Praise (2 page)

‘C'mon, I know you, it was solidarity. It was
a protest
. So what're you gonna do now?'

‘Nothing. Not for a while anyway.'

I hung up and rolled a cigarette and turned on the television. I could hear voices arguing from up the hall. It was a Wednesday night. I thought about it. Doing nothing for a while. It sounded fine, but I'd been out of work before and it'd never lasted more than a week or two. Money was the thing. You needed at least a little. In the end there was always Social Security, and the dole, but bureaucracies and their systems depressed me. Work in many ways seemed easier. I thought about maybe, despite it all, getting up and looking for work the next day. Bottle shop work, pub work, was always easy enough to find.

Then Morris arrived. He had four bottles of good white wine. Embezzled, along with several dozen others over the years, from the Capital. We settled in and drank. It helped. We justified each other, justified our positions. We didn't need the Capital. Morris caught a cab home when it was finished.

Next morning I woke late. Life was waiting there.

I got up and went down the hall to the toilets. I met one of the old men on the way. His name was Vass. I didn't know if it was his first name or last. He never said. He'd been living there longer than any of us, longer than even the agent remembered.

‘The bastards stole my radio,' he told me.

‘I've quit work,' I told him.

‘Yeah? You gonna get another job?'

‘Not today.'

And then I was on the bowl, letting the shit go.

New Farm Park was just around the corner from the house. I went there after I'd showered. It was about midday. I sat at one of the tables overlooking the river. There weren't many people around. It was a grey day, drizzling from time to time. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it. I felt pleased with myself. It was definitely a better thing to be sitting there in the park than to be at the bottle shop. I'd got that much right.

I sat there about an hour.

The rain steadied, got heavy.

I walked home.

The afternoon moved on. There was nothing on TV. I prowled around the flat, wondering what to do with myself. There were no answers. Then the phone rang. It was Cynthia.

I knew almost nothing about her.

I'd always maintained a certain distance from the staff at the Capital. I liked them, I drank with them, but I didn't get involved. There were only a few, Carla and Morris, and maybe Lisa, that I bothered with outside working hours. Most of my friends came from other parts of my life. From school. University. Most of the sex came from there too, but there wasn't that much sex and what there was hadn't been much good. I was young and nervous and not very enthusiastic. I didn't have the libido I felt I was supposed to have. And I didn't expect things to improve. I relied on masturbation.

And Cynthia had only been working at the Capital for three or four months. We'd talked just the once, about a book I found her reading behind the bar one day. It was by Voltaire. It wasn't much of a conversation. I didn't know who Voltaire was.

‘I heard you quit,' she said, on the phone.

‘I heard you got fired.'

‘I didn't get fired. I quit before they got round to it.'

‘Really? Why?'

‘I'm leaving Brisbane anyway. I
hate
this place.'

That was understandable. I was happy enough in Brisbane, but it wasn't for everyone.

She said, ‘I was wondering if you felt like a few drinks?'

‘Sure. I've got the time. You mean going out? Or would you like to come over here?'

‘Well, my parents are away for a couple of weeks, if you'd like to come over here instead. It's a nice house.'

So she lived with her parents. I wondered how old she was. She looked about twenty-eight, or thirty.

‘Okay,' I said. I wrote down the address. ‘You want me to get you something to drink on the way?'

‘No, only for yourself. I've already got some beer here.'

I drove over. I stopped along the way for some beer. Twelve bottles of Fourex. Cynthia lived in St Lucia. Her parents' house was set back off the street. The yard behind it led down into a rainforested gully. I carried the carton up the footpath and knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?'

‘It's me.'

The door opened.

‘Hello,' I said.

She had a cigarette in her mouth. I remembered her brand was Winfield Blue. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, blew out the smoke.

I held up the carton.

‘Come on in,' she said.

