Should I stay or should I go

Should I stay or should I go now
Should I stay or should I go now
If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
- The Clash, 1981

Lightly paraphrased, that had basically been my question to Don.

“Normally,” he opined, “I’d suggest, politely, that you find somewhere else to be. To be honest,” he grinned, “and I think I can be more honest with you than with most clients… the vendor usually gets in the way at open homes. For all manner of reasons, not all of which are the owners’ fault... but many of which are. How I see it is this. There’s a reason you’ve retained me to sell your home; it’s because I have thirty years experience doing this, it’s what I do. If you felt you could do it better than I can, you probably would have done so yourself. From my experience I can do it better if the vendor is a faceless entity who the potential buyer never sees, rather than someone they feel they can communicate directly with. Once they think they can do that, I’m of little use to you, I can’t add value to the process. In that instance, you may as well have listed privately.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I replied. “Pretty much how we used to feel about your brother trying to tell us how to write songs after we’d already had a bunch of them played on the radio. And we didn’t actually know what we were doing yet, you actually do…”

Don agreed with a nod. “All that said, in situations like this, the first open home is mainly an excuse for all the locals to come around and have a sticky-beak through the property. We may get a few nibbles of interest today, but I don’t think we’ll get the buyer, or a buyer, out of today’s open home. Next week, when the nosey neighbours have been and gone, I think we’ll have more luck. So if you want to hang around for today, be my guest. Or be your own guest,” he quipped.

“Might be useful to have someone to distract the tyre-kickers so you can concentrate on the genuines, I guess?”

“You’d be better for that if you were five-four and blonde, but unfortuately I left her back in the office in Sydney.”

“That’s OK,” I replied. “I might be able to obtain my own locally.”

Which was the height of vainglorious ambition, as Kretin used to say, usually about our touring schedules. Then again he was usually the tight bastard who booked us into such breakneck schedules in order to save cash, so he could spend it on Propecia. Even when we were with Intercom we never actually seemed to see any of the territory we were touring – I’ve been to England and America, and all I can tell you is that (a) I hate international long-haul flights; (b) Airports, freeways, rental cars and hotels there look a lot like airports, freeways, rental cars and hotels here; (c) I hate international long-haul flights; (d) Don’t get stuck next to Phil on an international long-haul flight, he cranks movies all night on the poxy little screen and keeps prodding you awake to replay the good bits even though you can’t make anything out from the angle you’re on; (e) London is fucking expensive and full of Polish bar staff, Ghanaian taxi-drivers and right-royal Cockney geezas who could well do with cheerin’ up innit; and (e) I fucking hate fucking international fucking long-haul flights. What were we talking about? Yeah, the height of vainglorious ambition, that being any plans of mine to actually get in touch with my current favourite five-four blonde. Her phone went straight to messages, meaning it was switched off, out of range, out of charge, broken, lost down the back of her car seat or just deliberately being ignored; I knew she never checked her email because she had Facebook, whereas I never checked Facebook because I didn’t have an account, on account of not being female or homosexual; and I suspected I’d get a poor hearing if I rocked up to her parents’ place, knocked on the door and asked “Hello Mrs Toogood, can Bethany come out to play?”

Don was right, of course. Once one o’clock ambled around, I could recognise eighty percent of the heads which began filing through the grounds. I’d tossed up whether to pretend to be a tyre-kicking punter or hide in plain sight, and having figured if Don was right most would recognise me anyway, decided just to set up camp near the coffee maker and see if I remembered any of the mad-fresh barista skillz which stood me in such good stead back in the day at Mount Road Motorcycles. After a couple of utterly woeful attempts I left the instrument in its intended capacity of ‘elaborate prop’ – I had at least managed to fill the kitchen with the scent of coffee, even if ever-so-slightly burnt, which was much of the point of the exercise, along with the baking bread from the breadmaker. Christ knew if the bread would actually turn out to be anything more than a solid brown turd deflated into the shape of a 1980s rugby league football, but I don’t think actually eating the stuff was ever in Don’s master plan.

So I circulated, picking off the most obvious of the tyre-kickers to save them wasting Don’s time – I doubted the contingent from the local residents group were serious buyers, none of them seemed in the market for a family-sized beach house even if they all claimed they were looking on behalf of children or grandchildren with money and/or interest in the area – and made small talk.

