Saul’s Dreaming: A short novel by Jason Quirk

Author’s Note: Saul’s Dreaming had no editor. It was written between 1986 and 1988 and was started when I was nineteen. It is not a great book by any stretch of the imagination and there are several styles which have been used in what really was an experimental novel. There is a voice waiting to be heard.

If the book needs surgery, it is not heart surgery as its heart is in the right place, it is just some of the passages are naïve and perhaps the first chapter is a bit too ponderous. Furthermore, if you can get past the second chapter you should finish the book!

Not everything will make perfect sense as the book is essentially about madness and the states of being between lucidity and that state which could also be sanity but is not. Totally unedited it would have made no sense at all and I have tried to clean up passages and polish some dialogue but, essentially, I found the book has not dated too badly and so left much of it as it was.

Please don’t hate this problem child. It was meant to be read a couple of times. It was not meant to be ignored forever in a box for over three and a half decades. It is diffi-cult.

Whether it is typing by a teenager or writing by a budding author whose dreams were shattered by schizophrenia, it is a record of a life of madness yet to come. It is almost as though psychosomatically the book prompted this author’s lifetime of mental illness. Just from that aspect alone, it should not be ignored.

Saul’s Dreaming

“The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life in between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceeds mawkishness.” John Keats, Endymion

Chapter One

“I dreamt last night. It is the first dream I can remember since the breakdown. I dreamt of the swagman and he brought us some gifts” Brad’s Journal.

“No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again” Buddha.

It was late afternoon in the camp during the tenth or eleventh year of the Reformation. Noone was really keeping time anymore. Saul looked down upon the place where he lived. It was a wooden house with a peeling iron roof and a wooden verandah. The garden, which was hardly a garden, except for the dead grass and a patch of roses, was surrounded by a perfect white picket fence.

He watched his mother, whom he loved, as she watered the roses along the fence with her watering can. Saul had his father’s binoculars and through them he could see the details of the hamlet of a town where he lived; the churchyard, the preacher’s house and other similar houses. Saul’s mother used the watering can gracefully, sprinkling the water over the flowers she loved so dearly. They were the only flowers at the moment in the dry valley, where gum trees and wheat thrived among the variety of native shrubs. The roses were a bloody scarlet, scented strongly like the soaps in the washroom, thought Saul. He started to count the freshly painted white pickets which rose sharply along the front yard. Perfectly spaced. He thought there would be a hundred of them but he immediately lost count and used the binoculars to watch the small fire being attended to by the preacher. The preacher had told him to go and look for wood, but instead Saul went to his father’s study and took his binoculars. His father usually took his binoculars with him when he went away. He did not take them this time.

The preacher called Saul’s mother as he stoked the fire and she turned from the roses. Saul wondered if she and the preacher had watched him when he took the binoculars and felt immediately guilty. It did not last. He felt hungry and still watched the preacher as he stoked the fire with a stick. He had watched the preacher slaughter a sheep earlier that day. He used the blunt end of an axe on the skull of the sheep three times. Saul counted the savage blows and watched the life leave the shuddering animal; each sinew and spurt of blood as it died and was skinned. Saul had not taken the binoculars to watch life in the valley where he had lived all his life, but to look for the swagman. They said he would come.

Saul stood in the dry grass near the hill, careful not to be seen. Dead leaves clung to his ill-fitting grey shorts which hung around his waist. He went to the other side of the hill, careful so that the other boys, who were swearing around the upturned wreck of an old Chrysler, wouldn’t see him. The three boys were a little younger than Saul and they smoked stale packets of cigarettes and used their arms to heave at the rusty relic embedded in the dead undergrowth. Saul hoped they would find a nest of snakes and listened to them while they swore.

“Fucken cunt bitch slut wanker whore poofter bum sucking arsehole”

“You forgot cock sucking” said another one taking a puff and coughing.

“Get fucked cunt.”

Saul sat down with the binoculars and looked over the dry grassland which lay on the other side of the ridge. They magnified the barren vista; the dried and overgrown wheat fields, split by a dusty track which zigs-zagged across the plain, emerging from the plain almost like a bolt of lightning. The land appeared to quake through the heavy binoculars as Saul tried to keep them still. Saul wanted the track to open up into what looked like a bottomless pit, wide enough to swallow a house but it was only an optical illusion. His stare followed the dusty track for his father’s car. HIs mother and the preacher expected him home tonight and there would be a feast. Halfway to the horizon, Saul saw the stranger, it was the swagman and his dog. It was almost as though he sensed his presence. The sight of the swagman as he walked towards the perimeter excited the boy and his mouth and eyes widened. It had been over a year since the swagman had come and with him, he brought remnants of the old world; toys, wind-up cars, comic books of men with guns and he once even brought a pocket video game with some batteries that worked for a short time.

The preacher did not like these things from the old world. He said they belonged to a time before the Reformation. The time of the age of television. The time which had destroyed our land and a belief in the people in one another.

Saul squinted at the near setting sun which began to cast shadows across the heads of wheat. The blurry plains sharpened on Saul’s sights. He was sure it was the swagman and forgot about his father in the excitement. The stranger with the gifts would soon enter where this small group of people dreamed of something they called the Reformation as they tried to forget the past.

The swagman’s pack was like an appendage; a natural extension of his body. He felt the heat and bore it. Dressed in a ragged pair of blue jeans, dirty blue flannelette shirt, a dark cotton scarf knotted around his neck and a black beanie on his head. He defied the heat. He carried his billy in his left hand and a gnarled walking stick in his right. Slung over his right shoulders was his roll and backpack, containing precious little food as well as his possessions for the journey. He trod through dust and stone, thick in dream as he bitterly walked the track away from his perishing thoughts. He felt himself approaching a new home, one as empty for him as the last. His haunted eyes thinned and his lips curled to whistle his dusty dog. The dog was some Rottweiler mutt, strong and sturdy, the survivor of some lost litter. He called it Hellhound, he called any dog Hellhound. It obeyed his master’s whistle, stopping to stare at the track which would eventually weave into the valley and the hamlet, which was named Border. The swagman was soon abreast with his dog and it too started to trot ahead, its nose occasionally buried in the dust.

The swagman stared across the sun-bleached rows of tall wheat which lined the gravelly road and saw the old iron windmill which still pumped through seizing rust, brought upon by winds which brushed the bobbing heads of wild wheat which grew at the base. The swagman closed his eyes and saw the shapes melt into black and red. He knew there were people there. The ghostly eyes opened and he listened to the shudder of the pump as it screeched in protest. Further, and his eyes met an overturned water tank, split and rusting in the overgrowth.

Lance threw his cigarette from the window of his FJ Holden. It was his last cigarette, his last moment of solace. The car ploughed through the dust, raising a stone beneath the balding tyres. He had ignored the straining engine and the bubbling radiator and instead pressed the accelerator down to the floor. The needle on the water gauge had been in the red for much of the day. An empty water container rattled on the floor among empty chip packets and disemboweled cassettes. The cigarette ashtray was full.

He could see the swagman and his dog as they shimmered in the hazy distance. The thought of running the sticklike figure down crossed his mind. He knew the swagman once upon a time. Let the dingoes have him, he thought. Scatter his bones and let the children use his knuckles for games. Lance liked to play games with his mind and it wasn’t until he knew the swagman that he began to do that.

Hellhound’s ear’s pricked and it stopped to turn around. The swagman turned as well and stared at the trail of dust which followed the face of the red car. The Holden skidded across the gravel and stopped. The swagman glimpsed a patch of glistening chrome beneath the dirt. Lance’s face was obscured, engulfed in the heavy mist of dust which had followed the car. The passenger door was open…

“Can I give you a ride?”

The swagman stared past Lance at the golden keyring which dangled from the ignition. It had a Mercedes insignia. The swagman seemed to smile as he curled his lips to whistle. The panting dog leapt obediently into the back seat of the car and the swagman threw in his pack and sundries. He got in the front beside a finely carved spear which sat between the seats.

“Mean looking mutha fucker… He won’t bite will he?,” said Lance, disturbed at the panting creature.

“He’s only a few teeth. Don’t worry about him, he’ll just lick his balls to death.”

Lance laughed: “It’s been a while – years.”

The swagman laughed, staring at the film of dirt on the other side of the windscreen.

“Is it time?,” he asked and pulled the door shut and looked briefly at the spear.

“I spoke to Gosseemtoo,” said Lance and he put the car into gear and began to search for a cigarette. He remembered he had none.

“Gosseemtoo…. You still in contact with him? What did his name mean again.”

“Go, I seem to be sick of you or something… That’s what he says all the time. I never caught his name,” they laughed. “Yes, it’s time,” Lance swallowed silently. “The preacher will probably send you back.”

“I understand,” said the swagman, his eye on the dusty windscreen, and his voice in his head was suddenly smothered by too many other voices which were living and dead… He had to squeeze them from his mind as he remembered how the aboriginals had gathered and were ready to clean out what was left of the cities. Their music in the night time was haunting. The cries of their warriors even more so… “I sometimes think your Gossemtoo doesn’t exist. That you’ve been corrupted… You made him up…”

“Well, that’s between Gosseemtoo and me.”

“And Mary?”

“She is well,” said Lance and scratched his nose where there was some skin missing.

“The child?”

“Him too, he’s grown,” Lance paused. “I won’ see or hear from Gosseemtoo again. Just for you.”

He felt he had spoken too hastily but continued.

“He said the storms which began the Reformation will begin soon, maybe this month. He thinks all the evil in the city will be vanquished and the land will be free to roam…”

“Then there’s little time. Do you believe it?”

“Yes I do. As for the storms. I think he’s talking metaphorically. The preacher still believes.”

“I too believe in this Reformation,” said the swagman. “And that the end will come … and a new beginning” and he smiled dreamlike at Lance.

The swagman fell silent as they drove and Lance turned to look at him.

“Have you given up on her yet?,” Lance asked about Her.

Still the swagman stared at the dirt and suddenly he felt the dirt on himself and the sound of television in his head. Voices and static as if he had fallen asleep and suddenly woken. It beckoned the swagman, a powerful invisible madness which throbbed along with the car. He could feel the grit in his mouth and pressed his teeth together and felt the dirt between his incisors.

“She’s dead Brad. Suburbia killed her. Pentan killed her. You realise that.”

The swagman closed his eyes and thought he could feel the dust drip from him like beads of mercury which rolled about at his feet and in his mind. Television, he was immersed in television… It had ruined him… He knew it would soon speak, like it always did. It would take control. The swagman winced and then resigned, unable to even clutch the joint at his elbow which ached.

“What is it saying?,” asked Lance.

The swagman imagined it enter his mind like a silver rocket ship, seamless and pointed, splitting the lobes of his brain and exploding into picture. He saw only himself frozen in the car.

“It is time it turned on itself… This is the final journey,” said the swagman and he resisted television and opened his eyes. He gulped a small mouthful of precious saliva.

“I must learn to love before I die,” he turned to Lance, who could see the hopelessness in his eyes.

“You loved me once. Remember?”

Lance felt his despair rising, tears came too but he quashed them as suddenly as they filled his sockets. Cruelly, the tears dissipated. The swagman slouched back and saw they had slowly reached close to home.

“Have you loved?,“ asked the swagman.

“You asked me that once. No, I don’t know love. I’m too selfish and I think too much. As for you, you are too inward and you know what … I don’t think there is anything there. There’s nothing,  Brad… And you know what? It’s a shame the world means nothing anymore. And nothing rhymes better with nothing than nothin…”

Lance suddenly wanted another cigarette but repressed the fruitless search, adding instead in an attempt to change the subject: “I know the future. I must shape the future. And it can’t be here. It must be with The Cross somewhere.” Lance immediately felt they were senseless words.

“And what is that?,” asked the swagman, feeling the vacuum of words. Almost, he thought. Almost. But television waited to enter his mind. Making him mad in both senses of the word.

“I am a guardian,” said Lance, without explanation of his part, and he seemed almost like a boy.

The swagman knew the business of the Reformation and let it begin to engulf him. It was all the seed of the preacher this doctrine of the Reformation. Born of a book in his mind.

“And I am what the preacher is not…,” said the swagman and stopped. Television entered and glazed the eyes of the swagman. He saw lines, many different lines. Maybe Mary’s face, or was it the preacher’s? The face was warped and then the picture became clear in his mind’s eye. It was some sort of androgynous statue, the face of a child.

“I am madness. This new world is not for me.”

“I’m sure Christopher Columbus uttered those very words… And Captain Cook. Don’t forget Captain Cook … or was it Charles Dampier?,” said Lance trying to keep the swagman’s fever at bay.

Lance drove through the two posts which marked the perimeter and the swagman could see the houses in the distance. It was thought Lance had taken the long way around which he had just to make sure his friend was presentable.

“Television,” said Lance almost bitterly. “It belongs to the dead. The age of the dead.”

“And so does the fucking Reformation! And all their lying voices in their heads.”

Lance felt his lips stick to his bare teeth and listened to the panting of the dog. He wondered if it was watching him. He winced. The swagman ran his hand across his head and pulled off the beanie: “You mix up man and machine.”

“Then I am the dead and I have returned to love the living… What’s for dinner?”

The car drew closer to the house, freshly painted. Lance could see the figures beyond the white pickets.

“It’s all bullshit Brad. Remember… bullshit!”

Mary saw the car as she stood among the roses with her spent watering can. She saw there were two in the car and almost laughed at the sight of the dog. Lance would like the dog, she thought. The preacher left the lamb which hung over the fire and walked over behind Mary, still carrying the salt and scraper he was using to clean the barbecue plate with. Mary looked beautiful thought Lance as he stepped from the car and watched her still eyes as she stood pillar-like waiting for him to speak. Lance nodded at the preacher: “I found him on the road alone. He’s got a dog. I haven’t seen one for a while.”

The swagman didn’t move and Lance glanced back at him sitting next to the spear through the open door.

“Does he speak?,” asked the preacher.

Lance nodded and walked over to the fence and said under his breath: “He says the Reformation is a goer and that he must return and that the spear of destiny or whatever is in the car and I spoke to Gosseemtoo, he sends his love…” said Lance sending up the entire world of the preacher in just one sentence. Mary drew closer and they embraced over the fence.

“Can I kiss you on the front porch?”

“No, but you can kiss my arse over the picket fence,” she laughed.

“Gosseemtoo said the latest stage of the Reformation has begun,” announced Lance, pronouncing more so the preacher could hear properly.

The preacher smiled at Lance. He felt something within him melt and he looked over at the swagman and his dog. He remembered the boy. The boy with blue eyes and Lance and Mary watched as the preacher moved through the gate, drawn to the car and its occupant.

“Bradley,” said the preacher through the open door. “Are you there, Brad? You’re back. You made it…”

The swagman turned from the windscreen and his blue eyes looked deep into the blackness of those of the preacher.

“Water,” he pleaded. “I need …”

“That confection? We’ve plenty,” said Lance.

“Come,” said the preacher. “Join us. We shall eat and drink and celebrate the Reformation.”

Brad opened the door and stepped from the car followed by his dog. HIs lingering gaze fell upon Mary.

How are you?,” he asked, his throat parched as he gulped the words once again dry.

“Good,” she said. “I mean all right. I mean there’s nothing like lamb or mutton for dinner”

Brad shook his head.

“She’s gone,” said the preacher enigmatically, sorrow in his downcast eyes.

Saul watched the arrival of the swagman and his father from inside the house. He ran quickly and replaced his father’s binoculars and stood at the window of the study. It was the stranger. He would come and stay at their house thought Saul and he went into his bedroom where he removed the floorboards beside his bed. He reached down into the hole where he kept his secret things. He pulled out a comic book. It had been given to him by the swagman last time he visited. It told the story in colour pictures of a man called GI Jack…

“This is television,” the swagman had told him. “Frozen in our minds. Telling stories with pictures.”

Jack was dressed in green. He was a soldier who killed people in the jungle. He could drive jeeps and fly planes and he could shoot cannons just like Saul thought the swagman could. There was some blood. Saul then remembered the blood on the preacher’s hands again.

“Sometimes we must kill,” said the preacher as he wiped his forehead. “And I mean the evil within as well… not necessarily kill it but quell it.”

Saul stared at the face of Jack. There was sweat on his brow… The preacher would burn the book if he found it and Saul replaced it in the hole with all the other forbidden material such as the video game and toy soldiers which someone had lovingly painted but were now chapped and scratched from too many games. He replaced the floorboards and concealed the cracks. He went back to the window of his father’s study and watched the three men walk up the road to the preacher’s house. Saul smiled as he watched the dog follow. The last dog, a golden retriever named Amber had died nearly a year ago.

Mary was in the kitchen. She prepared the knives and forks and serviettes for the barbecue.

“Saul!,” she called.

The kid with the sky-blue eyes, freckled nose and straight blonde but darkening hair appeared. She felt uneasy and smiled at her son. Yes, he was her son, she thought.

“Take these plates out to the table.”

Mary placed a stack of plates in his outstretched arms.

“Then go and play a little more outside, we’ll be eating soon.”

“Can I wait for Daddy?”

“He’s at the preacher’s house. You’re too old for daddy. Call him dad.”

She wasn’t sure and remained unsettled about the whole business. She never gave the thought of television a second thought. She liked the idea of feminism but the women there all stayed at home: “Go wait for daddy then come home for tea,” she said absentmindedly.

“Will the stranger come?”

“I don’t know,” she said, embraced by her inner calm.

She thought of the swagman and she had used his name. It was “Bradley.”

Brad followed the preacher and Lance to his house while Mary kept an eye on the food. To Brad the house would forever be the house of his grandfather. Brad stepped onto the verandah, looking down at the wood and up at the metal ceiling. He thought of television at his grandfather’s house… There was the proclamation of a new drink: “The taste will have you forget all others…” It was obviously an alcoholic drink. The screen of television was full of toothy grins and swollen lips.

“Don’t listen to them,” said Brad’s grandfather. “You don’t even have to smoke cigarettes like the others.”

It was then that Brad thought he didn’t want cigarettes anyway and turned to look through the window at the field where there stood a headless scarecrow instead of listening to his grandfather for a moment. It was the typical reaction of a child…

“What do you want? To go to buggery, I’d expect?”

“I want to be an explorer,” said Brad who had seen a book about someone called Douglas Mawson.

“An explorer, eh,” said grandfather. “They name cockatoos after you.”

Brad still looked pensively through the window. A dark bird preened itself on the shoulders of the scarecrow.

“I want to be an explorer like Burke and Wills.”

“Burke and Wills? Didn’t they find themselves lost?”

“There was one which was lost… I can’t remember his name.”

Brad remembered a sketch of the explorer with a grey beard and hair and he was thin.

“Liechardt?,” suggested his grandfather. Brad nodded and was interested again.

“He disappeared in the desert and was never seen again. The book said it was his fate.”

Brad didn’t admit to his grandfather he didn’t really know the meaning of fate.

And he was back in the preacher’s house. Perhaps it was never his grandfather’s house at all. He couldn’t really remember… “What is Battlestar Galactica?”

“Could be one of Pentan’s secret weapons,” smiled Lance slyly.

As Brad’s mind wandered, they entered the preacher’s study, and he once again noticed the stained wooden floor and the furniture. It was still all intact as if his grandfather had never left. Did they have these types of houses all over Australia?

“Well, it’s good to see you both,” said the preacher and handed them a cold beer home brewed and kept in a small refrigerator powered by their generator. Lance ripped the cap off the long neck and poured the contents down his throat in one fell swoop. The preacher rolled a cigarette from loose tobacco.

“The evil in suburbia is strong,” Brad had said as he opened his beer.

The preacher looked at Lance: “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Brad. “It should finally mean the end of Pentan, and the fulfilment of the Reformation.”

“Well, I told you, they’re doing what they’re doing. Gosseemtoo says they’re all there, every tribe,” said Lance. They are one nation. Like us.”

“They don’t know what threatens them,” said the preacher and closed his eyes solemnly to drink.

“He says that there’s thousands of them there and you can hear the chanting for miles… It’s an army of black fellas… and left over whites. Some of them are naked. You should see ‘em.”

“It takes only one to lead them and Pentan is that one,” said the preacher. “They could be swayed either way. It could go down to the wire.”

He is all that is left,” said Brad self-consciously looking around the room, his gaze falling upon Lance again. Brad couldn’t help but think it should be Lance who should take all the glory.

Each took a swig while Lance began once more to impatiently tap his bottle.

“It depends on the weather and who should act first. The rain people are a bit dim …,” he said.

“We will win. Here’s to victory. Finally, the new dreaming of the Reformation for all the people and an end to the tyranny of Pentan and television!” They hadn’t noticed their second beer.

The sun had almost set and the other children had gone home. Saul wandered through the backyard of the preacher’s house and looked at the house at times almost embarrassed to go in. He wondered what the men talked about. He put his hand on the head of a small concrete statue of a farm boy and spun around, using it for a pivot for his body. Saul’s father had said it had looked like a farm boy, with baggy trousers and a slouch hat. The statue held its hand to its face to block the sun from his imaginary eyes. The white statue glowed amber in the light of the setting sun. Here the preacher had told Saul the tale of Simpson and his donkey and how he had saved so many lives while GI Jack was killing people. Saul’s eye turned to the base of the pedestal where there was an ant’s nest. It was always there. Hundreds of ants would come out of it during the day. It was the biggest ant’s nest in the perimeter thought Saul. Here, the small black ants would follow each other in a line which led into the distance. He could never find the end of the line which disappeared somewhere underneath the preacher’s house. Perhaps there was a secret tunnel which led somewhere. Silly ants thought Saul as they scampered together in the fading light. Saul thought of how mad they must have been to all live together under the preacher’s house and how his dreams must have been affected. He used his finger as a machine gun and shot them as he imagined a dive bomber. He would call himself Chuck, the best fighter pilot of all. Some ants would be crushed outright while others would be cut in half and lose their legs as they tried to outrun the shadow of Saul’s fist across the concrete. A line would be drawn and any ants which crossed that line would be destroyed. Saul remembered the day when his mother emerged from behind the orange tree carrying a bundle of oranges.

“Aren’t you afraid giant ants with giant boots will come stomping into your room in the middle of the night?”

“No!”

She pouted as well and left the boy. An orange had fallen to the ground and Saul began to pick at its perfect skin. He looked down at the ants and bit into the ripened fruit, thinking of the ants and their bloodless and speechless world…. Before he went into the preacher’s house, he took a pee and washed the ants away in a tremendous flood. It was a blood orange sunset.

The men found a lull in their conversation and finished their third beer. Saul knocked on the door of the preacher’s study and stood barefoot on the polished boards.

“Hello son,” said Lance, opening his arms.

The boy sprung forth and Lance lifted him as high as he could, groaning slightly at the weight.

“You might be getting a bit too big for this,” said Lance: “Cos’ I know I am.”

“Tea’s ready,” said Saul.

“Good lad. Well, fellas let’s go over and get some tucker.

“Hello,” said Saul to Brad.

“Hello,” answered Brad.

“You remember Saul?”

“I do.”

“We’ll be there in a minute,” said the preacher.

“Okay,” said Lance and led himself and began to lead the boy away.

“Wait, I have this for you,” said Brad and produced from his pocket a small felt cloth and inside that cloth was a porcelain dog standing on a box and the word: Gundagai

Saul smiled broadly and clasped it in his hands and left the room.

“You and your kitsch Brad…,” said the preacher.

“He’s turning out a fine-looking boy,” said Brad. “How old is he now?”

“He’s coming along ten a bit younger,” said the preacher, drumming his bottle and falling back into an armchair with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“Do you still have television in your head?,” the preacher asked spinning a finger next to his temple.

“Always,” said Brad: “and just because you’re not receptive…”

“Lance thinks you’re all fucked up.”

“Well, fuck Lance.”

“He’s a good sort,” said the preacher, looking down the neck of his bottle… “Just a fuck-wit,” and they both laughed.

“Yes,” said the preacher upon the laughter subsiding: “We’re all a bunch of fuck-wits living in this godforsaken place. Just remember, no television in front of the children, they’re all too innocent.”

“Don’t lose it father,” said Brad. “There really is such a thing.”

“Tell me about television. It’s more than waking dreams planted by satellites…”

Brad remembered and tried to keep objective rather than drift into fragments once again…

“The age of television. Watch the great indivisible land and her monarchy, her people; strong, invisible, subtle. United! … Here storms rage in vast deserts, where dry winds change boundaries, and the desert grows. The water swelling creeks, choking and changing waterways, the flux of green on the plains, the ranges. Stroll through them with me, travel along them and through them. Television travels with us and this is television. Ta-da howzat?”

“It is time for Pentan to be destroyed,” said the preacher matter-of-factly, almost baiting Brad for what he really didn’t know.

“Television saves!,” said Brad, raising his brows at the comment and putting down the last of his beer.

“No! Television doesn’t save. The Reformation saves and saved!”

“You forget preacher that television came first.”

Brad looked at the floor, his mind swirled with sudden hatred and sadness.

The preacher saw the sadness and said: “I’m sorry you didn’t find her.”

Together they wandered over to find the BBQ had been relocated to the house of Lance and Mary, carrying an Esky between them. They ate the lamb and got merry telling tales of days past. Brad was silent about his past or at least he thought he was … was he related to these people in some way and was everything else just the politics of the everyday? They were scavengers really and they lived off the dead’s belongings. They grew their banks of food in the gardens. They didn’t speak of sex and there were no babies anymore. Brad only told the past to himself. He felt the inside of his elbow and instead dreamed of television visiting him again once more. Brad’s was a shattered world away from the carefully built lives of the others, thought the preacher. Yet he is a part of the Reformation. He’ll do … to kill.

***

Chapter Two

“O Children of the Sun, we are the centre of the universe” Anthony Sparkes.

“I still believe that if you aim to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon” Tom Stoppard.

To tell you all about my career as a journalist is pointless, Brad self-mythologised about himself. He would use the first person to make it all the less confusing but he is the hero of his own story and everyone should be the hero of their own story. He was born and educated in Adelaide and first joined the newspapers there before receiving a grading at the Gold Coast Bulletin. It was there for several years where he learned his trade and it was that period which changed his life though he did not know how much. He was young, undirected and perhaps even misdirected; an unguided missile, programmed to think he could write fiction when really his capacity was limited due to inexperience and a lack of education. His ego in his mind was broken according to his local doctor and out of control. It’s amazing how a chance comment can change a life, like when the girl he wanted to marry joked about the ending of his favourite movie and he decided she was no longer the girl to spend the rest of his life with.

Perhaps as he writes these words in the third person, he slips into the first as he tells himself: I still am out of control. He enjoyed the autonomy and enjoyed a type of disciplined madness that a newsroom sometimes demanded… The sweet nausea as he drove through the streets of Surfer’s Paradise watching the scenery and people with all their money spent on leisure and making a buck. If it was a pleasure to make money here then you had it made. The place never did really gel in retrospect it had no heart. The place could be a bit tacky where it had not been redeveloped. None of it gelled anymore for Brad, you had to really know the Gold Coast and the major players and he wasn’t ready to spend his entire life there and make that commitment. Some say it takes only one summer of experience. After two summers, he wrote a feature article on the death of Anthony Sparkes which was based on the book Death of a Surfy: Anthony Sparkes – Surf-osopher. It was some unpolished and unpublished bit of shock journalism a fellow journalist had concocted before he left the newspaper and joined the public service. This individual named Anthony Sparkes used homespun Nietzschean thumbnail philosophy along with the teachings of Buddha and Confucius to form his own following which ranged from hippies to surf Nazis. He was a Marxist, a socialist and an anarchist… The worst thing next to anarchy in this world is government was a quote he loved to use along with: every anarchist is a baffled dictator, which someone attributed to Mussolini. That was it, Brad had created a whole legend around a guy which had created a whole legend around himself. It was fascinating. If only, Brad thought, he could have changed the world…

Here’s a clip from the article Brad eventually wrote using the book: “‘O Children of the Sun, we are the centre of the universe’ – These are the inspiring words of surfy cum philosopher Anthony Sparkes – an enlightened youth who drowned in surf last week near Yamba. Sparkes, who formed the organisation The Children of the Sun, with a membership of over 2000 members on the east coast was a strikingly tanned and handsome 23-year-old with a knack of getting the right councilors sacked, to get MPs shaking and to get the police angry – all in the name of peace and the environment. Blonde with a bushy haircut and standing over six feet tall, he was born in Sydney in the mid-60s. He went to a public school and did not matriculate. Instead, he became an apprentice builder, preferring the life of a surfer on Sydney’s north coast. It was a life which brought him to Surfer’s Paradise and it was on the Gold Coast where he first received recognition.

His ‘religion’ was a potpourri, a religion based on sun worship, good health, good sex and consideration of the good and evil within man. Some were convinced he was beyond good and evil. It was not a religion which deliberately made money for Sparkes, who would spend any cash from fundraisers on current causes as well as on hard up members. No-one has actually yet traced the money trail and his money may have come from family but it all seems above board…” (All Brad could trace was some checks from a Senator Carlson and some notes which asked him to be remembered or Sparkes would be remembered come the next election) … “Sparkes was an unlikely philosopher. He was illiterate with certain words and could not spell Nietzsche’s surname and drank copious amounts of alcohol. His bouts with bourbon were legendary along with a heavy marijuana habit. When I first met Sparkes, he told me he was “permanently stoned” but he told me this fluently and logically. He told me that The Children of the Sun was a religion and a philosophy all in one and it was based on those five words … It was not a political organisation which believed in “that oneness of Australia we all talk about” but it felt those words instead.

‘I believe our black brothers and sisters walk with us and this should be recognised,’ said Sparkes. ‘The dreamtime was more than interrupted and so were a people.’

The Children of the Sun received much criticism for its naïveté from the Catholic and Protestant churches as well as mainstream political parties. Sparkes parents were members of the Uniting Church, and he himself never went to church and never professed any beliefs in the church or religion except his own. He described his as an Australian religion meant for Australians.

