Run to the hills

Run for your life.
- Iron Maiden, 1982

“Fuckin’ SWOS,” Mick growled.

He wasn’t referring to Sensible World of Soccer, though it was a pretty awesome football game back in the Commodore Amiga days. He was referring to what had once been called the Special Weapons and Operations Squad of the Queensland Police Service. These days they went by the much more PC sounding Special Emergency Response Team, making them sound more like a cute-and-fuzzy offshoot of the SES rather than what they were - the fucking Tactical Response Group, SWAT, SO19, whatever you want to call them. And they were parked outside our fucking house. Lights off, silent running – as were the two, no three unmarked cars which were lined up in the street behind. Waiting. Watching. Prepared. We skulked around to the far side of the house, trying to see down to the end of the street – two marked cop cars parked nose-to-tail across the entrance to our cul-de-sac, blocking entry and exit. Lights off, sirens off, they were being vewy, vewy quiet. There was only one thing you’d imagine this sort of response would be in response to.

“Toogood’s dead then,” I observed flatly.

Mick nodded tersely. “As are you, mate. As are you. Fuckers have a code. You need to get the fuck out of here.”

“How?” came the fairly obvious question.

Keeping down, we went for the stairs. You knew this was Mick’s garage because the car space was full of bikes. (The Mount Road Monster, Uncle Doug’s big Dodge RAM truck, lived at the dealership these days.) Mick grabbed a set of keys off a hook and threw them to me, then pointed wordlessly at one of the bikes. “Quickest fucken thing here,” he hissed. “Fucken test ya, but.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll hold these cunts off for a bit. Boomstick under the trapdoor here,” he signalled.

“Jesus Christ…”

“Not having any cunt break into my house and waving a gun about,” he growled. “Not without getting a throat full of shot. Don’t fucken care who the fuck they think they are. Now garn get fucken gorne.”

He pushed a helmet into my chest – an old back AGV lid which was my regular loaner for scratching-by-invitation when visiting – and I buckled it on, fighting with the strap with swollen, trembling gloved fingers. This morning had already gone horribly fucking wrong, horribly fucking quickly. And it was only 2.15am.

Still, I had two things left in my advantage. I had Mick covering my back, and I had the fastest fucken thing in the garage to get the fuck out of here on. It was a Ducati Monster S4S... of sorts anyway. It’d started life as a regular two-seat Monster 900, before the previous owner had gone a bit silly and decided to turn it into a track bike – full-house Testastretta 998cc superbike engine out of a 999SP running a full-race cam and various other trick internals, fully adjustable Ohlins suspension, Termignoni pipes, lightweight Marchesini wheels, aftermarket ‘bars, semi-slick road-race Pirelli Diablo Corsas. Could have got the same effect buying a new Hypermotard off the showroom floor at the local Ducati dealers, probably for cheaper, but apparently then he couldn’t take his missus two-up touring on it. On a bike so insanely twitchy and fearsome even Mick had given up trying to commute to work on it. The previous mentalist had traded it in for something far more sensible – a second-hand R1 superbike, which he took straight to Sprintex and had chipped and turboed. Not really my kind of scene. Or my kind of bike, really. After owning that homicidal little Suzuki RG250 race-replica during uni, I’d come to the decision that I really liked motorbikes that didn’t intend to kill me.

However, as I also liked people who didn’t intend to kill me, and there seemed to be a heavily-armed collection of them parked outside, it was time to make friends with the Monster. Swiftly. I went for the starter. The back door to the garage opened up on the path through the backyard, which was more like unimproved jungle as it dropped down into a gully, which formed the edge of the local reserve. Basically it was too narrow and undulating a block to build on, so the council cleared and mowed it, stuck a few park benches on it and some kids’ play equipment a little further down the hill near the street which marked the far boundary.

Right, this should be fun. A thousand million rear wheel horsepower, semi-slick tyres, downhill on wet grass.

