Show me the way to go home

I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
- Irving King, 1925

I was past tired. Past even the point of being too tired to sleep and nearing the point of being too tired to breathe, which basically meant too tired to worry about anything but faceplanting into the hotel bed and passing out. I should have had a shower – I was about a thousand years overdue for one – but it wasn’t like I had any spare clothes anyway. I’d sleep until they kicked me out tomorrow morning, then I’d fly… somewhere. I was going to say home, but as of press time I didn’t actually have one of those any more, not one I could go back to. Not without the risk of imprisonment or death. Not that Queensland ever really felt like home, you understand. But the realisation that I wasn’t just jobless and loveless but pretty much homeless too… yeah, that added another layer of suck to the equation.

So I ignored it and went for a kip.

Until I simply couldn’t stand the pong of me any more. Whereupon you’d have found me nude as a Renaissance statue washing my boxers and my old black Mount Road Yamaha T-shirt – which dated from when I’d worked at the place about thirteen years previous – in the bathroom sink, using the crappy little vials of shampoo and body wash combined as some sort of bastardised laundry liquid. Then hung them up on the balcony (half-expecting a gust of breeze to dispatch them to the winds and really fuck with my plans) in the afternoon sun. The jeans I couldn’t do much with – they were scratched and tattered and spattered with claret from where they’d punctured-through on impact with the gravel – and were still damp and manky from sweat and rain and seawater dating back many hours, so I just scraped off the worst of it and hung them up to air in front of the aircon, along with the jacket.

The boots were a nightmare. No socks, given the speed I’d had to get them on, so my feet had almost welded themselves into the seams in the hours since I’d stuffed them in there. They’d swollen up too, with moisture and stress, so it was a complete bastard getting them off, and the stench was neurotoxic. Found a squashed Huntsman in one of them too. Good times. They went outside. Since I was up, I had a shower, and raided the snacks in the minibar for a quick and dirty feed. Then, feeling ever so slightly more human, I flaked on the bed again. Except now I couldn’t sleep because I’d cleared my nose of all the dust, dirt, salt and shite from the past 24 hours and could now smell properly, and being downwind of the jeans and jacket soon became untenable. So that all went out on the balcony too. Fuck it. If it goes over the edge, it goes over the edge. If it happens, it happens. It is what it is. I’d embraced fatalism as only a naked man in a hotel room he hadn’t paid for could do. I also embraced sleep, because the list of things I could do anything about by worrying about was remarkably fucking short, in that it contained only one entry: Am worried I need more sleep.

Knock at the door. I was hoping it was room service I couldn’t remember ordering, but I wasn’t that hopeful. The knocking continued while I weighed up reaching outside for clothing, then gave up.

“You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel,” I called.

A pretty blonde girl was at the door. Not the one I was subconsciously hoping for, maybe, but Daniela would have to do.

“Danno,” I said. “This is… random.”

“Just your friendly eight PM wake-up call,” she offered brightly. “Half an hour late,” she added, checking her watch.

“You’re on Sydney time,” I suggested.

“Erm, no that’d be the other way. I think you might be mixing up your time zones a little.”

“God, not you too,” I muttered.

“It’s about to get worse,” she pointed out. “We’re about to fly out of Adelaide at half-nine and arrive half an hour before we left.”

“You are,” I corrected her. “I’m going back to bed, then I’m going back home. But enjoy your adventure in time travel.”

“Angus…”

I knew what she was going to say. “I know where I’m not wanted, Danno.” I was scratching around for the words. “And where I’m not able to make a useful contribution any more. I’m done. Don’t have anything left.”

A sad smile. “See, this is where if you’d been at the hotel where Marty had gone looking for you, you’d probably be getting some stern lecture about honouring contracts signed in good faith…”

“Marty doesn’t do stern,” I said. “He does whiny, and he does passive-aggressive. And besides,” I pointed out, “I don’t remember actually signing any contracts for the extension of the tour.”

“Handshake deals don’t count in your world?”

“Given that Marty left it to Jeff even to tell me there was an extension at all, I don’t think he’ll give much of a shit somehow. Reid was good today. He was the only one of us who was, but he was. He’ll be fine.”

“Reid doesn’t want to play with Gasket again,” Danno said.

“Yeah, he said that too. So what. Neither do I. Difference is, he’s still a salaried employee of dB, so he’ll do what he’s bloody well told. Me, not so much.”

“See,” she said, “I could argue that with you, seeing as though I’m sure dB will claim your existing contract would have had fine-print continuance provisions covering the rest of the Big Day Out period. Or I could ask whether words like responsibility, or loyalty, or legacy matter to you. But it’s late, and you’re hurting, and I don’t know the details why, but I can guess. I can’t do anything about that. Just…” She offered an understanding smile. “Just don’t throw out your second chance for a proper farewell at this, because there won’t be a third.”

