Sydney Noir

by John Dale

  Hendo. Dry mouth. Feelings from zero to a hundred thanks to his IV habit. Riled up. Lou saw it, saw what was coming, and split Hendo and the host. Took Manco into the bathroom. Lou tried telling Manco how it was going down, that this was the last of their debt. But Manco wouldn’t hear it. He put a vial to his nose and snorted gelatinous confetti.

  In the bathroom, Lou was teary and he started to plead. Told Manco about the new man, about being a hausfrau, about a new start. Hills hoist and gardens. Pot plants. Orange-colored cookware. Maybe a French bulldog as a pet.

  Manco just pawed at Lou’s pecs. “Interest . . . interest . . . you boys gotta pay the interest,” he kept repeating.

  Lou was at his end. He threatened an anonymous tip to the cops. They were always looking for the next bust. A big fag dealer with off-the-books cash and lots of drugs. Bye-bye loft apartment. Hello concrete cell. Manco fell still. Asked Lou to fix himself before he exited the bathroom, told Lou that he didn’t want to use tears as a lubricant again.

  When he went back into the living room he saw Hendo sitting on the black leather sofa. All the men were standing around him. They had their shirts open and weren’t wearing any pants. The pale-blue office shirts contrasted against their pink skin. Hendo was putting a syringe into a little baggie of speed and water. The men all looked down on Hendo, licking their lips.

  One of the men took the syringe off Hendo and shepherded him to a room with a swing. That was the last time Lou saw Hendo.

  Lou was crying when he told me. We knew that Hendo was gone. Hendo wasn’t a poem that I wrote and lost. He was just a rich-kid fuck-up. Lou wrote himself into me. On him I saw the same dark Mediterranean skin. In him I saw the potential for a good life; at least one of us could be saved.

  6.

  Sometimes I take the long way home. Suburban streets lead to the highways and they lead to the city like a river does to an estuary. I drive down Oxford Street. The road is wet, streetlights expose its emptiness. Under a rainbow flag I make out two emaciated figures that sway. They wear mesh singlets and huddle in each other’s arms. Those cold lost boys could be a memory of me and Lou.

  Lou and I kept hitting clublandia. We had a strong three-horse race with Hendo. When he was gone, we became crutches for each other’s mourning. On dance floors, the baby gays scoffed at our dated looks and melancholic energy. A generic twink put his pink fingers on the collar of my jacket and looked for a label. He gasped when he saw it was from Kmart. Lou kept spilling drinks on his pants so the exits looked appealing. We wandered out into the street and huddled under a rainbow flag, almost falling on the wet concrete.

  There were headlines when Hendo died. “SENATOR’S SON DEAD, GAY SEX SANDWICH.” I learned more about Hendo from that headline than he’d ever told me in life. Explained how his rent was always paid and he never worked. Made me reflect on that moment in the park with the cops, how Hendo spoke to them with a string of pearls in his voice. I reflected on his anthropological analysis of Lou’s suburban home. The headline made me realize that people like me and Lou were just subplots between the first and final acts of Hendo’s life.

  The only reasonable response was to boycott Hendo’s funeral. Said to ourselves, Nah, just nah. Too many jerk-off journalists. Too many judging eyes. We kept on seeing the newspapers lining pavements with sordid tales of the senator’s son. So we avoided going out. Avoided cafés, train carriages, anywhere we might find a paper.

  Lou’s house was in the outskirts of Bankstown. There was a sea of grass in the front yard. Roses not in bloom. Rusty old hills hoist. Paint flaking off Corinthian columns. As evening set in we lay on banana lounges in the front yard next to a kiddie pool. I put the whole of my hand in the kiddie pool, mosquito larvae swam between my fingers.

  Eventually tatted Turk came home. Around a laminate table, Lou served us lasagna. Dutiful wife he was. I was hush-hush, watched Lou as he fussed pouring wine and filling side plates with salads. Easy conversation. Tatted Turk was a security guard, a late-in-life gay but a kid from a rough home, desiring a simple life. Part of me just called him ride-a-motorbike-and-drink-protein-shake dumb. Part of me called him solid, unpretentious.

  The tatted Turk husband went to bed early that night. We were in the kitchen when Lou received an SMS from Manco.

