Con

By Jesse Pentecost

Derek Gunderson is a pianist in the last year of a degree at a conservatorium of music. He is a fine pianist, coasting toward a career in music. Emotionally complacent, he supplements his crushes of the moment with casual, empty sex with his adventurous ex-girlfriend. When he meets Jocasta Davies at a party, it initially seems as though she will be another prize to pursue lazily. Perhaps he'll get her, perhaps he won't. It hardly matters to Derek when so many aspects of his life are so well taken care of. Within a space of a couple of days, things fall apart for Derek - an important performance is a disaster, Jocasta announces she is involved with someone else, his ex-girlfriend starts seeing his best friend and his health goes downhill. Derek is forced to rebuild his character and life, reconcile his relationships and face the terrifying fact that his driving passion for music, his lifeblood is fading. Derek's confidence is suddenly crushed with the awareness of all things he no longer knows or understands.Jesse Pentecost has created a modern-day Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) who stands on the brink of adulthood, where there is a realisation that there is a point in life where the world promises everything but the future holds little certainty at all. Full of honesty and humour, the Con is a beautifully written, scalpel-sharp examination of the people and the choices that make us who we are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730498957

Jesse Pentecost

Jesse Pentecost is a first-time novelist, whose entry into the ABC Fiction Award received a high commendation.

Book preview

PART ONE

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

WARMING HOUSE

Derek Gunderson slumped in perfect stillness and stared intently at the book held open inches from his nose. Although to a stranger he might appear to be frowning, such was his face’s natural topography, he in fact wore no expression whatsoever. It was studied impassivity, though, obsessive composure. For all that he was alone in the room, he suspected — indeed, he was becoming rapidly more certain — that he was being watched. Calm or its outward semblance might be his only defence. Act natural. He wanted to squirm, to scratch, to groan. He itched. Hungry gazes tore tiny nicks from his flesh; his image was gorged upon from unseen vantages. Remain perfectly composed. Don’t give anything away, or they’ll have you. He stared at the book. There was no sound. How long have I been thus engaged? Hours? Days? The room, intimate, timbered and walled with brimming bookcases, gave no answer. Only the watchers were there, waiting and feasting.

Derek registered a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. His head jerked round. He had them! But the watchers, replete, had fled. The room’s only door banged open. ‘Derek!’ exclaimed the young man standing in its place. ‘What the fuck are you doing in here? What’re you doing with that book? Heidi has been looking for you.’

‘Martin.’ The world rushed back in as Derek’s eardrums reconnected. He looked around. He seemed to be in some kind of library or study. ‘How long have I been in here?’

‘The fuck would I know? About five minutes, I guess. Why? Are you wigging out? Bad e?’

‘No, I only had a half. Greening out, if anything. I think it was the cookies.’

‘Don’t you be dissin’ my cookies. Those’re the finest cookies you will ever taste, my friend.’

‘They were good cookies,’ Derek conceded. The cookies had indeed been something special. Martin had a rare knack for mixing in the hash so as to render it nearly undetectable. They had just tasted like very fresh, very delicious, Anzac biscuits. Derek had always had a soft spot for Anzacs. That’s why he’d eaten four of them.

‘Uh, Derek?’ said Martin, almost diffidently by his standards, ‘Me and Anne were kind of hoping to use this room … So if you could, you know, get the fuck out?’

Derek noticed Anne for the first time, a slender, boyish figure standing behind Martin, with a pretty face whose most striking feature was a pair of quite incredible lips. Those lips … they were simply perfect. No male could explain why, though there was no shortage of theories. They just were.

Smiling inanely, Derek got the fuck out, carefully closing the door behind him. Still bewildered, he peered around, with only the haziest recollection of how he’d come to be in that room. Certainly, he couldn’t remember enough of his steps to try retracing any of them. There was music — people who danced called it dance music — coming from somewhere, but for some reason he couldn’t tell from where. In Derek’s defence, he was in a truly colossal house, a vast, sprawling mansion (how they’d all gasped and ahhed upon sober arrival, about four years ago, it seemed). On the other hand, its layout was fairly straightforward. It hardly mattered, though. In his present condition he may as well have been navigating an Escher sketch.

