Sunday, March 4, 2007

Gaberdine

Gaberdine

Prologue 1
Chapter One [Dago’s turn at the screw] 21
Chapter Two [Mary finds it quite contrary] 27






Prologue

A spiteful sun prised him awake from his mescal malaise. Cartoon orbs of splintered red squinted from parched and punctured face.
‘What’s the fucking time?’ he asked through gravel throat. No one answered.
The shower ran for an hour. Passions dissolved. By late morning a queer restlessness rattled.
His name was Cunt to his friends and Labiata to the police. His fingers darted frequently to his mouth and plucked at the swollen labial flesh. His full red lips formed a rose, delicate in the centre of his pubescent moustache and beard. His face had that florid floral look to it, a bit of a pucker in his cheeks, and lips that were, quite frankly, an embarrassment to strangers and a source of amusement to his friends.
He stood empty-minded for a while in front of the full-length mirror and smirked from his careless height, covered from neck to ankle with gaberdine. His blue eyes sat beneath arched brows that reached out to each other across the bridge of his button nose.
Cunt was bored. He’d wasted the morning and was now feeling the need for change.
*
Smokey and dark was the room as they listened to his talk. There was a narrow slit in the window for them to act.
The air in the room shivered as a ghost of memory swept by.
A red glow hovered in space and a brief glimpse of cloud moved past his face as he sucked on a pipe. His eyes opened in comic ecstasy when the red glow moved on.
‘They were there. That’s for sure.’ Cunt’s vulval mouth parodied his nickname and twitched with nervous excitement.
A murmur passed through the room. The red glow halted and lit suddenly faces in the circle. Four shapes had eyes that searched the others. Beacons of surveillance were wistful in that strange and temporary glow.
‘You see them?’
‘They carry an odour that a dingo can sniff for kilometres.’
‘With your beak, Donk, you’d know!’
Donk feigned offence. His reply, ‘The girls love me, arsehole.’
‘Now that’s got me thinking.’ Dago sniggered.
‘What’s up with you, wog?’ Donk demanded.
Dago sniggered again.
Donk carefully formed a circle with his forefinger and thumb. By inserting the knob of his nose into the circle, Donk was able successfully to convey most graphically his state of mind.
*
A sleepy winter of discontent had settled upon the capital. A frost bit hard those who walk their dogs at dawn. Their faces show neglect. Empty-eyed creatures drift toward routine. Hollow minds at work in the nation. Strain and bitterness empty the hearts. The government has come home to rest.
Canberra is the loveliest city in Australia. The paradox of a burly griffin producing an enchanting garden emerges as you spend time in Canberra. The potpourri of suburbs, the avenues of oak, the citadels of power, the lake and its spray of life, the pampered atmosphere of seclusion and quarantine from the rest of the world impress the eye at first.
Then it reaches the nerve and the soul. The insubstantial beast of greed, swathed in the guise of civilisation, gnaws without pity, without trace, without evidence that an inertia of susceptibility had stripped the victims of their protective shield.
Now the nation was naked. Also exposed as a callous and calculating cur, this government had retreated from its post into a desolate and desperate doom. It were as if it were denying its own legitimacy. The machinery of state had collapsed. The dog-eat-dog rationale of the private world selected survivors and discarded the rest. The government had come home without hope.
Behind the façade of growth lay the grime of decay. Charity meals wheeled the cities where rich eyes could no longer see..
And the stony eyes of gratitude.
Resentment ruled okay in this land of desperation. The apartheid of capitalism kept the wretched at bay, collared and collected in tenantville. And below that the charity cases of hypodermic needles and bad-breath baddies. Wretched indeed!
Cunt slouched his face into a corollaceous caricature and moved easily across the street. Stubborn clutches of oak stirred as evening breathed a chilly sigh.
Parliament House had an aura about it. A fog of cold had gathered in the saucer of Canberra and this nipple of political power energised the atmosphere with a kaleidoscopic radiance.
They were sitting into the night. The prime minister would be indulging in his favourite delight as his team of bovver boys rammed home their legislative agenda. There would be no relief for the poor. There would be no retreat from war. There would be a Spenserian stratification of Australian society, with the status quo reinforced. Quantum leaps across the economic divide would become implausible.