The race cam made the thing idle like a grumpy old man, so of course I stalled it as soon as I let out the clutch, which was more a light switch activated by the controls from a Victorian signal-box. Got it going again, and carefully rolled out the door and down the gravel path. If they’ve heard the bike start once, they’re going to be listening to it starting again. Squeaky bum moment as I nosed the back gate latch open with my front tyre, waiting for the back of my head to get snipered off. Flicked the lights. The lie of the land was progressively downhill to start, then kicked up as it reached the street on the far side. Fucking madness, but I’d been here before already tonight. I went for it.

Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of grip. Lots of revs. Not a lot of grip. And a LOT of noise. Even so, the bike picked up speed ferociously, barrelling down the slope like a fat kid on a badly laid-out slip-and-slide. The end of the reserve was in sight, whereupon I noticed two things. One, the pair of unmarked Commodores parked on the street at the end of the reserve, nose to tail, with uniformed blokes standing around with binoculars and radios, squinting through the persistent rain, the rear guard for the operation. And two, even above the noise of the Monster and its probably-illegal pipes, the sound from somewhere over my shoulder of muffled shouting amplified through police loudhailers. Then gunfire. Actual fucking gunfire.

Jesus, Mick. Jesus.

Couldn’t stop, even if I’d wanted to. Writhing like a moray eel, the Monster pounded through the dip at the bottom of the gully and reared for the road, spraying grass and mud like a demented motocrosser. One copper bellowed for me to stop. Yeah, thanks for that buddy, I’ll get right onto that. The other reached for his crotch. Gun or radio, I didn’t have time to see. Monster and me slalomed between tree, playground equipment and the nearmost Commodore and vaulted onto the quiet residential street behind. The landing, a tankslapper for the ages, almost killed me. The next couple of suburban flicks left-and-right-and-left-again weren’t much better, with mud and shit all over the tyres – at least the surface water on the roads washed them clean again, but that just reminded me how little treat they actually had and if I hit any serious standing water I was toast.

After a bit of desperate and pointless squiggling through the streets, I hammered up the hill towards Stuartholme Road. I had no idea where I was heading, but ‘Away’ seemed like a good direction. Stuartholme Road wound around the hilltop compound of Stuartholme School (who are Oarsome, according to local reports from bumper stickers) - I’d always thought the place would make an excellent Bond supervillain hideout, built onto the crest of a rocky mountainside overlooking their catchment domain. Should have been ideal motorcycle roads – twisty and well-surfaced, perfect for putting distance between me and the chasing pack – but the Monster was THE most terrifying thing I'd ever ridden. It probably would have been terrifying enough with the peaky near-race-tune engine and cut slick tyres, but Mick had stiffened the suspension up as much as the Ohlins adjusters allowed, because for some reason he liked commuting on bikes that handled like every day was track day and felt like they were going to throw you into the scenery every time you hit a minor bump or surface change. He hadn’t earned the sobriquet ‘Mad Mick’ ironically.

From the school, Stuartholme Road plunged downhill into Birdwood Terrace, and the Monster with it (I was just hanging on for grim death by now) - then darted left past the cemetery into Mount Coot-tha Road, which ran down to the big roundabout at the end of the Western Freeway. Note the word ‘Free’ in the word ‘Freeway’. I certainly had. With sirens in the back of my mind and lights in my peripheral vision, I was already planning my entry into that big right-hand turn which would get me through the roundabout and out onto the freeway with as much corner exit speed as possible, in order to GTFO with maximum prejudice - while the Monster had acceleration up its sleeve, most XR8 or SS pursuit cars would reel me in on top end, so I needed to get gone while the getting was good. So I was thinking it through. Trucks and buses used that roundabout a lot though, so I’d have to stay off the centre of the lane, away from the oil and diesel. Then stand it up nice and early, like Mick Doohan back in the 500cc Grand Prix days, to push as much power through the meat of that huge rear tyre...

