Glory and consequence

Every moral has its story
And every story has an end.
Every battle has its glory
And its consequence.
- Ben Harper, 1997

It was a subdued trip back. McCarthy, who’d been noble enough to grace us with his presence for the homeward leg (largely after being evicted from the Landcruiser by the rest of Sagittaria on the Missy Higgins Precedent, i.e. not being pretty enough) was still off-the-air about Andrea, pensive and cranky. I was preoccupied, cogitating over whatever it was that had gone on last night, trying to work out how I really felt about it. Jeff just had a monumental hangover. The other complication was that the piffling annual leave which McCarthy had managed to accrue so far at the Star had run out as of Friday, and he was expected back at work bright and early Monday morning. So he absolutely, positively, had to be there overnight. We considered sending him by courier but they had a policy against carrying potentially toxic biologicals; after last night’s ‘nightcap’ kebab in Airlie, he was producing same at an alarming rate. Just served to underline the fact that we had a loooonnng trip ahead of us - some fourteen hundred kays - and cranking the windows every five minutes wasn’t doing much for the fuel economy either.

We left Airlie Beach shortly after ten on Sunday morning; three fuel stops, two meal breaks, a dozen changes of CD and several driver changes later, we rolled into Mountain View Drive with the digital clock on the postie van’s stereo reading 4:14 AM. Eighteen hours and change on National Highway One. By the time we’d lugged all the gear and locked it in the garage for security, it was nearing five - the sky was beginning to lighten with the coming of the new day. At which point the Jeff chose to flake out on the dodgy brown couch downstairs. Given that he’d taken the last leg of the trip into Lismore, he had an excuse for skipping the pleasantries, like saying ‘See you in the morning,’ or taking off his boots.

“What’s on for today with you?” I asked McCarthy as we staggered up the stairs from the garage.

He scratched his head, trying to remember. “Fuckin’ Casino saleyards,” he mumbled. “Yearling sales. Supposed to head out with young Thommo first thing.”

Gavin Thompson was the Star’s disturbingly earnest, straight-from-high-school junior shitkicker photographer, and usually got paired with the junior shitkicker staff writer for all the jobs deemed worthy only for the junior shitkicker staffers to do, like covering the yearling sales at the fuckin’ Casino saleyards.

“Going to grab some zeds first?”

“No point,” he observed dolefully, glancing around the kitchen. “May as well crank some coffee on and ride it through to sun-up. Got some sleep in the car on that last leg from Brisvegas, so I’ll be OK. Neck hurts like a bastard though… You boys are off to the farm later in the day?”

“Yeah. Ditches to dig, barns to raise, chooks to feed.”

“Mate, you’ll be ‘feeding the chooks’ for some time, it’s all you’ll have left once Jess hears about you and Artemisia.”

“There is no me and Artemisia,” I replied flatly. “Anyway, that’s an argument for later in the day, I’m off to bed.”

“Half your luck, you bastard,” he cursed. I grinned and sauntered off down the hall. “Oh, yeah, one other thing…”

I turned back. “Yeah mate?”

“Despite everything,” he offered, “it’s been one hell of a fuckin’ ride, hey?”

“You fuckin’ know it,” I concurred, clasping his outstretched hand in some poor, convoluted imitation of a yo-bro-homey handshake (which we’d developed and patented several years back.) This was as close to McCarthy got to apologising for being an arse for the past week. “And more to come, of course. This won’t be the last Tour de Pants, mark my words.”

He grinned, and returned to his coffee tendering duties; I made straight for my bedroom, swept all the shit off my bed that I’d thrown onto it when packing my bags two weeks ago, and collapsed unceremoniously on top. I felt a sharp digging pain between my shoulder blades; probably just another symptom of trying to sleep in the passenger seat of a Nissan Skyline. Or, I considered, digging a hand behind my back in search of the source, possibly it was just because I was sleeping on the flat’s cordless phone. For a few seconds I contemplated getting up to put it back on the charger, but my sense of duty to the house at large was trumped by flat-out exhaustion; I tossed it underhand onto the carpet and sank into a black, dreamless sleep.

