Baby Joe being ashore, and Mary Rose catching a few Zs below in order to feel fresh for the sailing, Penguin was entertaining Asia, Wally, and Bjørn Eggen on the bridge of the Wollongong when Crispin chugged up the stairs.
As he stepped onto the bridge a heavy object hit him in the stomach and a beer can rolled away across the deck.
“Ya meant ta catch it, ya fucken dingbat,” Penguin explained.
“I don’t drink beer, actually. Isn’t there any gin?”
“Gin. Fucken mutiny. I’ll ’ave no fucken gin drunk on my fucken bridge.”
“Asia is drinking gin.”
“That’s different, mate. She’s a good-looking Sheila. You’re a just fat shit-stabber with a dead fucken jumbuck on ’is ’ead.”
“Listen, you unsightly dwarf, I didn’t come on this rust-bucket boat to be insulted by a talking doormat.”
“So where d’ya usually go? An’ she ain’t a boat. She’s a bladdy ship, ya drongo, and in the old days, you’d’a bin in the bilges, getting the golden fucken rivet, mate. An’ I’ll tell ya sumthin else for nuthin, London to a fucken brick you’re talkin into the big white telephone before we clear the fucken harbor.”
“This is outrageous. How to you expect to get us to Australia in your condition? Anyway, you are so stunted I don’t see how you are able to see over that wheel-thing.”
“It’s a fucken helm, ratbag, an’ if there’s any more insubordination you’re swimmen, mate, if the Norgies don’t fucken harpoon ya by mistake.”
Penguin tilted his head back and bellowed. Asia was trying to sympathize with Crispin and bite her lips off at the same time, and Wally and Bjørn Eggen were holding on to each other and hooting like a pair of ancient gibbons.
Crispin stuck his nose in the air and turned to leave.
“Ah, come back ’ere, ya silly fucken gallah. I was only pullin yer plonker. Sheila, break out the gin rations fer me shipmate.”
Placated, Crispin took the proffered gin and sat next to Asia, and an hour passed in tales of storms and ice and wild places, and Penguin sounded the horn again, and they heard singing as the last of the crew came rollicking up the gangplank. Behind them came Baby Joe.
He stepped into the wheelhouse and deftly caught the can that was flung in his direction.
“Just in time, mate,” Wally said. “This fucken pirate is just about to ’aul away.”
“I just came to say goodbye.”
Wally walked over and shook Baby Joe’s hand. “Good on yer, mate. Watch yer arse. We’ll see ya down under, eh? You ’ave the address and all that shit?”
“Yeah, thanks, Wal. See you, hey.”
Crispin stood and approached. “Baby Joe, you know I…”
Baby Joe patted him on his shoulder, and shook his hand. “I know. Don’t go getting sentimental on me now.”
Crispin smiled a sad smile and sat back down.
Baby Joe walked over to Bjørn Eggen. “See you, you old fart.”
The old man grabbed Baby Joe’s hand, and wrung it. “You watch what you focken do, ja. I haf the beer ready for vhen you are coming under down.”
“That’s fucken ‘down under,’ ya antiquated old dingbat,” Penguin informed him, and then told Baby Joe, “See ya in Oz, mate, maybe, if we don’t fucken sink.”
“Yeah, see you, man, and leave those fucking birds alone.”
“It was a fucken nun, ya dill. ‘Ow many times do I ‘ave ter tell ya?”
Baby Joe moved towards the door, and Asia stood up to follow him.
Bjørn Eggen stopped them. “Baby Joe, vhat are you thinking about the idiot grandson?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. The last I saw of him, he was heading downhill fast on a forklift. He could be anywhere. If he turns up before I leave for the States, I’ll send a message to the ship. Tell Mary Rose goodbye for me, will you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mary Rose said, coming up the stairs. “You didn’t think I was going to let you escape without a kiss, did you?”
She reached up and hugged him. “Now you be careful. It is a very dangerous thing that you are going to try. Many before you have failed. Remember everything I told you. It will help.”
