Bender

The sound of his Street-fighter themed ringtone took Craig away from the monotonous yet soothing world of spread sheets that he had inhabited for the last day. This was the job that he couldn’t wait to get out of uni for five years ago, yet after spending the critical mass of the time since in the same cubicle it was beginning to wear thin. He picked up his phone and recognised that it was his friend Martin calling which surprised him, it had been nearly three months since they had last spoken.

“What’s up, Martin?”

“Craigie, my main man!” Martin had that naturally charismatic manner about him, forever appearing familiar with those he knew despite drifting in and out of their lives at his pleasure. “You free tonight?”

“Sure man, how about we get a beer?”

“When can you get off work?”

“Forty minutes.”

“Sweet, that’ll give us enough time.”

“For what?”

“To get there.”

“Where are we going?”

“Jupiter’s.”

Craig wanted to protest that he wasn’t up for another one of their wild getaways, that he didn’t feel like the hour long drive to the Gold Coast and would be more content with a Grazier’s rump and schooner of Toohey’s Extra Dry at the Newmarket Hotel. He was tired. Since the Finance Department Manager had taken leave to go on Christmas vacation, his work had eclipsed his private life with the added responsibility. At night he would come home and crash in front of the TV with his fiancée Fiona who had only recently moved in, and they would watch trashy reality TV shows while exchanging light small talk. This was the life he had been told that he was gearing towards ever since he had graduated with his accounting degree, yet now that he had arrived here it felt so alien. As much as he would settle for a quiet night in with a take-away pizza and a Blockbuster rental, he knew that if he didn’t accept Martin’s offer he would go a whole month without ever stepping out of his apartment for anything besides work. He sighed. There was no point trying to suggest an alternate arrangement for the evening; Martin was a man who came to you with an agenda, and you were expected to be happy that you knew such a compelling individual at all.

Martin buzzed Craig to say that he was outside as he waited in his leather-seated, yellow Saab convertible which he was still in the process of paying off. His wife of two years, Katie, could never for the life of her understand why he, a middle-income, Human Resources Manager at a collection agency would go to such extravagant lengths to appear cool. She wanted to ease out of her real estate work and have kids, not spend the next six years in debt to pay off a car that only he could drive. After all, she had been awfully patient with him.

This was something he told her that she could never understand; to be successful, one had to project the image of success. They had to both keep earning money while they were young and able, then maybe they could think of settling back and having a family. He rationalised to her that he had, after all, done reasonably well at conforming to society’s expectations. He had settled down in his mid-twenties, tying the knot at 27 shortly after they had bought their first property together in Spring Hill and he was earning a successful income in a workplace he had been in for the better part of a decade. It was now time, he thought, to defy expectations and become rich.

He wound down the roof of his convertible and lit a cigarette. He was not a‘smoker’, he always reiterated, it was just an occasional habit as a means towards coping with stress. His young staff members were falling behind their collection goals this month; he had managed to fire two newbies on probationary contracts this week but they were still falling behind productivity goals. For the last fortnight he had attempted to threaten one young student with termination if he didn’t man up and start collecting, but the student had responded by calling in a union representative who had embarrassed Martin in front of his superiors by reminding him of the unfair dismissal laws. It pissed Martin off that someone was allowed to enter the workplace and start calling the shots like that. “This country is going to shit,” he lamented.

Craig came down from his office and nervously put away his glasses to avoid ridicule from Martin. “Sweet ride,” he said putting down his briefcase on the passenger seat and stepping in.

“You betcha,” said Martin as he exhaled from his cigarette and accelerated out onto the street, turning on the stereo with his latest hip-hop CD blaring. It had always seemed incongruous to Craig that Martin, a 29-year-old, career white-collar worker made such efforts to be hip. His clothes were always designer, his mobile phone never a month out of date, while his music choice belonged to someone at least ten years younger. For at least the eight years since they had met at Griffith University, Martin had been bleaching his hair. He was the living, breathing embodiment of the expression ‘fake it ‘til you make it’, even at 20 having a taste for the high life. Such was the fondness for it that it came before everything... except work. He dropped out of University after less than a year, the moment he was given a start in debt collection and steadily took to climbing the ladder since then, keeping the monotony of his job under check by indulging himself in the luxuries it could afford.

The wind blew in their faces as they drove onto the freeway, and Martin donned his sunglasses, the noise of the loud music and the incoming traffic preventing any dialogue between them.

