Gasoline trees

[2004]

Californian mornings that dawn in sleep and don't get going for several hours, grey-hazed gritty and surprisingly cool for so-called summer, the sense that the whole of America has emerged and stretched and farted and been on-the-move for hours, and thus everything feels half-past done, half-over before the day here has even begun.

Mark Reynolds is driving through the hills near San Diego and he swears it could be Australia. There's trees here that remind him of so much home that he keeps thinking about the old days before any of this "famous" shit. Driving up the coast with Budgie and Samantha, going on surfing trips. Hasn't spoken to Budgie in years. Wouldn't know where the heck that guy is. Last he heard he was mixed up with some property development scam out at Maroubra. Legal matters, drugs? Probably. Something too about being a disc jockey. He couldn't say. Samantha had got on at Qantas, a flight attendant. Last he saw of her was on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne while promoting Last Line Of Defence. She was busy working. They promised to catch up. His schedule saw him soon forget that commitment. He lost her number. He had his eyes on the prize. The film was set for a well-plotted Oscar campaign. He wanted it bad. An Oscar. Sam was only on Qantas Domestic. Mark never saw her on his runs back to LA. He always flew Qantas. He made a point of it.

Marti viewed this as a pain in the freaking ass but what are ya gonna do with this guy? Like he's the star, what can I say? I'm just the agent that's all, you don't argue with Mark Reynolds, I'm here to tell you. Not many people did, nor did they laugh about this quaint bit of patriotism. Least not to his face. You could pretty much kiss your career in the industry goodbye if you did that. The guy has enough star power to light freaking Melrose Avenue and if you screw him around and get on the wrong side of him he can have you made persona non grata quicker than you can say 'where did my two front teeth go?' You'll be wishing he never did the training and got that part in The Killer Punch, that's a promise. Behind his back of course, everyone laughs at the guy. How can you not? Let's face it, he can't act. But then how can you explain his success? How can you explain three box office blockbusters and two Academy Award nominations?

Mark notices the land even smells like Australia. He lifts his Ray Bans to look closer as he drives his Pathfinder through the bends near Scripps Ranch north of San Diego. They might be gum trees? But aren't gum trees Australian? What are they doing here then (if they are in fact gum trees)? And now that he thinks about it, aren't gum trees actually eucalypts and if he remembers correctly they bloody well are! Yes, he's sure that eucalypts are Australian because, well, it's just an Australian word. Like kangaroo or outback or boomerang or, well, a heap of others. Mark is busily thinking about all of this while driving along listening to Jack Johnson on his CD player.

Then he spots a small rest area beside the road, pale sunlight dappling the sticks and rocks and chocolate wrappers and old cans of Coke on the ground. On a whim that he would never usually allow himself to follow, he pulls over and turns the engine and CD player off. He leans his head over towards the dash and looks up at the trees rearing above the car. Hollywood's hottest rising star opens the door of his gun metal grey Pathfinder and steps out of the vehicle (a clever director would film this scene from the ground, Mark's boot hitting the bitumen with a flourish of knowing cliché).

The premiere of Last Line to the President, the second of the Last Line trilogy, will be held in a week at the Palais in LA. Interviews are all locked in. Right at that very moment, showbiz reporters from 20 countries are on their way to the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego for "exclusive" interviews. The distributor is making final preps for the film to be released in thousands of cinemas worldwide. Mark Reynolds will soon be the hottest star in the world, his face cemented in the consciousness of fans from Boston to Bangkok, from the Urals to Perth.

He walks over to the rough trunk of a California-thriving red ironbark. He reaches up and pulls down a thin low-hanging branch. He tears off a handful of leaves and brings them to his nose, rubbing them together in front of his face. The lemony spice of the eucalyptus oil rushes out, the molecules racing up his nostrils, zapping into his sinuses and shooting into his bloodstream like an injection. He is ripped without fanfare but with horrifying speed back to being a small-shouldered boy in his parent's first house out in Mudgee and then he is playing down by the river with Budgie and Marparttu and they are swinging from a tyre hung from the old river redgum and his father is firing up the barbeque on the bank somewhere out of sight and his mother is worrying about him and her urgent warnings of 'you be careful now' are ringing in his small cowlicked head and the colours are faded but bright: rinsed khakis and thrill-tint blues, mottled branch browns and flat yellows.

