How it feels

by Brendan Cowell

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked her and she stopped, turning round to face him. ‘Everyone take their seats, please, it’s time for part two of the wedding speeches.’

  Courtney didn’t move.

  ‘Darling, take your seat. Now.’

  She looked to me for direction but I looked away, crossing the floor to the drinks table which was crowded with people I knew, may know, didn’t know, should have known or never knew I did know – but I would penetrate the forest of all, my need for vodka was beyond human understanding, I would eat their legs to get to it.

  ‘Unchained Melody’ came on as Gordon ordered us to find our seats. Kirkwood was with her baby on table 12 by the window but I did not honour her with any brand of look or wave. Was it true I had nearly choked her to death?

  ‘Double vodka please,’ I said to the pimply teenage girl behind the drinks table, my head between two women. One of them was Nina, and she turned to me.

  ‘Nelly,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

  I took my drink from the girl and followed Nina into the corner with big reluctance in my steps. I could not take another berating, another moral judgment from the Bible-belted beach believers, and if she offered one I’d show my teeth.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said to me, ‘don’t go that way.’

  And I was calm and I remembered her, she always looked betwee n things, like a Buddhist she saw the pain behind the anger behind the action.

  ‘What just happened?’ I asked her, pulling on clear liquid as if for air.

  ‘You lost,’ she said to me, her compassion turning to scorn. ‘Most of my girl’s heart is made up of you, but you lost…’

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘How did I lose?’

  ‘Like all men, you show no courage when it counts. you can cry at the football but you cannot handle us.’

  ‘But Nina I’m no good for her – I’m a fucking wreck!’

  ‘And there you go again – you want to be a wreck. God has given you the choices and you have thrown them all to the floor because it makes you feel fucked up and important, but you’re not, Neil, you’re just like the rest of us, but weaker.’

  I was too hurt to speak. Where had all this come from? I was wearing my groomsman’s outfit, I had my best-man speech somewhere, I just wanted to do what was right then go home and drink myself to death, like Jack Kerouac did, except my mother would not be joining me, she didn’t believe in the practising dark. I hunkered down into my chest and closed my eyes and immediately the whole world spun in the blackness – all I could make out were these sparkling red lights, which were trying to form a shape, a face – in my head. Whose face was this? Stuart, is that you shaping up in my mind’s eye?

  ‘I’m sorry, Neil – that was terrible of me,’ Nina said, and I was dragged back into the living land, where people were circling their chairs then sitting. ‘We all adore you, Neil. I think I always adored you too much – I so wanted you to be my son, especially after Tommy left us. And I’ve had a few too many, it’s all coming out – weddings, hey? They do it to us, so much emotion – too much!’

  ‘It’s ok, Mrs G, really…’ I just wanted to go, and go, and go.

  ‘You know our place is your place, always. you need a home-cooked meal, your washing done, or just some company. I know things aren’t always easy between yourself and your mother.’ She turned right in towards me now, I was the focus of her life and I liked this so much. ‘We have two spare rooms now, and Eric and I would love to have you, I mean it,’ she said, and I believed her. I could help with the maintenance, and just talk to her in the kitchen. I might even find myself in her bed one day, holding her while she cries, or pouring berry fruit whip all over her tits and sucking it off. I don’t hate the idea – I always found it easier, the thought of fucking you, Nina, than the thought of your daughter’s profundity, I always wanted to be between your legs. Can we go now, please?

  ‘I love you, Neil, we all do,’ she said, kissing me on the side of my mouth. My dick heated up and I wished she would not leave me here.

  And then Nina was gone, and my eyes drifted up to the podium, where Gordon had the microphone in one hand and a Carlton Cold in the other, and he was staring at me, along with the rest of them.

  ‘They call him the best man, but I’ll let you be the judge of that,’ Gordon said, laughing at his own joke. ‘Ladies and gentleman, my weird arty mate, the one and only, oh yes it’s the glorious fuck-up himself, Mr Neil Cronk!’

