The view from the afternoon

Anticipation has a habit to set you up
For disappointment in evening entertainment, but
Tonight there’ll be some love
Tonight there'll be a ruckus yeah, regardless of what's gone before
- Arctic Monkeys, 2006

I’ve probably said it before, but the Martins of Mount Road are just about the most generous lot of bastards anyone could call mates. I’ve had ‘demo’ bikes on loan from them for weeks, even months at a time – come to think of it, officially the Yamahas I used to ride on my contra-deal with the company were loaner bikes from the Mount Road dealership. And when I’d mentioned to the lads after the fishing trip that I needed to sort a place to stay over on ‘the mainland’ for New Years given I was recording in the Valley all day and hob-nobbing with Maddy and her celeb socialite peeps all night, Uncle Doug had simply tossed me the keys to their big old Queenslander in Bardon and told me to make myself at home. He reasoned cab fare to and from the Valley had to be less than the cost of a hotel in town plus parking, which you couldn’t really argue with regardless of what magic Wotif.com or similar were able to wreak. Which on New Years’ Eve was two fifths of fuck all, unsurprisingly.

I headed over on the late ferry on the 30th to crash at the deserted Martin household the night before, having reluctantly admitted defeat in my mission to secure a wingperson for the next evening. Not even all that high-quality intensive lovin’ amidst the stuffed animals was enough to persuade her. She didn’t have a thing to wear, she already had prior commitments with an astonishingly dull-sounding function her parents were running at the school hall for the church community, and besides:

“It sounds like a date, Angus. We don’t do dates.”

We didn’t do Christmas presents either, but I seemed to have a new Holley Equipped T-shirt, so clearly I needed an updated copy of The Rules as made-up-on-the-spot by Beth Alexander.

Anyway, as suggested I left the ute at the Martins’ and took a cab into the Valley next morning. It wasn’t like I needed to bring anything, other than my change of clothes for tonight. Marty had told me everything else was sorted. I still couldn’t get a bead on how keen he actually was to go through with this – he hadn’t liked much of the last conversation we’d had about BDO, not that I could really blame him, and he did tend to stew over stuff like that for lengths of time, whereas I tend to blow up and blow off steam pretty quickly. I got the cabbie to drop me off outside a café nearby the address Google had given me for Sound Investment, so I could pick up a couple of first-thing takeaway flat whites as a peace offering.

Turned out (a) Sound Investment was in the upstairs of what used to be a bank, which explained the name, though it didn’t excuse it; and (b) my peace offering was a bit of a waste given that the studio was already equipped with a coffee maker. And a water cooler, well-stocked kitchen, bathroom and even sleeping quarters. Money had been spent here, lots of it. I didn’t really need to ask whose money, that seemed pretty obvious; one of the Cohen-Lewis family of companies, a commercial real estate agency, were the tenant on the ground floor. “Just as well they built this place sturdily,” Marty remarked. “Noise doesn’t travel that far. It’s as sturdy as a…”

“Bank?” I guessed.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Way I see it,” I mused, “if downstairs aren’t calling council noise control, then you’re not playing loud enough…”

“Usually I’d disagree, but on this project…” He grinned. “Just as well they’ve knocked off until next week hey?”

Acoustics looked promising. Lots of old, dense wood, beautifully restored, which was as useful acoustically as it was aesthetically. The place was outfitted with surgical attention to detail – lots of shiny new recording equipment, mixing desks, booths and of course instruments. The only thing old and shabby here was me and my Mr Grumpy T-shirt, last year’s Christmas present from Claire and Josh (though I suspected the hand of their piss-taking parental units in the choice). Which was a bit of a worry, as for the sound I figured we wanted on this, old and shabby was probably preferable to new and clinical. But presumably there was some button amidst the thousands on that muntingly enormous display on the desk module which activated some ProTools modulator which made us sound like mid ‘70s AC/DC having a punchup with the Sex Pistols behind the shelter sheds at school, with the winner getting to shag Veruca Salt (preferably the girls). Unless of course, new and clinical was exactly the sound Marty had envisaged, which meant we might be back on that old road marked Rue de Differences Creative.

