They can be fuckin’ with other niggas’ shit
But they can’t be fuckin’ with mine.
- Rage Against The Machine, 2000
I used to know the drill. If you’re going to break up with a girl, there’s three words you need to become familiar with: Millers Self Storage. Get your car, motorbike, stereo, CD collection, stamp collection, porn collection, rare and vintage comic books, prizewinning goldfish, new girlfriend(s) and anything else you value or cherish well out of sight and safely secured where they can’t be trashed in a vindictive rage by your new, freshly minted ex. Of course, that depends on you actually being aware that things are about to go disastrously pear-shaped. Which, due to an astonishing oversight on my part, I hadn’t. I’d lost my infallible sixth sense for looming disaster. I was way out of practice.
While the destruction was extensive, it didn’t look that well-organised, or strategically planned. More of a passionate orgy of revenge-fuelled breakage than a carefully premeditated assault; if she’d really thought about it, she could have been a lot more tactical in her attacks. She hadn’t even discriminated between my stuff and hers; all of which pointed to the fact that she’d clearly been very, very angry at the time. The Bethany I knew didn’t get very, very angry, and didn’t react like this when she did. She was calm, composed, structured, balanced. At times it was like dating a German football team, but that was what I wanted at that stage in my life.
I’d had enough of Brazilian-style flamboyance twinned with insanity, or just massively going to bits in a crisis like the Portuguese or the Argies. I liked calmness, composure, structure and balance. I wasn’t sure I liked this, but by the same token, at least she cared enough to be mad at me. Points for passion, if completely misguided.
Apart from the mess, upturned shit and non-specific vandalism, which was considerable, the stocktake of things that were actually destroyed beyond use were: a shelf of coffee cups, half a dozen wine glasses, five picture frames, four work shirts (plus my D4 one), a swathe of trampled CDs (largely hers, ironically, because most of the ones of mine I actually liked were still downstairs in storage boxes) and a partridge in a pear tree. (Genuine fake-bronze statuette. Joke Christmas gift from Beck last year, she’s into that sort of kitschy Yule shit.) A can of ceiling white had been tipped over the Magna downstairs, which took most of Monday to clean off, employing equal measures of cutting compound, elbow grease and swearing. I figured I was lucky she’d reached for the acrylic and not the paint stripper beside it. My motorbike was in bits, but it’d been that way for two and a half years. I wondered if I should call the cops to report the vandalism. Ha, I made a funny.
What I didn’t do was get angry. What I didn’t seem to do anymore at all, in fact, was get angry. Ironically, the same calming influence that Bethany had over me made it less inclined to throw the toys out of the pram at her. Besides, I wasn’t very nice when I was angry. I felt wronged, of course, but I knew the facts would bear out my side of the story; until now I’d never had a ‘square-up’ from a girl which I didn’t deserve, in some way or another. Maybe this was a karma square-up for all the ones I wronged and got away with. No, that was just ethereal bollocks. Facts were, she’d misinterpreted the situation in front of her, or had been misinformed, and pretty soon she’d be embarrassed and apologetic and pleading for forgiveness. Which, of course, I intended to turn to my advantage and use as leverage to get her back into the bedroom at some point before March next year… but one step at a time, son.
So the phone didn’t ring on Monday morning, not that I had time to answer it anyway given that I was cleaning up the house and peeling a tacky skin of ceiling white off my car. It didn’t ring on Tuesday morning either, which was odd, Principal Gerald Toogood had suggested prior to the weekend that there’d probably be work for me that week, with a few staff off on annual leave. Then again I still had cleaning-up to do. When it didn’t ring by ten o’clock Wednesday morning, I figured something was up. But rather than call Principal Toogood, I went for a surf, as I’d been aching to do ever since Sunday morning at Chinamans; something else to blame The Bloody Jeff for. It was a glorious morning, but the weather was supposed to close in later.
Then, figuring gloomily that I might have time to spare coming up and may need a project, I went back downstairs to the garage and looked over the dismantled bits of the R 80 G/S. 
