Heavy heart

I’m like a waterlogged ball
That noone wants to kick around anymore.
- You Am I, 1998

“Yeah, so that explains last night’s fun and games…” Mick’s voice on my phone message was bemused, to say the least. “They came quietly, most of ’em anyway... dunno if you heard the shots fired, there was one who wasn’t that keen… yeah he’s got a bit of a limp now. Coppers are interviewing everyone in the street, not sure what we’re gonna tell ‘em about those fucking tyremarks someone left from our back door right past where the coppers had set up their backstop surveillance post, but here’s hoping the fuckers don’t ask... Anyway mate, I’m off to dig a fucken jetski out of a creek, hope this message finds you alright. Alive, I mean. Cheers.”

Aware I was short on battery, I flicked Mick a text, telling him I’d made it to Kyogle, and rumours of my death had been greatly exaggerated. Actually I just said ‘I’m in Kyogle. It’s not death but it’s close. Still it’s not fucken Casino. Long fucken night but I mate it. Cheers mate.’ Then I dug out Joey’s number and gave her a call.

“Wmhgffck?” 8.25am wasn’t Joey’s best time of day. She wasn’t a morning person. She wasn’t much of an afternoon person either. “Angus? Where the fuck are you?”

“Kyogle,” I said. “Long story. It’s in northern NSW…”

“Just south of the border, yeah I know...”

“Is there any dodgy rural town you haven’t been to?”

“Google Maps, dude. Jesus suffering fuck, you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“You sleep with your laptop under your pillow or something?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” I heard her rattling away at the keys. “I suppose you want me to save the fucking day and get you to Adelaide somehow…”

“If you must,” I said.

“Oh I fucking must alright,” she assured me. “I don’t get you to Adelaide, we’re both lining up at fucking Centrelink Monday morning.”

I tried to point out that I would be anyway, but she wasn’t listening. She was too busy swearing at Webjet for being slower than a slow thing on a slow day.

“Can you make Lismore by 9.10am?” she asked urgently.

I looked at my watch. It still read THU 11.27. Crash o’clock. I glanced at my phone display, which was reading corrected NSW time, and blanched.

“Erm… possibly?”

“You’ll have to. Rex ZL319. Tiny shitty pencil plane that’ll turn you seven shades of fucking green. No less than you deserve. I’ll sort a connecting flight and email you the deets, you can pick up emails at Sydney. Get going.”

“Thanks mate. One last thing…”

“What?”

“Did you bang Phil, or what?”

“Oh, fuck off,” she said, and hung up.

I had to motor. I really had to motor. In fact, I had to ride like an absolute arsehole. Lismore was a bit over 40 kays away, and my flight left in 40 minutes – but check-in closed fifteen or twenty before that. And it wasn’t exactly dual-carriageway freeway between here and there. Bentleys Road was pretty tight and fiddly, narrow and bumpy. Add in more school buses and commuter traffic headed for Lismore of a weekday morning…

As the man had said several hours before, garn get fucken gone. Helmet under arm, I walked back to the bike. Which, being a serious piece of machinery, had gathered a crowd. Of one, at least. Wearing light blue shirts, dark blue pants, hats, badges, radios and shiny shoes. His white XR6 Falcon – same local markings as the car I’d seen stopped by the combine harvester out on the road north of here – was parked on the forecourt, getting refuelled by the young bloke of the proprietor.

Oh, shit.

“Sorry mate,” he said, “just checking out the bike. It’s yours, yeah?”

“Yeah…” I shrugged. “Actually, it belongs to a mate of mine who runs a bike shop up in Brisbane.”

Well that didn’t sound dodgy. But it was all I could think of, given (a) I didn’t have the rego docs and (b) they weren’t in my name anyway.

“Really,” he said, enigmatically. “Generous, wish I had those sorts of mates.”

The copper was young-ish, and tall – six-three or six-four – with dark hair and a square jaw, and an Eighties cricketer mo’ that suit him in no way shape or form. With it, he looked a bit like the old cartoon of Constable Care which the NSW Police used to use in kids’ safety campaigns. And who Frenzal Rhomb sang about in their ode to police brutality I Got The Fuck Kicked Out Of Me By Constable Care. He looked at me and I looked at him. Then he pointed at me sternly.

“Angus Young from Flange Gasket,” he declared, with a grin. “I was trying to figure out where I knew your face from. Local rock royalty, no less! Aren’t you guys touring at the moment?”