Nup. As it turned out, Marty and his team had a pretty good feel for what production would work on what sort of song, and their track record spoke for itself. This was a earthy four chord garage-punk thrash, give or take, and it needed big, ugly, distorted guitars. Or as big, ugly and distorted as they could get being played very cleanly and carefully at eight-tenths intensity, then artificially made big, ugly and distorted in silico through the desk. Marty had already recorded the drums a while back – himself, which was pretty impressive, given the drums sounded John-Bonham-down-a-well immense – as well as a bass track which needed redoing because I’d changed some of the progressions around and thrown a few more Stooges-esque rapid-fire changes into the guitar part (I blamed Bear and the lads for cranking the kickarse old shit like Search and Destroy and I Got A Right in the Outback rolling around Dunedin) which had meant redrafting some of the bass lines.

Recording with Marty had always been a scientific experiment in audio, and now with a lab full of shiny new equipment and the last five years’ advances in tech there was no end to the precise care and attention that Marty and his like-minded team could polish their creations with. It was just as well there was lots of interesting wood to look at, because this made recording with Kretin look positively off-the-cuff. We spent an hour and a half on the first twelve bars of the rhythm guitar part, which Marty was laying down, and there was still Marty’s new bassline, my lead, and the vocals to sort before we needed to scrub up nice at sundown for dinner and Maddy’s do. Time was tight. The music video – which director Gerard had cut together around Marty’s original demo of Beef Week Queen from excerpts of the Real Girls Eat Meat trailer – was ready to go, and had been promised to the folks at ABC TV for the New Years Eve edition of Rage. Actually, it’d been promised to them, erm, a month ago. Likewise the cable music channels. Likewise radio. Likewise the iTunes store. Artwork was sorted. Film clip. Marketing. Distribution. The only links to the chain which were lagging were, as usual, those related to mercurial decisions of the Artistic Talent involved - in this case the Talent belatedly and mercurially deciding he couldn’t do this without his drunken bogan old mate Angus on axe and sweary vocals. Safe to say a lot of people were less than impressed by aforesaid decision. And a lot of people would be even less impressed than that if we failed to get this fucker to market tonight. Which meant the usual three-to-four-week mixing and mastering process that a Marty recording typically went through was going to be compressed a little, to whatever Marty’s lads could sort before sundown.

Always reckoned mixing was overrated anyway. Everything louder than everything else, bounce the fucking needles off the red until the fucker distorts, then dial it back half a notch. Done.

We broke for coffee (again – then again, our leader was Italian) at half-ten and listened back to the composite playback of the new rhythm part, old bassline, old drums, place-holder vocal and lead. Marty nodded at producer Kurt, who nodded at recording engineers Trent and Todd (or Two T’s as they were known). The only one not nodding was me, but this wasn’t my show. To be fair, these guys knew what they were doing here, and I didn’t. That desk looked more complicated than an Airbus flight deck and probably just as likely to plummet several thousand feet without warning.

Marty seemed to detect I wasn’t joining in the communal love-in re how well it was coming together. He stopped nodding. “What do you think, Angus?”

I said it sounded fine.

He shook his head. “Angus, you remember the original version of this I sent you?”

“Yeah?”

“You remember what you said about it?”

“Ah, not exactly.”

“Thin, reedy and anaemic, I think it was.”

I felt vaguely uncomfortable. It’d probably had been these boys who’d done the production on it, and slagging their work off had seemed easier before I’d met them and found out they were good fullahs. “I might have said it needed to eat more red meat, but that was probably just a shit joke.”

“Even so,” Marty pointed out, “you’re right. It made Posh Spice look substantial. That was us doing our best to try and rock the fucking thing out, and we’re still sucking a suckload of suck.”

Producer Kurt looked more uncomfortable than even I had. “Might we revisit the suggestion... that what the song really needs, given it’s for a film about rural life... is more of a country rock feel?”

