Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space (23 page)

‘Jake, mate, that gig went
off
so much it went
on
again.’ The second gig at the Sando had proved even more of a triumph than the first.

‘Cheers.’ Jake clicked his glass against Tim’s. After the Sando closed, they’d all moved up the street to Sleepers, a pub for those who weren’t, not at night anyway. From his
position leaning on the bar, Jake was able to keep an eye on the swell of admirers around Baby, Doll and Lati. There sure were a lot of them. Why couldn’t Baby be with
him
and him
alone?

‘Sorry?’ Jake realised that Tim had been speaking to him.

‘Mate,’ Tim was saying, ‘you angsting out over something?’

‘Angsting out? Me? Nah,’ said Jake, thinking, is it that obvious?

‘Look, I know what you’re going through.’

‘You do?’ Jake seriously doubted it.

‘They’re just pop, man. It’s
good
pop—don’t get me wrong—it’s cool, it’s sexy, it’s indie, it’s got some cred. But, like, ten, twenty years down the track, who are people gonna remember?’ Tim answered his own rhetorical. ‘Bosnia, man. Bosnia.’

Jake forced a smile. ‘Thanks, Timbo.’ Right. His male ego had been suffering so much that his rock star ego had forgotten that it was being mortally wounded as well. For fuck’s sake. Thanks a
lot
, Timbo.

Jake turned so he wouldn’t have to look at Baby, and found himself staring straight at a leggy girl with short hair, a shorter skirt, and a twinkle in her eye. Jake snapped automatically into flirt mode. ‘What are you drinking?’ he asked suavely, nodding at her nearly-empty glass.

She grinned. Jake took encouragement and grinned back.

‘Sorry, mate,’ a deep voice rumbled from just behind him. The fellow who owned the voice edged between Jake and the girl, who threw her arms around his neck in greeting. Jake realised with embarrassment that she hadn’t been smiling at him after all.

Jake had always maintained that if you couldn’t chat up someone at Sleepers, it was time to hand in your membership in the Newtown tribe and move to…move to…Where else was there? Like most people who lived there, Jake almost never left Newtown and therefore had only a hazy notion of what else was out there, Sydney-wise. Now it looked like he was going to have to hand in his membership after all. Never mind, he consoled himself. No one had been watching.

Wrong. Tim had seen the whole thing. ‘I think you’re losing it,’ he teased.

‘At least,’ Jake replied dryly, ‘I once had it.’ He wasn’t, like, totally
devastated
or anything. The girl was cute, and he wouldn’t have Kicked Her Out Of but his heart wasn’t in it. What his heart was in was standing about two metres and a million miles away sponging up the vile attentions of all manner of untrustworthy and insincere flatterers who had less than honourable intentions and whom she should be warned about, if not protected from. Well, that’s how Jake saw it anyway. Christ, he knew all of them, and they were
just like him!

There was a whole slew of new faces at breakfast on Galgal the following afternoon. Two gigs down the track and the girls had discovered groupies. Groupies, they found, were almost as much fun as abductees. Sometimes more so. And wasn’t it fabulous how they all got along? Earthlings were
so
easy.

Well, most Earthlings anyway. Baby was sitting on the lap of a rather distinguished-looking older man abductee who had managed to coax five tiny cunts out of her side,
one for each finger. She was also nibbling at a handful of nails offered up by a gorgeous young groupie with pert breasts and waist-length purple hair who was kneeling at her feet. Ebola was a respectful metre or two away, on his hands and knees, ready to do whatever his mistress commanded. But was Baby happy? No. Baby was thinking about Jake, wasn’t she? She knew he desired her. But something was stopping him from doing anything about it. And that, in turn, was stopping
her
from doing anything about it. Was it because she was an alien? She couldn’t help that, could she? And why would she want to? Mmmm, those fingers felt good. Mmmm. Jake. Why hadn’t he come over to her last night at Sleepers and taken her away from those other people?

No, she wasn’t obsessed. That was ridiculous. She was just, oh, curious. Intrigued. Attracted. Perplexed. Infatuated.

Obsessed.

‘Jake! Why didn’t you stick around last night?’ The twins, closely followed by Saturna and Skye, burst noisily into the house. ‘We all ended up back at their place. Oh, man,’ exhaled Torquil, ‘you should see where they
live
.’ He plonked himself down next to Jake, who was seated on the brown sofa tracking the tennis on telly with morose eyes. ‘It was, like, this flying saucer? On top of the Sebel Townhouse?’

Jake raised one eyebrow. He kept his eyes on the tube.

‘Yeah,’ enthused Tristram. ‘Can’t believe we’d never been over there before. It’s cool as. You, like, look out the windows and there’s Bondi in one direction, the city in the
other. Fully viewsome. And what a night. You’d never believe who was there. You know how Ebola Van Axel announced that he was staying on in Australia? Well, guess where he’s hangin’ out?’

Jake’s head whipped round. ‘
No
,’ he denied, horrified.

