by Peter Ness
‘And—, you. No god-dammed swearing!’ Fran shoved me on the arm, bullying me with a vicious scowl. Baby-sitting was just a pain in the butt. But, hey, the money was good.
‘Oops! Sorry Fran,’ I cringed. Whack! She slapped me on the head, lightly, with the back of her knuckles. It hurt, and I rubbed the spot, thinking out loud.
‘What was that for? Why’re you always ticked off at everyone?’
She never answered, just sat glowering at me: Did she need a reason?
I glanced over my shoulder at the two small girls bundling into the back seat of the car. They slammed the creaky door shut behind them. Clunk! Ten-year old Teresa’s hair was mousy blonde and her eyes below her little spectacles pale blue, compared to Jo who had big shiny, glittering, brown eyes and long brown hair. Jo was still a baby, just six. The starter motor spun out, the car over-revving as it started up. Crunched into gear now it took off jerkily, heading down the steep decline. We all hung on for dear life as the car high tailed it around the bends. Looking out the window at the steep drop-off below, a feeling of nausea crept in.
‘Quit squabbling,’ I said to my sisters who made lots of noise trying to buckle their seats up. Why Jo always treated everything as a competition was beyond me.
‘And—, did I ask you to talk? No, then shut the crap up! And—, who switched god-dammed radio stations?’ Fran asked as she fiddled with the car radio. She glared at me, knowingly. Then she rotated the tuner from a Country and Western station to one of hard rock. The car whizzed around another sharp bend, the food in my stomach rising.
‘I did. Sorry—,’ I said with an apologetic look, face paling, biting my lip.
‘Well. It’s not my car. I borrowed it. So, you cannot touch anything without my god-darned permission,’ Fran replied and changed the radio channel yet again. The glaring sun pounded through the window, splashing in on us.
‘Goodness me, you are a persistent twerp,’ I said under my breath, as an act of defiance. I ducked as Fran’s hand rose up in front of my face, and then dropped away.
‘Ah—, this is my favorite song.’ Fran turned the radio up full throttle. Anti-Vietnam war rock music rang out over the roar of the engine. The car shuddered. The engine screamed its way down the hill in the wrong gear. Fran interchanged the gears, the car jerked moving forward smoothly at a graceful pace, and then the engine stopped whining. Now the music had me firmly in its grasp, as with Fran.
I had gone too far, so I started to strum my fingers on the dashboard along with the beat, which made Fran happy. Then it was all downhill, smooth sailing. Soon the road leveled out. Just then, Jo flung us both a Mintie catching me in the face. Ah! This would wake me up. The nausea dissipated, responding to the sudden flood of glucose stimulating the brain.
‘If you’re good we can all go to the beach,’ Fran yelled above the blaring music. She suffered rapid mood swings; as if that isn’t half obvious. The music was soothing. Tucking the Mintie into her mouth she grinned, feeling much better. ‘In fact, let’s go now!’
I nodded. My sisters screamed ‘Yeah! Right on!’ in appreciation.
‘I’m not sure why you aren’t at school today?’ Fran asked, pondering it.
‘Oh! You’re from Scotland,’ I answered, chewing. ‘We’re on summer holidays and school doesn’t start again in Australia for another three whole weeks.’
‘Three god-darn weeks?’ She confirmed with a shock-horror grimace, as if it were both a burden and a nightmare. I nodded. ‘Okay. That explains why you kids are always at Locke’s Café,’ Fran replied, her face reverting.
She tapped her fingers to the beat as well. We sang along at the top of our voices, all way out of tune. Back then we were all tone deaf. Isn’t everyone?
#
London: July 2012
Kick!
‘Ouch! Stop kicking Peter. What was that for?’ Andrea asked, annoyed.
‘So, the Jesus man and that dumb girl — are they the main characters in the story?’ Peter asked.
‘Yes. No. Look, I don’t know, just a minute. No. Of course not! They’re just bit characters. Didn’t you listen to any of the story so far? And, how do you know she’s dumb? Wait. There’s something written on the inside of the front page.’ Andrea glanced at it. ‘Okay. Heni has several things written here. At the top is a list of “Important people you can trust”: Amanda and her mother, Jo, Kirin, Tom Fargo, and — sometimes — the Prima (preema). That’s all? Hmm. That name again. Other than Heni Hani’s parents, they must be the main characters.’