“I will. See you in Australia,” he said, waving as he left the wheelhouse, with Asia holding his hand.
“Yeah. See yer when the moon comes over the shithouse door,” Wally called after him.
Asia walked with him to the bottom of the gangway. He pulled her close and held her for a long moment, feeling her breathing, trying to absorb as much of what was her as he could. She resisted as he pushed her away and held her at arm’s length. The light from the ship shone on her copper hair and on the tears that were beginning to form in her eyes.
“I wish you would change your mind,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“But now we have all that money, we can…”
“We can’t. The money doesn’t make any difference. You know what has to be done.”
“But what if you don’t come back?”
“Listen, Asia, I don’t know what will happen, and I’d be lying if I said I did, but if I don’t go, there can’t be any us. This thing will hang over us, and I will always be thinking about it, and always worrying, and, if something were to happen to you because of what I didn’t do, then… you know.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I wish there were something I could do to help.”
“There is. You can kiss me, and then you can turn around and walk up that gangplank.”
“The ship is not sailing for half an hour.”
“I know. But you’re just making it harder for me to leave you. If we have to part, let’s just get it over with.”
Asia nodded and reached up to kiss him.
Baby Joe suddenly felt tired and old. He wanted it to last forever. He wanted to feel her sweet lips on his for a lifetime. He wanted to take her back up the gangway and make love to her as the ship rolled across the waves on the way to a new day, in a new place. He wanted to be warm, like the child who lies in bed listening to the footsteps passing in the rain outside.
Instead, he turned and walked away into the darkness at the end of the dock. Asia watched him go, watched the lonely figure getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the night beyond the lights. When she got back to the top of the gangway, with the tears streaming down her face, Mary Rose was waiting to take her in her arms.
It was a typical waterfront bar and the dregs who had washed up there, left behind by time and tide, looked at him as he walked in. But no one bothered him. He did not look at anyone, nor meet anyone’s stare, but he had that kind of light about him and they steered clear. The stumblebums and panhandlers and hard cases left him alone; the ladies stayed away. He stood at the bar and pointed to a whiskey bottle. The barman brought him a glass, without meeting his eyes.
“Beer,” he said. He took a bill from his pocket and, without looking at it, placed it next to the glass of whiskey.
While he waited for his beer he stared at his reflection in the grimy, smeared mirror behind the bar. It stared back at him, as if at a stranger. Beyond his reflection, smoke played in the color and the light and he heard whispers in the ambient noise and knew they whispered about him. When the beer came he took it up, and the whiskey, and carried them outside to a bamboo table set unevenly on dirty cobbles.
Looking down into the dock he saw hawsers being cast off and watched the Wollongong slide from her moorings, and he saw the turbulence in the water and heard the distant roar of the tugboat engines as they hauled her bow seaward. He saw the lights on the ship diminish as she turned beam on to him and headed out of port, and he watched the fading stern lights and the dimming glow from the bridge until they were far out to sea. The mournful echoing of the horn carried back to him over the water. He sucked back the whiskey and looked around at the darkness and knew that out there, under those moving specks of light, were his woman, his friends, and the reason that he was sitting here
alone.
What he didn’t know was that, concealed in the hold, sweating in the humid heat and just about deafened in his one good ear by the vibrations, was Monsoon Parker, sitting on top of a golden Buddha molded from extremely unusual material.
What do you do with a drunken sailor? In Monsoon’s case, you get him even more drunk, slip him some dinero to help you get holed up on the ship with all your bags, chattel, and stolen property, and then you send him to get you a bottle of something. Under the circumstances, it should be fucking champagne! This story had more twists than Chubby fucking Checker, and deserved to be celebrated in style. All that glitters isn’t gold! Absolutely co-fucking-rrect. Sometimes it’s worth much more than that.
