White wedding

Hey little sister, what have you done
Hey little sister, who's the only one
Hey little sister, who's your superman
Hey little sister, who's the one you want
Hey little sister, shotgun...
It's a nice day to start again.
It's a nice day for a white wedding.
- Billy Idol, 1983

Women, I was being reminded, are complicated. I’d spent a lot of the last week - my ‘decompression’ week - thinking about them, in particular the ones close to me. I’d spent quite a bit of a windless, cloudless Wednesday night doing so on a beach many miles from civilization, with my iPod, a southern sky atlas I’d picked up in a second-hand bookstore for five bucks and a fairly handy Hunter Valley cab merlot (which needed twenty minutes in the shallows at the end of the ride to get down to ‘quaffing’ temp from ‘wrapped in swag next to exhaust pipes’ temp.) A lot of time went on Lena, because she was a friend, ironically the most difficult of all male-female relationships to manage. Boyfriend and girlfriend – simple, love each other, everything else will sort itself out. Casual partners – even simpler, fuck each other, ditto. But boy-girl friendship isn’t something which has a great biological imperative behind it, and as such is a fraught dance between maintaining the (platonic) love and making sure you are seen to be steering well clear of anything more serious.

And another layer of weird had been trowelled onto the substrata of our relationship with the news, confirmed by press clippings, that McCarthy was no more; that he’d rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. He was an ex-McCarthy. And if that sounds flippant, it was. But it was the easiest means I’d found of dealing with it. What had I said on stage the previous weekend? Nice bloke. Turned into a cunt. Dead now. Miss him. I was happy to stand by those comments.

Though I wouldn't have said so in the immediate aftermath, in hindsight it was no real surprise that practically noone this side of the ditch knew, if you knew a bit about how the way the news media works. Barely anyone that side of the ditch would have either, given our fairly minimal profile there. The reportage which Media Monitors had been able to unearth, and which Lena had duplicated and left with me, was obscure in the extreme – a series of clippings from a variety of regional newspapers from the Deep South – the bottom half of New Zealand’s South Island (yes they have newspapers there, it would seem.) For instance, the Regions section of the Otago Daily Times of Dunedin, New Zealand (birthplace of the mighty Hayabusa), which announced the following to an utterly disinterested provincial audience looking for the stock prices and the rugby scores on April 12, 2004:

Motorcyclist named
Police have released the name of the motorcyclist believed drowned after an accident on the Queenstown-Glenorchy Road early Saturday morning has been released. The motorcyclist was Samuel David McCarthy, 28, an Australian who had been residing with family near Glenorchy. Police have declined to speculate further on the matter until the coroner’s findings are released on May 9th.

The end. An earlier story from the same section of the paper, dated four days earlier but no greater in detail, reported the late-night crash of a motorcyclist on the same road; a third brief extract, dated May 10, proclaimed the coroner’s declaration of death by presumptive drowning. Presumptive largely because it had proved too hard to drag him up from the bottom of a 300 metre deep glacial lake and ask him nicely what had compelled him to cark it. The Invercargill-based Southland Times, which also serviced the Queenstown area, had little more to say on the matter than the ODT, meaning they used the same sixty-odd words in a slightly different order, and also probably meaning there was little more to tell. Tourist stacks bike, dies, the end. Only the free local Queenstown paper Mountain Scene had anything to add, their reporter (presumably short of a story on a slow news day) interviewing the cop attending the crash scene. Executive summary: Late night/early morning, very cold, very wet, possibly black ice, probably speed-related, hit barrier, went over, long way down, rocks and rubble, very deep lake, helmet marks on crash barrier, helmet bits on rocks, bike bits everywhere. And a truly disturbing photo of a disembodied, headless sportsbike (or the remains thereof) – presumably something Italian, given the lad’s usual preferences – propped disconsolately against a very bent section of steel highway railing, the tableau cordoned off by police incident tape. I got the impression that if in doubt, Mountain Scene erred on the side of tabloid.