‘I don’t know any of them peoples,’ Peter said in a concerned voice.
‘Yes, you do too. You know Uncle Heni, and Jo is Mom.’
‘Wow! So, Mommy is a goody then?’ Peter asked, questioningly.
‘Of course she is!’ Andrea blurted out, shocked. ‘What did you expect? Hmm. At the base of the page is a list of “People to fear: Don’t trust Brian even if you like him, most of the adults, Goto or the Cydroid.” — Okay. But, who the heck are the Cydroid?’
‘I wonder which country they’re from?’ Peter scratched his nose. Slap!
‘Stop picking your nose!’ Andrea warned. ‘Look, I don’t know. Anyway, lets read some more and find out.’
Chapter 4: Locke’s Café
Meanwhile, in the Town we called a City:
The Jesus statue was our cities’ first claim to fame.
Our second claim to fame was that the city was, reputedly, the tuna and shark capital of the world. That was before we ate most tuna to extinction. And before we had killed and gutted the Great White Sharks, and other sharks and fish in complete ignorance of their two hundred and ninety million year history.
Our third claim to fame was that each summer — yes, every summer — this city was heir to the world’s largest and longest pub-crawl. The most renowned and noisiest alcoholics in the state would make a ruckus; the natives of this land, the cockatoo.
Dropping in spurts, grain dribbled off the back of the bouncing trucks laden with wheat and barley onto the tarred highway in small dancing trails, rolling and then skipping as it were sucked up into the air by a tornado of gushing wind from the next vehicle. After it rained the grain on the side of the road swelled up, fermenting. The pink cockatoo, parrot, magpie and crow converged in small groveling groups on the side of the road gobbling up the swollen, sprouting grain. The cockatoos became increasingly wobbly on their thin fragile legs, leading to the phrase “drunk as a cockatoo.” Oops! Steady there. Don’t fall over.
An intermingling magpie lark, seagull, pigeon or native dove swooped in to join the feeding frenzy, frantically dodging oncoming cars. Once in a pink sun or blue moon, an emu or a small grey wallaby would take on the cars as they flashed by, hopping across the road to join in the fray. Hey! Look out! Don’t hit that Roo!
A white tiger snake slithered across the steaming tar, curled up in a ball to watch, or found a partner and danced the death roll down a sand hill near Pebble Beach. But, pink suns and blue moons and other even more unusual phenomenon were uncommon in this neck of the woods. Or, were they unusual? Maybe I’m just pulling the wool over your eyes, toying with you, pulling your leg, kidding you, you know — joking. Or, perhaps not! Read on, if you are willing to take the dare.
The blistering, swirling furnace of the sun blazed down. In those days, we spent a lot of time at the beach; the cool sea breeze a welcome reprieve from the searing, pummeling summer heat. After building sand castles, we jumped on them, squishing them. Wading in, kicking up the shallow water or paddling in the small bird boats was a scream! There they go again. Fran and Teresa are paddling like anything to catch Jo and I. See, I told you Fran had a butterfly tattoo on her buttocks! Our shrill screams of laughter cut the burning summer air like a sickle slicing through hot wet straw. It is easy to imagine.
Summer harvest was a bird’s paradise: two months of heaven filled with pure, intoxicated, gluttony. A seemingly never-ending trail of grey-green monochrome tarpaulin-clad trucks and semi-trail
ers rumbled noisily, rolling along the sprawling highway.
Read the sign you dummy: “Danger! Steep Descent!”
Truck engines revved, squealing, as they dropped back down a gear. Ten tonne trucks filled to the brim with grain ploughed headlong, into the port town. Pink cockatoos staggered in a drunken stupor across the road. Parrots sat, strung out nonchalantly on the telegraph wires or fences, swaying in the breeze. As the trucks bounced down the road grain continued dribbling, overflowing, and spilling out from below the tight canvas tarpaulins. Bouncing across the tar the momentum flung grains onto the side of the road. The draft from the next vehicle roared past, lifting them skipping and dancing into the fickle afternoon breeze.
Fresh dribbles of wheat and barley littered the edge of the road, caught between thin clusters of new sprouted green shoots of grain. A few puddles lined the side of the road with thin fingered tributaries of muddy loam, meandering into larger puddles, attributed to the summer rain which pelted down the night before. The clusters of grain on the roadside were still moist, fermenting. From above the road, if you stayed long enough and watched carefully you might, literally, see the grains swelling and sprouting. They were a much sought after, potent, toxic elixir for the birds.
