Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection Of New Essays (8 page)

At the university interview, a design lecturer named Fred Littlejohn noted that I had included reading as a hobby on my application.

“Who’s your favourite author?” he asked as another lecturer flicked through my portfolio of work making ‘hmmm’ noises.

“John Wyndam. He’s a British science fiction writer.”

“Really? And what’s your favourite John Wyndham novel?”

“The Crysalids.” I answered, “It’s remarkable. I also like Trouble With Lichen.”

Fred smiled. “Consider Her Ways is my favourite John Wyndham novel. Have you read it? It’s certainly up there with Trouble With Lichen. You might also like the author Robert C. O’Brien.”

Fred also liked Macs. I was accepted into the course.

During class, in the second year of my studies, the head of the school knocked on the classroom door and politely asked to speak with me. I accompanied him to his office where a female plain-clothes police officer was waiting. I wasn’t arrested or anything, the officer just asked if I was doing ok, told me that I should consider contacting my mother sometime, and said that she was filing the missing person report as closed.  I was twenty.

I received a letter from my mother a few weeks later. It was addressed care of the University. It was three pages long and went on about how some parents lose sight of what matters and forget to be a parent and how she was proud of me. I didn’t need her to be proud of me and I didn’t contact her.

In my third year of uni, my sister phoned me at the semi-detached I was renting with two other students. Student registry gave her my number. I went with her to our grandfather’s funeral a few days later and we sat next to our mother. My mother cried when she saw me. She looked old. We didn’t hug and it felt weird to call her ‘mum’ so I just said, ‘Hello Diane.”

Afterwards, Diane invited my sister and I back to her house. We chatted, mainly small talk but broaching on the time between when we had last been in contact. It was awkward. I know I should have been interested in what she had been up to for the past several years but I wasn’t. I didn’t know her and I wished I hadn’t gone to my grandfather’s funeral. I didn’t know him either. I feigned interest but I didn’t care that Diane was now a social worker and most of her friends were also social workers. Or that she’d turned lesbian, then straight for a brief stint, then lesbian again and was currently ‘close friends’ with a local artist named Magenta Deluxe. Or that Magenta had taken her name from a paint swatch and was really into painting people’s aura’s.

As I was about to make my excuses to leave, Magenta arrived at the house. She was a large woman with  bright red dyed hair and matching red shirt and pants. She looked like a giant chili pepper.  She had two friends with her, a petite woman with long curly hair and a bald guy who was carrying a pottery teapot and small bowl. Diane and Magenta hugged.

“You must be David,” Magenta stated. She threw out her arms and hugged me enthusiastically, “Diane has told me so much about you.”

“Yes,” I replied, “I’m sure she has. The stories probably had a few gaps in them though.”

“A few. You have to let me paint your aura,” she continued, “it’s very interesting. Predominately green with red spikes.”

“That sounds dreadful. Some other time perhaps, I was just about to leave.”

“No, stay and chat with us for a bit. This is Terry, he’s a social worker.”  I shook hands with the bald guy. 

“And this is my dear friend Kate who is visiting from England.”

I shook Kate Bush’s hand.

See, I was getting to it. A thousand pages back you were probably asking yourself, “Who the fuck cares? What does any of this have to do with drinking a cup of magic tea with Kate Bush? And who the fuck is Kate Bush?”

“Nice to meet you.’ I said, “Are you an artist or a social worker?”

Kate smiled, “An artist. What do you do?”

“He’s in his third year at Uni,” my mother answered, “he’s going to be a graphic designer.”

“Oh lovely,” Kate smiled, “I know a lot of graphic designers. You can’t swing a cat in the Sulhamstead pub without hitting one.”

“Where’s Somersault?” I asked, not really caring.

“Sulhamstead. It’s in Berkshire. I bought a tudor cottage there.”

“Nice. What’s tudor?”

“It’s an architectural style popular in England during the 1500’s.”

“You couldn’t afford something a bit newer?” I asked.

