The Naked Drinking Club (32 page)

I stood listening to her, full of irrational hatred for her and everything she stood for, which so far had only ever been nice and boring; even though I knew what she was saying was right, I just hated it so much that she had jumped in at the waterhole and I hadn’t. That’s why we were both here at this moment.

‘You really need medical attention, please, go back inside.’

‘Where are you staying?’ I asked, like a robot.

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Obviously not.’

‘We were in the backpackers’ in Macksville, but we thought it best if we moved here tonight. Andrea has checked us into the Shore caravan park, she is waiting there.’

I walked away.

‘Where are you going?’ she called after me.

‘Nearest bar. I’ll wait for you there,’ I said, without turning round.

‘Kerry?’ she called. But I just kept on walking.

I went into a small bar I’d found a couple of hundred yards down the road, and walked straight into the toilet, keeping my head down so as not to freak everybody out. I pulled out the medical stuff I’d taken from the nurse’s trolley, and began fixing myself up as best I could. I wiped the cuts above my eye and head with the antiseptic stuff, and used the one plaster for the tiny tooth hole in my head, which I sealed first with strips of ready-made stitches that I didn’t realise I’d taken. I also used them above my eye, which made me feel like a boxer. At least I didn’t have blood all over my face now. I put
water
on my hair in an attempt to make it look a bit better. I could do nothing about the blood all over my T-shirt, however; I would just have to live with that.

My options were extremely limited and I was always dependent on others due to my lack of money, which made storming out of places for dramatic effect rather pointless. I pulled up my top again to check on my ribs, but there was no change. There was little you could do for cracked or broken ribs, anyhow. I knew that much from a time when I persuaded a nutcase friend of mine to let a couple of Algerian guys buy us dinner, then do a runner when they were paying. My friend got caught and they beat her up and broke her ribs.

I would check my suspected cracked or broken ribs again in the morning. Meanwhile, I could go back to the caravan park and wait with Andrea, or ask Jim where my wallet was. I didn’t want to do either of these, so I had no option but to do the Tampax machine fixed to the wall to the right of the mirror. So I did.

I bought some cigarettes from another machine, put three songs for one dollar on the jukebox and pulled out a stool. There were only a couple of old guys in the bar, and a rough-looking woman drinking alone. But they all looked at me.

‘Car accident,’ I said, looking at the barman.

‘Strewth, you all right?’

In all the time I’d been in Australia, this was my first ‘strewth’.

‘Yeah, but one of my friends is hurt. That’s who I’m waiting for just now. Some of them are back at the hospital with him; they’ll come and get me. I had to get away, hate hospitals.’

‘I’m with you there, love,’ said the barman.

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t want to make small talk for long, I wanted to have a smoke, one drink to straighten myself, and listen to some music, and try and figure out what had happened after the waterhole.

‘Have a drink on the house, love.’ The barman was warm and kind, and I felt guilty for raiding his Tampax machine. I felt guilt piled on top of guilt, and couldn’t afford to sink down any further, so I had a word to myself to justify my actions: after all, it wasn’t his Tampax machine, his Tampax,
or
his money in it. Just like it was not my fault that the bar we got beat up in was full of a bunch of small-town retards. After all, it’s not the law of the land that if you remove your clothes on a stage to a musical accompaniment, you deserve to get a complete kicking, and your friend has to get battered to within an inch of his life.

I ordered a whisky and Coke just in time for some other shit to finish on the jukebox, to make way for my excellent choices. I dragged slowly on my cigarette, listening to The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights In White Satin’. The music, the drink and the atmosphere of the bar changed me. I began to enjoy the way my wounds felt. I started to feel heroic with them, and almost sexy. Everything felt slow motion as I dragged on, and the song built.

Sitting at the bar, smoking out of my swollen hand and listening to the music, I felt like this was an ending, but of what I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I had just given up. I found it so hard to change. I changed people, houses, jobs and countries but nothing ever changed inside. All I knew was, I could live like that, right here at the bar, living it all out in my head, in this state for ever. Now I realised what it was that had drawn me to Mac – he was how I would turn out. It was like looking into the fucking future. Maybe one day I would live above a small bar and own nothing but a pyramid of lighters. Then one night I’d just fall over, fall asleep and never wake up, really easily, like that.

