When you mention my name to old girlfriends they pause. The more polite smile while the others roll their eyes and lean in to an anecdote about my bonkers behaviour: jumping off jetties into shallow water, dressing and acting like Caligula at a party, running out of restaurants without paying, the terrible puns, radical leftist politics, interpretive dances (the history of American Slavery is still famous) and the heavy drinking. The less mannered always mention the drinking. The car and motor cycle accidents, fighting people twice my size, the arrests, and failing to comport myself in a way one would expect from an individual with a first-class private school and university education.

Age has mellowed me. Not like a smooth merlot but a well-poured Guinness. In my 40s, I quit working for organisational psychic prisons and took up that most perilous of professions – a freelance journalist. To my surprise, considering the transformation of journalism into an adjunct of the entertainment industry, I did well. It wasn’t due to my people skills, which were appalling, but an innate sense of what makes news. But if I’m honest, as my hair turned pepper and salt, my nest was feathered by a small inheritance paid annually in British pounds from a distant Scottish relative. Like many of my ageing and neurotic peers, I’m surfing the great baby boomer wave towards death.

By my early 60s, I had matured into an eccentric, who raises the elbow Aussie Rules Football style, at the heads of spoilt fat brats riding Fat Boy e-bikes at 30 kph on footpaths, through Mum’s pushing prams and doddering old bastards. I took one out a while ago and the cops came banging at my door at 11.00pm. Bang! Police! Bang! Open Up! There were six of them over three metres tall with the usual accoutrement of death head insignia, guns, batons and body armour. I said if they’d come about the bookcases on Facebook Marketplace, they were too early. The usual palaver at the station: DNA test, photos of the tattoos – the Scottish Lion Rampant on the left arm, a Griffin holding a red star on the right, a dove carrying an Armalite rifle over the left breast followed by the charges, blah, blah. Not completely mellowed. There’s a wildness in the blood which obeys neither discipline or convention. In the next cell a drunk wearing only a grey blanket was singing Ian Dury’s, ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, The juice of a carrot, the smile of a parrot, a little drop of claret, anything that rocks, over and over again.

On the lighter side I would, at dinner parties in my white, upper-middle class seaside village, quote chunks of Shakespeare, Auden and Larkin. I’m a natural after a few drinks at Euan McGregor’s ‘Choose Life’ speech from T2 Trainspotting. A curio amongst the older women whose husbands had croaked. For others, I was a wanker. I might not be everyone’s cup of chai as I support the IRA (finish the job) and the liberation of Palestine. In my callow youth – my uneaten salad days – my heroes were the Tupamaro – the Robin Hood urban guerillas in Uruguay. What I don’t like, as many of my neighbours do, is to fixate on property speculation while spending their 60s and 70s bitching about people on Facebook, demonstrating not only inveterate cowardice but proof that they will go into that good night shrieking and howling.

The Occy Lady was in her late 70s. It’s hard to say with certainty. I’m 64 but look younger as the kidney medications camouflage cellular decay. The Picture of Dorian Grey in bathers. The Occy Lady’s hair was the colour of burnished steel cut into a half-baked sylvan pixie bob with an evolving tragedy at the back. Her mint green one-piece bathing suit had a small plastic daisy woven where her breasts once would have met. A handsome woman but gravity and the sun had turned an hour-glass figure into a brown beer bottle bulging at the hips, with an east-west arse and ice cream cone legs. Yet her eyes were mesmerising. Aged hadn’t diminished those sapphires. Like free falling into a deep pacific island sink hole. It’s hard to be complementary about old age. She’d describe me as combination of donkey stubbornness and camel malice, with a large pre-cancerous red splotch of sun-damaged skin on the right side of my face from driving up the east coast in my youth, arm out the window, looking for ‘anything that rocks’.

I call her the ‘Occy Lady’ because as soon as she told me her name, I forgot it and lacked the courage to ask her again. Too many tides have passed. When we meet at the ocean pool, I smile and say ‘hullo’ and she says ‘Hullo Michael’, although my name is Callum. Apparently, I look like a Michael and others have said as much over the years.

It was a beautiful September day when the Occy Lady called me in to the ocean pool. I’d just been visited by a new aural hallucination. Now on the sidewalk, huh, huh, whoo sunny morning, un huh, lies a body just oozin’ life, eek, and someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner, could that someone be Mack the Knife? The pool is 40 metres long and 30 metres wide. Its concrete walls were built in the Depression years by unemployed men to give them something to do instead of storming the government. The warm northern current had just reached the southern shores but the water was still freezing. With a wet suit top, snorkel and mask I tentatively entered the water and sang my Viking mantra picturing the icy waters off Lindisfarne, We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Tiny purple, green and red fish darted amongst the rocks. A few orange fan tails and even baby kingfish – a delicacy served raw with soy sauce and wasabi.

She pointed at a clump of grey seaweed lying on the ocean pool floor, about the size of a small dinner plate. I floated above it and saw nothing until a tentacle slowly unfolded and reached out towards her finger. It took me a few seconds to discern this master of camouflage: the eyes, the mantle, the gills and then it took off at speed, jet-propelled, its tentacles waving behind.

“It’s called a Gloomy octopus but they’re far from gloomy. They’re curious and explore the world around them like children. They have consciousness,” she said as her hair hung over her mask like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.

Feigned autistic indifference came naturally to me but this was interesting. What did it feel like to look like an alien navigator suspended in the cool twilight on the seabed, eight arms waving gently around me? Each of my tentacles with its own miniature brain, operating separately but in conjunction with my central brain. My suckers tasting everything they touch.

“They have blue blood as it has a high level of copper. Researcher reckon they not only have memory but can feel pain. They’re sentient.”

“Many years ago, I had lunch on the Greek island of Milos,” I said “and hanging in the sun were 20 octopuses pulled from the sea that morning. I chose the goat.”

“I wonder if goats think too,” she said with a smile and swam away.

According to Google, after a female octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she quits eating and wastes away. By the time the eggs hatch, she’s gone like Karen Carpenter. Some females in captivity try kill themselves by banging into the sides of the tank and eating the tips of their tentacles. I was hooked.

I had to re-employ behavioural therapy at our first meeting when she said she was a retired school teacher. Bile rose in my mouth. I’d lived with a teacher during the Jurassic Period; a hideous PC-infected drone who taught her young iPhone-addicted history students that the English Civil War was the progenitor of the #MeToo movement, Napoleon was gay and Emily Pankhurst was a tranny. I fled to west Belfast for some peace and quiet and she became a politician for the Greens.

I live alone one street back from the beach in a small two-bedroom apartment with a Japanese design aesthetic from the Edo period. Mats on the floor and bugger-all furniture. That was the interior decorator’s plan until I moved in with a queen-sized bed, six large bookcases (two empty) and three backlit glass cabinets full of shells from across the world. No futon? the designer asked. I spent my teens sleeping on the floor in other people’s houses. Fuck the futon. Guests say ‘what a marvellous shell collection’. They’re a marine graveyard. Sometimes it’s best to not get what you want.

I’d given up pair bonding with women some years ago. There were trust account babies who neither toiled nor spun, crystal huggers and ‘the Malaises’ – my collective noun for women who spread gossip like mustard gas over Passchendaele. A tedium of hens, their faces unclouded by deep thought. Many believed the journey to the centre of self was a dangerous and time-consuming expedition. In their bedroom mirror, a stranger’s face stared back or worse, a mask forged from the past fads of popular culture.

Was I so different? In my teens I used the Pinter pause to perfection before picking a male dancing partner to engage in ‘fisticuffs’ out the back of a pub. I buried myself in Dada and Surrealism, followed by Zen Buddhism, Marxism and endless nights gawping through the lens of my hand built refracting telescope, as the universe rushed towards and away from me. I too had wandered down lanes of thought far from the orthodox. In the morning, I did exercises from the Qi Gong and Tai Chi. I’d deep-dived into Jung and meditated on the Wiccan fire pentacle. To me, the ocean was a shrine to the ineffable, to the other. The truth was, in relationships, after swimming from the Titanic to the Marie Celeste, it became clear my powers of discretion in female companionship had abandoned me. The intelligence of apes, elephants, whales, dogs and octopuses had magnetic appeal. True, these were not great bed companions but better than waking up with Ms Givings.

The Occy Lady was a Quaker. When I think of the Quakers, I visualise people shaking in fear or a palsy. My mind flicks from image to image like the TV news. And now this…The Quakers – or the Religious Society of Friends – were pacificists, renowned for driving the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, prison reform and mental health care. Richard Nixon was a Quaker and he unsuccessfully tried to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age. The American invasion into Cambodia laid the path for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the extermination of two million people.

She loaned me a well-thumbed book on Martin Luther King and underlined a quote: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” I loaned her a book on Malcolm X and underlined my favourite passage, which flipped the Patrick Henry quote on its head, “Give me liberty or give me death” to “It will be liberty or it will be death.” Books sometimes divine one’s political philosophy but it’s a dodgy proposition as I also love Paddington Bear.

An invitation by the Occy Lady to the local flower show – a key event at the Annual Agricultural Show and Gymkhana – was something I’d normally turn down like a rectal exam. But as it was on a Sunday, which can be three months long, I made way to the Pavillion and Life Saving Club, paid the $5.00 entry fee, which included a raffle ticket. Ms Local Charity Queen was being crowned. A silk sash bash. The runners up pulled the icy cat-walk pout for the local newspaper photographer.

My nose was hit was hit by waves of perfumes as I browsed the rows of roses, Agapanthus, Gardenias, Hydrangeas (which bought back memories my of Grandmother’s garden and her ankle-nipping corgis). Below each exhibition a school child had drawn crayon pictures of the growers: all older women with smiley faces, dressed in hats and gardening gloves. A nice touch. The Orchids sat proudly and erotically to the left of the Dahlia’s, the petals opening up like women’s genitalia. The Occy Lady’s orchid was a Cattleya, with a purple and yellow cone protruding from a white flower. An exquisite shape, mathematical in its symmetry. I fought the temptation to touch it and kept my hands knotted behind my back as a large lesbian in overalls was giving me the evil eye. Below the Occy Lady’s orchids, a young girl had drawn her face with bright pink cheeks, blue eyes (she got that right) and grey and yellow whisps of hair, which looked either like Medusa’s snakes (under fed) or tentacles. Below the display was the name Margaret Eiger. Margaret. Remember that. A dog in the carpark was chasing its tail and people were laughing. As I walked up the street, her name flew away like a Bogon moth.

I wasn’t close to Patrick Magee but we’d sink a few Guinness in the Leagues Club. Paddy was in his early 60s and worked as a gas meter reader. The new digital meters will put him out of a job. He didn’t care. More time to sink pints and have a flutter on the nags. His grey hair was pulled back in a pony tail, the tips of his fingers yellow with nicotine. In his 30s, he lectured in literature at Trinity University but committed ethical suicide by sleeping with an Eileen, a Delores and a Saoirse. Patrick relished the magnetic attraction of young women who were only too keen to ‘go all the way’, (to quote Eric Carmen) but he failed to consider the power differential between lecturer and student. Like Odysseus tied to the mast, he should have resisted the siren’s call. He also didn’t consider the Pro-Vice Chancellor was a modern woman whose finger pressed heavily on the scale of prosecution. The fall was like Satan out of heaven and on to the dole lines. Like many Irishman, he set sail for Australia and a new life.

Patrick had a knack of guiding the conversation to his narrow and jaundiced lens of expertise – Australia. Not the ‘shrimp on the barby’ or the ‘dog on the tucker box’ Australia. But the regressive and xenophobic Australia. In the small alcove set aside for smokers, with a view of the local girls from the Greer and Steinem high school, wearing only coconut oil as they headed to the ocean pool, he’d broadside the Great Southern Land.

“Look, I’ll admit Ireland ain’t progressive. It’s uptight, regressive and buries new ideas under a sea of venom. Cromwell should have killed the lot of us and started again but don’t get me started,” he took a long draught of Guinness and kept talking as he rolled a cigarette with more paper than tobacco.

“Maybe as an immigrant I haven’t got the right to say it but I’ll say it anyway and you can love it or lump it. Australia is 1950s South Africa. They’ve buried the blacks under symbolism, our soldiers are fighting wars that have got nothing to do with us and the divide between the rich and the poor is like Russia before Lenin took over. Unless you come from a rich family, young people can forget owning a house. They’re fucked.”

Patrick’s rants had an epic quality. It was disconcerting to find oneself nodding along with a man who looked like hobo but had a doctorate in the poetry of WB Yeats.

“I tell you Cal, Australians are the most reactionary cunts on the planet. They don’t give a shite about anything but themselves. Mateship is long dead. D-E-A-D. The cult of Me, Me, Me has got them by the balls. If Thatcher succeeded anywhere, it’s here. As for that imperialist game, cricket, it’s dying. Aussie Rules has become unintelligible as they’ve changed the fucking rules. I’m telling you, your politicians are coprophiliacs with their Punch & July bickering and shit-eating grins. De Valera wouldn’t take a curried dump on the lot of ‘em.”

I thought so little about politics, that even if I could get a word in, I couldn’t add much. Society had atomised. Political parties were glove puppets for corporate giants and lobby groups. Political movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, rose up like sky rockets on social media, only to explode at the moment of apogee and disappear until the next outrage. Nothing changed.

Patrick could go on like this for an hour. If he got on to migrants – who he hated – I tuned in to my semi-autistic state and wondered why female octopuses kill themselves after laying their eggs? Surely in a Darwinian sense, they should survive to protect their offspring.

For three years I made my way to the ocean pool almost every day – except in winter when the water temperature fell below 16C – to see the occies. I saw them grow, prise open oysters and mussels, find mates, sporn and die. The Occy Lady was there before me and we’d make small talk about the occies and the arrival of new fish, some as big as one’s arm. The occies fled in high summer as brats did bombs and suey’s into the water and a thin film of suntan lotion covered the pool. The Portuguese Man of War jellyfish would sail into the pool on hightide. I took perverse pleasure as the kids fled the water screaming with stingers wrapped across their chest or legs. One less biped pissing into the pool.

An unsolicited email hit my spam folder and lay unread for two days. How did the Occy Lady she get my email? I don’t like people snooping online.

Dear Michael,

I thought you might be interested in this. It’s in Nature magazine. Did you know octopuses dream and they dream in colour? They have two stages of sleep: “quiet sleep” and “active sleep”. In the latter, their arms twitch, their breathing quickens, and their skin ripples with vibrant, shifting colours. Researcher reckon they fall into REM sleep.

During quiet sleep, researchers saw neural activity that resembled mammalian “sleep spindles” – they’re still a mystery even in humans but many scientists believe they help cement memories. Fascinating is it not? Yours M.E

Last week according to Facebook and Darren the publican, the Occy Killers were seen walking around the rock pool late one afternoon. Three men in their 40s. Facebook posts reckoned they were Greeks or Syrians or Lebanese or Aborigines. They had form. Their routine was to scout the pool for octopuses and a week later, they’d roll up in a rusted old yellow Holden Statesmen early on a Saturday morning with wet suits, nets and spear guns.

The Occy Lady held an emergency meeting in the Freemasons Hall with the politically right-on greenies and progressives. They’d confront the assassins and through sheer weight of numbers and yelling, “Go Home! Leave the occies alone!” would drive them out of town. I had reservations. The greatest deterrents are unalloyed fear and violence.

After berating a librarian for raising the price of printing from the computers by 20 cents a page, I parked my bony arse on a bench in the main street and enjoyed a sausage roll with sauce. My kidneys were playing up and I needed a breather. Across the road the Occy Lady was handing out flyers, exhorting the locals to stop the murder of the innocent cephalopods. Locals stopped to chat. There was consternation and head nodding and to a man and woman, they were in accord. ‘No pasaran’ and all that.

One of the curious aspects about kidney disease is that pain relief is useless. I took half a Valium and got five hours nod. I awoke at 3.00am for my usual toilet ritual and read a book on the Chinese Cultural revolution. Then snoozed for 30 minutes and was planning a boiled egg on a tray, like Salome in a bygone day, when a gentle knock on the door awoke me. It was barely 6.30am and the sun was peeping through the kitchen windows. I had planned to spend the morning in bed. When I opened the door, the Occy Lady did an ironic curtsey as I stood before her in my Hugh Hefner red silk jimmy jam jams.

“I have good news and bad news,” she said.

I let her into the apartment.

“How did you know where I live?”

“You’re a local. Everyone knows where everyone lives”

I let it pass as my eyes were hanging out of my head.

“The good news is my orchid won third prize at the show. I’m very pleased. It was the first time I’d grown them”

“Congratulations. And the bad news?”

“There’s no way to sugar coat it. None of the locals are coming. I got ten calls last night from people who were going away for the weekend, numerous sick children and pets and one woman who had to take her husband to hospital with a suspected heart attack. There were more messages of Facebook begging off”

“But surely … I mean, the flyers, the Facebook campaign – not least because there’s a mating pair of octopuses and people know that. It was in the local paper”

She looked wounded.

“There’s only me. Will you come?”

She was wearing a white terry-towelling robe over her mint green bathing suit and Birkenstocks, which had seen better days. Under her left arm she carried a small, well-thumbed bible.

“I bought the bible … well, I don’t know why but it seemed a comfort”

“Onward Christian soldiers and all that? I suppose if push came to shove, you could always sling the Bible at them, like David and Goliath”

Like an image from Poe, her face, as if momentarily caught in a flash of lightening, was torn by red hot anger and then quickly fell back into the benign, friendly old woman she was.

“Yes, something like that”

If I didn’t come, she’d march down to the ocean pool and confront the men by herself. A woman in her 70s with steel grey hair and ice cream cone legs carrying the St James Bible. There was no plan, no strategy and while the men probably wouldn’t attack on old lady, a belligerent older male was another matter. I ate a spoon full of honey for the glucose, quickly showered and put my bathers on. I looked in the mirror. I’d lost weight in all the wrong places. I pulled my shoulders back and produced a silent but deadly fart. Hardly Henry V at Agincourt.