Kate laughed and turned to Diane, “He has to join the circle and share tea with us. ”

The bald guy named Terry moved the coffee table to the side of the living room and positioned six cushions on the floor in a circle. He placed the pottery teapot and bowl in the middle. Everybody sat and Kate looked up at me, patting the cushion next to her.

“Actually, I appreciate the offer but I should head off...”

“Oh you must,” Kate grabbed my hand and pulled me down, “It’s magic tea.”

“Well I’m certainly not drinking it then. What’s magic about it?”

“It’s an ancient Celtic recipe made with herbs,” she explained, “and forest fungus.”

“I’d probably prefer Lipton’s.”

Kate ignored me, “Okay, everybody hold hands.”

“Really?” Diane was sitting to my right and that would mean holding her hand for the first time since I was a child.

‘Yes, we have to close the circle.”

Kate held my hand and I held Diane’s. It was wrinkly and dry.I wished I had left. Everybody closed their eyes while Kate recited something about a goddess and balance. It was all fairly stupid. When she finally released my hand, I quickly released Diane’s.

“We welcome David to the circle,” Kate announced, “and share this gift with him.”

She poured tea into the bowl and offered it to me ceremoniously. I took the bowl and raised it to my nose cautiously, the tepid liquid smelt like dishwater and had the same colour. Figuring it was better to get it over with quickly, I threw the contents back and swallowed quickly trying to avoid my tastebuds.

“Oh my god!” yelled the bald guy named Terry, “He drank it all!”

“I wasn’t meant to?”

Kate stared at me in horror. “You were meant to share it with the circle. What the fuck?” She grabbed the bowl from my hands.

“Should we induce vomiting?” my mother asked.

Magenta jumped to her feet, “I’ll see if there is any milk of magnesia in the medicine cabinet.”

“No,” the bald man named Terry said, “Milk of magnesia is for constipation and heartburn. You’re supposed to give plain milk for poisoning.”

Magenta searched the refrigerator, “Will soy milk work?”

I was panicking a bit at this point, “I drank poison? Why would you give me poison? Am I going to die?”

“What part of the word sharing don’t you grasp?” Kate asked admonishingly, “You were meant take a small sip and pass it to the person on your left. ”

“Well you should have fucking told me that beforehand. I don’t know the rules of the circle game. Why are you drinking poison? Is this a cult?”

“His aura is turning orange,” shouted Magenta from the kitchen.

“Should we take him to the hospital?” Diane asked.

“No, he’ll be fine,” Magenta said, handing me a glass of milk. She was still in the kitchen but her arm stretched twenty feet into the living room like the rubber guy from Fantastic Four and snapped back when I took the glass.

“How did you do that? I asked.

“It’s starting,” said the bald guy named Terry.

Time snapped back a few seconds.

“It’s starting,” said the bald guy named Terry.

“I feel weird,” I said, “Perhaps I should go to the hospital.”

“You’re going to be alright,” Kate told me. 

I blinked.

Everyone was sitting at the dining table eating pasta.

I blinked again.

I was standing outside watching them eat pasta through the kitchen window. I held my eyes open to avoid blinking and heard a noise that sounded like a hundred people saying the word ‘stick’ at the same time.

“It’s starting,” said the bald guy named Terry.

“Right, I really do think I should go to the hospital.” I said.

I blinked.

It was dark outside. Leith was gone. Diane, Kate and the bald guy named Terry were in the kitchen cooking pasta. Magenta was painting my aura while I sat on a stool in the living room. There was a mirror on the wall behind her and I could see the painting reflected. It looked like a squashed frog.

“Oh no,” I said, “I knew it would be dreadful.”

Blink.

The bald guy named Terry was playing an acoustic guitar. I was clapping to keep the beat. Diane and Magenta were curled up on the couch asleep at each end, Kate sat cross-legged in the middle making patterns on the wall with a laser pointer in time to the music. I couldn’t stop clapping but I managed to turn to her and say, “I hate all of you.”

I blinked. The blink was much longer this time.

I woke up just after 4am and gazed around. The lights were off and the only illumination came from the television screen. A documentary about Antarctica showed a sad looking bear floating on a piece of ice. I blinked hard a few times as a test but nothing changed. Diane and Magenta had gone to bed. Kate was asleep in a sitting position on the couch with her head lolled back snoring. My head was in her lap. The bald guy named Terry was on his knees giving me a blowjob.

