Published in Issue
6, SCANT literary journal, 1998. [In
memory of Natalie Jayne Russell of Frankston, Victoria, who was murdered in 1993]
by Barbara
Welton
He killed a Gothic
Punk girl. There was her picture in the morning paper - a gorgeous girl (as all
goth girls are) in purple and black velvet, standing in her parents' loungeroom
holding a single red rose. Almost all of us had practically identical photos in
our photo albums. Look into any punk's photo collection and you're bound to
find at least one teenage snap in front of the telly or the bookshelf or the
open fireplace or mum's rhododendrons. The tell-tale family details sprinkle
the background: framed pictures and tacky ornaments on lace doilies, cheap
Monet prints, teaspoon collections. The juxtaposition of punk child amidst
parents' trinkets always looks charming and nostalgic. It shows, more than
anything else, our parents' pride in us.
I can't describe
how angry I was when I found out he killed a goth girl. I'd read about so many
other murders in the newspapers, even other murders by this same bastard, but
this one ate at me for days. He’d killed one of us. One of my people.
The gothic scene is
a fairly small and intimate one in this city, just like any other. I’d probably
seen her dancing in one of the clubs. Her signature could have been the one
above mine on the "I need a Cure tour" petition. She could have been
the girl in the fantastic Cramps t-shirt I stood behind at the Mission concert
a couple of years back. She could have been the girl I pick up at the club next
weekend. She could have been.... She could have been.
I had a distasteful
kind of anger boiling away inside me for days, willing me towards destruction
but somehow never quite letting me get there. I hated that bastard for killing
that girl. So I didn’t go to Uni. I hated him for killing someone who loved the
same music as me. So I drank myself legless every night. I hated him for
putting an end to such a gorgeous girl’s beauty. So I turned all my cash into
white powder and snorted it.
The first Friday
night, club night, after her picture appeared in the paper, I was drunk and
speeding and barely able to stay upright at the bar. My best mates, Andy and
Justin, couldn’t work out what was eating me. They took it in turns to nurse me
and keep me out of trouble, and there was plenty for me to get into.
They talked my way
out of one fight I’d tried like hell to get into. And it took both of them to
literally haul me off a guy who made some remark about the Sisters of Mercy
being a better band than Bauhaus. By four in the morning the speed still had me
flying and I had a beautiful black-and-purple-clad girl against a cubicle wall
in the ladies’ toilet. As I came, I burst into tears and sobbed into her
alabaster neck while our legs trembled. She licked the tears from my cheek and
told me what a sensitive guy I must be. Justin, banging on the cubicle door,
shouted out I was just a mad bastard and a Bauhaus song had just come on, so
let’s dance!
On the dancefloor,
with my mates, surrounded by pale, gorgeous girls and boys, assaulted by the
best music in the world, I forgot about her for a little while. I danced ‘til
my thighs shook, ‘til my t- shirt was soaked in sweat, ‘til my air-sole Docs
seemed to have lost some of their bounce. And I forgot. But then it was closing
time and daylight had to be faced.
As Andy, Justin and
I stepped out of the club into the harsh, bright, six a.m. sun, my first
thought was which pocket of my leather jacket were my shades hiding in? My
second thought was, he killed a goth girl.
I felt like
running. It had rained during the night and the deserted city streets were
slick with rainbow oil patches shimmering under foot. It felt good, jogging
down the middle of the road, silver earrings jingling, cold breeze rising up
off the asphalt to blow some of the club-stink of smoke and dry ice out of my
hair. Andy and Justin fell in beside me and we ran for a while in almost
silence, just the fall of our steps, the creak of our leather jackets and the
rattle of Andy’s boot buckles. We ran as far as the river and sat down to catch
our breath on a bench damp with morning dew. Our breath caught in the air as we
exhaled, a phenomenon I called Dragon Breathing when I was a kid.
Justin’s black nail
polish was chipped. I noticed this when he put his hand on my knee. I didn’t
feel it at first ‘cause it was a light touch and black denim’s a pretty thick
fabric. But then he gripped, released, gripped, released a few times and I
looked down at his black-tipped hand.
‘What’s with you,
Dan?’
I wanted to hug
him. Wanted to put my hands inside his leather jacket and feel his bony ribs
through his black lace shirt and hug him and hug him and hug him. But I was too
angry.
‘That bastard
killed one of us.’ I looked across the river, over the brown water and floating
rubbish, to the new shopping development on the other side. A new crystal and
tarot shop was opening up there soon. She’d never see it.
‘Who did?’ asked
Andy.
‘That prick down
the coast, killing those women. One of them was a goth. She was gorgeous.’
‘Yeah, I saw the
paper,’ said Justin, ‘She looked a bit like my sister, I thought.’
‘Did you see him on
the news after they arrested him?’ I was talking more to the river than to
either of my friends. ‘What gets at me most, apart from there being one less
beautiful girl in the world now, is that that prick is the sort of person
everyone else calls normal. There he was with his blue jeans and his American
runners and his daggy jumper pulled up over his head. They’d look at him and
say he was normal. But they look at us and call us freaks. People stare at us
and point and laugh and call us all sorts of things just because we look
different. If you put that bastard and me in a room and asked a sweet little
old lady to pick which one of us murdered people for thrills, she’d choose me
everytime. Because he looks "normal". It makes me so fucking angry. I
just wanna scream.’
