I don’t know what part Magic Valley played in my life but I know without it, it would be like a jigsaw with a piece missing. You’ve seen people like Mad Mike and Sweet Suzette, the sole residents of the valley. Their hippy garb and faie ways date them from an era long gone or from a time that may come again. They were children of the earth, no matter how troubled that earth may be.

Suzette walked out of a Rossetti painting, beautiful and enchanting. Not a creature born to walk on concrete or to have her days parsed in to hours and minutes. Mad Mike’s fiery red beard and blue eyes imagined the buccaneer Captain Kidd. He wore a cornflower blue neckerchief to town, which he’d adjust in the windows of the social security office as he lodged his dole form. His finger nails were black from tilling the rich alluvial soil. When I first met them, I saw an Adam and Eve before the Fall.

Their renovated settler’s cottage squatted on government land. They planted veggies, installed water tanks and grew marijuana. Suzette held séances before a roaring fire in the dead of night. Pipes of hash passed around the circle and then Suzette sang folk songs on her guitar. Sounded like hippy bullshit to me.

I was in the middle of one of those terrible yearning phases. I’d just turned 20 and I wanted to be a writer but the words sat in my head like frogs on a log. My bedroom was full of books I’d stolen from libraries and bookshops. I thought reading Hemingway, Conrad and Lowry, would, by osmosis, make me a writer too or at least signal to young women that I was sensitive and well read. I was at turns arrogant and shy. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going.

I first met Brett when he got out of reform school. He had a list of minor convictions as long as his muscular arm. It was Spring and we’d just lodged our dole forms, when a small troupe of hippies walked towards us. Punk rock was all the rage and hippies were so yesteryear. Suzette wore a white gingham dress with a yellow scarf wrapped gypsy-style around her head. She looked Spanish and exotic and carried a guitar. Mike’s beard was threaded with black beads. He wore jodhpurs and a red t-shirt with a picture of Chairman Mao. Bouncing behind them on a pogo stick, was a stoned young man with dreadlocks who kept saying, “This is the night when kings in golden mail ride their elephants over the mountains!” A blue heeler called ‘Digger’ and a Staffordshire terrier called ‘Timothy Leary’, trotted beside them.

As they approached the social security office, with unemployment benefit forms fanning their faces, pogo boy cupped his hands and made a trumpet sound, as if heralding the arrival of royalty. Mike adjusted his neckerchief, held Suzette’s hand and they walked through the automatic doors.

“Who was that?” Brett said, meaning Suzette.

A hand-written invitation from Mike and Suzette appeared in the letterbox a month later. A dice was affixed to the card. It was a dinner invitation to Magic Valley and I could bring a friend. Mike had read some of my music reviews and poetry in the underground press and he wanted to meet me. The card said attendance was optional but if I rolled the dice and it came up ‘six’, they would expect me at 8.00pm. I looked at the dice. All the sides of the dice were sixes. Brett invited himself. I knew he would.

xxxxxxx

We pushed started ‘Creature’, my old Triumph Herald, as Brett rolled joints in the passenger seat. We both wore black t-shirts, black jeans and boots. Hardly hippy regalia. Past the old Horsnell quarry, we took a dirt track. On our right ran a small stream. Watercress and daffodils grew on its banks. To the left, we followed a corrugated track as it hugged a long granite ridge which delivered us to a valley. We followed the stream and took an overgrown dirt road through eucalypts and lines of olive and apple trees. On a slight rise stood a blue stone cottage, the type settlers lived in 150 years ago. We parked on the verge with the other cars and motorbikes. Behind the cottage, lay two acres of vegetable and berry crops. Mike waved at us from the verandah.

“Where do you think the dope crops are?” Brett asked.

“Far from prying eyes,” I said.

I parked Creature on a small hill as Mike made his way to us.

“Christ” Mike said, “you guys must go to the same tailor.”

He shook Brett’s hand quickly and I realised I was meant to bring a woman.

The other guests were dressed as ghouls, vampires and zombies. It was a Halloween party. I hadn’t read the invitation. The young women were well groomed ‘alternative bohemian’ types not long out of university. I had seen one of them doing laps at the local swimming pool. She wore Doc Marten boots, black stockings, a red mini skirt with plastic spiders hanging from the hem and an old Blue Nile t-shirt, with the sleeves cut off.

The cottage was one large room with a cobbled stone floor. A long table with chairs ran down the middle and stained glass windows over looked the valley. One wall of the cottage was covered with Mike’s books. On the other hung Suzette’s paintings, which sampled Marc Chagall’s famous flying goat pictures, except that in her case, it looked as if the goat had painted them.

Mike pulled my chair next to him and for the next hour, fired questions about my writing, which he answered himself.

“I bet you were first influenced by Conrad. Everyone of your type is…”

“I very much liked Lord Jim…”

“Of course, and then you went on to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and all of those guys…”

“Yes, I did but I made a few detours with Wilde, Jack London and Virginia Woolf. I liked Rimbaud but don’t think I understood…”

“Can you image Woolf and Jack London getting it on? That Bloomsbury refinement defiled on a bearskin rug in the Klondike?”

“Well, he would have appreciated her surname…”

Brett sat opposite Suzette and was taking a liquid dinner of beer with shots of whiskey. His mouth was open, giving the impression he wasn’t quite right in the head.

As the sun set, Mike lit five large pillar candles. Frankenstein’s monster turned on an old reel-to-reel tape player on the verandah and the thumping bass of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” bounced down the valley.

The party moved outside to a large bonfire. Suzette danced through a sea of zombies, headless horsemen and nurses covered in blood, doling out hash cakes from a wicker basket. Even though the forest was tinder dry, no one cared about bushfires. One hour later, no one cared about anything. I jumped in to the dancing witch’s cauldron and whirled around the bonfire with Digger and Timothy Leary barking at my heels. Brett and Suzette had vanished. The red mini-skirted spider woman pulled me from the circle.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something”

We walked to the top of a hill. The party looked so small under a bruised purple sky. The fire flickered against the white bark of the ghost gums.

“I’ve seen you at the pool,” I said.

“I’ve seen you too,” she said. “I’m Rachel, Suzette’s sister”

She placed a small microdot of acid in the palm of my hand.

“Let’s go travelling. You seem game,” she said.

I placed the acid on my tongue and washed it down with warm cider. I took my t-shirt off and laid it on the wet grass for her to sit on, such is the power of a private school education. We lay together for hours or days and watched the shooting stars. I can’t remember what we talked about or if we talked at all. We were still awake the next morning as a kookaburra laughed in the distance. We put our clothes on and made our way down the hill.

Brett sat by himself at the bonfire. Bodies littered the ground with old grey army surplus blankets thrown over them. A young Dracula was heaving up last night’s cider. We walked to Creature. Brett kept his head down.

“Big night?” I asked.

“Fucking unbelievable,” he said. “Me and Suzette go for a walk after dinner, through the apple trees and up to the water tanks. They’ve got acres of tomatoes, lettuces, beans, you name it. She tells me how they’re trying to live simply. Then fucking right in front of me, there’s 200 dope plants about a metre and a half high. Un-fucking-believable.”

“I’m presuming Mike doesn’t know anything about you and Suzette going for a stroll hand-in-hand, through his million-dollar dope crop. They don’t call him Mad Mike for nothing”

Brett lit a cigarette as we drove slowly down the track.

The last traces of LSD percolated through my body. The morning sun was warm and rejuvenating. In my peripheral vision, the sun’s corona, bubbled and flared.

“There’s something else,” Brett said.

“It’s real early. I don’t need graphic details”

“She kissed me and it wasn’t just a kiss. It was a real kiss.”

We drove in silence but I could hear Brett’s mind grind through the gears of possibility.

xxxxxxxx

On the first day of summer, I got a job reshelving books in the public library. The older women treated me like a child with a learning disorder. It was as a small irony that I should work amongst the very items I was so fond of stealing.

I drove Brett up to Magic Valley one hot morning. I stopped Creature to refill the radiator by the creek. Two bikies riding Harley Davidsons roared past. They wore the patches of the Doom Disciples, a local gang who specialised in small time thuggery and drug dealing.

