14 – Superflat
It’s still probably mid-30’s, the humidity up to max, asthmatic and thick by the time I get home late afternoon. The doors and windows are open letting in whatever breeze is going as the sun sets, bloated. A hot Berg wind moves the sleepy air around the porch, saturating my clothes and sucking my breath out like bus slipstreams. Zeus barks off the fence, down into the valley. Barks come back, the wind drops and trees fronting the porch hold their breath. Mom has Barbara Streisand on her Sanyo tape deck, sitting atop the Saltan hot tray.
Sitting on a wooden chair, one side of it bleached grey by the sun, I watch a crashed BMW dragged slowly down the opposite side of the valley by a black tow truck. The road up top is a sharp V around the headland which the Beemer’s taken at speed, ripping through a carport wall and plummeting down the gulley, flipping a couple of times in the process.
With a ginger bear in my hand I watch them attach the winch and slowly drag the crushed vehicle slowly down the hill. I imagine the people are still in it, all flopping around, dead, no seat belts as the flattened wreck jerks over the bumps.
This is all the time I’m not at Community Arts. This is all the time that I’m not seeing her.
I take a sip and imagine it’s my own dead body inside, my head repeatedly hitting the steering wheel, the rest of my body crumpled into the engine. I imagine Belinda’s in the passenger seat, head split open and bleeding.
This is the start of all the time I won’t be with her again and it hurts. And even now I know how little of it I’m conceding is my own strategies. It’s only slowly and vague that I formulate that my brain is my enemy and my logic my parents. That so little of what I think hasn’t been double and triple thought that when I make a choice, it only marks the end of some long line of marginal, almost inseparable options. This is all the time my life isn’t starting again.
I think to myself what I really need now is a beer and wonder back inside, leaving the Beemer to extricate itself, unwatched. I close my bedroom door and slide in a Bauhaus tape to wash some of the waling Streisand away.
I lie on my back on the bed, the fan making its way over my body, unable to do much. Mom walks in and tells me turn it down and I do.
The top shelves in my cupboard are littered with kids stuff like Space Lego and old teddy bears and old BMX gear that I don’t really know what to do with. Next year it will migrate to the next shelf up, near the back where it can’t easily be seen. The year after that it will migrate to the garage or the charity shop or bin. The walls are almost totally covered with pictures of bands. The posters move, get thrown out and replaced on a regular basis. All, that is, apart from Transvision Vamp. Wendy James is the sun facing my bed, forming an axis around which all other posters move. I imagine there are other poster-planets around the room that have their own gravity and poster-moons.
The phone rings and my heart drops and I hold my breath. I don’t get up and answer it because it’s not my phone, yet. Mom doesn’t knock; she just walks in, sleep lines firmly carved in her tired, old face and for an instant Telegram Sam and Woman in Love meet in some twisted mix.
“It’s for you. Can you turn that awful shit down, please.”
“I already have,” I tell her.
“It’s one of your little Goth friends, Cam is it? I don’t understand how you can listen to this.”
I head for her room and she heads off left down the passageway towards the kitchen, giving me some room. Dad is no-where to be seen. Maybe he hasn’t come home from work yet. I recognise in some far recess of my brain that I haven’t seen him in a while.
“Hello,” I pick up the phone which smells of some perilous mix of mums perfume and morning breath.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Right,” my heart is pounding with just sheer fucking relief.
“Not Cam.”
“Evidently.”
“What’s wrong with you?” says Matt.
“Nothing broe, what’s happening?”
“Well broe, we’re meeting at Belinda’s at 7 for a couple of aperitifs”
“Ah shit”
“Ah come on, I heard what happened.”
“Really, who from?” I flip the phone around to my other ear and attempt to unravel the thick cord.
“Does it fucking matter?” I don’t say anything. “You’re such a moron. I was there remember? She still, you know, wants to, you know, be friends and all.”
I change the phone back to the other ear, lying back on mum’s bed, trying to get comfortable in amongst the huge pillows like she’s expecting King Kong.
“So she knows you’re inviting me?”
“I’m not inviting you, she is. She said to call to you”
“So you wouldn’t have otherwise?”
“Don’t be like this, man”
“Like what?”
“Like a fuckin’ ass.” He says “You there?”, as I try to snap out of it. Try to hammer out a full stop.
“Ok, yeah, I’m here. Are we going to the Wheel?”
I can’t mention Community Arts or any variations as mum knows about it and has lectured me more than once on not going. The school knows about the club and has threatened to expel anyone it finds going. Although it still seems unclear exactly why. So it’s all code now.
“Yeah we’re definitely going. There’s not fucking around with that,” his parents must be out. ”You coming right?”
“Yeah, I’m coming”
“Have you got any booze?”
“Na, have you?”
“Na, reckon we’ll need to sort something out.”
“Yeah I’m on it.”
“Good”
“For myself though.”
“Well fuck you then”, he says with the “you” going up a bunch of octaves.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” I say.
He says, thanks for calling and before I can say I didn’t he hangs up and Zeus barks from the front porch and the wind stirs through the curtains again.
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