Girl Defective (7 page)

FUCKBOMB! The audience screamed against a batallion of drums.

FUCKBOMB! Like getting hit across the head with a sheet metal plate, again and again and again.

FUCKBOMB! Two girls in front of me throttle-danced, smiling huge.

Nancy and I thrashed around. The songs were short and violent and thrilling. By the time the band imploded in a squall of feedback, I was sweating and panting. My body hummed like a tuning fork that had just been hit.

“Do you feel it yet?” Nancy whispered.

My face hurt, but whether it was from smiling or clenching, I couldn't tell. The DJ was playing something that sounded like psychotic circus music. Nancy grabbed my wrists.

“Do you feel it now?”

My face would have answered her question, but her eyes were closed.

Later in the ladies' room I clung to a corner and watched the light fall on the beaded curtain. I'd lost
Nancy, and time had become a slippery thing. I had no idea how long I'd been in there, but it felt like forever. The room was jammed with girls checking hair and hurling laughter. A group of them was wearing silver scarves. They looked like a girl gang or a dance troupe. One of them saw me staring and gave me a dirty look. I shifted my focus to the wallpaper. I wanted desperately to straighten up, but the patterns on the wallpaper were moving. I turned my face to the wall, aware that I looked weird, unable to do anything about it. I went inside myself. And when I came back out, I heard voices volleying. A door slammed. The towel dispenser jammed. Somebody yelled, “He's starting!”

T
HE CROWD HAD CHANGED.
All of the color had moved up to the front. The girls with silver scarves hugged the lip of the stage and swayed like tendrils. I counted seven of them. Seven girls in silver scarves. The lights dimmed again. The audience
aah
ed. The curtains parted and a big screen showed slides of abandoned barns, plane wrecks, clouds. The band wandered out wearing animal masks and started up some moody swirl of noise. Otis—the fox—took his mask off. He was in a sharkskin suit and had a silver scarf, same as the girls. The thought hit:
the Girlfriends of Otis.
I remembered Nancy then and cast around for her, but the images on the screen tumbled down and I felt as though I was tumbling with them.

Otis emitted a series of sobs into his microphone. He had hair like bracken and skin like space dust. His songs were spells that floated up and weaved around the chandeliers and then were swallowed by the crowd. When he smiled, it was like his face fragmented and I didn't know where to look. It was merge music—there were no sharp edges; it was all meandering and liquid.

After a long time he lifted his hand and the band stopped. The audience seemed to be holding its breath. Otis's speaking voice was higher than I'd expected. It didn't completely break the spell, but it woke me up a little.

“It's the end of an era,” he piped. “The Paradise's coming down. Take a piece before you go.”

I saw Nancy then. She was on the edge of the stage, half-hidden by the curtain. Her face was flushed and dreamy—almost unrecognizable.

One by one the band members ambled off the stage until it was only Otis left with the hum of the amplifiers. Then: Crash. Shudder. Blink. It was over.

Otis lingered talking to various scarf girls. Nancy inched forward and picked up his fox head. She looked weird standing there, cradling it and staring at him with an expression that wasn't far from Gully's dazey-face. Then Otis was talking closely to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. I could hear the scarf girls seething. It was like a hive, the noise.

I called out to Nancy. She saw me, but she didn't move. I climbed onto the stage, but even when I was standing next to her, she felt far away.

“Hey.” I tugged her sleeve.

“Hey.” Her eyes stayed on Otis. He turned to talk to someone else, and then Nancy was fumbling in her pocket, trying to give me something. Money.

“For the taxi,” she said.

Otis was moving, and she followed after him, somehow wormed her way back under his arm.

I held the note dumbly and watched as they glided to the exit. Nancy's eyes were straight; her mouth hid her smile. The scarf girls formed two lines to make a kind of bower. They waved their scarves, and if one or two hit Nancy full in the face, she didn't seem fazed.

Then someone grabbed the song list. Someone else tore down a poster. All around me people were stealing their pieces of the Paradise. I went back to the ladies' room, where a girl was fashioning lengths of the beaded curtain into necklaces. It was Quinn Bishop. She recognized me and raised her eyebrows. “Sky
lark
. Do your parents know you're here?”

And just like that, I started crying. It was weird. Embarrassing. The tears kept coming.

Quinn watched me cry. She placed an awkward hand on my shoulder. And then she looped a bead necklace over my head. I splashed water on my face and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I didn't look startled anymore. I looked wretched.

Quinn squeezed my shoulder. “What are you on?”

“My friend gave me something.”

“Good friend?”

I nodded, wiping my eyes.

“You going home? You want to walk with me?”