I didn’t visit Diane again.

My only other ‘brush with fame’ is having Simon LeBon’s bodyguard ask me to move down two seats. I was waiting for a friend at the Hilton bar in Adelaide when Simon LeBon and a large man in a tight suit exited the elevator and headed over. This was well after the height of Duran Duran’s fame and I think they were playing cabarets and cruise ships by then. The large man in a tight suit tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Would you mind moving down two seats?” and I did. That’s pretty much it for my part in the whole thing but I was close enough to hear their conversation.

The bartender who served them asked, “Aren’t you that guy from that band?”

Simon nodded, “Duran Duran.”

“That’s it. I liked that song you did about a hungry wolf. What was it called? I’m a Hungry Wolf or something?”

“Hungry Like the Wolf,” Simon answered.

“That’s the one. Very catchy. That other one was good too, what was it called, Tainted Love, did you do that one as well?”

I wanted to yell, “No, that was Soft Cell. Duran Duran did Girls on Film, Planet Earth, Is There Something I should Know, My Own Way, The Chauffer and many other top ten hits,” thinking Simon might be impressed by my knowledge and we would become best friends, but I didn’t.

Simon nodded and said, “Yep.”

“We should go to Tasmania,” Geoffrey stated.

He turned his laptop towards me to present a photo of a woman posing on a trail in a rainforest. Geoffrey and I had been friends since working together at a printing firm years before. He was currently employed as a tech specialist for a local school and I was in my fourth and final year of studies. It was April 1996.

“Why,” I asked, “would I want to go to Tasmania?”

“Just to have a look,” he replied, “It’s supposed to be nice. It’s the Apple Isle.”

Tasmania is at the bottom of Australia, to the right, separated from the mainland by ocean. It’s shaped kind of like an apple and its main export to the mainland is apples. It gets left off a lot of maps, which Tasmanians carry on about but nobody listens.

“I’ve seen apples,” I told him. “If I could afford a holiday, I would go somewhere where they have things I haven’t seen.”

“It wouldn’t cost much,” Geoffrey argued, “we could drive there.”

“You mean I could drive there.”

Geoffrey didn’t own a car and caught the bus most places. “They have a boat that ferries cars across. It costs... fifty-five dollars per vehicle under two tons. That’s a bargain. How much does your car weigh?”

“Why would I know how much my car weighs?”

“Right. Hang on,” he typed something into Alta Vista and waited patiently.

This was before Google was a thing. Or wi-fi. We had to plug a box into the telephone, run a cable to the computer, edit scripts so they would work with the box, try several different ppp settings, unplug the cables, plug them back in...

“We’ve got two flashing green lights on the modem now, what did you do?”

“I changed 255.255.182.4 to 255.255.182.5, hang on, I’ll try 255.255.182.6” 

“Three flashing green lights!”

“What do the flashing lights mean?”

“I’m not sure but three has to be better than two. Try changing it to 255.255.182.7... no, they’re all off now.”

Nowadays, everyone has Google on their phone and they can research information anywhere. It’s practically impossible to make things up anymore without someone calling you out.

“Did you know that the word ‘hike’ originally comes from the time when the husband would ride on a mule while the wife had to walk alongside? As the routes were unpaved and muddy, the wife would have to ‘hike’ up her skirt.”

“That’s not true, Google says it is comes from the old German word ‘hyke’ meaning ‘to walk vigorously’.”

“Ok,” said Geoffrey, “It says here that a Fiat 124 Coupé weighs 2,205 pounds.That’s around a ton. Even with our bags it will be well under the weight limit.”

I’d traded up from my yellow 73’ Honda hatchback after it broke in half while on the hoist at Ultra Tune getting the brake pads replaced. Apparently the chassis was completed rusted out and the front and back were only held together by the exhaust pipe.  The green 75’ Fiat seemed like an upgrade at the time but it was nowhere near as reliable. Due to something amiss with the electrical wiring, it would occasionally start itself and there was a coolant puddle in the driveway large enough that it needed to be leapt over.

