The Truth & Addy Loest

by Kim Kelly

  She’d already decided she’d spend half her felafel money on a further schooner, even before Dan the Man appeared out of the tobacco haze. He waved, an index finger raised, from across the room, above the Elbowette horde, as though he’d sought her out, and only her, with that mild, sweet-boy, Elizabethan smile.

  Don’t be deceived, Addy Loest – he’s a pothead.

  While she might not have remembered much about that first night they’d met over Trivial Pointlessness, she recalled most distinctly now that he’d rolled and lit at least three spliffs in the course of that evening: he kept his stash in a black silk pouch embroidered with blue-and-white stars that had fallen from the sky along the road to Marrakesh. How was it that she could remember this detail but not the insult she’d hurled his way? Maybe he’d been too stoned to notice, anyway; hopefully. She’d have bet all her felafel money he was stoned right now.

  He said: ‘Hi, Addy.’ He was so cool, guitar case in one hand, pushing back his shaggy long hair with the other, he didn’t appear to notice the room around him; he might have been approaching a bus stop. Definitely off his face.

  ‘Hello,’ Addy finally replied like a normal person, although she swayed slightly on her feet.

  ‘Gee,’ he said. Who the hell says ‘gee’? He looked her over with a sort of awed nod-shake of the head, then he said: ‘Great dress.’ And he walked on, towards the stage.

  Then her heart did something very strange: it just about leapt out of her chest, wanting to skitter after him.

  How drunk are you?

  Not nearly drunk enough.

  She skulled the rest of the beer in her hand and turned back to the bar for something a little stronger: ‘A schooner of Riesling, please.’

  As they say in the classics, don’t mix the grape and grain – but Addy Loest hadn’t read that book. After her schooner of Riesling, which was near half a litre of the nastiest cask wine imaginable, and four further beers, followed by three generous glugs of green ginger rotgut and a shot of whatever shit Drummer Boy had in his hipflask, Addy Loest was as smashed as was possible for a human her size to be and still remain on her feet. As she had not eaten a thing since that beetroot-and-onion sandwich at lunchtime, it was astonishing that she hadn’t lost consciousness.

  There were, however, several important things that Addy would not remember from the run of events that night in anything other than a surreally juddering collection of disparate pictures and emotions.

  Among them, lurching back along King Street, getting jostled by a skinhead girl with a safety pin through her nose and shouting after her in reply: ‘If you’re the face of white supremacy, sweetie, we’re all fucked.’ Roz dragging her away: ‘Jesus, Addy, you’re going to get killed one day.’

  Then home again, at Flower Street, at about one in the morning, she hijacked the stereo, ‘My turn! My turn!’ and, standing on the coffee table, with an audience comprised of various Elbows and Tunas and their attendant tutus, she started belting out the choral section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, punching the air: ‘Freude! Freude!’

  The gathered lost interest quickly, as Roz had begun cutting up a little baggie of speed on top of the piano, on the back of Addy’s telephone book there, but one devoted audient remained: Dan the Man. He sat on the floor at Addy’s feet, head down rolling another spliff, and at first she thought the stereo was playing tricks on her when a baritone seemed to stray from the choir, the voice drifting rather close. Except it was Dan, joining her at the song, looking up at her, smiling: ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!’ And so on: words whose very sounds translated into hardcore, insistent joy, the joy of everyman togetherness, of friendship, of the better angels of western civilisation, of getting drunk on the best wine there was – love. She gave herself over to the rapture of it, the fantasy of singing with the Berliner Philharmoniker; the crazy delight that someone else was sharing this with her. She was Beethoven’s Tochter aus Elysium – she was his Daughter of Bliss. She was the Ode to Joy.

  Until the needle jumped and skidded along a scratch on the old record, hissing and crackling into the blank black vinyl grooves at the end. But she was too distracted now to bother trying to get the music going again, too curious to be disappointed; as the sounds of the party closed back around her, she asked this boy at her feet: ‘How the frick do you know the words?’

