The Family Law (24 page)

Upon entering, you hit the Cockatoo Club bar (you'll only understand the play on words years later: ‘cock or two') with the sole intention of getting devastatingly drunk. You drink everything in sight: vodka, beer, wine, champagne. This is dangerous, because alcohol acts quickly on your
48
-kilogram frame. You examine yourself in various mirrors throughout the evening. What you are wearing looks good to you, but is actually a jumbled mess: brown beads; a shirt with an obnoxious play on the Nike logo; orthodontic braces stained bright yellow by eating Indian food; suede pointed shoes that make you look like an elf. You will remember this outfit in years to come, wondering what you were thinking.

Nevertheless, you are shameless. You spend the entire evening fawning over a guy in the corner who has an ironic haircut and is dressed in army disposals. He looks heterosexual, and maybe this is a part of the appeal; part of the danger. Staring at him, you are already having conversations with him in your head; although you've never spoken to him, you already find him witty and intelligent, and begin to laugh out loud, rehearsing the moment when the two of you are actually talking. This is how drunk you are.

You're about to say hello when someone taps you on the shoulder and asks if he can buy you a drink. You haven't seen this guy before, but already you think he is fetching. He is basically the same height and frame as you, but he has very straight teeth. After chatting for a while, he tells you that you're the most attractive man he's seen in ages, and it's the first time anyone's ever said anything remotely like that. You didn't even know it was possible that anyone could think of you that way.

When you are so drunk you can barely see, you insist that he takes you to his place. He is quite sober; you are quite drunk. Despite his protests that he's just come out of a long-term relationship and wants to ‘take it slow,' you drag him out of the club with force. You surprise even yourself at the strength you've suddenly developed.

At his place, you proceed to sprawl on his futon, unflinch-ingly nude. When you are both finally naked and making out, his flatmates come home and tap on the bedroom windows. ‘Better be wearing a condom, you two!' You don't remember much, except that at one point he grimaces and says you have beer breath. After that, you pass out.

The next morning, you wake up with a head like an anvil and breath like a bin. But you look over at this stranger and think you've done quite well, considering. You've also had your best sleep in years; the futon is supportive, and it's the first bed you've ever slept in that isn't a single-frame mattress. You make a mental note to buy something similar if you ever have enough money, because the share-house bed you're sleeping in is destroying your back. Walking home from this guy's place, feeling crusty and smelling like a homeless person, you suddenly feel like a new man.

 

T
HE
O
NE
In the end, you don't have to look too hard to find a proper boyfriend. In fact, in keeping with your laziness, you've already met him: you went to high school together. He was in the year below you: you played the clarinet; he sang in the barbershop quartet. You were both awkward-limbed boys, one with bad acne and an orthodontic plate (you), and the other with a pigeon-toed posture and the face of a choirboy (him).

You first became friends during a high-school music tour to the United States. With a group of about forty students and staff, you toured America's Bible Belt, wearing a specially designed uniform consisting of a polka-dot vest with a crucifix embroidered on the breast – a garment so awful and non-gender-specific that it immediately transformed you into a travelling troupe of Christian hermaphrodites. With the band, you played ‘Come in from the Rain' in the Caucasian suburbs of Los Angeles, and the theme song from
Jag
in San Diego sports stadiums. With the vocal quartet, he sang ‘And So It Goes' in a demountable Christian school in Phoenix, a place where the students had names like Timofee – one F, two Es – the girls weren't allowed to wear trousers, and everyone prayed for the souls of aborted foetuses. His host family constantly asked him if he was ‘a fag.'

When his quartet performed Billy Joel's ‘The Longest Time,' you eyed him off, thinking his nervous bumbling was sort of adorable. Although it was the era of grunge, he was comically clean-cut, like a young blond prince from a Disney cartoon musical. But his innocent features belied a misanthropic streak. When told he would be spending the day at Disneyland, he became nauseous and refused to participate. When forced, he kicked the rubbish bins in protest and picked flowers from the Disneyland gardens, only for a gigantic butch female security guard to ask him what the
hell
he thought he was doing. His behaviour was borderline autistic, you admitted, but there was something about this boy, mouthing off and swearing in the happiest place on earth, that appealed to you.

Years later, you work alongside each other at your father's restaurant. You're on university holidays and he has just finished high school. Several things have changed, the most obvious being his hair, which has exploded into a wild blond mess. Gone are the short back and sides; now it covers his eyes and curls up in plumes around his head, a white man's afro. He also has stubble now, which strikes you as dangerous, and you have a sudden urge to see him naked.

It is New Year's Eve at the restaurant and the two of you work your way through a line of takeaway customers so long that it stretches down the street, its members drunk and hurling abuse at each other and the staff. The countdown to the new year is joyless, since everyone is so busy they could collapse. When you both leave, it's way past
1
a.m., so you buy alcohol and wander off together. You run into your older sister, Candy, and take turns giving her drunken piggybacks through the streets. When she finds her friends, the two of you walk together, taking swigs of cheap fizzy crap from the bottle, pushing each other around in shopping trolleys you find in empty carparks. Eventually, inebriated and suggestible, you start messing around in the sand dunes as the sun rises, while elderly couples walk past on their early morning New Year's strolls. You're pretty sure they see everything.

In the following days, he denies he is gay – it's all very dramatic. But one evening, at a party you attend together, the two of you leave discreetly, without any words, and start smashing your faces into each other with such violence that his five o'clock shadow eventually rips off the outer dermis of your skin. You roll over ants' nests until you're covered in welts. Finally, when you take a break, you realise you have somehow rolled down a hill and ended up in the carpark of a private hospital. With dirt all over your bodies and clothes, you hold hands and ask,
Where
the hell are we?