“Um, yeah. In fact, just after lunch, we’re playing Adelaide,” I muttered self-deprecatingly.

His eyebrows narrowed.

“How are you getting…”

“Got a flight out of Lismore a bit after nine,” I admitted.

He checked his watch. “You’ll struggle to make that,” he told me.

I nodded in reluctant agreement.

“Not without… riding with flagrant disregard for the posted speed limits, anyway.”

I wasn’t going to nod in agreement to that, reluctantly or otherwise. But the realisation had hit that it was pretty much game over. Might have made it had I not run into this bloke – if I’d taken my chances and flogged the Ducati along the road to Lismore, I might have dodged the traffic and any cops I came across and made it. But not now. Ironically, Johnny Law had caught up with me after all. Would there be any other flights this morning? Not out of Lismore, not until 11 or something which would be too late to get a connection to Adelaide in time for the show. Not out of Ballina either, I’d have thought. Deathstar and Virgin-On-The-Ridiculous only flew out around lunchtime and Rex would have a similar schedule out of there as out of Lismore. It was Rex ZL319 or Bust.

Which meant it was Bust.

“Well you’ve got two things in your favour,” he said.

“What’s that?” I replied.

“One, the airport’s on the west side of town, you won’t have to go through the city.” He grinned. “And two, you’ll have a police escort. Let’s roll.”

I wasn’t going to argue.

It was 43 kilometres from the BP in Kyogle to the carpark of Lismore Airport. We made it in 19 minutes. And, for the record, it’s a lot more fun chasing after cop cars than being chased by them. I made check-in by three minutes, while the copper had a quiet word to the carpark super to make sure someone kept an eye on my bike until Jeff or the old man could come pick it up for me.

“Mate, I can’t thank you enough,” I told him.

He frowned. “All part of the service,” he told me. “You guys have been representing our area for years, since I was a kid growing up round here… least we can do.” He looked a bit awkward. “One more thing, though… don’t really like to ask…”

So, yeah, that’s how my signature ended up on a NSW copper’s notebook. At least it wasn’t an infrigement notice. ‘To Constable Care – rock on, sir. Best regards, Angus from Gasket’.

“Constable Care?” he laughed. “Yeah, I should really lose the mo, grew it for Movember and the wife thought it was cute so I kept it…”

“Sorry mate, I should have asked your name.”

“It’s Constable,” he admitted wryly. “Sergeant Matt Constable. Your flight’s boarding, mate. Good luck.”

I waved Sgt Constable a farewell, slung my carry-on baggage under my arm – my helmet, wrapped in my jacket – and bolted for the gates.

So, the lesson for today: don’t drink rainwater out of random bush tanks.

Actually, the lessons for today were several, and they included ‘get some fucking sleep’ and ‘don’t book a Qantas flight which takes off less than 30 minutes after your Rex flight arrives’, but that was more of a FYI for Joey. It was just as well I checked my messages right on arrival and still had something left in the old legs to sprint between terminals. And that it was Qantas and not Deathstar. Arguing with fluoro orange jobsworths – both in clothing and in skin tone – on negative sleep and heavy time pressure wasn’t really on my Friday to-do list.

But yeah. Additional to the above, if you’re going to pull up crook, a Qantas 737 isn’t the best of places to have it happen. Better than a Rex-liveried Saab 340B, probably, but not by much. Still, at least I had form with being violently ill on domestic flights in the past few weeks. And it wasn’t as though I really needed to spend that two hours staring blankly out the window at the Riverina from 33,000 feet. Though presumably some paparazzi fuck was waiting in the back row of seats with a long-lens in order to capture footage of me suffering the effects of yet another rock star binge. Given it’d been apparently established as Indisputable Fact in the press that I was a bad boy rocker who was leading sweet innocent newsreader, journalist and darling of the city of Adelaide, Selena Hyphenated-Surname, wickedly astray with hard drugs and kinky sex, etc etc etc. If that didn’t make you want to throw up, nothing did.

