How it feels (16 page)

‘You went away, over the mountains,' Courtney said. ‘And now you sit on that mountain and look down on all of us.'

I stood up and walked towards her. She said, ‘No, don't do this,' reeling back at a rate. She was against the wall when I kissed her, my hands between her knees and thighs, before two hands found my ears and a knee dug into my back and I was on the floor and nowhere in this world could I find breath. My pink jacket slid off me as I was lifted up to discover Gordon before me, panting like a psycho husky. He slapped me in the face twice, once with the back of his hand, then Courtney told him to let me go, but he wouldn't, he kept on barking at me, telling me how low I was to cause such a scene, how desperate I was for an audience, how pathetic I was, and finally how weak.

‘You got your little prize?' I asked him, smiling.

Gordon headbutted me in the face, and blood dribbled into my mouth. I spat my blood into his open mouth, grinning madly; blood tasted good on drugs. Gordon moved back, and was seemingly about to launch a series of leg-and-arm assaults on my frame when Stuart arrived, dressed in a big puffy jacket and matching puffy MC Hammer pants. He had a bum-bag on his front groin and he just looked so big, like a blown-up, pumped-up version of my old friend from Grandview Parade. He was moving towards us and at the same time bellowing directions at Gordon to halt. Stuart was accompanied by two other enormous guys who were identically dressed, and with them two short Mediterranean women with long legs – one blonde, actually. The girls had a David Jones level worth of make-up on. I could smell it from my place against the wall.

‘This is not your deal,' I remember Gordon saying to Stuart.

‘Step off, Braithwaite,' Stuart warned, and Gordon did. In stepping off Gordon had conceded two things: that even though he had a brown belt in karate, Stuart was the superior force, and, in an even more savage blow, that I was more important to Stuart than he was. I had gone away to Bathurst, disappeared right up inside my own ego hole, whereas Gordon had stayed here and remained in the friendship, riding Stuart's light and dark, his rage and his arrogance, his chest-beating tales of sex and his brother, mother, father issues. But still, I was Stu's boy. And Gordon knew it, shaking his head at us as we filed down the stairs, the audience looking on.

On the street Stuart lit me a cigarette and we had three laughs before I realised I had left my pink jacket inside. Stuart sent one of his Massive Friends to collect, the one with the head like Steve Roach, while he and I chilled on the corner of Macquarie and whatever streets, smiling and shaking our heads at each other. With some friends it doesn't matter how much time you spend apart, the thing between you stays awake, in waiting.

The buses were loud at this hour. The drivers seemed keen to get home. Sick of the drunken louts from Scruffy Murphy's and the junkies sleeping under the seats in fresh sick.

‘What just happened?' I asked, blowing smoke into the city.

Stuart shook his head and kicked bits of asphalt with his Adidas.

‘Fuck,' I added, to the nothing zone.

‘G loves you man. More than any cunt,' Stuart said, meaning it. I couldn't look at him and I couldn't not look at him.

‘When did they get together?' I asked.

‘I dunno, man… while back.' Stuart stepped on and off the road.

‘Fuck. No one told me.'

‘I haven't seen a lot of them, eh.'

‘What happened? Like, I go away and… Aren't there like other chicks Braithwaite can drag into his web? Like fuck. Courtney, man. How did this…'

‘I don't know what happened. I've been in the city mate.'

Stuart was being uncharacteristically sheepish. Like he didn't want to let on about it. I knew this bloke and the way he went when he hid things.

‘What's the fucken deal Stuart?' I asked, the drugs and the night in focus now, making me see and feel the rain I had been left out in.

‘Nothing,' Stu said, the worst actor in history.

‘Why is everyone hiding shit from me?' I said, smoking at him now.

Stuart shrugged, high up into his neck. Then clapped his hands shut and punched the air a couple of times. He couldn't hide from me and he knew it.

‘Fucken tell me man.' I walked over to him.

Then Stuart's Blocker Roach pal came down the steps with my pink jacket. ‘Pink Jacket!' he exploded, and I realised we went to school together also.

‘Blackmarket!' declared Stuart, ripping the moment away.

I put my pink jacket on and shook my head, recalling who I came with.

