Preparation
I pass the town hall clock, driving forty-two kilometres an hour. Petrol is 92.7 cents. Car has done 107,000 kilometres. It’s thirty-seven degrees Celsius.
That’s the kind of person I wish I was, preoccupied with the tedious and minute, the small and day-to-day. That kind of thing would keep me going, not angst-ridden over the big picture, obsessing over my position in the world. If I could just focus on the little things.
Behind me the town hall clock ticks on, and even with the air-conditioner on there is the shimmering terror of the heat outside.
Before me lies that haphazard last frontier of urban sprawl – Midland. Liquor stores and chemists prevail. This is what living hand-to-mouth looks like. No one planned or had any foresight of design when they built this place. It’s like someone tried in a panicked way, in housing development after housing development, to cover up all that terrifying space that surrounds the city.
All the roads seem to begin and end here – the Great Eastern Highway, Great Northern Highway, Roe Highway. It doesn’t exactly make it a serene place for living, but the fact that you can head in whatever direction you want and keep driving until there is nothing and no one may bring solace to some.
When people fly into Perth I can imagine them seeing the line of yellow sand and bulldozers and concrete pads that surround the outer suburbs like the shoreline of an island. All around this edge, children grow up with the smell of wet concrete and fresh paint, of newly levelled earth and the white hum of sprouting streetlights.
The honking of horns and the slowing of cars disturbs my reverie and on the side of the road I see a woman leaning against a white Commodore. She is dressed in a scanty white-leather cowgirl outfit and is smoking a cigarette in true Wild West style. The top of the outfit is really just a bra with tassels that reveals a flat brown abdomen and two mounds of heavily oiled cleavage. As I get closer I realise it’s Nikki. I indicate and pull over a few metres in front of her, watching in the rear-view mirror as she grabs her handbag and marches towards my passenger door.
Nikki pulls her middle finger at several men in cars and trucks who beep and whistle as they drive by. A highly excited man in a fluoro shirt screeches out of a truck, ‘Lost your pony, babe? I’ll give you a ride!’
As she gets into my car I notice her arse is in full view. She is wearing cowboy chaps that have two round holes at the rear, from which her bum cheeks protrude in a very unwholesome way.
‘For fuck’s sake.’ She throws her bag on the floor and slams the door. ‘Why anyone can’t put petrol in that piece of shit.’ Sweat bubbles teeter apprehensively all over her perfectly applied make-up. ‘I’m late for this show now, and it’s so fuckin’ hot!’
I indicate my way back into the sluggish catastrophe of bonnets.
‘Can you just drive me to the footy club? It’s gonna take forever to get petrol. Look at this traffic.’ She holds out an upturned palm in disbelief at the jungle of trucks and utes around us, then she takes off her white cowboy hat in a sombre gesture, like she’s at the funeral of some country and western singer. Her hair-sprayed blonde wig remains perfect and unmarred. Hours of preparation, I think, hours of preparation for life instead of actual real life. All that time she and I spent getting ready for our lives – how else could we have used that time? Studying carpentry? Making papier-mâché houses? Becoming neuroscientists? The possibilities were endless.
‘Here I am,’ she throws her hands up, ‘back working for these bastards again. I got no money, no good orderly direction as they say in AA, and I’m in Midland.’ She grunts in despair.
‘Why don’t you just quit?’ This is a suggestion I have made often. She had quit once to start her own pole-dancing company, but it’s hard to compete against the bikies’ monopoly of the exotic dance industry.
‘You’d think I coulda at least made it outta here by now, you know?’
‘Well, Midland – it’s not an easy place to … get out of.’ It’s true, I think as I look around. I glance back at Nikki, whose sweat beads have evaporated in the cool of the car’s air-conditioning.
‘It’s just unbelievable how much I have stuffed my life up. I’m just fuckin’ amazed by it.’
‘No, you’ve done some good things.’ It sounds feeble even to me.
‘I’m nearly thirty. Nearly thirty! I’m still stripping. I’m still single, can’t even find a half-decent guy.’