  He stood up, laughter in his stoned-sleepy eyes, and those straight white teeth smiling and smiling: ‘Oh, I don’t really know the words. It’s just a family thing. Just something stupid we do at parties.’

  She thought: You are stupidly handsome.

  She thought as well: Addy, be careful. You are too stupidly pissed to judge.

  She wasn’t a good judge of anything in any state, she decided on realising that although she stood on the coffee table, he was still eye level with her. How could that be? He hadn’t seemed so tall before; had she shrunk, or had he grown?

  He asked her: ‘How do you know the words?’

  She didn’t tell him she used to sit by the radiogram at home after school, before her father returned from work, playing it over and over again, her brother, Nick, yelling at her: ‘Would you turn that fucken thing off, you idiot!’ She only told this Dan boy: ‘I just like it.’

  ‘Righto.’ He chuckled, lighting his spliff.

  She stared at him then, swaying a bit more than slightly there on the coffee table, remembering that they really had just sung a good portion of the choral section of the Ode to Joy together, in German, or thereabouts; she said, testing the reality: ‘Are you German?’

  ‘No.’ He took a deep drag and exhaled. ‘My grandfather is, sort of.’

  She asked, like an idiot: ‘Does he drink a lot?’

  And Dan laughed fully, a loud, round sound: ‘Shit no. He can’t sing either. He’s just nuts – he’s almost ninety-one. He’s amazing. I’m named after him, the youngest grandkid, and I don’t drink either. I just get fried, a lot. Don’t tell him that.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she replied as though it might be a possibility that she’d meet this grandfather in the next five minutes. She found it amazing that she was talking to someone who didn’t drink, and that she hadn’t noticed this before, when they’d first met, possibly because she’d been drunk. Indeed, she couldn’t recall when exactly they had met. She asked him, inside this wonder: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dan,’ he said, with a questioning frown, the sort of frown that suggested surprise that she didn’t know his name; he made it plain: ‘Daniel Ackerman.’

  ‘Hm,’ she said. The name meant nothing to her, but tears sprang, sudden and brimming: drunken tears, yes; tears that this boy had a German grandfather, an amazing grandfather – a live grandfather of any kind – and that he was just cool and normal about it; tears that the only grandfather of her own that she knew anything about had been a lawyer, a small-town solicitor, who died when her father was little, before the war, and was nothing more now that a grunt across the dining table, a wordlessly heartbreaking reason to work and work and work harder; tears that she was such a freak by comparison to the boy in front of her – to anyone; and so damn stupidly, embarrassingly drunk.

  He said: ‘Are you all right, Addy?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sit outside for a little while.’ She had to get some fresh air, try to stop the world from spinning, lurching. Oh, holy frick.

  She jumped down off the coffee table, grabbed a cigarette from Roz’s packet there, half squashed from where she’d trodden on it, and then she went out through the kitchen, trying not to stagger too much, feeling like a football tottering for the touch line; she swiped the gas lighter from the stove on the way through, and slumped down on the back step between No Name’s dish and the beaming moon, nearing full. The gas lighter was nearing empty, though, and try as she might, she couldn’t get that cigarette lit.

  ‘Here.’ Dan sat on the ground below her, holding out his light
er, cupping the flame. It was a Zippo flip-top, silver and solid. So cool. And the smoke bit into the back of her throat as he said: ‘I … um …’

  She managed to locate and focus on his eyes; they were brown, warm brown, like his hair that now fell across his forehead, a tangled wave; she wanted to brush it from his face, only she’d never done anything like that in her life; instead, she said: ‘Um?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked away, and the light from the kitchen caught the flush of his cheek; he said: ‘Ah …’ He looked away at the weed-sown patch of bricks that passed for a yard, and all his shadowed angles – jaw, cheek, knee, boot tip – were a jumbled elegance, a bundle of Apollo’s arrowheads at rest.

