Tales of brave Ulysses

And you see a girl’s brown body dancing through the turquoise
And her footprints make you follow where the sky loves the sea
And when her fingers find you, she drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind…
- Cream, 1967

Saturday turned into a brilliant, cloudless, oh-fuck-why-did-I-leave-my-sunglasses-behind summer’s morning. Beth and I walked along the boardwalk, her hand in mine because it seemed like what we were supposed to do, while she gave me her spin on local history and played Spot The Difference ref. changes in the past eleven or so years.

“This was finished in around ’91 I think,” she said, referring to the long, long boardwalk across the estuary which seemed to disappear into a vanishing point somewhere in the Pacific. “It was a hell of a mission beforehand to get from the caravan park to the beach. We usually gave up and rode our bikes to back beach.” By which she meant the beach around the back (nah, really?) of Hungry Head, a little way to the south.

“Better surf?”

“Yeah… that and you could hide in the bushes on the headland and spy on the older teenagers sunbaking nude and kissing and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“And things.” She offered a wry smile. “Hey, you’ve got to learn somewhere.”

“So it wasn’t all observational, there was a practical component?”

Beth shook her head, a little sadly. “Too young for any holiday romances, I’m afraid. Or at least any that led anywhere significant.” Sounded like a few broken teenage hearts lay down that path, so I didn’t venture any further. But she continued, a little further along the boardwalk: “Of course, it didn’t really help to have Ems as my wingman…”

“How so?”

She sighed. “I love Ems,” she admitted. “She’s as much of a sister as I ever had, growing up. Taught me a lot of stuff.”

“And things?”

“And things. But… let’s just say two years’ difference in ages, while it doesn’t really matter when you’re in your mid-twenties… matters a lot more when you’re thirteen, and she’s fifteen. And she’s… already got all the things that boys like.”

“Sassiness? Attitude?” I suggested. “A good sense of humour?”

“Yes, all that. But mainly big boobs.”

“Ah. Yeah, that’d do it.”

“Yeah. Particularly when she didn’t ever need much of an excuse to get the girls out. Not when there were boys around, anyway. String bikinis, tight T-shirts, ‘forgetting’ to wear bras…”

“Hmmm.”

She elbowed me. “I wouldn’t get too excited, we are talking about a fifteen year old girl here.”

“Hey, I was fifteen years old once.”

She laughed. “By ‘once’, you mean ‘for the past fifteen years’, yeah?”

“Hey, be fair. Seventeen years.”

We were nearing the end of the boardwalk now. I was regretting breakfast, i.e. the lack thereof. That and the lack of sunglasses… and footwear… and sleep. But it was breathtakingly pretty out here. In all facets.

“I wish I’d known you then,” she said.

“You’d have been eight,” I pointed out, ill-advisedly.

“You know what I mean,” she said. In Beth’s little fantasy, if we could time-travel, presumably we could age-equalise as well. “I can see you as one of those local guys. Beach kids. Country boys who knew about surfing and motorbikes and stuff…”

“And things?”

“Maybe later, if everything went well,” Beth smiled. “If you bought me a drink at the Blue Light Disco…”

“Slow-danced to some God-awful '90s shite like Wet Wet Wet…”

“It’s like you’re reading my mind,” she giggled. “Stop it, for your own sake.”

“Hey, I did some of my best work at Blue Light Discos.”

“Really?”

“Nah,” I admitted. “Not really. I had nuthin’. Got nowhere.”

“Liar,” she contended. “You would have got somewhere with me. Anywhere you liked. Behind the school hall where noone could see, to start with…”

“Really?”

“Nah,” she laughed. “When I was that age what I thought I wanted was some brooding, highly literate Jane Austen hero, not some scruffy bogan smelling of surf wax and two-stroke oil. Whereas what I actually needed…” She kicked off her thongs to let the sand scrunch between her toes, the albino white of the soft sand contrasting with her black-painted toenails. “Or maybe that was how I justified it to myself as yet another boy I kind-of-liked-but-hadn’t-told ended up in deep and meaningful conversation with Ems’ tits.”

