Schoolies Week

In hell, it's always Schoolies Week.
- TISM, 2001

Sod’s Law Beyond Thunderdome. Bill Howard of Dunwich State School called on Monday of Gig Week, asking if I’d be interested in working Wednesday through Friday. I had to decline, citing prior commitments; I didn’t want to admit what they were, but Bill had already heard through the grapevine, not much longer would I be, erm, his. “I guess I should never believe anything I read in the Courier-Mail,” he chortled. “Have a good night, old man - don’t stay out too late, and just make sure you don’t put your back out or something.” Dunwich State High called on Tuesday, with a similar offer of work; again, I had to wave goodbye to some very useful discretionary spending money. Of course, I’d get a slice of the kitty for the gig on Saturday night, but courtesy Phil’s charitable under-quoting and the amount of time and travel costs tied up in this little project, it was barely a break-even enterprise for us poor desperate bastards on stage. So pretty standard for a Chris Kurtin management deal then.

I should have been on the road down to Jeff and Rebecca's place by Tuesday morning, but I’d spent most of the last two days trying to get my old orange-metalflake Ibanez axe (the venerable Atomic Mandarin II) and retro Orange amp into a serviceable enough state to actually play a gig with them - I’d had to make a mercy dash over to River City Rock Centre to get some bits and pieces on the Monday afternoon, and some bits that were out of stock at the ‘RC’ were having to be couriered from the suppliers straight to the farm for our rehearsal sessions. And there was also the small matter of *cough* learning the songs all over again - I figured I’d just crank the old CDs on the way down and run through the left hand changes Guitar Hero style as they played through. Might look a bit odd to anyone watching, but as far as I’m aware, performing air guitar while in control of a motor vehicle isn’t yet a traffic offence in the state of Queensland.

So I was just surveying my handiwork, having finally worked out the best method to pad and strap the amp down so it wasn’t going to throw itself at the tray walls every corner or rattle itself to bits over highway lumps and bumps - the guitar case could go in the front passenger footwell - when my mind began wandering to random places. As usual. It tended to like it there so I tended to let it, like a badly behaved dog. Better it was pissing on someone else's fence than mine.

The phone rang. The number looked like the Stradbroke Christian College switchboard’s main dial-out number. I had an idea what was coming next. Stuff I wouldn't like.

“Hi,” said Bethany.

I’d be lying through my teeth, nostrils and arse if I said I’d been looking forward to this. Yes, I had fully intended to dodge the issue and not call her to sort out our little situation (that being my no-show for our coffee catch-up) before I took off down the coast until the end of the week. I’d been lying low all week anyway, what with the Schoolies invasion starting to inundate Point Lookout with teen angst, hormonal stupidity and Olympic standard binge drinkage.

“Hey… what’s going on?” I replied, hopefully convincingly.

“Staying back after work, catching up on some marking,” she reported flatly.

Insert awkward silence here. Well, it was her 20 cents (or her old man’s anyway), she could pedal the conversational tricycle on this one. I wasn’t volunteering.

Bethany sighed reluctantly. “Look… I’m sorry I stood you up on Friday… that was a bit… pathetic.”

Uh… wasn’t that my line?

“Well, I got there a little late…” I bullshitted. “I just figured you’d already left.”

Well, it was almost true. I did drive past the coffee shop a few days later.

“Ah, no. I was trying to make a point,” she replied. “Glad I bothered.”

“And what point is that, exactly?” I asked, trying to keep my tone at least a little jovial. “I shouldn’t have non-existent affairs with women I’ve known since you were in primary school?” That was a guess, but by my maths, just about accurate.

“Well what am I supposed to think?” she wanted to know. “You take off at a moment’s notice with women I don’t know, I keep seeing you with all these shifty looking randoms around town, you’re never at work any more, you’re picking childish fights with Brad…”

Oh fuck that. Right.

“First off, I’m never at work because I never get any work from the school. Your father’s blacklisted me, and don’t pretend you don’t know why. He never calls me in anymore and he still owes me pay for two weeks’ casual work but hasn’t signed off on my timesheets, and that’s from months ago. Maybe you can have a word to him, yeah? Because I dare say he’s on some bullshit agenda to get back at me for whatever it is you’ve told him I’ve done to you,” I said, warming to my material. “And as for Brad, for fuck’s sake…”

“Do you mind?” she snapped.

