Life gets in the way

When your friends
Choose to die
You pinch yourself
To work out why
There's not a lot
That you can say
When life gets in the way
- Even, 2001

Saturday night had been just as messy as Friday, given we had access to the cellar at Hollywood’s winery, on the western shores of Lake Dunstan near Bannockburn. (Winegrowing locality not far out of Cromwell on the road that leads towards the Kawarau Gorge – where that famous NZ bungee jump bridge is – and on to Queenstown.) His pinot noir wasn’t the greatest I’d ever gotten into – bit thin, bit earthy – but it was certainly drinkable, as we proved conclusively over the course of the evening. Didn’t seem to slow us down or reign us in given we had a notorious gossip-hound hack journo to chronicle the evening’s off-record revelations, but as it happened Lena retired for the night relatively early with the leftover half a bottle of Hollywood’s pinot gris (we’d tried that as well, but neither Bear nor myself were as into the white as the red) and her laptop for company, claiming tiredness and deadline pressure. Bear and I set about drinking for three in order to make up for her cowardice and dereliction of duty.

To be fair Bear took it upon himself to make up the deficit himself, mainly because I couldn’t drink fast enough to keep up. He passed out on the armchair in front of the fire sometime around half three – not that we actually needed a fire, but we couldn’t not burn things having been given a fireplace and stuff to burn in it, we were MEN dammit. I tried to shift him, reasoned I’d need a block and tackle, threw a blanket over him and stumbed off to bed via the fruit juice in the kitchen fridge. Again, to be fair, excess of fruit juice (slightly fermented) was what had gotten us into this situation in the first place.

A pale-skinned girl in a loose T-shirt and trackpants appeared at the door. I should have been expecting her, we’d brought her along with us. I just didn’t expect her at half three in the morning. I was too drunk to be grumpy.

“Still up?”

“Can’t sleep,” she admitted. “Given up trying.”

“Alright?”

“No,” she shook her head, and I realised she’d been crying. I mainly realised she’d been crying because she started crying again. I soooo wasn’t equipped to deal with this shit right about now. The funk soul brother, check it out now. The funk soul brother. For one thing, my mind kept wandering off of its own drunken accord and thinking solely in Fatboy Slim lyrics. Last I heard, he was fucking in heaven, which explains why his career’s gone to shit.

“Look, I’m sorry…” I stopped, because I realised I wasn’t, and because she was making hand-waving movements to stop me anyway.

“It’s not you. It’s not. It’s not even Sam, or anything… It’s me. It’s just me.” She wrested control of herself. “I’m sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry. I don’t know how many times I can say that and have it register.”

I couldn’t remember her ever having said it, but maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

“You hate me, yeah?” she added.

I shook my head. “No point. Be like hating myself.”

“Hell, who doesn’t do that?” she remarked bitterly.

I hadn’t finished, dammit. “I don’t hate you. Don’t trust you, don’t really forgive you, but I don’t hate you either. Seems like it’s cost you more than it did me, anyway.” Her eyes met mine, and she knew what I knew; the surrendered exclusive, the whole deal. I figured she knew about Beth and whatever else from the same source. Maybe we should have filtered all our communications through Danno and Joey, might have saved time and made a lot more fucking sense. “Beth says I should be thanking you. Though she’s sick in the head.”

A frail smile, at the mention of Beth. “You always land on your feet, Angus. How the fuck do you do that? Teach me, maybe?”

This is landing on my feet? I’m currently too pissed to stand.

“Go to bed, Lena. Tomorrow… today’s another day.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And tell me again, what’s so wonderful about tomorrow that we’re doing?”

Lena’s investigative efforts this morning had managed to unearth the young copper who’d scraped up the mess of McCarthy’s accident – or at least whatever had remained above the waterline – and had been interviewed in the local freebie paper for his trouble. He was still in Queenstown (or rather had been away and come back) but was now further up the food chain of the local cop shop, such that he was no longer first cab off the rank to go scrape idiot tourists off icy roads at two in the morning. He’d been off-duty this morning and obliging enough to join us out at the bluff to talk Lena through the crash site. Turned out he’d met his fiancee in the crush for Hayabusa’s set at the Rippon festival in Wanaka a few years back. He’d pulled her out of the melee and she’d shown her gratitude in various appreciative ways, probably. I could see him and Lena further up the road, near the dip in the surface which marked the latest possible moment after the preceding straight bit where you’d be able to get on the anchors and pull a bike up in time to tip it into the slow-ish right-hander around the bluff. In dry weather. Also the point at which you might expect water to pool and black ice to form in the wee small hours of a well-below-freezing April night after a cold, wet April day.