I was so grateful I had to stop myself from blubbering all over again.

As we walked out of the theater, all I could think of was wreck and plunder. As well as the beads around her neck, Quinn had an SLR camera. She took my picture. Then she snapped the emptying street, the passing cars.

“So you're into Otis?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He's like . . . total catnip.”

Quinn laughed. She looked completely different from in school. Open, friendly. Less bulldog-ish. She paused to snap two guys who'd scaled the sides of the building to lift letters from the marquee. Old Eli Wallace was in his camp chair, watching, his face an etching of despair. Quinn snapped him, too. Finally she lowered the camera. She pointed city-side. “I'm that way.”

I pointed in the other direction. “I'm that way.”

“I know,” she said. “The record shop, right?”

We smiled at each other like we shared a secret and then forked off.

I
WENT FROM GLOOM
to rushing. I felt jittery, alive. I half ran, half skipped with one hand on my new necklace, my heart pounding. The night was all things coming together and breaking apart, like kaleidoscope patterns, like kisses. The lights of McDonald's pulsed. The traffic was a steady throb. The clown face of Luna Park looked sinister in the half dark. I slipped onto the park path, into shadows, and heard movement by the iron siding, a scraping noise. Behind the bushes someone was pasting up a poster—a poster of Mia Casey.

“Hey!” My voice broke the quiet. The guy turned around, startled, and he was Luke.

“It's you,” I said, but that was all I could manage before lights swamped us and a voice commanded: “Stay where you are.”

Luke pushed past me, knocking me down. In that moment I heard something fall. I crouched and my fingers found Luke's glasses. I clutched them and stood up again, and blinked into the torch of a big-faced policeman. There was another officer with him. She stepped
out of the shadows, and I saw she was Constable Eve Brennan. My mind whirled on the smallness of St. Kilda and the bigness of my fuck-up.

“You're Bill's kid, right?”

I nodded.

“What are you doing?”

I found my voice. “Going home.”

“Who was with you?”

“I don't know. I don't know him.”

“Where have you been?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Eve exchanged a weary look with her partner. “Come on.”

The police car smelled like warm leatherette and antiseptic. I was in the backseat but not cuffed or anything. I pictured the cell, bread and water, skeleton keys. I played out scenarios—the stuff of Gully's dreams: being printed and interrogated under a bare, swinging bulb. The station loomed, all matte black and windows. Eve's eyes met mine in her mirror. She gave me a firm smile. “I'll take you home.”

I nodded. She was giving me something and I was grateful. I hoped I didn't look stoned, or that if I did, Dad would be too pissed to notice.

Eve came up with me. Up our skinny stairs into the too-bright light of the living room, where Dad was dozing in front of an old movie. She clocked the empties
but didn't mention them. When Dad saw her, his face was like the picture for
HAPPY
on Gully's chart. When he saw me, it changed to
CONFUSED
, and then
ANGRY.

“Where the hell have you been?”

I still had Luke's glasses in my hand. I moved them behind my back. “The movie finished early, so we went to a party. It's okay. I'm okay. Nothing happened.”

Dad ran his hand through his hair and then brought it down quickly to cover his beer belly. He was in his friendlies: a Cosmic Psychos T-shirt and football shorts that showed way too much leg. I looked at our flat the way Eve would see it: the unwashed dishes, the Pee-wee Herman poster, the bills skewered on the antlers Mum had found at a garage sale a lifetime ago.

“She was walking home by herself,” Eve reported.

Dad stared at me. “Where's Nancy?”

I smiled a stupid involuntary smile, and Dad's face just crumpled.

“Are you drunk?”

I ran then, out of the room and up the stairs, heading off the next wave of tears. I locked my door and took off Nancy's top and pressed my face into it. It smelled of her. My whole room still had the air of her, of promise and adventure. I wished I'd never left it. My record player was still turning, playing nothing, the belt squealing faintly with each revolution like a
tiny, desperate animal. I stood close to it and watched it spinning around and around. And then I turned it off and went to bed.

In my dream Mia Casey and I were sitting on St. Kilda Pier, our toes just touching the surface of the water. We were eating icy poles and talking about the future.

Mia said, “I want to work with kids. Like, maybe I'll do face painting.”

“I'm going to work in the shop,” I told her. “Forever.”

Nancy was there. She was sitting nearby, but she wouldn't look at us. She hung her head, and her hair was a curtain. I could see her face reflected on the water, but it appeared dark and distorted.

“Sky,” Mia said. “The water's really fucking cold.”

She jumped then and I couldn't see her after that. It was as if she'd never been there. No ripples formed. The water stayed flat, silver and shiny as a coin.