High Season

by Jim Hearn

  ‘Oh, that’s fucked then,’ confirmed Dave, who was an expert in all things mechanical.

  We sat silent in the darkness for a while. There wasn’t a lot of huffing and puffing about future plans or wonderful tomorrows. We all knew we’d landed on our knees rather than our feet and there seemed little point in going over old ground.

  ‘Is Flick’s car still down the laneway?’ I asked the boys.

  ‘Oh yeah, but it’s fucked, mate,’ said Benny.

  ‘It’s got no rego, no back seat, and the lights don’t work,’ Dave explained.

  ‘Does it go?’ I persisted.

  ‘Yeah, it goes. We started it up the other night to listen to the races. But you wouldn’t get out of the laneway before the cops were all over you, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right, mate,’ I agreed, nodding.

  ‘Where’re you thinking of going, Jimmy?’ asked Benny.

  ‘Thought I might head up to Nimbin.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sounds like a plan,’ said Benny.

  ‘You won’t fucking get there in that piece of shit,’ said Dave.

  ‘Oh, fucking lighten up, Dave. We’re just talking, mate,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m just telling you, the car’s a heap of shit and you won’t make it out of Annandale.’

  ‘Well, thanks for the tip, mate,’ said Benny. He looked at me. ‘So we’ve got an early start then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  27

  Last time I’d headed north I’d got busted doing my drug-run-gone-wrong to Brisbane. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Now, sitting behind the wheel of the heap-of-shit Corolla, which really was a transport of last resort, it was difficult not to imagine this current expedition ending badly as well. Still, Benny and I remained quite cheery. We’d managed to get on to some particularly low-grade, teeth-grinding smack as well as a few foils of Rohypnol. As the hours of driving wore on, however, the pressure of waiting for the axe to fall began to take its toll. We started fighting over radio stations and petrol costs, and whether or not I was speeding (which was something we couldn’t accurately determine because the speedometer was broken). Very little actually worked on the old two-door Corolla. It was quite amazing that the engine ran as well as it did and that the wheels and gearbox continued to do their thing.

  Our biggest problem was that we stood out. Because Benny and I weren’t planning to go back to Sydney, we’d stuffed everything we owned into and onto the car. There was shit strapped to the roof, the boot wouldn’t fully close and had to be bungy-strapped shut; the back seat was piled so high with garbage bags and boxes of crap that I couldn’t see out the back window through the rear-view mirror.

  It’s strange how at certain times when I’ve really needed to be invisible, things have transpired to make me a fucking rock star. People would overtake us and stare out their window, half laughing, half shaking their heads. And because the lights didn’t work on the old Corolla, we had to take the daylight option. Petrol stations were the worst of it. People just openly laughed when they saw us drive in and stop. And I guess it was something of a sight, a couple of junkies down on their luck, out for a . . . long Sunday drive.

  Driving into a random breath testing station at two o’clock on a balmy mid-autumn afternoon in Armidale wasn’t quite the blaze of glory we’d hoped for. As the cops waved us over into their cunningly hidden testing area, it was a relief in many ways.

  Benny and I looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘Well, mate, this is it then,’ I said.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I reckon top speed is probably about a hundred in this old girl,’ I said.

  ‘It’d be good for a laugh, though,’ said Benny, his eyes glinting at the thought of a Funniest Home Videos-type car-chase scene.

  But I glided to a stop. I figured that the police would have to take some responsibility for us now. We were obviously not only fucked up, but absolute gangsters.

  The officer leant in the window. ‘Driver’s licence?’

  ‘Don’t have one,’ I replied.

  ‘Rego?’ a second copper asked.

  ‘Don’t think so. It’s not my car.’

  ‘Stolen, is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah. Not really.’

  ‘He said it’s not really stolen, Terry,’ the young copper said to the older cop, feigning goodwill.

  ‘Yeah, well, that should be sweet then,’ the older copper responded. ‘You handy with a screwdriver are you, son?’

  ‘Yeah, not bad,’ I said.

