Secrets

Although you promised
I feel betrayed
Although you promised
I’ve been betrayed
For some secrets
That you needed
For some secrets
She’s the girl that you never liked anyway
- Grinspoon, 1999

So Lena’s hatchet job (sorry, ‘profile interview’) in the Weekend Australian magazine would have seemed to explain the twenty-three voicemail messages and twenty-seven emails. Which was now thirty-five emails. Only reason the voicemails weren’t piling up with similar pace was that by the time I finished going through the emails, it was two in the morning and most sensible people don’t call around then. I wanted to sleep, but knew I couldn’t. I wanted to chuck my toys, and had a go at it, but in an empty house it’s a bit pointless and pathetic really, particularly when you’ve only recently cleaned the place up after the last person did that. Even staying up all night watching cable TV sports was out because Foxtel had been disconnected the previous week.

So I sat up and sat through the fucking voicemails as well.

A complete waste of time, of course. There was a lot of ‘Er, hi, er, Andrew/Andy/Angus. Just thought I’d, er, call and, er, catch up. I’ll give you a call, um, some other time. Yeah.’ I was surprised so many people had my number – then again, it was in the phonebook, not that hard to track down. Annalise had managed it. Mind you, she could actually read, years of expensive private school education had to count for something. Bill and Ben had called on Monday morning – less to catch up, more to see if I was available to talk live-to-air on their show to comment on the story and some of the subsequent media reaction. In hindsight I was kinda glad I hadn’t been available, if I’d actually been here I’d have given it to a lot of people with both barrels – Lena, Kas, News Limited, half the reactionary tossers who’d spouted soundbites to column-inches-deficient journos that morning, you name it, I’d have given it to ’em – and would have come off as the biggest crank since Bruce Ruxton. Much less interest by Tuesday morning though, judging by the tapering-off on my voicemail, suggesting the news/gossip/talking-complete-bollocks cycle might have moved on without me. Hopefully.

If the media weren’t much bothered anymore after a tiring day or two of radio, TV and internerd chat – and there were a good dozen or so other media outlets who’d left messages on the Monday, but hadn’t pursued the story further on Tuesday – other interested parties still were. A Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Young – no relation, but immediately bringing back memories of ‘Fat Albert’ Young who used to play for St George in the ‘80s – of Northern Rivers CIB, Lismore called to see if we could have a chat sometime about my ‘insights’ into the disappearance of Brady Priddle. Naturally, my heart sank somewhere around my ankles. Having the local rozzers on my case was one thing, but detectives from the neighbouring state as well… fuck this, I looked like I’d have to move to Tasphobia or something. I’d have been well within my rights, for the moment anyway, to suggest Det Sen Sgt Young go and pleasure himself with a garden vegetable, at least until he went through proper channels, i.e. through his friendly, cooperative colleagues in the Queensland Pleece Service. Which would probably mean he’d get to talk to me sometime in 2012. Then again, I could do without Senior Constable Toogood having something vaguely legitimate to harass me about – the surprise was there wasn’t a vaguely menacing message on the answerphone from him, to be honest – so I reluctantly made a note to call the Lismore cop shop tomorrow and see if I could help Det Sen Sgt Young with his enquiries. Given how little I knew, I’d have more luck helping him with his interior decorating.

The response from the industry was interesting. From a straw poll of respondents, most of which I’d only seen again at the surf club show, the tone seemed to be:

(a) What the hell did you just walk into?

(b) What the hell are Lena and Kas doing forming an alliance?

and/or

(c) How much of that was made the fuck up?

The assumption that the ‘interview’ was a bunch of off-record drunken chats which had been cobbled together as an ‘exclusive’ – an assumption pretty much bang-on – seemed pretty widespread, which didn’t reflect particularly well on the industry standing of either of the alleged journalists involved in the reportage. As Kas herself had previously pointed out (pointedly indeed), Lena had always been too close to her subject, and had developed a reputation for this kind of rubbish. Which left the question as to why the two of them had supposedly written this load of bollocks together. I’d heard enough over the years about how newspapers worked to hazard a few guesses as to how Kas’ byline had ended up on Lena’s article; either News Ltd hadn’t let the article be published without one of ‘theirs’ on it, or more likely, the only way Lena could get her career-saving bombshell exclusive into print was by going through Kas, who could have threatened to let the air out of the balloon by reporting Lena’s major bombshells herself – confirming McCarthy’s demise, even outlining my involvement in Priddle’s, if she’d seen a pre-print copy of the article on the editorial desk.

