The Naked Drinking Club (24 page)

‘I’ll tell you why, cause you think you’re fuckin’ smart, that’s why.’

‘I thought your name was Scott,’ I said, trying to diffuse things slightly.

‘Yeah, everybody does.’ He didn’t move away from Jim, and didn’t look over at me.

‘What is it, then?’

‘Anthony.’

‘Weird. I just see you as Scotty.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

They both just stood their ground; Jim’s slightly shakier than Scotty’s, with him still laughing.

‘Fuckin’ teachers, they’re the fuckin’ worst, fuckin’ boring pricks as well.’

‘Is that so?’ Jim stopped laughing.

‘Come on, for fuck’s sake, what’s going on?’ I said intervening, pulling Scotty away. Karin touched Jim’s arm but he didn’t respond.

‘Really, guys, we’ve only just got here.’ I was no peacekeeper by nature but I could see a potential fight and didn’t want either of them to get hurt.

‘I’m taking Scotty for a drink,’ I said dragging him away, winking at Karin to look after Jim, who by now was standing serious and upright, hands out of his pockets, looking through Clint Eastwood in a
Fistful of Dollars
squinted eyes.

‘So. Anthony, eh?’ I said, with my arm around Scotty, walking in the direction of the site bar.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

WE ALL SAT
in the car waiting to be dispatched to various streets. Jim traced a line on the map with his finger.

‘You know, in the mid-nineteenth century, Newcastle was the centre of all shipping and industrial commerce. Strange, when you think about that,’ he said, still tracing as though he was reading it from the map. ‘It has the largest coal port in the world.’

‘Really, how come?’ asked Karin politely. The ‘really’ I could live with, someone had to offer up a ‘really’, but the ‘how come’ was unacceptable.

‘I know, it’s not something you would immediately associate with Australia, is it?’

‘No,’ she said, looking out of the window.

‘You’d think all the coal in the world was from my neck of the woods. Most people have no idea what goes on beyond their own street.’ Jim was more enthusiastic now he’d found a pupil.

‘Imagine the transportation,’ Karin piped.

‘Yeah, let’s fuckin’ imagine for a moment,’ Scotty mumbled, which made me laugh and have to turn away, avoiding Jim’s gaze in the mirror.

‘Well, everything was by boat of course. But can you imagine being one of the early settlers? I mean, what a journey. All this way.’ Jim went off into deep thought. Karin leant over his shoulder and looked at the map to further his interest, while Scotty chewed the gum he was never without, and I fixated on the word Newcastle.

‘It’s the sixth most populated city in Australia.’ Jim tried so hard with his class.

‘Jim?’ I asked.

‘Mm.’

‘Can I ask you, seriously, to explain to me what interests you about that kind of information, and how you came to learn about it?’

‘You taking the piss?’

‘No, I’m seriously curious, because I want to be interested but I’m not.’

He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

‘I mean it.’

‘How can you not be interested in history?’

‘No, I am, I agree, but all the information, the statistics, buildings …’

‘It’s maybe an age thing; I’m a lot older than you.’

‘Only about ten years.’

‘I think it’s the twenties and the thirties thing, there is a difference.’

‘But I think about other stuff more – people, love, death, sex.’

‘I think about those things too, obviously, but this is all the stuff of life as well, how this got here.’ He swept his arm round the limited space.

‘Who cares? It’s a fucking dump,’ Scotty said, stretching. Jim laughed at his response, which was a relief to us all.

I admired Jim’s ability to rise above all that happened to him and continue to move forward, while maintaining an interest in the developing world around him, and decided to talk to him further about this at a later date, perhaps when the others weren’t around. Maybe he could teach me how to be enthused about buildings and history, how to be more like him.