Yeah, I’d thought it through all right. Except for the bit where I had to grab a sickening handful of brake and give way to a bunch of traffic blaring through the spray at the roundabout. Then got freaked out by the sight of a police 4WD trolling past on the far side of the freeway – the side I wanted to be on – and kinda panicked a bit. So I went left. Which was dumb, that took me back towards the city. So then I went right, straight after, into the bus-only turning lane, and darted across oncoming traffic past the No Entry signs and up Dean Street, which runs straight up the hill along the back of the Toowong bus depot. Which was also dumb, because it mired me in the backstreets of Toowong. Then, swearing at my own cluelessness, I thrashed the thing up the hill – hanging on grimly as the back wheel slithered and spat over the old, crusty wet bitumen – hoping that when I looked over my shoulder next, I wouldn’t see a police Commodore or two. Near the top of the hill I glanced back. Lights and sirens at the bottom of the hill, one unit of polizia making the same dodgy crossing-of-M5-westbound that I’d gotten away with.

Keep pushing.

Dean St goes past a couple of shops then curves across the top of the hill into the end of Sherwood Rd, which runs all the way down the hill to Toowong’s central business district. If I was going to lose these bastards, by the time they got up Dean St and round the corner onto Sherwood I had to be off this road and out of sight. Which, given that Toowong (like Bardon) was a spaghetti junction of back streets laid out on some seriously hilly terrain, meant I’d have to rely on my dodgy half-remembered geography of living and working around here some ten years or more previous. Halfway down the hill – opposite a block of flats where an old girlfriend of mine from uni used to live (hi Kelly, if you’ve read this far) – Kensington Terrace intersected. It went up a rise, past the back of Brisbane Boys College, through 90 degrees (Toowong doesn’t do straight streets) and spat you out at Jephson, which led across a rail bridge into Taringa, and on into St Lucia. If anything, Taringa and St Lucia were even more hilly and sinuous than Toowong, and I was pretty sure you could lose someone in there. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Anything would have.

So Kensington Terrace, past the school, round the bend, tank-slapper over the wet pedestrian crossing, down to Jephson, far too close to that truck… fucking traffic lights. Red ones, which I was particularly anti. I sat, prone, trying to remain inconspicuous. A cabbie rolled up beside me in the lane that turned onto Moggill Road, which went on to Indooroopilly and that Western Freeway I’d so foolishly spurned. Still waiting. Waiting. Then, over the crest of the hill behind me, came that fucking white Commodore. He’d probably just got to the end of Sherwood and turned right up Jephson on a whim, back in the game through dumb luck. My serving of same came with the timing of the green – just as the Commodore propped under braking for the red, the lights served up a green. I was gone. No stall this time. Probably no clutch either if I did that again, but consumables are called consumables for a reason.

Burns Road narrowed over the rail bridge and through the cutting that followed as it pushed on down the gentle slope into Taringa. We were headed for a roundabout. Now we really were on home ground, ten years removed. Turning right here and pushing on a few blocks would have got me to the old hardware store where Mick and I had first met, working together in second year. Straight ahead would spit me up and over a sharp crest, which would hurt my man-jewels again. However it’d also get me to the western side of St Lucia – the Swann Rd/Hawken Drive side – which had good access into the Avenues, the serpentine back streets of St Lucia’s leafy, affluent non-student area. No idea how I’d get out, though, even if I did manage to lose Queensland’s Finest in there. And in any case it took too much thinking to remember which street went where, which wasn’t my best subject at the moment.

So again, I went left, ducking around the back of Perrin Park and the Toowong Bowls club to hang another left onto Gailey Road. The great underlying philosophy of my tactics wasn’t much more than the fact that you usually didn’t have to give way turning left. Genius. Of course, the next turn I wanted to make was a right, onto Sir Fred Schonell Drive, and the lights (and traffic) were against me. But this time I just ignored the fuckers and threaded the needle anyway. Yeah, screw you too, buddy. Shouldn’t be out in this fucking weather anyway. Give your wife her white MX5 back you nonce.

