NaNoWriMo 2010 contined. Previous installments:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Thursday. Port Macquarie. Hungover.
“As you’d expect,” Chris began, “I’ve done this properly.”
It’d be easy to characterise Chris as our very own James May. The one in the old jumpers and polo shirts. The careful, precise, logistical one. The one who understands how stuff works. The one you’d never expect to be the one with the long-term girlfriend. It’d be easy to make such a cheap and lazy shortcut of characterisation, I agree. It’d also be true. James May was Chris’ one true hero - well, along with Richard Feynman and Steve Waugh. He had very clear ideas on How Things Should Be Done and he never entered into a situation that he didn’t have complete annotated and blueprinted plans A through Z as to the management thereof.
He also always had insurance. Some people saw insurance as belt-and-braces. You could throw in suspenders, lederhosen and a surgical truss in Chris’ case. For this trip - a week-long drive up the national highway between the eastern seaboard’s only livable capitals - Chris had taken out travel insurance. OK, so travel insurance through the uni was dirt cheap, but the point remained - he’d taken out travel insurance for a week-long roadtrip. To go on top of the travel insurance that came with his Visa card. And his super-comprehensive roadside assistance package from the NRMA which included travel insurance. And the travel insurance component of his car insurance. So, in short, he now had multiple groups of people offering to make money available to him to prevent his holiday going irrevocably tits-up. He took this as sound validation of his approach. I took it as an indication at least three of those policies were functionally redundant, but hell, it was his cash. And since he was spending it on us (even if that wasn’t strictly the intent), more power to him.
What he’d Done Properly was wander along to the local hire car offices - after first assessing who had the best deal via a bit of on-line sleuthing, of course - and sort out wheels for the continuation of a mission I wasn’t entirely sure he was still buying into, but I guess he figured he had to get home somehow, preferably via the wedding he was meant to be groomsman at.
And yeah, he’d done it properly alright. Brand-spanking shiny new Falcon XR6. I was nominally a Holden man, but I wasn’t going to complain. Not that I’d been given a chance to - key to the Chris Bellamy concept of ‘doing it properly’ meant ‘doing it in a way that avoids having to listen to anyone else’s advice on the matter’. He’d done it while I was tied up at the wreckers haggling an extra hundy out of the proprietor for Mitch’s stereo, about the only valuable and salvage-worthy part of Frigmobile. That said the $450 we eventually cleared out of selling it to the wreckers wasn’t a lot less than Mitch was ever likely to get for it second-hand, so he sounded happy enough over the dog-and-bone. So much so that I was wondering whether I should have told him we’d cleared less out of the deal, just in case our raiding party came across any further… erm… difficulties.
The only problem with Chris’ new rent-a-toy was the colour. It was, frankly, rancid. Fluorescent yellowy-greeny-mustardy-something with metal-flakey bits in it. A real look-at-me-I’m-a-berk sort of colour, as you’d expect for the target demographic for the XR6. Already this morning, the colour in question had variously been described by the assembled drunks as Leaky Highlighter, Canary Fucken Yellow Indeed, Council Roadworker Hi-Vis Jacket, Something Radioactive Man Coughed Up and my personal favourite, for its accuracy on this hungover morning as much as anything: Berocca-Piss Yellow. Still, knowing Chris, he’d probably managed to save at least 49c a day on the rental agreement by accepting a colour that not even a attention-seeking fuckwit with would opt for. He was Doing It Properly.
Doing It Properly, Chris-style, also meant he’d taken the upfront financial arse-pounding for excess reduction, despite the fact his holiday insurance covered for that - although for all I knew his car insurance were probably paying for the car rental or something anyway. It also meant Chris was the only signed-up licence holder allowed to steer the thing, which I would be willing to swear on a stack of Origins of Species was the actual reason behind sorting the rental deal on his own. There’d already been far too much faffing about on this mission already, and there would be no further faffing about on his watch.
We tried. Really, we did. The boys took right up to our 10am checkout time to get the bags into the boot of the XR6 which he’d had parked out front since ten past nine, while I faffed about at the wreckers. Went for breakfast, strung that out into brunch. Stopped off at Settlement City shopping centre to pick up a new AUX stereo cable. We knew what we were doing; we were trained professionals in the art of faffing about.
“Sea Acres,” I remarked, as we passed the back of a tourist sign heading out of town. “I hear that’s awesome.”
“Yeah, most southernmost temperate rainforest in all of NSW,” JC read off the sign. “I want to go to there…”
Chris barely even registered the interruption. He had his road face on, sunglasses in position (more for the glare off the XR6’s garish plutonium-waste bonnet than for sunlight), eyes locked on target. The only things in the universe which existed were the road, the speedo, the fuel computer readout and his iPhone delivering the ‘80s cheese like a pipeline from the Bega factory direct into the XR6’s stereo. Requests to switch back to the more group-amenable ‘90s playlist he’d put together for the trip fell on deaf ears, as deaf as the ones which received our plaintive lamentations about the awesomeness of the café at the old Telegraph Point butter factory, or the Fredo pie shop north of Kempsey, or how great it would be for all concerned if JC didn’t have to wet himself and the back seat in lieu of a roadside convenience between here and the Northern Rivers.
And yet still he powered on. Signs and towns came and went. Clybucca, Macksville, Nambucca Heads, Urunga, Raleigh…
“Go karts,” I said.
“Go karts,” Jules repeated. He’d seen the sign too: Raleigh International Raceway. As laughable a concept as that seems. Raleigh International Raceway was a go kart track, and they had go karts for hire. Go karts, Chris. You know you love go karts.
“Go karts, Chris,” I reiterated. “You know you love go karts.”
“We’re only 20 kays out of Coffs Harbour…”
“I know mate. It’s probably a fastest-ever most-efficientest stage time for Port Macquarie to Coffs Harbour, for anyone who gives a fuck. Meanwhile… go karts.”
“Go karts,” Jules said.