I knew that road, a little bit. I’d been on it once before, in nothing more performance-oriented than a rented Transit van, but it was memorable enough. We'd been heading from Queenstown out to Glenorchy for a jetboat tour on an off day from one of our Anzac Cultural Exchange Program tours with local guides Hayabusa. (Our lack of local profile wasn’t through lack of trying, let me tell you. The Kiwis are pretty parochial about their tunes; while the Oz market has always been keen to adopt good Kiwi acts, not many Aussie bands crack the NZ market to any great extent.) The Queenstown-Glenorchy Road wound along the northern and eastern arm of Lake Wakatipu; the scenery was awe-inspiringly intense but going off into the boonies didn’t bear thinking about. Drop off the side and your clothes would be out of fashion by the time you hit the water. And you'd keep going, too - the lake was a couple of hundred metres deep for most of its length, basically the submerged valley between the mountain range just kept going down, and down, and down. On a cold Southern Alps night in April, with ice on the road and the mercury well below zero, I’d have guessed it was comfortably cold enough to induce hypothermia in an unconscious crash victim with significant head injuries from impacting the crash barrier, for his leathers, helmet and boots to become waterlogged, and for the remaining air in his body to finally leach out enough for him to descend to a watery grave. And I’m not just saying that because it’s what the coroner decided had happened and I’m trying to sound clever. An excerpt from the report, summarizing the findings, was included in the package.

So what was he doing there? Again, I had nothing much more than guesswork. Anne and her Kiwi husband lived in the area, it was a fair guess that he was staying with them trying to get his shit together, if he was still in the kind of addled state he’d been in the last time I’d seen him. It all made sense, although with a miserable inevitability about the whole thing. I’d been right. I’d always said he’d fucking kill himself on one of those things, and he had. He’d fulfilled his own prophesies, and mine. But goddamn it, people, Uncle Sam was dead. Uncle Sam was dead. Uncle Sam was dead. No matter where you put the emphasis, he was dead and had been for years. How couldn’t have I known? How come nobody told me? How did this not get reported on this side of the ditch? It wasn’t as though he wasn’t famous enough. Sure, it wasn’t Michael Hutchence choke-wanking himself to death, but surely this was worth of picking up by AAP or someone?

Lena had a theory on that. “There’s nothing on this [the regional NZ newspaper coverage] that identifies him as Sam McCarthy of Flange Gasket,” she noted in our Thursday night catch-up call. I hadn’t mentioned the weird conversation I’d had with Bill Howard earlier in the evening, as I didn’t really know what to make of it, given he’d clammed up, excused himself and signed off when I’d asked him what was going on. Had some ideas of my own. Didn’t like them much, so I was choosing to ignore them. “Just an Australian staying with family in the area who’d been killed in a bike accident. The death of some random tourist, parked up in the back of the regional news section of a country paper, not likely to get wide coverage, yeah? So who’d make the connection? Look at it this way - the Southland Times is part of Fairfax NZ and yet it doesn’t look like any of the other national Fairfax papers have picked up the story, otherwise presumably Media Monitors would have shaken them out. So it’s not even made it nationwide, let alone over this side of the Tasman.”

I was a bit more cynical. “And of course you have McCarthy’s brother-in-law Daniel Fyfe, third-richest man in the fucking country or whatever, who I’m sure would have enough pull in local media circles to make sure that reporting was very low-key so that his family weren’t hassled and his good name wasn’t sullied…”

Lena didn’t agree. “I don’t think so, Angus,” she replied softly. “It just wouldn’t have been necessary. Trust me - from a newspaper perspective it’s a non-story.”

She was right, of course. I was just being a conspiratorial pain in the arse, because my mate was dead and no bastard had seen fit to tell me.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” I remarked. “Ten years ago McCarthy would have been the sort of junior shitkicker journalist who’d have been stuck writing up ‘non-stories’ like this for hick regional fuckin’ newspapers…”

“You’re angry,” she observed. “I didn’t really expect that.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Only with him,” she replied. “I thought I’d left all that behind years ago. You too?”

“I’m not angry with him,” I retorted. “I’m angry with this shit. With his family for being too fucking rude to tell anyone about this. There’s protecting your name and then there’s slapping people in the face. Fucking hell, I knew that guy longer than anyone other than his own family, and yet I don’t deserve to find out he’s been dead since 2004? Or Jeff, or my folks? You’ve got the Courier-Mail quoting me talking smack about him, saying he was a showboating, sulking, spotlight-hogging wanker or whatever, with him actually dead and gone - how the fuck does that make me look? Like a total fucking arsehole,“ I added, redundantly.

“Well fuck, Angus, how do you think I feel?” she replied bitterly. “Who was the insensitive bitch who actually wrote that about him?”

I’d brought her close to tears again, and felt truly lousy about it. My agricultural approach to bereavement wasn’t always the most tactful way to deal with the issue. Worked for me, kind of, but others not so much…

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Lingering, awkward silence.

“'Course, it was piss-funny at the time,” I added.

She laughed and told me the reason I looked like a total fucking arsehole was that I was one. And that she deeply resented the fact that she couldn’t stay mad at me for longer than a few minutes at a time. If only she could have passed that skill onto certain other women in my life, I thought.

