onetwothreewhatever
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When it rains in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon, the streets run black and shiny, subrban gardens seem pressed under a great weight and the sky is bruised and bleeding. Walking up Punt Road, the clock upon the silo says eleven degrees, and you realise you just ran out of Melbourne cliches. The wind comes slicing up Swan St. direct from Glen Waverly, expressly to gnaw at your bones. It seems to be winter all over the planet. You slope past Punt Road Oval with your collar turned upu, acting as a funnel to let the rain pour down your jacket, and grit your teeth at the sound of victorious cheering and some fucken stupid football song from the 'G. You start off in the worst possible mood, then talk yourself into an upgrade. You turn the change in your pockets. You kick at the wet leaves glued to the footpath. You make up new swear words. You scream heavy metal arrangements of The Sound Of Music in your head, and think grimly about razors on roses and pythons on kittens. Your hair gets fucked around with. Henry Miller claimed that Paris was a woman, a great and hideous whore, a glorious creature rotting and riddled with incandexcent corruption, syphilitic, suppurating into spiritual decay. Lizi couldn't stand Henry Miller, but the metaphor, she decided, bore extension. Melbourne was her city, and she had so far totally failed to fall in love with it. This city was not a woman. Melbourne, as far she could determine, was profoundly male, a frustrating and difficult young undergraduate, so proud of his own complexity and so wrapped up in his own precious pain. At times she could see in his fog-shrouded demeanour the pompous, officious old man of fifty years hence. At other times the precocious and bad-tempered toddler came to the fore, screaming temper tantrums and hurling handfuls of rain. Melbourne, she decided, went to a private boys school and played on the footy team. Melbourne probably watched "The Panel" and secretly admired Jeff Kennett. Melbourne, almost certainly had read the right books, and wouldn't be seen dead without a Penguin 60 in his left hip pocket. He would drink too much coffee, smoke joints on alternate Fridays and get E'd off his head ever Saturday night at doofs in Clifton Hill. Melbourne was consumed with jealousy of his gorgeous fag-whore older brother who had always been Mummy's favorite. This city, she decided, did not paint pictures on the wall, and wouldn't walk you to the corner in his pyjamas, no matter what Tim Freidman would have you believe. Melbourne would insist that he was a Feminist. Melbourne would hate his lectures. Melbourne was capable of being sunny and charming, but would rarely do so 'cause he'd think he looked cute with a thunderous scowl. Melbourne would be perpetually Writing A Novel, and would continue to do so until he died, became a managing director, or turned fifty. Melbourne would drink beer 'cause he thought it made him a man of the people, vote for the Democrats, the loudly announce that Politics Is All Crap Anyway. Melbourne almost certainly owned a duffle coat. Lizi shoved through the door into Aleka's, stalked past the counter and hurled herself violently onto the couch. Brown velour under cold hands. Fuck it, fuck winter, her hands were always frozen. Fish fingers. Low blood pressure, crappy circulation, a flicker of rogue genetics. Her lifelong explanation for that dracula-pale face, and her fur coat in November. Her habit of turning green and keeling over without ten hours sleep. My life as a delicate flower. The rough scrape of the unfinished bricks against her cheek, and the irritating buzz of the single fan-forced heater somewhere behind the coffee display. Bad techno played softy in the background. To Lizi, techno was roughly akin to anal sex: undignified and awkward and even when good, she was not particularly fond of it. Someone had left a copy of Black + White on the sculpture-slash-coffee-table-thing in front of her. She leafed through it, taking care to maintain the prescribed bored-shitless-by-arty-celebrity-porn expression. Famous person gets his/her kit off, why it's super to have lots of money and buy things, ads with beautiful people that no-one ever looks like and nobody gets to fuck, interview with photographer in square-frame glasses and turtleneck. Ten to four. Fuck. She'd forgotten, how he ran on his own personal Hamish-time that no human clock could ever be persuaded to measure. Hamish-time did weird things to the laws of physics, turned an evening at the Public Bar into at least a decade, and a simple week into a bleeding eternity. Hamish with his own private time scale, his two hundred CD's and his reaking cigarettes. You could always smell him comming, pick his clothes from anyone else's dropped upon the floor, and when he held you that scent seemed to fill the world. Hamish who drove the best, read the best, ate and drank and listened to the best. As for fucking the best, well, he'd had a minor slip up recently but now he was right back on track. They had resolved only to speak in cafes now, diplomatic territory, mopped-linoleum no-mans-lands with blank-eyed soldiers in field uniforms of black aprons and primary-coloured dreds. "Hi, what can I get you?"
