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Sally and Julie had spent all afternoon in the pub, drinking and playing pool. By the time they left, the bus had been out on its evening run and come back again. The four adults and the two kids had spent a couple of hours in the Starlight cafe while it was out. This was the bus dwellers' usual afternoon ritual, if they didn't have anything else to do.
"Guess what," Anton said to Sally, once he'd checked out her mood and found it wasn't too hostile. "Phil reckons were in the wrong town!"
Sally laughed. "I could have told you that!" she said, with just a trace of a slur in her voice.
"Eh?" Anton was puzzled. "Did you know?"
"Know what?" Sally lay down on the seat and put her head on Anton's lap.
"There's another Goonabah."
"What?!" She sat up again and looked at him. Then, feeling mildly sick from sitting up too fast, she lay back down. "You serious?"
"Yeah, that's right." Phil joined in. "I'm not sure exactly where it is, but if we're in queensland, it's in new south wales, and vice versa. Whichever state it's in, it's about fifteen hundred kilometres from here, right near the border with the state next to it too."
"Ohhh..." Sally groaned. "I might have known! I bet that's where Max lives, not here."
"Yeah, that's why we couldn't find him." Anton said. "What the fuck are we going to do?"
"Well, i don't care what you do love, but i'm doing sweet F.A." She looked up at him wondering if she really didn't care what he did. "There's no way in the world you'll drag me off to another little town called Goonabah, which is probably more crazy than this one and where Max probably doesn't live either!"
Anton laughed. "Yeah, that's what i reckon. Now we're here, we might as well stay here. I'll write him a letter and tell him what happened."
"It'll never get there!" Yota said. "You can be quite sure that if you send a letter to Goonabah from here it'll just stay here, 'cause they'll think you mean this Goonabah."
Sally and Anton groaned at this thought. It was true, of course. It was that sort of town.
"We're going up to Phil's place tomorrow." Anton said, stroking Sally's long, light brown hair. "Want to come? He lives up in the hills."
"I might." Sally replied a bit abruptly. The alcohol was beginning to wear off now, and the feeling of euphoria was turning into nausea and a hangover. "I'll see..."
*-*-*
"How much further?" Anton asked breathlessly. The hill was almost vertical and the rain seemed even heavier than ususal. If that was possible.
"Oh not far now." Phil replied. He had Rainbow on his shoulders and he was panting slightly. But apart from that he didn't seem to find the hill too hard. "We're almost halfway."
"What?!"
"Only joking. It's just round the next corner." I remember the first time i walked up here. I couldn't believe how hard it was. But since i've been living here, it's got a lot easier. I've got a lot fitter too. Just keep remembering there's a taste waiting for you at the top!"
"Let's run!" Yota shouted. They all laughed.
Anton, Phil, Yota, Raphael and the kids had all managed to get a lift out there together, in the back of a ute. Anton had been amazed at how easy it was hitching on that road. The first car that came along stopped and took them all the way.
It was a new experience for Anton, sitting in the open back of the ute, driving along Mainline Road and into the hills. He was beginning to get used to the rain now and, sitting facing backwards, it didn't feel too bad.
Not far from Goonabah, the hills began to rise out of the flatter ground around the town. Here, they looked mainly cultivated, with all the original trees having been cleared years ago. But as the hills got higher and they got deeper into them, the native rainforest began to take over from the bananas and the cows.
The houses, which were suburban style and obvious at first, began to shift back into the trees and blend in more with their surroundings. Until, finally, there were none to be seen from the road.
Some of trees were pretty amazing too. Lke the giant strangler fig they passed, whose trunk was a collection af arm-thick sections, criss-crossed around another tree underneath. It would, although Anton didn't know this when he saw it, eventually kill the tree it was wrapped around, leaving a dead stump in the middle of it. When this finally rotted away, the strangler fig would be left with a hollow mesh of plaited wood for a trunk.
As they drove deeper and deeper into the hills that surrounded the Mainline valley, Anton felt a tight, almost sick feeling grow in his guts. Later, he would get to recognise this and accept it as just one of the strange effects of the powerful forces coming from the land around there. But today, he put it down to the previous day's indulgence in opiates.
Sally didn't go with them that morning, as her and Anton had a massive fight before they left. Anton had wanted to get more smack and Sally had been furious. She'd laid into him verbally for nearly an hour before they left to go to Phil's place.
While they'd been fightin, Phil and Rafa had gone to the station to "catch the train", as they called it. They came back with a couple of little silver packets of white powder.
Eventually, Sally had stormed off, leaving Anton dazed and confused. He hadn't forseen how much trouble a small smack binge could cause. Sally's hangover probably hadn't helped, of course, but he had the feeling that troubled times lay ahead.
"We saw Julie at the station." Rafa said as they were walking towards Mainline road to start hitching out of town.
"Does she use too?" Anton asked, wondering how Sally would react if she met a stoned Julie wandering around that morning.
"Yeah, of course." Yota answered in mock indignation. "All the decent people in this town are junkies. Most of the rest of its inhabitants are hideous!"
And now here they were, all thoroughly soaked, struggling up this impossibly steep hill to Phil's house. But at least, as Phil had reminded them, they could have a blast of smack when they got there. That would warm them up a bit.
"Here it is." Phil announced as they came round the corner.
Suddenly the driveway flattened out and a weird looking timber house appeared a short distance away from them. In front of it there was a small creek running parallel to the road. Between the creek and the house, an enamel bath tub stood on four wooden stumps. Smoke billowed out from around the sides of it and there was a woman with bleached blond dreads sitting in the bath, staring up at the tree tops.
"G'day Phil." She looked around and smiled as she saw them walking towards her.
