Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  And so he’d just cruised on, for … well, for the rest of his natural life, as it turned out.

  He had been loved, although most of the people who had loved him had been the sorts who wouldn’t be able to say so without adding an affectionate expletive or prefacing it with eleven beers. Or, in the case of the Assistant PR Officer for Cullem’s Nails, without turning it into one of the more memorable eulogies any of Barry’s nearest and dearest had ever heard.

  Fifty or sixty people had turned up to Barry’s funeral the weekend following his death, a solid crowd that had included his foreman and workmates from Cullem’s Nails, as well as several of his buddies from the University of Western Australia, and his Auntie Carol and her ever-present nurse-slash-assistant Chloë – and, of course, the cricket team. It was a mass conjunction of social planets with a combined gravitational shear, metaphorically speaking, that would have made Barry himself extremely uncomfortable in life. In death, of course, there was nothing he could do about it, and so conjoin they did.

  It had all gone reasonably well, a sombre affair highlighted by a hilarious eulogy, followed by some coffee and cake and stilted conversation, followed by a Saturday night of separate wakes for work crowd, UWA friends and cricket team respectively. Auntie Carol and Nurse Chloë may also have held a wake, but in their case it had probably just been a small glass of sherry and most-of-the-rest-of-the-bottle-of-sherry respectively, back at the home. And Auntie Carol had probably not been aware that it was a wake, and that she had just outlived her final breathing relative. And if her obliviousness to such a state of affairs wasn’t worth celebrating, then nothing was.

  The wakes had to be separate, really, since none of the three main groups would be seen dead in a bar either of the other two groups would go to, although the cricket team did arguably represent a Venn-diagram overlap between the UWA and Cullem’s Nails demographics, and would drink pretty much anywhere. The coffee and cake had been about as far as the metaphorical planetary conjunction would stretch, and each group was quietly in agreement that Barry would have been relieved it had ended at that.

  Barry. Auntie Carol had called him Barry, back when she’d been in her right mind, and Nurse Chloë had called him Barry too. To his workmates at Cullem’s Nails, he’d been Dell or Bazza. To his student friends at UWA, he’d been Baz or D-Man.4 And to the cricket team – because if there’s one group of nickname-bestowing Australian males5 less-inclined towards originality than a group of nail factory workers, it is a cricket team – he’d simply been Nails.

  The East Fremantle Riverboats, colloquially known as the Sheepbreezers – and if you’d lived in East Fremantle in the 1980s and 1990s you would know what that meant – wasn’t really a team in any competitive sense, let alone professional. It was just a bunch of guys who got together once a week or once a fortnight and played cricket. Occasionally they would compete with other amateur teams, particularly if the competition involved an extended boozy bus trip. And one of the guys was in advertising and he did them a good deal on an assortment of merchandise branded with their crane-and-sheep-ship logo. But most of the time the Sheepbreezers knocked off after an hour or two, chatted together and drank beer. It was a social thing, and Barry had participated actively. The week after his funeral, almost two weeks after his untimely passing, the lads met up at the local field for their weekly game.

  It was a sad affair. After an unmotivated couple of overs – July being the off-season anyway, and it being cold as a bastard – they pulled out the esky and dug cans of Emu Bitter from its ice-and-water-sloshing innards. The sun was just disappearing below the horizon, although it had already dipped past the treeline on the far side of the field and left them in gloom broken only by the clubhouse lights. It was the time Barry would usually go to turn on the field’s big post-mounted lights, everyone reminisced quietly, but they decided to leave them off that night. It seemed fitting, in the sense that they were basically too lazy to go and do it but it could arguably be passed off as a kind of homage.