‘I don't know where my girlfriend is,' I said, looking around Wynyard for her, as if she might just pop out of Hungry Jack's.

‘She and Sarah Kirkwood got in a cab.' Stuart snorted, ripping open a packet of Extra and one by one slotting the whole lot in his mouth.

‘Here for a good time not a long time,' Stuart said, handing round large yellow tablets to his friends in the car. We were travelling through the city in Stuart's clones' four-wheel drive. I was wedged between the two buxom Mediterranean party girls and I was grateful. I knew I had made something dark back there, and maybe I was
not
the one who had changed and grown up after all. The sloppy artist, the pretentious joy destroyer. The teething, screaming toddler.

Stuart winked at me in the mirror and we dumped, passing round a warm bottle of aloe vera juice to wash the tablet down. Stuart's nose was pecking to the happy-house, warning me of the joys to come, of green lights and corners.

When we arrived at Blackmarket there was a line of people dressed in black. They were all older than me and damaged-looking. Crazy committed to this. Most of them had some kind of leather item attached to their bodies; some had the bottom of their leather pants cut out. Some had bulldogs on chains, dribbling. They all looked worn, drained, with painted white faces. I wondered if they had jobs. Did they work in administration? Or were they in sales? One older man wore a sequined g-string and a leather vest with a heart-shaped burn mark in the middle of his chest and a tattoo on his neck that said
Hatred
. Across the lane there was a set of imposing transvestites and a boy on a chain. One woman had no top on at all, just two Nazi ribbons on her hairy pink nipples.

As we moved past the circus I spotted Malaki, standing at the entrance in a cut-off Lonsdale tank-top, radio ear-pieced up. He made a big open-mouth shape when he saw me. Followed by a warm display of golf applause. And then, like never, Malaki was hugging me, his enormous frame gripping my thin, shaking body. My ear was bent in his chest and it hurt. ‘Welcome to hell!' Malaki roared, and a handful of black souls droned ‘Yeaaahhhh!' in acknowledgement.

Blackmarket was widely considered a day-club: a nightclub for those who felt the night experience was not near long enough. It specialised in S&M, drug abuse and hardcore techno fantasia. Those who braved the cement steps that led up to the ominous cauldron would more than likely lose days, sometimes weeks, in the place. The windows were blacked out with thick velvet curtains, gaffer-taped to the sills, and no one asked the time. There was no time. Just black. And the human stalls of this market coloured up the inside. Blackmarket. This was where dads' and mums' imaginations stopped, at the foot of these cages.

I was placed in the ‘capable hands' of Stuart's bouncy friend Nancy. Nancy was a buzzing small person in a figure-hugging black lycra one-piece effort. She was aged between seventeen and thirty-seven and one could easily imagine her releasing an album of sweet, hooky pop songs. She was sucking a Chupa Chup and smiling up at me. She took my hands and in a high yet surprisingly authoritarian voice said: ‘You're with me.'

Through the main auditorium she yanked me. It was just filling up. Early days – it was still night (not ‘day'). Past the toilets, where a middle-aged duo were smoking pipes and lightly fondling an Asian man, and up two flights of dusty black steps I followed her pinecone bottom into a room that had a sign on it declaring
Service Room 4
.

Inside was a row of curtain-less showers. A tall man with a chainsaw tattoo on his stomach was showering with no water. He was naked from the waist up, rubbing and scrubbing himself. He nodded and smiled at me as Nancy led me into the corner of the room lined with long rows of lockers. I sat down on a long bench between the rows of lockers and felt the new yellow pill come to life in the back of my eyes.

‘I'm doing nursing at uni,' Nancy said in a slight Irish accent, and then expertly assembled some sort of glass pipe, shoving a combination of white, green and brown substances into the golden cone that sat snug inside the glass straw.

Then five men with spray cans and skateboards arrived, slamming over the lockers, creating, with efficient craft, a small cell in which there was no escape. Nancy kept on with her administration; she seemed comfor table with the new punks. Even as they began spray painting the walls with tags like ‘skunk' and ‘pussy wrestler' and ‘dad,' she raised not one of her eyebrows in concern. One of them angled in for a view up her legs, another tried to kiss her on the neck, but she just threw them off with short, sharp Irish sentences and looks of ‘this is my world too'. Three of the taller ones, who must have been brothers, lit a spoon. One of the brothers smiled insanely at me through yellow, fucked-up teeth. He said, ‘It's ok.' Like Mum did when I was eight and pissed my pants in Target.

