Until I had to run and hide
From the caring constabulary
They're there to protect you and me.
- Frenzal Rhomb, 1997
I woke around nine, nine-thirty. Call it ten. We had an eleven o’clock checkout on this already-sticky Saturday morning, so knowing how long it took Phil to coordinate himself, it’d be a serious stretch to get the place cleared by then. I wandered out into the lounge room to find Phil, in T-shirt and manky grey boxers, vigorously beating himself. That is to say he was beating his thighs with his hands as per his traditional DIY drum practice, hammering paradiddles on his knees while chiming in on imaginary double-kicks with his feet. The most disconcerting thing about this image was that he was doing it in
front of a repeat of kids’ show Hi-5, in which the spunky little redhead was crawling around on all fours, declaring proudly that she was a dirty little piggie and she needed a bath.
“G’day,” said Phil. “This show just keeps getting better and better, hey?”
“Just need beers and Black Sabbath,” I agreed. Well, it was one way to spend your mornings. One, to our discredit, that we’d been known to favour back in the latter days of Gasket. It all made sense if you muted the TV and cranked the stereo. Lord of this world, evil possessor; lord of this world, who’s your confessor now…
“I’d settle for a coffee, I think,” the Duffer pronounced, stretching laboriously and cracking all his knuckles one after the other. Appetising. “Actually, I’d kill for a coffee…”
“Me too,” I nodded. “Should try and sort breakfast soon… have you seen Lena?”
“Lena? Yeah she’s the tall one, with the big...”
Cue Lena, bursting through the hotel room door with a bunch of bacon-scented brown paper packages and a stack of takeaway coffees. “May I present,” she said, “for your feasting pleasure… McShite. And flat whites.”
“Oh. My. God.” I was grateful beyond comprehension.
“Coffees aren’t McShites as well are they?” queried Phil, always one to look gift McShite in the mouth.
“Hell no. What do you take me for, boy?” Lena demanded. “From the coffee cart downstairs.”
Dumbstruck, I fell to my knees and worshipped her as though she was Mecca (rather than from Maccas). “We’re not worthy... We’re not worthy…”
“Too right you’re not,” she retorted, and stuck a takeaway coffee and a bacon and egg McShite into my outstretched hands, tossing the other bags onto the couch and settling in with her coffee.
“…Sugar!”
“You can just say shit, you know, we don’t really give a… shit.”
“No, I mean… sugar. Forgot to get any.”
“You are so fired,” Phil smirked, as Lena ducked into the kitchenette to raid the sugar sachets from the coffee making facilities. “How can I possibly be expected to work under these conditions?”
From her position behind the breakfast bar she managed to hit the Duffer in the back of the head with two out of three shots, until he spilt half his coffee on his manky grey boxers, stopped trying to be funny and started going Aaaarghh Jesus Faaarrrkk. Like your mother always said, it’s all fun and games until someone’s reproductive organs get scalded. At least that’s what your mother always said to me, but it could have been the circles she was mixing in at the time.
“That’s it,” I declared. “It’s official. I’m definitely marrying the wrong girl.”
“A simple thank you would have done,” Lena said. “And what makes you think you’re still marrying her?”
“Don’t joke,” I winced.
That strand of conversation was revisited a little later, while Phil was in the shower and the rest of us were waiting for him to finish, or the second coming of Elvis, whichever came first.
“So,” she teased, “any more bad dreams you want to tell Aunty Lena about?”
“Only ones involving Aunty Lena’s wicked little sister, do you want to hear about those?”
“That’s quite enough of my little sister already.”
“There’s never enough of your little sister,” I replied. “Not enough to go round, anyway…”
“Look, I know what you’re doing, and it’s not funny,” she said, trying to look cross with me. “Super Dave’s Mum.”
“I am NOT,” I replied stridently, “nor have I EVER been, doing Super Dave’s Mum…”
She pulled a face. “Super Dave’s Mum was the punchline to every second joke you tossers used to crack. Super Dave’s Mom has got it goin’ on… You can’t use my sister as the equivalent of a Mum joke, it just doesn’t work.”
“So when did you start guest-lecturing in theory and practice for Comedy 101 then?”
“Wanker,” she chided, which meant I’d won. Hurrah for me. “So,” she changed tack, “you love her?”
