Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
This bloke I used to work for called me up. Jade and I were driving along in the car down to Jervis Bay for a holiday and it was Christmas so the weather was scorching hot. Jade was driving and I had the window open and the baking air smelt like roasting chestnuts. I had one arm out the window and the scenery was rushing by and the wildlife were all making a racket and the other hand held the phone to my ear and I heard him say that he’d like to talk to me about a job in a new dotcom company he was going to be working for. Yes, yes, laugh your head off, why don’t you. Look, I’m the first to admit that whenever the Internet was mentioned I’d always follow it with the word, bollocks. At the time, and this was back in 2000, it amazed me just how many people could believe that this clunky bloody system that never seemed to work properly could take the place of newspapers and magazines. I mean, I’m not going to take my computer to bed with me, prop myself up on a pillow and scroll through the bloody pages, am I?  
But you have to also remember what it was like at the time. Against my expectations loads of people were making a mint out of this Internet malarky and here I was listening to this bloke on the phone promising me stock options and bonuses and a really good salary. He actually said to me, “you could become a very rich man”. That’s the sort of thing I like to hear.
Now, also bear in mind that at this time I was working for Pete the yoghurt eater who was not exactly what you would call the Baron de Rothschild of publishing, if you follow. Add to that Jade’s comment, “how come you spend more time with the Sheriff than you do with me...do you want to talk about it?”, and it was getting blindingly obvious that a move was called for.
The other weird thing was this - ever since we’d come to Australia I was convinced that everything had happened for a reason. I mean, think about it. I hate flying, so why would I ever choose to go on the longest flight that’s possible, to a country I’ve never had any desire to visit (after all, I’d seen Neighbours)? And then since we’d landed it hadn’t been easy and there were loads of times when we almost got a foot back on the airline’s steps. And if you look at all of the nutcases we’d come across you’d have to question what the hell was going on. But always at the last minute something happened and we were rescued. Every time we had a setback something positive happened and that always made us realise that one thing would always lead to another. Clearly we were on a trip of some kind. What the ultimate destination would be was anyone’s guess (in fact, I still don’t know where I’m going...). So, it was with all this in mind that I met with the bloke who’d phoned me and after another chat with him I decided to embark on a new career - dotcom millionaire. Well, that was down the track a bit, but that was my new career objective, and a fine one too, if I might say so.  
First off I had to go on a course to learn all about the Internet. The first thing the new company did was bring in some children with names like Dazzle and Bazzle and Wazzle, Deck and Geck and Heck - and these were just their first names. When they walked in someone called security fearing that some dodgy street people had somehow got into the building looking for petty cash, but no, they really did dress like that every day and they really were the faces of the future (well, that’s what they told us). Some of them had been flown in especially from America. Personally I thought they were too young to fly without an adult accompanying them, but obviously the rules had been relaxed for Internet supremos.
These children used bizarre phrases like, “hey, let’s take this aspect of the discussion off-line, bloke”, (Translation: let’s discuss it after the meeting, mate) and, “throw me a curved ball, why don’t ya”. They laughed out loud, they really did, when we went through the process by which a magazine reached the newsstand. “It takes how long, man?!” they guffawed, “you mean like it’s made out of old dead trees, man?!!”, and “Jesus, you mean you actually, like, still use a camera and some film to take pictures, man? That’s some serious downloading, bloke!!”
Each day at Internet School began with what I believe they call in the entertainment industry, a warm-up. This consisted of a different foolish task each day, which supposedly helped bond the group, whatever that means. Dancing around at 6.30 one morning in a pitiable imitation of a Morris Dancer until each one of us was knocked out leaving one sadly embarrassed dancer as the winner (no, you got no prize, taking part was apparently prize enough) I began to ask myself why I’d spent all that time training to be a journalist when actually all you needed to do to become rich was take Olde English dancing lessons.
Dancing aside, I think The Pig was really my finest hour. One day the children asked each one of us to draw a pig. Now, I just can’t draw, that’s just the way it is. I can’t paint, I can’t act and I can’t speak Chinese. Those aside I’ll give just about anything else a bash, but draw? I don’t think so. So, my pig was a simple beast. One dimensional, side on, facing to the right, built of sticks. Now, as it turns out, everyone else’s pig faced left. Mine was a stick pig, theirs were mostly small works of art with expressions, real ears and snouts and feet that looked like they could go somewhere. However, my pig had a long squiggly tail that I’d put loads of feeling into, mainly because I couldn’t draw a proper pig if a herd of mightily tusked boars were chasing me across a bumpy turnip field. It only seemed right that the tail should have some feeling in it. Their pigtails were mostly straight, like car radio aerials. Please! The grandad kept pigs and I never saw a pointy tail like that, well not on a live pig anyway.
Of course, this being Internet School the drawings were analysed and our characters brought right out into the open. Well, apparently the fact that my pig faced right meant I was expressive and imaginative. This was not seen as good news. If there’s one thing they don’t want in dotcom land it’s imaginative people. Now, you might not believe that, you might point to all of the whackos who’ve come up with Internet-based businesses that were turning over trillions of dollars and say, surely those guys had imagination? Maybe - but I think they just had ideas, like I might think it would be good to go to Mars and have a look around. I’ve no idea how to get there, or even how to build the rocket to take me there, but I have the idea and in the days of the Internet madness that was how it was. It was no good telling the budding Mars tripper that actually there was rather more to getting red dust on your shoes than merely imagining it. That’s how these people worked. Imagine and it will be built, well, if you give us millions of dollars.
You also have to remember this was a time when new dotcom millionaires were appearing every day of the week, when every day saw the launch of the next big thing, the next big site, the next big idea. It was a time when there was talk - serious talk it should be remembered - that all of the old established bricks and mortar businesses would fade away, virtually at the speed of light as the high tech warriors marched to a different beat. As we now know, it certainly was a very different beat. It was a beating of epic proportions. It was a march to oblivion for most of these new companies and they took something else with them, the investors’ millions. We shouldn’t forget that because there was much talk about the many millions simply being swallowed up, but one way or another that money belonged to people who’d worked hard for it and frankly I can think of better things to have spent it on.
It does sound simply crazy now and I can’t believe how I took it all in, but I guess it must be like when Adolf got up there and told the Germans about the future according to him. It was so big, so skilfully done, so convincing that the grumbling feeling in your stomach was simply not listened to. Next thing you knew, you were in Poland.
Anyway, the people whose pigs faced left were ideal for dotcom land because their pigs faced the ‘right’ way. It meant they were logical people, people who were able to make quick decisions (they didn’t mention whether those decisions were likely to be right or wrong, but never mind, a decision is a decision) and they had their personal lives well sorted. The exclamation mark pigtail meant these were people going somewhere (and now we all know where they were headed. It’s called the dole queue...) and the well-drawn feet meant they were going to make their mark in the world and be remembered (right on that one too). My squiggly tail, on the other hand, meant I was sexually promiscuous. You know that pleased me more than anything. Of course it wasn’t true, but it gave me a glow for a while and a few glances from the girls. No, I don’t think they were admiring, but at least they looked.
During those interminable six weeks I’d had to tell four truths and one lie (that was easy, I told them I wouldn’t always be bald because in fact my hair had started to grow again), I’d had to play-act with other people in the team to see who was most stellar, whatever that means, and another day I’d been asked to share with the group my feelings on philanthropy.
One day at Internet School I rashly asked what would happen when the dotcom bubble burst and suddenly I thought I’d gone deaf, the silence around the polished oblong table was so loud it actually seemed to have a sound.
“When it bursts. If it bursts,” spluttered one of them eventually, an accountant by trade, “we will be in an ideal position.”
“Why’s that then?” I asked.
He smiled at me coldly like I was a dear, dear pupil who was nevertheless a bit short on the grey matter.
“Because we know our idea will work.”
“Oh right,” I said, “that’s okay then. But what exactly is the idea?”
They all stared at me and with hindsight I think that’s when I should have seriously started looking around for another job.