Nikki has what I’ve noticed many females in their twenties have – the idea that upon turning thirty their lives will suddenly end and they will completely disappear into the oblivion of old age.
‘I mean, what’s wrong with me?’ She looks over at me with furrowed brows as if I am holding back some secret from her. I’m not sure, but I think being touched up by her father for all those years hasn’t helped her in any rational decision-making process.
‘You haven’t had it easy,’ I say.
‘Well that’s no excuse.’
‘I know, but …’
‘I mean, you just have to look at how messed up my parents are. I mean yeah, what chance did I have? Huh?’
‘You’ve done pretty well, all things considered.’
‘Yeah well.’ She stops. Tears are welling up in her eyes. She purses her lips together in an attempt to stop her chin from trembling. If she’s not careful, tears will fall onto her perfectly made-up face. Outside, the glare and heat are all consuming, everything looks about to crack and sizzle, like a photograph put too close to a fire. As we come to the Roe Highway intersection you can see east to the hills with their precariously placed mansions looking down on us.
‘I mean, why are we so fucked up?’ She manages, somehow, to drag me down to the pits of despair with her. ‘There are people out there with loving husbands and families. They’ve got money and drive around in, in …’ she waves her hands around her head in exasperation, ‘in cars that have petrol in them!’ A single tear makes its way down her face. ‘How come we’ve missed the boat so well?’
I of course have no desire for husbands or happy, loving families, but Nikki often forgets this, believing it to be the aspiration of all females without exception.
‘You should quit stripping. It’s not good for your self-esteem,’ I say. But I know Nikki is pretty much programmed to be a stripper, a hooker, a porn star, whatever. Most of the strippers I’ve met have been sexually abused.
‘I mean, you don’t even have a job, you don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t understand. Why did we miss out?’
‘I don’t know, Nik.’
‘And now, you got all the bikies on your arse. You know, that’s another thing.’
I’m not at all surprised at how fast news sweeps around Midland.
She sniffs up her crying and wipes away the one rebellious tear with a long acrylic fingernail. ‘D’ya reckon you can give me something?’ She grabs the rear-view mirror to assess the damage to her make-up. ‘Those bastards have gone all tight-arse on me again, say I’m too much of a good-time-girl, fucking good-time-girl? I’m not even having a good time!’ her voice cracks like she’s gonna cry again.
‘In my bag, side pocket.’ I give it to her because I know I couldn’t get up and take my clothes off in front of a football team without being high. I give it to her, but I tell myself this is the last time.
We have finally gotten through Midland’s peak hour and up ahead of us is the hill. The lights turn green just as Nikki is snorting the crystals from her fingernail. After she finishes she lights up a cigarette and puts the window down.
‘What you need is a man.’ She puffs on the cigarette and looks out the passenger window towards the slow-moving traffic to the north.
‘I don’t need a man. There’s men around; what do I need ’em for?’
Nikki rolls her eyes. ‘Lyden? That fag. He can’t help you, not with those pricks you’ve upset.’
I want to probe, I want to know what level of reaction my dissident drug-dealing activities are having with bikies, but we
are already approaching the entrance of the football club.
‘So has Benno said anything?’ I ask.
‘He fuckin’ hates you, Stace. I don’t understand what you did, or why, but …’ she shakes her head while taking a succession of long fast drags on the cigarette. ‘You should find out who your dad is, maybe that’s why your life is so fucked.’
‘Yeah, because having a dad really helped you.’
She opens the passenger door while the car careens across the car park to the front door of the football club. ‘I could be in serious trouble, you know, talking to you.’ She slams the car door and I watch her walk toward the hall, teetering in her white stiletto cowboy boots. Her bum cheeks are out for all the world to see, the fake leather chaps glaring at my eyes in the sun.
I don’t know what bugs me more: the fact she thinks I need a man to sort my problems out, or that she thinks I’ve ‘fucked my life up’. Look where playing by the bikies’ rules got her, I think, watching her saunter through the front door.
