Money

Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you're OK
Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team

Money, get back
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off my stack
Money, it's a hit
Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class travelling set
And I think I need a Lear jet

Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise
That they're giving none away

- Pink Floyd, 1973

“This isn’t your stuff, yeah?”

“Turned up in a truck yesterday afternoon,” I confirmed. I’d cranked up the Saeco espresso machine and actually produced something serviceable out of it, which I was moderately happy with. Maddy was being shown around my place by Don Richardson, a little more comfortable now he had some known, genuine prospects with blue-chip property portfolios to put on his list of potentials. Marty and I were sipping flat whites at the breakfast bar. No latte-sippers here mate, we’re rural. Ay. “Professional open home house-filler-uppers.”

“Thought so. What’s happened to your stuff?”

“Sold most of it,” I said. “Went on eBay. Clearance sale, everything must go.”

Marty contemplated his coffee.

“I’m sorry about Big Day Out,” he offered. I waved him away, as if to say Don’t worry about it, but he knew I didn’t mean it, and he still had a point to make. Two, in fact. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do it, and I’m even more sorry that I said so in such a pissant sort of way. When I read that email back next morning I felt fucking lousy. Particularly a day or two after that when I got your reply.”

My reply had been pretty simple. I’m sorry to hear you feel like that, Marty. Here’s the song, for what it’s worth. Hope it’s what you were looking for. Cheers. For once, I’d taken the moral high ground, and was enjoying the view from up there.

“Rough Christmas?”

He lowered his voice. “Like every other Christmas we do down there.” Which was, as I understood it, literally every other Christmas. “It’s always the same with her family. Everyone gets full of wine and picks fucking holes in each other’s lives until someone chucks their toys and goes home, and that’ll be the member of the family none of us are talking to this year… it’s hell. As you can probably guess, I wrote that email in a pretty pissed-off state of mind, which you didn’t deserve.”

“Look, no is no, regardless of how it’s couched.”

“Yeah, but… it matters to me how it’s couched. Particularly for you. I mean, you’ve had a shithouse run of it lately, last think you need is me taking potshots at you as well.” Great. Free patronising with every apology delivered, this week only from Martin di Biagini Enterprises.

“Have you spoken to her?” he added.

“Who?”

“Lena,” he said, surprised I had to ask.

“Nup,” I declared. “In fact, on the list of women I’m thinking about at the moment, she’s not even in the top three. Not even scaring the podium.”

“Who is?” he wanted to know. “Anyone new in the offing?”

“Not so much,” I replied, trying to think of why the third placegetter would be if it wasn’t Lena.

“Not so much?”

I left that hanging. It looked pretty there. Maybe I could do a feature wall or something.

“So you’d already heard before I got in touch about the BDO thing?” Marty nodded. “I’m guessing then that Danno’s assurance that she would ‘handle’ your missus didn’t really work out?”

Marty laughed. “Is that what she said?” he smirked. “Yeah, that might have been a bit... misguided. I think she’s having another go next week when we’re back in Sydney. Meeting planned with Exocet over the next album, supposedly, but I reckon I can smell an ambush over the BDO issue. You can’t fault her commitment…”

“You can fault mine,” I remarked. “Unlike her, seems I’m prepared to take no for an answer.” Daniela, she’d do as third place. I’d thought about her more than Lena in the past week or so, mainly about how I was going to break it to her that I’d basically given up on trying to breathe any life into the BDO thing, given she’d kept emailing me with new schemes and ideas even well after my “Marty’s said no, she’s fucked folks” group email late Christmas night. And she was hotter too. Danno it was. Book ’em, Danno.

“Look… I’d have loved to have done it, if I could…”

“Enough, mate. You don’t need to justify it.”

“I just couldn’t do two shows in one day. Not at BDO. Noone’s ever done it before, I’m sure of it...”

I rolled my eyes. Did we have to go there?

