I’m getting more and more work every day, and I don’t have time to be caught up in chitchat, as much as I envy her beach-going lifestyle.
Jane surprises me with sweetness, knocking on the door one morning to give me a ‘present’, a packet of organic vegan biscuits to eat while I write. She invites me to kickboxing classes and the beach, but I always decline. I’m on a race against the clock, catching up on work which is streaming in with more regularity than ever.
Relieved to finally have a ‘base’, I go wild sending pitches to magazines one day, and come home from a walk to find I’ve been given ten commissions. Holey moley! I walk to the Fremantle library, clipping research from online journals and starting my work day at six, meeting up with Jim in the afternoon to walk down across the Swan and journey with him to gigs, or cook our dinner in Jane’s kitchen, happily full of forks and free of roast pork.
Jim, meanwhile, is taking longer and longer on the toilet, developing an unhealthy obsession with making it through Jane’s foot-long stack of NW and Who magazines. She holds a subscription to both, eagerly standing guard by the letterbox for their arrival each Monday.
We hear that Barry Humphries is in town, and buy tickets to his show in Subiaco, walking hand-in-hand, the closest we have become to a Sprinkler couple yet. He regales the crowd with spluttering Sir Les and Soft Sandy Stone and even pulls up members of the audience, as Edna, in a game remarkably similar to Jim’s Perfect Snatch.
After my biggest cultural feast in aeons, I type up a proposal to my editor from one of the Sunday newspapers, late in the night. Knowing that Humphries is touring Sydney and Melbourne in a few weeks, I am aware that the story both has appeal to the eastern states and can be timely with his show.
In the morning, I check my internet again, and find, to my shock, thrill and horror, that the story has been commissioned. ‘How soon can you file?’ writes the editor. Oh hell, how do I track down Barry Humphries?
I start with Google, hunting down his publicist under news and internet archives, finally finding a name and contact after a small news piece where she’d made a statement after he got snappy at a reporter. After looking up her contact details, making the call and explaining the scenario, she asks me to put it in writing. I copy my editor.
An hour later, she has arranged a phone interview with him in his hotel in Perth, the next day.
The morning I am to interview him, Jane is in the kitchen with two of her stripper friends complaining about the fake tan they’ve just bought.
‘The FUCKIN’ STREAKS! Is yours ORANGE too?!’
I close the door to the bedroom and make the call, committing every word to memory, hoping this man will deign to talk to me.
‘Are you any relation to Denison Deasey?’ is the first thing he asks after the operator puts me through to his room.
‘Y-yes. That was my dad,’ I say.
‘He was the first person to interview me about Dame Edna. He took me to a very elegant tennis court in South Yarra, I remember.’
Oh, my. If he could see me now, fifty years later, interviewing Sir Humphries from a bed in a shack below a picture of a girl in a g-string playing pool.
26
Nuts on the road
‘Lou! I am locked out in my underwear and you are asleep and I can’t wake you up! Call me! xx’
WHEN WE GET HOME THE next night, Jim’s phone rings. He takes it in the room while I’m cooking, marching out to the kitchen to entertain Jane’s daughter by balancing a chair on his chin in celebration.
‘Why so happy, babe?’
‘Got a good gig Lou. You’ll be into this one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My mate Dave is running it. He always organises accommodation, pays me straight away, has a cracking audience. He’s professional, you know. It’s in Geraldton tomorrow night. Wanna come?’
Random travel, a few hundred kilometres up a coast I haven’t yet seen – with an address to return to. Bring it on! I pack my pyjamas and toothbrush, leave the rest of my belongings at Jane’s, and hop in the car. On the way, we need to collect another comedian who’ll be doing a ten-minute set at the gig. We pick him up from his nice-looking house in Subiaco, glancing anew at the dusty, packed car.
‘Lou, I’m a bit embarrassed about our CD collection,’ says Jim. We’re not used to having visitors in the car. The comedian barely stifles his reaction to the vehicle which has been our mutual home, and asks Jim, incredulously, where he sleeps when he sleeps in the car.
‘Ah, in the front seat! I put it down a bit.’
The comedian is appalled, and I don’t feel so high maintenance anymore for begging Jim for a bed.