  There was some desultory around-the-esky conversation. Little Phil, Captain of the team and named ironically because he was really very big, was the victim of some gentle ribbing because at the post-service coffee and cake Auntie Carol had started rambling about somebody called Judith and Phil had thought she was telling him about Judith because she’d been talking to him a few moments previously. It had taken him several seconds longer than it should have to realise she wasn’t actually aware of him anymore, which was funny. His lines in the dialogue, including “I don’t know a Judith, is she one of the UWA birds?” and “Malcolm Fraser hasn’t been Prime Minister since ohh”, were repeated to great merriment by his teammates.

  Little Phil had also gone along with Nurse Chloë to see if he could help when Nurse Chloë had declared coffee and cake time to be over for Auntie Carol and had wheeled her outside. This elicited remarks about a potential blossoming romance between the Captain of the Sheepbreezers and the nurse, or possibly between the Captain of the Sheepbreezers and the elderly dementia-sufferer.

  Nurse Chloë was six-foot-two, forty-three years old, and capable of picking up Auntie Carol in one hand and changing her bedding and underwear with the other. She actually would have been an excellent match for Little Phil, if he hadn’t already been happily married and doing his best to raise a young son.

  Discussion branched out from this to the other victims of the Duxworth Hotel elevator crash. The seven casualties had been moderate celebrities for a few days after the accident, their names and pictures and stories in the papers.

  The tourists from the United States of America – one elderly lady, one twenty-something man, no connection between them except their country of origin – whose presence was generally agreed to have, heh, elevated the whole incident to the international stage and gotten enough lawyers involved to bring about the crippling compensatory pay-out that had created, among other things, the Cullem’s Foundation.

  The businessman and his lady friend who were probably client and prostitute respectively, at least according to the emergent fact that she had been arrested for solicitation several times in the past, she had not been the businessman’s wife, and he had rented a room in the Duxworth for two hours.

  The poor janitor who copped a face-full of gearbox and access hatch.

  And of course the other girl. The one they all agreed was hot in her newspaper pictures, but who happened to have been survived by a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend. A tragic loss to the heterosexual world, the team agreed in their coarse but paradoxically tolerant philosophical way, even before her death.

  It was all very sad, and all very juicy. And the discussion thereof accorded the team a spectacular view of the light-show Heaven put on for them that night.

  It was cold and overcast, but not raining. Between one joke and the next – they’d circled back around to “Malcolm Fraser hasn’t been Prime Minister since ohh” by this stage – there was a clap of thunder. The Sheepbreezers rolled their eyes and prepared to make haste to the nearest shelter or, more likely, get in their cars and take the back-roads home.6 Before any of them could move, however, the weather got weird.

  A gap opened in the clouds. Perfectly circular, like a hurricane, but not visibly revolving – and storms of that kind didn’t really happen in southern West Australia anyway. There was another boom, and this one didn’t sound like thunder. It was a strange Dopplering harmonic sound, like a giant cable twanging taut across unimaginable distances.

  One of the Sheepbreezers standing and watching this display was named Dale ‘The Seam’ Waddington. ‘The Seam’, or just ‘Seam’ most of the time, was a nickname that his teammates variously used in the place of ‘The Seam-Fondler’, ‘The Seam-Examiner’ or ‘The Gynae-seam-ocologist’ depending on mood or level of inebriation. He was, if he was being honest, one of the better players on the team. In fact, if he was being honest and a little uncharitable, he was one of the few Sheepbreezers who could actually play in any but an ov
er-or-two-of-beach-cricket capacity.

  Seam didn’t really mind this, though – it wasn’t as if his modest bowling skill and passable batwork would ever be enough to put him on a professional team. ‘Seam’ was a cricket-based nickname worth noting mainly because nobody actually acknowledged that his name was Dale anymore. In fact, Seam himself rarely acknowledged that his name was Dale.

  He couldn’t be sure whether he was the one who saw it first, but he was definitely the first dipshit to point and say, “Bloody Hell, meteorite!”

