Chapter 8
CHARLIE
Ahmed is fussing.
‘Zeke’s gonna crash in my bed, Ahmed,’ I reassure him. ‘Don’t go to any trouble.’
Ahmed pulls clean charcoal-grey sheets from the linen cupboard and presses them into my hands. ‘I’m not letting him think we live in a hovel. Change your sheets.’
I traipse behind him into the living area. Curtis is smirking at us both from behind his laptop at the kitchen table. The sea of invoices has grown since yesterday.
‘This is hardly a hovel, baby,’ Curtis soothes. ‘You keep it beautiful, just like you.’
‘Nice try,’ Ahmed snaps. ‘You’re just excited about taking in another one. You going to fuck this one, too?’
Curtis freezes awkwardly, and Ahmed looks up. I don’t think he realised I followed him in here.
‘Oops,’ Ahmed says. ‘No offence, darl.’
‘None taken,’ I lie.
I know Ahmed. This is a big flap about nothing. He’ll be in his element, fussing over a new stray. He loves to be the martyr. Taking Zeke in will give him endless mileage for good-natured whining.
‘If you’re not comfortable, we can say no,’ Curtis offers.
Ahmed opens the fridge and stares into a leftover trifle. ‘It’s fine. It’s fine.’
Curtis takes a break and we sit on the plush white leather couches as Zeke tells us about his falling-out with Sabrina.
Ahmed fusses over Zeke, bringing him a mojito with crushed ice, sugar rubbed onto the rim of the glass and a sprig of mint, and making him a toasted cheese sandwich.
Zeke keeps thanking him and Ahmed beams. I knew he’d love this.
Zeke bites off a stretchy strand of cheese from his toastie.
‘I can tell Sabrina’s triggered about Shane, not me.
And maybe I was too dumb to realise we were sleepwalking into a couple situation.
We get along so well. She’s my closest friend.
Or was. I don’t know what to do next.’ He looks at Curtis.
His face, always twitchy and unsure of himself, is a mix of afraid and apologetic.
‘I only need somewhere to crash until I work out a plan. I truly appreciate this, Curtis.’
Curtis inclines his head at Zeke. ‘I am not saying this to be nice, bud,’ he says. ‘Stay as long as you need. If that’s a few days, fine. If it’s a few weeks, fine. We’ve all been there.’
‘Hank you ho much,’ Zeke says semi-coherently, breathing through hot molten cheese.
‘It’s a shame, your friend Sabrina,’ Curtis says. ‘In your version, she hurt you. In her version, you hurt her. When your friends hurt you, it stings more than when your enemies do. You thought you knew each other, and you didn’t. You have different values.’
Zeke stares at Curtis like he’s been struck by a Zeus-thrown lightning bolt. ‘Yes. She’s like, friends with someone I used to be. She’s a bit wholesome, but I’m really sexual.’
‘It’s a classic fag hag situation,’ I contribute, not quite as sagely. ‘Some girls want a genuine friendship, like Reyna. Others want a gay BFF to dump their shit on, or have a crush on you, like my old bandmate, Hannah. Hard to tell who’s who sometimes.’
Ahmed brings over more drinks. He’s gone all out, making himself a pina colada, Curtis an old-fashioned and me a gin and tonic. ‘Well, cheers!’ he says, holding up his glass. We clink them together. ‘And welcome to the Cock Pit.’
Zeke snorts into his mojito; the force of air from his nostrils sends the sprig of mint flying onto the floorboards. ‘The what?’
‘It was the runner-up name for our bar,’ Curtis explains. ‘We went with Tool Shed, but Cock Pit was a strong contender. We’ve been calling the house the Cock Pit ever since.’
‘If you need help remembering it, just think of a pit of cocks,’ I offer, grinning and holding up my gin and tonic like Leonardo DiCaprio in that meme.
‘I wanted Cock Pit for the bar,’ Ahmed says. ‘We could have themed it like an aeroplane. The sex-on-premises section could be called the Mile High Club.’
‘Sex on premises?’ Zeke asks, astonished. ‘Like a sauna?’
‘More a back room,’ Curtis says. ‘We’ll finish it and open it properly when the business is financially solvent.’
‘Cough – never – cough,’ Ahmed says, sucking the maraschino cherry from his cocktail.
‘I wanted it to be the Sausage Factory, but apparently that was too far,’ I tell Zeke.
Zeke laughs, but I notice his gaze keeps roaming over us. ‘So – all three of you live here together?’
When he texted asking if he could crash with me, I said yes, as long as he didn’t expect to be spooned. But I didn’t give him the rundown.
‘Curtis and Ahmed are married,’ I explain. ‘This is their house. And they have two boarders – me, and a FIFO dude, who works on the mines.’
‘Rex,’ Ahmed says. ‘He’ll be back next week.’
Once we’ve all gotten to know each other, Zeke and I stumble to my room.
