How it feels (12 page)

‘Where will you live?' I asked.

‘At Mum's,' she said, and I scoffed. ‘I can't abandon her Neil! My father is going to live in New Zealand with my grandmother, they're separating – Mum and Dad. I have to stay with her or she'll be alone.'

‘Ok,' I said, passive as a table.

‘Sometimes you have to look after people, and anyway, I can get the train in, it's only forty minutes to Redfern station.'

‘Cool, makes sense,' I said, and there was more silence, unless you count that tinny, life-affirming musak.

Six minutes passed and I told her I'd auditioned for the Bachelor of Arts communications – theatre/media course at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst and somehow I had been accepted.

‘Why didn't you tell me you'd tried out?' she asked me.

‘I never told anyone, didn't think I 'd get in.'

‘Of course you'd get in,' she said.

‘I didn't know.'

‘Are you going to go?'

I shrugged. ‘The whole place felt magic when I was there.'

She took my hands in hers and rubbed them like they were frozen and she was trying to thaw them out.

‘Look at me, Neil.'

I turned towards her for the first time today; her face was flushed and open, she had no make-up on at all except for lipstick, she was not hiding from me, she was asking me to see her.

‘How long is the drive to Bathurst?' she asked me.

‘Three and a half hours.'

‘That's not much!' She smiled.

‘It is if you're doing it all the time,' I said.

‘Do you think we can handle it?' she said, in a high and bright voice, and all I could think was how right it was to call her desperate.

‘No, I want to be free,' I said, and took my hands away, feeling for my pouch of tobacco and looking around at anything but her. I knew I was being childish but still I couldn't stop; it was easier to make things clear to her by being all petulant and aloof.

‘It's so hurtful to have you discard me this way, after everything that has happened between us, Neil.'

‘Nothing happened,' I said.

‘I'm not talking about sex,' she said.

‘What are you talking about then?' I said, rolling a cigarette. I didn't care about the future generations, I needed the hit now.

‘You hurt me, and you hurt Gordon,' she said.

‘Gordon's a big guy, he'll bounce back.'

‘Who the fuck have you become? You're like this totally different guy – and in only two weeks!'

I explained it to her. ‘In order to grow, we have to unchain ourselves from the past.'

‘I didn't realise we were chains.'

I sighed. ‘I just need to go and find myself, and I can't do that with the people from my past judging me as I go.'

Courtney could've been anyone she wanted, but instead of reaching out into the great unknown she cowered, the invisible ties of guilt and family hauling her in like a dumb fish.

‘You're pathetic,' I said. ‘You're all pathetic.'

She stood and said, ‘You're up yourself!' and stormed off past the fibreglass statue of Ronald sitting on a bench.

The day I left for Bathurst Gordon came over and we all had some champagne and orange on the front lawn. Me, Agatha, Mum, Gordon, Stuart – even Dad was there, not saying heaps, but he was
there
in shorts and a penguin t-shirt, sipping Fosters out of a can.

I rang Courtney the night before to invite her and Nina answered. Her voice was colder than usual but I could still hear affection in it, something in the way she said ‘Mmmm' before ‘I'm not sure if she wants to talk to you.'

‘She's mad at me still?'

‘Yes, she is. You hurt her very deeply Neil.'

‘I'm just honest Mrs G,' I said. ‘That's who I am now.'

Then she took a deep breath and said something she had clearly been thinking of saying if she was ever presented with the chance.

‘Remember to chew what's in your mouth. Where you are going there will be many temptations and many reasons to look over people's shoulders for what else is on offer. But chew what's in your mouth Neil, be where you are and never anywhere else. If you do this, then the rest of them will come your way soon enough.'

I could hear Courtney in the background asking who she was talking to – Nina must have told her it was me because she didn't ask again. Then the call was over and with it that part of my life, in that haunted house, with those stoic women and those insane fruit drinks.