It’d spat a gearbox bearing in the dunes about a year and a half ago, along with a catalogue of other niggling woes (clutch cable, fuel pickup, speedo), which I’d never bothered fixing. I had a BMW workshop manual which I’d picked up on the net a few years ago; it was in German, but at least the ‘exploded’ diagrams were logical enough to follow, and it gave me the part numbers I needed to track down on eBay (while plugging random technical phrases into the Babelfish universal translator).
So went my afternoon, looking for assorted random bits of 1991 BMW R 80 G/S on the internet. And replying to a couple of emails - one from Dr Cletus about catching up for a beer in town on the weekend, given it’d been a while and all, and he'd lined Mad Mick and a few of the boys up, and all that lovely cold stuff in the pipes at the RE wasn’t going to drink itself. But like Senior Unstable Cunt Brad Toogood’s efforts in booking tourists for speeding on the only stretch of straight road between here and Dunwich, I had a quota, and I was going to stick to it. And in any case, he should have been home with his missus and new bub, even if it WAS driving him up the bloody wall and he needed to get some Quality Him Time. I made up an excuse about some family thing with Bethany, and felt bad about it.
The other email was from Lena, from only about five minutes ago.
Hey Angus. Marty still won’t talk (sayeth Spokesbitch Cohen-Lewis) but he’s heading up Brisbane way next week to play a show - was considering a Today Tonight style foot in the door approach - let me know if you wanna be the hired muscle, would appreciate the backup. How did Bethany react? Are you still in the doghouse?
Love, Lena.
I grimaced ruefully, and began composing a reply.
Went pretty well, all things considered. She’s trashed my house and my car, her cop brother is following me around making veiled threats, and her father isn’t giving me any work at the school, so I’ll be destitute in about two weeks. Hey, maybe when you come back up you can give me some more relationship counselling, it’s gone Spiderbait so far. Fucken Awesome…
Angus.
I should have rephrased that to make it sound more like a joke, but I didn’t do smiley faces in emails. They were totally gay.
The phone rang soon after, and I could tell she was a bit distressed for her part in proceedings.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she said breathlessly. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I wasn’t serious.”
“You what?”
“…Well, yes, all that stuff has happened, but I wasn’t blaming you for it. Sure, you’ve still got a talent for breezing into situations, causing unholy havoc and then breezing out again unscathed, but it’s my mess and I’ll clean it up.”
“Jesus,” she uttered. “Has she spoken to you?”
“Not as such. She’s left messages…”
“On your phone?”
“On my mirror,” I replied, and explained.
“God Angus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go and screw things up for you like this. I didn’t know she’d react like that…”
“And I did?” I laughed, only slightly bitterly. “I’d never have expected this from her. It’s just not her. This isn’t the work of the Bethany I know.”
“So, what... it’s someone else?”
“No… it’s just that she’s taken leave of her senses. I’ll give it a week, let her calm down.”
“Send her flowers,” Lena suggested wryly. 
“As you well know, it always works on erratic women as a token, meaningless gesture of reconciliation…”
“What, you mean you didn’t take those flowers back on the plane with you and put them in water straight away?” I said in mock dismay. “I’m heartbroken, girl. I don’t know what to say.”
“If you’re carrying on like this, I’m guessing you’re fundamentally intact, yeah?” she laughed.
“I’ll survive,” I answered.
“Look, call me anytime you want to talk, seriously. I’m out a lot of nights for work, but I’m home in the mornings.”
I suddenly had an image of that melancholy dark-haired girl from the flat in Clovelly ten years before, spending her downtime in her bedroom drinking red wine and listening to the Cure - or the Killers, or whoever it was who were covering the misery demographic now - and waiting for her prince to come. I shook the thought off; she was a big girl now, she could look after herself.
“I’ll be all right. Between surfing, Fox Sports and looking for motorbike parts on the net, I’ve got plenty to occupy myself until Bethany and the Toogoods come around to my way of thinking,” I offered. I didn’t often quote Urge Overkill, but now seemed as good a time as any. “Should be plenty of time to set things straight before you come back up and balls it up for me again… I’m joking, I’m joking. When are you coming up again?”