“Your sister?” I queried. “Only from the waist down.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Bethany? Of course I do.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure,” I replied. “And I’ll get her back.”
“Cool,” she said, in a way that said You are SO heading for a world of hurt.
“…Look, I’m not going to pretend it’s some mad, passionate, soul-draining, Wuthering Heights style insanity we’re talking about here. Noone’s running out along the moors in the storm over each other here. Those sorts of relationships don’t make for lasting partnerships, do they? We love each other, but we’re not tearing ourselves up about it, or each other.”
“Just your house then?”
“Fuck me, time for a promotion to Senior Lecturer in Applied Comedy is it?”
Lena sat down next to me on the couch, slipping an arm around my shoulder.
“Let me help,” she said.
“Help what?”
“Help get her back, you docile twat,” she replied. “I got you into this situation, I’ll get you out.”
“Oh great, another master plan like last night? That made McCarthy’s half-arsed schemes look like the tactical genius of a chess grandmaster.”
“Did we get a result or not?”
“We destroyed Marty’s career.”
“Yeah, but he still has all that soulful-dude-with-guitar stuff to fall back on. That whole ‘multiple platinum selling albums’ area of his musical output. You know, ‘number one in last year’s Hottest 100’, that old schtick… I suspect he’ll be all right, somehow. He won’t need to rely on an audience whip-around at gigs for aviation fuel to get home.”
“Well, with that sort of unshakeable endorsement, who am I to say no?”
“You won’t regret it. Now, I’ve got an idea… does Bethany read?”
“She reads, yes. Mainly labels on fashion and consumer goods, to see whether they’re expensive and important enough for her.” I wish I felt more lousy about making smartarsed comments about Bethany, but it was difficult to remain objective about her these days.
“Does she read the paper?”
“The Curious Snail? I think she’d know the back from the front,” I related. “Or at least which page the horoscopes are on. Why?”
“Leave it up to me,” she said, with worrying levels of sinisterness.
“Glad you didn’t said ‘Trust me’,” I replied, “because I don’t.”
What I really needed help with was avoiding having to spend vast amounts of money on a flatbed tow truck to get my allegedly defective metallic green 2001 Mitsubishi Magna VR-X AWD to fuckin’ Zillmere for a full workshop inspection. For, according to the slow-witted pedant at the Queensland Transport inquiries call centre (gee that narrows it down) who answered my call, to get a NSW-registered vehicle of more than five years in age converted to a Queensland registration would require a full workshop inspection, and the QT inspection station in Brisbane which was geographically nearest me on North Stradbroke Island was in Pineapple St, Zillmere. If you don’t know Zillmere, it’s pretty easy to find. Go into the city, then head north. And keep heading north. Keep going. That’s it. Keep on heading north, for about thirty or forty fuckin’ kays. In truth, it’s about as far north as you can get and still be in Brisbane. Given that I was just as far again out of the CBD as Zillmere, but away to the south-east and on an island, there was no way I could afford getting the thing towed that far. It’d break me - I’d be financially better off selling the bastard for parts on the internet. Or having Marty and his shiny Bell Ranger airlift it onto a passing superfreighter headed for NSW territorial waters.
So I decided to fight the law, and see if the law won. Actually, I decided to just break the damn law rather than fight the law, but I’d call that a matter of semantics.
Phil and Lena had taken me up on the offer of a no-expenses-paid weekend holiday at the Stradbroke Island beach house of your choice, so long as it was mine, despite the strings attached. These involved cruising down the road from Point Lookout to Dunwich after dark on Saturday and dropping me off outside Dunwich State School with a small thermos of hot soapy water, a sponge and a paint-stripping blade. Defect sticker my arse. While I was hurriedly removing the evidence of Snr Cnt Toogood’s misspelt fluoro yellow Post-It from my windscreen before any passers-by could clock me, Phil and Lena were serenely trolling around town, keeping me updated on the locations of the man, the pigs, the filth, the fuzz, the fuzzy muff and/or the flange. That’s the Snr Cnt I’m referring to, not our old band. Though we used to have a cool merch T-Shirt with ‘Respect da Flange’ on it until Ali G’s lawyers asked us not to. 