But as I turn the car around in the parking lot, a fear leaches into the groundwater of my brain. Maybe Nikki is right, maybe my life is comprehensively and irreversibly messed up for the simple misfortune of being female in a town ruled by men. As I drive back down the hill, a singular question turns over and over in my mind: Who the hell do I think I am?
Spiral
I saw him first. On the side of the road as we drove past. I saw him take hold of the bike handles, teeter, then fall and land on the sidewalk. I saw all the kids from the youth centre crowd around him as he scrambled like an insect on its back, hands and legs whipping in slow motion though the air.
At the time it was just another passing scene from the comfort of the passenger window. It wasn’t until we were past the football oval and the public toilets, gliding down Morrison Road, that Tony whispered in disbelief, ‘That was my dad.’ He made a scrambling motion at the steering wheel that sent the car into a screeching, immediate U-turn. We had the trailer on the back because we were moving out of that dump, that dump that I now miss, where even going to the shops was an exercise fraught with tension. Where the police passed by a brawl or even an act of road rage as if it were nothing more uncommon than somebody pruning a rosebush.
Tony might not have noticed his dad if he hadn’t sort of half-subconsciously been looking for him; his dad being in the midst of one of his downward spirals which involved him being found in new and humiliating displays of drunkenness and desperation – passing out in the doorway of his smallgoods shop, crying to the receptionist at the printing business a few doors down, abusing the bottle shop attendant who refused him alcohol. The whole reason he had taken to bike-riding was because, a month before, he’d been done for driving under the influence.
Each year the spirals would reach lower and lower depths; so low and so deep, it was like he was drilling down into the earth’s surface looking for something.
It had been the mainstay of my arguments with Tony for the past few weeks.
‘You’ve got to stop trying to save your parents,’ I’d say, ‘you’ve got to take care of yourself.’
‘But what if something terrible happens?’ Tony would reply. ‘Imagine how I’d feel.’
We pulled up on the kerb in front of the youth centre. Tony’s dad was standing now, swaying in the hot easterly breeze. His shirt was ripped and there was blood on his already mangled right hand, the hand he had cut in half in a work accident thirty years ago.
At first he didn’t notice us pull up, he was too busy trying to offer a soggy, mashed-up bag of mandarins to the group of kids around him. His bike lay on the ground, the spokes bent from where he had landed on them.
‘D’ya know ’im?’ one of the taller boys said. ‘We tried to help, but he’s fallen off about ten times.’
Ignoring the boys, Tony said in his language, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He didn’t yell but his words had this piercing, inappropriate sound that made all the surrounding boys look away; some looked to the ground, some inched backwards towards the youth centre.
He didn’t answer Tony’s question; his eyes went from us, to the boys on his left. That we were all there together seemed to confuse him, like we all knew each other, some conspiracy against him. He picked his bike up from the pavement and clutched onto the handlebars.
Cars roared past, V8s, hotted-up utes sans mufflers, trucks and red-dust-laden 4WDs. This was a place where the cackle of a loud modified engine gave people a feeling of warmth and comfort. The idea that car companies all over the world were busily trying to engineer motors to sound quieter seemed ridiculous.
When we got him to the car his confusion continued. He couldn’t understand why we had the trailer on.
‘Where are you going? Where are you going with this trailer on?’ He looked up at us, and the look on his face was, in a way, childlike, but it was more like there was an actual child inside of his old man body, like a small child had somehow been surviving inside him all this time. We had told him before that we were moving, that for the first time in our lives we were getting away from the place where we grew up. We’d explained it all to him.
He finally let us have his bike, which we threw on the trailer. But still he kept trying to convince us he could ride home.
‘You’ve already embarrassed yourself enough,’ Tony spoke in English now. ‘How much more do you want?’
I could feel Tony’s shame as he tried to push him into the back seat of the car. His father tried to put up a fight, but, unlike his sober self, his drunk self seemed small and helpless and weak. The loud cars going past became irritating and vindictive like laughter.
