The Naked Drinking Club (28 page)

‘Hi there.’

‘Hello.’

‘Yes, he said he waited as long as he could but had to leave earlier to go to do something at a radio station, and that he would catch up with you in Brisbane, and not to worry.’

‘That’s all. He didn’t say anything else?’

‘No, that’s all, that’s it. Would you like to leave him a message?’

‘Yes, I would, thanks.’

‘Go ahead, please.’

‘Tell him that Madeline Thomson is my mother, and that’s who I’m looking for.’

‘Madeline. Thomson.’

It felt so odd telling the receptionist this, and I almost detected some pity in his voice.

‘Is that everything?’

I laughed ironically through my nose. ‘Yes, that’s all, thanks.’

We arrived in Port Macquarie around eight. Jim and the Danish complained that they were starving.

‘Steak and chips and an ice-cold beer,’ said Jim, stretching. ‘What about you two?’

He turned around; Scotty and I were now sharing the back seat, where we’d slept most of the way, while the Danes rode up front in the big old-fashioned one seat.

‘Are we staying here?’ asked Karin.

Jim shook his head, mid-yawn. ‘Think we should go further up, nearer the coast. There’s a campsite and a hostel right on the beach, in a little place called Macksville.’

‘Macksville?’ I said. ‘This gets weirder.’

‘How come?’ asked Jim.

‘Just the names, people I know.’

‘So do you know anyone called Port or Macquarie?’

‘Yeah, very funny.’

‘We’re near Kempsey, aren’t we?’ asked Scotty, who hadn’t tried to be funny for a record three hours.

‘Yes, hang on.’ Jim reached for the map, which he kept folded behind the driver’s seat visor, and put the light on.

‘Kempsey’s just a few Ks up the way. Why? Do you think we should stay there?’

‘No, it’s the longboard capital, mate, that’s all, just sayin’.’ Scotty couldn’t muster a smile.

‘Hey, look at this.’

We all leant in.

‘Scotty’s Head, look at this!’ Jim pointed and passed the map around.

A little further up the coast from Kempsey, just before Macksville, was a stretch of beach called Scotty’s Head. We all started laughing.

‘Told you there’s a names thing going on,’ I said.

‘Scotty’s Head! Tell you what, that’s surely a place to avoid.’ Jim roared with laughter.

‘Yeah, you don’t want to go there, mate, trust me, I have to live there, and it’s not fucking easy.’ Scotty was easing back on form, I was glad to see.

‘I’ve heard there’s not much going on there at all,’ said Jim, all smug.

‘Too much goin’ on, mate, too much.’

‘Oh my God!’ screamed Andrea, like her lotto number just came up.

‘What?’ Karin grabbed the map from her because she was
laughing
so hard and talking Danish. Karin examined the part she’d been pointing to, and became infected herself.

‘You’re not gonna believe this, but right next to Scotty’s Head is another place, guess what – GRASSY HEAD!’ They both said the last bit together.

The whole car burst out laughing, even Scotty.

‘Looks like they named the whole flaming place after you and your hobbies, mate,’ said Jim, drying his eyes.

‘Grassy fuckin’ Head, that’ll be fuckin’ right.’ Scotty shook his head, and lapped up the attention.

Scotty and I felt increasingly bitter about the waterhole. As the evening progressed, the whole incident was starting to have some kind of negative effect on our personalities. I felt resentment towards the others for their ability to jump, and I knew Scotty did too. It was none of their fault, of course, and although the laugh in the car was good fun, I could sense that we were both beginning to separate ourselves from them. The three of them had initially attempted to console us, but it didn’t take away any of my darkness. Plus they didn’t really understand how badly it was affecting us. Why should they? They were normal, and this was our losers’ shit. The rot was well and truly setting in for us both now, and bringing out our demons. So we stuck together after that afternoon, and it started to become very much an us-and-them situation.

Jim and the Danes ordered schooners and steak and chips from a small restaurant down by the boats in Port Macquarie. Scotty and I found a pool table in a bar next door and made do with a packet of chips. We started slamming tequilas and drinking Coronas, a bland, thin beer I had only sampled since being in Australia, and although the bottle was attractively designed, it didn’t exactly hit the spot, unlike the cheap European beers I had always enjoyed since I started drinking. We talked about beer brands as we shot some balls, and agreed Foster’s was the best Australian beer, but I still stood my ground with Carlsberg, which was in my opinion the best lager in the world. I enjoyed the lightness of our conversation, and felt a little more brought out of myself than in the car.