  Lou’s eyes were open fully. “If Manco tells tatted Turk about my old life, he’ll leave me. I’ll have nothing. I wish someone would do something,” he said, and his eyes were like big wet frying pans. Rock-hard tears next to Tupperware and laminate tables. His body folded and he took long breaths; I came from behind and hugged him.

  I put my palm on Lou’s back and started rubbing it while he sobbed. That night I told him it would be alright and for the first time in my life I felt like a father. I realized that this is what a father should do. Protect. Help. Solve. Have dominion over a son and not in that gay-daddy kind of way. Eventually I lifted Lou up, pulled his arm around my shoulder, and put him to bed next to his boyfriend.

  The next morning before anyone got up, I drove to my dad’s. I waited for him to leave the house. In his Stalinist-cell bedroom and behind the door there was a case with a weapon. I pulled out the sawed-off double-barrel. It was heavier than I’d expected and the glint from where it was sawed gave it a sense of menace.

  Took the bullets out of the breech and put them back in the case. Wrapped the gun in a towel and slipped it in a gym bag.

  I had no money and Lou needed a problem resolved. Manco had a stash of cash and drugs. Problem crushed.

  7.

  The apartment hallway had the sterile nothing of a medical center. My knuckles hit the laminate door three times. Manco opened the door. He was in his sixties, bald, wearing jeans and a faded black T-shirt. His round wire-rimmed glasses were a hint of intellectual and creative pretension. I was carrying the gym bag and I held it low to the ground. Told him that Lou had sent me, that I was going to be the payment today. He put his hand up on the doorframe, blocking the entrance. His gaze started at my feet, scanned up, and when he reached my neck, he muttered an, “Oh you’ll do,” and waved me in with his hand.

  I followed him into the apartment. Went past a marble kitchen with stainless-steel appliances. I took deep slow breaths that filled the pit of my stomach. The rubber soles of my shoes squeaked against the polished concrete floor. The living room had a TV against a wall of glass that looked out over the city.

  “Nice view,” I said. He asked me if I needed to use the bathroom to freshen up. I held my gym bag low, tried to make it a discreet thing that I was carrying.

  In the bathroom, I opened my gym bag and unwrapped the double-barrel from the towel. There was a weight to it that seemed new. I looked at myself holding the gun in the mirror. Angled my head low and put the butt in between my arm and torso. Creased my forehead and eyebrows, practicing a look of menace. I entered the living space holding the gun. Manco was sitting on the sofa with his dick out. He stood up and put the pink thing back in his pants. He raised his hands up in the air, his palms facing me. His lips pressed together like two cars in an accident. I took one step toward him and pushed out the gun in front of me.

  “We need to talk about Lou,” I said. My voice was lower than a sewer. Told him that Lou’s debt was fully paid, otherwise he would see me again. He gulped and nodded, knew exactly what I was saying.

  I asked him where his stash of cash was and where all the dope was. A single drop of sweat ran down his face. He directed me to a kitchen cabinet. I walked over to the marble kitchen; my shoes made a squeaking sound that echoed throughout the apartment. I bent my knees and squatted. Opened a cupboard. Kept the gun straight as I pulled out a container full of chems. I snapped open the lid. There were caps of MDMA, blue LVs, and doves. All the pills were in sandwich bags, neatly arranged.

  “This is a nice little system you have here,” I said, and put the container on the kitchen bench. “But I’m gonna need cash too.”

  Manco pointed to the top cupboard; I reached up and pull
ed out a tin box. I put the tin box on the bench, ready to open it.

  There were three knocks on the door. I turned around to face Manco with the gun. His lips were gray, two thin slugs coated with saliva. The front door flew open and two cops came into the apartment, their guns in their hands. They saw me with the stash of drugs in front of me, holding a double-barrel pointed at Manco.

  Manco was smarter than I was. His organized pills were part of a system. His life was part of a system. Dealers needed a series of checks and balances. And what I didn’t know then is that many fresh-faced boys with threats had been there before me. Many fresh-faced boys trying to make a forced withdrawal. Manco had a failsafe. At an allocated time, if he didn’t send an SMS to a person and confirm that everything was good with his guest, they would call certain police officers—slightly dodgy and on the cut—who were intertwined with Manco. They would come. Scare the shit out of the person causing trouble. Make it seem that it was a legit arrest, when they were just clearing the scraps.

