The latest installment of Your Correspondent's NaNoWriMo effort from 2010, continued from Parts One, Two and Three
Wednesday night. Port Macquarie.
We rolled into Port Mac just on dusk, crossing the double bridges over the small Hastings River tributary on Gordon St on our way to our cheapie Wotif hotel near the beach. After a day like today I could do with a swim, but the narrow waters of Wright’s Creek below us - brown, murky and lined with swampy scrub and stormwater drain outlets - didn’t appeal so much.
“Wright’s Creek,” I noted sharply, out the bus window. “Low, dirty, shallow, bent and full of shit...”
For his part, Julian Brendan Wright didn’t respond. Jules didn’t need to. He was too busy fanning himself with my fifty bucks. Which he’d made us get off the bus in Laurieton, find an ATM and withdraw on the spot, due to some long-standing issue he had with me allegedly welching on a bet over the 1988 NSWRL Grand Final. When we were both eight. For the record, my comment had been “Nah Balmain will totally smash Canterbury, bet you a million bucks.” Showing all the signs of the sharp financial operator he turned into, he was still trying to hold me to it to this day. Bastard.
Anyway Jules got his goldfish and we got to Port Macquarie about half an hour after our bags and everyone else did. Frigmobile had gone on a flatbed truck straight to the NRMA depot; Jules had called the result of the bet on the roadside bloke’s immediate diagnosis of ‘Yep, she’s fucked.’ Though I was more relieved by his ignorance of the out-of-datedness of the rego sticker, which might have complicated things re whether Chris’ NRMA membership would hold for the recovery mish.
As far as I was concerned, this evening Jules could be as smug as he liked. He was buying. Especially if we ran into the dazzling Dutchies this evening in town. As the only other available, single, heterosexual male in the party - depending on how seriously he was regarding his self-declared ‘prior commitments’ back in London - any Dutchie-related success he might accrue from this evening would have been down to my groundwork earlier in the day up on North Brother, and he knew it. Refused to acknowledge it, but he knew it.
The irony was given an extra layer of varnish when we got to the hotel - an old-school '70s place overlooking Town Beach which had been given a bit of a refresh as a ‘boutique’ hotel, meaning ‘not fuck-off massive and full of identikit shoeboxes like Rydges or the Ibis or wherever’ - to find that JC and Chris had claimed the one-bedroom unit with the spare bed in the lounge, leaving the twin-share studio to Jules and myself. The stakes had been raised.
“Whoever gets back first gets the room,” I decreed.
Which just got rollies from Jules. He clearly wasn’t taking the threat seriously.
We repaired to the hotel bar, which was small but well-stocked and had a great view. The girl behind the bar was small but well-stacked and was a great view in herself. Her nametag read ‘Tabitha’ which just had to be made up. She looked young for her age (presumably over 18 and RSA compliant, since she was running a hotel bar and all), round welcoming features, unruly short brown hair (probably styled with extreme care to produce that effect), mischievous dark brown eyes, a diamond stud through her nose and some very sharp bar-honed banter. As well as some mad drink-making skillz. Jules tried her out on some frou-frou cocktail which took military precision and half a kitchen to put together - partly because he was flirting outrageously, partly because that was how he rolled now he was living in London and earning in pounds - drinking expensive cocktails that even JC considered questionable.
Anyway, I liked Tabitha. She was fun. She embodied all that was awesome about country girls. Cool, uncomplicated, adventurous. She reminded me of all the cool chicks I’d grown up with who I was too clueless, timid or stupid to try and get anywhere with back in the day. If only I’d read that article from Grunt about picking up any woman you wanted. NEVER failed, apparently.
Around seven we bade Tabitha a fond farewell and kicked on into town in search of food, beverage and hopefully a contingent of dazzling Dutchies. None of whom were actually Dutch of course - Krystyna was Polish, Sela was Norwegian and Karolina was from Prague in the Czech Republic - but it’d become our standing joke and we’d decided to run with it, if that’s not enough mangling of metaphors. We wandered down the hill along Clarence St, arguing about the relative merits of potential dinner options, each others’ choice in clothing and which of the non-Dutchies was the hottest. I was steadfast in my belief that Karolina and Hog’s Breath were the winning options, but was told that little more could be expected from a man in a freebie James Squire T-shirt. Dammit, that was one of my favourites. I’d dressed up and all. Chris backed me in with the Hog, Jules wanted to go Japanese (in fucking Port Macquarie??) and JC put in a surprise vote for Tabitha - I hadn’t thought he’d been into those sort of dietary options - and for the seafood place on the corner, which in conjunction with the previous led to the obvious jokes you’d expect from a man in a freebie James Squire T-shirt who wrote photo captions for Grunt Weekly.
Anyway by force of numbers, character and the sign out the front promoting buckets of Coronas for twenty dollars, Hog’s Breath carried the day. Or the evening. Our waitress for the evening was Lina, an angular, raven-haired witch with piercing green eyes and a dismissive haughtiness bordering on arrogance, as she took our drink orders, related the specials and ignored our jokes. She was disinterested, smug, rude and perfunctory. She had me at ‘Hello’.
What was it JC had said about me and bossy, dismissive stuck-up bitches? Yeah. That. It’s probably the corollary of the ‘bad boy’ thing some girls have. They want to correct them. I just want to break them. Not in any disturbing psychological way, I mean - I just have this urge to crack through their icy façade (in the hope that it is a façade) and make them smile, and laugh, and show their real personality, and want to have the fun sexy times, preferably with me. And anything that follows on from that afterwards, though traditionally that’s not my strong suit. That’s basically how it’d gone with Caroline. Including the as-per-programme ending, though the manner of how it went down (literally, I presume) was a new one on me.