“Go karts,” I nodded.
“Go karts,” mused Chris.
The blinker went on for the Raleigh exit, with that broken sigh we’d last heard somewhere near the Central Coast. We’d broken him.
Go karts win most arguments. The ones they don’t start, anyway. Ever since childhood bumper-car derbies on the old Lismore Grand Prix go-kart course - now lost forever under the carpark of a Bunnings (bastards) - they’d done both. Didn’t matter whether you drove like an old grandma on the road (Chris), couldn’t drive at all (Jules), or sneered in the fact of all that macho paternalistic competitive overcompensatory bullshit (JC). When the flag drops, the bullshit stops.
Until the end of the race when it gets recycled in ready-made Racing Driver Excuse Form.
“I’m sure mine was down on top end. Throttle cable felt like it wasn’t pulling cleanly…”
“Well my front tyres were fucked. Old and shitty. Couldn’t hold that quick left hander flat. Took ages to come up to temp…”
“That spin was oil on the rears. Serious.”
“YOU, you were driving like a fucking muppet. Changing lanes in the braking area for that hairpin?”
“What braking area, who brakes for that? Lift off and chuck it in…”
Still, everyone went away happy. Jules set overall fastest lap of the morning - yes, the guy who couldn’t drive, half a hundredth of a second ahead of the gay dude who drove a Barina. Fair to say we were all about as poor as each other, though. Of course, if anyone actually competent had shown up, we would have had our arses handed to us, but it was a mid-week morning in winter and we had the place to ourselves. I beat Jules in the reverse grid final, which did a little to wipe the Grin of Eternal Smugness off his chops ref my misadventures with Miss Tabitha. Chris won the mini-golf afterwards. I got a bunch of good photos. The owners actually got customers. JC finally got to have a wee. Everyone was a winner on the day.
We still had a fair distance to travel before our overnight halt, and large amounts of fuck-all to see between here and there, so after a long, leisurely and somewhat boozy lunch at a pub in Coffs - which Chris didn’t thank us for, since he was stuck on the pub squash (a self-inflicted injury, as we reminded him) - we fell in with his philosophy towards the road and how she must be relentlessly tamed, and let the man do his thing. The XR6, I had to concede, was a fair weapon for smashing kays flat, even camped in the cheap seats out the back with JC. And the sun was out and the road was empty and I’d had a late one smashing ales with Jules on top of more beers at lunch, so I’m not ashamed to admit I basically flaked out and cranked zeds for an hour or two as the sunshine flitted through the window. Jules had the dark glasses on as well, very much seeing this afternoon through the prism of last night’s minibar bottles. Perhaps a quiet one would be in order this evening.
Fat fucking chance.
Actually, that was a bit of an issue. Technically, I didn’t have a place to stay tonight. Thing was, we were headed home - back to the Northern Rivers of NSW, up in the hinterland behind Byron Bay, with the loose plan of some ales in Byron tonight - but that wasn’t actually home for me any more, not since my folks had sold up and retired to the Tweed Coast near the Queensland border. Jules’ folks were still locals, so were Chris’ family - in fact you suspected his determination to keep up the highway pace this afternoon had more to do with wanting to keep a post-work tee-time with his old man at their local council course - but I felt strangely unrooted, coming back these days. Still had friends, still knew the place like the back of my hand, still had memories of every street… still, it didn’t feel like home for me.
Didn’t feel like home for JC, either. His family were still here, of course, just that they were massive, massive arseholes.
His old man, simply, was a cunt about it. JC didn’t exist, as far as he was concerned. Even in the same room. He was a fuckwit anyway, ex-military, the sort of bloke who only functions properly in the cretinized hierarchy of the defence forces. Couldn’t understand why the same approach to personnel management - basically, institutionalized violence - didn’t work on his wife and kids, which was why he usually found himself spending time away from his wife and kids at the behest of the family court. Last JC had heard he was down a mine in Kalgoorlie, digging, drinking, fighting and whoring. So that was JC’s father, an abusive prick. JC’s mother was worse, if anything, because she was a manipulator, a vicious moral hypocrite who believed absolutely in the fucked-up derivation of Christianity their fundie church perpetuated. And, so it followed, that her son was sinning against God by carrying on with the lifestyle he’d chosen. She alternated between cajoling, threatening, negotiating and belittling, but the argument always came down to the same endpoint: when are you going to give up this attention seeking (because that was all it was, of course) and grow up?
For his thirtieth, there’d been some sort of rapproachment. She’d sent him a card with a cheque for two hundred dollars. JC had found it the morning after his monumental 30th bender - OK, so he was still very much mid-bender at the time, having returned from the clubs of Oxford St for noms (meanwhile I was trying to have breakfast and go to work at the time, seeing as though it was Tuesday.) He showed me the long, rambling letter which came with it. Along with the brochures for a programme run by the Mercy Ministries people, who were VERY nice, which had been shown to help a lot of people with issues like him…
JC tossed the lot - cheque, letter and brochure - into our fireplace and burnt it. Then and there. Had my wholehearted support in doing so too, even though we were behind on the bills that month. I’d known about the ‘gay correction’ programmes run by that lot ever since the links blew up in the media between them, Hillsong and the Gloria Jeans coffee muppets who were underwriting it all in some sort of dubious way. A year or so prior I’d been prepping a story on it for one of the news mags in the stable until Team Legal nixed it. Someone else from Fairfax ran the same story and cleaned up, of course. Fucking lawyers. Only people I hated more than fucking lawyers are fucking fundamentalist arseclowns who think it’s their business to ‘correct’ people of themselves.
“This sounds familiar,” I said.
“Should do,” Jules replied, “it’s your playlist.”
