The Byron Journals (10 page)

Tim shook his head. ‘Just ignore them and they'll go away.'

‘They've got no right,' Ananda said.

‘You're right…I think…' Andrew said, his thoughts swarming. ‘They don't have any right.'

There were another three knocks and then a loud voice. ‘Open up, please! We can hear you talking!'

Tim glanced at Andrew pleadingly.

‘I'll get rid of them,' Andrew said uncertainly.

Tim held out a pair of sunglasses, pink-framed Wayfarers. ‘Take these—your eyes are just about bleeding.'

He put them on and walked down the hall, thinking of something his mum once said to him.
Police are
just glorified security guards. They can't touch you.
He paused, drew a deep breath, then opened the door and looked the cops up and down.

‘Is there a problem?'

One of them tried to peer over Andrew's shoulder and down the hallway, so he stepped outside and pulled the door to behind him.

The other cop frowned. ‘We're just canvassing the area for information on a sports car that someone crashed into last weekend.'

Andrew's thoughts reeled and twisted; had they been tipped off about Tim's Valiant? The hydro set-up? Had they seen the piles of marijuana branches at the end of the hallway? Perhaps they could smell the marijuana on him. Maybe they were wondering why he was wearing sunglasses inside the house. They were waiting for a response, but he was too stoned to remember what the initial question was, so he just shook his head and stared at them blankly. They glanced at each other and the taller of the two cleared his throat. ‘You didn't hear anything—or see anything?'

‘Not that I can remember.'

‘Not that you can remember?'

Andrew shook his head.

‘It was a Maserati…' ‘A Maser—what?' A Maser-what? What did that mean? He almost started laughing, but coughed and covered his mouth instead.

The cops frowned and stared at him expectantly. ‘A Maserati.'

Andrew noticed the resin stains on his fingers and crossed his arms. He cleared his throat. ‘So…is that all? I'm kind of…busy—' ‘And we're sorry to disturb you—but this is a very expensive sports car. Perhaps there are other people in the house we can talk to?'

Andrew shook his head. ‘There's no one else here— just me.'

He shouldn't have lied. The tall cop moved forward. ‘You're acting awfully suspiciously, mate. You're not trying to hide anything from us, are you?'

‘I'm just really, really…busy,' he replied. He was ready for them to push past him and bust them for growing and harvesting commercial quantities of cannabis.

The door creaked open behind him and a hand fell softly onto his shoulder. He turned and saw Jade— naked except for a white bed sheet wrapped around her. She cleared her throat, adjusted the sheet and let it slip just enough to catch the cops' attention. ‘What's taking so long, babe?'

Andrew shook his head, relieved. ‘Sorry...babe… We're almost done.'

‘Just hurry up.'

She pulled the door closed behind her and one of the cops winked at him.

Andrew grinned and gestured towards the house. ‘I better get back in there.'

‘Yeah, you'd better. Thanks for your time.'

Andrew locked the door and watched through the split in Heidi's curtains as the police walked out the driveway and into the next-door neighbour's house. When he returned to the living room, everyone was pissing themselves laughing.

He shook his head at Jade. ‘My god…that was genius.'

‘Not really,' she said. ‘Men are just so stupid. You're like dogs. All you think about is food and sex.'

Heidi laughed. ‘That's so true!'

‘Those cops'll be giggling like schoolboys,' Ananda said.

Heidi cooked vegetarian lasagne for dinner, while the others continued harvesting. As soon as they'd finished eating, Ananda put on the Rolling Stones
Let
it Bleed
album and they set to work again.

It took them two days and by the end they all had sore backs and foggy heads. They sat around exhausted while Tim completed the final job of weighing the buds into ounces and packing them in snap-lock bags. He threw the bags into a large tea-chest, counting them as he went, then flipped the latch and locked it.

‘Ninety-five ounces,' he said. ‘Just under six pounds.' ‘How much can we sell it for?' Andrew asked, picking at the dark brown resin on his fingertips.

‘Twenty grand,' Tim replied. ‘Maybe twenty-five. Depends on the market price in Melbourne.'

