Surfing Antarctica: A Novel

SURFING ANTARCTICA Charting the course of the ultimate enviro-flick in the making, Surfing Antarctica is funny and savage, wild and raunchy. A hyper-contemporary, highcamp adventure story for the Greenie in us all. Out there gal Zan co-stars with the hardcore (in more ways than one) Hiroshima Hiroshima. Together with duelling directors Darwin and Kenji, they forge a path of mayhem and moral might versus the one-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins all-consuming yuppies. On the movie-making trail, real life keeps getting in the way — corrupt politicians, environmentallydicey development deals, nuclear protestors, retail therapy, sex, the Yakuza — but it’s not all high jinks and haute couture. Our eco-heroes are totally committed to their cause, and deadly serious. It’s just not always clear what the cause is, or which side everyone’s on. Just who is running this show anyway?

In 1983 Liane Shavian moved from San Francisco to Albany in south-west Australia where she has been writing happily ever after. Her poems and short stories have placed in various literary competitions nationally and have been published in Australian Weekend Literary Magazine , Penthouse and Westerly. She began working on Surfing Antarctica , her first novel, immediately after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Liane hopes you enjoy Mom’s Chilli Beans recipe on page 104.

SURFING ANTARCTICA a novel

Liane Shavian

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS

First published 1999 by FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS PO Box 158, North Fremantle Western Australia 6159. Copyright © Liane Shavian, 1999. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant editor Janet Blagg. Production Coordinator Cate Sutherland. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by Success Print, Bayswater. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data Shavian, Liane, 1943 – . Surfing Antarctica ISBN

1 86368 255 4

I. Title A823.3 The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission.

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

To all of you who are fighting the Green Fight.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons — living or dead — is entirely coincidental.

1 1 She flops out of sleep like a fish out of water, flips about on the bed like a stunned tuna caught in the net and fighting it, fighting it. Wanting back in the cosy confusion of fast flowing feelings, the swim of the dream. Sheehan. As handsome as Sundance. In the Crazy Horse, Paris. Champagne and spangles. Men in tuxedos. An extravagant floorshow. Perfect sleek women. With perfect sleek tits and perfect sleek asses. And black feather boas. Les fesses fatales of expensive French sex. Standing room only. In a crush of silk and tuxedos. Sweat and Calèche. Gauloises and garlic. I plain as an Australian Jane among the designer rape fantasy tarts. Sheehan smiles a small nasty smile. He grabs me and holds me. In the tuxedo shadows no one can see. His hand up my dress stroking and rubbing. Rubbing and stroking. Opening me. In his

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eyes I can see small spangled spotlights. Shiny pink bits of the tits and ass dance wink and prink in the dark in his eyes. His cock swells in the tuxedo shadows. Like a dog, pushes its nose in my hand … Oh! Coming with Sheehan in the Crazy Horse, Paris … on the first stroke of midnight … Yanked out of the slip of a slow sweet liquescence, left high and dry on an alien queensize, on the edge of a come, Zan sits bolt upright, cocked like a gun. The room is dark as night in a black and white movie, a fuzzy pale dryer-lint grey. The air smells expensive, efficiently filtered, no smoke, no human odours; a small high-tech sighing up in the ceiling expires an ambient cool. She knows without asking she is alone. The only heat in the room is the gathering heat under the covers. She kicks off the floaty feather-light duvet. Her scent rises up feral and sharp as a mink or a vixen. The high lonesome blues smell of sex unrequited makes her throat hurt. Her mouth aches with longing. She can almost taste Sheehan, subtle as oysters his seawater sperm. A long sad slide starts inside her, knocking her off her grown-up foundations, dragging her back to her first memory. Mummy … Mummy … Don’t leave me, Mummy … She gropes for her Walkman and pops in her favourite Bob Marley. ‘Meet chu at your house at a quatah to eight. Oooooh Baby, donchu be late. Rockitbaaby Rockitbaaby toonight!’ It isn’t easy but she tries to stay upbeat. The last time she got laid was on April Fool’s Day, the day she jettisoned Sheehan. Or did he leave her? She can’t remember. All the long day as she cruises the gilded suburbs in 8

search of some hot fashion gossip — teabagging midmorning at the classy Indiana Tea House on the Indian Ocean, lunching on sushi at the Tsunami, cafe-hopping in Claremont in the late afternoon, on the lookout for Lisa McCune or Marcus Graham — thoughts about Sheehan keep popping up and breaking inside her like shiny iridescent soap bubbles, leaving her wet-faced and hollow. He is so bigger-than-life his absence hulks empty around her. Those big booming appraisals she measured herself by echo inside her like a funeral drum. She is so horny she finds herself perving the trolley boy Rodney in Woolies, the long loose lean lank of his body as he lopes through the carpark, corralling the trolleys with sensual ease. What a fine pair of hands has young Rodney, what muscular shoulders, what watersmooth moves. Squeezing under his armpit to capture a trolley she faces him and enters his heatspace. He pauses. She can smell him. The Ezi-Glide starch of his white Woolies shirtsleeves. His Imperial Leather. The masculine tang wafting off his hot body makes her weak at the knees. He looks down and smiles. She wants to eat him. Bite him and lick him. Slide right on in that big handsome smile. Swooning through Woolies she buys olives and cashews and Twistees and Tim Tams and, blowing the budget, her favourite CD which Sheehan took with him, the bastard. Bloody hell, she deserves it and besides, she needs it for an emergency exorcism, get him out of her system before tonight’s gig. ‘Killing me softly with his charms,’ the Fugees’ delicious love-juicy voices sex up the air in her little Honda two hours later as she heads into town, all cried-out and brighteyed, ready to cover the Greenpeace premiere for Trendz. 9

Tonight is a dark and dreamy night in the most isolated city on the planet, one of those Drambuie ad nights where if you close your eyes and drink enough Bundy it can feel like you’re in Paris instead of in Perth, Western Australia, at the ends of the earth. A slow warm rain is falling, softening the hard-edged corners of the boomtown skyline. The wash of lights rushing into the city along the wet highway, the moving reflections on the black satin river give the whole scene a sexy French impressionist shimmer. Raindrops glitter like diamonds on the plexiglas port cochere of the Regency Hyatt, the ritziest hotel in the city, as Zan pulls up behind a long white stretch limo unloading a half dozen Japanese gangsters in elaborate punch perms and polyester. She is too far away to see if any pinkies are missing but their fiercely impassive expressions are a dead giveaway. And the body language. Most Japanese businessmen walk kind of humble but these sumos are swaggering down the long red welcome carpet into the Hyatt. Odd, she thinks, the Yakuza usually stay at the Casino. It’s Japanese-owned. Slipping the fancy-dress doorman a fiver to park her little car, she cocks her hips in her inky black cashmere Armani tuxedo and vogues down the runway and on through the door. Her ‘I’m too sexy for my suit’ designer entrance is lost on the middle-aged Asians singsonging in their Siamese cat voices and fussing with baggage near reception. She moves past them quickly and paces the huge open lobby, appraising the decor. She’s come early on purpose so she can hang out and suck up some mise en scène, along with a quiet aperitif in The Conservatory. The fake Pommy Raj look the new owners have gone for 10

is a major faux pas. The place looks like a stuffy Colonial outpost with its British Empire cane armchairs and TheNatives-Are-Restless wicker doodads, a tasteless brown carpet with a big palm tree motif so it feels like you’re walking through some kind of jungle. Taking out her notebook, she flips to the Black List of Indecorous No Nos she is compiling for Trendz and writes,

What does a great big obelisk fountain with four big dumb half-rampant elephant statues have to do with Perth, Western Australia? Give me state of the art relaxed nouveau Australian any time, instead of this borrowed Colonial Bwana bullshit. Over the ruby tilt of her Campari, she peruses her invite with anticipation. GALA OPENING NIGHT BENEFIT PREMIERE SHOWING OF

HOT ICE A DOCUMENTARY FILM BY DARWIN BROWN Friday 26 August 7:15 PM Frilled Lizard Ballroom / Perth Regency Hyatt $50.00. LOUNGE DRESS REQUIRED BY INVITATION ONLY ALL PROCEEDS TO GREENPEACE AUSTRALIA RSVP Patrick Sheehan Greer Martino & Sheehan/9383 3331 She drains her Campari and clips on her press pass. Time to go up and see What was wearing Whom.

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The crowd inside the Frilled Lizard Ballroom is percolating along rather nicely, fuelled by the bubbly, sounds photo-op ripe. She pulls out her auto-wind Nikon and like a one-woman media blitzkrieg, goes on in, flashing, shooting straight from the hip. Shrieks of surprise and cries of fake protest greet Zan’s Gonzo full-frontal but she coolly ignores them. She needs at least sixty mug shots for the social page insert that drives local sales up. She works the room for the next fifteen minutes, taking photos and first flash impressions, on the lookout for Unidentified Flying Objets d’art. To her deep disappointment, there are no dazzling EuroTrash strangers in sight, just the same old same old. Thank God! Her eyes light on Debbie, who’s wearing an over-the-top clingy white angora mini by Mondo that makes her look both demure and vampish, like the girls in Clueless. Her skin is a lovely Lancome creamy magnolia, her hair a rich reddish brown that costs $95 a month. Her dark eyes glitter like Susan Sarandon’s as she watches Zan change her zoom lens to a portrait and move in on her. ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve had a sex change,’ Debbie says, taking in the splendour of Zan’s cashmere tuxedo borrowed from John Marcus Menswear in exchange for a plug, the one-offsmanship of her luscious silk tie. ‘Hmmmm,’ flipping the tie up to check the brand name. The frenzy of Giorgio fumes coming off her hot little pulsepoints threatens to put Zan out for the night. ‘Pretty nice taste for a man.’ ‘Speaking of which,’ Zan snatches her tie back. ‘Where’re all the tall dark and handsomes?’ ‘The only “strange” here is Darwin Brown, the director,’ 12

Debbie leans in close, confiding. ‘I wouldn’t mind having some of that! He’s making his next movie in Perth. Haven’t you heard the rumours? He’s turning the town upside down looking for crews and equipment.’ A movie in Perth! Zan thinks, getting excited. Some juice for her Trendz mill. ‘Yes, I knew some bigshot from LA was here scouting locations,’ Zan fibs a little, embarrassed she hasn’t heard the gossip. ‘What’s the movie about?’ ‘Dunno,’ Debbie shrugs. ‘I haven’t asked him, I’ve been too busy drooling. He’s so intense. Your lean and intriguing type. Looks like JFK Jr.’ ‘Sounds yummy,’ Zan sighs. ‘He’s either gay or he’s married, right?’ ‘Married,’ Debbie murmurs, the word putting a dimmer switch on her smile. ‘Who isn’t?’ she shrugs, referring to her lover, Ric. ‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen!’ Sheehan’s voice booms around Zan in loud sensurround. Her heart sinks like a stone with regret and nostalgia. Try as she might in Perth’s little fishbowl, she just can’t escape him. Sheehan, in the spotlight as always, up on the dias, his chest all inflated with self-importance, and talking, talking, his voice so big he doesn’t need any amplification. ‘Welcome to the gala benefit premiere of Hot Ice by our guest director, Darwin Brown!’ She can’t take her eyes off his imposing figure. He’s gelled back his hair for the sleek look, exposing his big bluff square forehead, trimmed his beard to a handsome blunt cut. ‘Now, Darwin Brown would rather not talk this evening. Nor should he. His film speaks for itself and it speaks, I might add, most eloquently. This picture is worth a thousand pictures, if I may say so myself. I have nothing to 13

add except maybe only one thing and I promise I won’t talk for more than one minute.’ Everyone in the crowd who knows Sheehan titters at this one. Bombastic … garrulous … long-winded … verbose. He licks his meaty pink lips. The uppermost labia, he’d always called them. Her throat hurts. The pit of her womb aches. ‘Blah blah blah.’ Sheehan gives a little Greenpeace spiel about each one aiming their talents at the problem … using their talents and we might clean up our act before it’s too late … Japanese whaling … Antarctica a World Park. Protected … la la la la la la la … And, why you may ask, from whence cometh the title Hot Ice? Think “hole in the ozone”. Think “meltdown”. A lovely oxymoron … um, dichotomy.’ Christ, Zan thinks. What a show-off. Always goes for the polysyllabic. High Irish cheekbones shining like polished apples. Thick wide pink lips dancing, wet. His lips sucking at her. His tongue on her clit. He knew her by heart the moment he met her. His lips at her ear urging, ‘Show us your tits Zan.’ She can feel the tears welling up from the black hole of sorrow she carries inside her. God, she used to be filled with such a warm overwhelming suffusion, just like a junkie, mainlining love. She blinks rapidly to cut off the crying before it wrecks her mascara and smiling brightly in case Sheehan’s looking, ever-so-casually rushes out of the ballroom, away.

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2 2 He sits alone in the dark empty theatre thinking about things he doesn’t want to be thinking, like how he’s spent half his life in the dark thinking, thinking. Christ, he was tired of thinking. Thinking about gratuitous violence. Oliver Stone. Natural Born Killers . The box office phenomenon of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. If he had a nickel for every idle consumer who’d paid $11 to buy into Quentin the T’s cheap gangster WorldView, he could save the Third World three bloody times over. Eat my dust, Quentin. Darwin Brown smiles resolutely alone in the dark. How good it feels to be working on his next project. How good to be over the culture shock that had put him on hold for such a long time. Coming out from the most spiritually healing experience of his life, coming back into the malls, the McDonalds, the Calvin Klein clones

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one to a car gridlocking the highways, had sent him into a terrible downspin. He’d turned misanthropic, hid out with the Steenbeck, did the rough cut himself, then the fine cut. After Antarctica it all seemed so superficial, all games and gossip, sound bites and hype. Aerobics. Nintendos. Anorexic women dying from diets while Africans starved. Lighten up, dude, Darwin peptalks himself in the dark. Hot Ice is strong and it’s lucid. It’s your own humble/stupendous personal vision. You’ve sold them all on saving Antarctica without selling out. It’s fucking transcendent! He leaps out of his seat, triumphant, ready to go make nice with the local yuppies, and WHOMP! crashes into something large moving fast down the aisle. He staggers backward, goes down in a pratfall like a dumb circus clown. The other half of the head-on collision collapses on top of him like a sack of potatoes, bowling him over onto his back. ‘Are you all right?’ asks a faltering female alto. She pushes against him, her knee digging into his penis. He reaches out to help her, gropes something wonderfully boinky. ‘No worries,’ he murmurs, running his hands down soft woollen trousers, gently lifting her knee off, brailling strong sculptured kneecaps, firm muscled thighs. Her breath rushes warm on his neck. She smells expensive. Like the NY/Paris Concorde, high octane perfume and Moët et Chandon. A silky soft fabric slithers against his left forearm, making the hairs rise. Something wet drips on his lip. He licks it. She’s crying, noiseless. ‘Ssshhh.’ He feels for her head, cradles his hand round her skullcase, the smooth slip of hair, fits her head in the notch of his shoulder. ‘Ssshhh.’ She relaxes against him, so 16

warm and so solid, so wildly pliant, inviting the warmth of his palms, the quest of his fingers. A riff of adrenaline jazzes him. Who on earth is he? Pressed against him in the dark, she cannot see him, only feels the long range of hard bones under his leanness. He smells so good. So wholesome. Brown rice. Tahini. On high burn and heating. He is holding her head in his hand like a chalice, drinking her in, quietly breathing. Her hand cruises the speed-bump of his hard-on. He gasps and she knows in that instant whoever he is, she is going to have him. Whoever he is, she will happen to him. Lights explode, hot white around them, blow them apart like pieces of shrapnel. ‘There you are!’ Sheehan hails at a hundred decibels. The door slams behind him. He dazzles his big cartoon smile. The two of them, shell-shocked, sprawl on the carpet, dishevelled, blinking at Sheehan in the bright light. ‘I see you two found each other,’ Sheehan says in broad innuendo. He looks highly amused. ‘Saves me making the intros.’ He turns around and shielding them from view with his body, opens the door and sticks his head through it, booms ‘in flagrante delicto’ to someone, pops back in, still running his mouth a mile a minute. ‘Who would have thought it? The Visionary of the Month and my little ex-um … protégée.’ He pauses to emphasise his double entendre. ‘What can I say, Darwin?’ Sheehan smiles a beneficent smile and spreads his hands in mock benediction. ‘Enjoy.’ Darwin can hear noises of gathering outrage emanate from behind his left elbow. She is on her feet and rising, to a very full height. She looks bigger than he is. High colour 17

rising. Flaming her cheekbones. Big blazing eyes. Righteous. She looks like Joan of Arc, with Ingrid Bergman, not the Jean Seberg version. ‘“Protégée”, my bum, Sheehan!’ she cries out loud and clear as a bell. ‘“Protégée” implies you had something to teach me. Va te faire enculer par les Grèques!’ ‘That means “Get stuffed,”’ Sheehan drolly translates for Darwin, then turns to the woman. ‘I would very much like to, Zan, but you took the gerbil.’ Darwin Brown has to laugh, in spite of his annoyance with Sheehan, the surprise attack of his own arousal. He laughs, and his laugh begets another, and another, until he is helpless, bent over with laughter. She throws her head back and laughs big fat happy laughs like a child. Zan. Darwin masters himself. ‘Come on, dudes,’ he drawls in his best Californian. ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’

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3 3 She is stunned. The film is stunning. It holds her there awestruck, nailed to her seat. There is no soundtrack. No voiceover to tell you what the camera is saying and what your response is. Just a slowmoving flow of Antarctic icons. Striking. Straightforward. Without artifice. There is nothing of man in his film. No man-made constructions. No tools. No footprints. No human voices. No brave men in dogsleds on brave expeditions. Just deepfrozen silence. A boundless white landscape. Frozen snow. Icebergs. Cold. Incognito. A starkly forbidding alien beauty. The size and the scale of it appalling. The overwhelming presence of place chills the mind. He is brilliant. A genius. Her right breast pressed against his left forearm makes a secret electric connection in public. In the dark

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in the theatre you could hear a pin drop. She could sit like this forever next to him in the dark. Poised and excited. Taking him in through her eyes ears and nostrils. Every pore of her skin. Knowing. Not knowing what will happen between them. He is stroking her hand now. Her wrist. And her forearm. She can feel his eyes on her face in the bright bounce of Antarctic snowlight, watching her watching him, seeing receiving discerning his message. She smiles. It’s simply brilliant. And brilliantly simple. Antarctica is. It exists in its own right. Outside of humans. Man doesn’t belong there. He waits until the last possible second to break their intimate breast-forearm contact. His voice in her ear says, ‘Don’t go away.’ He is up on his feet and moving towards the front of the theatre with the credits still rolling. THIS FILM WAS MADE TO BENEFIT GREENPEACE. TO ARRANGE FOR A FREE BENEFIT SHOWING IN YOUR COMMUNITY PLEASE CONTACT 1800 4960000 TOLLFREE. She bursts into wildly happy applause. Her mouth hurts from smiling. Hoots and howls from all over the theatre. Claps and whistles. The crowd gives Darwin Brown a full three minute bravo ovation. He stands on the stage beaming, humbly taking his bows in his old unbleached T-shirt and faded jeans with rips at the knee. He looks like a French Existentialist rockstar. His hair gleams dark in the spotlight, chestnut with mahogany highlights, sleeked back in a neat little snub. Behind the fine lightstruck gold glasses set high on his cheekbones she can feel his dark eyes sweep the crowd seeking contact. She is caught in his high-beams. ‘Thank you,’ he states across the 20

brightly lit theatre, speaking directly to her in full view of the public. She feels suddenly shy. ‘And thank you, Darwin Brown!’ Sheehan looms out of the background closing in on stage front and centre. Next to Darwin’s elegant leanness he looks big, crude and clumsy, a Gerard Depardieu. ‘Magnifico, Maestro!’ Sheehan approves. ‘Wasn’t that a masterpiece, folks? Hot Ice is one helluva redefinition of the participant/observer paradigm shift.’ My God, what the eff is he saying? For the first time Zan feels deeply relieved she is no longer with him. Patrick Sheehan, blowhard supremo. No wonder he drove her to drink. Strange how your life can change just like that in ten seconds flat. She looks at Darwin’s knee through the loopy laddered denim, the cut of his quad, the bony mechanics, the secret connections underpinning the man. ‘But first,’ Sheehan booms on, beating his own drum, ‘we’re going to ask you to dig just a little bit deeper and make an extra special contribution to Greenpeace. Most of us have been living through the Recession We Had to Have as though it wasn’t happening. We continue to build buildings, some of them mine, I might add. Two this past year, three contracts for next year. And yes, this is good. Greed is good. But Green is better. I know you’ve already bought the benefit tickets but Greenpeace is taking it in the teeth because of the Recession. Lots of people are forgetting what’s got to be first on the priority list. And …’ ‘Yoohoo Patrick!’ Debbie trots down the aisle, pushing a trolley with a whale-shaped ice sculpture, her voice highpitched with nervous excitement. ‘I have twenty Mawsons for Greenpeace from Lawyers for Greenpeace!’ She fans out her handful of stiff crisp new-minted bills. 21

‘That’s two thousand dollars!’ Sheehan emotes like he’s hosting Sale of the Century. ‘How apropos!’ he gushes, talking down to the crowd. ‘Mawson’s Australia’s Antarctic hero! For all of you paupers out there who might not have seen a hundred dollar bill, Mawson’s frostbitten physiognomy is on it.’ The audience groans. What a wank! Who’s gonna give the most money to Greenpeace? What an orgy of self-congratulation and selfadvertisement! Darwin is getting fed up with Sheehan. He feels like a dope standing there with his hands in his pockets while Sheehan keeps him on hold with his Let’sTalk-About-Me blather. He should never have agreed to do Questions and Answers. He should have told Sheehan a five minute sound bite on what it took to make a film in the Antarctic Outback was all he could offer. Talking impromptu in public freaks him. If it wasn’t for Zan he would just cut and run. ‘I’ll pledge five thousand!’ A robust red-haired woman shouts, waving her chequebook. ‘Onya, Red!’ Applause and loud cheers erupt in the theatre. Everyone knows everyone else here, Darwin realises, watching the spot swing through the audience and shine down on Zan who is scribbling in a little notebook. The light makes her fine ash blond hair go translucent, like a halo of cobwebs around her flushed face. An odd little bump on her forehead shines in the downlight as smooth as an egg. Darwin twists off his gold puzzle ring, separates it and puts it together, takes off his glasses, polishes them with the hem of his T-shirt, rearranges the glasses on his bland public face — anything to generate patience, hide his annoyance. 22

For Christ’s sake, just wrap it! he ESPs to Sheehan who is up on stage bassoing, ‘Thank you, thank you, all you generous Perthons! Thanks to your wonderful generosity we’ve raised two hundred thousand dollars for Greenpeace!’ Sheehan ta-daas. Then the lights dim and the audience gasps as two shadowy figures in bright orange Greenpeace jumpsuits and balaclavas abseil off the balcony, macho as hell, and run up the aisle, leap on the stage and snatch the money-stuffed ice sculpture off the trolley, wrap it in hessian and toss it into a save-the-whale sling. Wild applause at the Sheehanesque antics as the orange jumpsuits make a quick getaway. Sheehan is beaming and looking in Darwin’s direction. ‘Now our distinguished auteur director will answer any questions you have. And I mean any, no matter how stupid or silly you might think. I urge you to ask them. This is a rare opportunity. You never get it directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what exactly is the horse trying to say?’ The audience titters. Darwin shrugs and rolls up his eyeballs in irritation. Sheehan heads for the front of the stage with the mike stuck out like a weapon. ‘Who’ll ask the first question? Who’ll be the first victim?’ he invites, with a malicious Jack Nicholson smile. I’ll be the first victim, Darwin thinks, bracing himself for an attack of the Tall Poppy Syndrome. An earnest looking young woman grabs the mike from Sheehan and asks in a loud and aggressively ‘intellectual’ manner, ‘I’m intrigued with the fact that humans are invisible in your nature film. Don’t you think that this invisibility is a lie? That you’re ignoring the cusp between humans and nature in the deep ecological sense of being a primary source of communion?’ 23

‘The c u s p? Between humans and nature?’ Darwin repeats, disbelieving, shaking his head. No one who had been there could doubt the aggressive indifference of that inhuman landscape. The inexorable cold. The no-ness of whiteouts. The insignificance of what goes on inside the human skullbox to the Real World Outside it. The soulless immutable dead neutral indifference … He takes a deep breath and begins, trying to give her a reasonable answer. ‘That argument might work in your armchair. Or in more salubrious climates where aboriginal peoples can deeply feel and express “we are the air, we are the soil,” but in The Big A, forget it.’ Darwin shrugs and gives a thin little ‘I’m sorry’ smile. Trying to describe the Antarctic to someone who hasn’t been there must be like trying to explain what sex was like to a stone cold virgin. ‘Let’s put our hands together for Darwin Brown, filmmaker for Greenpeace!’ Sheehan rescues him smoothly, leading a brief spate of clapping. ‘Moving right along, folks,’ he signals to Debbie who opens the curtain. Someone in a fat shiny black lycra whale costume with wide flapping tail and writhing flippers waddles out on the stage and cavorts on the runway to thunderous applause. Darwin turns away, appalled at the whole yuppie thing for Disney-ising the sacred, and heads up the dark aisle, towards her translucent pale face, her bright spin of hair shining like moonlight in the muddled praise of the crowd.

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4 4 The pizza at Iguana isn’t as good as I Dolci’s woodfired crispy designer thin-crusted Primavera with prosciutto artichokes charred capsicum basil but it doesn’t matter, she’ll have a nice big fat T-bone and maybe a small garden salad with aioli dressing but only if Darwin has something with garlic, too. Perth’s inner city is really quite cosmo with lots of great little restaurants that stay open late. She’ll take him to I Dolci for pizza tomorrow or maybe on Sunday and if she reviews it for Trendz, she can charge it to Siegel. There is so much to show him. Freo and Rotto and Neddies and Northbridge. The Cottesloe condo. The city is really quite pretty. Sheets of glass hanging in sparkling darkness. Vertical space. Stainless. It has stopped raining, the air is fresh, everything looks like it’s sprinkled with sequins. They are walking at Darwin’s Do-the-Green-Thing

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insistence. It feels great to be walking along all together in a big group through the bright spangled city. Even with Sheehan. She doesn’t care if he’s there loud as a bear in between Debbie and Ric, running his mouth through his architect number, going on and on about the disasters on St George’s Terrace and his Que font les architectes? architects are criminals who kill the soul of people harangue. La la la la la. She doesn’t hear him, percolating, as she is, next to Darwin, feeling him lope along beside her. He is so unfamiliar, his leanness, his darkness, his slowmoving presence. Putting one foot in front of the other is to him an act of deliberation so different from her own bouncy quickstepping, she has to slow down to stay level with him. She is glad she has her flat shoes on or she would be taller, she’s just the right height. She wants to put her arm round his waist, her hand down his blue jeans, grab a nice big buoyant handful. She laughs, deep down inside. The hardening on. She loves Darwin’s name. She loves Darwin’s accent. She loves walking next to him without talking, just two creatures together walking in silence through time and through space, echoing the roll of each other’s shoulders, the hips and the elbows, the human mechanics so beautifully slick. At the corner of Forrest Chase Darwin puts his hand on her arm and stops her in mid-stride, wheels her around and into the shadows of the old restored bank. ‘Nothing biodegrades in Antarctica in the subzero cold,’ he says, rather abruptly. His voice sounds remote. ‘Oh.’ Zan smiles inanely, a bit disappointed. She was hoping he was going to say something tender or at least 26

something a little more personal. ‘I suppose you carried out your own … um … litter? I know how astronauts manage but given how cold it is down there didn’t your pee freeze in midstream?’ Darwin laughs, a short quick loud ha! Then, ‘I can’t answer such an intimate question until I get to know you just a little bit better,’ his voice warm now, and teasy. His spectacles wink in the Forrest Chase streetlights, he is looking at her with a great big frog smile, he looks beatific, like Willem Dafoe as Jesus, with glasses. She can feel a fine erotic tension building between them. ‘What you see is what you get,’ she smiles deep in his eyes. He gives a nice low little chuckle. ‘So far, forty per cent of your takes are pure movie star.’ ‘Hurry up, back there!’ Debbie calls, bopping along ahead like a fuckable bunny in her fluffy white dress and red suede stilettos. ‘Coming!’ she grabs his hand and pulls, any excuse to touch him in public. He said ‘so far.’ Hopeful anticipation revs through her. They already have a little history together. ‘So far’ means ongoing. Going on. Going. She would go with him, anywhere. He’s married. One day at a time, Zan. One day at a time. As soon as they are seated inside the Iguana Zan whips out her notebook and scribbles a few descriptives so she can justify writing the meal off to Siegel.

Iguana holds its own with Perth’s trendy restaurants. The softer new American southwestern has replaced the tired old hard-edge Memphis style. Lots of cacti 27

and terracotta tiles. Earthtones like the desert. Starkly exotic proteas stuck in wrought iron wall sconces … ‘I just loved your film,’ Debbie is purring at Darwin. She’s put on fresh lipstick, her lips are amazing, polished a pulsating, purply passionfruit with layers of Propylene Glycol, Carnauba, Paraffin, ground up insect wings for that knock-em-dead glitter. The natural pale olive sheen of her skin costs $49.95 for a very small bottle. In the soft earthtoney light of the restaurant her big brown eyes look remarkably feline, shadowed in complex striations of ombre and dark iridescence. She looks like an ad for Visine, her eyes are that bright. ‘Tell me what it all means,’ she sighs. Zan gives him a little ‘give me a break’ eyeroll from behind her raised menu. ‘What you saw is what you get,’ Darwin paraphrases, smiling around Debbie at Zan. ‘In the last five years the number of Antarctic tourists has risen from 700 to 7,000,’ he says sombrely. ‘Nothing biodegrades there. The tourists are helicoptering in for these silly cocktail parties on icebergs, and the icebreaker that brings them is Russian, and we all know what that means.’ ‘Vodka,’ interjects Ric, waving over a passing waiter. ‘Let’s have some Stoly.’ ‘I wouldn’t drink Stolyichnaya,’ Darwin advises. ‘Not unless you know it’s pre-Chernobyl. I’ll have Smirnoff on the rocks,’ Darwin tells the hovering waiter, then turns back to Ric, explaining, ‘It’s made in New Zealand. The water is pure. It’s nuclear free. We were going to move there. It’s the last sanctuary.’ Who’s this ‘we?’ Zan wonders but doesn’t dare ask 28

because she won’t like the answer. ‘Campari and soda with a twist of lemon,’ she mutters in the waiter’s direction, then buries her nose in the menu to hide her distraction, reads ENGLISH SPINACH, BRIE AND GRILLED PIMIENTOS twenty-two times without comprehension, so preoccupied is she with the ‘we’. ‘But then the French refused to stop nuking the Pacific,’ Darwin picks up the thread of his story. ‘New Zealand’s too close to the atolls. That and the methane from all of those sheepfarts, put us right off. Methane is absolute hell on the ozone.’ ‘Don’t I know it!’ Debbie chirrups, with a sweet little smile. ‘Ric’s the expert on methane, with bulletins, daily.’ Ric and Sheehan guffaw at this one. Darwin chuckles politely. We. Us. Zan sighs into her just delivered Campari, still obsessing. She needs food, that’s what’s the matter. Those yummy biodegradable snacks at the gala were hours behind her. ‘I’m starving,’ she moans, catching the waiter, and orders a char-grilled T-bone, with extra potatoes and a large garden salad. ‘I’ll have the chilled gazpacho and yabbie soup. Hold the “laced with fresh cream” please,’ Debbie orders virtuously. ‘I’m so glad I’m a bloke. You girls like it fat,’ Sheehan innuendos, with a fond little pat of his prominent fat roll, ordering the market fresh fillet on a bed of warm spinach, with chunky chips on the side. ‘I’ll have the stuffed lamb cutlets with warm sweet potato salad.’ Ric’s order sounds so seductive Zan is tempted to change hers. To quell the rising consumer dissonance and reinforce her own choice she says to Darwin, ‘I highly recommend the char-grilled T-bone. It’s p o s i t i v e l y orgasmic.’ 29

‘Beware the heavy meateater,’ Darwin teases and orders ratatouille with grilled eggplant with a self-mockingly righteous flourish. ‘The best environmental choice is to eat low on the food chain,’ he continues, proselytising with a resolute smile. ‘Twenty pure vegetarians can be fed on the land needed for one meateater. If everyone on the planet stopped eating meat we could save it.’ Darwin’s forte isn’t exactly lighthearted banter, Zan notes with a twinge of disappointment, as she watches Ric’s expression change from slightly amused to forbearing. Debbie’s bright eyes have turned on the dimmer. Sheehan has ceased to pay even the slightest attention he affords insignificant others. ‘Who’d want a world without lamb chops and T-bones?’ Ric reasons, with lawyerly logic. ‘And what would we do with the billions of livestock? If we let them go wild without replenishing their pasture they would probably fuck up the earth even more than they do now.’ ‘The pure vegetarians aren’t responsible for global warming, it’s the meateaters’ fault,’ Darwin ignores him, going off on a tangent. ‘And to answer your question more specifically about what does my film mean,’ Darwin homes in again on Debbie, blind to her waning expression, her burgeoning frown, ‘you can take the title Hot Ice literally if the global warming continues, because the Antarctic ice sheet is bigger than the US and if it melts from the hole in the ozone and global warming — and remember three million years ago it melted extensively when the temperature was just a little bit warmer — the sea level will rise sixty metres and we’ll all be surfing the Antarctic Meltdown. Yeah, surfing Antarctica, that’s the name of my next project, as a matter of fact.’ 30

‘Surfing Antarctica,’ Sheehan ta-daas, knocking back the rest of his Stoly, whacking the glass down. ‘Good name for a movie but it’ll never happen. We’ll come up with some high-tech solution.’ ‘I’ll reduce, reuse and recycle until the cows come home but I won’t give up eating them,’ Ric grumps, staring into his Stoly. ‘It’s easy to be Green,’ Darwin says earnestly. ‘You make a commitment and then you just do it, and every day you keep doing it. It’s as easy as wiping your ass.’ ‘Lighten up, Darwin. Don’t be so boring,’ Debbie chides. ‘I recycle my bottles. But I just can’t bring myself to do the thing with the household garbage. I make Ric do the compost. It’s really disgusting.’ She crinkles her nose up. ‘You lift the lid from the bin and you try not to look at the black slimy stuff in there, and all of those things in there writhing. Yuk!’ Zan laughs politely, but she doesn’t mean it, inside she feels anxious, afraid they are losing their sexual momentum with all this talk. They should never have come out to Iguana, should have made some excuse to go off together. She reaches under the table and finds Darwin’s thigh, his knee through the ripped denim. ‘Jesus, I’d like to interview you,’ she says in a husky voice, giving him a slow foxy smile. ‘Get the scoop on the new movie you’re doing for my magazine, Trendz.’ ‘I’m pathologically shy, like Kevin Costner,’ Darwin smiles his winsome smile. ‘Come on, Darwin,’ Zan urges, stroking his kneecap. ‘Even Stanley Kubrick gave a few select interviews. He knew that aside from his work they were the only thing that represented him as an artist.’ 31

‘You couldn’t ask for a more select audience than the one Zan’s mag addresses,’ Sheehan butts in, outrageously snide. ‘There must be at least two or three thousand yuppie airheads with ten bucks in their pocket who want to know what they’re thinking and what’s happening to them.’ Zan glares at him and squaring her shoulders enunciates very slowly, ‘I am pleased to inform you the circulation of Trendz is twenty-five thousand.’ ‘Twenty-five thousand is incredibly small potatoes where I come from,’ Darwin muses, grinning at her. ‘To answer your question,’ he gives her a look that makes her toes melt, ‘“Just say yes!” is my motto. I’ll be happy to give you an exclusive.’ ‘Exclusive,’ Sheehan echoes, with a know-it-all smile, as though he can see what she’s doing under the table. Don’t you wish, Sheehan. Zan looks at her jealous ex with smug satisfaction, then turns her attention to the T-bone the waiter has brought her. It smells so delicious it makes her mouth water in one big seismic spurt of saliva, her teeth nip the air in anticipation, her jaw aches with desire, she would kill her own father if he got in the way of that juicy charred T-Bone. Her taste buds are singing, her blood sighs with pleasure as her teeth crunch through the crackling peppercorned crust on the outside, tear into the juicy perfection of lean grass-fed beef as full of the tantalising rich steaky flavour its aroma promised. ‘Ummmmmmmmmmm,’ she murmurs, making mmmmmmm sounds in the back of her throat, happily chewing, surfaces long enough to hear Sheehan tell Darwin, proudly, ‘Isn’t she something? She’s actually moaning. You’ll never convert her to low cuisine. She’s too 32

haute food chain. A true carnivore. She knows in her DNA why the dingo did it. She could write the “Why I Ate Baby Azaria” story.’ Zan kicks at Sheehan under the table. Debbie makes the obligatory squeal. Zan smiles sadly, already nostalgic for the last tidbit of T-bone she has just swallowed, eyeing Ric’s plate for a stray morsel of lamblet. Sheehan’s fork is strategically poised to ward off intruders. ‘Just for the record, I was always pro-dingo,’ he says, stirring. Ohmigod. Please! No more talking, Zan pleads silently. ‘I want to dance,’ she says, putting her fork down. It hits her plate with a loud pinging clink. A declaration. ‘With you, Darwin.’ She rises, and tossing a fifty in Ric’s direction says, tough as Uma Thurman, ‘We’re outta here.’