It was more the people I hadn’t heard from which I was disappointed by. Richie, for one; if he hadn’t sent Lena after me in the first place, I’d still be engaged, in employment and not being sought as a Person Of Interest in a historic gangland execution. Hell, I’d even had a smarmy voicemail message from Chris Kretin; how I hadn’t heard from Richie, I really didn’t know. Bethany, for another, but that was pretty much to be expected by now. She probably just thanked her lucky stars she worked out I was a total flake before she’d actually signed anything legally binding, like a mortgage or a marriage contract. And McCarthy’s family, most strongly; it still shat me immensely that they’d never even bothered to tell anyone that he was dead. Sure, everyone grieves in different ways – maybe they still considered him missing, rather than dead, given that I guessed they mightn’t have had much success recovering his body from the bottom of a 250m glacial lake – but surely after four and a half years they could regain enough composure to figure out the fucker ain’t coming back and to drop his oldest mates a line and let them know?

Then again, that shame and embarrassment of having your child bring their own demise upon themselves is something I knew weighed heavily on parents, and made them act in not necessarily rational ways. I was dealing with that on the home front as it was. And no, I didn’t plan to phone my mother to apologise, not this month anyway – we don’t have discussions like that in the Young household, we let things settle and sort them out down the track. Just like I didn’t plan to apologise for anything else I’d been reported as saying. All requests for apologies, legal damages and death threats were to be addressed to the Editor, Weekend Australian Magazine, News Limited. For if that useless twunt couldn’t distinguish a hatchet job from a proper interview before accepting same for publication, he or she wasn’t fit to fill the chair.

Failing that, there was a certain Polish-Italian ‘music journalist’ who had a fuckload to answer for, as a reassuring number of people seemed to think. Tractor, via email: “Tell your mate with the hair I’m not dead yet thanks very much. Though if I’d known your track record I’d have got the Duffer over instead.” He could afford to be flippant, and I could afford to let him be. The cheque had cleared. The Atomic Mandarin II and associated amp were still on eBay, but the auction was running another fortnight and proceeds were going to Tractor’s cancer charity – a bunch of other stuff from other bands was on the NZ online auction site TradeMe, all of which was linked from the Tractorfest and Hayabusa websites. He’d sent a second email – guess he had bugger-all else to do in bed – linking to a Monday follow-up article on Fairfax NZ’s Stuff.co.nz news site and saying cheers for the media coverage, bids were over two grand already.

Next to nobody actually said anything about… that stuff. That stuff I’d blurted out, or that had been blurted out on my behalf; that string of humiliating mortal secrets which had left me stripped to the bone. My brother’s suicide, my best friend’s death, my girlfriend’s sexual assault and my bringing about the death of Brady Priddle. Other than a generic sense of ‘sorry’, there wasn’t much discussion. By their silence, it was like I was being gently reproached for being so embarrassingly candid. On top of blowing the lid off my contented little life on my little island, and spreading my tawdry past over the papers for all to see, Lena had made me feel like a buck-toothed, spotlight-craving Cletus from the Jerry Springer Show, another thing I wasn’t likely to forgive her for.

But apparently Marty was still speaking to me, or at least emailing. Which was encouraging considering I hadn’t missed him with either barrels during the course of the ‘interview’. Then again, it was primarily a ‘business’ email.

Hey,
Hope the attached makes it through the spam filter (no relation) and it plays OK on your system, let me know if not. And if it sounds crap. Any suggestions re how to un-crap it would be choice eh bro (how was NZ anyway?)

Marty

PS For what it’s worth, it fucks me off we weren’t there. Could have lent you my Big Bertha to finish the fucker off properly. Would have happily held him down. Figured you’d want to know.

Even though it was easy to say now, I still appreciated it. Likewise the call from Bear – he’d just called to see if the flight back had gone non-vomitiferously given how woefully hungover I’d been when he’d poured me onto the plane, but had noticed the same coverage Tractor had unearthed this afternoon and wanted to check I was OK. The ‘holiday’ in the South Island suddenly seemed months ago, but I was determined not to let that surge of positive energy I’d soaked up from that fantastic weekend be dulled by yet more crap being piled upon me back here, not to mention the vital dose of perspective that spending time with Tractor in his later hours instilled. It was fucking hard though. I really wanted to crawl under the bed and hide. Or maybe just go to bed and sleep – it was after three by now.

