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He went straight to his extensive CD collection, all housed in a floor to ceiling wooden unit, custom built for the apartment. A feature wall with a difference, he joked at the house warming, attempting to sound sophisticated but instead coming across like a wanker. The ache inside him led him to three bands – Machine Gun Fellatio, the Violent Femmes and the Living End – the anthems of their love before it got complicated. More complicated, he corrected himself, because it had always been goddamn complicated. Although the fridge was full of beer, the Tasmanian Oak bar well stocked and a number of small plastic envelopes of cocaine in his bedside drawer, he just stood there with the CDs in his hand. He wanted to feel the pain inside. It had been festering for years, under the safe shroud of chemical numbness, and now, after today he wanted to sit with it. He wanted a chance for a clear head and a burdened heart to remember back to when he was a boy, when he loved purely and simply. When he called love, lust and no one asked any questions. He knew now that he really was a boy when he first saw her and wished that she were his. But every boy in the school thought that way, certainly all his mates. On a Friday night as they sat around drinking, smoking joints and watching pornos that Damo had stolen from under the tool bench in his Dad’s shed, they’d talk about what she had worn during the week. His favourite were the stretchy white three quarter pants and the floral halter necks. They debated over whether she wore a g-string or if she was naked under those white pants. No one ever seemed quite sure. He imaged her naked under them. Damo preferred the short blue sun dress, the one with the thin straps and they all prayed that a wind gust would catch the short skirt and flipped it Marilyn Munroe style. Then they would have know without a shadow of a doubt what was under there. She wore what all the other teenage girls were wearing, only her clothes were on a five day rotation and she some how made them look classy. It was a bad week when the white pants didn’t come out. Sometimes he’d purposely miss a class just to see her and it was worth the consequences should he be caught out wagging class. It was cruel anticipation, bunking off, usually from manual arts and the waiting, sometime days for the call up on the morning notices. There would be a list of names read out and each morning he’d wait expectantly for his name to be read out. When it didn’t eventuate he had to believe what Damo had said, that she didn’t check the lists everyday – that he’d seen her after school happily ditching a huge pile of absentee lists. He said the pile was so big one of the science teachers was helping her carrying it. Damo also said she cheered when it went in the bin, but Damo was a bit of a wanker back then. He liked to exaggerate things, though he liked the idea of her celebrating throwing all that stuff in the bin. When she did catch his name, wrongfully absent from class and call him up, he would wait excitedly in the queue outside of her door, trying to decide on what to tell her. Did he just fess up and tell her that he wagged to come and see her. He was brash, well sometimes, but not brave. Damo had dared him to, even put a bottle of scotch on it, but he didn’t dare expose himself. Definitely not when there were a bunch of Year 9 turds waiting in line also. He’d take his beaten black hat off when it was his turn to go in, and embarrassingly give his name. She’d then ask, looking up from her spreadsheet, if he had a legitimate reason for being absent from class. When she looked up her eyes were the craziest green colour. Someone said she wore coloured contact lenses, because no one had eyes that colour green. Damo reckoned head overheard her saying that to someone, that her eyes were fake. But ask Damo anything, and he always thought he knew the answer. Looking into those large green eyes, for a moment he’d forget he had a voice. He assumed that she thought he was stumbling over his excuse. “In the library Miss,” he would eventually blurt out, hoping it didn’t sound like a fool. “Please don’t call me Miss,” she would ask. Everytime he went there, with his nerves jangled, he’d forget to call her by her name. “My name is Abby.” She scribbled library down on her piece of paper and wrote his name on a late slip. He didn’t do it often enough to make it obvious and for questions to be asked. One day a bunch of flowers arrived for her at the front office. One of the Year 9 boys asked her who they were from, if she had a boyfriend. She refused to answer. That Friday night they drank and smoked, watched more of Damo’s Dad’s bad Asian porn and offered up their thoughts on who her boyfriend was. There were no more flowers and no more talk of boyfriends … it was too cruel a thought for them to contemplate. Then he met Melanie. In all honesty, he didn’t meet her, they worked together at K-Mart. One Saturday night they were at Damo’s house, drinking and smoking. He and Melanie ended up together, making out in the pool. Unlike the other girls their age, was wasn’t interested in taking it any further. This only increased his frustration. By the time decisions were being made about formal tickets, he and Melanie had parted company. His mates called her frigid behind her back, on those rare Friday nights that there wasn’t a party on and they were at Damo’s place doing the Friday night thing. It