Sick again

Lips like cherries and the brow of a queen
Come on, flash it in my eyes
Said you dug me since you were thirteen
Then you giggle as you heave and sigh.
Oh, do you know my name?
Do I look the same?
You know I'm the one you want
I must be the one you need.
- Led Zeppelin, 1975

Back in the day, Dr Cletus and I knew this bloke from our science course called Ringo. I don’t know why he was called Ringo, it wasn’t because he was a talentless bearded drummer with a Scouse accent, although his party piece was ripping off Mr Starkey’s vaguely stoned Thomas the Tank Engine narration pitch-perfect, except that the trains were usually swearing at each other or trying to run over the fookin’ fat controller for being a fookin’ coont, which might have had something to do with it. At heart, Ringo was a quality bastard. He was from Casino, but that was hardly his fault. He was good value (being inherently cheap helped), liked his league and his V8s, loyally volunteered for most of our half-arsed missions to cricket games or rock festivals or just down the pub on a school night, and never missed his round at the Rec Club or the RE, which made him quite excellent company.

I mention Ringo at this particular juncture not because I want to lift the tone from any unsavoury jailbait-shagging elements which are creeping in, but because of a character in the mesmerically appalling 1995 cult film Showgirls. Midway through the slow-motion train-wreck that is this motion picture (for want of a better description), the gangsta-blaxploitation bastard-love-interest of the intensely stupid rake-thin chick from Saved By The Bell frustratedly declares the following, by way of explanation as to why he’s been off boning other women while she’s been flapping vacuously about the place looking a bit Special Needs:

“Ah have a problem with pussy.”

Now the reason Ringo never heard the end of this particular nugget of Joe Eszterhas screenwriting gold is that the name of aforesaid character with aforesaid problem with aforesaid pussy was James Smith. Which, as it happens, was also Ringo’s real name (as it probably is for half a million other people on the planet, being the most popular first and last names in the English-speaking universe). And, as it happened, Ringo also had a problem with pussy, namely that he never got any. His crime was to be merely a nice, pleasant, amusing, well-brought-up fullah who wouldn’t have dreamed of having the bottle or the sleaze required in chatting up slutty women at seedy bars, and given that his chosen career path was astrophysics, it wasn’t as though he was surrounded by stellar hotties during contact hours at uni. (Happy ending alert: he married a fellow astrophysicist (the one available stellar hottie in the field) and now drives big fuck-off radiotelescopes on the big island of Hawaii for a living, discovering astral cosmic shit WITHOUT the aid of neurally active compounds. The man’s an astrophysicist dammit, not a chemist.)

Like Ringo, I too, had a problem with pussy, but mine was more in line with that of the black dude from Showgirls, and mine didn’t improve the more famous and/or cocky I became. Beach volleyballer Brooke, for all her overly-earnest, overly-punishing psychoanalysis, may have been right all along; it may have been an addiction. The Captain’s addictions were plain to see; by the end McCarthy had his substance-related vices, and Marty’s drug of choice was artistic pretention, critical fawning and basically having a lot of people hanging around telling him how glitteringly fucking wonderful he was. Mine was girls. I’d never managed to stay true to one girl for more than a few months (often not so much as weeks) at a time, and I’d very rarely managed to actually break up with someone without testing the waters elsewhere first.

But that changed with Rachel; everything changed with Rachel. Rachel was the demarkation line where one life pretty much ended and another began. In the five years since her I’d only dated two women seriously. One was Kirsten, the other was Bethany; one destroyed marriage, one fractured engagement. Beyond that, a handful of brief flings, usually abortive.

One of the English staff from Redland Bay High, the dictionary definition of neurotic - she was divorced, yet still fairly obviously in bitter and twisted love with her ex-husband, and used me to work her frustrations out as well as to try to get back at him. He was at the same school, on the social sciences staff - more specifically on one of the social sciences staff called Sharon. That ended well, as you can imagine.

Then there was Jasmine, the bouncy blonde girl who cut my hair at the hairdressers in Dunwich - a bit of fun, nothing serious, though you’d be surprised how erotic having your hair shampooed can be. At least it was a bit of fun until her ex-boyfriend came back from the Navy of course… And a couple of dismal first dates. That was it.

Until Bethany came by, I’d pretty much resigned myself to the fact my luck had changed. Changed in that it’d completely fucked off to the pub and wasn’t likely to be back anytime soon. Basically, I’d Brocked it. Through the late 70s and early 80s Brocky won Bathurst almost every year, with some bullshit good fortune involved. Then after that, for the rest of his career, he couldn’t buy a bit of luck, couldn’t even swap his last Energy Polarizer for some. Like him, I’d used up my life’s allocation of good fortune.

