'Sweetheart!' she cried when she saw my wet, blood-splattered bandage. 'What happened to your head?'
'Stack,' I said.
'Hmmm. Bike didn't fly?'
Paul looked guilty. Mum was the only one of our folks we'd told about the attempt. She was the only one who wouldn't freak. Paul's folks reckoned she was 'permissive'.
'Hello, Paul,' she said, out of habit.
Paul looked down like he hadn't heard her. He was one of those kids who refused to speak to adults. In the eight years I'd known him the only adults I'd seen him speak to were his olds, and only if it meant life or death. He reckoned he had gerontophobia – fear of old people (which, for him, was anyone over thirty). 'They make me think of porridge dripping out of a toothless mouth onto an old, wrinkly chin,' he'd say. Go figure.
'Let's get some paw-paw on those grazes,' Mum said.
She thought paw-paw ointment was the answer to everything.
'Hey, Mac,' said a voice. It was Speed, with Tony and Cat. 'Cool market.'
Cat was pulling the neck of her top up over her nose as if she couldn't stand the smell of the place. She lowered it briefly to sip a takeaway coffee, probably through one of her dad's lids. Mr DeVrees had made a killing selling plastic lids. Totally unrecyclable. My mum had a stat that you could circle the earth a bunch of times with the number of takeaway coffee lids humans chuck out every year.
'I'm Speed Cohen,' he said to my mum, shaking hands. 'We have a little proposition for your son.'
'Right,' Mum said, super-suspicious.
'It's cool, Ma,' I said. 'Can we go out back?'
Eyeing Speed and Big Serious Tony, she parted the purple curtain behind her and let us into the small, warmly lit back room. The walls were covered with dark red material and there was a table in the middle where Mum sometimes did Tarot readings. Paul leaned the mashed bike frame against the wall, adjusting it to get the best angle.
'Wow,' said Speed, looking around the room. 'This is sweet.'
He, Tony, Paul and I took a seat. Cat sighed loudly.
'So ...' I said.
'Guess you're wondering what all this is about?' said Speed. He looked to Tony who gave him a single nod.
'Well, we have a website you may have heard of called Coolhunters.' He waited for my reaction but I'd never heard of it. Cat gave me a filthy look and pulled a Vogue mag out of her bag. She was so hot when she was angry. Which was always.
'Well, anyway, we have this network of coolhunters, yeah? And they ... Do you know what a coolhunter is?' he asked, not waiting for a response. 'It's someone who hunts cool.'
'Yeah, I kinda figured,' I said. Paul flicked me a glare, and Speed went on.
'Like, say a company's about to launch a new phone or game or a new shoe, they come to us and our coolhunters tell them whether kids are going to dig it or not.'
'Right,' I said.
Mum delivered a Chinese teapot, five little cups, and disappeared.
'We're getting over a million unique hits a day from teens who form a worldwide network of coolhunters. They tell us what's hot everywhere on the planet. But we want five featured hunters to be the face of our site. We've got a kid in New York, one cruising South America, one in Shanghai and another in Paris. We need somebody down-under and Kings Bay is so hot right now, we want someone on the ground here.'
See, Kings has the best climate and some of the greatest surf on earth as well as this alternative, greenie history. It was put on the map by a couple of Aussie surfers, two brothers, who hit the pro tour at fifteen. Then a couple of movie stars bought houses here and, bud-a-bam, overnight we went from backwater hippie haven, population nine thousand, to coolest holiday place on the planet.
'We've been watching you for a couple of months, Mac. You and a dozen other kids from this place,' said Speed. 'We've been reading your blog. We think you're interesting.'
'My blog's anonymous,' I shot back.
'You can find out anything on the web,' said Speed.
I swallowed hard, knowing all the stuff I'd written in that blog, stuff I'd never tell anyone. I scanned my mind, trying to think how they might have found out it was me. Hacked into my profile somehow? I'd registered my name and stuff but no one could see that. Maybe they did a search on blogs with refs to Kings Bay or something. Whatever it was, it sounded Dodge City. Or maybe he was lying.
