The Naked Drinking Club (16 page)

‘All right, kid, all right.’

The room was very small with a single bed that was neatly made to military standards, the window was open and a blue curtain blew in the breeze, while late-night traffic going to and from the Cross roared and tooted from the street below. I surveyed its contents. His wardrobe doors were slid along open; in it was one black suit, one of crumpled linen, one pair of shiny good shoes, four white shirts and two pairs of trousers. There were no books, no radio and no pictures. On the table at the window, almost a foot high, was a pyramid of Bic lighters, each one perfectly and meticulously placed to add to the structure. Mac sat down on the one chair and lit up.

‘You see, I have everything I need downstairs.’ He blew out smoke from what was surely his last cigarette of the evening, and carefully added his current Bic to the pyramid. He mumbled something but I couldn’t make him out. I had removed Karin’s boots, which were killing me by now, and lay down on his bed. He sat there motionless for the longest time. He looked so sad, and I was well past sexy. But I wanted to see the whole night through with him. It didn’t seem right to leave.

I looked at the different colours of the lighters until I fell asleep.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

‘G’DAY FOLKS, TELL
you what. We’ve got some true blue bonza bargains down here, we really have.’ Joyce Cane walked amid a mix of hanging carpets in her downtown showroom. ‘Like this Persian.’ She stopped at one, stroking the corner with some non-speaking extras who smiled inanely. ‘Feel that quality.’

The extras nodded, still stroking.

‘I’m not kidding you. I would have to be mad to cut these prices, but I am, so I will. But only at my massive end-of-winter sale, where reductions are as much as sixty per cent.’

I stood eating cereal, leaning over the breakfast bar in the communal kitchen area, watching the ad.

The cameras followed her outside her showroom where she was joined by a cross-section of the Australian public in the forecourt.

‘What’s the name?’ she shouted.

The camera panned up high above them all, she stood at the front, and they all waved.

‘JOYCE CANE!’ they shouted.

‘You’d better believe it,’ said her voice, before 101 Parramatta Road flashed up on the screen.

Joyce Cane was a warm, bubbly, tanned, trusting-looking woman, with big highlighted curly hair, frosted lipstick and lots of sparkly jewellery. She seemed to be constantly selling all her carpets at half price in a furniture showroom on the Parramatta Road. I wanted Joyce Cane to be my mother. She was perfect. I imagined Christmas day in the Cane household, bursting with lively family, drunken wheezy uncles with Brylcreemed hair, cuddly aunties constantly bringing over
food,
cute children running around. I would sit next to Joyce at the table – I was her first born on Australian soil, only nine months after she arrived in the mid-sixties. I imagined a happy life as the daughter of a carpet mogul, working contentedly away in the family business for many years before inheriting the entire empire for my own family.

In comparison, I thought about my own family Christmases back home and how bleak they were. How unhappy my mother and father were, and how my father’s mood swings overshadowed our lives. How he and my brother would shout and fight, how my mother would drink heavily to cope with it all. I had spent last Christmas in the nursing home with my grandfather, in an attempt to avoid my father. A small thin man, who was husband to one of the nurses, dressed up as Santa Claus and gave out presents to the old people, who were mostly stroke victims or disorientated through dementia. I dressed my grandfather in a suit and shirt and tie and sat at the table with him, pulling crackers and wearing these pointless paper hats. When I left him at the end of the day, he held my face close to his when we hugged. He pulled me in with his working hand until our foreheads pressed firmly together. The stroke had left him unable to speak, but he didn’t have to. I understood what he was thinking and feeling, and I wanted to help him leave his overheated hell, but it wouldn’t be right.

After my grandfather was admitted to the home, there was no reason for me to stay. He would have wanted me to come here, to find what I’m looking for, and perhaps carve out a better life for myself. And become the only one in my family to escape.

My trance was interrupted by the Danish about to hang out their hand-washing.

‘Hey there, Kerry, how’s it going?’ said Karin, always the more talkative of the two.

‘Yeah, all right, what are you up to?’ I was glad of their arrival in the kitchen, for I was entering a massive slump brought on by my thoughts of back home. I pushed them away. They would lead me nowhere.