“’My eyes are up here’ kind of thing?”

“You say that like you think she cared they were staring,” she noted. “Actually… who am I kidding. We both know that would have been you all over.”

“Aww, I dunno…”

“Come on. I’m half expecting it to happen this weekend anyway.”

That came out quicker and more abruptly than Beth had intended. Piecing Beth together from the occasional shards of unguarded truth was still a work-in-progress.

“It won’t.”

“Wanna bet?”

I rolled my eyes. “Bet you anything in the world,” I said. “Anything you want. Whatever your heart’s desire.”

“I’d have to know what the fuck that actually is…” she began, before grimacing. “Sorry… sorry. I’m just so fucking emo at the moment, I don’t know why you don’t just… I don’t know.”

“You’re allowed to be, Beth,” I reminded her. “You’re here for a funeral, for fuck’s sake. It’s meant to be emotional.”

“Yeah, I know. And being back here… look, I love Ems. Honest. It’s not her fault no boys liked me. It’s such a stupid thing to even give a shit about. It’s just that… it’s hard to get away from, being back here. And I kind-of like to pretend there was a time before everything when I used to be normal, and secure, and not all fucked-up… but yeah.”

“Being a teenager means being all fucked up by default,” I reasoned. “Not really a fair basis for comparison.” My arm found its way around her shoulder; she squeezed my hand as it draped down her side.

“Ems was going to be my maid of honour,” Beth said. “In my dream wedding. Not the actual wedding I was ever going to have, but my fantasy wedding… Grandad was going to give me away, in the old blue suit from my parents’ wedding photos. It was going to be down here, on the beach.”

“Who was the lucky groom?” I shouldn’t have asked, but did.

She looked at me for a moment, sizing me up, deciding whether or not to answer.

“Come with me,” she said finally. “I wanna show you something.”

And took off down the beach like a startled gazelle.

What she showed me was the holiday playground of her youth. The rockpools they’d explored, the caves they’d hidden in, the bush tracks they’d conquered, the sand dunes they’d leapt off, the treehouses and fortifications they’d fought and died for (and worse of all, ran home to Mum to dob about), and later, those headland vantage points where they’d hidden and watched and learned about stuff, and possibly things.

Then, our shirts sticking to our backs in the mid-morning summer heat, we scrambled down the path to the southern side of the headland. Beth tugged off her shirt and kicked off her shorts, sprinting the last few yards to the water and diving in without a second thought. Didn’t even give me enough time to properly ogle her in the chocolate-brown bikini she’d been wearing underneath. I was in boardshorts, and it’d been a good 24 hours since I’d had a shower, so that water looked just as inviting as the girl splashing through it. I ditched my shirt and followed.
There was next to no surf at back beach; oblique lines of swell and an onshore breeze put paid to that. We didn’t mind. Hadn’t brought a board, for one thing.

She surfaced near me, arms around my shoulders, kisses wet and salty.

“Pity,” she remarked, “you could have taught me to body-surf again.”

Yeah, yeah. That’d been one of our very early courting rituals on North Straddie. Before I’d found out she’d grown up in the surf, and had used to be a swim trainer at a local pool on the Gold Coast, teaching little kids to swim. But that’s courting, right? That’s how it works. Lies get told, stories get fabricated. The party being courted has to want to be courted, and if they have to tell a few little lies along the way, what’s the big deal?

…Nah didn’t really convince me either, to tell the truth.

But I was past caring. More wet salty kisses. Eager hands searching for knots on bikinis, drawstrings on boardshorts. Past caring, even if I was just a stand-in for all the holiday romances she wished she’d had, the older girls and boys she’d watched doing what we were doing now. Eyes as intense as the sea and the sky, nipples cold from the water, hot to the touch, salty to the taste. Here, now? Here. Now. Especially here, and especially now. It was awkward, because of the cold water, because of the movement of the swell, but not so awkward not to be possible, hence probable, hence absolutely necessary.

