The house wins

Fingers blistered from the nightly scratching at the window
Which won't open far enough to let air in
The house wins
Oh the house always wins.
You don't have to be alone to be lonely
You might as well give in.
- OK Go, 2007

The fucker with a pulse wasn’t there when I came back to life again. In fact, no fucker was. I had no idea how long I’d been out because my watch had stopped sometime during the beatdown, but it felt like about an hour, as much as I had any sense of time, which I sooo didn't. No Priddle, and noone else - if I’d still been strung out and paranoid this would have completely freaked me out. But I wasn’t, I just felt utterly disgusting - dehydrated, banged-up, head throbbing, physically and emotionally wrecked. It took three or four attempts to read and comprehend the note which had been left for me. It was in a girl’s looping, rounded handwriting, but the tone was businesslike. Brady at hospital with Sam. Am looking after Rachel, she’s OK. You clean up and dispose of evidence in case cops turn up tomorrow. Destroy this. Chas.

Unexpectedly, Chastity seemed to be more useful under pressure than anyone in the entire operation, though her comments about disposing of the evidence before the police turned up sent a chill the length of my spine. What’s the odds she makes a habit of these sorts of cleanups?

I tried to shake out the fumes circling in my head, and think. Any sort of CSI-style forensic investigation would turn up my hair, skin and blood everywhere - in every room, on the door I’d punched, on the bat I’d beaten Priddle with, probably even embedded in his wounds. If he died from them, there wasn’t much hope for me; I’d done what I’d done. There probably wasn’t a lot of point in trying to clean up; with the amount of forensic evidence, disturbing the crime scene would just delay the inevitable. And that forensic evidence cut both ways - just like there was plenty of evidence that I’d beaten him most of the way to death, there was also forensic proof littered throughout the house of the events that had led up to that. I considered taking the cricket bat away with me, possibly to stick into the incinerator at the farm, but I didn’t want to implicate anyone there as well. Face it. I’d done what I’d done - so had he. If I went down, so did he. And he had a lot more to lose, if there was anything to the supposition about his drug connections. And if he lived.

So I left everything as it was, other than taking the note with me, and limped out the door and into the night.

I reached Firstlight maybe half an hour later. Usually it’d be fifteen minutes, but I kept needing to stop and lean against trees or roadsigns to get my breath back, or to work out whether I was going to throw up or not. Every limb ached, but some more than others. I’d definitely aggravated the rib injury. My fists and forearms were bruised from the stair-fall and from Priddle’s face and torso; my legs had taken a battering on the stairs as well. And I still had a headful of poison, though now it’d started to ferment. But most of the pain, I probably don't need to point out, wasn’t physical. No matter how I tried to scrub away the sweat, dirt and dried blood, it lingered. What had happened to Rachel was entirely, irrevocably my fault. I brought her into this. I was culpable.

There was only one thing for it. Drink. Drink to the point of obliteration, and then drink some more.

The logic, if you could call it that, was that the comedown from all the shit I’d been spiked with was truly fucking heinous, and I thought if I could anaesthetise myself a little, I could ride out the storm. Theoretically, by the time my hangover hit, I’d be through the worst of it. Or I’d be dead, River Phoenix-style. Either way we’d have a workable solution.

So I sat in one of the chairs behind the main desk in the Firstlight control room, most of a carton of Carlton Mids (all I could find in the building, leftover from a previous function because noone would drink the fuckers) taxed from the drinks fridge in the kitchen. They didn’t last long, maybe a few hours. Hey, I was parched, I needed to rehydrate. Once the beer was gone, sometime around one, I tottered out to the Monaro, popped the boot, and withdrew the bottle of red which we’d meant to have shared over dinner. Rachel’s bag was still in there. That cracked me; I finally broke down. Eyes blurred and stinging, I made my way back into the deserted, half-lit studio, the bottle of red sagging forlornly from my bruised fingers. Collapsing back into the big chair, I found Phil’s trusty Leatherman tool discarded with typicalforgetfulness by the desk, and unscrewed the cork. If only I’d had this a little while ago, I reasoned, I could have found fifteen different ways to gut Priddle like a fucking fish. Every time I closed my eyes I saw that face, that smug, self-satisfied gob of his, and wanted to stove it in with a blunt object. Still do, to this day. Just so you know.

