The Glass Kingdom

by Chris Flynn

  Yo yo Australia, and welcome to Cook for Your Life! the show where gourmet cooking really is a matter of life or death! I’m your host, Michael Mekong Delta Dempster, your friendly neighbourhood chart-topping lyricist with a mad flow. For those of you who missed last night’s episode, here’s the scoop. Our panel of judges decided to really up the stakes for our death-row inmates and challenge them to a taste test of their very own maximum-security-prison beef stroganoff.

  Sound easy? Far from it, ladies. With only nine contestants remaining out of the original dozen murderers, paedos and West Coast supporters, the trick is to name all thirty-six of the ingredients in the prison stew. The first person to get one wrong will be eliminated from the competition immediately, and eliminated from life itself shortly after.

  Yes, that’s right, folks—straight from the kitchen to the electric chair! Out of the frying pan and into the fire! Who will guess wrong? Will it be viewer favourite Tricia Q who finally meets the grim reaper? Tricia’s notorious of course for going postal at the DFO in Essendon and trying to gun down a dozen of her fellow bargain hunters. Or will it be not-so-gentle giant Bubba Tanning, the cop killer we all love to hate, despite the awesome juniper-crusted beef carpaccio with fig and chilli vinegar that he wowed our judges with last week? All will be revealed on tonight’s sizzling episode of Cook for Your Life! sponsored by Handee Ultra towels, absorbing even the toughest bloodstains after you’ve shivved someone in the showers.

  Oh, and the last chef standing gets a cookbook deal, a hunnerd large and a pardon from the judge. Dude, the ratings will be intergalactic.

  Gots me the stamina of a dromedary,

  Fightin’ claws of a crested cassowary,

  A vocabulary so extraordinary

  They call me the human dictionary.

  My flow is so revolutionary

  Sometimes I just speak in binary,

  One zero one zero one zero one,

  That’s certainly out of the ordinary.

  I’m so hot my nickname is January,

  My lap is where bitches seek sanctuary.

  My position ain’t doggy, it’s missionary,

  Wanna bust a nut not a capillary.

  Won’t see me readin’ books in no library,

  Ain’t no fun when you’re on your solitary.

  This shit is real dawg, it ain’t imaginary,

  You say literary, I say unsanitary.

  Now my secretary say my itinerary be arbitrary,

  On the contrary this tour gonna be legendary.

  This mercenary attitude of mine be hereditary,

  This one’s on me, son—don’t thank me, it’s

  complimentary.

  Probs some truth in there at the end. Keep thinking Freddy’s gonna grass me up and Corporal Wallace will let his dogs off the leash. Gots to keep off the main roads and away from any kind of town where the motherfucker might have eyes. It’s a long way to Brisvegas when you’re touring the cockroach byways of New Southey. It’s gonna take me fucken forever to get there.

  Least in these small towns there’s always a couple of tweakers looking to score or teenagers willing to skim fifty bucks from their mum’s purse just so’s they can try something new. Don’t exactly feel too proud of myself selling them crank but I gots to raise some chedda somehow since I done spent up big on supply. I’m in and out of places so fast I don’t even clock their names. Roll up to a milk bar in the C-dore, scope who’s lurkin’, jaw with them for a while to get the lay of the land, cement some deals an’ then bounce. Figure even if one of Ben’s crew eyeballs me an’ makes the call, I be already gone ’fore I gets braced. Gonna be lookin’ over my shoulder everywhere I go for the next month though, paranoid as a fucken andy-roid. Sooner I can cash in and kick back on down to M-Town, the better.

  Maybes I shouldn’t have left Freo in the first fucken place. Sick of my stepdad, but. Couldn’t stand another thirty minutes with the…shit, I almost called him a motherfucker but I can’t, I can’t be using that particular favourite phrase of mine when I talks about him. It’s an accurate fucken description of what he’s specifically doing, sexually and otherwise. Asshole be fuckin’ her and fucking her up. Worst kind of twofer.

  Now I gots wheels I’m of a mind to head back over there an’ wait for him to come stumbling out the RSL some Friday night, clock the cunt right in the dome with a bat, bundle him into the boot of the C-dore an’ head on out to the cliffs at Blackwall Reach. Drunks always be falling or jumping off there so ain’t nobody’d bat a fucken eyelid to find his bloated body washed up on the beach a week later, all ate by sharks an’ shit. Sure, Mum would cry at his funeral but she’d get over it and ain’t nobody who saw the bruises on her face wouldn’t be thinking he didn’t have it comin’.

