The Big Whatever (12 page)

What robbery? I hear you yodel. Well, that was it – I was improvising, jamming on a crazy speed riff, a long, twisting tale about a super-heist involving some expert break-and-enter men, with big paydays for all players. Alex listened. Fact was, I'd bought a lottery ticket just the day before, and that's what popped into my head.

I went on, stitching together bits and pieces of every cheap detective book I'd ever read, turning it into some kind of Ben Hall-Ned Kelly-Darcy Duggan-Scarlet Pimpernel adventure, decorated with cries of “Bail up, you bastards, or we'll ventilate your scurvy spleen!”, high-speed getaways, complex switches and costume changes, secret codes, hideouts and whatnot, ending up with our band of urban bushrangers having foiled the traps yet again, sharing a tankard or two of rum. What ho, me lads!

I kept spieling. I threw in a bit of technical talk. Offhand-sounding, professional. Couldn't name the other players, of course.

Alex, good-hearted simpleton and comic-book reader that he was, wanted to believe it all. I almost had him, I could see that.

The other bloke, Barry, was a different story. He said nothing the whole time. But I could
feel
him there, and the more I tried not to look his way, the more I sensed his presence.

And all the while I was laying out the plans, strange and freaky images kept forming in my head. Many faces. A cowering dog. A frightened child. A sense of prolonged pain. All emanating from Barry.

At one point I paused and let myself glance his way. He was smiling at me.

“You get it, don't you?” he said brightly.

“Don't know what you're talking about,” I said, but my voice was shaky and hollow. The psychotic cunt was reading my mind. At least, he knew I was picking up bits of telepathic static from
his
fucked-up consciousness.

Barry smiled, almost amiably, and it wasn't nice.

Alex glanced at him, confused, then back at me. He cleared his throat. “Mel, you're a dead cunt. You know that. You're full of shit. You always were. And you are now.”

“Harsh words for an old friend, Alex.”

“But irregardless, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. We'll wait a little. Get this straight, though, Mel – if your story turns out to be bullshit, which it probably is, but just might not be, then every day that you made us wait will be another day Barry will keep you . . . under his care, if you get me. And you don't want that.”

Until this point, Barry's gaze had been fixed on me, without so much as a blink, but now he turned and stared at Alex. I was relieved, I can tell you, my delicate ones. Alex was struggling to keep his cool.

After a long, uncomfortable silence, Barry slowly turned back to me and prodded the bag of dope on the table. “Is that any good?”

“It's pure.”

He looked at Alex again. “Aren't you going to try it?”

Alex, more wretched than ever, took the bag, opened it. And tipped out some powder. “I suppose I better test it, eh?” A nervous laugh. “Bloody speed.”

He took out a penknife, started working the powder into a couple of lines. Jesus H, I was thinking,
please
don't give
any to your mate.

Alex pointed at me. “You first.”

I leaned over and snarfed up a line. Alex watched me a moment then did likewise.

Barry looked from me to Alex, then back to me. The shit kicked in, my scalp crawled.

Without taking his eyes off me, Barry slowly picked up Alex's penknife, felt the edge. Then he rolled up his left sleeve and carefully cut a two-inch line across his forearm. Deep. Blood dribbled out onto the table. Then he cut another line, same length, perpendicular to the first one. Then another two, across those. Like he was about to play noughts and crosses. Smiling at me the whole time.

Then he stood up and walked to the door, went out leaving a trail of blood.

I looked at Alex, who was very pale. We sat in silence a few moments.

“He gone?” I said.

Alex shook his head, then sighed deeply. “Fuck knows.”

A pause. That dragged on.

“How did you get mixed up with
him
?” I said.

“The family,” he said. “It's their idea.”

“
Jesus
, Alex.”

He shook his head. Ruefully, I guess you'd have to say.

“This is way out of my hands. If they had their way, we wouldn't even have talked. Barry would have just done his thing. Where's Cathy, by the way?”

“Western Australia. Last heard.”

“Well, you're it then, Mel. That story you told, the lottery office? Jeez, I hope for your sake there's something in it.”