Time passes; hair changes. There's his blond afro to begin with, followed by his brown military mutton-chops. Next up is the prison-issue shave, which evolves into corporate back-and-sides and then rockabilly man-child. You're together, you break up, you're together, you live together. Nicknames change over the years, but the one that never changes is
monkey
, because of the way he holds on to you like a baby orangutan in his sleep.

Sleeping at night, you think about the people who spend their lives alone, and you wonder how people can possibly bear it. As you lie in bed together, you realise people all over the country are driving out to the outskirts of their towns, just to hear the faintest signal that there are other people like them in the world.

It's unlikely that the two of you ended up together. When people ask how long you've been together, the answer sounds like a long time. Other couples – including your parents – have gotten married and bred children in far less time. Sometimes, the figures scare you. But one night, you get out of bed and do the sums – this time with a calculator – and discover that the chance you found each other at all is exactly
0
.
0049
out of
100
. You even have to adjust some of the decimal points in your calculator to work out the maths, because the sum is so extreme, so beyond conceivable limits, that the calculator originally gives you an error message.

Wrecking Ball

Spend enough of your childhood in any one house and you'll end up dreaming about it for the rest of your life. I've spent a decade living in other places – an apartment with my boyfriend, a sprawling Queenslander with flatmates, a Cambodian hostel where I was almost hospitalised for dysentery – but I've only dreamed about those places once or twice. Everything comes back to my childhood home. Sometimes, the house will have morphed in my dreams: my sisters' bedroom will be plagued with gremlins, or there'll be a secret annexe in the study and a rollercoaster in the living room. But it's essentially the same place. The same narrow hallway; the same boxy bedroom. Even though I spent my entire teen years wanting to get the hell away from there, my subconscious keeps surprising me by announcing it never wanted to leave. Go figure.

 

*

 

In most ways, the house is pretty unremarkable. A three-bedroom thing built in the late '
70
s, it was constructed with bricks the colour of dried shit and windows covered in security screens and fly-mesh: a practical choice, but not what you'd call pretty. Even when it was brand-new, I couldn't imagine potential buyers in the garage scanning the prospectus, looking over the place and thinking,
Wow
.

Being perched next to one of the busiest intersections on the Sunshine Coast made the place convenient, though not exactly private. The road outside my house linked the region's towns and motorways, and we had constant traffic beyond our fence. While most people might look over their backyard fence to see a council park or next-door neighbours, we saw Linfox trucks and thick black diesel exhaust. For seventeen years, I fell asleep to the sound of vans changing gears and the constant clicking of pedestrian-crossing buttons.

Before the local council improved the traffic lights, we were the ones who called ambulances when car accidents happened. We'd be watching TV or reading magazines when, out of nowhere, we'd hear the high-pitched wail of skidding tyres before bracing ourselves— ‘

Whoa
.'

—for the smashing of metal and glass. It was always so loud; it felt like it was happening in our living room. Without saying a thing, we'd bolt outside, peer over the fence and scan the shattered windscreens and car bodies, all smashed up like they were made of aluminium foil. If the drivers were upright, out of their cars and screaming at each other, we'd call the police. If we saw blood on the road, we called triple zero.

Some nights, drunken men would vomit or piss outside our fence, or throw beer bottles into the yard that we'd pick up the next morning. Other times, sad-looking men in their forties and fifties – hammered with alcohol, freshly kicked out of their homes – would loiter in our garden like it was a public park. They were the worst. We'd be playing Monopoly or Upwords when one of us would see a grotesque face at the window, peering in like an apparition, and we'd all start to scream.

‘Get down!' Mum once hissed at us. ‘Get down and turn off the lights!'

The kids raced around the house, switching off lights until our entire house was plunged into darkness. This way, we could see out into the streets, but no one could see inside. As we moved silently from room to room, we picked up makeshift weapons along the way – tennis racquets, frying pans, a spiked netball pump – and tracked the stranger's movements. A security light traced him to a spot outside the bedroom I shared with Andrew.

The five kids huddled behind a bed frame, watching him all lit up.

‘Do you reckon he's a robber?' I whispered.

‘Well, Mum's calling the police,' Andrew whispered back.

‘Either way, he shouldn't be there.'

‘You should scream at him,' Candy said. Michelle and Tammy huddled into her, close to tears. ‘You should go out there with a
knife
. Chop off his dick.'

‘What if
he
has a knife, dickhead?'

Tammy sucked her thumb, watching the exchange.

‘You know karate,' I said to Andrew.

The stranger peered into the window and we all ducked.

When he turned away again, swaying slightly, Candy whispered sharply.

‘Both of you, shut
up
,' she said. ‘He can hear you. And I don't think Mum wants
anyone
chopping anybody up.'

Mum came into the room with a small torch in one hand and a kitchen cleaver in the other. ‘I've called the police,' she whispered. ‘And if that man comes anywhere near us, I'll cut off his balls.'

The police never came, not then or the dozen other times it happened. The drunks were probably harmless, but we had reason to be paranoid. By the mid-'
90
s, the Sunshine Coast had become a hub for One Nation supporters. More than once, family friends of ours were found bruised and bashed, after late-night encounters with violent men in petrol stations. Passing drivers would occasionally scream at us as we climbed into the van in our school uniforms in the morning, or as we crossed the road to get groceries in the afternoon.