Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  “No. I’m afraid we don’t have those… things.”

  “Blue cards. Gotta have ‘em for Health and Safety. No worries, you can get ‘em online, takes a couple of hours to do the exam. Costs about ninety bucks.”

  “Woah! That’s quite a bit. Will we definitely have jobs? All three of us?”

  “Yeah, no worries. And I’ll pay yer back for the Blue Cards. Just let me know when you’ve got ‘em.”

  “Alright! We’ll go and do them now.”

  And so, credit card in hand, we legged it to the nearest internet café.

  Trevor was dead right. For ninety-five dollars apiece, we could take the ‘Western Australia Health and Safety at Work Exam – or ‘Blue Card’ – right there and then.

  What’s more, there was no time limit, unlimited re-tests were allowed for the same one-time fee – and it was almost entirely multiple choice.

  In other words, it was a qualification in name only. In fact, it was barely that. Everyone knows that multiple choice tests always have one very obviously wrong answer. I could already envisage questions like:

  13) What colour is a safety warning light?

  a) Yellow

  b) Red

  c) Broken

  d) Brachiosaurus, in the late Jurassic period.

  I shared my suspicions with Gill and Roo, as they sat down at computers either side of me. “I think it’s some bullshit red-tape they’ve introduced so that some government department can cover its own arse,” I said.

  And I was right.

  Demonstrating a level of teamwork any boss would be proud of, Roo and Gill looked up the answers on the WA Health And Safety website, while I wrote them into the downloaded exam form.

  Then I submitted it, re-opened the same document, changed the name on the top and a handful of words in the ‘explain’ sections, and submitted it again for Gill.

  And again for Roo.

  In less than an hour we were almost three-hundred dollars worse off – but could at least console ourselves with the fact that the average time taken to complete the test was two hours.

  A day later, we had our results back; a one-hundred percent pass-rate, times three. It was a miracle!

  Trevor actually sounded impressed when I told him our scores. Was that another warning sign? No, surely not…

  And so, at 5:30 the next morning, we got up and donned the crappiest clothing we owned. Doubtless before long we’d be covered in mud from head to toe, and sweating like three fat swingers in a sauna. It was still dark outside, and we shivered as we climbed into Rusty for the hour-long drive to our new work place.

  “Don’t worry!” Roo said. She was surprisingly upbeat for that time of the morning. “We won’t be doing this for long. Just think about why we’re doing it. In a few weeks we could be starting off – to hike the Bibbulmun Track!”

  Now, I was getting on really well with Roo at this point, and was starting to develop deep feelings for her. But I tell you what, she was absolutely crap at motivational speaking.

  Lies That Trevor Told Us

  These lies were numerous, and included the following:

  “I’ll pay for your Blue Card exams,”

  and “I’ll pay for your petrol,”

  and “I’ll pay you.”

  Trevor did none of these things.

  He was a small, wiry man with a moustache any 70s porn star would have been proud of. He was spectacularly weedy for a landscaper, but he made up for his lack of physical presence with his personalities. All six of them.

  On our first day he showed up around noon, by which point we’d given up standing around and had pitched in carrying wheelbarrows full of soil. Apparently Trevor liked to stage his site visits at random, so as to keep his work force on their toes. For this reason, they all hated him – and it might have had something to do with him being a rude, paranoid, obnoxious prick.

  Although – was he paranoid? Because everyone really was out to get him.

  On our second day he refused to speak to us, so we carried on doing what everyone else was doing.

  On our third day, he cornered us by a cement mixer and demanded to know what we’d been saying about him.

  “I know it’s you three,” he told us. “I’ve got ears all over this site!”

  And presumably on a necklace somewhere, I thought.

  On the fourth day he came to us and complained that we weren’t working hard enough. He’d never seen us work; more to the point, he’d never seen any of his other workers work, and even we had seen precious little of that. I was starting to see the pattern – when Trevor showed up, a ‘look busy’ mentality electrified the site, and any lack of progress, complete with attendant belly-aching about our boss, was being laid firmly on our doorstep.

  Presumably by the same assholes who spent all day complaining when they should have been shovelling.

  Trevor told me that he didn’t hire girls.

  I told him he’d been perfectly aware he was hiring girls, and that both of them were working harder than any of the blokes on site.

  Trevor said that, even if that was the case, he wasn’t really happy about hiring two girls.

  So Roo quit on the spot and went to sit in Rusty; later she went back to work at the Underground, cleaning the place from top to bottom every day.

  I told Trevor he could give her pay to me, when payday came around.

  Which it never did.

  We quickly discovered that the vast majority of Trevor’s workers were lazy, mean, back-stabbing idiots – but worst of all, they were incompetent.

  The gardeners would complain at the pavers for driving brick trolleys through all the flowerbeds, ruining several days worth of planting; the pavers would go ape-shit at the gardeners for pushing muddy wheelbarrows full of mulch over their clean, freshly-laid patios. Nothing was done in the order it should have been, and overseeing all of it from a distance – badly – was Trevor. In our second week, he gave Gill and I a job levelling the driveways to a street full of houses. We had to make them flat and smooth, and on a precise slope so that when concreted, they would meet the edge of the garage slab. It was a ridiculous task, and we spent half a day on the first drive, getting it perfect at the top and smooth, but too low at the bottom, and vice-versa.

