In Bed with Jocasta (3 page)

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I
n the school science curriculum of the mid-1970s, it was mandatory to dissect a rat at every opportunity. If your teacher wanted to explain water evaporation in the Murray-Darling basin, he’d work in some sort of rat dissection. Ask him the atomic weight of magnesium, and the answer would come back: ‘Hand me a rat.’

It was even worse in my class, because my teacher was using rat dissection as part of a long-term scientific project — trying to establish just how many times he could, via rat dissection, cause me to faint or throw up.

Actually, I fainted only once, but that one faint was so spectacular, so breathtakingly humiliating, that you could understand the teacher’s desire to see the moment repeated. (This, of course, was in the days before the Internet, so teachers had to make their own fun.)

The occasion was a lecture about the dangers of heroin abuse, in which the teacher, quite naturally, took the opportunity to dissect a rat. This, he said, was in order to show us the intricate wonders of the human body — a task which, speaking personally, I felt was more easily achieved in French class in idle contemplation of Madame Chabrol.

But, for him, it had to be the rat, which he had pinned to a board and was just pointing out the wonders of the little lungs when I sought permission to ‘go to the bathroom’. Permission granted, I strode manfully towards the door, teetered a little in front of the teacher’s desk, turned a sharp shade of white, and then fell face forward onto the floor.

How long did I stay there, unconscious? Reports were uncertain — muffled as they were by the sound of thirty-two classmates pissing themselves with laughter. What’s clear is that I remain very worried by any mention of rodents.

The rodents who last week invaded our kitchen are mice rather than rats, but still there’s the sensation that total humiliation cannot be far off. For a start, The Space Cadet has to be convinced they are a totally different species to his pet mouse Fluffy, who continues to gambol — oblivious — on his Lazy Vue viewing platform.

Over a week, I set about twenty traps, twelve of which fail to go off (the mice regarding them largely as serving platters for that day’s cheesy offering); seven of which slam shut, but on top of my fingers; and one of which — no doubt due to some freakish accident — actually kills a mouse.

Which is when Locky arrives to stay.

Locky is our mate from the bush, a rice farmer who wears genuine bush boots and a genuine bush hat and can build a tractor engine using nothing but a roll of chook wire and a pair of old socks. on all indications, he is the sort of bloke unlikely to have fainted during science class.

‘What would
you
do about our mice plague?’ says Jocasta, instantly cheering to the thought that at last the house has a
proper
bloke in it.

‘Yes, what would you do, Locky?’ says Batboy, pausing in his drooling admiration of Locky’s hat.

And so Locky launches into three hours of increasingly unlikely bush stories in which he single-handedly defeats ever larger armies of mice, right up to the story of how the mice lifted his whole barn and carried it into Deniliquin and Locky had to carry it back. All of which is told as Jocasta, Batboy and The Space Cadet form a small and ever-more-adoring circle, demanding details of the trap that finally defeated the mice.

‘Ah,’ said Locky, ‘it was a traditional bush trap.’

And so Locky described it, while Batboy, following his instructions, built the thing.

I felt sorry for Locky really; it was such a stupid contraption, like something a kid would dream up. It featured an empty beer bottle, lying on a shelf, its neck sticking over the edge, a piece of cheese shoved in its mouth, and a bucket of water below. An old sock (there’s always an old sock in Locky’s contraptions) goes over the big end of the bottle, and the neck is greased with butter. The mouse — sure, Locky, sure — will walk along the bottle, towards the cheese, using the traction of the sock, step onto the butter, fall, then drown in the water.

All in all, a daft idea and proof once again of the tragic fantasy world in which many of our farmers are now living. Indeed, as we sat round the dinner table I started advising Locky how he needed to spend more time in town, updating his ideas, trying to get more of a grip on reality, which was exactly when we heard the first plop.

One drowned mouse. The first of eight caught since in The Locky Trap.

