Psycho killer

Run run run, run run run away
- Talking Heads, 1977

Nausea and pain woke me up. I’d had a ferocious bang on the head and had thrown up in my helmet. Problem was, it was the second ferocious bang I’d had in the last couple of minutes. At least it was to the other side of the helmet this time. Really, I should have been thanking him for evening up the lumps on my misshapen head.

“Got your attention didn’t it you fucking faggot.”

It takes a certain kind of cunt to wander up to an unconscious motorcycle rider, roll him onto his back with your jackboots and crown him across the helmet with your baton. I’d have thought checking for spinal injuries would have been common courtesy, but hey, it wasn’t like he was trained as a police officer or anything.

So here we were. I’d chucked the R 80 down the fucking road like a spectacular arsehat – I could see it lying disconsolately in the long grass over the way, back wheel still spinning forlornly, a decent whiff of leaking petrol on the breeze – and now, it seemed, I was going to die for it. Beaten to death by a delusional fuckwit strung out on meth and revelling in the psychopathic empowerment it gave him. All those horrendous Ivan Milat vibes I’d got off him that night he’d picked me up off this very road in October… yeah they were back. Evidence-based, this time. The only thing scarier than dying, is dying horribly, hideously and slowly, at the hands of someone who’d enjoy it. The overt reason, I guessed, was covering his tracks. I was going to die because Bradley Toogood didn’t want the world to know what he liked to do after hours. The world would be a much fucking better place if all the bitter, violent, Bible-bashing homophobes would just accept what the universe already knows about them: they’re gay. They’re always, always gay. From the fire-and-brimstone Tea Party Republicans of the US to the fag-bashing football hero of your high school, there’s only one place that sort of hatred comes from. Self-loathing.

“Take your fucking helmet off.”

No fucking chance. And that was even if I could move the fingers of my right hand, which felt very, very borked, to operate a D-buckle. I’d be harder to kill with a helmet on.

“Stand the fuck up, you fucking queer.”

Equally low chance. Everything was screaming louder than everything else. Left foot, left knee, right knee, right hip, right elbow and hand. You could almost do the biomechanics of how I’d fallen and tumbled - what bits had impacted into what - based on which bits were screaming the loudest.

He pointed the end of his baton at my throat. “I can end you right now, queer.”

It was hard to talk with a mouthful of vomit, but I did my best.

“I’m not the one who was fucking some dude in the shitter this evening.”

I’d meant ‘shitter’ as in ‘mens lavatories’ not ‘bottom’, so it wasn’t actually meant quite as crude as it came out, but that subtlety was lost on Toogood. At least it confirmed what the key issue was from his perspective. He jabbed down with the baton. I managed to squeak left just enough so it bounced off my carotid and hurt like the Jesus suffering fuck, rather than crushing my Adam’s apple. The force was still enough to see the tip of the baton sink into the damp sand below me. Instinctively I snatched upwards with my good (i.e. slightly less borked) left hand, grabbing his arm and pulling him down, hard as I could, using my weight. Had to be good for something. He toppled forward, overbalanced, wearing the handle of the baton in the solar plexus with a groan as he and it crunched to the deck. It’s hard to get a decent hit in when you’re on the deck – watch MMA, if you’re a congenital retard – but I did manage to get him with one in the guts, an elbow across the face and a jab in the throat before he struggled free and we both staggered to our feet.

I’d just been having a wild, angry thrash. All I could do. Fear and pain and adrenalin. I hadn’t been in a fight for a long, long time. And I’d had a cricket bat for company then. That said, the same sick sense of him-or-me was there. This wasn’t going to be a fair fight and it wasn’t going to end at ‘Ow ow ow OK you win stop I’m telling Mum.’ He’d made his strategy pretty fucking clear. Endgame. Least I could do was offer the same deal.

