I found I was depressed. And bored. It wasn’t enough, after all the driving, sitting there in a bland nightclub waiting for the DJ. In three days the only memorable thing we’d seen was a dog. I didn’t even know why it was memorable. It didn’t mean anything, dogs were everywhere. Surely life on the road was supposed to be something more.
We sat there and drank, talking about nothing. I was beginning to get drunk. When I finally looked around I saw that the room had filled a little. The crowd was in. I counted seven people. Five men, sitting in two separate groups. And two women, sitting together. The men appeared to be locals, judging by the moleskins and western shirts and boots. From time to time they checked out the two women. The women could have been from anywhere. They talked and drank amongst themselves. From time to time they looked at Wayne and me.
Then the background music cut out and there was a pause. One of the western boys laughed, sharp and loud. The lights on the stage went up. I looked at the sign to remind myself. It still said ‘Danny Ray. Who is he?!’ Then he hit the stage. He was short, dressed in white, and bursting with energy. He bounced in behind the console and said ‘Hello Tennant Creek!’
The western boys yelled back. It sounded like abuse. Wayne and I, the city boys, just sat there. We had nothing to say.
Danny Ray was peering out, assessing the crowd. ‘I’ve been touring the West,’ he said, ‘And the West rocks!’
No one said anything. The silence was ominous. We all knew who he was now, and we knew we’d paid two dollars to see him. Live. From Brisbane. He started on his songs. It was standard top-forty. Louder than the PA, a little more contemporary, but that was about all. No one was dancing. Eventually Wayne and I turned back to each other.
‘There must be something else,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Wayne nodded. We headed downstairs. On the way we got ourselves stamped on the wrist by the doorman. Out on the street Tennant Creek was quiet. We walked down to the next pub. It was closed. An old drunk was wandering around outside it. He didn’t notice us. The next hotel was a little further down. We looked in. It was packed. There were pool tables and a tiled floor and tall bar stools. The music here was country and everyone looked local. There were yells, laughter, dancing.
Wayne and I eyed each other, our clothes. There was no point in going in. It was their town and their night, not ours. We turned and headed back. Up the stairs to Danny Ray, our fellow Brisbanite.
He was still going. Spinning songs and trying to buck enthusiasm in between. The crowd had swelled to about a dozen in our absence. Wayne and I found our old table and set to drinking. Nothing else was going to happen for us. I descended into it, became very drunk.
At some stage, much later, the two women we’d seen before came over and sat at our table. I watched while Wayne talked to them. I couldn’t hear anything over the music. Wayne smiled and laughed. I was dimly surprised. I barely recognised him. He didn’t seem drunk. He seemed charming. Now and then the women would look at me. They asked me questions. I answered without any interest in what I was saying. They annoyed me.
Then the two women and Wayne were up dancing. They were the only ones on the floor. Danny Ray yelled at them, incomprehensibly. I stared. The women danced well. So did Wayne. His shirt was on fire under the strobe. It all seemed so easy. And beautiful. And horrible. I couldn’t dance, had never been able to.
Then they vanished. I looked around, couldn’t see them. It was just me, sitting at the table, stubbornly forcing the bourbon down. Feeling stubborn and slightly bitter, all round. I studied Danny Ray, up behind his turntable, and decided I hated him. What was he even doing there? What was I? Finally I stood up and left. I thrust my stamped wrist at the doorman on the way out, lurched into the street. It was dark. Blurred. I was too drunk. There were groups of people hanging about on the footpaths. More yells. More laughter. I swayed back towards home. On the way I passed another motel, and in the car park was the bus with the Darwin sign.
‘Bastards,’ I said to it.
I found our own motel and our room and went in. I switched on the TV. Nothing there either. Then I had an idea. I hunted through Wayne’s luggage until I found one of his bags of pot. I rolled a joint, very slowly, very carefully, and very badly. I lit up what I had and smoked it. I coughed and lay back and let it move in. The room spun. My stomach spun. I felt ill, and then very ill.