Then he is somewhere around the mid-north coast of New South Wales and it's a year or so after he and Budgie have moved to Sydney for uni and he's 17 and it's September and Mark and this girl Samantha he and Budgie have been hanging out with have managed to sneak back to the tent while Budgie is busy chatting to the group of four girls from Melbourne who have driven all the way to that isolated national park campground in a Datsun 120b with a burgeoning hole in the muffler and rust like acne in the door rims and he and Sam are buzzing after the day in the sun and with five beers apiece in their blood and then are being intoxicated by the damp nylon cut grass horny smell of the inside of every tent everywhere and finally they are getting it together and are rubbing and rubbing until their clothes come off and teenage Mark with teenage disbelief is actually doing it with Samantha and the bush outside is rustling softly in the seabreeze and they must keep quiet cos they don't want Budgie to know and this is what everyone has been talking about and finally Sam is sucking his neck and she smells of mint chewing gum and VB beer and Nivea after-sun crème and her smooth brown salt-tasting legs are wrapped around him and that's all imprinting itself on Mark's being and though he actually has no idea at the time, all this is combining to create the clutch of sensory things he'll carry with him for the rest of his life that he'll forever be looking for to switch him properly on and all this and a dozen dozen or more, memories and flashes are peeling inside him like onions and the eucalyptus is tingling out to his fingertips and swirling around and back and he's forgotten so much that he can't even remember what he's forgotten and all he knows now is that in his striving for something else he's lost something completely. It's gone, it's not his anymore because he didn't want it and when you don't want something it eventually leaves you even if it didn't actually want to.

The director filming this scene on the quiet roadway in the north of the country of San Diego, California, the United States of America, would notice Mark as he is physically jolted by all of this. He wouldn't be sure whether he should call "cut" or to keep filming as Mark drops down to his knees, then curls up foetal on the ground, crying and shaking uncontrollably, all the while with the handful of leaves still stuffed to his face like an oxygen mask.

No-one can say how long Mark lays there for. It feels like afternoon when he staggers back to his Pathfinder, feeling like a part of his mind has been removed. He still looks like the same hot upcoming actor as he was however many minutes or hours ago but now as he looks at his eyes in the rear view mirror he is a ship holed beneath the water line. He starts the engine and begins to drive, his clothes and hands still smelling of eucalyptus.

The End

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A slice of paradise

[2003]

Come to the Bolloboman Islands, the Pacific's 'Garden of Eden'!
- Bollobomon Islands Tourist Board advertisement, 1988.

On his second day as a cleaner at the Bollobomon Islands Consulate in Canberra, Lazar Strumze got an inkling of the way of things. And he quickly twigged to keep mum. He was lucky to have any darn job at all, let alone one as respectable as at the Consulate. He didn't want to blow it. He knew that when a man was not supposed to know something but did, that man was wise to, as they said at home on Pairofa, keep his coconuts in his tree. And there his sat. There was the family to think of, after all.
Lazar first came to Australia as an employee of Mr Trinidad Duncan. He was his gopher, his right hand man. Sure, it was donkey work but if you were in Mr Duncan's employ the Bollobomans – and a good share of the world – were your oyster.
When Mr Duncan copped the scoop of a bulldozer on his head and promptly died, Lazar knew his future on the Bollobomons would be difficult. As a bloon-too, a non-landowner, he and his family were basically up a cormorant shit heap without a pair of shoes. Mr Duncan may have been the Johnny-Boy of the phosphate millionaires but he was also widely regarded as an asshole. Thus Lazar, like a whole host of other bloon-too employees, could expect few favours on his home islands and so, with his family, left for Oz. He got the job at the Consulate a week later.

Georgia Blackmore played in Bloon-Koonui Lagoon for half the afternoon before getting out saying, my ear's hurting. Hurting is it? her father Russell said and threw a resort towel over her shoulders, walking her off down the pebblecrete path to the bures. They thought nothing more of it. Georgia and her brother Jimmy were placed in the shower. They emerged scrubbed up like two polished buttons.

