Rocknroll motherf**ker

Flyin' high in the sky, got my ripped soul baby
Goin' down on you, goin' down on you
X-ray vision, seein' right on thru
And there ain't nothin' that your god can do
'Cause I'm coming down to rock n' roll
And there's nothing you can do.
- The D4, 2001

The thing was, I didn’t believe McCarthy was dead. Mainly because he seemed to be, to all intents and purposes, indestructible. No matter how many times he put himself in a position to do serious damage to himself - being thrown down the road by cartwheeling motorcycles, crashing hire cars, blowing up amplifiers, falling off lighting gantries, diving head-first into teeming moshpits or entering into relationships with cocaine-addicted porn actresses with Very Large And Scary Minders-Slash-Pimps - he always seemed to emerge almost completely unscathed. The bastard.

Case in point: Mount Glorious Road, on a mid-week day off during the recording of Skank Factor Nine in the last weeks of February twenty-oh-one; myself on my shiny-new contra-deal Yamaha R6, Mad Mick on his Moto Guzzi Le Mans, and McCarthy on a borrowed Kawasaki ZX-9R Ninja from Mount Road’s pre-loved collection - his own Ducati 916 was back in Sydney, and in its absence Mick was trying to sell him on the qualities of Japanese sportsbike technology. Given that Mick didn’t personally use same, he probably wasn’t onto a winner trying to endorse same, but at least it meant McCarthy had something to ride.

On the youngest, lightest and raciest bit of kit, I was out front and easing away despite my comparative lack of insanity c.f. my riding partners; that generation of R6 was just weapons-grade tops at making even your average weekend scratcher like me look very, very clever, which was why I loved 600 supersport bikes - pound for pound, they had big litre-class superbikes covered under almost all conditions. Not really wanting to be held responsible for the pair of them killing themselves trying to keep up with the piano factory's finest, however, I backed off as I recognised the outskirts of the Mt Nebo township, pulled up by the speed limit signs just around a sharpish left-hander, and waited. I could hear the distinctive engine notes of both bikes, the thundering Italian V-twin pursused by the screaming Japanese four, bouncing off the hillsides, ricocheting off the trees and scaring the birds. Mick was either riding out of his skin to keep Sam behind, or Sam was playing about, though local knowledge counted for a lot up here, even more so than horsepower or race-bred geometry.

So it was that Mad Mick emerged from the tunnel of trees first, flicking an acknowledging hand off the bars as he rolled into sight and pulled his Guzzi up next to me on the side of the road. The sonic signature now read now two bikes at idle, smothered by one howling through the trees behind us, rising and falling with the curvature of the road. Then, suddenly, there was nothing - no scream, no howl. Just silence… apart from some nasty-sounding crunching noises. We ducked, pointlessly, as the borrowed Ninja flipped into view from around the last bend, highsiding and cartwheeling end-on-end down the road, enthusiastically distributing bits of itself across the approach to the 50km/h zone. And then into view slid McCarthy, on his arse. A most graceful entry. The leathers were borrowed too, as were the helmet, and the boots, and the gloves. The arse, of course, was Model’s Own.

He lay motionless in the blue metal on the roadside at our feet, as the Ninja, largely unnoticed by now, propped itself against the 50km/h sign and casually burst into flames. It remained unnoticed because we were slightly preoccupied with seeing whether he was dead or not. We bent over him and tried to rouse him. He opened one eye, prised his visor open, and declared: “That’s why I don’t ride Jap crap. Power delivery like a fucking light switch.”

He then picked himself up, apparently none the worse for wear, limped over to the shattered ZX-9R and started kicking gravel onto the flames.

“Sorry Mick,” he said to our apoplectic local dealer, “but in the fuckin' state that thing’s in, it’s either burial, cremation, or a combination of both.”

