Breakfast at Sweethearts

Six o'clock I'm goin' down
Coffee's hot and the toast is brown
Hey streetsweeper, clear my way
Sweethearts' breakfast is the best in town
- Cold Chisel, 1979

Yup, everything’s clearer in the morning. Including, it appeared, my bed. It was clear all right. Completely devoid of Beth.

Chicks are fucked.

I wandered up to the office and through to the house, where Emma had fired up the percolator. Ems was wearing not much more than a loose-fitting-yet-nipple-straining white cotton singlet and grey gym shorts, which wasn’t doing much for my unrequited morning glory. Of all the things she could offer me, coffee was the one which was going to get me in the least amount of trouble.

“Seen Beth?” I asked her.

She frowned. “She’s probably gone for a run, or something equally disgustingly healthy. I take it you’re not into that sort of gym junkie crap.”

“Hell no,” I declared.

“Good, there’s enough born-again rock stars on health kicks liver cleansing detox diets already. We need as many of you bastards drinking heavily and acting up as possible. Mind you,” she added accusingly, “you’re the earliest up of anyone last night, so you’re letting the side down there.”

“Farm kid,” I pointed out. “Body clock goes off at sparrows. A few sore heads today, you think?”

“Might be,” she said. “Though Terry might have a sore ear from Nadine, and Chris might have a sore arse from his night in the cells… Scrambled eggs and bacon OK for you?”

“Scrambled eggs and bacon would be all kinds of awesome,” I replied emphatically. “Can I do anything?”

“You can sit the hell down and enjoy being waited on,” she said. “I never get to make breakfast for anyone. Not since Captain Douchebag fucked off. And my scrambled eggs are insanely good. I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.”

“Brings all the boys to the yard then?”

“Brought you didn’t it?” she remarked. “I suppose it’s all tofu and lentil cakes when Beth cooks… if Beth cooks?”

“No, not really,” I said. “She used to eat vegetarian, but she seems to like eating meat.”

“She likes your red meat? Isn’t that a song? One of yours? Typically fucking classy?”

“Yeah, that’s us.”

“She’s changed. Well, duhhh. But I mean, she’s changed since uni. She had the most punishing food habits then. Actually she had the most punishing everything then. Food habits, friends, boyfriends, fuckin’ personality… don’t tell her I said this,” she laughed, “but she was insufferable.”

“Is that why you didn’t talk to her for five years?”

“She didn’t talk to me for five years, thanks very much. And no, it wasn’t because of that. It was because she got in deep with these fucking Hillsong happy clappy types, and paired up with some little Bible-study fuckwad. Harry Potter lookalike. All prim and tense and shiny-arsed. Well-connected, sure. Family owned half of Southport. But dull. Dull as fucking dishwater. Scratch that. Dishwater lodged a formal complaint over being compared with this guy. We weren’t flatting together any more by now, I was on the outer, but I still met him a couple of times. Felt. My life. Dripping. Away. As I Spoke To Him. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t go out. I said to Beth, ‘He must be hung like a rogue fucking donkey.’ No idea, she said, straight-faced. Hadn’t had sex. Not before marriage. Jesus fucking Christ…”

“Literally.”

“Yeah. No. Not literally because that doesn’t make sense. Anyway, marriage looked pretty likely, all this guy needed was Daddy to lend him enough cash for a big fuck-off rock, I’m sure he’d been cleared for takeoff by your man Gerald. It was all going to end in disaster. So I did what any good surrogate sister would do. I crashed his golf club’s awards night afterparty, poured vodka into him all night, then dragged him back to mine and shagged him until he was a hollow husk. Turns out he was hung like a rogue donkey,” Emma roared with laughter. “And the thanks I got for saving my girl Bethie from a fate worse than death? She refused to speak to me for five years.”

“Gratitude.”

“In fact it was probably around the time you got your claws into her that she got back in touch through Facebook, maybe it made her realise she’d been hung up on a total douche the whole time, made her get over it. Or rather made her family get over it. I can’t believe she ever really gave a shit about him. She couldn’t have. Not the Bethie I’d known as a kid.”

“That’s just it though, yeah?” I reasoned. “She’s told me herself, she had to change a lot just to survive, after…” I trailed off. Couldn’t find an appropriate euphemism.