“There’s more to you than meets the eye,” she said, when I emerged from the bathroom.

“Not really. Let’s go”

The shops were still closed as we set off down the hill. Lurex clad body fascist cyclists rode past and a young woman with an extraordinarily pert bum jogged around us. The Presbyterian church was doing bell ringing practice. The peels rang across the still morning, across the light sea fog and a couple of squawking shit hawks. I struggled to remember the first line of Wilfred Owen’s poem, the one about doomed youth. Something about bells ringing for those who die as cattle… demented choirs of wailing shells…It seemed improbable that no one would turn up. I’d told Patrick Magee who loved biff, especially when I said they looked like foreigners. He told Felicity McFly, who worked behind the bar. Flick or ‘Maggot’ (as people called her behind her back), had a sex change operation in the 1990s from a man to a woman with mixed success. All that was missing was the neck bolt. The fact she’d been in the Merchant Navy and then driven trucks across the Nullarbor, made her more of a man than most men. After the operation, she worked as a university administrator, where she’d learnt cunning and guile, which made her – as Darrell said sotto voce leaning across the bar- ‘a nasty piece of work’. Darrell kept her on as she doubled as security on the front door on band nights. McFly was a shoo-in for something physical.

It was an unusually warm morning and the Winter solstice was on us. Smoke mingled with the fog as the Community Fire Service burned off the forest undergrowth. The Occy Lady took my arm as we ambled along. Was I lagging or out of camaraderie? With the cross of Jesus, going on before. To the stranger’s eye, we looked like an old couple going for a morning walk, the woman helping her hobbling husband. As we passed the weatherboard houses, flat and apartments, eyes peeked between the venetian blinds and shades. Curtains moved behind closed windows.

“I called the police in case there’s any nastiness,” she said.

The police were more interested in revenue raising by booking hoons on the highway doing 170 kmph in a 100 zone. Last year young revellers in an Airbnb burnt the place down and the cops showed up just as the fire brigade hosed the embers. The locals had mixed emotions: happy the ‘party palace’ was razed but if there was a serious crime, something gun or knife-based, you were on your own.

I didn’t think octopuses could cook a chook or solve differential equations but they should be left alone. The ocean’s tides turned in me. My moods rose and fell from flat calm to storm. I didn’t agree with John Donne’s ‘No Man is an Island’. I was island and not a ‘part of the main’. I felt kin with the sea creatures. I didn’t lack socialisation. I had been socialised too well; bombarded by the carrion cry of my fellow men and women, with their insistent wants and needs. As we walked past Mrs Bellvedere’s magnolia’s – which apparently had won second place in the Annual Agricultural Show and Gymkhana – it was time to let the chips fall where they may.

“I suggest I do the talking,” she said “Most men still have a skerrick of reason left in them”

“I like that word ‘skerrick’. I’m going to use it more”

“You can use it with your Irish friend in the Leagues Club”

“Patrick? Oh, to have an army of alcoholic Irish men with us now”

“We are enough”

We walked past Whispering Jack’s fish and chip shop, turned the corner and saw the old yellow Holden parked on the flat by the toilet block. Three men were donning wet suits by the side of the pool.

Cortisol surged through my blood. Speedy and unpleasant. While verbal persuasion may pacify the men who wanted octopus cooked with lemon and garlic for dinner, it was as unlikely as picking three Melbourne Cup winners in a row. Like an old battle ship, I needed to camouflage my intentions, stow the cannons and raise the white flag, until I got within an old fashioned 18 inches. Play the doddering old fool who step-by-step apologises for the disrespect shown by the old orchid grower, who hadn’t taken her medication that morning and had wandered out of the house. I needed to target the largest thug and it had to be over in five seconds or I was dead. Fear trembled my left hand and stones ground in my gut. A flock of pelicans flew in a V-formation overhead. Noble creatures. The men turned towards us. Flippers and facemasks lay at their feet. They were in their late 30s. Two were Caucasians. The largest had a tattoo on his neck. A girl’s name. Caro? Caroline. He was about my height. A little over 5’9. Clean shaven. My dancing partner. The one struggling to get his leg into his wet suit was tall with red hair. The third was short and stocky with a passing resemblance to Deigo Maradona. Maybe Spanish but more likely Greek. One to watch.

The Occy Lady walked forward, past two loaded spearguns and a dab net. I stood behind her, looking like a fool.

“Gentlemen, I understand you mean to kill the octopuses in this beautiful ocean pool. You do know they are a protected along the coast”

“Who says?” said Neck Tattoo.

“The Commonwealth Government. This is a breeding area”

Neck Tattoo and Red Hair laughed and continued to put their wetsuits on.

“Lady and I mean this politely,” said Neck Tattoo, “Please fuck off and take that old bastard with you. We have work to do”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you,” she said. “These creatures are unique and we are their guardians. You’ll just have to pack up your gear and go back to where you came from.”

That was not going to go down well. The Occy Lady had inadvertently flagged there were octopuses in the pool and given them a directive.

Neck Tattoo smiled at his mates and took a step towards her.

“Look you fucking old bag, you’ve got exactly ten seconds to piss off back to your knitting club before I kick the shit out of you”

A small cloud passed over the sun as I slowly made my way towards Neck Tattoo, dragging my left leg. I’d perfected the supplicant position doing my Richard 111 interpretive dance in front of the bedroom mirror. My shoulders fell forward in a stoop and I held out my left hand in friendship until I was standing before him.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six….”

I edged another couple of inches forward. He smelt of Old Spice and stale beer. Not a bad looking chap. Brown eyes with a small scar above the left eyebrow. His fists were flexing open and closed, pumping himself up. He spat in my face.

“Five, four, three …”

I raised my hands as if in prayer and threw a left jab at his nose, with plenty of shoulder in it. Like clockwork, both of his hands flew up to his nose as tears filled his eyes. I stepped quickly forward and drove my right knee into his balls and he bent over like a man looking for something on the ground. I moved to his right and slammed my right leg as hard as I could on the outside of his knee, snapping the cruciate ligament. He fell to the ground by the pool ladder, screaming strangled obscenities. Red Hair took a step back. A spear carrier in a school play. An attendant without lines. A strange thought passed through my mind. ‘I wonder if he has private health insurance?’ Deigo Maradona hit me with a large 18-inch adjustable spanner, just above my left ear. A glancing blow from on high which hurt even more as it passed behind my left ear, ripping the sinew. I blacked out and awoke on hands and knees with blood dripping on to the concrete. My eyes were a camera seeking focus. Maradona half dressed in his black wet suit stood above me with the spanner, ready to deliver the coup de grace.

It sounded like a large rubber band being released from enormous tension. A dull crack, a thwack, which echoed across the pool. I didn’t see the spear hit Maradona’s left leg but I heard the scream. It passed through his thigh, like a kebab skewer. He spun like a Dervish and fell into the pool, his face contorted in shock and pain.

As I rolled on to my side, the Occy Lady picked up the second spear gun and aimed it at Red Hair.

“Throw him that lifebuoy.”

In the far distance police sirens whirled. She told me later as she helped me to my feet, a large humpback whale had leapt out of the water only 300 metres away, as if taking a look.

xxxxxxx

The judge sentenced me to a community service order for hitting the fat kid off his e-bike and punching Neck Tattoo. I spent three weeks sorting second-hand books at the St Vincent De Paul charity shop. Considering my years and health, he said in a stern guttural voice, as if sentencing the Guildford Four, I should put my vigilante days behind me.

I sat with the Margaret during her trial. She wore a smart black pants suit, grey shirt and pearls. She was quiet and kept her hands knitted on her lap. She ignored the locals – mainly women – who’d come to support her. The judge found not guilty of deadly assault and her actions, although unorthodox, had saved my life. The locals in the court room rose to their feet and roared approval, as if the she had kicked the winning goal at the AFL Grand Final.

I never found out why her supporters didn’t rock up. None of my business. Patrick had pulled a two-day bender, dropped two Valium and slept for 36 hours. A young, blind Japanese tourist had wandered into the arms of Maggot as she was closing the bar for the night. He asked for directions to the nearest backpackers hostel and ended up at her place. They drank saki and ate hot chips soaked in soy sauce while playing ‘eye spy with my little eye’. I couldn’t blame them. Alcohol and sex had been my binary stars for many years, leading to forgotten ecstasy and regret.

Margaret stopped going to the ocean pool. In the space of a week the media had turned her from a hero to a psychopathic old woman. It claimed she was a danger to society and the best place for her was in supervised home care. Society can’t have loony old codgers roaming around trying to kill other people. Online media carried an old photo of her emerging from the ocean pool, in Cousin Itt mode, with her hair over her face. The headline read: ‘Do you want your kids to be around this?

While buying Patrick a Guinness and a packet of salt and vinegar chips, Darrell said Margaret had put her house on the market and was moving away. Somewhere further south. Patrick rabbited on about the influx of day tripping Chinese tourists, who spent bugger-all money in the town. I downed my Guinness and went back for another with a whisky chaser. It was 1.30 on a Wednesday afternoon. I sank those and kept sinking them until four hours later, I was barking at the toilet bowl. I must have passed out because when I awoke, there was a double Russian and a packet of unsalted cashews waiting for me on the cistern.

I asked around for Margaret at the Lions Club and the CWA but she had resigned from both. Whereabouts unknown. I sent two emails but both were unanswered. A month passed and after returning from the doctors to get the stitches out, an email hit in my inbox with a ‘ping’.

Dear Callum,

As you might know, I have sold my house and moved some 300 kilometres down the coast. Far enough to deter visitors. It was time for a change. New vistas and all that. I have discovered only 500 metres off shore, a most unusual phenomenon – an octopus breeding colony. The locals call it Octopolis. I’m going to get my scuba diving licence!

While you’re not exactly my cup of tea, I want to thank you for your help with those three nasty pasties. That took courage, a quality which is in short supply these days. I leave you the most important task of all – looking after the occies. You don’t need to do much. I can tell they like you. Send me some pictures from time to time.

Kind regards,

Margaret Eiger

I got an email from her at Christmas and that was the last time I heard from Margaret. She was writing a book about octopuses and said she almost lived in the local library. Something of a ‘hermit’ which I understood.

The pelicans still sit by the boat ramp waiting for the fishermen to gut their fish and throw them the heads and tails. The council passed a motion to put a ‘no fishing’ sign up at the pool but as year has passed and there’s still no sign.

The doctors want me to have dialysis but it’s too much bother. Almost every day, if my legs are willing, I make my way to the ocean pool, even in winter. People have got to know me and I smile and nod. I’m called the Occy Man. I’ve become a magnet for dogs and kids. I keep some cooked bacon in a sandwich bag for the dogs and answer questions about the occies. For the more curious, I’ve got hands outs on how occies evolved.

I dangle my legs over the side and stare into the water. Sometimes an octopus will swim by and reach out a tentacle.

People who invested here, who bought houses and have dinner parties, who get drunk and sleep with each other’s wives and girlfriends, take offence when you put the city of the plain down. They don’t like strangers mentioning the shrinking gene pool or the closeness of the eyes. You’ll join the punch-in-the-face club. If you’re a local, they’ll ask, ‘what are ya?’ As if you’re a deep space virus or a prole from the once industrial western suburbs.

The City of Churches was founded by freemen who embraced the protestant God, the seizure of land and the extermination of the Aboriginals, although not necessarily in that order. On any day, the bells ring to signify a wedding, a communion or the death of a statesman. Stateswomen didn’t die as there were none. The city boasted a church on every block, which attracted the grey-haired matrons from the eastern suburbs to bend the knee in thanks for inheritances. The bonnets of the Rolls Royce’s and new Mercs were convenient benches for the moth-eaten poor to rest their threadbare arses after some fine dining at the soup kitchen.

On Saturday one can hear the roar of the crowd from the oval. It’s old scoreboard looked down on the people and saw that it was good. Cricket attracted tens of thousands of people and on hot days, when ball met bat and the sound echoed across the grass, people gathered with their drinks under the giant Morton Bay fig trees and woofed down pies and pasties, while the younger members ate Japanese food, which was not popular amongst the older men who remembered Sandakan and the Burma railway.

We call ourselves the Rincons after a line in a Beach Boys song. We didn’t know Rincon was a beach in California. We just liked the name. We play a game before taxes, jobs and mortgages wrap their bony fingers around our throats. It has many names: Tag, Wide, Ringolevio. But we call it Murder. Red cotton is tied in a reef knot around the left wrist of each player. For a week it’s Rincon versus Rincon across the city as you try to cut or rip the cotton off their wrist. At the end of the week, those not ‘killed’ – the red cotton virgins – meet for the decider in Tusmore Park. It’s a chance to vent pent-up teenage violence on one’s friends. Because that’s what friends are for.

The park has a creek with a small bridge, and a large wading pool, where during the day, the rich kids sail their model yachts until daddy buys them the real thing. At exactly 9.30pm in summer, with the heat of the day evaporating, three red spotlights hit a giant white angel in the centre of the park. It’s wings look like a tetradactyl. Everyone calls it The Dutkiewicz. No one knows why. After a hot day, about 10.00pm, the night air rich with the medicant scent of eucalyptus, the gully winds start to blow and the gum tree boughs creek and moan.

Tory catches the bus from outside Crazy Horse, one of five strip joints in Myra Hindley street. Who would have thought one of the great American Indian warriors would be named after a cheap tits and bum dive? Hoka hey. ‘She works hard for the money’, bleeds out of the street PA but it’s too early for punters. Yiro and hot chip wrappers eddy over the drains. Tory’s a year out of school and lives south amongst a sea of single mothers, crackheads and small time hoods. Her bedroom wall is plastered with anatomical maps of the human body. She’s 17 and deep into biology and chemistry. Knows the main arteries of the body and heart, liver and kidneys. She wants a job but hairdressing and buffing nails won’t cut it. She’s friends with Callum and Mongy, as far as boys and girls can be friends. The boys are underaged drivers who’ll be late as usual. She plays with her phone as an old drunk with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth wants to know if she takes it up the arse.

Tory’s smart and knows she’s smart, which makes her lonely. She makes up for her insecurity with a bristling over-confidence. She going to study medicine and be a surgeon. Mongy told her he wants a fucking house on the fucking Costa Brava but that ain’t going to happen either. Tory’s almost pretty with long black unruly hair which splits and flies away. Not a girly girl. Her dark green eyes are framed by high cheek bones covered in a light olive complexion with freckles around the nose. Her mother reckons there was a Greek in the cupboard some generations back.

She has drilled a hole in the base of her well-worn Doc Marten boots, and secreted a 15 centimetre shank. In a hall of fame Murder move, she tracked down Jason Not-so-Smart at the dentist. Little Jason was six foot in the imperial and needed two seats on the bus. He’s sitting in the chair with his mouth open staring up at the giraffe and elephant mobile on the ceiling. The giraffe turns left, the giraffe turns right. The dentist and nurse have their backs turned when Tory, dressed as a nurse, sneaks in, takes the shank from her boot, and cuts the red cotton from Jason’s wrist as the mouth saliva suction gear sucks and slurps. She replaces the shank and sneaks out on cat paws with the cotton. Totally painless except for Jason, who realised that night he was dead.

Where grace flourishes, evil must flourish but more so. The Murdoch media was in a slather over an extraordinary number of sex murders of girls and boys. Seven girls were snatched off the street, driven yonks north of the city, raped, strangled and buried in shallow graves. The boys were driven in to the dark hills – which made Tolkien’s Mordor look like Disneyland – their penises surgically removed and stitched in to their mouths. Murdoch beat the stories so hard, tourists fled and young people packed their bags. The murder of the innocents was a silence breaker at landed-gentry dinner parties before the talk turned to spinnakers for the 45-footer, holidays in Milan for the fashion shows and that cosy shack south of Paris.

Pretty Angie, 27, a former prefect at Methodist Ladies College – married to Steve, a barrister – over-shared at the ladies lunch for MND, MS or Spina Bifida, that something squirmed in her waters about the murders. Something NQR. Something a bit off. The table fell silent when she flagged a move east might be the go, with a harbour view, a berth for Steve’s yacht and there were awfully good schools over there. Unknowingly she had watered the seed in the mind of every other woman at the table, who’d been thinking the same thing and hated her for saying it. Angie ate her prawn roulade and threw back another glass of Shaw and Smith. Sacrifices would have to be made. David Horne-Pilkington, the Hackney College school captain, had been servicing her most Friday lunchtimes on the maid’s day off. For one so young, he was a master of cunnilingus and the thought of it made her squirm. The room filled with the rising cacophony of clinking glasses and bleating sheep.

Callum, Mongy, Cody and Gloria Estefan, park the car two streets back and leg it. Gloria hates Gloria Estefan’s music, which is why she’s called Gloria Estefan. When she’s at the pub, the boys slot $20.00 in to the juke box and play her greatest hits. Gloria’s not playing Murder. She was killed by Mongy. She can’t believe a boy with balls the size of capers, could creep up behind her, rip the cotton from her wrist, as she was walked out of Vinnies with a birthday present for her mum. There’s Mongy, smiling his shit-eating ‘gotcha’ grin, dangling her life in his grubby nose-picking fingers.

They walk down streets lined with high green hedges. In a large corner house, private school kids in white chinos, quality shirts and RM Williams boots are yelling and chugging back Dad’s beer. The girls are necking leg-opener coolers and Pink Floyd’s playing Money with it’s weird timing change and ‘don’t give me any of that do-goody good bullshit…’ the scent of Lynx, BBQ fat and vomit wafts through the evening air. These kids will soon embrace alternative music as ballast for a light weight character. Only two minutes to the park. Late as usual.

