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FOR MARK AND WILLEFORD
BILL’S WISHING WELL
THE SONG “WISHING WELL” by the Millionaires (Decca, 1966) was as rare as it was weird, and my dad named his record shop after it. The guy who produced it, Joe Meek, was famously bonkers. He had occult leanings and Svengali issues. He heard voices, but he also heard music in a way that no one else did. Just a few years after his greatest success, Meek killed his landlady, then himself, and for a long time his tapes were locked away in a tea chest. Dad had “Wishing Well” on a compilation. He didn’t like to admit to this (compilations are cheating), but it meant I got to hear it. The song was poppy and bent. It sounded like it was recorded underwater or on the moon. Dad used to say the only reason he even opened up in the morning was on the slim chance that someone would sell the single in. Every other week he’d get that hopeful, pathetic look. “It’s coming,” he’d say. “I can feel it in my waters. You’ll see, kids. Everything comes in eventually.”
And Gully and I would go, “Yes, Dad,” but we never believed it would actually happen.
This is the story of how it did.
It’s also the story of a wild girl and a ghost girl; a boy who knew nothing and a boy who thought he knew everything. And it’s about life and death and grief and romance. All the good stuff.
But first the specs—as Gully would say.
It was just Dad and me and Gully living in the flat above the shop on Blessington Street, St. Kilda. We, the Martin family, were like inverse superheroes, marked by our defects. Dad was addicted to beer and bootlegs. Gully had “social difficulties” that manifested in his wearing a pig-snout mask 24/7. I was surface-clean, but underneath a weird hormonal stew was simmering. My defects weren’t the kind you could see just from looking. Later I would decide they were symptoms of Nancy Cole.
At the time all this happened I’d known Nancy three months. She was nineteen and sharp as knives. I was fifteen and fumbling. We met when Dad hired her to clean the shop and the flat. I remember her walking into my room with the vacuum hose slung around her neck, sloppy and insolent like a bad boyfriend’s arm. She opened her mouth and all this stuff poured out. Did I know that sharks could switch off half their brains? That the average person farted fourteen times a day? That deep in the suburbs middle-aged couples were having sex dressed as plush toys? And I, who never said anything much to anyone, said, “Bullshit!” Soon enough we were gasbagging and lollygagging, and the dishes didn’t even get a look in. Dad had to let her go, but she kept coming around. Nancy’s laugh—and I can still hear it—was an unexpected heehaw that went totally against her glamazon appearance. “You’re all right, kid.”
“Kid,” that was what she called me. Or “little sister,” or “girlfriend,” or “dollbaby,” or “monkeyface.” Sometimes she even used my name—Skylark, Sky—all in that drawl that felt like fingernails on my back, lightly scratching itches I didn’t even know I had.
PART
ONE
UP ABOVE THE WEIRD
ONE HOT NIGHT NEAR the end of November, Nancy and I were up on the roof. We’d eaten our tea al fresco (Mutha’s microwave roast); washed it down with some of Dad’s homebrew—nicknamed Old Dunlops because it tasted like tires and made me stupid after two sips—and now we were talking about weird ways to die.
Nancy went first. “Year nine. Richard Skidmore. Killed by a piano.”
“Bullshit!” I called.
“Truth. His dad was a removalist. Richard was helping him one day when a piano slid off the truck and squashed him. All the girls were in love with him after that. They wore his picture around their necks and called themselves ‘the Girlfriends of Richard.’ The crazy thing is, he was nothing before that. He had pimples and he played clarinet, and he wasn’t even that good at it.”
She took another swig of Dunlops and mock-shivered. “Your turn.”
Nancy’s “your turns” made me nervous. Her “what elses” were even worse. I could never match her. My weird deaths were fictional. All my stories had soft edges.
I told her about the book I was reading.
“In the first chapter Freddie Frenger Junior, the ‘blithe psychopath,’ breaks a Hare Krishna’s finger when he tries to give him a flower at the airport. And the Krishna guy dies from shock.”
“Bullshit!”