  The object appeared as a glow above the clouds and rapidly sharpened in definition, becoming a brilliant orange line, streaking towards the ground. Its trail burned across the sky, straight through the circular gap in the clouds, and terminated with a crump like a distant firework. But it wasn’t distant – it was a hundred metres away, and it wasn’t a firework, it was a sodding great hole in the cricket pitch, and there was probably going to be Hell to pay for it because the groundskeeper sometimes complained about the rectangular indentation the esky made on the edge of the field, let alone actual damage to the grass.

  With barely a moment’s hesitation, Seam and the rest of the Sheepbreezers hurried over to have a look at their meteorite. Only to find that it wasn’t a meteorite at all.

  It was, however, theirs.

  NAILS RETURNS

  Seam stood looking at the crispy, writhing, whimpering thing in the bottom of the crater for a few seconds, then drew the conclusion that there had been a mid-air plane crash or something of the sort. A couple of his teammates turned aside and quietly regurgitated their beers. Seam, for his part, risked a look at the sky. A falling body, after all, was horrible – but a falling engine or fuselage could ruin your whole day.

  There didn’t seem to be any sign of crashing planes, and the weird cloud formation was already streaming away into darkening wisps. Then the black jagged object in the hole drew Seam’s attention back to it in the worst possible way by flopping around in the scorched dirt and making more awful, awful noises.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Little Phil murmured. It took a lot to make the big man go pale behind his beard, but Seam could see that Phil Hedlin was pale in the gathering darkness.

  “Gah!” the creature flopped onto its hands and knees, and quivered. Then it shook like a dog drying itself, the tremor running from the head back. Seam didn’t even recognise it as a head, in fact, until the shake had run its course.

  As the form shook itself down, it shed its flakes of charred flesh, and the red oozing stuff beneath filled out and went pink and became skin, and before anybody else could take the Lord’s name in vain there was Barry Dell, good old Nails himself, on his hands and knees in the bottom of a crater.

  And he had accessories. The usual ones, for an Angel.

  There was another moment of silence, this one far more complex than the one that had accompanied the lull between realising the meteorite was made of meat and the brief round of ensuing chunder. This silence, Seam felt acutely, was an instance of shared nonverbal communication as the Sheepbreezers stood and looked at something impossible, each of them wondering if all the others were seeing it or if it was just him, and what it meant if it was just him, and whether his grief had been far deeper and more damaging than he’d assumed somehow. And wondering, if what he was seeing was actually what they were all seeing and it was all real, just what exactly that meant about the entire universe as he’d understood it up until ten seconds before.

  There were more layers to the silence, but that was the main layer. Barry Dell could have danced on the head of a certain object, and then dropped that object onto the churned-up sand, and everybody would have heard it in that silence.

  Then Earth’s newest fallen Angel collapsed back into his crater, curled into a foetal position, wrapped himself in his wings, and started to cry. He cried like a child. He cried like he had cried – and only two of the Sheepbreezers present knew this, having been school friends of his at the time – when confronting the reality of his parents’ deaths.

  Seam, as one of the two aforementioned school friends, had been there when drugs, alcohol and close friendship had finally allowed Barry Dell to open up about his orphaning. So Seam was one of two guys on the field who wasn’t rendered completely uncomfortable and apprehensive at the sound of the crying … and he was still rendered quite uncomfortable by it.

  Seam was also in a position to note, however, that Barry’s voice had changed significantly. Significantly, and yet inexpressibly. The quality, the timbre, of Barry Dell’s voice was different from the familiar drawl Seam remembered so well, and while his racking sobs tore at Seam’s very heart, seeming to draw pain and sorrow from everyone standing around the crater rather than depending merely on Barry’s own overflowing bounty of emotion, they were also … too much. They were a symphony of grief. They left Seam dry and empty inside, but not out of empathy. They hollowed him out because they gave him no other choice.

  Barry cried, with an audience of fourteen, and after about ninety seconds that felt like ninety years to said audience, he trailed off and lay silent. Huddled and still under his great white wings, he cowered like a huge feathery tortoise. The Sheepbreezers exchanged looks, each of them daring the others to be the first to venture down into the crater, or at least say something, for fuck’s sake.