“Next week, probably Friday.”
“Look, let me know when you’re flying in and if I’m not working, I’ll meet you at the airport - it’ll save you wasting money on a hire car.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. The way Constable Toogood is carrying on,” I added, “I can probably even offer a police escort. Even if you don’t really want one.”
I was overstating things a little for comic effect. (Me? Never!) When I’d headed down to the shops on Tuesday to get milk and bread, he was there, trolling through town in his Rodeo, arm out the window, eyeing off the tourists like a wedge-tailed eagle scanning the terrain for prey. When I’d wandered down for a surf on Wednesday morning, he happened to be down at the Point Lookout SLSC (one of the most impressively positioned in the country, I’d say -
built onto a rocky outcrop on the northern end of main beach itself) talking to somebody about something, possibly in preparation for the onslaught of Schoolies in a couple of weeks. Nothing to fuel the paranoia there, really. Except on Friday, when I’d drove down to Dunwich to go to the hardware store and pick up some bits and pieces… and a certain police-issue Rodeo followed me every inch of the way. And then back again. By the return leg I was driving like an old Grandma, deliberating over every intersection, obeying every road rule in existence (and some that weren’t), keeping my speed a religious ten kays under the posted limit, and even backing right off on the straight section where Senior Constable Toogood made most of his money, almost obliging him to pass. He didn’t. I considered pulling over to let him past, but I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to pull up behind me and turn it into an impromptu traffic stop.
Up to then I’d almost managed to convince myself that there was nothing sinister going on and that the deeply unpleasant nature of our meeting on Sunday night was entirely in my head, courtesy two hours lonely foot-slog through the dark and unwelcoming scrub with thoughts of Ivan Milat in my head. I’d spent most of Sunday night having horrible dreams about being chased through the bush by Ivan Milat in Mick Whatsisname’s cowboy outfit; he was barrelling through the heath in Toogood’s Rodeo, the cage on the back converted into a torture shed. Nasty. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but that one kinda stuck. As did another I had later that night-slash-morning, which involved a dark-haired, volumptuous girl of Polish-Italian stock and a whole lot of sweaty, slithery sinning of the flesh. That actually disturbed me more than the bushman serial killer one, to be totally honest. At least until I convinced myself I was actually dreaming about Lena’s little sister Agnes, rather than Lena herself. It was Agnes’ body I was remembering, I figured; after all, I’d actually seen it in such a forum. Another thing which was fun to wind Lena up about.
Anyway, Toogood followed me all the way home, but didn’t stop, driving slowly past as I unloaded the boot of the Magna, its slightly tatty duco not-quite-gleaming in the sunlight. I’d missed a few spots, apparently.
“Nice paintjob,” he remarked. The bastard knew very well what had happened.
“I’d invite you in,” I called after him as he chortled off, “but the house is a bit trashed at the moment.”
More worryingly, my internet banking reckoned I hadn’t been paid on Wednesday night for my previous fortnight’s work. Nor on Thursday, which weakened the possibility that it was just some minor glitch in the system. By Friday, with no new funding flowing in, I figured it was time to start a dialogue with my employer. I phoned Carol in the front office who looked after the accounts for the school, and in my brightest, politest manner brought to her attention the fact that I’d been expecting payment for my last two weeks’ work at the school, some eight full days’ worth, and had somehow missed out on receiving this. Carol apologised, nervously, and said she hadn’t received my timesheets from Principal Toogood. I said that was quite all right, I understood, but would she be able to get Principal Toogood to call me at home at his earliest convenience? She said she would try. I thanked her, and she wished God to be with me. Whereas my Godly thoughts were more along the lines of ‘Jesus fucking Christ’.
