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When it stopped, Sally and Anton threw their bags from the doorway and climbed down from the smoky, bottle-strewn carriage. The last few stops had been at small, deserted stations, in little towns surrounded by rainforest. Like this one really, only with no people. As they pushed their way through the crowd, they wondered vaguely why there were so many people here. They didn't seem to be getting on the train or meeting people off it, although there was a definite feeling about them that they were waiting for something important.
But the feeling of mild puzzlement passed quickly as they looked again at the name on the back of the platform seat. "Goonabah" it said, in blue on a yellow background.
"We're really here!" Sally said excitedly. She grinned at Anton and threw her arms round him, giving him a sloppy rain-drenched kiss.
"Yeah, here at last!" He smiled wearily. It had been a bloody long journey, and the last part had been the hardest.
Sixteen hours on the train from Sydney. It had hardly seemed possible that it could take so long. After all, it had only taken ten hours longer than that to come from the other side of the world. But they'd done it. And now here they were at the end of their journey.
"I can't see Max anywhere." Anton said, trying to see through the milling crowd on the platform. "Perhaps the train's early."
"He probably couldn't fit on the platform with all these people here!" Sally replied, laughing. "Let's go and wait in that shelter outside."
"Good morning good sir. If the weather keeps up like this we should all be fishes by March, and a hand from the sky will whisk us a way to some heavenly fishmongers!" The man speaking was bent almost double, in an exaggerated bow towards the litter bin he was apparently speaking to. He stood upright and danced a short jig, before raising an imaginary hat to Sally and staggering off up the road.
Startled, Sally and Anton jumped backwards as he passed them. His shoulder-length hair was partly controlled by a red an yellow embroidered headband, but the rest stuck out crazily around his ears, intensifying the wild look of his heavily lined face. He smiled a cross-eyed smile as he raised his imaginary hat.
"I wonder if they're all like that around here." Anton smiled as he recovered his posture after the man had passed.
"I hope not!" Sally laughed at the idea. "But it looks like a strange little town!"
They waited outside the station for over an hour before they decided that Anton's cousin Max wasn't going to come and meet them. Perhaps they'd got the date wrong when they wrote to him. Or maybe he hadn't got the letter. It was surprising he wasn't there, but there must be some explanation for it. At least they knew they were in the right town, so it shouldn't be too hard finding him. Somebody would know where he lived.
"Well why don't we go into town and have a cup of tea?" Sally said, standing up and stretching. She was still stiff from sitting in the uncomfortable train seat all night. They'd tried to get a sleeper, but had been told they were too late.
"You have to book sleepers three weeks in advance on this route, i'm afraid." the booking clerk had told them with a bored shrug of the shoulders.
"But that's ridiculous!" Sally had almost shouted. Jetlagged and severely culture-shocked, she had already begun to get the impression that the australian government was out to get them. The queue at immigration control, with the little uniformed official, sporting a hitler-style moustache, strutting around and shouting at people for stepping over the yellow lines, had been the first sign. Then there were the lines down the centre of the pavements on the streets in Sydney, with arrows to make sure the pedestrians walked on the right side of them. These two things had made her begin to realise that maybe things weren't going to be quite the same here as they were at home. And now there was this.
"Don't complain to me", the ticket clerk had said with another shrug, "or i won't sell you a ticket at all!"
It was all Sally could do to stop herself punching him out, there and then. But she had the feeling that if she didn't get used to this and control herself, they would never get anywhere.
And now here they were, in a strange town on the other side of the world, and no-one to meet them. It would have been enough to make you cry if you didn't laugh at it. The only sensible thing to do was to go and have a cup of tea. It would turn out alright in the end. Then they could look back on it all and have a good laugh.
*-*-*
"Haven't seen youse round here before!" the skinny man behind the counter of the Starlight cafe snapped at them as they walked in. "I hope youse don't take drugs. Coz if youse do, don't come in here." He pushed a couple of yellow tablets out of the plastic bubbles on a silver card and swallowed them without a drink. Sally noticed the writing on the packet: "Valium".
"What?" Anton stopped in his tracks. "We just want a cup of tea!"
"Just warning you." the skinny man said. "We have some funny sorts in here sometimes. Oy you!" he yelled in the direction of the tables, where a young spiky-haired man was sitting. His head was drooping and he looked like he was going to sleep. "Get the fuck out of here now!"
The man's head snapped back into an upright position when he heard the shout. He looked vaguely nervous as he tried to ignore the proprietor, who by now had jumped over the counter and was standing by the table.
"Who, me? But i haven't done nothing."
"You think i'm stupid or something? I saw ya nodding off. Come on, get the fuck out now or i'll call the cops."