“Hoodoo Gurus, BDO 2004,” I quoted. “Opened the back stage as the Persian Rugs, played the main stage as themselves later in the night. Did the same at Homebake in 2001.” It was Danno’s research, but I was happy to claim it. “Lindsay McDougall played for Me First And The Gimme Gimmes as well as Frenzals at Livid in 2003. Dave Grohl played drums for Queens Of The Stone Age at BDO 2003 when he was touring with the Fooies…”

“Okay, okay,” he admitted. “It’s been done before. It doesn’t mean it’s particularly clever.”

“No, I can see that. Any management that encouraged you to divert your resources towards a project which stood to gain you less than your primary commercial product, would not be management I would be looking to retain.”

He looked a little blank at me.

“If your actual gig suffered because you’d fucked yourself playing for Gasket earlier in the afternoon, and people went away thinking you were a bit shit live because of it, that’d be fucking stupid because it’d directly cost you bucks. Instead of fractions-of-bucks.”

“That’s what I thought you meant,” he said carefully. “I was just hoping you didn’t.”

“Why not?” I responded. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It’s a very mercenary way of putting it…”

“How’s it not true though?” I maintained. “Don’t get me wrong, I agree with it totally. Like I say, I’d fire any management which suggested doing things any other way. Not doing their job properly.”

“Look, I don’t do this for the bucks,” he muttered, “and I don’t really like the suggestion that I do, okay?”

“But the bucks are nice?”

“Keeps me out of trouble. Means I can think about buying houses…”

“We both know you’re not buying this one, so stow it. The bucks are nice. And the bucks are what interest your management. Making money gives Maddy her buzz the same way writing and performing gives you yours. It’s just how you two are. Not saying either is wrong, it’s just different. But you can’t argue it’s not your motivation – if not yours then your peeps’. Maddy’s anti-this because it stands to make you less money down the track. Any increase in the sales of the Gasket best-of cash-in from us playing BDO will make proportionally less of an impact to your bottom line than you doing a proper job of touring your own stuff ahead of your new album later in the year. Fact.”

“You moving into management now?” he wanted to know, a little sardonically.

“May as well,” I figured. “Not getting a lot of fucking gigs, am I.”

Dark silence.

“You’ve come a long way out here just to sulk, you know,” I pointed out with half a grin.

He looked cross, largely because he wanted to grin too. “I just don’t like the inference that I’m only doing this... or not doing this… that I’m only not playing BDO with you guys for the money. I’m not. I just don’t think I can give both bands my best efforts, and inevitably spending time getting Gasket right is going to hurt my own stuff. And I don’t want to do it if we can only do it in a half-arsed way.”

He was probably right, but the cynical expression on my face was designed to give him the impression he wasn’t. He tried another tack.

“Look... Gasket is fun, yeah? It’s bulk fun…”

“There’s a phrase I’ve not heard in years.”

“Well, what do you want me to say? It’s great cranking the old songs, singing about beer and tits and Harold Holt and dumb-arse shit. It’s fun. But if that was all there was to it, we’d never have broken up, would we?”

He had a point.

“And my stuff is my stuff,” he continued. Less of a point, more a statement of the bleeding obvious. “It reflects on me personally, as well as professionally. I can’t do a half-arsed show of my own stuff just because I’ve been jumping around like a demented fuckwit singing about Harold Holt earlier in the afternoon. No matter how much fun it is.”

“I sense reluctance, young Jedi.”

“Yeah, well, try being me for a bit. I am fucking reluctant. I hate letting you guys down. But that’s just it, I can’t be everywhere at once.”

“Fair enough,” I observed. “And anyway, Bear should go OK in your place.”

I almost got a comic liquid-spraying-out-nose moment out of him. Which meant I needed to work harder on my timing. We'd had a long-running competition along those lines ever since the Chateau Dodgy days. He'd historically been the easiest to score points off. By now his septum resembled that of a heavy recreational coke user.

“Bundy Bear?” he spluttered. “From Hayabusa?”

“No, from the rum commercials. Yes, Chris Sorensen of Hayabusa. What, you don’t reckon he’s up to it?” I frowned. “Best hard rock bass player this side of Lemmy fucking Kilminster...”