McCarthy had a habit of destroying things, as we’ve discussed. He could break equipment faster and with more flamboyance, intentional or not, than even our man Macgyver could fix them. He dropped motorcycles as casually as someone falling out of a hammock; he’d dust himself off, count the bits he was in, and if it matched the number it was supposed to be, he’d pick the thing back up and see if it was rideable. That 916 of his, for instance, saw four new fairings in its two years as his regular ride, before he traded it in for an even more exclusive, expensive and fragile MV Agusta F4 ‘Ago’. Cars fared little better; he drove like a complete arsehole, had no mechanical sympathy whatsoever, and if he ever asked to borrow your car, you were well advised to respond with either ‘No’ or ‘Fuck off’. He at least wasn’t stupid enough to buy new cars, tending to purchase second-hand so that his particular ‘approach to ownership’ wouldn’t cause a clusterfuck of depreciation with every bingle, prang or burnt-out clutch, and to his credit he did attempt to behave himself when sharing communal driving duties in band-owned vehicles. Even so he still managed to score more speeding tickets than the rest of us combined. Between that and the collateral damage he inflicted on his machinery and the environment, I have no idea how he managed to get insurance, but he did - he may have been personally liable for the HIH collapse, as one of the largest risks FAI could possibly have encountered. Then again it was probably that useless fucking arseclown Adler.

In his favour, though, he was fucking quick, as all those hapless celebs who trailed around in his wake at the 2002 Grand Prix celebrity race can attest. He was giving everyone else a complete pantsing in the little Mini Coopers which the field had been allocated, until the last lap when he barrelled into turn 4 and pulled the handbrake on to bring the back around, presumably attempting some kind of tarmac Scandinavian flick for showboating purposes, and proceeded to put the thing on its roof… and somehow still managed to get it back on four wheels and stagger across the stripe in third. His explanation in the post-race interview on Nine was that because we were still under contract to another motor company - ‘and let me say at this point, how bloody good are Volvos, hey’ - that he’d felt obliged to try and remove the large Mini logo on the roof by scraping it along the South Melbourne Hellas stadium carpark.

Point being, McCarthy could not be killed by normal physical means. Chemical means, perhaps - but then again he seemed to have a cast-iron constitution, and by the end, judging from the amount of powder Chastity could ski through, if he’d been keeping pace with her, chemical means had little hope either. So I felt pretty confident about it, and said so. Lena didn’t agree. In fact, she was pretty much over talking about it, or anything else. Once we’d returned to the farm to pick up the Hyundai and our stuff (well, Lena’s stuff anyway; I was wearing all the worldly possessions I’d brought with me), said our farewells, agreed that yes, we did need to come and visit more often, and headed off back up Highway One, the afternoon was growing long and darkness wasn’t far away. Maybe it was fatigue, coupled with the prospect of another four hours on the road in this plastic Tupperware container with the tinny stereo (which I’d commandeered, Phil-style, and was bloody-mindedly vetoing her continuing attempts to play me more new music that she seemed to think I’d like - the Killers, for fuck’s sake! A band of New Romantic wannabes led by a Mormon!) Maybe it was the strain of raking back over the embers of the last ten years, particularly the really ugly ones about four or five years back. Maybe, or probably in her case, it was dealing with a lot of unpleasant shit she thought she’d already dealt with, like McCarthy.

Anyway, we rode in silence. Sullen, reflective silence. Apart from the tunes, of course. I ditched the Arctic Monkeys - they were OK, but I couldn’t quite see what all the fuss was about, and the back half of the album was arse compared to the front - in favour of Hayabusa’s most recent offering, West Coast Offence, which I’d been vaguely impressed by, if a little saddened - a bit overproduced, a bit American (particularly the title), but still recognisably them. Then again, I’d thought the same about Abscessive Compulsive, our own album, and how exactly had that turned out in the long run? Lads, I thought, step back from the precipice. Sounding like Seppos is a foolproof plan for Fucking Yo’ Self Up. Learn from us, from Shihad-ifier, from Jet, from every other hapless Australasian band whose record label has talked into trying it…

By the Queensland border Hayabusa had ridden off into the sunset, Lena had protested when I’d suggested cranking Wolfmother’s debut again - ‘can’t we have something a bit more laid back?’ - so I’d put on Marty’s Departure Lounge, the 2004 follow-up to El Martinez which was indeed a Departure - sounding more like Air or some other oddball Euro electronica act than Jack Johnson or Pete Murray, and which defined his bipolar approach from then on - alternating releases from his heartbroken-dude-with-acoustic routine with his disaffected-technonerd-with-Pro-Tools-addiction approach in a desperate attempt to avoid being pigeonholed. I put it on because I knew it would shit her - while his soul-searching troubadour material was inoffensive enough, his bombastic post-modern electronica compositions didn’t really sit well with her. In fact I had no idea why it was in her record collection, presumably for torturing hitchhikers with. So that lasted about one and a half tracks (read twenty minutes) until she finally declared enough was enough.