So, yeah. Hog’s Breath Café Port Macquarie. Feed: Pretty decent. Went the steak, as you should. Jules even went surf and turf again, not having learned from depositing his last attempt at same at the foot of a roadsign near Laurieton. Beers: Frosty. Kudos for lime rather than lemon, as Coronas are grievous crap with anything less. Service: Frosty. If debilitatingly hot at the same time. And let’s face it, it’s only through the fine work of creeps like us staring at her arse in those astonishing vacuum-sealed black pants that Lina was able to develop and maintain such an impressively snotty attitude about service provision in the hospitality industry. Still, it let JC out of his box - nothing he enjoys more than a bit of snark, and he got plenty of open looks. Plenty of dirty ones, but by the little smirk on her face every time she left our table, you could tell he was her fave.
“You’re on here,” I nodded with ironic respect.
“Yeah, in like Flynn,” concurred Jules.
“Fuck off,” JC declared. Then smirked. “Dark day for you when the token queer has to show you how it’s done…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “All that said, bags you as my wingman for the eve…”
“Totes!” JC declared, thrilled to be putting his powers for good rather than evil. “Team Sparkle engage!”
“Shit,” said Jules. Then added, “I mean… awesome. I’m sure Chris will be an excellent choice as a wingman. Not that I fucken had one…”
“Erm… let’s do a quick headcount…” Chris was a bit more bolshie with an ale or two under his belt. “Show of hands. People here who actually have a girlfriend. No. People here who’ve actually slept with a girl in the past couple of months…”
“Yeah yeah,” Jules waved him off. “Cheap foreign imports don’t count.”
Chris’ Corona almost resurfaced through his nose. “And what exactly have you been doing in London then? Flying Aussie girls in?”
“Yeah they have a special refugee holding facility for them, Villawood style. It’s called Earls Court.”
“Alright… and I hesitate to go here, but I must…” Chris was going to make his point one way or another. “Potential wingmen who’ve slept with a girl at all.”
“Hey, back off curly. I slept with a girl,” JC retorted. “How else do you think I found out it was shit?”
“Crap, I remember hearing about that,” I muttered. “Minette, wasn’t it? Nice Christian girl from first year. Think that traumatized her as much as you…”
“Yeah, well given I turned out to be the third boyfriend in a row she’d managed to turn gay…” He laughed. “That’s why I call her Mintos... The Gaymaker. Still see her around. She’s totes changed. Crazy hippie chick, runs the vegan café on King Street…”
“The vegan café on King Street? Which of the forty-seven vegan cafés on King Street are you referring to?”
“More to the point,” Jules interjected, “what the fuck are you doing in a vegan café on King Street anyway?”
“Harassing the staff, what else?” JC declared. “Besides, it’s the only place some of the boys will eat. You know… meat is murder, yoghurt is burglary…”
“Tofu’s fucking piracy then.”
JC nodded. “True. Funny, they’re not as philosophically icky about certain uses of butter…”
This time, Chris’ Corona did resurface out his nose. JC’s timing had been exquisite. Played for, and got.
“You bastard,” Chris blubbered, nostrils searing.
JC chalked the score in the air with a finger. One-nil. Points are on the board, read about it in the paper tomorrow.
Anyway, we settled the bill - Jules picked up the drinks tab, since (as he’d already pointed out to Lina, twice) he earned in pounds, on the odd occasion he didn’t earn in $AUD by striking up dubious bets re the reliability of dodgy 80s shitboxes - and headed out on the town. The town being Port Macquarie. In winter. On a Wednesday. This was going to go off like a frog in a sock.
We agreed pretty quickly on a loose interpretation of a pub crawl back up Clarence St, ostensibly to get a feel for the town, but really just to check out the maximum number of establishments we could in hope of tracking down (a) one with a pulse and/or (b) those non-Dutch backpacker chicks. They weren’t in the Port Macquarie Hotel, but cold beer was, and that did for a while. They weren’t next door in the Town Green Inn, but there were a couple of cute bar staff who humoured Jules long enough to extract the price of a round of drinks out of him as well as a generous tip, since he earned in pounds.
We were settling into the night nicely - the vibe was good, the headcount out-and-about wasn’t too bad for the time of year and week, and the laughs were being had. Largely because JC had by deed reminded us of our long-standing tradition - going back to lunchtime on the quad at high school - of the awardance of points for compelling others to project their drinks out of their noses via a well-timed quip. Of course, now everyone was on their guard - particularly Chris, who was usually the easiest mark - which made it all the more of a challenge. With all this excitement, who needed Euro backpacker chicks to make the night entertaining?
Erm, me, for one. So when my phone buzzed a message, I was sure to scurry out and check it, given the lack of light in the pub. Forgetting for the moment that it’d been non-threatening JC who’d managed to swap numbers with the girls and not me.
Need to talk :'-(
Not now. Not fucking now. Don’t do this to me. I wasn’t fluent in emoticon - even after a year dating a fervent aficionado thereof - but I was going to go out on a limb and interpret that particular one as sadface with potential teary drizzle.
This is the problem when you don’t have enough hobbies. Caroline played indoor netball on Monday nights, did Pilates on Tuesday, Body Combat at Les Mills (some sort of high-energy aerobics kickboxing thing, I dunno) on Thursday and was chief social committee organiser person (self-appointed) for work which meant work drinks on Friday, if there wasn’t a gig on to go to. Which just left Wednesday. Which, as far as I could gather, these days meant takeaway for one, Grey’s Anatomy, a bottle of forgettable white, and somewhere between half-nine and ten, more often than not, a teary, smashed phonecall to her ex-boyfriend. Sometimes, even to me.
