Blue Moves
Blue Moves is a fable for adults, a rock ’n’ roll ghost western that takes the timeless tale of the Nameless Stranger and twists it right out of shape. Set in a nominal antipodean town in order to scatter it with cultural and indigenous references no one can possibly approve of, and a natural beauty most of us can only imagine, Blue Moves is ultimately about the universal theme of how friendship, when it’s the real deal, can set you free.
Seventeen year-old Fulton Scott lives on the end of a string. Ostracized by the folks of Falls Point and brutalized by his father, he survives on the songs in his head and on the love he takes from Bob, an oversized, oversexed Bull Terrier slated for eviction because of his faggy, humping ways. Falls Point is not a tolerant town. But it has a secret, a nasty one. Two disgruntled employees of the city planners are heading home for payback, and when their path collides with a big black Honda and its mysterious musical rider, there is hell to pay.
DJ Person aka DJ Poison is a dreadlocked tough whose fierce and immediate connection with Fulton and Bob is the mystery at the heart of the story, a bond that will change their lives forever. Her main adversary is Dr Lance Clowe, the town boss with dominance issues who thinks he can blackmail the DJ into helping them with their little problem. Because Lance Clowe likes to say he can bust a move with the best of them… but think again, Doc. Disco is dead.
Praise for Blue Moves:
“Takes up all the air in the room…” Peter Bishop, director of Varuna Writers House.
“With dark, wickedly funny prose, J.S. Breukelaar masterfully blends contemporary small town life with an old West story in Blue Moves. This novel explores how, even in the bleakest of times, the connection between people who have been broken can create a bond that helps them not only survive, but find strength they didn’t know they had. This is a wonderful novel.
Russell Rowland, author of In Open Spaces
Blue Moves
CHAPTER ONE: Elvis Actually
The Honda Blackbird roars down Bay Road with its headlight on, dull and dusty from travel and pulling a parachute of heavy weather behind it. Fulton, even with wires in, gdang, gdang, and eyes down, hears it before he sees it—the groundswell that signals an advancing engine, powerful but not racing, and definitely high end, he thinks, yoinking an earphone. And possibly foreign. So black it’s blue. His heart hammering and the rider hunched into the machine like a lover, dreadlocks whipping out beneath the helmet, doing eighty maybe ninety down toward the Point, past the church, and then it’s gone. Leaving him standing alone and panting at the edge of the road, dust settling and that techno-prowl still wrapped around his slowing heart.
Bay Road runs straight down from the highway, bisects the stubby peninsula like a vein, and then loops around the Point, a distance of no more than a couple of miles. It is the only way in or out of Falls Point. In the sudden silence left in the wake of the bike, the gated homes and high hedges seem to hold their breath; a bird shrieks and then another as if to bully the world back into normality. Fulton hesitates, tight across the chest and legs wobbling. Sound bleeding into the grass from the dangling earphone and above him the muted flap of the silvering sky. A pair of lorikeets perch freeze-framed on the rise—their eyes darting behind impossible camouflage. Fulton shuffles onto the church lawn toward an old messy maple and ducks behind it, flopping onto his back, his cap off and black hair tumbling out and the sweat cooling on his neck. It’s the comfort of buttons and dials he wants more than anything but then, abruptly and without warning, there’s a wet tongue in his ear and it’s Bob, gentle humper, smelling like saltwater and dandruff and weighing in at sixty-five pounds with jaws evolved to rip living flesh from bone. Bob is this: Falls Point’s most wanted dog slash deviant slated for eviction because of his faggy humping ways. Ass-banging the poodles and the purebreds into wide-eyed submission and forcing the Dangerous Breeds Committee to call an emergency meeting of the Town Council to deal with it. Fulton obliges Bob with a stagy groan, submitting to seeking muzzle, ball-crushing love and eye-frying bad breath as Bob’s powerful cheeks pull back in the patient goofy grin of his breed.