I left the bottle in its brown paper bag from Liquorland and drank straight from it like an old wino - thirty dollar bottle of Coonawarra red notwithstanding - while I sat in judgement on the amassed recordings from the last three weeks, deciding which ones I’d unilaterally wipe from the face of the Earth in the name of good taste. Needless to say, the three songs McCarthy and Priddle had written and recorded together (I think I was busy being drunk at the time to stop this travesty from occurring) were very swiftly deleted from our recording databank. As were the digital duplicates. And the analogue backups - well, I just taped over them with You Can All Go And Get Fucked Then. Which, all of a sudden, didn’t seem quite such the big joke anymore.

Somewhere after two, with the wine all gone and my dissolving brain about to cry enough for the night - though on the positive side, I’d survived, alcohol and shit music had gotten me through the worst of the toxin-processing hellfire without doing further damage to myself or anyone else - my phone rang. I fumbled drunkenly with the too-small handset, scowling at my lack of recognition of the number; it wasn’t Rachel and it wasn’t Jeff, about the only people I wanted to hear from right about now.

“Yeah?”

“We’re back at the house, and it’s still trashed,” Chastity barked, “Didn’t you get the note?”

“Fuck the note,” I snapped, “and fuck you.” I went on to call her a bunch of things that you're not meant to use to describe ladies. Just as well she was as much a lady as I was a certified practicing accountant. “If I go down, he goes down. Make sure he knows that.” Of course, that depended on him surviving. If he didn’t, I’d be screwed. “Is she OK?”

She sighed. “What do you think?” she retorted sharply. “She’s doing well, under the circumstances.

“Circumstances,” I snorted. “Classy fuckin’ euphemism there…”

“She doesn’t remember anything,” she maintained.

“Oh so that makes it fucking all right then does it? No harm no fucking foul?”

Chastity didn’t really have a response to that. There wasn’t really any response she could have come up with that would have flown. “Look,” she said finally, “trust me, she’s going to be OK. She’s a big brave girl.”

“Where is she?”

“Andrew… seeing you won’t help. She’s still badly shaken up…” The last few words came veiled with reluctance, because she presumably guessed how I’d react. “…And she thinks you’re the problem, not the solution.”

My response to that was to throw her voice across the room. The phone smashed against the far wall, the battery, casing and shell breaking apart. Then I threw the wine bottle at the wall after it - most of the broken glass stayed within the brown paper bag, disappointingly - kicking over my chair as I stormed out into the main part of the studio. The nearest breakable object was my Yamaha acoustic; I picked it up and strode purposefully back into the control room...

From there, we rejoin the account of the End Of Gasket understood by most in the industry: guitar reduced to splinters over the recording desk, out to the Monaro to sleep off the worst of the grog (about three hours’ fitful sleep, haunted by the usual horrors) then driving back to the farm as the sun rose. That in itself took three hours. I only made it up to the hill south of Byron, and down the other side, about five kays from the studio, before I had to stop because I’d almost killed myself, three truckies and a coachload of backpackers with near-misses. I pulled into a rest area, which doubled as a truck layby, on the hillside just north of the Bangalow exit, then struggled over the centre console and curled up in the passenger seat. Luckily I wasn’t so munted that I didn’t remember that you could still be done for drink-driving if you were asleep in the driver’s seat on the side of the road.

I passed out for over an hour, subjected to the familiar miseries, with a few more recent additions. A sharp tap on the glass woke me; daylight streamed into my head and reacted violently with the photosensitive sludge which was sloshing through my skull, like cork sediment in a wine glass.

“Are you all right, sir?”

I tried the power windows, then realising the power wasn’t flowing, cracked the door open. The young constable visibly recoiled from the smell in the car - alcohol fumes, dried sweat and the residue of sweat and fear. I’d cleaned myself up at the studio when I’d first made it back from the slaughterhouse - washed my hands, changed my shirt and jeans - so any evidence in my appearance that I’d killed a man inside the last eight hours, or had all but done so (final results weren’t in yet), wasn’t going to be blatantly obvious to the young fellow in the natty blue uniform and the shiny white SS Commodore.

“Is this your car, sir?”

“It is,” proceeded my response.

“Sir, have you been drinking in the past 12 hours?”

