You’re a fuckin’ alcoholic, Evan, honestly, she said. He turned to Adam and widened his eyes. But she still loves me, doesn’t she? He buried his face in her neck. Fuck off, she said. Adam opened the fridge and took out a carton of juice. Me too, said Evan. He poured them both a glass. They leaned on the bench and drank. A flock of rosellas screeched and landed in a flurry of wings.
That story did my head in, said Evan. Sweet innocent hippie, then out of nowhere she’s telling us about some gruesome murder. I mean, what the fuck was that? Do you think that one had a moral to it? said Adam. About that girl being allergic, to her house, her parents, her life. Could those allergies, multiple chemical sensitivity and all that, chronic fatigue—could they, quod vide Sontag, be metaphors? They’re clinical conditions, Adam, said Megan, I think that’s been pretty well established; sadly what that girl in Hannah’s story didn’t have was proper professional and parental support.
Evan gave Adam his cartoon look again. And you can fuck off, said Megan, without looking at him. Everything with you guys is always so cynical, isn’t it? She turned back to the sink, closed the dishwasher and turned it on. Evan did his look again—a watered-down, furtive version—and took his glass of orange juice out into the living room.
Morning all! said Marshall. He was dressed, his hair wet and combed; he must have used the shower downstairs. He poured himself a juice. Tilly’s got herself a cup of tea, he said. I took it down earlier, said Megan. That seemed to deflate Marshall; he didn’t know what to do with his hands. So what’s to eat? he said.
The walking party came back upstairs.
Breakfast’s here! said Hannah. Free-range eggs, organic bacon, sourdough bread, freshly squeezed orange juice and special sweetie treats for later! They were all wearing hats and coats and scarves. Leon was last up, carrying the papers. Did you find some umbrellas? said Megan. It was nice in the rain, said Lauren, the air’s beautiful out there. Leon’s got a story, said Hannah. Lee?
They started taking off their things and hanging them over the chairs near the fire. Everything smelled faintly of the sea. Lauren took a pebble from her pocket and put it in Adam’s hand. She smiled, a big smile, maybe a false smile, but a loving smile too. He kissed her cheek—it was getting warmer—and put the pebble in his pocket. Lauren turned to Marshall. Tilly’s got herself a cup of tea, she said. Marshall? Tilly’s got herself a cup of tea.
There was a piercing noise. What the fuck is that? said Evan, holding his hands out away from his ears, ready to clamp them down. It’s the fire alarm, said Marshall, the fire alarm’s gone off. Is there smoke? Did someone burn something? Marshall had only just finished yelling when the fire alarm in the living room stopped as quickly as it had started. There was silence again, aside from the rain on the roof and the water gurgling in the pipes. Well thank Christ for that, said Evan. Is there smoke? said Marshall, looking around. Can anyone smell smoke?
They set the dining-room table, got the breakfast ready. They made a good team. There were lots of jokes and banter, light-hearted arguments about the best way to do this and that, whether there should be milk in the scrambled eggs, whether the toast should be light or dark, whether there should be oil in the pan before you fry the bacon. Adam laid the cutlery; Lauren brought the warm plates out. In a low voice she told him how when they’d come up the driveway and passed Tilly in the car with her cup of tea they’d heard her phone go ping.
I heard it too, said Leon, from behind. He was carrying a big plate of bacon. Hannah was behind him with the scrambled eggs. Me too, she said. What are you talking about? said Marshall, with a jug of juice. Tilly’s phone, said Adam. We made a pact, said Megan, putting the plunger of coffee down. Come on people, really, she said, it’s only a couple of days. I should check in with Jackie though, said Marshall. No-one knew what to say to that. They all sat down to breakfast.
If it’s something important she’ll ring on Tilly’s phone, won’t she? said Megan. Everyone started serving themselves from the spread. The downstairs shower went on. Marshall speared a piece of bacon and pretended not to hear.