I couldn’t taste the alcohol in the Coke; I had reached new levels of immunity to drunkenness. I wondered what would actually stop me from going the extra mile this time, and decided, if anything, it would definitely be sleep, but I was dreading what would come after sleep. I ordered another whisky and Coke but made it a double, which was just about all I could afford, and could only stretch to that because the barman had given me a free one. My second song came on; I turned around to make sure that no one else was infecting the jukebox. Santana’s ‘Samba Pati’ began and I raised my glass to the fucked-up woman at the opposite side of the bar, because she’d been grinning at me like a loon the whole time. I felt unreachable and untouchable again. If I ever woke up
after
this, I would get my things from the van, take a portfolio, and hitch to Brisbane and find my mother. She would be like Joyce Cane, and I’d live there with her, and start again, the madness finally leaving me.

Some car keys landed on the bar next to me.

‘Let’s have a look at you, then,’ said a Germanic voice behind me. I turned round slowly, taking the room with me. It was Anaya.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

‘WOW, WHAT A
mess, uh?’ she said, taking her time, enjoying the shocked look on my face.

‘What’s going on, why are you here?’ I raised my hand for a moment to fix my hair, but dropped it again, deciding that in the circumstances it would be ridiculous.

She clicked her fingers, got the barman’s attention, ordered herself a beer and helped herself to one of my cigarettes. She lit up, sucked in on it for ages before exhaling, then rested it between her fingers and looked all over my face.

‘I didn’t order you a drink because I think I have a lot of catching up to do.’ She gulped her VB as soon as it arrived, drinking half of it. ‘I drove so fucking fast.’

‘What, from Sydney?’

‘No, Byron Bay. I was going to meet you all there as a surprise, but I spoke to Greg and he told me Jim phoned earlier to say he had lost you and Scotty or something, and wouldn’t be there, so I drove down. I went to the caravan park and Andrea told me that you were all at the hospital because you and Scotty had been in some accident. I’ve just been there now and spoken to Karin and Jim.’

‘Where’s Greg?’ I asked, mesmerised by her smoking; she was a beautiful smoker. I just wanted to watch her now that she was here, and listen to the music.

She finished her drink, ordered another, and put her foot up on the rail that ran round the bottom of the bar. ‘Greg’s not here, Kerry.’ She sucked on her cigarette. I didn’t say anything, just watched her through my puffed-up eyes. She was such an actress.

‘I’m on my own,’ she said, blowing out again.

I was dead beat, but still nervous and uncomfortable in her presence, now more than ever. I had no energy any more for games and flirting, or word play. That left me feeling raw and in touch with all that really mattered, which at that moment was the desire to lie down next to her and sleep.

‘That’s some face you have now.’ She moved some strands of hair back from my face and ran her fingers round my jaw on the outskirts of my swelling. I didn’t move.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

‘No, not just now.’ I drank some more from my glass.

‘OK,’ she said, nodding slowly. ‘You can tell me later.’

My third and final choice came on the jukebox and nothing could be more perfect.

She pulled up a stool next to me and got on it, her body mostly turned towards me. Rod Stewart’s ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ began, that song that I’d always loved so much. I loved the way it came back, again and again, when you think it’s gone, each verse better and bigger than the one before; a long, winding life-pain song. She knew that song; of course she knew the song. She moved her head to the guitar break in the middle. I shut my eyes and felt her near me. I opened them again, half expecting her not to be there, like I’d just drunk her into existence. We looked at each other each time it slowed down and went back to a verse. The song faded out on a crescendo of electric guitar. She leant in before the fade, her hand on my leg to steady her as she bent as far forward as she possibly could, to get right next to my ear.

‘I’ve told Jim that I’ll look after you tonight. We will stay at the caravan park beside the others.’