“Bloody oath,” I replied. “That’s why I’m not driving.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“My brother was driving,” I said. “Until he managed to run us out of petrol, the genius. Forgot there’s no after hours fuel on the highway before Ballina. He’s flagged a lift with a truckie to get some from there.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“God, I dunno. Maybe an hour? He’ll have to sort a lift back at the other end, so could be a while. No rush. He’s big enough and ugly enough to look after himself.”

“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking… why didn’t you just call the NRMA? You’d have reciprocal rights,” the constable pointed out, indicating the RACQ sticker on the windscreen.

“Membership’s lapsed,” I admitted. “Never used it, figured it’s only needed if you’ve got a shitty old car which breaks down a lot…” I frowned sardonically, trying to disguise the fact I was talking Absolute Ficticional Bollocks to an orificer of the law.

The constable nodded, with palpable disinterest. “Take care,” he said, and returned to his car. I closed the door, and tried to stop myself shaking. I’d almost choked on my own tongue in blind panic when I’d seen that peaked cap appearing through the window. Now I was just alarmed by my own ability to bullshit like a conman in order to save myself - and thankful he hadn’t bothered to flick his flashlight in the direction of the fuel gauge to see if we really were out of go-juice as I was claiming. Then again, the ignition was off, as I realised an embarrassingly long time afterwards.

The SS Commodore rumbled past to the end of the layby, then turned right and headed northward along the Pacific Highway. I waited a few moments, then a few more, girded my loins, and trundled gently onto the highway, heading south. I survived the couple of hundred metres to the flyover which marked the Bangalow exit, traversed the sleepy seven AM townscape of Bangalow (flinching at the sight of every car and every turned head, wishing I was in a beige Camry rather than this attention-magnet Monaro), then began gently winding through the forgotten backroads that criss-crossed the Richmond Valley area, taking advantage of my local knowledge to stay under the radar. I cautiously proceeded along the Bangalow-Lismore road for a bit, then squiggled southwards towards Tintenbar, to get away from some of the traffic - there wasn’t much but it was still more than I really wanted to encounter given my limited abilities; I felt more confident wobbling through winding backroads rather than straighter roads with more people coming the other way. From Tintenbar I headed south-west to Teven, then on towards Alstonville, freaking out mildly at the exponential increase in the number of people going about their business in this more urban surroundings, trolling aimlessly through back streets to avoid run-ins with cops or other traffic. Then safely across the Bruxner Highway (phew) and southwards again, looping the Monaro through the rolling countryside, trying not to let enthusiasm outbid talent in my inebriated-but-improving state as I reached the tiny-but-pretty hamlet of Meerschaum Vale. Now we were back onto the roads I’d learned to drive on, in Mum’s Subaru wagon and Matt’s Torana, ten years before or more. From Meerschaum Vale I followed the road over the back of the Blackwall Range, around Buckombil Mountain and the repeater station towers, to the junction with the Coraki-Broadwater Road… then right, a few kays further, and right again, into the long dirt driveway of the farm, more suited to Foresters, tractors and the old man’s venerable Brumby farm ute than this thing. I peeled off the driveway at the Y-junction, following the path that led to Jeff and Rebecca’s newer house rather than the old folks’ home, never before as glad to be home as I was in that particular instant.

It was the morning of Saturday, November 8, 2003. Ten years to the day since Matt had died. Needless to say, once I’d recovered enough to explain what had happened to me and to Rachel, nobody in the family was much interested in inviting McCarthy to join us for lunch anymore. They were more interested in ripping me a virtual one for dereliction of duty: why the hell was I here when Rachel was out there somewhere, in the hands of McCarthy’s coke-whore girlfriend? Jeff tried to resurrect my mangled phone with gaffer tape and swearing, but in the end he had to salvage the simcard and hand over his own phone so I could recall her number, which my addled brain couldn’t produce on cue. There was a voice message waiting for me, from the same number as my 2.15am reception. The voice was brave, but undercut with tension and tiredness.

“Hi… it’s Rachel, this is Chastity’s phone… just wanted to say, I’m OK. Don’t worry about me. Chastity’s been great, it’s been really rough but she’s been here for me…”

And I hadn’t, as we both knew: I’d gone out looking for revenge instead of being there to console her, morphed into some sort of violent, demented psychopath who’d been looking for an excuse to mash Priddle into bits for many years, and had only succeeded in scaring the fuck out of her even more.

“Andy… I think it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while, OK?”

Her voice was breaking up as she began to cry. Then nothing. End of message.

