Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  “Hey, not all Americans are like that…”

  “No. Just one particular loud-mouthed, fat, ugly, dumb-assed devious bitch!”

  And then Lauren spoke up.

  “Hey, that is pretty hurtful, you know, to me, because I’m an American, and we’re perfectly nice people.”

  You know you’ve been travelling with someone for too long when you can read their “OH SHIT!” body language even though you’re sitting behind them. Gill’s head and neck went suddenly stiff, which can’t have been healthy, given the terrain we were bouncing over.

  “But…” her mental gears were spinning so frantically I could almost smell them burning. “But… Lauren… you’re not American, are you?”

  “I SURE AM!” Lauren sounded a little indignant, but that was all.

  “Oh!” said Gill, “Sorry! We all thought you were Canadian!”

  And somehow, unbelievably, she’d pulled it off.

  Lauren chattered away quite contentedly for the rest of the journey, blissfully unaware that she’d been savagely insulted for the first five minutes straight.

  It was a testimony not just to Gill’s mental agility under pressure – which I have to say, was brilliant – but also to the incredible density of the foam Lauren’s brain was carved from.

  Gill’s tirade may have been a little inappropriate, but she was bang on the money.

  Either Lauren was so self-centred that she couldn’t believe anyone would purposefully want to insult her, or else she genuinely hadn’t realised what was going on.

  Which meant that, as well as being annoyingly loud, irritatingly whiney, exceptionally abrasive and about as attractive as a poorly-shaved pig in a tracksuit, Lauren was also considerably dumber than that pig.

  Probably dumber than the tracksuit, too.

  One of the dangers inherent in fruit-dropping was that every person in the vineyard had hands full of excess fruit. Every few minutes a weighty bunch of grapes would arc through the sky, rising from one aisle and descending in the next. You could tell from snippets of conversation how far along the person next to you was, and it was utterly irresistible to try and smack them in the face with a bunch of airborne fruit from the other side of the vines. Goldie himself was target numero uno – not only because he was the boss, but because it made him so hilariously frantic. I’d caught him a couple of times, but when I heard him stomping down my row I had plenty of time to drop a veil of concern over my smirk.

  “Not me,” I told him, “try next-door!” It was what we all said, but he never cottoned on – he just stormed off to the end of my row, did a u-turn, and went back down the next one. Which was Shane, the pig-loving Geordie’s row.

  And Shane really loved to bait Goldie.

  “Did you throw that bunch of grapes at me?” Goldie demanded.

  “Which one?” Shane replied. He continued his lazy stroll up the row, forcing Goldie to chase after him.

  “Just now! You threw a bunch of grapes right at my head.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t me,” Shane told him, “not just now.”

  Holding my breath so as not to draw attention, I snipped a heavy green bunch into my hand. Goldie was just explaining to Shane that throwing grapes was not big and it was not clever – when my bunch came sailing over the top of the vines, and clouted him right on the schnoz.

  “HEY!” he yelled – at Shane! “What have I just been telling you?”

  It was more than I could take. I chopped the nearest bunch I could find and lobbed them over on the same trajectory. They landed with a thud on Goldie’s head, prompting him to yell at Shane once more; “I TOLD YOU TO STOP THAT!”

  Shane was standing in front of him, empty palms held out for inspection, saying “It’s not me, man! I’m right in front of you!” – when the next barrage hit. Only this was an orchestrated strike, from several rows on both sides of us, and it targeted the argument with deadly accuracy.

  Goldie was foaming at the mouth as the grapes continued to pelt him, shaking his finger in front of Shane’s chest and shouting, “STOP IT, STOP IT, STOP IT!”

  Shane was creasing himself laughing, as was every vineyard worked for ten rows in every direction.

  “I’m going to find out who that is,” Goldie fumed, clearly missing the obvious – that by now, it was everyone. “You’re in for it, whoever you are!”

  Never had a threat seemed more impotent.

