The Killer Koala (16 page)

I
don't really like being underground, in caves or tunnels or mines,
because I'm neurotically afraid they are about to collapse on me. But
I have many neuroses and this one faded under the consoling effects
of the coolness, the beer and Bert's rather sibilant voice. He spoke,
I mused, as one imagined a ferret might speak, with a husky, hissing
breathlessness.

'Anyhow
I've got to do one now, so I'll show you,' said Bert. As I didn't
know what he was talking about, I assumed I must have dozed off.

He
took a pick and dug a small hole in the far end of the new shaft.
Then he took from a box a package of what looked like a cube of
greasy brown paper tightly bound with wire. It was about as big as a
large rockmelon. From it protruded what seemed to be a long wick of
the sort used in fireworks.

I
watched, puzzled and slightly alarmed, as Bert shoved this object
into the hole and packed it round with rubble.

I
was substantially alarmed when he took out a match and lit the fuse
which began to hiss and splutter threateningly.

'What
the hell is that?' I said leaping (well, rising) to my feet.

'Just
a charge,' said Bert. 'I told you. Gunpowder. I make 'em myself.'

'But
you've lit it?' My voice, unaccountably, was a squeak.

'Course,'
said Bert, 'that's what sets it off.'

'Well,
damn it,' I cried, 'let's get the hell out of here!'

'Plenty
of time,' said Bert. 'It's a long fuse.'

'But
why did you light it?'

'Want
to knock out some dirt,' said Bert reasonably.

'But
why did you light it now?' I was squeaking again.

'Got
to make sure it doesn't go out.' This was quite beyond my
comprehension. 'Anyhow, plenty of time,' said Bert. 'Have another
beer.'

And
the wretched man actually bent down, took out more cans and offered
me one. It was then I realised he was a maniac.

'To
hell with that,' I said, staring horrified at the white spluttering
spark moving
—
to my
eyes
—
with appalling speed
to the hidden and deadly charge. 'I'm getting out of here.' And I
made for the tunnel.

'Hang
on then,' said Bert resignedly. 'I've got to start the bucket.'

He
slid through the narrow tunnel, doing his usual impersonation of a
ferret. I dived after him, doing my usual impersonation of a
terrified fat man.

I
stuck in the middle of the tunnel. Just like too large a cork driven
into too narrow a bottleneck, I stuck.

With
my head and arms in one vault and my wildly waving legs in the other,
I was trapped, a huge plug of palpitating living flesh jammed beyond
redemption three metres from that bloody bomb.

I
realised later that the beer I had drunk had bloated my girth with
fluid and gas. I would eventually, in the course of nature, have been
able to release myself. But nature was not going to be nearly as fast
as that hissing spark shooting up the wick to the package of
gunpowder.

'Get
me out of this!' I howled to Bert, who was fiddling with the
mechanism of the bucket.

'What's
up?' said Bert mildly.

'I'm
stuck!' I yelled.

'Oh,'
said Bert interestedly, and he came over, grabbed my arms and gave a
mighty heave. He was thin, but he was lithe and iron strong and all
he succeeded in doing was almost dislocating my arms. If anything, he
jammed me in tighter.

'You'd
better get out of there, mate,' he said, still mildly. 'That's gonna
go off behind you, y'know.'

'Of
course I bloody well know!' I screamed. 'I can't move!'

'Maybe
you'd better go back and pull out the fuse,' suggested Bert.

That
made sense and I tried to wriggle backwards. Useless. My arms and
legs were inoperative. All I had to work on were my abdominal
muscles. In normal circumstances they are not particularly useful. In
these circumstances, they were futile.

'Push!'
I panted to Bert, who was observing my efforts with clinical
detachment. He pushed at my head, and damned near broke my neck. I
didn't budge an inch.

'Hey,
listen,' he said, not exactly urgently but at least showing mild
concern, 'you'd better come out of there; that thing's going to go
off. It might bring the roof down.'

Ordinarily
I would have raised a quelling eyebrow at the man for his idiocy. As
it was, I yelled, 'What the hell do you think I'm
doing,
you imbecile?'

Offended,
Bert turned away.

'Dig
me out, you fool!' I bellowed.

Bert
considered that for a moment and decided it was worth a try. He
grabbed a pick and started laying about the tunnel within centimetres
of my head.

I
shut my eyes tightly and wondered whether death would come in the
form of an explosion behind or a pickhead between the eyes.

'Bloody
hard ground,' said Bert, taking a short rest to wipe the sweat from
his brow. 'Doubt that I'll make it in time.'

'So?'
I screamed.

Bert
looked thoughtfully at me
—
or
what he could see of me
—
a
bearded, fearful head and two waving, frantic arms protruding from
the earth.

'Well,'
said Bert, 'it's a problem.' He thought a bit longer. 'But you see,
mate, that blast is going off in a moment.'

'I
know that
—
for God's sake
get me out of this!'

'That's
the point, mate, I can't. No sense in my hanging around, mate. Good
luck!' And the bloody man walked over to the shaft bucket.

'You
can't leave me here!' I screamed.

'No
sense in our both being killed,' he said reasonably.

I
gaped at him. Behind me a bomb about to explode, before me a Judas
ferret of a man preparing to desert me. My carcase already enclosed
in its own grave. In moments I would be a bloody mess buried forever
deep below the desert. Whatever was left of me wouldn't be worth
considering.

'Hey,
Bert,' I pleaded.

'You
don't want to live forever, do you?' he said philosophically, and put
one foot on the edge of the bucket.

There
was no time to explain to him that living forever was one of my great
ambitions. 'Hey, Bert,' I bleated.