Chris’ iPhone had finally been persuaded away from the end of the AUX cable, to be replaced by an argument as to whose music would be least offensive to everyone else. Buggered if I know how it ended up as mine, that had to be considered a first. We were somewhere between Grafton and Ballina. Correction. We were nowhere between Grafton and Ballina, because nowhere is all there is between Grafton and Ballina. Sorry, places between Grafton and Ballina. You know it’s true. Them Crooked Vultures’ Scumbag Blues was resolutely kicking its way out of the XR6’s speakers.
“See, Chris, you should listen carefully here,” I quipped. “A piece of music that’s actually been written sometime in the past fifteen years…”
“And yet sounds like it was recorded in 1971,” he noted. Bastard. He had a point. “Hey, are you OK for a place to stay tonight? Wasn’t sure if you’d sorted anything out…”
“Erm, no, actually,” I said. “Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Well, I’d offer up my place,” Jules began wearily, “but my folks are putting on a family thing to welcome me back from overseas…” The way he said ‘family gathering’ seemed to echo the intonation with which clinically depressed BBC reporters recite the phrase ‘massive flooding in Bangladesh’ or ‘the desperate humanitarian situation in Ethiopia’. “Much as I’d love to drag you all down into the misery with me, I couldn’t possibly do that to another human being…”
“So no banging backpackers in Byron tonight then Jules?” I jibed.
“Not for either of us, with your form,” he replied stoutly. I had to stop bowling him long-hops he could smash over the backyard fence. Where was that taped-up tennis ball that swung like a bastard?
“It’s fine,” Chris said, “you guys are welcome to crash at mine.” Which was an amusing turn of phrase. Noone ever ‘crashed’ at Chris’ parents place. That suggested couch cushions hurriedly stacked into makeshift piles, and old throw-rugs requisitioned as blankets. Every night, every bed at the Bellamy’s was made-up and in a permanent state of overnight-guest-readiness. “I’m guessing I should call ahead and book two into Hotel Bellamy?”
“Erm, not me,” JC said. “I’m kinda… also... doing the family thing… tonight.”
You could feel the intake of breath in the car.
“Really?” I said. “How come?”
“Oh, you know. Happened to be passing through the area and all…”
I coughed ‘Bullshit’ into a clenched fist. He acknowledged it with a nod. “What’s the story, there been a change of policy there or something?”
“Or something,” he admitted.
“They still being cunts?”
“Probably,” JC said.
“Someone would want to be fucking dying then,” I said.
“Yup,” he nodded. “They are.”
Ah. “Fuck man, I’m sorry, that was a bit rough… your mum?”
“You saying my mum’s a bit rough?” he quipped. “You’ve met her then.”
“What’s she got?”
“Cancer,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Docs say she’s fucked. She reckons it’s because we’re not praying hard enough for her. And clearly she’s being punished by God for my sinning against humanity…”
“Fuck, man,” I said again, “I’m sorry.” I was the only other person talking. Chris and Jules had gone vewy, vewy quiet. Thousand-yard stares each.
“It is what it is, yeah?” JC winced. “Hell of a fucking argument for karma, you might say. So yeah. I’ll be doing the family thing tonight. And they’ll fucking well appreciate it.”
“Mate, if you need anything,” I said, “just shout.”
“Call for backup,” Jules chirped. “We’ll bust you out of there. A-Team styles.”
“You’ll be hanging by the phone waiting for the call yeah Jules?”
“Hell yeah. I’ll be standing in the one part of the house that gets Vodafone reception all night, hanging off the balcony railing getting people to bring me beers…”
So that just left Chris and me for the projected Mission: Beach Hotel Byron for the evening. Which, more than likely, would just turn into a hit of stick around the council golf course with Chris’ old man (which, given they were both good at and serious about the game and I was neither, was always a bit awkward), then kicking back at the Bellamys thereafter watching whatever was on TV on a Thursday night in rural and regional NSW. Pretty much as it’d been the last time I’d checked: fuck all.
But I was OK with that, I supposed. Heavy night last night, and let’s face it, I could do without the further humiliation. Even the idea that we were going to head out to Byron to try and chat up morally flexible visitors to our shores was basically a standing joke - as we’ve explored in probably more detail than I’d have liked to by now, I was laughably poor at that stuff, on account of being clinically unable to take myself seriously enough to put on the Big Act. Still, I figured some sort of attempt should be made - or even just be seen to be made - for the sake of the boys-trip narrative, if that was still the story I was trying to tell here, if I even had a story to tell. I didn’t really know anymore.
Anyway all that indecision lasted for as long as it took Chris to remember how much he enjoyed sitting around home with his folks watching every news and current affairs show broadcast on every channel from the start of the 5pm Ten News to the end of the 7.30 Report, and then remember that test cricket was on from the Caribbean, which would require pay TV, which would require a pub, which - to hell with it - justified a half-hour-plus drive through the back roads of the hinterland to Byron and the Beach Hotel for a few (light) beers and a big screen televising the opening morning’s play between Australia and the Windies. Sounded alright to me (though subbing the light beers for something a dash heavier, of course). Serial Ashes-losing failure Ponting somehow still had a gig, which I was none too impressed about, but the beers were cold and the banter (with a couple of Pommy lads who were deathriding the Australian attack as though their lot were still facing them - and credit them, we’d do the same if the favour was returned) was entertaining. More so than the inevitable fail that would ensue from actually going and talking to that willowy blonde and her surfie-chick friends over by the outside bar.
“So, this stuff with Caroline…” The stuff we’d just gone over again. Nothing non-single blokes like doing more than quizzing their single mates on their relationship fails. “How’s that affect your, you know, career prospects?”
“Erm, it means I don’t have any?” I laughed. “Nah, look, I can’t work with her. My choice, as much as anything. Just not happening. Which means that entire outfit’s out of the equation. Half the publishing industry, as things stand… But that’s just how it is, yeah? I mean, you go into this stuff thinking you can keep personalities out of it… you go in thinking a lot of idealistic bollocks about it, actually. Not just about work relationships, about the job in general. Maybe the same as science, I dunno. You go into it bright eyed and bushy tailed doing it for the pursuit of truth and beauty and whatever, then you find out it’s all bollocks and everyone’s dodgy and it’s about who you know and who you haven’t fucked off, not how good your ideas are… or am I just a cynical cunt who’s wayyyy off base on that.”
