KAMIKAZE KANGAROOS!
by Tony James Slater
This edition published 2014 by Various Things (ADT)
Copyright © Tony James Slater 2014
Tony James Slater has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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For Frieda
Concerning Rusty
When I first came to Australia, it was for pretty much the same reason that everyone comes to Australia; I was flat broke, and I had no choice.
Okay, so maybe that’s not the most common reason…
Can I get away with just saying ‘it’s a long story’, and leaving it at that?
No?
Okay then; here’s the short-short version.
My name is Tony, and I like to travel.
I’ve been doing it for years…
I’m just not very good at it.
I left England in search of adventure – and on a tiny island in the Gulf of Thailand, I found it.
I’d been volunteering in an animal clinic, which is a notoriously poor way of making money. On the one hand it had allowed me to work with kittens and puppies and the occasional monkey; on the other hand I’d been bitten and shot at, had run-ins with the police and the mafia, visited hospital several times, and on one memorable occasion had been dangled from a tree by an enraged water buffalo.
Around the time I was sitting on a ferry with the decapitated head of a dog in a polystyrene box, I started to wonder – just what was going on with my life? Where was I headed? Apart from, you know, to have a dog’s brain autopsied?
My love life had stalled.
Possibly because I spent most days covered in blood and poo.
As for my career… well. Did I mention that I was sitting on a ferry with a dog’s head in a box?
To any normal person, these would be considered warning signs; a not-so-subtle hint along the lines of: ‘Get out NOW, while you still can!’.
But personally…
I was rather enjoying myself.
At least until my money ran out.
I’d had to sell my body to medical science to get this far (told you it was a long story!), and as anyone who’s seen my body can attest, it’s not worth much.
Owing to a slight, ah, administrative error, I’d missed my flight home to England – by about six months – and I couldn’t afford to buy another ticket.
And I didn’t really want to go home anyway, because I didn’t want my grand adventure to end. And also because I was still technically AWOL from the British Army. I felt sure this would all blow over, but it seemed like a good idea to stay out of the country for a while – you know, just in case.
So I emailed my sister, who was visiting a friend in Perth, Western Australia. They offered me a space on their couch, and a seat in the van they were fixing up – for an epic, year-long trip around the entire country! That sounded pretty good, so I told them I’d be there straight away – and then spent the next three months diving instead. Thailand is a very difficult country to leave, you see, and diving there is a whole load of fun. Still, it’s not renown as a quick path to riches – and anyway, I was rubbish at it.
Hence: Australia.
When I stepped off the plane, this is what I had with me:
One pair of jeans, ripped badly (and not in an ‘artistic’ way); worryingly, they were also starting to fray somewhat around the groin area. I had three pairs of loose, cotton ‘fisherman’s trousers’ – mostly blood-stained. A couple of t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, and several others branded ‘LidStone’, with dubious comedy slogans printed on the front. Two pairs of shorts, impregnated with sea-salt to the point where they could no longer be folded in half – and a tiny Sony Vaio laptop, on which the embryonic story of a bear was taking shape.
At least I have shoes, I reminded myself (which is a surprisingly common first reaction to landing in Australia).
I could tell the other passengers were thinking the same.
“Thank God that bloke has shoes,” they were saying to themselves, “judging by the state of what’s hanging out of his jeans! Now if only he could afford some underwear…”
And that is what I was here to do: afford some underwear. And, ideally, one or two other niceties, like food, shelter, and onward travel.
At the baggage carousel I picked up an enormous holdall, crammed with every piece of diving gear imaginable – most of which I had inadvertently defrauded Lloyds bank out of.
My gaze lingered on an Italian-style espresso bar, but there was no way my bank balance would stretch to the price of a cup of coffee. That’s hardly surprising though, since airport coffee costs two, or even three times as much as underwear.
Financial misfortune was preying heavily on my mind – at least until I saw the delighted faces of my sister Gillian, and her best friend Roo, waiting for me just beyond the sliding glass doors. They looked like a comedy double act, capering about in excitement; Gill, having inherited her genetic legacy from our mum, is rather gnomic in stature, whereas Roo’s (apparently Dutch) ancestry meant she was so tall and slender that she daren’t go outside in a stiff breeze. Gill still sported a healthy tan from visiting me in paradise three months previously, whereas Roo, despite being born Australian, was so pale she could warn ships away from the coast. After joyful hugs all round, the girls practically dragged me out of the airport, and frog-marched me over to the far corner of the car park. There, Gill introduced me to the van that would be carrying the three of us all around Australia.
“This is Rusty!” she announced, proudly.
“No shit,” I said.
The door, when I opened it, came off in my hand, which was perhaps not the most auspicious start to our relationship.
“Don’t worry,” Gill said, “sometimes that happens.” She shoved her glasses back up her nose and reached out to steady the door. “But Rusty’s a good boy. I think he likes you!”
