How it feels (3 page)

‘Mrs Gonzales?'

Nina shot back to reality, removing her hand from my cheek and quickly transferring her attention to her untouched smoothie. She snorted and gurgled at the drink until it was all sucked down her throat. I watched in awe as she pulverised the drink, noticing her body and mind filling back up as the fruit went swiftly down. She breathed out and spoke with both breasts heaving to the new beat of vitamins A through E. My dick was growing thicker in my Bonds.

‘Men don't talk, they just… decide on their own.'

I nodded at this horrible, stripping truth. It was fucked, the way this woman had been left here to blend on her own. But as waves of thick afternoon light poured through the window onto Nina's bronze, freckled, forty-four-year-old neck and breasts, there was nothing tragic about her in my mind; she was a ripe goddess one hundred percent and I had a fat dick and I didn't even lean over myself to hide it.

With a clip-clop-clip-clop-clop and a thud, Courtney appeared in the brick proscenium arch of the Gonzales home. Never had she looked so complete, so beautiful. Like she had torn all the teenage poetry off her walls and let herself be the Amazonian grownup God had intended. She wore a black vintage dress with a choking frilly neck. The dress curved tightly around her hips stopping an inch or so above the knee where her awesome leather boots (that we had bought from Paddington Markets) nearly met the hem. She had spent the bathroom session working on her face, colouring her eyes, lashes and lids blue-black, and her lips sienna red. She wanted that Courtney Love/Kate Moss gothic heroin-chic look and she'd achieved it. I, for one, was scared.

‘Babe, you look so incredible.' My voice was higher than normal.

‘Do I look like Christina Ricci in
The Addams Family
?' Courtney asked in her self-deprecating way. ‘Like totally fucking depressive?'

Nina started crying again so I moved over to the sink and put my arms around her. As I stood there holding her in the kitchen, my cock started to grow more, flicking out of my undies and slapping my leg. I turned to look at Courtney, who was shuffling with the contents of her handbag.

I can do this tonight, I thought.

Sutherland Shire is otherwise known as ‘the birthplace of the nation'. Captain James Cook first sailed into the sandy wasteland of Kurnell in 1770 and thought ‘Why not set up here?' For eight days Captain Cook and his scientists and mariners scoured and mapped the area. One of the
Endeavour
's crew, Forby Sutherland, died on shore, so Captain Cook named the port in his memory – which is pretty depressing if you ask me. Now over two hundred thousand people live in the leafy, sunburnt oasis, which never ceased to amaze me and Courtney. We walked to and from school every day, past the thousand brown-brick houses, up the popular big-lawn streets like Gannons Road, Gunnamatta Road, Burraneer Bay Road and hardly saw anyone! There was the odd old man in lemon shorts watering his driveway, or a skater-boy practising his grinds on the curve of a neighbour's guttering, and, yes, the sporadic passing of white Holden Commodores and orange Mitsubishi Magnas, but really, for a thriving, well-populated, truly historic shire – where the fuck was everyone? Hiding under their couches in fear of terror? Asleep? Or just making sausages mash sausages mash sausages mash?

*

Linking her right index finger with my left pinkie, Courtney led me up Jacaranda Road. We were free as the wind for an entire night – and soon for the term of our natural lives. My mother was working the graveyard shift for the fifth night in a row and Nina was totally cool with Courtney staying over at my empty house. Well, my sister would be there but my sister being there was like no one being there. Nina had even shown support of our impending union with a series of winks and double eyebrow raisings as we left the house arm in arm. In months past, Courtney, me, Stuart and Gordon used to work together constructing stories for our parents, of houses we were
meant to be
staying over at. Sometimes the strategy got way out of hand with everyone allegedly staying over at everyone else's place, so that no one had any place to go and we'd all end up huddled together in a church or a park or an abandoned tunnel, wondering why we went to such efforts to freeze to death away from our inviting beds. The only good thing about staying out all night in the cold (apart from the sense of camaraderie, the freedom to smoke cigarettes, and the sunrise) was that at 6 am McDonald's opened, offering a ‘bottomless cup of coffee' for $1.20. We'd all sit there, battered, cold and wired, drinking this horrible black muck and feeling so alive because we had just stayed out all night and not much happened, but no one knew about it. Most of the time we ended up at my place though, cos Mum didn't get home from the hospital till eight and Agatha didn't care what we did; she had no friends of her own so mine added some flavour to her life, even if they were seven years younger than her. I felt bad sometimes for Mum, working hard through the night to provide us with food and shelter, while we sat up giggling and smoking on the deck, and eating all the bread.

