How it feels (29 page)

The dreams came thick and fast that London spring, and then the visitations followed, Stuart arriving on the foot of my bed in the same white suit and dancing shoes, bathed in yellow light and wearing a small, cheeky grin which spoke of how he missed it all, the beach and the easy pussy, the weather and the barbecued chook, shooting magpies and smoking bongs, and of course the time with mates he yearned for most, and this was visible in the corner of his mouth, which cracked inwards with lurking responsibility. The ghost was here for a reason it seemed, and as the visits crept on I became convinced that he would not leave me alone until I had resolved the discontent, or simply returned to Cronulla.

‘Neil,' he would say, loosening his tie and hopping off the end of my fold-out home in the study.

‘Stuart,' I would say – in my sleep? I had never been one to recall an entire dream; those who could always astounded me and I envied them deeply. All I ever had, when I woke up round eight thirty, was a collection of often despairing images, like me and Agatha eating tinned peaches out of my father's cheeks, or of stabbing a husky on a tennis court.

‘Wassup, bro?' Stu said, reclining on the lounge chair wedged between the door and the short IKEA bookshelf.

‘Just dreaming,' I would say. ‘Is this correct?'

‘You are dreaming,' he would reply, condescending. ‘When will you start living?'

‘Why did
you
stop living?' I asked.

‘I told you, bro: here for a good time not a long time.'

‘Shut the fuck up with your fucked mantra. It's a fucking stupid excuse and you know it, you fucking coward. Now fuck off out of my study, I want to sleep.'

In a flash, Stuart was hovering above me, vampire-like, peeling my eyelids open with his thumbs. I was far from scared of him. I was always far from scared of him and perhaps that was why he did it. I held his glare until he retreated to his place beside the bookshelf, shaking his head.

‘Cheeky boy,' he said. ‘Cheeky little Cronky boy.'

‘How is heaven?'

‘Is that where I am? I thought I was in Bethnal Green, and I can tell you this, from any distance, Bethnal Green is far from fucking heaven!' He doubled over with sick laughter. I hated him when he came, because he wasn't the same, he was always prying and running me down, he didn't let me be like the living Stuart had; he wanted to mould me now.

‘Are there girls in heaven?' I asked him, I asked my dead friend.

‘Yeah, all these girls are there, but see the chicks are the same, wherever you go in heaven the chicks are just your type. Like, all the chicks in my section are blonde with big tits!'

‘Perfect for you,' I said.

‘Yes, you would think so, but it gets repetitive, after the same thing a hundred times…'

‘Ohhhh…' I said, getting it a bit.

‘Yeah, that's pretty much heaven, mate. It's this gay place where all the things you ever wanted are right there, right everywhere, but it kind of fucken shits you because that's
all
it is, shit that you're into. Makes me think that is what life is about, having shit you don't want and shit you do want together. I'd do anything to bang a
short
chick or even a butch with no tits, but I can't!'

‘Haha!' I cried out, heaving with laughter in bed. ‘An artist type even?'

‘Yes, you faggot. Even one of your intelligent-looking chicks, but I never thought about it when I was alive so that's why all I got is these blonde sluts.'

‘Tough work,' I said.

‘I know,' he replied, ‘but hey, there is hope – this guy I met up with there who killed himself too, he reckons you can swap things if you like, and that gives you variety access.'

‘Sounds alright,' I said.

‘Yeah, it does. But the thing is, it's dangerous.'

‘Variety is?'

‘Not variety itself, just the way it's all policed. They get a sense of it. You can be punished. See, they design it for you based on what you wanted in your heart, and if you challenge that too much they take it personally and turn you off. '

‘Turn you off?'

‘That's it, gone, darkness. The housing people can deploy you to less optimum houses or simply turn you off to the darkness place. Any time they can decide – some of them just do it for kicks sometimes, to Dead they don't like.'

‘Fuck.'

‘Just like that.'

‘Does that scare you, Stuey?'

He sat back in his chair and pondered this, did it scare him, and if so would he admit this to me. ‘Yeah, man. That's why I settle for the big-tit blondes. In truth, I hardly even fuck anymore.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, it is all points.'

