After closing, we sat in his ute and pulled cones from his ‘mini bong’.
Should come out to my place and have a puff, he said. You’d be welcome.
Sorry, mate, got to get back to the motel, we rehearse tomorrow morning. You want to come to the show?
Nah, mate, rabbiting for the rest of this week. But he gave me his number and said, If you ever want to drive out bush, give me a call. Bring some mull!
*
I was attracted to him, though I wasn’t sure in what way. Maybe I just saw him as an alternative path in my life. A mix of the straight and the bent. I couldn’t be sure who he really was, of course, but intuitively felt he could be some kind of guide for me, to something somewhere, I didn’t know what. I was feeling pissed off with the whole city-theatre scene. The country tour was a revelation: some tough moments from a few folk in a couple of towns, and the odd ‘fairy’ taunt, but basically we were a popular exhibit. Nice to see some real art for once, was the verdict. None of this bits of bark hanging off lumps of rusty tin stuff.
Ours was a fairly conventional staging of the play. We needed to make money. We were a jobbing troupe of passable talent, with the occasional protégé who didn’t hang with us for long, high hopes, and the need to exploit young actors in order to make ends meet. I was, I am, what you might call an experienced director, who will always pull off a show. The reviews will be satisfactory, but not stunning. I am okay with that.
I got lost getting here. Laurie described the route on the phone with precision. He is a precise kind of guy. Very efficient. Dealing with life and death as he does, as his father did before him. There are no fuzzy edges. He even offered to wait at the end of the long gravel road that comes off the bitumen opposite the third dam on the left after you pass the fork to Merredin. No, no, I’m capable of following instructions, I said. I am the kind of director who does as the playwright suggests or demands; I am not much one for innovation. This was met with silence over the crackly landline, till Laurie laughed and said, Make sure you bring whatever shit you’re high on at the moment.
I found the gravel road easily enough, but the cattle grid and wagon wheel and salmon gums looked like the cattle grid and wagon wheel and salmon gums I’d seen twice over eight k’s. All of the farms had lot numbers on corner posts but the figures were scrawled in illegible black or red raddling. I went down the wrong drive, across the wrong hellish cattle grid, which was two k’s short on the odometer from what Laurie said, but I was confused and anxious. An old toothless woman with a pair of bull terriers at her heels yelled from her ivy-caged verandah, in reply to my query out of the car window, engine still running, that Laurie’s was the next place down, about two k’s, love.
I hate cattle grids, I really hate them, and so do my teeth. And wagon wheels remind me of Ezekiel and the wheels that turned as the multi-winged, multi-headed creature turned and rose as it rose. And as I drove up a long, low hill to a cluster of trees and a few sheds and an old colonial house, I felt I was rising towards the mouth of God, as if I were a prophet coming to hear the words. Even with the clatter of gravel under the car and the stereo on, I could hear dogs barking as I approached, and then I saw these huge giraffe-like creatures loping towards the car. They’d be roo dogs, I told myself.
*
That first night we ate rabbit. Boiled rabbit with lettuce and potato salad. Know your quarry, said Laurie. And we smoked some of my okay mull, okay enough for Laurie to say, I want the name and number of your dealer! Then before crashing out, we smoked a spliff of his ‘bush mull’, and I thought, Why on earth would he want to smoke anything different? And as if reading my mind, he said, Good to have variety. Even the best pot stops getting you stoned after a while. Like changing toothpaste or shampoo. Good for the scalp to change shampoo every now and again.
I was woken just before dawn. Laurie was sitting on the end of my bed with a bong. Here, pull a quick one to get you started, then we’ll head out to check the traps. The traps he’d set just before nightfall, while I was relaxing and reading through a pile of his old man’s shooting and hunting magazines. Should I come and help? I’d said, not so enthusiastically, being tired with the long drive. Nah man, you just have a couple of suds and I’ll be home to cook dinner in a jiff. Oh, like your room? Yeah, I said, it’s neat. I mean, really neat and tidy. Yeah, I like to keep things like that. Was my sister’s years back but she buggered off and I haven’t seen her in forever, then it was Mike’s room while he was here, now it’s yours.