“Truth. Think about it. When you stub your toe, it kills, and that’s just a stub. Imagine a clean break . . .” I grabbed her finger and fake-wrenched it. Nancy let me hang on to it for longer than I needed to make my point.
The roof was my favorite place. It wasn’t a roof garden or anything grand. It was more like a perch for stargazers or suicides. We had everything we needed up there: fairy lights and cushions and vintage opera glasses for people-watching. We had the portable record player and records my mum left behind: psycho-sweet ballads by guys with cleft chins, domestic pop by ladies in lounging pajamas.
Nancy put on Dusty Springfield doing “Spooky,” so cool and mysterious and infinite. Nancy sang along, trucking her feet and wheeling her arms. After a while she stopped.
“She looks sad. Why does she look so sad?”
At first I thought she was talking about Dusty, but then I saw where she was staring. The poster had appeared the week before on the wall opposite the shop. It was a stencil of a girl’s face, three feet high below a concrete sky. She had black hair and eyes. Her lips were slightly parted, and three fat black tears trailed down her cheek.
“I’ll bet she’s an actress or a model.”
Nancy nodded. “I’m going to ask Ray. He’ll know.”
Ray was Nancy’s landlord. He was fortysomething and worked for the council with a sideline selling books on a blanket near the Sunday market. He called himself an anthropologist, or as Nancy put it, “He likes to watch.” According to Nancy, his at-home attire consisted of a faded kimono that was so short you could see his tackle.
Nancy tapped a cigarette out of her packet. She moved on to her second-favorite subject—Her Great Escape.
“There’s this village in Wales that got swept into the sea in the thirteenth century. I’m going there. I’ve nearly got enough money now.”
“How can you go there if it’s underwater?”
“Did I tell you about the chapel made of human bones? Czechoslovakia. And the hotel made of ice? Finland. I don’t want to see the world, kid. I want to see the weird.”
“Uh-huh.” I bit my lip. I didn’t want to think about Nancy leaving. Sometimes I would look at her and almost forget to stop. She had hair the color of orange-blossom honey. It fell in perfect waves around her shoulders. My hair was short and dark and nothing. My look was nothing too. I didn’t have to wear a bra, and for that I was grateful. As far as I was concerned, the less stuff I had sticking out and drawing attention to me, the better.
Night fell soft as a shrug. I was starting to crash. Even the palm trees looked tired, like showgirls standing around waiting for their pay. Nancy went back to her plate. She popped a carrot in her mouth and grimaced before spitting it over the rail. She held a potato as if to launch it. “Do I dare?”
“Be my guest.”
She pitched the spud. We watched it bounce off the meat-shop awning and splatter on some guy’s shoulder. He stopped and looked up. We ducked back, laughing. Nancy found the opera glasses and checked him out.
&
nbsp; “He’s pretty.”
I took a closer look. The guy she’d hit was tall and thin—maybe seventeen. He had black-rimmed glasses and messy hair and vinyl patches on the elbows of his jacket.
Nancy clucked. “He’s gone into your dad’s shop. What if he robs it?”
“He won’t get much.”
Below us the sign for Bill’s Wishing Well creaked in the breeze. The only people who crossed the threshold were vinyl tragics, weirdos, and wayward tourists. I wondered which category the guy fit into.
Just then Nancy’s phone blared so loud it made me jump. She moved away murmuring and came back humming. “That’s Federico. I’ve gotta go.”
“Which one’s Federico?”
“Long hair, slight lisp, magic dick.”
“Don’t tell me.”
But she did anyway. “You know, like those inflatable dudes outside Crazy John’s that jerk every which way?” She rocketed around.
“Is it a date or an assignation?” I couldn’t remember the difference.
“It’s a date,” Nancy said.
I tried to act jaded. I stole her stance, her slang, her style. “So go, lam, am-scray.” My smile was unshakable even as I was being ditched.
Nancy kissed me lightly on the lips. She smelled like tea rose and tasted like Mutha’s gravy. A weird combination, but it worked.
“Don’t worry. It’ll happen for you.”