I suddenly panicked that my real mother might be in Newcastle; it would make sense, after all, if you were going to leave the city that you were brought up in for another one on the other side of the world, that you would choose its namesake. I had thought that the moment I knew of Australia’s Newcastle but hadn’t wanted to dwell on it, for I had already convinced myself that she was in Sydney or Brisbane. Based on what, though? An old woman I had spoken to on the doorstep of the house she once lived in, who thought she went
to
Sydney in the sixties. Or the psychic vibes of carpet mogul Joyce Cane after a chance encounter, or Hank White the country and western DJ, who, because he was based in Brisbane, led me to think that she’d more than likely be there. I was expecting fate to do all the work. How lazy and ridiculous my search was. I talked myself down. Jim’s mouth had been moving but I hadn’t listened for the last few minutes. I felt rage again, I felt it burning inside. Why the fuck should I be looking for her? Why wasn’t she looking for me? Just as well I wasn’t really looking for her, otherwise I’d feel really fucked over. I thought back to Joyce Cane’s parting words to me, about trying to look for the good things around me, and felt slightly calmer. I decided that after ten, I would get some change and call the home.

‘Don’t you wonder about how this place was built, how it was developed, how hard the people worked?’

‘I don’t, but I want to. It’s just I’ve got these things I have to do that distract me.’

‘At least the poor fuckers didn’t have to sell these pieces of shite paintings,’ said Scotty.

We all laughed. I faked mine.

My heart wasn’t in the game for the time being. I had grown tired and easily distracted, if it was possible to be any more easily distracted, and found the hours not drinking more and more difficult to inhabit. I dragged my folder round the corner of a street I paid no attention to, and chose a house to knock at. So far I’d already had five no-answers, and two not interested. One of them had the potential to be persuaded otherwise, but I just couldn’t care. I wanted to go and live with Joyce Cane, or go back to the caravan site and get drunk with Scotty or with Jim, maybe in a cosy bar on the edge of the beach where I could smell the sea and hear the waves lapping over the edges of the sand.

The hour dragged so slowly. I wondered if the others had sold any, if the area just wasn’t working, or if it was all down to me.

Eventually I got into a house, but only because the woman who let me in was a bit desperate and down on her luck. The outside of the house was normal and suburban, except for the
garden,
which was neglected, and therefore not entirely in keeping with the rest of the area. I didn’t have to talk to her for long before being allowed in. Always a bad sign, easy entry. She was thin and pale, looked like she’d never been in the sun. Her house smelt smoky with a trace of dope lingering. She had a big old Border collie dog, that wasn’t long for the world. The dog was blind and walked into the walls. I felt sad for her the moment I walked in, and realised she was lonely. This was all unusual stuff, perhaps because I’d only sold in Sydney so far, to comfortable suburban areas. I had begun to think there were no poor fucked-up people in Australia, except for Aboriginals whom I’d run into around Redfern and King’s Cross. I didn’t understand much about their plight other than they’d been really fucked over by the Australians a long time ago and never recovered. I’d seen a few of them wandering around with bottles of spirits. They would not have looked out of place in Scotland, where the sighting of displaced and broken drunken lunatics is part of everyday life, but here, where the people really did look like the cast of
Neighbours
, they looked bizarre.

I sat down on her sofa, which was covered with a sheet on account of the dog hairs. She listened intently to my routine; worse than that, she looked really genuinely interested and almost flattered that I’d chosen her house to rip off. She offered me a cigarette immediately, which I accepted, and asked me if I wanted a drink of some sorts, to which I asked if there was a beer. She came back with two mini VBs.

I pointlessly went through the motions with the pictures and laid them out. The dog sniffed them, its eyes all grey and weird-looking. Then, like a slow train coming down the track, she told me about her money situation.

‘You know it’s real weird that you’ve come here, because we were just talking at the weekend about the house, yeah?’

‘Uh, uh.’ I wondered who ‘we’ meant.

‘Yeah, and we were just saying I should get a painting up or something, brighten the place up a bit, you know.’

‘Really?’ This was ridiculous.

‘Yeah, I do really want to buy one – it’s just I don’t get my social security cheque until the end of the week so you would have to come back.’

‘The end of the week, mmm.’ I had no intention of coming back, but played along out of politeness.

‘Would that be a problem?’

‘Well, I’m actually on my way back to Sydney, and these are all the paintings I have left, I’m afraid. So a week from now I would have let these ones go. I’ve only just picked them up from our art warehouse in Brisbane. This is new work, but it really won’t hang around.’

‘I like that one.’ She pointed to the girls in a field. ‘That’s real cute.’

Her use of ‘cute’ in the circumstances made me too sad. I had to get out.