Small talk. I suck at it. I used to be good, but now I suck, because I’ve spent most of the last five years actively avoiding situations where I have to make small talk. I spent most of the southern Gold Coast between Mudgeeraba and Nerang trying to come up with something to pierce the conversational darkness.

“So,” I began, “seeing anyone at the moment?”

She didn’t give me a sideways glance. “No,” she said curtly, “as we discussed on Thursday night. When I explained I lived in a city where the only worthwhile single men are only interested in the other single men. But thanks for bringing it up again.”

Hmmm. That went well.

“You don’t have to live in Sydney, you know. There are fifteen million of us that don’t.”

She exhaled. “Come on, Angus. In my line of work, it’s Sydney or Melbourne.”

“That’s bollocks. Brisbane has an excellent music scene, and other capitals have…”

“Sydney or Melbourne,” she reiterated. “Everywhere else is piss weak. Michael Mouse.” A McCarthyism. Hadn't heard it for a long time.

“Fuck me, I’m glad you didn’t have that attitude when we were starting. We weren’t from Sydney or Melbourne. We were from Piss Weak World.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “There isn’t the critical mass anywhere else. Your mate Dr Cletus, where does he live? Brisbane. A big city. Because he has to work somewhere big enough where there’s a large enough uni to have the sort of labs he works in, right?”

“That’s a crap example,” I replied. “He could do that work out in the sticks at Bumfuck Uni if he wanted, and if he had the funding to do the research…”

“Bullshit. You need the critical mass to attract the funding, to attract the best people, to do the research, to get the grants. It’s the same in my field. You need the critical mass of punters to attract the bands, to put on the live show, to attract the punters.”

“Critical mass, huh - when did you do nuclear physics, by the way? Or is that the latest marketing wankword? Kretin will be disappointed he wasn’t told about it, he’ll hate being behind the times…”

“You’re a fucking pain in the arse,” she proposed.

“You’d know about that then?” I suggested. “Thought Sam said you weren’t into that sort of thing...”

That, dear reader, is the sort of thing you say in the full knowledge that it’s completely out of order, just to see how the other person reacts. McCarthy himself was particularly good at that.

“He told you that?” she retorted. “That’s fucking typical, what a disgusting pig. I suppose he waited until I’d left, then called a fucking press conference with the boys at the pub and it all came out… ‘yeah she wouldn’t swallow’ or ‘she wouldn’t do Greek’ or ‘she wouldn’t get in a threesome and watch me fuck other chicks.’” She was incredulous with rage. “That’s fucking pathetic. I can’t believe he’d say that.”

I paused. “Well, he didn’t, actually,” I laughed. “But cheers for filling in the blanks. Maybe a bit too much information…”

So that was how I happened to find myself standing at the side of the road at the Coomera exit on the M1, watching a pair of Hyundai Elantra tail-lights disappearing off into the distance, and wondering when it had been that my sense of humour and hers had completely lost track of one another. I shrugged, wandered into the massive BP service centre and ordered a nasty, burnt-tasting flat white. I didn’t order it as a nasty, burnt-tasting flat white, but it seemed to come that way as standard.

How to get home?

It took about ten minutes to formulate the plan, of which about seven minutes was grimacing my way through the coffee and three was racking the old cortex for a solution. I could get a cab across to the Coomera train station behind Dreamworld, that couldn’t be more than five or ten bucks. Then I figured the trains probably ran hourly into the city on Sunday nights - this was guesswork, it’d been years since I’d taken the train from the Goldie to Brisvegas. Last time would have been for Gold Coast Indy or something back at the turn of the Noughties. Then I could get a connecting train at Roma St or maybe South Brisbane around to Cleveland… by which time it’d be scraping it to make it in time for the last ferry over to Dunwich, let alone any sort of connection to Point Lookout. Things looked pretty grim.

What else? I could look up some mates here on the Goldie. I could look up some exes here on the Goldie… file that under ‘Vaguely humourous aside, never to be actioned’. I could probably crash at Dr Cletus’ place in Chapel Hill, which was closer to the centre of Brisneyland, except he and his wife Eloise had a new baby (she was a French-Canadian postdoc who he’d met on his travels - he’d brought her back with him as a souvenir) and that really would be unpopular. At a stretch I could crash at various other mates’ places, but the story was the same: I stood to make them highly unpopular with their wives, partners or girlfriends. Of course, I could give up and actually pay for accommodation, either here or in Brisbane, but my Fun Ticket situation wasn’t brilliant given that payday was a week and a half ago - reminding me why I really needed to get back to work on Monday, should work need me. Nup, the plan had to be to go all-out to make the ferry back to Straddie tonight. Taxi to Coomera, train to the city, train to Cleveland, shuttle bus to the jetty, ferry to Dunwich… then an as-yet-undefined stroke of genius to get me back to Point Lookout, since I realised that through an act of scheduling genius, the cross-island bus service didn’t meet the last ferry on Sunday night.

