Is that thing diesel?

by Paul Carter

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the porch for a moment. My cat fronted up from inside a nearby bush and sat directly in front of me, smiling. Oswald is pretty much an outdoor cat; he’s scarred from a million fights, and his face is contorted in a permanent scowl thanks to a stroke he suffered a few years ago. He’s deaf, his left ear is completely split, his tail has multiple fractures, he’s pissed more blood, drank more drain water, and lived through more attempts on his life than most people I know. But he’s smart, very smart. I think he’s even got his own website.

  Oswald spent months checking me out from a safe distance before he decided he was my friend. At night I would see his reflective eyes watching me intently from under a bush or car, sometimes from the roof. Now he knows me as an animal lover and we have quiet moments on the porch together.

  He wanders up and growls at me. His cat voice turned into a low rasp years ago; he sounds like a pack-a-day cat. I give him the odd treat, and he forgets himself and thinks he’s human, rolls over and shows me his beer gut so I will make a fuss of him.

  The family opposite us have a likable but stupid rottweiler, one of those bounding, relentless, totally undisciplined dogs that just does whatever enters its melon head. You know, piss on the car, eat the child, fuck that rubbish bin, rub your arse on the carpet. Oswald and I were enjoying our quiet moment when the rottweiler saw us sitting there on the porch and launched itself away from his owner across the street, coming at us full tilt, its tongue slapping the side of its head. Oswald sensed something was amiss. His head swivelled in the direction of the driveway where 200 pounds of mind-numbingly thick dog was hurtling towards us at breakneck speed.

  The dog was ten feet away when it suddenly put the brakes on, skidding to a stop only inches from Ossy. He was barking madly, his spit flying into the cat’s face. Oswald didn’t move a single muscle, just gave the rottweiler the dead-eye stare. The dog looked completely confused: wasn’t it in the cats’ contract that Oswald had to shit a brick and run like fuck? But Ossy just turned his head back to me, looking bored. Utterly nonplussed, the dog started running in wild circles, barking randomly, until his owner came down my driveway apologising and dragged the dog off.

  Here was an old cat showing me the way: he had just faced down a demented rottweiler and casually fallen asleep. All I had to do was picture the audience as demented rottweilers, naked demented rottweilers, and I’d be fine.

  My phone rang; it was my publisher making sure I was ready to go.

  I called a taxi and stood in the driveway. I’ve stood in the driveway a thousand times waiting for a cab to take me to the airport. This time it was not to an end destination on the other side of the world that involved a drilling rig in some swamp. This time it was as a writer. Me, a writer; I still can’t believe it.

  Perth Domestic Airport is always busy. I joined the queue to check in. My turn arrived and I handed over my ticket.

  ‘Where are we off to today?’ The check-in guy faked a smile.

  ‘Melbourne.’ I faked one back.

  ‘Right, Mr Carter, I’ll need to see photo ID please.’

  My hand automatically went to my pocket and then I froze, pulling that face you make when you know you’re stuffed. The interim paper licence came out anyway. I showed him the formal invitation letter; I pleaded with him. He pulled the face you make when you don’t really give a fuck. The APEC Conference was about to start in Sydney, a delegation of some of the planet’s most important decision-makers—and George W. Bush—were about to fly in, so the security protocols required that everyone checking in for a flight needed to have current valid photo ID.

  ‘Sorry,’ he smirked, ‘I don’t make the rules.’

  I was livid. Right, I thought, think fast. I ran to the taxi rank, jumped into the first cab and looked into the face of an ancient Indian man with glasses thicker than George W. Shit, I thought, this is going to be like Driving Miss Daisy all the way to my house.

  ‘Get me to my house and back here as fast as you can, mate, and I’ll look after you,’ I said.

  George hammered it. I was doing the right foot into the invisible brake thing all the way home. There was no way I was going to get back in time to make my flight, but there was another one departing in a little over an hour. It was the only flight left that could possibly get me there in time—and it would be tight.