So a cheap weekend then. And a sober one, making up for the previous one. Of course it had nothing to do with not having enough readies to go to the bottleshop, nor being game enough to drive out my front door in case Brad fucking Toogood started stalking me again. Instead I watched a bunch of sport – MotoGP and A-League mostly - went surfing, rearranged the remains of my CD collection (into His and Hers, given that the chances of Hers being formally separated and taken into protective custody seemed to be increasing by the day), and tried to figure out what my next move would be. I was wandering around in a dazed, almost concussed state, not quite believing what was happening to me, and wondering what’d be next to slap me upside the head. Jeff gave me a call on Sunday; I filled him in on the events of the past week, and to his credit, he didn’t laugh. Much. Lena called later that night to check I was OK and to pass on her flight details for the following Friday evening - she was getting in at five. No problem, I said. To say I was looking forward to seeing her again was an understatement. Maybe I was hoping she could undo this insanity as deftly as she’d managed to create it.
Something very weird happened on Monday. No, I didn’t get that phone call from Gerald Stanley Toogood. But I did get an email from Philip Alexander Duff. I’d point out at this stage that in the many years I’ve known the Duffer, I’ve had exactly no emails from him, because he’s the worst emailer in all of history, and because his computer is almost always in bits on his bedroom floor. But The Jeff had suggested he was better these days, largely because most of the band’s communication was done by email, in terms of organising rehearsals, agreeing on gig schedules etc.
Hey Angus, this is Phil. Great catching up last weekend [it was the weekend before last, to be picky] - coming up to see Marty’s gig, you should come along - I’ll give you a call on the mobile when I get into Brissie.
Which in Dufferese meant ‘Give me a call on the mobile because I’ll forget’. Of course, no mention of what day he was coming up, or what his mobile number actually was, but it was a start.
I had two rebuilding projects planned for the week. One was the BMW, the other was my relationship with my fiancee. Your guess which was more irrevocably fucked; at least I had a workshop manual for the bike, even if it was in a foreign language. Courtesy the good offices of Visa and Interflora, I had a big bunch of flowers delivered to Bethany on Monday at lunchtime - at work, where all the other staff in her department would see what a fuss I was making of her and what a lovely partner and future husband I was. Not sure which member of the Toogood clan was the one who was kind enough to return them – stuffed through my letterbox late that evening with all the flowerheads ripped off – but the findings seemed to indicate I’d invested poorly on this occasion.
Most of the R 80 bits came on the Tuesday, so I had that to keep me busy. In mid-morning I had to make a dash into Dunwich to the auto parts store there, but at least I had company; I turned onto the main East Coast (Point Lookout-Dunwich)
Road and there he was, as inevitable as death, taxes and the clap after screwing the town bike. Just for my own entertainment purposes I turned off and took a detour out to Amity, tooled around the streets and back again, just to see if he’d follow; then straight through Dunwich out to the phosphate mine, then back again. and then stopping for petrol, partly because I needed it now after all the detours, partly just to see if he’d hang around. Amazingly, he didn’t. He did a ‘blockie’ instead, until I’d finished refuelling, driven off the service station forecourt and went to seek a park in town. I bought the bits and pieces I needed at Auto One, then grabbed a few essentials from the supermarket and came back to the car to find the local constabulary casually writing me a ticket. I ignored him, popping the boot with the remote to load my purchases (thanks again Visa, delaying my funding problems for another month) into the boot.
“Sixty minute zone, Mr Young,” he announced pointedly, pulling back the wiper blade much further than was needed to slip the ticket underneath, then letting it slap back onto the windscreen with a resounding, contemptuous thwack.
“Interesting,” I replied, “because I’ve been here forty-five. And I’d have thought you would have noticed, Bradley, given that you’ve superglued yourself to my backside every time I’ve left the house.” Something about being in a built-up area made me feel a bit more bolshie, I guess. He was more likely to behave himself in public. I hoped.
“I don’t like your tone of voice much, son,” he said. Brad Toogood was eight years younger than me. How or why the Queensland Police had seen fit to promote him so quickly was beyond me. “It’s just as well I’m not in the business of writing tickets for being a smartarse.”