  Because Goldie didn’t possess the intelligence to figure out who was targeting him – even though he’d been writing our names on the end of our rows all day.

  And even if he’d managed that, he had less power than he had teeth.

  Which is to say, none.

  When it came to winding Goldie up, Shane knew exactly what buttons to press.

  It was Shane who came up with the idea to release the handbrake on Goldie’s car and push it halfway down a random row; it was he who created the ‘see how many bunches of grapes you can hang off Goldie’s jacket without him noticing’ competition. Not satisfied with knowing that Goldie could never remember any of our names, he went one step further by wiping the chalk names off the end of our rows, and writing gibberish there. It was quite amusing watching Goldie trying and failing to read it – he’d shake his head in confusion, clearly convinced that he’d written something he could no longer understand.

  But Shane’s best trick was one he’d learned from me and Gill – from the earliest days of Goldie’s idiotic demonstrations, we’d discovered that if we kept looking confused, and asking inane questions, he would repeat his demonstration ad infinitum – effectively doing our job for us, for whole rows at a time, while we strolled along next to him saying thing like, “So you’re clipping the green ones, right?”

  Oh yes, we had fun with Goldie alright.

  I could take the piss better than any urologist in history – but hats off to Shane.

  He truly was a master baiter.

  Something for Nothing

  When work shifted gears into proper grape picking, we rapidly began to wish it hadn’t.

  Picking meant even earlier mornings; we’d get a text message before 5am, telling us if we were working and if so, where. The work itself was fast and ferocious – at least, it was for the hordes of professional pickers that descended on Margaret River like vultures on a dead bullock’s bollocks.

  They picked grapes with a mindless ferocity, having learned from experience that the only way to earn anything approaching a sensible wage was to attack the bunches with such savagery that they shit themselves and jumped into the bucket of their own accord. These people shredded the vines, when we’d been repeatedly admonished just for looking at them too hard. They were delicate structures, but that didn’t seem to matter one whit to the hardened nomads of the fruit-picking industry.

  Consequently, Roo, Gill and I trailed along in their wake, plucking what grapes we could from the devastation and praying we wouldn’t get blamed for it.

  Some days we hardly made enough to justify getting out of bed.

  But the best days? Those were when we woke before the alarm, to the forceful drumming of rain on the tent. Wet days were non-picking days, which meant we could snuggle back into our blankets and snooze; we’d earn less – nothing at all in fact, which was marginally less than we earned on a working day – but the extra hours of sleep were worth every lost penny.

  We took advantage of a run of bad weather to drive Roo back up to Perth; she was doing a sponsored bicycle ride with her sisters, in aid of a cancer charity that had helped make Frieda comfortable towards the end.

  Driving through the suburbs was oddly refreshing after seeing nothing but nature for several weeks. It was also my first introduction to a fascinating phenomenon which takes place in Australia cities every few months.

  “Is it an evacuation?” I asked Roo.

  “Eh? Oh, that! No, that’s just the verge collection.”

  Lining the street on both sides were piles of stuff. Almost every house had something on the la
wn out front, whether it was a splintered old rocking chair or a pile of TVs. Some places had colossal stacks of what they must have considered to be rubbish – entire three-piece suites, mattresses, book cases, exercise bikes… you name it, it was there.

  “What… why?” It was all I could get out.

  “The council comes to collect things that are too big to put in the bins. You get a flyer to let you know when they’re coming, and everyone has to pile up what they want rid of on the verge. Then the council guys come with trucks and take it all away. What, you don’t have this?”

  “NO!”

  “Oh. Happens pretty often around here.”

  “But… you could just… take it all! Steal it, I mean!”

  “Ha! Feel free! It’s all junk, but they do say that ‘scavenging is encouraged’. No need to throw it all away if someone else can use it. Loads of people go around in vans and utes, picking out the best stuff – that’s how Dad got our TV.”

  “He got a TV?”