“So, you’re OK?” Bit of a leading question.

She shrugged. Bit hard to tell on the phone, of course, so we’ll call it an inspired guess. “Freaked out a bit when I first got the paperwork,” she admitted. “You know me in a crisis, I go to bits faster than Humpty Dumpty.” That wasn’t how I remembered her, but she’d moved on before I could contradict her. “But Danno was great, she was with me when I found out, and didn’t mind me having a little cry on her shoulder. Pathetic, yeah?”

“No, fair enough. It’s a lot of years of your life to just wipe off,” I offered.

“I mainly didn’t want him to cast a cloud over last weekend. He’s the ultimate prima donna, he’d have loved the opportunity to be centre of attention, having everyone talking about him…”

“Didn’t entirely prevent that on the night,” I pointed out. “And probably still won’t, even after you tell the story.”

“Yeah, but at least the question of ‘Where’s McCarthy?’ has an answer. And noone can accuse you of ‘well that wasn’t the real Gasket because McCarthy’s not there.’” I figured that was a veiled shot at Mike Cross of the Age, who’d quoted me saying as much. “You guys were as close to the real thing as there’ll ever be again…”

So I’d spent quite a lot of the last week post-gig worrying about how Lena was getting on, which was ridiculous because (a) she’d broken up with McCarthy years ago, even before the rest of us parted company with him; (b) she was a big girl (literally) and could look after herself, and (c) I’d see her on the weekend anyway.

But that was kind of the problem. The event in question, the reason for catching up again, was her little sister’s wedding, and like anything involving Agniezska, it involved drama. An almighty thermonuclear clusterfuck of a drama, to be fair. One involving Agnes turning into such an insufferable, punishing, demanding, fascist little Bridezilla that her chief bridesmaid threw in the towel and resigned a few months out from the event, disgusted at yet more impossible, unachievable demands from the little Hitler: organise everything, yesterday, and while you’re at it, lose ten kilos so I don’t look like I’m working for a charity dealing with the obese in my wedding photos. In fact, aforesaid former chief bridesmaid probably wouldn’t have gone at all, or had been invited at all, had she not been Bridezilla’s own middle sister and had her mother not intervened and ordered a truce.

Anyway, Little Miss Bridezilla’s various snide comments about missing an opportunity to save expensive ink by removing the ‘and partner’ calligraphy on Lena’s invite had pissed her off to the point she decided to drag me into the situation, because that was bound to improve matters. Despite all I’d done over the past few weeks, she still hadn’t been disgusted with me nearly enough to suggest I wasn’t welcome on her arm on November 29th, indicating just how desperate she was to have a date – any sort of date – to the big dance. The wedding was on the Sunshine Coast (where the groom’s family was from; they wedding was at a winery they owned up near Maleny), so I hardly had an excuse not to go, compared to Lena who was coming from Sydney it was basically at the end of my street. Or my ferry run, which was where I met Lena on Friday, fresh off the midday flight after trying to fit a heavy week’s work into four and a bit days, and in possession of a hired suit for me, a foul mood for her, and a rental car for the both of us. Not the one she actually asked for, of course, because that would be helpful.

“Why an X-Trail?” I asked her.

“Asked for a Mondeo. Go figure. I think the suit is right, though with my luck with rental shit it’s probably completely fucked as well. Get in.”

“Not looking forward to this, are we?”

“Fuck, I’m that transparent?” She assaulted the controls of the X-Trail like she was abusing a recalcitrant Woolies trolley, and we surged out of the ferry carpark, heading for Maleny, and tomorrow’s nuptials. “This is going to be more punishing than a week with Chris Kurtin.”

Whereas what she meant was “This is going to be just as punishing as a wedding involving my punishing little sister, her obnoxious scenester friends, my dysfunctional, hypocritical, reactionary family and her dull-as-fuck future husband’s dull-as-fuck family.” Because it was. No offence intended, obviously, but it was. Overly long ceremony involving far too many readings from far too many spotlight-seeking peripheral family members: Check. Wedding couple have written their own vows: check. They’re awful: check. Dreadful chintzy wedding song: check. Jesus, Agnes, what happened to you girl? Mentally reconciling this makeup-caked stress-bunny with the filthy-minded twenty-something in the PVC nun’s habit from Lena’s bedroom at Lena’s 25th was near impossible, though I was trying bloody hard.

