Praise

by Andrew McGahan

‘You still on it now?’

  ‘No. It’s easy enough to quit once you’re away from the crowd. I was in love with this girl at the time and she was a dealer. I got it for free.’

  ‘Are you gay?’

  ‘No, but I’ve been with women a few times. The problem with women is they don’t have penises. I have a thing for penises.’

  We drank on. Her parents had a dog, a cattle dog named Ralph. She threw it a tennis ball and he chased it around. It occurred to me to wonder why she had invited me there. I hadn’t thought about it until then. Not that there was any way to tell. It was fine in any case, there on the verandah.

  The dog ran around. She looked at me. ‘So do you do anything other than work in pubs?’ she said.

  ‘Not really. I went to uni a few years ago but left half way through. I was studying Arts.’

  ‘I’d love to go to uni one day, if I hadn’t stuffed around so much at school. I heard you wrote poetry.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Everyone at the pub.’

  ‘That’s strange.’

  We started talking about writers we’d read. She seemed to have read far more than I had. I asked her if she wrote. She said she didn’t. She said she didn’t do anything.

  Night came on and we dialled a pizza for dinner.

  But she was right. I had been writing poetry for three or four years by then. And short stories. And a novel, when I was nineteen. But after the novel, poetry was the only thing I had much interest in. It was quick and easy and satisfying. I wrote mostly about sex and my deep disappointment with it. I didn’t know much about sex.

  It started to rain again. We moved into the living room and sprawled on the couches and listened to various records, some of which I knew, most of which I didn’t. Cythia talked. She was good to listen to. Generally it was about sex. Sex was important to her. She told me about her experiences with it, about all the men and women she’d slept with. I got the whole story. She started masturbating when she was twelve, getting off on the penetration. With odd things around the house at first, then vibrators, and then to sex with boys by the time she was fourteen. Which was why her parents had tossed her out of home. She’d disappeared one weekend, spent three nights at her boyfriend’s place. When she arrived back at the family house her parents had her bags packed.

  I’d grown up on a farm, three hours west of Brisbane, the ninth child out of ten, Catholic parents. I was masturbating by twelve as well, but I didn’t sleep with anyone till I was nineteen.

  I thought Cynthia’s childhood sounded more interesting.

  Finally the beer ran out. We were still thirsty, and it wasn’t closing time yet. We decided more drinks were in order.

  ‘You want to drive?’ Cynthia said.

  I explained that I wasn’t comfortable about drink driving.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Okay, I’ll drive.’

  I wasn’t so uncomfortable about drink driving that I wouldn’t let someone else do it. We took my car, Cynthia behind the wheel, and drove to the nearest bottle shop. We pulled up and the boy came over. I felt for him. I know how hateful customers became after a while. They disturbed the peace.

  I said to the boy, ‘A dozen cans of Toohey’s Old.’

  He went away and came back with the beer. He did it slowly.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told him, ‘I used to work in a bottle shop too. In fact I only just quit.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. Which one?’

  ‘The Capital.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  We paid up.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ I said, as we pulled back out to the street.

  We returned to her place. She was a good driver. Confident and fast. We settled back into the couches. We talked on. About her life, about mine. Hers was definitely more interesting. Then I started losing it to drunkenness and the need for sleep. She explained that there were only two bedrooms in the house, her own and her parents’, and that she didn’t think it’d be a good idea for me to use her parents’. I went in and looked and saw what she meant. The room was immaculate. The bed was covered with a plastic dust sheet.

  ‘Your parents are paranoid about dust?’

  ‘My mother is paranoid about dust. Don’t worry. I’ve got a double bed, you can have half of that.’

  I agreed. Cynthia wandered off to the toilet. I lay on the bed. I kept my clothes on. She came back. I watched while she undressed on her side of the bed. Her body was big and white and her back was sprinkled with the same allergic rash as her face. She climbed in and we lay there, side by side.

