clintbodean: Party 2

Party 2

You smell like that party we went to a couple of weeks ago. Remember? It was a Saturday night, well, afternoon really. We went down to the reservoir and parked the car so close to the water you could put your feet in without leaving the vehicle. We jacked up the two back tyres for some reason. It looked like the car was frozen in the act of plummetting into the water. The recent rains barely crossed my radar when they fell but that night, out by the reservoir, we watched the ripples slowly advance and fade. Half the picnic area was under water. Signs had been placed near the water's edge, flood warnings. We laughed at the improbability of it all, cracked a couple of Bacardi Breezers and proceeded to just sit there, as the sun went down, listening to Belinda Carlisle's Runaway Horses album, the one with "Summer Rain", "La Luna" and "Runaway Horses" on it. As that song's soaring Spanish-affected chorus swooned around me, I began to lose consciousness, and could only be roused when you ejected the tape and replaced it with the soundtrack from Footrot Flats. That was all the encouragement I needed. As Dave Dobbyn's voice began tio warm up the "da-da-da" for "Slice of Heaven", I leapt from the car, landing in the algae-tinged water and, to my surprise, not minding it one bit. You chucked me another Breezer and we spent the next ten minutes or so sipping quietly. Then a whole bunch of pig-shooters came along in their roo-spotting utes, all high beams and Chisel. The illusion, shattered, decided to come back some other time. We joined the boys for a quiet drink but our Breezers did cause the odd raised eyebrow. As did my gentle demurral when offered a VB. They couldn't understand what we were doing out there and, truth be told, neither could I. The party had been your idea, remember, though you seem not to care now. I left you there, chatting with the pig-shooters, and drove off into the sad night. All the way home the tape player, whose circuits had somehow jammed, looped "Slice of Heaven" over and over again, only it never got past that a capella introduction: "da da da ..."

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