The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (3 page)

It took two years to sink in that Rachel and I had a wild rapport going, a perfect timbre that comes with time. After I had spent months hanging out with her, the girls I met at gigs and parties seemed like space cadets. If I even shot the breeze with one of those tarts, Rachel would rail into me about my lack of self-respect. I knew she was jealous though, and it made me feel good.

• • •

I’d been away for
the weekend; my Uncle Jack had remarried up in Swan Hill. By the time I returned, Phillip and Stuart had already selected Rachel for Simon’s old room. Phillip ran an over-the-top houseshare ad with the word
abutting
in it. I’d had to laugh. He wrote it with a thesaurus, the way he wrote his song lyrics. Rachel called it a Mary Poppins ad, which she said meant that its oddity was a magnet. It’s still in my black organizer:

Financially sound, artistically and musically attuned f. 22–30 wanted to share with 3 m. musos in an only slightly dilapidated house. St. Kilda. 60pw. Working fireplace in bedroom, abutting trams, groovy shops. No New Agers. Phillip/Colin/Stuart 510.1070.

I’d written the ad the time before, and we’d gotten Simon, who never took a shower. So I kept my mouth shut when I saw Phillip wanted a girl. Like he didn’t have enough girls from the shows. The “abutting” ad attracted sixty responses. We’d gotten three inquiries when I wrote mine—Simon, and two astrology nuts.

When I rang from Swan Hill to check on the response, Phillip explained his decision not to wait until I returned to fill the room. He didn’t want to lose her.

“She used to work at a New York radio station. Who knows who she knows? You’ll like her, Colin. She tells stupid stories like you.”

“What does Stuart think?”

“That he likes her smile. He’s not getting
any
these days. Probably wants to dip his wick.”

The night I returned, Rachel had moved in only hours earlier.
I went into the living room to say hello. This quirky, leggy Yank with a black ponytail was splayed out on the sofa like she owned the place. She looked so American in her jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes were deep brown and followed you everywhere, like Stuart’s. I had never met an American before, except for the odd tourist asking for street directions, and a wanker with a square American jaw who once needed blueprints “by yesterday” at the print shop. I couldn’t believe that she was going to live with us. She could have been a movie star the way I felt. Though I didn’t act that way of course.

“G’day,” I said, “I hear you’re my new flatmate.”

“Hi. I’m Rachel.”

“Colin. Love your accent.”

“You’re the one with the accent,” she teased. “That’s a movie line, I think. I can’t remember which one.”

I thought of an anecdote that might sound half intellectual: when I was little, I’d believed the American accent was the TV accent (or the telly accent, as my family called it then), and that shows were made in in Australia. Hollywood, where they made the cowboy movies, would be up North maybe, near Brisbane and the Coral Reef. But one day when my family was watching a cop show, a news presenter had interrupted with word that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, like his brother. Robert Kennedy was running for President of the United States of America. A diagram of Kennedy’s head was shown as was footage of him collapsed on the ground with blood streaming out of his ear. The news presenter had been handed an update: “Robert Kennedy, I’m told, won’t live.” My parents’ reactions and the tears of the people on the
screen amazed me; Mum mistook my staring for terror. “Don’t worry Colin, it’s far away. It’s in America. It’s happening on another continent.” It was the first time I’d heard the word
continent.
I began to realize that
Australian
meant distance from power and for the most part, from cold-blooded violence.

“How long have you been in Australia?” I said instead.

“About three weeks. I stayed at a hostel for a week, and then I moved in with someone I met waitressing while I found a place.”

That amazed me. I could never do that. Shift countries, get a job, get someone to let me use their house as a crash pad.

“What are you reading?”

“Some stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle. He’s pretty hilarious, ever read him?”

T what? I hoped she didn’t see me redden. “No.”

“I’ll lend you the book when I’m done.”

“Great. Want to join me for tea?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll fix us some then.”

“Thanks.”

I went to cook the chops I’d just bought, and the mint peas in the freezer. It was odd that she didn’t even offer to help. So comfortable on her first day in a new house. An alien being. I brought out a plate for her.

“Here’s your tea, dig in.”

“Oh, thanks,” she said, looking baffled, “but weren’t you making tea? I ate dinner before with Phillip.”

