Fitzy’s ex-wife crashed her car in Ballajura while high on meth last night. Mum and Fitzy left the house early to go to the cop shop. They want to make a case for custody of her two brats. Those little bastards are fucked either way, really.
While they’re out of the house, I turn my music up to eleven, until the throb hurts my eardrums. I lay on my bed and feel the bass pump through my chest. I imagine what would happen if my body could vibrate in the exact same frequency as the music. Would I dissolve? Would I become pure music? Would I float into the ether and there’d be nothing left of me?
I’m screaming along to Dave Grohl, holding up a can of Lynx Africa to my mouth like a microphone, when I glance up at the doorway and see a shadow there.
‘Jesus! Zeke!’ I hit pause. The silence rings in my ears. ‘How the hell did you get in?’
Zeke’s olive skin is flushed with red, like he sprinted all the way here. His black eye makes him look like more of a delinquent than me. He runs a hand through his sweaty curls and sits down on the end of my bed.
‘Your door doesn’t lock,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah. Fitzy broke it the other day.’
‘I can’t imagine how you’re feeling,’ Zeke says. He looks like a condemned building just before they detonate the explosives. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I think you copped it worse than I did last night.’
‘I mean with Matt … I can’t …’
‘It’s just a break up, dude. I’ll survive.’
Zeke chokes on a sob. His charcoal smear eyes suss me out. ‘Oh God. You don’t know?’
His pupils widen as he stares at me. It’s like he’s waiting for me to hand him a piece of a puzzle I’ve never seen.
‘Zeke, what’s going on?’ I prod. ‘What about Matt? Did he say something about me?’
Zeke’s two front teeth scrape the little tuft of facial hair beneath his lip.
‘Charlie …’ He swallows, eyes searching the ceiling for something he can’t find before he says, ‘Matt’s dead.’
I screw my face up at him for saying something so fucking stupid. ‘No he’s not. I just saw him yesterday.’
Tears form a silver trail on Zeke’s face. ‘He killed himself last night, man … I’m so sorry.’
Suddenly, I can’t feel any of my limbs. I can’t feel anything at all. My body is pins and needles.
‘He wouldn’t do that to me,’ I say, picking up my phone and scrolling through my playlist. ‘You must’ve heard wrong.’
Zeke’s shoulders are shaking. ‘He hanged himself in his dad’s shed. It’s all online. Everyone’s heard about it now.’
I keep scrolling, faster and faster, songs flicking past on the screen, until the skin of my thumb starts to chafe and burn and I ditch the goddamn phone at the wall and scream, ‘How could you! How could you!’
And then I die a sixth and final time.
I scream like Dave Grohl, but not to music.
I scream to the beat of the agony in my blood.
I scream like a hurricane.
And I tear through my room like a hurricane, too. I destroy everything in my path. I tip the chest of drawers over. Smash the mirror. Tear my posters off the walls. Beat my guitar against the carpet and ditch it at the window when it refuses to break. Even the dinosaur figurine Dad bought for my fifth birthday gets smashed.
When I finally run out of stuff that feels big enough to break, I press my palms against the wall and use them to brace my body before I slam my skull into the painted brick.
‘No!’ Zeke screams behind me.
The crack of pain cuts my skull, and at the same moment, sweaty arms wrap around my chest and tackle me. Zeke holds me from behind and wrestles me onto the bed. I fight, kicking and flailing my arms to hurt him, until Matt’s face swims into my mind’s eye and I realise I’m never going to see that lopsided, toothy smile again. I’ll never hear him mispronounce something as ‘somefink’. I’ll never hear that donkey-bray laugh. I’ll never see those pained but innocent eyes looking back into mine.
And I’ll never kiss him again. The last time I saw him, yesterday, I pulled away from him. Blocked him. His lips had landed clumsily on my hand instead of my mouth.
Did he know, then? Was he kissing me goodbye? Did I deny our last kiss?
That’s what gets me crying. Crying the way I did when Dad left me. Zeke rubs my back as I fall apart. It does nothing at all, but at the same time, I would die if he left the room.
A long time passes. I’ve run out of tears, but my body still spasms here and there.
‘He didn’t say goodbye,’ I say. ‘He didn’t even leave a note.’ My voice is croaky. ‘I want to die.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ Zeke says matter-of-factly. ‘I need you too much.’
‘I should have known,’ I say, empty. ‘I could have saved him.’
‘He didn’t want to be saved. He’d made up his mind.’
‘Not last night,’ I say. ‘I mean, the first night I met him. I could have saved him then.’
The farm boy’s maroon sedan smells of dust and sweat and a rich aftershave.
‘I’m Charlie,’ I say. ‘What’s your name?’
The farm boy smiles. He has messed-up teeth coming out at all angles but shit, somehow it just makes his smile more adorable. ‘Nice to meet ya, Charlie. I’m Matt.’
‘I’ve never been here before,’ I confess. The dark shapes of the wheat silos loom above us. ‘Is it busy, usually?’
Matt drums his fingertips on the steering wheel. ‘Depends on the night. Weekends are the only time worth coming here for, but even then you gotta wait an hour or so, most times.’
‘So you just come here and wait for guys to rock up?’
‘Yep. That’s not what I was looking for tonight, but. Typical.’
I raise an eyebrow at him. ‘You don’t wanna hook up?’
Matt smiles wryly. He folds up a piece of scrap paper and tucks it into a map. He reaches across me and puts the map away in the glove box.
‘Sitting here too long can mess with your brain,’ he says, with that painted-on smile. ‘I was starting to wonder what would happen if I drove up over the kerb and went straight into the water.’
‘Well, you’d drown,’ I say, deadpan. ‘Not a rocket scientist, are you?’
Matt shrugs. ‘Nope. Just a farmer with too much time to think.’
I lean forward and tap the head of the little green army man on the dashboard. ‘That’s cool. Where’d you get it?’
Matt’s eyes mist over. ‘Someone important to me gave it to me, years ago. I keep it there to guard the car, I guess.’
‘Sounds like the car needs guarding if the driver’s thinking of plunging into the ocean.’
‘You talk a lot,’ Matt says.
‘No kidding,’ I say. ‘Someone told me that the other day. Can’t shut me up, apparently. I’ve always been like this.’
‘No, it’s good,’ Matt says. ‘Most guys just sort of fuck and run. I kind of like the talking. I can imagine what it’d be like to have a boyfriend.’
The warm February breeze blows through the open windows of the sedan.
‘Why imagine?’ I say, flashing him a confident grin. ‘We’re both single, right?’
A genuine smile curls his mouth. Before he can say no, I lean over the gearstick and handbrake and kiss him.
Matt kisses me back. He tastes like fried chicken. I’m guessing that’s what he ate before he drove down here. But he’s got more passion in his tongue than I would have expected from a repressed farm boy.
‘What about it?’ I say, pulling away from him. ‘We could go out, couldn’t we? Be boyfriends?’
Matt looks at me cheekily, like he’s a little kid doing something he knows is against the rules.
‘We could be secret boyfriends,’ he says. ‘I could never survive coming out.’
‘Secret boyfriends it is,’ I agree.
I am so starved for love, I miss that second part altogether.