Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space (28 page)

Baby pulled his head close to her own and sweetened her lips against his. The turquoise velvet of her tongue insinuated itself into his mouth and found a willing playmate in the fat pink organ that lived within. Her antennae were humming ‘What a Wonderful World’ (the Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan version). Breathing unevenly but very deeply, she let go of her cue, which clattered to the floor.

Neither of them noticed Brian the Bouncer come into the room. After that business with the drunks, Brian had satisfied himself that nothing much was happening in the bar. He was in the bog laying a cable, checking the growth on his mullet and thinking about Shareen’s pasty thighs while that scene with Ratface and Doll was going on in the bar. Now he emerged to find the place weirdly sedate. No fights. No arguments. Nothing. Just a hippy dippy happy atmosphere of love and peace. It made him damn uncomfortable. Something was afoot. He checked the backroom. He checked the bar. He looked up and down the street. He leaned against the wall and waited. When he heard the clamour of the cue striking the floor, he strode into the pool room.

Aw, Christ. Didn’t these feral birds ever wash? She was
green.
And that bloke she was canoodling. Skinny fucken
wimp.
Brian watched till he could stand it no longer. He strode over and slapped Jake on the shoulder. ‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Feral face.’

Quick time out for the tonsil hockey team.

Jake and Baby blinked uncomprehendingly at Brian’s leering mug.

‘Oi’ve bin watchin’ youse,’ he scowled. ‘And youse
makin’ me sick, mate. You wanna do that shit, you do it outsoide. And woipe that smoile off yer doile,’ he further advised Jake. ‘Unless ya want me to do it for ya. Pubs,’ he informed them in a voice that brooked no dissent, ‘er fer sinkin’ piss.’

The main compu-tron on Pop crackled into life. ‘Mes. sage. re. ceived. “Hel. lo. Pop.” Over.’

Qwerk quickly checked the co-ordinates. Parkes? Where in Quagaar was that?

Standing in the doorway of the pool room, Lati could hardly believe her oculi. She’d come back for the Abduct-o-matic, which was with the rest of their gear next to the stage, just in time to witness the big kiss. Lati couldn’t understand why Baby and Jake allowed that big oafy bloke to interrupt what had obviously been, for them—and everyone else in the pool room including Lati herself, who’d grown a little cunt between her eyes just from watching—a rather sensational moment.

Those two were fucken hopeless. Baby should have turned the bouncer into a barstool or zapped him off to charm school in Perth. Instead, she just stood there awkwardly, not even daring to lift her eyes and look at Jake. Brian smirked. He turned and, examining his fingernails, headed back towards the bar. Finally, Baby picked up her cue and began to shoot pool as though nothing had happened, except she was hitting all the wrong balls. Jake was affecting an equally absurd nonchalance. He’d picked up
someone’s empty schooner from the table next to him and was pretending to drink from it.

Well, if Baby wasn’t going to follow through with Jake, then Lati figured she could pretty much do as she liked. And she liked to cause a bit of trouble.

The gig went down smashingly with the Byron crowd. Even Brian jumped up on a table to dance with Shareen. Poor things had to be carried off when it collapsed underneath them, but that’s rock n roll.

After the gang had lugged out, they all whizzed over to the Epicentre for the full moon party. Scrambling down the dunes to the beach, they discovered maybe a hundred people in feral finery dancing under the silvery light of the moon, skinny dipping, twirling firesticks and passing pipes and tabs. Torquil and Tristram joined the large drumming circle. Henry, mumbling something incomprehensible about ‘graphic EQs’, passed out on the sand. Doll got involved in tattooing some woman’s breasts, and the little goddess of the floral essences from that afternoon whisked Baby off to meet her cosmic family.

Jake sat on the cool sand, hypnotised by the waves and the drumming and thinking about Baby’s lips. He’d scored some Mullumbimby heads and had a pipe. Or two. It definitely wasn’t three. Maybe three. Yeah, please, do, kiss me again. Mmmm. That’s
wonderful.
That’s the most
wonderful
thing in the world. Mmmmm. I’m in heaven. Let me open my eyes and look at you, my gorgeous alien girl.

Shit!
Jake jumped about a metre backwards in the sand and covered his mouth with his hands.

Baby didn’t see Jake recoil. All she saw was him kissing Lati. That was enough. She turned and walked straight into the surf. Swimming furiously through the water, she dived to the bottom and punched the sand as hard as she
could. The ocean floor shifted under the impact and a new sand bank formed that, surfers would later swear, created the
filthiest
swells they’d ever seen on the north coast.

By the time she emerged from the waves again, Jake was frantic. He stumbled over to the water’s edge and shouted, ‘Baby, it’s not what you—’ but before he finished his sentence she dived in again. He turned to stare straight into Lati’s unrepentent eyes.

‘Christ, Lati,’ he moaned, raising his hands to the sides of his head. His tattoo ached.

‘Jake,’ she shrugged. ‘You know that Dave Graney song? “You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel”? Think about it.’

With that enigmatic comment, Lati turned on her heel and tripped off to join in the dancing. Jake waited for Baby to come out of the water, but she didn’t re-emerge till dawn when it was time to hit the road again.