“Lap steel,” suggested Todd. “Can do all that through effects.”

“Bit of fiddle,” nodded Trent. “Not piss-taking though, unless you wanted it ironic…”

“Big hats too? Utes? Circlework? Shouldn’t have left the XR8 at home,” I observed. Fuck it, they got me here for a reason, they were going to get it. “Marty, boys, if you want my advice, and I don’t think you got me here because you wanted me to sit on my coit counting fuckin’ tree rings in the walls, this is a big fuck-off rock and roll song and it needs to be played by a big fuck-off rock and roll band. And there’s only one way to do that, and you know what that is.”

Marty closed his eyes and massaged his temples. “There’s only two of us. And this lot won’t like it. More bleeding than a Tarantino film.”

“Won’t like what?” interjected Kurt. If the idea of recording more than one instrument at once was so foreign to the current gen of audio engineer kids that he couldn’t guess I meant recording live-to-tape with Marty and I playing together, old-school-Gasket style, then he really wouldn’t like it. Not that the G-word ever got mentioned. Marty and I had agreed to a deal whereby neither of us would mention the G-word, the F-word (in particular the F-word that was usually suffixed with the G-word) or the B, D or O-words.

“Boys, we’ll need to sort two mike setups here. Same booth. Might be a squeeze, but fuck it.” I’m not sure the boys had ever heard Marty swear as much as he’d been doing this morning. I was clearly having a relaxing effect on the lad. “Probably better if you do the guitar part, I’ll do bass? Then we can overlay lead?”

“Like it,” I reported. “One other thing. Which is your least favourite amp?”

I set down the borrowed Maton Mastersound which I’d been fiddling about with, reprofiling the solo I was trying to come up with – it was a lovely bit of kit, but I already knew it would probably be far too clean for what I wanted, unless we overdrove the living fuck out of it. Put it this way, the only bona fide guitar god I could remember off the top of my head who used one was Murray from the Wiggles. A gentleman and a scholar, but more inclined to write and record songs about the Queen of the Roses (that’s Dorothy the Dinosaur, according to Beck) than the Queen of Casino Beef Week. I was eyeing off the lonely looking two-pickup Gibson X-Plorer on the rack on the far wall – for the non-guitarista component of the audience, that’s that flashy, exploding-star axe beloved of 80s hair metallists like Kiss and ZZ Top, or Hetfield from Metallica, even into his later, saggier years. It looked far too lairy and dinosaur to fit into the clinical, restrained surrounds of Sound Investment. Much like Your Correspondent.

“…Least favourite?” Marty was a little taken aback. He was clearly out of practice.

I wandered around the studio, judiciously tapping or kicking the backs of the various amps on offer. Too tinny. Too plasticky. Thump. Oh hang on, what’s this… An old, slightly dog-eared Peavey 5150, the amp that Eddie Van Halen built. Weapon of choice for rock, punk and metal, so no wonder it was gathering dust in the corner here. It looked like it’d been remaindered for practice-amp duties, so I figured it wouldn’t be missed. I hauled it out into the corridor before anyone could say anything. A few solid kicks, then a good shove when balanced on its end, and the thing toppled over and crashed down the stairwell, bashing and rattling its way to the landing below. Luckily the casing was more dentable than the stairs, which were the same vintage restored woodwork as much of the property, otherwise I’d have a stiff bill coming my way from the landlords. I re-emerged from the goods lift – not a fuck was I hauling that bastard back up the stairs – and calmly dragged the sorry-looking 5150 back into the studio, aiming a swift kick at the back of the casing where it’d split away from the rest of it. It lined up again, mostly.

“Audio engineering 101, Flange Gasket style,” I instructed the lads, momentarily forgetting we weren’t supposed to be dropping profanities like the F-word. “If it’s an old, busted-arse sound you want, use old, busted-arse equipment. And if you don’t have any, bust its arse yourself.” I grabbed the Gibson X-Plorer off the wall – feeling very ‘80s throwback all of a sudden – plugged in, switched on, and let the howl and crackle of feedback rebound off the walls like high-energy particles and ping off the lads’ eardrums. The 5150 was always great for distortion, but even more so – kudos to Hollywood for the heads-up on this, many years prior – when you beat the Christ out of it and add a little ‘natural’ reverb into the equation. Then I smashed through the main progression of Beef Week Queen as if it’d personally offended me. Thunder, crackle, feedback, distortion. A noise to start wars with. Beautiful.