“Nah,” he reluctantly conceded, “you’re pretty much on the money there… I kinda wanted to ask you about that.”
“Yeah? How so?”
Chris screwed up his face. “Look… don’t take this the wrong way.”
“Promising start…”
“But… I remember when we were heading off to uni, and you were sure this was your thing. You were gonna be a writer, be a journalist, break big stories, stand up to bullshit, fight for truth and justice and all that. And, have to say, it struck a chord with me because that’s how I felt about science. But now it seems like you’d sell out tomorrow if you had the chance…”
“Yesterday,” I said. “Where do I sign.” This sounded too much like a Caroline lecture, and frankly, Chris didn’t have the rack to carry it off.
“Mate,” he said, “when you find out, tell me.”
“Serious?”
He nodded, taking a grim sip of Cascade Light from his schooner glass.
“But you’re shit hot, aren’t you? Publications up the arsehole…”
“Not shit hot enough,” he remarked. “There’s always someone working harder. Some no-life Euro postdoc who works 6am to midnight. Someone with sharper ideas, or who talks bigger, or who networks better. I’m beginning to see the end of the road. Options closing off. Every step in the science career progression there’s massive die-off - I mean you do the maths, they train ten times as many PhD students as there are postdoc positions for them these days, because postgrad completions are a metric they get assessed funding on…”
“Fuck me. Really? Ten times as many? Fucken. If you did that with a trade apprenticeships scheme, pissed away 90% of the capital the government invested into the system…”
“Fucking tell me about it,” Chris seethed. “There’d be questions asked in parliament about it. And the pyramid just continues at every step, you have another cull for getting lecturer jobs…”
“Sounds like pro writing,” I said. “Plenty of cheap, relatively unskilled labour out there. Fucking hard to perpetuate a career at any sort of reasonable higher level.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “You can’t maintain a living out of it beyond a certain finite lifespan, say into your thirties… Plenty of young wannabe kids happy to work lower pay and longer hours for a shot. And I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m a bit fucking over it.”
“Didn’t put ten years into this in order to become superfluous to requirements.”
“That’s the one,” he nodded. I think he was impressed with my schooners-to-big-words ratio, but that’s why I was a professional writer and not a parking officer. At the moment.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked. “You’ve still got funding for a while I thought?”
“Yeah, I’m on the big multi-year ARC grant the boss has. Which basically means I supervise all his students, write all his papers, manage all the staff he’s crap at dealing with because he’s basically a social retard with no empathy or personal skills, all while not getting any of my own work done. I’m all kinds of fucked if I apply for a fellowship. Wouldn’t even make second round. And with Lisa coming down from the UK…”
“She’s alright I thought?”
He raised his eyebrows. “She’s fine. She’s genuinely shit hot. She’s bringing her own Wellcome Trust funding for fuck’s sake, they’re desperate to have her. But we can’t really have two wannabe scientists on soft money in the same family, can we?”
“Shit, you mean you’re gonna chuck it in?”
“…Not quite chuck it in. Sell the fuck out, more like. Go into commercialisation or industry or something. Had a few chats with people, sounds like there’s a market for it. 'My skillset is attractive',” he mused with a sardonic smirk at his own turn of phrase.
“Is it what you want though?”
He shrugged. “What I want,” he said, “particularly with Lisa coming over, is to have a good life, enjoy myself, enough money and time to do the stuff I want, and no stress so I can enjoy it. I mean, if that’s not the point of this whole thing, I want to know what is.”
“Sounds fair enough to me,” I said. And recalling a track from Tuesday morning’s playlist in the Magna - Christ that felt like a long time ago now - began reeling off some old Reel Big Fish lyrics:
“Sell out… with me tonight, sell out… with me oh yeah… The pharma company’s gonna give us lots of money and everything’s gonna be all right…”
We were never going to get laid singing along and air-drumming to Reel Big Fish songs, but that didn’t matter. Mitchell Johnson was never going to take a wicket bowling that shit, but it didn’t seem to dissuade him.
We headed back at the end of the morning session, what was lunch in Barbados and beddy-bye-time in Byron (for us, anyway). Hadn’t heard anything from either of the other two, so the assumption was neither had found their families to be fatal on contact. Or they were burying them out the back of a state forest beyond cellphone range. Either way, it was a Friday morning problem.
Chris knew the road, of course, like he knew every road around here, but it was a bit wet and bloody dark with the moon wreathed in cloud, so he took it easy in the XR6. The temptation to fang hell out of it must have been there, but also front-of-mind the thought that it might be nice to complete more than one day of this road trip in the same car as we began yesterday in.
While Chris had careful control over his hoon urges, others didn’t seem to be operating under the same sorts of constraints. Perhaps it was a full moon out there behind all that cloud, or something. Maybe ten kays out of Byron, on a barely-straight bit of road connecting two narrow twisty bits that only a desperate moron would overtake on, a desperate moron screamed out of our rear-view mirror, lights ablaze; then, with a ferocious howl and a chattering whoosh, he was past and gone. The silhouette looked vaguely Falcodore, with a big rear wing and a not-dissimilar attention-seeking-fuckwit paintjob to ours (if anything, though difficult to assess in the darkness, possibly less a radioactive-waste green and more a urinary-tract-infection yellow) while the VRAAAA-KSSSHH definitely suggested something turbocharged with some sort of wastegate. Probably an XR6 Turbo with some aftermarket chip-work done.
For his part, Chris correctly identified the pilot as a wanker, and settled back down into his work.
“Someone’s in a hurry to make a fucking mess of themselves,” I observed.
“You’re not wrong,” Chris noted. “These are seriously not roads you want to driving like that on.”