  ‘You can take your clothes off,’ she said. ‘I won’t rape you.’

  I took off my jeans. We moved a little closer. Then we slept.

  THREE

  Cynthia woke me late next morning.

  ‘What’s wrong with your breathing? You sound like you’re about to suffocate.’

  I sat up and started coughing. The hangover moved in. ‘It’s asthma,’ I told her. I reached for my jeans and went through the pockets for the Ventolin inhaler. She watched me puff away on it, sucking in the drug.

  ‘And you smoke?’

  I smoked. In fact I had only started smoking about a year before. I was living in the Northern Territory. It was the boredom that got to me. I started with Winfield Blues, two or three a day, then discovered menthols. Alpine Ultra Lights. I worked my way up to seven or eight packs a week. I struck problems. I was wheezing all the time, vomiting after only three or four drinks. I switched over to rolled tobacco and things got better. Not quite so many poisons. I got through one pouch maybe every three or four days. Any brand.

  I explained all this to her as I rolled a cigarette. ‘It helps in the morning, believe it or not.’

  The Ventolin was working. I could breathe. I lit the cigarette and inhaled. The lungs caught, coughed it up. I inhaled again. This time it held. It felt good. The asthma wasn’t a problem. Asthma could always be controlled.

  Cynthia found her own pack and we smoked in silence for a while. The pillows had rubbed most of the make-up off her face and her skin was livid red. It was bleeding in places.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘It itches. I scratch my face in my sleep. That’s why it bleeds.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can do for it?’

  ‘Not really. The only drug that can stop it is cortisone, and cortisone is too dangerous to use for more than a week or two at a time. It clears up the skin for a while, but in the long run it does more damage than the eczema does. I still use it, though, when my skin gets bad. That’s why my face is all wrinkled. The cortisone does that.’

  ‘Or you could avoid the things you’re allergic to?’

  She nodded. ‘Or I could avoid the things I’m allergic to.’

  We smoked. She rolled on her side and looked at me. ‘Thought you’d at least try something last night,’ she said.

  ‘It didn’t occur to me. No offence.’

  ‘Do you like sex?’

  ‘It hasn’t worked out too well so far.’

  ‘What’s been wrong?’

  ‘Who knows. It can all be very cold, sometimes.’

  ‘You don’t seem cold. You have a very warm laugh.’

  We got up. Cynthia grilled us some ham and tomato for breakfast. I considered the cans of beer that were left in the fridge. They looked good, better than I felt.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m up to these,’ I said.

  ‘Have you ever tried Catovits?’

  I hadn’t.

  ‘They’re pills,’ she said. ‘They give them to old people in hospitals to keep them alert. They’re like speed. I get them on prescription for depression, but they’re great hangover cures.’

  She brought out a foil sheet containing round red pills. We took one each. We ate our breakfast. The hangover evaporated like magic. We opened some beer, moved out onto the verandah. The day was overcast and damp.

  ‘You doing anything today?’ she asked.

  ‘Uh-u
h. How about you?’

  ‘No.’

  We watched the sky for a while.

  ‘And you’ve plenty of these Catovits?’

  ‘Enough,’ she said.

  I stayed with her for the next six days.

  We slept together all that time, but we made no bodily contact other than rolling against each other in our sleep. It was something new for Cynthia. She’d fucked a lot of men. Sex was taken very much for granted. But she didn’t seem to mind. And I was content. I liked her conversation, but sex was something else all together. I masturbated occasionally when I was alone in the bed. From time to time she requested that I leave the bedroom so that she could do the same. It was a workable system.

  On the sixth day I called one of my sisters, Louise. There were four girls in my family, and six boys. Louise was only a couple of years older than me. She was a doctor. She was about to move to Sydney to specialise in pathology. She wanted to cut up the bodies.

  ‘Gordon? I heard you quit.’

  ‘It’s true. Work was killing me.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been taking it easy the last week.’

