Everyone's a superstar

Nobody's talking my language
I'm so damn good at this
You must be utterly humbled
With genius in your midst.
- The Monarchs, 2001

The Duffer loved his Japanese grey-import sportscars. He’d been big on rotaries for a while in the band years - by ‘big on’ I mean ‘completely obsessed by’, joining a RX7 owners club, living on their forum, pestering us all to go and buy one of our own, talking endlessly about fanging around the back roads of the north coast at licence-vaporising speeds in his own biohazard-yellow RX7 turbo - but it seemed he’d gone back to Nissans since. His first grey-import weapon had been a mid-90s Silvia (200SX); now he had a six or seven year old Skyline GTR, silver with matt-black powdercoated alloys, fully adjustable towel-rack rear wing (looking like it’d just been taxed off his old RX7), wastegate pop-off valve, chipped ECU, switchable AWD with active centre diffs like a world rally car (or at least until they were banned a few years back), black carbon-fibre bonnet, monstrous Xplod sound setup including a bowel-loosening subwoooofaaaaaaa, and a set of fluffy dice. His house was a mess, but his car was absolutely concours-pristine. Phil Duff, a walking enigma. Unless you talked to his brother Duncan, who’d say he was a walking non-event.

“Bit of a change from the old postie van, yeah?” he grinned. He’d insisted on letting me drive, in order for me to make the comparison with my old bog-standard Aussie-made R31 wagon - as if there was a comparison to make - and I’d insisted on letting him. The secondary advantage of his plan, for him at least, was that it enabled him to pick up a four-pack of Johnny Walker and dry from a bottleshop in Cleveland (funnily enough they didn’t have ouzo and coke in premix cans) en route to the Gateway Motorway and the airport. And roll a few as well for the night ahead.

I gave the loud pedal some approximation of toe and the silver missile reared up and shot towards the horizon, dominated by the arch of the Gateway Bridge in the distance. Instantly the speedo read twenty clear of the legal limit. Slightly chastened, I tapered off.

“Yeah,” I concurred with his previous statement. “Just a tad.”

“So what are you driving at the moment?” he asked as he cracked his second for the trip.

I was pretty sure we’d already had this discussion back at his place in Byron a week or two previous, but having known the Duffer for a good many year, knew that if a conversation with Phil was worth having, it was worth having a couple of times at least.

“All wheel drive Magna,” I said.

“Cool! That's with the Ralliart motor?” he queried.

“No, just the VRX one - bit of a power increase over standard, but I don’t think they put the engine out of the Ralliart Magna into the AWD version.”

“Ah, but you can get the same engine bolted in if you want. Or the 3.8 out of the 380 - both run the same Ralliart crank and valves. And Sprintex over in WA have these awesome supercharger kits for them, man… 350 horses easy as you like.” Phil’s on-topic infectiousness was catching, even though the last thing I really needed was a supercharger kit for my car which would (a) cause my fuel consumption to skyrocket and (b) not do much to solve my current roadworthiness issues. “Gearbox and driveline should be able to handle it OK, it’s all Evo parts mainly…”

“Yeah mate, but you know me… I’m all about grip and handling. Power’s for people with no imagination or talent.”

“So why did you buy that V8 Monaro then,” Phil quipped, “because you figured it’d out-handle a WRX? Nothing to do with burnouts or donuts then?”

I laughed. “Yeah, fair call.” I missed my old Monaro, a victim of budget cutbacks when the Gasket ride had trickled to a halt five years ago. It had been traded in for the Magna, which was a whole lot more sensible motor vehicle for someone trying to be a whole lot more sensible themselves. “Phil, if you don’t mind me asking, how the fuck can you afford this?”

“Probably the same way you afforded that Monaro, hey,” the Duffer related. “The last decent paycheck from Flange Gasket before it all disappeared up old mate from Intercom’s nose.”

The pot-kettle nexus was never at its more prescient.

Because I am both (a) cheap and (b) philosophically opposed to paying criminally large sums of money to airport parking operators, I’d told Lena I’d cruise by and collect her from out the front of the DeathStar arrivals terminal around 15-20 mins after her flight was due in. She was duly out the front like a good girl when we trolled past; she just wasn’t expecting my ride to have transmogrified into the fulleh sick weapon which had pulled up in front of her, the asthmatic horn trying feebly to attract her attention. Aha, I’d finally found something on this car which hadn’t been upgraded, enhanced or otherwise optimised. As I popped the boot, Phil scrambled out and chivalrously helped Lena’s bags into the boot and Lena’s statuesque frame into the back of the coupe. It was a bit of a squeeze. If anything, the car’s owner was the short-arse amongst us and by rights should have been condemned to the back pew - apart from that minor ‘owning the car’ issue - but she still seemed cheerful, despite her confinement.