  She thought she’d try for a witty quip at his present inarticulacy: ‘You might look like a poet, but you’re not much of one, are you.’

  ‘Oof.’ He turned to look back at her, sleepy smile pained: ‘You don’t hold back on an insult, do you.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean —’ She didn’t mean to insult his song-writing, not out aloud. She’d never criticise another’s attempts at creative expression so cruelly, no matter how woeful. The chorus of one of Elbow’s best examples rang in her ears: ‘The stars in her eyes scatter at the graveside of my desires. She cuts me and I bleed her lies.’ Awful, but not so awful the author should be punished for it.

  He said: ‘I know what you meant, Addy.’

  Addy. Her name ricocheted around the high tin fence and pounded into her chest; regret stung with whatever other unremembered insults she’d chucked at him the night before last: ‘Really, I —’

  ‘Really. I am a shit poet.’ He grinned, as if proud of the fact. ‘I get fried, very fried, and see what happens, see what crap comes out of my head. But someone’s got to do it. I don’t think we’d pull much of a crowd if we went instrumental. And if we played covers, you’d find out what bad musicians we are as well.’

  ‘You’re honest,’ Addy said, impressed, surprised, staring at him, searching for other words herself.

  ‘Best policy,’ he said, and then he looked away once more. ‘Um …’

  Idiot. ‘Did I just insult you again?’ He’s such a sweet guy and you’re a mean bag of spiders, aren’t you.

  ‘No. Hm …’ He took another deep drag on his spliff and asked the fence: ‘What are you doing on Friday night?’

  ‘Ha!’ The thought of what her Friday night would bring eclipsed any understanding that he might have been about to ask her out. ‘Friday!’ She smacked her knee and dropped the cigarette she’d forgotten all about, anyway: ‘On Friday night, I am going to a boxing match, believe it or not.’

  ‘What?’ He squinted at the incongruity of the idea.

  ‘Yep.’ She nodded, and wished she hadn’t: the world sloshed around, bouncing off the inside of her skull; she groped at the words, enunciating slowly: ‘I am going to a boxing match and I am going against my will. My father is making me go – and boy oh boy, I don’t want to go. But I have to. I have to go and watch my brother beat up some other guy. Biff. Biff. Biff.’ She pumped little fists at the night. ‘I have to catch the bus out to Kingsford, too – that’s just as bad. I hardly even know where that is.’

  She didn’t understand Dan Ackerman’s reply at first; he had to say it twice: ‘I’ll drive you, if you like.’

  And that made her tearful again; she had to put her hands flat on the concrete of the step so that she wouldn’t fall off it: ‘You’d drive me? In your car? You have a car? Which you would drive me to Kingsford in? You’d do that for me?’ How drunk am I? Oh my God, totally rat-arsed.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Dan, still smiling, smiling. Such a sweet, sweet smile. ‘No worries. It’s not far from my parents’ place – in Coogee. We could have Chinese at the club – I always take a girl to the classiest places.’

  ‘Really?’ She could feel her bottom lip begin to tremble, overwhelmed by his sweetness. ‘You’d do that for me?’

  He laughed, so loud, so free, and she clung to the sound as though it might keep her upright.

  She stared at him again, wanting to talk more, wishing her brain wasn’t so incapacitated; eventually, she found a question, her least ridiculous uncertainty: ‘Are you at uni?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Electrical engineering. Final year.’

  ‘Get out of town!’ She smacked her knee again; she hadn’t picked him as science-minded at all; she hadn’t paid enough attention to him as a fellow human to imagine much about him at all, apart from being the ghost of John Donne sent to taunt her with the fraying cuffs of his denim jeans. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ He flicked his spliff end against the back gate and it made a soft pling on the corrugated tin. ‘Got to get a real job one day. Maybe in a studio or something, if I’m lucky, but working in sound in some kind of way, hopefully.’

  She looked at his hands and imagined them twisting and fixing wires: working. He seemed so suddenly real and perfect, she couldn’t help letting a simple truth speak for itself: ‘That’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Beautiful?’ His laughter was gentle, querying.

