How it feels Page 4

  I stepped out onto the balcony, slapping Stuart on the shoulder with a hard, cupped hand. ‘Shut up, bitch.’ But Stuart continued his performance, setting down the BB gun next to the fibreglass bong and pulling out a bench seat for Courtney. ‘My darling Virgin Mary, you look quite sad tonight, all in black!’

  ‘Thank you, Stuart,’ Courtney responded, wry as hell. ‘I value your opinion so deeply when it comes to fashion.’

  Stuart’s eyes blew out and his brain over-fizzed with adrenaline (the steroids had a knack of doing this every hour or so) and before I knew it he had grabbed me by the Adam’s apple and slammed me up against the pine pylon, mock-fucking me and choking me with an elbow under the chin.

  ‘This is how you do it, baby, just get into him like this!’ Wearing nothing but board shorts and a bandana, Stuart humped away at my floppy, helpless frame, his head to one side, beaming right into Courtney’s eyes as he thrusted and foamed like an overheated cattle dog. But Courtney held his raging gaze right through it all. She knew these episodes well and she had developed a set of tools to deal with them. Courtney knew that this was Stuart’s way of claiming the space. In a few minutes he would be diluting the whole thing with a string of disclaimers like ‘I was just messing with ya! Where’s ya fucken sense of humour? Fucken everyone takes shit so seriously – chill!’

  As Stuart was reaching mock-orgasm on my poor leg, Gordon finally came out of the backyard toilet (with a copy of Woman’s Day – he loved reading on the job) and saved me, wrenching the beefcake off his whimpering, art-house friend. Me. Gordon was half Stuart’s size but he was a genuine nugget, one of those blokes you can’t punch hard enough. Gordon’s strength was all karate and life struggle, Stuart’s was injected and built, injected and built, injected and built, built and injected. Fertilised by constant looks in the mirror.

  Halfway through Year 8 Stuart found himself in his first gymnasium. Student welfare counsellor Shaun Clifford had been assigned Stuart Stone as ‘Task Case 1’ when Stuart’s violent, disruptive and often perverted behaviour with students and teachers had placed him on the brink of his third expulsion in as many years. Then Shaun Clifford stepped in, diagnosed him with ‘Restlessness’ and ‘Obscene Sexual Obsession’ and ‘Violent Urges’, suggesting to the principal that Stuart be allowed to replace science or home economics with a supervised hour in the local gym every second day – under his own personal supervision, of course. Shaun Clifford was a bit of a gym bunny, and believed that a good workout had a calming, almost purging effect on hyper children, as the release of energy and endorphins seemed to satiate the restless, nervous core of the hysteria (or anger, as it often seemed to be in Stuart Stone’s case).

  Stu loved the joint as soon as he walked in. The hard, weird, greenish-blue metal equipment, the long, tall mirrors and the awesome stack of tough-looking cunts rippling with humps, bumps and tattoos. Within weeks Stu was benching a hundred and fifty kilos and had convinced the management to let him control the stereo. Instead of AC/DC and endless Cold Chisel, Stu was jamming on happy techno, drum and bass, Felix and trance, and sooner than you’d think, the truckies, cops and meatheads were happily pumping iron to the camp, spirited dance anthems. Stu’s favourite part was the end of a big session, when he’d stand in a starfish shape in front of his favourite forty-foot mirror and admire the new releases on his long, brown guns, sparkling with sweat.

  For the next couple of years Shaun and Stuart set each other challenges, engaging in a friendly yet highly competitive rivalry of toughness and endurance. Eventually, and to Shaun’s chagrin, Stuart flew past him into a whole new world of fitness and strength. Not only was Stuart twenty years younger and more nimble, but he had a killer instinct – if he wanted to prove something he would do all it took.

  Shaun Clifford had thrown Stuart Stone into the gym to help him calm down and focus, but instead he had given birth to a monster, and a fucking buff monster at that. And, ironically, with all his muscles and self-belief, he no longer needed to bash fuckwits or smash faggots or pick on sluts or remedial teachers, or piss on nips, lebs, wogs or Year 7s to prove his worth, for he was ‘The Shit’ now, and no one could (or would) touch him.

  Malaki Stone, Stuart’s brother, was four years older than Stuart and Mal liked to remind him (and us) of that as often as possible. He had been working security since Year 10, and was always going on about ‘nosing rack’, ‘hurling muppets out’, ‘breaking up stinks’, and making one hundred percent sure that the ‘A Grade flange’ was being let in and the ‘porky whores’ and ‘westy driss’ were ‘barred hard’.