The massive doors to Parliament moved inward and Cunt followed. His eyes roamed furtively the lobby with its marbled majesty. The secret silent whirr of electronic surveillance watched him as he ambled toward the public gallery stairs. Slightly clammy hands dug deeply into his gaberdine pockets.
He had spent the day within the library. An assortment of books formed a battlement across his intense figure as he sought bits of knowledge about human spontaneous combustion.
No one else was in a position to say to him, ‘listen, old china, this is how you go up in smoke, just follow the instructions!’
So he followed the instructions and nothing happened to suggest he had found the path to self- immolation.
As he sat down in the gallery the voices of dissent rose from the chamber. Cunt leaned forward in an attitude of interest and listened.
‘Do you now…!’ came a voice of challenge and of mockery.
‘You know I do!’ was the quick retort.
Cunt leaned back into the seat and fumbled with his fingers in his gaberdine pockets. He thought of Mary.
*
Mary mused upon the artefact of discovery. She was becoming a character within her own fiction and her fate seemed to have been sealed by the strictures of authorship. She couldn’t turn away from her own inventions and fantasies; she was bound to her whims.
Alcoholism was a word that appeared as a subject of erudite comment from the media; it never was considered to be a permanent guest in her world. The boozy broad of her imagination was excused the sin of indulgence with the euphemism of exuberance. The glutton who served her own excesses with intoxicating replenishments was an orphan of chance and little responsibility rested in her lap.
The picture of her spewing over the gallery railing was crafted on sculpture rather than upon effect. The image of Mary, full to the brim with the vestiges of vomit, had to match her ever-changing mood. The tragic drunk or the violent vixen venting venom; she had a plethora of characters to be when she wanted to be, and that question had just been answered.
*
The prime minister of Australia was an ordinary bloke with an appetite fashioned on extraordinary desires. Raised to love cricket, he sought his own field of excellence in cerebral adventure. By the time he had reached puberty the little fellow with the earnest face was of firm conviction that the world needed him.
Oh yes! There was never any doubt about that, by crikey!
When he was a very small whippersnapper of a kid, the prime minister used to spend oodles of moments in his mum’s kitchen, whittling apples to the core so that he could gather the pips and hoard them in his room. He knew then that one day he would gather those pips again and plant them down the back of the garden where in years to come a grove of apple trees would form and provide fruit for the future.
That’s the sort of little boy our prime minister was.
Strangely though, he never took any notice of the apples he wasted, just as long as he gathered those pips.
*
The doll was sparse of hair and had that pendulous lower lip often preferred by mimics of the prime minister. Besuited with a glowing orange tie, the doll was fitted with black shoes and Dago spent a precious few minutes polishing those tiny vinyl things. It was important that detail be attended to.
The doll was stuffed with old mattress hair and a few errant strands sprouted above the eyes to give the face a frantic look. The mouth was open. The arms crossed in defiant pose. A certain pliability allowed the doll a bit of personality, to be shaped as needed.
Dago bent the doll forward and drove a darning needle into its rectum.
‘Hey! Look!’ he shouted to nobody in particular.
He realised he was alone.
*
The conjunction of characters at Parliament that night would prove not to be conducive to the prime minister’s envisaged schedule for the commencement of the first sitting of the House.
The prime minister scarcely noticed his family over dinner. The ride to the House was buried beneath a furious rush through the evening newspapers.
‘Aaaaaah!’ he sighed proudly as he stared at his image on page four.
Through the press throng his car was whisked and as he alighted a thunderbolt blasted above. But the prime minister did not hear it within the sanctuary of Parliament House.
‘Evening, Prime Minister.’
The woman had the name of Mrs Aardvark, with its awfully awkward pronunciation of ‘ard fuck’. The prime minister simply referred to her as ‘yes’.
‘Yes?’ he asked with raised eyebrows as he hurried along the corridor to his offices.
‘Whip phoned, Prime Minister, and he asked for a time. Early, if possible. Rumours abound. Also a delegation from Malaysia will be attending the gallery from seven.’
‘Oh, visit that upon the FM, and that lad Abbottom, will you?’