Jade groaned. ‘That was a shitload of work, babe.'

She was right, thought Andrew, it wasn't a lot of money. Five or six grand each, tops. Considering the work to maintain the set-up and harvest the pot, not to mention the risk of getting caught, it wasn't much at all. But enough to pay back Benny and maybe a little extra on top. He couldn't complain—as long as everything ran smoothly, it was money for nothing.

eleven

Andrew snatched his mobile off the floor before it woke Heidi. ‘Hello?' he croaked.

‘Andrew, it's me. Don't hang up.'

‘Dad?' He looked at Heidi, still asleep beside him, and rolled out of bed. ‘What's up?' He pulled on some shorts and let himself out of the bedroom into the hallway.

‘Your exam results arrived…I thought you'd like to know.'

‘Not really.'

‘You don't care?'

‘No, I don't care.' He unlocked the front door and sat on the edge of the verandah. ‘I care that you're fucking someone half your own age, I care how stupid that makes Mum look. I care that you sold the Volvo and now drive around town in a fucking convertible.'

‘It's a fine automobile.'

‘You look like a tool.'

‘It drives beautifully—you wouldn't appreciate something like that at your age.'

Andrew ran his hand over his face, stood and started pacing. ‘I don't understand what's going on with you.'

‘I don't understand it entirely either,' his dad replied. ‘I feel as though life's slipping away from me, and that if I don't branch out and keep growing, I'll just wither away and die.'

Andrew paused and ripped at some tufts of grass by his feet. ‘What's with all these philosophical musings?' ‘I'm going through some changes.'

‘Well, can you hurry up and get through them?'

There was a sigh down the phone line. ‘Your mother seems to think it's a mid-life crisis. And maybe she's right. I don't know.'

‘Well, whatever it is, it's not particularly elegant.'

Now his dad was laughing. ‘And why should it be? I realise you're still young—you have these notions in your head about how things should be. But let me tell you something.'

‘What?'

‘Life is messy, Andrew. People grow and change and make mistakes. The world is filled with so much deception—the least we can do is speak truthfully to each other. It's not always pleasant, but I think you're mature enough now to cope with it.'

‘You're hurting Mum.'

‘Your mother has made mistakes too, Andrew.' He paused. ‘It's just that you haven't walked in on them.'

‘Bullshit.'

Silence down the line.

‘Andrew—why didn't you go to your music exam?'

‘Because I don't want to go to the Con and end up becoming a music teacher like every other music student.'

‘Why was there blood on your shirt?'

‘You could have asked me about it on the day.'

‘You didn't give me a chance. You were so damned angry. And when I called later, you refused to answer.' Andrew remembered the cold, acrid taste of vodka. More silence.

‘All right, you don't have to tell me, but I want you to come home. Running away like this isn't going to solve anything.'

‘I've got no reason to take advice from you.'

‘Okay, tell me then, what are you planning to do?'

‘Model my life on yours and make a shitload of dumb mistakes one after another, then tell everyone that I'm going through some changes but I'm trying to be open and truthful with everyone about it.'

‘C'mon Andrew. Smarten up. I know I've done things that upset you, but that doesn't mean I don't want to help you.'

‘If you want to help me, you can fuck off and leave me alone.'

‘Andrew,' his father said, his tone harder now.

‘What?'

‘You got seventy-six percent. You've been accepted into your second university preference—ecotourism.'

Andrew started laughing. ‘Excellent. That's great.'

‘It's not funny, Andrew. We never talked about ecotourism. Do you even know what it is?'

‘Not really.'

‘It's driving busloads of tourists to National Parks and making shitty jokes into a microphone.'

‘Better than being a lecherous music lecturer, full of regrets about the music career he never had.'

‘Never mind me, Andrew. You shouldn't waste your musical talent—particularly if your only motivation is to get back at me and your mother. Have some foresight.' ‘God! Why do you have to be so serious about everything? I'm eighteen and I don't know what I want to do, all right? I don't know! All I know is that I don't want to be like you.'

Andrew killed the call and looked around, chest heaving. He was standing in the middle of the street.