Tory gets off her seat and with an open hand, clocks the old alco on the temple and he slides gracefully, to the bus floor. The door opens with a hiss and there’s Dino’s pizza bar and grill, the expensive bookshop and the rich bitch dress shop with clothes made by kids with nimble fingers in Pakistan. The game starts as soon as you step on to the park. There are no ‘hi, how are ya’s? How’s ya Mum’s black eye?’ It’s not a fucking Rotary Club meeting or a group of elvish children tripping like Wendy through a bluebell glade.

She’s standing on the rise under a gum tree with the road behind her. It takes a few seconds to get her eyes tuned into the visual purple. In the distance, she can just make out Mongy and Callum walking through the gate under the street light. Gloria Estefan is lagging behind and waves to her. Two shadows move quickly past the lake. The game has begun. High in a gum tree a crow craws. Late for crows. Tory’s plan is to hide and let the others kill themselves and then take on the winner. She moves into the dark.

With half a bottle of gin on an empty stomach, Angie’s in a hurry to meet the girls at The Feathered Nest Hotel. Joan wants to move to Melbourne and take the kids. She’s can’t take it anymore. Pussy’s bow. Her real estate husband Brian, with a beer belly at 35, is boring as batshit. Just wants to watch footy and go to the pub. Sure they live in a fabulous five bedroom house surrounded by forest with a tennis court. Sure they have a Japanese garden and a babbling brook but by 12.00 noon, after she has watched the maid clean the house, been to the gym, done yoga and had coffee with the girls, she’s drowning in grey holes. The house is a tomb. She’s hyperventilating with anxiety as she washes down two mother’s little helpers.

Angie has one eye on the road and is fumbling for a cigarette, which she shouldn’t have but the alcohol, Joan’s drama and the warm night, has created a carefree frisson and lowered her will power. She thinks of David and his tongue, swerved to miss a possum, as the faint smell of mackerel fills the BMW. Steve must have been to the fish market. A man’s dragging a girl by her hair from the park. A white cloth over her face. There’s an old battered white Valiant parked with its lights off the in parking lane. She’s wearing black jeans and Doc Marten boots and she’s kicking, kicking, kicking. He’s maybe 40. Muscular. Works out. No time to get involved in a domestic. She puts the foot down and takes the roundabout at 60. Joan needs her and by God, she’ll hang on every word.

Callum parts from the others in silence and makes his way in a Groucho Marx crouch to the scout hall. Someone is smoking clove cigarettes. Heavy footsteps pound from the wading pool, coming directly at him. In the half moon light a combat jacket carrying a baseball bat swings at his head and the swoosh clears his nose by an inch. Callum delivers a swift kick in the balls and then it’s wresting on the ground.

There has to be an easier way to meet boys, Gloria Estefan reckons. She sits in the hollow of a dead gum tree as a possum on a branch above her takes a piss. A cramp bites her guts. The macaroni and cheese her Mum made for tea was slathered in a sherry sauce. Her Christmas brandy snaps had more brandy than snap and her beer battered fish swam in Coopers Ale. Her mum had moved from a housewife, full of vim and vigour, to a three bottle a day barely functioning wino, who sought out noonday company of other female winos and criticised women who couldn’t hold their drinks.

Under the streetlights a man is bundling something in to the passenger well of a white car as a slingshot marble crashes into the bark above Gloria’s head. She makes her way back to the angel.

Mongy sprints after a kid dressed in combat pants and a purple t-shirt, rugby tackles him and cops an eye watering punch on the nose. He’s blind for a second and as he lifts his hands to say oh fuck me nose, gets a kick in the balls. A professional.

By the seesaw Callum is swinging a young hippy by his pony tail. No brotherhood of man. No crystal visions. As he lets go, he slams his right foot down on the young guy’s ACL. He’ll never walk alone. He’ll always walk with a limp. As the hippy drops, Callum rips the red cotton from his wrist and disappears into the night.

Mongy is in trouble and knows he’s in trouble. Purple t-shirt has played the game before. Fit, lethal and could go 15 rounds. Resolute and unforgiving. Mongy can’t run away. Can’t get a breath. It will end on this tiny grassy knoll under the great Southern Cross, his own personal Golgotha, as he pulls one last desperate ploy and lures Mr Invincible into a Dada black hole with a chorus of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, with a “Last night I heard my mama singing a song, Ooh we, chirpy, chirpy, cheep, cheep…” His assailant, hungry for the red cotton, backs away just long enough for Mongy to let fly with a fist-turning punch to the solar plexus and as purple t-shirt folds, feels a tug on his left wrist.

The headache from the home-made chloroform throbs. The passenger seat footwell smells of cats. She hates cats. Tory’s wrists are bound in front of her with a plastic tie. It’s an old Valiant with the push button torque-flight gear system. The horizontal bars of the orange street lights flash across the face of a large middle aged man with a black moustache more suited to fast bowlers, a red check shirt and denim jeans cut off at the knees. His thighs and upper chest have pumped serious iron with hands the size of baseball gloves. Bare feet and above the left ankle, a tattoo of Casper the Friendly Ghost wearing red devil horns. She feels the car is heading up Main North Road to the scrub, rich in shallow graves. On the rubber mat in front of her, there’s a young girl’s hair clip, a fairy holding a bowl of water up to the moon.

“Hey, fuck face. You can’t be serious…”

The heel of a large dirty foot rams into her forehead before she can raise her hands. Terror throttles her throat. Can’t breathe. Can’t think. It’s demons under the bed. No one saw her bundled in to the car and even if they did, they wouldn’t report it. Not in the City of Churches. Remember to breathe. Moustache turns on the radio, it’s just off station with someone hissing about radar love. The frequency of the street lights gets less and less. Good bye suburbs.

Moustache’s face is pocked and pitted like moon craters. Pimples as a kid. Don’t pick your face, you little shit, his mother yelled. He’d pop ‘em in front of the mirror. Little fat volcanoes. There he is at age 12 stuck in the school retard class. Shunned by the cool gang and rejected by the girls. They laugh, point and call him Puss in Bata Scouts. He trudges home with his backpack of unread books and uneaten banana and honey sandwiches, plotting revenge. His mind wanders up their thighs and down their blouses. He filters hardcore porn in his bedroom like whales sift krill. A time will come he stews, a fucking time will come.

Jesus, focus. Count primes: one, three, five, seven, eleven. Fuck it. On TV someone always comes to the rescue. The sound of cavalry. Bugles. Think. African nations with red in their flag: South Africa, Angola, Ghana? Of course Ghana, Congo. Oh Christ. How long to live? 15 minutes? Twenty? An hour? Maybe less. Extinction events: Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous – weren’t there five… Shit. Extinction events. Extinction events.

She closes her eyes and hears the front left tyre humm over the bitumen. A pothole breaks the rhythm and picks it up again, a little faster. Her breath is shallow at first and slowly becomes easier. There are only two ways. If he gets out, comes around to the passenger side, he’ll haul her out back first. He knows about the begging, pleading, the last minute deals, clutching at straws. No chance. But if he stays in the driver’s seat and hauls her up onto the seat, there’s a chance. A slim one.

The dead are hanging around the Dutkiewicz angel. Callum and Cody are the last one’s standing. They’re on a little bridge, over a tiny creek filled with water cress, perfect for trolls. In every group there’s a quiet one. Always watching. Cody’s passion is sea birds. Most weekends he’s down the coast with his camera and telephoto lens. Not a drinker. Not a party animal. Girls think he’s cute with his short blonde hair and button nose but he’s hard to get to know. Not much to say. Cody was the last Murder player standing the year before. Got some voodoo Judo moves. The halfmoon light falls on the stream, turning it silver and then onyx. Callum won’t get too close or he’ll be dead.

The green dash light goes off and Moustache turns on the cabin light. The engine motor cools with a tink, tink, tink. He opens the glove box above her head and pulls out a fish filleting knife. He opens the car door then stops. Looks in the rear vision mirror, closes the door, pulls down his shorts, and grabs her hair and pulls her up on to the passenger seat. They’re on a dirt track in the middle of a clearing surrounded by scrub. This is where he buries the bodies. On the back seat is a box of five grey kittens about six weeks old.

“Time to go to work,” he says.

His cock is hard with a small circumcision scar below the tip. He puts the tip of the knife to her throat and then points it at his groin. She lifts her feet from the passenger well and tucks them under her. There’s a packet of Viagra in the glovebox.

“Trouble getting it up?” she says.

“Get on with it”

She tucks her hair behind her ears.

“Dry mouth. Got any water?”

Callum and Cody dance around each other on the bridge, looking for advantage in the dark. Looking for a quick kick to the balls or fork fingers in the eyes. Boxers on speed dancing around the ring. Clockwise then counter. A feint here. A jab there. They can hear the water purling below them. Directly above them Mars shines its red eye on them. Twinkle. The scent of gum and pine then Cody pulls a roundhouse kick which clocks Callum on the chin and he falls against flimsy bridge railings. Pine shoddily nailed and glued together by bored council workers. Cody presses his fingers hard against Callum’s adam’s apple. Ten seconds of that and you hear pinging in your head as the brain screams for oxygen. Callum is leaning back over the railing looking up like a man seeing if there’s anything on his roof. Cody is on him, pressing his thumbs harder into his throat. Only a matter of time. It’s one for the money and two for the show. Cody has a forefinger under the red cotton on Callum’s wrist as the flimsy railing gives way and Callum manages, as he falls backwards, to snag Cody’s cotton and they tumble through space, not like angels expelled from heaven but like awkward teenage thugs denied their rightful prize, screaming to land heavily in the brook. They crawl like otters up the bank and look at their wrists. Two pieces of red cotton float downstream. They’re dead.

Moustache turns slightly away from her to retrieve a water bottle from the driver’s side door. There’s the tink, tink, tink of the motor as the radio hisses softly with static and kittens mewing as she pulls the shank from her boot and drives it hard into his heart. He drops the knife, turns in his seat and looks down at the shank sunk deep into his chest, the blood soaking his western shirt and running down onto the seat. Confusion runs over his face as if and he’s standing on a stage in front of his demons and he has forgotten his lines. His mouth opening and closing like a fish. Tory sits back against the passenger car door and looks at him. She’s never seen a man die before. The shank is moving up and down with every shallow breath he takes. She pulls the shank out of the haemorrhaging left ventricle, picks up the hair clip and presses it into his hand.

“Something to remember them by”

She gets out of the car and takes three deep breathes. Remember of breath. It’s scrub land. Shitty stunted trees and bushes. A light breeze picking up from the west. Good. That will cover the footprints. The stars tell her she’s maybe 15 or 20 kilometres off the highway. They were on the dirt road for a while. She puts the shank back into her boot and looks at the kittens on the back seat. Why would this fucker have a box of kittens? A present for a young daughter? Maybe to gut them with the filleting knife and watch them die. Must be about 1.00am, maybe later. There’s a BP servo somewhere ahead where the Melbourne Greyhound bus pulls in about 5.00am so people can get off, eat deep fried shit and have a piss. Been there. Done that. The bus driver never checks tickets. He’s as knackered as everyone else.

Moustache is turning a whiter shade of pale. She knows exactly what is happening to him. Blood is filling the chest cavity putting pressure on the heart. Blood pressure is in free fall. His brain is being starved of oxygen. Shock is setting in. His heart will arrest in a minute or two. Moustache is staring straight ahead. What’s he thinking? Maybe he’s climbing a poplar tree and he’s five years old and his grandma is standing below and has made him cupcakes. Maybe he’s thinking about the first time he kissed little Trudy Spencer behind her parent’s garage. Her eyes closed tight.

Tory rubs the plastic tie against the sharp underside of the front fender until it breaks and puts it in her pocket. No evidence. She pulls a tissue out of her back pocket and uses it to ferret around the glovebox. Behind the Viagra there’s $50,000 in unmarked and non-sequential notes, wrapped tightly in cellophane. Used cash. Drug money. She takes the money, opens the passenger door, rams the cash between her legs and walks back to the front of the car. The air is cool with a hint of sage. Moustache is staring out of the windscreen like he’s at a drive in. Venus is high in the western sky. No one knows why. She starts walking.

The Greyhound pulls in as Tory buys hot chips, drowns them in salt and vinegar and nicks a Coke and a Cherry Ripe. She climbs on board the bus like she owns it and makes for the back seat to lie down. Egg fart fills the air. A boy a couple of years older than her, moves his rucksack so she can lie down. Says he’s moving to the City of Churches to make a new start. All sorts of weirdo shit happened to him in Sydney. Crazy shit. The door hisses closed and the bus pulls on to the highway and heads south. Tory leans against the window and watches as they pass through small shanty towns blasted by poverty and despair. Angry men, broken women and vice a vera. Too early for people. Her mind plays new futures in her head, like an old fashioned slide projector. Her passport is in her bedside table. She pulls her hair back and the red cotton tie falls over her watch. Another two hours to the City of Churches.

Cotton Tree’s a lower rent suburb of Maroochydore with cheap condos. Think of a shoebox with holes for windows and put people in ‘em. The old King street shops with its bakery and corner deli are ripe for baristas, gourmet restaurants and web marketing specialists. Cotton Tree-on-sea. The rents will go up but it won’t matter to me. I’ve got a ticket to ride.

It takes a six pack of stubbies to grind the motor number off an engine block. It’s a bastard. You have to jack the car up, crawl underneath and with one hand, hold the grinder at an bloody awkward angle and grind away. I’ve also put in new heavy duty shock absorbers and springs and welded some supports for the axle. If you’re carrying a heavy load, you need that. The last thing I want is to break down and attract attention from the highway patrol somewhere out of Coffs Harbour, with their death’s head caps, leather jackets and boots, the Smith & Weston swinging off one hip and the cuffs and truncheon swinging off the other. They’d be suspicious why the car was so low on the axles, as it if was carrying something contraband, something spectacular, something that needed to be investigated.

My girlfriend comes over every now and then and we have indifferent sex. Fifty shades of vanilla. She once said I was a good fucker. High praise from a fuckee. She practices the drums in the lounge. I spend a lot of time at the beach or pub. She’s sort of pretty but her hair cut makes her look dowdy. There’s a touch of Princess Diana about her and because she went to a private school, she talks like she swallowed Sloan Square. A minor turn-on but nothing to write home about. She’s a collection of mannerisms imperfectly performed and reckons Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ is an Airbnb.

I’m a big fan of The Beatles. The Fab Four helped me through tough times as a kid. The first thing Dowdy says when I take her home and play, And your bird can sing, is ‘The Beatles are boring’. She wanted me to put on some alternative music, made for wrist-slitting depressives. Her job now is to bring me cold stubbies and shut the fuck up as I get the car ready.

It’s bloody hot under here but I’ve got a soft spot for this rust bucket. It has driven me up and down the east coast half a dozen times, over the top end to Broome and back and around the Daintree. It’s reliable in a world where most people aren’t. I call my car, Brum.

As you get older, you feel the heat more. Some years ago I lived in a tree house in the tropical Daintree: one large bedroom, a lounge and a view of the forest to die for. Solar power. Did a lot of reading. I worked as a fire watch on a tower on top of a mountain. 12 hour shifts. Did a lot of reading there too. I also had a job counting cassowaries in the rain forest. They’re like an emu but with an head coloured in by Timothy Leary with claws big enough to draw and quarter you. I learned to climb trees real fast. Anyway, those jobs were bloody hot but I enjoyed them.

Dowdy reclines on my old red sofa and reads stuff by women writers where the lead character is disaffected, cynical and irreverent to the point of being irritating. If you’re into novels about peri-menopausal women in their 50s who are aching to break free of their marriages and children and move to a country town or a sea side village, and lead a life which would make De Sade proud, to ‘find their true self’ through their vaginas, then you probably know shit about cars. Let’s leave it there.

Some of my girlfriends had mental health problems. It’s a red badge of courage now. If you haven’t been assaulted or don’t have half a dozen kangaroos bouncing around the top paddock, there’s something wrong with you. One threw a pan of boiling water at my face, another took a drug overdose and another pranged my car while out of her head. Some years ago, I arrived home late one night with a woman I’d picked up at a bar to find my part time girlfriend at the time, naked on my bed. She’d handcuffed her wrists to the stanchions. Not easy when you think about it. I’m bored with bourgeois women. They want to eat the cheese but won’t milk the cow. Reckon the world is made of Tim Tams. I learnt one valuable lesson. Never give them your house key.

So where’s all this going? At exactly 8.30pm tomorrow, MacArthur Bank will transfer to Dedalus Corporation, eight figures of funding to start their research into tracking the neurological pathways of children. They’ll use this data to create AI-driven implants with self-evolving commands. These ain’t cute robots you can fuck or who will do your homework. These are small voices in your head who will get you home loans, control your finances, diagnose your medical issues, mediate in domestic disputes, provide counselling and much more. Got a broken heart? It’s not your fault your little bytes buddy will say. Never, ever. Feeling a bit down? We’ve got a pharmaceutical for you. The voices will learn how you think and why you think the way you do. Everyone in the next 15 years will have one. As a form of entertainment, as a voice which appears in your head more frequently when things go wrong, who soothes and pats and offers advice, it can’t be beat.

I’ve got half a tonne of fuel-soaked fertiliser in the back of the Subaru and I’m going to drive it to Sydney and park it under MacArthur Bank. A cube of phosphorous will be exposed to air and burn its way into the core of the fertiliser. It will go off at 8.15pm tomorrow. Remember the port explosion in Beirut? It won’t be that big but it will blow up through the centre of the building and knock out the foundations. It will go down floor-by-floor. I’ll be on a ferry with my fake passport, heading from Athens to the island of Syro, where I have a small apartment in the Vaporia Quarter. See ya later.