I tumbled out of the plane, feeling like death warmed up by microwave – burnt at the edges and soggy in the middle. It was another baking hot day in Adelaide, as it always is, because it’s one of the outer circles of hell. It would be tight as a fish whether I’d get there on time or not. Wherever there was. Where the fuck was it? Hindmarsh? Showgrounds? Cabbie reckoned it was at the Adelaide Oval. That’s all he’d been doing all day, taking people to the fuckin’ cricket ground. Y’know, it was one fuckin’ game he just couldn’t fuckin’ get into, the cricket. So slooow, so fuckin’ boring for me… So we went to the Oval. Which had a fucking domestic one-dayer on. I decided to offer him the chance not to have his own cab rammed up his arse by taking me to the Showgrounds. On the other side of the CBD. Where the fucking Big Day Out was on. ‘Aww mate, the Big Day Out, you should have said…’ And then we argued about the meter, and I might have called him a collection of rude things, and taken the twenty bucks I figured was fair payment out of the thirty-something on the meter out of my wallet (coincidentally the last $20 I had to my name) and flipped it at him, along with the bird, as I ran for the gates. You might have, too. Particularly if you were in dire need of the bowl again pretty soon.

So much for getting in on my own recognisance.

“Mate I’m playing in half a bloody hour,” I insisted. “Don’t you know who I am?”

OMFG I actually said that. I died a little inside.

“Don’t care who you think you are, pal,” the seccy declared. “Don’t see a pass round your neck, Don’t see you getting past me, eh.”

A lot of security guards at venues and gigs are helpful, understanding and look after the poor fuckers who are there to earn a buck and entertain the punters. This lanky streak of shit wasn’t a lot of security guards. He reminded me of the bouncer who’d king hit David Hookes and killed him. That bloke hadn’t been a lot of security guards, either. So the last handful of electrons in my iPhone battery were used up sending a SOS to Marty. Who turned up just after the cabbie did, back for another go, this time dragging a very bored looking female copper behind him. Marty, with a world-weary sign, gave me my All Access pass, gave the cabbie another $20 and told him to get lost, gave the bored policewoman his nicest choir-boy smile and the grumpy seccy his most apologetic ‘yes I understand you have a job to do and you were only doing it’ nod of fake sincerity, as deployed five nights a week by reporters on current affairs shows.

“Is it possible,” Marty said as we walked quickly through the backstage compound, “that we could get you to a gig without you getting lost somewhere along the way? Do you think?”

“Marty, I’m sorry mate. Planes were out at Brisbane Airport, I had to…”

“I know the story,” he said. “Doesn’t matter now. You do know we finished playing ten minutes ago?”

“What?” I checked my watch. Still 11.27pm Thursday. My phone said nothing, because it was dead, but I couldn’t believe it was much later than a quarter past one. “We’re not on until half one…”

Marty shook his head. “We were second slot on the Big Top,” he said. “12.40 to 1.10.” He showed me his watch, which read twenty past one. “South Australian time. Think you might have messed up your time zones somehow.”

He delivered this news in a flat, unemotional monotone, like a trainee doctor building up to his first ever ‘I’m afraid you have terminal cancer.’ Me, I just sagged. Instantly. One moment I was walking beside him, next he was looking around and wondering where I’d got to. I’d just sagged, was leaning on a nearby shipping container for support. In a single sentence Marty had just rendered everything I’d done in the past 24 hours – everything I’d struggled and fought for, all the effort I’d put in, not to mention others like Mick and Joey and Sgt Constable – absolutely null. Pointless. Worthless.

After a quick search Marty backtracked and found me sitting on the grass, leaning against the shipping container, head in my hands. I’d had enough. Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed.

“You alright?” He was kneeling down beside me, his hand on my shoulder like he was posing for a Salvation Army poster with some bedraggled homeless dude.

I took my hands away slowly. Stared at him, blankly. Shook my head.

“You’re not alright, are you?”

Again. Blank look. Shook my head.

“You do know I’m joking, right?”

Oh, Marty and his deadpan sense of humour.

“We’re on at half one… and we really need to get fucking moving…”

Wordlessly, I got to my feet. The dazed expression on my face was clearly worrying him.

“Are you sure you’re going to be right to play, Angus?” he asked. Trying to keep his voice down so as not to be overheard.

I raised a finger, about to make a point. Then hurriedly rushed over to a nearby open wheelie bin and threw up the last of the fluids I didn’t realise I still had.

“Now I am,” I croaked. “Shall we?”

Everyone has their off days. It’s just that for those of us who make a living on stage, people tend to remember them. Like the shambolic, destructive final gigs of the Sex Pistols (‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’) or Guns ‘N’ Roses. Or closer to home, Tim Rogers’ breakdown at Falls a few years back, staggering around taking swings at Davey Lane and swearing about hippies like a pills-and-vodka-addled Eric Cartman. Or McCarthy at the last M1 festival show, the most pertinent local trainwreck you can imagine, given that I was supposed to be driving the train at the time.

