Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 6

by Frank Moorhouse

  She waits for the call; they never use conventional greetings. She’ll pick up, key in the ignition, and he’ll fire right up, tell her what forms she took in his mind all day. How she transforms, lascivious shape shifter. Lying under the belly of cars, he discerns their twists, their puzzles. Methodical, dirty work, she envisions his greasy hand gripped around the telephone, black fingernails, an oily charcoal handprint a permanent brand on the receiver. She pictures that hand mark all over her white dress, a tribal imprint, marking her white skin, engine grease tangled in her hair. To be dirty and alive with it.

  He snatches these moments, when she’s left alone. Weeks of longing have spun just the right words, made lust articulate. It’s just the two of them tonight; on the line, in the world; like a long freeway at night with no one else on it. He tells her about sweat-soaked sheets, dull knives finding their way into the quick of his soul. Domestic leitmotifs boiled down to raw flesh, flayed. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, head and heart charred. Chapped lips, sunburnt cheeks from long drives with the top down through the ash clouds. He plays her records down the line, crackling folk songs of broken men, burned by doomed love affairs. Their pained voices ring in her mind, make her shiver. She puts a cool hand across the glass of the window, feels it respond to her touch, imagines it’s his wet brow.

  Stars & Stripes: A Dream of Life

  A dream of waking in a dark green forest. Rose petals stuck to my skin. A wine river flowing. Silhouette of a black bird in the sky. Burned out skeleton of a car abandoned in a clearing. Orange trees. A white gate of pearl. A man approaching, riding a silver palomino, through the trees. Heart quickening, blood in my veins, black and whispering as the rain. Dismounting, he comes to me, puts white bread into my mouth.

  The Call of the Wild [The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle]

  “Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce”...

  {definition: a chant in concert, an invocation, an incantation}

  Being Bruce Springsteen

  The wonder of what it’s like to be him. Like a fat-suit experiment, stepping inside his skin, climbing aboard his mind, and observing the reactions; what he sees; hearing the music in his mind; his intimacy with his instrument; signing an autograph in his name; the disparity of how his voice sounds in his head; how others treat him. The Boss.

  Like the strange sensation of travelling a familiar route for the first time as a passenger, not the driver. The pieces of life driven past countless times yet never observed, ephemeral delights: a brown dog running alongside a white house; a fig tree; a street called Philadelphia; a baby in a white bassinet in a front yard; a red door; and coming home in the dark, different all over again in the shadows.

  TRACK #8 GLORY DAYS

  Glory days well they’ll pass you by

  Glory days in the wink of a young girl’s eye

  A faded beauty, a former number-one crush. An up-the-block-stroll to her living room; Friday night. At ease with her kids put to bed, ice rattling in her glass, melting. Her bleached-out hair over her face, she tells him about walking past groups of boys, how she has to move to let them pass now, as if she were invisible to them. A strange sensation. And it’s not shyness: heads don’t turn back for a second look, let alone a first. Her triumphs, her trophy case, built from her looks. Her currency: the heatwave of interaction, her worth mounting by the gaze of others. Alone a year now, she stays up all night, living through old love stories replayed on the television. Those were the days, she sighs; she trades in clichés. She wishes she’d revelled in the pleasures of her own flesh for her own sake. Spent more time alone, submerged in solitude; explored her inner world; danced. And he’d touch her now, love to want to, but the compulsion just isn’t there.

  She talks and he recalls a meeting from a few nights before. A chance encounter at a roadside bar, him walking in, another guy walking out. An exclamation of recognition: a baseball star from high school. Pure finesse, on and off the field. His speedballs, his razor wit whizzing past you, shrinking you down to size in their wake. They talked over drinks, but all he could hear was glory days, glory days, glory days, an undercurrent, a mantra in a monotone. A broken record. And the girl up the block; the same story told two different ways.

  He’s uneasy now, swaying on what he thought was his elevated position. His cultivated new-age spirituality, his amateur psychology. A live-in-the-now man, rejecting the authenticity of the past. We never remember what happened, what we remember becomes what happened. The art of painting the past prettier. He tries not to stare at mirrors too long, or dwell on the failing of his body to keep up with his head’s demands, playing baseball with his boy on weekends. The sweet taste of reminiscing, sitting back, cool glass in hand, trying to recapture, just a little sliver of glory, a chaser. To dog the slippage of time, to cling on, to not be left in the shadowy wake of the meteor, clutching worn-out tales of former glory, their stale musty reek.