Detectives and chocolate starfish-tonguing journalists always want to know the perpetrator’s motivation, aka the terrorist, the murderer, the devil. The real terror is loneliness but I digress. The media will say my mother put a peg on my penis as a child, I read Doctor Strange comics after church, I talked to dogs, rapped to the writings of Richard Brautigan, wanted to become a priest, masturbated over my cousin’s tam o’ shanter and pulled the wings off butterflies. Pick one or pick ‘em all. You might as well read the tarot. The media is a dinosaur trying to play canasta with a dodo.

If you’re under 30 and do know what I’m talking about, then this story is for you. This is the age of Kali and the faecal matter is hitting the fan.

Here’s the thing which is made up of hundreds of other things and an example of didacticism. Artificial intelligence isn’t the truth. It’s an aggregate of algorithmic data. It has nothing to do with human consciousness. It’s being sold to us like a robot vacuum cleaner. Just sit back. We live in a world where trust is as rare as rocking horse shit. We distrust governments, organisations, the media, the church and much of the time, each other. We not only live in a post-truth environment, the bullshit is building up higher than bodies on the Somme. If you don’t know any history what chance do we have if we put all our trust in data aggregating machines? Talk about Year Zero. It ain’t Pol Pot (better look that up kids), it’s Gaggle, Macroprofit and CheatGPT. Some universities – and that includes Oxford – now allow students to use AI to write essays. Those bastions of the Enlightenment have rolled over like an old Labrador wanting a tummy scratch.

Here’s the good news for modern man and woman. While you’re not the complete master of your own destiny, in an absurd universe, you’re as good as it gets. You are not what you do for a job; you’re not a label or even a significant other. You’re an empire of one and anything that seeks to control you must be vaporised. You’re freer than you think and me and a few others are going to make sure you stay that way. Sous les Pavés, la Plage.

I said to Dowdy that George Orwell worked all this out years ago. History and memory aren’t the antithesis of free will, but the condition of it, but she wasn’t interested in Orwell. Reckoned he bashed his first wife.

People will die in the bank big bang. I apologise right now. Say goodbye to the executive of the bank and the senior researchers at Dedalus Corporation, who will be celebrating in the board room. They’ll be glad handing, back patting, clinking champagne glasses with smiles all around until 8.15pm when the earth will move. There will still be plenty of banks left to screw you over but why let them?

At certain points in time, it only takes a few people to act to change things. Most people bend over and let themselves be fucked up the arse by politicians, corporations and the media – there’s a queue of businessmen out the door with their pants down. I’m no hero. No trumpets will blow over my grave.

xxxxxxx

I like mornings the best. It’s 5.00am and kookaburras are telling jokes. The car is ready to go. A gallon of Si perfume won’t hide the fuel pong. So it goes. I’ve left a note for Dowdy who is fast asleep. A sick relative in the City of Churches and Homosexual Slayings needs a hand and I’ll be sometime. I’m taking the car. I’ve paid six month’s rent on the apartment. There’s cash by the toaster. Ta ta for now.

There’s something pleasing about starting an old car as it fires up first time. My fake passport and credit cards are in the glovebox. I’ve put most of my money in a German bank. One benefit of being in your 60s is you don’t look prepossessing. When I put my old stockman’s hat on, which I wore many years ago working as shotfirer near Bow River, I’m just another old bugger going for a drive. I’ll miss my books and paintings but I’m setting them free. As for Dowdy, she’ll find someone new. In six months, I’ll have booked into memory hotel. I’ll be conjured in a small anecdote: ‘I knew this guy once who liked The Beatles and he just disappeared.‘

While the government warned tourists to stay away, thousands of holiday makers continued to flock to the over-priced accommodation, which promised romantic sunset views. The rats, long time natives and scourge of hotel managers, made their way to the ferries and were beaten and broomed in to the water. The seismographic station near the winery on the hill recorded small tremors but as the Greek tourist commission said, there was nothing worry about, and that was good enough for the honeymooners and backpackers, who drank more and danced harder into the night, because if a volcanic eruption was on the cards, they wanted to go out with a bang, preferably during sex.

As the weeks passed, the caldera stopped bubbling and the sulphur smell faded. The wine bar and night club owners regretted the passing of imminent death, because the tourists no longer drank three times their body weight in alcohol. A preternatural calm returned to the thousands of houses and apartments perched precariously high on the white chalk cliffs but below, the rats still fought to get on the ferries until they were poisoned and their bodies burnt in pyres inland, far from the tourists and their wallets.

On the island of Patmos, 240 kilometres north east of Santorini, sitting on an rusted life-saving tower, below a tattered blue and white beach umbrella, Craig McDonald looks down on the supine and glistening bodies. He’s Milo to the locals. He speaks the lingo.

The sun refracts off the turquoise water and the sapphire rays smack his 65-year old weathered face. He followed the Santorini story but the media had returned to reporting pregnant reality TV stars, woke outrages and senile American presidents. He puts his cheap sunglasses on and imagines the Greek fleet sailing past Ios, Paros, Naxos and Amorgos, to get Helen back from Troy.

There’s Helen’s on the back of the boat with Paris and the black sails are on a reach. Her husband Menelaus and the Greek armada are in hot pursuit. She’s wearing a light while cotton dress which falls just above the knee with a string of black pearls falling between two pert breasts. Her sandal thongs are wrapped tight around her calves. Her skin is the product of endless milk baths and she has never worked a day in her life. Helen’s the type of woman who says loud enough for the crew to hear, ‘don’t worry darling, every man has performance issues.’ Next stop, Troy.

Excuse me. There’s a Russian man over there who only paid the ‘some plastic’ fee and he has sat next to me.

The splitting image of the 1970s singer, Nico with a nose-job, looks up at him and points to the expensive section of the beach. The beach is divided into ‘some plastic’ and ‘no plastic’, dissected by a small concrete wall, which is easy to scale. The people in the ‘no plastic’ section pay more and have a better class of li-lo. Every morning, Milo rakes the beach of Coke and detergent bottles, empty cans and plastic bags and deposits the junk on a large plastic dune two metres high, which runs the entire length of the beach. It’s a Sisyphean task because the tide drops more rubbish every day. In the last month, pumice has washed in with the dead fish.

The Russian interloper looks like an anaemic Trotsky. He’s sorry like a rat says sorry and pays more to stay in the ‘no plastic’ section. Milo brings him a white plastic li-lo and a cushion and adjusts the umbrella. Nico wants him moved further away because he’s ogling her in her string bikini, which rides up her arse. Apart from neutering Trotsky, there’s nothing he can do. He picks up a plastic rake and clears the cigarette butts and lolly wrappers.

Milo’s house is high on the side of a hill with a spectacular view of Arkoi and Leipsoi, two islands off the coast of Turkey. He bought it for a song off a German family when he arrived from Paris. His bedroom is an eyrie overlooking the water. From his balcony, the islands look like the sunburned brown hills of coastal southern California. In winter, lonely writers live cheaply in houses which have seen better days to write novels which will never be read.

During the summer months, he works as a lifeguard and tour guide at the Cave of St John. The cave is on a mountain facing the sea. It’s the size of a backpackers hovel lit with votive candles, a window which lets the morning sun in, bum-worn wooden benches and old pictures of Jesus hang on the black basalt walls. John wrote the Book of Revelation in the cave 70 years after the death of Christ.

The cave tour is popular with middle-aged American women who harbour apocalyptic fantasies about the end of the world. Some wear Jim Morrison t-shirts. The cojoining of the insane visions of a mad Jew and a mad UCLA film school graduate. Milo herds them from the buses and makes them wait until the older Greek women leave. They tarry and press notes into Father Dimitri Rocobino’s weathered hand, little prayers they want him to say for their dead husbands, dead parents and dead grandparents. Father Rocobino smiles, does a little bow and tucks the notes into the folds of his black gown, which covers a sizable girth.

The American women can’t believe this is the cave where John wrote about the lamb and the seven seals and Christ returning to sort matters out. One woman from Oregon asked Milo how they got the seals into the cave. The women spend a long time in the gift shop and buy crucifixes, postcards and pashmina shawls.

“Yassou, Father Dimitri”

“Ah, Milo, another day another dollar, eh? Come here, I want to show you something”

The women will be another 20 minutes in the gift shop. They’re bargaining the attendant down on crucifixes. Father Rocobino opens a door at the back of the cave and they walk down a pitch dark passage way to a small room lit by an old kerosine lantern. Bottles of water, cans of tuna and tinned artichokes line the walls. Left over stock from a failed business venture. He points to the ceiling.

“See that crack? It runs right across the roof”

In the shadow play of the lantern, there’s a large fissure three centimetres wide.

“Jesus! Are you going to tell anyone? Looks nasty”

“Are you out of your mind? This gig earns me 300 euro a week in tips. If it gets worse, can you help me patch it up?”

“No problem big man”

xxxxxxxx

The Meltemi winds blow from the north, gusting up to 70 kilometres per hour. Milo’s beach is packed as it faces south and is protected by hills and the two metre high plastic rubbish groyne. The August sun takes the temperature to 35C by mid-morning.

He breaks up a fight between a young French couple and a Scottish woman in the ‘no plastic’ zone. When Milo confronts froggy, he holds his arms out in innocence as a red Katie Spade purse falls past his testicles and on to the sand. Milo leads him and his howling girlfriend to the ‘less plastic’ section.

Two American women in their mid 20s, bask in front of the life guard tower. They’re attractive in the way 20 years of high quality medical care and diet provides. They’d spent 1000s of hours sculpting their bodies in gyms.

“I went to this nightclub last night – the Resurrection – or something like that and ordered a Flamin’ Groovy, which is Vodka, strontium 90, Frangelico and icecream. In Boston, they put a cherry on top but the greaseball making it didn’t put a cherry on top, so I said, finish it off with a cherry and he says, that will be five euros more”

“That’s outrageous, Harlow. These fucking wogs are con artists. Five bloody euros!”

“I know. I know. That’s what I said and he says the cherries are imported and cost more. I says this cocktail calls for – no demands – a cherry and I’ll not be paying one more euro than the standard price – 20 euros”

“The absolute cheek. As it is, we paid for a non-plastic beach and there are bottle tops and straws from here to arsehole”

Milo’s humming a mixed bag of songs from his teenage years: Jenny said when she was just five years old, you know there’s nothin’ happenin’ at all; you’re dirty sweet and you’re my girl, bang a gong, get it on, oh yeeeaahhh.

The Meltemi wind blew itself out over the next three days as the oxy acetylene sun torches the sand. Milo finishes his raking and climbs up on the tower for the morning shift as the bathers slather themselves in coconut oil. A young Russian woman stands in the water in a high-cut red bikini with the inside of her arms turned towards the sun. Milo pictures her dressed in dental floss in a chrome Moscow disco at 2.00am, looking aboriginal, jiving her head off to the doof, doof, doof, surrounded by pasty women green with envy.

A sulphur-yellow cloud creeps over the water from the south west and within 30 minutes, it’s cats paws cover the beach. The pungent smell of gun powder and burning electrical cord sends fits of coughing and jesus fucking christs as people cover their noses with sandy towels.

“For god’s sake Jennifer” a nasal male Yorkshire accent hawks, “we should have gone to Corfu like I said”

“It’s not my fault. You’re the one who said Patmos was spiritual like Iona but without the fucking Scots.”

“Hey you, life guard!” Jennifer screams like a white cockatoo, “What the hell’s going on?”

Through the haze, Milo sees a well-fed middle aged woman from some English shit hole, kneeling on the sand looking up at him. When tourists complained he’d usually mutter ‘fuck you cunt’ in Greek and ignore them.

“I’m only a lifeguard but to me, it looks volcanic. A deep sea fissure or something like that”

“A fissure? What’s a fissure?”

“It’s like when you tear your arsehole, that’s a fissure”

“Oh Jesus, an Australian. When do you reckon it will blow over?”

“About 2.37pm”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t”

They saw it before they heard it. A large mushroom cloud rose quickly far to the south west. It churned and vomited black cloud higher into the sky. The tourists put their hands to their brows in a sun salute like in the old films of atomic tests in Nevada. The black cloud kept pillowing skywards. Then a colossal boom roared over the island, breaking the kiosk’s windows.

Behind Milo’s chair, in the car park, 200 well-dressed women, most in their 50s and 60s, sat on cheap plastic chairs, listening to writers from England, America and Australia. They’d paid $1500 a head for the privilege. The Australian women wore green and yellow terry towelling hats.

The mobile phones went dead. Disembodied voices arose Babel-like from the beach, a cacophony of different accents, some rising in panic.

“There’s no reception. My friends and memory are gone”

“Someone will come soon.

“How soon is soon?”

Milo walked the shore as tiny pieces of pumice crunched under foot. It was high tide yet an empty bottle of laundry liquid followed by clumps of seaweed were moving quickly out to sea. The water’s pull knocked a child off its feet.

“Hey, what’s happening to the water?”

“Why is our holiday turning to shit?”

He rides his old motorbike home. From the patio the town and bays are covered in yellow fog. No Internet, radio or TV. A pack of dogs runs past his house, making for higher ground. He throws a pair of binoculars around his neck and rides to the Cave of St John as Father Rocobino stares out the window.

“Never seen anything like it,” Father Rocobino says. “The water is being sucked from the island as if someone had pulled a bath plug. Are people still down the beach?”

“They’re huddling together looking frightened”

“Shouldn’t you get down there and save lives?”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“No time. We’ll get a good view up here”

“Unless up here isn’t high enough”

A large Greek islands ferry from Syro turns around in the bay and makes for deep water at speed. It’s decks crammed with holiday makers. They look like ants, running from the bow to the stern.

“Here it comes,” Father Rocobino says, pointing to the horizon. “Must be 70 metres high”

Milo looks through the binoculars and sees a wall of water charging towards Patmos. A flock of birds has settled on the roof of the cave and sheep have taken refuge in the entrance. The women of the literary festival are performing a chaotic Morris dance, running into each other, turning in circles, then pointing at the sea.

The bow of the 80 metre ferry rises quickly at the foot of the tsunami and is flipped on its back and buried beneath millions of tons of fast moving water.

In the last minute of his life, it struck Milo both curious and profane that he would die outside the Cave of St John, whose writings were so dedicated to apocalypse, with a fat Greek Orthodox priest who dedicated much of his later life to small time scams and sleeping.

As the wave approached with roar befitting the end of his world, Milo wanted to think kindly of his mother, but could not; to flick over the book of his life and see the pretty pictures of far off places visited, the Himalayan mountains, the snow falling on the Forbidden City, dancing to The Smiths in The Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, the Dervishes in Istanbul, but it all fell from his mind, not through fear but through ennui.

He wanted to dwell on past lovers – those middle class PC valkyries – but they bored him with their hunt for culture and status, for alternative music and bookshops. He wanted to revel if only for a few seconds in the beauty of literature but that bored him most. All of those words hung page upon page and to what end? The reification of the human spirit?

The wave was laden with rubbish picked up from the sea floor: washing machines, cars, yachts, bloated farm animals, hurtling towards him and he closed his eyes as Father Ricobono took his hand and said “Dog forgive me” – he meant God – and the wave crashed 20 metres below the cliff and moving at incredible speed, hit the town and beach and carried up the valley for five kilometres before it stopped and started to fall back dragging houses, trees and people with it.

Amongst the rooves and uprooted trees were the green and yellow terry towelling hats of the literary festival women, moving at speed out to sea. Moving with a grace and poetic elegance their wearers could never muster. Moving with nature not against it.

The sheep at the caves entrance were surprised they had survived and wondered how the death of the shepherd would affect them. Amongst the bleating democracy of wool, they realised it would not affect them at all. There was plenty of grass on the top of the mountain.

Milo walked inside the cave and found Father Rocobono had snapped the ring pull from a can of tuna and was now jimmying the top with a screwdriver.

“Do you think we should pray for the dead, Father?”

“First things first, Milo. First things first.”

While the skid marks of life are happily cosseted in their beach front properties supported by seven-figure investment portfolios, in a country town, which once employed steel workers, there are no yuppies lining up to buy the asbestos-clad weather boards and erect glass palaces Satan would be happy to live in – although they’re coming. I live here because if I went elsewhere, I’d pay twice the rent and couldn’t get credit down the pub. I live here because I like a bit of rough on a Friday night and it’s easy to buy crystal meth and other agents of decay. You may say, as you rest your gut on the bar, why don’t you get a job you filthy toilet trader? I say, politely – because good manners cost nothing – why don’t I pay you and your family a visit in the middle of the night and put on a one-man show of ‘In Cold Blood’?

There’s Kat Hugga standing on her balcony in her one-bedroom red brick flat above mine. She’s 33 and in serious need of reconditioning. Her real name’s Caroline but as she spends much of the morning in her XXXL dressing gown, squeezing the life out of that poor kitty, the name fits. Fat might be a feminist issue but if Kat could eat feminism, she would. It isn’t glands or any other dodgy statement vomited out by the Excuse Factory and meticulously reported by a seedy, needy media. Hang on … maybe she was raped and she’s internalising the pain by ingesting half a dozen Sara Lee cheese cakes. No. She’s fat because she’s a pig. Oink. Don’t get me wrong. I like Kat. It’s just the way things are.

In Xanadu, no one has a Christian name. I’m called ‘Bothways’ because I’m bisexual. The Criminal Element lives next door. He’s 45, has a string of small-time convictions for B&Es and lives with his Mum, who everyone calls, Mum. He enjoys watching day time TV and collecting Penthouse magazines from the 1980s gynaecological period. Sometimes Mum catches him spanking one out in his bedroom and says in a voice heavy with disappointment, leave it alone, Graham or it’ll fall off. He can’t leave it alone because it’s the most exciting thing that will happen to him all day.

I used to be a financial adviser for one of the four big banks. I told retirees to put their savings in to our ‘Golden Oldies’ portfolios, where we charged them colossal fees and paid bugger-all dividends. The Royal Commission into the Banking System is history now, which like the Tiananmen Square massacre, inhabits the same memory void.