Except there was one voicemail which kept echoing through my mind, one which would make sleep difficult.

“Hi, um, Andrew… You don’t know me, but I used to know your brother…”

The girl sounded fraught, and a little lost. She wanted to meet up sometime and talk about my brother, Matthew. She lived in Sydney, but had family up on the Gold Coast, so maybe we could catch up when she came up next… She gave her number, and her name. Zoe Stelios. She’d known my brother all right. She’d fucking killed him.

I decided to go to bed before the walls closed in on me entirely.

It always looks better in the morning. The sun was emerging from the sea, the breeze gentle, the horizon clear, and Cylinder Beach four foot and glassy in the early morning tranquility. I’d slept fuck-all, as you might have gathered, but the early replenished what REM sleep hadn’t. I also had Money. Not much, but enough to buy a half-dozen eggs, some bacon and some proper coffee from the corner shop – marginally cheaper than ordering it from the café – and cook myself a decent breakfast before making my morning phone calls.

I’d managed to clear almost eight grand out of the NZ trip, including subsidising my ‘donation’ of the Mandarin and amp – Aroha and Tractor had been massively apologetic that they couldn’t pay more given it was a charity event run on a shoestring, but given they and the boys (Bear in particular) had housed, fed and watered me for five days, and shown me a bloody good time in the interim, I almost felt I should have been paying them. But kept those sentiments to myself as I had a four grand Visa bill that wasn’t going away without throwing some coin at the problem; likewise my mortgage payment for this month, which I’d just managed to cover in time. Not to mention pending council rates, power, phone and internet bills; I decided not to mention them, or to pay them. Not this week anyway, not until I started seeing ‘Final Notice’ on a few bits of paper and I knew peeps were finally getting serious. Living with Karen the sketchy Goth in St Lucia had schooled me all about how far you can push things with credit companies, and how long you can go without actually having to pay anyone anything, as long as you’ve got no sense of shame or fair dealing. Dr Cletus and I tended to struggle with this more than she did, largely because we would have liked to have retained half-decent credit ratings out of the experience. Somehow we’d managed to do so to the extent we’d both successfully ended up with painfully large mortgages to service today. (And yes, he’d been among the email and phone well-wishers, along with Mad Mick, Super Dave and the usually suspect. All much appreciated. You found out pretty quick who your mates were in situations like this.)

I spent most of the morning returning calls and emails, which did nothing for my plans for using as little phone, power or internet as possible in order to minimize those bills going forward, but meant I got in touch with a lot of people. More emails than phone calls, obviously. I did spend a few coins on calling Northern Rivers CIB and leaving a message for Det Sen Sgt Craig Young – still getting the ‘Fat Albert’ mental image – who was on another call, potentially to Donut King’s delivery hotline. He called back shortly afterwards and we had a chat – he was simply following up the inquiry as [I inferred] he was obliged to, it having turned up in the paper and all; as apologetically as I could, I pointed out the ‘interview’ was largely fiction, libel and/or hefty embellishment, and while I was happy to cooperate, I didn’t really have anything to offer. And I was somewhat stuck in Queensland for the moment, I added mischievously, I didn’t suppose he would be able to come up here to meet with me? Knowing there was no chance he’d dare venture over the border on official business, being very much persona non grata in a blue shirt this side of the Tweed. We agreed that next time I was in the area I’d drop by. It sounded like an obligated follow-up of a high-profile cold case that had recently been given a bit of media oxygen, but not much new in the way of facts. I felt reasonably assured (much more so than I had last night at 2am) that I wasn’t about to be pinned for the shotgun murder of Brady Priddle, or even that they wanted to talk to me seriously about going him with a lump of willow. There was a crime, I’d apparently admitted to it (to which my plan was to deny, deny, deny), but there wasn’t anyone left wanting to press charges. Nor had there been at the time, but back then, Priddle had a choice about it.

That had gone better than expected, so I was fairly cocky when I called up Richie, and equally so when he was actually in his office to take the call.

“Does your brother still sell real estate?” I asked him.

He sounded confused, and not a little irritated. “Yes…”

“Good. Can I have his number? Because thanks to you sending that fucking unprofessional alleged music journalist after me to write your fucking liner notes, I now need to sell my house and move to South America, on account of having lost my job, my fiancee, my dignity, and having the police of two different states after me.”