I’ve been sticking well to my detox diet since moving in with Jane and the delights of a kitchen, so at the first petrol station, I decline Jim’s offer of Allen’s snakes, and rustle about to find some nuts in the glove box instead. They do look a bit mangy, and after a quick sniff I ask Jim for his thoughts on my proposed snack.
‘Oh Lou – No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I bought them in Victoria. I’m still not sure how they got past the quarantine inspectors in Bordertown.’
‘Oh, okay then,’ I throw the entire box of nuts out the window, and the comedian in the back seat yelps.
‘Ah there’s a car right behind us, Lou,’ Jim says, and I wonder if they thought my turfed cashews were bullets hitting their windscreen.
Eventually, they overtake us without throwing anything back at us, but Jim is so embarrassed he can’t look sideways at them when they pass.
The random information Jim gets given on his gigs often makes merely finding the locale a treasure hunt, and this one is no different. We know it’s at a pub somewhere near Geraldton, and Jim has the head comedian’s phone number, but we don’t have much phone coverage on the way, so until we get to Geraldton we won’t know where we’re sleeping or where, exactly, we need to go. When we pull over in a town where Jim asks the publican for a gig, his phone beeps with a message which sounds like it’s from a David Lynch film:
‘Go to the backpackers after the first roundabout in Geraldton. That’s where you will be sleeping. Ask for a girl called Rachel, she will show you the way.’
It’s about four in the afternoon, and Jim is due on stage at seven. These treasure hunts don’t leave much room for error.
When we get to the backpackers, we walk the silent halls looking for the elusive ‘Rachel’. The booker’s phone is switched off.
‘G’day mate, I’m here to do a comedy show … Dave booked me.’
‘Oh sure.’ The guy at the desk throws Jim some keys. ‘You’re in room 7. Rachel will be out in a minute.’
After a while a decidedly relaxed Irish girl pads out of the shower, asking if we’re her lift for the night.
‘Hi Rachel, I’m Jim. How are you?’ He gives her a nanosecond to answer, then shouts, ‘Let’s go!’
It’s six thirty.
Rachel has only been in Australia for a week. Upon arrival in Perth, she’d been offered bar work from an agency with the glorious option of ‘accommodation included’. Soon after getting to Geraldton, she discovered they meant a cold unfurnished barn at the back of a pub, forty kilometres out of town. The poor thing is forced to sit on the other comedian’s lap in the back seat, so overloaded is the car. But she takes it all in her stride, taking her job of navigating us to this mysterious barn seriously. The young comedian had been hoping to go over his set-list one more time before getting to his first ever country gig, but travelling with Jim is a serious lesson in the art of going with the flow.
We take a few wrong turns until Rachel recognises a particular line of trees, and it isn’t until she spots the roof of the pub that she can confirm we’re at the right place. When we eventually arrive, the pub – a giant timber hotel, smack in the middle of a field – is packed, with Geraldton locals coming in on buses, happily paying their forty-dollar cover charge. The hall is full. I know, immediately, this isn’t go
ing to be like one of Jim’s haphazard gigs competing with the jukebox and the skimpy at the bar. He’s getting his excited look, like he’s about to run a race, and I blend into the background, happy to be left alone to mingle and watch the scene.
Men and women of all ages pack the hall, and Jim takes the stage, warming up the crowd with a few jokes about Western Australia, goats and sex, instantly raising the energy of the room, this eager floor, wanting to laugh. His timing is perfect, with the laughter rising and falling as rhythmically as his punchlines.
Sadly, the other comedian from Perth doesn’t go down so well. It would be kind to say he merely crashes and burns. It’s his first gig out of Perth, and as tight as his twenty-minute set is, his logo t-shirt, techno music and gags about nightclubs just don’t run with the Geraldton crowd. They’re audibly relieved when the headliner Dave takes command of the stage. Really, he’s who they’ve come to see, a seasoned pro who knows his crowd and plays to them like a piper.
After forty minutes of non-stop laughter, the crowd is the best kind of exhausted, cheek-sore from laughter and even tears.
The comedian who bombed commiserates with a pretty blonde in the rowdy bar afterwards, and we drop them at a nightclub on the way back to the backpacker.
