Don't Kiss Girls and Other Silly Stories (9 page)

Double far out!

I'm still trying to come up with a plan when the door opens and a familiar face peers in.

‘Cleaning toilets, hey, Rossy? I can see you're moving up in the world.'

‘Kane! What are you doing here?' I ask.

‘On a date with Megan Frost. Fast food followed by fast moves, if you know what I mean.'

‘Megan? I thought you two broke up.'

‘We have. But it's Saturday afternoon and I was bored, so I called her up and convinced her that what she needed this weekend was a little bit of Kane.'

‘She must be desperate.'

He looks at the wet
floo
r, then at me. ‘You're looking a bit desperate yourself, mate. Painted yourself into a corner, have you?'

‘It's not paint,' I say. ‘It's
water. Give me a hand, will ya?'

I chuck Kane the mop and he catches it one-handed. Then he starts strumming the hairy end. I can't help it. I laugh. While he's playing mop guitar, I empty the water into the urinal. Then I throw Kane the bucket and he catches it using the end of the mop.

Now I just have to
figu
re out how to get across the
floor
without dirtying my sparkling work. It's not easy, especially when another thought pops into my mind. ‘Hey, Kane. How do you get a girl to like you again once you've dumped her?'

He gives me a look. ‘You want Ash back?'

‘Maybe,' I say.

He shakes his head. ‘Don't like your chances. Devo's got lots of moolah.' Kane rubs his
fingers togethe
r. ‘And you don't.'

‘Can you help me?'

‘Probably.' Kane brushes back his hair like his idol, Steve Smith. ‘I'm the king at getting girls to like me for a second time. They never trust me again, but trust is overrated, anyway.'

‘Well, how do you do it?'

‘Why should I tell you? What can you do for me?'

I think. ‘Umm.'

A brainwave hits me. ‘I can get you and Megan free food. Anything you want.'

‘Really?'

‘No worries. I'm tight with the
manager. We're like this.'

I hold up crossed
fingers.

‘Promise?' he says.

‘Yep.'

‘All right. Listen up, then.' His voice is serious and I lean forward to catch every word. ‘To win Ashleigh back, you gotta compete.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You've got to
fight
for her. Show her that you're a better man than Devo by beating him at something.'

‘That's it?'

‘Sure. Deep down, girls are just damsels in distress, and we're the knights. They want us to
fight
each other to the death.'

Hmm. I gotta
figu
re out how I can beat Devo and get Ash back. But
firs
t I need to get out of the toilet.

Kane opens the door.

‘Where are you going?' I say, but it's too late. He's already walked out. He's always leaving me when things get tough.

If only I could
fl
y, or walk on walls. Or both. Super Spiderman.

While I'm coming up with a plan involving tightrope toilet paper, the door opens. A plastic food tray slides towards me and stops a few metres away.

‘You didn't think I'd leave you here, did you?' Kane says.

‘Thanks,' I say. Maybe
he's a better mate than I thought.

He continues. ‘Not
when you're going to get us free food.'

Yeah. Thanks.

He nods at the tray. ‘Surf's up.'

I look at it for a moment, smile, then jump back and kick off the wall for extra height and power. In mid-air I extend my arms for balance, which is just as well because when I land on the tray with my feet slightly apart, it skims across the wet
floor
like a hovercraft. I nearly fall backwards, but years of skating down wet grass on cardboard is now coming in very handy.

I'm
flying
across the toilet
floor
and thinking that this is the coolest job a bloke could ask for, when I realise that I need to stop. Now. And a plastic tray doesn't have brakes. I'm about to hit the door so I do the only thing I can. I close my eyes.

Bang!

Kane must have kicked the door open because I go sliding through into the restaurant on my tray skateboard. I swerve past a little kid and scare an old lady, who drops her walking stick and yells at me as I
fly past.
I try to stop myself by grabbing onto the condiment stand, but all I do is knock down a tub full of straws.

I come to a stop by running into the back of Sherie, who falls onto the front counter and into a tray of food. When she turns to face me, I can see that her white top is covered in chocolate topping. It looks delicious.

‘Get out!' she hisses.

‘Aww, c'mon, Sherie—'

‘Out!'

‘All right. All right. But can I have my lunch
first?
You promised.'

Her teeth clench together like a werewolf's. She turns around and slides the tray of food towards her.

‘Here's your lunch.'

But instead of handing me the tray, she takes a fry and spears it like a dart at my chest!

‘Well done!' says the old lady. ‘A good belting is the only thing young hoons of today understand.'

I reach down
to the
floor
and pick up the chip. Then I
throw it at the old lady. ‘That's
for calling me a young hoon.'

