Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

The Firstborn Is Dead
Mute, 1985

On afternoons I would ignore my mother's instructions to walk home and catch the bus instead. Walking was boring – there was a racetrack that went on for too long and some houses I'd seen before. Anyway, most kids caught the bus. They would pour down to Nine Ways after the school bell in a stream of blue shirts and white blouses and condense outside the fish and chip shop. Sometimes I would wait with them there, loafing in the tiny car park around the corner next to the doctor's office, as the crowd gradually peeled off in twos and threes onto buses packed with other school kids headed up the hill towards the suburbs.

Eventually I would cross the road and wait for a normal bus to take me into the city. There would be a few down-on-their-luck types up the front and the back half would be empty. Sometimes a girl called Rowena would catch the same bus and get off at my stop to catch another one back across the bridge to Mayfield. I had a sort of unfocused crush on her that was dampened by some impossible truth – she was tall and thin and had perfect hair and a nice smile. One day she got on board with a girl from school who lived in the same suburb and was a year or two above us. Her name was Lauren. She had badges and pins on her clothes and wore her spiky red hair in pigtails.

We got off on the dead end of the main street, filled with boarded up shops and pubs with newspaper over the windows. The stop was in front of a giant building that looked as if it had been a department store at some point. I was never sure – it had been empty since I could remember. As we crossed the road Lauren spied on my bag the name of a Nick Cave record that my mother's boyfriend had given to me. It was the title of The Firstborn Is Dead, scrawled in black marker around the points of a pentagram. She was so excited that she gave me my first cigarette – a menthol – and her phone number. The following week she gave me a love letter written in blood. I drew her a picture of a hand puppet singing a Mr Bungle song.