Mrs Aardvark nodded as she noted on her electronic diary. She panted slightly as her eyes lifted to follow the prime minister’s passage along the corridor, and a strange heat emerged in her belly. She smiled wistfully and turned back down the corridor to her office.
The office of the prime minister was coloured cold as he walked into its chill.
‘Is the treasurer in?’ he asked his office.
The office remained quiet.
*
Donk wandered alone into Parliament House and surveyed the place for a while before heading for the evening parks and gardens. A clear and cold sky was above his evening and all about him was overwhelmingly familiar. The déjà vu of dreamland had crept up close.
Fade was veiling the Canberra forests. A crisp, crackle, dry grass crunched beneath his feet as he moved from tree to tree, touching the trunks, connecting.
Finally, Donk found a suitable place to be alone. He sat and looked about. There was nothing here but himself. Absently he caressed the nob of his nose.
From his gaberdine Donk withdrew a flask and unscrewed its lid. Before he lifted Drambuie for a quick nip, he opened his nostrils and a dreamy drip of nose dew dropped dead-square down the neck into the liqueur.
A mite over 172cm Donk was a physical enigma. His long phallic nose ushered forth fiercely haired nostrils that had a tendency to collect emotional moisture.
He had sparse black hair, receding, but pushed forward bodgie style. At the back it was duck-tailed and lacquered.
His grey eyes with flecks of white on iris and slightly inward slanted, gave an impression of vagueness. Donk was the Uncertainty Principle personified.
At 29 years Donk was the eldest of the group. He had a Harley, a BA and LLB, and spent excessively long periods refashioning his hair when he removed his crash helmet.
He worked at Centrelink in his gaberdine world. He was an enigma indeed.
*
The doll sat snugly inside the gaberdine pocket and Dago was warmed by it. An air that tasted of parsley conditioned the men’s toilet. The hum of the building was a mellow and mysterious hum and Dago fingered the wall lightly, testing the vibration of the living bowel of Parliament House.
He sat there for a long while until he removed the doll and stared at it in wonder. ‘Little Johnny’ stared back with its dotty eyes.
‘You think you have all the answers, my friend.’ said the doll.
Dago shrank from the doll slightly. Then he pushed it to arm’s length. Its demeanour had changed. A terrible cockiness had taken hold of ‘Little Johnny’. Its puffed-up chest has strained the top button of its coat.
‘Ugggghzzzz!’ spat Dago with a snarl. ‘It’s the mescal!’
*
The prime minister stood amid noise. He stood there and moved his head from one side to the other. His mouth remained closed, pressed patiently tight. He was waiting for the Speaker to quieten the mob on the other side. He turned to his colleagues with as much to say, ‘Typical, isn’t it!’
The Leader of the Opposition was standing in his hostile domain and demanding a Point of Order.
‘There is no point of order. The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat.’
The Leader of the Opposition glared at the Speaker, dared the second reprimand, and resumed his seat.
A furore began and those in the gallery leant forward in eager spectacle. Ushers became alert as an agitation rippled Parliament’s visitors. The Malaysian delegation was entering behind its uniformed guide when two gaberdined figures slipped into the gallery.
*
Mary became aware of their presence when the gaberdine swished past her hair. She turned in startled triumph as a lump of vomit moved about inside her gut. As she inched forward to the railing she was vaguely aware that Donk had arrived in gaberdine and was hunched near the railing to her left. He was smiling at her.
The Malaysian delegation was herded into a central square as the uniform intoned descriptions of the spectacle below on the floor of parliament. The green atmosphere of parliament was an incongruous backdrop to a coliseum of corn and consumption.
The figures in gaberdine were witness to the threnodial chorus of the Opposition as it bayed for the blood of the prime minister.
Then the plaintive voice of the prime minister rose from the floor and Mary felt the first violent shove of a foetus-like vomit as it lodged in her throat. It was a thrilling moment for her as she lifted herself steadily and leant over the railing.
*
Donk set sight upon the prime minister and with fixed eye delved beneath the gaberdine and found his pleasure pencil reluctant to react. A moment’s doubt smacked his mind with the cold and clammy thought that the prime minister would simply be too much for him, and that the proud and reliable functions of his prick would collapse in protest at too gruesome a task.