I didn’t do that though and when we finished the course the serious business of actually starting a dotcom business began.

I’d started working for this small publishing company and they had an office in a big old block of offices. This particular office didn’t have any windows and when I turned up on my first day a girl who was all pale and anaemic and who didn’t introduce herself, just said to me in a sorrowful way, “Flowers die when they don’t get any sunlight.”
Great.
The guy who ran this company was a nut-case. (You know how some people attract nutters. Like, they come and sit next to you on the bus? Well, I’m a bit different. I always pick the nutters and then I go and work for them). Let’s call him Pete. Pete had the cleanest desk imaginable (you know what I always say, empty desk, empty mind, but then as Jade points out to me, I would say that because my desk resembles the local garbage tip two days after Christmas.) So, Pete had a computer and a tub of yoghurt on his desk. The yoghurt was always the same make, same flavour - actually it was unflavoured - and that was it. I never knew what he did all day, until eventually it occurred to me that what he did all day was sit in front of the computer in his little glass-partitioned office and eat a yoghurt. At 12.30 he spooned the yoghurt into his mouth, left his office briefly to wash the yoghurt container out and then went back into his office.
The people who worked for Pete were a motley bunch. Garth the sales manager had been there for 15 years (can you imagine, 15 years without seeing daylight all day, and in the winter months I guess he never saw a blue sky at all except when he went downstairs to have a smoko).
Garth was the consummate Aussie Bloke. He always wore high-waisted jeans and when I say high-waisted I am talking in contact with his armpits. Jade and I call these Pimpineenis. The name came from Jade’s mother who’d seen men wearing incredibly high-waisted trousers in Africa where apparently they are a source of much pride. The higher they come up, and preferably the waistband should be snug under the armpits, the greater esteem the wearer is held in in his community. That’s in Africa.
In Australia, Garth’s Pimpineenis definitely lowered his self-esteem in direct proportion to the height of the waistline, and also because they were made of what I can only describe as fake denim. The only label I ever saw warned the wearer to keep away from heat sources. That’s probably why Garth kept his cigarette in his mouth all the time.
Every day he travelled on the train from his home over an hour and a half away and every lunchtime he had a meat pie. He walked up to the corner shop and bought the pie, which I believe they began to gently heat for him sometime after 10.30, am. I think it’s fair to say that on the proceeds of that very regular purchase the shop owners had decided to put two daughters through college. Who said meat pies weren’t good for you?
Garth considered himself to be an indigenous Australian, though he didn’t know what the word meant. He dismissed aborigines as “those black bastards” but he’d never met one. He lived in a little house in a suburb near the sea and he had a daughter who he was presumably bringing up in the same way he’d been brought up. One can only hope that she has some renegade genes which will cause her to question life as it is taught her. I hope she can break away from Garth’s awful prejudices and ignorance and examine life fully and discover it has many beauties. We shall see.
Anyway, Garth spent all day on the phone  - when he wasn’t having a smoko - trying to persuade people to buy an advertisement in the magazine. His sales patter went like this: “Hey, ya old bastard. When ya gonna fuckin’ put yer ‘and in yer pocket then? We’re waitin’ for yer to come on in the publication. Can’t hold it much longer - if yer know what I mean, yeah, that’s what I mean, heh, heh, heh - now cum on yer old bastard, when are yer gonna fuckin’ come in ere?”
His motivational speeches to his sales staff - one frightened looking young boy from the
bush - were not exactly inspirational. They went like this: “Now, I might not be a big bloke in terms of stature you understand but” - and here he would hitch the pimpeneenis so vigorously that his balls would momentarily separate and other staff members would suck in a sharp breath in unison - “I’ve got a dick like a fuckin’ rhino and if you don’t reach your fuckin’ target this fuckin’ week I’m going to take my dick and ram it up your fuckin’ arse.”
Now, sales staff retention was not high and as a publication we never made a lot of money. Personally I thought there was little mystery to this.
Then there was Tegan. Pale and anaemic, she was the girl who’d told me about the death of flowers. Tegan had what she called “a personal agenda” and she liked to pretend she was working for a large multi-national corporation. I think this pretence ran along the lines of the prisoner who knows there is little chance of escape. The only thing to do is imagine that actually things are not as bad as they seem. I believe this is what doctors call delusion, and I think it is treatable.
Tegan called her friends more often than she did any work and when she wasn’t calling them she was e-mailing them. She’d obviously told them she worked for Boeing Aircraft or Sony because she was always coming out with phrases like, “Yah, got a four o’clock and the whole board’s going to be there. Must dash”, or, “it’s merger time with the big boys at the big end of town and that’s where I am, so gotta go and shake some serious corporate butt baby. Catch yah. Ciao!”
Garth once growled, “She’s always talking to that fuckin’ Ciao geezer. Bet he’s a no fuckin’ good  fuckin’ greasy Eye-Tie bastard.”
The designer was nicknamed Speedy because he wasn’t. Sometimes he’d just sit and stare at the computer screen for half an hour - and that was before he’d turned it on. His art was from what I’d call the Play School; it was big and colourful but totally meaningless to anyone over the age of five.
Some days Speedy didn’t turn up. Once I phoned him to ask where he was and I could hear the sound of roaring waves. He said, “Can’t come in today mate, surf’s up”. I said, “Speedy, we have a magazine to get finished – today.”
I heard a sharp exasperated intake of breath down the phone and then he said, “Mate, you’re not listening to me. Listen to this” and the phone was filled with the sound of roaring waves and then it went dead.
It took me a month to get rid of him. But he came in so seldom, I’m not sure he noticed.
**
One day I was walking across the road from the newspaper shop and a car pulled up outside the building. On the side in big letters it said, Sheriff. Now, if you’re English and Sheriff is mentioned you immediately think of Robin Hood and robbing the rich to give to the poor (why do they always say that like it’s some kind of clever plan? Obviously there wouldn’t be much point robbing the poor to pay the rich, the poor don’t have anything. I don’t know, it just seems like such an obvious thing, or is it just me?)
Anyway, if you’re English you think of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham, typically played most excellently by the sneering Alan Rickman. In Britain I don’t think Sheriffs exist any more but if they do they’re not much involved with robbers and all that stuff. I think these days they just open motorway extensions up North, or shopping centres in places like Basildon.
The Australian Sheriff though is another thing entirely, as I was soon to discover. For starters they wear what looks like a police uniform. On this particular day, this particular Australian Sheriff gets in the lift with me and I smile at him and I say, making conversation,  “Not going to arrest me I hope!”
He didn’t answer, just looked at his clipboard and then looked back up with gimlet eyes and said, “Depends, mate, on what yer name is.”
I started to think - had I run any red lights? No, I couldn’t have, I didn’t have a car. Had I outstayed my visa and was the jet waiting, engines running, on the runway ready to take me straight back to Britain? Turns out it wasn’t that either. Anyway, I gave him my name and he looked at his pad again and he said, no, it’s not you and I breathed a sigh of relief as the lift doors opened. There were only two offices on our floor. He took a look at the plaque on the door of the other one, and then he followed me in.
Now, the yoghurt-eater was not there, he’d taken a couple of weeks holiday. So the Sheriff came into the office and I suppose I was, well, sort of in charge. As soon as he was in, all of the others flinched, all except Speedy who was staring at his screen like he expected a message to suddenly appear telling him what to do today (“surf is up, Speedy. Time to go.”).
“So,” said the Sheriff, who seemed to have grown at least six inches in height and towered over me, “who exactly is in charge here?”
I believe I heard the swish of air as everyone turned their heads to look at me.
“Not fuckin’ me mate,” said Garth.
“I suppose it would be me,” I said, which must have made him wonder why I didn’t own up before. An image of a gleaming pair of handcuffs kept flashing before my eyes.
“Well mate, I have a warrant here to seize goods to the value of $5000, due to an unpaid bill.”
I smiled then, the realisation that this had nothing much to do with me directly was a relief, I can tell you.