Sir Fred was a wide, mostly straight, four-lane arterial road. My logic – unless it was justification after the fact, trying to explain to myself why I’d turned right and come down here – was that the Monster had it over the Commodore in acceleration and in cornering. Cornering meant thinking – having to remember where the corners, in this case the streets of the St Lucia hinterland, actually went. Acceleration just needed me to hang the fuck on, so that’s precisely what I did. The Monster’s WSBK engine note howled off the apartment blocks as I crested the first rise, struggled to get the nose down as we plunged into the first dip, then hammered up the guts of the hill towards the junction with Ryans Road. The lights ahead were green. They needed to be, because the lights in my mirrors were red and blue. I knew what would happen over the crest of the hill – I’d had it happen on lesser, softer-sprung bikes at legal speeds, so it was Going To Happen on a rock-hard track bike at a hundred plus – but I still shat myself, figuratively speaking, when both wheels went light as the road fell away beneath me. It was the fact it kinked left at the time that was the attention grabber. As any Isle of Man TT rider will tell you – the guys who face up to shit like this for a living – the tactic of choice was an initial pre-turn, straighten up at the crest, leap, land, gather it up and finish the turn. Head over the crest with the thing canted over and they’d have to bring extra bin bags to collect the bits after landing.

And yes I landed on my spuds again, and it hurt. But I was slowly getting a handle on this evil, rock-hard bike which Mick had put me on. Finding the button marked DTC helped. DTC was Ducati Traction Control. Turned wheelspin into traction. Suddenly leaving corners in a straight line had become standard operating procedure rather than the desperate pipedream of an inveterate delusionary. Which, when it was still chucking it down and blowing like a tart, was a little bit reassuring. The Monster skipped across the little undulations (barely noticeable at 60, like hitting a jump ramp at twice that) at the bottom of the hill past the fringes of Guyatt Park, bucking and weaving like a late ‘80s GP bike - say the '88 Honda NSR500, that was a particular bastard of a thing - as I wrestled it into the next left kink at the intersection with Brisbane St. Past the Chinese supermarket, our favourite local bottle-o and the dodgy café that’d become a Nandos. More lights, at Laurence St, but these were green too. And then…

Most roads go somewhere. Sir Fred went to the university. Of course he did, he was the founding chancellor, but his road went there too. Ahead, in the distance, was the roundabout which led into campus – the North Gate as they called it. It was about now that the realisation hit me that I really had no fucking idea what I was doing. I’d deliberately headed down a dead end. Straight ahead was the uni – speed bumps, CCTV cameras, and a slow looping drive around the bend of the river to eventually link up with the other side of St Lucia. Left was not a lot – a short side street that led into Macquarie St, which ran parallel to Sir Fred on the riverside – just residential apartments, scabby ones for the students, flasher ones for the cashed-up oldies. Right was Coleridge St, which ran along the western boundary of the university and linked Sir Fred to Carmody Road, Swann Road or even the twisty stuff around the back of the golf course and head back out of St Lucia again – all of which gave me a way back out. But that was where I’d come from, and that was presumably where the mates of the bloke on my tail – well a hundred metres back anyway – were coming from too. The bend of the river St Lucia lies on dictates the geography of the roads around it. What goes in, has to come out - the way it comes in or not. They knew that as much as I did.

The roundabout loomed. I braked hard – wave discs, radial Brembo calipers with braided lines, race pads that needed a lot of warming up – and glanced right. Another police car, a Falcon, was powering down Coleridge towards the roundabout, lit up for Christmas. Right, it appeared, was right out. I went left, picking the Ducati up to square off the corner exit with a squirt of throttle. The two marked cars almost got into an argument over who’d follow me first, like Ford vs Holden diving into Hell Corner, lap one at Bathurst.

Munro St almost immediately terminated in Macquarie, as I said. Left went back towards Laurence St and Sir Fred, right petered out into a dead end. I knew it well. We’d lived on the far side of Guyatt Park for a year in a big old house near the river, and Macquarie St was part of the cycleway to uni. That was my big idea. It was also my last and only idea. I flicked right, straightened up, rolled off the throttle, sucked in a big one and aimed for the gap in the trees at the end of the Macquarie St cul-de-sac. The road dropped away into a concrete-paved dip, pinched-off by steel dividers painted in reflective yellow to stop cars from using the cyclepath, before rejoining the continuation of Macquarie St near the rowing club. The yellow steel bars were unsighted from the road, until you were already going over the edge, but years of practice told me where my front wheel needed to be as I plunged unsighted into the dip, Grazing my arse on the leftmost one was a pretty fair indication that a mid-Noughties Ducati Monster was a touch wider than an Apollo mountain bike. Either that or it was my arse that was wider. Probably a little from column A, a little from column B.

The Monster, despite the muscle-car grunt of this particular example, was a small, nimble thing by design – low-slung, short wheelbase, compact frame. It could handle tight streets and twisting mountain roads. It could even handle cyclepaths. By the time the coppers had hauled to a stop at the dead end and jumped out, Monster and me were streeting into the distance along the narrow concrete path which linked up with Sir William Macgregor Drive, the main ring road around UQ. Which would have been just as easy to get to off Sir Fred if we’d gone straight-on at the roundabout, but snookering my closest pursuers at the end of Macquarie St – even if only for a few moments – had bought me just enough time to get out of sight.

By the time the first of the police cars were flogging themselves along the ring road, lights flashing, river on one side, sportsgrounds on the other, getting airborne over the speedhumps and shooting sparks on landing, I was thirty metres above them, out of sight, making my escape. Gingerly tiptoeing the Monster on low-percentage throttle across the cycle lane on the far side of the Eleanor Schonell Bridge, the busway-only ‘green’ bridge which reached across to the uni from Dutton Park. To the students and staff of UQ the Green Bridge had opened up a whole new selection of suburbs you could easily commute to uni from, by bus, cycle or shanks pony. Granted, not that many had tried darting over on a Ducati Monster while the constabulary weren’t looking, but at least the precedent was set now.

The Monster wasn’t a bike that liked traffic. The ride was too hard, the suspension too jiggly, the clutch too grabby. It wanted to be on the freeway, or scaring tourists on the Mount Glorious Road. Problem with that was, if I was looking for me, the first place I’d crank up surveillance would be on the freeways. So Monster and me took to the minor arterials of Brisbane’s south-west: Fairfield Rd and Beaudesert Rd, which became the Mount Lindesay Highway south of the Logan Motorway. By then the road had freed up to semi-free-flowing 80km/h dual carriageway and we motored serenely southwards, keeping the revs and our heads down, not attracting attention, not that there was much attention to attract out there at this time of night. My tiredness was no match for residual adrenalin and racer-crouch pain twinges. Light-urban dual carriageway gave way to rural single carriageway, the posted limit became 100 km/h and I stopped watching for cops and started looking for roos instead, cursing the Ducati’s pissweak Euro-spec high beam, yet thankful as hell I’d survived long enough and fled far enough to be in a position to use it.

The fuel light blinked on just as I rolled into Beaudesert. It was half three in the morning. Not much happens at half-three in the morning in Beaudesert. Or at any other time, for that matter. The 24 hour card fuel at the Caltex truck stop was still where I’d left it last, on some band roadtrip mission years ago. Did this thing drink standard 91 unleaded? Didn’t have a lot of choice. My still-very-wet Visa card took a couple of swipes to register but eventually yielded the precious. I had to get moving again before I seized up completely – the racing crouch this thing demanded with the aftermarket Renthal bars was about as comfortable on the old frame as medieval torture after an hour plus in the saddle, particularly with everything else that’d been done to it the past three or four hours. But I did take the time to find the adjustment knobs for the Ohlins shocks, and softened them right off. Because I Just. Couldn’t. Take. It. Any. More.

Actually, I’ll tell you the truth: I seriously considering just finding a roadside tree, curling up and flaking out. I was dead on my feet, worse on wheels. Tired, sore, hungover, aching, dehydrated – you name it, I was it. The fatigue just hit you in waves of disorienting nausea. But it was still raining hard enough to be cold and miserable if you weren’t moving – it was cold and miserable when you were, but that massive Testastretta superbike engine made plenty of heat which kept you toasty warm – and dammit, I was so close to the border I could almost smell the purity and sanctity of the New South Wales countryside air.

I rolled out of Beaudesert a bit after a quarter to four, passing the 100 km/h speed limit signs and seeing nothing but a deserted (Beaudeserted?) country road stretching out in front of me. The sooner I get there, the sooner I can get some sleep. If I could hang on just a bit longer, I could even cut thought Kyogle and Casino and make it to the farm – crash in a real bed, either at the folks or just breaking into Jeff and Beck’s. Get a shower and an hour’s shuteye before calling Team Gasket and finding out whether they needed a guitarist for this afternoon, and whether they wanted to sort me some flights. Yeah, maybe that was a bit ambitious. But a man can only dream. And after the day I’d had, just the ability to dream was something to be thankful for…

Oh for fuck’s sake. Where did he come from?

Lights erupted from behind me, shattering my reverie. I was slipping. Just blundered out of town thinking I was home and dry, never bothered to check my mirrors or my speed, just fucking oblivious. Probably just one of the Beaudesert cops on patrol, tooling around town with nothing else to do. He’d latched onto me – headlights off, as you do – and followed me to the town limits, eased up behind me as I set my cruise speed – say 120-130 kays, it was a deserted road that pretty much went dead-straight – then pounced, a few kays out of town.

Oh well, I guess I better pull over then.

Or... not. I swore profusely, dropped two gears, grabbed a big handful of throttle and hung on for dear life. The big V-twin howled furiously at the night as the lane marking posts started flashing past at increasing rates of warp. That thing about getting to wind out a motorbike on a country road? Yeah, it’s more fun on a track-prepped Ducati than a ragged old BMW R 80 G/S. Who’d have thought. But I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to be home in bed, but I’d have one last fight on my hands before I got to have a lie down tonight. The turnoff for the Lions Road over the range was about 15 kays from Beaudesert, and I really, really wanted to lose him before there. The fact I couldn’t meant I wasn’t being chased by a squad car. This was Highway Patrol - SS Commodore, XR6 Turbo, something like that. Quite happy in the neighbourhood of two hundy plus, even if I wasn’t because my nerves were shot and I was absolutely fucked.

OK, so we do this on the Lions Road.

It’s not technically the Lions Road until you get within a couple of one-irons of the border. To begin with, it’s Running Creek Road, winding through the same valley that carries the Brisbane-Sydney XPT train line. Then after a couple of creek crossings and furious squigglings-about, it sets off through a set of fearsome crests-and-dips and leaps crazily for the sky, aiming for the border on the top of the mountain. After which point it gets really fucking dodgy. It’s not a road you take lightly, not a road you take flat-out, not even a road you try and attack after dark – not with unfenced verges, free-roaming cattle, unmarked corners and blind bends made slimy with cattle-truck runoff, and that’s just the ‘easy’ bit through the valley. But I was doing all those things. Terrifying tank-slappers over the crests, pushing far too fucking hard in the corners, understeering wide through bends with no-forwarding-address dropoffs on the outside. Because I just couldn’t stop. I couldn’t look back and I couldn’t ease off. Like a long, recurring nightmare, being chased all night through the dark by unknowable, unfathomable, unbearable demons. The border was all that mattered. Those old tick gates at the top of the hill, where farmland on the Queensland side abruptly terminated into state forest on the NSW side. I couldn’t even hear the cop car by now, couldn’t even hear the sirens. Didn’t matter. Tunnel vision. That last, long blast up the hill.

Fuck you, Queensland. I’m home.

Didn’t even remember to bring a gold coin to donate for the road upkeep, either.

The effort of making it to the border pretty much broke me. I meandered on for a kay or so further, winding downhill through the heavily forested switchbacks of the Border Ranges National Park, but I was done. There was a lookout a little way along which looked out over the Border Loop, a clever bit of rail engineering by which the track looped back on itself to get up a particularly gnarly part of the range. Not much to look out on at this hour of the morning, but it had a picnic table, a bit of a shelter and some fresh water. It did for me. I trundled dumbly down the gravel path, propped the bike against the picnic table, lay down on the flat wooden boards to straighten my back, and blacked out.

To dream of being chased, relentlessly, endlessly.