Big Day Out, Adelaide 2009, was an off day. Anyone who was there would be able to tell you. And if they thought it was bad from where they were standing, they should have been standing where I was.

We got on late. That was inevitable. It took nearly ten minutes to get from the gate to the back of the Big Top and onto the stage in the between-sets crowd crush (just as bad backstage as out amongst the plebs as regards having to fight your way around bodies in motion). I got handed a guitar and was pushed out under the lights. Phil looked bored, Marty looked uncomfortable, and Reid Burton didn’t look like he should have been there, but at least he knew it. The crowd were deep, but I knew that was probably just a trick of playing a smaller stage than at the other shows – and that the Big Top had shade, the main stages didn’t.

Someone had to start this bastard off, I supposed.

“Hello Adelaide,” I muttered. “For the record, I didn’t fuck your newsreader.”

The guitar I was handed? Yeah, it wasn’t actually mine. Neither were any of the ones I’d been playing before – they were loaners courtesy Big Al from the ‘RC’ – but these weren’t them either. It was someone’s Fender Strat (or approximation thereof) and it felt weird in my hands. Didn’t help that I’d recently taken off my gloves to discover my right hand had swollen up like one of those inflatable novelty hands they sell at one-day cricket matches, and my left had cramped up from being tensed around a handlebar grip all night and had the flexibility of petrified wood.

So yeah, I was quite shit.

I was sloppy, I was late, I missed changes, hit bum notes. My voice was someone hitting a dog with a sack of gravel. I had all the stage presence of Buddy Holly after the plane crash. But at least I was trying. Marty stood up the back and looked embarrassed, Reid Burton, true to form, had his head down over his work like a 13 year old doing a classical guitar recital at church, not crunching through a big fugly garage-rock declaration of war like Harold Holt or Angus Young. Reid and I looked and sounded like we’d only just been introduced that morning and had never played together before. Which was obviously lies. We hadn’t even seen each other that morning.

We were dying up here. I died, anyway. I choked, basically. With noone to banter with, I just started talking incoherent shit. Mostly about Selena and Richard’s open marriage. And then, a song or two later, a rant about how some kiddies’ band from New Zealand was ripping off my old mate Sam McCarthy’s unreleased demos. And how they were all cunts. Definitely cunts. McCarthy’s family and all. And his ex. And you people who were leaving to go see fuckin’ Sparkadia or whoever. And then I offended Marty by introducing him as ‘the cunt from the country, the man who puts the milk in milquetoast’ (which doesn’t actually fucking mean anything) when he stepped up to sing one of his songs. And then more conspiracy theory lunacy about what a cunt’s act it was putting me in the papers to improve your odds of winning your fucking divorce case against your wife, who was a dirty skank at the best of times… in the best possible way, people… yeah that got boos.

“C’mon, cheer the fuck up,” I berated them. “You got to sleep last night. You’ll get to sleep tonight, too. Some of us would fucking kill for a good night’s sleep. Here’s an insomnia cure, it’s our second last, it’s This Didn’t Get Played On Video Hits Cos It Was Shit…”

“Not so much,” came a terse voice from behind. “Thanks to your very entertaining commentary, Andrew, we’ve run over time. Folks, we’ve just got one more, and it’s from our special guest guitarist, Adelaide’s own Mr Reid Burton…”

Sure, I get that if you bring someone in as a special guest guitarist at fairly short notice – certainly not enough time for him to get in any way comfortable with the music, judging by his performance – then they deserve something in return. A couple of beers from the rider, or some kind words, or a cuddle and a pat on the head. But an entire song of their own fucking choice? I’d thought we’d shitcanned the special requests back in Melbourne when Phil couldn’t decide between his hundred and fifty favouritest evaaarrrr songs to play live. And we were squeezing this into the set at the expense of Beef Week Queen?

I went over for a word. “The three of us didn’t rehearse Beef Week Queen,” Marty hissed off mike. “When we were sure you weren’t going to show up. Now piss off back out there.”

“For what?” I growled. “What the fuck are we playing?”

“Erm, hi everyone,” Reid’s reedy tones began. “This is an old song which means a lot to me. It’s an old Jimi Hendrix song called The Wind Cries Mary. We all have a Mary… you probably have one too. Mine was called Krystal, but that’s not important right now…”

Too right it fucking isn’t, I thought. I liked him better when he was silent. Shut up and play the song, I’m growing old here.