Couldn’t argue with any of that. Still didn’t have me getting on a plane to Perth, but for the record, she was factually correct.

“And, from a selfish perspective, if I’ve just blown five hundred bucks flying my mum and stepdad out to Perth not to see the best band he ever signed play their last gig…” She pulled a face. “Just so you're properly warned. I’m really, really ugly when I cry. Ask any of my exes. You don’t want to see that. Or be responsible for it…”

“Richie’s coming over?”

“Richie’s coming over,” she confirmed.

I was wavering. There were a few people we still owed a fair bit more than we’d given back to in this industry. Chief amongst whom was one Gregory ‘Richie’ Richardson of Exocet Records.

“When’s the flight?”

“An hour.”

“Do we have enough time to hit the shops?”

“At Adelaide Airport??”

“Hmmm, good point. In that case I apologise in advance for the rankness of my attire.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “I’ve got a key to the merch stand, we’ll raid it tomorrow.”

“Awesome,” I said. “By the way, do you know if we’re we playing as a three-piece on Sunday, or do we have another ring-in?”

“You’ll find out at soundcheck tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “But yeah. We’ve got someone.” And told me who.

“Christ, why the hell didn’t you say so before?”

So, fortified by dodgy airport food and one or two very slow beers, we boarded the plane and duly travelled back in time to Perth. Which is quite the achievement considering Adelaide is already back several decades from the eastern seaboard anyway. Lena met us at the hotel – she’d skipped Adelaide, lucky her, and had flown direct from Sydney. It was embarrassingly good to see her again. “Of course the one I missed had to be the one where this one had a total meltdown, didn’t it?” she remarked. She’d already heard, which meant it was all over the industry grapevine. Fab. Noone wanted to talk about that, it was all a bit too fresh in the memory. I took it Marty’s own show had been a bit lacklustre too, he was a touch out of sorts and Reid was apparently feeling the effects of playing two ‘intense’ festival shows in one day. So, for all the wrong reasons, we were the talk of the VIP compound, the lower forms of entertainment journalism *cough News Limited cough* and the local music forums on the Magical Inter-Google. Still, there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is being kicked repeatedly in the love spuds by an agitated pack mule.

They were putting us up in the Crowne Plaza overlooking Langley Park on the riverfront, at the WACA end of the CBD. We had the cheap rooms which overlooked a bunch of other buildings rather than the river, but hell, I wasn’t paying so I was unlikely to give a crap. Lena was, for her room, anyway. Paying I mean. Not that interested in hearing about the rest of it. Which could have been a problem, given we’d ended up with adjoining studio rooms separated by a not-very-soundproof wall and linked by a door. Helpfully, housekeeping had forgotten to re-lock it since the last family had booked both suites. We came to an arrangement by which knocking would always precede entering. I suppose we could have flicked the lock again, but that’d mean having to come around the front every time I wanted to borrow her iPhone charger. Or her laptop. And besides, I had the beer.

Not only that, but courtesy a lightning raid on a late-night area Kmart I also had a pair of craptacularly ‘80s lime green, white and orange boardshorts that looked like they were based on the fairing design of an old Kawasaki superbike, a black T-shirt displaying a cartoon of a clenched fist that declared ‘If in doubt, ROCK’ (as distinct from PAPER or SCISSORS presumably), a couple of new pairs of boxers to replace the ones which were dissolving under me, and some deadly double-plugger thongs emblazoned with the logo of a brand of bourbon I wouldn’t even inflict on my lawnmower as emergency two-stroke. But only six bucks. Bargain. Not quite as sexy as my five dollar Newy Jets ones from the Rebel Sport clearance bins, but you get that on the big jobs. With that and a ten buck pair of crappy-but-cool sunglasses – fucked if I was taking on the glare of a Westralian summer without something in my favour – I was set for tomorrow. Where hopefully Danno would find me to wear that wouldn’t scare hipsters, children and the elderly.

Lena flaked pretty quickly – after that trip to Kmart, there was only so much additional excitement she could cope with. There was probably something there to do with the timezone changeover but as established I’m not good with timezones. Haven’t been in one since the original Sega Rally was out. So when I was awoken around half-eleven by a sharp knock at the door – initially stumbling towards the front door, then realising it was the connecting one – I was a bit taken aback. Actually I was baffled as fuck. My head was still all over the shop as it was. But there stood Lena in the doorway. Fully dressed. Looking… troubled.

