The Kiss

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Contents

About the Author

The Kiss

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. After graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, he worked for several years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation, but since then has divided his working time between general practice and writing. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, novels, theatre and opera libretti.

Goldsworthy’s novels have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia alone, and have been translated into European and Asian languages. His novels have three times been shortlisted for the NSW Christina Stead Fiction Prize, and twice for the Miles Franklin Award. Three Dog Night won the 2004 FAW Christina Stead Award, and was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize. In 2003, his first novel, Maestro, was voted by members of the Australian Society of Authors as one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time. Five of his novels are currently being adapted for the screen, and two more – Wish and Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam – for the stage. His most recent novel, Everything I Knew, published in 2008, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Fiction Prize. A new collection of short stories, Gravel, was published in 2010.

The Kiss

The thunder is closer now, almost seismic, as much inside the car as outside.

‘Just made it,’ Kenny says. He noses the dusty Mercedes in among the pillars that support the house, and switches off the ignition and lights. Utter darkness.

‘Relax,’ Tom says somewhere in that darkness. ‘The car would have dried overnight.’

His voice, as disembodied as the thunder, seems to have Kenny surrounded.

‘Yeah – streaked like a fucking zebra.’

‘You worry too much. Live a little, for Christ’s sake.’

His friend is right, Kenny knows. They could have joyridden the dusty back roads till dawn and still had time to clean the car; his parents are not due back till late the next day. ‘It’s my neck,’ he says. ‘Not yours.’

Tom isn’t listening. ‘Take the old zebra for another gallop,’ he mutters somewhere, and chuckles again, pleased with himself. ‘Take the old zebra back out on the savannah . . .’

‘Just empty the fucking ashtray before you get out,’ Kenny says.

There is no anger in his words; the obscenity comes as naturally as music, a necessary rhythm.

‘Say please.’

‘Just do it.’

He climbs from the car and walks out from beneath the house into the October light-and-sound show. The humid weight of the impending Wet presses down upon him, squeezing an answering wetness like a kind of juice from his skin, but he is beyond the discomforts of heat and sweat. The dark night air carries powerful scents: a cusp-mix of Wet season and Dry, dust and imminent rain. The thunder is constant, a rumbling sound horizon. Lightning flashbulbs the darkness, alternating night and day. The first rains are surely no more than hours away, although they have seemed no more than hours away for weeks. Tom’s voice, at his shoulder, startles him. ‘Drink?’

The sherry flagon is offered; Kenny waves it away. Tom takes a swig before speaking again.

‘This is just a tease,’ he says. ‘Foreplay. The Wet is still a week away.’

‘Bullshit. It’s going to piss down any second.’

Mention of the various liquids – rain, sherry, piss – seems to increase the pressure in Kenny’s bladder. He vaults the low back fence and walks to the edge of the small cliff above the beach. Lightning flickers with special intensity on the far side of the harbour – a distant fireworks, embedded in banked cloud. Perhaps the Dry has already ended over there. More lightning; the mudflats below are revealed, hidden, then revealed again, the low-tide line half a mile out. Tom materialises at his side; they unzip and send two long, steady arcs of urine over the edge of the cliff and down into the darkness of the mangroves. Years before, it would have been a simple contest – higher, further; contests mostly won by Tom. Now, sixteen years old, sweet-and-sour sixteen, Kenny is finding words more useful weapons. ‘It’s a lightning conductor,’ he says.

‘What is?’

‘Piss, stupid.’

The idea strikes them as hilarious; they laugh convulsively, their streams becoming broken, scattering showers.

Tom leans back and aims his cock near-vertically. ‘Way to go!’

The dare is unpunished by the heavens. Kenny vaults back over the fence, grabs the garden hose, twists on the tap and aims the gushing water at his friend.

‘Mine is bigger than yours!’

‘Longer, maybe.’

Tom, taller and stronger, soon wrests the nozzle from him; the spray is turned back into his own face, point-blank. The coldness of the water – a deep earth-cold – gives only temporary reprieve from the sticky heat. They lie in soaked clothes, on wet grass, sweating. The night is dead calm; no air movement cools their skins.