  35

  After the house on a leaf was built, and my time at the rehabilitation facility (‘Serenity in the Shire’) was done, I rediscovered the art of fishing.

  The past couple of months had reunited Gordon and I in the most glorious way but now the house was done I think we were both worried about how and when we would see each other – boat fishing was the perfect way to maintain the rebirth. Being men, neither of us would ever say how much the whole adventure had meant, but we knew it had, sitting there on that decking with a beer: me ‘alive and well’ with a house made of mud, brick and tin to show for it, a house we had built together on weekend breaks from the facility, adding the finishing touches over the Christmas holidays with the help of Albert, Graham, Shoes and some of the local Bundeena kids. Never had I known the extraordinary depths of man until this season, when Gordon Braithwaite single-handedly got his best friend off meth and into the property market and, inevitably, the water.

  *

  ‘Did it say high tide was at five o’clock, or low tide?’ Gordon asked me, twisting a six-millimetre line between his fingers. ‘Forgot that fucken chart.’

  Courtney found it deeply amusing, the way we’d board the tinny at Lilli Pilli wharf and drive the thing twenty-five minutes round the headland all the way to Dolans Bay, parking it a mere ten metres from the rocky shore which still led up to that old cave I’d clung to so dearly in the whirlwind of adolescence – my solace hole, our hideaway. We could have driven, walked down there from the street and thrown a line out from the shelf, but we did it our way because ‘boat fishing’ was the dream and so it would be fishing from a boat. And the sport was apparently a lot more rewarding in other spots, like South West Arm and Port Hacking Bay, but we liked Dolans, it was ours, and as we hung our lines over the edge of our small vessel, memory and its warmth encased us, whether they were jumping or not we knew we felt lucky.

  ‘Mate, I cannot for the life of me recall. High tide is better for fish, yes?’ I asked him, resting back on the motor with an orange hand reel in my lap, its line pressed firmly over my index finger, ready to pick up any sign of action beneath.

  Gordon loved our amateur approach to angling, tightening the bream hook onto his line and plucking a prawn from the bait box. ‘I think high tide is better, yep – well I fucken hope so!’ he said, bellowing laughter into the air, and surely scaring off the one dumb and hungry fish we had a chance with.

  The sun bounced around inside and outside the scruffy clouds until twilight came to soothe us all. I opened a bottle of pinot noir and unleashed the cheese platter in celebration of a new arriving mood. It had been an hour since either of us had spoken, and even longer since a fish had appeared in our boat, but this was irrelevant, fishing had nothing to do with the fish, and our time together was not necessarily about talking, it was enough just to be here in the hobby, bobbing around on the wet stuff, together, and alive.

  ‘This is a good wine,’ Gordon said. ‘Where’d you get on to this one?’

  ‘I got it from the Bundeena Liquorland, it was only eleven bucks,’ I told him.

  ‘I didn’t think you could get a good pinot under twenty dollars.’

  We shook our heads and savoured the wine. It smelt like vomit and tasted like dead ants and strawberries, but something about it kept moving in your mouth long after the liquid was supped.

  ‘You know,’ Gordon said, peering up into the dotted spray of housing before us. ‘Would not be a bad time to place something in the Dolans area, it’s still a
well-kept secret. I mean, listen to that Nelly…’ and we listened. ‘It’s so quiet. you can’t buy that kind of tranquillity in Cronulla no more.’

  ‘It’s special, that’s for sure,’ I said, crunching on a cracker topped with the crumbling and always delightful Mersey Valley vintage cheese.

  ‘You know what we could do?’ he said, his eyebrows hitting the roof of his scalp like they always did when he had a grand plan emerging, ‘we could do what we did with your joint in Bundeena, buy a chunk of land – I mean, look up there, there’s plenty of space – we buy a block and whack a little bungalow on it, two bedroom, fresh-water tank, priceless views. Mate, we could make a go of this, it’s so cheap to build that kind of joint, you saw how easy we did your one!’