I followed her into the kitchen and we stacked the beer in the fridge. There were several six packs of Tooheys Old in there as well. She already had a can open for herself, so I poured myself a beer and looked around the house. She was right, it was nice. Wooden floors and big rooms and a verandah overlooking the gully. We sat out there. The sky was still grey but the rain had stopped.

I said, ‘So where are your parents?'

‘In Darwin. Dad's in the Army. He's a major. He's being transferred up there. He's gone up with Mum to sort out a new house. Then they'll come back and get the furniture and get me and we'll leave.'

‘You're going with them?'

‘There's no reason to stay in Brisbane. I've only been here for six months. I don't know anyone here. I don't like the town. And I want to spend some time with Mum and Dad. It's the first time I've lived with them in years. They threw me out of home when I was fifteen.'

‘How old are you now?'

‘Twenty-three.'

I stared at her. Twenty-three? She didn't look it. Short dyed blond hair, a round creased face, big solid hips.

‘You're kidding? Twenty-three?'

‘I know. I look older. I've got a skin condition. Eczema. It's fucked up my face.'

I got up and had a close look at her face. She was wearing a lot of make-up, but under the make-up you could see that her skin was red and scraped and tough. I told her this. She said it wasn't tough. She said that it was in fact quite delicate. Just a touch could make it bleed. The problem was allergic reactions. She was allergic to things like wool, dust, soap, various foods, alcohol. She finished her beer and got herself another one.

I watched her gulp it down.

‘So how old are you?' she said.

‘Twenty-three.'

‘You look older. You've got soft skin, but you still look older. Maybe it's the hair.'

‘Maybe it is.'

My hair, at the time, was long. Unwashed. Down to the shoulders.

We sat there all afternoon. Mostly we talked about the pub and how good it felt to be out of it. I asked her if she'd been to Darwin before. She hadn't. I told her I'd seen Darwin and that I couldn't imagine her liking it any more than Brisbane. She shrugged.

I asked, ‘How come you've moved back in with your parents after all this time?'

‘I came up here to straighten out. I'd been in Sydney for a year on heroin. I got sick of it.'

‘You still on it now?'

‘No. It's easy enough to quit once you're away from the crowd. I was in love with this girl at the time and she was a dealer. I got it for free.'

‘Are you gay?'

‘No, but I've been with women a few times. The problem with women is they don't have penises. I have a thing for penises.'

We drank on. Her parents had a dog, a cattle dog named Ralph. She threw it a tennis ball and he chased it around. It occurred to me to wonder why she had invited me there. I hadn't thought about it until then. Not that there was any way to tell. It was fine in any case, there on the verandah.

The dog ran around. She looked at me. ‘So do you do anything other than work in pubs?' she said.

‘Not really. I went to uni a few years ago but left half way through. I was studying Arts.'

‘I'd love to go to uni one day, if I hadn't stuffed around so much at school. I heard you wrote poetry.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Everyone at the pub.'

‘That's strange.'

We started talking about writers we'd read. She seemed to have read far more than I had. I asked her if she wrote. She said she didn't. She said she didn't do anything.

Night came on and we dialled a pizza for dinner.

But she was right. I had been writing poetry for three or four years by then. And short stories. And a novel, when I was nineteen. But after the novel, poetry was the only thing I had much interest in. It was quick and easy and satisfying. I wrote mostly about sex and my deep disappointment with it. I didn't know much about sex.

It started to rain again. We moved into the living room and sprawled on the couches and listened to various records, some of which I knew, most of which I didn't. Cythia talked. She was good to listen to. Generally it was about sex. Sex was important to her. She told me about her experiences with it, about all the men and women she'd slept with. I got the whole story. She started masturbating when she was twelve, getting off on the penetration. With odd things around the house at first, then vibrators, and then to sex with boys by the time she was fourteen. Which was why her parents had tossed her out of home. She'd disappeared one weekend, spent three nights at her boyfriend's place. When she arrived back at the family house her parents had her bags packed.