“Hey,” she declared, squeezing my arm from her perch behind me, “what happened to the mobile cardigan?”

I glanced over my shoulder. That ironic smile, sleek dark hair tied back in a ponytail, pale-blue blouse and dark jeans. She recovered from air travel much better than I did; I tended to look like I’d been through a laundry mangle. Then again, Lena always looked infuriatingly glam at the best or worst of times. I shot her a welcoming smile over my shoulder, turned to grab another gear (Phil had warned me the one-two shift was a little notchy, particularly at low revs) and respectfully would the GTR’s turbo mill up to traffic speed.

“Would you believe, sitting in the carpark of Dunwich State School with a defect sticker full of typos stuck on the bastard?”

Phil’s Godzilla was parked at vast expense in the parking station at South Bank, near where the three of us were sampling a few quiets and a bit of a feed at a café on Little Stanley St. From her Sydney base, Lena had Wotifed a nearby hotel ahead of time and had just completed check-in. The boxy contours of Q-PAC, focus of our attentions for later in the evening, was parked further down the river. Q-PAC, other than sounding like an options pack on a mid-80s Nissan Pulsar, happened to stand for the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, situated amongst the ambitiously titled (for Queensland, anyway) Cultural Precinct at the northern end of South Bank. Our conversation had already dealt with the trials and tribulations of my love life (at present I was lacking both love and a life) in as brief a manner as I could manage to get away with, and we’d turned our attentions to our half-arsed mission for the evening: crashing the backstage quarters of Marty’s performance with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, for whom he’d once again slapped together some sort of arrangement of one of his toe-tapping avant-garde confections of ambient electronica in the pursuit of critical acclaim, artistic credence, and of course riches ‘n’ bitches; and getting some sort of comment out of him for Lena’s article or series thereof. Phil, always a fan of half-arsed missions, had been very keen to join.

“Marty’s going to be a tricky one to get close to,” figured Lena. “It’s his entourage that’ll be hard to crack, plenty of hangers-on to deal with now he’s a patron of the dramatic arts…”

“You’re saying Maddy is a dramatic arse?” I quipped. “She was dramatic, yeah, but as far as I remember she had no arse to speak of. Straight fuckin’ line. Could have used her as a spirit level.”

“I see what you mean though,” Phil noted. “Marty’s got what he always wanted - not only commercial success for his pop stuff, but approval and respect from arty types for his serious compositions…”

“Which we always tended to view as decompositions.”

“Speak for yourself,” Phil maintained, “I liked his stuff. All his stuff. Unlike narrow-minded bogan rock dinosaurs like you, I like all kinds of music…”

“You mean country AND western?”

Phil laughed. “Yeah, never did apologise properly for dragging you guys to Tamworth in festival week that time, did I?”

“Point being,” Lena continued, trying vainly to get us back on topic, “he’s surrounded at all times by a conga-line of suckholes who are just not going to want to let me near, not if Maddy has much to do with it.”

“I don’t get it,” Phil said. “All you want to do is talk to him…”

Lena nodded. “And Maddy doesn’t have a problem with Marty talking. For the right price, though. He’s not telling his story unless a deal is put on the table. She’s made that very clear, that they’re holding out for New Idea or ACA money before Marty sits down for an interview with anyone, let alone the likes of me, on the topic of the Last Days of Chez Gasket.”

This was a novel development. I’d been under the impression it was just that Maddy didn’t want Marty to talk full stop, hadn’t realised they wanted to name their price. But, knowing Maddy, it sounded as per established SOPs.

“But surely there’s no market forces at work here… noone else other than you is interested in talking to him about this shit anyway?”

“She’s very patient when she thinks she’s sitting on something the market will want to pay for, if not now, then soon, like when the Gasket best-of CD actually comes out. She’s a businesswoman, with a reputation which speaks for itself…”

“Unlike Marty,” I quickly chipped in, “who’s not allowed to.”