So he did. Or rather, they did – Marty, Phil and Reid – while I stood around leaning on my mike stand (someone had switched it off, presumably on Marty’s signal to Team Front-Of-House) wondering what the fuck to do now. Walk off? Yeah, because further upstaging everyone would be an even better look. Jesus, at least give me a tambourine so I can look useless in a context-appropriate Linda McCartney sort of way.

But nope. I stood, and watched.

And they played it very well. Like a band that’d actually rehearsed together. Like a band that could very easily play the Perth Big Day Out without me, if that was the plan. Hard to argue it wasn’t. Or shouldn’t be. Reid, who believed he couldn’t sing, could at least impersonate Hendrix, who believed he couldn’t sing either. And the pair of them could play. Believe that.

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clouds have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red.
And the wind whispers ‘Mary.’

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife.
And the wind, it cries, ‘Mary.’

I didn’t really hear Reid’s solo. I’m sure it was beautiful, perfectly weighted and crafted, as technically immaculate as his playing was, which was part of the reason I hated him. Thing was, I was a little bit preoccupied trying not to dissolve on stage. I missed Beth. Missed her like sleep, and there wasn’t nothing romantic about the hours I keep. It didn’t feel like heartache. It felt like a large, crushing pain to the chest, like an open, sucking shotgun wound. Like the entire facile pointlessness of the universe only became obvious when she was gone. Isn’t that stupid? Don’t you think a cunt like me with thirty-plus years under my belt would know better than this? Than to invest his entire sense of what mattered in the whole world in a girl as flaky and messed up as Beth? After all I’d been through?

Universe says ‘No’.

The traffic lights they turn blue tomorrow
And shine the emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived, is dead.
And the wind screams ‘Mary.’

I sat down on the edge of the stage, guitar hanging dead over my shoulders. I had nothing.

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers ‘No, this shall be the last.’
And the wind cries ‘Mary.’

Marty, Reid and Phil made their goodbyes, and left the stage. I sat there a little longer, dumbly, in the sort of shocked silence that was left behind. Then I slipped off the edge of the stage and just wandered off. It felt like an end. It felt like The End. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Sorry, Adelaide. You deserved better than that.

I was sitting, alone, in Gasket’s nominated backstage portacabin, in the little cordoned-off corner of the VIP compound which housed us and Marty’s band. It felt like being the bloke who’d got himself sent off to the sheds in the Grand Final while everyone else was out there trying to win the game, but that was OK with me. I liked the quiet. Outside there were people – people as far as the eye could see, people as far as the boundaries of the compound lay. I didn’t really want to talk to people. People could fuck right off as far as I was concerned. Short of scaling the outside of the Big Top and perching myself on top for the balance of the evening – and I’d considered it, I’ll admit – this was the closest to properly alone I’d likely get to be at the Royal Adelaide Showgrounds on the day of the Big Day Out.

The last person on Earth I expected to see at that point was Reid Burton.

OK, I’ll qualify that. The last person I would have expected to see would have been Jesus, or Elvis, or Lord Lucan. In an Evel Knievel jumpsuit. The last person I’d reasonably expect to see was the hired gun second guitarist who’d just shamelessly fucked off with my spotlight while I was busy trying to melt down in the most humiliating possible manner on stage at the Big Day Out.

Then again, I still had his guitar around my neck. Reid and his personal guitar tech ‘Harry’ Harrison – who’d been around since the deusexmachina days – had stepped up when the case full of Big Al’s loaners had been mislaid by the BDO’s freight forwarders.

“You’ll be after this,” I mumbled. “Thanks for that. Sorry I didn’t do it justice.”

“Dunno about that,” he said. Reid had an awkward, lilting gait to his voice. I’d never met anyone as unsure of himself – yet so absolutely cocksure as an instrumentalist – as him. A personality type tailor-made to be bullied and subjugated as Brady Priddle’s second banana. He coughed. “Marty said they’d found your guitars at the depot. They should make it to Perth OK, no problems.”

“That’s ironic,” I remarked bitterly, “since I probably won’t.”

“Dunno about that,” he said. ‘Dunno about that’ was Reid Burton’s default answer to a lot of things.

I tried to be gentle on him. “Mate, you’ve worked for Marty’s missus long enough to know what she does with people who displease her.”