So there was the ‘waiting for the last bus’ mentality. There was also the ‘ready to settle down’ mentality creeping in there as well. I’d turned thirty not long before (a heinous fucking trauma in itself), Jeff and Beck had two kids and a model relationship, all the rest of my mates were settling down - apart from Super Dave who was already two divorces down and swinging for a third. It was just time. The old man had a cancer scare in ‘06 and I figured I couldn’t let him go out without proving I hadn’t made a total fucking botch of everything, just pissed away my advantages and regressed to juvenile delinquency. He’s fine now, touch wood, but when your mortality gets a question mark against it, or someone close to you… shit gets thought about differently, anyway.

Maybe I had things arse-about, maybe I decided to settle down and then met the girl, not the other way around, but by that stage I’d already been seeing Bethany for over a year, which was the longest I’d been with anyone - all-time record partnership for any wicket, home or away. And we got on well enough - we didn’t make life difficult for each other, we didn’t ask a lot of questions of each other, we seemed to make each other happy. Any disagreements we had were along the lines of whether nine AM was a reasonable time to be getting up on a weekend morning, whether the bathroom vanity sink was the best place for someone to be trimming their toenails, or whether cold sausages, leftover spag bol or BLTs were appropriate breakfast foodstuffs. She didn’t have a clue about what I used to do for a living five or so years ago, and nor did she seem particularly interested either, given she never asked.

It just seemed to be the right dynamic for a long-term deal – I figured you didn’t really want passion and fury, you wanted stability and security. I remember asking the Jeff – what the fuck was I doing asking him for advice, I have no idea, but anyway – about how or when he knew things with Beck would be different than with the various pieces of short-term crumpet he’d systematically boned over the years previous. “You just know,” he said, which was as much use as a busted arse. But he was right; I knew this was different. The intense, brilliant, short-lived flame of passion wasn’t there; instead, there was Something Else. Slower-burning, self-sustaining, low-impact, reassuring, dependable, stable.

Or so went the plan anyway.

What went wrong? One morning I woke up and I couldn’t get Kirsten out of my head. It was just a stupid chance thing, like these things usually are. I’d seen her the previous night on the news being interviewed as the rent-a-quote university expert on some education story, what’s-wrong-with-kids-these-days-etc sort of thing, and she looked fucking astonishing – looked five years younger than the last time I’d seen her, new hair, new wardrobe, wedding band conspicuous by its absence. There’d been a moment, maybe a week or so towards the end of our affair, where if I’d seized the initiative, if I’d had my head on straight, I could have ended up with her, instead of going our separate ways, never the twain shall meet. But I just couldn’t get my shit together at the time. There was still too much white noise in my head and I couldn’t commit.

Right then, the morning after Kirsten had swaggered through my evening’s dreams with her customary nonchalance, the pangs of nostalgia and regret were visceral. I was turning thirty, the best years of my life were long since past, and all I could think about was old girlfriends. That particular morning they were all after me, hunting in packs. Brooke was in the sports pages of the paper having just made the Olympic team for Beijing in a year or so, gleaming smile and sunbleached flaxen hair, sunshine and good living incarnate; another life I could have lived, maybe, had I been better behaved. Former Face of Australian Fashion Week Olivia was in the gossip section, looking disembowellingly gorgeous on the arm of an artfully unshaven Hollywood heartthrob at the local premiere of his latest appalling explodey-things CGI blockbuster. The newsreader wasn’t in the paper but she was reading the news on TV, except on a better network in a bigger city than she’d done when she’d been seeing me. (On the side. While her husband was still director of news for that channel.) And Kas Casoli’s column, which was in the paper but which I never read because it was about music and by Kas Casoli, stared accusingly at me from the entertainment section. Not that she’d ever mattered to me, but the point remained. Like Bill Murray in Broken Flowers, no woman who’d left me had gone on to regret the decision, it seemed.

So I panicked, and asked Bethany to marry me.

Look, I wasn’t sure how long my luck would hold. The last bus was leaving and I was going to be on it. Shit reasoning I know, but what do you want? And I loved her, or near enough for government work. It’s hard to remember clearly now or put into logical context, because as soon as that engagement ring went on her finger, in the words of the Back Of The Y team, all of a sudden the stunt went horribly wrong. It wasn’t just the ‘born again virgin’ thing, her unilaterally cancelling our sex life until we were married so she could feel ‘pure’ again – though that was a worry, not being the sort of thing you want to see being used as a weapon. To that point, we had a fair-to-reasonable sex life, if not an echelon-shattering one – great to begin with, then becoming less frequent and/or adventurous as time proceeded, but this was the way of the human condition; simple reproductive biology dictates sex is never going to be as thrilling as at the start of a relationship. What worried me was how little she seemed to value sex in our relationship, despite her claiming the opposite (that was why she wanted to wait, to ‘make it special’); and that she seemed perfectly prepared to use withdrawal of sex as a weapon in any future conflicts. But it wasn’t as though I was going to use ‘taking my travellers cheques to a competing establishment’ as a counter-strike, should the need occur. I was too tired, too old to bother with that sort of shite.