OK, always to me. In the past few weeks-to-months, anyway. Time wasn’t healing any or all wounds there. And if there was some grim satisfaction to be had out of her secretly struggling as badly as I was, I hadn’t found it yet. Particularly as this Caroline - this vulnerable, melancholic Caroline - only existed for half an hour every Wednesday night, before she put herself to bed, woke up next morning and went back to refuting any notion that I’d ever fucking existed, let alone meant anything to her. I’d made that mistake once, calling her back on Thursday. Once. Wasn’t making it again.
Still, she meant something to me. Like Mitch had said, if she hadn’t, why the fuck was I so angry? It wasn’t just the humiliation of getting cuckolded. Well, OK, it was mostly the humiliation of getting cuckolded, because I’d always done the right thing by her and I felt like I’d been blindsided. In the past, let’s face it, I’d been fairly shit boyfriend material. I might not have cheated on you with your sister, but I probably wanted to at some stage. Or your hot friend. Or even your slightly-less-hot friend who’s funnier than you. Or that chick who just jogged past in the tank-top and lycra gym shorts looking all kinds of in-need-of-a-shower. With Caroline, with it getting serious - met her folks, shared her hobbies, stirred my coffee with the same spoon, knew her favourite tune - I made a deliberate attempt to cut that shit out. I was true to her not only in body but in mind and spirit. As much of that stuff is under conscious control, at least.
And in return I’d got the smackdown of all time. Karma police, arrest this girl. So yeah. You need to talk. Again. Good for you. My therapy rates are two hundred an hour and I charge in half-hourly blocks. (Have to make up for badly-placed bets on shitboxes somehow.)
All that said, when she rang, I took the call. You know I was always going to, too. I’d already wandered down the street towards the river’s edge where it’d be quieter. I knew JC would be pulling a face and busting out the snark by way of explanation as to what I was up to - he’d been around the place for enough of these little Wednesday night tete-a-tetes that he could guess what was up - but yeah, I was always going to. Because one of these weeks I might finally get it through to her that you don’t get a comeback or a get-out-of-jail-free card for shagging someone else in a serious relationship. You. Just. Don’t.
“Grey’s over already?” I quipped. Seemed a little early.
She exhaled into a deep sigh. So this was going to be one of them heavy breathing phonecalls I’d heard so much about. “It’s on, but it’s… not what it used to be.”
“Jumped the shark?”
“Jumped the what?”
My turn to sigh. “Google it. Not my gig anymore to have to translate all your pop culture references. Now if you were on Twitter, instead of deriding it like the rest of the old-media dinosaurs, you’d be up-to-date with your pop culture references…”
“Isn’t that, like, from Happy Days or something?”
“Yeah. The point at which the show went downhill.”
“Always with the up-to-date pop culture references, that’s my Ben.”
Always with the weapons-grade snark, that’s my Caroline. Never quite figured out why she and JC had never hit it off. Too similar, perhaps. Now there was a scary fucking thought best drop-punted out of a hovering Navy Iroquois into shark-infested waters. Though despite the fact he couldn’t stand her, JC had actually been supportive of the relationship as it got more serious - largely because he was hoping to pack me off out of the flat and live on his own at last, which he’d been long determined to do by age thirty (failing by many months.)
I could see her there, curled up on the couch, knees tucked under her for warmth. Her apartment, the top half of a terrace over in Annandale, was old and cold, unless you had someone to chop firewood for the little logburner, which transformed the place entirely. The last volunteer for that task had been let go some months previous, of course. She’d be in tracksuit pants and that Adidas sweatshirt I never got back from her, a polar fleece throw over her legs, a well-thumbed glass of wine by her side, her fingerprints smeared over the glass. Long, wavy copper-red hair - originally mousy-brown curls in childhood photos, but not in the time I’d known her - and green eyes that could flare with anger, pierce with intensity or occasionally dazzle with happiness. There was Irish blood in her, but it’d be a cheap cliché to bring out all that Celtic fire and passion crap. That wasn’t there, unless you dug deep, knew where to look. And unless she wanted you to find it. I’d been lucky enough to get security clearance, for a little while anyway.
Enough of that shit. This was why I couldn’t kill it. Because she’d got me into a headspace where it was my fault we weren’t together any more, because I’d been somehow unreasonable about Footy Dude. Like she deserved a pass because of their previous history. I’d tried asking ‘So I get one of them too? Awesome!’ - which had been a very effective way of ending the phone call at the time, which had been good, as I’d needed a slash and it’d been my turn to deal at poker. Now we didn’t even talk about that stuff, which led me to wonder exactly why we talked at all.
“What’s up?”
“Just needed to talk.”
“About?”
“Look, Ben… if now’s not good…”
I laughed. More bitterly than I’d intended. “It’s alright, I have this timeslot cleared in my weekly schedule...”
“You’re so cynical sometimes…”
“Yeah, you say that like it’s a bad thing. What’s up?”
“Just wanted to see how things were. At work, I mean.”
Now THAT was a bitter laugh. Executed as intended. “Fabulous. Couldn’t be happier. Big new project. Cleaning the toilets. Next month I get a promotion, they’re going to give me a brush.”
For someone as well versed in snark as Caroline, she sure couldn’t identify it out of a police lineup. Probably another reason why she and JC hadn’t clicked. “Don’t make me laugh, I’m trying to drink.”
“Did wine come out your nose?”
“No… and why?”
“Trying to win a bet,” I said. “Can we say it did?”
“No…”
“Bugger. JC’s clubhouse leader then.”
“I remember when you were a nice boy,” she reminisced. “When you didn’t boast about betting on making alcoholic drinks come out of people’s noses.”
“Erm, we’ve always been doing that,” I pointed out. “That competition’s been running since the early ‘90s.” And fucking JC was still leading. Bastard.