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5 5 Darwin sits up in bed. Where the fuck am I? Disoriented. Outside his bedroom window in San Francisco there are tall Monterey pines and temperate sunshine which in the cool foggy summer turns opalescent. But here the drapes hang thick and heavy against rocketing photons. The light clashing at the edge of the curtains is Mykonos brilliant, a harsh neon white. He gropes in the dark for the light and hooks on his glasses. The room coalesces. Condo Moderne. White walls with big abstract seascapes. Dove-coloured carpet. Wall-towall mirror at the far end. A rack of shiny chrome dumbbells. A big black rebounder. Fancy exercise bike. Wherever he is, the natives are into hamster activity. He yawns. His ears pop, loud as champagne corks. A soundtrack kicks up in the undisclosed distance beyond the

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closed drapes. The stuttering sounds of disparate motors kickstarting. The rmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMM! of lawnmowers. Yep, it’s Australia at 8:00 in the morning. If he squinches his ears he can hear past the lawnmowers. The pneumatic whooooosh of a bus. The shrill shrieks of squabbling seagulls. The erratic boom-crash of surf in the background. He can feel the bright commotion tick away like a time bomb outside the window, waiting to blow him away. He burrows back under the covers. There, that was better. A cosy dark hideout. It smells like a woman. Where did she go? ‘Cawwfeee???’ he bleats at the empty tuxedo hanging on the valet rack. No answer. The condo is empty. Where on earth is she? He looks at his watch. She must belong to that other fifty per cent of the human species called Morning Person, she must be out jogging or swimming or leaping around being healthy. It was just his luck. He liked to lay about in the morning, make languorous love. Darwin grabs the Walkman he sees on the bedstead and plugs himself in. ‘Lively up yourself …’ jinks in his eardrums. Oh god, not Marley. He pokes the STOP button before that boop a doop rusty brassjazz doan worry be hoppy thirdworlder tra la la la la la jammin’ in the name of the rockabilly-reggae funk rhythm can get a hold on him. His yawn cracks around the edges, stretches into a laugh. The sound of his laugh makes him feel guilty. He thought he’d never be happy again after Linni. He’d buried that man-woman feeling like an old bone. That was then and now is now, Darwin, he reminds himself, as he does a dozen times daily. Something flutters and stirs in the pit of his stomach. Not hunger. 35

Anticipation. Butterflies in the stomach. The flutter of hope. The bathroom is oddly uncluttered for a woman’s bathroom, no cleansing cremes or make-up or toner, no unguents or potions all over the counter, just a bar of sandalwood soap in the soap dish, some Nivea skin milk and HBF sunscreen, a small tube of cherry lip gloss. Darwin finds some Flex shampoo in the shower and wets himself and his clothes down, turns the water off while he pours a small dollop of shampoo in his palm and lathers his hair up and soaps down his body, scrubs his clothes with the dripping shampoo suds, then turns on the water and rinses everything off very quickly, to save energy. Beyond the glass doors in the rear of the condo a pool shimmers turquoise in the bright morning sunshine like a big David Hockney. He braves the harsh yellow-white sunlight just long enough to hang out his towel and his washing. Perth had the most hours of sunlight of all of Australia’s sunstruck big cities, which used to be a beach barbie bonus but now they were warning the tourists to use plenty of sunscreen. Even at eight o’clock in the morning he could measure the hole in Perth’s ozone by the prick of his skin. Shuffling around in the kitchen in among the packets of Samboys and Twisties and precooked pasta soup-for-one play food, he finds a pot and a funnel and a small bag of ground coffee and brews a small pot. Ahhhhh. The smell is … orgasmic. Darwin chuckles. He’s given up meat but no way in hell can he give up his coffee. It takes him three hours to wake up, with coffee. Without it, he’d never make it to lunch. Slowly sipping the delicious elixir, Darwin pokes around the apartment, still half asleep, still getting his bearings, 36

idly looking at things. He runs his hand along the rack of chrome dumbbells, hefts a twenty pound dumbbell without thinking about what he is doing and shit! almost drops it into the mirror on the plummeting downswing. He mugs at the empty tuxedo standing there blankly on the valet rack, squeezes the sleeve high up on the bicep. Examines the fine black Italian moccasins at the base of the rack. Slips his foot in. All the way, up to the ankle. Wow! What a woman! It fits perfectly. He takes a couple of hops on the rebounder, it makes him feel nauseous, jerked around too soon in the morning. He’d rather sit on this nice comfy sofa and think about things. Like the way she would look on the rebounder pumping those shiny dumbbells, jumping and bouncing without any clothes on, just her little white socks and her high bouncy … Zan shoulders her way into the bedroom, and stops in midstride, glowing with sweatsheen. She is like a girl in Sports Illustrated: tall, strong and athletic in her tight Netti bikepants, all flaring lats and wide shoulders, aerodynamically curvy, the kind of girl who windsurfs the Ganges and then heads for Tibet for some cross-country skiing, with three or four broken men in her slipstream. ‘G’day!’ she says, jaunty, tosses her helmet into the corner and heads for the dumbbells. He wants to leap in her path and lick the sweat off her like a dog, pull off those bikepants bite some of that nice big fat juicy … ‘Hullo,’ he says, striving to keep his voice ever so casual, but his face betrays him, independently stretching wide in a smile so cosmic she must think him insane. But she doesn’t notice, her eyes are fixed on her form in the mirror as she chuffs like a boxer psyching herself up, and hoists 37

the twenty pound dumbbells, pistons through a blistering set of two dozen hammer curls with such fluid precision he can’t take his eyes off her biceps her powerful forearms. He could watch her forever, just like the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, which he’s seen over and over and over, never bored, each time through new eyes. ‘I’ve seen Psycho sixty-nine times,’ he says inanely when she puts down the dumbbells. He saunters over, closing in on those sleek swelling bikepants ever so slowly. ‘Janet Leigh’s anorexic,’ she says, flexing her eyepopping biceps. ‘I saw her on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.’ Drawing her to him, he drops to his knees, and nuzzles the cleft in her bike tights, feels her knees buckle. ‘I started out with an old-fashioned Bolex,’ he whispers, peeling her like a banana. ‘Oh,’ she says, after a while, ‘I still have to do you!’ munching a handful of bright orange Twisties, her idea of a post-coital snack. ‘The interview,’ she giggles and pops a Twistie into his mouth. ‘Yuk!’ Darwin’s teeth grit on the airy puffed extruded cheese snack he is sure contains enough additives to kill him in one sitting. He takes a swig from the can of sparkling apple juice to get rid of the fake taste and makes a mental note to buy some emergency high-fibre Ryvita to keep in his backpack. ‘I’ve never done this before so you’ll have to bear with me,’ Zan admits, putting a blank tape into her Walkman. ‘Okay, you’re on. Um. The only thing I know is you’re not supposed to express any opinions or get in the way of the other guy’s personality coming through when you’re the interviewer. Um. First question: When did you decide you 38

wanted to be a filmmaker when you grow up? Were you always a quote, visual person?’ Darwin grins. ‘In the sixth grade. They gave me glasses. Wow! I went. Everything’s got edges! I thought it was all Jell-O before. Undifferentiated. Without my glasses a single telephone wire looks blurry, like somebody twanged it, like a vibrating harp string.’ She plucks off his glasses, suddenly playful, holds them out of his reach. ‘What do I look like?’ ‘Where are you?’ he teases, groping the air like a blind man. He captures a breast. ‘A Cézanne or a Monet,’ he sighs, happily squeezing. ‘Okay, now let’s get serious here,’ she purses her lips, prim as a schoolmarm, ‘or I’ll tell the readers about how you can talk through your penis!’ Grinning, she skips away and slips on her panties. Spying his video camera on top of the table next to his backpack, she asks, ‘May I?’ and effortlessly hoists it onto her shoulder and before he can answer, pulls off the lens cap and turns on the tape. ‘Careful!’ he shouts, anxious she’ll drop it, or record over something valuable on the tape. Just as he’s about to yell at her to stop he remembers it’s a brand new tape with nothing on it. ‘You know how to use it?’ he asks, keeping his voice soft, pleasantly shocked at how cheeky she is, enjoying the fact that she’s filming topless. ‘Hey, I didn’t study media at Edith Cowan for nothing, dude!’ she boasts, waving the camera, and then hearing her own words, amends, ‘well, maybe it was for nothing ’cause I couldn’t find a job when I graduated, but no one can find a job in video production unless you’re in-house, making training films. There’s no infrastructure here.’ She adjusts the viewfinder and poking the lens in his 39

face, asks, ‘What is your new movie about, Mr Brown,’ her tone crisp and aggressive. ‘The cusp between humans and nature in the Western Australian outback?’ He chuckles at her imitation of the irritating woman at the gala and responds in a droll voice, ‘Details of the plot are being kept tightly under wraps but the movie is believed to be about life on this planet.’ ‘Well, that certainly sounds nice and organic,’ she shrugs and blithely continues, ‘If you won’t let us in on the future, then we’ll just have to rewind you back to the past. All the way from Perth, Western Australia, to the harshest most isolated place on the planet, the coldest, most hostile, most godforsaken subzero frozen desert of ice, it’s so cold only heroes and fools and weirdos go there — did you hear about those two guys from Great Britain who are crossing the Great Antarctic Desert? They’re hauling these huge sledges behind them with no help whatsoever, they’ve lost one third of their bodies, eaten themselves up alive, past the fat now they’re living off their own muscles, the sheer effort of staying alive costs that much in the Antarctic, so I’d like to ask you, Darwin Brown, what is the engine that drives you, why did you go there?’ He was laughing at Linni when it happened. She was high on the wine and the Amaretto, really inspired, doing this incredible Gonna Have an Aviance Night! number, flinging along through the deserted carpark, peeling her clothes off like the hot nympho housewife in the ads on TV. She gave a high kick and flinging her blouse off, sashayed away with a pale flash of skin. Her laugh ringing out in the darkness like a handful of coins tossed in his direction. Closing in, crouching low behind a Mercedes, he poked himself on the prod of his hard-on and laughed. So high and so wired with anticipation, his head thrown back 40

and laughing laughing. That’s when they rushed her. One second, just her in the dark at the end of his vision. It was like a cartoon. A few jerky movements. No screams. No soundtrack. Just a rush of black shadows. A flutter of mothwings. A flash of her hair in the hard moonlight. ‘Darwin? Earth to Darwin?’ He can hear Zan’s voice scratch at the surface like a dog at the door. ‘Blah blah la la la … the Antarctic …?’ she continues, insistent. His mind claws at her words, struggling against the slurry of quicksand clogging his head. There were so many things he hadn’t had a chance to ask Linni. Like how did it feel to be such a looker. She was utterly stunning. He never got used to the fact that she picked him. She could have had any man she wanted. Just point a finger, say, ‘Baby, you’re it.’ ‘Um. What was the question?’ he murmurs, stalling for purchase, for time to return to the semblance of reason. ‘The question is, what is the answer?’ she says with a smile, low key but persistent. He opens his mouth to attempt a sane answer, croaks ‘personal reasons.’ Then the phone goes off inside his backpack, like the chirp of a bird or the rasp of an insect. He dives for the backpack, saved by the bell.

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6 6 ‘Yes,’ Darwin is saying into his mobile phone. Isn’t it a contradiction, to be a Deep Green and to have a mobile plaything, the favourite toy of the one-who-dies-with-themost-toys-wins all-consuming yuppies? Hah! Wait till she gets Mr Greenie on this major slip-up. Zan signals, want me to leave? Then she remembers she is in her own bedroom and the damn thing is mobile, he can leave the room if he wants to. He shakes his head, holding her gaze with his dark lively eyes. She tries not to listen in on the conversation, puts down the vidcam, makes herself busy, fossicks through her dresser for shorts and a sports bra, goes down on the carpet and crunches through two dozen sit-ups. ‘Uh huh. Yup,’ he says in that deadpan laconic American phone talk that all the Americans use in the

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movies. She can’t tell if it’s his wife or his boss or his mate or his brother on the other end of the phone. How sensitive things are with new lovers. How tentative their intimacy. Personal reasons, my ass. How unrevealing. Why couldn’t he tell her? Trust her with his secrets. As if she didn’t already know who he was, or what his cock told her. There was something dark about him. In certain lights his face showed a hollow-cheeked gauntness, spoke of past damage, like the face of JFK Jr under the make-up. When he looked at her the first time they made love the edge in his eyes almost hurt her. ‘Far fucking out!’ Darwin laughs, a warm intense sound behind her left shoulder that makes her feel jealous. Who the bloody hell is he talking to? His bloody wife? Her face turns to him, eyebrows quirking her query. He is holding the phone tight to his ear, she can’t hear any noise leak. ‘Who’ve you got to do the Zapruder?’ A long pause while he listens and listens, nodding his head, looking at her as though she’s a stranger, so intent is he on his conversation. ‘Oh. Okay. No problem. I’ll take care of it from this end. Uh huh. Yup. Hai okay, Kendo-san. Tell Egor to pick me up in South Perth on his way to the airport. Hai okay.’ The airport. Zan’s heart sinks with deep disappointment. He’s leaving already, just when they were starting to happen. His eyes search her face, reading her feelings. Comprehension breaks in his eyes and he grabs her arm and pulls her down on his lap to reassure her. ‘That was Kenji Kendo, my Japanese co-director,’ he tells her, all excited, running his words together like Robin 43

Williams. ‘We’re shooting the ecotage scene tomorrow. He’s laid it all on, it’s all coming together. Egor — he’s my male lead, he plays a Deep Greenie who puts his butt on the line for Gaia, perfect casting, he’s exactly like that in real life, he does his own stunts — don’t ask me how, but he’s scored a free chopper. It’ll be a real hit-and-run!’ ‘Just like that? No rehearsal?’ Zan wonders aloud. ‘Believe me, little lady, this one’ll be better with no rehearsal,’ he says, patting her thigh and gently pushing her off him, too excited now to sit still. He slits his eyes, looking her over, then snaps his fingers in aha! conclusion. ‘You can be the Zapruder. You can run a vidcam. Are you free tomorrow?’ ‘Sure,’ she says without hesitation, cool as can be. Inside she is leaping about like a puppy, desperate, ecstatic, panting at the sight of its leash. She wants to sleep, eat and drink him. Wear his pants and his T-shirt, reach deep inside him. ‘You’re perfect for the Zapruder!’ he enthuses. ‘Just wear your press card so you’ll look like you coincidentally just happen to be there covering the wedding when all of a sudden some Green history-in-the-making just happens to happen!’ She wants to ask him a few hardnose questions like ‘what’s a Zapruder?’ and ‘what exactly does ecotage mean?’ but she’s too busy being elated that he’s letting her in on his life, on his movie. It’s been a long time since anyone asked her to make history. She composes her face, collecting her feelings. ‘I’m no Deane Semmler, but I can handle it,’ she says, making her voice flat and insouciant as Judy Davis in Naked Lunch. ‘By the way,’ he says in his sensitive manner, ‘I think 44

it’s great that you don’t wear any make-up.’ ‘I take it your movie isn’t a doco,’ Zan says, reaching for her notebook and biro, not wanting to break the flow by going to get her tape recorder. ‘The audience doesn’t give a shit about docos. They want escape. “Entertainment!”’ Darwin waggles his fingers in ironic air quotes, off on a nice little rant now. ‘The only ones who’ll show Hot Ice are the Greenpeace people, a pretty teensy niche market which is preaching to the already converted.’ ‘Preaching to the converted,’ Zan echos, scribbling it down in her notebook. ‘Do you mind if I quote you?’ she asks prettily. ‘Quote, schmote,’ he waves his hand at her, impatient. ‘Show, don’t tell. You can do anything you want in a movie, lots more than you can in real life. It’s the most powerful thing in our culture. Visual packs a powerful punch. ‘I hate Tarantino! But I’ve learned from the asshole. Everyone loved John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, and what was he but a drug-taking, out-of-it, middle-aged, overweight, hit man,’ Darwin sputters. ‘If Tarantino can do it and his background is working behind a video rental counter, I can do it. I went to fucking film school at UCLA Long Beach! And Kenji Kendo’s the hottest young director on the Japanese scene. A real radical. He’s the one with the money.’ He gives her a fierce look. ‘Surfing Antarctica’s going to be as influential as Pulp Fiction. Erotic and funny. Action-packed with a powerful Green theme. ‘And I’ve got the sexiest female lead on the planet. Hiroshima’s a top Japanese actress. She’s a no bullshit lady. As committed as Egor. She does her own stunts, too. 45

I’ve created some sexy, powerful Green heros for people to follow. I’m taking my message out into the mainstream. I want Surfing Antarctica to inspire a planet-wide movement of copycat Greens!’ He strides to the table and picks up the big video camera and looks at her through the eyepiece. ‘It’s real userfriendly, the Sony. If you’ve got an opposable thumb you won’t have any problems. Do lots of zoom-ins and handheld woggles. Make Egor look like a hot evil rockstar and everyone’ll love him. ‘Lock ’n load, Baby!’ he triumphs, popping in a new tape, thrusting the heavy Sony into her hands.

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7 7 ‘Lock ’n load,’ Zan mutters twenty-four hours later as she shelters inside the Central Park lobby clutching the Sony like a limp Uzi and yawning, looking out at the pizzling rain. Bonking all night with a most lively Darwin has taken its sleep-toll. Underneath her fug of exhaustion, she can vaguely sense a small hit of excitement kick over and fluzzle. If she can stay awake this rain-dreary morning, she’s going to be in a movie! The Central Park lobby is sterile and cold. Vast walls of marble rise up all around her like a dead Pharaoh’s tomb, a perfect example of Sheehan’s Que font les architectes? killing the soul. She looks up and down St George’s Terrace. Hungover tax lawyers in wraparound Raybans and Pierre Cardin pinstripes limp in and out of the Price Waterhouse

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building, wincing in the dim morning rainshine. At 10:05 sharp a sleek silver limo lurches over and stops at the curb. A stick-on sign on the side says LOVE ME TENDER in electric pink letters. Elvis lives! Zan thinks, peering in through the dark tinted window at the driver. A gorgeous young Japanese woman in a plummy silk pants-suit who’s got to be the lead actress, Hiroshima. The back door pops open. ‘What’s this, the dead Elvis Fan Club?’ Zan jokes, rapping the LOVE ME TENDER sign with her knuckles, scrambling in with the Sony. ‘No, it’s the name of the Japanese film production company,’ the actress tells her in American-accented English, giving her a warm cat-like smile. Zan busies herself with her raw linen suit, smoothing the wrinkles, feeling a little bit frumpy compared to this exquisite creature. She can’t keep from staring at Hiroshima. Skin the colour of antique ivory. Nice big broad forehead. Lovely full lips slathered with a sexy luscious hot fuchsia lippy that makes her look like she’s been sucking on lilli pillis. Every day is a good hair day for this beauty whose lustrous blunt cut bluish-black hair swings and swoops across her delicate cheekbones like a Vidal Sassoon ad. ‘Zan McNaughton,’ Zan remembers her manners, sticks her hand out. The woman’s tiny hand makes her feel like a giant, with huge giant bear paws. Zan gingerly shakes it, afraid she will break it, but there is steel in the smaller chick’s grip as she pumps out a handshake. ‘Hiroshima Hiroshima. Let all who hear my name be nuked with my message!’ her voice rings out, declaiming. ‘I’m all for a nuclear-free world,’ Zan says agreeably. 48

‘Shame on the Japanese Eco-Pigs! is my message,’ Hiroshima hisses with a fierce little smile. She turns the key and grinds the ignition not once but twice before she realises the motor’s on and jams the gearshift from standstill into fourth gear, kangarooing the limo a few metres forward out into the flow of traffic and stalling. ‘The Aussies can be pretty piggy when it comes to the environment,’ Zan shrugs. ‘Look at all those extra emissions they grabbed at the Kyoto summit.’ ‘Yeah, but the Japanese are so fucking two-faced!’ Hiroshima says, with a disgusted expression, accelerating. ‘On the one face they are saying they are concerned for the environment, coming up with hot new high-tech in an effort to “fix it”. But underneath the gently speaking surface they are horrible eco-pigs, ripping down the Costa Rican rainforest for computer cartons and w a r a b a s h i disposable chopsticks and r a p p i n g u paper. They wrap everything in layers and layers of paper so it looks aesthetical then put it in boxes. They wrap each bloody carrot individually! In cling plastic! They’re killing us with their packaging! I hate the slanty-eyed little bastards!’ ‘But aren’t you, um, one of them?’ Zan asks, looking at her almond eyes, her delicate Asian features. ‘I am no longer them, I am Me,’ the girl says with deadly serious fervour. ‘Gaia is my country and I am pledged to fight Gaia’s enemies. No compromise in defence of Mother Earth!’ she raises her fist in a militant salute. ‘Watch out!’ Zan freaks, grabbing the fear grip in whiteknuckled panic as Hiroshima swerves wildly left to avoid broadsiding a passing Black & White taxi and, overcorrecting, pinballs the limo into a near certain head-on with an oncoming truck. ‘Stay on the fucking left!’ Zan 49

shrieks and at the very last second Hiro whips the wheel round and slingshots the limo out of the death zone. ‘Do you want me to drive?!’ Zan shrills in a full-on vibrato. ‘Who taught you? Did anyone? Or are you selftaught?’ she jabbers, nervous. ‘I thought the roads were the same in Japan. Don’t you drive on the left side?’ ‘I learned to drive in California. Darwin taught me. I learned to drive on the right side of the road. Down here it’s the wrong side. Everything’s backwards Down Under. I’m all fucked up!’ You can say that again, Zan thinks under her breath at the same time it hits her what Hiroshima has just said. Darwin taught her! Jealousy flares in her gut like a bad case of heartburn. Teaching someone to drive is a heavy commitment. They must have been lovers. Wonder what else he taught her upside down and all backwards. Were they still lovers? Damn! Why did this chick have to be so bloody exotic, so dainty, so ardent in her convictions? She makes Zan feel like a bloody enormous toad, sitting there on the edge of her seat in a jealous panic. She toys with the accoutrements in the back seat to distract herself from her negative feelings, opens the bar fridge and inspects the contents: plenty of Möet, an assortment of fruit juice, Midori melon liqueur, Coca Cola and Pepsi, and little bottles of something called Sweat with Japanese writing. Zan helps herself to a bottle of Sweat, her teeth cringing at the sweetish thick liquid which fuzzes her tastebuds instead of refreshing. She idly turns on the little TV. Jesus! More boring blather about Bill Clinton’s behind-the-scenes sex life. Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress. Why the 50

heck did she bother to keep it? Zan wonders, changing the channel with the nifty little remote. Teletubbies. Cricket. An American soapie. She channel-surfs for a couple of minutes, finding nothing to engage her, then hits the PLAY button. A big close up of a woman’s nude torso fills up the small screen. A masculine hand trails along the shapely torso, strokes the nape of the neck, then cruelly turns the woman over with a gutteral outburst of lust. The camera pulls back to show the man mounting the woman, then closes in in a medium close up, lingers on the intricate tattoo of a fierce samurai warrior etched on the man’s back, whose face stretches and contorts with the man’s thrusting movements as the woman whips her head back and forth and whimpers in lust or in protest. The camera moves in for an over-the-shoulder close-up of the woman’s exotic cat face. ‘Is that you?’ Zan gasps, staring at Hiroshima’s unmistakable profile. ‘Yes, it is Yours Humbly Truly,’ Hiroshima laughs, a nice tinkling sound. ‘But. It looks like it’s porn,’ Zan sputters. ‘It is. Pinkku eiga . Japanese soft core. Kenji Kendo directed. That scene was honban, for real. The best in the Desire Moon series.’ ‘You mean, you actually, uh, did it with the guy?’ Zan asks, feeling more and more provincial by the moment. ‘Oh yes. Japanese are very biological about sex. It’s not shameful or nasty. You can buy porn videos in vending machines at the train station,’ Hiroshima informs her. ‘I often see my own humble physique on the covers on the way home.’ She giggles a hand-to-mouth Japanese giggle in self-parody. ‘Oh,’ Zan says, wondering if Darwin has seen this little 51

beauty in action, wondering if Darwin ever did it honban with her, stewing in her own jealous juices all the way down Riverside Drive and across the river to the Burswood Casino where Hiroshima pulls into the carpark and lurches the limo to a juddering stop. ‘Yatta! Made it!’ Hiroshima crows, exultant, turning the motor off with a smart little fillip, her hair whipping like a curtain around her neat head as she turns towards Zan, gives her that incredible smile. ‘My character Tomiko is a real heavy. A radical Green activist. But I don’t really have to act. I believe in everything she says so it’s easy to play her. She falls in love with the macho Australian Greenfighter Marcus who’s played by Egor. I can’t wait to take his clothes off. He’s so, like, cuuute!’ Giggling like a high school girl, she opens the glovebox and takes out a solar mobile phone just like Darwin’s and punches a number. Bowing, she shouts into the mouthpiece, ‘Hai Hai! Moshi moshi! La la la la la. Hai okay!’ Zan watches her flip the phone shut and slip it in her pocket, admiring her small, quick, neat movements as she slides out of the limo and opens the back door. ‘You’ll be shooting the ecotage scene from the inside-out, Zan,’ Hiroshima fills her in, bowing a little. She is wearing a pair of teensy, exquisitely sexy, silver sequinned stilettos that Zan would die for, or at least cheerfully undergo years of footbinding. ‘Tomiko’s tipped off the Greenfighters who’s the next eco-pig target. A big fancy Japanese wedding reception happening here at Burswood Casino. All the important guys in the Japanese community are attending. The Japanese Consul plus movie stars, and fashion designers in from Tokyo. The bride and the groom are the hottest thing 52

on the Tokyo circuit since Shonen Knife.’ Hiroshima locks the limo with the remote and gestures to Zan to follow. Zan shoulders the heavy Sony and, feeling like Hiroshima’s pet Yeti, lumbers after her into the service entrance. ‘The bride and the groom are talento. All surface image. Nothing underneath. She’s a pop singer and he’s a game show host. They’re a real pair of Urban Consumer Nip EcoPigs. Throw money around like it’s water. The gown’s a Dior, cost $30,000.’ Hiroshima explains as they trot past the big laundry rooms at the rear of the complex. ‘But the thing that pisses off the Greenfighters the most is the groom flew in his own whale meat and his own special chef to prepare some traditional dishes for the reception.’ Hiroshima stops just outside the kitchen and instructs Zan, ‘Now turn on the camera and when we go in I’ll say a little speech about the whale meat. Stay about two and a half metres behind me and whatever I do, get it on tape and just keep on going. I’ll be talking into your camera as though you are one of the Greenfighters behind-the-scenes. You don’t say anything. Just get some good shots of the kitchen and the whale meat on the trays.’ Zan blows out a big breath and counts to six. Hiroshima pushes the swinging door open into the kitchen and singing out a Japanese greeting, bows at the Japanese chef who’s stirring a big pot of broth at the huge stainless steel range. Sashaying past him, out of his hearing, she says in a low voice into Zan’s camera, ‘Jimmy Murakami brought his own whale meat with him,’ wrinkling her nose in distaste. ‘Isn’t it awful!’ She rolls her eyes up in disgust and waves at dozens of trays full of beautifully presented dishes arranged in precise geometric patterns on the long stainless 53

steel table. ‘Jellied whale brain with chives and ginger followed by marinade of whale heart, tail meat of the pilot whale and steamed testicles with Western-style sauce.’ Tippy-toeing, she reads off the Japanese script menu taped to the wall. ‘Damned cannibals!’ Hiroshima hisses, whacking against a big tray with her hip as she passes, deliberately knocking it over with a glorious clash. The chef goes off his face, whoofing and grunting like in a Kabuki play. Zan zooms in on the mess and then pulling back quickly sidesteps it. ‘Excuse me! Please! Thank you! So sorry!’ Hiroshima wails in the chef’s direction with a perfect please-don’tbeat-me look on her face, bowing ferociously as she backs out the swinging door at the front of the kitchen, scoots across the hall, and down the passage, with Zan hot on her heels. ‘You’d think Jimmy and Yukio would know better,’ she says, breathless, pulling Zan around the corner, looking into the camera. ‘They’re shinjinrui, new generation. But no, when it comes to the wedding they revert to tradition. Whale meat is soooo special. And super expensive. Impress everybody. Someone should take revenge on behalf of our gentle big brothers and sisters and kick their environmentally unfriendly ass!’ she says with a grim little smile and makes the cut signal with her left hand, offcamera. ‘How’d I do?’ Zan asks Hiroshima, lowering the Sony, collapsing with adrenaline jitters. ‘Great,’ Hiroshima enthuses, checking her flawless make-up with a gold Cartier compact, patting Zan’s shiny nose with her powder puff. ‘Don’t worry about filming me in this scene,’ she says, drawing Zan down the hallway to 54

the atrium. ‘The other hand-held will track me and get the overall picture. Just concentrate on the other guests’ faces. Sort of jump from one to the next with your camera, catch their reaction. We want to see all those smug whale-eating faces lose it. We want to see them lose lots of face!’ Hiroshima heh hehs like a comic book villain and rubs her small hands with relish as she heads towards the door. White balance. Gain control. Autofocus. What was she supposed to remember about the lens cap? Never expose what to the light? Zan yammers to herself, still adrenalised, nervous, as she adjusts her crooked press card and hoists the heavy Sony up on her shoulder and pads after the glamourous little actress into the startling atrium lobby where she gasps at the drama of the sparkling glass swooping up and away in wild flying angles. It is so dazzlingly bright in that crystalline lobby she has to be very careful not to burn the tube out. Under no circumstances was she to point the lens for more than a few seconds at any strong light source, Darwin had warned. He was counting on her to come up with some good Zapruder, whatever that was. Hiroshima checks her watch and pulls out her lipstick, slathers a fresh coat of lilli pilli on top of her smile and gives the cue for Zan to begin filming. ‘Okay, this is it.’ Zan turns on the Sony, strides off towards the staircase, light on her feet in her flat Italian slip-ons. Naturally strong and steady with enough muscle to shoulder the Sony without getting tired, she moves and shoots in a slowflowing rhythm, filming the VIP guests as they come down the stairs and mill around waiting for the bride and groom’s entrance. A hush settles over the chatting crowd, then a quick little 55

stir of excitement as something flutters and winks in peripheral vision. A piercing dazzle of sun off a windshield strikes her lens like a laser. A smear of white in the distance approaches. A gleaming Rolls Royce coming up the grand driveway, back from the Chapel. The guests oooh and aaah. Smiles of pleasure and anticipation. The Consul’s wife beaming to see her favorite pop starlet emerge from the back of the Roller in a billow of white. Veil pouffing around that little sweet face like a cloud round a cherub. Here comes the groom. His smooth round face and owlish glasses make him look like a high school student dressed up in his father’s tuxedo. A pretty, petite Japanese bridesmaid in a little pink and white flouncy lace mini with little white anklets and wee high-heeled shoesies pops like Bo Peep out of the Roller followed by a tall sleek Japanese man in a gorgeous black Agnès B Homme suit with a vivid hot coral shirt and a loud patterned tie. Finally some fashion. Oooh what a suit! Zan notes the fine details. Every stitch in it handstitched. By people. In Paris. It takes gutsy flair to wear an Agnès B Homme with a Hugo Boss tie. She aims the Sony at Mr Charisma who eclipses the groom with his keen hard-edged presence, big glittering eyes, sleek pony-tail bluey-black like the sheen on a crow’s wing. The best man is aware she is staring at him through the Sony, gives her a look that makes her knees tremble. A wedding service employee with a Minolta pops out of the Roller, ushers the wedding cake couple out into the sun next to the big granite logo and poses them so they can prove to the folks back home they really were at the World-Famous Burswood Casino with honeymoon suite and 18 hole golf course. 56

Then THWACKA THWACKA THWACKATA THWACKA. The couple pause and look up at the racket, shielding their eyes from the brilliant sun. Zan moves closer to the entrance, aims the camera upward at what they are looking at. A helicopter bearing something beneath it in a large sling. Loud stirring music erupts from the chopper. It’s Wagner. The bloody ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Da Da-Da DUM Da. Da Da-Da DUM da! The guests laugh in delight at this dramatic touch. Applauding. Applauding. The bride and groom smile and wave at the chopper which hovers high overhead spilling out the dramatic music. The bride’s veil is caught in the updraft but gently, not roughly. The effect is dramatic. She looks like she’s flying, a runaway bride, and then the chopper spins like a dragonfly and dips its front in a salute then turns and rises, trailing the heroic music, then comes around for a pass, swoops and dips and something comes flying down from the chopper and onto the couple in a big splurchy splash, like a pigfarmer flinging a bucket of slops at the pigs and the bride and groom gasp and start screaming. Everyone’s screaming. And Zan is zooming and panning and wildly shooting the scene all around her, getting it down. The Rolls Royce is shockingly filthy. Then SPLAT! something awful hits the atrium’s lovely glass ceiling, a browny-red slime spreading and sliding with chunks of stuff in it, backlit by the sun. A horrible viscous goo sliding down the glass like in a Z Grade movie, Giant Amoeba From Hell Eats Burswood Casino. Then the chopper makes another pass like a big red and white insect hanging in the innocuous sunshine trailing a banner that says,

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EAT THIS, WHALE-EATERS! LET THE GREEN FIGHT BEGIN! Then the WHACKA WHACK WHACK sound getting smaller and smaller. The bride getting louder and louder. Screaming and wailing. The Japanese men growling deep in their throats like Mexican bandidos. Rage. Pandemonium. Shock. The groom screeching in Japanese outrage as he mops at his besmirched tuxedo with a white hanky. The poor bride is retching, she is splattered with what looks like fish guts. Little pieces of liver gum her once sleek shiny hair. The bridesmaid has fainted in a little pink heap. The best man’s face looms huge and grotesque in Zan’s viewfinder, eyes bulging in anger like a Kabuki mask, mouth barking into the camera, ‘You Westerners are crazy. You have no right to deny our food culture. We Japanese will eat whale whenever we like. We will eat YOU if we decide to!’ Then he waves her off with an imperious gesture and Hiroshima comes up behind Zan and in the confusion, yanks her away.

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8 8 ‘Yay! Yow! WOH!’ Egor is whooping and yelling, rock ’n’ rolling the chopper, absolutely combusting, adrenalinehigh. Egor is the Green warrior Marcus, Darwin thinks, grinning, zooming in on that mouth that’s roaring with triumph in an extra Big Close Up, a huge BCU. Darwin turns off his Sony and whacks it with gusto. He feels like Francis Ford Coppola must have felt coming back from a wrap in the jungle on Apocalypse Now . The soundtrack of the moment fills Darwin’s head with a skullwhomping wollop behind and above him. Coming out of his mouth. Coming up through his sphincter. The thwacketa thwack of the chopper, the buffeting thwap! of the windstream, the Howling-With-Wolves whoops coming from Egor. The ecotage scene at the Burswood Casino keeps

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flashing in his hot brainpan, he can still see the bride flinging her arms up in horror, her mouth in a scream shape, Kenji rushing forward in that odd rocking flatfooted way Japanese men run. The arc of the whale-chum flung from the buckets, slo-mo, elastic, classical sine waves. The soundless splat of the stuff on the gleaming white Rolls, its startling colour the abattoir red of ox-blood. The splurch of the stuff on the glass as shocking as a chamberpot’s shitslop thrown at the nave of a glass cathedral. The kinetic commotion under the glass like a shark interrupting an angelfish picnic. Darwin grins a facesplitting grin. He hung so far out of the chopper hatch with the Sony he scared himself silly, but he got the whole thing down in one seamless scene it’s just as good as Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence. Far fucking out! He can’t wait to see it. Can’t wait to run the scene in slow motion. Hugging his camera, he laughs a deep belly laugh and throws a high-five at Egor who winks and clicks his mouth twice, tips his head in that snappy little ‘Oi, Mate!’ salute so peculiar to Aussies. ‘YO!’ Darwin returns the gesture with a rush of affection for the burly bearded Australian actor he met in Hobart on the way back from The Big A. He was perfect for the Greenfighter role. Ruggedly handsome with a good strong thick body like Robin Williams. Totally competent, SAS commando style, you could drop Egor in the middle of the jungle and he’d act like he was born there, he can climb like a monkey, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Look at him now, Darwin thinks, with a mixture of awe and envy. The guy’s handling the chopper as though his 60

last name is Sikorsky, all the while maintaining a steady stream of rapid-fire technical knowledge, his normal soft patter raised to a roar as he bellows on about pitchsticks and swashplates, explaining How The Thing Works to Darwin as they eggbeater along through the air following the serpentine river back to the airport. From the air Darwin can see just how remarkably small the city of Perth is. A few high-rises clustered to form a toy skyline next to the river, with perhaps the worst case of suburban sprawl in the cosmos spreading north, south and eastwards. The dark green Norfolk pines at the Cottesloe coastline look like spiky little architect’s models lined up in a row. The great ships in the port at Fremantle look like little toy boats. The Indian Ocean stretches in vast blue scintillation way out past Rottnest towards Mauritius and Madagascar, the faraway neighbours of the most isolated city on earth. ‘Shit, I’d hate to have to be in on the clean-up!’ Egor bellows over the sound of the chopper, making a wry face at Darwin. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be,’ Darwin yells back. ‘They don’t know who or what hit ’em.’ ‘At least we got some hard-core ecotage footage, even if we had to Do-It-Yourself-it,’ Egor grins. ‘Kenji Kendo’s a top bloke in my book.’ ‘Yeah, Kendo-san does love his cinéma vérité!’ Darwin laughs. ‘Sure beats setting up a little card table outdoor cafe on St George’s Terrace and pretending to serve forbidden whale meat, hiring some extras to wave polite protest signs.’ ‘Well, just watch your ass, mate,’ Egor says, serious. ‘This is a police state. It’s not like the US. People do time here for 61

not paying their parking tickets.’ He kicks off his boot and steadies the joystick with his bare left foot, leans out the window and yanks in the long sheet of canvas he used to cover the chopper’s CALM markings during the fly-by. Darwin chuckles. How ironic to be flying one of CALM’s choppers to trash the Japanese whale-eaters. The Department of Conservation and Land Management was Egor’s arch enemy. CALM was allowing the logging of the state’s old-growth jarrah forests for Japanese woodchips to turn a quick profit. The radio crackles. ‘State your call sign and business,’ a curt voice demands from the tower. ‘CALM 0008654 reporting in from the Jarrahdale burnoff. Took us all morning and half of this arvo. Request permission to land. We’re bloody thirsty!’ Egor bullshits to his subversive Deep Greenie friend in the tower who secretly lent him the CALM chopper this morning. ‘Think locally and act locally,’ Egor’s mate paraphrases the global Green slogan, and okays them for landing. ‘Will you go an Export, Mate?’ Egor invites ten minutes later as they wait in the carpark. Reaching into his Li’l Oscar Esky he hauls out two cold ones to celebrate their Mission Accomplished. Smashes his tinny against Darwin’s and drains it in one long macho gulp, crumples the can and slips it back in the Esky and belches, before Darwin has finished his first couple of sips. ‘We’ll go straight to the studio and edit Zan’s tape!’ Darwin says, clunking his can against Egor’s second, high on that rush of excitement he always feels on the first day of shooting, greedy for more and more visual input. ‘Kenji’ll have the rushes ready by 7:00 and we can all look at them then.’ 62

‘How about the rest of you go out for pizza and leave me alone with Hiroshima Hiroshima,’ Egor sighs, fantasising. ‘She’s the most beautiful woman on earth, doncha think?’ Darwin nods absently. ‘Do ya think she fancies me?’ Darwin shrugs. ‘Fairy tales can come true. It can happen to you,’ he sings to Egor, musical comedy upbeat. ‘Look at Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas!’ ‘I’m way sexier than Antonio Banderas, aren’t I?’ Egor prods him, after reassurance. ‘You can say that again, Mate!’ Darwin clicks his tongue twice and dips his head, winking, hoping that Egor will drop this dangerous subject. Talking about women is starting to make him feel precarious again. But Egor is just getting started on the subject of Hiroshima Hiroshima. What a wonderful stage name. A real double whammy. Very earcatching. It means what it says. How smart. How intense. How no-bullshit is Hiroshima. Did Darwin know that she was one of the protesters in the Monju nuke protest in Fukui? Along with the activist Buddhist monk Nakajima Tesuen? The Japanese had built fifteen nuclear reactors, most of them on seismic fault lines, along a fifty kilometre coastline in Fukui they called the Nuclear Ginza. Did Darwin know that Hiroshima Hiroshima had stood up to the powerful Kansai Electric which had bought everyone’s silence so no one dared protest? ‘I’ve seen all Hiro’s films but we haven’t been close since we were at Berkeley,’ Darwin confides. ‘You know more about her personal life at this point than I do.’ ‘I’ve been meaning to ask about you two,’ Egor says shyly. ‘I don’t want to hassle you or say the wrong thing 63

but um, just between us blokes did you shag, um, fuck her?’ ‘I love you plainspoken Aussies,’ Darwin rolls his eyes, mock-sarcastic. But he isn’t offended, knows the question’s straightforward, no malice intended. Egor just needs to know all he can about the object of his desire. ‘So did you?’ Darwin sighs. Pain spreads like heavy dead lead in the pit of his stomach. ‘No,’ he says in a hollow voice. Not that he didn’t want to. He couldn’t. After Linni his whole body shut down, his dick included. To his dismay, tears squirt from his eyes the instant he thinks this, his gut heaves with awful dry sobs, beyond his control. ‘No. Hey. Man. I didn’t mean … You don’t have to tell me,’ Egor splutters, embarrassed he’s opened up some kind of deep wound. He flings a comradely arm around Darwin’s shoulder and waits in silence for the next couple of minutes, giving Darwin time to regain his composure. Darwin clears his throat and moves out of the hug and puts his foot up on the low railing, leans on his thigh and stares off in the distance. ‘You don’t want to get too excited about Hiroshima. Not a nice boy like you. She’s got a real kink in her,’ he says in a low voice, watching the silver limo lurch towards them up the long winding driveway.

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9 9 ‘You should have seen the look on that guy’s face when they hit the Rolls Royce! And the bride’s mother. She went ballistic! Those guys sure know how to act!’ Zan gee whizzes at Hiroshima on their way to pick up Darwin and Egor. She laughs and scooches closer across the front seat of the limo, feeling cosy towards the petite, pretty actress. ‘They weren’t acting,’ Hiroshima tells her with a little cat-like smile. ‘The wedding was real. The tall sexy best man was our co-director Kenji Kendo, and I, Yours Humbly Truly, was a guest of the bride. We were the only ones who were actually acting. The rest were honban. For real. The other guests didn’t know what was going to happen.’ ‘Oh wow!’ Zan exclaims, digesting this little bit of

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information. ‘I guess we really fucked up their wedding!’ she says with a nervous giggle. ‘We just borrowed it for a good cause,’ Hiroshima says blithely. ‘No one got hurt. They just got enlightened. Dramatically. With the reek of that old whale oil up their nostrils I’ll bet they’ll never be able to stomach whale meat again!’ ‘What if they sue?’ Zan verbalises, anxiously drumming her fingers on the case of the Sony. ‘We are all prepared here to be bankrupt!’ Hiroshima cries out, her voice reverberating with fervour, swerving into the fast lane, over-correcting, fish-tailing the limo. ‘If they sue, it will bring us more publicity. The bigger the attention, the better for our movie. This movie must attract the attention of as many as possible, even if it means going to jail.’ ‘Jail!’ Zan gasps, trying hard not to panic. ‘Do you think they called the cops?’ ‘Not these guys,’ Hiroshima says, nonchalantly. ‘And they’re not gonna sue either, I hate to tell you. Even if they knew who to sue, they’d be too embarrassed. It is not the Japanese custom.’ ‘But what if they find out …’ ‘Don’t be such a pussy. You sound like one of those wimpy armchair Greenies who sit back and do nothing but whinge. What good is having a save-the-planet message if nobody gets it!’ Hiroshima throws her hands up, impatient. Zan grabs the wheel to steady the limo but Hiroshima slaps her hand off and roars through the right turn to the airport. ‘Yatta!’ she announces as the limo squeals to a stop next to Egor and Darwin. 66

‘We’re outta here!’ Egor cries, hurtling into the back seat with Darwin, slamming the door. The atmosphere in the limo crackles with adrenaline ions, Darwin and Egor so pumped-up you could cut the testosterone fug with a knife. Egor talking non-stop, describing their exploits, with Darwin ‘Yo!ing’ for punctuation and elbowing Egor, Egor giving him punches, the two of them carrying on in the back seat like a couple of rugby players, full of rough matey horseplay after a match. Zan laughs, finally relaxing into The Fun Zone. ‘You must be Egor,’ she says rhetorically, sticking her hand out, thinking the actor looks like Russell Crowe’s hunky younger brother. ‘That can’t be your real name, right? I mean your real name is probably Mervin Malone or something.’ ‘My real name is Roger,’ Egor admits, crushing her hand gently in his. ‘But the audience remembers you better if you’ve got a weird name.’ ‘He is full of ego, ergo he’s Egor,’ Hiroshima chimes in, teasing, peeping at him over her wraparound sunnies. ‘He’s full of shit!’ Darwin laughs with affection. ‘You should change your name to Hobart,’ Zan jokes inanely, though she likes his name. ‘You should have seen the face on Kenji Kendo!’ Hiroshima laughs, looking back at Darwin, making deep eye contact, then turning to Zan she explains, ‘He is always so elegant. Especially well-curried. Kako ii, a man who impresses the ladies.’ ‘He didn’t look so kako ii with all that yukky guck on him!’ Zan giggles, lightening up, patting the Sony, flirting with Darwin. ‘He didn’t even flinch when the shit hit his beautiful suit! It was a real Kodak moment!’ 67

‘Kendo-san’s diabolical,’ Darwin says, grinning. ‘The dude really delivers. He actually hijacked his own cousin’s wedding.’ ‘What about me!’ Hiroshima lilts at him, coyly, fishing. ‘Onya, Hiroshima Hiroshima!’ Egor barracks from the back seat. ‘You did great, Hiro,’ Darwin rumbles his approval. ‘A perfect inside job.’ What about me! Zan thinks, feeling left out, wishing Darwin had sat in the front seat where she could make contact, touch his wrist with her left hand, caress the soft skin on the inside, trace the root of his life line at the base of his thumb. But he hadn’t and she couldn’t very well clamber into the back like some kind of sick puppy, she was, after all, a cool self-sufficient post-modern woman. Before she knows it they’re turning off Great Eastern Highway and heading into the city, pulling over in St George’s Terrace outside the Central Park building to pick up her Honda from the underground carpark. Zan leans in the door and asks Darwin brightly, ‘Where to next?’ He parks his big Raybans on top of his head and looks at her as though he hasn’t heard. ‘Whachu wan me to do now, Mon?’ she jokes in her best hang-loose Rasta accent. A bright beetroot red stains his neck and his cheeks. The vault of his forehead. She can see a vein throb in his right temple. His ears are on fire. He ducks his head like a boxer, away from her gaze and looks over at Egor who blurts as his spokesman, ‘We’re going to the studio.’ He puts his dark shades on so she can’t see his eyes. ‘I have to edit the tape now,’ Darwin says, reaching over the seat for the video camera, retrieving the tape. It’s highly 68

technical work,’ he explains, quietly. ‘It’ll be very boring for you. Then we’ve gotta workshop the script with Kenji,’ he mumbles, pointedly looking at his watch as though it were bedtime and Zan was the kid. ‘Okay,’ she swallows, trying to smile. ‘I’ll come back for you. I still have to finish our interview. Where’s the studio?’ ‘Um … it’ll have to wait,’ Darwin says, avoiding her eyes, slipping his shades down. ‘I’ll be up all night working.’ ‘Oh,’ says Zan, shutting her mouth to hide the black hole of disappointment yawning inside her. She can feel the three of them closing ranks, blanking her out with their Hollywood shades. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Darwin murmurs, giving her his thin froggy smile and, blowing a kiss at her, closes the limo door and motions to Hiroshima to drive away.

