Praise (11 page)

Sunday rolled around. It was time we got out. The flat was closing in on us and the old men were becoming cranky up and down the hall. Sunday afternoon was never a good time.

‘I want food,' Cynthia said. ‘I want
steak
.'

We went to the Story Bridge Hotel, under the Story Bridge, in Kangaroo Point. It wasn't far. New Farm was one side of the river, Kangaroo Point was on the other, the bridge crossed between. We drove over and parked in the car park. Inside we got ourselves drinks, ordered lunch at the counter, then found ourselves a table out in the beer garden. It was a good beer garden. There was no sun, only the bridge above us. You could hear the cars and trucks thumping over the concrete slabs.

The meals came. Cynthia got her steak. It was big. She had a plate of fat fried chips with it. She wolfed it all down. She could eat. I was having fish. A delicate little fillet in light sauce. With salad. It was all the wrong way around. Cynthia was more of a man than I was.

‘How did I ever find you?' she said. ‘I always said I'd never meet the sort of man I wanted because the sort of man I want never goes out to meet people. He's always at home in bed, or watching the football, or just doing nothing. Just like you. And I
found
you. How did that happen?'

‘You didn't ask me out for drinks, you asked me over to your place for drinks. That's how it happened. The difference is significant.'

‘It took me a long time to make that phone call.'

‘I'm glad you did.'

After lunch we settled down and drank. We talked. It became clear we weren't going anywhere. The bar and the beer garden filled up as the afternoon progressed. The normal mix. It was a popular place. Around three a jazz band started playing. We didn't like jazz, but we stayed on. We had a table and it was a warm afternoon and all the better places seemed a long way away.

Cynthia asked, ‘You put the Scrabble set in the car, didn't you?'

‘I did.'

I went out and brought it in. We set up, started playing. We played two games. We won one each. By then the score was seven games to five, in Cynthia's favour. It was important business. People came over and watched us play. We dazzled them with seven, eight, nine letter words. We drank.

At some stage someone called my name. A woman's voice. I looked up and there was Rachel.

Rachel.

I'd seen her only three or four times in the last couple of years. Lately I hadn't even thought about her. But from the ages of about thirteen to twenty-one, she was more or less all I
had
thought about. She was my past. More or less my only past.

‘Rachel,' I said.

‘Hello Gordon.'

She was smiling. She looked pretty much the same. Tall. Short cropped hair, blonde, a little more blonde than I remembered it. Square face, big-jawed. She had a few large pimples on her chin. Rachel didn't pick at her pimples. She let them grow till they burst.

‘So how's it going?' she said.

‘Fine. Good. Rachel, this is Cynthia.'

‘Hello Cynthia.'

‘Cynthia has just moved in with me.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're still in New Farm? I heard you moved.'

‘I did, but I'm still in New Farm.'

‘And what've you been doing?'

‘I quit work not long ago. That's about it. I'm on the dole now. What about you?'

‘Not much. Study.'

Rachel was studying Administrative Sciences at Q.I.T. It was her second attempt at a degree. Originally it was Psychology at Queensland Uni, but she abandoned that around the same time that my own studies were faltering. Then we lost track of each other. I was working here and there around the country and she was unemployed and neurotic and living on Social Security in Brisbane. There was a man. She was in love with him. Hopelessly. She wanted his child. He didn't love her. For that, at least, I thought he was a fool. Meanwhile Rachel and I still met from time to time, but it was never very good between us. I wasn't the one she wanted around anymore, and we both knew it. She was depressed, tearful, wildly irrational, walking the streets at night, alone and drunk. I had my own problems. I stayed away. Later she pulled herself out of it and enrolled at Q.I.T. I heard about it from friends. I didn't know what it meant.

‘How
is
the study?'

Terrible. Nothing new there.'

‘Do you want a seat? Are you here with anyone?'

It turned out she was there with a lot of people. Uni friends. But she sat down and we organised more drinks. Beer. We all drank beer.

It took Rachel and me about half an hour to catch up. Cynthia sat mostly silent, drinking. Then Rachel got up and said she was going back to her friends. After she was gone, Cynthia turned on me.

