Snake Bite Read online

  SNAKE

  BITE

  CHRISTIE THOMPSON

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Christie Thompson 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781743316863

  eISBN 9781743434079

  Internal design by Alissa Dinallo

  Set in 13.5/19 pt Granjon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTYEIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  Lukey and I were at Kimbo’s Body Piercing, in seriously sweet spirits. It was two days after we had finished Year 11, and we were only just coming to realise the possibilities of a whole summer of freedom. We were getting pierced to give a finger to another long year of boring-as-fuck school.

  I took a deep breath; the smell of antiseptics made my adrenaline kick in. I loved getting pierced. I had eleven piercings already, one in each nostril, six-mm stretched lobes, and three holes in the top cartilage of each ear, plus a belly ring and a bar through my tongue. Blood and metal. Yum. That day I was tossing up between a snake bite—two piercings on either side of my lower lip—and a septum ring, a piercing through the middle bridge of skin inside the nose.

  Lying back on the cushioned table, a big metal clamp pinching a fold of skin, the needle being pushed through my flesh—it was all very Frankenstein Gothic type shit but like now. I knew all about Frankenstein because I read it for English that year, when we were supposed to give a talk on a book of our choice. Actually I just downloaded the movie; it was so rad, I really got into it. I loved the bit where Dr Frankenstein goes on about how he’s like a scientist who’s creating art with flesh and bone. Body modification is like that.

  In the waiting lounge we slouched on the hardwood benches, flipping through plastic-sleeved binders that held pictures of different types of piercings. Lukey was stoned, as usual, his face slightly slack and his eyelids drooping at the corners. His face was long and thin, like the rest of his body, and he had dark stubble on his jaw that made him look older. I liked the big silver flesh tunnels he wore in his ears, and the rings through his lower lip. He looked totally scrams.

  On the wall above Lukey’s head was a poster of a peroxide blonde with massive tits in a fishnet body stocking and huge chunks of metal in her face. Below that was a sticker in the shape of the Australian continent that said, FUCK OFF WE’RE FULL.

  Lukey was telling me, in his thick-tongued stoned monotone, about this insane anaconda attack he’d seen on YouTube. A group of zookeepers somewhere in South America were trying to shift the snake into a wooden crate when the snake suddenly snapped around and sank its fangs into one of the men’s forearms. It took the strength of all the other men to pry the snake’s jaws apart. Awesome. I made a mental note to look it up when I got home.

  ‘I’m going vegan, hey.’ Lukey changed the subject.

  ‘For real?’

  We’d both been vegetarian since Year 7 after Lukey’s anarchist cousin from Melbourne sent him a DVD of footage from animal slaughterhouses.

  ‘Yeah.’ Lukey nodded. ‘You know how I always puke when I drink milk and shit? Gunna have one last guts on chocolate, though.’

  ‘You’ll miss ice-cream.’ I pulled my legs up to my chest and rested my chin on my knees.

  ‘Dairy-free gelato? Or soy ice-cream is alright.’

  ‘Doesn’t dairy-free gelato have eggs in it?’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe.’

  ‘You’re gunna be too fucking hip now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Vegan. It’s like a fashion statement, hey?’

  ‘Nah, it’s ’cos of my stomach and stuff. Plus the animals.’

  ‘I guess so . . .’

  ‘You wanna pig out on chocolate tonight and play Xbox?’

  ‘F’shiz.’ I grinned at my best friend.

  Lukey punched me lightly on the arm. ‘Nobody says that, Jez.’

  ‘We gotta get Rocky Road.’

  ‘Peppermint.’

  ‘You got some weed?’

  ‘Don’t I always?’

  The door shuddered open and a short, chubby girl with a black Bettie Page fringe and black-rimmed nerd-girl glasses bounced inside, paused briefly to give Lukey and me a once-over and plopped herself on the waiting-room bench next to Lukey. Well, I say next to, but she practically sat in his lap. She grinned widely, her dimpled cheeks sparkling with fake diamond studs. She was so cutesy I swear I could taste vom in the back of my mouth.

  ‘You want a chair there? Lap is good for you?’ I queried, ultra polite.

  ‘I’ve seen you guys before,’ she exclaimed, enthusiastic. ‘I live up the hill from you, on Sinclair Street. Me and my family just moved here from Melbourne. I’m Laura, by the way.’

  ‘I’m Jez, that’s Lukey,’ I said. ‘I think I saw you on the bus once.’

  ‘That’s gotta suck, moving from Melbourne to Canberra,’ Lukey observed. ‘Why would you move here?’

  ‘Joanie, that’s my mum, she works in the public service. I don’t mind it here, though.’

  ‘You call your mum “Joanie”?’ Lukey sounded impressed. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘Do you call your dad by his first name, too?’

  She laughed. ‘We call him Mr Sperm. I’ve got two mums. Joanie is the one who gave birth to me.’

  Lukey and I nodded. I was thinking, Wow . . . I’ve never met the kid of two lezzas before, but I didn’t want her to think I was impressed or anything.

  Laura pulled an iPhone out of her oversized handbag and stared at it for a few seconds, pressed the touchscreen a few times and then put it away again. Show-off, I thought.