  Glancing across at Benny, I smiled. We were up for this shit. Give us your worst. We’d probably be behind bars in half an hour enjoying a mug of sweet tea and some Vegemite toast.

  ‘Well, get out of the car and take the plates off then,’ the older cop said.

  ‘Yeah, no worries,’ I agreed, not wanting to aggravate the situation by spinning a yarn, which was something I’d have done in the past.

  This time felt different. Benny and I were both completely over it. We were hanging out badly even with the low-grade skank we were on. And ever since my trip to Wagga Wagga, a strong sense that life was going to change had stayed with me. If this was to be the event that brought about that change, so be it.

  As I took the number plates off the car, the older cop was busy writing a whole lot of shit down while his offsider was in the police car phoning home. When I handed the officer the number plates, he handed me three tickets and said, ‘Have a nice day.’

  I was stunned. Were these cunts blind? And not only blind but fucking stupid? We were drug-fucked gangsters, for chrissake, ripping up the highway in a stolen car. The tickets for unlicensed, unregistered and uninsured driving totalled into a very nasty figure that only added to the surreal nature of what had just gone down.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Benny. ‘We’re free.’

  ‘Well, fuck me sideways,’ I said. ‘I really can’t believe it.’

  Benny shook his head in wonder. ‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’

  That was the question I didn’t want to hear because I was sick to fucking death of pondering such matters. ‘I don’t fucking know, mate. Why don’t you put your thinking cap on and jot a few ideas down.’

  ‘Oi, steady on, mate,’ Benny protested.

  ‘Well, I don’t fucking know what we’ll do, all right? I’ve fucking had it with figuring out what to do.’

  ‘Yeah, I was just saying, mate . . .’ Benny was starting to sulk.

  ‘I know what you were saying. And the answer is I don’t know. We’ve got fuck-all money, fuck-all drugs and we’re a long way from Nimbin.’

  ‘Well, what’s up in Nimbin anyway?’ said Benny, looking around the parklands of Armidale.

  ‘Oh yeah, right. You think we should set up camp here in sunny fucking Armidale, do you? That’s your input, is it? Benny to the rescue . . . switch on the sirens, sound the alarm, here comes fucking Fireman Sam.’

  ‘Nah, I wasn’t saying that.’

  ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘what’s in Nimbin is freaks like us. All right? We’ll be among our own. It’s not quite Hollywood but there’s weed growing down the main street and people who don’t give a fuck if you stop to roll some of it up. You think we’d bump into those sorts of people here?’

  ‘No, mate. I was just saying—’ ‘Yeah, well, I know what you were saying.’

  ‘Well, I’ve still got a few hundred, Jimmy,’ Benny volunteered.

  ‘Righto then,’ I said. ‘Let’s idle the car down to that motel and make camp.’

  ‘You think we should drive?’

  ‘Mate!’ I said, exasperated. ‘A bloke can’t get arrested in this town.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ said Benny, getting more comfortable with the idea of being a free man.

  ‘C’mon. Get in. We’ll just roll down the hill, mate.’

  ‘Nah, mate, I think I’ll just walk down and meet you there.’

  ‘Oh, right. That’s how it is, is it?’

&nbs
p; ‘Nah, it’s not how it is . . . I was just saying.’

  ‘No fucking worries,’ I said, angry now, revving the shit out of the Corolla and setting off a particularly toxic chain reaction through the exhaust system. Then I clunked the car into gear and did a very piss-weak bunny-hop and sped down the road to the motel.

  Once we’d settled into the Settler’s Inn at Armidale, things started to feel a little better. Benny and I weren’t really speaking to each other but at least we were civil and glad for the comfortable beds and clean sheets. The old couple at reception were very pleasant, which was the greatest surprise of my recent life. It had become rare for people I didn’t know to be remotely kind to me or even stop to give me the time of day. In retrospect, they were probably more scared than anything; not that I felt like a dangerous person or was anything other than polite. It was probably the palpable sense of desperation we gave off that frightened people.