These days those shirts, sold at the time for thirty bucks, were pulling hundreds on eBay, much like the Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees ones. Unfortunately over the years I’d spilled beer, coffee and pies all over mine, and as such they weren’t really in ‘as-new condition’.
“Polizia,” reported Lena. I had her phone, she had Phil’s. Made perfect sense. “Falcon patrol car. Just rolling past now.”
“Not likely to be old mate,” I replied. “He likes his big jacked-up Rodeo 4WD paddy wagon. Penis compensation unit.” I figured something as routine as a defect sticker wasn’t the sort of thing Toogood would have chosen to brag about in the office - not when there were plenty of tourists to book out on the only bit of straight road on the East Coast Road, the main highway out to Point Lookout - so I was prepared to gamble that the rest of the pleece force on the island would be pretty much ignorant of the situation and wouldn’t look twice at a boring dark-coloured old-shape Magna as it rolled past them in their company cars… or slipped audaciously past their front door onto the ferry to the mainland. So long as the day-glo sticky note wasn’t still there to attract attention.
I worked by the dim light of the nearby streetlights - the carpark wasn’t floodlit - studiously wetting and scraping all trace of the defect sticker away. I think they use the same adhesive as NASA do on the shuttle tiles; if they don’t, NASA should really give them a call. Soon I was satisfied that what we had in front of us was just a common-or-garden variety 2001 Magna, that just happened to have NSW plates.
“I’m done,” I reported. “Should be fine to make the last barge at half eight.”
“Rodeo ute,” Lena replied, sharply. “Your man.”
“Where?”
The line went dead.
“Where, dammit?” A chill slithered down my spine. “Lena?”
“Just screwing with ya.”
“Oh you cunt,” I muttered. “Don’t do that. Where’s the pork extract?”
“He’s just cruising through town. Probably looking for rough trade,” Lena observed with a laugh.
“He hasn’t clocked you guys?”
“No, we’re keeping well back. Not the most ideal car for close surveillance work, but hey, everyone looks the same in the dark.”
“Enough about your love life,” I deadpanned. “Once he rolls past, I say let’s do this thing.”
“Righto. Toodle pip,” she chortled.
We fell silent, but stayed on the line. Gotta love those free time weekends - just as well Lena and Phil were on the same telco provider. The Magna was parked parallel to the road, driver’s side furtherest from it, and I was standing by the driver’s side door admiring my work on the sticker.
“How are we looking?”
“Not sure,” reported Lena, “we’re a few cars back. Should be coming past you any moment…”
Headlights through the trees, in the distance. Nothing new there; the density of trees around the carpark and the lack of direct lighting were enough to prevent too much being seen from the road without actually turning off into aforesaid carpark; from my vantage point I could see sets of white and red lights strobing past through the tree trunks about twenty metres away. The headlights were accompanied by plenty of road noise from the tyres - big, knobbly things, apparently - and the rattatatta of a turbo-diesel mill at work. There was that chill through the spine again. Steady on, big fella.
He’s slowing down.
Shit, he is. And he’s switched on the spottie on the roof racks. Jesus fucking Christ…
Has he spotted me? Is this just a casual look-see… or does he already know I’m here? Has he got this place under fucking surveillance or something?
Out of better ideas, I dived through the driver’s side door of the Magna, pulled it shut behind me, and cowered in the driver’s side footwell. The realisation that that was just about the dumbest of all ideas hit me immediately thereafter. If I’d just crouched beside the car, he wouldn’t have had a chance to see the movement of the door out of the corner of his eye, and he wouldn’t be not only slowing, but pulling up, as he was doing now. And with that spotlight illuminating the entire carpark like an emergency flare, there was no way I dared stick my head over the passenger doorsill to see what was going on. Cornered. If he got out of the truck, and came over to have a proper look, I was fucked five times from Friday.
“He’s right on you,” Lena reported.
“Cheers for that. Is he getting out?”
“Don’t know,” she replied, “we’re already past.”
“Faaarrrk.”
“Do you want us to double back?”
“Actually,” I muttered sharply, “a fuckin’ distraction would be handy…”
I heard Lena bark an instruction to Phil: one distraction thanks, to go.