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10 10 ‘Think Globally, Act Locally!’ Zan toasts herself in the bathroom mirror as she washes her low dosage Diane 35 pill down with a tumbler of water. She might not be into compost but at least she was doing her bit for Zero Growth population. A hot and happening chick’s gotta be ready for action. Wishful thinking, kiddo. It has been three weeks two days and seven hours since my last action with Darwin, bless me Father, a long time between bonks. She pokes the sides of her mouth up into a smile and growls at her sad face, ‘No pain, no gain!’ Snatches a towel off the rack and stomps into the loungeroom, grabs the twenty-five pounders and forces herself through a blistering upper body workout, doing very slow reps with the heavy dumbbells, digging into that quivery beyondthe-burn feeling, going for high meat. 70

At least she’ll look good for her birthday, she thinks, frowning at herself in the full-length closet door mirror, trying hard not to cry at her poor sad little face. Almost twenty-seven and she’s not a success yet. Couldn’t even hold on to Sheehan. Can’t get a hold on anything lately. Everybody keeps running away. It started with Mummy and it just keeps on going. It must be contagious. Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. I think I’ll go eat worms. Zan slings her backpack over her shoulder and goes out into the morning, another day of trying and failing miserably to forget him, the bastard. Every day she picks up the West Australian at the King Street Cafe and reads it from cover to cover, looking for any news of the movie, Darwin et al. So far, nil, nothing, nada. No one’s been arrested for making a mess at the Casino. In fact, no mention at all of anything untoward at the Casino. That must’ve been a helluva clean up. Wonder how much something like that cost. Don’t think about it, kiddo, she tells herself every day. Just be glad no one’s come knocking at your door, asking you questions, serving you papers. Be glad you’re no longer involved with that bunch of cowboys. Talk about your baptism by fire. At the corner of King and Murray, a blur of bright cyan blue in the window of Sports World stops Zan in her tracks. The bright graphic poster pitching the Reeboks shows a single lone woman in full stride wearing a pair of flash running shoes and very brief shortlets boldly striding right through a burnt out urban landscape straight out of Mad Max. LIFE IS SHORT. PLAY HARD. Zan reiterates the words on the poster at the top of her breath and dives into the sports shop, after some of Those Shoes and their express promise. Go ahead, girl, don’t let those urban freaks 71

scare you, walk right on through, on your own, through the ratscape. You don’t need a man to keep you from the horror of horrors. You can stand on your own two feet if you’re wearing Reeboks. Zan sucks in the lovely new smell of non-marking soles and nylon synthetics, Hexalite insets and sanitised rubber, the plastic tang of man-made leather made in Korea, the wonderful whiff of Nikes and Reeboks. She smiles with sweet expectation. What a wonderful feeling! The best sensation. Buying new shoes just to play in. Play. Recreation. Amusement. Enjoyment. Fun. Darwin’s no fun, the bastard. Selfish. Self-centered. More egomaniacal, even, than Sheehan. He didn’t even bother to fill her in on the ramifications of what she was doing at the Burswood Casino, just went ahead and bloody used her. And then he just left her hanging. Why hasn’t he called? Is he feeling guilty? Maybe she should just call him, just pick up the phone, say in a light voice, without recrimination, ‘Hello, Darwin, It’s me. Can you come out to play?’ ‘Um. You’re very funny. It was fun while it lasted. But I’m very busy. Have to pick up my clothes. And cut my toenails. Figure out The Meaning of Life. Get it all down On Film. You’re a great fu–, um I mean, friend, Zan. But I’m going to the Amazon rainforest to make my next movie. See ya.’ He was no fucking fun. She had to do all the work, even the work of imagining their imagined conversations. Debbie wouldn’t let such a little thing as the phone faze her but Zan was too scared to ring him, to hear that awful word NO, so she let the silence between them keep building until it came down to the same thing, all that negation of dead time between them. Looking back, the instant he got in the limo she could feel 72

it. There was something new in the air in between them. Some kind of static. A weird vibe. A tension. He was sending out some kind of signal. She didn’t catch it at first because of Egor’s noisy egotistical interference. And when she caught it at last she could sense only its ghostly subliminal shadow — like someone moving across your grave in a parallel universe when you hadn’t died yet in this one. His hand brushed her hand when he got in the limo. It felt like a magnet. Then he drew it back as though she had burned him. That was the last time she touched him. Touched a man. She looks at the young blond-haired surfie in a Hot Tuna T-shirt who kneels at her feet juggling boxes of Reeboks. How inept. What a dickhead. They’re all the wrong size. All nine and a half women’s. ‘No. I need a men’s nine and a half, like I said,’ Zan says, rather brusquely. She’s been through this hassle so many times in her life she has had it. But it isn’t his fault for making the wrong assumptions. He’s just a young kid. ‘I have very big feet, even though they don’t look it.’ She softens, gives him a grumpy smile. The kid’s so embarrassed he’s throwing off heat now. His ears flush bright red. Just like Darwin’s. Unlike this clunky blond Australian surfie he’s whippet-thin, like Daniel Day Lewis or Willem Dafoe. She can’t remember what colour his eyes are. Are they brown? Are they chocolate? The colour of raisins. Bright shiny prunes like the cockroaches in Gogol? Not like this surfie shoe-kid’s. Transparent aqua. The colour of ozone before it went missing. ‘I’ll take them,’ she says of the first pair that fit her and 73

pays with her plastic, avoiding the touch of the kid’s shallow eyes. The instant she hits the pavement in her lovely new Reeboks she doesn’t want them. She feels deflated. And guilty. She doesn’t need their extravagant excess. She already has two pairs of Reeboks, one pair of Nikes, some fine blue suede Bandalinos Sheehan brought her from LA. But what she’d really like is a pair of five inch silver stilettos like Hiro’s, then she’d be statuesque when she walked next to Darwin. Shit. She doesn’t even know what his wife looks like. She should have mustered the courage to at least ask him her name. Kimberley. Tiffany. Stephanie. Lisa. No those were too straight for California. Maybe something like Summer. Moon Unit. Rain. Yeah. Rain Something or Other. She would have her own last name. One of those Women-WhoRun-With-The-Wolves Californian hippie New Agers complete with clumpy Birkenstock sandals. She was patiently waiting for him in a yurt back in Berkeley singing ‘we shall overcome’ and weaving hemp baskets, making her own acidophilus yoghurt in between saving the whales and standing shoulder to shoulder with Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, surfing the Third Wave of Feminism without a bloody surfboard. Zan revs up her pace to get the blood going, clear out her head, banish the down thoughts. Bounding along St George’s Terrace dodging the couriers on their quicksilver ten-speeds, feeling the heat from their hot hard pumping bodies. How urgent the short bursts of static erupting from their hand-held walkie-talkies! How tight their bright Lycra bikeshorts! How deep the cut … the separation … what 74

definition! … their calf muscles like little stuffed squabs leaping as they jump on their Repcos and pump helter skelter along the glass canyon of the Terrace in the teeth of the wind. What wonderful bums! Ab-ra-ca-dabra. Wanta reach out and grab ya. Empty-handed, she stands there, watching them go. Stuff him. She’s got a life to live. Work to do. Lots of fun things to do without him. Like drop into I Dolci and pick up a yummy wood-fired pizza, don’t hold the garlic, that should help her to shake off the Seduced, Used and Abandoned blues. Back home munching on soggy pizza Zan puts on her Redemption tape. ‘Dese songs of freedom. This is all I ever had …’ The song the Great Marley wrote just before he died of brain cancer. Her eyes shine with sorrow as she listens to her favorite Bob Marley and knows he will die soon. Knows we will die soon. And understands his songs are all Bob Marley had. All we have to remember his being. What has s h e done to make people remember? Zan thinks, morose as a toad. Pretty much nothing. Her head is full of pop culture and fashion and gossipy nuggets about which movie stars are fucking each other and who’s had a tit job, a face lift, a butt lift. They could all use a soul lift, herself included. ‘In case of nuclear attack cover yourself with wet newspapers and follow instructions,’ Zan tries to cheer herself up with the funniest line from her favourite Rocket Attack USA agitprop movie as she slides under the covers in her big cosy bed and with a sharp pang of regret realises she’s stupidly, automatically laundered the sheets without thinking. The smell of Darwin is gone with the wind, just like he is. 75

11 11 Welcome to the BankWest Tower, Perth’s most prestigious building … The digital display in the lift twinks in selfadvertisement. Zan smiles and punches the familiar Greer Martino & Sheehan floor button, plays with the blue plastic pass key she accidentally forgot to return to Patrick. Perth’s most prestigious … the digital strip keeps repeating. These architects all had such big egos, she smiles. Big dicks and big egos. Still the BankWest Tower — known as the Bond Tower before Bondy’s Downfall — was the most interesting phallus along St George’s Terrace, it stood out from the rest of the buildings like a cocked thumb. She smiles again with a little frisson of anticipation, wondering what Sheehan has up his sleeve, the big sexy devil. ‘Tell you over dinner,’ he’d said in that deep teasy rumble he used on the phone.

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She slots the key in at the twenty-eighth floor and with a gentle wheeze and a shudder the lift opens its doors to the inner sanctum. Sheehan’s office oozes refined understatement. The curved high brushed stainless steel reception counter whispers ‘I cost $22,000.’ The handwoven moire silk sofas speak of a long and expensive journey from Thailand. The dove-coloured wall-to-wall carpet murmurs ‘Don’t tread on me.’ Zan takes off the new Reeboks she’s amortising and tucks them into her black Mossimo backpack, slides on her dressy black Italian slip-ons and slinks past the large burnished stainless steel letters that spell PATRICK J SHEEHAN AIA. The views out of the windows hang there suspended like living paintings stuck in the wall, the hard-edged bright lights of the city at night, the bright white pyramid of the Casino lit up like money in the glittering dark. ‘Patrick?’ No answer. It is unusually quiet. She clicks on the lights and slips down the hallway to the big wedgeshaped office. Sheehan’s drafting table is empty. So is his fancy high gas-operated architect’s chair, like all of his architect accoutrements made of the finest and softest Italian leather. She savours the moment, enjoying the aftertaste of Patrick J Sheehan. The slightly medicinal smell of the ink in his Mont Blanc. His skin smells like black olives and Ralph Lauren’s Safari. She is stroking his leather chair when the urgent shrill little scream of the fax goes off in the corner. Out of habit she trots to the fax and pulls out the paper and reads it:

OSAKA RE: HAPPI ENDO RESORT

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THE HONORABLE GENERAL MANAGER OF LORUS INTERNATIONAL INC. MR JUN YA M A M O TO HAS APPROVED Aus$50,000 (FIFTY THOUSAND AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS). WOULD HE PREFER A MITSUBISHI PAJERO? PLEASE CONSIDER. THE COMPANY VERY MUCH APPRECIATES YOUR SPECIAL EFFORTS, SHEEHAN-SAN. KONNICHIWA, MATE. TOMMY TANAKA MANAGING DIRECTOR LORUS AUSTRALIA ‘YO! Is that you, Zan?’ she hears Sheehan’s deep sexy voice. She turns around still clutching the fax. A shock runs all through her. The face looking at her is the face of a stranger, doesn’t go with the voice. He’s shaved off his beard. ‘Uh. This just came for you,’ she says matter-of-factly, handing it to him. ‘Well, I’ll be faxed,’ Sheehan drawls, gives her a wink as he casually takes it, puts it on his high drafting table without reading it. Then pats his big chiselled cheeks, clearly pleased she’s so startled at seeing him beardless. ‘Didn’t know I was so handsome, did ya?’ he says, his eyes all lit up like a fire. Sheehan, excited, is bigger than life. ‘We’ve got a lot to celebrate!’ His eyebrows shoot up like Groucho’s, his voice fills the room. ‘I wanted you of all people to share this with me — to see me successful after that fiasco with the Kuwaitis. Let’s walk. It’s so nice out.’

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Her arm in his, he walks fast like she does. ‘You look magnificent! You give us all whiplash.’ What can she say? Just go with the flow. She’s feeling good, feeling better. How can she feel lonely with this wonderfully noisy big bozo wrapped all around her, wrapped up in her. Rapt. She can’t hide her excitement when she sees he is taking her to the glass-walled revolving restaurant on top of St Martin’s Tower. She loves Hilite 33. Being high up inside the skyline eating and drinking and laughing with all of that spectacular great expensive perspective hanging around her, the magnificent views so taken for granted, like disposable income. The soft little crunch of fine linen, the tinkling crystal, the mellow voices in soft conversation. It makes her feel as though she owns the whole city spread out around her. The glittery shimmer of the ribbony river. All the lovely new buildings. The AMP like Old Faithful. The Casino. The sparkling blue building where Debbie’s Ric works as a lawyer. The views slowly changing as the restaurant rotates very slowly and smoothly. Being with Sheehan feels so bloody … rich. She loves feeling ritzy, loves the cute bouncy scallops with scallions in bechamel sauce, the sweet little lace doilies under the soup bowls, vichyssoise. The Chateaubriand so scrumptiously Chateaubriandy. The 1994 Redhill Estate Chardonnay, a big buttery wine with beefy, vegemite characteristics, has a nice supple mouth feel, and a good mid-palate weight with rich ripe flavours. Though the Capel Vale Chardonnay has lovely limey peach flavours with subtle French oak, is a real trophy winner, a nine out of ten. ‘Remember the fantastic restaurants we went to in 79

Paris?’ Zan reminisces. ‘The Café de la Paix at least six times. Mmmmm. Those incredibly delicious French oysters fresh in from the cold North Coast waters, the double zéros. Mmmmm, the outrageously luscious bélons. Fouquet’s on New Year’s Eve after midnight, all glassed in for the winter and heated. Those whooping wild Parisians rolling down the Champs Elysées waving glow-in-the-dark light wands? I was just a small-town girl from Narrogin,’ Zan smiles fondly, ‘drinking champagne in bloody wonderful Paris celebrating the New Year in style. And the next morning at the Cafe of the Fat Pig in Versailles at dawn in the rain. Red wine and blood sausage. “Bare bellies to the ground and laughing laughing we arrived in Paris rice all over …” How did that Ionesco go?’ She can feel herself smiling back at his smile, he is making lots of intense eye contact. His nice thick pink lips smile back. His eyes crinkle nicely. Under his beard he’d been hiding a fine facial structure, his jawline is finer than she’d ever imagined. My god, he is confident, handsome, he looks like a man in a Hugo Boss ad. And somehow he’s different. Sleeker. He’s quiet for Sheehan, letting his eyes do all the deep and meaningful talking. She wasn’t used to his face yet. ‘Tell me about your new building,’ she prompts. He looks at her very seriously and says, ‘What can you say about a building? That it was beautiful and you loved it. And then you died?’ His version of the old Love Story line cracks her up. Then serious, he tells her, ‘It’s the biggest thing going in Western Australia! It’s in Vancouver, down on the coast. The town council has opened up the old foreshore. It’s a hotbed of hot property development. They’re wooing Asian 80

investors. I’m doing a complex of luxury units that’ll outshine Queensland’s Sanctuary Cove, totally sumptuous, your ten star type of accommodation. We’re putting in not one but two 18-holers and of course it’ll have its own airstrip.’ He waggles his eyebrows at her, excited. ‘The Japanese are paying me very big bucks to do the Happi Endo complex. It means Happy Ending in Japanese.’ He leans across the table and drops his cosy rumble even lower. ‘Now Zannie, this is just between us, okay? It’s a very sensitive project. And I mean very. The Japanese give their employees rewards and incentives, you know, vacations and things for doing a good job, for being loyal. Happi Endo’s a highly special place.’ He pauses for drama, gives her a low sexy chuckle. ‘You know how the Japanese are always going to Thailand and the Philippines on their wild sex tours. These people are very rich, Zan. They can afford to build special purpose. Happi Endo is very exclusive. It’s a sex resort for VIP Japanese honchos in the Yakuza.’ ‘What!?’ Zan squawks in mid-swallow, inhales some peachy lime Chardonnay up her nostrils. She has to laugh. What a perfect project for Sheehan, the sexaholic. It was right up his one-way alley. La Rue de Sex. Once he’s opened up the subject there is no stopping his torrent. ‘The site’s perfection,’ he is so enthused his eyebrows are flying off his forehead. ‘It’s on a nature reserve near the ocean. Unspoiled. The town had to get special coastal commission permission to sell off a parcel. It’s inside the boundaries. And I’ve had to come up with an environmentally sensitive design. Clusters of very unobtrusive low buildings, with berms and rammed earth on the outside. But whoa, boy, on the inside! I went totally 81

crazy! Lots of plastic and rubber for the wilder constructions. With all the latest high-tech sex toy equipment. There’s even a cyber-orgasm room. What a turn-on just doing the research! My kind of challenge! The Japanese are really into fantasy and I had to come up with some goodies that really deliver,’ Sheehan babbles on and on. You always deliver, she thinks, watching his gorgeous lips, feeling her cunt fatten and melt into honey. She can hear his voice echo deep in her head, Montre-moi tes jolis petits seins, Zan. Tes fesses. Ton joli verge. Baise-moi. Oui. Comme ça, Zan, remembering how it was when she first met him. She, a small town virgin tomboy straight in from woop woop. He, so outrageously sophisticated, just back from his sexploration of Europe. Into aesthetics in the same way that she was, he was into perfection, the search for the perfect design, the perfect typeface, the perfect orgasm. He made her feel like she was in one of those Sixties black and white sexy French movies where everyone has a really hot lover and they’re all doing hot sex. They drank Pernod and smoked Gitanes and spoke French with each other, shared everything. Zan blinks, looks at him over her sparkling wineglass. They are having a good time drinking lovely peachy lime Chardonnay as the world twirls around them, they are high in the sky. He is happy, expansive, wining her, dining her, thrilled with his triumph. She gives him whiplash. He makes her feel very Great Gatsby. He’s got a hard-on as big as the Ritz. Zan looks at Sheehan over her wineglass and hears herself saying in a low husky alto, ‘You’ll have to show me your etchings.’

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12 12 ‘You’ve spoiled me for other women,’ Sheehan is saying, in the foyer of the refurbished house she lived in for five years. His hands open like Jesus showing his nail holes. She takes off his camel cashmere coat and hangs it on the colonial hat stand, looks around the familiar high-ceilinged room. The two comfy Moran tartan couches look back at her, cosy and friendly. The familiar scent of candle wax and Olde English wood polish coming off the Baltic pine settlers table flies up her nostrils with a Proustian rush, overwhelming her with feelings of home and belonging. ‘Wow!’ she exclaims at the huge new eighty inch home entertainment system that hunkers in front of a black and red futon in what used to be Sheehan’s study. ‘I got it to help me get over you,’ his mouth says as he hands her a double Drambuie in a crystal glass.

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His eyes tell her he hasn’t. She feels herself backsliding all the way into his bed, or at least down onto the low futon. ‘Come here, ma chérie,’ Sheehan is saying, patting the seat next to him. He gives her a seductive smile. ‘I’ve got some great new CDs.’ ‘Mon cher,’ she murmurs, leaning in close for a kiss, breathing in the black olivey scent of his heating skin. Mmmmmm Drambuie! sipping her second glass of the honey-smooth liqueur, her mind focused on the touch of Sheehan’s hand. Just let yourself go, get into the wonderful feel of his big cosy body. She sighs, remembering Debbie’s tried-and-true motto. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. ‘And what’s this?’ she whispers, grasping his straining pink hard-on, thinking how nice it will be in the morning to have cafe au lait on the verandah, underneath the beautiful soft pink tamarisk tree. How nice not to have to talk, just read the papers, the ground between them feels so nice and cosy, going back all those years. His familiar big cock sways near her mouth like a snake-charmer’s cobra begging for magic. She takes it in, relaxes her jaw and slides it in deeper, down the back of her throat, she can still do the deep throat he taught her without ripping his cockskin. So thin. So elastic. Like a squeaky balloon skin under her tongue. She squeezes his balls as he spasms, his come drowning her, his shuddering sighs coming at her like waves of rain in a downpour. She sits back on her haunches, surveying Sheehan, looking deep in his come-struck eyes.

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13 13 ‘“More is more!” to quote RuPaul,’ Debbie is saying with a big naughty wink, her eyes aglitter with concupiscence, as she vogues along next to Zan in her best navy Trent Nathan, eyeballing the goodies in Daimaru Melbourne, the classiest store in Australia. ‘Who’s RooPall?’ Zan asks, mock-ingenuous, falling into their Debbie and Zannie routine. ‘My hero,’ Deb sighs. ‘Or rather my heroine. She’s a rock singer drag queen. Or a drag singer rock queen. I can’t tell you for the life of me what’s the music. She dresses pure glitz. She digs excess. She’s not into Thoreau.’ ‘Camille Paglia would dig her, I take it.’ ‘Camille Who?’ Debbie asks, her eyes slowly scanning the display cases floating on a wide sea of carpet. She is looking for the perfect ‘I’ve just got to have it!’ item, and

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she hasn’t seen it yet. For Debbie, a top of the line fashion buyer at Myer, shopping is a sexual act and she likes lots of foreplay. Her quest for The Perfect Item has been known to take her all day, starting off with breakfast downstairs in the International Food Hall, ending with afternoon tea. Zan sighs and squirts her wrist with the Obsession tester, takes a deep yummy breath. God, it was good to be back in The Fun Zone, shopping with Deb on a frivolous little stopover on her way to see her editor Siegel in Sydney. Swanning from counter to counter in their very best glam gear like Linda Evangelista and Elle McPherson. Nudging each other and making sly little tongue-in-cheek comments. ‘Doncha just L-U-U-V this stainless steel coffee pot by Alessi? It’s so weird it looks like a sculpture. I’ve just gotta have it. A genuine bargain at $495!’ Everything was a giggle with Deb. Taking a pee in the fancy Ladies restroom. ‘Shit!’ Debbie yelped at the hightech Swiss Hygolet gizmo that wrapped the seat in fresh plastic cling wrap when you flushed the toilet. ‘It’s attacking my honour! Good thing I know where to go for a Virginity Restoration. Price upon application at your friendly gyno. They just resew the hymen. Presto! You’re pristine. ‘Speaking of which,’ Debbie pouts, pretending hurt feelings, ‘you never did tell me what it was like with Darwin. Coming from LA he must be nice and kinky. Is he kinky? Come on, girl, tell.’ His cock filling her to the brim. He holds her head in his hands like a chalice … like holy communion … ‘You know that scene in 91/2Weeks with the ice cubes,’ Zan starts to joke, evading the question, but the look on Deb’s face demands satisfaction. ‘You know,’ she fibs, ‘nothing

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special. Any way you slice it, it’s still the same old salami.’ Debbie sighs. ‘Well, at least it’s a world-class salami. The closest I’ve come to a celebrity fuck is when Ric took me to the races on Melbourne Cup Day. Russell Crowe came up so close behind me I could feel his lunch and, believe me, his girlfriend doesn’t go hungry! So I’d say you’re not doing too badly, chook. Not compared to what you were like when Sheehan dumped you. You were such a fucken mess, Zan, I was worried about you.’ ‘He didn’t dump me,’ Zan protests, tossing her crumpled paper towel at her. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?!’ ‘Yeah, yeah I know,’ Debbie interrupts, brushing her perfectly plucked eyebrows, spraying her perfect hair with a small can of hairspray. ‘You needed your, and I quote, “space” to “become your own person”, etcetera, bloody feminist shit … you had to get out from under that egotistical, controlling, patriarchal, male chauvinist …’ ‘… superdickhead blowhard,’ Zan finishes. ‘But once you got out there, Zannie, you didn’t like it, if I may so humbly remind you.’ ‘The singles scene sucks, Babe.’ ‘At least you got some strange, girl. I’ll bet that made Sheehan sit up and pay attention. With you running around like the jinky jiver with Darwin.’ Deb smiles, fishing, but Zan instinctively doesn’t want to tell her about her little backslide with Sheehan. ‘I’ll bet when you get back your answering machine will have a dozen “call mes” from sexy old Sheehan.’ ‘We’ll see,’ Zan says, mysteriously, just to keep Debbie guessing. 87

In the shoe department Zan is transfixed by a pair of Omega jade coloured suede platforms. ‘Ooooo.’ She dares slide her foot in. The fit is perfect. Size 111/2. And the one and a half inch platform makes her look like an Amazon. ‘Having our Out of the Body Experience, are we?’ Debbie says slyly, giving her a girlie nudge with her elbow. ‘Oh, go on. Be good to yourself. Buy them.’ ‘I don’t know, Deb. Don’t I look too tall? Do I?’ Zan agonises. ‘RuPaul can handle eight inches, as long as they’ve got toe holes,’ Debbie offers, one of her trademark little fun tidbits of gossip. ‘Go on. You’ll look like a Helmut Newton photo for a watch ad. They’re only $149!’ Easy, girl, Zan warns herself. No way can she admit to Debbie she can’t afford them. Unlike her best friend she’s totally self-supporting and is now at a crunch point, for the last couple of weeks she’s been spending so much time moaning about Darwin, she’s behind in her Trendz work. And Siegel was driving her nutzoid with all his ‘Shitcan this, shitcan that’ edits. Making her rewrite her precious features. Every word she cut she bled her own lifeblood, they were so fucking apt. Sometimes it felt like she was pushing a rock uphill against the snobby elite of Sydney and Melbourne. The Establishment Over East thought they had a lock on fashion and culchah and Perth was just a big cowtown on the edge of nowhere full of cultural cringe cowpokes who hadn’t a clue. But people are people no matter where. It was like mining opal, fashion and glamour, you had your flash surface trash and the deep and true shine-from-within gems. How the bloody hell is she going to get Siegel on side, she wonders and the instant she thinks it a light bulb goes off in 88

her head. She will do an amusing reverse-snobbism feature on shopping at Daimaru as seen through the Gee-Whiz eyes of a Western Australian ‘Sandgroper’ — and Siegel will buy it and pay her expenses. ‘Chaaarge!’ Zan bellows her cri de guerre as she whips out her Visa and captures the sandals. Fuck being Green! Darwin’s anti-consumer ‘less is more’ crap. They make her feet look sort of smallish. They make her feel sexy. She sees herself in the sandals towering high over Siegel. She will inspire awe at their confrontation. She will win the big showdown over the rewrites. He will stet every word from now on. The weight of the swingy green Daimaru plastic bag in her hand makes her feel jaunty as she trots along in her old shoes savouring future triumphs. Darwin will fall down on his knees when he sees her in the magnificent high jade suede platforms and kiss her feet. Maybe even lick them, his tongue warm and wet as a dog’s, adoring. All Zan needs is the one perfect find to be sated but Debbie has garnered two bagfuls of trophies, is stalking the Menswear Department in search of The Perfect Something or Other for Ric. Now she’s caressing a jacket by Ermegildo Zegna in fine herringbone cashmere. A bargain at $2,995. ‘I’d get it for Ric but he wouldn’t wear it. He’d think it was too poncy. He’s a real bush boy. Didn’t wear shoes till he went to high school,’ Debbie says, grinning, stops dead in her tracks at the men’s accessories counter, stunned by the ties. ‘Aren’t they luscious. French. And Italian.’ She is purring with pleasure stroking the satiny infinitesimally sensuous textures. ‘Why don’t you buy one for Darwin!?’ ‘Hah! Let his bloody wife bloody well buy him his ties!’ Zan shrills, rather nasty. 89

‘Not bloody likely,’ Debbie drawls. ‘Unless she’s got “Hi Honey I’m Dead!” kind of powers.’ Zan looks at her, startled, feeling her face flare. ‘She’s on the other side, Zan,’ Debbie says, eloquently raising her eyebrows. ‘I thought you said he was married.’ Zan’s head swims with confusion. ‘I did. But then Sheehan told me his wife was dead.’ ‘Why didn’t Sheehan tell me?’ Zan wails like a child. ‘Hah! Why should he?’ Debbie flashes a cynical smile, slits her eyes like a cat. ‘Men, you can’t trust ’em. You know the three most famous promises men make: One. I promise I’ll still respect you in the morning. Two. I swear I won’t come in your mouth. Three. I’m gonna be tied up for a while but I’ll call you in a few days.’ ‘Don’t I know it!’ Zan makes a wry face. ‘I’ve stopped counting the twenty-eight days fourteen hours and sixtynine minutes since the Big Mucky Muck Filmmaker from La La Land told me “I’ll call you” — the bastard.’ Deb shrugs her wide-padded shoulders. ‘What can you expect? We’re so different. Men use the phone for information. Women use it for bonding.’ Zan is fed up with men. Bloody hell! It was so complicated, this man-woman sex thing. At least things were straightforward between her and Siegel, an out-ofthe-closet and loving it, thank you Sweetie Darling Ab Fab gay. She is so grateful to Siegel she feels a surge of affection and buys him The Perfect Tie, a sexy looking taupe and purple silk Giorgio Armani with its own registration number for $105. Even if she knew who Darwin was and what his feelings were she couldn’t buy The Perfect Tie for him. He would 90

shudder at her misplaced values, make her feel guilty for wasting her time and her money when she could be using it to Save the Bloody Planet. Let’s just face it. He wasn’t her type. He was too bloody skinny. Too bloody cerebral. Too slow-mo. Too serious. Too eat-low-on-the-food-chain vegan. Jesus, he had such a handsome sleek cock. ‘Oooooo, look at this lippy!’ Debbie is oohing, swiping the back of Zan’s hand with the greasy tester. ‘It’s perfect for you. See, it’s okay to buy it. It’s a new range. Ecologically friendly. What a fabulous colour! Rainforest Toucan. When you kiss ’em with this, they stay kissed forever!’ ‘Or turn into frogs,’ Zan jokes, forcing a smile, her mood on a plummeting downswing. The image of Darwin echoes, ricochets in her big lonely head along with her thoughts. Why hadn’t he told her about his dead wife?

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14 14 At 6:45 Zan slips into her little black sex babe number by Ray Costarella and her new jade suede platforms and hobbles out of the Park Hyatt along the edge of the water trying not to see the floating clumplets of garbage bobbing so gaily, trying not to feel nervous. For the nth time she wonders why Siegel has summoned her in the flesh all the way out to Sydney — surely not just to yammer at her about rewrites — if he wanted to do that he could have saved himself some big bucks and used the phone or the modem. Not that she’s bitching, mind you. After a decade of prowling Perth’s oh-so-familiar precincts, she appreciates a sprawling skyline you could get lost in. The nightlife, the dancing, the big city juice. How fast the ferries whiz by. One every minute. The Opera House rising like winged Victory just over the water. She loves the crowds

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strolling by along the harbour, the flash outdoor restaurants where every person she sees is either a stranger or famous. Is that pale skinny chick with the frazzle of dark reddish hair slurping down oysters Judy Davis? Is that Colin Friels in a shocking blond crewcut drinking champers? Molly Meldrum with his big horse face and trademark cowboy hat? The man with the smooth-as-Ray-Martin voice is Ray Martin, climbing the stairs outside Bilson’s, he holds the door open for her with a big piano key smile. Siegel is sitting right in the centre of the curving glass tower, his fine lupine face poised behind a big dry martini. He is wearing his big wide smooth brow with the circumflex eyebrows, his sexy dark eyes and a gorgeous winter-weight camel cashmere jacket by either Zegna or Boss, she can’t quite determine. ‘Zan! Sweetie! Darling!’ He unfolds his long length from the chair like Ab Fab’s lanky Patsy and comes round to kiss her, French style, his lips moist and bouncy, on each of her cheeks. ‘How’s it hanging?’ she opens, sophistirisqué, reaching into her black rubber briefcase, giving him the slim silver folder that holds the Armani, along with her Shopping-atDaimaru feature. His eyes light up and swoop on her printout, quick as two magpies. ‘I’ll be happy to do a rewrite of course,’ she stammers, ‘if you think it needs it …’ He puts his hand up to sssshhh her, waves the waiter away with ‘Bring us some Evans & Tate Chardonnay and two chicken salads.’ She watches him speedread, sucking her words up, an odd little sexual tension building inside her. 93

‘Yes!’ he says, laughing, his eyes fondling hers as he quotes her own words back, ‘Fuck being Green! When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping!’ ‘You’re so refreshing. Like a female Tom Robbins. Cosmic and comic. I love your extraneous depth, Z.’ He clinks his wineglass against hers with a resonant boing. ‘A little zany goes a long way, Possum,’ Siegel continues, his mobile lips mesmerising to watch. ‘It’s pretty grim out there, what with The Virus, The Dying Planet. You’ve got your fingers on the pulse, Zan. Nobody cares about the environment except for a handful of ferals and they don’t buy Trendz! No, it’s the couch potatoes who buy us. And the couch potatoes out there are sick of the Green Thing. They’re scared of Nature. They don’t wanna go out and hug the trees ’cos the trees out there are full of serial psychos. They’re scared to go out, they might catch The Virus. They want to stay home and be titillated. S & M. Lesbian testosterone junkies. Incestuous Siamese twins who share the same rectum. Homoerotic Encounters of the Third Kind, in and out of the closet,’ he smacks his lips at this one. ‘Gold and brown but hold the Green showers, Darling. You don’t have to consult Faith Popcorn to know what the trends are. Just keep your eyes open and look around you.’ Zan props her eyelids wide open and makes googly eyes at Siegel. She pushes her gift on top of the printout, watches him open the silver folder. ‘I think I’m coming!’ he gasps, delighted, stroking the silken tie, slipping it over his head, looking at the little registration tag. ‘What cachet! It’s got its own serial number. I’ll have to get this framed.’ His eyes glow at her over his wineglass. ‘I’m starting a 94

new mag. Calling it Black & Blue. Sort of an elegant forum for the cosmopolitan urban neurotic with an S & M subtext.’ He pours more Chardonnay and toasts her. ‘And I want you to come in on the ground floor, Sweetie. I’m thinking 90 thou a year plus a gold Amex. And of course your own Beamer. You do like red, don’t you?’ ‘Is the Pope Polish?’ she smiles a cool savvy smile, slitting her eyes just a little so he won’t see behind them where 90 thou! Amex! BMW! is flashing like neon inside her hot head. ‘What’s your time frame?’ she asks, bottom-line business. ‘I’m thinking Easter,’ Siegel says, wrapping his eyes around her like a magnificent present. ‘All you have to do to clinch the offer is come up with a hot freelance piece for the launch. I need something really special for the positioning issue. A really big feature. Something that explains the cosmopolitan couch potatoes out there to themselves and makes it sound groovy. A ‘Why I’m Into S & M Instead of Breeding’ kind of thing. Sort of a disguised thinkpiece like they give you in Penthouse or Playboy. Think “Bruise.” Think “Dangerous Games,”’ he says, his elegant manicured fingers making ironic air quotes. ‘Whatever. Just make it brilliant. If it’s hot enough then I’ll sign you on on the masthead, Z.’ ‘Cool,’ she says, looking across the light-sequinned water at the sparkling high-rises bunched round the harbour, the big clunky bridge that bulks in the night like a set out of Batman.

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15 15 At dawn the entire Perth Zooful of monkeys erupts, a block away from his apartment, the gibbons screaming and carrying on like psychotics, cawing maniacal cackles high in the trees. A couple of kookaburras join in, more hoo hoo ha! psycho laughter. Darwin chuckles at his own crazy built-in alarm clock, like an insane asylum with all of the inmates shrieking and laughing, ‘HELLO! I’M ALIVE!’ He likes the round-the-clock racket of diurnals, nocturnals, likes the Big Evolutionary Scale perspective their presence affords him, a constant reminder of how bloody low his own oh-so-upwardly-mobile homo sapiens species can go. Convinced they owned the whole planet. Grabbing its natural resources. Exterminating species. He feels like sneaking in tonight and letting

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everyone out of their New Improved Cages but he knows they would die out of the slammer. Yawning, he opens the blinds on a glorious morning. It looks like a big Ken Done painting out there, all bright blue and upbeat, with a big happy sun. He putters around in the kitchen, brews a pot of extrastrong coffee and drinks a cup standing up at the counter, trying to blast the inertia out of his brain. Everything’s ground to a halt since the big ecotage scene at the Casino. The hassles with local industry quotas and regulations are driving them nutzoid. Their little sortie to Northcliffe to film the anti-loggers was a stone cold bust. What the local New Agey-Green paper had described as a ‘huge’ protest turned out to be two or three ferals sitting politely up in the trees, with another half dozen hippies waiting quietly behind police lines. Shooting’s been on hold for the last several weeks thanks to delay after delay in getting equipment from ‘Over East.’ He couldn’t believe they didn’t have one lousy Louma in the whole huge state of Western Australia. It was going to cost them $3,000 to haul the bloody crane across the Nullarbor. He was so used to a different set of assumptions, the ones he’d grown up with, he just couldn’t believe it. He’d taken Zan’s comment as a zippy one-liner, a cute throwaway, but she hadn’t been joking. They had more cinematic infrastructure in Toledo, Ohio than they did in Perth. He can hear her laughing, holding the mike out, ‘Tell us Mr Brown, speaking strictly off the cusp, now …’ Her face flickers on his inner TV and zigzags into static, like an outof-tune channel. He should have rung her and told her she gave great Zapruder, he should have sent her flowers, asked her to dinner. So many should-haves he didn’t do. 97

Stop fantasising about ashould-haves or you’ll drive yourself crazy, Darwin frowns. Hey, he should be filming hassle-free somewhere near Sydney but Kenji’s uncle was based here and Yamamoto’s resources were free. The LMT Productions studio in Subiaco, the crew, the hotel suites, not to mention the plane and the limo. So what if Kenji spent half the time popping in and out, taking care of uncle. Everything was a trade off. Darwin knew how to work around him. When Kenji got back from his latest little jaunt with his uncle, he’d have lots of good stuff to show him. All done in situ. American ships in Australian harbours, shot with the hand-held. Establishing shots. Big Picture context. Kenji might be the one with the money, but he had plenty of talent to offer. ‘Yo, bro!’ Darwin calls out, identifying with his fellow primates as he rolls past their leafy green jailhouse on his bike, heading out for the port to shoot some nuts and bolts footage. Do monkeys think? he wonders. And if they do, what do they think? I think, therefore I is. That all depends on what your definition of is is, as Bill Clinton would say. He flits in and out of the slow-moving traffic, gets to the ferry in what seems like seconds, joins the small group of smiling South Perth commuters lucky enough to escape the daily grind of Perth’s jammed highways. What a mellow way to start the day, he thinks as the old-fashioned ferry bumbles across the wide shallow river, slowly homing in on the small boomtown city, construction cranes poking up like big insects out of the skyline, rat tat tat jackhammer noise. Heading over the bridge to Fremantle an incredible stench of ammonia and sheep piss from the six-storey-high export sheep ship attacks him, almost knocks him off his 98

tenspeed, makes him relieved he only eats veggies, has nothing to do with the torture of sheep. The briny smell of saltwater mixed with the sickening fumes of marine fuel still fills him with pleasure, he’s always loved ports, they’re so single purpose with all that busy toing and froing, the great man-made structures, the cranes unloading like huge working toys. He stops his bike to capture the sight that greets him in the near distance. A huge American warship is hulked up next to the wharf only 500 metres away from the Russian icebreaker, post-glasnost cosy. He couldn’t have set it up any better to further his purpose, make things more dramatic. He whacks down the kickstand and pulls out the Sony, shoots some establishing footage of the icebreaker’s big boxy structure. Its small window slits make it look like a floating fortress. How absolutely totally wonderful the sight of the icebreaker was down on The Ice, he remembers, it was almost enough to make him forget and forgive it was nuclear-powered. He flips off the zoom and turns his attention back to the warship. So huge and sleek, a monument to everything his country stands for, The Right to Bear Arms, Don’t Tread on Me. He lies down on the dock and films the ship from this new bizarre angle, trying to capture its Don’t Fuck With Me power, the physical thrill of its ominous presence. He looks at the big guns bristling on the deck and knows that there are far more powerful weapons — missile launchers, nuclear warheads — hidden below out of sight. Americans always responded to media queries about the presence of nuclear weapons with the same, ‘It is the policy of the United States Navy to neither confirm nor deny nuclear capability,’ delivered in a poker-faced voice. And 99

the Australians didn’t dare press them. With Asia slathering over their shoulder, the Aussies needed to rub up against all of that hulky power. New York City absolutely refused to allow its own country’s nuclear warships to berth in the harbour but Australia couldn’t afford to offend its American ally. Fremantle and Perth didn’t have many people. So what if a million Australians go down the tubes in the event of a nuclear accident? Gidday, mates. It was fun having youse. A handful of raggedy barefooted left-over peaceniks quietly huddle near the big warship’s gangplank protesting the nuclear presence with home-made YANKEE GO HOME! signs, hugely outnumbered by the gaggles of Australian women flirting and cooing with the funky cool American sailors who talk just like the rappers do on telly. Darwin stands there a while in the sunshine filming the hive of activity surrounding the warship, the deliveries of pizza and drycleaning, food supplies from the local greengrocers, grinning at the Black American sailors. It’s been a long time since he’s seen that wonderful rolling-hip macho swagger, an African-American can throw his heat space fifty metres, knows how to muthahfuckin’ pro-ject. He hails a passing Chicano sailor whose badge says Martinez, can’t resist asking, ‘How’s it going back home?’ ‘It’s going down the tubes,’ Martinez tells him, shaking his head. ‘It’s the drugs, man. It’s for shit. Used to be they waited till you wasn’t at home for them to come rob you. Now the thieves want you to be there. They want confrontation. It’s more exciting.’ Darwin shakes his head. Would there ever be an end to the non-stop violence? ‘I’ve been away a long time.’ ‘You lucky devil,’ the sailor gives him a look of pure 100

envy. ‘You get to play here in the land of the endless white beach and no visible tanline. Your life must be like one big long R & R then, huh, buddy?’ Not exactly, Darwin thinks as he moves his bike closer to the Russian icebreaker and hoists his Sony. Trying to look like a tourist, he ever so casually aims it at the group of passengers who are milling about with their piles of luggage getting ready to board the icebreaker for their Big Soft Adventure sipping cocktails on icefloes in The Big A. In need of some interior shots, he boldly elbows his way through the crowd and shoulders up the gangplank and onto the deck where all hands are busy stowing and trimming, no one sees him or stops him. For the next fifteen minutes, grinning behind his whirring Sony, he shoots some craftsmanlike meat and potatoes footage, from inside a cabin through the fortress-like window, up and down the dark passageways, from around the far side of the vessel, shooting out to sea. His mission accomplished, he strides down the gangplank, along the wharf past the vessel, the tourists parting before him like the Red Sea. A sudden depressing deflation hits Darwin like the air going out of a tyre. He puts in a new tape and stashes the Sony, shoulders the heavy backpack and takes a long slow ride around the big harbour, stopping here and there, shooting Big Picture context. By the time he’s made the circuit the American warship is preparing to leave, ceremoniously weighing anchor. He switches to the wide angle lens and sets up his tripod, starts the camera rolling. The sailors stand in formation all over the ship in stiffly dramatic stances, their legs spread wide, their feet firmly planted, their eyes look straight ahead, past 101

the group of women gathered there to farewell them. They look exactly like the stylised little sailors on Zan’s white anklets he realises. If this was his movie he’d start with her socks then cut to the warship, then back to her face. Is she crying? All the women are crying pressed in a clutch as though they gathered some scant little comfort from being in a group. Their bodies yearn at the ship as it moves away from the quay, very slowly, makes its slow stately way out to sea. One woman tall and athletic sets her jaw and tosses her hair back, strides down the quay. He can see from the way she is walking her body is talking across the wide water. Her strength and determination carry across the widening distance. Grace undulates from her breasts and her thighs as she swings along with her head held high for her vanishing sailor. The thrust of her belly, the sway of her hipbones semaphoring I AM YOUR WOMAN across the distance. The intense connection of memory and desire. His throat clogs with love for the man, for the woman. The woman spreads her arms high and wide towards the sky in an epic gesture of triumph, of longing. Her sailor by now looks microscopic to this warrior woman. Ohmigod, what a beautiful woman! When he’s dead, when he’s gone she will remember. Forever. Forever. His smell in her blood. His seed in her belly. Forever. Undying.

