Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  I bought one from an op-shop though, so I could have my photo taken underneath the sign on the station platform. This was much more amusing to me than it is to you (you’ll just have to take my word for it), because whilst trying (and failing) to become a world-famous actor, I became heavily involved in making a low-budget movie. Strictly speaking it was a no-budget movie, but we all did our best – most of my kung fu class showed up to be extras, all being given a balaclava from a box and a toy machine gun, and being told they were ‘the baddies’. There was no plot as such – just an endless orgy of violence, which saw the demise of dozens, nay hundreds of balaclava-clad minions – the vast majority of whom were played by yours truly and a couple of mates. To keep it fresh, we’d swap odd bits of gear – and balaclavas – each time we were killed on film.

  So my first action in this strange new town was to send a copy of that photo to my friend and mentor, Mark Strange, who had masterminded the production of that movie.

  And, because he’s half decent at that shit, he now is an actor.

  Damn it.

  But anyway, it’s hard to be bitter when you’re living in Melbourne instead of Manchester. Although our accommodation wouldn’t suit everyone…

  Roo and I rented a room, based on an advert in the ever-useful Gumtree website. As far as we knew, we had a double room – and this part turned out to be right. The room was basic, but after living in a tent for three months, so were our needs. There were two other bedrooms in that house. One had four people in bunk beds, and one sleeping on the floor; the other had four bunk beds and no-one on the floor, because there was barely enough room to stand up between the beds let alone sleep there. The lounge had two mismatched sofas, obviously rescued from the side of the road at some point, and both of these were occupied as well. And occasionally, there would be a couple of house-guests crashing on the living room floor.

  It made for quite a friendly little community, with anywhere from twelve to fifteen people living there at any one time. There was one tiny kitchen, which we all managed to share amicably, and one bathroom, which was about the size of an under-stairs cupboard. There was a queue for the toilet twenty-four hours a day, which grew dramatically every time anyone took a shower. It was… remarkably cosy, actually.

  The house was owned by an Israeli couple, and several of the tenants were friends and family of theirs from back home. Two of the guys cultivated a healthy cannabis plant in the shed, which they lined with egg boxes and newspaper to keep in the heat. They brought the plant out every day for a bit of sunshine, and in all respects treated it like a pet. They talked to it; they pruned it with a pair of nail scissors, and sprayed it with water from a misting bottle. One of them even played his guitar and sang to it when he thought no-one else was around.

  But despite the harmonious relationship we developed with our enclave of housemates, we got sick of late-night toilet visits, which generally involved getting fully dressed and legging it to the public loos in the car park across the road.

  Balaclava had only ever been a temporary measure, and as the work became more regular, we found another advert on the Gumtree, and moved in with a lady called Kat, in Yarraville.

  At the risk of spoiling the surprise of the next chapter, we would come to call her The Crazy Kat Lady.

  And no – she didn’t own a single cat.

  Kraziness

  The room Kat had to let was unfurnished, but that didn’t faze us; we strolled down to St. Vincent De Paul’s op shop (otherwise known as ‘Vinnies’), and bought a second-hand, queen-sized mattress, which we fervently hoped would fit in Rusty.

  We hadn’t dared drive the van this far, for fear he’d break down on the wrong side of a major junction – so we lifted the mattress onto our heads, with Roo at the front because she was more observant than me (and more stable in every sense of the word), and me bringing up the rear so that I could watch her rear as we walked.

  Everyone’s a winner!

  And we hiked the two miles back home to Balaclava with a queen-sized mattress on our heads. But everyone’s had to do that at some point, right?

  We crammed the mattress in on top of all the other crap in Rusty, and made the drive to Kat’s place at 4am, to ensure we met no traffic. Even so, Rusty barely made the twenty minute journey, and as Roo parked him outside our new home steam was bubbling out of him; I had serious doubts he’d be making another trip anytime soon. Maybe never.