‘She wants to fuck you.'

‘Rachel? C'mon, she's had the chance to do that for years. I don't think she's changed her mind just tonight.'

‘Who is she?'

‘I told you about her. She's the one I went to school with, back in Dalby. The one I was obsessed with. The one I only ever held hands with. The one I never kissed.'

‘
Her?

‘Her.'

‘But she's
ugly
.'

‘Cynthia, everyone I know is ugly.'

‘Well, she's still in love with you.'

‘She isn't. She never has been.'

‘You wouldn't know. You never look at people. She's jealous. She hates me.'

‘That's crap, Cynthia. We haven't even talked in months. Besides, even if she had changed her mind about me, I'd say no.'

‘Would you?'

‘Of course I would.'

It was true. Rachel wasn't for me, life had taught me that much. We'd met each other in the first year of high school. She didn't live in Dalby, she was from a farm in the mountains, about an hour's drive away. She boarded in town during the week, for school. Her parents wanted to give her a Catholic education. On weekends she went home again. I was in love with her. I wasn't sure why. She was a serious girl, there was something incorruptibly sensible about her. No one else at school had it. Throughout the three years that we were at the same school I begged her to stay in town for just the one weekend. There were parties we could go to, things we could do.

She'd shake her head. ‘Gordon, I'm needed at home, you know I can't.'

Cynthia and I finished the Scrabble game. We packed it up and Cynthia brought her seat around closer to mine. She draped her legs over my lap. We drank and talked. She reached over and moved my legs and arms around, getting them right. Then she leaned back, surveying. She smiled at me. ‘My beautiful
boy
.' She was my mother, all right. She was crazy. I wondered if Rachel was watching us, what she would think. There was something of the mother in Rachel too, but it was a very different sort of mother.

But to hell with Rachel, I thought.

I was with Cynthia now.

We sat there until closing time. The table was covered in empty glasses. We decided to walk home and leave the car. The police drink-driving teams often had the bridge covered on Sunday nights. We left the bar and climbed up to the bridge. The river was there, moving slow. It reflected the city towers and the lights. I liked this part of Brisbane. I liked the towers. Towers were okay. They were artefacts. The bigger the better. Like the pyramids. Just as long as you didn't have to work in them. The city, as a workplace, looked odious. In that respect, maybe the World's Tallest Building really hadn't been much of an idea. Ten thousand office workers, that was how many they'd been hoping to squeeze into the thing.

We took it slow across the bridge. We stopped to look down at the water. The bridge was just high enough to make jumping worthwhile. And people sometimes did, although there was one better, higher bridge to jump off in Brisbane. It was because the Story Bridge had class, it had age. It was all iron and rivets and arches. The only problem was, if you jumped off the highest parts of the arches, you didn't hit water, you hit solid earth. The high parts were over the river banks. Not that it mattered, once you'd got enough free fall behind you.

‘Have you ever been suicidal?' Cynthia asked.

‘Not yet. What about you?'

‘No. Never. I'm terrified of dying.'

We got off the bridge and into the backstreets of New Farm. We paused every now and then and kissed, good kisses, leaning up against trees and fences. Life was strange. Only a few weeks earlier I'd seen people doing exactly this and I'd hated them for it. And now here I was. Doing it myself. And it didn't feel as ugly as it looked. Or as beautiful.

‘Let's find a park,' I said. ‘Let's fuck on the grass.'

‘Not in New Farm. People die in the parks around here. People get their heads cut off.'

Which was true. We went on home.

When we got there, we found Leo and Molly sitting in the couches, watching TV and sipping on beer.

‘How'd you get in?'

‘The old guy up the hall opened it for us. We told him we were friends of yours.'

Leo and Molly seemed as drunk as we were, or maybe they were stoned. We sat down and watched TV for a while. Leo wanted to know all about the heroin. He was annoyed I hadn't told him about it, brought him in on the deal. I described it as best I could. Molly offered the opinion that heroin was a dangerous, evil drug. It wasn't
natural
. She was only into natural drugs. Marijuana and sometimes mushrooms.