So I sat around all day, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, waiting for the police to turn up and drag me away. I deserved it, for failing Rachel, if not for beating seven flavours of shite out of Priddle. But they failed me. Granted, they might have shown up when I was out later in the afternoon, with the rest of the family, down at Matt’s gravesite. Poor bugger, he’d been badly upstaged on his big day. Not the sort of thing he’d have taken well to - but then again, had he lived, he’d have been turning 30 that coming May - maybe with a family, kids and all, who knew. We never got a chance to find out. I’d never actually answered McCarthy on his question of whether I thought he’d turn out the same way Matt did, but if he’d asked the same question today, I think I’d have replied, “Christ, I fuckin’ well hope so.” Then I would have cracked him repeatedly over the head with a crowbar until his brains leaked out. (Cricket bats are sooo passé.)

I decided to stay down on the farm for a few days, if only to lick my wounds and to stay near the epicentre, in case there were further developments. I didn’t need to wait long. The Northern Star ran the following on its front page on Monday morning:

Musician Brady Priddle was savagely beaten in a suspected home invasion at his Byron hinterland mansion late on Friday night. He is currently in St Vincent's Hospital, Lismore in a stable condition, with fractures to his cheekbones, nose, jaw, wrist, six ribs, right ankle, left femur, and a protruding C3 vertebrae. Police are refusing to speculate on a possible motivation for the assault, or what weapons were used in the attack. Watch as we string these three measly sentences out into a four-para lead story on page 1 with background articles on pages 2-4, in lieu of anything else vaguely fucking interesting to write about today…

No mention of me, no mention of Rachel. No mention of spiked drinks, the minor issue of a drug-rape (though it seemed I was the only person who saw it that way), handguns real or replica, or a cricket bat with Allan Border’s name and Brady Priddle’s blood all over it. Instead, the reportage speculated on the single-minded heroism of Priddle, defending himself against what the Star guesstimated wildly as up to three or four assailants… Reading about his ‘heroism’ made me want to vomit. I had to be physically restrained from going up to their offices and punching someone. At least I had the dubious honour of having done enough damage for it to appear the work of three of four men. Yay me and my homicidal rage. Something to write home to Mother about.

As I had on Monday, I spent a large part of Tuesday scanning the local radio airwaves, poring over the local paper and reading the internet to see what the next twist would be. The ‘home invasion’ angle was solidly adhered to by all media outlets - both local ABC radio and the Star, and the national press, most of whom were taking their lead from the local media outlets anyway. The fact that at the time of the ‘home invasion’ Priddle had just finished production on the new Flange Gasket album barely got a mention - in fact some reports had it that it was a deusexmachina album that had just been wrapped. The specialist music press were scratching to delve any deeper - Fairfax’s music press (namely the Mike who shall not be Crossed) got hold of Marty for a soundbite, but neither he nor Phil were able to enlighten anyone further, because neither knew any more than Cross did, not having been on the premises at the time. McCarthy, according to Phil’s account, showed up at his place to say goodbye, looking like death warmed up, but didn’t mention Priddle or me at all - just ‘this wasn’t what I signed up for.’ Self-involved to the last, that’s our McCarthy.

And, out of the blue but not totally unexpected, my phone rang on Tuesday morning while I was trying to listen to local ABC radio. It doesn’t happen often, let me tell you. Flood warnings and impending cyclones is about it.

“Long time no hear, stranger,” I quipped. “How’s it going?”Lena sidestepped the pleasantries. “What do you know about Brady Priddle getting the shit kicked out of him in a quote unquote home invasion last Friday night, Angus?”

“I know they couldn’t have kicked all of the shit out of him,” I replied. “There’s too much shit there to start with… Nah, he’s gonna be OK, apparently. Unfortunately.” As Lena’s wicked laugh crackled down the line, I warned her, “’Course you realise if you quote me slagging him off while he’s in hospital and looking like a total prick, I’ll come around to your house and set fire to your cat.”

“Wasn’t he working on your latest album?”

“Yes he was. Hey look, if you’re looking for a scoop, I’ve got nothing. The cops are still investigating, and Priddle’s helping them with their inquiries, or their homework, or their fuckin’ interior decorating, or something.”

“Who was there at the time, do you know?”