I could see he wanted to say ‘Dunno about that’ but I could also see he wasn’t sure. You could say he didn’t know about that.

“You played a good show,” I offered, “despite the challenges. At short notice too. So thanks.”

He blushed. He was pretty pale and pasty so you noticed when he’d reacted to a compliment.

“Thanks.”

“Have they talked to you about Perth?”

He shook his head. “I won’t do Perth. I’ve already told Marty.” A self-deprecating giggle. “Your fans used to scare us enough when I was in Deus, they’re just terrifying when you’re actually playing for them…” He caught himself, fearing offence. “I mean… some of the things they were shouting at you…”

“Deserved,” I nodded. “You disappoint people who pay to come and see you, you deserve that.” And people had paid to come and see us. One way or another, we’d somehow turned into The Story of BDO 2009 – largely because the rest of the lineup were so uncontroversial, from Neil Young sweatin’ for the oldies as main stage headliner to the Prodigy turning the Boiler Room into half-past 1995. Adelaide had moved from not-sold-out to sold-out pretty swiftly on the basis of the post-Melbourne buzz – and yeah, most of that wasn’t us, it was South Aussie punters waiting to commit to ticket purchases until they’d heard how the eastern seaboard shows had gone. But some of them were the Gasket freaks of Adelaide trying to grab a bit of their youth back, hoping for the farewell show we’d never given them. And I’d personally failed them, because I didn’t have my shit together on the day.

“That’s not fair though, you’re not well… I thought?”

I nodded, reluctantly. “Food poisoning,” I said. “Been up most of the night.” Both of those things were based in absolute incontrovertial fact. The minor fact they were completely unrelated wasn’t the issue.

Reid nodded vigorously. “Yes, I heard Marty talking to Mike Cross outside about it.”

“What’s he been saying to Mike?” I queried.

Suddenly feeling caught out, Reid was evasive. “Erm… just that he knew you had a problem… and it was unfair to judge the performance on that… he blamed himself… that sort of thing.”

“Great, they’re making excuses for me already…”

Reid shuffled his feet. Still came out in the same order, he’d never get a job at Star City. “You can’t perform if you’re not right.”

“Anyway, for the record, thanks for the gear, and thanks for carrying me out there. And that read of The Wind Cries Mary… that was real nice. Moving.”

Reid looked especially flushed at that.

“Well, like I said, we all have our Marys,” he muttered.

It felt like a conversational lead. I left it dangling until it was too awkward not to run with it.

“I’m trying to get over one at the moment,” I nodded. “But that’s not important right now.”

I’d borrowed his own words to throw the conversation back to him – back to whatever he wanted me to ask him about. This stuff hurt my head.

“Mine was called Krystal,” he said. I knew that. He clearly wanted me to ask about her, so I did. It wasn’t like I had much else to do and he probably wouldn’t go away until I did, so why the fuck not. And his eyes did that faraway thing that eyes do when you start thinking about forlorn lost loves, and I knew I was here for the duration. “She was the most amazing girl that ever lived,” he said gently. “She also was addicted to heroin. Which wasn’t as much of a good thing.”

“No.”

“No, not when your best mate… or who you think is your best mate… is her dealer.”

“Really,” I said. Trying not to show that I’d suddenly become interested in his story. His best mate, one presumed, was one Bradman Dennis Priddle (no, really), late of this Earth.

“I mean,” he added self-deprecatingly, “I was using heaps too. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to call me a junkie, but… I was a junkie. I used. Heaps.” I’d guessed that much, from the first time I’d set eyes on him at the Manning Bar at Sydney Uni in ‘98. He’d always been so spindly and sickly, and I’d never seen him out of a long-sleeved shirt. “And when your connections are the same as your girlfriend’s…” Reid tensed up. “It’s a horrible, horrible drug, heroin. Nothing else matters when you’re on it. Nothing. And when you can’t get your cash together for a hit…”

I left that hanging, in lieu of anything tactful I could say to it right away.

“…Brady Priddle wasn’t a very pleasant man.”

Reid nodded solemnly. “I read about what he did to your girlfriend,” he said. “Or what he tried to do before you got to him. It killed me,” he choked up. “Fucking killed me. Because that was what he did to Krystal. Every second night.”

At which point I realised: I didn’t want to be in this conversation.