My mother the eccentric, at least by Cronulla standards. A buoyant, inquisitive woman, always quoting the
Sydney Morning Herald.
My mother imported hormones from America. She had been menopausal since I could remember, her moods were fully mad, and often resulted in her closing the door on us and sobbing for half a day, or slapping Agatha across the face in the kitchen, or chasing me around the house with a wooden spoon.

Mum was a mess of thoughts, feelings and contradictions, and this became brutally clear the moment you entered our house. There was shit everywhere. Mostly papers and books, accompanied by half-started knitting projects and tapestry adventures, a busted blender turned upside down in the hallway, a box of cutlery from St Vincent de Paul's on the side table, sixteen dresses from an auction, and a collection of allen keys on the counter beside a pincushion and twenty-three used tea bags she was saving for the garden. Dad hated mess. When he came home from a day of driving classes he wanted nothing more than a cold beer in front of the news. The beer was doable, but when Dad sat down there'd either be a candelabra jutting into his behind, or a box of useless jewellery found at a garage sale in Kirrawee taking up half the space. Either way he was never settled. Dad would extract the object from his buttock, and it would begin. Dad calling her a ‘failed housewife' from the living room and her taking it all submissively from the kitchen until one too many barbs hit the mark and she snapped, retrieving a frozen popper from the freezer and hurling it at his head.

Then Dad left, and the house got considerably tidier, in case he came over again I assumed, but he never did, he just sat out the front in his instructor car until I went out front to meet him. He had left the clutter behind and nothing could make him go back. Dad once said, ‘Lonely people are drawn to clutter because it makes them feel popular.' Perhaps Mum sensed he would leave her one day, so she cluttered up the house in advance.

*

‘So irenic,' I said, as we walked past a dozen silent trees and houses, Courtney's lacy black dress sailing softly along in the half-wind.

‘Ironic?'

‘No,
irenic
, it's all so irenic.'

‘What does irenic mean?'

I paused, enjoying the knowledge. ‘Peaceful.'

We mooched down Burraneer Bay Road, past Caringbah's local swimming pool and around the back of the Anglican church where a fresh sign for the season shouted
God believes in New Year's resolutions too: Get fit, lose ten kilograms, go to church!

‘Did Mum make you drink another fruit whip?'

I loved talking about Nina and her idiosyncrasies. ‘Yeah, pineapple, kiwi, orange and mint again.' I smiled with the corner of my lips.

‘You're so good with her.'

‘Ah, not really, no. Fruit whips are good for you, right?'

Courtney grinned and kissed my ear, but her smile faded and dipped, twisting her face into its most familiar form: the long shape of despair.

‘Do you think Mum will lose it when we tell her about moving to the city?'

‘I told her,' I admitted.

‘You told her? Shit, Neil…'

‘She seemed ok with it, really she did – especially when I told her she could come stay with us.'

Courtney stopped on the kerb and took me in her arms.

‘I never want to lose you.'

‘You don't have to,' I said into one of her little ears.

We walked on, talking about university and all that came with it. Our favourite topic was what clothes we would wear and what hairstyles we would experiment with, for once we left the Shire we could finally become the people we had always wanted to be.

‘I want a “Christianity Sucks” t-shirt!' I said loudly.

‘“God is Gay”.'

‘“The Ramones”.'

‘Who are The Ramones?'

‘I don't care, I just want the shirt.'

‘Cool,' she said.

‘And in the night we will make economical meals in our tall terrace house.'

‘That we share with a lesbian and two Asian students at the bottom of Glebe Point Road.'

‘Near the markets.'

