By Charlie Gill
In Darwin, when it was too hot outside, we’d lie on our beds and watch reruns of A Current Affair. Smug journalists in shirtsleeves would loiter outside brick-walled homes to confront “the country’s most contemptible characters”: conmen, hoarders, addicts, bludgers and battlers and thugs. When the door swung open, they’d spit out gems of wild junkie abuse at the suited pests, and we’d burst out laughing uncontrollably. An endless production line of carnival freaks: toothless men tattooed with video game characters, dead-eyed women breastfeeding with blunts between their teeth. In some way we identified with them, which was ridiculous, of course. We were two unburdened, unblemished young men who’d go home that summer to decadent Christmas lunches. Still, there was something about that period—jobless, reckless, open to everything and answerable to no-one—that made me and Archie feel like honorary members of the nation’s despicable underclass: drifters, hooligans, artful dodgers.
It was the city too, with its glow and spread, its waystation ambience: weary travelers gathered at the gateway to the Pacific, deep blue and stretching towards somewhere real. A constant hum of heat rang out across the flat expanse and lay a wet gauze over everything: What’s that shimmering up there? Jets groaned through the sky, daily. An air force base stood not far from where we played cricket. After all, in the event of invasion, Darwin goes first. That’s been established. Better to leave the expendables up there: let them do what they want.
Not that we could count ourselves part of them. I knew I was a tourist, and far from the only east coast university student who’d come “up north” in search of adventure. But by tagging along with Archie—grasping at his coattails as he flung himself from one exploit to the next—I was able to wash off the sticky, residual middle-class self awareness I’d arrived with. He was tuned to life’s most thrilling frequency, and I forgave him for being the most arrogant person I’ve ever known. I couldn’t help it: his heart was thrown open to the joy of possibility, which came through in gusts and slammed his eyes wide-open. And then mine.
We lived in a barren one-bedroom apartment. Two lilos, a shower, a sink and a terrace. I loved it: windows open to yellow-green late afternoon light, cool air trickling with vestiges of midday swelter. Me in bed with a novel, Archie having a post-siesta shower. He’d waltz out completely naked, pour cheap beer into a martini glass he’d pocketed from a city restaurant, stand on the balcony arse-to-the-world and raise his glass at me like a scruffy blonde Jay Gatsby. Then, as was our evening ritual, he’d induct us into the night with whatever strange toast he’d thought up in the shower. Usually they were bizarre bastardisations of historical quotations and gangster rap lyrics—Churchill with Tupac, Confucius with 50 Cent.
We’d drink, then go out and rip through whatever Darwin could do for us. At the lawn bowls club we’d cheer on the old blokes while flirting with their wives and at the nightclubs we’d try it on with girls our age. Sometimes we’d head to the markets, swarming with Archie’s “contacts”: Asian matriarchs running smoothie stands, flamboyant old white men selling kangaroo hide whips, young African preachers presiding over platforms connected to scales with Good-or-Evil-Meter written above them. These were friends he’d collected in the months he’d been up there before me, and I was jealous, like I used to be of his action figures when we were little. But there were others, too, who Archie mentioned in passing—shadowy blurs on the periphery, a different set of toys. We didn’t speak about them and I didn’t care to ask. Whatever sort of life he was leading, I wanted it.
Really, I wanted to shed my old skin. Every time I encountered any of the other young tourists taking a hiatus from bachelor’s degrees, in line for drinks or next to me on the beach, I bristled with contempt. All too familiar: same tattoos, clothes and practiced intonations, gentle little ghouls from haunted Melbourne floating up to remind me who I truly was: “Come home, Noah. ”
But why would I? And why would they want me? I felt severed entirely from my tired old city: stranded at the ends of the earth like an overdeveloped Antarctic station, polar winds rushing up to slap me as I walked off the tram. And during that last catastrophic winter, after me and Hazel ended, it just seemed so thoroughly sapped. No life, no dare. Brilliance fizzing out and neutralised by the grid, all locked-up and straightened-out. A safe little home for gold panners’ descendants—the gold panners who couldn’t find enough to get out with.
