280E

It looks like I'm just about up for a new car. The 280E is beginning to blow smoke and, I reckon, she's lost a bit of power.

Not the 280E... or Fiona, as Mat called her, because of her metallic gold paint work and white lambs-wool interior. Mat said she was a girl's car; she looked like a middle-aged Brighton woman, bravely hanging onto her youth with too much jewellery and too much fake tan.

Mat, said I got away with it because of my dark, wavy hair. Whatever that meant? Something about me loving the beach. Ex-non-surfie, to be truthful. Hardly, I never tried surfing. I just liked the flat, tranquil beach, early in the morning, watching for the waves. It used to clear my head, sort of put stuff in perspective. It was the one place I used to let go of all my fear. I've just got the hair, had the hair, that's what Mat meant.

My mates have often said the car is a girl's car. 

“Looks like a fucking powder-puff,” said one of my mates.

Mum was just trading it in on a new model and wasn't going to get much for it, relatively, you know what trade-ins are like, when my brother wrote off my car and they felt sorry for me being at uni with not much money. Of course, on the face of it, an aging Mercedes for a uni student wasn't, perhaps, the best choice.

But having said that, the 280E has never broken down, or let me down, for that matter. She's been a classy old bird all the years I've had her, despite what everyone around me has said at various times. Believe it or not, people, boys have been impressed by that car, over the years. It always kind of amused me, since I've always just got stick about her from everyone else, my secret weapon.

I've blown too many joints to remember, smoked crystal meth before weddings and popped pills up city alley ways at night, in that car. I've had sex, on a few occasions, in the front seat, and the back seat.

Sad to think of her gasping her last breath.

Mat just laughed when I suggested I could get a purple Monaro, at one of those moments when he was dishing Fiona. I saw one driving down the Calder, it looked slick. Mat said the idea was too laughable. I didn't expect him to react that way. I'm not sure what he meant, exactly? Something about changing my name to Spiro. Then he was talking about his ex-boyfriend's cock, some Italian mechanic named Tony who, apparently, had a salami as big as his wrist.

When I told him I meant mid-night purple, nearly black, he laughed more.

“Beaudy!” he said. Thumbs up.