So I had my plan. Just in time for it to be completely buggered up by the return of a lost looking girl in a red Hyundai. She was parked outside and was looking through the huge plate-glass windows, somewhere between agitation and regret. She hadn’t spotted me before I ducked out of sight, tossing the dregs of the Caffe al Sludgo con Lumpy Bits in the bin and making for another part of the facility.

Lena had given up on looking and had made her way back to the Hyundai, trying to figure out what her next move would be - possibly leaving the country to avoid the seemingly fearsome wrath of Bethany Toogood, having not only taken her fiance away for the weekend without her permission but having failed to return him on account of losing him somewhere near Coomera. Then again, things always turn up in the last place you saw them; Lena found me beside the Elantra, a sheepish grin on my face, and an apologetic bunch of flowers in my hand. There went the cab fare to the station; I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

“I’m not going to admit how long it’s been since a boy bought me flowers,” she said. “So why did it have to be you, you insufferable fucking bastard?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but she said I was better company when I shut up, so I should just get in and be thankful she’d had second thoughts. And not even thanks for the flowers.

“Look,” she said wearily, “you sure this is going to be OK? You can crash at my hotel room, and I can run you back over in the morning…”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “I really should be back for Monday, in case they need me for work.”

Lena and I were sitting at the jetty at Cleveland waiting for my ride home. We’d gone from her leaving me on the side of the M1 near Dreamworld, where Marty met Madonna a hundred years before on the Big Brother set, to her making a considerable detour out to Cleveland in order for me to make the last JetCat over to Dunwich - who said I’d lost my old skills in charming spirited women. We hadn’t exactly thought things through on Friday morning when we’d decided to head down the coast for the Spam Filter gig - my car was still in Point Lookout, some 20 kays east of there, but I was confident I could figure something out. I’d call Bethany when I reached Dunwich. Would she actually want to talk to me? Well, that was another story, but like I say, I still had the old skills.

“Looks like your ride is here,” she noted. “If I’m up this way again for this article, can I count on you for your company, or maybe for further comment?”

“Why not,” I said. “You can interview me as McCarthy if you like, I’ll just make some stuff up about how I wrote everything and everyone just rode on my coat tails…” She laughed, but I felt bad for bringing him up again - we’d been under tacit, wordless agreement since the Coomera incident that we wouldn’t mention McCarthy, the band, or anything to do with music for the rest of the trip. “Seriously,” I added, “come over whenever you like. Y’all come back now y’hear and all that sort of thing. I’ll introduce you to Bethany.”

“We’ve met,” she reminded me. “I don’t think Bethany likes me much.”

“She’ll come round,” I insisted. Boat here. Time to go. I stood, and gave her a farewell hug. “Have a good flight back.”

“Stay out of trouble,” she replied, squeezing her arms around my sides. Her eyes were clear and dark like the night sky, and for a moment I felt a little pang of regret leaving her. Then again, maybe that was just indigestion from the roadside Maccas we’d been obliged to ingest around Springwood.

Then she was away, and I was boarding the JetCat.

It was a calm, clear night, the JetCat carving through the shallows of Moreton Bay like a heated sharpened kitchen implement through some form of soft dairy-based solid with a relatively low melting point compared to the temperature of aforesaid heated sharpened kitchen implement. The last ferry home was quiet (save for the windrush and the two thundering diesels) and relatively empty. I stood out on the stern, in the open air but out of the wind, and reflected on the weekend’s adventures, Jeff and Phil’s band, Lena’s deeper motivations, the Duffer’s continuing Duffness, and why the scent of marine diesel and seaspray just went together like Mexican lager and slivers of lime. I decided that Jeff’s band were a very decent hobby, which was very much in line with what he’d had in mind when he’d joined the Duffer’s ensemble; that Lena probably didn’t really know what her deeper motivations were, so how were any of us to guess at them; that the Duffer was a total write-off, but I hoped for the best for him as he was a good bastard; and that I could do with a Corona and lime, but because I’d completely blown my self-allocated month’s budget of standard drinks in the past three days, I’d have to wait until next month – November – to act on that particular trigger.

