Where do you go?

Where do you go?
Tell me, when I’m not around?
There’s a place I know
You can let your defences down.
- Hunters and Collectors, 1992

We didn’t linger long after the set. Within half an hour of Marty’s solo-plus-Vanity-Project set wrapping up – he carried himself bloody well, to be honest, though we’d been very careful about not over-using him in our Gasket set – we’d been thrown into cabs and sent packing to Auckland airport, in order to grab the 8pm flight to Brisbane that a fair swag of the earlier-playing BDO acts were booked on. The Gold Coast show was Sunday, this was Friday, so the sooner we got back to the left-hand-side of the ditch the better, really. And besides, while on balance I’d enjoyed my time in NZ, it was time to get back home. The timezone shift coupled with Queensland’s lack of daylight savings meant that we landed in Brisbane about ten minutes after we took off, even if it was after 11pm in my poor addled still-ringing-from-inferior-earplugs head.

Only one problem: how the fuck I was getting out of here. Last I recalled, my ute was… hang on, where the fuck was it? I’d gotten to the airport via Marty’s M5. Before that, I’d gotten down to Bangalow and back via the Martymobile. Which meant my ute was probably still parked outside dB’s offices in the Valley, presuming it hadn’t been towed or stolen.

“Ah yeah, should have probably mentioned,” Marty commented as we filed through Customs, “we brought your car to the airport when we flew over. Don’t let me forget to dig the keys out of my checked bags.”

“Who drove?”

“Phil… but don’t worry, he didn’t do anything stupid…”

“We made him stop doing circlework after the fourth lap of the roundabout,” chirped Jeff.

“So long as I don’t get speed camera photos in the mail with your arse hanging out the passenger window.”

“Course not,” Jeff said. “It’d be red light cameras, not dumb enough to do it at the speeds that bastard drives.”

The Jeff, who was stretching marital harmony to its most generous limits with this sortie as things stood, was first through customs, first into the carpark and first onto the motorway, arrowing his ute south to get back home to the woman he loved and the kids he adored. He’d meet us back up on the Goldie tomorrow afternoon; we had a cast-iron rendezvous time which Was Not To Be Broken. I’d already scored an impressively embossed Official Written Warning for my conduct re my contractual obligations over the NZ trip, which I’d treated with the respect it deserved – tore it up in front of Danno, who’d been the poor unfortunate delegated by the Big Boss to deliver it, and then proceeded to call the hostie and order another Steinlager – so I was already in fairly poor odour ref the Management. Fuck ‘em. You want to do this without me, good fucking luck, bitch. I’d have taken it up with the Management, but she was up the pointy end of the plane behind the magic curtain, and we weren’t. Not sure how that worked. Not sure if it worked.

I found the ute. Which was an achievement in itself, given I was working to directions hastily provided by the Duffer, before he and his R34 Skyline fishtailed out of the carpark and VRAAAAA-KSSSSHHHed away into the night. Times like this you were supposed to celebrate the small victories, but I was fucking over it. Fatigue, deafness, headache, a bumpy flight and too many Steinlagers prior to finding out I was driving, rather than taking a cab to the Martins’ place – basically a cumulative feeling of shiteness. I was considering just getting that cab anyway, didn’t really feel like running the gamut of the Friday night RBTs between here and Bardon, dB could pick up the tab as far as I was concerned. There was no prospect of a night in my own bed on Straddie – or even the bed which was sitting in for my own bed in my own bedroom at the moment, all my stuff being in storage downstairs while Don Richardson had the house in shiny yuppy wanker mode for the open homes he was running over Jan-Feb weekends – but at least there’d be a bed, a couch, a couple of cold beers and a Mad Mick Martin to vent with re the cuntiness of my management. There was a hotel room booked in my name somewhere flash in town, but I just couldn’t be arsed.

It’s not locked. What the fuck.

Within seconds of pressing Unlock on the keyless fob, then pressing it again and again to no visible response, my mind started ploughing the same furrows yours would have:

Phil, you arsehat.

What did I leave in here that was worth nicking?

Phil, you stupid arsehat.

What’s it insured for? Would I have been better off if…

Phil… seriously. You. Are. An. Arsehat.

