Praise Page 3

  She rooted through her bag to find some cream. She said it didn’t help much, but it was better than nothing.

  The argument next door rose to screaming, cut off abruptly.

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘he’s killed her.’

  ‘She’s probably in love. She won’t mind.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why he did it.’

  ‘Love is a dangerous thing,’ she agreed. She curled up against me. She reached down, rolled my balls between her fingers. She did it gently. ‘Your name would have to be Gordon.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Gordon?’

  ‘All the great loves of my life seem to have been named Gordon. There were two of them. And they both left. Each time it fucked me up for years.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She rolled over on top of me, stared at my face. ‘Never mind, you’re beautiful. Your eyelashes are beautiful. And your skin. It’s like a baby’s. I’d kill for skin like that. It’s a woman’s skin.’

  ‘I stay out of the sun.’

  ‘So who were your great loves?’

  ‘There was only one. And we were at school at the time. I wanted to run away with her, I wanted to marry her. It went on for years. I think it affected me permanently. It’s a very significant time, adolescence. Significant and tortured. We never even kissed. We only saw each other at school. She lived out of town. We held hands a lot.’

  ‘Poor baby. Are you still in love with her?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of years. I probably am.’

  ‘And no one else?’

  ‘Not really. There’s one other woman, perhaps. An older woman. But that’s a little complicated. And otherwise things have been pretty slow.’

  ‘But why? I couldn’t believe it when the other girls at the pub said you were single. I said I want that boy, and they said they thought you must be gay ... are you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve only slept with a man once.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Yes. I did. Still, I don’t know. It was only the once, and I was very drunk ... it’s not much to go on.’

  ‘Do you fantasise about men?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not as often as I do about women. And there’s always a certain amount of violence about it.’

  ‘So why didn’t you do it again?’

  ‘The chance never came up. He moved to Adelaide. And there’s never been anyone else that appealed ...’

  ‘What was his penis like?’

  We talked penises for a while. Sizes and shapes and the uses of such. She pulled back the sheet and slid down my stomach and examined mine. ‘They’re such amazing things,’ she said, moving it around, ‘I wish I had one of my own, just to play with.’

  I watched her over my stomach.

  ‘It’s not very big though, is it’ I said.

  ‘How long is it erect?’

  ‘Five inches. Just under five inches.’

  ‘Well ... I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s enough to work. And the really big pricks can be horrible sometimes. As long as they’re wide enough, as long as the shape is right, the length doesn’t matter so much. The worst penis I ever had was about a foot long but it was so thin it hurt. It was like being fucked with a knitting needle. I like yours. It’s cute.’

  Cute. I didn’t want cute. I wanted ugly. I wanted something huge and purple and bulging with veins. I wanted a pole. This life of mine was cursed with all the wrong attributes.

  Cynthia meanwhile had started muttering and whispering to my cuteness. I watched her. She kissed it, sucked it. It rose up. She pulled back, considered.

  ‘I think it wants to fuck me,’ she said.

  ‘I think I know what my own penis wants.’

  ‘Bullshit. I’m the only one that knows.’

  She came climbing back up, lifted herself and descended. She was wet. I slid straight in. ‘Another fucking Gordon,’ she said.

  ‘Gordon is a useful name. Not a single famous person has ever been called Gordon.’

  She was pushing down, sliding back. ‘What about Gordon Lightfoot?’

  ‘Who’s Gordon Lightfoot?’

  ‘Forget it. And move.’

  I moved. I did my best.

  She rode me into the ground.

  Later that day I retrieved my car from Louise’s place, then drove Cynthia home. Her parents were due back and she wanted to get the house clean.

  ‘I’ll call you in a day or two, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  We didn’t kiss goodbye. That was good. She closed the car door and walked up the path. She always moved fast when she walked. She was impatient.

  I drove home.

  FIVE

  It was time to consider money. I still had about five hundred dollars left, but the idea of finding another job was becoming incomprehensible. I was destined for unemployment. I walked down to the Fortitude Valley C.E.S. I told the woman behind the counter that I’d like to register. This was the first step towards getting the dole. Once the C.E.S. had you listed, then you could register yourself at Social Security for unemployment benefits. She gave me a form. I looked at it, read it through, then filled it in. It was a surrender of sorts. She told me to wait for an interview. I sat down along the wall and waited.

  The place was crowded. Bad times in the economic world. There weren’t many jobs listed on the boards. People walked around, staring at the adds for assistant cooks, builders’ labourers, service station attendants...and maybe they all needed the work. Maybe they had kids to support, maybe they had debts. I didn’t need the work. I was young and single and male. Society was constructed for the likes of me.