Satyric grunts from several of the rooms he passed suggested why Anne and Martin had journeyed so far in search of an idyllic grotto of their own. Derek was unable to remember why he had, though. The fevered pressure on his bladder walls might have provided some clue, had he not been so preoccupied with a wall-clock that was almost certainly stalking him. Eventually, and by the simple tactic of alternating two left turns with a right (a strategy chosen to baffle even the most wily of timepieces), Derek came to a hallway with people in it. Any comfort he might have gained from this discovery was soon dispelled, however. These people were all lined up outside a door. Several were grabbing desperately at their crotches, jerking and groaning in a grotesque parody of dancing. Others were shouting at the door, their voices by turns imprecating, challenging and hopeless. Despair and strain marred every face. It was a tableau of the damned, and Derek had never beheld a scene more hellish. The worst part was, he knew some of them, or had, before they’d fallen to this. He hurried past, eyes down, neck tense.

The hall soon brought him to a sort of balcony overlooking what in a normal-sized house would be known as the lounge-room. The house’s owners doubtless had a different term for it, thought Derek. They usually do, rich people. One end of the room (the play-room? the ballroom? the ice-rink?) was devoted to dancing. It was a writhing mass that to Derek’s bleary eye signalled all the grace of penned wildebeest. Any risk of the dancers losing the beat was forestalled by a rather magnificent stereo system — a system Derek would’ve given anything to own — whose sole purpose was the deployment of a rhythm so relentless it made both ventricles throb in tandem. The other part of the room (the family room? the cavern? the hangar?) was the domain of those too tired, drunk, timid or indifferent to dance. There were a lot of first-year students there.

The university year was far enough advanced — it was late April — for some of the first years to be beginning to display a little personality of their own. A similar party in, say, February would have seen them bolted to the wall, maintaining those tentative formations they’d formed in the opportunistic hothouse of Orientation Week. A couple of months later, though, and the inhibitions that secondary schooling strives so mightily to instil were starting to disintegrate. A few first years were even essaying tentative dance-steps of their own. Most didn’t though, and some looked decidedly scandalised at the very thought.

Heidi Johnston was in the milling throng on the other side of the room, grinding herself against Pete Stannhope, the host of this housewarming party. He and his girlfriend Carly were perhaps the first people to hold a housewarming party in a house other than their own. But, the reasoning went, their new place was a tiny apartment, while his parents’ house was vast. The Beautiful Gemma — Derek always thought of her this way, believing her striven-for look to be that of a gameshow assistant — was directly beside them. Heidi’s dancing had a certain grim gusto, but little coordination, and those nearby devoted as much time to avoiding her heels and elbows as they did to executing steps of their own. Derek’s passage across the room slowed. Thanks partly to the drugs, he found Heidi’s thrashing, formless flourishes quite compelling. He’d come to a complete stop by the time she noticed him. With a final knee-wrenching kick, aimed with special vehemence at the back of Pete’s left knee, she disengaged and walked over to him.

‘So, have you seen Martin?’ she asked. She was sweaty, and breathing hard.

‘I have,’ said Derek, guardedly. He thought he knew where this was headed.

‘Was that slut with him?’

And there it was. ‘Um, yeah, she was there somewhere.’

‘Wasn’t sucking his dick, was she?’ There’s a saga behind this, obviously. I’ll get to it shortly.

‘No. No, she wasn’t,’ replied Derek, who really wasn’t in the mood or condition for this. ‘At least, she wasn’t when I left.’