The waitress took in Lizi's interesting-ugly features, tortoise-shell glasses and treaky violet hair. Recognising a fellow barrel-scraping part-time-working Yoof-Allowance-offcut, she dropped that syrupy customer-service purr. "Dounle espresso. Thanks." It was a day to embrace the toxins. The waitress pivoted and swaggered off on her racehorse legs. The waitresses in this place, they were always so perpetually skinny. Made you wonder what the cafe owner did to them. Probably had a battery farm out the back, keep 'em in wire cages, feed 'em on bruschetta and coffee beans 'til they were too hyper to see straight, then sold them to the children's television industry. It was probably time to cut down on the coffee. She lit a cigarette and stared out the window, brain slipping gracefully sideways out of shot. Easy to lose yourself, staring into the rain, and if you sat and stared for long enough you could lose just about anyone else, too. Typical Hamish for you; he was born one of those people whose fears and fuckups and capital-I Issues had a way of sneaking out of their box and becoming everyone else's Issues too. When he fell down and scraped his knee in kindergarten, it was probably the little kid next to him who started crying. She picked absently at a cold-sore scab on her lip. And lets be fair about this, she was probably the kid who'd pushed him in the first place. The coffee arrived. She drank it. Her cigarette went out. She drew patterns in the ash, hearts and flowers, triangle-skirted stick-figure girls, little skeletons out dancing in the rain. Tall skinny Claires with shiny blonde hair and sweet dispositions. Pretty pale long-limbed angels whom it was vexingly impossible to hate. She wished, on the spur of the moment, for someone else to be there, some utterly platonic companion, someone with both listening skills and venom. She contented herself instead with thinking up some suitably polished guilt-tripping line to whack Hamish over the head with. "Ah yeah, I'm doing great now, I used to cry bucketfuls a day, the it was more like saucepans, now I'm down to half a teacup a week." Nyeh. Too pathetic. Better to stick to the traditional script, "I'm fine, don't worry about me, I want you to be happy, " accompanied by patented Romanian-orphan expression and shining green eyes full of tears. The one sphere of life where pale corpselike skin and cracked bleeding lips stood as a positive advantage. Four-fifteen. Jesus. The speading winter dark outsife was turning the window into a mirror of ghosts, reflecting the candlelit cafe interior back in weak yellow smears. Lizi focused in vain on the moving figures outside, unable to quite look past. And Christ she was getting fat - she'd look in the mirror these days and see only a porcine pig-ugly troll. Four-twenty-five. Fuck it. Control the guilt and you may control the man, as Granny would have said, but keep the girl waitting around the coffeehouse for half an hour and it's pretty clear who's in charge, who's always been incharge and who always will be. Things had been all right briefly, or maybe they'd just been able to trick themselves otherwise, but something had splintered and faded out of sight and you can just blame entropy, the inevitable winding-down of the universe, things falling apart. Claire could put up with his shit if she chose, but Lizi had a healthy respect for that girl and her judgement, platinum hair or not. Breathing in deeply for one of her famous drama-queen sighs, she'd have sworn she sniffed his tobacco, just the faintest puff of it, drifting past her face, dissolving, dispersing. She slapped two dollars down on the coffee-table and stood up to go.
by Anna Andrews-Caughney |
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