Honkytonk women

I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride
She had to heave me right across her shoulder
'Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind.
- The Rolling Stones, 1969

Port Douglas is a long way from anywhere. Think of anywhere, and I can pretty much guarantee Port Douglas is a long way from it. (Cairns doesn’t count.) Even so, the place had a ravenous appetite for entertainment in its various bars, pubs and clubs, particularly over the northern hemisphere winter when twenty-something Poms, Euros, Canucks and Seppos alike flock to FNQ in their thousands to thaw out in the sunshine. There was a ready-made market for bands up here; they simply couldn’t get enough decent acts at peak periods like mid-year. Enter Chris Kurtin and Seek Discoveries, who through a masterful display of networking and relationship-building within the industry (i.e. his brother Terry owned a couple of bars up here) had managed to match venues needing acts with acts willing to play them. Even if one of aforesaid acts had been gigging properly for two months at best and were greener than the kitchen Laminex at Chateau Dodgy (itself greener than the greenest thing in the world, a Kawasaki Ninja superbike.)

We met Terry on our arrival, weary and stinking from our two-day-drive, in the late-evening FNQ humidity. Terry Kurtin if anything was even dodgier than Chris, but engagingly so - not taking himself quite so seriously at least. His venues were seedy dives, but endearingly seedy, much like their owner, or ourselves. As part of our deal for the tour he put us up in a rundown block of motel units near the beach which he’d bought as an investment property several years back - the investment being his plans to make a bucket o’ coin out of Christopher Skase once the latter inevitably looked to expand his hold over the Port Douglas beachfront. It hadn’t really worked out - these days Skase was now occy-strapped to an oversized Ventolin inhaler in his Majorcan villa, and the Marlin Coast Holiday Court had seen better days (and lots of ‘em). But the view, my Lord, that was something special indeed. From the corner unit which the Duff boys shared, you could see through the window into the girls changing rooms at the fitness centre next door. Dirty buggers, those Duff boys.

Between us, Seek’s four bands had the run of the place - Kretin and his scuba suit weren’t sighted all week, his MX5 parked securely outside Terry’s house up on Millionaire’s Row (not that either of them were) rather than deigning to slum it with the plebs at the Marlin Coast Holiday Court - and in truth we did go just a little bit silly. Let’s face it, our only responsibilities were to turn up after dark with our gear and play, once we’d remembered which of the three venues in town it was our turn to play that night (a task which we managed to bugger up on more than one occasion) - the dodgy Hawaiian-themed bar, the dodgy Irish pub, or the dodgier-than-both backpacker-slash-meatmarket nightclub which made the dive-licious Powerhouse in Lismore look like Studio 54 in its mid-Seventies New York pomp.

Fairly swiftly it emerged that the pseudo-Irish pub, Tam O’Shanter Kilpatrick’s or Dodgy O’Shonkys or whatever it was called, ended up our favourite of the three on the following basis: (a) the bar staff were babes; (b) the dress code did not include a luau or a grass skirt; (c) the bar staff were babes; (d) noise curfew was half-twelve so we got to go home before stupid o’clock and get back to our drinking, unlike the poor hapless saps who were trapped at the Powerhouse’s evil twin until the ugly lights came on at 3am - our new mates from Three By Three seemed to get that gig most nights, poor bastards, so we saw bugger-all of them for the duration of our stay in Port Douglas; and (e) the bar staff were babes.

I may have mentioned that the bar staff at Hackney O’Clichés were babes. I should probably also mention that I had a girlfriend. Yes, Jessica, the same one as before, as much to my surprise as it must be yours. Sure, it hadn’t been all that dazzlingly fresh and exciting these last couple of months, but the mere fact that our relationship could be measured in months was an achievement. I measured it at several months, as I tended to use the counting system one, two, several when it came to how many months I’d been in a relationship. Several was usually a synonym for far too fucking long matey but I was determined to stick this out, dammit. Jessica was a great girl, she seemed to think the world of me, and that little voice in the back of my head which pointed out the gorgeousness of pretty much every other girl in a ten mile vicinity was going to be ignored this time - as an exercise in self-control, as much as anything.

