How it feels (31 page)

 

   
Some art I left for you.

   
Swanna

Sarah Kirkwood was the first person I saw at the engagement party. I walked in and she was right there before me with a glass of champagne in her hand and a baby in the other.

‘Neil Cronk!' she said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘Look what the cat dragged in!'

‘Yes, the cat just came and got me,' I said, laughing politely.

Her baby smiled up at me and burped and I couldn't help but love the little thing automatically. It was a genuinely cute baby, it didn't look like an old man or a Gremlin, and that's rare in kids younger than one. I wondered what Swanna and my baby would have looked like. I wondered where she was right now. Her phone turned off for the entire week before I left. I had no idea if she would return to the house in Bethnal Green – I didn't even know if she was alive.

‘Means he likes you!' Sarah said, handing me her glass. ‘Can you hold my bubbles for a second?'

‘I'll hold the baby if you like,' I offered, my arms already reaching out.

‘Oh, that would be awesome. Do you still smoke?'

‘I do,' I said.

We went out front and she rolled one while I held the baby, only just protected from the rain by an overhang of roof. Sarah smoked liked it was Year 12 and we were on the oval again; deep and fast and guilty. The rain was loud on the roof but her baby fell asleep in my arms. Sarah said this was ‘not common' and that I must have ‘the touch' . Sarah talked about her failed marriage, and how the last three guys she had dated were all gay now; not only had she turned them off herself, she'd turned them off ‘the entire gender'! She said she was a drunk there for a while and ended up in the program but found it all a little cultish in the end.

‘I really shouldn't be drinking but fuck it. My best friend's engagement!'

‘I didn't know you and Courtney were so close,' I said.

‘Neither did I till recently. But I love the bitch – she's such a spunk!'

We went inside and Nina took the baby for a while. Sarah and I walked around the party, dodging old classmates and teachers. Sarah was smart and spontaneous, her mind jumping from thought to thought like an electrocuted frog, but the course it took was corrupt, her mind unravelling at a rate of knots then questioning its own patterns constantly.

‘I was working at the UN for a while, which was intense. But I gave that up when I had Dylan. Now I'm working for Channel Nine News three days a week and it's really quite whatever, some of the men there are disgusting though I do like television, it killed the radio and it will probably kill me too!'

‘What do you do at Channel Nine?' I asked, hoping she would stay near me tonight and ramble on, for the sound of her head dropping thoughts was the best music I'd heard since I saw Radiohead play in Victoria Park with Swanna. And I didn't want to face my old friends alone; I hadn't even really spoken to Courtney or Gordon yet, but I could see them by the pool.

‘I help run the news department. It's a long way from the UN but it's here and I'm only part time which is great with Dylan.'

We drank more and followed each other around, bouncing in and out of conversations with uncles and aunties and friends from school. But we did not leave each other's side. If anything, we fed off each other, knocking down the obligatory catch-ups as a team, then happily returning to our own, more fascinating, yet oddly normal connection out front.

‘The last time I saw you –' we were smoking again, the rain was hitting her long forehead but she seemed to like it ‘– you were necking my girlfriend Chandra in the bathroom at Gordon's twenty-first!'

‘Nooooooooooooo!' she cooed. ‘My lesbian phase!'

I was about to ask Sarah if I could stay the night at her place when Courtney came out and grabbed my elbow.

‘Dance with me!' she said, and hauled me inside and away from good old Sarah Kirkwood, the single mother with a son.

‘We bought some speed,' Courtney said, directing me up the stairs with her hand on my back. ‘You want some?'

I didn't want some at all, I was happy getting drunk and smoking with Sarah Kirkwood. But Courtney was so fired up I bumped a couple of lines off her dresser drawer (adorned with elephants) and felt like dancing too.

‘Gordon's being boring because he has to go away on business tomorrow, so you have to get fucked up with me, ok? And stay up all night!'

I hadn't seen Courtney like this for ten years, all scatty and high, talking madly at people and dancing with sharp, rabid movements in front of her friends and relatives, but she did not seem to care, and man, did she let me know how proud and happy she was that I had come, telling everyone in her speech how I had flown in from England especially, and just how important it was for her to have me there. Seriously, she mentioned me more than she did Nina, and nearly more than Gordon – it was kind of embarrassing, with half the people in the room not having a clue who I was. The emails had made us closer than ever, and drugs were spilling this out into the air. I hadn't told her yet that Swanna had discovered our correspondence; I knew this wasn't the time or place. Courtney was so happy at the party, but something told me it wasn't the party itself that made her this happy. She was buoyed by something, and she kept turning to me to acknowledge it; I had lit something in her and she would see it out.