I stumbled into the bathroom. I saw the shower and decided it might help. I undressed and climbed in, turned the water on hot and heavy. It didn’t help. I vomited. Gushes of bourbon and thin strands of steak. I pushed the solid bits down the drain, then leaned against the wall, breathing hard. I vomited again, bile. I lay on the cubicle floor, panting, until the worst of it passed. It passed slowly. Finally I crawled out. I towelled off, moved back into the room.
It was still empty. I thought about Wayne and despised whatever he was doing. I found my bed. Single mattress. Cold, stiff motel sheets. I got in, switched off the light and listened. There was no sound at all. I waited for Wayne to come home.
EIGHT
The hangover and the asthma woke me. It was daylight. I lay still for a moment. The air wheezed along my throat. It was bad. I’d forgotten to take any of the asthma drugs the night before, and the smoking wouldn’t have helped. I sat up. The coughing began. It always sounded terrible, the coughing, but it was a good sign. It meant the air was getting through and the phlegm was on the rise. What I truly feared was the death rattle, the spasm in the chest that locked everything down for good.
I reached for the Ventolin, sucked in the gas. I looked around. Hotel room. Tennant Creek. Wayne sleeping in the other bed. I sat there until the crisis passed. Then I got up, pissed into the bowl, and stood under the shower. Things got no worse. I climbed out, towelled off. I thought about cleaning my teeth and decided against it. I went back out into the room.
Wayne was awake. He was slumped on the end of the bed, watching TV and smoking a cigarette. He didn’t look any healthier than I was. His skin was patched red, his eyes swollen into a squint. Maybe he was allergic too, in some way. He wasn’t taking in much of the nicotine.
‘Ready to move,’ I said.
He slumped even further. ‘God. This is endless.’
I started dressing. Wayne moved off to his own recovery in the shower. By the time he returned I was sitting on the bed, the morning glow gone. I needed painkillers.
‘Where the fuck is Darwin anyway?’ he said.
‘Somewhere up there.’
‘Do we have to go today? I don’t feel up to driving.’
‘You really wanna spend another day here?’
He thought. ‘Guess not.’
I left him to it and took my gear out to the car. It was another bright, utterly clear day, already hot. The Kingswood sat there, streaked with dust. A journeyed car. You had to hand it to the Holden designers. The more shit you covered a Kingswood with, the better it looked.
I took the map from the front seat and studied it. Darwin was up there alright, at the end of a long, very long, straight road. We wouldn’t make it. Not today. Which left only Katherine, two-thirds of the way. I went back in to Wayne and explained the proposal. We would still reach Darwin by Monday.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘So what exactly is the plan, once we’re in Darwin?’
‘We call the guy at the Conservation Commission. He’ll tell us what to do.’
‘I thought it was the Met. Bureau.’
Wayne shrugged. ‘Dad’s friend is in the Northern Territory Conservation Commission. He’s the one we go to first.’
‘Is he expecting us?’
‘He should be.’
By a little after ten we were back in the car, striking northwards. It was more of the same. Scrub, dirt, dust. Whatever natural wonders brought all the tourists out this way, none of them were visible from the highway. We sat and watched the white lines—when there were white lines—sliding away under the bonnet. Wayne was very qu
iet. I waited, brooding.
Finally I said, ‘So where’d you end up last night?’
He looked across at me. ‘Nowhere. Just back at the hotel.’
‘But where’d you and the women go? I was sitting by myself for hours, there in the pub.’
‘Oh. That. We went outside for a smoke. One of them had a few joints with her.’ He thought. ‘That was Sarah, I think.’
‘It was a long smoke.’
‘I don’t really remember. We would’ve asked you, but you were just sitting there getting pissed off at everyone. You were gone when we got back.’
I sorted through the memories of the nightclub, the table, the women. ‘I wasn’t in the best of moods.’
‘No. Sarah and Kate thought you were a bit of a dickhead.’
‘I didn’t think I was that bad.’ I considered the scenery. Then, after a while, ‘So what were they like?’
‘Oh . . . fine. They’re backpackers. From Adelaide. They’ve been in Darwin for a few weeks, they’re on their way back.’
