90 Packets of Instant Noodles (14 page)

‘Have you noticed anything ... unusual, Joel-boy?' Craggs says as I lie motionless on the fungal couch.

‘Hmm?'

‘Anything different, say, on the roof?'

I unglue an eye. ‘Nah.'

‘That's a shame, mate.'

‘Whysat?'

‘Well, because there was a major improvement made to this joint today, but as you haven't noticed it you don't get to enjoy it.'

‘What?' I lean up a little. Everything hurts. I slump back down again, groaning. ‘What is it?'

‘Go out and have a look.'

‘No, no, Craggs, I can't. I think I'm paralysed. I walked 34 kilometres today to get us sustenance, for fuck's sake. Cut me some slack, will ya?'

He looks at me. ‘You're gunna tell me you're hungry next, aren't ya.'

‘I was, actually.'

He raises his voice to an old bag's whine. ‘And if you only knew what I'd been doing all day, slaving away here, fixing all your problems!'

‘What did you do, you lying fucker?' I croak.

He flicks the switch on the grandma radio.

The Strokes are playing.

The volume gets catapulted to eleven within milliseconds. I look at Craggs through the smog; he's grinning like a lunatic.

There's pure joy circulating in the shack. ‘Take It or Leave It' cranks out and we cut sick. Every one of my senses hones in on the song and for a minute or two I reckon I could be watching these guys live, with people drinking and dancing all around me. The lead guitar kicks in and Julian Casablancas's voice is bloody visionary.

It winds up and up till we cut about the house, screaming:

I'm sweating by the time the next track comes on. I shake my head at Craggs. ‘I can't believe it,' I say. ‘Triple J—down here? You're a fucking genius, Craggs.'

‘I know, mate, I know. But it wasn't that hard, really. You just have to play around with it until you get a signal.'

‘But where'd you get the aerial from?'

He coughs. ‘Umm ... well, you know you need a really long piece of wire, nothing too thick, just something you can run from the radio to the highest point.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, there wasn't anything lying around, so I ... uh, improvised.'

I'm getting suss now. ‘Yeah—
and?
'

‘Well, you know that old bed in the other room?'

‘Yeah.'

‘It has a spring base.'

I look at him. ‘
Had,
do you mean?'

He nods.

I grab his shoulders and shake him like a doll. ‘Who fucking cares about the bed, man! It's totally worth it. Triple J for the rest of my time here, it'll be sweet from now on, just
sweet.
Thanks, mate.'

‘No worries,' he says, cracking open the Pepsi Max and trying hard to keep the grin from his face.

We lie around listening to the
Oz Music Show
with Richard Kingsmill for the next couple of hours. Every now and then I shake my head in disbelief. Music, stuff out of the vault, new bands.
Distraction.
Joy. Utter joy.

Craggs says to me after a while, ‘So how about a bit more action?'

Uh-oh. What's he talking about now? My heart kicks in. Be cool, Joely. ‘Like what?'

‘Like doing over one of the joints in town.'

I groan. ‘You've gotta be kidding, Craggs, that's why we're stuck down here in the first place, remember?'

‘Yeah, so?'

‘
So
—everything you said last night. About surviving when we get back.'

‘Aah, nah, I just lost my humour for a bit last night, that's all.'

I sit up and look at him. ‘No you didn't, mate. You bloody saw the light for a moment, you dickhead. You saw how things
could
be, Craggs.' I shake my head. ‘I want that. I wanna see you do that—Craggs, in twenty years' time, a mechanical engineer raking in the cash, not Craggs in twenty years' time behind bars for another piece-of-shit gig that made you some pocket money and gave you a five-minute thrill.'

He's silent.

I'm right on the edge of the couch.

He's somewhere else, I swear it.

‘I'm not interested in doing that shit anymore, okay? I'm serious: that was it. I'm not doing over any more joints. It's just
not fucking worth it.
'

He snaps back. ‘Remember how much fun it was, though?' He grins. ‘It fucking
rocked.
'

‘Yeah, Craggs, for half an hour, and then we were shafted. Don't you remember that part? All the stress? Sull chundering in the car like that? And now look where we are. Jesus Christ.'

‘But we
learned
shit that last time.' He leans forward. ‘And when I was at Banksia Hill I found out some ... techniques we never knew before. Inside info, you know, the tips. Just think, Joel, some action again. It's so goddamn
boring
out here—I feel like grandpops sitting around whittling down sticks, for fuck's sake. Have a bit of imagination, why don't ya.'