Did you see this? said Leon, flicking the paper flat, someone’s just paid thirty thousand for what they say are Ned Kelly’s long johns. There’s even a certificate of authenticity. How do you certify someone’s undies? said Evan. I didn’t think we were allowed papers, said Adam. A private collector bought them. Good for them, said Lauren. I am a widows son outlawed, said Leon, and my orders must be obeyed. Can I have real estate? said Evan. There was a sudden scream in the pipes. And sport. That’s ridiculous, said Lauren, how can the value of something like that get measured in dollars? What else are we going to measure things in? said Marshall. Love units? The downstairs shower stopped. I might take down a plate, said Megan. A while ago, said Adam, following his own thread, they found a piece of surveying equipment from the Burke and Wills expedition and that fetched a lot of money too. I guess we’re a bit desperate to fill the artefacts cupboard, aren’t we? With the stories of losers, said Megan.
She took the plate downstairs.
That’s great bread, said Evan, holding up a slice. Is that sourdough?
Sometimes, said Hannah, in a good bakery, they might use the same starter for decades. What? said Evan. The yeast, said Hannah, in sourdough. As long as it’s kept warm and moist it continues to be active, so the baker takes a bit of the dough they’ve used to make that morning’s batch, adds a bit of flour and puts it aside in a warm place and when they fold it into the next day’s dough it acts as a starter to make the dough rise, then from that you take another bit and that’s the starter for the next day and so on. Jesus, said Marshall. Just like, said Adam. And generally, said Hannah, the older the starter the better the bread. Evan flicked the paper. Bread’s ridiculous, he said. What? said Lauren. The price, said Evan, it’s flour and water for chrissakes.
Megan came back up the stairs, sat at the table and resumed eating.
Listen to this, said Evan. Four bedroom, architect-designed with sea views, large living area, rain tanks, grey-water recycling, sloping bush block, five mins beach and shops. How much? One point five, said Marshall. A million, said Lauren. Two million, said Leon. Megan? Nine hundred thousand. The same, said Hannah. Adam? Two oxen and a sheaf of barley. Two point five, said Evan. No way, said Marshall. Yes way, said Evan. That’s crazy, said Megan. Two and a half million, said Hannah, for a holiday house? But you could live down here, said Evan, it’s a family home. But where would you work, what work would you do? There’s work in Geelong. But two point five million? You sell that inner-suburban home, said Evan, and you’ve got money to spare.
How long’s it been on the market? said Marshall. Doesn’t say, said Evan.
A friend of ours, said Hannah—well, not really a friend, someone we know—bought a house in Daylesford last year for just under two million. Nice garden and all that but nothing special. What worries me, said Lauren, in that situation, is that you sell in the city and buy in the country but if you don’t like it and you want to go back to the city later, well, you can’t, can you? You can’t afford to. It’s a one-way street. I’d be offering one point seven tops.
Here’s another one, said Evan: one point six. Three bedroom, period, edge of town, established garden, circular drive, double garage, five mins walk to beach. Doesn’t sound like anything special though, does it? said Lauren. You�
�d need to have a look, said Marshall. It’s nearly a million dollars cheaper, said Hannah. I’d have it, said Adam. In your dreams, said Lauren. Best place to be, said Adam. I just think that’s fucking outrageous, said Megan, that people are prepared to pay that much for a house down the beach. It’d be nice though, Meg, wouldn’t it? said Lauren. Sure, said Megan, but still. Lee, said Evan, how much did you pay for Halls Gap? Two hundred for the land, said Leon, and sixty to build. It’s beautiful up there, said Hannah. The coast’s a better investment though, said Evan, it’s always going to hold its price better than the bush.
