The Byron Journals Read online

  Andrew shook his head, relieved. ‘Sorry...babe… We’re almost done.’

  ‘Just hurry up.’

  She pulled the door closed behind her and one of the cops winked at him.

  Andrew grinned and gestured towards the house. ‘I better get back in there.’

  ‘Yeah, you’d better. Thanks for your time.’

  Andrew locked the door and watched through the split in Heidi’s curtains as the police walked out the driveway and into the next-door neighbour’s house. When he returned to the living room, everyone was pissing themselves laughing.

  He shook his head at Jade. ‘My god…that was genius.’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Men are just so stupid. You’re like dogs. All you think about is food and sex.’

  Heidi laughed. ‘That’s so true!’

  ‘Those cops’ll be giggling like schoolboys,’ Ananda said.

  Heidi cooked vegetarian lasagne for dinner, while the others continued harvesting. As soon as they’d finished eating, Ananda put on the Rolling Stones Let it Bleed album and they set to work again.

  It took them two days and by the end they all had sore backs and foggy heads. They sat around exhausted while Tim completed the final job of weighing the buds into ounces and packing them in snap-lock bags. He threw the bags into a large tea-chest, counting them as he went, then flipped the latch and locked it.

  ‘Ninety-five ounces,’ he said. ‘Just under six pounds.’ ‘How much can we sell it for?’ Andrew asked, picking at the dark brown resin on his fingertips.

  ‘Twenty grand,’ Tim replied. ‘Maybe twenty-five. Depends on the market price in Melbourne.’

  Jade groaned. ‘That was a shitload of work, babe.’

  She was right, thought Andrew, it wasn’t a lot of money. Five or six grand each, tops. Considering the work to maintain the set-up and harvest the pot, not to mention the risk of getting caught, it wasn’t much at all. But enough to pay back Benny and maybe a little extra on top. He couldn’t complain—as long as everything ran smoothly, it was money for nothing.

  eleven

  Andrew snatched his mobile off the floor before it woke Heidi. ‘Hello?’ he croaked.

  ‘Andrew, it’s me. Don’t hang up.’

  ‘Dad?’ He looked at Heidi, still asleep beside him, and rolled out of bed. ‘What’s up?’ He pulled on some shorts and let himself out of the bedroom into the hallway.

  ‘Your exam results arrived…I thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You don’t care?’

  ‘No, I don’t care.’ He unlocked the front door and sat on the edge of the verandah. ‘I care that you’re fucking someone half your own age, I care how stupid that makes Mum look. I care that you sold the Volvo and now drive around town in a fucking convertible.’

  ‘It’s a fine automobile.’

  ‘You look like a tool.’

  ‘It drives beautifully—you wouldn’t appreciate something like that at your age.’

  Andrew ran his hand over his face, stood and started pacing. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on with you.’

  ‘I don’t understand it entirely either,’ his dad replied. ‘I feel as though life’s slipping away from me, and that if I don’t branch out and keep growing, I’ll just wither away and die.’

  Andrew paused and ripped at some tufts of grass by his feet. ‘What’s with all these philosophical musings?’ ‘I’m going through some changes.’

  ‘Well, can you hurry up and get through them?’

  There was a sigh down the phone line. ‘Your mother seems to think it’s a mid-life crisis. And maybe she’s right. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s not particularly elegant.’

  Now his dad was laughing. ‘And why should it be? I realise you’re still young—you have these notions in your head about how things should be. But let me tell you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life is messy, Andrew. People grow and change and make mistakes. The world is filled with so much deception—the least we can do is speak truthfully to each other. It’s not always pleasant, but I think you’re mature enough now to cope with it.’

  ‘You’re hurting Mum.’

  ‘Your mother has made mistakes too, Andrew.’ He paused. ‘It’s just that you haven’t walked in on them.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Silence down the line.

  ‘Andrew—why didn’t you go to your music exam?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to go to the Con and end up becoming a music teacher like every other music student.’