Still, he had the baton, which was dumb on my part. I had… a jacket. Woo hoo. Still, it’d have to do. As he started to cross the five or six paces between us I painfully slipped the jacket off one shoulder, then the other, and started waving it around like a lead-filled cosh. Of course, it probably would have looked a bit scarier had my iPhone not dropped out of one of the pockets while I was doing my gangland bastard routine. Fucking hipster. No time for that. He came at me with the stick, wild-eyed, swinging once, then twice. I caught the second swing with the jacket, gave with the impact, then wrapped it up and twisted it under me. Dunno how. Couldn’t do it again on cue. He was pulled towards me and I raised an elbow – unfortunately the sore one, so the resultant contact hurt him nearly as much as it did me. But the ones after that… well, I had the baton now, and he didn’t. And I had form with blunt swingable objects and absolute cunts. I went at him.

He tried to stop the first swing – a double-handed medieval swipe – with his hand, which was a bad idea. It made a crunching sound and he made a hideous noise. The adrenalin was flowing now and my right was working well enough to grip the handle, which I drove into his temple heel-first, my left offering supporting leverage on the blade of the baton. Then backhand across the side of his head… yeah. Someone nice would have stopped when he went down. Then again, someone nice wouldn’t have started in the first place.

Toogood... look, he just sort of dissolved. One minute he was this snarling, baton twirling special-ops wannabe, next he was on the floor gargling blood and crying for his mummy. Seriously, crying for his mummy. I’d like to say that made me stop. But it didn’t. Red mist, people. I have form here. Don’t say you’re going to kill me then try to follow through on it, it’s very offensive and I tend to react badly to it.

Anyway, he stopped crying for his mummy after a while, because I kicked him in the head and he flaked out unconscious. Or dead. I’d been here before too.

Difference was, the red mist went away very, very quickly. Replaced by an urge to vomit like a geyser. This time I got the helmet off – mostly – before fountaining a lot of red wine over a stand of melaleucas. And thought, way to avoid leaving your imprint over the crime scene, fucktard.
It’s about then I put my head in my hands and had a bit of an adrenalin-soaked cry and asked myself what the fuck had I just done. This one couldn’t be chalked up to whatever Priddle had spiked me with the night I’d rearranged his furniture and his face. This was just me, my anger issues, and a whole bunch of ugly, ugly violence.

Toogood was splayed horribly across the grass verge, the crimson dripping from his mouth in vivid contrast to the pale grey of his complexion. He was breathing – shallow and panting, but he was breathing – and he had a pulse, racing all over the place but he had a pulse. Gingerly, I tipped him over into the recovery position, so he wouldn’t choke on blood vomit. Remorse? Can’t even begin to tell you. That brilliant little kid who Emma remembered, that eleven year old who’d discovered his dad’s half-faceless body in his shed on Father’s Day - he was lying beaten half to death on a lonely road.

Still. Could have been worse. Could have been me. What the fuck else you want me to do?

R 80 G/S BMWs are fucking heavy bikes, particularly when you’re operating in a world of pain after crashing big time and getting taken to with a big fuck-off stick. It took a lot of grunting and swearing to get the big fucker upright again, and a lot of squinting in the darkness – there were a few streetlights around the intersection, but they were out, which didn’t bode well for Amity Point’s power supply – to work out that the crankcase was cracked and the fuel tank was punctured, but theoretically if it turned over, it could run…

A groan behind me. Toogood was stirring. I went back to him. He’d thrown up – blood and vomit intermingled – and was moaning again for his mummy. Except I’d misheard. It wasn’t ‘Mummy’, it was ‘Bethie’. The emotions I had about that, I choked back. Time for me to get out of here. Except I couldn’t leave him like this. Just couldn’t. Ever since I’d been a kid at school and the local coppers had done a visit, I’d been aware that there was a ‘request for assistance’ button on their radio sets; these days, with GPS in the truck, it was probably even easier to pinpoint an officer in duress. The radio was in the truck, and was switched off. Not really helping the cause here, Bradley. My current theory was they’d called him back from leave as an emergency fill-in with resources stretched to the limit by the weather conditions – not quite realising he’d been on a week-long meth bender beforehand. I switched the radio on, found an appropriate looking master switch – took a deep breath – and hit it. Then I flicked the hazard blinkers on the truck and limped hurriedly back to the R 80 G/S.