Nancy kissed my hair and passed me the machine. I could hear the punk boys laughing. One of them was injecting the other. I sucked on the glass pipe and large static moved up my neck, and with an awful surge of pleasure I threw up on my ankle.

When I looked up, the punk boy with the gruesome teeth was mock-fucking a locker, two others were freestyle rapping about crimes they had committed in Mosman. The room was all air now but the air weighed a lot. Nancy handed me water from a Cottee's cordial bottle.

‘You're a cute little thing, you are, you are.'

I was walking now but I had no management. There were other pilots in me, ones I had not yet met.

Down back down there now. Stuart handed me an ICY COLD BEER and took me into the men's toilets. He was setting out some rules for me as he burnt up a spoon full of brown and yellow powder.

‘Don't fuck her without a condom.
If it's not on, it's not on
,' he said
.
‘Enjoy the market but look out for the older guys, they're sick cunts on wrong drugs and they prey on the new young cock. They'll fucken bomb you with Normison and take you home and strap you to their mantelpiece and fuck knows what shape they'll leave your anus, bro.' Stu wrapped a ribbon round his bicep then popped a needle into his arm, pushing down on the butt of the syringe until the compound was inside his body and his brain. I had never seen someone shoot up, and as I sat there watching it, all I could think of was our Year 8 drama project,
Don't Drink the Water
by Woody Allen, where Stuart played the Italian priest, handing out the Eucharist (Minties) to the entire audience. He was very funny in the part and got better each night of the small run.

‘There you go!' He grinned, one hundred and forty percent, holding the half-filled syringe out to me.

‘Stu,' I said, grinning, already so fucking charged.

‘Yeah, man?' It was clear by the way his hands tapped and his eyes darted about the cubicle that he wanted out and into The Action.

‘What's become of us?' I asked.

‘Don't look down,' Stuart said, placing the syringe in my palm.

Stuart wrapped my arm in the ribbon but I pulled away, dropping the syringe into a puddle of water and piss on the grimy floor.

‘Fuck, Cronk, shit!' Stuart said, quickly sweeping up the apparatus and shaking it. ‘Fucking drenched in piss, fuck it!'

‘I don't like needles,' I told him, but he wasn't looking at me, he was busy drying the thing, tying his muscle up, and emptying the rest of the load into his left arm this time. I told him how I had missed him but he wasn't listening; he was full of the cocktail now. The coke, the speed, the heroin, whatever he had loaded into that thing, it had him, and his eyelids were pulsing, slapping his eyeballs.

‘Stuart, what are you doing with needles, man?' I asked.

He shook his head at me and laughed darkly. ‘You ever know about those animals?' he asked.

‘What animals?'

‘The lemmings,' he whispered secretively.

‘Oh, yes. I have heard of them,' I said. ‘Mammals?'

‘They're mammals, but they look like rats. And when they migrate, like from the Arctic every year, they climb up a big cliff and follow the leader right off it!'

‘Lemmings can swim,' I said, trying to find him. ‘They're good swimmers.'

‘They're overcome,' Stuart said. ‘With deep-rooted instincts. They want to go, that's why they don't hesitate, just follow each other over.'

‘Stuart,' I said, clasping his shoulder. ‘What the fuck are you saying here?'

And he just smiled at me.

‘Stuart, dude, you're scaring me!'

‘There's nothing to be scared of Neil, not anymore.'

And with that he was up and out, Batman-like, disappearing through the doors with a flourish. I slumped down on the ground. I didn't care if I was sitting in piss or whatever. I thought about what Stuart had just told me, asked me. He had asked me to join him and it thrilled me. I don't know why but it did. He wanted me with him, even there. There was theatre in it and there was bravery, but most of all it was about him and me, and our little secret from the world.

Nancy was wearing a laser white g-string and boob tube now and I was dancing with her. My shirt was off and my whole brain was burning with ecstasy and freedom – I felt like there was a collective noun of horses trampling through the caverns of my skull. Nancy and I had obtained serious harmony and rhythm.