Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Michaela used to call my brother every other day. After a while, it seemed that I would answer the calls more often than he did, mostly due to my bedroom being closer to the phone than his. So I would get to talk to her every day she rang, nearly. We would chat about mutual friends, school, nothing. The usual teenage banter. It was easy, it was the most natural thing in the world, there was no awkwardness, there was mutual understanding, there were laughs and empathy.

Then after sometimes half an hour or more, I would call my brother to the phone, when he would summarily grunt out his responses to her questions. Yep. Nup. Maybe. Bye. I am not sure if he even thought about the fact we were friends, and had a possibly deeper relationship than they did. In hindsight, probably not. He was just like that.

And he didn't mind that almost every weekend he went out with her somewhere in the city, or to whatever house party we transported ourselves to, or whatever gig we might sneak into, she would ask me along. And sometimes she would bring a friend, which made it seem less weird in one way, and more like a double date in every other way.

One of her friends was a tall red head, who dressed, like many girls at the time, in op-shop chic floral dresses and boots. She was lithe and slim, and pale in the street light when I kissed her in the middle of some park around some scout hall in the far distant fringe suburbs of the city. I even went over to her place when we both wagged school, and fooled around for a bit, but nothing too serious. Then just as suddenly as we had met, I don't think I ever saw her again. And for the life of me, can't remember her name. Just her long, tight orange curls and her floral dresses.

There was nothing to hold me to her. Nor another I can recal who wore what I thought was the coolest green leather jacket ever. To be honest, anyone who wore a leather jacket looked cool to me, and the chances of me owning one any time was about as likely as a girl asking me out. On second thoughts, more remote than that. Jo, which was the leather jacket girl's name, asked me out. We had somehow come into possession of a bottle of vodka, which between Michaela, Jo, myself and my brother, we finished off in one of the parks along the river close to the middle of the city.

Having made ourselves quite raucously drunk, there was no way were going to gain entry into a pub. Drunk teenagers usually can't muster the bravado to get past even the laziest bouncer. So we found ourselves in a corner of a carpark behind some warehouse/office complex in the inner suburbs, and Jo had her tongue in my mouth, and I had my hand up her shirt, and the coldness of the asphalt was doing nothing to dampen our progress. Until we were illuminated by headlights and realised quite quickly where we were, and that in all likelihood it wasn't somewhere we were supposed to be. So we leapt up off the ground, and along with the others ran down an alley between two buildings that led to the train station, and the police car couldn't follow. Well, we assumed it was a police car, because we always assumed the police were on to our highly criminal lifestyles, in the way teenagers exaggerate the importance of everything they do.

On the train platform, my brother and I needed to catch a train in a different direction to the girls, and after drunkenly kissing her goodbye, Jo said "Let's go out again soon". That was the first time I had been asked out by a girl. And it certainly seemed like a good idea. Of course, I never did see Jo again. I don't even know why, other than the clear probability that I was actually in love with Michaela. I did begin to wonder if she would run out of friends soon.