‘Hey there,’ said Andrea, which was almost all I had ever heard her say. But at least Andrea had admitted to letting Bengy the dog lick her, which made her marginally more interesting.

They pulled open the sliding patio door and began arranging their washing in the yard.

‘Yeah, Andrea and I are going to the botanical gardens, I think. Have you ever been there?’

Fucking botanical gardens, who gives a shit? I thought. ‘No, but it’s supposed to be beautiful,’ I said.

The Danish were the perfect tourists. In the short time I had known them, they had taken a day trip to the Blue Mountains, climbed Sydney Harbour Bridge, visited Taronga Zoo, done a guided tour of the opera house and been to see an art exhibition. They had taken hundreds of photos, written millions of letters back home, which they seemed to be constantly posting, and kept a journal each day of what they’d been up to. I, in comparison, had been to several bars and the pawnshop twice.

I envied the Danish. I didn’t really know them, but I envied them. Although they were boring and weak, they had happy lives without darkness. They were the only ones in the happy troupe of sellers that were like this. People always say everybody has got their problems, skeletons in the closet, nobody’s perfect, etc., but that’s bullshit. There are also many people who have had an easy life, with a happy mother and father who loved one another, and a happy schooling, and a life they feel relatively comfortable in; these people inevitably glide through life effortlessly as a result. And Andrea and Karin of Denmark were a prime example.

I had never met anyone from Denmark before and knew nothing of the country itself. I thought it might make bacon, but I couldn’t be sure. I should really make an effort to ask them things about it, I thought, finishing off my Kellogg’s Multigrain, the cereal of athletes.

‘Morning, girls.’ Jim was in his shorts and vest, covered in a post-jog sweat.

‘Morning, sir,’ I joked.

‘What’s happening here then?’

‘The Dan— Karin and Andrea are going to the botanical gardens, and I’m not sure what I’m doing yet.’

It was ten o’clock, which was late for the rest of Australia to get up, but early for me. The night before I had been hot, and slept badly. I was constantly dehydrated from drinking, and the intensity of the weather was starting to give me what I feared were my first hangovers, which would be a major blow.

‘You should come out on a run with me,’ said Jim, stretching out, making it possible to see under his vest to the scar that ran from the middle of his stomach right round to the side of his abdomen.

‘I know I should.’ I gulped some apple juice from the fridge.

‘Right, then.’ He clapped his hands together twice. ‘Anyone fancy Bondi? It’s a bloody boiling-hot day out there.’

‘What time? We’re going to the botanical gardens,’ said Karin, hanging out the last of their perfect whites.

‘Well, to hell with that, grab your togs all of you, I’ll see you out the front in ten.’

Bondi is Sydney’s most famous beach. It is the busy, brightblue metropolitan seascape always used in holiday brochures, or adverts for Australia. It was an easy bus ride from town, and was always full of surfers. The beach was quite small, but the water could get really wild and choppy, full of treacherous rips and curls that could drag the most accomplished, experienced surfer out to sea. Consequently, it was manned by muscular lifeguards who sat on high chairs positioned between flags that indicated safe areas to swim and surf. Bondi had its own pavilion at the back of the sand, a large white fifties building, with a café seating area and changing-room facilities. Behind it lay a parade of restaurants, bars and shops. This was where all Sydney’s teenagers did their first dating, which if you were a girl, consisted of watching surfing, and if you were boy consisted of showing off your surfing to the watching girls.

Everybody in Sydney looked like they had a modelling contract. The boys were so good-looking it was ridiculous. They had blond wiry hair from surfing and enormous golden
shoulders,
with tiny hips and waists to die for. It was such a shock coming from Scotland where most people were fat and white, with faces broken up with red veins, due to the cold or excessive alcohol consumption, and where nearly all men were bald before thirty.

Jim was in good condition, tall and broad and solidly built.

We all took off our clothes and settled down on the sand. Jim wore fairly baggy shorts, while the Danes and I wore our bikinis. Karin and Andrea had matching bodies, with long lean legs and small tits. They too were broad and healthy in their frame. I was shorter than them by about two inches and my tits were bigger, but my frame was petite, and without paying much attention to what I ate or drank I never seemed to put on weight, which is why I knew I would never venture out jogging with Jim, and had no plans to exercise until I was in my thirties. The Danes wore baseball hats to protect their pretty little pale faces and fair hair from the sun. I, on the other hand, was blessed with good skin, which was almost Mediterranean in its ability to turn brown without getting burnt. I covered myself with olive oil that I’d taken from the kitchen in an effort to get even browner. After a while I got bored and became curious about Jim’s scar, now that it was in full view.

