Jimmy was a mid-60s, six foot string bean with long silver dreads who loitered around the entrance of Woolworths calling people ‘fucking pricks’ and ‘scum sucking motherfuckers’.

The police moved him on but back he’d come with the delight of a dog returning to a bone. Since the factories on the industrial estate closed down, packs of young men would kick the shit of him. Jimmy highlighted the bruises with black Texta, turning him in to a burlesque clown from the Weimar Republic. Every town has a lunatic and Jimmy was ours.

Women shoppers walked nervously past him carrying their green reusable shopping bags. Jimmy would sidle up to them and whisper like a heroin dealer, “pssst, you want some of Woolie’s finest? You chasin’ tomatoes? Real cheap. Shoot ‘em up in the car park.”

The women stared straight ahead. To engage him in conversation was suicide.

“You’re a real nice lady. I can get you a kilo of Columbian roasted coffee. Chop it up on a mirror, darling. Make every day like Friday night.”

Jimmy brought a new dimension of running with the bulls at Pamplona. He called it ‘Running with the Sheep’. He’d wait until the busiest time, usually a Saturday morning, strip naked and cover himself with old wollen seat covers and Ugg boots and then tear around the shoppers, bleating his head off.

“Baaaaaa, baaaah, baaaaah, you fucking morons, baaaaaaaah!”

Kelpies and blue heelers in cars and utes went beserk. The police took longer to arrive on a Saturday morning as they’d have a leisurely brunch with their radios off at the beach cafe. Packs of children ran around Jimmy screaming, ‘Baaaaaaa, baaaaaah, baaaaaaaah’ with Jimmy screaming, “Get some bargains, baaaaaaaa, buy shit cheap, baaaaaaaaah!” and the parents yelling, “Anthony, Patricia, Nancy, for Christ’s sake, how many times have I told you to leave the God-damn loony alone?” You could hear it 200 metres away at Liquorland.

Woolworths hired Ajay, a young and newly qualified security guard, to keep Jimmy away. He had the requisite cropped hair and muscles but his uniform made him look like a bus driver. Ajay spent much of the day feeding treats to the local dogs. Jimmy gave him a photoshopped nude picture of Bollywood beauty, Alia Bhatt.

“How you get this?”

Jimmy smiled and tapped his nose.

As Ajay stared at Ms Bhatt’s charms, Jimmy picked a small black dog pawing Ajay’s shoes and thrust it skywards yelling, “Kunta Kinta, Black Prince of Africa!” He put the confused dog down and walked up to Mrs Delia Cranford-Jones, the red headed treasurer of the local Country Womens Association, who looked like a handsome horse, and recommended a cure for ‘penis breath’. Mrs Cranford-Jones slapped him hard and was going to hit him again when he did his Muhammad Ali dance and sang, ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’. He knew all the words. She looked at Ajay ogling Ms Bhatt and sprinted in to Woolworths.

“Hey, Mrs Jones, ‘ere’s some advice. Why don’t you pull your labia over your head and make a redback spider out of yourself?”

The police arrived, bundled Jimmy in to the back seat and drove him 40 kilometres out of town. It would take him the rest of the day to walk back.

Jimmy lived with his old mum in Bedown Street, not far from Woolies. I’d see him in the mornings as I drove to work, sitting on the fence, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He knew I’d served in Afghanistan and as my old Subaru chugged past, he’d stand to attention and salute. I’d salute back and mouth, ‘carry on’. I worked in construction and wrote poetry at night, more out of a psychological urge than a commitment to art. I’d had a couple of poems published in national magazines and Jimmy found out.

“Hey William Carlos Williams, I read your poems. They’re shit! Stick to construction!”

Jimmy went for the soft under belly but in a coastal town where 97 per cent of the population were vanilla white with a deep distrust of the new or different, he was a crazy red squiggle on the canvas of life.

Just before Christmas, Woolworths installed a new manager. Kevin Beauregard came with a reputation for getting things done. He told the deli workers to work two hours a week unpaid overtime. The trolley jockeys had to help unload the bags in to customer’s cars and keep the store full of trolleys. Rest breaks for checkout operators were cut from 15 minutes to ten. He wanted to be called Mr Beauregard in private but Kevin in public. Kevin was a Napoleon of the fast moving consumer goods world.