The conversation fizzled out. The table was cleared, the dishwasher stacked. Lauren cut up some vegetables and got them on the stove so they could have soup later. Leon and Marshall made themselves a second coffee; Megan and Evan sat in the living room browsing the papers. It was nice inside, with the fire going and the rain pattering on the roof and the sound of waves flopping down there on the shore. Adam went to the toilet, Lauren to the shower. Hannah shook the tablecloth off the edge of the balcony and when she came back in she had raindrops, like pearls, in her hair.
Brr, she said.
Lauren returned with her hair in a towel. Adam was carrying a book. Everybody, look, Future Shock! he said. There was a rumble of thunder. The air turned cold and metallic. Hannah knelt up on a chair to see.
Is everyone comfortable? said Megan. She handed Leon the stick. You’ll need to speak up, said Evan. Is she okay out there? asked Hannah. Marshall nodded.
So, said Leon—everybody?—my story is a true story that might end up sounding like it isn’t. But it all happened. The basis of it, he continued, has a bit to do with what’s going on here, I mean how much truth we tell each other, even friends, and how many lies. It’s about the death of idealism, too—Jesus, said Evan—and the growth of expediency. It’s about someone trying to dig down to the core of things, to get at some truth, but who feels like he’s digging through a pile of feathers to nothing.
Do you remember that guy from uni who was in that student production? Adam? Three Sisters. Remember? You were Solyony. Marshall, you were Tuzenbakh. I was Kulygin. He was Vershinin. Lauren, you were Masha. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be inexpressibly beautiful and amazing. His name was Aiden. He was involved in student politics too—Marshall, remember?—and he used to hand out flyers and all that. I lost touch with him after we graduated but then one day, around 2005—maybe 2006—I bumped into him in the city.
He hadn’t aged well: bald on top, long white hair, a beard, scruffy clothes and some kind of skin disease, like a bad case of acne. It felt awkward, I won’t lie. He asked did I want a drink. Come on, he said, for old times. We went into the front bar of Young and Jacksons. It wasn’t like drinking in the daytime was an unusual thing for me back then. It was three in the afternoon and still pretty quiet. I offered to shout. No, he said, and he pulled out a wallet with a wad of bills.
Leon: The Broken String…
We went and sat at one of those high tables on a couple of stools near the window. He asked what I’d been up to and I told him how I’d knocked around for a while after getting my BA, went into journalism, travelled, wrote, married, divorced, married and divorced again. He looked interested, for a moment, then he stared into his glass. I was already wishing I’d said no. He said he’d moved to Canberra and enrolled in post-grad politics at ANU; he just couldn’t connect with the old crowd. He became a student again, did student things. He met a diplomat’s daughter and they got married and had a kid. Then he dropped out and took a bureaucratic job, advising government, boring as all hell, in a place called the Office of National Assessments.
But, said Aiden, what could I do? I had a wife, a kid, a mortgage. Canberra had just sort of sucked me down. We had another kid. Then, about eight years ago, late nineties, for various reasons that I won’t go into here but let me say involved a story about so-called illegals drowning or not drowning at sea, I took stress leave. At first I just pottered around the garden, played in the shed, dabbled in carpentry, looked up at Mount Ainslie, thinking nothing. I usually had my first beer around three. I also started revisiting the campus, on the side, wandering around, eating my lunch. I was thirty-two, going on thirty-three. My wife, Lil, was worried, I know, but she couldn’t fix things for me. So one day I left, just like that; yes, I packed a bag and took the bus back to Melbourne. I don’t know what came over me, really, but I know I was telling myself that I was not running away from things but into them. Do you know what I mean?
I got a room off the board at Readings, a shitty room in a sharehouse up the shitty end of Coburg. My housemates were all younger, early to mid-twenties, as was just about everyone I hung around with in those years. I worked odd jobs: telemarketing, delivery driving, dishpigging, and sent what money I could back to Lil. It was never much. What was I doing? I didn’t know. But I was sure I had to keep doing it, like when you’re running downhill and if you don’t keep going you fall.