“You’re not actually in the business of writing tickets for parking fines, either,” I indicated casually. “Last I checked they were Redland Bay council’s responsibility, not yours.” I climbed into the driver’s seat, and shut the door firmly behind me. Or I would have, had Senior Constable Toogood not stuck his pointy boot in the doorframe, and leered in after me.
“Watch yourself,” he told me. It was more Gary Busey in Point Break than John Wayne, really. “And stop calling her.”
“What’s it to you?” I asked, slightly less confidently than before.
“Not from me. From Bethany,” he reiterated, “stop calling her.”
“Bethany can answer for herself,” I replied, thinking Shit, she’s call-screening me, isn’t she. Fucking caller ID. “She knows where to find me.” With that I flicked the key and punched it, which had the effect of clipping Toogood’s heel and sending him sprawling into the dirt as I accelerated away. One-all on that count. The Magna picked second gear as I pulled the driver’s door shut with a muttered ‘Cheers for that, cunt.’
Okay, I reflected shortly after, that was dumb. That was all kinds of dumb. That wasn’t going to resolve the situation, just inflame it. Toogood would take that as a personal insult (being called a ‘cunt’ does that to people, I find) and would just ramp up the harassment from here - he was that kind of narrow-minded, arrogant little shit. If I could just get to Bethany - presuming this was all her doing - maybe that would solve things. If I could get to her, plead my case… maybe she’d call off the dogs.
Then again, playing devil’s advocate for a moment - if she can go off on such a tangent, and throw away a couple of great years together on the vague impression of cheating…
No, we weren’t going there, not yet. Salvage operation first.
Ever tried to answer the phone with hands covered in gearbox oil? It sucks. I tried it on Wednesday, around two. Luckily I had a cheap phone. No, it wasn’t Toogood - it wasn’t any of the Toogoods. It was Bill Howard.
“Thought you’d fallen off the face of the Earth,” he remarked. “Or at least you didn’t associate with the likes of us anymore…”
Bill Howard was a transplanted Victorian, an avid golfer, a devout Anglican, and an AFL supporter. Despite all of this, I liked him. He’d been the first of the local principals (Dunwich State or Dunwich High) to try his luck on the new guy when he’d needed a casual teacher, about three years ago, and called me in.
“You know me, Bill, I don’t discriminate,” I said. “The Government’s money
is as good as Gerald Toogood’s.”
“He’s got more,” he protested. “But I hear through the grapevine that there’s trouble at t’mill and you’re persona non grata up there, am I right?”
“News to me. What've you heard?”
“A broken engagement,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“So am I,” I replied, “since it’s the first I’ve heard of it myself…”
He laughed. “My sources are misinformed,” he reported, and sounded happy about it. “So you’re still in the Toogood fold, and wouldn’t be interested in work tomorrow and Friday then?”
“I’m not that much into the Toogood fold,” I replied. “What class is it?”
“3B. Relief for Nora Greentree,” he explained, “she’s in for an operation on her hip. She’s off today as well, but we’re covering that in-house.”
“Anything specific I need to cover?”
“Nothing critical. Ad-libbing should be fine. She’s left work for them, you can probably spend your time staring out the window like you usually do, waiting for the cheque to clear...”
“It’s called quiet reflection time,” I replied. “Every class needs more of it.”
“I’m sure they do,” Bill remarked, and rang off.
Bill Howard. Thank God for the man. He’d just saved me from having to sell something I liked. I was about to run out of bits to fix on the R 80 G/S rebuild, still waiting on the replacement speedo cable; as discussed, the other ‘rebuild’ was going pretty appallingly. So I was faced with a pretty ugly task as my next little job: picking something to put on eBay, in order to guarantee being able to pay off my credit card next month. There really wasn’t much choice. The R 80 G/S wasn’t registered (not was it in any state to be even remotely saleable), I needed my car, my CDs were worth two fifths of fuck all, my stereo and TV likewise. There was only the stuff in the basement adjoining the garage which could be sacrificed. Not the couple of boxes of kitchen stuff, not the old blankets and jumpers from my Sydney days… it was the old Ibanez guitar and Orange amplifier which sat like washed-up flotsam in the corner, unloved and unused. Bill Howard’s call had offered them a stay of execution, maybe, but it wasn’t likely to be for long.
