Free Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space by Linda Jaivin Page A

perch.
    ‘It’s Trist. I’m the purple one this week. Remember? Hey, where’d you go last night, dude?’ asked Tristram through the door. ‘We saw you do this hell stage dive and then, like, you disappeared. We looked for you after the gig but couldn’t find you anywhere. We thought you might’ve scored with some chick.’
    ‘Actually,’ Jake said, cautiously, as an evanescent vision of himself strapped to a table winged into his consciousness, ‘I think I was kidnapped by aliens and made to have sex with them in their flying saucer.’
    Tristram jerked open the door. The cockroach lost its grip, fluttered its mahogany wings and fell backwards in a perfect arc, right into Iggy’s open and waiting mouth. The dog’s wide jaws clamped shut and his smile widened. Shaking his head, he trotted off to the kitchen to play with his snack. Tristram, meanwhile, fixed Jake with a sardonic stare. Sex in a saucer? ‘Yeah right,’ he said, poker-faced. ‘And my mother’s a Klingon.’ He whipped around. ‘Don’t you dare say that about my mother!’ he snapped.
    ‘Do you mind?’ huffed Jake, pulling the door shut. ‘Can’t a man get some privacy around here?’ He regretted saying anything.
    ‘Well?’ Tristram demanded through the door.
    ‘Well what?’
    ‘Were they cute?’
    Jake considered the question. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring to mind a single detail of their appearance. ‘Yeah,’ he ad-libbed. ‘Cutest little aliens in the whole yoon.’
    ‘Yoon?’
    Jake frowned. ‘Dunno where that came from. I meant to say “universe”.’
    ‘You know what I think?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘We ought to go out more on Wednesday nights.’
    ‘Wednesday nights?’
    ‘I think you’re watching too much
X-Files
.’
    ‘Wait, wait.’ Jake struggled to recall something that was being chased around his brain by an eager little particle of Memocide. ‘They, uh, they watch the
X-Files
too,’ he said tentatively. His arse suddenly itched very badly.
    ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Tristram. ‘You were abducted and sexually experimented upon by a bunch of aliens who also happened to be
X-Files
fans.’
    ‘Yeah. I think so.’ Jake shook his head. He wasn’t so sure anymore, now that he thought about it. He
had
been tripping.
    ‘What’s their phone number? 0055-Space Cadet?’
    ‘Actually,’ Jake said, ‘I think they said they’d be in touch.’ He regretted saying anything at all. It had probably just been a hallucination. Now Tristram—and no doubt Torquil as well—would be paying out on him on the subject of aliens for days to come. Maybe he should just have a few Panadols and a big glass of water and go back to bed. He emerged from the loo, knotting the towel around his waist. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ he added, scratching his head, ‘
and
I was scabbed by a Planet Rescue Bear.’
    ‘No way.’ Tristram really looked shocked now.
    ‘Way. He got my last two dollars. Said he needed a beer.’ Jake frowned. He shook his head again. His hand was stuck. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he cursed.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Ring’s caught,’ said Jake, waggling his wrist. His dreadlocks occasionally took prisoners: rings, small particles of food, the stray beetle. ‘Give us a hand, will ya?’
    Tristram rolled up the sleeves of his frock, grimaced theatrically and dove in heroically. After he liberated Jake’s hand, they meandered downstairs and into the kitchen. The reasonably spacious kitchen, with its mixed antipasto of found plates and scavenged cutlery, its bread-crumbed floor, sautéed walls, butter-basted table, flambéed stove and sugar-dusted benchtops, was the warm and nourishing centre of sharehouse life.
    Their housemates Saturna and Skye, who were sitting at the table, didn’t even look up at the boys’ entrance. Saturna and Skye were drinking coffee out of black bowls and talking about the end of the world, which, along with George, they believed was imminent. Whereas it worried George, it rather