Smeghead...

A long time ago in a high school far far away, a not-yet bearded nerdboi and an obnoxious little shit became friends. 

Actually, "friends" is too strong a term. Let me reframe. 

Once upon a time in a misogyny-and-homophobia incubatorCatholic All Boys School run by soon-to-be-convicted-paedophilesThe Christian Brothers which smelled of anxious conformity, unwashed socks, burgeoning testosterone, furtive (occasionally mutual, I'm told) masturbation, and a less-than-subtle undertone of Lord of the Flies, a small group of outcasts accumulated. We were nicknamed "The Cool Gang", and somewhere along the line I became its leader... in that the rest of the group could generally be found on the opposite side of me from the bullies. One of that group was a weedy lad named Leith C****** R****** who never missed the opportunity to tell you about how he was in the Air Force Cadets and reminded me of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf, so I took to calling him Smeghead. 

For the longest time I thought he was pretty fucking annoying, but The Cool Gang never excluded a member because "safety in numbers", and... well there wasn't really anywhere downstream for someone to go. We were the outliers; we played Chess, or Suicide Chess, or Magic: The Gathering, or D&D, or Lacrosse, were hyper-clever, or functionally retarded, on weird scholarships for Academic Achievement or Organ Playing (the one with pipes and a keyboard, not another masturbation reference), the awkward, the uncoordinated, the Mad Scientists (one guy made his own taser out of 9V batteries and copper wire coils in ~year 9), the Terminally Inept, the hadn't-hit-growth-spurts-yet, the already-6-foot-tall-at-14. We, the unco, the nerdy, who fit in with none of the cliques, collected in one corner of the playground near the Library, and kept each other company (and occasionally from being beaten up by the rugby playing jocks). 

I never really liked him all that much in high school; I mostly thought of him as an annoying hanger-on, and I remember mostly just putting up with him because he was just this-side of being irritating enough to punch. Still, he invited me to his birthday party out of the blue one year, and we bonded over our mutual love of Pink Floyd (I later gave him the Super-Audio CD High Bitrate Remastered edition of the Wish You Were Here Album for his 20th or 21st birthday). 

He was one of the two who dragged me off the last of the bullies I beat up in Year 10, and made an effort to keep in contact as we were winding up Year 12; somehow when the rest of them fell away he remained. 

He'd come to my parties.
We'd go body-surfing for fitness and fun (and a bit of a perv) in the summer.
He worked at the local Sizzler, so I'd go out for a cheap feed.
We both go into wine wankery - he worked for Sandalford Estate for a bit, and I worked for Saracen (plus I'm a wanker). 

Whilst our adventures weren't by any means the Stuff of Legend (the escapades I collaborated on with Sharpie, the Silent Bob to my Jay, transcended fame into infamy), a bond was formed which survived his finishing uni and heading over to ADFA, various postings, and long stretches of distance and time. 

I visited him in Brisbane because fuck-it-why-not, when he was posted at RAAF Amberley (I vaguely remember being driven up to Sunshine Coast to fix his nan's computer as being an excuse?), then again to stand as his Best Man when he married Esther.
We hung out in Canberra when they were posted back here between my returning from London and moving back to Perth.
I visited him again in the Blue Mountains when I was in Sydney for orientation day at AGSM (before I restarted my MBA with Ducere).
I missed his mum Rhonda's funeral because of time-frames and covid restrictions.
I managed to procure two high-end monitors for his twin sons at the behest of his dad Cameron during the peak of hardware shortages and had them drop-shipped to Canberra just in time for Xmas in 2021, which I sold him for Cost-Price+A-Mars-Bar (literally rounded up by $1 to $300 per unit when the market price was $450).
But I was here in Canberra in July of last year when Cameron passed away after a long battle with cancer. 