“After her father blew his fucking head off like a selfish cunt,” she said. “Sorry. Sorry, but that’s how I feel about it. I don’t care that he had problems. You just don’t fucking do that to those kids. And that’s just talking about Beth. Brad, he’s just… pfftt. He’s fucked. Completely. He was a brilliant little lad,” Emma contended, her voice cracking a little. “Fucking brilliant little kid. Couldn’t do enough for you. They both were. They were superstars. Particularly Beth. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, or wouldn’t try. Brave as hell, could run faster, climb higher, swim further, could play musical instruments, sing, dance, do gymnastics, kick my arse on the netball court, and she was prettier and funnier than me.” An ironic laugh. “God, I hated her sometimes. But she was the nearest thing to a sister I had. Out of all my other girl cousins, including the ones who lived nearby. Yet when we tripped over each other at uni years later - and it was like that, she totally freaked out at first, I was some interloper from another world, like I was going to blow her secret agent cover or some shit – she was completely some other person playing completely some other role.”

“Sad,” I said. I was down to one-syllable answers. Emma had words enough for both of us at this hour of the morning.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is. It was. You’ve been good for her, I think. This is the nearest to normal Bethie that I can remember… as much as I can remember, trying to imagine what a mid-twenties Bethie would turn out like.”

“She’s still pretty messed up,” I admitted.

“Yeah, she would be,” Emma conceded. “But she’s got that spark back. You’re either the cause or the effect, depending on what you want to take credit for. And you know all this shit. She can’t play roles with you because you know who she is. She has to be herself, which for her is both the most liberating and terrifying thing in the entire fucking world. So whether you’re planning an exit strategy or if you’re gonna stick around – I’m guessing, based on track record, you’re more likely to fuck around than stick around - whether you want it or not, you have a lot of responsibility here. You do what you want with that information, but just keep something else in mind too… If you hurt her, I will hunt you down and cut your balls off with a rusty fish knife. More coffee?”

“It’s for you,” Beth said, and handed her phone over.

“Y’ello? …Joey Johns, this is an unexpected pleasure. I was just about to call you.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you?” came the strident response from our go-to girl at dB.

“Because my phone is off. By which I mean it’s flat. By which I mean the charger is… somewhere.”

“Lemme guess,” she growled, “that’s why you haven’t picked up your emails or your phone calls?”

“You’re onto it,” I marvelled. “Have to get out of bed pretty early to get one over you, Josephine.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing disappearing like this?”

“Is that basically the content of the messages, because that saves me picking them up…”

“I’m fucking serious, dude. Where the fuck are you?”

“At a funeral,” I said flatly. “Do we get bereavement leave in this job? Cos we would flipping burgers at fucking McDonalds.” I had no idea whether we would, but hell, if it wins me the argument.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But fuck, man, you’ve got to tell us these things.”

“What the fuck business is it of my employer what I do on my days off?” I wanted to know. Just being bolshie, basically. Getting Joey on the back foot was a rare enough occurrence, and wasn’t to be wasted.

“It’s not your day off,” she reminded me. “We had soundcheck an hour ago.” Arse. I’d carelessly handed back the ascendancy in this round, judges were scoring it square on points. “So where the hell are you?”

“Urunga.” I knew that would baffle her. Heh heh heh.

“South of Coffs Harbour, yeah?”

Double arse. “You know it?”

A groan. “My old Bluebird’s water pump broke there on a roadtrip from Brisbane to Sydney years ago. Ended up having to take the train while the local garage fixed it. Not before I had to stay overnight in this dodgy little caravan park near the beach… yeah, laugh it up smartarse. I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“Long story. Tell you later,” I said. “So how are we getting out of this one, Queen of Logistics?”

“Queen of… Fuck you with bells on. I had you on a flight out of Brisbane at ten this morning.”

“Ten Queensland time or ten non-fucking-Cletus time?”

“Does it matter?” Ah this was fun. “Are you all finished there with the funeral and stuff?”

“Yeah, we are. Went… well, I guess.” It had, really. Short, meaningful ceremony. Scattered Rose’s ashes over the headland. Doug said a few words. He was a man of few words, so it was only ever going to be a few words, but he picked them carefully. Talked about how when they first started ‘going together’, she’d always be haranging him about spending too much time with his best mates. And yet over the years, she’d become his best mate, as well as everything else in his world. And I couldn’t help but think about the shit sandwich he’d been dealt – he’d outlived his wife and two of his kids, with another one estranged in the UK. He’d probably made his mistakes, not been the best of fathers (away a lot, by my maths) – but judging by the respect and love from the generation below, and the one below that, he must have been one pretty decent grandfather.