As it turned out, it wasn’t worth a pinch of shit either on the road or on the books of my insurer, so I was probably better off with it intact rather than burnt out on blocks out the back of Ipswich. Phil was an arsehat, but maybe not for this. And I hadn’t left anything in there worth nicking, but there was something in there worth having.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “Miss me?”

“Nope,” I replied. I was getting used to acting nonchalant when she sprung these random appearances on me. It was more a surprise when she didn’t show, to be honest. “Thought I did, but I was mistaken.”

Her smile said ‘Good answer’. I was learning, apparently. Learning what, I had no idea.

I climbed in and shut the door. She was on the passenger seat, in a sleeveless T-shirt and a summery floral-print skirt. Hair back to blonde, slightly more platinum than I remembered it, tied back as it usually was. No business suit, no sweat-dampened sports gear, no buttoned-down daughter-of-Christ look. What she looked was… normal. Whatever that was. If I was really being honest, the fact that she’d not been in the arrivals area to meet me when I got off the plane had slung me further into the funk I’d developed. She didn’t do stuff like that, though; it’d be far too predictable, for one. And I’d spent much of the previous night chatting up Dr Caitlin Taylor from Auckland Uni, after all, with intent to cause a disturbance of the peace in her pants, so I hardly deserved a cheer squad on landing.

Slightly awkwardly, she negotiated her way along the seat and clambered into my lap, ducking her head so as not to crown herself on the low cabin ceiling. She draped her arms around my neck and looked quizzically into my eyes, trying to work out how happy I was to see her. I had to ask the obvious question.

“How’d you get here?”

“Magic,” she replied enigmatically.

“Broke into my house and found my spare car keys?”

“Might have,” she smiled. “But that’d be giving away all my secrets, wouldn’t it.”

She was sparkly and upbeat. I wasn’t. I so very wasn’t. Since the last time I’d seen her, I’d buried a good friend, nursed a bunch of hurt people through it all, played a fairly emotionally draining show… I had nothing left. As I explained, after she’d asked me what was up.

“Sorry, Angus,” she said. “Can’t help you with any of that. I don’t do emotional support.”

I shrugged, going for ‘no big deal’ and falling about three suburbs short.

“I do this, though,” she said sweetly, guiding my hand under her shirt as her lips searched against mine.

So, not quite nothing left, as she reminded me afterwards. She’d promised to be as quiet as she could, it wasn’t the most private place in the world, and we didn’t want to be discovered. Which explained the bite-marks in the fleshy part of my shoulder, even if it didn’t quite justify them. Our bodies had missed each other, even if we hadn’t. Officially, at least.

“I changed my mind, too,” she added, eyes large and dark. “I’m coming to Big Day Out.”

I didn’t believe it then, just as I didn’t believe it right up until Sunday morning on the Goldie. But there she was, outside my hotel. In a black Chemical Brothers T-shirt.

It’d been nine years since she’d been to Big Day Out, she admitted, like a lapsed Catholic schoolgirl in confession. It’d been here at Parklands on the Gold Coast. A sixteen year old clubber on fake ID and E's brought up by an old south coast school friend in a Vegemite jar. Why her mate had been so paranoid about sniffer dogs at Brisbane Airport, Beth had never figured out. The irony, of course, was that I’d been there the same day, same venue. Just as a punter, though we’d managed to scam low-level backstage passes – not through Exocet or anything, just through our web developer mate who did the IT for Parklands, he was also handy for free ‘supplier’ passes for Indy as well – but there we’d been, Beth and I, two strangers in the night, ne’er the twain to meet. Not really surprising we’d not met, she’d been in the Boiler Room all day and you wouldn’t have gotten me out of the main stage moshpit with a block and tackle. The Foo Fighters and Chili Peppers went fucking off. As was their wont. Plus Nine Inch Nails, the Hellacopters, the ‘Spoon, the ‘Bait, Shihad… with a proper-stage lineup like that, I was about as likely to venture into the Boiler Room and have other peoples’ sweat drip on me from the ceiling in order to watch Basement Jaxx or the Brothers Chemical pressing play on their laptops as I was to wander up to Joe Strummer and call him a soft sack of shite who’d never amount to anything in this industry. Even though Primal Scream were playing the doof tent, they were deep into their electronica phase back then and hadn’t been terribly likely to crank out a kick-arse version of Rocks any time soon.

