Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  ‘Sorry, could I please cancel that?’

  On their way out, Mum clocked Bryant at close range. He was talking about wasps, witnesses say, to no one. Mum noted the hefty sports bag beside the table.

  As they stepped off the verandah onto the car park gravel two tour buses hissed to a stop and a man called out behind them.

  Coming out of the Broad Arrow was the elderly guy who lived across the street from us in Perth. Dale and Sylvia, who they liked, were holidaying there too. ‘We saw you come in!’ said Dale. ‘Come back; say hi.’

  So back through the portal they went. It’s a small world, someone said, surely.

  (Once, on a family trip, we bumped into the family accountant with his wife at Stonehenge. This strange delight was eclipsed by a creepy bewilderment four years later when my brother convinced us to redo Stonehenge, as he’d been too young the first time, and we ran into the family accountant again, with his new wife. Small world.)

  So they’re standing in the crowded café and small-talking: Dale and Sylvia had just finished lunch and were about to do the bleak sightseeing, and Mum and Dad were seeking food and booze. Dale suggested the joint down near the little bridge, and Sylvia admired Mum’s new coat: a beautiful thing, sunflower yellow, wool, sixties cut, collar, to the knee and warm.

  I saw the coat among Mum’s packing when my folks separated a few years ago, in dry-cleaning cling-wrap on a hanger.

  I was like, ‘You’ve still got that.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah. I can’t throw it out.’ What both of us were thinking, yet again, was, Christ it’s so yellow. It’s the yellow of a sideshow fucking duck target.

  Very few people weren’t shot in that café. Twenty of them were dead in the first fifteen seconds.

  My parents said farewell. They were all going to catch up for a drink in Perth.

  Mum nudged Dad as they left. Check this guy out. Bryant had finished his meal and was standing, revealing his height, his flipped-out eyes. Jesus, thought Dad, abstaining from another jab at the Tasmanian gene-pool.

  They walked out of the café that was soaking in death ninety seconds later, across the car park that would soon be running with arterial blood, and hopped in their hire car.

  As they pulled out they heard the tap of gunfire. The Broad Arrow window blowing out. A re-enactment? A dropped crate of bottles?

  Dad isn’t sure.

  They drove three hundred metres over the little bridge and got out at the restaurant.

  The sound of distant mayhem, maybe a scream.

  They went in, looked for a maître d’. One eventually appeared and said, ‘Everybody, we’re going down to the basement.’

  And there they stayed, barricaded, as the unthinkable uprooted and tore apart the buses, crossed over the little bridge, claimed the fate-struck Mikac mother and her toddlers, and the hapless drivers heading the other way, and burned out in the siege at Seascape a day later. My parents knew nothing other than a man had shot up the Broad Arrow Café.

  ‘Dale and Sylvia,’ my mum mouthed in the gloom.

  Dale and Sylvia observed Bryant enter after my folks left, they saw him place his gym bag on a vacant table, then watched him stare out on nothing. They left the Broad Arrow, on the heels of my parents, and were setting foot down the same road when devastation burst in the café, then blasted into the car park. They saw the unseeable and ran, as best they could for old people, down the road.

  Bryant was suddenly slow-crawling on the bitumen behind Dale and Sylvia in his yellow Volvo, but instead of shooting them as he did everyone else he chanced on, he beeped them off the road. They count their stars on a theory he had a soft spot for the elderly.

  Dale and Sylvia dived, pushed through the brush and hid under that little bridge. They saw Bryant stop at the bend, get out, chase the Mikac children and execute them in the bush.

  After five hours, a telephone jangled in the restaurant above my parents and an announcement was made. The gunman was holed up a few kilometres away, but all were advised to stay put.

  Dad took Mum by the hand and got out. They sped north away from a place designed to be forgotten against a fusillade of emergency vehicles coming at them, finally, out of the night. Mum called my unattended phone, my brother, then her mother, whose birthday it was.

  They picked up their holiday, I imagine a little numbly.

  Dad instantly, wilfully, and I suspect efficiently, compartmentalised the incident. It was too much: the threadbare odds, the foul loss of life. He claims to remember the ’74 Dutch World Cup in leagues more detail. Can trauma be so skirted?

  Dad says, ‘It doesn’t accentuate my life at all. The 1990s were good times. What I think about most, other than the weather, is: I’m alive because I wanted a cold glass of good white wine.’

  Here’s my mum: ‘On the plane, I was finally able to cry, thinking what might have been for us and for what had happened to innocent people. If we had been killed I would never have been able to tell anyone that I was killed sightseeing something I wasn’t very interested in seeing. Maybe that’s why I will never go to China, Russia and a few other places because I think I have been warned not to spend time seeing places I am not really interested in seeing.’

  And that’s it, that’s the yarn. My parents caught up with Dale and Sylvia from across the road for a drink, every year, on that date, for some time. They always enjoyed themselves and no one mentioned Port Arthur.

  My folks, separately and unfailingly, seek out a drink every lunch.

  For me, well it’s my after-dinner story. I think I think about it more than them.