So, after scoffing dinner in front of the Champions League football highlights on ESPN (cable TV was going to be the next thing to go, so I was enjoying it while I could), I made my way downstairs to the basement, which in a previous life had been set up as a mini-recording studio, with soundproofing, mikes, mixing desk and a Pro Tools setup. Now all that stuff had long since been flogged off and the room itself was just a storage space for leftover shit in boxes. I sat on a box of blankets, wiped my palm along the strings of the almighty Atomic Mandarin II - depositing six go-faster stripes of beige dust on my hand - and contemplated the old girl. She’d been retired from active duty shortly after the Yamaha deal came through; her debilitating addiction to cheap Taiwanese pickups, as well as a nasty habit of producing skanky-sounding static feedback courtesy a duff lead plug had counted against her, but she still had a place in my heart. That ‘Holley Equipped’ sticker was peeling and faded, but I remembered its significance well enough; my brother Matt, who taught me everything I knew, and who was dead long before he should have been. Hope we made you proud, bro.
I flicked the amplifier on at the wall, then on the control panel. The orange box hummed to life. Plugged in the Atomic Mandarin; snap, crackle and pop
from the dodgy plug, a little buzz of feedback. All reassuring old noises, like the creaks and groans the floorboards made in your childhood home. I gently strummed a few chords. Just gently. Just so I could hear. Dodgy pickup as well, but the old girl still sounded sweet, even if she was horrendously out of tune. I made a few adjustments, and all was well again, or near enough for government work. I strummed a little more, and found myself softly intoning:
I wanna be Angus Young, he’s thun-da-struck…
I wanna be Angus Young, half his friggin’ luck…
I wanna be Angus Young, rock guitarist, alpha male…
I wanna be Angus Young, though he only plays one scale.
And laughed. So did I - even at the best of times.
I spent most of that evening down in the basement, cracking a few quiets (yeah, the home brew – desperate times etc) strumming through the past, finding that despite everything, I’d completely failed to exorcise the demons of my previous life. There was no way I was selling the Atomic Mandarin. I’d have to find something else to put on eBay. Hey, I didn’t really need two kidneys, after all…
The best thing about teaching Year 3 kids is that they had no idea who I was. High school kids had probably heard by now who I was, or who I used to be. “Didn’t you used to be that guy from Flange Gasket, sir?” Yes kids, I did. I used to be someone, but now I’m not. Teenagers showed no mercy, reminding me at every post how far I’d fallen. Or, spun more positively, how little I cared for my past. But with primary school kids, I could even run music classes as a singalong with a guitar, without a trace of irony. I had an old Maton acoustic
for expressly that purpose - funnily enough the same one McCarthy had left at the farm after our high school reunion gig five years ago, which he never did get around to picking up - which I threw into the back of the Magna next (Thursday) morning, along with various other ‘get out of jail free’ activities, the sort of thing casual teachers are expected to come up with at short notice to educate, entertain or at least distract the little brats while their regular teachers were away. The job was part educator, part circus ringmaster, part activities coordinator, but mostly sideshow act.
I passed Toogood’s Rodeo heading the other way on the Point Lookout-Dunwich road. Given that it was shortly after eight in the morning, it must have been earlier than he was expecting, and he hadn’t been able to take up station outside my house or down the street to see what I was up to. At least it indicated there wasn’t a lot of crime on Straddie, if one of the island’s handful of permanent coppers could devote himself to putting me under close surveillance. By the time he’d pulled a handbrake turn and gathered himself back up again, he was quite a way behind me - about three cars back in the lineup, judging from the speck in my mirror on the longest stretches of straight road - and in the twisty stuff between the Amity turnoff and Dunwich I lost sight of him completely.
Hmmm.
The trees thickened to the left, and I seemed to remember an old forestry road peeled off a few hundred metres further along, after another left-hander. I checked my mirrors again; just the Commodore a safe gap behind me, then a glimpse of the dawdling old Camry behind that, but no sign of Plod.