“That place has changed you, Ben,” she said, and I could feel my lifeforce ebbing away. This old chestnut. Just because it was true, didn’t mean I wanted to hear it. Not from her, anyway.
“No, see that’s where you’re a bit off the mark, Caro. I’ve always been this guy. Just pretended to be reputable for a while because I thought you were worth the effort.” Left the rest - the ‘clearly you weren’t’ bit - unsaid. It was an open look, but it’d be a cheap shot.
“That’s not true.” Then realising what she’d said, clarified the bit about which bit wasn’t true - the me-always-being-a-bogan part, not the she-not-being-worth-the-effort part. And in the process completely mangled whatever point she was trying to make, gave up and started crying out of frustration. Or maybe out of the realisation that she hadn’t been worth the effort. I don’t know. I’d just realised I’d been pacing out of tension throughout the whole conversation and had managed to walk halfway along the stretch of river beach in front of the caravan park, placing me now a bloody long way eastwards from the half-finished beer with my name on it in the bar of the Town Green Inn. Presuming the lads hadn’t moved on and hooked up with the non-Dutchies already.
“Caro… come on.”
“That was cruel, Ben,” she insisted. “Unnecessarily cruel.”
As cruel as fucking someone else then expecting forgiveness? How lacking in self awareness are you, for fuck’s sake?
“Well look, much as I’d love to stand around here all night discussing who was more of a bastard to whom, it looks as though the lads are keen to move on to round two, the farting competition. Just quietly I reckon I’m a special for this.”
“Ben,” she said, “are you happy at work?”
“Absolutely.”
“Really?”
“What the fuck do you care?”
“Because it’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said. “And because I want you back. We. The company wants you back.”
“Don’t, Caro. Just don’t.”
“We’ve got a job advertised at the moment. You’ve probably seen it. The applicants are, frankly, shit. Clueless brats straight out of uni with writing styles inversely proportional to their sense of self-worth and entitlement. Typical Generation Y.”
This ignored, rather conveniently, the fact that Caroline was in fact born in 1982 and thus, by most measures, Gen Y herself. As a 1980 kid with a deeply veined cynicism of anyone born after me, I claimed Gen X cusp status. Besides, all the cool music came out in 1980 - Back In Black, Ace Of Spades, British Steel, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables - and the rest of the ‘80s was a total fucking writeoff as regards albums, apart from a couple of releases by the Gurus, the Gunners, the Cult and Van Halen, so I was keen to keep as much distance between myself and the rest of the Gen Y spawn as possible.
“Can’t get good help nowadays,” I said. Flippant was good. Flippant showed disinterest. Important in job negotiations, if that was what this was.
“You’d kill these kids, Ben. You’re far too good a writer to be wasting your time doing fill-in work on misogynistic crap like Grunt.”
“Agreed,” I conceded.
“And it’s sport,” she said. She told me the magazine. Doesn’t matter which one. “You’ve told me how many times you want to get back to writing sport? That all your heroes were sports writers?”
“Actually, all my heroes were motoring writers, mainly, but hey, details.”
“We can talk pay and level at a better time,” she said, “but what are your thoughts?” Jesus Christ, she’d gone all HR on me. Deliberate ploy, probably. If you sound professional, you are professional.
“Would I be working under you?”
“Indirectly,” she said, “yes.”
“Office space?”
“It’s the same one we all work in,” she exhaled, voicing the obvious. Open-plan cube farm.
“Then the answer is no,” I replied, as evenly as I could. “I can’t work for you.”
“OK,” she said, a little stiltedly. “Can I ask why? Professionally, I mean.”
“No,” I replied. “It’s not really a professional reason.”
“Can I ask why it isn’t it a professional reason?”
“Sure,” I said, figuring Here goes fuck all of nothing. “It’s because every time I’d sit across a cube farm from you it’d remind me of the time when you weren’t my boss, you were a girl who I used to be in love with. And it’d remind me why that wasn’t the case any more. It’s not a professional reason. You don’t have to like it. I certainly fucking don’t.” And then, because I was on such a roll, I decided to add the fairly unnecessary addendum, “Can’t say I really like being phoned up every Wednesday just because you’re drunk and feel guilty about fucking my career and some footballer all at the same time…”
Long, unpleasant pause. Caroline sighed.
“We’re never going to get away from that, are we?”
“No,” I said. “We’re not. Can you find a hobby for Wednesdays please? More Pilates maybe? Yoga? Salsa dancing? Cos this is just no fucking fun at all.”
That had her sulking. “I just figured you enjoyed saving up all your bile and hatred for the week to use on me.”
“Yeah, not so much,” I said. “Not so much.”
“I can’t give you anything back to make up for it, can I.”
She was in tears, again, properly. This felt like endgame. It felt just as fucking awful as the night she’d told me about Footy Dude. Exorcisms aren’t meant to be fun. Push on, push on, said the Hermit cheerily.
“You’ve finally worked that out.”
“Not even your career?”
“Not if it’s a straight swap for what’s left of my dignity, no.”
“You’re stubborn,” she railed. “And miserable. And bitter. And I wish I hated you as much as you hate me.”
Yup, that’s the lashing-out bit. She’ll be up to the 360 degree pea-soup vomiting pretty shortly. The power of Christ compels you! To fuck the fuck off and leave me the fuck alone!
“Work on that,” I said, “see how you get on.”
“Why do you have to be such a fucking martyr?”
“Why did you have to be such a fucking whore?”
Yeah, not cool. I know. Honest, it just slipped out. Just seemed to fit the metre of the conversation. Too late to regret what you can’t forget. Or something.