Funny to think. That wasn’t just the last time I went to the BDO as a punter, that was the last time before everything went mental. A few days later, Triple J called me up at Dr Cletus’ Straya Day BBQ to tell me Angus Young had made it into the Hottest 100.

It’d been an interesting nine years.

As it’d been for Beth as well, of course. What she could remember of it. What she could remember of BDO 2000 wasn’t a great deal either. That clingy black T-shirt still fit, though. That clingy black T-shirt was going to live in my memory when I was dribbling in a rocking chair on the nursing home verandah. The dribbling had already started, to be honest. Inconsiderate on her part. She might have worn a bra.

It’d taken me most of the trip from the hotel to theshowgrounds for me to figure out how to ask the obvious question. I’d counted the stitching in the dodgy-looking leatherette of the back seat armrest twice already. Corporate Cabs Fairlanes weren’t the last word in upholstery artisanship.

“So what made you change your mind?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she offered. “Interesting company? Free drinks?”

“The Prodigy?”

Beth suppressed a smirk. “See,” she challenged, “you should probably know, you’re a lot less cute when you start thinking you can read me.”

“The Prodigy, then,” I confirmed with a grin.

“Hey,” she replied, “you’re lucky you’re not clashing with them.”

Unlikely. They were headlining, we were flatlining. Well, not quite that bad, but we were still trapped in that mid-afternoon netherworld of mainstage performances before the sun goes down and the punters’ collective second wind (or second stash) kicks in and saves the day. Still, at least we’d pulled a crowd backstage, plenty of familiar faces had popped by, from within the music scene and otherwise. Dr Cletus had negotiated a leave pass and we’d matched it with a backstage one, so there he was in camo boardshorts and a BDO-merch wifebeater singlet, guns on show, premix Bundy can in hand, not looking in any way like a ginger thirty-something family man scheduling a mid-life crisis. His wingman was my current flatmate Mad Mick, who’d also come down for the show. Short, shaven-headed, bearded and nuggety, Mick looked as ever like a drunken hybrid of Angry Anderson, Nick Oliveri and Gollum. They’d come down first thing, got early check-in on a cheap apartment on Wotif, and had been on it ever since. First beverage had been somewhere around seven – not counting the sly beers Mick drained in Dr Cletus’ Magna on the way down, which the Doc had been furiously trying to catch up for since they’d gotten in here. It was an Indy trip all over again, except with less naked-boobies-on-balconies action. Particularly since the Darkness weren’t playing, who used to publically decree at festival gigs that any girl sitting on her boyfriends’ shoulders blocking other punters’ view had to get her tits out as compensation. Worked far more often than it had any right to.

“Shit lineup this year…”

“Yeah, thanks mate.”

“Nah serious,” Dr Cletus declared, his voice booming now that he had his drunk on. “Fuckin’ noone playing. Who’s headlining? Fuckin’ Prodigy, who’ve been shit since the 90s, and Neil Young, who’s just an old cunt.”

“And is behind you,” I nodded, indicating over his shoulder with my Heineken.

“Wha…?”

It wasn’t Neil Young, of course. It was some old, gnarled roadie with greying 70s hair, making his surly way between somewhere and somewhere else, sneering disapprovingly at the overheard comment as he passed by. But Dr Cletus didn’t know that. Dr Cletus probably wouldn’t have known Neil Young from Neil Diamond, come to think of it. He was here for the beer (or the rumbos at least). Since the Donnas weren’t playing, of course.

We weren’t as pretty – well, Marty aside, of course – but we did at least play Dr Cletus’ sort of music. Loud. We ambled onstage under leaden mid-afternoon skies, humidity hanging heavily in the air like a stale fart in a phonebox, to the ripping-corrugated-iron riff of Rose Tattoo’s Rock And Roll Outlaw over the PA – a tip of the grubby Xerox Ducati WSBK cap to our Mad Mick, one of the very few who we’d figured would have journeyed to Parklands for the sole reason of watching us go around. But surprise surprise, here were punters, in reasonable number – reasonable considering we were on even earlier than we’d been in Auckland, when the D-barrier was usually half empty. Or maybe we were just in a D-barrier-half-full kind of mood.

