‘That pig amp lasted the distance, but.’ Sometimes I just don’t give up.
‘Yeah, well. Second best is all there is. Tonight.’ But he’s not looking at me.
‘Sounds you got out of it though . . . Fully beaut. For a substandard unit, you had it really singing.’
The weatherboards of the old pub creak where he rubs his head back, school chair on a lean. He’s got a dangerous smile.
‘Yeah, she gave it up. Like she had much of a choice.’
He’s still got that infected toenail he’s had for the last handful of gigs – bashed it on the amp when we were packing-in a few pubs back. Could be what rooted the head. The nail’s well cracked now, so he has a pick, and lifts off a chunk of it while we smoke. Passes it to me like a trophy tipped with pus. Which I cheers him for, and flick into the burnt-out bucket. The rails run over the tin like a bad chart of something. And that’s it. Just the two of us in leftover moonlight. Same as always. Last of the punters out on the street, bouncing on the hood of a ute, a clumsy hellraising. The bouncer, offering to waste them, had it with their antics to his back teeth, no comedy in his bloodthirsty yells. Me chatting, Bruz yawning. I get the CB from the bath, and Bruz pops the back, takes a quick jack, reckons its circuits should be passable. I trail a cord from the socket in my room, and fiddle with the thing, but nothing comes through. No over and over and over and over. Just the sound of some lonely bastard down the street still going, full throttle, at another pub.
I feel there’s a young girl out there suffering
She has to shade her eyes at the faith-healer’s house – it’s glass all round the outside. Too much pool and not enough palm trees. He takes her to his office, shelves of bibles in a glossy saved glare. She wonders if he dunks people out there, if his suit wades in and he bobs their souls like holy buoys. If they splash up rinsed and bright, with chlorinated hallelujahs. Her mother has dressed her in her best ugly clothes, and she’s sweating up the seams, trying not to smell teenage – she wouldn’t mind if salvation meant getting in the deep end. But the preacher would need to keep his layers on. He’s thick-set with tortoiseshell eyes, greasy dome between ears. His socks are Fair Isle, tugged to mosquito-bite shins. But he’s supposed to know his business. The night he came to town she missed redemption, but her mother’s friends told her of the miracles he struck, the bargains on the stage that the demons couldn’t back out of, bucked out of hosanna chests, hurled off shackled legs. So her mother praised the Lord and gave her bus fare. And now she’s sitting just about in the faith-healer’s lap. He’d called to the audience for her: I feel there’s a sick girl who needs to come forward. Her mother paid extra for the kick of the whole town gossiping that girl was hers. The Lord has called me to lift this girl’s pain. But the Lord has a strange way of moving through an old man’s hands, their hairy sunlit knuckles. The Lord has a bad taste in dirty words. The Lord doesn’t care about all the open windows. He has her by the scalp, glinting nothing like glory.
extraction
Remember those buzzy bees the dental nurse would make for you, cotton-wool swabs she’d leash with floss, and tie-on white wings she’d snip off the bibs that would paper your collar to soak all the dribble, remember how you’d loll in the whirring chair, bare legs sticking to its aqua slope, headlit with sting from the long-neck swivel of the lights, their terrible probing silver, and the mouth of you broke open, numbed, just blinking till she passes you the string, fuzzy eyes and smile she’s felt-tipped on? Remember?
They should give them out after your abortion.
ladybirds
At the last minute, we had to take her little sister: pigtail silhouette, left knee always cobwebbed with scab, rusty and pickable. Ladybirds dawdled round her sundress – not the look we were going for. There could be boys – me and Marty’d snuck on something slutty, baby-oiled our legs so we shone from the shinbones. We kept our walk drowsy and so-what-about-it through the hips. But Lolly didn’t walk so much as hopscotch, heels coming down on a skinny four-five. Me and Marty were bitches all the way to the bus stop – by the time we were finished, Lolly had zero bounce.
On the bus, me and Marty got busy rejigging each other’s braids. I leant back on the metal seat and let the gear-changes tug my nape, while she snagged up a pattern of blonde that looked like fishnet. Seriously, you would not believe her fingers – high-speed and fineprint, strand by strand. We liked it tight as real tears at the eye corners. I stuck my toes in the stirrup of the seat in front and let Marty crisscross away. On the outskirts of my head I sometimes still feel it, the swish of her pinky nails. I didn’t get hers right, so I handed over the plait, three black leashes from around midway, a trade of slippy fingers, and then she took it home, top-speed down her skull, showing off.
