Stark (11 page)

62: THE NERVE CENTRE OF ECOACTION

T
he place was real dark. Rachel wasn’t scared of the dark, no, it wasn’t the dark that she was scared of. It was not being able to see anything that she hated. She had already gone arseover- tit twice, tripping on some form of creeper. The garden of Zimm and Walter’s place definitely needed tending.

‘We should tend that garden sometime,’ Walter would observe.

‘Man, it would take a Napalm strike to even make a dent in it,’ Zimm replied. ‘Doctor Livingstone is still in there looking for the source of the Nile.’

And so they let it go. It was getting increasingly difficult to get to the front door, as Rachel was discovering.

Country music was drifting through the darkness, whining, mournful music, straight-forward music. That was the great thing about country music, it did not mince words. The word ‘obscure’ is not in the country dictionary, foot-notes are not required. For instance, the country ballad writer wishing to suggest that he is low and blue because his baby is gone, would probably write something like. ‘I’m low and blue because my baby is gone.’

This was how Zimm liked his music. Plain speaking was important to him, he hated hypocrisy. ‘I want you out of my head and back in my bed before the morning comes’, sang Lorreta Lynn as Rachel struggled up the path in the blackness, vegetation brushing her cheeks and deeply suspect substances underfoot. Just about every cat in Carlo shat in Walt and Zimm’s garden. Walter thought it was OK because cats are clean shitters. They are always very careful to dig a shallow toilet and fill it in again afterwards. The problem obviously comes when the land has been so overcrapped that the surface is 100 per cent cat crap, which means the cat digs a hole in the crap, craps in it and then carefully pushes crap on top of it. A soul-destroying activity and one calculated to make any cat lower its personal standards.

There was no light inside the shack save the glow of a cigarette brightening with every draw and then dulling almost back into the blackness.

‘Whoever you’re looking for, they don’t live here,’ said a voice located just behind the cigarette.

‘I’m looking for eighty-two King Edward the Seventh Empire Terrace. Have I got the right address?’

Whoever did the road naming in Australia was a serious empire freak. You’d be walking down some street in Sydney, half-Greek, half-Italian, half God knows what and the place is named after Queen Victoria. Zimm and Walter tried to get their street renamed Dead Abo Terrace and the local Freedom Association pushed a burning rag through their letter-box.

‘You’re here,’ said the cigarette end, ‘but you’ve got the wrong address. Like I said, whoever you want don’t live here.’

‘I’m looking for the two guys who got busted on the USS Enormous this morning.’

What happened next was an object lesson in why it was a bad idea to send confused young men off in a haze of drugs to fight a war that no one understands and can not be won, then bring them back, trained killers with fried brains and no bollocks. There was a split second of confusing movement. The cigarette end shot to within an inch of Rachel’s face and she found herself pinned to a tree with her arms firmly clamped behind it. Her head was pushed right far back exposing her neck and although she could not be sure, she was conscious of the possibility that there might be a knife at her throat.

When her assailant spoke he sounded almost offended, which struck Rachel as strange since she appeared to be the injured party. In fact Zimm was offended. He had a genuine persecution complex. He felt people did not respect him as a person. He felt they just saw him as a terrifying space case to be humoured, patronized and, if at all possible, avoided. He was, of course, right about this. It was a paradox of Zimm’s sad mental condition that despite being pretty much a complete nutter, he could, on occasion, come up with an analysis as breathtakingly astute as this one.

‘Oh man, I mean, what is the point, right?’ he demanded, ‘I mean, just what is the point? I mean, what am I, a non-person or something? Did they leave me out of the constitution, is that it?…Uhm, yeah, every guy and chick has a right not to be hassled in their own space, except Zimmerman…Like, if a dude was in court, right? The judge would say to him, ‘You are convicted of pulling someone’s head off and eating it, have you anything to say before I bang you up in the slammer for ever?…‘ And the dude says, ‘It was only Zimmerman’s head, your honour…‘ ‘Oh in that case you get a ten bucks reward and a new hat.’ I said we weren’t home!’

Rachel sensed that with the last line her attacker had returned to the planet earth and some response was in order. However, even if her head hadn’t been thrust right back, making speech pretty difficult, she would still probably have been at a loss for an appropriate remark.

Many people put Zimm’s erratic speech patterns down to his terrible experiences in ‘Nam, but in fact he had always been weird as anything speech-wise.

‘I’ll never understand you, son,’ Mrs Zimmerman used to sigh — and she was right, she never did.

