A New Tense

The Flight

There was some problem with the booking, I didn’t know what, I couldn’t understand. I don’t know why I spoke in German, I could barely speak it and my accent was awful. I tried anyway, but instead of saying I wanted to get my ticket I used Muschi instead of möchte. The woman hid a smile and shook her head and I felt like a fucking idiot. I’d been learning German for months, that was a mistake I thought I’d gotten over. My face burned, I imagined school kids chanting on the oval: Laurie wants pussy! Laurie wants pussy! “I have to go home,” I said in English. “My mum died.” I didn’t say it to make her feel guilty, it just kind of came out, and she looked sympathetic. She told me that she was sorry and spent a few minutes frowning at the screen before she smiled at me sympathetically. “Everything’s fine, you can go through,” she said. The flight was in a few hours. I changed most of my remaining money, which was fuck all, to Australian dollars. Spent the rest of my euros on whiskey at the bar, anything to cover last nights ‘one beer’ in Neukölln, which of course turned into all the beers and three hours sleep. I’d hoped to sleep as soon as I got to my seat on the plane but the man next to me was snoring and farting in his sleep. I welcomed the distraction of food but it quickly became a toxic mass in my stomach and the days of drinking caught up with me and I had to clamber over the snorer so that I could vomit. There was a stopover in Abu Dhabi. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the toilets and almost recoiled. I went into duty- free and sprayed myself with various perfumes, rubbed lotion on my dirty sticky skin until I didn’t smell anymore, or smelled less, which was something. Put on all the makeup I could and and looked at the result, matte skin, red lipstick, mascara. I wiped the lipstick off, smeared the eyeliner. Bared my teeth in the mirror to inspect the nicotine stains that’d been multiplying for a while. Still there, zigzagging the fangs that betrayed the stereotype of my English heritage. The red lips contrasted with the yellow of my teeth well, it was kind of nice to look at. The first molar on the right was missing from a cavity I hadn’t bothered to get filled in until it was too late and I sat in a dentist chair in Prenzlauer Berg feeling it pulled from me. I’d felt like my privacy was being invaded, as though the dentist had taken something from me that she had no right to take. I thought of that sensation whenever I tongued the much-tongued space. Behind me a woman stood holding some miracle wrinkle potion in her hands but she was looking at me. Her expression was almost concerned. I grinned at her in the mirror, our eyes meeting, and she jumped, put the lotion down and quickly walked away. I bought an expensive beer and brought it with me to the smoking section. Found a spare seat and sat down and started to read “I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus. My eyes were gritty from the smoke and I was having trouble concentrating on the book. Not that I needed to, I’d read it so many times, it was dog-eared and covered in various stains. I noticed suddenly that there was someone standing over me, a guy, a little older than me and attractive in a generic, boring kind of way. It was obvious from his expression that he was waiting for a response from me. “Sorry?” “Do you mind if I sit here?” He sounded Australian, Australian with a hint of something else. I looked at the clock above the bar and saw that I still had an hour before I had to be at my gate. “Go ahead.” He’s going to sit down, I thought, and say something gross about the title. He sat down and looked at the book. “What’s it about?” I thought for a moment. “Feminist art and obsessive love.” “Not about dick, then?” Ugh, fuck off, I thought. “It’s the name of a character,” I said coldly. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I regretted that as soon as I said it. I’m so fucking tired. It sounds interesting.” I thought the hint of an accent might be Polish. “Yeah, it is. It’s one of my favourites.” I started to talk about it and my brain disconnected from my words so that I was stumbling through sentences. I was fucked, totally fucked, had shifted between drunk and hungover so many times that I couldn’t remember what being sober was like. After a few minutes I saw the smile on his face was becoming a little fixed and I stopped. “Man, I have no idea what I’m saying. I’m fucking tired, too.” “Fair enough,” he said. After that I relaxed a little. I put my hand out. “I’m Laurie, by the way,” I said. He shook my hand. “I thought so.” “Sorry?” “ I thought I recognised you. I’m Thomas, Thomas Balsonowski.” I shook my head. “We only met briefly. You took photos at my sister’s wedding a few years ago.” “Oh, right.” My brief stint as a wedding photographer, something I’d stumbled into, doing it cheap for the family of a friend and then charging more when I realised how much I could charge. I didn’t enjoy the work at all, and I never got to work for friends because none of my friends got married, but the money was too good to turn down. “Would’ve been three years ago, I think. Her name’s Natalia Anders.” “I barely remember my own name right now.” “It was at the Botanical Gardens, that summer day we had that was about forty-five degrees. My uncle got drunk and did some fucking horrible speech where he said, ‘poon-tang’. The bridesmaids’ dresses were tie-dyed. It was