Michael Shoes dealt out more speed in the laundry as the oldies filtered out to their cars and Gordon signed off for bed. Gordon and I had hardly spoken all night but he looked well and proud of his engagement. He told me he would see me in the morning before he left for Kempsey. I said ok, hugged him, and then watched him climb the stairs to Courtney's bedroom, where she would sleep next to him once more – if she got to sleep at all.

‘Look what Dad got me!' Courtney screamed, holding a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Grandfather Port in the early morning mist.

‘Wowee,' I said, ‘that's expensive shit.'

‘He told me not to drink it until my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.'

‘Ah,' I said, nodding.

‘Let's drink the motherfucker now.' She started ripping the foil off the top.

‘Court, are you sure that's a good idea?'

‘I fucking love port,' she said, screwing into the cork. ‘Don't you?'

We sat out by the pool, smoking and drinking port amid the detritus of the engagement party. The port tasted like cherries and lacquer, it was groovy, and watching Courtney savour it in her mouth amused me no end; she really was a lawyer, with a judge's palate.

‘You and Sarah were getting along well?' Courtney noted.

‘Yeah,' I said, grinning, ‘she's cool.'

Michael Shoes had fallen asleep in his banana lounge, which left just the two of us awake, free to say what we needed to, free to speak of the dead and the living, free to angle in on what the hell was moving here.

‘It's funny, isn't it?' she said, her mouth painted red with Penfolds.

‘What is, my dear?'

‘That we never fucked.'

‘Wow, ok,' I said, sitting up.

‘We never did, and now we never will.'

‘That's the whole idea, isn't it? Of marriage. To
not
fuck anyone else?'

‘Are you angry?' she said quietly, and directly.

‘Angry?' I asked her.

‘That I'm marrying Gordon.'

‘No, C ,' I said, ‘you're not the prize.'

‘The prize?' she said, alerted to something here.

‘I'm glad you're being looked after properly, I am glad it is him,' I lied.

‘It wasn't him,' she said, exhaling smoke out her nostrils. She was wearing a blue chiffon number with a single strap on the right shoulder. The dress ruffled out above her cleavage and dragged diagonally down her long slender back. On anyone else I don't think I would have liked it, but on her, tonight, it looked divine.

‘What wasn't him?' I asked, a new brand of headache settling into the side of my skull as the birds announced the first signs of a new day.

‘It wasn't Gordon,' she said, slurring her words.

‘Wasn't him what? I don't know what you're saying now.'

‘Gordon didn't have me first,' she said, and Michael Shoes got up out of his banana lounge and walked inside and out the front door in one swift sequence as if controlled by remote.

‘What are you telling me here, Courtney?'

‘That night, the night of the results party…'

‘Yes,' I said, my whole body starting to shake.

‘Well I lost you at the squash courts,' she said.

‘Yeah?' My voice thinning out to almost nothing.

‘I went back to Stuart's house that night,' she said, and his name hung in the air. ‘I'm sorry, Neil, but I had to tell you this. I had to say it before I get married.'

I put my twenty-five-year-old port down and stood up in the shock stream. ‘You had to tell
me
this before you get married? Why me? I'm not marrying you… Jesus, Courtney – you fucked Stuart?'

‘Neil, please don't flip out on me,' she said, following me to the pool.

‘Fuck!' I said, flicking my cigarette over the fence.

‘It just happened,' she said, placing her hand on my back. ‘He took me back to his place for a shower, after that awful riot out the front of the squash courts? He said we should wait there until we heard from you guys. But we didn't. So I lay on his bed and watched him inject steroids, we chatted. And then I took my top off and asked him to touch me.'

‘No way, and what'd he do?'

‘He hesitated, but then I pleaded with him. I said I wanted it over. I asked him for a favour and he obliged me.'

I moved away from her, ducking under vines to get to a spot where she could not reach me.

‘
Obliged
. Fucking hell what kind of word is that!'

‘Shhhh…' she pointed to her mother's room just above us.

‘Oh, man,' I said, ‘this is way bent.'

‘I'm surprised he didn't tell you.'

‘Yeah, “Hey Neil, fucked your girlfriend last night!”'