“There,” I pronounced, “is your sound, gentlemen. No ‘Tooling about necessary. Any questions?”

“Just one,” observed Marty with a half-smile. “You know that’s Reid Burton’s favourite amp you’ve just kicked down the stairs?”

Ah.

“Oh well,” I remarked. “His amp, his lead singer, it’s all the same thing. Should be used to it by now.”

Seemed I was buying someone a new (or preferably an old) Peavey 5150 sometime soon. More financial fun.

Marty declined to perform similar surgery on either his shiny new fire-engine-red Fender Jaguar bass or his matching Bassman Pro amp, but he did turn everything way the fuck up and belted merry hell out of it once the Two T’s had set everything up to Big 'N' Ugly and Kurt had clicked the big red button marked Record. We had the vocal and drum parts piped through our headsets, but I had to physically restrain myself from singing along as well. I didn’t really go for this bit-by-bit recording process – never had, never would. Live to tape, or be damned. But this was as close as we were going to get with just the two of us, so we gave it all we had.

Which, it seemed, was plenty. It only took a couple of takes – one of which I fucked up through not being accustomed to the Gibbo, another to get me to stop singing – to nail it. All with a few deliberately ugly changes just to underline this wasn’t being painted by numbers. No fucking way were we going for perfection here, capturing a clinically executed eight bars and looping it 42 times like Maroon fucking Five or someone. The lead part took longer, mainly because I kept doing it differently every time which pushed Team Control Freak completely out of their comfort zone, but we ended up earmarking the first half of take three and the back half of take five (cue Dave Brubeck) as probables for selection. Then Marty and I had a few glasses of red over lunch, came back and howled and hollered through a heroically demented call-and-response reading of the lyrics. Again, it only took a couple of takes, which was just as well because we were tearing the shit out of our vocals. But it was the sort of song that demanded an enthusiastic approach…

Beef Week Queen (di Biagini/Young, 2008)

Well I been to Rio Carnivale
And I seen some girls that’s great
I been to Sydney Mardi Gras
And seen some girls that ain’t.
Seen sketchy girls from round the world
Drunk at Oktober-Fest
And hairy girls at Burning Man
But the girl I likes the best…

I want the Beef Week Queen
She likes her red meat if you know what I mean
I want the Beef Week Queen
She’s dressed for success, and relatively clean
I want the Beef Week Queen
Knows her Brahman from her Limousin
Not so hot but I don’t care
She just wants it medium rare.

Miss World says she wants world peace
Got Buckleys chance of that
And the Seppo entrant keeps slipping up
And falling on her twat
Miss Indy don’t make no moral stand
Just wants publicity
But Miss Beef Week’s got charm and wit
And no iron deficiency.

I want the Beef Week Queen
As she parades across the Irving Bridge
I want the Beef Week Queen
Style and grace and a well-stocked fridge
I want the Beef Week Queen
Loves the taste of prime sausage
Don’t want to see me in a fancy tuxedo
Just wants to go down on my steak torpedo…

[OVER SOLO:
MARTY: Now Angus… get some PORK on your FORK!
ANGUS: I think that’s a different festival, Marty.
MARTY: Oh, sorry.]

Now there’s pretenders and they’re fakes
In the Beef Week Capital game
Casino knows it’s number one
Rockhampton says the same
But all they got’s a concrete bull
Whose concrete balls got stole
Casino has the Beef Week babes
And Rocky chicks are moles.