Bad call on the dereliction of duty, I realised, as the phone screamed at me from across the room. Just like the bastard to still have battery life after a fortnight off charge. My clock radio reported it was now a little after nine-thirty. Probably Jessica - just what I needed in my shattered condition. I scooped up the cordless - it’d become entangled with a pair of her panties which had been casually flung into this corner of the room, in the preliminaries to some enjoyable but now forgotten experience. I felt a pang of guilt and shame; one of each. Dickhead.

“Chateau Dodgy, hello?” I answered in a gravelly voice. Then swore, pressed ‘Talk’ and said it again.

“Yeah hi there, it’s Gavin Thompson from the Northern Star…”

“Oh g’day Gavin. You’d be looking for our Sam I guess?” I picked myself out of bed and began slowly making my way towards the living room, where he’d last been sighted.

“Yeah, it’s just that… I’ve been expecting Sam to come by and pick me up this morning, we’re supposed to be out at Casino saleyards by ten, and I was wondering whether he’d forgotten or didn’t know the address or whatever. I knew you guys were heading back from up the coast so I was worried you hadn’t made it back or something. I called work and they hadn’t seen him in this morning…”

I reached the lounge room. McCarthy was slumped on the couch, comatose and drooling. His mug of coffee, by now cold, was still perched on the armrest. He was not available for comment.

“Ah no, they wouldn’t have I suppose… Unfortunately Sam’s not going so well. Don’t worry, we got back OK, it’s just that he was tripped up by a dodgy hamburger at some roadside joint on the trip home, or something like that - he’s been in a bit of a state, up all night, firing at both ends if you know what I mean. He wanted to come in, really he did, but we convinced him to camp here and get some rest in case he came across more, erm, issues.”

“Jeez, sounds crook,” Gavin noted. “Look, don’t worry about it, I’ll just head over myself. Reckon I can probably handle it on my own.”

“Been to the odd saleyards in your time?”

“Yeah, the old man’s run thousands of head through there since I was a nipper, can’t say Casino yearling sales change much over the years.”

“That’s great - cheers for that. if McCarthy surfaces later in the day and starts keeping stuff down, I’ll let you know - could have a career as a photo-journalist ahead of you mate!”

“Jeez, I hope not,” he laughed, and rang off.

McCarthy, momentarily back from the dead, creaked one eyelid open.

“Best you come up with?” he groaned, imaging the stories that would circle the office. “Projectile gastric?”

“Hey, at least I wasn’t pretending to be Andrea,” I quipped.

“Ah fuggoffphhh,” he slurred, and nodded off again.

What an excellent idea, I thought, and went back to bed.

Jesus Christ, what now? I’d only just gotten back to sleep, and now my mobile was sounding off. Incoming message. Ever notice how Nokias have the loudest incoming message alerts in all of Christendom? How deaf must those Finnish bastards be? I rifled through the random chattels on my stylish bedside table (an upturned TV box, but it supported a clock radio, wallet, keys etc about as well as a proper store-bought one), and grabbed my phone. The time, according to it, was well after five PM. Uh, yeah. Only just gotten back to sleep, huh? Riiiiight.

It was from Jessica. Coming over. A statement rather than an enquiry. I presumed the lack of a question mark indicated she was coming over here rather than that I was supposed to be coming over to her place. Presumably I’d be corrected if I was wrong; my reply was to choose to go back to sleep. My brain rejected my right of choice over such things and instead stank out the place with foul, toxic thoughts about what the hell I was going to say to Jessica to stop her removing important bits of my anatomy with a cane knife, whatever the hell it was that was going on between us anyway, and what my feelings for Artemisia actually meant. Cheers for that, brain. Team player to the end aren’t we. You cunt.

I limped into the shower and detoxed under as hot a spray of mineralicious Lismore mains water as I could handle without melting into a puddle. An insistent knock at the door went unanswered. Probably Jess, I conceded reluctantly. Deciding nudity was the greater part of valour, I shut off the shower and chose to answer the door at my leisure, in a towel.
I opened the door to a tall, angular brunette with flaming caramel-brown eyes and a face like thunder. She wasn’t even taken aback by my dishevelled, half-naked appearance. Hey, I figured, if it all goes pear shaped, Andrea’s single… or will be in about fifteen minutes. Ha, I made a funny.

