The Dark Part of Me Read Online Free

fluoro light and past my old primary school, the buildings dull and tired and flaking paint. The Flying Fish flies by
and the air-con shop, which tells me it’s a hottish kind of night at twenty-one degrees. Down the overpass to our first stop: Shoppingtown. We pull in up the top, near Macca’s and the
BCC Multiplex. The pashing bevans disengage and get out. A stinking drunk gets on and sits in the seat behind me and I have to peg my nose against the putrid stench. He starts singing that
‘Henry the Eighth’ song which Dad used to sing when he was drunk. The dero taps me on my shoulder and mumbles something in my ear, but I ignore him as we circle the huge, brick monolith
of Shoppingtown and head towards the city.
    Next stop: the R.E. It’s packed with university students spewing out from the beer garden and onto the footpath. The drunk gets off and staggers into the public bar and I think how Dad is
probably in there, drowning his sorrows, shoulders slumped, gazing into his beer glass. Some uni guys get on. They’re wearing checked shirts and plaited belts. They order the skegs off the
back seat and, as they barge up the aisle, I recognize one of them from the BP servo – a gangly guy with sideburns and a weak chin. He points at me like a cowboy firing two pistols. I
visualize the name badge he wears when pumping petrol into Mum’s Holden: Gavin.
    ‘Nice tits,’ Gavin says.
    ‘Piss off, Gavin,’ I say, just above a whisper.
    But he’s heard me and he stops, resting one knee on the seat beside me. ‘Do I know you?’
    I shake my head. His mates are hooting and jeering from the back. Gavin wedges in next to me. He slides his arm across the top of my seat. His breath is hot and stale against my neck. I turn my
back on him and stare out the window.
    Gavin taps me on the shoulder. ‘What’s yer name?’
    I swivel around, my legs sticking to the vinyl seat. ‘Gertrude.’
    ‘Hey, Gavin and Gertrude. How ’bout that?’
    ‘Hilarious,’ I say, withering him. ‘Do you mind racking off? I’m meeting my boyfriend in town.’
    ‘Now, don’t get all nasty on me, Gertie. We were getting on real good.’ He squeezes my knee with bony fingers. ‘You’re just my type, you know. Knockers with
attitude.’
    I give him the silent treatment as the bus rockets along Milton Road past the Night Owl and the dilapidated tennis courts and the Fourex beer factory, choking yeasty fumes out into the
night.
    Gavin smiles. ‘You don’t really have a boyfriend, do you, Gertie?’ His hand climbs warm and clammy up my thigh. I knock it away but he puts it right back where it was.
    His mates shout, ‘Go on, Garvo. Stick it to her, mate.’
    ‘How ’bout it, babe?’ He grins. His front tooth is chipped.
    I glance at his crotch and wiggle my pinky at him like I’d seen the cool girls do to ugly guys who try to hit on them at the bus-stop. And, just like that I say, super-smooth and arsy,
‘Sorry, but I like my wieners a bit bigger, thanks.’ Crash and burn sound-effects come from the back.
    Gavin stands, sneering down at me. ‘Slut,’ he spits, before swaying back up the aisle to his mates who are doubled over, cacking themselves.
    Next stop, everyone else gets off. We’re in Paddington. To my right, there’s the Suncorp Stadium lit up like a giant jewellery box. The skegs cruise down the hill to the skate-ramp.
The uni wankers unload. Gavin comes around the side of the bus and gives me the finger through the window, before they head into the Paddo Tavern. It’s twenty past eleven and I sit on the
bus, peering out. The pizza place is closing up, a girl stacking chairs on top of tables. A street lamp flickers on the blink, illuminating a halo of bugs in strobes. Out the other side of the bus,
a guy urinates against a Besser-brick wall. His piss trickles, filling out cracks in the pavement, amber then cochineal-pink in flashes from the Café Neon sign strung overhead.
    ‘Last stop, girly,’ the driver sings