  Malaki must have loved his job because he never seemed to break out of it. He wore bouncer-type outfits even when he was at home, and he spoke to you like you were a guest at his club, or at least trying to get in, and Stu idolised him for it. ‘Yeah, Mal’s working the harder clubs now, and the clientele are punchier and more hardcore, but the rack is straight off the rock and the sluts are A1 Sex Inventions. And the vitamins and sniff are all ticked on the house! Also, get this shit. Sometimes, at fucken Blackmarket, this day club he works at, the owners, right, they pay him to slap on these leather shorts, jump on stage or in the cage or whatever, and be fully whipped by this dominatrix chick, or one of the dancing boys like the faggots there, or just freak out to the trance in front of everyone. In a cage. In leather shorts! How fucken off the chop is that shit!’

  Eventually, after six months of relentless begging, Malaki issued a challenge: he and Stuart would wrestle on the front lawn, and if Stuart could pin him down for three seconds, just once in ten rounds, then he could accompany Malaki to Blackmarket the following weekend.

  It was invitation-only and the cheerful yet anxious crowd included the wrestlers’ mother, Judy Stone, Malaki’s girlfriend Ebony, and, of course, Stuart’s key support group, me and Gordon.

  ‘Let’s go, Stuey!’ we cheered, nervously, in our Year 10 sports uniforms, sipping on cans of Swan Light, quietly terrified that Malaki might just rip Stu’s limbs off and eat them in the rose garden.

  The Stone brothers divested themselves of all but their black Calvin Kleins and stepped down into the earthy colosseum between the front door, the street and Judy’s rose garden. They laughed and flexed and stretched, circling each other, shrugging the fear off, scuffing their hooves as if they were bulls before a full-tilt rodeo showdown. Gordon’s eyes bulged with excitement, but I was more scared than anything; I had seen Malaki beat a guy up outside Caringbah station one night and it was not fucking pretty. Then Ebony yelled, ‘Round one!’

  The first five rounds were over before Stuart knew it, Malaki simply using his height and power to barge over Stuart and blast him onto his back. He was like a tractor stomping on a field of silly reeds, following up with two driving knees to the shoulder and armpit, from where he would dribble saliva down onto his brother’s face and count back from three to one – ‘You’re out of there!’

  Even Gordon (a lover and participant in martial arts fighting) had lost all hope, shifting to a chair behind Ebony’s flowing sarong, embarrassed. Ebony was the opposite; she was loving every moment of the spectacle: two ripped and toned bodies clashing, sweating and springing off each other, rolling and moaning about on the hard, manicured lawn. She twitched and quivered, pulling at the wire of her g-string.

  ‘I’m sorry, little Stu-Stu, you’re going to have to do better than that if you want to come play with the big boys in the city!’ Malaki said, pushing off his brother and preparing for the next round of front-yard annihilation.

  Stuart sat up, spitting blood through a gap in his two front teeth, checking the status of his wobbling, aching jaw. Why was he losing so badly? He had smashed Shaun Clifford in the gym challenge, every chump at school feared him, and even the NRL heavies at Coyotes nightclub thought he was ‘proper tough’. Stuart stared up into the golden orb that stung his bloody, cracking lips. Deep down, Mal was a weak piece of shit and Stu knew it. And we knew he knew it, and he knew we knew he knew we knew it too.
Gordon thumped me on the shoulder saying ‘Watch this now, Nelly.’

  Stu scrunched his face in recognition, looking over to the balcony where he caught sight of Ebony and her too-tanned D cups popping out of her bikini top like overripe honeydew melons. Her figure filled Stuart with sweet memories: taking her from behind in Malaki’s bed a month ago, sucking on her clit three nights ago in Malaki’s shower, and just this morning, while Malaki was at the shops buying protein shakes – giving her the big stick on the rough, burning carpet of Malaki’s bedroom floor.

  ‘Round nine! Go, Stuey!’ Ebony yelped, lighting a Horizon four-milligram and sucking hard on the thing.

  Malaki, eight rounds up and loving it, swept his sweaty blond locks behind his ears and once again bounded towards his blood-soaked brother, assuming the story would play out as it had done thus far. Mal opened his lips to reveal his broad wall of gums as he drove towards Stuart, who stood still like a stalk, hands by his side, as Malaki picked up a bullocking pace. Extending his seemingly telescopic arms and emitting a loud, guttural roar, Malaki gripped Stuart’s neck and chest with his massive webbed hands and drew breath to kill with. Stu took one step back and Zen-like spun on his heel, using his brother’s rampaging force and speed to turn the both of them around then lift Goliath up off the ground and drive him back into the pylon – smashing his skull against the trestle and holding him there, a foot off the ground, with a thumb and forefinger dug deep into the pulp of Malaki’s windpipe.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and despite my position as a pacifist, I yearned for Stuart to finish the duel with some more smashing of head. Eat his head or throw him, throw him and then eat his head.

