Roadman Read online

  The kid squealed, as much as in pain as in shock. “What the…”

  “Seen my cat, kid?” Max said. He had to growl extra loud over the idling lawnmower, just to make sure he was heard.

  Kenny looked up, trying to keep calm despite Max pressing his work boot in even harder. “Don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Don’t tempt me kid.”

  Kenny shrugged his right shoulder, not daring to move his left arm for fear of inciting more pain in his hand. “More of a dog man, myself,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Max smiled, impressed by the kid’s pluck. He released his boot off the kid’s hand just as the screen door banged shut on the porch next door. The fat prick was holding a six pack of West End Draught and a cigarette was hanging out of the corner of his mouth. He was wearing a blue singlet and shorts, nothing else, not even in temperatures that had Max rugged up in his army seconds. The flea-bitten mutt at The Blob’s bare heels was baring its teeth and growling at Max.

  “Get the fuck back over ‘ere,” Warren yelled at his son. His mutt added an extra growl to go.

  Kenny snatched up the football and darted around the fence back to his house, keeping his distance from his old man. The Blob sneered at his son scuttling down the path at the side of the house to the backyard, then turned his sneer on Max.

  “What you starin’ at?” he said.

  Max was about to say he was staring at the fattest prick in the whole fuck’n neighbourhood, but held his tongue. Which was probably the most neighbourly thing to fuck’n do.

  All part of keep’n a low profile, Maxy boy.

  At that moment, the woman from number thirty-seven across the road burst through her front door and onto the street, holding a wrench above her head and screaming blue murder.

  Max was stung into action by a sudden injection of two conflicting, but by no means exclusive, hormones: adrenaline and testosterone. Both, he knew from experience, were as uncontrollable as each other. But it was adrenaline that always kicked in first, followed by testosterone. That said, adrenaline was a fly-by-nighter. It was the hormone of survival, the fighter pilot’s hormone. It supercharged your senses and sparked immediate action, usually to get the fuck away as quick as fuck’n possible, but its affect was always limited. It didn’t last long. If it had a physical persona it’d be fireworks: nice big bang that made you go ooh and aah but faded pretty fuck’n quick after that.

  Testosterone, though, that was someth’n else altogether. Might be a bit slow out of the blocks (no kick arse bang like adrenaline), but what it lacked in speed it sure made up for it in longevity. If adrenaline was the fear hormone, then testosterone was the fuck it or fight it hormone, and once it was in your system it pretty much hung around until it got what it wanted. It was the hormone of power, the gangster’s hormone.

  The fear hormone fizzed through Max’s veins within a microsecond after seeing the woman burst onto the street, heightening his senses—the smell of cut grass and petrol fumes; the ruckus of barking, whirring lawnmowers and high-pitched feminine squealing; the image of his neighbour brandishing her wrench like a blonde Amazon woman wielding her sword; the metallic taste of danger in his mouth. Yet despite his senses being yanked into overdrive, Max at first couldn’t make out a word she was saying over the noise of the lawnmower and the yapping of the flea-bitten mongrel next door.

  She screamed again, moving toward him, still with her wrench held above her head as though she wanted to strike somebody (him) down with it.

  A second later, reason started to win the tug o’ war with fear and began to assert its calming influence over Max’s state of mind. (Or was it testosterone filtering through the system already? If it was, boy, that was fuck’n quick.) The woman couldn’t be more than five foot six or seven, just his perfect height, just the way he liked them, and slim. Even with the wrench, she was no match for him. Instead of running or ducking for cover, like his initial instincts had told him to, Max stood his ground, but kept his muscles tense and ready to spring out of the way should she suddenly surprise him with a black belt Karate kick to his baby-makers.

  “Help! Please!” the woman shouted. She had crossed the street and was now standing at the end of his driveway. “My house is flooding!”

  Which would explain why you’re look’n like a drowned rat, Max thought.

  Her shoulder-length hair clung to her scalp in wet locks, dripping from the frayed tips to her saturated grey trackies and Nike sneakers. She had two big black eyes, much like pizza face next door who had only moments before raced around the side of his house to his backyard. But unlike Kenny, the cause of her racoon eyes wasn’t the result of a knuckle kiss to the face but smudged mascara. His stupid bitch of an ex looked like that every time she got caught in a downpour.