So you’re thinking, hey, this guy’s a tool, can’t keep it trousered, but listen. Here’s the deal. You meet someone new, you start dating them perhaps. Sometimes, there’s a spark. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, there’s a big fuck-off bolt of lightning - like there was with Jessica. They’re fascinating, they’re amazing, their company so enrapturing and fulfilling that you want to spend as much time with them as you can. You ditch your friends, you blow off your commitments, whatever, to be with them. They’re everything you were looking for at that particular moment. As was Jess. Blonde, gorgeous, funny, spunky, free-spirited, open-minded, made fantastic cocktails and was spectacular in bed. Complaints? None. Not a fuckin' sausage. You can’t help but congratulate yourself, along with all your mates (the ones you have left anyway) and everyone you know slapping your back for your enviable success in landing such a brilliant catch. It’s all good.

Then you settle into the relationship, and it’s still all good. Maybe it’s three days in, maybe it’s three months, you start finding yourself making little mental notes. Don’t really like the way she does this. Or that. Of course, to start with, these little mental Post-Its are swamped by full-scale billboards reminding you of all the things about her that are just Fucken Awesome (to quote those great philosophers of our time, Spiderbait). She’s smart, funny, provides you with free drinks, laughs at your jokes, and has proven her willingness to initiate various filthy acts of a sexual nature that could get both of you locked up in various backward states in the Deep South, like Tasmania. Then again, though… she’s always working when we have gigs. And she comes home reeking of cigarette smoke, and when she does she’s too tired and cranky to wanna get hot and sticky. And her parents vote National, and she can’t see anything wrong with that. And she starts nearly every sentence with ‘Like’ or ‘You know’ like Frank Zappa’s apocryphal Valley Girl. And she thinks all teachers are lazy because they get fourteen weeks off a year (that was one of the main reasons I chose the profession!) when she can barely be bothered turning up to lectures for her mid-morning ecology lectures, and doesn’t want to be an environmental scientist anyway, so why the hell did she enrol in the course in the first place. And she shaves her legs with my razor, blunting the motherfuckers faster than if Bigfoot had used it to denude his back hair. Admittedly, she shaves a lot of other places as well, so it’s not all negative...

But it’s never the big things that kill a relationship, never the Wuthering Heights-style blazing arguments and running out across the moors in the storm screaming someone’s name in abject passion and fury. It’s the annoying little things, like blunt razors and smoke-flavoured hair on the pillow next to you. And, of course, the sex.

It’s not that the sex gets boring, or infrequent; sure it gets a little of both, but that’s not necessarily the problem. The problem is that it gets efficient. Efficient, predictable, even clinical. By now, if you’re not completely rubbish and she's not completely frigid, you’ve experimented thoroughly over the past few months, you know exactly what trips her trigger. What kind of dirty talk gets her going, what she likes to hear whispered in her ear, and at what point she’s just going to get offended; where she likes to be touched, with how much pressure, with how much insistence or repetition; what she’s freely willing to do, what she’s prepared to do with a little persuasion, what she'll only do when she's drunk and you've promised to never get the photos developed, and what’s wayyyy out of bounds. Basically, and bluntly, you know how to make her come just about as loudly and demonstratively as you'll ever make her do, and now you don’t ever find yourself deviating from the script: kiss neck, nuzzle earlobe, stroke here, suckle there, tease here, rub there, stick that there on that precise angle of incidence as determined by experiment, repeat as necessary; hey presto, who’s your daddy. One recipe for gorgeous blonde on the brink of thermonuclear meltdown. Here’s one I prepared earlier.