And that still didn’t get me peace. Of course not. I clearly had an eternity of penance to serve for some sort of lifetime of cunt-act bastardry that I wasn’t entirely aware I’d inflicted on anyone. By now I’d paced most of the way around the riverbank to Town Beach Reserve and could almost see the lights of the hotel on the hillside above. I wondered if the bar was still open.
“There’s been noone since you,” she maintained. “If I’m a whore, I’m pretty shit at it.”
“Speed dating,” I suggested. “Could be your new Wednesday hobby.”
“Just so I know, you’re going to be fucking obnoxious right up to the point I hang up on you?”
“You’ve played this game before I see. Weekly, even.”
“Fuck this,” she burst forth. A sudden, violent explosion of filth. That still worked on me. I’d never told her how thrilling it was to hear a nice girl from a Catholic school swear as vehemently as she did. I’d have loved to have taken credit for it, but I think secretly she was always corrupt. “Fuck this. Fuck all of this. I want to come over. I want to end this properly.”
“Riiiight…” This had gotten very bunny-boiler all of a sudden. “Should I be changing the locks?”
“Not your locks,” she said, and I sensed a change in her tone. She was a moving target when she was this drunk, and she was very, very drunk. “Maybe your sheets…”
“My sheets.”
“It’s not a proper break-up without break-up sex.”
“So that’s where we went wrong?”
“Yeah, I read it somewhere. ‘Masterminding the perfect breakup.’ In some trashy lad’s magazine…”
“Yeah, cos I’m fucking world expert on that.”
“Ben,” she said, “I’m very drunk, I’m not wearing any knickers, and a taxi can have me outside your front door in eight minutes. Your move. Can I come over?”
OK, so for the record, none of the Wednesday catch-up teleconferences to date had ever ended up here. Not even looked like it. And look, part of me wanted to tell her yeah, sure, then MUHAHAHAHA with true evil genius panache as she stood on an empty doorstep outside a darkened terrace in Erskineville-Newtown-wherever-the-fuck-we-technically-lived and cursed my name to the blackened skies. And part of me - more than I wanted to admit - wanted even more to jump a plane or steal a car or teleport back to Sydney to be ON that doorstep to meet her. But the same strange moral sense of decency that had me answering these phone calls every week instead of call-screening, had me answering her question with something best used very sparingly when dealing with ex-girlfriends. The truth.
“One problem,” I offered. “I’m in Port Macquarie.”
“Why are you in Port Macquarie?”
“Because it’s here,” I said, trying to remain oblivious to the fact that such logic had seen me attempt to scale the sheer face of North Brother in a clapped-out 1989 Camira and lose a $50 bet in the process. “Munter’s… Mark’s wedding is on the weekend, up in Brisbane. A bunch of us are headed up there. Myself, JC, Chris and Jules.” She probably didn’t know Jules, except by reputation, which preceded him much the same way his post-thirty blubber eel was beginning to. “See, if you were on Twitter, you’d know...”
“You’d have blocked me by now anyway…”
Probably true.
“So it’s a boys’ trip,” she remarked. Not entirely approvingly, which was in character. Particularly since she’d just been cock-blocked by it… if that was the appropriate term. “They gave you time off work?”
“Sorta,” I said. “Hoping to sell the story back to them to pay for petrol money.”
She laughed, just a little. “And if not?”
“Ah, we’re right. We’ve got Jules. He earns in pounds. Just ask him.”
“So… no breakup sex, then.”
“Not unless you can get to Port Macquarie,” I said. “In less time than it takes Jules to bring home a friendly backpacker. Twin share room. First in, first… erm… served, I guess.”
“You’re so crass.”
“Yup,” I said. “And yet you wanted to sleep with me just now. If I didn’t know you better, Caro, I’d have thought you liked a bit of rough trade.”
“No breakup sex,” she reiterated wearily. The alcohol was telling. “Not tonight… and not ever.”
“No, Caro… it’s not going to help really, is it.”
Did I seriously just fucking say that aloud? Did I? I needed my fucking head read. Jesus handstanding Christ in a bucket of Castrol GTX.
“Hey look, I’ve got to go,” she said suddenly. “The offer’s there, if you want it… but I’m guessing you don’t want it.”
“The job?” I queried. “Or the other?”
“Erm, the job. I’m afraid my battered sense of self-esteem compels me to withdraw the other, I hope you understand…”
“You’ve got to go,” I reminded her. “This is the bit where we say goodbye. And mean it.”
“Gosh, really?” she said. “I’ll need something to do on Wednesday nights…” She did OK jokes, Caro. When the mood took her, which wasn’t often.
“Goodbye, Caroline,” I said. “Have a good life. Be awesome at everything.”
“This is starting to sound like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” she sniffed. “Be excellent to each other…”
“Yeah, that’d work too. I’ve got to go. It’s cold, and there are wolves after me.” Bloody Jules. He even had me quoting Simpsons now.
“I love you,” she said.
Hell of a thing just to throw out there. Or maybe it was loved. I loved you. I couldn’t really tell. I decided to interpret it as past tense.
“I loved you too,” I replied. “See ya, Caro.”
And before she could string the goodbye out any further, my trembling thumb found the red button to kill the call. Like I say, it was cold. Hence trembling. What are you trying to say?
That sound you could hear - over the gentle crash of the surf, over the sporadic traffic on the roads above - was six months of tension and anger and anguish (which is not the same thing as anger) whistling out of me like a torpedoed weather balloon. With it went my stamina for continuing the evening. It was well after ten, I’d probably walked a kay and a half from where my last beer had been positively identified, and my reply to the text from JC asking my whereabouts and whatfors, which had been mentally first-drafted as ‘Where are you headed? Will meet you there’ had somehow become transcribed by my fingers as ‘Stick a fucken fork in me. I’m done.’ Send.