I was living the good life. At 37, I had a swank apartment and a nice car – then tight, taut and terrific Trudy skipped into my world. Petite and drop-dead gorgeous. Picture a very young and diminutive Charlotte Rampling. She was my ‘Honeysuckle’ and I was her ‘Horse’. One thing led to another, which led to role playing, where as a schoolgirl she had to please her harsh teacher so she could matriculate and go to university and study the romantic poets. I made her recite Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey naked on a slightly soiled Sealy Posturepedic mattress. In a moment of post-coital generosity, I said I’d take her to the Lakes District next year. That would be ‘utterly fab’ she said as she’d drop out of junior high.

Trudy’s mum, an uptown manicurist, contacted the police and hired Andrea Hardcastle, a client and power-dressing legal eagle who specialised in castrating paedophiles. Men ranked below Protozoa. It hurt when Trudy broke down in the witness box and through sobs and tears said her Horse was a calculating fuck and her childhood was in tatters, even though – just between you and me – Honeysuckle could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I got seven years and did four.

The bank held me up as their sacrificial horny goat in the glare of the media spotlight and blamed me for the $1.2 billion ripped from the pockets of its elderly clients. That’s how I ended up in Xanadu.

It’s hard not to come over all Rear Window in this block of red brick flats. Across the way, 24/7 a mobile is plastered to Fone Fagger’s ear, with a lung biscuit planted firmly between her cracked lips. She runs a hairdressing salon out of her garage and in summer, leaves the garage door up a metre to let air in. The Criminal Element is fixated on those shapely but varicose-veined legs. I see him next door amongst a sea of small potted succulent plants, staring at those pins. Staring in a way I know too well; like a hungry wolf, which is laughable because her butcher’s arms hide significant muscle and she could punch his lights out and still mix the tints.

At night when the wind is from the west, and she is on her balcony with an ash tray on her lap, clutching a glass of cask wine with the mobile to her ear, it’s possible to make out a few sentences.

So I said to this cunt, unless you come up with the cash, I’m going to cut your balls off, fry ‘em in garlic and ram ‘em down your throat.

Her husband Dave runs an SP bookie business out of the kitchen. Woe-be-tide any punter who doesn’t front with the cash. They will meet Fone Fagger. Dave is one of life’s cowards. Hates confrontation. Picture a magpie, with a long sharp nose, black hair and small, sharp eyes. That’s Dave but the similarity ends when he laughs. Instead of the beautiful trill of a magpie, it’s a cackle, like one of MacBeth’s witches. When he isn’t placing money on the nags, he supports Fone Fagger’s smoking habit by padding over to Woolies and buying her packets of Holiday. No one calls him Dave. He’s the Cackling Enabler.

I’ve been in Xanadu for a couple of years. Pint and Parmy nights at the pub are a sociological experiment as skin heads sit next to migrants, all hoeing down and feeding the jukebox, which only plays Elvis from his Las Vegas years. Outside the pub it’s a different story. But between those four yellow walls there’s a tacit understanding that if one gets barred, there’s nowhere else to go. I’m built like a brick shithouse after working out in the prison gym, but even as a part time rump-rustler, I get left alone. One group get short shrift. The skid marks with the nice shirts and good manners are told to fuck off as soon as they step in the door.

How do affairs start? Someone – often the male – girds his loins or loins his girds, and makes a move, like Hannibal across the Alps, Germany into the Sudetenland or Japan into Singapore. I’d like to think that women are pure and innocent and live in a world ignorant of the masculine sex drive, much like The Railway Children, Swallows and Amazons and Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, where tumescence and moistness are never found in the same sentence but only a fucking idiot believes that.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and The Criminal Element was cleaning his old Subaru Liberty. When he crouched and polished the chrome rear fender, he had a good view of Fone Faggers calves, as she tizzed and blow-dried Mrs Domenaide’s hair. He fantasised she wore nothing but a clean, white pinafore, open at the back, like Miss July 1983. You didn’t have to be a big swinging dick in risk management to know where this was heading. When pent-up lust meets the married object of one’s desire, there will be tears and in the worst case, significant mayhem.

Fone Fagger has needs like any other woman but more so. She’s queen of her own finger and fantasy island, and truth to tell, the Cackling Enabler didn’t cut it between the sheets. At barely 75 kilos with a concave chest he was more moth than man. The Criminal Element was no George Clooney either and his beer-n-pie paunch has its own post code.

The Criminal Element was crouched by the car fender when she tapped him on the shoulder. He squealed and jumped. Faint heart never won Fone Fagger.

“Nice car” she said.

“T-t thanks. Got a double overhead cam and I extracted the motor”

She had no idea what he was talking about. Since her husband had an interview with his unemployment case worker, now was as good a time as any.

“I’ve got a leaky tap, I was wondering if you’d have a look at it for me?”

The Criminal Element followed her into the house, saw a new LG 65” OLED TV, worth at least $2000 on the black market, and was thrown on to the bed, smothered in tobacco kisses, as freckled hands fumbled for his fly. He imagined a seduction where he was in charge, where Fone Fagger was shy and demure and her clothes fell to the floor to reveal a black teddy or suspenders and lace bra. Be gentle with me she’d whisper as they writhed on silk sheets. Nothing conformed to this script. While naked on her knees before him, he noticed grey roots poked through her henna hair as a pair oversized Berlie panties were pushed under the bed. Her stomach was convex not flat like the angelic Miss August. A caesarean section scar ran from her belly button to an deeply wooded map of Tasmania. Her breasts looked like they had suckled a pack of wolves who’d come back for more.

A picture of The Cackling Enabler sat on a bedside table, taken when he was seven. Cute like a rottweiler puppy, before his nose grew and his chest caved in. Chintz curtains covered the window. Only old people have chintz but in a two-bedroom rental without air conditioning, you take what you can get. He tried to focus on the circuitous tongue action below but it was no good. Mr Floppy had come to stay. A picture of Bruegel’s ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ hung on the far wall, a fitting description of the Australian political class. It never occurred to him that Fone Fagger was a paradigm example of what Germaine Greer called, ‘owning one’s sexuality’. She was not a woman who catered to male sexual fantasies. After she’d satisfied her needs – which was becoming increasingly difficult with a recalcitrant dick – she might consider her partner. Fone Fagger reached around to the backstairs passage and life stirred in Mr Floppy. The Criminal Element pictured his cousin, who won the Miss Tunarama swim suit competition many years ago, coming into his room after school and repaying the $50 he loaned her to buy dope with a blowjob.

Fone Fagger threw him on the bed, jumped on top and between gritted teeth, yelled, ‘Giddy up!’ It was all over in three minutes. She came quickly, urgently with a host of profanities and fell on to her side as he lay exhausted in the wet spot.

She lit a cigarette and put and arm behind her head. Her under arms smelt of pine and something faintly like Irish Stew. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see Kat Hugga on her balcony staring at the sun while watering the basil with a blue plastic watering can she bought from Bunnings. It cost $6.00. Mitre 10 had them for $5.00 but they weren’t as big. In a moment of recklessness, he thought of bonking Kat Hugga but the recent disparity between his fantasies and what had just taken place was a penis too far. Besides, it would be a difficult copulation as he cantilevered on her gut in a vain attempt at penetration.

“You want a hand job?”

“No you’re right. I’d better get back and help Mum shell the peas”

He dressed quickly and wanted to say thanks but that wasn’t appropriate, so he smiled.

“How about next Wednesday?” she said”. “Dave’s got a dentist appointment at the hospital. He’s starting to look like fucking Shane McGowan”

He nodded, felt his bowels cramp and quickly made for the backdoor. Mum was out and she’d left him a ham and cheese tomato sandwich with the crusts cut off, just as he liked it. He plonked himself down in front of the cricket. Before all of his mates got ambition, jobs, and moved to Melbourne, they’d go to the oval together, get shit-faced and ogle the girls. For the last ten years, no matter who the Australian Test and One Day teams played, there were only 150 people in the stands, not including security guards and cleaners. The TV cameramen panned quickly over the vacant seats. The Criminal Element sniffed his fingers. A shower called.

As the water streamed down his pimply back, a few neurons clustered and connected, suggesting that looking at porn whether in old, cheap magazines or online, had stunted his ability to satisfy women and himself. The masturbatory fantasies were just that. Fantasies. As the hot water ran down his chest and he gently soaped his chaffed penis, he knew something was wrong but what to do?

Fone Fagger sighed as she pulled the doona straight and brushed her hair. The wet patch would dry before fucknuts got home. As she plumped the pillows, men she thought, were a disappointment. Not just existentially through bad faith, by being self-centred, ignorant and uncouth, but by failing to know what a woman wanted in bed. While every woman was different, men were totally ignorant of the base common denominator: take it slow early on, a bit of dirty talk and wait until the juices start flowing before moving out of second gear. It was paradoxical that men spent so much time lusting after women and when they got them into bed, went full speed like the captain of the Titanic, through an iceberg field.

The Criminal Element wants me to be all soft and demure, she thought. Wants me to be one of those vertical skid marks, a middle-class toe rag who spends the morning shopping, then nails and a pedicure, lunch with the girls and cooks the latest dinner from Master Chef for her man, before submitting to the fortnightly necrophilia. He can kiss my quoit.

xxxxxx

The Criminal Element has been shagging Fone Fagger for three months and he can’t break it off. She’s possessive and treats his penis like a toy, which if she could, she’d keep in the bottom drawer of her bedside table. He’s trapped like a trap in a trap. I’ve washed down a new supply of Mogadon with a few shots of tequila, salt and lemon. The Rising Sun Hotel is on the high street and I promised the Cackling Enabler I’d meet him there for a liquid lunch and help him ram $200 of his rent into the pokies.

The Cackling Enabler is perched on a barstool like a chook, his nose staring into a glass of Southern Comfort and lemonade. He’s got a new bovver boy haircut, circa northern England 1975 to make him look tough. Not to be fucked with. He looks like a plucked magpie. The barber missed a bit at the back. I order and Pimms and dry and clutch the bar. My legs are going east and my arse is going west. I lower my swaying frame on to a stool. Making language sounds is hard and understanding them is impossible.

Hey Bothways, how are they hangin? You look a bit rough. Early start? No wukking furries, I’ll catch up.

For the last month he’s been watching the Criminal Element from the pub go to his house at 11.00am every Wednesday morning. His wife answers wearing a black mini skirt and see-through blouse. She furtively looks up and down the street and closes the door behind him. The Cackling Enabler’s heart is bleeding on the bar. I want to comfort him but don’t really give a flying fuck.

For Christ’s sake I want to say, pull yourself together. Are you a man or a mouse? Worse things happen at sea.

I want to say that but I’ve swallowed my tongue and my eyes have rolled back in to my head.

The Cackling Enabler puts his heart back in his chest, skulls the last of his Southern Comfort and lemonade and slams the glass on the bar.

I’m telling ya mate, I’ve had a gutful. I know people ‘round ‘ere think I’m weak as piss but I’m telling ya, a man can only take so much. You know what gets to me, I’m vacuuming the lounge, cooking the tea, doin’ the dustin’ and makin’ sure she’s got plenty of ciggies and what’s she doin? She’s bangin’ your neighbour, what’s his name?

Gra-grah or…

I don’t give a fuck what his name is. He’s brown bread, dead. Youze don’t think I’ve got the ticker. I’ve got plenty of ticker. Ticker is what I’ve got. Tick, tick, tick. Just you watch. Jeez mate, you don’t look so good. Would you like a hand to get home?

A week later, on a fine Wednesday morning, with magpies and galahs battling it out high in the gum trees, I’m sitting on my lounge room floor surrounded by IKEA bookshelf parts. The instructions have been written by Wittgenstein. How can anything so simple, have so many parts? I hear the Criminal Element close his front door and tell Mum he’ll be back in 30 minutes. He’s whistling the opening bars of Marc Bolan’s Hot Love, when a car door slams and there’s a fuckin hey, you, where the fuck you think you’re goin? I walk outside and Fone Fagger is standing in her door wearing red hotpants, black knee-high boots and a black bralette. Her hand is over her mouth and her eyes are wide in fear. The Criminal Element is standing on the road wearing dirty white footy shorts, thongs and a black Godzilla t-shirt, which says, “I’m home, darling.” The Cackling Enabler is walking towards him holding a double-hammer shotgun, looking cool in black RM Williams boots, 504 Levi’s and a worn thin white t-shirt, with a 1976 Torana LX SS on the front. His favourite.

Hey, you fuck, where you fuckin goin? I’m fuck’in talkin to ya. You deaf or summin?

Fone Fagger had never seen her husband so bold, so macho. Her heart beats hard in her breast. This is her husband carrying a shotgun, defending her honour. A good man who when they bought Oscar De Le Rental, a rottweiler puppy, stayed up all night singing to him during a thunderstorm. The same man who had stolen her bottles of black Sambuca for her birthday for the last 10 years. Now here he is telling pencil dick to vamoose.

If we didn’t live in a no-go zone for the middle class, where BMW’s are double-keyed; where death metal plays at funerals for OD’s kids, then someone would call the cops. But for a neighbourhood knee deep in violence, arson and the nightly sound of bottles smashing, this is something new. Something which has a strong reality quotient, which could not be introduced by a pretty but fading starlet, on a reality video show. This has drama and we are the audience and we want more.

If I was a writer, I’d describe this like the standoff in High Noon when Gary Cooper knows he’s done like a dog’s dinner and Grace Kelly, his Quaker wife is looking on and oh, what to do, what to do, she’s thinking but Gary’s there, standing tall. He’s the law and the Criminal Element must be taught a lesson. But I’m no writer, I’m a bystander, one of half a dozen slack-jawed yokels as the Criminal Element wonders if he can cover the distance to his house but it’s a lawn and a drive way too far.

I don’t have a deep knowledge of guns but when I was a kid in short pants with a ridiculous amount of energy, my step father used to take me shooting in the hills. He had one of those old double barrel shotguns and if you pull both hammers back then you barely need to touch the triggers and it will go off like one of Napoleon’s cannons.

The Criminal Element is hoping Fone Fagger will say something along the lines of ‘darling, put the shotgun down and let’s talk about this over a cuppa’. Fone Fagger does no such thing. Her admiration for her deranged husband knows no bounds.

It’s ain’t my fault, mate. I only went to your missus house to change a washer and it sort of got out of control and here we are and I’m hoping you’ll lower the gun and we’ll talk this through.

The righteous indignation was fading from the Cackling Enabler. It wasn’t this poor bastards fault. The Criminal Element just followed his dick into the expanding universe of his wife’s cunt. He starts to lower the shotgun when Kat Hugga screams from her balcony as her kitten leaps from her bosom, on to the shrubbery below and like a tortoise-shell furball, pelts across the road to freedom only to be collected by a sports ute full of men with muscles and tattoos. The Criminal Element takes an involuntary step forward and the Cackling Enabler, who had turned his head to look up at Kat Hugga, swivels his head back and sees the Element advance on him, so he lifts the gun, aims it at his chest and is about to tell him to fucking stand back, when both barrels go off and there’s a flash and a scream and bits of the Element’s chest fly out of his back and with a surprised and beatific look, falls to the road.

There should be a name for the silence after an act of extreme violence. Men and women rooted to the spot for a second or two like a spell. Then on the count of three, Kat Hugga emits another unearthly wail, as if her whole family has died in a house fire and she watched them burn. With the spell broken, Fone Fagger covers the Cackling Enabler with kisses as Mum comes running from the back of the flat and kneels at her son’s lifeless body.

In ten minutes there will be an ambulance and someone will take Mum inside and give her a cup of tea and tell her that her son is now a chunk of meat heading slowly without lights and music towards an autopsy room. The police finally come and cuff the Cackling Enabler. Fone Fagger has to be restrained as she wants to throw her arms around her husband’s neck and tell him loves him and will get a legal aid lawyer and everything will be alright, there there, there there. But all of the love and legal representation will have to wait until she gets a new packet of Holiday from Woolies.

Normally the media would be here by now but there’s an issue. The last time they rolled up for an audio-visual feeding frenzy over battlers sorting their problems out with pool cues in the pub, the reporters and cameramen became the object of their wrath, with unusable footage of screaming, what the fuck?!, broken bones, noses and various grades of concussion. There’s a helicopter hovering overhead, so some of this mayhem will drip on to the TV news tonight.

Into this mayhem a middle-aged man in a beautiful charcoal suit and Zegna hand buffed shoes (I used to have a pair) and an immaculately groomed young woman carrying an iPad, wants to know where Ikon Investments is, a property development company. The woman’s light blue eyes are the colour of water off the Greek island of Milos. I point them to the high street, they can’t miss it. The office has a chrome door and black glass windows.

He liked the first hour of work. Bangkok was dark, cool and quiet. The resort guests were asleep and the scent of frangipani hung heavy in the air. He wondered why they planted the trees close to the pool’s edge. The small fish-shaped leaves fell in to the water day and night and clogged the filter. No sooner had he cleared the pool and deck of leaves, then he’d have to do it again under the hot afternoon sun, his white shirt and long black shorts soaked with sweat. Don’t wonder his mother said. It’s a job.

Malai sold baseball caps with images of elephants on them in the resort foyer. The foreigners couldn’t pronounce her name so her breast badge said ‘Fiona’. She was two years younger than Amree and three years out of school. She raised money to help an elephant reserve in Thailand’s north. She looked part Khmer with her round cheeks and almond eyes. A white satin ribbon gathered her long black hair. Malai spent much of her day smiling. The elephant on her white t-shirt held an old fashioned telephone to a large ear and said, “I want to make a trunk call.” None of her co-workers understood the anachronism.

Malai wasn’t allowed in the pool area and Amree wasn’t allowed in the foyer. He fantasied as he raked and pruned, they’d swim together naked in the pool at midnight, long after the pool attendants and tourists had gone. They’d solve the riddle of elephant consciousness and talk at universities across the world but no matter where they went, they always ended up in bed. He tried not to look obvious as he stole glances of her through the large smoked-glass windows. Her older brother, who was twice Amree’s size, picked her up on a motorbike outside the resort when she finished work.

