My apartment was just one in a block of over thirty. I’ve always thought that from the outside, the building bore a disturbing resemblance to a late 1950’s styled retirement community for the elderly, and belonged in Miami, Florida. And with its red neon sign above the entrance, carrying the name Fairy’s Palm Lodge complete with green, stylised palm trees flashing on either side, perhaps that was indeed it’s origin. May be the apartment block had been picked up by a passing tornado and carried ”somewhere over the rainbow” to one of the gayest suburbs in the merry old land of Oz?

I mean seriously - ‘Fairy’s Palm Lodge’…? What were they thinking?! I should add that rumor had the name being derived from the elderly Chinese woman who had funded construction of the block. She apparently named it after a plant from the Opuntias family (a type of cacti) which, in it’s Chinese name, is known as ‘Fairy’s Palm’.

Amongst certain of Fairy’s Palm Lodge’s tenants and neighbours - of the ‘flamboyant’ disposition - the building was affectionately known by a variety of pseudonyms, including my personal favourite: ‘Hairy Palms Lodge’ (employed to convey that we were going through a dry spell in the sex and/or love life department).

By the time the girls and I arrived at the flat, my housemate, Terry, had already left for work. He was employed as a waiter in a city restaurant, based at Federation Square, most days of the week. When he wasn’t working, Terry (formerly of New Zealand) was out on The Scene every night and seldom got home before dawn. I envied Terry his stamina, for no matter how hard and how late he partied, Terry was ever cheerful in nature and never missed a shift as a result of his excesses.

The three of us settled down in the living room. The girls took the sofa while I sat on the floor, by the coffee table, and we somewhat mechanically consumed our breakfast in front of the TV. We caught world news that was meaningless on Today on Channel Nine, interspersed with entrancing TV advertising for products a person could go their whole life without ever needing. I found myself feeling sickened and cynical by those things we/I deemed so terribly important in day-to-day life.

We ate with little conversation in between. Certainly, nothing was said about Michael or his suicide attempt, nor did we speculate about the apparent injury to his spine. This might sound peculiar, but in hindsight, I believe it was a combination of numbness and emotional and physical exhaustion in the immediate aftermath of events that led to our reticence to talk about anything other than the hideous tie one of the Today show’s hosts was wearing.

After we’d eaten and allowed the food to digest a little, I sent the girls up the hallway to my bedroom, ordering them to take the bed and get some rest. They protested at first, but eventually I won.

I made myself comfortable on the sofa, having ferreted out the spare doona from a cupboard in the hallway. I didn’t think for a moment that sleep would come, so it surprised me when four and a half hours later I woke up, startled, by the sound of my mobile phone ringing as it sat on the coffee table. It was Drew Ducharme.

The idea of letting the call go through to voicemail was entertained, but (lapsed) Catholic guilt tugged at my conscience. I answered the call, wiping sleep from my eyes. When I spoke, my voice crackled and broke – to my own ear, I sounded eerily like Marge Simpson, only less masculine: “Hello…? Drew? How are you?”

“Hi Puck.” I could hear Drew’s all too charming, all too wonderful smile dance across the airwaves and through my phone. “I’m great. How are you? Did I wake you?”

“Mmmuh-is-okay,” I mumbled lethargically, wondering what my hair was doing and very pleased that Drew couldn’t actually see me. I suspected my hair was doing an impersonation of the Sydney-Opera-House-meets-Tina-Turner.

He apologised and offered to hang up and call back in an hour or so, after I’d had some time to wake up and get my head together. I told him it was fine, as I needed to get up, having a number of things to do before returning to the hospital. Drew asked after Michael and so I gave him a general overview of the little we knew, but held back on the confounding discovery of the damage to Michael’s spine and the nerves surrounding it.

“Are you at work?” I asked him, and he replied that he was.

Drew owned and operated his own business - Ducharme’s Flower Galerie, a florist shop located in the exclusive suburb of Malvern, nestled amongst some of the finest boutiques and stores to be found on High Street. Amongst his regular clientele, Drew could boast of TV and movies celebrities, visiting international performers, politicians - well, their wives, Personal Assistants and/or minders, as well as the occasional mistress or ‘kept boy’ - and the leaders of Melbourne’s high society.