I wasn't expecting gifts but they came at me. Mum bought me a yellow mattress that I could tuck under my arm. She sobbed, handing it over to me in its plastic pop-wrapping. She also bought me a year's worth of underpants and socks, handkerchiefs and lanolin hand cream. Agatha gave me
Journey to Ixtlan
by Carlos Castaneda; she said his teachings had really helped her through her long-term unemployment. Agatha kissed me and I nearly combusted; I could not remember her
ever
kissing me – not once in our eighteen-year tenure – and then she remembered she was coming along with Mum and me on the drive to Bathurst and so she got heaps embarrassed and went inside.

Stuart had bought me some extra-small ‘flavoured' condoms and laughed his fucking nut off as I unwrapped them.

Dad handed me a pair of binoculars. He said something about ‘looking at things' and then he shut up again, sipping on his Fosters and disappearing behind the shrub.

Then Gordon stepped forward. My heart was racing a million miles an hour. His grey eyes were glassy and his hands were shaking as he handed me a long box, almost as tall as me, wrapped in newspaper. I opened it to find a sword, a long, slender silver sword that had been engraved:

 

Cronk,

Don't forget us

Gordon and Stuart, 1995

 

Stuart came forward, a stretched chocolate condom in his hands blown up to resemble a poodle.

‘Poodle penis!' he said, hugging me with a set of slaps on the back.

Then Gordon approached me again, holding out the face of the blade. ‘Sixteenth-century samurai,' he said.

I hugged him and started crying.

‘Take care of Courtney for me, won't you?' I asked Gordon, and he nodded into me, warm tears gathering in the bowl of my collarbone and neck.

‘The sword is to protect you,' Gordon whispered, holding me tight as hell. Then we broke apart in a push and I was left with the sword and twelve hundred feelings. Gordon put some sunglasses on and wiped his nose. Stuart punched him in the arm and called him a ‘faggot'. I took the sword, held it out like Excalibur, and bowed to my two mates. They bowed back to me, and that was that, we were connected forever.

The last thing I remember about that morning is driving away from that house, the house I grew up in. And Gordon's body diminishing in the rear-vision mirror, his chubby white arms waving at me from the front lawn of my life; he was all I could see. He was all I could feel. He was all I thought about for the entire drive, and then we got to campus.

 

Seriously, things are better when you're skinny. T-shirts look more awesome, you can bend over or sit down shirtless in the sun without having to worry about how you're looking, because you're always looking skinny – from every angle. It's truly liberating.

I had been wonderfully skinny for three years now, which was wild considering my diet consisted of beer and sausages, potato wedges and wine, beer and wine, chocolate biscuits, spaghetti bolognese and wine and sausages, and my favourite dish, microwave penne pasticcio from the all-night Coles in South Bathurst. (They had just done up the all-night Coles and I can tell you it was a fucking joke. They put palm trees in it. Palm trees! In a Coles. In the Western Tablelands of New South Wales. What were the intentions behind this? More pineapple sales?)

I looked
especially
thin in the mirror that morning. My weird poking-out ribs and my six-pack. My long brown hair and my goatee. I wish Courtney knew what I was capable of now. With my rhythms and my cock, my thin agile frame, fuck, I could
really
fuck now. I missed that girl mad-style, and when I thought of her it was like being ripped open, whereas Gordon, he could go and get fucked, on so many levels.

Last night, after dress rehearsal, I'd gone to Swanna's house. She and I had been having an affair for three months – since she had started working on my major work. She was practically a virgin when I met her but now she was in tune with nearly all of it. I had broken her in – kind of like what Michael Hutchence did to Kylie Minogue, I guess. Taught the young thing. She loved wax.

It all started when I began the audition process for my major work. Naturally everyone wanted to be a part of it. She came into the studio in a floral dress with a slit up the side, eating from a bag of birdseed, with a
lost look
that could only be described as ‘Please help me, third-year man!'

I didn't give her the part, but she was so mesmerising to look at it was impossible not to ruin her life in some way. Tiny and exotic with these dazzling eyes, a curious angel sent from Sri Lanka or God. I had the straightaway stir and quake in my gut and knew that my relationship with Chandra was in jeopardy. Well, maybe that is too strong a word. Chandra and I had lived through a lot in our three years together. A small dalliance with a first year was not going to shake the foundations. At least, that was my justification for firing the starter gun.

