White Ute Dreaming
Page 10
‘Oh yeah. I’ve got to go. Tell me that you love me, please. I’m going crazy.’
‘I do.’
‘No! Say it!’
‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘Mum’s got her big ears on tonight.’
‘So what if she hears?’
‘I . . . I don’t want her to know.’
‘Der. That’s a pretty limp excuse.’
‘See you, Kez.’
‘Yep,’ she shouted, ‘see you, Wayne. I love you, Wayne. Bye-bye my love, see you.’
I laughed mostly to myself and hung up.
The phone rang again just before the next lot of ads. Mum answered it and handed it straight to me.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi Wayne.’ It was Kez again.
‘Hi, how are you going now?’
‘Good, good. Sorry to ring you. I just wanted to know if you want to walk the dogs tomorrow?’
‘What?’
‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’
‘How?’
‘Um. You put a lead on them and . . . um you take them for a walk. I think Kelsey and Ernie like each other.’
Shit. It was Angie. My gut rattled and my brain got bumped into neutral. Took me a few seconds to grind it back into gear.
‘I don’t . . . I’m not sure . . . I think that will be okay. Where to?’
‘I don’t know. We could meet at the library if you want and think about it after that.’
‘Okay. That sounds fine. At the library. What time?’
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘How about eleven?’
‘Eleven in the morning?’
‘Um yeah. Not at night. Might be a bit cold.’
I laughed and it came out as a squeal. ‘Yeah. You’re right.’
‘So you’ll meet me at the library at eleven?’ she asked.
‘Yep. That will be good,’ I said.
‘Okay. See you there.’
‘Yeah. Okay. See you Kelsey . . . I mean Angie . . . that was Ernie talking.’
‘Bye,’ she giggled and hung up.
The phone booped in my ear for a full minute before I hung up.
I got up at 7.52. I had a quick shower and nearly froze my armpits off with half a can of Lynx ‘Aztec’. I could still smell it when I jumped on my bike at ten o’clock to ride to the library. Maybe I overdid it a little. Ernie made up for it. He stunk like a yellow dog and together we balanced out. One can Lynx ‘Aztec’ plus one smelly yellow dog equals no smell. I thought I was an hour early but Angie was already at the library. She was sitting there on one of the seats reading a book with her dog lying a few paces away. At the sight of us, Kelsey barked so her body shook. Ernie stopped in his tracks.
‘Hi!’ Angie called. ‘You’re early!’
‘Yeah, I thought I was. You’re earlier than me.’
I dragged Ernie over. Kelsey didn’t just wag her tail; she wagged her whole body. Ernie just shook.
I sat down next to Angie and let Ernie’s rope go. He ran away a few paces and Kelsey gagged on her lead. Angie let her go. They had a sniff-off then ran. Then another sniff-off. Kelsey growled.
We watched them playing for a few minutes. I didn’t know what to say.
Angie looked at me and smiled.
‘What are you reading?’ I asked.
She showed me the cover, which had a blonde girl wrapped around her boyfriend’s shoulders on it. He was wearing a leather jacket. She looked like a cheerleader.
‘It’s called The Never Mind Game. It’s about Daniel and Claire and falling in love. It’s cool.’
Yeah, looks a bit like the stuff I like to read, too. Except Daniel and Claire don’t usually have clothes on. Well, there’s not much reading, plenty of pictures. I wondered what I was doing there.
‘Do you want to walk?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Okay. Where?’
I pointed across the park to Richardson Street. She shrugged and called Kelsey over. Ernie wouldn’t come. I had to chase him down and stand on his lead. Sometimes, I think my dog has more brains than I do.
Ernie eventually settled and Kelsey just trotted along. Angie was quiet for a long time.
‘Where do you live?’ she asked eventually.
‘Off Merrimans Creek Road,’ I said, and nodded over my shoulder.