Hmmm, investigative journalism. She still remembered something from journo training at UNSW, apparently. “Look, you’re going to hate me saying this, but I’m not really keen to comment… hey look, short answer is I don’t really know, I’d just be speculating, so I don’t want to put people in or out of the picture when I’ve got fuck all evidence either way.”

“Were drugs involved?”

“That’s a broad question. You mean did they have a cappuccino and a ciggie beforehand, or what?”

“You know what I mean. Do you think it’s drug related?”

She could have meant Priddle’s infamous drug connections, I supposed. This line of questioning didn’t necessarily mean she was on to me, did it?

“No idea. No comment. Either-or, whichever fits your story better,” I proposed.

“Thanks for that,” she remarked. “You’ve been spectacularly fuckin’ useless.” She almost meant it as a joke.

“Fuck you too, sweetheart,” I replied, in the same quasi-lighthearted tone. “Hey, do you want to have a yarn with Beck? I’m down at the farm at the moment.”

“Oh, yeah? If she’s around…”

I glanced over at Beck, who looked very grave and gave the universal wave for No.

“Ah shit, she’s just taken off into town, it seems. Never mind. You’re looking after yourself?”

“In the absence of anyone else to look after me, yeah,” she observed sardonically. “Look, I gotta go. Pass on my best wishes to Priddle if you see him.”

“You mean that?”

“Hell no,” she replied. “He’s a fuckwit. Had it coming. If only he’d been less seriously injured, it’d be fucking hilarious. Catch you later, yeah?”

“See you later,” I concluded, knowing full-well I wouldn’t. And didn’t, until she turned up on my doorstep in a rainstorm nearly five years later.

Beck looked at me like I was some form of alien.

“There’s no way I could have talked to her,” Beck said, reproachfully. “I can’t just flat-out lie to people like you can, Andrew.”

“What do you want me to do, break down and confess? How’s that going to help? While this home invasion story is out there, I’m getting left alone.”

“And what about Rachel? He’s just buying your silence by not putting you in the frame, isn’t he?”

“I can’t speak for Rachel,” I replied wearily, “because I can’t speak to her. I don’t know where she is, I don’t know what she wants to do. Believe me, I want to see him pay for this - not just by being thrown down a flight of stairs, I mean jail time.” What I meant was him getting pack-raped in the showers at Long Bay until his arse imploded, but that wasn’t really a discussion topic for the breakfast bar. “And if it means that if I testify against him for what he did to Rachel, he testifies against me for bashing him, and we both go to jail, then that’s what happens.”

“Seriously? You mean that?”

“Well, if we end up in the same cellblock I’ll probably have to kill him properly, but yeah…”

In the end, it was up to Rachel, and whether she could face the idea of a long, brutal and painful court case, where his expensive lawyers would drag her name through the mud, trying to prove she was just a dirty slut who wanted to give it up to him, and I was just a psychotic ex-boyfriend who couldn’t deal with being cuckolded.

On my way down to Sydney to clear my stuff out of SOD-Off for the final time, I made a detour to Rachel’s apartment in Newcastle. She’d not been returning my calls, so I’d stopped making them. But I still had that travel bag of hers to return - the one which had sat in the boot of the Monaro ever since she’d dropped it in there, on the Friday evening, on the way to dinner in Byron. I’d beat myself up about the fact we hadn’t made it to dinner in Byron ever since, and would continue to for a lot of years yet. Her flatmate Christa opened the door, wild hair and all. It seemed strangely incongruous with the resigned look of pity she offered me.

I held up the bag. “Is she around?”

Christa shook her head. “She’s in town, booking flights home.”

Home. Canada.

“One way?”

“It’d seem so,” Christa observed. “Not that she’d want me telling you that, of course.”

So Rachel was going home. And Priddle would be getting away scot free. ‘They’re always too shamed to talk’. I wanted to kick his brains in all over again, screaming in his face with every impact. I hoped the plastic surgeons did a reasonable job rebuilding it, so I’d have a decent canvas to work with next time.

She must have recognised the look in my eyes, wavering somewhere between grief and homicide. “I’m sorry, Andy. I wish it wasn’t like this.”

“So, she told you about…?”

She nodded, “She did,” she said, starting to choke up. “And she told me what you did, too…”

“How I wasn’t there for her,” I muttered softly.