‘We'll drink at the local pubs.' Courtney gestured the guzzling of beer.

‘And fuck every night on our futon which we bought for thirty-five bucks from a guy who left his phone number on fingers of paper stuck to the campus noticeboard.'

‘Heaven forbid, we will actually fuck, Neil?'

I punched her lightly on the shoulder and she fell off the kerb onto the road.

‘You'll see,' I said, winking at her with smooth promise. ‘Your mum should talk to someone, Courtney, like an analyst or a priest or something.'

‘Not a priest. What the fuck do priests know about real-life problems? All they do is sit in cold rooms drinking light beer and trying not to think about little boys.'

‘Well, a therapist then.'

‘Yeah, I know, but she won't. She blames therapy… well Dad blames therapy and drugs for why Tommy did it – and she believes what Dad believes.'

‘Parents are so scared.'

‘Yeah,' Courtney replied. ‘I definitely think we'll be different though, as parents. We'll be much more in touch and aware.'

‘Yeah.' I nodded like a cocksure American as we turned down Willarong Road past a young boy reluctantly washing his father's boat. ‘Baby boomers got all the cheap real estate and inheritance but their parents couldn't really teach them much about the world. Kind of feel sorry for our parents.'

‘Our kids will be so lucky!'

We rounded the last corner to Stuart's house, tummies grumbling and foreheads dotted with nervous sweat. It was a thrilling type of trauma; the final party of our school life, where everything would happen and nothing would be left behind.

‘You going to dance with your hands in front of your body?' I asked her, pinching her hips.

Instantly she went to dancing, clicking her fingers to every second beat, as she famously liked to do whenever she was smashed.

‘Ha ha!' I said, and she kissed me on the mouth.

‘Did Gordon tell you what he got on his TER, bub?' Courtney asked as we descended Grandview Parade.

‘No', I laughed, remembering the brief phone call I'd had with my best mate earlier that day. ‘He just mumbled something like “the whole thing is shit”.'

‘What do you think he was trying to say?'

This was a familiar game only we played in private; me or Courtney would relay one of Gordon's angry, stunted sentences then translate it to the other in grand detail. We saw it not as mockery but as a celebration of our friend's efficient delivery. ‘I, Gordon Braithwaite, believe that the Higher School Certificate is not simply a measure of man's intellect, but a measure of something far, far lesser than acumen – that is, “memory retention”.

I, Gordon Braithwaite, am a highly intelligent man but I have smoked way too many cones to remember fucking
logarithms
or what year Hitler died or whatever.'

Courtney was giggling so I ploughed on, doing Gordon's low, British speak to perfection. ‘The Higher School Certificate is therefore a load of bullshit and I should get full marks because I can suck more bong than any fucker here and I play the drums!'

‘Sounds like he got less than fifty.' Courtney bit her bottom lip in concern.

‘Yeah, he doesn't want to go to university anyway – wants to make cash.'

‘He is totally right though – if that
was
him speaking. The HSC is a ridiculous construct, the whole thing should be wiped out and re-imagined, gearing itself towards the realities of the workplace, not some meaningless political quiz for private school kids – alienating the weak!'

I was not exactly sure about her use of ‘alienating the weak' but I loved it when she fired up (her nostrils flaring like a boxer's cheeks after the ninth round); these strong and driven conversations made me feel like a demigod, above the rest of the world in vibe, insight and general coolness. These were the chats of the new generation, and me and my hot girlfriend were at the fucking helm: we would take our brilliant love all the way to university and never ever apologise again!

The university adventure was sealed and locked in beyond doubt or speculation until a friend of mine from
OnStage
(the Year 12 state drama finals), Julien, told me about a university around three and a half hours west of Sydney in a small town south of Orange (weirdly, Orange is the home of the apple). Then he arrived at my door with his mum in a silver Tarago playing the
Hair
soundtrack.

The humble university grounds sat wedged between the chilly, pie-shop-littered town (every country town makes ‘the world's best pie') and the iconic, snaking raceway, Mount Panorama. The morning wind whipped our eyes and noses. Julien hugged me as if we had crossed the Tasman in a kayak together without a map.