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16 16 Dark thoughts move in him like a slow-motion mudslide as he hauls his heavy bike up the stairs to his apartment, trudging past the downstairs dentist who asks, ‘How ya travellin’?’ and smiles, locking his office up for the night. Heavy, Darwin thinks but doesn’t say, instead mumbles, ‘Good. How you doin’?’ and without waiting to hear the answer, pushes in through his door. ‘Hi, Honey, I’m home!’ he calls out just to feel his own lonely voice echo, picking the scab of his psyche, taking perverse pleasure in pain. ‘You’re not depressed, you’re just hungry,’ he hears his mom’s voice in his head, clucking and soothing. ‘Have a bean tay-co, maaate!’ he brays at himself, pretending he’s Egor, and stalks resolutely into the kitchen, full of grim Darwinian purpose. He drains the big pot of

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borlotti beans he’s soaked overnight and rinses them in a sieve over and over, that old soaking water is pure essence of fart. He puts the beans back in the pot and fills it with fresh water, chops up six cloves of garlic and a fresh chilli pepper, throws in some salt and brings the beans to a rapid boil. After twenty minutes he turns down the flame to a simmer. He works on the script for the next half an hour, trying to tighten the dialogue and amp up the action. He makes a note about the nondiegetics, thinking of how to persuade Kenji Kendo to let an American do the musical soundtrack, if a Japanese composer does it, it might be too subtle, or worse, too hit ’em over the head directive. TRY IT WITHOUT MUSIC? he scrawls across the page. That would be a first. No music to cue the audience how they should be feeling. Yeah, let the ding an sich visuals speak for itself. He gets up and stirs the beans and adds more water. It’s a lot of work making Mom’s chilli beans, they take three hours to cook and you have to get up every twelve or fifteen minutes to stir them and add water. The trick is to keep scraping them up off the bottom with a big wooden spoon. If you do it right they turn into a delicious thick beany custard which you eat with rice, grated cheese, salad and chopped red onions to get good complex carbos. He hasn’t missed meat since he’s been eating Mom’s beans. He rummages through the kitchen drawer looking for the cheese grater, finds the card Zan gave him. 3-D, holographic, it hurts his eyes, it’s so bright, refracting shatter-print rainbows when the light hits it. Flashing ZAN McNAUGHTON! if you hold it one way, TRENDZ! if you angle it in the other. Talk about look-at-me attention104

grabbing self-advertising! He grabs his mobile then hesitates, his fingers poised to punch out her number, takes a deep breath and shakes it off like a dog shedding water, puts down the phone and picks up the film script and a red pencil, gets lost in his work for the next couple of hours, sketching out new ideas in the margins. The familiar clarion horn of the LMT limo beckons him to the window. ‘DocoMan!’ Kenji calls outside his front door, waving a fun-size bottle of Glenfiddich. ‘Come on up, Pinkku Eiga Man!’ he yells down to Kenji, happy to see him, buzzing him in. ‘I need three four five scotch-on-the-rocks after being all day with my uncle. “Do this. Do that. Take me here. Take me there.” Yamamoto-san, he drive me banana!’ Kenji exclaims, slamming the bottle down on the table, heading for Darwin’s fridge, cracking the ice-tray into a bucket. ‘Only one scotch-on-the-rocks, dude,’ Darwin warns, dishing out a bowl of Mom’s beans for Kenji. ‘We’ve got work to do. We need to think-tank this mother,’ he says, waving his spoon at the script. ‘The whole icebreaker idea isn’t going to work,’ he tells his co-director, sitting down opposite him at the table. ‘I was out there this morning. It doesn’t have the right impact. If the Greenfighters scuttle the ship, it’ll come off too nasty. Like the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in reverse. It’ll turn people off.’ Kenji gives him that blank Japanese face that means he is thinking, his fork still-paused in mid-air. ‘Okay, let’s blow up a woodchipping mill! There’s a big new one down there in the forest north of Vancouver,’ Kenji suggests, hungrily shovelling some beans in, burning his tongue in the process, blowing and huffing like a guy 105

in one of his porn flicks who’s reaching his climax. ‘Yeah!’ Darwin enthuses. ‘Let Tomiko and Marcus kick ass! And no one’ll get hurt, like if they sank the icebreaker. We’ll make Marcus look better than Bruce Willis in Die Harder Two.’ ‘Yippie kai yay!’ Kenji chortles, punching the air, grabbing a biro and scritching some notes in Japanese kanji. ‘The Greenfighters can sneak in up the river to the mill deep in the forest. Throw in lots of gaman endurance, you know, they cannot hold back they must throw themselves into it up to the eyeballs. Japanese audience are so turn-on by gaman.’ ‘The woodchipping mill thing ties in beautifully!’ Darwin says, off on a roll, putting it all together. ‘Egor says there’s going to be a big protest down there the Sunday after next. Not some little dud, like with the tree-sitters at Northcliffe. But all the Greenies from Pemberton, Walpole and Troy and all over will be there. Maybe we can do something with that.’ ‘You bet, DocoMan!’ Kenji takes a quick sip of his scotchon-the-rocks, adds a large splash of water and turns his attention to blocking out a new schedule while Darwin makes a list of equipment. ‘We’ll need a good underwater camera,’ he says, looking over at Kenji who raises his eyebrows, making columns of yen signs in the margin. ‘I want to shoot lots of whale footage and work it into the film. We need real whales in the film to show why the Greenfighters trashed the Casino. We need the sounds of the whales moaning and loving, calling to each other. We want the audience to fall in love with the whales and then show them reduced to meat in the Casino sequence. We want to contrast their natural 106

beauty with the murderous stupidity of the humans!’ Darwin shouts, winding up his little rant. ‘H a i!’ Kenji agrees, tossing back his watered-down scotch-on-the-rocks. ‘Now, about the nondiegetics,’ Darwin begins, and the two of them settle into a long involved wrangle over the editing of the soundtrack, Darwin wanting only the ambient sounds that are a result of the natural on-thescreen action, Kenji favouring adding emotional Muzak. Time to get out and get some fresh input, Darwin thinks, after nearly two hours of head-banging with Kenji. You can’t do creative work when you’re running on empty. He tosses the keys to the limo at Kenji and grabbing his denim jacket, shoos him out the door and directs him to the Lumiere Theatre where the Japanese-Australian collaboration, Heaven’s Burning, is showing. Directed by Craig Lahiff. Starring Russell Crowe, Youki Kudoh, Kenji Isomura. Darwin sits in the theatre, utterly still, unaware of Kenji Kendo sitting next to him, waiting for that moment of magic. He loves it. There is nothing like it. The lights slowly dimming him, drawing him into a velvety greyness the colour of night in an Eisenstein movie, drifting along in the dark, his breath a hushed susurration, his own animation suspended. Donovan’s Brain with a set of hot eyeballs, Darwin Brown watches himself watch the movie, watches the screen itch with light and motion. It is magic. That hypnotic shift that lifts him right out of his life and inside the illusion, into bigger-than-life life. What seems like a life-time later, the two of them stagger out of the theatre into the shocking sodium streetlight. 107

‘What a piece of shit!’ Kenji growls, making a face. ‘Just another stupid road movie.’ ‘You said it,’ Darwin mutters. ‘No intellectual content. No socially redeeming message. No message, period. Unless you think “Scorned Japanese Husband Goes Psycho And Chases Runaway Bride Around Outback Australia Slaughtering Innocent Bystanders With Sword” is some kind of message.’ ‘Only to some twelve year old computer nerd otaku who hasn’t got a life,’ Kenji shakes his head. ‘You can bet there is big Tokyo money behind this one, DocoMan. My slick friends indulging themselves in a wank in Australia. What a perfect example of what not to do!’ he exclaims, highfiving Darwin. ‘We can do better!’ Home just after midnight, Darwin pours two fingers of Glenfiddich and picks up the script. ‘Good onya, Surfing!’ he toasts his own wonderful movie, winking and clicking like Egor, and gasps as the hot liquid fire makes its way down his gullet, exhausts through his nose. ‘And another?’ he asks himself Australia’s most rhetorical question and knocks back another large tot. The entire zooful of monkeys starts up across the street, yawking and screaming, ‘Hey hey we’re the monkeys!’ ‘Shuttup!’ Darwin slams down the window, pours another three fingers, lies back down on the couch. Between half-closed eyelids he surveys the room, looking for clues, visual pointers, manifestations, cunning red herrings. Nothing of his betrays who he is or gossips his secrets, not his blue puddled jeans, the plain white unmottoed T-shirt, the plain gold-rimmed glasses tucked into one of his Nikes, the cold black dead eye of his camera. ‘Shit,’ Darwin mutters before passing out. 108

A loud banging on the door yanks him out of his coma. Christ! Morning already, the harsh sunlight tells him. He lies there a moment hiding under the throw rug, hoping whatever it is will go away. BAM! BLAM! WHAM! What a godawful racket! He gropes for his glasses, can’t find them. Everything’s out of focus, like someone’s smeared Vaseline on the air. He scuffs to the front door and unlocks it, peering out, groggy. She is standing there with her bike in her shiny tight bike pants and brand new white Reeboks, unannounced, uninvited. High as a kite from biking all the way in along the river. Standing there with the light behind her, glowing and sweating, the fine downy fuzz on her face like a halo, filling his doorway, his life, the whole morning, vulnerable as a baby. Her eyes asking where do we go from here? Her mouth gasping, ‘I am Risk!’ at him like some kind of apocalyptical vision. ‘What are you on?’ he gapes, wondering how she scored cocaine in Perth, Australia. ‘My bike,’ she smiles, carefully wheeling it into his flat with a nice little metallic clickety click sound, leaning it against the wall in the lounge-room, turning to him. He is going to say something clever like ‘And where’re the other four horsemen, oh ‘Risk’?’ but he can’t get it together, he is so stunned by the sight of her peeling herself out of her bike shorts, shrugging out of her singlet. He wants to say something so heavy she’ll never forget it but he is too busy running his hands along the curves of her traps, feeling the sinewy little dips of the tie-ins binding them to her deltoids, her back so smooth and so long it goes on forever, too busy feeling the amazement of being together with her again. The two of them standing quietly 109

alone together in his big unfurnished flat with all that jungly hoo hoo ha zoo-noise monkeying around in the background, she holding his cock in one hand, his balls in the other, he, stroking her like a cello, giving her riffs of goosebumps, feeling the sweet give of her flesh.

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17 17 ‘What made you decide to invite me along to the shoot in Vancouver? Is it because I’m a post-porn modernist par excellence, like Madonna?’ Zan asks him, her voice lifting coyly in that rising inflection he’s noticed in Australian women. ‘Celebrating sex as the nourishing life force? Embracing my genitals as part, not separate from my spirit …’ She peeps at him over her notebook. ‘Absobonkinglutely, Babe!’ he chortles, buoyant, not caring at all what her words are saying, so turned on is he by the wonderful heat of her presence inside the small car. ‘Thanks for asking me, Dar,’ she says with a smile in her voice. ‘I’m going to interview Kenji Kendo, have the two of you side by side on the page. But I’ll give you the most side-bars,’ she coos, ‘unless Kenji’s more quotable, that is.’ She writes something down in her notebook. ‘Siegel’s behind me one hundred per cent on this one,’ she babbles 111

happily. ‘He loves the idea of a behind the scenes look at making a movie in little ol’ WA. And the Japanese angle gives us a chance to get into aesthetics. The Zen of Saving The Planet via The Filmic Medium or something. Some nice high-brow hot copy for Trendz.’ ‘You’re a nice high-brow piece of hot copy,’ he tells her, slipping his hand between her long legs. ‘After a couple of weeks in my business even very hot copy goes cold,’ she can’t resist saying, slamming him for not calling. How many times is she going to hit him over the head with this one? he wonders, grinning to himself. ‘Yo, Risk,’ he counters. ‘You’ll love Vancouver, ’ Zan says. ‘Wait till you see how spectacular it is, with all that rugged coastline. Very dramatic, it’ll add subliminal gravitas to the film. I mean if you were shooting some boring old ugly alley in Perth who’d give a stuff, but everyone will care about saving this beautiful little piece of the planet. How did you find such a perfect location?’ ‘Kenji flew down there with his uncle, to check on his property,’ Darwin tells her, sneaking a look at her profile. ‘The Japanese have a huge new woodchipping mill there, on the Deep River. And they’re having a big ceremony of the first woodchip shipment at the port in two weeks. Egor’s Greenie friends are planning a big protest action and we’re going to shoot it. We’re just going to add a little cinematic kick to the protest, spice it up nicely.’ ‘Well, I’m not gonna do the Zapluder,’ she pouts. ‘Zapruder,’ Darwin corrects, gently. ‘He’s the guy who captured JFK getting shot on his little home movie. By the way, you did a good job. We used all your footage. Nice and shaky. Amateur hand-held.’

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‘Amateur!’ she squawks, faking outrage. He sees the sign for the Narrogin turn-off and slows way down and stops before turning. ‘You’re such a slowcoach,’ Zan teases. ‘You drive like old people fu … er, bonk.’ ‘Y’all keep forgettin’ I’m drivin’ on the wrong side of the road,’ Darwin reminds her in a broad American drawl. ‘I’m surprised Egor let me borrow his Vitara.’ ‘Take a right by the clump of black cows, and go half a kilometre until you hit the Brahmins three paddocks down from the dam. Then you go left,’ Zan smiles. ‘It’s good of you to make this little detour,’ she tells him, patting his thigh. ‘My dad would never forgive me if I didn’t pop in on my way to Vancouver.’ ‘I love the way you Ausssies are always “popping” in on each other, ‘ Darwin tells her. ‘Back home we do everything on the phone.‘ ‘Everything?’ Zan asks, looking at him with innocent eyes. Before he can answer she waves her hand at the POPULATION 4,670 sign. ‘Welcome to my little sheepopolis,’ she says, grinning. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Beaucoup de sheep,’ he chuckles, squinting out at the paddocks. He still can’t get used to the light in Australia. It makes the colours seem glarey, all wrong and garish. The haze of Canola flowers in the fields isn’t a soft buttercup yellow like it is back home, but an acid yellow with an edge of chartreuse. The shadows all fall the wrong way to Darwin. ‘It must look very boring to you.’ ‘Nowhere is boring when I’m with you,’ Darwin says, surprised that he means it. She laughs and gives his bicep a neat little punch. ‘Everyone in Australia wants to get out and go where 113

the juice is. Everyone wants to go where you’re from,’ she says as he parks the car in front of a crafts shop that sells twiggy bush things. He can’t take his eyes off her long lissome legs sliding out of the small 4WD. He loves the way she talks with her body, is highly amused at the transformation in her demeanor. From the moment her boots hit the newly bricked footpaths of her home town she’s walking tall and with a big swagger, throwing herself around like a Harley, sixty-nine kilos of blood meat and bone. VRRRRRMMM, heavy duty, her chin stuck out there like an invitation. Just try it, sucker. What a tough chick! Darwin chuckles. Underneath those big muscles and that show of bravado she’s just a little girl showing him off to the little old Tidy Towners. He grabs her hand to slow her down and to aid and abet her. ‘Ohmigod! They’ll piss their daks! Holding hands in Australia is rarer than pulling your dick out in public!’ Zan exclaims. ‘Here, this is how we do it in California.’ He gives her a conspiratorial grin and puts his hand round her waist and into her back pocket, fondling her rump. ‘God, I hate this town!’ she exclaims with happy gusto, throwing her arm round his shoulder as they head down the main street. After a thorough tour of the local shops where Zan shows him off so much he feels like a trophy, she suggests they eat a leisurely lunch at the Butter Factory, a quaint little eatery on the edge of town. Her idea of leisurely differs from his, he discovers, watching her polish off a soup and a salad, a large ham and cheese sandwich, in the time it takes him to make a small 114

dent in his cashew nut bake. Fifteen minutes later she is fidgeting in her seat and playing with the salt and pepper shakers, sending out such restless vibes she feels like an earthquake waiting to happen. Sighing, he bolts the rest of his food down and pays with his Visa and heads out the door after her, his gut in turmoil. ‘Wanna drive?’ he invites, holding the keys out, knowing she won’t be able to resist the cute little Vitara. His stomach flip-flops when he sees where she’s taking him. The HillTop Abattoir, ten klicks out of town. ‘Today’s a pig day,’ she announces, pulling into the carpark, next to some long sheds, jumping out. ‘It won’t be smelly.’ Darwin reluctantly follows. ‘The pigs are smart. I think they know,’ Zan says cheerfully , handing him a gauzy hair net and a big rubbery apron. Amplified phone rings blast out of the wall behind Darwin, make him jump out of his skin. Zan laughs. A tough looking dude with tats all over his biceps, wearing white rubber Wellies and a plastic hard hat comes chugging out of the shed and into the office, two huge knives in a big yellow holder slung at his side. Darwin gives him a wide berth and gapes through the window: a pile of meat pies heaped on a platter, an economy size bottle of tomato ketchup. A couple of slaughtermen taking their smoko, wolfing down pies. The sauce looks like blood. The pies look like vomit. The sight makes his gut squirm. ‘Come on,’ she urges. He swallows and takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders. He would follow that heartshaped butt in those shorts anywhere, even into this horrible abattoir to meet her father. ‘Just watch the kill floor. It’s a little bit slippery.’ 115

‘Why won’t he come out?’ Darwin hears a whine in his voice, pleading. ‘He’s too busy. The Japs have placed a big order for some of Dad’s free range porkers. They love Australian meat because it’s healthy, unpolluted. Not like Chernobyl!’ His feet skid in bloodpools, great gobbets of fat splattered all over in chunks big as your fist or small as your finger. He feels like he’s walked into a psychotic painting by Heironymus Bosch. Lifeless pigs hang off the huge conveyor belt hooks in various stages of slaughter, pigs with blackened hair passing by the gas burners. The stink of singed pig hair fills the moist air, making his head spin. Semi-denuded corpses are dumped one by one into steaming hot cauldrons to melt the rest of the hair off, then manhandled by huge brutish men who turn them and scrape them. Then the poor beasts are decapitated. A row of hog’s heads on hooks slowly jerk along the conveyor, towards the chiller, like porky pig puppets from hell, on their way to be served up in some hotsy totsy Tokyo restaurant with a $12 Donnybrook apple stuck in their mouths. Wicked knives slit the pork bellies, spilling pigs’ guts out into huge tubs. Lungs, hearts and kidneys, huge floppy livers are chucked into trays. The high whining meatsaws dismantle the pigs with a smell of hot bone. The slaughtermen walk around matter-of-fact, carving up the clean pinkish flesh, sharpening their long curving knives every few minutes. The killer puts away the big stunning pistol and grins at Darwin. One of the slaughtermen gives him the eye as he slits open a pig, spilling out the guts in a startling viscous tumble of glistening blue. Darwin retches. The man smiles, evil. 116

Darwin’s mind flashes on Auschwitz. How humans would smell, burning. He sees her talking to a big tall beefy man at the edge of the kill floor. It must be her father. His forehead and jawline echo hers. They are arguing. Their breath’s vapour puffs buffet each other. Reluctant, the brute is washing his hands off, soaping up to the elbow and heading his way, coming to meet him. Slipping and sliding, he turns away from them, scrabbling, bolts for the door but before he can make it, he slumps on the duckboards and spills his guts out in a torrent of vomit. The floor heaves and yaws. The smell of pig fat and vomit rising in him. Making him lose it. In and out of a faint. ‘Darwin!’ A voice slaps his face. Hauls him up. Slowly slings him over her shoulders like a sack of potatoes. He squints through half-closed eyes, sees the slaughtermen falling all over laughing. ‘See youse,’ her father is saying at him with an evil smirk. Embarrassed, he rolls his eyes up, closes down in a faint. Coming to, on the ground, next to the white Suzuki Vitara, he sits up, woozy, and croaks, ‘Let’s get outta here.’ She helps him into the car and drives them very slowly way out of town to a weird kind of forest that looks like an ugly stage set, scabby clumped trees and dry ground the colour of roos, snakes and lizards all mixed together. There is no one around — just the two of them in the bright little universe inside the car. ‘Here you go,’ she smiles, passing him a bottle of Bundaberg rum. ‘This’ll settle your stomach.’ He sputters as the stuff sears his taste buds. ‘What is this shit?! Kerosene?’ ‘Bundy,’ she chortles and grabs back the bottle, takes a big macho chick swig and gargles noisily. 117

Christ, he can’t even drink. He feels like a wimp. What an asshole! He should never have followed her into that chamber of horrors. He should have known better. He, who used to spraypaint MEAT IS MURDER IS DEATH ON YOUR BREATH?? all over the Oakland meatworks. ‘You must think I’m a real eco-geek,’ he says morosely. ‘No worries.’ Her breasts rise in her singlet as she shrugs her wide shoulders and gives him a look with a double whammy. Her eyes are stunning, unusually two-toned with two very distinct layers, the lower a flat grey, verging a little, not a lot, on the blue side, over this a burst of fine gold. ‘I don’t think about you, I’m too busy feeling,’ she says without thinking. Then in case what she’s said sounds a little too heavy, she slips her hand through the hole in his jeans and fondles his kneecap. ‘Hey, no need to be embarrassed. So, we come from different backgrounds. For me there aren’t any evil vibes there. It’s my father’s business. I grew up with it. It doesn’t feel like a death house. It feels nice and clean and Dad’s got all the latest equipment. It’s just animals killing each other, Dar. We’ve raised these pigs and now we can eat them. And the guts and the blood aren’t freaky or ugly. I felt kind of reverent. I think all this organic stuff has a strange beauty. God’s pretty high-tech, doncha think?’ ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Darwin grins, grabbing the horrible Bundy. Feeling better. And better. An hour later she pulls into a small deserted carpark on 118

the top of a cliff overlooking a huge stretch of ocean. ‘D’ya like my beach?’ she asks him, tossing him a packet of Twisties and a double-size Mars bar. ‘It’s sort of my church. I’ve been coming here since they let me out of the convent. The convent my mum dumped me in when I was three, would you believe.’ ‘Christ!’ That explains all that toughie bravado, he thinks, trying to imagine what that experience must have been like for a three year old. ‘She ran away from being a mother,’ Zan shrugs as she grabs a wetsuit from out of the back and strips to her undies, pulls on a lycra rash-shirt, then hauls on the wetsuit with some nice wiggle action that makes him sit up and take notice of how those hot neon stripes curve in to her waist and sweep out and under, wrapping her body, delineate the explosive power in her thighs. He looks at the huge rolling waves out there in the vast empty ocean. There’s nobody else there to help her, don’t ever go in the ocean without a buddy they always tell you, what if something happens, a shark comes or something. He was there when a whole family of Samoans drowned at the beach south of San Francisco on Father’s Day. Even though they were born swimming they didn’t know how fast the cold of the Humboldt Current could chill you to your core. Don’t go! he starts to tell her but he’s still embarrassed from the abattoir business so he leans back against the Vitara and surveys the lashing ocean. ‘Surf’s up,’ he says, laconic and cool as an Aussie surfer. ‘If I don’t come back you can have my laptop,’ she laughs, grabbing her surfboard. ‘But don’t you look at the poem on it. It’s still under construction.’ He stands there a long time on the endless white beach 119

watching her swim way way out into the heaving horizon until she is as small as a black grain of pepper. He can barely see what she’s doing out there in the weird offshore break, all he can see is her magnificent spirit flitting across the horizon, her tiny form inside the vast wet rushing seascape with the sky falling down all around her in a thunderous tumble, flying through the long wild slide of the moment, her whole body and being surfing the NOW that’s collapsing around her. His heart leaps in his chest as the wave bucks her off like a horse. He holds his breath until he sees her black peppergrain head surface. ‘I love you Zan. Love you! Ohmigod I love you, love you,’ he bellows into the wind. God, look at her surging out of the water her hair plastered wet to her skull showing the sculpt of her headshape, the lovely strong bones, laughing, peeling off her sleek flouro wetsuit. He wades into her, grabbing handfuls.

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18 18 WELCOME TO SURFING ANTARCTICA! Dozens of bright red and black flags with Japanese-looking writing flap their upbeat greeting all up and down the main street of the picturesque little town of Vancouver. Japanese lanterns and big paper fish kites festoon the tall Norfolk pine trees outside the Town Council, making the place look like Christmas. Zan chuckles at how small town Small Town Western Australia is. ‘The last time any glitz came to town was when Rodney Rude sold out the Town Hall. I’ll bet they’re still selling the T-shirt,’ she wisecracks to Darwin, grinning as they head past the old stone courthouse towards the small harbour where Kendo-san and the film crew are waiting. The little working boats upside down on the sand remind her of a small fishing village on the French Riviera, only instead of

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grey greasy pebbles the beach is of crunchy fine sand the consistency of grains of raw sugar. Off to the left the modern port bristles with cranes and gantrys and grain storage silos. The jinky little steel-drum jingle of the yachts bouncing around in the water livelies up the morning with a Bob Marley beat. Kenji waves to them from the big red-dust-covered truck parked on the wide wooden jetty where a small crowd of townspeople is milling around all excited, stickybeaking, peeking in the cab windows, oohing and aahing, pointing at him like he’s some kind of rock-star. He leaps down from the truck and strides tall and composed through the crowd towards Darwin, gladhanding, ‘Sorry please. Excuse. Konnichiwa, mate,’ tossing his words like confetti, hair flying around him like a medieval warlord, his Japanese film crew trotting behind him loaded down with gear. His teeth flash as he thumps Darwin on the chest and crows, dramatic, ‘I got the big Louma crane over from Sydney. Two Arriflex and a big underwater!’ Ticking off Darwin’s wish-list equipment, with big Kabuki gestures, eyeballing the excited onlookers from behind inscrutable Ray-Bans, playing to them. Then, remembering his manners, he makes a half-bow in Zan’s direction and asks her abruptly, ‘Are you and DocoMan avec?’ Giving her one of his dark handsome looks, lifting one thick sleek eyebrow. Zan laughs, taken aback at Kenji’s directness. ‘Well if I’m not “with” him, I’m not against him,’ she jokes, wondering why a Japanese would use the French ‘with’ to mean a couple, wondering if Darwin thinks of them as a couple yet. ‘Then you too are a Deep Green,’ Kenji gives her a deeper more respectful bow. 122

‘Nah, she’s just along for the ride,’ Darwin says, butting in, patting Zan’s bum like a get-along doggie. ‘And the ride is leaving in a coupla minutes. We’d better hurry.’ Just along for the ride! She jerks away, her cheeks burning with outrage. So much for Darwin’s California dude SNAG bulldust. He’s no better than Sheehan, with his fucking big ego, just hides it better. The bloody dickhead can’t even see she’s doing her bit for Gaia. All the free publicity she’s giving his bloody Green message movie in the big exclusive feature she’s doing for Trendz, and he puts her down, the ungrateful bastard. Inwardly fuming, determined to show him how professional she can be, Zan throws back her shoulders and whips out her little Sony recorder, starts to prowl around the jetty while the film crew sets up the big camera and checks the equipment. ‘The vibe in this small coastal town at the Bottom of Nowhere is high and excited. Hollywood’s come to Vancouver and is gonna make the place famous! Visions of 90210 Porsches and blonde Baywatch beach babes dance in the eyes of the throng of townspeople crowding around the Surfing Antarctica film crew.’ Seeing Darwin has picked up his Sony and is tracking her, she draws herself to her full height and smiles a big flashy smile right at the camera, widening her eyes the way Jana Wendt does, deepens her voice down. ‘That is, if you could call forty-two people a throng,’ she drawls, clowning a little just to show she’s not one of those bimbos who let personal matters affect her professional demeanour. ‘Since nothing ever happens in this ho-hum small town with the Slo-Mo by the Sea nickname, the commotion is huge out here on the jetty, like when your dream ship finally comes in.’ 123

She continues detailing the scene for the next couple of minutes, and in her peripheral vision sees Darwin walking at her with a big surprised smile, his Sony hanging down at his side. ‘Hey you’re pretty good, Doll! How’d you like to be in my movie? I’ll write you in as the reporter, Vanessa, who helps the Greenfighters. We’ll even pay you,’ Darwin says, giving her his nice froggy grin. ‘We need another Australian to meet the quota,’ he adds, damping it down so he won’t sound too eager. ‘What do you say?’ Zan lets him hang for a nice long juicy moment, stands up on her toes and turns the brights on, projecting some dazzle while she pretends to consider his irresistible offer. Kenji swaggers over, his glittering eyes all over her like a pirate, his hands framing Zan’s face. ‘The camera eats Blondie up. The eyes. The cheekbones. You could cut through Tokyo phone book with those cheekbones!’ ‘And what a body!’ Darwin enthuses, putting his arm around her, pinching her little fat roll with affection. ‘With that body we’d be making a bold anti-Hollywood statement against anorexic role models. What do you think, Kendo-san?’ ‘Blondie-san better than Sharon Stone,’ Kenji says, raising his expressive black eyebrows, grabbing Zan’s chin and turning her head this way and that as if she were a mannequin. ‘Yeah, I’m fifteen years younger and I write my own lines,’ Zan deadpans, poking her tongue out at Kenji, yanking her head back, pleasantly shocked by his touch.

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19 19 ‘We used to kill whales here,’ Gary Morgan, Vancouver’s Economic Development Director, is explaining to Darwin half an hour later as they roll along near the Blowholes on the Southern Ocean on his big fishing boat Krakatinny, in pursuit of a pod of great Southern Right whales that were spotted that morning. ‘It was a big blow to us when they made it illegal. Half the town out of work. Businesses closing. Now we just watch them. They’re a tourist attraction. The town’s back to life,’ he yells over the throaty hum of the inboards. ‘They migrate here every winter from the Antarctic so the females can calve their babies in sheltered waters.’ This is sheltered? Darwin thinks, looking at the two metre swell heaving beneath them. He feels horribly exposed out there on the thirty-six footer with the watery universe

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fluxing and swelling beneath his braced feet. His stomach is lurching, his bones feel all hollow, he shrinks in his skin, trying like crazy not to think of alien creatures as big as a boxcar lurking down there in the bottomless dark, skeletal fish like evolutionary abortions with two sets of teeth. He looks around for Zan to distract him from his queasy stomach, his dark lurking thoughts, and feels instantly better seeing her on the bow of the Krakatinny, leaning into the wind like some kind of heroic figurehead breasting the Roaring Forties round the Cape of Good Hope, her profile strong and handsome. His mind flashes on their little pit stop on the way to Vancouver, pulling into the deserted parking place deep in the bush. Her eyes peeking up at him from behind his thick penis, the slickery snake of her tongue teasing and teasing, her pillowy lips exquisite as– ‘So what’s your movie about?’ Gary Morgan yells, interrupting his daydream. ‘Uh, it’s a love story,’ Darwin says, deliberately vague. ‘A love story!’ Morgan recoils from Darwin like he’s a faggot, bunching his big jowly face up. ‘Give me thrillers and action any day.’ ‘No worries, mate. There’s plenty of action. It’s a sort of Green Indiana Jones,’ Darwin tells him, whitewashing a little, watching Kenji Kendo testing the underwater camera at the stern of the boat. ‘Hey, and thanks again for bringing us out on your boat,’ he says, being nice. ‘Kendo-san and I really appreciate it. The whales make a nice background to a Green love story.’ ‘Hey, it’s my job,’ Gary says, casually using Yank slang back to Darwin, making an expansive gesture to encompass the crisp morning sunshine, the spanking clean ocean so free of pollution, the air so fresh and tingly it feels 126

like champagne in your nostrils. The spectacular coastline surrounding the natural harbour with its small sheltered bays a bright pure Tahitian turquoise. ‘You’ve got a pretty nice office,’ Darwin grins, picking up his big Sony and aiming at Gary. ‘True,’ Gary concedes, digging into the big blue and white Esky for a breakfast beer. ‘Ya get a weird tan on this job, but.’ He grins for the camera and fizzily cracks a can. ‘Just the underside of your chin from the reflection off ya tinny.’ Darwin laughs. It’s easy to like Gary Morgan, a big loose-boned lunk of a guy. Gary’s job as Vancouver’s top salesman was a piece of cake, Darwin thinks, aiming the Sony at the pretty little town on the far hillside. The place sold itself. ‘It’s not every day the Town of Vancouver gets to star in a movie,’ Gary preens, twirling his bristly Merv Hughes moustache. He cracks a new tinny and drains it. ‘It’s a beautiful setting,’ Darwin smiles. ‘And the woodchipping ceremony will add just the right touch,’ he says, grateful to Gary for nailing down the permission to shoot it. ‘A little pomp and circumstance for a change. Symbolic of the town’s dynamism.’ ‘You know, there’s going to be a big protest,’ Gary tells him. ‘They applied for a permit. Is that gonna be a problem for you?’ ‘Oh, no,’ Darwin says, keeping his face straight, ‘we can shoot around that.’ ‘Well, don’t shoot around me,’ Gary grins, whacking Darwin’s bony shoulder. ‘The missus is all excited I’m gonna be in a movie. Playing myself, Gary P Morgan. She’s all in a tizzy, trying to decide which suit I should wear.’ 127

‘Wear something that stands out in a crowd,’ Darwin advises, ‘that the camera can cue on. A bright handkerchief. Or a wild tie. Express yourself!’ ‘I’ll see if I can sneak it past the Dress Code Police,’ Gary says with a sheepish grin. ‘I’ve got to be very careful. Officially, I’m not supposed to stand out or have an opinion, which, let me tell you, isn’t all that easy. I have to be so fucking polite. ‘You don’t have a clue, mate,’ Gary continues, smiling at Darwin over his tinny, enjoying talking Big Picture with his captive Yank. ‘You can’t because you come from a superrich country where there is something called Economy of Scale. It doesn’t exist here in Australia. Each small pocket of civilisation has to create its own little infrastructure, its roads, a Post Office, whether it serves two hundred or twenty. We need new roundabouts, signage and a new sewage works, but we ain’t got no money. So we’re selling off the old foreshore. Nobody uses it anyway. It’s just a big empty piece of prime frontage looking for rich investors. We’re wooing the Asians. They’ve still got heaps of cash and they’re looking for investments. Right now at this very moment,’ Gary pauses dramatically and looks at his watch, ‘a planeload of Asians is circling Vancouver with a billion in their pockets to invest in food processing plants, cosmetics factories, meatworks, you name it. And it’s Gary Morgan’s job to welcome them with open arms. Smiling. Tell them, What you want? I got it. No worries. They won’t have any problems. No Pauline Hansons in Vancouver, oh no. Then it’s Gary Morgan’s job to make sure half the town’s population doesn’t show up outside the Chamber of Commerce with picket signs screaming, “GO HOME, YOU FUCKING PLATEHEADS!” 128

‘Sometimes my job sucks, let me tell ya!’ Gary rolls his eyes up. ‘But today I’m having fun.’ He crushes his tinny and tosses it into the Esky, hauls out another, gives Darwin a devilish look over his sunnies. ‘Look! A whale!’ Zan cries as a big black shape appears out of the depths just off the near headland and leaps out of the water, belly-flops on the surface with a big playful splash. Her heart leaps up with the whale, a big happy thing jumping inside her, filling her body. ‘Oh I love them!’ she sings like a child, running over to Darwin. ‘Thar she blows!’ Gary Morgan trumpets, raising his tinny in the whale’s direction, popping an Enya tape in his special tapedeck, turning up the volume on the speaker mounted underwater. ‘They like Enya. No bam-bam drum beats. She’s soothing, melodic. She sounds eerie like they do when they echolocate,’ he chuckles. ‘My boat sounds friendly to them. They don’t like aluminium dinghies. That high-pitched noise of the motor. The hull hitting the water with that bang bang bang makes them feel threatened. Look, there’s two or three more over there closer in,’ he says, heading towards the cove’s dazzling turquoise sheltered waters. ‘Why do whales make us happy?’ Zan asks, slipping her arm into Darwin’s. ‘Because they’re happy,’ Darwin says. ‘Maybe they’ve all seen Hot Ice and know what we Greenies are doing to save them.’ He shrugs off her arm and pats down his pockets, looking for that ever-elusive paper and pencil the absent-minded never can find. Sighing, she tears off a page from her clipboard and hands him her biro, watches him disappear into the cabin, go into a huddle with Egor and Hiro. 129

‘Are you the scriptwriter?’ Morgan asks, looking at her clipboard, turning the charm on. Zan laughs. ‘No I’m the reporter-cum-gofer.’ ‘Oh,’ Gary says without understanding, busies himself with turning the boat round to get between the beach and the whales so they won’t feel trapped. A mighty shape comes out of nowhere, rears out of the water, breaching the surface with a tremendous splash. Zan gasps, overcome by the size of the creature. Twice as big as the boat, it’s surprisingly graceful, slowly turns and sinks down beneath them. Then appears again portside, rolling on its side and looking at them with its huge all-seeing eyeball. Black and white and surprisingly bumpy with patches of dirty white barnacles, the curious big Southern Right watches them closely, she can almost feel it ponder their presence. Who are these guys? Egor and Hiro come running and plop down on the big cushioned seat that runs the width of the stern, rearrange themselves like breathless new lovers, looking deep into each other’s eyes. Kenji and Darwin are moving slowly down the gangway filming the whales with their heavy cameras, legs braced in flatfooted stances against the light chop. Kenji looks like a cubist sculpture in his super-thick Zero wetsuit. He’s joking, silly, calling, ‘Here whalie, whalie. Come here Fat Boy!’ Jun Sato, the sound man, makes a sharp hand motion indicating he’s turning the sound on and pokes the long mike at Hiro and Egor, keeping it out of frame. Darwin moves in on the couple, shooting from a different angle. Tomiko looks over Marcus’s shoulder at the frolicking whales in the background and exclaims, ‘I just love them!’ 130

Then, in a childish singsong, ‘Why do whales make us happy?’ Bloody Darwin! He’s plagiarised her! The opportunistic bastard, Zan grouses under her breath wondering if their latest sex scene will show up in his movie. Kenji comes shoving past her with his waterproof Sony shouting, ‘Here is Kendo Kenji chance to be Nipponese Attenborough. Show the whales fucking honban!’ Then he slips on his dive-mask and hops up on the padded seat next to Egor and sits on the railing, tumbles acrobatically backwards into the ocean and she is so busy laughing her irritation with Darwin evaporates like a faraway storm out at sea.