“…She’s just using the opportunities in the market to leverage the price-point of her product,” Lena continued, sounding like Kretin all of a sudden. “Let’s face it, Marty’s a commodity, just like anything else in her business empire.”

“Just one that writes her vaguely sickening love songs as well,” I offered.

“And puts out,” Phil added. Unnecessarily, I thought. I was trying to eat for Christ's sake.

We were ushered into the Performers Only area of backstage with a flash of Lena’s credentials. (Her media pass, nicked from a previous Marty-with-the-QSO show, not the other bits. They weren’t laminated. Though at a pinch you could say they were swinging below her neck and required staring at.) For a bunch of scruffy bastards, the Brown Stripes half of Flange Gasket were quite slickly attired, having raided the city op shops (cheers Friday night trading) for appropriate threads. Lena was looking very stylish herself in glad rags at least a million miles from her usual jeans-and-sardonic-T-shirt ensemble. I needed troublingly little invitation to sidle over to her and invent a question.

“So how exactly is this going to work?” I queried as we filed along a narrow corridor deep behind enemy lines.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a confident, dazzling smile. “Trust me.” She could have sold me a bridge with that smile. This could get all sorts of interesting.

Lena rapped on a door marked with a large star and the words ‘Dressing Room’. As footsteps drew near, she indicated we should stay out of sight for the moment.

The door was opened by a severely dressed middle-aged woman, whose expression was equally severely dressed. Not Maddy, though if Maddy kept frowning like she was sucking a lemon, and the wind changed, this old fruitbat was probably what she would end up looking like. Her ID tag indicated she was Q-PAC staff, presumably artist liaison, i.e. babysitting the talent and collecting toys thrown from prams.

“Yes?” she demanded. “I am under clear instruction that Maestro Signore di Biagini must not be disturbed before his performance.”

“Hi there,” Lena began with a winning smile, and a vaguely acceptable East Coast US accent. She slickly introduced herself as Valentina Rossi (elbowing me to stop me from giggling), a freelance journalist working for the New Yorker magazine. “My office organised an interview with Signore di Biagini’s people for seven-thirty PM.” Which it was now five minutes before, for those keeping score at home.

“Your office must be in error,” pronounced the aide, “because as I have told you, Signore di Biagini’s people have clearly specified he must not be disturbed before his performance. I suggest you contact Signore di Biagini’s press office and organise another time. You will have to leave, I’m sorry,” she finished. Not sounding it.

“That’s a pity,” Lena responded, projecting her voice over the shoulder of the cranky old door bitch into the darkness of the dressing room, “because we were planning to include Signore di Biagini as part of a New Yorker series of interviews with great avant-garde composers of the contemporary era. I guess that will no longer be possible. I should say his reticence seems odd; Philip Glass saw no problem with giving an interview immediately prior to one of his performances. But anyways…”

“…That’s okay, Ms Ponsonbury,” came a voice from within. “I’m sure this won’t take long, Ms… Rossi, wasn’t it?” The aide, clearly pissed off in extremis at being overruled, steamed silently as Lena brushed past her with a smug little smile. “I hope you’ll keep this brief? I need to focus my energies before my performance. I can only give you ten minutes.”

The speaker was seated in a monstrous armchair-cum-throne in front of an edifice-like mirror, being made up by the gayest makeup artist guy in Christendom. Maestro Signore di Biagini was more gaunt than I recalled, dressed head to toe in funereal (he would probably claim ‘minimalist’) black. He looked like an industrial design graduate, or the hereto-undiscovered Black Wiggle. What he didn’t look was particularly well, or particularly comfortable. Even by his own standards of pre-gig nerves, he looked shot to bits. I guess when it’s all your show, all on your shoulders, the buck stops with you. He seemed miles away, lost, concentrating on his own reflection, presumably focusing on the purity and sanctity of the virtuoso performance to come. Just as well as we’d snuck in the back as well, because once he spotted us, the game was well and truly up.

“Certainly,” Lena replied. “I wanted to begin with discussing some of your earlier works, those undertaken in a more, shall we say, populist vein…”

A sigh. “Look… I’m not prepared to discuss my so-called ‘populist’ works in this context,” he cut her off. “In fact I wouldn’t agree with your assertion my work is, or has ever intended to be, ‘populist’. Departure Lounge and experi|mentality were popular, granted, but never ‘populist’.”