At last they pulled into a back street and parked the car. Martin got out a bottle of Chivas Regal and took a long swig, biting his lip and feeling that familiar sharp sting as the dark liquor went down his throat. He passed the bottle to Craig who paused before taking an enormous gulp, wincing at the burn. He didn’t like the taste of scotch, or much alcohol for that matter. For him it was always just a means to an end. Martin had reached the point where he was indifferent to it, indulging in it recklessly on the weekend then straightening out through each week. The more he stayed away from it the better it felt, to a ritualistic point. Sometimes it would be so much he’d swear “never again”, but sure enough with each Friday he felt the need to break loose and self-destruct once again.

“Fuckin’ work,”Martin said, breaking the silence after another drawn out guzzle.

Craig took the bottle and made sure he held it for just as long, forcing his body not to comply, “Agreed.”

Martin lit a cigarette; it helped take his mind off the burning in his throat, sucking in the rich tobacco, feeling it relax his lungs as he held it in there momentarily before releasing it from his mouth. “So many fuckwits at work.”

“You can’t complain, didn’t you get a pay rise last year?”

“I should be on another one by now,” he said, chugging the scotch. “But instead I have useless pricks slowing down the line and stopping me getting a pay rise no matter how hard I work.”

Craig considered voicing some half-baked, happy-go-lucky rhetoric about life being a team sport, that businesses needed cooperation to function but knew it would sound inane. Instead he parroted off what Martin wanted to hear. “You would probably lose most of it to the taxman anyway.”

“Yeah, then they’d give it to some lazy cunt who’s never worked a day in their life, claiming disability pension,” Martin said, thinking of some clients he’d listened to on the phone. Even though the phone calls became less and less each time he moved up the ladder, Martin relished making a collection call, listening in on the troubled life of some lower class git and hearing their lies wither away as he successfully managed to outwit them. He loved that aspect of the job better than anything; it was extortion by legal means.

“Yeah, or some migrant,” said Craig, even though in his heart he didn’t know if he believed it.

Martin took another long chug, belched and then repeated what was fast becoming his catch phrase: “This country is turning to shit.”

“Let’s hope the government gets flogged next year.”

“Bunch of fuckin’ soft-cock pansies,” said Martin, sculling some scotch and lighting another cigarette. He turned to Craig and looked at him intently, beginning to appear disoriented and slurring his words. “They’re taking the country away from ordinary hard-working people like you and me and giving it to the unions while letting in boat loads of foreigners.”

Craig was going to add something to the conversation but knew that Martin was far more knowledgeable about it than he was.

“Then you got the fuckin’ public servants, thank God they got cut loose,” Martin went on. “Now they’re expectin’ some bloody compensation after getting sacked, I mean I’m sorry buddy but you don’t deserve my tax dollars just because you couldn’t get a proper fuckin’ job.”He got out a small zip-locked bag of cocaine and poured about a quarter of it onto the dash board. “Fuckin’ degenerates,” he said as he separated it with his MasterCard, taking out a hundred dollar note and rolling it up tightly. “Want a line?”

“Fiona probably wouldn’t like it if I did,” said Craig, putting up a weak defence.

“Fiona’s not here man,” said Martin, separating it into three big lines and then taking a long snort. He liked snorting with a hundred dollar note, it made him feel powerful. He gasped as he felt the potent chemical go straight to his brain and relaxed his muscles, letting the anesthetizing sensation flow through his body. The effects of the two-thirds of a bottle of whiskey seemed almost irrelevant as he began to look at the world with a new enthusiastic vigour.

Craig hesitated before doing a line then snorted the exotic powder. He held his hand over his forehead as the chemical shot straight into his brain then dangled it above his eyes as his vision changed. This was living. This was that blissful feeling, that stimulating feeling of excitement and intrigue, of hyper-alertness, self-confidence, euphoria and everything that was not mundane. He smiled and watched Martin do the remaining line, his feelings of contentment being superseded by a yearning for more.

They stepped out of the car and headed towards the casino and Craig, usually uncomfortable around such bright glossy environments suddenly saw an indescribable beauty in it. They downed drink after drink and must have lost a week’s savings each at the roulette table, then one part of it back at blackjack only to lose it again. Each time they felt bloated from the drinking they retreated into the men’s room and did a line each and suddenly they could drink some more and their appetite was quelled. Craig noted how each new line was never as good as the first as his tolerance grew, he realised that they could only delay the inevitable come down. Martin would complain about the drongos at work, the rising interest rates and how whatever Rugby League team it was he’d decided to support as of the start of the week kept losing. Every now and again Craig would try and get in a word about Fiona, how the two of them had lost some of the intimacy ever since she’d moved in but Martin would stop listening and drool over some show girl.

“I mean I want to provide for her,” he said. “Be the man that she expects, but we can’t even seem to buy a home. It’s a seller’s market and first-home buyers like me can’t seem to enter into it.”