A thin trickle of grain extended, trailing, along the road for kilometers, all the way to the local ship-docking wharf on the other side of town. Here the farmers pulled the grating metal shoots on the sides of their trucks, watching the grain as it gushed whooshing out the side, then down through the grating. The suffocating dust billowed up, catching in the light breeze. Then, the grumbling Harbor Master Supervisor wiped off some errant sweat of his forehead, flicked a switch and the conveyors began their noisy humming rumble. The grain churned down spraying into golden piles in the holds of the ships, which slowly sagged under the weight, dropping to their water line. Then off they sailed to their final overseas destination, to Europe or Japan, our main trading partners at that time.
Parrots hassled pedestrians from their branches. Seagulls and cockatoos flapped loosely lifted by the scant flickering sea breeze as it lingered over the warm wet sand.
‘Food, food, free food, come and get the food,’ they squawked, or at least that’s what I heard them say. ‘Come quick, the beer wagon has finally arrived.’
‘Drunk alert! Drunk alert!’ one Galah[3] squawked.
The annual birds-r-us pub-crawl had begun.
#
A pub-crawl, for those who are uninformed, is where a group of animals — usually humans and mostly young adults at that — go to a hotel, pub, bar, beer garden, or liquor store. There they buy, and then consume, elegant quantities of alcohol. They make loads of vile noise then move on from one bar to the next until totally drunk, blotto — until the money runs out, or the sun comes up the next morning and they find themselves sleeping next to a trash can and a scum of dry vomit.
‘Who’s that dry reaching? Don’t step in the — vomit. Look at your shoe Rich. Oo—,Yuk!’ It’s hard to see clearly in the dark when you’re half sloshed.
These folk, Aussies call them piss ants for want of a better name, typically create a ruckus: hooting, screaming, hurling tin cans in the air. Crash! Bang! They kick rubbish bins, wolf whistle, and squeeze their skinny little bare backsides out of the back windows of cars: a sign of friendship to passing motorists.
‘Hey! Let’s give them a brown-eye as we drive past Rich.’
They sing country and western, rock, and pop songs out of tune at the top of their voices with music blaring, turned up to the hilt. This is all fine and dandy in the daytime, but at night it has the undesired side-effect of waking up the elderly old men and women from their slumber. These old fogies scrape open their windows or creaky front doors jerkily. Still half asleep, and feeling in cups of water for their false teeth, they poke their dazed heads out to see what all the fuss is about. Others step half-naked onto their verandahs, hurling abuse at the passing hooligans, fists in the air, in a sign of love and adoration.
‘Go home you hoodlums—, before I call your parents and then the cops in that order,’ which they invariably do. ‘You—, you—, I know you! I know who you are! You—, you’re that Dunbar kid, aren’t you? And you, yeah — I know you as well. You’re that baseball player — Jimmy Arsenic. And you—, you. You’re Guy Porter. Your old man owns the Used Car Lot! I’ll ring him up and tell him all about you, you little runt.’
‘Yeah, sure you know us Pops! Put your wig back on. Go back to bed in your pajamas before you catch cold!’ the drunk, tattooed, Jimmy Arsenic yelled back. ‘Move across Dunbar. You’re driving Porter.’ They wedged themselves into the Ford Falcon.
These pub-crawlers, hoodlums, or hooligans, are usually driven from one designated watering hole — a place that sells immeasurable quantities of alcoholic beverage — to the next by a delegated driver. This person is supposed to remain sober and get all the participants home safe, with some luck. And, luck always plays a role in both happiness and in misery, especially when you’re a drunk driver. Crash!
‘Blast Porter. We only went fifty meters and you already hit a telephone pole,’ a sloshed Rich Dunbar spat out. ‘And look what you’ve done. You darn well killed the bloody car.’
‘Sorry ‘bout that Rich, the pole jumped right out and hit us,’ Guy Porter laughed.
‘Think Pops recognized us?’ Jimmy asked, creaking open a car door.
‘Yeah, probably but who cares,’ Rich Dunbar replied.
‘Quick let’s scatter, before the old codger calls the cops!’ Porter hissed on wobbly legs.
‘Oi! Over here,’ Dunbar whispered hoarsely. ‘Think you can jump-start the Volkswagen Jimmy?’ He rotated the sun visor now. ‘Oh! Look what I have here.’ A set of car keys jangled from his hand.