Marty certainly was. He seemed pretty damn happy to be his own warmup act – he was due back here on the Orange Stage in about three hours – possibly because the longer gaps between Gasket and solo act sets versus AKL meant he could actually get some recovery time in (i.e. sober up a bit.) The Duffer was grinning like a loon, twirling his sticks like he should be harnessed in an upside-down cage in a Motley Crue video clip – preferably as Tommy Lee rather than one of the peroxided dancer chicks – and even the Jeff, who’d seemed about as cheerful about playing the Big Day Out with a popular Australian rock band (or us even) as he was about the Dragons’ twenty year wait for another premiership, had a suitable smirk going on as he nodded along to Rock And Roll Outlaw being cranked through the biggest PA in the southern hemisphere at that moment.

“Fucken A,” I said. One straight out of the Jonny Toogood School of Crowd Intros. “We’re the fucken Gasket, who’s up for a swim?”

We’d fucked about with the set, again. But for good reason. Marty’s first hit Blip On The Gaydar had been dropped so Marty could save more voice, and besides it gave us an excuse to crank Dr Cletus I Presume with full Living End rockabilly fury in the general direction of its namesake. They were on here later too, second last act of the night, just before Neil Diamond. We also dropped Cock Rock Will Never Die – not because it wasn’t worth cranking, just because we needed the space at the end of the set. Actually, on second thoughts maybe Jeff was just happier because I’d listened to the bastard and taken his advice for once. That setlist now ran Harry Holt, Angus Young, Dr Cletus, Meaning of Life, Stupid People, Chick Song, Drunkees, Video Hits… and Beef Week Queen. We had to, after all. We’d managed to make Beef Week Queen into the most talked-about single on alternative rock radio. How? The same way we usually did. Picking fights with opinionated wankers in public.

OK, it wasn’t quite like it was in the day, back when McCarthy was our unofficial marketing manager – pulling stunts like getting the local National MP to embarrass himself in the paper over Harold Holt, or the cooked-up shitfight over our Nevermind-lite second EP cover. We were mature, sensible, respectable members of the industry these days. We didn’t go looking for trouble. Trouble went looking for us. And found us, in the form of an acrid column in Saturday’s Melbourne Age. Thing was, it wasn’t in the music section – Mike Cross tweeted me (that just doesn’t sound right does it?) to disclaim responsibility or even prior knowledge – but in the op-ed bit where all the ramblings of the disquieteningly demented are housed. Or to put it another way, where Catherine Deveny’s column went. Deveny was a stand-up comic of arguable merit who’d parlayed her thin talents into a regular writing gig at the Age as basically their militant lefty crank in residence. Now I like a good bit of militant lefty crankery as much as the next guy, not all farmers’ sons are fucking Young Nats after all. (Though Super Dave was fucking a Young Nat once, think I told you how that turned out.) Problem was, everything she said was pretty much guaranteed to do more damage to the case she was arguing for – atheism, feminism, whatever – than any good it was going to do. Even more so than a Helen Razor rant, and that’s saying something. Months ago, I’d read a bilious, sneering Deveny-penned put-down of sheep-like Godbotherers that should have had me nodding in wry agreement, but instead had me wondering whether there might actually be a place in my life for Jesus. In the end I decided there was a place in my life for the Superjesus and dug Sumo and Jet Age out of storage for sunset crankage on the deck at the beach house.

Anyhoo. Reports started coming in from Gasket’s Twit Army (we actually had a good few thousand followers by now, the road trip through NZ had somehow gained us many more heads than we’d lost) that Deveny had gone to town on us. Even before clicking the link to the article I knew what to expect; I’d helped write the fucking song, after all. But just how far over the top she’d gone, and by how much she’d missed the point, just astounded me.

I actually ‘re-tweeted’ the link, it was that hilariously ill-judged.

Gold medal for complete fkn cluelessness goes to @catherinedeveny: [article link] We’re as misogynist as she’s a humourist

Which sparked an all-out Twitter war. As I detailed in my mission report this morning on the Gasket webpage:

Arguing on the Internet fucking RULES. It’s fully totes AWSM times infinity. Seriously. Especially when you’re arguing with a chick, cos they just don’t get the internet, they’re like totes heaps n00bs compared to us 1337 h4x0rz. In fact, I’m reliably informed the correct response when you meet an actual chick on the internet, instead of a fat hairy truck driver from Geelong pretending to be a chick, is ‘TITS OR GTFO’. Which confused me, I thought a GTFO was what Allan Moffat used to drive at Bathurst in the ‘70s. Confused Catherine Deveny of the Age, too. Probably because she’s a Prius sort of girl. More important to be seen making a loud, self-aggrandizing statement about Important Issues than actually doing anything fucking useful about them.

