Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  There was a final moment of irony. Mike never knew of this scam we were pulling, and in any case he’d given me so many free beer vouchers I could nearly wallpaper the room with them. It was a bit of a bugger that none of us liked beer. But living in the Underground was expensive, and it was far from ideal. Roo and I craved some space of our own, and none of us could hold down a steady job while we lived there. So when rooms became available in a house owned by the hostel, we jumped at the chance. Figuring we probably wouldn’t be back, I spread my beer tokens liberally around the hostel; waste not, want not.

  The Irish contingent thought I was Father Christmas.

  Shit, they were so pissed they probably thought I was a tap-dancing unicorn.

  Anyway, we packed all our gear back into Rusty and made a short trip across town, to the considerably more up-market neighbourhood of Subiaco.

  But just before we left Mike came to me with a proposition.

  “I need a quick word with you,” he told me, so I braced myself for the worst.

  “I need you for a proper job,” Mike said. “How would you feel about running a bar?”

  Getting Barred

  It was a hard request to say no to.

  But I couldn’t tell if he was messing with me, or if he was serious.

  “Well, I’ve had a bit of experience,” I said. “The last time I was in Perth, I worked at The Shed nightclub.”

  This was true; it had been during that difficult period, after Roo had flown home from Kununurra. Gill and I had tried all sorts of things before we landed jobs with Lindsey.

  Of course, I cleverly left out the fact that I’d worked there four nights a week for exactly four weeks – during which time I’d been disciplined for being too slow at serving drinks, demoted to glass-collector, disciplined for being too slow at glass-collecting, and had quit one step ahead of being fired for giving away free drinks – whilst drunk – and for spending fully one quarter of my time as an employee rearranging the shelves in the stock room ‘to make them neater’.

  Guess I was kind of slow at that, too.

  But Mike didn’t seem to care.

  “Here’s what I need,” he said. “Go to this address. It’s a little pub I’ve just taken over. Not many customers, just a few regulars, and they all know what they want. Look after the place for me, and run the bar from about three in the afternoon till eleven. Okay?”

  “Yeah sure, no worries! But, ah, is there anything I need to know? Like, training and stuff?”

  “Nah, it’s alright. There’s another bloke there, handling the stock. Ask him any questions, he knows what to do.”

  And that was it – one of the least conventional job interviews I’ve ever had.

  The pub, when I got there, looked derelict. I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite nice on the inside, all decked out in wood and carpet like a traditional English pub. It was sandwiched between two freeways, which could explain the lack of custom – as did the exterior, which looked like a meeting place for people with bodies to bury. The place had potential though. I figured that, given a bit of work and the right vibe, it could be the perfect hangout for people from the hostel – a backpacker’s bar, with a free shuttle bus to and from The Underground. Yet another clever tactic to milk every last cent from those who seemed desperate to waste it. Had I only known how devious Mike really was…

  I started at the bar. I checked what they had available, and restocked the fridges as best I could. There was a bottle shop attached to the back, too, and I took most of the stock from there through into the pub. “How much do I charge for these?” I asked the bloke who was doing the stock-check.

  “Dunno, whatever,” he replied.

  “Is there a price list somewhere?”

  “The locals will know what they usually pay. If they ask for anything different, just make it up.”

  “Oh. Okay…”

  “If you have any trouble—”

  “Get you?” I interjected.

  “No – just figure something out. She’ll be right.”

  And that was my on-the-job training.

  Not that it really mattered – we had less than ten customers the entire time, and most of them did indeed know what they were after. I poured what they pointed at, and held out my hand for the cash. Booze is so expensive in Australia that most of them were paying with a note – so I just stood there holding it, my brow furrowed as though in deep thought, until the customer helpfully reminded me how much change they were expecting. It worked, albeit stressfully, and by the end of the night we’d very nearly taken enough money to pay my wages. I reckoned I’d been fair – undercharging the punters rather than overcharging, not that anyone would ever know or care.

  Bloody hell, I could rob this place blind, I thought. Probably for the best that I’m not that way inclined.

  Roo came to pick me up in Rusty, and she agreed that from the outside, the place looked destined to appear on Crimewatch as the scene of some grisly murder.

  During the evening, whenever business was slack, I’d taken to compiling a list of things that could be done to improve the place. I started off with the most obvious jobs – like making the exterior resemble something other than the set of a horror movie, perhaps by replacing a few light bulbs and sweeping up all the broken glass. Removing some of the burnt-out cars and charred sofas from the car park. Cutting the weeds to below knee-height, fixing the boarded up windows, scrubbing off the graffiti and shovelling up enough dog shit and rubbish to fill a dozen wheelie bins would also help. But then I moved onto more proactive strategies – like expanding the clientele to include people who didn’t store rifles in the back of their trucks. Maybe finding a few customers whose parents weren’t blood relatives… By the time I’d finished my list, it was exhaustive. And quite impressive. I hoped Mike would be impressed anyway, and that he might consider letting me loose on the place for a couple of months. “Imagine what I could do,” I said to Roo as she drove us back to Subiaco. “I could run the place for him, learn how a bar really works, fix it up really well, do some great deals to get students and backpackers down there… Get some theme nights going! X-factor competitions, toga parties, James Bond night! It could be huge. Massive! Maybe Mike would cut me in, or at least give me a share of the profits… I’m going to talk to him tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” she said, letting me air my dreams without contradiction. “Just see what Mike says.”