Dammit, why not.
I stuffed the brakes on and dived for the forestry road, the Magna slithering into a four-wheel drift, the turnoff alarmingly sharper than I remembered. The Lancer Evo
origins of the Magna’s all-wheel-drive system came to the fore, gripping and pivoting rather than spearing off into the nearest tree, which would have sucked. I gathered everything up and rolled along down the bush track a little way, picking my way between the trees for maybe a hundred yards or so, then slowed to a halt, and watched my mirrors. What I saw was a lot more dust than I’d hoped for; it’d rained overnight, but there was still enough of a dust trail (as well as a series of tell-tale tracks in the gravel, of course) to catch the attention of your average Senior Constable.
In the distance, out on the main road, the Commodore had already flashed past; the old Camry followed, then an oblivious Rodeo with police markings. Clearly, we were dealing with a very average Senior Constable. I waited a few more minutes, checked my watch to make sure I wasn’t going to be late for work, then serenely backed up onto the main road, and along to Dunwich State School on the north side of town, just past the turnoff for the ferry terminal. I parked as far from the main road as the teachers’ carpark allowed, up the back in the trees, then grabbed my ‘learning resources’ from the boot, locked the car and strolled into the school grounds, feeling rather pleased with myself. It had turned into rather a good day, all told. And it wasn’t even nine yet.
“Mister Young,” said earnest young Timmy from 3B at lunchtime, ‘there’s a policeman outside and he’s talking on his phone.”
“Policemen have radios, don’t they Timmy?” I corrected him mildly.
“No,” he replied stridently, “not his radio, his phone.”
Timmy was a dobber, but his heart was in the right place. And he was right about the policeman on his phone, I discovered, from my discreet viewing position behind a sturdy eucalypt. It wasn’t Dunwich base that Toogood was talking to, standing next to my car in the carpark, that was pretty clear; he might have been talking to headquarters, but it wasn’t anyone in a police uniform at the other end. But he didn’t enter the school grounds or get in my face again that day, which was good for both of us. The next phone call I intended to make was to his area controller - the one in uniform, not the one on the other end of the phone line. The novelty had worn off.
Day two, the Friday, went just as well, I felt. 3B really started to warm to me, we had another good sing-along (under duress, I even led the class through a song by ‘Shannon Mole’), we did a very well received lesson on Stranger Danger (quite appropriate considering tonight was Halloween, a.k.a. home delivery for kiddy fiddlers), everyone behaved themselves impeccably and Bill Howard said it was good to see me down from my ivory tower and associating with the plebs again - there was a man with a healthy disrespect for the private school system. I even successfully dodged ‘bus duty’ - marshalling the kids for the after-school buses - which was great, considering I had a plane to meet at five. I rolled out of the carpark just after three, feeling pretty good about the world, with only a few hundred metres to traverse to the ferry terminal carpark. Cue the donkey noises: hee-haw, hee-haw. And the flashing lights, and everything. Just when you thought it was safe to go back onto the road…
Senior Constable Toogood was in full John Wayne mode, striding slowly and deliberately from his truck, taking his time over noting my number plate, licking his thumb as he leafed through his pad and scrawled a few smugly thoughtful notes. After quite some bloody time (including the time it took for the school bus to roll past and at least half the kids to figure out who it was who’d been pulled over by the cops), Senior Constable Toogood deigned to stroll by my window and tap his knuckle on my window, which I wound down with a resigned air.
“Good afternoon, driver,” he said briskly, a twinkle in his eye. He’s planning something, I know it. “Can I see your licence and registration please, sir?”
Christ. I shrugged, and dug my wallet out of my back pocket, a difficult task given that I was still belted in. I unclipped the belts, fished out my wallet and extracted my licence. It was current, valid, and issued in Queensland. He had nothing there, unless he decided to tear it up on the spot, in which case Officer 50986 was going to be in a world of hurt with his boss, the ombudsman, the police complaints authority, Today Tonight and any other motherfucker who’d listen. He’d also have problems tearing it up on the spot as it was a laminated piece of card, which would need at least a Stanley knife or a pair of kitchen scissors, not usually permitted to special needs kids.