  ‘It’s kind of ugly here,’ Laura continued. ‘It’s so dry. So, like, suburban.’ She paused and wrinkled her button nose thoughtfully. ‘But it’s a novelty for me because I grew up real close to the city.’

  ‘It’s boring as fuck here,’ I informed her. ‘Nothin’ to do.’

  �
�What do you guys do for fun?’

  ‘Dunno. Xbox. Swim in the river. Hang around.’

  ‘Back in Melbourne I was always going to all-ages shows.’

  ‘There’s shows every now and then,’ Lukey said. ‘Youth centre stuff.’

  ‘We’ve got a pool. You guys should come over for a swim.’ Laura giggled and then leaned in conspiratorially until her hot-pink-lipsticked lips were close to Lukey’s face. ‘Have you heard of a Christina?’ she whispered, her voice all breathy as though she was trying to be sexy.

  ‘Er, nah. I dunno.’ Lukey moved back, embarrassed, blushing. That annoyed me, I don’t know why.

  ‘Christina? Is that your other mum?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, my God! No, it’s a type of piercing.’ She laughed, leaning back. ‘I’m not getting a Christina anyway, I’m getting a Marilyn.’

  A ‘Marilyn’ is a top lip, ‘beauty spot’ piercing, pretty common.

  ‘So what is a “Christina”, then?’ I asked, almost immediately regretting my curiosity.

  ‘It’s a genital piercing, right at the top of your V, above the clit,’ she explained, parting her legs slightly and gesturing with her hands.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and I could feel my face getting hot. ‘Why would you get that?’

  ‘For pleasure! Well, pain first and then pleasure.’ Laura laughed. ‘I’ll get that one day. You’ve gotta work your way up to something like that.’

  Kimbo swaggered into the waiting room. Two teenage girls followed, looking a little pale yet triumphant. It’s weird how tattooists and piercers were always super arrogant. He explained the piercing aftercare to them, really patronisingly, and rang up the sale.

  ‘Who’s next?’ He sneered at the three of us.

  ‘You go. We’re still deciding.’ Lukey smiled at Laura. She beamed and hoisted herself from the couch, smoothing out her polka-dot baby-doll dress.

  ‘Piercers,’ I whispered to Lukey. ‘So up themselves.’ I wished I did something cool to be up myself about.

  ‘Fuck that.’ Lukey shrugged. ‘Doesn’t even take talent to be a piercer. You stick a needle through somebody’s skin. Big deal. Try computer programming.’

  ‘I don’t know shit about computers.’

  ‘Me neither. Old dudes like him know less,’ Lukey said. ‘Why do you think “nerd” is suddenly cool again? ’Cos everyone knows the cyber world is gunna be as important as the real world one day. The world needs nerds. The world does not need more piercers.’

  ‘Why are we even here?’

  ‘Bulk jewellery he buys is cheaper,’ Lukey pointed out. ‘And my ear got infected when I did it myself,’ he admitted, tugging on the cartilage just above his lobe.

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah, true.’

  ‘So . . . she seemed cool.’ Lukey looked at me hopefully, blinking his huge green eyes.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, playing dumb.

  ‘That chick who was just in here.’

  ‘Pfft.’ I made a noise through my teeth. ‘Some random flirts with you and you get all typical male on me.’

  ‘She was totally flirting with me, huh? Do you think she was? She kept kind of looking at me funny.’ He had this dumb tight smile on his face and he was fiddling with the plastic sleeve of the piercing album, not really looking at it anymore.

  ‘You’ve got a booger hanging out of your left nostril.’

  ‘You are such a bitch.’

  I pretended I hadn’t heard him and grabbed the album of piercing photos off his lap, flipping through the pages rapidly. ‘Snake bite. I’m definitely getting a snake bite.’

  Laura was waiting out the front of the piercing studio for us when we had finished, smoking a cigarette and examining her bright-purple acrylic nails.

  ‘Heeey!’ Laura exclaimed, stubbing out her smoke. ‘Snake bite looks awesome, honey.’

  I hated it when people I didn’t know called me ‘honey’, especially when they were my age. To me, it was so smug.

  ‘Do you like mine?’ Laura tilted her head to show off her ‘Marilyn’.

  ‘Looks great.’ Lukey leaned onto the wall next to her. ‘I love those on chicks.’

  ‘So you guys want to come for a swim tomorrow? My parents aren’t home so I’ve got the house to myself!’

  ‘Sounds sweet,’ Lukey said.

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. ‘Sweet as.’

  TWO

  The next day Lukey and I met on the street outside Laura’s house at the top of Sinclair Street. Lukey lived on the corner of Sinclair and Marconi Crescent and I lived in a little cul-de-sac off Harrington Circuit, which was off Marconi. We were basically neighbours, all in ‘da hood’, Lukey would say ironically, because it was a relatively safe little bit of Australian suburbia. Well, okay, there’d been a couple of murders, domestic incidents mostly, and a bikie shooting, but compared to the big cities it was the type of place where you could leave the door open on a hot summer night, and just have the flyscreen closed. Laura’s house was the same as all the others in the neighbourhood. Brick, one-storey, unremarkable. The native gums that lined the streets provided little shade; the scorching sun created a psychedelic hazy heatwave effect on the surface of the tarred road.