  ‘Why was there blood on your shirt?’

  ‘You could have asked me about it on the day.’

  ‘You didn’t give me a chance. You were so damned angry. And when I called later, you refused to answer.’ Andrew remembered the cold, acrid taste of vodka. More silence.

  ‘All right, you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to come home. Running away like this isn’t going to solve anything.’

  ‘I’ve got no reason to take advice from you.’

  ‘Okay, tell me then, what are you planning to do?’

  ‘Model my life on yours and make a shitload of dumb mistakes one after another, then tell everyone that I’m going through some changes but I’m trying to be open and truthful with everyone about it.’

  ‘C’mon Andrew. Smarten up. I know I’ve done things that upset you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you.’

  ‘If you want to help me, you can fuck off and leave me alone.’

  ‘Andrew,’ his father said, his tone harder now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got seventy-six percent. You’ve been accepted into your second university preference—ecotourism.’

  Andrew started laughing. ‘Excellent. That’s great.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Andrew. We never talked about ecotourism. Do you even know what it is?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s driving busloads of tourists to National Parks and making shitty jokes into a microphone.’

  ‘Better than being a lecherous music lecturer, full of regrets about the music career he never had.’

  ‘Never mind me, Andrew. You shouldn’t waste your musical talent—particularly if your only motivation is to get back at me and your mother. Have some foresight.’ ‘God! Why do you have to be so serious about everything? I’m eighteen and I don’t know what I want to do, all right? I don’t know! All I know is that I don’t want to be like you.’

  Andrew killed the call and looked around, chest heaving. He was standing in the middle of the street.

  ‘You know,’ Heidi said, pulling a weed from the garden bed. ‘If you believe in reincarnation, time doesn’t really mean anything. This life is just one more life in an endless series of incarnations.’

  He passed her the joint and watched a brush turkey pecking at the orange flowers under the flame tree. ‘You don’t really believe in that though, do you?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘But I like to think about it.’

  ‘What would you come back as?’

  ‘I wouldn’t care,’ she replied. ‘Just so long as it wasn’t as hideous as that brush turkey.’

  She started laughing, then stopped and sat up straight, listening to the low, uneven rumble coming up the street towards them. The brush turkey ran a few steps, flew heavily to the fence, teetered and dropped into the neighbour’s garden. Moments later, the rumble cut out as Tim stalled their new tour bus mid-turn into the driveway. The bus was off-white with faded green and blue pinstripes along its sides, its windows were laced with spider webs and it had a buckled roof-rack tray on top. The wheels were bald and the wheel arches were pockmarked with rust. Tim restarted the engine, pulled into the driveway and sounded the horn, a low, off-key drone, then stuck his head through the open window. ‘She might be ugly,’ he said. ‘But she’s got a fantastic personality!’

  Heidi laughed, put her arm around Andrew an
d passed him the joint. ‘Nice work, Tim,’ she called. ‘Really inconspicuous!’

  Tim opened the door, climbed onto the roof of the bus and surveyed the surrounding houses. He turned to Heidi with his palms upraised. ‘Why would I want to be inconspicuous?’

  ‘Umm…’ She looked from Andrew to Tim. ‘Maybe because of what we’re transporting.’

  Tim laughed. ‘No one will suspect us. We’re musicians on tour—that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about!’

  They spent the next two days cleaning and doing up the bus. A hot northerly sighed and panted around them while they scrubbed and deodorised the interior, and cut and bogged the rust. They installed a stereo system Tim had bought from a pawn shop in town, along with bright yellow curtains Heidi had picked up at the op-shop. The oven no longer worked, so Tim and Andrew gutted it and installed a safe inside for storing money. They threw out the scungy mattress from up the back and replaced it with a new one. Jade wanted to paint something crazy on the exterior, but they vetoed her.

  Heidi rolled over and kissed Andrew, her breath sour with sleep. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘What…? Today?’ He stretched and yawned. ‘It can’t be!’

