Chapter 26 #3
‘I feel so fucking guilty about Matt,’ I admit, lump in my throat.
‘The last time I ever saw him, he tried to kiss me on the cheek. He knew he was saying goodbye for good. And I didn’t …
’ I choke on it but I need to say it to them.
‘I didn’t kiss him back.’ My voice breaks; that sentence is poison leaving my body.
‘I was just so angry at him for breaking up with me. I shoved his face away. Matt kissed the palm of my hand instead. You have no idea how much I regret that every single time I think about it. If he was going to leave, I wish I’d let him kiss me. ’
I’m crying a bit. This guilt is corrosive and nothing they say or do can ever undo it. Both the others make the noises you’d expect them to make. Zeke goes to offer to pull me up off the floor and into a hug, but I’m not in the mood to be comforted. I need to release this.
‘And I introduced him to that Green Day song,’ I say, externalising it for the first time. I’ve never told anyone this. ‘That’s why he called them letterbombs. It’s my fault.’
‘Jesus,’ Zeke says.
‘Called what letterbombs?’ Hammer asks. Forgot he doesn’t know shit.
Zeke tells him. Hammer whistles, long and low.
Zeke adds, ‘Charlie, that’s not your fault. Matt was suicidal before he ever met you. He was in so much pain he couldn’t cope. Being with you made his life better, not worse.’
‘I can hear that, but I can’t make myself believe it,’ I say.
‘I have replayed that night over and over in my head. Everything was so perfect up until that moment. Like a rollercoaster reaching its peak climb right before it plummets. If I could have frozen it there, we’d be okay.
Me and Matty at the top of the world together.
Instead it all went to shit, and it’s stayed shit, and it’s never gonna get better, is it?
I don’t want youse to cheer me up or tell me I’m wrong.
I want you to get that my life has been shit since then.
My life is going nowhere. Every single day of my life, I feel so fucking lonely. ’
The boys are both silent and I feel a smouldering, angry victory to have shut them up.
‘That’s exactly it,’ Hammer says eventually, nodding at me and making eye contact. ‘Fucken lonely. That’s me, too. Every day.’
‘Well,’ Zeke says. ‘Make that all of us.’
We fall silent, and when the Pendulum song finishes, Hammer presses pause, leaving us without music, too.
We can hear the cum trees, if that’s what they are, rustling gently below, and the dull sound of freeway traffic on the Narrows Bridge echoing over the fat part of the river, and our own breaths.
I don’t think any of us realised until now that the eyes of all our hurricanes are the same cold iris of loneliness, turning their cyclonic spines since the same night seven years ago. We’re as shattered as each other.
‘We fucked things up back then,’ Zeke says.
‘We found each other but we messed it up. But here we are again. If you mess something up once, that’s forgivable.
Mess it up twice, and we’re idiots, right?
I’m not saying we have to be best mates, but we owe it to each other to not mess this up again.
If we’d known that the first time, there might still be four of us here.
And if I don’t say this now, I don’t want to wake up one day and find out we’re down to two. ’
Hammer covers his face.
‘If any of us feels so lonely that he doesn’t wanna be on the planet anymore, he has to tell the other two,’ Zeke says. ‘We can go months or years without seeing each other, but if things ever get dark, we have to tell each other. Like a pact.’
I swallow the lump. ‘Okay, dude. I promise.’
‘I will, too,’ Hammer mutters hoarsely.
Zeke says we have to shake on it. I get up off the floor and sit back at the table with the other two. I hold Zeke’s vodka-cold palm in one hand and Hammer’s sweaty palm in the other, and we shake each other’s hands, hard and rough.
‘Orright, I need another drink,’ Hammer says gruffly, clearly maxed out.
When he comes back onto the balcony, we don’t bring up the pact again.
We drink and smoke and talk about sex and drugs and bathhouses.
We talk about being a big-time AFL star and being a small-time punk rocker and being a geeky little burnout.
We talk about being Gero Deros in the big smoke.
We play a big country kid game of Where Are They Now?
with the people we went to high school with.
Pedro’s a bank manager and Jeremy works as a biologist for the fisheries department.
Rocky’s a FIFO worker now and Hannah teaches music at our old high school.
Rosita Lopez works at Rambo’s Gym in Geraldton; Piera O’Dell married a rich crayfisherman and has four kids; Richelle is a famous wellness influencer with a hot yoga studio; Caleb O’Bree became a PE teacher.