More of a problem was the ferrymaster’s passing comment that the shuttle-bus connection to Point Lookout wasn’t just vetoing the last ferry of Sunday night, but all of them. The new owner was a member of the same flock as Bethany’s family, and didn’t work after 6pm on Sunday nights. Given that I knew their Sunday service didn’t start until eight, I figured he was just fucking slack and liked knocking off for his Sunday evening roast before he made himself pretty for the sight of the Lord. I needed a Plan B.

B as in Bethany, as it turned out.

Plan B didn’t begin that auspiciously. Bethany’s phone, I discovered on disembarking from the ferry at Dunwich and making for the nearest public payphone, was still switched off, presumably from the church service. But then that as-yet-undefined stroke of genius turned up on time and under budget - the church service. It was only around half-eight - Bethany and her family were probably still there. The chapel was at the school, about three kays out of town and well out of the built-up area (land was cheaper out there, on what had once been an old cattle farm bought by the Godbotherers) and there was bugger-all chance of a cab around here at this hour, so if I wanted to intercept them before their hour of power reached its conclusion I had some moving to do. I broke into a sprint, then re-thought that very quickly, took a vote, and remodelled my running style into a swift-ish jog.

Old mate Haile Gebrselassie was in no danger from the likes of me, even though he’d long since retired and had probably lost the odd yard(s) of pace. I arrived at the well-maintained gravel turnoff to the school carpark just in time for Bethany’s distinctive yellow Beetle to sweep out of the access road and onto the main cross-island road, spitting blue metal at me. Jesus cunting fuck, as Super Dave would have said. I ran after her and waved with all the casual, demure grace of Tony Bullimore on his upturned yacht trying to attract the attention of the Navy rescue lads in the Seaking, but that little yellow bug just kept getting smaller…

And then, just as I thought I’d be in line for a long walk home, the tail-lights of the little yellow bug doubled in intensity, and then were flanked by white ones as she reversed back to the unglamourously demonstrative random in three-day-old clothes (washed once, though) at the side of an otherwise deserted country road - well, apart from the rest of the Christian soldiers marching onward from the carpark in their nice shiny cars, many of whom were filing past us on the road back to the rich person’s parts of Point Lookout. Christians can afford nice cars, and nice houses.) She must have recognised me… unless she was either very brave or very stupid. I considered opening the conversation with ‘What the hell are you doing picking up hitchhikers in the middle of the night?’ but figured that would be pushing my luck uphill with a shitty stick, or something. Instead, I jogged victoriously around to the passenger side of the VW as it backed towards me, opened the door, and craned my head in.

“Hey… long time no see,” I began cheerily.

Bethany didn’t look too cheery. Bethany looked very pissed off, actually. Normally she was kinda sexy when she was angry, but this was something a bit different. She was beyond angry. She was beyond disgust and verging on horror, in fact, as though I was some demon she thought she’d vanquished. I preferred it when her eyes were blazing and she was shouting at me, because therein lay the prospect of some delicious make-up sex… back in the days when that sort of thing was a possibility, of course. Only a few months to go, I told myself, then you can start fights just for the make-up sex just as much as you like.

And then she pinned the throttle, and the passenger door ripped itself out of my hands and slammed shut in my face, as the Beetle departed violently, exeunt stage left. Before I could get out a word - ‘Beth…’ was about all I managed - I was getting gravel spat in my face again and those taillights were disappearing down the road and around the next corner.

Probably just as well. She hated hearing me call her Beth.

I stood by the side of the road for some time. Maybe five or ten minutes. One car passed, not even looking like slowing down let alone stopping; the Point Lookout God-Botherer Flotilla had already sailed down the road, so the prospects of blagging a lift were very grim.

Now, about that long walk home…

Sometime near eleven I reached the Amity Point turnoff. Amity Point seemed a rather ironic name for a beachside holiday village, considering the name of the town in Jaws. Seemed a whole lot more ironic when a girl got lunched by a shark at a Christian youth camp there a couple years back. But I wasn’t thinking of that; I was mainly thinking that I wasn’t even halfway home so by this rate, I’d be home around two. And that my feet were killing me. And that I was badly dehydrated, with three days of consecutive hangovers multiplying the effects of my physical exertions. And that my little sprint to the school had knocked the stuffing out of me, and I felt like a dead man walking. And that fucking Jeff was right, I really was a fat bastard who needed to run my arse around the block a few times.