  At first we thought we’d struck it lucky; a mix-up of place names had us assuming we were moving to South Yarra, a thriving suburb full of trendy cafés and funky boutique shops. Yarraville was something else entirely; a quiet, rather down-at-heel suburb full of dilapidated period houses in overgrown gardens. It was starting to become popular with developers because the train from Yarraville’s single platform to the colossal Victorian edifice of Flinders Street Station in central Melbourne took less than fifteen minutes.

  Kat told us that she had only just moved in (a year ago). Apparently she’d bought the hundred-year-old wooden house as a fixer-upper, and she was renovating it at a speed that made evolution look fast. So far she’d succeeding in removing a breakfast-bar, leaving a giant raised concrete plinth in the middle of the kitchen – and that was about it. Tins of paint, brushes and rollers, tarps and tools, lay in piles in a wooden lean-to she grandly labelled the ‘sun room’.

  In the lounge there was a hard wooden bench with a green vinyl-covered foam cushion, which she mistakenly referred to as a sofa. I could practically see the struggle going on inside her, as she decided whether to tell us we could use it or not. It looked so uninviting, I didn’t care either way, but it seemed like a peculiar issue to encounter at the beginning of our lease.

  There was only one other piece of furniture in the lounge; a book case filled with shelf upon shelf of fancy tea-cups and saucers. Some of them were quite beautiful, with ornate handles, paintings of birds and flowers on them, and matching saucers with gold-leaf edges. It was the kind of collection that would take pride of place in your Grandma’s china cabinet.

  Oh, and there was a TV, but it wasn’t plugged in and had no aerial. Kat really was one of those ‘don’t watch TV’ type people – which of course meant that from then on, we didn’t either.

  But we didn’t care about any of that. The rent was cheap, it was close to the city, and on the other side of the train tracks there was a take-away called Weird Pizza. Oh yes! Their banana-curry pizza was a masterpiece. Not quite as good as the sour-cream-chilli-nachos pizza, but way better than the prickly-pear-and-goat’s-cheese.

  (As an aside, I got chatting with the owner one day and asked him how he’d come up with the idea. He told me he’d been heavily stoned one day, when his mate said, “Dude, we should totally sell pizzas with really weird shit on them!” And that was that. You had to respect that kind of vision.)

  No, there was nothing wrong with Yarraville’s selection of pizza.

  It was Kat herself, who was the problem.

  On our first evening in the house, we heard a knock at our door – and then it opened without waiting for an answer. Kat poked her head around it. “Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I’m back from work! And I noticed you’d put your trash out…” she held up a scrap of card from the back of a battery packet, and a plastic bottle top. “…and these are recyclable, you know? Is that okay?”

  “Ah…” There really isn’t much you can say when faced with that sort of thing. “Yes, that’s fine.”

  “Okay!” And she scurried off, all smiles now that her lesson had been imparted.

  “Woah,” said Roo, when the door was safely shut, “she went through our rubbish! Even though we put out our recycling separately. That woman is bat-shit crazy!”

  The house had central-heating, a rarity for Australia, but Kat refused to turn it on. “It’s a waste of money,” she explained, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was our money she was choosing not to waste. Instead, as the evenings and early mornings became chillier, sh
e resorted to wearing a bobble hat, duffle coat and ski gloves inside the house. Roo and I snuggled up together on our mattress on the floor from about 8pm onwards – wearing jumpers – and shivered through the night.

  Ever the eco-warrior, Kat continued to go through our rubbish – even sneaking into our room when we were out, to go through our bins before we emptied them. She’d leave the evidence next to my pillow, with little Post-it notes saying, “Hi! Just popped in to check on something, and found these in your bin. Don’t forget to recycle!”

  It wasn’t a horse’s head, but it was pretty fucking close.

  In the evenings, she’d follow us around flicking out the lights as we moved from room to room. Quite often Roo would nip to the toilet, leaving something cooking on the stove, and come back to find the kitchen in darkness – and a stern reminder from Kat, written on a Post-it note stuck to the light switch, that she needed to remember to turn things off when she wasn’t using them.