The first meeting of The Children of the Sun occurred in a wooden hall in July of last year. The hall on the Gold Coast Highway is in the heart of Surfer’s Paradise and had been leased by sympathetic Presbyterians. I reported on this first meeting and described it at the time as ‘electric’. I still do not think I used the word incorrectly. It still rings true. I am not a member of The Children of the Sun, but I have followed the growth of this church over the last 18 months and remember many moments of delirious happiness involved in its formation. Yet the children and Sparkes were not without their difficulties. They were short of money and the council and police were conservative. They were intent to ‘run these kids out of town’ to quote anonymously. The Children of the Sun met every Wednesday night and they were bright affairs. There was wine and food brought by members, a speech or sermon by Sparkes, followed by open discussion of social problems in the area and charitable donations. These would last for around half an hour and were a rich source of stories for the newspaper. They were social problems discussed by the people who knew best and included discussions on drug and alcohol dependency. I attended many meetings and ignored much of the hypocrisy and found true stories which damaged forever the credibility of several well-known figures in the area. From bagmen to wife beaters to child molesters. Throughout the 18 months The Children of the Sun remained undivided, growing stronger and increased its membership ten-fold. The circumstances of the death of Sparkes – he is listed as ‘presumed drowned’ are, well, mysterious. Only last week I heard his last ‘sermon’. It regarded drug use by the young and corruption within the police force which only compounded a situation which included death threats on his life.

“Sparkes had named people and members of the Establishment who kept an eye on proceedings and were obviously disgruntled. I can only hope there can be an honest and thorough investigation into the disappearance of this man who will be sorely missed by his congregation and possibly Sparkes had a future in politics.”

“Governed by a lack of space and deadlines, I know now I could have written a better piece, a more powerful article. There was no investigation of any note. Anthony Sparkes had drowned and so had the hopes of his multicultural congregation as well as his own political ambitions about amending the Constitution. With a total vacuum, The Children of the Sun became defunct and folded straight sway like a fad. But you can still find some people who still call themselves Children. Shortly afterwards I resigned from my position due to disillusionment with the ingrained corruption on the council and state levels of politics.” Brad’s Journal

“I found the first article I wrote on The Children of the Sun, about their first meeting at the church hall: ‘Gold Coast City Councilors, politicians and policemen are corrupt and leading the country to its downfall according to a religious sect The Children of the Sun. Those people would be named as a part of “The Reformation of the Nation” according to sect leader Anthony Sparkes. Sparkes spoke to a congregation of over 100 people, who met at the Presbyterian church on the Gold Coast Highway last night. The atmosphere in the church was electric. Sparkes opened his spiel with the phrase “O children of the sun, we are the centre of the universe’. The crowd consisting of people mainly from the ages of 18 to 25, were spellbound by the local unemployed surfer, himself no less than 25. His speech maintained that many Gold Coast elders were corrupt.

“These people are leading us to our downfall,” said Sparkes. “Like the Romans the nation will fall, it is falling and the barbarians will be ready to strike. They are striking now from within. They own our land – they own our food. Who will stop them?”

There was a roar from the crowd: “Us”

The meeting which included pizza and soft drinks along with the smell of some exotic herbs ended before ten o’clock without further incident.

“A spokesman for Gold Coast Alderman Mr Gary Griffith said these people were not to be taken seriously.

“What they are making are fierce accusations which have no proof,” said Griffiths. “The council can only hope there will be retractions of these statements.”

The Member for Surfers Paradise Mr Alf Dunstan said he was interested in any further allegations.

“If these people are making this sort of statements, then I challenge them to come clean and tell us who these people are myself,” he said. “I would be interested to know who these people are.”

“The police would not comment on accusations of corruption. I have notebooks of all the meetings. I have kept some recordings of Sparkes, including the first interview.” Brad’s Journal

“I have tried to learn as much as possible this last week. I think he has been murdered by the barbarians. I refuse to work in a world polluted by these hare brains. They are the destroyers of truth. They have destroyed any hope of anything being achieved except maudlin.” Brad’s Diary

“In my madness, my obsession, I did manage to piece together his last moments. I was helped with an interview with Karen Smithers who was the last person to see Sparkes alive. A nice-looking freckle faced teenaged blonde girl. She was his girl and she too is dead. Here is the short essay I prepared on his death.

‘Anthony Sparkes gave his last sermon on the Wednesday November 31. The following day, he and his girlfriend of six months, Karen Smithers, drove to Nimbin where they scored and spend the night in their van on the side of the road. In the morning the couple returned to the New South Wales coast where Sparkes surfed in the bay at Yamba.

Karen said the last time spent at Yamba had amounted to “good jollies” as she stayed on the beach smoking dope. The couple were stoned when they, with other Children, whose names she cannot remember, met and spent the day together.

‘I was stoned,’ she said.

‘They went to the Yamba Hotel overlooking the water where they ate hamburgers with chips and continued to smoke dope. They stayed at the hotel for several hours, playing pool and getting drunk. Sparkes couldn’t stand when the others left. He was shouting obscenities and was soon removed from the pub gently. Karen drove the pair of them out of Yamba and went south for some reason which she blamed on being stoned. They should have been heading north which would have returned them home in time for Sparkes’ appointment with the bank. The bank appointment was for a loan for a premises for the Children. They stayed the night on the side of the road among the sand hills after Karen pulled over suffering ‘delusions of paranoia’ that they were being followed. Sparkes said they were ‘delusions of grandeur’.

‘There were these headlights and they just kept following close sometimes and other times they would be far away. I thought I could see a government number plate.’

They slept soundly although Karen recollected having heard Sparkes get up sometime during the night to vomit. It was then she said that she heard voices and again she told me she can’t be sure because of the state she was in. Karen woke to find Sparkes and his surfboard gone. She went to the beach and could not find him and walked for hour until around eight in the morning when she found his surfboard. It appeared that the leg-rope had snapped and there was no sign of Sparkes. She drove to the nearest settlement and the police were called in. They searched for the rest of the afternoon and the next two days but found nothing. Sparkes was gone presumed drowned.”

“I fucking well don’t believe it!” Brad’s Diary

“I first met Sparkes at the beach in August last year. I took my tape recorder with myself. Here is a transcript of the conversation, parts of which were unintelligible because of the wind and the surf.

“Anthony Sparkes? I’m Brad Minikin from The Coast Bulletin. Can we talk for a minute?”

“Yeah, I’m about to have a cone. You want one?”

“No thanks Brad… I mean Anthony…”

“Call me captain. Good morning to you… We’re all captains at the helm… Is this for an article? … Something about the Children?”

“Yeah.”

“Well shoot …. You probably want to know where it all started?…”

“Yeah.”

There is a pause as Sparkes fills a big cone and coughs after taking a large toke.

“You know it was when I was a kid. Yeah, I was a kid watching Skippy or something you know with all the hands holding paws on sticks. I was watching this shit and I couldn’t laugh. I stopped laughing and I thought: ‘This is crap’. And this crap is killing us! Mum had just been sacked or retrenched whatever you want to call it… interest rates were yet to be shit but we would never own our own home since dad dumped us… I suddenly grew up when she said she hadn’t bought any dinner… I had friends with me and at thirteen I turned to them and said: ‘They’re feeding us this crap and we’re just taking it.’ I went out for a surf, there wasn’t much, so I got thinking again and I thought that we were the Children of Television. That was when I started crying. When I came ashore, I thought: ‘Hey, I’m Australian! Then what the fuck is Australian? Christ all these remnants and the Age of Television has fucked us all up. Like in the past they all died in wars and they didn’t know why. We should know why. Instead, we’re brought up on all this shit and it’s fed to us by the people in charge, the barbarians. They know what they’re doing, they’ll be the reason for the end of the world. Then end of this paradise. And it is the damaged leftover children of the Age of Television who will have to rebuild for a new generation. They will have to ignore and rebuild. That’s the idea of the Reformation. The end of the world and the beginning of a new one.”

“Now tell me where the indigenous come into it.”

“Well, they’re the real and original Australians, aren’t they?”

“Well, yeah (unintelligible)”

“They had their dreams of the land, their own remnant in their own language? Perhaps it was all just pictures painted on walls and giant creatures in their minds fighting one another and other tribes. It’s their Dreamtime which we fucked up. You know the barbarians came and fucked up and destroyed it. They weren’t given a chance man. But now this is their chance and our chance too. The barbarians are fucking the barbarians and making more barbarians. Is that a maxim? No way. God, I think shit after two of these.”

“Mmmm.”

“Well, they are Children, maybe more innocent once upon a time, they haven’t been fed as much shit as us the Children of Television. They’ll pray, and we’ll pray together, that the Age of Television will end and there will be a total reboot and a new land will be born from the stores of the Reformation. We’ll grow together, united together, walking hand in hand together… It probably sounds like shit to you. Think of them back in Dreamtime and thinking one another’s thoughts. All naked, man.”

“What made you? What brought you to tell people about it?”

“I was talking to some of the guys, you know we were pretty coned and they said they told me that people said ‘who’s that bloke’ you know and they think I’m eccentric and all that. Anyway, people were listening to this shit and before I knew it I had people thinking it should be some sort of religion and there was something good about it and I was the new Christ or something. So, I called them my Children. We liked the beach, the surf and the sun. So, it was The Children of the Sun.”

“But what made you turn serious? You made some pretty strong allegations last night.”

“Oh right, big jump. You see I met this chick Karen and she said, let’s get this thing together. We got everyone together who knew shit on everyone… The Children love it and they’re not scared, they don’t care.”

“What sort of shit?”

“Be there next week mate, we know everything … a rich church, maybe even a party. We’ve got documents and signatures… Who’s (unintelligible) …”

That’s where the interview was terminated. This transcript sent my mind wild and several months ago I started the story of the Reformation from the sketchy religious details from the depths of my own imagination and the power of plagiarism. I decided I was one of the Children. It would be a desolate world with only a few survivors where only the innocent survived. There was one other occasion and this was at the secret meeting of The Children. Sparkes invited me and maybe I was really meant to tell their story. Still, I doubt myself. Well, tell all the doubts to fuck off. The meeting took place in a small farmhouse outside Toowoomba.

“Welcome,” said Sparkes. “To all Universal Soldiers. Who saw that one? Pretty good, wasn’t it? Don’t you love Dolph?”

I looked around briefly at the dingy high ceiling of the lounge and dining area in that country farm house. It smelt a little damp, probably unused. There was a couple of tables and the smell of hay. There was also twenty of us surrounded by half empty bottles of champagne. This was the first secret rendezvous that I knew of. The heart of The Children of the Sun veiled in secrecy. The discussion of the Reformation. I was interested to see who would attend. I was surprised by the large number of Indigenous. Six of them male and one full lipped slim woman. Anthony and myself, eight or so other men and Karen were there with three other men and two handsome women.

“As you know, we are young,” Sparkes continued. “But we are disciplined and we have a task – The Reformation.”

Sparkes was eloquent as he stood before the band of people wearing tight fitting, dull surf attire. A couple of the others wore suits. All had short cut hair, even the women, who were boyish in appearance. This was the first and, as it turned out, final meeting of the Australian Reformation Front or ARF and I laughed at a vision of a lame dog. The intensity, the seriousness of those tight young bodies with cropped hairstyles… the strong and even fierce voices when each spoke. I felt disembodied, away from them, detached, an intruder of The Children. Yet I was treated as one of them. I was sworn to secrecy and I knew it. I could never break their trust.

“This is where the world, our world begins,” said Sparkes coolly. “And their’s ends!”

Minds bantered and this journalist listened intently in his detached manner letting the scene absorb him/me, myself without touching, breaking the imaginary glass which was between myself and the people. Fuck philosophy, it was a job and yet I would never report this scene as the minds discussed what should and should not be done. It was never heated. There was suddenly a vote and it was tied. There were discussions of violence. Sparkes had the deciding vote. I watched his face, so pure as he decided.

‘Children it is decided. We have a weapon. We have several weapons. One of them is biological and local … It would mean the total destruction of the world … Except for The Children.’

They would also use violence. It was the time of The Children.

Two of the men were high ranking civil servants and I knew them as in their late 20s who existed somewhere in the public service bureaucratic maze. They outlined their first phase of sabotage. They talked with the other young men, large in stature, one was an ex-policeman with army training. They had a network where they could get guns. Karen spoke with icy precision. I found she was already ex-ASIO who was disillusioned with the grand plan. She said she was only a teenager and yet she was much older. I doubted her for some reason. The leader of the Indigenous was a full-blooded fellow who went by the name of Samuel and he spoke with calm determination.

‘It has taken the Reformation for the people of this land to finally see our heart. It will give us the freedom to finally see our heart returned to us. Stuff the Constitution, The Reformation will give us Our land as it was meant to be. The way the white people are living now, the land is being destroyed and not even for our people. We tear our heart out of our land and give it to the foreigners with the money. The money they created and control. The land is raped of the minerals, and those minerals return home bastardised…’

‘Bastards,’ I whispered to myself feeling another awakening, almost giggling.

‘The Reformation,’ he continued will put an end to the coastal dwellers. It will destroy the ports and the other lands who come to plunder us. It will also put an end to the Establishment and free and convict settlers who failed to create a proper society. They call themselves government. It is the genocide of our land, people and animals. Our land!”

As I watched the man speak, I became aware of how perfectly he spoke, as if he were reading from some script, as if this was all some damned television show and this man were an actor. Samual sat down and Sparkes stood with a glass brimming with champagne.

“Let us begin the ceremony – the Reformation. It is with one heart, the heart of Our land. Let it grow and the world as we know it cease to exist.”

There was a moment silence while it seemed that everyone was reading each other’s thoughts while I wondered if this man was a God or just another Roman emperor. Then I sipped the Great Western with the rest of them. Television? And soon Anthony Sparkes would be dead.

I was the first to leave. I think I must have nodded off as it was later than I thought and it was a long drive back to the Gold Coast. As I departed there was a roar of laughter as if the joke was on me. Surely, he just suggested they get stoned. That night I dreamt I saw the imaginary coffin of my brother being lowered into the ground with a woman crying and vowing solemnly to have another child. I had asked my mother about my brother when I was younger and he had been stillborn. Stillborn and yet full term … Back then, they took them away. I missed him even though I never met him. I always wanted a brother and craved one when I began to masturbate and other times when I was alone. It wasn’t a perversion. I really wanted that boy to live … and I blew out my grief into almost Oedipal proportions.

***

Chapter Three

“Fuck them all. Death to the barbarians.” Brad’s Diary.

“I nearly missed the train. I haven’t trained enough for training.” Anonymous.

Inside the taxi it was hot even the with windows down. Brad’s sweaty left hand smudged his blue bound diary as he wrote: ‘I fell into the overwhelming sadness. It seems like a wave of night. It glows midnight blue from deep within and lingers; a jewel-like eclipse. This dark well of self is a burning knife extracting tears. It obliterates thought into lightness and then it will fade. There it lurks and weaves, through the tide of thought. It is primitive. It too can kill.’

The page was brown with sweaty muck. I know the thing keeps me sane, thought Brad. What is sanity? Does it make sense? It could all be so fucking ambiguous just to be angry and be labelled mad. Fucking! Fuck them all! Who the fuck’s going to tell you otherwise? It really doesn’t matter. Angry in your head… Does that make you ‘mad’?

Brad stopped sucking the end of his pen like some spoilt child with a red lollypop and saw his taxi approach the train station. I mean my business is supposed to be reality, he thought. I take pictures of reality and sell them into the highest bidder. Sounds good but it is freelance blackmail of the self to continue earning and eating and drinking. Fuck the days of spirit drinking councilors and pot smoking movie stars all calling each other arseholes. Black and white blackmail with pics of smoochers, right through to politicians with dog collars around their necks and carrots up their arses. It was mainly sex.

Brad felt an erection follow and pass and he wondered about the shower in his compartment, not for relief but for business. It throbbed placidly for a moment and he shut his diary as the taxi drifted to a stop past a billboard of Jennings Homes.

“That’ll be ten dollars fifty,” said the Italian taxi driver, barely looking over his thick hairy shoulders. He was wearing a singlet dripping with sweat and grunted as he handed me the change and Brad took his camera case and travel bag.

The sun was a big blazing wheel spinning relentlessly in the sky. They had to put the fucking platform out here, he thought. Adelaide, the most planned city in the world once upon a time! Humbug! Brad must have looked like Humphrey Bogart standing on the burning bitumen waiting for Ingrid Bergman to leave.

‘Fuck off,’ he whispered to himself and started to walk towards the main platform. Brad’s sometimes priapic cock started to harden again and he began to think of his little steam train at his grandfather’s house. It was a town where you would stop to whet the thirst of your radiator and pick up something greasy to eat. All made for a quick escape. He smiled at the mystique of that town; the heat and the flies and the bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Brad stopped for a moment at the scale sized engine which sat on the platform. There were a few people milling around, some of them chatting idly and there was a loud group of people, a bunch of party supporters all dressed up for the election in their red and blue and white badges and hats, blowing horns and making general fools and nuisances of themselves. Brad suddenly remembered the federal election and how, in a few days’ time, most people would have to vote again. A-fucking-gain! They all thought it was fun though, on their way to catch a train to Alice Springs with their beloved Bob Carlson, who was making the change from Senator to MP. Our next Prime Minister! They hoped. Or the one after that.  The man Brad had been assigned to photograph tonight or sometime during the journey.

The steam train returned into view, as Brad stared at the scale model. He was in his grandfather’s shed and that shed was full of mystery; old trunks and gadgets and all sorts of tools populated his work bench. It was kept in a cupboard beside the bench. A tiny machine, contraption or gadget as he might have called it, no bigger than a loaf of bread with a steam turret. Brad had wondered at how Federation had brought all the different gauges into one and how the Children of the Sun hoped to monopolise on this and bring on the Reformation. It was as simple as that as Brad’s mind flicked over for a moment and then back again.

The miniature in his grandfather’s shed ran on methylated spirits much like a politician and it was the perfect example of the beginning of the Industrial revolution and man’s demise into a civilisation full of people and pollution. The beginning of the end and Brad chuckled at the thought so empty and worthless. The beginning of the fucking end. End fucking thought. Thought ends.

“I had one when I was your age,” said my grandfather as he hammered away at his work bench like he did with his words and thoughts.

The thoughts came leaking back in Brad’s mind and he could not stop them, they were like a song which would repeat over and over again in his mind. The sound of the whistling steam train in my grandfather’s shed brought the girl from down the road. She said she could hear it from her house. A tomboy with short hair, brown jeans and boots, we would go spider hunting among the galvanised iron behind the shed. Red-backs were prizewinners, daddy long legs came second and if there was a huntsman we would run… “Will you show me yours?”

“Only if you show yours.”

“You go first,” she said both of us less than eight years old.

Brad pulled down his homemade school shorts and his undies and quickly lifted his Happy Days t-shirt. She didn’t say anything and instead watched the penis swell into the air.

“You can hang things on that,” she said and squeezed the end of the pink knob. He quickly pulled up his shorts to hide the stiffy. And she ran away.

“I had one when I was your age,” Brad’s grandfather’s voice echoed as he terminated the thought.

He went inside the building and bought a can of Woodies lemonade, looked at his watch and thought he had been waiting nearly two decades. At least too long. Jesus I hate time, thought Brad. Lousy time. I had a lousy time, people would say … Did you have a nice time? Quite nice. I hope you had a whale of a time and Brad played with the word for a moment longer.

The lemonade frothed and foamed down his throat and he returned to the platform where Brad noticed a tap dripping and told himself: Here we are, in the driest state, in the driest continent and this happens and shook his head. Brad put down his case and pack. Here he was about to take some photos of some well-known pork-barreling pollie, porking some wench, at least that was the tip off… A bead of sweat was dripping down Brad’s left temple. He could feel it and gulped the last of the Woodies before his eyes wandered back to the tap. There was the sound of The Ghan as it pulled into the station. Adelaide was a city of dripping dicks and dripping taps. Or was it? It really didn’t seem to matter to anyone, Brad least of all.

The conductor showed Brad to his compartment and he gave him fifty dollars to serve dinner there… The motion beneath my feet, he thought and Brad took out a large hip flask of scotch and his diary and journal with the papers of his unfinished manuscript. He would constantly look at old entries:

February 19: Coffee was breakfast, the papers were boring. My head began to ache. No more tears my friend.

February 19: ’I don’t believe I wrote that bullshit.’

February 20: I blinked sharply in the mirror and thought I could grow to love scotch. It certainly loves me.

Bullshit! Compelling stuff though, the ravings of a mad photojournalist. This diary is caught up in all the crap which floats freely around Brad’s camera cum travel bag, a sort of review of his life. He had burned all his bridges and now he looked outside the window of his compartment as the dry country eventually enveloped the train.

My name is Brad Minikin and I am 25 years old, he thought. I see myself in the mirror once more and the image poses for me. Forever trying to tell me something. I think he grows stronger in this doomed courtship. He will gloat innocently, he will look handsome, even beautiful, but he is as silent as the moon in a cemetery at midnight.

Brad poured the silky scotch down his throat.

Scotch is the love of a woman, bourbon her kisses, lingering like sweets for a spell, he mused, pompously. Eyes again on the mirror which is chapped and steamy, the murk of rising damp, past journeys, past glories of souls long since departed.

“If only you could speak,” Brad whispered and poured more scotch into himself. “I haven’t a voice from you, you give me nothing except silence.”

There are crow’s feet around Brad’s eyes, too much time in the sun; football shorts, coconut oil, beach towels on the sand and tinted sunglasses with a bromance resembling a well-built American film star. Vanity all in the quest of a hard on? What crap! It’s pure madness! Surely, surely, surely and don’t call me Shirley! … Me and the blonde princess screw endlessly in a night of drunken wonder broken by the encroaching tide lapping at our feet, he told himself. Jokes in the sand about television … I couldn’t read her thoughts! Blown out tubes and worn-out knobs!!

“Wake up you fool. You tired liar. You live a consciousness of wanton uselessness.”

Was it my voice? I put my hand up to my mouth and held it there. Or was it someone else?

“You fill a void with vices and waste your consciousness in lies and emptiness.”

It could be my grandfather talking or it could be … repeats. Past repeats of … I shook my head and my brain. Lies! They’re whispers, there’s no such thing! Lies and whispers

“You do not share. You cannot. Look at what you have become… Impotent. Live for beauty, the creation of beauty from this barren world. This world exists in yourself. Failure and frozen metamorphosis. It is you and the planet both as one.”

The voice was silent and Brad cried: “It’s heaven on Earth.” With tears in his eyes.

Brad placed his hand over his mouth as if I had muttered something forbidden. There were footsteps in the corridor as he questioned his sanity once more. These are not dreams, let them not be waking dreams, he thought.

“I shall awaken from dreams. Snap out of it.”

These words echoed in the compartment and Brad picked up his diary and his shaking body began to write: “In my hand a flower from the graveside. It was the most beautiful flower of purple and I stroked it with my hand. It sprung forth from the ground and reached endlessly into the sky. Its perfect petals reaching from a dark nucleus, flooding the air with a slight aroma which spiraled toward the newborn sun. Death encircled ready to destroy. The warm westerly winds tackled and frayed the immaculate structure, disturbing rotting foundations encroached upon by a cruel Mother Earth. Its dryness clamped thirsty organs in an unaffectionate embrace. The flower starved in the emptiness of its vice. The flower will die as the ripening sun radiates a smile upon its weary facade. It is gone as I let it go.”

Brad threw down the diary repulsed by what he had had written. The sound of the train on the tracks. It was getting dark outside. Then he heard the voices in the next compartment which was number four. Carlson. The reason why he was on the train. Snaps. I need snaps, he thought. He opened up the door to his bathroom and inside was a cream-coloured plastic plate held into place by four screws. He removed the plate carefully. There was no voice for this moment, but once he had removed the plate, he could see through into the next compartment. A two-way mirror, a peep-hole especially built for my camera by some blackmailer someone knew from years gone by. There was a man standing there right in front of Brad and the mirror.

“Here I am,” he said, a middle-aged man, greying about his bald and pallid scalp.

“You know I don’t really do this for a living, I make movies.”

“What sort of movies?,” flowed a high pitched giggle.

A woman stood too far to the left. Was this it? Why the hell was he telling her to make movies?

“Only the best movies.”

They embraced and Brad strained his eyes to see the woman. It was hopeless. Brad’s mind began to think of how he would set up the camera and then there was some wild fantasy about fucking some girl in the aisle of some movie show, his cock gliding in and out of her mouth. He gulped, she gulped. Brad thought she knew he was there for a moment and his dick was bone hard or at least he thought it was when the voices started again.

“Remember what happened last time?,” he said.

There was no answer.

“Who picked up the pieces after your damn fool suicide attempt.”

My eye focused again through the hole. I could see the back of the bald head, but all I could see of her was a pair of red stockings.

“O window to the Gods,” Brad whispered through pursed lips and twirled a finger towards his hip flask. The voices stopped and he waited in silence except for the sound of the moving train for the voices to rise again. Then there was the sound of the door shutting. They were going out. It was the best time to set the camera up. Brad pulled out his portable tripod and loaded his camera with film. Missed opportunity. Would they fuck with the light on again? Did they actually fuck?

Brad peeled off his sweaty clothes and had a shower before he set the tripod up, wiping any steam away from the peephole. He took another swig from the hip flask and began to write in his diary once more:

‘There is land floating beneath my feet. This is a land of coastal cities with a heart of desert. Cold and nebulous it sleeps. It tires from the stings of her tribes, and the children bitten to roam. They destroy the image of the sky, blot the light of the bloodied sun. A time endless where the world suffers a slow decay, peering over tall towers. We scream aloud or whisper naked on the sandy shores. Defiant is this land Terra Australis they spied and circled its endless shores. Lost among her cities the Children follow roads to nowhere or lead only to another city or death. After the fists stop shaking, hands shall unite. The people survive with the land, rich and strong-hearted, a core which bleeds only the rust of the sun. It is a long time past the Age of Television… Let us interrupt the broadcast skies and prepare for the Reformation!’

A knock on the door of the compartment interrupted the flow.

“Who is it?,” Brad called all too angrily.

“It’s your dinner sir.”

He shut the bathroom door and unlocked the compartment door and the porter gave him a look of bewilderment. Brad thought he must look a fright in his underwear. His empty flask was sitting on the table. He told him to leave the tray and locked the door again, took a deep breath and realised why the fellow had looked so odd. The spaghetti lunch he had wolfed down at some nondescript Italian restaurant was sitting on the floor; worse, it was moving with the vibration of the train. He still felt hungry. A plea from the organs demanded satisfaction. Brad lifted the plastic cover from the tray. Roast beef and vegetables with an appetite for Hungry Jacks and he picked up the tarnished fork and began to devour the rubbery meat.

He finished the meal and decided to go to the club car. There were many people there, including the election revelers who were living it up. The carriage stank of beer in the heat and the cigarette smoke made the haze even worse. The election party sat at a table shouting slogans as they drank their red and whites.

“Labor won’t get the Senate how many times do I have to tell you!?”

The sound grew over the rumble of the train. It was there, Brad met Paul Parsons. The man was a drinker. Brad did not make the league of the barfly like the men who would stand at the bar and demolish beer after beer, with the odd scotch or vodka. Parsons bore the scars of a drinker, the pale look and the premature ageing. There were two empty beer glasses before him and he was smoking a cigarette from a packet of Benson and Hedges Special Filter. His hand idly flicked ash into a filled ashtray and he looked up every now and then at the waitress cum barmaid, a pretty but short girl in a uniform. He brooded over his drinks and then looked quickly over his shoulder as Brad approached the bar.

“A beer,” he said to the girl.

“Fosters?”

“Have you XXXX?”

“No.”

“I’ll have a West End.”

It was South Australian beer, the best they had. Brad noticed Parsons ordered one too and could still taste Fosters at the mention of the word from a long night with his former bromance and it made him feel nauseous. He took a deep breath and pulled out a cigarette.

“Are you going all the way?,” asked Parsons.

“Not in here. But all the way to Alice Springs, yes.”

The waitress gives them two cold glasses and two tins of the West End. They poured the amber fluid until its usual frothy end.

“Are you going to Alice?,” Brad asked.

“For sure. I’m there for the party conference,” he said as he threw open his arm at the rowdy bunch of people in the corner. “My name’s Paul Parsons and I’m press secretary for old Bob Carlson. I think everyone here is going to Alice.”

“He’s a minister?,” Brad feigned ignorance.

“That’s right, they’re shipping us poor bastards up the right way – Australian National. The rest have got their Ansett tickets. Bugger of a place to hold a conference. Gives us a break though.”

Parsons sipped his beer.

“Haven’t seen the place. Has something about it though with all this Chamberlain bull. Are you going to the Rock?”

“I’m a photographer. My name is Brad Minikin. It’s my second visit.”

“Pleased to meet you Brad – Paul Parsons” and they shook hands.

And Brad thought he’d never been there in his life – not since he was four years old. He wasn’t lying and did remember some of the trip… Parsons looked at his watch and then out of the window.

“Well, old Bob’s got a few comments to make on the radio in a few minutes. I’ll catch you later Brad.”

“How do you do it?”

“Secrets of the trade.”

Parsons extended his hand to shake and Brad accepted. In a few hours, he hoped to get some pictures of his employer in some of the most alarming positions, and hopefully not snoring.

Brad had another beer and then returned to his compartment to find the mess on the floor gone. The camera was ready. He took out a bottle of scotch and waited with his diary, unable to write. There was no-one next door, Carlson must have been in the dining car. ‘Dear fucking diary, sometimes I think I’m an ASIO agent sent for some purpose…’

Parsons knocked at the door and Brad answered.

“What are you writing?,” he asked looking at the diary and all the other notes on the table.

“Something about a fellow named Sparkes. He was some sort of philosopher. He had this notion about saving Australia perhaps by destroying it first. He died last year. There may be a novella in it. Promising politician, too good for them.”

Brad reached into his bag and pulled out the rest of the notes of the doomed manuscript. Parsons picked it up and then raised his eyebrows as he began to read.

“I went through the young poet stage years ago. I had to stamp it all out. It was far too soul destroying.”

“I know what you mean but I think my soul has already been destroyed,” said Brad and Parsons almost laughed, not quite, a dismissive titter.

He opened up the first page of the section…

***

Chapter Four

“The evil I know in suburbia is Sir Pentan and the evil in myself is Sir Pentan.” Brad’s Diary

“The mood of tuning into the presence of television is somewhat depressed.”

Anonymous.