  And I have to say, when the spectre of death does pass in my mind’s eye, it’s often dressed in a yellow sixties-cut woman’s coat.

  And sometimes, when I order a drink, and it’s rakishly close to still being morning, and the waiter or bartender or cabin attendant cocks an eyebrow that says, Really?, I see that yellow coat in ’90s crime-scene video footage, in situ, tagged, cordite pocked, blood stiffened, just a flash, and I stand my ground.

  ZOE NORTON LODGE

  Zoe is a writer and performer working across fiction, memoir and something vaguely resembling journalism. Her writing has been published in various Australian anthologies including Best Australian Stories, Women of Letters and Best Australian Comedy Writing. Her own titles include an autobiographical book of short stories Almost Sincerely, Elizabella Meets Her Match and Elizabella and the Great Tuckshop Takeover. Zoe worked with The Chaser on various shows and was a writer and presenter on ABC TV’s The Checkout for six years. In 2009, she co-created Story Club with Ben Jenkins.

  ‘Tequila’ copyright © Zoe Norton Lodge 2018

  Tequila

  by ZOE NORTON LODGE

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

  I have a problem. With Tequila. The song.

  You know it, obviously. But it’s not your favourite song. It’s nobody’s favourite. Nobody loves it, nobody hates it. It’s just you know . . . Tequila. In fact, you probably don’t ever really think about it except when you hear it.

  If you’re anything like me, you’ll hear Tequila anywhere between about one and four times a year. It might be at the arse end of a wedding playlist, in a pub, on Kmart radio, on a theme park ride, or lilting out of the open windows of a brightly lit amateur salsa lesson in a community centre as you cruise by.

  I don’t hear it all that often, but when I do, I think about it for days. Because every time I hear the song Tequila, I ask myself, Zoe, I ask, is this the last time you will ever hear the song Tequila? Before you die? Because it is a truism that there are a finite number of Tequilas in your lifetime. And one time, when you hear the song Tequila, it will be your last. And you’ll have no idea.

  You will have some kind of Tequila-adjacent experience, and presume that there is another one down the track. But no, unbeknownst to you, some time between this Tequila and a far away future Tequila that you’ll never hear, you will meet your maker.

&
nbsp; So yes, I measure my life in Tequilas. I’ve been doing it for a very long time, but the root of this horror film I find myself in stems back to early childhood, way before I even had any sense of my own mortality. To the time before complex abstract thought. To the time of yes and no, of salty and sweet, of happy and sad, and nothing in between. It was the time of neon tulle and Reeboks with curly laces. The time of chocolate crackles and a negligently executed Women’s Weekly Castle Cake. To an early birthday party of some acquaintance who has vanished into the margins of the Book of Zoe. The girl is gone, but the memory is forever.

  The memory of sitting on the floor during a game of Duck Duck Goose and having this surprisingly cogent conversation in my head. Should I do a wee right now on the floor? I probably should do a wee on the floor. Could something bad happen if I wee on the floor? No. I have a lot of layers of tulle on. I can sit here in this game of Duck Duck Goose and participate in this natural process and the pink and orange tulle will soak it up like a sea sponge. Worst-case scenario the wee will mingle with the pink and orange and create an ombre effect.

  ‘Zoe, I didn’t realise your fairy skirt had such a cool pattern on it,’ someone will venture. ‘Thanks,’ I will reply. ‘I dyed it myself.’ And this will not be a lie. I lie a lot because I am four, but this will not be a lie. Yes. Yes, weeing myself is a good idea.

  Now there is no shame in a child weeing themselves. They may get overexcited, or scared or anxious, and have a little accident. That’s fine. An accident is OK. But I thought about it. I interrogated it. And I made my choice.

  And as the streams and estuaries flooded out of me and all over the floor like I was a tiny bloated water goddess, and the parents descended, dancing around the swirling murky yellow and whisking their children up up and away from my little tsunami of ammonia and full-strength cola to the high shelter of their arms, I remember thinking: Wow. That is so much wee. How could there have been so much wee in me? This was a bad decision. And as I try in vain to grind the gears of time backwards and will myself two minutes into the past, while sitting in a pool of my own piss, watching little Maltesers and Strawberries and Creams and Twisties jettisoned from their bowls regatta down my rivers of my shame, I hear . . . Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da.

  As far as I know that moment, as I sat atop my personal Niagara Falls of urine, was the first time in my life I ever heard Tequila. The first stepping stone on my long, meandering path to the grave.

  I didn’t have the tools to fully understand what that meant at the time, except that the song was burned into my brain. Where it mocked me.

  But time heals all wounds. I went to primary school, I learned how to read and write. I made friends. I watched other people piss themselves. And the leaves turned from green to red to brown to crackly to dust and green once more, over and over, and statistically I probably heard the song thirty or so times. At school discos, parties, shopping centres, at Time Zone, every time I watched The Sandlot Kids, but it didn’t bother me. I just trucked on with my life. Like a normal person who doesn’t associate the song Tequila with their forthcoming extinction.