Just as Rachel was trying to decide whether kicking her assailant’s shins would be a good or a bad idea, Walter turned on a lamp. It was a sixty watt bulb but after the darkness it made everyone blink. The light flooded out through the open French windows to the tree against which Rachel was pinned. She heard a gentle movement and then the light was gone. This was because Walter was now standing in the doorway and it fitted him perfectly. It was almost as if the doorway had been built around him, and what’s more, by a carpenter who liked his doorways figure hugging. For Walter was huge, terrifyingly so — far bigger than he had looked at the docks. Rachel commended her soul to God. Zimmerman, at six foot two with his lean and wiry frame had been worrying enough, but his companion was the proverbial brick shithouse. A municipal version with fifteen sitters and a thirty yard trough. He was not fat, although the years had lent a certain dignity to his midriff, he was just huge. A shaggy bearded bear of a man in a smock and khaki shorts.

As it happened, Rachel need not have been afraid (of Walter, that is — she was still in the vice-like grip of a lunatic), because Walter was the gentlest of souls, Rachel could tell from his voice.

‘Zimm, what are you doing, man?’ Walter said. ‘I mean, really, what are you doing? You have to cool it, you know? I mean, this is a terrible thing, pushing people around like that is a terrible thing. I just don’t know what you think you’re doing. If you do these terrible things, Zimm, you know I’m going to have to start thinking that you and I are on totally different wave-lengths. Like me on one wave-length and you on another wave-length, but a different one, not the same as mine at all. That’s what I’m going to have to start thinking if you don’t cool it.’

Despite her difficult situation, Rachel could not help but be impressed by the extraordinarily mellow quality of Walter’s voice. It was a lovely calming voice. It made you think that things were going to be OK and she felt this despite the fact that Walter seemed to be talking almost complete drivel. She couldn’t help but wonder what the effect would be if he ever said anything worth listening to.

Zimmerman, releasing Rachel, stepped back and was caught in what few rays of light managed to squeeze past Walter’s huge frame by holding their breath and thinking thin. Rachel could now see that even without the voice, and despite his quite absurd size, Walter was definitely the one she’d prefer to meet on a dark night. Zimmerman looked like a piece of human granite. He wore the traditional Ozzie singlet, which is a baggy vest with very low cut armholes and his muscles looked like they had been painted on by Leonardo da Vinci. There wasn’t sufficient fat on him to fry an egg (although the grease in his hair would have tempted Slampacker to open a franchise on his head). When you’ve been blown to bits, as Zimmerman had, you either train hard or you don’t get better. Zimm had got better and then gone on getting better. From his shiny, greasy, biker-looking jeans to his short, greying beard, he was muscle and bone. Above the beard was a different story. He looked out to lunch — Mr and Mrs Sanity were clearly not at home to callers. His temples were quivering with riotous indignation and his deep-set eyes flashed about behind the long, sweaty strands of hair that fell forward from his centre parting. He was still mightily aggrieved.

‘She said she’s come about us getting busted on the boat this morning…I mean what is the point? All the cops are down at the Pig Pen thinking what shall we do this evening to justify the extortionate amount of bread the public pays us to be pigs? Shall we, like, go and catch a rapist or something? No, let’s go hassle Zimmerman, that’ll really make the streets safe for the kids to play in.’

‘I’m not a police officer,’ said Rachel. She could not bring herself to use such a monumentally dated and unfashionable expression as ‘pig’. The fact that Zimmerman’s mind had closed down in 1972 was his problem, not hers.

‘So, what’s the story, lady, where is it at?’ said the mellow one.

Rachel was seriously beginning to regret having come. Not because of being half assaulted but because she seemed to have fallen in with yet more hippies. It was expressions like ‘where’s it at’ that made Rachel suspicious. But she decided that she would have to persevere.

‘I wished I’d been on the boat with you,’ she said. ‘I was one of the people on the quay waving a sign.’

‘Man,’ said Walter with what, for him, was a tone of excitement — which meant it would have anaesthetized an epileptic trapped in a stroboscope. ‘You were one of the girls with their tits out? I wish you’d been on the boat with us.’

Rachel put Walter right. Walter admitted that although he abhorred sexism in every form, if it had to have a form, the form of a load of chicks waving their tits around didn’t seem such a bad option to him. Rachel said she didn’t think that Walter had thought this one through properly. Walter admitted that this might be true and promised to think about it really hard later in bed. Zimm said it was all one to him because he didn’t have any bollocks anyway. Rachel thought this a pity, kind of like finding an E-Type in perfect condition, except the gear stick had been broken off. Introductions thus affected, Rachel went and got CD from the car and Zimm volunteered to make some tea.

