Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  The Irish Troubles were ostensibly over, and a lot of people were writing tell-all memoirs about their time in the IRA. We represented the publisher of one such book, and The Lads, which is menacing slang for the IRA, told our author they would leave him alone if he stayed in the Republic and kept out of Northern Ireland for the rest of his life. But, unsurprisingly for a former IRA terrorist, he was quite bloody-minded, and he went back to the North and got gunned down.

  We settled that case.

  Despite this bad omen, when my mother came from Sydney to visit, I told her it would be totally fine to visit the North.

  ‘They’ve let all that stuff go now,’ I said.

  First, we travelled to the family village in Kerry, which was very remote. The people there spoke with an Irish accent so thick they literally sounded Jamaican, which I didn’t know was possible but can confirm now that it is. Then Mum and I drove north, with Mum constantly criticising my driving, and we crossed the heavily armed border into Northern Ireland, and drove into the streets of Londonderry.

  Londonderry has a long history of sectarian violence between the Protestants and the Catholics. The city is so divided, its occupants can’t even agree on the name – Protestants call it Londonderry but the Catholics just call it Derry because they really can’t stand English shit at all.

  The main no-go area is called the Bogside. It is a Catholic and dissident Republican enclave, and the police and the ambos at that time would not enter it. It’s where the Bloody Sunday massacre happened.

  Naturally when we drove our Corolla into town, we parked adjacent to the Bogside, right within throwing distance of it – a fact which soon became relevant.

  At the end of the day’s sightseeing, we returned to the car and discovered it had a dent in it where someone had backed into us. My mother, who tends towards anxiety, was very worried about this.

  ‘We just have to call the cops to make an insurance report,’ I said. ‘No big deal.’

  Mum had a very bad reaction to my suggestion of calling the police: it made her really nervous.

  Meanwhile it was getting dark and the damp was creeping into our bones in a miserable, potato-famine kind of way. I called the police and Mum paced nervously.

  We were in a quiet cul-de-sac next to the city wall and across the road from the Bogside. The only other people around were a group of itinerant gentlemen drinking on the footpath from a communal bottle of what I assume was whiskey, although maybe that amounts to racial profiling.

  At that moment, the police showed up in a marked car. They were heavily armed, and in their uniforms. They paced around our car inspecting the damage and, all of a sudden, I became aware that we were standing with cops next to the hot epicentre of the centuries-long conflict between armed authorities and Irish republicans.

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a group of youths gathering on the Bogside.

  Shouts of ‘Wankers!’ and ‘Fook off, pigs!’ began to bounce off the cold stone of the medieval ramparts.

  The police looked nervous, and given they were the ones carrying automatic weapons, this made me nervous.

  The next minute we heard pinging, and then sickening thuds, as rocks began to rain down upon us.

  The youths were launching an all-out rock attack on us. One of them was wearing a striped Adidas tracksuit and had his arm drawn back like a slingshot.

  ‘We need to evacuate!’ the police officers shouted, as rocks rained down.

  Then there was an enormous crash as a big fucking rock smashed through the back window of our hire car, right next to where we were standing.

  Mum was nearly hysterical by this stage. It really sucks when you have anxiety and people keep telling you to calm down but then something actually life-threatening does happen just like your anxiety-brain has been warning you it would.

  Mum and I bolted to the cop car and jumped into the back seat, which I remember had a gun on it which I sort of nudged onto the floor, hoping it wouldn’t discharge.

  During the whole rock attack, the itinerant gentlemen had sat sipping their whiskey, like they were at a cocktail bar.

  As we left at speed in the cop car, I heard one of them shout at the youths:

  ‘Let it go, you fookin gobshites!’

  Luckily, we had whiskey back at our hotel, because Mum needed it. She was doubly traumatised because she had to file a police report against her own side – the oppressed Catholics who mounted a resistance against the evil British-backed authorities.

  As soon as word of the incident got out, the local media sought to interview us.

