How it feels (25 page)

I was still in my boxer shorts, sipping on the tea and checking my email, when Oscar came blazing through the fly-screen door and into my kitchen, wearing tweed pants, a white button-up shirt and blue vest, with shiny shoes and a hat. The very sight of him running towards me made me want to cry. I cried a lot lately, not sure why exactly; Mum reckoned it was an emotional response to getting off drugs, which had held me numb for so long. I read in the
Good Weekend
the Sunday before an interview with a TV journalist about her happiest moment, and she said it was touching her newborn daughter's skin, and I ended up sobbing uncontrollably for an hour.

Oscar leapt into my arms and demanded we go looking for cicadas. I kissed his blond, heaven-sweating head and looked up at my father, who stood hesitantly in the doorway in trousers and a sports jacket, and I realised, stupidly, and finally, that this was the reason he visited me now: Oscar loved it here. Oscar had the Bundeena in him too. Noise like thunder.

Dad shook his head at the state of my house, bottles and shit everywhere, but he couldn't help smiling as he went. I was alive and he knew it; pickled with grog I was alive.

Dad drove smoothly and slowly, without errors.

‘How was that bucks' night a couple of weeks ago?' he asked me.

‘Ok,' I said, but I didn't want to talk about it because that would make me think about it.

I thanked Dad for picking me up, and he winked at me. I asked him if his girlfriend was coming to the wedding, and he winked at me again, but cheekier with it. I felt like crying right away; this was the best moment we had shared in so long. To be in on something with another man, to share a sly victory, the easiest of love.

My father scared me, his mere presence in a car, a room, a park. I loved him but I could not reach him, and I had tired of trying. Being away and growing up somewhat had diffused the rage in me, the desire to shake him up, spit in his face, and make him see just how disconnected I felt from him. But with my own failings in the time I had spent as a man, I saw he was not that bad after all. The whole thing of life was so hard to do right.

One night, when I was just younger than a teenager, after my parents had been fighting again, I made my father react to me, I made him jump up.

It was Halloween week at school and everyone was making ‘trick or treat' costumes and decorating pumpkins for the big night. I chose to dress myself as one of the zombies out of Michael Jackson's
Thriller
video. It was here I discovered fake blood. My world opened up, I could not believe we were allowed to smear ourselves in the syrupy nectar of death and massacre. I stole bottles of it and brought it home with me, spending hours in front of the mirror applying blood to my lips, ears and forehead, constructing scenarios in my head of having been hacked up, or slashed at, or stabbed in the eyes.

When Mum and Dad were fighting, Dad would often stay out late in the weeks following, coming home full and clumsy in the middle of the night. He'd bypass his own room and come into mine, where I would pretend to be asleep as he told me how much he loved me, breathed the night on me, and then asked me not to tell Mum he was in here. It was at this point Mum would appear in my doorway and ask him to get off the bed and let me be.

One night, upon hearing him enter the house, I opened three of my clothes drawers to differing lengths, and dotted them with blood. I then applied a convincing line of the stuff all the way from my skull down to my ear, and lay down on the carpeted floor, in a swirling pool of purple-red fake blood, and moaned like my skull was opening. Dad walked in, turned the light on, and saw me there on the floor. I opened my eyes, ever so slowly, ever so creepily, and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy – help.'

Dad took a step back and bent over in the hall, pulling at the air, and screamed out my mother's name, at which point I stood up and laughed at him, holding a bottle of fake blood. After that show Dad became wary of me, and for the years to come always looked at me with a suspicious eye.

Dad dropped me at Gordon's house where my groomsman suit was. I thanked him again for picking me up and told him I would see him at the wedding in an hour or two. I messed Oscar's hair up and was strolling towards the poolside entrance to the mansion when Dad called to me.

‘Son!' he said.

I turned around. ‘Yes, Dad?'

‘Come 'ere.'

I went over to the driver's side window, which rested at its limit, three-quarters down and on an angle up. There was a large portion of silence and then he broke it with speaking.

‘Your mother and me… we had a miscarriage too.'

‘Ok,' I said, confused as to why he was telling me this now.

‘I know it's hard to take.'

‘It was a while ago, Dad.'

‘Yep, but things hang around, don't they? Not everything goes.' I nodded, and tapped his hand with my hand, then wandered up to Gordon's place. He was right, my dad; not everything goes away. I felt physically sick every time I thought of Swanna, the pain had not gone anywhere, nor the regret, nor the disgust. I still could not see how or where the weather changed so quickly between us: one minute we were sunny and high on our very own sexual and creative revolution, the next there was death and darkness all around and no way of lifting the clouds up.