It’d probably save time to list the bits of me that didn’t hurt like hell, so I’ll do that. My nose felt OK. And my toes, probably because they’d gone numb. Everything else – and I mean everything else – was ruined. Head. Neck. Shoulders. Ribs. Arms. Elbows. Hands. Feet. Knees. Calves. Upper legs. Balls. Arse. Everything. Was. Ruined. Whether from being bashed up by rural tarmac, beaten by a demented copper, hammered by Moreton Bay whitecaps or tensed too long in a paralysing racer crouch on the back of a Ducati Monster. Or just falling asleep on a wooden picnic table. Not me. My arse. It’d fallen asleep. I hadn’t, not for long – the dawn chorus had put paid to that – but it had.

It was light. Probably half six or so – half seven NSW time. This time yesterday Beth and I were exploring hangover cures. I’ll repeat that bit. This time yesterday. That just broke me. I should have been making love to a beautiful girl in my bedroom as the sunlight streamed in through the window, not lying half-paralyzed by pain on a picnic table in the Border Ranges National Park. And the fatigue… God. It was like a psychosis. It felt like ants were crawling on my face. It took a couple of minutes to work out ants were crawling on my face, which was pretty fucking annoying to be honest. I wasn’t someone’s picnic lunch, dammit.

I wrestled my helmet off and washed my face. Braved a big slurp, too. Rainwater tank, so it was pretty well topped up since the past few days. It took a couple of minutes of hard concentration to remember what the plan was from here. Get hold of Joey. Get some flights sorted for Adelaide. Get there. Play. Pack up. Get ready to go to the next city. Rinse. Repeat. Trains moving in sidings. World of pointlessness.

Or… lie down and stare at the trees in the wind.

That sounded like more fun, actually. Here, on the civilized side of the border, the wind was gentle and benign, the sunlight dappled by the eucalypts. I could do with just lying here for a bit. A day and a half, at least. Besides, if I got up, some itinerant fucking rozzer would probably start chasing me, just on principle. It’d take a long, long time to get the residual nightmares from the past six or seven hours out of my mind.

Bleep bleep.

That was your standard Nokia message tone. It was also about the only sensible message tone I could find on my iPhone. Which… I’d left on Straddie, I thought. I patted down my jacket pockets. Opened the zip and reached for the breast pocket. Pulled out an iPhone. Crazed and cracked, and with next to no charge left, but here, and mine, and complete with a message for me. I had no recollection of picking it up – probably just after my head knock. I’d never, ever query the fragility of these things again.

The message was a text from Voicemail. There wasn’t enough signal to call, but seemingly there’d been enough for this to eventually find me hiding out in the scrub. According to this I had one new message. Only one? Nobody loved me, it’s true. Not like… she… did. Hmmm that fitted the metre of the song, good one. I went to flick through the missed calls to see who it was, but the screen didn’t want to cooperate. Cracked just where I needed touchscreen buttons. So I cracked the shits instead, and gave up.

Time to get on with it.

It was better on the bike. Sure, I was stiff as a board and sore as a bastard, and sure this road couldn’t have been bumpier if they’d tar-sealed it directly over sideways sheets of corrugated iron, but it felt good to be moving. Up early, before the heat of the day had set in, easing through the switchbacks that serpentined through the rainforest in a narrow tunnel of trunks and foliage. How’s the serenity. I wasn’t pushing, didn’t feel up to it, didn’t feel I needed to – had no idea what schedule I needed to be on anyway. Besides, I wasn’t over-endowed with fuel, and it was just as easy to coast downhill as it was to use fistfuls of throttle. Like most track-biased bikes the Monster didn’t much like warbling along at sedentary speeds, but it conceded me the point. We’d bonded, Monster and me. I felt like I owed it something for saving my arse a few times over last night. Even as it’d bruised it purple in the process, thanks to Mick’s stupidly firm suspension settings.

Together we wound down the valley and back up the other side, out of the rainforest and into farmland, crossing about a hundred and one narrow, rickety one-lane bridges seemingly hewn from railway sleepers and massive fuck-off bolts which needed avoiding if you were running soft semi-track-day rubber like I was. Lions Road became Gradys Creek Rd as we rolled through settlements so tiny they weren’t much more than two houses in relatively close proximity to each other; Cougal, Loadstone, Gradys Creek, and the appropriately named The Risk – we’d taken enough of those last night thanks very much.