pretty bad.” Suddenly I remembered. Everyone drank the champagne like water and bucketed sweat and a couple of hours in everyone was shit-faced. The mother of the bride — Thomas’ mother, I guess — had kept trying to set me up with everyone, she was relentless. I finally told her that I had a girlfriend and there was a pause where I wondered if she was going to get all haughty on me, but then she said I should invite her. And I was so hot and bordering on pissed off that I called Sophie and she came. She’d tapped on my shoulder and she was wearing a blue dress and her big boots even with the heat and I’d — well, shit, cliché and everything, but I’d been so fucking happy to see her, so bowled over by her brown shoulders and the sweat beading her hairline, knocked out by the fact we’d been together for two years and she still made me grin like an idiot when she looked at me. She’d helped me that day, fanned people with paper, laughed, pulled faces at me when the men who hit on her turned their faces away for a moment. “Yeah,” I said slowly, “yeah, I do remember that, actually.” Thomas smiled. “Yeah, it was something, huh? ‘Something’ in this case not necessarily meaning anything good.” (Sophie’s smile across the marquee, her eyes not cutting away from mine, even though by then I guessed she’d have started having let’s-go-steady talks with Jake.) “You’re lucky you left when you did. Things started to get really messy after the food ran out.” (We held hands in the taxi on the way home. As soon as we got through the door Sophie had taken off her dress, had lifted her hair to fan her neck and I’d put my hands around her waist.) I sipped my beer and tried to focus on Thomas. It was just drunken sentimentality that made me remember her in such nice terms, or at all. I didn’t usually care. Get it together. “Oh, yeah?” And he told me the usual, as I drifted in and out of the conversation, drunken uncles, vomit in hilarious places. I wanted to excuse myself, but I couldn’t quite do it, I was so tired, and besides that, I guessed he’d be on the same flight as me. He was a nice enough guy — or, at least, nothing overtly problematic in these first few minutes of talking to him — but I wanted to be around my female friends, I wanted Julia here with me, we could cackle in the corner. There was a silence between us, not completely comfortable. “Where have you come from?” I said. I hoped that he hadn’t already told me. “I came from America.” “Whereabouts?” “I was in Illinois. For a competition.” “What kind?” He paused for a second, and then said, “Well, I’m a taxidermist. They have a worldwide convention and competition there. They call it a championship.” “You’re a taxidermist? Really? I don’t think I’ve ever met a taxidermist before.” “Yes, I’ve heard that. A lot of people think it’s gross, or weird.” “Well, yeah, maybe a little, but still, it’s interesting! Do you do all the gutting and stuff?” “Yeah. My father was a butcher so I grew up around it.” I’d researched it once, I tried to remember what I’d learned. “So do you make the models from scratch, or do you have, like, bulk ones? But then they’d all look the same, I guess.” He paused, his beer halfway to his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “You know about taxidermy?” “Not really. A little. I saw a video in a museum of an artist working on an animal. e tape only looped for about ten minutes but I stayed there for ages. The eyes were the best, the eyelashes. I did a little research afterwards. Not a lot, though.” “What was he working on? The guy in the video.” “Um...fuck. Something with antlers. A little deer? No. Something African. I don’t know, I was so focussed on the process that I didn’t pay attention to the finished product. That’s probably not what you want to hear, is it?” He smiled. “You just called me an artist, you can say whatever you want.” “Yeah,” I said, waving away the possible flirtation, “so where do you work, exactly? What stuff do you do? Oh, you don’t work for hunters, do you?” He shook his head. “No, not for hunters, no. Not even because they don’t often eat what they catch but because most of the time they’re big fucking arseholes.” He said assholes, not arseholes. American-learned English. “I spend most of the time working with museums,” he continued, “using their labs, and I also have...” he shook his head. “No, never mind.” “No, what?” I sipped my drink. “Oh, wow, you have your own lab, don’t you?” “Yeah, except we call it a studio. But, you know, when I’m talking to people I usually hold off on the fact that I have a studio in my house where I gut and mount animals. It’s not the greatest of icebreakers.” “Nah, it’s the ultimate icebreaker! Who wouldn’t be interested in that? I’d love to see it.” He raised his eyebrows again as he drank his beer, set it down and wiped his mouth. “Yeah? You’re going back to Melbourne now too, right?” “Yeah. Would you mind? I could take some photos. I wanted to ever since I saw the video.” “What would you do with the pictures?” “Oh, I mean, it wouldn’t be for anything, probably. Just interest. I couldn’t pay you.” He laughed. “I wasn’t asking what the rate was! I was just curious. I got an award in the competition—” “You mean the championship.” “Sorry, yes, the championship. So I don’t need your money. Take my number, let me know when you want to see it.” He wrote his number down on a coaster and then, afer a moment, his name at the top. It was a good move. I’d already forgotten it.