‘You know,' Heidi said, pulling a weed from the garden bed. ‘If you believe in reincarnation, time doesn't really mean anything. This life is just one more life in an endless series of incarnations.'

He passed her the joint and watched a brush turkey pecking at the orange flowers under the flame tree. ‘You don't really believe in that though, do you?'

‘No.' She laughed. ‘But I like to think about it.'

‘What would you come back as?'

‘I wouldn't care,' she replied. ‘Just so long as it wasn't as hideous as that brush turkey.'

She started laughing, then stopped and sat up straight, listening to the low, uneven rumble coming up the street towards them. The brush turkey ran a few steps, flew heavily to the fence, teetered and dropped into the neighbour's garden. Moments later, the rumble cut out as Tim stalled their new tour bus mid-turn into the driveway. The bus was off-white with faded green and blue pinstripes along its sides, its windows were laced with spider webs and it had a buckled roof-rack tray on top. The wheels were bald and the wheel arches were pockmarked with rust. Tim restarted the engine, pulled into the driveway and sounded the horn, a low, off-key drone, then stuck his head through the open window. ‘She might be ugly,' he said. ‘But she's got a fantastic personality!'

Heidi laughed, put her arm around Andrew and passed him the joint. ‘Nice work, Tim,' she called. ‘Really inconspicuous!'

Tim opened the door, climbed onto the roof of the bus and surveyed the surrounding houses. He turned to Heidi with his palms upraised. ‘Why would I want to be inconspicuous?'

‘Umm…' She looked from Andrew to Tim. ‘Maybe because of what we're transporting.'

Tim laughed. ‘No one will suspect us. We're musicians on tour—that's all. There's nothing to worry about!'

They spent the next two days cleaning and doing up the bus. A hot northerly sighed and panted around them while they scrubbed and deodorised the interior, and cut and bogged the rust. They installed a stereo system Tim had bought from a pawn shop in town, along with bright yellow curtains Heidi had picked up at the op-shop. The oven no longer worked, so Tim and Andrew gutted it and installed a safe inside for storing money. They threw out the scungy mattress from up the back and replaced it with a new one. Jade wanted to paint something crazy on the exterior, but they vetoed her.

Heidi rolled over and kissed Andrew, her breath sour with sleep. ‘Merry Christmas.'

‘What…? Today?' He stretched and yawned. ‘It can't be!'

‘Well, it is the twenty-fifth of December. That's normally the day people celebrate. The birth of Jesus… or whatever.'

‘Ha!' he said and started laughing. ‘What are we going to do?'

‘Who cares? Go to the beach, hang out, it doesn't matter. We can do anything we want.'

She was right. It didn't matter. Every day in Byron was like Christmas. Better than Christmas. Christmas without the bickering relatives. The back streets were quiet, the trees hung limp in people's gardens and the town was in perpetual flux.

Andrew turned off his phone. He had no reason to speak to his parents—or anyone else in Adelaide for that matter. When Jade and Tim woke, the four of them walked to the supermarket and bought seafood, fruit and white wine. They strapped Tim's longboard onto the roof of Jade's Mazda, and headed for Wategos Beach. As they passed through a tunnel of small, gnarled eucalypts and hooked the final corner along the cliff edge, Andrew glimpsed the ocean glittering to the horizon and he wished his life could be like this forever.

twelve

The sun was low in the sky as the bus strained up a steep back road into the Byron hinterland. Jade had organised for them to play a private New Year's Eve party for the owner of her modelling agency on the Gold Coast. Seated in the front passenger seat beside Tim, she lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.

‘You complain about never being invited to the parties I go to,' she said. ‘So I organise you to play a show at one—the best paying gig you've ever had—and you're still complaining!'

Tim hunched over the steering wheel. ‘Is the guy you're fucking behind my back going to be there?'

‘I'm not fucking anyone behind your back!'

Andrew took Heidi's hand and kissed her cheek, glad that they didn't fight like the other two. He looked out the window and watched the grassy hills sloped like giant ocean swells passing on either side.