“Think it’s funny, do yer?”
Oh no, no, “ I said hastily, “just take whatever you want.”
He looked at me, frowning and said, “I’m not going to take anything yet. I’m just letting you know that if the bill is not paid in the next 14 days we’ll come back and take goods to that value.”
“No problem,” I said, seeing him to the door, and being handed the notice.
Of course, things went from bad to worse. When Pete came back and I told him the news he acted like he was surprised but as my days there unfolded it became clear that he was becoming a proficient tap-dancer in the money-excuses game. Basically he wasn’t paying any outside contractor anything and when they started to pester him with phone calls he switched his business - though business is rather too grand a word for what he was doing - to other suppliers. Of course there is a finite time you can continue to do this on account of the fact that not many people live in Australia, word gets around like a bushfire and sooner or later you’re going to run out of new companies to do business with. I just can’t understand how Pete could have continued with this ducking and diving game; it must have been incredibly stressful to him personally. I mean, why would you bring this down upon yourself? It also resulted in not a few people making the trip to the office to demand payment. On one occasion two big chaps clutching baseball bats turned up and marched straight into his room. They were not there to ask him if he wanted to come out and play, but they did leave with what looked suspiciously like a cheque. When they walked out Bert was smiling and that could mean only one thing - the cheque would bounce.
Bounce it did. The baseball players didn’t come back to the office but one night they surprised Pete as he was walking home, dragged him into an alleyway and let the bats do the talking. I think even now he’d still have a limp.
Next off, Pete stopped paying his staff, or at least he added an element of suspense into our weekly paydays because sometimes he would pay some of us, but not others. We also discovered that he hadn’t paid any taxes on our behalf, as he was obliged to do, so everybody began frantically searching for new jobs.
You know, I have a dream. I dream that one day I will have a job that lasts, a job that pays enough money to get a house to live in, a job that I enjoy.
All things considered, I thought it was about time I jumped into the dotcom world. Yes, the Internet beckoned. Now hang on, did I hear someone laugh?

The big bust-up in Lesbo land came early that bleary Sunday morning as the car reversed at high speed out the driveway. The actual moving-out took place a week or so after that. This was an affair of epic proportions, involving The Bloke's brother who looked more like her than she did, if you follow. Anyway, this guy was big, mainly on account of his mammoth appetite for junk food which we believed sprang from his mammoth appetite for drugs. His heavy drugs use did not go unnoticed in our neighbourhood because he would imbibe and then roam the streets in the middle of the night shouting at the top of his voice, "No! Oh no! Come on!" It rather reminded me of Tingha actually, the roaming about making a noise bit, but it also reminded me of that Carry On actor, Kenneth Williams, though he didn't deliver it in the camp Kenneth style, it was more Billy Connolly.
One day Jade saw him walking up the street, stuffing his face with a massive loaf of bread. She said, "and he was walking accordingly", so from then he became known in our house simply as, Walking Accordingly.
When the lesbians moved out it was a business and a half. Much swearing of course, shouted recriminations, nasty stuff about their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, all of whom seemed to have had one or another big emotional problem or been involved in some ridiculous relationship. I didn't know, for example, that The Bloke's mother had once had an affair with a sailor from Papua New Guinea and had borne him three children, all of whom were now cigarette smugglers operating out of southeast Borneo. Truly, you live and learn.
Anyway, Walking Accordingly hired a truck to take his sister's stuff away. He'd had to hire one because, as you will remember, she couldn't drive, and on top of that she didn't have any money because the gym where she worked had closed down rather suddenly. Like she went to work one day and everyone was standing around outside and there was a note on the door that said, "Flown the country with all the money. Have a nice life". Actually I made up that bit about the note but apparently the owner did have a penchant for drugs that you inhale and he was also a major supplier of steroids, so I think that would have been the final straw for The Bloke because without her fix of roids she must have had visions of her body rapidly changing back to a woman's (one day I heard her out in the garden shouting out to her female lover, "I'm just a guy who's been put on this earth to make your world heavenly, baby!" She really was a terribly mixed up person).
So there they were moving all her stuff out of the lesbian apartment and this big argument developed between The Bloke and her brother. It was a battle royale and unlike The Bloke's lover, Walking Accordingly was just as big as his sister.
The Bloke was asking him for more money and so he went into one about, I already got that fuckin' truck for you, bitch, and she comes back with, "You are so like our fuckin' mother! You take so many drugs man you don't even know who the fuck you are no more! Next thing you'll be goin' out with some sailor, you fuckin' faggot!"
Now, I never understood this one. She was gay and yet she hated gay men? I think it was because she saw them as some kind of threat but I can't get my head around exactly what that threat might have been.
Anyway, Walking Accordingly, who in truth was usually pretty mild-mannered, yells out at the top of his voice, "You aint fuckin' listening to me!" and sticks his fist right through their front door. This was the start of one of the biggest fights we'd ever heard from next door. It was real championship stuff, real Ali and Foreman. I swear I saw the walls trembling as the two of them, brother and sister, but to all intents and purposes really two men, grunted and howled and groaned and swore and bounced each other off every available surface. We heard the crash of packing cartons and the smash of glass as they picked up half-packed items and threw them at each other. Sometimes there would be an almighty crash as one of them threw the other in amongst the boxes. Each time, they picked themselves up and entered the fray one more time. Eventually it sort of petered out - I think there was nothing left to throw or smash. They sort of shovelled all the remains of her belongings into the back of the truck and left, and just for good measure they stole one of the rubbish bins as they went. I tell you, it was one of the best days of our lives.
Meanwhile though, I had a few little problems of my own...

The idiots upstairs, next door to Doris, were drug dealers. These were possibly the most stupid people I've ever met. He was English, she was an Aussie girl and between them they had barely a brain cell to rub together. They had a V6 Holden Commodore which she'd chosen because she wanted something that most closely resembled the comfort she'd once experienced in a taxi...
Neither of them worked. Her daddy had bought them the apartment under the proviso that she paid for the annual insurance. Hardly onerous that, but she always forgot to pay it, so daddy had to pay that too. She told Jade she didn't have a mobile phone because she kept leaving them places, like in nightclubs, so she decided not to have one at all. The last mobile she had was lost in some dodgy club up in Kings Cross. The following month she got a bill for $8000, mainly due to many direct line calls to Colombia, well, and also the fact she’d not bothered to tell the mobile phone people she’d lost it. Of course, daddy paid that bill too.
Now, the English idiot, he had this little moped. It took him ages to get it started and sometimes it just didn’t happen and after half an hour he'd give up and slouch back indoors, dragging his thonged feet as he went.
Other times the machine would burst into life and he'd hop aboard and putter off down the drive, fighting for balance. He didn't always succeed and sometimes fell off on the front lawn before he even reached the road. When that happened he'd just untangle himself from the moped, abandon it and slouch on in again. Once we had both the moped and The Bloke's mangled pedal bike on the front lawn so it began to look like a secondhand bike lot. One day I caught an old woman standing there staring at it and she looked at the mess and said, "will the artist be taking commissions?"
When The Idiot did manage to get to the road and still remain on the moped he'd always be back within about 20 minutes so we figured he must have been dropping drugs off somewhere local. One day he came putt-putting out of the driveway as I was sitting outside in a car waiting for Jade to lock the flat up. I was doing some freelance motoring writing at the time so every week I had a different car and I guess he didn't recognise me. Anyway, we decided to follow him. I carefully kept my distance like I'd seen in the films (actually, unlike in the films - I did keep my distance. In Hollywood blockbusters the only person who wouldn't see someone following him is Stevie Wonder).
So, The Idiot goes off up the road and then he takes a right-hand turn and goes into Woolworths' car park. We follow him and he goes out the other side of Woolworths and we think, this is getting very exciting indeed. Then he starts looking around, side-to-side and glancing behind him. We hang right back. We reckon he must be looking to see if he's been followed.
"He's checking, just in case the drugs squad are on to him," breathed Jade and I nodded tersely.