“Maybe you should ask him if he’d like to stop stalking me,” I continued through gritted teeth, “before he gets done for harassment and is packed off to Cunnamulla or Mount Isa or somewhere equally glamorous, instead of the cushy fuckin’ job he’s managed to score here.”

Bethany was pissed. My use of Old Norse had ensured that; played for and got.

“Use that language again and I’m hanging up,” she told me, which sounded like a reasonable deal to me. “Have some respect.”

“Try earning some,” I retorted. “Throwing a tanty and trashing someone’s house isn’t cute or endearing, Bethany. It’s pathetic. You're twenty-five, for Christ's sake. I’d have called the police, but I didn’t think there was much point.”

“For God’s sake, what the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. This was good, she was really, properly, getting angry. True colours showing at last. Better now than after six months of marriage, yeah? “I come back unannounced, on a weeknight, to find some six-foot goddess smearing herself all over my fiancé…”

“Six-two in heels, she’d have you know…”

“…And the pair of you both rolling drunk!”

Rolling drunk? Give me a fucking break, I thought. We were just comfortably pished.

“…And then you disappear for some intimate weekend together, with the nerve to leave that message on my phone, saying you’re down at your parents’ place or something, like I’m going to believe that? Do you think I’m a complete moron? How did you expect me to react, for God’s sake?”

“I’d have expected you to actually listen to me when I told you Lena is an old friend of mine. And of Rebecca, Jeff and everyone else I know, who I’ve known for my entire frigging adult life and have never so much as looked at in that way. And we were down at the farm, thanks very much. How about trusting me, and not immediately jumping to ludicrous, house-trashing, bullshit-vendetta-instigating conclusions…”

“And how the hell am I supposed to do that, when you’re about as forthcoming about your past as someone from the bloody witness protection program?”

Wow. Not sure where that came from, but strong language from Little Miss Bible Study.

“There’s no bloody mystery about my past, Bethany. If you’re that desperate, look it up on Wikipedia, for Christ’s sake.” It was a constant source of bemusement to me and others that I actually had a Wikipedia entry. Then again, so do millions of momentarily-famous, now-long-since-irrelevant people. It wasn't much longer than the entry for Earth in the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: Mostly harmless. “My past reads as follows: I was in a band. We had fun. We disintegrated. The end.” Her attitude was starting to piss me off - pardon my French, my Latvian and my Israeli. They were a three-piece harmony act who occasionally opened for us. “And anyway, since when did you give a stuff about music?”

“I like music,” she said defensively. “I listen to all kinds of stuff.”

“You listen to processed crap,” I replied. It’d slipped out before I’d had a chance to vet it, but damn that felt good, in an embarrassingly petty sort of way. I’d wanted to say that for two years. Two years of B105 and Nova in the car. Two years of Top 40 pop dross on her stereo system. Two years of watching Australian fucking Idol with Kyle cunting Sandilands front and centre. Jesus Christ, kill me now. Professional tip: the musical merit of songs should not be rated on the basis of how easily you can coordinate an aerobics routine to them.

“Oh, so we’re having this discussion, are we? What the hell would you know about music? You haven’t bought a new CD in two years or been on iTunes in the entire time I’ve known you!”

Oh thanks ever so for the setup, love…

“I haven’t needed a new CD in two years,” I replied, feeling as though I was getting the ascendancy for the first time in a long time. “I have lots of good CDs downstairs. Including the one I fucking wrote which went to number one on the fucking ARIA charts. You're aware of them, yeah? You think that qualifies me to comment?”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, you lying bastard!”

“Bit hard to,” I said, unnecessarily. So this was how a calm, gentle, well-adjusted Christian girl ended up so irate she decides trashing your house is a rational solution. She’s secretly batshit insane. Excellent to know. “Hey, tell you what, come on down to the surf club Saturday night and check us out, you might even learn something.”

“So it’s your band that are playing for Schoolies? French Casket, or whatever?”

Damn. I knew she wasn’t that interested in alternative Strayan rock, or music in general (other than liking particular tunes when they got played on the radio) but that’s just flat-out ignorance. I thought we’d occasionally got a spin on B105 back in the day, but clearly not enough to register.

“Flange Gasket,” I corrected her.

“Stupid name anyway… and what happened to ‘we disintegrated’?”