Which brings us to our wee Twunter war over her column yesterday. Now, we’ve had crap reviews before. Usually from Kas Casoli of News Fairly Limited, and to answer the most oft-answered question directed at me, I did, and she still hates me. Probably more, which doesn’t say much. Typically, music reviews centre around actually listening to the music involved, unless you’re US Maxim mag reviewing a Black Crowes album, but not for our Cath. Nup, it’s probably enough that she bothered to fire up the Inter-Google on her shiny new Mac and read up on the lyrics to our new single Beef Week Queen.

(I say our. It’s mine and Marty’s. Noone else wants to take responsibility for it, even us. Though dB and Exocet are quite happy to take the proceeds from it, I see it’s now getting bundled into online sales of our best-of compilation.)

Now, our fans – you lot - are usually fucking smart people. Despite what Deveny would say – and has said, publically - you’re not cretins. You’re not bourboned-up bogans looking to punch-on at the local suburban beer barn. You’re not fat wifebeaters in wifebeaters, you’re not group-groping footy players, you’re not bigots, you’re not racists, you’re not homophobes, and you’re not misogynists, partly because for half of you that’d involve self-loathing. And you get that we’re not. You get the fucking joke. Jesus H. Christ on an inflatable pedalo, if you didn’t, why the hell would you be listening?

And that’s the point. Normally I wouldn’t give a fuck, but when the militant minions of dumb have been summoned from all over the Twunterverse to propagate the hate spat forth by the Miranda Devine of the left – no surprises they work for the same lot of clowns, but militant fuckwits positioned on both extremes does not a balanced media organ make, Failfax – and the integrity of you lot is being called into question, fuck that. Fine, call us misogynists. So long as every rock band in the history of the genre from the Stones to the Arctic Monkeys gets the same smear job. But don’t you fucking touch the people who give their time and their money to let us do what we do. They can tell parody from bigotry, even if you can’t. And they can distinguish comedy from aimless, bitter, politicized ranting, too. Which is why they don’t tend to read your column, Deveny. Now stop being an embarrassment to all of the rest of us pro-republic atheist lefties who you purport to think for, and shush. You are not Germaine Greer. You are not even Jermaine Jackson. You are less funny than anthrax and less relevant than Betamax. Now go away.

Tits or GTFO indeed.

See you at Parklands, Gasketeers.

Probably would have been a bit less over the top had I not co-authored the piece with Mad Mick, Dr Cletus and a cold case of Grolsch swingtops, but the point was made.

While they’d scored her a shitload of attention and page hits today, Deveny’s Twitterage went on to get her fired from the Age a year later after an astonishing rant on Anzac Day basically describing every male who ever enlisted to fight as a misogynist (yes, again) racist bigoted fuck hellbent on any excuse to gun down chinks, wops and krauts – that’d be my old man, a fairly unwilling Nam conscript, she’d be insulting there - followed by some bewilderingly pedophilic joke at the Logies about Bindi Irwin’s sex life. Unsurprisingly, given the way the world works these days, it was the celebrity sledging that did for her in the end. But that was a long way into the future. For the interim:

“This is our last song. I’d like to dedicate it to Catherine Deveny.”

Yup, our crowd thought that was amusing too. And so we launched into Beef Week Queen. The most unlikely hit song we’d ever had. Apart from all of the others, I suppose. Everything since Harold Holt. Were we the last band ever to get famous entirely by fucking accident? Acts these days had a business plan and a marketing strategy even before their first RSL covers gig.

Good show, was the consensus offstage. Real good show. The sun broke through the clouds just as we’d been waving farewell and wandering off, and it was back to being your usual stinking hot January afternoon on the Goldie. Cold Extra Dry in a plastic bottle never tasted so good. Which wasn’t much of an achievement. Official backstage beer of Big Day Out my arse, either they’d changed the recipe over the years or I’d gone off the Teds since the glory days.

Took a while to find the girl in the clingy Chemical Brothers T-shirt after the show, which wasn’t that surprising. It was enough she’d even bothered to stick around for the set, I guess.

“She’s right, you know,” Beth said.