We went to the gate together. We weren’t sitting near each other which I was thankful for because I was nearing the end of my ability to be able to make small talk. Still, I stayed awake until the plane had taken off and levelled out so I could get another drink, a nightcap. I tried my best to make it last, sipping the beer slowly from the can and looking out of the window with my knees up and my head resting against my rolled-up hoodie. The clouds parted and there were waves of desert with highways cutting across it, highways to massive skyscrapers and high rises. I wedged the can of beer between my knees as I started to drift off, jerking a little through the layers of consciousness.

I was thinking about mum, about when we’d seen each other last. It was about six months after Jones and I moved in with Pete. We were out shopping, Pete had driven us to the supermarket in his old van. I’d gotten into cooking, I was pretty good at it, and Jones and Pete were constantly taking advantage of this. I didn’t mind so much, except that I didn’t do the dishes because I didn’t want to do all the cleaning and they didn’t do it because they were lazy shits. I didn’t want to have to ask them constantly to clean up because I thought it was gendered until I realised that yelling at them for being lazy shits wasn’t me falling into gender roles, it was just not wanting to live in squalor.

I’d seen mum in the refrigerated aisle, just her back at first, and then her profile as she turned to look at something else. I’d wondered about what would have happened if I’d gone up to say hello. I’d lost a lot of weight at that point, better eating and bike riding but also forgotten meals and too much speed. Of course I didn’t know at the time that it’d be the last time that I’d ever see her. I didn’t chastise myself now for not going up to speak to her, because what could I have said?

Hey? How’s it going? Why haven’t you spoken to me in a year? We saw each other when Pete was driving us out of the parking lot. Probably had the same expressions on our faces. We didn’t wave but we didn’t look away, either.

The sleeping tablet I’d gotten from Max was starting to kick in when the German woman next to me asked if I’d been to Melbourne before, and did I know how much the rent was?

