Thrill Seekers (6 page)

‘Jump Beck! Come on!’ shouts Brian from below. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

She tumbles down after me, falling off the van into the carpark and we bolt through the trees after the others. The thunder of heavy boots drops onto metal a few seconds after us. Way too close.

‘RUN!’ I roar at Beck’s back. ‘They’re coming!’

Like stampeding elephants, the skins give chase, yelling threats and throwing beer cans. One whacks me on the back of the head but I don’t even look around. I keep running even though I’ve got a stitch. My legs are burning. I grip at my side and turn my head to see if I can slow down but there are at least twenty furious skinheads charging after me.

‘Fuck!’ I scream. ‘Faster! They’re gaining on us.’

I clutch at Beck’s arm. She’s panting and starting to get the trembles so I call out to Brian, who half carries her the rest of the way to the pontoon. Jacko’s already in the boat pulling like a maniac on the starter cord. He barely even looks up as Beck collapses into the dinghy. The motor splutters then conks.

‘Jesus! Give me a go!’ yells Brian, as we leap in from the jetty. ‘They’re right behind us. Get in! Hurry!’

Russ jumps in, almost tipping us, followed by Steve who trips on a nail and tumbles in on his back. The engine’s still conking.

Zip, putter, putter, putt.

‘Shit! Shit!’ chants Brian as he tries again.

The skins are on the pontoon. One of them is waving a broken bottle over his head.

‘Do it!’

‘FUCK!’

Steve unties the rope and grabs an oar. I scramble for the other one and we start paddling as fast as we can away from the jetty. But not fast enough. A huge guy vaults into the boat onto me but I whack him with the oar. The motor roars into action and the boat swerves out into the river, toppling the skinhead into the water. He comes up swearing at the top of his lungs. Behind him, the pontoon sags with the weight of the rockers who are foaming at the mouth, they’re so angry. They promise certain death and throw cans, bottles, and rocks into the wash behind us as the dinghy zooms away.

We laugh with relief, panting and slapping each other on the back. Sweaty, bloody, exhilarated.

‘That was too close for comfort,’ I say, watching as the skins rock a parked car onto its side and start flipping it towards the river. ‘They were some mean bastards.’

‘Are you kidding? That was fucken unreal!’ raves Jacko from where he’s regained control of the rudder. Beck is crammed in beside him, stuck to his hip. ‘Best fight we’ve had in ages.’

‘Yeah,’ the fellas answer, echoing Jacko like they always do.

‘Did you see the way I dropped that midget one upside down?’ Jacko asks and then we re-live every punch and kick, making ourselves the heroes of the story. I scoop up some water and splash my face, checking my nose and sore ear.

‘Reckon I’m going to have a black eye in the morning,’ I say. Everyone has some wound to show off. We compete to see whose is worst. Steve might have broken a rib but he says it’s nothing. Brian’s got a fat lip and
Russ’s chipped half a tooth off so he looks real freaky when he smiles.

‘What was that skinhead’s problem anyway?’ Brian asks.

‘Shit, that doesn’t matter, does it Douggie?’ says Jacko. ‘We had a great night, didn’t we?’

It’s a long way home and all the booze is gone. In the cold, my muscles start to ache and my nose is throbbing. I hope it’s not going to mend crooked. No fight’s worth losing my looks for. My face is my passport. My fame depends on it.

Empty goon bladders and crumpled cigarette packets slosh around my feet as the dinghy speeds down the middle of the river towards home. The water looks like milk, with the full moon shining on it, almost beautiful when you can’t see the dirt. Brian blows up one of the silver bladders and drops it overboard and we watch as
it floats away, glowing like an astronaut’s balloon in space. That’d be the way to go, just float away and never come back. Away from all the shit. Maybe I’d see Dad there at the end of the Universe. Maybe.

But if I start thinking like that I’m going nowhere. It’s been a great night, feels like one of the old boat adventures before everyone started going weird on me. So I reckon I’ll cheer us all up with one of my songs. I’ve got some lyrics that kill. The angels sing them in my ear sometimes when I’m stoned like I am now. Like…

Flying / Flying away with you /You and me Babe / Yeah.

Pretty good, hey?

I try it out, singing into the wind and it sounds unreal.

Behind me I hear them all laughing. Laughing and whispering, ‘Crazy Douggie’. But tonight it’s different, they’re laughing with me. Or it feels like they are anyway.