The Bollobomon Islands sat like a fist-shaped puncture in the mid-Pacific. For miles there was nothing but the foamy chop of the ocean and then, out of nowhere, the Bollobomans sprang. It was this remoteness to which the islands owed their existence. For if it wasn't for thousands of years of exhausted Big Beaked cormorants landing on what was initially a few knobs of coral, then the Bollobomons would never have come into being. That's right — the islands existed thanks to generations upon generations, layer upon squirted layer of, you guessed it, bird poo. And it was this bird shit which not only meant the Bollobomons existed but also that many Bollobomonians were worth millions.
This bird shit, you see, was no ordinary excrement.

Lazar, stooped over a mop, first got wind of something being up on his second day at the Consulate. There, in the Troost Room, he heard High Commissioner Roland Bloognoove in animated discussion with Mr Terence Napp, the Head of the Bollobomon Islands Tourist Board. They were red-faced and speaking in a hoarse whisper.

Lazar walked right into it. How the hell was he to know? The words phosphate and tourists and poisoning and bloot-ooved seeped out of the room. It wasn't Lazar's fault he was cleaning the adjacent amenities at the time, no siree. But if there was one thing he'd learnt in his time in the employ of Mr Duncan it was the value of being discreet. So Lazar discreetly ensconced himself in the linen closet until the two men wound up their confab.

A rare combination of factors - mainly the fact that for centuries the islands were the sole breeding ground of the Big Beaked cormorant and that this species of cormorant's poo was the most phosphate-rich source known - meant that the Bollobomonians were sitting on a piece of real estate every phosphate mining company in the world wanted their mitts on.
After the phosphate stockpiles were revealed in 1919 by an American businessman, there was a free-for-all on the four Bollobomons. The phosphate mining companies came in droves, the landowners at first suspicious and then, after the delights of cash had made them malleable, fell over themselves to blavia, or sell-up, their lands. But in 1984, as the islands got ever smaller, the Big Administration put a moratorium on mining.
This was against the wishes of the then head of the Phosphate Commission, a young gun named Hammar Polites. He wanted mining to continue for the fiscal good of the people but was over-ruled by then President Alfred Bloont. The damage, however, had been done; the upshot being that almost a third of Pairofa, close to a half of Pairova, three-quarters of Bloovia and the entirety of Bollobia were no longer.
It was in 1984 also that the Big Administration, at the instigation of President Bloont, greenlighted tourism as a way of replacing the money earned from mining. And they did well with it. A real money-spinner. But there was a problem which was to emerge.

As the entrée of elaborately-stacked prawns was placed on the table, Georgia scrunched her nose up and said my ear still hurts. Heaps.
After dinner, the family attended the Food and Dance Display (With Warriors). The pool attendants and bar staff donned grass skirts and painted their chests black. Georgia felt her ear quiver and, as a local man dressed as a ragged sailor raised a flag to the air, Georgia fell softly to the sand holding her head, no-one noticing amid the exciting island scenes.

What made the Bollobomans truly unique was that, instead of being settled as part of the great migration of peoples across the Pacific, they were left untouched. Oh they were seen by these migrating masses alright but they were seen for exactly what they were — piles of bird shit. What self-respecting chief was going to say to his people; 'Okay, this is the spot; it is here where we make our future, here, here on these mounds of shit'? In such a manner the islands were bypassed for centuries.
Indeed it was only in 1707 that someone first called the Bollobomons home. This was the Dutch merchant Gerit Troost, who guided his leaking ship the Leviathan into Pairofa inlet one bright day. Within 20 years, all sorts of wandering travellers had made the Bollobomons home. Among them were Lutheran missionaries, Portuguese pirates, English poets, Timorese midwives, Fijian woodcarvers and Italian musicians, the last two of which Lazar was a descendant. This eccentric bunch melded together under the tropical sun in a fairyland of richness, the land bursting with fruit and a wild array of other vegetation. Back then, even the Big Beaked cormorant still visited the place.
By the time Lazar was born, the Big Beaks had long since disappeared. By then the only thing anyone cared about was that the shit from the birds was connected to why all the miners had come. And why, also, anyone whose ancestors had managed to secure some land during the Big Blavia of 1919 was able to sit drinking white wine and soda spritzers on big balconies or jet off to Brizzy at the drop of a hat.
Unfortunately for Lazar, indeed for his whole bloodline, his grandfather, Guido Strumze, was out diving for bêche-de-mer on the day of the Big Blavia. He missed the whole thing. As man of the household, only Guido was allowed to make a land claim. Thus his whole family was condemned to live in as close as it came to poverty on the Bollobomons because they didn't own a square inch of the land the miners were paying such big bucks for.