I thought of the cheapest place I’d lived in, the first, when I wanted to get out of the Jones’ for fear that I was taking advantage of them. I was only there for one rainy winter, housemates always asleep on the couch, running late for work. Flu constantly on rotation, sniffles and allergies to the dust in the house, we were drunk or high constantly which was fine because we were young. After a few weeks used needles started to appear in the bathroom bin, nestled among the bloody tampons. Nobody knew where they were coming from, or said that they didn’t, and I didn’t care so much. Beer had always gone missing from the fridge, and that was okay, except after a couple of months nobody was replacing it. Our house had always been the party house but now there were strangers sleeping on the couch, and strangers shooting up in our kitchen, and visits at all hours. I started wondering about what it would be like, found myself pissed as a bandicoot on the phone to Jones, telling him about it. Silence on the other end, and then: Jesus, Laurie, get a fucking grip. I’d just been rambling, no real idea of what I was saying. No, you don’t understand what it’s like... Silence on the other end. I’m kidding, I’d said, too quickly. Right, he’d said back. The conversation had ended pretty quickly. When I got off the phone I looked around properly. House messy, but this wasn’t the mess of kids living out of home for the first-time mess, this was serious. Ants and mice and fat spiders that watched the flies buzzing around the rotting dishes in the kitchen, too stuffed to move. Later that night, when we were all stoned or drunk out of our minds on the couch watching RAGE, a mouse had sprinted up a leg of my track pants. I’d yelled in shock and jumped and had nearly given everyone heart attacks. When they realised what had happened, that I hadn’t lapsed into some kind of psychosis (there’d been a few freak outs in that house before) they started laughing, nothing malicious, probably just relief. I’d gone for a shower, and when I was bending down to inspect the little scratch marks on my thighs I saw that there were mushrooms growing under the sink. It dawned on me a little then that the way we were living wasn’t anarchic, or anti-conformist, or even artistic. We were just a bunch of kids, burned out even though we were too young to be burned out, talking about all the things we were going to achieve, things that would always start tomorrow. One day after Jones’d turned up in his beat up old Datsun Sunny, and after one conversation we’d packed my stuff into the car and he was driving me back to his parents’ house. To the woman next to me (blonde, glasses, younger than I was by some amount), I said, in my best British accent, “I’ve never been.”

The Jones'

I only had my carry-on luggage, a big old army backpack, and I passed quickly through customs at Melbourne Airport, I was one of the first people out. The hangover I so deserved had finally kicked in and I was so tired and hungry that I felt faint. As I came out into the international arrival lounge they were there immediately, Calliope and Gary and Jones, and I had to stop myself from double-taking at Jones because he was gaunt, cheeks pulled in, singlet hanging off scrappy shoulders that’d always been so strong.

I went over to them and greetings were said. Calliope put her arms around me in a hug and it was too much. I was covered in cold sweat, my heart was pounding, and spit was pooling in my mouth. I was suddenly aware that I was going to throw up. I looked around for the nearest toilets but couldn’t see any, a bin was the closest thing to me. I mumbled something like an apology to all of them before I went over to it and vomited.

Not much came out of me and thick bile burned the back of my throat. Someone was behind me, rubbing my back. It was Calliope. Good old Calliope. If I had enough hair I’m sure that she’d have held it back from my face.

After a few minutes it subsided, my heart went back to its normal rhythm, but there was still something wrong. I felt disconnected and I couldn’t talk, all my words were coming out strangely. Jones looked worried. He took my bag and didn’t ask me questions, and when I staggered a little coming off the escalator he took my arm and linked it through his, supporting me.

In the car they took pity on me and stopped trying to involve me in the conversation. I sat with my legs drawn up, looked out of the window with hot air blowing into my face, which felt burned despite not having been in sunlight for weeks.

I barely remembered going inside the house but I woke up sometime later in the bedroom that had once been mine. I went out into the kitchen. Jones was in there, sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open, drinking a beer, and I was so disorientated, was I really on the other side of the world?

“Hey,” he said when he saw me. He closed his laptop. “How’re you feeling?”

“Yeah, better. I’m so hungry though, is there anything to eat?”

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff, mum made it for you.”

“How long was I asleep for?”

He looked at the clock on the wall. “Seven hours.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.”

“Right. Where are Gary and Calliope?”

“They’re at some family thing.”