“Unless you were us, about ten-twelve years ago,” I pointed out.
“We’ll gloss over that,” he said. “Besides, there’s not that much trouble you can get into in a 1976 Corolla anyway…”
“I dunno, I seemed to manage,” I admitted.
“Not to Munter scale,” he said.
“Oh hell no,” I agreed. “That’s a different scale entirely. Richter scale.”
“Beaufort scale.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that too. Whatever that is.”
“Gale force winds,” Chris explained. “Ha, here we go. I’ll get well out of the way here.”
He’d picked up the red-and-blue lights in the rear view mirror, monstering the closing distance like a locked-on missile. Chris bundied off and wound the XR6 over to the side of the road. For a moment, as the highway patrol SS Commodore lingered on our tail, I wondered if we were about to be mistaken for the fleeing party, but clearly by colour or numberplate or some identifiable feature they realised we weren’t the droids they were looking for, and took off up the road like a scalded cat with a NASCAR V8 wedged up its jacksie. Or something. Hell, it was late, I’d had a few and unmixed metaphors weren’t my strong suit.
At least we had a short run tomorrow. Originally we’d planned to meet up on the Gold Coast with Munter for a few Friday drinks ahead of the wedding shenanigans on the weekend - on the quiet of course, keeping his missus and her family out of the picture given she wouldn’t have approved - but work was a bastard for him at the moment and Munter was going to have to mission it up to Brisbane from central NSW at sparrows on Saturday morning instead. The Gold Coast stopover tomorrow probably seemed a bit redundant - particularly since it was only an hour and a bit to there and then an hour and a bit on to Brisbane next day - but we’d already committed to it (i.e. we’d already booked a couple of cheap apartments on Wotif ahead of time and couldn’t get refunds.) And there’s always fun and stupidity to be indulged in on a Friday night on the Gold Coast. Jules and Chris had mates from uni who lived locally, so some sort of tribe of no-goods could surely be assembled. Chris and I were tossing ideas around for plans, locations, headcount and so forth amongst ourselves - most of which was getting sidetracked into discussions of epic nights barely remembered and once-great Goldie venues that now sucked the big one - when we rounded a tight 55km/h (advisory) left and the world exploded.
OK, that’s a little melodramatic. When I say ‘the world exploded’ what I mean is that the darkness in front of us suddenly burst apart with about eleventy billion candlewattages, Chris and I both went ‘YAAARRRGHH WTF??’ and we crashed the car.
Actually, Chris did that bit. He didn’t need any help from me with that. Blinded by the headlights, driving lights and spotties of the police truck which had been waiting off to the side of the road against the flow of traffic to launch its luminal fusillade, his reactions (somewhat understandably) went from ‘Hmmm what a nice night for a drive’ to ‘OMFG I CAN’T FUCKING SEE’ and henceforth driving directly off the road into the scenery at the posted speed limit.
All in all it was probably some sort of justice that what we ended up ploughing into was the police truck. Didn’t do them much damage, but it annoyed them, and that was something. Annoyed them enough to find ourselves surrounded by shouty angry voices waving black things at us which I really fucking hoped weren’t guns. Smashing up a rental car was one thing, despoiling the upholstery was another. While we were being screamed at to get the fuck out of the car, a torch shined into the window, directly into Chris’ eyes. Because he hadn’t quite had enough of that sort of shit already, apparently. And suddenly everything went a bit quiet.
“Aww, fuck,” said a voice.
I knew that voice. So did Chris. His response defined incredulity. And disgust.
“Dobbo?”
So there followed a fun couple of hours at the local cop shop which neither of us were ever going to get back, while super-sleuth Senior Constable Wayne Dobson established that in fact we were NOT a possibly-armed local drug kingpin fleeing to his bolthole near Tabulam in a stolen chipped-‘n’-boosted XR6 Turbo after shooting a ‘business’ rival in a deal gone wrong out the back of the Broken Head caravan park, and in fact were… two guys he’d gone to school with who’d been long convinced he surely had to be too thick for the coppers to take him at the Academy.
Still, at least he ran us back to Chris’ place in his old Land Rover. His work truck, it seemed, wasn’t going to be mobile again for a little while. Nor would he, once his superiors had finished sorting the story out. Chris was far too wired to sleep after that, so cranked up the interwebs and told Lisa all about it. For me, though, that half-two night from last night had finally caught up with me. I flaked, and slept soundly.
I still had a head full of random next morning - and a bloody sore neck - and since we didn’t look like we were going anywhere anytime soon, I grabbed a takeaway coffee from the corner shop - the same one I’d used to buy my 20c worth of lollies from as a young bloke, which now had alfresco table-and-chairs, a proper Gaggia coffee machine, someone who knew how to use it, and regular deliveries of freshly roasted beans from Zentfelds outside Byron - and went for a wander around the old town.
I wasn’t really dressed for a hike. Boardshorts, double-pluggers and a black Foo Fighters T-shirt from a promo we’d run for their last album. But that was OK, I wasn’t really aiming to cover ground. Just wanted to meander around the streets I’d grown up on, ridden my bike around, learned to drive on, then like most kids of my age and station in life, had fled the moment the opportunity availed itself. Ironically, of course, most thirty-plus types now gravitated towards tree-changer hinterland towns and villages like this because they were so cool and laid-back and wonderful for raising kids. If that’s what you’re into, of course.