The bike veers left and keeps on going to just before the road begins its looping climb around the peninsula. Falls Point hangs out over the vast and indifferent harbor like a hitchhiker’s thumb, wreathed by massed bushland and black rock up high, and lower, pink sculpted foreshore and sandy beaches. To the left and right of the blurring bike are the mansions and gates of the rulers of the realm, who live here high up on the Point, where the flowers are gay and the leaves are always free of dust, and even on a dull day the air takes on the shimmer of the water all around. The machine slows at a crossing, pulls up to the curb and stops, the engine yapping, the bike so big and black and low to the ground with those strangely outdated lines like something from the future. The rider, slight yet in full leathers and with heavy dreadlocks still helmeted, kills the engine, dismounts and pockets the keys. Then walks stiffly toward a gabled two-story home behind a stucco wall, stops at the side gate and lifts a gloved hand to push a keypad. Over it a painted sign says ‘The Ritz’ or would except for the graffiti sprayed over the R so that the legible part of the sign now says, among other things: ‘The Pitz!’ The biker’s shoulders beneath the leathers lift a little and there is an almost imperceptible shake to the helmet as the gate clicks open and she disappears behind it.
Later, Miss Maye says, “Female. Who’d have thunk?”
She stares down Bay Road in the direction of the vanished motorbike. Above her, rust-coloured clouds trawl the evening sky. She leans against a high broken fence that looks like a row of rotten teeth. Beside her house is another one just like it, one of only two Victorian waterfront cottages remaining on the peninsula in its original state; this in spite of the best efforts of Time Out Enterprises, the company that transformed Falls Point from a dockside town into a high-end getaway for the guilty rich. But it was a company town long before that, as far back as 1878, settled by hard men, wharfies, dockers and prostitutes too drunk or opiated to get their brogue around its original name, Thawanbundaanhi, which means either Land of Falls or Fallen Land, no one knew for sure. Whitey could get as far as saying ‘Towonby’ before falling off his bar stool, so Towonby it became. Until Natura Petrochemicals set up shop on the eastern shore after WWII, and decided Towonby sounded too English, so it became Falls Point, a high-falutin name that suited the new kids on the block, Time Out Enterprises, whose investors wanted the non-compliant chemicals giant out, and fast. So to this day no one knows or cares what the name refers to—either a legendary waterfall formed by the severing of the land from the peninsula, or the fact that Falls Point looks, on the map, at least, less like an extension of the land than like an appendage, a finger maybe, or a thumb, that has fallen off and is now hanging by a rocky tendon. Most folks don’t care; the more cut off the better. But Fulton has seen some of the ancient drawings scratched into cave walls deep in the bush and has told no one what they portray: violent and apparently one-sided tectonic events in which the peninsula seems to be trying to break free of the land, to escape, out of guilt maybe, or shame, or fear, he can’t be sure.
Fulton lives in the basement of the apartment building next door with his old man, the janitor. The Bay View, a glass and brick sprawl clinging to the steep slope of the peninsula with views across the bay to the west and the city to the east is one of the new developments built by Time Out Enterprises in the 80s. Bennet Scott, who once worked for Time Out in a much more glamorous role, would seem well past his ‘use-by’ date except for his humongous schlong, a tool handy for distracting the select group of female residents from faulty pipes and cracking plaster, women whose needs, unable to be met in the real world, can be found reflected in the lashless eyes of their backdoor man. Fulton shivers on the sidewalk, a tight empty feeling in his stomach because he forgot to eat, forgot to think, too anxious to do anything but get out of the apartment, leave the old man to his meds and rubber gloves, but it had taken him longer than usual tonight, longer to find a vein to give the old man his shot, to find his clothes and keys and ear phones. Then he’d rushed his shower and stepped haphazardly into the wrong jeans.
“Her timing is interesting,” says Miss Maye with that sideways pull to her lower lip. “Do you think it has anything to do with the Hegartys?” The streetlights paint shadows across her face. Miss Maye is Bob’s official owner. Auntie Em is what they call her in Falls Point and when they start with that he just goes into his own head. Just because she never married or had kids of her own but instead takes in stray dogs like Bob. And Old Tryke too just because she drives a Ute and a vagitarian even though he has seen her eat chicken.
“Surely you’ve heard. Even you. The Hegartys are due back again at the end of next month?”
He looks past her toward Bay Road Village, nodding yes and no because he wants nothing and he hopes for nothing. His hands feel cold. The Hegartys were before his time or at the end of it, he’s never sure. Miss Maye bends down to take Bob’s wrecking ball head in her hands, his batwing ears unfurling and raising his umber eyes to narrow back up at her, her pink torso reflected in the black slits.