‘Well, she’ll be slurping it down by now.’ Bitterness and drink, in a ratio of about five to two, were doing Heidi’s sense of humour no favours. Derek supposed she did have some reason to be bitter, but regardless …

‘Heidi, is this what you wanted to talk to me about? Martin said you were looking for me, …’

She looked at him, and smiled a smile that might have seemed more genuine had her eyes not betrayed its falsity. That's what eyes do. That’s their thing. ‘Actually, it was, Derek. I wanted to bail you up in a corner and talk your fucking ear off about how much I hate that cunt and that awful little sneaky bitch because you’re Martin’s closest friend and shouting at you might feel like shouting at him. And I was going to tell you how much it hurts and how much I want to kill the fucking pair of them. But I won’t bother, thanks a lot Derek.’ From her hot eyes ran hotter tears as this admission progressed, though the smile remained firmly cemented in place. Derek found this very eerie. He nearly said so, but she stalked off.

(OK, the saga goes: Heidi and Martin had been one of those on-again/off-again items. This had gone on and off for nearly a year. One night, during what was presumably an on-again phase, Heidi had discovered Martin’s penis in Anne’s mouth, a discovery not helped by the fact that it was still attached to his body, which was obviously enjoying Anne’s ministrations immensely. Heidi herself somehow remained unobserved, and watched with macabre fascination as Martin orgasmed and Anne swallowed. This last was the deed that really elevated Anne into Heidi’s slut-pantheon (she herself never swallowed, ostensibly for feminist reasons, but probably — and justifiably — because it isn’t very nice). She then screamed something incoherent and ran out. She and Martin were now off, again and indefinitely. However, the deed that, for Heidi, had seen Anne apotheosised as Slut-Goddess, instead caused Martin to look on her with fresh appreciation. A drunken encounter thus became a regular fixture, to which the ignominy of its beginning only lent a sordid piquancy. This all happened about six months before the current story begins, at a party thrown after third-year recitals were over. Heidi can now speak civilly to Martin, but still openly abuses Anne in public, though she has given up egging her house in the small hours. Anne, who initially felt guilty as hell, now hardly helps matters by licking her lips in response.)

Heidi rejoined the mob and took up her dancing with rejuvenated rage. A first-year violinist wore an elbow in the ribs. A young trumpeter was expressively hamstrung by a booted foot. She seemed unable to remain in one spot for long. Derek watched as she lurched and skittered back and forth across his field of vision, a one-woman conga-line of death. He shook his head to dispel the vision, and a vague feeling of remorse. He made his way outside, pressing determinedly through the unusually tiny kitchen, an unholy press of halter-necks, boob-tubes, jeans, glitter and midriffs. What food remained had been largely trod onto the sticky cork-tiled floor. The music — all samples and that 4/4 beat, in no danger of wavering — flung itself at his back. He gained the relative calm of the garden, and stood swaying for a moment, breathing deeply, savouring the vestiges of ecstasy slowly melting his bones in syrup. The cookies had definitely been a mistake, he thought. Reality’s tempo kept breaking apart, like late Cage. And Christ, did he need to piss.

He set off along one of the several paths leading out into the garden in search of a secluded spot to ease the napalm from his bladder. A little kink in the path provided an ideal patch, although, upon shaking the last drops free, he was interested to note that a low wooden bench now occupied the space. He thought about wiping it clean, but he wasn’t about to soil his clothes to do so. Anyway, the odds on anyone sitting on it before it dried were relatively long, though a quick glance at the clear night sky suggested that, were they to do so, the dampness wouldn’t be ascribed to any recent downpour. Also, hash and red wine (not to mention whatever nastiness bulked out the ecstasy pill) had hardly lent his urine an enticing bouquet. Derek was roused by voices rounding the path ahead, and he fled back to the house. He was momentarily concerned that he was being pursued by panthers, but suspected they wouldn’t attack so long as he didn’t acknowledge their presence.

He perched himself on a boulder in the shadows by the back door, absently wondering whether Anne really was going down on Martin at that moment. Martin, inclined to advertise such things, insisted that she gave ‘the best head in the universe, ever’. Quite a rap. Derek visualised Anne’s lips and believed it. He idly toyed with the idea that it was her boyishness — slim build, no breasts to speak of, cropped hair — that so appealed to Martin; that his best friend gained an illicit thrill from having his genitals associated with a mouth of (momentarily) indeterminate gender. The thought was oddly consoling. Mostly, though, Derek was just envious, sitting there on his big rock, with that throbbing beat and the shuddering window behind him.