But Donk had a history of spurting his lust in the most spectacular fashion. He massaged until the prime minister’s red face was spitting visible gossamers of saliva, when a familiar pleasure grew beneath the gaberdine.
*
‘ … and it behoves the honourable Member for Werribee … ’
‘ … and gentle women … you sexist! … ’
‘The Honourable Member for Jackson … ‘
‘I make my point, Mr Speaker, that … ‘
‘The Honourable Member for Jackson has the Call.’
‘Siddown ya mug!’
‘If ya knew what was good for ya, ya wooden want to go there anywayyyeeee …’
The Speaker stood impressively and raised his hands like an evangelist seeking intercession from above. His black robe he then gathered between his thumbs and forefingers and, for a moment, he was flapping like a frantic Dracula under the full moon.
‘I ask the prime minister to resume his seat. Thank you, prime minister.’ The Speaker remained standing while the House settled. Then he sat and glared about him, seeking those who would defy his authority. ‘A Point of Order … the Member for Namatjira has the call …’
Dago had separated from his companion in gaberdine. He had gone elsewhere to prepare his own very complex arrangements. An intense feeling flowed from the Chamber. The Malaysian delegation sat stone-faced and riveted to the drama of debate.
The prime minister inclined forward when another Point of Order was called amid a boisterous interchange of invective.
Dago removed the doll from his gaberdine and cradled it in his lap. The doll’s eyes stared hard at Dago.
*
As the prime minister took his call a jeer erupted from the Opposition. The Speaker glared. The Malaysian delegation watched impassively with eyes that shone with suffused satisfaction. A certain charge of electricity stung the air of the Chamber as Dago sought a rubber instrument from his gaberdine.
The prime minister spoke.
Dago stood, and showed Parliament his Little Johnny.
*
Looking across at Dago Mary took her cue and urged her vomit into the waiting cavity of her mouth. Then she stood, leant over the railing and ejaculated a hideous jetsam onto the Chamber below.
Dago was now out of his seat with the doll in one hand and the threatening instrument in the other. He was in full voice and the prime minister was looking upward in alarm as the rubbery figure plunged into the doll’s rectum.
*
Donk was quick to take advantage of the pandemonium to advance swiftly to the edge of the railing. Under cover of his gaberdine he found his erectile muscle and inched it over the railing. With an unexpected burst of brilliant pleasure Dago shot salvos of semen into the Parliamentary air.
It was over without too much fuss and Donk withdrew into his gaberdine and sat down again. His smile was wide as he kept his eye on the growing activity below. He met their upturned stares with a smirk and decided it was time to leave.
*
Cunt’s predicament was awkward if he were successfully to burst into a human bonfire. Apart from timing, there was the difficulty of being in position without the accoutrement of self-ignition cluttering the gallery and causing security to view him with suspicion.
He had to bring to conclusion all the preparations in a concomitant explosion of fulfilment. He didn’t want to hang around after the event, to be packed into a meat bag and rushed to hospital with horrible wounds and a terrible stench like when the neighbours burnt their dead cat.
No! He wanted to explode.
Not to simmer like frozen prawns in oil or burn like a stack of leaves on an autumn afternoon. No! He wanted to burst into millions of bloody fragments and to shower the whole fucking lot of parasites with his shit life.
He wanted those pricks of politicians to experience what it was like to have shit poured on them from above. He wanted them to understand the dreadful impulse that drove an ordinary bloke to spontaneous combustion. He wanted them to be stained with the awful effects of their policies, to be showered with the blood and guts of their political victim, the microcosmic and epitomic citizen of Australia.
*
‘Cunt!’
The air within the vehicle became uncertain.
And soon became silent.
A closed gob mob, this, with shifty eyes of accusation.
Mary smiled and saw that Cunt had detached himself from the other end of the vehicle and had begun his way back to her. She liked to watch people in public vehicles, rooted to their places by that strange repulsion of crowds.
They were a restrained lot. She could trample over them and they would whimper gratefully.
She was 24, 144 cm tall, with silver hair, short and spikey. She wore black swastika tattoos on her lobes from which hung Stars of David. Her voice was soft inside a muscular and olive skin, and her hazel eyes swirled giddily in certain lights and she preferred the company of soft friends.