I found Swanna in the library later that week, bent over the microfiche absorbed in the bright blue stencils. I told her about this thing called ‘intranet' that was kicking off in the computer centre. It was this wild and new way of sharing information across campus. Like sending a letter but the recipient gets it within
seconds.
She explained that she wasn't really an actor but wanted to be involved in my piece as she found my work… well I believe she said ‘deeply inspiring'. Not to worry, I told her. She said it was meant to be hot this weekend, a rare thing round here. And I said to myself ‘tell her about the swimming hole', so the next thing the library knows I'm telling her about the swimming hole called White Rock, out near the Oberon abattoirs.

Was it a Wednesday? We jumped in my Magna and drove out to the humble little lake between two vacated deer farms. It was the world's most peaceful place, except when there were snakes, but even the snakes at White Rock seemed relaxed, slithering about all groovy.

I took off my ‘No Jabiluka Mines' t-shirt and my flares and threw myself naked into the green excellent water. Swanna stalled by the car in her singlet and fisherman pants, sheepish.

‘Does anyone ever come down here?' she asked.

‘Sometimes this dude on his kayak but like, nah.'

She had an
irregularly
hairy bush for her size – it was so bushy it seemed to blend in with the surrounding shrubbery – and her small, dipping breasts housed massive red nipples the size of LPs. Being from Cronulla, I had hardly seen an Indian-looking woman, let alone a beautiful one, and naked, in a lake, before me: Swanna was a swan no doubt. After a nervous, painfully slow submergence into the water she was soon
swanning
about in it. She had no issues with her body or its involvement with the water or all available nature for that matter, and I knew right then the fucking would be good and she would let me take photos of her region – anything in the realm of ‘deeply inspiring'.

She splashed about then did graceful things, then spent whole chunks of minutes on her back, floating down the flow so trusting. Akimbo and glorious – there were reasons you met people.

The first time we made love was the second, no, third visit to White Rock. It was clearly her intention to make things move along, as she brought wine and a yoga mat. She laid the mat down by the car and told me about growing up half-Sri Lankan in Australia. How her father, on a business trip to Colombo, had met her mother at a cricket match, fallen instantly in love and brought her back here. Her father was an agricultural scientist and they were married in Canberra, where Swanna lived before uni. Her mother died of breast cancer when Swanna was fourteen, which she admitted she was still not entirely over. Her mother was her best friend and not a day went by where she did not think of her, often wondering what her home town was like, for Swanna had never been to Sri Lanka.

‘My father remarried,' she said, her singlet all wet from the swimmers inside it, as she popped open the wine and poured it into teacups. ‘But the woman he remarried, Rhonda…'

‘Rhonda.' I smiled, sipping the cheap chardonnay.

‘
Rhonda
.' She smiled back. ‘She is a scientist as well, and this, well, I think two scientists together, it makes things very cold and detached in the house. Sometimes I feel like they don't care if I exist or not, they just go on talking about their work as if you're not there, as if you are a lesser thing.'

‘What a joke,' I said, my hand in her hair. ‘Where is your sister?'

‘She…' Swanna burped up some wine. ‘She moved to America years ago. She's a lesbian and doesn't feel like she can tell Dad, so she took this scholarship with a bank there and her and her girlfriend ran away from it all. You know that feeling?'

‘That's why I'm here,' I replied, opening my arms to the countryside. ‘Escape the cottonwool comfort of family.'

‘Same.' Swanna nodded. ‘But I didn't want to be in the city. I wanted to be near the trees and the birds. And a bachelor of arts felt like the perfect degree for an orphaned, confused, half-Asian, twenty-year-old girl.' She laughed.

‘Where is your name from? Swanna?' I asked her, my thumb on her eyebrow.

‘My mother wanted me to have a Sri Lankan name, but Dad said that would make things hard for me at school in Canberra. So she looked at me, and she said to my dad that I looked neither black nor white, but at the same time I looked
both
black and white.'