“A little known fact is that the Staffy is descended from Mastiffs—red-mawed beasts who ruled the pit and ruined the punter,” she says. The plastic tie where she’d pulled off the price tag sticks out on the inside of her sweatshirt hood. “But there’s always a ‘but,’ you troublemaker, you, and the Dangerous Breeds Committee knows you couldn’t hurt a fly, foolish humping giant that you are.” She continues but with a subtle change in tone and delivery that makes him hold his breath. “You know, one ‘but’ crosses my mind. That maybe the unexpected return of Spike and Mike Hegarty will take precedence at tomorrow’s council meeting over an old dog with dominance issues. We can only hope, what do you think?”
He smells surrender on himself, the smell of it rank upon him and he wishes the spring would hurry up and come so the smell of jasmine and sweet blue dust would mask the reek of his lost and squandered will.
“Bob or no Bob, I shouldn’t think those boys have a chance in Hades of getting their back pay from the Time Out bosses, especially after fourteen years,” Miss Maye says. “There must be a statute of limitations on these things, don’t you think?”
Here is what he knows about Time Out Enterprises. It is the company that owns Falls Point and it can make people disappear. It is a property development company, turnarounds, a tax shelter for white-collar criminals but there is something random at its core, a mission statement its directors keep between themselves like a blokey joke they’ve sworn never to repeat.
Miss Maye looks up at him. He flicks his eyes toward the pale orange glow of the Falls Point Village. Saturday night lights calling to him, acting on him. And he can’t think about all this now, about how he’ll get on without Bob, he can’t. Can’t think about meetings that he won’t attend, or if Miss Maye is right, and if any good can possibly come from the Hegartys’ return, which he is pretty sure it can’t.
No one has anything good to say about the Hegartys.
“Goddess knows,” she says, standing up. “I’ve got them fighting over my land again and the Dangerous Breeds Committee gunning for Bob’s humping heiney and that all pretty much makes both you and me the meat in a poo sandwich. Doesn’t it?”
She pulls up the zipper of her sweatshirt and moves out of the light.
“Poor silent child. Why do you stay?” her jaw pulling to the side like maybe somebody broke it once. “You know, someone said—Elvis actually—that there are only two stories in the world.” She holds two fingers up. “The story of come and the story of gone. It’s your choice, you know that.”
He gives her back her peace sign and turns toward the Village because what he knows is that it is Saturday night and his birthday.
And much later he is standing at the edge of the underage crowd outside Spanky’s Bar, holding a slimy can of coke and waiting for DJ Night to begin. Spanky’s is a single room above the IGA on Bay Road, half-way between the Point and the highway. There is a balcony at the rear of the building facing over the bay and it caters to the local capitalists and to their offspring who wait outside and make do with a chipped patch of asphalt that by day is the IGA loading dock and by night is a place to set up a beatbox on a milk crate, to exchange punches, contraband and blowjobs—sometimes all three at once. He has never been upstairs, behind the cold red neon sign, behind the musak and murmurs.
It is late but when you’re a DJ it’s never too late and the talk on the street is that the strange visitor is a famous DJ, in these parts because of business in a nearby town. They’ve all been on about it ever since the bike roared down Bay Road and parked outside The Pitz—and Elaine Pitts, the proprietor, breathlessly reporting how the rider took off her helmet unleashing dreadlocks that brushed the top of her boots, and how the rest of her equipment would be arriving later. The DJ said that the garage better be secure for the bike, and Mrs Pitts assured her it was, standing well back.
Fulton leans against a towering silver gum about a metre behind the tree line—its thick folded flesh firm and cool against the bruises on his back. He nervously inhales eucalyptus and below it the carpetty smell of spilt beer and a whiff of salt from the bay and his own body, boy-jam and hair-dye and clean shirt. Bottle-black tendrils veil his face, because of all the things he has taught himself over the years, the most important is how to move softly in the fearful spaces so that whatever is out there in the dark will pass him by. A ridge falls a hundred feet down to Briar Canyon Road which runs parallel to Bay Road, and the foreshore another couple of hundred feet below that, every cave and bay and hidden rocky reef projected on the walls of his mind, like living inside a hologram. He watches and waits trying not to think about the Hegartys or about anything. He tells himself to relax. No one sees him, or if they do, they don’t really see him. At his feet, the dog, whose pulse bat an urgent countdown and along his spine, a blunt swathe of hackles on the rise.