I can feel the blood pressure rising the longer he goes on. ‘I
know
it's fucking boring, don't I? But I'm trying to think beyond being here. Don't be a
fuckwit,
Craggs! Are you
trying
to end up back in the slammer? You know we'd get caught if we bloody well even picked our noses down here—they know who we are and where we are, okay? My old man told the local cop shop about me—that was part of the deal I had to make with the juvenile justice team, orright? Who do you think they're gunna blame when some joint round here gets done over? Old Man River?'

‘Relax,' he says, laughing at me. ‘We'll split before they get us.'

‘No, mate,
we
will not split and there is no
us
in this story, okay?'

He stares out the window.

I've never taken it up to Craggs like this before. That was a rant. The silence thuds in the shack.

I didn't stammer at all.

I try to ease it up a bit. ‘Sorry, mate, but I've got other things I wanna do.'

‘What, like go to
Hammy High?
'

‘Nah, fuck Hammy, but I do want a life, man. Now we've got music we won't even
be
bored here anymore.' I take a deep breath. ‘Just hang here and be cool, Craggs. We've got a stash, we've got music: we're set.'

‘It's that chick, isn't it?'

‘What?'

‘That chick. Bella. She's fucking polluted your brain with all this goody-two-shoes think-about-your-future crap. She's not gunna stick around, mate, you do know that, don't you? You reckon she's waiting for you back in Perth?' He laughs and gives me a weak look. ‘That's not what Damien Saunders reckons.'

I say nothing.

‘I saw him before I came down here, you know. He said everyone knows it—she's been getting into that new drama teacher hero big-time. Bit more than a teacher's pet, if you know what I mean.'

‘Bull
shit,
' I say quietly.

‘Bullshit nothing. You gotta look after Number One, mate, haven't you figured that out yet?'

I can barely breathe in here.

He jabs his chin in my direction. ‘If I didn't know you better, Joely, I'd fucking well call you a poonce.'

My brain is frying. It takes everything I've got left to quietly say, ‘Get fucked, Craggs. Go and get fucked.'

I wear all my clothes to bed, just to keep warm. It doesn't help. After a couple of sleepless hours I sit up and shine my torch out the window. The forest is completely still. No sounds, no wind, nothing. The trees arch up over the cabin like something out of a horror movie. The low-down scrub doesn't even bounce with the movement of insects. Where's Foxy? Where the hell am I?

I wake up closer to lunch than brekky, feeling shattered. For a while, I lie in bed, looking around the room and listening for sounds of Craggs. I see a shitload of heavy-duty spider webs and bouncing daddy-long-legs in the corners of my room but there are no sounds in the shack just yet. It was a big night, I guess. Not the good sort, that's all. Just thinking about it makes me feel stressed.

I sit up slowly and look out the window. It's a different world during the day. The sun is a mega X-ray and crickets are winding up for a concert performance. Where the hell does everything go at night? To the fucking morgue?

I don't have to get dressed, cos I already am, so I head right out to get some coffee happening. The radio grins at me this morning and I flick the switch to get
Mornings,
or, actually, whatever the show is in the afternoons—I don't think anyone would call this morning. Even Craggs has beaten me getting up—he must be out in the dunny.

The radio offers the lifeless hiss it always has.

I fiddle the tuning. Nothing. I pull the switch on and off, in case there's a loose connection. Nothing. I decide to go outside to take a look at Craggs's aerial, thinking it must need adjusting or something.

But as I open the door I'm greeted with a mangled heap of metal lying on the ground. The aerial's been ripped down and bent in half, and half again.

It's not something too many animals, or even a gust of wind, could have done.

I swing back around to the house.

Craggs's bed—the couch—has none of his shit on it, not even his scabby jocks.

A brick settles in my gut.

I check what stuff of Craggs's is still here. The smelly old jumper I lent him and his spare T-shirt are gone. So is his wallet and
so
is our stash.

Fuck! What the fuck is he doing? When did he go? This morning, last night, or what? He doesn't have a torch—unless he fingered mine—so he must have gone some time this morning. I look over on top of the fridge where I keep the torch. It's still there. I concentrate on keeping cool. Chill, Joel, just
think,
for Christ's sake. Maybe he's only gone to the shops. No torch—he's not planning to need light, so he'll probably be back later on. He's probably just really pissed off about what happened last night and wanted to get out of here for a bit. Maybe he's gone to get some beers or to see if he can find the dope plants and stock up.