All of a sudden he jammed the brakes on and the little moped's back wheel bounced up and down as the brakes locked, then he let the brake off and swerved into someone's drive, fighting for balance. We drove slowly by and saw him falling off the bike into some rubbish bins. We couldn’t stop because he might have seen us, so we drove on. We were pleased though. The pursuit had begun.
From then on we took a keener interest in his comings and goings. We started by keeping a log because we knew that sooner or later the Drugs Squad were going to raid their flat and arrest them and then we would be prime witnesses in the ensuing trial.
Two days later the bike disappeared. We expected to see him driving a new Ferrari, bought on the proceeds of his illicit drugs dealing. But nothing turned up.
Another day or so passed and all was quiet, save for the lesbians who were throwing each other against the walls with increasing regularity, and Doris's visitors who were almost as energetic, though for much shorter periods - typically two and a half minutes by my Swiss watch.
Then one day Jade bumped into the drugs girl while she was putting the washing out and they got chatting and drugs-girl said, "He had to get rid of his bike. Business was not so good." Jade nodded, and she continued, "Used to be they wouldn't stop ringing, all hours, asking for all sorts of exotics, all sorts of extras and some of them just weren't available straight away, you know?"
"Well, they wouldn't be," said Jade, thinking of Columbian Marching Powder, whatever that is.
"And really that bike. It never went properly and if he was late they'd give him hell. Say they'd ordered it an hour ago, they would. They'd go mad sometimes, threaten him with physical violence. It just became too dangerous out there."
 "Yeah," said Jade fishing, "we noticed he had to go out all hours."
The girl said, "Well, that's pizza delivery for you."
Okay, okay, we all make mistakes. Anyway, that was all well and dandy, but a month later they had a break-in and they didn't report it for three days and when they did the police came around with sniffer dogs and a helicopter hovered overhead and then they took them away and for a while at least the door banging ceased. Doris, on the other hand, kept her banging up, and so did the lesbians, although it seemed to us that the girls' relationship was well and truly on the rocks and we hoped, we prayed, that it could only be a matter of time before some relative quiet descended on the apartments.

As I've said, The garbos weren't the only nutters we shared a plot of land with...
One bright Sunday morning I staggered out of bed, woken by fiendish screams and shouts, coupled with the banging of fists on metal. I pulled the curtains aside. A heavily muscled woman was spreadeagled on the boot of a car reversing at high speed down the driveway. The Nissan bumped down onto the road and the slim girl at the wheel with the crew-cut hair slammed the brakes on. She seemed to be crying.
The fiend on the boot clutched the sides of the rear window, arms spread out wide, muscular legs beating against the metal of the bumper, feet trying to find some grip. Even in the sparse morning light - it was barely dawn - I could see the neck muscles standing out thick as cord, the massive biceps bigger than Popeye's after a tin or two of spinach. With a chirrup of badly worn tyres the car suddenly accelerated and despite the fiend's best efforts to hold on, her fingers popped loose one by one and as the car shot off she lost grip and rolled into the road. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and then I quickly took in another as the fiend leapt up off the road, seemingly unhurt, and then like a scene from Terminator the legs began to pump, the arms rotated and she ran off up the road after the car, screaming, "You bitch! I'm coming after you. Be ready, be very ready. I'm fucking pumpin'!"
Let me introduce you to the lesbian neighbours. They were bodybuilders and they suffered from Roid Rage.
Now when we first moved in it was during the week, so I didn’t meet them because I was at work.
But one day I was standing there, slouching around I suppose, eating an apple and looking at the flowers in the garden as Jade hung the washing out. This short but very muscular bloke in tight running shorts and a tight vest comes striding into the garden. The close-cropped hair was bleached blonde and I held the apple inches from my open mouth as he advanced towards me and I realised he was a she. This was The Bloke, as we soon came to call her, to differentiate her from her girlfriend.
"How ya doing mate," she said and stood so close to me I could feel her intense heat. Her face was just inches from mine and her eyes gleamed unnaturally. She smiled insanely at me and said, "You wanna stand up straight, matey. Get some backbone in yer body. And look at yer belly! Jesus it's a bloody disgrace, mate!"
And then she slapped my stomach so hard it imploded and any apple that hadn't yet worked its way down into my stomach was ejected, splattering all over the clean tea towels hanging on the line. At the same time her other hand went to the back of my head where she smacked it hard against my skull. It was like being straightened on a rack (I've never actually been on a rack but this is how it would feel – I just know it). I'm sure something cracked deep inside my body. Anyhow I didn't eat an apple again for around a year.
We soon discovered that all was not well in the lesbian household. Regular as clockwork on Friday mornings, and usually before the sun rose, the arguments would start. And because they were both body builders they had the necessary strength required to pick each other up and throw their hard bodies against the walls. The arguments were loosely based around The Bloke's belief that she knew everything there was to know about every subject under the sun and that her girlfriend knew exactly the opposite. You know, nothing.
Now, The Bloke was actually very thick and knew just about nothing about anything. As a case in point, one day The Bloke tried to learn to drive, using the girlfriend’s car. She reversed at high speed, aiming for the entrance to the driveway, which went down the side of the apartments. She hit the wall and scorched a trail of bright paintwork right down the brickwork. She never slowed for a second, in fact I think she actually increased speed as she stared wide-eyed out of the side window, sparks flaring up in front of her heavily muscled square face. It looked like she thought someone else was driving. Anyhow, that was the end of learning to drive.
Then she bought a pedal bike, one of these really racy ones with 48 gears and a rack of plastic bottles in the front. I think she filled the bottles with some kind of drug cocktail - probably cocaine or something mixed with vodka - and then she just inserted a thin plastic tube into the bottle and snaked it up into an artery in her arm. She was off!
Once I saw her on the Pacific Highway. She overtook me and a whole line of other fast moving cars, her legs pumping so fast on the pedals they were a blur. She once got clocked by the police doing 80 in a 50 area, admittedly downhill, but the case never came to court. They thought the equipment must be faulty.
Of course it had to end in tears and one day I saw her limping towards her back door, the mangled bike bent across her shoulders like some modernistic Jean Paul Gaultier creation. One complete side of her body, from her ankle right on up her leg and including her hip and side, and even the side of her face, was rubbed bloody raw where she'd obviously come off at high speed. It looked like she'd slid for maybe half a kilometre.
"You alright?" I asked.
She fixed me with her glassy blue eyes and said, "Why'd ya wanna know. Something wrong with me? Something you can see? What’ya askin' me for Pommy?"
I smiled nervously and said no, everything was clearly fine and she looked at me like she was going to fix me later on and then she just threw the bike off her shoulders like it was a shawl and it crashed down on to the grass and she left it there and strode on into her flat. I tell you, she was sucking diesel.
Of course, the Lesbos were not the only weird ones in our block of five apartments - as I've said, they were all very bizarre. Take the woman who lived above us - many a visiting man apparently did. She was this small 40-ish Chinese woman called Doris (I still haven’t figured this out. Why do all Chinese people who live in the west have first names like Doris, Maud, Claude and Peter but their surnames are always something totally unpronounceable like Xzinhpxen or Wzakaou? This has always baffled me. One Chinese woman told me once her name was Shirley, only that was her English name. I asked her what her English surname was and she looked at me like I was bonkers.) Anyway, this Doris had different men around all times of the day and night and we thought, oh yes, we know what she's up to. One day I said, you have a lot of visitors at night and she said, yes, so many friends, and I said, okay, but what puzzles me is why you scream out in the middle of the night, "Oh God, I'm coming, I'm coming!" And she said, "Yes, that's when someone else arrives. I have to go let them in". Indeed.
Doris had also ripped up all of the carpets in her flat and she had a penchant for wearing high heels. In fact this, I assume, was more to do with the needs of the men who visited her than any desire of Doris's to wear high heels all hours of the day and night, but whatever the reason, it drove us mad this constant tattoo of spikes on the ceiling above us. She also got involved in persistent and ever increasing door slamming competitions with the idiots who lived next door to her. Sometimes these competitions would go on until three or four in the morning as they each tried to outdo each other in the door-banging decibel league. Jade said it didn't matter what time of the day or night it was, there was always some kind of banging going on up there.  

