‘Settle, Gretel!’ Hammer says. ‘I told ya, I wasn’t in on it. Razor’s a funny bastard but he went too far, I’ll give ya that.’
‘Too far’s an understatement!’ I snap. ‘That was a cruel prank. They’re fucking sick in the head.’
‘Ease up, turbo!’ Hammer says. ‘What’s lit a fire under your arse?’
I make a face at him. I hate how he talks to me when we’re in front of other people. Like we’re two blokey blokes digging a trench or laying bricks. And then when we’re alone his voice is quiet. Not so sure of himself. Wants to be gentle. That’s the guy I know he is inside. Kade.
But Hammer is such a tool.
‘Hey!’ He cups his hands and calls across the street to the skate park. ‘Did you potheads see which way Charlie went?’
One of the stoners pulls the finger at Hammer. Another one tells him to go fuck himself. The third one chucks a half-empty carton of iced coffee at us. It explodes on the bitumen and sprays over the bunch of girls sitting cross-legged with their backs against the PCYC wall.
If this were an American teen movie, the girls would squeal and run inside, distraught at their dresses being spattered with cold milky coffee and backwash.
But this is Geraldton.
‘You fucken prick!’ Rosita Lopez shrieks, grabbing the carton and standing up in a rage. Her three friends follow suit.
‘Hey,’ I say quickly, sensing that shit’s about to get out of control. ‘Did you guys see where Charlie went?’
‘Cop THAT!’ Rosita screams, lobbing the carton back at the stoner who threw it. ‘Yeah, how’d you like that, you little bitch!’
The stoners hurl back a can of energy drink; something the colour of radiator coolant explodes from it and splatters all four girls.
‘Oh, it’s on!’ Chloe Smith roars. All four girls charge across the car park, shouting and swearing; the stoners flee for the safety of the basketball stadium.
‘Yeah, you better run!’ Rosita yells.
The girls congratulate themselves on vanquishing the stoners. As they cluster against the PCYC wall again, Rosita wipes her hands on the back of her dress and says, ‘Charlie went that way, Zeke. To the right. Nearly ran Chloe over.’
‘Right. Thanks,’ I say, blinking with surprise. I didn’t think she even heard me before.
I turn back to Hammer. ‘Weird. He lives in Spalding, I think. If he turned right, he must be going into town.’
‘I reckon I know where he’s goin’,’ an ocker voice says.
I almost forgot Matt was standing with us. He’s so quiet.
‘Where?’ I ask.
Matt pulls his car keys from his pocket. ‘I’ll drive us there.’
Matt has a little green army man blu-tacked to the dash of his car. The bottle-green figurine holds a semi-automatic, barrel pointed through the windscreen at anyone who might ever dare look in. I stare at it the whole way into town. The dappled orange streetlights play over him: dark and light, shadow and glow. When we get into town, there are too many lights on: the hypnotic dappling effect stops and I snap out of my mini-trance.
I wait until Matt glances my way to check for oncoming traffic, and jab my finger at the green army man. ‘What’s that for?’
He bites his lip. I don’t think he knows I can see him do it. ‘Oh. Someone gave it to me. I like the idea of him standing guard. I figure it means no-one will ever break into my car, y’know?’
Matt pulls into an empty bay on the side of the road.
‘Ya kiddin’ me,’ Hammer pipes up from the back as he sees where we are. He lunges forward, seat-belt off, grasping both front seats and jutting his squared jaw between me and Matt. ‘We goin’ clubbing?’
We’re stopped in the hub of the Geraldton club scene. There are only two clubs in town: The Igloo and The Circus. They’re about a hundred metres apart, and according to Robbie, the only difference between them is their names. There’s two other seedy pubs dotted in between them that makes Fitzgerald Street the axis of Saturday night booze-houndery in town.
Matt turns the engine off. ‘Not the clubs. There.’
He points across the street, at the black shape of the abandoned primary school silhouetted against the rising moonlight. Charlie’s pink scooter is propped against the waist-high wire fence that forms a perimeter. There are faded tin signs tied to the fence with bright yellow string.
‘The school?’ I say. ‘Why would Charlie go in there? Didn’t they shut it down for asbestos?’
‘In the walls, yeah,’ Matt says. ‘He doesn’t go inside it, but. He goes on the roof. It’s where he goes to get away from everything.’