  But I was worried. My fear of bureaucracies was real, and the C.E.S. and the Department of Social Security were reputedly monsters. I’d spent most of my life avoiding going on the dole, just to stay out of their grasp. They needed to know things. They needed to limit and define. They created motives where motives didn’t exist. They assumed guilt, they searched for it, rooted it out and pinned it down. And I was guilty. Every form I’d ever filled out had told me that. I didn’t have the right desires. The only safe course was employment. No one bothered you if you were employed. But then no one bothered you if you were dead either. Employment was death. Safety was death. These things had to be understood.

  A man called out ‘Gordon Buchanan’. I got up and followed him down a line of small cubicles until we came to his. He was middle-aged, round, balding. He was the monster personified, but there was no joy in it for him either. He was carrying the form I’d filled in. I sat down and he sat down. He read through the pages, typing the information into his computer terminal.

  ‘So you’re a barman?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m usually in the bottle shops, not behind the bar.’

  ‘Okay. And you’re capable and willing to look for full-time work?’

  Well ... only part-time really. I’ve only ever worked twenty or thirty hours a week. It’s all I need to get by.’

  He typed it in. ‘Of course we can’t help you much with your job searching. Not with part-time work. Things are so busy these days we can only concentrate on the full-time stuff.’

  ‘That’s okay. Pub work is always easy to find.’

  He nodded. I nodded.

  We were agreed.

  It was all bullshit for both of us.

  ‘You realise,’ he said, that you won’t be eligible for unemployment benefits if you’re only looking for part-time work.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was a suprise. ‘But I don’t need a full-time job. I’m happy with part-time.’

  ‘Sorry. To be eligible for unemployment benefits you have to declare that you are able and willing to look for full-time work.’ He gave me a look. Waited.

  Which was fair enough. The game was there to be played.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, put down that I’m after full-time work.’

  He typed it in patiently.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you some forms, and if you want to apply
for benefits you fill them in and take them down to Social Security and they’ll take over from there. Okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘One more thing. Come and check the boards regularly. We don’t have the time to send any referrals out at the moment. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He glanced through my forms again.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  He led me back to the waiting area. Then he picked up another set of forms from the pile and called out a name.

  I took my Social Security forms back to the car and read through them. They seemed depressingly detailed. One section asked for bank account numbers and stated that anyone with an accessible fund of five hundred dollars or more would not be immediately eligible for benefits. I thought about that for a while, then got out of my car again, went to the bank and withdrew all my money.

  But Social Security could wait for a few more days. There were several things I needed to gather up anyway. Three forms of identification, for a start, which I wasn’t sure I had. And more importantly, I needed a separation certificate from the Capital, to prove I was no longer working there.

  Cynthia had warned me about this. She’d been unemployed for several years all told, here and there. She advised that if possible I should get my former boss to fill in the form in such a way that it said he’d sacked me. A sacked worker was elegible for benefits much sooner than one who’d quit.

  I didn’t know if my old manager would do this.

  He was an unpleasant person.

  Still, I had to go and see him anyway. I had discovered, in the act of emptying my bank account, that the money owing to me for my last half-week’s work had not been paid.

  But that could wait too.

  I was tired and hungover and more occupied with thoughts about Cynthia than I was with finances. I drove home, opened up the flat and went to bed.

  I woke in the dim evening and got up. I showered, made a sandwich, turned on the TV. There was a knock on the door. Vass came in. He was red-eyed and smelled of old wine, but he was sober. His lungs sounded as bad as they’d ever been. Death was close. I always watched Vass carefully when his emphysema was in ascendance. It was my own future, after all.

  ‘That was a nice girl you had here last night,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. She is.’

  ‘I walked past last night in the hall and I could hear you going for it ...’

  ‘The walls are very thin.’

  ‘You met the new people yet?’

  ‘I heard them this morning. They were screaming at each other. What’re they like?’

  ‘They’re nice kids. They just got up here from Sydney. You wanna buy a car? They have to sell their car. It’s an HQ Holden stationwagon. They need the money.’

  My own car was an HZ Holden sedan, the last of the Kingswood series. I was very fond of it. There was something pure and humble about the lines, the wide-set wheels, the simple 3.3 litre engine. But there was no room in my heart for another one.

  I said, ‘No, one car is enough. How much do they want for it?’

  ‘Eight hundred.’

  Which might’ve been good value. I didn’t know. The truth was I didn’t even own my car. It had been the family vehicle, years before. It’d been handed down by my parents through the various sons and daughters until it came to me. It was still registered in my parents’ name, and they still paid the registration, year after year.

  They were very good, my mother and father, to a son who even at twenty-three hadn’t shown much sign of getting his economic life in order.

  ‘He’s Spanish,’ said Vass. ‘His name is Raymond.’

  ‘Is that a Spanish name?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know? That’s just what he said. And she’s a nice little thing. Cathy. She’s white.’

  ‘Why’d they come to Brisbane.’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Vass thought everyone that moved in was okay at first. Generally he ended up hating them within a week or two.

  ‘Did you get your radio back?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh? How did you know my radio was gone?’

  ‘You told me. In the hallway. About a week ago.’