I couldn’t speak, I was so nervous. I had fantasised about being alone with her from the first day of meeting her. I had planned so many moments and showdowns in my head, but none of them were like this. In the scenes I invented, I was on ‘top form’ and in control, the drinks just arriving. Not cut, mashed and stinking from a two-day bender that nearly killed someone. This seemed, however, to be my night with Anaya, and now that she was here with me for possibly its entirety, I was terrified, and she knew it. She moved nearer to my face,
narrowing
her eyes as she examined my injuries. I could smell her, she was so close. I could smell her shampoo, her beer, and traces of gum, and freshly applied lip-gloss that smelt of sweet fruit. When she’d finished scrutinising me, she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the bar.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. Then she grabbed her keys and the bottle she was drinking from, and we both left before the next song finished.

We drove past the hospital. In the wing mirror I saw an ambulance arrive and thought about poor old Scotty, holed up in there with all the injured and crazies and vomiters.

I watched Anaya’s legs move back and forth on the pedals; she wore a denim skirt. She was a one-handed driver, smoking with the other one, her arm leaning out of the window, and every so often she would cock her head to the right and let her hair blow around outside. She was such a cliché, and I loved her for it. She looked at me a couple of times, but we didn’t speak once on the way to the caravan park. I loved Anaya for her lack of small talk and her ease with silence.

Just as the tyres rolled onto the gravel at the entrance to the site, huge spots of rain dropped on the windscreen. She drove slowly along the track until we saw the Kingswood next to a van with the curtains pulled, but lights on. I saw three heads silhouetted inside. Anaya parked her car beside the van next to it, which was dark. As we backed in, Karin’s face appeared from behind the curtain and gave us a quick wave. I lazily raised my hand, knowing that Anaya wouldn’t bother. I wondered what she was thinking and feeling, and if it was anywhere near matching the intensity of longing that I was feeling for her.

She yanked up the handbrake. ‘Hang on, I just need to get the keys.’

I nodded. She reached behind the seat for her bag. I watched her twist round, and then watched her get out and walk over to the van with Karin in it and knock on the door. As I watched her talk to Karin and then Jim at their van door, and take some keys from them, I wondered why she was here, and what she truly wanted from me. She scared me, and always had, and tonight I had no strength to deal with it.

Inside our caravan, Anaya drew the curtains and put on a small lamp by the window. I slumped onto the seating beside it, still watching every single thing she did. She checked out the toilet and the two bedrooms, and then sat down opposite me, with the table between us. The rain began hammering down on the roof. I loved the rain beyond all other weather conditions, the way it shut you in and gave you the right to be indoors, with no one questioning your lack of go-out-and-getit drive. Everything felt ridiculously perfect.

She rolled a grass joint, taking her time inserting the roach, carefully easing it in with a match, stopping every so often to look up at me, half smiling. When she finished, she offered it to me, but I declined in this instance, because I wanted her to have it all. That way we might be more level with one another’s head states.

‘I know you’ll think I’m fucked for saying this.’ She dragged on her joint. ‘But I kind of like the way you look right now.’ She spoke softly.

‘Yeah, you are fucked.’ I said, not knowing what else to say, yet understanding what she meant by it. Anaya was a strange person with her reactions; nothing seemed to shock her, move her or anger her. With so little going on, she should be boring, yet I found her utterly absorbing.

She came over and sat next to me, lighting up, and then ran her fingers over my mouth.

‘Is it sore?’

‘Getting sorer,’ I said quietly. I felt calmer than before, partly due to overwhelming exhaustion.

‘You know, in the morning it will hurt more than now.’

I nodded. She’d only made a single skin joint, so she soon finished it. She put it out in the ashtray slowly and gently. I could see her now, more than before, I told her.

‘And I can see you,’ she said dreamily.

‘What will happen now?’ I asked, wanting her to take control.

‘Forget everything tonight, it’s too much. Let’s just get some rest, tomorrow we can sort things out, and you can tell me everything if you want to.’

I didn’t know what there was to sort out. I had fucked the
others
off, and would be asked to leave by Jim in the sobering conversation that no doubt he’d want to have with me when I got up. And although I wanted to apologise to everyone and see Scotty again, I had already decided that I would say my goodbyes in a note, before boarding a bus to Brisbane.