I wake slowly, face mashed into carpet soggy with beer. The world's a blur so I’d either taken out my contacts (please please) or lost them somehow somewhere. I move slowly, checking the floor around me in expanding circles until discovering them gummed to a coffee table.
Brilliant.
Sucking them clean I prise open my eyelids to drop them back in – ouch – and tugging a couch cushion out from under a still comatose Trace, I lie back down.
Everything hurts: my head has been run over by beer, fat spots, sculled spirits and a room thick with smoke; a stomach that’s seen only a few spoonfuls of a rotten chicken curry and white bread. Now it’s eating me. Roadkill.
I stink; I can taste the stink. It’s four days till dole day and the twenty bucks I spent at the supermarket is pretty much gone. I have no plans: not for today, this week or month. But I am thinking of going straight sometime. The blank patches scare me.
Fuck; this is pretty scary as well:
Last night three of us arrive on Nath’s dirt bike well after the party had started. It had been a tight squeeze and a bit hair-raising cos there was only one helmet and Nath was pissed-as after drinking all afternoon. We took the back roads through suburbia until we were free of town, then cut back round the stock car track to dart across the main highway and into the block of flats where the party was. Sweet, no one died.
Two kegs are in the middle of the kitchen, one of them is cracked and frothing like homebrew all over the floor. Bags of melting ice are clustered round them – the bath is too far away to bother traipsing back and forth and in the clammy heat they just add to the beer and mud slop that is already making walking hazardous. There's a tight knot of guys around the kegs clutching their jam jars and stolen pint glasses all going hard. Already there's one casualty curled up on the end of a couch, a clutch of toi toi flowers stick out of the poor bastards pants. Beside him and deep in animated conversation are the only two women at the party; multiple layers of black and purple lace, jewellery and Docs. Yep. Alice Cooper is cranking on the stereo just like the last piss-up held here, but he doesn't dampen our joy. We like these guys, they're cool.
A chopping board beside the glowing stove is covered with tightly rolled spots for anyone in need and this is our first port of call. Pre-drink nibbles. Sucking on a cut up coke bottle my brain seizures, dies, and I slam backwards against the fridge before sliding to the floor.
“Welcome to my nightmare” growls Alice in his scary voice. But that’s it; then I wake up on the other side. I'm pretty sure I had a great time.
And now?
Well to be honest I wish I had some food to cook; hell I wish I could cook. Maybe I should wish that food was important to me; be a start eh? I could wake with the energy and motivation to do, to be. To not feel so fucking insignificant, pathetic, useless, depressed, sick, mad. And yeah, sometimes I wonder why bother waking at all. Not for long though; I get over it, get on with it.
“Why do you want this job?” my case manager had asked.
“I’m really keen on vegetables. In fact I’m practically a vegetarian.”
“Well good for you, but I’m afraid that you’re too old to qualify for the youth rate that they are going to pay.”
“That’s ok; um, can we pretend?”
“Hmmm. Now, last week you applied for a position as a financial controller and the week before that you left with an application to join the Navy.”
Oh.
So I’m a little lost. I’m not sure which way is forward, why I was born. Why. Fuck lets just not go there ok?
She's smiling patiently while I contemplate my career options. I shrug my shoulders - she sighs, fidgets, briefly reveals her disdain for me and my inability to forge ahead. I must be a drag on her monthly job placement stats eh. Maybe we should talk suicide after all? How sometimes I lie on my bed when the afternoons get just too long, hold my knife and wonder about pain, about slicing and dicing. But I can’t be bothered. Doing; talking.
I’m eighteen and I don’t want to work at Watties or learn to fix cars. My excuses always seem to bemuse my case manager. Oil wars? Free trade? Made in China? Well go pick apples then and buy nice New Zealand made things, she tells me.
It’s all insane; must be it, cos deep down I know, I hope, that all that is me… is real. That's all I want. To know. Right now though I'm happy enough knowing that it's not the time to die. Maybe that's enough.
I sit up slowly, bum shuffle over to a sunny patch of carpet and resume the position.
Yeah, that's how it is.
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