“Well, we… re-integrated, didn’t we?” I grinned wickedly. “Gotta do something for a job, don’t I? Now that your old man is keeping me out of work… Look babe, I gotta go. Busy rehearsing the next couple of days. Don’t bother trying to break into the house again, I’ve changed the locks. And don’t get your brother to do it either, there’s cameras set up. Not good for his career if it ended up on A Current Affair.” Neither of the above was true - but I had barred or chocked all the doors shut from the inside, and had climbed out through the downstairs laundry window, which I’d then screwed shut with my cordless drill, which I was taking with. Only to remember I’d left my wallet upstairs, so out with the screws and back in through the window again…

“You’re an arsehole,” she claimed. Which was just about the strongest language I’d ever heard her use.

“Thanks, sweetie. I love you too.”

That got her furious enough to just flat-out hang up on me.

Ha. Or at least it would have, had we ever had that conversation, rather than it just being yet another triumph of deluded imagineering. Yes. One man and his tragic revenge fantasies. I'd fallen that low. I hadn’t spoken to her in a month, had only seen her in passing, hadn’t even had the bottle to turn up and see her, just sat around dreaming up petty point-scoring scenarios in which I took her on and won, because I was too weak and pathetic to actually instigate a final showdown where I might take her on and get my arse handed to me. I think we can officially call that ‘over’. About the only factual bit of all of that was the charade with the drill and the bathroom window - which, sadly, did actually happen.

Anyway it was time to finally get on the road - and as quickly as possible, because I figured it’d be pretty busy down by the barge, what with Schoolies traffic incoming and most of Point Lookout’s more conservative older population trying to escape, and I could do without being stuck in a line of cars parked practically under the verandah of the local cop shop. Then again, Brad Toogood didn’t actually know what car I was driving these days, courtesy my guile, craft, and having worked out what days local toe-rag Rhonda Partridge worked in the ticketing booth at the ferry terminal. And it paid off. There he was, on the side of the road near the Amity turnoff, having just pulled over a metallic forest green, Point Lookout-bound Mitsubishi Magna. Right colour, right make… but wrong car. For starters, Bradley, that’s a station wagon. They have a bigger arse than usual. Like your mum.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Or at least a bacon and cheese Zinger combo from KFC South Tweed Heads, unless I came up with a less campylobacter-scented plan in the meantime. I breezed the rest of the way towards town, dropped my speed back as I neared the built-up area, rounded the last turn before the Stradbroke Christian College turnoff….

And, irony of ironies: a lemon yellow Beetle sat impatiently, waiting for a gap in the traffic. The sun was streaming straight through the oversized glasshouse of the Beetle’s cabin, illuminating a sour-faced little Bethany Toogood, looking like thunder after another week of waging war on teenagers and their hormones. She squinted into the sunlight in a disinterested attempt at gauging speed and distance. Not one of her fortés at the best of times; driving with her in traffic made our frenetic band missions with McCarthy seem like a trip to the bowling club with your Nan. The sun was floodlighting my cabin too, so when she glanced back to her right, just as I trolled past, she would have seen straight into the cockpit of the World’s Most Boganlicious Vehicle. GT stripes, bull bar, roo-shooting spotties, 'Queensland - The Smart State' numberplates. At that moment our eyes met, with an undeniable, inescapable, spark of recognition. I’d been clocked. I had good enough reflexes to offer an ironic smile and a little wave; damn her to hell, she’s cute when she’s mad. I realised that now, or at least the next time I drove this road, the game will be up; an inter-family APB would be out for me and my ute and I'd be absolutely stuffed. But at the time I was mainly thankful that she hasn’t just pulled out in front of me in her usual distracted haze.

And if the game wasn’t up before, it was by the time I reached the ferry. Rhonda Partridge on duty (clearly I'd fucked up that timetable too) and asking all the questions you’d expect a dutiful snitch to ask. Between us, despite what I might have told her, I wasn’t really heading off to a family reunion in Lithgow. Reckon we can keep that to ourselves?

Things learned, or re-learned, from four hours on the road:

• Back in the day, we were actually a pretty fuckin’ good rock band.

• I have SO got a ballsier singing voice than McCarthy does or did. Arse to you, so called big-name producers.