Well, mine for a couple of nights! I wanted to ask who Mike was but it didn’t seem polite or relevant to ask. I still have no idea who Mike was. I can guess, but that’s about it. I wish I had asked. It would have helped. I know that now.
I pulled the bong, propped up in bed, as Laurie watched almost lovingly on, holding the flame of his father’s war-issue spirit lighter over the cone as I sucked with whatever vacuum I could muster before dawn. And then he left me to it, taking the bong with him, and I made my bed, went for a piss – loving the Dolly Varden toilet-roll holder sitting on the shelf. I washed my hands and face, and rinsed the pukey taste of stale tobacco and mull and rabbit out of my mouth. Then I was in the kitchen where Laurie had laid out a real cook-up, which we tucked into fast (Quick, quick, said Laurie, it’s the business end of the day!), then we were on our feet, pulling shoes and boots on, and jackets, and we were ready to roll. Laurie went into the pantry and came out with a rifle and a box of ammunition, which he shoved into his jacket pocket. Okay, son, old man, time for a blooding.
As the ute bounced across the clods and grooves of the paddock, the sun lit up the wandoo forest like the garden of Eden. That’s beautiful, I said. Sun’ll be in our eyes in a minute, he said, and it was. Couldn’t see a thing. But Laurie changed course and it rose so fast it seemed out of time with the world in the ute cab.
Then we were at the warrens and I saw a living tail vanish down one, and three bunnies were there on the surface, going nowhere really, two dragging traps back and forth, round and round, Job-like in their suffering, and one already dead from exhaustion. As he pushed a boot on the spring to remove a rabbit, Laurie described what he was doing. He was a good teacher. The two live rabbits he karate-chopped across the back of the neck. All three went in his sack. Why did you bring the rifle? I asked. Sometimes a fox is here already chewing their heads off.
At one of the sheds near his house he showed me how to gut and skin and I got a go on the third. I made a bit of a mess of it, but peeling the skin back made me think a lot about physical theatre. I was growing by the moment. I fucking well felt alive! The big roo dogs were barking in their pens and Laurie told them to shut the fuck up. There was a vehemence, an annoyance, in this reprimand that seemed a little harsh, even a little out of character, but he softened again and took all the body-waste shit over to the pen in a steel bucket and emptied it over the fence. The dogs went crazy, tearing it all apart. Look at them go! he said.
*
After going out to set the traps (I was worthy, I got to go with him, I got to sprinkle dirt on the paper spread over the open jaws), Laurie cooked and we ate rabbit again. Fricasseed. With lettuce and potato salad. I didn’t say anything, just ate what I was given. We smoked and drank beer, a carton of beer, and listened to the stereo on ten, the speakers distorting with rage. Then late at night, Laurie vanished and suddenly reappeared with a pot of what I thought was red paint. Let’s play dress-ups, he said. Let’s play theatre. I’ll direct the show. I laughed and laughed and thought, This is it, it’s all going to come out now, he just needs to role-play, just needs to change the setting a little. It’s a catharsis for him as well. Both of us are being reborn, right here, right now. I was burning up. I almost knew what I wanted and why I was here and why I was slaughtering rabbits one moment, then rubbing noses with his wild pet rabbit the next.
So he painted his face, then mine. It smelt. It was warm. It was blood. Where did you get this, Laurie? I almost yelled, but still not wanting to
put him off. Drained it fresh from my pet bunny, he laughed. I always make good use of my pets!
I was so drunk and high and eager I kind of laughed too, and let him apply it liberally to my face, hair, wherever. Then he put the pot of bunny blood on the shelf above the kind-ofsad empty fireplace, next to an ornamental pair of fauns up on their hind legs and rubbing front hooves. He came over to me, grabbed me, and started to wrestle. I wrestled back, laughing and yelling and loving it.
But then I was in a headlock and then from somewhere Laurie produced a length of rope and hogtied me. I was laughing and yelling and crying and blacking out. He was up, then back with a gag and I was mute. I struggled to free myself. You ain’t going nowhere with that knot, son, old man, he said. And then he was away for an age and returned with a bong, his gutting knife and his rifle, all carefully balanced. Whoops, whoops, he said, almost dropping the lot. Shit, I must be out of it! Damn it, son, old man, you remind me of my, damn it, old man, son. Yes you do.
