Gone...

Every name is shortened in Australia. People’s names, organizations’ names, even the names of objects. So, the Fire Brigade are called Fire-ies, the Ambulance people are Amboes, lottery is Lotto, the Returned Servicemens’ League is even shortened twice, firstly to RSL, secondly to Ahhh-Reee, going out for a quick cigarette is a Smoko, Kindergarten is Kindy, garbage men are Garbos, my name’s shortened to Kay (and if I live her long enough I’ve no doubt it’ll eventually just become, Kuh), and Derek was called Dare.
When Dare was a nipper, as he put it, he slept in a top bunk in the same room as his brother. Sometimes in the middle of the night Dare’d roll over and fall out of his bunk and crash down on to the floor. This was maybe a six-foot drop. His dad would hear the thump and come into the boys’ room and pick Dare up and put him back in the bunk. The thing is this, never once did the youngster wake up. I think that says a lot about him.
When Dare became an adult we found ourselves sharing his house. Now, Dare is Australian and he bangs doors. This is an interesting thing about folks Down-Under. We soon discovered they are not quiet people. Not only do Australians bang every door they can - including kitchen cabinet doors, car doors, wardrobe doors, front doors, back doors, side doors, rabbit hutch doors, petrol flaps on the car, glovebox lids, paint tin lids and women’s makeup compacts, in fact you name it, if there’s a door or a lid of any kind it’ll be slammed and banged - but they also get up at the crack of dawn and that’s when they start banging around. I think it’s some kind of competition, with points awarded for who can bang the most doors the loudest and most often, and the earlier in the morning the better – there’d be bonus points for that. I think it is a compo, as they would call it here, which runs across the length and breadth of this great land, and I am not sure it has a finish date.
We’ve been to most parts of the country now and I tell you, noise is being made everywhere. It’s fortunate there are only 20 million people in a place the size of Europe. If there were, say, 250 million, the rest of the world would be covering its ears. And out of all the noise-mongers nationwide I reckon Dare and Miranda were definitely competition front runners, up there right along with the very best of them.
Each and every day Dare blundered around like an elephant, banging into walls, slamming the doors, talking really loud. That’s another thing they do - they talk really loud. It’s actually shouting but because there’s no real aggressive inflexion it comes across as really loud talking. But I’m telling you, IT IS SHOUTING!
Dare had trained and qualified as a lawyer and he even took a few cases before he realised it wasn’t for him. Dare worked in corporate law and it soon dawned on him that he didn’t much like the idea of working for a big company that used every filthy trick in the book to try and win their cases against the little man. So Dare chucked it all in and, as you do, he opened a tobacco kiosk on Manly promenade. I don’t think he ever saw the supreme irony in this - the fact that he railed against the big corporates but now here he was peddling their drugs. Anyway, another thing was, a tobacco kiosk would have been fine in 1952 when every man, woman and their dog smoked, but at the relatively enlightened beginning of the 21st century, well, it just aint that profitable any more. The tobacco kiosk has gone the same way as police boxes, bus conductors and people who actually answer the phone when you call any company you care to name. But Dare was undeterred by the passing of similar icons of our age - for him the tobacco kiosk was where it was at. Indeed, I think he believed it was the very future of tobacco retailing.
Perhaps the other thing working against Dare was Manly itself. Manly is one of those big surf beaches (Manly got its name thanks to the ubiquitous Captain Cook who was sailing by one fine summer’s day when he noticed an athletic aborigine chap standing proud - as it were - on the headland. The good captain reportedly said, “Oh my, that dark chap is so manly”. Well, you have to remember, Cookie had been away from his wife for the best part of a year, so perhaps it’s understandable how he could have been so taken - as it were - with such a vision of masculinity). Anyway, the point is this, on Australian surf beaches you don’t find that many heavy smokers, on account of the fact that your tobacco tends to get soggy when you’re out on a board in the water all day.