‘Yes,’ Trist affirmed. ‘Oh, yes.’

Jake suddenly noticed that Torquil was wearing one of Baby’s frocks, the lime green one with the diamond-shaped cut-outs in the sleeves. Couldn’t his world fall apart a little at a time, like everyone else’s? Did it have to happen all at once? ‘Nice frock, Torq,’ he said, hoping those weren’t really tears that he felt in his eyes. For fuck’s sake.

‘Yeah,’ Torq smoothed the stretchy fabric over his legs. ‘Lati just
shredded
what I was wearing and I had to have
something
to come home in.’

Jake was feeling thoroughly alarmed by now. ‘Did you guys, did you—’

‘Did we what?’ Tristram asked, looking suspiciously innocent.

Jake decided he didn’t really want to know any more about last night. He hadn’t been there. Whatever happened, it hadn’t happened to him. On a need to know basis, he didn’t need to know. He blinked rapidly a few times. ‘I think it’s time,’ he declared, changing the subject, ‘that Bosnia moved up in the world. I’ve decided to call the Annandale to see if we can get a gig there. With the Babes, of course.’

‘Cool,’ said Torquil, staring hard at Jake. Was that a
tear
in his eye?

The Annandale Hotel was considered a notch higher than the Sando in the feeding chain of Sydney pub rock, if only because it had a stage that wasn’t constructed from milk cartons, its bar was in a logical place, and it could hold more people.

Old-timers compared the Bosnia/Babes night at the Annandale to the famous gig played by Midnight Oil at the Stagedoor Tavern in 1980 at which nearly 2000 people crammed into a space licensed to hold 129 while 500 more rioted outside. No one could estimate how many people managed to get into the Annandale that night—the bouncers, like everyone else, had fallen under the Babes’ chaotic-erotic influence and were go-go dancing naked on the pool tables.

‘I reckon it’s time to hit the road,’ Jake observed to the twins afterwards. They were leaning against the Kombi, waiting for the Babes to extricate themselves from the boisterous cluster of fans who’d besieged them the second they emerged from the backstage door and were still surrounding them now, an hour or so later. All the boys could see of the Babes were their bobbing antennae.

Torquil looked at Jake in disbelief. ‘You don’t want to wait for the girls?’

‘You’re not, like,
jealous
or anything.’ Tristram was shocked as well.

Jake treated them both to a look of disdain. ‘I’m disappointed in you both,’ he sighed. ‘Deeply disappointed. As
if
. What I meant—obviously—was that it’s time we took this show on the road.
Tour
time. I am looking into the future and I see Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Byron Bay. Any prior commitments? Speak now, or hold your peace.’

The twins’ faces lit up like a pair of spotlights. ‘Let’s do it,’ enthused Torquil. ‘I think I’m overdue for long
service leave from the dole anyway.’

‘And I,’ announced Tristram, ‘will check my diary but I don’t think I have anything planned for, oh, the next twenty years or so. So, like, whenever’s good for me.’ He jumped up, punched the air and whooped, ‘Rock n fucken
roll!
’

Kate the Kombi grew alarmed. They weren’t planning to drive to all these places in
her,
were they? At her age, just trundling off to the shops could be traumatic. She broke out into a cold radiator sweat. The more she thought about the toll such a trip would take on her aching joints and old starter motor, the more she became convinced she was on the verge of a breakdown.

Two cute girls with bindis on their foreheads, feathers in their hair and lust in their eyes fronted up to Jake. Now this was more like it. Jake let rip his killer smile and snaked his posture into a sensuous, relaxed curve. He raised his cigarette to his lips, cocked an eyebrow and looked from one to the other. ‘Hi there,’ he drawled.

‘Uh, hi,’ said the one with the green glitter on her cheeks. ‘We’re, like, really big fans?’

Jake puffed with pleasure.

‘Of the Babes?’ the girl continued. ‘And we were wondering if you could get them to autograph…’

It was deep into the wee hours by the time Baby, Doll and Lati finally bubbled up to the Kombi, high on performance and adulation, and full of apologies for the delay.

And then they still had to jumpstart poor Kate. Baby did it with the tip of her little finger.

‘Erotic,’ sang Eros tunelessly.

‘Neurotic,’ taunted a fellow ‘roid, zipping past and
refusing to indulge in even a minor prang. ‘Quixotic.’

‘Despotic,’ hooted a second. ‘Idiotic.’ He slammed straight into the first, just to annoy Eros. Asteroidal fragments flew off in all directions and their screams of pleasure echoed through space.

If they weren’t going to play with him, why couldn’t they just leave him alone!

Wretchedly, Eros huffed and he puffed and he still couldn’t blow himself down. But he was having something of an effect. The Philippines experienced a series of minor volcanic eruptions, there was an intense gurgling in the boiling mud pools of New Zealand and Peking shifted slightly on its geological plate. Feel the Earth move under your feet?