“Coolio,” she said. “How quick can you be in Coffs? There’s a plane to here in a bit over an hour…”

“Here? Melbourne?”

“Actually I’m in Sydney, but there’s connections straight off…”

“Why aren’t you in Melbourne?”

“Long story. Tell you later.”

“How many flights you booked?”

“None, yet. One, in about ten seconds.”

“Make it two?” Beth shook her head, started to say she had stuff to do tomorrow, but she was less convincing than Bert Newton’s last five hairpieces. “Make it two. Book it up on me tab.” That was a Mick Martin-ism from years back. Completely lost on this audience, of course.

“I don’t even have any clean changes of underwear,” Beth protested afterwards.

“We have shops in Melbourne, you know,” Justin the designer reminded her pithily. As it happened, Justin had the same flights, as well as an Audi A4 rental from Europcar which was straining to be used as per its autobahn design parameters. And an apartment overlooking the Esplanade in St Kilda with a spare room which his partner Darren was already making up for us. And a booking at their favourite Japanese place down the street… and a couple of bottles of ’03 cab sauv from a friend’s winery which were particularly excellent…

“Yeah,” I remarked quietly to Beth as we were getting ready for bed, “have to say, I like your new family more than your old family.”

“This is my old family.”

“Whatever.”

She smiled. First for the day, just about. At 11.58pm, it wasn’t before time. “Don’t get too attached to them,” she reminded me. “It’s back to reality after this.”

“Still looking for somewhere to live?”

An ironic smirk. “Mum took her meds, and we’ve put it behind us. I think.” Brow furrowed, she added, “Might just be that Bradley’s being more of a handful at the moment than me, so I’m down the list for micromanagement.”

“He OK?”

“It’s sweet you’re pretending to care, Angus, but it’s not your problem.”

“I’m not pretending.” I was thinking back to Emma, and her tears over that ‘brilliant little kid’ who’d ended up… well, I didn’t really know, I hadn’t seen him for weeks. But it sounded from the second-hand stuff I was picking up on, like the plot and wee Bradley had parted company fairly dramatically.

“Sure,” she said. “It’s sweet you care, then. But it’s not your problem. Hell, it’s not even mine.”

“Big enough and ugly enough…”

“That’s it,” she declared. “Both of them are.”

“And you’re not going to be made to feel bad because you’ve chosen to be happy for once in your life.” Probably overstepping there. Worth a crack.

“See, babe,” she began, “sometimes when you do that thing where you read my mind and tell me what I’m thinking, it’s scary as hell. But other times, you almost seem like boyfriend material.”

“Only almost?”

“Yeah… because the next thing I remember is that whole you-having-sex-with-another-girl thing, and that’s not so good.”

“Beth,” I said carefully, “if you’d said no at any point… if you’d actually said ‘I’m not comfortable with this’…”

“Yeah, yeah. I changed my mind. Turns out I’m not really girlfriend material, either.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d be happy to keep you.”

“How long for?”

“How long have you got?” I mused.

She laughed. “The rest of tonight, at least. Tomorrow, too, if you want. Beyond that… I’m not good with future stuff.”

I don’t know if I could have laid my cards out more clearly. And I don’t know why I didn’t just say ‘Well fuck ya then’ and call it quits, then and there. Well, yeah, I do, but we’ll get to that later. I must have looked a little wounded, even though I was trying to hide it, because she added, “How about this… I’m OK with sticking around for as long as you’ve still got dirty fantasies you need me to help with.”

“Oh, in that case…”

She laughed, because she knew the response she’d been likely to get.

“I kinda meant the long-standing, pre-existing ones. Not the ones you make up just to keep me around.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I figured that. Why, have we almost run out of yours? Because yours are particularly good.”

Beth looked a little ashamed. Or guilty, or something. It was dark and I’d had half a bottle of red. Followed by the other half.

“Got one left,” she began. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”

Don’t know what I found more troubling there, that she only had one deepest darkest fantasy left (meaning I’d be gotten-bored-with and kicked to the kerb fairly shortly – in no way karma for the girls I may or may not have done similar to when younger and stupiderer) or that she thought it’d be outside my comfort zone. Anyhoo, press on.