“Knew you couldn’t hold out on me,” she contended.

Yeah that’s me, predictable. How dare I be swayed from the path of Corrective Celibacy by a beautiful girl in a bikini who wants to make love in the waters of a secluded north coast beach. Strike me off the register.

Speaking of holding…

“I gave them to you to hold,” she insisted.

“I thought you put them in my back pocket?”

“Whose hands would they have been in, babe?” she pointed out.

Dammit. Stupid inarguable logic.

“That’s quite an attitude for a girl with no pants on.”

In all the excitement, Beth’s bikini bottoms had vacated the scene, location unknown. Apparently this was My Fault. It made for an interesting walk back, largely because I was trailing Beth and her damp jogging-shorted arse up the track over the headland to the road, and the liberal baring of flesh thus entailed left my thoughts even more filth-laden than usual, despite (or maybe because of) the fun and games we’d just enjoyed. Surely she wouldn’t mind that much if I grabbed her from behind, pressed her against a tree and helped myself to an encore performance…

All in all, a pretty crap time to run into her relatives, which left my daydreams as just that. Dammit. Terry was one of Beth’s cousins – one of the rough-and-ready older boys she’d grown up with, who’d turned into a bespectacled, slightly overweight accountant from Canberra who dressed like a retired golfer and whose wife didn’t appear to like him much. We made small talk. I went unrecognised, which was fine by me; Flange Gasket didn’t tend to play too many winery gigs with James Morrison or Kate Ceberano. So it was all fine and dandy. They continued on their constitutional back to the house they’d rented for the weekend to reunite with their X-Boxing offspring, and Beth and I followed. At a distance.

“That was awkward,” I offered.

“You think?” Beth observed. “You’re not the one with it running down your leg.”

Yes, that would make small talk rather awkward.

“I’d better get you back to the shower block then,” I offered.

“You’d better,” she concurred. “I’m a little… dirty.” She glanced into the bushes over my shoulder, her eyes searching for a suitable location. “Unless you want to make me a little dirtier. Like, right here on the side of the road…”

We didn’t make the shower block. Not for a while longer, anyway.

OK, enough of that. Segue to the kitchen of a slightly run-down fibro-and-iron house (not fair to call it a shack) about one street from the beach. 60’s tiles and 70’s lino, grass matting, old photos, old surfboards and bits of memorabilia. An old, gnarled, nuggety bloke in a faded wifebeater and stubbies is pouring me a beer from a dark brown longneck of homebrew. An old, blued tattoo snakes up his arm, its design no longer really discernable. His eyes are tired, weathered, but friendly. He seems a good bastard. I like him, because he reminds me of my old grandad, rest him. I’m hoping I don’t remind him of his son.

“So what do you do for a crust, Angus?” he asks me, in a voice a dead ringer for Johnny Meillon from the old VB ads. If he starts asking ‘How does it happen?’ I’m going to be absolute rubble.

Might as well tell the truth. “I’m in a band,” I admit.

“Really.”

“Yeah mate,” I say. “Pays the bills, keeps me off the street.”

“I see,” he says. I’m wondering if the next thing he’s going to say is “Fuck off out of me house then you layabout and stop wasting me granddaughter’s time.” But the next thing he does is hold up a hand. It trembles, slightly, but I remembered the vice-like grip of his handshake from a little earlier. Crocodile-leathery hands used to a lifetime of manual labour and fixing stuff. Even at his current age and stage in life, you’d underestimate Doug Alexander at your peril. He indicated a knuckle, one a little more gnarled and lumpen than the rest. “See that?”

“Yeah?”

“Broke it,” he said proudly. “Sunbury ’75. On Ritchie Blackmore’s fuckin’ nose.”

