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Lachy and Lara

Text: Lachy and Lara

from Gretchen Miller, 15.06.08

Write what you know, eh? I'm thinking of putting together a little set of stories that are set in and around the suburb in which I've lived for 17 years now... The longest I've lived anywhere.

This place has become 'home', which is kind of nice for a gal who never had any one childhood home, in any one city or even country.

Perhaps the stories will go well as a series for radio - I'll flesh them out with sound and music - with a light touch, I think.

Text

The Pool team advise there’s coarse language in this piece, so we've disemvoweled it.

His memory has never been good. Even as a kid his mother, always a charmer, called him ‘vague as f…k.’ And bender after bender has put paid to what there was.

But he does remember this: the first time he saw her she looked right at him. She was wearing an artfully battered cowboy hat, tilted back. Down at the Coopers. It was the days when pubs were full of smoke. Six months ago, maybe. Through the smoke her smile was wide and white and totally without guile. She was tall, a head above her girlfriends, and they were laughing with her, at the boys, at him. She was waving a roll-y as she spoke.

So often the vision comes back to him, how she marched over and asked him if he wanted to buy her a drink, and yes, thanks, bourbon and coke, if you don’t mind. All of 25 and he was 40, but what the hell.

Her blond hair, her hat, the chocked up cowboy boots made him think of a prairie, whatever that might be. Something with grass, long and yellow. The pub disappeared and in his head they were heading down dirty old King Street in the clapped out HQ, and straight down the highway, due west.

They’ve talked a lot about that trip ever since. He’s not been over the mountains, but she has, and she tells him all about the funny old fashioned towns, some with their heritage worn up front and proud, others with the Woolies square ugly as sin, taking center stage. The fighting Friday through Sunday, the boys doing donuts down the main street, the girls swearing at each other and at the boys, falling in and out of love in a lipstick smeared night. And beyond the towns, nothing. Roads straighter than tongs can make my hair, she says, always taking the piss.

Right now they’re going nowhere much at all, but hey, striding down Erskineville Road, heading for the Coopers Arms, where they first met, and it feels good.

He’s really very short, and wiry. His hair is dark and long and matted, his eyes; dead cheeky. He’s got a cocky walk. He plays the drums all over town, and all over town the girls want to bed him, though they can’t work out why. He’s so ..small! So freakin' wild! they say. God, he needs a bath. No-one can pin him down. But each one tries, just for the moment, just for the night. He’s Lachy, slugging whisky from a hip flask, better to get in a freebie before the pub gets hold of his wallet.

Next to him his girl is a good foot taller. She makes no concession to his height and wears those same, high-heeled worn-out boots, the real deal, second hand imported from the USA – the same hat, slung low to shut out the afternoon sun. She wears her gorgeous breasts up high and her tops cut low, and men and women alike, their eyes are drawn to that fantastic cleavage. She knows it, grins and tinkles her lucky charm bracelet at a mesmerised kid wandering by, reaches for the flask. They’re totally in love, right, and soon to be married, up the Central Coast in a bush camp, where the booze will surely flow and with every friend a muso the music will stagger loudly on to dawn and beyond – it’s going to be massive.

Since that first night they’ve yet to actually head out west - there’s always a reason - Lachy’s lost his licence, or he’s got it back and the HQ's in the shop; Lara’s elderly mother’s fallen ill, again, begging her with tired and lonely eyes, not to go, not just yet, knowing once her wayward daughter leaves she just might not be back, maybe not for years, maybe not til it’s too late. And anyway the rent’s gone up and someone pinched the savings from the jar and blew it all on a load of speed one night at a party… geez that was a good one, though, eh?

When they’ve been at the pub 5 hours and it’s nearly time to close, and they’ve drunk all the whisky in the flask and quite a lot of the cheapest house wine and she’s scored a few free drinks from fellas willing to take their chances despite the crazed drummer boy – a girl like that's gotta be worth a punt - they start talking about that boat they keep seeing when they’ve gone visiting in Balmain at the Commercial…
Tied up down by the water, it hasn’t moved for months. Each time they go to that old sandstone pub they take a bit of a detour, a wander down by the water’s edge. It’s just a tinnie, hey, but its got a bit of personality; the metal is dulled by salt and the little wooden seats are worn.

They start to pace through the back streets from Newtown, meandering to the west like they so often do, without planning it, feet just going there. They murmur about how wide and black the water is, with all those lights flicking like glow worms on the surface. How the boat just sits there and it’s gotta be a waste, leaving a boat just there, like that for months and months. Maybe the owners have forgotten it, or upscaled and left it there to rot. And anyway it’d be romantic out there, wouldn’t it, the roar of the city turned into something soothing as it mixes with the lap of little waves up against the bow.

Just an hour or so of strolling, tripping sometimes in the dark, heads spinning with the booze, but his arm always circling her waist, and they’re there. She fingers her lucky charm and whispers that making love out there could be something else, hey, the boat rocking and holding them, the dome of the night sky above, and if they looked only upwards and didn’t see the city skyline it could be like being out there, under a prairie night sky. He can hear the sweet smile in her voice.

Much more of it and he’s down there fingers unpicking the knots, the rope fraying to set the boat free, for sure it’s meant to be.

The oars, miraculously, are still lying in a bit of bilge in the bottom of the boat. They’re half-rotten, but they work. Lachy and Lara start to row. He reckons they can head around the point to Glebe and maybe make it up the canal and stash the boat a bit closer to home, hide it somewhere in the muddy reeds, where no-one’s going to wonder about it too much.

They get right out into the black velvet of the harbour. They can feel how cold the water is through the bottom of the boat, and they’d shiver but the rowing has made them warm, and the alcohol numb.
Most of the boats are moored now, in the predawn dark, and even the city hum has hushed. Lachy is starting sing softly to himself a little Steve Earle ditty that was on the PA at the pub that night. “My baby sparkles and shines, sparkles and shines, sparkles and shines, my baby sparkles and shines and everyone knows she’s mine’…

For several moments he doesn’t realize she’s gone, doesn’t hear her silent splash above the rhythm of his rowing, doesn’t hear her call out, swearing at him. The current slipping just below the surface has swung her away faster than either of them could have imagined.

But the boat feels lighter in the water, and he turns to her to smile and sing a little louder and she’s just not there.

Shit, fck, Lara! He stands up in the boat, which rocks, suddenly with his movement. He falls back to his seat, eyes straining in the dark. He can hear her calling distantly but the water is playing tricks with the sound and he can’t tell where her voice is coming from.

Then he spots her hat, sinking back behind him towards the Bridge and beyond the hat a disturbance in the water, her white blond hair, wet and gleaming, her sweet mouth not smiling but gasping in the cold. The effects of the alcohol vanish with a flood of adrenalin and he’s rowing fast. The hat bobs, forgotten, and he makes it to her just as she starts to sob. He wrenches her into the tinny and flicks off his coat, throws it round her shoulders.

After that, after they make it home with the last dollars in his account spent on a cab, and after the events become a story to be told down the pub with a lot of laughter and a whole lot more wine, he always holds her tight and close. They stop talking about the prairie and heading west. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter any more, and anyway, they like the feeling of the buildings around them, hey, the solid bricks within arms length, the tarmac covering the soil.

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