And then of course her father, who’d been pretty neutral towards me, even in our dealings as employer and employee, started to become more prominent - either by his own actions or because she was trying to please him… because he was paying for the wedding… because he disapproved of her cohabitation with me… because I wasn’t religious… because I hadn’t asked his permission for her hand in marriage? I don’t know, is the honest answer. For a lot of bullshit reasons I didn’t agree with, most probably - I didn’t really want to look into it. Anyway, whatever the reason, his opinion started mattering a lot more to her than it’d previously done, it seemed. More than mine did, even. But as you people know, I’m a path of least resistance sort of guy, so I went along with it. And he was never outwardly antagonistic, just disapproving. Nothing I did was enough to impress him, so I didn’t bother.

Her mother was a different case; a caseload of Valium, I believe. She was the most emotionally vacant person I’d ever met – not in an unpleasant way, but she just wasn’t there, had no emotional investment in anything. The only time I saw signs of life was when the topic turned to planning the wedding itself - when your future mother-in-law spends her homemaker downtime hand-crafting designer wedding dresses for an online bridal boutique, potential Bridezilla Vs Mother-Of-Bridezilla confrontations are fairly inevitable. I got the impression she'd once been a formidable dragon, but you can’t keep that up forever before burning yourself out, which was my guess as to what had turned out. Gerald was head of the household, won the bread and wore the pants - a very old-fashioned sort of family unit. And, to be honest, not one I’d have signed up to join had Bethany not been part of it.

It wasn’t the fear of getting married, let’s set that aside nice and early in the piece. On top of Bethany’s various other talents and occupations – PE teacher, pilates instructor, school netball coach, squadron leader of the Volkswagen Imprecision Driving Team – you could add part-time model, showing off her mother’s creations to their best effect in adverts in the glossy, phone-book-thick Brisbane and Gold Coast bridal bibles. As such I’d seen her in enough bridal dresses to be fairly comfortable with the idea of marrying someone who, one might hazard a guess, had probably spent a lot of her life looking for an excuse to get married. In fact I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t factored that into my snap decision to propose, guessing correctly that she’d be delighted to sign up to such an arrangement. Don’t ask if you don’t think you’ll like the answer you’ll get. I also correctly predicted that wedding planning would be a multi-opinionated shitfight, but I’d learned from the experiences of the Jeff, Super Dave, the Tractor et al that the best way to survive the process is to invest big on open-ended pragmatism. Repeat after me: whatever you want, honey.

The following is, of course, irrelevant, but the best wedding I ever went to was probably the Tractor’s wedding on the future Mrs Tractor’s family farm in the Catlins, down in astonishingly beautiful coastal Southland, NZ; the groom didn’t have so much a party as a UN contingent, which was basically all of Hayabusa, all of us, a couple of All Blacks, a bunch of Tractor’s old school and uni mates, and about thirty-five cartons of Speights. Though Hollywood, mercurial lead axe for the Hayabusans, still insisted on trying to bounce the groom in pre-wedding drunken backyard cricket because he was an overcompetitive arsehole after one or nine beers, which was why Tractor has a prominent bruise on his cheekbone in most of the wedding photos, and Hollywood likewise.

The worst I didn’t actually get to go to, but McCarthy did; it was Super Dave’s first wedding, to a lawyer from an allegedly aristocratic horse-breeding family from south-western NSW. She was a former president of the Young Nats which should have warned him; if not, the fact that his future father in law was (a) the sitting Nats member and (b) a total, utter, irrevocable cunting arse of a cockburglar should have done likewise. Anyway, for his sins, McCarthy was made Best Man, in a hefty wedding entourage that included the bride’s cunting arse of a cockburglar brother in the groom’s party, by order of the family; the gent himself was kind enough to regale the bucks’ night celebrations, of which I was a part, with tales of how his Super Dave’s future bride used to, and probably still would, fuck anything rigid which would stand still long enough to buy her more than one drink, including the astonishingly inbred farm help. At which point I kindly suggested that if he wanted to continue his observations, he could consider the probability that we might be forced to beat the living cunting-arsed cockburgling shite out of him. McCarthy held similar views (as did the remainder of the room), but I was louder in expressing them, apparently. Equally apparently, I wasn’t going to the wedding.

Anyway McCarthy put some considerable effort into being charming and debonair on the night, taking his Best Man responsibilities seriously, and penning a thoughtful and elegant speech about how David had once been slightly rough about the edges, but how Beatrice (even the name sounded nasty) had changed him for the better and how they had so much to look forward to together. It was intended as a hands-across-the-water exercise, a conciliatory gesture on behalf of the grooms’ side of the room (heavily outnumbered, given that her side was paying) given the undercurrents of unrest between the two families. Immediately after McCarthy’s speech had played out, her father got up, cleared his throat and declared he’d never liked Dave, probably never would, but since his daughter apparently saw something in him, he and the rest of the family would just have to put up with it and learn to tolerate him.

