Chapter 11
DIAMOND ON A LANDMINE
CHARLIE
I have less than zero interest in sports, but all anyone’s talking about is Hammer’s refusal to wear the Pride Guernsey. It’s unavoidable online, at the bar, even at home.
On Sunday morning, it dominates Curtis and Ahmed’s wedding anniversary brunch.
There’s too many guests for their dining table, so we spill outside.
Rex’s smoking table on the wooden deck is replaced with a trestle table, surrounded by the courtyard’s ornate black-painted wrought iron balustrades and white pebbles and Ahmed’s rose garden and lemon tree and green ivy creepers on the outside of the house.
The jewel in the crown of the courtyard is a Japanese-style karesansui garden with raked concentric circles in the white sand and big pewter-coloured stones and a verdant bonsai tree Curtis and Ahmed got from their friends Celeste and Kieran as a wedding gift.
The brunch is a smallish affair: the five of us who live here, Kayla and Tenille, Ahmed’s sister, Fatima, and her husband, Joel, two of Curtis’ gym bros.
There are two extra guests – Reyna and Brayden, who crashed on our couches after a big Saturday night – but thankfully Curtis and Ahmed took a ‘the more the merrier’ approach.
It helped that Curtis bought a Hectic Lettuce album on vinyl and is a legit fan of Reyna’s music, while Ahmed’s taken a shine to Brayden since they hung out at the Tool Shed opening night.
Somewhere between Curtis firing up the barbie and Ahmed popping the cork on a bottle of Moet, the subject of Hammer comes up. Everyone has an opinion, none of which I haven’t already seen shouted in a comment section on Insta or TikTok.
‘What’s so wrong with a Pride Guernsey?’ Kayla prods. ‘The AFL women’s division does it every year with no drama.’
‘And half the girls are Friends of Bunnings themselves,’ Tenille adds, smirking.
Reyna, who’s clearly never heard the euphemism, bursts out laughing.
‘Can’t footy just be about footy, but?’ Rex grunts.
And so we ping-pong around the trestle for the better part of an hour.
When I tell everyone Zeke and I went to school with Hammer, there’s this twitter of excitement that we know someone famous. The attention makes me feel elated for five seconds, then grubby as hell for the rest of the morning.
The brunch is chill: everyone’s in good spirits. Kayla and Tenille bought matching aprons for the happy couple and blanked out one of the letters with sticky tape, so the ‘Kiss the Cook’ aprons both say ‘Kiss the Cock’. Curtis and Ahmed take a goofy selfie wearing the aprons by the barbie.
The funniest thing is when Ahmed wheels out not just the leftover pussy cake, but a new penis-shaped gateau he’s whipped up for the occasion.
‘We thought it would be a good match for the vagina cake,’ he declares. ‘A match made in heaven.’
The girls laugh, but Tenille ashes her cigarette and fixes Ahmed with a quizzical look. ‘Ahmed, that’s a vulva, not a vagina,’ she points out. ‘Surely you know the difference?’
Ahmed looks politely astonished. ‘I genuinely don’t.’
Tenille turns to the rest of us. ‘And none of you corrected him?’ Her face falls as she surveys Curtis, Rex, me and Zeke, and realises we have all learned, in real time, that a vagina and a vulva may not be the same thing. ‘Oh my God! How can you boys not know this?’
‘It’s not relevant to our interests,’ Curtis splutters, before giving a whooping laugh that turns into a cough.
There’s a frenzy of selfies taken with the cakes, during which the girls are even dirtier than us guys.
Kayla and Tenille make horrified puking faces at the phallus cake; Reyna pretends to fellate it; and Fatima grabs a can of whipped cream and adds a flourish of cum shooting from the penis, before cackling.
I had her pegged as a shy, reserved type, but I should’ve remembered she is, after all, Ahmed’s sister.
After brunch ends and Curtis and Ahmed get ready to open the bar, I’m with Reyna and Brayden on the porch swing out the front, our legs dangling as we rock back and forth.
Reyna’s tapping on her phone, mouth downturned. ‘Ben wants me to come over.’ She shows me a Snapchat message from her on-again, off-again blues singer boyfriend. It’s a ‘we-need-to-talk’ kinda message.
I put my arm around her. ‘What you gonna do?’
Reyna sculls the last of her flute of Moet. ‘Tell him I’m too busy with my friend Charlie.’ She swallows. ‘Don’t wanna deal with this yet.’
I squeeze her shoulders. ‘If you need a cover story, I’m happy to be it.’
Once Reyna bounces, Brayden calls an Uber and begs for me to come with him to meet Xander Sullivan for espresso martinis at The Court.
‘Please, Charlie,’ Brayden begs. ‘Xander’s being so annoying about this AFL crap and I don’t care about it. If you’re there, you’ll be a buffer.’