This is suburbia in the fifth year or so of the Reformation. The year television returned to suburbia as Brad remembered. Or, is the valley where Brad lived ‘suburbia’ and have the remnants of television never really left? It’s always a case of only really knowing your own neighborhood. Brad is stoned and asleep. But not quite…

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I think of the air and my oneness with it. When we sleep, does a part of us leave? Do our minds float about the room disembodied like giant dark blowfish? Our minds, our souls? Do they watch the organism at the same time? Our bodies begin to stir, adjusting to the light. Do they watch? Do the floating minds tease the organism with a heightened sense of reality? Or is it the body which ultimately draws the mind nearer?

Brad squeezed the skin of his penis until he felt it swell two-fold. His hand rubbed the flesh, lubricated with drops of semen which escaped each time he approached orgasm. He felt himself coming again, rising within himself and he squeezed the shaft of his penis until the feeling subsided and disappeared with a fleeting feeling of pain. He let it go.

A boy of sixteen, I am drawn to my body beneath the blankets. I see him. He raises his head slowly from the pillow and his perspiring body stands before the mirror. Arms long and unseemly, the hair long and unkempt, upper lip unshaven, a diamond of pubic hair. There is a gentle light through the grilled windows of the bedroom. I am closer now. He looks at the gentle lines which have begun to weave patterns on his forehead. There are the blue pools on his face, they seem to float in stillness. Perfect blue. Sleep is rubbed from them and he peers through the window.

The sound of the kookaburra in the distance, a cry from the wilderness which echoes through his valley. Its purity overwhelmed the chorusing cicadas and the merciful hum of perpetual madness. There were no birds in the sky and yet their calls still haunted the valley among the whispers of the wind in the trees. Eyes met the clouds in the sky, swirling in grey mass, swarming in the morning sky. They still brimmed the window’s vista. Brad felt the hunger once more grip his body. He clutched the pain which seemed to take hold his whole being as the kookaburra grated the silence outside his window once more. Its laughter held aloft in that often-stormy, if still often rainless valley.

Brad was awake. It came innocently and abruptly, the moment hard to isolate. It always was, this emergence from a deep, dark cavern, or the opening of a crypt. Enter the blackness and exit once more. Brad’s eyes focus on the picture on the wall. It is of his family; mother, father, sister and brother. And there is Brad wearing a goofy smile.

The approaching grey clouds in the sky were a warning thought Brad. They were thick and carried the rains of sowing and not harvest. He could feel the void in his body once again. Imaginary parasites chewed at his entrails. More hashish, he felt the headache coming.

“Plenty of hash will turn to ash,” Brad laughed pitifully.

He lit and sucked the pipe beside the bed, the hashish was sweet and Brad felt restful again. His eyes closed once more to forget the presence of the rain people, the followers of Sir Pentan and even Sir Pentan himself. Brad liked to drop the Sir since it was self-appointed anyway.

Pentan’s presence is dark and sickly thought Brad. There is only Pentan in this world. And I will destroy him before he destroys me with the massing of his evil smelling followers, their plunder and their rape of this city and the other cities throughout the country. I must isolate him as he destroys me through my isolation. I remember black-and-white, it can seep through in many colours. It is so I can no longer sleep. It is the hangover of dreams.

The rain people came to suburbia amid an autumn rainfall before sunset during the third year of the Reformation or two years ago. The skies flushed them from their burrows making them possible and unlovable. The long-known effect of water caressing and changing the planet and her organisms. The rusty orange of the leaves with their fingerlike leaves dripped of the moisture. It seemed to let life linger. The water fell through the thick undergrowth and then rested in the rich potent soil. There it found equilibrium once again. Perhaps good and evil also have an equilibrium… Brad liked to think the planet was getting better like he was getting better. Beneath this layer of earth, the rain people would be awakened by the moisture which gave new found life to their foul bodies as if some new-found Judgement Day had arrived. They were released, their dirty nails clawed their way to the surface and their eyes seemed to glow. They would face the world with dark, knotted faces, tormented with some unseen horror. They would often emerge from the bottom of a pool of mud, bodies wriggling with delight and almost dancing whilst dressed in rotting fibres of the latest fashions. As the rain fell, it cleansed their scabbed bodies of the putrid reminders of the world… Their haunting voices in his head! Brad emptied his mind of the rain people.

He instead fell on the bed again and watched the ceiling as the sound of the rain tumbled listlessly on the roof above. He felt the house was no longer empty. He sat up and looked at the television. There were six of them stacked together in the room in the form of some sort of idiotic crucifix but more like a pyramid. He believed in pyramids more than crucifixes. None of them worked, not since the end of the Age of Television. Each of them stood as silent as sentinels. In the silence Brad could still hear the hiss, the electronic sound of static, like the insects around him. It would grow stronger, and Brad had isolated one television, the one on the left with the fake wood and stubby legs. It is named HMV, letters of an emblem.

“Are you there?,” asked Brad.

“I am here.”

It was the return of television to suburbia. They were back from wherever they had gone. There were times when the television would not leave Brad. It would stay and taunt him.

“HMV will not go away. HMV is here to stay,” Brad would mumble to himself to block the voice.

HMV tells Brad about the world. A world where only he lives. It is the way of suburbia. Brad finally rose from the bed and kicked over an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Have you seen the clouds?,” said HMV and Brad nodded at his reflection in the grey screen and flattened his hair with spittle on his hand.

“Is it going to rain? It hasn’t rained in suburbia for over a year.”

“It is a sign.”

“Another sign,” said Brad who was bored with signs especially the one which at the end of the world said: Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think!

“It’s a sign of evil,” said HMV. Television then spoke with heightened aloofness or Brad tried to keep aloof. He didn’t want to get too close. He was getting better… and better!

“Do you remember the last time it rained in suburbia?,” it said and Brad could still not discern whether it was a male or female voice or even a child’s since it was kind of metallic.

Brad remembered the darkness. It appeared long after the streets were emptied of people. The darkness was fearful, murky and uneasy. Something would follow and watch whenever it pleased. Then it would be gone, leaving only a presence in the hollow of a tree or an empty house. This was or is the reign of Pentan. Brad has seen Sir Pentan. His pale face is hooded like he had seen in a movie which had obsessed him as a child. During the rain when he is with his disciples, he is the strongest. Pentan rules the cities, the central business districts and his threshold has begun to cross into suburbia. Brad’s thoughts remained there with Pentan for the moment.

The cicadas were silent and through the persistent sound of the rain he could hear moans and cries, connecting into one long whisper. The hair on Brad’s scalp stiffened as he strained to listen to the grisly sounds. He stood and moved warily to the window, opening his eyes wide toward the shadows through the grime. There may have been several of them but the moon shielded by dark clouds created a chaotic mess of shadows moving in the unrelenting rain. A pool of mud in the backyard began to move and a dark shadow rose from beneath the surface, followed by another. The shadows mingled and fell as if in some sort of mating ritual. An icy hand gripped Brad’s shoulder, and its eerie tenderness sent a shiver down his spine. Brad turned to see the cold face of Pentan. A smile curved the edges of his pale mouth. Was he really there, or was it some sort of apparition? It almost seemed frightened as if unable to ask a question… which was typical of the rain people and then he spoke.

“Look at me boy,” said Pentan using his long white arms outstretched from his dark robe to feel Brad’s skinny self, jump and shudder.

“Who are you?”

“I am Pentan. I am Sir?,” said Pentan with his dark eyes staring like some sort of venomous snake.

Finally, his hand released his grip as he pointed towards the window.

“Watch my children play out in the rain…”

Brad looked again through the window at the shadows which surrounded the house.

“Your children?,” and Brad turned to see Pentan had gone, his shoulder still chilled at the touch of his bony fingers and the hairs on the back of his neck still erect.

“Who is he?,” Brad asked the shadows and the muffled rain on the roof.

HMV was silent.

“Yes, I remember,” said Brad and a lingering shiver echoed unpleasantly within him.

The thunder opened a short symphony with a simple clap. Blood pumped through Brad’s temples, reminding him of the persistent hunger. Feed the organism, fill the need. A second clap of thunder scuttled birds from the trees.

“Please let there be no rain HMV,” he said to the empty set.

Brad pulled himself away from the window and left his bedroom. It was a simple house in suburbia in a valley, a family home with four bedrooms, kitchen and separate dining areas. An abundance of living space. The garden was fertile and overgrown. Brad had not moved from the valley in suburbia since the beginning of the rot. It was the perfect home. Yes, imagine this house bounded off by a fence waist high and multiply it hundreds and thousands of times. It is suburbia. It is truly a desolate place; buildings faded and weather-beaten, dark bricks, their fate spelt out with moss, paint peeling from the rotted wood, alive with blind creatures nourishing themselves in its decay. The houses of suburbia were lonely in the rot; gardens choked with weeds. Others wore vines which were mindless creeping vandals. Brad always wanted to be a mindless creeping vandal. He wanted to draw penises everywhere and write fuck on the side of aeroplanes, but that was another movie he had watched.

With the wind, these desolate monoliths began to howl like stray dogs pining for attention through the broken windows and doors. But there were no dogs here. The only animals to be seen here were the birds. The birds appeared in suburbia like phoenix, rising from the ashes. Brad would watch them and they would watch him with unquestioning eyes. He loved them for they were free. He loved all but one. There was a black one which lived at the end of the street. It hailed the rising sun with a rasping call. Its zombie eyes watched Brad as it collected whatever it needed to create the growing murder. He imagined it as some sort of breast-less demon regurgitating repugnant morsels for its zombie youth. The black bird did not crow this morning.

Brad entered the kitchen of his house where he could satisfy his hunger. He filled the hypodermic needle with the liquid he stored in a cordial bottle above the silent refrigerator. He injected the solution into a vein he found at the base of his inner elbow. He closed his eyes and lowered his head as he waited for the cocktail to take effect. He began to feel warmth as it filtered through his skin, reaching his face with a flush of a kind of heat. He opened his eyes and saw a perfect crystal in metamorphosis, floating in the sky, streaming the light of life. It was the sun and it shone brightly through the kitchen window for a moment and touched Brad. A storm had passed.

“There will be no rain,” said Brad to himself.

HMV remained silent and Brad began to feel good. Just the movement, the action of the body: the purpose of action. Just like mum used to say: Better and Better.

Parsons finished his glass of scotch

“Pentan now where do you get that name?”

Brad was surprised he had read most of the chapter.

“A simple play on words.”

“Is he a God this Pentan?”

“No, he is the destroyer. Not the destroyer of the world or maybe he was. Maybe he was there all the time… I don’t know what he is. Anything he does not like he feels he must destroy.”

“Where are the Gods?”

“Television.”

“Television is a God?”

“We worship it every day. Politicians take for granted that they are the Gods and think they are worshiped like movie and television stars when really its television.”

“This Brad is it you?”

“No, it’s the guy Anthony Sparkes and maybe my brother Saul…”

Parsons refilled his glass with scotch: “Personalities shift like the sand and so do characters.”

The golden beams of sun were always the inspiration for the beach. It was there, Brad could feel free and roam. He would feel the warm sand squeeze beneath his toes and let the sound of the lapping water suffocate his ears. He felt the smile burst spontaneously on his face. He closed his eyes and savoured it.

“I will go to the beach.”

Brad lifted his hands and covered his eyes as he walked slowly back to the bedroom. There he dressed in his favourite blue-checked flannelette shirt and a pair of red shorts he found in the large shopping centre which stood silently in suburbia. They were the latest fashion and would look good on one of the rain people, he laughed to himself once more. He scooped up the car keys next to his bed with a well-practiced swing. He left through the back door which led to the green backyard. The door shut solidly behind him. Brad dragged his feet through the grass which had been slightly replenished and let the evaporating moisture tickle his warm skin. The lawn was no longer and the once manicured landscape was long overgrown with clover. The gate which led to the front yard was off its hinges as the dog had escaped and was long dead.

Brad’s brow knotted momentarily and he stopped and turned, twisting his feet into the grass. The yard seemed to look the same as always. He looked down at his feet. The ground was so soft he began to sink through it. There are no rain people here, he thought. They are dead. The sun is shining and they are dead. Then Brad noticed what had changed in the corner of the yard. The crosses were missing from the graves of his family and the earth had been removed. There was a skull sitting on a mound of dirt. Brad pictured Pentan stroking his hairy face as he considered how to kill his injured child. He does not want them to suffer and they respect him like a father. He had heard one of them calling for him as the rain shrouded its hideous appearance: “Sir Pentan!,” gasped a shrill woman with a longing sated by his appearance.

Brad knew that they bowed and swayed before him, for they loved him and would love him until the day his, and their revolting sores, would stop weeping and they would lie immobile in the dry soil together forever. He is the lord Christ to them, he’s the demon Satan – he is their Buddha and he gives them strength. There, in the ground some will rot forever without having kissed him or placed their rotting fingers about his pale face. They are fools because I see Pentan caressing their corpses in his sleep and tenderly walking through the wildflowers which grow on their graves. Brad left the gravesite as his feet began to sink uncomfortably into another well-disguised patch of mud. It was his father; he could tell from the teeth: “Hello dad.”

Beside the road, next to the house, was a car. It was a Commodore an original 1978 model which he had seen before the rot in suburbia. Nice and red. The last car he had was blue, but it was wrecked last month when Brad was just as wrecked on a bottle of Jack Daniels. He had thrown the empty bottle through the window of an abandoned police car, blaring the horn as he passed. He had lost control of the car at a corner and ploughed into the gutter, rolling it twice before it bounced off a power pole and ended up in the front garden of some forgotten house. The bloody thing had exploded but Brad had fallen out somewhere between the gutter and the power pole and instead watched it burn. He found the red car nearby and with a bit of retooling it went just as fast.

Brad pressed the cool metal key firmly into his skin as he quizzed the car with a brief, engulfing look. He jumped in and inserted the key, fighting the gearstick as he started it. It quivered to life immediately, sending a pulse through its entire frame. It breathed dark fumes through its exhaust. Brad’s wet foot fell heavily onto the accelerator as it fell into gear… Brad treated the car like shit. And he sped off.

“I am on my way to the beach,” he said driving through a stop sign obscured by a branch of the tree where the black crow lived. There was also a sign embossed in green and gold which spelt out the name of the part of suburbia where Brad lived. Creedence Park. Green and Gold home of the koala! The colour of Caramello Bears, at least that’s what it reminded Brad of… Just a chocolate koala bear full of caramel which left Brad shaking his head. Oh, for a Freddo frog or a Bertie Beetle!

“Follow the blue horizon through suburbia to the beach.” …

Streets full of empty houses with broken windows continued to sweep by, while some remained intact with nobody home. Curtains danced from gaping holes. They were empty houses waiting. Brad passed a road where his family had seen an accident. There had been three sheets on the road for the motorbike rider, one for his body and two more for each leg. They formed a perfect triangle and three policemen stood with their legs apart, to stop the sheets blowing away in the wind. Brad shook his head again for the streets were now clear. There were hundreds of empty cars throughout the streets, thousands of them covered in dust and grime. Weeds grew out of the thick mounds of dirt which gathered around the wheels and gutters. The bitumen was barely visible beneath the dirt and only the white line in the middle of the road, where Brad steered his car, watching from time to time the fine mist of dust in the rear vision mirror behind him. This was a well-worn track; it was a track to the beach which ran alongside the shopping centre. The centre itself was only a few kilometres from where Brad lived. It was always very handy. It was big and possibly one of the biggest in the world. Hundreds of shops where he could have anything he wanted. He remembered the place before the rot. There was music there and people, happy smiling people, lonely people too. A graveyard of cars surrounded the shopping centre and the carpark itself had become some sort of mini scrubland. Except for the city which was still a jungle of filthy concrete emptiness, and the beach of course, where the sand hills had dawned upon the blocks of houses which stood idly on the foreshore.

Brad had driven dazedly and stopped the car on a street where the bitumen and the white lines down the centre disappeared beneath the most enormous sandhill he had seen. It seemed to have grown overnight. Beside the road, a brick house was half engulfed by the sweeping mass of off-white sand. A wooden house was pushed aside and lay completely shattered amidst the onslaught of the marching sand. Brad got out of the car and listened for the sea through the slight breeze. He grabbed his towel covered in cartoon fish squirting water everywhere and began to scale the makeshift mountain. His feet trudged knee deep against the gravity of the sand rolling downward, which beckoned for Brad to sink. He had seen it happen to Sonny in a Skippy movie, each step a challenge against the sand. The rain people did not live in the sand hills, they could not become a part of its shiftlessness. The danger for Brad was the houses below, should he step thorough some rotted roofing and become swallowed forever, to die a part of some crappy lounge room with a dead television. Brad conquered the sand hill and stood atop. He took a deep breath as he looked at the sea and the beach. The sea must still have life he thought. A bloody dolphin, what if I saw a bloody dolphin!? The waves which crashed on the shores carried a hint of discontent but not too much. And he thought the wind was a friend here, its mood often fickle and when the wind and the sea played together it was the essence of unpredictability. He stood on the threshold and looked around him. Suburbia and the sea… Brad ran down the sandhill, gathering speed as he approached the ocean which had cleansed the shores of the bodies years ago, taking with it any sign of the rot. It looked clean and untouched. There was only the smallest reminder of suburbia from the rubbish washed up from distant shores and even then, they were covered in sand. Brad threw down his towel and didn’t wait to stand at the water’s edge. He lifted his legs from the ground and propelled himself into the depths. His body was immersed, suspended in green water, lit by streams of radiation. He opened his eyes and his arms pushed down until his chest brushed the bottom. Above the water he gasped for a precious mouthful of air, as his legs scissored in the water deep below. Further from the shore was a sandbar where the seagulls frolicked in the damp sand when the tide was out. There they would scavenge for worms with their mighty beaks. Brad swam to the sandbar and the gulls dispersed out to sea to join a bigger flock, some of them floating on the water above a swirling school of roughs imagined Brad. He stood on the sandbar and watched their heads bob up and down. Some would disappear beneath the surface. Life? He pulled off his sopping shirt and discarded it on the warm sand. He was reminded of the fish and chips, wrapped in butcher’s paper, almost transparent from the grease, salt on your fingers and the smell.

“Chico roll,” grieved Brad as he remembered.

It was an odd-shaped sandbar, almost round and it was one not readily affected by the tides. An island of golden sand surrounded by a living pool of healthy green water. Brad could almost taste the fish and chips. The gulls probably knew no better. Hamburger, fish sticks, pineapple fritters…

“I really have to take a leak,” said Parsons who was bored with the manuscript or unable to control his bladder thought Brad.

“That one’s broken unfortunately. I’m having them look at it in the morning.”

“Well, I’ll have to go then.”

“Interesting writing, keep up the good work.”

Brad nodded with relief. Parsons had one more for the road and looked at his watch.

“About time. I’ve got some work of my own in the morning. I might see you at breakfast.”

Parsons left his half empty bottle of scotch and Brad sighed as he shut the cabin door.

***

Chapter Five

“An unenlightened journalist knows he has a pen and notepad.” Brad’s Journal

“Oh, how hard it must be to be the only one who knows the truth.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There was noise in Carlson’s compartment and Brad went to work. He was slightly drunk from the scotch and had a little trouble standing. He opened the door to the bathroom and peered through the lens of the camera. He could see her now. She sat on the bed wearing red stockings, nothing but red stockings. Her legs were parted as she revealed the pink flesh of her vagina. She was a dark girl in her late 20s. Brad thought he could smell her aroma in the bathroom and looked at her face, her lips red with lipstick and plucked eyebrows. She had a button nose. She was attractive and her lips parted as her hand moved gently down to her vagina, stroking her clitoris slowly at first and then more violently around the vulva as she began to reach orgasm. She closed her eyes and her head tilted back, her tongue licking her lips. Brad pressed the shutter and the camera erupted with a quick blast of half a dozen shots. There was a glimpse of her teeth as she groaned with ecstasy. Carlson appeared naked, running his tongue along her throat, as his hands squeezed her perfect breasts. Brad let off another burst of film from the camera. A dozen or so as Carlson pulled her onto the sheets by her hair. He bit her throat and she writhed beneath him. Brad took off another half a dozen. The sound of the camera whirred with the rhythm of the train. She reached for his cock and squeezed it. A final burst and the film had finished in the camera. Brad swore as he rewound the film. He grabbed another from the bag and reloaded the camera. Carlson was thrusting himself inside her and Brad kept his finger on the shutter and let the whole film run through, catching the face of a possible Prime Minister at the point of orgasm.

As Brad rewound the film, the light went off in the compartment. He felt he had accomplished what he had set out to do.

It took a single cloud to remove the rays which warmed Brad’s face. The afternoon sun was blinkered by a puffy white cloud moving inland. Following it off shore was a mass of cloud which stretched across the water and disappeared into the horizon. The sun still shone on suburbia but out to sea, the water was grey with hints of choppy white foam. The seagulls were gone as the sun emerged briefly again. Brad looked from the sandbar at the distant shore where the tide seeped forward. He waded through the shallow water until the bottom sank beneath him and he started to swim breaststroke to the shore. The sun disappeared behind a cloud again and Brad did not look up and instead felt the cool air blow through his wet hair. A sharp pain gripped his torso, a sting ripped down his chest to his loins. He controlled his panic momentarily and brushed his hand down his chest. Another shocking sting on his leg. Brad could see the mass of bluebottles which swarmed around him and he began to swim freestyle towards the shore. His arms stroked forward quickly and clumsily and his arm brushed a mass of slime on the surface, He recoiled and his chest tightened, staring at the mass of green weed which surround a pale white nucleus. Brad was repulsed further as its tentacles found his legs. There was a hole in the centre a perfect oval and the meshing of rotting laces. A lost tennis shoe with some All Day I Dream of Sex label still visible and possibly a skeletal foot still inside. The pain did not stop and Brad swam ashore until he was in chest deep water, wading until he was ashore on the dry sand. His foot fell upon the shredded edge of a cola can and blood poured from the wound, crimson on the sand. Brad picked up the can and threw it as far as he could, grimacing as it disappeared into the swirling anti-mirror of grey.

“Fuck you!”

He pulled off his shorts and saw the red welt which ran diagonally from his belly button down to the side of his thigh. He pressed sand into the burning welts of red skin and then lay back with his eyes closed trying to isolate the pain. A dull throb in his foot sent him to sleep.

The sun had almost set when he awoke still naked and the sky was engulfed with cloud. Brad lifted himself upright and in the dimming light he could see the bloody tracks which led to where he slept. The bleeding had stopped and his foot was asleep. He was struck by the appearance of another set of tracks which led to his side and into the sand hills. The cool breeze brought small waves crashing on the shore. Thoughts that it could be Pentan exploded in his mind and his sphincter tightened. Brad wanted HMV to reassure him, although, if he spoke, it could be Pentan himself. Brad got on all fours for a moment as a sprinkle of rain fell on the arch of his back and caused the hairs to stiffen. He clenched his teeth to stand and limped towards the sand hills. There was the rumble of thunder but the rain still held off, the air was damp. Brad waited for the impending downpour. He wondered about the footsteps in the sand. He had heard and felt nothing.

He pulled on a pair of jeans he had in the car and then lit his pipe and toked heavily on the hashish. He felt better. It numbed the pain and he drove down the track past the shopping centre, listening to the static which crowded the car radio. There was the telemetry of some lost satellite calling from space which faded in and out. The manmade sound would seep into the deep crevasses of Brad’s mind. He imagined a ship at sea, its mate-lot in the bunks, the captain and navigator at the helm and the radio operator hopelessly punching away a mayday call, rising troughs wasting the signal. The dream of raging wind and black cloud. The philosophy of a man at the helm of his life and destiny and yet not necessarily his fate.

Brad parked the car outside the house. Darkness had fallen over suburbia. He stopped the car engine and prepared for any flickering images of the rain people. There had not been enough rain, he thought. There was already a steady tap of water on the roof of the car. He stepped out of the vehicle and realised it was now the dark which controlled the shadows. The door to the Commodore snapped shut and its echo faded in the wet and empty street. Water gurgled down a street drain, deep into the bowels of the Earth where the rain people also lived in an endless maze. Suburbia: home of the rain people and their purposeless lives. No-one would vote for them, thought Brad. The was a splash from the garden across the road. Brad turned on his sore foot and it returned a jet of searing hurt into his brain. It was Mrs Green’s garden; her front door was wide open and her Woolworth’s garden gnome was gone. Maybe her body was still on the bed clutching the lace handkerchief given to her by her husband before he killed himself. Was that a splash? Shadows began to rise in the front garden across the street. They seemed to flicker in the dark and Brad began to run through his front garden and down the side passage, with its brick wall on one side and galvanised fence on the other. The rain was torrential now and he darted through the passage and to the back door of the house. He felt his jeans for the keys. He had left them in the car. The terror struck him, he could almost hear the blood within him, he could almost smell it bleed from within his nose. The house keys were on the passenger seat of the car and so he reentered the side passage. A mass of shadows appeared from around the corner, blocking the passage. The sky above was lit by a perfect bolt of lightning. Three of the rain people stood there. They seemed calm: icy statues of death, waiting. The tallest lifted an arm and beckoned Brad with a stump of blistered and wet scabby meat. Brad gasped and turned. A silhouette was approaching at the other end of the passage. Brad prayed for HMV and then launched himself over the galvanised fence, a kind of light-footed pole vault into the yard of Mr and Mrs Johnson. He landed on what he thought was their compost heap only now it had turned into a putrid and swirling mass of mud. The pain in his foot caused Brad to fall on his back. A mass of limbs began to fight blindly for Brad’s body. He tore himself away and stumbled awkwardly to the Johnson’s back door. It was locked. Shadows began to rise from the compost heap. Brad rammed himself against the rotting door, again and again until it gave way and he was able to slam the door shut. The teenager tried to collect himself, the sweat and rain dripped from his brow along with the mud. Nothing happened for several minutes in the darkness of the Johnson’s house.

“Are you there?!,” he asked idiotically and threw up his arms momentarily.

Mr Johnson was a policeman and his wife enjoyed a weekly bashing. Brad could hear her cries through his bedroom window. Brad hoped the rot had not caught them at home. He remembered Mr Johnson’s car and the keys which hung in the kitchen. In the garage was a red FJ Holden, polished chrome, adorned with a collection of reflectors, which encrusted the mud-flaps. Before the rot it had roared to life every Sunday. Brad felt for gold chain with the Mercedes emblem and found it among the many keys. Garage? Garage? He returned to the back door and could see the garage door across the yard and knew a spare key to the garage was on the outside door frame if it was locked. While the rain people huddled silently together around the compost heap, Brad unlocked the garage and shut the door behind him. He turned on the Dolphin torch he found on the work bench and it still emitted a dull yellow light. Brad aimed the torch at the car. The bonnet was caked in dust and there was almost half a foot of bird droppings on the roof which overflowed onto the windscreen. Brad opened the door and slipped the key into the ignition, briefly overwhelmed by the fake smell of leather and what he once would have described as old car. He turned the key… Nothing. His heart skipped… Again. The engine began to turn. Amazingly, the battery had some life until it suddenly caught and roared to life with a healthy burst of energy, idling precariously and then strongly. The precocious new engine its owner had put in had done its job. Brad was gripped by a smile as the fuel gauge kept rising until it was full. His hand ran across the leather dash, leaving a streak of dust on his hand. Jimi Hendrix was suddenly blasting Hey Joe and Brad rubbed the back of his neck on the woolen seat covers. He got out of the car and opened the garage door which screeched quickly upward. Figures rolled in the mud, with their bodies entangled by their groping stumps. Hell, kids, have fun! It’s when they try and poke your eyes out and twist your head round that it got scary. The torch suddenly died in Brad’s hand and he got back into the car and locked the door. The headlights didn’t disturb the rain people and the car drove over some of their pathetic bodies as the windscreen wiped away bird crap. There were no screams, only the sound of their spines cracking beneath the heavy half-flat tyres. Brad remembered the television cartoon of an evil coyote wearing a tyre mark down his back and followed the track to the shopping centre and marveled at the car. The rain and the windscreen wipers slowly removed the bird droppings. Never had he come so close to the rain people since his parents died. They seemed scarier than they really were and perhaps Brad was really one of them… He really wondered sometimes. There were scratch marks across his body. They seemed nice enough. For zombie dead people.

Brad could see the shopping centre. A concrete construction to quench his every desire. Careful not to bog the car in patches of mud, he became aware of a light burning in a display window. Not a bright light, but a glowing ember which lit the rectangular enclosure. Brad slowed the car in front of the window. The bitumen car park was no place for the rain people. He got out of the car and walked to the window, overwhelmed by a sense of wonder. He pressed his forehead against the glass, his breath creating a mist on the smooth surface. A candle burned in a porcelain holder. It flickered for a second and continued to burn steadily. Around it was a summer display entitled: Fun in the Sun with a barbecue and table setting embraced by a multi-coloured umbrella, while a giant sun wore sunglasses against the wall and cardboard cutouts of a family sat around… Enjoy yourself it’s later than you think, thought Brad at the Christmas gifts. The faces glowed orange in the light. Brad watched the candle wax spill down in beads.

He found the door he knew was open and followed the linoleum pathway to the window and the candle. He picked up the candle and melted wax spilt as he held it aloft and forgot all his pain. Could it be Sir Pentan? The knob of his penis twinkled like a Fruit Tingle as he thought it could be someone else who caused it. He stared at the rain which poured outside the window and saw his reflection as he stood there holding the candle. Brad walked back into the main department store and found an arcade which wound upward and around the corner. Bare feet on the stone floor, Brad walked along the arcade with only the candle to light his way. Then he became aware of a voice. It was the voice of HMV. Or television. Whatever you wanted to call it.

“Hello,” said the voice and Brad didn’t know if it was in his head or not.

It lingered in the empty arcade and Brad took several more steps before he stopped. He listened hard and the voice still echoed in his mind this time. It had been soft and unbroken and it was as though it surrounded him.

“Don’t be afraid,” it said.

“I’m not,” said Brad, almost feebly. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“You’re not Pentan or the rain people?’

“I’m not of their world and you must promise not to hurt me.”

Brad hesitated and his eyes strained through the darkness of the candle: “I promise.” He said it with almost a sense of relief.

There was a further silence and then in the distance Brad could see another candle. It cast a halo over the figure which carried it. It moved toward Brad and seemed to descend from the sky as it moved down the slope of the arcade. Close enough to see the lips moving.

“I am coming because I know you won’t hurt me.”