Oh well. That kinda settled it. Home to bed. Long day tomorrow. Not that we had any idea where we were going or how we were getting there, but judging by today, it’d be a long day doing whatever it was we’d be doing. And hell, at least it’d fuck with Jules’ plans if he came bursting through the door with Miss Scandinavia to discover me snoring my arse off in the room already. I don’t actually snore, but I’d be happy to learn just for the purposes of the evening.
Of course, by the time I’d scaled the seemingly enormous grass hillside that separated Town Beach from the part of town that overlooked it, I was thinking other thoughts. Mostly about how much I’d like to quench my hard-earned thirst with a big cold beer. And the best cold beer is… anything I could find at this time of night. To the point where I’d even consider busting into the minibar in our room and wearing the financial arse-violation which would ensue (remember, you’re talking to a man who will die in a ditch before he’ll pay over the odds for VBs out of a bar fridge under the sink of his hotel bathroom).
So not for the first time tonight, I walked through the front door of the hotel and fell instantly in love with Tabitha. Largely because she was still behind the bar. I’m shallow like that. The place was empty, which at least guaranteed a short queue for beers.
“I’m closing up,” she protested. “So this never happened, yeah?” And in the same breath, cracked two stubbies of Heineken - the proper imported stuff, not the bilge brewed in the Tooheys plant in Lidcombe, we’d already checked on that - and slithered one across the bar to me. I caught it with my right, sliding a stool under myself with my left and sitting down opposite her. Tabitha’s thirst was clearly more hard-earned than mine. It can happen at any time. You can get it running a bar. Matter of fact I’ve got it… erm, naaarrrr.
“Cheers,” I said. We clinked bottles - a bit late for her, she’d already monstered a quarter of hers - but ceremony must be respected.
“You’re back early…”
“Pretty dead in town,” I lied. “Besides, I’m fucking trashed. Got to download my thoughts for the day before they vanish into the ether.”
“So Ben… you’re a writer, yeah?” she queried. My name and job title had come up in conversation earlier in the evening, it wasn’t just a fucking impressive series of guesses. Like I said, the one good thing about the gig was that it occasionally worked as an interesting job title to impress girls with. “Who do you write for?”
“Crappy lads magazine.” Whose advice I was ignoring by telling the truth. “May have seen it around. Grunt.”
She laughed. “Grunt? Oh that’s fucking awesome, I love Grunt!”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s hilarious!” Tabitha beamed. “You guys are, like, taking the piss, yeah?”
“Well I am,” I admitted. “Not entirely sure everyone else is. But that’s the nature of the best satire. If not even the editorial staff are in on the joke…”
“Oh that’s fucking rad,” she said. Rad. I hadn’t heard that since 1987. Tops. “You’re not Ben… North then?”
“Someone reads the fuck-off tiny bylines, I’m impressed.”
“Hey, I love your stuff. You get it. It’s like they’ve hired one of the dudes from Things Bogans Like and they don’t even fucking realise…”
Tonight had improved. A Lot. The mood I was in, the state my ego was as well, I could really do with some gorgeous curvy bar chick sharing her beers with me and telling me she loved my work. And right on cue… Port Macquarie, I love youse. You seeing anyone at the moment?
Tabitha closed up the bar and dropped the keys with the night receptionist, then ducked back into the bar, pinched a six of Heinies from cold storage and locked up with her spare key. I like a woman who comes prepared. We wandered down to the beach - second time tonight for me, but I wasn’t complaining. It was also a little chilly, but I wasn’t complaining about that either. Tabi hadn’t really dressed for the conditions. Clingy black T-shirt as per international bar-wench uniform, pants ditto, but maybe a bra might have helped re the general sense of nippliness. Were they pierced? Dammit, I think they are. And dammit, I’ve so totally been caught out staring. Somehow, it didn’t matter. With the chill in the seabreeze and all, it seemed natural that we’d stay close together, sharing warmth. And drinks.
“What’s this tattoo on your wrist?” Chinese characters. Three units thereof.
She pointed a black-painted fingernail. “Strength. Beauty. Truth.”
I smiled. “Like it.”
“Of course, for all I know it could say ‘This end up’ or ‘Bob was here’… or even ‘This chick fucks’…could explain the strange looks I get from Chinese tourists.”
“Happens a lot?”
“Yeah… nah… one did try to lick me once. Elderly Chinese man. Tried to stuff twenty dollars down my top and take me away with him. Tried to explain that it totally wasn’t on. I’d want at least a fifty…”
“Dammit,” I laughed. “I gave my last fifty to that bastard Jules.”
Her tongue stud flickered as the tip wetted the edges of her lips. The intent in her eyes was unmistakable. Even for a muppet like me.
“That’s cool,” she said. “I’ll settle for an IOU. Or a favourable review in the magazine…”
OMG. Go go go. Hands, and mouths, and tongues all over the place. Never kissed a girl with a tongue stud before. It was interesting. Not quite as interesting as the sensation of having her slither into my lap, grasp my wrists and smear the palms of my hands under her shirt… yup, pierced. Which led to wondering what else of Tabitha might be pierced.
“Patience,” she replied wolfishly, “and you might just find out…”
Patience I’m not good with. For one thing, it’s one of the crappier tracks of the Gunners’ back catalogue. But if patience was what was required… nup, still couldn’t do it. Wanted her now. Was going to have her now.
“Daaaammn,” she exhaled, “you’re very keen, aren’t you?” Given what she’d slipped her hand around, it was hard to argue otherwise. Hard. Heh heh. See what I did there. I write for Grunt, you know. “And I really wanted to christen that room with you, babe… tell you what. How about a little entrée here, then the rest a little later… if you’re up for it?”
