.

  Chatting with her as the photographer manipulated all sorts of false and terribly clichéd scenarios, I felt good, and happy she was there to catch my rolling eyes. It was the same brand of goodness I felt now, throwing the fly net over baby Dylan and asking Sarah if she’d ‘care for a cham-poo?’

  ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ she replied, applying lipstick.

  I kept checking on Dylan because I wanted to but also because Sarah liked it. Mostly I guzzled champagne and listened to the woman talk, and man could she talk, with a mouth full of tyres she would manage any of Hamlet’s soliloquies. We were well into our third glass of Yellowglen and this impressed me further, a girl that could drink properly and quickly. On the dance floor Courtney and Gordon were laughing too hard. Some ugly fuck from my Year 9 PE class was grinding some demented chick who worked at the Woolooware Mobil. ‘Moondance’ was playing, or some other Van Morrison, I can’t be sure, for I am smashed and elsewhere.

  ‘Sorry to hear about Stuart,’ Sarah says, a hand on my neck.

  ‘Ah, that was a while back.’

  ‘Still. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Let me fucking kiss you,’ I say. Then, with new politeness, ‘May I?’

  ‘Tell me what happened, first,’ she orders, putting down her flute and focusing.

  ‘ To Stuart?’ I ask her.

  ‘ To you. Tell me all of it.’

  ‘And then I get a kiss?’

  ‘Depends on the story,’ and she kissed me on the eyelid.

  Bathurst Hospital was a mess. The place was under heavy construction and I couldn’t work out where the hell I was meant to be.

  It was a post-apocalyptic scene: massacred people in wheelchairs, rubble and bright lights and balloons and staff running for closing lifts.

  Gordon didn’t come in, he didn’t like hospitals, and said he would get some coffee and a paper and meet me back in the car park in an hour. It was kind of him to drive me, I didn’t have a licence and the idea of me getting the train offended him, as if trains were jails or places you shouldn’t be seen in, transport for the lesser. He had picked me up from the airport, taken me to the beach, and then driven me the three and a half hours to Bathurst. He didn’t comment on the state of me, either; my smell, my weight loss, my skin. I was a scaly, jittering, chattering shell of a man and I could feel the concern in his silence. He didn’t know the half of it. I planned on being home for a few days only, enough time to see Mum and say my goodbyes to Dick – then I would fly straight back to London and resume taking ice.

  When a man is dying he is like a wounded lion, he curls up and whimpers in his fur and no longer resembles the Beast of the Wilderness that he once was. He is still a lion, but there is no fight left in him, and the children of the Beast see him and they know they have to be the Beast now.

  ‘Boy genius!’ Dick called from his bed. The room was small with a window looking out over the cranes and trucks. An old Greek man shared the space, but Dick’s side held all the cards and flowers.

  ‘Who’s this bloke?’ I said, approaching. Dick had a ‘Comics Out West (COW!) Tour 1991’ beanie on, his face was three times its usual size, and his hands were bruised and swollen.

  ‘Ohhhh, my boy,’ said Dick, and I hugged him, careful not to tug on any of the many cords stretching out of his bloated, failing form.

  ‘Mate, I didn’t bring you anything,’ I said. ‘I meant to get you some stuff duty free but I clean forgot.’

  ‘Get out, ya cheap bastard!’

  I could see how much energy it required of him to make conversation. He was not long to go and it hurt me. I don’t think I would have come home for many other people in my life, maybe just my parents and Agatha, maybe Gordon (though Gordon will never die) – but Dick, I had to see him before he departed this sordid stage. I did not receive warning, I simply started to cry, uncontrollably, and the more I tried to hide it the more it flowed out. But it wasn’t just Dick, it was the twenty-four hours without meth that had penetrated the numbness and let the feelings through again.

  ‘Sorry, Dick… Things have been intense in London.’

  ‘Mate, don’t feel bad. All I do is cry,’ he said. ‘Cry all night and day.’

  ‘He does too,’ the Greek man chimed in from across the room.

  Dick wanted so much to live. He was fifty-eight going on twenty-one. He had never seen theatre in Japan, or Germany, or even the Blue Man Group in New York, and he and his wife were set on it, and so too were their savings.

  ‘Tell me about London,’ Dick said, patting the bed for me to sit.

  I sat on the edge of the skinny bed and told him a little about it. Of course he had read the reviews of all my shows and printed out the articles about our work. He was so proud to think his teachings had ‘made waves’ overseas. I told him about Swanna and the machete, and I told him that I was by no means an angel when it came to love and responsibility.

  ‘I am a wreck,’ I told him, and he chortled lovingly. There was nothing but love and acceptance in his soul.

  I touched his grizzly beard and he laughed. I didn’t tell him that for months now I had been living in an empty house with Swanna, smoking from a crack pipe and not sleeping for weeks at a time. I did not tell him what I do to get this drug, or any of it, how could I? He thought so well of me, he was the only one left.