McCarthy’s old mate Super Dave had a saying. Sex is like pizza: it’s never bad. Now presumably Super Dave had his fair share of greasy (and possibly triple-cheese-encrusted) rumpy-pumpy over the years, but he’s got a point. Sex with Jessica was never, ever bad. It was just getting a little… formulaic. Whereas sex with all the utterly gorgeous girls I’d suddenly started noticing in my local vicinity had the potential to be mind-blowingly, stratospherically brilliant. That’s one side of the problem: other girls start to become more and more attractive to you. Call it the biological prerogative of the male of the species, call it just being a horny bastard - call it what you will, it is what it is: the grass just looks greener.

And on the other side, even more problematically, you start to become more and more attractive to other girls. I've got no doubt that women find men within a relationship more attractive than those without. It’s the stamp of approval that you've met the global sisterhood’s exacting criteria, have been granted security clearance and been deemed worthy. Even if they aren’t aware you’re already in a relationship, you’re automatically going to compare favourably to your ‘single’ brethren (let’s face it, how many long-term-single guys do you know who are single by choice?) - girls can see you’re more confident, more sure of yourself; you’ve had someone laughing at your jokes and telling you you’re wonderful, so you know you’re the shit; and you don’t need to even try because, after all, you know what you have waiting at home, so you’ve got nothing to prove. And if they do know you’re already in a relationship, well for some that’s just a little challenge that their egos are more than keen to meet, often enough.

Let’s be unequivocal. Jessica was awesome. I liked her a lot. I didn’t love her, but I wasn’t deluding myself that she loved me, either. I’d been with her longer than I’d ever been with anyone up to that point, and I was happy being with her. And if keeping her meant ignoring all the little subconscious signs and signals which I’d always obeyed before, the ones that said Exit This Way, then so be it. But the question remained: Did I have itchy feet? Maybe. Then again, maybe that was just from the shower block at the caravan park back in Airlie.

And I was hardly on my Pat Malone on the being-tempted front. If the Jeff still had romantic intentions regarding Sagittaria’s lively strawberry-blonde cellist Madeleine, he probably hadn’t helped his cause much by seducing (read ‘being woefully drunk and vaguely charming in the proximity of’) a series of attractive (read ‘attractive enough at the time’) foreign backpacker girlies during our week in Port Douglas. He didn’t discriminate: most nobly, he saw not race, or colour, or creed, largely because he’d encumbered himself with beer goggles like the lenses on the Hubble telescope, and would probably, in the rather unkind characterisation of our man Krusty Kristensen, ‘root a rat on a chain’. On Tuesday, our first night in town, it was a wacky Dutchie, who seemed to like the odd wacky Dutchie herself; on Wednesday, a flirty French girl, who presumably enjoyed a little French as well; and on Thursday, a Greek goddess… didn't hear what she was into actually. On Friday, he took the night off ref. pants action (an RDO apparently) and on the weekend he entertained some female visitors to our shores from Canada (yes, two of them, the jammy little bastard). The reason I know all of this is, dear reader, is that this hapless bastard happened to share a suite with the Young family’s hereto-undiscovered pants man, and the walls at the Marlin Coast Holiday Court were a little on the thin side, constructed as they were from wallpaper, reinforced with more wallpaper – the latter no more structurally sound that the underlying wallpaper, but much uglier.

As such, most nights, once we’d breached closing time at the various alcohol-retailing establishments in town, I ended up camped out on the balcony knocking back a few more than necessary with McCarthy, pining for his beloved Andrea (the difference between mine and his long-term relationships was he really did believe it was love) and the Duffer, another refugee from his homeland - his snotty little brother was also getting more skirt than he was. The night usually ended with us crashing out on commandeered mattresses, bits of couch or (at a pinch) the carpet in McCarthy and Marty’s impromptu refugee camp, keeping Marty awake until daylight with the talking of rubbish and the drinking of yet more piss. Late on the Saturday night (call it Sunday morning, to be factually correct), Phil and I proceeded to write a song together for the very first time, describing and reflecting upon our common experiences of the week. It was called, naturally enough, My Snotty Little Brother Gets More Skirt Than I Do. To which Drunken and the Jeff released the following joint statement: “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, whinge about it.” Fair point, well made.