  “She’s timing me in the shower,” Roo confided to me one night. “And she goes in after me, to check I used that bucket to catch the ‘excess water’. If I forget, I have to fill it up from the taps, or she’ll barge in here while I’m naked to remind me about it.”

  “Wow. Bat-shit crazy is putting it mildly!”

  “Quiet!” she hissed. “That bat-shit crazy woman has bat-like hearing too. In fact she might actually be a bat.”

  “I wonder if she hangs upside down in her room at night?”

  “She probably has to – she doesn’t own any furniture! Let’s not get close enough to find out though. She may bite. And if she does, she probably has rabies.”

  By this point, the backpacker job agency had found me a semi-regular gig with a company called InstallEx. They built exhibitions, transforming giant empty spaces into display-packed halls, laying thousands of carpet tiles and assembling hundreds of stalls and booths with a quick-lock post and rail system and a judicious amount of swearing. I excelled at the job, and got to see – and decorate – the insides of such iconic buildings as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Crown Casino, the Convention Centre and Flemington Racecourse.

  When we were tasked with setting up for the Building Expo, the bosses of InstallEx were on high alert. They wanted a show of force, to prove that they were players in the construction industry – which they weren’t, but apparently the Big Boss really, really wanted to be. He was there himself in fact, which is where I met him.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, because he was in a scissor-lift.

  He was in the cage on top of it, inspecting something, and I was walking past the bottom.

  “Hey, you!” he called down to me.

  “Hello!” I responded cheerfully.

  “Listen, I need you to move this thing about two meters over there,” he pointed to a huge sign, which he was obviously intent on inspecting.

  “Ah… I’ve never used one of these before, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s alright lad, it’s not rocket science. Just steer it with the joystick and press GO.”

  “Okay… but aren’t you supposed to come down first?”

  “We’re only going a couple of meters.”

  “Okay. Give me a sec.” I studied the controls. They looked simple enough, but I had that feeling of dread in my stomach – the one that knows Sod’s Law by heart: ‘What Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong’ – in my life to date, it has held truer than any other law except gravity.

  I pushed the joystick, and the scissor life leapt forward. Shocked, I let go of the lever, and it lurched to a halt. There were cries of “WOAH!” from above.

  “I’m not too sure about this, maybe you should come down and show me how?”

  “Bloody hell, just drive us over there. It’s not that difficult!”

  So I pushed the lever again. The lift lurched into life once more, covering the couple of metres far quicker than I expected.

  “STOP!”

  I stopped. In very nearly the right place, it seemed.

  “Right – just spin us around.”

  I looked at the controls, and started to twist the stick, but the lift gave an alarming wobble as it shifted, accompanied by a few yells from above.

  “I think it might tip over if I try to turn it anymore,” I called to the boss. “The floor down here is a bit uneven.”

  He swore under his breath, in the way that bosses do when their minions prove unspeakably incompetent, and said, “Alright, bring us down.”

  Happy to comply, I pushed the ‘lower’ button – and was rewarded with a screech of steel and a hideous ripping sound.

  “SHIT!” I stopped lowering, but it was too late – the far corner of the lift platform had caught the top of the huge sign as it descended, and with thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, had torn the thing in two.

  When the boss got down, courtesy of someone who actually had their Scissor Lift Operator’s License, he was so red in the face I thought he would explode like a tomato in a microwave.

  So I fled. It wasn’t like there was anything I could do – the sign would have to be re-ordered, and the boss would have to shoulder the cost, seeing as how he was risking a huge fine from the Health and Safety Executive for breaking pretty much every rule in the book when it comes to scissor lifts.

  I went back to the crew I’d been working with, building a series of small, enclosed rooms at the furthest end of the hall. There I hid, and dwelled on my most recent cock-up while I fitted plastic wall panels into tracks on the steel framework.

