A music, sex and drug-fuelled excerpt from Australian writer Kate Scott’s debut book, ‘Compulsion’
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEUNG ROK BAEK
WORDS BY KATE SCOTT
“Shows ended, inevitably, with everyone on stage. Parties ended, inevitably, with everyone undressed.”
Content warning: This article discusses drug use.
The coke’s white-magic alchemy made me bulletproof – a temporary state, but a useful one. Anika raked out another four lines with her deft surgical precision, and we gobbled them up. Then we lay back into the floor and waited for something to happen.
We’d been waiting all day for one thing or another. Drugs to arrive, water to crystallise into cubes, the right feelings and chemicals to accrete in our receptors. Above all, we’d been waiting for the night, and like everything, it was taking forever.
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The sun’s last cherry streaks tore the sky with agonising slowness and the same Lee Hazelwood album played all afternoon, both of us too heat drunk to choose another. Yet part of me was coiled in readiness because part of me always was.
“So,” said Anika, lighting a cigarette. “What should we do?”
“Well, there’s the Pink Fist show. We could cool down by taking an illicit swim or riding the silk-lined elevator of The Elysium. Or maybe we could find The Unspoiled Monster.” I lit a cigarette too, as if smoke might diffuse the terrible want of this last impulse.
“Surely not.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “We could just stay here, put on Fleetwood Mac and finish the coke.”
“That is not the purpose of my coke. We need to hitch this buzz into the evening, or nobody will be finding anyone.” And then, with the right degree of censure, she said, “We’ll discuss The Unspoiled in the cab.”
Everyone knew The Unspoiled Monster. I suppose everyone knew me too, but The Unspoiled was famous in that highly localised way passionate spectators are famous just for showing up to things. He had impeccable taste, excellent bones. And the height of his particular beauty coalesced perfectly with the times.
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It was a strange, tense, electric epoch. Sixty thousand body bags had been acquired by the city in case our machines failed on New Year’s Eve. A redundant precaution, it transpired, but a contingent of us – young, hungry, predisposed to ecstatic nihilism – found the symbolism irresistible and decided to go out swinging. We found a soundtrack in the dark drama of high-camp electro, music that equated glamour with self-immolation.
Every week, new 12-inches materialised from an imagined 1983: minor-key hymns to pleasure and leisure, polaroids and sleek androids, caviar and crashing cars, strict machines and deep ravines. Shows ended, inevitably, with everyone on stage. Parties ended, inevitably, with everyone undressed. If The Unspoiled was engineered for anything, it was this. He only had to stand still. He only had to wait.
We met officially when I interviewed him for the magazine, when the job was still fresh and good. Then, I’d spend whole days on the telephone with musicians. They’d talk of their compulsions, their idols, their sudden renouncement of guitars for keyboards, and their sudden renouncement of keyboards for guitars.
These conversations seldom went beyond 20 minutes, but intimacy was swift and palpable. The Unspoiled and I compared proclivities, graphed shared obsessions, and started meeting in ferocious assignations. I’d found a perfect, alabastrine surface on which to smash myself.
The air outside crackled and rasped. Our cab pulled away from the curb, and Anika opened the windows to drink in the dissolving afternoon. We stalked overpasses and underpasses, speeding towards Pink Fist. She had decided this, but Pink Fist were my band, my discovery, and invisibly yoked to The Unspoiled, so only a six-car pile-up could keep me away.
“So,” she said. She shook out two pills, relined her eyes in a pocket mirror, and fixed me with her ersatz violet gaze. “The Unspoiled. Is that a good idea?”
“Probably not,” I said, chewing my capsule, meditating on this. “I haven’t had a good idea in ages.”
The day was finally licked, stars now magnifying the twinkle of skyscrapers and skyscrapers imitating the twinkle of stars. The cab edged around a rattling bus, and the city pulled into focus: fire-bright, twitchy, leaking rum and sulphur. I braided Anika’s hand into mine, and we dashed to the club.
We lost each other immediately, so I shoved my way to the bar. Someone yelled, “Did you listen to my CD yet?”, and someone grabbed at my skirt, but I angled my shoulder to a weaponised ‘V’ and kept moving. The abiding fact of The Unspoiled was his eel-slipperiness; never being where you wanted or expected. He didn’t own a phone, so finding him required going into the night, ostensibly not looking. Tonight was unusual. Tonight, the chorus directly followed the verse.
“Hello, Editrix.” He stood at the bar, backlit to alien magnificence by an exit sign. “I thought you might be here. What have you been up to?”
“Putting out hundreds of small fires with my own blood,” I said. “Do you have any cigarettes?”
Inventing tragedies was my specialty, and The Unspoiled my best rendered to date. Enamelled green eyes, untroubled countenance, something nasty starting to harden at his jaw. A lock of red hair that brushed the creamy gold of his brow, enormous strong-knuckled hands.
I stood close to him, our heads near-touching as we bowed over an ashtray. We took inventory of the seven-inches and 12-inches released that week, the bands that had imploded, and the new ones who had taken their place – all called Crystal this or Wolf that, as that year’s zeitgeist demanded.
The Unspoiled played keyboards for the loudest and most novel, moving on the instant he got bored. That he couldn’t read a note didn’t matter; he was tall to the point of impracticality and imposing behind any machine.
He asked if I’d heard The Terrible Lakes, racing ahead of me towards the next thing – whatever was harder and weirder, wherever the cutest and most unhinged girls hung out – but I wrested it back, pinned him down.
“I have a great confluence of feelings around you.” I said this standing on tiptoe so it landed in his neck.
He leaned down. “Which is mutual, in a fashion. And impractical, as we’ve established at length.”
“Well, let’s put a full stop to it. No more colons and semi-colons, no more drawn-out sets of en dashes, no more tortuous ellipses. Let’s get out of here.”
Time arched, stretched like a cat. The Unspoiled met my gaze. Ecstatic suspension. He clenched his jaw in the manner I knew by rote, taking a drag from his cigarette to prolong things further. It was already happening. I was flooded with calm.
“Ok. I’ll get my keyboard and meet you around the back.”
This is an edited extract from Compulsion by Kate Scott (Penguin Random House, $32.99), available now here.
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