Christa shook her head. “That’s not how she told it.” Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she was just trying to protect my feelings. With Christa, you just didn’t know. “The way I see it,” she added, “every morning that guy will have to look himself in the mirror, at what’s left of his face, and remember why. So it’s not like he’s getting away with it.”

“Yeah he is,” I grimaced sourly. “He needs to be locked up, Christa. I think he makes a habit of this sort of thing.”

“I know,” Christa replied. “And Rach knows, believe me… but she’s just not… she can’t. Not right now.”

I nodded. “I understand,” I said vacantly. I must have looked a bit lost; she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a big hug, not at all proportional to her diminutive size.

“Tell her,” I said, and realised I didn’t have anything to tell her. “Tell her… you know.”

“I will,” she smiled. I’m glad she knew what I meant, because I didn’t. “Take care, OK? Look after yourself.”

“Yeah,” I replied. In the absence of anyone else to look after me.

If evil were a lesser breed then justice after all these years
The righteous would have freed the world of sin.
The house wins
Oh the house always wins.
You don't have to be alone to be lonely
You might as well give in.
You don't have to be sick to be dying
You might as well give in.

In November 2003, the month which marked ten years since my brother killed himself, I was twenty-seven. In fifteen years of being interested in girls, I’d only been in love, properly, unequivocally, with one woman. She was also the only woman whose life I’d managed to completely fuck up, such that she felt compelled to fly tens of thousands of miles home to North America to get away from me. I didn’t have a job, because my job was my band, and my band had self-destructed like a suicide bomber in a Gaza Strip marketplace. My dissolute, womanising little brother was now a family man with a successful business, a beautiful wife, a baby son, and a daughter on the way. I had a flash car and a flash house, neither of which I would be able to afford much longer, a newly-discovered homicidal streak which I hoped never, EVER to have to experience again, a lifestyle which would keep me from any sort of long-term relationship happiness, and what looked for all the world to be an alcohol problem. It needed to end here. If anyone was going to turn out like Matt, it wasn’t going to be me.

It was time to grow the fuck up.

After I bought that motorbike and did that lap of the country, of course.

There’s two schools of thought when you’re trying to delete people from your life, whether because you need to go cold turkey in order to get over them, or because you’re just trying to avoid them and everyone else associated with your old life because they’ve all turned into total arseclowns. One, that you do exactly that - delete all record of their existence - from your phone, your email address book, your contacts list. The other is that you keep those numbers in your phone so you know not to answer the bastard if those numbers come up. I went with plan B. I only had the phone - new case, old simcard - in order to be contactable by Jeff and the folks, should any emergencies crop up with the house or whatever while I was away on safari. Any other numbers, recognisable or not, I tended to let go through to the ‘keeper.

This wasn’t one I should be shouldering arms to.

It’d been my fifth night in Noosa. I’d been out drinking with the Celts on Hastings St, and Fiona and I were striking sparks off each other again. Fiona was from Glasgow, and like all great punk rock songs was short, loud and offensive. She also had big tits, hardly ever a bad thing, and had pledged her life with near-monastic dedication to the pursuit of pleasure, alcohol and casual sex, which meant we had that in common. We’d originally hooked up in Caloundra the previous week, where I’d first tripped over the Celts in their incongruous ‘I have a dream’ Martin Luther King ‘Wicked’ camper. Fiona liked me enough to have forgiven me for subsequently nailing her Irish roommate Sinead earlier in the week in Noosa, who unlike other Irish girls called Sinead we could mention, did have hair (even if it was ginger) and wasn’t a lesbian (even though she’d been happy to make a big production of making out with her equally drunk friend, Charlotte the Welsh dragon, in a Hastings St nightclub late the night Sinead had ended up in bed together - probably contributing to my interest in Sinead and I ending up in bed together, to be honest).

In the interim, I’d varied my diet with a Dutch girl called Maryke, who was blonde, early-twenties and six-five barefoot - how come Dutch girls are all so friggin’ tall anyway? As Clarkson once said on Top Gear, while belting across Europe in a McLaren-Mercedes SLR: “Tallest race on Earth, the Dutch. Something to do with all the drugs they take. That’s probably why they like Top Gear so much.” Maryke’s grasp of English was endearingly ragged; whoever told you all the Dutch speak English forgot to add that they don’t always speak it in any sort of correct syntax. However we managed to communicate well enough through the international language of love, or at least the international language of cheap, drunken, two-am shower-block sex. Even if she had a penchant for barking instructions like a militant dominatrix that weren’t always unambiguious in their interpretation, eg ‘Now do me the behind and fingers in the front…’ Ah well, it all sorted itself out in the end.