'What do you know about me?' I asked, calling his bluff.
'How's your dad?' said Speed. My stomach sank. 'When's he get out?'
Cat looked up, and if I didn't know how tough I was I'd say I nearly had tears in my eyes. Nobody knew about my dad, except Paul. Speed saw my reaction and pushed on.
'Now ... I'm going to ask you some questions. Just answer as honestly as you can,' he said. 'How often do you go out?'
'Out?' I asked, still reeling from the Dad stuff. 'Like, out of the house?'
Cat laughed.
'No, like to parties or on dates with girls,' said Speed.
'Well, I dunno, kind of never, I s'pose.'
'OK,' said Speed. 'How do you find out about the latest trends?'
'How do you mean?'
'Well,' said Speed. 'Do you read mags, surf the web, talk to friends? How do you find out what's cool?'
'I don't know,' I said. I don't even know what cool is, I thought to myself.
'Right,' said Speed. Cat put her mag down so she could watch the carnage.
'Well, tell me about this school uniform on the weekend thing,' Speed said.
I looked down at my blood-stained uniform. Cat's face spread into a smile.
'That's totally cool,' said Speed. I looked up. Cat's smile dropped.
'Where'd you get that from? That's total anarchy, man. It's, like, the reverse of refusing to wear your uniform to school. Parents and teachers would hate you wearing uniform on the weekend, yeah? And you're doin' it.'
'I just don't have that many clothes,' I said. Tony laughed a big, deep laugh. Speed gave me a weird handshake. I didn't know when to punch knuckles and when to slide skin.
'This guy is an Innovator,' said Tony, with a French accent, the first words he'd spoken.
'And like the best, he doesn't even know it!' said Speed.
'At school he's, like, not even on the map. He's a freak,' said Cat.
'At least he's not a stuck-up cow,' Paul snapped.
'Settle,' said Speed.
'What's an Innovator?' I asked.
'Someone who's going off-map,' Speed said.
'Doing their own thing. Someone who does stuff and other people follow, yeah?'
'He's so not an Innovator,' said Cat. 'As if anyone's going to start wearing uniform on the weekend and trying to make their bike fly.'
'I'll tell you what we're going to do,' said French Tony, ignoring Cat. He had this energy that commanded everyone's attention. 'We are going to give each of you a week to prove yourselves. Cat and Mac, we'll give you a camera and you will vlog whatever you think is cool about Kings Bay every day for the next week. Our subscribers will decide who they want.'
Cat looked like she wanted to scratch my eyes out.
'And then what happens?' I asked.
'The winner becomes one of our five coolhunters,' Speed told me. 'You'll be our Australian guy and cover Kings Bay and we'll send you phones, skateboards, new games consoles, loads of stuff to try before it hits shelves. You vlog it, say what you think. We'll pay you. If the subscribers like you, you stay. If not, you're gone. The Chosen Five are meeting in New York City, in a month's time.'
New York? I wondered if he'd read that in my blog, too. I'm, like, obsessed with New York. If I could go to any place it'd be New York. It's the opposite of my life. Subway trains, steam through gutters, rats in sewers, the Lower East Side, people from all over the world making movies and music, writing books, creating stuff, innovating, putting it all on the line. I love where I'm from but, to me, if you're gonna go anywhere, you go to New York. Even to smell the place. That's just the way it is.
I cou
ld see my mum's shadow on the curtain. I knew what she'd think of all this. And I knew she was listening. I tried to act cool, like I didn't want it so much.
'Well, I don't know,' I said. 'Cat seems to want it pretty bad, and I don't know how fired up I am about being in some kinda popularity contest.'
Paul kicked me under the table.
'Well, it's up to you, mate,' said Speed. 'Like I said, we've been tracking a bunch of kids so we could get someone else to trial, or we could just give Cat the gig. She's cute and she's very right for it. But you're a wild card and I like wild cards.'
Cat gave me the deathliest of death-stares. Paul kicked me again, harder this time, and I realised why.
'Well, see, Paul and I are kind of a team,' I said.
'This isn't a school project, Mac. It's you we're interested in. Not your friend. Your call. Are you in or are you out?'