Because there is something nervous and on-edge to the party tonight. The gang is going through their moves but not like they mean it. Fatty Fu throwing himself down for a half-hearted rendition of the Funky Chicken beside the label-pasted b-box and Brett’s paint-stained fingers squeezing the life out of a can of Beam.
Because Saturday night is DJ Night. The air hangs thick with deodorant and weed, the hard glow from upstairs picking up the bleached tips of their hair, varnished fingernails. They pull soupy beer from a keg supplied by Brenda’s cousin Butch and rag and brag and pull bongs and split pills. DJ Night is a night for being outside and wishing you were in. It is a night to wait. Watch for the old-timers to weave down the stairs so you can jeer them on. Wait for midnight and for Dale Stubbs, DJ by night and school bus driver by day, to start working that old rig, to start spinning phat and filthy so the kids can have it.
And a few of them still talking about the bike.
“Were it black or blue?”
“It were black and blue.”
Almost everyone who should be at Spanky’s has already gone up. Only the stragglers remain hurrying past full of talk about the massive bike parked outside The Pitz. They talk about how it disappeared quick smart behind the clean double doors into the garage fitted with back-to-base security for the Mayor’s BMW. They relate third-hand what Mrs. Pitz had told Birdie Stubbs about it: a big black THING, she’d said: Yes, like a bug or a bird. But his keen ears pick up a friction to their talk that wasn’t there earlier; a grinding of gears in the rusty old engine of fear that will keep Falls Point running on empty forever.
Then, the creak of leather and the crunch of boots on gravel before he sees her, the anticipation thrumming at his temples, the sudden clutch in his chest. She comes around the corner of the building and moves into an abrupt white wash of light and he forgets to breathe. Her dreadlocks are pulled up off the high curve of her forehead and hang heavily down her back, shoulders square in blue-padded leather; opaque blue wraparound glasses and glossed lips set in a loose yet wilful curve. Taking them all in. The thudding beat box resting on a milk crate and the sprinkle of slack-jawed bottom feeders frozen mid-break. The sad patch of chipped asphalt lit by the orange glow from the upstairs windows. She looks smaller than on the bike, almost dwarfed by the dreads and she walks erect past with an easy, supple strength to her movements, a coiled grace. She goes through and he watches her step ramrod straight up the stairs, feeling his knees buckle and sliding down the trunk of the tree, the dog rigid beside him.
Is it really her? In person?
At the top of the stairs is another door. You push that open and you’re inside, the double doors to the terrace to your left, the bar ahead of you. He’s pieced together the layout from Dale’s Facebook page. Fulton stays outside but it is easy for him to imagine what happens next, because when they hear the sigh of the leathers moving up the stairs and smell her perfume and taste the musky tang of her sweat (the stranger is not exactly dark, according to Birdie, but not white either), or at least dream about it, they too will know she has arrived.
“Bitch just walked in like she owns the place,” Lex Spanky, the publican, will complain the next day. Fulton doesn’t need to be there. He closes his eyes and listens, made easier when someone kills the beat box and props the back door open with a crate so that, without stepping foot inside, they can hear snatches from the parking circle below. He stares up at the flame-coloured rectangles of light from the terrace windows until flames fill his vision, and the he is floating, floating up over the fire and into Spanky’s and hovers at her back, where he drifts, watching. Waiting. Listening. His mind filling in the blanks. How she walks across the floor past a smattering of wood-look tables each with a red candle and plastic caddy with racing forms and pencil. How she gives Dale Stubbs at the decks by the dance floor the stink-eye and how when she gets to the fake brass and wood bar, Lex Spanky, with eyes narrowed and fear puckering her chin, spills a packet of chips onto the bar top instead of into the plastic bowl she was aiming for. From the parking lot below, he hears a tinkle of glass and he listens to Dale nudge the gain and gamely start up with some pathetic battle patter and Fulton could have told him that was a bad idea, and turns out it is.