*-*-*
This unusual scene affected Anton strongly. It struck him as being perhaps the most typically australian sight he'd come across yet. Somehow the picture it presented seemed tocontain the essence of at least one aspect of australian culture. The unpainted and roughly built wooden house, raised above the ground on metre high timber posts, surrounded on three sides by dense and wild looking sub-tropical rainforest. A woman sitting in an open-air bath with smoke billowing all around it and raindrops splashing on the surface of the bath water. A creek flowing in the foreground of the picture, which they'd had to wade through to get to the house. And the whole scene made solid, and at the same time rendered two dimensional byt the ever present pouring rain.
It was a picture that would remain in his mind for a very long time. One that somehow, subconsciously, taught him something new about his environment and made him realise quite strongly that he really wasn't in europe any more. That australia was very different, despite a lot of illusory signs which contradicted that reality. Somehow, out here, the collective hallucination produced by the minds of european migrants on mass began to fade. The european delusion, that product of mass hysteria, which large numbers of disorientated and scared migrants had managed to wrap themselves up in, had no effect out here, away from the cities. This really was australia.
That revelation flashed into Anton's mind momentarily. And the disappeared as fast as it had arrived. It left him with and uneasy feeling that he'd forgotten something and he couldn't work out what it was. In fact, it was still lodged somehwere at the back of his consciousness, a seed that would take several years to germinate and grow into a clear understanding of his new surroundings. But from that moment, he did see australia from a slightly different point of view, a point of view that maybe a lot of australians - both born and migrated - never do quite get hold of.
Phil introduced the woman in the bath as Zara and they walked past her into the house.
To get to the verandah, where the front door was, they had to climb up a steep slope which the rain had turned into a slippery mud slide. Anton found, after a couple of goes, that the only way to get up it was by sort of walking sideways and digging his heels firmly into the mud. At the top of this, some broken wooden steps led to the verandah.
"I wouldn't want to do thid drunk!" he said when he finally reached the safety of the doorway.
Inside, the house looked like the aftermath of a riot. In one corner about fifty cassettes lay strewn around, as if thrown carelessly from the other side of the room. A filthy carpet was covered in cigarette butts and dirty plates and cups, with comics scattered here and there at random. Half adozen bottles of McWilliams Royal Reserve port lay dead around the edges and two silver wine cask linings sat deflated by the torn boxes that had once contained them. An ugly brown dog was sprawled in front of the fireplace, which was full up with empty cigarette packets and other assorted bits of rubbish.
A man dressed in torn clothes with a partly shaven head and multicoloured dreadlocks sat slumped in a broken armchair staring at the floor. He looked up as Phil spoke.
"Jeezus, this place is a fucking tip!" Phil spat, looking round the room. "Have a bit of a party last night, did you Alien?"
"Uh... Yeah..." the reply was slow and vacant.
"That's the worst thing about living here." Phil turned to Anton as he spoke. "All the derros and degenerates around here like to use this house as the local party house. And look at the fucking mess they make! None of them would ever think of cleaning up or taking their rubbish with them when they go. There's bugger all you can do about it though." He shrugged in resignation. "If you tell them to fuck off, they get all offended and abuse you. They keep away for a couple of days, but they're soon back with flagons and goonies. Innit, Alien?"
"Uuh... Yeah..." Alien looked up from the empty port flago he was idly pushing along the carpet with his foot. Anton wondered what combination of drugs had reduced him to this kind of vegetable state so early in the day. Last night's port probably, by the look of things.
Phil quickly did a trick reminiscent of Moses parting the Red Sea and all the debris was suddenly banished into the nether regions around the walls. It sat there sullenly eyeing up its oppressor and looking as if it was waiting for the chance to jump back out and spread itself over the floor again. Ignoring its cries of protest, Phil sat down in its old territory in the middle of the carpet.
He produced a spoon from somewhere, then the two silver packets and a handful of fits. Yota went to fill a cup from the creek, as there was port coloured vomit in the water bucket, and Phil began to mix up a hit for them all.
Anton sat on a battered old lounge and watched the proceedings with a growing feling of nervousness. Then he looked away and began to check out the rest of the house.
Downstairs was basically all one room, with a wall the width of the stairs dividing it in the middle. A balcony at the top of the stairs led to a loft the same size as the bottom floor, which was again all one room. Hanging under the stairs was a child's toy animal with a big wooden stake through its heart and red drops of blood painted onto it.
Around the walls were various posters. "Don't let houses rot - squat." said one, "Crass" said another and a third one had a photo of an animal being tortured, above an anti-vivisection slogn. As well as the posters, there were pictures and patterns painted onto the bare wood, obviously by a number of different hands.
The other side of the stairs was a kitchen area, with a sink, a couple of battered old cupboards and a bottled gas burner on a shelf. The sink was piled up with dirty plates and the floor was dotted with scraps of old foot. A rat sat by the leg of one of the cupboards chewing on a piece of cabbage.
Anton found the overall effect of this house vaguely disturbing. His mind had some difficulty joining together the apparently idyllic rainforest setting outside with the deranged and chaotic mess inside the house. Alien seemed to fit in quite well with the inside, and Zara in the bath seemed quite in harmony with her surroundings outside, but the two places seemed to be part of completely different worlds.
And where did Phil fit into it all? He seemed quite comfortable and at home both inside and outside the house, but somehow neither of them seemed to quite fit his personality. Or at least the side of his personality that Anton had got to know. He had a sort of english city manner to him which cetainly didn't go with the australian bush. And he seemed quite clean and together, not the sort of person to live in a house like this.
But Anton's pondering was cut short by Phil placing a loaded fit in his had. And very soon he was to preoccupied with other feeling to wonder any more about his incongruous surroundings.
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