“Try me,” I insisted.

“Come closer,” she said, “and I’ll whisper it.”

I shrugged, and curled up beside her on the bed.

Whereupon she told me, basically, that since we’d done everything else, the only thing left to do was to make love like we meant it. Just pretend. Just once. Didn’t have to mean anything. Just to find out what it was like. She asked me if I could do that for her, and I said no, I couldn’t. And she asked why, and I took a deep breath, and rolled the dice.

“Because I wouldn’t be pretending.”

Yeah, that’s why I hadn’t chucked it in and walked. I was in love with her. There’s a breaking fucking newsflash I realise. Didn’t really know myself for how long it’d been like that – probably ever since the night she came to see me, out of the blue, after the writeup in the Weekend Australian. There’d been a connection there that went past sex, went way past the limited, two-actors-playing-roles nature of our original relationship. I’d given up trying to argue, defensively, that it was age playing tricks, that I just thought I loved her because I was getting on and had racked up a fair handful of failed relationships and was still on the shelf and didn’t want to admit I’d wasted years of effort already with her. At best, that was detail; at worst, it was just crap. I loved her and I wanted to protect her. Which, you’ll agree, is incredibly stupid and not something someone in full control of their faculties would do. Fits the definition of being in love as far as I’d always understood it.

I’ve always doubted the common bogan wisdom which has it that blokes – particularly staunch rural types like me and McCarthy (stop giggling) – aren’t in touch with their emotions. I’ve always made it my business to know exactly what my emotions are. Mainly so I can ignore the fuckers and get on with stuff. McCarthy, as you know, spent most of his late teens and early twenties in the Wronged Romantic Lead role – sort of proto-emo without the stupid hair or shit taste in music, perhaps – and he’d always had it that there was only every one true love out there for every person. Quite what he thought of Said Philosophy five or six years later when his designated one true love (that’d be our girl Lena) fucked off on him for turning into a massive tool, isn’t available for publication. Me, I reckoned you could fall in and out of love several times across a lifetime, and that Wuthering Heights style lifelong-obsession hunka-hunka-burnin-lurrrve didn’t play outside the pages of crap romance novels. Christ, I fell in and out of love several times a day depending on which girls were walking past at the time and what they’d worn to school that morning. And the same was true back when I was a student rather than a teacher. (Jokes, Education Queensland. Just jokes.)

But even so, you only get a handful of chances to tell someone you love them, so you’re best not to fuck it up. You could count my opportunities on the fingers of a particularly careless machinery operator, so I tended to remember them. Sophie, aged 17, in the shower at her parents’ place. Tears and promises and the sort of forever-after certainty that comes with teenage this-is-the-only-thing-that-matters-in-the-whole-world hormonal madness. *cough* Well that went well didn’t it. Jess, never told her, probably paid for it in the end; same for Kirsten, I suspect. That said, I dated around and fucked about throughout my twenties not because I was scared of intimacy or unable to love or any of that Psych 101 bullshit, but because it was fun. I told Rachel I loved her in the streetside beer garden of the Australian Hotel in the Rocks, on the phone, after many pints, surrounded by the equally drunken members of Hayabusa; didn’t mean I didn’t mean it, and she knew that too. Yet fast-forward a couple of years to the recent past and I was saying it because I thought it sounded good and thought it was what Bethany Toogood wanted to hear.

See, I’d already gone through the age-playing-tricks, left-on-the-shelf, don’t-miss-the-last-bus sort of mentality with Bethany the first time around – her own motivations hadn’t been too different – so I knew what that was like, and equally, I knew this wasn’t that. This was something very carefully weighed up and calculated out. It wasn’t like I was going into this without all the facts – I knew my own history, and I knew Beth’s, and everything that went along with that. I also knew the strength of what I felt for her. I knew what the scale of the damage would be if it went pearshaped, but I also knew what the payoff would be. This was as close to a proper cost-benefit analysis as I’d ever gone through. Believe me, I’d done the numbers on this one.

And when they still came out as ‘Prediction: Pain’ I said ‘Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.’ Because that’s what you do, yeah? If we all sat on our coits running CBAs on our love lives we’d end up staying home and watching internet porn. I’d also weighed up her potential responses, from trying to talk me out of it to reminding me we’d gone through this before and what made it different this time to running screaming out of the room. Turned out I’d missed one. The one where… well let’s roll it back to my last line of dialogue.