“Yeah... so I was wondering,” Drew went on. “Do you want to may be have a late lunch this afternoon? I could meet you at Bubble Butt, say about 2.30? Or later, if that’s going to be better for you…?”

Bubble Butt was a café on Commercial Road – or The Strip, as we usually called that stretch of gay Prahran. We’d been haunting it for years on a regular basis, and to our mind we ‘owned’ a large chunk of it, often looking on it as an extension of our own respective living rooms. Unfortunately, this delusion had on occasion extended to include ‘an extension of our toilets’, particularly on blisteringly hot summer afternoons when we’d drank too much champagne and ate too little food.

Luckily for us, the management and staff at Bubble Butt had taken us to their figurative bosoms and didn’t seem to mind our familiar attitude towards the café itself, and them as well.

“I can’t, Drew, sorry,” I said frankly. “There’s just too much going on… and too much I’ve got to do,” I told him.

“Sure, ok,” he replied. “I can understand that.” There was a strained silence coming from his end of the line. “Puck, look, I know that you’re going through Hell right now…. And I don’t want to add to your problems in any way, you got that?”

“Sure,“ I said softly, fearful of where this was leading.

“It’s just I’m starting to get this feeling that… that you’re pulling away from me,” Drew said, and he left the statement there, obviously waiting for me to respond in some fashion. But what could I say? What was there to say?

“Puck…?” he said after a moment or two of waiting.

“Yeah… I’m still here,” I said quietly.

He sighed softly. “Is it Caroline?” he asked me.

At the mention of her name, the sound of cannons, machine guns and an industrial sized meat grinder echoed in my skull. My jaw was so tightly clenched it throbbed.

I cleared my throat and tried to make my voice sound as casual as possible. “Have you spoken to her recently?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re going to catch up tomorrow night for a drink and a chat.”

“Give her my love, won’t you? Or, failing that, a machete to the head would do,” I quipped.

“Puck…” Drew said reproachfully.

“I can’t pretend to be anything else but what I am, Drew,” I snapped. “And right now, I fucking hate her guts! She is a despicable, low, manipulative, lying bitch.” I rattled off my list of adjectives for Caroline as though reciting a shopping list.

Caroline Cross, a.k.a. Judas Iscariot in drag, was beautiful, smart and utterly without conscience, or so it appeared to me. She was around the same age as Drew and they had grown up in the same wealthy suburb in Melbourne, developing the kind of friendship that Desi, Tish, Michael and I enjoyed.

When I first met Caroline, a few years back, I was stunned by her warmth and kindness, not to mention the attention she showered upon me. Caroline went out of her way to make me feel welcomed in Drew’s world. Never did I suspect for a moment that Caroline was attending to her own agenda the entire time.

It was the classic Faggy Fairy Tail; Boy (A) meets Boy (B), Boy (A) falls in love with Boy (B) at first sight, but being kind of shy, keeps it to himself. Enter the vivacious Female Friend of Boy (B) who forms her own relationship with Boy (A). And when the two have a mutually honest and trusting friendship, Female Friend of Boy (B) one day takes him aside and tells Boy (A): “You do realise, don’t you sweetie, that he cares a lot about you? As a friend, I mean? But he could never see you as anything more. He told me so himself.”

Once Boy (A) got over the humiliation of realising that his so-call ‘secret’ love for Boy (B) had been evidently noticed, as well as dissected, Boy (A) limped along, grateful for the knowledge Female Friend had provided. She had spared him any further heartache and allowed him the opportunity to release that dream from his mind. He would move on with his life, just happy to have Boy (B) as a close friend… and so Boy (A) lived unhappily ever after…

Until the day he discovered that lying fucking cow had played out the exact same spiel on Boy (B), and thus ensuring (or so she believed at the time) that no one would ever take her beloved Drew from her side… I guess every fairy tail has to have a wicked witch.

I’d made it clear to Drew when the truth came out that I wanted nothing to do with Caroline ever again. He respected my choice. But it was not in his make up to be so harsh himself. He’d let Caroline know what she’d done had hurt him – had hurt us both – terribly. But Drew was a forgiving soul and he was prepared to give her a second chance, hence they were taking tentative steps in re-establishing a relationship.

“She robbed us, Drew,” I reminded him. “She stole time from us… Caroline played us like idiots, but worst of all, she stole the most important thing we’re given in life,” I cried. “Time.”