  “Yeah, there’s loads of TVs. Especially now everyone is upgrading to those massive flatscreens. Some work, some don’t, but Dad can fix them, so he got the best one he could find. We’ve had it for years!”

  The concept was still blowing my mind. “So, really, anyone can just take any of this stuff?”

  “Yeah – you’re supposed to. But you’re not supposed to make a mess.”

  “Wow. Just… wow.”

  One disadvantage of going from student, to the world’s crappest actor, to a backpacker, is I’ve always been broke. Free stuff – even half a jar of jam two months past its sell-by-date in a crusty hostel kitchen – is very exciting to me.

  To see this – all of this… Well, it was very nearly too much. I was getting all emotional about it. I mean, lust is an emotion, right?

  Roo could tell from the excitement in my voice, so she nipped it in the bud; “No. My Dad’s house is already full of junk. You cannot fill it full of more shit.”

  “Awwww…?”

  “No!”

  “STOP!”

  Roo slammed on the brakes. Never a good idea in Rusty, as they didn’t always come off again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Look! That sofa is perfect! Pristine!”

  “Oh, bloody hell! It’s a crappy old sofa someone’s throwing away. It’s probably been there for a week.”

  “But it’s sooo preeeety! We could… we could use it…”

  “For what? We’re twenty miles from my house. No way it’ll fit in Rusty. And we couldn’t do anything with it.”

  “Not true! We could do anything with it! If we owned a sofa like that… Gill and me can walk twenty miles. Gill? Get out and grab the end of that sofa.”

  “It’s uphill. All the way.”

  Gill didn’t look thrilled either, I have to say. But I knew, deep down inside, that she also wanted that sofa. I mean, it was free. Who wouldn’t want it?

  The rest of the journey was punctuated with excited cries (mostly from me – okay, entirely from me) – of things like “Look! Multi-gym! They cost thousands!”

  Roo: “No.”

  Me: “ARMCHAIR!”

  Roo: “No.”

  Me: Holy SHIT! Did you guys see that pile of computer stuff? It was taller than I am! I bet some of it still works fine…”

  Roo and Gill together: “NO!”

  We dropped Roo home, and Gill took the wheel for the drive back to Margaret River. By this point, I’d been forced to admit that a lot of the roadside piles did contain junk. Broken furniture, useless electronics; the occasional busted-up washing machine, or a giant CRT TV with a Post-it note on the screen that said ‘still works!’. Not much we could directly use, as Gill pointed out, because we live in a tent.

  I was also forced to concede that point.

  But Gill is far more like me than she cares to admit, so we spent the whole morning cruising slowly up and down residential streets, carefully studying each pile as we passed, always on the look out for that one sweet item of treasure that we knew would make it all worthwhile.

  And then we saw it.

  “It’ll never fit in,” Gill said.

  “Or will it?” I countered.

  “It WILL,” Gill decided.

  “Awesome. Let’s get it.”

  A bright blue La-Z-Boy reclining armchair, fully cushioned, it screamed comfort and luxury in a way that couldn’t be denied.

  “Who would throw this away? It must be knackered!”

  But no. At some point we’d crossed the line into a posh suburb, and as we all know, rich people have a better class of trash. Looking up the driveway at the house responsible for our find, I could well imagine that they’d thrown it out because they’d decided to redecorate, and it no longer matched the curtains.

  “Score!”

  It took us over an hour to get it into the car.

  By then we’d emptied Rusty completely (which by itself takes twenty minutes), tried to manhandle the La-Z-Boy in through every opening Rusty had. It wouldn’t quite go in through the tailgate, even with the back seats flat, but by turning the thing on its side, it went in through the sliding door – and, tipped upside down, finally came to a rest filling the whole back section of the van.

  Gill and I did our little victory dance (thankfully no-one was around to film us this time), and spent the next ten minutes congratulating ourselves on our find.

  And then, we saw another one.

  Not an armchair this time, but a bizarre kind of wickerwork basket-chair. It had a separate base and a giant, soft cushion the size of a duvet.