I went to the fridge and pulled out all the containers. Beans in tomato sauce, a bunch of different salads, skordalia, spanakopita. I’d forgotten how good the food was here, Calliope went to her parents’ house a lot and cooked big meals, or her parents did alone and delivered them to her. There were beers in the fridge, too. I balanced a bunch of containers on the counter and popped the cap from the beer, drank greedily. It felt small in my hands compared to the longnecks I was used to and I necked half of it in a mouthful. I couldn’t be bothered plating up the food, and ate it straight from the containers, oily beans and fresh vegetables. Jones had opened his laptop again.

Around a mouthful of spanakopita, I said, “Are you working on something?”

“Yeah. But I won’t bore you.”

“It’s okay, I’m used to it. Go on.”

“It’s just some coding for a company.”

“Okay.”

After I’d eaten and put everything away we smoked cigarettes in the backyard, Champion Ruby for him, Pepe for me. He bought out speakers and played some music.

“Are you playing the drums anymore?”

“I’m practising, but I’m not in any bands right now.”

“How come?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“Okay,” I said again, even though I had a million questions.

“How’re you feeling?”

I considered. “Yeah, alright. Tired and jet-lagged but okay.”

He lit another cigarette. “Have you decided if you’re going to the funeral or not?”

“I dunno. When is it?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Right. Fuck. Um...I guess I’ll decide tomorrow.”

“Fair enough.”

A silence stretched between us. “So what’s happening with you, man, are you living here?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “For a little while.”

“Fuck.” I’d have asked what was wrong if I thought there was any chance that he’d answer me.

“Do you want to see the paper?”

“The paper?”

“There was an obituary in the paper today. I saved it in case you wanted to see it.”

I breathed deep. The air was warm and rich with jasmine. Somewhere on the street a family was having a barbecue, I could smell the smoke and hear voices from a backyard nearby.

“Yeah, okay.”

He went inside, sliding the door behind him. I stretched my arms up, trying to fix the knots in my back from the plane, even though it felt like the whole trip hadn’t happened, that I’d been in Berlin a second ago. Jones came back with beers for the two of us and handed me a newspaper, folded open at the obituaries page.

Turnbull, Madeline Jessica.

Beloved mother, and partner of Mark.

Funeral and memorial service will be held at

- and it gave the details of a church in St Kilda. Beloved mother? Who wrote that?

“So did you talk to this guy? To Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he sound like?”

He shrugged. “Just a guy. Pretty sad.”