“I doubt the Fiat would make it that far,” I said, “it’s only running on three cylinders and the radiator is shot.”

“I’ll pay for your car to be fixed and we can go halves in petrol. Motels are only about thirty dollars per night if you’re not fussy about sleeping arrangements. If we go for a week the entire holiday will only cost a few hundred dollars. It will be a road trip.”

“You’ll pay to have my car fixed?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t actually have any assignments due.”

“Excellent.”

The drive from Adelaide to Melbourne, where we had to catch the ferry, took just over fourteen hours. It’s an eight hour drive but we had to keep stopping to top up the radiator. Geoffrey’s idea of paying to have the car fixed had consisted of purchasing a bottle of Wynn’s Stop Leak and a new set of wiper blades.

“If we’re going to be touring the ‘apple isle’ by car, we want a clean windshield to look out of. You don’t have to pay me back for those. They were only four dollars.”

As we missed the ferry by five hours and had to rebook for the next day, we spent that night in the ferry parking lot.

When the movie The Mask first came out, someone told Geoffrey that he did an excellent impression of the bit where Jim Carey says, “Smokin!” Since then, he’d wanted to be a voiceover artist, convinced that his repertoire of Fred Flintstone, Crocodile Dundee and John Cleese impressions were nothing short of a gift for others to experience. It was a very long night.

“This parrot is dead! He’s an ex parrot. Bereft of life.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it Geoffrey.”

“No, you’re meant to say, ‘He’s just resting.’”

“Can’t we play I-spy instead?”

“Fine. I’ll go first. I spy with my little eye, something beginning with an F.”

“Well it’s certainly not a ferry.”

“No, but it’s got the word ferry in it.”

“What?”

“Yes, it’s got three words.”

“That’s a sentence.”

“No, it’s a name. Of a place.”

“Fuck that then, I’m not playing anymore. What was it?”

“Ferry Booking Office.”

“I’m really tempted to drive the car off the edge of the dock right now and drown us both. What’s the time?”

“11.15, so...” he counted off fingers, “eighteen hours and fifteen minutes until we get to board. You know what we should do?”

“What?”

“Hum parts of a song and the other person has to guess what the song is.”

“I’m going to go to sleep.”

“Oh no, don’t do that. Then I’ll be awake by myself and there’s nothing to do. Come on, I’ll start. Hmmm hmmm, hmm, hmmm hmmm hmm, hmm.”

“Bohemian Rhapsody?”

“No. It didn’t sound anything like Bohemian Rhapsody, you must be tone deaf. Here, I’ll do it again. Hmm hmm, hmmm, hmm hmm hmm.”

“That sounded completely different from the first time.”

“That’s because I did a different bit. That was the chorus. I’d have thought you’d get it easy with the chorus. Do you want me to hum it again?”

“No, I give it up. What was it?”

“
Don’t You Want Me
by The Human League.”

“What time is it now?”

“11.18.”

At 4.30pm the next day, we were first in line to drive aboard. The ship was essentially a floating parking deck. Due to the booking change, the only tickets available were ‘Ocean Recliner’ which meant sitting in a chair overnight, with no shower facilities, after spending thirty-six hours in the car.  A few chairs down from us, a couple had a child with a toothache and a set of healthy lungs but we managed to get a few minutes of sleep regardless.  We drove off the ship into Devonport at 6.00 the next morning leaving a large puddle behind. 

Devonport looked a lot like Adelaide and I had never been that impressed with Adelaide. We filled the radiator and headed south. Our original five-dayplan was to tour the island in a clockwise route with overnight stays in Launceston, Hobart
, 
Queenstown and Burnie before arriving back in Devonport for departure. With only four days, we decided to bypass Launceston and head straight to Hobart.

“We should stop and buy apples,” declared Geoffrey.We were driving through farming land and every few miles, kiosks selling apples were set up at the front of properties.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’re in the Apple Isle. We have to buy apples. Tasmania is famous for them. People will ask us about the apples when we get back and what are you going to tell them? That we didn’t try any? That’s just ridiculous.”