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20 20 ‘Do your rant on woodchipping now, Tomiko!’ Darwin yells at Hiro, shouldering the big waterproof Sony, slogging towards her upriver, slipping on the rocks underwater, trying like hell to keep the lens firmly fixed on her bum in her cute little wetsuit, each section a separate bright colour like a Mandarin duck. His neck and face sting with sunburn, in spite of the factor 15 sunblock he slathered on early this morning. His thighs, traps and biceps are screaming with pain from hauling and shoving his heavy canoe up and over and under the logs clogging the river. Deep River. Ha! What a misnomer. The bloody water’s mid-thigh this morning and loaded with boulders and enormous old karris and jarrahs fallen in from the high bank’s erosion. ‘I’ve got bruises on top of my bruises!’ Hiroshima

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bitches, ignoring Darwin’s instructions, ducking under a low arching log, shoving her kayak through the tight space. ‘Kendo-san’s a real Nazi. Making us do all this bloody gaman endurance footage. “The more the pain shows on your face the more the audience loves it!”’ she quotes their Japanese co-director, perfectly imitating his accent, an odd combination of singsong and gruff. ‘Come on, Hiroshima, get with the script!’ Darwin yells, with a “help me out here” gesture to Zan who’s playing Vanessa the reporter. ‘Did you know that Australia is selling this irreplaceable old growth timber to Japan for twenty-eight dollars a tonne?’ Zan calls from across the river, cueing Hiro without missing a beat. ‘And the Japs are turning around and selling it back to us as high quality paper for eighty-four thousand dollars a tonne?’ blithely humping her heavy chuckwagon canoe laden with foodstuffs in waterproof barrels up and over a half-submerged giant jarrah. She makes Darwin feel like a wimp. Christ, look at the torque of that back and torso, the cock of her buttocks, the thrust of that wrist, arm and shoulder, the follow through pure liquid motion as she flows down the logface, Bobby Takahashi on the other hand-held, three metres behind her, capturing her every movement. ‘Lookin’ good, Hiroshima!’ Darwin yells, closing in on his grouchy little leading lady, pumping her up. ‘You look like you’re a ballsy, brave ecotager putting your butt on the line to save the planet, slogging up the Not-so-Deep River to trash the woodchipping mill that’s destroying old growth native forests to make throwaway crap. Come on, let’s hear it!’ he coaches, gesturing to the sound man Jun Sato to run the big Nagra recorder, ‘Come on, really go for 133

it now, we want Egor’s face to be buffeted by your words.’ Hiro lets fly with a spew of spluttering Japanese plosives, then pauses and rearranging her face, delivers the English version, gesturing at the majestic karris. ‘It’s bloody ridiculous! A stupid disaster! You don’t even know you’re our Banana Republic. We pay you Aussies peanuts to chop down these big old growth beauties and grind them up into woodchips and send them back home so we Japanese can have throwaway chopsticks! And all of that useless wrapping paper we waste. Layer on layers of rappingu just for the sake of presentation. It’s an unconscionable crime!’ She yells at Egor who flinches in all the right places. ‘Cut!’ Darwin yells, grinning at Hiro’s fervour. At least she’s not faking her passion. Nor is he, he chuckles at the wonderful thing he is doing out here underneath the Australian sun, making a blockbuster Green movie with a blockbuster message. Eat your heart out, Quentin. I got a cause, and you don’t. Eat my dust, asshole. ‘Unconscionable!’ Zan hoots across the river, ever the critic. ‘Nobody says “unconscionable” unless they’re a judge or a lawyer. Just say “it’s immoral”.’ ‘Okay. “It’s immoral!”’ Darwin yells back, swallowing a little auteurial bile as he turns to Hiro, cajoling, ‘Can we do it again with the new lines?’ hoping his volatile little actress won’t throw a tanty, but she comes through like a champ, goes through the extra half-dozen takes smoothly, without losing an iota of her fervour and at last he is able to stow the big Sony and just carry his own weight. His stomach is growling. His body is numb from the icy cold water. His trail mix is sodden with rank river water. And, Christ, the flies in Australia! Little and shitty, they buzz in his ears, suck at his eyeballs, fly into his mouth, 134

crawl up his nostrils. A seething little shawl of beady black flies clings to everyone’s back and shoulders, sucking at their salty sweat. ‘Whoo!’ Zan makes a big joyous whoop up ahead, looks back at him and gives him an ‘Isn’t this great?!’ grin. The great bronzed Australian Brunhilda, muscling her rig through the bloody huge boulders. She could eat him for breakfast. Just looking at her gives him a stiffy, as she so cutely puts it, but the water’s so cold it’s more like a softon. He laughs and rests his canoe against some waterlogged branches, hauls out the Sony, and ignoring the pull of the heavy camera against his bruised shoulder, trains it on Egor, captures a good action sequence as Egor steps on a boulder and twists his left ankle. His canoe jerks and butts him in the hip, knocks him off balance. He flounders, goes down on one knee, heaves himself upward and snags his canoe with a rugby tackle. Hiro claps, little-girlish, in a high humour. ‘What a wonderful gaman challenge!’ she thrills at Greenfighter Marcus, back in her role as Tomiko. ‘This is just the warm-up, Tomiko,’ says Egor as Marcus, grinning into the camera. ‘When I was in high school I wanted to be a Za Gaman hero who would come back to the show after having survived snakes in the jungle, shipwrecks in the Arctic, and being dragged through the desert by racing camels. Now I am grown and as a Green Ninja the gaman required of me is not TV mock-up but real. What a wonderful challenge!’ Tomiko emotes, speaking to the sound man, looking into Bobby Takahashi’s camera. ‘Don’t you think that oration’s just a little bit stilted?’ Zan appears at Darwin’s elbow, critiquing again. 135

Damn! He wishes she’d quit it. The last thing he needs is having to explain himself when he’s trying to make such a tight shoot time and come in under schedule. ‘This is a Japanese-American co-production,’ he tells her, endlessly patient, resting the Sony in his canoe. ‘We have to have a few formal conventions. Tomiko is cueing the audience to admire the g a m a n factor. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a movie to make here, then you can take me out to dinner,’ he says, whacking her chuckwagon canoe, sending her off on ahead. It takes a long time to set up the next shot because he’s getting tired, but finally Jun Sato and then Takahashi give him the thumbs up and Darwin yells, ‘Okay, Marcus!’ for Egor to pull his canoe round. ‘It’s time for the accident that doesn’t happen scene. Tomiko, count to fifty then trip and fall in. Push off the kayak.’ Hiro does as he orders and to his surprise makes it look seamless. ‘Watch out!’ Egor bellows, throwing himself between the canoe and the onrushing kayak, grabbing it before it crashes. ‘Be careful, Tomiko!’ he exclaims in a very good imitation of panic, struggling to keep the two boats from colliding. ‘There’re explosives in here! We don’t want to blow ourselves up. We want to blow up the woodchipping mill!’ ‘Blow up the chip mill!’ Hiro golly gees as Tomiko, her eyes wide as saucers, scrambling to retrieve the kayak, then ‘I can’t say this!’ she squeals in her normal Hiro voice, cracking up at the ridiculous notion and falls about laughing, splashing and rolling in the river, upsetting her kayak. Now Egor is losing it, laughing big roly poly deep laughs, dunking his head in the water, snorting like a seal or a walrus. He catches Hiro round the waist and fishes her 136

out of the water, tucks her under his arm like a cat, hugs her to him until she stops laughing. Darwin keeps the Sony rolling in case they might want to edit in some comedy stuff for the kids sometime in the future. ‘Sure beats slaving over a hot iron, huh, Tomiko,’ Egor ad libs, setting her off again into gales of laughter. When finally the dynamic duo has calmed down, Darwin yells ‘Cut!’ and makes the slityour-throat gesture at Sato. ‘Are you really going to blow up the woodchip mill?’ Zan asks, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Of course not,’ Darwin chuckles, reassuring, wondering how she could possibly think this, not at all minding her picturing him as a real radical. ‘We’ll do it back at the studio. Special effects. Like Godzilla. ‘Now let’s get the show on the road!’ he yells, one eye on the grey and blue tie-dyed clouds which are trailing down around him in tatters. Rain. Just what they need for more bust-your-ass cinéma vérité gaman. ‘Rain!’ Zan cries, happy as a kid, sticking her face up for a free drink. Shit, man, Darwin mutters, four long cold wet and nasty hours later, after slogging through scary rapids and currents in between bouts of hard portage in the pouring rain. Every bruise hurts like a dog bite. But he’s got some great Green Apocalypse Now grunts-in-the-rain footage that should blow Kenji’s mind. Aside from ten or twelve minutes when he left the cap on, they’ve had a dream run, might even actually meet the schedule, and maybe the budget. It was tough to keep to a tight schedule when you were filming outdoors, in rough and red tooth and claw nature where accidents happen and weather can sink you. He squints through the mizzle, rain rivulets sluicing his glasses and for the 137

millionth time in his life wishes for wipers. ‘Camp, ahoy!’ Egor the woodsman shouts, signalling them over to a kink in the river where there’s a natural landing. Darwin beaches his canoe and scrambles up the steep river bank towards a big bunch of trees packed close together and collapses flat on his back with his arms up, playing dead, making whimpering dog sounds. Jun Sato bends over him and takes out his Swiss Army knife, jokes to Bobby Takahashi, ‘You think Darwin-san make good sushi?’ ‘No, skin too thin,’ Takahashi rejoins, cheerful even after their long day’s slog. ‘I should think it would be too thick!’ Zan looks up from doing magnificent things with tent pegs and guy ropes. Exhausted, Darwin falls asleep in a puddle, dreams he is rolling around on the river bank clutching his hollow belly. He is so hungry his gut is making little pig squeals and squeaks, gurgles and growls. The smell of high-frying onions assails him. His stomach flip-flops with lust. His mouth squirts saliva. Zan pads into his vision, passing out mess-kits, her luminous facefuzz iridescent with rainmist. Her wetsuit booties are flayed like his sneakers from the jagged granite. His rain-smeared eyes travel up the curves of her wetsuit to a pile of something steamy heaped on the divided plate. ‘Is it vegetarian?’ he croaks at her. ‘Mom’s Chilli Beans and rice, just like you taught me,’ she tells him. ‘But I accidentally stuck my thumb in it. So what does that make it?’ ‘Gourmet,’ he sighs, grinning, grabbing the mess-kit in one hand, her wrist in the other. Rising, he hauls her in like they’re in a square dance. ‘Suzanne McNaughton,’ he says, his voice coming out oddly formal. Fitting her close in 138

against him, the feel of her so exquisite like he’s hugging himself come to life as a woman. Later in their little dome tent, sleeping bags zipped together, he whispers hoarsely, anguished, ‘Hold on to me Baby. Don’t ever let go!’ like some kind of cornball but she doesn’t laugh. Wraps him up hard and tight in her arms, saying, ‘Yes Darwin. I’ll never let go.’ Drowning in her. Deep in her sweet velvet suck. Rocking. He comes violently, flies out of himself, off the planet, drifting in space. Coming to in the small silver dome tent. It has stopped raining. She is lying beside him, her head propped on one elbow, looking at him. Her teeth and her eyes gleam in the ambient moonlight coming in through the tentflap, her face is streaked with silvery snail trails from the tears she is crying. He leans in and licks them, kisses the wetness, the dark pools of her eyes. ‘Tell me,’ she murmurs, reaching for a place deep in him he can’t let her get to. He can hear her voice scratch at the surface like a dog at the door. ‘Tell me about her, Darwin,’ she urges, her voice low, moving her hand in slow stroking circles, ‘so I know who you are.’ Pushing with all of his strength at the bleeding. Splurching all over like some kind of obscene fountain. Screaming OHMIGOD! LINNI! NO! It was just like the faucet fell out of the wall the way her blood kept on spurting. Shooting all over. The way that a hose does when it’s left on the ground. Losing pressure. Blood in his eyes and his mouth. It tastes bright as money. OHMIGOD! NO! All the blood out of her rushing in one long sighing gurgle all down the drain … ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he hears himself say in a dead hard flat voice, closing down. 139

21 21 At precisely four bloody forty in the bloody morning all the crows on the south-west coast of Australia wake up and caw raucous crow-noise that sounds just like FUUUUUCKK! drawled out slow and nasty … sarcastic … FUUCCCK! with lewd underchuckles. Zan could sleep for a week if the FUUCCCKers would let her. In between the loud crow-noise, big black and white magpies karaoke the morning, warbling carols only they know the words to. She hears the big zipper unzipping from the next tent, puts her eye to the tent flap, observes Junior Sato the sound man wearing cutie-poo Hello Kitty pajamas and a beatific expression, slipping out to record the polysyllabic glycerine slide of the magpies which peals from the trees. Wide awake in the sun-spangled morning, she lies in the sleeping bag next to Darwin for a long lovely while,

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watching him sleep. What is he dreaming? she wonders idly, her mind drifting along like a leaf in the wind. She remembers the first day she met him. That morning she woke all adrift. She smiles to herself in spite of her backache, the horrible bruises which throb here and there on her knees thighs and shinbones. She knows exactly where she is now. And where she is going. Straight to the top. On the Black & Blue masthead. She is going to blow Siegel’s jocks off with her hot sexy feature. All yesterday she’d been thinking up just the right interview questions for Kenji. ‘I’ve read that the Japanese think fucking is just like brushing your teeth and porn is the toothpaste. Do you find that offensive?’ I mean, how kinky is Kenji? A hot pinkku eiga porno director who’s making a Green flick with Darwin Goody Two- Shoes, the straightest most serious film director she’s ever met. She stretches, fully awakened now by her own noisy thoughts, snuggles up against him like a big curvy spoon with a big curvy bottom cocked at his sweet spot. Holding still now she squeezes her pelvic floor muscle just to see if she can wake him with a subliminal tease. His cock leaps in response, metronoming against her with every beat of his slow steady heart. ‘Hi, guy,’ he croaks. She throws herself at that slow drawly accent, his knees shins and elbows all awkward and hard-boned, his hand under her chin spanning her jawbone, pushing her head back, taking her measure. She pants at him, teasy, taking off on a seismic come. Darwin finally emerges, froggily grinning. ‘Wow! What a woman! You almost knocked me unconscious.’ On his back, eyeing her sideways, ready to go again. No way does he want to get up and out of his warm cosy 141

cocoon. What a randy devil. A male odalisque. He could stay in the sack all morning, loll his way through the day like an opium eater, ruminating between fucks. But she has to keep an edge on herself to get her work accomplished. You can’t write cutting edge stuff if your mind is a mush of warm soppy pudding from too much love. Ninety Thou. Amex. BMW! Zan silently chants her new Black & Blue mantra. Thank God she is now self-directed, has her own work to accomplish, her own personal vision to guide her and hew to, or she could fall into the Abyss of the Other, like she did with Sheehan. ‘Up and at ’em!’ she elbows Darwin, ‘I thought you were on a super-tight schedule!’ Two minutes later, Zan is singing ZZ Top’s

She was a fast machine, She kept her motor clean, She was the best damn woman I ever seen happily cleansing her engine behind a big jarrah tree with a little mild vegetable soap and a small plant-sprayer bottle of water, the perfect bidet for the sexually active Australian bushwoman who’s into good hygiene. A sound like a chainsaw erupts in the distance somewhere on the trail. But the sound’s not a chainsaw. It’s a motorcycle. Not a deep-throated Harley but a hot trailbike, high-pitched and whiney, going all out. Zan yanks on her shorts, boots and T-shirt and scurries towards the commotion. ‘Kendo-san!’ Jun Sato shouts in adoration as the motorcycle jackrabbits up over the rise at the top of the

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trail, bucking and rearing, its long-haired rider punching high at the sky, slewing downhill. Darwin crawls out of the tent with his camera, the big heavy Sony heaving back and forth like the hump on a camel, almost knocking his THX-1138 cap off. The motorcycle slides through a fishtail perilously close to the steep bank of the river, then skids towards Darwin who scrambles on all fours out of harm’s way. Kenji jams on the brakes and leaning way out towards Darwin snatches the cap off in a daredevil pass. ‘Kendo-San!’ Hiro runs out to greet him in cute little white cotton undies and singlet. Egor bowls out of his tent in his Y-fronts, stands yawning at Kenji like a big sleepy bear. ‘I got something for you, DocoMan!’ Kenji’s wide lips split in an ear-to-ear smile, pointy in the corners, his lower lip surprisingly thick and glistening. ‘Looky looky!’ he singsongs, waggling his trophy, then stuffs the captured cap on his head backwards funky rap style and proceeds to circle around Darwin in a slow triumphant ride-by with the motor snarling and growling beneath him. Then he kills the engine and leaps off, chunks down the kickstand, struts over to Darwin and demands, ‘Who am I?’ ‘Marlon Brando in The Wild One!’ Darwin enthuses, like he’s playing charades at a fun LA soiree at Spago’s instead of sitting on his butt in the bulldust in lovely downtown Woop Woop, Western Australia. Kendo throws his head back and laughs like a swaggering pirate, hands on hips, eyes flashing at Darwin. ‘Not Marlon Brando!’ Darwin clambers to his feet and starts pacing back and forth like a man in a think tank throwing out options. 143

‘Dennis Hopper? Peter Fonda?’ ‘Easy Rider is cliché,’ Kendo-san dismisses this with an arrogant gesture, tossing his head. ‘I Kendo Kenji am never cliché.’ ‘I know!’ Darwin points at him, confident, grinning, ‘Michael Douglas in Black Rain in the opening sequence!’ ‘No Mike Douglas,’ Kenji says, looking down his nose at Darwin. ‘Black Rain is not such good flick.’ ‘James Dean!’ Zan mouths at Darwin, remembering how much the Japanese adore the tragic dead gay young actor and how appropriate was this fixation, the Nips, according to Hiro, being all Rebels Without a Cause. ‘James Dean! In Rebel Without a Cause ,’ Darwin smiles a ‘gotcha!’ smile at Kenji, fingers the director’s monocle eyepiece he wears round his neck. ‘Hah!’ Kenji bark-laughs and props his Ray-Bans up on his forehead, slides his enormous black eyes over the insolent female who has dared to cue Darwin, the look on his face an unsettling combination of masked sexual interest, competitive challenge and scorn. The heat of his gaze makes Zan blush like a schoolgirl caught staring ga ga at the spunky new teacher. He turns back to Darwin and tells him, ‘Don’t listen to Blondie. She’s a silly lady.’ Silly lady! Zan sputters with outrage like milk in a pan. Kenji glares at her with a look so ferocious it must hurt his eyeballs and says very clearly, ‘Hasta la vista, Baby,’ shoots her with a stiff index finger, shouting ‘BAN!’ as he does it. ‘That means ‘Bang!’ in Japanese sound effects,’ he translates for Darwin. In spite of her peeve at his silly behaviour, Zan catches 144

herself watching his every movement. Very tall and leaned to the muscle, he moves like a dancer in his black leathers, always aware of himself in relation to others. Watching the way his dark wild eyes keep changing colour. Now they’re black but not deep-down black as coal or licorice, black the way aubergines or damson plums are, with that purple undertone to lift the blackness. ‘I know!’ Darwin crows, thinking Kenji’s just given him some kind of clue. ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jack Whatisname in Terminator 2.’ ‘Not Arnie,’ Kenji spreads his legs and crosses his arms like the Austrian Oak and stares at Darwin, his eyes adamant. ‘Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo?’ Jun Sato dares to ask in a timid voice that croaks with bravado. Kenji dismisses this with a snort, doesn’t bother to answer his lowly employee, keeping his attention full beam on Darwin. ‘Who a m I?’ he asks, for the last time, impatient, frustrated. He reaches down and grabs a handful of the bright orange dust, rubs it onto his face and into his hair, then looks around at what must be a desolate landscape from the look on his face, dazed and shellshocked, but comprehending. Then he pulls off imaginary boots and flings an invisible cape around his resolute shoulders, and strides to the bike looking noble and stern-faced at the horizon. Like a dancer Kenji has magically reduced his height just by changing his stance to a more compact posture, adjusting his shoulders to match the ass swagger of a much shorter man. The gestures he’s making strike a chord in Zan’s limbic system and she feels herself sketching what 145

she knows is the most famous trademark gesture of the asyet-unidentified actor Kenji is aping. That boyishly comical double raise of the eyebrows when he shoots his offsider a quizzical ‘aren’t we having a good time?’ kind of look, selfaware and wryly observing without being overly selfconsciously cutesy like Tom Cruise always is. He’s irresistibly charming. The men like him, too. Who the bloody hell is he? It’s on the tip of her tongue the name of this actor, she feels who it is without actually knowing. She can feel herself making the very same gesture, being the gesture her body remembers but her mind just can’t place it. ‘Mel Gibson!’ Zan shrieks in a blinding satori. ‘In Mad Max! By George Miller.’ ‘Hai!’ Kenji explodes in total excitement, beaming at Zan. Darwin looks at her, astounded. ‘Which one?’ he chimes in, his voice tinged with disappointment she beat him to it. ‘Mad Max One or Two?’ ‘Thunderdome!’ Kenji booms. ‘I worship Mel Gibson! Japanese Mad Max clubs come to Australia to reenact his movies, drive motorbikes in the outback.’ Then, turning to Zan he says, bowing, ‘Blondie is not a silly lady after all.’ ‘How’d you find us Kendo-san?’ Egor asks, still amazed at the Japanese director’s sudden appearance. ‘It took us two days and heaps of stiff-upper-lip gaman to get here and you come waltzing in out of nowhere!’ ‘High tech global locator.’ Kenji whips out what looks like a mobile phone but is a satellite global locator with a pulsing green screen and barks something at Sato who runs off to fetch the transmitter unit that led him to them. ‘We Japanese got the best toy!’ Kendo-san laughs, pounding Egor on his broad back, then with a quick graceful 146

movement he straddles the bike and beckons to Darwin, pats the rear seat for him to ride pillion. ‘And the one who die with the most toy wins, don’t forget!’ ‘Iku! I am coming!’ Darwin calls out to Kenji who barks out deep belly laughs at this private in-joke. Flinging a ‘See ya’ at Zan, Darwin eagerly hands off his Sony and runs all excited towards that irresistible chainsawing racket, folds himself up on the back, wraps his arms around Kenji, his long legs sticking out like a praying mantis and off they go roaring up the trail laughing at the top of their voices, Kenji yelling at her over his shoulder, ‘We are windy people!’ whatever that meant.

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22 22 ‘Which directors have influenced you the most, Kendosan?’ Zan asks, trotting behind him with her Nikon camera, trying to get a full frontal view of Kenji’s face as he squints through the big Arriflex camera, setting up the opening shot of the blow-up-the-woodchipping-mill scene. ‘The French Film Noir-ists? The Italian Neo-Realists?’ She throws him some jargon, plays with the zoom while she waits on the answer but before she can focus he’s off after Darwin to show him the angle and get his professional input. Watching him run around in this heat makes her exhausted. The man’s hyperactive, in perpetual motion, leaping over the thick snarl of cables, checking, re-checking the cameras, the light stands, the boompoles, the tripods, the big generator, the rubber-wheeled tracking dollys, the

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arc lights that fill in the shadows, all the wildly expensive equipment he had his crew haul to the chipping mill in two 4WD trucks. He keeps tossing back little baby-sized drinkies she suspects are laced with speed, in between barking instructions at his cringing minions, ducking into the fancy director’s pavilion to change into an impeccably tailored safari suit complete with pith helmet and puttee style snake leggings, rushing back to go over the script, conferring director-san to director with his best mate Darwin-san, their faces wreathed in mutually admiring smiles. ‘Why did you choose of all places Western Australia to shoot Surfing Antarctica?’ she persists in the midst of all this male bonding, as dogged as Oprah interviewing Madonna. ‘Sorry please,’ Kenji brushes her off like a leaf that’s just fallen, throwing his arm around Darwin’s shoulder, leaning in for a quick tete-a-tete about filters or F-stops or something esoterically filmic. Zan sighs, frustrated, and puts down her Nikon. It’s been like this since she got to the mill in the truck Kenji sent to fetch them. Windy People indeed! Blah blah blah. The two big important directors haven’t stopped talking, playing who do you know? impressing each other. She can’t get a word in edgewise with all that blather. She makes a square box with her fingers, framing the two men, thinking, If I were Gillian Armstrong, how would I shoot two talking heads, talking? She’d get Sally Bongers to do one of her weird angled close-ups, shoot their mouths and their noses all distorted, ironically highlight two blabbermouths blabbing. ‘Quentin Tarantino is my idol. I love him so much!’ Kenji 149

smiles a wide wicked grin. ‘In my movie, Dark Desire, just now completed I pay homage to Pulp Fiction. Heroine pretty little Japanese lady. Man is big black foreign gaijin. They meet on air base in Okinawa. She put hand under big black man’s peenie, weigh it like bunch of grapes, says, ‘You know how we call Big Mac in Tokyo?’ He says, ‘Is it metric or normal, the Japanese system?’ She says, still playing with peenie, ‘Ooh, you have big brain! Forget about metric, we call him MacSumo!’ Then, just before she stick it in she says, ‘Japanese McDonald serve french fries with soy sauce!’ Darwin cracks up. ‘You dork!’ he yawks, giving Kenji an affectionate good buddy punch on the biceps. Bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer, Kenji returns Darwin’s affectionate punches with a lightning quick one-two-three sequence of playful man-to-man jabs. Darwin rocks and rolls with the punches, off-balance, but before he can topple, Kenji reaches out in a flash and rights him. ‘Tarantino is my big influence, Blondie,’ he says to Zan, impatiently snapping his fingers at her to get his important director-san words down, now that he’s finally deigning to answer her interview question. ‘No way you know this unless I tell you,’ he says, bowing in apology for blowing his own horn, ‘but I am celebrated as the “Quentin Tarantino of Japanese fuck flicks.” Lots of blood. Lots of jissum. Better than Muranishi, Tooru Face Shower series. Sometimes with Kuroki Kaoru, Muranishi’s porn actress, men can’t get hard-on. Kuroki too scary. She has hairy armpits. But my pinkku eiga are all nukeru unsheathe the sword, good for masturbation. Japanese audience know Kendo Kenji pinkku eiga like Big Mac. All same. You know 150

what you get with Kendo Kenji fuck flick. A big erection!’ He uncrooks his index and pokes it up, stiff, looks over at Darwin with huge Astro Boy eyes. Darwin raises his eyebrows and, laughing, sticks out his finger, repeats Kenji’s gesture like a secret male handshake. ‘Where you get that hat from?’ Kenji asks, snatching Darwin’s recaptured cap and, holding it out like a frisbee, threatens to toss it, the way that kids do when they’re jealous. ‘Careful with that, dude!’ Darwin lurches after his ratty old THX-1138 cap and misses. Kenji laughs and continues his teasing, pretending to toss it, jerking Darwin along like a bunraku puppet attached to a string, away from Zan and her pesky annoying questions. Bloody Kenji! He makes her feel like a whiney obsequious puppy, grovelling before him, in hopes of a crumb. Zan takes a swig of her Evian water and soundchecks her little recorder, with a resolute sigh closes in on her moving target, armed with her most provocative question. ‘You say you are a f e m i n i s t o, Kenji Kendo,’ she says in her best reporter’s alto, poking her recorder at him, ‘but isn’t porn violence against women?’ ‘Put that away, Zan! We’re having fun here,’ Darwin protests, making a grab for her little recorder. ‘No, no it’s okay,’ Kenji blocks Darwin’s hand in midgrab. ‘I like she keeps asking. She is like little bull-dog on the front of Mack truck.’ His eyes flare a little along with his nostrils as he looks in her eyes. ‘It is very hard to ring everyone’s ding dong and at same time be PC,’ he tells her with a solemn expression. ‘Porn is fantasy providing the man and the lady sexual outlet. No 151

hard sex, no snuff in Kendo Kenji pinkku eiga. The man just slap the lady a little around when he discover she not baijin virgin on wedding night and he rape her both oral, anal and pussy style in the Jacuzzi to get his revenge back. Very aesthetical.’ ‘Yeah,’ Darwin says totally deadpan, rolling his eyes up behind Kenji. ‘Also you question why we shooting Surfing Antarctica in Western Australia, it is because my uncle has big projects here. All kinds of money. Many connections. As part of the family I get to use his plane, his trucks, his bank account. And his hotel room.’ He goggles his eyes at her in broad invitation then turns to Darwin and says with affection, ‘Come on you big bad muthafucka,’ yanking at him, ‘We better move butt if Surfing Antarctica is gonna be the definitive Green flick of the mih … mih,’ he stutters, suddenly at a loss. ‘Millennium,’ Darwin comes to his rescue, finishing off his sentence with a good buddy grin. ‘Blondie, would you please be bothered to go bring us Tomiko and Marcus now okay. And we need many more drinks also.’ Kenji arrogantly snaps his fingers, relegating her to the role of gofer. ‘And take T-shirt off, please. You better than Playboy!’ He calls after her, then adds in case she didn’t get that he’s joking, ‘Do not worry, just doing my sekkusu hara sexual harrassment job as the boss-man.’ ‘Har har,’ Zan fakes a laugh, giving him a big cheesy smile, hiding her annoyance, running to fetch Hiroshima and Egor. At least she’s getting paid for her work on location, which is more than she can say for the Black & Blue pieces she’s doing on spec. 152

‘I’m not so sure we should blow up the mill,’ Tomiko frets for the camera a few minutes later, watching Marcus set the fake charges at the base of the structure. ‘It’s IRA stuff,’ she gasps, looking into the camera. ‘Don’t worry about jail, mate,’ Marcus gruffs at her, macho. ‘First they’ve got to catch us. We’ll set them off long distance. With radio detonators. On the CALM wavelength. And we won’t hurt anyone, just the mill. We ring them and warn them to get out in time.’ ‘No more wimpy Mr Nice Green Guys,’ Tomiko quavers, her resolve firming by the minute. ‘The meek do not inherit the earth,’ Marcus continues his eco-defence speech, his tone flat as a pancake, his face serious as can be now. ‘What are we supposed to do? The logging is blatantly illegal, chopping down our old growth beauties, ignoring the moratorium in this sector. I’m not going to say, “excuse me please, but I think you’re doing the wrong thing and you’d better stop or I’ll write to my member of parliament.” Hell, we spent the last three years writing to parliament and doing petitions to get the moratorium in the first place. No, I’m going to fucking disarm them! Blow up their tools of destruction.’ ‘Cut!’ Darwin yells. ‘Too boring,’ Kenji grumps, with an exaggerated yawn right in Darwin’s face. ‘Come on, Darwin-san, we put in a nice cum shot.’ ‘No way,’ Darwin says, ‘Surfing Antarctica’s art house, not porno, dude.’ ‘Pretty please, dude,’ Kenji wheedles, jumping up on the dolly, adjusting the camera to a low tracking position, squatting on his haunches. ‘From feeling danger Tomiko gets so hot she wants to fuck Marcus.’ He frames the shot 153

with his hands, makes Japanese sound effects, ‘Do do do. Here comes Hiroshima. Taking all her clothes off. Shoot up from low angle with camera down here. Show fat little cunt in little white panties. And fat little assy. Ring Egor’s ding dong so much he fuck her on pile of woodchips, the soundtrack the sca-reech! and the karunch! of the logs getting woodchipped to be made into warabashi disposable chopstick! Very ironical.’ Egor lights up, eager to try such a wonderful scene but Hiroshima is glaring at Kenji, whines at him like an angry mosquito, then tossing her head translates for the gaijin, ‘I say no way Jose you fucking Little Nip prick!’ Kenji barks like a dog and explodes in a tantrum of deep-chested plosives, strutting around making angry male gestures. ‘Way, Jose!’ he sputters. Hiro cracks up, laughing. ‘Ooooh, you so bushi, Kendo-san,’ she taunts. ‘Okay kids. Cool it. The playground’s closed now,’ Darwin calmly steps in between them, hooking Kenji’s elbow, drawing him towards the pavilion. ‘I’m starving. What’s for lunch?’ Heaven, Zan thinks, ten minutes later, eyeing the beautifully laden table in the pavilion. ‘First Class all the way,’ she murmurs appreciatively to Kenji, piling her plate high with little bite size sushi creations, sashimi slices, skewers of chicken yakatori, a mound of mouthwatering vinegared rice. Sitting down at the small folding table with Kenji and Darwin, bowing bon appetit at Jun Sato the sound man, who has taken off his little round glasses and is slurping up noodles along with the rest of the Japanese crew. Hiroshima’s calmed down, is happily scooping in rice with her chopsticks at the next little table with Egor. Zan 154

sighs with pleasure as the crisp frosty Kirin hits her palate, already planning to taste-test the Asahi Dry that’s on ice in a bucket. ‘What could be cooler than green tea ice cream?’ Zan exclaims to Kenji, going back for a second helping, surreptitiously letting her belt out to accommodate the little roll that sits on her waist like a Michelin tyre. Better amp up the jogging, tear herself out of bed early, do an extra half-hour. She’s put on two kilos since she’s met Darwin. And he’s probably lost two. He forgets to eat or drink he’s so bloody focused. Look at him now talking with Kenji, his hands flying all over, sketching his thoughts out. Zan smiles, thinking of the satiny skin on Darwin’s penis. It must be nine inches long, that astonishing penis. She can’t wait to get him alone. Lick him all over. His face and his eyelids. The bristly little one-day-growth beard hairs rough on her tongue. Lick the smell in his armpits. He doesn’t use roll-ons, smells only like Darwin. Lick in between all his folds and creases. Gently nibble and suck, take one of his balls in. Mouth that amazingly airy honeycombed male thing. That strange small lightweight heft. Imagine what it looks like inside. Like a drawing by Escher, the coiled perspective of a world self-inventing. Taste the seawater taste that reminds her of beansprouts. Feel the thing itself live and living. The balls harden and tighten. The hardening-on happening just beyond her peripheral vision so she can’t see but senses that thick lifting and rising beyond her eye’s arch and marvels at all that pneumatic power of taa daa! The erection! ‘What are you dreaming, Blondie-san?’ says Kenji, tapping Zan’s forehead, waking her up from her little 155

sexdream to find herself stroking Darwin’s thigh in an Xrated manner. ‘I don’t know but I hope I’m in it!’ Darwin grins, running his hand along her forearm. ‘See, Darwin-san, e v e r y o n e wants to get laid,’ Kenji cajoles, his face breaking into an ingenuous smile as he puts down his rice bowl to better pursue his favourite subject. ‘If we put in some nice juicy cum shots the flick will be better, get bigger audience.’ Darwin takes off his glasses and slowly breathes on the lenses, buffs them on the hem of his T-shirt, peering at Kenji like a myopic turtle. ‘I made myself a good reputation with Hot Ice , Kendo-san, and I’m not going to spoil it by making X-rated Green porn.’ Kenji’s face clouds and his eyes slit with anger, his voice scowls at Darwin, ‘You think Hot Ice is so hot, Darwin-san, but I tell you the penguin scene is too long and too slow. It reminds me of Night of the Living Dead with all the penguins walking around like zombies with the mouth open. You can’t hold the audience interest. Only audience of old lady with arch preserver!’ He tosses back the rest of his Kirin and slams down the bottle. Darwin sips his tea calmly with a neutral expression, nodding at Kenji, as if he’s talking about the weather instead of hitting him in the aesthetics right where it hurts. ‘I too wish to do something of value like your hotsy totsy Hot Ice doco,’ Kenji says in a low intense voice, his eyes softening. ‘This is why I am here with you now in the wildness of Australia. ‘I have integrity Darwin-san. What are you risking here, mister? You don’t know anything. Five gangsters slash face 156

of Itami Juzo for making Taxing Woman in which he makes fun of the Violent Ones. You worry about censorship rating. I’m putting my life on the line here. What do you think my uncle Yamamoto-san Love Me Tender Productions boss-man gonna think of this hotsy totsy politically correct Green flick? Where do you think all the money comes from? The sushi the fancy cameras, etcetera.’ Kenji chops his left pinky with the edge of his right hand, making the plates and the bottles jump on the table. ‘Yakuza,’ he says in a hoarse whisper, his eyes bugging out.

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23 23 Christ, what a beautiful bright shiny day in the Great Somewhere! Zan thinks as she whips the Vitara off the main road onto washboard gravel in a long skidding tailspin of a turn, heading for the beach-house Kenji Kendo has rented right on the coast. The wind in her hair and the sun on her shoulders. She feels so happy she can hardly contain it. Her life rushes inside and all around her, like a whispering dream. She looks over at Darwin, that hooky nose and olive bisque sunburn, those dark sexy eyes that wrap around his face like an Egyptian fresco seen from the side. She loves that he’s growing a designer stubble and looks like a guy in a Ralph Lauren ad, only his clothes are all faded and lived in, at least ten years old. She finds it amusing that he won’t buy new clothing until the old stuff falls off him in tatters. His Ray-Bans look, of course, legendary, on him. 158

She feels ultra-delicious in her silky BORN TO SHOP Tshirt and Zouave linen trousers, her straw Panama. She can feel herself glowing with a fresh healthy sex-sheen, she can still feel the pump of his blood inside her. Thank you, Jesus. She lifts her eyes skywards. He’s a fabulous present. The best life can offer. It’s enough to make a failed Catholic get down on her knees and say a few hailies, get religion again. Thank God he came to Australia out of all the places on earth to film his movie. The big empty landscape through which they are jolting must feel like The Great Nowhere to someone who comes from a place with two hundred and sixty million too many people. In between the low scrub she can see glimpses of ocean, endless white beaches rimmed with broad swooping bays, and, in the distance, high granite cliffs plunging straight down into the ocean. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous!’ she exclaims, yelling to be heard over the airblast. Her voice wa waa waaas in her throat from the road’s corrugations as the 4WD bucks along the spinejarring washboard. He gives her a guarded expression, won’t give her an answer. Probably thinking about You Know Who. Why won’t he tell her about his dead wife? Did she drown? Did she die in a car wreck? Or was it from cancer? A long painful death? It hurts he doesn’t trust her enough to tell her. She was open with him, told him all about Sheehan, except for the extraneous fucking. He didn’t need to know all the details of what she was doing during that long lonely time when he couldn’t be stuffed picking up the phone and bloody calling her. They weren’t together. She was out on a limb. 159

He is very quiet this morning, subdued, introspective, staring out the window, thinking. Always thinking. She can feel strange little vibes coming off him. A subtle distancing like he’s half disappearing that reminds her of the time she and Hiro picked him and Egor up in the limo after the ecotage thing at the Casino. A slipping away. ‘What was your nickname in the Antarctic? Cold Shoulder?’ She tries for a joke to defuse it. He ignores her, stares straight ahead out the windscreen. ‘Why don’t you just allow yourself to be happy, Dar?’ she exclaims, exasperated, making a gesture to embrace the dazzling sunshine, her own sparkling self. ‘With me. And with life!’ ‘Look at the salt blight!’ he yells back at her, badtempered. ‘All that sterile salt marsh. Those brine lakes. Those dead trees. You Australians are really environmental assholes, coming in tearing down the bush, dragging great chains between huge bulldozers so you can put in unnatural pastures to feed all those goddamn unnatural sheep! And now you can’t afford to fix your salinity problem, come whining to the World Bank for assistance.’ Zan grits her teeth and forces a smile. ‘Well, at least you’re doing something proactive with your movie,’ she says nicely, not wanting to get into a fight about it. ‘How stupid can people get?’ he is still grumping. ‘Well, don’t look at me,’ she says, testy. ‘Look at my grandfather.’ ‘I’m looking at you and all I can see is your T-shirt. BORN TO SHOP. Ha! Some philosophy!’ Darwin’s words sting her like wasps. Where is this coming from? she wonders. Why is he attacking me? What did I do? ‘Lighten up, Darwin,’ she says, keeping her own voice light, remembering how Debbie handled his dour 160

outburst back at Iguana’s, ‘You’re no fun. ‘I’m trying,’ she adds, hating the defensive little girl tone in her voice. ‘I bought some frumpy natural undyed hemp trousers instead of that sexy new manmade microfibre. And some new ecologically friendly lippy. See,’ she sticks her lips out. ‘Rainforest Toucan. It’s from Daimaru.’ ‘I hate it. You don’t need to wear lipstick. Just look at those shoes!’ Darwin sneers, pointing at her lovely suede platforms. ‘Look at your clothes! Look at what you do for your work. And you like living with it! ‘Being Green is as simple as wiping your ass,’ he pontificates at her. ‘We’ve got a whole civilisation out there that doesn’t know enough to wipe its own asshole and you’re pandering to it,’ he says, with a look of disgust. Pandering! Asshole! Zan stiffens with umbrage, her heart shrivels up like a sun-dried tomato. She doesn’t dare speak or she’ll burst into tears. She stares through the windscreen, concentrating hard on her driving in white-knuckled silence for the next couple of minutes while a confusion of feelings roils inside her, all of them bad. Grits her teeth and decides to ignore Darwin’s outburst, shifts the 4WD into gear and aims for the swooping glass and steel structure that sits on the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean. ‘What’s Emoh Ruo?’ Darwin asks in a neutral tone now, reading the fancy sign at the edge of the driveway. ‘It’s Aboriginal for “Yaa Yaa, my house is bigger than your house!”’ Zan jokes, trying for a light touch, surveying the spectacular views of the distant headlands which frame Vancouver. ‘Just kidding. It means Our Home spelled backwards, us Aussies’ top name choice for our humble abodes.’ ‘Cute,’ Darwin chuckles. 161

She usually loves it when he says cute. Such a sweet little Yank wordlet. What a cute ass you’ve got, Darwin. What a cute erection. But no way can that meager little chuckle make up for his awful behaviour. Just who the fuck do you think you are, matey? she simmers. How dare he talk to her as though she were the enemy of the human bloody race! Him and his mingy holier than thou use the dental floss till it looks like cornsilk bloody Green scrimping. He’s no better than Sheehan trying to dominate her, only he masks it with his bloody SNAG bulldust. She takes a big breath and exhales loudly, trying to blow away the bad feelings. Forget it, Zannie she silently peptalks. Concentrate on your own work, the hot feature for Siegel. The Japanese angle. ‘What does the new breed of Japanese male shinjinrui think of Australian chicks, Kendo-san?’ should be the only question on your hot little mind. She emphatically parks the Vitara in a swirl of red dust and without waiting for Darwin heads for the beach-house, charging up the steep stairs two at a time. Kenji and Hiro are in the big open room doing Tai Chi together in harmonious silence, too absorbed in their graceful slow motion tiger and crane moves to acknowledge her presence. Zan makes a vague wave in their direction, unobtrusively slips into the kitchen, careful not to disturb this rare peace and quiet. The smell of rice cooking away in Hiro’s Japanese steamer makes her mouth water. She helps herself to a big slice of wholegrain with honey, sits down at the giant rough-hewn jarrah table, and takes out her laptop, lets her mind flow in synch with the flowing Tai Chi movements quietly going on in the background. 162

The house feels extraordinary around her, the roofline soaring up like a condor on takeoff, the giant windows open to the sky and its constant aliveness, its wild instantaneous changing. Masses of clouds piled up all limned with sunshine, birds soaring by in startling flight plans. Sitting there in an exhilarating communion with the sky and the weather for the next several minutes, Zan almost succeeds in forgetting Darwin until she hears the door open, the squeak of his Nikes on the tile floor in the kitchen. She bends her head over her keyboard and furrows her brow with writerly concentration, coolly ignores his hot masculine presence so he won’t think she’s easily distracted from her own workmanlike focus, adjusts the fold-up screen and types QWERTYLSLSLSODFJFJFJSLJALALALALALA in a nonchalant flurry, her ears tracking Darwin like heat seeking missiles as he squeaks and skids across the wood floor. Kenji and Hiroshima twirl towards him in slow motion and stop their Tai Chi. ‘The night climb’s all set,’ Hiroshima tells Darwin. ‘We’ve got all the gear, the low light level video cameras, and Kendo-san’s got the perfect location. Construction site. Big cliff. Right on the beach.’ ‘The moon will be beautiful light. Much better than shooting la nuit américaine style at day with a filter. It’s gonna be très cinéma vérité,’ Kenji says in a perfect French accent. The mobile phone on the benchtop chirrups like a cricket. ‘Surfing Antarctica,’ Darwin answers. ‘Hai hai, moshi moshi,’ he singsongs, exhausting his Japanese vocabulary. ‘Kendo-san!’ he yells in a teasing falsetto, his voice bright with amusement, ‘there’s somebody named Charisma from 163

Love Me Tender Productions on the phone for you. ‘You can take the boy out of the porno, but …’ Darwin drawls, holding the phone out to Kenji, rolling his eyes at Zan, then remembers he’s angry at her and looks away. Pacing impatiently, Kenji slaps across the wood floor in his flip-flappy thongs, making doizu bouzouki buzzsawing noise interspersed with adenoidal questions with lots of gruff barks. Though Zan can’t understand what he is saying it is clear he’s annoyed with this lowly chick for interrupting. ‘Yamamoto-san!’ Kenji says in a new tone, his eyebrows rising, obviously speaking to a new person. Zan recognises the name of Kenji’s uncle. Fascinated, Zan watches Kenji morph from a boss to a servant as he talks to his uncle. His voice whoofing out the same abrupt male sounds but the intonation now very careful, with minimal barking and frequent deep bows, even though Yamamoto can’t see him. ‘Hai okay!’ His back ramrod stiff, Kenji goosesteps with the phone to the kitchen and puts it down on the table and salutes it, raising his arm in a Heil Hitler salute. ‘Yes, Yamamoto-san. Yes sir, you big stinky old fish head. Fart breath. Cat butt.’

