Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  I find it oddly comforting.

  We did a series of abseils, and clambered over boulders and around tunnels of varying sizes. Then it came time to put ourselves through a ‘squeeze’. This is caving terminology for a tight gap or narrow crevice, that you generally have to do a bit of contortion to get through. This one was nearly vertical, meaning you went head-and-hands-first into an opening in the ground, emerging in a chamber below from which you could quickly climb back around to the main area.

  Mum chose to watch as we took turns going through the squeeze, before finally summoning up the courage to give it a go.

  When she felt ready she knelt on the sandy cave floor, put her arms up above her head, bent forwards, and slithered into the hole.

  And stuck there.

  Something that we hadn’t really considered is that Mum, though short, is somewhat egg-shaped – meaning, she is tiny at the head, with a child-like face, and substantially… um, wider, at the bottom end.

  And it was by the bottom end that she was stuck; suspended through the hole, with her head and arms sticking out the ceiling of the chamber below.

  “Quick! Push!” I shouted.

  “NOO!” yelled Mum. “I’ll fall!”

  “Right! Grab a leg each, and pull!”

  “NO! I’ll smack my head on the rocks!”

  “Well okay then, we’ll just leave you there. We can send someone down every few days with some more food and a new book…”

  “Don’t. Make. Me. Laugh.” she pleaded.

  Which, as we all know, is secretly a plea to be tickled.

  “Sorry, did you say you wanted tickling?” I asked. Just to be sure.

  “You tickle me, you die,” she said, but she was chuckling while she said it so I didn’t take the threat too seriously.

  “Hey, if I put my foot on your arse and lean heavily enough on it, maybe you’ll pop out like a cork?”

  Mum was in full hysterics by this time, her stumpy, protruding legs quivering in time with her laughter.

  “H-H-Help meee!” she chortled.

  “Can’t you wriggle a bit?”

  “No! I’m wedged in tight!”

  I checked it out.

  “That’s amazing! Your ass has completely conformed to the shape of the hole! I couldn’t even slide a credit card into the gap.”

  “No way!” Gill exclaimed. “That happened to me in America! So it is genetic!”

  “Eh? What happened in America?”

  “Oh, we were climbing up this little waterfall, and I tried to hoist myself up backwards. When I planted my bum in the gully, it dammed the waterfall, and a mini-lake started building up behind me! The tour guide said ‘Woah lady, that is one malleable ass.’ I never forgot it!”

  “No, I’m not surprised.”

  Then Mum spoke up. “Uh, I know it’s fun to reminisce, but could we possibly leave it until a time when I’m not stuck upside-down, hanging by my arse half a mile underground?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry Mum! Shall we push?”

  “NOOO!”

  We pushed anyway.

  Roo scooted down into the lower chamber to take her arms, and proceeded to catch her when Gill and I finally put enough pressure on her buttocks to squeeze them through.

  She was still giggling when Roo helped her back up, prompting a round of applause from our guide and the rest of our tour group.

  After that, we wisely decided to head back to the surface.

  Mum’s holiday was over far too quickly, and her departure brought us to the brink of another series of changes. Roo had decided that as only a year had passed since losing her own mum, she owed it to her family to spend the holiday with them. She’d booked a flight back to Perth, and would be leaving at the start of December, only days after our Mum flew home. This left a Roo-shaped hole in Gill’s and my plans, as all the hostels around Sydney were already fully booked over Christmas. We scoured our new favourite website, a collection of backpackers’ classified ads called ‘the Gumtree’, looking for somewhere to rent – and this time we struck it lucky. A science student called Leo was taking a trip to Europe over the holidays, and was looking for someone to rent his flat while he was away. We jumped at the opportunity, sending him a whopping great pile of cash ($600!) as a deposit, so desperate we were to secure some accommodation.

  “I hope you did the right thing, trusting that guy,” Roo said.

  Until she mentioned it, I hadn’t even thought about it.

  And yet again Gill and I found ourselves alone together, in an unfamiliar city, living in a hostel with Christmas just around the corner.

  It was starting to become a habit.

  Mum; Addendum

  The day after Mum arrived home, we got an email from her. It seems things hadn’t been quite as dull as expected in England, while she was away. One night, Dad had received a phone call from the Welsh police, demanding that he come in to the Cardiff city police station. When he’d protested that it was 2am, they’d replied that either he could come straight away – or they’d come and get him. With handcuffs.

  My Dad is the most mild-mannered individual you could ever wish to meet. He calmly ushered the dog into the car, and drove for two hours through the night to Cardiff. There, the local constables confronted him. They wanted to know what kind of business he was into, and what kind of ‘game’ he was playing.

  He didn’t have a clue what they were on about, and said as much – so they took him up the valley in a paddy-wagon, stopping at one of the houses we’d bought and renovated a couple of years back.

  They led him inside, and his jaw hit the floor.

  The entire house had been converted into a cannabis factory.

  Bless him, my Dad is about as clueless as a person can be when it comes to the evils of this world. I mean, he doesn’t even drink.