The candle bobbed towards Brad and stopped ten metres away.

“What is your name?,” asked the voice.

“Brad Amphlett.”

Then the flame strode alarmingly close and stopped only a metre away revealing a face.

“My name is Katherine Vernon.”

Brad could see it was a girl and he stared silently at the face. It was a mask of unlined skin, soft and perfect with bright eyes and features pinched elfin-like upward.

“Are you shocked?”

“I don’t know,” Brad smiled awkwardly.

“What?”

“I don’t know, it’s just funny. Seeing someone after all this time. There’s no-one normal left in suburbia.”

“You are right. No-one normal except us.”

“There is no-one left?,” Brad felt the enormity of his words.

Both their eyes welled up and they lowered their heads.

“I have been watching you,” she said looking up. “I saw you at the beach today. I often see you at the beach.

Brad’s ears burned at the thought of the footprints on the beach that day as he lay naked and he still looked at the cool arcade floor.

“I enjoy watching you,” she gasped.

A warm sensation suddenly embraced Brad as he felt a tingling sensation in his knob once again. It felt good.

“There’s nothing much else to do. Sometimes I think I will go mad. But you are always there. You reminded me of things,” she stared as she spoke.

“What things?”

“I don’t know, things … good things.”

“Why are you here now?”

She looked around, at the shops in the arcade. Her eyes seemed to carry some untold sadness as they glistened in the candlelight.

“This place reminds me of so much. Before everything happened. It is a part of me, it’s my home.”

“You live here? I haven’t seen you,” asked Brad.

“I burn a candle in the window every night. I hoped you would come. Even when you left. I knew you would come back and I still burned a candle.”

“Did you have an antidote?”

“I still don’t know why we are still alive.”

“Are there any others, or do they still play games just like you? – watching me?”

Brad felt a little angry and apologised: “I’m sorry.” He looked to the floor again.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Katherine. “There may be more, they may even be watching us now. But they are most likely dead. There is only the two of us and we live in two different worlds. I know my world and I respect it. Yours is a dangerous world. You live on the brink when you are in suburbia. You are the one who is being watched and plans are being made while you wait. Someone else’s glory. They are not my plans. My father got me a rabbit one day and that day he locked it in a cage of wire. I stared at him and it would wriggle its nose. He was so cute. I wanted to set that rabbit free but my father would not let me. I brought him a carrot one day but my little rabbit was no longer in his cage where I thought he was safe. The rabbit lay next to it, its fur was all covered in blood which poured from his headless body. My father said it was a fox which bit its head off and sucked all the blood out.”

“I don’t like rabbits,” said Brad with no thoughts of Pentan until that very moment: “They’re too rascally,” said Brad unable to recall where the comment came from.

“It is a shame as they are very beautiful.”

“What are we doing here? There is danger everywhere. There is no escaping the danger. There is so much in the dark… There is Pentan… Are you television?… I mean are you HMV?,” Brad felt himself begin to hyperventilate a little.

“Come,” she said with her hand outstretched.

Brad took her hand and they walked up the arcade together. The candles bobbed slightly. Her hand was warm and Brad held it tightly. It seemed to suck the pain away. His foot still ached and the hunger had returned once more. The pain seemed unimportant. At the other end of the arcade was another department store.

“These things often come in threes,” said on old women in Brad’s mind. The thought faded as he didn’t quite remember what she meant.

Katherine led Brad through a fire escape and down a long dark corridor. She stopped and Brad could hear the sound of keys as she reached into her loose cotton pants. She opened the heavy door and they entered. She put down the candle and lit a hurricane lamp, unmasking the room from darkness. A miniature sun fueled by a can of gas. Brad squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light in the room.

“We are safe here,” she announced and blew out the candle. “The air comes in through here,” she pointed. Brad blew out his and stared at her in the light. She was older than he first thought, nearly as tall with dark eyes and brown, shoulder length hair, tinged with strands of gold, bleached by the sun. She wore a faded blue t-shirt with a flame embedded in the logo of the local gas company. Her white cotton pants hung down to her bare feet. When she smiled her lips parted revealing a row of pearly white teeth. She stared at Brad who dripped water over the white carpet. Rainwater also dripped from his hair across his bare chest and down through the soaking jeans. Brad’s cock was hard.

“This is where I live. I have lived here since it happened,” she said. “Who is HMV?”

Brad immediately noticed the room. It was big enough to hold three cars comfortably and was probably some sort of storage room. It was decorated with sheets of white carpet and curtains with bright colours covered the bare brick which were also hidden with posters of animals and young men and women. Framed on the wall was a photograph of her family, he gathered. Her mother and her sister embraced by a silver-haired father. There was little furniture. A couch and a chair and a bed draped with a big quilt with a Vegemite jar printed on it. Brad remembered he loved Vegemite.

“Do you want some? I’m addicted.”

Brad was confused as she opened a drawer and pulled out a large jar, unscrewed the lid, stuck her finger in and pulled it out. A large black globule at the end of her finger.

“I found it last week. They don’t usually last.”

“Pentan?”

“He plans to be God of Australia or something.”

“Only Australia,” scoffed Brad.

“And he maybe HMV and I may be HMV some of the time.”

Brad shook his head and felt his erection subside. He put his finger in and tasted the Vegemite as he let it sting his tongue. They ate more of it together a little at a time and then sat on the bed and talked about the beach and some of the people they knew in their lives who were now long dead. Katherine pulled out a view master and they looked at three dimensional images of faraway cities and forests.

“I would like to go there one day,” she said handing the view master to Brad.

He held it to the light of the lamp and looked at the city full of people. The tag said it was New York City in the summer. The footpaths were crammed with people wearing empty faces, some of them lined and unhappy.

“Where’s New York City?,” he asked.

There was another one which told the story of a man who lived in a dark box in a castle and would only come out at night. There he would awaken from an endless sleep to tear out the throats and suck the blood of young people. The young hero made him cower before a cross and the bad guy was killed by the rising sun. Katherine put the view master down beside the bed.

“Is it true this story?,” asked Brad.

“I don’t know.”

“Why are we alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we chosen?”

“You mean by God or something?”

“There is no God.”

“How can you say that?,” said Katherine.

“There is no God. There is only television. Or was…”

“There is no television any more. It died with all the people.”

“Television is alive…”

“There isn’t even any lights. How can we have television.”

“It lives through me… People who do not believe…,” said Brad frustrated. “HMV?”

“I used to like television. Then it got too nasty with all those people dying.”

“Television is the ruler of suburbia. It is all suburbia has left,” said Brad, seemingly boasting about his direct line to God.

Katherine was left a little speechless.

“You don’t believe me?,” said Brad.

“What is there to believe? …”

“How dare you?,” said Brad and stopped to listen for television in the silence, staring momentarily into space, like his father used to do when he came home from work and the kids were sitting in front of the set – just to hypnotise them again. He thought he could hear it and he could feel the pain of it. Some kind of drug which deliberately inflicted pain at times. But all he could hear was Katherine’s breathing.

“Listen do you hear it?,” said Brad and held her shoulders: “Do you believe the spirit of television has come back to haunt the living?”

Katherine did not speak since she was almost in shock all while Brad felt the anger of the pain and the absence of television. All those dead people …. He wanted to hit her or television did, punish her, for it not being there. The urge throbbed stronger and then the anger turned inward. The comforting hiss of television was a ringing in his ears and then was replaced by a rambling monologue which screamed through Brad’s mind … “You live because I will it. You exist because I exist. You sit here and you listen to this being. You do what you will, this being is not to be trusted.”

Katherine could see Brad was listening to something horrible.

“What?,” she asked.

The thought exploded and Katherine watched Brad’s eyes glaze over… Children danced around crazily where a galvanised tool shed sat on the site of a house being built in suburbia. Inside a boy wept locked inside. The children pounded on the hot metal and the boy pounded back against its impenetrability. Listen to it echo… There was an explosion of a fist…. The boy began to sing a cartoon tune as some sort of barrier. He sung it the best he could…. Another explosion…. The boy was running across a vast beach of golden light. Endless stretches of sand beneath his naked feet. The seagulls scattered around him: “Here he is. He watches you. He always watches you. He exists and it is his will to infect suburbia. All the sake of misbegotten some trust.” The boy had shat himself, listening to the Gods.

Brad felt for Katherine’s hand and then opened his eyes.

“You must believe in television. It can save us.”

“I’ll believe for your sake,” she smiled, the evil spell broken. “Bad dreams?”

Katherine’s hand felt his bare chest, her fingers moved in circular motions down his chest and unbuttoned his jeans. Brad fell back on the bed and she grabbed his jeans by the ankles and pulled them down to his knees. Her hand grabbed his swollen penis, then his balls. She licked the end of her finger and used it the circle the tip of his cock. She pulled off her t-shirt and Brad’s hands cupped her breasts. She gently squeezed his cock again. The cotton pants fell to the floor and she climbed on top of him. He could feel the warmth of her body and felt himself enter her. She closed her eyes and her head tilted toward the ceiling. Her body started rippling, squeezing down like an orange releasing its juice upon a juicer. Brad felt the pain recede and he became lost and disembodied. There is no television, he thought. Forever. Please. Forever.

“Sleep now,” whispered Katherine, their bodies finely covered in sweat after more love-making.

“There ARE others?,” asked Brad again, not really believing there was no one.

“Not here. Not in suburbia.

“We cannot….”

“They’re somewhere in the country.”

Brad could feel the presence of feigned sleep until the steady hiss arrived to comfort him. It was almost the hiss of a serpent. He thought there would be no evil in suburbia as long as he was with Katherine. He was hungry and he needed a fix. He slept for a short time with the taste of Vegemite in the cavities in his mouth.

He thought television would help him and he waited for it to happen. His mind cried for help. Then a dream took him to the city where Pentan lived. Brad knew he lived somewhere in the city. It could be seen clearly from the hills which surrounded suburbia. The city centre was a place of tall buildings and they had stood empty for many years. Brad could see him living in the big grey building with the Roman columns. He would sleep there during the day, venturing out at night to see his precious city. At night he would go anywhere he pleased and he could drink red wine until the sun came up. The rain people, if they were lucky or bright enough, would be invited back to the grey building where he would fondle their scabbed bodies. And he would fuck them until they died. The story of Pentan’s rise in the city was awe-inspiring according to television. A great leader. If it weren’t for the rot, he may not have existed at all. After all the people were gone, he emerged. He spoke to the rain people and told them he would help them and release them from their torment. They believed him and they loved him, in a way. They helped clean up the city of some of the dead and rubbish until they returned to their burrows. There were parties in honour of the rain people and sacrifices were held on rainy nights. Then there was a dream Brad had of himself being crucified naked before the rain people and as they laughed and spat Pentan stepped forward.

“I am telling you that I am watching you,” he said. “But you have no hands. I am sad for you as we will have to devour you in your honour. Toes first.”

Television told many stories. It was hard for Brad to decide what was true and what was a nightmare. But he had an underlying faith that television wouldn’t lie. Would Katherine lie: God of Australia. HMV? Would you lie?

Katherine massaged Brad’s cock, squeezing as it hardened once more and semen squirted on her bare stomach.

“What are you thinking?”

“Television,” he smiled; imagination, dreams, voices …

Brad felt the liquid seep from his cock.

“You are right,” she said and Brad opened his eyes.

She continued: “There are others, I’ve seen them. No black fellas like you say but I have seen a man.”

Katherine hesitated. “IT may be this Pentan that we joked about earlier…”

“Joked…”

“I travelled from the other side of suburbia where I lived. I was at the beach when I first saw you. Years ago now. I watched you fondle yourself as you lay on the beach and I would do the same. Just watching you and wishing I could touch you and you could touch me. There was a day when you slept and I saw a man. He is nearer each time. I thought it time to see you before he did. This was this afternoon or yesterday.

Sir Pentan in suburbia! Brad sat up. It was time for a fix.

“I thought he had only dreamed he was here. Maybe projected himself. Television said he would never come to suburbia. It is our sacred place.”

“Television is lying. Sir Pentan in suburbia. It sounds like a singer at a show.”

“No, you could be lying.”

“No!”

“Liar. Pentan sent you. Or are you Pentan in disguise?”

Brad felt a wave of nausea. He needed a fix: “I must go, I’m feeling sick.”

“You need another fix don’t you? I’ve seen you since I lived here, crawling in pathetically looking for more.”

Brad looked for a spare candle and his mind soon crept crazily along the corridor to the shop he knew so well. He could hear Katherine call after him: “I am not Pentan. I am the only hope you’ve got. That ringing in your ears, the voices in your head… It’s not the aborigines. There are no aborigines…”

Along the long line of shops of dead neon. Lonely and unopened; the fashion shops, the electrical shops and the blue shop, the shop with the blue and yellow cross. It was the first shop that Brad had opened since in it was all he needed. There was so much there and Brad remembered this serious shop where people would go when they were sick. Giant jars of liquid, people in white coats, names of things Brad had never heard of. So much.

“I must go there,” said Brad as he realised he was still on the bed with Katherine.

He pulled on his jeans and she watched his limp cock disappear. He looked at her body as she lay on the quilt cover. The spray of hair on her vagina. There was another twinge of hunger and through it, Katherine’s aroma.

“Haven’t you ever smelt sex before?,” she said.

“I’ll be back.”

She asked if she could come as he lit the candle. Brad refused and entered the fire corridor through to the dark arcade. His damp jeans felt warm and he listened to the voices which once populated the arcade. Once upon a time … He thought he could hear his name. People walked around like ants in their tunnels. A face then appeared with a smile and worried eyes and took him back to safety… The candle flickered.

“I do not know what to believe now… except my next fix.”

“Do you believe in me? Do you believe in Pentan?,” said a whisper.

“She believes in Pentan.”

“She has no faith in me,” the voice returned, perhaps even talking to itself.

“There is evil in suburbia,” said Brad’s mind to what he thought was HMV.

“There has always been evil here. It has not yet made itself apparent. I have protected you from evil. I will always protect you.” Was it Brad’s grandfather? Was it Katherine? Suddenly there was nothing …

“You watched us. You watched us fuck,” he laughed, immaturely.

“It is what you wanted. It will mean the end of the rain and the end of the rain people. You must leave suburbia. Darkness will fall here soon and the black fellas will reform their New Dreamtime along with the Reformation. The city and suburbia will be engulfed by fire and the sea shall remove the remains.” Pentan?

“Do not think,” said HMV or was it Brad’s true mind? Pentan himself?

The shop was just a little further down the arcade but each step milked Brad of energy. He stumbled and the candle fell from his hand, swallowed by darkness as it hit the floor of the arcade. Brad fell on his face but felt no pain. Only darkness.

“It’s Katherine..It’s Katherine…”

There was a muffled noise in Carlson’s compartment, like someone falling out of bed. Brad went to have a look. The light was on as he took a look through the Pentax camera. It was red. The light went off. It was red with blood!

***

Chapter Six

“Tell me about the explorer – is he lost or has he found himself?” Brad’s Journal.

“Explore the nether-regions of the soul and find the universe has a soul.” Anonymous.

Television spoke with might,” such was its will.

Brad could hear the voices. The voices changed when he tried to think there was nothing but television. He wanted to scream but there was sand in his mouth… It had crept beneath the scarf of the explorer…

“Billy! Billy boy!,” the explorer screamed through the deafening whistle of the burning sand and the words were somehow familiar.

Billy had the last camel and with it the last of the rations. He felt his water bottle again to make sure it was still with him. His eyelids shut out the sand and he called though the scarf once more: “Billy.”

He waited, lost in thought, and the taste of burnt horse still lingered with the sand. The desert was no lady. Lost in the desert. He imagined Billy flogging the camel to keep the beast moving, cracking the beast with a stick.

They had told the explorer he was mad when he had left for the unchartered and unknown desert with four men, six camels and four more horses. Cross the great unknown desert! It was no bet. Damn the fat traders, he thought. They had waved goodbye to their money at a bad party arranged for the explorers, all while the band played God Save the Queen. The bastards actually drank tea. Apples or Mrs Appleby the cook baked a large batch of scones. O for a mouthful now, he thought.

“Billy,” his voice rasped as he thought he had not been prepared for such rude weather.

He was too arrogant when dealing with the rich gold-diggers living fancifully in Melbourne from fortunes amassed in Ballarat or Bathurst, or from the corruption that existed in Melbourne. This is a desert. His mind was struck by the white line of teeth of his aboriginal tracker Jimmy as he led the camels to the edge of the desert. He had laughed like a demon.

“We done it this time,” he laughed. “Cross the desert.” And he laughed some more. “Now the desert cross with us.”

The explorer had smiled tolerantly at Jimmy atop of his horse and gently tapped the ribs of the creature until it was abreast with Robert Lester, the thirty-year-old Irishman and veteran of several desert expeditions. The explorer had met him while they were wiring fences for a crooked landowner.

“Will you cross the great desert?,” the explorer had boomed and Lester shook his head in disbelief.

“Well? How about it?,” he insisted.

“It’ll be a short life for me,” said Lester as he mounted his horse and rode off.

.

The explorer stared at Lester, his face red with whiskers blonde from the sun. The horses were tired: “They reckoned we were mad.”

“You seem disillusioned my friend. We’ve far to go,” he said a little gravely.

“If it weren’t for that horse which upped and died,” the explorer said.

They had tried to forget the horse, which had fallen the day before, its eyes rolling and saliva drooling. The Irish are so superstitious, thought the explorer and his eyes sought the endless track of red sand.

“How long do you think the track ended?”

“Been well over two hundred miles. No cattle around. Tracks don’t last long out here. I reckon that was the last camp we saw days ago. Give or take a hundred miles?

“The last camp had been comfortable for the men. The track had led to a place where there was a solitary gum tree scrawled with the graffiti of other souls. The explorer had been inspired enough to scrawl notes in his diary about how well things were going and Lester had sketched an impression of the tree in charcoal.

“How’s the boy?,” nodded the explorer towards Billy Walker, not yet seventeen, who led his horse at the front of the party.

“Full of questions. I just keep smiling,” said Lester, who then looked the explorer in the eye: “This is no place for a boy like him, he’s too green.”

Billy saw the explorer approach: “Saw a dead wallaby, long dead.”

“There’ll be plenty more.”

“Funny to think I’ll be with them first to cross,” his eyes sparkled.

“You can tell all the girls when you get back.”

The boy reddened beneath his tanned face and looked again towards the desert at the barely discernible track. He was an orphan boy with eyes as blue as blueberries.

The explorer could not see his feet for all the sand carried by the storm. His diaries were in the pouch with the last of the smoked meat.

“Billy!,” his throat dry.

His eyes squinted as the funny-looking face of a camel appeared through the blowing sand, blinking its long lashes. Billy stood alongside with a scarf across his face.

“Christ Billy.”

“She wasn’t going to move. I had to hit her hard. I reckon she’s going to die soon…,” he paused. “There’s people out there looking for us aren’t there?”

He cursed the boy’s weakness.

“They won’t stop until we are found, will they?”

The explorer brought the camel down to kneel and they both slept beside he ailing beast. They had seen a lot of desert. Too much. It enclosed them and it was now trying to engulf them. Lester was gone and Jimmy too. The explorer’s thoughts became lost and he slept as well.

“Wake up,” said Billy, shaking the explorer. “The storm has ended.”

The explorer squinted and looked at the sky. Already the morning sun had heated the sand and masses of stones which had barely cooled during the night. They brushed away the dust from the camel.

“Where are your family, Billy?”

“They’re dead, sir.”

“And where’s Lester and Jimmy?”

“You’re having a joke, sir.”

The boy stared at the explorer until he realised he was serious.

“They’re gone. Don’t you remember?”

The explorer felt his head and tried to remember. All he could think was it had been hard these past few days. Hard enough to even remember the boy’s name. Then there’s Lester’s voice.

“You’re kaput you stupid bastard. It’s time to turn back,” it said.

“Turn back? You must be mad!”

“We’re not to go on. It would be madness. I’m surprised not one of us is dead. The boy is weak. We could be lost. The desert can fool you, it’s endless. We’re tempting fate with two horses and a solitary camel.”

“I know where we are,” lied the explorer and looked at the boy who leaned against the camel. Jimmy was making himself scarce tending the horses.

“It’s Jimmy, isn’t it? He’s turned you against me. You want this expedition to be a failure.”

“To survive, would not be to fail, we have enough water if we continue south east.”

The explorer became angry: “Go on and take your tracker with you.”

“Don’t be daft.”

Billy saw the punch which floored Lester. It was a strong right hook. Lester pulled himself from the ground and felt the blood pour from the inside of his mouth. The explorer released his fist and numbed.

“We are going to cross this desert from east to west,” he proclaimed, his eyes wide.

“It’s nonsense this dream of yours. Can’t you see? Nonsense. Money from your rich friends, who wouldn’t even fork out for a proper expedition. Gillies left before us! You’re bloody mad.”

“Mr Lester, you may return if you like. We shall continue west.”

Lester hesitated at the rabid eyes upon him.

“I will return with help.”

Lester turned to Jimmy: “You stay and I’ll be back with help.”

Jimmy nodded as Lester led the stronger horse away. The explorer threw him a water bottle.

“And may God have mercy on your soul, Faulkner,” said Lester as he departed.

“I’ll see you on the other side, you bastard,” said the explorer.

He felt fatigued, in fact for the past few days he had felt drained. All of them were irritable and even murderous.

The desert swirled around him again and Billy shook him.

“This camel is dead, sir,” said Billy, desolately. “We have one left.”

He raised his master’s head from the ground and poured water into his mouth.

“Rest now sir. It’s still early.”

“Tell Jimmy to have the horses ready, we’ll be moving soon. There’s no point waiting for Lester, he won’t be back.”

“It’s the sun, sir. You’ll be all right. Just rest a little longer.”

Faulkner closed his eyes and thought of what the boy had said. He remembered when Lester took off. Jimmy had taken them further north than west. He was certain. He looked at the stars and he was certain.

“We got to find more water boss,” said Jimmy. “We’ll find water north of here.”

Faulkner was annoyed because Jimmy didn’t show his white teeth when he spoke. He thought this disrespectful. He looked strong compared to the boy who was stumbling, losing the fight for life… The explorer began whispering in the boy’s ear: “Jimmy is taking rations. Leading us further north to our deaths in this dreadful place.” Then came the atrocities of madness: “Yes, perhaps we are to be sacrifices. Our bones will be used to point the way out, to warn others. Jimmy is far too strong. North to our deaths,” Faulkner scoffed with a gasp. “Heaven forbid, north to our deaths?”

The explorer turned away from Billy, too weak to be frightened and pointed at Jimmy.

“You will not kill us, Jimmy.”

“It’ll be the desert which kills us, not me boss.”

“You expect me to believe you, you and your black trickery…,” and his sunburnt eyes widened as if in revelation, “Lester! Lester told you to take us north. Bleach their bones north he said.”

Jimmy could only shake his head at the explorer who frothed at the mouth as he spoke.

“I don’t know what you’re saying boss… bloody Dreamtime makes more sense than you do now.”

“We’re to die in this desert,” he cried wild-eyed.

“Drink the blood of our last camel and die,” said Jimmy, smiling and looking quickly at Billy.

Faulkner looked at both of them: “Well, I forbid it. I forbid your trickery. We will continue west through the desert” and he slowly collected himself. “There will be water on the other side.”

He looked at Billy and he had reclaimed a sane yet subdued smile through the froth on his beard.

“Drink until we burst, eh Billy?”

Billy nodded.

The morning of the sandstorm Jimmy disappeared with the last horse.

“Why did Jimmy leave us?,” he whispered once more in Billy’s ear almost like a lover, if such a sentence maybe delivered in that way.

“Maybe he just got lost, sir” said the boy, pouring a little more water into the explorer’s dry mouth.

The explorer then drank the last of the water and discarded the empty canteen on the stony desert floor. It could have been two days since the storm and the death of the camel but he didn’t seem to know. Billy had fallen a little less than a mile back and did not notice. The boy had called for his friend and watched him wander out of sight, over the horizon. Billy closed his eyes to blinker the afternoon sun and waited for the explorer to return with help. None would come.

Faulkner stared at the land and dared it to beat him. He laughed at the skull of a lost bird but the tears did not come.

“You had the skill to fly and look at you … You are a mighty desert but you have not beaten me yet.”

Any sane thoughts he had turned to the party which awaited him on the other side. He would have a cup of tea, he thought. It shall be iced tea with a sprig of mint. He thought about how foolish Lester had been to return to the depot, for he would miss out on all the iced tea. Yes, he would drink all of the iced tea before Lester arrived. He was in the midst of discussing whether the Irish drank iced tea with the world newspapers when he saw a small roo next to a bush in the distance. It discarded something from its pouch. He stumbled over, careful not to disturb the marsupial. It darted away at the sight of a hulking body stumbling forward, kicking stones in all directions. The explorer licked his scaly lips at what he thought was the sight of Apples’ scones… But no, a baby roo, its skin still pink as it lay on the desert floor. He picked it up carefully, looked at it with greedy eyes and began to devour it.

“Why Mrs Appleby you’ve done it again,” he said at the engrossing taste. Burnt horse couldn’t compare! He licked his fingers after he ate it and savoured the moment the skull crunched between his teeth in another taste sensation. He looked around for another wallaby. It was already gone.

The explorer opened his eyes and they rolled with delirium. He had dreamt of his own funeral and of his brother placing a wreath on his grave. He tried to thank his brother for all he had done for him but was covered in earth. He wanted to say sorry for all the disappointments which happened and which were to come… but never eventuated: “For I was dead before I was born…” it doesn’t make sense: “For I was dead before I was born. For I was dead before I was born.” He tried to wrap his mind around the sentence but he couldn’t quite make head nor tail of it. It was the thinking of the kaput.

Suddenly awake, he barely discerned the eyes which stared back at him. Dark and unmoved they looked at the blue eyes. A naked black fella stood above the explorer and had bent over his eyes. When he saw the traveler open his eyes he spoke to the others who stood pensively some distance away. The explorer thought he was dying. He now wanted to dream of the Virgin Mary coming to take him away on a stairway of silver which reached into the sky. He saw instead what he thought were the eyes of the devil himself.

“O father why have you forsaken me O Lord.”

The warrior stood aghast and lifted his spear. His tribe had found a strange figure in the desert. A stranger dressed in rags with a golden-brown beard. Reddened skin draped his bones and protruded from the rags like a sack full of blunt objects. An elder looked to the sky from which he had fallen. Another spoke seriously of the evil they had banished over the horizon. The explorer did not speak and slowly realised the presence of the tribe in the distance. The elders spoke among themselves and the young warrior still stared unflinchingly.

“Water?,” he pleaded.

The warrior lifted his spear higher. The elders still spoke and then the one who looked to the sky spoke to the explorer. He did not understand what the old man said but he listened to every word. He knew they were not going to kill him. The other elder stepped forth and the tribe began to set up their camp. A little water was poured into the explorer’s mouth and he nearly choked on the liquid as it fell down his parched throat, long dry from the desert heat.

“You must forgive me,” he said to himself but was silent as the elders began to chant with steady voices. The young warrior slowly receded back to the camp, still wary of the dusty package which had appeared from nowhere. He had heard stories from other warriors of such people who had appeared in the desert. The elders along with the children chanted throughout the rest of the day and the explorer was fed various roots and pieces of food which he had never seen before in his life. The night unfolded into a thousand stars. He could see the Southern Cross above him among the splatter of broken lights which shone and twinkled above him. He felt himself rising.

The two elders held the explorer between them. It had been two days since they had found him and it was the first time he had moved from the spot where he had first felt himself begin to die. They stood him on his feet. He looked at them, one face on either side as they cupped his body on their unsteady frames. The explorer managed a smile, he was not worried. The black fellas were in awe of him or so he thought. He was taken to the embers of the camp fire next to the camp. They had fed him much during the last two days and he wondered what they were surviving on themselves. Maybe he was surrounded by food, maybe the water was there. He cursed his own stupidity. There was so much to learn. It was like a veil of mist, an eerie atmosphere, yet not daunting for both parties.

Meanwhile the young warrior still kept his distance. He wished to return to their lands once it was certain the floods had receded. But that was long ago and they had hesitated to return to that land which was fertile. The tribe was weak now and when warriors from other tribes found they were trespassing, it could become fierce. The tribe had more or less cornered itself from its native land by crossing well marked boundaries. The warrior knew no complacency and the behaviour of the elders troubled him. His father had died before his initiation and the other boys teased he would never be a great warrior like his father who had been murdered by a group of blood-thirsty warriors. All for a kangaroo on their land. He knew the warriors were from a similarly weak tribe and he longed for the day he could avenge his father’s death. He looked to the sky for the star the elders said was the symbol of all his father’s strengths and weaknesses. It was not his own star but his father’s and he watched it in the sky on troubled nights. To him it was alive and he guarded it with his eye as if it were his very being. It was better than their dreaming of giant lizards and snakes, he thought, prone to those nightmares and soothing images when they were on empty stomachs. He even dreamt of edible roots.

The explorer was not troubled by the warrior. The elders began to chant once more in front of the embers. Was this some sort of sacred flame?, thought the explorer and he went back to his childhood and dreams of fairies in the red and blue light. Watch the fire burn and then he fell asleep. It was a fitful sleep, one not troubled by the guilt and anxiety of a failed mission, of the death of Billy. He had thought of the boy’s flesh living mummified under the sun of the desert sky. His young brains fried in the heat. It troubled him enough to wince. Had the flies already gathered? He prayed his spirit would be returned gracefully to the heaven and his soul restored. He had watched the campfire during the night. So intense was its power and so strong was the explorer’s thoughts sleep came. Saul…. I am Saul.

“Just wrote about a boy I wish I had known and about the hero I will never be.” Brad’s Diary

***

Chapter Seven

“Who is the guardian of our lives? Is the Fourth Estate our only hope, or is the Fifth Columnist a man’s inner Bakunin?” Brad’s Journal.

“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die…” Edmund Kennedy.

The plane crashed in the wheat field. Lance saw the crop-duster go down as he stood in the field, dreaming he could fly. He knew his father was dead and he ran from the field chased by the ensuing fire which had engulfed his body. Grasshoppers leapt across his path as he ran forward to the homestead. The fly wire door slammed behind him. He took all the dollar coins from the plate and listened to the radio. No-one came to stop the fire and Lance would have burned to death, if it wasn’t for the firebreak built by his father. He didn’t know why he took the money.