Of course it would have been cleverer to do all that AFTER I’d made sure the bastard started.
Which it did. Sounded like a bag of hammers in a cement mixer, stank of petrol and felt like the handlebars had only recently been introduced to the front wheel by Skype – but it started, and it ran. I hung my vomity helmet off the luggage hook on the back, and made my way slowly and carefully down the road. Only a fuckwit goes without his helmet – unless it’s been spewed in. And unless he’s already taken a few head knocks on top of being half cut, and wouldn’t know what the fuck is doing.

The crippled R 80 G/S could only pull about 30 kays, but as that was around my comfort level considering my state of mental health, that was OK with me. The front headlight was cactus, and since all the rear did was tell people behind me where I was, the sort of information I could do without telegraphing, I’d smashed that with a rock before setting off. Cornering was interpretive – the bars were canted at a thirty degree angle to the direction of travel, and fuck only knew where the front brake lever had ended up, so yeah, thirty kph was all you’d want. I had to force all of my concentration into riding the thing, which meant no time to think about anything else, but yet still I was thinking about everything else. About Beth and Brad and whether I’d get caught and whether I deserved to. I deserved to be allowed to defend myself against attack, but it was fair to say I’d overstepped that boundary. Basically, I decided the morality came down to this: if I made it, I made it. If I got away from tonight without getting killed or arrested, I wasn’t going to go back and hand myself in. Fair enough?

Amity Point at five past midnight isn’t really the place to be riding the brokenest, noisiest BMW R 80 in the Southern Hemisphere. Not if you want to escape attention anyway. I dropped the revs right down, almost to walking pace, and crept the thing into town. It really sounded very, very sick. Mick’s mechanic Bueller wasn’t likely to be interested in it any more, that was for sure. In the end, about two blocks from Mick’s, I felt it start to tighten up and seize, and just got the clutch into it. I should have left it there – or back in the bush maybe – but part of me felt a loyalty to it for getting me this far, and part of me didn’t want to leave big fuck-off clues lying around the place for the pursuing officers, so I pushed it to Mick’s shed. Still had the keys. I wheeled it in. Flicked on the lights. Remembered there wasn’t any power. Swore. Thought about a shower, then remembered I usually had to turn on the hot water the day before the Martins came over, or they didn’t have any. Swore again. Washed my face. Decided against taking off my gloves as Christ knew how many bits of fingers would fall out if I did. Wandered back outside and glanced back up the road. Saw the thin trail of oil, fuel and coolant, mixed like so much vomit and blood, that dripped all the way down the street as far as the eye could see. Presumably all the way back to the crash site. Swore once again with feeling. And tried to come up with a plan for getting off the island before the rozzers managed to follow the trail.

There was a tree down across the road halfway between here and the turnoff, which would slow them down, but not enough that I could sit around on my coit deliberating over exit strategies. The tinnie wasn’t going to cut it. Too hard to launch, too unwieldy in the chop, and into the teeth of that headwind the thing would be lucky to be able to get out of its own way. The ferry wasn’t happening – never had been, and certainly not with the cop shop immediately above the terminal. But… the jetski, now there was an option. Wankers rode these things around entire coastlines, properly fettled and fuelled-up. Used them for tow-ins in seriously fucking gnarly surf. Had speed, next to no cross-sectional surface area for cutting through the wind, and it’d be fast. It’d be a mission, and yes it’d be absolute madness, but what was a better idea, waiting around to get caught by the fuzz? A rather painful experience I’m led to understand.

The Martins had a big three-seat Yamaha Waverunner for the boys to much about on, and a five-year-old Kawasaki STX-15F for Mick to make an arse of himself on. The big Yamaha would cope with the rough water, but I wasn’t sure I’d cope with having to get the fucking thing out into the water. Then again, the Kawasaki wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet – properly modded, they made decent racing skis - and either one would need fuel. That was going to be an issue. Not just finding it - the Martins always drained their tanks when they weren’t using them, and stumbling about the place looking for fuel cans wasn’t fun in the dark – but making it last. At wide open throttle Mick used to reckon the Kwaka was good for an hour and a half’s cruising before the sixty litre tank was dry. Wide open throttle on flat water was nearly 100 km/h, but that wasn’t helping me with the very non-flat water ahead of me. And the other issue was, I didn’t have 60 litres of fuel. I had whatever I could siphon out of the leaking BMW tank (about thirty litres full in touring spec, about twenty litres in recently-crashed-by-me spec), plus whatever I could scavenge on-site. At least they were all four-strokes. I’d have been fucked if they'd been two.