to be continued...

Now, we’d been in Australia for a while and we decided that we needed to find somewhere more permanent to live. We could afford it because I was working and besides, Dare was driving us nuts. It was bad enough living with his banging-about self, let alone with Bruce Willis and the rest of the cast of Pulp Fiction. I swear, if he’d banged another door I was going to shoot him. And, you know what? I could have done that.
So, we looked around and eventually we found this nice little apartment, or unit as they are rather unromantically called here (unit always makes me think it’s some kind of prison block. “Mr Coultas? Yes, you’ll find him in Unit Four, Cell Block Eight”).
It was a block of only five, built about 1965 and it looked nice and peaceful. I hate to say it again, but it just shows how wrong you can be.
Every Tuesday, for example, the garbos came around about three in the morning – yes, that’s in the middle of the night, but what can you do.
I reckon not many of us are fans of the cacophony of revving diesel trucks, tipped and smashed bottles, and the clatter of dustbins being thrown back on the nature strip – except that is for the old couple who lived next door.
They were rubbish experts and in my expert opinion (I have a mate of a mate who knows a doctor) they were bonkers.
Now, they were both deaf, but just to make things even more difficult for themselves they’d stand at opposite ends of their unit and shout at each other. This is one of their typical exchanges:
Him: D’you know him!?
Her: Know who?
Him: That bloke!
Her: What bloke?
Him: That bloke up the road!
Her: What road?
Him: Eh? I’m talking about that bloke!
Her: I know.
Him: You know him!?
Her: Who?
Him: That bloke!
It never got much more exciting than that.
Mr Garbo always wore the same clothes; a shirt, tracksuit trousers and a cap. They were a colour even Paul Theroux couldn’t describe. All I can say is, they were dark.
The first time I saw him out and about he was doubled over half inside a big rubbish bin in the local shopping centre, foraging like a tramp. He was engrossed with pulling litter out of the bin and putting it into the plastic bags he carried. When he came back home after one of these regular trips he said to his wife, “Look! Look what I found! Plastic bags! Loads of ‘em! Just thrown away!”
Another day he came back and said, “Look! I found this on the bus! Just left there!”
“What is it?”
“Chinese! Chinese meal! Half eaten! Just left there! On the bus! I picked it up! It’s in a plastic bag! See that?! Couldn’t believe it! Just left there! Half eaten! Let’s wash the bag!”
That’s the thing - Mrs Garbo would wash all the plastic bags her husband brought home and then she’d hang them out to dry on the washing line.
We were not surrounded by the chimes of wind bells or the gentle cawing of the native Australian pigeon or the rousing call of the Kookaburra, no, we were in plastic bag hell.
When the wind gets inside 40 or 50 plastic bags hanging out to dry on the line boy oh boy do you hear them. It is a sound I will always remember. It is a sound that will haunt me.
Alongside the plastic bag line, Mr Garbo also brought home aluminium cans, once again rescued from rubbish bins far and wide. Every Monday he spent the entire evening outside the back door stomping on the cans, turning them into small pieces of flat aluminium. This too is not the most pleasant of noises, not when it goes on for eight hours.
Now, I’m all for recycling, don’t get me wrong, but we are talking obsession here, we are talking rubbish-itis, we are talking being utterly bonkers.
On Tuesday mornings there was something of a party atmosphere in the air, well at least in their unit there was.
“The garbos! They’re coming! Coming soon! Let’s help ‘em sort the rubbish! See if they got any o’them plastic bags we can wash!”
So, they got up even earlier on Tuesdays, usually around 3.30am. Now, call me old fashioned but I consider this to be the middle of the night.
They’d pace up and down outside the bedroom window, going up and down the driveway, looking up and down the road for the garbo men and their trucks, cocking their ears, trying to hear the diesel engine coming to them on the breeze, heralding the appearance of the men in waterproof dungarees. Mr Garbo talked loudly, excitedly.
“I think I hear them! They’re coming! Oh no! They’re not! Not yet! But they will!” And she would hiss, “Quiet!” And he goes, “Okay! Okay! If I’m quiet we’ll hear them before they arrive! Okay! Fine! Quiet! That’s what we’ll do! Keep quiet!”
Of course, by this time I’d be wide awake and ready to explode.
One Tuesday in the dead of night I looked out of the window - after all I wasn’t going to get any more sleep - and I saw Mr Garbo do a little jig and raise his baseball cap high in the air and whoop out loud. He’d caught a whiff of decay.
Then he saw the garbos coming in their green and white trucks. Mrs Garbo clasped her hands together and smiled insanely and then they both hugged each other and danced on the spot.
You’d have thought relief had arrived for Mafeking.
When the trucks finally pulled up I saw no evidence that the professional garbo men paid them any attention at all, but Mr and Mrs Garbo tried to direct operations, excitedly pointing out plastic bottles they’d crushed, plastic bags they’d washed and a mountain of aluminium that each week was sufficient to make a small Audi.

to be continued...

Don also worked at the publishing company.
He arrived in Australia 11 years ago. In London he was a gas fitter in Ponders End. In Australia he’s a magazine designer and fancies himself as a bit of a musician. You can do that in Australia. Work for the council in Bognor Regis, then come out here and become a brain surgeon - well, not exactly, but it’s easier to reinvent yourself. Partly that’s because people will give you a chance. In Britain if you come up with a good idea people snarl at you. They don’t like it. I don’t really know why, but I think it’s got something to do with the “mustn’t grumble” school of thought where you should always be happy with your lot.
In Australia you can go up to someone and say, “look, what I’m going to do is design a rocket and then build it and then blast off next month to Jupiter because I think there’s a bit of potential up there”, and the Aussie will say, “not a bad idea mate, I can see that working. Give it a go”, and they genuinely believe it. There’s none of this, “well, I told the chap that it was a damned fine idea, but frankly Biffo he’s never going to get it off the ground. Simply didn’t go to the right school, don’t you know?”
Don lived at Bondi. Now, just about everyone in the world has heard of Bondi Beach. It’s where most of the Brits wash-up when they land Down-Under. As it happens, Jade and I went there on our second day in Sydney and we took a long look at the small stretch of sand and then we looked at each other and one of us said, “is that it?” and then we went for a coffee.
The thing is this, how this beach got this world-famous name for itself, I don’t know. Undeniably there are a lot of attractive young things parading around but you can say that about any beach in Sydney. Bondi has got some good cafes but you can say that about any beach in Sydney. Bondi’s got some eccentric characters but...well you know where I’m headed.
Anyway, the other thing about Bondi is this - the tides are so dangerous that in the summer months when the beach and the water are full to bursting with holidaymakers, at least 80 people a day have to be rescued by the surf lifesavers or the lifeboats and in some cases they send a helicopter out too. Most of the rescuees are English, though sometimes a Japanese bloke also gets swept out.
Don often sits on the headland with his friends and they lay bets on which bobbing head is going to be next to be swept out to sea and eventually rescued. Apparently you can spend a good time doing this and if you take a picnic and some wine and pass the binoculars around then it’s even more fun and the day passes quite agreeably.
Don told me, one day he saw this group of English lads, they were from somewhere up north, and they’d obviously just arrived because they were still wearing their purple and white shell-suits and they were walking along and as they passed Don on the Bondi promenade he heard one of them say, “Let’s go and jump in the water then.” And another one said, “I don’t like the look of that there water, mate. It says don’t swim too.”
“What you are,” said Shell-Suit One, “is a fuckin’ poofter. Call yourself English! You’re kiddin’ me!” And then apparently he ran onto the beach, stripping off the shell-suit as he
went and launched himself into the foaming water.
Don said an oil tanker picked him up four hours later when he became a danger to shipping.