“Of course,” Lena conceded, her accent starting to slip. “I was, however, referring more to earlier works than those…”

The composer coughed. “If you’re talking about the other side of my business - as I’ve said, I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss them in this mode of performance. They pay the bills, but I wouldn’t say those works are necessarily… erm, representative, of my broader, um…”

“Canon?” prompted the fawning Ms Ponsonbury.

“Canon,” the composer concurred, “and would rather not comment on them in this context.”

“Try a couple of years earlier again, Monster,” I said. “And don’t Canon make fuckin’ cameras anyway?”

Marty turned suddenly at the sound of my voice, causing his makeup artist to poke him in the eye with an eyeliner pencil. He looked, and stared. And squinted and said Owwwww for fuck’s sake Marcel aaaarrrrghhhh Jesus because being poked in the eye with an eyeliner pencil seemed to hurt quite a bit.

“G’day champion,” I grinned.

“What the hell are you doing here?” was his spluttering comment, as the makeup guy flapped about helplessly trying to fix the situation his tools of trade had created. Apparently being poked in the eye with an eyeliner pencil (better or worse than a burnt stick, it was difficult to say) hadn’t improved Marty's mood.

“Well, we were in the area,” said Phil, “thought we’d drop by and say hi…”

“And there’s the small matter of getting you to talk to our friend Lena here so she can write a balanced account of the Gasket years, so we don’t go and blame you for everything,” I added, trying to get as many words into the room as possible before we were directed to leave it. “After all, that’s what McCarthy’s for, right Lena?”

Lena shot me something that looked vaguely like a scowl.

“You’d better get Maddy down here,” our former keyboardist barked at Marcel, Ms Ponsonbury, the doorway, anyone who would react.

“Sergeant Duff, the doors please,” I requested.

“Aye aye, Capt’n,” the Duffer replied, and twisted the lock.

“What the hell are you doing?” he squealed, now verging on outright panic. “For God’s sake, I’m on in thirty-four minutes!”

“Don’t worry princess,” I replied, “you’ll be ready for your close-up in plenty of time, no need to fret…” Metaphors involving powdered concrete and measuring teaspoons were springing to mind. Prima-donna acts like this would have been soundly stomped on in the Gasket days.

“Marty,” Lena began evenly, “now that we have all the assorted hangers-on out of the way, can we catch up for a chat sometime? My diary’s mostly free…”

“Talk to my representatives,” he finally stammered.

“Jesus man, what the fuck happened to you,” I declared, already disgusted with the weasel act, the Black Wiggle get-up, the whole pretentious toss of it all. “It’s us, you little shite. Don’t give us this ‘get your people to call my people’ shit. Fuck off. You don’t do that to Lena and you don’t do that to us. Gasket made you. You didn’t have the bottle to play outside your fuckin’ bedroom until we dragged you out on stage. The fuckin’ least you can do is offer Lena the respect of a cordial discussion…”

Yeah. Angus tells it like it is, motherfuckers. You go, son. Except that halfway through my dressing down, everyone’s favourite fearsome, fire-breathing dragon-bitch had burst into the dressing room. Clearly my associate Sir Philip the Duff had a rather limited grasp of how locks on doors work. Such as when they’re already locked from the inside, twisting the lock will actually enable people outside to enter the room, rather than the contrary.

“He owes you nothing!” the shrill voice declared, and I think she kinda meant it. Particularly by the way she followed it up with a slanderous, high-volume diatribe against myself and my absent fellow frontman thug in terms of our bullying consipiracy to keep little Marty up the back and out of sight, even to the point of our claiming we’d written songs that were all his own work. Gee Maddy, tell us what you really think.

“You getting all this?” I queried Lena out of the side of my mouth. She nodded, scribbling furiously. It was probably as near to Marty’s ‘official position’ on the Gasket Era as we were likely to get. I hoped the claims of content-theft went to print; I’d quite enjoy suing her fucking arse off, if any, for libel.

“And now you come crawling back and want to put your pathetic band back together? You have the disgusting bare-faced gall to think that Martin would be a willing participant in such a pointless and stupid escapade as that?”

Putting the band back together? She thought that was what all this was about? The repeated inquiries from Lena? The pressure from Exocet to play ball? I actually laughed, which threw her for a second. Good move. In hindsight. “Hadn’t thought of it, to be honest,” I remarked, brow furrowed. “You?”