Sigrud Clarke ran the local bookshop which carried a large selection of female writers from Mary Shelley to Hilary Mantel. Every third Friday night, the Big Sister’s bookclub run by Sigrud, met to discuss the latest novels over wine, cheese and dips. While opinions varied as to the literary merit of a book, the tacit consensus was that reading made one a better person. Stories told by women predominantly for women were unique in their textured sadness, intensity and profundity, even when they oozed self-pity and righteousness.

It was a brilliant Saturday morning when Sigrud – hungover from last night’s reading of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ – locked her shoulder length steel grey hair in a purple scrunchy and set forth to Woolies with her ‘Handmaiden’s Tale’ shopping bag. She saw Jimmy out of the corner of her eye, pissing on the rear wheel of a black BMW in the car park, and walked quickly to the entrance.

“Hey Gertrude Stein, did ya hit the wine?” Jimmy yelled. “You’re still lookin’ fine but I reckon if you spent less time reading and enjoyed the things that make your back arch, you’d be better off. Just sayin’. Where’s Alice B?”

“Fuck off, Jimmy”

“Many of the writers you flog are perpetually reclining into a solipsistic relationship with their own affliction, as if about to faint on a couch. But what the hell would I know? I’m just an XY chromosome.”

Sigrud used the bookshops’s display windows and Facebook page to alert browsers to the appalling conditions refugees endured on Manus Island, the appalling state of Indigenous Health and the appalling state of domestic violence against women. What really appalled Sigrud was Jimmy.

“Look Sieg Heil, the real world is outside,” Jimmy said. “Reading is middle class frottage for women with too much time on their hands. Want adventure? Learn to shoot, take up sailing, learn to surf or box. You won’t have time to think of yourself as a victim.”

Sigrud called the cops and said Jimmy was waving his penis at her and could they take him for drive. Two minutes later Jimmy sat handcuffed in the back seat of the patrol car. They dropped him 60 kilometres away.

I picked him up 35 kilometres out of town.

“Hey, it’s the gun toting poet,” he said as he jumped in to the passenger seat of the Subaru. “I normally don’t accept lifts from trained killers but my feet are killing me.”

We sat in silence for 10 minutes when he pulled a Golden Rough chocolate from his old green combat jacket and gave me half.

“I like Peppermint Patties best,” he said, “but Golden Roughs are good too”

Jimmy wound down the window as a kindness. He smelt. He adjusted the side mirror so he could see the wind blowing through his dreads.

Old Ray Stone died of a heart attack last month. He ran the fish n chip shop on the hill with his wife, Tanya. Married 50 years. He’d sometimes chuck in a ten dollar note amongst the dum sims for Jimmy. At the funeral, Jimmy comes up to Nancy and says, “No day will erase Ray from the memory of time,” and walks away, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket.

“Hey mate, I’ve got a question,” I said as I washed down the stale chocolate with water.

“Shoot, killer”

“At Ray’s funeral you quoted a line from The Aeneid. How did you know that?”

“How did you know it was from The Aeneid?”

“Studied it at Duntroon”

“After the shooting women and children lecture?”

People said when Jimmy was in his mid 20s, he fell in love with a woman who broke his heart and never got over it. He came home from teaching one day and she was gone. No inkling. No note. He spent two years looking for her, from the cane fields of North Queensland to Albany in Western Australia. He moved back in with his Mum.

Others said his Dad chucked him headfirst against a wall when he was a toddler. Spent six weeks in hospital. Never quite the same. His Dad took off. No one really knew what happened to Jimmy. He was just different. I dropped him at his Mum’s house, my questioned unanswered.

“Just one more question, Jimmy,” I asked. “The sheep performance on Saturday mornings. Any hints?”

“Check out ‘The Exterminating Angel’. The lift was a cracker. Thanks a lot Albert Jacka,” and he walked down the driveway rubbing his lower back. The cops had stuck the boot in.

xxxxxxx

Jimmy’s mum died in the early hours of a cold June morning. No funeral. No memorial. He disappeared for a month after the bank sold his mum’s house. With her debts and bills, there was nothing left. Someone saw him picking oysters off the reef at low tide. He’d secretly taken up residence in one of the large steel recycling bins for cardboard boxes out the back of Woolies. The deli women and bakers fed him ham and bread. The checkout girls at the end of the nightshift would chuck him a family block of fruit n nut chocolate.

When the cannery closed, people started bartering and growing their own veggies. Woolworth’s monthly take nosedived. If Kevin didn’t turn sales around in six months he’d be history. He gathered a war chest by secretly underpaying the staff.