  “That’s him, officers,” said Manco.

  The cops ordered me to drop it with booming voices. They held their guns with both hands and arranged themselves in a pincer movement around me. I put my gun on the bench in front of me. Gently resting it—the sound of metal clinking on marble. I put my hands in the air. A blue uniform came toward me and twisted my arm, forcing me to turn around. I felt a big hand push me on my back and I was up against the glass wall. My chest was pressing against the cool.

  I looked out over the city and the skyscrapers were dead-eyed monuments. Behind me the two cops and Manco muttered while my arm was twisted. The pain made me shut my eyes and when I opened them again, I looked over the cityscape, saw the skyscrapers as concrete pillars that were a bulwark to suburbia. Beyond them were the fringes of a landscape that had houses with red roofs, dead-end streets, nature strips, and parks. There were fringes of green trees. When I squinted I could almost see an olive tree and there was a goat stuck in its branches and underneath a father and son fought.

  THE RAZOR

  by Robert Drewe

  Lavender Bay

  One humid Sunday morning when the scent of frangipani hung heavily in the air, Brian Tasker stood in his yard overlooking Lavender Bay while his mother-in-law shaved his body.

  Sunlight bounced off the fence of oleanders and frangipanis and flickered through the native fig trees clinging to the cliff behind the house. The cliff marked the boundary of Luna Park, the harborside fun fair, and between the loops and slopes of the dormant roller coaster that came to rumbling, screaming life every sunset, a mirage quivered on the surface of the bay.

  While Dulcie Kroger was kneeling and spreading shaving cream over her son-in-law’s legs, he tried to concentrate on the way the mirage lapped like a windswept lake on the boat shed roofs across the bay. But once his mother-in-law began wielding the razor, working upward from his size-thirteen feet, up his shins and calves to his thighs, he found it difficult to maintain interest in an illusion.

  * * *

  During dinner the evening before, he’d mentioned something Don told him at training.

  “Guess what?” Brian said to his wife Judy and her mother as he dug into the five courses Dulcie had served him. “The Yanks have had a bright idea—shaving their bodies before a race.”

  “Seriously, Brian?” Judy’s eyes twinkled. Even after six months of marriage he still found her wide-eyed look and little-girl giggle appealing, even provocative. “Shaved all over?”

  A delicate creature to look at, but her chirpy laugh, blond bob, bright nails, and arms like twigs hid her intensity. Though full of energy, she seemed to hardly eat. Compared to his meal—tonight it was chicken soup and thickly buttered bread, six lamb chops and vegetables, a plate of potato and egg salad, a dessert of sliced bananas and ice cream, and cheese and biscuits, washed down with two glasses of milk—hers was miniscule: a single chop, a smidgen of mashed potatoes, and a smattering of peas to push around her plate.

  “All over?” her mother repeated.

  “Shaving down, it’s called,” Brian explained. “The whole body. All the exposed parts anyway. They reckon it makes them swim faster.”

  Don Wilmott, his longtime coach, had picked up this intelligence from an American friend who’d observed a training session of the swimming squad at the University of Southern California. “Shaving down eliminates drag,” Don told Brian as he dried off after his afternoon of one hundred laps in the North Sydney Olympic Pool. He’d been Brian’s coach ever since Junior Dolphins, where he’d recognized the talent of the skinny nine-year-old who was swimming to help his asthma. More than a coach, really. A mentor, almost a father figure. Then through all the high school and district victories over his teenage years, and the regionals, and his successes at state level. And now, if all went to plan, to the nationals and the selection trials for the Australian team.

  “We’ll give it a shot,” Don went on. “They say you feel transformed. Smooth and slippery like a fish. The psychological effect alone is supposed to make you swim quicker.”

  Brian didn’t need reminding that he had to swim faster. To be transformed. As Don repeated, unnecessarily, the Melbourne Olympics were only nine months away, in November. The Australian team would be selected in August, after the national championships. And there was another Sydney swimmer, Murray Rose, dogging his heels. Rose’s times for the 400 and 1,500-meter freestyle almost matched his. Worse, they were improving, and he was still only sixteen.