We’ve all heard about Razor going to jail for drink driving, and about Manny Mendoza being a drug dealer but not having been caught yet.
Around eight o’clock, my phone buzzes. Mason’s texted back.
Yeh OK, come over if u want.
Brayden’s expression is thunderous when he sees me on the porch.
‘Absolutely fucking not,’ he says, pushing the door shut in my face.
‘Bray – come on, dude, hear me out!’ I protest, sliding my Converse sneaker into the door frame just in time.
Brayden tries to squash my foot with the door, but my sneaker is too strong.
‘This is exactly why I didn’t want you to get with Firetruck!
’ he says. ‘You thought I was being unfair. I wasn’t.
I was protecting him. I’ve known you for years, Charlie.
Heard you hype up every new guy, then woosh, one minor problem and you dump them.
I know your MO. To paraphrase Tay Tay, it’s you, Charlie. You’re the problem.’
I try to interrupt him about five times during this monologue, but Brayden won’t have a bar of it. He wants his moment of vengeance.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You’re right, Bray.’
Brayden looks at me suspiciously. ‘What game are you playing now?’
‘No game,’ I say. ‘I’m copping it sweet. You’re right. I push people away. That’s on me. It’s not Mason’s fault. I was a jerk to him. I can’t fix that, but I can promise to be there for him any time he ever needs again. If he can forgive me.’
Brayden peers at me. ‘If this is a trick …’
A hoarse voice roars from behind the door, ‘Bloody hell, Bray, let him in!’
Brayden swings the door open and I see Mason standing in the corridor. He’s shirtless and scruffy, just woken up, wearing nothing but Bush Chook satin boxer shorts.
‘Mason – I’m sorry I went cold on you,’ I say. ‘I’ll never do that again, promise.’
Mason’s mouth is downturned like a little boy who’s lost his favourite toy. ‘I don’t understand what happened,’ he says. ‘I just needed a hug, man. You bailed.’
‘I’m no good at letting my walls down,’ I explain. ‘I’m sorry. But I wanna make it up to you. Can we start over? I really like you. I don’t want this to end before it begins.’
Mason scoops me into a big bear hug and lifts me off the ground, his scruffy beard sandpapering my face. ‘I don’t want this to end either, you jerk. I thought we were just getting started.’
I soften, and as Mason returns me to the ground, I push my Converse up onto my tip toes so I’m tall enough to kiss him. He kisses me back, winding his arms around me more gently, and I get lost in him.
Maybe two traumatised guys together is a recipe for disaster.
Or maybe it’s good, cos we will both understand each other’s quirks.
Either way, I don’t want to be lonely anymore.
I have to believe that if I keep waking up each day, something good might happen.
Maybe this beautiful trucker boy is that good thing. I won’t know until I try.
Brayden leaves the house to give us some alone time – finally some atonement for how he screwed us over. I spend the morning curled up beside Mason, in his bed with the yellowed pillows. I cry about Curtis and Mason holds me the way I should have held him.
When I’m done crying about my feelings, I decide I want to eat them.
Mason orders us Maccas from Uber Eats and I ask if we can just put something on TV and zone out for a bit.
Mason grabs a Blu-Ray from a stack beside his bedroom TV (who uses discs anymore?) and asks me if I have seen the movie Jumanji (the 2017 remake).
Emotionally wrecked as I am, I nearly crack up laughing.
This is Mason’s go-to movie to help me through my grief?
Jumanji? A cheesy action comedy with a wrestler in the lead role?
‘Me and Jared went to see it at the Innaloo Cinemas when it came out in year eleven,’ Mason says. ‘He pissed his pants. He thought Kevin Hart was so funny. And he thought Karen Gillan was hot. I wanted to be The Rock.’
‘Do you wanna talk about Jared?’ I ask Mason. ‘I don’t know much about him.’
‘Yeah, I do.’ Mason nods. ‘He was so misunderstood.’
I listen as Mason tells me all about a golden boy who had the world on his shoulders.
When the Maccas arrives, Mason drops the paper bag on the end of the bed and crushes me into a big hug.
I can feel his pain about Jared and he can feel my pain about Curtis, these brimming energy waves of grief wafting between our bodies, being absorbed by one another’s rib cages the way a lead wall absorbs destructive X-rays.
If we fall in love, we could do this radioactive dance for the rest of our lives, until the pain is less and we settle into equilibrium.
But it’s too soon to know if that will happen. For now, we are just heading into the unexplored jungles of Jumanji together, for an adventure.