Always knew he’d kill himself on one of those fucking things.

Front-end lose, almost definitely. Followed pretty much straight-up by a heavy impact with the railing next to me – you could even tell they’d replaced it with new Armco in the past couple of years – over the top and into oblivion. Helmet marks on the railing, the copper had been quoted in the Mountain Scene article – different colour to the bike, matt black rather than Ducati red – and on the rocks below. He knew bikes and reckoned it’d been a Duke, he’d told us back in town. Either a Monster or a streetfighter 900SS, no fairing. Bit of an economic comedown from the thirty grand MV Agusta he’d had in Oz. Revisiting the rest of that Mountain Scene article, Cliff Notes version - 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. It all fitted sickeningly well. As I knew the moment we’d pulled up behind the copper’s Impreza in the little lay-by – that same sinking feeling of inevitable, inescapable doom that I’d had when Jeff, Rebecca and I had visited Matt’s crash site ten years ago. Nothing to do with premonitions or ESP or any of that supernatural bullshit, I’d spent too long with a science head on to give any of that any credence. Just the crashing inevitability that a man died here because circumstances meant he had no choice but to.

A beautiful spot, but a fucking lonely place to die. Particularly when noone remembers you died there, or is prepared to acknowledge you did. Something I planned to put to rights, personally, later today. In the interim, while PC Plod was distracted with Lena and her boobies – distracting for any man, no matter how engaged – I dug out the big fuck-off Sharpie in my pocket I’d commandeered from the cellar-door office at the winery, and scrawled a few thoughts on the newer piece of steel railing.

To Samboy. Sorry we never knew. You are not forgotten. Love from Angus, Lena and Bear.

Hey, it was the best I could come up with, with a head full of pinot noir fumes.

On a whim I took a photo of my graffiti efforts, framed with the lake and the opposing mountain range in the background. It was a lovely shot, too pretty not to share, so on a second whim I decided to post it on Gasket’s Twitter feed once I got back to civilization, i.e. somewhere with 3G coverage.

angusfromflangegasket RIP Uncle Sam. Picked a good spot for a lie down mate. http://twitpic.com/5ux0r

One of those occasions when you’re glad to get your second whim.

Lena had been a journalist for as long as I’d known her. Yet she’d missed out on that standby of all great investigative journalists, or at least the self-promoting fucktards of current affairs TV – the foot-in-the-door interview. She got her opportunity later that afternoon. Sure, technically it’s not ethical to invite yourself into the home of a grieving family member and ask pointed questions of them, but hey, they’d had the best part of five years to get over it and we’d had a month and a half, so fuck ’em and the helicopter they rode in on.

The Fyfe compound lay on an elevated promontory which overlooked the northern end of Lake Wakatipu, some ten or so kilometres from where the Rees and Dart Rivers fed into it near the township of Glenorchy – scenery that’d melt your face off, real Lord Of The Rings countryside. Plenty of multi-millionaire types had properties in the area, many of which had stayed in the same family for years. The Fyfes’ property was like that, although the original house, closer to the water’s edge, had been damaged in an earthquake and partially demolished; what was still structurally viable had been converted into a roll-in hangar for Fyfe’s Eurocopter EC135 (one model above Hollywood’s, heh heh) as well as storage for his jetboat. Probably said as much about Daniel Fyfe’s pragmatism in resource use as his disregard for sentimentality. Further up the hillside, recessed into the ridge, was the new house, an architectural tour-de-force in glass, stainless, aluminium, schist rock, slate, and polished kauri wood. Landscaped to within an inch of its life with Central Otago motifs of tussock grass, sandstone and schist, it was designed to if not disappear into the environment, than certainly to complement it. I knew all this because it was in a copy of NZ House and Garden as the winner of their House of the Year awards for 2006; Lena’s investigative journalism chops coming to the fore again. The owners of the property weren’t identified in the text, which wasn’t that surprising given he was the third richest man in New Zealand and preferred a touch of privacy. It was a fair guess Fyfe granting permission for the award nomination was probably part of a publicity contra-deal with the architects and builders which brought the presumably fucking immense sticker price of the project down a tad. Daniel Fyfe hadn’t made it to where he was by making deals that didn’t squeeze every ounce of commercial advantage to his benefit.