Matt gets out of the car. Hammer follows.
‘C’mon, mate,’ Matt says. ‘This was your idea.’
‘But there’s asbestos in there. It could get in our lungs. Kill us.’
Hammer rolls his eyes. Matt raises an eyebrow at me. ‘Yeah. But it’s not like we’re smashing any walls down. We prob’ly won’t die. Come on.’
‘Or don’t,’ Hammer says. ‘Be a pussy if you want.’
He’s an obnoxious, schizo idiot, but he’s pressed the right buttons.
‘I’m not a pussy,’ I snap. ‘I’m coming!’
Apparently, in that moment, the risk of death is not quite as terrifying as being left out.
Matt leads us across the road. We all jump the wire fence. The other two are agile and fit. I’m out of shape and clumsy, struggling so much on the fence that Matt has to hold out his hand for me so I can vault myself over. I land badly and twist my ankle. When Matt asks if I’m okay, I say I am – but it hurts. I could never admit that to them.
‘I went to pre-school here,’ Hammer says. ‘Before we moved to Greenough. Kissed my first girlfriend over there, under the slide.’
‘In pre-school?’ I blurt out.
‘Yeah. Why? When did you first kiss a girl?’
Judgmental butterflies crowd out the enclosure of my stomach. Apart from pecking Sabrina on the cheek tonight, I’ve never kissed a girl. ‘Bit later. Hey, how do we get onto this roof?’
‘This should work,’ Matt says.
His way up involves a knotted tree-trunk, a section of hard metal fencing, and a drainpipe. Again, Matt and Hammer dart up like it’s nothing. I get half way, but Hammer has to pull me over the gutter. I feel like a blue whale being hauled back into the ocean.
‘Thanks,’ I say. My leg is stinging. My suit pants are ripped: the grey fabric flaps in the breeze. There’s a straight red line of blood blossoming over my thigh.
‘All good?’ Hammer says.
‘Of course,’ I say. I don’t want to sound like a pussy, but I’m silently freaking out. I’m bleeding from a cut from a rusty gutter on a building full of asbestos. I might get tetanus and mesothelioma in the same night.
Damn Charlie for coming here.
‘There he is,’ Matt says.
I follow the other boys along the edge of the tiled roof and around a corner.
Charlie’s sprawled out on the sloped roof of the kindergarten block, shoes hooked into the gutter like a foothold. His body melds into the slant, hands behind his head like he’s reclining on a plastic sunlounge at a Hawaiian resort. A lit cigarette dangles from his mouth, the smallest wisp of smoke curling up from it.
‘Cigarettes taste like shit,’ he declares, watching us pick our way across the roof. He flicks the butt into the gutter. ‘Zero out of ten. Would not recommend.’
‘Coulda told ya that,’ Hammer says. ‘What the hell you doin’ up here, mate?’
‘Thinking about dying,’ Charlie says. ‘You didn’t need to follow me.’ He casts a sullen look at Matt. ‘Why’d you have to go and bring them all up here, Matty?’
Matt reaches the same side of the roof as Charlie. He flattens his body out beside Charlie, except he’s much longer and just about stacks it. I don’t think we’d die if we fell from here. Just break a lot of bones.
‘You okay?’ Matt asks.
‘Nup,’ Charlie says.
‘I’m so sorry, man. I never knew the jocks swapped the names,’ I tell him, following Hammer onto the slanted roof and laying my body uncomfortably on the tiles. All four of us are stretched out in parallel lines – all bent at the same angle, but none of us touching. The roof better not break.
‘Honestly, Zeke, shut up,’ Charlie says. ‘Not being rude, but just shut up. You can’t undo what happened. Nobody can. It’s done. Everyone in school saw it. I just want to die.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Oh really? Have you been crowned queen of the dance, Zeke? Did you get your bike spray-painted pink, like a girl’s? Do you have any idea what it’s like?’ He rummages in a plastic bag beside him. ‘Everyone laughed.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Me neither,’ Hammer and Matt say at the same time.
Charlie unscrews a bottle of something brown. Whiskey or bourbon. Or are they the same thing? He takes a quick swig and his face contorts. ‘Fuck’s sake. This tastes like shit, too. Everything tastes like shit.’
‘Acquired taste,’ Matt says. ‘Go on. Sharing is caring.’