  >>>>interlude

  ‘What are you thinking about right now?’

  ‘Re-cataloguing my Springsteen collection.’

  <<<<

  Candy’s Room

  To get to your room I had to walk down the dark hall of your parents’ house. Pictures of your eclectic heroes on the walls: rock stars, Escher’s hands, a topless girl. Empty exotic beer bottles on a shelf. A single bed with plain blue sheets where you drew first blood. Victor’s feast of chocolate bars and a cup of black instant coffee in a cartoon mug. When we kissed I could hear my heart in my chest. You told me to close my eyes.

  You had a car. You were dark-eyed, brooding, carried an air of entitlement. A teenage dream. We’d have nowhere to go so we’d drive for hours. That intimate space, passenger in a boy’s car. A miniature escape, a dash of danger, city lights all around, traffic lights reflected pastel on my skin, then flashing underneath, coursing through my veins. Overpasses, long tunnels, under the bridge, over killjoy speed bumps of suburbia. In an air-conditioned bubble of hip hop and dance music that made you feel omnipotent at the wheel, saving us from conversation. The strange, intense joy of being mobile. A horizontal freefall.

  I could die with you on the streets tonight.

  The slow burn of time between visitations; so much life to get through before I could ride with you again. The passive, waiting woman, while you made the decision. You could summon me or not, whether I appealed to your mood or not.

  I didn’t want to go home so we slept in the back of your car at the beach, your windows fogged over by morning, crystallised by the cold sea air. Daylight creatures, joggers and dog walkers, peering in at us. You took off to find a bathroom and I followed in pursuit. A huge lilac jacaranda in heavy dress; several fresh blooms had floated onto the pavement, dawn’s discarded plumage. I watched your long denim legs in front of me; yes, no, yes, no; if you avoided standing on them, it was real love. Fate’s kiss. Like picking petals off a stem, he loves me, he loves me not, a mantra in time with your steps. A nursery rhyme. And I knew you didn’t see them, your heel left them bruised, bleeding their scent into the new day. But I kept following.

  You tried to shake me off your trail. You tried to make me hate you. Asked me what colour my eyes were. Told me about the girl you knew who gave you butterflies, said she cast a spell on you, that you’d never felt that way before. I felt like a failure, that I had to ramp up some magnetism within me to lure you back. Then one night, you drove me up a different road. I knew of it. Girls lingered in the shadows, spaced out, marking their own territory. It was a cold night. Look at that one, you said, slowing down, pointing. She was like a glass soldier, standing erect, stoic. Plaid knee-length skirt and boots, long sleeves, but thin. She looks like a school teacher, who’d pay her? And on you went up the strip, weighing up the goods.

  Darker and darker, dignity dimming with the dusk. A wall of sound, the clamour of dense instrumentation as I undressed myself. You never made a move until the lights were out.

  I woke up, blue morning light. A riff ringing in my ears. You were standing over me, smile, a flash
. I could see myself in the photograph, body twisted in sheets, slitted eyes, a strange pale urchin. A flashback to a bus ride, overhearing two girls behind me talk about a boy they knew who took snapshots of his girlfriends naked and put them in a scrapbook.

  I try not to wonder.

  TRACK #9 BRILLIANT DISGUISE

  Tonight our bed is cold

  Lost in the darkness of our love

  God have mercy on the man

  Who doubts what he’s sure of

  She’s a bright new thing, a new star in the sky, wrapped in his arms. Her female scent, a shifting bouquet, the light soft through her hair, small winking strobe lights wincing down from the ceiling, reflecting off the mirrored walls, the mirror ball. The overkill fog of a smoke machine. His fast forward heart, the terror of contact with her; he can’t see her eyes. Once ensnared, he thought, once he knew for sure she was his, the all-at-sea feel would abate. She’s watching the band, the air thick with their four-piece male allure, he can see it changing the women all around him. Their music-making sweat, black denim, animal hide, their howls of pleasure as it all comes together, the artful distortion. A song about a nightmare, waking up in a strange dark city. A glimpse of a cloaked lover through the shadows, the grim intuition that she’s the only way out but she eludes you, you’re doomed to stumble after her for eternity, a loveless vagabond, dagger to the heart. Message close to his skin.

  She’s far away, removed from the body weighed down by the music, in the arms of the man. Someone’s calling her name and she follows the sound, via the red haze of a lucid dream. A weeping willow by a river at night, the still surface reflecting the world upside down; a parallel universe. She parts the drooping fronds, peels away the mask, slipping her secrets between the lips of her pillowcase. The power she feels because she cares the least, her hands, and only hers, on the wheel of this thing. Smooth leather sliding under her palms, hugging the gentle curves.