Obviously, I hadn’t seen the new place - nor the old place for that matter. The last time I’d been over here, on the last of our Anzac Cultural Exchange Tours with Bear and the Hayabusa lads, Sam’s sister Anne had an apartment in Queenstown – she and Fyfe were engaged, but not cohabitating at that stage. Sam and I had gone out for a meal with them at a flash waterfront restaurant and made hideous braying rock-star dicks of ourselves, as you’d expect – mid-to-late 2003, post-Lena for Sam. Fyfe hadn’t been thrilled. I kept wondering if he’d steeple his fingers, send for his minions and have us dragged out the back and summarily disposed of. (Didn’t stop us pressing the issue though, of course.) He had a peculiar world-domination vibe to him – peculiar when it came from a guy who looked like a bible-college geek who dresses up as a Medieval revivalist to get his kicks. The sort of bloke whose idea of a dream car was the DeLorean from Back To The Future, regardless of the fact that DeLoreans were reportedly pretty fucking dismal bits of kit. (And yeah, he had one. Of course he had one.)

The weathered wrought-iron gates at the end of the finely manicured crushed gravel drive were, to my mild surprise, open. The drive dipped then rose and curved left around a little swail before ending in a gravelled carpark adjoining the garage, largely subterranean and off to the east (our side) of the house itself. Out the front were parked a couple of suitably expensive tractors – a BMW X5 and an Audi Allroad. Bear’s grubby Outback looked fairly out of place next to them; for one, it actually looked like it’d seen a bit of dirt in its time.

Foot-in-the-door time.

Except noone was coming to answer the door. The lights are on (well the carpark’s full) and someone’s home, but noone’s answering. Not for a while anyway.

“Sorry, Cath,” called an approaching, slightly breathless voice, “we’re out the back in the pool, you should have come around the side…”

The door swung open.

“Surprise,” I grinned.

“You’re not Cath!” Anne squealed. But it was a good squeal. A shocked and horrified squeal, yes, but not a ‘Help, police, I’m being attacked’ sort of squeal. “My God, Andrew! And Lena! And… sorry, I’ve forgotten your name!”

Bear grinned laconically. “Chris.” We’d warned him not to breathe out, in case there were naked flames around.

“Chris! Yes! Oh, my gosh, this is such a…” She fluttered a hand over her chest. Such a middle-aged-woman thing to do. Christ, Anne’s a middle-aged woman now. She was wearing a dressing gown of some sort over a mumsy one-piece floral swimsuit, which like her mousy brown hair was wet, but unlike it wasn’t shot through with blonde highlights. It’s funny, she was the girl I spent most time near all through my childhood – Sophie aside – and yet I never really fancied her. Which for me, you’ll agree, is a serious diversion from SOP. Was it the familiarity? Was it the fact I always saw her as snooty and pretentious and she always saw me as her grotty little brother’s grottier little mate? Nah. It was probably the fact that when I looked at her, I saw Sam; same eyes, same nose, same jawline. To be fair, though, Anne had a better rack. Which, having ‘accidentally’ walked in on her getting changed once after a trip to the beach, I could personally vouch for. Admittedly, eighteen years and a couple of kids might have had something to say about that. Anyhoo, back to the talking bit.

“I thought you were a neighbour,” she explained quickly, “her kids are over here in the pool… God, you nearly scared me to death!”

Turned out it was a bit of a pool party out the back; the cars out the front belonged to some other neighbours of Anne’s, other stay-at-home mums (*cough trophy wives cough*). Given the stark emptiness of the surrounding area (even though we were only thirty kays or so out of Queenstown) I was kinda glad she had friends nearby, even though the abundant cash plus abundant boredom plus abundant muscly gardener and/or pool cleaner types meant it was probably Desperate Housewives au-go-go down here. Particularly if, like Anne, their husbands spent a lot of time away from home on business. Fyfe’s helicopter was currently, as it was regularly, parked on the roof of the company’s corporate HQ in Auckland.

I’ll say here and now – I don’t understand sisters. Not ‘the sisters’, i.e the global sisterhood – though they’re impossible enough – but the deal with having a sister, how that relationship is supposed to work. I’ve got brothers, or at least a brother, and that makes perfect sense. Half the time we fight, the rest of the time we’re mates. Can you be mates with a sister? Are you supposed to be? As near as I could tell, sisters weren’t usually mates. They were surrogate parents, if they were older, or surrogate kids, if you were. Most guys I knew with younger sisters were ferociously protective of them, which the girls themselves were inevitably embarrassed about (usually as their older brothers chased me out of their sister’s bedroom with various improvised weapons). On the other side, older sisters seemed to remember the day their little baby brother was brought home from the ward, triggering all their nascent maternal instincts from day one. Beth with her dickhead younger bro was a good example, though with mitigating circumstances. As was Anne with Sam, though the mitigating circumstances would have come into play much later in his life, when he and the plot went their separate ways.