“No, no, no,” Marty insisted stridently. “I didn’t mean that… I’m just surprised… I didn’t realise you were going ahead anyway,” he trailed off.

“None of us is indispensable,” I reminded him gently. “We’re also lacking a lead guitarist of some repute, you might have noticed. And I’m not flying to NZ and fishing him out of that fucking lake, so I guess we go ahead without him.”

“That’s a bit… cold, isn’t it mate?”

“It’s a glacier-fed lake, it probably is,” I retorted. I found hammering the issue with a big fuck-off sledge was the best way to deal with the confirmation of McCarthy’s demise. “In the meantime, you might have noticed the lack of stuff around here that actually belongs to me. Money’s not just a motivator for Maddy. I gots to get paid, dawg. Simple as that.”

“Is it really?”

“Is for me, mate. You get down to the last twenty bucks in your account until payday - except as of last month you don’t have a payday any more - and see how idealistic you are. I don’t mean to be a prick about it, Martos, but I can’t afford to take the moral high ground here. You can do without the BDO performance fee or the royalties from Gasket’s best-of, I can’t. Not sure the Duffer can either, but I can’t speak for him…” I relented a little. I was hammering him a bit harder than I probably needed to. “Look, I haven’t spoken to Richie or the boys, but if you’re as uncomfortable about it as you seem to be, we can ditch your songs from the set list. Probably won’t be able to do them a lot of justice without keyboards anyway. Four-on-the-floor might not get it done for some of them. Meaning of Life, maybe. Actually we’ll probably need to keep that one, might be the only one the kids remember…”

Marty cut through to the point with uncharacteristic bluntness. “It’s more that I’ll look like a fucking cunt if my old band are playing, and I’m not playing with them, won’t I?”

“Mate,” I said in as conciliatory way as possible, “that’s not my problem. If I don’t sell this house by the end of January, I’ll default on my mortgage. That’s if the bank don’t chuck their toys about the fact that I haven’t covered December properly, what with Christmas and all. You have a choice between having fun with your mates or doing the best possible show for your own fans. I have a choice between not hurting your feelings, or affording to eat and having somewhere to live.”

“When you put it like that,” he remarked, “it doesn’t look like we can come to an agreement, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

He seemed to weigh up what he was going say next with a lot of care, which should have warned me.

“Did you know,” Marty began, “that the rights to the name ‘Flange Gasket’ are actually held by us, as a result of Maddy ending up managing the washup from the demise of the band?”

You fucker, I thought.

“And you’d seek legal recourse to prevent us performing under that name?” I responded, diving in with a two-footed challenge. Studs up, of course. They tend to get the message faster that way. He was Italian, he knew about robust defending.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Doesn’t worry us,” I counterattacked. “Plenty of names we can go by. We know who we are, and I’m sure we can make sure the punters do too. But seriously, if you’re worried about looking like a fucking cunt, I don’t really think that’s the way to go about it…”

“Look, we wouldn’t ever…”

“So why bring it up it? Why mention it if you wouldn’t ever?” I was ‘stowing it’ as best I could, but he’d fucked me off with that. That was low.

“Forget I did,” he muttered. “Forget I said anything.”

“I’ll try to.” That bitch would try anything, she really would. I was already bluffing ferociously here, I could do without more complications.

“So what happens after?” he wanted to know.

“How so?”

“For you,” he said. “After BDO, after the house sells, all going well. What do you do then?”

“Something else,” I said. “Maybe travel a bit, if I can clear a decent amount out of this place. Really hoping to get over to NZ before we lose the Tractor once and for all. Those lads were good to me when I was there. Had a lot of shit on their plate, still looked after me.”

“Any prospects there?”