As higher-level cognitive reasoning wasn’t my strong suit at the moment, I nodded. Quickly. Before she could take her hand away and change her mind. Or stop doing that thing with her tongue where she rolled the stud across her lips and made me think profoundly lurid thoughts about better uses to put it to….
Holy crap. I’m psychic. I have telekinetic powers… Either that, or she’s got just as dirty a mind as I do.
“One condition,” she breathed. “Back in the room, I get all this back with interest.”
Hell, I’d have agreed to anything. Working for Caroline, even. I agreed.
And then…
Yeah you can probably guess what happened then, without detailed explanation or informative diagrams. And yeah, the whole tongue stud thing. Interesting. Real interesting. I’d clearly, definitively, been dating the wrong kind of women for oh, about the last dozen years or so. OMFG. That’s going to melt my fucking brain.
And you know, I kinda wish it had. Because then I wouldn’t have started thinking. Yeah, I know. Thinking can help. Thinking about certain things, like the names of the colours on the Dulux colour chart, or all the Formula 1 world champions in chronological order, or anything else that prolongs the sweet, sweet agony. But not thinking things like: That streetlight’s quite bright. I wonder if you could see from up there. (You couldn’t. Probably.) Or the followup question without notice: That streetlight’s so bright I can almost read the inscription on the back of this necklace of hers. (Sort of a Druidish crucifix thing, hung from a chain-mail necklace with a little locket behind the neck.) What’s that say? Lean forward… hang on, back again… now forward… Tabicat. 26.11.95.
There’s only a handful of things that three two-digit numbers so arranged can realistically add up to. The most obvious of which was the one I was currently contemplating.
“Something wrong?” Tabitha queried, a little out of breath. Sixth sense, that girl. And I do mean, erm, girl.
“Awkward question, I know,” I muttered, “but how old are you, Tabitha?”
“Eighteen,” she replied.
“How old?”
A mischievous grin parted her lips.
“Sixteen?” she offered. “Erm, in November?”
Cue the Family Feud sound effects department: Baapp-baaoow.
“Riiiighht,” I said. “Hmmm.”
“But, like, it’s not as though that changes anything, yeah Ben?” she continued. “I mean, you’re hardly going to turn me down on a little technicality like that…”
“You turned her down on a little technicality like that?” Jules demanded to know.
“You mean, a little technicality like Fifteen’ll Get You Twenty?”
“Meh, you spent too long listening to Flange Gasket songs in your twenties.”
“Erm, Jules,” I pointed out, “it’s actually illegal to have sex with girls who are under sixteen. Like, properly fuck-off-illegal. Get-sent-to-Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison illegal.”
“Meh,” he argued. To his credit, he had a point, and he made it well.
“Dude,” I said, “we’re talking about someone who I’m technically old enough to be the father of.”
He mused on that. “Yes, but only if you banged someone her age in the first place.” He clearly thought this was the trump-card of all debate-winning points, so I let him continue to think that. “Besides,” he added triumphantly, “what would Munter do?”
“Best not explore that line of questioning,” I suggested. From what I’d gathered - largely because it was talk of the school the first school day after the party in question - Munter had lost his cherry aged fifteen to a particularly feisty 14 year old called Kerri (well, not actually called Kerri, because she’d sue, but we’ll call her that for the purposes of this.) He wasn’t her first, and he didn’t get rave reviews, largely on account of being paralytically trolleyed at the time. It was in the most part those less-than-glowing reviews that had circulated around the school. “But yeah, thanks for the sentiment.”
“The wanting-to-get-you-laid sentiment?”
“Only if it’s by some large black man in a jail cell, apparently…”
“Oh piss off. You need to have sex with something, and that’s an order.”
Red Dwarf quotes. He was broadening his reference base. Or he was hanging out with Chris too much.
“Lemme guess, JC’s been giving you chapter and verse on the Caroline saga?”
“Yeah, like I wanted to hear it.”
“It’s over. Properly over.” Felt good to say, actually. “And that’s what I was doing, just celebrating that over a few beers with a pretty girl, until her being born in 1995 got in the way. Officer.”
“How the hell does she…”
“Do that thing with her tongue?”
“I meant, run a hotel bar…”
“I think her folks own the joint or something,” I said. “My guess. Bohemian hippie weirdos I gather. Whole joint is a weird setup. Probably cameras in the smoke detectors. Be afraid.”
“More afraid of you,” Jules replied. “In your current over-tensioned state.”
“You can talk,” I derided. “Where the fuck are my dazzling Dutchies who aren’t remotely Dutch, by the fucking way?”
“Ah,” he grinned. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that.”
He’d actually beaten me back to the hotel room. The Dutchies were a no-show, seemingly already skipped town. I’d come in, having extricated myself from the reluctant-but-kinda-understanding grasp of Tabitha (though it didn’t sound like I’d be receiving as much of a positive welcome as I’d hoped if I came back in, say, December), to find Jules perched on the bed entertaining himself. With the contents of the minibar, I mean. I immediately threatened to sue him for infringing my intellectual property from earlier in the night, i.e. going back to the hotel and raiding the minibar. I’d just been too cheap. And yeah, there was those free beers that nice girl from the bar had spotted me.
“Fuck it,” Jules pronounced, signalling vaguely in the direction of the fridge. He was sloppier than I thought. “I’ll get this round of drinks.” Meaning the contents of the minibar. In their entirety.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, fuck it. I earn in pounds. Apparently.”
I cracked my first minibar beer. Ever, in fact. Not counting the ones where you drink the beers out of the minibar then make a demon first-thing run to the earliest opening bottle shop and buy replacements of the same kind for marginally less money and probably far more effort. I mean my first proper minibar beer that I had no intention of hiding from the bill at the end. I’m a rebel, me. And of course it tasted just as shit as every other Extra Dry I’ve had since the turn of the millennium, when either Tooheys changed the recipe or my taste buds woke the fuck up, or both.