The physical agony took my mind off the mental variety which was also brewing, the realisation that I’d fucked up much more catastrophically than I’d thought. I knew nothing was happening between Lena and I, as would anyone else with a pulse and a central nervous system, but Bethany had sure as hell jumped to the conclusion that there was, and my completely blasé attitude towards it couldn’t have helped. I remembered Lena saying something along the lines of me being out of practice with pulling bastard stunts on girls - I’d never done anything like this before, never so much as looked at another girl when she was near. OK, that was a flat-out lie. I’d looked - I always looked - but I’d long since come to terms with my own wandering eye, and knew to ignore anything it told me. I’d watch and appreciate an attractive girl walking past the same way I’d watch and appreciate a nice motorcycle ride past. One of those would be cool, sure, but I don’t need a new one. Not that I actually had a cool motorcycle any more; the last bike I’d owned was an old BMW R 80 G/S enduro bike, the sort of thing you’d try and win the Paris-Dakar on, and which was still in bits in my garage. Could have been useful right about now, I figured.

I couldn’t believe how few cars had passed, even for a Sunday, and I couldn’t believe noone had stopped. That was the problem living in a tourist town - most of the traffic were tourists, and they weren't out at half-eleven on a Sunday night. I could imagine the few locals who might have sped past thinking ‘That was Andy Young, wasn’t it? No, it couldn’t have been, what the hell would he be doing out here tonight?’ And driving on home, shaking their heads at the mirage they’d seen. Either that or there was some massive conspiracy against me which was in effect. I hadn’t been out here in the dark on my lonesome for quite long enough to start believing that, but I was certainly regretting seeing Wolf Creek, or at least the bits of it I could stomach watching. I could never watch John Jarratt on Better Homes and Gardens after that - I kept wanting to shout at Monica Trapaga to run for it, for fuck’s sake. (We did care about her after all, even though we’d written that song about Noni Hazlehurst leaving Play School and Monica being a crap replacement. Ironic that she replaced Noni on Better Homes as well, actually.) I was just waiting for some Mick Whatsisname style fucker to turn up in a battered ute and desert boots with an evil grin on his dial. Or more poignantly, some Ivan Milat style fucker with a shed full of tools… Actually, that’s what really fucked me off about that film. There were seven kids who were tortured to death and buried in shallow graves, and it didn’t need to be made into a cheap fucking snuff film for sick cunts to revel in. I tried to distract myself coming up with context-appropriate demises for the writers and producers of that film to meet.

Anyway, you can probably imagine my state of mind when I heard the ute coming up behind me, quad driving lights splitting the darkness, diesel mill ratta-tatting dutifully. And then heard the ratta-tatting begin to slow as the piercing beams of light grew closer. And closer. And then, flashing red and blue lights, and a completely unnecessary burst of siren, as the police Rodeo recognised its target and pulled over. If the siren was unnecessary, the spotlight was totally gratuitous.

I shielded my eyes and swore, even though I knew it’d get me in trouble. “Fuck’s sake, Brad…”

The door slammed with a thump, and Brad Toogood’s boots clip-clopped on the metalled bitumen. “Senior Constable Toogood, Mr Young,” he barked. “I’m in uniform, you’ll respect it.”

The fear in my throat had subsided to a particularly skanky aftertaste, which I knew wasn’t just the dodgy roadside coffee from Coomera. Senior Constable Toogood was silhouetted by the burning lights of the Rodeo - square-shouldered, exaggerated legs-apart stance, police-issue 9mm Glock twitching by his side, in what his big sister laughingly called his ‘John Wayne’ routine - making himself look big and scary like all the American cop shows he’d seen. I’d hate to have actually been pulled over by him - I couldn’t imagine what he was doing for tourism, shaking down tourists with his ChiPS routine. At least, as his future brother-in-law, I only got patronised, rather than pistol-whipped.

“Good evening, Senior Constable Toogood,” I said. I sounded like one of my own pupils, for God’s sake. “What brings you to this part of the island?”

“Regular patrol,” he lied. I could tell he was lying, his lips was moving. Cheers for that one Jessica. “More to the point,” he said, making his slow, deliberate way towards me, “what brings you here?”

I thought for a moment. “Seems I missed the memo about the shuttle bus not running on Sunday nights,” I began. “Bethany says I need to do more exercise anyway.”