As it turned out, there wasn’t much Dougie hadn’t done. He’d been in the merchant navy, had an adventurous life as a roadie in the ‘70s (including helping AC/DC beat seven bells out of Deep Purple Mk4 backstage at Sunbury) after he’d come back from ‘Nam, he’d run a uranium prospecting operation for Western Pacific Minerals in the NT - no formal geology training, just what he picked up on the job allied to the logistics and bushcraft he’d learned in the army – and he’d built and run a caravan park out of scrub and heath, now run by one of his daughters’ kids, Emma. There’d been a bit of a bust-up with Emma’s mum Alice, he and Rose’s eldest, and she’d gone off to live in the UK. But Emma was a good kid. Went off to uni, but couldn’t stay away from the area too long. He and Rose had three kids – Alice, Mary and David – though Mary had died from breast cancer about five years previous, and David… well, David was Beth’s father. We weren’t going to dwell on that much.

We were hiding out in the kitchen at Doug’s place while Emma bravely hosted the various inlaws and outlaws as they descended upon the caravan park. Beth had flaked out on the bed she’d used to sleep on when she’d come here as a kid – a location that was still on the ‘to do’ list, for the record. As with most of Beth’s fantasies I wasn’t really sure if it was really hot, really wrong or some kind of cocktail of both. Case in point, that thing with the school uniform and the My Little Pony knickers. (Or was it Rainbow Brite? Detail wasn’t my forte, to be honest.)

“Honest opinion,” Doug nodded.

“It’s decent,” I said emphatically. “Very serviceable. Don’t mind a big old black stout.” It was, too. He’d done it properly, too. Cracked and mashed the malt himself, the whole deal.

“Yeah, it’s not really the weather for it,” he admitted, “but it goes all right I reckon.”

“You’re not wrong,” I offered. “We used to brew a bit back in the day, me and an old mate… just kits, nothing too fancy. Bucket chemistry. Was good fun though. Learned a lot, made some good beers.”

“And that’s just it,” he nodded. “Some of these bloody enthusiasts, trainspotters I call ‘em, just endlessly bloody wanking over every detail… just make some drinkable bloody beer and be done with it.”

“The enjoyment’s meant to be in this,” I said, raising the glass.

“Too true,” he nodded. “I’ll drink to that, son.”

That warranted a refill. Well the sun was over the yardarm. Somewhere. Probably.

“So you don’t brew any more then?”

“Nah,” I admitted. “Gave it away. The old man and my brother still do it, but it’s a bit bloody hard without the extra pair of hands.”

“Just the one brother?”

“Yeah… well there was one other, older, but… he did himself in.” Dammit. I’d meant to say he’d died, accidentally, but it’d just slipped out. Freudian. “Car smash, but… yeah.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“Long time ago,” I breezed. “Actually… my mate who used to help with the home brewing… yeah, he went the same way.” What the fuck was I telling a recently widowed grandfather all this for? Particularly one whose only son had topped himself?

“Beth’s told you about what happened to her father, I guess.”

I nodded, awkwardly. “Yeah, we’ve had a few talks about it.”

Doug nodded, as awkwardly as Doug ever did anything, which didn’t seem much. “I’m glad,” he said, after a long pause. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sorry you’ve been through the same shit – and believe me I know what that’s like, there’s nothing more gutting. But I’m glad to hear she’s found someone who she can talk to about it. None of the cunts in her mother’s family were ever gonna be much fucking good for it.”

“Yeah,” I said carefully, “that’s my experience of them too.”

Old Doug seemed embarrassed by his outburst. “Don’t mind me mate, I’m just a grumpy old cunt. Should watch me manners. How you going with that? Those pilseners should be cold by now.”

So we cracked a few more longnecks – these being Reschs Pilsener, like my own grandad used to drink – and steered the convo back into calmer waters. And by calmer I mean dodgy and lurid, i.e. Dougie’s tales of roadieing for the likes of Bon Scott, Billy Thorpe and Chain back in the early 70s. Eventually, Emma and the outlaws found us. Which was what I’d been trying to avoid.