I love what you’ve done with the place. (Which was actually nothing, apart from live in it.)

Gosh, is this lounge setting yours, it’s very stylish, very you. (No it’s not, and no it isn’t. Very ‘me’ would be the shabby old couch from the verandah which Don had the lads shunt into the garage and cover it with a sheet. It’s dishevelled and untidy and fraying at the edges, but has had more women than any other soft furnishings in the building.)

What a lovely view from the back side of the deck! (Yes, if you don’t mind fuck-off-awful Sunbleached Terracotta abominations excreted into your peripheral sightlines.)

Speaking of Crittenden, I wondered if he’d show. I wondered more at the etiquette – I presumed it was very much against the real estate agents’ code of ethics (almost managed that with a straight face) to crash another agents’ open home, whether as a buyer or seller. I figured he wouldn’t. He’d send a proxy, to check out the state of the property, and that of the prospective market. I expected one of the underlings from his office, or at a stretch, his lad Brad Toogood.

Given the circumstances, I really didn’t expect who he did send.

She breezed into the room like she owned it, and if her father stumped up the cash she could have, right then and there. Sunglasses slid back over her crown, the arms nestled in her glossy chestnut hair; a midriff-baring T-shirt she’d apparently been poured into, and denim cut-off shorts which diverted attention to her legs so blatantly it was almost comical. She’d phoned weeks back, left a message after the whole all-your-secrets-are-belong-to-us feature piece in the Weekend Oz; that was OK, that didn’t stand to get me in any particular trouble, it’d be hard to make the case I’d initiated, sought or maintained the contact. But promenading through my front door, pulling up a seat at the breakfast bar and cockily ordering a flat white in front of a room full of people… this could be hard to pretend didn’t happen when evidence was called against me.

“It’s a prop,” I explained flatly. “Doesn’t do anything.”

“Much like yourself,” Anna remarked, with a wicked little smile. “Not surprised you’ve decided to fuck off though. Even in holidays, this place is deader than platform heels.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that might have been a ‘Cat’ line from Red Dwarf. If it wasn’t, it should have been.

“This from someone who lives in Faaarrrrmadale…”

“Yeah, well, at least there’s more than one pub open. And they don’t check fake IDs too carefully.”

“Owned by the UNE student union,” I pointed out, “they’re just looking after their student body.” Her student body was being slyly checked out by one or two of the more corpulent holiday makers touring through the premises. And me, of course. “In any trouble yet?”

“Hell yeah,” she remarked. “Mainly for sneaking out after lockdown and going to the pub, you know how it is… My cellmate is another girl from up here. She’s a year younger and is a bit naïve, so she’s had to become my bitch.”

“So she has to take the fall whenever you get in trouble, that sort of deal?”

“Not so much. More that I make her have nasty prison sex with me to get rid of my frustrations.”

She’d said it to get a reaction, which, by fuck, she was not going to get. Nothing more than a grim half-smile as I firmly persuaded that particular mental image out the doorway of the visual projection suite. You’ve actually had sex in the past 24 hours. 12 hours in fact. Sort your shit out. My case wasn’t helped by Anna flipping open her Motorola Razr (no relation to Helen Razer, given it was modern and of use) to show me her current wallpaper – herself and her dorm/cell-mate Carmen, at some sort of high-intensity dance party (presumably at one of the union-owned establishments) streaked with sweat, not very well dressed for the vagrancies of the Armidale weather, and both pouting outrageously for Anna’s phone camera. Damn. Carmen looked small and feisty, not like she’d be prepared to be anyone’s bitch. But, then again, Anna could be very persuasive…

Stop it, Young. Drop your weapon and step away from it. It wasn’t losing my registration as a teacher that worried me, nor the infamy for my reputation – I figured if anyone couldn’t join the dots on a former rock star used to sleeping with young women getting fired from his new job for sleeping with young women, then there really were some stupid people in the world. But, basically, I didn’t want to go to jail. Anna’s references to ‘nasty prison sex’ were getting my attention, but partly in a way she hadn’t intended. And I wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t end up in proper criminal trouble for it. My research hadn’t been definitive – there’d been cases of girl teachers sleeping with boys, and vice versa, which had ended with the teachers involved serving community service or even low-security JT, though predominantly those had been where the student was sixteen or under. So unless Anna was lying about her age as well, maybe I was OK. But maybe I wasn’t, and it wasn’t the sort of risk I wanted to exacerbate. To be honest, though, while my research hadn’t been definitive, neither had it been exhaustive. Mainly because my best bet for getting a definitive answer, phoning up Education Queensland and asking ‘Hey, as a thirty-something male teacher, what sort of trouble would I get into if I fucked one of my students?’ didn’t really seem that good or appealing an idea.