I want the Beef Week Queen
Sirloin, ribeye, rump or veal
I want the Beef Week Queen
Juicy and pink’s how she wants her meal
I want the Beef Week Queen
Makes Roseanne look like Ally McBeal
Can’t fault her commitment to the cause
Lives on nowt but pies and sauce…

I want the Beef Week Queen
She likes her red meat if you know what I mean
I want the Beef Week Queen
She’s dressed for success, and relatively clean
I want the Beef Week Queen
Knows her Brahman from her Limousin
Not so hot but I don’t care
She just wants it MEDIUM RARE!

[ANGUS: I’m fuckin’ starved, ay. Anyone for a kebab?]

Maybe we had a few too many reds at lunch. Most of the retakes were because we couldn’t stop giggling or throwing in ad-libs. And then we had another great idea in a series of great ideas.

“Bash out some B-sides,” I said. “Make an EP out of it.”

“Yeah,” Marty said, clicking his fingers in superbly Kretinesque style. “A meat-themed EP…”

I nodded. It was only ever going to be an iTunes product, anyway. Throwing a few more tracks onto the lineup, even if it was a bit more turd-polishing work for Kurt and the boys this evening, wasn’t gonna hurt. “Just do a couple of covers yeah? Dead Animal Product, for one. Walk-up start.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. At least we get the royalties anyway… Reinvented though, no point redoing it like the Gasket version.”

“Unplugged. Two acoustics and a six of Heineken.”

“Only six?”

“Mate, I’m trying to make sure you don’t get delivered to your missus’ thirtieth in a bucket…”

“More like you’re not wanting to get blamed for it… What else?”

“Meatplow by Stone Temple Pilots?... Nah, not enough meat references.”

“Something by Meatloaf. Or the Meat Puppets.” Marty didn’t like any of his own suggestions either.

“Or Captain Beefheart… too obscure.”

“Got it,” Marty said, busting out not only the click on its own but the point AND click. “Off Chops, by your lads.” He meant Hayabusa. I wasn’t aware I owned them, but it was a good pick.

“Beautiful,” I declared, and we declared together, “I’m not a vegetarian but I am Off Chops…”

So Marty made the executive decision to dispatch the Two T’s to Doolittle’s bottle-o down the street in search of a carton of Something Good. They instead came back with two cartons of Something Cheap, because the only thing they had which was both Good and even vaguely Cheap was Crown Lager, which is Nasty. A mate of mine from college – he did industrial chem – works in the QC lab at the Yatala CUB plant and admits that Crown is just the VB fermentations which give the best traces on HPLC – same malt, same hops, just more consistent outputs. So instead the lads came back with two cartons of some obscure unpronounceable Czech pilsner which had clearly been brought in on a palette for cheap. But it was cold, and it was good. By Christ was it good.

Producer Kurt, who’d dealt admirably well with becoming progressively more irrelevant as the day had gone on, as well as me calling his ideas shit, had retired to the mixing suite on turd-polishing duties – we were happy to leave it to him as (a) we only had today to sort things and (b) he’d admitted over a few vinos at lunch to secretly believing Motorhead’s Ace of Spades was the greatest album of all time, and there was nothing wrong whatsoever with Iggy’s everything-in-the-red remix of Raw Power, so he’d passed the audition – while the two T’s had taken over desk-driving duties, not that much was really needed other than pressing Record and Stop and making sure everything was plugged into everything else that should have had stuff plugged into it. And were helping us get through the Czech pilsner, of course. We didn’t forget Kurt, of course. Marty had a trick radio-controlled truck (for ‘creative frustration release purposes’) on standby in the studio, which the lads used to ferry coldies from the fridge down the hall to the mixing suite.

Now, how the fuck did I'd Be A Vegan But Dead Animal Product Tastes Fucken Tops go again? Even though I hadn’t written it, I’d at least played Off Chops recently, i.e. sometime in the last seven years…

“Play that back, T-Bone.” I’d decided Trent was T-Bone and Todd was T-Bag. At least I think I had. Occasionally I got them mixed up. They didn’t seem to mind. They seemed to find the whole process profoundly hilarious, and in any case, were getting half-cut at work on the boss man’s say so. The part they couldn’t really believe is that, yes, this was how we used to record in the Gasket days – or in the early days at least (i.e. all our best stuff.)