“It’s so stupid,” he said, the words spitting out like rapid-firing from an underpowered machine pistol. That shit one from N64 Goldeneye. The Klobb or whatever it was called. “She was as desperate for shit as I was. She would have happily…” He searched for the words. “Crack-whored herself out to him. She wanted to. She said she found power arousing, and he had power over her because of what he could provide. But…” Reid had a face like a man about to vomit. “He wanted it to be rape. To hurt. For her to scream, and cry, and for me to have to watch… I’m sorry,” he spluttered, “you don’t want to have to hear this, I’m sorry. You’re probably asking why I’m telling you this.”

The thought had occurred to me, read my expression.

“She overdosed in late 2003,” he said, almost matter-of-fact. “She’d talked about moving on, getting better, cleaning up. Getting away from Priddle, she meant. Let him know, too. And then she died,” he snapped. “Overdosed, so-called, on the same volume doses she used to take, so you tell me what’d been slipped into her stuff.”

“I guess that wouldn’t have been long before he made his move on Rachel,” I said dully.

Reid nodded grimly. “No, it wasn’t. And when I’d heard what you’d done…” He shook his head forlornly. “This is where being a geeky little classical music nerd all your life is so useless. When all you really want is to be able to swing a cricket bat…”

He didn’t need to say much more.

“Reid,” I began, “and I’ll understand if you don’t answer this… someone made the call to the police to tell them to turn up to Priddle’s place with earthmoving equipment and have a dig under Priddle’s garage. That wasn’t you, by any chance?”

An enigmatic grimace.

“I wish, mate,” he wept. “I wish.” And then laughed, bitterly. “I always thought it was you…”

“Nah, I was the one who blew his bits off with the shotty,” I said.

“Really?”

“I wish, mate,” I replied. “I wish.”

He contemplated his shoes. Chuck Taylors, of course, like any respectable shoegazing guitarist with his heart in the 90s. Then again, I’d just done a gig in motorcycle boots, so who was I to judge. “I’m afraid I don’t have the luxury of thinking those sort of thoughts any more,” he remarked ruefully. “I’m supposed to forgive those who’ve sin against me.” His fingers found the crucifix around his neck, almost apologetically.

“Of course,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “I’ve been trying to say thank you. For bringing it all to an end. The pathetic thing is, I knew he’d killed her, but because I still needed him, or needed the shit he could get me…” Reid’s face screwed into anguish. “What sort of human? What sort of human being does that? Just conveniently forgets like that?”

“What sort of human does that to another person in the first place?” I counterargued.

Reid accepted the point. “In a way, I’m glad I was such a music geek and didn’t know any dodgy underworld types. Brady introduced me to the stuff in the first place. I should have been suspicious seeing he never seemed to use it… but it meant that when he went down, I had no choice. I had to go to rehab. And that’s where I found my friend.”

I knew he meant Jesus. I had my best ‘I’m not cynical’ face on, honest.

“And look, I know what you’re thinking. It’s so, so easy to be cynical. Heck, even when I was a junkie, I was cynical. ‘These guys who become born-again Christians after giving up drugs, or drink, or gambling… they’re just replacing one addiction with another.’ Fact is,” he admitted, “I’m an addictive personality. I know that. And this is the most harmless addiction I could find...”

He was being self-deprecating again, to a fault, really. He was probably aware of my usual position on people who needed imaginary friends to get them through day-to-day life, and particularly what I think of people who think their imaginary friends should dictate what I can do or say, or what my friends’ kids learn at school, or whether young women can have the right to control their own bodies, or whatever. Bible-bashers, God-botherers, moralistic nimrods, punishers and straighteners, to use a bit of Manning Clark by way of John Birmingham. That wasn’t, however, what underpinned Reid’s faith. It was harder to resent people who actually needed – rather than dumbly accepting without question – the crutch of faith to get them through the day-to-day, for whom every day was a struggle against their own demons, a genuine good-versus-evil stoush. It was harder to be cynical about that. Even for a trained professional like me. And whatever my part in bringing him to that better place he’d found – one where his pre-gig ritual, which he’d apologised and disappeared for immediately after talking with me, was meditating in his corner of the Vanity Project trailer, not tying off his arm to make the veins bulge – I was glad for it.

But as for absorbing all he’d had to say, and making sense of it – like trying to put in a decent show, that was beyond me today. I got my stuff together – my helmet, my gloves, my half-ruined, chargeless iPhone – took one last look around the Big Day Out precinct, and trudged for the exit, the cab rank, and the airport hotel.