‘How dare you!' she screams, tossing her Senior Burger like a frisbee at my head.

I catch it. Sucked in, old lady.

Then I get dunked from behind with a full cup of freezing soft drink. ‘That's for attacking poor old ladies!' Sherie says.

I unwrap the burger, open it up, and throw it at Sherie. Mustard and pickles splatter her face. ‘That's for attacking innocent young boys.'

Sherie turns away. I've beaten her.
She's going to cry.

Kane and Megan are standing behind me, probably waiting to pick up their free food.

Then Sherie does a 180 and squirts something at my head. I duck and Megan gets hit in the face with a stream of tomato sauce.

‘Aghhh!' she squeals.

Kane grabs a sachet of mayonnaise off the condiment stand and pops it. He gets Sherie in the hair.

I give him
five.

Then Sherie squeezes the end of her nose and her zit explodes like a volcano. Pus shoots out and sprays my left eye.

‘Aww, that's sick!' I say, wiping my eye with a napkin.

‘Code 306!' she yells.

Within seconds, uniformed teenagers run out of the kitchen. Reinforcements. There are at least four of them – carrying burgers with the top bun missing, shakes with no lids, handfuls of pickles.

‘Retreat!' I scream.

Kane, Megan and I make a run for it. Our backs are being pelted with food that's probably better for throwing than it is for eating. As I open the door an apple pie bonks me on the back of the head.

‘And good riddance!' yells Sherie.

We dart into an alley and collapse beside some industrial bins.

Megan wipes her face and discovers a large dob of red on her
finge
r. ‘I'm bleeding!' she cries.

Kane holds her
finger
in his hand, studies it, and then puts it
in his mouth.
Megan shrieks and we laugh.
‘It's just tomato sauce,' Kane says.

Megan doesn't see the funny side of it at all. ‘I want to go home!' she whines.

Kane helps her up. ‘You still owe us a free meal,' he says to me.

‘What are you talking about? I got you heaps of free food. I can't help it if you can't catch.'

We laugh again.

‘Kane!' howls Megan. ‘I want to go home now!'

‘See you, Rossy.'

‘Not if I see you
first.'

‘And r
emember,' he says, giving me a wink. ‘Compete.'

I will, I think. I just have to figure out how.

Counciling and My Brush with the Emotional Side

‘Tony, this job can be tough. Real tough. Let me show you the tools you'll need to survive.'

It's work experience week and luckily I found somewhere to go instead of Mr Garrahy's office. My dad works for the local council as team leader of transport operations and safety management. This means he tells people to paint the faded lines and arrows on the roads, and sometimes he has to paint them himself when he can't con anyone else into doing it. Anyway, he pulled some strings and got me a gig in the council's transport division, and now Joe, deputy team leader of transport operations and safety management, is playing show and tell.

‘First, you got your shovel. If you have one of these things in your hand, people don't ask you 'cause they think you're doing something. I carry mine pretty much everywhere, even to meetings.'

Right.

‘Next, you got your Vaseline. Now, except when
we're on smoko or on strike, we're out ther
e in the sun and wind. Standing around, mostly.
It's tough as hell on your lips, but if you spread
a nice fat layer of this on,
you won't have to worry about dryness
or cracking. Come Friday night, you're ready to kiss like a
movie star.'

It's hard to believe anyone would want to kiss Joe. His shorts are pulled up high around his fat belly and his beard makes him look like Ned Kelly.

‘And lastly – but certainly not leastly
– you got your most important tool of all. The esky
.' He holds it up. It's big and blue, just
like his regulation council uniform, only the esky doesn't have a
fluo
ro yellow vest around it.

‘This is where you keep all your food and drinks,' Joe continues, ‘and there's nothing more important than cold liquid when you're in the hot sun half the day. And the best thing is, once you got the lid on tight, it doubles as an office chair.'

Joe takes out a bottle of Solo, pops it open and sits on his esky. ‘Well, smoko time, son. Give us about twenty minutes and we'll hit the road and do some serious work.'

Yeah, I don't mind this job so far. Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. They're the sort of work hours I can handle. Only trouble is, I don't have an esky so I have to sit on the
floo
r. I've got esky envy.

We hop in the council ute and it's not long before we make our
first
stop. The petrol station. We don't need petrol but we do need drinks. Joe says it's going to be a stinker out there.

After throwing the bottles in the esky, Joe sets the radio to the country music station, and we cruise down the road, listening to a song about some pub that's run out of beer.

‘So, what are we doing?' I ask.

‘Driving 'round.'

