Where I Slept by Libby Angel

Author:Libby Angel [Libby Angel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

SPECIAL K

A collective of DJs starts an underground techno club called the Temple, which pops up on Thursday nights at various venues around the city and the inner suburbs. (None of the spaces has been hired legally—it’s a matter of staying ahead of the law.) It is at one of these parties that Angus hooks up with Special K, and they quickly become a unit.

Special K is thick-limbed and her skin is speckled. She is always smiling and her mouth seems to take up most of her face. When she visits, which is often, Special K brings boxes of vegetables from her family’s hydroponic farm on the outskirts of the city. She likes to cook for us: porridge with fruit and coconut milk in the mornings, and lentil and vegetable soup for tea. Sit down, she orders us. Eat! The rodents are banished from the kitchen and the dishes stand gleaming in the dishrack. We are no longer a household, but a posse. Her ebullience is almost indecent.

On an industrial sewing machine in her parents’ shed, Special K sews pants and matching jackets from patchworked fabric remnants. She makes T-shirts appliquéd with stars and hearts, and matching tube skirts and crop tops from fractal-patterned cotton jersey. She sells her wares at a small shop on G Street, where most of the customers are their friends from the Temple.

Angus starts wearing K’s designs, even to work. He has to use bicycle clips on his pants because the pantlegs are so wide. Then Special K makes Zero an outfit out of green and orange Fair Isle machine-knitted remnants. With her orange dreadlocks, Zero looks like she was born in it. Naturally, Paul gets on board, although the effect is not quite the same. Special K makes him a pair of loose pants with appliquéd stars, but they cling disconcertedly to his crotch, even while he looks like a giant toddler. He starts teasing his fine hair into fuzzy dreadlocks.

When the Temple crew go to Sydney to hold a series of raves, Special K, Zero and Paul go with them, leaving me alone in the house with Barnacle Boy and Teagan.

Barnacle Boy quickly takes advantage of the others’ absence, even going so far as to deal drugs out of Teagan’s bedroom. A series of desperadoes turn up at the door, each more far-gone-looking than the last. I come home to find a woman vomiting in the front yard or a man dialled out on the mattress in the lounge room. Fin makes a brief reappearance and the sculptor comes by. I hear them down the passageway in the small room: tap, tap, tap.

I bail up Teagan in the kitchen.

‘This is not a business-zoned area,’ I say.

She grips the edge of the table and looks at me through a tress of hair in her practised waif-like way. ‘I haven’t got anywhere else to go,’ she says.

When I next see Mace on the street, I beg her to return to forty-seven. She is almost tired of the sculptor; I can see it in her face.

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