This is the song that’s going to make my first million. Number one with a rocket. Fellas shouting my name and all the girls screaming and fainting as I stride out on stage into the flashing lights, my leather pants tight and sexy, my silver jacket reflecting colours. One girl jumps up on stage, even before I sing the first line and bouncers drag her kicking and fighting to the side. Her skirt gets hitched right up and I see her undies, ‘Douggie 4 eva’ written in felt pen on her crotch. I blow her a kiss and start to sing, the microphone rough against my lips.

I belt it out and stare into the camera, doing ‘fuck me’ eyes like I practise in front of the mirror. I fall onto my knees and sing, ‘Baby, baby. I want you so bad,’ reaching out my hand to touch the fingertips of screaming fans. A couple of them faint and have to be carried away on stretchers. I start to get up, putting one foot on the front of the boat. The wind feels great as it rushes past.

‘Hey Douggie! Watch it!’

The boat tips to one side as I balance on the prow.

‘Flying away with me,’ I sing, then yell out to the fellas behind me, ‘Check this out!’ And I put the other foot on the metal and lean forward with my hands on the point of the boat till I can stand upright. I put my arms out to the sides to balance and sing, ‘Flying! Flying!’ The climax of the song. The crowd roars!

‘For fuck’s sake Douggie, sit down!’ Jacko shouts.

He’s not that into my music.

‘Okay, okay,’ I mutter, but I could’ve stayed like that the whole way home, face into the wind, cool and sexy.

I reach down a hand onto the boat’s nose but I slip and land with a thud on my arse. Water starts flooding over the front and side. Cold.

The fellas start hollering. ‘Move back! Lean left! Lean left!’ But it’s too late. The river’s taking over the boat; we’re sinking faster than the Titanic. We’re all in the drink, floundering like catfish on the end of a line.

I start swimming like crazy. Luckily we’re not too far out. My jeans drag on my legs but I’m a pretty good swimmer, got a trophy last year at school, so I make it to the bank first.

Steve crawls up out of the mud and punches me on the arm, ‘You big loser. Why’d you have to go and do that for? We could’ve drowned.’

‘What? What did I do?’

It’s not really a question he’s supposed to answer so I look out at the others struggling in with the boat. Brian’s helping Beck to hang onto the side as he and Russ kick it in. And then I see Jacko clambering up out of the mud. At least I think it’s Jacko. Jacko with no clothes on, stark white and skinny,
dragging his jacket behind him. His droopy grey undies sagging and leaving a trail of drips.

I turn to Steve and grin and he smiles right back at me, like maybe he’s even missed me a bit.

‘It was worth it,’ he says and we laugh till we could bust.

I saw Russ last night. He came to me in my dream. Funny that, how the dead come to visit you in dreams. It freaked me out. Even though it’s been months now since it happened, there he was, real as life. I could even smell the Marlboros on him, his hair as wild and bushy as it ever was.

‘How’s it going mate?’ he said.

We were in that field, the one near the creek where we went picking mushies, a couple of weekends after the fight with the skins.

I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to a dead guy?

‘You look good, haven’t changed a bit,’ I said.

‘Yeah mate, you look like a right bloody fat bastard.’

I laughed, ‘Yeah mate, reckon I am.’

He was still the same funny bugger, always up for a laugh, when he wasn’t having one of his moods that is. It was a shit of a thing. Should never have happened to him at all.

It was Jacko’s idea to go mushy picking. We grabbed Steve and Russ on the way; at least we had the sense to leave Douggie at home. We were looking for gold tops. After that kid got sick that time, we steered clear of blue meanies. They weren’t called mean for nothing. So gold tops it was. And we found them, heaps of them.

It’d rained the night before so we got up early and drove out to the vet school cow paddocks, down the creek a bit from Mum’s. Grass seeds stuck to the hairs on our legs and our flip-flops got slippery with dew as we scoured the cow pats for mushies.

People always used to cheer when we arrived at parties with our shopping bags full of dripping black gold tops. Like at that coolest party ever at Jacko’s place. That night we boiled up two huge vats of mushies, bubbling thick and black. Everyone had too much.

We tried to stop the little ones – the grommets – make them have only one cup; but shit, those mongrels, who could stop them? I didn’t like to see the young ones get too wasted, not after what happened to Douggie. But you can’t tell kids anything.