I pictured some kind of English Victorian, waistcoat and all. I wondered how they’d met, if she’d gone on dates, what they’d have done. If they’d had a first kiss, if they’d held hands. Beloved mother. “He left his number, he said that you could call him.” He drew on his cigarette and exhaled quickly, the way he always smoked, little mannerisms that I’d already forgotten about. “Oh. Right.” I looked at the number. Put the paper in my pocket. “Fuck it, I’m not doing it today.” I sighed deeply and realised that I was beyond the point of reeking, and I hadn’t changed my underwear in days. “I’m gonna have a shower, I stink.” I was digging around in the pockets of the jeans I’d been wearing on the plane, trying to find a hair tie, when my fingers brushed against the unmistakeable thickness of a baggie. I was home and safe and through god knows how many airport securities, and here it was, not much, a few big lines of speed, but still my heart stopped in my chest for a moment and then, when I put a hand to my chest to remind it to do its job, it compensated by going double its normal rate. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, to no one. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the baggie in front of me. “Shit,” I said, as I was tapping out a little line, just a little one, on the bedside table, rolling up a five dollar note from my wallet. The familiar burn. The shower was luxurious. My apartment in Neukölln was old and charming but the water pressure was ridiculous, just a trickle, Steffi came out of it looking fresh but I came out with soap still in my pit hair. This, though, this was blasting, and I was gasping with the pleasure of it. I got out. There was a full-length mirror on the opposite wall to the shower. I unwrapped the towel and took it in, body going so from the winter and belly protruding from the beers but still a strong body, and if it wasn’t conventionally beautiful it was beautiful in its abilities, there was strength underneath the so ness. The first time I’d taken all my clothes off around a woman — or a girl, we’d both been girls — had been fast, all of them off at once. I was saying here it is. Expecting disgust or laughter. Instead, she’d sat up in bed and smiled at me and pulled me down on top of her. I liberated one of Calliope’s hair ties, smoothed my hair from my face, and went into ‘my’ room. I put on fresh underwear and cut-offs that hadn’t been worn since summer. I hadn’t had any clean shirts to pack and now I didn’t want to wear anything that smelled of sweat. I walked to the kitchen in my bra and shorts, called outside. “Hey, can I borrow one of your shirts?” “Yeah, go nuts,” Jones said. He’d been looking at his phone, he put it face down on the table. “They’re in my room.” Everything was crisp but deliciously off-kilter. Jones’ room smelled of cigarette smoke and there was an empty Vegemite jar full of butts next to the window. I opened a beat-up duffle bag on the floor, expecting Jones’ usual jumble of mess, but it was empty except for a few leftovers — an odd sock, a ripped flyer of a band I didn’t know. His general mess was in his cupboard. I picked out a black t-shirt, soft and clean, and pulled it on. Looked in the mirror, inspected my smile again, seeing how far I could go before I revealed the gap. I helped myself to his deodorant and then looked around at the room again. There was a notebook on the bed. I picked it up, just to hold it, and then put it back. My heart was racing a bit and I wanted a cigarette. I went back outside and lit one and started to talk about a band I’d seen, a feminist band from Sweden that I’d seen last week in Prenzlauer Berg, how when me and Julia had talked to them afterwards they’d said we should go visit them and play some shows and we could stay at their place, they all lived together and I was envisioning some blissed-out commune. Probably it was just drunk talk — our band wasn’t so good yet, we were just starting, but still, it was exciting. Halfway through I realised that Jones hadn’t asked me any kind of questions, I’d just come out and started to talk about it, and I was talking too fast. When I stopped for breath he smiled. “So how’s the jet lag?” “Yeah, I’m fucked.” Ordinarily I’d have told him about the speed, offered him some, but it still felt a little weird between us, and there was a self-awareness of the fact that I was taking speed just to sit here, and I would’ve had to admit that I’d brought it all the way with me, accident or not. “No arguments here.” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “What?” “It’s just... it’s fucking amazing to see you, man. I’ve really missed you.” “I’ve missed you too,” he said. We kept drinking. Jones played more and more music but none of the stuff that we ever listened to together. We didn’t talk about Pete. I guessed I couldn’t blame him, he’d been through the same, or nearly the same because Jones hadn’t found him. But I couldn’t bring it up. I couldn’t imagine his reaction if I told him that the world was still fucked for me, not all the time, but sometimes when I lay in bed trying to sleep after a good night out Pete’s face would come to me and I’d crawl into bed with Julia, and if she wasn’t home or had someone over then I’d drink in bed until I could cry or pass out, or both. And that wasn’t fair, anyway. It was impossible to know how Jones felt, and I didn’t really know what it was that I wanted to talk to him about. Mostly I didn’t know how to voice the feeling that I was arriving at something, some surety, but I