The orgies ended when I fell through the roof and shattered my right shoulder. Since Glenn and Ivana had moved in above us towards the end of spring, the air moved with sensuality, and everything was heading towards our central areas.

Glenn was twenty-six, Irish, and could well have continued quite successfully as a male model with his chiselled-to-the-fuck jawline and piercing blue eyes. He always seemed to have just the right amount of stubble, and when he smoked or appeared in a hallway through shifting light, James Dean was alive once more, in Hackney Borough. But Glenn was a singer songwriter, wholeheartedly obsessed and plainly influenced by the pop/jazz sensation Serge Gainsbourg; he even wore the same jackets and spoke with that rich velvet relax. Modelling was something Glenn rarely spoke about, so embarrassed by his years in undies on billboards and on catwalks in Milan. He was a muso now, a journeyman only, and fortunately for him (as I have noticed that most models have a passion for either music, acting or photography) Glenn was gifted. He constructed guitar riffs and cruisey little chord progressions that grabbed your attention within bars, pouring his dreamy lyrics over the top of it, creating such a deep, hypnotic groove it was hard to resist shaking your hips or nodding along. Musicians of this time were so swept up with recreating the maudlin, ex-girlfriend folk of Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, it was refreshing to hear a youngster with a sense of swing and sex and playfulness in him. Yes, Glenn had ‘style', the elusive thing no man can buy – but boy do we try. I liked being around him, and his girlfriend Ivana, who was clearly Glenn's very own Jane Birkin, adding sweet back-up vocals and gushing moans and sighs where appropriate. They were a famous and highly enchanting stage presence.

Ivana had moved from Serbia when she was sixteen and her English was still very shaky, but she was astoundingly, strikingly beautiful, with her hard eyes and big lips, soft skin and sharp black fringe. She hoped one day to be an actress in ‘important cinema' . Many of the women in our circle of artists and actors found Ivana too intense, too earnest and direct, but Swanna and I adored her, and as winter kicked in and London froze up, resembling a perfect place to kill yourself, the four of us hibernated, finding solace and more before the open fire of our living room on Ridley Road.

We never left, and there was no need to, each night was more fun than anywhere outside had to offer, and outside itself was too terrifying a prospect even if there was enticement. We played a highly competitive brand of charades, read out pages from pieces we were working on, drank cheap wine and smoked like chimneys, cooked paella, shepherd's pie, and countless red pasta meals, talking on into the night and early mornings, huddled together in a million coats and blankets, connected by our friendship, our curiosity, and our hands.

One night, it may have been a Saturday, I came home to find Ivana and Swanna running Glenn a bath. They were all semi-naked and had obviously been drinking. I felt very far outside it all, and ached to catch up. I knew Glenn wanted Swanna, it was plain as day, and he had all but asked me through insinuation and looks if he could have her. And he knew I was desperate to fuck Ivana, catching me out on many an occasion gazing up her legs splayed out before me on the blanket, or simply stroking her hair and neck as we lay about watching Tarkovsky.

There was MDMA around that winter, and I had found a pure batch through a friend in Angel. Within an hour we were all high as kites, lingering around the bath which was now heaped with the bubbles of assorted bath products found at the markets by the girls that morning. Funnily enough, Swanna began it all, asking Ivana if she could kiss her in front of us. Ivana did not answer, she simply moved forward into the light of the bathroom moon and they were kissing. In the weeks to come I admired, and envied, the way the girls kissed; there was no chance I could ever kiss Swanna like that, for there was no drive inside it, no carnal need from man to get somewhere beyond it and invade, conquer or fuck, there was just sensuality and pleasure on its own.

I looked beside me to find Glenn with his pants down, jacking off at the sight of the two girls kissing. Ivana raised her singlet over her breasts and Swanna led her into the steaming, overgrown bath. Buoyed by the drugs, we laughed our way through our first foursome, and Glenn and I never crossed paths in the night, shifting cautiously over or under each other's bodies to get to the other girl or part of her. It was challenging, ego-wise, to watch Glenn fucking Swanna from behind, and to see how much she loved it, the feel of another cock, another rhythm, another man, but it was quickly appeased by diving mouth-first into Ivana's shaved and petite quim, closing my eyes and pushing the threat right into her.