“And why in particular would you need to make use of the shuttle bus, Andrew?” he asked.

“Headed down to see my parents with an old flatmate,” I explained, “and we didn’t really figure out the getting-back-home part that well. A bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing, really. She’s an old mate of Rebecca’s… you know, Jeff’s wife.”

“I thought you said she was your flatmate?” he asked accusingly. Wow, this guy’s good. He should be on TV.

“She’s both,” I said truthfully, if vaguely unconvincingly. Realising I wasn’t even managing to tread water here, let alone swim to conversational safety, I decided not to mention the bit about her being the former love of my former best mate’s life, as it would probably confuse him. It confused me.

“I see,” he replied, then turned and spat decorously onto the road. He then turned back to me, and strode forward another step, until we were nose-to-nose. He didn’t seem to like it that even in his big shiny boots - they even shone in moonlight - I was still taller than him. He rose up on the balls of his feet to stare me down, as he declared: “Listen, mate, and listen good. You can bullshit my sister, but you can’t bullshit me. I don’t care what you were doing to this other chick. Don't give a fuck. For all I care, you could have been fucking her in the arse until she called you Daddy.” He seemed to be relishing that mental picture a lot more than I was. “But when Bethany gets hurt…”

He left that hang. He didn’t need to enunciate it further. It was dark, it was late, it was a long way from anyone else, and I was in the company of an agitated Queensland police officer (most corrupt in the land, with the track record to back it up) with a loaded handgun, and a lot of creative ways to dispose of a body. I nodded dumbly.

“Now get in the back,” he said. He goosestepped around to the back of the Rodeo and opened the cage.

Ah yeah. This is the bit where we drive off into the bush and I get skewered on a meat hook and left for the butcher birds, right? Waheyy. Where do I sign.

Fresh out of other options, I clambered into the cage, which still stank of the last drunk’s piss, and was firmly locked in. I heard him climb in the front, then the slot was snapped open between cage and cockpit.

“Guess what?” he said. “You’re going home in the back of a divvy van.”

It wasn’t a very good joke, but I sure as hell laughed along with him. Albeit nervously.

One back-breaking ride later, which seemed to involve finding bumps and creases in the bitumen that hadn’t existed the last time I’d driven this road, and getting bounced between seat and ceiling over each of them, we pulled up outside a house - one which turned out to be mine, once I’d picked myself off the nature strip after falling out of the back of the cage. I’d never been so glad to be home. The neighbours presumably thought I was rolling drunk, but that didn’t matter to me, because most of the places next to me were either holiday lettings (and who gives an arse what tourists think) or old retiree farts from the Toogood flock (ditto).

Senior Unstable Cunt Brad Toogood wanted one last word before he left.

“Remember,” he said. “If she gets hurt…”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I told him.

“There better not be,” was his surly reply. He turned, spat, and John Wayned it back into his truck, then ratta-tatta’d back down the street.

Fuck me drunk, was I glad to be home. Did that really just happen or was I dreaming it? I staggered in the front door, thinking it was just as well I was out of beer as I would have killed for a coldie right about then. There was Jeff and the old man’s home brew of course… but I wasn’t that desperate. Was I?

It took me a half-circuit of the house to figure out something was wrong. Chairs were upturned, CDs were all over the floor, cutlery and cooking implements was distributed throughout the kitchen, my clothes had been ripped out of my wardrobe and some of my shirts had been hacked with scissors - they were pretty ugly ones anyway so I didn’t mind so much, but they were ones I usually wore to work because they were inoffensive enough for school - well compared to the old rock T-shirts that hid up the back corner of the wardrobe, anyway. Smashed picture frames littered the common traffic areas - most notably the cutesy ones with me and her in couple mode, a majority of which had sustained heavy damage to my side of the photo.

And if I hadn’t quite gotten the point by this stage, one trip to the bathroom told the rest of the story. The mirror in there was smashed - drops of blood on the basin as well, so she’d cared enough to bleed for her art - and taped to the shattered remnants was a crudely hacked-out photo of me from one of the larger couple shots, together with a single word in white print on black material, even more crudely hacked out of my old D4 shirt from Livid '02, the one she’d seen me wearing when all this fucking madness had begun only a few days earlier.

I stared back in wearied disbelief at my own cheerful, oblivious grin, and the caption underneath:

MOTHERFUCKER.

All the ‘old skills’ in the world weren’t going to help me now, I realised.