He
paused again as though to console me. And that was his downfall.

The
bomb went off with a dull 'whumph!'

I
felt an immense pressure on my backside as though a brick wall had
suddenly bounded forward and bumped into me.

Then
everything went into intensely slow motion.

I
flew out of the tunnel exactly like a circus performer shot from a
cannon. Except that to me it was all happening very slowly.

Detachedly
I heard an enormous belch, and I even had time to realise that it had
been forced from my stomach by the pressure of the blast driving me
through the tunnel.

I
was flying through the air and Bert was directly ahead of me,
cowering in fear as my immense bulk bore down on him. He was all that
stood between me and the rock-hard wall of the cavern.

He
raised his arms to ward me off. I, quite callously, impartially and
with apparently all the time in the world, dropped my own arms and
deliberately hit Bert directly in the middle with my right shoulder.

His
anguished howl was pure music.

We
ended in a tangled mass on the ground, in clouds of evil-smelling
smoke and dust.

Bert
was holding his stomach and gasping for air. I was fine, apart from a
few grazes and some torn clothing. Bert's wiry frame had made an
excellent protective padding between me and the unyielding wall. If
Bert had been mortally injured, I didn't give a damn.

He
wasn't. Only winded.

Eventually
he recovered and reproachfully directed me into the bucket, organised
my ascent, followed me a few moments later and drove me back to town.
He dropped me outside the pub and drove away without saying a word.

But
then, pub friendships are seldom lasting.

Reef Encounter

The
main cause of trouble in my life is that I keep running into friendly
people in bars. They not only encourage my natural tendency towards
alcoholism but they lead me into all sorts of situations in which I
would rather not be. Friendly people in bars have plagued me since I
first started going into bars, which is a very long time ago.

But
I have never met a friendly person in a bar who got me into more
trouble than Bill. All in a matter of fifteen minutes.

I
met Bill in a bar at Airlie in northern Queensland
—
an
excellent starting-off point for the Barrier Reef. He was one of
those huge young men you meet up there, all tan and muscles, with the
clear blue gaze of the dedicated rum drinker. He was ugly but
amiable, like a gorilla.

He
had, he told me, recently arrived at Airlie to set up business as a
scuba diving instructor. I expressed a polite and academic interest
in scuba diving, which I had never tried and didn't particularly want
to, because I can hardly swim, am grossly overweight and morbidly
terrified of sharks. This fear of sharks is totally irrational and I
don't attempt to justify it. I know that motor cars are much more
dangerous than sharks, and motor cars don't frighten me at all. But I
have been known to leap screaming from a freshwater stream five
hundred kilometres inland at the totally imaginary shadow of a
triangular fin cutting through the water towards me. I tried to
explain this neurosis to Bill.

'Reef
sharks don't bite,' he said briskly. 'Now, come on . . . come and
have a go at diving. It's like falling off a log. Any fool can do it.
Anyway, I'll look after you. Come and have a go.'

I
have one great rule in life that has allowed me to survive for quite
a long time: never accept a challenge. Unfortunately this commendable
principle sometimes tends to dissolve in rum, particularly at ten
o'clock in the morning.

After
handing over a not particularly large sum of money to Bill (I suspect
I was merely the latest victim in his standard method of touting for
business) I found myself in a large, powerful motor boat speeding
across the glassy waters of the Whitsunday Passage.

In
considerably less than two hours I was eighty kilometres on the way
to New Zealand and the boat was anchored just above a coral reef. The
top of the reef was only about a metre below us, but six metres away
was the edge where a coral cliff fell away some hundreds of metres to
a dark and murky distant ocean bed. North, south, east and west there
was nothing to be seen but the restless seabirds, waiting, I fancied,
to pick dead men's bones.

On
the way out, standing in the safe and powerful boat, my greying locks
streaming in the wind of our passing, I had felt like a grand old man
on the way to adventure. Perhaps it was the rum. Once the anchor
dropped and I looked into those rich and colourful waters and thought
what might be living in them, I became the coward I am by nature.
Every vague shadow in the water was to me a ravenous, maneating,
enormous shark.

'Oh
dear,' I said self-consciously, 'I forgot to bring a costume. What a
pity. Never mind, Bill
—
you
go in and I'll watch.'

Bill
looked at me. 'That'll hardly worry the fish. Here, strip off and
I'll put you into your gear and show you how it works.'

It
was a very difficult situation to get out of, short of a downright
declaration that the notion of sinking into that foreign element
terming with indubitably ferocious life terrified me.

So
I said, 'I'm afraid the idea terrifies me, Bill. Sharks and all that,
you know.'

'Reef
sharks don't bite,' said Bill impatiently. 'Come on, get your gear
off.'

I
did. Soon I was standing naked in the boat, not a pretty sight, and
Bill draped me with an inflatable vest, air tank with a breathing
pipe, face mask, lead belt and flippers. The combined gear must have
weighed half a ton.

Bill's
instructions were perfunctory.

'You
turn this this way if you want to go down and that way if you want to
go up,' he said, pointing to a valve on my inflatable vest. 'You'll
be quite safe, I'll be with you all the time. There's only one thing
to worry about
—
make sure
you keep breathing.'

'I
make a habit of breathing,' I said defensively.

'Yes,'
said Bill, 'but sometimes when people get a fright they come up
suddenly and hold their breath. The air in their lungs is compressed
and it expands as they come up. If they don't keep breathing, their
lungs rupture
—
messy
business.'

'Why
should I get a fright?' I said nervously.

'Oh,
you never know,' said Bill vaguely. 'Oh, by the way, if you get a
pain in the ears, just blow your nose, that'll clear it.'