  After the engagement party I flew back to London with purpose. I would give Swanna and me one last chance, for it was painfully clear, on the living room floor with Courtney, that my feelings for Swanna were still abundantly alive and life without her was another mistake for my collection. When I arrived at the
Bethnal Green house, wielding Australian flags and a chocolate wombat, Swanna was sitting in the middle of the kitchen with Clive, naked and freebasing, Serge Gainsbourg drifting out from the CD player.

  Initially, I resisted, doing my best to get her to a hospital, to a rehab clinic, or somewhere out of here. But she brought me in with soft hands, and built me up a perfect snow cone to ease me into the understanding, and I soon understood, more than I would know, how it felt to feel nothing, and this was exactly where I wanted to be, numb and skating in England with my girl – high above what we had made, and way above what we had lost.

  ‘Son…’ Dick coughed violently, and I knew I should go and let him rest. His eyes were closing and his lips didn’t quite open when he spoke. He sounded drunk. ‘Get yourself a martial art. I’ve been doing tai chi for the cancer, and even though the bastard still won out, tai chi gave me balance and peace of mind for my final moments. This is what we all need… the thinking men… the artists… we need to find a way out of the restlessness and panic into the calm.’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ I lied, dreaming of a pipe stacked with meth.

  ‘How is Swanna?’ he asked, and I shrugged the subject dead. He nodded, and even though he knew fuck-all, he understood everything. Dick fell asleep at a clumsy angle; his big and beautiful smile collapsing now.

  ‘You’re a good dad, Dick,’ I said, and I left the ward, pocketing a plastic jar of Endone tablets off Dick’s side table.

  I didn’t own sunglasses and it was frighteningly bright outside the hospital. I could hardly see from the glare. But then I recognised Gordon’s blue Lexus.

  We drove out of Bathurst without speaking. I put the radio on and it was comforting to hear the Australian accents on Triple M, even the ads were nice. We stopped at Lithgow for petrol and he spotted a pie shop across the road. Gordon loved meat pies so we sat inside and ordered two each. I bit into my first one then went to the bathroom and swallowed two of Dick’s Endone tablets.

  When I came out Gordon was squinting at me.

  ‘You’ve lost weight!’

  ‘Oh, man, yeah. Been riding my bike round town.’

  ‘You a junkie, Cronk?’

  ‘No, dude –’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’m not a junkie.’

  ‘You look like a junkie. You ate half of one of your pies.’

  ‘I’ll eat it later.’

  ‘Don’t fucking lie to me, Cronk!’

  ‘I just… I’ve not been eating a lot,’ I said. ‘ We lost a baby.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know.’ Gordon scrunched up his napkin and then threw it at me. ‘You saw what drugs did to our other friend, didn’t you?’

  In the car I asked my friend Gordon if he knew where my father was living now, and if so, could he drive me there. I was not ready to see my mother yet and I figured Dad wouldn’t notice what state I was in; he never looked at me for long enough.

  The drive to Cronulla was surprisingly fun. Now we had got things out of our system we were free to talk and make the old jokes that worked well. The Endone had kicked in and I felt magic. G-Man dropped me at my father’s house and I waved my friend off and thanked him emphatically. He said he would call later that night, ‘get some beers’. I would love to have beers with Gordon, and with the sun on my back I decided that it was time to leave the ice alone and maybe hang out here for a bit, freshen things up with salted water and good fruit salads, cold beers, NRL on Fox and normal shit.

  My father was still at work, she told me. She was my age and horrible to look at. She was not ugly, she was just severe, and I did not like her one bit. I rarely had such a negative reaction to a person, but she was hard and harried and didn’t invite me in. I was not sure what I had done to deserve this from her, so I waited on the front steps for three hours and it was ok, I had a book to read and I was high.

  Just as the sun was calling things off my father arrived in his instructor’s car, but it was a different one, it said Cronk/Minetti Driving School on it. He got out of the car and just stared at me from the kerb as if I was an eleven-foot octopus who’d just loped out of the sea. I opened my arms but he didn’t respond, he just stood frozen on the street.

  ‘Son,’ Dad said.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, and I stood up.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came home for a second. To see some people.’

  ‘Who?’ my dad asked, and I wondered why he hadn’t come to me yet. A handshake or a hug or even a scruff of the hair.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello? Haven’t seen you in a year,’ I said.

  ‘Where… did you see Loretta?’ he asked, keeping his voice down low.

  ‘Some chick answered the door. She wouldn’t let me inside.’

  ‘She didn’t ask you in?’ he winced at what he knew was true.

  ‘What’s with the new car? And the new signage?’ I pointed at it.

  ‘Oh yeah, we broke off from ABC. Loretta and I have started our own thing; she runs the business from inside the house.’

  ‘Wow, right – so that’s that?’