After overhearing High Commissioner Bloognoove and Mr Napp, Lazar knew he'd been unwittingly privy to a big secret. But what could he do? Sure he was jealous of the wealth of many of his countrymen, but really, what difference would it make? The best thing for him to do was hold onto his job at all costs: thus, he zipped his lips.
And then, a few days later, as he Mr Sheened the parquetry in the vestibule, Lazar heard this:
We are terribly sorry she has become sick, but every test has made it clear we have no problem at all, really. The Bollobomons are the Pacific's Garden of Eden. Err, perhaps we can come and meet you? Perhaps we can make an arrangement, perhaps?
He hung up then dialed the President, Sir Hammar Polites. Hammar? the High Commissioner said abruptly. It's Bloognoove. Listen Hammar, our little problem. It's getting worse. Yes. We have five calls today alone. I am serious. We have five!
Five, you say? Lazar overheard Sir Hammer ask on speaker-phone breathing down the line from Pairofa.
Yes, replied High Commissioner Bloognoove. Five, just today.
The President asked if the press had got wind of it.
The High Commissioner told him that no, thank the goodness, the press had not heard a whisper of anything. The payments had been stepped-up and seemed to be working, thank the goodness.
The President asked what does Napp say? Is he concerned?
He is, the High Commissioner said. He is very much worried Sir. He says that if word gets out about poor little Tommy Bickfield then we'll be up a shit heap without shoes, Sir.
He's not wrong, the President said sternly. Bloognoove, we'll all be bloot-ooved if this gets out.

From the mid 70s to the early 80s Hammar Polites pulled the reins at the Phosphate Commission. Then came the wilderness years thanks to the imposition of the mining moratorium. By the time he eventually maneuvered his way to becoming President and earning his knighthood in 1987, however, tourism was booming so beautifully that he eased his push for mining resumption. But, boy, he did miss the sight of those great phosphate-laden ships pulling anchor…
If you wanted something done on the islands, Sir Hammar was the bloke to see. But, to sufficiently oil the wheels of procedure, he had groomed a coterie of people who all made sure that the best interests of the islands were cared for at every level.
For example, there was Dave Stencil, an Australian Vietnam vet, who stitched-up a bottler of a deal with the Queensland government to ensure that supplies of fresh water to the islands were shipped-in on a regular basis. No-one mentioned anything about contamination of the local lagoons or water supply during the whole deal and the payback came in the form of Pairofa's two resorts being open house for any Queensland politician, bureaucrat or anyone remotely connected to them. That's how things worked. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. No-one complained.

The Blackmore family took a bure right on the lagoon at the Gerit Palms. It was one of the best bures in the resort. But why wouldn't they take it? Russell Blackmore had done his bit back in Brisbane and this was the reward. Anything wrong with that?
But the holiday didn't pan out as expected and, when the family should have still been sipping fruit drinks at the Gerit's poolside bar, Georgia was laying in a hospital bed in Cairns with a skin-coloured bandage wrapped around her head. She watched people come and go, saw her parents talking at the end of her bed. But she couldn't hear a word. She was deaf as a post. A few days later a man came in and her parents looked like little schoolkids. This man, about as wide as a lounge chair, came over, smiled, patted her on the head and mouthed something at her.
He then walked over to her parents, gave them a smile and shook their hands, all of them nodding. After he left her mum and dad gave each other a hug, then came over and started mouthing something at her too.

Little Tommy Bickfield wasn't as fortunate as Georgia. The youngest child of Stuart and Jenny Bickfield, Tommy had been swimming in Bloon-Koonui Lagoon a month before Georgia took her earful of water.
Little Tommy, aged seven, lapped-up what appeared to be the shining clear waters of the lagoon. When he got out saying his head hurt, his mum thought it might just have been a bit of water in there. She wasn't to know it was the result of mining waste-product contamination; nobody was to know. Who would have thought that the water was polluted, that it was practically off-the-scale as far as toxicity went? And who would have thought that poor little Tommy would die so quietly and with such an innocent look on his face? Not Sir Hammar Polites for one.
He and a handful of aides had done a great job prior to that. Three hundred and forty-two eminently traceable sicknesses and yet the tourists kept coming in droves. Why upset the applecart?
No way: Lazar (by means of the wonderful acoustics of the linen closet) found out that the government had been paying off people left, right and centre. He discovered that they regularly threw hush money at victims. He found out they paid off scientists and doctors and commissioned studies that were so over-the-top that the World Swimming Association was one vote off holding the mixed pairs synchronised swimming championships in the lagoon.
But the case of poor little Tommy Bickfield nearly blew the whole thing wide open.