  Mum and I gave interviews to the BBC and other channels. Back at home, my brother heard on the radio that two Australian women had been caught up in sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

  It can’t possibly be . . . he thought. And then: Of course it fucking is.

  It didn’t occur to Mum or me to phone home because we were busy enjoying our celebrity status.

  We were put up in a five-star hotel and given free tickets to a Van Morrison concert. I should note that such compensation has not historically been offered to the victims of Ireland’s sectarian violence. The Lord Mayor personally apologised to us, and the Bogside community leaders offered us a tour. The hire-car company waived the excess fee. When we picked up the Corolla from the smash repairers, Mum asked to see the rock that had crashed through the back windscreen.

  It was made of pebble-crete. It weighed several kilos and would definitely have stoved one’s brains in, had it landed on one’s head.

  Mum took the rock home with her in her luggage, and she has kept it ever since, as a fun garden feature she points out to guests when they come over. I think it became a sort of memento mori: like, make the most of your time on this earth. There is only ever one gobshite between you and the Big Sleep.

  Sometimes it can be hard to let go.

  EDDIE SHARP

  Eddie is a writer, comedian and broadcaster based in Sydney. He curates and hosts Erotic Fan Fiction at Giant Dwarf, hosts and produces a Sunday morning comedy show on FBi Radio and presents segments for ABC TV’s The Mix. He has performed at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Sydney Opera House, Biennale of Sydney, Melbourne Comedy Festival and Kaldor Public Art Projects. He has been published in VICE Magazine, People of Letters and Smith Journal. Eddie has been interviewed on telly twice: once on the ABC’s The Book Club and the other time for Channel Seven News in 1997 when a storm blew the roof off his dad’s house.

  ‘Kill Your Dinner’ copyright © Eddie Sharp 2018

  Kill Your Dinner

  by EDDIE SHARP

  This story was originally performed at the event Why Don’t You Make Me

  My ex-girlfriend Janet just gave birth to her first son. His name is Merlin and her plan is to homeschool him in her yurt outside of Lismore, feed him nothing but liver, and then, just see what happens. Last year my friend Bridget, a performance artist who lives in the Blue Mountains, heaved out a kidling called Gumnut.

  This worries me a bit. Not just because my friends are making mountain children with names that ensure they’ll have to become good at fighting. What worries me most is that the people who have babies first are always the loosest units.

  I’m sorry if anyone reading this had cool young parents, but your parents never wanted you. That’s just a fact. That counts double if you’re an only child. This counts triple if you’re an only child of divorced parents. Years of psychoanalysis may have convinced you otherwise but you were such a mistake you made your parents get divorced. It’s all your fault. Don’t shoot the messenger.

  I’m a second child and my dad’s so old he can recall with fondness the days when a shilling got you a tram ride to Bondi Beach Promenade to catch a racy glimpse of ankle. Which is to say, I was planned.

  I’m a careful anxious person, raised by other careful anxious people and when the time is right I will raise more little worriers and respawn the cycle of anxiety.

  My children, like their father bef
ore them, will be the kind of people who, when they’re supposed to be having ‘fun’ on MDMA with their friends, will be the one person who is obsessed, fixated with everyone having enough water.

  It was at one of these house parties that I first met Jim Pratt. We were both twenty-one years old. I was on MDMA and frantically topping up my friends with a litre bottle of Cool Ridge like an over-attentive waiter. He was dressed as an adult baby. The party wasn’t fancy dress.

  He swaggered over and invited us all to an orgy he was arranging in the attic. He pitched it as though this was a normal thing to do. As though we were going to play Celebrity Heads later. ‘Hi, guys, I’m organising an orgy later in the attic and I was just wondering if you would be interested. We’re planning to kick off at about eleven.’

  We passed on the offer. Because we were terrified.

  Jim was so cocksure and casual about life that I guessed that his parents must have had him when they were about twelve. A few months later, he and his girlfriend had a glorious little accident called Ichabod, as is the custom with young happy carefree people who run headfirst into life.

