How it feels Read online

  Brendan Cowell is an Australian actor, writer and director. He was born in Cronulla, New South Wales, and completed a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre/Media at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.

  Brendan’s plays have been produced by prominent theatre companies in Australia and internationally, and he has received the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award, the Griffin Award and the Philip Parsons Young Playwright’s Award. Brendan played the popular character Tom in Love My Way and wrote many episodes of the critically acclaimed television drama series which won the AFI Award for Best Television Drama Series for each of its three seasons (2005–2007). He has played the lead role in feature films, including the 2007 crime drama Noise for which he was awarded a Film Critics Circle Award and nominated for an AFI Award; the World War I drama Beneath Hill 60 and the rom-com I Love You Too. He played Hamlet in a 2009 Bell Shakespeare production.

  Brendan lives in Newtown, Sydney, and is a committed supporter of the Cronulla Sharks rugby league team.

  You can follow Brendan at twitter.com/brendancowell.

  First published 2010 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Brendan Cowell 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Cowell, Brendan, 1976–

  How it feels / Brendan Cowell.

  9781742622675 (pbk.)

  Youth—Fiction

  A823.4

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Typeset in 11.5/16 pt Golden Cockerel by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  How it feels

  Brendan Cowell

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  For Bart

  Either you turn your back forever on those who have seen your youth, or else you will admit its nakedness, and even shame has some sweet melancholy.

  – Patrick White

  Part 1

  1

  This was not how I dreamt it.

  Clutching the frame of the too-high bed with my left hand, trying to unlock a Target sports bra with the other, erection blasting out of my groin like one of the pylons that held up my school, I now knew why virginity was referred to as a ‘loss’.

  I mean, all the crap my two best friends had taught me about ‘doing it’ was doing my head in. This was Stuart, my six-foot-two Ken doll rooting expert whom I had known since the first day of Kindergarten:

  ‘Here’s the maths: If she lets you touch her tits for ten seconds that means you can suck on them, if she lets you suck on them for fifteen seconds that means you can finger her gash. If she lets you finger her gash for thirty seconds that means you can give her the stick. Give her the stick, Nelly!’

  And Gordon, my best mate in the world, five foot seven inches and stocky from the United Kingdom:

  ‘Chicks want it, that’s the look they’re giving you. Even if they say they want to wait, they don’t. It’s up to you Cronk, cos chicks want a bloke to take the steering wheel.’

  We had started kissing in the computer room where Courtney was showing me brochures of the two universities she was pumped about, when I dunked my mouth into the ramp of her neck–shoulder connection, letting my tongue and lips dot the tarmac of her milk-dipped skin, luring alto gasps and moans from her encouragement place. She was seemingly stoked by all this, as instigating wasn’t what I was known for and Courtney was tiring of this – she had wanted to have sex since we first got together over a year ago and we saw each other every day, which made the past twelve and a half months pretty strained and weird. Just a week ago she said I may as well have gone to war.

  Down the beige carpeted take-off strip we moved into her bedroom like Torville and Dean, so eager. She pushed my left hand up and through her summer dress, where I found her leg, I found her inner leg, I found wetness and the heat. Poised, I looked down into her eyes and like every other time my dick connected with my soul and the world went static and floppy.

  We were the wrong age for love and yet it was all we could think about. Who were we to pretend we were capable of such sophistication? Pubic hair was only just arriving in patches – we had no idea how to relate to the other sex, and yet we were insane with perversion. Erections launching their campaign out of nowhere and often too; I had planned to wait until I was at least forty till I got a girlfriend, if at all.

  Not to say I hadn’t noticed Courtney before. Of course I had, she was my style after all, a style I liked to call ‘bookish and smart’ and Gordon liked to re-label ‘weird and sad with father issues’. I often wanked off to invented scenarios of her playing tennis or reading poetry naked, but I never ever imagined we would actually date each other in real life. She was too beautiful for me, too exotic and otherworldly with her big green eyes and sharp facial bones. Her brown hair was long and thick and she was really polite and curious, always reading at lunch, or lifting up her glasses to peer out at the ocean which set off from the base of our little school. I did catch her looking at me in 3 unit English a couple of times, and we did have a laugh that time we were asked to co-narrate the story of The Taming of the Shrew in less than a minute in front of everyone, but still, no way! I was the quiet theatre boy with the satchel and the cigarettes and she was really something. I tell you, a genuinely unique person who wasn’t afraid to use her brain. This was not so common at De La Salle High School, where ninety-six percent of students prided themselves on ‘bludging’; if you were seen to be trying too hard you copped it large. The enigma of Courtney deepened when her younger brother suicided. Tommy was a real popular kid, and no one saw it coming. After the funeral, which it seemed the whole fucking Shire attended, I spotted her in the corner drinking Fanta on her own. I don’t know what came over me – I’m such a loser I never talk to chicks, or people for that matter – but seriously, one second I am looking at her through an archway, the next thing I know I’m sitting next to her, sitting with her, staring at her tiny knees through the lace of her
black funeral leggings. We sat there for a minute or two, breathing in and not doing much, when she took my hand and said, with a million cracks in her voice: ‘Will you walk with me?’