‘Sure you don’t want a drink?’

Tom’s words remind Kenny there is work to be done, evidence to be disposed of. He pushes himself to his feet, walks back beneath the house and gropes inside the car between lightning flashes. The brandy bottle is still half full, to be watered down and replaced in the liquor cabinet. The moulded glass bottle of sparkling wine – Pineapple Pearl – is empty; its absence from his parents’ fridge still seems a gamble worth taking. He checks the ashtray. Of course it has not been emptied; he empties it himself. The picnic rug on the back seat is briefly illuminated. He bundles it up, steps back onto the lawn, and shakes out the gritty beach sand over his wet friend.

‘Do you mind?’ Tom says.

‘What are you complaining about? You’ve been rolling around in the sand with Debbie all night.’

‘Jealousy’s a curse, Kenny.’

Is he jealous, Kenny wonders? If so, jealous of whom? Of Tom for beating him to the pleasures of Debbie, or of Debbie for intruding on a boys’ night out?

Tom rambles drunkenly on, beyond nuances. ‘I thought you were never going to leave us. I thought you were going to hang around and watch.’

‘Who needed to watch? I could hear everything half a mile up the beach.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘The noise she was making. What were you doing to her?’

‘How could she make any noise? Her mouth was full.’

Kenny almost chokes himself with laughter; Tom can always make him laugh. He flings the rug into the air above his friend; it seems to hang there, a parachute canopy, momentarily suspended, floating on the viscid air, before settling.

‘Fold that up. Please.’ He strips off his wet shirt, slings it over the clothesline, then climbs the steps up into the house. The slatted metal louvres that form the outside walls of each room have been cranked wide open, but no breeze yet enters. He switches the big overhead fan to maximum notch, the heavy air begins to stir. He is searching the fridge when Tom appears in the door with a roughly bundled picnic rug under his arm.

‘Anything cold?’

‘Butter,’ Kenny tells him. ‘Eggs.’

‘Very funny. Anything to drink?’

‘Milk.’

Tom topples theatrically backwards onto the sofa, as if shot. ‘What I need is a swim,’ he announces.

The lightning flicker, on cue, might have been a warning sent from Kenny’s parents. ‘Swim in the bathtub,’ he tells his friend. ‘The car stays where it is.’

‘We could break into the pool.’

‘How do we get there? Transporter beam?’

Flopped on his back on the sofa, Tom takes another swig of sherry, thinking. ‘The water tank? It’s closer than the pool.’

‘We’d still have to fucking drive there.’

Even as he speaks, the notion of a swim is growing on Kenny. Debbie has been dropped home not more than an hour past her curfew, the night is still young, its hours small and empty. The alcohol is leaching from his system, he is feeling restless again.

‘We could ride,’ he finally announces. ‘If you can keep your bike upright.’

The task does not seem beyond them as they sit beneath the big, cooling fan. Tom rises and follows him unsteadily down the steps. The pushbikes are leaning against a pillar beneath the house; they set off immediately, riding abreast, bare-chested, weaving and wobbling a little. The lightning has eased but their sweating torsos glisten as they pass through the successive light-fields of the streetlamps. The night air is resistant to movement, hot and viscous, difficult to breathe. Tom, heavy with his own thick flesh, is soon struggling for air. The cooling breeze of their own motion fails to keep pace with the outpouring of sweat; soon Kenny, too, is up off his saddle, standing high on the pedals, pushing down as if riding uphill but getting nowhere fast, tethered to his starting point by invisible elastic.

At the top of the descent to the beach-flats they pause to take breath. Sporadic flashes of lightning illume the view. On the far side of the wide flats the road rises again to Bullocky Point. The huge tank and its reservoir of cooling water is still impossibly distant, perched high on the far point.

‘Seemed like a good idea at the time,’ Kenny says.

‘Not one of your better ones.’

‘It gets worse. We’ll have to ride all the way back home afterwards.’

‘So you don’t want a swim?’

‘Did I say that?’