Sunday was our last ‘playing’ night at Port Douglas; the Brothers Very Grimm (i.e. the Youngs and the Duffs, as members of Flange Gasket and ACME Industries) were lucky enough to play the Irish theme pub on the last night, the redeeming qualities of which I’d already described. More specifically they could be described as Natasha, Brigitte, Siobhan and Holly, each amongst their respective nations’ finest exports. (Which were, from hazy recollection, Scotland, Belgium, Ireland and the good ol’ US of A. In fact the only remotely Irish thing about Terry’s Irish pub was Siobhan.) The girls were kind enough to ply us with massive amounts of free alcohol while we played, making a total farce of the Responsible Service of Alcohol legislation, if anyone cared. I remember looking over my shoulder while we were cranking through one of our originals - we were at the point of playing about fifty-fifty originals to covers these days - and seeing the Duffer craned backwards off his drum stool, being supported by Holly and Natasha, who were pouring Jose Cuervo laybacks into his gob straight from the bar stocks. Holly was squeezing a lemon into his mouth, and Natasha was providing the salt ‘lick’. I won’t say from where, and while it wasn’t enough to get them arrested, it wasn’t by much. The Duffer, heroically, just kept on drumming. To say he still managed to keep the beat would be an exaggeration - he never actually managed that when stone cold sober - but it was still a remarkable performance, considering he was mostly off the chair reclining into Holly’s voluminous cleavage at the time. What a powerhouse. I turned to McCarthy, currently playing a slide guitar solo with the neck of a bottomless Corona bottle (every time I turned around, it seemed to be full again). He flashed a winning grin. I flicked a thumb over my shoulder.

“The Duffer’s a fuckin’ tank,” I slurred, shouting over the racket. Okay, so I’d had the odd free drinkie myself, courtesy Belgium’s finest export since Stella Artois, young Brigitte. “You couldn’t kill him with an axe.”

At which point the Duffer collapsed off his stool with an almighty crash of cymbals and a hearty cheer from our superb and very well lubricated Sunday night audience, most of whom were new friends or acquaintances we’d picked up along the way during our gigs in town. Krusty, man of action, slung his bourbon aside, leapt off his barstool, vaulted over the comatose Duffer into the hot seat (well, it was more sticky than hot, courtesy all the tequila spilling over the stool), and proceeded to save the day. Admittedly all he could play were hundred-mile-an-hour punk rock rhythms, but that was OK. Ever heard U2’s Mysterious Ways covered by what appeared to be an Offspring tribute band? Neither had I. Or anyone else, apparently.

It was a rather large evening, curtailed only by exhaustion after a hard week’s gigging (and an even harder week’s pissing-it-up.) We were only permitted to head back to the motel and crash on our sworn pledge to come out with the bar girls on the following (Monday) evening, traditionally the night when hospitality staff are allowed out to play. We staggered back to the Marlin Coast and blacked out till late afternoon.

Even though Monday and Tuesday were nominally ‘off’ days (Wednesday was marked in our official Seek-approved schedules as a ‘transit’ day to Airlie Beach, with gigs booked for the Thurs/Fri/Sat nights), Chris Kurtin had told us that we were to be packed up and ready to check out by ten, and that he’d be there to ensure we were. However his dear brother Terence proceeded to get him monstrously drunk at the Hawaiian joint while his employees were dutifully sullying the purity of our performance at the Irish pub further down the street, and we didn’t end up sighting Chris until four in the afternoon. He looked like death warmed up, and not warmed up by much at that.