  ‘Well, it is the twenty-fifth of December. That’s normally the day people celebrate. The birth of Jesus… or whatever.’

  ‘Ha!’ he said and started laughing. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Who cares? Go to the beach, hang out, it doesn’t matter. We can do anything we want.’

  She was right. It didn’t matter. Every day in Byron was like Christmas. Better than Christmas. Christmas without the bickering relatives. The back streets were quiet, the trees hung limp in people’s gardens and the town was in perpetual flux.

  Andrew turned off his phone. He had no reason to speak to his parents—or anyone else in Adelaide for that matter. When Jade and Tim woke, the four of them walked to the supermarket and bought seafood, fruit and white wine. They strapped Tim’s longboard onto the roof of Jade’s Mazda, and headed for Wategos Beach. As they passed through a tunnel of small, gnarled eucalypts and hooked the final corner along the cliff edge, Andrew glimpsed the ocean glittering to the horizon and he wished his life could be like this forever.

  twelve

  The sun was low in the sky as the bus strained up a steep back road into the Byron hinterland. Jade had organised for them to play a private New Year’s Eve party for the owner of her modelling agency on the Gold Coast. Seated in the front passenger seat beside Tim, she lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.

  ‘You complain about never being invited to the parties I go to,’ she said. ‘So I organise you to play a show at one—the best paying gig you’ve ever had—and you’re still complaining!’

  Tim hunched over the steering wheel. ‘Is the guy you’re fucking behind my back going to be there?’

  ‘I’m not fucking anyone behind your back!’

  Andrew took Heidi’s hand and kissed her cheek, glad that they didn’t fight like the other two. He looked out the window and watched the grassy hills sloped like giant ocean swells passing on either side.

  It was dark by the time they pulled the bus to a stop at the end of a long line of parked cars. In the distance, the lone, two-storey house looked like a lantern nestled in the rainforest. They loaded the gear onto the trolley and made their way towards it. A whip bird’s call echoed through the darkness and the sound of music and conversation mixed with the buzz of insects.

  ‘Stay off the coke tonight, Jade,’ Tim said.

  ‘As if, babe! It’s New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘Hey, I’m the one who has to deal with you when you’re coming down.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that! You’re going to make a fool of me if you talk like that in front of my friends.’

  There must have been at least two hundred guests. The crowd easily filled the enormous central living space and spilled onto the wide decking that ran around the outside of the house and overlooked the steep valley. Mostly older couples in hippyish evening wear, but also some young people, models, Andrew assumed, dressed in brighter clothes, as well as clean-cut waiters in black pants and white shirts.

  Already running late, they unloaded their instruments where the stage had been erected and began setting up. This would be the biggest private show they’d played to date and the money was good, too.

  An elegant waif in a black satin dress approached Jade, shrieked with excitement and threw her arms around her. Andrew watched Jade and the girl talk excitedly, holding hands, before an older man with combed back grey hair and faded blue eyes stopped beside them. The waif introduced the man to Jade, and Andrew’s heart sank. Wasn’t she supposed to be modelling for him?

  Tim looked up as the older man kissed Jade’s hand. ‘This is exactly why I didn’t want to come,’ he said.

  Arm in arm with the man, Jade walked over to the edge of the stage. She introduced him as Gilbert, the owner of the house. In a smarmy, caramel voice, Gilbert thanked them for playing and asked if they wanted any drugs. Performance enhancers, he called them, anything they wanted—on the house, of course. Heidi and Jade glanced at each other and nodded.

  ‘Andy?’ Heidi said.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I used to be high on life too.’ Gilbert smiled. ‘But then I developed a tolerance.’ He turned to Tim. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Tim ignored him and continued setting up. Unphased, Gilbert led Heidi and Jade through the crowd into a small side room. They emerged five minutes later, sniffling and touching their noses, and Gilbert wandered off to attend to other guests.

  Jade stopped beside Andrew, while Heidi returned to setting up her drum kit. ‘I’m getting everyone drinks,’ she said. ‘What do you feel like?’