  That is until one afternoon when I was fourteen and I was playing with some friends after school in the park. Which is a true sentence if you replace ‘playing’ with ‘punching cones’ and ‘park’ with ‘abandoned train tunnel’.

  There we were corroding our developing lungs and brains when I remembered something terrible. I had to play the French horn in a concert band performance that night. In nowhere near enough time to not be stoned any more, I would be sitting in the hall of my high school dressed in my stage blacks with ribbons in my hair, playing hours and hours of music in front of hundreds and hundreds of parents and students.

  And suddenly nothing was fun any more. A fog of paranoia set in and I sat quietly deep in the back of my mind, all alone, as my body walked itself home, got changed and got in the car with my parents and made small talk, getting more and more stoned, like a steak that continues to cook while resting in foil.

  And then there I am sitting in the hall, with all the other girls, all of us with our instruments raised at attention as the bandmaster raises his baton and then commences the first downstroke and the band starts to play Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-.

  And suddenly I am activated. Oh my god. That song! Oh my god. I pissed myself on purpose ten years ago? That song that mocks me! Why am I remembering this now? That song that comes to visit in times of woe, when all I want to do is turn back the hands of time! And as I’m thinking this I’m playing my part Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da and I’m hyperventilating Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da. And I think I never want to hear this song again. If I never hear this song again before I die I will be happy. But I’m stoned, right, so then I think: Oh my god, what if this is the last time I ever hear the song Tequila? What if this is the last time I hear it before I die?!

  A few weeks later I’m washing my hands in the loo at a shopping centre and I hear Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da and I drop my handbag and spill its contents over the floor.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asks a woman.

  ‘Sure, I’m fine, I’m just inching closer to my own death,’ I don’t say. But I think it. For days.

  And I never unring that bell.

  I lived in this fortress of solitude for a long time. Me alone knowing my life, your life, everyone’s lives are only a number of renditions of Tequila away from being snuffed out. Until I unburdened myself by telling my partner, Mark.

  I told him when we were politely asked to leave a friend’s birthday party at a bar. I’d come in costume as a pregnant woman in a VB singlet. Christ knows what the theme was, but nevertheless the pillow was too convincing and the chain smoking and beer skulling were troubling a lot of people, so the staff asked Mark to take me home. As we stood outside the bar and I wished I could turn back time I heard it wafting out the window Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da – ‘Mark, I have to tell you something. Something terrible.’

  He was furious. ‘Why the hell did you tell me this?’ he said. ‘Why would you burden me with such a load?’ He could have also been mad because I got us both kicked out of a bar but, mainly, it was because I rang that bell right in his ear. I activated him. And now he measures his life in Tequilas, and we measure our shared life in Tequilas.

  At a mate’s wedding recently, late in the night, I’m chatting to a long-lost friend and I hear piercing through the drunken happy hubbub, ZOE! ZOE! It’s Mark; we lock eyes. He stares at me intently and he points to his ear and suddenly all other noise fades as the bell tolls for me, for us both.

  Da-da-daaa Da-da-dada-dada-da.

  And, of course, I do understand that I have now passed this curse onto you all. I hope that every time you hear the song Tequila you aren’t reminded of your own mortality, but of course you probably will be. Enjoy!

  Acknowledgements

  It takes a village to raise a massively dysfunctional brood of stories. Here are some of the people who have made that possible over the years.

  To our families, for always listening to our stories and being extremely good sports about being the subject of said stories.

  To Nikita, for helping us grow into something so much bigger.

  To Donna and Paul, for Story Kitchen.

  To Katy, for the fudge.

  To Coleman, for always wanting to know which of the guests are ‘actually nice’ (all of them!).

  To Sophia, for making us all 75% hotter.

  To Georgia, for the posters.

  To Ali, for always making sure we can read our stories.

  To Christian, who makes sure everyone can hear the stories.

  To everyone who has pulled a beer, operated an autocue, flipped the lights and the cameras, manned the doors and everything else that the Giant Dwarf theatre staff do to make this show happen every single month.

  To everyone who has downloaded an episode on the podcast.

  To the University of Sydney Union, who allowed this bullshit in the first place. />
  To the one person who tuned in to Story Club the TV show.

  To Jude and Barbara and everyone at ABC Books and HarperCollins who have made this book happen.

  To Giant Dwarf and our Story Dads, Craig and Jules, for having faith in us and supporting this event, which has definitely lived on a lot longer than anyone anticipated.

  To Mark and Anya, for cheering us on and being involved while we did this every month for a decade.

  To everyone who never sued us.

  To everyone who has sat in our audience at Hermann’s Bar, Raval and Giant Dwarf and laughed and cried.

  To every single person who has sat in the big chair and held the great big book and shared something.

  We love you all.

  Zoe and Ben

  Copyright

  The ABC ‘Wave’ device is a trademark of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.

  First published in Australia in 2018

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright in the individual story remains the property of its author

  Copyright in the work is the property of © Giant Dwarf Pty Ltd 2018

  The moral rights of the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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