  ‘Which I will pay you back for,’ I added, eyeballing him for agreement.

  ‘Mate, it was the land I spent money on, the rest was kids’ play.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s because everyone worked for free.’

  ‘Not for free – for me!’ Gordon said, winking at me cheekily. ‘We need to make some plans, Nelly. You’re in good shape now – we need to make a five-year plan. You ever read Richard Branson’s book, the guy who created the Virgin brand? It’s fucken inspiring, dude! That guy just did it all himself, didn’t wait around, didn’t listen to the negativity, he just stayed positive and got it done.’

  ‘I’ve never read it,’ I said. ‘I should, but.’

  ‘Business, travel, family, water views – these are all things we can have.’

  ‘It’s exciting,’ I said, wishing we could go back to the serenity.

  ‘Did you guys ever talk about it?’ Gordon asked me, lowering his tone and scratching at his ginger beard with fresh discomfort.

  ‘Did who?’

  And he whispered now, into the bait bucket. ‘You and Swanna, you guys ever make a plan for your life? Like a list of goals you wanted to achieve?’

  I was taken aback. Never had Gordon addressed something so directly – never had he been this interested in the details of my past.

  ‘We were never goal-oriented, no,’ I answered, lighting a pre-rolled rollie.

  ‘Right, you just went with it?’

  I didn’t answer, I just stared out into the stillness.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ he asked me, and I wondered who had sent him to ask these things of me. Was he working for ‘Serenity in the Shire’, had they planted a microphone here? My mother? Courtney?

  ‘You don’t have to answer, if it’s too hard,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m just asking because I care about you, man, and if you ever wanted to talk about it…’

  I smoked for a while and then I turned to him. My eyes were hot and my chest was thumping against its chamber, but I wanted to speak of her, I wanted to bring her back into this realm – this harmless estuary, she would like it here.

  ‘I disappointed her, G,’ I said, and a tear tumbled down my face.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ he said, refilling our plastic glasses with wine.

  ‘You know what Mum said to me, when I left the last time to resurrect things with Swanna?’

  ‘What’d she say?’

  ‘She said, “Swanna has everything, Neil. She is attractive, she has talent, and you’ve been very good to her. What about Agatha and me?” She says, “We don’t have men in our lives. We could do with a man around. It’s very selfish of Swanna to expect you to come running every time there’s a problem – what about us women at home?” ’

  ‘She didn’t say that!’ Gordon roared in disbelief.

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Did she know about the stabbing?’

  ‘Yeah, man. She knew. I told her.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Gordon. ‘If women don’t get a man by the time they’re forty, they go fucking nuts. Fuck, man, I mean – you guys lost a baby and all.’

  ‘We never really recovered from that one. Aside from the meth and other things, that was what really killed us,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a pretty full-on thing to happen to a couple, Nell.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much that event, I mean that didn’t help; it was what happened before and after it. I’d been asked to go to Berlin, to meet people and see some readings, I’d been flown over by the Schaubühne and there were all these investors in Germany, people who wanted to throw money at me to make a work there – a work that could tour Europe maybe. I didn’t even think of taking Swanna with me, even though she was my creative partner. She was pregnant and I – I don’t know why, for the first time I wanted to go on my own. And when I was there I partied a lot and I started fucking this Swedish ballet dancer, she was young and she was just… free and young. I stayed an extra couple of weeks, making up lies to Swanna on the phone about workshops and readings and shit, and meanwhile I’m just taking drugs and partying with this girl. When I heard the news of the stabbing I was in bed, I was on GBH, this sex drug, and I was in bed in Kreuzberg. I never told Swanna any of what I had been up to, but she knew, she knew I didn’t want her with me for a reason, she knew I was scared of the life we were about to make and…’ The tears fell in rows now, but I would tell him all of it because then it would be out of me – no longer just sitting there chewing at my soul night and day. ‘She always said that the baby was taken from us because whoever put it there knew we weren’t ready for it. She said they took one look at me, and one look at her, and they severed all ties.’