So read my thoughts as I stood in the kitchen watching Lena make Anne cry.

Yeah, we’re bastards. Turn up unannounced, invite ourselves in, make her neglect her existing guests, then drive her to tears. But dammit, we didn’t come all this way for NUTHIN. And to Lena’s defence, all she did was answer Anne’s question ref. what brought us here with the truth: we’d come to pay our respects to Sam. Didn’t need to ask pointed questions about why the family hadn’t told anyone anything, or whether there’d been a media coverup, or why there wasn’t even any sort of memorial at the site. Paraphrasing – because frankly it was an awkward, stilted and embarrassing exchange and the effort-to-reward ratio for transcribing all of it isn’t flash – it was because she didn’t believe he was dead. Actually, that’s overstating her position a bit. She wouldn’t say he was dead, she’d only accept that he was missing. Even if the coroner had pronounced him dead, he wasn’t dead, he was missing. Even if Daniel, all of her family and all of his accepted he was dead, even if they’re been no sign of life from him in the almost-five-years since he’d had the accident, and even if the accident had appeared to me, Bear, Lena, the police and the coroner to be profoundly fucking unsurvivable - he wasn’t dead, he was missing.

And you know, I couldn’t really fault her for that. My mum wanted to believe Matt hadn’t killed himself, after all. Did believe, in fact. So I knew how that shit worked; didn’t buy into it, but understood how it came about. And equally I knew we could do no good here. So after a time – shorter than would probably be normal for catching up with near-family after many years apart, but plenty fucking long enough given the cripplingly awkward circumstances – we made our apologies, left Anne to tidy herself up for her guests, and skulked out the door. We’d made vague arrangements to catch up this evening in Queenstown when Dan made it back from Auckland, but ‘when’ sounded more like ‘if’ and neither side of the discussion seemed to be that horrified by the prospect of those plans falling over.

“Well that experience sure did suck,” Lena pronounced.

“Got what you wanted?”

“No,” she retorted, guiding the Outback along the undulating gravel path to the gate. “You think I enjoyed that?”

“No,” I echoed, “but did you get what you wanted?”

She shrugged, irritated. “I suppose. Don’t even know what I wanted, I guess. To find McCarthy hiding under the bed perhaps?” A hollow laugh. “He’s really, properly fucking dead, isn’t he. No kidding.”

“This is news to you?”

She blinked. Tears appeared. Great, our second crying girl of the afternoon. Twice in 12 hours for this one, too.

“Sorry,” she said, brusquely wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her top. If anything it should have been me who was apologising. “It’s stupid, I know. It’s just… there’s only so much death you can handle in one weekend, yeah?”

“I’m with that,” grunted the Bear. He’d observed a solemn silence for much of the trip since the morning’s stop at the bluff, partly out of respect, partly out of not wanting to distribute what little lunch he’d been able to stomach from the pie shop in Glenorchy over either the inside of his car or the Fyfe’s award-winning designer home.

“Yeah, enough death for today,” I agreed. “Shall we go get drunk now?”

The answer, as it turned out, was No. Despite having all of Queenstown at our disposal, a ski town with an impressive breadth and depth of places to get drunk in, we had a couple of quiet, slow pints at the Irish bar before heading back to the chalet at the winery in Bannockburn and kicking back until dinner. Bear reckoned he’d done enough drinking for the last wee while; I was going to claim that as a Win. There was also the fact that someone would have had to drive, and that narrow, winding, cliff-hugging road through the Kawarau Gorge ain’t one you’d really want to attack with a few shandies under your belt in the dark of night, so we attacked it in daylight. There’d still be sun for quite a while here – not as long as down in Dunedin, with the substantial mountain ranges to the west calling time on the evening sometime between eight and nine – but even so I decided to make the most of it, and my last hour or so of iPhone charge, by wandering down to the lake’s edge, parking my arse on the old park bench situated there, soaking up the serenity and the golden light and committing a few thoughts to paper… silicon… whatever. I had to write something for the website, and hadn’t Twuntered for a bit either, and needed to check my emails – not that the chateau’s wireless broadband coverage or NZ’s patchy 3G mobile coverage extended this far along the property. I bashed out a few ideas but nothing really stuck together. What I really wanted to do was have some quiet Zen time to myself and dampen down the white noise in my head. And maybe give Beth a call and see how she was getting on.