So, one weekend I go and see Don for a coffee. He lives in this house that he rents and he sub-lets rooms to other people. He has a studio on the top floor, which is the third floor, and he’s within walking distance of the beach so though you can’t see the water you can always smell the sea. He’s also near Bondi golf course.
The golf course is bounded on one side by the sea, so when you lose a ball that’s it. I guess some of them even hit English people being tugged out to sea by the rip-tide. If you were one of those being swept away I imagine that really would make your day complete. There you are drowning and then a bloody golf ball whacks you on the head. Super.
The other side of the golf course has a major road running up it. This is not the safest of places to be driving. I mean driving a vehicle of course, not a ball, because often
when Don and his brother play golf they have balls whizzing off the course and bouncing off passing vehicles. Don swears he only ever once got a hole in one when he hit a double-decker bus lumbering up the hill, had the ball bounce back, tip onto the green and go into the hole. Apparently people on the bus applauded.
Like many things in Australia the golf club is not the preserve of rich geezers - anybody can take part. Personally I’m not a golf fan. To me it’s just a game played by men with small balls. I only mention this because when I was a kid I used to live near a golf course in Leicestershire and it marked me for life.
One side of the course was bounded by a stretch of fields. I hear that the verdant pastures have been built on by some hideous company like Wimpy but in those days when I was about 11 or 12 it was the best place to be. You could walk through fields and fields and fields and in those days there were still hedges not wire fences. There were wooden stiles to get over and I remember oak trees roaring in the stiff wind. I remember fields that had nothing growing in them except lush green grass and daisies and buttercups you could hold under your chin where they glowed in the sunlight. There were lazy old cows and sometimes a bull. I used to pick up conkers and acorns and climb trees (and leave my bike near the road and nobody nicked it, because, well nobody did back then) and I’d look for golf balls because there were enough bad golfers for a good number of balls to be knocked over the hedges and into the deep grass of the fields. Once I found the small white balls I’d go and sell them to the Pro in his shop. It was easy money. The thing was though, this bloke was really unpleasant and if you went in his shop when there were golfers there he’d chuck you out, really start verbally abusing you, make you feel like nothing. At the time I never understood why he was so unpleasant but of course it all made sense years on - there he was buying golf balls off me and my mates which belonged to the bad golfers who came into his shop. These golfers were sold their own balls back as secondhand balls and unless they had their names on them - which of course some did - then they could never be sure these were their balls. This Pro was paying us kids a few bob to get these balls and then selling them back to their original owners for many more bobs. Anyway, I assume that what goes around and all that has happened to him. In the often neat way of these things, it’s perfectly possible that he could well have been on holiday to Australia, gone to Bondi, went out in the water, got swept out to sea and then got whacked on the head by one of Don’s errant balls. One can only hope.
So, phew, here we are, back at the beginning of this particular story, in Bondi. Don said to me, come and have a look out the window here, and I did and in the building next door, which is a block of smart apartments, there was this good looking girl playing a violin. She was two floors below so we were sort of looking down and across at her and we could see almost all the way into her apartment which was lit with sunlight.
“She is so good looking,” said Don quietly.
“What’s with the violin,” I asked.
He looked at me. “She plays it.”
She was strumming the violin like she knew what she was doing. It didn’t even sound bad. Snatches of the music floated up to us on a breeze from the sea, so it was like music with a sharp sea flavour - very strange.
“I’m going to marry that girl,” said Don and wondered if he’d been getting a bit too much of that sea air.
“What’s she think about that?” I asked just as quietly, watching her, listening to the music. I think it was a bit of Beethoven.
“Well,” said Don, also watching her, “I haven’t actually talked to her yet. On account of her boyfriend.”
“Oh,” I said, moving away from the window, “that’s going to be a bit tricky then.”
“I don’t think so”, he said, turning towards me and spreading his hands, palms up flat, “see she plays the violin and I’m -?” He waited for me.
“Well, you’re a gas fitter.”
“Mate! I am a musician! I make music! It is only a matter of time before our musical talents collide.”
“Hmm,” I said and turned to look out the window again and listen to some more music as the sea breeze inflated the room.
Two weeks later Don calls me up and says, “Come round. I want to show you something.”
I drive over there and go up to his studio and he has the TV wired up to the video player and he shows me this film of this girl from next door who, it turns out, is called Zady. In the video she’s sitting in Don’s room talking to Don about music. On the tape Don has this fan gently blowing in the room because it’s so warm and she’s wearing this filmy dress and the fan breeze is just playing with the edges of her dress, just gently flicking the material. Because she doesn’t know she’s being filmed it’s actually a whole lot more sexy than any other video I’ve ever seen – and that includes Don’s renowned porn collection, which is about the size of the contents of the British Library, and definitely a serious rival to the array owned by Mr Henry from the brewery.
“See, mate, I’m going to go out with that girl,” said Don as the tape came to an end. “She’s already interested in playing in my band.”
“On the violin?”
“Well, I’ve been having a think about putting a string section in the group.”
“What about the boyfriend?”
“I don’t think he’d be interested, He’s an architect.”
“No, I mean what are you going to do about him? She’s not going to go out with you while they’re still living together.”
“Well,” he says, “I hear them arguing all the time now, so way I see it, it’s only a matter of time.”
It was maybe three weeks later that Don called me at work. It was like a scene out of Seinfeld.
‘Hey,” he said, “guess what happened?”
“Tell me,” I said as I continued to tap on the keyboard.
“That girl, Zady.”
“Yeah.”
“She ran out on the street yesterday.”
“Yeah.” I said, still typing, only half listening to him.
“And she was screaming.”
My typing slowed.
“Really screaming -”
“Yes,” I said listening intently now, leaning back in my chair, the computer abandoned.
“The boyfriend’s dead!”
“Jesus,” I sprang forward in my chair and nearly head-butted the computer screen. “How’d that happen? He was only maybe, what, 35?”
“Thirty-two, as it happens. She came home and he was lying on the sofa and he was just dead. Had a dicky heart or something.”
“God.” I paused. And then I said, “So when you going out with her?”
“Friday.”
So, Zady started playing in Don’s heavy rock band, her violin fighting with Duggs on double bass and Monster on the drums. It was an interesting sound, but the more I listened to them the more confident I was that John Bon Jovi had a future. There was something a little frightening about Zady’s playing. Gone were the soft lilting chords that the sea breeze had brought up to us that day in Don’s flat and in their place was a savagery that seemed to come from another place entirely. Of course it was to be expected. When you’re in your mid-20s you don’t expect your 32-year-old boyfriend to lie down on the sofa one afternoon and die. Not when you’re out. Imagine the way things had been left, the words that hadn’t been said. What a terrible business.
Anyway, Zady and Don started going out. This had to be the worst thing to do. And, no of course, I didn’t tell him. Some things you just have to find out for yourself.
Not too surprisingly the relationship didn’t last and when it finished it upset Don a lot. He really thought he’d found his soulmate but when they broke up she said to him, “You know, I never fancied you.”
“What!?” said Don, “after all the things we did?”
“That,” she said, “was just sex.”
The truth was, she’d wanted a shoulder to cry on, just one, and Don’d wanted her, all of her, not just her shoulder. But it was a relationship with three people in it. And one of them was dead. How can you compete with a dead man? Well, you just can’t because he’s already had the last word.

"What you want to do skip, is you go with your missus. You go in and have a few drinks and then you say you’re off and you get given two of them computer software packs as a present for coming along. Now, you go and put ‘em in the car and then you go back and you go up to another of those public relations chicks and you say, ‘ello, I forgot to take my software packs, and she smiles at you and gives you two more, ‘cos that’s her job, see? Then what you do is, the next day you call them up and you say, I was there last night and somehow you blokes forgot to give me and my colleague (that’s your missus, Big Kay) one of those software packs and so they apologise and they send you two more. That means you’ve got six altogether. Now, I’ve already got buyers for all six. What I’m saying to you mate is that you and your missus could get six too, and then I’ve got 12, and I flog ‘em and make you some money too. What d’ya reckon t’that?”