‘Yeah, I know but … what's our job?'

‘Well, we look for potholes.'

‘There's one over there,' I say, pointing.

‘Easy does it, eagle eyes. We don't look on the other side of the road. It's against occupational health and safety rules.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, I might get distracted and run over some old lady, and we can't have that, can we? Believe me, kid, this job is a lot more complicated than it looks.'

We drive past a group of workmen. Their uniforms are green, not blue, but Joe must know them because he slows down to a crawl and winds open the window. He doesn't wave to them, though. He raises one finger.

‘Go home, you scabs!' he yells.

They shake their tools at us. I'm
glad we don't stop.

‘Bloody private contractors,' he says to me. ‘Making our life hell.'

‘How?'

‘Well, they work too hard, for one thing. Makes us look bad.'

‘Okay …'

‘And they've signed away conditions that our union fought long and hard for. Now we're under pressure to do the same.'

‘What conditions?'

‘Well, the right to take heat stress leave, for one.'

‘What's that?'

‘Anytime it gets above 29 degrees we can officially request air-conditioning. If the bosses can't provide it we can go home.'

‘But how can you get air-conditioning? You
fix
roads. Outside.'

‘That's the council's problem. Anyway, during the last round of enterprise bargaining we pushed for the ten/ten clause – ten per cent more money for ten per cent less hours. But the bloody CEO said no way and signed up these private jokers to do resurfacing and the like. These clowns have no idea – half the time we're called in to clean up their mess.'

‘So they can't
fix
roads properly?'

‘Yeah. They can
fix
'em, all right. They just leave a bloody big mess. Rocks and gravel, mostly. We have to take it to the dump. It's hard work.'

I see another pothole. This time it's on our side of the road. ‘There's one.'

‘Where?' says Joe, squinting.

‘Right there.' I point at a hole the size of the Grand Canyon.

‘Yeah, I see it,' he mumbles. We ease to a stop. ‘I just have to make a business call
first.'

I listen to the radio while Joe rings someone up on his work mobile.

‘Yeah, g'day, Mick. I'll have ten each way on No Promises, and twenty a place on She'll Be Right. Yeah, I know. Look, I'm sure to get a winner this time, then I'll pay you back pronto. Aw, don't be like that! No, don't add it up now, I don't have time. I'm
flat-cha
t at work. Yeah, yeah. See ya, Mick.'

He
puts the phone in his pocket
, and we hop out of the car to take a look.

‘Yep,' says Joe. ‘That's a hole all right.'

He goes to the back of the ute and grabs an aerosol paint can. After giving it a shake, Joe sprays a white ring around the pothole.

Then he wipes his brow. ‘Phew. That's good work. Time for a brew, I reckon.'

‘And then we'll
fix
it?' I say.

‘Nah, don't be silly. I'll bring the boys back in a week or three. Today we just have to mark it.'

After our drink we head off again, and at the next hole Joe gives me a go at spraying.

‘Careful,' he says. ‘You need correct thickness and top visibility. It's not a job to be taken lightly.'

It takes me about ten seconds to paint a circle around the hole.

Joe nods slowly. ‘Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all.' He gives me a friendly pat on the back that almost knocks me over. ‘You know, I think if you work really hard, you may just have a future in this business, Tony.'

I look at my hole and feel a surge of pride. Then I crack open a drink.

*

The
next day I'm assigned to the traffic management unit. W
e have to tell the cars what to do while some
other blokes
fix
the road. It's a two-person
team. Joe and me.

‘Now, what you've got here is your standard two-sided sign,' says Joe, showing me. ‘On this side you've got STOP, and on the other you've got SLOW. I've actually invented a three-sided sign that I'm going to show the bosses soon. Might make me a fortune.'

‘Yeah? What's the third side say?' I ask.

‘It says, “That's
not
slow!”'

Joe gives me a walkie-talkie and a sign and tells me to cross the road and walk down a 100 metres. While work is being done on the road there's only one lane available and we have to take turns to let the cars through. When Joe tells me to, I turn the sign around and make people stop.

At
firs
t I don't expect them to obey me, but they actually do. It's fun having so much power. I might take one of these signs home and
flas
h it at Simon and Belinda when they start annoying me.

Although it's not a bad job, holding a sign up all the time is a bit tough on your arm muscles. Luckily after twenty minutes there's a whistle, which either means a pretty girl is walking past or it's time for a break. I see the blokes congregate behind the bulldozer. Smoko.

I've brought my own esky today so I have something to sit on while I listen to the guys complain about the two Ws.

Women and wives.