The spiky-haired man laughed strangely as he slowly stood up. "Why? D'you wanta buy a beer?" He walked to the door, grinning now, as the skinny man let out a low yell.
"What was that all about?" Anton whispered to Sally as they sat down with their cups of tea. They were soaking wet, but it was a lot warmer than the sort of weather they were used to, so it didn't seem to matter that much.
"I'm buggered if i know!" she replied. "But i'm beginning to get the feeling that we're on the wrong planet!"
"Hah! Don't let him worry you."
They both jumped and looked up at the person who'd spoken. The first thing they noticed about her was her eyes. There was something really unusual about them, as if they could see things non-one else could. The pattern of lines around them added to the effect by drawing your attention to that part of her face. They also protruded a bit, giving her a slightly reptilian look. She sat down next to Anton and stared across the table, straight through Sally.
"He's crazy. He really hates drugs. He's totally obsessed by it."
"But... He's taking valium!" Sally replied, startled by the way this newcomer was staring at her. It was almost as if she was looking into her mind.
The woman laughed, throwing her head back and shaking it from side to side. "He doesn't think valium's drugs! The doctor gives it to him, so he thinks it's medicine! I told you he's a nut!"
Their laughter at this somehow broke the spell, and the two travellers relaxed for the first time since they'd got off the train. They looked at each other, gaining some kind of reassurance that they weren't completely mad.
"Anyway, i'm Julie. I haven't seen you two in town before. Just come in on the train, did you?" She held out her hand and they took turns to shake it and introduce themselves.
"Yeah, that's right." Anton answered. "We were supposed to meet my cousin Max at the station, but he never showed up."
"We've just arrived here from england and we don't know anyone else. We've never been here before and it's all a bit confusing." Sally joined in.
"Fresh off the banana boat, eh?" Julie chuckled. "And you've come to Goonabah?" She laughed again, a more sinister laugh this time. Both Sally and Anton felt a slight tingle run down their spines at this, but neither of them said anything. "Well, you could have done a lot worse. There's a lot of good people here. But watch out," she leaned over the table and lowered her voice, "some of them are real weirdos!" She looke up at a short bearded man who was walking towards their table. "Like this one!" She looked at him with pure hatred in her face.
"Good morning Julie, nice to see you're your usual friendly self today!" He sat down next to Sally, not even appearing to notice her presence, and stared at Julie. "You must be the most beautiful woman in th whole of Goonabah! Did you know that before Jesus christ was born the roman emperor was into this strange form of magic and he had just performed a ritual to summomn up a devil in Jerusalem when..."
"Fuck yourself Astro!" Julie snarled. She stood up and moved to another table.
"Don't take any notice of her." He turned to Anton and Sally, "She loves me really. Anyway, as i was saying, he was trying to conjure up this devil when christ was born. It's all written down in this secret manuscript they've just discovered in a cave in the south of spain..." He carried on talking as if he'd known them for ages.
Feeling totally lost, and not knowing how to shut this new weirdo up, Anton just switched off and looked around him, aware for the first time of his surroundings.
The Starlight cafe was long and narrow, with a big old egraved mirror on one wall. In front of this wall was a long, brown formica-covered counter with an old espresso machine sitting on it at one end. The rest of the walls were painted in a sludge-brown, creamy sort of colour. Well, the original colour would have been cream, anyway. And dotted around them were views of the Sydney harbour bridge. There were about a dozen of them, all taken from different angles and all framed in silver plastic. There were tables along the wall opposite the counter, and a jukebox at the far end was playing a Kylie Minogue song quietly.
He looked round towards the front of the shop, which had a big glass window in it and an open door. Outside the door, a few people were standing talking and looking at the great rivers of water that was running down the gutter. Beyond the wide, flat awnings, which were keeping them dry, was an almost solid wall of rain. It looked like someone was pouring a giant-sized bucket of water from the sky. Anton had known it was rainforest around this area, but somehow he hadn't been quite prepared for this. Surely it couldn't rain like this all the time though!
*-*-*
"Well, we're really no closer to finding your cousin, are we ?" Sally said to Anton after the bearded man had talked for half an hour about fuck-knows-what. His name really was Astro - short for Astronaut, he told them. He thought he might have met Max in the Starlight a few times, and he'd left town a few weeks ago to go overseas. But, judging by the rest of what he'd said to them, they didn't pay much attention to this possibility.
"What are we going to do?"
The only address they had for Max was c/o Post Office, Goonabah, which wasnn't a lot of help. They didn't even know what road he lived in, or where it was in relation to town. He'd given them some vague descriptions of the place in letters, but there had been nothing that was concrete enough to find him by. They knew he lived in the hills and had no phone or electricity. But, at a guess, so did lots of people around here.