  By the end of Year 11 we had conveniently altered our trails and started walking home by the same route, passing each other and nodding, then ‘hello’. A month or two of waves and small chats then like whoosh, ritual had us in a spirited, almost gay canter come bell time. Every afternoon at 3.15 pm we would flee the school grounds to the manicured lawns of Woolooware Road to buy pine-lime Splices at the brick-brown strip mall Gumnut Village like there was a show tune behind us. Then out past the eyes of the main street we’d scale the tall snaky track of Burraneer Reserve, smoke Drum by the boat ramp and drift by the gully where the yabbies breed. We’d hold hands and swing our arms all the way home, talking about school, about the people at school, about life after school, about our fucking families and the meaning of life, loping at that gorgeous three-quarter pace reserved for turtles, old people and seventeen-year-old lovers who in their hormone circus feel every drop of rain, every car that passes and every shift of thumb in the hand that holds theirs. And this suited me; it was playful, innocent, and still miles away from things I had seen in some of Stuart’s VHS like ‘fingering Asians’, ‘fucking hard’ and ‘sluts that squirt’.

  I loved Courtney and it wasn’t long before I told her. She needed to know there was love in this world for her and I wasn’t one of those dickheads who couldn’t express such stuff. Yeah, I was quiet, but I wasn’t a moron, if something needed to be said, I said it. But like my mum told me: ‘If nothing needs to be said, then don’t say anything.’ And I didn’t. Until I met her, and all of a sudden I couldn’t shut up about things. It was like we had both been half-asleep for ages, then woken up by the other and those magical little hummingbirds of love. I loved everything about her, and I didn’t care how dark she got. If anything it was what I loved most, the veil of pain that fell across her face most of the day, and all of the night. My life was pretty drama-less, whereas hers was riddled with hell, and for some reason I couldn’t wait to get over there, where the clouds hung low in the living room and her grieving, torn-apart mother Nina made fruit whips in the kitchen like a mad woman. Death crippled the big old house, and it felt real. I liked it.

  My house was boring in comparison to hers, so I just hung out there all the time; with Mum always at the hospital working shifts and my sister Agatha asleep or baking cakes, no one seemed to notice I was gone. Whenever I felt like I had overstayed my welcome I would say to Courtney ‘I’ll go’ and she would say ‘You don’t have to’ and I would say ‘Ok, I won’t.’

  Jill, Tamsin, Fiona, Shauna, Caroline, Bryony, Siobhann, Daniela, Faye, Leisa, Maria, Emma, Wong-Shu and most of the Year 12 girls had lost their peach in back seats, basements, friends’ houses, classrooms and even toilet cubicles over the last five years, but not Courtney Gonzales, who time and again resisted the advances of wogs and surfers and even one teacher. She swam against the currents of her ‘easy’ time, instead waiting in the wings to find a guy who she believed was worthy of what my mother called ‘the great intrusion’.

  Stalling, I cupped Courtney’s breasts, recalling the advice Stuart had offered me so freely. As I started counting to ten I realised how stupid this was – I had permission! I had more than permission; Courtney was gagging for it… I just hadn’t told the boys that. I mean, I’d vaguely told them of long heated sessions of ‘69’ and explained that she was ‘almost ready’, but I hadn’t told them the exact truth. I was the reason why Courtney and I were still in Adrian Mole world not Debbie Does Dallas.

  Gasps of hot air jetted out of Courtney’s mouth as I teased the edges of her southern place. She liked this, how I’d duck and dive, threatening to finger her deep, then not. I was a performer, using performance to hide the frightening monster that sex was to me. It was now, I thought, in this golden afternoon on results day, that I would finally ‘get there’ and be able to call my two friends and say ‘It’s done, ok?’ But those eyes, those big green eyes of hers, they bore right into me with crippling force. She wanted it too much; the space Tommy left in her, she wanted me to fill it. And I couldn’t. She looked too young and too scared, almost like she didn’t really want it either, she just needed it. I couldn’t stick it in and fuck her pain away. I did not know how to fuck at all, let alone as therapy. Those eyes, pleading dumbly at me from below, saying ‘just do this thing so it is done’, they were too loud. She didn’t want me, she didn’t even want this, she just wanted it over. My dick went soft and my girlfriend knew it was gone again.