  This boy Rose was a handsome wunderkind, a blond prodigy who defied swimming’s traditions. For a start he was thin, rather than conventionally barrel-chested and broad-shouldered. And he trained in Sydney Harbour. The harbor? With its tides and waves and oil spills and flotsam? Moreover—veteran sports writers shook their heads in wonder—the kid was a vegetarian.

  They struggled to recall any top athlete who’d been a vegetarian. The papers set up photographs of wet-headed, muddy-footed young Murray standing on the harbor shore after training, towel looped around his neck, skinny ribs poking out, happily munching a carrot or a stick of celery.

  Brian knew Melbourne was his last chance to make the Olympic team. The combination of his BSA Gold Star with slippery tram tracks on the Lane Cove line led to a broken elbow that had ruined his chances for Helsinki in ’52. So he’d sold the motorbike. No more physical risks. He’d be twenty-four by November, twenty-eight, positively elderly, by the 1960 Olympic games.

  “Get out the razor this weekend,” Don had said. “We’ll do a time trial on Monday.”

  * * *

  Brian thought he’d surprise Judy with his new smooth body when she came home from Mass at St. Francis Xavier that Sunday. Surely anyone could put a new blade in their safety razor and shave themselves down? But standing there in the sunny yard in his skimpy racing costume, cursing with the effort, he found it surprisingly tricky. How to shave the backs of your thighs? How to avoid nicking the tender skin behind your knees?

  The grunts, the near-naked contortions: a neighbor or passerby might have wondered what was going on behind the frangipanis and oleanders.

  Dulcie was watching this comedy through the kitchen window and she came out into the yard. She was wearing a swimsuit too: pale blue and strapless, in some sort of elasticized satiny material.

  “Come here, furry boy,” she said, and took the razor from his hand.

  It was like a mild electric shock at first. As she scraped the razor up his shin and thigh to the edge of his swimsuit, his focus on the wavy roof mirages of Lavender Bay began fading fast.

  “Relax, kiddo,” Dulcie said. “I used to be a nurse.”

  This was evident in her proficiency: in her frowning attention to her task and the frequent pauses to rinse the razor in a pot of water to keep the blade keen.

  Brian stared out across the bay. Dulcie kept on shaving his thighs while he fought the reaction of his body and mind: somewhere between excitement and fear, stimulation and embarrassment. This woman k
neeling before him, her head abutting his groin, strands of her auburn hair brushing his skin, her tanned cleavage looming below his eyes, was his mother-in-law!

  After she’d finished shaving his thighs, she rose to her feet, rubbed more shaving cream on his stomach, and, as a tremor ran down his whole body, she performed a professional depilatory operation on the furry track of his abdominal hair.

  Brian was blinking rapidly by now and finding it difficult to regulate his breathing.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before,” she said. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”

  Nevertheless, in her competent hands he felt ridiculously young, a self-conscious adolescent. His heart was still hammering when she rinsed the razor again and attacked the curly hairs on his chest. As she worked, she hummed a sentimental song from the hit parade, “Oh! My Papa.”

  In a greater effort to distance his mind and body from Dulcie’s busy razor work, Brian lifted his gaze to the sky where a pelican was hovering over the bay, higher than he imagined possible for such an ungainly-looking bird. Then, as his mother-in-law glided the blade carefully over his pectoral muscles, gently circumnavigating the nipples, the pelican became a tiny soaring white blotch.

  The sun beat down. “Oh, my papa,” Dulcie hummed. In the fig trees on the cliff, a flock of black cockatoos clumsily rustled and fed. Brian closed his eyes on the sky, and orchestrated shapes like dew droplets or oil globules began to float in patterns behind his eyelids; he could feel the sun’s rays on his upturned face.

  The chest-shaving continued. “Head up, tiger,” Dulcie said, standing on tiptoe. In four strokes she swept the razor from collarbones to chin. “Right arm up,” she ordered. Brian’s arm hung tentatively in the air, trembling slightly, until she held it steady and shaved his armpit. “Now the left one.”

  Unhindered now by hair, a trickle of suds ran down his chest and stomach. Eyes still firmly shut, he heard the cockatoos continuing to squawk and eat, and half-gnawed figs plopping on the ground, and a train clattering across the Harbour Bridge toward the city.