This sort of vagueness ran in Anton's family, Sally thought, trying to stop herself from blaming him for the whole fiasco. His mother was the sort of person who couldn't remember your name from one minute to the next. Shit! she couldn't even remember having met you before, most of the time. In fact when her and anton got married, she'd asked Sally if she was a friend of the bride! Anton was a bit like that in some ways too. She'd come across him sometimes, just sitting staring at a wall or into space somewhere, totally disconnected from the rest of the world. At these times it would take him several minutes to come to and work out who she was and where they were.
Bearing this in mind, she thought, it wasn't really surprising that Max hadn't met them at the station. He was probably sittin on a hill somewhere, talking to a tree. And here she was, in a town full of weirdos, married to a weirdo and looking for another weirdo! She laughed out loud at this thought.
What's so funny?" Anton asked, snapping out of a daydream. He'd been imagining himself flying all the way from england on his own, without the aid of an aeroplane. Swooping like a bird through the dark skies over india. Looking down at the little puddles of yellow light shining up at him out of the vast expanses of darkness.
Then, as daylight came, he was soaring throught the brilliant blue skies above a sea almost the same colour, around the islands of indonesia. He had just flown through the baking hot air currents above the great dry stretches of desert in the centre of australia, and was coming down to land in the tree-covered mountains near the coast, when Sally's laugh interrupted his flight. He fell down to earth with a crash and landed at a table in the Starlight cafe.
"What're you laughing at?"
"Oh, just thinking." Sally answered slowly. "About your dopey family and how we got into this ridiculous situation!"
"I suppose it's my fault, is it?" Anton retorted angrily. "You're the one that wanted to come to australia in the first place!"
"Thank god that prick's gone!" Julie said, sitting down next to Sally. She'd noticed the tension rising between the couple and thought her presence might help to diffuse it. They were obviously tired and a bit lost, she thought, and fighting now wouldn't help the way they felt.
"He drives me crazy with his eternal raving." She smiled at them in turn, as they looked around at her, a bit surprised by her presence. "I suppose you want to try and find your cousin, eh?"
"It would help." Sally answered, smiling back, her anger quickly dissolving. A flash of intuition told her that she would become good friends with this woman. Although she appeared quite strange at first, she was obviously a genuinely nice person. "We've come such a long way, and spent so much time travelling. All i want to do is lie down and go to sleep."
"Well, if the worst comes to the worst, you can always do that in the park."
"But it's pissing down!"
"There's a couple of shelters there. One is usually full of people drinking, but the other is always empty. You can lie down in it. It's pretty comfortable. I should know," she laughed, "i lived there for a couple of months!"
"Really!" Sally was astonished. "Why was that?"
"Oh, it's almost impossible to find a house around here. You wouldn't believe the places some people live. The lucky ones find a shed somewhere, or maybe get away with building a shack in the forest. Others live in humpies and tents. And the worst off live under the hall, or in the park when it's dry."
"Jesus! I thought this was supposed to be the lucky country!" Anton was amazed at this revelation. Somehow, he'd thought he'd left that sort of homelessness behind in London.
"Lucky for some, mate! The rich bastards. They've got it alright. That's why we have to live like this, because those arseholes have taken the lot. But, anyway, what was your cousin's name again? Somebody'll know him."
*-*-*
"Ohhh. Shit!" Anton groaned, putting his hands to his head as he rolled over on the hard concrete floor of the shelter. Outside, the rain was still pissing down, turning the already soggy park into a swamp. The light was starting to fade and Anton felt totally disorientated. He couldn't work out whether it was morning or night and he had no idea at all where he was. Beside him, Sally stirred too and began to wake up.
"Uuuugh!" she said, sitting up slowly and rubbing her eyes. "I feel like someone's dragged myu guts out, scrubbed them with a wire brush and put them back inside me again!"
"Yeah, i know what you meanj!" Anton was now fully awake. He'd worked out where they were and that it must be evening, not morning. But it hardly made him feel any better. "I don't think it's such a good idea sleeping in the day time this soon after flying from europe. It seems to have brought the jetlag on again." He groaned once more, as if to demonstrate the fact, and stood up. "What the fuck do we do now?"
They'd given up struggling with their tired and aching bodies some time after one o'clock and gone to lay down in the park like Julie had suggested. She said she'd keep asking around if anyone knew Max while they slept, so they might have somewhere to go by now. They didn't feel so tired after their sleep, but in some ways they both felt worse for it. A sort of confused nausea had taken the place of their exhaustion, and their bodies seemed to be trying to switch back to european time.