  He’s hanging onto the bumper and being pulled along. Sparks flying from golden soles. He tries to catch them all like falling stars when they’re alone in the dark: loving woman, faithful man at pitch-perfect play. Fingers entwined, palm to palm, blushing pilgrim’s kiss. The roadlines merging, twisting fates fuse into the future, that’s what the gypsy swore, under heavy lidded eyes, under heavy hooded cloak. Love conducted in the dark, senses heightened, sureness dulled, lost in the ebb and flow. His fingers slip along the smoothness of her jawline, no snag of rough edges, to his surprise, hers slip under the fray, cold air on new skin as he’s flayed, unveiled.

  Rockstar Chronology

  Know your instrument:

  high school report card: loner, misfit, just wanted to play his guitar.

  Lean learning years, hours alone in your bedroom, wooden body in your lap, the ghost in the machine, necromancy, trying to bring it to life, make it talk.

  The impetus—to impress girls who don’t even know you exist. Fertile ground, the conditions are right by which to flourish, to thrive.

  Create a transformable self by the powers of the imagination:

  You serve your apprenticeship -

  a wandering gypsy from band to band.

  A halo of belief, a record deal: the new Dylan.

  A swag of songs -

  three minute orgasms followed by oblivion.

  Two albums -

  public indifference; there’s gotta be a way from here to there.

  But there’s nothing else for it. Nothing else for you.

  Your last shot, you give it your all, I wanna know if love is real...

  SCORCH THE EARTH

  Poet of a generation:

  we’re at one with you, same time, same place, as you come on the radio. But in concert your flesh comes alive. A boogying storyteller, not too scared to sweat.

  A long way down a different road

  having to remember where you are every morning.

  From the cacophony of screaming fans and roaring band each night—to alone in the still, cold macaroni and cheese, warm beer, wired all night. Sleep through the day.

  Life = tragedy, broken by moments of unworldly bliss that make tragedy bearable = pop music.

  TRACK #10 HUMAN TOUCH

  Ain’t no mercy on the streets of this town

  Ain’t no bread from heavenly skies

  Ain’t nobody drawin’ wine from this blood

  It’s just you and me tonight

  Afternoon light in the street she grew up in. Trouble in the heartland. Nowhere to go but back to the start. Kicking sandcastles of a failed union built on pretence, a dream of what love should look like, forcing the real to fit the shape of the imagined. The last time she saw him, pouring a bottle of red wine over his head—he left—and she was left to clean it all up, the carnage of their togetherness a crimson flood on the carpet, the pattern oddly beautiful, a passionate deluge in the shape of a heart, a real one. She lies on her childhood bed playing his favourite jazz, the letter folded three times, held in one hand, brushed against the other palm, a steel brush on a snare drum. An offer inked on the pages. Distilled basic truths, human needs; someone to talk to, someone to touch.

  She realises she hadn’t even known what his handwriting looked like. The twang of a rarely plucked string inside her when she saw his signature. The strange voodoo she had played in her mind for the longest hours clotting the longest days and weeks had worked, somehow—she had conjured him. Her midnight telepathy, her scent in the night had flooded his dreams, licked his neck while he slept. Her fragmented reflection in the beads of sweat on his brow.

  Sultry heat of the day weighing her down, eyelids slick, her body curled like a pale guitar in her pink silk underwear, longing to be a strong woman, beckoned by the feeble-fisted certainty of childhood, seduced by her old surrounds. Her hands made for holding the ice-cream cones, while her dad held the car keys, key chains revealing character, driving trophies of foreign knickknacks; to her a small percussive instrument.

  The price of losing so much greater than having that which you desire. Push, pull, call and respond. In her chrysalis of dry safety there is no large hand, no embrace, and that’s all he asks for, all he offers, what she craves the most.

  Coda

  Her brain takes a vacation just to give her heart more room

  Rising sun streaking across her aviators like gasoline rainbows. Wind in her hair, wild heart, open skies. The pages of the scrapbook flutter, empty. Their contents now ghosts on the highway.

  She presses ‘next’ on the luminous music dial just before the close of each song—six-string possibility, endless musical combinations—if songs don’t have an ending, they play on and on in your mind forever.

  Broken white lines as far as the eye can see.

  Pedal to the floor; she’s crossed the state line.

  I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.