Only trouble is, Locky’s gone home now, so it’s up to me to reach into the water and fish out the little dead bodies, turning as I do it various shades of blue, green and yellow. And up to me to turn Fluffy’s mouse house discreetly away.

Have I fainted yet? Surprisingly, no. Could it be that The Locky Trap is finally making a man of me?

W
hen I was sixteen and living alone with my father, the culinary standard was not high. For breakfast we would both have two raw eggs, stirred up in a glass of milk with a fork — me adding a spoonful of chocolate Quik as a concession to youth. For dinner we would have lamb chops, done under the griller, served with mashed potato and frozen peas.

We would have this meal on Mondays. Then we’d have it on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays. On Thursdays. And on Fridays. From this distance, I can’t recall the weekends, but I have a strong suspicion they involved chops, potatoes and peas. I also remember thinking the whole thing very tasty.

Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, has reached the bestseller lists by promoting the simplicity of his recipes — but he’s nothing on my dad. Or on a thousand other suburban chefs. They have
really
simple recipes. Perhaps it’s time someone recorded their subtle joys.

As tasty as Jamie’s Lemon and Lime Cream Tart? Perhaps not, but truly
wicked.

Then she sighs. It’s a long, bleak sigh,
slipping from her lips with a mixture of
exhaustion and self-pity. As best I can decode
it, it contains within it the narrative of how,
twenty years ago, an intelligent young woman
with options in life made a series of decisions
which led her, in middle-age, to be driving at
30 kilometres an hour over the Anzac Bridge
with a moron.

I
n the building trade, everything has some bizarre, slightly Yorkshire-sounding name, designed to cause humiliation once you arrive at the hardware store.

‘Hey George,’ the main bloke will yell out, shouting down to his wizened offsider at the back. ‘Guess what this bloke wants to do? He’s going to use a crumpin pin to fix his nondles.’ At which point, thirty tradesman in overalls will turn to face the counter, in their excitement sending flying to the floor countless packets of scrogin bolts, grommet flanges and grogan pipes.

‘He’s got his nondles mixed up with his scrogins,’ they chorus as one, laughing merrily, and lurch into a little dance, all the while casting admiring glances at each other’s spondles.

Sometimes, watching them, I’d like to insert a grogan into each of their blurgin pipes. Except, of course, for the ever-increasing price of grogans.

I’m only here, in the hardware store, because large cracks have just appeared in our new bathroom floor — the bathroom floor I’ve only just finished installing. Plus the toilet creaks every time you come near it.

It seems I stuffed-up the level of the joists when I rebuilt the floor. Which means that each time you approach the toilet you’re greeted by a loud and apprehensive moan.

Jocasta calls it the ‘talking toilet’ and says we should have hired a tradesman. she’s right. The joists are stuffed, but so are the bearers, the soffets, the tindrills, the blagdorms, the rafters and the reefers.

Mind you, it was Jocasta who encouraged this current spate of DIY — or Destroy-It-Yourself, as we now call it. she’s the one who bought me the portable workbench, designed to clamp wood or piping at various angles, and costing a fortune. A fortune so great that, finally, in mid-life, I realised I’d become a man with expensive vices.

The portable bench has some sort of fancy marketing name, like the Bloke-O-Matic or the Handi Guy. It’s solitary. It’s portable. It’s a vice. And yet it’s still approved by the Vatican.

The only catch is that the Bloke-O-Matic is supplied in bits in a flat-pack box, and it emerges that you need a Bloke-O-Matic and about $500 worth of tools in order to put it together. But, still, some people have been lucky enough to somehow manoeuvre Bolt E into Hole C and end up with something featuring four intertwined legs and two vices (remember: still Vatican approved).

And it’s only natural that these people believe they can do anything. Even build a bathroom.

Which is how I found myself digging trenches for the sewerage pipe and considering the need for some new building regulations, specifically designed for the nation’s Do-It-Yourselfers. such as: