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a man riding a skateboard down the side of a ramp

Best, she thought, were the bees.

She pulled up again, out of breath, resting on the black stone of the old fountain in Martin Place. There was no water in it, but people had packed the basin full of soil and grown up all sorts of things: tobacco flowers shot their purple and white stars around her head and further along, the arrow heads of purple joeys and fat, red bottlebrush. In amongst this were clumps of basil and parsley. There was no order, like someone had discarded a rug in the corner of a messy room, and the bees, drunk on pollen, meandered through it.

It was a place to sit and watch and remember now as she took in the people. The looks were different to that time before. It was the pre-infant bump probably, and many of those who paid her any attention were smiling when they looked north and caught her eye.

It was just about here twenty years ago when a fellow, pretty face glowing from the reflection of two thousand dollars of phone, nearly knocked her onto the road. She’d pulled herself up onto her bum and he was down there picking up his phone bits. That manicured face of his stared at her.

“Fuckin’ reffo.”

She knew what a reffo was even then, but was that her? She was born in Randwick, through Mum, via Hong Kong and London.

Was I part fuckin’ reffo? she thought now. Half -and- half fuckin’ reffo? 0.3… fuckin’ reffo?

Her aunties, Seh-Seh and Kat Yi-Yi, had pulled her to her feet, fucked off the fund manager and dried her eyes and elbow.

She smiled at the thought of them. Now the aunts are either insane or dead and the beach begins at Bondi Junction. She supposed that makes everyone a fucking reffo.

What she liked and envied now were the shoes. She sat, lost in dreams, and counted five pairs of colourful, beautiful trainers in various stages of disrepair. The weeks before the plastic ban, back in ’29, people panic-bought like tins of beans before a cyclone. Mae wished she’d been one of them as she compared her own dangling, ankle-length black bug stompers.

Even so, she had what was in the pack on her back.

That was enough to get her moving. Within a minute she was up over Castlereagh St and here it was on her left, The Bank of Australia.

The state didn’t do grandeur anymore, at least on the outside. Any signs of its past life had been chiselled off years ago and nobody was wasting water polishing a rock wall. Still, it had windows of actual glass, which said something these days. In the right one, taped over the busted stock exchange board, were the current rates. There was no official exchange, but people still had pretty stuff that other people wanted to buy from them. They needed a place to keep it and a price.

Inside was the original opulence. Marble pillars, relics of dead gods and empires, held the roof, and everything that was banned outside was conspicuous inside: mirrored marble benches, golden fittings, clean shaven and coiffed people.

No neckties, Mae thought as she approached the counter. There’s only so much you can get away with, even in here.

One of the elegant few approached the counter. “Can I help you, Miss?”

“Yes, I have an appointment. An exchange.”

She was led behind the counter into a glass-walled room from which she could witness other deals being negotiated in silence around her.

“Mae Allport? I’m Phillip.”

Phillip ushered her to a chair with an elaborate ringmaster’s confidence. He was the first of them she had had time to really look at, and what she saw was a smudged, cracked window into the past. Phillip’s fancy black pocket handkerchief had sweet purple-pink threads running through it like an old liquorice lolly, and some of these had come steadily undone. The suit itself was clean and hugged him in all the appropriate spots, but some of these spots were rubbed smooth from overuse. It was this, and having the treasure safely behind stone, that calmed her.

Phillip followed her eyes and pulled at one of the threads, giving up as soon as he’d made it worse.

“I understand you have something to sell… Do you mind if I take a look?”

Mae watched. Phillip’s hand had wandered back to the stray thread. He was young and fidgety. First big fish probably; a decent commission.

Mae smiled. “I had the feeling, talking to your boss on the phone, that I’d already sold it.”

He grunted. “Yes, sure. Of course, no, we’re happy to buy. It’s just a matter of price. If you’ve been following it, you’d notice that it’s gone off the boil a bit, so…”

Mae grabbed her sack. The thing Jane had told her was don’t mess about with them. Their magic, Jane called it their juju, was gone, it went the way of hedge funds and Ferraris. Bermuda was an atoll now.

“Look, I had a price agreed with Sharon. I had a slightly weaker one with your competitor half a block from here. And I’ve got this little one here- she patted her stomach. And my thighs are stuck together and my haemorrhoids don’t like your hard leather chair. So, I’m going to stand up and take this elsewhere.”

Phillip was out of his chair.

“No! No look, I’m sorry.” He held out his hand. “No. They tell us to do that. Sorry. It’s just that people sometimes say they’ve got something like this and then it turns out they don’t and we have to ditch the tire kickers. We have an agreement, yes? The price set to the Lego Standard on the 29th?” He leered at her pack. “Provided of course…”

In response, Mae pulled the drawstring on the pack and upended it. The clatter was loud enough to turn heads outside the glass walls as thousands of coloured bricks, a vomiting rainbow, washed out onto the desk and the floor.

