loved by him just then—and stroked his thumb over the Tasmanian birthmark. He kissed Gibbo long and hard. Love detonated like dynamite through him. Like an explosion of fists on his face.
Tek and Annabelle were horrified to see the cuts and bruises smudged over their son’s face when he returned the next day. Annabelle raced for the Dettol and began disinfecting Justin’s wounds.
‘What happened?’ she demanded.
‘I slipped and fell on some rocks,’ Justin said.
She shot a seriously annoyed look at her husband. ‘You see. I told you it’s not safe. This is what happens when you try to make an NS-man out of your son and tell him to go camping.’
Gibbo picked up the phone to ring Justin several times but he was always too angry and too ashamed to dial Justin’s number. He did not know what to say to his oldest friend. He rang Tien instead. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He felt that if only he could talk to her, they would be able to sort things out. But he could not reach her. She was never in and although he left several messages with her mother, she did not return his calls. He didn’t know what he had done wrong. He did not have the courage to ask. It was the end of the Three Mouseketeers.
When university started they were scattered; different universities, different courses, different life directions. Gibbo made a number of acquaintances in his engineering classes and socialised in the most basic manner. He went to the pub with them after class, got blind drunk, and chanted collectively: ‘Engineer! Rhymes with beer! Engineer! Rhymes with beer!’ He thought he was enjoying himself; he was doing all right. Then he discovered that these were not the kind of friends to whom he could really talk, or the kind who would even ring him up to hang out on weekends. Nothing in his experience of watching cheesy American campus movies had prepared him for university life where, after classes and the pub, people just disappeared back into the suburbs from which they came. And when they moved on to different classes the following year, he didn’t see them anymore.
That was when he realised that his friendships—such as they were—had congealed into a pattern of association by default, followed by the fragmentation of the group when the centrifugal forces of life circumstances flung them outside his physical orbit. He ached with fear that he would always be alone.
Saturday Night Phobia
All her emotions tangled like sleave silk as dreams of home kept stirring sleep till dawn.
From her gauze-curtained window, at heaven’s edge, alone, forlorn, she’d watch dusk follow dusk.
While the moon hare and the sun crow whirled round, she mourned all victims in the Sorrow League.
Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu
By the time he was halfway through his university course, Gibbo was convinced that weekends should never have been invented. Or if that was impossible, then mankind would have been better off sticking to the six-day working week. Saturdays were a humiliation, a taunt by malicious higher beings—both terrestrial and celestial—who delighted in demonstrating to him on a weekly basis his social ineptitude and consequent isolation.
Friday nights were all right. Just. He was so buggered by the end of the university week that it was as much as he could do to drag himself home through traffic jams and road rage, bolt down the dinner his mum had prepared for him, thrust his clothes into the washing machine and flop onto the bed to read in his Y-front underwear. Anything served his purpose; he did not differentiate between Tom Clancy or Thomas Mann, Tom Jones or Thomas the Tank Engine.
Out the back of the flame-brick house, in the dun-grey fibro extension that now served as the TV room, he could hear his father exclaiming angrily at Friday night football on the television. If Gibbo had a Groundhog Day in his life, Friday night footy was it. Friday nights hummed with the muted buzz of barracking crowds, his
Tek and Annabelle were horrified to see the cuts and bruises smudged over their son’s face when he returned the next day. Annabelle raced for the Dettol and began disinfecting Justin’s wounds.
‘What happened?’ she demanded.
‘I slipped and fell on some rocks,’ Justin said.
She shot a seriously annoyed look at her husband. ‘You see. I told you it’s not safe. This is what happens when you try to make an NS-man out of your son and tell him to go camping.’
Gibbo picked up the phone to ring Justin several times but he was always too angry and too ashamed to dial Justin’s number. He did not know what to say to his oldest friend. He rang Tien instead. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He felt that if only he could talk to her, they would be able to sort things out. But he could not reach her. She was never in and although he left several messages with her mother, she did not return his calls. He didn’t know what he had done wrong. He did not have the courage to ask. It was the end of the Three Mouseketeers.
When university started they were scattered; different universities, different courses, different life directions. Gibbo made a number of acquaintances in his engineering classes and socialised in the most basic manner. He went to the pub with them after class, got blind drunk, and chanted collectively: ‘Engineer! Rhymes with beer! Engineer! Rhymes with beer!’ He thought he was enjoying himself; he was doing all right. Then he discovered that these were not the kind of friends to whom he could really talk, or the kind who would even ring him up to hang out on weekends. Nothing in his experience of watching cheesy American campus movies had prepared him for university life where, after classes and the pub, people just disappeared back into the suburbs from which they came. And when they moved on to different classes the following year, he didn’t see them anymore.
That was when he realised that his friendships—such as they were—had congealed into a pattern of association by default, followed by the fragmentation of the group when the centrifugal forces of life circumstances flung them outside his physical orbit. He ached with fear that he would always be alone.
Saturday Night Phobia
All her emotions tangled like sleave silk as dreams of home kept stirring sleep till dawn.
From her gauze-curtained window, at heaven’s edge, alone, forlorn, she’d watch dusk follow dusk.
While the moon hare and the sun crow whirled round, she mourned all victims in the Sorrow League.
Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu
By the time he was halfway through his university course, Gibbo was convinced that weekends should never have been invented. Or if that was impossible, then mankind would have been better off sticking to the six-day working week. Saturdays were a humiliation, a taunt by malicious higher beings—both terrestrial and celestial—who delighted in demonstrating to him on a weekly basis his social ineptitude and consequent isolation.
Friday nights were all right. Just. He was so buggered by the end of the university week that it was as much as he could do to drag himself home through traffic jams and road rage, bolt down the dinner his mum had prepared for him, thrust his clothes into the washing machine and flop onto the bed to read in his Y-front underwear. Anything served his purpose; he did not differentiate between Tom Clancy or Thomas Mann, Tom Jones or Thomas the Tank Engine.
Out the back of the flame-brick house, in the dun-grey fibro extension that now served as the TV room, he could hear his father exclaiming angrily at Friday night football on the television. If Gibbo had a Groundhog Day in his life, Friday night footy was it. Friday nights hummed with the muted buzz of barracking crowds, his
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