  The cops escorting him took one look at his face and set him free. “If you’re reaction had been anything else, you’d be sleeping in a cell tonight,” one told him.

  Apparently they’d seen his genuine shock, and realised he had nothing to do with it.

  Dad then spent a while wandering through the house, staring in disbelief at the damage done. Holes had been cut in the floors and ceilings to run vents through. Thousands of pounds worth of lights had been hung from every surface, beaming down infra-red radiation on both floors – all of which were covered in a foot of top soil. Hundreds and hundreds of plants were being bagged up by a forensic team, while a police electrician tackled the deadly mess our tenants had left by the front door – all the grow lights had been wired directly into the mains, bypassing the electricity meter. Bundle upon bundle of cables snaked off up the stairs, branching out into every room; even though they’d been off for hours, the house at 4am was hotter than a summer’s day in the garden.

  “That’s how we spotted them, too,” a young copper informed him, “they were using the attic. A helicopter passing overhead with a heat sensor saw your roof lit up like a Christmas tree!”

  “Oh,” said my Dad.

  “It happens all the time. In most cases, the landlord is in on it, turning a blind eye in exchange for a cut of the profits. But I could tell you weren’t involved. I guess because you live so far away, they thought they could get away with it.”

  “But they were the best tenants we’ve ever had!” Dad told the cop. “They paid the rent by Direct Debit – always there on the first of the month, and never a peep out of them.”

  “I’m not surprised. They didn’t want you coming down here and seeing all of this!”

  “But… why?” my Dad asked.

  “Whaddaya mean?” said the cop.

  “Why… why have they done all this?”

  “To grow the drugs, of course.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Cannabis.”

  “Oh…”

  “You do know what cannabis is, don’t you sir?”

  “I think so. Um… actually, no.”

  The cop sighed. He pointed across the room. �
��That, Mr Slater, is cannabis.”

  “Oh! Right.”

  “So, you understand now, the seriousness of this situation?”

  “Yes officer, I do. It’s funny though, only the other day I was wishing all our other tenants were like these ones.”

  “Other tenants you say? How many houses do you rent out around here?”

  “Six, at the moment…”

  “Right then, we’ll go and have a look, shall we?”

  It was a very, very long night for him.

  Mum, when she got back, had been unable to resist calling us with a blow-by-blow account.

  “It could only happen to your Dad,” she concluded, “I’m away for a few weeks, and he nearly gets arrested for running a drug lab!”

  “I bet he’d have made a bigger profit than he does on the houses,” I said.

  “The cops did tell him, the stuff they found in the house was worth about a quarter of a million pounds. So your Dad asked if he got to keep some of it, in lieu of the damage! I don’t think that went down too well with the police.”

  “Oh my God! No way!”

  “Yes, and that’s not the best bit. Tell Tony what you told the cops!”

  And my Dad poked his head into the Skype window and said a cheery “Hello!”

  “Tell him what you said,” Mum demanded.

  Dad complied. “Oh, well, the police seemed to think it was a good job I hadn’t gone round that house to do any rent inspections or anything like that. They probably weren’t very nice people living in there, you see, and they might have been annoyed if I’d called in and seen the mess they’d made.”

  “Yeah, no shit! They could have had guns and stuff!”

  “Yes, well, this is South Wales. I doubt they have guns. They barely have motor cars. But we’d had a couple of complaints from some of the neighbours, about the state of the garden. Apparently these guys weren’t bothering to look after it, and it had gone a bit wild. So in a couple of weeks I was planning on taking our lawnmower round – and asking them if I could cut their grass…”

  Student Digs

  Saying goodbye to Roo was even harder this time than it had been before. I knew she’d be back, and I completely understood that she had to go and spend Christmas with her family. It was the right thing to do, and she missed them every bit as much as Gill and I missed ours. But still… it made me incredibly sad, to think of spending the next month without her. In the entire time we’d been going out, we’d hardly spent a moment apart. Some people might call that unhealthy, and a year ago I’d have been one of them. But you know, there was just something about Roo that made her… hard to let go of.

  There’s a word for that, but I think it gets overused a lot in books like this. So for now we’ll go with Gill’s phrase to describe it: ‘a pathetically-needy-limpit-like-inability-to-prise-yourselves-off-one-another-for-more-than-ten-seconds’.

  It’s possible that she was a little jealous.

  Nevertheless, our first job was to find our new digs and pay for them, before the bloke that had offered them to us changed his mind. Leo and his girlfriend were both postgrad students, in Genetics and Art respectively. We’d been lucky as hell to snag their place, and I’d promised Leo faithfully that we’d look after it. Now we had to meet up with him, learn how to feed his fish, and part with a sum of money so staggering that I was sleeping with it inside my underpants in case our hostel burned down in the middle of the night.

  Leo had seemed like a good bloke in our brief phone conversations, and he was clearly a clever chap, so I had high hopes that his flat would be clean and tidy. I know the two things don’t always go together, especially considering that he was a student, but I’d been reading and re-reading The Secret for weeks now, and I was determined to put that whole ‘Law of Attraction’ thing into practise. For anyone that doesn’t know, it’s a souped-up version of the power of positive thinking – basically, what you believe in strongly enough, comes to you.

