Spinning Around Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sure.’ He eyed the cappuccino for a second, picked up a packet of sugar, and dumped its contents into the coffee. As he reached for another packet, I stumbled onto the subject of Briony, who turned out to be a real Godsend. Matt enjoyed hearing about Briony almost as much as I enjoyed talking about her. We discussed Briony’s rune-reading. We touched on her eccentric taste in men. Matt was quite sure that he knew one of the shaggy interlopers trundled out for my inspection, every Sunday morning: we tried to work out if it was the same guy— known as ‘Relic’ to his mates—but couldn’t be sure. All the while, Matt sat behind his cup of coffee.
    Finally I said, ‘You’re not going to drink that, are you? What’s the matter? Is it too strong?’
    Matt gave a shamefaced grin. ‘It’s these bloody packets ,’ he complained.
    â€˜The what?’
    â€˜The packets. Of sugar. They’re not like the old canisters— you could use as much sugar as you liked, with them, and no-one would know what a wuss you were. With these packets . . .’ He gave the crumpled remnants a poke. ‘You get up, and the waitress knows you’ve been pouring six sugars into your coffee.’
    I put on a serious expression.
    â€˜Matt,’ I said gravely, ‘you can pretend three of them are mine. Your secret’s safe with me.’
    â€˜Nah.’ He shook his head with exaggerated sorrow. ‘Nah, I know what you’re gunna do. You’ll walk away and tell your friends, “I met this woofter today, he was trying to be hard, but he snuck six sugars into his coffee”.’
    â€˜You mustn’t let sugar define your self-image, Matt. Napoleon liked cream puffs, you know.’
    Matt looked surprised. ‘Really?’ he said.
    â€˜Oh sure. I wrote an essay on it.’ But I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. ‘Shit, I don’t know, how should I know? Don’t be ridiculous. Woofter, indeed. We don’t talk like that, in the public service.’
    â€˜â€™Zat so?’ He was grinning by now. ‘What do you say, then? “Masculinely challenged”?’
    â€˜We say “ten-sugar screamer”.’
    And that was that. He fell about laughing, and I was hooked. I was landed. Because he was a real find—especially for someone with my background.
    You have to understand, he was so hip. So hot. For one thing, he was a drummer in a band that you could actually go and see (on occasion) in clubs and pubs that people actually went to . The Breaks, they were called, and they played mostly covers, though the lead guitarist wrote a few songs. Drummers aren’t generally the pin-up boys of most bands, so it wasn’t as if Matt was exactly beating off the groupies, but still—there must have been any number of groovy young things who had cast an acquisitive eye over him.
    And then there were the jobs. Matt had jobs with real street cred. To start with, there was the bartender job, which allowed him to become acquainted with all kinds of seedy King’s Cross personalities: bouncers, spruikers, drug dealers, crooked cops— and the barmaids, of course. Barmaids as hard as nails, as sharp as razors, and sometimes as exotic and bizarre as the cocktails they served, which were all tarted up with suggestive swizzle sticks and glacé pineapple. Matt was a good bartender. He had endless patience, never lost his temper, and was quite skilled; he’d done a cocktail course at the Silver Shaker training college. In fact he had quite a memory for noxious mixtures. I tested him once, out of a book, and the only one he got wrong was Kelly’s Comfort. He remembered the Southern Comfort, the Bacardi, the vodka, the milk, the ice and the strawberries, but he left out the grenadine. (And a good thing too, in my opinion.)
    Then there was the recording studio job. He worked parttime in a dingy Darlinghurst