I felt a room full of eyes burning into me. They weren’t, but I felt like they were. And I wasn’t helping to get my property sold standing around here talking smut with a seventeen year old NEGS senior. The vintaged lettering on the shirt which seemed vacuum-sealed to her curves read ‘Let’s take this outside’ – honest, I was just reading the words – so we did.

“Care to join me out on the back deck, Anna?”

The back deck was really just a continuation of the front deck, which snuck around between the side of the house and the trees and opened out again at the back, where you could see down over the south beach on the rare days the glare off Tuscany On Point didn’t make you want to throw up over the balcony. One of Roger Crittenden’s more palatable creations (can only think of the one) followed me through the kitchen onto the balcony, with apparently altogether different ideas about what I had in mind than what I actually did. The back deck was momentarily deserted, which led Anna to slide her arms around my shoulders and sidle up close. It was meant just as a friendly hug, but I wasn’t really feeling the love, platonically or otherwise, and she sensed it.

“How’s it going, Angus?” she wanted to know. “Sold your guitar, selling your house… what’s happening?”

“This,” I remarked sharply. I kept the letter from EQ in my wallet, if only to remind myself not to do stupid things in public in the present climate. She did a very good impression of astonished and/or fucked off as she read through.

“What the fuck is this?” she spat. “Us?”

I came up with a suitably ‘What do you think?’ look in reply.

“How the fuck do they know about us?” she demanded.

“Well,” I replied coolly, “shouting about it at the top of your voice probably hasn’t helped.” And hated what I’d said, because I sounded like a fucking schoolteacher.

“I haven’t said anything,” she responded darkly, but more quietly. “I wouldn’t have told anyone. Fuck’s sake, Angus, you know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. I love you, I think you’re fucking awesome. Take that in whatever creepy stalky fangirl way you like. But I’m not going to start boiling bunnies in your kitchen or stabbing your exes with icepicks…” Good general knowledge of film. She’d be handy in pub trivia quizzes, if we could get her past the seccies checking ID.

“Then, as you say, how the fuck do they know about us?” I reiterated. While quietly beginning to scribe a line through Anna on my mental list of suspects. She might have been lying about not telling, but I doubted it. Which just left the girl I’d ran into on the way home. Despite me beginning to fall head-over-heels in lust with her in the 12 hours since I’d seen her again – actually, make it nine - I knew Ms Bethany Toogood was just about as trustworthy as she was stable.

“Shakedown,” she offered gamely. “They don’t know anything but they’re trying to shake you down. Toogood never liked you, the repressed old fucker. Hell, they could have seen the way you used to look at me in class.” She looked me in the eye with a sly grin. “Like a starving man looking at a packet of salted peanuts.”

“That’s two Red Dwarf references in five minutes,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, well, Carmen’s a massive, I mean fucking massive fan of all that old shit...”

“Totes massive?”

“Totes heaps massive,” she offered with a wry smirk. “Hard to avoid when she’s watching the DVDs on repeat all the time. Red Dwarf, Young Ones, whatevs. And hey, I tried to be classy. I left out the bit about wanting to peel off the wrapping, get inside and taste the salty goodness…”

I tried not to grin. “So,” I continued, “you’re not here scoping the place out for your old man then?”

“Fuck no.” Anna pulled a face. “He can sort his own shit out. I came here to see you,” she said accusingly. “See how you’re getting on after the whole having-your-life-shat-upon-by-Rupert-fucking-Murdoch thing. I only came to see how you were, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition…”

“Does anyone?” I mused ironically.

“Seriously, I’m just picking all this shit up by osmosis, I’m not into it at all.”

“You sure you’re not her bitch?”

She offered a promising smile. “Maybe occasionally. If she’s been good, kept the cell nice and clean for inspection. Smile. Actually, don’t smile, just look sexy. Like that.” She pulled out the camera again, but all she saw through the view finder was the palm of my hand.

“Bad idea,” I suggested. “I’d rather there wasn’t evidence of me on your camera for when this goes to the tribunal.”

