Three

June 2nd 2000.

Jay strode back to our table. Sweat had made his hair slick. He stabbed the air in front of my face.
“Come on, dance, I'll get a song played for you.”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Let's dance, put your red shoes on and dance the blues.”

“Steady on, you almost seem enthusiastic.”

“It’s only an act. Don’t tell anyone,” His shoulders sagged by exactly 5 centimetres only to rebound
rolling into his face as a smile, “when in Rome and other clichés.”

Jay puts his hands on his hips and looks at me seriously. Eyes glinting, eye brows raised.
“I don’t like to see you sitting here alone. It looks like you’re having a crisis.”

”Crisis? Shut up. I am as stable as this table.”

”Stability and happiness don’t always go together. I'm always ok, as in I can soldier on and function.”

“I question your functionality.”

“It’s possible to function and achieve while depressed.”

“I don't envy you for knowing that.”

“Last chance...”
“It's cool, I'll just soak up the atmosphere.”
_______________________

I met Jay several years beforehand. About two years before I started to keep a diary, sometime in 1995 -
High school - Year Twelve.

I had hoped to be a journalist. The dream didn't quite come to fruition. I didn’t have the courage to try
for that, plus I didn’t get the marks in the dreaded Year Twelve to get in first try.

I went science as a second option.

Now I pay the bills with a wine career. I work long days for about three months of the year, staining my
hands with red wine and tannin as a winemaker for Glenview, in Ten Mile Creek. Never heard of Ten
Mile Creek? - it is not quite the Barossa Valley in marketing terms. Ten Mile Creek conveniently located
two hours south of Adelaide on a windswept plain. It is near highways. Highways help keep transport
cost down. It is efficient, if not romantic.

The namesake Ten Mile Creek rarely has water in it. The water for the vineyards comes from
underground aquifers.

Glenview you ask? Not all that famous we tend to make wine for other labels. No, I don’t stamp on a bid
tub of grapes. It’s a modern winery, all stainless steel and flashing security lights.

The place looks as if it has risen from what was a series of pasture farms and wasteland. In fact it has.
Ten Mile Creek; you wouldn’t go there for a holiday, it not the McLaren Vale or Western Australia’s
Margaret River but you have to give it something. Dollars and cents, pounds and pence, Ten Mile Creek
is an important part Australia’s wine engine room.

Ironically my job involves a lot of writing, and no, I don’t write the backs of wine labels, the marketing
team does that.
I’m a writer of cellar notes. These are instructions that run the winery. They involve moving wine from
one stainless tank to another. They contain such poetry as pump 400 litres from Tank A to Tank B, clean
out the lines, add 4 bags of tartaric acid to rotary fermentation tank four. These notes make sure things
end up where they belong. I do a tiny bit of Math and try not to make any mistakes. It is not the kind of
job you can cut corners. You will get caught out.

Write the wrong note and chaos ensues.

One of the worst mistakes you can make is pumping red wine into a white wine tank. I once had a cellar
hand, the juniors of the winery, misread one of my notes and create a pink wine mixed mess. That is
hard to explain away, we made a cheap rosé and sold it to a Hong Kong company.

I met Jay at a young writers award ceremony. I think I still have the certificate thanking me for my
submissions. An honourable mention it’s called. Thanks, but no thanks. Keep trying, you're nearly there!
As a writer and poet I was nearly there. Jay was there both physically and as an 'it' writer. On this day Jay
received a major prize awarded in the competition. School’s Award. He got a cheque, smiles and
handshakes. I should have guessed it would lead him to write for student newspapers and me to write
winery operational manuals.

He showed me his submission at some stage later. For someone who was seventeen it was good. I could
see how he tricked all of them. The internet was a new thing. Not many people were using it.

The results were not Sylvia Plath but passable. His writing was probably worth the fuss. His Frankenstein
prose was miles better than anything I had written. Better than anything I had in the school year book.

I'll never forget when I met him. We were both standing in line to meet the Governor. I was there with a
couple of other people from my school. The usual suspects were in attendance from my school, over
achievers and student council members. Kids thinking about how they would look in the school
newsletter.

I don’t know why they even bothered. They always looked good in the paper. Shined in the eyes of the
teaching staff. Perhaps that is why I didn't like them very much.
So there I am standing in line. Not really fitting in. Jay starts talking to me. The writer of the year was
interested in what I had to say. Maybe Jay knew I was different from the others somehow. Perhaps he
needed to confess. Most likely he wanted to cause an emotional stunt. I was his random target. So, for
whatever reason he handed me a little piece of folded paper. It was well inked on a typewriter. The
front said in neat lettering, Confession... It wasn’t signed.

After shaking hands with the Governor and a brief tour of Government house, I sat down in the
manicured garden. With the smell of cut lawn running my nose I read the note. Even though Jay was a
stranger, after the reading the note I had to know more.

His writing was seductive.

____________________
 Confession...

I have tried to put words down on paper. You cannot call it writing. I regurgitate,
I spew.

I will explain my fraudulence in plain terms. I am a rehasher. They are only other
people’s thoughts put into a new order. Cut and paste. That is not an achievement. I
used pop culture to write for me. I just change it so you can’t tell. Old Poems.
Songs. Free thought is not an ability. I am capable of demonstrating. Over the last
few television seasons I have been mismatching my thoughts and theirs.

I have cheated them all.

I have theories about life and its little idiosyncrasies. Some I have tried to put
into the poetry I write. Most never make it that far. My rants remain trapped in a
series of random lines. Written in blue pen on little scrap pieces of paper. Or worse
lost, left as thoughts in between channels. I lament. With my obsession with popular
culture things can so easily be lost. Thoughts, loves and even whole sentences lost.