  ‘Are you still coming to my party?’

  She was throwing a party at her house, to say goodbye to her friends.

  ‘I’ll be there. Is it okay if I bring someone?’

  ‘Of course. Who?’

  ‘A friend from the pub. One of the barmaids.’

  ‘Oh? Anyone special?’

  ‘Just a friend, Louise.’

  ‘Okay ...’

  Cynthia took some time getting ready. She covered her face with powders and creams. When she was finished you couldn’t tell about her face, not unless you looked very closely. She went through this every time she left the house. She hated her skin. Another thing she hated was her tattoo. She had a tattoo of a butterfly on her left breast. If she was wearing a light coloured shirt she wore a bandaid over the tattoo to hide it. Tonight though she was wearing a black top and a black skirt. They were work clothes. She’d been in pubs for so long that all the clothes she owned were either black or white.

  ‘I like it,’ I said, about the tattoo.

  ‘I don’t. I don’t know what the fuck I had in mind when I got it done ...’

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘Fifteen. I did everything when I was fifteen.’

  We drove over to the party and walked in with a carton of Toohey’s Old and a four-litre cask of Lambrusco. There were thirty or forty people there. I knew most of them. Louise’s friends. University graduates. Doctors. The gainfully employed. I wasn’t sure what I thought of them. I’d almost gone that way myself. I’d believed in things. Dedication. Diligence. Direction. I’d even finished school in the top one percent of the state. It was a cruel and meaningless system, still, there I was at the top of it. But things had changed since then. I was ashamed of it all now.

  I introduced Cynthia to my sister and a few others. We put our drinks in the laundry sink, where the ice was, and sucked down the beer. The party developed. Cynthia took to it well. She was short and oddly shaped, but she had style. She moved around, talking, laughing, concentrating on the men.

  I ended up on the couch, drinking and watching. The stereo was on, a few people were dancing. The rest were getting themselves wherever it was they needed to go. It was Friday night. Party night. It was beyond my conception, the importance of Friday night to those who worked a five-day week. It was always something to watch though, curious and a little appalling. All that desperate relief. Right across the country, in nightclubs and bars and restaurants, millions of them were at it. If I thought about it too long it became horrifying.

  Cynthia came back to me some time after midnight. She was drunk.

  ‘So when are you going to fuck me?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted me to.’

  ‘Of course I do. You’re the one who’s got all the hang-ups about it ...’

  I looked up at her. It was not a thing I understood. I had no sense of timing, of when things should or shouldn’t be happening in a relationship. Of when a relationship had even started.

  ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘You think we should sleep together?’

  ‘We’ve been sleeping together. I think we should fuck.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  ‘You mean I’ve been waiting all this time and all I had to do was ask?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Jesus. What is wrong with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just haven’t thought about it.’

  She looked at me, hard. ‘How can you not think about it?’

  I shrugged. The truth was I thought about it all the time, but not about it actually happening, not with anyone I knew.

  She said, ‘Tonight then?’

  I said, ‘Okay.’

  But we didn’t leave the party until our beer had run out and people were starting on the Lambrusco.

  We caught a cab home, to my place. The house was lively. The old men were still awake, most of the doors were open and the radios were turned up high. Vass stuck his head out of his room and said good evening.

  I introduced Cynthia. Vass bowed, all charm. He was tall and thin and black. Emphysema made him whisper when he talked. ‘Hello little lady,’ he said. Cynthia leaned against me.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Vass looked at me. ‘You kids feel like a drink?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Vass.’

  ‘Where you been all week anyway?’

  ‘Away. Cynthia’s place.’

  ‘Ah. Well. You know you’ve got some new neighbours.’

  ‘No. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Right in the room next to yours.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They put out a welcome mat, for chrissake.’