At least we survived the fight-through to the reception, where the grog was on hard, early and often, and we began blessing the new union with regular libations long before they made it back from getting their photos done. Naturally we were parked on Hell’s Own Table with the most punishing and self-absorbed of Agnes’ punishing, self-absorbed friends, as well as the girls’ other, glacially disinteresting sister, Yuliya (Jules) and her husband. She spent most of the time whinging that Agnieszka had unilaterally and unfairly banned children from the reception and that they had no faith in their nanny whatsoever, because she was foreign or something. Lena decided to deal with that, and with the torrent of self-absorbedness from the rest of the table, by getting absolutely fucking wasted on the plentiful, almost-drinkable house red. And as her loyal wingman, I could but follow her into the maelstrom, providing supporting fire and keeping my head down.

After a good hour of being passive-aggressively pestered into ‘circulating’ by her mother, and a very good hour of smashing house reds, Lena decided she’d decided to take matters into her own hands. Standing as I returned from the gents, and slipping an arm around my waist, she declared, “C’mon boy, let’s DOMINATE the room.”

“Done and done,” I agreed, surveying the post-meal festivities. “Time to make ourselves really unwelcome.”

“Remember,” she added, “if anyone asks - we’re not dating, you’re just the current fuck.”

We then had to wait for a minute before setting out to DOMINATE the room because I couldn’t stand up on account of giggling like a mentalist.

We swaggered from table to table, air-kissing relatives ostentatiously and making small talk with familials, none of which was in any way consistent with the small talk we’d made at the last table. And giggling in each other’s ear like a pair of drunken, shambolic eejits. Guilty as charged, Orificer. We’d seen off at least three bottles between us and were feeling no pain whatsover.

“Oh fuck, it’s Bridezilla! Run!” she hissed in my ear, as the bridal party approached. “Run for your life!”

“Shouldn’t that be dubbed badly from Japanese?” I queried. “Jet-u Generation!”

That was too obscure for even Lena. (Guitar Wolf, epically epic Japanese guitar punk outfit.)

Then followed a monumentally superficial exchange of greetings with some of the most amazingly plasticized smiles ever faked for family consumption. Agnes seemed to be at least as drunk as Lena – I figured we needed to be on eggshells here to avoid the two instigating a really big barney – fluid levels in the flute of bubbly between her fingers didn’t appear to have bottomed out at any stage across the night, indicating the staff were being very attentive with refills on the Big Table. (We’d just raided other tables while they were up at the dessert buffet and ransacked unopened bottles from people who weren’t drinking fast enough and therefore didn’t deserve them.) While Lena made small talk with the bridal party – i.e. made up a bunch of lies for her own amusement – the woman of the moment (this and every moment, in her own estimation), sat down in Lena’s chair, next to me, crossing her legs demurely and raising her champagne flute. She looked fucking hot, I’ll admit. Maybe even as much as the second hottest girl on the table. Then again Bethany’s part time modelling seemed to have cured me of my thing for girls in wedding dresses. Agnes said something I couldn’t hear over the noise (on account of my industrial deafness), so I leant closer and she whispered something in my ear. That was:

“So, Angus, you’re trying for the full set then?”

I glanced up at Lena, then back to Agnes, who was sitting primly with a distinctly superior smile. I knew exactly what she was inferring, but that didn’t mean I had to like the inference, or even answer the question honestly. Hadn’t done all night, why start now?

I furrowed my brow, and leaned back over. She repeated her inference, making it very clear what she was referring to. Trying for the full set are we?

I smiled a little awkwardly. “Sorry, erm, but have we… I mean…” I pointed between us, flicking from her to me and back, then shrugged. “You and I… did we, at some stage…”

“You did what?” roared Lena, on the walk back to the chalet (read superannuated on-site cabin) we were sharing at an adjoining mountain retreat (read caravan park with ideas above its station.)

I reenacted the scene, though obviously with no exaggeration whatsoever of Agnes’ blustering indignance, or my astonishingly sharp comic timing. In reality she’d just bloused away to talk with someone more important, but it was funnier to claim she stormed off in a huff.

“Love it,” she declared. “Love it. One thing she’d never be able to deal with, is not even being memorable enough to be… um, remembered.”

I nodded with the conviction of the truly pissed. “Particularly given why she shagged me in the first place, to try and upstage you at your birthday. Fucked if I know why that would have worked.”

“Oh,” she flapped, “she’d always been banging on her fucking anvil at me to dump McCarthy and shag you instead. Reckoned we were better suited. Said he was too high maintenance…”

“She’d know all about that yeah?”

“Exactly,” she pronounced, loud enough to wake up half the chalets in the resort. Given we were among the last to leave (as contractually obliged) and a lot of the guests had been hived-off onto the resort (also owned by the groom’s family) waking up half the chalets in the resort was a pretty fair result.