The wake was Saturday night – a bit arse-about considering the funeral was tomorrow, but this wasn’t the sort of family who stood stubbornly on ceremony, particularly if it got in the way of a BBQ and a few beers, and given most of the visitors had to be back home Sunday night… you get the picture. Dougie was in fine form – I was glad I’d had the chance for a bit of a one-on-one yarn with him, it made getting clearance and approval from the rest of the outlaws a fair bit simpler. Beth had been even more apprehensive about everything than me – later in the night, after a few drinks, she admitted she hadn’t been sleeping at all, she’d just curled up onto her old bed, closed her eyes and had a little cry (whatever that meant by Beth’s standards), which probably meant she’d heard all of the discussion about her old man and her mother’s family – but it seemed pretty clear that with this lot, on this occasion, grudges didn’t make it past the front door. And if dragging me down here had really just been a distraction, it worked. Most of the conversations I ended up part of, particularly when Doug was about, were about rock and/or roll. Talk about what you know.

And yet, of course, it all ended up going horribly wrong. I’d been through all this at the wake after Tractor’s funeral, I knew how these things could end. Too many drinks, too many loud voices, too many people wanting the spotlight under such emotional circumstances. It would all end with tears.

Or Singstar. Same diff.

The elderly and the sensible had retired for the night, of course. Those still trucking on at this late hour, in the garage behind the caravan park office, were: Emma, MC and chief Singstar instigator, as you’d probably expect. Myself. Beth. Terry the Canberra accountant, and his eldest; disapproving wife had retired for the night with the other kids. Terry had already got his chopper out – i.e. the license photo of him with an enormous handlebar moustache, which I felt was a pity he didn’t still have. By accountant I hadn’t quite grasped he’d meant big fuck-off-shiny government investment liaison head for KPMG, but financial stuff often got lost in translation with me. Terry was three sheets to the wind (literally, he’d brought up some 3 Sheets Ale from the Lord Nelson in Sydney – I didn’t even know they bottled it these days) and was feeling no pain. His brother Justin was an industrial design consultant from Melbourne with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a fleet of matching black turtlenecks (probably) and a passionate belief, shared over a glass or two of Hunter red, that the AU Falcon was the most adventurous piece of design in Australian motoring history. I wholeheartedly agreed, under the premise that by ‘adventurous’ he meant ‘shit.’ By Beth’s estimation he’d come a long way since he was a feral snotty ginger kid jumping over campground tents on a muffler-less XR and annoying the paying punters.

His (and Beth’s) cousin Chris was a builder from Coolangatta, rough as guts and tough as teak. He’d turned up in a Titans jersey with a case of XXXX Gold under his arm and a stubbie holder around his wrist. I can talk league until my arse drops off, which so far is yet to happen despite many years of opportunity, so even though he turned out to be a turncoat Maroons supporter (that shit should be etched in your DNA dammit!) we were on decent ground there. His brother Brett was in IT, but he’d flaked for the night having had to do a full server install at his work over the past week on zero sleep and endless crates of Red Bull, so presumably was pissing pure plutonium at this stage. Sister Carrie was a high school teacher locally, she’d knocked off a bottle of chardy singlehandedly and had done a serviceable rendition of the Grease medley (if it’s possible to say any renditions of the Grease medley are serviceable) with Emma and her other sister – or cousin, I couldn’t work out who belonged to who and had just about given up – Madeleine, who’d married well, divorced even better and lived in the flashest part of Coffs Harbour (yes there is one) planning other peoples’ weddings at vast expense without any trace of irony. The current fuck (as she introduced him, after several vinos followed by several more as her airs and graces dissolved amusingly by the minute) had driven down from his bar manager gig at Opal Cove resort to collect her, but didn’t look like being granted his freedom anytime soon. However, I remembered Tom from a previous life – he’d been underaged teenage bass player in a crap-but-enthusiastic punk-metal outfit we’d played with once or twice when touring the mid North Coast in the late ‘90s – and he reported that yes, they did still play a bit, and yes, the proprietor of the Valla Beach Hotel still had no fucking clue about positioning the pokies vis a vis the bandspace such that performing bands wouldn’t have to play at 10% throttle in order not to drown out the precious beep bleep burp for the battery hens feeding their pensions thereinto. We played there once, and once only.