I started drinking Leo and Molly's beer. Over the TV we could hear a fight building in the flat next door, the new neighbours again. Mostly it was a woman's voice we could hear. Cathy's voice. Raymond's was indistinct. They were arguing about money. I told the others about the cut on her face.

‘It'll be a good-looking scar, though,' I said, ‘when it's healed.'

Things next door began to get violent. Something heavy smashed against the wall. Cathy was screaming.

Vass came running into the room. ‘You gonna call the police?'

‘Is there any point?'

Raymond was yelling now. There was another crash on the wall. It sounded like the phone. The bells rang.

‘I don't think he's hitting her yet,' Leo suggested.

We all listened. There were muffled sounds, but no more yelling or screaming.

‘He's a mean bastard,' said Vass, ‘and he steals too.'

‘So I've heard.'

‘I'd do something about your door, if I was you. It's the easiest to open in the whole damn place.'

He went out.

‘He's the one who let us in,' said Leo.

Things quietened down. Leo and Molly stayed on. I mentioned that Cynthia and I had seen Rachel.

‘I saw Rachel not so long ago,' said Leo, ‘she was depressed. Her life isn't going too well. I think she misses you.'

‘Me? Why?'

‘Jesus, you guys were friends for years. And then you just stopped seeing her.'

‘It wasn't just me. What's wrong with her life, anyway?'

‘Men, mainly. She keeps falling for arseholes.'

So some things hadn't changed.

Leo and Molly left about two in the morning. The house was quiet. Cynthia and I undressed and climbed into bed.

‘I like them,' Cynthia said. ‘I thought you were going to ask them to stay, but I'm glad you didn't.'

‘I wouldn't ask them to stay. They'd end up in bed with us. And I'd have to watch them fucking again. It wasn't much fun the first time.'

‘No. (God. Leo fucking. Leo
coming
. It'd be evil.'

‘Everyone looks evil when they come. The animal is out.'

‘You don't look evil. You look like you always look. Your face doesn't even change.'

‘Really? That's alarming.'

‘Yes. It is. Do you have any porn around here?'

‘Magazines, you mean?'

‘That's what I mean.'

I explained that porn of any extreme sort wasn't legally available in Queensland, except by mail order or on the black market. I didn't have any black market connections. Nor did I ever have the twenty or thirty dollars the mail order firms were asking. I did, however, have a friend called Harry in Sydney, where certain magazines at least were legal. Non-violent erotica. Harry was a porn fanatic. He toured the shops regularly and collected hundreds of volumes. And sometimes he'd mail me three or four issues that he was tired of. He thought I needed them. And they were always in mint condition. Crisp and clean. If he'd ever masturbated over them, he'd done it very carefully.

‘So you've got some? Here?'

‘Yes. I do.'

‘Well, c'mon, let me see.'

I climbed out of bed, turned on the light. I dug the magazines out of a box. There were about twenty of them. Things like ‘Teen Sex', or ‘Cum' or ‘Anal — Volume Three'. I wasn't like Harry. I used them to masturbate all the time. I hadn't treated them well. The covers had fallen off and the pages were bent.

Cynthia sat up and started going through them. ‘I love these things,' she said. ‘Some jerk offered me a role in a porn film once. The money was good, but not
that
fucking good.'

‘No. And you were a serious actor.'

Cynthia had been involved in theatre at one stage. Amateur productions. It'd gone on for three or four years. She secured an Actors Equity card. She made it as an extra in a film called ‘Windsurfer'. She auditioned for ‘Neighbours' and missed out. Then she gave it away. Her skin hadn't been so bad in those days, she said, and she was a lot thinner.

‘Problem is,' she said, turning the pages, ‘if I think about this sort of thing too much I get turned off. The exploitation and all that. The thing with porn is not to think too logically. You just have to look. And make up your own fantasies.'

We kept going through the pages, taking in all the big pricks and open cunts and jammed arseholes. We didn't bother with the print. The stories were laughable. At least the pictures were just pictures. And they did what they were supposed to do. We pushed the magazines aside and started on each other. It was violent, pretentious sex. We were trying to match the photographs. Trying to make it hurt.