“Ah.”

“Yes,” I said. “Ah is about right.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Richie said, as though he’d accidentally bumped the table and knocked over my pint, rather than precipitating the end of my career, relationship, credit record etc. Then again it wasn’t really his fault, I just wanted to make him squirm a bit. Someone. ANYONE. “I can pass on Don’s details, but I should warn you, he tends to only work in the prestige end of the market nowadays…”

“It’ll be mid-seven figures,” I replied flatly. “That enough? I realise that’s barely enough for a pre-fab Bunnings garden shed in Surry Hills these days, but it gets you some decent ocean views up here. And he knows the place, he sold it to me.”

The reason that broke-as-fuck Angus here could calmly talk about my house being potentially worth millions without getting excited was that most of those millions were going to be handed back to their traditional owners, the bank.

“Yeah, it’s a bit under the range he usually works in, but I’m sure as a favour he’d consider taking it on…”

Old Pretty Boy Dick had certainly moved up in the world since he was our landlord at SOD-Off at The Bra. Richie asked for my email address and flicked me a message with his brother’s contact details while he asked after the Hayabusa lads, Tractor in particular, and how his eponymous ‘Fest had gone. Epically, I told him. Even the hired Aussie hack had been welcomed like a hero.

“And how are you, mate? All right?” This was as close to pastoral care as Richie got.

“Yeah,” I conceded. “Embarrassed. Had better writeups. Anyway, it is what it is.”

Again, we resolved to catch up next time I was in town, which looked like being no particular time soon, much the same as my ETA for visiting ‘Fat Albert’ Young at Northern Rivers CIB. We were in the midst of saying farewells when Richie had to ring off sharply – Daniela was in his office, something had come up. Something always came up with Richie. Our entire phone conversation had lasted five minutes and it was still probably a personal record for him.

Don Richardson had left the various real estate chains he’d represented over the years and had set up a highly profitable private agency, judging by the very flash looking website Richie’s email had pointed me to. He specialised in big shiny houses for big shiny people, and encouragingly, seemed to do quite a lot of business out of holiday homes for the comfortably affluent, which is what my house really amounted to, and had been for the owners before me – Point Lookout wasn’t a particularly sensible place to try and live all year round, given the hassle of depending on a ferry to go to the supermarket/motor registry/guitar shop/a bunch of other rather useful establishments we lacked on the island.

Again, my luck with catching usually-super-busy Richardsons at their desks this Wednesday morning was holding well. Don chuckled as he recognised my voice. He knew the property well; he’d found it for me in the first place, and judged my ballpark valuation as fairly reasonable, although with the proviso that while the market for properties around my price point was generally fairly buoyant at present, he’d not yet done his due diligence on how things were performing on North Stradbroke right at the moment.

“In any case, we should be able to do a little better than the last property we managed to sell for you…”

A moment of confusion. “Oh yes, the place in Maroubra, I’d forgotten about that. Still, as far as I remember, we made a reasonable profit on the deal…” Which was immediately swallowed by our debts, but the point remained.

“You may have,” he chuckled. “I’m still paying for storage for three or four boxes of leftover rubbish which you boys left behind - they were still under the stairs when the developers moved in after settlement day!”

“Surely that was their problem. Off to Vinnies with the lot?”

“Yes and no. They decided to gift them back to me, by dumping them on my doorstep at six in the morning. I tried to return them to your management, only to discover…” I could tell Don was trying not to smile. “You had none. They weren’t managing particularly well at that stage, let’s say.”

I agreed. By that stage we indeed had no management. I think Maddy was acting for Marty, and by default the rest of us, though our interests weren’t being actively represented by anyone. Our Intercom handlers had either long since disappeared into the ether, or were up on fraud charges. Don went on to say he considered passing it all on to Greg or even Chris Kurtin, but realised that neither of those gentlemen were particularly close to us either. And that in truth, he wasn’t paying for storage, or at least not in the traditional sense – just in spousal disharmony, given that it was taking up space in his garage. Then again, as I recalled it, he had a four-car garage at his waterside Port Hacking mansion, so he was hardly lacking for space.