I felt like I was talking to a complete stranger. A complete stranger who thought I was hot. We started from scratch and talked about where we’d lived and our families and all that stuff. I think I gave her the impression that Mum and Dad were still living together. Hers weren’t. She had two brothers that were both older than her. I told her I was an only child. We walked up to Beaufort Street and past the Humes’ place. The grass didn’t need mowing. The grass didn’t need mowing and I was going out with another girl. I didn’t feel too good. We crossed the road and headed back towards the library. Angie decided to run and I remembered why I’d let this thing roll on as far as it had. She was gorgeous. Awesome model material. Beautiful to look at. She moved like a big cat and it made me growl.
I ran after her and gave her a solid hip and shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry.’
She laughed and pushed me back. Kelsey growled and nipped at Ernie. He pounced on her and grabbed a mouthful of the loose skin on her neck. You go, dog.
‘I thought you were at least twenty years old when I first saw you at the milk bar,’ I said as we sat down in front of the library again.
‘Yeah, that happens a lot. I’ve been buying smokes since I was thirteen. I bought a bottle of Bundy once as a dare. I was fifteen.’
I believed it. Had me buggered what she would see in a one-handed varmint like me.
‘Sometimes it’s not so crash-hot,’ she said, sitting on her hands.
I looked at her.
‘I went to a party with Todd and Damien—my brothers—when they were supposed to be looking after me and this old bloke—maybe twenty-five or so—couldn’t keep his hands off me. Pretty sick. Todd told him I was thirteen and the bloke went ape. He told Todd he was bull-shitting and dragged me onto his lap. Todd punched him in the head,’ she said, and laughed.
I jotted that down in my mental notebook—Don’t mess with Angie while her brothers are around.
‘One bloke last year came up and asked me if I wanted to be a model. I laughed and that but he was serious. I told him I wanted to be a beauty technician. I still do. He said being a model pays better money and he asked me if I’d ever taken my clothes off in front of a camera. Sicko.’
Yeah. That was sick. Imagine Angie with no clothes on. Made me want to have a shower. She talked about her friends and her dog and her brothers but mostly she talked about herself. For two and a half hours I didn’t open my mouth. I started getting hungry and I told her I had to go.
Crack!
Sounded like a gunshot coming from Beaufort Street. We both stood up to see a huge truck lumbering up the hill. One of those massive two-storey jobs they use to cart cows. It had a grey cable draped across the roof. The truck stopped. I realised the grey cable was attached to a power pole on one side of the street and had been ripped from the front of someone’s house because of the height of the trailer. Whoops. It slid over the roof of the truck like a grey snake and landed in a spaghetti coil on the road. The driver looked left and right, then at the cable out of his window and kept driving. What a man. His face was bright red as he pulled past the library, bucked forward in his seat to survey the damage in his side mirror. The cable cracked again but not as loud as the first time and a bloke came out of the corner house. I grabbed Ernie’s lead and Angie followed me over for a closer look. The bloke shouted for us to stay back when we got to the end of the road. Yeah right, mate. I’m going to waltz right over and put the cable on my tongue to see if it kicks like a new nine-volt battery. Fair dinkum.
‘There’s Danielle,’ Angie said, and started to cross the road.
I recognised Danielle, too. Who wouldn’t? Her face is still pink and swollen from when it got burnt last year. I remembered he
r story. She had been cooking chips and had left the burner on. Luckily she’d gone into the kitchen a couple of hours later and had seen the smoke. Not so luckily, she hadn’t known what happens when you put water into a pot of boiling oil. At school, they probably call her ‘you know, Danielle with the burnt face’. Well, Wayne—you know, Wayne with the one hand—tugged on the lead connected to his yellow dog and got the hell out of there.
Chapter Thirteen
I ATE TWO-MINUTE NOODLES AND WATCHED THE TELLY. MUM went to work so it was comfortable at the flat. Not that there was much to watch but hey, as long as it is flickering I can sit and stare at it. I didn’t move until Wednesday night. I took Ernie for a walk and ended up at Game Zone. Lucky I did. When I got home at about eleven o’clock Mum passed on a message.
‘A girl phoned tonight, just after you’d left. Angie someone-or-other,’ she said, and waited for my reaction.
I kind of expected she might phone. I nodded like I didn’t give a rat’s pimple.
‘She wanted to know if you were going to the party tomorrow night. She left her number.’