Because then, with the TV news above the bar on mute and the harsh glow of the pool tables to the left seeming to pulsate, the stranger’s shoulders stiffen a little but without tension. She swirls the whisky around her mouth a little longer than necessary and the curled edges of her wide mouth stiffen. She replaces the glass on the soggy coaster with more deliberation than she needs to. In the end there is a tired purpose to the way she pushes herself off the barstool that doesn’t do much for the pretense of conversation around her. By the time she makes her way through the sparse crowd to Dale and whispers something in his ear that he’ll later blog as six guns at noon or but is more likely give me some room, no one is saying anything except with their eyes. Dale shoves the headset at her and half backs up, half falls over the milk crate of albums in his hurry to oblige. She moves behind the deck and flips one record onto the B-side, cues it to the drum intro, counts out sixteen bars on the A-side and drops a phatty right on cue, cutting down to where the melody gives way to those thin and lovesick vocals the backbeat lending them a strength and purity they don’t deserve, and totally lost, according to Dale, on the crowd.
Outside, Bob’s ears lay flat against on his skull and his eyes narrow to slits. There is a halting skitter of applause as the stranger returns to the bar, where Lex’s boys are waiting for her, dressed in freshly creased jeans with their hair still wet from the shower—Kev’s dark waves and Luther’s white-yellow crew-cut as square as a box. Kev Spankawolski and Luther Marks are enforcers, the kind of muscle that always springs up around new money and power like Time Out. But Kev and Luther come over from West Falls, where there are no high hedges or sparkling waters. They live crowded with dogs, chooks, girlfriends, step-cousins, faded John Pauls and scattered kielbasa skins, into a double-brick box in a treeless street on the mainland, the other side of the gorge. The Spankawokski family are a package deal—get one, you get them all—and they have run the town bar for two generations. Like the rest of the riffraff brought or allowed in to meet the needs of the founding fathers, they move in tight, treacherous circles. Fulton’s ears throb and his eyes behind his hair sting from squinting up at the orange light of the terrace windows and from Brett Clemens’s stolen Longbeaches. He hears the scrape of barstools and, in snatches, the men’s harsh weak voices.
“Speak of the devil,” says Luther.
“You a DJ or something?” says Kevin.
The stranger sits a little straighter, but it is still a peaceful upright pose. Her silver-ringed thumb teases at a coaster on the bar, and once she leans forward to get Lex’s attention for another drink. But Lex has her back to the bar, with blue mascara-ed eyes on her boys in the mirror tiles. The stranger flips the coaster over and over on its four corners.
“I think she’s shy,” says Kevin.
“I like em shy, but,” says Luther, licking the beer foam from his white moustache.
At the end of the bar, one old-timer says something in a low voice. His companion bangs his glass back down and spits, “Spike was the crazy one.”
No one in Falls Point has anything good to say about the Hegartys.
Outside, Fulton’s balls palpate in the direction of three-four girls tapping toward the door with high, full breasts above flimsy necklines. Trying not to pant, he watches them go up the stairs and disappear through the door. Before it closes he hears, or thinks he hears, Luther let out a low whistle:
“Hey boy, pussy alert.”
And Kev, along with everyone at the bar including the stranger, swings around to watch the girls make their way across the floor. This gives Lex the chance she’s been waiting for to refresh the stranger’s drink and drop a little extra something into it besides—reflexes, she’ll explain later; she used to work on the cruise-lines. The boys turn around again and Luther lights up a Longbeach from a packet Lex pushes across the bar to him—and that’s the signal.
“Anyway,” he says through a deep inhale. “DJs got those strange names, don’t they? D-one thing and another.” Exhale. “Maybe we can call you D-Parted? How does that sound?”
“D-Farted,” giggles Kev through small pink lips. “D-pucken-farted.”
Which slightly ruins the menacing effect Luther was aiming for. He flushes and tells Kev to shut it. The stranger downs her shot and sets the glass back down calmly on the coaster. If she seems to be smiling at the expense of the men who watch her, the men who wait, that’s not her problem. If the crowd sees itself reflected badly in her lenses even when it isn’t, couldn’t be, that is its problem, not hers. So why Fulton, waiting downstairs pressed against a mangy old Bull Terrier, should feel abruptly fearful, not of, but for her, he doesn’t know. But next thing, he’s on his feet and so is Bob—tail up, wang out, and ears pinned back—an amorphous blob, like those ink blots the school counsellor gave him long ago to make him talk. Raw shocks, she called them.
