He killed a Gothic Punk girl. There was her picture in the morning paper
- a gorgeous girl (as all goth girls are) in purple and black velvet, standing
in her parents' loungeroom holding a single red rose. Almost all of us had
practically identical photos in our photo albums.
Look into any punk's photo collection and you're bound to find at least one
teenage snap in front of the telly or the bookshelf or the open fireplace
or mum's rhododendrons. The tell-tale family details sprinkle the background:
framed pictures and tacky ornaments on lace doilies, cheap Monet prints,
teaspoon collections. The juxtaposition of punk child amidst parents' trinkets
always looks charming and nostalgic. It shows, more than anything else, our
parents' pride in us.
I can't describe how angry I was when I found out he killed a goth girl.
I'd read about so many other murders in the newspapers, even other murders
by this same bastard, but this one ate at me for days. He'd killed one of
us. One of my people.
The gothic scene is a fairly small and intimate one in this city, just like
any other. I'd probably seen her dancing in one of the clubs. Her signature
could have been the one above mine on the "I need a Cure tour" petition.
She could have been the girl in the fantastic Cramps t-shirt I stood behind
at the Mission concert a couple of years back. She could have been the girl
I pick up at the club next weekend. She could have been.... She could have
been.
I had a distasteful kind of anger boiling away inside me for days, willing
me towards destruction but somehow never quite letting me get there. I hated
that bastard for killing that girl. So I didn't go to Uni. I hated him for
killing someone who loved the same music as me. So I drank myself legless
every night. I hated him for putting an end to such a gorgeous girl's beauty.
So I turned all my cash into white powder and snorted it.
The first Friday night, club night, after her picture appeared in the paper,
I was drunk and speeding and barely able to stay upright at the bar. My best
mates, Andy and Justin, couldn't work out what was eating me. They took it
in turns to nurse me and keep me out of trouble, and there was plenty for
me to get into.
They talked my way out of one fight I'd tried like hell to get into. And
it took both of them to literally haul me off a guy who made some remark
about the Sisters of Mercy being a better band than Bauhaus. By four in the
morning the speed still had me flying and I had a beautiful black-and-purple-clad
girl against a cubicle wall in the ladies' toilet. As I came, I burst into
tears and sobbed into her alabaster neck while our legs trembled. She licked
the tears from my cheek and told me what a sensitive guy I must be. Justin,
banging on the cubicle door, shouted out I was just a mad bastard and a Bauhaus
song had just come on, so let's dance!
On the dancefloor, with my mates, surrounded by pale, gorgeous girls and
boys, assaulted by the best music in the world, I forgot about her for a
little while. I danced `til my thighs shook, `til my t-shirt was soaked in
sweat, `til my air-sole Docs seemed to have lost some of their bounce. And
I forgot. But then it was closing time and daylight had to be faced.
As Andy, Justin and I stepped out of the club into the harsh, bright, six
a.m. sun, my first thought was which pocket of my leather jacket were my
shades hiding in? My second thought was, he killed a goth girl. I felt like
running. It had rained during the night and the deserted city streets were
slick with rainbow oil patches shimmering under foot. It felt good, jogging
down the middle of the road, silver earrings jingling, cold breeze rising
up off the asphalt to blow some of the club-stink of smoke and dry ice out
of my hair. Andy and Justin fell in beside me and we ran for a while in almost
silence, just the fall of our steps, the creak of our leather jackets and
the rattle of Andy's boot buckles. We ran as far as the river and sat down
to catch our breath on a bench damp with morning dew. Our breath caught in
the air as we exhaled, a phenomenon I called Dragon Breathing when I was
a kid. Justin's black nail polish was chipped. I noticed this when he put
his hand on my knee. I didn't feel it at first `cause it was a light touch
and black denim's a pretty thick fabric. But then he gripped, released, gripped,
released a few times and I looked down at his black-tipped hand.
`What's with you, Dan?'
I wanted to hug him. Wanted to put my hands inside his leather jacket and
feel his bony ribs through his black lace shirt and hug him and hug him and
hug him. But I was too angry.
`That bastard killed one of us.' I looked across the river, over the brown
water and floating rubbish, to the new shopping development on the other
side. A new crystal and tarot shop was opening up there soon. She'd never
see it.
`Who did?' asked Andy. `That prick down the coast, killing those women. One
of them was a goth. She was gorgeous.'
`Yeah, I saw the paper,' said Justin, `She looked a bit like my sister, I
thought.'
`Did you see him on the news after they arrested him?' I was talking more
to the river than to either of my friends. `What gets at me most, apart from
there being one less beautiful girl in the world now, is that that prick
is the sort of person everyone else calls normal. There he was with his blue
jeans and his American runners and his daggy jumper pulled up over his head.