“How did you find me?”

“I saw you on telly last week.”

“What happened with Drew?”

Alex put his hand up. “Don't. Better not to talk about that shit. Now or ever.” Alex was shaking his head.

“Yeah, it was wrong, in every way. I know, I know.”

Alex leaned forward and jabbed his finger at me. “I set that whole thing up, and let you in as a favour. So after you pulled that fucking stunt, it was
me
in the hot seat.”

“I didn't think,” I said. “Those bikey blokes were obviously arseholes. And Drew, a useless piece of work. Not that I endorse homicide.”

Alex shook his head slowly. “The bikeys complained to my uncle. He pays them to keep an eye on that pub of his at Botany.”

“Oh fuck.”

“Yeah. And then it was really on. My uncle made good, so that put you and Cathy in his sights.”

“What do I have to do?”

“You were supposed to die. Today. There never really was any other plan.”

“How about I pay you back? Double?”

He shrugged, without much enthusiasm. “I can put it to the old man. Wouldn't hope for too much, though. For chrissake, give me some more of that fucking goey.”

“You said you hated speed.”

“I do. Give it here.”

Alex left a few hours later. Then I paced. The outlaw-type shenanigans was something I'd made up on the fly, but the more I talked it up, the more convinced I had become that it was my best way out. I had no objections to robbery per se. Hadn't Johnny and I once cut a dashing swathe through Sydney's underworld, robbing evildoers, defending our swag from bent coppers, fascist thugs and assorted villains? Johnny? You out there?
You
remember, right?

No, my dears, stealing from the wicked was no crime in Mel Parker's book. Property being theft and what have you. But running into a bank waving firearms about – goodness, there must be an easier way.

On the other hand, your armed robbery is quick. Bang. You make a noisy entrance. Hands up, you cunts. Give us
the money. In the bag there. Thank you. Goodbye. In and out. If you get away clean, that's it. Your work is done. Let's have a party.

And didn't I have a direct line to my very own band of bold bank robbers? Oh yeah, I know, I'd shitbagged armed rob to Denise. And, yeah, Denise was in way over her head there. But Stan and Jimmy were seasoned crims. And Cathy – holy Jesus shit, she handled a gun with more panache than anyone I'd ever seen.

There were problems, admittedly. The mysterious cop-like bloke I'd seen visiting the robbers, and the strange offhandedness I was digging from that whole crew – which by now I was getting a pretty good idea about. Not to mention Denise's naiveté. But nothing's perfect in this world, right, my little jaundiced ones?

Anyway, my musings didn't have much bearing on how things turned out. Fuck me if Fate hadn't chosen just a little while before to stick its fickle finger right up my date. Yeah, that's right – after a lifetime of strumming ukuleles, pawing pianos and flailing at guitars, dressing up variously as a cowboy, gypsy, beatnik, juvenile delinquent, beach-bum, lounge lizard or whatever the fuck, suddenly it had all come to fruition. Kind of. Up to a point. But as old Carl Jung once said: Beware the gifts of the gods, 'cause they mean to fuck you up if they can. So gather round me, earnest young seekers and listen closely. It happened like this.

First, let us wind the clock back to the previous winter. We – that is, Bobby Boyd and the Oracles, recently (sorrowfully) renamed “Oracle” – had been playing our busy round of dances and discos and one-off events. Like I told you, the inner-city crowd had long since stopped dancing, except for a little free-form hippie arm-waving. It was the pot, dig? And the acid.

But the suburbs still floated on an ocean of beer. Beer and hot cars, brawls out the front, sex out the back. Just like always.

And then it changed. One week it was booze and knuckles. Next week it was peace and love. Knowing looks and nods, secret knowledge. Everyone was in the club. The suburbs had discovered marijuana.

The penny dropped at a dance in West Heidelberg, which used to be one of the rougher places in Melbourne, a hard-bitten Housing Commission burb, to which I always took a shiv and an iron bar, at the very least. This one week it was suddenly different. Smiles, nods, much digging of the music.