A slow, drunken smile creases Tom’s face. ‘You’re not fucking suggesting?’

Kenny answers by turning his bike back towards home. His friend hoots loudly. ‘I don’t believe my ears. Half an hour ago you were shitting yourself about the car.’

‘I’m older now.’

‘You grow up quick.’

They ride home at speed, forcing themselves through the muggy air, knowing the tank is much closer now, even if they are pedalling in the opposite direction.

‘Bring the sherry!’ Tom shouts upstairs as Kenny fetches the car keys, but Kenny already has the flagon in hand, feeling reckless and ready for anything, as if overcoming his guilt about taking the car is the first step in a more general unravelling. The night is beginning again for the two of them – the old boyhood team, no outsiders. He backs out of the drive at speed, crashes through the gear change, and accelerates away with a squeal of tyre rubber.

‘Petrol’s low,’ Tom notices.

The news seems only mildly alarming. At the top of the beach road Ken switches off the engine and coasts in neutral down the long incline, windows wound open, the air moving sweetly across his upper body. Many times the boys have freewheeled down this same slope on their pushbikes, the contest to glide as far as possible without pedalling, slowing gradually once the beach flats are reached. Tom benefits from his extra bulk; sometimes he can nurse his faltering bike as far as the gardens. The heavy metal mass of the car carries them even further before Kenny restarts the engine for the last ascent.

The big water tank looms out of the darkness on Bullocky Point, a squat, square concrete fortress, or gun emplacement. Kenny parks on the far side, hidden from the main road. Tom is first out of the car, stripping himself one-handed, sherry flagon clutched in the other. He kicks himself free of shorts and thongs and rapidly clambers up the rusted metal ladder fixed to the northern wall of the tank, still wearing his jocks. As Kenny joins him at the top, he is draining the last of the sherry. They gaze down from a high ledge into the dark interior. No water level can be seen; the inside ladder descends into blackness.

Kenny feels a flicker of apprehension. ‘Maybe it’s empty.’

‘Better toss something in,’ Tom says, and grapples playfully with his friend, jostling him towards the edge.

‘Fuck off.’

Tom releases him, and with a flip of his wrist tosses the empty flagon far out into the void. The splash is invisible, but noisily resonant, amplified within the vast echo chamber.

‘Last one in!’

‘You don’t know how deep it is!’ Kenny shouts, but Tom has already launched himself out into nothingness.

This time the splash is visible, a brief silver explosion against a dark field, followed by the glimmer of spreading ripples catching and reflecting the weak light. Tom’s voice follows, echoing loudly within the four walls. ‘Chicken!’

Kenny leaps immediately from the ledge, freefalling, it seems, for far too long. The sudden cold smack of the water is half reassuring, half shocking, stopping his heart, paralysing his breathing muscles. He surfaces, unable to breathe for a long moment. The walls and corners of the tank are as black as ink, but as his eyes accommodate he begins to sense the pale moon of a face somewhere in the centre, lit only by the faint glimmer of starlight and the cloud-reflected lights of the town. ‘So – what did you do with Debbie?’ he asks the moon-face.

‘A gentleman never tells,’ the face says.

They might be shouting, their voices are so amplified, reverberant. Kenny lowers his. ‘What’s being a gentleman got to do with you?’

Tom laughs as loudly as ever. ‘I thought you said you could hear everything.’

‘It didn’t leave a lot to the imagination.’

‘It was weird, Kenny. She let me do everything – except kiss her. Said I was too pissed.’

‘I’d have to be pissed to kiss her.’

Tom ignores him. ‘She told me a good story. She was kissing some guy at a party last year and he suddenly stops, turns away to spew up over her shoulder, then goes right on kissing her.’

‘Choice,’ Kenny says, and kicks away, a few lazy backstrokes. When he turns back, his friend’s face has vanished.

Ribbit, a frog croaks, a throaty basso in a dark corner. Ribbit.

Kenny’s tone is scornful. ‘Five out of ten.’

A human voice answers. ‘It wasn’t me, fuckwit.’ ‘

You expect me to believe there are frogs in here?’