I met The Dipper at work. The big thing about him is his thick skin. Now, some people will tell you they have a thick skin but Dipper could have taken on a rhino in the Thick Skin Competition and won hands down.
“Well,” he told me one day, “me mates call me The Dipper on account of the fact if I see something I’ve gotta dip inside it and see if there’s anything worth ‘aving.” And then he laughed out loud, showing his gappy teeth.
The thing is, this bloke was into everything and anything. If there was money in it, he’d be involved. If he could see an angle, he’d take it. If he could just pick something up and sell it on, he’d be lifting it quicker than you could say, stop thief.
It soon became clear to everyone that they had to lock up all their belongings, otherwise The Dipper would have them. He’d even take empty CD cases. One day one of my colleagues put a note in an empty CD case. It said, “Dipper, why don’t you just take it?” and then he went home early. Dipper came sniffing around just before five o’clock and picked the case up and said to me, “What’s this?”
“CD case,” I said looking over my glasses at him for a moment before returning to my work. He grunted and then he turned it over and over and looked at it closely from every angle and then he opened it up and saw the note and frowned for a second. He looked like a big gorilla who knows he’s found something interesting in the jungle, but he’s not sure exactly what. The Dipper finished reading the note and he laughed out loud. “Will you take a look at this?” he said and as I turned around to look he let me read the note and then closed the CD, and still shaking his head at the humour of it all he pocketed the empty case in one smooth motion. “some people, they are so fuckin’ funny.”
Yes, I said.
One day, five new laptop computers went missing on the floor he worked on. Another day The Dipper was caught on a security camera carrying out a load of wooden shelves on his shoulder - the MD told The Dipper’s boss that he had to bring them back - and on another occasion he brought his car around to the front of the building and was seen easing some filing cabinets in.
Once, Jade and I went round to his house because he had a computer he wanted to sell. Dipper was there with the kid from next door - I guess he would have been about 13 - and both of them were sitting on the floor putting CDs in cases.  Jade said, “hey, those look like the latest Madonna CD.”
“Yer right. Not even out yet. Me young friend here’s been downloading off the Net and I got some CD cases for ‘im. We’ve got a rumble going on. Sell ‘em down the Organic Market on Sundays. Go like the clappers they do.” And then he playfully cuffed the boy around the head and said, ‘off you go now young fella, and don’t forget, I need that Nelly
Furtado tomorrow.”
Fagin would have been proud.
As Dipper was showing me the computer Jade looked around.
“Hey,” she said, “this chest of drawers looks familiar. Where have I seen these before?” And Dipper just smiled and said, “I had them out of that company, you remember the one we used to work for? Just backed the Falcon up, popped the boot and slipped them in there. Went in easy as- “
“Yeah”, I said quickly, “I think we’ve got it.”
Another time he told me this remarkable story. The sort of story you’d never dream of telling anyone. But he did...
Every year the company had a golf tournament organised by one of the staff. Anyone could play and The Dipper wanted to, not least because it was free and anything free was right up his darkened alleyway. Trouble was, The Dipper didn’t have a set of golf clubs, well not a full set. One day though he managed to solve the problem. I'll let him take over the telling of this one.
“So there I was up at the golf club. See I didn’t have a full set of clubs but I go up there and have a bit of a putt. There’s always someone I can get talking to who’ll give me some grog.
“On good days I can get three or four glasses without having to pay anything. That’s the sort of golf day I love, see. After I’d played I went out to the Falcon for the off and I was swaying about a bit on account of the grog I’d had, but anyway I found the motor alright and as I was walking up to it I sees this woman leaning her golf clubs on the back of her car and then she goes off and goes in the shop. I saw an opportunity here so I unlocks the Falcon’s boot remotely with me infra-red key thingy and then I scoops that woman’s clubs up on me way past and easy as you like slip ‘em into the Falcon, slap the boot closed and I’m away, clean as. See, then I went to the golf day and it were ripper mate. Shame them clubs weren’t my size, y’know, but I had a top day - plenty of free grog and all that.”
One day he said to me, “You know, my wife? She don’t like you.” And I said to him, “You know, I don’t like her either. I don’t like racists.”
And he said, without a hint of apparent humour, “Nah mate, she’s not racist. She just don’t like them blacks, that’s all.”
Well now, here’s a funny thing and really the point of this story. The Dipper has two kids and they’re young adults, one’s working and the other’s at university. He thinks he’s close to his kids but they’re not close to him - he’s just too embarrassing for them.
One day it’s his son’s birthday, his 18th, no less, and The Dipper is hosting a backyard barbeque and all is relatively blissful in the Dipper household. Or as Dipper himself would say - it were ripper, mate. The sun is shining, the sausages are sizzling, the steak is juicy, and the burgers are almost ready. Then there’s the sound of the front door bell - it plays Waltzing Matilda and sometimes Dipper will not open the door until it’s played right through because he just loves that tune - but this time The Dipper thinks it must be someone else coming to the party and so off he goes and opens the door.
And standing there on the doorstep is this young man, who, as it happens, is also 18, though it isn’t his birthday. He looks at The Dipper and Dipper looks at him and Dipper thinks he looks sort of familiar but he can’t place him immediately and he thinks he must have drunk more grog than he thought.
By now The Dipper’s wife is walking up towards the door too, asking him who is it and before Dipper can say anything and just as his wife gets to the door and looks past her hulk of a husband the young man on the doorstep says, “Dad. It’s me.” That’s not what gets The Dipper’s wife screaming hysterically; rather it’s the fact that the young man standing on her doorstep on her son’s 18th birthday is black. Very black indeed.
It turns out that The Dipper had an affair with a black woman and he never told his wife. Well, he wouldn’t, would he?

I was lying on the bed one day reading a book. In fact it was a mattress on the floor. It was hot outside but in the room it was cool and I was off work for the day. Probably I’d had one too many of those excellent Cooper’s Pale Ales the evening before (the green-labelled Pale is not as strong as the Sparkling Ale and it has a vanilla flavour and just a bit of bubbly-bite). Jade was outside somewhere, I think probably trying to work out why every time we washed anything in the washing machine it came out with loads of fluff attached to it. This was a continuing problem and one that Dare couldn’t seem to solve. Sometimes we’d see him in the local shopping mall, people around him sneezing uncontrollably as he trailed fluff behind him.
Most people in Australia have these great big top-loading washing machines which I thought had gone the way of the Chevrolet Corvette, Marilyn Munroe and politeness, but no, they are alive and whirring Down-Under. They use about twice as much water as a European front loader and they will eventually rip your clothes to pieces but then again you can get just about a whole year’s laundry in there in one go.  
Anyway, I was reading the book when I heard a rustling noise. I ignored it at first (don’t ask me why. When there’s a rustling noise in your bedroom you should always investigate immediately. This is something I’ve learned.) but ignore it I did until I heard it again. I was engrossed in the book (I wish I could remember which one it was but I’d be lying if I told you it was one of Stephen King’s, it probably was, but it might not have been) so I slowly turned my head to the left. And there it was. Staring me in the face. Inches away was the biggest bloody lizard I’d ever seen, in fact it was the only lizard I’d ever come face-to-face with in my life and it was staring right at me. As I shrieked out, “what the - !” it rolled it’s long tongue out and I screamed again and leapt off the mattress. Jade heard me and she ran into the room, took one look at the beast and turned tail and ran out screaming, her hands waving in the air. I quickly followed her outside, oblivious to the fact that I was naked, and joined her on top of the wall on the other side of the road.  If someone had been filming that day they’d have signed us up for some sporting event. I would have been taking part in the 2000 Nudist Games.
Jade turned to me and then screamed again. “You’ve got no clothes on!”
“I can’t go back in there,” I said, “the beast’ll kill me.”
“Get back in there now,” she said, “otherwise we’ll be bloody deported.”