The Rodeo was idling maybe twenty yards away, but so far, no crunch of gravel under jack-boots to signify an approach on-foot. If he did, I was tossing up just cranking the ignition, flooring it and mowing the motherfucker down. My straining ears hadn’t heard the gentle whoooshh of the Skyline through the situation on its first pass, but now I could barely hear a second engine with a distinctively different idling note to the turbodiesel, maybe a hundred yards from where I was. Phil and Lena had pulled up, and had gently circled back around, lights killed. I didn’t know that at the time, though.
Then, as I held my breath (why? How would that help?) and the seconds passed like hours, a stupendous cacophony of noise split the night apart and sent the wildlife into hysterics. It was a 2.6 litre Nissan six, 
running twin turbochargers and an intercooler, being suddenly, and mercilessly, hammered against its rev limiter. Almost immediately followed by the sound of two fat rear tyres screaming for their very lives. Phil had the brakes on, the throttle pinned, the wheel cranked full to the right, and was moments away from disappearing in a cloud of his own tyre smoke. I couldn’t help myself, peeking over the top of the passenger door at almost the very moment that Toogood shut off the spotlight. The Rodeo’s headlights illuminated a dense pall of smoke, formerly a set of 275/35 Dunlop Direzza performance tyres that Phil wasn’t entirely happy with the wet-weather grip of, and intended to switch back to Bridgestone Potenza RE101s next time he bought tyres. Which would be the moment he got back to his nearest Beaurepaires, the way he was going.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Phil lifted off the brakes before they had a chance to completely burn out, twisted the wheel left to straighten it up, and the Skyline fishtailed out of the donut and away down the road. He was reportedly grinning like a loon (like a loon?) as he snatched second, calmly flicking the rotary dial from RWD (rear wheel drive) to ACD (active centre differential all wheel drive, another little aftermarket addition) as he checked his mirrors. Bingo. Low budget red and blue Christmas light show, sirens wailing, a diesel Rodeo ute desperately trying to build up a head of steam in pursuit…
“Your cue,” Lena barked, hanging on grimly. You’d have thought four or five years with McCarthy would have given her some sort of tolerance for mentalist driving, but apparently not.
Christ. I waited until the Rodeo’s taillights had disappeared down the street, then gingerly started the engine and began rolling the Magna out of the carpark, heart in mouth. I waited my turn at the junction onto the main road, trying not to think about the really fun bit ahead of me: trolling past the cop shop and parking in the floodlit dockside carpark outside their front door to wait in the lineup for the vehicle barge over to Cleveland. Or the prospect of Phil wrapping himself, Lena and his lovely Skyline GTR around a tree trying to get away from Constable Care. Surely Toogood would have glimpsed his number plate or at least taken a good look at the car before it disappeared in its own funereal pyre - surely they were screwed. I sat calmly (ha!) at the intersection, waiting for a gap in the traffic which was serenely filing past me. At least I wouldn’t be waiting long at the jetty, given how tight I was running on time to actually make the last barge over. Come on, come on…
A gap. I threaded the Magna into the Friday evening traffic and drove like a grandma on Rohypnol over the last, fairly densely populated, concerningly well-lit stretch of road down to the water’s edge. Past the cop shop, positioned like a medieval guardhouse on the hill overlooking the wharf, then left down the gently descent to the terminal. I was absolutely shitting myself. But I made it, unnoticed and unmolested, down to the barge, pulling up and parking in the queue.
The problem with living on an island with a relatively small permanent population is that people tend to know you. Particularly people who either work in positions where they end up interacting with the whole population of the island, at one stage or another; or people who are inveterately nosy. Rhonda Partridge, who worked in the ticket office, was both.
“What are we up to tonight then, Mr Young?” she casually inquired.
I made up some non-committal answer along the lines of ‘Not much’ as she processed my ticket.
“Did you see any boy racers on the drive over?” she wanted to know.
“Boy racers?”
“Yeah… a whole bunch of them came over on the four o’clock barge. Y’know these young hoons, all with those silly Japanese plastic cars with the big wheels and the farty exhausts and the doof-doof stereos…” Rhonda drove a 1989 Camry which blew more smoke than Phil. “A couple of them grounded out on the off-ramp,” she chuckled, with a laugh like a two-stroke whipper-snipper. “Served the little bastards right!”
Why it served them right, I couldn’t quite figure out. Tourists were tourists, whether they were Bevans in sicked-out S14 Silvias or snap-happy Japanese in tour buses. Bevans’ money was as good as anyone’s else.
“Some sort of club get-together, you reckon?” I wondered.
“Dunno,” she said. “Don’t bloody care. Your mate Brad will sort them out,” she cackled.
That was the thing about Straddie. Sure, in Point Lookout it had a beachside resort village reminiscent of a mini-Noosa in places… but at heart, it was as backward, bigoted and unwelcoming as anywhere else in rural Queensland. Dunwich, in truth, wasn’t a tourist town; if anything, it was a mining town. The local sandmining operations’ jetty facilities 
were just a few hundred metres south, running alongside the enormous boat ramp at the wharf where the vehicle barge was going to pull in. Any moment now. I climbed back into the Magna and began scrolling through the recently used numbers on Lena’s phone - ostensibly to find Phil’s number to call them and check on their status, but in truth I was just having a stickybeak to fill in time while I waited.
Lights and sirens exploded behind me, making me jump (although seated) high enough to crown myself on the interior headlining, as another patrol car was caned out of the station garage in a massive hurry to get to somewhere or other. I was starting to wonder whether getting off this island, permanently, wouldn’t be such a bad move. Figuring that Team Distraction needed to know about the most recently dispatched unit heading their way - my imagination had already made the leap to Snr Cnt Toogood having made a call to base for backup - I found Phil’s number and pressed the green button.
However, Insert Incompetent Telco Provider Of Choice Here were sorry that they could not connect me at this time. The phone I was trying to call was either switched off, or unavailable. Please try again later. On a more positive note, I would not be charged for this call.
I tried a few more times on the barge trip over, but without luck. The reason seemed pretty clear. Bloody Phil. Back at the house he’d asked to borrow my old Nokia charger to recharge his phone, having left his in Byron. I’d managed to dig it out, but had he managed enough coordination or forethought to plug the bastard in? It seemed not.
There was a long-term car parking area just near where the barge disembarked on the Cleveland side, but for some reason I fretted over whether that was a bit too ‘obvious’. Instead I drove a couple of streets away from the ferry stop and parked outside Cleveland State School. I don’t know why, for some reason I figured it’d be safe there. Completely illogical I realise - you try and name a more likely target of juvenile vandalism than a government primary school? - but that was my thinking on the matter. I locked the car, gathered my belongings together and jogged back to the ferry wharf to get the JetCat back over to Dunwich, and hopefully - hopefully - meet Lena and Phil. But the odds on them actually ending up in the cop shop on the hill seemed more likely than the odds of them turning up in the carpark below.
Having stewed over their fate for most of the previous hour and a half (with a brief jog in the middle to release the tension), the biggest surprise of the evening, second only to Phil deciding that ‘we need a distraction’ actually meant ‘pull some circlework 
and trigger a police pursuit in a built-up area’, was the sight of Phil and Lena propped casually against the Skyline in the carpark, Phil contentedly puffing on a rollie that I hoped like hell was only made up of Drum, Lena looking a bit paler than I remembered but otherwise safe and sound (and more importantly not in police custody.)
“G’day,” said Phil. “Sorry about that, I forgot to recharge my phone this arvo!”
“You don’t say,” I remarked flatly. “You guys OK?”
“Don’t ask,” muttered Lena.
So as it turned out, the Duffer had encountered very little trouble shaking off Senior Constable B.S. Artist, despite driving around with his lights off, apart from a set of ‘parkers’ - basically he could switch his fog lights, which were on a separate circuit to the head and tail lights, onto a low setting - at Ludicrous Speed. “It’s OK,” Phil had said, “I’ve done this before.” Neither of us wanted to know when, where or why he’d done this before; Phil moved in dodgy enough circles as it was, and we had enough suspicious regarding how he supplemented his income. Anyway, his mirrors were empty by the time he reached the Amity Point turnoff, so he turned off there and parked up in the bushes until he saw Toogood barrel past. Then it was just a matter of waiting another five or ten, switching his lights back on, and serenely motoring back towards Dunwich to wait for the ferry. It’d been a good three quarters of an hour since they’d made it back - enough time for Phil to smoke three joints - and yet Lena was still looking rather ill. Then again, she’d been downwind of him.
