Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space (17 page)

Knock knock.

‘Wanna suck my cock?’ Doll yelled through the door. No answer. ‘Why are our favourite Earthlings not in their nest?’ she grumbled. Revor leapt out of Baby’s carry bag and sniffed at the crack under the door.

Iggy, on the other side, wagged his tail deliriously. He cursed under his breath. Why didn’t the humans ever leave him a key? They were all out. Saturna and Skye were at their shop, Tristram was at his part-time job in a King Street newsagent and Jake and Torq were at the CES,
earnestly explaining to their case managers how difficult it had been, once again, to find any work. The door was deadlocked. Oh God, oh God, please, somehow, let me open that door.

Oh, all right. Just this once. But don’t make it a habit.

A shiver crept down Iggy’s spine. His fur, such as it was, stood on end and his ears pricked nervously. He sniffed at the air. Who the hell was talking to him?

It’s God, dog-face. Remember? You called Me?

God?!

Who’d you think it was, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?

Iggy’s knees went weak and he sank to the ground.

I promise I’ll go to church from now on, and…

Cut the crap. I’m just doing this as a favour to the babes.

The bolt sucked in and the door swung open. Revor bounded up to Iggy, jumped on his face, and humped his nose in greeting. Gnyah! Gnyah! Gnyah! As the girls watched in amusement, Iggy’s big pink tongue extended out of his mouth and disappeared up Revor’s arse.

Doll shook her head. ‘How beastly,’ she tittered.

‘Anyone home?’ called out Baby, her heart racing.

Silence.

Oh, how foolish of her. She hadn’t even checked the Locate-a-tron. Quickly, she punched in the code.

‘Did you fart?’ Jake’s case manager wrinkled her nose. ‘No wonder you can’t get a job,’ she said.

Masking her disappointment, Baby led the others into the lounge. ‘Did you do that, Lati?’ she chuckled, fingering the bite marks on the stereo speaker. ‘What a naughty little ayle you are.’

Lati burst out laughing. ‘You should’ve seen their faces,’ she chortled, wiping away tears of mirth. ‘Shock-o-rama.’ She picked up Torquil’s bass.

‘I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,’ cautioned Baby. ‘I don’t think he’d be very happy.’

‘I wouldn’t eat a
bass
,’ Lati resiled. ‘What do you take me for?’ She twangled the strings while Doll dragged Tristram’s drum kit out from the corner and seated herself on the stool. Picking up a drumstick, she twirled it in the air and attacked the drums. Digitidigitidigiti. Baby discovered Jake’s guitar behind the sofa. She threw on the strap and struck a pose. ‘One two three four!’

Revor and Iggy were in the midst of a little game called the Gerbil and the Movie Star (Iggy being the Movie Star and Revor the Gerbil) when the girls began to play. Iggy’s ears pricked and a smile widened his bullie jaw. His tail began wagging furiously, the movement of his backside evoking muffled groans from Revor. Finally, Revor’s little head appeared from its salmon-coloured collar. He blinked a few times. Wriggling out, he landed on the floor, shook himself and galloped after Iggy into the lounge, where they positioned themselves in front of the babes and listened with total absorption, tapping their tails to the beat. ‘You said they were good,’ whispered Iggy excitedly, ‘but you didn’t say they were
this
good.’

The girls ran through their entire repertoire, including ‘Comet Karma’, ‘Close Encounter You’, ‘Warped Drive’, ‘In the Sexual Experimentation Chamber (Anything Goes, Everything Cums)’, and, of course, the seminal
‘Hangar 99’. They were so absorbed in their jam that they didn’t even see Torquil and Jake come in until they’d been standing there for some time.

‘That was
filth
,’ Torquil exclaimed, awed.

‘Fully,’ agreed Jake. He grasped the doorframe to prevent himself from floating away.

On Saturday night, Jake had promised to do the door at the Sandringham for two Canberra bands, Prik Harness and The Angel Pygar. He’d gone to school with the drummer of Prik Harness. He thought Baby might enjoy hearing them and suggested she go too.

Doll was accompanying Skye and Saturna to a CD launch by Pitch Bitch, a new all-woman Goth band. No one was sure where Lati had gone. While dropping acid with the twins on Friday night, she turned into a giant chicken with sparkling blue feathers, flew straight into the television set and was yet to re-emerge. The twins felt they ought to wait for her to return.

About an hour before Baby was due to arrive, Jake tried on all his shirts. He settled finally on a purple paisley polyester number. Being a tad too tight, it looked excellent on his lean frame. He considered striped leggings but opted in the end for red jeans. He gathered his dreadlocks into a ponytail, and studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Nup. He shook out the ponytail and swept his dreads up on top of his head, where they fanned out in a magnificent geyser of yellow piping, but decided he wasn’t feeling enough in touch with his feminine side at that moment to carry it off. He let them flop back down
au naturel
, and examined the result. He tweaked one or
two till they stood out at interesting angles, and applied a dab of Fudge to ensure they stayed that way. He then rummaged through Saturna and Skye’s considerable collection of makeup, smearing concealer on a zit, experimenting with a smidgen of eyeliner, and painting one nail black. He tweaked another dread. He unbuttoned the bottom button on the shirt, buttoned it up and then unbuttoned it again.