But at least we could locate him - we’d managed to lose the Duffer somewhere between him dropping off the perch at the gig, and us waking up at the hotel the next afternoon, but no matter - he’d surface somewhere, no doubt. After throwing ourselves in the surf in a vain attempt to revive our major life signs, we wandered into town for ‘breakfast’ (steak and bacon pie and sauce with a black Aspro chaser) - the staff at the bakery by now were regarding us as long-lost friends - and found the Duffer propping up a table outside, monstering a steak and cheese potato-topped pie. Between massive gulps of delicious, protein-infused lard, Phil detailed how he’d passed out on the way home and had ended up kipping on a bench in the park. Apparently. Needless to say, he looked a wreck - there were still park-bench imprints in his face. He finished inhaling the pie, ordered another in a cheerful spray of pastry flakes, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and addressed us all:

“Last night was fuckin’ tops. Same again tonight?”

My word yes. We met the girls at seven for a few preliminary drinks at the Irish pub - we being the Brothers Very Grimm, Uncle Sam and Krusty; Marty had accepted the invitation of the Sagittaria lovelies for a low-key Thai meal and a quiet night without quite so much alcohol poisoning. The inside word from Madeleine, according to the Jeff (yes, he was persisting, like a yeast infection) was that she and Artemisia were trying to set him up with Imogen, figuring they were similar personality types - shy, reserved, intense souls, given to poetry and introspection, not so comfortable in the raw, rough-edged world of the rest of us. Apparently they hadn’t seen Marty last evening when he’d bared his pasty drunken arse to the world and performed a heroic nude run down the street to the motel. Not that I’m one to notice these sorts of things, but our Italian contingent was reported to be a lot hairier of arse than anyone could have reasonably expected. I was rather thankful he wasn’t borrowing my razors also.

The plan was to grab some food at a Mexican place down the way from the Irish pub, but our ‘appetiser’ drinks went well into second or third course and we ended up in a pokey-but-cheerful Italian joint in a side alley off Macrossan St. Nastro Azzurro, Lambrusco and (eventually) grappa flowed in torrents as we scarfed pizza and pasta of more than passable quality, talked a lot of bollocks and generally made merry. Then it was on to the Hawaiian place, happily tripping over the Three By Three lads and their new entourage of local aficionados (including the bar staff from the dodgy nightclub, or Powerhouse Northern Branch Office as we’d tagged it). A few fearsomely overhopped cocktails and a lot of shakin’ dat ass later, closing time threatened to bring a premature end to proceedings. Bollocks to that, we declared. Powerhouse North it was then.

I wasn’t sure how this had happened, but as recently as a few minutes earlier on the walk up to the nightclub, I’d realised there was something soft and warm nestled under my arm. It turned out to be Holly, the seriously cute platinum-blonde barmaid from Southern California (via the Irish pub up the road). Holly wasn’t the tallest of lasses, fitting securely under my arm, but she did have grrrreat tits and seemed to have no problem at all with me leering drunkenly at them (it was all I could do not to fall in, to be fair.) Away to starboard (listing precariously to starboard, in truth) McCarthy had somehow contrived to hook up with one of her workmates, the Belgian brunette Brigitte - try saying that after four pints of Kilkenny, half a dozen Nastros, most of a bottle of an Italian red most kindly described as ‘rustic’, a couple of shots of grappa which could peel wallpaper (best not to try this at the Marlin Coast Holiday Court as the walls would disintegrate), several largely unidentifiable island-themed cocktails, and… well, I stopped counting after that and so did he.

McCarthy, loud, lucid and animated, was several hundred sheets to the wind and was feeling no pain whatsoever. What he was feeling was Brigitte’s rather lovely arse, which she didn’t seem to mind at all. Various other souls had found members of the opposite gender to drape themselves over - the gospel according to Holly and her dazzling American teeth was that we lads would stand a much greater chance of getting in if we were attached to attractive females, but in truth we knew there was bugger-all chance they’d turn us away on a Monday, particularly as we’d all played the place in the past week. Hell, we owned this town, dammit. But the excuse to tighten my squeeze around Holly’s waist was gratefully exploited by both of us, as Holly winked at the m-a-s-s-i-v-e Samoan dude on the door - hey, if he had decided he didn’t want us to come in, the decision was final and no correspondence would be entered into - and we were ushered in.