Justin’s white hand
crept up from my knee to my thigh and squeezed companionably. I suddenly
remembered a time we got stoned together when we were seventeen. Justin’s
parents were never the kind to check up on him when he had friends over. So we’d smoked ‘til our eyelids drooped then
undressed each other in slow motion and exchanged virginities on his dad's pool
table. It was a special friend you could do stuff like that with. I wanted to
cry again.
‘If you wanna
scream,’ Andy shrugged next to me, ‘Go ahead and scream. Who’s gonna hear you
at this time of the morning?’
I sniffed and
looked around me. Andy was right. We were the only people stupid enough to be
out this early. I opened my mouth, not really expecting any sound to come out.
But it did. I screamed out over the river, up at the sky, heard my voice scream
back at me after bouncing off buildings. I swore. I cursed. Eventually I cried.
And it felt good.
Andy and Justin
took me home to my place and pushed me into bed. Andy was starting to come
down, so he left to head home himself. Justin was about to follow suit when I
asked him to stay.
‘She did look like
your sister, now you mention it.’ I told him as he wrapped my shivering body in
the black satin top sheet and let me sob against his chest until our mouths
found each other.
Four days later I
finally sobered up, came down, got straight. The preceding days were a blur of
vodka, nightmares, speed and Justin’s hands. Then the news said the final
victim had been buried yesterday after a small family service. That was her.
I grabbed my
leather jacket and my sunglasses and jumped into my Volkswagon, heading for the
suburb the papers said she grew up in. I once went out with a girl from the
same ‘burb and we used to picnic in the local cemeteries. I at least had an
idea of where to start looking for her.
I found her in the
third place I looked. The smaller, prettier graveyard with more ivory angels of
death than all the others. Very gothic. She’d be pleased. The fresh grave was
easy to spot, with its fertile brown earth and temporary headstone/marker. So
many fresh flowers! So many wreaths and cards and spilled tears.
I dropped down onto
the ground, my black-jeaned knees sinking into the disturbed soil. I didn’t
know what I wanted to do or say now that I was here alone with her. I fiddled
with the blood red petals of a rose for a bit while I thought about her. I
thought about her smile in the photo in the paper. I thought about her stab
wounds. I thought about how resplendent her friends must have looked at her
funeral, all decked out in their finest black lace and velvets. I thought about
the empty space at her parents’ dining table.
An idea suddenly
came to me and I started scrambling around in my jacket pockets, turning out
whatever treasures I could find. A home- taped cassette of the Bauhaus singles
album. A free pass to my favourite club. A black silk scarf I had used as a
playful bondage implement on more than a few partners. A hip flask half-full of
Jack Daniel’s. An empty, crumpled speed bag.
A broken silver necklace with an ornate cross dangling from it.
I laid these things
out on the soil and looked at them for a moment, remembering how the Ancient
Egyptians used to give the dead useful things for the next life. Took a few
swigs from the hip flask. Stuffed the empty speed bag back into my pocket. Then I spread the scarf out, placing the
cassette and the free pass on it and tied it all together with the silver
necklace. The bundle, once firmly tied, looked vaguely like an old fashioned
draw-string bag, the dangling cross on the necklace standing
starkly against the
black silk. It was a weird kind of offering, but it was all I had. And they
were my things. A personal kind of offering. I placed it at the base of the
temporary marker and sat back on my heels.
Tragedy had never
touched my life. I’d never lost anyone close to me. She, the girl I’d read
about in a newspaper, was the first recipient of my mourning. Was it okay to be
so angry? Feel so self- destructive? To want to drink more and fuck harder and
take more drugs? To want to scream and cry and throw myself against things?
An enormous black
crow "faarked!" beside me, making me jump. I looked at my watch and
saw I’d knelt there for almost an hour. I hadn’t told Justin where I was going.
He might be worrying. Then again, I’d been a hell of an arsehole to be around
since I saw her in the paper, so maybe Justin was glad to be rid of me for a
while. Nah... he was my best mate, of course he was worried about me. I had to
get home and let him know I was okay.
I gulped down the
last of the bourbon and slid the hip flask back into my leather jacket. My
knees made a cracking noise as I stood up and dusted the brown dirt off my
jeans, wondering what the most appropriate way of saying goodbye to her would
be. I realised quickly there wasn’t an appropriate way. So I bent down and
pressed my cold lips to the first initial of her name on the marker, letting my
tongue snake out to touch it softly. Stuffing my hands into the pockets of my
jacket, I backed away from the grave, only turning my back on her when I was
far enough away to not be able to read her name anymore. Then I put my head
down and stormed out of the cemetery, back to my Volks, back to my rooms, back
to Justin and Andy, back to Uni, back to my life. And I hated that bastard
every day for killing a goth girl.
the end.