  Laura answered the door in a bright-pink zebra-striped one-piece swimsuit that showed expanses of fleshy dimpled skin. We followed her through the house, filled with packing boxes, to the back patio where Laura plopped herself down at the picnic table. She picked up a lit cigarette from the ashtray and scooped up a handful of potato chips, smoking in between shovelling chips into her gob, and occasionally stopping to fish stray crumbs out of her cavernous cleavage. I gagged involuntarily.

  ‘Got your swimmers on?’ Laura asked, her mouth full.

  Lukey and I nodded and obediently peeled off our uniform black jeans and whipped off our t-shirts. We exchanged looks and grinned at our skeletally thin bodies, white because we never tanned. Lukey had a dodgy home-job tattoo of a snake, old-school style, winding up his thigh. His anarchist cousin in Melbourne did it for him when he was about fifteen and everyone at school was super-impressed because he was the first person in our year to have stretched lobes and a tattoo. Lukey never thought he was cool or anything, though. He just did shit like that ’cos he liked it.

  Laura let out a low whistle and jumped up from her chair. She ran a hand down the snake on Lukey’s thigh.

  ‘That is so sexy,’ she asserted.

  Lukey smiled, chuffed. ‘Thanks. I’m gunna get heaps more when I can afford it. Proper ones, I mean.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m going to get my first one.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Laura studied me for a moment. ‘What’re you gunna get?’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe a swastika right here.’ I slapped my shoulder.

  Lukey snorted and Laura’s eyes widened, then she broke into a grin, realising I was joking.

  ‘Yeah, Nazis are rad!’ She giggled.

  ‘And don’t you just hate Jews?’ Lukey chimed in, deadpan.

  It was that kind of cheap South Park humour we’d all grown up with. Too easy, but it got the laugh I was looking for. At the same time I wanted to punch Laura in the face for being so pleased with herself for having ‘got it’ and plus I didn’t really think it was funny, laughing at Nazis killing Jews.

  ‘Hey, you guys wanna pinger?’ Lukey asked, rummaging in the pocket of his backpack and pulling out a baggie of E.

  ‘Oh, yesss!’ Laura squealed. She bounced inside and came back with a bottle of Sprite and three glasses.

  We dumped a pill each and washed it down. The lemonade sloshed over my chin. My bottom lip was still swollen from the snake-bite piercing. It hurt but felt great at the same time.

  The pool was nothing to write home about, one of those shitty above-grounds. But it was stinking hot and I couldn’t wait to get in the water. We bombed into the pool, splashing and doing all the predictable stuff, dunking each other under the water, playing a really short game of Marco Polo because it didn’t work
in a pool that small.

  Within half an hour I could feel the first waves of euphoria from the pill. At first it was a tingling that spread through my torso, then a feeling like I was going to empty my bowels right into the swimming pool, then a kind of numbness in my limbs. We got out of the pool and flopped onto towels spread out on the grass. I could see from the looks on Lukey and Laura’s faces—that faraway contented look and slackened faces—that they were feeling the same as I was. They were good pills, floaty and happy.

  ‘Whoooah,’ Lukey exhaled.

  Me and Laura nodded. He didn’t have to explain. It’s funny how connected you feel to people when you’re high. I never get that in real life. We each dumped another to make sure we had a really long pill and then Lukey rolled a joint and handed it to Laura to light. She took a few deep mouthfuls and let the smoke drift slowly from her lips.

  ‘Yum,’ she said and hopped up, passing the joint to me. ‘I’m gunna put on some tunes.’

  I could taste the faintest trace of Laura’s lipstick, fruity and greasy on the end of the joint. She is such a girl, I thought, watching her skip into the house, flapping her arms excitedly like a big fat butterfly. I drew sharply on the joint and sucked the smoke deep into my lungs, narrowing my eyes with concentration, letting it out slowly. It caught in my throat and I hacked up, coughing, my eyes spilling tears.

  ‘Slow down, greedy,’ Lukey drawled.

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  As the first electrifying notes of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Only Shallow’ floated across the lawn, Laura stepped outside. She started to dance in slow circles, glancing over at us to see if we were watching. I looked at Lukey, who had propped himself up on one elbow, trying to look casual, like he wasn’t really paying attention. I suddenly felt like all the blood had drained from my face. The dope. The dope had hit me hard.

  I got up and slipped inside and down the hallway until I found the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I absorbed my reflection in the mirror. Longish black hair, with a floppy fringe streaked with silver blonde and pale blue, kohl-black-rimmed eyes that had smudged in the pool giving the panda-eye effect. My dilated pupils seemed to glow under the muted bathroom light. I touched my face. It felt warm, smooth, alive. I narrowed my eyes a little and parted my lips slightly, like the models do on the covers of Cleo and Cosmo. I looked ridiculous. I mean, like, super-lame ridiculous. I started giggling hysterically until I could hardly breathe and I had to sit down on the edge of the bath with my head between my knees.