  An hour later we completed the rooms by fitting a series of locking doors into the last openings. I led the crew inside the first one to tighten the bolts holding it together.

  Suddenly, with the door shut, all became peaceful. It was a little haven from the frenetic atmosphere outside.

  “You know, it’s crazy,” I said, “but no-one would ever think of looking for us in here. There’s so many staff out there hanging around, doing sod all… we’d never even be missed!”

  “Ha! Yeah. Just chill in here, like, till it’s all over!” someone agreed.

  “I could even stretch out like this – Zzzz…” I lay full length on the floor with my hands behind my head, and closed my eyes in mock sleep. “No-one would ever—”

  And that’s when the door opened.

  “I thought I heard voices…” the boss tailed off, as he was presented with probably the most blatant evidence of skiving he’d ever seen.

  We all stood up, trying not to look too busted – difficult, really, because Katie Price isn’t as busted as we were in that moment.

  The figure in the doorway was the boss. Not just of InstallEx, but of the gigantic parent company, Morton.

  I recognised him, because an hour ago I’d inadvertently helped him demolish a five-hundred dollar sign.

  I didn’t work much for InstallEx, after that.

  InstallEx

  But you know what? The other bosses at InstallEx were decent people. After the dust settled – and settled some more – and when they were desperate – I got the call again.

  Perhaps because, unlikely as it may seem, I was good at this!

  The steel framing system used on most of their jobs was like Lego – and who doesn’t love Lego?

  I also discovered I was pretty good at organising the other backpackers, mostly because no-one else seemed to give a shit about it. The bosses had their work cut out just dealing with the endless stream of complaints about lack of tools, or slight injuries, or missed break-times. Without direct supervision more than half the workforce would quite happily just stand there, staring blankly about them, as though they were being remote controlled and the signal had been cut off. I took it on myself, out of frustration more than anything else, to point out the rather obvious contributions they could be making towards getting us all out of there.

  “Why don’t you start another row of floor tiles?” I’d say.

  “Uh? Yeah. Might as well.” And off they’d go. Empty handed.
So I’d send another lad after them with a trolley full of floor tiles, and another with some helpful reminders about how far from the wall to start placing them, and then another with the missing tape measure that he’d just discovered in his pocket.

  When Paul the manager came back, his keen eye for the job must have noticed that something was different. He was a friendly chap – tall, thin, and bald as an egg, presumably from the frustration of running a business reliant on backpacker labour. He soon started seeking me out, asking how work was progressing, who was doing what, and if I had any suggestions on how to divide the labour for the tasks ahead. His instructions to me graduated from, “Take this floor tile. Put it there,” to, “Take this map. Grab a few guys, and see if you can build fifty cubicles in the south-west corner.”

  Without even noticing how it happened, I was promoted from mindless labour to supervising a team. Whether laying flooring or assembling exhibition stands, I was the one giving out jobs, making the measurements, explaining how to build the railing system into recognisable, three-dimensional booths, and strategizing with Paul about how to get everything done on the typically frantic schedule.

  I worked on all their big jobs, building hundreds of individual stalls and displays for international-scale exhibitions – flower shows, future homes expos, computer fairs – you name it, if it came to Melbourne, we built it.

  And two, three or sometimes four days later, we pulled the whole thing down again. Packed every steel rail, locking nut and bolt, partition, plinth, sign and carpet tile, back into their appropriate containers and shipped them back to warehouses all over the city.

  On the one hand, it was ridiculous; the sheer quantity of labour that went into erecting some of the displays was monumental, not to mention the thousands of dollars that had been spent crafting the individual pieces of signage, and bespoke booths and counters, that we spent dozens of frustrating hours struggling to assemble. This titanic expenditure of cash and effort produced something amazing, time after time – every show was unique, and all of them looked incredible. Staggeringly impressive, almost as though hundreds of people had sweated for thousands of man-hours to perfect every little detail across two acres of show-floor…