The day after our first endeavour we all fell away awkward and Swanna and I made soup in the afternoon, wondering whether they would ever come by again. But we were only halfway through our meal when they knocked on the door in just dressing-gowns, bearing champagne and honey; we were soon on the floor again.

It went on this way for weeks, the girls kissing and licking away at each other in the bath, then all of us getting in and washing each other and laughing at the flesh and the way it rose and changed with touch and stroking, then wrestling to the living room floor or our bed to fuck for hours with music playing and fruit and toys involved. But still Glenn and I manoeuvred around each other. Every now and then I'd feel him bump up against me or a courser hand pass across my thigh, waiting to see if I approved of its question, but I never let him near my balls or dick until, by twisted god or ill nature, the girls began cycling together, and with just their difficult, narrow arses to put things in, demanded we suck each other off before them. I had been here before, at university, and it had not been so bad. I preferred to receive the act, for at least I could close my eyes and dream of a first-year female cultural studies student on all fours, but to have one in your own mouth, well, there was no mistaking what it was. And Glenn's dick was big and uncircumcised with quite a bend in the shaft. Swanna had often remarked how pleasurable the bend was, and it filled me with rage, that it held special powers, but now it just filled me, and as the women clapped and hollered, Glenn blew in my mouth with gusto, and I ran to the kitchen to be sick in the sink. I returned, Glenn cuddling up to the ladies in quiet rejoice, but I would be having none of this victory lap.

‘On your fucking knees, Serge, it's your turn.'

The girls howled with laughter as I stood on the bed and fucked Glenn in the mouth, clenching the back of his long neck and cranking myself deep into his gob. But no matter how hard and long I went at him, Glenn just ate the thing and smiled around it, roaring like a lion and clenching my arse with his fingers, pulling me to him and taking my cum and swallowing it with immense pride, then rising up to kiss me on the lips. I ducked his mouth and pushed off the bed, spotting Ivana and her mind piecing all sorts of things together. Her man had taken the violence and the object all too well, and she knew now why he had wanted this all to begin. It was the end of a novel for her, where the beginning finally made sense.

The following night I was drinking in the corner, high off the Valium Glenn had thrown us all, watching Ivana growl Swanna out as Glenn sucked on her tits. It was at that moment I realised I wanted Swanna to be my wife. I wobbled out of the room high as a kite and in the nude. I stumbled onto the glass balcony instead of into the hallway, and I fell three storeys, shattering my shoulder and breaking two ribs. I didn't feel much at the time, so elated was I from the drugs, the epiphany, and the small flight through the air, but the fear rose up in me when I saw Swanna's face above me, so full of love and fear for my life.

We saw very little of Glenn and Ivana after that; my injury seemed to kill all prospect of further liaison. Swanna and I sensed months of discomfort on the stairs, and so we found a cottage in Bethnal Green, streets from the park, and above a brilliant little deli with an internet cafe.

That year we returned to Sydney for the Christmas break. Swanna's father had fallen ill with a stroke and, frankly, we missed everyone a little. Somehow the love and security Swanna and I had found in each other had made us itchy to get home, if only for two weeks, and reconnect with those we used to know and love. It was great being home, and Swanna found Cronulla so amusing; how beautiful it was, and how proud everyone was of it, and how white everyone was too. She couldn't believe what the teenage girls wore though, and how long it took to order something in a shop with the staff taking so long to make a single cappuccino. She helped me rediscover the place and I enjoyed showing off my home, and in doing so letting her in on me and my life, even if I did dress up certain parts to suit my ego. It was a little odd making love in the single bed next to my mother's room, and strange to feel the entire pace of the world slow down, back in Cronulla, where everyone seemed happy, and people took pride in their lawns. It was a family place, and so it felt more than appropriate when we discovered we were pregnant, the morning of New Year's Eve at the GP on Caringbah Road. Even though it wasn't planned and I had absolutely no idea how I would feel or think when it happened, I tell you, I had never felt so happy. It was like I had been dead up until that point, like I had lived without purpose or force and now I was galvanised, now I was in the real stretch of river. I loved Swanna so much in the revelation, and the thought of making a person together made so much sense to me. It was the only thing we had not yet made together, and I knew, like all the other pieces of art and love we had made, this would be the most magic, the most life-changing, and the most true. This was to be our greatest show ever, and it was all for us.