Good Oil (18 page)

And I am lonely. Really lonely. Even a girlfriend I don’t have any great connection with would be better than no girlfriend at all. And this drought shows no sign of breaking.

I have to seriously consider my options.

Then there’s Amelia, who I like better than any of the other girls. It’s about time I wrote that down. But she is young. I’m going to be twenty-two in a few months. I’m hoping to move into some brave new phase of life aft er university, and I really can’t see myself doing that with a fifteen-year-old in tow. If only she was a few years older. But she ain’t.

Bianca is having a select few over to her house this Saturday night – her parents are overseas again. There’ll be a lot of alcohol directly sponsored by Bianca’s parents, and most likely a lot of white powdered substances indirectly sponsored also by Bianca’s parents. I have to say, I do like the idea of doing a line of speed off their $7000 granite coffee table, looking out over the harbour at the city lights blinking on the skyline.

June 6

Dad is being all stoic about Zoe moving out, but I think he’s worried and sad about losing his not-so-little princessa. It’s strange, this modern life where kids stay at home for so long. When Dad was twenty-four he’d just bought a house, married my mother and knocked her up. Zoe’s the same age but it’s a whole different set of markers. I wonder how much of it is due to changes in education funding and living and housing costs. For most students, there’s no option but to stay at home while you’re studying.

Mum’s putting together a couple of crates of cutlery, crockery and linen for Zoe to take with her. She’s also bought her a toaster and a kettle, both of which are gleaming in their boxes in the front hallway. I swiped a few clean empty boxes from the back dock at work for her to pack stuff in.

‘You realise,’ I said to Zoe a couple of days ago in a last bid to get her to stay, ‘that there won’t be cold beer laid on in your new place. Unless
you
buy it.’

‘Yep,’ she replied smiling. ‘
My
beer in
my
fridge.’

It’s time
. Bloody oath.

June 10

It’s about midday on Sunday. It’s the first really cold day. I’ve not yet surfaced, but Mum and Dad must have rummaged out some of the heaters because the smell of burnt fluff has seeped under my door. I’m loath to get out of bed because a) it’s cold, b) a Sunday morning (well, afternoon now) spent solely in Mum and Dad’s company will reinforce my status as the only
child
left living at home, and c) I am delicate, hung-over and sheepish in the wake of Bianca’s party last night.

Zoe moved out on Friday. She’s due to come over for dinner tonight. She’ll bring Dad’s car back and I’ll drive her home in it. On Friday I helped her ferry several car-loads of stuff to Leichhardt and we loaded up the final one at about 7 p.m.

Mum and Dad came out to say goodbye. Mum gave her a Tupperware container of Zoe’s favourite ‘Mum dish’ – fish curry, and another of rice.

‘For dinner,’ Mum said. ‘And . . . ’ she handed Zoe a plastic colander, ‘I don’t use this one so you take it.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Zoe, stowing them carefully on top of a stack of pillows on the front seat.

‘And here,’ said Dad, ‘I thought you might like some of this . . . ’ he handed her a bottle of Elliot Rocke shiraz. Zoe’s special favourite – but extremely seldom purchased – winter wine.

‘Oh
thanks
, Dad. Yum!’ She inspected the label, smiling.

‘I haven’t had this for ages. What a treat. Sylv and I will crack it open tonight.’

A pained silence followed.

‘Well, I’d better be going,’ Zoe said. ‘I’ll see you all on Sunday night.’

She and I hugged briefly.

‘Easy does it, Ripley,’ she said softly in my ear.

Next she hugged Dad, and then Mum. She and Mum had tears in their eyes.

‘Right,’ she muttered, fingering the car keys. ‘Bye.’

She got into the old white Commodore, started the engine and switched on the lights.

We raised our arms in salute as she pulled out from the kerb.

Later – 5 p.m.

Oh, all right. Here’s why I feel sheepish in the wake of the party last night.

It was, as always, a pleasure to attend Bianca’s harbour-side mansion. Ed and I caught buses over together.

‘What about Alana?’ I said to him as we jumped off at Rose Bay. Alana is seriously chasing Ed. He shrugged.

We walked in silence. I’ve wondered lately whether Ed might be gay. I had a sudden rush of courage and faith in our friendship.

‘Ed, are you gay?’