THREE CHORDS

He was still thus preoccupied when three girls appeared along the path, their raised voices announcing them. ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s kind of sticky.’

‘You shouldn’t have sat there. You need a tissue?’

‘Nah, I’ll go inside and wash it off. It stinks, but.’

‘Alright, I’ll come with you. You coming in, Jo?’

‘No, it’s a bit loud. I’ll be fine out here. It’s a nice night.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Go. Wash,’ the remaining girl said, making a shooing motion at her companions, who disappeared inside. She stood in the dull light by the back door, shaking her head slightly, about seven feet from Derek, lurking atop his boulder. He stared at her gently silhouetted profile, entranced. It’s very easy to become obsessed by things with the help of ecstasy — clear skin, grass, Bruckner, anything at all. She had the most extraordinarily attractive nose, Derek thought: bold, yet expressive, and a perfect compliment to her strong cheekbones. He wondered, momentarily, whether anyone had ever considered the nose as an object of desire before, or whether he was the first. He vaguely hoped he was. Her white, collarless shirt had its sleeves rolled up to reveal the most exquisite forearms he’d ever beheld. So for the nose, ditto for the forearms. He was charting all sorts of hitherto unmapped erogenous zones that night. Her pants — they were a dark green, he thought, it was hard to tell in the half light — were not especially tight, but sufficient to betray the fairly athletic body within. She looked perfect. Had the drugs permitted him the luxury of real sexual arousal, he might’ve jumped her there and then. Ecstasy saved him from at best a slap, at worst a conviction. As it was, he merely fell in love.

‘Hi-i,’ he said, his voice cracking and executing an unplanned diphthong, nearly a full tritone. Utterance sans suaveness.

She turned, looked at him, and smiled. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’

Her voice was beautiful, too, he thought. Even in his present state he didn’t believe himself the first to regard a woman’s voice as such. ‘Great, thanks. Having a good night?’

‘Yes, I suppose. It’s OK.’

‘You don’t sound thrilled. Are you with the bride or the groom?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You a friend of Carly’s or Pete’s?’

‘Oh, Pete’s. You?’

‘I know Pete from the Con.’

‘The Con?’

‘The Conservatorium of Music.’

‘Oh, right. So you’re a musician too, then?’

‘Uh-huh. I guess it’s that kind of party.’

‘Tell me about it. I’ve met at least ten people tonight, and their first question has been So what do you play?.’

Derek smiled. ‘So what do you play?’

‘So funny. I should get a card printed saying I once played the flute at school, but now I don’t play anything.’

‘Surely you’ve been cured of the urge to ever attend a Con party again. And anyway, not playing the flute carries more credibility than actually playing anything else, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Me too. Not playing the flute is very satisfying. I practise it every day.’ Derek laughed. He was enjoying this, and the effort to keep up was clearing his head a little. ‘So what do you play?’ she asked.

‘I’m a pianist,’ said Derek, with the problematic pronunciation (peenust) that has seen the word form the punch-line for any number of worn jokes. One of the jokes is very well known, and features a genie with a hearing problem.

‘Cool,’ she said, not batting an eyelid. Perhaps she hadn’t heard the jokes.

‘Thanks, I’m glad you think so. That’s why I spend so many hours a day practising.’

‘No, I didn’t mean … You’re kidding.’

Derek smiled again. He had been kidding, but that hardly means he wasn’t telling the truth too. There’s no shame in admitting it: lots of guys play music so that pretty girls will be impressed. If you’re really good, determined, or lucky, you might even get to fuck them. ‘And what do you do?’

‘I’m a student. Law.’

‘Really, law? I’ve never met a law student before,’ said Derek.

‘Yeah, we’re pretty rare.’ She was a quick one.

‘And becoming rarer. Especially now our universities are phasing out vocational courses in favour of more esoteric ones.’

‘Soon there’ll be no law school left. Commerce, either. And I hear medicine is being downsized to make way for the new classics department.’

‘It’s a crime, is what it is.’