“You OK?” I asked her.

She nodded, pensively.

“What’s up?”

She glanced over her shoulder. Into my field of view, in the half-light of Lena’s bedroom, stood a man in black. Not Johnny Cash. Not anyone else I recognised, either. Ramrod straight, square and bluff, he looked serious and menacing. Straight away you could tell he had a pretty unmistakeable private-security, possibly ex-military aura to him. Couldn’t see if he was carrying a weapon of any description; felt it safest to assume he was. Either that or he was very skilled in talking himself into the bedrooms of worldly thirty-something women like Lena. Could have also been true.

He smiled. A steely smile. He seemed to be made of steel, I wondered if he was a Terminator. T-800 series of course.

“Mr Young,” he said gently, unthreateningly. Conversationally, even. “Sorry for the intrusion. I’m here on behalf of a mutual friend, Mr Fyfe. He was wondering if you’d care to meet with one of his representatives to discuss some of the… allegations, shall we say, that yourself and Ms Krzyzewski have been propagating recently.”

My first reaction was ‘Wow, he pronounced Lena’s surname right. Noone does that.’ My second was ‘How do I know if he pronounced it right? I can’t pronounce it right’. The third, of course, was ‘We’re fucked.’

He followed my furtive glance back towards the door of my room. With a slightly bored sigh, the man in Lena’s bedroom explained that his colleague Mr Smith was on the other side of that door, and was cranky about being kept up past his bedtime as it was, so it was best not to annoy him. And then he asked us to follow him. Asked. Not ordered, asked. Which inferred there might have been a choice. Somehow though, it didn’t really feel like a question we were well positioned to answer ‘No’ to.

Some of the blanks were filled in once we'd been ushered, quickly and calmly, into the well-lit corridor. Our new friend Mr James (as he introduced himself) and his colleague Mr Smith were wearing the monogrammed black shirts and trousers of Crowne Plaza’s own security staff, complete with earpiece mikes and radios on the hip. The likelihood they were actually hotel staff seemed about on a par with the chances Mr James and Mr Smith were their real names, but they looked like they knew their way around the place and were meant to be there. We took the goods lift to the carpark, where a black (or possibly dark grey) Commodore Sportwagon was waiting for us. Mr Smith helped me into the back – he had the same square-jawed, ex-mil, probably-special-ops look to him as Mr James, bristling with intent and pardon-me-while-I-go-and-kill-someone self-assurance, just a tad shorter and maybe a hair less well-defined in physique judging by relative bulginess through their respective Crowne Plaza shirts. Though (a) I’m not exactly an expert in checking out other dudes and (b) I’d have been pretty fucking content to be carrying his pecs and guns around as OEM equipment. Lena got to ride in the front, presumably because she was less likely to try and be a hero by reaching across and cranking the handbrake on in the fast lane of the Kwinana Freeway.

We headed towards the airport, following the signs for the civilian aviation area. Nowhere near the freeway, as it turned out, though we did get there by what seemed a fairly circuitous route which completely buggered my flimsy Perth geography – which I guessed was the point. Though at one point we did get stopped at the lights and were joined by a lovely old blue Sandman panelvan, sounded like a V8 too, burbling like an off-shore powerboat. I fervently hoped there was either a rack of surfboards or a well-used mattress in the back, or the guy wasn’t trying hard enough. Anyway, he disappeared soon enough courtesy Mr James’ aversion to taking sensible routes, or having dropped his GPS down the stairs a few too many times. Though I probably don’t need to explain the irony I was feeling now that I actually wanted to be followed by police cars tonight – as many as the WA Police could spare, if possible. After the last couple of days – weeks? – this was well outside the dynamic range of stuff I could deal with. So I just went with it.

The airport was quiet, though Perth Airport is never truly quiet – it doesn’t run a curfew on flights, which must thrill the locals. The helicopter was a black (or possibly dark grey) Bell Ranger, much like Marty’s except with a long range fuel pod on it that made it look like it had a weirdly placed goitre. We were bundled and buckled into the back by Mr Smith, while Mr James got the rotors got up to speed. Mr James and Mr Smith took the front seats, on account of needing to drive and all.

“Now you kids will behave back there, won’t you,” Mr James said. “Because if you misbehave, it’s a long way down.”