We hadn’t spoken much about the waterhole since first
leaving
it, except for begging Jim to drive us back, because we were both sure that given the chance to face it again, we would have been able to jump. Jim had refused to turn round, instead appeasing us with a ‘perhaps on the way back’. What we hadn’t really talked about was how bad and disappointed with ourselves it had made us feel, and I certainly hadn’t told Scotty, or anyone, that I’d actually physically shat myself while up there.

Scotty was the first to mention the jump.

‘Fuckin’ bummer, eh?’ he said, then gulped some beer and burped.

‘Stupid, isn’t it, Scotty? That we’re so fucked up about it. I hate that about myself, you know? I get so fucked up over things. Fuuck.’ I felt a bit man-to-man with Scotty, half expressing what we wanted to say, with our beers.

‘Nah, mate. Natural to be pissed off.’

We began talking about our lives, now that we were temporarily inseparable. I wanted to know more about my new best friend.

‘What are your folks like?’ I asked, knowing nothing about him, other than the fact he lived with his mother.

‘My old dear, she’s cool. Love her to bits,’ he said, putting another fifty in the slot in the pool table.

‘What about your dad, do you get on with him?’ I leant over the table watching him set up.

‘My old man. Nuh, don’t wanna go there, mate, fuckin’ prick,’ he said, slamming into the break. I didn’t push him on it. I let him have a couple of gulps and just play the game with me, and then he opened up some more.

‘My old man is a fuckin’ turnkey.’ Scotty spoke in hard street-life talk, without ever having lived it, I knew that. However, it was his way of disowning his parents, and I couldn’t blame him for that.

‘Yep, prison officer all his life, tough as fuck, I’m telling you.’

There were no big surprises, really, as I learnt more details of his life and childhood. He was the eldest of four and his parents were strict Catholics. Scotty had been an altar boy for a while, which we both had a good laugh at and a toast to. His
dad
was a massive drinker and had beat his mother all the time Scotty was growing up; his mum was a total victim. The story went on, down the usual depressing path, leading to how Scotty came to be Scotty. Except he didn’t refer to anything as being depressing, and did all that ‘You make what you can in this life’ and ‘You gotta laugh’ bullshit, and drank onwards and upwards, but I could see him for what he was. He was sad already at a young age for what had happened, and fearful of what lay ahead, with no conception of how to run things. Exactly like me.

I thought again about my reliance on fate as a life plan, which wasn’t really a plan, but something desperate to hold onto, and felt that in moments of truth, it was wearing rather thin.

After a while, the others joined us for doubles, but we were way too pissed to be on the same level as them. Jim told some funny stories but I couldn’t stay with the plot. I could see the Danes laughing but didn’t understand why. Jim said it was a beautiful sunset and that we should go drink some wine or beers on the beach. Scotty and I were reluctant at first, seeing no draw in the outdoors at that particular time, and we both agreed about the need to be around music. Andrea persuaded Scotty otherwise, and I just went along with it, so we ended up on the beach, making a fire and drinking a couple of cheap boxes of red wine with the plastic tap at the bottom, until way after midnight. I went back from the shore towards the trees to have a pee and decided not to come back for ages. Something had clicked the wrong way inside my head with the drink, and I became convinced that I was separate from all of them and had to get away. I became highly suspicious of them, and thought they thought I was an idiot. I lay on the sand, flat out on my stomach in the dark, watching them at the fire. I lay still like a soldier on a night mission. I waited until they started talking about me, and enjoyed viewing their concern and frantic search along the beach for me, when I failed to return. I lay in the sand, and laughed and muttered to myself that they would never understand things, no matter how much they tried.