  Despite the black eyes, she was kinda pretty, in a Sandy from Grease kind of way: innocent, shy, reserved, despite her antics. She wore a pink T-shirt with fancy pink REEBOK written across her chest (wasn’t anyone else freezing in this weather, or was it just him?), under which he could make out the cotton-embossed shape of a crucifix. The T-shirt was as saturated as her hair and track pants, which was just the fuck’n best thing he’d seen all week because it clung to her fantastic C-cup breasts as though she’d just walked off stage from a wet T-shirt competition. His gaze remained fixated on them, mesmerised, like he was staring at the most fabulous set of breasts he’d ever laid eyes on. Surprising, too, that he didn’t want to rip her T-shirt off to get a better look at them, but just keep admiring them as they were, much as he could see himself admiring a priceless work of art, like the Mona fuck’n Lisa. Only this was better. Much fuck’n better. This was real.

  Sandy from Grease followed his line of sight to her breasts, looked back up, and said, “Please, Ma… Mister, my house is flooding.”

  If she meant to cause him shame at staring at her breasts, he wasn’t. He met her pale blues, liking the desperation in them, the innocent need for him to help, and glanced up at the wrench she was still brandishing above her soaked scalp.

  She too glanced up at the wrench, dropping her arm to her side when she realised how threatening the gesture actually was. “Oh… sorry, I didn’t mean to be… I must look frightening,” she said.

  Now that she wasn’t screaming or pleading for his help, her voice lost its desperate squeal and quietened into a more sedate tone, something sweet almost, kind of cream-on-cupcake sweet that he associated with high-society ladies that had married a rich fuck’n doctor or lawyer and promptly retired from her chosen career, who now only took the kids to and from school and played golf on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. Only he didn’t get the impression this lady had kids nor knew what to do with a 1-wood in her hands. She had a lovely creamy voice though.

  “Fuck’n hurry up and help the stupid bitch before I kick your stupid arse over there,” Warren shouted from the porch, and belched. He was now sitting in his tatty couch, can of West End perched on his beer gut like a huge erect nipple on a grotesque abdominal breast.

  Sandy from Grease glanced over at Max’s obese neighbour (her neighbour too, actually) and his growling mutt. Max ignored the outburst. The fear hormone had already worn off, but now he could feel the fuck it or fight it hormone settling in and making itself right at home. He knew damn well it was here for the long haul, which he didn’t have a fuck’n problem with at all.

  The sudden image of water flooding into her house got Max moving. He marched over to the lawnmower to switch it off, then said, “Whereabouts?”

  The lawnmower spluttered into gasping silence. Sandy from Grease didn’t respond immediately, a dreamy, vacant look in her eyes, as if she’d been tracking his butt while he walked over to shut off the lawnmower. He kinda liked it. She glanced back up to his face.

  “Oh… sorry… what?”

  “Where’s the leak?” Max said, still amused that he’d been blatantly checked out by his neighbour, of all people. The cheeky bitch. Not even his wife had ever glanced him
over like that before, although she did once say very early on in their courting that he had a nice butt in a pair of Levis.

  ‘Bout the last and only compliment the cow ever paid me, he thought.

  “The leak?” She was now absently twirling the end of one saturated lock of hair. Then she suddenly sprang into action. “Oh, the leak! It’s not a leak, it’s a torrent. Come, quick, I’ll show you. It’s in the laundry.”

  They hurried across the road with Warren yelling after them that it was about fuck’n time. Max saw no car in the driveway (come to think of it, had he ever seen a car pull into her driveway?) as he stepped onto the scruffy patch of lawn that fronted her house. He figured the same architects or builders had been involved in the construction of most of the houses along Amesbury Road, seeing that they all looked the fuck’n same from the outside—same yellow-brick façade plonked in the middle of a quarter acre block of land, same charcoal roof tiles, same central front entrance, same lounge room and bedroom windows fronting the street—all about the same period too, late sixties, early seventies.