  Thank fuck he can’t get her pregnant. Way I heard it, she got her tubes tied after she had me an’ didn’t have much choice in the matter. Fucken violation of a woman’s rights if you ask me but she had the epilepsy real bad back then and the surgeons, those fucken butchers, advised she be sterilised in case of a repeat incident. When I was old ’nuff to understand, she told me they wanted to flush me right on out of her belly too at the time but she weren’t having none of that shit.

  Had her hands full anyways with my stepsisters. After my first stepdad run out, she had a couple of boyfriends but nothing serious until Tony come along with his instant fucken family, straight out the packet just add hot water, homes. He seemed all right at first. Had a tragic story and two girls he was strugglin’ with, boo friggen hoo. Ended up stopping with us for most of my teenage life. Got me into the Dockers, at least, I’ll give the fucker that. Tried out for them himself when he was younger but didn’t make the grade.

  Was in the army too there for a while, but that didn’t last either. Don’t know what happened to him, it’s not like he got barbecued in Afghanistan like Corporal Wallace or anything. He never even shipped out overseas. Always figured he must’ve been getting harassed or something and come up short when it was time to kick back. Probs ended up as someone’s bitch in the showers. Whatevs. All I knows is he washed out and came on home ready to show us what they’d taught him to do with his fists.

  Mum copped it the worst, but I weren’t far behind. Tried fighting back but that just made him angrier. Broke couple of my ribs one time an’ his precious girls had to step up and put theyselves in harm’s way just to make him stop. Please, Daddy, please. They was all right, I s’pose. Didn’t have much in common with them since they was a couple years younger than me and into really bad music but least they stuck up for me a few times, though it was probs just so their precious dad didn’t wind up in the joint.

  Matters got serious once they started growing titties. Tony got real paranoid that I was eyeing them off. Like I’d be remotely interested in diddlin’ my own sisters. Fucken maniac. Never knowed the truth of it but I always suspected there was somethin’ funny goin’ on with him and the girls. They was creepy together and you don’t need to be no Dr Freud to work out all those unnecessary warnings he done doled out to me were as much for his own fucken benefit as mine.

  Tried convincing Mum to bounce but she was scared, dawg. Scared to leave, scared to speak up. Can’t fucken win with assholes like that. Only thing they understands is the way of the gun. One of these days, I swear, I’m gonna go Halo on that motherfucker and then that’s the one thing he won’t never be no more, fo’ reals.

  Yo yo viewers, this is your host Michael Mekong Delta Dempster broadcasting from a secret location deep within the bowels of the Channel Ten studios. Welcome to tonight’s episode of Cook for Your Life!—the show where food poisoning just might be a blessing! After last night’s shock exit for serial murderer Brian Percy—and believe me, folks, no one was more shocked than Brian himself—we’re down to eight remaining contestants on Australia’s favourite cookery show. Fair to say Brian was not one of our most loved chefs, having killed his family and two neighbours with an axe and grated their parts into a ratatouille, but he’s
history now and the relatives of the dead can rest easy in the knowledge he ended up as human toast. Brian was the first contestant to guess incorrectly in last night’s sudden-death taste-test elimination when he claimed one of the ingredients he could taste in the stew was ‘my wife, Caroline’. Burn!

  God, that’s hilarious. People would totally watch that.

  I know, right? ’Cept we don’t have the death penalty in Australia, so I’d have to tweak the format a little.

  Maybe they could bring it back just for the show?

  Maybes, yeah. Hey, you good for a drink? Barkeep, yo, ’sup dawg, can we gets a couple more alcomoholic beverages over here? ’Nother Bundy and Coke for me and a Lemon Stoli for the lady. Nah, no ice, brother, up to my eyeballs in that shit. Anyways, you was sayin’ before ’bout leavin’ all this behind?

  God yeah. Mudgee’s a sweet little town and everything but it’s so boring. There’s, like, nothing to do here unless you’re into playing pool while morons like Jackie Dawson pretend to do you from behind with his cue. He’s so immature. Typical country boy.