“Licence and registration, please Sir,” he added sourly.
Registration. Ah.
I leant over to the passenger side of the Magna, and opened the glovebox, hoping the rego papers were still in here. I rifled through, concentrating on exuding a calm, detached air about myself. No, those were last year’s… come on, April 2008 renewal... Great. Here we are. I fished out the current rego slip - the bit of paper which comes attached to the sticker - and handed it onto Senior Constable Toogood with a vaguely bored flourish.
“Mr Young, is it?”
I smiled ironically. “Yes, Bradley.”
He didn’t like that. “Mr Young, this is your current address?” He gave my Point Lookout address.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
“That’s a problem,” he announced. “Because this,” he held up the registration paperwork, “gives the registered address as Woodburn Road, Broadwater, New South Wales.”
“That would be why it has New South Wales number plates, yes,” I replied curtly.
“How long have you had this car, Mr Young?”
“Three years,” I replied.
“And are you aware it is an offence in Queensland to drive a motor vehicle registered in another state for more than four months, unless you have the vehicle re-registered under Queensland law?”
I wasn’t. I was pretty sure Toogood wasn’t either, until he looked it up the night before. He’d been following me around for how long and had only just figured out they’re not Queensland plates?
“No Bradley, I wasn’t. But it was nice of you to point it out to me sometime in the last two years while I’ve been in a relationship with your sister.”
“Step out of the car, please Sir,” he said through gritted teeth. It wasn’t John Wayne he was channelling now, nor was it even Gary Busey. It was Eric Cartman.
I wearily climbed out of the car, and shut the door. Toogood peeled off a bright yellow sticker and slapped it on the windscreen. It said, in big black letters, DEFECT. Reason: No regerstration. Well, that was how he spelled it anyway. Signed Snr Const B.S. Toogood, 31/10/08.
“If you intend to move it,” he declared triumphantly, “you’ll need a tow truck.”
Oh good, more money I don’t have.
“Can I drive it back into the school carpark?” I indicated the twenty-yard distance with a thumb over my shoulder. It wasn't a public right of way.
“No.”
So he watched smugly as I strained to push the Magna back into the carpark, then pulled the handbrake, gathered my overnight bag from the boot, and locked it up. In pretty good control of myself, all told. I was getting something close to angry. I’m not that likeable when I’m angry. Not quite Hulk-style, but fairly antisocial, nonetheless.
“Going somewhere?” he wanted to know.
I considered brushing him off, but the urge to fire back with something, anything, overwhelmed me. “Off to the airport to meet Lena, actually,” I replied breezily. “You know, the one who likes to call me Daddy… Be sure to mention that to big sister when you report back tonight, yeah?”
I slung the bag over my shoulder, and started walking the few hundred metres down the road to the ferry terminal. I’d successfully managed to keep my language just this side of actionable, so he couldn’t legitimately arrest me for offensive language - no way was I going to use the same turn of phrase he’d used that Sunday night. He got back in his truck and followed me at walking pace the whole way down to the jetty. I don’t know where he was expecting me to go other than down to the jetty, but he wanted to see for himself nonetheless. Then he watched from the cop shop on the hill above as I boarded the JetCat and sailed off for the mainland, and sanity.
So what next? Shuttle bus to the train station, train to the city, then Airtrain to the airport, and the sheepish admission to Lena that yes we DID need a hire car after all…
Except, on disembarking at Cleveland, I saw a vaguely familiar figure there, 
waiting beside his R34 Skyline in the queue for the next barge over to Dunwich. It was Phil Duff.
“Wasn’t I meeting you at your place?” he asked scratching his head.
Phil was amenable to any and all plans, no matter how out-of-the-way they were - so long as they didn’t need to be made in advance, or remembered in any great detail. He thought it was a great idea to go miles out of his way and collect Lena from the airport.
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