“It’s nothing really,” he said. “Cooking utensils, old books, CDs... I’d have thrown it out long ago but was wondering whether there might be old recordings or memorabilia in there which might be of interest or value one day. That, and I was hanging onto the share-house stuff for when the kids finally go flatting in a year or so, so they don’t empty our kitchen at home…”

“They’ll do that anyway, you know. You’ll probably end up eating off our crappy old 1970s Nanna plates from the share house.”

“Quite possibly.”

So the upshot of that was Don would come up and do a valuation late next week – he didn’t have a large Queensland portfolio at the moment, but he had a property on the Brisbane River at Hamilton which he needed to value and another property in Noosa which was being settled upon that week – which I was happy with, things usually moved pretty quickly when Don was in the market. Less excitingly, I’d agreed to take the residual Flange Gasket leftovers off his hands, or at least out of his garage. He was putting them on a courier truck this very afternoon, which would make Mrs Richardson very happy indeed, though all it would do for me was to fill my house up with yet more crap. The idea of maybe unearthing old, lost Gasket demos appealed however, if only for the perspective of possibly ‘borrowing’ an old riff to spice up Marty’s new song in case my riffwriting font really had run dry, as I feared it might have. With luck it might even be something I’d already written, which would simplify the authorship arrangements immensely. Or even something of McCarthy’s – it wasn’t as though he’d phone up and complain. I didn’t even know who or where his royalties went to, to be honest; presumably the family. It was a cute idea to imagine his royalties putting petrol in his parents’ campervan as they Grey Nomaded around the countryside.

It actually felt good to be doing stuff, organising stuff, even if it was just phoning and emailing people. Actually doing something rather than waiting for something to be done to me was a step in some kind of direction. I’d realised some time on the NZ trip that for far too long I’d been sitting around waiting for things to happen – you could argue I’d been doing that as long ago as when Bethany and I had started dating, if not well before. Maybe it was a side effect from casual teaching – waiting to see if I had any work on a given morning. Maybe it was just symptomatic of the rut I’d lodged myself into. Up until recently I’d been waiting for work to call, waiting for Bethany to call, waiting for Toogood to turn up in my rear view mirror, waiting for motorcycle parts to arrive… and people had called me up and said ‘Do you want to do this?’, be it gigs, teaching work or whatever, and I’d come back with ‘Yeah, it’s not as if I have much else to do’. I’d observed and reacted too long. It was time to try and make the pace myself a bit, or as much as I could from my current position. I was selling my house and most of the stuff in it, I was looking at job vacancies on the internet – not too much as it was hideously depressing, given how disgustingly underqualified I was for anything much and how sketchy my CV looked considering the number of years I’d been available for employment – and I was thinking carefully about places I might like to move to and jobs I might like to do there. Somewhere out of the public eye, preferably. Maybe overseas, a long way overseas, but fun tickets might be limiting, as Bear would have put it. Might be able to buy some sort of small business in a small town and run it… probably into the ground given my lack of business expertise, though to be fair I’d learned a lot about company law and business practices while being involved with Flange Gasket Pty Ltd, most of which were very dodgy indeed. I could see myself running a small hardware store in Broome or a home brew shop in St Helens on the Freycinet Peninsula in Tassie. Noone else probably could, but stuff ‘em.

Then again, that’d be yet more running away. It was time to engage again. Maybe even time to live in a proper city, somewhere I could hide in plain sight. I’d kinda done Brisbane and still didn’t rate Melbourne much, but there was another option. I still had mates down in Sydney – many of whom had begun as McCarthy’s buddies, of course, but Super Dave had been a flatmate for a few years during our time being based in Maroubra, and if Jeff was the fifth Gasket, Super Dave had to be the sixth. Only an international environmental remediation management conference in Brussels had kept him away from the Point Lookout SLSC show. (It was originally supposed to be in Barcelona, but they moved it to make it cheaper. Super Dave had been ropable. He’d invented more new swear words than a man with his dodger in a laundry mangle.) And Virgin Blue’s midday ‘Happy Hour’ had flights from Ballina to Sydney each way, this week, for $59 – sounds like someone had half-filled planes and wanted to get bums on seats. It had been ordained. I’d head down, do a quick recce, catch up with people, drink beer with them, check out the real estate market and some employment prospects, and see whether something could be in the offing. I could even look at buying old houses and doing them up – I’d done enough general handyman and farm maintenance stuff over the years to be able to manage renovations, although I’d need to be a bit crafty to get around the NSW government rules on builders needing to be, you know, licenced and shit. Anyway it was on the list as something which might be worth looking into.