“What’s on my camera is none of anyone’s fucking business,” she replied snappily. “Jesus, you’re paranoid aren’t you? I’ve never seen you so on edge, Angus. Selling everything, leaving town, running scared…”

“It’s not just this,” I countered. “There’s a lot going on at the moment. Being pulled in a lot of different directions.”

“Like what?”

Like this. “The article. Lost a lot of friends over that, had a big bust up with my family, we’re probably not back to level terms still, may never be. NSW coppers reckon I made up the stuff about Rachel and pulled strings to get Priddle rubbed out by his handlers.” Why was I admitting all this? Why couldn’t I stop admitting it? “Not having a job. Not being able to go back to my old job, because Marty won’t let us put the band back together… even though,” I added reluctantly, “we’ve been offered a shot at Big Day Out.”

“No,” she said, and proceeded to call Marty’s manager just about the rudest word in the English language. Not a word that nice girls use. No problem for Anna then.

“And my man Dan Maxwell, the Tractor, is dying, barely has weeks left, if that, and I can’t afford to go over there and see the bastard in his last days because I’m fucking skint.” I blinked. I had the weirdest feeling that I might actually tear up here. It’d caught me completely off-guard and hit me over the back of the scone with a sock of wet custard. The sunglasses I was wearing, and a swift dose of hardening-the-fuck-up dealt to that problem. “So yeah, things have been better.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” she wanted to know. “Thought you’d had enough of bending over and taking it?”

“I’m going to find out who’s behind this,” I replied, flicking the EQ letter against my open palm, “and then I’m going to fuck them up.”

“Really?” She seemed to like the sound of this.

“Really,” I added. “Ask Northern Rivers CIB, I’m a dangerous man. I must still have gangland connections…”

She flashed a wicked grin. “So the Toogood family should worry, yeah?”

“What makes you think I’m looking at the Toogoods, Annalise?” I offered.

She liked the sound of that a lot less.

“Surely you don’t think…”

“Of course I think,” I growled. “It’s you, or your father. Who else can it be?”

“No, it’s a fucking shakedown from the Toogoods, to get you back for…”

“Seems a bit convenient your old man wasn’t around that night, now that I think of it. Of all nights to leave town…”

“That’s fucking insane,” she spat. “That’s so wrong. What the hell would he have to gain from it?”
I had to tread a little lightly here. I wanted to scare her, but I didn’t want her to turn against me. I really wanted to provoke a mistake out of someone. Anyone. Whoever it was I was playing against. I fixed her with my best Blue Steel. Which was a bit rusty, but workable.

“You’re standing on it, Anna.”

“Oh, come the fuck on…” But I’d planted a seed there. Not THERE, you fucks. In her mind. And given she’d been the one who’d told me a bunch of fairly lurid stuff about her old man’s property dealings - when we happened to be in his study for some reason or another about a month ago - I knew she couldn’t have argued it was out of character. “I had nothing to do with it, I swear to God.”

“I hope you’re right, Anna.”

Don Richardson caught my eye from the doorway leading onto this part of the deck. He was professional enough not to take any interest in whatever it was myself and a girl clearly several years my junior were agitatedly discussing, but if he couldn’t join the dots on those he needed to hand back his crayon set for good.

“Apologies for the interruption, Andrew, but I was hoping you might be able to answer some questions for Ms Camberwell here? They’re a bit… particular to the property, slightly out of my experience base.” His eyes read ‘Can you distract this punishing non-prospect so I can get on and do my job properly?’ The punisher had her back turned and was a little way away from us, talking to someone else – fitted blouse, serious skirt, copper-coloured hair in a crisp businesslike bun. She didn’t look like a tyre-kicker – worse, she looked like a real estate agent. From Don’s tone I think he presumed I knew who she was and what local agency she represented. I didn’t.

“It’s OK,” Anna pronounced, “I was leaving anyway.”

Don turned back to fetch Ms Camberwell and continue working the room. In the meantime, Anna linked her arms around me in a facsimile of a hug. Her eyes read confusion, hurt, sullenness. But not anger. She squeezed me reluctantly and whispered in my ear.
“It’s not me, OK?” she murmured. “You’re tense, paranoid and delusional. Find something to fuck, that’s an order. I’d volunteer, but given the circumstances... ”

“Actually,” I replied, “I’m good.”