With the people in the house—all students—I started gravitating back to the stuff I’d been into before; politics, I mean. I started hanging around Trades Hall, the New International Bookshop, going to meetings, demos. I bought myself a Lenin cap (it covered up my bald patch) and got back into theatre, amateur stuff mostly, not very good, but I loved the camaraderie of it. And at least what we were doing had an edge, at least it was about something. That’s what I told myself, anyway. The beginning of 2000. A good time. Actually, everything felt good.
Aiden got off his stool. He asked did I want another and came back this time with a jug. Why not? he said.
Well, the next part, said Aiden, raising his beer, starts with an image I can’t get out of my head: my Lenin cap lying in a puddle in a lane behind the Crown Casino on the twelfth of September 2000. The World Economic Forum. A cop had just punched me in the head. I’d been hanging around all day with my housemates—a pretty ineffectual bunch, really—when I thought I might wander off and see what was going on elsewhere. I’ve always been doing that, wandering off. I walked all the way around the blockade and back out onto the Spencer Street Bridge where I saw a group pointing and shouting. A police barge was ferrying delegates up the river from the hotel on the other side. Someone yelled: Down here! and everyone started running towards the voice. Without thinking, I ran down there too.
The lane below the bridge was empty. Buses here! Buses here! someone yelled. In the loading dock behind the hotel were three big touring buses with a queue of men in suits getting onto the first. They were going to try and break the line. Stop the buses! Stop the buses! Everyone ran to the front of the first bus, and, spontaneously—magically, I remember thinking—twenty or so people formed a chain and blocked the door.
The queue of delegates had split when they saw us coming; some ran back to the loading dock with their security guards following, the others madly scrambled up the steps while the driver closed the door. I ended up dead centre, under the front window. There was a young guy, straight-looking, on one side of me and a girl, younger, hippie-looking, on the other. It all happened so quick. I remember the way we smiled at each other when I raised my elbows so they could link arms in mine, as if the three of us were about to set off on a do-si-do.
Hold the line! Hold the line! Then everything went quiet—and that’s when the weirdness came down. Twenty-odd people, different ages, male and female, all types, citizens,
standing around a big touring bus in an ugly city laneway, while there above us, inside, sat about thirty men in suits, citizens too, clutching their briefcases, terror in their eyes, wondering how on earth this had happened. And so it went on, for what felt like an hour but was more likely a couple of minutes. The chanting stopped, then the murmuring started. Hold the line—Arms linked—Don’t be scared—You have the right to protest—Look at their badges, get their names—Don’t speak without a lawyer—Are you okay up front?—Is everybody ready?—All right, hold the line. I turned to look at the girl next to me and saw how her eyes had glazed over. Don’t be scared, I said. She smiled, a half-smile, squeezed out through the fear. A beautiful smile, I’ll never forget it. Thanks, she said. We looked straight ahead again and I could feel her link her arm in mine a little tighter.
Then we heard it.
It was a phalanx of cops in riot gear: dark-blue boiler suits, pants tucked into knee-high boots, helmets, batons. They weren’t trotting, they were running. It took them a while to assemble into a solid line and start the dance-chant that had been going on everywhere in the streets that morning. Move! Move! they shouted (it sounded like they were saying Moo!) and in rhythm with the chanting they stomped forward, step by step. They started the dance about ten or fifteen metres away—me, the guy to my left, the girl to my right, the only ones facing them directly, we all stiffened. Then with each chant, they moved closer. Chant, shuffle, chant. The protesters behind us started chanting back, trying to drown them out: The whole world’s watching! The whole world’s watching! The cops upped the volume: Move! Move! Move! It took a while for us to see the whites of their eyes. The cop directly in front of me had locked on: I was his target, little old me, with my cute little Lenin cap. I could sense the fear running through the girl’s arm into mine. So this is what it’s like, we were thinking, to put your ideals on the line. We want a better world, this one’s fucked, but all that cop there wants to do is bash the living crap out of us and tell his mates about it after.
Demons Page 8
