From then on I lived in the middle of a thunderstorm. I dreaded school each day. I obsessed about the wrong things, like my weight, like how did he get money for expensive books. Finally, one warm evening, after school, I walked the wrong way up Sydney Road. That is, not the way we had always walked together. He let me go. I did it to myself. By the time I got to Cornwall’s Hardware, I knew we had broken up.
Next day I returned to the home room. Let it be the same, I thought. I sat where I normally sat. I waited passively, already dead. When Frederic took his usual place, I thought, thank God, but when he turned to me his eyes were leaking, black and murderous.
I said, I don’t know what’s happening.
He said, I have to help Cosmo.
Cosmo, who later became the notorious Paypal, was the biggest dork in a home room totally full of misfits and dorks and refugees from all sorts of marital, pedagogic and political disasters. His father had Palermo Plumbing and Gas Fitting out the back of the Coburg mall. Cosmo was at R. F. Mackenzie because he was thought unteachable. His father had four other sons, and no room for the youngest in the business. But Cosmo was like a dog that won’t leave your door. All he did was make models and machines from plumbing parts. He was already six foot tall but he had no sense of personal space and it was a nightmare to even walk down Sydney Road with him because he was always bumping into people plus he had a loud hysterical laugh. Plus he was a PC gamer which was, of course, the point.
Cosmo needs help, Frederic said, rubbing his eye, smearing black across his wrist.
OK.
So I’ll just help him for a bit, OK?
I looked back at Cosmo. He winked at me, which was not his privilege.
OK, I said.
I was slow to appreciate that my gentle polite Frederic was about to permanently sit beside the nerd and they would now spend days whispering to each other about all the games available for PC.
When Cosmo lent Ultima VI to Frederic everybody knew I had been dumped. No-one in the home room was sorry for me. No-one came to save my pride which would have been so easy. Beyond R. F. Mackenzie was outer space, no life on any other planets. I had pissed off Troy. To the Samoans I was dead meat. I had been so fucking superior with the Keppel Street Quartet that they had long ago stopped trying to phone me. My father had become distant, and Celine arrived drunk at night expecting what she called “girl’s talk.” Yuck.
But Christmas was nearly here, ditto summer, so I could hide from myself at the creek where the council mowed down our saplings because, of course, there could be no life between the tractor wheels, and we should have known to plant our trees at one-metre intervals. Someone somewhere was having meetings with the three councils and MetWat, but I was just replanting. I hung out with wrinkly old people. I worked hard and tried not to feel too much. I volunteered at the plant nursery and did my best to get along with my father who could not get over himself. Night after night I stayed at home eating takeaway until I was brave enough to call Katie, who had been my alibi when I was sleeping with Frederic at his place.
I deserved nothing from her, but she was going to the Mechanics Club in Brunswick that night, where her boyfriend’s band was playing. He was a drummer in a punk revival band called Snot, something like that. He had the early gig and they would meet me out in front, OK.
Really?
Are you joking? I miss you.
I had spent so much time being Gaby-and-Frederic I no longer knew what I should wear to listen to a bloody band. I knew those girls, they would arrive so cool and cute and I made myself totally vomitous attempting to “get a look together.” Finally I smoked a joint and dressed in all the second-hand stuff I normally wore. When I arrived at the club my old friends were all waiting, hooing and cheering that they loved my look, they loved me. I was original to them. There was no-one like me, although of course they would have rather died than look like me. Their clothes were all clearly expensive (not to boys, but to girls it was completely obvious).
The Mechanics Club was a ratfuck, the band itself was crap. The boyfriend was handsome but too pleased with himself. WTF. I jumped around and had some drinks. Katie shared a bump of coke with me. There was what they called an “after party” and the drummer boyfriend put my bike in the van and I was so pleased to be included in the normal world. Katie sat in the front seat next to her drummer. He drove with his arm around her shoulder, serpent scales in blue ink from his sleeveless top down to his fingernails. Katie kept on flopping her hand over the back of the seat. Then: duh: she had a condom. My friends had become babies while I had been gone.
The after party was in East Kew. I had lived in Melbourne all my life and never saw a house with gates like these, four-metre-high spears tipped with gold fleurs-de-lis, like the owners were waiting for the revolution. A bright yellow Porsche was parked inside. The punk revival drummer lived here with his mum and dad and little brothers. His left ear was rolled and pierced like a weird piece of pasta, but he was very well mannered. He carried my bike from the van and showed me where to leave it. Damn, I thought, fuck it. Have to ride it home.
The parents were away. There were frantic kids in every direction, speed, molly, coke, hash oil. They were so private-school, and I was the freakiest thing they ever saw, those silly little girls with white powder still clinging to the philtrum of their Botticelli lips.
I thought, I will have a pee and try and find my way back home.
But the loos were locked and filled with idiots. I went downstairs and found, amidst the chaos, the moronic thumping bass, shrieking, vomiting, not a loo but a brand-new Mac IIci. It turned out to be upgraded with a 50 MHz Daystar 68030 board, and it connected to a Hayes Smartmodem 96 and it was surrounded by silent kids some maybe as young as twelve. At the keyboard, like the most perverted seminarian or Sunday-school teacher, was Frederic Matovic.
The little boys hung on him, on his shoulder, pressing in on him as he did his fluttery feathering Frederic typing, and I knew it absolutely was not sexual, but just the same my stomach tightened. It was, to me at least, so completely intimate. Those rhythms were his rhythms, created by commands and responses, by pauses, by almost violent returns, when he shifted in his seat, the way he did, and nodded his head as he had first done when he had a fringe to flick away. I knew that he was breaking into something good. When one of the munchkins hooked him up to a brand-new snail’s-pace StyleWriter it was clear he had a shitload of treasure to take home. I had meant to run away, but I barged in and tapped him on the shoulder and he was like, Hi.
He pushed a skanky skateboard child away and I, just, took my place.
What had he got into? A few years later it would have been email. That year it was a CSIRONET account. Holy Shit. He was inside MetWat’s Secretum secretorum where correspondence was still headed Memo and RDM as in Restricted Distribution Memo. He made a Frederic noise, indeterminate, a sort of moo, and left me with his mullety crew while he relieved the StyleWriter of its burden, reading as he stacked the pages.
We should go, he said. He flicked the fringe that was not there.
I stood. (I should have reacted how else exactly?)
OK, guys, he said. The water is on me.
I was staggered he would do this. Leave these little anklebiters running like mice inside MetWat, but perhaps that was the fee he had negotiated with them, or perhaps he was safely pissing on the Federal Police, or engaging in class warfare by getting the Computer Crime Squad to hit East Kew. His normal procedure would be to not interfere with any site he had entered, to build a nice back door perhaps, but to tidy up after himself and do no damage to the system.