Phillip had his commission alright; there hadn’t been a pile like this outside Denmark for at least twenty years. People had started to think a little mountain like this would never be seen again.

As the crackling died to an ebb, Mae thought about that sound again, on the hard-tiled floor of their house, as children. And Kit, dear, lovely Kit, locking the corner pieces into place for her tiny hands.

But there were other little hands to think of now. She looked at Phillip’s dumbstruck face and smiled again.

I can build a house out of this, she thought.

The Room is Spinning

“You wouldn’t believe it… he’s done him between his legs!”

I’m looking up towards the corner as I come into the foyer. I’ll bet there’s a camera right there, copping me in hazy black n’ white, all shaky as I come in. It’ll be good enough even to spot these sweat stains growing under this sticky, white t-shirt. It’s bloody hot out there.

Cameras are on all of us, so it shouldn’t bother me. But then, for them it’s random. Well, not random; it isn’t a random shooter if the aim is to kill everybody. General is probably more accurate. For them it’s general; for me it’s specific.

I go to the counter with my head down, catching a bit of my reflection in the slick tiles, it follows me like a broken, technicolour shadow. I don’t want any company right now, just want to get to my room and rest for a bit. Unless…

“Hello, how are you going? Room 22, please. The one on the top floor. Penthouse.”

I give her a sly grin. She’s pretty- small, lean, compact body. She’s got that dark skin, hair and eyes. Not usually my thing, but what the hell. She hands me my key, smiling, not making eye contact, except for just a faint second. Then I can’t work out what it is: does she know me? Most of the locals don’t, which is why I come here. But her look had a bit of weird knowing about it. Or maybe it’s because I clock myself in the mirror behind the desk and I look a bit frantic. I’ve just taken my cap off, my hair’s still shiny blond but it’s flat, matted, stuck to my head and face. My eyes, blue and green, heterochromia they call it, are bouncing around. There’s the sweaty shirt, too.

All this is to be expected after hours on the tables. This last one, I could only just see the top of the dealer’s head over the pile of chips, large enough to jump over on a BMX bike. I couldn’t even see the card when he laid it down.

Four of Spades. A flush. Had it been the six, it would have been a straight and that would have been Christmas in March. Still, it was more than enough.

I didn’t flinch, didn’t even look up. Sure, I was smiling, but a smile was my poker face. I didn’t even send an eyelash in her direction, that woman on the other end of the table, the last one left. She, on the other hand, I caught it out the corner of my eye, her fist squeezed her cards just a bit tighter and there was the faintest echo of a smile blowing across her face. Barely there, but I caught it. I’ve been reading faces for years and years and years.

She went big and I followed. Not reluctant, not eager, but like I always have: smiling, like I’m the show, I’m the one they all came to see, and you, my lovely, are my support act.

She went all in and I followed.

It’s got nothing to do with the money, that’s for sure. It’s that feeling you get in the contest. I’m chasing it. It’s not quite the same as before, but it’s nearly there. That moment, when all the electricity in the universe runs into and out of you. Most of us get it just a couple of times, if we’re really lucky. When we hold that new baby child in our arms for the first time. But me, I used to get it all the time, whenever I did… that.

Now I’m in the lift (I hinted, she said no, but not without first getting a good look at my hands. That’s what they do, they look at these great gauntlets and they wonder about size correlation. She looked at them, then at me, then she said no. Fair enough) and I just wanna get to the room in peace. That doesn’t happen for two reasons.

The first is the music. It annoys me because it’s not muzak, it’s music, and it’s that bloody song by what’s her name, someone Jones, the one Elizabeth used to sing to me. I know all the words.

It was easy enough for Elizabeth to insert my name in there. Then she’d get to the last line, and she’d do that pause, and she’d sidle up close and go looooahhaove, love, love… with me.

So, there’s that.

Then the door pings and the boys get in. They’re around thirty, there’s two of them, headed to the rooftop pool in their boardies with their hotel towels and their singlet sunburn. They nod, then they whisper to each other, and one pokes the other in the ribs, like I’m a girl in a nightclub and they just have to muster up the courage. I look at myself in the door and count the floors under my breath.

“The King. It’s you, isn’t it?”

“G’day fellas. Yeah, it’s me. How you going?” I reach out and shake their hands.

“Mate, Jesus! Look at the fuckin’ size of this mitt! No wonder you could fuckin’ rip it!”

“Ha. Yeah, they got the job done.”