63: SPYING OUT THE LAND

64: DINNER AND BULLSHIT

The sun had been down for hours but that didn’t seem to make much difference in that baking summer of Stark. The Queen Victoria Pub’s upstairs room was like the inside of a microwave. Dinner was over. What had started out as a summer salad had been reduced by heat and humidity to a sort of vegetable stew. The royal toast had been made and the beer was flowing, served in the curious Australian glass known as a pony, which is about the size of an egg cup. The point being that you drink in small units because if you leave your beer in the glass too long it will evaporate. Due to the climate, beer is served at almost zero degrees. A person freezes to the glass. In other countries you might complain about a bit of lipstick on the rim of your beer, in Australia you might find someone’s lips.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the chief dingo, rising to his feet and calling order. ‘The Royal Hatch of the Old, Stupid and Contemptible Dingo’s (Bullens Creek chapel) have great pleasure in welcoming a self-made multimillionaire and good old all round Ozzie bloke, Silvester Moorcock.’

Sly rose to his feet amidst admiring applause. It did not disconcert Sly that he found himself addressing an audience who were all wearing false dingo ears. He considered himself lucky that it was not a Tuesday, in which case he would have been talking to the Chapel of the Charitable Chickens, which would have meant beaks, feathers and singing the ‘Honourable cluck cluck song’ on the stroke of each hour. Sly chose his words carefully, he wanted to win them over, to make them like and trust him so they would not start asking questions when he came to make his purchases. He gave them his best shot, his trusty ‘Road to Success, I made it, you could make it too’ speech:

‘Listen, I’m pure Aussie, right? This is a great country and the honeypot is open to all. Christ, if a stupid bastard like me can get a pawful, anyone can,’ — they loved the self- deprecatory stuff —’I mean, any old pie-brained dickhead with no teeth and a wallet full of condoms way past the sell-by date can make it in the lucky country.’ The older blokes were ecstatic.

‘Sure, you need some talent and application,’ he added, ‘people who are not prepared to put the hours in need not expect to travel club-class…‘ Some of the audience attempted to nod intelligently at this — not a very advisable thing to do when you are wearing false dingo ears.

‘You also need luck, of course you do,’ Sly granted magnanimously. ‘Christ, you got to be in the right place at the right time. The fellah with the goldmine isn’t necessarily the best miner around but he’s the fellah who found the gold, and good luck to him. Mind you, I don’t say you can’t make luck sometimes. Oh yes. That fellah who found the gold, well, chances are he was looking for that gold. Maybe he was the fellah who was prepared to go looking for gold in the hills that the mine expert said weren’t worth touching. Maybe he just thought hell, maybe I’ll get lucky…’

This meaningless tripe was slipping down pretty well with the fourth or fifth beer. The audience knew they weren’t exactly listening to Abraham Lincoln but it was pleasant enough stuff. They liked the rugged frontier side of it and redneck anti-intellectualism. Actually it was a much cleverer speech than it sounded because Sly was getting around to a point. ‘Listen, mates. There’s more than one way to bite the tail off a kangaroo. Are you with me?’

They weren’t but they didn’t mind pretending. It was too hot to argue. ‘What I’m saying is, if there ain’t no gold to be found then dig for something else. I’m telling you, there isn’t a hill in Australia that a profit can’t be wrung out of if you think hard enough.’

Here, Sly lost his audience somewhat. Everyone in the room knew that their scrappy little hills had been surveyed to death and the only things ever found were a few old Ab’ relics that a couple of archaeologists had got excited about for half an hour. But Sly pursued his theme of nothing ventured; nothing gained, with his usual force and charm so that when, just before he sat down, he announced his intention of taking another look at the whole area, he almost had people believing that he had a chance. After all, it was his time and money and if he did find something! Bullens Creek would become, figuratively speaking, a goldmine. Perhaps even literally! After all, look what this same man, Sly Moorcock, had done to Kalgoorkatta! Who could tell, maybe he would work the same magic in Bullens Creek.

By next morning reason had regained its throne. Nobody was planning swimming pools or European holidays, but Sly had laid a firm foundation for his story. They believed that he was going to take another look at the hills. Who cared? He was just a crazy bloke with more money than sense.