“Because I wouldn’t be pretending.”

See, I thought that’d been a pretty killer line. But she was shaking her head. Sadly, like I’d asked some forlorn, doomed question like ‘Do we have enough fuel to make it home?’ or ‘Did Souths win last night?’ Which, at least, meant she’d understood what I’d been saying and I didn’t need to slap an obvious and redundant ‘I love you’ over the end of it as a postscript. We’d already said that enough to each other without meaning it.

“I tried,” she said. “You can’t say you weren’t warned.” She didn’t need to elaborate. Everything up to and including last night’s ‘Love is the potential for unlimited hurt’ soliloquy had stated her case pretty clearly. Now watch as Our Hero gets Shot Down In Flames in excruciating sloooowwww motion…

But then she went and completely outmanoeuvered me in the dogfight by laughing, declaring “Fuck it,” and diving into bed with me. That ended the conversation for a bit. Well, the actual talky stuff. There was plenty of inter-personal communication going on, of course, but that doesn’t translate so well to the page. Unless Lauren was writing it, I suppose. Then again, it wasn’t Lauren’s sort of dirty gymnastic extremism. It was more… well, more like making love. A lot like it, in fact.

Afterwards – a long while afterwards, since we’d had to stay quiet, which meant going slow, which meant taking our time over it (yeah, real problem that) – she slipped out from between my arms and eased out of bed.

“Something I said?” I asked softly.

“Yeah,” she replied, but she had a smile on her face. “I love you. There,” she said triumphantly, her bare feet on the polished wood floor. “It’s not supposed to count if you say it in bed, so…”

Turned out she’d done the same sort of cost-benefit analysis as I had, and ended up with the same result. Which she’d then ignored because it sounded like advice her mother would have given her.

“You were warned, weren’t you?” she added, slipping back into bed with me. “What’s the phrase? Caveat emptor…”

“Carpe diem,” I replied.

Big smile. “Good answer,” she said, and kissed me.

“It’d want to be, it’s all the Latin I know,” I admitted. “Apart from our old high school motto. Facta non verba.”

“…Deeds, not words?”

“Good! They always told us it was actions, not words, though.”

“Actions… I prefer that, I think.”

So we went with that as our philosophy for the rest of the night. Erm, morning. Whatever.

I’d given up trying to get on with Melbourne. She hated me, I knew. While Sydney loved me – the brazen little tart, she loved everyone so long as you had enough money – Melbourne had always turned up her nose at me. Particularly whenever I’d turned up with a guitar under my arm, from our first horrendous shows supporting deusexmachina to being booed off the stage at our final M1 festival show in 2003, our final show full stop. I hadn’t actually been back to Melbourne since. Hadn’t had a need to, or a want.

But today was different. Today had to be different. It was the last time I’d stand astride a crowd of people as a performer in Flange Gasket. In amongst all the other stuff that was going on with Beth and everything – and it had been a fucking insane couple of weeks since the last time I’d spent a night in my own bed, sometime before heading to Byron for our pre-BDO rehearsal sessions – it’d been pushed to the back of my mind, if not forgotten entirely. But this was it. This was the end. My only friend, the end. And it had happened wayyyy too fast for my liking. A subdued show in Auckland, a pretty good outing on the Goldie (though still distracted by everything else that was going on), and a tired-and-emotional set in the wilting heat of Sydney Showgrounds. We hadn’t given anywhere near as good an account of ourselves as we could have. But today was different; today had to be different. And we’d start by getting off on the right foot. By, erm, me not turning up to soundcheck yesterday.

“Morning,” Marty said brightly. “Shall we get this out of the way nice and early?” He handed me a folded piece of office paper. dB letterhead. Stern font. Grumpy words. Second written warning. Rollies. I crunched it up and tossed it into an open wheelie bin over Marty’s shoulder. He shrugged apologetically. Actually, he might have just been ducking.

“You’re in a good mood,” he said. “I was expecting to get… well, put where that letter is right now.”