It took just over an hour, but by the time he was finished, Jake managed to look like he’d just rolled out of bed and pulled on the first availables.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Allie.

Allie who?

Alien.

Jake opened the door and was almost blown backwards by the sight of Baby in a silver lamé shift worn over purple tights and basketball sneakers. She’d tied a velvet ribbon around her neck and stacked black and silver bangles on her long green arms. She’d wrapped her plaits around her antennae so they stood up in a giant V from her head like a TV aerial. She was the most stunning thing Jake had ever seen in his life.

Upon recovering his breath and balance, Jake searched for the right words to tell her how beautiful she was, how magnificent, how totally fantastic, but also that it wasn’t
just
that, it was her talent, her energy, her intelligence, her confidence, her style that made him want to lie down and die at her feet. He wanted to carve the pounding heart from out of his chest and present it to her on a platter. He rehearsed all these thoughts in his head before finally managing to speak. The words came out like this: ‘What
d’ya reckon? Should we just head straight to the Sando?’

Baby smiled happily. She’d read his thoughts. ‘Yeah, sure,’ she replied.

At the pub, Jake dragged a small table and two stools over to the doorway. Before he had a chance to fetch the small tray with the stamp and the $100 float from the bar, Gregory, noting Baby’s presence, sailed over with the tray in hand. ‘Hi, gorgeous,’ he greeted Baby, offhandedly passing the tray to Jake without even looking at him. ‘
Filthy
frock,’ he added, giving her the once-over.

‘Thanks, Greg,’ Baby purred. ‘Nice shirt, by the way.’

Gregory patted his authentic seventies nylon black-and-white op-art shirt and smiled with intent. ‘It
is
good, isn’t it?’

‘Nice to see you too, Greg,’ Jake interjected, trying not to sound as sour as he felt. She hadn’t said anything about
his
shirt, he thought petulantly.

‘I like your shirt too, Jake,’ Baby said, turning her dazzling smile upon him. ‘I like it a
lot
.’ It was suddenly as if there was no one else in the room. As if there had never been anyone else in the room.

‘Cool. Well, I’ll just get back to it, then,’ Greg said, giddily, weaving his way back to the bar.

A tall boy with the hair of an electrocution victim and an Unsane t-shirt shuffled up to the door. ‘How much?’ he said, doing a double-take at the sight of Baby.

‘Three dollars,’ Jake answered.

No reply. Unsane was in love. You can’t talk when you’re in love. Unconsciously, he moved ever so slightly towards her, drawn into her orbit at just the precise moment that, way up in the outer, the asteroid Eros shook himself a wee bit further out of his. Unsane’s mouth opened. His tongue rolled out. His eyes drooped at the
outer corners and his cheeks flushed pink.

‘Three dollars, mate,’ repeated Jake. He looked at Baby to see if she was in any way encouraging this moronic display. She appeared oblivious, happily tapping her feet to the music—they were playing
Songs in the Key of X
over the PA—and watching the bands set up.

Unsane tried to remember where he was and why. Curiously, he took in the orange walls of the pub, the stage, the mammoth bar, his own feet.
That’s
right. He pulled in his tongue. Speaking slowly, as though coming out of a dream, he asked, ‘Any concession?’

‘Sorry, mate.’

Unsane pulled three coins out of his pocket, one at a time, farewelling each individually with tragic eyes. He held out a skinny wrist and Jake stamped it with a little picture of R2D2. He gave Baby one last look of pure devotion and disappeared up the back of the bar.

Next to front up was a sophisticated-looking girl with sparkles on her face and cartoons on her stockings. She was handing over her three dollars when the bouncer stepped in. ‘ID,’ he demanded.

‘Tosser,’ pouted the fifteen-year-old, turning on her heels and walking off.

‘Friend of the band,’ announced the next comer, a skinny fellow in a huge Prik Harness t-shirt that said ‘Choose Satan’ on the front and had a cartoon of giant mutants on the back.

‘Name?’

‘Fizzer.’ He pointed to his name on the list.

‘Cool.’ Jake crossed off the name and stamped his wrist.

‘Sorry.’ Fizzer apologised as he squeezed past Baby and into the venue. His leg accidentally brushed against
hers. He jumped as though shocked and, if Jake’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, the mutant on Fizzer’s t-shirt suddenly grinned and winked its one eye. Fizzer gulped and hurried on inside.