A Master of Science, she possessed a deafening contempt for mediocrity. Clothes were irrelevant. She would wear just about anything, as long as it was gaberdine.
The vehicle air shivered as newspapers bent into newer shapes. The eyes of reprimand returned to avenues of print. A tunnel sucked at the vehicle and everything was ghastly bright as they sped into the darkened worm.
Faces gaunt and faces bored stared along the aisle and then they were out, back into sunlight, and faces in the windows were gone.
‘Ya getting there?’ she asked with vertiginous eyes.
Cunt stared at her with droll and homicidal amusement. He lent his hand to her throat and opened skin below her Star of David. An impatient burst of blood spread across his fingers as he smiled into her eyes.
‘Don’t worry, Mary.’
He lent forward and licked her throat as a sound stirred in the vehicle. With his face wrinkled ruddy he turned to his fellow commuters. His tongue emerged to moisten his lips and then methodically licked his sticky fingers clean.
*
A long way and they were home. Music was loud before evening’s schlep of social drinking.
A crinkled lettuce lay exhausted next to the milk. A fog glowed defiantly as Cunt slammed the fridge shut. Shut against a sudden draft of panic.
Mary tossed her clothes into a space behind a door in the hallway, plugged the bath, and let a fierce blast of hot water from the tap.
‘Want to join me?’ she cried as her toes touched the furious swirl. ‘It’s your turn. Remember!’
Cunt lolled by the door with his eyes ablaze.
‘A bloke blew up in France yesterday.’
‘Yeah?’
Cunt stepped over the rim and squeezed into the bath with Mary.
‘I am serious.’
‘Stick your tongue into my cunt, Cunt. Please!’
‘You’re not listening, are you?’
She smiled.
He took her buttocks into his palms and eased her toward his protruding lips. Her head dipped backward into the water as his tongue brushed her lips.
‘Stuff of the Middle Ages, Cunt. Mind the metal strap.’
It was a strange and sapphistic sight.
*
At the back of the bar images of the room, broken images in a cracked mirror, sepia where years of beers had darkened the glass. Dago grinned and laughed at his cracked and sepia self.
‘Wassa madda, ladda?’
Donk grimaced silently and they both stared defiantly at that sepia world. A hard hum hammered the air. A jostling crowd. A machine in the wall was spitting water. No one minded. Laughter erupted with a sudden jolt and died again immediately. The machine hummed harder.
‘It’s getting worse, you know.’
As he lifted his beer Donk opened his nostrils and a dreamy drip of dew dropped into the froth.
A mite above 172cm, Donk was a physical enigma. His long phallic nose ushered forth fiercely haired nostrils that had a tendency to collect emotional moisture.
He had sparse black hair receding but forced forward in a Bodgie gossamer lump. It was ducktailed to a pony, this mixed metaphor of hair, whimsical and fickle fibres that deserted the pate for the warmth and humidity of the nostrils. He spent excessive time refashioning his hair each time he removed his helmet.
His grey eyes with flecks of white on iris, and slightly slanted inward, gave an impression of vagueness.
At 29, Donk was the elder of the group. Rode a Harley through his BA, and escaped extreme boredom by ploughing through his LLB. A public servant’s enigma with Centrelink, he lived in a gaberdine world of subterfuge and conspiracy.
The wall vibrated like a mad larynx. Dago and Donk had plonked themselves at the far end of the room, beneath the hard hum of the vibrating air conditioner, and beneath the putrid water fountain that spurted from that over-worked machine.
‘It’s pathetic.’
Dago looked quizzically at his friend with the unusual hair and phallic nose. He then leant back in his chair, against the hard humming wall.
‘You’re down, maybe?’ Dago suggested with voice sepulchral and strange. He immediately moved away from the wall and his voice became his again.
‘They’ll never understand, Dago.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘They must be brought to account.’
And Donk did not smile.
*
An arena of ideas collected all four as night faded. Three bottles of mescal stood sentinel as rivulets of mottled liquid moved as lava through the ash of ugly cigarettes. A drowning fly struggled for release, but Cunt’s needle had it skewered. All four stared while it was dying.
‘This government’s cracked and criminal.’