all changed on the final day of Term Three. They had been experimenting blowing things up. Their dream was to find the right explosive mix and blow the car wreck down the cane paddock over the fence from the back oval. They had been surfing the internet trying to find what they needed. In the mean time they had taken to blowing up small things. Damo got it into his head that it would be funny to let off a dry ice bomb at the staffroom door of the Art building. They thought that both the male art teachers were gay and knew it would be a laugh to see them come flapping out the door of the staff room, scared shitless. T hey were doing something with the dry ice in Science and Damo nicked a tiny bit in an empty coke bottle. Half way through lunch, he Damo and Chas put the tiny amount of water in the coke bottle, gave it a shake, put it at staffroom door and then hid a small way away. It sounded as though they’d let off a tonne of TNT. They were pissing themselves so hard that it was obvious who had done it and they were marched off to the Principal’s office, by a very shaken female art teacher who had been the only one in the staffroom. First day back, the three of them ogled with wild appreciation as Abby walked through the foyer with a handful of morning notices in her hand. She smiled quickly at them and then disappeared down the sterile white corridor to the main staffroom. They all copped three days in-school detention – three days of being in Abby’s room, with lunch time and little lunch at alternate times to the rest of the school. It was like mana from heaven, though in reflection he was grateful it was a few years before 9/11. He was certain that the soft punishment they got then would not be doled out now. He made sure he was up early enough every morning to have a shower – something he did rarely, because he sleep through his alarm more mornings than not. His mother would come in, screeching that the would be late, blah blah blah. He was always terrified she’d resort to reefing the sheet off him and he’d be caught by his mother in all his morning glory. On the final day of their ‘detention’ she wore the white pants. They put Chas up to asking her if she had a g-string on. Chas had been hit by a car, crossing the highway on their first day of highschool. He was in a coma for almost two weeks and it was Year 9 before he made it back to school. In those days, the only sign of his accident when he was fully dressed, was the slight limp – until he opened is mouth. The experts called him ‘slow’, his mates called him a ‘miracle boy’. They didn’t care if he wasn’t too bright … especially when they could put him up to things, like asking ‘the’ question. Just before lunch Chas piped up, before he got half way through his question, Abby had worked out what he was asking, flushed pink from her cleavage to her forehead and asked him to sit back down and do his work. Abby and her friend who was the lab assistant in the science department turned up to their formal. Damo reckoned she had been working out or something – he guessed that she’d lost at least a couple of kilos since the start of the year. How Damo could tell was a mystery to him. She wore tight black leather look pants and a glittery gold top. She hung around their table, to all of their boyish embarrassment and when she asked him on the last song of the night if he wanted to dance, he emphatically said no. All the time while Damo and Chas were kicking him under the fancy smancy table cloth. He’d wanted to, but he didn’t want to be singled out. He’d blown his one and only chance and that was it. So he had thought. An hour after the formal had finished and while they were organising their lifts to the after party, their mob, along with Damo’s Mum had run into Abby and her friend in the foyer of the Casino. Damo’s Mum, being Damo’s Mum invited them to sit down with them. She sat next to him on the two seater lounge and it was cosy. Damo’s Mum took photos – she just couldn’t help herself. He guessed that it was ammunition for her to use against them all in the months to come, after all that she’d heard overtly and covertly over the year. Abby had gone to the ATM for money, repeating for the umpteenth time that it was illegal for her to buy them beers, or any other alcoholic beverage. She’d refrained from drinking infront of them. He’d headed off for the toilet and on the way back they converged under the huge chandelier in the very front of the foyer. They started to chat about nothing in particular, when she blurted out “I can’t do this.” “Do what?” he asked innocently enough, wondering just what he’d missed. He’d been certain that he’d been following the conversation and not her cleavage. “I can’t be here with you like this.” “Why?” “Because I want to drag you off into a dark corner and kiss you.” He was sure that Damo and Chas would never have believed him, even if he had have fessed up to it, on their last beer, smoke and porno night of their school lives. Instead he’d kept to safe topics such as whether chicks actually could do that with ping pong balls and fetching the beer. The conversations about Abby seemed sleezy at best now and while he wanted to scream ecstatically to them both, “I’m going to do Abby when school finishes” he just drank beer. | |
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Postcardia-cum-Poetica #107
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Image by Thomas Dworzak, Russia, February 2001. Words from Care of the Soul.