‘The current missus tells me I only think about one thing,' says a bloke known as Wacko. ‘She's right. I put a hell of a lot of thought into how to hide the credit card.'

The blokes chuckle.

‘Hey, kid,' says Wacko. ‘You got yourself a girlfriend yet?'

All the men look at me.

‘I had one,' I say, ‘but I dumped her. And now I want her back.'

Wacko nods. ‘I hear ya, kid. Walked out on my second wife – stupidest thing I ever done.'

‘Especially when she cleaned out your bank account,' says the bloke sitting next to him.

Everyone laughs.

We go back to work but all the talk about girls means I can't stop thinking about Ashleigh. Her long brown hair, big eyes and soft lips. I imagine her coming towards me in her mum's car …

Hang on, my imagination ain't that good. She
is
coming towards me in her mum's car.

I quickly turn the sign from SLOW to STOP, and they pull up right in front of me.

‘What are you doing?' asks Joe through the walkie-talkie.

‘Umm. My ex-girlfriend's driven up. I just want to talk to her for a minute.'

‘Well, that
's totally against council regulations and …
we do it all the time. You're a fast learner, son. I'll let my cars through for a while. Good luck, mate.'

‘Thanks,' I say. I'll need it.

I give Ash a wave and her mum rolls down the window.

‘Hey,' says Ash.

‘How are you, Tony?' says her mum.

‘Good,' I reply.

‘What's the hold-up?'

‘We're
fixing
the road.'

‘What's wrong with it?'

‘It's broken.' I look at Ashleigh. ‘How's work going?'

‘Good. Today I got my eyelashes tinted and foils put in my hair. For free.'

‘Looks great,' I say, even though I didn't notice.

‘The lady said I'm ready to do my
first
haircut tomorrow. But only on a mannequin.'

I spot an opportunity. ‘Hey, why do it on a dummy when you can have the real thing? Me.'

Her mouth opens. ‘Would you?'

‘Yeah, sure.'

My walkie-talkie starts crackling. It's Joe.

‘Mate, we've all had a look at her through the binoculars. She's a good sort, all right. But you better let 'em through. There's about twenty cars lined up behind you.'

I take a look and he's right. I hadn't noticed. I turn the sign around. ‘See you tomorrow, then.'

‘I start at seven,' she yells as they drive past. ‘You can come by before work.'

‘No worries.'

I smile. I'm going to get a free haircut
and
get back in Ashleigh's good books, maybe even get her back as my girlfriend.

It's the smartest thing I've done in ages.

*

I tilt my head and feel Ashleigh's
fingers
massaging my scalp. I'm in heaven. Because this is such a posh hairdressing salon I get to have my hair washed before it's cut. I can't remember the last time someone washed my hair. Actually, I can't remember the last time
I
washed my hair.

After drying my head with a towel and bringing the chair upright, Ash gives me a smile. ‘So, what sort of cut do you want?'

I smile back. ‘Whatever you want.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Yeah, I totally trust you. Just make me look sexy.'

She laughs, then gives me a kiss on the forehead. ‘This is going to be
so
good, Tone. You won't regret it.'

I sure won't. Especially if I get more kisses.

She starts off in an unusual way, shaving all the hair off the back with a pair of clippers. Then she does the same on the sides. Looks like I'm in for a buzz cut, which is
fine
with me. Cool Rossy.

Because I haven't had my hair cut in ages, my fringe is really long, and she wets it and pulls it down until it reaches my chin. Then she picks up a pair of scissors and starts randomly chopping off bits at the front and top. She snips away for ages, but I can't see that much because I've got hair covering my eyes.

I'm not sure what she's doing, probably getting some cutting practice before she buzzes the rest of my hair off with the clippers. She squirts some goop into her hand and starts moulding my hair like playdough. It sticks up at funny angles, which I can now see out of one eye. The other eye still has hair over it.

Her touch feels nice, although I don't know what the heck's going on. Probably more practice.

She stops shaping my hair for a second and checks the mirror. I look at myself and am about to laugh. Imagine if the blokes saw me now!

‘Okay, I'm
finished,'
says Ashleigh.

‘What?'

She must be joking. There's hair everywhere you don't expect it to be, like over my ears and left eye, and it's not even close to being straight. It's more like an uneven triangle over my face, as if Simon took a pair of scissors and chopped off a bunch of my hair while I was asleep. Like I did to him that time.

‘It's the latest style,' she says. ‘Emo.'

Emo? You've got to be kidding me. Don't they wear black and listen to sad music all the time?

‘It's about creativity and
being an individual,' she adds.

I feel like telling her that I don't want to be an individual. I just want to look like everyone else.