Hey, this wasn’t so bad. We still hadn’t paid full price for a beer all night, and since we were last here, they’d canned the Top 40 dance detritus in favour of cool old shit like early Stones and Beatles. Yes, the same ‘crusty old shit’ I’d objecting to playing as part of Flange Gasket. I reserved the right to change my mind on this or any other subject, as I was pissed as a fart. Somehow, after arseloads of grog, with the volumptuous Holly gyrating against me, the old stuff didn’t seem so bad. The way that girl could move to Honkytonk Women… I tell you, it gimme (gimme, gimme) the honky-tonk blooooze. Or at least it made me want to bang her silly right there on the dancefloor.

Instead, we urgently retreated to a corner, where she clambered into my lap, and boldly pushed her tongue down my throat. I reciprocated, cupping, then kneading her heavy breasts with my hands while I kissed her. I’d guessed right; from the wicked little smile this produced, she seemed to appreciate a firm hand. I could feel her breath, hot and hard, on my neck, and her inner thighs, warm and damp, through her tight black pants, almost grinding her pussy against my lap. Hang on, I’ll rephrase that. I’d be lying if I said I could feel her breath, hot and hard, on my neck, and her inner thighs, warm and damp, through her tight black pants, almost grinding her pussy against my lap. But it sounds pretty good so let’s say that’s how it happened. Hell, I was too drunk to remember little nuances and details anyway.

I wasn’t drunk enough, though, not to hear that little voice, now raised to a scream, echoing through the fog in my head:

For fuck’s sake, STOP.

Ironic really. The same little voice in the back of one’s mind that gleefully informed of the blisteringly attractiveness of each and every girl within visible range, was now a panicked shrill. Don’t you DARE do anything that fucks our chances of getting regular lovin’, you stupid fuckin eejit! All that shite about Jessica being an annoying pain in the arse, look, forget we mentioned it. You’re not fuckin' thinking straight. Cease and desist all further gropage!

Like a shaft of light through the thick alcoholic clouds, a moment of cold logic that I couldn’t refute: No good could possibly come of this. This can’t end well.

Holly must have read my reticence. “What’s up, baby?”

I gave a wry, regretful smile. “I have a girlfriend,” I said. Pretty weak, I realise.

“So?” she said suggestively.

But I just shook my head ruefully. “Sorry. Promised her I’d behave myself when I was away. Hey look, I’ll catch you around.”

The latter was a total lie, and she knew it. We were heading south tomorrow, just as soon as our hungovers allowed it. All of a sudden, the cumulative effect of all those drinks hit me. I left Holly with a wave and made a ragged beeline for the exit. Not my most dignified exit, I know, but I felt like shit - physically and psychologically - and I needed fresh air. Like all nightclubs, particularly pre-Smokefree legislation, Powerhouse Northern Branch Office stank to the Jesus fuck. It stank of sweat, smoke, and sexual desperation, and I had to Get The Fuck Out.

The night air was cool and clarifying. I gave the big Samoan bouncer a professional nod of recognition; he was professional enough not to mention the lurid magenta lipstick stain that was smeared across my face. I wandered a little way down the street, fed some change into a Coke machine in return for a Powerade (which did two fifths of fuck-all to deplete my now-massive stocks of spare change - ever notice how you can gauge the success of a night out by how heavy your wallet is next morning?) and sat down on what I guessed to be the Philip Duff Memorial Bench opposite the park. By now, I felt good, surprisingly. Sure, I could still taste Holly on my lips and smell her on my clothes - thank you v. much Butthole Surfers - but I hadn’t slept with her. It might sound odd, even reasonably pathetic, but I was rather proud of myself. In some half-arsed, deluded way, I’d managed to stay true to Jessica, under extreme duress.

