‘Sixty,’ I say, suddenly vulnerable, like I’m holding up my heart to be smacked away. This daydream was for my father, not a random.
Jack nods, impressed. ‘Ay, not bad, bro!’
I get a full-body shiver. It might be delight.
It makes me stupid enough to go one step too far. ‘I changed my tip for tonight. Thomson’s out with an ACL injury so Port aren’t looking so strong,’ I tell Jack, like I’m a guru. He cringes at the term ACL, like he knows full well how season-ending that is. ‘So, my money’s on the Hawks now.’
Jack taps his nose. ‘Good to know. I hadn’t even heard that yet, and I keep on top of most things. Might change my tips too. You’re like Footy Yoda, all wise and shit, bro!’
I get the buzz of delight again. I would love to be Footy Yoda.
‘Tell you what,’ Jack says, ‘me and my boyfriend just started a social footy club for gay blokes who wanna play footy in a chill environment – no dickheads, ya know? You should come train with us.’
My ego lodges in my throat. Sprung. I’ve never played footy in my life. I want to say no, but the people-pleaser in me wins out. ‘Wow, really? My kinda team! Where do I sign up? Count me in, man, count me in!’
I float right out of my body in horror as Jack replies, ‘Sweet, we train Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. I’ll send you a link! Seeya there, bro!’
He leaves.
I stare in the streaked-mirror reflection of me with myNinja TurtlesT-shirt and Marvel cap. What was I thinking, saying yes to playingfooty? If I rock up, they’ll all find out I’m a massive fraud.
The bathroom door swings open. Bevan, one of the guys in the call centre, strolls in, nodding on his way past. If he’d walkedin two minutes earlier, I would’ve lost my job. I would’ve crashed and burned and been exposed as the dirty, self-serving man whore I am.
Why do I wish he’d caught me?
When I get home from work, Sabrina’s Mitsubishi ASX has beaten me home: I park my ageing white Nissan Maxima on the paved driveway behind her. Usually, we spend Friday nights together with Chinese takeaway from Shining Dragon and some TV series, but I’m not convinced I’ll stay awake long enough tonight. It was a hectic day. Dealing with Colby types was infuriating. Working after an orgasm was excruciating when my body wanted to curl up like a Golden Retriever and kip under my desk. And the drive home was marred by those never-ending Mitchell Freeway roadworks we were all promised had ended but which somehow magically returned to ruin our lives.
I’m ready for a vodka and a wank and a sleep.
I open the door to the flat, expecting Sabrina to be flopped on the taupe-coloured IKEA couch, but the living room is empty. There’s a mug of English Breakfast on the coffee table, though, beside a packet of Tim Tams, which means some sizeable gossip just dropped. Sabrina’s voice is muffled behind her bedroom door: she’s on the phone to Victoria bitching about Shane again.
Other than Charlie, Victoria is the only person who’s indicated mine and Sabrina’s dynamic is weird for two people who used to go out, occasionally referring to me as Sabrina’s ‘boyfriend’. One time when I answered the door, Victoria blurted out, ‘Oh, hi, Will – is Grace home?’ (I was tempted to answer, ‘You know that makes you Karen, right?’)
It made sense for me and Sabrina to live together when this was a student house, though now we’ve both finished uni, I do wonder if it’s normal. But I don’t know how to broach thatconversation and besides, it’s working. Plus, beggars can’t be choosers in the double-whammy of a housing crisis and a cost-of-living crisis. I’ll never find anything nearly as cheap as this on realestate.com.au.
I sling my Squirtle backpack to the floor of my bedroom, which is tiny. If there were steel bars on the window, it would be the kind of jail cell the government deems unfairly restrictive for a prisoner. But it’s home: a single bed I’ve never had sex on, the doona I’ve had since I was fourteen, Iron Man and Batman movie posters on the walls and stacks of textbooks and notebooks I’ll never look at again, but don’t throw away.
I boot up my laptop and go to the kitchen to make a vodka soda. On the bench is a hi-vis orange pen emblazoned withStolen From George Sefton Building Companybeside a plate of two cling-wrapped red velvet cupcakes with a yellow sticky note on them:
Zekey
These were left over from Maureen’s birthday so I nicked 3 for you. You owe me xoxo
PS Yes there’s only 2 now cos I got hungry on the drive home
I smile at the note. Scoffing cupcakes while driving through peak-hour traffic, probably while on speaker phone to Victoria, is about as Sabrina as it gets.
I wolf down a cupcake on the spot, then make my vodka soda. When I dump the cupcake wrapper in the bin, I can see Sabrina’s tossed her first empty Prosecco bottle in there already. Maybe this is why we get along, too. By day, we’re both high-performing – since graduating from her biomedical science degree, Sabrina’s been working for the CSIRO – and by night, we’re both geeky slobs, or slobby geeks. We eat and drink and vegetate on the couch watching sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV shows. We’ve even hit Oz Comic-Con and Supanovaexpos together, dressing up as characters fromGame of ThronesandStar TrekandBuffy. Sabrina’s all-time favourite show isFirefly– ask her how unfair it wasFireflygot cancelled and be prepared for a long rant – and on her lounge-room wall are two posters she got signed byFireflyactors at Supanova. Apart from conventions, we don’t go out much and rely on each other for company. It’s comfortable.
Well, it’s mostly comfortable. Usually, Sabrina’s a fellow slob, but every now and then she gets into a real OCD clean-freak mode and bosses me around. She’ll also eat my food without telling me. And every now and then some outragedu jouron social media will set her off on a rant that blows up into an all-or-nothing argument if you disagree with her.
Sabrina likes to win. She wasn’t President of the Debating Club for nothing. Back at high school, Sabrina was a pious Catholic girl: I still (viscerally) remember her reacting to Charlie coming out by saying homosexuality wasa sin. Times have changed: a uni degree and her friendship with Victoria have mixed a dash of wokeness into her conservatism, to the point where it’s nigh on impossible to pin down her political leanings. Her opinions aren’t based on left-wing or right-wing ideology, but on whatever she’s been pissed off by on any given day. Her ideology is outrage. Once she finds something to fight about, she needs to win. When that elderly Polish baker was getting piled on, Sabrina sent his business this scathing comment, then showed it to me expecting me to be grateful. Like, the guy was in his eighties, hardly spoke English and survived some war shit in his childhood. Sure, he probably should’ve baked the gay cake, but he didn’t deserve to be trolled out of business, did he?
To keep me on my toes, the next week she was ranting that at uni she felt discriminated against for being Catholic and claimed Christians were more marginalised than any other minority in the 2020s.
Again, it’s not all the time. Just once in a blue moon.
I take my vodka soda to my room, and close myself in my jail cell for some much-needed ‘alone time’. I don’t have a social life and I don’t have mates. My weekends and weeknights are all the same numb blur: drink, scroll memes, jack off, eat takeaway, hook up, pass out. That’s my routine. I’m a classic Gay Loser.