He turned to look at me out of his reddened eyes and shook his head.

‘What about Donna?’ he asked me pointedly.

‘Donna!’

‘Donna,’ he said calmly. ‘She’s keen; you must know she’s keen.’

‘I’m not that keen,’ I said. ‘I’m lonely and I’m horny, but I’m just not that keen.’

‘She’s an attractive girl.’

‘But is she? Or is it just a lot of jewellery, piercings and attitude?’

Ed shrugged again.

‘Your call,’ he said.

We walked for a while in silence.

‘Amelia’s not coming tonight, is she?’ he said, sly as a swagman’s kelpie.

‘Amelia? Nah. Bianca wouldn’t have invited her.’

‘She might’ve if you’d said something.’

‘I doubt it. She suspects, quite rightly, that the youngster knows too much.’

‘Too much about what?’

‘About Bianca. That she’s a vacuous, parentally-funded phoney boho who enjoys manipulating youngsters to fuel her own ego.’

Ed laughed.

‘That’s our hostess you’re talking about.’

‘I know. I feel terrible.’

‘Are
you
keen on Amelia?’ Ed asked, with the same trying-to-sound-calm tone that I’d used when I asked him if he was gay.

I laughed. ‘Am
I
keen on her?’

‘Are you?’

‘She’s very young.’

‘Answer the question.’

I struggled. I flailed.

‘Yes. No! Kind of. In
theory
, mind.’

‘Righto.’

We turned onto Bianca’s street.

Bianca had set Alana and Jeremy to work making cocktails with a huge, gleaming blender. She circled, carrying a large jug of whatever batch they had just made.

I wasted no time getting into a well-lubricated comfort zone. I even had a half-civilised chat with Kathy. She was looking fetching in one of those cross-over top things that accentuated her neat collarbone and those perfect breasts that I will never get my hands on.

‘How’s your prac going?’ I asked.

‘Oh, all right. Actually, this is my fourth week, so it’s wearing pretty thin,’ she laughed. ‘But, you know, all right.’

Crikey, I thought. She can’t
wait
to find some financially solvent backer to marry so she doesn’t have to work. I reckon she only chose primary-school teaching because it’s non-threatening, even attractive, to the banker types who want a pretty, low-maintenance wife to run the house, raise the children and please – but not
titillate
– the business associates. Primary-school teaching. A
suitable
occupation for a young lady. Just until the babies come of course. Then it will be all designer prams, Peter Pan kindergarten, mothers group in Centennial Park and four-wheel drives for the bumpy road back to South Head.

‘Are you seeing anyone?’ she asked sweetly, draining her glass of passionfruit caipiroska.

‘Little old me?’ I replied, without embarrassment. ‘No. No I’m not. You?’

‘Actually, yeah. I just started seeing a guy from uni.

James Lyon. Do you know him?’ James Lyon, James Lyon. Yes, vaguely. He’s one of her library-lawn gang. I’ve met him at the uni bar a few times. He’s in his last year of Commerce. Already has a cadetship at Price Waterhouse Coopers. Very, very tall and alpha-race looking. He could well be the pea! Good luck to ’em. Of course, what really I mean is Fuck Them Both. But I finally feel I am ‘on the level’ with Kathy – with who she is and what she wants. And where a guy like me fits in to her world view, which is nowhere. I could have provided strawberries, poetry and orgasms, but James on the other hand will provide a house in Vaucluse and a six-figure salary.

I can see clearly now. Amelia would be proud.

Anyways, the evening progressed and I found myself in the pool room, playing doubles with Ed, Donna and Bianca. We all drank from large tumblers of something lethal and red. Ed and I won the first game by one ball. The second game came down to the black and turned into twenty minutes of frustrating stalemate, broken when Ed sunk the white after the black. Ed was disgusted with himself and went off to smoke a joint on the balcony. Bianca excused herself to go and check on the alcohol supply, closing the door behind her. Which left me looking at Donna in the dim light of the custom-made lamp hanging over the pool table. She leaned against the table’s wooden edge about a metre away from me, with her arms crossed and her pool cue between her thighs.

‘Want to take me on?’ she said smoothly.

‘Sure.’

It was somehow understood that I would ferret the balls out from underneath the table and pack them in the triangle, while she sat down on the window seat to roll a cigarette.