“Bit macabre to be measuring the man’s band up to replace him while he’s still breathing, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Anyway, the truth was self-evident, as far as I saw it. “Tractor’s an impossible act to follow, and to be honest, I think the boys will just quietly pull stumps and fade into the background. Rightly so, I guess. I know Bear won’t carry on. It’s enough of a burden on him playing with us, I think he’s hoping he won’t be needed. But he’s prepared to put his hand up.” Because he’s a good mate and that’s what mates do, I considered adding, but figured that was trowelling it on a bit thick. I should probably tell Bear at some stage that I’m using him in a high-stakes game of poker here. There was no way known that Bear would play with us while his best mate was fading away in a palliative care ward, and there was equally no way I’d even have asked him. But I figured he’d be OK with being used as a bluff, given the situation.

“You realise it’s an irony…”

“That I’m talking about Hayabusa doing the right thing by not performing any more after losing their founder, while I’m talking about taking Gasket back out on the road with just Phil and myself left?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Like I say,” I reiterated, “it’d be fucking tops if I could afford to care.”

In the distance, Don and Maddy seemed to be coming towards the conclusion of their lap of the compound.

“But you didn’t come all this way to argue about this. And I really don’t think, despite Maddy’s best efforts in humouring Don, that you came out here to look at a house you’ve already seen plenty of times. So what did you come all this way to argue about?”

He cleared his throat. “Not sure if I should, now,” he said, but realised how sulky that sounded. “Firstly, Maddy is interested. She likes the area, likes the house. Depends on the price, of course…”

“And now you know the vendor is financially desperate and needs to sell within the month, I’m sure that’ll help immensely,” I remarked flatly, more to myself than anything. Yet again I was reminded of the old man’s truism: if you’re swimming upstream through a river of shit, keep your fucking mouth shut. This basically proved Don’s point about how vendors and buyers should never get in direct communication. Any deal involving Maddy would see me being utterly, utterly screwed, so I hoped like hell that other leads were forthcoming.

“And secondly… look, I wanted to ask if you were interested in recording Beef Week Queen with me,” he sighed. “It’s good, it’s what we want, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to play on it given the rewriting you’ve done. But given all the stuff you seem to have on your plate, I can understand if you don’t.” He didn’t need to say that given all we’d said to each other this afternoon, he’d been a coin-toss from rescinding the invite before he even gave it, but he’d evidently decided to push on. Again, I really needed to keep my mouth shut more often. “I only have a day spare… and it’s the 31st.” Meaning New Years Eve. Three days away. “Gerry needs it for the film ASAP. Yesterday. Last month, really. So, like I say, if you can’t make it…”

I didn’t actually have anything planned for New Years. If the Martin contingent was still camped over at Amity, I’d probably head over there for beers and a barbeque, but otherwise, nothing doing. New Years often got ugly here, much like Schoolies, so any excuse to be somewhere else would probably be fairly handy.

“I can make it,” I replied.

“Cool,” he said, sounding almost completely ambivalent about it. “Sound Investment, in the Valley. Meet there, say nine? Later’s OK if you can’t get across by then.”

“Nine,” I confirmed. I figured guitars and amps would be available. It wasn’t as though I was likely to borrow the Atomic Mandarin back anyway. Also wasn’t as though I actually knew where the hell Sound Investment was, or even what it was, whether it was a studio, a bar or a financial services firm. Given the rate at which the latter were going arse-up at present, I favoured either of the first two.

Maddy burst in on our conversation. “So,” she wanted to know, “did you ask him?”

“Yup.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said yes,” I smiled disarmingly.

Maddy seemed pleased. “You know it’s at the Press Club, they have a dress code…”

Blank looks. Followed by Marty getting cuffed sharply by his better half.

“He only asked you about recording, didn’t he. Typical. It’s my thirtieth,” she admitted breezily. “On New Years. Can you imagine? Anyway… when you get done with recording, drinks begin at eight. I’d better give you an invite, they’ll be checking them at the door,” she told me. It looked very flash. The Press Club was very flash. “It says ‘and partner’, I really didn’t know, I hope you’re not offended…”

“Not at all,” I replied. “At this stage I’m not sure if I have a partner or not. I’ll have to ask her and see if she knows either.”

