How it feels Read online

  But outside school was where he really came alive; Tommy could surf big waves, kick a conversion from the sideline (in the rain), and when he’d cleaned up a six-pack or two of cold tins he could do a reckless, gravelly cover of The Offspring’s ‘Come Out and Play’. He was famous for it.

  Fourteen weeks, four days and eight hours before Tommy died he met a girl named Bianca. Tommy had already lost his virginity to Year 10 Captain Angela Chapman, but everything from before disappeared when Bianca took position.

  Courtney hated Bianca from the outset. She knew she was trouble and she was right. ‘Something rotted inside her,’ Courtney told me, on our first walk after the funeral. Bianca had such a strong effect on Tommy that he no longer surfed, his grades plummeted and the Special Ed kids were left to read The BFG on their own.

  Then one overcast Friday close to school break, Bianca met Tommy at ‘their spot’ by Lilli Pilli Baths and broke up with him. She had ‘found someone else’ or said something about ‘the wrong head space right now’. Tommy was never fully capable of explaining it, apparently. Then he was gone.

  The following Saturday Tommy hanged himself from a tree in Lilli Pilli Park. He called Nina from the phone booth half an hour before, telling her what he was about to do and how it wasn’t her fault, or Courtney’s, or their dad Eric’s; he just couldn’t go on without Bianca. As soon as Nina realised the finality of the phone call, she wrote on a bit of calendar with texta and Eric read it and jumped in the Subaru with Courtney beside him screaming to go, and go faster. But they arrived too late, Tommy’s brilliant frame already swinging in the morning air.

  Making my way into the kitchen I was struck by the way Nina’s buttocks shook in her black leggings as she gripped the thick glass of the Breville blender.

  Nina was way fit for her age, a taller, yet almost identical, ‘vintage’ version of Courtney, her skin slightly darker from the weekly home-tanning sessions (another thing she’d picked up since the death of her son) and her eyes, though slightly smaller than Courtney’s, were the same deep green. Her good breasts pointed out and up from within whatever they were within, and her voice was low and husky. Stuart would often smack me in the neck, jibing that I had chosen the second-hottest chick in the Gonzales family, and he wasn’t far wrong.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Gonzales.’ I moved through the tall foyer, skimming my fingers on the exposed-brick wall. Nina instantly buttoned off the blender and turned to greet me, wet-eyed and frantically still.

  ‘Neil, hello, would you like a fruit whip?’

  ‘I’d love one!’ I am not a massive fan of fruit-driven drinks, but I’d happily guzzle a gallon a day if it made Nina happy.

  ‘Congratulations on your results, Courtney told me you got enough for arts or communications. You and Courtney can get the train in from Sutherland station – big uni students travelling together!’

  I leant on the marble counter. I felt strangely comfortable in Nina’s presence, sometimes even more comfortable with her than her daughter. Relating to Nina came without all the expectation and fear that were so abundantly present with every look, word or touch involving Courtney. With Nina everything was just so cool.

  ‘Yeah, not a bad result, I guess, Mrs G.’

  ‘Not bad? You topped drama and 3 unit English! Your mother must be over the moon.’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet. She’s still sleeping off the night shift.’

  Nina poured the smoothie into two tall metal milkshake cups she kept cool in the fridge. ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Oh yeah, she’s ok, thanks. Still working graveyard at the hospital.’

  Nina popped a sprig of mint on the top of my orange-pink drink and handed it over.

  ‘You’re ok though, aren’t you, Neil?’ Nina took some of the counter herself, her eyes cracked and meaningful.

  ‘Yeah, generally I’m pretty ok. Glad school is over. Is that what you mean, Mrs Gonzales?’

  ‘Yes. No. I guess. With your parents being apart. Not being together.’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘It’s ok. You don’t have to say anything. I just wonder how you go… how kids go… in that situation.’

  Well aware of the strain Eric and Nina’s marriage had been under since Tommy’s death, I did my best to stay cool and play naive. This kind of real-life performance was something I really enjoyed. I was good at it. She went on.

  ‘Eric doesn’t talk to us anymore. He just waters the garden or sits on his chair in the garage listening to the horse races on the radio.’

  ‘I’m not that into horse races.’

  ‘I just worry about my daughter.’

  I had several speeches in mind, all of which would work in this situation, so I chose the simplest and most positive. ‘At first I was pretty devastated when Dad left, but then after a while I realised it was kind of cool.’

  Nina snapped, ‘How can it be cool for a teenage girl not to have her father around when she needs him the most?’

  Man, did I wanna reach out and kiss Nina, hug the fuck out of her with my whole body, like I would when someone in my Year 12 drama class had opened themselves up, divulged something, or exposed vulnerability. Or even if they’d simply nailed a scene or improvisation exercise. But this was not drama class, and this was not an exercise, this was a house with spikes in it.

  ‘Well, you become friends with your parents is how. I meet Dad for coffee some Saturdays up at Miranda Fair. We might go shopping for shaving equipment or buy a bike pump or go to the movies. And we’ll talk about our weeks and he’ll ask me about school and Courtney and Mum a bit. He doesn’t really listen that well, my dad, but you know, he rolls up, which is cool. I guess what I’m saying, Mrs Gonzales, is that you develop a relationship with your parents that you somehow can’t when you’re sharing a roof. And you know, the Sutherland Shire is pretty conservative; it’s just divorce but still everyone tiptoes around me as if I’m some abuse victim or I’ve lost my ability to see, when I really haven’t suffered at all. I was just relieved that the yelling had stopped, and I could finally get some sleep. And anyway, Mrs G, you can visit me and Courtney in Glebe, stay over even – we’re going to have the coolest place!’

  Nina’s heart lifted up into her neck and eyes, burning the inside of her forehead. She had obviously never considered an empty house. With nothing but the memory of the three gone people. One who left her for a rope, the other who left her for horses, and now her daughter, who would leave her for study and fun in the city with her boyfriend. I’d fucked up. Of course Courtney hadn’t filled her in on our plans yet, the woman was as frail as quail bones.

  ‘This is a beautiful fruit whip you made me, Mrs Gonzales.’ I smiled.

  ‘You’re a good kid, Neil.’ Nina inched closer, and as she always did after I finished a fruit whip, ran two fingers across my face and said, ‘So like Tommy in this light.’

  I didn’t mind. Whatever helped. But a minute passed like this, and I heard the shower stop, so I thought I should wrap it up.

  ‘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 a
rch 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.

  3

  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.