‘How long did you stay at the Hawaiian Room?’
‘Till it closed. You had a smoke last night yourself, I noticed.’
‘It seemed the only hope.’
‘What’d you do with it?’
‘Threw up several times.’
He laughed. ‘You’ve really gotta take up smoking tobacco. It’s the only way to get your system attuned.’ He pulled out a Winfield Blue and lit up. The smoke blew across. I’d always liked the smell of burning tobacco. I liked the look of the whole thing. The drawing out of the cigarette, the cupping of the hands, the flick of the lighter, the first drag, then the easy drift of the hand away from the face . . .
Who was I kidding.
‘Why?’ said Wayne, ‘Did you think I was back at their room fucking one of them?’
‘Maybe both of them.’ It was true. Maybe I was sick. I always had to assume sex was involved. I didn’t even know why I cared. Jealousy. It was a cruel and pointless use of the imagination.
Wayne was offhand. ‘Well, I suppose, if they’d offered. But they were just backpackers. It wasn’t really on my mind.’
I said nothing. It was on mine.
We crawled along. Every two hours or so there were small settlements by the road. They earned no descriptions on the map. Generally they weren’t much more than a roadhouse, bar attached, and maybe a motel. Sometimes there was a small shantytown behind. I was surprised by the towns—the run-down shacks, the junk littered around, the people, mostly black, sitting in the shade. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen. They came and went at speed, but they left an impression of something. I wasn’t sure exactly what.
The afternoon lengthened. We traded stints at the wheel, drank water and persevered. We avoided the bars at the roadhouses. Katherine presented itself around sunset. It was just in time. The driving and the hangover had taken their toll. I needed a bed, and airconditioning, and sleep. We did the usual tour of the town, looking for the cheapest motel. Apparently the Sunday night session at the pubs had just finished. There seemed to be a lot of drinkers pouring out onto the footpaths. One man lay passed out on the street. We looped our way around him.
We found a motel. It was a budget affair, off the highway, twenty-seven dollars a room. For that we got two bad beds, a tiny TV and a ceiling fan. We went out again and a found a pizza place. Then it was back to the motel. I lay on the bed. The mood was low, it was Sunday evening. Maybe Katherine just seemed worse than anywhere else.
I thought about the lighthouse. It was close now. Next day we’d be in Darwin and Wayne would make his phone call. Things would start happening. Lying there in the second-rate motel room it all seemed depressing and unlikely. I thought about my finances. I had roughly one hundred dollars left. Wayne, as far as I knew, was even worse off. It was nowhere near enough to get ourselves and the car back to Brisbane. Petrol costs alone, so far, were standing at over three hundred.
Wayne came out of the shower, a towel around his waist. I was stuck with him now, whether I liked it or not. ‘Look at this body,’ he said, ‘It’s ruined.’
I looked. He was right, all the sun of the last few days was killing him. His arms and legs and face, everything was burnt.
‘It gets worse.’ He opened the towel, turned around for me. Where his shorts and singlet had been was pure white, the rest was deep red. It was painful to look at, grotesque. Even his pubic hair was almost white, and his prick was whitest of all, hanging down smooth and pale. ‘I couldn’t have gone to bed with those women last night. They would’ve been sick when they saw this.’
He stood there, the towel held out behind him like wings.
‘Are you gay?’ I asked. I was serious this time.
He thought, wrapped the towel around his waist, sat on his bed. ‘Madelaine told me you’d fucked men.’
‘Ah.’
‘Well?’
I thought. It was no secret anyway. ‘Just the once,’ I said. ‘It was a couple of years ago.’
‘Why only the once?’
‘I dunno. It was with this friend. It got awkward.’
‘So tell me.’
‘The details aren’t important.’
‘Of course they are.’
I lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling. There was no reason not to tell him. He was stuck with me, too. I said, ‘I didn’t know he was gay at first. Then he told me, and wanted to know if I was interested. I didn’t think I was. We kissed one night, when we were drunk. But that was about it for a while.’
‘And then?’