“Thought you said there wasn’t anyone new in the offing?” Marty queried.

“I did,” I nodded. “It’s a long story.”

I go fishing only once or twice a year. I’m not that bothered by it as a sport, unless it’s done properly, i.e. as an excuse to sit in a big boat under a cloudless sky and sink piss. The Martins did fishing properly – they had a big boat with big engines and even bigger eskies, even if Uncle Doug insisted on filling the eskies with XXXX Gold instead of anything drinkable – so I made sure to get out on Moreton Bay with them at least once a year, usually at Christmas while the extended Martin clan (or at least the menfolk of same) were over on Straddie. And so it was next morning, out on the bay with rods, beers, someone vaguely sensible and sober to drive the boat – Doug’s eldest Jack, who was on the verge of shifting to England with his old man to pursue his motocross career, and who seemed to have a reasonably good idea about how to handle this particular motorized vehicle even though it was a couple hundred horsepower more grunty and a hell of a lot less manouverable from his usual ride.

How else would you spend a holiday Tuesday? The fish weren’t biting, but neither were the mozzies. Result. And at least we had something to read, even if it was just the Queensland-centric sports questions from the undersides of XXXX Gold bottle caps.

“Who scored the final try for Canberra in the 1994 NSWRL Grand Final?” I read from my latest.

“Fuck knows,” Uncle Doug said. “Badge Belcher? Probly have more chance remembering how many wins Mick Doohan had in the 500s that year…”

Doug’s young lads up the pointy end of the boat, Jack and Pete, looked bewildered. Neither were league heads and only Jack had been born by the time 1994 had come around.

“Ricky Stuart,” proposed Mick confidently. “Nah, wait. Laurie Daley?”

“The tosser,” Uncle Doug grinned. “Wasn’t he the one who was…” He caught himself, given the company, and trailed off. It’s a pity Lozza hadn’t.

“Caught flogging himself in the change rooms after the Grand Final by the NSW Premier and the Prime Minister?” I replied. Probably should have self-censored as well, but I had a certain reputation to uphold. “Yeah he was, but that was ’89 I think.”

“Are we even fuckin’ close?”

“Well, you’re at least picking Canberra players, some of which even played in the ’94 Grand Final…”

“It was Mal,” declared a voice from under a floppy terry-towelling hat. “Played his final game, scored the last try, chaired off the ground, the end. Christ's sake, he’s your Origin coach, how the hell do you not know that?”

I nodded, and raised a hand. “We have a winner, lads. Our Canberra specialist.”

“Must be some compensation for living in that shithole for years,” the ginger-haired girl pronounced with a sly smile.

I’d been pretty unsure about this, to be honest. Very, very unsure, to be completely honest. The Martins were magnificent bastards, but they were, by any measure, rough as fucking guts. They swore, they farted, they told dirty jokes, they couldn’t hold down meaningful long-term relationships with women, and they drunk prodigious amounts of piss, particularly on fishing trips. Unsurprisingly they’d not looked particularly thrilled when I’d muttered something about wanting to bring a girl with me – it was strictly against regulations, of course – but they’d reluctantly consented to her presence. Likewise, I’d warned Beth as best I could that there would be a requirement for her to swear, drink beer and appear to know something about fishing, but she assured me she’d be OK. “Social chameleon, remember?” she said. “Watch and learn.”

So what had changed since the last time we’d talked about going fishing? Well, this was different. We weren’t going fishing on purpose, she told me. I happened to be going fishing and she happened to be joining me. I’m sure it made sense to her. What made sense to me was that it was a glorious morning, we had the windows down in the quasi-XR8 and the V8 was thundering through the twin pipes like an offshore powerboat as we arrowed across the island towards Amity. She kicked back in the passenger seat, bare feet on the dash, serene behind big sunglasses, looking more at peace with the world than I’d seen for a while, or projecting as such. And with about as much in common with the Bethany Toogood I’d asked to be my wife as Mad Mick Martin had with the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

I don’t know what sort of girl the lads were expecting me to turn up with – presumably a girlie girl, something in a pink cardy and floral skirt with perfect hair and seamless nail polish, judging by the reaction when I turned up with Beth, in a Speights bucket hat I’d appropriated on my NZ trip, an old Bridge to Brisbane T-shirt (she’d finished inside the hour, quicker than Dr Cletus had ever managed), lairy Technicolor-print girly boardshorts and double-plugger thongs. She looked like my twin sister. And given what I wanted to do to her, it was just as well we were in Queensland.