“You’re fucking joking,” I said.

“Nup,” McCarthy had reported. “The cunt had given pretty much the same speech at their engagement party too…”

So unsurprisingly that marriage went tits-up inside 18 months; Super Dave went off with his secretary, while Beatrice went off with half of Super Dave’s stuff. Moral of the story: don’t date lawyers.

And compared to the National MP for Cunting Arse Cockburglary, South West NSW, my future father-in-law didn’t seem that bad. Compared with malevolance, I could deal with indifference. And I could deal with being the subject of nepotism accusations as to why I had a job at SCC, as long as I was getting paid. I wasn’t nervous about issues with her parents, her brother or her friends (not that she really seemed to have any). What was making me nervous was Bethany, and the way I suddenly didn’t understand her, couldn’t predict what she was going to do, which played on my mind. It played on my mind even as I lay in the dark, on the bare cotton sheets of Anna’s bed – even the decent quality manchester was already boxed up, ready to be freighted to NEGS – contemplating the ceiling, and arguing myself onto and off a position within spitting distance of the moral high ground.

Finally, I decided, I didn’t care. Right or wrong, I’d slept with Anna. And I’d have done it again in a heartbeat. Because I was that guy from Flange Gasket who played loud music and slept with girls I barely knew. I was a bastard. And, it appeared, I was back.

She lay next to me on her side, her back to me a sheet curled around her gorgeous brown limbs, concealing her nakedness. I rolled over to take in the scenery, tracing a long strand of black hair away from her neck and kissing the supple skin beneath. Well, since I'm here. And it's not as though I can make it any worse. Anna wasn’t as asleep as I figured. She turned and met my mouth with hers, still keener than Old English Mustard. Despite the rising sense of omigod-wtf-have-you-done I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t a fucking immense ego boost to have fallen into bed with a gorgeous, long-limbed creation who clearly liked what she saw in me, always had, and wasn’t afraid to show how much.

“Was I OK?” she asked pensively.

I shook my head in amazement. “Stellar,” I replied.

“Not bad for a rookie, then?” she smiled.

“Definitely,” I replied without thinking. Then realised what she was saying. Omigod wtf...

“Yeah, I was kinda… I haven’t… fuck, this sounds so creepy-fangirl... I was kinda saving myself for you. Fucking pathetic, yeah?”

“Well…”

“Look, here’s the deal,” she added quickly. “Setting aside the whole creepy stalky fangirl thing… I could have lost it to a guy my age, who would have known fuck-all about what he was doing, blundered about like a fuckwit…”

I wasn’t really listening. I was just making the following minor alteration to my charge sheet at the department, when all this came up before the beak for my deregistration, humiliation and possible prosecution. Not just sleeping with a student. Deflowering a student. Oh my god. What the fuck.

“…I mean, you’ve done this before, yeah?” I heard her say.

“The creepy stalker fangirl thing?” I asked. Keep talking or she'll start smelling your fear. “Sure. There’s a reason why I’ve not set foot in Wagga in five years…”

“I meant,” she replied self-consciously, “the… you know. The stuff, with the thing.”

“The deflowering virgins and being chased out of bedrooms by angry fathers thing?” I suggested. “Sure. There’s a reason I’ve not set foot in Mildura in five years. Or Gawler… or Tamworth…”

“No off position on the smart-arse switch, is there Angus?” she exhaled. She was re-using one of my own teaching lines on me. “Look… if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool. But it’s not just me being weird, it’s… everyone I know hated their first time. Every one. Whether they were drunk, or wasted, or it hurt, or they never actually said yes, or they thought they loved the prick and he dumped them afterwards, or they shared with their best mate because ‘bros before hos yeah’… Fuck me, you know what these dicks are like. I mean… no choice there, really, is there?” she finished demurely. This was the most self-conscious I’d ever heard her. It was rather sweet, really.

“I’d believe you,” I began, “ but there’s just one thing …”

“Okay, okay. It happened jetskiing,” she interceded, a little embarrassed. “Off Amity, in a fairly serious swell, choppy as hell. I got thrown out of the seat cresting a wave and landed hard as we hit the next one. Hurt like fuck, but I was more scared of bleeding in the water, given the history of the place…”

“Not that,” I replied reassuringly. “I meant, it’s more how the hell you got to be so fucking good at it…”

Anna’s dark, devious eyes appreciated the compliment. “Hey look, I practice a lot when I’m alone,” she offered. “And hell, it doesn’t hurt when it’s someone you’ve been practising to for as long as you can remember knowing how to…” She kissed me enthusiastically, tracing her long fingertips southwards to squeeze me inquisitively. She didn’t know how to be any less forward, I figured. Even if either of us wanted her to be.