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2 4 24 ‘I hope you got lots of insurance, Pinkku Eiga Man,’ Darwin grumbles at Kenji Kendo, squinting to see Egor and Hiro who are ascending the sheer granite cliff-face in the eerie on-again off-again moonlight, doing their own stunts as the ballsy night-climbing Greenfighters Tomiko and Marcus. They look like shadowy two-legged spiders scuttling sideways in very slow-mo as they carefully plant the protection into the rock wall by the light of their headlamps for the others to cling to, placing big solid ‘carrots’ and moly-chrome ‘friends.’ ‘Do not worry, DocoMan,’ Kenji says behind the big tripod, looking through his infra-red LLLTV camera which sees everything in the dark. ‘Lookin’ good, Tomiko,’ he murmurs, coaching his favourite actress long-distance. ‘Yes! So much beautiful gaman. Shooting at night-time

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makes the action look hotter. Nice scary ambience,’ he pronounces the French word like a nasal Parisian, gestures at the patchy wind-driven clouds scudding across the lowburning moon. ‘Wow! She almost lose it. But now she got her foot back. Hiroshima-san is one bushi lady! So are you too, Darwin-san, dude,’ he adds, popping out from behind the camera, playfully tugging at Darwin’s laden bandoliers, jiggling his belaying bollards and threads in a clink a jink jingle. ‘Macho man.’ ‘The things I do for you,’ Darwin mutters, vibrating with adrenaline. For the eighteenth time he checks his halogen headlight, readjusts the webbing across his forehead. ‘Itte irasshai, DocoMan,’ Kenji says, infuriatingly enigmatic. ‘Urusai! Shuddup now. Sato-san!’ he yells to the shadowy figure a way down the beach. ‘Turn on the Nagra, we can lay down some soundtrack!’ Although Darwin can’t quite make her out in the stuttering moonlight, the sight of Zan in her climbing tights burns in his mind’s eye. Black with a bright moon and stars pattern in yellow exploding all over those thighs and that ass. He grins to himself at her multiple talents, pleased with the role he’s written for her as the gorgeous athletic fasttalking reporter who helps the Greenfighters. It is beautiful on the beach. Unusually placid. No noisy loud boomers slamming BLAM! In Echo Beach Bay the water lies flat and smooth as a big antique mirror reflecting the eerie moonlight, little ripples of dark round the edges where the old gilt has bubbled and vanished. There are no birds in the soundtrack. No shrieking seagulls wheeling and diving. No skreeling terns. Just the clinkety jingle of the belaying gear hanging off his right shoulder, the muffled clunk of the bolt plates inside his chalk bag, the 166

thud of his heart, the whine and the THWACK! of Egor’s big airdrill planting protection. Socking it to the virgin granite makes him feel guilty for violating Green minimal impact climbing ethics but as Egor said, a dead ‘natural holds’ Greenie’s no good to Gaia. He shivers, edgy with anticipation. ‘Go, Darwin!’ Zan slaps his ass none too gently and off he goes throwing himself at it, every nerve in his body screaming like rabid monkeys biting him. ‘Fucken A, mate,’ he peptalks in Rock Jock bravado, blowing the fear off as he hauls himself upwards with his white-knuckled fingers, his feet growing new sensors inside his butyl-soled rock boots. He can feel the icy cold ocean seething way down below him. ‘Mind over matter,’ he mutters his mantra, focusing on the tensile sensation of pulling his own weight, his own human physics of muscle and sinew, intention and will. He gropes for a widish vertical crack in the granite, executes a textbook sprag manoeuvre, his thumb pushing one way, his fingers pulling the other against the crack edge, then a very slow toe jam. Nice and slow. Nice and steady. Smearing and edging. Mostly edging with the side of his foot now. Thank God sturdy Egor insisted on hauling up the heavy LLLTV equipment. Already he’s tired. He’s lost finger strength since the Antarctic. He turns his hips at right angles to the rock so he can use the sides of his feet to take higher steps, take some of the outwards pressure off of the hand holds. He puts his foot in the etrier ladder. It slips. Awkwardly, he grabs for the runner and clips into it. It twists. They call it a zipper when everything rips. They call it a screamer when gravity wins. Fear twists his face in a horrible grimace. He is terrified 167

he’ll turn to stone right there on the rope ladder. He swallows his fear. Thick as mucus. It clogs up his chest. Freaking, he listens for the metallic PING! of the anchors de-pinning but the friends do not fail him, just dig in deeper. He scrabbles for purchase. Regains his grip. He is glad Zan’s below him and can’t see his face. He babbles his mantra over and over, practising rock cool, hanging there by a thread in a juddering panic with sewing machine leg. Finally, he is able to grab the Jumar ascenders and hoists himself up the last pitch, slowly and surely, shaking with fear and with triumph. And then Egor and Hiro are there, hanging down and boosting him up and over the shadowy cliff edge, and sending the slings down for Zannie. High as a kite and out-of-it breathless, he stumbles away from the shadowy cliff edge onto a big open mesa, lit up in the moonlight like a big empty stage, stumbles against a sign bolted into the rock. Rusty and twisted, warped by the wind. He leans close to read it. WARNING. DANGEROUS COAST. KING WAVES. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! A nice friendly greeting. And then Egor is next to him bashing him on the shoulder, saying something that sounds just like Russian ‘goodonya onya.’ Only it’s Strine. And then Zan comes up laughing and joking with Egor, the two of them aaay-Maaate-ing away in that braying Australian accent. Then she comes in for a close-up. Her face fills his screen. The cool bounce of the moonlight illumines her cheekbones. Her eyes pools of shadow. Her lips shine. Her teeth. She is saying something. He only hears ‘Darwin.’ The way her mouth says him. He flashes on the poem on her laptop he snuck a look at when she went surfing, Our Hearts Beat All of Us to Death and he wants to tell her he 168

didn’t mean it, she isn’t a pandering asshole, she’s one great big beautiful living poem. But then Egor comes stomping over, goes down on one knee like a clumsy suitor genuflecting before her, checking her harness, pulling and tugging. And then Egor hauls off his backpack and hands him the LLLTV camera in a one-handed ham-hand and his movie takes over. Back in synch now, adrenaline down to a nice cruisy level, the familiar weight of the camera digging into his shoulder, Darwin goes for a very long take, an extreme long shot panning slowly and slightly, setting the scene. CLIFF TOP AT NIGHT IN WEIRD FLITTING MOONLIGHT. NOTHING MOVES ON THE WIDE EMPTY MESA THAT SLOPES AWAY FROM THE CLIFF LIKE A TILTED RHOMBOID-SHAPED TABLE. IN THE FAR FAR DISTANCE TWINKLING LIGHTS TWINK. THE LITTLE TOY TOWN OF VANCOUVER. NO TREES BETWEEN HIM AND VANCOUVER. JUST HERE AND THERE SOME ODDLY SHAPED BOULDERS PILED ON TOP OF EACH OTHER IN PRECARIOUS BALANCE THROWING WEIRD LITHIC SHADOWS IN THE THIN JAUNDICED MOONSHINE. A MAN-MADE SHAPE GLINTS IN MID-FRAME. OBLONG. THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF A SHIPPING CONTAINER. JUST BEYOND THE CONTAINER THE CHUNKY UNMISTAKABLE SHAPES OF A DUMP TRUCK AND BULLDOZER LOOK LIKE HUGE FISHER PRICE TOYS LEFT BEHIND BY A GARGANTUAN BABY. He keys on his actors. Egor and Hiroshima, two guineapig coloured shadows, crouch along the edge of the seacliff, re-anchoring anchors and joining the ropes up, preparing for the abseil down. He prays to their fingers, deft in the 169

dark. In this low level light Zan’s platinum blonde hair looks ghostly, seems to float along disembodied above her black sweater. He zooms in for a close-up. She pirouettes, hams for the camera, ‘Good evening,’ she ad libs in her professional alto. ‘Vanessa McLaughlin, for WOW! coming to you live from somewhere deeply secret in Western Australia reporting on the hot ecotage scene. ‘Many of you may have wondered,’ she continues, deadpan, ‘just what does the smart EcoChick wear After Five? ‘A black SAS turtleneck sweater with a very high turtle to cover your face is essential for nightwork. And these accessories are to die for,’ she says, activating the epaulet lightsticks sewn into each shoulder with dramatic snaps. ‘De rigueur on the rock.’ Smiling that bright stunning smile straight at the camera. ‘And for further visual tagging we have our sleek glow-in-the-dark lycra leggings. Spunky Spanish Fire rockboots with thick rubber bottoms complete the nightclimber’s basic outfit.’ Darwin chuckles and presses the marker, tagging the clown-around footage as out-takes. She could go off on a fashion tangent forever. He could look at her through his lens forever. Standing there in her platinum skin. Her forehead and cheeks shining with moonsheen, the backs of her hands. ‘Okay, roll ’em,’ he gives the signal for them to start acting. Marcus stomps over to Tomiko and adjusts her gear like a grumpy old mother, tugs at her harness, breaks her epaulet lightsticks. ‘Don’t want to lose you,’ he says ominously, as though he expects the moon to go out and them all to be plunged into darkness. Tomiko does a quick reconnoitre, her small silhouette in 170

the dark Peter Pan boyish. ‘No one’s here. The place is deserted,’ she hisses, climbing up on the dozer to do some quick eco-mischief, funnels some sand into the fuel tank. As if on cue, to add to the drama, some long thin clouds flow and bleed into each other and, running together like ectoplasm, flow over the moon. Darwin aims at the heavens, takes some eerie footage, keys back on Zan as the reporter Vanessa who is moving towards him, her epaulet lightsticks bobbing like fireflies in the gloaming. ‘How exciting it is to be prowling around in this Halloween moonlight at midnight looking for trouble!’ her voice vibrates with excitement as she talks along into her Sony, taking notes on tonight’s Eco-Action in a low, wired whisper, perfect in the role. ‘So what on earth are we doing out here in this voodoo night soup? Up here on this cliff-top?’ Her voice holds a hushed sense of awe and self-reverence. ‘Tell you what, taking a stance is better than taking a sit, mate. And the Greenfighters are stancing tonight. The question is “Is the Shire of Troy allowing a commercial development to proceed on a nature reserve? And why?” Tonight we’re here to answer the question.’ Darwin grins. Taking a stance is better than taking a sit, mate. Great improvisation. Moves in on her from a very low angle shooting up at the weirdly lit sky so she looks heroic. Smile, Zannie! You’re in my movie. ‘Over here!’ Marcus hails, fifty feet up the slope in front of the shape that looks like a container. Darwin adjusts the gain switches, telephotos right in. It’s a trailer. The kind they use on a construction site for an office. He slo-mos the pan. In the window, an elegant sign announces PATRICK J SHEEHAN AIA is the architect behind HAPPI ENDO, the 171

real life construction going on on this site. Funny how small the world of Western Australia was, you kept bumping up against people you knew. ‘Yo! Vanessa!’ Marcus’s triumphant voice from behind the trailer urges her over. ‘Aaah. Sooo!’ Tomiko is smirking, looking into the camera like a kitty who’s pounced on a big tasty rat. ‘We’ve found it!’ Vanessa emotes, all excited, running around the big cement mixer, a stack of cement bags battened down with a tarp. Darwin lines it all up with the architect’s trailer in the near foreground, the twinkling town in the distance, slowly pans back to the cliff edge, the moon-sheeted ocean, racking focus from one to the other, a perfect shot. At that very instant loud offscreen sounds come into earshot. The high-powered whine of a turbo engine in the distance. The powerful sound of another big car. Two pair of bright headlights swoop down the hill in their direction. ‘Run for it!’ Hiro yodels. ‘We’re not supposed to be here! Kendo-san didn’t ask for his uncle’s permission!’ Great. Now she tells me ! Darwin curses to himself, weighted down by the Sony, waffling in and out of a fight or flight freezeframe. Goddamnit, Kenji! ‘Get ready for an emergency descent!’ Egor maydays, whacking Zan’s and then Hiro’s bottom, and unceremoniously sends them off towards the cliff. Then he runs straight at Darwin like a charging rhino and literally sweeping him off his feet, hauls him behind the big wall of cement bags. ‘We’ll be safe here,’ he reassures Darwin, as, grunting, he pulls a couple of twenty-five kilo bags out as though they were feathers, dumps them down on the ground, and hides 172

the big Sony in the gap in the wall. He pulls Darwin in under the tarp with him. ‘It’s probably just a routine security check. We’ll just wait till the coast’s clear.’ ‘But why are there two cars?’ Darwin asks, freaking, the back of his neck and his hands pricking with static. His heart thumps like a drum. He feels sickeningly claustrophobic. The damp mildewed smell of the tarp invading his sinuses makes him feel queasy. He starts to dry cough. ‘Here. Rub some of this on your mo,’ Egor pushes something at him in the fetid dark. A little glass bottle. ‘My what?’ ‘That little thing that’s trying to be a moustache when it grows up.’ The high powered fumes of the eucalyptus oil cut through to his sinus, take care of the coughing, the queasy feeling. ‘Shit, man,’ Darwin laughs. ‘You’re worse than a Boy Scout!’ ‘SAS survival,’ Egor shrugs in the dark. He pokes his head out of their impromptu bunker. ‘They’re still coming. No worries, mate. No one packs heat in Australia except the Asians.’ His pulse still racing like crazy, wondering what the fine is for trespassing, Darwin looks through the high-powered lens, pulls down the focus. Bright lights hit his retina through the Sony’s lens. He flinches and ducks. Did they see the reflection? The engines cut off. The slamming of car doors, one after the other, four slams in all. A booming male voice. Two others answer. No shrill notes of alarm or upheaval. Just normal talk. Too far away to make out what the voices are saying. The tone is upbeat and happy. 173

‘It’s not the cops,’ he whispers to Egor, relieved. ‘Who is it?’ Egor whispers back. ‘Hold on.’ Darwin takes his time adjusting the focus, the gain and the eyepiece, enjoying his little edge over Egor, as the only one in on the bizarre tableau unfolding before the hidden lens of the Sony. It’s like a scene from the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing. A black Saab Turbo with its boot up is parked on the mesa next to a big blue Mitsubishi Pajero with the headlights on so they can see what they’re doing. One of the men — he’s shaved his beard off but Darwin can tell it’s Sheehan — is taking some things out of the boot. A box of stuff and a folding table. Laying a cloth down and putting things out on the table. A bottle. Some glasses. He’s even brought a fancy ice bucket. And a big bag of ice. What an asshole! But he’s a happy asshole. Laughing and talking and looking pleased and excited. The second guy’s a tall lanky geek, bigger than Sheehan, his back turned to the camera. Okay turn around will you. That’s a boy. It’s Gary Morgan! Not saying much just standing around doing a whole lot of smiling. The other guy’s ducked into the Pajero. He’s got a bottle of something. It’s Glen Morangie. Single malt. A very good Scotch. Okay, so here comes the guy with the bottle, a short stocky fellow in a shiny blue suit. Really wide-bodied. Looks Japanese. But you can’t see his eyes because he’s wearing these Ray-Bans. He’s got a weird hairdo for an Oriental. Sort of short and here and there kinky, like some half-assed kind of perm. And weird white shoes on. Moccasins. Zan wouldn’t approve of those shoes with that suit. They’re doing some kind of ceremony. Sheehan’s bowing to the short wide-bodied dude. He’s bowing back. 174

But not as low as Sheehan is bowing. Now Sheehan’s taking out this fat little big-bellied statue. He gives it to the Japanese dude. And what’s that in his other hand? It looks like a paintbrush? Now the Japanese dude’s painting the statue. Nice and careful. He’s concentrating. Biting his tongue. Just a bit though. He’s put down the paintbrush. Jubilation all around! Everyone’s clapping. And here come the drinkies! The only sound effects are the whir of the Sony, Egor’s noisy breathing beside him, Darwin’s own occasional sighs as he watches the three men drinking and smiling, congratulating each other and clinking their glasses, their voices at this middle distance melding and blending into a convivial mumpf-mumpf-mumpf. A fourth man gets out of the Pajero. Another Japanese, in a white suit. This one’s tall and skinny. Looks really mean. Looks like he’s been shopping. He’s got a couple of Coles bags. He’s putting them on the table next to Gary Morgan. Fuck! They’re full of money! Gary’s giving Wide Body a coy ‘for me?’ kind of look and Wide Body’s beaming and bowing and reaching into his pocket and here comes the pièce de résistance. He’s got some keys on a nice fancy keyring and he’s presenting them to Gary Morgan with this big formal bow and Gary’s grabbing the keys with this big shiny smile. You naughty boy Gary. And Sheehan’s looking on like they’re getting married and he’s the matchmaker. Oh-oh. The tall skinny mean guy is looking hard in our direction and pointing, he looks agitated. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here!’ Darwin hisses, jamming the camera into the backpack, shoving it in Egor’s direction. Egor grabs it, pokes his head out and peers at the heavens. The moon is awash with a marbled cloud scrim. The 175

ground between them and the cliff is blotched with camouflage shadow. Stumbling after Egor’s low-crouching hulk, forgetting to look out for snakeholes, Darwin half staggers, half runs to the cliff-edge. Halfway there he hears Egor yelling but cannot catch what it is. Why’s Egor yelling? The guys’ll hear him. Then he sees the most wonderful sight before him. Three big bounding shadows. Kangaroos. Bouncing and boingging! As graceful as dolphins, only their strength more apparent as they spring off the landscape, limned by the moon. His heart leaps at their strength and their weird unique beauty. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ kicks in on his internal Muzak, so schmaltzy it’s comic. If he weren’t so busy escaping, he’d stop for a laugh. A horrible soundtrack starts up in the background, closes in fast, and jumpcuts to foreground. Savage barking and snarling. Slathering sounds straight out of Cujo. Holy shit! He sees a montage in his brain of thick muscled pit bulls and mastiffs, evil Rottweilers, snapping white fangs and flying saliva, rabid white bulging eyeballs rolling with rage. He can feel the snarling beast coming at him out of nowhere. He can taste its saliva, raw meat and metallic, its slavering blood lust. The evil smell of its breath hot on his neck. He puts on a spurt, running faster and faster, his legs scream with pain, his lungs are going to burst now. Then a small nimble shadow is running back towards him. Hiroshima throws herself past him with her arm thrusting out. Then KER CHUNK! The pneumatic jackhammer. Then a sharp yelping yip sound. The whimper of death. Then nothing but his own booming blood in his ears and Hiro is yelling, ‘Got him!’ in relief and triumph. Then crouching, she hooks herself up and goes over the edge. 176

Then Egor is there, chuffing and whewing and slamming his shoulder. Clipping him into the whaletail descender. One last check of his harness. Shoving the rope in his hands, Egor simpers, ‘Going down, Sir.’ What a hambone! And then with the adrenaline singing and wailing inside him like Jimi Hendrix, Darwin goes over the edge and down and down and down and down in a freefalling vacuum; it doesn’t matter at all which one falls faster, a pound of feathers or a pound of Darwin, it’s all fucking falling ohmigod! falling! in a vacuum of fear.

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25 25 ‘Showtime!’ Darwin announces, euphoric, back at the Sky House, unloading Kenji’s LLLTV camera, popping the tape in the VCR player. ‘Yeah!’ the others all yell in chorus, eager to see how they look in action. ‘Wait for me!’ Zan yells from the kitchen, where she’s building herself a ham sandwich, not wanting to miss out on a second of the hot footage Darwin’s been keeping a secret, just to build the suspense and enhance his own personal charisma. ‘Who wants a ham sammy?’ Zan sings out, and is met with dead silence. ‘On whole grain. With cheese. And lettuce. Bean sprouts and tomato. Capsicum. Carrot?’ she cajoles like a mother. ‘Hold the ham, please!’ Darwin calls. ‘You know I don’t eat anything that once had a face.’ 178

‘Or if it had a mother,’ Egor teases, pouring Zan a nice tot of brandy, clinking her glass. ‘You’re the only one here who eats high on the food chain.’ It is two going on three in the morning but nobody’s tired. They’re all sporting scrapes and rope burns, blisters and bruises, everyone’s all hyped up and excited, still on a high from the night’s wild action. Everyone’s getting off on each other, how great it is to be Egor and Hiro and Kenji and Darwin and Zan, all oozing charisma and so much adventure they have to stay up till dawn just to tell each other Our Life, Be In It Story. Zan settles down on the leather sofa and takes a test bite of her sandwich, a sip of her brandy, looking over the snifter at Darwin. His fine goldrimmed glasses wink in reflection. His eyes shine behind them, dark as coffee beans from Sumatra. His elegant lips tilt in that I’m-too-sexy-form y - m o u t h smile. His face is bruised with a few small contusions. He has rolled up his sleeves to display the bruises on his wrists and forearms, preening for her, proud of his trophies. This man has no problems with self-esteem, Babe. He is radiant with pride. She gives him a slow sexy smile, feeling her womb pulse at Darwin, the showman, running the show now, ballswinging in a way he’s never before done for her. ‘Ta daa!’ Kenji drum-rolls. ‘The beach at night-time!’ ‘Très cinéma vérité,’ Hiro admires, her perfect French making Zan jealous. ‘Wait’ll you see my tape!’ Darwin taunts Kenji, dragging the suspense out. ‘You’ll cream your jeans.’ Zan doesn’t know about Kenji but she’s already creaming her jeans just being in the same room with Darwin, all her hormones are surging in celebration of 179

surviving the night climb. The heavy duty Green feminist Hiroshima Hiroshima must have the hots, too, from the way she’s backsliding, popping choice tidbits into Egor’s big sexy lips, blotting his mouth with her neatly rolled napkin, like a coy little geisha. ‘Wow! Look at that heel hook!’ Darwin admires Egor on the small screen. ‘You better than Sly Stallone!’ Kenji compliments, his lips nibbling at something on the end of his chopsticks. Settling herself on the wide arm of the armchair, Zan relaxes back against Darwin’s shoulder, and listens to the blokey banter. ‘Gamatte! Tomiko-chan!’ Kenji barracks as Hiro ascends the cliff on the screen nimble as a monkey. ‘You exhibit so much gaman!’ ‘We’ll have to change your name to Gaman Gaman,’ Egor says. Hiro giggles, and bops him with her serviette. Irresistibly sexy in her tights and her little white singlet that shows off her little round breasts, the intricate Joan of Arc tat on her left biceps, she is one of those impossibly beautiful people you can’t take your eyes off. No matter how much you tell yourself beauty is only skin deep, superficial, your eyes gravitate back to those perfect features, the tilt of the head, the almond-shaped eyes with their sharp dark erotic edge, like the eyes of an ocelot. The scene shifts from Hiro’s lithe figure to Darwin’s slow climbing. ‘Look at youse!’ Egor teases. ‘You’re so gripped, you’re packing it!’ Zan feels Darwin stiffen against her, getting his back up. ‘Packing?’ he whispers to her in confusion. Crikey, she realises, he doesn’t know Egor’s just joking. ‘Shittin’ yerself,’ Egor translates, guffawing. 180

‘He’s just having you on, Dar,’ Zan interjects, seeing the cultural gap yawn before him and threaten to swallow. ‘It’s just your Australian male mateship in action. The nastier the insult, the more the guys like you. Where did you learn to climb so well, Dar?’ she changes the subject to ease the tension. ‘Was it in Yosemite?’ ‘Yo-sem-itty. Not Yoze-might,’ Darwin corrects her in a stiff voice, for some reason not liking her question. Ohmigod! Zan’s heart sinks as her bum fills up the screen, huge in the Day-Glo moon and star leggings. The camera slides to the moon in the sky then back to the fluorescent moons on her leggings where it lingers. And loiters. In a long loving shot. ‘A beautiful piece of work, Kendo-san,’ Darwin comments in his objective director’s voice, pausing the tape. She looks like a big Huntsman spider doing that bridge move, all spread out. She almost pissed her daks, it was so scary. Then she’d slapped a mosquito and half lost her foothold. Damn! Why did Kenji have to catch her slipping and sliding and frantically scrabbling for purchase? Why didn’t he shoot her when she was hanging by one arm in the classic stiff-arm to save energy? That would have made a great Eco-Chick-to-the-Rescue visual statement. ‘Blondie-san got a nice big beautiful butt,’ Kenji smiles, bowing at Zan. ‘Make the mouth water. The teeth wish to bite.’ ‘Come on! Fast forward it, Darwin!’ Zan protests, embarrassed. ‘Yeah,’ Egor seconds, ‘we’re all dying to see what you got.’ ‘I got what it takes, folks,’ Darwin says, full of that upbeat off-handed self-admiration that only the Yanks can 181

pull off without seeming up themselves pompous. ‘Cannes Prix d’Or, here we come!’ he introduces, ejecting Kenji’s tape, popping his own in, fastforwarding it to the scene they’ve all been waiting for. Zan is glued to the edge of her seat, like the others. Very Alfred Hitchcock, she thinks, as she hears car doors slamming off camera. With bated breath, she watches three shadowy figures stroll into the light from the car’s highbeam headlights, directly into the camera’s clutches. ‘Sheehan!’ Zan gasps. He looks as good as Hugh Jackman without his beard. ‘Ban! Ban! Ban!’Kenji makes loud Japanese sound effects. ‘Here come Yamamoto-san. Maito gai. So bushi. The balls big as two gong bonging! Can you hear?’ he sneers, sarcastic, pausing the action. ‘Very strong man. Heavy duty,’ Hiro translates, making a face at Yamamoto. ‘This big boy Sheehan very sexy. How do you know him?’ Kenji asks Zan. ‘Um … we used to be … close,’ Zan stammers, trying to spare Darwin’s feelings. ‘Like this,’ Darwin says, putting two fingers together. ‘They were lovers,’ he says casually, shrugging his shoulders to show he’s sophisticated. ‘Once upon a time.’ Zan feels her face flare. If Darwin knew how recently she and Sheehan were ‘once upon a time’ lovers, he wouldn’t be quite so sophistirisqué, to put it mildly. ‘He calls himself a Deep Green architect,’ Darwin is saying, ‘but he only goes as deep as his bumper sticker.’ ‘Honk if you love Sheehan!’ Zan chimes in, joking for Darwin to hide her discomfort, waggling her eyebrows and rolling her eyes. 182

‘Look, Gary Morgan!’ Egor cries. ‘What’s he doing there?’ Nervously, Zan watches Sheehan unpack the Jaguar and set up the table, with The Perfect Items for the odd midnight celebration in the moonlight occasion: the solid small folding table, jarrah-slatted, by Settler’s. The Lalique crystal ice bucket. The silver ice tongs. The heavy Scotchon-the-rocks crystal glasses etched all around with black and white Scotties she bought for his birthday the Year of the Dog. ‘Just look at Sheehan!’ she scoffs, a little too loudly, for Darwin’s benefit. ‘You’d think he was Christopher Skase!’ Inside she is freaking. Her face is in flames, a dead giveaway, she is sure Darwin can see SHEEHAN WAS HERE written in big scarlet letters across her hot forehead. ‘Wait’ll you see what the tricky prick’s up to,’ Darwin whispers in Zan’s burning ear. ‘What’s going on?’ Zan asks brightly, changing the subject, ‘what’s that?’ pointing at the doll Yamamoto is clutching. ‘The Daruma doll ceremony brings good luck in the Japanese culture,’ Hiro says. ‘Daruma is a doll of the Buddha. See how the doll is fat and roly-poly. No legs. Like Buddha. He sat facing a wall meditating so long his legs rotted off,’ she says, rolling her eyes up, conceding how weird this must sound to the gaijin. ‘Yamamoto-san is painting the eye in. When you start a venture you paint one eye in. When you’ve finished the project you paint in the other.’ ‘Aha, the Pajero!’ Zan blurts without thinking when she sees Yamamoto pull out the keys, flashing back to the fax she eavesdropped in Sheehan’s office. 183

‘What do you mean, “Aha, the Pajero!”’ Darwin asks. ‘Nothing. Isn’t it a nice car? I want one!’ She quickly ad libs. ‘I smell something fishy!’ Kenji says, gleeful, his eyes glued to the screen. ‘You’re smelling the stink of corruption,’ Egor cackles, watching the skinny Japanese guy grease Gary Morgan. ‘Thou shalt not bribe,’ Darwin intones, like Charlton Heston as Moses. ‘The sanctimonious “Let’s dig deep in our pockets for Greenpeace” Sheehan’s a sellout.’ He gives Zan a look that’s somewhere between disappointment and triumph. ‘This is how my uncle takes care of business,’ Kenji says, staring at Yamamoto with big brooding eyes. ‘Yakuza launder their money squeaky clean in Australia,’ Hiro says. ‘Big construction projects eat lots of dirty money. And Yamamoto’s money is dirty, I can tell you. His money comes from sex, gambling and drugs.’ ‘I hate Yamamoto-san,’ Kenji says, bitterly. ‘I do not like what he does. The money you see in Coles bags comes from the Great Hanshin Earthquake donations.’ ‘Oooo Kendo-san!’ Hiro exclaims, excited to hear the inside dirt about her own country. She turns to the others, explaining the scandal. ‘The Japanese government was a great disappointment to its people after the big earthquake in Kobe! They didn’t do anything to help the victims, stood around hemming and hawing, trying to figure out what to do. Whose responsibility was it? Blah blah etcetera. Should we send in the Army? Was it the precinct leaders’ duty? Typical Japanese stalling, worrying, are we doing things in the proper manner, instead of just going ahead and doing what’s needed. All these poor homeless people were 184

freezing their ass off and getting the flu so the Yakuza jumped in to the rescue and went around collecting money for food and medicine and tents for the victims. They became local heros but it was discovered they kept most of the money, the devils!’ ‘I told you you’d cream your jeans, Kendo-san!’ Darwin says, gloating. ‘I’ve been trying to think how we can work this footage into the movie, it’s great Art Imitates Life stuff. We could mosaic the faces out and computerise the voices, write a new scene around it.’ ‘No way, dude!’ Kenji says, his dark eyes burning bright. ‘I have better usage. All my life Yamamoto-san has make me feel like a worthless fish head. All my life I have been waiting to say fuck you, go to the devil! Now many thanks to honourable Darwin-san I can!’ His voice quavers with feeling as he whacks Darwin hard on the back. ‘I need two copy of your beautiful I gotcha! footage, DocoMan.’ ‘Roger dodger,’ Darwin says, snapping a salute off. ‘I’m going to bed now,’ Kenji yawns, heading for the master bedroom. ‘We have a seven o’clock call in the morning. I recommend all do the same,’ he says, giving Hiroshima a pointed look but Hiroshima ignores him and continues to play geisha with Egor. ‘What an excellent suggestion,’ Zan says, peeking over at Darwin to see if he’s listening. He isn’t, she can feel the old distancing vibes coming off him, his body language making a point of ignoring her. Yawning elaborately, she walks over to where Darwin is rewinding the tape, fiddling with the Sony and announces, ‘I’m going to bed, too. ‘You coming?’ she asks, a little bit wistful. He shakes his head. ‘Gotta make those spare copies.’ ‘Can’t it wait?’ she asks, trying hard not to whine. Since 185

when has Darwin been so bloody dedicated? Here she is practically flashing her pussy at him and he’s got to copy the bloody tape. Then it finally hits her. ‘But what about Sheehan?’ she asks, all alarmed. ‘You could get him in trouble.’ ‘He could get him in trouble. He’s the bad guy here. Not me,’ he tells her, shrugging. ‘Well can’t you at least mosaic his face out so you can’t see it?’ she hears herself pleading. He shrugs, noncommital. ‘Noity noit, maayte,’ he says in his awful Australian accent, giving her a small tired smile, then adds in his normal voice, ‘I’ll see ya when I see ya.’

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26 26 ‘And then Marcus rapes Tomiko in the Jacuzzi. Au plein air. So many bubbles!’ Kenji is storylining to Darwin who is holding the end of the tape while Kenji measures the length of the next shot’s focus, makes a big X with his greasepencil near the big L-shaped pool. ‘He fuck her so hard she wakes from the dead. What do you think, Darwin-san?’ he asks grinning, batting his big Astro Boy eyes. ‘About what?’ Darwin says, standing there heat-struck in the glaring hot morning sunlight, thinking about things he doesn’t want to be thinking about, like whose dog was that Egor slaughtered? Is the money that’s floating Surfing Antarctica from pushing speed, sex slaves, or the great earthquake hoax? Whatever, it’s not exactly your Grade A spotless Hollywood finance. Does the end justify the means? In addition to his mounting moral dilemma, his

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balls are steaming this morning. His whole body feels like a hard-on, edgy and tense. What he wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall wherever Sheehan and Zan were. Were they tucked away in his fancy hotel room eyeing each other over champagne and croissants? Sheehan, playing the wise, knowing mentor, Zan the all too willing pert young protégé. A ‘working breakfast,’ my ass. He can just see them. ZAN, LICKS LIPS LIKE LAURA DERN, DRAWLS IN HARSH ANTIPODEAN ACCENT, ‘Say-lore, uuuv got me hotta thehn Alabama macadam!’ SHEEHAN, LOOKING LIKE BEAU BRIDGES IMITATING NICHOLAS CAGE, ‘Wh-ai, Lula you blah blah blah blah.’ PATRICK AND ZANNIE AS LULA AND SAILOR. BLOODY WILD AT HEART. He shouldn’t have acted so goddamn standoffish when all he wanted to do was get into bed with her. She was hot to trot. She was practically panting. Man, what a stupid asshole he was! Stayed behind and futzed with the tape until dawn on purpose. To punish her for her once-upon-atime lover with his silly-ass mind-games. What a fool he was! The whole thing’s backfired and he ends up punishing himself. If she’d gone off this morning wellfucked and happy he wouldn’t be torturing himself with his stupid-ass fly-on-the-wall thoughts. ‘What do you think, DocoMan?’ Kenji asks for the third time before Darwin finally cues on his soundtrack and hears what the voiceover is saying. He looks at the greasepencilled X mark where Kenji is pointing, the X-marks-therape spot his memory tells him, replaying, ‘This where Tomiko gets rape!’ chortling, running to the pool fence with his thumb and tape measure lining up the fence and the 188

Jacuzzi for an eye-level POV shot. ‘Aboriginal tracker here looking, get big erection. Touch self and party. Shoot spunk all over. ‘What do you think, Darwin-san?’ peering at him from under those bushy thick eyebrows. ‘Hold it. Where’d the Aboriginal tracker come from? Why’s Tomiko dead?’ Darwin asks, trying to retrace Kenji’s tortuous plot twists. ‘No honban!’ Hiroshima pipes up from under the big sun umbrella. She is wearing a hat and fanning her face to keep her makeup from melting in the broiling sun. ‘It’s too hot for honban.’ ‘Aaww,’ Egor’s face falls at Hiroshima’s refusal to do a real sex scene. Christ, it’s hot in Australia, Darwin grumps to himself. Even though it’s only 10:30 the sun is relentless, he’s sweating all over like a self-basting turkey. Why didn’t they plant any trees when they put this fabulous pool in? he wonders. It’s such a weird place for a pool out here in the middle of nowhere, you can’t even see the big fancy mansion they’re using as the GreenFighters’ safe house. All you can see is sky and wheatfields, the sky a Vincent Van Gogh bright crayon blue, the wheat a dry bleached-blonde like Heather Locklear’s hair. And then there’s this huge pool dropped in out of nowhere, plunked down in the dry barren landscape, carving out a cool sharp-edged L of shimmering turquoisey wetness. A nice dramatic setting for the love scene they’re shooting this morning. ‘I agree we’ve got to amp up the action, but no rape. And no Aboriginal tracker wanking, Kendo-san,’ he says very firmly, giving Kenji a look. ‘It’s too cheap and nasty. Plus the tokenism factor is a racial put down.’ 189

‘What?!’ Kenji’s eyebrows knit his face into a fierce fright mask. He looks daggers at Darwin. What gaijin effrontery to question his art! He smacks his belly to show he means business, puts on his sombre work face and bows to Darwin. ‘Many thanks for honourable input Darwin-san but don’t look down your long nose at me. The Aboriginal is to show Japanese audience the romance of Australia outback. I must keep the native tracker looking. Need third party male looker to show audience the fucking is honban. For real. Peeping Tom is tradition. Japanese male conditioned when he see third party onlooker to know to feel sexy.’ ‘Okay. Okay. But no wanking,’ Darwin says, weary of the struggle for artistic control the two of them are having this morning, deciding to negotiate the Aboriginal tracker later. ‘We’ll do a naked love scene in the pool, not the Jacuzzi, like Bruce Willis and Jane Marsh in whatsisname.’ ‘Bruce Willis is a shrink and she is nympho? Not so good fuck scene. We can do better,’ Kenji says, winking at Hiro. ‘Iku iku!’ Hiroshima gasps, joking. ‘We Japanese say “I am going” when we come,’ she tells a blushing Egor. ‘Especially when it’s a rape scene.’ ‘I don’t get it. It must be some kind of Japanese thing. Why do you always want to have a rape, Kendo-san?’ Darwin grumbles. ‘Marcus is a good guy. They’re at this big fancy safe house their rich Green friend lent them and they’re enjoying some hard-earned R & R. Why would he rape Tomiko? He loves her.’ ‘That’s why he rapes her,’ Kenji says, shrugging at their cultural differences. ‘Doesn’t matter. Main thing is the party-time action.’ Giving Darwin a big toothy grin, he drives his fist in his palm in the universal sex gesture. ‘You catch my drift?’ 190

Darwin shakes his head at Kenji and finally voices, ‘Actually, I’m having a problem here. It’s the source of the money. Don’t you realise that if Surfing’s a hit your bad guys are gonna make a shitpot of money?’ ‘Har!’ Kenji laughs, throwing his head back, ‘I tell you now Darwin-san, these corrupt bastards exist without us like the bacteria under Western style toilet seat,’ drilling him with his dark eyes. ‘All that matters is we get to make our Green blockbuster movie, change minds all round the planet. It is excellence.’ Tired of thinking Big Picture Darwin turns his mind to battling over the filmic aesthetics. Why can’t they show Hiro and Egor embracing full frontal in big BCU? Why can’t they put in a nice little sequence of underwater cunnilingus like Bruce Willis did? Darwin sits back for a while and lets Kenji take over. He takes a swig from his water bottle and watches him swagger around giving orders in that arrogant hectoring tone, the Japanese film crew running around behind him, lowering the waterproof camera down in the deep end under the springboard to capture whatever wet dreams Kenji’s inventing. The gaffer and grip Kumitomo and Watanabe head for the bougainvillea vines with bags and scissors, snipping off the bright fuschia flowers, carefully avoiding the thorns. The wind blows a stray blossom at Darwin, he leans over and picks it up thinking it’s so bright it looks fake like it’s made of dried paper, thinking of how Linni loved the bright bougainvillea in Mexico. Las Jacarandas in Cuernavaca. Over the bed instead of a mirror a window opened wide to the tropical night sky, letting in the sensuous waft of tropical flowers. Over her shoulder a 191

shooting star flared in the dark at the crux of their climax and he thought, his heart thumping so loud in his ears, he would live forever. Kenji yells through the megaphone, ‘HIT-THE-MARK! SILENCE-ON-THE-SET. ONETWOTHREEFOAH ANDR O L L - ’ E M!’ Junior Sato stoops in front of the rolling camera, claps the slate with its slashy Japanese writing. Hiroshima slips out of her cotton yakata and gracefully walks down the steps into the water. The sight of her pale, perfect body makes Darwin’s chest hurt. He looks at the fragile bougainvillea blossom he’s crushing and hears Zan’s voice in his head urging, ‘Tell me.’ Sees her face in his mind’s eye, open-faced as a little girl, expectant. ‘Come on you can tell me.’ That big winsome grin. ‘I swear I won’t bite off your penis. I swear I’m not jealous. What’s past is past.’ How can he tell her about Linni. Flying up California Street in the zippy magenta Spitfire behind a cable car full of touristas who’d finally made it to San Francisco in search of their Summer of Love. Cresting Nob Hill with all those big mansions, the cable car ring-a-ling clanging, and Linni’s hair flying behind her all snaky and wild like a gorgeous Medusa. The two of them laughing and sending out love vibes so hot in the foggy evening the tourists were staring and pointing ‘They’re movie stars!’ Linni. Linni. Fine little hands. Delicate shoulders. A mosaic of Linni shifts in his mind. Fleeting impressions. Crazy-quilt snippets of feelings. He is losing his sense of her now with this new one. He shakes his head to clear it, feels his brain wonk and wobble inside his domed skull. ‘Our Hearts Beat All of Us to Death’, her poem about him is titled. ‘Earth to Darwin!? Beam me up Darwin!’ 192

Noisily clearing her throat and braying. This big clunky new one was crowding right in. He hears a loud splash and looks over to see Egor surface and porpoise around with the petite Hiroshima while Kenji moves in low with the Sony attached to his shoulder like some kind of transplant. The gaffer and grip are scattering bougainvillea blossoms on the pool’s surface. They drift by Tomiko and Marcus in a riot of colour, blazing in the sun. Darwin stares wide-eyed at the brilliant red flowers. He rocks himself, bent over double. His gut cramps with pain. His mouth tastes bile as the terrible sorrow rises inside him. He is reeled back in time like a bad acid flashback, feels the lightning bolts of the knife in her slashing, the shock of her hot blood exploding, gushing all over, hears her screaming ‘DARWIN!’ Crying. Sighing down the long dying. Forever. Dead. Except in his head. Forever imprinted in all his neurons. Like epilepsy. Reliving it over and over. Linni’s blood on his shirt on his face on his jacket. He can still smell it. Bright and metallic. Like new copper tubing. Shooting all over. Like the shower pipe when it blows a gasket.