By the lights of the Yamaha Grizzly quadbike – fuck it if the battery goes flat – I managed to siphon about eighteen litres from the BMW tank into the Kawasaki, and seemingly about half a litre into myself, which wasn’t fun, particularly with only warm XXXX Gold to gargle with. Found a couple of small jerry cans too, they’d clearly had fuel drained back into them – having this stuff kicking around the place wasn’t something Mick and Doug looked well upon, so it was probably the young lads cutting corners after fitting in one last ride. God knew what the fuel quality was like, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. In it went. A power of luck to you, fuel filter. That got me to two-thirds full, and by my maths – ropey as fuck though it was – I reckoned that’d be enough.

I had two choices, head straight out over the bay and make for Cleveland, or hug the coastline and island-hop around to the south, just in case I struck trouble and had to swim. Then I had a serious think about what I was actually doing, realised no matter which option I picked, what I was doing was fucking insane, and decided to make straight for the mainland. It was only thirty or so kays, and even using fuel at twice normal cruise speeds, fighting against the chop and the wind, I’d make it OK. I ripped the Brisbane map out of the Yellow Pages for navigational help – after trying to memorise the lie of the land re islands, docks, pointy bits of land and identifiable navigation points – and stuffed it in my jacket. Then, as quietly as I could, I pushed the jetski on its trailer down towards the water, before swearing softly as I could, losing grip on it and letting it splash into the surf on its own. I dragged it back to the sand, wheeled the trailer back to the shed, grabbed a non-vomited-in motocross helmet and goggles which looked like they’d fit me, locked up, and went back to fetch the jetski which was now drifting in four feet of water.

Am I really going to do this? I asked myself. To which the answer, reinforced by the blinking red and blue lights which suddenly loomed through the trees in the far distance, having just made the turn onto the beachside stretch of Ballow St from the road that lead from the turnoff – was another question. Do I have any fucking choice?

Right. Jetskiing from Straddie to Brisbane City. How hard can it be?

It fired first time. It’d want to, it’s a four stroke, that was the point. I kept the revs as low as I dared, waking up the neighbours and alerting them to the idiot stealing jetskis from the Martins’ place wasn’t what I had in… mind. Just as I began to open it up, the lights went on next door.

Fuck it. Wide open throttle. And into the teeth of hell…

I could tell you it was the dumbest thing I’d ever done, but I don’t think you’d believe me. Put it this way. After ten minutes I knew that everything the Maritime Safety Board had said was right. This wasn’t navigable in a ferry let alone a jetski, and furthermore all that EPIRB and emergency flare and lifejackety stuff they go on about? Top idea. Had none of it. After twenty minutes, I was fucked, and after thirty, I wanted to die please. Still, as Russell Coight always said, there was one way to enjoy the scenery around this big brown land of ours, and that was FULL BORE. If you hit the chop at the right rate of knots – I say chop, you could fucking surf it on a longboard – you’d skim from whitecap to whitecap and sure it’d beat the Christ out of you (lovely if you already had trashed knees, buggered ribs and a sore head) but it’d be better than nosing into the hollow and having the fucker break over your scone. Then you’d hit the occasional patch of flatter water where the sea level was friendlier and you’d just fucking fly. Problem was, next to no visibility meant you wouldn’t see the next patch of rough water until you were on it. And then you’d take off and land in the middle of next week. Seriously, only dumb fucking luck and a childhood riding wobbly old ag bikes like they were motocrossers kept me hanging on the thing. That was what it was, basically. Motocross on water. In the dark. On a track that randomly regenerated itself every five seconds.

Navigation had kinda gone out the window by now. I was just heading for the lights. I figured out I’d fucked up when what looked like Wellington Point slipped past on my left about 40 minutes into the trip, a bit before 1am in the morning. My original target, Cleveland, was south of there, but it wasn’t as though I had to end up in Cleveland, it was just that I knew the area, knew the lie of the land on the way there. I also knew I’d struggle figuring out a place to hide this thing near Cleveland (unless I ditched it in the canal development on the north side, under someone’s jetty or something), or a way to get to Mick’s in Bardon to explain why I’d stolen and trashed his beloved jetski. I’d been operating at fairly open throttle, but had probably only done about 20-25 kays into a howling headwind. Still, I had fuel. That was the key.