Are you fucking
kidding,
Joel? No one doing that walk would need to take a
jumper
with them, unless they were planning to be out at night. And unless he's gunna sit under a tree all day and smoke dope, I reckon he's got a tad more mull than he needs for a couple of arvo spliffs.

I look around the shack, panicking. Maybe I should go looking for him. I might be able to find him and convince him to come back here and just mellow out. I mean, fuck, last night was pretty bad, we said some stuff we shouldn't have said and we were both pretty pissed off. But Craggs is my oldest mate. We're both under the pump at the moment and he's always known how to push my buttons. Things are no longer how they used to be—we're hanging out together as always but things are all shifted about. It's the crack, it's widening. Everything's changing, and neither of us knows how the hell to stop it.

I spend the day internally sweating and looking for whatever Craggs might have taken with him that could give me an idea of where he is or how long he plans to be away. In the end I can't say if anything's gone. The place is a shambles, so it's impossible to tell. I wish I could go down to the swimming hole for a cold plunge, but I don't wanna leave in case he comes back. I also wanna write to Bella, seeing as I couldn't talk to her yesterday, thanks to the Phone Nazi, but I can't concentrate on anything apart from what Craggs may or may not be up to. On the one hand, I wanna say fuck it, he's gone—nothing I can do about it, no point worrying. But this is different. Firstly, we had that argument. And secondly, what was the argument about? Him wanting to do over a place around here. Put two and two together. I don't like what I get.

By the time it's dark I know he's not coming back, not tonight, anyway. I pace around, fuming that on top of this whole drama he took
all
the stash and didn't even leave me a joint—I mean, I know I can get more, but I didn't want to have to visit that place any more than necessary. And it would help with the stress of right now.

The more I think about this the worse it gets. Down here there was this ‘no visitors' rule—part of my conditions—and I take it that meant especially no young offenders. If anything happens, it will get back to the old man. I will end up in even deeper shit than before. Bella will find out and cut me loose forever.

Even though I personally haven't done anything.

Foxy pokes his head around the door.

‘So where have you been?'

He looks at me.

I groan. ‘Looking for snacks, are ya?'

I scan the kitchen. I haven't had anything to eat for hours, either. I crack open the Weetbix and chuck him one. He sniffs it and paws it and then looks at me as if to say,
Am I meant to
eat
this?

‘Not quite the same as Coco Pops, is it, mate?' I say, looking glumly into the box. ‘But they're a shitload ch—'

My emergency money. The hundred bucks Dad gave me. I hadn't even thought of checking it. I go over to the drawer, where it's been in an envelope from day one, and peel it open.

I count it. All there. I breathe out. Nah, he would never have done that. Never.

I sleep really badly, keeping half an ear out in case Craggs shows up. The night seems to go on and on like a John Farnham album and I get up at dawn because I can't stand being in bed anymore. Not only does the mattress smell of hundred-year-old mushrooms, but my sheets stink, largely because I haven't washed them since—well, since I arrived. Today's the day, Joely. I disgust even myself.

I stand at the kitchen window as the kettle warms up and watch the trees emerge as silhouettes in the grainy light. Birds start to
peep
and cry and the fog of the cold night settles down on the forest floor like a cloud. I look for any bigger critters—bandicoots, numbats, whatever—but of course I don't see anything. I'm starting to think that if, after three months of being down here (which will probably turn into ten years in chains if Craggs has anything to do with it), I haven't seen at least one of these ‘protected species' that people go on about, then maybe they're a total myth? I mean, yeah, they're protected because there's not very many of em, and, yeah, they probably would stay well away from people, but fuck ... I'm beginning to doubt that any of these guys
ever
existed. And Foxy doesn't count. He's not protected, for a start. More like we need protection from him, the scabby runt.

I make tea, not because I particularly want it but because I'm freezing my butt off, I've run out of coffee, and I can't be bothered making Milo—heating up the milk and all that. I can't stand how some people make Milo with just hot water. No, no, no. Milo requires
milk.
Otherwise it's just watery brown dribble.

Craggs has been gone all of yesterday and all last night. He must have frozen his balls off out there. Maybe
he
got to see some rare and endangered southern potoroo, though I doubt that's what's on his mind right now. He's probably hitched down to Albany or somewhere by now. I mean, it's not much fun here, and with me out of action—I don't blame him for leaving, really. I just wish I hadn't told him to get fucked. That was harsh, after everything we've been through together.

Empty noodle packets flap about on the counter. Another packet will do me for dinner. No room in my head to think of anything else.

I bet he's just gone walkabout. Bella and Dad might not have to find out about any of this, after all.