  As it happened, Mike was so keen to find out how I’d managed at the bar that he found me first. He let me waffle on for a few minutes describing my shift, and then cut in with an offer. “I’ve been thinking about something. How would you feel if I gave you that place to run?”

  “WOAH?! Really?”

  “Yeah, why not? You can do whatever you want with it. I’ll give you a bit of a budget, and maybe you can have some fun?”

  “Mike, that’s fantastic news! I was SO hoping you’d say something like that! You won’t regret it, mate. I promise you, I’m the man for the job!”

  “Well, we’ll see. Might as well enjoy yourself while you’re at it, anyway.”

  The conversation was going as well as I could possibly have hoped.

  It was time to reveal my master plan.

  “Mike, we can make this place incredible! It just needs a bit of fixing up, and a funky new paint-scheme. I can do that in no time. Then we’ve got to target the same people who stay at The Underground – make it backpacker’s night every night! Forget food, and concentrate on drink – cheap deals and special offers. Do a different theme each day of the week – 70s, 80s, 90s. Do fancy dress parties, like Superhero Night, Vicars n’ Tarts, a pyjama party! Find something dirt cheap to give away free shots of – hey, you could do punch! Cheap fizzy wine for ‘champagne’ prizes… And then get darts matches going, pool competitions, pop-quizzes… endless possibilities. And all based around cheap booze, aiming to sell large quantities to pissed-up backpackers. You could even run shuttle buses from here, instead of sellin
g tickets for that Perth Pub Crawl – send the boozers to your own bar, and make it a no-brainer: so many different drink offers, they’d be mad to go anywhere else. And shuttle buses back at closing time, so they don’t need to fork out for taxis. I bet they’d even pay you for the bus!”

  “That’s… very interesting,” Mike said. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

  “Yeah well, there weren’t a lot of customers that needed serving! But we can change all that in no time.”

  “Great. Right, I’ll get back to you.”

  I never worked in the pub again.

  At first I felt slighted, and as the days wore on I spent hours going over my shift there, trying to work out where I’d gone wrong. It was incredibly unfair, I felt; not only had he given me no instructions at all, and no training, he’d given me no hint since our last conversation about what I’d failed at. The question ate at me – I’m a life-long perfectionist of the highest order (agricultural work notwithstanding), and the idea that I’d messed up so badly, without even knowing it, prickled me like a cactus condom.

  It was weeks later that a chance conversation with old Mex shed some light on my mistake.

  Mike had bought the pub for one reason only; the land it was on, straddling the gap between two freeways, was worth millions. Only, the land had a covenant, stating that the pub couldn’t be demolished as long as it was a viable business.

  He had absolutely no intention of redecorating, updating, reinvigorating.

  He wanted to flatten the place asap and sell the land on to a commercial developer. He just needed the bar running into the ground first.

  And for that, he had deployed his secret weapon: Mex.

  The canny, work-shy ex-con had been given a slightly more explicit job description than I was, and from what I can gather it was his dream come true.

  Getting paid to do as little as humanly possible, to piss off random people for no apparent reason, to throw customer service down the toilet, take everything that was good and mess it up, and, whenever the mood took him, to break something.

  Mike never said anything about it, but he’d made the right choice.

  I was so NOT the man for this job.

  The Things You Have To Do

  Living in Subiaco; it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

  (I may have borrowed parts of that sentence from another book).

  At last, Roo and I had a room to ourselves; and what a room! The huge, queen-size bed barely made a dent on the available space. There was room to turn cartwheels in there, which I took full advantage of by… um, turning cartwheels.

  Come on, you know you’d have to try it!

  The bay window at the front looked out onto a quiet residential street, on which Rusty was parked – facing down the slight slope, as these days the only way we could start him early in the morning was to push him.

  Roo and I were more than happy to hibernate in that room, disappearing into it for days at a time and only emerging to visit the kitchen or the bathroom.

  In hindsight, this may have been part of our problem; we never really integrated with the rest of our housemates, whereas Gill, sharing a room on the top floor with another girl, had no choice.

  All our housemates, with the exception of the girl in Gill’s room, were Irish.

  They’d obviously met at the Underground, and had transplanted their hostel lifestyle seamlessly into the house.

  Their nightly ritual would start at about eight o’ clock. There’d be the six of them, sitting around in the lounge, drinking beer. None of them would move, other than to go to the toilet or fetch more beer, and they seemed to do nothing but shout insults back and forth in an Irish brogue so thick as to be unintelligible. I tried to join in once or twice to be sociable, but this was clearly not a game for outsiders. I could never quite grasp the rules, or figure out if there were rules, or even have a clue what the hell was going on; mostly though, I gave up because I don’t like beer, and I was bored shitless. Because from what I could tell, they seemed to get through the entire night using a vocabulary of less than eight words.

  The conversation went something like this:

  “Fook you, ya fookin’ cont!”