  Courtney and I had met at the corner of Burraneer Bay and Gannons roads at 8 am that morning, kissed by the swings, bought two takeaway cappuccinos and made our way down to the post office to open our HSC results. To open up the rest of our lives with a rip. Courtney, being a complete brainiac, had nailed 4 unit maths, French, legal studies and 3 unit English, scoring a blazing 99.1 Tertiary Entrance Rank, whereas I, spending most of Years 11 and 12 smoking and reading Metaphysical Poetry, scored a modest 74.45. Courtney and I had discussed it and set our plans in stone. I would apply to do a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney Uni, or UNSW, or even Macquarie out in Ryde, and she would go for law at one of the same. We would live together in Glebe and cook and fuck and make interesting friends on campus. Planning my future with her was the most fun I had ever had. Courtney was incredible, and her future would be the same. Given what she had been through I imagined her as some sort of legal counsellor, helping those in need. Her mind was brilliant but her heart was the true phenomenon.

  The only thing was, I hadn’t discussed it with Gordon yet, and I still had no idea how to. We hadn’t been apart for more than a day since we’d met five years earlier in Year 8, and the idea of going our separate ways dropped so hard neither of us could even speak of it. So we didn’t.

  I rolled off Courtney and she pulled up her undies. ‘What is so wrong with me that you do this? Am I that ugly?’

  ‘No! We’ll do it tonight!’ I said. ‘Tonight at the party… your mum’s just outside.’

  Courtney did her bra back up. ‘I can’t believe this!’ she fumed.

  ‘I want it to be special,’ I said.

  ‘It feels really fucking special now!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Courtney. I just want to make it something we’ll never forget,’ I said, kissing the dent her glasses had left. She smiled and nodded. God knows how much more she could put up with.

  ‘Look at your funny penis.’ Courtney flicked my cock, the culprit. She’d forgiven me, again, but I could see in her eyes that she was getting pretty bored of the prevarication and I felt for her. I wanted it bad too, but the weight of it always won out. The vagina, to me, was like one of those national parks the teachers led you into on orienteering day. They give you a compass and a hat and you’re on your own. I had no sense of direction and the woods went deep and curved endlessly into themselves.

  Courtney kissed me full and open on the mouth, swirling her tongue around the back of my teeth as she gripped the middle of my chest with a threat and promise. ‘Tonight… or else… ’

  She disappeared into the bathroom with the flash of a sky-blue Cronulla Sharks towel, leaving me squashed against the corner of her bedhead where I met with the fifteen ceramic elephants that stood on her bedside table. The elephants were from all sorts of places and people; whenever it was time to give Courtney something everyone thought ‘elephant’. Courtney loved elephants; she said they had a ‘quiet grace’ about them, and that if she was an animal she would want to be an elephant. I adored this in her, but today they were no longer my friends, today they were judging me, having witnessed my failure at the edge of the river bank. So I rolled over and away, where I was met with a blu-tacked bit of poem I had written her a week after Tommy’s funeral.

  I am this thing

  I am this thing that needs to go

  I love my sister and my sport

  Love the way the wa
ter feels

  But I am this thing

  I am this thing that needs to go

  From the darkness

  Beneath the surface

  From the spaces

  You don’t swim in

  It’s not your thing, sister

  Your thing is living

  You glorious thing

  Two things struck me as I read the poem: (1) I had stolen the style and structure from one of Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy poems, and (2) I had arrogantly assumed the position of first-person narrator – ie Courtney’s dead brother. Artists can be such cockheads.

  The smell of chopped fruit flowed from the kitchen where Courtney’s mum would be hacking into pineapple and kiwi with a cleaver. I knew Courtney would be more than five minutes in the bathroom so I started to wank, thinking in montage about Courtney in the shower and Nina in the kitchen. It was always better this way and not like orienteering at all.

  2

  Since the sudden and theatrical suicide of her fifteen-year-old son Tommy, Nina Gonzales had got way into making fruit whips. Something about the whirling mess of colour, the slutty integration of flavour, or perhaps the dull, thudding vibration of the blender made her stand there for hours on end pushing orange, pineapple, kiwi and mint deep down into the tall glass cylinder, then flicking up the metal lever to violently whip fruit into beverage. We all knew how weird it was, but no one dared stop her; hell hath no fury like a woman blending.

  Tommy was a super-bright kid who had been named Student Leader in Year 7, 8, 9 and, finally, 10. He was loved by every teacher and student who came into contact with him, and his English essays were always so opinionated and cool that kids would talk about them in the playground. Tommy also volunteered at Special Education twice a week, reading Roald Dahl novels out loud with such warmth and diction.