“Apparently?” I queried.
“Well I’m not earning at the moment, am I?” he remarked. “Fucking visa bullshit.”
I’d heard about this shit before. Known a bunch of people who’d been doing their stint in the UK recently - what the Kiwis called their ‘big OE’ - since the visa laws had changed. To renew your visa you now had to fuck off out of the country, back to the home consulate in the country you came from, to wait for the fucking thing to be processed - usually six weeks and change - before you could fly back. A massive bureaucratic wank and an exercise in barking up all the wrong trees at once. These were not the droids British immigration were looking for, or should have been anyway.
“They’ll have you back though I guess?” I had no idea. I never asked much about Jules’ job. Just seemed so fucking venal, the whole financial market deal. Seemed an exercise in who can be the biggest cunt with other people’s money. “After the six weeks or whatever…”
“Yeah,” he snorted. “Something like that.”
“And the girlfriend…”
“Girlfriend?”
“The prior arrangements,” I reminded him. “She’s happy to wait the six weeks… even if you mightn’t be?”
“Yeah… look…” Jules looked immensely frustrated. Probably as you’d expect someone to be if they were on the other side of the world from their job, their flat and their girl. “Fuck it. You can keep this to yourself, right?”
“You know me, mate.”
“Yeah, I do, you’re a journalist,” he said. “But you’re also a good mate. Always have been. So here’s the story. There is no girlfriend. There is no job. There is no flat. And the reason for that,” he said flatly, “is that there is no visa. Not now, not ever again.”
“Fuck,” I said. “How come? Don’t they just get you to reapply from your home…”
“Yeah, normally,” he said, taking a bitter swig of Extra Dry. “But normally they don’t find out you’ve been working there three years on a tourist visa that’s been dodgied up to look like a working visa. And then deport you permanently from the fucking country.”
“Can’t go back?”
“Can’t go back,” he said. “All bridges burnt. Even if they’d let me in the country, work don’t want to know me, even though it was my old boss there - he was ex-KPMG from here - who put me in touch with the lot who sorted the visa paperwork so I could stay. Great fucking job they did. Un-de-fucken-tectable. Of course, my flat’s gone, along with the bond, which was thousands. And my girl…” He pulled a face. “Such as she was. She wants to know me even less.”
“What, just because you’d been there on the wrong visa?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That, and she found out I was banging her best mate a bit.”
“A bit?”
“OK, a lot. Whenever she went out of town for work. Which was a lot…”
At that, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Yeah, laugh it up. It’s not like your life’s been fucked over by banging someone you work with. Oh wait on…”
“Like the man says,” I reminded him, “never dip your pen in company ink.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and we clinked bottles. Well, he was actually trying to hit the neck of mine with the base of his so mine would foam over, but he fucked up, missed and spilt his own beer all over his pants. Instant karma. Much faster acting than regular karma. Ask for it by name.
“So, fairer to say you earned in pounds…”
“I’ll be right,” he said. “Built up a decent nest-egg, saving my pay and doing a bit of day-trading on the side. And the old-boys network will hopefully come through for a gig back here. Guy I used to know from uni, he’s now up the chain at Mac Bank, reckons there might be a vacancy coming up. Problem is…”
“It’s Macquarie Bank?”
“Ex-fucken-xactly,” he said. “Dodgiest lot of cunts in the entire fucking local industry.”
I knew, I’d seen the Four Corners ep. Ogling topless shots of Miranda Kerr on live-to-air news crosses was a long way from the dodgiest business practice they got up to. “Still, if it’s your best option…”
“Best paid option,” he mused. “If that’s the driver. Girl I used to know at KPMG… well sort-of had a fling with… she’s with Treasury. Canberra.”
“Canberra,” I said. “Hmmm.”
“Yes, hmmm.”
“Chris likes it.”
“Exactly,” Jules said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. And it pays fuck all, of course, because it’s APS.”
“Job for life though,” I pointed out. “Or as near as anyone gets nowadays. And you could always try it out for a while. Hell, Chris won’t have a flatmate for another six months or so…”
“Yeah, that’ll work. Dunno which of us was first to officially state ‘Decent bloke alright but never fucking living with him again…’”
“Erm, he was. Was calling it six months before you actually finished the lease.”
“The two faced little bastard. Besides, I called it eight months out.”
“Didn’t that chick you were dating try to ‘persuade’ him to move out?”
“Yeah. She was very persuasive, Laurel. She then persuaded me to leave her about a month after that, because she was more annoying than having your pubic hairs ripped out one by one.”
“Went alright in the sack though. So I heard.”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Same way everyone else in your apartment block did,” I mused. “Fucking thin walls in that place.”
Jules spluttered into laughter. I continued the story:
“You remember, we came up for Livid that time, JC and me were camped out on the living room floor. Fucking deafening she was. Performance art. After a while JC and I started taking spot bets on which she’d use more of, profanity or blasphemy…” Jules was doubled over trying not to spill his beer, as I finished the tale. “From memory the ‘Oh fucks’ beat the ‘Oh Gods’ by about 40 to 36 in extra time. Got no sleep, but got a dozen Coopers Spark out of it…”
“You were backing the ‘Oh fucks’ then?”
“Always. Swearing’s always big and clever.”
And so it went. We drained the beers in the minibar, got properly incoherent, talked a lot more lies and nonsense which neither of us could remember the next day, and crashed out sometime around half-two. With still no fucking idea about what the plan for tomorrow was, but that didn’t really matter much.
Continued in Part Five
