I can’t believe he bought me flowers – that’s so old school and legit charming.
Twelve flowers would be hell expensive – I am not worth this.
These are nicer than the wildflowers Matt picked for me on our first date.
The third thought boards a steam train in my head and starts to race around an endless track like it’s being driven by theEnergizer Bunny. Why did I think that? Now I can’t unthink it. Am I betraying Matt’s memory? I always found it so cute and rough around the edges that Matt just grabbed flowers off the side of the road for me (and half were weeds, which made it sweeter). He didn’t want to buy roses in Northampton or people would’ve asked what girl he was dating, when it was actually me. His weedy wildflower bunch was so him and I loved him for it.
By contrast, Mason’s a city boy. He’s gone to the effort of choosing roses – red, for romance. They’re from a proper florist. There’s even a card tucked into the cellophane, with two bees nuzzling each other with love hearts over their heads and the captionFor the Man in My Life. Probably the only male card the florist had. Mason’s been out since he was eighteen, something Matt never managed to do. I love that he barrelled up to a florist in his flanno and asked for this. I wonder if he chatted with them about the dude he was buying them for.
This is the dumbest thing to get in my head about, but here I am, comparing Matt and Mason.
Head over heels. Horrendously guilty.
Is it wrong of me to want to have a bee to nuzzle back?
I try to shove the comparison out of my head for the rest of the date.
Mason drives one of those American muscle utes that have become so popular. It’s a bright blue Ram: half work ute, half monster truck. Mason opens his door first and then cries, ‘Aw shit, hang on!’ and bustles around to my side. He clatters a dozen empty cans of energy drink and empty beef jerky packets into the back seat: the leg room of my passenger seat is his rubbish dump. I’m hit with a whiff of stale Red Bull, dried meat and body odour.
Mason’s cheeks are rosy as he scratches his chest, embarrassed. ‘My bad, mate – I meant to clean it before I picked you up, ay.’He whips out a can of Lynx Africa and sprays it all over himself and the dashboard.
On the drive to Mount Lawley, I realise he’s nervous and I can’t fathom why, since he’s the straight-up hottie and I’m the one punching above my weight (Ahmed outright said so).
The restaurant Mason booked is an old-style Italian ristorante called Sinagra. Nino, an old Italian bloke in a grey peasant cap, greets us at the front. He ushers us across the terracotta tiles, past a fishpond sunk into the floor, to a table blanketed with a crisp new red-and-white checked tablecloth. He pauses after seating us, glancing between us furtively, registering we are both men. I wonder if he’s got the same homophobic streak Zeke’s Italian family have.
But then he smiles warmly at us both. ‘Can I get you nice-a boys something to drink-a?’ he asks, with full wog accent.
Mason orders us each an Italian beer called Peroni Nastro Azzurro and Nino potters off to fetch them.
‘Do you like the vibe here?’ Mason asks me. ‘It’s pretty homey, ay?’
There’s something charming about him saying ‘homey’.
‘Yeah, that’s the word,’ I admit, looking at the photos of Nino and his family in Italy on the walls, the signed photos from semi-famous Perthonalities. ‘Warm and homey.’
Even though he gives off strong, silent vibes in a group, once you get him alone, Mason’s talkative. He laughs freely, like he doesn’t care if the people at the table next to us look over and see two dudes. He slams his fist on the table when he gets animated about something (footy, MMA, beer). He tries to pronounce ‘spaghetti aglio e olio’ in Italian when he orders his entrée, and even I know he’s butchered it: he could not have sounded more like Steve Irwin impersonating Super Mario if he’d tried. But Nino is nice about it, saysbravo, and looks almost disappointed when I order a Caesar salad, no massacred accent involved.
‘You can get more than a salad, mate, it’s my shout,’ Mason says. ‘Want some pasta?’
Bloke has clearly never bottomed in his whole life.
As we talk, I understand why Brayden called Mason dumb as two planks. For instance, he’s convinced Pluto should still be a planet, based on no astronomical theory, but just his vibes that it’s unfair it got demoted to a dwarf planet.
And he’s stubbornly adamant Venice is in Spain; when I google it to prove him wrong, he shrugs and says, ‘Well, geology was never my strong suit.’
And when I mention poppers – the sex drug – he thinks I’m referring to party poppers, the things you shoot streamers out of on New Year’s Eve. I have to explain these are two different things entirely. Has he never had dirty sex before? Are we a total mismatch?
Then he reveals he doesn’t know what punk is.
‘Like, I know Blink-182 and Green Day from the radio, and I know there’s more hardcore punk cos my friend Kaiya listens to it,’ he starts. ‘But the way you talk about it is so serious. Like, what does “punk” mean?’
We are in such different orbits. How can you not have a clue what punk rock is? Mason’s just driving his big Yankee monster truck, smashing Red Bull and beef jerky with ‘All The Small Things’ cranked up, burping and farting his way through life, isn’t he?
I paraphrase my favourite definition of punk I saw given by The Offspring guitarist, Noodles, in an interview once. ‘Punk is trying to defy convention,’ I say. ‘When someone says you can’t do something, you say, “Why the fuck can’t I?” It’s not just music or an aesthetic. It’s an attitude, a way of life. We rebel against conformity, what’s on trend. We do what we want, say what we want. Or, like Pennywise said, “Fuck Authority”.’
I tell Mason about my music, how I’m trying to break through and haven’t quite made it yet.
‘So, you’re not successful yet, so you’re not happy?’ he asks.