A bunch of kids came up to me during a break and invited me out back for a puff. And they had good gear. A blond girl told me she was reading Meher Baba. Another was into some Buddhist,
Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road
kind of thing. Yet another wanted to talk about William Burroughs and the Incredible String Band.

Back in Melbourne the next day, Bobby Boyd and I knocked out a song about all this. Him strumming chords, me tapping out words on my Olympia portable.

We started with the line “The Phantom's shooting dope!”, which led us to “Boofhead's dealing coke!” and then “Superman is stoned off of his dial.” On it went, for many verses. “Clark Kent just robbed a bank,” we wrote, “Mandrake's got a shank.” And so on. We had Ginger Meggs on the nod, Dagwood fiddling the books, old Dick Tracy taking orders from the mob, Batman and Robin . . . that's right, you guessed it.

Bobby had backed away from the space-cadet hippie thing by now; he was looking and sounding more John Lennon-John Sebastian-Grateful Dead these days. He sang this new song Dylan-style, spitting out the lines, all on one note, kind of an “It's All Right, Ma” rip, but with a funk beat.

In one hour, zap, we had our song. This was the one that had gone over so well at Denise's house party in December.

The ditty had its first truly public airing at a weekend music festival just before Christmas. It was one of those
half-arsed Woodstock-type get-togethers which had suddenly become the big thing. You know the drill: you get a horde of hippies and psychos hopped up on grass and flagon wine, feed them kebabs and macrobiotic food. You
claim
to have booked some renowned international rock act, who for some reason always cancels at the last minute, but the punters don't find out until they've already handed over their hard-earneds and are sitting in a paddock somewhere.

So there we were. John Lennon hadn't shown up. Big fucking surprise, huh? Billy Thorpe was supposed to play, but he'd cancelled too. So we were put on stage at ten o'clock on the Saturday night. Perfect timing. It was a warm night, but camp fires were burning. Hash and grass and wood smoke wafted out of the crowd. The lushes were nicely lit up, but not yet drunk and ugly. Bobby went to the microphone and just stood there. He was good with the patter and people knew that. So he's standing looking out at the crowd, while the rest of us are poised, waiting to be counted in. The crowd is silent, patient, expecting something funny.

“Batman's shooting dope . . .” Bobby shouted, then paused. The crowd cheered. “Boofhead's dealing coke!” More cheers. “And Superman is stoned off of his diiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaalllllll!” Then the old “One, two, three, FOUR!!!” and away we went.

It was the hit of the festival. We did encores. Later a bloke from the ABC approached us, arranged for us to go into the studio the next week and film the song for broadcast. We had that effer properly recorded within a week, were on TV with it a week later, and bingo – by New Year we were the fastest rising act in the business. Got an album recorded quick smart:
Deeply Disturbed
, it was called.

So that's how Alex had found me. Saw me on the idiot box.

SOMEBODY DONE HOODOOED THE HOODOO MAN

It wasn't that hard to muscle in on the robbery caper. The day after my visit from Alex and the self-lacerating fruitcake, I went to see Stan and Jimmy. Didn't tell them too much, just said I wanted in. They were surprised, but cool with it. I had come through all right on the Mornington Peninsula getaway. So I was to be wheelman on an upcoming job. Out of town. Fat little post office in the boondocks. Cathy and Denise weren't part of it. Just us. This was one for the boys.

It went like this: we drove up first thing on pension day. Plenty of money there waiting. We timed it for right on the knocker, nine a.m. Door opened, oldies wandered in. And we bold Knights of the High Toby barrelled in behind them. Well, Stan and Jimmy did. Me, I waited in the car, right outside the door. After a little bit of dramatic carry-on, the tellers handed over the bread. No heroes – this was the post office, after all. No one was hurt. Less than a minute later the boys were back, and I was driving off, taking it slow. We switched cars around the corner, less than two hundred yards away, and motored off again. I dropped the boys at a rented fishos' cottage down by the river, then took the second car back into town, left it near the railway station. Stan followed me in a third car, a clean one which we'd parked back at the cottage. He picked me up, we returned to the cottage.