“Is he here?” she asked, thin-lipped.

I smiled wryly, and signalled her through. I couldn’t even be bothered trying to buy him time with bogus tales of food poisoning. She pushed past me and was soon banging on McCarthy’s door. I looked down the street to see if Jessica was coming; no sign of her, or indeed of Marty’s Landcruiser. I’d presumed he and Phil would be back by now, but remembered hearing some vague story that they had to rendezvous at the di Biagini farm up in the hills to drop off the Toyo and trailer, and load all the gear back into the other lads' cars which were still up there.

McCarthy answered his bedroom door looking marginally more human than I’d last seen him - he’d apparently gotten up from the couch at some point, had a shower, changed his clothes, then went back to bed. Ficticious projectile gastric or otherwise, he looked pretty ill at the sight of his beloved looming over his hunched form in the doorway. This, gentle reader, is where having a penchant for tall, athletic lasses can work against you.

The door shut firmly behind them.

Cheers lads, began the Jeff’s note, on the back of a takeaway menu for the Indian place down the road. Thanks for the use of the couch. Headed back to the farm - figured Angus would rather head down on his own later than get hauled out of bed before his meeting with the judiciary - take the early guilty plea I reckon. Awesome trip - glad to be part of it. Cheers again - The Jeff.

It was just as well the Jeff had left, and the other boys weren’t back yet. Because if they were, they’d probably be trying to catch up on a little sleep. Which would have been next to impossible, due to the world championship level screaming match that had just kicked off in McCarthy’s quarters. Only just after the opening whistle and it was already a cricket score in favour of the away side. Might not want to be me today, but by fuck I'm glad I'm not him.

A perfunctory rap on the open doorway, and there stood my girlfriend, hair tied back and looking very cool and businesslike. Before the judiciary’s prosecuting officer could make her first address, I offered a disarming smile and suggested that maybe we could take this somewhere else, flicking a thumb over my shoulder at the outside wall of McCarthy’s room, which seemed to shake with the verbal violence within.

“My place?” she replied breezily. It wasn’t a suggestion. “I’ll drive. Though you might want to put some pants on first...” The not-very-veiled inference was that if I’d had kept them on in the first instance, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

I ducked back into my room and clambered into a shirt and jeans, then collected her missing underwear and performed a quick search for anything else of hers which looked like it mightn’t belong here anymore. A lipstick, a thin necklace, two earrings (unmatched), a Triple J Hottest 100 CD; past experience told me it was best to sort the return of these things as soon as possible, it saved custody battles later. I stuffed them in my jeans pocket and emerged from my bedroom, just as I heard Andrea assert that McCarthy had never loved her, never committed to her at all, because he was still in love with his stupid bitch ex-girlfriend from Sydney - Layla, or whatever the fuck her name was - and furthermore, perhaps he could do all of us a favour and fuck off back there. Meanwhile, Jessica flicked Jeff’s note back down on the table, scowling at the witty reference to the ‘judiciary’, and shot me a look of utter, pitiless contempt.

I have so much to look forward to this evening, I observed.

We drove in silence; she always drove with a relaxed, casual air about her, maybe a little too relaxed given the number of minor bingles she’d racked up through slight moments of inattention. Now she gripped the wheel with an intense look of concentration. It was barely a couple of kays from mine to hers, but it felt as long and interminable as the last leg into Lismore had been in the early hours of this morning. At length, we pulled up outside her place. I waited for her to get out first; she waited for me to do the same. So we sat there, in deafening silence, playing car-door-opening chicken.

Finally, Jessica spoke.

“So, what was it? Did she read your aura? Realign your chakras?”

“Who?”

“Artemisia, you fuck,” she replied sharply. “Did you astral-travel? Was it, like, just the most mind-blowing spiritual experience, like, ever?”

Oh this isn’t good. She wasn’t supposed to know about that yet. I wondered if silence counted as an early guilty plea.

“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Getting onto some slutty barmaid is bad enough. Actually fucking some other girl, some deluded hippie chick, the morning you’re supposed to come home…”

Oh goody. She knew specifics, too.