Night fell and Lance listened to the rhythmic electronic buzz of the satellites. They droned into the night and the fire receded. When Lance woke, the radio no longer worked. He decided to leave his home that day. He packed food and water into the station wagon he used to drive around the farm hunting rabbit. He drove through the blackened field of the farm to the road which led to the town. The town had been razed by the fire and only the monument in the main street remained. It was a bronze statue, a soldier standing solemnly with his rifle by his side while a plaque listed those who had died during the wars. Lance stared at the statue for a while and thought the soldier was somehow smiling beneath the cake and ash which covered his uniformed body. The town was more or less gone and the people too. Lance did not stay in the town and instead drove east in search of people. He found none. While he was in New South Wales he found a roadhouse in a town called Hay and stayed for two weeks doing nothing. He then took a white Jaguar which was outside and proceeded to circle the region. Somewhere he found a kind of rainforest and lived there on cans of baked beans and spaghetti and drank boiled water from a nearby creek which flowed into a pool. He swam in this pool in the morning. Here an ancient aborigine often sat on the edge of the rock pool and those dark waters. He would just sit with dark eyes staring at Lance as he was undressed to swim.

“You know I pooped in there once,” he laughed and Lance recoiled from putting his foot in.

“Just pulling your leg. It’s a sacred site, you know, I wouldn’t poop there…” And he pointed… “There’s a site not so sacred over there for poop. I watched you… You pooped in there didn’t you?”

Lance was slightly alarmed and turned around to cover his nakedness before he said: “Can I stay here?….” and the man was gone.

One warm morning, Lance stood next to the pool and pulled the jeans from his hungry body. He dived into the billabong’s stillness and it shattered and burst the surface into a thousand broken ripples. Reflections disconnected and overlapped in an incomplete metamorphosis. The inner space of the water filled his ears and eyes. Lance imagined he could breathe the water. He wanted to let it fill his lungs until he was one with its seclusion. At times there would be the spectre of a rainbow at this place, it would caress the sky with a spurt of brilliant colours. His head lifted above the membrane of water and he felt as the raw air funneled down his throat, flooding the tentacles of alveoli as he swam to the mossy shore. Lance pulled himself from the water and noticed his steely erection as he picked up his towel. The old man watched and Lance could feel the sun between the branches above.

“You call yourself a warrior carrying a spear like that,” laughed the aborigine and then his old voice drawled from exhaustion and he stood slowly and produced a beautiful pointed spear: “Pierce his heart and watch the devil’s bleed from his soul.”

He threw the spear with a thin arm and it soared elegantly across the rippling water and landed at Lance’s feet. He plucked it from the ground and admired its smoothness. His finger ran across the crafted wood. A wood which was light in colour and firm, yet not too heavy. It was pointed to a razor’s edge which almost stung Lance’s index finger when he prodded it. He stood up and the old man stood and leant on his walking stick.

“It is the season of rebirth, the time of the New Dreamtime. I think the white man calls it the Reformation, silly bugger.” The aborigine began to walk away and Lance thought it would be wise to follow him.

“Are you returning to the heart?,” said Lance, naively.

“I go since I seem to be sick of you. Call me that: Gosseemtoo… I have never left,” he said.

Lance tore away a leech which had attached itself to his chest. Its teeth tugged at the flesh as it sucked profusely, its saliva enticed the blood in an orgy or engorgement. It fell from his bloody hand into the water.

“Not good tucker… too much white blood,” he shivered comically as he paused: “Don’t want to turn white overnight.”

Lance held the spear above his head and balanced it. The dense wood was not cumbersome in his grip and he threw it vigorously toward a large tree. It wobbled through the air and missed its target, skidding aimlessly across the rotting leaves beneath the gum canopy.

“Nice shot if you’re a kangaroo,” was the echo, but nobody was there. Then: “I have far to go. It is the reason the rebirth. Don’t break the spear. There is only one.”

He threw it again and hit the tree. Through the heart! He did not know whose, but Lance thought was spear was meant for something. His biceps rippled with the lightning thrust of his arm and the spear became a runaway bullet which ended with a slight quiver in the trunk of another tree. It took both hands to remove it. Lance couldn’t understand how it could remain so sharp. Lance pulled on his jeans and returned to his camp site. A slight ruffle of feathers and the startled birds to chatter. Their inane society would spar and play instinctively. Birds soared high to watch the plate of land roll on forever, changing contours, stark and often shrouded. The bones of a lost emu cracked beneath Lance’s feet, which were hardened by long hours of walking. The camp was a mess of empty plain wrap baked beans tins and empty Kirks bottles around a burnt-out fire and upturned rainwater tank which served as home with a sleeping bag inside.

“It’s time to fly,” Lance to himself. “Time for me to save the world.”

He packed his sleeping bag, turned his jeans into shorts by ripping off the legs and then began his journey along the empty highway.

How many had died by this spear?, he thought, amazed at its possible antiquity. Who were the warriors who once held it? A grimace on their blood-spattered faces.

A semi-trailer lay overturned on the side of the highway, spilling the bones of cattle over the road. A road sign pointed to the next town only five kilometres away. The name of the town was Border. It was either that or Xerox. Half an hour later, Lance walked past the line of long closed and empty petrol stations with several abandoned cars. The town had died before the world died. There was a church sign on one of the sign posts and Lance was drawn to one of the churches further out of town in Xerox. Maybe there were people there, he thought. He walked past the old town hall and entered the church yard. Pine trees and gums and Lance could feel the needles crunch underfoot. They were deep these many years. The church door was wide open, paint peeled from its doors.  Lance went inside still carrying the spear. He was not prepared for what he saw. At the altar was a beautiful young girl in a singlet and shorts. Brown hair draped over her honey-coloured shoulders. She kneeled before a candle which was burning before a giant crucifix. She heard his footfall and turned with the suddenness of a frightened animal. She was alarmed and started to scream. Lance waved his arms.

“No… No, it’s all right.”

Lance could do nothing except place his hands over her mouth to stop the sounds of a banshee. It was then someone grabbed him from behind, threw him to the floor and sat on his back, two hands clasped behind his neck. Lance couldn’t move and the spear was out of reach.

“Who are you and what to you want here?”

“I’m Lance …. I mean no harm.”

“But you have a spear.”

“Given to me by an old man. I’m a warrior,” Lance kidded his teenage self.

“I see,” and the pressure on his neck lessened. “Some warrior.”

Lance could see the fellow now, broad-shouldered and about twenty, as tall as fifteen-year-old Lance: “Who are you?”

“I am the preacher. Survivors of the rot. The chosen few for the Reformation. This town is our camp. We await the arrival of the Chosen.”

“Well you’ll be waiting a long time ‘cos there ain’t nobody left.”

Lance looked at the girl who was about sixteen, or seventeen and she was still shaking before the candle.

“Join us as one of the Chosen. It is the last place before the next phase of the Reformation.”

“The Reformation?,” and he remembered the word mentioned by the old man and on television before the rot.

“Yeah, its the time our world or our land will be one… We wait only for the last of the evil to die in suburbia… that’s right and some surfer dude was going to lead us … and he died and poisoned the world instead. Is that right?”

“Yes, the land will be one…”

“All right I’ll be Chosen then.”

“Hmmm,” said the preacher unequivocally unaffected and yet you didn’t know if he was really joking or not, at least Lance didn’t: “You are the guardian of the desert and this is the sacred spear.”

“You’re shitting me?” said Lance as the preacher picked up the spear. He felt it with a firm grasp and looked at Lance.

“This is the spear which will destroy the last of the evil in suburbia.”

The girl no longer seemed frightened and Lance then decided he would stay.

“Did you know I can fly a plane? It is my condition.”

“You shall fly and you will be the greatest guardian this desert has ever known.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“Would I shit you?,” he winked.

“According to legend … there shall be no evil once the Reformation is complete. There will be another. In time he will come. You may help us to find him. He is the guardian of suburbia. He is meant to save us.”

“Who told you?”

“Gosseemtoo,” and Lance recounting the man and the sometime voice in his head which seemed to have become attached.

Lance once more looked at the girl who knelt before the altar.

“What is her name?”

“This is our sweet daughter Mary, or sister,” said the preacher as he pulled up his fly. “Oops, just getting ready to do a spot of painting… She’s a survivor from afar. She’s the youngest of five born in the jungles of New Guinea and there she roamed naked until she was nine years old. Her father was a Lutheran missionary and she was brought to this country where she discovered tall buildings and television. I found her along the river one day living in the remains of a houseboat. She lived there naked and would take fish from the river for her food.”

The preacher looked at her as he spoke.

“I found her weeping for lost souls. But she is finding her happiness just as you shall find yours. I must to go the house. I will burn a fire in the front yard this evening. Will you come? We’re in the process of moving to a hamlet called Border. It’s safer off the beaten track.”

“Okay. I think I really have found my happiness.”

The preacher turned and put his hand on the girl’s shoulder: “Come Mary.” And then added: “I don’t know why the newspapers called it the Reformation… They may as well have called it: “Fuck all.”

Lance liked his sense of humour and Mary watched Lance every step as she departed.

The teen spent the day in the town. He found a general store and flicked through a copy of Penthouse and an aviation magazine. It was as he walked past the post office that he felt an urge to enter. He looked at the local phone directory and found listings under aircraft. There were several local services. He found his car at the Shell station and drove to an airstrip ten kilometres out of town. There was a small hangar and Lance parked the car and had a closer look. He used a hammer on the padlock on the doors which were rusted and hard to push open. Inside were two twin engine light aircraft. Lance thought they were two of the most wonderful pieces of machinery he had ever seen. He gaped over them and returned to the town where he found the preacher and Mary inside the house where a fire burned outside.

“I’ve been reading the newspapers. They were much more reliable than the television.

“I cannot read,” lied Lance, whose reading was simply good.

“And television?”

“We had no television. No time for it.”

Lance did remember, however, a movie about a great race with old flying machines. He knew Hinkler and Kingsford Smith and there were women too.

“Mary knows a little about television and the evil remnants which emerged.”

Lance watched Mary desolately stir the cream of mushroom soup.

“The age of television is over. It was meant to be. It was man creating his own image. An image controlled by man, eventually controlling himself. The circle was complete for the endless decay which became the rot of corruption. I personally no longer believe in television… It was God. To believe in television would be to see evil first hand and let it swarm and infest the mind. We can’t have that. There must be purity of mind for those who wish to fulfil the Reformation. Do you believe in television? … Listen.”

Lance exclaimed in his head ‘what the fuck?’: “I’m listening.”

“No television. Only plans… Once the camp at Border has been fully established with its growing tribes and once the warrior has destroyed the final evil in suburbia, then we may all step forth towards the heart of the desert and become one.”

“I like the beach better,” said Lance.

“There’s plenty of inland seas. The land will heal old wounds. One government, no borders… It shall be called Australia once more… How about New Dreamtime… beats New Holland.”

The preacher stopped to suck on his pipe and stared at Lance once more: “Nah.”

“The man from suburbia shall believe in television and I have heard him think from a great distance such is the silence. It is his weakness and it is his virtue. It shall help him to destroy the evil in suburbia. It shall also mean his own destruction. It is you who must destroy him afterward. Then there will be nothing left. How do you feel about that Lance?”

Mary poured the soup into bowls and served it at the table, placing napkins in everyone’s laps. Lance felt the end of his cock ringing when she put one on his lap: “Personally I don’t like to kill people unless they’re evil, of course.”

Lance used the knowledge his father passed to him and a number of false starts to begin his flying career. He had been up alone before but wasn’t quite confident. There were almost a few ditches. Late one morning he took one to the twin engines along the airstrip and as the runway began to run out, the plane left the ground. Lance felt as the ground disappeared and the rough bouncing suddenly became smooth. Lance flew across the open plain, no more than one hundred metres from the ground. He took the plane higher over the town, over the church again and again until Mary came out staring at the sky with a hand across her face. Lance waved, although doubted she could see him. Mary did not speak and just stared at the plane. Lance laughed and then looked at the fuel indicator. He was running on empty and suddenly an engine spluttered. Lance gasped for the approaching bummer. He was probably too far from the airstrip and the plains were a tinderbox for a fiery entry. He looked down the highway. The stretch was near Border between the two states, one of which supplied the worst roads in the country thanks to past miserly politicians.

Lance said: “I pray preacher man television saves me this one time. Please television save my pretty white arse. Gosseemtoo here I go …”

He touched the plane down gracefully on a pothole, and it immediately spun to the left and hit gravel, sending it into a further spin where the wings were almost ripped off on the hot tar. Lance shook his head once the wreckage came to a standstill. He counted everything on him in pairs and stepped triumphantly from the cockpit.

“Charlie Ulm, you’ve done it again,” Lance said, clicking his heels and arms together and admired his glorious victory which was simply a smoking wreck on the highway some ten kilometres from town. A few minutes later the preacher arrived in his car. The preacher got out and scratched his head.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Flying… without a licence.”

Dinner that night was the first time the three laughed together. Mary had a hearty laugh and it lingered with the chicken soup as it dribbled down her chin after one laughing fit. She brought the napkin to her face when she noticed Lance was staring at her. The preacher laughed at Lance’s trousers on the clothes line as he lit his pipe since Mary washed out the skid marks.

“If only the skid marks on the highway were so easy to erase. Such a brave warrior.”

“There’s another plane in working order.”

“Then you shall fly to suburbia. You will find the chosen one.”

“Yeah, talk about a needle in a haystack.”

After a while, the preacher put down his pipe and decided to retire early. Mary and Lance were alone together. She cleared the table and Lance tried to concentrate on the flying manual to ease the collection of blood in his loins. There was a tinkering of cups behind him and then silence. Lance read the same line over and over again. Something brushed against his arm and it was Mary. She sat on the end of the table, with her legs wide open. Lance’s mouth opened with shock but she moved over and then placed her finger over his lips, moving down to unbutton his shirt and then his pants. Lance stood and pulled his pants down.

“You’re not fifteen, are you? Tell me you’re not fifteen?”

“You’re right, I’m seventeen.”

Mary’s hands harnessed his genitals and gently tugged until semen squirted across the kitchen table. Their tongues met for an instant and he bit her throat, pinching the skin as she squeezed his still leaking cock. It was uncontrollable. Lance buried his face into her crotch.

“No bullshit? Seventeen, eh?”

Morning brought people to the camp. They arrived in a Volkswagen Kombi-van. A man and two women. He was a young accountant named Mark and he had found the women walking across the Nullarbor Plain.

“They were lucky and now we’re all lucky,” said Mark, a little too overenthusiastically.

The women were young, ragged and tired.

“Did you see suburbia?,” asked the preacher.

“I have avoided it like the plague of the rot,” said Mark who was older than all present.

Mary and Lance stood back as the preacher spoke.

“This is the camp of the Reformation and I am the preacher. You may join us, become one or move on.”

“And who are you? Christ all-fucking Mighty himself,” said the stranger. The girls were too tired to laugh at the bravado. Lance felt hurt and angry for the preacher.

“So you won’t stay, then?,” said the preacher leading with his chin.

Mark looked over Lance and Mary.

“What have you got going here preacher?”

“It’s a sanctuary for the Reformation.”

“Looks like the chicken before the egg to me. Who bangs the chick?”

The preacher went to punch the intruder but held back.

“You will leave this place,” the preacher said, visibly crumbling.

“Well, fuck me dead. Did you see that, girls?” Mark said over his shoulder. We’ve got some proud preacher here. Warlord of the dead world. Keeper of the flame. Sacrilegious self-abuser. You’re straight off tee-vee, isn’t he girls. Another cliched, slimy cock-sucking Evangelist type…”

One of the women he was with picked up a brick and cracked it across Mark’s skull and the crack could be heard as he fell to the ground outside the house. Blood poured from his head and his eyes were still and lifeless.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since Tailem Bend. He was mad, really around the bend… I’m not joking” she said and began to cry.

Lance noticed the bruises on the girl’s legs, bruises seemed to envelope their whole bodies. He looked to the ground and the dead man had just pulled a knife from his pocket. It glistened in the morning sun.

“He was once a child born of the age of television. It’s evil essence finally distilled. Death is its only release,” the preacher winked at Lance.

“We did see suburbia. There was nothing in Perth and so he went mad.”

“At least the wine was good,” scoffed the other girl and she hiccupped.

The morning came for Lance’s first flight to suburbia. It was a clear day and the plane was filled with enough fuel for the journey. The engines ran smoothly and took off from the airstrip alone, following the compass directions which would lead into suburbia. It was an uneventful flight, except Lance had nearly flown into a flock of pigeons. Above the mountains into a landlocked place, he found it. suburbia. It was massive. Bigger than Lance had dreamed. The spread of dwellings swirled in Lance’s mind. He watched from above, a wave of serpentine bitumen wound boundlessly as it crossed into some sort of mesh of webbing. Lance searched for the airport since he would need fuel and passed over the hulking skyscrapers of the dead city. It was not yet midday. Once he spotted the airport, he took the plane past it and saw the beach and enormous sand hills which stormed forth into bush which took over some of the streets. He landed the craft on the runway, past the dormant Boeings and stopped among the Cessnas and Pipers. Lance cut the engine and stepped from the cockpit. There was an unearthly stillness about the place he thought, almost like a cemetery. The sun radiated in the empty sky and buildings stood in the distance.

“Hello! Is anybody there?! It’s me Lance the wonder boy from wherever,” and his voice failed him. It echoed across the emptiness, returned weaker and then died. There was nothing to answer except the silence he knew so well. Lance stacked old wood and tyres some distance from the plane and lit the pile. Black smoke began to rise and he began to refill the tanks with a hand pump. It was mid-afternoon when he decided to leave. No-one had come. He took off and swooped low over different parts of suburbia looking for smoke or a sign of life. He would make this journey three times a week until he would find someone – the so-called warrior.

***

Chapter Eight

“I remember only the colour of blood in black and white” Brad’s Journal.

“The Ghan is an experience you will never forget” Advertisement.

Brad developed the film in the camera with the mini-lab he brought with him. The pictures on the negative were dark but he could see the dark patch on the sheets of the bed. Blood. It had to be blood and too much blood. He would have to take a walk since the compartment was suddenly becoming too stuffy. Brad stood from the seat where he was slumped and felt a little numb and topsy-turvy. He tried to guess the time and looked at his wristwatch. It was four in morning. He opened up the door to his compartment and peered out. The corridor was bare and Brad began to walk to the back of the train, through another first-class carriage and two sleeper carriages where he crossed a man dashing to the toilet. Brad strolled through the economy section where people sat up all night. Some were still awake reading while others tossed in their sleep. Many different faces, young and old. The next carriage was the same, an eerie quiet as he went through. At the junction between the carriages, there was a couple of teenagers smoking what looked like a joint and Brad could hear them screaming together for a dare just before he opened the door. He apologised and kept walking, through another set of economy carriages where someone played a radio with the old song The Beat Goes On, by the Globos. It was there he stopped by a rather surly looking and drunken middle-aged man. There was an empty vodka bottle still in his hand. He put his hand on Brad’s chest and stared at him rather groggily.

“You’re a cunt.”

Brad looked speechlessly around him and a few people stared at the spectacle.

“Excuse me?”

“No. Didn’t you hear what I said. You’re a cunt.”

A young conductor came up from behind and grabbed the man. Brad stepped back and followed through the corridor next to the toilets. The drunk broke free and threw one solid punch in the conductor’s eye. The conductor hurled three more back in to the fellow’s face and kicked him in the balls before he had him in a headlock. Everyone was staring at Brad before he left the carriage. This time he kept going until he reached the end of the train. The carriage was meant for baggage and guards. Brad sneaked past the guards and the floorboards could still be heard creaking above the rattle of the train. The door at the end of the train was unlocked and Brad sat there with his legs dangling over the edge. The pilot lights cast a dim glow on the tracks which continued to rattle. Brad lit a cigarette, toked heavily and blew the smoke away. Blood. Whose blood? The picture haunted him of a splatter and then a giant globule. Was Carlson dead? Or was it the woman? Brad pondered Anthony Sparkes once more and finished his cigarette before a guard came and flashed a torch in his face. What if Sparkes were alive?

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m a passenger in first class. I was feeling a little sick and this was the only place I could come to for air.”

“First class have got their own toilets to be sick. Now come on out of here. It’s dangerous.”

The guard stepped forward and helped Lance shut the door. He was an old man who still wore his old-fashioned hat and badges proudly.

“I’m sorry,” said Brad not wanting to create a fuss.

“Well then, if you’re feeling sick then I can understand. Enough of them bloody politicians in first class to make you sick,” said the conductor. “You do look a little pale… Do you need a doctor?”

“No. I’ll be all right.”

“I don’t mind people if they know what they’re after. Just like this a few years back. I was in the guardhouse and I found this young lad sitting right where you were, the door wide open. He jumped. Before I could do anything, he jumped. Well, I reported the thing and they thought me mad. Walked the train from end to end asking if there was anyone missing. They even had people comb the line where I thought he went down. They found nothing.”

“What did you do?”

“What I did was I’d had too much whiskey to drink. And look where I am now? Shuffling out strangers from the back of trains for the last twenty years because it looks like they’re about to commit suicide.”

Brad smiled at the old man and he winked.

“You know there’s an urban myth here that people go around with vans carrying rifles and pick up the remains of all the cuckoos who jump off this train and perish in the desert here and around Alice Springs. They heap the bodies high. All that’s left is flat piles of bones held together by flesh. Tell me and I reckon that Bob Curtis should get a heap of trucks the way him and his mates have treated this country… Carrying rifles – the guys in the vans,” and the guard trailed off as Lance returned to his compartment and crashed into a deep sleep upon the black and white negatives of the smudge on the sheets.

Brad woke up screaming. At least he thought he did. He shook his head and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Light streamed in from the window. It was almost midday and they were passing through some hills. Then there was a knock on the door.

“Are you all right, sir?,” asked the serviceman.

“Yes, fine thanks,” replied Brad, quite unsure.

“Lunch is in half an hour. I’ve saved you a place in the dining car. I might clean up in here while you are out.”

Brad looked at the broken scotch bottle. The smudge where the spaghetti was, the general mess: “Yes, that’ll be fine.”

He stood and looked in the mirror and told himself that he looked like shit. He removed the camera from the cubicle and noticed Carlson’s compartment was clean, as if it had never been used. Brad took two Panadol. The camera was packed away and Brad got into the shower. The hot water seemed to revive what life was left in him although he felt he was still under the influence of something or other. He scrubbed himself, washed his hair and dressed in a new pair of trousers and a blue shirt.

“There ya go,” he smiled in the mirror but it suddenly disappeared, if it was a smile at all.

There was a dinner call over the speakers and he slapped his face and departed. The conductor smiled with a brandy grin and Brad gave him a goofy smile in return.

“One helluva night,” he said.

“They just seem to go on, don’t they?,” he said as I pushed through.

The dining cart was already buzzing with people waiting to be seated, mainly old women with walking sticks and cardigans, with the odd assortment of family members, whining kids getting a thump behind the earhole. Brad was seated behind a genteel woman of about seventy. She had a puffy looking face covered in powder and a frail body covered in talcum which Brad could smell as he sat down. She wore a thick blue coat and a hat to match impaled with a hatpin almost as large as a knitting needle embedded with a red plastic rhinestone. I’m guessing a Beryl, thought Brad.

“I’m having the roast beef. What do you think? I discovered they’re a little stingy with the dessert. Peach Melba is always nice,” said without barely a glance at Brad. He picked up the menu and tried to read it.

“Of course, the fish is nice, I’ve had that several times.”

Brad had the urge to call the conductor and have her removed

“Do you travel often?,” Brad said bluntly through a headache.

“Why yes, can you tell? Let me see, this is my…” And she held up her fingers and started reeling off meaningless dates as Brad looked at the menu once more as the waiter arrived for their orders.

Brad ordered the chicken and the woman nodded: “Same as last time.”

“And who do you vote for?,” Brad asked.

“That darned election. If you’ll excuse me, I don’t believe in politics. When I was a lass, I was a bit of a socialist with a little wickedness towards anarchy. They say if you aren’t a socialist before you are twenty-one then there is little hope for you. After that it really doesn’t matter does it? I’ve really no time for these politicians and their raving supporters…” and she nodded at the electioneers in the far corner.

“I come on trains to relax. They are simply for that purpose. They’re also very safe … except in Agatha Christie novels. Do you like train travel?”

“To tell you absolutely, apart from suburban trains this is the first real train journey I’ve made since I was six years old or so.”

Now that truly does seem a long time.”

“I took the old Ghan. When it ran through Port Augusta”

It’s wonderful country. Do you remember much of it?”

“I remember Saul went missing. He always went missing. I’d look for him and he would always be missing… “Brad thought he could see a drop of blood on the end of the hatpin… “I loved my brother…”

“I had a brother once, killed in Italy. He was younger of course and I loved him dearly. He was the most perfect baby. He’s buried there somewhere over there. He flew with the RAF. A lot of Australians flew with them. I tell myself I’ll go there one day, but I’ll never get there.”

“What was his name?”

“Richard.”

“That’s where Hinkler died isn’t it, Italy?”

“And like my brother it was years before they found the plane.”

There was possibly a good story in it but he sighed and let it go. Poor woman, he thought.

Brad stared through an enormous window in a hallway lined with compartments, lost in a dreamy plain of grassland, which rolled on until it would meld with the hazy sky. Other children stared out of the window, watching the sweeping nothingness. A dead bullock appeared momentarily in the foreground next to the line.

“What is it doing?,” asked a young boy, whom Brad imagined as himself.

“He’s dead. A man with a gun probably shot it,” said an older girl.

“Poor thing,” Brad thought, the carcass lost in the desert amidst the rising dust of the passing train. “What is dead mean?,” the kid asked incongruously.

She said: “Dead is dead. You know when your heart stops beating… You just die and you don’t come back to life. You’re just dead forever. And you turn into a skeleton.” Brad seemed to understand his dead goldfish now at home when he was a kid.

The Ghan roared along a girdle of desert tracks spun across dry forgotten land. It was the biggest train Brad had ever seen. If you stood at one end and when the track would turn, you could see through the window, the tail winding far behind. Brad lived on the train, ate on the train, slept on the train. They were going to a place called Alice Springs with his grandfather, his grandmother and his mother and baby sister. The previous baby was stillborn and it was a boy to be named Saul. His mother didn’t seem fussed at first but it was the first argument he had heard between his parents. Something about cat shit and cheese. When his mother said Saul died, Brad didn’t really understand but now he was putting two and two together and Saul was dead like the goldfish. He longed for Saul while he was still alive and when he had died, he missed him. He missed the patting of his mother’s stomach and he missed all the talk of having a new brother… At night, he had a torch in his bed and he would speak to Saul since Brad was unbaptised and had never been to church.

“Saul, are you there Saul?,” listened Brad and all he could hear was the television and his father’s voice from a conversation he had about his penis with his father: “Be gentle, be gentle.” Then there was cheese and cat shit.

“Saul?”

“Yes?,” said a voice after some bullets and screams from the television.

“Where are you?,” he asked as a grey cloud rolled over his mind as he closed his eyes. He thought he could see a face in the cloud just like his mother said there was a child’s face in the painting they had of a starry night.

“I am everywhere. I will always be here and even if you are alone, you will never be lonely. You only need to look at the stars at the sky,” and it was his grandfather’s voice and yet it was still Saul. Brad couldn’t make out the voice…

“I wish my brother had a willy like me,” said Brad and pointed the torch at his erection and he didn’t know why his love of his willy was so pleasurable. Before he went to sleep Brad turned off the torch.

“Saul… Saul… I love you Saul … Do you like licorice ice cream?”

But there was no answer.

The family took showers on the train and went to the toilet on the train and Brad had to go to the toilet. He turned away from the window and saw a man with a chicken bone who had been talking to his grandfather in his compartment leave. The line chattered on for a time and the train stopped for a time in a small country town where some people climbed aboard from the dusty ground. There was no platform and the station was little more than a tin shed. One side had an old sign which read: tea room. The train continued to a larger town where they got off for a while. There was a large collection of steam trains and an assortment of carriages, all dormant and full of waist-high fences and signs which read: Do Not Touch. Brad’s grandfather told him to stand in front of the train over the fence.

“No.”

“Don’t be silly… Why not? Nothing will happen.”

“The man might come.”

“No, he won’t”

“Yes, he will. The man will come and take me away. Like they said mum took Saul.”

There was an unhappy photograph taken of Brad standing in front of the steam train.”

“I still have it at home.”

“What have you got at home?,” asked the old woman wondered if it was something heretical.

“Nothing,” said Brad, realising he was speaking aloud as dinner arrived.

“When did you say you were last on this train?”

“Years ago. Back when McMahon was PM.”

“He was a crook… Do you remember much of Alice?,” she said as she broke her bread roll and reached for the butter.

“Yes, I do, I remember the heat.”

The family stayed at an air-conditioned motel or a Flag Inn. The youngest one-year-old sister whined while Brad got his finger wrung through the wringer in the laundry. His grandfather hired a Land Rover and they went driving in many directions sight-seeing. Brad remembered the Springs themselves and they weren’t very glamorous, more of a puddle really. He went to Katherine Gorge and had his picture taken at Albert Namatjira’s grave. There was a hot afternoon while they watched the flickering image of Andy Pandy on the black and white television, crushing ice in their mouths from the lemonade, between their teeth. His grandfather then took him for a walk across the road into the bush. They walked for about five to ten minutes and then came across a derelict car, an old Chrysler with a camp fire burning bedside it. There were several aboriginals there and one of them sat in the car wearing a woolen beanie. The older man was carving some sticks and Brad’s grandfather spoke to him about buying them. Another man came over and patted Brad’s blonde hair, smiling widely and laughing when Brad smiled back.

“You colour your hair that way?”

“No,” frowned Brad and crossed his arms.

He laughed richly. Meanwhile a group of children appeared from out of the bush dressed in an odd assortment of clothes. Brad walked closer to them as his grandfather admired the craftsmanship of the wood. They were all boys, the kids and one of them picked up a stone and hurled it at Brad, missing him. Brad ran back to his grandfather as they were shooed away and they ran off over a small hill and disappeared.