I got up, recognising an issue which needed to be dealt with.

“Something I said?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Inspecting the facilities,” I replied. “I’ll be back.”

“You’d better be,” she called after me, sliding a hand over the sheet between her thighs as she rolled over.

I conducted my tour – finally finding the slashers in this enormous, gaudy, echoingly-empty place, and trying not to trip on boxes of Anna’s stuff en route – and unsurprisingly got lost on the way back. Where I ended up was in what looked like Crittenden’s study: glass-topped desk covered with neatly-stacked papers and folders, ostentacious leather chair, bookcase full of books whose spines I couldn’t decipher in the darkness, but were probably excrementally dull and about property law, high-powered sales techniques and ways of blackmailing council officials so as to get dubious developmental applications approved. I took a cursory glance over the stuff on top of the desk, wondering idly if Crittenden was stupid enough to have anything like ‘Master plan for improving Tuscany on Point property values by poisoning big fuck-off trees directly over the road’ lying around the place which I might be able to punt along to Wally at the residents’ action group. I guess I lingered a bit too long.

The silhouette was tall, slender and familiar. Oh, and naked. I mentioned that yeah? She filled the doorway, long arms reaching for the extent of the doorframe, long legs likewise. She had the body of a woman. Lord, imagine my surprise... no, hang on, still a woman.

“So, Mister Young. You are here to steal our secrets, yes?” Among her talents, many of whom I’d only discovered this evening, Anna did a rather excellent pseudo-Russian Bond-villainess voice. “You think we will let you live if you escape with what you know?”

“Do you exspect me to talk?” I offered in my least worst Sean Connery, as she strode slowly towards me.

“No, Mister Young,” she told me. “I expect you to fuck.”

Yeah, it was a shit line, but I didn't really mind. Possibly I should have been professionally flattered she was finally calling me Mr Young instead of Angus. About time I earned some damn respect. I swept her up over the desk as she squealed demonstratively – one of the advantages of a big, empty house being the lack of people to hear us – and into the big leather chair.

“I’ll never talk, you know,” she insisted, trying to stay in character. “Never, you hear me. No matter what you do to me…” It was pretty clear what she wanted me to do to her, as she reclined into the chair and guided me down on her, her fingers tangled in my hair. She writhed and squealed and cried out, but never once tried to get away. And, even more impressively, managed to stay in character the whole time. Next stop NIDA. Though, before too long, she talked. And believe me, she told me everything. At least until she couldn’t stand it, then she twisted herself around and impaled herself on me, and we fucked insanely on the big leather chair until she exploded like a New Years fireworks display. And still wanted more, so I carried her back to bed and helped her out with a little after-play – even after several months off it didn’t seem I could put more than two efforts back-to-back in a single night. Back in the day, yeah, but now? Not so much.

Anyway, we finally fell asleep sometime in the wee small hours, cradling each other. I’d missed that skin-to-skin contact almost as much as I missed the actual sex.

I awoke at sunrise, largely because even the curtains had been packed up and the light poured in relentlessly. How Spartan were the furnishings at NEGS that even the curtains were being sent to Farmadale? Or was Crittenden planning to redecorate the moment he managed to shovel Anna out the door? And, judging from the story Anna had told last night of watching Bethany and I making love in the garden next door from her bedroom window (while entertaining herself at the same time) – how much of last night’s activities in Anna’s bedroom would have been seen through the non-existant curtains by someone at street level – or, for argument’s sake, from a first floor bedroom window in the house across the way?

Jesus suffering fuck.

When she’d first told me, to be honest, I didn’t know whether I liked the idea of Anna watching during those intense, shadowy, storm-etched moments while Bethany and I first became acquainted. Actually, scratch that. I liked the idea of the above, rather a lot actually, but I didn’t know whether I liked the idea of liking it, as it made me into exactly the sort of sex addict Brooke the ex-beach volleyballer used to claim I was, and had been solemnly trying not to be any more. Anna had explained that on a clear night, when the moon was out, it was rather illuminating what she could see from her bedroom window.

“It was pissing with rain,” I pointed out.

“Okay, okay, so I was stalking you. Hey, if you’ve got your mind set on some al fresco fucking with some dirty little blonde in the bushes behind her house, don’t get fuckin’ sulky when you start attracting voyeurs. And don’t pretend you don’t lurve the idea of me watching, boy...”

Fuck it. Thinking back to the night before, lying half-awake on Anna's sheets, I kinda hoped Bethany had seen it. All of it. Particularly the acrobatic stuff which Anna threw herself into nearing her climax the first time. In fact, I was almost of a mind to wake her up and bang her again, up against the window this time, just to make sure the statement was as unambiguous as possible. In that moment, there was no guilt, no shame, no tension. Just the mild annoyance that I wasn’t eighteen again and maybe in a better position to have this girl for as long as I wanted.