Later they found me when Jim combed my area, and I was too slow to slither away back into the trees. He gave me a talk
about
self-pity, which I took for the time being. Then my shrunken goldfish brain forgot everything and Scotty and I started taking the piss out of modern dance, and began entertaining everyone by throwing each other around. We all went back to the campsite, where I unfortunately phoned the nursing home and told the nurse to fuck off. Then I called my mother and hung up when she answered. Scotty and I shared a van, as the others wanted some peace and quiet from our hysteria. We listened to the best music we could find on the radio, which was a Doors’ retrospective. Then Scotty did a crazy thing by getting out a bottle of whiskey from his bag, which he said he was keeping for the last night. It was Bushmills, and we drank it and went to bed well after the sun was up, and normal people were beginning their happy campers’ day.

Jim knocked on the door what felt like ten minutes later, and as we were moving on to Grafton early we had no choice but to get up.

The morning was a haze; we dozed in the back of the car, still completely drunk, miles away from hungover. They had breakfast in Port Macquarie, but Scotty and I sneaked off and had really badly made Bloody Marys in the same bar we had been in the night before. We stopped at a service station, and I sold one painting to the people who ran the garage next door. They were sitting round the table with some other family visiting. It took about half an hour, and the others stayed in the car – I could see them laughing through the windows. The people I sold to found my state hilarious and they began laughing. I can’t remember anything I said, though I didn’t have to say much because they were actually looking for something to hang in a small granny flat extension they’d just had built out the back. I went back to the car for the credit cardforms and brought Jim in, getting him to take a photo of me with my crappy disposable camera. We all leant into the table and held up the picture, and I gave the thumbs-up sign.

I was a big hero again for selling
ad hoc
, especially when pissed, and suddenly everybody enjoyed the state of Scotty and me again. We started pleading with Jim to take us via Scotty’s Head beach and wouldn’t give up our chants, like children in the back, until he partially agreed. We stopped at
Grassy
Head and looked at the surf, and then drove on to Scotty’s Head, renowned for its surfing competitions, and stopped for lunch. Scotty and I slept in the car in the place called Kempsey while the others went selling, but the sleep did us no good, making us moody and humourless on their return. We had headaches and nausea that we wanted to postpone, so we went off to a bar again while the others had food. When Jim got back he’d had enough of us, and dropped us at Scotty’s Head because we ‘wanted to go there so fucking much’ and left us on the beach with a blanket, telling us to sleep it off, and that he’d check in to the backpackers’, in Macksville, and come back later. I phoned Mac’s bar in Sydney from the call box at the edge of the beach, before passing out. But by that time I could barely speak.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

IT WAS DARK
when I woke up. What woke me was the cold and the water on my legs. There was a blanket over us. I was doing spoons with Scotty, me behind him. He came to at the same time as me, as his legs were also soaked with mine. We were on a beach. We didn’t speak for the first minute, we were so disorientated. I had to genuinely think very hard about where I was. Then I remembered I was in Australia. I told Scotty immediately.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, coming out of the spoon.

Marathon drinking vapours filled my nasal cavity, making me keep my breathing shallow. My first concern was that I’d fucked Scotty, but no matter how much I’d drank I couldn’t see it happening. We scrambled onto our knees, crawling away from the water which we now knew was the tide coming in. We were both unable to stand. We had our arms round each other to help as best we could, at least for balance, and moved back away from the shore. It was pitch black; I was unable to see any landmarks or lights of any kind. This was my biggest blackout.

‘What’s going on, Scotty, please?’ I slurred.

‘Fuck knows. Hang on.’

We stopped crawling and slumped on the sand. Scotty tried to look at his watch; he had a waterproof sports watch with a luminous dial. He held his wrist and pushed it back and forth trying to read it, but couldn’t.

‘Hang on, hang on.’ I tried to help him by squinting my eyes then opening them wide, but the yellow lines added up to too many.

‘Fuck.’ I collapsed back on the ground, as did Scotty.

‘This-is-bad.’

‘Man. Fucked. Totally.’

It was impossible in the state we were in to deal with the sheer density of the blackness. Amazingly I was able to process this and realise that we must be out of the city and in a remote part of countryside, as there were no lights anywhere, not even the tiniest sign of one, not even in the distance.

‘Sssh,’ said Scotty, not that I was saying or doing anything at the time except lying back with him, panting, as the effort involved in crawling back from the water’s edge had taken all the strength I had. ‘No traffic.’