I sipped my Powerade, thinking about what tomorrow…. [checks watch] …uh, later today would bring. We’d probably take it easy rolling on southwards, maybe a night in Cairns - I’d heard Trinity Beach was nice - maybe then on to the Whitsundays, a trip out to the reef if fun tickets permitted. We had plenty of time to get down to Airlie by Wednesday night to check into our salubrious on-site vans at the caravan park near the beach. Which reminded me, I thought. I should pick up some thongs for the shower block. Or at least some Tinaderm.

My phone bleeped an incoming message. I hadn’t had the phone long, or any mobile phone for that matter. I’d always thought they were a wank, and like those phone-sex lines they used to advertise on late night TV until Brian Harradine shut them down, a bloody expensive wank at that. But given our line of work, they had their uses. I found myself hoping it was Jessica. Not that I was about to call her up and declare my undying love for her, or even mention in passing what had gone on that night - even in my sub-optimal state I recognised that snogging some random big-titted barmaid from California wasn’t necessarily a winner in the ‘Earn Your Girlfriend’s Undying Gratitude’ stakes - but I would have preferred it was her that, say, McCarthy, who it turned out to be.

‘CALL ASAP!!!!’ barked the uncharacteristically terse message - he usually wrote texts in full sentences, with punctuation and everything; what a massive nerd he was.

Curiosity got the better of me. I’ll bite, I thought, and tried to locate his name in my phone.

McCarthy answered the phone in the midst of a reenactment of Hiroshima; or failing that, the dancefloor of the Powerhouse’s northern sibling. “Hang on,” he called, and within moments the turmoil receded and he was out into the night air - presumably only a few hundred yards up the road.

“What’s up mate?”

“Andrea! Wow, babe, what time is it in New Zealand?” he declared loudly.

“No, mate, it’s…”

“No, I’m not still out at this time of night…” he said, projecting his voice as best he could. In the background, a feminine giggle, tinged with a little European haughtiness. Brigitte?

“What the Jesus suffering fuck are you up to, McCarthy?” I grinned.

“No, there’s noone else with me… Andrea, seriously, just listen to me. You know I wouldn’t lie to you…” The sound became muffled, like McCarthy had pressed his hand over the speaker. “Look, I’m so sorry. It’s my girlfriend. She’s over in New Zealand, I promised to call her hours ago... got confused with the time zones…”

“So you don’t want to do hot and sweaty with me any more, Sammy?” I could hear Brigitte coo. She was drunk and horny and had the delivery of a Hungarian porn actress in her first English enunciation class. I was almost wetting myself, it was The Funniest Shit I’d heard in years.

“No baby, I’m sorry…”

“Not even with these?” Something that could only be a zip being undone. Brigitte’s outfit for the eve involved a zip which ran right down her cleavage. No prizes for guessing, folks. I couldn’t help myself. I practically cried with laughter.

“How dare you, Samuel, you bastard!” I squealed in loud falsetto, and hung up. Then tossed the phone onto the park bench, and curled up into a guffawing mess next to it. I was still giggling intermittently when McCarthy appeared five minutes later, alone, dishevelled and out of breath. I took one look at him - Brigitte’s lipstick was a darker shade than Holly’s, judging by the smear on his face - and cracked up helplessly all over again.

“You think this is funny?” he panted angrily. Then turned a little pale, and looked around nervously for somewhere to throw up. The jog down the road had upset his tummy, it seemed. Of course, the ninety-seven beers and multitudes of overly-creamy fettuccine alfredo had nowt to do with it.

“Fuck oath I do,” I giggled. “Getting me to call you and pretending it was Andrea, that was seriously the best you could come up with?”