  When Jim saw Ichabod’s face for the first time his life changed completely. He got a haircut, he shaved, he cut all the orgies and refined sugar out of his diet.

  He also became much more serious about his art. Jim and I went to art school together. I studied video and installation art, which is the subject that glib hipsters study at art school. Jim was a sculptor, which is the course for people with sickening amounts of integrity.

  For his final-year project, he made an enormous cavernous tent out of old truck canvases. It was an incredible structure the size of a small house with secret openings and tunnels and a big communal area in the centre that smelled of old diesel fuel and general manliness.

  After we graduated he approached me to work with him on making a theatre show with the tent as a portable venue. It was a great idea. At the time I wasn’t entirely sure why he approached me to be involved although I’m certain he regrets it now.

  The show was in development for two years. We did a lot of artists’ residencies.

  There is a point towards the end of the show where my character and Jim’s have to hunt and butcher a cow to eat. Jim decided in order to do the scene justice we should actually kill a cow to experience what that was like.

  There were also other reasons: Jim felt bad about the fact that people eat so much meat but don’t really know where it comes from. And so do I, actually. So the intentions were sort of noble. It was marked in my diary.

  May 8th: Kill Cow & Eat it

  We’d received funding from the Arts Council for our project, and the cow was itemised in the budget for around $750. We actually had a call from one of their accountants. The man called up Jim and said, ‘What does this entry for “cow” mean?’ and Jim said, ‘It’s a cow,’ and the man said, ‘What are you buying a cow for?’ and Jim said, ‘We’re going to kill it and eat it,’ and then there was a pause and the man said, ‘OK, and what’s this entry for “stage lights”?’

  It wasn’t until I was in the back seat of Jim’s car and we were being driven down winding bumpy dirt roads by a red-faced backwoods hobby farmer we had just met called Donny who was taking us to his homemade killing field in Picton and I was staring out the back window at this big calf in the trailer behind me as it pissed and shat itself and rolled its terrified eyes, that I thought, ‘Wait a minute! I don’t want to kill a cow. At all!’

  When we arrived at Donny’s property with the cow, the place looked like a mix between an ISIS training camp and a haunted hillbilly Neverland Ranch. There was decades-old sun-bleached playground equipment randomly scattered across a large brown paddock. And stripped cars up on blocks.

  Donny told us that it would be better to eat lunch straight away, as we wouldn’t have the stomach for it later, and he served us cheese, bread and really roughly made salami meat. It was then that I realised that the salami was from a pig he had hand slaughtered recently. I looked at the salami. I looked at the cow. I then went very white, got up and went around to the other side of the car and dry retched for a bit.

  I was having definite second thoughts and I could see that Jim was too.

  It was then that I had the stupidest idea of the day, in what, to be honest, was a day of fairly stupid ideas.

  Seeing as the calf had spent all this time in a pen, I rationalised to Jim it would be cool for him to have a bit of a wander around on Donny’s property before we killed it. Its only little Green Mile, just so that it could, you know, reflect on its life.

  As we opened the trailer gate to let the cow out I swear it gave us this incredulous look. As if to say, ‘Seriously? Thanks, idiots.’

  When you see cows in pens and slaughterhouses it’s easy to mistake them for benign walking hamburgers. But cows aren’t as stupid as you might think. They’re also quite athletic when you threaten them, and this one legged it into the trees.

  So we had to chase it. Through the mud and bush. For four hours. We were also dressed in character for our parts. I was dressed like the Unabomber, in a baseball cap, a Driza-Bone and grey tracksuit pants, and Jim was wearing blue and white striped pyjamas.

  And neither of us are country types: we’re inner-city people, smokers, not exceptionally fit. So we’re in costume pursuing a cow around a field, me and Jim, with lassos. Donny’s running around with a mallet and a butcher’s knife like Wile E. Coyote.