  We’d thought nothing else would ever fit in Rusty (apart from a few books, and a spare hammock, and a football, and a PlayStation that I was sure would work again once it dried out) – but this was different. Because it was hollow, a sort of skinny round frame… and because we wanted it badly enough to make it fit.

  And we did.

  Unfortunately, Rusty punished us for stuffing him full of skanky old furniture, by boiling up just as we were leaving the hills. It had never happened without Roo there to advise us, because Roo was always there to advise us. So in her absence, I did the most sensible thing I could think of – wrapped my hand in a tea-towel, and opened the radiator to put some cold water into it.

  To say it exploded is only a slight exaggeration. Filthy, boiling water fountained up from the engine with enough pressure to soak the roof Because Rusty’s engine was inside the cab, it also soaked the dash, the windscreen, both front seats, and had a damn good go at ruining our new chairs, too. All I can say is, thank the Goddess I wasn’t leaning over to look inside at the time, or I’d have been in hospital with third degree burns to my face.

  “SHIT!” said Gill. Understandably.

  “I know! Fuck me!”

  “No, I mean I’ve just remembered the first rule about what to do when your car boils up.”

  “Oh yeah? What is it?”

  “DO NOT open the radiator.”

  “Great. Thanks for that.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We made it back to Margaret River before evening, so we didn’t have any suicidal kangaroos to cope with. It was much easier getting the chairs back out again, and in less time than it takes to tell, our little world was transformed.

  Gill nipped off to the fire pit, and came back with two un-burnt logs. We laid a short plank across them, and I strung up the extra hammock I’d acquired.

  And this was our set-up for the rest of our stay.

  It did look quite out of place in the middle of a forest, and it caused quite a few double-takes when new people arrived. They’d drive in, past tents, toilets, a fire pit, a kitchen… and then pull up short with a “Holy hell! What’s that all about?”

  And there would be Roo, Gill and I, relaxing around our big-screen laptop. Gill would be dozing in a hammock, Roo curled up in the huge basket chair, and I’d be on the La-Z-Boy in full recline mode – with a glass of wine, of course – right next to Gill’s tent, which was glowing with all
the colours of Christmas. We had lights hanging in the trees, and music playing, and a box of books for the reading of.

  It was paradise.

  “Bloody hell,” they’d say, (when they felt they were far enough past us to do so), “I wouldn’t mind a bit of that!”

  And they were right to feel envious. Because our camp rocked.

  But it was still missing a little something.

  “Such a shame,” Gill was heard to say, “living surrounded by all these amazing trees. And yet, we haven’t got a tree house…”

  The Tree House

  Kevin and Shelly, the owners of the Big Valley, were fantastic sports. They came over to have a goggle at our five-star encampment, and very generously agreed to keep our La-Z-Boy when we left.

  And when Gill uttered the fateful words, “We were thinking about building a tree-house,” – and after they’d been crying with laughter for a few minutes and were starting to calm down – they were very open to the idea.

  So long as we agreed not to hold drunken parties up there, because drunken parties and shoddily-built tree-houses are a notoriously bad mix.

  This brought us to the question of building materials.

  First Kevin showed us to his scrap wood pile, which contained more good quality timber than most home improvement depots, and then he led us around the back of his farmhouse and presented his junk yard. Which was out of this world.

  There were cars in it. Household appliances. Farm machinery. Fence poles and mesh panels, sheet metal, electronics, tools, rusty and shiny and pointy and blunt.

  “Never throw anything away, me,” said Kevin. And he left us to it.

  All we wanted was to build a tree-house, but as I stood looking across those piles of junk I could see far grander designs emerging.

  “You know what we could build out of this stuff?” I whispered (in case anyone else was listening in on my plans).

  “Anything?” Gill guessed.

  “Yes! Like a giant mutherfucking transforming robot warrior!”

  “Not particularly useful, though.”

  “Or a submarine!”