‘I’ll be fine!’ he shouts, only to text Jim the next morning to say that he’ll find his way back to Perth, probably to avoid more car-time with Ma and Pa Nut-throwing Kettle. At one in the morning after a long day’s drive, gigs and adventures, I hop up to the top bunk in our stuffy room, and fall asleep immediately. Jim, post-gig wired, and stripped down to his underwear to sleep in the stuffy room, lies awake, then gets an urgent need to go to the toilet. For some weird reason he takes his phone to check his messages on the way, absentmindedly leaving our one key in the room.
He comes back and lightly taps on the door. Nothing. Knowing how loud my ring-tone is set, he calls my mobile. I sleep on, with a ringing phone making its way into my dream world.
He calls seven times.
People in the nearby rooms are sighing, and when someone grunts a loud ‘Fucking shut up!’ he gets too scared to do it anymore, looking for alternative sleeping arrangements. Jim wanders to the common room, still in his underpants, where an English guy is watching the soccer. He gives him a sheet which is sitting on one of the vacant couches. It was about half an hour after this that I woke and noticed the message on my phone:
‘Lou! I am locked out in my underwear and you are asleep and I can’t wake you up! Call me! xx’
It’s the kisses at the end of the desperation that make me laugh. I let him in and he’s understandably upset.
‘The soccer guy gave me a pretty suspicious look when he handed me the sheet. He sort of threw it at me!’
In the morning, we walk along the beach and buy fresh fruit at the Geraldton market. Jim snaps his phone shut looking excited after a phone call.
‘Mate wants me to emcee at his wedding in Katherine. He also wants me to be best man. Reckons there’s a heap of truckers up north who’ve been burning my DVD and want gigs. Might be time for a move, Lou.’
Ooh, the Territory. I’ve never been that far. Once again, the lure of the road calls me louder than my pangs for home.
27
Dust on my tongue
‘Wouldn’t you rather risk a croc than miss out on this?’
DURING THE DRIVE BACK TO Fremantle, we take a wrong turn and end up deviating by about two hundred kilometres east of Perth. As it’s about to get dark we pull into New Norcia, a little town once run by Benedictine monks. We call Jane, tell her not to wait up, try to gauge her mood and whether or not we should give notice tonight.
When we do eventually pull in, after midnight, she’s applying fake tan and cheerfully watching Friday the 13th whilst instant messaging someone on a dating website.
‘Oh, no worries,’ she says, distractedly. That’s it. We’re free again.
The next day, I beg a break from the car, and Jim agrees to drive up to Broome and meet me there, so I book a ticket online and spend the next week finishing off my writing assignments. It feels so indulgent, waiting to catch a plane all those miles of road Jim is patiently logging.
He phones from Monkey Mia, where he’s made a friend in the Mr Whippy ice-cream man, and landed an impromptu gig emceeing the guy’s fiftieth birthday. He’s been feeding dolphins and washing in the sea, and sounds psyched like never before.
‘Should I have come?’ I ask guiltily, secretly enjoying trips into Perth city to have coffee and buy myself a new suitcase so my things are no longer in that hessian sack. I count down how many more sleeps I have in the bed at Jane’s, mentally preparing for the car again.
‘Nah Lou, there’s been a whole lotta nothing until now. You would have just complained.’
I pile everything into my new suitcase, and when Jane drops me off at the airport it feels as though we’re just going on a short trip to Geraldton again. I don’t even say goodbye to Justin and Rhyll.
‘There’re so many goodbyes, with travelling,’ I say to Jim on the phone from the airport.
‘Yeah but it’s never forever. You just don’t know what road you’ll be on tomorrow.’
When the plane lands at Broome airport, Jim is waiting for me wearing some shorts I’ve never seen before with his hair totally matted and wild.
‘I stopped showering this week,’ he tells me proudly, ‘and I found these shorts on the beach. Tell ya what, Lou, you could furnish your whole life with other people’s rubbish.’ The zip doesn’t do up.
We drive to a motel which he’s booked for the night in an uncommon display of organisation. ‘Thought I’d ease you back into the road, Lou. Tonight’s luxury. But from tomorrow onwards – things might get a bit hairy.’