Going through Ballina meant I could get this meeting with the Lismore cops out of the way, so it wasn’t pressing on my mind (which it was. Oh yes it was). I booked flights down for Thursday afternoon – there was only one Virgin flight a day between Ballina and Sydney – and back Monday. I got in touch with Fat Albert – if he turned out to be a skinny bloke who hated the Saints or even league generally it’d be such a fucking letdown – and confirmed I’d be available to catch up on Thursday morning. I gave Super Dave a call, who immediately offered the spare bed in his place – his rather empty place, considering the latest ex had cleared the place out, so I figured he could do with the company – and punted a few emails to some of the other Sydney-based peeps. Oddly enough, Lena didn’t make the list. The only email I’d sent to her (of the four or five incandescently livid ones I’d started, then reluctantly binned) had been at three yesterday morning: a JPG image of thirty pieces of silver. Google Image Search in the house, y’all.

Only one minor detail. Did I actually have a place to stay on the North Coast tonight, given I wanted to be in Lismore next morning? Only one way to find out. Phone home.

And the answer: Erm, no.

“You’re kidding, right? Not until you apologise to Mum.”

“For what?” This was starting to piss me off. Actually, fuck starting, it WAS pissing me off. “Hey, genius, news flash. There was no fucking interview. It was a hatchet job. I’m not apologising for shit I didn’t actually fucking say.”

“If you didn’t say it how’d it get in the fucking paper then?”

“Seems noone at fucking journo school taught Lena about off-the-record conversations, did they.”

“So you did say it. Well then you’ve got something to apologise for.” Disapproving female voices in the background, couldn’t tell which of us they disapproved of. “I’ll handle this. As for you, you need to pull your head in, you big fucking guitar hero.”

“Fuck me, wouldn’t want to get upstaged would we? You precious little dear. Don’t worry, I’m not out to take your fucking job in your pissant covers band, sonny…” At which point a little voice in the back of my head should have said ‘Hold on there, if Jen doesn’t make her return there might be a vacancy there…’ But I was fucking furious. I’d had enough people poking and prodding me over what I’d said, or was alleged to have said, than someone was bound to cop the brunt of it. It might as well have been family, they’re contractually obliged to. “Jesus man, have a listen to yourself. What the fuck is doing?”

“Do you know how distressed Mum was over your little puff piece in the paper?”

“Do you know how fucking distressed I was about it? Whose fucking life was on display there? Whose every fucking failing was made into public knowledge? Who’s selling their house and all their shit because they’re suspended from their job for alleged contrary conduct and have no income? Who’s being interviewed by Northern Rivers fucking CIB tomorrow because Senior Sergeant Bargearse now thinks he’s a person of fucking interest in the disappearance of Brady Priddle? Not fucking you I’d be hazarding a guess. Now pull your head in, and go back to driving your fucking tractor you fucking farmer.”

“I’m not the one who’s been fucking his students, pal.”

“You’re asking for a punch in the fucking teeth, you do realise that. You precious fucking cunt. What about all the fucking teenyboppers you used to fuck the arse off, you hypocritical fucking...”

I suddenly realised the reason I could hear the other voices in the background was that I was on speakerphone, using language that would have made Super Dave blush. And with my luck, there was no real surprise I’d picked a moment to call that my folks had dropped by to say hello. Beck was probably at work, so that meant Mum had been the indistinct female voice in the background. No points guessing who belonged to the other, gruff voice. It cut in at that point and informed me with that attitude I wasn’t welcome at the farm again any time soon.

“Fine,” I replied. “What’s Jeff need a brother for when he’s got you as his fucking twin anyway?”

And hung the fuck up. Well, it was better than the other, even less tactful option, which was to loudly ask for a show of hands whether anyone else thought the lack of skidmarks at a crash site suggested anything about the intent of the driver to slow down prior to impact.

Well, that experience sure did suck. But at least the Duffer was home – “Oh sorry man, I’d meant to call about the thing in the paper, but I just never got around to it, hey…” – and happy to offer his couch to a passing traveller. I threw my swag and my bag in the back of the ute and made for the mid-afternoon ferry, still stewing over the latest defections to the anti-me ranks. When you can’t even depend on your family to take your word over that of one of Rupert's rancid rags, what the fuck is going on in the world?