Two dark brown eyes regarded me sleepily, but enticingly, from beyond a tangled fringe of licorice black.

“Sure you don’t want to apply for a transfer to NEGS?” she suggested.

“Yeah, me at an all-girls’ school, that’s a brilliant idea,” I reasoned. The thirteenth Duke of Wybourne? At an all-girls’ school? With my reputation?

“Like you’d have anything left for the others after I’d finished with you.” She reached between us, slipped her hand around me and squeezed me gently. “Fuck me, you do have something left.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Well, what the fuck do you expect, I've got a perfectly good cock in my hand and am far too fucking sore to be able to do anything with it…”

But we figured something out, as you’d expect two intelligent, resourceful adults in our position to do. The something we figured out involved the shower, a lot of warm soapy water, and Anna belatedly and selflessly returning the favour I’d paid her earlier that morning. When I say selflessly, I’m obviously not considering where her other hand was going, but that little concession to her own amusement wasn’t detracting from her performance. Adding to it, if anything.

“How am I doing?” she wanted to know, after a little while. It could have been half an hour, but it felt like half a minute, for the amount of time I’d have liked to drag this out for.

“Yeah good,” I breathed. “I'd say good.”

“Are you close?” she wanted to know.

“Not necessarily.” Meaning, I’m doing everything in my power not to be. Including counting backwards from a thousand, focusing manically on the mould in tile grout, and/or mentally reciting all the colour names from the Dulux colour chart. Jesus suffering fuck, anything to prolong thiiiisssss.

“You might want to be closer,” she offered, bowing her head back to her work. “That sound in the background?”

“…Yeah?”

“Garage door,” she remarked, almost conversationally. “Just so you know…”

I was safe. I was on the grass on the far side of Crittenden’s border fence, the side that belonged to the council and not to Crittenden, and I was safe. Sure, I’d had to scramble into my clothes, kiss Anna goodbye (without tongue, for self-evident reasons) and vault out through the window at the very second her father’s footsteps fell on the entrance hall – Bon Scott would have been very proud – but it turned out a’ight. Sure I’d managed to demolish half the miniature Japanese garden which had been landscaped immediately below her bedroom window, but I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, and you can’t prove anything. Sure I’d managed to almost disembowel myself scaling the fence, but ‘almost’ was the operative term there. And sure I would have been able to get out of there with a lot more time, grace and dignity had I not insisted on letting Anna finish what she’d begun, but do I look like a total fucking idiot to you?

Don’t answer that.

The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and it was the dawn of another beautiful day in paradise. Yeah, I was in a good mood, surprisingly enough. I felt alive. Which, considering the exertions of the past 24 hours - primarily the gig, you filth-minded cretins - was an achievement. I wandered cheerfully along the track which wound across the back of the properties backing onto the bridge, though I dampened down my cheerfulness in favour of stealthy ninja styles for the section of path which adjoined the Toogoods’ along the way a little. Once past there, totally undetected, I was home free in all but name. This early in the morning, there was not a soul about – not even the shambling zombies of the night before. Granted, this pathway was a bit of local knowledge which the imported schoolies and toolies probably weren’t across, and neither were they likely to be in much state for higher-level motor function at this stage of the morning, but it equally seemed like the early-rising locals were keeping a very low profile as well – hardly surprising given their town had been overrun by drunken arsewits, and many of them had buggered off to the mainland anyway, cashing in on the holiday rentals bonanza.

It was amazingly quiet and peaceful, given the widespread insanity of the previous evening. All I could hear were birds, distant surf, and the perennial tinnitus of the long-term rock muso, though after last night it seemed to be running through a Marshall stack cranked to 11. And there were no clouds on the horizon, literally or figuratively. Sure, I had a minor bit of bridge-mending to do at home, particularly with Lena – presuming she even remembered I was supposed to join her for drinks and sparkling repartee last night – but, in hindsight, there was no way I’d have exchanged one potential night’s experiences for the other.

I was already reflecting on the night with Anna, but not in a miserable ‘God, I miss her already’ way, or an apprehensive ‘There goes my career’ way – just in a “Yeah. That was fucking cool” sort of way. Not proud but not repentant? Hell no. I was proud as hell. I’m claiming that, I thought. I’m a fucking rock star, sleeping with gorgeous seventeen year olds is in my job description. For further details I recommend consulting the Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There. I emerged from the track through the bush onto the end of my street, only a hundred yards or so to go, wryly humming along to the tune of ‘Well she was just seventeen, and you know what I mean…’

And felt my buzz being killed. Not just killed. Dragged out of its bed in the middle of the night, kicking and screaming, and shot through the head by firing squad.