And suddenly we were turning left onto the Summerland Way, an actual highway, and our little morning ‘scratch’ – such as it was – was at an end. No matter. The roads were quiet, apart from the odd school bus or farm ute. We trundled through the small town of Wiangaree, lake on the left, shops on the right, then pushed on towards Kyogle, the highway playing tag with the railway line. The temptation, after all that slow squiggly stuff through the hills, was to flog the Jesus out of whatever you were piloting now that the road went (mostly) in straight lines. I’d certainly been guilty of that in the old Atomic Mandarin, my old early-‘70s Torana GTR. But it was also a favoured hunting ground of the local constabulary – I’d missed being booked along here by dumb luck and timing more than once, encountering the fuzzy muff just as I’d had to back off behind some slow moving vehicle, rather than while blazing across the countryside at 120 plus. Particularly on that long straight just to the north of Kyogle. So tempting…

In the distance, though, something that made me throw up in my mouth. A large tractor – or bulldozer? – some kind of enormous farm equipment, seemingly blocking the road ahead. Cars with lights – a ute with yellow and purple, a white sedan with red and blue. Men standing on the side of the road, in a group, deep in discussion, gesticulating down the road. At me, coming towards them. Roadblock. I had two choices: slow down and hand myself over, or wrench the throttle, grit my teeth and hope for a gap. A Vanishing Point, maybe. See, Kowalski had it all wrong. He might have made it through the gap between those bulldozer blades if he’d been on a Ducati Monster and not a Dodge Challenger…

I slowed down as I approached the roadblock. There'd be no Vanishing Point ending today. Roadblock? Road blocked. By a very large combine harvester that some bunch of oblivious cockies were trying to move down the road from farm to farm. They had a ute with lights and a ‘Wide Load’ sign, but judging by the amount of the southbound lane that the harvester attachment was jutting into, that wasn’t quite enough for the local copper, who’d pulled them over to discuss their transport and logistics strategy. I even got a disconsolate wave out of them as I trundled past, comfortably threading the needle between the harvester and the lane marking posts on the outside. Then, with an almost-joyous blip of the throttle, I powered away towards Kyogle, shaking my head. You had to laugh.

I was still shaking my head when I rolled into my fuel stop at Kyogle around a quarter past eight, though more at the economy (or lack thereof) of the Monster. In 90 or so kays since Beaudesert – admittedly a lot of which involved riding like an arsehole – it’d mostly drained the tank. Tiny tank, huge engine, and it’d been running on 91 which it was clearly not best pleased with, increasingly running rough. Poor wee pet. I packed it full of as much 98 octane premium as its tank could drink, to dilute out the last of the crappy truck-stop 91, then wandered into the shop to see if my luck with road food was going to be any better. A packet of chips, a sausage roll and a Coke later, I realised that no, it wouldn’t. That said I hadn’t actually eaten for hours and had been running on adrenalin most of the night, so it’s fair to say I could have eaten the arse out of a rabid donkey. Or even a Mrs Macs pie and sauce, which I went back for straight after. And a big bottle of Pump water, which I took with me to the little table-and-chairs on the grass next to the servo in order to check my missed calls. I had a whole bunch of them – Marty, Joey, Lena – but most of those were from last night when I’d been ignoring my phone and slugging red wine. None since around eleven last night. One received call, though, which presumably was the voice message. Looked like Mick’s number. Which might actually mean he hadn’t been shot in the face, unless the special ops coppers had decided to randomly call people on his phone. After shooting him in the face.

“Ah yeah.. hey mate. It’s, erm, Mick. Hope you’re well.” He sounded… awkward. But he didn’t sound like someone had shot him in the face, which was good. “Hey look… did you’ve any fucken idea that two doors up was running a fucken meth lab??”

That made me smile. Then it made me laugh. Like a drain, in fact. Because you had to. Because, as Mick went on to explain, I’d apparently spent most of last night running from cops that weren’t... actually... after... me...