  This was when we first met George. We’d already heard him; George was the resident bobcat (mini-digger) driver, and there was only one noise more noticeable on site than the roar of his engine; it was his chatter. George was the exception that proved the rule; an excessively friendly, larger-than-life character of aboriginal descent. He referred to himself in the third person whenever he was talking, which was pretty much the entire time. He moaned about the job and the boss, waffled on about his plans for the future – and when there was nothing else to talk about, he simply narrated his every move around the site, as though his internal monologue was spilling from his mouth with no attempt to regulate it.

  “George is coming round the corner! George’s bucket is very full this time!”

  It made him very easy to like, although it was a nightmare to get any work done around him. Workers from all over the site were constantly shouting at George to come and do things for them. He typically sat there with his bobcat running, chattering away at someone who wasn’t listening, until whoever wanted something doing actually came over to get him. Then he’d speed off quite cheerfully, achieve whatever task they required in almost no time at all, and find someone else to talk at.

  After discovering that Gill and I both listened – and answered him back – he became our new best friend, and tried to help us with every job we were given.

  Starting with the driveways.

  George drove his bobcat right through the pile of sand we’d been painstakingly sculpting for the last four hours, up to the top of the garage slab. Then he put the machine in reverse, and pushed down with the digger bucket as he backed onto the road – result: instant, smooth, perfectly graded slope. Total time taken: eleven seconds.

 
; “Holy crap! And Trevor asked us to do the other fifteen driveways in this street as well.”

  “No worries, George’ll sort ‘em out! Back in a tick.”

  And off he trundled, spinning into each driveway in turn and accomplishing in minutes what would have taken us most of the week.

  We could see now why the rest of the workers overlooked George’s idiosyncrasies – in the world of landscaping, George’s control over his machine gave him God-like abilities.

  It was like someone rocking up in Ancient Egypt to help them build the pyramids – with a tower crane.

  We could also see now that Trevor, the cunning bastard, was stitching us up. Setting us an impossible task, presumably to give him an excuse to fire us. I can only guess that he was sick of me asking him for money every time he came to site – finally, after two weeks, being forced to choose between eviction and starvation made me bold. I demanded the money instead of asking for it, and Trevor got all nervous and started digging in his pockets. He surrendered enough grubby banknotes to cover almost half of what he owed us – for the first week – and as I walked away, shocked by the effectiveness of my tactics, the other workers began to circle Trevor like sharks. I guessed they were all in the same boat – but working cash-in-hand, which is illegal of course, is always a risky business.

  You’ve got to take what you can get, sometimes.

  And at least now we could pay our rent…

  And then, in our hour of need, something came to us.

  We were strolling through Northbridge, the clubbing district of Perth, after picking Roo up from the Underground, when we found it.

  It was a wallet; an unassuming brown leather bill-fold, sitting on the road by the curb as though it was the most natural place in the world for a wallet to be.

  Roo’s eagle eyes picked it out of the background milieu of cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers.

  Nothing was parked in that space. The nearest cars were a good way down the street in either direction. Foot traffic was light too, but as any good wallet knows, if it lays in the street for long enough, it’s bound to get picked up.

  So I picked it up.

  And opened it.

  And inside was one-thousand, five-hundred dollars, in a mix of fifty and hundred-dollar notes. I’d never even seen a hundred-dollar note. I was quite surprised to find they were green.

  “HO. LEE. SHIT,” I said, as the others clustered round to see. “If we were the kind of people that would keep something like this, just imagine what we could do with that money!”

  “We could eat!” Gill said immediately. I felt bad to have put her in this position, but the truth was we hadn’t been eating much. Rationing had come into effect, on account of our dire financial situation.

  “We could get pizza!” I enthused.

  “We could leave here right now, and start the Bibbulmun Track,” Roo said quietly.

  Which was true.

  In our hands we held limitless possibility. More than anything else, we held the power to escape. To set off on the next leg of our grand adventure, to see things and go places that few people had, or ever would. I’d slowly come around to the idea that this epic hike could be our crowning achievement in Western Australia. I mean, not many tourists even bother visiting Perth; I’d never met another soul who had done what we were planning on doing. Hell, I’d never met anyone who didn’t think we were insane just for thinking about it.

  One-thousand, five-hundred dollars.

  “That is A LOT of pizza,” I reminded the girls. “We could keep it. I seriously doubt there’s a single person anywhere along this road, that would find something like this and not keep it.”

  “We’re in Northbridge,” Roo shrugged. “Everyone here at this time of night is out to get wasted.”

  “They’d do what they did to our shared wallet,” Gill added. “Take the cash and ditch the wallet in a bin somewhere. This bloke… ‘Akmed’… would have to replace his driver’s license, all his bank and credit cards, everything.”