This is how I thought as I trudged home half-drunk from unfulfilling house parties. And while I lay half-sleeping, the same realisation crystallised like it always did, gleaming with truth like rain on steel: Melbourne was boring me, but most of my problems lay elsewhere. More specifically, they lay down the hall and to the right.
Not that I disliked my parents. It was just that they’d come to represent everything wrong with life. Comfort, lethargy and a sense of happy demise: sunsets, sangria and superannuation. Mum was the illegitimate daughter of a dead financial big-wig, and most of my parents’ time was devoted to wheedling out more of the inheritance from her evil half-sisters. She sometimes taught German at the local high-school while Dad pretended he was a working session musician. Occasionally when me and Archie dazed off watching A Current Affair I fantasised about waiting outside our house with a film crew: “Pair of bludgers, aren’t you?”
I’d saved money working at a supermarket and doing some very small-time drug dealing. Then Hazel and I broke up, and I realised I didn’t like any of my friends. My older sister Sadie, the only person I ever felt like talking to, mentioned in passing that our only cousin on Dad’s side, who we hadn’t seen in years, had gone up to the Northern Territory. Archie, from Sydney. Floating in like a lost balloon, a long forgotten scene: firetruck piñata, motorbike-shaped cake and a crowded room staring with delight at a little blonde nuisance blowing out the candles. A year or two older than me. Of course, Archie. Maybe I should get in touch?
******
Early on, he took me on the customary day-trips to waterfalls two hours or so from the city, driving in the battered electric blue Nissan Pulsar he’d procured from someone “in return for a favour”. He was always trying to ornament his sense of mystery with muttered asides, and later I found out he’d just bought it from Facebook marketplace. Anyway, I was his cousin, I knew some details about his life. His mum, my mother’s sister, was long dead; he’d dropped out of university; his Dad had lost their family home gambling and he’d moved to Darwin for a girl and it didn’t work out. But he made things up. He liked fucking with me.
I swum through lagoons. I reached the craggy rock face, peered out through the thick curtain of water, pictured crocodiles lunging at me from the bleary depths. I climbed up cliff faces and sunk into big clusters of green bush springing from the red wall. Archie, meanwhile, practiced a kind of seen-it-all-before mode of detachment, but I didn’t mind, because but I knew he liked showing it to me: this great new world, harshly-lit and brightly-coloured; spirits lurking in the long-grass and dancing in the distant wobble of hot air. Then we drove home.
We lived in a seaside apartment block. A small road separated us from a wide strip of grass and footpath that curved around the entire foreshore. The grass gradually turned to sand and lead down to a beach where Archie swam most mornings, and a few hundred metres to the west lay a massive expanse of flat rock I walked across at dusk—it was one of the most beautiful parts of Darwin. By evening, it overflowed with people on walks or eating at one of the myriad food trucks, like the Vietnamese one run by an old couple, or the Thai one run by two Philippino sisters and the little boy who play-fought us while we waited to eat.
I learnt that Archie, like his father, was addicted to gambling—but unlike his father, he was lucky. He mostly bet from his phone but we weren’t far from Fannie Bay, the city’s racecourse, sometimes made a day of it. He’d animatedly speak to bookies and trainers while I took in the dream I’d drifted into: the handsome horses, fine black sand of the tracks and wasted bodies lying on the grass. It was there that Darwin felt off to me, the way I knew it did for some: a sweltering bush purgatory crammed with lost souls, the grand capital for an empire of dusty misfits. I dozed off on a lawn chair thinking of the endless land stretching south from the city—once pure and loved, now used by governments for war games. I heard planes in the sky and felt the murmurs of a military junta rumbling underground. I watched the termite mounds on the side of the highway fly past like shrines to ancient soldiers. I thought of the Aboriginal rock destroyed by European wasps who’d snuck in at port, and the asylum seekers sitting imprisoned in islands a couple stone’s throws away, wishing they were me.