‘You get awarded points for how good you are?' I laughed.

‘No, you faggot, it's not
Sale of the Century
. If you take one of the things you like, say a beer or a surf or a barbecue chook or a gun or a bong or, say, a twenty-one-year-old biking slut, they take credits off your book, and you can only spend a certain amount of credits a week.'

‘What do you spend yours on then? If you're not banging sluts anymore?'

Stuart twisted in his chair, awkward now, and in the awkwardness his secret revealed itself.

‘You use them to visit me?' I asked, glowing now.

‘Visits are expensive, but
you
need the fucking help so I do it.'

‘What a guy.'

‘Hey, cunt? I haven't had a root or a surf or a beer in months.'

‘You can really surf up there?'

‘Well
you
couldn't because you're a faggot, but yeah, fuck, man, it's fucked because I can only surf Bells Beach!'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘Well apparently that was my true dream, which is fucken bullshit – I used to dream about Hawaii and heaps of other sick reefs.'

‘Do you know anyone up there? Are any of the other guys that suicided up there?'

‘Nah, I never see anyone. Mustn't have given a fuck. Are you going to come up?'

‘Me?' I asked, amazed at how he just slipped that in.

‘Yeah, OD on meth or something and come stay. I'm pretty sure we'd be housed together.'

‘But I like living,' I said.

‘Do you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is that why you're sleeping in the spare room?'

‘We had a bad thing happen, we were pregnant and –'

‘I know all the shit.'

‘You
knew
?' I asked him, in a rage all of a sudden.

‘Yeah, mate. I saw the whole thing.'

I stood up beside the bed and held my fist out in the air. ‘Then why didn't you stop the black cunt from stabbing my pregnant girlfriend? Why didn't you help her?'

‘Keep your voice down!'

‘You fuck off!'

‘I can only reach you, Cronk. I can't reach anyone else.'

‘Bullshit, how were you watching then?'

‘I can watch anyone, but I can only reach you.'

‘Fuck off, Patrick Swayze,' I said, returning to bed and burying myself under a pile of pillows.

‘What's important to you, Neil?' I heard him say.

‘I don't want your help, Stone!' I said, crying now.

‘It's ok, Neil. I'm here to listen.'

‘Go fuck some tits!'

‘Nelly…' he said, his eyes all wet with desperation. ‘It feels good, mate, when you decide you want out; it's like heroin, and so much more than pussy, when you know you're going to blow your head off. Nothing matters, you're fucken fearless.' He shook his head and smiled at me and for a moment there I could feel the weight fall away and the opiate brilliance of Stuart's nihilism take over – and I liked it, and I wanted to know it more. ‘Kill yourself, Nelly, you'll never feel so alive.'

*

I knew things had reached an all-time low when Swanna told me one morning, typically busy as an ant in our kitchen, skidding from one bench to another to stir or clean or scrub or label a container, that she was considering moving to Sri Lanka. I told her she was crazy, and that it was a terrible situation there at present, and suggested that we go to couples therapy in Notting Hill. She said she would be very happy for me to go, but that you have to be a ‘proper couple' to go to couples therapy, and we certainly were not that. It occurred to me in this moment that I had abandoned Swanna, I had left this poor girl to suffer on her own. Yes, she had chosen reclusion, she had taken her leave of me, but this, in the language of the broken one, never means you should leave them alone, it means you should persist in asking the recluse to come out into the light, and cop the relentless ‘no' on the chin. One day they will come, one day they will choose a hat and walk outside with you, but only if you keep at the door with a quiet, motiveless whisper and an outstretched hand. I had left my post indefinitely, turned right around and leapt straight back into the tangled web of my past, delving deep into dark correspondence with my dead friend Stuart Stone, and Swanna knew it, she knew I was elsewhere.

‘Maybe we should try working again,' I suggested. Pour the grief and the pain into our art, stage a wild and honest adaptation of Seneca's
Thyestes
.

She slapped me hard across the cheek and told me I was the sickest person she knew, then she lifted up her top and showed me the scar on her stomach where the machete had gone in.

‘Make a fucking play about this!' she said.