  Romance is dead. Dudes like that, man, all they want is a root in their ute.

  Eww.

  I feel you. So where you headed? Sin City?

  I was thinking maybe Newcastle. What about you?

  Brisvegas. Gots me some merchandise I needs to offload. After that I’ll be sweet for cashola for, like, two years.

  Wow. Maybe you can pitch the idea for your cooking show to the TV people then. You know, I’ve got a couple of ideas myself, not for shows though, just stuff that doesn’t exist yet.

  Yeah? Pitch ’em to me, sugarish.

  No way. I don’t want you stealing them.

  I just told you ’bout my show, right? And how ’bout this—for every idea you tell me, I’ll run another one of mine by you. And we drink to celebrate what fucken geniuses we are.

  Ha ha—okay, well, don’t laugh but how come we don’t have fluoro black yet?

  How’s that work?

  It’s like a material you make clothes from. It’s black but when someone shines a light on it, it goes fluoro.

  That would look dope in a club.

  Yeah, I guess. I was thinking more so that cars could see you walking home at night.

  Oh yeah, safety, safety, that’s trill. How come we don’t got that? One of those Jean Paul Gaultier motherfuckers oughta bring that out. Yo, listen up, I gots another one. Picture this—a brand-new sport called SK8Ball. Capital S, capital K, number eight, then ‘ball’ with a capital B. It combines two of the most popular street sports of the last hunnerd years: basketball and skateboarding.

  How’s it played?

  On a court the size of a footy field that looks like a massive skate park. You got a black volleyball-sized ball with the number eight on it, that’s the eight ball like in pool, and you gotta ride your deck over the terrain and pass the ball around in your team, then try to sink baskets that are placed in fiendish spots to reach. I figure the easiest basket is worth three points, let’s call it a ‘trip’, then the next hardest is worth five points, we call that one a ‘cinch’ and the hardest one to sink is worth ten, that’s a ‘dixie’. Or maybe a ‘doozy’, I ain’t decided yet. You gots to be a Tony Hawk-style motherfucker to score a doozy, though.

  That’s so cool. It sounds really dangerous.

  Shit yeah, but can you imagine the combos? Guys doing verts while some other motherfucker tries to knock them off and steal the ball? Fucken awesome.

  Aww, yours are way better than mine. The only other thing I can think of is a Meminto, and there’s no way that can even exist.

  A Meminto? Pray tell, m’lady.

  It’s like Mentos, except when you suck it you get information that goes into your brain, just simple stuff like someone’s phone number.

  Whoah. Full on! So like you’s out on a date with someone and you kinda like them and stuff so you give ’em a breath mint at the end of the night and your phone number gets zapped into their brain somehow?

  Exactly! Plus, if you want to pash them, you know they’ve got minty fresh breath.

  Fuuuck. I’ll raise a glass to that. I thought I was mental but that is straight up off-the-hook beast. Nice work. Get on to Apple about that shit.

  Oh wait, I just remembered another one.

  Hold up, girl, it be my turn now.

  This is fun.

  A’ight, a’ight, so this one’s for the man who travels a lot, like your salesmen and backpackers and shit. I call it the Razorbrush. It’s a disposable razor with a toothbrush at the other end of the handle. Bam!

  Wait, doesn’t that exist already?

  Never seen one. Don’t think so.

  Huh. You’d think it would though, right? Seems obvious.

  S’what I’m sayin’.

  You could have one for women too. Keep the teeth clean and the legs smooth.

  Not just the legs.

  Hmm. No comment.

  What’s your other idea?

  Oh yeah. I was thinking how good would it be if there was some sort of bead necklace you could wear that would prevent you from drowning. Like if you got tired in the ocean, or caught in a rip, or bumped your head on your surfboard, or just couldn’t swim?

  What’s it made from?

  I don’t know. Something that hasn’t been invented yet. Something super buoyant so your head just can’t physically go under the water.

  You mean like a lifejacket?

  Yeah but no, just a tiny necklace so you don’t have to wear a lifejacket all the time. It’s pretty lame, but the only thing I could think of calling it was the Float-a-Neck.

  Ha ha, yeah, that needs some work. What about Drown-away? God, that’s even worse.

  Safety Beads?

  Maybe. Hey, if you help me come up with a good name for it, I could cut you in on the profits.