Dare’s tobacco kiosk was small and cylindrical. In fact it was so small only Dare and just
about a customer and a half could be together in it at the same time. As long as nobody made any quick, sudden moves all was fine. Dare told me once that he was always on the look-out for really fat smokers because if they came in most of his stock got swept off the shelves by their chubby backsides. So there it was, a small, inviting, round blue cubicle of the sort that yobs in Britain would pick up and hurl into the sea, usually with the cigarette bloke still inside. In Australia there are not that many yobs and even if there were they wouldn’t be interested in picking up something like this - it would just be too much effort for them, man.
Dare’s house used to belong to his grandfather. This is the thing in Australia. Dare lived in this house that was worth maybe a million dollars and he just had this little tobacco kiosk which earned him perhaps $80 a week before tax, (though of course he didn’t pay any tax because most of his financial transactions were in cash). Loads of people are like this in Australia, they live in these great houses and they seemingly don’t have more than a dollar or two to rub together. The other thing here though is that you can never really be sure if someone has money or not. In Britain people with money swan around in some big bastard of a car, they only buy clothes with other people’s names on them and they’ll talk in a posh, affected accent. (I’ve never understood this names on clothes business. How come if you want to advertise something you have to pay loads of money to do it and yet Calvin Klein or Dolce e Gabbana can stick their names on your clothes, charge you more than you’d pay for equivalent clothes without the name and then have you parade around all day advertising their product! It’s bonkers).
Many people in Australia have barrow loads of the folding stuff but it doesn’t stop them dressing in jeans with holes in them and going out to the shops wearing their flip-flops or, as they call them here, their thongs. Okay, your rich older guy in Australia is much like your rich older guy anywhere - he might well buy a Porsche and wear some snazzy sunglasses so he can drive around and imagine the young girls are all smiling at him (actually they are smiling and as soon as he’s gone past they may well double up laughing out loud at his sorry, orange-skinned self) but most rich Australians don’t flaunt it. If they did then other Australians’d soon cut them down to size. This is good because it means there’s not a lot of pretension. After being brought up in stuffy, snooty Britain the lack of pretension in Australia is something I’ll never tire of, that I can tell you.
But let’s get back to Dare. Dare is typical of a certain type of Aussie bloke. I suppose you’d call him a real salt-of-the-earth Aussie, always willing to help his mates, always willing to sip a cold one, or a frosty, as he would call it. Dare says things like, bonza mate! and fair dinkum and when I told him what sounded to him like a tall story he said, “No! You’re having a lend of me, mate”.
There was one other thing about Dare - he thought he was Bruce Willis. And more than that, he thought he was Bruce Willis as the boxer in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Dare had Bruce’s close-cropped hair and he had a motorbike, though his wasn’t a powerful beast like Bruce’s. In truth it was little more than a moped, even though he’d had it fitted with those Hells Angel style handlebars, the ones you have to reach up to grasp. Dare tried to look at you like Bruce, but Dare had thick glasses and one of his eyes looked out sideways at something else, so he didn’t have the sharp flinty, squinty, stare that Bruce had in Pulp Fiction. Dare just had the squint.
Dare loved to drink and Dare loved to eat and he was going out with this woman Miranda who loved to drink and who loved to eat too – it was a match made in heaven. Most evenings Dare would drink eight bottles of Coopers Sparkling Ale. This stuff is explosive. Coopers is an Adelaide brewery, which is still family-owned, and this family makes really good beer. The Sparkling Ale has a big red label on it which is appropriate because we all know red is for danger. As far as I’m concerned, it should also have a flashing blue light and a siren on top. I just love the stuff but it really is strong and I can’t drink more than a bottle without having a close-faced encounter with the floor. The other thing is, it has what Coopers calls, ‘a residue of yeast during maturation which gives a cloudy appearance that enhances the flavour’. It’s only a personal theory, and clearly I’m no doctor, but I reckon the yeast goes on working in your system like some kind of small organic brewery. I believe it enhances the alcohol and then fizzes it around your body like an express train. And the driver is honking the horn for all he’s worth.
Well, Dare drank Cooper’s Sparkling like he had shares in the company. Jade and I started calling the Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, DSP for Dare’s Sleeping Potion on account of the fact that once he’d had a case or two he just dropped off like he was dead.