Then they go into it, the ‘I Was There When’ story. Half the time it’s just rubbish and so is this one. There’s no way these blokes were drinking on the Hill that day; they would have been five or six years old; if they were there at all, it was with their dads. But they tell it well, and sometimes I dunno. They tell it as good as I do and I’ve heard and seen it so many times, and told it myself. I’m starting to wonder if I was even there or if it just happened to a bloke who used to look like me.

“Mate, come an’ have a swim an’ a beer with us!”

“Sorry fellas, but I need a bit of a rest. Been a long one.” They look disappointed. Worse, they look angry.

“Look, how about I have a shower and get changed. Maybe I can meet you for a quick one in the bar before I head out?”

This cools them down. The word ‘champion’ gets thrown around and then they pump my hand and slap my back and then there’s the cameras. Always the cameras now. Always the cameras even then, but not everyone had one, and nobody gets what it’s like to always be on this side of them.

The doors ping and I’m out, and I hear the last bit of my name chanted in that languid way, like you would if you were teasing some poor bugger in Year 9 Maths.

I wonder: do they imagine what I am heading into as I go up and put the card in the door and open my room? Is it true, what they dream and hope? Is this next bit a scene from a movie or book?

The first thing is Dave, asprawl an enormous, lime green, leather swivel chair. He spins and comes into my view as I shut the door. He’s got nothing on but a pair of stained y-fronts and one Carlton football sock, pulled up over his left knee, his arms are above him and he’s holding two silver, steel Sapporo beer cans, one is the amber, the other dark and the liquid is cascading down his chest which is as white as flour, in contrast to his red shoulders and arms, he also the victim of the Thailand suntan, and the liquid is running down onto his shaved chest and hairy stomach and he appears to be trying to wash something off of there, maybe it’s caked spew, brown and red, and every second or so he positions the cans above his head and tries to pour the beer into his mouth; and this is very hard to do because there’s a joint the size of a cooked sausage jutting out of his lips and so most of the beer just runs down his knock-off Aviator sunglasses and over his nose so he laps at it like a dog through gritted teeth and all the while he’s trying to shout out my name because he’s seen me come in and the noise is ‘NNNNGH! NNNGH!’ which makes it sound maybe like he’s dying.

I’m suddenly hot, can’t feel the air conditioning and by the time I kneel at the mahogany coffee table, reverent, I’m stripped down, not y-fronts, mine are designer briefs, Giorgio, black flecked with gold, there’s the coffee table in front of me and on it is a pile of coke as big as that mountain of casino chips I had seven lifetimes ago, here’s a straw jutting out of a glass of coke with three cigarette butts in place of the ice cubes. Coke and coke. I pull the straw out, tap it on the side of the glass and with magnificent dexterity, inhale two lines the size of a popping crease, the inside of my nostrils fizzing, I stand up with a fist full of blue tablets, maybe Viagra, but I’m pretty sure they’re Ketamine, two of these go down with the last of that Coca-Cola and then I spark up a Winnie Blue which goes into my lungs like a motorbike on its side down a dark backstreet but it has the right effect because the fog around my vision clears and now I can see into the distance.

There on that bed, that bed, I’ve been in car showrooms smaller than that bed, are two women, naked, asleep, their limbs are wrapped around each other, coiled up like the rainbow serpent. I can see that Dave was there; his imprint is on those sheets like a deranged snow angel. And I can see now that the red and brown stuff is tommy sauce and mustard.

I stand up, stagger for just a second, and the change of my body’s centre of gravity forces all of those toxins into my head and heart. Then the dam cracks and I suck in a deep breath as I go under, and it washes me into the bed between the two women. They come alive and at first they’re pushing me away, not fully awake, but then they come into consciousness and remember where they are, and that I’m paying. The first one rubs her eyes and smiles, that kind of ‘Thank you, have a nice day and enjoy your meal’ shit that you can only get from The Employee of the Month, but I’m so high that it looks to me to be honest and true, beatific.

This is what money and fame can get you: nearly whatever you want.

And of course, there’s none of this. None of this happens, none of it is real (well, except for the Coke, capital C, and the smokes. And those undies, they’re real). The blokes outside, they get to think this about me because I belong to them, and they can make me be whatever they want.

There’s none of it, what they dream. I lay back on the sheets (the bed, that’s real, and it is pretty darn big), take a last drag and put the smoke down. As I close my eyes, I get, again, the other: the sometimes roar, the sometimes hush when I got to the top of my mark; the quickening of breath that first time I kissed Elizabeth; and my babies, my wonderful, tiny girls and boy.

All the electricity in the universe runs into and out of me.

But is he here?

No, he don’t come here no more.

Top quotation from Benaud, R. (1995), Channel 9, Sydney.

a man riding a skateboard down a street next to tall buildings

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Short Story 4

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