When the fly ceased to beat its frantic wings, Mary withdrew the needle and tossed it and its murdered hostage into the bin. Mary took another huge swig of mescal and said:
‘Coward Howard and his criminal cohorts cannot be held responsible entirely, Cunt. ‘
‘No?’
The others stared at Cunt.
‘Had a bloke in today and the poor bastard went home and opened his veins with the ragged end of a beer bottle. They said it took a couple of hours for him to drain to death. Just sat in front of his TV and bled away.
‘Drank a few beers too, you know. Poor bastard. He was just a young fart, too. Soft voice. Polite. Said he’d be back in a few days to check up on a few things. Poor bastard. We’d docked him six months ‘cos he’d forgotten his appointment.’
Cunt was curling his moustache hairs back into his vulval lips and sucking them with eye-popping relish. Then he blew hard and all his moistened hairs stood out from his mouth in languid spikes.
‘Wouldn’t it be great to burst into flames right in the middle of parliament, right in the middle of Coward Howard’s rant to the nation?’
‘That’s a cunt of an idea, Cunt.’ snarled Mary.
‘Better to blow up the dickhead, wouldn’t it?’ suggested Dago.
‘And make a martyr of him?’ Cunt’s mouth turned scornfully into scorn.
‘The idea is not one of murder, Cunt.’
‘Who suggested anything about murder, Dago?’ asked Mary.
Dago rose and looked steadily at his friends with an expression of anticipation, of wanting to say something but was unable to manifest the structures of his thoughts.
He walked to the door and disappeared into the house beyond. After a while he reappeared and resumed his place among the group. In his left hand was a rolled cloth of sorts, with something wrapped up inside.
He met their questioning gaze. ‘Well … ‘ he said with a quirky smirk.
Dago was 27. He stood 191 cm above the deck. His pallid and depreciated face was framed by black hair, thick and wavy, widow’s peak. A bit like Dorothy Lamour, black eyes, long lashes and thin brows like biro lines across his forehead.
His traditional garb consisted of old gaberdine overcoat, jeans and joggers, sockless and smelly.
Dago painted in oil when he disappeared into his shack at the back of the house. Now and then he’d venture to the shopping centres where he’d sell his paintings from a doorway he’d claimed as his.
He unrolled the cloth in reluctant stages and smiled when they espied the Prime Minister of Australia, resplendent in miniature tuxedo, forty centimetres tall and shining brightly under the light.
‘Fuuu …uuck!’ shouted Cunt with pointed finger and face aghast.
*
A spiteful sun prised them awake from their mescal malaise. Cartoon orbs of splintered red squinted from parched and punctured faces.
Cunt tried to yawn. ‘What’s the fucking time?’ he asked through gravel throat.
No one answered.
The shower ran for an hour. Passions dissolved and by late morning a restlessness rattled. It was Cunt who began drinking again. ‘Is it Saturday?’ he asked needlessly.
‘I hope to fuck it is, Cunt, my worthy lad.’ beamed Donk as he too began to drink.
‘Tis Saturday, since dawn, I beg.’ Said Mary as she leapt back onto the sofa and unplugged the cork from the wine bottle. A few inches of red disappeared. She had a bright expression. And an ardent aim to get drunk again.
Dago arrived with a cognac glass of Black Russian aswirl. He sat on the floor and tasted the vodka cocktail.
A sullen silk gradually settled their mood. Memories of talk were muted. Each trembled slightly as a vagrant discipline sobered their souls. A distant haze of brown made the day murky as the sun struggled to reach the eye.
They talked about what they had come to do with their lives.
Mary wanted to drink herself sick before dragging her swollen carcass into Parliament’s puiblic gallery and vomitiong from the railing.
Dago believed he could effect humourous adventure on the Prime Minister with his voodoo Little Johnny.
Donk could hardly betray his visage with anything other than a theatrical form of seminal ejaculation over the prick who thinks he runs the country.
And Cunt? Cunt never lost his penchant for drama. He went to work on how best to effect spontaneous combustion, right in the middle of the PM’s speech.
*










Chapter 1
[Dago’s turn at the screw]
A spiteful sun prised them awake from their mescal malaise. Cartoon orbs of splintered red squinted from parched and pounctured faces.