“Jesus Christ. You mightn’t respect me, Andy. I might mean nothing to you. But there’s disrespect, and there’s public fucking humiliation.”

I let her calm down, get her breath back. Really though, that was probably the most disheartening thing. She wasn’t shouting and screaming and throwing sharp objects at me. She was staring straight ahead, still holding the steering wheel, talking as if I wasn’t there, with the same utter contempt I’d seen a little earlier.

I had nothing. “How did you know?” I could only ask. Adding ‘”About Artemisia” was probably redundant, but I added it anyway.

“Andrew,” she began, “you don’t take a lot of interest in my life, do you? Then again, why should you. I’m only your girlfriend.”

“How did you know?” I asked again, a little more testily.

“You know that guy I flat with?” Only vaguely, was the answer I didn’t give. I spent very little time over at her place, and would have struggled to pick her flatmates out of an identity parade - there was two girls and a guy, all fairly nondescript. I think they were in her environmental science course, the one she’d been doing for the last year and a half, and had presumably been threatening to ditch for the last year and a third. “David is his name. Lovely guy. Kind, considerate, sensitive to others… you really couldn’t find a sweeter, nicer guy.”

“Surprised you ever had need for me,” I chided.

“Thing is,” she continued, “even if I was interested in him, David’s already got a girlfriend.”

“Good for him,” I replied. Then realised why it potentially wasn’t that good for me. If I’d been in any doubt, Jessica was about to strip it from me.

“He just loves her to bits, it’s so sweet. She’s not a very well-behaved girlfriend, though,” she noted mildly. “Has a tendency to… stray.”

Oh, fuck.

“I think I can see where this is going,” I muttered.

“Good. Then I don’t need to tell you her name, do I,” Jessica said. “Or why I can’t stand to be in the same fucking room as her. Because she keeps reeling him back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what I tell that poor little bastard to console him, no matter what kind of state he’s in after one of her teary-eyed calls from the road, saying how sorry she is, how lonely and desperate she gets when she’s away from him, how she’s made a horrible mistake and needs to confess all the awful details. The sort of call he received at about eight this morning, as it happens…”

“A tendency to stray, you say?”

She looked me up and down contemptuously from the corner of her vision.

“All I can say is, boy, you better hope you had protection. She’s served more than McDonalds.”

Gott in himmel. Mein lieben ist in der schiessenhaus, or words to that effect.

“Jess, I’m sorry. She never mentioned anyone else.” Like that helped, or would have changed anything at the time. Shut up, Young.

“I’m sure she didn’t,” Jessica said. “I’m sure she gave the impression that she was single and carefree, prancing through fields of daisies and riding bareback along the beach like she was in a fucking tampon commercial.” The ‘riding bareback along the beach’ thing was unintentional irony, I hoped. Presumably David hadn’t been given quite so much detail as that in his long-distance call. “She probably also gave the impression that she was in blissful ignorance of the fact that you actually had a girlfriend as well, yes?”

I confirmed with a reluctant uh-huh.

“Well I’m afraid to say,” Jessica outlined, “that Artemisia Bailey knows very well who you supposedly belong to. The same evil blonde bitch of a flatmate who keeps telling her boyfriend he’s better off without her.”

Even in my foggy state of mind, I could read between those lines.

“Man, that’s cold,” I observed. “That’s cold. I mean… what the fuck did I just walk into?”

“Walk into?” She almost laughed. “Yeah, you’re completely blameless, it’s all a massive consipiracy. Fucking hell, Andrew. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

“So Artemisia’s boyfriend is your flatmate?” I queried, as if I was going to get a different answer if I asked again. I kinda hoped I would.

“It'd appear so.”

“Small world,” I muttered.

“Yeah,” she agreed bitterly. “A bit too fucking small for my liking.”

“Of course, that’s not going to be your problem for long,” I ventured, about to ratchet up hostilities to Defcon 3. I might have been outgunned, but I did had one weapon of mass destruction left in the locker. “Not with your fucking off to fuckin’ Woombieland and all…”

I’d hit a nerve. Aimed for, and got.

“This again?” she retorted. “Is that what this is all about? I decide to make something of my life, instead of being just another slutty little bar chick like you want me pigeonholed as, and your response is to go off and try and fuck anything with tits?”