  Oh, so we’s going into bidness together now, issat right?

  Well, you seem like a man who’s going places. Rolling into Mudgee in that fancy car of yours, paying for all my drinks, making me laugh, telling me all about your album.

  Caused a stir, have I?

  More of a stirring, let’s say.

  I see. On that note, I think it’s high time we moved this business discussion to a more amenable location. You know a joint round here we could hang an’ not be disturbed?

  I know just the place.

  Sweet as. Let’s bounce, baby.

  Breathe it in, that’s right, now hold it, hold it…and exhale. You feel it? It’s tha bomb, right? You wanna get out of Mudgee, this here’s one way, girl, ain’t no big city gonna match the hit you get from crystal. But you know, I ain’t tryin’ to quash your dreams or nothin’, just sayin’ you gots to be realistic an’ also open your horizons so you is ready for life in the land beyond.

  You feelin’ relaxed now? That’s the way, just kick back and take in those stars. Yo, this is good glass, though you gots to be careful you don’t get hooked or nothin’. Moderation is the key, girl, the key to everything in the world. Can’t be drinkin’ too much, can’t smoke too much, can’t be scarfin’ too much red meat—shit, likely only a matter of time ’fore they tells us sex be bad for us too.

  It is. You can catch diseases. Are the stars meant to be moving like that?

  Ain’t no flies on me, girl. Gots me a clean bill of health in that department. Been livin’ the life of a monk over here, to tell you the truth.

  Sex on ice must be amazing.

  Wet and slippery, I hear.

  Sounds good. Wait, what do you mean, ‘you hear’? You’ve never done it after smoking?

  Me, I gots to be careful with that shit. Though…I’m off meds this week, so fuck it, pass me that pipe, girl…Oh man, that goes straight to the brain stem, don’t it though? See what you mean ’bout them stars, maybes we done switched hemispheres an’ didn’t notice. Hey, you serious ’bout doin’ it?

  Sure. Why not? Nobody ever comes down to this old dam, the water level’s too low for swimming.


  Ain’t got no flunkies, though.

  Don’t worry about it. I’ve got one of those implant thingos.

  The pizatch for the snizatch? Music to my ears, girl. In that case, I gots me a recipe for your cookbook right here.

  You talk funny. Take my skirt off—I can’t seem to move.

  Panties too?

  Yes, but don’t call them that. No woman likes that word.

  Fo’ reals? But that’s what they always say in the movies an’ shit.

  I know. Nah. Horrible word.

  What you prefer, then?

  Undies. Knickers, maybe.

  Knickers, yeah, I like that. Duly noted. Oh wow, that’s, uh, that’s fucken awesome actually.

  Is it? I never really know if it’s pretty or ugly. I can’t see it from that angle.

  Take it from me, girl, you look fine. That’s the sort of cooch should be put up on a pedestal an’ worshipped by the masses.

  Really? Well then, in that case bow down, my subject.

  Oh no, oh no, no no no, this ain’t happenin’, this can’t be happening. Wake up, Debs—wake up, girl. Hold on, Imma pinch your thigh real hard now—shit, watch where you goin’, dawg, keep your peepers on the road. Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good if you wraps the C-dore round a tree. Holy fuck, look at the size of that welt on her skin an’ it didn’t even stir her none. This is bad, so fucken bad. What am I gonna do? Can’t take her to no hospital, an’ even if I could where the fuck’s the nearest one round here? We’re in the middle of fucken nowhere, needs me a helicopter to get her out of here ’fore she ups and dies on me. Fuck fuck fuuuck, what was you thinkin’, Mikey? Letting some small-town girl you just met smoke up a crystal storm. She must’ve had a reaction or something.

  A’ight, a’ight calm down, homes, calm the fuck down, panicking ain’t gonna solve this—just get your head straight and think, man, think. Least she ain’t dead, her eyelids is still flickerin’ an’ she be makin’ weird noises. Think maybes she pissed herself a little but that’s gotta be a good sign, right? So all I gots to do is drop her off somewheres they’ll take care of her. Outside someone’s house or somethin’, ring the bell and drive off ’fore they sees me. Ain’t pretty, but that’ll have to do it. Can’t very well take her to the cop shop, not with all this fucken glass in the back.