“Too nice a morning to waste on memos from middle management functionaries,” I smiled sarcastically. The functionary in question – the signatory to the warning – wasn’t technically middle management so much as Exective Director (Talent Management), but Marty let me get away with it because I’d been nice enough not to throw him head first into the wheelie bin for being the bearer of bad news. Where the fuck the signatory herself happened to be was a fair question, as yet unanswered. Presumably in meetings touching base with key stakeholders, pursuing the commonalities, leveraging the synergies and picking the low-hanging fruit. “Besides, I’m figuring there’s not that much I can do on my last fucking day in the job to get another written warning and get my arse frog-marched off the compound.”

“Oh, I dunno, this is you we’re talking about… Seriously though, about that…”

I shook my head, cutting him off mid-sentence. “Don’t want to know. Seriously. I’ll be good. Let’s not fuck up the last day with this sort of fucking nonsense. One more show. Let me and the boys do our last show and I’ll fuck off and leave you and Mads alone. Without the need for any more of that.” I signalled over his shoulder to the bin. “Deal?”

He shrugged. “OK, but…”

Fact was, it was too good a morning to waste on memos from middle-management functionaries. Justin and Darren had taken Beth and I for breakfast down on the Esplanade, being very nice about not mentioning the noises from the room adjoining theirs the previous night, then Justin ran us out to the BDO venue at Flemington Racecourse in his beautifully restored old late 60’s Citroen DS21 (a designer with a thing for old funky Citroens, whodathunkit) – beautifully restored in that the air suspension did not at any stage undergo catastrophic mission-critical systems failure and dump us on our arses in the middle of Flemington Rd. The sun was out, Flemington looked a picture (track officially rated as ‘fast’), it was Australia Day and my girl loved me. Kill that buzz, I dares ya. Send whoever you got. Maddy had tried and failed already, so the Forces of Shitness were already down their sharpest spearhead.

“MARTY!” called a voice. It was Daniela Selenic of Exocet Records. Shouting. Danno wasn’t a shouter. Danno made things happen without needing to shout. So when Danno needed to shout, something was up.

“DANNO!” Marty called back, smirking slightly. “WHAT’S WRONG??”

She jogged into sight, out of breath. Danno was a fitness freak like Beth, so if Danno was out of breath… you get the idea. She pointed at the pair of us. “You. Him. Triple J tent. Now.”

So we jogged off after her, like two early mid-life-crisisists pursuing our personal trainer along some Godforsaken death run. It wasn’t that far, so Danno must have been seriously motoring on the way here. The red tarps of the Triple J enclosure – likely to become a hotbox for the ages if the sun got as serious as it had on Friday in Sydney – were in the process of being set up for an OB, but seemed a fair way away from being broadcast-ready.

“Looks like we’re a bit early,” I remarked archly, trying to pretend I wasn’t sucking in the big ones.

“There’ll be an OB later in the afternoon with John Safran and Father Bob, nearer the pointy end of the countdown.”

“Countdown?”

“Angus,” she said, “you do realise it’s Australia Day don’t you?”

If I hadn’t before, I did once someone had slapped a set of headphones on me and Marty and plugged same into a hurriedly-uprighted mobile OB desk. And at seven past ten in the morning, we found ourselves talking to Zan Rowe about our embarrassingly juvenile (sorry, ironic and satirical) song Beef Week Queen. Which had, for reasons best ascribed to the randomness of the universe, crept into the Hottest 100 for 2009 at position 99. I had to do the talking as Marty was too busy gagging with laughter, his hand grimly tightening over the headpiece mic. Not that I had a lot of words. I asked who we’d beaten. Marty exploded in more giggling when the word came through: Tori Amos. Again.

No. Fucking. Way.

“Not Professional Widow again?” I queried. No, apparently she’d recorded something else since. “Christ, there’s hope for old washed-up acts from the 90s after all. Present company excluded of course… yeah, this is our last ever show… don’t pull that face at me Martin, I’ll tell your mother. I’m well aware you get to kick on to Adelaide and Perth and we don’t. And someone said there’s still tickets at the gate for today. No idea why… the lovely Danno is telling me it’s because last year was an absolute… whatfight? Sorry, an absolute dustbowl, my mistake. And the bands were crap.” Death-stare deserved and received for putting words in her mouth, particularly those. “Well, they’ve certainly fixed that this year with us being here. [blows raspberry]”

“Get out here Melbourne,” Marty piped up. “DOOO IIIIIT. DOOOO IT NOOOWWWW…”

“Thanks for that, Marty,” I said. “You’ve really put in for the cause there. And that’s an excellent impression of… whatever the hell that was.”