I got the message. No funny business. I’d been weighing up – as calmly as I could, which wasn’t very – every situation we’d been placed into, in turn. Can I make a break for it here? Can I manufacture a way to get out? And in each situation – in the room, in the corridor, in the hotel carpark, in the Sportwagon, in the airport carpark, boarding the chopper – I’d done the maths, played the odds, fed it into the analytical instrument between the ears, and got the result back each time: ‘Computer says No.’ In some cases, maybe I could get away and make a run for it – maybe – but I’d be leaving Lena behind, and that didn’t seem very palatable a prospect. And we didn’t yet know for sure that these guys were going to kill us and dump us at sea. Who knows, they might have even genuinely been intending to take us to have a polite chat with one of Mr Fyfe’s business associates about the allegations we’d made.

We’d made?

Lena, whose Polish side was stoically trying to restrain her Italian side from freaking the fuck out entirely, made the admission a few thousand feet over southern WA, somewhere. She tried to whisper it, initially, which turned out to be about as much use as Marcus North’s test career. I pointed out that there probably wasn’t a lot of point, as these two probably knew anyway. Mr Smith nodded wryly from the co-pilot’s seat.

“Your email on Thursday,” she said. “Thought you and the plot had finally parted company for good... but I followed it up. Traced where Superfun’s royalties go. Black box of holding companies and such, but there seems to be at least a proportion that gets siphoned off into a common holding company to one which is associated with the McCarthy blind trust, and as near as I can figure out, the dollar values month-on-month track pretty much exactly with the amounts the McCarthy blind trust is over and above what regular Gasket royalties would be.”

So, basically, McCarthy’s old demos had been recycled by Team Fyfe into an income stream to fund Chastity Chase’s lifestyle. As a payoff for whatever it was that McCarthy had done to her, or perhaps whatever juicy bits of blackmail Chastity had over the Fyfes, possibly relating to McCarthy’s demise. Insert conjecture here about him being offed for the royalties by some or all parties concerned. You wouldn’t invest this much in covering something up - private security, choppers, cars, everything else involved in this little operation - if the something didn’t warrant it by being inherently quite fucking evil and not suitable for a public audience to hear about.

“I realised I couldn’t wait any longer to weave this into a longer narrative…”

“Ah, you mean that book you’re not writing?”

She ignored me. Tetchy. “And wrote it up for the Saturday papers. Submitted it for editorial consideration Friday lunch. Knock on the door late Friday evening…” She screwed up her face. She wasn’t dealing well with this. “I’m Polish,” she said, defensively. “My people don’t do late night knocks at the door from fucking secret police wannabes. Long fucking memories on that shit.”

“Who’d you send it to – Fairfax? News? Some media organisation has a Fyfe mole in their ranks…”

“I think you’ll find,” Mr James interceded with a polite chuckle, “that most media organisations do...”

A reluctant sigh. “News,” she admitted. “But I think I know the weak link.”

“Yeah?”

“Tell you later,” she said.

“There might not be a later,” I observed flatly.

“Don’t say that…”

“Well, there mightn’t. We might get blown out of the sky, Bond supervillain style. Or we might get hit by a bus tomorrow crossing the fucking street. Shit happens.”

“I’d just like to point out, if I may,” Mr James responded, “that we have no intention of killing you and dumping your bodies at sea. OK?”

“OK.”

“We’d give you a proper burial at least… hmmm, tough crowd Mr Smith.”

Mr James’ joke hadn’t helped Lena’s state of mind much. Neither had the fact we’d been flying forever – well a couple of hours at least – and had no idea where we were, disoriented by the darkness, the tinted windows of the Bell Ranger, and Mr James’ fascination with flying in what felt like large-radius curves and loops, so that without a GPS we had no hope of figuring out where we were or where we were heading. Lena and I did actually have a GPS, in fact we had two – one in each iPhone – but they were safely in the keeping of Mr Smith, stashed in what I suppose you’d call the glovebox, in with the flight docs. (I’d have liked to see the flight plan for this get approved. I suspected it hadn’t.) We hadn’t even had a chance to turn off our electronic devices or switch them to flight mode, which would have pissed off the trolley dollies. Maybe that was what was fucking with the navigation. Rather than Mr James’ preference for us not to know where the hell we were going.

In the end, you’ve got to just accept the cards you’ve been dealt. I yawned, stretched, told them to wake me up when we got there, and went to sleep. Sure, it was part I’m-going-to-pretend-this-doesn’t-scare-the-fuck-outta-me bravado and bullshit. But it was also I’ve-slept-about-four-hours-since-Wednesday-night absolute and utter knackeredness. Lena kept trying to jab me awake with her elbow, like this lot were just waiting for me to nod off before dumping the cheery bonhomie, pitching the chopper into a death spiral, punching out and leaving us to plummet screaming into a nest of quokkas on Rottnest Island or something. But in the end, my renown ability to sleep anywhere, anytime won out. Everyone needs a special skill. That was mine.