4
In Case You Change
Your Mind
I crossed the rusty railway track that separated town from the Arts Estate. The track hadn't seen a train in years, not since cheap flights on the 'net.
I entered the Estate through the low, timber open-air reception area. There was a desk just inside where a sunburnt Danish backpacker was peeling skin off her boyfriend's back while they checked in. The web computers were all booked out with a dozen travellers bashing away on keyboards in different languages.
I passed through reception and made a beeline towards our bus. My arms were killing from lugging two heavy green bags full of fruit and veg all the way home. I passed a few twenty-something chicks carving didgeridoos over near the beach track. Ken, a Hare Krishna dude with robes and a bald head, shuffled by eating a bowl of strange white goo. A cattle dog snapped at flies. Smoke curled out of one of the teepees next to our bus.
The Estate was a wacky mix of travellers, healers, artists and alternatives. One of the few places in town that hadn't been yuppified. The owners had been battling for years to fend off a company who wanted to level the place, build sixteen shops, twenty-seven apartments and make a packet.
Jewels Piper, a chick I'd grown up with, was sitting on the edge of the ti-tree lake, drawing designs on her shoes, a Smash Hits mag lying on the ground beside her. Jewels was born in a tent at the Estate and lived in it for the first two years of her life. Then her mum left town and her dad, a poet, upgraded to a teepee. I don't know if you've heard but there's not a lot of big money in poetry these days so Jewels is a bit of a dag like me. A total original, but like any kid from a weird upbringing all she really wants is to be normal. Meanwhile, all the normal kids are trying to be weird. Paul reckons she has a crush on me but I think Paul has one on her.
'Hey Mac,' she called out.
'Hey,' I said, not stopping.
'Wanna hang out?'
'Nah,' I said. I wasn't in the mood.
Jewels looked a bit cut and went back to doodling.
I rouf our bus – double-decker, painted decades back with lots of little murals and quotes like 'Think Global, Act Local', 'Be You!' and the one my mum loves: 'Vegos save the world! It takes 100 000 litres of water to raise a kilo of beef!' The bus had wheels that hadn't turned in about two million years. Mum had driven it round Australia before it died on this spot. She took it as a sign and stayed. Now we live in a bus but we don't have a car. Work that out.
The bus faced towards the ramshackle wooden fence that separated the Estate from the new chicken factory next door. They 'processed' 18000 chickens a day in there and when the wind was against us, the stench was deadly.
'Mac,' said a voice. I turned. It was Mr Kim, the old Korean dude with dreads who owned the Estate. He was smiling as usual, carrying a big package wrapped in brown paper. 'This came for you. Ten minutes ago,' he said.
I plunked down the shopping bags and he handed it over. 'Annyongi kyeseyo,' he said, and left. He was always trying to school us in Korean.
The package had an envelope taped to the front. On it were these words: 'Mac. In case you change your mind. Speed.'
Mum arrived next to me with a couple more bags.
'What's that?' she said.
I just looked at her, turned and shoved open the rear fold-in doors of the bus. I wasn't up for a discussion on morals or ethics or whatever.
5
The Driver's Seat
'Mac. In case you change your mind. Speed.' I read it for the tenth time. 'In case you change your mind.' And I knew I could. All I had to do was rip open the wrapping. I was desperate to see what was inside. I had a strong hunch what the big box was but I wasn't too sure on the little one strapped to the side. Maybe I could just look inside the envelope. But if I opened it I knew I'd want to do the trial even more. I held it up to the fading sun to see if I could read anything through the wrapping.
I was sitting in the driver's seat of our bus. I always sat there and thought about stuff. A bunch of old gauges without needles, a rusty spring poking through the seat into my bum, wipers that had stopped halfway through a wipe, now piled with leaves and dirt. Through the windscreen I could see workers milling around in the fluoro-lit chicken factory.
I decided to rip a little corner of the packaging. But then I thought about what Paul had said out the back of the Bardo: 'We're Mac and Paul, man. Like Mac and cheese. Dogs and fleas. We go together. Do you really want to do this by yourself?'