“I panicked,” he retorted, like it was my fault. Which, apparently, it was. “Unlike you, I’m no fuckin’ world expert in cheating on my girlfriend. I don’t do it as often as you.”

“Oh, fuck off…”

He stomped his feet. I wondered if he was getting his moves off Kretin. If so, the point ’n’ click couldn’t be too far away. “This is all your fuckin’ fault, dammit! If you hadn’t encouraged me…”

“Encouraged you?”

“All that, ‘don’t worry, she’s miles away, she’ll never know’ bullshit…” I couldn’t actually remember saying anything of the sort, but I couldn’t remember much at all of the night’s conversation, so there was a moderate chance I had actually egged him on thus. Bad Angus. “You might be able to delude yourself with that crap, but I can’t. I care about Andrea, I really do. I can’t believe you’ve led me into this. This is not the way I conduct my relationships.”

I let him finish, then paused.

“You done?”

He considered this for a moment, then wandered thoughtfully over to a nearby rubbish bin, and violently deposited his fettuccine into it with a voluble growl. Some moments later, he resurfaced. He gestured for the remnants of the Powerade, gargled profusely, and spat.

“I’m done,” he said mildly.

I waited until he’d settled into his stumbling gait for the long walk home, before propping an arm on his shoulder in as reassuring a manner as I could, and offering the following as condolences:

“So… a pretty good rack on Brigitte, in your opinion?”

I was hoping McCarthy had gotten over his sense-of-humour-failure by the morning. Yes, we’d gotten familiar with a couple of barmaids in a distant Port. Yes, we’d ended up going out with them the night after our last gig, and yes, we’d managed to end up snogging one each while verrry drrrrunk. A significant fuck-up on both our parts, granted, but not worth sacrificing our respective relationships over. In other words, I’d tried to suggest the following: don’t ask, don’t tell. It meant nothing to you or to the other girls involved. Regret it all you like, but keep it to yourself; if anything, use that shame and guilt positively to try harder in your 24/7 relationship, turn it around, bring her closer to you.

Of course, I wish I’d actually made that point before he phoned up Andrea the next morning.

The phone in the unit rang sometime in mid-morning; I didn’t get it, but Jeff made sure I took the call by tapping on my forehead with the receiver. I think it was Morse code for S.O.S. Pertinent, perhaps. It was Jessica.

“Hey Jess, what’s going on,” I said, my voice gravelly from singing, drinking, second-hand smoke, and generally acting up.

“You tell me,” she said. “I’ve just had Andrea call me up, very distressed. Seems her ever-loving boyfriend has managed to pash on with some random bit of slutty Eurotrash. Is that true?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” I replied, “I lost track of him later in the night.”

“I can tell when you’re lying, Andy. Your lips are moving.”

Ack. Oy vey. (I was turning Jewish, all of a sudden. Hey, at least now I’d have a chance of getting laid in Sydney’s east.) I glanced over at Jeff, who looked rather bemused by the whole situation. And in the doorway had suddenly appeared our Pontius (or was it Judas?), McCarthy, looking mortified and white as a sheet after getting off the phone with Andrea.

“Yeah, I’ve just seen him, and judging by his expression, he’s in a world of hurt. But hey, he’s a big boy, has nothing to do with me. I am not my brother’s keeper.” Just as well, as my brother had been doing a damn sight more than snogging barmaids.

“Look, I really don’t want to know what Jeff gets up to, so long as you aren’t doing the same. I just want you to tell me you’ve been behaving yourself, like you said you would. I’ve just had Andrea bitching at me for twenty minutes about Sam, telling me how lucky I am to have you rather than him. I barely know the girl, for Christ’s sake. ‘Your Andy would never do something like that’, she tells me.” A little hesitancy in her breathing betrayed her emotion. “Tell me she’s right, Andy.”

I glanced up at Jeff, who was steadfastly avoiding my gaze, and at McCarthy, guilty as sin.

Fuck it.

“Well,” I began, “here’s the thing…”