‘You want to break?’ I asked her.

‘You break,’ she said, lighting the cigarette with the huge flame from her trademark Zippo.

You know
, I thought as she blew a large plume of smoke and flicked the Zippo shut,
I don’t much care for smoke.

‘Where’d you get that?’ I pointed to the Zippo.

‘America. When I was visiting my mother a couple of years back.’

I broke, and sank nothing. Donna sank two smalls with powerful shots. Then she tried a softer shot and missed.

She wore several chunky pendants around her neck, all on long pieces of black cord or leather, with the metallic features coming to rest at nipple latitude. Before she bent over to take a shot, she’d pull the pendants around to hang behind her shoulder so they wouldn’t spill onto the table.

When I stepped up to survey my next move, Donna sat again at the window seat and produced a small and beat-up looking tobacco tin from her pocket. She extracted from it a rectangular hand-mirror, a tiny plastic bag of speed and a keycard.

‘Want a line?’

‘Sure.’

With a veteran’s dexterity she emptied a quantity of the brownish-white crystals onto the mirror and began to chop at them with the keycard’s edge. She expertly separated them into two neat lines.

I sank two more bigs, while she pulled a ten-dollar note from the tin and rolled it up tightly.

‘You’re up,’ she said. She held the mirror for me in her palm – at about pendant (and hence nipple) height – while I bent down and inhaled one of the lines through the ten-dollar note.

‘Ah,
fuck
,’ I couldn’t help but whimper, as the harsh chemical burned through the back of my nasal passages.

I sniffed several times.

‘Stings like a bastard, huh,’ said Donna. She pointed at the other line. ‘That’s for you too.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll cut more.’

I tested for my clearest nostril and bent my head again.

I chalked my cue and took two more shots while she cut a couple more lines and hoovered them up herself.

‘Your shot,’ I said.

She picked up her cue and surveyed the table, before bending over to take a shot a few inches from where I was standing. I could see a short expanse of pale skin between the waistband of her jeans and the black and white stripes of her top. She missed.

‘Damn,’ she muttered.

I felt invincible as I strode around to the other side of the table. I sank the rest of the bigs in quick succession and then, with a satisfying thwack, the black.

‘All over red rover,’ I said suavely, draining the rest of my tumbler and smiling.

‘Sure is.’ She dumped her cue on the expensive-looking green-felt tabletop. Then she walked around to the other side of the table and did the same to mine.

‘That was good . . . um.’ I motioned to my nostrils.

‘Good.’

‘Yeah, it’s not bad.’

‘I’ll give you some money.’

She’s standing rather close
, I remember thinking.

Then she grabbed hold of my front jeans pockets, pulled my pelvis in to lock with hers and kissed me with openmouthed, smoke-flavoured fervour.

My poor sex-starved body kissed back immediately and responded particularly well to the pressure of her pelvis. Like I’ve often said, Donna seems sixteen going on thirty-five, which she well and truly confirmed last night. Her hands were all over my crotch in a matter of seconds, rubbing and squeezing.

Chris
, I thought weakly somewhere off in the distance,
come on man, don’t have sex with the sixteen-year-old.

You can stop this now
.

But then she took hold of my hands and put them inside her top. And then there was no stopping. Once a man gets his hands on a couple of breasts, he’s not going to stop himself. Especially if he’s full of amphetamine energy. But when she started undoing the buttons on my fly, I caught her hand.

‘What if someone comes?’ I whispered.

‘That’s the whole idea, Chris,’ she said in a normal speaking voice.

‘No,’ I said, gesturing to the door. ‘Comes through the
door
.’

‘They won’t,’ she said.

In retrospect, I think she and Bianca must have planned the whole thing and Bianca was guarding the door. Donna undid the rest of my buttons with unnerving precision and adjusted my boxer shorts until I sprang out of them. I kissed her again before she lowered herself onto her knees on the expensive creamy carpet. I gripped the edges of the pool table and looked out over the harbour at the bridge lights.

And that’s how Donna came to be performing unmentionable acts on me, and then I on her, in the pool room of the harbourside mansion until the small hours of the morning.

And now I suspect I might be in a bit of a pickle.

Zoe’s here for dinner. I’d better wrap up.

I’m so not hungry.