The night before his wedding we stayed in a hotel in the Brisbane CBD (he and Esther were living together by then, so this meant they could at least pretend to observe some of the tradition) and decided to eat at the nearby Sizzler for "old time's sake" (and because we thought it was hilarious, and because neither of us was particularly rolling in cash), then his "buck's party" involved us sitting around the dingy hotel room we were stating in, sharing the best whisky I could afford. 

So when he messaged me saying Cameron had gone I threw my phone over my shoulder in the middle of the discussion I was having about IT Security Policy, finished whiteboarding the gap-analysis we were doing, picked it up again to reply "well shit." and went looking for an appropriate bottle. 

It took a few stops to find, but whilst showing Ian around we found ourselves in Manuka and I ducked us into the Vintage Cellars wherein I found what I was looking for. 

I've been fond of Oban whisky for ages, since I found it on special and decided to try it. It used to be my "keep some in the cupboard for a special occasion, or Tuesday (whichever comes first)" until the price started creeping up. I was exchanging bottles with a client in Melbourne for a while - he sent one when I told him I'd got my marks and had officially passed my MBA - I knocked off work early, poured a glass, plonked a couple of ice cubes in it, and took a photo from my infamous Friday chair of it alongside an empty glass with the bottle in the background. He sent one back a short time later, of the same arrangement on his balcony; one glass with whisky, and the other empty but for a couple of ice cubes. Pete's a good client, and a great guy. 

This was a Limited Edition called The Tale of Twin Foxes, which sat nicely with me in the context of me and Smeghead, particularly the blurb at the bottom of the box: 

Sweet, for how life is supposed to be.
Salt, for tears at a funeral.
Smoke, for a cremation. 

It was special because it was a Limited Edition, but at $200 it was also modest because that was Cameron; I thought he'd have approved of the effort and consideration, but also that I didn't go all overboard over it (Smeghead agreed). 

So the day after I watched a short-but-sweet ceremony over Zoom as a grid of people I didn't know sat alone with their grief and cried on webcams and Cameron went up in smoke to the sound of On The Turning Away, I Ubered out to Moncrief and cracked open the bottle. 

It was a pleasant evening - we spoke very little of the day before, or Cameron, although Smeghead did say at one point, with a wry smile, how amused he was that the song his casually racist dad had picked was a song admonishing racism. 

When I left there was just a small bit left in the bottle - enough for one more stiff pour. I have no idea whether it's still there on his shelf, but I rather hope not; I prefer to imagine that later, either after I left that night or one shortly after, he found a quiet moment to himself and put his own full-stop at the end of that sentence. 

A while later I checked in to see how things were going. He and his sister Cara were doing the "you take it"/"no you take it" thing with Cameron's possessions, and neither of them had need or room for his Rather Nice Bose Sound System. I, an audio-snob, made a joke about giving it a good home, and he, knowing that both these things were true, said "Done." In a later call he mentioned that they couldn't find it, and I promptly forgot all about it. 

Last week, having spent my first Friday in town with my Penpal, I pinged my once-Air Force Cadet-now-Wing Commander friend to see if he was free to join me for my second, and when he arrived he'd brought it with him; it had been boxed up in some out-of-the-way place, and he'd put it aside. I was touched, and a little ashamed - I recently upgraded my stereo and wondered if I'd be able to show it the love he deserved, but I accepted it with gratitude, and we sat out on the balcony as the sun set catching up on the last 8 months' worth of stories, and some from much much longer ago (when you've known someone for a lifetime-and-a-half there are plenty of them to remind each other of). 

Last night I set the Bose up in my bedroom; there weren't enough power points in any convenient part of the living room. Cabling it together, re-tuning it for the room, and with the only source I had cables to connect to it being my laptop, positioned it alongside, cued up Wish You Were Here so the album cover was visible on the screen, hit play, and settled on my bed to listen to it, snapping a photo on my phone which I sent to Smeghead without caption or comment: 

This morning he replied with a Thumbs Up emoji, which was all that really needed be said.