She seemed a little taken aback. Jesus, why the surprise? It’d been over a month, wasn’t I supposed to be a rock star here?

“Anyone I know?”

“Kind of,” I replied.

Anna and the estate agent met at the doorway, did the old you-first-no-you-first, then Anna slipped past, looking back at me with a bemused expression on her face. I understood why once Ms Camberwell appeared in my peripheral vision. Ms Camberwell was mid-twenties, very cute and cambered rather well thanks very much, with rich copper hair and piercing blue eyes. In fact, I began to realise, she looked awfully like a girl I knew who’d broken into the same house at approximately 4:14am that morning. She’d obviously been very keen to view the property.

“Mr Young?” she inquired.

“Ms Camberwell, I presume?” I quipped.

“Bianca will be fine,” she replied, with sparkling eyes. “I’m representing an out-of-town buyer with interest in the area, and I just had a few particular queries about the property… do you think you could show me around, Mr Young?”

“I could,” I replied. Bianca. Dear Christ, where was she getting this from? And please, please, could we have more of it? “Where did you want to start, Bianca?”

Bianca appeared to have done her research on the floorplan. She suggested the downstairs bathroom.

“Not a word,” she breathed.

Beth, or Bianca, or whoever the fuck she was today, was nestled in my lap, looking endearingly dishevelled - respectable from the waist up, at least - and glowing with that lovely post-climax sheen. Her eyes hadn’t left mine since I’d rested against the vanity unit and she’d decided my lap was a good place to nest.

“...Or I’ll just fuck it up?” I suggested impishly.

She blushed. “Look… you can’t take anything I say seriously, least of all in bed.” That explained a lot. For one thing, we’d been in bed when ‘Bethany’ had originally told me she loved me. She tousled a sweat-dampened curl of flame-red hair away from her face. The new colour, wherever it’d come from - presumably sometime over Xmas - suited her. She looked like the wild chick from Mythbusters’ even wilder little sister. Sure, the carpet didn’t match the drapes, but I can’t say that was a major concern. “Or bathroom. Or anywhere, really… Sometimes I just say things, just blurt them out, just because I like the way the words sound as I say them.”

You used to think about her, didn’t you, she’d whispered in my ear. It was part accusation, part enticement. When we used to make love, a million years ago. You’d be with me, but you’d be miles away, thinking about her. You had to be the first to have her, didn’t you? To make her cry and scream and beg and bleed for you? Is that what you used to think about, while you used to have me? That faraway look in your eyes as you got close...

She said some other stuff after that, progressively more lurid, but it was also progressively more indecipherable, largely because she was getting lost in the realms of a self-evidently epic climax and having her bite down hard on the fleshy part of my thumb, clasped over her mouth, was just about the only way I could stop her from screaming out loud enough to have the whole street kicking in the door, let alone the ‘open home’ attendees on the other side of the wall. Of course all of that become no concern of mine at all about two tenths of a second later. Wahey.

Afterwards, we were close, speaking almost inaudibly. Lipreading was a near-necessity. Her forehead rested against mine, our noses just touching, our eyes locked. What do you say in situations like this? How was your Christmas? I like your hair, did you do it yourself? What do you mean, did I used to think about Anna when we used to fuck?

“How was your Christmas?”

“Probably much like yours,” she said. “Locked in a room with seven year old copies of NW and Who Weekly for stimulation. Still, I got some interesting research done...”

“Oh?” This sounded leading. “Learn anything?”

“Just that my last boyfriend were a compulsive starfucker,” she said, lingering over the accusation. “Left a trail of broken celebrity hearts… well, pseudo-celebrity at least.”

Relationships come and go. The spark of lust flickers and fades. But glossy celeb-couple photos from tedious premieres and endless fucking launch parties never seem to just fuck off and die.

“Well, when you’re as famous and as interesting as me, sleeping with normal people would just be dull, yeah?”

“Thanks for that.”

“Hey, who said you counted as normal, Beth?”

“Again. Thanks for that.”

“Excuse me,” I pointed out, “but breaking into someone’s house because you had a dirty dream about them, isn’t exactly normal. It’s fucking epic,” I grinned, “don’t get me wrong… but it’s not normal. I’ve seen normal, and that’s not it.”

She looked suitably ashamed, i.e. not very. “One innocent little 4am booty call, and you never hear the end of it…”

“And what about dressing up as a slutty real estate agent and seducing me during an open home?”