Phil scratched his head thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea, I guess,” Phil mused, “but it’d need a lot of work and I’ve got a lot on…”

“Yeah me too,” I noted. I turned back to the incandescent Ms Cohen-Lewis and offered the breezy response, “Sorry Mads, appreciate the proposal but I’m afraid it’s a non-starter. We’ve just got too many other projects on the go I’m afraid.”

“Like what?” Maddy snorted derisively, willed on by Marty. “The Brown Stripes?”

“Hey, don’t knock it, that was fun shit,” Phil recalled. Mainly because, as previously observed, we were both on the fun shit the whole time. Funnily enough, out of all the Gasketeers, Phil and I were probably the closest (read ‘least distant’) by the end, though we eventually wanted to punch each others’ lights out like everyone else. I’d like to think it was mateship, respect and common interests that kept us on reasonably good terms in the night hours of Flange Gasket’s existence, but it was probably just our common interest in substance abuse that did so.

“Flange Gasket is dead,” she denounced, stating the fucking obvious I thought. “It is a rancid, putrescent corpse, floating on the sea of filth, corruption and artistic barrenness that characterises the popular music charts. We want no part of it.”

“That’d be the popular music charts that your boy’s releases do very well out of, sweetheart. Just out of interest Martos,” I interceded, firing a question at the mute and pale virtuoso hiding behind his missus in the makeup chair just to see if he was capable of defending himself, “did you have to go to night school to get qualified as a complete tosser, or have you been hiding your light under a bushel all these years?”

“This discussion is over,” ejaculated Maddy (confirming at least one rumour we’d heard about her.) “What could a shambling undead zombie Flange Gasket possibly offer someone of Martin’s career standpoint? Mediocre reviews and a loss of standing among his peers? An audience of the ignorant, the stoned, the pre-pubescent and the intellectually disabled? The opportunity to dress like a pissed bogan and bash out three chords on a plastic keyboard for hours on end?”

“The chance to pick up someone hot for the first time since Celebrity Big Brother?” suggested Phil.

Maddy’s expression finally unpursed from cat’s-bum-sourness to bitter relief. Not on our account, though.

“Mr Hardwick,” she pouted witheringly, “show these trespassers from the building.”

She spoke to and of a thin, wiry, forty-something figure in an ash-grey bespoke security uniform, epaulettes of dubious origin and blindingly shiny over-polished boots, to match his head. His eyes, sunken into his gaunt, drawn features like Skeletor (the cartoon character not Jessica Rowe) were slate-grey and devoid of emotion. The bristly club cricketer’s moustache on his top lip was salt-and-pepper with a dash of ginger – or possibly paprika - suggesting ranga bloodlines that the regimental figure under the grey overalls had tried and failed to hide with his choice of hairstyle. In this light, he looked like an angry cross-bred hybrid of Peter Garrett, Peter Sterling and Gollum.

“Major Havock,” I said, offering a grin of recognition. None was returned.

“Ferals,” grimaced Major Havock.

Major Havock wasn’t actually a major as far as we knew. He was definitely ex-mil though, allegedly in shady black-ops-style deployment involving the knowledge and utilization of as many means of killing people with your bare hands as possible, and/or the blowing of shit up for fun and profit; I’d never seen his CV (it was probably classified under the National Security Act) but apparently it made for fairly Bravo Two Zero sort of reading. Since leaving the army he’d worked as a freelance security consultant for various firms and groups, and was operations manager in charge of security for one of Maddy’s father’s PNG mining operations when the love of Marty’s life decided we were taking security far too casually in the band post the squealy-girly phase of our career (the ‘Intercom Blip’ as we liked to call it) and unilaterally appointed him Chief Operations Officer (Security) for Flange Gasket Pty Ltd. This basically involved him shouting at us a lot, and occasionally us (mainly McCarthy) shouting back at him. Major Havock seemed to understand shouting best of all, probably due to some hangover from his Army days. EVEN HIS FKN EMAILS WERE FKN SHOUTY!!!1!

