You know when your skin is too small for the ideas you have? Like you might split at the seams any minute? Yeah. So that’s when the third less-hot Hemsworth came to me. He sat at my desk, rifled through my science homework then started talking to me. That’s a complex hallucination when it goes across several senses, so I immediately knew it was a) not real and b) a product of my pubertal distress, not some sign of schizophrenia.
Anyway, he said, “So, Mahesh, what’s the plan?”
I said, “Well, Mr Hemsworth—”
“Fuck’s sake. No one ever remembers. It’s Luke. So, what’s your plan for your life, mate?”
“You sound like my mum, Mr Hems—Luke.”
“I don’t mean like medical school and shit. I mean, how are you going to get laid?”
Up until that exact second, I don’t think I had ever thought about getting laid. I knew about sex as a biological act obviously, but I never saw myself as being involved. My brother Madhan always had girls hovering around him, but he is on the school footy team.
“Um…”
“Come on, Mahesh, what are you, thirteen? You need to have worked a strategy out by now, bro. What’s her name? Or his name – I’m an ally, it’s all good.”
I did one of those parabolas with my voice that means a shrug.
“Mahesh, Mahesh, Mahesh. You can’t not know, my friend. Life is a fucking roo and you’ve got to punch it in the dick before it knocks you out, you get me?”
Madhan had his entire life mapped out. He was in the Hawthorn Development Squad. The edges of his life had been drawn for him by the painted lines on the footy oval. Me? I didn’t even know where a kangaroo’s dick was.
“So?” Luke raised his eyebrows, crossed his arms and leaned against my desk, waiting for my answer.
“I mean, Luke, my issue is more how to be a man.”
“How to be a man? I mean you just be one. Go to work, shoot the shit, come home, crack open a tinny, watch the footy.”
“Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to work for me.”
“Right. You got dreams and crap?”
“That’s the other problem. All I know is that I want to do something big, but I don’t know what I could achieve walking down the corridors of Nunawading High.” Particularly when people’s eyes slide over me because I’m not Madhan.
Luke nodded slowly, pursed his lips, then leaned against my desk. “You know, I think I needed someone like me to come chat to me when I was thirteen to figure this shit out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. At thirteen all I did was chuck a footy around, eat sausages and watch my brothers get laid.”
“So, what would you have told your thirteen-year-old self?”
“You know what, Mahesh. That’s a fucking great question. I want you to scratch what I just said to you, mate. Giz a mo, and I’ll work it out, right?”
I watched as Luke paced the meter-and-a-half of rug in front of my desk. He was messing the pile up, but I could see that it was important to him to move. His calves were like chicken drumsticks, bulging with muscle. Mine had just the amount of skin required to cover my tibia and fibula. I looked like a flamingo. I’m not sure if a flamingo can really make anything of their life, even if it filled its notebook with math equations and chemical reactions looking for some magic formula.
Luke stopped and spun around to face me, making pistol hands. “I’ve got it!” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You know what I didn’t know when I was thirteen? Who the actual fuck I was.”
Do I know who I am? “I guess I know who I’m not?”
“Mate. Fucking word. I am not Chris or Liam, and that’s defined me my whole life.”
“So, who are you then, Luke?”
“Mahesh, that is the juice, my friend. Who the fuck am I, and who the fuck are you?”
Another shrug.
“Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it? It’s not getting laid. If it was, I should have sorted my life several times over by now. So, we’re going out into the world to find ourselves, mate. Get your travel card.”
And that’s when my complex hallucination of the third less-hot Hemsworth took me out into the suburbs of Melbourne to figure some shit out. We’re still at it, but we’re having a great time working it all out.