I had a similar relationship with karaoke. I’d done it once. Didn’t need to do it again. Besides, I got paid to sing, it was my job (apparently). I wasn’t going to ask Chris to knock up a house for fun while drunk as 40 bastards, or Carrie to teach while completely off chops – although given my experience of teaching high school classes I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. But Emma insisted. Emma was very insistent. All of Emma’s very insistent bits insisted I… erm, boobies… erm do I have to? Yes, said Emma and her boobies. Yes, said Beth, veteran of many losing arguments with Emma and knowing what battles to not bother fronting for. She had the other microphone thingy. And the controller, so she’d be picking the song.

“What’s the damage?” I inquired.

“Khe Sahn!” bellowed Chris. Fuck me, there’s always one.

“Britney,” declared Carrie.

“I’d like to spear Britney,” Chris declared.

“Thou shalt not Britney Spear,” I quoted.

“Any Gasket mate?” Terry wanted us to hurry up. He’d been bitten by The Bug. Every second song had found the microphone nestled into his hand. To his credit, the big fella really put his back into his performances. Literally. He’d end up needing to see a physio when he got back to Canberra.

“Nah, they’ve obviously got class and discernment.”

“There’s Nickelback on here,” Beth pointed out.

“Apart from that,” I corrected. “By the way, if you pick Nickelback…”

“Don’t worry, I’d have to kick my own arse,” she said. And picked something.

“Kids?” I racked my brain. “That Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams one?”

“Yeah,” she said, a little defensively.

“Which part are you singing then?”

She flipped me off. I had been sort of serious, though. Back in the day, when we’d still been primarily a covers act, McCarthy had come back from a night on the piss on the Goldie (I was somewhere else on girlfriend duties) raving about a band he’d seen that had played a (in his words) ‘fucking enormous’ version of Kids. It turned out that the basal cause of his ravings (according to the Duffer) probably had less to do with that song and more to do with the thermonuclear hotness of the band’s lead singer chick. Who’d gone on to proposition one of his group’s female contingent in the girls’ ablution facilies during set break, so wasn’t likely to be having any of McCarthy. I digress. McCarthy came back to Lismore steadfast in his demands that we introduce Kids into the set. He’d do the Robbie Williams part, obviously, and Marty would do Kylie (ooh err Matron). Which Marty got the hump with (ooh err carry on up the Khyber), interpreting it as yet more aspersions being cast on his manhood, and refused flat-out. There was no fucking way I was singing the girl part – I didn’t have the range to carry it off, or the arse-in-gold-lamé-hotpants – so McCarthy was left with the option of (a) stepping up to the plate as our Singing Budgie By Proxy or (b) forgetting the whole bloody idea. He chose (b), and furthermore chose to sulk for a week.

Anyway, I still didn’t have the arse to carry Kylie off – in any respect – so I got Robbie’s parts (ooh err, I’m stroking Mrs Slocum’s pussy, or something). Which meant I (a) got to tell Beth she couldn’t just up and leave me, as I was a singer in a band, and (b) got to bust out possibly The Lamest White Man Rap in the History of Things, Stuff and Random Capitalization. Although it it should be pointed out that (c) at heart, I was looking for serial monogamy in preference to some bird who looked like Billy Connolly; and furthermore (d) through (f) and related figures in the Appendix, in the words of our short-lived contemporaries the Casanovas, I was into monogamy, although it sounds like wood. Yes, it was a fucking shambles. No, I regret nothing, as some haughy French chick once warbled. No, she wasn’t on Singstar either, I checked. Beth probably could have carried a bit of Piaf, she was ace of aces. Hold her up to the light and you could see the years of music training, the glint of childhood conservatorium potential to her. Never quite worked out that way, of course.