For the drive back to Sydney, Doll took the wheel. Baby sat in the front with her, staring out the window and not speaking for the entire trip, except to tell Lati in an annoyed voice to shut up when she sang the Foo Fighters’ ‘For All the Cows’ for the hundredth time after passing yet another fucken paddock. Lati didn’t care. She snuggled up to Henry, who was still feeling very delicate. Jake, mortified, horrified, crucified, and drug-fried, huddled behind the passenger seat, torturing himself with the sight of the back of Baby’s head. The twins, unaware of any psychodrama, lay side by side, trying to recall exactly where they’d misplaced their brains. ‘Somewhere between Kalbarri and Brisbane,’ Torquil was saying. ‘Definitely somewhere between Kalbarri and Brisbane.’

‘Couldn’t you be more specific?’ groaned Tristram. ‘Otherwise we’ll
never
find them again.’

‘It’s for you, Jake,’ Saturna called out. She hadn’t actually answered the phone. As educated guesses go, however, it was a PhD. The phone had been ringing nonstop for days—more even than the time last year when the dozen or so girlfriends that Jake had accumulated suddenly found out about each other and felt compelled to share with him in detail their feelings on the subject of his general desirability as a member of the human race. As before, every call was for Jake. This time, however, they were the sort of which every musician dreams—venue and festival bookers, scouts for record companies, producers offering their services, journalists begging for interviews. Kwong José Abdul Foo wanted to do gigs together and Nick Cave was hoping for a duet. Countless fans volunteered their sexual services or just pleaded for scraps of clothing or locks of hair. None of the callers was the least bit interested in Bosnia.

The career of the Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space had taken off at warp speed. The word was spreading faster than warm butter on a hot toaster (the girls’ current breakfast of choice). Radio Triple J, which was running on a shoestring now that the government had cut 95 per cent of its funding, had snapped up the Babes’ single ‘In the Sexual Experimentation Chamber (Anything Goes, Everything Cums)’. They put it on high rotation despite government threats to razor the final 5 per cent unless the station started playing
healthy
music. When the Babes launched their LP
Come to Mothership,
the Js defiantly made it their featured album of the week, as did Triple C, which billed itself as the alternative to the alternative. The commercial stations put several tracks from it on their top
ten, and even the Christian community stations played a couple of their songs. (God had had a word in their ear.)

They continued to play live, to sellout crowds all around the country. The unresolved tension between Baby and Lati over what had happened in Byron only added to the heat on stage.

One day, Jake, who’d by now become the Babes’ de facto manager, headed over to Elizabeth Bay to discuss the upcoming No Way Out festival, where the Babes were to be supporting top international acts. Arriving at the Sebel with Iggy, he took the lift up to the pool area, just in time to see Ebola laying his daily offering of roses at the foot of the water tower. ‘Hi there, Jake,’ Ebola gurgled ingratiatingly.

A shiver of disgust ran up Jake’s spine. ‘Uh, g’day,’ he replied with evasive eyes. The man was aesthetic offence. Jake couldn’t even bring himself to greet Ebola by name. For his part, Iggy looked at Eb and growled at him, as he always did. Iggy
hated
death metal.

‘Gonna see our Baby?’ Eb asked.

Our
Baby? The man was a fucken outrage. Iggy’s growl deepened. Jake ignored him and called up to the saucer. ‘Baby?’

She looked out the window, waved, and let down the steps. Jake and Iggy couldn’t believe it when Ebola, uninvited, followed them up.

As Iggy scampered off to find Revor, Jake pulled Baby aside. ‘How can you let this guy hang around like this?’ he whinged. The mobile phone that the babes had abducted for him rang. As Jake took the call, a flash of annoyance lit Baby’s features. Jake had some nerve telling her who she should or should not be seeing.

She hadn’t gotten over the Lati incident. Doll, who saw
the whole thing, told Baby what had happened as soon as they returned to Sydney. Baby had confronted Lati, and there had been a bit of antennae-pulling and name-calling, but at least they’d faced up to it. What still irritated Baby was how Jake avoided all attempts on her part to raise the subject. Was he guiltier than Doll made out, she wondered. If not, what was his
problem?
Earthlings, obsessed as they were with primitive toys like mobiles and e-mail, still couldn’t
communicate
to save their lives.

On a sudden impulse, she grabbed for Ebola, who was lying prostrate at her feet, a rose between his lips. Hauling him up by the collar, she plucked the bloom and planted a smacking wet kiss on his mouth, right before the astonished Jake. This caused Eb’s hair (which he’d recently cut back to his shoulders, as a sort of compromise with the Metallica thing) to stand on end and his ears to glow orange. Then she patted him on the arse and told him to go back to the pool and leave them alone. Stepping out of the saucer, the love-befuddled rock star fell straight down to the pool deck, for no one had activated the steps. He cried out as his ankle twisted beneath him. Sitting on the deck, he cradled the hurt foot in his hands, weeping tears of pain and gratitude.

Jake swallowed bile. He concluded the call and switched off the phone. ‘About the concert,’ he opened, a little harshly. They discussed details, neither looking the other in the eye, and Jake took his leave. ‘Iggy?’ he called. ‘IGGY!’