I widen my eyes comically. ‘Wow, I get to be a buffer? What an amazing offer. Hard pass, dude.’
Brayden wrings his hands. ‘Urgh. What if we come to the Tool Shed instead?’
‘I mean, that’s better, but I’m not a huge fan of hanging out at my workplace on my day off.’
Brayden looks at his Uber, only three minutes away, and looks like he’s passing a gallstone as he finally says, ‘I’ve invited Firetruck, too.’
I shift on the porch swing, dislodging my centre of gravity and nearly falling off.
‘I’m in,’ I say, racing for my Converse sneakers. ‘You had me at Firetruck.’
Brayden wasn’t kidding about Xander being in an annoying mood.
When the three of us meet Mason at the Tool Shed just after Curtis and Ahmed open for the day, Xander barrels up to the owners and badgers them to make a statement in support of the Perth LGBTQIA+ community and the importance of Pride Round.
I know Curtis has run gay businesses, shops and bars for decades and he’s always preferred to focus on his community, rather than wading into politics. So when he rebuffs Xander, I’m not surprised.
‘I got opinions, and I’ll tell whoever wants to listen,’ Curtis explains. ‘But privately. You want me to make a statement for every single scuffle? I ain’t a freakin’ politician.’
In Xander Sullivan’s eyes, this is tantamount to waving a white flag instead of a rainbow one.
Ahmed’s response as he takes our drinks order is even less delicate. ‘Xander, of all the things I don’t give a flying fuck about, sports is the thing I don’t give a flying fuck about the most. It’s not on my radar. Sorry not sorry!’
It’s not a great sign after the Xander–Curtis alliance seemed to go so well on opening night.
When me, Brayden, Mason and Xander settle around a table, there’s something heavy in the air. Xander’s now got an axe to grind. Anyone who gets in his way might get cut.
The bar is quiet, only a handful of guys. Ahmed’s making a meal of cleaning some glasses before making our drinks order.
Xander’s rant isn’t over. ‘How will there ever be an out AFL player if this is the culture we allow to fester?’ he demands loudly, in the hopes Ahmed will hear.
‘We’re the only sporting code with no out players,’ Mason tells us. ‘It’s bullshit.’
I can tell from Brayden’s constant glances at TikTok that he’s disappointed his buffer plan didn’t work and he’s waiting for the topic to change.
‘Charlie, can’t you talk to them?’ Xander presses.
I shake my head. ‘Their minds are made up. Curtis has fought homophobes for decades,’ I add, making sure he understands Curtis is one of the good guys. ‘But he’s got his own way of doing things, and he’s got a business to run.’
‘Sorry, but that makes him problematic,’ Xander snaps. He stares at Ahmed, who I am now sure is taking a deliberately long time to make the cocktails as retribution for Xander pressuring them. ‘You have to hold people accountable for their actions.’
I wonder if he swallowed some Slacktivism for Dummies manual after his reality-TV run ended. The more Xander speaks, the more I realise ‘hold them accountable’ is a 2020s euphemism for ‘punish them’. And ‘problematic’ really means ‘heretic’.
Hanging out with Xander turns out to be a fascinating glimpse into the psychological dents in his armour.
I thought he lived in a sparkly fame bubble, but he comes across unhappy.
In one breath, he’ll name-drop Aussie household names he’s had drinks with, and mentions being friends with a music producer who worked with Silverchair (that gets my attention).
Then in the next breath he’ll make some comment that makes me wonder if he’s okay.
Like, ‘Ha, parents who give a shit whether you’re alive or dead!
Imagine that!’ Or, ‘When you get famous, people only pretend to like you. It’s all fake!
’ And even his brag about a local newsreader: ‘I remember being in a three-way in his mansion, but I totally overdosed and I can’t recall if he fucked me or not!
’ It seems seriously bleak, but he laughs after, so the rest of us laugh with him.
As staunchly progressive as Xander’s political positions are, he doesn’t seem to have a grasp on other human beings having different opinions.
He seems to think if he can shout down everyone who doesn’t do things his exact way, he’ll fix the world.
He lives for naming and shaming, and when he regales us with his kill list of minor celebrities and small businesses whose careers he’s ruined with public pile-ons, none of them are hardcore bigots: just people who weren’t quite woke enough for his liking.
One was that tiny bakery run by an eighty-year-old grandfather before Xander obliterated him.
Xander doesn’t seem to have any empathy for them, either.
‘You reap what you sow,’ he says repeatedly.
The more we speak about Curtis giving a statement, the more inflexible he becomes. And the more a pit starts to form in my guts.
I swill my Heineken. ‘Well, holding people accountable is great, but when you take a step back, Curtis is just some guy who runs a bar,’ I say. ‘He isn’t the accountability police.’
And neither are you, Xander.