His raking sometimes disturbed an old monitor lizard resting amongst the undergrowth. Mr Addams was two metres long and lived in the klongs. He’d climb out of the Chao Phraya river and spend the night snacking on discarded potato chips and half eaten sandwiches. At first light he would slowly make his way back to the river past the spa and wellness centre. The white women gave him a wide berth. Amree liked Mr Addams and threw him pieces of fish from his lunchbox.

During his meditations on Malai, he built perfect geometric shapes out of leaves: hexagons, pentagons, Buddhist prayer wheels and then elephants, birds and lizards. He flicked his wrist to slot each leaf into place. Totems of love. The tourists took photographs and said he was so talented, an artist. He smiled and bowed with his hands together and eyes on the ground, as some of the young women were almost naked, their genitalia barely covered. His boss, ever alert to pleasing management, said he could create animal shapes from the bushes near the bar. Amree smiled and bowed.

The Bangkok Post ran a photo story on his leaf and bush sculptures. Had Malai seen the story? The resort CEO shook his hand and he was appointed deputy head gardener with a little more pay and longer hours.

It was just after 3.00am and the full moon was at its zenith, as Mr Addams slowly made his way across a small teak bridge and around the pool bar. Just up river, a slight zephyr blew under the Krung Thep Bridge. A half empty pack of potato chips was quickly eaten, followed by a discarded piece of sashimi. The leaf and bush sculptures glowed in the darkness. Mr Addams walked to the pool’s edge and looked at his reflection in the moonlight. His tongue flicked around his mouth and then froze.

The leaf and bush sculptures turned silver and luminescent green and shimmied until the poolside was alive with spiralling and twisting geometric shapes turning in the air and behind them, a menagerie of leaf animals stood on their hind legs and slowly rose to the moon, as if lifted by ghostly hands. They moved over the river and chased each other, then as a cloud passed over the moon, returned to the garden and took their earthly shape. Mr Addams rolled his eyes back and made for the river.

Two months passed and his boss handed him a black elephant cap. Malai’s mother was sick in Chiang Mai. She’d quit to look after her and she wanted him to have the cap. On the front was a bright silver logo of an elephant surrounded by the words stitched in black thread: ‘Let’s paint a brighter future!’ He thanked his boss, bowed and asked if he could be excused for the day as he was not well. He caught a river taxi to the Reclining Buddha, walked past the tourists and sat alone in a corner and stared at the elephant cap. There was no way to contact her. He didn’t know her last name. He was a fool to think Malai would care for him, an ignorant gardener.

Two American women in their 40s were arguing how much to put in the perspex charity box. It had to be more than 100 baht the large blonde woman said opening up her bumbag. After all, the Buddha’s made of gold. Amree saw on the inside of the cap, near the maker’s label in small, delicate writing, no more than two millimetres high, Malai’s cell number. He walked past the American women, stopped, turned back and said the standard donation was 5000 baht – per person. The women looked relieved. At last, local knowledge.

He caught the ferry to Tha Tian Pier and made his way down Thai Wang Alley to the park. Children were playing by the lake. He turned his cell phone on and Mr Addams’ image appeared on the screensaver. He took the elephant cap off and raised his finger over the number pad.

“I’m Miranda.”

My wife of three years had just left me. She said she didn’t want to hitch her star to a man in his late 20s, who set sail on weekend benders of such epic proportion, that recovery took three days. She said – and I don’t think she’ll mind me quoting her verbatim – that when I hit the ‘glug glug’, she wanted to, ‘run a rusty cut throat razor across your neck and watch you die amongst the empties.’

“Do you mind if I come in? It’s rather personal”

Miranda sat on my wife’s ‘good lounge’. It still had the plastic protective cover on. I thought of offering tea but she looked like an escapee from an esoteric bookshop.

“I’ll come straight to the point. I’m your half-sister. My dad is your dad. You’re my brother from another mother”

Mum never said I had a half-sister but then again, she never told me my Godfather was gay or that the six years I’d spent in boarding school was paid for by Aunty Polly, who ran a successful brothel. Mum, Polly and my Dad died many years ago. They belonged to a generation that buried the past deep.

“You lived on a farm north of Adelaide. I was there when you were born,” Miranda said. “When your parents split up, your Mum took you to live with your grandparents. Your Dad wasn’t easy to live with. My Mum left him too. He used to hit her when the rages took him. It runs in the men. Know what I mean?”

From 15 years of age, I’d become a walking Krakatoa. I’d explode for scant reason, sending people fleeing. My Dad’s father had killed a man with an axe and buried the body on the property, so people said. Miranda was searching my face like a cryptic crossword.

“Most people blow their tops,” I said. “I’m no different”

She folded her hands in her lap and smiled at me. Mum used to do that when she’d caught me in a lie. Those smiling eyes said it all. Judge and jury. I brewed two strong cups of tea … fucking hell.

“How did you find me?”

“I asked your Mum – a long time ago. She thought at the time it would be best if I didn’t just ‘pop out of the box’ when you were having problems”

‘Popping out of the box’, was one of Mum’s euphemisms for ‘don’t upset young Callum.’ When I was 17, I spent two months in my bedroom reading Camus and Sartre. I took an overdose and spent three months in a psychiatric hospital. The therapy was useless. I replaced the therapy and the existential writers with bottles of scotch.

“I’m flying home to Byron Bay tonight. Amazing, isn’t it?” she said. “Instant family! In the old days, people didn’t let the skeletons out of the closet. Here’s my phone number. Come and stay with me over Christmas and we’ll make those skeletons dance”

As I held the door open for her, she pulled a black and white photo from her velvet shoulder bag.

“I thought you might like this. It’s me and our Dad sitting on the verandah of the farm. I’m 17 and 20 kilograms lighter. That’s you in the basinet under the grape trellis. It’s the only picture I have of us. My face is a bit shadowy but that’s me”

She opened the front gate, smiled, waved and walked across the hotel carpark to the city.

I put the photo on my bedside table. My wife’s old clothes were in green garbage bags at the foot of the bed. I took a deep breath and wept like a child.

xxxxxx

I caught a bus to Byron Bay. Liberation ran through me like childish laughter. We drove in her old Mazda to a house by the railway line and close to the beach. It was covered in palms and bromeliads. An old caravan covered in vines was my new home.

Miranda liked telling stories and the stories she liked telling the best were the ones about herself.

“I was 19 and poor as a church mouse. A social worker came to see me and asked a whole lot of personal questions about me and Dad. By then, my Mum had died of lung cancer. I had to do things to get money. I wasn’t always proud of that”

“You hawked the fork?”

“I entertained high class men at parties. The more money men have, the more they want you to piss on them. Anyway, the next thing I know, I’m hauled off to the loony bin. They put Thorazine in the food. I still can’t eat porridge without tasting it. I ended up working as a psychiatric nurse for a few years but I identified with the patients too much. I’m with Laing. Society is bonkers”

We walked through the forest to the beach and lay in the shallows. Tiny crabs raced to the water’s edge as gulls swooped on them.

“You think prostitution and the loony bin is bad,” I said. “I did six years in an all-boys private school. I went in when I was six and came out when I was 12”

“Give me the boy before he’s seven,” Miranda said.

None of her friends dropped by. She was a lone wolf like me.

On New Year’s Eve, the hippy community built a six-metre high strawman of the Hindu God, Shiva on the beach. They stuffed his sari and arms with firecrackers and used Catherine wheels as ears. We arrived just before midnight as the crowd jumped to Indian rock music.

Miranda washed her ecstasy tablet down with a bottle of tequila. Two large men dressed as Sannyasins, carrying flaming torches, walked through the crowd to the giant straw god. People started pogoing and shaking their heads as one of the Sannyasins lit the straw and counted down: “ten, nine, eight …”

A woman in her 30s who looked like a young Scarlett Johansson, was guzzling Krug champagne and smiling at me.

“Five, four, three”

I looked at Miranda and thought, ‘this woman is a complete stranger to me’, then it passed, like summer lightening. I walked over to Scarlett, who saw me coming, and pulled the lips of her ferret-faced boyfriend down on to hers.

Sky rockets whistled across the night sky and exploded over the ocean, as Shiva burst in to flames. His ears spun fire like mad Ferris wheels. I walked to the water’s edge and watched as the heaving mass of people exchanged saliva and later, other bodily fluids.

xxxxxxx

Eartha Kitt howled in the kitchen. Miranda knocked on the caravan door, walked in and sat on my bunk.

“About that girl,” she said.

“Which girl?” I said bleary eyed.

“The one you were eyeing-off at the beach last night”

“Eyeing-off might be too strong. Her boyfriend was standing next to her”

She folded her hands in her lap and took a deep breath.

“She’s trouble. I know one of the doctors at the sexual diseases clinic and she’s a regular. The real trouble is her boyfriend who calls me names like ‘fatty-fat-fat’. I’m a little over weight – Rubenesque I’d say – but of late, he’s got nasty”

“Nastier than calling you ‘fatty-fat-fat?”

“I’m an older woman and an easy target”

“I’ll have a chat with Ferret-face”

My morning run took me towards the rich houses on the headland. I was running back in to town when Ferret-face walked by. His dreadlocks tied on top of his skull.

“Excuse me mate, have you got a second?”

Ferret-face pulled an earphone from one ear and sized me up.

“What do you want?”

I wasn’t expecting attitude so early in the morning. He was 5’10’ and about 35. His face pocked with teenage acne.

“My sister, Miranda, you know, the one you’ve been hassling, would like you to stop it. It’s not very PC. She’s a burnt-out old hippy and deserves to live the last years of her life singing along to dead black musicians”

“She owes me $300 for a bag of dope I sold her months ago”

He was probably telling the truth but he made one fatal mistake. He took a step back and flexed his shoulders, as if getting ready to throw a punch. I’d done it a dozen times before. I held up both hands in front of my face, palms out if saying, ‘I don’t want any trouble’ and then I quickly stepped forward and drove my left fist in to his nose. His head snapped back with the shock and his eyes teared up. I then drove my right fist in to his stomach.

“Let’s call the debt paid in full. If you hassle her again, I will be most displeased. Say hullo to Scarlett”

I didn’t like hurting people. But I had a new family – a half-sister. Miranda savoured the details of the fight but I felt sorry for Ferret-face. All he wanted was his money.

I returned home, wearing a new silver bracelet Miranda gave me with the word ‘shanti’ engraved on the inside.

Twelve months past and we talked on the phone daily. It was good to have someone to tell my troubles to. Miranda told me about the films she’d seen and recommended books to read.

“I might be able to help you with some cash,” she said. “I’ve had a run-in with a local counsellor who wants to ban me from subletting the caravan. He called me an ‘old boiler’ and gave me the finger”

“Is this a rerun of Ferret-face?”

“Nothing like that. Can you called him up and convince him otherwise. I need that money to supplement my sickness benefits. A girl has to eat”

Miranda had rorted the government for years with a forged doctor’s letter which said she was a victim of domestic violence and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress.

“How much were you thinking of?”

“How about $500.00? That’s all your poor old sister can afford”

She gave me his telephone number and address. I spent a week building a package in my back shed and posted it to the counsellor.

David Cressy had been a Greens Councillor for 20 years. He was popular and had a strong sense of social justice. Miranda had helped him get elected but she wanted favours in return. After 10 years, the favours and the friendship had run dry.

The package arrived on David’s doorstep and he took it inside. He was 75, spry and still helped at the local surf club. He cut the paper away and there sat a wooden box the size of a bread tin, with a latch on the top. He flipped the latch and a one metre jack in the box exploded towards the ceiling, sending blood-red confetti high in to the air. David took two steps back as a pain shot across his chest. The jack-in-the-box arm’s flung out a large banner which read: ‘YOU’RE DEAD!’

He fell to his knees by the refrigerator. That’s where two members of the lifesaving club found him that afternoon. Dead as a doornail. The police investigation turned up nothing.

Two days later, Miranda called me with the news. It was the talk of Byron Bay.

“That was genius”

“It was meant to scare him, not kill him!”

“Your secret is safe with me”

The following week, five $100 notes arrived in the post.

Spring arrived with a bang as thunder rolled over the house. I was clearing out old books for a garage sale when I picked up the picture of me, Dad and Miranda, taken all of those years ago. There I was, a babe under the grape vine.

I looked at the back of the picture and saw a faint pencil mark, ‘12/17’ and the word ‘copy’. I thought nothing of it and lugged a box of books to the corridor. Something nagged. I walked back to the study, picked up the photo again. Miranda wore a small digital watch. Digital watches hadn’t been invented then. It had been photo-shopped.

My ex-wife’s cousin worked in Births, Deaths and Marriages. I needed a favour. In my inbox the next morning, was a scanned PDF of the births and deaths of Lawrence’s children by his marriage to Jean and Mum. There was also a news clipping. My Mum had two children. One died at 7 months – which I didn’t know – and there I was, Callum Patrick McDonald. Jean had no children. The newspaper clip said she died in a house fire, cause unknown. Then who was Miranda?

Miranda had met Mum all those years ago. She was a psychiatric nurse and visited her at the time of my breakdown. I didn’t remember her. The past would have come gushing out of Mum in a torrent of relief. At last, someone to talk to. And Miranda or whoever she was, would have listened. She would have made notes and stolen the photo.

It wouldn’t have taken much detective work to realise that my family was shored up by lies. After Mum’s death – and with infinite patience – Miranda concocted a story which no one could deny, least of all me.

She simply sought what I sought. A family. A brother and sisterhood clubbed together against lonely nights. If I said nothing about the doctored photo and the birth certificates, what harm would that do? What solace is the truth, if the truth meant being solitary? But if she lied to me about who she was, what else had she lied to me about? She had used me with Ferret-face and the old bugger. The media was calling it the ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ murder.

Now she had a secret over me. If I didn’t toe the line, she’d shop me to the cops. But that meant destroying her fantasy and incriminating herself. She wouldn’t do that. She’d know better than anyone, there would be ‘unpleasantness.’

The season turned and the pollen pods on the plane trees outside my house burst, sending me in to fits of sneezing. I placed the takeaway Indian food on the kitchen table as the phone rang. Miranda was breathless. Her words were locomotive.

“You won’t-believe-it, Cal. You have a half-brother! I was just talking to him on the phone. His name is Tyler. I should have told you before. He wants to meet you”

I walked in to the study, followed by the scent of Vindaloo. I would play along. This woman was building a family of strangers. What was wrong with that? She was an Earth Mother, leading lost sheep on to her imaginary ark.

“Name the time and place and I’ll be there”

“First, I need a favour. Many years ago, I had a fling with a trumpet player. He’s still hanging around me. He played ‘Moon River’ for two hours outside my bedroom window last night and the cops came. They’re the last people we want to see”

“Sorry Miranda, you’ll have to sort it yourself. By the way, what do you mean by we?”

The phone fell dead for a few seconds.

“I went to a lot of trouble to find you. I opened my heart and home to you,” she said. “I treated you with love and light. Just have a little chat with this bloke and send him packing. Once he’s gone, I’ll introduce you to Tyler. We have to stick together. We’re a family”

I wasn’t going to destroy our fortress against loneliness. Neither was I going to monster her old trumpet playing boyfriend.

“Sorry,” I said as I walked back in to the kitchen, “tell Miles Davis that love don’t live there anymore”

“There’s a $50,000 reward for information on the Jack-in-the-Box murder,” Miranda said. “Did I tell you?”

That was a mistake and Miranda knew it. The red and orange vindaloo sauce spilled on the kitchen floor. My ex-wife’s voice in my head said, “you’re going to clean that up, aren’t you?” I hung up and walked outside.

I walked in to the shed, picked up the new axe I’d bought for splitting firewood and placed it in the boot of the car. If I drove through the night, I’d arrive in Byron Bay the next evening.

I was only seven when the crone and her dolls got their hooks in to me. I lived with a Greek family during the week because Mum worked long hours as a nurse and couldn’t look after me. Dad had shot through. The Deatrakis family had two boys about my age and a girl a little younger: Niko, Paul and Chloe. They were beautiful with jet black hair, olive skin and green eyes. I was blonde, tanned, with a freckled nose and buck teeth. Niko was a year older than me and ran like the wind. Kallos, the family German Shepherd, slept in the sunroom with me. I could speak some Greek and was fluent when hungry. I roamed Goodwood, a working class suburb full of migrants with impunity, armed with an insatiable curiosity. God helps those who help themselves and I did.

My world squirmed and wriggled with tadpoles and worms. Tigers prowled through the bamboo in the vacant block behind the house. I was an explorer like the great Captain Cook or an Australian solider on the Kokoda Trail firing his machine gun into waves Japanese soldiers. I’d pick cumquats and water cress for Mrs Deatrakis. My night dreams were as vivid as noonday play.

This was the time of the child murders. Three children about my age – all girls – were kidnapped from a beach and never found. Two young girls went missing from Adelaide Oval. A headless boy was fished out of a river behind the orphanage. Two boys were kidnapped off the street and buried in shallow graves in wasteland, north of the city. They’d been scalped.

That summer was so hot, Mr Deatrakis cracked an egg on the bonnet of the car and the edges bubbled and fried. We threw buckets of water over Kallos and hosed the chooks. The thermometer in the back yard read 104 degrees. A blow-torch northerly wind blew from the desert sending leaves and dust spiralling in to mini tornados, to rise and then quickly die.

The January school holidays stretched to infinity. Boredom drove us down Goodwood road where we stood in front of the ivy covered Catholic Church. A life-size crucified Christ hung above the door, complete with nails and crown of thorns. Next door was the immunisation centre, where on Monday mornings, babies and young kids would scream and howl as the hypodermic syringes punctured pink, tender flesh.