“Never known anyone to spend more time looking in the mirror,” I said.

“Exactly,” she repeated, a little more quietly this time for the benefit of the other guests. “It’s as if.. as if you had to share a fucking bathroom with her for eighteen fucking years.”

“No, I meant when she was having sex, she spent the whole time watching herself in the mirror…”

At which point she clamped her fingers in her ears and went “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA, don’t want to know, getting mental picture, fuck that’s horrible, you’re sleeping in the truck…”

Munted as I was, it was taking a while for weird factoids to absorb through my addled cortex. Like that Agnes had been agitating for years for Lena to ditch Sam for me. I’d never heard that before and it made less sense than, well, me, right about now. Or me, right after helping Lena knock off that last bottle of red which she’d casually smuggled out of the venue on our way home.

“Hey, you fucked up first. Conversationally I mean. Remember our pledge after last night - no more McCarthy talk. You broke the rules…”

“…Now I’ll pull out all your pu-bic haaaiiirrr…” she declared. Obscure Tenacious D references: we really were fuckin’ munted.

“Whatever gets you off,” I suggested, as she fumbled with the key.

“You’re out of luck,” she said. “I’ve had a Brazilian.”

“That’s good,” I giggled. “Was he nice?”

Suffice to say, this was a lot more cheerful than the night before. A lot drunker too, to be fair. Last night the atmosphere, and the participants, had been a lot more sober – relatively speaking of course – and McCarthy had dominated the conversation, the ‘elephant in the room’ as tedious social scientists would say. And we’d gone from there to darker materials, too. We’d started talking about the latter days of Gasket, about his deteriorating mental state, and mine, and how I’d wanted to kill him, and how I’d had the chance. And all of a sudden I was confessing everything, telling her about Rachel, and Priddle, and about the night I smashed up his house and his face with a cricket bat. And things went very quiet and I thought fuck it, this is going to end in print somewhere, but she read my mind, and she promised not to betray my confidence. And she put her arms around me and we had a little moment together. I’d never told that story before and it took a lot out of me, reliving it all; couldn’t sleep afterwards, still ignited with fury and bitterness.

I don’t know why I told her. I don’t know why I took so long to tell her, either. I probably just figured that with McCarthy confirmed dead, the number of people left that were willing or able to tell the story of what happened that night numbered exactly one. Anyway, now she knew, she didn’t seem to think less of me – if anything the opposite – and we were still friends. Closer than ever, if anything. Hell, maybe Agnes had been right… nah fuck off.

One night and many bottles of red later, we fell up the stairs (all two of them) leading into our chalet, kicked the door shut behind us and promptly fell over the sofa, ending in a tangle of upside-down boy and girl on the floor. She was warm and soft and her eyes were telling me entire novels. She was hotter than the second hottest girl in the room at the reception. Which by my maths... nup can't add up that high at the mo.

“Angus, a bit of etiquette. When a girl tells you, “Hey, I’ve just had a Brazilian,” the correct response is, “Don’t believe you, show me.” Understand?”

“Yeah, I can see June Dally-Watkins enforcing that rule…”

Just where was that hand going? And whose was it? Ah, it was, um, mine. And it was heading off on a mission of its own.

Must have been the blood draining into my head, being upside-down and all. Lena was similarly afflicted, apparently, judging by the way her tongue surged forward and crammed itself down my throat. And, suddenly, it was on. Arms and legs everywhere, tongues searching hungrily, hands groping and fumbling in the darkness, both of us refusing to listen to the little voice squealing away impotently about this might not be a fab idea long-term. Well I certainly was, or was just too drunk to be able to discern the squealing. Lena, whose drought outstripped mine (a mere week) by orders of magnitude, set upon me with the reserve of a starving hyena in a butcher’s shop. She mauled me. Our tongues wrestled, our lips bit against each others’, our teeth clashed; gentle, she was not. Clearly it wasn’t just dominant personalities which we shared, either.

Completely independent of that, or anything else supposedly under motor control, our hands slithered aggressively over each other, tugging and tearing at each others’ clothes, including what was left of my hired suit. Fuck the deposit, I remember thinking. Probably because I hadn’t paid it, she had. I was sliding a hand behind her back to unlock her bra – very unlikely to work one-handed, particularly in my state, but I wasn’t going to stop and think it through – as hers sought out my fly, and the evil that lay beneath, murmuring she thought she loved me, thought she always had, and had been waiting for this for a fucking long while…

We should have known. That much alcohol, that sort of ‘night before’, that much tension for that long.