didn’t know of what. Maybe acceptance, I sometimes thought, and I thought as well that I was avoiding that as much as I possibly could because that idea was so much worse than any pain. The speed made me sound nasal, made me sniff every few minutes. Jones had his bare feet on the chair, was smoking cigarette after cigarette. I went to the bathroom to piss and have another line. It was still early, or early enough to have more beers and see if Jones had some weed to smoke before crawling into the clean bed. A nice lie-in tomorrow. I walked down the corridor. I was a bit drunk, I had to trace a hand along the wall as I walked, and as I did my arm brushed a photograph and nearly knocked it down. I righted it, swaying slightly. The house was covered in photos of Jones as a kid, looking at the camera, masses of curly hair, so fucking beautiful that I imagined his whole childhood had been plagued by old women in supermarkets pinching his cheeks until blood vessels were at risk of bursting. I went back outside. I was getting more and more in my head, trying to be conscious of the conversation and be quick in my responses but even with the speed I felt slow. We talked more about music, and this led onto music in video games, which led to the intricacies of a game he was making, and I was proud of him but as usual I started to drift. I was looking at him but my mind was floating away, thinking of photos I should get printed out, drawings I could do, a show I could play, friends I should get in contact with. Gemma, Ryan, Scotty, Holly. And Ada — I missed Ada. I’d only met her a few years ago but it’d felt like I’d known her forever, so that we talked about experiences we’d had when we were kids as though the other had been there. “I’ve completely lost you, haven’t I?” I came back, shook my head. It was dark, the night light had flicked on. Moths and other bugs were bashing into it. “Yeah, completely, I was totally in my head. Go on, tell it again, I’ll try to listen.” “It’s alright,” he said, smiling. “You can just play it when it’s done.” “Thanks,” I said gratefully. He’d always been into video games, since I’d first known him. The first time I went to his house he’d made fun of me, telling me I was no fun to play against because I was so bad. I didn’t really know what a video game was — mum didn’t have a television or a computer or a mobile for years, which could’ve been great. Like I’d be trampling through the wilderness, or something, when what I was really doing was taking my skateboard down to the skate park and sitting with the older boys, drinking their beer and smoking the weed they gave me as a joke, imitating their machismo. One of the boys, they called me for a while, and I wore this title with pride before I started to realise that they were excusing me from something that didn’t need excusing. So when I went to Jones’ and saw the television and the console I had no idea what I was doing. When he realised that I was confused and getting embarrassed and angry at his comments he’d backed off, had said, It’s okay, you play for a while, I’ll teach you. I can’t believe you get to play for the first time. The first times, man, those are the best. “And you,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “What have you been doing?” I told him the outline. Working a little, playing a lot, boozy nights out and boozy nights in. Making zines. Odd jobs I’d gotten, people I’d met. “I’m in a band with one of my housemates,” I said. “We’re not bad.” “Oh yeah? That’s cool.” I couldn’t tell but I thought that I heard a tone of caution in his voice. Jones and I had played together for a while, growing up. He played drums, he said if you understood maths it was easy. I wasn’t sure that I believed that but it seemed to work for him. I bought myself a shitty bass and amp with one of my first pay checks and we started to play together. We started playing with Pete when he moved in. He played guitar, he’d been in a few bands in England, some folk-punk stuff we hadn’t heard of before, which I’d liked but Jones hadn’t. We got better because of Pete. Jones and I had been lazy with practice, preferring instead to get drunk, but Pete wouldn’t have that. He introduced us to bands we hadn’t heard of before. We all sang even though none of us had good voices. Jones’ was monotonous, Pete’s wavered in and out of tune. I could sing but I hated the girlish sound of it (it took me the longest time to stop hating anything feminine, one of the boys rang so often in my head) so I forced it to sound guttural. After I’d started to get horrible sore throats I went to see a doctor. He told me that I was starting to get nodules and said, trying to be helpful, Well, you should probably learn how to sing. Pete would stand in between Jones and the game on the television (the most dangerous place in the world) and wouldn’t say anything but would just look at him, chin tilted down and eyebrows raised, refusing to move until Jones, grumbling, would put the controller down and we’d go practice. We had a few shows, supporting other bands, and we got good feedback. “Maybe we could play together sometime,” I said. He shook his head. I thought he was going to say something — I wasn’t sure what — but he just stood up. “Do you want another beer?” “Sure.” I reached for my tobacco, saw that it was empty and reached for Jones’ instead. Lifted my arms to stretch my back and looked at the plants on the patio, ferns and potted palms in terracotta pots. One that I’d bought for Calliope for her fiftieth birthday. It needed watering.