‘I thought he might have admitted it to you,' she said. ‘Now or then! Now that he comes to you, in your dreams I thought he may have.'

‘Who knows if it's even him?' I wanted to hurt her now. ‘Maybe Stuart's just a projection, like you said, and everything he told me, of then and now and Tommy…'

‘Don't you do that.'

‘All the shit he said about Tommy is my sick brain making it all up!'

‘Don't be cruel, Neil. I know I have hurt you.'

I walked back to the banana lounge and sat. She followed, crouching down and forward before me. Finally she spoke, like a social worker not a lawyer, like a friend not a lover.

‘I asked him to do it,' she said. ‘I just wanted it done and over.'

‘Beautiful,' I said, sardonic as all get out.

‘It was,' she said in a whisper, ‘it was very beautiful.'

Her hand rested on my neck and I began to cry. Was I crying at how pathetic I was back then? How frigid and scared of such intimacy? Or was I crying over my friend's betrayal? For so long I had tortured myself at the loss of him, only to discover he wasn't the loyal and true mate I thought he was. In the end, I think I was crying because I was beginning to believe that no one was worth loving in this world, that everyone was evil and self-obsessed in their truest hour, and so I cried in the knowledge that I would never let a soul in again, I would go cold from now on in and shut the world out, it was the only option. These were my final tears and the rain was joining me.

‘I spoke to him,' she said, ‘after we made love on that night.'

‘Oh you
made love
now, did you?'

‘He said that you and I should be together forever.'

‘As he pulled his cock out of your pussy?'

She did not laugh nor miss a beat. ‘I asked him why you'd never wanted me enough,' she said, ‘I asked him if he knew, if you had ever told him why…'

I looked up at her for Stuart's answer, and as I did she stroked my cheek, and her green eyes filled with salted water, swirling about with ten years of concealment and guilt.

‘He told me you wanted my mother more than me,' she said.

‘He said that?'

‘Yeah,' she said, and she started laughing. ‘Was it true?'

I couldn't help myself either. I started laughing big and loud and full.

‘Yes, it was true,' I said. ‘It seemed easier to me, the idea of that.'

‘She's upstairs,' she said, and we laughed together as the birds fired up a big song and dance about this brand-new Sunday they were all so fucking proud of.

With the yellow light of reality upon us, Courtney took me by the hand and led me through the kitchen to the living room.

‘You can sleep here,' she said. ‘I'll get you a blanket from upstairs. Set the cushions up on the floor.'

I did what old Courtney had told me to do. I set the cushions up on the floor behind the couch. The living room of the Gonzales' house was one of those beautiful ‘presentation rooms' no one ever entered. They had dinner in here twice a year and most things were covered in plastic. I looked around the room at the glass cabinet filled with Tommy's trophies and further sadness fell upon me. I had never felt so displaced and ugly. What had any of my
wondrous
life come to? The love, the art, the travel. Here I was at twenty-eight, in my ex-girlfriend's house, sleeping behind a couch in a room no one ever entered. I had no place to live, no girlfriend, and no ideas in my Moleskine notebook. All I had was the fresh knowledge that people were pain, and this excluded nobody.

I woke up with her above me, grinding back and forth on my centre, my hand in her hand on the outside of her left breast sliding about on the chiffon. For a moment there I wasn't sure this was truly happening, I was seriously half asleep and dreaming, but I knew it was real when she came down and my lips met hers and the taste of her gums and teeth brought me back to her, and forward, propelled into this passion unknowingly. I peeled the hair back from in front of her eyes but she did not want me to take her in as she moved herself down and around my cock, mocking the act, fucking me with her dress on, hiding on an angle in my neck and face. I parted her hair once more, but again she dived back into my lips and resumed her veiled, fervent kissing of me. When she paused, when she allowed my rhythm to be a player in this, I fell into things as participant mutual, opening my mouth to receive her tongue and teeth, gripping her neck from the back and getting her as close as gravity and flesh would allow, and she made sounds, sharp gasps of horror and joy in harmony as we turned the corners of each other's bodies and found ways to get nearer, and obtusely so. She kissed so differently now, she kissed like a woman, with certainty and intent. She knew what she wanted and how to get herself there, but also, inside this kiss there was punishment; I could feel the self-loathing in every gasp, but still I pushed on, too far gone now to consider my best friend asleep in the room above me. I lifted her out of the blue dress, and she removed my jeans then led my penis out of its home.