Martin downed his martini and didn’t respond for a minute. “It was fine for me; I didn’t have to blow my money on a piece of paper like you.”

Craig hated the way Martin always wore the fact that he never graduated like it was a badge, as if the fact that the degree hadn’t catered to him made it a failure and that Craig was a lazy fool for being sucked in and not going straight into the corporate world like he did. He tried to ignore it.
“I mean, could you maybe talk to one of Katie’s colleagues, help me get set up with a home?”

“Fuckin’University administrators are the biggest con artists in the world,” said Martin. It was clear that he wasn’t listening. “If you teach business it’s clear that none of it is coming your way.”

 

It must have been 3am by the time they left, any longer and they probably would have been booted out, Martin had gotten unruly when the waitress had hesitated before pouring him another drink. While initially charming to other casino goers, with each drink he was growing irritating, getting cavalier and slowly turning aggressive, accusing someone of being fake. Craig suggested that they check into a motel but Martin wasn’t listening as opened the door to his car and stepped in. Feeling too apathetic from the come down of the cocaine, Craig followed him in.

They seemed to drive aimlessly around the Gold Coast from what Craig could tell, cruising down an abandoned path without street lamps. Not far off was a figure, which as they drove closer appeared to be a young girl in her late teens.

“Is that her?” asked Martin.

Craig struggled to separate what seemed like an infinite string of women to have rejected Martin that evening from each other.

Martin called out, “Oy!” Craig hadn’t expected her to hop in but he was reminded how alluring the prospect of riding in a $50 000 car would have seemed at 19.
“Cigarette?” Martin offered and she accepted it.

They rode along mostly in silence, and ‘Kirsty’, Craig thought he heard her say her name was, said that she was only two miles away, but it was unclear whether Martin was intending to take her to her house.

She wasn’t sure what to say around these two older men in their late twenties. She’d been serving them drinks for most of the night and they seemed friendly, if a little out of it. The older and more handsome one was starting to get a bit rowdy to her friend Georgia just as she was leaving and she wasn’t altogether comfortable with him behind the wheel now. She didn’t usually accept lifts from strangers but it beat walking two kilometres down a dark street in indecent footwear, she had caught her boyfriend cheating on her a day ago and was feeling very little regard for her own safety.

“Cigarette?”Martin asked and she said yes impulsively; she didn’t usually smoke either.

“You took the wrong turn,” she said but Martin wasn’t paying attention.

“Martin,”Craig said, rousing suddenly.

Martin accelerated rapidly and Craig could see where he was driving.

“Martin what are you doing!?”

“Just going for a swim,” he said as he turned towards the jetty and proceeded forward. “It’ll be epic, just like in the movies.”

Hastily, Craig grabbed the steering wheel and they crashed into a jetty post. Martin hit his nose against the steering wheel while Craig whacked his jaw on the car door drawing blood. The girl leapt forward and squeezed herself out of the exit on Craig’s side, tripping over and losing a shoe.

“Martin, fuck!” Craig cried out, getting out his mobile. “Let’s call an ambulance.”

Martin turned to him and glared, threateningly, blood trickling down his newly broken nose. “Where is she?”

“Forget about her, are you hurt?”

Without warning he stumbled out the door and dived onto the beach, chasing after her with what felt like superhuman speed. He grabbed her and tackled her against the sand, forcing her body down with all his weight. She cried out and desperately attempted to push him off, he hit her in the lip and felt it instantly swell up. He hadn’t intended to hurt her but driven by a state of panic he was desperate that she didn’t get away. She cried out and he hit her again, then again, feeling a sudden rush of power amidst all his frustrations. With each punch he threw away the dissatisfaction he had with his career, with his marriage, with the government and with his country, overrun by trade unionists, invaded by refugees who refused to assimilate and restrained from progressing by the dole bludgers who bankrupted the state. He felt dominant and successful in the sink or swim world that he envisaged, where the strong overcame the weak and were not subdued by the bleeding hearts.

He heard Craig’s distant voice, “Martin stop! You’re going to kill her!”

Still, he went on squeezing his body against hers until he felt the knee ram into his face. He fell to the ground and watched her take off with lightning speed. He tried to get off and chase her but Craig kicked him in the ribs. He grabbed Craig’s knee and tackled him, the two rolling on the ground together for a while until he realised that she was now long gone.

53 hours later, the two men were beginning yet another dull working week and both attempting to construe plausible excuses to their colleagues as to why they were covered in cuts and bruises. It had been a hell of a weekend, thought Craig, and it would certainly be a few weeks before he did that again.