“Jess, if you seriously think moving to fuckin’ Toowoomba is making something of your life, you’re delusional.”

Living in Brisbane for a few years, particularly first year in college, I’d gotten to meet lots of people from Toowoomba, or ‘fuckin’ Woombieland’ as we more accurately called it. Almost without exception, they were fuckwits. The girls were clueless bimbos; the guys were total cocks, invariably called Brad, who drove lowered utes with Bundy Rum stickers and wore checked shirts tucked into overly tight Lee Riders, and Blundstones of course - wear anything else and youse must be a fuggen poofta. Sure, Dr Cletus carried himself in pretty much the same fashion, but the difference was, (a) he could spell, and (b) even he thought the denizens of Woombieland were fuckwits. And coming from someone who grew up in Mount Morgan, that’s saying something.

However, Jessica hadn’t been swayed by my flawless reasoning. The Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland, assisted by teaching staff at the base hospital, ran a nursing course which was very highly regarded, and Jessica was hoping to be accepted as part of their mid-year intake. Where this interest in nursing came from, I had no idea. I’d found her bedside manner pretty perfunctory on any morning I’d woken up feeling ill over the past four months: go and get your own damn bacon and egg McMuffins. (OK, so strictly speaking, a hangover isn’t an illness.) Quite why the course here at SCU was so inferior, I also wasn’t able to determine. She’d been talking in vague terms about tossing in her enviro science course ever since I’d met her, initiating hand-waving discussions about changing her career path to this or that - early childhood teacher, marketing consultant, flight attendant. Now, all of a sudden, it was nursing. Or maybe, just maybe, she’d been planning this for months, and I wasn’t picking up the signs, or was just ignoring them (sticks fingers in ears and goes LA LA LA really loudly).

In any case, when she’d presented her plans a week before we were due to leave for NQ, I would have admitted to being a little taken aback. She, however, interpreted my reaction differently, particularly after the events of the past two weeks. I’d lost my rag. I couldn’t handle her leaving. I’d taken her moving to Toowoomba as a desertion, even a betrayal, and I’d sought pre-emptive revenge. For my part, I’d accept the first part, but the second part - the ‘revenge’ motive - I had issues with. If anything, maybe I’d just accepted, subconsciously, that we were nearer the end than the beginning of things. Either way, I’d clearly managed to circumvent the childproof lock on the self-destruct button.

“It could have worked,” she insisted. “You know it could. I would have gladly come back at weekends, come to see you play at gigs, been the adoring girlfriend looking on. I wouldn’t have had to work nights at weekends…” Part of the attraction of the USQ nursing degree was the stipend which went along with it, it seemed, which meant no more working casual jobs. “At the very least, I’d have met you halfway. We could have met for secret dirty rendezvous at secluded bed-and-breakfasts up in the mountains around Stanthorpe or Tenterfield or somewhere…”

“Long distance doesn’t work,” I reiterated.

“You’ve tried?” She knew I hadn’t. “And do you really think I’d have cared if you tried and couldn’t quite manage it, and you happened to need something on the side down here during the week? Come on. I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t care, so long as I didn’t know about it. You could have gone off and banged Artemisia silly for all I cared. But no. You had to rub my nose in it. You couldn’t even last two weeks. Two fucking weeks.”

I was getting the impression that Jessica thought I was rather pathetic. She’d have thought I was even more pathetic had she known all I could think about during her tirade, was that I was now pretty sure Artemisia didn’t love me. I’d had some romantic vision of Artemisia as was some soulful, majestic, deeply spiritual creature, when she was really just a dirty little slut with a vindictive streak.

“So when are you heading off?”

“Thursday,” she said.

“This Thursday?”

“I brought it forward by a week or so. Have to find a place, settle in, that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d be on the farm by tomorrow morning. Probably wouldn’t see her again before she left. Probably wouldn’t see her again, full stop.

I exhaled grimly. Bollocks. This was one of those end-of-the-road moments which I was so damn good at. Good at blundering into, that was, not good at dealing with. My fingers reached for the door handle. It wasn’t a long walk home, I figured, and I could do with clearing my head. For a girl I supposedly wasn’t in love with, I felt pretty fucking low saying goodbye to her, so I decided not to. Big dignity points there.