Little did I realize then, but over the next few months Rusty was to be both my salvation and my nemesis, in roughly equal measures. One thing was bothering me already, though; “He? Aren’t we supposed to refer to vehicles as ‘she’? You know, like they do with boats?”
“Don’t be stupid Tony, look at him! Of course he’s a boy.”
I had looked at him. In fact I hadn’t been able to look away, since first clapping eyes on him from halfway across the car park. It was kind of like watching a horror movie, when you know for sure somebody is mere seconds away from being eviscerated in a particularly savage manner, but for some reason your eyes won’t leave the screen – won’t even blink. And so I’d stared at Rusty as I approached, and part of me wanted to do my best Princess Leia impression and say “You came in that?”
Because… Hm. How to put this politely?
The girls had painted ‘him’. They had cleaned him thoroughly, and very carefully masked off his windows, and then covered him from brake shoes to sunroof in bursts of yellow, green, purple and red spray paint. It was very pretty. He looked like a unicorn had thrown up all over him. Inside each spray-painted circle was a white hand print; the girls had worn gloves, and had used them as stencils to create a van that was striving to give you a high-five with every square centimetre of its being.
Credit where credit’s due though – the girls had done a very professional job.
Rusty look
ed fabulous.
And as I climbed into the back (and Gill replaced the sliding door behind me), I couldn’t help but notice – they’d tailor-made curtains for all the windows. With psychedelic, multi-coloured dolphins on them.
I had to say something.
“You know, if Rusty is a boy, I think he might be batting for the other team.”
Roo looked at me in the rear-view mirror, her eyes wide in mock horror. “Are you saying our van is gay?”
“Almost definitely. But don’t worry – lots of my friends’ vans are gay.”
“Don’t listen to him, Rusty,” she said, patting his dashboard.
Then she changed gears, and Rusty groaned in pain.
“Also, I think he’s dying,” I added, “possibly of extreme old age.”
“Nonsense,” said Gill, “he’s fine! I think of him like a young lad, really – he’s trying to give us his best, only his best isn’t quite good enough.”
Riiight. So Rusty had not only a gender, but an appropriate character defect.
I had a horrible feeling he was being modelled on me.
But Rusty’s life had been very different from my own, for which I was profoundly grateful. Roo and Gill took turns in relating this sorry tale to me, as we clunked and clonked down the highway towards Roo’s home, in the hills south of Perth.
Rusty had started life as a young, brilliant-white work-van, but his innocence had only lasted until a gang of burly builders started putting their tools in him. Since then, every gruff, hairy-backed council labourer in the shire had taken a ride; he’d been used, and used hard. For more than two decades he’d been passed around the motor pool, and every tradesman they have a name for had been inside him. And most of them weren’t too careful about it either.
His days as a working boy were over. And so was his healthy prime, those middle years of taking a constant pounding with no outward signs of strain. Now, Rusty was entering his golden years – that time of life when, if he’d been an animal, he’d either get adopted by an appropriate sanctuary, or get taken out to the field and shot for dog food.
After spotting him sitting forlorn and broken by the side of the road, Gill and Roo had wanted to rescue him immediately.
In a fit of compassion they’d paid well over the odds to liberate the old van, and then they’d lavished their attention on him. Their attention, and their cash, as it turned out – Rusty had needed a fair bit more than a good clean and a few pairs of curtains. Dragging him unwillingly out of retirement had required replacing almost everything that could be replaced – from the gear box to the window latches. For anyone who is interested, here are the cold, hard facts: Rusty was bought for $2,000 – and he cost a whopping $2,500 to be made driveable!
If the girls had known this at the time, he’d have been dog food for sure.
And this eccentric, decrepit, borderline road-worthy vehicle was the trusty steed that was supposed to be carrying the three of us all around Australia. Or at least (as I became fond of saying) until it exploded in a rather garish fireball, killing the lot of us.
But that wasn’t terribly likely, now was it?
Meeting The Locals
The late-afternoon drive through Perth’s suburbs was an eye-opener.
Everything looked so clean and modern; so new, as though it had all been built yesterday, and to a plan made by someone who actually knew how roads should work. There were wide, tree-lined boulevards, uncluttered by parked cars. Junctions were spacious, and the traffic seemed suspiciously light, given how close we were to the city centre.
The only time we ever queued was at traffic lights.
Most of the other cars on the road were either huge four-wheel-drives, or something that looked like a saloon car cut in half, with a pick-up truck’s tray glued on where the back seats ought to be.
“It’s called a Ute,” Roo explained, “short for Utility Vehicle.”
“How odd. Can you sit in the back?”
“No, of course not!”
“Then… what’s the point?”
“Tradies – sorry, tradespeople – use them for work. So they can carry their tools around.”
As she said this, the ute sitting next to us roared, its driver flooring the gas and screeching the tyres, then it blasted off from the lights at terminal velocity.