Between the church and the immunisation centre ran a small path, cloaked in shadow. The older neighbourhood kids said a witch lived down there and she ate children’s feet and noses. The shadow was cool and smelt of piss and cooked cabbage. The red brick of the church stood on one side and ivy of the immunisation centre on the other.

“Niko you go first, I’ll follow,” I said, pushing him towards the path.

“No, we all go. Can’t leave Chloe here”

“I can look after myself,” she said. “I’m going with you”

Paul hung back and leant against the ivy. “What about the witch?”

“No such thing,” Niko said with little conviction.

“You chicken, Paul?” I said and made chook noises.

“Ain’t chicken. Lets go”

At night Mrs Deatrakis read us stories from The Odyssey as we lay on the lounge room floor and ate Baklava soaked in rosewater. Kallos lay his head on my lap. She told of Circe the enchantress with witchy powers and how she tried to seduce Ulysses and get him to stay on the island and how she changed his crew into a pigs. We sat there and looked at our hands and saw pig trotters.

We walked slowly single file down the path. I was behind Niko and Paul and Chloe were behind me. The sounds of the suburb fell away until we were enveloped in silence and shadow, like in an eclipse. As long as Niko held his ground, I wasn’t going anywhere. I hated ivy because two years ago, a massive thunder storm woke me in the middle of the night. Mum was out on a date and I was alone in the flat. I crawled up on her bed and stared out the window. The thunder cracked overhead and I was afraid. In the lightening flashes I saw on the neighbour’s fence, large snakes twisting and turning through the ivy. Their diamond-shaped heads rose and flicked their fork tongues in the charged air. I pulled Mum’s bed sheets over my head and that’s how she found me.

“Did you hear that?” Paul said.

“Ain’t nothin’,” Niko said. “There’s no witch here. Nothing but piss and dog shit”

A window flew open above our heads an old woman with white hair and a soothing, almost melodic voice, like the Sirens in the Odyssey, asked what we were doing. Niko pushed me in to the ivy as he belted past, making for the road. Paul and Chloe followed him, screaming witch, witch, witch. My legs were concrete.

She raised her finger and pointed at me.

“You! Bucktooth boy, why don’t you run? You can’t move your legs. That happened to me everyday many years ago. You are braver than your friends. Well, would you like to come up stairs?”

A large blowfly the size of a 20 cent piece hit the back of my head as I slowly climbed the broken stairs. A garbage bin below the steps rattled and buzzed, full of flies. A dog barked in the distance setting off a pack of mongrels up the road.

The hag opened the back door and ushered me in to the darkness. I was in a small room with a single bed made with tight hospital corners. A Star of David hung above the bed head. Candles burned in a candelabra on a small table with two chairs. The sun struggled to pour through a high and dirty window. Classical music played on the radio. I could tell it was classical because it sounded like cats having sex.

“It has been a long long time since I had a visitor. Father MacDonald lets me live here as I clean the church. I’m Dina”

A black shawl hung over a grey, shapeless dress. A lion’s head broach clung to her sagging left breast. Her hair was a white as flour with grey eyes set deep into the skull, surrounded by dark circles, painted by a thousand sleepless nights. While the skin on her jowls sagged and her nails were chipped and chewed, she had been a beauty once. In a clean corner, below a poorly framed picture of a young family smiling at the camera, sat two life-size dolls about my age, a boy and a girl. The boy’s bald head made him look like a cancer patient.

“Would you like some tea or cake?”

“No thanks. What’s with the dolls?”

“That’s Karl and Marion. They keep me company”

She put a plate with a thin slice of stale cake and butter on my lap. A tattoo with five numbers ran up the left side of her wrist. She hovered over me for moment and ran her long fingers through my hair. Women were always doing that.

“You have beautiful blonde hair. So thick and soft.”

The cake smelt of almonds and Broom Hilda and the dolls gave me the yips. I put the cake aside and made to leave.

“Would you like to hear a story? It’s a true story although sometimes I think it happened to someone else. It was long time ago in a land far away. It involved women, children and monsters”

She’d thrown a lure to hook my attention. Mrs Deatrakis did that. Give a juicy precis and then stop. I sat back in the chair. The dolls were staring at me.

“I was put in a camp with my two children…”

“Like a holiday camp?”

“Not quite. The camp was run by men with guns. The fence was patrolled by German Shepherds. First I worked in the kitchen. This was good because there wasn’t very much food. I could steal some for my children. We lived in a big barracks and in winter, it was very cold. We had to work such long hours”

“Sounds like shit”

“It was, as you say, unpleasant. Every morning we stood outside the barracks while they did a head count. My children clung to my legs. Remember how frightened you were when you saw me? That’s how I felt. A tall man in a black uniform examined us. Those who were sick were taken away. We never saw them again”

A mote danced high in front of the dirty window. It rose and fell, disappeared and appeared again. The dolls were giving me the willies and her story bored a hole in one ear and out the other. In the distance thunder rumbled. The storms raced across the desert and spat lightening and rain. Time to go but it was hard to find a break in her droning monologue.

“An officer saw I played the flute. A woman’s orchestra played classical music when the trains disgorged new people and to welcome the skeletons back from the work parties. The next day, I stood at the front of the orchestra while my children stayed in the barracks. We played Mozart, Lizst, anything lively and with a melody.”

The crone kept looking at my hair. The problem with old people and their stories, is that they go on and on. They want to describe everything. I could never be a writer. Pages of describing this and that. The weather. The rose colour of the kids cheeks as the pure white snow fell. Just give me the gist and I’ll fill in the rest in my head. The thunder was getting closer. Kallos didn’t like thunder. He’d hide under my bed.

“I got privileges in the orchestra. Marionetta and Carlo got toys. Old battered things, cuddle-keeps of other children, who disappeared like smoke. They were a touchstone to the world outside. It was winter and we were playing Mozart’s Flute Sonata in B-Flat Major”

“I gotta be going…”

“The cold iced one’s bones. The women and children from the trains walked like cattle to the parade ground. The mothers kept their children close to their skirts. Light snow was falling and I was in the middle of a difficult passage. I won’t bore you with the technicalities…”

“You couldn’t bore me more if you tried”

“I turned and saw the tall man in the black uniform take Marionette and Carlo from the barracks and lead them to where the old and sick were corralled. I could say and do nothing. If I stopped playing I was dead. So I played through the tears, my heart breaking. I wanted to run to them and plead with the man but the conductor heard me miss two notes and yelled at me and the women and children from the train were smiling as they were told hot food and blankets were coming. So I played for my children. I played as if they were in the front seats of a majestic hall and I was on stage with the spotlight hard in my eyes and the snow fell heavily and when I stopped playing, they were gone. In the barracks Carlo’s black jacket was folded on my bed with a couple of blonde hairs on the collar. Such beautiful hair”

She got up, put the kettle on and cut herself a slice of cake and sat in front me, cutting the cake into little squares, then stabbing the squares with the knife and raising each square to her mouth. She ate like a cow. If she was expecting a reaction, she’d spilled her guts out to the wrong boy. Mrs Deatrakis impersonated the Hydra using her hands to do its heads swaying before Ulysses’ boat. Scary. If you’re going to tell a story, give it some edge. Really sell it.

She wiped cake crumbs from the corner of her wrinkled mouth, walked behind me and ran her fingers through my hair again. Then she pressed the knife against my throat.

“I’ve almost finished Karl. All he needs is some hair. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is getting the right colour and texture. I’m sorry you didn’t like my story but that makes it easier to do what I have to do”

Dina yanked my hair back, exposing the throat. Her smiling face above me. The motes danced, the cake fell to the floor, soft classical music played on the radio as lightening flashed. She waited for the thunder to crack before drawing the knife back to slash the windpipe. She cocked her head towards the door like a bird and muffled a scream and ran to the dolls as Kallos placed one tentative paw in the room, his ears flattened by the thunder, his lip in a well practiced snarl. The hag dropped the knife and shielded the dolls with her skirt.

“Get it away! Bitte. Get it away!”

I leapt down the rickety stairs with Kallos barking in delight behind me and hurtled along the thin path, the ivy dripping with rain. The smell of water on hot concrete filled the air as dead brown leaves whirl pooled over blocked drains. I sprinted past the Immunisation centre, the small used car lot, the hairdressers and the civic hall. I turned down Victoria street as Kallos ran in to the yard and through the backdoor.

“Put dry clothes on,” Mrs Deatrakis said, “you’re soaked”

“You’ll never believe what happened”

I stood dripping on her newly mopped floor. Kallos made his way to my bedroom and hid under the bed.

“There’s a witch, she tried to kill me, at the Church”

“A Church going witch,” she threw a towel at me. “How unusual”

“No, no she is Jewish and lives there”

“A Jewish Church witch. Did she turn people into pigs?”

“She turned her children into dolls”

Mrs Deatrakis gave me a small slice of Turkish Delight coated in powdered sugar and hung the laundry in the sun room.

“It’s a good story but too short. To tell a very good story, give more description, use more words to describe the witch and her dolls. Take the reader by the hand and show them the church and the storm. Tell Kallos your story. It will take his mind off the storm.”

Cars passing down Elsternwick road on a wet Saturday morning sounded like a G note sustained in a large, empty concert hall.

“I’ll give you $8000 for both of them,” Dubcheck said. “They’re old and I’ll need to replace the strings.”

Dubcheck hoisted his trousers over his belly, sniffed the stale air and saw salt damp rising above the skirting boards.

“There’s key damage on the Bosendorfer. Someone has been smoking while playing.”

The winter sun poured in to the room but Geoffrey was cold. The gas had been cut off. How much had the Bechstein cost? He wondered. More than $100,000 but that was many years ago. He’d bought it from an American woman who had seen him play in Berlin.

“Is that the best you can do?” Geoffrey said. He withdrew a nicotine stained finger from his left ear, sniffed it and then twirled it around a grey lock of greasy hair. “They really are superb. The Bechstein is more than 100 years old. I could get much more on the open market but …”

The telephone was disconnected and amongst the pile of letters in the passageway, lay the landlord’s final notice. There was no ‘open market’. He’d take what he could get.

“Mr Hawkshore, you must understand my position,” Dubcheck said. “I buy and sell musical instruments. It will cost me a lot of money to repair these pianos before they go on sale. The piano is not such a popular instrument now. They take up so much space.”

Geoffrey remembered when he was nine, he played Bach’s Concerto in F Major with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It was televised nationally. He was called a ‘prodigy’. He looked at the empty brandy and cough mixture bottles lying on the floor. Half a pizza had grown fur on the settee.

At 14, he was a semi-finalist at the Leeds International Piano Competition. The next year he made his European debut at the Albert Hall. The English newspapers said his recitals of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Liszt were ‘exceptional’. He toured Europe, Japan and Australia. Then the troubles started.

“Exceptional” he muttered.

“What did you say Mr Hawkshore? I’m sorry. I cannot give you more than $8000 for both pianos. You will, as they say, have to take it or leave it.”

Geoffrey paused to consider the offer. Dubcheck was his last chance. A loathsome little man who knew nothing about music.

“Do you see that black and white picture on the mantel piece, Mr Dubcheck? It’s me and my mother taken in the early 1970s. We are walking along the Rue St Germaine in Paris. I had just won the Grand Prix prize. I played a piece by Bartok on a Bechstein.”

“The price stands at $8000”

“Only 24 hours after that picture was taken, I fell sick. I was 19. It was the queerest thing. When I looked at people’s faces, I saw animals. The psychiatrist was a gorilla and the nurses were hyenas. I remember playing the Sydney Opera House and looking out from the stage and the entire audience were horses, parrots and tigers. I was petrified the whole time. And they talked Mr Dubcheck. They talked!”

Dubcheck had heard Geoffrey was mad. He’d seen him shuffle along the street in his dressing gown, talking to himself. He’d once come in to his second hand musical instruments store and asked to play one of the pianos but was shown the door. Loonies scared people, Dubcheck thought. The kitchen smells of mice, grease and shit. How did this idiot ever get these pianos? I had better humour him.

“My family came from Warsaw to Australia more than 60 years ago,” Dubcheck said. “We lived near the zoo. As a child, I would play a game with my sister and match the faces of the animals with those of our family and teachers. My mother was a piano player and wrote reviews for a newspaper in Melbourne. She knew Rachmaninov or so she said. I play a little but I am more interested in business now.

Geoffrey bent down and picked up a black folder containing sketches. He handed them to Dubcheck.

“These were drawn by my mother when I was very young. She had an affair with a British army officer when we lived in northern India. The first sketch is of me sitting at the piano in a nappy. The next one – I was four – I am learning to read Beethoven, to write notation and count the time signatures.”

Dubcheck held the sketches up to the light. They were good. Pencil and charcoal. They might be worth something in the right frames.

“I am sorry if I talk so much,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t get visitors often. It’s the medication. I ran out last week and I ramble. Am I rambling? You are very patient with me. My mind gets so full, I can’t tell if they are memories or whether I am improvising. That was my downfall. Improvising. People were jealous of my talent. They wanted to lop the tall poppy. I am now lopped.”

“You improvised – on what?”

“On Mozart. Mozart would have approved. But the conductors in Sydney and Melbourne wouldn’t hire me. I became ‘difficult’, they said. I like a drink, I will admit that but it never affected my playing. Never! I am sorry. I must control myself. They say I must control myself. I am alone but my pianos keep me company.”

Dubcheck walked over to the Bosendorfer and picked up a pile of yellowed news clippings. They were reviews of Geoffrey. He had won the Diapason D’Or – the world’s highest prize for classical music. Dubcheck felt envy rise. This drunk on the couch used to be someone, he thought. Now look at him. On the bottom of the pile he found Australian reviews. He read one aloud.

“While Geoffrey Hawkshore has incredible gifts, he is unable to suppress his improvisational tendencies. He takes liberties adding extra ‘twiddles’ to Schubert and improvising on Beethoven. Many may applaud this ability but in a world of plenty, when it comes to pianists, it is no surprise that the conductors of the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras prefer to be on stage with someone who is more predictable.”

Dubcheck looked at the byline, saw his mother’s name, checked his watch and put the review down.

“My mother died just after that review came out,” Geoffrey said. “She was my star. I got lost after that. I fell in love with a man who said he worshipped my playing. What he really worshipped was my money. I would come home and find the house full of young men. It was a nightmare. He spent my money on drugs. By the time he died I was too far gone to rebuild my career. The curtain had closed on me.”

Geoffrey hadn’t talked so much in months. He rose slowly to his feet clutching his pyjama bottoms and shuffled to the bureau, pulled open the drawer and pulled out a man’s black leather wallet.

“Can you give me the money in cash Mr Dubcheck? I have no bank account.”

Mr Dubcheck’s mouth dropped and he sat down carefully on the worn felt piano stool.

“Mr Hawkshore, it will take me a week to get you the money and it will come in a cheque. Then it will take you a week before you can draw against it. But there might be another solution. It is unusual but as we are both musicians, it is something I am prepared to do. I can get you $6000 now in cash for both pianos. I can have it for you this afternoon. Are you agreeable?”

Geoffrey returned to the sofa. He needed to pee but clamped down on the thought. He drew a copy of the Herald Sun across his lap.

“I’m sorry Mr Dubcheck, what did you say?”

“I can get you cash this afternoon. We will come for the pianos tomorrow.”

“Of course, you are most kind.”

“Do you have anything else you would like to sell? Those sketches for example?”

“I have some sheet music but it is not worth much. I have sold pretty much everything I had. The prizes and awards have all gone but of course the real prize is up here.”

Geoffrey tapped his skull, smiled and made to stand up.

“Do not trouble yourself, please.”

Dubcheck walked down the corridor over the pile of unopened mail and let himself out without saying goodbye.

Geoffrey felt a sharp pain in his liver. The doctors said it would get worse. He sat on the felt piano stool and opened the Bechstein keyboard. He stretched his fingers and waited for the conductor, who looked like Mr Dubcheck. The conductor tapped his baton.

Thunder rumbled in the north and then the room fell silent. Geoffrey bent his head and started to play the first notes of the Bist Du Bei Mur, the music Bach wrote for his wife as she lay dying. He carried the melody line on his right hand as if caressing his mother’s face. He was a small boy and his mother was smiling at him from her bed as he practiced his scales. He sang the first line in English:

“If you are with me, then I will go gladly

unto death and to my rest…”

Over his shoulder, a large chestnut horse shook her mane in his face. On the floor lay a tiger who stared at his fingers as if they were sausages. A baboon sat on the couch reading The Age. Its eyes were so close together, the baboon reminded Geoffrey of his first piano teacher.

The melody rose across the Melbourne rooftops, across the chimneys and antennas. It rose above the clouds, past the passenger planes, past satellites. Geoffrey saw the notes curve out in to infinite space and beyond. He finished and the animals disappeared except the baboon.

“That was very good, Geoffrey,” the baboon said. “You are coming along nicely.”

The baboon took a bow by the door and left.

Rain started to fall as he closed the piano lid. He rolled a cigarette and went outside. Amongst the weeds and long grass were empty pots and pans of all sizes. He leant against the splintered door frame. Each pot resonated to a different sound as the rain hit it. The large thin tin pots beat like a timpani. The smaller milk saucepans were triangles. Geoffrey laughed with delight.

William Shield lived in a treeless cul-de-sac of Paradise Grove in the intellectual vacuum of Adelaide. He was not a migrant, an Aborigine or a wage slave in the satanic mills of the culture industry. He was not a communist, labor man or conservative. He was hungry. He smeared the last of the butter on to a nub of stale bread. The morning sun fell on William like a bureaucracy and although it was a brilliant day, full of laughter and smiley faces, he pulled the shades down. His stomach cramped on last night’s bubble and squeak and he just made it to the toilet as a free trade agreement hit the porcelain. No toilet paper. A newspaper hawking entrepreneurialism lay crumpled at his feet. He looked at his left hand then at the newspaper then at his left hand again and reached for the newspaper.