Failed on both counts – the white noise wasn’t responsive to serenity, and Beth wasn’t there, or wasn’t answering. Still, it was kinda nice down there, being able to ignore my responsibilities ref. looking after Bear. I’d left he and Lena at the café with a couple of flat whites – mine was to go – and they were still there when I’d come back past at six, phone battery reading negative fuck-all. The staff had been obliged to pack the place up around them while they carried on regardless. (The café and restaurant, which had been part of the premises when Hollywood bought the place, had remained open through the renovations, though each had been redone, redecorated, tsuzjed-up and shinyfied over the quieter months of last winter.)

Later we dined on traditional rustic NZ cuisine – wild Fiordland venison, lamb shanks, fresh salmon – over one or two bottles of wine (taking it easy) while comparing notes on the whole messed-up melange that was the saga of Flange Gasket getting clearance to play Big Day Out 2009. Presuming of course that something ELSE didn’t happen between now and next Friday in Auckland to fuck THAT up. Each of us pretty much knew the story now – Lena more than most – but it was interesting to hear what each side’s perspective was. Bear roared with laughter when I admitted I’d used him as a bluff in a high-stakes game of poker with Marty, which had worked about as well as a chocolate fireguard. Lena’s story was pretty much as Joey and Danno had said, or rather shouted drunkenly, though she wasn’t prepared to be hugely forthcoming with detail as to exactly what they’d done that was dodgy, partly because Maddy’s company lawyers were tidying up the mess as we spoke, partly because the detail was in her words ‘incredibly fucking dull’. The point remained though she’d binned an exclusive – a potentially much bigger one than my ‘interview’, though likely a more destructive one for her career and the industry – for the sake of Gasket getting the last victory lap we’d missed out on. I swallowed my pride, and another mouthful of pinot, and offered my thanks.

“Hey, it’s better for my book sales this way. It’s not all about you, you know.” And then laughed and reiterated, AGAIN, that she wasn’t writing a book. But that I should. I shook my head, but she was insistent.

“I’ll help with the big words,” she offered.

“I can do the colouring-in,” remarked Bear. Aside from the odd grin he’d been pretty quiet. Usually meant he was feeling the hurt a bit. You couldn’t really tell for sure though unless he was howling along mournfully with Counting Crows or U2’s One.

In the end I told her to secure me a massive fuck-off book deal with a massive fuck-off advance I could live off for the next couple of years, and I’d get right onto it. And that given the state of the Australian publishing industry I expected to hear from her again in about 2030.

I actually heard from her again around 2230. Hours. We’d all taken the opportunity to grab relatively early nights, given our need to prepare for being reimmersed in death tomorrow and the fact Bear had plans of leaving at stupid o’clock in the morning in order to be back in Dunedin before ten – if he was back on early-morning surfer time he really WAS on the improve - but I was still up, arsing about on the internet on the recharged iPhone, when Lena appeared in my doorway for the second time in two nights. And STILL no poon dammit.

“Hey,” she asked. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Driving the interwebs,” I said. “Someone has to. You?”

“Not sleeping,” she admitted. “How’s the girl?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Not answering her phone.”

“Is there someone else?” she mused.

“Probably,” I chuckled.

“Am I ever gonna get the chance to meet this girl who everyone keeps going on about, then?”

“Everyone isn’t…”

“Beck, Danno, Joey… hell, even Maddy,” she listed.

Great, I thought, Beth’s got her very own fan club. This’ll end well.

“You’ve met her,” I pointed out. “Remember?”

“Don’t think I saw her at her best,” she noted with an ironic smirk. “I mean, how are you going to know if she’s The One without my all-important seal of approval?”

“What makes you think she is?”

“What makes you think she isn’t?”

I couldn’t answer that comprehensively without a prepared speech and a Powerpoint presentation, so I just rolled my eyes.

“Bear’s not going so good, is he?” she posed.

I laughed a little at that. “You should have seen him on Friday,” I told her. “He’s improved out of sight. Might even be sober enough tomorrow to drive his own car. And might not even want to drive it off the top of the dam at Clyde either...”

“I didn’t just mean…” She waved her hands about the place. I took that to mean the immediate surrounds, the immediate circumstance we were in, i.e. Tractor’s passing. “It’s not been good for him for a while.”

“How do you arrive at that?” I replied. “Before this, he was backpacking around the world with his board and his guitar. Had a fucking whale of a time. I’d hardly call that not good.”