  David had flung the thing, and Malaki was no hero. Stu could see it all so clearly now in his brother’s beady, fearful eyes. How pathetic that he only lasted three weeks in the police force, quitting after his first call to a domestic. How pathetic it was that Malaki wet his bed until he was fourteen and how he still couldn’t even read that well. How paranoid he was, convinced everyone was laughing at him all the time, when, like always, people were thinking about themselves.

  The defeat on Mal’s face and the magnificently low and fatal choking sound that gurgled from the back of his throat inspired Stuart to lift his brother’s skull off the pylon, spin him back around and throw him into the rose garden. But he didn’t. A wave of compassion and, in the end, pity rushed over Stuart. He was embarrassed for his older brother, and so he lowered him back onto the grass and kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘Blackmarket, yeah?’

  This was two years ago, two insane years where I lost my friend to the underworld, and, when I think about it, lost him forever. Fridays he and Mal would drive in, dressed in puffy black jackets, caps and Lonsdale weightlifting pants. They’d cover a collection of new clubs through till Saturday night, then Sunday mornings launch into Blackmarket, chomp on some biccies, rack up some dust and dance, grinding jaws and making darkness sing until Monday morning. Out of the club and into the light of reality they’d cruise back to one of the boy’s pads for a spa and a few drinks, bongs and two or three Rohypnol to take the edge off. Then Tuesday morning Stuart would run ten k along Cronulla Beach, take a forty-five-minute shower, drink a litre of apple and blackcurrant juice and roll up to school with dilated pupils, pasty, blotched skin and chattering teeth – dreaming of being back on the razzle, ripping snow-lines off a model’s tits and being held like a baby in the warm arms of the flashing, zapping, buzzing sepulchre. The teachers knew about it, and Ron and Judy were even called to school on occasion, where they were made aware of their son’s routine. Absent from Friday, arriving back at school Tuesday with ‘crazy big eyes’ and ‘repetitive jaw movements’. Ron rarely turned up, but Judy did, explaining time and time again in a frustrated drawl that Stuart ‘aims to work in the field of nightspot security’ and that this was a necessary part of his training.

  ‘Does everyone have a drink?’ Judy Stone asked, sailing out onto the balcony in high-waisted beige shorts and a tight red Esprit top, verdelho curling and tipping against the round cubes of ice in her smudgy wine glass.

  ‘We’re cool, thanks, Mrs Stone’, I said, showing her my beer.

  Judy was all set to nod and smile and nod and smile when she caught sight of the BB gun on the table, resting up beside the bong.

  ‘Stuart! Clear your gun away, please!’

  As he had done so many times, Gordon politely picked up the BB gun for Stu, and transported it down to its home in the tool shed.

  ‘Stuey! Bong!’

  ‘I’m not going to pack the bong up now Mum – we’re all about to smoke a fucken cone out of it,’ Stuart said, chopping grass in a bowl.

  ‘Alright, alright, don’t do your aggressive voice with your mother,’ Judy replied, grinning madly at me and Courtney. ‘I’m sure Neil and Courtney don’t talk to their mothers that way.’

  Stu thumbed dope into the cone and lit it, the mull fizzing, blazing, popping then disappearing into the column shaft with a threading swoosh.

  Judy had this awesome way of ignoring Stuart’s bong work, obliviously flicking away at the ice cubes in her glass. ‘So how did you two go?’

  ‘Um…’ Courtney looked to me for direction, so I ceased rolling my cigarette, the Tally-Ho paper hanging off my lip.

  ‘I went ok, Mrs Stone, yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Neil got enough to get into where he wants to go,’ Courtney added, attempting to quash the topic.

  Gordon pulled on the bong too hard and fast, coughing coarsely into the wall.

  ‘You right, pal?’ I asked, privately glaring at Courtney.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, with a burning cough.

  ‘Fag,’ Stuart said, staring down at his nipples.

  Gordon and I had left this titanic issue uncovered, but the end was looming. After four and a half years of intense kinship and inseparable day-to-day brothering, it was too much, too much, too too much.

  ‘And you, Courtney?’ Judy asked.

  ‘She fucken nailed it, eh?’ Stu answered. ‘Going to be a lawyer in the city or some shit which will rock when I need someone to get me out of jail.’