I rolled my eyes. And went into my now-well-practiced diatribe about if we were misogynists then what about Led Zeppelin, or Guns ‘N’ Roses, or Spinal Tap – and for fuck’s sake if you’re going to split hairs how about reading up on your typical modern R&B lyrics – and so on, and so forth.

“Doesn’t change what you said in that song.”

Further rantation about satire, the nature of parody, the inherent misogyny in beauty pageants or any other competition which purports to ‘rate’ women, the fact that if anything, Beef Week Queen was a feminist statement…

“You said all that already. You’re still wrong, and you’re still a misogynist.”

“Are you serious?” I asked her, suddenly channelling John McEnroe at his brattiest. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Yeah,” she smirked. “But only cos you’re cute when you’re angry.” Beth smoothed her fingers down my cheek, her fingertips tickling the stubble, equal parts seductive and patronising. My blood boiled. What I should have done was drag her out the back to the pre-fab shanty which had been made available to us as our backstage hideout, into some dark, secret corner behind lockable doors, and dealt with her insolence through proper channels. But it was too public, there were too many people around.

So what I did was… exactly that. Sorry, I’m not very imaginative with revenge strategies.

“See,” I told her. “I can’t be a misogynist. I lurrvve women.”

“Yeah, so I keep hearing,” she remarked. Picked a bad day to run into not one but two ex-flings backstage who seemed quite interested in finding out what my current relationship status was. So was I, actually. Answers on a postcard.

Marty’s set came only a few short beers later (or so it seemed), by which time the sun had set, the lights were bathing the stage and the first few rows of happy smiling punters, and Marty and his Vanity Project were working their magic. It was the first time I’d seen him play a crowd this big, and he truly was a magician. OK, there’d been Auckland, but that wasn’t a homegrown audience and anyway our heads were all elsewhere that day. Here, I could appreciate just how good he was at taking a big festival crowd and sweeping them along with him, like I’d seen Powderfinger or You Am I do in years gone past.

Then again, I did have the required accessories to make a Marty show work to its greatest potential: a head full of alcohol-infused sentimentality, and my arm around a beautiful blonde girl. Who’d only just decided to be blonde again, and who didn’t think she was beautiful and would argue the point with you with bewildering vehemence, but it worked. When Marty finished with a swelling, soaring, orchestrally-backed (well as many string players as they could get on stage) version of Mesmerising, and I squeezed Beth a little tighter around her waist, and she rested her head on my shoulder… meh. I know it’s corny, and obvious, and whatever, but I had a lump in my throat. As distinct from the lump in other places she usually inspired… and yeah, I understand the irony, and I appreciate the cynicism. We’d already been as intimate as a boy and a girl could be. I’d told her I loved her. Asked her to marry me, bought her a ring, the whole deal. And yet none of that seemed anything like any of… this. This was different. This meant something. This was something. It wasn’t a familiar sensation, but I knew what it was, and what it meant. I knew what that feeling was.

Blind. Fucking. Terror.

It went, as soon as Marty left the stage and the Arctic Monkeys joined it, and Beth made some joke about betting I looked good on the dancefloor, and one thing led to another, and before too long I was using all my backstage VIPedness to get us into the chokingly overcrowded sauna of the Boiler Room in time to see the Prodigy. Yeah, yeah. I know. All that stuff about sweat dripping off the ceiling and brain-nuking decibels and random randomists frotting themselves against you… it’s all true. And the last time I’d actually moved my body in some form of time to Breathe was eleven years ago at the Powerhouse Niteclub in Lismore with Jessica, when the bass was cranked so high you could feel your organs resonating in your chest. I knew all that. So I’m a hypocrite, as well as a misogynist.

“What did you think?” I asked afterwards. With brain of jelly, limbs of lead and ears of custard, it was an effort just to come up with rational conversation. Sweaty, tired punters were filing out of the venue, the floodlights illuminating the dust haze like an incandescent mist. It looked kind of impressive.

Beth chose her words carefully. Either that or she was just as shattered as I was. “What’s that line from that song of yours? Sounded better on drugs?”

“Played better on smack,” I nodded. “You think they would have sounded better if they were on drugs?”

“No, if I was,” she admitted with a self-conscious laugh.

“You are,” I suggested, “just different drugs.”