He uttered a string of sympathetic words, claiming to understand my point of view, but then he tried to present his position. I couldn’t believe he was defending the bitch! That he was justifying her behaviour on the basis of her ‘troubled childhood’! So what happened to the poor little urchin – she didn’t get that round the world holiday she’d always wanted?

“Give me a fucking break,” I spat into the phone. “I don’t want to hear this, Drew! Not right now… In fact, it’s a real bad idea for us to be talking about her or any of this crap, ok?”

He agreed, taking his cue from my foul mouth and heated tone. “Alright, I’ll let you go,” Drew said. “But we’re going to have to talk about this at some stage… And I do want to see you,” he added.

“Ah-huh,” I replied coolly.

Sounding a little wounded and saddened, Drew completed the call, but before hanging up, he said: “Take care, Puck. I’m thinking of you – you know that? And hopefully I’ll see you tonight and we can talk then? Bye.” He rang off.

I put the phone down on the coffee table and sighed, rubbing my tired eyes. I then wondered what he’d meant by ”… I’ll see you tonight…”, which he’d uttered so naturally, as if it were a fait un complé.

I was now making my way to the kitchen, having collected the McDonald’s wrappers and packaging from the coffee table and deposited them in the pedal bin. I spied a yellow Post-It Note on the kitchen bench, upon which sat the so-called ‘secret keys’.

I first read the note, written in Terry’s typically rushed, barley legible scrawl:

Hi Puck!
Your Mum rang at about 8pm last night. Asked if you’d call her back or she will call you again tonight. Nothing important, just wants to see how you’re doing…

’Oh faaaaaaaabulous! What perfect timing that woman has!’ I thought to myself. There was no way I wanted to speak to her just at the moment; if she asked the wrong question, like “… And how is Michael?”, the woman – who had a nose for a lie like some pigs do for truffles – would soon get the story out of me. And then she would take it upon herself to tell Barbara and Bill McDermott, Michael’s otherwise estranged parents. That could only lead to additional disaster.

I made a mental note to avoid my Mother for a few more days and would speak to Terry to make certain that if he took any calls from her, he wouldn’t reveal anything about Michael being hospital.

I returned my attention to the note:

… Also, I locked myself out last night. Was running late - again! So used the secret keys. Meant to put them back this morning but guess what? Am running late for work, so can you do it? Thanks mate! Have a good one.

Cheers,
Terry

Again, in security conscious East St.Kilda, we had an arrangement much like existed at Michael and Alexander’s apartment, with buzzers and so forth. But somewhere over the course of time, a previous flatmate of Terry’s had come up with the whole ‘secret keys’ idea. It was for emergency situations ,when one has locked themselves out of the building and it’s 5:00am and you’re reluctant to wake your housemate for fear of reprisals.

The not-so ‘secret keys’ were usually housed in a rather unique location on the balcony of our ground floor flat. The building was constructed of orange brick, including the ‘decorative’ edging around the frames of the bedroom windows. One such brick on my bedroom window could be pulled out, exposing a small niche. To the casual eye, the brick (third from the left) would not have caught your attention. But those in the know (a select group of friends) could find the keys there and use them to get in, in the case of a crisis.

We’d spent a number of drunken and/or stoned hours pondering precisely how and why the brick had come to be loosened, speculating that a drug dealer had perhaps once rented the property and that was where he’d kept his stash.

Regardless, I resolved to return the keys to their rightful place. But now, it was time to wake the girls and for us to get organised. I turned round and it was then I noticed the white and gold card, a little smaller than envelope, adhered to the front of the fridge.

It stood out amongst it’s neighbours, which comprised a colourful display of bills, photos, postcards and assorted novelty fridge magnets, as a beacon of decorum and class: elegant gold lettering printed on an embossed piece of card.

I read over the words and my eyes shot open wide in alarm I grabbed the invitation off the fridge (hitherto held in place by a rather fetching fridge magnet, fashioned in the shape of a hunky guy clad only in a thong), and proceeded to curse with remarkable enthusiasm, particularly given my lack of sleep.

“Aw fuck me with a chainsaw!” I implored to no one imparticular, and looked over the invitation once more, annoyed to find that the details hadn’t altered one iota since the last viewing.