Where am I getting to with all this, other than deeper in trouble? Well, it’s night five (or morning six) in Noosa, I’ve been on the road about two or three weeks, and tomorrow (or later today) some other band will be playing in our slot at Homebake, much to the annoyance of one Annalise Crittenden and probably at least some other people. Lust and alcohol are doing a stellar job (or perhaps just a Stella job) of making me forget about all of that - indded about anything other than Fiona. We’re back at Fiona’s place - the room at the backpackers’ she’s sharing with Sinead - and there’s only one way this night is ending. There’s steam rising from Fiona as we make out in an ancient, heavily worn armchair, my shirt off, Fiona down to white, steadily dampening cotton panties and her two-sizes-too-small Celtic football shirt - which she never took off, not even to fuck. Well, she’d peeled it far up enough to allow me access to those gorgeous tits of hers, but she wouldn’t take it off - in fact the only place I saw her without it was in the shower, and once in a resort pool in Townsville on a one-in all-in topless dare with the other girls. In fact, as I’d discover through further intermittent sexual episodes over the next few months, if Celtic were travelling particularly poorly, she still kept her shirt on, but wanted it as rough, nasty and disrespectful as possible. Some sort of Catholic self-punishment ritual, I supposed. Fiona, if she chose, had a lot of sins to confess, and would need a lot of correction. She wanted to hurry, in case Sinead came home early; if that was the case, given Sinead’s penchant for snogging other girls, I wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry.

“Give me a moment,” she told me, and slithered out of my lap, in the direction of the bathroom.

Which is when my phone rang, I’d volubly asked who the fuck that could be, and dug it out so I could switch it off. But like I say, this wasn’t one to let through to voicemail: RACHEL HOME. She was, apparently.

“Uh, hi?” I stammered, suddenly heart-in-mouth. Not that I wasn’t a little hot and bothered already.

“Hey,” she said, sounding pretty nervous herself. “Sorry it’s late, I didn’t know if you’d be up.”

“I’m up,” I replied, wincing at the irony. I was very much ‘up’, thanks to the girl in the bathroom. “I thought you’d flown back to Canada?”

“Tomorrow night,” she explained. “Had to give a month’s notice at work, sell my car, help Christa find a new flatmate. All that kind of stuff. She’s driving me down to Sydney airport tomorrow.”

“Oh,” I said. What do you say to that? You’ve still been around for a month since we last saw each other, but didn’t think to call until your last night in the country?

Then again, whatever I got, I probably deserved.

“So, I was wondering… if you’re around… I was hoping we could catch up tomorrow, just so I could say goodbye. I read somewhere you guys have broken up and aren’t playing Homebake any more…”

“Yeah, but I’m kinda… in Noosa.”

“Oh,” she said.

Fiona walked out of the bathroom and through into the bedroom, shooting me a dirty look as she passed for daring to take the call in the middle of everything. Because going for a slash right as things get heated isn’t a passion-killer either, of course.

I didn’t know how to ask this, but I needed to know, so I just blurted it out.

“Rach… are you okay with the way all of this has ended up?”

A tired, resigned sigh foreshadowed her response. “Do I have a lot of choice?” she replied reluctantly. “Hell, it’s not as if I remember anything… other than finding you and Priddle at the bottom of the stairs covered in each other’s blood.”

“Rachel, look, I’m sorry…”

“For what?” she replied. “Put it this way. I had a lot of disturbing experiences that night. Watching you turn into a psycho wasn’t the least of them.”

“Andy, are you gonna get in here and fuck me, or do I have to do it my fucking self?!?”

Rachel, as we’ve noted before, had excellent hearing. She had no problem overhearing that, anyway.

“Sounds like you’re a bit busy right now,” she said flatly. “I’ll leave you to it. Goodbye, Andy.”

And before I could say another word in my defence, the line went dead.

Fuck.

I tossed the phone at the chair, which was still smouldering slightly, and looked around for something to kick, punch or otherwise destroy. But rather than that, I strode into the bedroom, where Fiona had made good on her threat to start without me (despite lacking certain relatively important bits of equipment), and found something to fuck instead.

I’m a lover, not a fighter.