“That actually doesn’t suck,” declared Marty, on hearing ourselves back. “I’d buy that for a dollar.”

“I think it’s a dollar forty-nine on iTunes these days isn’t it?”

“Near enough.”

“Martin?”

“Yes, Andrew?”

“What are we actually going to call this sack of arse?”

“What, the EP? The Beef Week Queen EP? Hey I know, why don’t we call it The Beef Week Queen EP?”

“But by who?”

“Ah,” he said. “I see what you’re getting at. Well, it’s not the F-word…”

“Or the G-word. Or both.”

“I mean, stylistically it’s a bit Flangey…”

“Stylistically it reeks of Flange.”

“It does. And reeking of Flange is a good thing, as well as being an excellent mental picture.”

“Bit fishy but.”

“True. And, more to the point, you and me do not a Flange make,” he pointed out. “You reckon?”

“Yeah, that’s fair enough. But what else? Martin di Biagini with Andrew Young? That’s a bit arse.”

“And nor do we actually want to be taking responsibility for this in name…”

“Also true. You might want to play a gig in Rockhampton again one day, yeah?”

“Not deliberately, but you never know…”

“How about Meat is Murder.”

“I thought about that. The Smiths song, for the EP. But it’s dreary as fuck. And it’s pretty anti-meat, which is against the spirit of the thing. This is a celebration of meat. And the women who love it.”

“Then what about… the Carnivores,” I proposed.

“Or just the Carneys,” he laughed. “Fits the bill on so many levels…”

“Fuck yeah,” I grinned. “The Casino Beef Week Carneys. Or just the Carneys.”

“That was the Carneys, with Beef Week Queen… number one on the 2009 Triple J Hottest 100…” Marty cracked up. “Look out for their new album Small Hands, Smell Like Cabbage…”

“T-Bag’s onto it,” I reported, glancing through the glass. “Is there a Carneys band?”

“Yup,” came the voice back through from the desk. Todd (or Trent) had the laptop open and the wireless internerd cranked, checking MySpace. “From Austin, Texas.”

“Half the bands in the world are from Austin, Texas,” I observed. “Finesse it a bit then. The Toothless Carneys. The Dodgem Carneys.”

“The Vegan Carnies. The Carnivorous Vegans.”

“The Vagetarians?” Now the boys were starting to throw suggestions in as well.

“The Kebab Munchers… the Vertical Bacon Sandwiches… the Steak Torpedos?”

“Sausagefest!”

“The Don Brahmans.”

“Limosin Ride.”

“The PETA Eaters.”

“Steak Sandwich. Like Shark Sandwich. Fuck, that’s obscure. I’ll shut up now.” Marty popped the cap on his next beverage. “It’s a boy!” he annouced, as the bastard foamed over after his first swig. He’d developed a drinking problem already, i.e. forgetting how to. Meanwhile, I’d been touched by genius. I planned to report it to the relevant authorities, of course.

“The Heiferlumps! Or just… The Bull Artists.” I glanced over at T-Bag, who seemed to be unimpressed. Either there was another band by that name on MySpace, or he just thought it was shit.

But Marty said he had one more.

“Never Mind The Bullocks.”

With that, a big grin spread across Marty’s face. And mine, too.

“That’s fuckin’ gold,” I declared. “I’m calling it here and now. Never Mind The Bullocks. Fuckin’ A. Do we have freedom to operate, Teabagger?”

After a pause, the intercom replied: “Can confirm we are clear for launch with Never Mind The Bullocks. And can I just add, that is fucking gold, boss.”

“Got one more song,” I said. “Spam. Monty Python.”

“Is Spam technically made of beef? Or any recognisable animal, come to think of it?”

“Best not ask,” I suggested.