Brian (a.k.a. Nicky’s flesh and blood Platinum MasterCard) Henstridge’s birthday party was being held that evening at their apartment in South Yarra - that had been what Drew alluded to one the phone when he said ”… I’ll see you tonight…” for naturally he’d been invited, too.

Nicky loved to entertain. It gave him a chance to show off their stunning home as well as permitted him to spend an obscene amount of money on food, wine and gift bags for the guests to take home with them once the evening was done. There had been one particularly memorable night when everyone who’d been to the party left with gift bags that included a vial of amyl, an ecstasy pill and a line of speed, along with gift vouchers for Versace underwear. People still talk about it to this day.

But as to the coming festivities, well Nicky had vowed to out do himself. He’d been preparing for almost two months, ordering in supplies from across the globe. Plus he had a stylist in to assist with decorating the apartment ,and had employed the services of a well-known Melbourne DJ from The Scene, who would be providing the beats for the night. Naturally, Ducharme’s Flower Galerie was supplying the floral component of the evening.

But truthfully, I could not think of anything worse than attending a function heavily populated by pretentious queens and sundry sycophants – the type who only ever emerged whenever something is offered for free. Like cockroaches they descend, devour and fuck whatever they can before scuttling off to their dark, rank hidey-holes until the next invitation with freebies did the rounds… Although I noticed that Nicky had emphasized Invitation Only on this particular occasion. ’Good for him’, I thought.

For a moment I wondered what possible excuse I could come up with to get out of attending; not even gangrene or amputation of a limb was likely to appeal to Nicky’s notoriously fickle sense of compassion. In the end, I realised that trying to get out of the party would require more energy and produce more anxiety than actually going to it. This also meant I had to think about a gift for Brain.

“Crap,” I mumbled. “What the Hell do you get a man who has everything, including the most expensive boyfriend in the Southern Hemisphere…?” I asked out loud, as I am often in the habit of talking to myself.

I had an unexpected and inspired vision of the perfect gift! A pair of bright, shiny new scissors with a lovely golden bow attached, along with a diagram depicting a credit card with Nicky’s name on it, and instructions on how to use the scissors … But no, that would be tantamount to signing my own death warrant…

Tossing the invitation onto the kitchen bench with a grunt, I dismissed it as something to worry about later, and so made my way down to the bedroom to rouse the girls from their sleep.

The animals hadn’t been fed or had their kitty litter changed in over 17 hours, and poor Tish pulled a face as she fretted over what state she would find her small, one bedroom apartment in when she finally got home to her furry brood.

Desi, too, would shower and freshen up at home. And then the three of us would meet later at the Alfred. With that sorted out, my only other concern was the party at Brian and Nicky’s penthouse. I knew the girls had been invited, too, so asked what they were planning to do.

“Can’t go,” Tish responded abruptly, as the three of us hovered by the door to my flat, just prior to the girls departing. “I’ve got no choice – I have to go into work tomorrow, and my shift starts at 5:00am,” Tish said. “So tonight I’m going to crash early… But I’ll be in to see Michael at some point tomorrow afternoon. And you know you can always get me on the phone, right…?”

Desi and I nodded. So now I turned to my petite friend. Desi pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I really don’t feel up to it, Puck,” she confessed.

“I know, neither do I,” I agreed. “But if I try to bail on Nicky, he’ll have my sack on a pike,” I told her.

“Hmm, now there’s an image,” Tish pondered thoughtfully.

“Hmm, gee, well that would sure upset Drew, I s’ppose…” Desi remarked, a twinkle in her eye. “Can’t have you going all ‘sackless’ on him now, can we?”

“Excellent!” I shouted happily, and bowed gracefully before her. “My sack and I both thank you, milady.”

“Yeah, well how about you and your sack go jump in the shower, huh?” Tish suggested. “And we’ll see you – though hopefully not your sack – a little later …”

There followed a quick round of hug and kisses, and then the girls were out the door, while I dashed towards the bathroom, wondering what I would say to Leo Clarke when I saw him later that afternoon?

<< - >>

Enjoying the Story? Then Pimp Me!




Super Sleuths since
September 24, 2005:-

Click to join The Robin Goodfellow Adventures!
Copyright Jay Kerin
All Rights Reserved.
All original images & written content
remain the property of the author.
The use and/or copying, in full or in part,
of images and/or written content,
without the author's expressed permission, is strictly prohibited.
Any infringement of the author's copyright
will result in litigation.