I took a deep breath, jumped down off the wall, sprinted across the road, ran inside shouting out loud like there was a burglar in there - “You fucker!” - ran into the bedroom, scooped my jeans up off the chair and high-tailed it back out of there, screaming out obscenities as I went. I ran across the road and leapt up onto the wall again, jumping into my jeans as I went.
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I think we need some help.”
“Do you think it’s dangerous?,” she said.
I looked at her as if she was mad.
“It nearly bloody killed me!” I said.
“What exactly did it do?” she asked, her practical streak taking over.
I stared across the road at the house, my eyes slits in the sunlight. I said quietly, “It stuck its tongue out.”
She looked at me. “It stuck its tongue out?”
“It was bloody long. You should have seen it.”
“What colour was it?”
“His tongue?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know, blue, I think.”
“Blue! What’s that all about?”
I shrugged and looked back across the road. It was getting hot out here and my lily-livered English skin was feeling it.
The sun in Australia is not like the sun in Europe. When it’s really hot in Europe the sun bears down with dull hammer-weight. In Australia the sun is like a lance. It’s sharp and can cut you just like that. While you’ve got a couple of hours to play with in Europe before you look like a lobster, in Australia it takes about 20 minutes before your scalp is red and peeling and you’re thinking about calling an ambulance.
Once - and you only ever do this once - we went to the beach, slapped the sunscreen all over except for one vital area - my feet. They turned bright red and throbbed so much and so brightly that a light plane tried to land on the beach. Not only that, they swelled up to twice their normal size. I drove from the beach direct to the chemist, every gearchange, foot pressing the clutch, making me cry out in pain. I told him what the problem was and he said, “Mate, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. But I’ve gotta tell you, you’ll never do it again...”. He gave me a big tube of aloe vera. This is about as useful as throwing paraffin on a fire.
The following day was a Monday and I had to ease the big red feet inside a pair of shoes that suddenly appeared to be five sizes too small. This was the most indescribable pain. So indescribable, of course I can’t describe it. But trust me, it hurt a lot. I spent the whole day at work tiptoeing around like a burglar in a French farce, much to the amusement of my fellow workers. It lasted for about a week and by then I could execute just about any ballet step you ever saw, including a passable pirouette. Then of course my feet started to shed skin like I was a snake. The chemist was right - you only do it once.  
Meanwhile, back on the wall it was getting very hot indeed.  A Ford Falcon quietly pulled up at the curb just up the road. We both looked at it.
“Go and ask him about the beast,” said Jade nodding towards the driver.
I jumped down and jogged to his window. I had no shoes on and no top, just my jeans, and my eyes must have looked kind of wild. In western countries the driver would have seen me coming, quickly wound his window up, locked his doors and called the police on his mobile phone. This bloke was Australian, so I looked normal to him.
“G’day mate, how’s it goin’?” he asked.
I leaned on his windowsill and said, “We’ve got a bloody big lizard in the house. I don’t know what to do.”
He looked away from me at Jade on the wall and squinted his eyes, then he followed her gaze across the road to the house and without taking his eyes off the open door he said through lips that barely moved, “What colour’s its tongue, mate?”
I grunted and slapped the top of the window ledge.
“You’re the second person’s asked me that.”
He looked back at me. “See mate, if it’s got a blue tongue it’s a blue-tongued lizard, and those blokes’re protected, see. Now, if it’s got a green tongue that’s another thing.”
“So, if it’s got a green tongue what’s that mean?”
“Phuh! I dunno mate. Everyone asks what colour the lizard’s tongue is. Always have done. Since I was a nipper.”
“Great,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “thing is this, if it’s a Blue-Tongue it aint gonna kill ya. Get a towel or something and sling it over it and then grab hold of it and chuck it out. Be careful though.”
“Why?”
“It can give ya a nasty bloody bite and then we’d have to call the ambo and that’ll cost ya.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t dangerous?”
“Well, it aint gonna kill ya, but it’ll bite hard if it’s roused. Anyway, best of luck with it,” he said as he turned the ignition key.
“Can you give me a hand with it.”?
He drew in a slow breath until his lungs expanded so much I thought they’d explode.
“I would mate, only I don’t like the little bastards. One grabbed me toe once and wouldn’t let it go. Had to go to the hospital and have surgery. Still can’t walk right.”
My toes curled up almost under my feet and I started to lightly dance on the spot. He looked at me and glanced down out of the window at my feet before putting the car in Drive, nodding at me, then moving quietly away from the kerbside. He turned at the end of the cul-de-sac and drove off.
I hopped, skipped and jumped back to Jade.
“What the hell are you doing dancing all over the place?”
“Look I think it’s dangerous. He said it could bite.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to have to go in.”
“You’re either brave or mad.”
“Look, we can’t stay out here all afternoon,” I said.
I crossed the road and as I was going she shouted after me - “what shall I tell your mother?”
“Funny!” I shouted back and then entered the darkened house.
I listened hard. I could hear nothing aside from the whirr of the air conditioners. Then I thought I heard a rustling noise in the hallway. I looked and couldn’t see much. It was dark in the house after the searing sunlight and it took my eyes long seconds to get used to the gloom. I heard a noise and looked down and there it was, standing only two inches from my toes! The toes it could bite! With it’s blue tongue! No, it would lick with its tongue, but you know what I mean. So, the lizard was looking up at me with its mouth open and its tongue flickered out and Jesus, it was blue! It looked like the bastard was smiling at me. All of this information entered my brain at the same time as the scream came out my mouth. It was a scream that I thought must belong to someone else and that made me scream even louder. The beast reared up on its rear legs and spat at me, it’s tongue reaching for my toes. I jumped up high in the air like one of those hopping African tribesmen and before I came back down again the beast had skeedaggled out of the open door. Jade, alerted by my screams was running up the path as the lizard ran out. She ran screaming towards the house, her eyes wide and looking at the lizard as it ran towards her. They passed on the pathway, both looking at each other and then he jumped onto the nature strip and ran behind a tree.
Jade and I clutched each other tight as drowning sailors.  
“It’s all over,” I said as our hearts raced against each other. A motorbike came up the road. It stopped and Dare got off like he imagined Bruce Willis would. I could almost hear the theme from Pulp Fiction as he strode across the road. Dare used to have a car but he used to leave the windows open. I said to him one day, “why’d you do that, leave them open?” And he looked at me and laughed and said, “Y’know, I’m making it easier for them car thieves, mate.” Of course he was only joking but that night they nicked his car, them car thieves. The police eventually arrived and the copper said, “d’you leave the doors unlocked mate, or the windows down.” Dare just looked at him. “That’d be it then,” said the copper before pocketing his notebook and getting back in his patrol car and closing the door.
“Do you think I’ll see it again?” asked Dare.
“Not unless we find it, mate,” said the copper as he fired his engine.
“Oh right then,” said Dare hopefully.
“What I’d do mate, if you follow me, is I’d go out and buy another car soon as you like.”
“Oh”, said Dare, and so he bought the bike.
“Hey blokes. You okay?” he said to us now.
“We’ve just had a bloody lucky escape,” I said.
He looked at us, his eyes widening behind his glasses until they both looked big as full moons. One eye looked left up the road. I was never sure what he was actually seeing, but it must have been hellish confusing for him.
“Jeez, that’s good. So Jadey aint having a nipper then? Bonza!”
We both looked at him and disentangled ourselves.
“No,” I said, “we just had this big lizard in here.”
“Yeah? A lizard, ya say. What colour was its tongue?”
Jade went AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!
“Jesus , Jadey, scared you didn’t it? Anyhow, did it have a short stumpy-tail?”
We both looked at him. Only one of his eyes looked back.
“Thought so. See, that’d be Bluey. Me grandad used to feed him every day. Sometimes I forget to leave something out for ‘im. I guess he was in here looking for tucker. You give him anything? He loves mozzies and once I saw him catch a moth with his tongue, but I leave him some cucumber usually. He can’t get enough of it. Loves licking me toes too. Really loves that. Yeah, thinks it’s bonza.”

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.