So of course then Lolly wanted a lookalike. Marty suckered her in real mean. Over the kid’s head she slid the design into place but at the neck she flicked out a long feed and lashed it round the bolt on the seat back, hissing sweet the whole time at her little sis keep still, keep super still okay. When she finished she tapped Lolly’s shoulder – Lolly’s head pinged forward then ricocheted back, taking a tough whump on the rail. She sang out a squeak like air fannied out a balloon. Teach her, said Marty. But someone had to reverse the hair from where it was screwed round the bolt. In the end, I busted a fingernail.
Lolly wanted to push the bell, so the least we could do was let her after that. Or that’s what I reckoned. Marty just shrugged, and rigged her eyebrows when it was the right stop. When the kid didn’t click too quick, she punched her shoulder, hurry up. We slid past the driver but he looked like we left a nasty taste. We’d hardly unloaded all six legs before he swung the door shut.
I don’t remember what we talked about while we walked to Marty’s dad’s. What do girls chat about? Are you expecting two dead girls to talk any different? What I remember is having to backtrack a lot because Marty was hazy on the route. She didn’t have a map, just a vague hunch on street corners, so we spent a lot of time hanging round where roads forked while Marty scuffed her jandal and narrowed her eyes. She’d only been there a couple of times – her guesswork was wired to bits of ground-memory, like derro cars in the front lawn on blocks, a pair of sneakers lassoed from a powerline, the All Blacks flag some hardout fan had strung up. She remembered the dairy with its red roller door, its Fresh Bait sign. We turned right in the end. And then we got to her dad’s park: thirteen hectares of dropout heaven with a playground through the gate on a bed of old bark and black tyres.
Her dad had one of the hillside chalets – Marty liked that word and would say it with a lick – dotted round the panorama of clapped-out caravans. When we got up there he was in a deckchair in his jockeys, and the plastic awning picked up tree-fern fuzz and mixed it with corrugated sun. He finished his smoke before he cranked himself out the seat to give Marty a hello that was more like a mugging. Me and Lolly hung back: he wasn’t her dad, and I got the feeling I’d be levering him off my sternum. He just nodded, and led us through the munted French door into his crib. There was a sunbaked nugget of shit turning chalky on his welcome mat.
It was mostly just one crass room, with random lean-tos for a dunny and a bunk. Marty, being Marty, had built it up but you could clock it in a couple of blinks. It smelt septic. The laminate on everything wasn’t retro, just queasy. The over-sink cupboards looked ready to drop, but not through overstocking – you could just see the odd bung tin and mangy baggie stuffed back on the ply. On the bench there was a shoebox of sachets from takeout joints, little crimpy slugs of tear-off sauce – and beer caps pinged round the lino you couldn’t tally. The sink was deep, unshining and fishy. The bed was a wiry yellow seen through an unhinged door – he was dragging some jeans on at least. To start with I squatted by Marty on the couch, but when he came and sat with us I thought about the rubbery things you’d find if you rammed your fingers down, which got me goosebumpy. So mostly then I stood out on the front deck and pretended like the sea view was worth
squinting at. In the salty offshore light the chairs looked bandy and the blinds unravelled.
He must have known it was a comedown from Marty’s stories, her big talk on the holiday park. He told us the mess was mainly the fault of a gull who’d got itself trapped when he was out of town. Must have jimmied through a window he’d left cracked then gone mental in the blinds, couldn’t find an exit. It properly trashed the place he said. Days out he was still finding the splashdown of shit. He picked a feather out the couch-back while he said it. It even managed to knock out the power to the freezer while it was freaking off the walls – he waved us over to take a jack while he propped up the jellied lid. In the bottom was a slump of plastic he hadn’t got round to spading out. I think about it sometimes now, that clammy oblong view down. He said it wasn’t meat but it may as well have been. The stench pumped the back of your tongue, and made your gut wall buckle. He dropped the lid with such gusto the stink hit your eyelashes.
How does a girl catchup with a dad she hardly ever sees? What do they have to say? He fished out a pack of budget biscuits and we chewed that into vanilla dust. I didn’t want the Raro stuff he fork-whisked in a glass for each of us, so Lolly sculled mine in big gulps that left her a temp moustache, goofy and neon. Then she let her tongue out, and got busy lifting the chequers of scab off her crusty knee: when she finished, her tweezing left a pattern of pink snakeskin. He mostly tinkered with his lighter, while Marty prattled basics, home and school details. He nodded along like her smalltime kid shit was of minor interest: when he wanted to look like he really cared a trail of B&H would trumpet out his nose. Up his forearms he had the kind of homemade tattoos that have fogged over, a furry blend of barbed ink and hair – I looked at those when I went through the ranchslider with Lolly and closed it while Marty kept talking. That’s all I knew about the visit: at some point she needed to get her dad alone. So I helped. I pinched little Lolly, like I might have a good game, and led her out.