But I shook it off. I looked for beauty and glamour, always. I stared intently at the the vacant, wind-whipped faces of the old jockeys and told Archie to paint one. He’d studied art in Sydney but got disillusioned and told me that art school “took good painters and had them sticky-taping cracked iPod Touches playing porn to a wall for their grad show”. All he ever made were small oil paintings inspired by geology: infrared cyclone forecasts with shapes of things burning up through the red-black swirl, so it looked like you were reading tea leaves. Isobars, contours, meridians and dotted lines. But we never spoke about his art because he didn’t want to. He’d paint in the afternoons then rip it all up when we got home pissed that night.
We drunk at the races and the markets, by the beach, in the apartment, and on Mitchell Street—Darwin’s sunset strip—jostling for drinks amongst the other sweat-stained rascals. Like strange antiques on the shelf in an op-shop, we slid in seamlessly amongst the glittering, tarnished jumble: racist, barrel-chested jackaroos between jobs, jovial Indian security guards, elderly Aboriginal tour guides, sex-obsessed American teenagers stationed at the army base and babyfaced Thai masseurs. In almost all cases, we met them while they were bored and drinking: easy crowds. Archie would ask them if they’d like to hear about our antics the night before. They’d say they had a minute or two spare and in twenty minutes they were buying us drinks. It felt embarrassing to say I liked the city for its “diversity”—especially since its exactly what I’d mock other young deserters from Melbourne for saying—but I told myself I appreciated it on a purer, more visceral level; no pretence to speak of. This was, of course, a pretence in itself.
It was something I was bad at and Archie was best at: dissipation. Wherever he was or whoever he was with, he became a vessel for experience. He didn’t put himself in context. It isn’t the best example, but I would always note the difference in the bumper stickers I saw: Fuck Murdoch in Melbourne, If You Don’t Love It, Leave It up north. Archie didn’t care. He didn’t have time to check himself, or where he was, as he blazed from one person, place or thing to the next; time and space left burning behind him. And while some of his friendships scared me, I could simultaneously admire them: everyone appealed to him. He had a a trigger-happy approach to people, a relentless adaptability. Falling to sleep at night, I cast him in a thousand roles: cheeky Irish stowaway on cargo ship, scheming Roman senator, underage Vietnam war soldier with one of his ridiculous mottos emblazoned on his helmet. I was obsessed with him, I guess.
And I was cowardly, too, because I felt like I could go home any minute and he couldn’t, and that at some point I’d abandon ship. I could romanticise almost any outrageous thing we did together as the hair-raising antics of a mischief-making duo: two millennium babies on a mission to live like outlaw kings, silhouettes against the sunset. Stealing drinks. Breaking into backyard pools. But as Archie started losing his bets, our adventures began to take on a more nauseous edge. People he knew began asking him to do strange favours. It wasn’t our fault, but we became involved—in a small way—on an arson attack against an old cinema lying dormant above one of the clubs. One of Archie’s jobs involved something to do with a state politician beholden to local brothel owner, but I can’t really remember.
No one remembers anything in Darwin. It’s redundant: absolution comes at sunrise. I wondered, whenever we went out, about all the things the local, older crowd had seen. I wondered about them: sun-kissed hair, snakeskin faces, white-hot smiles. Big-hearted and small-minded. Veteran drinkers and odd job men. Enthusiastic backslappers with a thousand fucked-up stories; the lemon zest grime beneath the country’s fingernails. What had they done?
What would we do? I didn’t want to find out. I saw the flags on the beach and swum back towards them, pushing against the current. After ten months living with Archie I went home at Christmas, like I knew I would. He was invited but didn’t come, like I knew he wouldn’t. He registered my departure the way an old dog does: grumble briefly, acknowledge me quietly and pretend not to care. I wasn’t offended; I could never guess if he cared about me or not. Eventually he called and said he was leaving Darwin for “various reasons”. A final blue with a bookie, maybe, or an ex-girlfriend, or a night-out gone wrong—though for him that would just be a night-in. Whatever it was, his luck ran out. Maybe that was me?