  “Just looking at it makes my stomach rumble,” I admitted.

  We gave it back, of course.

  For a few minutes, walking across Northbridge, we felt like royalty. We could go anywhere, into any of the posh restaurants lining the café strip; we could eat expensive food, and drink real booze from a real pub; we could live, in short, like pretty much everyone around us was living.

  Comfortably.

  It was a pleasant fantasy.

  Then we arrived at the police station and gave the desk-sergeant the shock of his life when we handed him a wallet filled with money.

  “And you’ve giving this back?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

  “I’ve never had that before,” he admitted. “Do you want to leave your contact details? In case there’s a reward, or the owner wants to say thanks?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?” I was stuck repeating myself. Perhaps it was the shock of being parted from fifteen-hundred bucks.

  I scrawled my email address and phone number on a form for the cop to include with the wallet, and just like that it disappeared from our lives.

  I’d like to say we got a reward, or even a thank-you from a grateful owner, but we didn’t.

  It just goes to show, having a fat wodge of cash doesn’t necessarily turn someone into a nice person. And not everyone is as honest and as considerate as my two travelling companions were.

  But I was glad they were. It was the right thing to do.

  Even if it did cost us a shit-load of cash.

  And so, the next morning, instead of quitting our jobs and running around the streets crying “FREEDOM!” – Roo returned to the Underground, to clean the fetid dorms and vomit-stricken toilets, and Gill and I headed back to shovel soil for a paranoid, schizophrenic, misogynist asshole.

  It was enough to make anyone regret their honesty.

  George Gets Pushy

  It was around this time that Rusty developed a fault on his lights. It was called Gill leaving the damn things on all the time. It wasn’t really her fault… no, sod that! It was her fault. Even though I denied it strenuously at the time, to avoid making her feel bad. It bloody well was your fault, Gill!

  Because it was still dark when we left for the ridiculously long drive out to the job site, we needed the lights on; dawn would overtake us on the road each morning, and by the time we arrived at work we were bathed in full daylight. This made it hard to spot the lights being left on, and as we were always in a rush – and Rusty wasn’t advanced enough to have any kind of alarm or signal – the lights, quite often, stayed on.

  The result being, when it was time for everyone else to go home, it wasn’t for us. Because we lived nearly fifty miles away, and our car was dead.

  The first time it happened, Roo was still working with us. As the building site was on slight slope, we simply pointed Rusty’s nose downhill, and Roo and I pushed him while Gill sat in to get him started. We were lucky enough, on that occasion, to have him belch a cloud of foul black smoke and shudder into life before we came to the perimeter wall – because that meant his brakes started working, too. That’s always useful when you’re pushing a car downhill towards a rather large brick wall.

  We weren’t always so lucky.

  Several weeks later, after a long, trying day, we sagged into the car seats, worn out in body and spirit. Then Gill summoned up the energy to put the key in and turn it.

  ‘CLICK’.

  And nothing.

  Ohhh… crap.

  Gill reached up and flicked off the headlights – sadly about ten hours too late.

  As usual, we were the last vehicle in the car park. Not that any of the other workers cared enough about us to help, even if they’d been there to ask.

  I sighed, climbed wearily from the van, and assumed pushing position. Gill opened her door and took her own stance, one hand on the wheel – we were so used to this, it barely required communication.

 
“Go,” Gill said, and we both leant our bodyweight forward, pitting ourselves against Rusty’s steel-framed inertia. With three warm bodies, this was difficult, but doable. With just the two of us, uphill, it was borderline impossible. Inch by foot we forced the ungainly vehicle out through the car park entrance, and turned him so he faced down the slope. Gill climbed in, and got ready.

  “Ready!”

  And off I pushed. Downhill, faster and… not faster. Slower, in fact. Thick mud sucked at Rusty’s tyres, fighting me for his momentum. I wheezed and panted, throwing all my effort into moving the van, but Rusty plodded on. Gill made a few useless attempts at starting him – a few clicks and a lurch – and then we were finished. Facing the wall.

  We were struggling with the impossible task of pushing him back up the hill – backwards – when George the bobcat driver wandered up.

  He came to help straight away, monologuing about his reasons for still being here – most of which boiled down to him spending so much time talking he hadn’t finished his day’s work yet. Unbelievably, we’d pushed Rusty almost halfway back up the hill before he thought to ask what the problem was.

  “Flat battery,” I told him, and explained the difficulties with push-starting him over muddy ground.

  I should have known that such a helpful chap would have a solution.

  And I could have guessed I wouldn’t like it.

  “No worries! George can sort it out. I’ll give you a push with the bobcat.”

  “Eh? How… um, how?”

  “I’ll just use the bucket, eh.”

  Gill and I exchanged glances. I could see she was thinking the same thing as me: Is this guy a fucking lunatic?

  But you know what? It didn’t matter. We weren’t getting home without him. It was an hour’s drive, for gawd’s sake. There was no way in hell we were walking.