She put on her mirrored shades even though it was night. For a moment I saw myself reflected. I looked like a small, dark thing. Like a possum or a raisin. I’d never been kissed, never had a boyfriend. I didn’t even know any guys other than Dad and Gully and the odd shop customer. Before Nancy I never smoked or drank; what I knew about sex, you could ice on a cupcake.
We took a last look down just as the guy in the glasses was leaving the shop. He had his hands stuffed in his pockets and a poetic lope and a brooding, care-worn expression on his face. I got all of this in seconds under the streetlight. He paused in front of the girl on the wall. In the dim light it looked like he was part of the poster.
“Hey, pretty boy!” Nancy hollered over the rail. “Want to party?”
He looked up without even the hint of a smile.
Nancy’s lips twitched. “Serious boy. Definitely yours.”
She said it like it was the end of something, but actually it was the beginning.
RETRO GIRLS
WHERE WE LIVED, IT was never quiet. Once upon a time in old St. Kilda, Victorian ladies would promenade and no one made disparaging remarks about their arses from the open window of an unregistered Ford Falcon. Then came wars and sailors and tramlines and the riffraff bleeding in: working class, immigrants, refugees. Then it was all punks and junkies and prostitutes, and then Money moved in. These days the red light still glowed but only faintly. I could live without the tourists, but there were things I loved—like the palm trees and poppy-seed kugelhopf; like the monster goldfish at the botanical gardens and the sad song of the marina boats. The wind played their masts like a bow on strings, and the sound was eerie and lovely and more lonesome than anything I could imagine.
Post-Nancy, I trundled around the kitchen, foraging for snacks. Household was my department. That and looking after Gully: making sure he’d put his pants on the right way, and that his lunchbox had approximately three rice crackers with peanut butter (sandwich-style) and a fruit roll-up (never apricot). He was asleep. I could hear his seismic snores. Dad was still down in the shop, sinking beers, listening to the soundtrack of his youth. He did this most nights. He wasn’t a terrible drunk. He just got melancholy. Only occasionally he went too far. Last Christmas he checked himself into rehab. Gully and I had to go and stay with our aunt in the country who made mosaics that looked like monster vaginas. Aunty V was nice enough, but she didn’t know what to do with us. We had three weeks of big skies and conspiring cows. Gully was completely out of sorts. When Dad came to get us, his cheeks were rosy and his eyes were bright. He said he’d changed, but he stopped going to AA meetings after a month.
I grabbed an apple and went to my room and flicked through my records. We had record players all over the flat—an occupational hazard—mine was a Sanyo from the seventies that played everything one-eighth of a beat too slow. I put on Tom Rush singing “Urge for Going.” His voice was oceans deep and reminded me of old polished wood. He got the urge for going, but he never seemed to go. I played the song over and over until I tasted the sadness.
Sometimes I thought if it wasn’t for music, I wouldn’t be able to cry or laugh or feel giddy or wild. Music was a valve. Back in the post-grunge days Mum and Dad played pubs and festivals billed as Little Omie. Dad played guitar and Mum played the melodeon. She used to empty her spit pipe straight onto the stage. They toured around the country and collected postcards from every stop. I lined my walls with their travels, from the Big Banana to the Black Stump. I also had a picture from an old Rolling Stone: my parents at a club, wearing bearskins and grim smiles. They sang murder ballads like the one they were named after, which is about a girl who gets pregnant, duped, and drowned, in that order. Little Omie were going to make it big; instead they made me and Gully.
When I was ten and Gully was six, Mum left us to “follow her art.” She changed her name to Galaxy and moved to Japan, where she lived on grants and investments and the kindness of “pointy-headed art fags” (Dad’s term). She kept in sporadic contact. I mostly followed her through her website. For her last show she wore antlers and covered herself in umeboshi paste while lightning crackled on a black screen behind her. I don’t know how a person gets to that.
Once, I asked Dad which traits I got from Mum. He looked at me for a long time, but he could only come up with one: “Persistence.”