The front deck balanced on brown-stained stilts and a bottlebrush was pulling in bees the ranchslider end, in jittery hopped-up orbits. Lolly backed off to crossleg as far as she could get, but I stood and looked at those bees, fizzing like atoms round the ugly bars of red bloom. Through the glass I could still hear Marty talking gibberish. It was 75 percent hum, and it’s not like there was subtitles. Like I told the cops later, you can’t exactly pinpoint the words when it’s like that, weird and offstage. But I picked up enough. I expected his tattoos to flinch when she told him what her stepdad was up to, but all those green blurs of flame never gave an inch. The skulls lay there in limbo, useless spells looping from their sockets. Later of course, when she told again – a teacher at school, a friend’s mother – then she took it straight back, cried off and said she’d lied, nothing ever got done. Everyone assumed that was her pattern: make some shit up, then panic and retract. But I know she looked at her dad that day head-on. In the beginning, she didn’t take back a thing. She just waited, and I looked on, and the hellfire stamped round his wrists brought no reckoning. The death wishes trickled to his fingers, but I know he didn’t even flex his knuckles.
At the joint of my ribs I felt the sizzling sound of bees.
Lolly’s favourite trick was to sit there thumbing her milkteeth, testing for a suspect one – she narrowed down enough that her dumb smile was always black-notched. She was at it now, crouched on the deck, with drool dewing out while she counted down holes. At some point I went and sat with her. When she grinned it was really too dorky to be true. She always looked grubby, coloured outside the lines, and her dim face was scattershot with freckles. Sun kisses, she’d correct you, if you teased. I told her I’d rehash her hair. I suckered the stretchy ties out and it gave like silk. As I restrung it she puffed out little sighs of happiness her sister would have slapped her for.
At some point the dad slid out the door and lit up, leaning on the fall-apart rails. Bees vied past him for a sip of the raggedy flowers, but he just waved, gave them a rev up. Lolly’s hair had come to an end in my hands long before but I kept tweaking it, doing clockwise wisps, for somewhere else to look. I wish I could have made her a dreamcatcher. Round the side of the shack I heard garbage bags fluttering.
We left not so long after that. Lolly was still chirpy when we walked down through the park grounds. Side to side, she kept whizzing her head as if she might catch a glimpse of how sweet her plait was. When she skipped ahead, I tried asking Marty what she’d told her dad. But she said nothing at first. And I didn’t push – she knew how to fix you with this dead-end stare. Instead we scuffed around for a bit, in the bark playground by the park gate. Lolly mounted the seesaw goggling with please, so me and Marty worked the metal T bar to lever her up and down on the whining slat. She peeped while her cushiony ass boinged up, then slapped back down, astraddle – you could hear her thighs grating slivers out the paint. The joints of the seesaw played bad unoiled chords. She giggled with whiplash, and kicked her minnow toes. Then Marty let her drop to the black-tyre buffer hard and bossed her back out to the road. Lolly begged to jump real quick on the wood submarine thing that was beached on the bark – Marty hissed a major no, so she knew not to cross her. It had a steel-pipe periscope so you could pretend to scan horizons – anyway, the view was only thick black leagues of dirt.
I did try asking Marty again, once Lolly fidgeted off, out of earshot. But she was all excuses dealt out in a who-cares voice, said she’d just been joking, said she’d just been looking to get her asshole stepdad messed up. And I could understand that: her stepdad was a cliché. You’ve seen footage by now I guess. On late news clips, sitting in the docks, he looks no different to how he did at their place, a mix of high-handed and can’t-be-fucked, waiting in the same old chair just daring you to front him. She shrugged: big whoop, so much for that. All her dad had given her was an ice-cream tub she was carrying now, its lid bird-shit frosted. Inside were marbles, a glass nest of rolls and clicks. At its core each globe had a tinted fin of light. Later, on the bus home, when the driver wasn’t looking, Marty poked them one by one through the window and we watched them craze and spit on the tar seal, a pinball of blind eyes.