I felt her hand squeeze my wrist.

“Andy…”

She looked at me directly, for just about the first time. Her composure was the most notable thing. There were no tears, no quivering bottom lip - just a sad, resigned look. A look of tiredness. She just looked tired. She looked like she’d given this all a lot of thought, over many hours, and knew what had to happen: she just wished it was over.

I asked her what she wanted from me. If it was sorry, she could have it; it wasn’t worth much, but she was welcome to it.

She shook her head.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

She took my hand, like we really were boyfriend and girlfriend, and led me up the stairs into the house, and down the deserted hall to her bedroom. David was out looking for happiness in the bottom of a bottle or series thereof, I presumed, and the other girls from the flat were probably assisting him with his enquiries. Even so, Jessica closed the door behind us, kicking her shoes off as she turned to face me. It was dull, if not yet dark; the curtains in her bedroom were drawn against the setting sun, casting a red-orange glow over the her bed on which we’d made love. Actually, that’s overstating it a little - we never really made love, Jessica and I. We had delicious, sticky, fantastic sex, and plenty of it, but we’d never actually made love.

Jessica tugged the hair-tie out of her long pale-gold mane, and shook it all free.

“I don’t want you to say sorry, Andy, because you’re not.”

“Hey…” Unfair. True, but unfair.

“I don’t want you to say sorry,” she repeated, more softly. “I want you to say goodbye to me. Properly.”

I considered this, and shrugged non-commitally. She wasn’t accepting that. She stood right in front of me, toe to toe, and looked me evenly in the eye.

“If you can’t say sorry, at least say farewell. As if you cared about me, as if you respected me, as if these last four months actually meant something to you. As if I wasn’t just a fucking stopover point on route to something better. You think you can do that for me, An?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. I was beginning to suspect that saying goodbye, in Jessica’s eyes, didn’t actually have to involve saying anything; she was thinking more in abstract terms. Face to face, our hands touching, her defiant, challenging eyes fixated on mine.

“I’d like to see you try,” she provoked.

So I kissed her. I squeezed her wrists and kissed her firmly on the mouth. Luckily, that was precisely what she had in mind. Good guess. Could have gone horribly wrong had it been a bad one. Her hands found my sides, then my shoulders, and she reciprocated my affection. I kissed her mouth and neck, around to her ear. Whereupon I whispered goodbye and pulled away, just to test her reaction.

She grabbed my wrists, and said that wasn’t what she was after. “It’s the rest of me you have to kiss goodbye to,” she told me. “So I want you to lay me down on that bed, and show me what you’ve learned. Show me what was so fucking astonishing about her performance that you just had to have her. It’s one thing for her to play silly little mind games and get you into bed with her,” she added with contempt, “it’s another for her to have you think she’s actually better than me.”

I could do that, I thought. So I undressed her slowly, trying to savour each moment, to record her body in my mind’s eye for all time. Who knew if or when I’d ever get to experience a girl as gorgeous as her again - in a very short period of time, measurable in hours, I’d be single. I lingered over each button of her blouse, kissing each inch of her tanned belly as it was exposed. I unzipped her slinky pinstriped pants and peeled them down her elegant, slender legs. Black G-string panties, black lace bra, bemused faraway smile and sparkling blue eyes. I traced the curves of her body with my fingertips, the palm of my hands, my lips, my tongue. I kissed her mouth, reaching behind her back to unfasten her bra, then to slide her panties down.

“How am I going so far?” I asked, tousling her hair.

“Not bad,” she replied with a smile. “A little overdressed, maybe...”

Something I planned to attend to, very shortly.

As the sun set over the hills, we lay down together and made love, for the first and last time. She didn’t cry, or scream, or try to suffocate me. We just made love to one other, to the best of our shared ability, using everything we’d learned over the past four months. It was longer, more intense, more caring than we’d ever shared before. She channelled all her anger, all her frustration, all her disappointment into the passion between us. And there were no tears afterwards, either; she just closed her eyes and I cradled her in the darkness. If anyone wanted to cry, it was me, out of sheer frustration at my own stupidity. And, to be honest, I did. Just a little bit, when she wasn’t looking. I knew now exactly what I was kissing goodbye to - and that was exactly what she had wanted to show me. Game, set and match, Jessica.

