For David Ireland

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 are 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 while staring at the sun, 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 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 HECS-Fee scam and 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 with a drop-dead face gorgeous face. 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 media spotlight and blamed me for the $1.2 billion ripped from the pockets of its elderly clients. Where was the love? 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 her 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. 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 and his beer-n-pie paunch has its own post code. He’d been trying to upskirt her by the garage door for a month.

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, Kat Hugga was 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, they thought like the captain of the Titanic, to go full speed 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. No way out. I make the appropriate hmmm and ‘yes’ sounds because 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 gums in an audition for a new reality TV show, I’m sitting on my lounge room floor surrounded by IKEA bookshelf parts. The instructions look like they’ve 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 Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, 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, who hosts 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, he thinks. 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, who don’t stop. 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, he falls to the road.

There should be a name for the silence after an act of extreme violence. The 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, cuff him and gently place the Cackling Enabler on the back seat. Be careful of your head one cop says then secures his seat belt. 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 be the post facto anal dripping of 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 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.