Chapter One

Gravity

Scot Gardner

Win, lose or draw, there’s always Saturday night.

It was a shit game. We won, thirty-two to eight, but I played like a dog. It would have been a different result if the boys from Eden Tigers had realised earlier in the game that I was a seriously weak link in the backline. Their two tries were give-aways that I gave away. Their lock mowed me down twice in the last ten minutes of the game. The line was broken and they scored but they couldn’t convert.

My heart wasn’t in it.

My heart was nowhere to be found.

The boys were suitably fired up in the change room. We showered and blasted into the front bar of the Catalpa Arms to wild cheering and whistling. I had a smile on my face but it didn’t go any deeper than my lips. I’d nailed my mid-year exams and it was the first day of the school holidays but that didn’t seem to count. The boys were in fine form but their pissed cheer felt like cold hard rain. I drank rum. I drank a lot of rum but it didn’t seem to warm my bones, so I drank more. Bullant was slumped in one of the couches with his arm over Sandy Willis’s shoulders. Sandy’s smiling cheeks were red and I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to see her small-town ugliness; her eyes cramped around her nose and her old-piano teeth. She was more like one of the blokes than one of the women. It was the lack of choices that allowed Bully to overlook her downy moustache and the aura of unwashed armpit that surrounded her. Bully had found the lack of shame that rides with six beers and if I pressed him, he’d give me his standard response: she was prettier than a sheep.

And she wasn’t related.

I didn’t want to be there. I thought about jumping in the ute and driving the two hours home to Splitters Creek, across the border into Victoria. I rested my elbows on the bar and stared at the dregs in my glass. I rubbed my temples and the noise around me got louder. I caught a whiff of the bar mat and I needed to spew. I needed to get all the rum and feelings of stuckness out of my guts. I was wedged in a family that was eating me alive. Stuck at a school I didn’t like, doing my last year of study so that I could fall into a job I loathed in a town I absolutely hated. I shoved my way towards the door.

I slapped my hand over my mouth and the crowd who could see me magically parted.

‘Adam?’ Bully shouted. I could see him untangling from Sandy and levering himself off the couch. ‘You right, mate?’

I nodded and my guts heaved. I made it to the footpath before the stuff erupted from between my fingers. Gripping a verandah post, I bent and emptied into the gutter. The pub door swung closed behind me, locking the racket in with it.

The main street of Catalpa was empty and I heard my retching bounce off the lonely buildings and rattle into the night.

Sound burst from the pub door as it opened. Bully was there with his hand on my back. ‘You spewing again, mate?

What a waste of good Bundy.’

I nodded and spat. I wiped my fingers on my jeans. ‘I’m going home.’

He slapped my shoulder. ‘You’ll be right, mate.’

‘Do you want your swag?’

‘Come on, mate, it’s still early. You’ll be fine in a minute.’

He stood there patting my back. I straightened and he stepped away.

‘See, you’re fine. Come in out of the cold, mate. I’ll get you something to wash your mouth out.’

I looked at his face. ‘Do you want your swag, or what?’

He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you have a bit of a kip? You know, rehab. Half an hour and you’ll get your second wind.’

I took the keys from my pocket.

‘How am I supposed to get home?’ Bully said.

‘You’ll work it out.’

‘What’s the matter, Adam? You’re going all freaky. What’s wrong?’

A peal of laughter crept through the walls of the pub and the hard ball of indifference in my chest started to soften.

‘I don’t know. I’m just sick of it. Sick of everything.’

Bully stood there in silence, nodding. In time, he rubbed the stubble on the side of his face. ‘Leave my swag, bro. Just chuck it in Thommo’s ute. I’ll find my own way home.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Nah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it,’ he said, and crossed his arms. ‘I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. Go.’

He slapped the cap off my head and it span into the gutter, narrowly missing the freckled puddle of spew. I dived on it and misjudged my step. I stumbled into the middle of the road and Bully chuckled.

‘You shouldn’t be fucking walking, let alone driving,’ he said.

I smiled then, carefully collected my hat and walked beside the pub to where my ute was parked. Thommo’s blue XR8 was parked three doors down and I offloaded Bully’s swag into the back. Well, it looked like Thommo’s ute. He’d work it out.

I felt a bit wide-eyed on the trip home. With the heater and the lights and the radio on high and the window down, I drove as fast as my rubbery rum-head would let me go.

I was about thirty k’s from Splitters Creek when I dozed off. The wheels hacked on the gravel at the edge of the road and it woke me. I corrected hard. Too hard. I took out a white post with the back wheel, slammed on the skids and came to a shuddering halt across the middle of the tar. My fingers tingled and I breathed in but I couldn’t breathe out. The air snagged in my throat and my fingers clenched and unclenched on the wheel. The car had stalled and the red lights stared at me from the dash.

I eventually had to exhale.

‘Fuuuuuck.’

Yeah, I’d survived. If I was asleep before, I was certainly awake after. More awake than I’d ever been. My skin twitched like a rabbit caught in a ferreting net. My heart drummed a pulse into my breath.

I turned the key and drove off, swearing at myself. Fucken idiot. How did I let myself get so tired and still be driving?

Never again. Next time I might not be so lucky. Next time my car could end up bloody and mangled like Simon’s Cortina. There was never going to be a next time.

But there was.

The adrenaline hit from my near miss had faded.

I was three k’s from home when the ute left the road.