  I booked it on my mobile while George snaked in and out of traffic mumbling to himself, constantly pushing his glasses back up on his nose with his index finger. By the time we turned into my street I was starting to feel confident; George had done a sterling job.

  ‘What number?’ he asked, but I was staring in shock, my heartbeat had doubled. ‘Oooh, there’s a fire,’ he casually pointed out.

  ‘Stop the car,’ I yelled at him. We pulled up in front of my house—my rental house, currently on fire. Neighbours had gathered on the lawn, peering through the front window. Flames were visible and smoke was billowing out.

  I ran to the front door fumbling with my keys while the neighbours flashed their whiter than white teeth. ‘We called the fireys,’ they said. I suppressed the urge to run straight through the kitchen and into the study. No doors in the house were closed and smoke was filling the house from our high ceiling down to head level. I could see into the study from the kitchen; my desk was burning, as was the carpet underneath it, and half my bookshelf. Right, I thought, think faster. Working on drilling rigs, every two years we would do a firefighting course. First we’d practise assessing hypothetical situations and decide the best way to deal with all kinds of different fires, and then we’d spend the rest of the day setting things on fire and putting the theory into practice. After all these years, my first time ever fighting a fire, and I didn’t even have time to enjoy it. Shit.

  Propped up against the wall by the kitchen door was a nine-kilo dry-powder, big fuck-off industrial fire extinguisher. I grabbed it, pulled the pin, and pointed the nozzle at the bread bin to test it. The corner of our kitchen bench, the bread bin, the toaster, the kettle and a revolting embroidered hanging thing that said ‘Clare’s Kitchen’ were instantly covered in white powder. Yup, it worked. I turned to my study and let fly.

  The fire was out before the extinguisher was empty. My passport sat in the top left-hand drawer of my desk. As I pulled it out I heard the fire truck roll up outside. My heart was pounding and I was sweating like a pig. I shoved the passport into my hip pocket and ran out.

  On the way out I passed the firemen, the real estate agent and the neighbours, still standing on the porch.

  ‘You got keys?’ I said to the worried-looking agent.

  ‘You got insurance?’ he replied.

  The taxi driver sat there behind the wheel, engine still running. I jumped in and started doing a pantomime for ‘get me back to the airport’. He couldn’t believe I was just going to leave.

  ‘But what about your house, my friend?’

  ‘Just go,’ I snapped.

  ‘Don’t you want to change your shirt?’

  ‘No, just go.’

  ‘Did you just use a fire extinguisher?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You know that was very dangerous. What if you inhaled smoke and collapsed?’

  ‘Airport.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you want to go back to the airport. It must be a very important meeting you are going to then.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Do you want me to take the tunnel or go through the city?’

  ‘JUST FUCKING GO.’

  George’s finger shot up and shoved his glasses back up on his nose and we took off like a rocket. My phone rang. It was the real estate agent: the fire was well and truly out. Thank Christ for that, I thought, imagining the alternative, searching for a way to make myself feel better. All those years of working on the rigs, with endless flights, hundreds of chart
ers, choppers, donkeys, commercial airliners—you name it, I caught it. I had only missed one check-in in twenty years. This time I was lucky I’d missed that flight. The agent was very understanding and said we would get everything sorted out in a couple of days when I got back from Melbourne.

  I sat back, trying to relax, looking at my watch every few minutes. There were just too many variables. I had stacked things in my head the way you do when you’re confronted with too much to deal with and none of it is really under your control. I stank, sweat was running down my back, my hands were sticky. Meanwhile George continued to drive like a maniac, and we pulled up at the terminal almost before I’d gathered my thoughts. He popped the boot. I slapped two green ones down on his waiting hand and he beamed. ‘Good luck to you.’

  I had arrived just in time to make the second flight. I couldn’t believe it. Skipping the long queue I ran up to the guy at the desk. Same guy, same expression. He even said, ‘Where are we off to today?’

  ‘Melbourne.’ I slid my passport across the counter to him.