  ‘Well that’s crazy,’ Gordon said, and I got the sense he wished he’d never opened this up. ‘That’s just a chick being over the top.’

  ‘She was right, man, I only every liked the idea of children and family. When the reality came I ran away, and someone saw this, or her body felt this, and it was gone.’

  ‘That’s fucking nonsense, that’s perfect fucking nonsense, Cronk, and you know it,’ Gordon said, shaking his head adamantly.

  ‘And you know what she said to me, when I finally got to the hospital? I asked her what happened, and she said, “It’s gone,” and I said, “I’m sorry,” and she said… she said, “You look relieved”. That’s what she said to me.’

  ‘Well she was probably under, man, and look, I mean she’d just been through a lot physically, you can expect a woman to lash out in that situation.’

  ‘She’s right, mate, I killed the kid – and the next one.’

  ‘You keep on like that I’m going to throw you in the fucking sea!’

  ‘Best thing you could do.’

  ‘Cronk, I’m warning you, stop talking like a faggot, ok?’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ I said. ‘But you asked about my goals.’

  We fished quietly as the moon made its first offering to the night, appearing as a sort of fucked-up white banana that a mouse had chewed a hole in, but on its travels managed to insert a row of forty-watt bulbs inside.

  ‘You know Nina and Courtney worry about you all the time,’ Gordon said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘How does Nina put it? She says, “I hope he has not taken on any of the suicidal tendencies of his fellow artists or the friends he used to know.” ’

  ‘She thinks I’m going to follow Stu and Tommy, does she?’

  ‘She worries, but I tell her you don’t have the balls.’ G grinned.

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘Cowardice, my saviour.’

  We laughed and drank until the bottle was done and we felt stupid in the dark, catching nothing and shivering. As Gordon pulled the boat away I turned and took in the cave one last time, remembering the image of Stuart Stone standing there with his cock swinging back and forth in the early evening wind, and the way Courtney watched it, hypnotised by all it could be.

  36

  Wanda Beach was empty as I pushed out past the limit of the club, breathing in the air that hit me like a swinging sheet on a Hills Hoist. Left shoe, right shoe, get you off, then left sock, stumble, right sock off – my feet were in the sand. I flung my arms to the side and let the hefty breeze have me – and you can if you want to, lift me up and encoura
ge my wings, I will go with you, please know that.

  Sea mist swept over like a flying circus tent, and we will play beneath it, when he arrives down here and yes I know he will – always there to finish things, there will be playtime, two kids in men’s bodies laughing big and bright at each other, love and rage in our eyes, teeth bared and knuckles up I assume. Why change now?

  I made my way down to the shoreline which fell away steeply in the end. The water was cold around my ankles. I rolled my pants up to my calves as the remnants of a wave exhaled around me. This felt right, it felt right.

  ‘Oi!’ he cried, and it echoed shyly away from me.

  I turned around to face the surf club but he was nowhere in sight, the mist had erased all but the venue, which made it seem even more glorified than it already was; ‘the wedding’. Where was the rest of the world? I wondered. I knew of a church and a school and many suburbs beyond. I knew Forby Sutherland knew something when he arrived on his boat and saw it for the first time. He wanted to make a life here, a good and honest life. He wanted to stay and live and prosper in the sun. I closed my eyes and smelled the salt – I tried to imagine how it felt to be Forby Sutherland, and I was so close to knowing when Gordon pushed me in the chest and I fell onto the hard, wet sand.

  ‘You fuck,’ he said, hovering over me, the devil’s Elvis except without the wig now. ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘What?’ I asked him.

  ‘I call on you to make your speech, the best man fucking speech, and you take off – what’s that bullshit, Cronk?’

  I sat up and scrubbed my face and hair roughly with both my hands, like my dad used to do when he got out of the pool or the shower.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gord, I just had to get out of there.’ I looked up at him; it wasn’t good enough. ‘I couldn’t hack it any longer.’