He hadn’t really known what he was doing. He had been so completely stupefied that his head had been devoid of any structured thought, empty of everything except the vague notion that he should escape, and that somehow the Buddha would protect him. And how, brother? And how! It was not until the night air got to him, after all the guns and sirens were far behind, that he noticed that the Buddha had something sticking in its head. That didn’t seem right, so he pulled it out. It was a fragment of the gong…just like the gong that went off in his head when he saw the congealed substance sticking to the fragment. He still couldn’t quite believe the astounding improbability of what had just happened.
And now, he was going to make it. Anyone who could drive a bullet-hole-filled forklift—with two chopped-off feet stuck to the chassis, loaded with illegal contraband stolen from a fucking Attila the Hun impersonator—away from a murder scene, right through the center of Ho Chi Minh City and into the docks without being arrested, robbed, shot, lost, or involved in at least a five-car pileup, was definitely going to make it. He was still struggling to get his brain around it. It was totally, mind-blowingly, no-fucking-way-you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me impossible, and yet here he was. One minute he expected to be fish food, and the next he’s in the navy and in the motherfucking gravy, man.
And nobody to stop him. One by one, the threats had been removed. Belly Joe, gone. Frankie Merang, history. Sasquatch, in the big Yukon in the clouds; the third man, gone to meet Orson Welles; Long Suc, footloose; Mary Rose, the murdering granny, converted; that lunatic pisshead Paddy on his way back stateside to get himself wasted. An amusing ditty came unbidden into his head. Ten little psychopaths sitting on a wall, ten little psychopaths sitting on a wall, and if one little psychopath should accidentally fall, there will be nine…
Okay, so he could be a little more comfortable, but you had to be breathing in order to be sweating your balls off inside a giant vibrator with a rivet up your ass and in need of a change of underwear. And as soon as he figured they were far enough out to sea so they couldn’t turn back, he’d show himself. What were they going to do, throw him overboard? The way his luck was running they’d probably give him a stateroom, feed him a T-bone and a case of cognac, and airlift him in a couple of hookers to play with on the trip. And in the meantime, he’d just entertain himself by calculating the street value of the little stash that he just happened to have inherited.
He jumped when the sailor came weaving around the bulkhead door with a bottle of gin. He hadn’t heard him on account of his bum eardrum. Well, what the fuck. When he got to Australia he’d get it fixed by the top man, who’d have a receptionist with massive tits who could really go for a guy that looked like Tiger Woods and had ten million dollars in his back pocket. The sailor plunked himself down next to Monsoon, took a swig from a bottle, and handed it to him.
“I got this, mate. Gin. S’all I could get.”
“It’ll fucking do. Cheers, pal. What you say your name was again?”
“Norm.”
“Well, Normy baby, I hate fucking gin. It stinks. So here’s looking at ya.”
Monsoon was still flying at altitude from the adrenaline and from the overwhelming fact of not being severely dead, and as he poured the gin down his throat it was the best thing he had ever tasted, and as the recollections of the night’s events assaulted his fevered brain he was gripped by the need to recount his adventures to someone. He began to babble at the befuddled Norm, who stared at him with blank, uncomprehending eyes, his head weaving slightly from side to side.
Even in the retelling of a tale as fabulous as the one he had just featured in, the simple unembellished truth would not suffice for Monsoon, so the version that the besotted Norm heard differed slightly from factual events, particularly with reference to the ingenuity and heroism of Monsoon Parker.
“Ain’t that a hell of a fuckin story?” he said, finally.
Norm didn’t answer, and Monsoon looked round to see him stretched out on the deck with his eyes tight shut, his tongue lolling out, and a pool of glistening drool gathering next to his slack jaw and baggy, unshaven cheek.
“Some fuckin audience you turned out to be,” Monsoon said, raising the gin to his lips.
Part 3. Down Under.
A long, long time ago, when TV evangelists and game show hosts were just a distant, horrible future nightmare, all the continents of the world were joined together in a big lump, floating around on the molten magma at the earth’s core. Eventually some bits snapped off and floated away to become places like France, and China, and Russia, and Birmingham, Alabama. Some of these bits kept bumping into each other and changing shape and splitting up again, but the bit at the bottom sailed off into the great southern sea and stayed there.