  ‘Have you met them?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Then he was gone. Cynthia was curled up against me. She looked tired. I led her into my flat. Maybe we’d just crawl into bed and go to sleep. I wouldn’t have minded. I was nervous. The only thing that was going to get me through fucking her was the alcohol, and I hadn’t had that much to drink. I wasn’t sure what to do. Cynthia had fucked dozens of people. She’d been in love, she’d said, she’d fucked for love — what did I know about it? I’d had, at that stage, a total of five casual and unsuccessful sexual affairs. One of them was a brief encounter with a man, two of the others — with women — had only lasted one ugly night ... I had no rhythm, no grace. I couldn’t even dance. How could you fuck if you couldn’t dance?

  But as soon as my door was closed, Cynthia came alive. She reached up, pushed me back against the wall.

  We kissed.

  There was no emotion in it. My eyes were open and staring at her face. Our mouths were stretched, our tongues jamming in and out. It was grotesque. I was not fond of kissing. Either it was like this, grotesque, or it was something terribly tender. Something far more than sex, something that demanded sincerity. And I had real problems with sincerity.

  Why wasn’t I a man? Why was I worrying about sincerity? Why couldn’t I throw her down on the bed and be brutal?

  My body was the problem. My prick had no guts. It couldn’t take over my brain like pricks were supposed to. It couldn’t subject everything to the whim of the Lord Penis.

  It was too small, that was the problem. I had a theory. Desire was directly proportional to size! You needed something big to wave around, to inspire nausea and confidence. I had no chance.

  And her body was the problem. Women’s bodies were the problem. They did nothing for me, they were just flesh. It wasn’t bodies I got off on, it was personalities, indulgent personalities, fucked-up personalities, ugliness, fear ... the situation of fear. But even then, when it came down to the sex, something seemed to be missing.

  It didn’t matter. Cynthia displayed no great interest in kissing either. She pushed me over to the bed and threw me down. She might have been short but she weig
hed as much as me and was just as strong. We kissed some more and she wrestled me out of my jeans. I was erect, for what it was worth. I was operating, I was functioning, but the mind was still there, it wouldn’t shut up: What do I do now?

  But Cynthia was away. She didn’t bother undressing. She reached under her skirt, pulled off her panties and jumped straight on me. She jammed herself down. ‘Fuck,’ she said. She thrust away. Her eyes were closed. All I could feel was friction and pain. She wasn’t even wet. I grabbed her hips and held on. She threw her head back. ‘Oh fuck.’ Then she rolled off and lay there, curled up.

  I touched her back. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay. I just came, that’s all.’

  It’d been no more than twenty or thirty seconds. My penis had barely even registered it.

  After a while she uncurled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that was almost rape. It’s just that I haven’t done if for so long with a boy. I’ve been thinking about it for days. I’ve been so horny.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘I thought you must hate sex.’

  ‘It’s not that. I just haven’t managed to enjoy it much yet.’

  ‘I can’t understand that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She found her cigarettes and lit one. I took one of hers rather than roll one of my own. It was the first Winfield Blue I’d had for months and it tasted very good.

  ‘One thing you should know,’ she said, ‘when I come, I have to do it alone. Don’t try to talk to me when I’m coming, don’t try to touch me or do anything to me. Just leave me alone. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We smoked our cigarettes.

  ‘Can we do it again?’ she asked, after we were finished.

  ‘If you want.’

  FOUR

  We woke late next day. There was an argument in the flat next door. The new tenants. A man and a woman. The voices were loud and angry but indistinct. I sat up and began coughing. Cynthia watched me as I went through the routine of sucking in the Ventolin and rolling the first cigarette.

  Her skin was bad again. It was my fault. I’d been exploring it during the night, testing the limits. The disease was all over her face, neck, shoulders and back. It made her skin tender and wrinkled, covered it with hundreds of small scabs that broke away with my fingertips. Now, in the morning, her face was oozing blood. The bleeding woman. If I’d rubbed my unshaven cheeks up against hers I could probably have killed her.