Perhaps art was not the solution, but this was our currency, this was how we related from the start; we worked together, that is how we fell in love and how we stayed there. Without work the tyres blew and there was nothing between us to travel on. Months went on without a script, a concept or a rehearsal room floor, she slept in there and I slept out here, reading books and drinking Jameson's from the bottle. We had lost our voice and I was desperate to scream out and make some sense of this.

It was around this time I received a sweet, simple email from Courtney. She had heard through Gordon of our misfortune and emailed me to say she was sorry, and that she was there if I needed her. She said Swanna and I had seemed so ‘happy and together' that New Year's Eve down by the harbour, with our 2004 glasses on and our smiles, the fireworks dancing in our eyes, all green and red with tomorrow's hope.

Four minutes after I had read the first sentence of her email I had sent a one-page reply, riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. I didn't even bother with capital letters, I just pushed it out, like I did in my room the first time I found one of Agatha's
Cleo
magazines lying around; I simply belted it all out and then it was done.

I pressed the ‘send' button and a wave of absolute nausea swept over me, I had to get up and go for a walk around Victoria Park, just to deal with the enormous sense of truth and heartache I had released over the Pacific Ocean past Singapore to Cairns, down the coast of Queensland over the army barracks and endless stretch of wasteland to New South Wales, Sydney, Sutherland, then Caringbah, and finally Wanda Beach, up the stairs and into the screen where it would open itself up and out for Courtney's eyes. Of all the people, why had I chosen her to share this trouble with? It seemed perverse, but it felt so right, and so thrilling at the same time. She knew me, that little lawyer girl with the big green eyes and the pale and perfect skin. She knew me well enough to move through this mess with me, and she did, she did so expertly, and with such delicate compassion I was forced to reflect, constantly in the following weeks of communication, just what a complete and brilliant young creature this old friend of mine was, and in doing so began to contemplate a life with her, and to contemplate how and why it had come about that this might never happen.

I told her about the Rude Boy and his blade. I told her about Swanna and her silent departure from me, and our life. About the obsessive cooking (‘just like Nina and her fruit whips!') and shopping and the ice-cold stare that went right through me as we wrestled with the kitchen to get our breakfasts done. And then, as the emails went on, and she asked for more and more, I told her about Stuart and his visitations. This, funnily enough, was the part she seized on. It fascinated her, my contact with the dead, and stupidly I did not realise why, I did not see right away that her casual interest was hiding a palpable yearning to establish contact with Tommy, the beautiful brother boy who had truly broken her heart in two.

 

Dear Neil,

Hey how are you?

   So nice to hear back from you!

   I 'm so sorry to hear of all your sadness. Like I said, you two seemed so happy when we saw you. Did you ever find the guy who did it?

   I wish I was there to cook you both a big vege soup!

   Things here are pretty okay. Gordon is busy at the construction office in Woolooware two days a week and at the blinds company in Gymea three to four. I hardly ever see him, but he looks so happy with all of it going so well.

   I am working, as I think I told you when you were here, and am discovering family law to be more challenging than I had anticipated. It is very intense, and often heartbreaking, which I guess is why no one ever volunteers for it!

   The worst cases are the divorces, when it gets to custody especially. It's usually the men who lose out and often their houses are taken from them, and sadly, and too readily I believe, their children. Last month I was representing a woman who was asking for sole custody of her and her husband's daughter, a five-year-old named Clara. We won, which was great as I did the whole case on my own for the first time. But in a way I wish we hadn't won, as the husband, as it turns out, is not quite stable. He spent the following three weeks following me around the Shire, sending me threatening and often quite disturbing text messages, and only a week ago threw a box of weights through our living room window. Gordon being Gordon ran out of the house (in just his Foghorn Leghorn boxer shorts!) and chased the guy down the street. The guy was in his hotted-up Torana, so Gordon didn't quite catch him, but he got close enough to read the licence plates, which served as sufficient evidence to take out an AVO against the man. I haven't been sleeping so well of late, and I guess you could say there are reasons why. See, Neil? Not all is dull in the suburbs! Though I could go without that type of excitement, thank you very much!