Of course, having near brought the house down, Beth and I were immediately and irrevocably upstaged by Terry from KPMG, who swaggered onto stage, bellowed ‘YEEAAAHHHH MUTHAFUCKAAAA’ and set off into a blistering, fire-spitting, word-perfect-and-fuck-the-lyric-sheet rendition of Rage Against The Machine’s Bulls On Parade. He rallied round the family with a pocket full of shells. He dropped tha hits like De La O and got the fuck off the commode. In short, he threw the fuck DOWN. It was mesmerising. It was hilarious. And it got the cops called on us. By his wife, as it happened, who was in bed two blocks away and couldn’t sleep. Chris went to his ute and cranked the Dead Kennedy’s Police Truck at deeply offensive volume, which in a roundabout way was how he ended up in one. To his credit, I was just impressed his taste in music went beyond Chisels and Acca Dacca. He’d be alright. Brett was staying in town, he’d bust him out in the morning.

Things quietened down once the nice policemen had taken Chris away for a bit of a kip. Beth and I took the opportunity for strategic escape by moonlight. Now if only we could remember which fucking on-site van was ours. Probably one of the unlit ones.

“You’re a fucking star,” I told her. “Even if you have shit taste in music.”

“Ditto,” she replied. “You like my crazy family?”

“Yeah, they’re value,” I said.

“They like you,” she offered. “Which is good, because they fucking hate me.”

I shrugged. “Seemed alright to me.”

“Yeah… you might be right. I’m probably just oversensitive to little things. Like being asked ‘Is your mother still an absolute cunt?’”

“Who was that? Chris?”

“Madeleine,” she smirked.

“Second bottle of bubbles?”

“Third, I think.”

“She’s going to be a mess tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Beth checked her watch. “I’d say she’s a mess right about…. nnnnow.”

“Tom’s problem.”

“Tom’s problem,” she agreed. “You used to know him? Small world…”

“Remembered him somehow. He was a skinny little skate punk kid from a band we played with down here once or twice, ten years ago. Barely recognised him with a three hundred dollar haircut and shoes that could pay my mortgage…”

“You remember people,” she contended. “I wish I could do that.”

“You sure?” I said. “It’s not all good, there’s plenty of people I’d rather not remember.”

“True,” she agreed. Somehow, we stumbled over the on-site van with the corresponding number to the key in Beth’s hand. Which meant we won a night for two in an on-site van of our choice, assuming we chose this one in front of us, at the exclusive Urunga Sands Caravan Park. We tripped up the stairs, shutting the flimsy aluminium door behind us. There was one double bed (measured fairly charitably) in the van, made up for the pair of us. She flaked out on her back, kicking off her sandals. The thought occurred that we were alone here. No, really. There wasn’t another house for Beth to run away to, unless she bunked down with Emma or someone. Unless I was missing a key point somewhere, she’d actually have to spend the night with me. Like, wake up next morning with me and everything. And I was pretty sure she’d realised the same thing, because that cute little brow of hers was suddenly complicated with furrows.

“Well,” she said, “here we are…

So we were. Hmmm. Doot de doo.

“...Hey, totally off topic, was just thinking… did you ever write a love song in the band? Or anything personal?”

I screwed up my face. “This has something to do with people I’d rather not remember?”

“No,” she laughed, “I was just thinking… like, when I was trying to pick a song on Singstar, most of those stupid pop songs are about love, I was deliberately trying to pick one which wasn’t dripping with it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Didn’t want to make you feel awkward,” she said, feeling awkward. “Like it was some sort of ambush… it’s not like it matters, anyway. I was just thinking,” she repeated, “that I couldn’t think of any of your songs I’d heard which were personal like that…”

“Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo. That was sort of autobiographical a bit…”

“I know you guys wrote stories based on personal experience, that’s kinda not what I meant.”