  “Nah, youse can get fooked, youse a fookin’ cont!”

  “Fook off, ya cont! Yer a cont n’ yoo nae it.”

  Then someone else would chime in, “Ahh, yer all fookin’ conts, ya fookin’ buncha fookin’ conts!”

  And they’d all collapse in gales of laughter.

  I’ve never felt more painfully English than the night I edged into the middle of the room and said, “Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry to bother you all, but is there any chance you could be just a tad quieter? I have to get up for work in three hours…”

  There was a few seconds of confused silence, then another massed roar of laughter. I took this as a good sign, so I made my escape, pursued by good-natured calls of “ya fookin’ cont!”

  Every night it carried on until around four in the morning, at which point the last participant would pass out in his chair, surrounded by empty beer bottles and puddles of vomit, and promptly piss himself.

  This was another reason why we didn’t spend much time in the lounge.

  For the most part, I didn’t mind. Just having Roo all to myself in that ginormous bed was compensation enough.

  I was getting to know her rather well.

  Although, every so often she still surprised me.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked.

  “What? Now?” It seemed an odd question, as we were lying in bed at the time. It was midnight. Neither of us could sleep, so we’d been talking about what possibilities the future could hold for us. “I don’t mind. Might have to put some clothes on though.”

  “No, not now! No, a proper walk. Like, a hike.”

  “Hiking? Yeah, we could do that. Maybe.”

  “But what about a really big walk? A long walk.”

  “I dunno… maybe?”

  I could tell she was building up to something, so I decided to shut up and let it happen. It’s not often my intuition is this good, and even less common that I’m clever enough to act on it – clearly, being with Roo was having a positive effect on me.

  She was quiet for a bit, thinking something over. Then she said it:

  “I think we should walk the Bibbulmun Track.”

  “Oh? Really? What’s that?”

  “It’s this amazing aboriginal walking trail, an ancient route that they used for migrations. It’s all restored now, with little wooden huts to stay in overnight. I did a few sections of it with Mum, a few years ago…”

  “Interesting. Staying overnight, eh? Where is it?”

  “It’s right here. It goes from Kalamunda, just north of Perth, to Albany on the south coast.”

  “Woah! That sounds like a long way. How far is it?”

  “It’s about a thousand kilometres.”

  “What? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s ridiculous! You’d have to be out of your mind! Why the hell would you want to do something like that?”

  “For Mum. She loved the Track. She always promised me that one day we’d walk it together.”

  “Oh. Ah. Um… great. So… I guess we’re walking The Track then. What did you say it was called?”

  “Bibbulmun! Oh Tony, are we really going to do it? YAY! It’s going to be so amazing!”

  “Yeah…”

  I found it hard to share her enthusiasm right at that moment.

  But the idea grew on me.

  Luckily.

  Roo told Gill the next day. It was our last chance to get out of this; if Gill wasn’t keen, if she showed any sign of hesitation, there would be reasonable grounds to rethink the whole idea. Gill liked walking as much as any of us, but she’s never been super-fit. She had bad knees too, I remembered – maybe that would help sway her decision?

  Maybe…

  This is how the conversation went:

  Roo: “Hey Gill,
Tony says we can walk the Bibbulmun Track!”

  Gill: “Wow, just like your mum always wanted you to do! Great, when can we start?”

  Bugger.

  It looked alarmingly like I was about to hike a thousand kilometres.

  The reality of the situation was that we wouldn’t be setting off on any grand expeditions anytime soon. The holiday had wiped out all our finances, and doing odd jobs for the Underground was only making us poorer. I mentioned this to one of our new Irish housemates, and he had an almost instant solution; “Ys can gera job with this fella, he gis us a job nar n then. Easy stuff like, all cash-in-han’.”

  He dug in his pocket for a screwed up bus ticket, and copied a number out of his phone onto it. “Here. Jus tell im ys know us,” he said, generously.

  Which I probably could have done, but I didn’t because I had no idea who ‘us’ was.

  It took me two days of ringing that number to get someone on the other end of it, which in hindsight should have been a warning. But we were desperate for cash, desperate for jobs – and the further into the phone call I got, the better this one sounded.

  It was with a company called Global Gardens, doing unskilled landscape labouring; in other words, shovelling soil. Trevor, the owner, manager and HR department all rolled into one, told me that we could start straight away.

  “There’s three of us,” I explained, “My girlfriend, my sister and me.”

  “Yeah, no worries. You got transport?”

  “Ah, yes, after a fashion. We’ve got a… van.”

  “Great. I’ll pay petrol for yer, and it’s a hundred bucks a day. Cash in hand. How does that sound?”

  “Fantastic! Thanks so much!”

  “Right, I’ll give yer the address, and – oh, have you got yer Blue Cards?”

  “Ah…”

  At this point my acting training kicked in. Specifically, the part of it where we’d been told, at audition, to say yes to everything. Can you horse-ride? Sky-dive? Speak Sanskrit? Just say yes. Get the job. Then you can worry about how to leap from a plane onto horseback whilst chanting the Upanishads. Honestly! Check out the quality of my training, and then wonder why I never became famous.