  ‘Just a Coke, thanks. Coca Cola.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you, Andy?’

  When she came back with their drinks, Andrew skolled his. He wouldn’t get the chance to have a drink once the show started. It was when he’d put down the glass that he noticed the strange, bitter aftertaste.

  Heidi played a fill on her kit, Tim fired off a rhythm and Andrew tested the keys. The music on the stereo, Baba Maal, was turned off and the murmur of conversation filled the room. Someone cheered in anticipation and Andrew felt a lick of nerves. This was the moment he always found the most intense. The moment when the three of them made a standing jump—a simultaneous leap into sound and movement. The moment when the chances of everything going wrong and falling apart seemed greatest. Tim played his call and their music burst from the nothingness—clean, balanced and good. It thrilled Andrew every time.

  Twenty minutes in, Andrew started feeling a lightness in his chest that spread through his body. He felt both inside and outside of himself—a strangely pleasant vertigo. He remembered the bitter aftertaste and wondered what Jade had put in his drink. He would have felt nervous about it if he wasn’t starting to feel so damned good. The music intensified as though it was a gentle ocean washing through the room around him. The keys felt like an extension of his mind, seamlessly translating thought and feeling into sound. When he looked up, people were dancing and grooving to the music—laughing and shouting with happiness. Separate but connected.

  Tim called the music to a stop for Heidi to play a solo and Andrew felt his whole being ascending dizzily with each hit, a hang-glider rising on warm gusts of air. He turned to watch her drum, her eyes wide with concentration and her hairline dark with sweat. How extraordinarily beautiful she was. He dropped a couple of chords through her rhythm. She looked up, biting her lip, and nodded. He chopped out a progression, slicing up majors and suspended sevenths. He felt phenomenal— like there was lightning in his blood. Tim played the call, the three of them smashed into a new rhythm and the audience erupted.

  The next few songs were a kind of flight. Andrew was a trapeze artist twisting and somersaulting through the air, being caught in the grip of each new bar and flung forward into
the next. He felt as though nothing could stop him, as though there was no way he could possibly fall. And it made him crazy. He jumped up and down, spun in circles, and left his keys to double up with Heidi on drums.

  They stopped for a break and Tim walked out to the balcony. Jade rushed after him and Heidi and Andrew followed. Heidi and Andrew halted just outside the door when they saw Jade and Tim arguing at the far end of the deck.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Just their usual bullshit…How do you feel?’

  He drew her into a long, velvet embrace. ‘I’m absolutely… Fizzing!’

  She laughed. ‘Oh! You’re fizzing, are you?’

  ‘Yep. Like a giant can of lemonade!’

  She pressed herself against him. ‘You don’t mind that we slipped you E?’

  ‘Nah, I don’t mind, I don’t mind at all. We should have some more. This is amazing. This is the fucking best!’

  She turned to him and smiled. ‘I thought you might like it.’

  Jade sidled up next to them and lit a cigarette, glancing over her shoulder at Tim. ‘So much for spending New Year’s Eve together.’

  ‘What happened?’ Heidi said.

  ‘He said that we can all go and get fucked. That’s what happened. Lovely, isn’t he?’

  Andrew turned and saw Tim stomping up the driveway towards the street.

  Heidi frowned. ‘What’s his problem?’

  ‘He was carrying on like he owned me or something. I just told him that I wasn’t his possession…So now he’s called a taxi to go home.’ She glanced at Andrew and smiled. ‘How’s our protégé doing?’

  ‘Loving it,’ Heidi answered for him. ‘He wants some more.’

  ‘Well, we better give him some.’

  Heidi placed a pill on her tongue and gently pushed it into his mouth as they kissed. Her mouth was soft and delicious and he swallowed the pill without water. Jade raised her eyebrows at Heidi. ‘And where’s mine?’

  Heidi put another pill on her tongue and kissed Jade while Andrew watched, feeling like he’d just been blasted with a defibrillator and was smashing into a higher plane of consciousness.