"You know what i wan?" Sally said, standing up next to Anton, her confusion suddenly changing to decisiveness. "A double scotch!"
*-*-*
Everyone in the pub turned and stared at them when they walked in the door, and a sudden silence fell over the smoky room. The feeling of all those eyes looking at him made Anton feel like turning round and running out, which is exactly what he would have done if Sally and Julie hadn't been there too. But he kept his desire to flee under control and walked casually up to the bar.
A sign said: De-louse your hair.
No patched clothes
No coloured hair. Above it, the clock said twenty to seven.
"But don't take any notice of that." Julie said, "It's set to queensland time. This is new south wales and the time is an hour later here."
"Why have they got the clock set on queensland time?" Sally asked, the clearness in her head fading away rapidly under the disturbing influence of the pub's strange atmosphere.
"Because they think they're in queensland, that's why!" Julie replied, half sneering, half smirking. "Half the people in Goonabah think the town in in queensland! All the alkies think so. You see, we're right on the border here and due to some surveying bollocks-up by the Poms last century or something, Goonabah somehow managed to avoid being included in either state. It sounds ridiculous, i know." She paused, seeing the puzzled looks on the faces of her two new friends. "But it's really true. The town's so small that it's completely covered by the line on the map that shows where the border is. And half the town's convinced we're north of the border and the other half is sure we're to the south of it.
"Naturally, all the rednecks are in queensland. And all the other alkies too, for some reason. Goonabah's gay community, of course, like to live in the security of knowing they're in new south wales and quite legal. So long as they're over eighteen, that is. The local cop is a queensland man, not surprisingly, as it gives him more power. But he's more interested in having a quiet life than upholding the law. Anyway, new south wales is paying his wages this year!"
"But why hasn't the government sorted it out?" Anton asked fascinated by the ridiculousness of the situation.
"Well, they've tried." Julie answered, aware they didn't believ her. She hadn't believed it herself when she'd first arrived in Goonabah. But it didn't take long to find out it was true. "In the early years of this century, the queensland and new south wales governments started to try and resolve the problem. But then they both wanted the town and they couldn't reach an agreement about who'd have it. Now they both DON't want it. As soon as one changed their mind, so did the other. It's sort of a matter of interstate pride and rivalry. For one government to agree with the other would be too much like admitting that their state wasn't better than the other! They even tried to hold a referendum to sort it out, but the result came out exactly fifty-fifty, down to the last vote.
"Of course they could leave it up to the federal government to sort it out, but there's no chance of either state ever agreeing with anything the federal government decided, so they'd be right back to where they started again."
When Julie started explaining it, the whole thing had sounded quite far-fetched, but as they listened to her explain it, both Anton and Sally had a creeping feeling she was telling the truth. From what they'd seen of the town so far, it didn't seem totally unlikely.
"But how do they work out the things that are normally run by the state government, if they can't decide which state they're in?" Sally asked, quickly dismissing the thought that maybe the whole of australia was as strange as this.
"Well, the school sort of teachesw a mixture of the two states' curriculums, and somehow they've managed to get the tow states to share the running costs without causing too many complications. And the police and fire brigade swap states each financial year. Like, this year, the cop is part of the new south wales police force and the fire station comes under the queensland fire department. Last year it was the other way around. They made up special magnetic stickers for the side of the fire engine, so they can change the name on the side of it according to what year it is. And the cop's always got a spare uniform in his wardrobe, waiting for the next financial year. But he's barely interested in that. He puts more energy into running this place."
At this, Anton and Sally both looked round them at the pub they were sitting in. Most of the drinkers had turned their attention back to their beer glasses, but a few of the slower and more pissed ones were still staring at them, almost openmouthed. It was as if the three of them had just landed from another galaxy.
"The cop runs the pub?" Sally said feeling more and more lost in this unfamiliar world.
"That's right. So of course it doesn't matter whether the clock is set to queensland time or new south wales time, because the place never closes anyway. Funnily enough though, this is the only place where not knowing what state we're in does cause a major problem."
"Why's that?"
"Well, in new south wales the beer comes in 'middy' glasses, which are ten ounce, and 'schooner' glasses which are fifteen. But in queensland they have 'glasses', which are seven ounces, and 'pots', which are ten. So there's no end of confusion and arguments, even though all the drinkers reckon they're in queensland. You know what drinkers are like!"
"Er... well... we drink a bit." Anton replied weakly. He felt like he was being personally attacked. "Don't you?"
"Oh, a drop now and then, yeah. But with this lot it's a religion. It's not so much the drinking which makes the difference really though. But don't tell anyone i said so. It's more which side you're on in the town. Looki," She paused, uncertain how much she should tell them, "you'll get the hang of it after you've been here for a while."
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