“Why do they throw stones at me?,” said Brad and stared into the emptiness.

“It’s for us to know and for you to find out,” said his grandfather at the risk of being misunderstood. Brad just wrinkled his nose into the distance.

“Your chicken will be cold,” said the old woman.

Brad looked down at his plate and realised he had been staring out of the window.

“Yes… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say you’re sorry. You’ve obviously got a lot of things on your mind. Don’t burden yourself by apologising to an old woman. You could let me have your dessert though. The Peach Melba is delicious.”

“Why, of course,” said Brad and pushed the plate towards her. He watched her have another mouthful of dessert. She smiled and tried to hide the crumbs which fell into her lap.

“You look tired, did the election revelers keep you awake?,” she asked.

Brad’s mind clicked over for a second and of the three or four worlds which he inhabited, he thought of two of them: “Did you know it will be the end of the world because of these bastards? It will be the end. And when it is over there will be all the housing and food you can choose from because they’ll all be empty… You’ll be able to choose any religion as well… And the one I’m going for is myself and the one which really did care about babies with cancer, about insane children, about Australia for Australians, forget the rest, lest we forget… socialism without a vote, having the right to not care at all, discounted fuel, free cigarettes and alcohol… Vote for Saul because this creep ain’t gonna give you the time of day once he reelected.”

The old woman stopped eating her peach.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Brad and left the table and as he left Carlson entered the dining cart followed by Parsons. Carlson looked Brad in the eye and nodded. It was then he returned and opened the door to Carlson’s unlocked compartment. It was bare, the bed had been made and two suitcases stood unopened next to the bed. Brad looked for traces of blood around the bed and could find none. He then opened the door to the bathroom and froze. There was a camera and tripod peering through and into Brad’s compartment. Stuck to the walls of the bathroom were various pictures of Brad, standing in front of the camera or two-way mirror making faces, even a nude one of Brad, stepping from the shower. There were others of Brad developing the negatives.

“What the fuck is this?”

Brad repeated this over and looked around the compartment, in drawers and cupboards. He was panicking and needed something to tell him what he wanted to know. Nothing. He opened one the suitcases and found them to contain woman’s clothing and a bloodied sheet. There was a small box and he opened to find it contained a handgun. He took the gun as he felt he needed it and shut the suitcase and the bathroom door. Brad returned to his compartment and put the gun away with his camera.

***

Chapter Nine

“I love Lance but don’t want him to reach beyond life itself.” Brad’s Journal.

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.” Beryl Markham.

It was beyond pain. His body turned in a tight ball as it felt the spasms of withdrawal. Brad dry-wretched over the arcade floor and it made hollow echoing sound. He could smell the Vegemite and then it would disappear in a spasm of pain. His palm pressed down through the liquid on the ground. Harder as the pain escalated in ebbs. A kaleidoscope of dark red shadows moved throughout his brain. There was no television. Television, save me now, he thought and felt the sweat pour from his brow. He felt hot and the fever burned his very innards with pain. Recede! Recede! It would not and Brad felt himself tumble from his body. He felt a note of sadness as he rose to watch the boy as he lay still shaking in his own bile-like vomit. He looked closer. His eyes were shut tightly and his nose crinkled in evident pain. His arms pulled his knees close to his chest. Even his toes seemed to shake. Whimpers could be heard, like the whimpers of a sad and lost puppy. Maybe they should be answered. Pity the poor lost boy in the shopping arcade. Dressed only in his jeans, this boy no longer has a mind of his own. Overrun by messages of pain he could no longer understand, he would wish himself dead if he could. But he had forgotten he had forgotten. There was nothing to remember in this world of no right and no wrong. It was as though he were thoroughly immersed in television or television had turned on him… And yet high above it all were more questions…Who could grant him a wish if he had reason to ask? Why should there be any reason? For there is no longer reason. And once more why should there be. Look at him and he will look at himself. Paranoia. Silence and darkness in the shopping mall.

Hours later the shudders ceased and Brad felt his body move voluntarily. He was still weak but had regained control and stumbled back to the big orange fire doors. A bright glow poured from the room in the distance down the corridor. Not the light of the lamp but an orange flame, which licked the doorway. He looked through the smoke and could only see his own reflection in a mirror across the room. It shattered in the head as the flames grew bigger. The bed was empty. He stared longer at the room sniffing the flames and waiting for the smell of burning flesh. Instead, he began coughing.

“Katherine,” he spluttered.

Laughter seemed to echo along the corridor, the smug and satisfied laughter that Brad knew so well. He covered his ears with a vice-like grip. The laughter still pierced and a coughing fit sent him to the floor as smoke filled his lungs. Brad broke away from the burning door and ran back through the arcade.

It was dawn outside and he returned to his car. He drove away for a couple of hours as the shopping centre burned and then returned. It was a magnificent fire. Brad knew if he had been caught within that he would not have worried. They had destroyed the world and made a shittier one. But there was beauty in the flames as they extended like turrets into the blue morning sky. The sound of crackling would sometimes be punctuated by a wild explosion. And the warmth. Acres of building burned in this spectacle Isolated from suburbia by the car parks. The flames peaked as they engulfed the flagpole and burned the faded blue rags which swirled above the currents of wind generated by the mass of flame.

“Pentan!!!!,” yelled Brad. “I love you Pentan! I love you!!”

The last of the flagpole had fallen when through the roar of the fire, Brad could hear the buzzing of a chainsaw. It sounded like a chainsaw. Then it burst through the smoke. It was a plane. Or was it? Brad was uncertain as it disappeared overhead. He turned and saw it again in the distance. It was a plane and it was coming back.

Lance was excited by the fire and approached the smoke again. Brad stood on the FJ and waved his arms at the pilot. Lance returned for another swoop of the shopping centre. Maybe it was an old gas bottle that just exploded, he thought. Then he saw someone standing beside an old red FJ Holden, waving with both arms. Lance flew low and put an arm out of the window and waved. He circled the centre twice more before returning to the airport.

Brad followed the plane, sticking his head out of the window every so often to make sure of its direction. Someone in the plane waved to him. Lance saw the car and circled it to allow him to catch up and eventually led the way to the airport. When Brad got to the airport, a fire burned and thick black smoke rose from a couple of tyres. The pilot stood next to the twin engine, wearing his flying jacket and reflective aviators, pumping fuel into the machine.

“Knew you’d find me. I’m Lance.”

“I’m Brad.”

“Are you the sole survivor of suburbia?”

Brad felt pained: “I suppose I am at that.”

“Well, you must be the warrior then. I’m here to take you to a better place.”

“Where?”

“Over the hills and far away.”

“A better place? In that thing?”

“We call it the perimeter and it’s the place of the chosen ones.”

“You fly like a demon.”

“You should see me eat pussy… Don’t worry. I’m a warrior too. It’s just I don’t kill people, well not yet…”

“I’m a warrior at that. Have you flown one of them?,” said Brad as he pointed to one of the abandoned Boeings.”

There’s only one other plane I’d like to fly.”

“And what’s that?”

“Smithy’s Southern Cross.”

“You mean…”

“That’s the one. Remember they brought her out of retirement a few years before the rot and flew her around the country… She should still be working. If we can find her,” said Lance.

Brad was taken aback, lost for words: “You’re kidding… When?”

“Well, if you keep pumping at that rate, we might make it next week.”

Lance’s hand continued to pump the fuel into the plane faster and Brad returned to the FJ for his sunglasses and more hash.

“Tell me more about the chosen ones… Are they a band?”

“Well, you see there was the age of television in suburbia and everyone died because of this thing called the rot and the reformation. I get tired of explaining this… Well, everyone is chosen in the reformation and they must do their bit to make it good so the whole thing works. My bit has been to guard the deserts and find more chosen one’s like yourself?”

“And what’s my bit?”

“Well, I dunno, you’ll have to talk to the preacher when we get back to the perimeter. He’ll tell you… He says you are the chosen one who must destroy the last of the evil in suburbia. You will save the reformation and Australia. That means you’re pretty important. Green and Gold… Better than a medal in the Olympics… And it just might be javelin,” Lance said under his breath.

Brad felt unnerved by what Lance said and he immediately thought of Pentan and the evil in suburbia. He had no television any more. The smile left Brad’s face when he saw Lance’s.

“What? Aren’t we going now?”

“The fire.”

“Yeah.”

“There was someone in there.”

“Someone alive?”

“No,” Brad shook his head. “Not alive. Just the fire.”

“Well, we can’t just put what’s left out…”

“They’re dead. You know what dead is?” Then Brad felt the presence of television: “Do you know television?”

“No, I can’t remember much. I don’t want to remember…all those people dead and dying and all the animals too. All I remember is a guy with scissor hands who killed you in your dreams… But, yeah, I knew someone who talked of television. It all seemed a bit mad. Why don’t you sit down.”

“It’s madness. It comes anytime. There was only one person…”

“Yeah mate, we all have our moments,” Lance lifted his eyebrows trying to raise a smile.

“Well, are we going?”

“Yeah, I knew you were an arsehole when I saw the glasses. I’m a reasonable man.”

“Get your stuff from the car and we’ll go.”

Brad pulled a pipe and some hash from his pocket.

“Not only a reasonable man but a reasonably stoned man,” said Brad to himself

as Lance pulled the hose from the tank.

“Where will we be tonight?,” asked Brad, raising his voice a little above the engine as the sky around them began to darken.

“There’re airstrips, highways. I know an airstrip for tonight.”

It was almost sundown when the pair of them touched down somewhere.

Morning came and Brad awoke to the sound of Lance again pumping fuel into the tanks of the plane. They did not speak until the plane was filled in the crisp morning air.

“You got anything to eat.”

“I’ve got a tin of chilli.”

They ate the beans and then took off and followed the Murray River, travelling north before the Snowy Mountains and then passing over Canberra, refueling if they could.

“Are you sure you know where the fuck we are going?,” said Brad at the sight of Canberra.

“What does this television thing tell you?”

“It tells me you’re one smart kid who should have been on one of those game shows and as for the rest… It’s all dead…But that’s the thing. Adelaide was dead … and then Pentan was there and it seemed like he was really there. I think he can travel vast distances…”

“Maybe he has a plane that can go the speed of sound?”

“He should get stoned more, whoever he is and he wouldn’t be such an arsehole.”

“Who?”

“Sir Pentan. Just call me sir. I hate to burst your chosen one balloon but I’m not a chosen one and even if I was, I don’t think I’ve got the balls to kill anybody. I just want to get stoned and die.”

“Give me a toke man, you just said a mouthful,” Lance said in mocking fashion.

They eventually found Sydney and her sprawling suburbia and Lance decided they should see the Harbour Bridge. They were shocked at the sight of the city as much of it had been gutted by fire. The top of the Centrepoint building had fallen, the Sydney Opera House was blackened by a fire which had made a shell of her insides and the grand old bridge was almost orange with rust. Lance found the airport and landed next to an old hangar beside a tail section from an old TAA plane.

“Let’s take a little drive,” said Lance. “I’ve always wanted to see Sydney Town.”

There was a silver Mercedes waiting for them outside the terminal they were able to get going and the tape inside played Vivaldi and Bach on the stereo. The tank was full and so, they drove towards the city. There were cars strewn all over the highways leading into the city. Half the city was impassable, covered with fallen concrete and debris from the buildings.

“It’s a mess all right,” said Brad…. “I’m not picking up anything and there’s no sign of life… Hey, remember museums?!”

Lance, who had an interest in all things old and new, except the end of the world, slammed on the brakes. Inside the museum, there was enough light to see but they found it quite dull and stuffy until they reached the stuffed animal section. Each of them took a ride on their favourite animal even though a horse’s leg was broken by Brad and he stood through the spine of an elephant, settling for the lion. Lance lifted up the polar bear’s tail and pretended to shove his head up its dead arse.

“Got a camera?,” he laughed.

They then smashed the mummy case and took the mummy with them, bending it in half so it would sit in the back of the Mercedes.

“Let’s take a ride to Kings Cross,” said Lance with pursed lips.

The Mercedes followed the signs and they slowed down on Oxford Street.

“How do you know all this.”

“My mum brought me here as a kid… We tried to get a plane to America but it was hopeless, especially when everyone there got sick too. All that coughing and bloody lungs… Anyway, she brought me here… and tried to sell my body.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Course I’m kidding…. You wouldn’t do that now, would you, mummy?,” said Lance and pointed his thumb at the back seat.”

Brad laughed the hardest he had ever laughed for the longest he could remember.

The car stopped and they both got out. They walked down the street until they found a stairway which led to a nightclub.

“Let’s have a look,” said Lance. “We may get some nookie.”

Light streamed through high-set pavement windows. The room was full of skeletons dressed in black and they were strewn across the dance floor.

“Who would have thought it could strike so quickly?,” said Brad.

“They appear to have been striking a pose at the time,” joked Lance, tilting his head.

“Not so funny … Cmon I wouldn’t be caught dead in this place.”

“Real funny. Poor devils,” said Brad, giving them one last glance before they moved on.

“They probably really were celebrating the end of the world.”

Brad lingered for a moment in a double take, looking around the night club. There was a smell, an odour which reminded him of the rain people. He followed Lance up the stairs and they walked a little further down the street where newspapers swirled in the wind.

“There’s nothing here,” said Lance. “We’ll go back and head for Brisbane in the morning.”

A piece of newspaper blew across Brad and he picked it from him and discovered it was a front page which read: ALL HOPE FOR WORLD GONE… and it read Final Edition. The wind blew it from his hands and they passed an electrical shop with televisions in the window.

“What I’d do to watch it and not … not bloody Pentan. All the time. And he knows everything, I think. Why I am cursed!”
“Cursed! The mummy in the car is more cursed that you. You’re alive. This Pentan whoever he is probably has a tiny dick, or else one that’s too big and I bet he hates his father. And Pentan? What does he do tan himself in with a pen or something? A pink one at that… Pentan …. Does he worship a Pentancle or something? Pentan: is he so pent up he can’t come?…”

Brad was coming round again to lucidity: “He killed Katherine.”

“I know, I know buddy you told me…”

“He wants to see me dead…”

Well maybe we’ll see him dead. Maybe his pen tan will give him skin cancer. Maybe his dick will drop off and he can grow another one and he’ll be perfectly happy. He’ll leave us all alone.”

Brad had more to say and it was obvious from his silence.

“Don’t tell me Brad, you’re an alien, and one of Pentan’s boys and you want to anally protrude me while I sleep? Don’t tell me, you’ve already anally protruded me on television.”

“…. I just want to kill him, stuff his balls down his throat and then with my fist bash his head in, that snake eyed, skinny and pasty face…. Bash it all the way the FUCK in… wasn’t that a movie?”

“Yes, Yes protrude me, protrude me!”

“… I want to stomp on that face, that ugly appallingly rancid face FUCK that face right into the ground with steel caps, twist them …. And then his balls!!

“Yes Brad, you may insert one of your balls. Remember they’re still in his throat…”

“Something sharp. And then grind them to dust… And forget the rest of him that’s his problem,” said Brad with a flourish. “What do you mean: protrude? Don’t you mean probe?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” said Lance. “I once had a bad experience with some kid at kindergarten.”

They laughed.

Brad stared out of the window from the plane and watched the coast pass sleepily; its inlets, rocks, reefs and sandy shores. Lance pointed to a large container half buried with its contents spilled all over the shore.

“What are they?,” said Lance, taking the plane down for a closer look.

“They’re televisions,” giggled Brad, staring at so many.

Lance told Brad to pull out the tape deck and they blasted some Eric Clapton to drown the monotonous sound of the engine. The plane continued along the coast, the lighthouses and the dead beach towns.

“There’s some ripper surf,” said Brad, squinting down at the orange waves.

The sun had almost set and Brisbane remained to be seen.

“It’s okay we’ve still got another hour or so ‘til sunset.”

The thought of landing in the dark made Lance shudder. There was the water, the beach and the hills which spread inland.

“Is this it?,” asked Brad pointing to a mass of buildings.

“No, this is the Gold Coast. Coolangatta through to Surfer’s Paradise.

They watched as they passed the empty skyscrapers along the beach, the rubbishy shores and empty streets below. Lance increased the throttle. He followed the freeway and they could see Brisbane in the fading light and found the airport next to the shadow of the Gateway Bridge. Lance told Brad to hang on as the plane grew closer to the tarmac which was clear. Lance could see with slight panic that part of the runway was strewn with the wreckage of a crashed airliner. He pulled the twin engine up slightly and realised there was no second chance. He let the plane touch down again. There was the tearing of rubber, then the sound of metal grating along the runway. Brad’s eyes widened at the sight of sparks which were obviously coming from beneath them. He held on tightly to the tape deck which blasted Tales of Brave Ulysses. Lance held tightly to the controls, with his eyes closed. Then the aircraft stopped its horrifying racket and left behind only quiet, no flames, nothing. Lance gulped and stepped from the wreckage. He could barely see the missing wheels crushed beneath the undercarriage which he doused liberally with the fire extinguisher just in case.

“It’s okay, we’ve landed,” said Lance to an immobile Brad.

Brad looked out of the door and after he got out said: “I thought you’d bitten off too much then.”

“Never underestimate a chosen one.”

“Get that out of your head. There’s no chosen. The guy who made the Reformation was an idiot. All he did was have them release the germs in the first place.”

“Well sorry … and to think I was trying to think of the greatest footy mark I’d ever seen.”

“And?”

“I finished with Rod Marsh slogging a cricket bat.”

“Cricket? I thought you could land the thing.”

“I said I could fly these things… Landing on an obstacle course isn’t in the flying manual.”

The night was cool and the morning revealed a tropical lushness.

“Well,” said Lance.

Brad’s answer was always predictable: “I’m hungry.”

“Well, find some food while we look for The Cross.”

They walked across the tarmac and through the terminal where some vending machines resided. Brad used his method to smash them and retrieve stale packets of chips and chocolate. The doors to the terminal were unlocked. Inside were echoes of past chaos, empty from end to end, with only unclaimed baggage outside the Ansett counters and papers strewn across the ground.

“We could rent a car. Avis or Budget?”

“The one with the Porsche,” said Brad as he stood among the tables with the Foster’s umbrellas.

“A Porsche, man,” answered Lance. “Well, I don’t think we can cater, our rates have skyrocketed with the rot you know, but insurance costs have fallen dramatically along with the population.”

Brad took a swig on a bourbon bottle from the bar.

“You really like all that shit, don’t you?,” said Lance.

“I mean, fuck yeah!,“ he swigged again: “Mother’s milk. Don’t you drink?”

“Or do drugs. The preacher has beer and I have one now and then.”

“The preacher? Who the hell is he?”

“He’s the teacher of the Reformation. You’ll meet him when we get back to the camp. I told you all about him.”

Lance watched Brad throw the empty bottle away and it smashed against a flower shop window, breaking it and knocking over the dead flowers inside.

“Poor flowers. Poor pretty dead flowers,” hiccupped Brad.

“Come let’s find The Cross.”

“You’re not serious … or are we?”

Lance pushed open the dead sliding door and stepped though the gap. Brad followed rather pissed. He hiccupped again as he sucked in his small gut to squeeze through the gap. Beans can do that to you, he thought.

“Jeez look at this place, all cars and no people,” said Brad while Lance pondered the massive car park and decided to walk through the collection of dead metal.

“If the memorial was at the airport, then it would have to be on the road leading in,” said Lance, hypothetically.

They started to walk.

“Oh my God, tell me it isn’t true,” said Brad with his hand on his forehead.

“Dude you’re staring at a car. An old car.”

So, this is a Chevy, Brad thought to himself as he ran his fingers along her edge.

“Of all the cars I drove in suburbia, I never drove a Chevy. He sighed when they found a set of keys in the car but the battery was flat. So Brad griped that it would never happen since the chance would never present itself again. Lance told him to shut up and they found the road beside the car park which was a long stretch of dual-lanes highway that headed off into the distance, sandwiched between growth that was ten foot tall.

“Would’ya take a look at that?,” said Brad with a gaga look on his face.

“Well, it’s down that road somewhere, come on.”

“Well, well, well, is that all you say?”

They followed the road, Lance kicking an old can of Fanta. The wind picked up and Brad noticed the clouds in the sky. He tossed thoughts of Katherine around in his mind. He remembered the feelings when they came together. He thought of his reflection in the burning room, or was it Katherine trying to escape? The laughter seemed to echo along with the sound of the aluminium can and the buzzing of insects among the tropical plants.

“Lance?”

“What?”

“I was just thinking. What if we can’t find this thing. Or if it doesn’t work? How are we going to get out of here?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. There’re other planes.”

Lance stopped. He thought he could see something through the bushes. It was some sort of building and there was a gap, a car park. Brad saw Lance dart through the plants, unable to contain himself. Brad followed.

“Hang on.”

Lance paused to take a pee and found himself pissing on some sort of gigantic metal letter. It was the letter ‘M’ attached to concrete. He stood back and he could make out ‘TH  MEM. Further back and ‘MITH’. The rest was obscured by the undergrowth. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial. Brad made his way through the gaps in the plants until he came to the building made of iron. A sort of mini-hangar surrounded by reinforced glass which was stained with bird droppings that almost shrouded what lay within. Lance wasn’t far behind and had his face pressed against an enormous pane of glass, peering through a gap in the white and black and brown droppings. Brad finally found a gap and peered in.

“There she is, there’s the old bus,” said Lance, half pondering what to do next.

Brad rubbed away some more grime from the window for a better look. It was The Cross all right. They were looking at her from behind. The words Southern Cross ran across her tail. She was sealed perfectly in a little time capsule, untouched by the outside world. There were glass windows on all sides and Lance followed the windows with the pictures of Smithy, charts and diaries around to the front. This was the most significant view. Brad stared at the colours; silver wings and tail, the fuselage a royal blue. He noticed the engines.

“Three propellers.”

“One for good luck. Three whirlwind 220 horsepower, piston driven engines. Look she’s perfect. And those wings, they’re all wood you know.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. And you can fly this bus.”

“I studied everything about her. Dad had books about it.”

Brad remained uncertain about termites and the tropical weather on such a structure.

“Remember this mama flew right across the world,” said Lance.

Brad stared and was suddenly awed by the beauty of the plane. He resigned himself to her. He could see it, the character, the beauty, the perfection of design, the perfect contours, the colour, that deep blue and the stars. The Southern Cross.

“She is beautiful.”

“I want to touch her first,” said Lance.

“Okay,” said Brad and left the hangar to go back to the terminal in search of a sledgehammer. He went to security first and instead found a key, or a stack of keys, one of which worked.

Lance fell into a kind of trance and he walked into the hangar toward the plane with his hands outstretched. He caressed the plane with his fingers and opened the door on the side to enter the belly. Brad watched as Lance slipped into the cockpit. He sat there for a few moments with his hands on the controls.

“Can I touch her now?,” said Brad outside the cockpit.

“You know this is pure desecration,” yelled Lance.

“Do you think you can start her?”

“I don’t know. It might take some time. Batteries and fuel.”

Brad watched as Lance seemed to play with the controls.

“There’s no power,” said Lance and disappeared from the cockpit.

Brad stood next to a pedestal holding a bronze bust entitled ‘Smithy’ and waited as Lance checked the engines and the fuselage, finally emerging rubbing his hands on his trousers.

“Shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. She’s fully restored. Took me a while to work out there’s no electrical starter. I can’t find it anyway.”

“Bullshit… Every one of these, especially restored ones have an electrical starter.”

“It’s a worry.”

“We’ll bring fuel and I’ll check the engines thoroughly. You try and work out how we get it to the highway to fly the thing out of here.”

Brad nodded and almost grimaced as he turned and looked at the direction the Southern Cross faced. There was the plate glass but there was a fire axe out the back… Metal barriers, ten-foot-high grass and then maybe a carpark. Brad’s eye froze on the sight of a figure peering through the bushes. A wild-eyed figure with bushy silver hair, an open mouth and a finger pointing straight at Brad. He turned to Lance and motioned him over.

“Take a look at this.”

When he turned back the figure was gone.

“What?”

“He’s gone. There was someone there, pointing at me.”

“It was probably your electronic imagination… You are stoned,” said Lance returning to the engine on a ladder which was kept in the cupboard along with archaic and new tools.

Brad left the hangar and went outside to where he had seen the man. He stood for a moment listening to the cicadas in the grass. There was the sound of a startled pigeon in a tree.

“I am here. I am not,” said a voice from behind the grass. “I am here I am not. I am not here. I am here.”

Brad moved slowly through the bushes and found an old man who jumped in front of him, dribbling on his wild beard: “Here I am.”

Brad tried to look into the old man’s eyes but as he stared, he could see the old man’s eyes seemed to have grown and stared apart. It was scary to the stoned Brad but they were staring outward!

“Who are you?”

“I am a wise old man,” he giggled horribly.

“Wise? You nearly made he shit myself,” and he shook himself in disbelief.

“I knew he would return. He has come to save us,” nodded the man speedily. “Bring the world back to the way it was… There’s more black fellas now than white fellas, did you know that?”

“Who’s going to save us?”

“Him!“ and the old man pointed through the window at Lance who stood where Brad had been standing next to the bust of ‘Smithy’. Brad began to laugh and laughed so much his stomach suddenly ached.

“Thank God it’s him. I thought it was going to be me to save the world.”

Brad saw Lance peer quizzically through the window, mouthing: “What?” The old man was gone and Lance called: “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

Brad shrugged his shoulders and walked further into the bushes. There was no sight of the old man. He simply disappeared. Except for the whispers of television or was it just the old man?

“Black fellas immune to the plague…. So sick for many years they get an immunity…. The power of Oz is now strong again … the power of the voices which made me wise… beware young fella or the black fellas will get you… Only pure of heart can save Oz maybe with help from a black fella.” … He listened further but there was no more.

Brad kept walking and he came across the carpark, wide enough to take the plane to the highway and thus skyward. It really was possible thought Brad who had doubted the venture from the very beginning. He heard the shrill sound of the old man again.

“Here I am.”

He stood at the other end of the carpark and motioned for Brad to come over. Brad obeyed and followed the old man through the greenery along some sort of track. Brad became aware of some sort of electrical humming, the sound of a motor amidst the bushes. There, in the distance was a generator truck, covered in vines and surrounded by empty drums of fuel. A red light showed it was working. A number of electrical leads tangled together followed the pathway. Brad followed the pixie-like walk of the man who would look behind him every now and then to check whether Brad was still there. Finally, there was a sort of a clearing amidst the bushes with a barbed wire hurricane fence and a sign which warned ‘Trespassers Prosecuted’. Beyond the fence was a brick building, not at all large, and an open door the electrical cords ran through. The old man paused at the door and looked at Brad again.”

“Yes, do come inside.”
Brad felt a little cautious at the sight of the electricity, the mystery of the cords drew him forward and into the building.

“Yes, do come inside,” he repeated daftly.

There was a glow within the room. The light fell onto Brad’s sweaty skin as he faced it, the large glowing screen, the fuzzy picture, the sound of static. It was television.

Brad watched the man press a button on the futuristic hard drive.

“Yogi Baird invented this. A man called Yogi Baird. He was a true mystic and a Yogi who knew the existence of the dark arts of television…”

“It does exist still… television is true.”

“Yes, it has been the time for him to come, says the television.”

Brad felt the screen and there was static like the one he had at home except he had drawn the static on a piece of paper in his bedroom. The old man didn’t seem to understand what Brad was doing until a picture came on the screen. There was no sound, only colour pictures of the jungle. In this jungle there were men dressed in green and they were stalking something. There was rapid fire which jolted the arms of the men. Someone fell down and the picture came closer to the man. Closer still until you could study the blank stare in his eyes. Blood poured from his mouth and massive chest wounds.

“What is this?,” said Brad, somewhat appalled.

“It is television. Do you not watch?”

“I can’t there’s nothing there and all the tapes disintegrated… some sort of bacteria… How are you watching this?”

“It is the world created in our image,” said the wild man and a gentle calm rested on his face: “Yogi Baird begat Rupert the Bear and Rupert the Bear created with all the others in the name of the Reformation… The world past. Like the world, this man is dead. Like the world became dead from watching too much death. Think television with your mind… Thinking you are a hero too.”

The pictures then turned to black and white. Tractors pushed naked bodies into ditches. They rolled lifelessly downhill and dirt was pushed over them.

“Is that me? Who are you?,” asked Brad, not quite sure the man wasn’t violent.

It was then the television spoke: “I am the guardian of the spirit of television. I am the warrior who has quelled suburbia. I am a piece of the Reformation. I am a messenger.”

Silence again in Brad’s mind. He watched the black and white images fade into darkness. The television seemed to die. There was no longer any sound as the humming of the generator ceased. Brad breathed quickly, frightened. He turned and saw a mummified body sitting in a chair, its head tilted sideways and an empty can of XXXX clasped in its hand. Eyewitness News on a badge pinned to its chest.

The skeleton asked: “Do you want to watch another one?”

It faced the television. Brad recoiled and ran back to the hangar, unable to scream until he found Lance. His friend shook him and said: “Have you seen a bloody snake or something?”

“I think someone or something is reaching out to me. I don’t know what it is, but we have to get back. We have to kill whatever it is before it starts all over again… Fucking Yogi Baird!,” and there were tears in Brad’s eyes. “We must get back. The evil will come!”

“Yeah, don’t worry about that just yet,” said Lance, blowing his fingernails and rubbing them on his jeans. “Plenty of time for that and since you are acting like such a drunken schoolgirl… let me be your best friend who takes your clothes off and puts you to bed after a quick bath …”

Brad collected himself and noticed the engines were running. The hangar roared with fiery winds which had blown displays over and wafted through their clothes. The life of the Southern Cross; breathing, all consuming. A living legend.

Lance winked: “There’s a bit of fuel. They’ll die in a tick. It wasn’t hard, someone was in love with her and they obviously planned to fly it again. I can’t quite get the third one going though.”

Lance looked over his shoulder: “How about it? Can we get her out of here?”