‘I make my own way home!’ he yelled as Tony slammed the door on him.
Tony got in the driver’s seat. ‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said into the rear-view mirror. ‘You close at four. What have you been doing?’
‘I just talking with George.’
‘Fuck George, I don’t even wanna hear that dickhead’s name anymore.’ Tony slammed his door. George was a local alcoholic, intent on guzzling as much booze as he could before he died of the asbestosis he’d been diagnosed with.
We took off down the road again. In the car the smell of alcohol and sweat was as pungent as one of those old public bars; the ones my mum used to drink in, the ones that all seem to have been gentrified now.
Tony’s dad kept trying to open the car door while we were moving. Tony pulled over, bouncing over a kerb. This time I got out, walked around and put the child lock on the door. I looked down at the old man there in the back seat. I wanted him to feel something terrible. I wanted him to beg us for forgiveness. I wanted to tell him he’d be better off dead. I caught a glimpse of my face reflected in the glass, my eyes squinted into harsh slits, my mouth a pinched mean grimace. I’d become one of those people, I thought, those people whose anger oozes out of every pore of their skin, whose resentment covers every gesture, every stride they make through life.
As we drove I looked out at the squat, unkempt suburban houses and wondered how many other children were taking care of their drunken parents, how many other kids were looking for them, waiting for them to come home, just hanging on until they sobered up. My mother couldn’t think straight with or without alcohol. She was really only a functioning adult for a few minutes a day – in-between opening her first bottle of wine and finishing her second glass of it. The rest of the time she was a ghost weighed down by the heavy chains of the past and the loneliness of not being a real, living person.
There was the obligatory yelling when we got to Tony’s parents’ house; his mum was furious. I couldn’t understand much of it, as she doesn’t speak English, but I learnt a long time ago the pointlessness of yelling at drunk people. I sat down for a few minutes on the couch while Tony tried to calm the situation. In the middle of it all Tony’s dad came out to the lounge room, smiling, jolly almost – oblivious to the emotional shit-storm around him. He patted me on the head, ruffling up my hair playfully.
>
As we drove away from the house I said to Tony, ‘It’s like the world got too heavy for our parents. Only drinking makes them forget about the load for a while.’
That night, as I cooked dinner, we argued. I was angry that Tony wasn’t as angry as I was. I had taken care of my drunken mother for most of my life and at twenty-eight I had only just started counting the costs of having someone entirely dependent on me. I was tired, overweight and depressed.
‘I mean, I don’t see your three brothers rushing to help. No, they’ve got lives of their own; they’ve got boundaries.’
Tony stood in the lounge room folding washing with the TV on. ‘Well, I guess my dad is doing the best he can.’
‘So fucking what? Doesn’t mean I want to be involved in him doing the pathetic best he can! Why is it your responsibility?’ The way I saw it, we had been constantly lifting his dad and my mum up from the side of a cliff, when we ourselves needed some lifting up.
‘You don’t know what my dad has been through. He’s an idiot, I know, but I feel sorry for him.’
‘Well, feeling sorry for people doesn’t help them; it just enables them to continue being pathetic and useless and a burden.’ I was kind of tired of listening to myself, tired of talking about other people, tired of trying to solve other people’s problems. I turned the sausages and gave them a stab with the fork. Tony came into the kitchen and pulled some knives and forks out of the drawer.
‘I mean, I see what you’re doing. I did it, and now I feel like I gave all my energy away. I have none left.’
‘That’s not true. You don’t just get one container load of energy that you can use up.’ He sat at the table. ‘Energy – it’s a renewable resource.’ He smiled.
***
A week later Tony’s dad went missing. He’d stumbled home drunk one evening and he and his wife had got stuck into each other. For weeks, in recognition of his fondness for drink-driving, she had been hiding the car keys in the third kitchen drawer. But at six p.m. she’d heard the car start up in the driveway and realised he had found her hiding spot. By the time she got out of the front door he was speeding off down the street.
The Whip Hand Page 14