*
And now he is speaking, performing to the room, the stereo long dead, and he is crying a little, now pulling a cone and exhaling the smoke over my face, blowing it up my nose and I am suffocating, choking. It’s called a shotty, son, old man! It’s like hysteria. Now, I am gunna smoke the rest of your excellent mull, he says, and you’re going to play rabbit.
I have been hogtied for hours. I have pissed myself. Laurie has crashed out next to me, clutching his knife and a photo of his father. It is wet with my tears as he’s jammed it so close to my eyes. I am astonished at the close resemblance. I could be his old man.
I tell myself that I am in this very moment. That I am alive. I cannot see the rifle. I can see the knife if I rock upwards. I do this and roll onto Laurie, who stirs. It is now, it is a Saturday night, no, a Sunday morning, late March 1983, and I am going back through the script, then coming back to the present moment. Laurie is suddenly awake and joking about how he gelded boomers for his old man, ones that had been gutshot and were dying a slow, kicking death. Take their maleness with their last breath, he’s saying.
If he’d let me speak, I’d tell him that I am a sad, lonely man. I haven’t made love to anyone for a decade. I ogle the young actors, whatever gender, and wish I had a body like theirs, or talent like theirs, or just youth like theirs. I can’t even masturbate: it just doesn’t work. I think maybe this is some kind of hate crime against homosexuals. He has assumed. Well, I am and I am not, like so many people. But then I think this has nothing to do with sex, it’s just opportunistic. He is so damaged it’s all coming unstuck. Maybe it’s dope psychosis. Maybe he’s angry at me for skinning rabbits, too. I regret the rabbits. I wanted to impress. But why, I don’t know. I truly don’t know. Then he’s unconscious again.
I have teetered back and forth and my hands are flying like a sick pigeon. I am clutching for the knife still in Laurie’s big, sleeping hand. Now I am grabbing at Laurie and he’s stirring. Just before dawn he will wake and have breakfast and head out to the edge of the bush to check the traps.
LICENCE
It was the day after he’d got his driver’s licence. Only the night before, they’d had a close encounter with a freight train out behind the town where the flat-topped hills held back the vastness they worried about. They were his friends: David, Alex and Gazza. All in Ken’s – that is, his mother’s – car. Nothing spectacular: a Holden Kingswood sedan, but with a set of mags; his car while he was driving.
That day, he was driving with David as his passenger, while Alex went in Gazza’s car, an old Valiant. And it was Gazza’s car – given on his seventeenth birthday, the day he got his licence, twenty-seven days before. Gazza even looked like his car – slick but worn. The two cars were driving along the main road out of town, heading for the beach where their occupants would sit parked and hang out for a while before heading back into town, doing a few laps around the centre, and breaking off home.
They were fanging along – Ken needing little encouragement from David, the other car following just a few car lengths behind. Ken was arguing with himself. There’s nothing in this town, nothing at all. It’s fucking boring, said Ken. David was uninterested, picking something gristly out of his braces. He was only hanging out with Ken because Ken had his licence and access to a car. David would have preferred to be in Gazza’s car, there on the front seat with his arm hanging out the window. But Gazza’s sudden discovery of a new best mate in Alex meant he’d have been relegated to the back seat, which he was never going to let happen. Made David want to puke. And here he was, sitting in the car (admittedly with mags) of the most uncool guy in Year Twelve, an out-and-out wanker dickhead.
Stop rabbiting on, Ken, you sound like an old woman!
The police STOP sign came up, and the burly officer wielding it forced his will like a tractor beam through the windscreen of Ken’s car.
Fuck! It’s Rhino! Ken started pulling over, while Gazza went a little further on down the road and pulled over too, engine running, waiting. And then the cop was on Ken, indicating violently for him to wind down the window, and Ken heard himself saying, Are you pulling me over, or both of us?
The cop leant in and said, Why, you boyz travellin’ together?
And Ken heard himself saying, Yes, and then he was motioning to Gazza to come over, so frantically that the cop’s hand slipped down towards his holster.