  All I needed from these kind, elderly motel managers was a place to sleep; a room to lock the rest of the world out of while I put on the television and dreamt of a time when I hadn’t had my particular set of problems. It was a dream that seemed to roll back a long time. I’d been ‘up’ for so long by then, ferreting out a living, crashing and burning, talking it up and pushing the needle in, that I was tired in a way that a young man should never be. There was not a single thing I felt I could be grateful for; everything felt too heavy a burden and too hard to hold. And the worst of it was the strong sense I had that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I had brought it all on myself, because in a very real way I knew I had. Sure, there’d been extenuating circumstances, and there were people to blame and even some good reasons to justify a bit of carry-on . . . but at the end of the day it was my life and I’d run out of answers.

  It wasn’t as if I’d planned any of this; it felt like I hadn’t taken a breath since I’d left high school as a fifteen-year-old kid, and through circumstances unfolding had ended up here in this motel. What scared me most about that was the idea that I might suddenly stop; might become catatonic beneath my polyester quilt in the floral surrounds of Armidale. I fantasised that I could just lock myself in the room and see how the rest of the world dealt with the problem. And yet there was a crazy part of my brain, the mad scientist, the eternal optimist, that kept at me, pushing me towards the ‘answer’. It was like, if I could just join all the pieces of the puzzle together, then the whole thing might somehow lock together in such a way that would not just make sense of how I was feeling but shine a fucking light on things.

  Let me give you a bird’s-eye view of Armidale in mid-autumn. Come evening time, it’s a very pretty little country town. The township itself is nestled in a valley where fog sets in most nights. When it gets cold, smoke trails out of the many chimneys that line the roofs of the village houses. And there’s a very pleasant-looking historic bluestone university on the edge of town. The whole feel is quaint; it’s the sort of place that a lot of people might stop at and wonder what it would be like to live there.

  I slipped out of the motel after dark to organise some food and wine for us. Benny had run the local river dry with a half-hour steaming hot shower and then crashed out on the queen-size bed.

  As I wandered around the streets of Armidale trying to decide on Chinese or fried chicken, I stopped off at a phone box and—in utter desperation—opened the phonebook and dropped my finger onto a random number. I rang the number and, as I listened to it ring, wondered what I was going to say to whoever answered. My finger had landed on some business called Triple 7 something. And it sounded good. It sounded like a code, like there might be something hidden there, and when the guy at the other end of the line answered, ‘Triple 7, can I help you?’ my immediate response was, ‘Yeah.’

  And after an extended pause the guy said, ‘Okay, what do you need?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Are you looking for some advertising space? We’re an advertising firm.’

  ‘No. No, I’m not looking for advertising space,’ I replied.

  There was another long pause, during which he seemed to sense this wasn’t just a prank call.

  ‘I’m not really sure what I can do,’ he said.

  ‘No. Nor am I.’ I gently hung up the phone.

  It was an intimate call. A weird, softly spoken and utterly random call for help where the caller had no idea what questions to ask and the guy who’d answered had no idea what to say in response. As I placed the receiver back in its cradle, it was hard not to realise how desperate I had become. Pressure will do funny things to a person and everyone is going to deal with things differently, but I was critically aware that I didn’t have much sane time left. I was straddling a line, seesawing between madness and something else. And my greatest problem was that I had lost contact with, or even a sense of, what that something else was. I could no longer recall what normal felt like.

  I decided on Chinese, a six-pack of beer and a bottle of red, though I didn’t even feel like drinking. The powder I’d been shooting up was so riddled with chalk I had to throw away what little I had left. I’d tried burning off whatever they’d cut the pasty skank with by holding a lighter to the bottom of the spoon, but what remained after was no better so I just flushed it. It had been getting harder to breathe the further north we got and I eventually had to acknowledge it was more likely the result of shooting up chalk dust than the side effects of breathing clean country air.

  Benny was up when I got back to the motel room. He had the television on and lights going and seemed quite happy propped up among his eight pillows and floral doona.

  ‘Well, hello, Princess,’ I said. ‘How’s that great big bloody bed then?’

  The sleep had obviously done Benny good because instead of biting back he just laughed and took the piss.

  ‘’Bout fucking time with the dinner, mate. I was about to phone Pizza Hut.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want you to strain your finger now, mate, would we? What would we do if that happened?’

  ‘You’d have to pick me nose, for one thing.’ He laughed.

  ‘Yeah, and feed it to you, I suppose.’

  ‘Nah, mate, I haven’t chewed on me snot since I got off the gack,’ Benny said.

  ‘Mate, you’d fucking starve if you stopped eating your snot.’

  ‘What’d you get?’

  ‘Chinese and red wine,’ I said, holding up the packages. ‘Who the fuck said crime doesn’t pay?’

  Benny went straight back to sleep after dinner. The combination of food, red wine and a comfortable bed quickly lulled him back to dreamland. Meanwhile, as I sat on my single bed, the television playing soundlessly in the corner, I drew the curtains back and stared out at the old green Corolla. I realised, looking at the car, that it represented a picture of what I had managed to achieve in my twenty-eight years. And it was a picture that, even if you were talented at such things, couldn’t be spun into a story where success was even remotely connected to the themes of the narrative.

  I’d spoken briefly to Benny about getting up while it was still dark and making a run for Nimbin. It was only about four hours up the road if we didn’t plan on implementing the Stop, Revive and Survive plan. After sliding the curtain closed and flicking off the television, I lay in the darkness for a few minutes and resolved that, if I woke up early enough, I’d shake Benny out of his slumber and hit the highway. How bad could it be? We’d get nicked again, probably score a few more tickets, then try to make it all the way to the Promised Land. I was still surprised the police hadn’t taken us down to the station or impounded the car or done something that had relieved us, or at least me, of the burden of having to make further decisions.

  Ten o’clock in the morning in Armidale is reasonably busy. It’s not Pitt Street but there’s plenty happening, including the motel’s maid banging on our door and insisting—in the nicest possible broken English—that it was time to arise from our beds and face the day. And what was good about that was t
hat we hit the ground running. Benny headed straight for another pounding hot shower while I placated the maid and told her we’d be out in fifteen minutes.

  The car didn’t look quite so vulnerable in the morning. Somehow the colour and movement of a busy weekday allowed the faintly ridiculous nature of the Corolla’s bulging outline to blend more into the background. I jammed the rest of our shit into the car and strolled down to reception and paid the bill. Once again, the old couple were completely charming; they didn’t make a big deal about payment or being late or using half the town’s water supply; they just accepted payment graciously, not asking too many questions in the process, and bade us well on our journey. Their graceful hospitality has become something I recall in moments when I’m working in a hotel or a restaurant and a customer strolls in who is obviously not a natural fit with the surroundings. If they’re looking for kindness and hospitality, then I try not to make a big fuss and give them what they’ve come for. And more generally, whether it’s in the family home, at a social function or in the context of work, hospitality addresses the human body and its universal needs for food, drink and shelter. That’s what we do in hospitality; we don’t so much address people as bodies. It doesn’t and absolutely shouldn’t matter if you’re black, white or brindle, rich, middle class or down on your luck—everyone has to meet those basic needs of food, drink and shelter in order to survive. Sometimes I think we get things a little screwed up with grading systems, restaurant scores or numbers of stars, rather than acknowledging our roles as either host or guest with a spirit of hospitableness.

  As Benny and I waved our goodbyes to Ma and Pa Hospitality at reception, I turned the smoking four-cylinder beast towards the train station. I’d convinced Benny we should load our collective shit onto a train and then catch a bus to Nimbin. We’d be able to collect our treasured possessions at a later date from the Lismore railway station. It all sounded fair enough to Benny, whose spirits had picked up remarkably as a result of a long night of uninterrupted slumber.

  ‘You’re a cheery soul this morning,’ I said to him.