There was only ever one way that night was going to end.

Ah, yeah. Only one way that night was going to end. With a very incapacitated Andrew Young, in the hallowed words of Rolls-Royce service techicians, Failing To Proceed. Hydraulic failure. Brewer’s (vintner’s?) droop. Call it what you will. I called it fucking embarrassing, because it never, ever, happened to me (honest). And yet, as the steam dissipated, the windows stopped fogging up and we started reluctantly finding our half-discarded clothes in the darkness, the feeling began sinking in that I might have just dodged a bullet. I - we - might have just avoided doing something very fucking stupid indeed. And, it occurred further, that had I not fallen into bed with Anna the previous weekend, I definitely would have. See, there was an upside. It'd been totally worth it after all.

Lena, though, was not quite so phlegmatic. Pretty angry, I’d give it. Actually, I’d have said pissed the fuck off. Like I mentioned, her drought was longer and her situation a bit more desperate.

“Are you saying I’m desperate?” she wanted to know.

I didn’t even know how we’d suddenly ended up in the middle of having an argument about this. I’d just tried to explain how it might not be such a bad thing, that we might have avoided doing something really, really bad.

“So, what, the idea of having sex with me is so fucking heinous?”

Uh, no, but shouldn’t we stay as friends, I mean it’s probably better off that way…

“A suggestion. Decide upon these fucking things before you stick your tongue down my fucking throat, boyo. And definitely before you get me off enough to want it yet not enough for you to, apparently. Fuck’s sake!”

That’s not fair.

“How is it not fair, you fucking pricktease?”

I’d never heard that term used in that context, but I guessed it could work. In that I had a prick that teased, presumably. Nyaah-nyahh nee-nyaah-nyaah. It wasn’t fair because didn’t she think I wanted to fuck her just as much as she wanted it?

“No.”

Oh.

“You’re just in search of a warm, wet orifice,” she added, “and whether it’s mine, my sister’s or one of your students, doesn’t fucking seem to matter.”

Should it? (getting pissed off now)

“You tell me,” she challenged. “You’ve fucked all the others. Jesus Christ, is there anyone you haven’t fucked? Out of my friends, my family, even skanky fucking bitches you know I fucking hate…”

Hang on a minute. Having sex with Kas Casoli wasn’t about hurting you. Having sex with Kas Casoli was about having sex with Kas Casoli. Or anyone, really… uh, I think I just made your point for you. Sorry about that.

“What’s wrong with me?” She was in pain. Probably from the whole frotting-upside-down thing.

You really want to know? (Did I really just say it like that?)

“Yes.” Tears. Drunk ones, so hopefully they don’t count.

Oh fuck, are you really going to say this, Angus? You are. OK, don’t say I didn’t warn you. ‘Cos I did. And stuff.

“Because to me, you still belong to him. You did when I first met you, you’ve done for the last fifteen years. Wouldn’t matter what I felt for you, which is a lot, in case you’re wondering. To me, you belong to Sam, dead or alive.”

(There, I said it. And may God have mercy on my soul. Because Lena won’t. Not after before, when I’d responded to her ‘I think I love you’ with ‘No you don’t.’)

Yup, there was only one way that night was ending. With Lena distraught, and me and my belongings evicted from the chalet and left to sleep in the ‘truck’. Except I felt proceedings were too far gone for that, and decided to just keep walking. It was only twelve or so kays to the Sunny Coast railway line at Landsborough, it was mostly downhill, and I was getting quite good at this death-march-by-moonlight deal. After the original, this one was a walk in the park, if you’ll pardon the expression. Which you shouldn’t, because it’s fucking shit.

Not much happens around Landsborough at four in the morning on a Sunday. Nor at five, for that matter. At half-six, though, the first Brisbane-bound interurban of the morning rolls into the railway station. It took me, at length, to Central, where another train took me to Cleveland, where a shuttle bus took me to the ferry terminal, where a ferry took me to Dunwich, where my feet took me unsteadily to the carpark. There I climbed into my battered pseudo-XR8 ute (I’d definitively discovered the truth on that count – meaning I’d found a service receipt stuffed in the glovebox from a wreckers’ yard in which a set of XR8 badges and front end had been paid for, almost as bad as something I’d seen on an episode of Top Gear – at least the dodginess long predated Dr Cletus’ ownership, so he wasn’t pulling a swift one on me) and motored home. I was probably still drunk, it was mid-afternoon on the day after the second biggest Saturday night of Schoolies Week – this time for the NSW students – and the island wasn’t exactly short of cops at that time of year. But I drove straight up the main road, straight up my street, and parked straight in my garage, without a breathalyser being waved anywhere in my general direction. I probably deserved to be stopped and to be arrested, but I wasn’t. Call it another karma get-square for all the times I’d been stopped and harassed by the local cops for no fucking reason whatsoever.