“Yeah, we’ve never written a standard format boy-girl love song, it’s true. Was a deliberate plan. Based on the prior experience of Bon Scott from AC/DC. Right back at the start, he wrote a love song about his wife. Called it ‘Love Song.’ Was up all night coming up with the title to that... And she fuckin’ left him. That didn’t sound like much of an endorsement, so we decided to sing about beer and tits instead…”

“At least you’re honest.” She regarded me from the bed, her eyes two points of light in the darkness. “There’s a kind of purity and truth to your stuff.”

“You’re soooo drunk, Bethie…”

“Don’t patronise me when I’m psychoanalysing your music, Andrew. It won’t do.” Ah yes. Psych 101 rears its head again. “It’s a cruel truth… that what drives all men is the pursuit of gratification, particularly sexual, and any attempts by woman to shackle that and correct it into something more acceptable to them will always end in misery…”

“Always?”

“Sorry. Two-thirds of the time… latest divorce stats… it’ll end in misery, because of the inherent incompatibility of the sexes. Is that better?”

“Erm, no?” I offered. “All this just because I didn’t write anyone a love song when I was young and dumb?”

“Come on, babe,” she chided. “It’s not that. Imagine trying to be honest in a love song. What’s love? The unlimited potential for hurt. Giving someone else the ability to cause you as much pain as they can, showing them your scars so they know where to dig their nails into. Write that into a song, see how far you go on MTV.”

The thing was, she didn’t sound bitter. She was calm. This was truth. To her, anyway.

“My man Bear wrote that song,” I replied. “Pretty much. It was called Chicks are Fucked.”

“Did it chart?”

“Not so much. I don’t think he ever released it. One for the solo album maybe.”

“See, you always do that,” she said. “Always with the funny comeback when you want to steer the conversation back into areas you’re more comfortable with.”

I suppose I should have been happy it was a recognisable attempt at humour. “I was trying to cheer you up,” I said tiredly. “Fuck me for being shallow and all, but discussing how all love is pain isn’t really my sort of bedtime story.”

“You’ve been in love, Angus?”

I nodded. “Couple of times.”

“Did it end well?”

“No,” I said. “It hurt after. But it didn’t hurt during. It was particularly fucking awesome during. Which is kind of the point, I thought.”

She rolled off the bed, onto her feet. “Where are you off to?” I asked, but by then she’d reached her bag – which was as far as she’d ever been intending to go.

“Sorry,” she said, fishing out her cosmetics pouch, “this is kinda where you get to see the strings that hold up the puppet show, I’m afraid.” She laughed a little. “I used to know a girl, years ago. Back at uni. She couldn’t stay overnight at her boyfriend’s place. They screwed like rabbits night and day, but staying overnight… she just couldn’t do it.”

“I used to know a girl like that too,” I replied.

“Mmmm, yeah. Except this girl’s problem was she just couldn’t deal with her boyfriend seeing her without her makeup on...”

She slipped a finger into the cosmetics pouch, opening the magnetic clasp. Silver-backed foil blister packs, encasing tablets – lots of them – caught what light was in the room. Well, some of them could be contraceptives, I told myself, and some could just be paracetamol…

“...Me, I’m just terrified of intimacy, and anxiety, and my whole messed up fucking self, and people finding out about it. So I take drugs to help me sleep. Or, like in the good old days, I’d curl up and pretend to be asleep until my boyfriend dozed off, then I lie awake and watch him sleep and wonder how the fuck he doesn’t know I’m insane, and how long before he works it out.”

She punched a couple of tablets – some sort of self-prescribed cocktail – into her fist, and poured half-a-glass of water into an old chipped tumbler.

“To better living through chemistry,” she smiled grimly, and slammed the lot down.

“Come to bed, Beth,” I said.

“You’ll need to be quick,” she said impishly. “Which isn’t usually your forte…”

The combo of sleeping pills and alcohol bombed her within minutes. And no, I didn’t bother. That was what the morning was for. Everything’s clearer in the morning.