  He looked at it for a moment, then looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. ‘This is expired, Mr Carter.’

  My face must have dropped a couple of feet. ‘What?’ I grabbed it and yes, I had picked up the wrong one. When you get a new passport the government sends back your old one as well, but because it’s cancelled they cut off a corner. I stood there for a moment looking at my photo, the top right-hand corner of my head chopped off. How had I missed that?

  ‘Look, you can see it’s me,’ I said, holding the invitation letter above my face to block out the same area, but it was pointless.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t make the rules.’ He faked a sympathetic smile and waved up the next person.

  I went back outside the terminal and stood there for a moment, getting myself together. I’ve managed to get myself into and out of some remote corners of the globe, often really shitty parts of the Third World, sometimes countries where civil war was raging, but I couldn’t get it together to get out of Perth to go to a writers’ festival. I was shaking with anger, but there was nothing to be done; I’d blown it. At least the house hadn’t burned down. All I could do was phone the festival organisers and let them know I would be a no-show.

  After I made the call, I looked over to the cab rank; there was George reading the paper. The thought of getting in that cab again was too much to bear and I found myself wandering back into the terminal, towards the airport shop. The airport shop where they sell books, books with the author’s photo on the jacket . . . motherfucker. I broke into a sprint, grabbed the first book of mine I could see on the shelf, stood in the queue feeling like a dick for buying my own book, then ran back to check-in guy and thrust it under his nose while people in the check-in queue protested. ‘What the fuck?’

  I ignored them.

  ‘Excuse me, dickhead.’ A deep voice spoke close behind me. I turned and the guy stopped mid-speech. No doubt I looked like your stock-standard bald, angry, control-seeking narcissist who’s in receipt of some kind of mental benefit. Our eyes met. He took in the stench of a house fire mixed with dry-powder extinguisher, mixed with sweat, mixed with my best fuck-off look, and he took a step back.

  I turned around to the check-in guy, who was studying the jacket photo. ‘OK, Mr Carter, here’s your boarding pass, good luck.’ This time he showed teeth.

  ‘Thank you.’ I had five minutes. ‘Thank you.’ I ran towards the security section. ‘Thank you,’ I yelled over my shoulder.

  Sitting in the departure lounge I felt worse than before I made the check-in. Now I had to phone the festival back and tell them I was coming after all. Hearing their confusion, I could tell they were convinced I was an idiot. Finally we boarded. I tried to relax. A quarter of an hour went by, then another. If we didn’t push back from the terminal in the next five minutes I wasn’t going to make it. If we got underway now, and landed on time, then I had just fifteen minutes to get from the airport to the stage. Christ. I turned my phone on and dialled the only man I knew who could get me from the airport to the festival at light speed. James Ward was my only hope.

  James is an interesting guy, affable, funny, in his mid thirties and already the manager of the Supercar Club. He has at his disposal a frightening array of ridiculously fast and exotic sports cars, as well as the necessary driving skills to put a fast car into low orbit.

  I’d met him a few months earlier, when a TV crew was in the process of casting the presenters for the Aussie version of the British motoring television show Top Gear. Out of the blue they’d called and asked me to audition.

  ‘But I’m not a car guy,’ I said, but apparently that didn’t matter.

  The next day I was on a flight to Sydney, and from there to a small town in rural New South Wales via a minibus. I met James on that bus. From the get-go I was the guy in that group who didn’t know about cars. That is to say, yes, I’m a car lover; yes, I know as much as any regular guy who dreams of owning a fully restored 1966 Fastback Mustang, but the others were all walking auto savants who could rattle off every conceivable detail about any car. ‘Mate, the GTO was faster than the ABC coz the ’76 model had the blah blah plugged into the thingy, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .’ was all I heard after the first hour. You can imagine the amount of testosterone in the room, ten guys in heated ‘pick me’ mode, every last one of them a dedicated car lover.

  ‘Paul, what do you think of my new Ford Blah?’ they’d ask.