Spring sprung on a glorious September morning as a light offshore breeze blew. The scent of frangipani hung heavy in the air. Kevin bought $10,000 of fruit and veggies and laid it on pallets in the the car park, with a large yellow and green sign saying ‘free food’. Ajay roped off the area and tried to shoo the dogs away. Hearts and wallets would be bought through charity. People flocked like seagulls.

The big city TV media helicoptered in as it was a slow news day and a ‘feel good’ news story would be perfect for Sunday night. Kevin walked from the entrance and stood with a megaphone on a small wooden nectarine crate as the cameras rolled and the reusable green shopping bags rustled.

“Welcome my friends. I know you came here for peaches, not speeches. Ha Ha. So I’ll keep it short. In hard times, in tough times, we have to stick together. That’s why Woolworths (quick nod to the regional manager) has dug deep, put its shoulder to the wheel and provided the town’s consumers with a delicious, and free range of fruit and vegetables. It’s free because Woolworths knows that in tough times, in hard times, it’s customers are the real bottom line and what is the bottom line? It’s love”

The media lapped it up. No need to ask any questions. Kevin said it all. The newspaper reporters made a mental note to check the spelling of Beauregard. The cameras rolled and clicked amongst the hand clapping when a voice rose from the back of the crowd.

“Hey Kev-baby, you gunna pay the staff back for this spread?”

The crowd parted and tried to move up wind as Jimmy walked through them. Kevin looked for Ajay but he was busy trying to stop a large black Labrador from humping his leg.

“This fruit and veggie feast was paid through wage theft,” Jimmy shouted. “He ripped the money out of your son’s and daughter’s pay packets”

The bakers, deli and night fill staff yelled over each other: “too fucking right”, “ripped off”, “treated like shit”.

Kevin ignored them. “That’s bullshit, you god-damn whacko,” Kevin said. “The best part of you ran down your father’s leg”

Jimmy crafted a beatific smile, held his arms out wide and wrapped them around Kevin’s legs. “Daddy!” he cried as a Jack Russell terrier attached itself to Kevin’s ankle.

Ajay undid the ropes and the crowd descended on the pallets leaving only a packet of Brussel Sprouts. Kevin fled to his office as the regional manager parried a barrage of questions.

The story broke nationally and Kevin Beauregard was given four weeks notice.

xxxxxxxxx

It was Sunday night and the day trippers had left. Jimmy’s minor celebrity status lasted two weeks. The charity shop gave him a pillow, a bed sheet and a torch. The real pay off was the TV and print exposure for the town. People wanted to see Jimmy but he spent most of his days spear fishing and at night, he’d make his bed in the dumpster. One of the checkout girls heard him whistling an old Beatles tune as she walked past after closing time, as she headed for her car. It was a clear night with sea mist forecast in the morning.

No one really knows what happened. The cops say at least two men, probably locals, poured four litres of petrol in to the dumpster, threw a match and put a bike lock on the lid so it couldn’t be opened. Ajay and his dogs found what was left of Jimmy in the morning. His charred remains curled up like a foetus. The torch was still on. He’d been reading the passage in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ about how, “she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of a child; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago…”

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I don’t know if time is a river or an arrow. All I know is that on a Wednesday afternoon at 3.05pm, in the bowling club, you can hear the tick of the second hand of the clock mounted on a large wooden salmon above the bar. Jimmy was dead a year. No funeral. No memorial. A few people laid flowers against the old burnt out dumpster. A couple of cards. Sitting there drinking with a few mates, also unemployed, we got talking about Jimmy. Remembering the time he got his picture on page one of the local paper, cuddling a lamb outside the local Liberal Member’s office. Jimmy told the reporter that the interests of voters would be better served by voting for the lamb instead of the resident fuckwit in the office behind him. The reporter didn’t print the word ‘fuckwit’ but readers knew what he meant.

Remembering the time Jimmy entered the local surfing competition who surprised the crowd by making it through to the semifinals. Or the time Tim Fraser, the local pedophile, tried to haul little Nancy Carlyle in to his car and Jimmy stopped him. Fraser thought Jimmy would be an easy victory and then Jimmy danced and danced and with a right hand from hell, broke Fraser’s jaw and knocked him out.

“Down goes Fraser!” Jimmy yelled, “Down goes Fraser!”

The stories and laughter went on for 20 minutes. Our bellies heaving, wiping eyes, remembering the batshit things he said and did. Then we fell silent and ordered another round and the clock took over. It beat like a pulse and we shared an unspoken thought in that silence. We didn’t know Jimmy at all.