Mum used to be a thrift shop queen. She could stand for an hour next to a guy who’d messed his pants if it meant getting to the good stuff. And there was always good stuff. My room was like a shrine to her kitsch. I had tiki dolls and Tretchikoff prints, a pair of rocket lamps, a kidney-shaped occasional table, and a wardrobe full of heart-in-mouth vintage clothes. I wasn’t brave enough to wear the angel-sleeve minidress with pompom trim, or the forties black bombshell bathing suit, but I knew their value was higher than money. The clothes were the reason Nancy and I clicked.
A star on my calendar marked August 12. That was the day Nancy opened my wardrobe and almost stopped breathing. She held up a pair of clamdiggers and some Lucite wedge heels.
“Can I try these on?”
Nancy sampled outfit after outfit. She didn’t ask me to turn my head. I remember she had on a fancy bra but terrible undies. She tugged the elastic. “Classy, eh? Sometimes you’ve gotta let your choocha breathe.”
Finally she lay on my bed in Mum’s leopard-print playsuit, a size too small. She patted the space beside her. I lay down and it didn’t feel weird. She said, “I’ll tell you a secret: Nancy’s not my real name. My real name is Nana, like Nana Mouskouri. You know, the old girl with the glasses?”
I nodded. I knew.
We were so close I could hear her breathing.
“Your turn,” Nancy said.
I sifted through possibilities: When Dad was zonked, I’d pour his homebrew down the sink (he always made more); I left nasty asides on the message board on my mother’s website (she never replied); I had a shoebox under my bed where I’d been collecting pictures of beautiful people (boys and girls). I could have said any of these things, but when I opened my mouth, this was what came out: “I’m lonely.”
Nancy looked at me for ages. “We can fix that.”
We lay still. Connected.
Then she smiled brilliantly. “Can I borrow something?”
After that, the pilot light was lit. Nancy’s presence gave Mum’s stuff meaning. She got it—that everything old was good. And now we were retro girls together. I never dared dream of such a friendship. We listened to old records; we read old books. We watched old movies and filched the dialogue:
“I wonde
r if I know what you mean.”
“I wonder if you wonder.”
I did wonder about lots of things, but there was one thing I knew: when Nancy wore my mother’s clothes, she looked fucking beautiful.
ANARCHY
I WOKE TO THE sound of breaking glass. I sat up in bed, my heart beating like a bird in a box. The air in my room was stale and hot. My alarm clock glowed 4:03. Outside my window everything was still, like a monster god had sucked the world in and forgotten to exhale. Then I heard movement: Dad lumbering about, the buzz of the kitchen light. I heard him clump down the stairs. The front door needed oiling. His voice rose up from the street: “Fucking shit.” And he wondered where my mouth came from.
I headed downstairs, nearly colliding with Gully on the landing. He was in his pajamas with his pig-snout mask pushed above his forehead. He pressed his back to the wall and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Sounded like a gunshot. I think it’s the Melbourne mafia.”
“They don’t go south of the river. Wait here, okay?”
“Roger. Send coordinates ASAP. Chh.” Gully pumped his fist and then tapped the wall behind him, all the while looking around suspiciously. Then he pulled his mask back down over his nose and gave me the two thumbs-up.
Gully was ten, but he looked seven. He was a ninja, a detective, a secret agent. He’d throw a wobbly if I bought the wrong cereal, then seconds later be mugging like nothing ever happened. Lately he’d been getting into Mum’s video collection: Dragnet, Joe 90, Get Smart, Monkey. He loved Pigsy most of all. If you know anything about Monkey, you’ll know that Pigsy is fat and sloppy and wholly un-crush-worthy, but maybe it was Gully’s role in life to love the unlovable. For sure he loved Dad and me.
It was Mum who’d sent Gully the mask—one of her random, inappropriate gifts. It was made of latex and hair, and it looked real enough. Did she know he’d never take it off? Dad said we should ignore it. Martin family credo: “If we don’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t exist.” But it was there. Right there, over his nose, stuffing his speech and sending us spare.
Girl Defective Page 1