  I was believing as hard as I could that Leo’s flat would be worth the money.

  And you know what?

  It was.

  In fact Leo’s apartment was amazing. Incredible. There are buckets of these words (called ‘superlatives’, apparently) that I could use to describe it, but – actually, that’s just what it was. Superlative.

  I’d seen a grainy photo of his bedroom on the advert, but my first real hint of what lay in store was when we found what we thought was Leo’s building. Our entire knowledge of the area extended to a name – Surry Hills – and the fact that our hostel manager thought it was “a very nice neighbourhood”. So when my astounding map-reading abilities led us to a sleek new apartment building with a video-intercom by the doors, we thought we’d hit the jackpot.

  A remote-control conversation with a confused Indian gentleman followed, the outcome of which was that this was not the right address. We were instructed to go around the corner and down the street for a block, where we would find “the expensive-looking building”.

  This made me quite excited. And a little nervous.

  It also made Gill question my map-reading skills again.

  But our second attempt was much more successful.

  And the building we were looking for? It did look rather nice.

  The foyer was clad entirely in marble. Leo buzzed us in, but had to come down to meet us because the lift was activated by a wireless plastic doofer on his key ring. The lobby doors were, too, if there was no-one above to buzz you in.

  Cool.

  We rode the lift all the way to the top, and I joked that we’d arrived at the penthouse.

  “Yep,” said Leo. “My parents own the building, so…”

  And he opened the door to the kind of room you see on the cover of Grand Designs magazine. It was wide, open plan, mostly white, and scattered with artfully staged props. The pictures on the wall had their own frikkin’ lights, for gawd’s sake! That is how posh this place was. The cushions all matched, and there were so many of them on the sofa there was hardly any room for my bum.

  A telescope big enough to fit a small dog inside poised elegantly in one corner.

  But it contained no dog.

  A gleaming black granite kitchen dominated one end of the room, while at the other end sliding glass doors gave out onto a wide balcony overlooking the Sydney Harbour skyline.

  Ho. Lee. Shit.

  So, let me show you the room,” Leo said.

  I had to pick Gill up off the floor first. “Get my jaw while you’re down there,” I told her.

  Leo’s bedroom was the master suite of the penthouse apartment. There was another bedroom which he rented out to a friend, who was conveniently also out of town – otherwise, he’d probably be on house-sitting duties, and Gill and I would be sleeping on the street over Christmas.

  One wall of the bedroom was lined with matching his n’ hers study desks, festooned with computery gubbins. The opposite wall was lined with mirrors, which concealed the walk-in wardrobes. Again, his n’ hers (by which I mean, one was noticeably bigger and filled with shoes). There was an en-suite bathroom in grey marble, with a double-headed shower big enough to practise yoga in, and the piece de la resistance: the wall opposite the enormous double bed. It was all glass, and Leo led us through it, out onto a patio area that covered the entire floor-plan of the apartment below. It was stunning. Sweeping, two-hundred-and-seventy degree views (I calculated that) took in the whole of Surry Hills behind us, and everything up to – and including – the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

  My first thought was ‘Party!’

  My second was ‘No! BAD Tony!’

  Then I noticed outdoor speakers mounted above the glass doors, and a shiny steel barbeque tucked away to one side. Party it is.

  Or it would be, if I had any friends.

  I tuned back into the conversation. Leo was telling us that it was the perfect spot to watch the New Year’s Eve firework display.

  “But apart from that, we never really come out h
ere. It’s too windy to play badminton.”

  “Big enough though?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You should try tennis. Only, you don’t want to get your balls out up here.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your balls. Don’t want to get them out up here.”

  “I… sorry, what?”

  “Well, you’d have to go down in the lift to fetch them. Unless you put a big net up around the whole place…”

  “Ah, right, I get you.”

  Gill was giving me that look that means ‘please stop talking’.

  She uses that look a lot.

  But it works. Sometimes.

  Notably absent from the flat was a TV, but Leo seemed like the type who might be above such mundane concerns. I’ve often wished I could be classy enough to tell people, “I don’t watch television,” – thereby subtly suggesting that my time is too valuable and too important to be frittered away so frivolously. But I’m not cut from that quality of cloth. Blame my generation, if you like. I love telly.

  I decided not to mention this lack though, because I already felt dramatically out of place. That was one step up from asking him, “dude, can my band crash on the couch?”

  But I needn’t have worried. Leo led us in from the bright sunshine of his balcony, and closed both the doors and the curtains behind us. Then he plucked a remote from the wall above the bed, clicked a switch, and a giant projector screen lowered itself from the ceiling.

  “This is how you operate the projector,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way that suggested everybody had one. I was expecting James Bond to bust in at any moment and start shooting henchmen.

  “Sound is wired through the walls, so keep the bass down or things start to fall off them.”

  Gill and I mumbled our agreement to keep the bass down.

  Leo pushed a few more buttons, and the screen rolled itself up again, vanishing into a hidden cavity in the roof. He waved the remote at us, then returned it to its wall socket.