  She wasn’t sure what she might have just said; she scrambled at the nearest thought that didn’t have anything to do with how she might have wanted to kiss him; she attempted to say something that sounded intelligent: ‘The way electricity goes down the wires and round and round. It’s beautiful. Magical.’ What the frick?

  But he said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s magic, too.’

  Inside the house, at their backs, the music blared, someone turning up the stereo, The Cure plunking and scratching at the night with the song, ‘Let’s Go to Bed’. Addy could have said, ‘Ah, now there’s an example of poetry that’s just as awful as yours, and they’re raking in millions.’ But at that moment one of the neighbours stuck his head up over the fence, yelling down at them: ‘Turn that fucken music off or I’m calling the cops.’

  Fair enough. The people on that side had only moved in a few weeks ago, and they were yuppies – young urban professionals – husband-and-wife actual lawyers who must have wondered what they’d done buying in to Chippendale. Addy sympathised with the man’s upset, not that she could move to do anything about it.

  ‘No worries,’ said Dan. ‘Sorry, mate.’

  ‘I’m not your fucken mate.’ The neighbour was beyond annoyed.

  But Dan laughed at him: ‘Keep your fucken hair on. Mate.’ Then he left her and went inside; the music died.

  She stood and held onto the door frame for a little while. What am I doing? Why am I here? I hope the police don’t come and find me this wasted.

  You should be locked up. Thrown in the bin. Trash.

  She made it as far as the brown couch, where she lay down, curled in a corner of it under the pink paisley bedspread. HRH and Maaaahrtin returned from wherever they’d been; Roz made toasted cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. Addy could have done with a sandwich of any kind, except she was too far past it to eat. She fell into a doze as a pair of deep voices duelled, close by her, arguing about the treasurer’s plans for a broad-based consumption tax, Dan Ackerman sounding not very stoned as he said, ‘It’s an evil idea, hitting those who can least afford it the worst. What does Keating think he’s doing? It won’t fly.’ Addy opened an eye, smiling straight into the back of his head as he sat on the floor, against the seat-edge of the brown couch, his hair curling down around the collar of his shirt, his shoulders broad and ironing-board lean: He’s not a fascist at all, frayed denim or otherwise. Maaahrtin’s the fascist. Of course. Martin Chalmers, HRH’s med student, was such a clean-cut, bloodless conservative, he thought universal healthcare was a bridge too far towards communism and the annihilation of western civilisation. She must have got their voices somehow mixed up the other night – they were quite similar in low-note resonance, if not quite the same level of poshness. There it was, mystery solved, more or less.

  Order was restored to Addy’s understanding of the world now, at least temporarily. It had even stopped lurching about so furiously
.

  She would remember the drape of her arms around Dan Ackerman’s neck as he carried her upstairs.

  But she wouldn’t remember what happened next; she wouldn’t remember a thing.

  A POTENTIALLY LIFE-CHANGING

  DISASTER & OTHER SMALL,

  EPIC EVENTS

  Addy woke in a galloping panic at the usual hour around dawn, wondering where she was, how she got there, and why she was in so much pain. Her head was throbbing, and her stomach was clenched so tightly she thought she’d been stabbed – before she realised this was just a bad hangover and she was, in fact, in her own bed, safe and warm and —

  Naked.

  Or at least naked from the waist down. She looked under her quilt to see what she was wearing: an oversize yellow-and-white-striped singlet top she only ever wore to the beach, over her swimming cossies. And no underpants. Addy always wore underpants.

  What have I done?

  She sat up – far too quickly – so that she now felt she’d been stabbed in the head, multiple times. It’s never easy to distinguish a natural anxiety from the kind inspired by alcohol abuse, and Addy was as yet naïve to the idea of just how much the latter had begun to hurt her mind, but in this instance she leapt with the full force of both to the worst conclusion possible:

  You stupid, stupid slut.