That was some party alright, chairs busting out through the windows onto the lawn, kids up trees howling at the moon, slam-dancing into walls. So many colours;
some wild trip. Then those fellas crashed and Jacko lost it, went ape-shit kicking their heads in till Russ and Steve threw the crashers out, and steered Jacko back to the dance floor.

That was just before the pigs came and that kid came running in screaming, ‘The pigs, the fucken pigs. Anyone with drugs get out!’

We were out over the fence, across the neighbour’s yard and hurtling down the street when we heard a sound like rolling drums, and there was the rest of the party racing down the asphalt after us. Don’t know who was left back at the house, probably no one. That was some party. One of our great mushy parties.

There was going to be another one that night, that’s why me and the other fellas were out there in the paddock, filling plastic bags, laughing and munching on a few as we went. Tasted foul, like rotten dirt, but still, we swallowed anything if it got us stoned.

The trip started coming on strong, good fresh mushies. They were always the best out in nature, with the trees and grass and everything. The clouds were going wild and we were laughing and falling over and forgetting what we were supposed to be doing.

‘Fuck man, it’s so fucken beautiful.’

That was Russ – he loved to be out in the bush, must’ve been the murri in him. He reckoned it was anyway, though he was so freckly I never would have guessed it. He could just walk up to cows and pat their slimy noses, laughing when they licked his face. He loved it out there. We were having a great time.

It was Jacko’s idea to go for a swim. Swimming was magic when you were tripping. You know water and that, it’s all over your skin, you swim in it, you drink it, but you can’t breathe it. Sometimes that’s a bit hard to remember.

So we went down to the creek. The rain had swelled it up and made it high and wide, rushing through the mangroves. It was swirling and exciting. We edged down the mud and took off our flip-flops.

‘What are you waiting for, ya pussy?’ said Jacko, even though he still had his shoes on. So I jumped right in.

And bugger me but that water was fierce. It was angry at me, wanted me down at the bottom sucking mud. I tried to swim back in but I couldn’t. I was being dragged out into the middle. I started screaming, yelling for help.

Jacko stood on the bank laughing with Steve. They thought it was a joke.

Then Russ looked at me and I saw his face change. He pulled off his shirt and was in after me. He was a good swimmer, real strong. His arms were the biggest part of his body. His legs were stick thin, just waiting to catch up with his arms he reckoned. I was getting tired. My arms weren’t big like
his and they were hurting, burning, trying to fight through that heavy brown water.

‘Mate,’ I panted as he ploughed towards me.

‘Don’t worry Brian, I’ve got you.’ He grabbed me round the waist and started pulling me back towards the bank.

Once he had me I stopped trying, let myself relax into the strength of his muscles dragging me forward, taking me home. He slowed down a bit, fighting against the current.

A log came rolling, tumbling towards us.

‘Grab it! Grab the log!’ he yelled, throwing me towards it. And I opened my eyes, remembered where I was, came back from the spa pool of my mushroom dreams, and reached for the rough bark as it rushed by. I held on good and tight, looked for Russ beside me. But he wasn’t there.

He was back behind me still swimming for shore, his big freckly arms lifting out of the muddy swirl.

I gripped onto that log for dear life and floated down and down, all the way to the bridge where the log got snagged on a pylon. I pulled myself up onto the concrete slab at its base and huddled there, hanging onto the steel girder, shivering and freaking out till the water police came and got me.

They never found Russ though. Not ever. Not all those days they dragged the bottom and sent in divers. He just disappeared, lost in the dark mud of that fucking creek.

I used to think about him all the time, feel really bad about it. But Jacko says you can’t let stuff like that get to you too much or you’ll go crazy. So I try to forget about it, like he has. We never even talk about Russ anymore. Like he was never even here. I push what happened to the back of my mind, don’t look Beck in the eye when she gets drunk and starts to cry. And whenever Russ’s wonky-toothed grin flashes at me out
of nowhere, or when the bloke in front of me in the queue at the fish and chip shop has the same big freckled arms, I close my eyes, shake my head and stuff it back down.

But then, last night, there he was. Large as life and grinning at me.

‘Mate,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re right mate. You’re right.’

‘It should’ve been me.’

‘Nah, mate, nah – it was always gunna be me.’

And he sort of patted me on the shoulder.