Both Dare and Miranda loved Pulp Fiction. Well, to say they loved it is barely doing justice to their obsession. The only person who can have been more intimate with the film is Quentin himself.
Dare and Miranda’s typical Friday evening consisted of eight Cooper’s Sparkling Ales each, a whole chicken chopped into pieces and fried with plenty of olive oil and garlic, plus vegetables, potatoes boiled and then fried, followed by a treacle pudding with cream, washed down with a couple more Coopers. While they did all this they’d clatter and bang and whack things down in the kitchen and slam doors because when you’re in the noise compo you need to make as much noise as you can, as often as you can.
Once the food had been eaten (and the crockery banged down in the sink, and the knives and forks clattered on the draining board) they’d flop down in front of the TV and from our room we’d hear the strains of Pulp Fiction. I have to say I soon became so familiar with the music and the script, that even from the safety of our room I could tell you when Bruce Willis was about to get on his motorbike. I could even mouth along to the script, playing the parts of Bruce, John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and I could sashay about like Urma Thurman. Sometimes while Jade lay on the bed reading a book I’d play John Travolta’s part so it seemed like he was there in the room (well, that’s what I thought...). I think there must have been something about Travolta and me - back in my younger days I’d attempted the same sort of thing with Grease but unfortunately I never quite had the rhythm. I look back now and just remember this skinny kid jerking around in front of a mirror - that was me, not Travolta you understand.  
Sadly the other scene that I remember from Pulp Fiction, at least aurally (that’s your ears...) is the one where the blokes are having to endure a bit of argy-bargy from behind. Whenever I think of Dare now I think of anal sex, which is unfortunate to say the least.
Anyway, about three quarters of the way through the film, Dare and Miranda would both pass out. Thinking about it, this is probably why they played Pulp Fiction so much, they’d never made it to the end before falling into a drunken stupor. The point was this, once the video finished the TV would hiss and crackle with white noise at such volume that I’d have to get up out of bed and go and see what the hell was going on. The first time this happened I walked into the lounge and stopped dead in my tracks.
Dare was sitting on the floor, his head propped against the seat of the sofa and his legs spread out on the carpet. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Miranda was in the middle of the carpet, flat on her back, legs spread wide either side of the TV, and arms spread out from her sides.  If Bruce had stepped out of the TV he could have had her right there and then. Her head was at the sort of angle that I thought was only possible with the benefit of a broken neck. I stared down at her and couldn’t see if she was breathing either.
I thought a madman had got in while the film was on and killed Dare and Miranda. We hadn’t heard it happening because the TV’s volume was turned up so high.
I went over to Dare and got down on my hands and knees beside him and got my face up close to his to see if there was any breath at all. All of a sudden his eyes sprang open and he said, “A Royale, a Royale with cheese, it’s just a fuckin’ Big Mac!”, and then he saw me and screamed and brought his fist up off the floor and punched me in the eye. Jesus it hurt. Then he flopped back against the sofa and went back to sleep. I groaned and got shakily to my feet clutching a hand over my eye and went and turned the TV off. On the way out I kicked Dare hard in the thigh and he just grunted and mumbled, “huh, medieval on your arse”, which I believe is another line from Pulp Fiction. Miranda hadn’t moved and she could have been dead for all I knew but I figured I didn’t want another punch in the eye or a kick in the groin, so I just left it at that. If she was dead, that was just tough.
I went back into the bedroom and Jade looked up from her book and said, “Jesus, what happened!?”
“Bruce whacked me,” I said, flopping down on the bed.
“Serves you right,” she said returning to her book “you taking the piss out of Travolta like that.” I looked at her sideways. With my one good eye.
Of course Miranda wasn’t dead, and here’s the bloody annoying thing, the day following a bout with a treacle tart, Pulp Fiction and Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, Dare was bright as a penny. You’d have thought it was someone else that’d been lying dead on the lounge floor. Miranda was never around the morning after a Pulp Fiction evening, and I’d bet a case of Cooper’s Sparkling Ale that she didn’t cope so well. In fact, I’d be surprised if she could recall her name for at least two hours after she was up and moving.