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27 27 Zan sits in the Vitara in the Biarritz Hotel carpark collecting her thoughts before she goes in to surprise Sheehan. She can smell, taste and feel a great Greed and Corruption exclusive brewing inside her but how can she slant it so Sheehan won’t cop it, the big bumbling boofhead. How can she ask him about the Yakuza connection without getting into trouble. She’s in trouble enough already with Darwin who’s been giving her the cold shoulder treatment. Deja vu. She shivers, flashbacking to that awful moment when they drove away in the limo and dumped her on St George’s Terrace, Darwin staring at her from behind his impenetrable shades like Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant. Love is a stranger in an open car . The voice of Annie Lennox comes up on her inner soundtrack, haunting,

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edged with hard danger, warning, Take you away and leave you far behind. Left behind. Abandoned. All alone in the quiet room with just your two hands for companions. Holding the book before you for hours. Just you and your two lonely thumbs thumbing through selfhelp and healing-your-inner-child hype by American authors, the black empty hole of my mother, myself. ‘… and you stumble in the debris … ‘… and I want you … ‘… and I want you …’ Zan sighs a deep shuddering sigh, trying not to remember what it was like to be out there all alone in the world after Sheehan. Without his big cock to anchor herself with, she felt insubstantial, adrift in the night in her big empty bed. At least she always knew what Sheehan was thinking — in between thoughts about style and arty architect concepts, always that good old bottom-line lizard logic, what’s in it for me me me? And how can I get to fuck it? How can I make the world sit up and take notice of wonderful fabulous me me me? Okay, let’s do it. Stop moaning about men. You’ve got a career here. Zan shakes her head to clear out the cobwebs and resolutely picks up her laptop, focusing on how to turn things to her advantage. She pauses in the arched doorway, scanning the sunny glassed-in patio for Sheehan. He looks very lonely without her, sitting there with his papers, brooding over his coffee, thinking things architectural. How the Biarritz-by-the-Sea architect botched it by using such small narrow windows 195

that chopped up the magnificent view of the ocean with too much stone wall. How stodgy it felt, like an old British winter hotel plunked down by the sea in Australia. Thinking how great a Philippe Starck-style hotel by Patrick J Sheehan would look here in this wonderful ocean-side setting. A great big quirky blue and gold sculpture with a sense of humour. Le pauvre petit. He’s put on some weight. At the back of his neck there’s a puppylike fat roll. He must really miss her. There was no one who could handle his thrust and his parry, no one who knew him as well as she did, no one to speak bad French with. Her heart shrinks with guilt. She hasn’t rung him since she got back from Sydney, hasn’t told him she’s gotten together with Darwin. The poor bloke will feel awful. She takes a big breath and smiling her face off, sweeps out onto the patio, blowing air kisses either side of his cheek, ‘Chéri!’ doing their French thing. Surprise and delight light up his face. ‘Bébé Adorable! In the flesh!’ he smiles, looking her over, pinching the inside of her forearm. She flexes her biceps, making her pecs jump, just to amuse him. ‘Hmmm, you’ve got some nice high meat developing there,’ Sheehan sighs, eyeing her cleavage in her tight Wonder Bra. ‘I can type too,’ she drawls, playing into his sexist patter. Poor Patrick. He tries but he just can’t help it. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, grinning with pleasure. ‘A story on a Japanese film crew. They’re making a movie down here,’ she laughs. ‘You know how ho-hum it is in the “State of Excitement”, she air-quotes Western 196

Australia’s wannabe slogan, rolling her eyes. ‘Everyone’s ga ga they’re gonna be in a Japanese movie!’ she grins, carefully not mentioning Darwin just yet. ‘You look great!’ she enthuses, turning the conversation to his favourite subject. ‘I’m fat,’ he gives her a wry look. ‘I’ve been eating for two since you split for Sydney so I wouldn’t miss you.’ ‘It’s cute.’ Chucking him under the chin like a baby, she sits down at the table. ‘Have some of Bill Wignall’s latest Unwooded,’ Sheehan smiles, waving at the waiter to bring another glass. ‘Du petit déjeuner?’ he invites, pouring a nice crystal glassful of bright Chardonnay. What a relief, she thinks, crunching the savoury crisp bacon. The lovely golden pillow of egg swoons on her tongue. She mops the creamy, lemony hollandaise sauce with her toasted muffin and beckons the waiter to bring her another. To hell with the diet. She’ll start working on those two kilos tomorrow. ‘How about this beach! It’s better than the French Riviera!’ Sheehan waves at the seascape spread out before them. The ocean is spangled with glittering silver sequins winking on and off in the sun. ‘Ummmm … heavenly,’ Zan gives him a Chardonnay smile. ‘How’s your Happi Endo project?’ ‘It’s great! Everything’s going marvellously. The Japanese consortium are a pleasure to work with. They recognise talent when they see it, Zannie. Appreciate my special aesthetics,’ he says in his Great White Architect’s voice. ‘They’ve given me free rein on the fantasy rooms. And they love my innovations.’ He lowers his voice to a seductive rumble, looks deep in her eyes. 197

‘Tell,’ she says, breathless as Debbie about to unload a week’s worth of gossip. ‘This is highly confidential,’ he hesitates, then decides to tell her. ‘The council thinks Happi Endo’s a retirement complex for nice little old Japanese couples but if word of its special nature gets out they could reverse their approval and then I’d be up Shit Creek without a paddle.’ ‘I promise I won’t say a word,’ she zips her mouth shut like a zipper. ‘Eco decor is very in now. The natural look. I’ve created an Australian nature suite for the nature lovers. Climate controlled with sprinklers for rain. I’m putting in real jarrah trees, and lots of natives, blackboys, bottlebrushes, and banksia bushes. They look really weird to the Japs. The bath’s a granite rock pool with a real waterfall. I’ve let my imagination run wild!’ His eyes sparkle at her, his high Irish colour rising with each sip of the wine. ‘There’s a big giant hammock to truss people up in. And a fantasy You Jane Me Tarzan tree house guaranteed to make the toughest businessman feel boyish. The Japanese like to feel childlike when they have sex, did you know, Zannie? You can use the special life-like lianas to chain your partner to the tree and the blackboys are there so you can cut your own switches.’ ‘Ouch!’ she wiggles a bit, clowning for Sheehan. ‘The Japanese love kinky sex,’ Sheehan the sexpert informs her. ‘Especially my clients,’ he says with an intimate chuckle. ‘The consortium, like any other Japanese business, works on the basis of rewards and incentives. Employees who are a hundred per cent loyal get a vacation to Happi Endo, complete with the works.’ ‘The works?’ she asks, arching her eyebrows, wondering 198

why he doesn’t come right out and say the Yakuza instead of all this consortium rah rah. Maybe because he wants to hold on to both of his pinkies, just like she does. ‘Hot and cold running Australian blonde bimbos with special talents,’ Sheehan says, pouring her coffee from the glass Bodum, snaring a piece of rockmelon, slipping it into her smile. Ever since she became so independent, he can’t resist her. ‘Ummm …’ the rockmelon slides down her throat, so ripe and delicious, Eat-Me erotic. ‘Consenting adults, I presume,’ Zan murmurs, then dares to add, digging, ‘I know the Yakuza like to kidnap Filipinas and Thais and use them as sex slaves but I guess they wouldn’t try anything like that in Australia where we take really good care of our women.’ Sheehan raises his eyebrows at her astuteness, then adroitly changes the subject, ‘I forgot how much I like taking care of you, Zannie,’ he says in his sexy rumble, giving her that ‘you give me whiplash’ look, smiling deep into her eyes. ‘Me too,’ she smiles back. She knows him so well she can see what he’s thinking, rerunning their last time together inside that big boofhead. She knows him so well she could wrap him around her little finger and eat him for supper the big silly bozo. ‘Now I’ll be able to do a proper job of it,’ he says, his teasy eyes dancing, giving her that enigmatic little smile that means he’s got something exciting up his sleeve he’s dying to tell her. ‘You look like a big fat cat who’s eaten a canary,’ she giggles, prompting, bopping him with her serviette, just like Hiro. 199

‘I’ve just brokered a very big deal for the consortium, Zannie. On the foreshore,’ he bursts out, all excited, spilling the beans like she knew he would sooner or later. ‘And I’m in for a very big reward.’ He tosses his serviette on the table and writes in the air at the waiter, calling for the bill. ‘Come on, I’ll show you!’ A stiff wind is blowing in from the east as he walks her to the Biarritz carpark. The sun is high in the sky now and heating the morning as Zan slides into the front seat of his yuppie gas-guzzling Saab Turbo with the NO WOODCHIPS sticker, right next to that big warm hand creeping closer and closer to her driver’s side thigh. ‘Just look at that view!’ Sheehan stops the car at the top of the hill, sticks his head out the window, takes a deep breath. ‘The air is so clean you can drink it.’ They are high on a cliff-top looking out over a vastness of ocean. The seethrough blue air skys all around them, a huge superdome of ethereal ozone. They can see all the way to the Antarctic. Nothing in between them but far horizon and steely blue ocean flexing and seething in muscular flux. Sheehan sighs at her, dramatic, his left hand clutching her knee now. Zan eyes the magnificent coastline of headlands and ocean spread out in front of them, an enormous gift of infinite beauty. ‘It’s all mine,’ he beams, slipping his arm round her shoulder. ‘I’m not known as the Michelangelo of Perth architects for nothing, you know!’ He taps his big head, awed by his own genius, in full flush, his cheeks glowing like polished apples inside the black Saab. ‘Michelangelo,’ Zan murmurs, amused by his indefatigable ego. ‘That’s what inspired me. My own sobriquet! 200

Michelangelo! Yes! The Sistine Chapel!’ Sheehan trumpets, moved by himself. ‘What about it?’ asks Zan, starting to fidget from all this sitting in the car looking at the view like they’re at the drive-in. ‘The Vatican couldn’t afford to restore the Sistine Chapel so the Japanese very cleverly stepped in and offered to pay to clean it if the Vatican would give them the rights to the images in it. What a trade! Imagine, the best of Michelangelo’s magnificent paintings. The one with the hand of God reaching down to touch Adam, giving the species the elan vital. And now the wily Japanese own that glorious image, even though it means nothing spiritual to them because their creation myth is totally different. But think of the video games! The CD-ROM interactives!’ ‘Sony i s the hand of God, Sheehan,’ Zan intones, wondering when he’s going to cut to the punchline. ‘I am the hand of God,’ Sheehan chuckles fondly and finally he tells her. ‘So I did some lateral thinking and the deal I’ve just brokered is this. Vancouver’s in deep doo-doo financially, can’t afford its own public works. Lorus has heaps of money but can’t be seen to be buying up the town. So, in exchange for a prime tract of land on the old foreshore, my consortium, Lorus, is going to upgrade the airport, put in big runways to handle jumbos, knock down the dinky old shed of a building and put in a state-of-theart terminal, all automated. ‘And of course upgrading the airport’s in their best interest. They’re going to put in a huge tourist complex on the foreshore. With a five star hotel and a theme park. With whales as the theme. Roller coasters. Theatres. Museums. I’m submitting a proposal for the hotel.’ 201

‘Philippe Starck style?’ Zan guesses. ‘But of course,’ he says in his lovely French accent. ‘But the best thing is my reward, Zannie. Instead of a fee for brokering such a brilliant deal for them, the Japanese are giving me a piece of this magnificent parcel. As soon as they break ground for the foreshore complex, this view belongs to Patrick J Sheehan!’ he triumphs, throwing his arms out like a conductor. ‘What a coup! Wow! I love it!’ Zan glees, happy for Sheehan, looking around at the breathtaking panorama. ‘I love you,’ Sheehan is saying, impossibly. Drawing her closer, talking all in a rush. ‘I know it took me a long time, but I’ve got plans for us, Zannie. I’m going to build us our own holiday house here out of plantation, not old-growth karri, and glass. We can even get married. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I know how … big … I can be at times. We’ll have separate bedrooms. Give you your space.’ ‘Ohmigod. Patrick,’ she whispers. Tears prick her eyes. The smiling man-in-the-moon of his face blurs before her as, crying, she puts her lips to his feverish forehead, feeling a long empty slide of sadness inside her. How many times has she hoped he would say this? How patiently she had waited. ‘It’s too late now,’ she tells him, shaking her head. Her heart breaks as she sees his face sag with disappointment. She’s already unlearned him.

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28 28 Flying free as a bird along the deserted beach near the Sky House, Zan runs through the deepening light of that magic transition between twilight and evening the French call le crépuscule. A rich indigo seeps like an inkstain through the wide, high-flung sky and gradually deepens to the sombre grey-purple of oncoming night. There is no moon rising, just darkness descending. Leaching the landscape of colour, turning the dappled bright oatmeal of sand to shadowy nightshade, the seagreen of ocean to a dark sheening granite, the olive green headlands to a dusky deep gentian. The small town of Vancouver twinkles too far away in the distance to aid her safe passage with ambient light. She gauges her path by the frilly white seafoam edging the sliding dark water like ruffles of lace, the gentle SPLAP of the surf three metres off her right shoulder.

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She is grounded in the solid connection of surefooted running. Her grip on the earth pure and animalistic. Free of all thought. Just the wind of her own swift momentum in her flushed face. The deep rhythmic chuff of her breathing. Her lungs big and bursting. Her heart in her chest like a powerful inboard throbbing and booming below decks in the engine room. All blood bones and muscle. Pistoning legs flying fast through the twilight. Euphoric from her own endorphins. Hopeful and happy in spite of her painful time this morning with Sheehan. She is out on a limb now with no safety net, hasn’t a clue where it’s all going. All she knows is she wants Darwin and she’s not going to let him get away. Just hang in there, Z a n n i e, she coaches herself. Day by day they were accumulating a history together, working together on Surfing. All she needs is some quality alone time in bed with Darwin to set things right, and after that she’ll hit the laptop. She has so much on her plate with the acting and gofering, and her interviews badly need to be polished. And she still has to come up with The Hot Story for the premiere issue of Siegel’s new glossy. The thought of all of that work makes her feel tired, makes her wish she had a nice little job writing T-shirts. She is starting to flag. Her sports bra feels tight as a vice. Her breasts feel swollen. She used to feel so energetic but now she’s having these awful lows. What was wrong with her lately? It had to be the birth control pill she was taking. Unnatural hormones. Even though it was supposed to be very low-level. It was probably metabolic. Blood sugar too low from not having eaten. All you need is a Mars bar, she tells herself, then you’ll be right. Pushing herself, she sprints until her legs feel hard and 204

as big as a Clydesdale’s, heading home to the stables, until she’s high as a kite. High, hot and horny from anticipation. By now Darwin should be on his way back from the set with Kenji. The champagne is chilling. She’s popped not one but two bottles on the special shelf in the East German no CFCs Green Fridge, left them in the bag with a warning scrawled on the outside in big black texta HANDS OFF ZAN’S BUBBLY! so no stray ‘sharing is caring’ Greenie New Ager can possibly think her grog is communal. She imagines those thin sexy lips smiling, ‘What’s the occasion?’ The fine feathered eyebrow quirked in amusement, peeping over the glint of his patrician goldrims, the lively deep eyes taking her measure. ‘You,’ she will answer, moving in for a kiss. The thought of his hipbones against her, the way the soles of his feet reach around and press on her instep, how he pulls her against him for a perfect fit, is making her wet. Fifteen hundred metres away in the distance the Sky House glass windows glow with cold light from low-level fluorescent light bulbs. She’d rather light candles to save energy. But who cares about Green stuff at moments like these. She suddenly realises the lights mean he’s home! She sprints down the beach with renewed energy, takes the big wooden beach steps two at a time to the cliff-top where with a lurch of deep disappointment she sees the Vitara’s still parked in the driveway all on its own, Kenji’s Tarago isn’t back yet. Hungrily, she eats a couple of Mars bars and an orange and since she’s in a food mood decides to do her Chez Paris review and fax it to Siegel. Might as well make some money while she’s on hold.

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I love Chez Paris! Its murmuring candles, thick sumptuous linens the colour of slightly sun-burnished flesh, the shy dazzle of mirrors reflecting your image. The menu is small and expensive but for your money you get top drawer cuisine, consistently French without being snobbish. Take for instance, the crème de laitue, otherwise known as cream of pea and lettuce soup, laced with sherry (you do your own lacing from a little glass cruet). How to describe it? Pea and lettuce, separate but equal, yet deeply committed to a live-in relationship with lots of hot sex. As I reverently slurped it, the smell and the taste of pure photosynthesis, high keen and racy, sang in my nostrils, made love to my taste-buds … A strange atonal music is coming from Hiro’s bedroom down the side passage, interrupting her train of thought with its plinking and plunking of oddly plucked strings, the intervals off beat, women meowing in high nasal voices. Zan saves her file and strains to listen. She can hear Hiroshima’s voice rising and falling in incantation. Fascinated, Zan closes her laptop and sneaks down the side passage for a better listen. Candlelight flickers behind the door, throwing odd jumping shadows into the hallway. The hallway is dark, she’d be hard to see in the shadows, looking out from that blaze of candles that jumps like fire. Zan edges closer, inch by inch, sidling past the half open door and peeps through the doorway. The part of the room she can see is draped in silk bunting in blood red and Imperial purple. There are roses all over, long-stemmed and crimson. Clusters of burning black candles arranged in odd patterns placed around the room. Hiroshima is standing in front of a large cheval mirror dressed in a teensy black leather corset that 206

shows off her high little titties and her teeny-bop buttocks. Thigh-high black stiletto boots and a slash of black lipstick complete her costume, her black hair is pulled back severely in a tight glossy bun. Zan forces herself to breathe very slowly and hold still as a statue as Hiro picks up a candle from a small nearby table and, turning, passes directly in her line of sight, but Hiro doesn’t see her. She prances across the room with the candle, striking extravagant poses, sticking her ass out, showing her pussy which is very pretty, Zan decides, if you’re into shaved twats. ‘Momo. Hamaguri. Hotategai. Shita-kuchi. Nekko. Mame,’ she sing-songs like a child. ‘These are the Japanese words for vagina: Peach. Clam. Scallop. Lower mouth. Pussy. Bean-clit.’ Then she arches her body in a supple slow backbend, picks up the black candle and drips molten wax on her shaved pubes, without flinching or losing her perfect balance, hissing ‘A d a i j i - n o - t o k o r o,’ translating, ‘August Important Place,’ in a contemptuous tone. Zan gasps and shrinks back into the shadows, riveted to the spot by her prurient interest. She must have someone in there with her to be translating in English. Christ! It better not be bloody Darwin! Zan creeps back to the doorway, watches Hiroshima take a small book out of an old-fashioned school bag and with a rapt expression read to herself in the mirror in a high quavering voice: ‘Turn me loose in a strange wanton world … plunge me into sacred and sensual … swimming in ancient artistic styles … bury me there as a corpse. These blasphemous sports make me transparent like the wind I will travel from one existence to another, free as the wind. Confront me with torture and extinction delayed time after 207

time until drawing me to a close I embrace death in a state of perfect physical beauty and I ascend to a dark setting sun.’ Zan feels a sneeze tickle her sinus. It’s going to explode before she can stop it! She squeezes her nose, makes a sound like a cat sneeze. Hiro looks through the door at her, startled, then slits her eyes and gives Zan a look that is dark and erotic. ‘Take me to the strange city that is not to be found on the map of any land … a city of awesome silences where Death and Eros wantonly frolic in the broad light of day. Strip me of my meaning,’ she intones with passionate feeling, performing for Zan now, watching to see her reaction. ‘Warped. Sarcastic. Grotesque and savage. As promiscuous as the sensuous rape of the rose.’ Then looking into Zan’s eyes Hiro takes a black leather crop out of her school bag and whipping herself on her small exposed breasts, shrieks, ‘I wait for the metamorphosis to overtake me!’ Amen, Zan thinks, rolling her eyeballs, backing away, heading down the hall into the sauna, feeling more agricultural than ever, just your average wholesome country hick bumpkin into Mars bars and jogging and straightforward sex.

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29 29 Zan sits in the sauna ruminating, sweat crawling along her back and her forehead, slipping between her sore and swollen breasts, thinking either the Japanese culture was fucked or Hiro was one bloody sick puppy, wondering how to parlay it into a story for Black & Blue. Where the bloody hell is Darwin, she wonders, starting to get nervous. Has he met someone else? Is he off at the Earl of Vancouver shopping for a nice quiet meek little Greenie chick for his next interlude in Australia? Why can’t she learn to keep her big mouth shut? Stop bugging Darwin about You Know Who. She couldn’t help it, The Forbidden Subject just keeps popping out of her like a bad case of hiccups. Sighing, she throws a ladle of water on the hot rocks, gasps as the boiling steam hits her lungs. She has to think her way through this one. It wasn’t what you’d call

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a lover’s quarrel, he didn’t confront her, just backed right off and withdrew into distance. She was used to full frontal headbanging from Sheehan but Darwin aggrieved was passive-aggressive. She has to feel her way through this one oh so carefully, woo him back gently with champagne and kisses. Maybe she should stop taking the pill, get back to her own natural hormones and just use a condom. That is, if she ever got near his dick again. The way he reacted she couldn’t be sure if they had any future. Just like a man, his mouth saying, ‘Oh no, everything’s okay,’ his face going all testosterone testy. Zan sighs and wipes the sweat off her forehead. Relationships were so complicated. It took such a long time to learn how to be graceful with one another. Just leave him alone. Give him some space. Let him stew in his juices. A rap on the small sauna window makes her heart skip a beat. ‘Darwin!’ she cries, instantly happy, leaping to open the door with a big naked welcome. ‘Come on baby light my fi–’ she cuts off, embarrassed, when she sees it is Hiro in a big white towel and her little black thongs. ‘It is I, Wareme chan!’ Hiro announces in self-parody, folding her towel and sitting down on it in the lotus position. ‘I saw you peeping.’ ‘Hey, the door was open,’ Zan shrugs, trying not to stare at the large complex tattoo decorating Hiro’s left bicep, Joan of Arc in knight’s armour on a horse, rampant, with JEANNE D’ARC in gothic print underneath it. ‘Isn’t your wareme chan itchy?’ Zan asks, trying to be matter-of-fact, scrutinising Hiro’s shaved mound, inwardly cringing at the bright red blotches where the molten wax burned it. 210

‘Oh no. I use the Epilady.’ ‘Ouch!’ Zan winces, remembering how Debbie’s little electric hairzapper felt like a thousand bull ants biting her armpits. Hiro laughs, ‘The Epilady is exquisitely pleasant. So is the hot wax.’ She peers at Zan closely with her elegant almond eyes. ‘What’s a liberated chick like you doing that shit for?’ Zan blurts out without thinking, blowing her objective investigative reporter self-image. ‘Someone’s got to do it,’ Hiro shrugs, brushing it off with a joke, but Zan won’t let her, goes after the answer like a Staffy bull terrier. ‘I thought Deep Greenie feminists were supposed to love their own cunts and celebrate being female?’ she probes, but Hiro doesn’t answer. She picks up the loofa and starts scrubbing her body so roughly Zan winces, recoiling inside her own skin. Zan wants to leap up and grab the loofa before Hiro can do any permanent damage but she forces herself to keep very still and go with the flow of the Zen of the Moment. She concentrates on the pain in her knees and her hips from maintaining the lotus position, the snail trails of her sweat crawling down her back and her forehead, the thermonuclear heat emissions coming off the hot rocks, the small scratching sounds of the loofa. When she finally speaks Hiro is trembling so hard her voice quivers like a leaf in the wind. ‘You can sleep in a park in Japan and not be bashed or robbed. A suitcase left on the pavement overnight will be there the next morning. It is very safe and very tidy and oh so polite there. But to be born a woman in Japan …’ Her voice trails off, bitter. ‘I wouldn’t wish such a fate on a dog! 211

‘You round-eyed gaijin women who are born free just can’t understand,’ she says in that flat Japanese voice that means she is feeling heavy emotion. Hiro pauses, slowly scrubbing at her Joan of Arc tat with the loofa, over and over. ‘Japan is a man’s country, the men run the show and the women are expected to stay home and cook and have babies and take care of their husband’s parents.’ ‘Sounds like Australia,’ Zan comments, giving Hiro a wry little smile, but she can tell Hiro isn’t listening. ‘I had a detestable father and two detestable older brothers who worshipped the Cult of the Imperious Penis. But I was smart and bright and I managed to get my father’s permission to go to Berkeley to further my studies in English so I could interpret when important visitors came to his paper factory. In California I became intoxicated. So many choices. So many behaviours. Everything possible for a woman. It made my head spin!’ ‘Is that where you met Darwin?’ Zan asks casually, eaten up by curiosity, desperate to know what went on between them. ‘I met Darwin at Greenpeace in Berkeley. He was studying philosophy.’ ‘And?’ Zan prompts, not sure she wants to hear the rest. ‘He was magnificent. So impassioned. On fire,’ Hiro says, her eyes shining at the memory. ‘He was working on a new paradigm for self-controlled evolution, a conscious cooperation between man and environment, he called his theory Unnatural Selection.’ ‘Did you and Darwin …?’ Zan trails off. ‘He is my only failure,’ Hiro admits, giving Zan a rueful little smile, as she continues her story. ‘After one year my father summoned me back to Tokyo — urgent. Why? I 212

found out only after I hit Narita airport. To marry the boring high-test-score nerd son of a boring old business associate. All arrangements made without asking. You understand, Zan-chan, it is the daughter’s duty to go along with the parents’ decision or we bring shame on the family.’ In spite of the heat in the sauna Hiro is shivering like a wet kitten. ‘In Japan to break with your family is like losing a leg. Once back in Japan I became all confused and crazy. I could not bury myself in what me and my girlfriends call marriage — “the cemetery of life”. I refused to marry the otaku nerd they’d picked for my husband. Mother was useless. She would not speak. Only wailing and pulling her hair out. My father punched me in the face when I told him. BAM! This time I punched him back.’ Hiro’s face twists as she freshly attacks her Joan of Arc tat with the loofa. ‘My father disowned me. Just like that. Presto change-o!’ There I was with no family. No home. No money. No nothing,’ Hiroshima hisses at Zan, vibrating with anger. ‘So you became a porn star,’ Zan states flatly, only halfguessing. ‘You bet your ass!’ Hiro says with a proud wicked look. ‘I vowed to myself I would hit them so hard they would never recover! I am not only a porn star but an environmentally passionate porn star! Now I have lots of power. Hiroshima Hiroshima is featured in cartoon magazines and digital animation videos, computer games. I even have my own manga, GORIN NINJA BABY HELLO!’ ‘Okay, so while we’re on the subject tell me how you reconcile being a porn star with being an eco-feminist?’ Zan asks in her best reporter’s voice, trying to sound nonjudgemental. 213

Hiroshima laughs at Zan’s naivety. ‘It’s not mutually exclusive, Zan. Nothing is. Just ask a Buddhist. Everything exists all together at once. Just because you like kinky sex doesn’t mean you can’t be an equalist or a Greenie. Look at me. Look at Darwin. He’s doing a Green flick with lots of sex and violence so they’ll all sit up and take notice.’ The sound of Darwin’s name makes Zan’s lip start to quiver. ‘I want him to sit up and take notice of me, Hiro, but he pushes me away. I don’t know what to do,’ Zan wails, letting Hiro groom her with the loofa. ‘It’s like he won’t let himself love me. I’m scared.’ ‘Everybody has something,’ Hiro says very gently, scraping away at Zan’s shoulder. Sniffling, Zan shrugs off the loofa before her raw skin starts bleeding, gently pats Hiro’s hand. ‘My Mum ran off when I was a baby. Dumped me in a boarding school convent. I wasn’t even three,’ she says in a voice thick with self-pity. ‘I overcame it with my own bloody mind, Hiro!’ The sound of her sad little story sets her off crying. ‘But I still feel scared and insecure. Like nobody loves me,’ she says in a voice choked with mucus. ‘Everyone loves you, big little dear,’ Hiro says, with surprising affection, her little hands pat-a-caking Zan on the back. ‘You are so noisy and big and authentic. You do not have a false bone in your body.’ A burst of energetic sound in the hallway. ‘Okay, okay,’ Kenji’s gruff voice followed by Darwin’s. The sauna door flies open. Kenji pops his dark head in, his big eyes drinking in the sight of their naked bodies. He frames a shot with his hands, panning from one to the other. ‘Blondie-san, you blondie all over!’ he exclaims happily. 214

Darwin sticks his head in the sauna, swivels from Hiro to Zan. ‘Yummy yummy!’ he grins, his eyeglasses steaming. Zan grabs her beach towel and wraps herself up, hiding her fat roll from the men’s roving eyes. Hiro giggles behind her hand like a geisha. ‘Oooh Kendo-san,’ she singsongs in a coy little joke accent, ‘yuu bring me gaijin toy boy. Just looka za skin!’ ‘Your skin isn’t bad either, it’s exactly the colour of Haagen Daz butter pecan ice cream,’ Darwin says like a nerd, rolling his eyes over Hiro’s flawless body. Her perfect nipples sit like little pink jujubes high on her breasts. Zan bristles, jealous. She can feel this morning’s outbreak of zits flare on her forehead, broadcasting their embarrassing I’VE GOT PMT message. ‘Why don’t you two just nick off,’ she growls at them, bitchy, tossing her hair back. ‘We’re talking girl talk here.’ ‘Whoa there, big girl,’ Darwin murmurs, leaning across the sauna, patting her shoulder like he might pat a horse. The brief contact calms her, revives their connection. Everything is all right now, now that he’s touched her. ‘Talk talk talk …’ Kenji says drolly, tick-tocking his head like a clockwork puppet, ‘Please no more yakkety. I need to get out of this sleepy prefecture. If I don’t get some juice of the city I am gonna go nuts! ‘Put your clothes on! We’re flying to Perth now!’ he orders, yanking Zan up off the slatted wooden seat, and pulling her to him like they’re doing the tango, rolling his eyes over at Darwin, dancing her out the door. ‘Blondiesan’s avec with me!’ Zan laughs as they segue down the hallway, her face sliding sweaty against Kenji’s smooth cheek. ‘I have something for you!’ he grins, stopping her in 215

front of the big hallway closet. ‘Close your eyes,’ he orders and reaches into the closet and pulls out an armful of slinky silk jersey in cool neutral colours. ‘These Issey Miyake. One size fit all. Even big tall gaijin lady!’ ‘Ooooh,’ Zan gasps with pleasure. The dresses are beautifully unstructured, cut on the bias, with a wonderful drape. Kenji holds up a shimmery rich mulberry number and murmurs like a salesman, ‘See how this goes with Hiroshima’s beautiful ivory skin and dark eyes? ‘And for Blondie-san!’ He selects one in a silvery green like the underside of a gum eucalyptus. This kind of splendour a girl could get used to. Zan feels herself grinning wide as a mile, oohing and aahing and purring as she strokes the fine slippery fabric. ‘And for Darwin-san, ta-daa!’ Kenji prestidigitates a pair of pull-on evening trousers by Comme des Garçons and a wraparound tunic with a long-sleeved silk shirt with an interesting roll collar. ‘If it should honourably please you.’ Darwin’s face works with conflicting emotions. Uh oh. After his shitty little speech the other morning, she hopes he won’t go off on a rant about rampant consumption. She can almost read the thought balloon over his big Deep Green head. Oh no, I couldn’t possibly, Kenji. Think of all the sweatshop Third Worlders who went into making that garment! ‘These are so beautiful!’ Zan sighs, hoping that Darwin will follow her grateful example. ‘It feels just like Christmas! We thank you very deeply.’ She bows low to Kenji, knowing how important the giving of gifts is to a good Japanese host. ‘This is just splendid, Kendo-san,’ Darwin bows, gracious enough to allow Kenji his generous hostly feelings. 216

‘I am so very happy,’ Kendo-san says, solemn, opening a different cupboard. ‘Please. Also have accessory. There are some matching shoes to choose. Many big size to suit gaijin. Best Italian leather.’ Zan dives into the Italian shoes, drooling over the strappy stilettos, but the biggest size in there is three sizes too small. ‘Kendo-san,’ Zan starts to explain, feeling like Cinderella’s stepsister. Giggling, she sticks her big feet out. Kenji sucks air through his teeth, astonished. ‘You very awesome!’ ‘So are you, Kendo-san, you great big shinrinjui kako ii dude,’ she grins at him, enraptured by the Issey Miyake that’s slipping and sliding against her bare forearm. ‘S h i nj i nr u i, Blondie-san,’ Kendo-san corrects her, laughing. ‘Means ‘new human being’ in Japanese. The new generation. We hold all the hope.’

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30 30 ‘Radish Head!’ Kendo-san leans on the horn of the customised blue Tarago and makes obscene gestures of road rage as Junior Sato the sound man roars by overtaking in the Vitara, going at least 160 kph on the narrow road that leads to the airport. Sato gives a regal wave from the front seat while the crew all hang out the 4WD’s open sides with their pants down, flashing the boss-man the brown eye as they go wildly by. Kenji roars with laughter. Zan bursts out in her great maniacal yawks just like Tom Hulce in Amadeus, setting off Darwin. He can’t get over the twelve year old goofball hiding inside her handsome sleek head. ‘Japanese love to act naughty when we leave Nippon. We break all the rules. Can’t get enough freedom!’ Kenji says, then as if to illustrate the impulse does a ‘Look Ma! No Hands!’ leering over at Zan who calmly puts her long

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arm out and takes over the wheel. ‘Not a good idea, Kendosan,’ she scolds him, coolly, gesturing at him to put his hands back on the wheel. ‘You have to be on permanent roo alert in Australia. They can jump out at you and kill you. Anytime. Anywhere. If you see a roo coming at you whatever you do don’t swerve to avoid it or you’ll hit the gravel and roll and then you’re dead meat. You have to be tough and aim straight for the roo and hit it head-on so your roo-bar will ricochet it off to the side.’ ‘Yeah, don’t fuck with the boomers,’ Darwin mimics Zan’s tough guy alto. She tosses her moonshiny translucent hair back and looks at him from under her lashes, giving him an X-rated flashback to their hot wild come in the shower after the sauna, her body wet and sleek as a seal, her long thighs around him, she is just the right height. His own personal porn star with those pert perky breasts. Those hunky long distance swimmer shoulders. That dense understructure. Her sinews and bones made for the long haul. Those big hunky hands grabbing on good and holding. Her toes with their big square broad toenails winking at him like little TVs at the edge of his vision. ‘Be excellent to one another and party on dude!’ he jokes, feeling expansive. The designer outfit he’s wearing fits like a silk glove, makes him feel rich and sexy. Zan’s dress clings to her curves like liquid quicksilver, brings out her eyes, an intense blueish-grey, those small deep dense irises with their sharp-edged punch. She can blam them across the room like a bullet and drill you, just like Muhammed Ali could. ‘Pit stop!’ Kenji calls, swerving the Tarago into a parking place by the side of the road. ‘Mi mi mi mi!’ The electronic back-up warning sounds like a high-pitched soprano stuck 219

on the scales as Kenji reverses the Tarago CRUMP! into the big yellow metal bin by the roadside. ‘You silly idiot! You hit the garbage!’ Kenji yells in selfremonstration. Then, turning to his guests, ‘Sorry. Please. We stop now and party on dude, like Wayne’s World advise us.’ He turns off the engine and fossicks in the bar fridge. ‘De la champagne?’ he asks elegantly, popping a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Holding out a fine crystal champagne flute filled with the extravagantly expensive French bubbly. ‘Avec praisir,’ Zan jokes with a Japanese accent, winking at Kenji so he’ll know she’s just teasing. ‘Avec play-zeer Buh-londie,’ Kenji pronounces the difficult L sounds, playful as a precocious schoolboy correcting the teacher, teasing her back. ‘August congratulations to us all!’ he toasts, smiling. Away from his Japanese film crew he’s a changed person, relaxed and low-key, he’s stopped posturing. His voice has changed timbre, lost that hectoring tone that’s so annoying. ‘Kampai!’ Hiroshima gaily raises her glass. ‘To our collaboration on Surfing Antarctica,’ Darwin says debonairly, looking at Zan over his champagne flute. Light shines off the prism-cut crystal like diamonds, flashing rainbows in her eyes. ‘Surfing,’ she echoes, pinging her flute ever so delicately against Darwin’s, the sound ringing out like Palestrina. Kenji tosses his bubbly back like it’s sake and makes a small show of washing his glass in the little bar sink before stowing it back in the overhead cupboard. ‘See, Blondiesan, this is how new breed of Japanese man shinjinrui act. Even wash own underpanties. You safe with me!’ Then quick as a flash, energised by the sugary champers, he 220

scrambles past Darwin and clambers into the customised director’s chair that’s been installed smack in the van’s centre under an oversized sun roof and starts pushing buttons, moving the chair round, playing with all the gadgets and gizmos, sliding the sun roof open and closed with a whirr of the remote control motor. Then he grabs the small mike and looking at Darwin with matey affection, deadpans in a slow soft robot voice, ‘Hello, Hal. Please stop that, Hal. I think I’m losing my mind, Hal,’ and shoots his chair up through the roof in a whoosh of hydraulics. Darwin cracks up at Kenji’s Mickey Mouse antics but Zan looks confused. ‘2001,’ he explains. ‘You know, where Keir Dullea is Dave and Hal’s the on-board mainframe computer that’s taken over the starship.’ ‘Oh,’ Zan says but he can tell she doesn’t get it. Darwin shrugs to himself. Who cares if she doesn’t know movies? As long as she keeps on doing to him what she is doing — snuggled up close to him now in the back seat, kneading his thigh through the soft cloth of the fancy trousers, feeling the muscle the way that a cat kneads your stomach before settling down for a long sexy nap. All his grumpy mean outbursts forgiven, if not quite forgotten. Nobody’s perfect in this best — or is it worst? — of all possible worlds, he shrugs, feeling sheepish. ‘Kampai !’ In the pilot’s seat Kenji raises his can of Coke without turning his head round, keeping both eyes on the sky. He is really quite handsome sitting there behind the joystick in his spanking new Top Gun bomber jacket, his body language exuding Don’t-Worry-I-Know-How-ToDrive-This-Baby male macho assurance, just like Tom Cruise. 221

‘Up yours!’ Zan toasts, bashing her tinny against Darwin’s Asahi. She is high on the high voltage smell of the Avgas that lingers inside the luxurious little jet’s cabin, as heady as a jolt of Ralph Lauren’s Safari, that tangy expensive favourite scent of the jetset. Back in The Fun Zone, flying to Perth in Kenji’s own six-seater Jetstream, quaffing a can of icy cold Kirin. And hey! She’s in the movies. And getting paid for it, too! Snuggled up next to Darwin. Laughing and joking. His hand on her thigh. Closer than ever since their little tryst in the shower. For once she let her body do all the talking, letting go all the sad words unspoken between them. ‘You’re a real stunneroo!’ Darwin whispers. She sighs and rests her head on his chest, vowing to just keep her mouth shut in future. ‘I’m glad it’s dark,’ Darwin’s voice throbs like a talking drum inside that big ribcage. He is looking out the plane window as though he could see the rising-salt-infested land lying near dead in the dark. ‘It’s not a pretty sight out there.’ He opens his backpack and takes out a script and starts making pencilled notations, crossing out text. ‘The land looks like a plucked chicken where they’ve clearfelled near Bridgetown,’ Zan laments, grateful she can’t see the broken-off toothpicks that used to be the towering karris she remembers from her childhood. ‘I can’t believe what CALM is letting the bastards get away with,’ Hiroshima puts her two cents in. ‘Not after Surfing Antarctica comes out!’ Kenji Kendo yells over the sound of the dual jet engines. ‘CALM will be too embarrassed by the global outcry to keep on the logging!’ ‘I’m still not one hundred per cent sure of the sequence,’ 222

Darwin says in a loud voice to Kenji, poking the script with his pencil. ‘Should we have the protest at the port before the blow-up-the-mill scene to lay the rationale in, or after?’ ‘Don’t be so much a workaholic, DocoMan,’ Kenji chides, waving his Coke can. ‘I don’t want you kicking the bucket on me from karoshi!’ He makes a stern face. ‘We figure it out later. It’s time now to R & R.’ ‘Hang loose, Darwin,’ Hiroshima pipes up. ‘The best films I’ve ever worked in were organic.’ ‘Many organs in pinkku eiga!’ Kenji guffaws. ‘Our motto at Love Me Tender Productions is hang loose, Baby, and see what comes up.’ Darwin gives Zan a longsuffering eyeroll and asks her directly, ‘What do you think?’ She quickly reviews what she knows about films, they’re made all back to frontward and cobbled together at the last minute, most of the footage ending up on the floor. ‘It’s all in the cut, isn’t it?’ she smiles, remembering what Darwin said about forty per cent of her footage being pure movie star. ‘Too true,’ he smiles, pleased at her answer, closing the script, putting it back in his backpack. ‘And we’ve got some really prime stuff to work with. The whales. The Casino. The river. The night climb. And Egor’s meeting with the Greenies tonight, he’s got them all fired up for the protest, they’re calling in reinforcements from New South Wales and Queensland, jacking up their numbers just for the movie. They’re gonna raise a big stink. It’ll be far fucking out!’ ‘Far fucken out!’ Kenji echoes. ‘Many thanks to Egorsan’s honourable efforts.’ Kenji swivels his seat and gives a quick little bow in Vancouver’s direction, in homage to 223

Egor, and then turns his attention to Darwin. ‘But I still think we need to put in more honban.’ ‘The sex scene in the pool is enough for this movie, Kendo-san,’ Darwin says patiently, shaking his head. ‘We’ll Tarantino it up with more action, but no quick little fucks in mid-abseil.’ ‘I don’t care what anyone says about Tarantino,’ Zan says, sticking her jaw out at Darwin, pulling his chain. ‘You know that graphic inter-racial homosexual rape scene? I liked that scene. It made my heart squinch. Any director who can do that is a genius.’ Gotcha! She thinks, watching his face crump in a frown but reason wins out over anger and he smoothes himself out, tells her in his maddeningly patient voice, ‘We’re trying to create a whole new generation of copycat Greens here, not copycat rapists.’ Then he turns to Kenji and says, ‘We don’t want to scare away all the little sweet Japanese girlies with any raw footage. We want them to think Green is fun. Green is sexy! We want them to take Tomiko the dauntless Greenfighter as their role model.’ ‘Don’t forget Vanessa the dauntless Aussie reporter!’ Zan chides. ‘She’s a good role model too.’ Zan gives him a big happy smile as the plane banks and turns, begins a smooth slide towards the sparkling city. Flying into a city at night is always exciting but in a swanky little private Jetstream, sitting next to your lover who’s a hot and happening film director, a maker of icons, it’s perfect. For the first time she feels like she’s inside the glam and the glitter she is always observing, looking out from inside the Drambuie Ad Life, giving off a sweet golden glow. She loves the hot little adrenaline crackle, the 224

exhilarating butterflies-in-her-stomach feeling just before landing, that on-the-edge-of-disaster long scary moment willing the plane to Please, Jesus make it, casually clutching at Darwin’s arm, tracing the nobbly smooth veins on his forearm as though this connection could bring her through the last fifty feet of invisible physics when flight turns hubristic and it can all go wrong. And then the smooth solid skip bumps of the little plane landing. The burst of the jet thrusts braking. The sweet melt of relief through her hot-wired body. ‘All right!’ Hiroshima leaps out of her seat, high-fiving Darwin. ‘Banzai!’ Kenji chortling. ‘Bravo!’ her own voice, elating. Everyone high. Zan grabs the mike and announces in the cultured tones of a Qantas flight attendant. ‘Ladies and Gentlepersons. Welcome to the hotness of being cool. The coolness of being hot. What a cool way to travel. Brought to you by TheSound-of-One-Hand-Clapping Zen Airlines.’