Brad nodded. Surprised by his energy, Brad spent the rest of the day removing the metal barriers which were bolted into place. The grass was flattened as best they could and they proved the glass could be smashed with the fire axe. A day later and the pair had found drums of fuel and filled the tanks while Lance fixed an engine that was misfiring a little. They ate spaghetti from a tin with some chocolate. Brad slept fitfully, while Lance worked with a hurricane lantern on the engine he could not start. He occasionally swore and Brad found him sleeping in the cockpit. Lance lived and breathed Southern Cross. Meanwhile Brad spent the morning running over the grass again with a mowing tractor and used thick wooden boards to grade the carpark gutters. By mid-afternoon it was clear. All that had to be done was the smashing and cleaning up of the rest of the glass. Lance had all the engines running smoothly, except for the middle one which kept stalling. As it drew closer to nightfall, Brad swung the hammer against the glass, shattering the rest of the capsule. He stood back as giant splinters fell dangerously about him. He smashed another and finally the last window came tumbling down. Broken glass lay strewn across one front of the plane and Brad stood back with the sledgehammer he found out back and listened as the sound of the engines roared in front of him. He felt a surge within, for the Southern Cross had once again regained her freedom.

A white dove came floating down looking for its nest in the ceiling but became caught in the turbulence of the propellers, sucked in and spat out in several different directions.

“Beats Millie Bryant’s funeral,” said Lance and Brad didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

The plane then started to move. It lurched forward a few feet, jumping from the supports beneath her wheels and Brad fell back on his arse. The plane started to move again, as the wheels gracefully rolled over the glass which cracked beneath her weight. The Southern Cross rolled free from her hangar and into the late afternoon light. Lance pulled the throttle and the engines roared once more before the plane settled on the grass.

“You coming?,” yelled Lance.

Brad got up from the grass, entered the plane and sat in the cockpit with Lance. There was room for two in the open cockpit and the roar of the engines was deafening. Brad was surprised by the simplicity of it all. There were only basic instruments there, an altimeter, a compass, speedo, a fuel gauge and turn and bank indicators. Lance gave Brad Smithy’s flying helmet or hat which had been a part of one of the displays and he put it on.

“Mr Ulm, I presume,” yelled Lance and Brad nodded. “Ya ready?,” and Brad nodded again heartily.

Lance turned ahead with a look which suggested a great mustering of concentration and the plane started rolling across the boards and into the carpark. Lance turned the plane left when they were supposed to go right and the pair circled the carpark until they got it right and started through the entrance to the highway. Lance ignored the one-way sign and straightened the Southern Cross, pausing for a moment as he sized up the stretch of straight road ahead.

“Okay Lady or Mister, show us what you’ve got.”

The plane started forward. Brad was silent and only watched the road ahead. The white lines rolled beneath them at a quickening pace. The Southern Cross gathered momentum and as she did so the wheels began to wobble ever so slightly horrendously.

“The wheels must be out a bit,” Lance said and the vibrations sent his teeth and his vocal cords into a chatter as he spoke. Suddenly, the vibration ceased and returned again as The Southern Cross couldn’t decide whether to leave the ground. The vibration was gone. Brad thought it was incredible, the roaring engines formed a perfect triangle around him. He suddenly glimpsed a roundabout sign.

“What the bloody hell is that?,” said Lance, adjusting his goggles.

“What?,” said Brad.

“Ahead, you silly wanker,” screamed Lance. “Ahead! What is it?”

“It’s a fucking mango tree!,” said Brad. “Right in the middle…”

Suddenly airborne, Lance managed to turn the plane to port or the left so it only clipped the tree on the follow through. Brad kept nodding his approval, his head still vibrating.

“Did ya see that? I think it had mangoes on it. If only I knew,” said Lance excitedly through a tight pearly grin and continued to watch the road ahead as the plane grew further aloft.

He took the plane higher and soon they were well above the airport. Brad pointed to the Gateway Bridge and The Southern Cross flew through the giant arch beneath it and followed the winding river toward the city. Lance dared the Story Bridge and laughed while Brad noticed the city. The dulled skyscrapers, just a dulled burnt-out shell. A great fire had burned this city as well.

Looks like they had a lot of trouble down there,” said Lance.

“It’s like he goes to every city. He actually destroys every city and kills everyone, turns them into one of his rain people. If I find him it’ll be back home. I thought he might be here… It’s like he can be anywhere he likes.”

They passed over again and all had been destroyed except for the Suncorp building which was stained by smoke and read: ‘unco’. Tropical plants grew through the streets and fruits trees populated Fortitude Valley. Brad just stared while Lance continued to hold on to the controls tightly.

“She seems to run okay, knock on wood. I’ll say with a few stops we should be back tomorrow or the next day. But let’s check out other stuff…”

Brad nodded at the chill of the city and in the cockpit. There were plenty of skeletons just lying around: “We must get back.”

The Southern Cross returned to the airport and descended upon the runway used for light aircraft and Lance made a text book landing.

“I just got to work out how to brake,” said Lance as the nine spoke wheels of the plane went at excessive speed, the tail skid added a grating edge. Brad saw the runway was running out. Then The Southern Cross began to slow down and Lance began to laugh as it came to a complete stop.

“It really is a wonderful world,” he smiled but watched as Brad closed his eyes. He felt weak, his mind felt a need for something else. Lance stopped the engines.

“Is this not one of those momentous occasions Mr Ulm?… I know, you forgot your passport!”

“Every day is Christmas Day, eh, Smithy?,” said a drained Brad who produced a bottle of warm champagne and shook it before the cork shot out and they drank mouthfuls of what remained in the bottle and threw it on the tarmac.

“Well, that’s enough excitement for one day. Let’s go and raid the bar at the terminal and pick up a few blonde hostesses,” said Lance.

They walked into the deserted terminal and ate a tin of stew each for dinner and then started on a bottle of Jim Beam.

“I woke up and found I was the only one left,” said Brad. “I never thought there was anyone else in the world and then there was her.” He could feel a head spin from the Jim Beam. “No-one was there to save me… But there was always television. You can talk to television for hours. Television is a boy’s best friend.”

“Television is bullshit. It is no longer a part of the world. It does not exist except as a voice in your head. I prefer books and reality.”

“But I’ve seen it…”

“This bullshit again.”

“Yes, it was shown to me by an old man. He was a guardian.”

“You’ve seen a guardian of television.”

“Yes, and I too am a guardian.”

Lance laughed: “No you’re not. You’re a warrior. Read your job prescription or whatever they call it… You’re pissed. Don’t believe everything from the past.”

“But I must, it’s not just voices in my head…”

“Well, I’m a guardian too, then. Just don’t tell anyone. I guessed the colour of a girl’s undies at school once when she just thought of the colour. Now do you believe I am a guardian of television?”

“I know my place in the world and I know while I live in suburbia there’s another who does not deserve to live there.”

“Here we go, Pentan again… I get sad in suburbia,” said Lance. “At times I can see the beauty. The ice cream shops, the really old buildings. I had people there.”

“It’s a changing place. I sit and watch it change. There will come a time. Everything in the hands of television. Could you imagine people not talking just happy tribes of people living together with no reason to yell and kill one another?”

“Yeah and only themselves… and when will television stop?,” asked Lance, concerned as whose sanity should be questioned. His question now just going through the motions.

“I can’t stop it. I don’t know if it really can be stopped by me. I don’t know if it is good or evil but I feel I am a part of it, but I don’t think I really belong there. Not in the sense of being different. I sense a kind of being there and yet not a part of it. It is coming back to me again… Sir Pentan may be a figure in my head, he may just become an illusion. He just haunts me like … He will interfere and always be there. A kind of fly that bites. He’s evil and poison, and it grows in the rain people. I see it all through a window.”

“You’re a one pot screamer aren’t you, mate. One part pot and one part bottle,” said Lance and put his arm around Brad: “Just stop whining or people will stop listening to you and we’ll have no-one to save the world… Let’s start singing the Play School theme again: “There’s people in a chair…” Brad didn’t join in: “Count on me buddy, we’ll find out if you’re a lunatic or from outer space, and whether the world is really worth saving. We’ll go to the centre tomorrow and see if it’s really true.”

The Southern Cross covered the desert terrain but Brad and Lance found nothing. Their navigational skills were ordinary in the endless red. They tried to find The Rock where the black fellas were supposed to be gathered for the Reformation at some stage. Wherever they were they were well hidden. Lance was concerned about the lack of fuel and they decided to find home, rather than end up like Smithy did one time. Lance wanted to see Mary and feel and bite her nipples for some strange reason. Brad meanwhile fell into an uncomfortable sleep. He shuddered not from the cold but from an innate hunger which had returned to haunt his body. He dreamt of television, of Pentan, the rain people and Katherine. He saw Pentan with her, holding her and Katherine offering her body to him. Pentan would kill her, he thought, if she were not already dead. There was a dragon inside Brad and it lurked in a cage with other demons. A red and black television dragon. The dragon breathed fire and then there was Brad. He stood at the mouth of the cave with a sword. He was dressed in armour and the dragon began to breathe its fiery breath over him. Brad stood there and did not move against the fire which engulfed him and sent him falling back. He could feel the heat as the armour began to heat due to the fire. It touched his bare skin and it burned. Brad then awoke suddenly in the cockpit and Lance asked if he was alright. He felt calm, but he could feel himself coming closer to some conflict and it could include an inner one which he could possibly lose for the rest of his lifetime. Where were all the black fellas? Were they all dead too? Or had they found their New Dreaming? That was not the promise…

The Southern Cross arrived in the nearby Xerox airstrip in the afternoon. Lance helped Brad into the car. Brad could barely stand and Lance had to help him. Lance drove towards the camp in the failing light and arrived at the preacher’s house. There was the sound of voices singing inside

“Do you know where you are?,”asked Lance.

Brad nodded and said: “Yes this is my grandfather’s house, a place of dreams, a place of make believe. There is no television here.”

Lance agreed with him and Brad could see the people coming out of the house holding candles.

“I have him,” said Lance.

“He has returned and with him the stranger from suburbia. The chosen one you have come this day. Do you know what day it is?”

“Well, it ain’t Australia Day,” said Lance and took him inside. “Let me guess? Christmas Day!?”

Brad remained in a stupor for several days. It was Mary who looked after him. She bathed him, tenderly rubbing the grime from his body. She fed him soup and bread until the time came as he lay in a sweat and she brought him a needle and injected the contents into his body.

“I love you,” Brad wanted to tell her: “Jesus Christ I fucking love you.”

He drifted off to sleep, one untroubled by anything.

Four weeks after arriving at the camp and making love to Katherine, Brad told them he no longer needed the needle. Lance and the preacher were skeptical but Brad felt it was the truth and Mary consoled him and told him that she believed in him.

“I am returning to suburbia. I think I must go there,” said Brad and the preacher didn’t want to argue but did anyway.

“You must have more time. The forces of the Reformation are not strong enough for you to return to do battle.”

Mary smiled knowingly at the preacher’s familiar line.

“But I must go, I must find her. She is there somewhere waiting for me… and my heart aches for someone to be with….” Brad cleared his throat: “She is there.”

And the preacher looked at the ground and said: “I’m sorry.”

Lance no longer spoke to Brad because he had seen Mary and him explicitly have sex, or at least that’s what at least he thought, in the touches and caresses that Brad received from her. He was simply jealous and Lance would work with the engines on his plane and his other engines. He knew what was happening between Brad and Mary. Mary wanted a child and as hard as the preacher and she had tried they were unable to produce one. Lance wondered if Mary was barren and cursed each time his salty semen entered her.

There were about twenty people in the camp now, six of them were children. Lance noticed a good-looking boy named Sebastian and he wished to give him a gift as he seemed the most gifted of the children. He had nothing to give, nothing to offer … and the child knew this and ignored him. Brad knew he had nothing to offer these people either.

When Lance summoned Brad to go back to suburbia in The Southern Cross, it was a quiet and sad journey. Each was unaware of the other’s sorrow, sensing their own too much and they sat silently in the cockpit as the figure of the Southern Cross instead lifted their spirits above the clouds. When they burst through the clouds and over the hills which kept suburbs, Brad was struck by the fact that nothing had changed. The Southern Cross landed at Adelaide airport and Brad stepped from it. Lance did not speak and they shook hands. Brad stood next to the flaming red FJ Holden and watched the Southern Cross tail away. The pilot tried to wave before finally turning the plane to leave. It disappeared over the horizon. Brad stepped into the car and twisted the golden keyring. Lance had told him he wanted a car just like this one as if they were brothers. The car started finally and Brad laughed. I bet the bastard will get one too, he thought and he began to drive home.

***

Chapter Ten

“My shattered mind. My shatted mind.” Brad’s Diary.

“The very last person on your mind when you close your eyes at night is either the reason for your happiness or pain.” Psychology Quote.

Brad barricaded himself in his compartment. That is, he locked the door and put everything in the compartment he could which was not tied down against the door, including the mattress from the bed. He had the strip of film with the pictures of the bloodstained bed and also his diary and pen.

“I have my mind,” he told himself and wrote this in his diary.

Brad put a sheet over the mirror in his compartment so they could no longer take photographs. They. And Brad began to drink his last bottle of scotch and could hear the election revelers in another compartment singing Roll Out the Barrel and then an AC/DC song. The train would be in Alice Springs in the morning. Or was it the same night? Brad lost track of time.

‘I could see her face and it was close to mine. It was her. It was Sparkes’ girlfriend and she spoke of death, of killing. This image comes and goes. I cannot remember what she is telling me. I remember her lovemaking though. She was very passionate, biting my body as she came, groaning out loud… Now was this a quote from her? Or me or was it Sparkes himself?’ Brad’s Diary

Brad tried to calm down. Was there a murder? Brad looked at the photographs. I do not know. What is happening to me?, he asked himself.

Brad was seeing things. He didn’t understand what it was which ruled his mind. He felt it was bent. It was bent on his own destruction. He felt a rich surge in his brain as he had another cocktail. This was relaxed in suburbia. There no-one could touch him. After a cocktail, he is warm and nothing can hurt him. Then the expletives begin as he says: Fuck the preacher, fuck them all. He thought he would especially like to fuck Mary… and this made the boy inside him want to cry.

Then television spoke his mind in that voice: “I rule you and I rule suburbia. Here nothing will change. With me as your companion nothing will change. I will always be yours in your mind. You cannot control me. I will torture you to the end. Til you are dead.”

“Where do you come from?,” asked Brad, feebly.

“I come from nowhere but the bowels of the Earth. I am one of the escapees from hell. One of the chosen ones here for your torture. I have risen through the fissures of molten rock where we gather and celebrate the day when we are all liberated. I come from within and if not the earth but the hell that is within you and within your mind, I will destroy you and control your destiny.”

“Will you ever leave me?,” Brad almost prayed for help. There is the sound of snow ringing in Brad’s mind, the feeling of despair, the emptiness and spiritual pain which can only be filled by the void of sleep.

“Will you leave me or will I have to live with you to the very end? Pentan! Do Not Enter!”

“Your love of Pentan. Your very obsession calls him to you. You are fascinated by him. I think you are his lover.”

Brad searched the voice for Katherine but it wasn’t her. He had almost forgotten HMV… He looked for pieces of conversation with her but could remember none. It was his voice. It was him. The misery of it all. It was Pentan and as much as Brad tried to remember he couldn’t…. His lover?

“The seed is planted in suburbia. The rain people will kill any who have survived along with your friends in that little Border town. I can read your thoughts … They shall die! And all of your dreams of a New Dreamtime shall be the dark reign of the Reformation. For am I not Anthony Sparkes?”

“I know you and I hate you for what you did. Leave me. Leave me to die in suburbia,” cried Brad.

“This is the place where you shall die and you shall kill yourself.”

Brad is in the compartment and he feels television with him. He knows it as a friend sometimes. It was spilling from the journal and the manuscript…

“He is myself and I call him television. He has been witness to this creation. I cannot bear it. I took another swig of the scotch and looked down at the photograph again of the bloodstained sheet in the negative. I feel empty again, like the bottle. I looked down at the page and there is only this sentence. It is not working. I cannot describe the television and how it has destroyed Brad’s existence in the manuscript. It is surely destroying mine.” Brad’s Diary

“Are you Pentan?,” asked Brad who was stoned again upon his return.

The television was on but silent. And when Brad thought it was on, it was the picture of snow he had drawn which was stuck to the screen.

“Are you Pentan?,” he asked.

Of course, I’m fucking Pentan, thought Brad to himself. His lover?

There was still nothing and Brad sat in his bedroom waiting for an answer. His father would have called him a masturbating malingerer. There was a noise outside the house, a horrible cry. The sound of the crow in the tree and it had come for Brad. He stood to meet the crow, to face it and his destiny. It was a game of sorts now, and he had grown considerably since he’d last played it. Brad heard the cries through the front door of the house. He opened the door and expected a flurry of wings like in a movie he had seen as a kid… Body and claws ripping until there was nothing left. Escape from the crows leads to a day of your face being ripped off, he thought dramatically…. Instead, a child lay in a Burger Rings box being used as a basket. The child was naked and crying and next to it was an envelope. He read the letter:

“Brad. This is your child born from our union. There can’t be more of us except this child.. He is part of you and he is part of us. He is also the first child to be born in suburbia and the last. He is the end of what you would call the age of television. He is the destiny of our land and the children shall follow him for his is young and strong. His name is Saul. Take him away from suburbia. Give him the life we could not give him. Your lover Katherine.” He looked at the last name again and he thought it read Pentan but when he looked again it was definitely Katherine.

Alive thought Brad. Katherine is alive. He failed to answer the cries of the child. Its mouth opened wide and screamed in triumph against the man he would probably oppose.

“You’re alone,” said Brad and picked up the baby. It was a while before its screams ceased and Brad caressed its fair skin and blonde hair. The outer voice of television grew angry and discontent at what it saw: “Throw down the blonde child. Cast it aside. It is no good for you.”

“It’s only a baby.”

“It is a gift from Pentan. Are you going to accept gifts from Pentan?”

“HMV?”

Brad took the child back to his bedroom and there it slept. He went outside and could see the black bird in the sky as it returned to the tree with food for its young. Brad screamed a long howl and then he screamed another one. He felt it was the end of his life in suburbia. He would take the child back to the preacher and Saul would be raised by the barren Mary, Lance and the preacher.

Television had long ago told Brad he could have no child and that he could not father another being that was so perfect.

“Suburbia is dead. I feel in my soul that I too belong with the dead.”
“Is that the best Hamlet you can do?,” laughed television.

“Pentan!,” screamed Brad, horrified and yet almost amused that he should be compared to someone he thought was so great.

“Perhaps it is our child…,” it laughed again. “No, me and Katherine. Perhaps it is the angel of one of the rain people. Hide it before I eat it.”

There was laughter and then no more.

Brad left the child at Border with the preacher and Mary and gave his car to Lance.

“I am no longer alive and I cannot love. I can’t love this child,” said Brad as he prepared to leave. I’m too fucked up!”

And Mary pleaded: “Stay.”

“I can’t,” I must see our land.

Television is incomplete, thought Brad and wrote in the compartment: “It shall wind its destiny wherever it goes around myself and my destiny. It is more powerful than the controlling forces of my mind…” Brad hugged the gun in his hand. It was loaded with five bullets. One was missing. He felt the gun become a part of himself… “It tells me in every atom that it lives and I tell it that I love. I love this gun and I shall use it to bring life to it.” Brad remembered how he sucked on Laura’s crotch. Was that her name, Laura? And Sparkes’ cock? It was like some sort of LSD flashback.

“You are the chosen one. You shall be the first to destroy. You will be the first to bring us the beginnings of the Reformation,” said Laura.

“What must I do?”

‘You must kill. First you must kill yourself and then you can kill another.”

“That sounds nuts. I don’t understand.”

“You will not understand that you have been chosen.”

Brad felt the drug she had put in my drink take effect. I felt drowsy and then I noticed Sparkes in the room staring at me with eyes I had never understood before..

“Yes, you are the one. Don’t you understand? You are the one to fulfil our destinies. The destiny of the nation…

‘I still don’t understand.’ Brad’s Diary

“Fuck it, you are the perfect being.”

Brad began to feel himself black out.

“You shall work wonders in the perfect plan of the Reformation.”

She whispered: “Germs… a little germy cold. A bit of bacteria here, a bit of bacteria there… a virus here and there.”

They were screwing, Laura and Brad in a zombie state. It happened or it didn’t happen. Brad remembered eating her for a little while as Sparks watched pulling on his half erect dick. Brad had his dick sucked by her in turn for what seemed like an eternity. It felt good but Brad couldn’t come and she gave up with saliva dripping from her mouth onto his glans as she pulled his foreskin tighter and tighter… Then it was Sparkes turn as he chose to mount Brad: “You are chosen, you are one of the Children of the Sun… How does it feel Brad to be chosen?” And all Brad could think of was Frank from Rocky Horror as Sparkes plunged himself into Brad’s zombie like body. It was kind of like having open heart surgery with anaesthetic which didn’t quite work although it was much more pleasurable. Brad couldn’t bring himself to say there was a popping sound which is said all men felt when they lost their virginity but he felt the relief once Sparkes had come. If there was a popping sound it was the sound of cameras flashing.

“Germs. A little germy cold-sore,” said Laura.

But this was a deep subconscious memory that Brad could hardly remember.

There are noises in the next compartment and they mingle with those of the train. and the election revelers. Brad felt the eyes of the camera upon him once again. The eyes of television. Perhaps he should use another word for it and that is paranoia. Brad sees Parson’s eyes as he read what Brad had written. He had the eyes of Sparkes although they are darker and they are ringed. They are bitter and disappointed. Brad has another swig of the scotch. Laura and Sparkes are on the bed together and I watch their bestial lovemaking. These are all rambling thoughts going through Brad’s head. They groan and Brad is dreaming of his part of the plan. Brad discards the gun from his grasp and his stomach convulses. He vomits on the floor of the compartment. “I will sleep soon,” says Brad: “And then I shall continue with the master plan. The death of Pentan. It is his death which assures the purity of the age of television and it will mean the beginning of the new world.” So many mantras and affirmations for Brad to remember, so many to the point where he vomited again.

***

Chapter Eleven

“I see the children okay with death” Brad’s Journal.

“The interpretation of dreams in the right royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” Sigmund Freud.

Mary licked her lips as she buttered the bread for the swagman’s breakfast, leaning against the sink, she stared beyond the window sill. Saul was already out in the ridge where she knew he played. He had already asked about the stranger sleeping in the spare room. She took the tray into the room and laid it on the bedside table. She tugged the blind open and the golden sunshine filtered through onto Brad’s face. He stirred from sleep pulling a sheet over his nakedness.

“Good morning.”

“What happened?”

“You came down with a fever shortly after we ate. You were jabbering something.”

“I was remembering something.”

“It happened again.”

“Yeah, I know – the television. Television. It’s my life in suburbia. You’ve got the country.”

“You were talking about the fire.”

“The fire?”

“The fire, remember?”

“All I remember is a mirror and a voice…”

Mary sighed inwardly as she thought it was the same old story…

Mary watched Brad in the yard as she cleared away the scraps from the breakfast tray. He sat and looked at the car. Saul was in the yard too, playing with a football and moving closer to Brad. Hellhound sniffed around.

“Do you know GI Jack?,” Saul asked Brad.

“I might’ve met him.”

“GI Jack didn’t have a dog with him.”

“GI Jack’s dead,” said Brad: “He didn’t know any better. What do you know about GI Jack, anyway?”

Saul showed him a book curled up in his shorts

“Forget him. Burn that book of yours. It’s all rubbish.”

Saul felt a little despondent and pulled out a coin to give to Brad. A fifty-cent piece with a monarch and a picture of Captain Cook and a map of Australia on the back.

“What have you got there?,” asked Brad.

“Money. Ain’t worth nothing now, but it’s good luck.”

“Who says so?”

Saul placed the coin carefully into Brad’s palm and closed it.

“Why do you give it to me?”

“Cos you and I need luck and I’d give you all the money in my money jar to see you have good luck. The preacher says some people have bad luck all their life.”

“Your money jar. That’s the preacher’s money jar. Cheeky sort. Don’t get caught, the preacher packs a fair wallop.”

Saul nodded and heard his mother call out through the window.

“The donkey had a baby last night. All the kids are there. Now you run along and leave the man.”

The boy did so and Brad shook his head with the coin firmly within his grasp.

“I’m sorry Brad, he’s a cheeky sort of fellow.”

“No harm Mary,” said Brad, walking towards the kitchen window. “No harm at all.”

They stared at each other and Mary began to titter.

“It’s been years.”

“I know it has. Tell me Mary, when was the last time you saw a fifty-cent piece?”

Mary stopped doing the dishes.

“Well, I suppose not in years. I guess they’re lying around the place.”

“Not one like this,” and he held up the coin.

‘What is it?”

“It’s a sort of good luck charm I picked up on my travels,” and he showed her.

“This one is rare. Sydney?”

Brad lifted his eyebrows and Mary clutched the coin in her hand.

“I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk, go and see what the preacher and Lance are getting up to.”

She watched him walk into the distance.

The children were fascinated as they watched the donkey. It had learned to stand on its feet and it staggered about the stable. The children thought it was cute and they laughed when the little donkey fell on its face. It stood and went back to its mother. There was something not quite right about it.

The preacher lit his pipe once more.

“The Cross is a mighty weapon.”

“I’ve my own. I’ve fulfilled my part of the Reformation.

Lance sipped his beer. He had only come to bid the preacher farewell. He was drunk and raving about his lonely exploits searching for Pentan and the power of television. Meanwhile the preacher sat coolly in his leather-bound chair.

“If only we could…”

Put him out of his misery?,” Lance’s eyes rolled.

“I wish someone would put me out of mine. All this talk of evil and the Reformation.”

The explorer dreamed. He was an old legend of the black fellas. It was his own legend. It had weaved itself through the language of their tongues as they spoke to him.

“I understand,” drunk on the melodic sound of their voices.

He saw two tribes who had seen hostilities for several generations. They lived on a giant flood plain which rarely flooded. Between them was a boundary and between that boundary was a mighty set of rocks honeycombed with caves. Within these caves were ancient drawings and paintings of rituals as well as the bones of tribal elders who were long since dead. It was a sacred place and the dead were no longer buried there for it is said to curse all those who enter the caves. Once you enter, you do not return. There are no people there, only the campfires outside of the young warriors, one from each tribe, the campfires opposite each other with only the rocks between them. It was a quiet site and there was no trouble with either warrior. They seemed to live in peace, aware of each other’s presence. Each respected the other’s boundaries and never strayed over them or over the rocks. There came a night when the wind was weak and the smoke from the campfires rose straight up in the air. From the cave came a most terrible howl. It was not a human howl, nor that of an animal. It was the most shocking noise the warriors had ever heard. They collected their spears as each suspected the other of performing some sort of trick. They crept through the darkness towards the place from where the sound came from. A haunting and deafening roar of despair came from the mouth of one of the largest caves. The cave of the dead. It was where the spirits of the elders were said to dwell. The warriors waited in the darkness, crouched behind some sparse bush, waiting for any signs of life. There was none except for the sound. Each decided to look closer and emerged from their hiding places at the same time. They froze at the sight of each other, wide eyed they held their spears up high. There was another wail from the cave, weaker this time. It lingered. The warriors forgot any animosity and turned to the cave. They walked closer together and entered the cave. Their campfires burnt out and the wailing ceased. The spears of the warriors were found at the cave entrance but the warriors had disappeared. The warriors from each tribe met and talked of the fate of the warriors and the folly at entering the cave. The talks were peaceful, past differences were forgotten and the rocks were also to be forgotten. The tribes parted.

The explorer was near the mouth of the cave after the tribes had left. It was sunset and there came a terrible moaning from within. He stayed so he may take a look in the cave. He wished to discover its contents. He stepped closer and as he got nearer, the wailing became stronger. This did not disturb the explorer and he entered the darkness of the cave, deeper until he was surrounded by the wailing. It moved around him. On the walls were paintings of every kind of animal and man he could think of and for some reason he was drawn to a large man with a large whistle cocked penis and he rubbed his hand across the paint. He smiled and laughed at this incredible place and saw one of the spears … There were two of them and he took the most beautiful for it promised much for the future.

The chant of the wailing elders ceased.

The little donkey was sick and it could no longer stand. It closed its eyes and the steady heaving in its chest ceased. It died and the children cried. Saul did not cry and he went forward where he patted the head of the donkey and picked it up. He left the stable and the children followed Saul and the donkey.

“Let’s call it Little Simpson,” said the preacher with a tear in his eye, winking the boy.

“So, I am to die tomorrow, preacher,” said Brad.

Lance could not speak and the preacher could only stare emptily at Brad.

“It’s not necessarily written…. Here, bring the spear Lance,” said the preacher and Lance left the preacher’s study and quickly returned for a moment and returned with the spear. The very one he had been given all those years ago. He held it firmly and it was lighter than it looked, looking over it one more time before handing it over to Brad. On the other hand, Brad thought it was heavier than it looked. It was obviously ancient.

“Through his heart and we will all be free. No more… the Reformation will be complete.”

“I will destroy Pentan,” said Brad. “For I have no choice.”

“It is your part and all shall be finished. You will be cured the world will be cured,” said the preacher whose eyes were welling up with tears. He knew what was ailing Brad but he couldn’t help him. No-one could help him. If you wanted to say he was cursed, then he was cursed. If you wanted to say he was mentally ill, he was that too. For all his ranting of television, the drinking and the drugs, the rambling conversations… No-one really wanted him to be expelled but someone had pointed the bone at him long ago…

“No, it shall be your part. I have told you I have no choice. You still stand there and tell us that all television is evil and so I must be evil and when I destroy Pentan I must destroy something of myself,” said Brad, not really comprehending.

The preacher shook his head: “You’re wrong Brad, the Reformation is much more.”

“I know that once I have destroyed him, I shall have a choice. Suburbia shall be free and then I can stay forever.”

The preacher thought of Brad’s rebounding behaviour, in search of someone to love him, in search of company, forever in a loop… In search of himself.

Brad clutched the spear tighter: “I don’t want to have to make that decision. It will mean the end.”

“I’ve filled the tank in the car,” said Lance, handing the keyring to Brad, who himself was upset by his sudden departure.

“Well bastards, if that’s how it’s gonna be, fuck ya!,” said Brad and walked off with the spear.

Hellhound stood next the FJ panting and staring at Brad.

“How are you, old fellow, you ready to go?”

Brad opened the door and the dog hopped in, sitting in the passenger seat. Brad carefully placed the spear through the passenger window and started the car. Lance and the preacher stood on the verandah. There was no sign of Saul.