The day dawned strange for Lazar. He started work at 6am and soon after noticed the High Commissioner's car pull up, followed closely by the Presidential entourage, which had just arrived from the airport.
We're gone, High Commissioner Bloognoove nervously announced to Sir Hammar.
What do you mean? the President said.
We're stuffed, the High Commissioner said, voice shaking. We're … we're… God, Hammar, we're bloot-ooved!
Hold still man, the President said, be calm for goodness sake, what's happened?
The High Commissioner slid a newspaper across his desk and there, emblazoned on the front page of the Daily Herald, was the headline they'd been dreading:
Tot's death blamed on holiday dip
It was a disaster. The article, by Pacific Correspondent Rod Button, told the whole story of little Tommy, with a large photo of the lad playing soccer, captioned: 'Poor little Tommy Bickfield … dead after a holiday swim'. It mentioned suspected contamination of extensive areas of 'the place known as the Pacific's Garden of Eden' and said sources had indicated hundreds of people had taken seriously ill after holidaying on the Bollobomons.
By Christ! the President said. Have you spoken to this Button chap?
Got his number here, High Commissioner Bloonoove said, pushing a piece of paper hastily to Sir Hammar.
Button's a tough nut I must say I've heard, the High Commissioner croaked, eyes bloodshot.
But Button wasn't as hard a nut to crack as first thought. A hastily arranged visit to his Suva office by an entourage consisting of Sir Hammar, High Commissioner Bloognoove, and newly crowned Miss Bollobomon Islands, Veronica Singalong, soon won him over to their cause.
A day later Button wrote a story debunking every claim from his previous yarn and hinting that Stuart and Jenny Bickfield were now under police investigation for poisoning their son. But, as Lazar later found out, the Bickfields were happy to wear that suspicion thanks to the $US500,000 swiftly deposited into the family bank account.

When the High Commissioner arrived back from Suva he called a meeting of Consular staff.
Friends, he began, we know that we hold a unique place in the world. And we intend to keep it that way. People are saying some bad things and you must tell them it's not true. To reward you all in advance for abiding by this sentiment and continuing to tell the world how great the Bollobomons are, we hereby give you all a cash bonus of $100 plus a dinner for two at the restaurant of your choice.

When Georgia got out of hospital, she still couldn't hear. Russell wrote her a note saying everything is okay now. The wonderful people from the Bollobomon Islands have taken care of everything. We're all going to be very happy from now on. We'll be moving to a new place on the Gold Coast, with tennis court and, yep Georgia, a swimming pool.
Georgia didn't protest because she saw the determined tilt to her father's head. Her mother stood behind him, smiling benignly into the middle distance, the words one point five million dollars! quivering on her lips.

However on a Tuesday morning a month after the Tommy Bickfield story broke, Mr Napp arrived at the Consulate looking grim.
The latest figures, he said, throwing a folder onto High Commissioner Bloognoove's desk.
What do they say? the High Commissioner asked.
Napp leaned his wiry frame forward, fixed Bloognoove with his rabbit stare and said: They say bloot-ooved. That's what they say. BLOOT-OOVED!
Yes, the figures were disastrous. Tourism had plummeted like a Big Beak going after a school of bait-fish. The Gerit Palms was near empty and the Big Beaked Atoll was laying-off staff.

The first step was to try another big ad campaign, similar to 1988's award-winning 'Pacific's Garden of Eden'. It was a minor success, considering. In the following months tourist numbers did nudge up but they were still far too low. Average Bollobomonians began to complain that life wasn't like it used to be. A public meeting was called in Troost Hall to discuss the problems. The people were ropeable. It was Valerie McKinnon who really stirred things.
What's going on? she demanded. What's wrong with all these tourists? This sickness is normal in this day and age we've been told. Is it not? We've been sick for years. Everybody sick. Why such a big matter now? These tourists! So now they stop coming and we have no money. No tourism and no mining. No money! We know what we want!
What followed was the only sensible solution, really. Why not? All that phosphate was just sitting there doing nothing. Valerie was right.

But what about the landmass? High Commissioner Bloognoove asked nervously.
What about our families? Sir Hammar replied.
But there won't be any land left in a few years.
What can we do? said the President.
Yep, what can we do?, agreed Mr Napp, theatrically shrugging his shoulders. Think of our families, he said.
And so the decision was made to recommence the mining of phosphate.
The world phosphate market didn't kick up a stink. They accepted the 'Australian' supplies, no questions asked.

Two years later, every Bollobomonian lived on Pairofa or had left for Australia or New Zealand. They had to. Pairova had disappeared, the little bit that was left of Bollobia was a noted international shipping hazard, while where Bloovia once stood was a reef which had gained fame as a challenging surfing spot.
No-one complained however. Really, it was like the good ol' days. Bloof-di-DOO!. There were parties and fun. The citizens of the Bollobomon Islands basked in their renewed good fortune as, every day, considerable slices of land were shipped off for use fertiliser in the gardens of the world. The few unlucky people of course still went deaf or blind or came out in bubbly skin conditions, but what can you do? The interior of Pairofa was eventually scoured down to sea-level, the island looking like a donut with just the coastal fringe so far largely untouched.
Another crunch decision had to be made. Sir Hammar gathered the Big Administration and said bloot it! We're going for it! And they did. They banned all outsiders from coming to the islands, made every Bollobomian sign a confidentiality agreement and gave the go-ahead for the bulldozers to rumble down Troost Mall. Eventually only the airstrip was left unscathed to allow the final residents to leave, and then they mined the bloot out of that site too. The last workmen and their gear had to be airlifted out by chopper onto a waiting ship. Just a few nobs of coral remained.

By a happy coincidence the Great Polar Surge occurred just a week after the last worker left. When interviewed by a news crew the day the islands were all but consumed by the sea, Sir Hammar Polites repeated the words he and High Commissioner Bloognoove had rehearsed: Thank the goodness we got out in time, he said. Our scientists had predicted this. It is a terrible shame that such a beautiful place, the Garden of Eden, is no more.
And when trapped by an investigative reporter from the ABC the next morning as he hosed his new BMW outside his house, Lazar also kept his head like the others.
It is a terrible shame, he said, shaking his head mournfully. Such a beautiful place, the Garden of Eden, disappearing … just like that.
As Lazar then popped a CD into the stereo and whizzed off to work, he recalled with a smile the look on High Commissioner Bloognoove's face when he'd said he knew the way of things. The High Commissioner had gone pale when Lazar said 'we must think of our families' and then quietly named his price to ensure that his coconuts stayed firmly in their tree, his lips zipped tight.

The End

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The Kisser

[2003]

By Adam Gibson

Everyone was getting off the mark, kiss-wise, around this particular time; a time of fake IDs, grey leather shoes and pastel Penguin shirts (tucked-in, naturally). Each weekend one of the gang would nudge away from the zero kiss mark, while those of us who had yet to crack it were left to stand head down, lightly kicking the ground at recess when discussion turned to "tonguies".

Of course there'd been blurred fumblings at school dances or in the beachside sheds when lips would be pressed together and heads moved so as to simulate the kissing in movies. But that was mere imitation, that wasn't The Real Thing. It was batting practice in the cricket nets. The main event, the on-field action, lay somewhere out there in the vague night.

The Real Thing involved looping necklines and frosted lipstick and, above all, it involved tongues. Tongues were the be-all and end-all. We were consumed by them. We dreamt about them. We drew them on our folders. You could talk to as many girls as you liked, you could be called a spunk a dozen times. It didn't matter: if you didn't score tongue, you were nowhere.

It was a Saturday night and I'd been told Samantha liked me. 'She's keen' a friend of hers told a friend of mine to tell me. She'd been going round with a bloke a few forms above for the last two months and had been out-of-bounds. But now she'd dropped him and was, from all accounts and for some inexplicable reason, keen on me.

We had a big night planned. Karpy, Deutschy and I caught a bus down to Double Bay. Karpy already had a bit of a mo so he was the designated booze buyer. We bought a six-pack of Strongbow cider and a bottle of champagne each and lugged the stock to a park at the back of the Golden Sheaf hotel. We proceeded to drink about a third of our supplies each before Karpy threw up, Deutschy almost passed out and I started to stumble around singing American Pie.

After half an hour, largely spent trying to remember the second verse, I managed to rally the troops and get them into some semblance of coherence. Annabell's was the place where we were headed but it could have been any number of others. It could have been Players or Chequers or Tramps or Archies or Incognitos. They were much of a muchness really.

A twenty-five minute walk in the brisk June air worked wonders on our sobriety and soon the lights of Bondi Junction and the bustle of the Annabell's queue loomed. And we knew they'd be there. We knew Samantha and Karen and the rest of the gang would have sweet-talked the bouncers and got in without showing ID, which most of them didn't have anyway. We hit the downstairs dancefloor first. In my stonewash jacket I propped at the bar sipping a JD and Coke while Karpy and Deutschy disappeared off somewhere.

While standing there, I saw her. Samantha. Wearing a fluoro orange tube skirt and white shoes, she was dancing with Karen, arms in the air, head thrown back in a smile. She wasn't a hell sort but she had something. Proxed blonde hair, great tan, but a sorta funny nose which had nostrils which were a bit too long. I wasn't picky.

They were dancing to Funky Town and when it finished they left the dancefloor and began walking straight in my direction. They saw me and in an instant came over. In an equal instant Karen left, leaving Samantha and I standing there looking at each other. We must have chatted for a little while and then we may have bought a drink. We may have done several things but the details have become a bit fuzzy due to subsequent events.

One thing I'm sure of is that the opening strains of Spirit in the Sky emerged over the speakers. And I know that Samantha grabbed my hand and said 'let’s dance'. And so we danced. I'd been trying out a few Paul Weller-inspired moves in the preceding weeks, so I felt pretty confident. She was beaming my way and my heart thudded in my Penguin shirt.

The music pumped and everything started to spin and Samantha looked at me and I danced and the music pumped and Samantha looked at me. Then suddenly she grabbed both my hands and pulled me towards herself, vertigo gripping me and my groin tingling. I felt her torso against my torso, her thighs against my thighs and, without fanfare, her lips against my lips.

And incredibly, through the dampness of her strawberry frosted mouth, there emerged something beyond belief - the unmistakable musk taste and whippet movement of her tongue. In it went, around and about, a silvery eel-like glimpse of all the great things life may have in store for me. I responded in tentative kind. She'd done this before but, uh-uh, not me, I was batting in a Test match on debut. I threw out a few prods then, emboldened by the JD kicking in, I was soon going for it like there was no tomorrow. I was magnificent. Everything stood still. The music didn't exist. Nothing existed. There was no-one else there. We were in a golden-lit palace floating above the world and Dr and the Medics were the house band.

It lasted for maybe one minute. I've got no idea how things ended but we left the dancefloor holding hands. I sincerely believed I was several inches taller. I looked in people's faces and wondered if they'd seen me, the kisser, in action. I wondered if they noticed that I was now on my way in life and whether it was some semblance of a Man, a practitioner of The Real Thing, who stood before them.
I went to the bathroom, clucked my cheeks in the mirror and did a moonwalk backwards with my thumb and forefinger held like pistols.

The End

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Something Happens

[1995]

By Adam Gibson

ON A cold Paris weekday walking the streets looking at people and for something to do, coachloads of police suddenly tear past me and my naturally curious instincts overtake and I begin walking in the direction they're headed.

Before I realise what I’m doing —it almost seems like a dream — I walk right past where the police are assembling and soon after I come across a line of flimsy wooden barricades. They're not designed or put in place to act as an effective physical barrier, more obviously as a symbolic one, and I duck under them and keep walking.

I lean close to shopfront walls, aware that I may appear to be on the police side or even, in fact, a police officer. But as I continue it becomes clear to me that neither the police, assembling behind me, nor the protesters, whom I can see approaching in a mass at a distance, have seen me breach the line.

I stay near the wall and keep going, head down. Eventually, the push of the protesters sweeps towards me and I find myself immersed in a sea of rough-mouthed hard-lined faces. They shout and chant in French and while my initial urge is to continue walking against them, it feels like trying to swim against a river and I soon find myself turning and going with them.

They wave indecipherable placards and stomp their boots in a march. But there's no ill-feeling here. Indeed, there's a remarkable sense of harmony, benevolence even, in their midst. I feel warm for the first time in months.

The protesters look like farmers and their chants ring though the air, wrapping around me. The beat of the several hundred pairs of feet taps into my circadian rhythm, it carries me along, I’m borne aloft by this strange protest of which I can only guess the reason for.

I march along further, purposefully now, towards the direction I came not five minutes earlier so warily, so full of desolation and lack of hope. Something has drawn me here. Call it curiosity, call it just the need to watch something happen.

It had been like a force, a magnet to which I was irresistibly drawn, lonely and alone, walking cold streets which eventually all looked the same, taking the odd photograph, making the occasional eye contact with the girls cutting a swathe down the street. I’d been taken in and I'd been accepted without question. I’d been beckoned and grasped by an invisible hand.

And, now, as we head towards the barrier where the police I'd seen previously had now firmly set in formation, I gladly take hold of a placard offered by a large man in a check shirt with the face the colour of roast beef.

He smilingly urges something in French at me and heartily pats me on the back, enticing a small but palpable cheer from the people nearby. We stomp along, the sound of all those shoes and leather boots rising as we approach the waiting police, whom I can see now have donned shiny black helmets and are holding long black batons in their gloved hands. But I feel no fear. I feel cocooned and alive. My throat opens and I leap into a pidgin literal version of the chant which is swelling around me.

We march on and I feel my face turning red with the anger the farmers feel. I feel my temples rising with thoughts of injustice, thoughts of exclusion and unfairness. My chest thumps with a store of passion I’d been keeping somewhere behind my breastbone, somewhere behind my consciousness. It's a pure anger, a stanchion of power. It spills out as I march and thrust the placard into the air and scream the chant. I feel my neck pulling with sinews. I feel my tongue grimly batting the roof of my mouth. I feel the force of my comrades pouring into me. I feel the frustrations of subsidy cuts. I taste, literally taste, the freezing mornings when they wake for work and blankly wonder how they'll get through another season, another day.

As I seethe and tense and swear I watch ahead as the first protesters begin pushing against the barricade. Myself and my companions begin to pile-up behind them and soon the unbridled force of all our collective anger starts pushing ahead as if we're one single body. The police hold their batons at waist level and seem either reluctant to use them or waiting for the order to do so.
Soon the flimsy barricades are pushed over and, with a slowness which belies the force coming from behind, the levee breaks. We push over the barricades, boots stomping on yellow timber and on towards the police. We're screaming at the police, unleashing against all they stand for. Regulation, blind obedience, unbending authority, stupidity, ignorance, corruption and faceless power.

The police back back in a line, moving at the same strange slowness as us. They still hold their batons aloft but it seems now that they're genuinely disinclined to use them. We flood on and I find myself crossing the barricade which I'd been confronted with not five minutes before. It seems like a lifetime ago. I see myself as younger then, unknowing. I was ignorant and timid, weak and soft-voiced. But I now step ahead, forcefully, transformed, a clarity in my mouth, a power in my mind. It's exhilarating.

At that point two men either side of me lock their arms roughly in mine, doing the same to their companions next to them, and we charge ahead, towards and past the police and their vehicles and equipment and onto the open street ahead.

Through an air now filled strangely with light smoke I realise that the police have broken into two fronts, seemingly splitting down the middle. They swing open like a wide gate, peeling towards the footpaths at each side and allowing us to march through unimpeded, their helmets shining in the winter sun.

We push on freely for another several hundred metres. But then there's a palpable hiccup in the air. A catch. A puncture of time. Suddenly, with no preemption at all, I feel the chanting drop down a notch. I feel the stamping of boots lessen. Soon, I hear my own voice stop shouting, then I feel as if the number of people around me has suddenly halved.

It's like waking up from a dream. There's nothing ahead of us, there's nothing to march towards or shout about anymore. The arms of the men beside me slide away without fanfare and I walk on, alone, still holding the placard, the slogan on which I can't understand.

The End