“G’day boys,” she’d said. “No fucking risk of catching anything today I suppose?”

Apparently not. But at least we got most of the XXXX Gold quiz questions right. And, while it was moderately embarrassing to me to be shown up as knowing less about fishing than a girl, at least it gave me a few laughs seeing the younger Martins trying to comprehend that there were girls out there like Beth, who drank beer, swore spectacularly, had a kitbag full of deadly one-liners and knew all about lures, bait, reel tension, line weights and Canberra Raiders teams of the mid-90s. Actually, the older Martins seemed a bit confused too, in need of some sort of point of reference from the dim and distant past.

“Angus,” Mick remarked at one point, “has Beth met Lauren?”

“No, why?”

“I think they’d get on well,” he chortled.

“Who’s Lauren?” Beth asked, her eyes narrowing. “And why would I get on well with her?”

“Tell you later,” I told her. Ideally alone under a hot shower, where she could wash off all that salt, sunscreen and insect repellent and turn back into my favourite dirty little girl.

It’d been eye-opening, not always in a good way, seeing just how proficient she was at her social chameleon deal, figuring she was probably basing it on her dad’s old fishing mates, but personally I’d have rather had the girl who liked to play dress-ups, who’d I’d become acquainted with over the past couple of fairly interesting days. On Sunday she’d been a real estate agent; Monday morning I’d found her in my kitchen dressed almost exactly like a hot gym instructor midway through her morning run. A role you could say she was born to play. She tried to protest that she’d just stopped by for breakfast because she’d found herself completely ravenous – read into that what you will – and, true to her cover story (if it was indeed a cover story) she’d already made me pancakes with maple syrup. However, remaining unconvinced, I’d still insisted in devouring her instead. With maple syrup. Now that would have taken some getting out of lycra running gear. However, that was a problem for Unilever's finest, not me.

But no such luck re sharing a de-boganifying shower.

“I’d better get back,” she’d admitted after a few ‘rehydrating’ ales back on shore at Mount Road MCs’ new eastern dealership, “before I’m missed.”

“Jack can run you back in the truck if you like…”

She glanced over at the Mount Road Monster, that fucking enormous bright red Dodge RAM SRT-10 parked with the chameleonic stealth of a casually abandoned firetruck on the grass in front of the Martins’ beach house. Reading her expression I think she figured it might draw more attention to her return than she really wanted. It’d been hair-raising enough sorting our morning rendezvous in something as conspicuous as a belching V8 Falcon ute.

“No, it’s fine,” she smiled. “I came prepared.”

She reached under the tonneau cover for her bag, disappeared into the house to change into her running gear, and refill her drink bottle, and ran home along the beach. Just the ten kays or so, though at least she had a sou-westerly as a tailwind. She hadn’t made it to the gym the past few days, she’d said. Couldn’t imagine why…

Didn’t look like I was going to make it home tonight, though. Never mind. The Martins just decided to bring New Years forward a few days. There was plenty of floor spare to sleep on, and I’d had the foresight to throw my camping swag into the Falcon that morning.

“She’s fucking hard core,” marvelled Mick. He was still marvelling several hours after she’d left.

“Broke the mould with her, yeah?”

“Yup,” I said.

“She’s not the one you were going to marry though, was she?”

“Yup,” I grinned.

He looked like I’d just said ‘I’m gayer than Graham Norton.’

“Why the hell did you back out then son?”

“Mainly,” I mused, “because she’s batshit fucking insane.”

“Shit eh?” Mick reflected. “Apart from that, all good?”