They'd look at him and say he was normal. But they look at us and call us
freaks. People stare at us and point and laugh and call us all sorts of things
just because we look different. If you put that bastard and me in a room
and asked a sweet little old lady to pick which one of us murdered people
for thrills, she'd choose me everytime. Because he looks "normal". It makes
me so fucking angry. I just wanna scream.'
Justin's white hand crept up from my knee to my thigh and squeezed companionably.
I suddenly remembered a time we got stoned together when we were seventeen.
Justin's parents were never the kind to check up on him when he had friends
over. So we'd smoked `til our eyelids drooped then undressed each other in
slow motion and exchanged virginities on the pool table. It was a special
friend you could do stuff like that with. I wanted to cry again.
`If you wanna scream,' Andy shrugged next to me, `Go ahead and scream. Who's
gonna hear you at this time of the morning?'
I sniffed and looked around me. Andy was right. We were the only people stupid
enough to be out this early. I opened my mouth, not really expecting any
sound to come out. But it did. I screamed out over the river, up at the sky,
heard my voice scream back at me after bouncing off buildings. I swore. I
cursed. Eventually I cried. And it felt good. Andy and Justin took me home
to my place and pushed me into bed. Andy was starting to come down, so he
left to head home himself. Justin was about to follow suit when I asked him
to stay.
`She did look like your sister, now you mention it.' I told him as he wrapped
my shivering body in the black satin top sheet and let me sob against his
chest until our mouths found each other.
Four days later I finally sobered up, came down, got straight. The preceding
days were a blur of vodka, nightmares, speed and Justin's hands. Then the
news said the final victim had been buried yesterday after a small family
service. That was her.
I grabbed my leather jacket and my sunglasses and jumped into my Volkswagen,
heading for the suburb the papers said she grew up in. I once went out with
a girl from the same `burb and we used to picnic in the local cemeteries.
I at least had an idea of where to start looking for her.
I found her in the third place I looked. The smaller, prettier graveyard
with more ivory angels of death than all the others. Very gothic. She'd be
pleased. The fresh grave was easy to spot, with its fertile brown earth and
temporary headstone/marker. So many fresh flowers! So many wreaths and cards
and spilled tears.
I dropped down onto the ground, my black-jeaned knees sinking into the disturbed
soil. I didn't know what I wanted to do or say now that I was here alone
with her. I fiddled with the blood red petals of a rose for a bit while I
thought about her. I thought about her smile in the photo in the paper. I
thought about her stab wounds. I thought about how resplendent her friends
must have looked at her funeral, all decked out in their finest black lace
and velvets. I thought about the empty space at her parents' dining table.
An idea suddenly came to me and I started scrambling around in my jacket
pockets, turning out whatever treasures I could find. A home-taped cassette
of the Bauhaus singles album. A free pass to my favourite club. A black silk
scarf I had used as a playful bondage implement on more than a few partners.
A hip flask half-full of Jack Daniel's. An empty, crumpled speed bag. A broken
silver necklace with an ornate cross dangling from it.
I laid these things out on the soil and looked at them for a moment, remembering
how the Ancient Egyptians used to give the dead useful things for the next
life. Took a few swigs from the hip flask. Stuffed the empty speed bag back
into my pocket. Then I spread the scarf out, placing the cassette and the
free pass on it and tied it all together with the silver necklace. The bundle,
once firmly tied, looked vaguely like an old fashioned draw-string bag, the
dangling cross on the necklace standing starkly against the black silk. It
was a weird kind of offering, but it was all I had. And they were my things.
A personal kind of offering. I placed it at the base of the temporary marker
and sat back on my heels.
Tragedy had never touched my life. I'd never lost anyone close to me. She,
the girl I'd read about in a newspaper, was the first recipient of my mourning.
Was it okay to be so angry? Feel so self- destructive? To want to drink more
and fuck harder and take more drugs? To want to scream and cry and throw
myself against things?
An enormous black crow "faarked!" beside me, making me jump. I looked at
my watch and saw I'd knelt there for almost an hour. I hadn't told Justin
where I was going. He might be worrying. Then again, I'd been a hell of an
arsehole to be around since I saw her in the paper, so maybe Justin was glad
to be rid of me for a while. Nah... he was my best mate, of course he was
worried about me. I had to get home and let him know I was okay.
I gulped down the last of the bourbon and slid the hip flask back into my
leather jacket. My knees made a cracking noise as I stood up and dusted the
brown dirt off my jeans, wondering what the most appropriate way of saying
goodbye to her would be. I realised quickly there wasn't an appropriate way.
So I bent down and pressed my cold lips to the first initial of her name
on the marker, letting my tongue snake out to touch it softly. Stuffing my
hands into the pockets of my jacket, I backed away from the grave, only turning
my back on her when I was far enough away to not be able to read her name
anymore. Then I put my head down and stormed out of the cemetery, back to
my Volks, back to my rooms, back to Justin and Andy, back to Uni, back to
my life. And I hated that bastard every day for killing a goth girl.
the end.