“Who seduced who?”

“Who came here dressed as a slutty real estate agent?”

“It’s not slutty,” she maintained. “It’s only slutty because you want it to be.”

“But it’s not exactly spontaneous…”

“No,” she admitted, “you’ve got me there. This was… a little bit premeditated.”

“A little bit?”

“Just a touch.”

I shook my head, thinking of all the possibilities of this. Indeed the possibilities of just this outfit she’d fished out of the back of the wardrobe. Slutty real estate agent, slutty secretary, slutty lawyer, slutty corporate CEO…

“What?”

“Starting to wish I’d kept the ring,” I remarked casually. “Just in case you changed your mind…”

She laughed hoarsely. “Don’t even joke,” she declared with a smile. “Let’s not go there, yeah? Ever. I’d better get out of here before I’m missed. Or before curiosity gets the better of someone on the other side of either of those doors…” One led to the laundry, the other to the spare bedroom. She stood, smoothing her skirt over her thighs, adjusting her blouse in the mirror. Given ten minutes I’d have wanted her all over again. Hell, I wanted her now, I just wasn’t in any physiological state to do anything about it. Best she left now, really.

Beth paused at the door. The one to the laundry, which led out into the backyard.

“Do I look OK?”

I verbalised my previous thought about her looking good enough to have all over again, though maybe after a little rest.

She smiled. “One last thing,” she added. “It wasn’t me either.”

“It wasn’t you what?”

She exhaled gently. “I’m not the person who made the complaint about you having a relationship with a student,” she replied carefully, “and I’m not the person who told the story to whoever it was who made the complaint. For the record.”

“I know that,” I said. “You told me.”

“You didn’t believe me. Didn’t believe Anna, and I’ve got to be well down the trust rankings even compared to her…”

“You heard all that?”

“Yeah. But don’t worry, I was eavesdropping deliberately,” she said. “It’s not as though the whole house could hear you.”

“That’s reassuring… I think. Don’t take that too seriously either,” I told her. “I’m just shaking a few trees, see who falls out.”

“Crittenden,” she quipped. “If it’s anything like the trees around your place. You did see him photographing people coming in here from the place over the road, didn’t you? He was well back inside, but if you looked directly into the property. And I’m sure I saw one of his minions up in the trees behind Tuscany On Point, doing the same from that side…”

“Any bites?”

Don frowned. He didn’t feel he needed to sugar-coat it. “Mainly locals,” he reported. “Granted, that doesn’t exclude them from contention, just lowers the probability of a quick impulse sale.”

“Next weekend then?”

He nodded. “We’ll hit the market hard again with advertising, and we’ll see what we can do then. Of course we’ll follow up what leads have declared themselves, but I think next week we should have better luck. In the meantime, try not to get fingerprints on the expensive stuff…”

“Anything we can do about the competition over the road?” I suggested.

“I was wondering whether you knew anything about that,” he muttered. “I don’t mind playing dirty, so long as I know why we’re playing dirty. What’s their angle here?”

“Not really sure. It’s Crittenden’s, a local outfit. I dare say they’d have wanted to represent the property. But Crittenden himself is a developer as well, might be a potential buyer. He’s responsible for that pastel pink shitfight over the ridge…” Don grimaced, which I appreciated. He knew an abomination when he saw it. “And there’s other agendas at play as well, so no idea what his motivation really is...”

“The girl?” he guessed. Damn those Richardsons, they were perceptive old bastards.

“Crittenden’s daughter,” I admitted. “It’s a small town.”

“I’m making no judgements,” Don pronounced. “She looks old enough to make her own decisions.”

Just then a gunmetal-grey BMW M5 nosed into the drive, under the ‘Open Home’ flags, and pulled up in the space where my busted-arse old pretend-XR8 Falcon ute would have normally been parked had we not hidden it down the street for the duration, figuring it was likely to drive down the property values. A curly-haired ethnic dude, stylishly dressed but who could probably use a few more pies flung his way, climbed out of the driver’s side.

“Sorry we’re late,” he apologised. “Misjudged the ferry timetable somewhat. Is it still OK if we look around?”

From the black look on the face of his navigator, I took Marty’s comment as actually meaning ‘Maddy fucked up reading the ferry timetable somewhat. Still OK if we look around?’

Men are from Mars, women can’t read maps. Or timetables.