“You say that,” she maintained. “And yet this is the least shit I’ve been on since I was fifteen. And the longest I’ve been off antidepressants since…” She laughed. “Since the first time around with you… doesn’t really bode well, does it?”

“It’s OK,” I told her, “all my stuff’s safely in storage now.”

“And I know where the keys are, remember…”

“Ah yeah, I forgot about that. We’re fucked then.”

She laughed, squeezed my hand, said thanks for today, she’d had a great time.

“That sounds a little too much like ‘Date’s over, piss off’ for my liking…”

“That’s probably because it is,” she said.

“Was it something I said?”

“For once, no,” she replied. “Just a prior engagement.”

“On a Sunday night? A little late for church, surely?”

“It’s not that,” she said. She tried adding, “And don’t call me Shirley,” but couldn’t manage it without giggling. She was in a slightly manic mood. Many legal accelerants had been harmed in the making of Beth’s day. “You’ll love this. I’m going to a midnight session of Twilight…”

“What the…”

“I know, I know…” She self-consiously swept a sweat-dampened curl of blonde out of her eyes. “It’s just a bunch of girls I went to school with down here, they found me on Facebook. They do this movie night thing every couple of months down here. It’s not my choice, it was Kelly’s… it’s her birthday after all. She’s the one I’m staying with. I figured, since I’d invited myself down to stay, I should probably sit through her teen angst melodrama. Besides, it’s research for school. Find out what the kids are into these days.”

“What the middle-aged women are into these days,” I mumbled. “You know, there’s a perfectly serviceable bed in my hotel suite. There’s two, in fact. You don’t even have to sleep with me.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I can see that happening.”

“Yeah?”

“No, not really. We both know how that’ll end.”

“Problem?”

“We’ll just end up having sex on every horizontal surface we can find. And most of the vertical ones.”

“Like I say, problem?”

“Angus,” she said with a little exasperation, “how often do I do anything like a normal girl does? Like go to movies with her friends? Like even having friends?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not very good at this stuff. I just… I want to be better at being… normal. Whatever that is.”

“I was normal once,” I said. “Didn’t rate it.”

Beth checked her watch. “Kel’s picking me up in five minutes out the front,” she said. “Thanks for today. I mean it.” She kissed me, short and sharp, and was gone. Another girl in a black T-shirt, lost in the silhouettes of the crowd.

I hadn’t known she was staying down here. Hadn’t really given it much thought, either. Call it selfish – because it is. But I’d become used to, or as used to as I could be, her random appearances and just-as-sudden disappearances. Where she was and what she did when she wasn’t with me was outside my control and hence nothing I could do anything about.

Yeah. Right. And meanwhile, on planet reality, a Hunters lyric whispered into my mind:

Where do you go?
Tell me, when I’m not around?
There’s a place I know
You can let your defences down.

Hmmm, yeah. Of course, that song stopped being helpful pretty quick:

I’d like to believe that you love me
I’d like to believe that you care
I’d like to believe you’re the one I can trust
You’re the one that will always be there.
I’d like to believe in the future
I wish it was sacred and strong
I wish I could fly on a wing and a prayer
But I’ve lied to myself for too long.

Yeah… nah. Best not dwell on that. Besides, I had drinking to do.

“Kerb,” declared Mick. He was resolute. He was also the drunkest man in the universe this side of Brad Fittler outside the Glebe cop shop, but he was very clear in his commandment: Kerb. As in, ‘Kick her to the’.

“Yeah,” chortled Dr Cletus, in a fairly dodgy approximation of ghetto skank: “Lose that zero and get yo’self a hero…”

“Ohhhh…”

“What?”

“Chicken Hero roll,” I gargled. “That’d be fucken tops.”

Marty, who was mostly flaked out on the bed, opened an eye – the one which occasionally levered itself open to scorecheck on Arsenal v Liverpool live on the flatscreen – and mumbled something which would have passed for “Got five star room service and you want a Chicken Hero roll?”

“Yes. Or a kebab.”

“Ohhh kebab…” Marty drooled, and flaked out again.