She looked at me for the longest time. ‘Well, do you want to go? I won’t be here so if you want to, and you can promise me there will be no trouble, you can go.’
I shrugged. She was making it all too easy.
‘I’m going out with Gilbert,’ she said. ‘He’s taking me down to Lygon Street and then into the city to see an opera at the Arts Centre.’
That was more information than I needed. She pushed her hair behind her ear and lit a smoke. I brushed my teeth and went to bed.
I mowed the lawn at the flat on Thursday morning. I should have gone around with the little shovel first. Every other lap around the yard I hit a landmine that Ernie had laid. One number that I shaved the top off got splattered all over the wall of the mower shed. Little spots of brown death. Normally, I like the smell of cut grass.
I took Ernie for a walk down to the path that follows Merrimans Creek, just to give the air time to clear. We jumped down and walked inside one of the huge concrete pipes that lets the creek go under College Road. I’ve always loved that pipe. Den and I still have our names plastered on the wall about halfway down where the light is strained and blue. It must have been when we were living in Finlayson Street, when Mum and Dad were together. I remember hooking a can of white spray paint from Dad’s shed. Den wrote ‘D.S.H.’—the ‘S’ is for Stanley—and I wrote ‘Wayne’ and for some reason, my phone number. It might have been the year we shifted. I remember putting my hand flat on the cool concrete, fingers outstretched, and spraying the back of my hand with the white paint. I copped an absolute caning when I got home. I couldn’t get the paint off the back of my hand and Dad made us show him where we’d sprayed it. I think that was the last time he smacked me on the arse. I had to lie face down on my bed and cry because I could feel my heart beating in my bum. The weirdest thing is that my handprint is still there but the hand that made it has gone.
It’s sleazier in there than I remembered and I had to bend down to get inside. The skeleton of a shopping trolley guarded the entrance. There were more than a few Burger Boss cartons and plastic bottles along the side. Halfway down there’s a skylight—a drain hole from College Road that would be a cheap shower in the rain. On a ledge under the skylight I found two syringes with needles and a piece of aluminium foil. Some people are sick. Imagine injecting yourself with shit just for fun. I shivered and dragged Ernie back out into the light.
I finished the English assignment. They had a big countdown of the best radio songs in history and I bopped along and wrote at the same time. Sometimes Mum wouldn’t believe the shit I get up to when she is not around. I found the note from Kez—the one with ‘I love you. That’s for certain’ and ‘go out with Mandy if you want’. I didn’t realise how big it was that they were shifting away. Huge. With my forehead flat on my desk, I could feel a hole inside me like the tunnel under College Road and my thoughts were echoing around in there like a loud fart. Den and Kez made up the best part of my life. They were gone and the best parts of my life had gone with them. The best parts, but not my whole life. Everything had been breezy and then I’d started feeling like I was dragging myself through life again. It was a huge effort just to get up and get going. I had to make that effort or I’d disappear up my own bum. Like after my accident.
I had a shower after tea and kissed Mum on the hair.
‘See you, love. Take care of yourself,’ she said. I nodded, zipped up my Adidas jacket and walked around to Ashburn Street.
Rod Halloway’s house looked exactly the same as it had last time I’d visited—about five years before. That rusty red Torana still sitting like a sculpture on the front lawn. The trees around it had grown and been cut back so you could get to the letterbox if you needed to. I don’t think the grass around the car had been cut in those five years—some of the long stalks reached over the bonnet. The front verandah had been converted to a motorcycle workshop and the dim light filtering through the lounge window made the bits lying around look like pointy teeth and blackened bones in a horror flick. I twisted the ringer in the middle of the front door and Rod’s sister, Tanya, opened it. Light and some lethal music flooded out from the hallway. Tanya’s older than Rod and when we’d hung out in primary school, she had fussed over me worse than my mum. Her face lit up and she grabbed my hand.
‘He’s here!’ she shouted, and dragged me through to the kitchen. She bounced off the doorframe and giggled. ‘Look who I found!’
Griz smiled and nodded hello.
Rod was pouring a drink and he nearly lost it when he saw it was me. ‘It’s my old mate, Wayne. How are you, brother?’