“Hey, D-Parted,” says Luther at the bar. “You got news? Because if not…”
“Newsflash,” she finally says, her words already slurred. “I bet I can bust at least one nose, maybe two, before this rufie kicks in. How’s that for news?”
Fulton has never been slipped a Mickey, so he has no real point of reference for the spiralling heaviness, that crotch-melting chill she will try to describe to him later. Not a goofball this time, she will be quick to explain, but GHB, maybe or rohypnol more likely. He will learn how it has taken her lifetimes to finally master the art of riding the wave instead of drowning in it, because after all it’s easier than it sounds. So she straightens a little at the bar and closes her eyes. Inhales through her nose. Fills her lungs, and outside he holds his breath too.
Kevin—whose unleashed thinking can stray rabid for days—wiggles his tongue-stud and giggles. Luther drains his beer and wipes his moustache with a hard red finger. He stretches his neck to one side and then the other. You just have to time it, she will explain. Like cueing a record for the perfect release, right on time—beat for beat—so there’s no excess noise in the system.
Dale Stubbs starts moving toward the exit himself as if what he is about to witness is safer seen from a distance.
But so far, there is nothing about the toughness of this game to warn Kev or Luther that it’s different from any other, so the older man blows a cocky stream of smoke over her head and Kev is twitchy on her left—all horny grin and spit-licked stubble—rubbing his balls against the bar stool. He’ll keep. The DJ, who has played games of a kind of toughness neither of them can imagine, turns to Luther, bending into it, the sudden swivel off the stool, taking all her weight on her right leg so that her left boot, stamping down on Luther’s instep, turns three metatarsals into jelly. She levers a padded elbow into his nose—driving it in a centimetre and a half. His hands fly to his spouting face and he jerks back enough for her to heft a steel-reinforced knee to his crotch and then he goes down in a spirograph of spit and blood to be rendered roaring foetal on the rug. Dreadlocks fanning out as she turns to Kev, jaw hanging open like a stroke victim, drool bungying down his lip. She snaps her fingers under his nose and he blinks; finds his focus and jabs out with his right, but she blocks it with a twist and a crack audible from the tree line, where Fulton stands, dripping sweat and mouth hanging open. She knifes both hands down either side of Kevvy’s head so she can grip those hairy ears in a move that comes back to her from across the rushing years—rows of skinny kids in white uniforms and Grandmaster Wu beneath a rusty gym hoop getting a senior boy to translate: “After the block, take opponent by ears and smash nose down onto lifted knee, while hands of steel squeeze scrotum until enemy screams like little girl.”
Easy enough to do if you get your timing right even when riding the wave of a slippery mick, and she does but only just.
Because it’s tight with Kevin twitching under the stool and Luther on the floor with blood bearding his jaw, and Lex rushing around with towels mopping up blood, yelling, “Fuck me dead, oh fuck me dead,” and the crowd frozen mid-flinch but not for long. Go for the gap, Fulton thinks, and she does. Makes it through the door before tumult breaks out, half falling down the stairs and into the chill night. Jerking her upright with a gasp and a jangle of keys. To seek damp-faced the one she saw earlier, not the underage Idol wannabes, but the one standing at the edge of the canyon with girl-hair and eyes the color of mist. And finds him, slammed up against the tree, smooth hard leather against his soft boy-body. And something pressed into his hand, keys sharp-ridged and cold, her slim will pushed up against his, needful and strong and her face turned up to him wet with tears because after all, Lex’s goofball is no laughing matter. The fuzz of her dreads on his neck, her body against his, the smell of the lotion she wears. He closes his hand around her fingers and sees himself in her mirrored lenses pale as a ghost. Bob backs into the scrub, kicking up rot and barking up a lung and she pushes away, bent at the knee and her wide mouth gone slack. He watches his reflection disappear and other shapes, dark and unknowable, move across her lenses and she stumbles past, surrendering finally to the drug’s vicious pull and inevitably, the edge of the ridge.
He takes one step back into the scrub. And another. Thinks about the person living his life somewhere else. Beyond Falls Point. Doing the things he could have done. Somewhere in the city. Going to music school. Being the man he could have been. In another place