Rusty was left trembling in its turbo-charged wake.
“That happens quite a lot,” Roo noted, as our van puttered up to speed. “Maybe there’s a certain kind of person that feels, I don’t know, threatened by being close to Rusty? And they always seem to be young guys in shiny new utes…”
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” I said, “they seem like the perfect car for tools.”
All the houses we passed were detached, on their own little plots of land. Most were single-storey affairs, the only exceptions being miniature mansions complete with Grecian columns and electronic security gates. There were enough of these, scattered around the various districts we drove through, to suggest a certain affluence; obviously someone was doing quite well here.
And then the van laboured up a series of increasingly steep hills, through scrubland and forest, right to the very edge of the famous Australian Outback. This is where Roo lived with her family, in a sprawling, split-level bungalow that clung precariously to the top of its hillside plot.
“Welcome home!” the girls chorused, as Roo guided Rusty down a driveway that was more than half precipice.
My first contacts in Australia were to be Roo’s immediate family – and there were millions of them! Okay, not literally, but Roo did have two parents, Gerrit and Frieda (both Dutch), and three sisters – one of whom was her identical twin, Sonja. The two of them looked… well, identical. To the untrained observer. The same wavy, mousey brown hair, the same pale, slender frame. Even my sister had trouble telling them apart, and she’d been living with them for three months already…
Which was partially my fault.
Unless you ask Gill; she would tell you it’s entirely my fault.
Personally, I blame Thailand.
The two younger girls could have been twins too; both tall, pale and incredibly slim, Wendy and Vicky differed from Roo and Sonja only in their hair colour (they were both proudly ginger).
Roo’s family gave me a very encouraging welcome, considering I was the second member of the Slater Clan to wash up on their doorstep.
After warm hugs and handshakes all round, Gill went straight to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and straight away I felt relaxed and at home. I’d been introduced as ‘Gill’s brother’ – so I had to wonder how much further into our family their enthusiasm would extend. Next week: ‘And these are all Gill’s cousins…’
Eventually they were bound to run out of sofas. Even in a house this size.
And it was huge, at least by English standards. The living room was as long as a tennis court, and lined completely on one side with glass; from there, and from the open-plan kitchen next to it, I looked out across a wide, raised decking, and down into a sloping, garden teeming with life. All of which was alien to me, apart from the butterflies, of which there were hundreds. The myriad snuffling, scurrying and hopping creatures were harder to glimpse as they darted between the trees, but Roo, a volunteer at several local wildlife centres, could identify all of them.
But it was getting late. I’d come a long way, from the penniless vagrant that left Thailand, to… well, the penniless vagrant that turned up in Oz. It was the emotional miles, I reminded myself, that made me feel so suddenly old.
I’d left all my friends in Thailand, along with a way of life I’d been enjoying for almost a year. From here on, it was the great unknown. Which was exciting and terrifying in equal measure – and, consequently, quite draining.
Roo loaned me a sleeping bag and led me back up to the landing.
“I hope you don’t mind, Tony, you’re sleeping in the Games Room.”
Wow.
I’d never been in a house with a dedic
ated Games Room before.
Most people I know are lucky if they’ve got space for a Games Cupboard.
I followed Gill, as she was also sleeping in there, and I was seriously impressed.
Roo’s games room was of a size that, had it been in an English house, would have been called the Grand Banqueting Hall. It was massive, with chunky wooden beams supporting a pitched ceiling, and the same wall-of-glass effect that characterised the lounge. Cousins? Hell, my entire family tree would fit in there!
Probably best not to mention that, I thought, in case they get scared.
And so I passed my first night in Australia, surrounded and comforted by all the sounds of nocturnal life. Rustling leaves and humming insects, the constant drone of cicadas; and every so often, a clatter on the roof that sounded like a hippo had fallen off his unicycle onto it.
“SHIT!” I sat bolt upright, the first time I heard it. “Gill, was that you?”
Gill was sleeping on the sofa opposite me, dead to the world as usual.
So I lay back down, and listened to the drumming of feet on the roof. After a while I was pretty sure that something way too heavy to tap dance, was tap dancing up there.
But the big things in Oz aren’t dangerous, I remembered as I drifted off to sleep. It’s the little things you’ve got to watch out for…
Changing countries so abruptly can be very disorientating.
I woke up in a sleeping bag on a strange sofa, looking up at white-painted roof beams, and thought where the hell am I?
I’ve had this experience quite a few times, and normally a quick glance around the room reveals enough clues to jog my memory.
So I turned my head to the side, and there was a big lizard looking at me.
Oh, that’s right! Australia.
The lizard was about two-feet long, about three feet away, and covered in sleek black scales. It looked slightly disappointed, as though it had been intending to suck my brains out through my nose while I slept, and its dinner plans had just been cancelled.
“Hey, don’t be sad,” I said to it, by way of an apology.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 1