“Who’d he have to share it with though?”

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Like that matters. How about the couple of hundred fucking legendary people he intersected with on his travels?”

“That’s what he said to me. This afternoon. The only thing he missed was having someone to share it with.”

“Fine, and when do travelling couples ever return from their travels together? More often than not they split. Jesus, maybe he was happy on his own, enjoying a bunch of holiday romances… Don’t be bringing your Jane Austen sensibilities into my room, girl.” That was a wind-up. Lena resented Jane Austen even more than I did, because she was expected to utterly adore it, having ovaries and all.

“He said it…”

“It was a pick-up line,” I replied mischievously. “He’s trying to make you feel sorry for him.”

She glared at me, then softened.

“Well… It’s working, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” I laughed derisively. “What are you going to do about it then?”

“What do you think?” she replied carefully. Her arms were stretched to the extent of the doorframe, her hands pressing against the wood. It had the effect of showing off her body to its best effect; full-breasted, Amazonian even. “Would it be such a crime?”

“Lena…” I had to get that giggle out of my voice, or I was priming myself for a slap. “Are you asking me whether I think you should sleep with Bear?”

“I’m not asking,” she replied, “I’m telling.” She disguised her rising embarrassment with feistiness, as usual. “Just figured I should let the poor bastard who has to share a car with us tomorrow when it’s all weird as fuck.”

I raised an eyebrow. The right, since you asked. “You sure this is a good idea? How’s this going to help?”

“The way it usually does,” was her condescending reply. “By feeling fucking awesome for an hour or two. Besides,” she added, “he can always say no. After all, you did.” A sly smile. “Night, Angus.”

“Night,” I replied.

Um, good. This’ll end well. Even better than Beth and her fan club. Best case, Bear’s sensible enough to talk her out of it so we can all get through tomorrow without ANOTHER slab of fuckin’ awkward trowelled over the top of everything else. Or at least get a raincheck. Bang seven bells out of her on the bonnet of Hollywood’s 911 TOMORROW night instead.

Hey. Sorry I missed your call. Life got in the way.

I wondered if Beth knew that was a song by Even. When your friends choose to die, you pinch yourself to work out why; there’s not a lot that you can say, when life gets in the way. God I felt old, and sad, and alone. And vulnerable. Fucking hated that the most. Defences down, just waiting for someone to sink the boot in. Just the overload of death, of mourning people who mattered to me, had me low as fuck right at that moment.

Hey babe, I texted her. You near puter? Will DM you on Twunter.

Beth was on Twitter too, but not for broadcast purposes, mainly to follow the 140-character chunterings of various celebs (presuming they weren’t prepared and published by itinerant underlings) including someone calling themselves angusfromflangegasket. Direct messaging on Twitter was pretty much the same as Instant Messenger or a bunch of other two-way interdweeb communication methods, just momentarily trendier. And it wasn’t in open channel like the main Twitterfeed. I mention this because by the time this goes to print Twunter, Arsebook, Gheyspace and a hundred other once-‘now’ technologies will be nothing more than historic curiosities. Yes kids, we DID communicate this way once upon a time. The following sounds like a quick exchange, but factor in a minute or so between replies.

Not much going on here. You OK?

Sort of. Little freakout but I’m good. Wouldn’t want you thinking it was cos you weren’t around.

Was it?

Course not :-). How’s your friend Mr Bear?

He’s about to be the recipient of a sympathy fuck. Not from me I’d add.

You don’t sound like you approve.

You think it’s a good idea for the two most messed up people you know to sleep together?

We already do, don’t we? ;-)

Touche. I miss you. And stuff.

…Nup, I’ve broken the internet. Either that or she’s taken offence, but I’d prefer to believe this long, cold silence is because the internet has SPONTANEOUSLY EXPLODED and isn’t working anymore.

Then, after a long, long while:

No you don’t.

Followed by:

You’re just down because you’re surrounded by grieving and depressed people. Same reason why Lena is sleeping with Bear. Anything to black it out.

That nasty metallic taste in my mouth was me wondering if ‘anything to black it out’ was why Beth was with me in the first place.

Somewhere, in the darkness, a scream and a cry. Not of sadness, but of ecstacy, of delirious, sustained release. I’d heard that before. As McCarthy himself had been wont to say of Chateau Dodgy in Lismore, ‘Fuckin’ thin walls around here…’

If you say so. Love’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it?

The best. Sleep well babe. Beth x.

Not much good it did me. I slept appallingly.