‘Going good, Rod. How are you?’
‘A little bit pissed and a tiny bit happy, I reckon,’ he said.
Tanya still had my hand and she dragged me towards the lounge. ‘Angie!’ she shouted, and waved her over. I reckon it was about half past eight and by the way Angie staggered over, she’d been drinking since three. Maybe she just had a low tolerance. Maybe she was stacking it on. She smiled and slapped Tanya’s hand off mine. She grabbed me. It would have been a hug but she lost her balance, I think, and she hung on for dear life. When she got her legs again she led me to the couch, threw me into the seat and sat on my lap. The heat from her bum passed straight through the thin material of her tracksuit pants and warmed my thighs. Got a bit of heat going nearby, too. I couldn’t look at her face. She was staring at me with her arm over my shoulder but I watched Rod bringing some drinks through from the kitchen. He got Angie’s attention by kneeing her in the arm and he handed one to her. The other one was for me.
‘What is it, Rod?’ I shouted over the music.
‘Bundy.’
I raised my glass to him and he gave me the thumbs up. He walked back through to the kitchen then spun around digging in his pocket.
‘I think you might need these, too,’ he said, and held out his closed hand. I put my glass down and took some crinkly plastic wrapping from him. A string of three condoms. He smiled. Angie saw what they were and jumped off my lap to pound him. I hid them in my pocket.
There was a battle raging in my head. I had the makings of a huge hard-on in my jeans and a woman on me that thought I was God’s gift. What more could I want? I dunno but there was something missing. The drink Rod had made me must have been fifty-fifty. That’s almost too much rum for my first drink of the night. Almost. It rolled around in my guts and made them ache. Made them rumble. Made them glow. He’d bought me another before my first was finished. I threw the dregs down, burped under my breath and handed him the empty glass.
Anna Tulesco arrived with Mario hanging onto her hand. I wouldn’t have guessed that those two were a couple. No way. They fought like ferals at school. Bizarre.
Angie sat beside me and shouted in my ear about what was going on. It was all stuff she’d told me at the library but that didn’t matter. The Bundy was kicking in and my brain was sliding into party
mode. I put my arm over her shoulder. Just then, a war cry rattled out of the stereo and Tanya raced into the lounge with her mouth open and hands outstretched to Angie. It was the Black Glass song ‘Angels In Heat’ and they started dancing with each other like the girls on the film clip. Running their hands over each other’s body and shaking their hair. Mate, the video clip is hot but those two were scorching. At one stage, Tanya had pushed Angie’s jacket and shirt off her shoulder so I could see her black bra strap. Angie kicked her foot up and Tanya caught it and started biting on her toes. I heard Griz whoop from the kitchen and could see that his eyes were boggling out of his head. They would break for a breather and laugh at each other then slam back into it again.
‘The devil goes all weak with defeat,
All the burning fires of Hell can’t compete,
With angels in heat.’
Anna was sitting with Mario at the other end of the couch shouting ‘Gross’ and ‘You two are totally off’. Mario had his tongue hanging out. At the end of the solo, Tanya had her head right back so her hair was nearly touching the grubby carpet and Angie was holding her at the waist. Tanya threw her head forward so her hair fell over Angie’s head. They couldn’t see it in the kitchen but I watched them kiss and I saw Tanya’s hand squeeze Angie’s breast as the song finished. Griz started clapping and I joined in. What a show. They bowed, giggled and Angie flopped down next to me.
‘That was hot,’ I shouted in her ear.
‘Yeah, me and Tan are lezzos.’
‘Really?’
Her eyes couldn’t hold focus on me and she bowed her head. I looked under her hair and she was smiling. ‘You dork. Why would I want to hang out with you if I was a lezzo?’
Good point. Still, I wasn’t going to stand up for a few minutes and I prayed she wouldn’t sit on my lap. As it was, she rested her head on my thighs. She said she was feeling a bit tired. She kept squeezing my knee, gently so I wouldn’t notice unless I wanted to. I wanted to.
Rod and Tanya started having a shouting match in the kitchen and Griz came out to sit in the armchair next to me and Angie.