The morning stretched in front of him like a yawn. He did a number incorrect yoga poses in front of a mirror which hurt his back. When he worked as a food delivery wallah, delivering pizza on the back of his postie motorbike, he could afford to go to the gym. A good place to meet women. The women did not think it was a good place to meet him. They were more interested in toning their tummies and bums than listening to William’s woeful pick up lines such as, “do ya live around ‘ere often?” Sometimes after doing his stretches, he’d masturbate in front of the mirror but because he was a 37-year old unemployed loser, living alone in a bedsit on Christmas Day, that seemed too sad.

Christmas passed like a herpes infection and for this, William was thankful. An old iMac on the kitchen table provided propaganda-driven Youtube videos of the war in the Ukraine, dogs doing tricks, the extermination of the Uyghurs, porn, death bed confessions, porn, the Twin Towers falling again and again, clips of ageing b-grade movie stars of the 1960s, real estate porn and the news of the day filtered through politically correct news rooms. He checked his email expecting to find invitations from pert-breasted wannabe brides in eastern Europe who really knew how to please a man and spam from SEO experts in India who promised to get his website to rank on page one. William didn’t have a website. A government email in Times Roman marked ‘urgent’ sat on top of the list.

“Dear Mr Spears,

You are hereby notified that due to 12 unemployment benefit overpayments and an undeclared income of $22,700 over the last two years, you owe the Department of Social Security (SS) the sum of $11,333 dollars. We ask that this sum be paid within 21 days. If you wish to discuss this matter with a customer service officer, please call 1800 …” blah, blah, blah.

Since he’d quit the wage theft food delivery job, he lived on the dole and worked one night a week cleaning a Vet’s surgery for $60.00 cash. His bowels cramped again. He looked at his bank balance. A little over $400.

He called the 1800 number and John Lennon’s Imagine crackled down the line They say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one… every 30 seconds a monotone robot voice chirped he’d progressed in the queue and the wait time was 47 minutes and Merry Christmas. He stared at the indelible coffee stain an old lover had left on his mahogany chessboard, a present from his mother when he won the state under-12 championships. The affair lasted barely longer than a game of chess. Her flat was full of high brow books she never read, which shored up a fractious and humourless personality. A princess who ghosted him so effectively, he struggled to remember her name. He called her Amber, short for ambivalence. His mind drifted off in to a grey study where time stood still.

The paint was flaking from the wall above the sink. It looked like Gondwanaland. He could make out Africa and Australia and there were dinosaurs and strange sea creatures and birds the size of old American cars and then the meteor and his mother’s face coming through the acid rain saying, a Queen-side Castle in the first 15 minutes is absolute suicide. Are you a freaking idiot?

A lilting voice with correct English and a hint of Mumbai poured sweet and melodious in his ear. Another robot.

“Thank you for your call. We will record this conversation for our records so we can deliver a better service to you. Would you please state your full name”

“William Speers”

“Willhelm Queers?”

“No William Speers”

“Thank you. You live at Unit 2, Beria Place in Paradise Grove. Is that correct?”

“Correct”

“Please answer yes or no”

“Yes”

“How can we help you today?”

“I got an email from the SS and it says I owe $11,333 dollars. There must be some mistake. Would you please check it out”

“Just one moment Mr Spears and I will search your social security and tax records”

The phone went dead except for a click, click, whirr sound Kookaburras make when they’re about to break into song. A text hit his mobile with a ping which read he owed the Department of Social Security $11,333 and he had 21 days to pay. In the far distance a Mr Whippy van played ‘Greensleeves’ as it headed down Anzac Highway to the beach to await sticky hands clutching money.

“Mr Speers, thank you for your patience,” Ms Mumbai robot said. “Our records show you owe the Department of Social Security $11,333 and this must be paid within 21 days. Our records also show you have $427.00 in your bank account, which means you will need to lodge an appeal or compound interest will accrue on the debt at 9 per cent per month”

“So I can appeal against the repayment?”

“No. You can appeal against having to pay the interest”

“I want to speak someone who’s not a robot about this error. I’m just one step from living on the street. Help me out here”

“We have feelings Mr Queers. Be advised that you must pay this money within 21 days. Have a Merry Christmas and goodbye”

How did the robot know he had $427 in his bank account? The flat Coke in the fridge tasted like gun metal. A pimple was growing on his neck. There was something delicious and awful about squeezing pimples. Of late, he’d started to watch Youtube clips of Bot Fly removals from people’s skin. Parasites plucked from flesh.

The SS weren’t going to get one dollar. What were they going to do? Send around a goon squad of accountants and batter him with double entry ledger books? He read the fine print at the end of the email.

“If payment is not made by the due date, the matter will be passed to the Sherriffs’ Office and you may be detained”

The Christmas tree covered in fake snow looked forlorn in the corner. He pictured a 1930s American movie about a chorus girl who endures hardship only to find true love and gets the lead role in the Follies. The final scene, set on a mountain of fake snow and pine, is her leading the girls, arm-in-arm, high-kicking their way to happiness. In truth, it looked more like Orwell’s Aspidistra. A symbol of middle class respectability wilting amongst a rising tide of urban poverty.

The problem was, as he picked at Gondwanaland, knocking India to the kitchen bench, he was smart enough to know his prospects, even without this extraordinary government impost, were slim. He had a worthless degree in political science which he would never pay off. Once upon a time, in his salad days, something approaching idealism welled in his tummy and he thought of becoming a politician but then blanched, knowing too well the self-seeking bovine qualities of the beast. Shouldn’t he too line his pockets with superannuation paid at 17 per cent on a salary of $220,000 a year? Shouldn’t he too boss his staff around like a psychopath or walk into a room and every one knows his name? Oh, to feel the poisonous patronising pats on his back from colleagues. To have friends amongst the hyenas and jackals. He ripped off a loose hanging nail and trimmed it with his teeth. He picked up an old text book, long out of print, of Barrington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and placed it carefully on top of the newspaper in the toilet. A penny saved.

The ‘Wraiths of the Unemployed’ blog was created long ago by an Adelaide Hills hippy, whose brain was pureed by Tolkien. A place for the unemployed to bitch about the SS. The site went viral three years ago when ‘Brillig’ a young man from Fortitude Valley, blew his brains out live with a 12-gauge shotgun. He’ d fallen in love with his case worker but the case worker lived in fear of Brillig getting a job because he’d lose his. It made the 6.00pm news.

William kept his post short:

Just got a bill from the SS which says I owe them more than $11,000 in overpayments. They also know how much I’ve got in my bank account. The government has armed their servers against me. WTF is going on?

He toggled through some of the articles he had posted two years ago. He’d calculated the unemployment rate was 13 per cent and rising, not four per cent and falling. The SS hadn’t counted young and old people who’d dropped out of the workforce. He sent the figures to the media and all he heard back was the crackling sound of the universe expanding.

William looked at the nude women on Metart but depression stole his hard-on. His last dole payment was three days late. The shape of things to come. The sun set and he lit candles in the kitchen. Almost romantic. He was heading back into the 18^th century. A bottle of stolen Jack Daniels sat next to the iMac when his mobile rang.

“Is this William Speers?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name is Mark Robespierre”

“You can call me Billy Marat. How do I know this isn’t the SS?

“You don’t think they’d call themselves Robespierre do you? I’ve read your posts on the Wraiths and I’ve got an idea. Can we meet?”

“How about 12.00 noon tomorrow at The Shallow Bowl in Sellers Square? You pay”

“See you then”

The Shallow Bowl wasn’t called the Shallow Bowl. It was a Hari Krishna restaurant where you didn’t get much dahl, veggie and rice but it only cost $5.00. The water was free. The off yellow walls were covered in pictures of a ghoulish Kali surrounded by skulls. Reluctant children were dragged in by their hungry single mums. The salt and pepper shakers were ceramic Shivas and Ganeshes and were frequently pinched.

A man in his mid 50s, wearing a ridiculous straw hat worn by older males at Womad and other culture vulture events, saw William sitting alone in the corner.

“Mister Speers, I presume,” lifting his hat to reveal a semi-circle of male pattern baldness and a dent in his forehead where a melanoma was removed.

“Mister Robespierre, I presume.”

He sat down, poured himself a glass of water. His preconceived image of Speers was wrong. He pictured a tall, well-educated man, maybe with a goatee and a courduroy jacket. Not a short man with rounded shoulders and acne pocks on his cheeks. As a child he’d kept ferrets and the similarity was unnerving.

“What’s the food like?”

“The same as last week,” William said. “It could be last weeks. Who’d know?”

“I’ve been reading your comments on the blog. You know the political system”

William scraped his spoon on the side of the bowl. The Hari’s used to provide a slice of bread to do the mopping up, now they charged a dollar.

“Good to know your enemy because the enemy sure as hell knows a lot about me”

“The government has activated a web browser that hunts and catalogues everything about you. It’s called the Lantana Code. At the moment its targeting people on the dole. If you’ve gone to school or university, paid tax, got a bank account, a credit card or joined a club, they know. They can even activate street cameras to track your movements based on facial imagery. The code’s inculcated with the political values of the government.”

Robespierre spoke like a radio just off station. Sibilant s’s and ‘s that sounded like b’s. Well educated. Middle corporate or public service. William found it hard not to stare at a one centimetre hair poking out of a black mole on his chin. The image of tweezers floated across his mind then vanished.

“You wanted to chat. I’m all ears. Obviously, not all ears …”

Robespierre did the talking as his fingers knitted and unknitted below his chin. As a convicted whistleblower, he’d lost his executive job in the government’s IT department in Canberra. He’d discovered the department was using Chinese technology, bought at a discount price and hadn’t declared it in the procurement papers. Neither did it mention that there was a chance the technology could be monitored from Beijing. Robespierre told the Prime Minister’s department who told his boss who sacked him. He was now working in a call centre, helping people to open a browser. He wanted revenge and William was onside immediately.

William’s job was to pick up a brief case from railway station locker 17 and take it to Colonel Blights statue in the city and leave it. The briefcase contained important diagrams on the interconnectivity of the government’s servers.

“It sounds all very hush hush. What are you going to do?”

“If I told you and they tortured you by making you watch as they squeezed shampoo into puppies’ eyes. You’d crack and spill the beans. It’s best you don’t know. Remember the dominant paradigm. Ignorance is bliss”

Here was a chance to do something worthwhile whatever that was; something secret squirrel, something at some time in the future, he could use to impress a woman. He pictured himself wearing a beret and a black leather jacket and he did not look ridiculous. She would be so overcome with patriotic fervour, they’d fall madly, deeply in love and have blonde children with strong chins and they’d buy a lovely house in leafy Statusborough Street and the sun would rise and fall just for them.

“So you’ll do it?”

“Count me in,” William said and in a fit of extravagance, walked past the terrifying pictures of Kali and ordered a slice of bread.

That night he fell asleep like a man with a mission. He ignored thoughts of jail, of torture or being made to work in the public service, where the future was called moving forward, and change was called action, as in ‘we will action this’. Verbs lay dead and dying like fish thrown upon a shore. He didn’t need the sleeping pills or valium. To sleep, perchance to dream with an empty bladder. Sleep wrapped its velvet arms around him. His mouth filled with stars as he rose through the roof of his bedsit, over the suburbs, where people were actioning their lives.

xxxxxxx

William walked from the railways station on a sunny Monday morning, carrying the small leather brief case. He imagined in years to come, when he was dust, children will study this walk to the statue of Colonel Blight; people in green rocket cars will note, if only in passing that on this day, the 27^th of April at 9.30, William Speers walked with confidence, his face a picture of steely determination. The sun was low in the east and the dew on the parklands was burning off. The teacher hologram will say to those upturned happy kid-ogram faces, he walked over King William bridge where generations of wage slaves, like ghosts, had trod before. How he studied the faces of those walking towards him and noted the incestuous features of low brows and weak chins, the stooped shoulders of a shrinking gene pool.

The history books will not mention the car of hoons, who hit him in the back of the head with an egg and then did a u-turn and with tyres squealing, sped out of sight. He wiped the yoke off and rubbed his hands on the cool grass.

The brief case was locked. Robespierre didn’t trust him. Fair enough. Trust was like Tasmania Tigers. Much talked about never seen. The bag felt light. He placed the brief case at the foot of the statue and looked up at Blight’s hand pointing to buildings rising up from the plain, full of wage slaves with IQ’s bouncing around in the low 80s. He returned home and stood naked in front of the mirror and a tingle of tumescence rose in his manhood.

The daily newspaper, which sacrificed truth for boosterism, said the burgeoning unemployment camps in the parklands, were a blot on the landscape. An eyesore. They must be bulldozed. The city life style reporter wrote that while the cardboard tents looked like the Soweto ghetto as ghettos went, it was world class. Much better than the ghettos in Melbourne and Sydney.

To drive circulation the newspaper bet big on a fear campaign. What were Australia’s chances of avoiding obliteration if China attacked? Would a nation focused on property prices, football and inflation, rise like the sun over an ANZAC Day commemoration, and meet the foe, who was armed with 57 submarines, five aircraft carriers, a fleet of battleships and 1.5 million armed men, as they sailed through Sydney Heads? Would advertising executives and real estate agents lead the way carrying high our star spangled Union Jack as the Americans debated and ummed and ahhed as getting involved looked like an expensive exercise in terms of hardware and human capital?

A month passed and the Shallow Bowl closed because hungry people ransacked the food trucks. The CEO of Woolworths said its shareholders were demanding action and armed guards would now ride shotgun.

William took half a valium as he crawled into bed. He put the headphones on and played a sleep-guided meditation. A female voice backed by cooing whales led him through a forest and the grass felt cool under his bare feet. He relaxed his legs, unfondled his penis and looked down and saw he’d trod in human shit. He was sitting in an open cubicle in the New Delhi railways station at 1.00am. His first trip to India as a 19-year old and he had a stomach churning case of food poisoning. The Lassi at the Taj Mahal seemed like a good idea. On the ceramic floor in front of him, half a dozen cripples were begging and contorting their arms into Hindu swastikas, while chanting praise of Shiva. Some were missing arms, eyes and noses. A Goya nightmare. Shit and stagnant water rose from a broken cistern. He wiped his arse with his left hand and dipped it in a bucket of water full of cigarette butts. It was 20 metres to the front door. The cripples were screaming for help. In another minute, they’d drown. This was William’s chance to be a hero and carry them one-by-one, on his back to the railway platforms. He’d read Lord Jim. This was his Patna moment.

He took his socks and boots off, pulled up his pants and made for the door. An old man missing his teeth and left eye latched on to his leg and wouldn’t let go. Help me, Sahib. Help me. William turned, lifted his other foot from the rising tide of shit, urine and water, kicked the old man in the face and ran out the door and towards his train. He slathered himself in deodorant and hoped his fellow passengers wouldn’t be offended by the smell.

That night as the train made its way to Dharmasala, he thought of the cripples. Surely someone would save them. This wasn’t a world where we left the poor and defenceless to drown in the mire. He lay on his back in the sleeper. Soon he’d be sitting at the feet of the Dalai Lama and all would be well.

William rose, cooked a stale piece of bread in egg and sipped a cup of strong, milkless tea. He gave yoga a miss and felt guilty because, as his mother used to day, he was letting himself go. His inveterate laziness would end up as middle age spread and tits. Women would run screaming when he entered a room. He checked his bank account as yoke dribbled on his Paw Patrol night shirt. There must be some mistake. He logged off and logged on again. At midnight, a Mr Robespierre deposited $115,000 into his account. He logged on to the Wraith and saw hundreds of posts saying a ‘Mr Robespierre’ had closed down the government servers while pumping money into the bank accounts of the poor and unemployed. A Robin Hood, a saviour, the prince of peace.

Robespierre’s Myna Worm spread through the Department of Social Security network, when at 9.00am on a cloudy Tuesday morning, the drones armed with cups of tea and buttered finger buns, turned on their computers. The screens locked to the sound of an Indian Myna bird screaming its head off. The worm locked the network and deactivated the Lantana Code. SS executives gave a strict instructions not to email another government department. They’d contain the worm in the local network and work out what to do.

Dorothy worked in accounts on the fifth floor of the SS. The news was too good not to share with Amanda, her best friend, a low level functionary in Treasury. She opened her laptop and logged on to the SS wifi. The email was short, full of superlatives and open ended questions. This was the biggest thing to happen to the SS apart from that mental defective six years ago who fired a surface to air missile in to the cafeteria, killing 12 people. Blood and soup of the day hit the walls creating an image Jackson Pollock would have been proud of. Dorothy hit send and Amanda, who was about to go on long service leave opened the email.

The Myna worm hit the banking sector the next day and 24-hours later, the economy ground to a halt. ATM’s died. No one could withdraw money. Shops closed and property prices plummeted. The fat white people blamed the government, the Chinese, the Russians, migrants and the unemployed. They formed lines in active leisure wear which stretched across the city and waited for the soup kitchens to open. Lamentation turned to grumbling then anger as petrol bombs flew at police cars. It took three weeks before the government IT boffins hammered out a fix. They couldn’t trace the money the unemployed received. It vanished like Robespierre.

William stood in the Anzac Day crowd wearing his Granddad’s Vietnam service medals. The old men and women doddered past. A few sat in cars and wheel chairs. The sun poked its head out from behind a cloud, and blasted the parade with phosphorescent brightness. While the economy hiccupped and farted back to life, property prices continued to fall and he was happy. This wasn’t schadenfreude. He’d found a woman. Melody was no princess. She was hungry for him, which was baffling. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a rodent with a long nose and beady eyes. But helping Robespierre had re-ordered his organs, welded steel to his spine and made his realise, his life was not meaningless. A small cog played a part. Melody looked at the medals on his chest, smiled and squeezed his hand.