While they’d been talking — Derek flattered himself by thinking of it as flirting — the song that had been roaring through the back windows into the garden for several minutes came to a sudden halt. Derek thought it was techno, dance or house; he couldn’t tell the difference. Something slower came on for a good fifteen seconds before the CD player rejected it as well. Derek thought maybe it had been house, or trance, or something. Perhaps, he thought, this sort of music is going the way of the early atonal, pre-serialist stuff. There’s an orchestral piece of Webern’s that lasts about thirteen seconds before it exhausts itself. Something new made a sonic appearance, but didn’t last very long. Shouts of ‘Just put a fucking CD on and leave it on!’ wafted dreamily from the lounge-room (cathedral? squash court?). There comes a moment in many parties when testosterone expresses itself in a jocular contest for CD-player supremacy. In order to avoid socialising, a group of males will gather round the host’s music collection and enter into a game of one-upmanship, the rules of which are reasonably rigid. Blood is never spilt, for example.

The tussle was eventually resolved. The opening bars of ‘What’s my Scene?’ trickled into the garden, a surprising choice from the new alpha-male.

‘I love this song,’ the girl said.

‘Really?’ asked Derek, with partly disingenuous surprise. ‘I don’t really know popular music all that well,’ he said, with the lingering stress on ‘popular’ making it clear his ignorance was the fault of the genre, and certainly no oversight on his part. ‘I mean, it’s pretty simple, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. I guess that depends on what you mean by simple.’

‘Just that it’s very basic, musically speaking. That there isn’t exactly a wealth of detail in which to lose yourself. You see, the problem with this kind of music,’ said Derek, warming to the task of enlightenment, ‘is that anyone can do it. Anyone with half a brain can learn how to churn out this stuff. There’re only three chords, and there’s only a very limited number of ways to combine them — it’s not like it’s harmonically complicated or anything. Anyone can do it.’ He held up three fingers. ‘Three chords.’

‘And what are the three chords?’

‘Well, that really depends on what key you’re in. It’s basically tonic, subdominant and dominant, and usually in that order. So if you’re in C, then the chords would be C, F and G. If you’re in D-flat, though, they’d be D-flat, G-flat and A-flat.’ The D-flat part was an unnecessary, and pretentious, addition. What pop song has ever been in D-flat major?

In any event, her eyes had begun to glaze. ‘So what kind of music do you like, then?’ she asked, slightly absently.

‘Music that smacks of genius,’ Derek replied, a flourishing statement, one that demanded applause. ‘Music with which you can lose yourself in the fine detail, that repays repeated listening. Music that at least allows for the possibility of inspiration, that doesn’t merely rely on tired formulas, like rock music. Verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus — has the form changed in thirty years? Forty? It’s seems kind of dull, when every song is three minutes long, every song is about love, every song uses three chords, and every song is structured the same as Yesterday.’

‘I happen to like Yesterday.’

‘Me too. But that’s partly my point — it’s seminal. It was original. So much that came after it seems like a pale imitation. And it is harmonically far more interesting than most popular music. And that bears out my point too. Compared to, say, Schubert, you could hardly cite Yesterday as a moment of profound harmonic inspiration. It says plenty about the state of popular music that the stand-outs can’t hold a candle to the most basic examples from the Lied repertoire.’

‘Right,’ the girl said flatly, beginning to appear bored with having her musical tastes lengthily dismissed. Or perhaps she was just bored. The loquacious earnestness of the ecstasy user is no fun at all, unless you’re e-ing too, which she wasn’t. Her eyes had begun to wander, a series of increasingly frantic glances in search of anyone who wouldn’t talk her ear off.

‘So … I’m Derek, anyway.’ Nice move. Introductions would salvage the day.

‘Oh, sorry! I’m Jocasta.’

‘Nice to meet you, Jocasta.’

‘You too.’ A strangled honk from a bassoon’s treble register, coming from the room behind them, abruptly rent the air. Jocasta gave a quick laugh. ‘God, what was that?’