  It was Seam, on the basis that he had friend-seniority and in the apparent absence of anyone else willing to do so, who eventually spoke up.

  “Nails? Mate?”

  The feathers twitched, the crying stopped, and the shape fell somehow even stiller than it had been previously, unmistakable body language. What I did up to this point I did because I thought I was alone, the body language said. How long has this intruder been listening?

  “Dale?” a new, indefinably rich Barry-based voice rose hesitantly, the sound muffled under the wings but still somehow splendid.

  Everyone looked at each other some more, then at Seam, who felt himself twitch much like the wing-pile in the crater just had.

  Oh right, he thought. Dale is me.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah mate, it’s me. It’s us. You’re, um, you’ve gone and landed right in the middle of the pitch, mate.”

  The dome of alabaster feathers fell still again, as Barry processed this information. And then, with a soft rustle and no further stuffing around, he climbed to his feet and stood straight.

  “Ah fuck me and you haven’t got any pants,” Little Phil said in a pained voice.

  The Sheepbreezers managed to get their miraculously-returned friend into the little clubhouse nearby, and another of the lads ran to his car to grab a blanket to cover him up. Their need to cover him up was a bit of a mixture of this-is-what-you-do-to-a-trauma-victim and this-is-what-you-do-to-unwarranted-bloke-nudity, although Barry for his part seemed bemused by the whole thing. He barely seemed aware that he was naked, or that it ought to be a problem for anyone, least of all himself. Seam acknowledged that his friend might just have acquired a certain perspective about clothing, or lack thereof, in recent days.

  Miraculously-returned. The term had slipped easily into his mind but had never before been so appropriate. Miraculous. Indeed, the word had retroactively never really been appropriate in the first place, in any of its usages outside the biblical context. And the biblical context was starting to look terrifyingly relevant.

  Seam looked around at the rest of the team, who were huddled in a semicircle around the naked Angel where he sat at the plastic-chair-ringed ping-pong table in the middle of the clubhouse. The ping-pong table was the largest piece of furniture in the clubhouse, so the cricketers generally used it to sit around when they were done standing outside getting eaten by insects.

  The chair-back had given Barry some trouble, and he’d almost knocked it over before lifting and rustling his wings around the furniture and settling his bare arse in place. Several of the lads met Seam’s gaze, wide-eyed and superstitiously horrified. This was so far beyond their stimulus-response mo
del, they were essentially coasting until someone did or said something that seemed like a winner. Then they would all do it. Seam was concerned that the person they were all waiting for was him.

  In the meantime, his teammate had taken some initiative and now returned with the promised blanket. Barry mumbled semi-coherent thanks as the trembling cricketer first extended the blanket in the usual to-spread-over-the-shoulders fashion, then faltered when he remembered the wings would interfere with this, and finally settled for a weird waiter-esque lap-drape manoeuvre that ought to have looked comical, but events were not currently slipping into their usual sociocultural pigeonholes. The sociocultural pigeonholes were a mass of beaks and shit and flying feathers.

  As if to make an utter mockery of Seam’s earlier reflection about Angelic transcendence over the social construct of clothing, the first really intelligible thing Barry Dell said after climbing out of his re-entry crater was, “where’s my hat?”

  This, bizarrely, turned out to be one of the only sociocultural pigeons capable of making a successful landing in its hole under the circumstances. Several of the Sheepbreezers laughed, with something like relief in their voices. This – this – was the Nails they knew and loved, in their own rough way.

  “We – they – we cremated you in the hat,” Little Phil said, building on the foundation of the laugh and making the best of the conversation that had been offered up. As the Captain of the team, he’d been instrumental in seeing to the Sheepbreezers’ part of the funerary obligations. “At least, that was the, um, well, it was closed-casket, so … but yeah, they put in your cricket pads, your factory overall, your Doc Martens, your hat…”