We pulled up in the front of the cottage and saw Suzette stabbing her finger in to the chest of one of the men. I’d seen the bikies before. Chris and Dion DeAngelis. Chris acted tough but his passion was motor cycle racing. Dion was another matter. He’d done four years for rape and was a stand over man for various criminal gangs.

“We want ten per cent of the crop,” Dion said.

“What crop?” Mike said with a smile.

Dion smashed his fist in to Mike’s face. Suzette grabbed Dion’s hair and pulled it with all her might until his palm caught her under her chin. She fell to the ground then crawled over to where a tomahawk leaned by the front door. Brett walked on to the verandah and stood in front of Suzette, his hands raised.

“We don’t want trouble,” Brett said, his voice, cool and relaxed. “We’re just putting in a hard day’s work for a fair days pay.”

“Who the fuck are you, Noddy?” Dion said.

“I’m the Prince of Peace,” Brett said.

Dion laughed, looked at Chris, made the loco sign around his head and walked back to his bike laughing.

Dion lunged towards Suzette just as Brett picked up the tomahawk and smashed the flat end in to his forehead. He fell to his knees. Suzette grabbed a shotgun from the cabin, stood over him and levelled it at his face.

“You come here again and you’re fucking dead,” she hissed.

xxxxxxxx

The Burngum Memorial Swimming pool was packed with kids. The pool had windows in the walls so you could watch people swimming. Brett called them ‘Perve Portholes’. The sun beat down on the lawn, forcing the bees to shelter under the eaves of the toilet block. Every summer, you’d hear screams from kids as they stepped on a bee. I threw my towel on the lawn and looked through one of the windows. A sea of legs, large and small, kicked the water. Then a woman in one of the swimming lanes, put her face to the glass and blew me a bubble kiss.

As I swam towards Rachel, I got a feeling of déjà vu. That at some time in my past, I was swimming towards a young woman with black hair, who was was asking me a question. I sensed some great event had taken place and I was on the other side of it.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” she said. “I wondered where you’d got to”

“The life of a casual assistant librarian is full of thrills,” I said treading water. “But be sure, not a moment has passed without me thinking of you”

She laughed, splashed water on my face and took off to do another lap. She swam with effortless grace, while I struggled to keep up.

“Can I ask you something?” she said as we reached the shallow end.

“Of course”

“Is Brett trustworthy? Mike is an arsehole but at least she knows where she is with him,” Rachel said. “My sister looks like she stepped out of Woodstock but she doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

“Can Suzette trust him? Yes. Can Mike trust him? No”

She stopped towelling her hair and kissed me.

“I like a man who gives an honest two word answer,” she said.

We lay on her towel and ate two packets of jelly babies. I watched as an ant made its way to the dead body of a bee, which had lost its sting. Maybe buried in the foot of a howling toddler.

xxxxxxx

A hot north wind blew from the desert. Mike lay in bed with a migraine and a wet flannel across his eyes. There was nothing he could say to stop Brett and Suzette taking the fruit and vegetables to market. It needed to be refrigerated. Suzette kissed him on the forehead and said she’d be back by 5.00pm. She was going to see an old school friend who was selling jewellery. She’d be later than usual.

“Okay, to pass the time,” she said to Brett, climbing in to the passenger seat, “I’m going to teach you Frere Jacques”

“You’re shitting me?”

Suzette had her fingers up in the air as if conducting an orchestra. The passenger window was down and the hot wind blew her hair back. Her eyes were smiling but she meant business. Either sing Freres Jacques or suffer arctic silence in the truck on the hottest day of the year.

Brett sang with a gusto that surprised him. He sang as if there was no other moment as important as singing a stupid French song with the most beautiful woman in the world. He opened the driver’s side window and sang it loud as they passed a group of school girls sneaking a cigarette during lunch; they sang it in two part harmony to an old lady sitting in her Morris Minor at the traffic lights. By the time they got to the market, they were laughing hysterically.

“Do you want a lift back to the farm?” Brett said.

“No. I’m going to visit a friend. I’ll hitch hike up later.”