• Rather than taking that big Intercom deal, what we ought to have done was… retire. Right then, mid 2002, at the absolute peak of our powers.

• Or maybe after just those last two contractually-obliged albums for Richie Richardson.

• There were a hell of a lot of songs of ours that I didn’t quite know the words to. Like most of the ones McCarthy used to sing. I was going to propose someone else sing them, if we didn’t just arse them completely. After all, they had an emotional attachment to the guy, and I wasn’t (sniff) sure I was up to the idea of (sob) playing them without him there…

• Roadside KFC always seems like a better idea a priori than it turns out to be.

I could have added ‘don’t show up to Jeff’s place without bringing rental payments in kind’, but I knew that anyway and I’d picked up a cold(ish) carton of Tooheys Old from Ballina Liquorland on the way. Jeff looked particularly pleased to see his seedy old bro. Free beer will do that to people.

“Hey old man,” he grinned, shaking my hand. We’d got our one non-Xmas hug for the year out of the way on my last visit. “Good to see you haven’t found an excuse to soft-on for this one. You do remember some of the material, yeah?”

“Fuck no,” I replied. “We call this a voyage of discovery.”

“Like the odd occasion you can see your toes in the shower, yeah?”

“That’s correct. My schlong IS that big, thanks for pointing that out. Obviously it’s not genetic, given you’re so underequipped you can’t dress on either side…”

“You guys are both over thirty, right?” interceded Beck, to remind us how juvenile this was. I don’t think she was looking forward to this much - or the fact Jeff was gallivanting off to Straddie for a couple of days without her or the kids (not to mention the overwhelming oversupply of distractingly young, nubile flesh which would be decorating the place. She had faith in her boy, but seemingly viewed me as a cheerleader for Bad Things.)

“Yep. Thirty years refining our banter, right there,” I replied. “Your guarantee of quality.”

And of course the banter was never likely to improve much, sitting out on the verandah with a citronella bucket candle and a carton of Tooheys’ finest (at least by Young brotherly assent) in the fridge just through the door. By half-ten we’d got through a decent few each and were vaguely considering calling it a night, him with a solid day of work behind him, me with a lot of miles under my belt, in favour of getting some zeds in before Big Rehearsal Day One tomorrow. Well, Big Rehearsal Day One for three of the four of us in Spam Filter And The Waterford Crystal Method (or whatever it was we were supposed to be called - that was an issue for Scotty to sort). And maybe just for the two if us, if Phil’s uncanny ability to bend space and time without even trying hadn’t been rectified in the last five years.

“What time’s Phil getting over?” I asked.

“First thing, he said.”

“Lunchtime then?”

“Just said he had to drop by a mate’s place to look at his computer.”

“Not before sundown then,” I revised.

“See me laughing, right here?” he deadpanned. “I’m laughing because that’s fucken funny as fuck.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Yeah,” he conceded with a laconic grin. “Less use than a busted arse, our Phil. But, what you gonna do. The ladies love him…”

A flash of light in the distance caught my eye. “Are those… car headlights?”

“…Either that or two bikes riding very carefully beside each other,” the Jeff responded. He was referencing an old routine Glynn Nicholas did on the ABC’s Big Gig years ago - he was doing a bit about motorbikes, the first time I’d ever heard a stand-up routine about bikes which was probably why I remembered it - talking about the introduction of twin headlights on late-80s sportsbikes being a fantastic safety innovation because it made oncoming Volvo drivers think you were actually a car - a very small car, granted, but you need that psychological advantage.

“You expecting company?”

“Nah,” he said. “Could always be Phil of course, he’s been ‘late’ a day early before. We seriously considered it as a permanent tactic to make sure he turned up on time for shit….”

It would have worked. Actually it had worked, without even trying. What didn’t work quite so well, however, was trying to drive a lowered Nissan Skyline with a kerb-scraping front spoiler up a rough gravel track better suited to Foresters, farm utes and tractors. Even with the much-vaunted multi-position air suspension which Phil had gone on and on about when he’d first shown off the car - it was as useful as adjusting the settings on your lawnmower. There wasn’t exactly a ‘Range Rover’ ground clearance setting - it was low, lower or lowest.

“G’day,’ grinned Flange Gasket’s own Peter Russell Clarke impersonator. “Sorry I’m late, hey…”

“I have a question,” pronounced the Jeff wearily.