  ‘Look, mate…’ Dad moved up the lawn towards me. ‘Loretta’s a little funny about things, she –’

  ‘Why are you whispering, Dad?’ I asked. He was in front of me now, I could touch him.

  ‘She’s not quite… she isn’t… she’s not family-oriented. She just likes things nice and simple,’ he said, and I did not know him.

  ‘Are you asking me to leave, Dad?’

  ‘Let’s meet up for lunch tomorrow, just the two of us,’ Dad suggested. ‘She just doesn’t like the mess!’

  Tears arrived in my eyes. ‘Am I “mess”? Is that what I am, Dad?’

  He said nothing, just glanced over my shoulder and through the window at the shadow of bitch-woman inside.

  ‘Bye Dad,’ I said, and walked away from his new house.

  I tried life at my mother’s but she wouldn’t leave me alone to sleep the days through, she kept on at me about the Black Dog Institute, telling me I was depressed and ‘a man can come see you for not a lot of money a visit’. I wanted ice now.

  I moved in with Ioannis, one of the mechanics I’d met towards the end of high school. I tracked him down through Malaki, Stuart’s brother, who since Stuart’s death had gone all clean living, practising yoga on the beach every morning at five and eating wheatgrass and shit. He shook his head when I asked for Ioannis’s number, but he gave it to me. For a second there I could see Stuart in his eyes.

  My bed was a pink foam mattress beneath the ping-pong table in Ioannis’s garage, which was fine because, well, I was not sleeping so much in that time of skating. On top of the bar fridge was a mirror. I was looking in the mirror at my face. My cheekbones pushed out of my skin, my lips were thin and colourless, my eyes were empty and grey, my skin was blotchy, but it was ok, I could pull this off. I wet my hair and moved gel through it. I combed the hair to the side then I tied my tie. I was wearing beige linen pants and matching jacket over a white button-up shirt and a red-checked tie. My shoes were open and I wore no socks. I’d bought the whole outfit from the Vinnies on Beach Street for $15.80.

  A week ago Ioannis told me that Gordon called by the mechanic workshop asking for me. He had heard I was living with Ioannis and gave him a letter and Ioannis passed the letter on to me when he got home. We got a whole swag of ice and cooked it, discussing the intricacies of the letter for six days.

  Cronk,

  Mate, how are you? Where did you go after I dropped you off three weeks ago? I thought we were going to have beers??

  Me and the missus are throwing a barbecue at the (newly renovated!) joint on Saturday from 1-ish. We ’d love to see you, nothing big, just Mum and Albert and Albert’s mate Graham and of course us!

  So come along if you’re not busy, don’t bring anything we’ve got heaps.

  Oh, maybe boardies if you want to swim. We’ve got an in-ground fucken pool, dude!!!

  Righto, hope to see ya!
<
br />   G.

  Ioannis dropped me a couple of blocks from the beach house. I didn’t want him to drop me out the front because then they might ask him in, and I didn’t want him with me, his face had tattoos on it and everyone knew he ran ‘all things drugs’ in the Shire. But I didn’t want to walk either, as it was 32 degrees and I would surely sweat through my linen suit, undoing all the hard work I had put in that morning.

  Ioannis squinted over the wheel; the meth fucked his vision completely. Everything went orange and shook, he said.

  ‘Cronk.’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, smoking out the window.

  ‘Do you stay in touch with anyone from your college?’

  ‘Uni?’

  ‘Yeah. From theatre school.’

  Ioannis was always asking me about theatre. I appreciated his interest but at the same time I didn’t like talking about it. It all led to Swanna and the baby.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What about the lecturer you told me about? The one who loved you?’

  ‘Dick died,’ I said.

  ‘Did you go to the funeral?’

  Fuck off. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was in the garage smoking crack with you.’

  All the houses that led to Gordon’s were either brick or fibro, and most of them had a Southern Cross flag in their windows or on their lawns, hoisted up nice and high to catch the ocean’s breeze. Many had boats, or half-fixed cars outside, plenty of apple crates, surfboards and balls lying about like monuments of heroic days.

  I could see Gordon’s place from the corner. It was impossible not to. The two-storey house was enormous and savage with hard lines and plenty of glass.

  I heard familiar chatter, took sixteen deep breaths, swallowed five hundred milligrams of Xanax, and made my way up Gordon’s path to Gordon. I should’ve brought something. Even when people said ‘don’t bring anything’ they still expected you to. I was thinking about walking into town and going to Liquorland or the florist or some joint that sold Darrell Lea when the door opened and Carmen was there, real and alive in her two-piece swimsuit with a golden camisole draped over the top. She had a fruity sun visor on and not-yet-rubbed-in sunscreen on her face and nose. She had lost a tonne of weight but she was still pretty mega, and if I was her, I would have definitely gone with a one-piece and sarong for cover.