CHAPTER EIGHT
"I'm lost but I'm hopeful." (Alanis Morisette)
There's a bang from inside the pub and my head snaps around. The strobing green and red lights flash yellow. The next few things happen in quick succession—one, the red lights are replaced by that of a police car, siren blaring, shaking my eardrums. Two, Raisa jumps out of the way and tugs me with her. The car grinds to a half in the middle of the car park. Three, a male and a female officer step out. My first instinct is to duck back into the shadows, and luckily, Raisa's on my wavelength, and soon enough we're both hidden. Four, smoke files into a steady pillar stemming from under and above the main door. Five, a man is thrust out the door by an angry-looking bartender.
We wait for Joel to have his turn stumbling through the door, but he doesn't come. I watch, eyes trained on the doorway, the entire audience spill from the hotel. The police begin interviewing people. "We should go," whispers Raisa right in my ear.
"What's happened to Joel?" I whisper back. As much as I would hate a 'talk' with the police, I don't want to leave without Joel. I don't want to be without the group of people who have properly got me. And I got them. It wouldn't be right to continue without everybody's favourite Van Morrison fan. I tell Raisa this, voice as hushed as I can make it, and she laughs so softly it's like she didn't laugh at all.
I am just as frozen as the girl beside me, so frozen I don't notice how close we are until she moves away a centimeter, separating us. Neither of us dare to breathe. Another car pulls up and uses a fire extinguisher to kill the flames, and the smoke slowly ceases. Then, my eyes grow wide. A body is being guided out of the remaining smoke, not distinguishable; I can only see his outline. He moves slowly and shuffles his feet over one another. Is he injured? Is it Joel?
The combination of moon and street and city and car lights rain over his face and I breathe out a synonymous sigh of relief. The man is clean-shaven, blonde, and a bigger build than the brown-haired, whiskery weed that is Joel. Adrenaline disperses and I can see clearly again—but where is Joel? Maybe he's still in there... I swap a look with Raisa and know she's thinking the same.
Raisa whips around behind her. I hear a slap, and a voice that sounds like Joel's saying: "Jesus, Raisa!"
"Where were you?" Raisa snaps at him, but catches herself halfway and quietens. She reaches a hand up, grabs a fistful of Joel's precious hair-do and pulls him down into the shadows with us.
He slaps her hand away and scowls. He might have been about to answer Raisa when the police officers look in our direction with raised eyebrows so instead he says, "We have to leave." Silently agreeing, we wait until no-one is looking to slink back to the car; I'm holding my breath the whole way.
-
No-one dares speak until we're on the highway again. From our rush into the car, I'm now in the front seat and Raisa is in the back seat behind me. Joel hasn't said anything about it, but he comes off as being the sort of person who is the only person who drives his car, and may execute anyone else who attempts to. Slowly, I begin to notice the city falling—the calm demeanor I'd observed while walking over the Iron Cove has dripped away. I see a few people standing on street corners with signs, "The world is ending! The apocalypse is nigh!" Of course, there's always been those, but it seems they've all come out at the one time. The streets gradually become a lined with a thinner layer of people; but the commotion has been replaced up above, in the apartment buildings. It's 7:00pm, and party time, apparently. I don't feel like I'm partying, not at all like I'd promised Harry and Kieran.
It's funny to think I could be at 'one of my mates' parties'—I don't have any mates, not really, but you don't have to be friends with anyone to go to a high school party. A rumour is spread that there's free beers and maybe strippers, if you're lucky, at Andrew's place at nine, and that you should be there; that's the invite etiquette, at least in my experience. Usually, there aren't any strippers (those are what I like to call 'popularity magnets'; things the least popular member of the soccer team say to get more people to RSVP) but in their place there is live music and alcohol. If I were at 'a mate's' party, I would be sitting on the grass in front of the band's stage in the garden, holding a plastic cup of cheap beer 'my mate' would have nicked off his drop-kick uncle.
Now, I might be running from the police, in a shitty Ford Commodore, with a mysterious bohemian surrealist, and an anger-issued Van Morrison fanatic. I'm having trouble, honestly, deciding where I'd rather be. Raisa turns to Joel, whose eyes are unmoving from the road, and asks the question that's been overdue ever since the Ben Folds Five Disaster (which I feel like was a week ago, but as I look at the clock I realize it's only been about ten minutes). "What was that about? Did someone else threaten your zero-tolerance policy for arseholes?"
I think I might have heard Joel say something, or mumble it, but as the silence continues I know Raisa's still adamant she didn't ask a rhetorical question. Joel waits until we're halted by the unrelenting Sydney traffic to say, in a clear voice—a forced voice, like Joel had just been screaming and someone's told him to lower his voice: "It wasn't me."
Raisa looks up. I get the feeling she wasn't fully expecting Joel to answer. "It wasn't you who did what?"
"I set off the fire alarm," Joel admits, not sheepishly, but stubbornly. It's odd... I guess he must want to admit something other than the fact that he's done nothing. "I saw a couple of guys through a crack in the back door dealing something, and, like, it was heavy stuff, whatever it was. I thought they'd seen me—I'm sure they have—so I panicked and set off the alarm and..."
"You set the fire for it to be more realistic?" Raisa gasps melodramatically, and I nearly laugh since she sounds like a character in an Agatha Christie-esque 'whodunit', but I don't fancy a kick to where the sun doesn't shine so I keep my mouth shut and settle for silently sniggering.
"No," Joel sighs. He sounds calmer, which is good, because that way he's less scary. I hadn't really taken in quite how much bigger he was than me—when he'd been kicked out of the Bridge Hotel, he was a crumpled, dejected mess, and I'd thought him about as tall as myself. Now, even sitting down and driving, he looks older and taller. He takes a deep breath and continues:
"Some drunk kid spilled vodka in the doorway and I, um, since I was running out of the joint so quick I guess I must have bumped another boy because a lighter went flying."