Cunt tried to yawn. ‘What’s the fucking time?’ he asked through gravel throat.
No one answered.
He was alone.
Or so he thought. For some time he worked his mind back to a form of reality, a reality stitched together by elements of hate, despair and an urgent need to do something about it all. Then he remembered the others and what they had to do. He sobered instantly.
This was no time for dramatics. The theatrical appeal of applause for an outstanding performance had quickly become a dull tinsel in his mind.
Saturday had come and gone. The weekend had closed behind him. He now faced what his eyes saw and the others were gazing at him.
‘Huh?’ Cunt demanded, lazy and urgent, nervous of this reality.
Mary acted fast and tore Cunt from his place and in panic began to shriek. Donk reacted and tried to remove Cunt’s clothes. Dago was already in the kitchen filling a container with cold water.
There was an odour of burnt dust and a faint aura of smoke above Cunt’s shoulders. Amazement shrouded his features as his friends gabbled and grabbed at him in a panic of concern.
‘Cool, hey!’
The following days were poison. Insidious destruction of ego as the plan formed, consumed them, took them to the edge, tipped them over and held them by their ankles, drained, heady days of poison. When they reached the appointment, met their task, they dissolved within an enormous vat of circumstances and it was only through chance, luck, that they emerged with some semblance of their original purpose.
‘No one’s going to take any notice of us when El Inferno here takes Parliament apart with his simmering hatred.’
Dago, of course, was spot on. A bit of vomit over the rail and a shower of semen don’t rate all that much when a bloke begins to burn.
But a spectacle of intent was perhaps a necessary addendum to Cunt’s magnificent munition of spontaneous combustion. T’was of little use if Cunt’s burnt out body was carted off to the morgue without so much as a what-the-fuck?
There had to be publicised purpose to Cunt’s valiant vaporisation. Dago was comforted by his about turn and said to the others: ‘We could, of course, space our events sequentially, with Little Johnny starting it all off with a bit of satire and comedy and everyone will take it as a bit of a joke and move on. Then we hit them with Mary’s bile transfer and then as they’re distracted and distressed Donk sends his seminal message to all and sundry and Parliament will be awash in a ghastly soup of sperm and spew.’
‘Now that’s not a bad idea, Dago, old chap.’ Cunt smiled that smile that caused his friends to look away. ‘We can proceed then?’
***
It was a Cunt of a day for spontaneous combustion. Cloudy. And a dirty mist of capitalism stank the dank and rank atmosphere around Parliament House.
They stood near Lake Griffin’s shore and eyed their prospect with sullen and sober silence.
Some silly symmetry structured Parliament House above Parliament House and the comparison marked the transition from a pseudo art deco version of modernist Canberra circa 1927 to post-modernist explorative [it reminds one of a space launch site] Canberra circa late 20th century.
‘Order.’
Dago nodded absently and followed his nostril vapour with fretty eyes. His hands held Little Johnny carefully. The specs were clean and set correctly upon the bridge of the nose. Sprightly eyebrows were suddenly bereft of that look of surprise that comes with errant and alarmed individuals of hair. Now a pomaded and brylcreemed figure of a man with that determined look he gets when he’s out for that walk in the morning.
‘Yes, order. Order for the mob. Shake yer head with contempt of the working mob, Little Feller? Yes! That’s it. Just a slight nod of contempt. Not too much energy wasted on the mob.’ Mary said with her slightly syllogistic sense of cynicism. ‘Did you whack on the jell, Dago?’
Dago smiled. He had.
Little Johnny was most spic and span and would be loved by his adoring public. Everyone loves a cute little imp.
‘And your spear? Is ready?’ Again Mary smirked that smirk that smirked at everything on a bad day.
Dago produced the ugliest phallic spear devised by the scatological mind. It was a rubbery thing. But the rubber had a greasy look about it, as if it were rubbed in pig’s fat. Nodules of pussy-looking red gave it that distinctively STD appearance. Nearly ten centimetres long and a nobbly couple of centimetres wide, the spear came to an abrupt and mushroomy end in a twilight of fantastic patterns and colours.
Hypnotically, the phallic spear stared from its demon eye and dared its prey to defy its will.
Mary’s smirk morphed to a smile.
‘Little Johnny will never be so happy.’