“Adios amigos,” yelled Brad and threw the car into gear. It spun around and hurled dust into the air. Brad passed Mary who carried an armful of oranges and waved to her. She smiled and watched the car leave the camp.

Brad followed the road he knew through the dusty plains just outside the camp or the perimeter as the preacher had made them believe as it was no longer either. He concentrated his hatred on the road and the engine of the FJ Holden strained as he pressed hard on the accelerator. He tried to remember a song he had heard so long ago. He hummed it and it had the word ‘suburbia’ in it but finally gave up as he could no longer remember the words. It used to annoy Lance all that singing to block television, especially when he could no longer remember any of the words. Hellhound began to look at him with wonder. He played Jimi Hendrix instead.

“It’s okay old salt, we’re not there yet.”

The spear began to vibrate against the open window as though it had some supernatural life of its own. He stared at it and wondered for a moment. Brad didn’t see the small group of children which could be seen through the window. They happily trudged together across the plain, led by a boy holding a donkey.

The children did not speak although there were times they did laugh together. They would laugh at Saul, or they would laugh at each other, even at themselves. Their bare feet didn’t feel the prickles for they were often hardened and it was the same with the less sharp pebbles and rocks. They strode through the knee-high grass following the boy and the donkey as they held their conversations in their heads. They dreamed together as well, dreams like whirlpools of their personalities.

The explorer awoke alone. The tribe was gone. They were nowhere to be seen. They left him no food or water and he looked toward every horizon for the people he had grown to love. They were gone. He began to wander again toward a shape in the distance. There would be people at the shape, he thought. The yellow eyes of a dingo watched his every move, stalked him silently. For the explorer there was only a shape in the distance. Orange on blue.

***

Chapter Twelve

“Who would kill a politician except another politician? Or a journalist who must reveal his sources?” Brad’s Journal.

“…that is that capitalism should be knocked on its head.” Percy Brookfield.

Brad awoke with a splitting headache. It was mid-evening according to his watch and he took some headache tablets and decided he needed ice. He placed the gun under his jumper and pulled away all the junk he had piled against the door. Brad went to the bar cart in search of ice. Inside was the usual group of electoral lunatics from next door who were still singing and dancing as if the world were about to end and a couple of elderly gentlemen. Paul Parsons was there passed out at the bar, his head cradled in his arms. Brad was careful not to be seen by the drunken fools and leaned an arm on the bar. Brad saw a sordid reflection of himself. He seemed to squint with pain through a cocky-haired and unshaven face, awesomely scruffy in a shirt and jumper. Brad still wore a tie as the barman recognised his face.

“Ice.”

“Hangover is it?,” said the old fellow next to me.

“Of sorts,” Brad said, trying to end the conversation.

The old man lifted his glass: “Hair of the dog.”

“Now, what’s that you’re drinking?,” Brad asked resignedly.

“Scotch on the rocks.”

“Okay bartender, I’ll have one of those.”

“What brings you on this trip? Business or pleasure?”

“Neither. Yourself?”

“Sightseeing. I have just returned from the southern states where I managed to do a little shooting.”

“Shooting. How interesting,” Brad feigned. “What did you shoot?”

“Birds.”

“And what was your big coup?”

“A wild boar,” said the old man and added. “And I think I’ve got another one.”

Brad felt the sting like any other word he’d been called: “Despite what you think, I like birds. Aren’t there better things to shoot?”

“Like people?”

Brad suddenly wondered if they knew his plan. Were they all talking about his plan before he entered the room and only awe had made them shut up. The old man was being cheeky and Brad gulped down his scotch.

“Yes, suppose people. Now that would be a sport. Track the fuckers down and shoot them right between the eyes. Get all the fucken’ rotten bastards.”

Brad bit his tongue in fear of having raved too much. They certainly enjoyed what they were hearing. Had Brad declared his position?

“Hey there young tyke. What is it you’re saying?”

“Answer me, why do you shoot birds?”

“I suppose I shoot birds for the sport of it. I suppose it’s like stamp collecting. It’s a massive hunt, always exciting, you can be on edge for the whole day and all for what, the thrill of it all, the search for the elusive bird. It’s a sport that’s all. It’s relaxing. You seem to be worried, are you one of them… We call it a game.”

“One of them what?”

“Greenies,” the man whispered under his breath. “Or worse, an Australian Democrat.”

Brad slurped some more scotch and squinted at the old man every so detestably.

“You can’t change things. People have been hunting birds for hundreds, thousands of years, since before the dawn of civilisation. All your slandering can’t change the fact people do it for pleasure. The hunter and the hunted and no laws in your Parliament, no student blockade is going to change that. See that? …” The old man pointed to an RSL pin on his lapel. “I was a prisoner of war for over two years… and we had to eat…and we ate birds among other things if we had the chance.”

Brad’s icy stare melted.

“Killing people, that’s another story,” said the old fellow.

In his mind Brad was telling the old man off and where to go and instead smiled to himself about the treatment he probably got in that prisoner of war camp. It was a sadistic grin which ran across his own face and Brad recognised it and didn’t like it. He was suffering from it a lot lately.

“I’m writing a book about how a surfer guy planned to save Australia with a new religion… The whole world dies and we start again. Help everyone and not just ourselves…,” said Brad unable to remember any more…

“You know religion and politics don’t mix… That’s why the government can’t set up a religion… You’re better off getting the Constitution changed with a referendum, or helping the poor aborigines, they’re in a frightful state… Think of them. Think of someone apart from yourself and your religion… and you’ll be all right. And give up writing. This fellow over here was having a good laugh about how bad your book was or is going to be…”

And he laughed as Brad backed off almost glazed with humiliation. He locked the compartment door behind him and remembered he hadn’t paid for the drinks. He waited for several embarrassed minutes, too scared to go back and waiting for a tap on the door from the bar steward. Brad sat down as nothing happened and tried to relax again. His stomach rumbled.

The road back to suburbia was laborious under Brad’s tiring eyes. He was returning and remembered the last time, when he had arrived by foot after he had left his son behind.

He stopped the car in the hills outside suburbia and felt like he was a child as he stood and looked down on the city and suburbia from the range of hills which embraced it. There, in the early morning, the magpies gargled and the city shone innocently. He followed the gutters of the main roads which fed into the city, descending from the hills. Across the freeway lay an upturned petrol tanker, completely burned out and a trail of blackness ran downhill where petrol had burned across the road and the gutter. Brad followed the blackness to its end which was before a small shopping centre. There was the place of the yellow cross and he smashed the window and claimed what he thought to be his – a needle injected into his arm. Brad sat in the shop for a while and stared at the pretty picture of the nurse who smiled and told him to get immunised before it was too late. Big smile and two white pearlies staring right at him. He could feel himself drifting into or away from television. The bullshit of television. He slept for a while. Hellhound waited and licked his master’s hand.

He drove into the city and let the car horn reverberate through the empty city streets. He stopped the car at the end of the city mall and released the horn. The sound rolled into the distance as it bounced among the concrete relics. The city was Pentan’s trophy and for a moment Brad basked in the silence. The mall was a mess as bones occasionally littered the rotted rubbish. He parked in the shade and locked Hellhound in the car and walked among the cobbled bricks which stretched forth into the distance. He felt the spear in his hand as if it was absorbed into his body. A tool of destruction. The sky was darkening with cloud. The beginning or the end of the Reformation, he thought.

The city whispered with the sound of the wind and Brad jogged down to the end of the mall. There was nothing. Further around the corner of the main-street toward the big grey building with stone columns which cast shadows over large wooden doors which were slightly ajar. He walked up the steps and pushed open the doors. An immaculate hallway lay within. Red carpet rolled down the centre and disappeared into the distance. Pictures of old men adorned the wall in thick wooden frames. The corridors branched as Brad walked further into the darkness. The carpet then led beneath another pair of wooden doors. Brad looked back to see the light fade through the doors he had left open. The dark had engulfed him. With a mighty push the doors fell open with a rusty squeal and revealed a massive chamber which was lit with hundreds of candles. Its oval shape was surrounded by rows and rows of wooden seats and benches covered in velvet and leather. It descended into a small arena where there was a wooden bench. A giant slate of wood clean and gleaming with the light of candles. Brad watched them flicker and as his eyes adjusted, he could see the bony hands which clutched each candle. Bones held together by mummified flesh which led up to their perfectly tailored suits. The chamber was filled with the dead, the skulls gleaming in places. Teeth shone brightly, hair parted perfectly. Some of the heads sat tilted to the side, others had fallen off completely and had rolled down into the arena floor. Empty eye sockets gawked crazily with open mouths producing a silent chorus. Brad walked down the steps to the floor of the mini arena, watching in awe the dead in their splendour. They did not speak and Brad blushed at the thought of having interrupted their private meeting. Down the steps, he accidentally kicked a skull and it rattled as it fell down the carpeted stairs with shrunken brains within. Its hair fell from its grip before it spun to a stop at the bottom. Brad stopped at the bottom of the arena and looked around him. A slight stench still haunted the massive crypt like chamber. There was a giant chair ornately carved with whirling designs and above it was an insignia. Brad thought he saw another skeleton sitting there. It was then that Pentan pulled back the hood on his head and spoke.

“Welcome. And for what do we owe this pleasure?”

“Where is Katherine?”

“This is my house and you shall not speak in such a manner.”

Brad remained silent.

“You want the girl, is that correct?”

Brad nodded.

“Do you want her?”

“I love her.”

“And for the love of one you expect me to release her.”

Brad didn’t know what either of them were talking about: “For the love of one… Give her to me!”

“Respect in my House boy.”

Brad fell silent once again as the chamber echoed with the repression of Pentan’s paternal voice. Houseboy, thought Brad, who is your houseboy?

“The House has voted and your Bill is rejected…” Pentan waved his hand into the air: “Silence in the House…. Did you fuck her, boy?” He said with his yellow teeth apparent beneath his beard.

Brad lowered his head, the spear heavy in his grip and the sound of his father in his head. Not his grandfather but his father.

“Well, did you? Did you get to stick it right in?”

The voice ringing in Brad’s ears.

“Well, I hope you didn’t, there’s diseases boy – diseases! Nasty ones which will creep into your mind and turn it to mush. All because of a little poke! You know I fucked her,” Pentan spoke enticingly: “It felt so good. I rubbed my disease all over her and now you have it if you touched her. And you know the only way to stop the disease is through fire and that’s why I burned her. You watched her pretty flesh burn. Pink burning to red and then black. You fucked her and you burned her. Isn’t that right? You burned the fucking little bitch.”

Pentan picked up a gavel and slammed it down on the table. The thunder echoed in the chamber. Nathan wondered if he was diseased, if he really did burn Katherine for being infected. Did Pentan really exist here in his mind or in reality? Would he too die like all the rest? He felt a cold-sore on his lip with his tongue.

“Stand on the altar!”

Nathan didn’t move and Pentan slammed down the mallet of a gavel once more.

“Do it now! Or be ejected! Or be in contempt…”

Brad looked up, a pathetic tear in his eye as he stood on the table in the centre of the chamber.

“And Jesus wept, sir,” said Pentan with mock pity.

Brad’s ears burned as he stood impotent like a spear bearer in some old play.

“The House has found you guilty. Guilty of fucking with intent to kill. You are a deviate son. We have watched you through the years with the tenderness of parents. You do not love. But this is a traitorous crime! We here at the House thought you as incapable of such an Act. You may not have even fucked her. Imagined you did perhaps. Jerking off over a dead photograph…”

Pentan fell silent and he stared at Brad, waiting for an answer.

“She’s dead, isn’t she? You killed her, you cocksucker.”

“Your precious Katherine is most probably dead because of your actions. Look at you, barely hair on your balls. Just hold them and keep dreaming boy. You may even dream of me. Clutching that spear like an extension of your cock. You are truly a pathetic sight.”

Pentan stood and slammed the gavel down. He motioned to his choir of the dead.

“The House has no avenue of appeal. The kingdom of suburbia has fallen with the severity of your crime and I Sir Pentan proclaim my kingdom. You are now mine, property of the state of the rot. You surrender yourself to me and you are at one with my kingdom. I rest my case.”

Pentan began to laugh. He laughed louder and louder until the tears welled in his eyes. Brad clenched his teeth with a slight shake of his head.

“I would rather die and rot in hell than be one of your…”

“Say it… rain people? You know how they hate that title… Or they would …”

Pentan still laughed madly and Brad’s body was swamped by dark figures as the rain people grabbed him and pulled him down. They emerged from a hole beneath the table and their scabbed arms held him tightly. The unused spear fell from his grip and he heard it fall onto the table before he felt the rain people conquer him. He mingled with their fetid fumes and the odour of their bodies. Brad was passed down the sewer as they held him like a hammock, treading soldier-like through shit and mud which squelched between their toes. Some handled him lustfully, rubbing their leather skin over his bare chest, smearing him with their stench. A fleshy bone-protruding hand held inside the front of his jeans and Brad felt the flesh tear as it was suddenly wrenched out. It was dark and Brad imagined the snow on television. Endless grey and white drifted around in an imaginary blizzard on the television screen. The last bars of Advance Australia Fair could be heard. Brad hummed it over and over and placed his hand towards the screen. The snow seemed to form a shadow, an imprint on the screen, so slight that it seemed imaginary. Dizzy in the weightlessness and the darkness Brad could see a small bi-plane and it floated in the air and smiled. It was not the Cross, it was not …. “Southern Cross jelly for meeeee…”

“The children have gone,” said Mary.

The preacher was alarmed.

“What?”

“They’ve all gone.”

“How long?”

“Hours.”

The preacher felt some sort of panic: “Then we must find them.”

“I’ll go across the fields,” said Mary.

The preacher continued: “Tell Lance to take the plane. I’ll take the utility and look around the roads. Tell the others to look. We must find them. It is time to leave. It is time for the Reformation. There are clouds on the horizon … There could be a flood …”

Mary kind of wanted to give him the finger but she was too worried about the children. Meanwhile Lance sat in his study with a bourbon as Mary was starting to get a little frantic as she told him to get the Southern Cross and to help find the children. The preacher filled the petrol tank of his utility and drove down the track. He did not stop. It was the time of the Reformation, he thought excitedly and it was wrong of the children to stray so far. He would meet them there. They would make it there. They would be led by a divine star to the place of the Reformation. The preacher drove into the desert to the place where he thought he would be led to find the black fellas wailing. It would be the beginning of the perfect world! The preacher started humming merrily to himself to stop the negative thoughts from creeping inside. It was some idiotic tune…

Lance looked over his beloved Southern Cross. She was still as beautiful, he thought and he took her to the sky like an old mistress. Below he could see the children standing in one of the fields around an open hole. He circled them and the Southern Cross was then headed towards Suburbia. It looked like they were asleep or lying down… They were dreaming, thought Lance. Not dead. Dreaming. And now it was Lance’s time to be a legend…

The explorer found the strange shape in the desert; a giant orange rock which glowed in the sunset. So big was the rock and so weak was the explorer that he sat in the orange sand and did not move again. Only his eyes moved as he watched the beautiful shape and caressed it in his mind.

“This is my soul. I have found you,” he said and planted the spear before him to the sound of the wind whistling in his ears: “My soul.”

The rain people moaned as they carried Brad along the endless corridor which was the sewer and storm water drain. He was singing still and his voice echoed television

“Haven’t you seen them on the television?,” asked Brad and continued to sing. “Which count? Dis-count!”

The rain people stopped and Brad squinted as light fell from above. He was passed up through a hole and he was placed on the cold stone floor. His cheek rested on the marble and he could see his breath on the stone. There was once again light from candles. He could see the wooden legs of pews spread across into the distance. Pentan was there.

“Ah, the guest of honour has arrived. Smile for him my pretty one.”

Brad lifted his tired body from the floor, fighting against gravity and sleep. He could see he was in a church and its ceiling towered high into darkness. There, at the altar stood Katherine and she was dressed in a gown of flowing white. She looked pale in the light of the candles and didn’t speak. She stared lifelessly.

“Welcome to my little love nest. Pull up a pew,” said Pentan.

Brad slumped apathetically on a wooden bench beside him. The rain people were gone but he could still hear them in the sewer below.

“Who did you fly with? The flying kangaroo?”

Pentan laughed: “Why television of course. Tis the day I have chosen a queen,” said the foul breath of Pentan. “A queen for suburbia and what a coronation or funeral. You can smell the shit rising,” he said taking a deep breath.

Brad thought he had shit himself but it was the sewer as Pentan looked at Katherine: “Isn’t that right, my pretty one?”

He licked his lips and Brad noticed the bouquet of dead flowers in her hand.

“She’s not feeling well. But she looks radiant, don’t you think?,” and Pentan looked at him with his penetrating eyes. “I’ll wager you she is not wearing any panties,” he laughed.

Brad began to feel sick and his throat flooded with a burning sensation. He swallowed.

“Katherine?,” called Brad, who wondered if she was a wax figure like one of those candles.

“Silence on my wedding day, you young never do well.”

Pentan spoke concisely with his nose pointed ever slightly into the air as if it were the very church which made him special.

“Bet you bitch about me with all your friends,” said Brad, in a weak joke.

“Yes, tis my wedding day. A royal wedding in suburbia,” he turned to the altar and grasped Katherine’s hand and turned on a tape recorder. His tinny voice came from the muffled recording.

“Do you Sir Pentan take Katherine to be your lawful wedded wife? To squeeze and suck, beat and fuck until death us do part?”

“I do.”

“And do you Katherine take Sir Pentan for a lifetime of poke until you croak until death us do part?”

Brad waited for her to speak but she did not – her voice, however, was on the tape recorder: “I do.”

“When I pronounce you man and wife. And just for the album … Am I your only lover?”

Brad stared at Katherine until the recorder spoke.

“All the others are better off fucking themselves really. They’re hopeless but with you my love I am complete. I will never leave you now that I am queen. Long live Sir Pentan!”

Katherine’s face seemed to melt into a skull as her big luminous teeth began to laugh, fleshless and bare. The sound of heavy breathing came from the tape recorder. The lovers embraced on tape as her skeleton crumbled to bones and dust.

Brad screamed a cry of despair and leapt down the hole with the rain people. He fell on his back in the muck and ran through the sewer back to the Parliamentary chamber. His hands pushed the rain people aside, as he cried “Boogie-woogie” and they fell like skittles as Brad ran almost blindly feeling for the concrete walls. He came to the light of the hole where the rain people had first dragged him down. He climbed up and grasped the spear. He kept running and left the chamber of the dead, then vacated the building and returned to the car where Hellhound barked madly. His heart drummed in his ears. Long Live Sir Pentan, he thought ironically and started the car.

Then: “Arsehole,” he added matter-of-factly.

Brad really wasn’t aware of the chorus of beautiful wailing aboriginals in the wind for he possibly heard it all the time. It was a rich sound of male and female voices which raised in pitch higher and lower with the sound of two percussion sticks. It was a haunting sound …

“They’re here,” he said as he became aware, and tears poured down his face. “They were here for me all the time. And I was not here for them.”

The windscreen exploded the moment he put on the headlights. Pentan stood in front of the car with a revolver and Brad ducked as he fired again. The force of the bullet tore a hole in the bonnet on the Holden. He pressed his feet on the car pedals and put the car into gear. It jerked forward and there was a thud as Pentan bounced off the side of the car. Brad pulled himself upright as the car sped out of control toward the front of a department store. Pentan stood and aimed his gun again. The bullet ripped through the door on the driver’s side and passed through the bare flesh of Brad’s right shoulder. Blood poured copiously into his lap and over the dashboard. The bloody steering wheel slipped from his grasp and there was another shot. The engine exploded into orange flame and the car spun into the glass frontage of the department store. Brad watched the flames grow from the engine and engulf the mannequins dressed in flammable pyjamas.

He pulled his bruised chest away from the steering wheel, grabbed the spear and stood away from the car. Pentan stood watching as Brad emerged from the burning smashed plate glass window, followed by Hellhound. Brad began running towards him, holding the spear upright in his good arm. Brad opened his mouth and let out a long howl.

Pentan again lifted his revolver and aimed it at Brad. His hand shook as he squeezed the trigger. Brad heard the gun fire and saw the barrel sparkle for a split second as he released the spear. In an almost muffled silence, it floated in the orange light of the escalating fire, like some glorious torpedo. It entered Pentan’s head between his eyes and punctured the back of his skull where it became embedded. He stumbled on his feet for a moment, the spear lodged in perfect symmetry and then he fell backwards, snapping the spear as its splinters lodged in Pentan’s brain. Brad watched the convulsions as his body died and felt his own face with a bloodied hand; the ridge of his nose, his brow and forehead, to make sure it was still all there. Such a pretty face, he thought, once upon a time. His mind turned to the fire which had spread throughout the building.

He knew one main road out of the city. He walked on a painful foot as the need for the needle cursed him. A trickle of blood came from his shoulder as he followed the gutters of the main road. Brad’s dog followed faithfully.

Dawn heralded the city of fire. Brad fell in the gutter outside of the city in the parklands somewhere. He could not reach the lookout and he wasn’t bothered enough to look for a car. Hellhound licked his face and his arm fell from the hole which was somewhere near. his heart. A broken heart, it amused Brad. Blood more scarlet than he had ever seen near matched the flames which burned the city and had spread to suburbia. Smoke curled in the sky and Brad saw a bird, blue and silver, so splendid were the wings as it soared speedily across the sky. Living and breathing the sky. Nathan listened to the sound of the morning and closed his eyes. The sound seemed to slip slowly away and he watched the bird leave, higher than the flames, over the ocean, towards the horizon. Never, he thought, to return

“Look at me,” wheezed Nathan, “I have the eyes and ears of television. I feel my dream has almost ended. It is a broken dream…”

The chanting of the invisible aboriginal elders in the wind ceased and so did the wind.

***

Chapter Thirteen

“I’m just the patsy.” Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Corruption arises from never-ending greed…” Anonymous.

Brad waited until it was nearing midnight and went back to the bar. Carlson was there and he was trying to wake Parsons. The two elderly men were gone and so were the electioneers. The bar was closed and Parsons was paralytic.

“Having a bit of trouble with the young fellow?,” asked Brad.

“He seems to have had a little too much,” said Carlson who seemed surprised by the presence.

“We should take him out for some air.”

“We need to go somewhere.”

“I know,” said Brad and helped him lift Parsons: “Through here.”

He led them to the back of the train. The old guard was asleep and they crept through to the back and opened the door. The cool air gushed through and they placed Parsons down in front of the open door.

“Give him a few minutes.”

“Yes, thank you,” said Carlson, at a loss and a bit edgy.

“You photograph well,” said Brad.

“So do you,” he said, suddenly clenching his teeth.

“What did you do with the woman?”

“Woman?”

“The one you fucked and killed.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that Mr Minikin. Everything’s been taken care of. Even yourself, you’ve been taken care of. We’ve seen the photographs.”

Brad pulled the gun from out of his jumper and felt himself become one again. He heard the whispers of Laura in his mind. And for some reason he saw the similarity between Sparkes and Parsons. Yes, it was all too perfect…

“How did you get that?”

“No matter now.”

Brad aimed the gun at his head: “Would you please step in front of the doorway Mr Carlson. I would like to see how you look in the moonlight tonight.”

Carlson gulped and shook his head as he moved toward the doorway.

“There’s a lot of money you can make. Just wait until after the election. It should be worth your while.”

‘Tell me Mr Carlson, why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Why do you make us all suffer? Do you think we’re all fools?”

“I never said you were a fool.”

Where the hell are the guards. thought Brad, it was too perfect. If he thought at all as he looked around behind him.

“Do you think everyone’s going to sit down and watch you grow fat doing what you’re doing?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know Mr Carlson. I know you do, you fucker.”

Carlson reached out toward Brad and the gun.

“Don’t Mr Carlson, this thing’s likely to go off.”

“Is it money you want?”

“No, I want more than money.  No, I want something which money could never buy me or any other Australian…”

“And what is that?”

“Justice. Pure justice. I want the sword to stop swinging above my head. I want those who hold the sword to stop playing with it, with other people’s lives.”

“This is madness,” said Carlson. “You’re kaput!”

“This is pure justice. The justice of the socialism you have destroyed and plan to dismantle in this country. It’s the golden justice of a golden-haired boy destroyed by lies…. You hangered me! You hangered the country’s dreams of itself! You are the one who must pay the price for corruption and letting the Philistines like me end the world with a sneeze and not a bang … Prepare to die on the road to Damascus Carlson…”

Brad had a vision of himself naked in the compartment looking through the camera finder and on the other side was Parsons naked looking through the camera finder. It was though the whole set up of walls spelt out some sort of swastika that spun around and around like some ancient eastern symbol before it stopped again … and for the first time in his life Brad thought he was a Nazi, not a Philistine but a Nazi… and when this realisation came to him, his heart kind of hardened and then crumbled at the same time until there was nothing left. He saw himself in those photographs being screwed royally and he knew he was nothing since he had no defence… He had been set up by someone to kill Carlson, but was it Parsons’? Or even Sparkes? Did it matter at all, now? He was a tool and it was too late. He would destroy the very movement he hoped to create and maintain, to nurture and remain one of the keepers of the flame until the country would be one with the people… It didn’t make sense anymore and his eyes glazed over for a moment.

“All right, I set you up David or whatever your name is… We’ve got the pictures of you stoned getting fucked by Sparkes… You’ve seen them, haven’t you? We wanted more so we had Parson’s drug you and fuck you too, at least metaphorically… that’s life in the front line. We’ve got to win this election….”

Thinking he had the upper hand, Carlson reached out for the gun again and Brad squeezed. The bullet entered Carlson’s left lung as Carlson grabbed the gun and accidentally blew his own brains out. He fell through the door and the inertia threw his body out on the train line. He was gone. Gone forever. Brad didn’t see his body disappear along the track in the darkness. He could remember only the spray of brains. Yes, he was gone he could tell the O Children of the Sun. Brad threw the gun after him and stood for a spell listening to the rattle of the line. There was a little blood on the frame of the door.

“Dead as a door nail, universal soldiers! Let the dingoes feast on his bones and I shall drink in Alice in the morning,” said Brad, who then turned inward: “Drink a toast as I have fulfilled my part of the Reformation.” And he began to talk to himself incoherently and pompously again: “I shall escape with my life and every moment shall be rich for me, richer than any dream past. My dreams shall leave me empty from now on and yet they shall flow like honey across the sea of my mind. I shall forget then, but I will not be broken, for I am but one in the birth of our great land of the New Dreaming… Bring on the rot!”

And the silver threads of line disappeared into the darkness…

***

Epilogue

“…And the Lord rejected Saul as the king of Israel.” Popular book.

“Thank God for television or the lack thereof.” Anonymous.

“It takes two, baby…” Popular lyric.

Along the sweeping sandy shores of a land reborn there walked a naked tribe, their bare feet left their mark on the seamless shores. It is the only tribe to walk these shores. They have travelled from inland to see this place. It is not a sacred place and they will not stay long on the shores but will return inland with memories of sand and seawater. It is a small tribe of nine, led by a tall man, skin dark from the sun, hair bleached golden. He walked erect at the head of the tribe, proud and naked in the sun. His name is Saul and in his hand is a finely carved spear. A few steps behind him, is a woman. She is young and there is beauty in her smile. Her belly is swollen from child and beside her, holding her fingertips is a very young boy, who fails in the sand at times. She scoops him up with the swing of his arm. There is another woman with wide eyes which reflect the sun. She screams with laughter as another, younger man tickles her torso as he runs past her toward Saul. Saul watches as the three children play in the sand ahead. A boy and two girls digging in the sand, no more than eight years old. It is their laughter which also haunts the beach.

“They must know this place,” said Saul.

“The water?,” asked the young warrior.

Saul looks out to the water and sees a seagull leave the surface and soar into the sky.

“The place where the land meets the water and where the water meets the horizon.”

The young warrior nods in understanding and turns around with a look of concern.

“Mary,” He begins and runs down the beach.

A seagull settles again on the water beyond the breaking surf and Saul watches the children dig. The boy stops digging as if he has found something buried in the sand. He fondles it with his fingers and blows on it. Saul can see the boy is fascinated and keenly watches him approach with the object in an outstretched hand. The object flashes in the sunlight as it is placed in Saul’s hand. It is a silver coin. The boy runs off again, tripping in the sand and laughing as he rejoins the digging. Saul looks at the coin; its perfect shape, words and image of a woman with a crown who must have been some sort of queen, he thinks. On the back there is a man much like himself. He clutches it for a moment and wonders about his father before he throws it as far as he can across the water. There the money would disappear off-shore forever.

In his hand was his own find, a bottle cap rusted but still crinkled where it met the old bottles they’d find by the thousands around the country. The cap is oxidised betraying its origins. Then he threw this too into the water not wanting to burden himself with too many belongings.

Further along the deserted beach, among the footprints of the tribe, stands an old woman. She does not notice the water as it rushes forward and laps at her feet, ankle deep in the sand.

“Mary!,” calls the young warrior.

She turns and looks away from the waves and the warrior sees her eyes amidst her wild greying hair which blows in the cool afternoon breeze. She does not move.

“Come Mary,” the warrior calls and he waits for her.

The old woman’s eyes are once more drawn to the grey sea, the waves which crash into foam, the tide carrying it out again, changing and flowing together. It brings more sand to her feet. She lifts her clutched hand to her dark and leathery breast and glimpses for a moment the silver coin within her hand. A seagull rises elegantly from the water, dripping from the sea and Mary thinks for a moment of a majestic blue plane with silver wings and a silver tail, beating across the sky, closer to shore. There’s a booming crash of surf and the foam comes closer, glistening as it approaches her ankles, burying them deeper in the sand.

“I am coming,” she murmurs and turns her back on the sea. So cruel is the sea, she thinks, breathes the salt air and follows the footprints in the sand. The Cross, they called it The Cross… and it disappeared forever. She follows the flesh of her own, her tribe which stands waiting for her as she waddles towards them… For the love she could not describe, except for the tender touch of her dry hands. She felt a tear in her eye for Him. Soon she was with them again and the coin would be put away and forgotten for the final Embrace. Towards the tribe where the warrior held out his hand and the children played beneath the sun. Lips did not move in the wind, only their song.

***

Copyright @1988 @2023