Charlie takes another drink and passes the bottle; Matt takes a long drink. ‘Nah. It’s good.’
‘I wish I’d never hooked up with Kevin,’ Charlie says to the sky. ‘I felt it, when I rocked up at his house that night. Something was wrong. There were kids’ toys around. Family man. I should’ve known. But I was horny. It’s my fault. I wanted to get off. I think I knew he was still married, deep down.
I really did wreck their marriage.’ He swallows. ‘I’ve been thinking this ever since it happened. I’m no better than Fitzy. What he did to me, I did to those two Stratton kids. I ripped their home apart. They’ll grow up with divorced parents now, because of me.’
‘No way,’ Matt says. ‘His marriage. His family. His fault.’
‘It doesn’t feel that way.’
‘He’s a seedy old fuck,’ Matt says. ‘You’re sixteen. He’s a pedo. His fault.’
Charlie brightens up suddenly. ‘Kevin’s the one who fucked up, right? But I’m the bad guy. Everyone in town hates me, not him.’
‘Make up your mind,’ Hammer says drily. ‘Is it your fault or his?’
‘His,’ Matt says before Charlie can answer.
Charlie’s mouth curves in the corner, his face softening for a moment. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ But then his face hardens again, like setting cement. ‘I still wish I could undo the whole thing. I just wanna go back in the closet. Maybe I can just say the whole thing was a phase and forget any of it happened.’
‘It might be a phase,’ Hammer says. Nobody responds to that.
‘This town won’t forget, but,’ Matt says.
‘Nobody ever would,’ I say. ‘Even if you got married, everyone would always look at you and whisper behind your back.’
‘My life is fucked,’ Charlie declares.
Hammer wipes his mouth and passes me the bottle. Some bourbon with a drawing of a bird on the label. I splash some on the cut on my leg. It stings and sizzles. Then I realise what a mess I am – my pants ripped and stained with blood, bourbon and layers of dirt. No idea how I’m going to explain this to Mum and Dad. I raise the bottle to my mouth and chug a bit down. Now I know what people mean when they call spirits rocket fuel. You could light a match in my mouth right now and I’m pretty sure I’d launch into the stratosphere. The burn!
We lay there, passing the bottle back and forth. Nobody except Matt seems to like the bourbon, but we all drink it. My face glows.
One of the beautiful things about living in a small town is there’s no light pollution. You can see every star in the night sky, even the ones that don’t have names. They’d be invisible in the city, but here you can see them, struggling, twinkling against the black.
It’s a full moon tonight. Maybe a bit less than a perfect circle. When I was younger I used to bounce around on the trampoline, then when the sun set I’d lay down and watch the clouds scud by and change colour from periwinkle blue to orange. When the moon rose, I’d wonder if there was a boy somewhere looking at the same moon, maybe in Europe or America or Africa. Would we meet one day and talk about how we were both looking at the moon at the same time?
Is he here, on this roof, with me?
‘I never thought that I’d meet any other gay guys in Gero,’ I say. ‘It’s cool that we found each other.’
‘I’m not gay,’ Hammer says.
‘Me neither,’ Matt says.
‘Ha!’ Charlie snorts. ‘Then you’re both more fucked in the head than I am.’
‘I’m not gay,’ Hammer snarls.
‘Come off it,’ Charlie says. ‘It’s just us. It’s only the four of us here right now. Tomorrow you can go back to lying to yourself if you want. But tonight, none of us is fooling anyone else. We can’t fool each other. We’re poofs, every single one of us on this roof.’
‘Poofs on a roof,’ I chuckle. ‘If only it rhymed properly. You could make a song about it.’
‘A shit song,’ Hammer says.
‘I reckon you can like guys without being gay,’ Matt says.
‘Semantics,’ Charlie mutters, taking a drink. ‘You still like the cock.’
Matt falls silent. He shifts his body on the tiles, face to Charlie, so I can’t quite see whether he’s angry or upset or what. But then he surprises me. ‘Well, what’s not to like?’ He guffaws, loud and annoying and off-key, if a laugh can be off-key. Suddenly, Matt chucks a little piece of gravel in the air and shouts into the night, ‘I LOVE DICK! ALWAYS HAVE. ALWAYS WILL!’
It’s so friggin weird that we all just crack up. Maybe the bourbon has something to do with it.
‘When did you first know?’ I ask him.