I'd grown up on a farm, three hours west of Brisbane, the ninth child out of ten, Catholic parents. I was masturbating by twelve as well, but I didn't sleep with anyone till I was nineteen.

I thought Cynthia's childhood sounded more interesting.

Finally the beer ran out. We were still thirsty, and it wasn't closing time yet. We decided more drinks were in order.

‘You want to drive?' Cynthia said.

I explained that I wasn't comfortable about drink driving.

‘Jesus,' she said. ‘Okay, I'll drive.'

I wasn't so uncomfortable about drink driving that I wouldn't let someone else do it. We took my car, Cynthia behind the wheel, and drove to the nearest bottle shop. We pulled up and the boy came over. I felt for him. I know how hateful customers became after a while. They disturbed the peace.

I said to the boy, ‘A dozen cans of Toohey's Old.'

He went away and came back with the beer. He did it slowly.

‘It's okay,' I told him, ‘I used to work in a bottle shop too. In fact I only just quit.'

‘Yeah?' he said. Which one?'

‘The Capital.'

‘Never heard of it.'

We paid up.

‘Poor bastard,' I said, as we pulled back out to the street.

We returned to her place. She was a good driver. Confident and fast. We settled back into the couches. We talked on. About her life, about mine. Hers was definitely more interesting. Then I started losing it to drunkenness and the need for sleep. She explained that there were only two bedrooms in the house, her own and her parents', and that she didn't think it'd be a good idea for me to use her parents'. I went in and looked and saw what she meant. The room was immaculate. The bed was covered with a plastic dust sheet.

‘Your parents are paranoid about dust?'

‘My
mother
is paranoid about dust. Don't worry. I've got a double bed, you can have half of that.'

I agreed. Cynthia wandered off to the toilet. I lay on the bed. I kept my clothes on. She came back. I watched while she undressed on her side of the bed. Her body was big and white and her back was sprinkled with the same allergic rash as her face. She climbed in and we lay there, side by side.

‘You can take your clothes off,' she said. ‘I won't rape you.'

I took off my jeans. We moved a little closer. Then we slept.

Cynthia woke me late next morning.

‘What's wrong with your breathing? You sound like you're about to suffocate.'

I sat up and started coughing. The hangover moved in. ‘It's asthma,' I told her. I reached for my jeans and went through the pockets for the Ventolin inhaler. She watched me puff away on it, sucking in the drug.

‘And you
smoke
?'

I smoked. In fact I had only started smoking about a year before. I was living in the Northern Territory. It was the boredom that got to me. I started with Winfield Blues, two or three a day, then discovered menthols. Alpine Ultra Lights. I worked my way up to seven or eight packs a week. I struck problems. I was wheezing all the time, vomiting after only three or four drinks. I switched over to rolled tobacco and things got better. Not quite so many poisons. I got through one pouch maybe every three or four days. Any brand.

I explained all this to her as I rolled a cigarette. ‘It helps in the morning, believe it or not.'

The Ventolin was working. I could breathe. I lit the cigarette and inhaled. The lungs caught, coughed it up. I inhaled again. This time it held. It felt good. The asthma wasn't a problem. Asthma could always be controlled.

Cynthia found her own pack and we smoked in silence for a while. The pillows had rubbed most of the make-up off her face and her skin was livid red. It was bleeding in places.

‘Does it hurt?'

‘It itches. I scratch my face in my sleep. That's why it bleeds.'

‘Isn't there anything you can do for it?'

‘Not really. The only drug that can stop it is cortisone, and cortisone is too dangerous to use for more than a week or two at a time. It clears up the skin for a while, but in the long run it does more damage than the eczema does. I still use it, though, when my skin gets bad. That's why my face is all wrinkled. The cortisone does that.'

‘Or you could avoid the things you're allergic to?'

She nodded. ‘Or I could avoid the things I'm allergic to.'

We smoked. She rolled on her side and looked at me. ‘Thought you'd at least try something last night,' she said.