So I went home, had a shower, ate whatever I could find in the house that didn’t involve any preparation, my first since the wedding reception; my death march had taken me within a few kays of Jono’s farm (he of the Concrete Box) and for a while considered dropping in for breakfast, since he was a credentialled cooking coach these days with his own food blog and all, but I could do without Mrs Jono joining the seemingly endless list of Women Who Want To Hit Angus About The Head With A Length Of Copper Pipe. I flaked out on the bed until late that night, then sat up all night watching Premier League football, because it was on and it required no mental or emotional investment, except to boo when Man United scored. Then went back to bed, because somehow I wasn’t expecting any work later that Monday morning. At four or so on Monday afternoon, I got up, knocked a feed together for myself, and wandered out to check the mail.

And there it was. My very own karma get-square. It was my notification from the Education Queensland, who held my registration as a teacher, that an official complaint had been made against me relating to my conducting an inappropriate relationship with one of my students, and that these allegations were to be investigated on that basis. While the complaint stood I was not permitted to seek employment as a teacher in the state of Queensland, nor in any other state of the Commonwealth of Australia, and that I was not to enter Education Queensland property or…

Eyes glazed over a bit beyond that, to be honest. And that feed was making plans to return, judging by the sick feeling in my stomach. No names were mentioned, and no details forthcoming; it would all follow due process, justice would be seen to be done (rather than to actually be done, and there was most definitely a distinction there), and you couldn’t hurry that sort of bureaucracy with a grenade launcher, much as you’d like to. I tossed the paperwork onto the kitchen table and ground the balls of my fists into my eye sockets. I knew it had been wrong, or at the very least, massively, massively unprofessional. As Bon would have put it - they told me it was disgusting, told me it was a sin, saw me knocking at your front door, saw you smile as you let me in… But what I hadn’t expected was to be ‘shopped’ by the only other person who could have known the details of what had transpired between us. Anna had set me up. Lord knew why, or what sort of ludicrous game she was playing, but she’d set me up. Throw in the circumstantial evidence that after-the-fact witness Bethany would have been more than happy to provide if asked, and I’d been fucked by the pair of them. Which seemed ironic on a lot of levels, if you had enough of a sense of humour to notice. Which I didn't, mine having suffered a mission-critical systems failure.

Looking to sell? interrogated the glossy flyer, stuffed through my letterbox along with the mail. Buyers are looking to buy! We have buyers interested in YOUR property NOW! Contact us now for a obligation-free valuation!

The agency involved, of course, was Crittenden’s. Irony of all fucking ironies.

Unless, I suddenly wondered, unless this isn’t irony, or coincidence, or happenstance. And unless there really are no depths of dignity or morality Crittenden isn’t prepared to plumb in order to get his hands on this place…

Don’t know. Every question I asked myself regurgitated that same, useless answer. What the fuck just happened? Don’t know. Why did Anna do this to me? Don’t know. Did she do this to me? Don’t know. Why can’t Lena call and we can have a laugh about whatever the fuck it was that went on the other night? Don’t know. What is it with me and women this week? Don’t know. What do I do now? Don’t know. What do I do for a gig after this? Don’t fucking know so any time you want to stop fucking asking would be OK by me.

At this stage I didn’t know, and wouldn’t be allowed to know, who’d laid the complaint against me. I knew that. I didn’t know, offhand, whether anything beyond deregistration was possible if I was found guilty, or whether I could end up getting in serious criminal shit, but I figured I could get in touch with the union over that; likewise I’d take any advice they had on defending myself. Deny everything, bullshit like a fucking bastard, see what proof they have.

So at least that lot of horrible depressing shit could be parcelled up and separated from all the other horrible depressing shit that seemed to constitute my life. I had no food in the cupboard, no beer in the fridge, and no income to deal with either. I was within gobbing distance of defaulting on my mortgage. I couldn’t leave the house without harassment by police or pissed bogan fuckwits. My fiancee (remember her?) had left me. My oldest female friend and I had fallen out in the worst possible way, i.e. by trying to bang each other. (It couldn’t have been worse if we'd actually succeeded.) And my oldest friend in the world was dead at the bottom of a lake in New Zealand, had been for several years, and noone had bothered to tell me.