  He reckoned he didn’t even have to enter the house to know its layout either: three bedrooms; well, two bedrooms and a tiny third bedroom that would barely have enough space for a cot and a wardrobe, which she most likely used as a home study or single-bed guest room for visitors that had too many glasses of chardonnay or vodka tonics to drive home until they sobered up; single toilet and bathroom; an outdated, laminated kitchen leading onto an equally outdated, plush-carpeted lounge room; and a laundry inconveniently tucked away somewhere near the bathroom. That’d be pretty much fuck’n it, apart from the huge backyard that’d be big enough for a swimming pool or tennis court but which she most likely only ever used on the weekend to hang out her wet laundry on the Hills hoist.

  Sandy from Grease trotted up to the front door that she had only a minute or so burst through screaming and brandishing a wrench, surprised when Max didn’t follow.

  “Give me a sec,” he said, heading across the lawn to the far corner adjacent to the sidewalk. Although hidden amongst high tufts of grass, he found the water meter precisely where he thought it would be and turned it off. “That’ll stop the flow at the mains,” he said, heading back to the front door where Sandy from Grease was watching him with those pale blue dreamy eyes again. “Means you’ll not have any water at all for the time being, not even the toilet. Until we sort out the fu… the problem, that is.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She looked relieved. “I didn’t even know the water could be shut off.”

  She ushered him into the house and down a dark paisley-wall-papered corridor toward the back, where, as Max had guessed, the laundry was situated. He caught a whiff of sickness coming from one of the bedrooms down the corridor. A sweaty, dirty-laundry kind of smell he associated with his ex-fuck’n wife when she was on the rags. She was a heavy bleeder. Would sometimes lay her low in bed for days when it got real bad. He once walked into the bedroom during one of her PMS relapses and was hit with the toxic fumes of sweat and blood and major fuck’n hatred that could’ve wilted a forest and rendered it uninhabitable for decades, like Chernobyl. He never did that again. When it was that time of the month, when it was nuclear bad, he made himself invisible, usually at the Johnson farm. Even then he felt he wasn’t far enough away. The smell now wafting from the bedroom down the corridor was kind of similar. Not a lot. Not in your face like his ex by any means, but it was there, lingering, just letting you know that something was not quite fuck’n right.

  “This is the disaster zone,” Sandy from Grease said, opening the laundry door. She looked wary, as if expecting it to be ten times worse than when she left it.

  As a matter of fact, it was a whole big fuck’n mess, but nothing so bad he reckoned was irreparable. Water was fuck’n everywhere, much as if a thunderstorm had just opened up outside and was now pouring in through a gaping hole in the roof, filling the room like it was some kind of indoor fuck’n swimming pool. The entire linoleum floor was saturated in an inch or more of water, which was seeping under the laundry closet, washing machine and sink and lapping the wooden kickboards like ripples on the billabong along the shoreline. Thankfully, for her sake, most of it was flowing outside through the laundry door that opened onto the backyard. He nodded in appreciation. No dumb blonde, this chick. Even in her state of panic she’d had enough sense to open the door to prevent the rest of the house from going under.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” she said, staring at the layer of wetness covering the floor. “My landlord isn’t going to be too pleased.”

  “We don’t have to tell him,” Max said. “We’ll get it cleaned up as good as new.”

  This seemed to lighten her mood. “Well, as good as a used rental property that hasn’t had a single bit of renovation done to it since the seventies,” she said and giggled.

  He liked the cheekiness in her eyes and in the sound of her laugh. Sarah, his ex, had a grating laugh that sounded like a crow cawing and made his whole body tense in revulsion every time he heard it. This was nothing of the sort. Sweet, like her creamy voice, an innocent childlike laugh, something he reckoned he’d like to hear over and over again. Something he reckoned he’d never get bored of listening to either.