*
Mrs Aardvark opened her purse and took out the tidy packet of Kleenex. With a deft stroke she removed the smudged tear from her left eye and blinked away the suggestion of a new torrent of tumult. Of course her pride had been wounded. Of course she forgave him. He was after all the Prime Minister of Australia.
Anyway, she closed her purse with a definite click. She was a purposeful woman. The folio was ready and she took it with her along the corridor. She knocked and entered.
‘Yes? Oh it’s the folio. Thank you, yes, thank you. That will be all.’
Mrs Aardvark removed herself from the Prime Minister’s office and returned to her space along the corridor. Her eyes kept downcast as a cruel thought crossed the horizon of her mind. She suddenly seemed brighter. She lifted her head and began to do things that needed doing.
*
The Prime Minister entered the chamber and took up his position on the front bench. Opposite the gunning Leader of the Opposition. Amid a staccato of Stockhausenistic sibilance the Speaker of the House arose from his Chair and raised his arms. It was theatrical and a sense of comic relief drained the tension and strain from the chamber.
The Leader of the Opposition was standing in his hostile domain and demanding a Point of Order.
‘There is no point of order. The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat.’
The Leader of the Opposition glared at the Speaker, dared the second reprimand, and resumed his seat.
A furore began and those in the gallery leant forward in eager spectacle. Ushers became alert as an agitation rippled Parliament’s visitors. The Malaysian delegation was entering behind its uniformed guide when two gaberdined figures slipped into the gallery.
‘The Member for Werribee has the call.’
Again the Speaker made his devil eye flicker at they who snicker.
The Member for Werribee stood and read from a page of paper.
‘My question, Mr Speaker, is directed to the Prime Minister. Mr Speaker, what wonderful opportunities has this government provided for Australians in the years since 1996?’
As the prime minister took his call a jeer erupted from the Opposition. The Speaker glared. The Malaysian delegation watched impassively with eyes that shone with suffused satisfaction. A certain charge of electricity stung the air of the Chamber as Dago sought a rubber instrument from his gaberdine.
The prime minister spoke.
Dago stood, and showed Parliament his Little Johnny.
The first to react was the youngest member of the Malaysian delegation. She was clad in traditional garb and her hands flew to her face as she screamed.
Pandemonium followed. It was the scream that shook Parliament House. Only a perspicacious home camera caught the insertion of that ugly phallus into the exposed anus of Little Johnny. There was Dago, all excited by his moment. He had Little Johnny over the rail, trousers about the stick legs, the pustular penis pumping the posterior of the puppet.
The Malaysian delegation had concentrated on the woman who screamed. Her figure had collapsed back into her seat and her companions had surrounded her with their alarm. The hubbub of concern was growing into a tut-tut turret of tantrum. And none noticed the pantomime of Dago doing the demo on the demagogue.
None but the Prime Minister. He was agog at his effigy being pummelled by the demon dick.
*

Chapter Two
[Mary finds it quite contrary]

Mary mused upon the artefact of discovery. She was becoming a character within her own fiction and her fate seemed to have been sealed by the strictures of authorship. She couldn’t turn away from her own inventions and fantasies; she was bound to her whims.
Alcoholism was a word that appeared as a subject of erudite comment from the media; it never was considered to be a permanent guest in her world. The boozy broad of her imagination was excused the sin of indulgence with the euphemism of exuberance. The glutton who served her own excesses with intoxicating replenishments was an orphan of chance and little responsibility rested in her lap.
The picture of her spewing over the gallery railing was crafted on sculpture rather than upon effect. The image of Mary, full to the brim with the vestiges of vomit, had to match her ever-changing mood. The tragic drunk or the violent vixen venting venom; she had a plethora of characters to be when she wanted to be, and that question had just been answered.
The Prime Minister was searching the gallery with that little boy look of Ginger Meggs at the church fete. Then his search ended and Mary felt an elastic elation energising endlessly effortlessly effervescence over the rail and silver satin gossamer vomit etched and stained and stung and stank all over the scene below.
The effect was a scintillating sputter of sputum that seemed to hang forever above the heads of politicians as they waited for their brains to react. Then the sodden spray suddenly sank and spotted and spoiled

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