‘Like I said, no spooning,’ I say, as he kicks his sneakers off beside the bed.
Zeke smiles. ‘Charlie, we’ve shared a bed before, remember? In the hostel, years ago?’
‘That was a bunk bed. I was on the top bunk and you were on the bottom.’
‘Only time you’ve ever been a top, ha!’ Zeke quips, then giggles at his own humour.
I smile. ‘I like when you get drunk, dude. You’re funnier. Like you’re not scared.’
Zeke smiles and looks vaguely flattered.
We decide to top and tail in my double bed: Zeke puts his pillow at the foot of the bed with his socked feet near my face. I turn the lights off and we both go silent so quickly I wonder if the cocktails have made him fall asleep already.
Then, as my eyes adjust to the cobalt gloom, I notice Zeke’s silhouetted hands are covering his face, the tips of his crumpled elbows meeting over his chest.
‘You okay, dude?’
Zeke’s hands remain over his face. ‘Uh, honestly, no. This isn’t what I thought would happen after graduation. My parents are threatening to move to Perth, I just lost my closest friend – and I’m homeless, too.’
‘Brutal, dude,’ I say slowly. ‘I’m sorry. Dunno what else to say.’
‘Can I ask you a question? It’s deep.’
‘Meaning of life? Shoot. I can totally answer that.’
Zeke clears his throat. ‘Why are we gay? No moral judgements. Just scientific curiosity. Why are we like this?’
I realise I don’t know, either. ‘You shouldn’t overthink it. You are who you are.’
‘But that’s what everyone always says. I don’t want to change it. I love it now. But I’d love to know what made this happen. Why aren’t we allowed to wonder why?’
‘Cos Lady Gaga said we were born this way, and if you question her authority, the little monsters will cancel you,’ I offer. I’m only half-joking.
‘I sometimes feel like I was born this way, a genetic quirk, but what if I wasn’t?
I remember learning at uni about the MAOA gene that predisposes human beings to violence.
Except, if you’re raised by loving parents, the gene doesn’t kick in, and if you’re raised in neglect, it does, and you go violent.
What if it’s like that? What if a bunch of us are born bisexual, nature loading the gun, and how we’re raised pulls the trigger on whether we skew gay or not? Nurture pulls the trigger.’
‘I dunno. I guess that kinda checks out.’
Zeke keeps talking about his overbearing mother and his hard-arse father.
I make the right noises to show I’m half-listening, but my brain has spiralled out, thinking about my own parents, which I usually don’t do because TRAUMA.
My mum was a checked-out couch potato who barely noticed if I came home or not.
My deadshit stepdad Fitzy probably threw a party when I ran away.
But my dad, I loved. He died when I was a teenager. He’s the reason I love music: his playlist became mine. I used to watch music videos on Rage with him and he helped me learn guitar. He was a drinker, but he loved me, until life got too much for him, and he ended it.
I sometimes daydream what could have happened if he had stayed.
I have visions of us performing together as a father-and-son duo.
In my dreams, we’re best mates, me and Dad: jamming in pubs, drinking and smoking and talking shit about life on the road as touring musos.
We go all over the country, a real-life version of those old larrikin Dad and Dave stories.
If that had happened, would I have grown up straight? Or would I still be a big mo? I don’t think I care either way. My sexuality never plagued me the way it plagues Zeke, and confounded Hammer, and destroyed Matt.
In fact, it was Dad who made me feel okay about it, before I even knew.
One day when I was little, we were at the Wintersun for a feed and there was a Savage Garden music video on TV.
Two deros made comments about Darren Hayes being a poof, and Dad snapped, ‘So what if he is?’ The deros made sour faces and skulked off.
I asked Dad what a poofter was: the word had fallen out of schoolyard use in my generation.
‘He likes men,’ Dad explained simply. ‘Instead of having a girlfriend, he’d have a boyfriend. It doesn’t make him less of a man, and he’s still one of the most successful musicians in Australia. Don’t you ever look down on guys like that, will you, Charlie?’
So, I never had a drop of angst about it. Dad was fine with it, so I was fine with it.
My angst came when I got outed. The whole town wanted to strip me down and make me walk barefoot down Marine Terrace, like Cersei in Game of Thrones, with some judgy old wench ringing a bell and chanting, ‘Shame, shame, shame!’
But that shame didn’t live inside me. The world projected shame onto me, and I flipped it the bird, so it never took root in me the way it did in Zeke.
I was there when Zeke’s dad hit him. Guess that messes you up.
‘… thought I was a bottom, but lately I’ve been more vers … Could I be overthinking it?’ Zeke asks.
I’ve tuned out, so I latch onto what I did hear. ‘Best not to overthink why you’re a top or a bottom or a vers or a side. Or why you’re dominant or submissive. And never overthink why you like to call older dudes “Daddy”. Just let it be what it is. Enjoy it.’