Yeah, we’re fucking rock stars. Sunday after GC BDO, days off in our future, most of the rest of the touring ensemble are out painting the Goldie a vibrant shade of scarlet, and we’re nursing beers in Marty’s hotel room watching Premier League footy and keeping Marty awake. His suite had a better view of Surfers, and a bigger balcony for the Duffer to smoke on. Not that we actually had the Duffer with us, he’d bailed at the last minute with Ed and Tommy from Marty’s band, plus a bunch of other randoms from the BDO circus. If I hadn’t been so fucking rooted (yeah, thanks for that, Prodigy) I’d have been envious. Jeff, as was becoming his trademark, had fucked off in the general direction of away at the first possible moment, and would have been home by now. A text to let us know would have been nice. Or even saying see-ya before he fucked off, for that matter. Thank heavens the massive imposition of being paid quite well to play the biggest rock festival in Australasia would be over soon. Don’t know how he was possibly coping with the stress and pressure…

Yeah, yeah. He had a family to look after, and a farm (ditto), and a wife he was trying to get on better with. He had his reasons. And I was just in a lousy mood because the lads had correctly surmised I was on a road to fucking nowhere with Beth and would be better off pulling the plug. And, probably, because I was here sinking piss instead of out on the tiles with the massed BDO choir for the first time in six or seven years, or for that matter, getting any. Marty wasn’t getting any either, the boss had stayed in Sydney, which explained why we were scattered around his suite like discarded throw cushions, knocking back tumblers of Heineken. (Someone had fucked up the aftermatch rider. Two cartons of Heineken… not two 5L mini kegs of Heineken. Anyway, it was cold, and it was good, and drinking out of coffee cups and wine glasses didn’t seem to affect the taste.)

I knew where Mick was coming from, at least. He’d never been in a relationship that he wasn’t prepared to walk away from if it wasn’t working for him. Despite the ‘mad’ reputation, under that shaven biker bonce of his was a sharp, pragmatic business mind – Mount Road MCs wouldn’t have been in such rude health today if he hadn’t been its effective CFO – and he tended to take that ruthless cost-benefit assessment into his love life. Significantly fucked parental role models probably contributed to his long-term relationship issues, though. Dr Cletus, I reckoned, was just doing what I’d seen most thirty-sumfink settled/married/parental blokes do ref. their single mates – living vicariously through their shagging about. To which any sniff of a long-term relationship was a clear and present danger. And besides, his job on this earth was to wind me up, it was written into his fucking position description, the Arnold Rimmer to my Dave Lister. Besides, Dr Cletus hadn’t even met Beth before today, so you could set his opinion aside as aimless pisstalk. Mick had, of course, but she’d been playing games at the time – the fishing trip – and that was most of his argument, actually.

“She’s a fucken actress,” he maintained. “She’s either fucken mental, or she just likes fucking with your head. Either way…”

“…She’s perfect for you, you’re saying?”

“Ah fuck off ya cahrnt.”

Bastard was right, though. I liked Beth. A lot. A worrying amount. I’d be lying if I said anything else, and you know it. But he was right. Difference was, he knew when to walk away from a low-percentage investment, no matter how well it was performing in the short term.

She could pick her moments, though. I knew it was her the moment my Jesus Phone sounded its message alert.

OH GOD OH GOD OH JESUS SAVE ME

Which was a little worrying.

You OK?

A longer than comfortable pause.

Can’t begin to explain how awful this movie is. Can’t believe I turned down partying with rock stars for this…

Yeah, it’s fucking rock and roll armageddon here babe. Hookers and blow laid out like a RSL buffet. Marty’s hanging off the chandelier by his ankles... nah he’s flaked out on his bed. Arsenal 1 Liverpool 1 with half an hour to play. Probly won't even finish the keg.

Aww babe, really? Don’t tell me I tired you out on the dance floor…

Will be invoicing Keef for my internal injuries. So I hear it’s a fab film you’re watching. And that people who text in movie theatres are evil.

Room full of evil then, all I can see are phone screens in here. Tells you how exciting the movie is.

Hey look… if it sucks that bad, I can swing by and rescue you… head out on the town and go a little bit silly…

Hmmm… the trophy boyfriend proves he actually exists, could be interesting…

It’s a deal then?

Can’t babe. I’ll see this out. It can’t get any worse. Night. Beth x.

K. Seeya babe.

It wasn’t until next morning, waking up with a faceful of couch in my room about a minute before check-out, that I noted the subsequent message.

IT GOT WORSE OH GOD NOOOOO…

I laughed. Then threw my worldly goods in a bag and pissbolted for the door. This was dB I was working for. Late checkout fees went on MY tab.