Having said that we were thankful for the emails, as they meant we didn’t have to read his handwriting, which was interpretive at best and serial-killer chicken scrawl at worst. It was the Duffer who’d coined the nickname Havock, completely by accident. He read the Major’s sign-off at the end of his first security briefing memos to us – Reg Hardwick – and asked whether the new seccy guy’s name was in fact Rude Havock. Given the Major’s tendency to go off like a frog in a Semtex-lined blender over pretty much anything and everything put to him, it wasn’t long before the name stuck. Which tended to set his usual thin-lipped rictus into an acid-sucking grimace usually reserved for the mention of politicians, public servants, greenies, asylum seekers, unionists, dole bludgers, duck-shooting protesters, people from Sydney, academics, taxi drivers, Collingwood supporters or nanny-state public health poofters trying to put up the tax on VB and smokes. All of whom were FKN FERALS who needed FKN CAPPING FFS.

But Major Havock had one, great, redeeming quality. He was our trump card in Backstage Cricket. Not really for his batting – he was handy, don’t get me wrong, he was the only actual grade-level cricketer in our lineup, but his great weakness (other than for office girls from the city with business outfits, ponytails and fuck-me boots, but he wasn't on his Pat Malone there) was he’d lunge at anything like Michael Slater back in the day - on or off the pitch - and was a sucker for a slower, stopping ball outside off which he’d usually bunt down cover’s throat with much wailing and gnashing of teeth back in the sheds and the making of further plans for FKN CAPPING OF FERALS AND KILLIN OF SPARTANS. So yeah, not for his batting, or his bowling. Definitely not for his bowling. No, the Major was our trump card for his sledging. He kept wicket, right up to the stumps in the batsman’s ear no matter how fast McCarthy was attempting to bowl, and had memorized every line from the Ian Healy Big Book of Giving Batsmen The Shits (case in point, Healy to Arjuna Ranatunga, some random ODI in ‘95, after the big unit asked for a runner: ‘You don’t get a runner for being a fat overweight cunt’). Sure, it made Team Gasket about as popular backstage as projectile gastric, but it meant we finally knocked Powderfinger off the fucking Backstage Cricket honours board, so GET THAT UP YA BERNALD. Even if we had to get Kram from the ‘Bait in as a ringer to strengthen our top order. Still holds various senior batting records at Finley High, does the Beardy One. Just ask him, he’ll tell you.

To be fair, while the Major was mad as a box of ferrets and looser than the loosest of loose cannons, he wasn’t a bad bastard. McCarthy, arch-leftist to rule them all, found most of his political and social views deeply obnoxious, but having had farming families as my parents’ friends and neighbours growing up (most of which were staunch Nationals voters) I’d heard enough Pauline-style ‘All Asians fuck off home and no fucken handouts for the boongs neither’ rhetoric to know it was all pretty much piss and wind. Off duty, once the pomp and circumstance had been set aside, the targets of opportunity had been picked off and the Spartans had all been killed, he was good value. He was as much part of the Gasket road crew as Macgyver or Capt’n Snooze or any of the rest of them – though by the time we collected Major Havock most of those lads had moved on and our road crew had swelled to faintly ridiculous, if not obese dimensions. And, most importantly, he might have been an almighty pain in the arse, but he did his job well. We got bothered by No Bastard when Major Havock was on the case. Ferals got capped. Within the bounds of the law. I think John Butler has finally forgiven Marty for that time the Major had him carted off at a Riverstage gig where the pair of them were on the Big Finger's undercard. One way of getting rid of the competition I guess.

Of course, any charitable nostalgic thoughts ref. the Major on our behalf were few and far between right at the mo, given he was frogmarching us out of the compound on the end of a Tazer. Well, at least there might be some high voltage rock and roll here tonight.

“Don’t worry,” muttered Phil. “Trust me.”

“Don’t look at me,” Lena protested, “Kofi fucking Annan here was the one who opened his mouth...”

“Ah, fuck off. It was going perfectly well until Charlotte Manson barged in,” I replied. “I see your fuckin’ boss hasn’t improved her manners since last we met her, H.”

“Easy on the language, mate. You don’t want to gimme a reason to use this,” he replied flatly.

“You’re right about that, H.” I said over my shoulder. “My future bro-in-law’s a Queensland copper. Tends to look out for me.” Well, that was sorta true. He kept his eye on me, that was fairly self-evident. “Wouldn’t want you losing your job in the current economic shitfight. Of course you’ve got a licence for that sonic fucken screwdriver there, yeah?”

Mumbled grumblings.

“Yeah, thought as much.”

Eight sets of feet clip-clopped down the corridor. Two of Major Havock’s people were in front of us, two behind him. We looked like a game of Precision Bullrush looking for a place to happen.