I was still pretty on edge and wasn’t delirious with joy ref. the idea of getting into a car with the Duffer driving, particularly after a few choofs, so I suggested Lena should drive on the basis that it’d look better if we were pulled over - for one thing she was probably a faster talker than Phil. It seemed a pretty spurious reason at the time, but when halfway to home we passed one of the Falcon patrol cars parked at the side of the road, lights rotating, with what looked to be a silver Mitsubishi Evo 5 or 6 pulled over in front of it, it suddenly started to make sense. I mentioned what I’d been told about the maniac hordes of evil boy racers set to invade the defenceless townships of Straddie in order to tear up their roads, sleep with their women, take their jobs, spread their foreign diseases and generally bring about the downfall of Western civilization.
We rolled back into the outskirts of Point Lookout around ten. Home and dry? Not quite. Old mate Brad had set up his stall on the run into town, pulling over and interrogating just about anyone who happened to be passing by. The excuse, to the extent he needed one to carry on like such a cock, was that he was running an RBT stop. ln reality, he was looking for something silver, lowered and weighted down with enormous wings; beyond that, he wasn’t too sure. Phil and I had sampled some beers over lunch at the recently renovated Straddie pub; Lena, bless her, hadn’t had a drink since half eleven yesterday evening. Non-problematic. Unless he noticed the molten scraps of rubber which had welded themselves inside the rear wheel wells, or the comprehensively shagged state of the back tyres. 
And joined the dots with the finding, if he’d since checked, that the rear-seat passenger’s own car was no longer parked where Toogood had left it.
Senior Constable Bradley S. Toogood strode purposefully over to the next car in the queue, and rapped impatiently on the heavily tinted glass. “Come on, son,” he said. Fucking boy racers. Should know the drill by now.
“Good evening, officer,” the driver said pleasantly. To put it bluntly, she wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d been expecting some snotty-nosed kid, probably of gook descent, to be blatting around in a doof-doof car like this. The driver was thirty-something with glossy dark brown hair, a voice like honey, and was clearly what his junior constable Sean Stevens would have called ‘a grade A glamour.’
“Good evening,” he replied. “Can I see your licence please, driver?”
Lena produced her drivers licence, which he examined with his flashlight. She smirked at his clear bewilderment at her surname.
“Is this your car?”
“No, it’s my boyfriend’s,” she replied. Phil offered a casual half-wave from the passenger seat, secretly rather bemused by the idea. Though not nearly as much as I was, so far unnoticed in the cave-like gloom of the Skyline’s back seat.
“Fine, fine,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of boy racer activity around the place at the moment, so we’re automatically suspicious of vehicles such as this…”
“I’m afraid I’m neither the sex nor the age for being a boy racer,” she tutted. At the mention of ‘age’, he glanced back down at her licence again. This time she wasn’t quite so amused with his reaction. He handed it back to her, almost apologetically. Goddamn it, she swore to herself, when did early-thirties become pension age?
“Have you seen anything suspicious this evening along those lines? Any boy racers?”
She shook her head, and Phil shrugged in support. “Saw a guy pulled over by one of the other police cars,” Phil offered, about the only truthful thing either of them had said so far.
“I understand.” Unable to see through the tinted side glass at this rather late hour, he peered into the cabin. “Who else is in here with you?”
“My cousin from Poland,” she said. “We’ve just been out to collect him from the airport, he just flew in. He’s pretty jetlagged, so he’s been dead to the world since we picked him up…”
On that basis, Toogood decided that the slumbering form in the back seat with the old fishing hat draped over his face wasn’t of any further interest. He fought the urge to point his flashlight beam in his face, just for kicks - he’d already been in trouble with his boss for hassling tourists. You could see him mentally putting two and two together - her Scrabble-clue surname, and the Polish cousin in the back.
“Where are you staying?” Toogood wanted to know.
Fuck’s sake, what was this, Twenty Questions?
“One of the little B&Bs up on the ridge,” she replied. There were a few to pick from; he almost definitely wouldn’t check. At a stretch, my place would have qualified.
“OK then, that’s all. Have a nice stay, and drive safely.”