And as I pushed on, the lights drew me closer. If that was Wellington point, that’s Wynnum… or Manly. Manly has the yacht club, Wynnum has the pier, I remembered. I passed both. I could stop here in a sheltered harbour, but for what? Still a long way from home. And still fuel in the tank, now I was closer to shore and the waters were calmer. I pushed on, north, feeling recharged by the closeness of land – hell, that was only a couple hundred metres, I could swim that if I had to. I then proceeded to almost run aground in an unlit mangrove swamp just north of Wynnum and decided to give the coastline a little bit more margin from here.

I pushed on further. I’d come this far, rolled the dice… now it was mangroves on both sides, a channel about a kilometre across. Lights around to the left. That’s port. I think. It was the bridge across to Fishermans Island, the man-made (well, man-redesigned) heart of the Port of Brisbane. Massive trucks and endless freight trains rolled hither and yon over the bridge, ferrying cargo to and from the port. And under it all trolled me on my borrowed water scooter, feeling like a toddler on a Cyclops tricycle. Still. Could be worse. I could be being asked what I knew about GBH of an off-duty police officer on North Stradbroke Island a couple of hours ago.

It was only now that I’d broken free of the open-water chop and spray, and had backed the throttle off, that I realised just how hard it was raining. It was absolutely throwing it down over this side of the bay. The wind was still machine-gunning spray into my face, except it wasn’t spray, it was rain. Now I was on the main stretch of the Brisbane River. Well lit, smooth(er) and open, it was like a freeway compared to crossing the bay. Every mile I covered got me closer to home, which was fine by me; I’d ride until the thing coughed onto reserve, then find somewhere safe to ditch it. Past the airport – useless to me, particularly since (a) it was a quarter past one and (b) even if it was open it'd be closed for high winds – under the Gateway (and Gateway II, currently under construction) – past the Royal Queensland Golf Club and the new cruise terminal, Kingsford Smith Drive and the hillsides of Hamilton…

And still it ran. Fuck all left in it, you could even feel how light it’d become, but still it ran. If I continued, through the bends of the river around Tenerife and New Farm, I’d run the risk of doing the equivalent of running out of fuel on the motorway. In the city, I wasn’t sure I had a place to hide. And by my dodgy geography, unless I made it to somewhere like Toowong, which was a bloody long way away via the river, I’d only be getting further away from where I wanted to be. Whereas if I went up Breakfast Creek, which as I understood it ended up somewhere near Ashgrove…

So I went right – that’s starboard, nautical freaks – and pointed the jetski up Breakfast Creek, past the eponymous hotel and northwards towards Albion, past other peoples’ more expensive watercraft. The river then ducks under a couple of bridges and U-turns around the Mayne railway yards – and by now the parade of other peoples’ boats had ended because rail bridges aren’t the friendliest of things to navigate under with a mast. In fact, most boaties will tell you Breaky Creek isn’t navigable. They’re probably right. In a boat.

South past the railway yards, just squeezing past the bridge construction pontoons at the Clem 7 tunnel outlet, then under Bowen Bridge. The river narrowed, hemmed by trees and mangroves rather than concrete and industry. The lights of RBH to the south caught my attention, but not as much as a perilously low pedestrian walkway. The Kawasaki and I wiggled and squiggled a bit further and I had to admit, as the thing flashed its reserve light, I was just about lost – no idea where I was – hang on is that the back of Ballymore? This was Herston then. Another badly lit, low-hanging pedestrian bridge almost gave me another parting in my hair, borrowed motocross helmet notwithstanding. It was getting pretty ropey now, both in terms of fuel range and water depth, but both sides of the river were mangrove swamp without any safe point of abandonment. Not one which would make recovery likely, anyway. I was having to pick my way through overgrown reed embankments now.