Matt tells us a story about some straight farmhand named Brent. ‘He’s the one who gave me that little green army man, Zeke,’ he finishes, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows hard.
‘What about you, Hammer?’ Charlie asks.
‘Not playing this game,’ Hammer says. ‘Don’t feel like talking about it.’
‘Zeke?’
‘Uh. One of my cousin’s cousins. We’re not blood relatives, so it’s okay. I was twelve. He helped me build a Lego spaceship and I wanted to be his best friend forever. You?’
‘Rocky.’
‘Rocky from your band?’
‘That’s messed up,’ Hammer says. ‘You can’t crack onto your mate. It would screw up the friendship.’
‘I never cracked onto him, and the friendship got screwed up anyway,’ Charlie says.
Suddenly we’re talking freely about things I never imagined I would ever talk about. We talk about wanking. How often we do it. Techniques. Charlie likes to sit on his left hand until it goes numb and then pretend someone else is pulling him off. Hammer jerks off into socks instead of tissues. Matt does it in the toilet, not in the bedroom. We talk about porn. The best sites. The best types. Fetishes. Everything I never thought I’d tell anyone, I tell these three guys on the roof.
The bottle gets empty pretty fast. My head is spinning and I know if I try to stand up I’ll fall off the roof and kill myself.
Charlie lets out a giant burp. ‘First celebrity crush?’
‘I dunno if he’s famous enough,’ Matt says. ‘The bloke who married Pink.’
‘Casey something?’
‘Carey something. All those tattoos. Fuck yeah.’
‘Wolverine,’ Hammer says. ‘Muscles.’
‘Negan from The Walking Dead,’ I say.
‘The fuck?’ Charlie says.
‘Ha! Zeke’s into daddies.’ Matt laughs again, loud and off-key.
‘No seriously, Zeke, Negan is a murderous psycho,’ Charlie says sharply, fighting away a puzzled smile. The look in his eyes is both horrified and somehow impressed.
‘Yeah, but he’s a hot murderous psycho,’ I say, with a laugh. My cheeks are too warm for me to care what he thinks about my taste in men, or the kinks I might be into. ‘You?’
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br /> ‘Billie Joe Armstrong.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Jesus, that’s embarrassing for you. Lead singer of Green Day.’
‘Imagine if someone left the club and walked over to the school to take a piss on the side of the school or something,’ Matt says suddenly. ‘Reckon they could hear everything we’ve been saying?’
‘Shit,’ Hammer says.
‘Oh, I know how to take care of that,’ Charlie says. The plastic bag rustles. ‘I come up here some nights just to peg them with these …’
We all lean on our elbows to see what he’s holding. It’s a carton of eggs.
‘For real?’ Matt says.
‘Robbie’s car got egged once,’ I say, frowning. ‘It messed up the paint on his car. It’s not a cool thing to do to someone.’
‘Total and complete humiliation at a school dance isn’t cool, either,’ Charlie says. He plucks an egg from the carton. ‘Sometimes, dude, you gotta take all the shit life’s given you and chuck it at someone else.’
In one swift movement, he leans over the peak of the school’s roof and lobs the egg hard and high at the queue for The Circus.
It smashes into the back of some muscly guy with a too-tight black T-shirt. Yolk slides down his back as he spins around, shouting, ‘Who did that? Who thinks they’re a funny fucker? Ay? Ay?’
‘Charlie, get down!’ I cry.
Charlie’s eyes shine in the moonlight as he watches the meathead whirling around, accosting random strangers on the street.
‘You don’t need to hide,’ he says, grinning. ‘They never think to look up.’
‘Gimme one,’ Hammer says.
For the next ten minutes, the punters lining up for the nightclub get pelted with raw eggs at random intervals. Hammer, Matt and Charlie take turns to lob them over. They develop a strategy: hit one person, then wait until that person and their mates are inside the club, so when they strike a fresh target, there are no repeat witnesses.
‘Go on, Zeeky,’ Hammer says. ‘Just chuck one. The cops won’t bloody arrest ya.’
‘It’s not because of that. I just don’t think it’s a nice thing to do.’
‘Come on, Zeke!’ Charlie moans. ‘Grow a backbone. For once in your life, don’t be perfect. Get angry. Get mean. Think of all those jerk-offs who gave you hell in the change room, like Hammer.’
Invisible Boys Page 21
