‘Please, take me, let me be your kept woman.’
‘So you’ve been to Europe?’ Katie asked.
Leanne nodded, licking the edge of her cigarette paper. ‘I took a year off after school, went through Europe, west and east, but then I came back through Vietnam and Thailand and I loved that. That was real.’ She handed the rolled cigarette to Demet. ‘Have you been to Asia?’
Katie shook her head. ‘Nah. I mean, my background is Chinese but, you know, three generations back now. I’m pretty much bog Aussie Chinese.’ She made a self-deprecating face, and Dan thought she was pretty, it was the right word for her. She was light, delicate, fragile as a sparrow.
‘Luke wants to take me to Vietnam,’ she went on. ‘And to Greece.’
‘Why not?’ Luke shot out. ‘We’ve got places to stay in both countries. You’ll love them both.’ He tapped Leanne’s tobacco pouch. ‘May I?’
‘Help yourself.’
Dan was reeling. He’d never known Luke to smoke. Luke hated smoking. Dan sipped from his glass, looked down at the ice in the tawny liquid. He was lost in this conversation about travelling, the ease with which the four of them could imagine flight and passage, the matter-of-fact way they had of claiming the world.
The other three had gone outside to smoke and he was conscious of the silence that had fallen between himself and Katie. He wanted her to talk, to drown out the television, the joy and pride of the crowd.
‘Do you want to travel, Danny?’
She had slipped into calling him Danny. He wished he could tell her: ‘That name doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to someone else.’ But that would mean explaining. And he couldn’t bear that, he wasn’t brave enough for that.
She was smiling, waiting patiently for his reply.
‘Yeah, I guess.’ He shuddered, wanting to kick himself for the inanity of his answer. Once, not so long ago, he had assumed travel, he had felt entitled to it, in the same way the others had been talking about it only a few minutes before. But it was supposed to come from his talent. Water and swimming were going to take him there, he would see every city in the world, roam the five continents. His talent was going to be his wings. Except it had failed him. He hadn’t been good enough.
And now, where would he go? What could he offer? Who would want him?
She was waiting for more. He could tell her that he’d been to Japan. But to tell her that would be to let her know about the other Danny and he didn’t know how to do that, to recover that youth. He couldn’t conceive of where that boy had gone.
Maybe she knew already. Luke’s hands all over her body, her hands on Luke, maybe he’d told her everything, all was nakedness and all was revealed; it was only perverted virgin creeps like himself who lived in subterranean worlds. She must have known, she must have known every pathetic shameful thing there was to know about him.
For the first time Dan looked her straight in the eyes, looking for signs of condolence. He was sure he could see it, in the velvety softness of her dark eyes, the tinge of sadness there. He could see the pity.
Behind him a cheer had gone up. A masculine voice yelled out, ‘Go Spain!’ The applause for the Spanish team was loud, but then another masculine voice cut through with ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi’. It was followed by derisive laughter, but the chant went up: ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi.’
Katie’s hand was lying on his wrist again and he snatched his arm away.
‘Danny, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘God, I hate that chant.’
She nodded, agreeing. His abrupt movement had unsettled her, she was nervously scratching her elbow. ‘That’s why I want to leave and go overseas for a period. I hate all this nationalistic bullshit, it’s so disingenuous, just a cover for rank racism.’` She let out a forced, weary sigh.
The confection of her outrage, the smugness of her righteousness, Dan found pretentious.
‘Sometimes this country makes me sick,’ she continued. ‘It literally sickens me.’
Demet said that, Luke had said that: This country, it makes me sick. As if they knew there was somewhere else they could go where there wouldn’t be nausea, somewhere else they could find home.
She was talking non-stop now, complaining the way Demet did all the time, about how small Australia was, a big country with a small soul, and she was deriding racism, cursing the government. Dan’s glass was empty and he wondered how he could interrupt her to ask if she’d like another. Dan knew he should make his next a beer; the bourbon had seeped through every part of him, his thoughts and his body were woozy, warm. Katie couldn’t shut up now, never-ending complaints fell from her lips and he was thinking, when you put a finger up a woman’s cunt, was it hot there? it had to be wet and sticky there, and he was nodding as she spoke, the way he nodded when his father ranted about the ills of the world or when Demet went on about how everything was fucked here, and so he just nodded, thinking, I could put my hand up her skirt and slide my finger inside her panties and that would wipe the look of pity off her face.
‘Here, mate.’ Luke was smiling as he handed Dan another bourbon and Coke. Demet and Leanne fell back into the booth, and Dan slurped greedily from the glass, letting the liquid soothe his tongue and his throat, letting the liquid soak through him.
Demet was smiling at him across the table, Luke had his arm stretched across the bench, folding in Katie, reaching out to Dan. They were thinking he was that other Danny, they didn’t know how sick he was, what evil he had become.
A roar of celebration rang from the television and it was answered in the pub by good-natured jeering. All of them in the booth stopped talking, aware of the motion of a current once more, this one with an elemental tidal force drawing everyone towards the screen. All those bodies were pushing forward, and it was as if their table had been cast adrift, quarantined from the rest of the crowd. Luke was downcast, examining his beer closely, Leanne was playing with the tobacco pouch, Katie had her hands between her knees, and Demet was fixated on Dan. Dan knew that they were caught up in the current and they wanted to be experiencing what everyone else was, they wanted to be celebrating, having fun. But they couldn’t, they mustn’t, because Dan was there, the loser was with them, and Leanne knew it, and even Katie who had only just met him tonight, she knew it, that Dan was so lacking in courage, so weak, so pathetic, so pitiful that they had to protect him from that tide.
He emptied his glass in one swill, wiped his mouth. He stood up. ‘Come on, let’s go and watch.’
He used his elbows, his shoulders, the weight of his whole body to battle through the throng. He shoved a man aside, and the man turned back ready to fight but one look at Dan’s face told him to shut his mouth.
Dan stopped behind a short young woman. Luke’s head was bobbing over Dan’s shoulder.
It was the Yugoslavians marching now, the athletes in white shirts and shiny blue suits. ‘They look pretty hot, even I’d go for some of those guys.’ Dan recognised Leanne’s nasal voice and saw that the three women were behind him. He moved aside and Demet, Katie and Leanne gratefully squeezed in between him and Luke.
He watched the screen but he didn’t see bodies and he didn’t see a crowd; he translated form into shadow and movement, the flicker and sparkle of thousands of flashbulbs were waves that shimmered and diffused the light. When Dan was a child his father had read him the stories of Aladdin and the Thousand and One Nights, and he recalled the stories now, those tales of unimaginable treasure hidden in caves, how the revelation of such magnificence and beauty would strike the beholder blind. Watching the lights spray out and splinter, he didn’t see electricity, he saw shining diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds, saw amber and opal, all the colours of the world splitting night into day. The people on the screen weren’t human forms but jewelled shapes gliding across it. He wouldn’t make them human, wouldn’t delineate faces, for to see faces was to see joy, to see triumph. Demet had grabbed his hand, was squeezing it tight. He couldn’t let it go, but he didn’t want her touch.