So he didn’t, and instead we threw together possibly the first and only ever unplugged rockabilly version of Monty Python’s Spam Song, with Marty manically double-tapping the low strings of his very expensive classical acoustic in an attempt to generate the same sort of big fat bouncy bassline which was the Living End’s trademark – actually it was pretty much a rip-off of Second Solution – while we called-and-responded:

“Loverly spam…”

“Wonderful spam…”

“Loverly spam…”

“Wonderful spam…”

“Spam…”

“Spam…”

“Spam spam spam spaaaaaaaammmmm…”

And then, as the final harmony trailed out, I felt for some reason compelled to come out with:
“FATAL DEATH EXPLODING ARSE AAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” giggled Marty, still on-mike.

It stayed on the take.

We wrapped up a bit after five, Marty diving into a cab in order to get back to his beloved at their New Farm apartment and tidy himself up. Rather than impinge on their privacy I opted to get changed there in the studio - well not IN the studio, the lads were still on turd-polishing duties in the mixing suite out the back and my hairy arse probably wasn’t going to add value to the process, so I confined my nudity to the bathroom of the studio apartment (geddit? Studio apartment? King of Comedy.) I was vaguely thinking whether I might be able to crash here rather than trying to score a cab back to Bardon on New Years, but I hadn’t run that past the landlord yet. Mainly because he’d taken one look at the message on his phone at three past five, went a bit pale and said “Got to go… late… dinner’s… somewhere.. at some time… bye.”

My own phone rang when I was in the shower, but I scooped it up anyway and towelled myself off with the other hand.

“Hello, Angus,” said Marty’s beloved.

“Birthday girl!” The bonhomie wasn’t really that forced, I’d had a pretty good day, all said. “Is the boy back yet?”

“Yes he is, he’s in the shower. Though he keeps giggling about fatal exploding arses and concrete bulls with no concrete balls, or something, and he smells of beer... Should I be asking too many questions about what you two have been up to?”

“Nothing untoward. Ask Kurt and the lads, they’re reliable witnesses. Probably.”

“Hmmm. Anyway, just letting you know, Marty and myself and some of the others are going for a quick bite before festivities this evening. It’s nothing special, just Isis.” From my recollection, Isis was a lot more than nothing special, but this was Maddy after all. “And it’s at six, I’m afraid. Ridiculous hour I know, but what can you do.” Not much when you’ve already specified your birthday drinks begin at eight, I guessed. “Would you be interested in that?”

“Certainly,” I replied, figuring Brunswick St Mall KFC wasn’t quite as appetizing, even if it was more within my budget. “Meet you guys there, I guess?”

“Excellent. Ciao bello.”

“Cheers.”

Seems I had a text too. It was from Marty, and said FATAL ARSE EXPLODING DEATH ARRRRGHHH.

I cracked up. Jesus fucking Christ indeed. He’d had a good day too, it seemed.

Halfway through climbing into my boxers, and another. More fatal arse exploding death, I figured. Depending how you punctuated that, it actually had a couple of different meanings, none of which were very appealing.

Hey. It’s me. Offer still open?

This was quite a bit more appealing than fatal death of an arse-exploding variety, or however it was to be interpreted.

Yeah, of course. Where are you?

Made it into my trousers before the reply sirened through:

I asked you first.

I rolled my eyes and texted her the address, adding Where are you?

Outside, the reply came back in moments.

I threw on my shirt and padded barefoot down the stairs – avoiding the occasional broken bit of Peavey 5150 along the way – to open the door.

Beth looked me up and down. “I like,” she pronounced. I could have said the same about her. She was wearing a figure-hugging little black dress which plunged where it should plunge and split where it should split and basically did astonishing things, though to be fair, it had fairly astonishing things to work with. It took me quite a long time to find any words at all to come back with.

“Nothing to wear, huh?”

“What, this old thing?” she laughed. “OK, I lied. I had a few options.”

“By a few options, you mean an entire wardrobe of creations from the House of Lavina, tailored precisely for their number one catalogue model…”

“Still had nothing to wear,” she maintained. “You’re right, though. I’m feeling pretty damn spectacular in this, I don’t mind saying. There’s no way my bridesmaids were wearing this. They’d have made me look like mutton dressed as Bronwyn Bishop… and no, you’re not allowed to unwrap your present before the party.” Damn, she’d read my mind. “Took me long enough to get into this, you’re not getting me out without a lot of persuasion.”