“Is it ‘why am I always hungover when I hang out with you arseholes’?” I suggested. It was for me. Saturday morning had dawned unnecessarily hot and painfully bright. Actually I’m assuming it’d dawned like that, I was too busy burying myself under a protective cocoon of zeds to see sunrise (without Kochie, thank Christ.) The Jeff and I, along with the Duffer, had made it up the Pacific Highway to Point Lookout around nine on Friday night and had very sensibly pledged to have one or two quiet ones to unwind from our roadtrip up the coast before retiring for the eve. And then not very sensibly backed another half-dozen not very quiet ones onto the back of those and didn’t hit the sack until the early hours, much as we’d done the first night I’d been down at the farm, and every night since. By the time we staggered back into reality it was unnecessarily hot and painfully bright, whether it’d dawned that way or otherwise.

“No,” he replied patiently. “Where’s Phil?”

“Off having a wank?” It was about all my addled brain could come up with.

“Class,” remarked the Jeff. “This is why nice Christian girls just chuck themselves at you yeah?”

I appreciated his sympathy about screwing things up with Bethany, and told him so. Actually I told him to fuck off back into the kitchen and cook the man some fucking eggs.

A cursory search of the house indicated Phil wasn’t about the place, and a tentative sortie onto the balcony, out into that harsh, piercing late-morning sunlight, indicated his Skyline wasn’t parked outside. As it was I’d strongly suggested to the Duffer that bringing the Skyline back onto the island wasn’t a great idea, particularly with the increased police presence during Schoolies. Phil called it ‘hiding in plain sight’, I called it ‘fucking stupid’ but he’d followed us over on the barge anyway. I couldn’t believe he could actually fit his drumkit in that thing - it usually travelled to Spam Filter gigs in Jack White’s old red Transit van (formerly an actual postie van, unlike my old Skyline wagon which was that in name alone), but it did all fit somehow into the boot and back seat of Phil’s much less capacious Skyline. Mind you he had to pack his clothes into his bass drum and use it as a suitcase.

Rehearsals down at the farm had been pretty shambolic - other than its great success in demonstrating the following: (a) just how woefully out of practice I was; (b) the limitations of Jeff’s vocal range, playing abilities or patience for criticism when either of the above was brought up; or (c) how easily Phil could be distracted from doing his job, or even turning up in the morning. Even settling on a set list was a drama. With Marty absent, making most of our rehearsals pointless anyway, we had to bounce ideas around with him (and his ghostwriter) by email and texts. This went appallingly badly, as you’d expect for any conversation about why we didn’t like performing each others’ songs, and it looked as though the whole bloody enterprise was going to derail before the first siding.

The Jeff had voluntarily taken a back seat on this process - “I’m just the hired help,” he’d quipped - but he’d become exasperated pretty quickly with the three emergent (resurgent?) primadonnas. “Look,” he proposed, “why don’t you clowns just each make a list of what songs you actually want to play instead of the ones you don’t, then swap lists, see if any of the bastards are in common, and pick from them? It works, trust me.”

“This is how Spam Filter arrive on set lists then?” I asked.

“Nah,” the Jeff replied, “it’s the only way Beck and I managed to agree on baby names for either of the kids. Christ she came up with some woeful crap… Brianna, for fuck's sake? Anyone? Bueller?”

“Bueller would have been better,” I suggested.

So we took Jeff’s approach. The result of which was that a bunch of our so-called ‘hits’ (with a capital ‘S’) got the arse, mainly because these were always the ones we’d grown tired of earlier than the others, but the point of the exercise wasn’t to play all our better known numbers. The point of the exercise was to have FUN, dammit. Even if it killed us.

So by the morning of the gig, we really should have been tired, cranky and quietly freaking out. We hadn’t so much as all been in the same room together this week, let alone played as a unit. North Straddie, particularly Point Lookout, was absolutely heaving with people - the streets were clogged with cars, pedestrians and the flotsam and jetsam of consecutive nights of hard partying; the corner shops and bottle-os had cranked their usual Schoolies margin onto everything they sold (we were drinking Tooheys Extra Dry a.k.a. Uncle Ted, both because it was traditional among gatherings of the faithful and drunken, and because it was the least hideously expensive thing available locally); the boys in blue were also doing a roaring trade booking teenage dickheads for drunken circlework in unroadworthy shitboxes (but at least that distracted them from the Duffer, our better class of circlework-performing dickhead in his superior-grade shitbox.) Add to that the fact it was hotter, stickier and nastier than Boonie’s jockstrap, flat-out unpleasant even by late-November standards - weather straight out of Top End monsoon season designed to drive you fucking nuts. Sum total: Potential shitfight.

