Son of No. One

Abstract

Thanks, thanks, the lady says. Yeah.A guy last week had sold her headache pills for $50 and she'd lost faith in the system, the midnight beat train and the stranger danger, a safety fire. I told her it was fine, I'd made it myself.Made it yourself?She didn't believe me. I said Sure, still in school and I can't get a job and this is all I could come up with.Funny boy, she said, and she'd taken my real stufffor real money. Funny boy. Like mama does say.I was far from land and I saw in the sky my dog's nose poking out of an old blanket that used to be mine. They'd started to put the signs up in the pharmacies around where I lived:No Pseudoephedrine Sold Here.Then there were the reasons why underneath in little letters, all the guys and some girls but mostly guys like me sick every day taking their tablets home to pestle and mortars and later bathtubs and Bunsen burners. I have to travel so I can stay in one place. Out here no one cares and I'm fifth in line when I'm used to being first, but I've never won anything. Rattails and yoga pants pushing little bags of garbage.Someone says, Hurry the fuck up. Someone else turns around and says, Shut the fuck up.I've never won anything but I just want to break even.Do you want this life?Do you want it?There's this girl, pre-drinking and doing her makeup on the train back from Pakenham. City bound and her legs shine in the carriage; she's got a handbag like a fancy cushion and a big heel and some toes kicking up and down. She doesn't want what I've got because it's not ready yet and, she told me, I aren't got a cold, and she laughed and rubbed her dry lips on top of each other and forgot I was sitting there watching those legs and moving around in my seat. Sugar waftlike babydoll pink in here, like a crying flower in here, just me and her.Her lips are wet now and so are her eyes. She looks in a small mirror too much at herself. The old teen weeps I-just-want-love all over the slashed leather seats and rude walls. I fucked ya mum to the leftand a good-time phone number on the right.I get offkays from my stop and following the tracks home gives me a new perspective.I put the good-time number I saw on the wall in the train in my other phone and wait on the dial tone.Hey, says a girl. This is Chelsea.Why they call her Chelsea when her name's Davina, I asked a guy who knew her one time.Got a smile like razors made it, he told me.She did. I liked Chelsea but I didn't want to fuck her.Don't know my dad, she says, our breath smelling like the same cigarette. Don't know.Me neither, I tell her. Some guy.Some guy, she breathes out, taking the cigarette. Hey you and me, we could have the same dad.Chelsea laughs and Chelsea is like that. Her tongue whistles over her teeth set like broken porcelain into her gums and over her barbed lips. She is pretty when she pretends she's not Chelsea, who is not Chelsea but a girl called Davina.I fucked up ma's life, she's saying. Ma was gonna go to school. Couldn't get rid of me but wanted to, she says. Tells me that some nights so I go someplace else. Monya's or Cassandra's. Sometimes Monya is at Cassandra's.Chelsea makes a tent over her nose and the back of my hand and smells those poison roses I grow.Thanks, she sniffs and the taste of those flowers is bad, Yeah thanks. Why are you here?Just am.Some guy. Chelsea nods and she knows that story, and there are pinpricks in her eyes and she shakes her head; it flops over the back offthe bench. Her hair trails in the autumn water. Thanks, she keeps saying. Comes back up and squints and complains, My tram is here.She gets on and swings from the third step, her fingers and their thin silver rings poking out of her sleeve. Looks back at me. She paints her nails with White-Out.Are you just some guy, she says, she doesn't ask. …