Gazza placed a hand along the door, stuck his head out and reversed towards the cop car, dust kicking up from the gravel shoulder. He reversed as if he’d been doing it for years. Ken could see Alex waving, as if he was trying to tell Gazza to boot it and get out of there. David was pushing his knuckles into Ken’s thigh and whispering, You fucking slimebag, Ken.
Ken was confused. His heart was beating faster than ever before and he thought he might vomit over his mum’s car. The cop said, in a spray that washed the front windscreen of Ken’s car and the tail-lights of Gazza’s, Now, all you boyz out of the car and hands on bonnets. And don’t any of you so much as twitch.
They all did as they were told, and Ken wondered why he couldn’t speak. He felt he should. It was Rhino. Everyone knew Rhino. He came to the school regularly to talk about drugs and crime and driving. It was said that he once chased some kid to his death, and that he hated punks who thought the road was theirs.
Rhino was trim, about forty-five, and loved the town, a seaside town hundreds of k’s from anywhere, the town he had grown up in and left to become a cop, returning after he’d done his years in the city and other country postings. As Rhino walked around the cars, checking tyres and rust patches, Ken heard David whisper, Good thing we’re sober. Rhino was known to bash young drunks. Whenever a complaint was filed against him, he came up smelling like roses. He had immunity. The moral backbone of the town. Fibre, he called it, fibre.
You keep quiet over there, son! Gee, well, these are shiny wheels, ain’t they? I sure would like a set of them on my cruiser. Rhino thought he was an American cop. He liked to boast to the other cops that he was born laughing. Got a sense of humour, I have. He had a Dukes of Hazzard sticker on the back of his patrol car.
Rhino had sauntered over to Gazza’s car. Alex was shaking; Gazza was nonchalant. He always was. Well, this is a bucket of bolts, said Rhino. What have you got to say about this, boy? he asked Gazza, poking him with his finger, then poking a rust bubble on the bonnet.
It’s good, sir. Been over the pits. Only surface rust.
Pits. Well, I’ll be fucked. It’s been over the pits. Hear that boys, over the fucking pits. Over the pit of Hell! Well, I reckon you might be in for a yella sticker. Yella is the coward’s colour, son.
Yes, it is, sir, said Gazza. My mate over there, Ken, driver of the hot rod … it’s his favourite colour.
Rhino contemplated Gazza, kicking his boot into the gravel, fingering his holster, and said, You know, son, I reckon you’re right.
Alex, excited, said, Yeah, Ken’s a yellow bastard and a dobber … this ain’t nothing to do with us. We
were just driving behind him. It’s his problem. Uugghhh. And Alex dropped to the ground, winded.
Shee-it. Rhino liked the sound of his shee-it so much, he said it again. Do you boys reckon I sound like one of those redneck American cops you see in the movies?
Watching Alex squirming on the ground, Gazza lifted his head, looked straight at Rhino, and said, You mean sound like … why yes, you do, sir.
Well, thanks, son. A lot to admire in those characters. Now, you pick your scummy little mate up, get him in the Valiant, make sure he does up the seatbelt, and fuck off.
Yes, sir! We’re out of here … slowly.
Hey! called David, who couldn’t control himself any longer. Can I go with them? This is nothing to do with me. It’s to do with this whinger, Ken.
You shouldn’t speak about your mate in that tone, said Rhino, smiling.
No mate of mine. I was just getting a lift. I hate him. Everyone hates him. No one will sit next to him at school. He stinks. He’s a crawler. Gets top marks in everything and then wants to earn more marks. And he’s a poof.
Is he now? said Rhino. Well, you leave him to me, and I’ll sort it all out.
With that, David, who had been magnetised to the bonnet, broke free, dusted himself down, and edged backwards towards the Valiant. Gazza had started the engine, watching it all unfold in his rear-view mirror. David went to the front passenger door, told Alex to get in the back of the car, and then insisted under his breath to Alex to get a move on. Alex staggered around to the back, then David leapt in, and yelled, Jeezus, Alex, you’ve pissed on the seat. The door slammed, and with goading from the others Gazza momentarily lost his cool, hit the accelerator and spun the back wheels, spraying gravel all over Rhino, the patrol car and Ken. Then they were gone.
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