‘How did you get this, then, Jim?’ I asked, tracing it with my finger.

‘Got involved with some stupid big Yorkshire men, back home, in a long-running feud.’ He spoke from behind his sunglasses.

‘Who came out worse, then?’

‘My little brother did.’

‘What happened?’

He began filling his hands with sand by his side and emptying them again.

‘Life deals you blows, terrible blows, and it changes everything, and then you become someone different.’ Jim spoke slowly in a monotone. ‘It can all change, in a matter of minutes.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Madness.’

‘What happened?’ I fixed on his scar.

‘Aw. It’s too much for now.’ He sighed, and tipped sand out his hands again.

‘I’ve told you, when we go on this bloody trip we’ll learn lots about one another, don’t you worry.’ He dusted sand off his forearms and started tidying around him, even though there was nothing to tidy. He moved a Coke can and flattened out the beach towel he was lying on.

All the time the Danish had been listening to Jim, they never said a word in response to his story. How could they? This was way out of their league.

‘Christ’s sake, listen to me going on, what a miserable bastard.’ Jim stood up, took off his glasses and stretched. ‘Pull yourself together, Crown.’ Jim was always telling himself off in the third person. ‘Come on, let’s get in. I’ll race ye, ye daft Scottish bastard!’ He sprinted off.

I ran screaming towards the giant foamy waves, Jim already waist-deep punching the water and roaring with laughter before I’d reached the edge.

Greg and Anaya called a group meeting back at the flat, half an hour before we left for the suburbs.

Jim and I sat drained and sunbeaten on the sofa waiting for Scotty to arrive. Anaya and the Danish drank herbal teas in the kitchen, while Greg paced up and down smoking. We all laughed at Scotty’s car screeching to a halt outside, for he drove all the time like it was an emergency. His stereo stopped and he burst in.

‘Guys, guys, how you doin’?’

Despite what a see-through dick he was, I had to admire him for his constant attempts at humour and friendliness.

‘Yeah, in your own time, Scotty, mate,’ said Greg, who, despite his casual, relaxed, constantly stoned persona, was always keen that we maximised our selling time and rarely allowed any excuse for lateness. Scotty winked at me and sat down on the floor. I noticed that he had two different shoes on.

‘Right then, guys.’ Greg brought out some envelopes from his pocket. ‘First of all, I’ve got some money cleared from various people’s credit-card transactions. Scotty.’ He gave one out to him.

‘Cheers, mate.’ Scotty gave him the thumbs-up.

‘Karin, here you go. Kerry.’

‘Thank you.’ I took the money and counted it before putting it in my pocket.

‘Finally, Andrea.’ She smiled sheepishly taking the money; I was mystified as to how she sold anything. Perhaps they just found her look trustworthy and honest and her pretty little pale face spoke for itself.

Anaya took over. ‘Yeah, guys, I know you know this but do try to get cash. I know it’s hard but try. It’s better for all of us, especially when you go up the coast.’

‘Yeah, the coast. Looks like we’re all set for next week,’ said Greg, handing Jim an envelope which I took to be his percentage of our credit-card sales. ‘Basically, we think the middle of next week would be a good time to go. You’ll all take the Kingswood. We’ll load it up and off you go.’

‘How long?’ asked Andrea.

I couldn’t have cared where we went or how long we went for. I could call Hank from wherever if I wanted to. I had no interest where we would be staying when we did, happy to go with the flow. I didn’t bother with the usual questions; I left that to Karin and Andrea.

‘Two weeks is what we usually do. You stay in caravan parks and motels.’

‘Yeah. Watch out for redbacks,’ said Scotty.

‘What is redback?’ asked Karin.

‘It’s a spider with a lethal bite and if it’s miles to the nearest serum store you’re fucked.’

‘Scotty! Enough now!’ shouted Frau Anaya.