The Bellamys were still in the house they’d always been, with the reserve next door (too swampy to build on, but fine for racing BMXs on, or playing-out our endless Test series of cricket and football.) My family’s old place was a couple of blocks away, further up the hillside into the trees - the Bellamys were practically in grid-reference suburbia by comparison, with a kerb-and-gutter driveway and a picket fence around the outside. We’d basically been in the bush. I slowly made my way up to the old place, steeling myself for the disappointment, which duly came; the latest set of new owners (the place had been through a few since my folks had sold up) had continued the utter fuckedification of the place. First lot of new owners had massacred all the trees from around the place - the ones we’d climbed up, swung off, fallen from and raced bikes between - through some obsession with it being a bushfire risk, no matter that no fire had ever reached that part of the landscape since back when the Bundjalung tribe were tending it. This meant you could now see the place from the road, which meant you could see the astonishingly ugly urban-wanker-bar gentrification that the subsequent new owners had wrought on the place. Glass, wire and stainless steel. Seriously, it looked like the fucking Regatta. They’d also smashed through the corner of the house where my room had been and tacked on a deck that looked like it’d been hacksawed off the arse of a cruise liner. Way to piss on my childhood memories, cunts.
And for what? The house was deserted. Probably had been for weeks, if not months. A sign hammered into the ground in front of me advertised ‘Holiday Lettings’. And, with an ironic touch, the contact details and logo of Geoff Wright Realty - Jules’ old man’s estate agency.
Fuck it. You can never go home. Particularly if someone sells it from under you. The folks’ new place in Kingscliff (or Casuarina Beach or whatever the place was technically called) was nice enough - more compact, closer to everything, made more sense for them as they got older, less shit to do around the house with trees to prune and gutters to clear of leaves and the eternal battle to keep ants and spiders outside. It all made sense. Depressing amounts of sense. I just wished… I don’t know what I wished. To go back and have another crack. To not make dumb calls about what I wanted to do with my life which would end up with me in the same career station at 30 as I’d been at 20, i.e. bumfuck nowhere with the arse out of my trousers. But none of that was ever going to happen, so fuck it. As you were.
I wandered off again. Back towards town - thinking about whether I wanted to do a cruise-past of JC’s place, then figuring if there’d been serious problems I’d have seen the mushroom cloud go up and the smoke billowing from the rooftops - then out towards the golf course and the lifestyle blocks in the valley. Out towards Chateau Munter, in other words. Munter’s folks had sold up too - they’d gone touring around Australia, Grey Nomad style, in a Transit campervan - but Chateau Munter remained largely as it had been back in the day. The old house, typical ‘70s in painted Besser blocks and western red cedar panelling. And up the back, almost hidden from view, the old shed. Dammit, the memories here were almost as thick as they were standing outside my own house. Or maybe it was because of being able to glimpse the Siracusas’ place down the road, just about visible through the trees.
Not that I’d ever spent much time there. Mr Siracusa didn’t think much of his eldest’s choice in mates. Mainly because he’d hoped for better things for her than hanging around with the local boys like some sort of feral tomboy. He might have cut her some slack, I thought; she was eight at the time. We had a decent posse, back in the day. The four of us - Jules, JC, Chris and myself - plus Munter, of course, and a bunch of other lads, most of our year from primary school, including the aforementioned Dobbo (and yes he’d been the butt of most jokes then as now). And our token chick. Layla Siracusa. She was the only girl in our class of nine, and refused to accept she was either outnumbered or inferior. Which spoke to either a furious tenacity or a deep inability with maths, and if you knew Layla you knew it probably wasn’t the latter.
Layla was feisty. Athletic, too. She fought harder, ran faster, jumped further (particularly on the BMXs - she was lighter than us, it was clearly an unfair advantage) and basically argued and scrapped and fought her way to parity, until by the end of primary school she was considered one of the boys. At which point her father decided to pack her off to boarding school on the Gold Coast to make a lady out of her, rather than a grubby-faced urchin who came home from school with skinned knees and boisterous tales of beating us all at handball or soccer, as well as wiping the floor with us in maths or spelling tests.
The day she left was not a personal highlight, it’s fair to say. She didn’t want to go, we didn’t want her to go - and not just because she was our secret weapon for our under 11s indoor cricket team, nobody expected her to pack the skillset she did into the frame she had - and I remembered vividly watching her being driven away in the Siracusas’ big old LandCruiser, her face streaming with tears - but only once she’d thought we couldn’t see her anymore. A fighter to the end, she was.
I remembered feeling gutted, too. But because I knew it was The End, regardless of what anyone else was telling me. I’d had a few mates who’d moved away - kids who I’d buddied up with in kindergarten or preschool or whatever, only vague memories now - and remembered how no matter the assurances we were given from both sets of parents that we’d stay in touch, we’d meet up at holidays, whatever… it always turned out as goodbye, forever, the end. Same with Layla. There were assurances that we’d catch up again in the holidays, that it’d be just the same as it always had. But, of course, it wouldn’t. That was the point, after all. Mr Siracusa didn’t WANT it to be the way it always had.
I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Summer holidays, end of our first year of high school, Jules and I ran into Layla at the local shop. Layla had friends with her. Friends we’d never seen before. Friends who didn’t think much of what they were seeing in us, and Layla seemed to be of a similar mindset. She was dressed differently, had different hair, a different attitude. She looked like… well, a girl. A girly girl. Something told me not to ask whether she’d be into coming down the basketball courts for a bit of half-court. Jules, who was a bit more ahead of the game than me, asked one of her friends to the movies. Got laughed at, but at least he had a crack. Hadn’t even occurred to me to ask. These were Layla’s friends, and Layla was… well, Layla.
So, yeah, the boy-girl thing got in the way. Didn’t see much of Layla after that for a good few years. Not until about ’95 - that was year 10 for us, the first year Triple J were broadcast into the local area - when we were down at the beach on Australia Day, listening to our first ever Hottest 100 and wondering what the fuck this music was and where it had come from and why the fuck it couldn’t have gotten here years ago. Bore not a lot of resemblance to the commercial radio we’d been listening to up to then courtesy Lismore’s Triple Z FM (no relation of the legendarily random 4ZZZ of Brisvegas.) Still, it was an education. Under a tarp Chris and I had strung between the trees and a couple of golf umbrellas used as tent poles, we’d set up with the portable stereo, a big old Esky (mostly full of soft drinks… mostly), a bunch of deck chairs and a feed of fish and chips from the local takeaway joint. We were fucking SORTED. Hats off to Captain Logistics, Mr Christopher Bellamy, then as now. So we sat, and ate, and drank (soft drinks… mostly), and talked shit, and played cricket, and smashed ourselves in the oversized surf, and got sunburned, and all the usual good stuff. And this being pretty close to Byron, we also spent a goodly amount of time kicking back and watching the world go by. By which I mean chicks. In bikinis. Because that’s how we rolled as undernourished teenage lads. Or as thirty-somethings, come to think of it.