'Are you kidding? New York!' I'd said. 'We can take our inventions, sell our ideas, skate in the sewers, live the dream, man! This is our shot.'
'Your shot. Do whatever you think's right,' he'd said, turning away, sulking.
I knew my mum would hate the whole coolhunting thing, too. On the way home, she said: 'Well, I think you did the right thing. You're not a consumerist kid, Mac. That's not us. And it sounds like you'd be encouraging more people to fly to Kings, clocking up carbon miles and helping big companies to sell kids more things that they don't need.'
She was probably right, I s'pose. And I couldn't do it without Paul. But they were talking New York and I'd dreamt of going there forever and it all sounded really cool, y'know. And listen to this – Mac Slater, Coolhunter. Got a ring to it, huh?
The sun disappeared behind the chicken factory and the sea breeze blew a bunch of stink in through the open window. I reached for the winding knob and it snapped off in my hand. Typical. I chucked it on the floor and climbed out of the driver's seat and up the stairs to my room. I threw the box onto my bed and stopped for a second to look at the map of New York City stuck to my window. (There's not a lot of wall space when you live in a bus.) Lexington Avenue. Canal Street. Rockefeller Centre. Tribeca. Little Italy. Harlem. Brooklyn. All these places I'd dreamed of going and now I had the chance.
I took the stairs three at a time and snuck out the back door of the bus.
I clicked 'Skatergirl' and a profile of Michiko, a kooky Japanese photographer/skater-chick from the 'burbs of Paris came up. She was one of the 'chosen five' on the Coolhunters site.
I was in the backpacker café at the Arts Estate. A girl with B.O. was pounding away on Facebook next to me, mumbling stuff under her breath in German.
Skatergirl's 'likes' were listed as plastic cheese, Apple, handbags, hot sauce, Green Day, camouflage underwear and graff art. Her dislikes were: London, tourists, baseball, geeks, oatmeal and Picasso paintings. There was a whole bunch of other stuff, too, telling us her take on the world. People got to vote on whether they thought she was cool or clueless. Her gauge was firmly in the cool.
There were over a million profiles, including Michiko and the other three coolhunters who'd been selected. The three other 'chosen ones' were Van (a self-confessed NYC rich girl and tech expert), Luca (a South American adventure sport guy) and Rash (a music- and movie-obsessed dude from Shanghai, China, who hates going outside).
Pretty different, but they all seemed to know what was cool. I wondered what my profile would look like if it was up there, but I had no idea about cool. Least I didn't think I did. Still, something inside me wanted
to be one of them and I needed to open that package more than anything.
I quickly logged into my blog. I had quite a few regular readers. (I wondered how many other people, like Speed, knew that I was me. If you know what I mean.) People often commented on the stuff I wrote so I thought I'd put the question to them:
what do you do if your best friend is trying to hold you back from something you really want to do, just because they can't be involved? do u play for the team and just miss out or do you go ahead and do it anyway and look like a self-centred pig who'll ditch their mates for the right opportunity? i'm talking about something that would really be cool for you and might involve say a trip to new york (or something) but this other dude won't let you do it without them?
I re-read what I'd written, highlighted it all, hit delete, then headed back to the bus.
6
Monday
Someone dropped their shoulder into me. Another kid palmed me in the face. I shoved back, trying to hold my ground.
Getting on the bus was hell. Every morning the same thing. Fifteen kids in a flying wedge all trying to get through a doorway fifty centimetres wide at the same time. I had to start skating to school again.
I shouldered my way up and on and was rammed down into the belly of the bus where kids were packed so tight that every time you turned a corner you ended up sitting on some weird dude's lap or with your head buried in a hot girl's armpit. I landed a couple of metres away from Paul. Through the crowd he raised his eyebrow at me, then kept looking out the window. Still annoyed. He always got weird when I was asked to do stuff without him.
I dipped low and burrowed through the mosh pit, poking my head back up when I was next to him.
'Hey!' I said over the roar of bus and kids.
'Hey,' he said.
'Guess what?' I said, smiling, trying to soften him up.
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