A siren whined in the distance, wailing louder and louder as it approached. Its blue flashing light splashed the shrouded houses as it passed by, piercing the night sky.
#
The birds, however, have no designated driver. And, they don’t stay out late at night. They have their fun well before the sun sets on the western ridges. It’s all for one and one for all.
The drunken cockatoos bounce their heads up and down almost falling over. We copy them, laughing and run off in the searing heat. Of course the birds never understand a word of what we say. To them we are just acting silly.
‘Bunch of stupid kids down there — ten points if you lay a missile on that girl,’ one bird squawks. ‘— the small short one, with the dark brown eyes.’
‘Oh! How gross Jo. The bird dropped a sloppy turd and it just missed your hair. Look out! — Another one’s falling,’ I say.
‘Well, now that we’ve dropped the car off, we can wander back down to the café,’ Fran says. ‘Quick! Let’s run across the road before that next truck gets here.’
‘Grab my hand Jo,’ I say. We all rush across in a flurry of flapping towels. A large white and sloshy wet turd splatters the hot bitumen. Splat! We zigzag to miss it. The seagulls skim the gentle breeze, hovering in circles above us. Now, they come at us in bombing runs. Jo covers her ice-cream with one hand to stop them from thieving it, while she tentatively takes another bite.
The semi-trailers came storming down the bitumen highway towards us kids at forty kilometers per hour. Sandwiched between the trucks and semi-trailers, scared out of their wits, other drivers cling to the steering wheels of their old rust buckets. The sea air plays havoc with the Fords, Chryslers, and Holden’s in this city.
The hardline alcoholic birds waddle, or fly, onto the middle of the road in a drunken frenzy, risking their own life and that of the oncoming motorists to get their next, perhaps their last, fix. The truck driver jerks on his squealing brakes. Missed that one! Phew!
Winding down towards the heart of the city the road perches on the edge of steep twenty-meter high overhanging cliffs, white caps sloshing at their bases down below.
We children wander down the side of the highway still in our bathing suits, chatting
with Fran who looks hot in her red poker-dot bikini. Our wet towels drag behind.
Taking a fleeting glance down at the water sucking against the rocks below Jo scurries back from the precipice. She clutches at the safety of Fran’s hand.
The same group of young hooligans driving past on the way to the local café, now slow their red-brown Holden Monaro to a trot. They wind down the windows, wolf-whistling at the hot bikini chick. Fran flicks her red hair at them and holds up an obligatory finger. They spin their tires on the melting tar, beep their horn and drive off hooting, their woof-whistles echoing up the road towards us.
‘In your dreams Dunbar—,’ she yells back, then sharply ‘Keep away from the cliff edge Jo! It’s a dangerous place for young children. Near the edge is unstable,’ Fran roughly drags Jo by the hand pulling her away from the sucking near-vertical drop-off.
A group of trucks lumbers past now, the sucking wind pummeling against our thin puny bodies. Jo peers hesitantly over the side of the cliff, clutching at Fran’s hand. To her, a seemingly endless ocean of huge waves with white caps seems to smash into the sharp, jagged rocks below. The term huge is relative. Huge to small children is not huge to adults. Even so, it is still a dangerous place for the faint of heart, the intoxicated, stupid, or even the sober.
A car tears past at break-neck speed, beeping at the flapping cockatoos.
‘Some of these drivers are on steroids. Hey! Watch out you idiot! Where’d you get your license?’ Fran spits out.
A pink cockatoo scurries across the tarred road just in front of us, just avoiding collision. It staggers around looking for grain. All humans are monsters!
‘Hold my hand Jo,’ Teresa says clutching at Jo’s little fingers. It was January.
Teresa died six months later.
#
The birds were not the only budding alcoholics on the road that day. A thirty-something Ashton Hani fumbled in his pocket for a bottle of the fiery stuff.
‘Ah! There it is. That felt better,’ he wiped his giant paw over the back of his dark beard. Re-tightening its lid, he dropped the half-empty bottle onto the dashboard. The other man in the truck, a giant Neanderthal of a man, ignored the driver, continuing to stare out of the open window of the cabin. A few whitecaps whipped up below the nearby cliff, but the bay was otherwise tranquil. Taking in the scenic beauty of Kangarilla Bay, his eyes rotated up towards Justanava Island jutting out of the ocean in the distance.