And it wasn’t as though this was turning out to be a low-key deal, after all. On our drive across the island the previous night (when the humidity had still been sauna-nasty) every second power pole in Dunwich seemed to be plastered with posters advertising the gig. And not as Spam Filter and the Waterford Crystal Method, or The Australian Flange Gasket Show, or anything else along those lines. Rather, in massive fuck-off black and fluoro-yellow capitals, it said: FLANGE GASKET. And then in smaller letters: REUNITED FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY. SATURDAY NIGHT AT POINT LOOKOUT SLSC. WITH SPECIAL GUESTS: THEMSELVES.

Maddy wasn't going to be impressed. In fact, chances were she’d spit the dummy and pull Marty out of the entire deal. If she and Marty even turned up in the first place, of course - they’d supposed to have been here Friday afternoon for an evening rehearsal, but Marty had been in meetings all day, things had run overtime, they hadn’t been able to organise suitable accommodation for the Friday and the Saturday…

And now Phil had done a runner as well. The Jeff, having reached him on his mobile, reported that Phil had decided to spend his day off visiting the music shops of the CBD and the Valley, since he wasn’t needed until late afternoon for soundcheck. It was a bit of a shock to him when Jeff reminded him that (a) he didn’t actually have a day off because (b) there was supposed to be a final rehearsal at my place just as soon as Marty turned up.

“Oh,” he said. “Bugger.”

So, yeah. We should have been absolutely peaking by that stage. But we weren’t. Or at least Phil, Marty and Jeff weren’t, because they were professional musicians. I was, because I was an old, fat man who hadn’t played more than two songs live in the past five years, and neither of them particularly well.

We were sitting out on the balcony, darkest available shades installed, soaking up the rays as we watched Point Lookout wake up from the night before. Even in my street - populated by some of the most expensive houses in town, hence theoretically least likely to be given over to rampaging Schoolies - the wreckage of juvenile excess still littered the gutters: broken beer bottles, discarded roadsigns, the odd patch of spilt bodily extract. Ah, you gotta love this time of year. If only for the girls sunning themselves on the balcony of the house opposite. Did someone mention hot, sticky and nasty?

Jeff was trying to avert his eyes, given our neighbours were barely a decade older than his eldest, but I wasn’t so concerned, becoming increasingly relaxed about (or at least resigned to) my status as a dirty old man. Particularly considering the ‘old’ part of ‘dirty old man’ wasn’t as self-evident as I’d figured - apparently my new haircut (Jeff had taken to my locks with the clippers set on Three) was making me look younger, or at least less like a Mormon encyclopaedia salesman - teaching at a conservative school meant turning up with a very conservative haircut. The Jeff had reckoned I’d looked like the old man in his wedding photos, which despite the respect we both had for the guy, wasn’t intended as style points.

Anyway, back to being a dirty old man; when we’d rolled into Dodge last night, the girls had been moving into the place across the street for the week. We’d gotten to chatting with them, and one of them happened to ask me what I did at uni. ‘Blondes, mostly,’ was the Jeff’s helpful response.

“Just as well I don’t need a wingman,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “All you need is colouring-in books and a Wiggles DVD…”

That warranted an Oh fuck off, which was duly administered.

“Toolie,” he declared, the most heinous insult he could come up with in the circumstances. “Just so we’re clear, I’m all for what happens on tour stays on tour. But if you end up in bed with anyone half your age, forget it, all bets are off.”

“What, you’re going to shop me to your boss?” I shook my head. “Christ, give me some credit. I’m not that dodgy am I? I’m just appreciating the visuals, I’m not about to do anything unseemly, young Jeffrey. And it’s not my fault I’m being mistaken for a twenty-year-old.”

Jeff groaned. He knew he’d never hear the end of that one.

“Look, either it was bloody dark, or she was bloody drunk, or both.”

“Hey, junior,” I said, punching him gently in the arm. “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, whinge about it… While they go get the first round in.”