By the time we ducked under one more major bridge – I’d have bet on Kelvin Grove Road if it’d been my money – you could almost get out and walk. Afterwards you had to. Maybe 150m further upstream, the reeds won. The Kawasaki took a big gutsful of organic matter and gargled its last. Silently, I waded it across to the bank and wedged it between two trees, in sight of a mildly flooded childrens’ playground. Hulme St, said the streetsigns. Hulme St it was.

Rather than wandering randomly off into suburbia in what I guessed was the direction of Bardon, I headed back towards the noise of the main road, keeping my helmet and goggles on to keep the incessant deluge out of my eyes. Kelvin Grove Road, so it was. A little way down Kelvin Grove Road back towards the city was a cab centre, where an Indian bloke in a battle-scarred Falcon was happy to take me home to Bardon in exchange for the opportunity to explain to me in detail everything that was wrong with the Australian cricket team. At least he knew all the best short-cuts and was content to accept a $20 when the meter read $21.70.

“You be right out there mate?” he asked, as I fought with the door in the gale.

“Yeah mate, it’s only rain.”

“Yes, very much,” he nodded. “Wind and rain like this where I grew up all the time.”

“Where was that?” I asked. “Monsoon country?”

“Yes and no,” he said with a toothy grin. “Wellington.”

So I had keys to the Martins’ shed at Amity in my pocket. But did I have keys to this fucking house that stood in front of me? Did I bollocks. They were in a waterproof rucksack, under a tonneau cover, in the back of a ute, in a garage, in a house about fifty kays away. One I’d spent a good two or three hours trying bloody hard to get as far away as possible from. It was nearly two in the morning when Mick Martin found me painfully scaling the outside of the balcony. He’d thought I was a burglar. I’d narrowly avoided my second arse-kicking of the night. Actually, third if you counted stacking the BM, and the fourth if you included being chucked into the cement mixer that was Moreton Bay on the fringes of Former Tropical Cyclone Nigel.

Quite reasonably, he asked what the fuck I was doing here, what with me supposed to be playing a gig in about (checks watch) ten hours. In Adelaide. He had a fair point, so I told him. Right from Beth and the plot diverging over those fucking tabloid photos of me and Selena (cue ‘I told you so’ smirk from Mick, which I had to admit he’d earned the right to) to ferries and flights getting shitcanned by the weather, to knocking off a few drinks as breakup therapy, to going for a walk and a slash to clear my mind, tripping over the local cuntstabulary in flagrante delicto with an Austrian backpacker and instantly becoming The Man Who Knew Too Much…

“Ya fucking serious?”

If I had a dollar for every time Mick had uttered that, as I recounted my evening’s adventures, I’d have a shitload of dollars. He was getting higher-pitched every time, too. By the time I told him about the jetski, he was almost inaudible to everyone apart from dogs. Actually, the thing that astonished him the most wasn’t that Beth’s brother was a psychopathic meth-addled homophobic fuckwit in denial, but that I’d actually dropped a bike. He’d never seen me drop a bike before. Thought that was hilarious. Then asked if I needed an X-ray or anything. (That’s sympathy, folks. For the record, everything hurt, but everything seemed to work.) Not as funny was the part about me nicking one of his jetskis – not just any one, his favourite, personal one – and hammering it across Moreton Bay with the throttle pinned open. Then dumping it in a kiddies’ playground somewhere near Kelvin Grove Road. But he understood. In fact, he’d have gone further.

“I’d have killed the cunt,” he pronounced, “straight out. Ironed him out and dumped him at sea for the sharks, if he’d come at me like that. You’re a better man than me, Youngy.”

Ah yeah, the sharks. I’d forgotten about them. Just as well. That girl who’d been torn to bits by a pack of sharks in the surf just off Amity Point a few years back, while her Christian school camp friends could only watch on… she’d died. I’d lived. Toogood… no idea, but I wasn’t going back to check.

“How long you reckon before they find you here?”

“Lost ‘em at Amity,” I said.

He nodded. “But old mate’s sister knows you live here.”

“She’s in hospital.”

“So’s he, if he’s lucky,” Mick observed laconically. “They’ll still find out. I’d expect a knock at the door. Make no mistake, those cunts don’t take it lightly when one of theirs gets what’s coming to ‘em.” A bitter chuckle. “They’ll put a cunt in uniform that has no fucking business being there, then it’s your funeral if you take exception.”

