Where can I find a woman like that?

My time with Rachel was short lived. For some reason, the most obvious being that I was not all that satisfying, our relationship seemed to fade away. I left her place the following day, and I did end up on her arm at the dance, dressed in a begged borrowed and stolen dinner suit and bow tie. But even then, things became more and more distant as the night progressed, and my sister who shared our table got more inebriated. The night finished at the after party, hosted at some other school-friend's parents' house in the leafy suburbs, with me keeping an eye on my sister after her date abandoned her, and eventually, taking her home to put her to bed.

And after that, there was no real contact between us beyond a strange knowing friendship we shared. Sure, we talked, and we still had plenty to say, but I guess my novelty as a lover had worn off somewhat, and it was years later, after we had both finished school I heard she was married and living in England. Exotic, romantic, and probably the kind of thing I had imagined for her. Again, from my observer's post, it was the exact sort of thing that other people did with their lives. People who had direction and ambition, who got university degrees, and bought houses, and had children and careers. People like me were just swept along in the course of history, not leaving a mark, or making a dent, or influencing the turbulent stream's path.

Not long before Rachel, my brother had found himself a girl. She was part of the amorphous gang of kids we had begun to associate with. Not defined by school or locality, but a roaming pack of us from all over the north, east and southern suburbs. Defined by what we did and where we went more than where we had originated. It was no kind of subculture, either, but a motley assortment of rockers, punks, stoners, skinheads, bogans, jocks and glamour girls. Each of us, I suppose, trying to find out place in the world by carving a niche in the historical rebellion and normality of youth in last half of the twentieth century.

Michaela was from a less regarded Catholic girls' school closer to the city, and was friends with a punkish type of girl who had begun seeing a floppy haired stoner friend of ours who went to the local tech. She started to drop by our afternoon congregations at the local railway station shopping centre, and found her way along to the pub with a group of us one night. Going to the seedy Richmond Club Hotel was something we got away with back then, we blended somehow with the inner city crowd of grotty students and unemployed bohemians. There were no bouncers, and most of us had forged proof of age evidence of some description. And it was easy enough to get someone older to get drinks from the bar and hide up the back of the pub out of sight to drink them.

I started talking to her after a particularly noisy and talentless band had relieved us of their art and were packing up. She was cute, and freckles on her face gave her a look of having just been dusted with cocoa. Her skin beneath was very pale, and her hair long, straight, and the same chocolate colour. She squinted at my terrible jokes and laughed with a tooth-baring smile while we drank beer and smoked cigarettes and tried to act mature in the smoky darkness. Before the next band had set up, we had found a seat in a quieter alcove to the side of the main band room and continued to talk.

Then my brother appeared from across the room and sat with us briefly, before the band started up and drowned any hop of conversation. We had been drinking jugs of beer quickly, as we had learned to do in case the police decided to show up, as they would clear us all out and end our sheltered revelry. So my brother motioned that he was going to watch the band, who happened to be friends of ours on this particular occasion. We followed, and bobbed our heads, and bent our knees, and raised our glasses to the messy rock rhythm of the band. I suddenly felt the urge to relieve my bladder after the six or eight pots of beer I'd swallowed decided it was time to leave me. So I shouldered my way through the mainly disaffected and surly loking crowd to the back door where I stumbled my way down a long corridor along the side of the band room.

There is nothing quite like breaking the seal after drinking beer, the relief is intense, and sometimes makes my teeth ache in a strange kind of relaxing of pressure. But after I had finished and made my way back, my brother and Michaela were nowhere to be found. Not in the band room, not in the front of the bar, I yelled into the ear of a friend who was about six-foot-and-a-bit if he'd seen them but he looked around then shook his head and shrugged and mugged over the noise of the band. I decided to get some more beer and grabbed a jug from the nearest of our party and a glass someone else had been using, and filled it.

I watched the end of the band and was numb enough to have forgotten about them. Helping my mates lug their gear up a narrow sticky carpeted hallway behind the bar I carried an amplifier out on to the bitumen pavement and saw in the yellow streetlight, the two of them against a corner of the pub, pashing with drunken abandon. I felt a twinge of something. Something green, and ugly, and as far from brotherly as could be imagined. So I jumped in the van with guys from the band and got myself closer to home without him, despite our earlier arrangements. I would be home in time, it wasn't my problem. Fair's fair.