We walk around Broome, another world of remoteness from Perth, and Jim looks fiery and excited, like he always does when he’s got gigs on the way and a tour planned. I feel uncommonly nervous, about getting back in the Mazda again. I’ve read the road from Broome to Darwin can get a bit rough, perhaps too rough, and when I’d told Jane where we were driving next she’d shaken her head and said, ‘Good luck!’
We eat Thai takeaway back in our motel room and I remind myself to savour every second of a bed, a shower, a door. I don’t have any articles due so I wake before Jim and walk to the beach.
It’s the most magnificent shining stretch of sand I’ve ever seen, dripping with sky, unlimited in turquoise space. Jim appears after I’ve been stretching and splashing for about an hour and pulls me into the water.
‘Seriously, there’s something different in the water up here.’
I feel even better than I did in that patch of space in Fremantle where medicine men lived.
Jim has a gig tonight at a little bar a way out of town. He’s organised it differently to usual and given me a job to do. I’m to collect a cover charge from the punters and sell his goat stock.
We eat barramundi burgers on Cable Beach while the sun sets and twinkling camels parade before us, masquerading as tourists. Jim starts gearing up for his gig and I wander off to put my feet in the rock pools at dusk under the balsamic moon.
After the gig, a Big Night Out show in an old room attached to a hotel, we try to sleep in the car. I’d sold just two stubby holders and one t-shirt, and a girl who had noticed me just drinking diet coke kept coming and offering me sips of her Wild Turkey, concerned that I wasn’t drinking.
Accommodation in Broome is expensive, and we’re forfeiting motels in order to travel for longer and dine on barra burgers each night. Jim is nervous, though, thinking someone from the gig might knock on the car window if we sleep here, so we drive thirty kilometres out of town. He pulls up at the back of a Roebuck Plains Roadhouse, where trucks are parked eerily in blank dust in the silent night. All I can see are shadows of reeds shivering to a whispering wind, even though Jim tells me we are close to a caravan park. Jim, a little cold, pulls something over his head after we lay down the swag on the dirt road a
nd climb in. My eyes are shut and I’m trying not to see Ivan Milat and his creepy mullet every time I close my lids. Something tickles my chin.
‘EEEEEAAAAAAAA!’
Jim is wearing a wig in the shape of a mullet.
If it was daylight I’d be able to laugh at the fact that it’s purple, but for now, all I see is Ivan Milat’s double.
‘SSHH! Lou! My head is cold!’ he’s laughing now, and so am I, but it mixes with a sick feeling like I’m going to vomit. We lie there for a few hours until the sun comes up and we drive back to Cable Beach, where I fall asleep on the sand and use the sink in the café toilets to brush my teeth.
It’s hot, in Broome. Not the Swan-soft warm of Fremantle, or the gritty male heat of Kalgoorlie, but more a dusty, dusky baked heat I realise, for the first time, is what I’d been expecting all along.
Camels trot past on the road and we decide to tour a crocodile farm while we’re here, napping in the car for two more hours until our tour starts. I cuddle a baby crocodile with its jaw kept shut with a hair-tie and Jim takes a photo. Fear mixed with fascination is becoming a theme of this leg of the tour. We spend the rest of the day on the beach, walking and swimming and taking more photos. No proper sleep has my head shot to pieces and I make up for it by chain-drinking diet coke.
As I’m standing in the water looking across the Indian Ocean, Jim wave-surfs then reminds me that crocodiles are often seen down here. ‘Wouldn’t you rather risk a croc than miss out on this?’
Hmm. I’m not sure. Especially after what we just saw at the Malcolm Douglas crocodile park. Those beasts are living dinosaurs, with enough teeth to mince me quicker than Jaws. But this water …
I plunge in.
It’s seven thirty on a Saturday night, thirty kilometres north of Broome, Western Australia. Roebuck Plains Roadhouse is a place truckies often stop and refuel, or grab a paper-thin ‘donga’ for the night, before a fry-up breakfast that will see them through the seven hundred or so kilometres up the Great Northern Highway to Kununurra, or down south to Carnarvon. The bar is full to overflowing, with a balmy mix of beer, dust, steak and fresh cologne rising with the anticipation of a cashed-up crowd ready to suck the life out of this Saturday night. Ready to laugh. No pretences allowed.
Love and Other U-Turns Page 29