Mick didn’t really like or respect the Queensland Police Service, it was fair to say. The feeling was probably mutual. Wasn’t just the ritual harassment he typically copped as a motorbicycling enthusiast, though that certainly stuck in his craw. He had a more personal gripe. His old man – the absent, violent bastard – had been a Special Branch cop under Joh in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Every totalitarian regime needs its secret police, and Special Branch were Joh’s. They were bent, dodgy and vicious, and Mick’s old man was more bent, dodgy and vicious than most. His career had met an end as part of the Fitzgerald inquiry, but he’d managed to skip the country on a questionable passport and had lived out the remainder of his nasty, misbegotten life in the opium dens and brothels of south-east Asia, before being stabbed to death in a bar fight with a six-two transexual in the early ‘90s. Mick hadn’t bothered getting his body back for the funeral. An accommodating undertaker in Bangkok had, for the appropriate fee, disposed of the remains. The pigs on his family farm hadn’t eaten so well in months.

“Anyway. You need a fucking shower,” Mick declared. “And I need to figure out a way to recover a jetski from a kiddies playground in Kelvin Grove. With all my trailers on Straddie and all.”

“Borrow one from the shop?”

“Yeah,” he said dismissively, “no dramas. I’ll get out there at first light. And steal me own jetski back…”

“Look, mate, I’m sorry…”

“It’s alright. I’ll just book it up on yer tab,” he grinned.

“How about I buy it off you,” I suggested. “Or half of it... along with everything else at Mount Road.”

That wasn’t just a series of head knocks talking. I’d had a while to think about this. The only thing missing from Mick’s master plan for world domination was the cash to make it happen. Truth be told, he was under-capitalised. He knew it, and I knew it. I also knew I had a lot of equity tied up in a house I wasn’t selling anytime soon. But if I was going to be renegotiating finance anyway… fuck it, free up some capital, invest it in something I believed in. Find something I could contribute to. Build up. Make better.

“Mate, I can’t let you do that,” he said, quickly grasping what I was getting at. “We go under, you’d lose everything.”

“So’d you,” I pointed out, in case he’d forgotten.

“I’ve got fuck all to lose,” he said. “You’ve got a house.”

“Mate, the money I bought that house with, some lot of Seppo fuckwits gave me for playing a fucking guitar and writing dumb songs about dead prime ministers. I didn’t fucking earn it. Now, if you don’t want me to buy in, that’s alright, it’s your show. But the offer’s there.”

“Look,” he finally said, “I’ll have to have a think about it… figure out how it’d work.” To me, it was pretty obvious how it’d work. I’d do marketing and publicity – the stuff I’d been doing ever since Gasket had taken off in the first place - and he’d do the actual business management shite. But it was his call. Hard-heads like Mick didn’t necessarily like sharing their toys, I got that. “In the meantime, you need to get a shower, get a feed and get the fuck across the border…”

First things first. A shower. The guy in the mirror didn’t look too flash, he had a head someone had used for pinata practice and eyes that looked like they’d been open for a month and a half. But a nice hot shower… that’d make all the difference. Then a sleep. Then, I might start taking Mick’s concerns re getting out of Dodge a bit more seriously. Amazing how it’s just the simple stuff you start craving. Amazing how… Mick, fuck off with the banging, use the other bathroom if you need a slash for fuck’s sake.

“Your mates are here,” he growled tersely.

I didn’t have any mates who tended to visit at this ungodly hour. Maybe the Duffer, but he was in Adelaide. (In theory at least.) Wearily I slipped my jacket back on and hobbled out of the bathroom. Walking in wet motorbike boots was hard enough (at least I hadn’t had to swim in them) but since I’d been off the jetski I’d tightened up dramatically, particularly in the bits that had been banged the hardest into the tarmac at the intersection of East Coast and Beehive Roads, and it bloody hurt to walk. Let alone jog, which was what Mick wanted to do. Even with his dodgy leg that was an inch or two shorter than the other, I was never going to match him in the sneaking-around-the-house-at-pace caper at the moment. He was over by the window, pointing through the blinds.

At a big, square truck that was parked across our driveway.