“Four o’clock,” reported Chris. He wasn’t telling the time, just discreetly alerting us to approaching targets of interest. Of course if I could figure out what he was referencing as 12 o’clock I might actually know where to look, but I was guessing it was either down the beach towards Broken Head or up the beach towards Byron. Yup, there they were; target acquired. Three girls, bikinis, pretty (well as much as you could tell from this range, and through the shimmering haze of hormones.) Everything you could ever want. The tall one was the pick of them, I decided, though Jules made a passionate and characteristic case advocating for the one with the biggest tits. Nah, the tall one. She had long, wavy blonde hair, a slender, athletic figure, and… holy fuck. She’s waving. At us.
At JC. Of course. Bastard gets ALL the female attention around this fucking place. Wish we had his skills with the ladies.
“Lay!” bellowed JC.
And she came over. And it was Layla, all right. Her old man had sent her away to become a lady; she’d come back a woman, that was for sure. And yeah, she’d changed; she indulged in grown-up small-talk with us, mostly about herself and how awesome she was (to be fair, she had the press clippings to back it up - word had even reached our parochial local paper of her exploits with the under-17 Queensland Academy of Sport basketball and netball sides), and she didn’t once wipe her nose on her sleeve. Not that she had one. (A sleeve, not a nose.) Just bare, golden brown arms that (like her legs) seemed to go on forever. Particularly if you were the opposing goalshoot trying to sight the netty ring over the top of them.
“She’s changed,” Jules declared after she and her two lovely girls (and her friends as well) had wandered off again. “Don’t like her.”
“You don’t like her because her friend laughed at you for asking her out.” Yes, again.
“Well, none of you lot were going to, because you’re soft…”
“In your company, I’d fucken say so, yeah.”
So that was Layla. A nice girl, ruined. Fucking private schools. Burn them all and salt the ashes. The end.
Except… the story doesn’t quite end there. Flick forward a bit further. New Year’s Eve 1996. Munter’s place. Mrs Munter was away for work and Mr Munter was keeping out of the way (he was safety officer for the council’s NYE fireworks down at the beach.) And Munter was throwing a bash in the shed. The bash to end all bashes. Pool, stereo, beers, all the good stuff. There was a sort-of end-of-days feel to it anyway, we knew by the same time next year - New Years ’97, the end of Year 12 - we’d all be going our separate ways, locking into our various uni or job choices. And, not to put too fine a point on it, we were all fucking petrified of that, so were living for the now and not thinking too far ahead. I was drinking Reschs Real, because it was what the old man had in the fridge (he knew I took it, I knew he knew and he knew I knew he knew, we were just going to move forward under the tacit understanding that it was all OK so long as I didn’t go stupid and Mum didn’t find out.) Jules and I were busy rewriting the record books for the worst game of pool ever played on Munter’s rock-hard obstacle-strewn excuse for a pool table when in sauntered JC with a Cheshire Cat grin and a girl under his arm.
I say under. She was almost his height. Blonde hair, jeans, pink cardigan. Pink cardigan. Pink. Cardigan. And a handbag to match. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
“All hail the birthday girl!” he bellowed cheerily, over Layla’s protests that she couldn’t stay, was only stopping by to say hi, she had another thing to kick on to. But I was impressed by his memory. It was her birthday, too. December 31st. I remembered because she used to have to hold her actual birthday a few weeks earlier so her friends from school and sport wouldn’t have buggered off on holidays with their families yet. I thought that was somehow cheating, at the time. I’m sure I’d have been more supportive if, like a mate of mine from uni, I’d been born on Feb 29 of 1980 (a leap year). Poor bastard.
As it was, that made Layla a month or two older than most of us, and standing in front of us in Munter’s shed, she seemed even older again. More mature, more with-it. Being in the Queensland system, she’d already finished her final year of high school, so she’d been through the growing-up experience we all feared and loathed. Listening to her disarmingly elegant small-talk - humouring my bad jokes, carefully fending-off Jules’ clumsy chat-up, mirroring JC’s sparkle - you could tell she knew how to work a room, comfortable in any situation, ready for the real world. Which made one of us, at least. Keep in mind I was wearing lairy rainforest-foliage-print boardies and a T-shirt that advertised Roy and HG’s 1994 Asian Pigshooting Bushromp (‘If It’s Feral, It’s In Peril’) and was drinking Reschs Real stubbies with a stubbie cooler from one of Mr Munter’s fishing trips which read ‘RBT: Random Breast Testing’. I was about as ready for the real world as Shane Warne is for the popehood.
But then… then stuff changed. Not to me. To Layla. She stayed for a drink - one of JC’s Subzeros, freely offered. Then another. And another. And the carefully constructed façade started to fray at the edges. The pink cardie was tossed behind the couch - under it she was wearing a athletic tank top singlet with the Qld Academy of Sport logo on it - and she started slurring her words, and laughing that thermonuclear explosion of a laugh she used to have, and sledging our choice of music, and beating us at pool. And suddenly, awesomely, our Layla was back. Better and brighter than ever.