And all because as I emerged from the bush, my eyes met those of a pretty blonde girl in athletic attire who was jogging up the hill, up the part of my street which wound back down to the main part of town, but definitely planning to detour down the track I was emerging from, well before getting anywhere near my place. And as our eyes met at the track entrance, she looked at me with something between horror, disgust and utter contempt. That same look the last two times I’d seen her in the past five weeks – once, in passing in town, the other, the Night of the Long March.

“Hello, Bethany,” I said stiltedly.

She stared at me. Just stared, like she couldn’t believe I still existed, as though I was supposed to have been wiped from the face of the Earth after she’d decided to start avoiding me. Then she seemed to compose herself.

“Did we get dressed in the dark, Andrew?” she asked. The Royal ‘we’, meaning me.

“Why’s that?” I asked, not wanting to think about the reason. Not again…

“You’re wearing your shirt inside out,” she responded icily.

And, with that, brushed past me and ran off, looking like she wanted to throw up.

She wasn't alone. Oddly enough, that line seemed funnier the first time I’d heard it.

There was a dark-haired girl curled up in my bed when I ninja’d into the house – everyone, even Farmer Jeff was still out to it courtesy last night’s post-match drinks, the wreckage of which could have filled the recycling bin two or three times over, had anyone bothered to clean up the mess they’d made in my house – but this one wasn’t laying in wait for the usual encumbent, rather was taking advantage of him not being around. Suddenly feeling very tired – the exertions of the past 24 hours finally catching up with me – I kicked off my shoes, slipped between the sheets next to her, and crashed. An hour later I woke up to find myself spooning her, which was a shock for the pair of us. I blamed my sudden sexual awakening (sounding all Mills and Boon heroine of a sudden) for the fact that all my subconscious wanted to immerse itself in was committing sins of the flesh, in graphic detail that not even all the streaming smut on the interweb could compete with. And for the fact that Lena woke up with an annoying pain in her lower back from something that really shouldn’t have been able to create such a disturbance, given its recent pattern of use.

“Hey,” she said. “I know it’s been a while, Angus…”

Oh no it hasn’t! I wanted to bellow pantomime-styles, but thought better of it. However…

“No it hasn’t,” she corrected herself suddenly. “You’re smiling. Suspiciously. And you reek of sex.”

“I always do, baby,” I offered. “I’m made of it.”

“You bastard, you’ve been off fucking some pre-pubescent schoolgirl until sunrise haven’t you?”

“No…”

“No?” she interrogated.

“She’d definitely been through puberty,” I corrected her. “That seemed pretty obvious actually.”

She hit me. She actually hit me.

“You fucking idiot. I’m really disappointed in you,” she said, and seemed to mean it. “You can’t blame me for fucking up your relationship with Bethany now. If she finds out about this…”

“When,” I corrected again.

“When?”

“Pretty much straight away, since you asked,” I laughed. “Ran into her mid-Walk of Shame...”

“Hope she was on one herself,” she said pointedly.

“Nah, she had her clothes on the right way round,” I recalled. “And what the fuck do you care anyway?”

“It was salvageable,” she maintained. “You threw away a salvageable long-term relationship… no, engagement… in favour of a grubby, nasty, one-fuck one-nighter…”

“Three,” I corrected once again.

“Three what…” And guessed what. “Look, I don’t want to know,” she moaned.

“Ah, you’re just jealous ‘cos you missed out,” I claimed. “Hoping for a shot at the title were we?”

“Oh, fuck off…”

“Hey, you wouldn’t be in bed with me otherwise now would you? Ah well, if you play your cards right, make me dinner…” I realised I was channelling Super Dave at his finest. Anyone beginning to wonder how he had managed to make it to his third divorce?

She rolled over, and looked me in the eye.

“Boy, if it was me you’d had that three-fuck one-nighter with… you’d barely be able to speak by now, let alone walk home.”

Ah, I think she won that argument a bit. Just by weight of conviction. Even though thanks to the gig last night I was barely able to speak anyway.

“Shall we get out of this bed now and never speak of this again?”

“Let’s.”

Too late. The bedroom door had swung open to reveal The Jeff, cautiously eyeing off the contents of an expired shaker bottle of instant pancake mix from the depths of despair, or my pantry at least. He was even more cautiously eyeing off the contents of my bedroom.

“Hey,” I said, before he could get a word in. “Are you Jeff Vader?”

That threw him, but he got back on-message pretty quickly. “I’ll kill you with a tray,” he pronounced. “Death by tray it shall be.” Glancing back to the plastic bottle in his paw, he added, “I was going to ask whether these pancakes would still be all right, and whether you’d want any. But I see you two have already dined out…”

“Yeah, we’ve been makin’ bacon since the earls,” I quipped. “You and Beck got what you wanted after all.”

“No you didn’t!” Lena responded stridently. Then asked, angrily, of Jeff: “What the fuck, you and Beck are trying to set us up??”