  ‘That’s precisely why I am going to study law, Mrs Stone – so I can save Stuart from being anally raped in jail by ten large Samoans,’ Courtney said.

  ‘Why save him?’ she said. ‘I’m not asking you to!’

  The table fell about in giggles as Gordon recovered, screwing a sweet mix of tobacco and bud into the bronze metal cone, passing it over to Courtney. I could see the indecision on her face. Courtney didn’t mind a bong; she went all quiet and funny but she was into it, more than I was. She and Gordon got on well stoned, making toast and laughing at the madness of kitchen appliances. But Courtney had never felt entirely comfortable pulling billies in front of other people, especially grownups. And now, as the sun held off setting, instead shining a garish spotlight on her overdone gothic fashion and thick, morbid black eye make-up, I could see her face shake and burn. I wanted to reach out and take the bong from her grasp, wanted to save her, but at the same time – and look, I know how this will sound – I enjoyed watching her struggle. That feeling of tension and awkwardness was an opiate to me; I didn’t need a hit of grass.

  ‘Um, so yeah – probably just do law, Mrs Stone. Thanks.’

  Deafening silence reigned as Courtney took a sharp look up at Judy, then back down to her left hand, which by now was poised on the shotty, her right hand cradling the shaft and lighter. For a second it looked as though she might just do it, lift the lighter to the grass and fire it up, but that moment was gone the instant it appeared, and instead she was frozen still, paralysed by the situation. And everyone just sat there watching, including Judy – eyes fixed on Courtney’s left hand, waiting.

  ‘It’s not a fucken microphone!’ Stuart yelled, hitting his neck.

  ‘Or a karaoke machine!’ Gordon chimed in. He was ripped, giggling maniacally, eyes like organic cherry tomatoes.

 
; I could almost see her thoughts flitting across her face. If only it had been a joint so she could smoke it. If only Mrs Stone would stop fucking staring at her. If only piss-weak Neil would fucking step in and do something, instead of just sitting there.

  ‘Neil? Do you want this?’ Courtney asked, pushing it over as she took a full and necessary gulp of her Stoli and orange pre-mix. Whether it was the situation, or my lack of assistance with bong-hell, she stood up and faced Mrs Judy Stone, breaking the embargo she and I had so firmly put in place today.

  ‘Neil and I are moving in together, Mrs Stone,’ she said. ‘Looks like we’ll both get accepted into university. We’re going to live together in Glebe.’

  A southerly buster whipped up off the surface of Burraneer Bay, blowing the tops of the trees this way and that in a no-joke, rainless storm that sent us inside. It was a torrid and boiling summer, 1994/95, but Stuart still chopped up a stack of timber and lit the fireplace, setting up a stoners’ paradise in the dead-animal museum living room. Gordon on the left flank cradled a cup of VB, Courtney in the middle (who had quickly hit a half-bong when Judy went to the ladies) whispering in my ear whether she should do a wee now or wait until Stuart was done with the fire, and me on the other side of her considering this massive inquiry while sipping Carlton Cold from the bottle; this was the Couch Collective, stunned and stoned and sated, watching (still bare-chested) Stuart crank up the fireplace, sweating like a pig as he carefully stacked the planks. He was skilled. He had failed his HSC, but, in this other way, this ‘way of the world’, this possibly crucial way, he was more adept than all of us, and we marvelled as he stacked and sorted, blowing into the fire which rose before us.

  This Violent World was Stuart’s favourite film. An Italian-made documentary that filmed people from all over the world who were victims of, privy to or involved in the execution of horrifically violent acts. I’d seen the film a thousand and fifteen million times but still found myself glued to its vivid, way-evil imagery. The first story was about this Nigerian woman who got pregnant to this married guy. This elder tribesman and these younger blokes led her deep into the jungle, stripped her naked and made her climb up a tree and crawl out onto a long branch. First time I saw this I was pissing myself with laughter, I mean it was really funny watching this chick try to climb up this tree in front of everyone. But then it got way dark, the tribesmen bouncing the branch she was perched on, flinging her up into the air. She fell at least twenty feet down, landing gruesomely on the base of her spine and arse. Then the tribesmen made her crawl back up the tree, out onto the branch, where they bounced her off again. Time and time and time again until her vertebrae split, the baby was dead, and she was unconscious, lying in a bed of leaves, leaking blood. Then the tribesmen sang this weird, joyous song which was way fucked up, lit a fire, drank out of a shell, laughed together, and then carried her back into town.