“Drink?” I offered.

“Good start,” she conceded, taking the cold beer.

“I can be persuasive,” I reminded her. “How’d you get in?”

“Sea kayak,” she deadpanned. Then smiled, and said her brother had dropped her in. “Some big dance party down at a warehouse in Newstead. He’ll probably take a bunch of drugs, get his shirt off and smear himself all over a bunch of other boys. If he is, I’m the one who has to drive back tomorrow.”

“You’re funny,” I told her. “What’s he really doing?”

She giggled. “Some stuff. He told me, but I forget. What, you’re not believing the drug-taking and boy-smearing?”

“It’d explain a lot,” I noted wryly. “But no.”

“Fair enough,” she conceded.

I messaged Maddy’s phone, with the simple request: Any chance of adding a plus one to the dinner res?

You have a partner now? read the reply. No problems, see you at 6.

It would seem I did. For tonight, anyway.

The Valley, late afternoon, just before a big night. You could smell the anticipation in the air. This being the Valley, you could smell a lot of things in the air, but anticipation was chief among them. I’d missed this. I didn’t get too many big nights out on the town anymore – as much because I lived two or three hours travel away from the centre of town as due to incipient oldness/sadness – and the feel of a big night, when you really, genuinely, have no idea how it’s going to turn out, is as unique as it is special. The view from the afternoon looked pretty good from where I was standing.

Beth and I walked along Brunswick Street, my arm nestled around her waist, her heels and my dress shoes striking a rhythmic percussion on the footpath. There’s also a special feeling when you’re squiring a very attractive girl down a busy street in a social precinct like the Valley. It’s probably somewhat akin to being king of the universe. Weaker minions bow before thee, and your dominion is all you see before you.

“So,” she remarked, “is the date going well?”

“Not sure,” I reported. “She’s not talking to me much.”

“He’s not talking to me either,” she responded. “Don’t think he’s very big on conversation.”

“A bit thick, possibly?”

“No,” she replied archly, “just not what he's best at.”

“Touché,” I said, and squeezed her around the waist. “How do you think I should rescue the situation?”

“Start a conversation,” she said. “About anything.”

“I always think a date’s going well when it’s pretty early on and I already know some funny, quirky thing about her, like what her first pet was called, or what her middle name is.”

“And?”

“Is two years and change still counted as early-on?” She rolled her eyes. “OK, sorry. A thousand apologies for bringing up the Age of Miserable Darkness and Eternal Arse.” It was a bit arse-centric at the moment. I blamed Marty for encouraging me. He’d taken to sending me texts that simply read FATAL ARSE!!1! Or just ARSE!!! How many beers had he had again?

“Apology accepted. Say, what was your name again?”

After a bit more gentle banter, we reached Isis. I wasn’t sure whether to push on in, or wait for the rest of the party to show themselves. Dammit, this was a date after all, I had to pretend I knew what I was doing.

“Shall we?” I inquired. I wondered what name Maddy had booked under, her own or a pseudonym.

“We shall,” she concurred.

Then slipped her arm around my shoulder, nestled against me and gently whispered:

“It’s Leilani.”

“Leilani?”

She nodded, with a resigned sigh. “From the old Hoodoo Gurus’ song, yeah. Dad got to pick my middle name, Mum picked my first name. Happy now?”

Bethany Leilani Alexander. Or Toogood, depending on the prevailing wind.

“You like it?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I kinda do, hey. I’m not embarrassed about it, not as much as I once was. It’s cool.”

We shared a smile.

“That said, if you tell anyone, I’ll push you under a bus.”

I laughed, and so did she. “Guess we know all each other’s secrets now, yeah?”

“Not even close,” she replied enigmatically.

And with that, she linked arms with me, and we headed through the doors of Isis, and into whatever the night had in store for us.