  ‘Aaah. No. The bastards. One of them took it. They stole my TV and they stole my radio and now I’ve got nothing.’

  Although I didn’t know who had stolen the radio, I certainly knew why. It was a big old thing, with powerful speakers, and he played it loud, always on country music stations. Vass was mostly deaf. He refused to wear his hearing aid, even in private. We’d all gone through nights of hammering on his door and yelling at him to turn the volume down, but he’d stay in his room and pretend he couldn’t hear. Still, I felt for him. He rarely left the two rooms he lived in, and without a TV or radio, all he had left was reading and drinking. I’d seen what he read. In his flat there were stacks of Louis Lamour western novels.

  ‘That’s pretty bad,’ I told him.

  He nodded. He seemed sad.

  ‘You aren’t working today?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I quit. Remember?’

  ‘Aaah. So you did. You treat that girl nice, okay.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Don’t hit her. There’s too much of that.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  And so we watched TV.

  SIX

  Next day I drove over to the Capital Hotel. I found the manager out in the bottle shop. Nothing had changed much, except I didn’t recognise the boy working there. The manager’s name was Simon. He was twenty-two. He hadn’t been there long. He was the last in a long line of managers the owners had appointed to get the pub going again. The Capital had been running down steadily for the last decade or so. On his first day as manager Simon had assembled the staff and made a speech.

  He’d said, ‘There’s only one thing I want you to remember. We’re here to make this place a success. As long as everyone is working as hard as they can and as long as the hotel is bringing in as many paying customers as I know it should, everything will be fine. You’ll be happy, and I’ll be happy. Remember, we’re a team, and if everyone puts a little extra effort in we can make this work.’

  He was the youngest person in the room. It was no real suprise that everyone had left or been sacked within a month.

  But he liked me, for some reason, and when I told him about the certificate I needed and about how I hadn’t been paid yet, he appeared genuinely concerned. He took me up to the office and counted out the money I was owed. Then he found a severance form and asked me how I wanted it filled out.

  ‘Could you say you sacked me?’

  He could. There were several options on those forms as to why an employer might discharge an employee. One was to do with incompetence on the employee’s part, another was for excessive absenteeism and so on, and one was simply for lack of available work. He ticked the third. Looked at me. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. That’s about it.’

  ‘If you ever wanna come back, y’know, just give me a call.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I didn’t understand it. He was decent to me, but I still didn’t like him. Some people you never did. Maybe it was just that he was fool enough to expect his staff to care about the hotel, and fool enough to tell his staff that he expected it. Working in pubs, or in any retail business, was at best a dreary and mindless existence. To be merely competent at it — to refrain, say, from abusing forty or fifty per cent of your customers — often took a soul-destroying effort. To have enthusiasm demanded of you, that was more than the job was worth.

  Back home again I found visitors knocking on my door. Molly and Leo. I knew Leo from university. He was an Agricultural Sciences student. He lived on study benefits and worked part-time as a cleaner in a department store. He was short and wiry, with long stringy red hair. His movements were nervous. Molly was his girlfriend of three or four months. She was a modern-day love child. In a sense they both were. They were striving for a peaceful existence. Molly work
ed as a nurse. Part-time. Very few of my friends had passed into that netherworld of a full-time career.

  I invited them in.

  ‘You feel like a smoke?’ Leo asked. He was already rolling one. I didn’t smoke a great deal, in this particular sense, but there was nothing else happening for the afternoon. Leo lit up and we passed the joint around. It wasn’t very strong, which was good. If it’d been strong I would’ve been useless for conversation for the next hour or so.

  ‘I hear you quit work,’ Molly was saying.

  ‘Uh-huh. I registered at the C.E.S. yesterday. I’m going on the dole at last.’

  ‘What will you do with all that time? Will you write?’

  Molly wrote short stories and poetry. I’d never read anything of hers. I had, once, in a bad and drunken moment, shown her a few of my own poems. She hadn’t liked them. She thought they were crude and pointless.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll just sit around here for a few months.’

  ‘Sit around? How can you just sit around?’

  ‘It’s easy. You just have to keep your expectations under control. Expectations are the problem with everything.’

  ‘You have to have expectations about something.’

  ‘No. No, you don’t.’

  Leo and Molly had no plans for the afternoon either. In the end we walked down to one of the local pubs, the Queen’s Arms. We sat in the public bar and drank, then moved into the private bar where a band was starting up. They were doing ironic covers of songs from the sixties and seventies. It seemed appropriate enough, considering the company.

  Molly and Leo were a strange couple. For all their peaceful intentions, there was a lot of hatred between them, from Molly in particular. She was possibly the most commercially attractive women I’d ever met, but she was the coldest too. She wore purple sarongs, talked to flowers, but there was nothing of the earth mother inside her.

  That was part of Cynthia’s attraction. She was very much earth mother material. Big and warm and chaotic.