Tea is the Aussie word for dinner. I explained that to her. I felt like I was from the sticks or something. There she was from New
York, and here I was offering her chops and mint peas when all she wanted was fucking Earl Grey. She offered to eat the meal, but I said don’t be silly and knocked on Stuart’s door to give it to him. Again, this was before he had a habit.

In less than a year Stuart began seeing that tart Melissa Rizziola, a dancer and a junkie who frequented the Greyhound Pub. Melissa got him hooked up with a shady, drug-abusing crowd whose personal hygiene was more than a bit on the nose. The few times I met any of them over at our house, I disinfected the couch after they left. Not like the band scene is a hall of saints, but shit, we’d put out a bona fide album. We worked hard to have the little slice of the musical Melbourne pie we had. And the one unbreakable band rule was
no drugs
, with the exception of a little pot now and then. We weren’t Christian maniacs, but being in a band is a
job
.

But it was a normal thing to do in the early days of knowing Stuart, giving him the leftover chops. He basically kept to himself outside of rehearsal. Stuart was someone I didn’t think about much.

I read this exotic American’s T. Coraghessan Boyle book that next weekend—a funny writer but he’s a bit too much of a smart-arse for me—a couple of good stories. But I kept that to myself.

“Tell me about your
childhood,” she said later that week during a commercial. I didn’t think she
really
wanted to know anything as boring as that. “Where did you grow up?”

“Seaford. It’s down the Peninsula.”

“Is it a nice place?”

“Not really,” I said. Phillip interrupted with a funny story about the captain of the ambulance corps who had a drinking problem. She left me alone.

Not long after Robert
Kennedy’s death we moved out to Seaford, a few kilometers from Frankston. Close to Melbourne, Frankston was a rough, small city, chockablock with working-class poms, English immigrants. Seaford was small, too, but a distinct step up to lower middle class. It was quieter and less developed, almost a country town. My mother’s big selling point to my father was the nearby beach. Aunty Grace and Uncle Patrick, parents of my cousins Liam and Anna, had moved to this outermost edge of suburbia when Uncle Patrick was offered a job managing one of the resort hotels further down the Mornington Peninsula. The local development was so recent that cows grazed in the field past the public golf course.

Aunty Grace said she liked it, and furthermore the affordable house next door was up for sale. Mum convinced Dad to move from our flat in Richmond, even though he would now have to commute an hour to the clothing shop he managed in Melbourne. Dad had thought moving next door to Aunty Grace was rabbit warren-ish, and at times our part of the block did feel like one big house. This really good kid, Cormac Kennedy, and his mum and dad lived on the other side of us—far flung from the American breakout achievers of their family tree. Cormac was five when I moved to Seaford. He watched me from a go-cart his dad had built for him. There were a good three years before he would begin dying of leukemia, when he would give me his beloved Cadbury
wrapper collection. Mr. Kennedy often claimed that he had the same great-great-grandfather as John Fitzgerald.

Rachel grew up in
the most exciting city on the planet. Why would she want to hear anything about my ho-hum childhood? I maybe even worshipped her that first month, especially her brains. Every now and then I identified another glitch in her personality, but it was inevitably minor, like the way she skimmed books she didn’t have the patience for. That really gave me the shits. The house was a five minute walk from the St. Kilda library. Rachel was always reading, or at least checking books out. She flipped through masterpieces like my mum did with those romance novels she bought in the supermarket. But with her in the house, I did read more than I ever had with Simon in that room, for what that’s worth. Rachel checked out
Crime and Punishment
during one of her “I’m slipping behind” fits. “A guilt literature moment,” she owned up a day later. “It’s too subtle for me, you’ll get more out of it.” She was right. She had the attention span of a teenager. If she couldn’t finish a book in one or two sittings, she wouldn’t read it. She’d give it to me, The Snail. I’m no bloody Einstein but if I’m going to bother to read a book, it’s going to be a meaty one and I’m going to savor it like good wine. It took me forever to read
Crime and Punishment
, but I remember everything. Nothing happens for the first million pages, according to Rachel. But in my opinion it’s the lingering details that make it great. Raskolnikov is the main character, and Porfiry is the inspector who knows that Raskolnikov has committed a double murder. But Porfiry doesn’t have enough proof to dob him in. Porfiry uses reverse
psychology, slowly closing in. He warns Raskolnikov that he knows he is guilty as fuck and tells him that he will surrender one day. His steadfastness drives Raskolnikov fucking crazy.