‘Sounded like someone molesting a bassoon. Or playing a duck. Must have been Heidi’s. I hope she’s there, otherwise the shit is about to make contact with the fan.’

One of Jocasta’s friends — not the one who’d had the little ‘accident’ — stuck her head through the doorway. The music leaped over her shoulder, straight for Derek’s throat. ‘Jo? You ready? Annabel’s got most of the … Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise you were with someone.’

‘It’s OK, I’ll come,’ replied Jocasta. Was it Derek’s imagination, or was her lack of disappointment at her friend’s appearance significant? She turned back to Derek. ‘It was lovely to meet you,’ she said, staring straight into his eyes. Derek’s heart missed a beat or two, a sickening experience that’s common when ecstasy wears off. He tried to cover it by incorporating the hand that’d leapt to his chest in alarm into an elaborately theatrical bow. The overall effect was very lame indeed, and made him seem somewhat uncoordinated. Jocasta glanced at her friend, perhaps a trifle embarrassed. ‘OK. I’ll see you later, then.’

Derek, his aorta back in its usual position, watched her enter the house with a nebulous feeling that things could’ve gone better.

JOHN-CANDIED SOUL

Derek sighed with genuine satisfaction as his shit entered the water with barely a splash to mark its passage. Sometimes the big ones come out so streamlined as to cause barely a ripple, like the submerging of a massive brown submarine. These were always his favourite, especially when they went in so perfectly that they didn’t hit the bottom of the bowl, but continued on around the S-bend under their own steam. It was as if they’d been briefed prior to excretion, told not to hang around waiting for the flush but to make straight for the target. It was one of the few next-day benefits of heavy drinking the night before.

He settled back, as close to a semi-reclining position as the toilet-seat allowed. He felt empty, cleansed. He closed his eyes and took twenty deep breaths, a daily ritual. Like men of all ages, the toilet was where he gathered his thoughts of a morning, planned his day, scratched himself. Eyes still closed, he searched his system for any vestiges of last night’s drugs. He could detect nothing: no rapid heart flutters, no flickering of despair or annoyance. It’d been a good pill, and he’d only had a half. He was quite thirsty, most likely due to Martin’s Anzacs and the heroic quantity of vodka he’d drunk.

Derek opened his eyes and looked down the length of his shirtless body. This was the second part of his ritual, examining his stomach for signs of expansion, checking his sides to ensure his love-handles hadn’t somehow grown overnight. He poked at his flexed pectorals, searching for any excessive softness. Despite putting away more than his share of chips, nuts, salsa and cake the previous night, his torso appeared much as it had the morning before. He took a relieved breath, and thought about what he might eat that day.

There are, of course, ways of being overweight that exist solely in the mind, vestigial secretions of fat that linger as spare tyres for the ego well after scientifically predetermined optimum weight has been achieved. Brutal fad diets are powerless to eradicate them. The most careful abstinence from sweets won’t emaciate a John-Candied soul.

A backpacking trip through south-east Asia provides perhaps the most illustrative example. Sooner or later, depending upon your innate constitution and willingness to consign gastronomic caution to the winds, travelling through certain countries will probably make you sick. Local E. coli will overcome your laughable Western immune system and turn your lower intestine into a gastric scene devised by Hieronymous Bosch, complete with racks and pincers. Stuff will gush from both ends of your body. Other stuff will ooze from your pores. There’s every chance you’ll want to die, if only from shame. At least one toilet will be rendered unusable, its ceramic grace marred by the torrential evacuation of your true quintessence. Shit and vomit will be your reality for some days, liquid kak the horizon and landscape of your existence, and you’ll be very bad company.

There is almost no way this experience can be viewed positively. Derek, however, managed to see the excremental cloud’s silver lining. Despite feeling about as awful as he ever had, he was nonetheless deeply consoled, even thrilled, by the sheer volume of matter exiting his body. This was food that would never find itself converted into physical bulk (his metabolism’s usual, thoughtful way of preparing him for the privations of an endless winter that never came). There was something strange and satisfying in actually not wanting to eat. Constipation, when it inevitably arrived a week or two