“Cheers,” she replied, and clicked the Window Up button as his poncy jackboots crunched the gravel between ours and the next sucker in the queue. She calmly slotted first and we rolled away, merging back onto the road and away from that horrid, horrid little man.
I lifted the brim of Phil’s very stinky old fishing hat, and offered the only words of Polish I could remember Lena teaching me. She broke up with laughter, and replied (in Polish), “Yes, absolutely, I very much think so.” At least I think that’s what she said.
“What’s that?” Phil wanted to know, as we neared the turnoff to my street.
She tilted her thumb over her shoulder, indicating her ‘Polish cousin’. “An old Polish curse, which I very unwisely taught him many years ago. It means, roughly translated, ‘His mother is so loose she cannot piss straight.’”
Ah, you gotta love multicultural, multilingual Australia. The joys of being taught new and exciting ways to insult people.
“Probably just as well he didn’t have a good look through the car,” Phil remarked.
“You reckon he’d have been smart enough to join the dots, if he’d seen Angus?” queried Lena, as she dialled the Skyline along the ridge to my house.
“That’s not really what I was worried about,” he replied matter-of-factly. “When we were talking to old mate I just realised there’s a stash in the spare wheel well big enough to have us all put away for a couple of years at least…”
Things went a little quiet all of a sudden.
I was aware that Queensland’s drug laws hadn’t really changed since Joh’s era. Even so, it was a surprise back at the house to see how little you needed to be in possession of - a couple of zip-lock sandwich bags’
worth - to be looking at some time in the custody of the state. Phil endeavoured to ameliorate the problem by getting through as much of the stuff as he could on Saturday night - and yes, he did make us sit up all night talking rubbish and telling tales. Courtesy the bottle shop at the Straddie pub, Phil was on the ouzo and coke again; Lena was drinking red wine, and I was helping. We sat out on the balcony so Phil and Lena could smoke (cones and Alpines respectively) while we argued the toss about music, cars, girls, football, politics, alcohol and all the other important issues of the day. Phil usually won; noone could argue (or toss) quite like he could.
A blurry, unnecessarily bright morning was voted down in favour of sleeping in and merging breakfast with lunch, with the plan being to trot down to one of the cafés on the main drag and gingerly absorb some rays there to recharge the melatonin receptors. Or is that the seratonin receptors? I can never remember which of the two are supposed to react to sunlight (rather than MDMA). Anyway our plans were interrupted by the phone - my house phone, the number for which not that many people actually knew. Lena, as designated grown-up, answered it (I was downstairs digging through my archived boxes of CDs looking for some liner notes to settle, i.e. win, an argument; Phil was in the shower.)
“Found it?” she asked when I’d resurfaced. My expression confessed plainly that I hadn’t.
“Jack White did the girl vocal part for Danger! High Voltage,” I maintained vehemently, meaning the White Stripes frontman not Spam Filter’s bass player (and our former English teacher). “NOT the chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs!”
“But it doesn’t say so on the liner notes, does it?” she replied with the superior air of someone who knew they were wrong (and she did) but also knew they couldn’t be proven wrong on current evidence. The album in question was the Electric Six’s debut, Fire. A tops record if you like the idea of disco funk morphed with Nirvana grunge and played with a deft sense of humour - another of 2003’s great releases. A list that didn’t include anything we’d managed to release in 2003, of course.
“Other than a cryptic mention in the thank-yous that’s probably to him,” I admitted. Seeking to defuse her inevitable smugness, I asked “Who was that then? Telemarketing wankers from India?” I was almost hoping she’d say it was Toogood (father, son or daughter) and she’d said something totally outrageous to completely screw with his/her/their minds.
“No,” she replied, “it was your little curly-haired mate, whose career we destroyed on Friday night. Remember?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Is he sending the lawyers for us?”
“No, apparently he’s on his way himself. Wanted to know what the address was because it’d been so long since he’d been out here.” At my bereft expression she added, “Apparently Maddy decided yesterday she wanted to go to the beach on Sunday,” she explained, then chuckled. “Marty’s last words were, ‘Didn’t Phil tell you guys about this?’”
“He told me, briefly,” I replied. “I just figured given Phil was involved in the plans, they were guaranteed to fail catastrophically.”
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