Suzette smiled, blew him a kiss and walked towards the exit.

xxxxxxxx

Rachel’s mobile rang on my bedside table at 7.00 on a hot Saturday morning. She stirred and flung an arm over me, picked up the phone and put it on speaker.

“For Christ’s sake, Mike”

“Suzette is missing. She’s not with Brett, is she?”

I could hear the fear in Mike’s voice. I pictured him sitting on that King size bed alone.

“No. Brett’s asleep on the couch,” Rachel said. Rachel got up and shook Brett awake.

“Has Suzette called you?”

“No. I figured she hitched back up to Magic Valley after I dropped her at the market.”

Rachel dressed quickly, ran out the front door and roared up the street on her motorbike.

Brett made tea and we sat at the kitchen table amongst a sea of empty beer bottles and full ashtrays. We drove in to town. No one had seen her. We drove back to the house and Suzette was sitting on the front porch, barefoot with a bruised left eye. Her nose was broken. Brett put his arms around her but she pushed him away.

“Jesus, what the fuck happened?” Brett said. She rose unsteadily to her feet.

She walked slowly to the bathroom, closed the door and took a 20 minute shower. I laid fresh clothes on a rack outside the bathroom and made her a pot of tea.

She sat with a white towel wrapped around her hair. Brett paced up and down in front of her.

“Suzette, I need to know, are you OK?”

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. Trying to work out whether she liked him.

“Who did this to you?”

“Dion”

“The mother fucker, I’ll kill him.”

“Too late. What I really need is for everyone to back off,” she said. “First of all, I need to see Mike. I suggest you don’t come, darling boy. Mike can be unpredictable.”

“I’m coming,” Brett said.

“Paul, can I borrow Creature?” Suzette asked.

As we pushed the car out of the drive, fire sirens went off in the foot hills. It was a low, eerie whoop whoop. Ten years ago, a large fire roared down the valley and in to the suburbs where the doctors and lawyers lived. TV news showed their Mercedes Benz’s and BMW’s burning on slate drive ways.

I watched them drive away. I looked down and my left hand was trembling.

xxxxxxx

Mike isn’t going to be that happy to see you,” Suzette said. “He’ll think we slept together. Let me do the talking”

Mike was sitting on a chair with a pair of binoculars. Lying on the table was the shotgun. The scent of smoke was thick.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Mike said. “My lover returned safely to me by her lover. How cosy. Writer boy phoned me with some details. Kidnapped? Pull the other one.”

Mike picked up the shotgun, flicked off the safety switch and pointed it at Brett’s chest.

“I didn’t like you when I first met you and I sure as shit don’t like you now.”

“Put the gun down, Mike,” Suzette said quietly. “I need to talk to you alone.”

Mike took the shotgun with him as he walked with Suzette up the hill.

Brett threw some of her clothes in an old canvas rucksack, got her guitar and stowed them in the backseat of Creature. He grabbed a large green garbage bag and made his way through the forest. He threw the garbage bag in the boot as Suzette returned to the car.

“How did that go?” Brett asked.

“As good as can be expected. Drive.”

xxxxxxxx

They left with the clothes on their back, one rucksack, a guitar and eight kilos of freshly picked marijuana. I gave Brett the keys to Creature and $500. Suzette kissed me on the cheek and I waved them goodbye.

The following Wednesday was a public holiday. A fire roared through Magic Valley and tore in to the eastern suburbs. Smoke, sirens and water bombers filled the air. I was swimming with Rachel at the Burngum pool as ash settled on the lawn. The news said a well-known criminal, Dion De Angeles, was found stabbed to death in his home. Police were investigating, but as the story intimated, not very hard.

Rachel said they’d made it to Melany and were picking fruit. Suzette got a job playing guitar and singing in a pub. I was amazed Creature had taken them so far.

Mike, the dogs and the dope crop disappeared. I still think of him wandering around looking like a pirate, thrown in to a world of strangers, carrying his memories of Suzette.

As I swam towards Rachel, I saw a child being carried to the first aid station with a bee sting. Déjà vu swept over me.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

I missed Brett and my heart had softened for dreamers.