‘Listen, if I’m back up this way in the next few weeks I’ll drop round, I might have something that you like, or even that one, we’ll see.’

‘Yeah, OK, sorry about that, but I’m really stretched just now.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ I made my peace with this being a quick beer stop.

‘Yeah, I get my cheque next Thursday. I’ve had bloody vet’s bills as well for Glen. He’s real crook.’ She stroked the dog and spoke to it. I drank down my beer in one and left.

When I got outside, the car was circling, with Jim, Scotty and one Dane in it. I made the thumb-down sign at them.

‘Crap, isn’t it?’ said Jim, leaning out of the window, looking tired.

‘Not good, I’ve shifted nothing at all.’

‘Andrea hasn’t either. There just doesn’t seem to be anyone around.’

‘Told you, it’s shit, mate,’ said Scotty, leaning over Jim in the passenger seat.

‘Yeah, all right, we get your point. Come on, let’s get Karin and go back.’

I threw my folder in the back, delighted that we were calling it a day.

Back in the van, things felt better again. We got a pizza takeaway and some beers and sat and listened to the radio, our
only
source of music. We all shared a six-berth: the Danes got the double bed in the living area that by day was a table; Scotty and I got the bunks in a separate room; and Jim was next door in the double. He put up a very strong argument as to why he should sleep there, mostly based on him driving and his ongoing back problems. Nobody disagreed with him.

‘Come on then, let’s show each other our tricks of the trade. I’m intrigued as to what you’re all like,’ said Jim.

‘Yeah, that’s always fun,’ said Scotty.

‘What, every group does this?’ I asked.

‘Course, yeah, ’cos there’s always a part of you that wonders how the fuck you sell them, right? We all work our nuts off, yeah, in the houses, I mean. And then there’s people you just can’t imagine getting anywhere, but they do – so you wanna see what they do, yeah?’

‘I want to see you first, Kerry.’ Jim lay on the single sofa at the back of the van, stretched out, peeling the label off his beer, while the rest of us sat round the table.

‘I don’t have a particular thing, I just learnt as I went along.’

‘Yeah, that’s what we want to see. What you learnt.’

‘Well, it’s down to the individual, you know.’

‘You’ve sold the most, know that?’ said Jim.

‘What, you keep a record of everyone?’

‘Oh yeess,’ said Scotty.

‘I suppose I’m good at playing around with people – like, if they say they don’t like something, I’m good at making them want it by the end.’ I sipped on my beer, and thought about some of my highlights, including the Arab man and the barbecue. But I didn’t really want to do my thing in front of the others – it was personal, and I didn’t want anybody stealing my technique. Besides, I wanted my success to be a mystery to them, and would enjoy my new aloofness.

‘What about you girls? I want to know what you get up to.’ Scotty sank down in his seat like a gormless idiot and pulled his hat down when he spoke to the Danish, which was a sure sign that he had a thing for one of them, and my guess it was Andrea. I’d also had the feeling for a while now that Jim and Karin were pairing off slightly. Where did that leave me? I wondered.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ said Karin, playing it up.

‘For a start we’re blonde, so we gonna say we’re Swedish, right?’

‘Swedish, Danish, same thing,’ I said, trying to wind them up.

‘Hey, you!’ shouted Karin, pretending to take a swing at me.

‘If the husband answers, then we are Swedish,’ said Andrea, in an unusually playful manner that I’d only ever seen the night of truth or dare.

‘Yeah, not if it’s the lady, she wouldn’t like that.’ They both burst out into fits of laughter. I looked over at Jim and Scotty who were loving every second of it, and wondered if perhaps I wasn’t the only one who played games in some of the homes.

Mosquitoes buzzed around the light at the top of the phone booth. I smoked with one foot in the door, one foot out, waiting for Jim to finish the call back to Sydney. I could hear the distant squeak of Greg’s voice in response to Jim’s report on how bad a day it had been for selling.

‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Yeah, I’ll tell her. OK, bye, Greg. Will do.’ He mouthed fuck off at the receiver and put down the phone, which was very out of character. ‘Sometimes Greg talks such shite, you know? Like he’s a total space cadet.’ Jim burped intentionally really loud.

‘Hang on, I need to make a call. Do you have any bucks? I’ve got four but I need to call home quickly.’