“I’m fairly certain they are the same apples we buy in Adelaide. All our apples come from here.”

“Yes, but these ones haven’t been in a truck. And a boat. They’re straight off the trees. Besides, we need snacks for the road trip. Pull over at this one.”

Geoffrey purchased two large bags from the vendor, a woman with no teeth, who told us we were going in the wrong direction. We headed back the way we had come looking for the turnoff.

“Do you want one?” Geoffrey offered the bag to me.

“No thanks.”

“You’re not even going to try one?”

“I kind of like the green ones better. They’re more crisp.”

“These are pretty crisp,” Geoffrey replied, “Listen...” he took a large bite.

“I stand corrected. That did indeed sound crisp.”

“Do you want one then?”

“No thanks.”

“Fine. All the more apples for me. I’m fairly sure that was the turnoff by the way.”

“What?”

“You missed the turnoff.”

“Well why didn’t you tell me it was coming up?”

“You’re the one driving.”

“Yes, and you’re the navigator,” I countered, “That’s your job. You have the map.”

During our trip across on the ferry, we’d taken time out from our designated chairs to eat at the cafeteria. It was slim pickings, pre-wrapped sandwiches and the like, and we had to line up with trays like they make you do at IKEA. Our tray liners, an A3 piece of paper, featured an outline of Tasmania, with landmarks, for kids to colour in with a supplied small box of crayons. The crayons, four per box, were only slightly thicker than a piece of wire and one of them was white. They kept snapping and were constructed from a material not unlike crayon, but not similar enough to leave much of a mark on paper. Our proposed route was marked in purple crayon with tourist locations we intended to visit coloured in green. Geoffrey had also shaded the shoreline in with blue.

“The map doesn’t show the turnoff. It just has a picture of a turtle. I’m going by what the old lady told me. She said to turn left at the big rock shaped like a boot. That road will take us to a main road that goes all the way to Hobart.” 

“Was there a rock shaped like a boot?”

“Kind of.”

“Right. I’ll keep going for a bit then and if we don’t see a rock that is definitely shaped like a boot, we’ll head back.”

“No, it was definitely boot shaped.”

I turned the car around and drove back. The rock wasn’t shaped anything like a boot.

“Maybe you misunderstood because of her thick Tasmanian accent and lack of teeth.”

“No,” Geoffrey replied, “She definitely said boot. Maybe it depends on which angle you look at it from.”

“It’s round. Whatever angle you look at it from, it’s going to be round. Perhaps you should have asked her what kind of boot; a boot shaped one or the round kind.”

“It’s not perfectly round, it has a bit that sticks up at the back. I can definitely see a kind of boot shape.”

We took the turnoff. It led to a farmhouse so we reversed back down their driveway and continued on along the highway until we found the correct landmark. It was actually shaped like a boot. Someone had spray-painted black laces on it. Someone else had spray-painted the words, ‘Ken Matthews is a wanker’ in white.

“Oh yes,” said Geoffrey, “I saw that when we drove past earlier.”

“You knew where the boot was?”

“It didn’t register that it was boot-shaped at the time. I was too busy wondering who Ken Matthews is and if he has seen that rock. He would have been pretty cross.”

On the five hour drive to Hobart, Geoffrey made me play a game that he invented called ‘Number Plate People’. As cars drove past us, we had to record the letters and numerals from their number plate and use each letter as the first letters of someone’s name. GZA-426 for example, became Glen Zoe Alice. The numbers indicated the probability of the person driving the car being called either Gen, Zoe or Alice. In this case, a 4 in 26 chance. It was far more excruciating than I am making it sound.

“Losing that day has really mucked up our schedule,” Geoffrey complained as he marked our new route on the map. He’d tried colouring over the old route with the white crayon but it hadn’t worked. He held it up. “Ignore everything in purple. Everything green is where we are going now. Except the green whale.”

“Right, well you’re the navigator. We’ve already established your skills in that area.”

“Okay, because we lost a day, and it’s now nearly noon on Sunday, we should turn left up here. That will take us to Port Arthur. ”