I once thought I had the answer to the thing I hold most dear. Then the episode of
'The Simpsons' came back on. I was not sure if I was truly thinking or just echoing
the thoughts of Major Quimby.

I have been doing this for want of true originality or spirit. However of late I
have been finding it increasingly difficult to justify myself. I am just ripping off
the sum of my media observations and trying to pass it off as worthy. Who am I trying
to kid?

______________________
Then – in a nightclub – Twenty years old.

Jay returned to me sliding a beer across the table. It spun around, faking to fall. He had read my mind.
Mine had just finished, both!

I reached out and seized the bottle to stop its fall. I quickly sipped the foam layer out of the neck of the
bottle.

Jay danced off again, still happy. His friend Morgan returned, the two of them did some sort secret
dance move as they passed. Morgan sat down opposite.

His face was always stuck in a permanent smile. Grinning as if he knew something I didn’t. He looked like
he has worked through to the detached DJ. Set up a playlist of his favourite songs and was going to
taunt me with the knowledge he knew exactly what was coming next.

“Here, have some of this,” he said as he produced a metal hip flask from his pocket. Morgan poured a
clear liquid into my beer. He was helping me get loaded.

Now there is no way you would let someone do that, just let someone load up your drink, date rape
drugs and the like, but I did know the guy. I didn’t think he was after me like that. I had absolutely no
idea what he put into my drink. Perversely it thrilled me like touching fire.

“You'll like it, I play around with distillery in me spare time.”

“A homemade still, hey?”

“Legal with a pot capacity smaller than four litres.”

I was impressed and said something like; “You can do impressive acts with four litres.”

I think I explained to Morgan that I made home-style Kaluha on my stovetop.

“Saves a fair bit of hard earned.”

“What is it?”

“SVR. It has next to no taste.” With Morgan's encouragement I took another slug of my beer. “Just that
incredible warmth.”

“I haven’t seen it used like this before. Wow!”

_____________________

SVR is a very high strength alcohol added to wine to fortifying it. You use it in port or sherry.

It has two types, low strength spirit, with complex flavour components, or the high strength with no
taste. Morgan’s version was high strength category. By high strength I mean it would have been 80%
alcohol.

A high cost Uni degree taught me that.

My education didn’t teach me if putting it in beer is a good idea. I don’t endorse it. In the event of doing
this seek medical advice.

_____________________

“‘Tis a fun drink. A 3am-cheap-special,” Morgan said.

All concerns aside, it was. Clean like an unmuddied lake. Warm on your tongue, a very dangerous thing.
The liquid equivalent of walking up to the cliff edge and closing your eyes. It made you worry about
losing your balance.

“I like it when she wears her hair down.”

“Sorry?”
Morgan looked over my shoulder. I had trouble following what he was saying with a head full of spirit. I
tried to read the time. Blur past fuzz, my watch read. I distinctly remember not being able to read my
watch after that drink. Luckily, I had previous experience in this state.

“Hair down... Normally 'tis up. Always up, pigtails you see. Kind of her little trademark.”

“Sorry?”

Continued to stare blankly, I was confused. I tried to follow the conversation. The music tended to send
me deaf after awhile. I leant in close and tried to explain.
“Sorry, audio shellshock, Morgan, too many concerts and night-clubs.”

“Ella's hair. Very long. Always up. Now down. Wish she would do it more.”

“Oh, yeah!”

He was talking about his girlfriend!

I turned and looked over my shoulder.

Jay was dancing away with young Eloise playing his beer bottle along with the music like a guitar. As
Morgan deemed fetching, Ella's hair stretched out almost to her hips. It looked like a series of long red
ribbons. They flicked about as she jigged up and down. As she rocked from foot to foot, side to side her
hair followed. The ribbons tried to catch up her movements but always stayed half a beat behind.

“Yeah I see what you mean. It just takes love’s eyes to notice it immediately.”

One of those silences settled over the two of us. You know, the type when you want to talk but you
don't know what to say.

After a time Morgan broke the silence with his accent sharp.
“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sounds ominous.”

“Well, when you said it takes love's eyes.”

“Umm, yeah.”

“Why did you make love, sound like a dirty word?”

I don’t have a reliable record of what I replied. I was getting drunk at this point and in the morning when
I scribbled in my diary I couldn’t remember what occurred.

I had a soft opinion of love at twenty. My own scars were not yet cut. I assume I said something like this;

“Love is not a dirty word. It makes the world go round. I have been in partially in love on a few
occasions. I feel better for the experience.”

“Partially?”

“Yes, partially,” I said something along those lines.

“Is that like being slightly in love?”

“To quote Fitter happier - Radiohead. ‘Fond but not in love’.”

Morgan started laughing at me. I am not sure if he found my love life funny or was impressed that I did
that Radiohead quote in a perfect steely robotic voice.

“Fitter, happier, comfortable, not drinking too much,” I cringed.

I absentmindedly sculled the rest of my drink. It was hot with spirit. Too hot. I started to gag.
I chased it down with the nearest thing that came to hand. A sour sensation leaped over my tongue and
lingered in the back of my throat. It tasted like white wine. Sour white wine, house dry white. Pretend
Riesling. Sultana doctored up to taste like citric acid.

“Excuse me.” A voice scolded me.

Like a deep-sea diver coming up for air I was confused and short of breath. I floundered as the girls voice
spoke.

“Excuse me.”

That was the voice reaching out from somewhere beneath the depths – a mermaid? Right from the start
that voice unsettled me. Her voice had a combination of charm and urgency.

Her tone made me feel I had come up too quickly, boiled my blood. I felt I had dragged up a mermaid up
with me, hooked by a piece of seaweed to my leg.

“That's my drink!”

“Oh.” The realisation hit me. “I'm sorry.”

I had taken her drink... I was drinkstealing.