At Sydney Airport I don’t pick up a paper. I move slowly from one gate to another, collecting my baggage as I go. Then I sit. I have no idea how long. Eventually I climb on board another plane.
I’m on a Qantas Boeing 707 over the Great Australian Bight. The air hostess brings me a meal. I know the names of all the vegetables. They have no taste. I keep asking her for salt because she smells like a highland morning after a solid rain, and she’s blonde, leggy, beautiful, her breasts are a nice neat fit with the rest of her and I want to take her into the small room at the back of the plane and ask her if she’d like to fuck, then help her with her panties and drop my daks and stick the lizard into her and push and shove and go in and out until I’m ready to burst and then, when the bursting is done, ask her to remove all her clothes so I can look at her soft whiteness and remind myself even though I have never seen it before and hold her nakedness next to mine and try to love her but I don’t and never will because she’s a Madonna, and white, oh so white, and I am a whore.
Could I have some more salt, please? I ask.
You like salt? she says.
I have a craving, I say.
And because of the salt my mouth is dry and dusty and I drink lots of Tooheys New and because of the beer I get up every thirty minutes and go to the toilet. When I piss, the lizard itches and experiences a slight burning sensation. I wonder if it’s the Australian beer.
I fall asleep. I am in George Kanluna’s Volkswagen and there is a dead body on the back seat. He doesn’t seem to know it’s there and I can’t tell him. I try to. I want to. But I can’t. He stops the car and turns around, ever so slowly, as though he knows he will see something. I wake up in my room, shivering, sweating, and full of fear that he will see the body and know I put it there. Then I’m puzzled: he already knows it’s there?
I wake up in the plane and get up for another piss. The plane is flying nice and steady. I walk towards the front, hoping to meet the hostess coming the other way and that we will touch as we turn sideways and pass between the seats and I will smell her loveliness and look closely at her delicate hands and want them to hold my lizard. Maybe one of the pilots will invite me into the cockpit. I’ve heard it happens and that the view of the world from a great height is something to remember.
I can go no further, there’s a curtain, not quite filling the gap, and behind it I glimpse the hostess and a man in uniform, a pilot. There’s movement. The curtain is pulled. Did I see her and the pilot kissing? I did. I am sure of it. The Madonna is not a Madonna. She’s a whore. Or is she? Maybe she’s engaged to the pilot. I return to my seat. The hostess walks down the aisle. I don’t look at her. Now I remember who she looks like, Megan Stirling, the girl who kissed me goodbye at Perth Airport. Maybe I’ll ask Megan out, make her laugh and she’ll kiss me. A kiss would be nice. I miss a kiss.
My head falls forward. I lift it up, then it falls again and I dream I’m out with Megan Stirling. When we get back to her place we kiss. The lizard grows and keeps on growing. I try to contain it. It breaks through my pants. Megan doesn’t seem to notice. I’m angry with the lizard. I have to get out of the dream. I wake up. The lizard is big in my pants, but I’m dry.
Fuck, Jimmy, a dead girl in your bedroom. I can’t concentrate. I feel sick. I’m tired. My head is hot. Margaret Baker looks at me, not really looks at me, because I’m on a plane, and she’s in Sydney, but I know she’s thinking we have no future, that I’m a coward. I write her a long love letter inside my head, knowing it will never see paper and that Margaret Baker will remain forever the princess of my dreams. Then there’s May, gentle, kind, simple May, my Mary Magdalene. There I am again, a coward. I should have stayed behind and protected her. If Merkel knocks on her door, she’s doomed. If he does I’ll kill him. No. Did I do something about the dead girl? Did I say anything to anyone?
The coward slumps. He left his girlfriend, even though he knows she has no blood, no period, that she might be pregnant.
The coward has a window seat. He looks out as the plane crosses the final splash of water to fly over the vast emptiness, the flatness, the dryness, and heads up the land mass for Perth. He cries for his mother. He longs for his father.
The plane dips, drops from the upper world of blue into a shroud of white. He’s come too far. It’s too late to turn back. He thinks he can hear music.
The plane dips further, shudders, and moves into heavy cloud.