What do dead girls talk about? They don’t ever talk to me. Marty just looks at me and shrugs again, like there’s fuck-all point ever telling. Why would you? In the end what he stuck into her, body or blade, didn’t much matter – he’d been jamming in so much pain for so long there was no space left for her. She reaches up her arms and tightropes her hair down her skull as close-knit as a scar. Ladybird, ladybird, Lolly comes tagging along, her painful cute coming too, so you can’t help smirking at her kaleidoscope of freckles, her uprooted grin. It’s always Lolly, Lolly at the last minute, waking, waking to see what she shouldn’t: they say she wandered their room in bloody footfalls an hour before she lay down by her sis. No one came. Marty’s lies were truth the whole time – but leaving the park I think she already knew I was starting to listen less. On the way home instead she told me the rest of the story of her father and the bird, so I could see it belting the walls of her dad’s cabin, its black-and-white panic, its eye a red pin. He came home and found it, Marty told me, washed up and stupid in its feathers and soil, and he beckoned it out of its splinters – then he took it outside and finished it.
devil’s trumpet
There was a rumour about the boys who smoked the wrong flowers. Hiked into the bush with a legend and a scheme to get high, and picked the wrong vine (a white flower, tricky and forked at the stamen, spiked and purpling at the petal-tip). Three of them, crippled that night round the campfire, only able to roll the parched terror of their eyes. There was a rumour about the girl who could manoeuvre a whole Coke can up there. Who made cash taking small gangs of guys round the back of the Metalwork block, and demonstrating the technique (a cotton hitch, a hushed crouch, a bow-legged swallowing). There was the rumour about the boy from Special class who’d lurk by the gully on Cross Country, leap out and maul your bra (the skidding of pine-needled sneakers,
gurgled I love yous). There was a rumour about the Phys Ed teacher, who’d wander the changing rooms with a beer-soaked smile, gold-tooth-third-from-the-right glinting at the scurry of half-checked girls (blue checks, regulation, like shrunken maths grids, a timid trigonometry of thighs). There was a rumour about the boy the Physics teacher bawled out as thick as bricks: the next time the teacher walked into the class there was a pile of bricks stacked, dumb, on his chair. And a rumour that once, the Deputy had sat with his spit-shined shoes so deliberately akimbo a student caught a clear view up his walkshorts to unencumbered cock. And a rumour that you’d bragged you could fuck every one of my friends before we were finished.
When I was nuzzling your collarbone I couldn’t hear the rumours. When I was tucked into the musk of your neck, and busy licking the body salt there. When I was out of my seatbelt, cock-teasing you driver-side, begging you to get me spreadeagled. When you were thumb-deep in my opaque school tights and I’d arch and coo on their 70-denier pucker. When the stars were rhinestones. When your car was a blue Holden god. When kisses spread to your back teeth, marathons of sucking, and jaws clicked from laughing so long into their wet. When we pashed through jokes, through tunes, through homework, through the leftovers we shovelled out our schoolbags, warm clingwrapped afternoons of kiss. Sticky third-base sunsets. When you let me tattoo you with talk, whispered onto your chest-wall, while an image of sea slid the windshield like a distant rumour.
And the one about the perv who collected antlers and pelts, house stuffed with creepy arcana (animals posed in downy flight, detail stiffened to the fetlocks and eyelashes). And the one about the kids who broke into the millionaire’s beach house, the concrete joint we nicknamed the Castle, and found a spray-can you could aim at your dick if you needed to keep it rock-hard, or your nipples if the measly pink let-downs should have been plumper (a blouseful of ozone, a flysprayed breath, the crinkle of skin under chemical spackle). And the one about the boys who went rogue on the homo’s house, pasting his windows with centrefolds, so when he woke up he was trapped in a kaleidoscope of lace splitting open at the airbrushed lip. And the one about the guy at the service station who had a collection of pregnant stick-mags, frame after frame of hairy men hammering at the moon. And the one about the boys who took the stray down to the rockpools and took turns aiming at it with the crossbow. And the boys who took the shotgun to the dump to pitch the noisy seagulls wide. And the boys who were with you in the wagon when you bet you could each pick up a fresh girl and drive the mainstreet getting simultaneous blowjobs (silhouette of stallions on a silver five-seater, a fistful of hooped earrings and hair gel, ponytails’ mea culpa. Difficult elbows, novice tongues. The Doors on the stereo, light my rubber-burnt knees. Applause. A sob of monoxide).
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