At least I didn’t feel compelled to deal with my problems by drinking myself into a stupor. Largely because (a) I had no alcohol left in the house and (b) I was still nursing a hangover from the weekend. Stupid thirty-something constitution. Two-day (and even three-day) hangovers hadn’t even existed until I’d hit 30.

What to do. Maybe I could go and work with Jeff and the old man on the farm. If they’d have me, and if I could ever live down the humiliation. Maybe I could go and work at Mount Road Motorcycles again, selling bikes to punters alongside Mad Mick and Uncle Doug. That was a good job, even if it paid fuck all. Or I could wash dishes in Dr Cletus’ lab, or hit some other of my mates up for a job, or move to Sydney and become a trophy toy-boy for some rich Vaucluse divorcee. Because I wasn’t capable of finding and retaining a job off my own bat, apparently. Everything that had ever been said, by parents, teachers, lecturers, bosses and girlfriends about me being lazy, commitment-averse and seeking the path of least resistance, was true, and had come back to bite me resolutely on the arse. Unfortunately it was a bit late and I was a bit resource-scarce to do much about it.

Which was how my eBay account ended up with the following listings as of the evening of Monday, December 1, 2008: one 1991 BMW R 80 G/S, restored but unregistered, with helmet, jacket, boots and goggles (can be separated); one Dahlberg 6’2” thruster, only ridden by a old fat man on Sundays; one home theatre setup complete with painfully expensive flatscreen TV with apparently no resale value whatsoever; and one Ibanez RT-350 electric guitar and Orange Overdrive 120 amplifier, as used by former rock star, now destitute loser, Andrew ‘Angus’ Young. I worded it a bit more positively than that, in case you were wondering.

Next step after that fire sale – which wasn’t going to bear fruit for at least a week or two, that being the shortest period I was comfortable holding the auction for – was figuring out who to list the house with. Despite all those kind reminder notes from Crittenden, he wasn’t making the shortlist somehow. The sale of the house wouldn’t happen overnight, but it would happen, and it would square all my debts once and for all – it was just the matter of surviving until settlement day, and the more depressing task of figuring out what to do with myself after that. Might seem a bit self-obsessed, but suddenly figuring out at 32 that you're no further ahead in your life planning than you were at 17 is a pretty fucking miserable conclusion. Tuesday and Wednesday seemed to be spent staring at the internerd waiting it to do something, and occasionally answering cretinous questions from cretinous cretins about the goods for sale, while subsisting on Vegemite toast, cold short-dated frankfurts and nasty instant coffee. That’s 48 hours of my life I’d be happy never to revisit; I have never wanted to fall through the Earth’s crust and anonymously perish as much as I did by Wednesday evening. Let’s just say I was at a pretty low ebb and leave it at that.

When the phone rang around seven-ish (which would have meant time to watch Fox Sports News on cable, had it not been disconnected the previous week), I briefly considered smashing it into little bitty pieces with my old golf clubs, but decided not to just in case it was someone important, and because I was going to list my sticks on eBay next and could have used them being undamaged. I hoped it was Lena, or Jeff, or some sort of familiar voice. If it was a fucking Indian telemarketer I’d personally hitch over to Mumbai to smack their face in, with or without the golf clubs.

It was, in fact, none of the above. Though it was an international line, and a fairly crappy one at that.

“Hey, what’s your buy-now price for the Ibanez?” asked the voice, which was laconic, gravelly and… strangely familiar.

I was so surprised to be phoned up and asked, that I told him, without thinking. It was early four figures; well more than the thing was actually worth, but I figured the celebrity cachet had to count for something. It kinda had to, or I wasn’t even going to be able to afford short-dated frankfurts to live on.

“Add another zero,” said the voice, “and it’s a deal. ” He paused to let me get back on the chair I’d fallen off. “On one proviso.”

“What’s that?” I asked carefully. I’d been thrown for a moment, but was zeroing in on a name. Nailing the accent had narrowed it down massively.

“We get you for the weekend as well,” he chuckled.

Fucking hell, I knew that laugh.

“Tractor??”

“The same,” he replied. “What the fuck are you doing selling your tools of trade?”

“What the fuck are you doing buying them?” I grinned.

“Long story.” He coughed, raspily. “You?”

“Broke as fuck,” I laughed. “Lost my job, bank’s about to foreclose on my mortgage, fiancee’s left me, ute’s broken down, dog’s died, massive clusterfuck. Gonna write a country song about it and make some fucking cash that way I reckon.”

“Ah, that’s no good,” he said carefully. “Reckon I can top it though, just about.”

“You reckon?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he offered. And outlined his case.

Jesus Christ.

“You win,” I conceded.