Jeff looked sour in defeat. “So that line’s finally come back to bite me in the arse, huh?”

“Only took ten years,” I called after him, as he wandered off in search of whatever was left of the two cartons of Teds we’d stashed in the beer fridge downstairs on arrival yesterday. At least he hadn’t been soft enough to protest over the idea of beers before midday. Which it wasn’t, for much longer anyway.

I felt… OK. Ish. Fair to middling, better than I’d been when I’d woken up that morning (repeatedly, at one to two hour intervals). I had a beer in my hand, the sun was soaring over the yardarm, and tonight I was going to play a rock and roll show with the greatest band to ever escape from a Lismore garage. I had no idea whether we’d do anything other than suck, but at least we’d have fun while we sucked. And there was no way we could possibly have sucked any more than the last time I was on stage, or even the last couple of times the real Gasket had a bash at playing on stage.

A Rodeo 4x4 ute, white with fibreglass canopy, trolled up the street and ratta-tatta’d to a halt in front of my house. Oh super, Captain Eunuch has come to visit. But no, on closer inspection - no red and blue disco lights, no blue chequerboard striping - just an orange safety light on the roofrack and the insignia of the local mining company barely visible under a generous coating of dust. From the drivers side front stepped a skinny white guy with curly black hair, matching black jeans and a short-sleeved light blue T-shirt with a vaguely UN-style insignia proclaiming ‘I’ve Retired From International Football’ which we’d bought him for a long-past birthday; he helped his GF, a slender, well-dressed girl in expensive oversized sunglasses, from the passenger seat, where she seemed to be offering an unflattering opinion of the ride quality characteristics of a Rodeo 4x4 ute. Jeff and I leant over the balcony rail and bellowed our welcomes. The girls on the balcony opposite had taken a sudden interest, chatting, giggling and camera-phoning in earnest as they recognised our celebrity visitor. OMFG, that’s totally…

“El Martinez,” I declared, my voice booming from the balcony. “Welcome to Stradvegas.”

“You’re welcome to it,” he said with a grin. It was a very, very old in-joke - a Spike Milligan standby, long-since propagated into Gasket lore by repeated use, mostly by McCarthy - but we were glad to see its like again. “Where’s Phil?”

I looked at Jeff and he at me. “Uh, yeah…”

“Ah,” Marty laughed, while Maddy’s concerned expression grew more pained. “Situation normal then, good to see standards are being maintained...”

We vaulted downstairs to help unload Marty’s crates into the garage, though the lad had a couple of questions left to answer.

Question One: How much crap did one man need to play a two-set gig at a regional surf club?

Question Two: How the hell had they made it this far and why had they turned up in a mining company 4x4?

And where was the much-vaunted Bell Ranger?

And was that Question Three or just an extension of Question Two?

And what about that one?

“There’s only one proper helipad on the island,” Marty explained once we’d got him and the gear safely inside away from the drooling neighbours, and had pressed a cold one into his hand. “At least only one place we could securely park the thing undercover, anyway.”

“So how’d you sort that then?”

“Ask Maddy,” Marty smirked. Maddy looked a little defensive, but she’d never before thought it necessary to apologise for her family’s wealth and influence (including her father’s extensive financial interests in the mining sector) and she was hardly going to start now. As predicted, she didn’t look terribly at-ease about the day ahead. I wasn’t game to ask her what she thought of the very low-key promotional material plastered over every available flat surface between here and the ferry terminal. Instead I belatedly asked her if she’d like a drink.

“God yes,” she remarked. “Thought you’d never ask. What he’s having.”

“You sure? We’ve got… other stuff,” I replied. We were a little light on the major name-brands of French champagne, I realised. The girls over the road might have had some Passion Pop.

She shook her head. “I’ll have a Father Ted, or whatever you call it.” With a slightly askance look at Marty, she added, “Someone’s got to make sure your boys don’t drink ALL of it, you DO have a gig to play later in the day…”

“We’ll be right,” I said reassuringly. “We’ve got bugger-all left.” I didn’t want to admit that I considered half a carton bugger-all. I knew what sort of rabble would be frequenting the establishment this afternoon, so I knew full well half a carton equated to bugger all.

“Can’t believe you didn’t notice there’s another couple of cold cartons in amongst the gear,” Marty noted. “The mining company lads were good enough to leave them in the ute before we landed.”