Afterwards, we drove back to Chateau Dodgy in silence; the lights were off, the house was quiet. She switched off the engine and walked with me to the stairs leading to the front door. She didn’t say anything; I kissed her goodbye, and she left. Watching her old Corolla’s taillights disappearing into the distance up the curving sweep of Mountain View Drive, I felt exactly like I deserved to feel: lousy. Worse than any time since Sophie. Worse than any time I could remember, in fact. I trudged up the stairs and in through the door.

Then again, there’s always someone worse off than you, I realised. That ‘someone’ isn’t always Sam McCarthy, but it was tonight. He was sitting in the darkness, rifling bitterly through the last two weeks’ editions of the Star (it was home-delivered as a perk of McCarthy’s employment). He was gouging out Andrea’s byline wherever he found it with the end of a sharpened chopstick, and swearing profusely when it went straight through the paper and jabbed his thigh, which it did regularly.

“Bunny-boiler,” I declared.

Embarrassed by his own pettiness, he crunched up the entire Wednesday edition into a massive ball and hurled it at the dormant television.

“Not going so well?” I said.

“Not really,” he admitted. “Newly fuckin' single, it would seem. You?”

“Likewise.”

“How bad is it for you?” he wanted to know. “You also planning to run away and join the foreign legion?”

“Nah, one of those Trappist monasteries in Belgium. Mainly for the beer.”

He laughed bitterly. “Fuck, did I just cop it this arvo, or what?”

“You did, mate, you did.”

“She just went on for ages, she would not stop. Nothing but absolute bullshit.”

“I don’t know about that,” I told him straight. “She said one thing which I’d have to agree with.”

“About Lena?” he guessed. I nodded. “She doesn’t know a fucking thing about Lena.”

“True, but she’s right on one point - you’re still in love with her.”

He balled up the World News section of the Thursday edition and pelted the TV with it.

“I have no comment to make on that,” he declared pithily.

There had to be a positive spin here, otherwise I was heading for a smack in the chops. “At least it meant Andrea loved you, or felt enough passion, to get so angry with you. Jess just seemed relieved it was over. She’s fucking off anyway to Woombieland - I guess she figured it was as good a point as any to say goodbye.”

“Why couldn’t we have just done that? I mean, why couldn’t Andrea and I had just fuckin’ shaken hands and said thanks very much for your custom, let’s call it a day.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that for Jessica and me, ‘saying goodbye’ had been a slightly more interactive experience.

“Well, look on the bright side,” I suggested. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

“Yeah,” he observed dolefully. “Sure is. Gotta go to work tomorrow. And guess whose bloody desk is barely thirty feet from mine?”

I had no answer to that. I just laughed. Thankfully, so did he.

“Still hope for you yet then,” I proposed.

“Oh fuck off. Make yourself useful, fire up the N64, I’ll teach you how to play Goldeneye by shooting you through the head a lot.”

“I’ll do so on one proviso,” I replied, dialling up AV IN on the TV remote and switching on the power to the N64. “Get us a fuckin’ beer you softcock.”

“Already locked on,” he called from the fridge. “Target acquired.”

It was about the only target he managed to find all night. I might have been missing Jessica (already), but on the N64, he missed pretty much everything. Pretty soon his controller was being flung at the TV as well as half the last fortnight's papers. Missed again.

“So this is our future,” he observed. “Two fat, aging, single blokes, drinking beer and playing video games until the nursing home minibus comes for us, hey?”

“Yeah,” I observed. “Not sure about you, but I’ve got no idea what’ll become of me without the stability and security of a long-term relationship..."

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “To be honest, there’s a serious fuckin' risk I’ll be forced to throw myself into a series of casual, no-strings sexual relationships with as many beautiful, morally flexible young women as I can find in the front row of the audience on any given night.”

McCarthy considered this suggestion.

“Could work,” he concurred, taking a swig from his beer. “Could definitely work.”