  While we were chasing this cow around, I was also receiving calls from my girlfriend at the time who was starting her first day as a judge’s associate. Or something. I’m not sure. I’m quite self-absorbed but, believe me, it was a very important job that lawyer people have.

  The mobile reception was bad so I would occasionally take a moment to position myself on a high rock to talk:

  ‘How’s it going? Oh that sounds good. Congrats. I might cut out. Yeah I’m running around a terrifying hobby farm in Picton trying to kill a cow. Why? I don’t know! I was talked into it by a charismatic madman. Oh, you’re cutting out and I’ve just seen the cow again. Bye.’

  For the first time in a long time I started to reconsider my life choices. I had spent a large portion of my life thus far not really making any. I just responded to things as they came up. And all of a sudden, there I was twenty-four years old and essentially unemployed with nothing to show for it but a degree in video art. I was dressed like Ted Kaczynski trying to kill an animal for reasons that had become increasingly unclear.

  It began to get dark, and I left Jim and his friend to finish the job. The experience had shaken my delicate sensibilities so deeply that I went vegetarian for three full days.

  OSHER GÜNSBERG

  Osher has been a guest in the living rooms of Australian’s for nearly two decades, from having the best hair on TV in the ’90s to hosting every season of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. In his spare time, he produces ‘The Osher Günsberg Podcast’, which is a weekly conversation with someone who has figured out how to manage life’s challenges to forge a career where they do what they love to do. In August 2018, Osher released his memoir, Back, After the Break, a powerful, dark, funny and heartwrenching story about life, love and living with mental illness.

  ‘Fruity Lexia’ copyright © Osher Günsberg 2018

  Fruity Lexia

  by OSHER GÜNSBERG

  This story was originally performed at the event If I could Turn Back Time

  If I could turn back time . . . I’d probably have stopped a few drinks earlier. Sometimes it was stopping just one drink earlier, but on the night I am going to tell you about, I should have stopped many drinks earlier.

  It always started out as fun, a few charged-up young men angry at the world, drinking in a park because there was nowhere else to go. That’s not exactly true: we were eighteen and legally able to get into pubs if we wanted to. I really can’t remember why drinking in a dark, wooded suburban park in Brisbane was a better option.

>   Maybe it was because this was the park we’d been drinking in since Year 11, and we saw nothing wrong with being four young men alone in the dark drinking heavily, broodingly complaining about the lack of women in our lives . . . despite the fact there were literally hundreds of similarly aged women out and about having a great time just waiting for a nice young man to come and talk to them just a few short kilometres from where we angrily listened to Soundgarden on a tiny battery-operated stereo, in the dark.

  Also, going to talk to pretty women in a pub would probably require showering, and wearing something other than the Dunlop Volley, board short, black T-shirt and flanno uniform which was standard issue for me and my friends.

  On the particular night in question, three of the four of us had gone in on a case of Milton Mangoes, the finest from Brisbane’s Castlemaine Brewery, twenty-four rapidly warming cans of XXXX.

  Being a semi-employed roadie, I quickly did the maths when we were up at the bottle-o as to what my meagre ten-dollar budget would get me in such a buy-in. Maybe a six-pack, a little over two litres of beer. Given my standard consumption pace, that was less than an hour of drinking. Which on a long, hot Brisbane night didn’t really sound like a good deal to me.

  That is when I spied the prize.

  Gleaming in the fluorescent-lit fridge.

  Sitting proudly on a middle shelf, its pastel-coloured artwork one easy reach from the open door – the four-litre goon of Coolabah Fruity Lexia.

  Yes, the favourite of starving students and the generally povvo, a box would set you back ten bucks, and had a wide variety of practical attributes. I could carry it to the park using the handy pop-out handle in the top. Should we come upon a Hills Hoist I could have pegged it to the clothesline and started up a rousing game of ‘Goon of Fortune’. And, no matter when the festivities ended, I could be assured of a comfortable night’s rest, as, once liberated from the carton, with a few simple puffs back into the empty foil bladder, I would have a warm and welcoming pillow on which to rest my weary head.