“Jesus, they’ve been looking after you…”

“Ah, we did make sure they sorted a couple for themselves on our account while they were at it, of course.”

“Beer contra economics,” I nodded respectfully. “Is there nothing it can’t achieve?”

We phoned in an order for a suitably large quantity of fish and chips from the local takeaway while we started setting up Marty’s gear in the old downstairs rehearsal room - reclaimed from its role as all-purpose junk repository - alongside our gear which we’d set up last night. Phil’s kit sat forlornly to one side, all dressed up and nowhere to go (until its driver came back anyway.) My well-worn old Ibanez with the peeling ‘Holley Equipped’ sticker wasn’t going to win any beauty contests when ranked alongside the Jeff’s lovely sunburst Les Paul - a real Gibson one, not a shabby Korean knockoff like we’d have been accustomed to in Gasket’s formative days. But I was still out-amping him - his Peavey floor unit was newer, but my old Orange amp was punchier and gave a big ugly sound that did its job well, i.e. growling like a T-Rex (or in fact T-Rex themselves) and scaring small children, pets and the elderly.

Given that neither of us was much of a guitarist - he better than me, mainly because he’d had more practice in the past few years - we’d decided that trying to out-shred the shadow of McCarthy was a pointless exercise. Instead we’d split the soloes between us, focus on cranking the riffage over and above straining over the twiddly bits, and try not to embarrass ourselves too much.

In the absence of the Duffer - and with Maddy refusing to embarrass herself by getting behind the skins and offering up even the simplest of ‘boom-chick’ drum beats for us to work with (to wit: “I’m management. I don’t do performance”) - we still needed some sort of beat to work with, so I dug out an ancient kids’ Casiotone keyboard-axe which had been left up here from Team Jeff Beck’s last visit. (I think Beck left it behind on purpose to get it out of the house so the kids wouldn’t keep pressing the ‘Demo’ button, which played a truly cringeworthy synthesized version of ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham, dating the technology immediately). It had a very rudimentary electronic drum beat which, while thoroughly poxy, had at least three advantages over the Duffer: (a) it was actually present, (b) it could be relied upon to keep some sort of beat, and (c) its preferred taste in consumables (i.e. ‘D’ batteries) could be legally bought from any supermarket or corner shop. Though I have heard in the past of a few corner shops where Phil’s preferred taste in consumables could be purchased, but that was more of an ‘under the counter’ sort of arrangement. Indeed there was a fish and chip shop in Studentville near UQ which used to be run by these dodgy Lebanese dudes which… anyway, we’ll move on before we get served with defamation papers, an arrest warrant, or a fatwah.

So yeah, final practice was a shambles as well. We managed to play about two songs through in their entirety - the rest was just the first verse and maybe a chorus, followed by a chorus of ‘Yeah near enough, move on’ or thereabouts.

“Trust us,” I tried to reassure Maddy, who was looking pretty ill at that point. She looked about as ill as I felt, but was trying desperately not to show. “We’re trained professionals...”

“Trained monkeys, you say?” she queried, and trailed off, immersing herself in pacing around the house while we launched into an abortive attempt at Radio Friendly Chick Song, terminated when Marty (of all people, given he wrote it) fucked up the transition to the bridge, blew a resounding raspberry into the mike and declared, to our general surprise, “I’ve always hated that bit. Anyone give a shit if we can that one as well?”

“Your one actually successful song from the Intercom era, you mean?” Maddy was near-incredulous. She’d clearly missed the briefing where we decided this was all for our benefit not for anyone else’s.

I took a critical look at the set list, taking a quick head-count of tracks for our second set. “We don’t need it,” I reckoned. “Can probably use a bit more space in the lineup, to be honest.”

Marty nodded. “I reckon we can probably get away without sounding like Savage Garden for one night.”

“Confucius say, never try to sound like band named after brand of weed killer,” the Jeff opined, in a truly questionable Asian accent.

By sunset we’d shamblesed (?) through our proposed set list to an acceptable standard - close enough for Government work, as Phil would say. If he’d been there, which he wasn’t.

“So what if he doesn’t show?” the Jeff mused.

Good question. Pity noone had a good answer.

“Only one thing for it,” Marty replied, with the makings of a grin. “Mike up the Casiotone.”