The reason Rachel and
I grew closer was that we had shopping and toilet duty together. Stuart had the rubbish and the sweeping, and Phillip washed the dishes and organized the rent. I thought for sure that Phillip and Rachel were getting it on. That first month, Phillip had her sipping the green tea his yoga teacher sold him and rubbing his pressure points, like the back of his ear and the two cavities in his neck. He once moaned so hard that his new girlfriend, Kerri, just through the door, thought they were having sex.

Phillip and Rachel had both gone to uni to study film, and could trade annoying references. But when we were rolling the cart down the pasta aisle it came out that she didn’t think Phillip was all that bright. I was secretly relieved, although I also couldn’t believe that I had a daily relationship with a guy who wrote such bullshit lyrics. I enjoyed Phillip, but there’s no denying his lyrics were dated and rang hollow. I put my foot down once or twice, like when he used a rhyming dictionary to pair platypus with Oedipus. Even the band name was straight out of the eighties: the Tall Poppies. Everyone around this time had one-word names like Nirvana. Or over-the-top names like My Friend the Chocolate Cake.

Rachel liked Phillip well enough even if she didn’t like his words. No skin off her back if she lived with a handsome bad lyricist. After a year, enough time with Phillip to pale anyone’s view of him, Rachel had a repertoire of hilarious comments about his
sickly sweet breath, the jar of peanut butter in the medicine cabinet which, he said, let him get a closer shave, and the overpowering patchouli he dabbed on instead of cologne—he’d bought ten vials at an Indian spice shop. But she never went for blood. Phillip amused Rachel. He was a cartoon character for her. He was a hack, but he wasn’t lazy. Phillip was our Captain Kirk, a kind idiot we could make fun of, who kept life easy for us by making the decisions, such as which day we had to write out the rent checks. By then, Rachel’s venom was reserved for Stuart.

“Why can’t we kick Stuart out?” Rachel was forever whining.

Rachel could laugh Phillip Harvey off. But as band members you’re married to each other. I could hardly justify to myself why I joined, let alone stayed, in this bubble-gum band in the first place. My taste runs a little harder, pop with a sprinkle of dissonance.

A customer had needed
a gig poster printed. I filled out his order form. Phillip Harvey. Robe Street, St. Kilda. Phillip had flat ears you couldn’t see when he stood directly in front of you. His body was disproportionate—his legs, muscular like a huge frog’s legs, were too big for his frame. But girls never saw that. Girls liked his red lips and violet eyes and big shiny smile. He smiled with confidence, a good-looking man.

“I’m a muso, too,” I’d said, casually. “You know anyone who needs a guitarist?”

“No, but hey, you know anyone good on bass? My bass player and keyboardist are moving to Sydney next month.”

“I play bass, too,” I said a bit grudgingly. Playing bass or drums
is the only way to join an established band. Everyone wants to be up front with the guitar or singing.

“Yeah? Bass? Where have you gigged?”

“I was in Ursa Major, towards the end of the band.” (A bit of a stretch. I played with them for one week before they broke up, for one show, two years after they had their number one Australian hit.)

“Yeah? I’ll try you out. I got a new drummer three weeks ago. Stuart. He’s an insane drummer—learned everything in a day. I’m thinking of reforming the Poppies as a three piece.”

“Worked for the Police.”

“You want to jam?” Phillip asked.

“Better than playing in my bedroom with the door locked.”

A whole swag of friends was over at his house. It was Bourke Street in his living room. He’d even converted the garage into a soundproofed rehearsal studio. Phillip’s offer was a tidy little package: a whole new house and social set if I joined his band. And I needed to break from my houseshare; my flatmates at that time hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, ever since Nigel had a threesome with Helen and Justine. Justine had gone down on Helen, not part of their arrangement. I’d heard Helen screaming at Justine about her indiscretion, and Nigel had happily clued me in on his sexual adventures at the pub. The household tension back at Imperial Avenue was hard to stomach, plus how come I wasn’t invited?