Left to develop all on its own some extremely improbable creatures evolved, like animals with built-in handbags that bounce up and down, and mammals with beaks, and lizards with umbrellas round their necks that run on two feet, and men that wear funny clothes and throw little red balls at three sticks stuck into the ground and think it’s fun.
For a long time there were no people in this place, but then about forty thousand years ago, deciding they needed a bit more room, some dark-skinned people wandered in. When they got there they found as much room as anyone could possibly need, and they spread out over the whole continent in small groups, living off, and in harmony with, the land, and for millennia all was tranquil and as it should be.
Then, a few hundred years ago on the other side of the world, some people on a small island invented the steam engine, the puddling process, and the spinning jenny, and decided to go around the world annoying everybody. The way they annoyed people was usually by killing them and taking away their land and making them sing songs about fat Germans and old ladies and dead carpenters.
While they were sailing around the world, looking for new people to annoy, they found this continent, but nobody really knew what to do with it. Then someone had this brilliant idea. Why don’t we use it as a place to keep all the bad people who have committed horrible crimes? Crimes like being hungry, or not having any money, or wanting to have their own country back, like the Irish. So they gathered up all these people and put them in boats with soldiers, and sent them to the other side of the world to build a new country.
And as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, when building a new country it is always a good idea to begin by killing as many of the people that are already there as possible, especially when you have muskets and pistols and sabers and horses, and they have sharpened sticks.
In the fullness of time this new country, which they called Australia, became a great nation with fine, independent people. But they never forgot the heritage of their country, which was born in strife and blood, injustice and misery.
And it wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 22.
The smell of eucalyptus was powerful in the cool dawn air. At the far horizon, a huge domed rock began its chameleon display with a becoming shade of phallic purple. In the high branches of a tree a kookaburra berated the morning, and a couple of branches below a koala yawned and scratched its balls. Beneath, in the leaf litter, a wallaby stirred and took a few tentative hops, the low sun glistening russet on its dew-damp fur.
In th
e shade of the tree the skeleton of an old, abandoned Holden Kingswood stood with its tireless wheel rims sunk deeply into the red earth. Stretched from its roof, which in some forgotten past had been red, a faded canvas was suspended from two poles, forming a rudimentary bivouac, the whole resembling the construct of some inept refugee. Under its sheltering folds the car seats had been placed to make a rude bunk, upon which a long slender figure with black, bushy hair and skin so dark it appeared to absorb the light lay sleeping upon his back, his chest rising and falling as he softly snored.
The trampled bare earth around him was littered with crushed beer tins and empty wine bottles. In the propped-open trunk, where an old torn mattress was stuffed, a fat wombat opened its eyes, clambered onto the ground, shat out a prodigious turd, clambered back into the trunk, and was immediately fast asleep again. From a low branch above, an outraged cockatoo summoned Australia to wakefulness with its shrill squawking. Flaring its bright yellow crest it began to strut along the branch, posing and preening, tilting its head to peer at the world below through its wild eye. The kookaburra’s manic yodel answered the cockatoo, and a low-circling flight of parakeets joined in.
A general shrieking and trilling ensued, ravaging the peace of morning until another more subtle sound entered the mix: a soft whirring noise. The cockatoo pivoted its head in alarm the instant before the swirling blade of a boomerang ferried it into oblivion in a spectacular cloud of feathers. The return to the former silence was instantaneous.
Wombat Jimmy deftly caught his returning boomerang and wiped the blood and feathers from its edge against his bare buttock.
“Bladdy screeching drongo,” he muttered.
Wombat Jimmy had been rudely awakened from a particularly vivid and pleasant dream involving a proud-breasted half-caste girl from Parramatta, a case of Castlemaine XXXX, and a didgeridoo, and was not impressed, especially as he had been dragged into wakefulness before he had reached the vinegar strokes.
Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1) Page 37