“H, how many seccies do you need to escort three people down a fucking corridor?”

“No comment on procedural matters,” he growled. As ever. But no thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening. The Tazer had effectively been shelved as an option; it was now about as much use to H as a melt-in-the-mouth condom, and equally as likely to be used. Chalk one up to Team Gasket.

“What’s the collective noun for a group of seccies, do you reckon?” I asked Phil and Lena.

“A Wiggum?” proposed Lena. Her escort was a dead ringer for same.

I grinned. “A Wiggum of security guards. ‘They fucken needed a Wiggum of seccies to chuck Super Dave out of the cricket, ay.’ Yeah, could work, could definitely work.”

The Major growled. “You’re not making this any fucken easier, mate.”

“Well why the fuck should I, H? Every other bastard I’ve met tonight is a sellout, a farce, a joke and an embarrassment to themselves. Your boss has presided over our mate turning into a fucking caricature of himself. And he knows it.”

“Doesn’t seem to be fucken keeping him up nights,” declared the Major. He had a point there. Other than the one on top of his head. He concluded his argument by opening a fire exit and booting us out into the street. I wasn’t prepared to concede defeat that easily, but shouting abuse at closed fire exit doors ain’t much of a winning strategy. Angus Young, out for 1, c&b Major Havock of Bacchus Marsh District Cricket Club. Or, as we preferred to call it, Bacchustan. (Bacchustan are gunna kick off? What fucken game are we playin' here?)

Hmmm. Rubbish skips and loading bays. Scenic.

“Well that went well I thought,” I said.

It was remarkably quiet out here.

“Nice night for it.”

Dum de dum.

“Well I suppose you're wondering why I've gathered you all here today...”

“I’ve got a plan B, if anyone’s interested,” Lena piped up.

“Could be,” I offered. “Phil?”

“Got nothing else planned for tonight,” Phil reasoned. “What’s it involve?”

“That guy,” she said.

A nervous looking kid of about 18-20 in black shirt and pants, looking vaguely orchestra-gopher in his appearance, was trotting down the main stairs two at a time towards a waiting silver Falcon. He grasped a brown manilla envelope in his increasingly sweaty hand, which he hugged against his chest as he dived into the back seat and the Falcon swept away into the night.

“What’s going on there then?”

“The great maestro Signore di Biagini has apparently developed an OCD-style aversion to having anyone see his music before it’s performed,” Lena’s low, conspiratorial tones explained. “These days, it’s gotten to the point that none of the musicians performing his work are allowed to see it before they are asked to perform it, particularly when collaborating with symphony orchestras or other ring-in performers. Officially it’s borne out of a desire for ‘musicians performing his works to approach them from a fresh and unfettered direction’… but in reality it’s because he’s (a) turned into a bit of a tosser, (b) is going to bits upstairs and (c) has completely run out of ideas after having done this orchestral arrangement thing a couple of times already and used up all his best stuff.”

“So that was, what, tonight’s running order?” I asked. “Set list? What?”

“I’d say it’s the sheet music for tonight’s performance, which they’re running off to make copies of.”

“Why not make copies ahead of time?” I suggested. “Wouldn’t that me, I dunno, a lot less fucking mad?”

“Part of the mystique, supposedly,” Phil piped up, drawing on a bummed ciggie from Lena. “His stuff is so fresh and cutting-edge he’s still arranging it on the way into the concert...”

“Or he just can’t work to deadline,” I muttered. “Fuck me, the layers of bullshit surrounding him these days are like an onion. Remember when he was just our little mate who didn’t have the trouser to ask girls out? He’s turned into a monster!” Ironic, considering his old nickname. “How the fuck did he go from splicing together pretty little instrumentals in his bedroom on ProTracker to dictating terms and lording it over the Queensland Symphony Orchestra?”

“Same way we went from bashing out a few chords over beers in the garage to releasing… what was it? A ‘double concept album in two stand-alone installments’.” Phil pointed out. “You get people telling you you’re wonderful and your shit doesn’t stink year in year out, you start believing it. This is the result. We are the result.”

I nodded my assent. We were as culpable as he was. The lad needed saving.

“What’s the plan?”

“I need you guys to drop me at the hotel - my laptop’s there.” Lena said. “I’ll need ten minutes max.”

“And us?”

“In the meantime,” she suggested, “see if you can figure out where that lot are going. And more importantly, when they might be getting back…”