  Yet it brought back a memory he’d rather hoped he didn’t have to relive. He was sitting behind a classroom desk at Serena High when he heard the giggle floating toward him, like the one he’d only just heard, only this one wasn’t quite so innocent and its sweetness was laced with cyanide. Kirsten Brunell was sitting behind him, the slut of the school, if not the slut of the whole fuck’n town. He had lost his virginity to her the previous night in the back of the old man’s Kombi. She’d pocketed more than his virginity too, he reckoned, over the course of her education. There were at least seven other lads that he knew of back then that had enjoyed her company in one form or another, often at the same time, and that didn’t include Mr. Hancock, the science teacher, good ol’ “Mr. Hand-On-Cock” as he and the other kids used to call him behind his back. She stayed late after science lessons every Wednesday evening for extra tutoring, he recalled. He himself flunked science. In fact, he flunked every fuck’n subject in high school except woodwork. Go figure. He missed his calling. Should’ve been a carpenter, like Jesus and his fuck’n gullible old man who believed virgins could get pregnant on their own.

  Most kids in his class flunked science, come to think of it. Kirsten didn’t. She was a C-average student who somehow plucked the Golden Egg from Mr. Hand-On-Cock, an A+, an event so rare that the teachers and staff of Serena High were probably still talking about it thirty years later. If he also remembered right, she also plucked an A+ for English, which made Max wonder what she and that dirty fat bastard, Mr. Pendleton, got up to when the rest of the Serena High debating team packed their bags and drifted home.

  She was a slut all right. But weren’t they all? And despite her vast experience, she didn’t get no A+ from him for that brief home tutorial session on Sex Education in the back of the Kombi.

  Maybe she knew that. Maybe that’s why she had laughed at him in science class the following day. Giggled, in a not so innocent and not so sweet way, to one of her slutty friends he could no longer remember the name of. Made him feel real small, like he just didn’t come fuck’n close to stacking up against the three hundred or so other men she’d fucked to date (A slight exaggeration, Maxy boy, but you made your point). Until that moment he’d actually felt rather proud of himself. He was no longer a virgin. None of his mates could ever throw that despised accusation at him ever again. He felt like a man, like he’d finally fuck’n arrived in the world and nothing could ever take that away from him.

  Except, of course, the most poisonous of all things, a girl’s mockery. She giggled at him from her desk behind his, and to this date he had never learned the fuck’n reason why. He’d even harboured hopes of doing her again after school, after she’d finished gobbling the science teacher that was, but that idea was skitt
led by one tiny giggle tossed absently in his direction like a hand grenade from the back of the class. He still wanted to fuck her (except now he had visions of strangling that scrawny neck of hers at the same time). He began to hate her with a deep, visceral animosity that had surprised him even back then. His old man’s loathing was nothing in comparison to her scorn; he could roll with the physical punches and backhanders and leather straps, but Kirsten Brunell’s taunting giggle was a penetrating and mortal wound from which he had never recovered. He had hated the sound of a girl’s giggle ever since.

  Until now. Until he heard Sandy from Grease laugh her innocent laugh and in one clean stroke it seemed to wipe away all those feelings of animosity he’d been hurling toward any female, of any age, that had dared to giggle within fuck’n earshot.

  Max located the source of his neighbour’s problem easy enough. The cold water tap to the washing machine had rusted through and weakened the outlet pipe, into which he now inserted his forefinger up to the knuckle and felt around. From what Sandy from Grease had told him, she saw the tap leaking and had tried to “tighten it up a bit with the wrench”, in her own words, although he got the picture she didn’t really know what the fuck she was trying to do. But hats off to her: at least she’d tried to do something about the problem and hadn’t just played the pathetic damsel-in-distress card that most other women would have, most notably you-know-fuck’n-who.

  Despite her best attempts, though, all she’d succeeded in doing was twisting an already rusted pipe. The mains pressure had done the rest. The tap had exploded from the wall in bits of rusted metal and water as if it’d been fired from a small bore cannon. It had smacked into the closet door opposite where it left an indentation the size of a small fist, like a five year-old child had punched the wooden door in a temper tantrum. He figured she was lucky not to have been in the firing line, and that it had been the cold water tap and not the hot water. The tap and the boiling water would’ve done a right nasty job on her pretty face, he reckoned. Whole thing must’ve been a shock and a half, too. No wonder she came screaming out of the house like she had.