Not that JC noticed - by eleven he was passed out on the grass having overindulged heavily on cheap vodka mixed with Home Brand orange fruit drink (warning: may contain traces of fruit juice). Jules was off having either a D&M or a domestic (or all of the above) with his then-girlfriend somewhere out in the yard. Chris and some cricket mates were smashing golf balls off a square of carpet on the balcony into the forest behind the Muntons’. The house and barn were a melee of fun-loving faces, some we knew, some we didn’t - and as usual, Munter himself had gone very silly very early in the piece on booze and weed and more booze (and some magic mushies of supposedly legendary Nimbin renown, according to the feral neighbour of Munter’s who provided them, that subsequently out to be dried shitake offcuts from the local market) and was face down and gurgling on the floor of his room by half-eight, oblivious to the random couple who were rutting in his bed at the time.
“We might be the only two left upright to see the New Year,” I pointed out.
“This is upright?”
Layla had a point. We were flaked out on ancient bean bags and mattresses in the loft of the barn. It was a bit musty and dodgy up here but we were kinda stuck, the ladder had given way just as I was following her up. Better view that way, of course. All well and good being trapped in a loft with a seriously cute netball goal defence, but I was seriously concerned about where my next beer was coming from. Layla was alright, she had goon. Yup, our upper-class boarding school princess had moved from Subzeros onto fruity lexia in a bag. Jesus fucking Christ I was crushing on her, it was making my head spin worse than the Reschs Real. Deeply and drunkenly in love with her. From the waist down, at least. She was funny and giggly and still sharp as a tack despite being at least as drunk as me, which was very.
“Yeah, OK. The last two awake. That better?”
“The last two who count, anyway,” she nodded. “The originals.” We clinked glasses. Hers was a goon-filled plastic tumbler with Disney characters on it. Mine was a half-empty stubbie of Real.
“I thought you had some other thing to go to?”
“I lied,” she admitted. “I’ve got nothing. All my friends are still on the coast, or on holidays. Happy fucking 17th birthday Layla.”
“Aww, you’ve got us…”
“You,” she reminded me. “I’ve got you.”
“That’s all I want…”
“Huh?”
“Crowded House,” I said. “Or Split Enz. Not sure which. They both suck.”
“Then why are you singing it then?”
“Cos I’m fucking smashed?”
She liked that answer. “Ha. I’ve missed you, Benny-Bob. You make me smile.”
“Missed you too, Layla-Jane.”
“Hey, no middle names,” she protested. “Below the belt.”
“So, seventeen? That’s, like, old and stuff,” I grinned. “What next?... I suppose you’ve got the whole thing all planned out from here?”
“Can we just not?” she replied.
“What, serious?”
“Serious,” she nodded. She wasn’t kidding. Intense little frown right there.
“C’mon,” I said, “I thought you were supposed to be taking over the world.”
“Yeah, you heard that too,” she said distantly. That’s a decent swig for a drunk girl. “Why, what do you have planned?”
Hell, may as well admit it. Might impress her.
“Going to be a writer,” I offered. “Finish the HSC, fuck off to Sydney, do journalism, have a go. Not sure how good I’ll be, but figured I’ve got to have a crack.”
She looked at me for a long time, trying to figure out if I was serious. Then, she smiled, and the world lit up. “I’m glad,” she said finally, and seemed to mean it. “And you’ll be awesome.”
“I’d settle for being alright,” I replied. “Just good enough to get paid.”
“Liar,” she laughed. And we were close, all of a sudden. And we were touching. And she was smiling - mostly with her eyes. And I could barely hear myself think over the pounding in my chest, which seemed to reverberate through my ears, through my temples, in my throat.
“You have a girlfriend, Benny-Bob?” she wanted to know.
Lots of potential answers, ranging from little white lies to abject perjury. Then, there was the truth. Which was what she and her big confessional eyes got from me.
“No,” I said softly, “no I don’t.”
She paused a little before offering a reply.
“…Would you like one?”
We were kissing. I don’t remember how or why or who moved first. Perhaps I levitated across the room. But we kissed. She tasted of… well, goon. But sweet, exotic goon. And I probably tasted of cheap beer and barbequed sausages so it wasn’t my place to complain. Didn’t seem to dissuade her. We kissed again, and again. As if to prove this was actually happening. Never felt wrong, not for a second. The kids we’d once been, and the relationship there’d been between us then, were distant, long-forgotten memories. Non-issue. We liked each other and wanted this to happen. And so there we were… a few minutes to midnight, curled up in the loft. Layla was sitting in my lap, tugging off her tank-top with a little smirk… and yes, she was just as gorgeous topless as I’d imagined (and, let’s be honest, since Australia Day on the beach nearly two years back I’d imagined it more than once.) And she loved my fingertips, and my lips, and my tongue…
All in all, a shit of a time for her old man to storm in. He was looking for Layla, Layla’s little sister Madeleine (who was a 15 year old firebrand far more capable of getting herself into trouble than her sensible older sis), and/or any form of responsible adult he could harangue for letting things get so disgracefully out of hand over here with drunk teenagers and loud music and widespread depravity. It just so happened that Layla and I were to wear the full force of his Sicilian temper. Then again, I suppose finding his eldest playing with one of the boys he’d sent her to boarding school to get away from would have been a bit of a disappointment…
Memories. Like the corner of my mind. I’d never forget that mental freeze frame from up in the loft - Layla in my lap, half-naked and just the most beautiful thing in the world. Not just because of the boobies thing - though obviously, the boobies thing matters. (Boobies ALWAYS matter.) It was her eyes. Warm and intense and hazel-gold, they said something I’d never seen in a girl’s eyes before: I like you. I might even love you, but we’ll figure that out in due course. I’d see it again, with other girls, eventually - after sulking, pining and generally wimping-up the place for most of year 12, I got back on the horse that threw me once I got down to Sydney in first year - but in terms of your all-time missed opportunities, that ranked up there with the biggest. The one you carry around with you wherever you go.
Message alert. Chris. Where are you?
Wandering about, I replied. What’s doing? We got wheels?
Appears so.
I considered writing back ‘You’ll have to do better than fucking Appears’ but wasn’t sure if he’d remember the line from Lock Stock or get offended and sulk. So I just walked back to his place.
Concluded in Part Six