  ‘Very nice,’ I’d say, while another guy jumped in with: ‘I’ve got one, but what about their move over to trans blah, blah . . .’ Each question posed with a serious expression, as they tried to feel out exactly how much I don’t know about cars. ‘What colour is it?’ I would respond. Another asked me what I thought about V6 compared to V8 and I told him I preferred apple juice. They must have hated me.

  So James and I drank all their single malt, and bonded; James didn’t care either.

  We drove about in go-karts, racing each other while the decision-makers recorded everything. All I managed was some very average drink-driving, ending in a fairly unspectacular crash. The whole experience was lots of fun, but in the end they chose their presenters and the rest of us sobered up and went back to our regular jobs. James and I stayed in touch, and I’m glad we did. Now I was about to ask him for a huge favour.

  He picked up the phone when I rang and without hesitation said, ‘No worries, mate, I’ll be out the front waiting.’ As I turned off my phone and the aircraft finally pushed back, hope flickered alive once again. During the flight I pondered my situation. Why was this so hard? It wasn’t like we were trying to breed pandas here, all I had to do was get up and go to the airport for fuck’s sake.

  The aircraft touched down bang on time in Melbourne; I had no check-in luggage so I bolted for the exit. Hitting the outer doors I spotted James instantly, leaning against a brand-new white Maserati GranTurismo.

  Bingo. This was going to be fun, I thought as I ran up. I started thanking him and apologising, but all he said was: ‘Jump in.’

  I dropped into the low-slung car like you’d slide into a warm bath after a hard day. James took off like we’d just robbed a bank, concentrating totally while making polite conversation. I tried not to look frantic as we passed other cars as if they were standing still. ‘How’s Lola doing?’ James asked casually, taking the Italian V8 from a low growl to a fuel-injected feeding frenzy as he pointed my great white hope towards two giant semitrailers and shot out the minuscule gap between them like an Exocet missile.

  ‘Oh, she’s fine, mate.’ Time slowed down. I think a little pee came out. I was pushed back into the ample black leather, feeling like a bum in a dinner suit, mesmerised by the number of buttons and dials on the dash.

  If we had passed a cop, there would have been just enough time for them to report a UFO. James chatted calmly about everything from po
litics to soap operas as if he was driving the Popemobile sedately through Rome, not tearing down the Tullamarine Freeway at a million miles an hour. If I had been driving that car we would have ended up vaporised in the grille of a semitrailer full of bridge parts. Or the cops would have nailed me, and what would I have told them? After the day I’d had, I would have welcomed getting arrested. I could have popped open the glove box, and shown the officers the scarf I was knitting or given them a list of the top ten movies that made me cry. Jesus. I needed a tall glass of ‘Harden The Fuck Up’: there was no backing out now.

  If the Nobel Prize Foundation gave out awards for driving, James would have won that day. It was like being on the set of The Transporter, but without the guns. We banked hard and darted into an exit. I glanced down at my watch. I had two minutes. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll get you there,’ he said in that confident I-could-do-this-shit-for-a-living kind of way. Sure enough, he made it; I owed him one.

  My goodbyes were fast. I had already undone the seat belt, and I sprang from the low GT as soon as he pulled up outside one of many entrances to the theatre. It was one of those utterly confusing modern buildings; I had no idea if I was at the right door or even the right building. Adrenalin forced me to run inside, my head darting from left to right as I looked for a magic arrow to point me in the right direction.

  A young woman came around the corner in a festival t-shirt wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard, so I grabbed her. ‘Hi, I’m supposed to be on stage,’ I blurted out.

  She scanned the clipboard. ‘What’s your name?’ I told her and bang, we were off: down the hall, up some stairs, down some stairs, through a backstage corridor. I could hear a lot of people settling in on the other side of the wall, and nerves started pulling at my gut.

  She stopped and motioned towards a small set of stairs that had to lead to the stage. ‘Go out and take your seat,’ she said, looking firm.