"You committed arson at a Ben Folds Five gig?" that's Raisa's voice, lighter than before.
Joel's face cracks a smile, just a tiny upturning of his lips, but it's there. "Indirectly. How badass is that?"
I laugh and add, in a posh voice, "Joel Darien, you are sentenced to three years imprisonment on account of the charge of first-degree indirect arson at a Ben Folds Five gig. How do you plead?"
Joel gives me a look, but answers nonetheless, "Guilty."
Raisa cheers in the back seat just as the traffic starts moving again and we are continuing on whatever journey this is turning out to be. We talk nonsense for the next few kilometers; I hear that Joel's beloved Alice used to share an apartment with him before they, "you know" (which I can only assume means 'before they broke up'), and I spare a thought for a derelict nineteen-sixties-oriented almost-adult like Joel struggling through the payments of an apartment in the city like he'd described. I still don't know how old Joel is; next time there's a gap in conversation, I'll have to ask. He looks only eighteen, with a failed attempt at a beard decorating his jaw—but he had an apartment, so how old does that make him?
Joel throws the conversation over to Raisa by trying to explain his love for the nineteen-sixties, and asking Raisa and me what our thoughts were. Joel wears the sort of clothes someone driving home from Woodstock in nineteen-sixty-nine would wear: a 'groovy' (Joel's words) patterned shawl (? I don't know what else to call it) slung around his shoulders and a dark purple button-up shirt half-tucked into his loose-fitting jeans. I jump into his and Raisa's competitive speech and ask: "Joel, how old are you?"
"Nineteen." Joel says. "Why?"
"I was just wondering..." I say. "When did you leave home?"
Joel's quiet for a while. Raisa seems to get some kind of telepathic message and steers my thoughts away. "Nathan," she asks me, "What's your favourite sixties song?"
"Lazy Sunday by the Small Faces." I say.
"How does that go?"
I raise my eyebrows at her. "Oh, come on. I'm not going to sing it. You must know it."
"I don't." she shrugs.
"Go on," says Joel. "Sing it. I'll do backing vocals."
"No," I say, but it's light and happy in its tone, and nobody seems to take me seriously.
"Please," says Raisa.
Joel rolls his eyes and starts vocalizing the introduction.
"I'm seriously not doing it." I protest, but Joel just gets louder. Raisa starts up a rhythmic hand-clap, and I feel as though I haven't got a choice. With all their eyes on me, like they're burning, and the noise of claps and Joel humming the intro over and over, I begin singing: "Oh, wouldn't it be nice, to get on with my neighbours..."
"You have to do it in the accent." Joel interrupts me. The song's sung in a cockney East-London accent, and oh, God, this couldn't possibly get any more humiliating, could it?
Raisa looks positively ecstatic at the idea of me doing a British accent, which just makes me a bit more anxious, if I'm honest. I take a deep breath and start again.
"Oh, wouldn't it be nice, to get on with me neighbours? But they've made it very clear they've got no room for ravers—" Raisa and Joel both give a shout as part of the song, which proves they both already knew the song and they're just doing this to embarrass me. I get quieter as the verse goes on, and, thank God for Joel—Joel picks off where I fade out and carries on like nothing happened. We're acting all the world like we're drunk and disorderly and having the times of our lives—the only difference is that we aren't drunk, and we'll remember this for as long as we can recollect.
-
Raisa complains she's hungry about halfway to Bondi so we stop over for what appears to be the only takeaway open on New Year's Eve ('Mickey's Takeaway: Burgers, milkshakes and chips'—a highly effective slogan, if you ask me). It's odd to think if I'd said I was hungry, Joel probably would've told me to shut up, but with Raisa, both Joel and I would drop everything to fix whatever she's complaining about. It's actually more stupid than it is odd, but I can't pretend I don't sort of like it.
Joel originally sent Raisa to order, but she had deflected the offer politely, and asked me. "No, way," I said.
"I'll have two small servings of chips," I say to the utterly bored middle-aged woman at the counter. She comes off as if she'd rather be in a barrel full of spikes going over Niagara Falls than be in here. I can identify with that. "And—" I look back to Raisa standing in the diner's doorway, who mouths, 'latte' to me. "And a latte." She moves her hands apart, mouthing the coffee size she wants, so I add, "Make that a...a large? Yeah, a tall latte." Raisa relays some information from Joel to me: 'and a Mars bar for Joel'. "And a..." I grab a chocolate bar from the counter. "A Mars bar, thank you."
The spike barrel woman beckons me a bit closer, and murmurs to me: "Why are you ordering for her? Why doesn't she do it herself?"
I back away and shrug, getting a twenty dollar note out of my pocket. I whisper back to the woman: "I'm getting really scared at this point that I'll do anything for her."
She takes my money and gives me three two-dollar coins in return. She shakes her head. "Boy,
you'll want to get out of that while you can."
"Why?" I ask, eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
"Because," she says, "If you keep going on like that, you'll get married." She pauses. "And then your life is over. You should stay independent while you can."
Independent? Like, Joel's ex-girlfriend-type independent? I don't mean to but I imagine Raisa and I being independent together; me, a music journalist for the Rolling Stone, her, directing indie films in black-and-white on purpose. She hasn't said anything about wanting to do anything like that, but it seems like the sort of thing she'd do. Life doesn't seem over at all.
"Thanks," I grab my butcher's paper-wrapped order. "But I'm going to dismiss that opinion for the sake of irrelevance and pretend I didn't hear it," I say, and walk out.