“It’s Total Recall,” he said tetchily, “you fuck.”

“ISS NAHT A TOOMER!”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” he giggled. This was going nowhere so we gave the nation’s youth their radio station back and left. Still giggling.

“Gonna have to play it now I suppose,” he pointed out.

“Ah well. Just as well we already have girlfriends,” I said. “Cos that shit ain’t getting either of us laid in this town.”

“Or anywhere,” he laughed.

“I dunno. Casino?”

“Kyogle,” he corrected me. “Inter-town rivalry might help us out a bit.”

“Mate we need all the help we can get.”

“You’re doing all right I think,” he noted. “Compared to where you were as of Friday…”

“True.” I’d almost forgotten what a mess I’d been in Sydney.

“Weekend was worth missing soundcheck for then,” Marty finished.

“Look, mate, sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not an issue. I know you needed to support your girl, and for fuck’s sake we’ve got a pretty good idea by now of what your guitars should sound like. Of course Jeff might have broken a few strings of yours…”

“Of Big Al’s,” I reminded him.

“Ah yeah. That’s right, they’re lenders aren’t they?”

“Yup,” I grinned. “But I’m sure if Jeff wants to discuss that with the largest scariest man in Brisbane I’m sure they can come to some sort of amenable agreement…”

Jeff hadn’t broken any strings on my (Al’s) guitars. That was another of Marty’s Little Jokes, of course. Jeff himself I hadn’t actually seen today – he was here, apparently, but he’d come down and stayed with his old mate Duncan Duff (Phil’s brother, and in a bizarre kind of way the guy you could blame for us all ending up flatting together – Jeff and Duncan had played North Coast Schools rep soccer together as young ‘uns, and had introduced their respective dodgy older brothers sometime around when I was looking to move back to the area after finishing undergrad in Brisbane. The boys rocked up around eleven, just as Darren and Justin had dragged Beth off to the Boiler Room to check out some local Melbourne acid house act which they thought were ace of aces. These days Duncan was living over in Carlton, not too far away from here, still getting paid in pounds (his severance from his last high-flying IT gig in the UK) and being sounded out for offers with local firms once that wrapped up. It was all going well for him, as he’d willingly tell you. Yet despite his slightly pretentious faux-Pommie accent and matching Ben Sherman RAF roundel shirt (these days filled out with more pies than I remembered) he was still Drunken Duncan Duff, the snotty, grotty little bassplayer from ACME Industries who’d helped make the inaugural Tour de Pants up the FNQ coast as shambolic and hilarious as it’d turned out to be. He was hanging out to see the Dropkick Murphys, the Arctic Monkeys (insert rave about having seen them at Glastonbury or Reading or something) and ‘yeah probably you cunts as well I guess.’

“How’s your playing?” I wanted to know.

Marty read my mind. “My Snotty Little Brother Gets More Than Me?”

A reluctant shake of the head. “Pants,” he said. “I’m rubbish, yeah. Haven’t picked up a guitar in, what, six, eight years? I’d be worse than Phil.”

“Bugger,” I said, “we will have to go with Phil’s pick then.”

Phil had insisted that since we’d all had a chance to play a song of our choosing outside of our core set at our previous gigs (a slightly conceptual interpretation of reality, I thought) that it was his turn here in Melbourne. He was still narrowing it down between the Foo Fighters’ cover of Pink Floyd’s Have A Cigar, and Supergroove’s Can’t Get Enough. Had we rehearsed any of these? Had we fuck. Did this enter into the Duffer’s calculations? It would appear not. Marty and I were of half of a mind (which meant one whole mind cumulatively, by my maths) to invoke force majeure, ignore whatever Phil wanted to do and just finish the set with Led Zep’s Moby Dick – we knew the riff as part of our ageless Zep medley that we’d been playing since day dot – and just wander off and let him solo his arse off until security dragged him off stage so the fucking Ting Tings could start their set on the stage next door.

“No bloody way,” Marty pointed out. “We’ve got to fit that 99th bestest song in Australia into the set somewhere, yeah?”

“Good point. Sorry, Phil.”

“Huh?” he mumbled. He’d been nodding away with iPod earbuds in and hadn’t heard a word. “Fellas, I’ve decided. What about Pantera’s Five Minutes Alone?”