“No, what?” he cried. “No!” And then “…What?”

This was great. Not even breakfast time and I had Jeff accusing Lena, Lena returning fire at Jeff, Jeff backpedalling furiously and confusedly, and all because I’d woken up on the right side of bed this morning. Just not this particular bed. Which I was bounding out of, declaring pancakes were all right but we could probably rustle up some scrambled eggs and bacon, and we could drag the big percolator out of storage for some decent coffee, or we could all wander down the street for breakfast instead, that is unless anyone was keen to head down for the early at Cylinder Beach first…

“Well if you haven’t fucked him, who has?” Jeff wanted to know. “He’s far too fucking cheerful, someone’s clearly missed the memo. Don’t feed the animal… Christ, will you get some pants on?”

“Those that can…” I reminded him, crawling into a pair of shorts as most attempted to avert their eyes.

“Angus,” the Jeff replied tiredly, “ten years ago just called. They want their quote back.”

Bethany still hated me, apparently, but she hated me before, and I’d not done anything before. At least now I’d done something to deserve it. Call it a karmic get-square. The world was in balance and the planets were in alignment. The post-gig buzz was good, from the vibe amongst our entourage on Sunday afternoon before everyone headed home, to the media reports which began filtering through across the week - hell, we’d even got a vaguely positive review from Kas Casoli in the Courier-Mail. ‘Like meeting up with a long, lost friend who you’d forgotten just how much you missed… if only to remember absolutely everything they do and say shits you to tears.’ (I may be paraphrasing slightly.) My inbox and voicemail was inundated with literally some messages of congratulations, as well as howling abuse from distant mates round the country who hadn’t heard we’d been gathering to play again. Which in its own way was nice... ish. Mike Cross from the Age called wanting a chat (his preferred non-threatening term for interview); there was a g’day, congrats and a drop-in-next-time-you’re-in-town from the office of the famous Greg ‘Richie’ Richardson, who was probably just as pleased his stepdaughter had returned unmolested from parts north, as he was the gig went well. And I’d gone from reclusive no-name to small-town celebrity, unable to wander down to the shops without some band of half-cut schoolie well-wishers bellowing my name, a greeting or something equally unintelligible across the street. All good and well, but I could see why half the town fucked off out of here (as I usually did) for Schoolies Week(s). There’s only so long you can live in a zoo without turning into one of the exhibits.

All that considered, I can’t say I really noticed that I didn’t get any teaching work that week. The time I spent not answering emails or phone calls, I spent enjoying just being on my own again. I’d become used to my own space over the past few years, and while sharing it with others over the past few weeks had been great fun, having the place to myself again was just luverly. I got up at first light to go surfing (trying to get in before the Schoolies hordes woke from their hangovers and headed out into the briny), I went on lots of long rides through the bush and along the beach on the R 80 G/S, even busted out the old swag and camped down the far end of the island for a night down near the Jumpinpin channel, just to get away from town, kick back with a bottle of red and count the stars. I got a lot of useful thinking done that night, and figured I could probably solve all the world’s problems, as well as my own, if only I could get around to fucking off away from them more often. I felt better than I’d done for a while, to be honest. That disconcerting feeling of being slowly, deliberately strangled by my own life, had left me. And I don’t think I saw Senior Constable B.S. Toogood once during the entire week; this being a busy time of year, possibly his Actual Job was interceding between him and his ambitions of harassing me to the point of moving to Lithuania.

There was a message there somewhere, hidden in the fine print and the legal disclaimers. For those playing at home, the message wasn’t ‘Go back and teach next week’.

However, since paid work in the field of education was likely to be more likely than paid work out front of a rock band, least of all my own – particularly since Marty (and, more to the point, Maddy) was very clear on the point that the Gasket renewal show had been a fantastic, awesome, super-cosmico-enjoyable one-off, and I reluctantly had to agree, despite how much I was jonesing on the thrill of the show; it was all those great things because it was a one-off – then I couldn’t just kick teaching to the kerb, not yet anyway.

So on Thursday afternoon – I had plans for Friday, which I’ll get to in due course – I dialled up Bill Howard, just to see whether there was any work in the offing for next week. I figured I was less likely to get myself into problems at the state school.

He asked what this was about, and I told him why I’d called.

He stammered a little, and said that wasn’t likely, given the circumstances.

I asked him what circumstances, I didn’t know about any circumstances.

He seemed surprised I didn’t know about any circumstances. He agreed I’d never been anything less than professional when working for him, but said it was an issue of perception… and harrumphed. He was of that vintage of men who harrumphed, so harrumphing wasn’t unprecedented, even though it was concerning.

And I was concerned, because all of a sudden, there were a lot of big fuck-off dots in front of me, and I had a big fuck-off Sharpie in my hand.

“Bill,” I asked carefully, “what have you heard?”