‘Then another night we’d been drinking all day at his place. He’d gone to bed and I was sitting on the floor with a cask of wine. And it hit me. I wanted to fuck him.’
It was still a strange memory. It’d come from nowhere, a desperate blast. I’d sat there on the floor, glass in hand, shaking with it. Not knowing what to do. It’d never happened before. Suddenly I wanted a prick. Someone else’s prick, clashing with mine. Both of them erect. Like swords, duelling. It was ridiculous. And compelling. It wouldn’t go away.
‘So what’d you do?’
‘I got up, went to his room and woke him. He said okay and I climbed in.’
‘And was it good?’
‘I dunno. We were both very drunk. Not that good maybe.’
It was good, for me at least. Not so much for him. We rolled around and kissed. He had a lean, hairless body and I could feel his prick aginst mine. I broke off kissing, went down for it. It was small and half erect and I wanted it, more than I’d ever wanted a piece of anyone’s body before. I wanted to swallow it. So I sucked and pumped, but it grew no larger, no harder. Maybe he was too drunk, maybe I was just no better with penises than clitorises. After a while I gave up and he started on me, first with his mouth, then with his hands. He knew what he was doing. I writhed about the bed and came into his fingers, loving it.
‘Anal sex?’ Wayne asked.
‘No.’
‘And it was just that once?’
‘I woke up next day and I was horrified. I got out of there. I couldn’t face him for days. And certainly not for sex.’
Wayne shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t worry. Most gays are used to that sort of stuff from straight men.’
‘He was disgusted.’
And he had a right to be. I should’ve had more style. It was nothing to panic about. It was just sex. I wasn’t even sure of what I felt about men anymore. I hadn’t met one since that I was remotely attracted to, but I still had visions. Pricks. Strong bodies, pitted against each other. I masturbated over them sometimes, instead of women. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t think I could ever do it again.
‘So what about you?’ I asked Wayne.
‘You worried are you, about the two of us alone for the next six months?’
‘Just curious.’
‘Well God knows, there won’t be any other sex happening. Not at a lighthouse. But no. Not really. I prefer women.’
‘You’ve s
lept with men though.’
‘Sure. Often enough. More than you anyway. You haven’t fucked anyone much, have you?’
It was that obvious, then. ‘No.’
‘That’s what Madelaine said. She said you’re too tense about it. Male or female. You should just relax. Enjoy it.’
I didn’t want to hear this. I had problems, I knew that. Hang-ups about everything.
We switched the lights off, went to bed. I lay there. It was hot. Sleep wouldn’t come. Orange light filtered through the windows from the street. The sound of cars. The ceiling fan. I thought about things. About Wayne. About his ease with men, women, fucking. Why didn’t I have it?
I thought about his body, red and white, like the American flag. There was no appeal there. I imagined it fucking—fucking Madelaine. In her huge bed, both of them drunk, naked, laughing. Madelaine short and round and big-breasted. They looked appalling together. I thought about her and me. I remembered her hands, her legs, her cunt. How they’d felt. How they’d smelled. Had I enjoyed it at all? Had she? I didn’t know. And no matter how I pictured it, Wayne was still there. Ugly and thin. Fucking her better than I ever had.
NINE
Next day it was three hours of final tedium on the road, then it was all over. Darwin. We sailed down a long strip of industrial sites and takeaway joints, glorying at it. Capital of the Northern Territory and bombing target for the World War Two Japanese airforce. Population variable, depending on the weather. We cruised the main streets, inspecting things. Neither of us possessed much knowledge about the place, other than that it had mostly vanished in 1974. If we’d expected any signs of the cyclone to remain, there weren’t any. Still, we’d arrived, and that was something.
The town itself seemed green and open. There were lots of thick, leafy trees and loudly flowering plants. Maybe they were orchids. We were in the tropics now, after all. Eventually we found the tourist section. It was a street full of backpacker dorms and cheap motels. We booked a twenty dollar room. Two beds, no TV, communal showers. Cash was low. Wayne went off and made his phone call in the foyer. I lay on the bed and waited. It was hot and it was humid, and it felt good not to be moving. Wayne came back.
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