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31 31 Strutting through Northbridge on their way to Acqua, Perth’s newest nightclub, Zan feels as sexy as Uma Thurman stepping out with the elegant dark-eyed Matt Dillon at the Cannes Festival, only Matt Dillon is Darwin who’s looking spunky as hell in his sexy Comme des Garçons outfit. Hiroshima looks absolutely stunning in her mulberry Issey Miyake and silver size three stilettos, Kenji tres kako ii in the snazzy Jimi Hendrix jacket and high waisted black toreador pants and braces he pulled out of the Jetstream’s storage compartment. And if she looks the way she is feeling then she must look delicious. After Vancouver’s cool crisp coastal climate Perth’s Mediterranean night-time feels wonderfully balmy, with a special soft sexy edge. She pulls Darwin into a darkened doorway, presses herself up against him, drawing him into

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a long deep sweet kiss, his tongue in her mouth so quick and so slick, like an ad for his penis. ‘Whew!’ he gasps, joking, staggering after Kenji who is slipping a hundred dollar bill to the bouncer at Acqua’s, bypassing the eager crowd waiting to enter. Inside the huge high-ceilinged space, water cascades down the walls in a living mural, making soothing white noise like the ocean but you can only hear it in between numbers. The dance floor is clear plastic set over a shallow pool full of bubbling water. Underwater strobes flash on and off, changing colour, uplighting the dancers with their eerie magic. Two Chardonnays and two platefuls of tapas later Zan is ready to shake her booty. The edgy hot techno music beats all around them, frantic, electric, like it’s been chopped into pieces and smacked back together, the baseline beat repetitive as a stuck record. ‘Time for some party action!’ she yells over the music, pulling at Darwin. She feels like a sexy, insatiably hot goddess in her slithery silver green Issey Miyake, shaking her ass off, jumping around Darwin who’s doing his stiffhipped little samba on the offbeat. She could do him right here on the dance floor he’s so bloody fuckably cute and spunky. ‘Kampai!’ she toasts everyone in the big writhing room and knocks back the Chardonnay that keeps renewing itself in her glass like a never-ending packet of Tim Tams. Her glass rings out against Darwin’s, over and over, scintillatingly lovely. She can feel herself hitting that peak of disinhibition, she’s in that eight minute window before you start losing coordination. But who the fuck cares! She looks over at Kenji to see if he wants to sign her up 227

as his hot Aussie porn star but he is too busy watching himself dance, checking his technique in the Japanese manner, the way an unformed adolescent checks his reflection in the mirror to see how he looks when he’s talking or joking. Stalking around Hiro making kickboxer moves in very slow motion, his eyes hot with lust, probably thinking about their last h o n b a n movie. Hiroshima is bopping up and down like a yo-yo headbanging, almost snapping her neck off. ‘Oh you’re doing the Tokyo Slo-mo!’ Zan is so drunk she cuts in between them and starts her own little kickboxing tango with Kenji just to show him she’s got really great balance. The music stops with a loud crash of silence. Kenji stands there looking at her with his big stun-gun eyes, pissed as a fart from four scotch-on-the-rocks. He is so close she can read the size numbers on the inside of his glasses. Jean Paul Gaultier. They go for $800 in Australia, probably $1600 in Tokyo. He puts his palms together and bows the way they do in Aikido, ‘ Blondie-san, sell me your panties. I give you fortysix dollars if you sell me your panties.’ ‘What?!’ Zan squawks, disbelieving. ‘This is a very fair offer,’ Kenji says, very solemn. ‘Going rate for used panties in downtown Tokyo.’ Then Kenji is pounding her shoulder and barking his ‘Har!’ dog laugh. ‘Just joking. I don’t need your panties, Zan-chan,’ he says, looking over at hiphopping Hiro. ‘I got the real thing.’ ‘The real thing!’ Zan yodels, a dazzling insight about the nature of porno going off like a New Year’s sparkler right under her nose. She looks around for Darwin to tell him her insight. He’s behind the bar partition getting more drinks, 228

and when he sees Zan, presses his hands and his mouth to the glass window and blows big-cheeked blowfish kisses at her. Laughing and sweating buckets, Zan lurches into the loo and sticks her head under the faucet. ‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this!’ Debbie’s voice sings behind her, high and teasy. ‘Debbie!’ Zan swings around, her heart lifting with pleasure at the wonderful sight of her best friend all decked out in a shiny red dress, her red-lippied lips shining like Christmas. ‘Wow!’ she admires, moving in for a big hug. ‘Down, Girl,’ Debbie backs off. ‘You’re wet.’ Squinching her face up, she holds Zan at arm’s length so she won’t stain her red satin dress. ‘You look great, Deb!’ ‘The orgasm diet,’ Debbie murmurs, batting her sparkly brown eyes. ‘Nice dress,’ she says, feeling the slippery fabric. Then she arches her eyebrow, looking Zan over with a serious frown. ‘Hmmmm,’ she appraises, flipping the silver green dress open, looking pointedly at Zan’s eyepopping cleavage straining at her Wonder Bra. ‘As your own personal trainer it’s my job to tell you. You’d better lay off the Tim Tams,’ she scolds, pinching Zan’s waist, circling her for the rear view. ‘You’re getting panoramic. ‘Either that or you’re pregnant,’ she adds in a flat voice. ‘What?!’ Zan’s mind cramps and farts unloading a gassy miasma of angst. ‘Impossible!’ she sputters, ‘I’m on the pill.’ ‘Shit happens,’ Debbie shrugs, reaching into her purse for a $50 note, familiar with Zan’s perpetual state of broke. ‘Go get yourself a Clearblue pregnancy test kit at the allnight chemist,’ she instructs, leaning in for a quick little 229

airkiss. ‘And call me tomorrow. Ric’s waiting. I gotta go now!’ she flutes at Zan over her shoulder. Six minutes later Zan, queasy and breathless from her quick little trip to the all-night chemist across the street, stares at her pale face in the mirror over the sink. She can feel the thing in her hard as a stone. She sees herself blithely toasting herself in the mirror, night after night at the condo, the Sky House. Think Globally, Act Locally! Knocking her pill back, her own private joke. Thank God for Debbie or she would’ve had to borrow the money from Darwin and no way could she tell him what it was for. The bloody kit cost $31.40. The condom machine on the wall nyeh-nyehs at her in a playground singsong. She whirls around and thumps it hard, jams her wrist. Great! Now she’s in pain as well as in horror. Crazydrunk in the loo at Acqua, the sound booming in through the walls overwhelming, she stares at the urine-soaked dipstick with an awful sick giving-way feeling as the little line in the clear plastic window turns a horrible blue. Thinking in Muzak, It’s all over now, Baby Blue.

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32 32 ‘GOT THE 20TH CENTURY BLUES?’ The big suicide prevention billboard cheerfully greets her on her way to Debbie’s in Subiaco. Zan caws a small dry sardonic laugh that sticks in her throat. The streets are deserted. It’s almost 1:30. A terrible loneliness hollows her chest. Her throat hurts from crying. Her eyes are puffed and raw. In the blubbering state she’s in, she shouldn’t even be driving, but she has to see Debbie before she goes nutzoid. Better ring first, she remembers, Debbie doesn’t like being interrupted when she’s on the nest with Ric. She turns off Hay into Rokeby, pulls the Honda over at the first pay phone, wishing like hell she’d bought a mobile as she punches out Debbie’s number, lets it ring eleven times.

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‘Ric?’ Debbie finally answers, her voice lifting with hope. ‘Debbie!!’ Zan wails. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Debbie says, deflated. ‘It’s positive, right?’ she bottomlines. The familiar sound of her best friend’s voice pierces Zan like an arrow and she bursts into tears, sobbing into the phone like a big bloody baby. ‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together and get your bum over here,’ Debbie orders, no-nonsense. ‘Ric went home to his wife, the bastard, and I’m sitting here all alone feeling sorry for myself. Getting into the chardy. So come on down, Chook, and join the party!’ ‘Well, fuck me!’ Debbie greets her with a nice big glass of E&T and a box of tissues, pulling her into the foyer of her lovely old house. ‘Looks like you were expecting just that,’ Zan drawls, looking over Debbie’s sexy red satin mules and black negligee, already cheered by the friendly surroundings, the elegant very high ceilings, the iridescent stained glass at the front entrance. Debbie plunks herself down on the pristine white sofa and pats the seat next to her. ‘Tell,’ she urges, all gossipy girlie, flipping her hair off her forehead. ‘Is there any chance a vasectomy can spontaneously reverse itself?’ Zan asks in a little girl voice. ‘So you did sleep with Sheehan!’ Debbie exclaims, her face shining with triumph. ‘That sexy old muffdiving devil …’ she trails off a second, thinking. ‘The same surgeon who did Patrick did Ric’s vee and he’s top drawer — when he cuts it stays cut.’ She playfully scissors Zan’s hand with her fingers, trying to brighten her up. ‘Nope. It’s got to be Darwin’s, girl. All of those multiple O’s act like peristalsis, boost the lil sperm boys along in their journey and bingo!’ 232

‘What am I gonna do, Deb?’ Zan wails. Debbie frowns at the histrionics, pulls out a handful of tissues and passes them over, gives Zan a hard look. ‘Ask yourself what would Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia do in this spot. Come on, stop your bawling and think!’ Where are her idols now when she needs them? Zan laments, blowing her nose with a strident honk. Cammy’s an on-again, off-again lezzo. Naomi, despite her passionately pro-choice politics takes the birth control pill to avoid any confrontational hassles, dreads the responsibility of abortion. ‘What about “Dad”?’ Debbie probes gently, her eyes soft with concern. ‘Can’t you just hear him?’ Zan slashes airquotes at Deb, ‘“Don’t you know the world can’t sustain its present population as it is without adding to the problem,”’ pursing her lips, holier-than-thou prissy mimicking Darwin’s accent, righteously shaking her finger, ‘“How unconscionable of you!”’ Debbie rolls her eyes, sympathetic. ‘Darwin’s great in bed but once he’s out of the sack he moves right in with his big macho ego,’ Zan complains. ‘He’s no different from Sheehan, except for that California SNAG bullshit. You should see him move in and take over. He hogged my interview with my Japanese film director. I couldn’t get a word in. I’ve got a career going here, trying to make a living, but he thinks his work is more important. He called me a — get this — “pandering asshole”!’ Zan sniffs, indignant, still smarting. ‘Because I’m into fashion and style. And he said I have a T-shirt philosophy!’ ‘At least you’ve got one,’ Deb consoles. ‘There’re lots of chicks out there who don’t even have a thought in their 233

head, much less on their T-shirt.’ ‘It’s like you say, the minute you become a regular fuck they think it’s your job to trail around after them, move when they jump.’ Zan gulps a big mouthful of the delicious crisp chardy, feeling revived in spite of the late hour, her face flushing hot. ‘Pick up their undies, fetch their drycleaning,’ Debbie sighs, taking a healthy swig of her wine. ‘His dick is to die for, but he’s too Goody-Two-Shoes. You should see the way he brushes his teeth, Deb. With two teaspoons of water. And he re-uses the tea bags until they run clear. Bottom line, he can’t hack the C word.’ Debbie makes a wry face, all too familiar with The Commitment Dilemma. ‘You’ve gotta look out for number one, Zannie,’ she says, emphatic, putting her empty glass down. ‘I just can’t see you with one of those nasty little things screaming and spewing and shitting all over your Anthea Crawfords. ‘Now honey, you know I love you deeply and madly but it’s after two and I’ve got to get some sleep,’ Debbie says, yawning. ‘I’m on the 7:00am flight to Christchurch to check out the Baker Street Collection. And I’m going to knock the ugg boots off those Kiwis, if my name isn’t Debbie “as in the harbour” Darling! ‘I’ll sleep on the couch so I won’t wake you. You can have my bed, just don’t drool on Ric’s pillow, it’s the one with the droolstains. ‘First thing in the morning get your little self down to Pregnancy Problem House on the Great Eastern Highway in Belmont. It’s just past Bike World. I’ll blow some kisses at it on my way to the airport. Give you good karma. If you’re short of cash use my Amex number, build up my 234

FlyBys, and get them to ring me at the Hyatt in Christchurch.’ ‘I don’t know, Debbie, it just feels so … sleazy,’ Zan whimpers. ‘Get real, Zannie. Y2K’s almost upon us. The millennium, Possum. How can you make your grand entrance with a nasty little ankle biter holding you back, whingeing, ‘What’s for tea, Mum?’ Remember your new mantra, Zannie. Ninety thou. Amex. Red BMW!’ ‘Love you, Debbie,’ Zan smiles bravely. ‘Kiss kiss,’ Debbie smooches in her direction with her red lippied lips.

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33 33 Where the hell is she? Why isn’t she back yet? D a r w i n grumbles to himself as the Regency Hyatt lift opens on a little clutch of Japanese tourists bowing and smiling their ‘please don’t hurt me’ smiles, cringing at him with uneasy eyes. It ain’t easy being Green, he thinks, sardonic, rolling a critical eye over the hyper-sumptuous lobby with its four million dollar granite counter, $800,000 worth of brass touches all over, the highflying atrium windows, the $789,000 fairy lights set into the swanky black marble floor. Talk about excess! This airconditioned cocoon he’s trapped in makes him feel guilty. Wasting so much power, just to keep the heat and the dust and the hoi polloi out. Hey, let’s eat up more ozone. He hates the dumb elephant statues ramping on

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their obelisk in the middle of the lobby, trumpeting their obsolete White Man’s Burden message. Beats the shit out of him why all the formerly oppressed little brown people like the Hyatt’s new Indonesian owners were so hot to decorate their new hotel lobbies with all of this bad old colonial days stuff. Jesus, he was in a helluva mood this morning. Out of sorts. Horny. Hangover heaven. Darwin stands by the fancy front desk stewing in his own bitter juices, a grumpy curmudgeon, watching the perfume-drenched overdressed-to-kill women in their masks of make-up click clack on by the front counter in their silly stilettos. Every one of these pantihosed broads a walking time bomb danger to Gaia, shopping till they drop because the TV tells them they’re ugly unless they buy face cream or eye cream or cream for their ass. Don’t give a flying flip they’re gobbling up power when they use the hairdryer for ten bloody minutes so their hair will look big. Don’t give a damn that the power company is building an ecologically murderous coal-burning plant down in Collie just to keep all their mindless appliances going. Dustbusters. Footwarmers. Electric tea cosies. Breadmakers. Ricemakers. Piemakers. Gizmos that make pancakes and jaffles and waffles and pasties. And then they have to go out and buy an electronic treadmill because they’re getting too fat from not using their muscles. Where the hell is she? Why isn’t she back yet? He misses her big happy presence, the energy crackling off her like a Van de Graaff generator. His hands ache, empty, wanting the silky warm feel of her arm against him, the liquid slide of her silver green dress slipping through his fingers as she 237

tells him breathless outside the ladies’ at Acqua, ‘I’ve just run into my best friend in the loo, Debbie! I’ve got to take care of something! I’ll call you in the morning!’ ‘What is it? Can I help?’ Confused, getting angry. He can tell something’s wrong by the way she’s looking, a part of her’s skittered off in the corner, hiding out behind her big eyes. ‘It’s girlie stuff,’ she blurts at him over her shoulder and heads for a taxi, leaving him standing there empty-handed like a sixteen year old dickhead, the flash of her hair as she spun on her heel a titanium blur like an FX morph job. Lying awake in the fancy kingsize in the suite in the Hyatt all alone without her, deflated. He rings the Cottesloe condo. No answer. He doesn’t know what her friend’s last name is, he realises, frustrated he can’t call her there. His mind starts to jump cut, flashing from one jangly scene to the other. CRANE SHOT: THE CITY’S MEAN STREETS AT MIDNIGHT. GORGEOUS BLONDE WOMAN IN BRIGHT YELLOW HONDA ON HER WAY TO RESCUE GIRLFRIEND. WINDOWS WIDE OPEN TO LET THE NIGHT AIR IN. PURSE ON THE SEAT. A MOVING TARGET JUST WAITING TO HAPPEN. SHE STOPS AT A RED LIGHT. CLOSE UP: SILENCE OF THE LAMBS SICKO IN BATTERED OLD KINGSWOOD NEXT TO HER AT THE RED LIGHT LOOKING HER OVER, CHECKING OUT THAT NICE BIG SUPPLE SKIN. HE TAKES SIZE 14. THE BIG CHICK SHOULD FIT HIM. BIG CLOSE UP: KINGSWOOD DOOR FLYING OPEN. BIG GERBER KNIFE FLASHING, BLADE REFLECTING THE GREEN FOR GO! LIGHT. THE CITY AT MIDNIGHT. DESERTED SHADOWY 7238

11 CARPARK. ZAN, DISTRAUGHT, COMING BACK WITH TWO BIG BROWN BAGS FULL OF CHIPS AND PRETZELS AND ICE CREAM AND TWISTIES, ALL THE THINGS SHE NEEDS TO HELP HER BEST FRIEND THROUGH HER ‘GIRLIE STUFF’ CRISIS. POPS THE BOOT UP. STICKS HER HEAD AND HER SHOULDERS DEEP IN THE BOOT AS SHE LOADS THE BAGS IN, UNAWARE OF HOW INVITING HER ASS LOOKS, WIGGLING AROUND. SON OF SEVEN PSYCHO COMES IN OUT OF NOWHERE SLAMS LID DOWN ON HER HEAD SHOVES HER BIG JUICY ASS IN LOCKS HER IN BOOT. Sitting up all night in the Regency Hyatt sipping Glenfiddich, thoughts coalescing on his murky mindscreen, cursed by his own imagination, the film director’s occupational hazard. Why couldn’t she just take care of the problem over the phone like a normal LA chick would instead of running over in person? In the morning he makes his way downstairs to the lobby in a fug of exhaustion. MONSTER ICEBERG THREATENS CRUISE SHIPS. The nightmare come true newspaper headline on the granite counter comes into focus as he realises the overdressed Asian woman is speaking to him. ‘Mr Brown? Mr Kendo is waiting for you in the conservatory.’ Darwin crosses the wide expanse of wall to wall palm leaf patterned carpet towards the big fancy rattan table under a real potted palm tree where Kenji is sitting in his Jurassic Park jumpsuit that means he’s been up since dawn working and scheming, probably storyboarding an off-thewall sex scene in his impressively intricate manga style, the 239

more details the better to convince Darwin-san to slip in some h o n b a n. The morose look on his face means he’s relaxed and happy. Kenji flips up his Spike Lee dark lenses and locks eyes with Darwin, knocks back a little bottle of vitamin juice laced with speed. Don’t mind if I do, Darwin thinks, eyeing the baby-sized bottle. He could use a little Kickapoo Joy Juice. ‘I wanna be young. Have fun. Drink Pepsi!’ Darwin greets him, ad-hype ironic, but Kenji of course takes him at face value, shrugs apologetically as he tells him, ‘There is only Coke on the menu.’ ‘Have some dog of the hair,’ he invites, pouring Darwin a glass of Möet, then ‘Gah-son,’ he calls in French, snapping his fingers, signalling the waiter over to order a big hearty breakfast for Darwin, clucking over him like a mother. ‘Come Darwin-san, you will feel a whole lot better after eating nice big fat Spanish omelette. Nice big bowl of rice. You eat egg, do you? Japanese man eat everyone’s egg yolk. Wife pass him her egg so he can suck yolk out. Put meat on his bone,’ Kenji says, whacking him on the back. ‘You need to keep strength up.’ ‘We’ve only got six more days shooting to bring this picture in on budget. So tell me what you’ve been working on this morning,’ Darwin pokes Kenji’s expensive Filofax. ‘No no. We’re on the R & R now!’ Kenji protests with a mischievous eyeroll, closing his notebook. ‘No R & R for me, Kendo-san,’ Darwin shakes his head, feeling guilty already for writing the night off, not to mention this morning. ‘Can’t afford it. You can’t inspire a planet-wide movement of copycat Greens if you’re on vacation.’ ‘Do not worry, Darwin-san, I am with you one hundred 240

per cent. Surfing Antarctica is my heart’s desire. To make a movie about my generation, the Japanese shinjinrui who has such big social responsibility to the planet and who give such a big shit about it! I been working on getting more money. We can’t do what we need to without so much more money!’ Kenji tells him, pulling a tape out of his briefcase, excitedly waving it at him. ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Darwin asks, getting nervous, recognising his copy of Yamamoto bribing Gary Morgan from the GREASE label he taped to its spine, wondering just what the hell Kenji Kendo was up to. Was he thinking of blackmailing his uncle into investing more money? Christ, what a loose cannon! ‘You bet your sweet ass,’ Kendo-san smiles his sleek predatory smile. ‘Un unh,’ Darwin shakes his head, flashing on all the violence portrayed in Black Rain. ‘You of all people should know you don’t fuck with the Yakuza.’ ‘All my life I been waiting to get Yamamoto-san off me,’ Kenji says, impassioned, banging the table. ‘When I can get out from under his ugly old fart-breath then I can find my own self. ‘In Japan the self is nothing,’ Kenji explains, looking at Darwin with big brooding eyes. ‘Only the group. The family. The big family of Japanese people. After my father died I was given to Yamamoto-san by my mother. I worked for him at Love Me Tender making pinkku eiga and she enjoyed his protection. He got lots of money. Simple as that. ‘We need lots of money for the editing and the distribution. Now I have a way to get it,’ Kenji smiles, tapping the cassette box. ‘I sell him the tape back. If he 241

don’t pay the money, I take the tape to the High Commission and they kick his ugly butt out of Australia.’ ‘Blackmail’s a crime,’ Darwin warns. ‘And even if he goes for it, I don’t want it. It’s dirty money.’ His tone is flat as a pancake. ‘He gets his money by gambling and pimping and bashing up grannies and selling amphetamine sex slaves.’ ‘It is, how you say, dilemma, Darwin-san. Is more aesthetical than moral. But I think we can take his money and turn it into a big work of art to get revenge for the poor granny. I hate the guy. I hate how he owns my soul, DocoMan!’ ‘No blackmail, Kendo-san. Amen.’ Darwin says, final. ‘I got something better.’ Stretching the truth, stalling for time while he racks his brain — where on earth can he find a fresh source of finance? — comes up with a blank. He looks into Kenji’s dark impenetrable eyes and in a bid for more time to think of a solution, asks, ‘What’s your favourite scene from a movie? Mine’s the one in The Piano where Harvey Keitel touches Holly Hunter through the hole in her stocking.’ ‘My favourite? Oh. Not so easy,’ laughs Kenji, pouring more champagne. ‘I must say my favourite scene must be from The Ballad of Narayama by Shohei Imamura-san. When Stinker fucks the dog.’ ‘The dog?!’ Darwin bursts out laughing, thinking he will never understand the Japanese mind-set as long as he lives. ‘Yes, it is a very aesthetical depiction. I am–’ Kenji’s animated face freezes in mid-sentence as he stares into the middle distance. Then he sets his face in a blandly inscrutable expressionless mask and ventriloquists out of the side of his smile, ‘BAN BAN BAN. Here comes 242

Maito Gai Man. Can you hear his balls bonging?’ indicating a short blocky middle-aged Japanese hipster in heavy black-rimmed Onassis glasses and navy blue polyester and oh-so-familiar white slip-on loafers swaggering in their direction. Darwin snickers appreciatively. Kenji’s perfectly pegged Yamamoto. He thinks he’s extra hot shit sexy, is out to get laid. He starts to blurt out a laugh but Kenji grabs his thigh in a vice grip under the table. No laughing out loud in front of the boss. ‘Prease doan raff at his Engerish,’ Kenji whispers, irreverent, then he’s up out of his seat bowing and scraping so low his nose almost touches the green palm tree carpet, whining an obsequious greeting, kissing ass, ‘Sorry please, excuse,’ his face as bland as a bowl. ‘I was just asking Darwin Brown, technical consultant, for his opinion on Aboriginal tracker sequence. ‘My uncle, Mister Yamamoto-san. He is my boss-man. He own Love Me Tender Productions film company.’ ‘Herro. Soo nice to make za akaway tonsu,’ Yamamoto the evil Yakuza singsongs how nice it is to meet Darwin, squinting his eyes in a smile, lowering himself into the highbacked rattan chair the waiter has brought. He takes a big choke chain dog collar out of his jacket pocket and starts playing with it, sliding the chain through the loop, making slippery steel sounds, his blank Japanese face indicating he’s thinking. He stares at Darwin, then announces, ‘Kendo-san make good pinkku eiga!’ almost shouting. ‘Pinkku eiga,’ Darwin says bowing and smiling, playing along with Kenji’s deception, not wanting to think of who the dog collar used to belong to. ‘Surfing Antarctica is a very interesting movie. It’s got everything the Japanese want in 243

a movie. Voyeurism. Patriarchy. Sexism. Fetishism,’ he says, totally straight-faced. ‘Yes,’ Yamamoto agrees smiling and nodding, obviously not understanding a word Darwin is saying. ‘Fetishism is like …’ Kenji starts to explain. ‘Urusai!’ Yamamoto orders Kenji to shut up, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper and angrily waves it at Kenji, barks something nasty in Japanese. Kenji shrinks down a size right before Darwin’s eyes, losing IQ by the second, morphing into a cringing minion. Darwin speedreads the paper in Yamamoto’s hand. Some kind of invoice from Burswood Casino to LMT Productions. $45,000 for window-washing. The atrium clean-up. ‘How’d he find out we did it?’ Darwin says out of the side of his mouth to his loose cannon partner. ‘My cousin. My enemy ever since baby. He must have figured it out and snitched to his Japanese pals at the Casino,’ Kenji ventriloquists at Darwin, continuing to smile and bow from the waist at his uncle. ‘The Japanese community here is so bloody knit tight. Shikatta ga nai,’ he shrugs, ‘what can you do?’ ‘Bakamon!’ Yamamoto yells at his nephew. ‘You stupid SOB, he is saying. Politeness Level One: rude, condescending,’ Kenji translates. ‘You not make fuck frick!’ Yamamoto accuses in English, shaming Kenji in front of his technical consultant. Darwin whacks Kenji’s knee under the table to let him know he’s right in there with him. Bolstered, Kenji sits up in his chair and bows to Yamamoto, suddenly formal, his face a cool mask of convention. ‘There are too many fuck flicks in the world already. Too many ugly people,’ he says in a flat voice, 244

looking Yamamoto right in the eyes. Taking his time, he pours Yamamoto some tea, making a little ceremony of it, ignoring the invoice as if it’s of no interest. Kenji suddenly gives his big har har har pirate laugh and says something in Japanese to Yamamoto. Darwin can see from the Yakuza’s face that he likes it. ‘Darwin-san, would you be so kind as my technical consultant to honour boss of Love Me Tender Productions Yamamoto-san with a game of jankenpon — Rock Scissor Paper?’ ‘Yeah, sure,’ Darwin agrees, smiling, going along. ‘Rock kills the scissor. Scissor cuts paper. But paper covers rock.’ ‘Hai,’ Kenji says. ‘Usually one who lose have to drink lots of sake in a fast manner but today the game is different. If big boss Yamamoto-san wins you and me will be obliged to pay the $45,000.’ ‘No problemo,’ Darwin says, as cool as Harrison Ford, sizing up Yamamoto. ‘And if I win?’ Darwin smiles, ‘Will Yamamoto-san cut off my pinkies?’ ‘No y u b i t s u m e, Darwin-san. Yamamoto-san is not barbarian. He will pay invoice then go off to play golf all by his self feeling way sad,’ Kenji says, laying out the rules of the game, and the Western-style protocol of the situation for Yamamoto. Darwin puts his hand out flat and shoots Paper three times in a row against Yamamoto’s Rock Paper Rock combo. ‘I win!’ he crows, thrilled at winning such a huge sum of money. ‘Shikatta ga nai,’ Yamamoto mutters. ‘What can you do?’ Kenji translates, trying to hide his delight from the grumpy loser who, scowling, pulls out his American Express travellers cheque wallet and tears off 245

nine crisp $5,000 cheques and signs them. Sighing heavily, he stands up and bowing to Darwin, tells him, ‘Have nice day!’ Darwin sits there grinning like a fool. Who cares where the ill-gotten money came from, who cares if Kenji’s cousin dobbed him in, everything’s okay now, thanks to Darwinsan, DocoMan, faster than a speeding Sony, able to leap tall buildings with a single crane-shot. He pushes the crisp little pile of cheques at Kenji with a magnanimous smile. Kenji draws in a deep breath, gives Darwin a here we go look and leaps to his feet and turns to his uncle, respectfully bowing. ‘I have something to say more, Yamamoto-san.’ The wide-bodied Yakuza glowers at him like a sumo psyching out his opponent. Kenji draws in another deep breath and lets it out in one long rushing wordstream, ‘So sorry please I quit.’ Yamamoto’s eyes widen then clench in a Kabuki scowl. He sucks his teeth in confusion, making sounds like the spit-sucking gizmo they use at the dentist’s. Then he goes off like a volcano, spewing vituperation, his eyes bugging out, slamming the table. Kendo-san holds his ground, his eyes steady as stones, drilling Yamamoto. ‘Yamamoto-san is pissed off, big time,’ Kenji translates gratuitiously, bowing his ass off, backing away from his uncle’s mountainous rage. ‘This is the part where we go riding off together into the sunrise,’ he whispers to Darwin, grabbing his briefcase and hooking his elbow, pulls him across the lobby like a yank-along toy, ducking into the safety of the elevator.

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34 34 ‘Shittu!’ Kenji gasps, laughing his maniac laugh, pushing the seventh floor button. ‘I feel just like Robert Redford jumping off the cliff with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid! Oooo, it’s so scary!’ ‘Ohmigod! Robert Redford!’ Darwin is off like a rocket, fuelled by his own highflying brilliance, putting their rescue package together. ‘Sundance! What a dazzling idea! I love you.’ He grabs Kenji’s face and plants a big Jewish kiss on his forehead. Kenji rocks on his heels and whacks Darwin’s back open-handed, clumsy with such a display of affection. ‘I love you too!’ ‘Redford’s the biggest Green in The Business,’ Darwin says, beckoning Kenji inside his hotel suite, possibility babbling inside him like a rushing Montana river taking him back to his future. ‘And the Sundance Institute has

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done more to support indie directors than all their own mothers combined! I’ll bet you I can get him to help us with finance.’ ‘Redford help us?’ Kenji’s eyebrows bob up and down. He opens the bar fridge and helps himself to a Perrier, pours one for Darwin. ‘I sincerely hope so, DocoMan because I have kissed all my uncle’s money bye bye in case you have not noticed.’ ‘We don’t need his steenking money,’ Darwin does the Mexican bandido in the old black and white movie, and knocks back his Perrier in a big tough guy swallow, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, digs around in his backpack, comes out with his mobile. Arching his eyebrows at Kendo, he scrolls through the index and punches the little green phone ikon, aware Kenji’s impressed he’s got Redford’s unlisted number. ‘Bob, please,’ he answers the receptionist’s query, cool as Steven Spielberg. ‘Tell him it’s Darwin calling from Australia.’ He smiles as the familiar voice comes on, that voice he’s heard so many times in the dark saying cool macho things as the Sundance Kid, only Redford’s voice in Real Life is raspy and unmodulated. ‘Darwin! What the hell are you doing over there in Australia?!’ Darwin gives him the spiel on Surfing Antarctica, his voice quavering with excitement, building his concept. ‘We Greens can’t afford to be so subtle and touchy-feely about selling our Save the Planet message,’ he tells Redford, positioning him. ‘Not with all the shit out there competing for brain space. I’ve joined forces with a brilliant young Japanese director/producer,’ he enthuses, winking at Kenji who grins back at him, bright-eyed. ‘You’ll love the project! It’s all about radical Greens in Western Australia who run 248

around blowing up things and making these heavy Green statements. Plenty of sex. And plenty of action. I’m using Tarantino as my model. Shifting the Green paradigm from wimpy to wild. Hot Ice was just a warm-up, pitched to the already converted. This one is out to inspire a whole generation of copycat Greens.’ Redford gives him an avuncular chuckle. ‘Love the title, but your concept needs some massaging. Can you get here for lunch on Tuesday? I’ll have them hold an open ticket for you at Qantas. I’ve just got some new fellowship money that’s looking for a good project. And if you can deliver, it’s yours, kid. You have the most original eye I’ve seen in a long time.’ Darwin can almost see Redford’s eyes crinkle, the boyish grin that made him so famous. ‘Yes!’ he leaps up, high-fiving Kenji who’s out of his chair with his palm up, elated. A hurried knock, then Zan flings the door open, bursting in on him like she did that long-ago morning. Bigger than life in a gauzy pale see-through dress and a red linen jacket. ‘I am Risk!’ Darwin trumpets, borrowing her famous line, forgiving her the worry she caused him. She laughs but it comes out funny because she’s embarrassed, more like a snort sound. ‘I have something to tell you!’ They both yell at the same time in uncanny chorus, only his tone of voice is excited and hers is distraught. ‘I’m …’ she looks at Kenji, hesitating, but Darwin’s too focused on his own news, bulldozes right through. ‘I’m going to San Francisco on the red eye! I’ve just talked to Robert Redford. You know, the Robert Redford,’ he crows in triumph. ‘The Sundance Institute. I’m talking 249

big money here, Babe. I cut the deal in forty-eight hours. I’m gonna get enough for the editing and distribution. Surfing Antarctica is gonna hit bigtime!’ ‘Hooray for Darwin-san!’ Kenji cheers from the sofa, his bright orange jumpsuit garish against the white leather cushions. ‘Hip hip hooray,’ Zan says in a dull voice, her eyebrows knitting, her face a battleground of conflicting emotion. She can’t look at him, is staring past Kenji at the Perrier bottles on top of the bar fridge. In profile Darwin can see her chin start to quiver and crumple like a small child in the path of an oncoming tearstorm but she glares at the bar fridge with a fierce focus, a weapon to fend off her tears. Is she jealous he’s going to do lunch with Redford? Upset he’s jetsetting out into the juice and the action and she’s stuck in Australia? ‘I’d ask you to come with me but Vanessa needs to be in the protest scene,’ he says, with a placating gesture. ‘Kendo-san can do it without me, we’ve done the script, got all the shots down, the crew knows what to do.’ ‘That’s not what I’m on about, Darwin! I don’t give a stuff about Robert Redford!’ Zan yells, her face fractured with conflict. ‘You’re so busy with your high-minded global mission to save the planet you can’t even see the people in front of your own bloody face!’ Her voice breaks. She shudders and sucks a big breath in. ‘I’M PREGNANT!’ she wails, almost howling. ‘Ohmigod!’ he gasps and the instant he hears his own voice despises himself for using the most uttered phrase in the movies. ‘Ohmigod!’ he whispers again and slumps down on the bed, stares at the familiar holes in the knees of his blue jeans. 250

‘This is bad copy, right?’ she says, frantic, looking from him to Kenji. ‘I can’t stand being bad copy.’ Then before he can say anything she’s running out of the hotel suite. ‘Come back, Blondie-san!’ Kenji’s voice echoes in the hotel room, Hollywood hokey as Brandon de Wilde in Shane. Darwin sits there stunned for a very long moment. Time and space spin around him in Brownian motion. OHMIGOD! He tears himself off the bed and races past Kenji, rushes down to the lobby, sees the bright flap of her red linen jacket through the sheeting shine of the glass at the entrance, then quick as a flash she’s swallowed up by the glare of the sun.

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35 35 Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel, Zan thinks, feeling shithouse, as she heads into the Little Lebanon in Subi for some comfort food and orders a $6.50 chicken shwarma with chilli sauce, don’t hold the garlic and devours it at the low hammered brass table, almost moaning, the grease running down her face. The only other person in the small restaurant at 2:30 is a frayed exhausted mum and her hyper toddler who is toing and froing, hands-on exploring his surroundings. He grabs the salt shaker off Zan’s table, spilling her water and scattering napkins. ‘Come here, you little shit!’ the mum leaps up and grabs him, smacks her kid whack! His mouth opens ‘O!’ He drops the salt shaker and wails like a siren on its way to a fire. Mum throws Zan a look that gives her the shivers. Zan jumps up and orders an intense baklava to

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take away and flees to the Japanese Consulate where she puts in three hours of deep background research on Japanese film so she can pull her piece about Kenji Kendo together with learned references to Ozu, Itami, Kurosawa et al. Debbie’s house in Subi welcomes her home with its warm winking leadlights. The shiny brass bedstead with the starched white broderie anglaise bedspread, the spotless kitchen and bathroom, the Evans and Tate Chardonnay in the fridge, all whisper endearments in Debbie’s absence, ‘She’ll be right, Mate.’ His face bleached white as a ghost when she told him. Like he was stuck in a crowded theatre when someone screams FIRE!! Eyes whipping around, bashing like moths against the doors and the windows, he wouldn’t look at her. Just like the first time they slept together, at the moment of climax when she looked in his eyes, he flinched and his eyes slipped away, elusive, wouldn’t connect. Okay, okay forget about Darwin, she tells herself sternly, grabbing her laptop. She can’t think about him. Siegel’s deadline shadows her mind like a buzzbombing March fly. Kenji Kendo is intensely attractive. I’d give him a 12 out of 10 for his eyes. They’re like battering rams blamming into your soft parts. And the way that he moves is amazing. Fast and with a flowing self-conscious awareness. He moves like a dancer who’s studied movement and knows what he looks like, precisely. He must look at himself in the mirror a lot, reflecting. Directing. There isn’t much difference when you think about it. He still gets to use the cinema as man’s most cutting edge evolutionary tool.

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Zan sighs and closes her laptop. Downstairs in the kitchen she pours herself a nice big goblet of E & T, wanders around looking at herself in all the mirrors. She feels like a walking egg. She used to be Suzanne Dauntless McNaughton, career girl and lover, Perth leg man for Trendz. She can hear Siegel’s voice echo, ‘You give great leg, Z,’ somewhere in the far distant past. Now all she is is a big fucking ovum. Christ, she doesn’t want this thing inside her. She flashes on a comic book she read as a kid about a sailor who swallowed a peachpit and this thing grew inside him and took over his body, took over his soul. You can’t do a fucking thing when you have a baby. Ohmigod in heaven and hell and hail to you, too, Bloody Mary. I don’t want to have it. It wasn’t my fault. There was a glitch in the system, the low dosage pills. I can’t bloody have it. I can’t hack the R word. Responsiblity. By the third glass of Evans & Tate, Zan’s mood has swung all the way from freaked to reassured and mellow, back now to truculent. She’ll show him, the bastard! First thing in the morning she’ll pick up the phone and ring Pregnancy Problem House and say, ‘Hi. My name is Zan and I’ve got a problem,’ like she was joining AA or something. Then she’ll catch the afternoon plane to Vancouver, and hook up with Kenji and Hiro and Egor, rehearse her script as Vanessa the reporter in the big protest scene and pick up a nice fat paycheck. Thank goodness Kenji paid scale, it should be big enough to take her to Sydney. Deliver her feature in person to Siegel, muscle on in with her scintillating post-modern prose, get her name on that masthead. Ta-daa! A Woman’s Life is Her Only Art, Darwin, you SNAGGY bastard. 254

Maybe she should print up a T-shirt with that little motto and send it to Darwin, she thinks, yawning. She falls asleep and next thing she’s dreaming she’s a fact-checker assigned to a story by Hunter S Thompson. CLONG! CLONG! CLONG! a huge clunky clangour interrupts her just as she’s telling Hunter they don’t have any crack cocaine in Perth ‘where the fuck i s t h a t ? ? ’ Western Australia. You’ve got to be joking! she thinks, sitting bolt upright. Who needs to know that it’s bloody three in the morning? She’s never noticed the bloody town clock in Subi before. It goes CLONG! every fifteen minutes and then on the half hour just to let the insomniacs know how much they’re not sleeping. Finally she drifts back to sleep and has another nightmare. She is trapped in the movie The Fortress with Christopher Lambert. This is the good part. But the bad part is she’s pregnant. And it’s anti-Green to have babies and so they put the horrible intestinator inside her which rips her guts out. She wakes up screaming. ‘Mummy!’ she whimpers, a wave of terror and panic sweeping over her head, sucking her down, drowning her in a backwash of feelings, down all the years. She is holding on to her new Donald Duck toothbrush . Standing in a big cold marble hallway with big scary statues of Jesus and Mary dead by the cross, sobbing and sobbing Mummy, Mummy don’t leave me Mummy don’t leave me all alone with the big scary ladies, they look like black crows. Peepee running down her all hot and nasty making a naughty puddle on the nice shiny floor. She can’t see Mummy’s face in her head any longer, just 255

little raisin eyes in a blurry doughface. But her arms still remember the feel of soft flesh, her face the sweet yielding pillow. Lying with her underneath the big Queensland pine tree looking up at the blue puzzle pieces of sky through the spiky green branches poking out all above them like the spokes of a wheel. Dizzy with the soft smell of Mummy. Her voice all around her big as the day. Mummy’s big pretty feet poking up at the sky like flowers, her own little ones wiggling worms beside them. Zannie laughing, wanting always to show, tell, look, see, touch, smell, breathe, eat, be Mummy. Mummy gone away. Always. Gone. Mummy Mummy, you’re contagious, Mummy, stay away from me. Zan sobs in the empty night twenty-three years later, holding her fattening belly, scared out of her tree.

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36 36 ‘I’ve called everyone. I can’t find her anywhere!’ Darwin laments to Kenji and Hiro as they race through the sprawl of Perth’s suburbs in the LMT limo on the way to the airport. Outside the windows strip malls pass by in an oh-sofamiliar bright blur of commerce, they could be in Palo Alto on El Camino Real except there are no Taco Bells and few of the stores are open for business Saturday afternoon. He can’t hear himself think over the noise of his babbling bloodstream. His heart beats, arrhythmic, spikes with excitement, flatlines with dread. She misunderstood him. He was so stunned he was knocked back flat speechless. She thought his silence meant heavy rejection when he was just catching his breath. If only she had a mobile he could get to her before she does something stupid, before it’s too late. ‘God, why doesn’t she have a mobile!’ he mutters at Hiro 257

as though it’s her fault. ‘What if she does something stupid? You know how impulsive she is!’ ‘Calm down, Darwin,’ Hiro tells him, flipping her curtain of hair back, putting on lippy. ‘You’ve got me jumping out of my skin.’ ‘Don’t let her do anything stupid,’ he pleads out loud like a mantra. ‘Darwin, even if she wanted to “do something stupid” this isn’t LA where you can get a drive-by termination,’ Hiro says, trying to get him to snap out of it. ‘What a horrible word,’ Darwin shudders, anxiety squittering in his gut. ‘Do not worry. Blondie-san will be okay,’ Kenji sings out from the driver’s seat, sliding the limo into the fast lane. Hope knifes through him, exquisite, an impossible upside. His heart swells with love for all that’s inside and around him. The air. The Great Eastern Highway with its stream of eco-unfriendly autos that’s taking him through the unravelling suburbs straight to the airport. The big hard blue sky that hangs down around him and Hiro and Kenji. His own brilliant vision he’s projected onto the future, he will make it come true. ‘I rang SouthWest. She wasn’t on the morning flight to Vancouver,’ Darwin says, his voice taut with angst. ‘So she drove.’ Hiro makes a ‘what’s the big deal?’ shrug. She turns and looks at him, her delicate eyebrows arching high. ‘How’d you get them to give you the manifest info? That’s confidential.’ Her eyes slit even more with prurient interest. ‘My accent,’ Darwin tells her. ‘I said I was FBI.’ ‘Naughty boy!’ Kenji teases, pulling onto the off ramp for the International Airport. ‘Now is bon voyage time.’ He 258

parks the limo outside the Departures, leaps out and pops the door open for Darwin, hauls out his backpack, stands facing him on the footpath. ‘Darwin-san, my friend, do not worry,’ he says sombre, his big dark eyes purply-black as Quink ink. ‘I will take care of everything. Zan-chan and the movie. Now you go get on the Qantas flying roo jumbo and go see Robert Redford, get us big money.’ He puts his hands on Darwin’s shoulders in a rare show of physical affection and looks him deep in the eyes. ‘I am very sure Blondie-san will be in Vancouver and I Kendo Kenji will take personal responsibility for her to still be here when you return with the money, triumphing.’ Solemnly, he leans over and plants a smoochy Jewish kiss on Darwin’s forehead. Then he bows from the waist, deeply, and straightens up, beaming a reassuring smile at him. ‘This why people fuck. To have baby.’ Kenji smacks his belly where his vital hara energy lies. ‘It is excellence. Nature. Blondie-san knows this in her own hara.’ The huge open space inside the terminal dizzies him with an echoey disorientation the instant he moves inside it, the fumes of the Avgas give him low-level quease as he meanders through the blue-carpeted lobby, weaving around the small knots of people embracing goodbye, to the Qantas check-in where the smiling male clerk comes up with his ticket. ‘Perth-Sydney-LA-Denver-Utah,’ Darwin reads out his air-route. ‘First Class all the way!’ ‘Somebody loves you,’ the clerk says with a smile. ‘Yeah,’ Darwin is just about to impress the pants off him with who bought the ticket when he hears her voice echoing in his head, ‘I don’t give a stuff about Robert Redford!’ Her face swims before him, those incredible eyes full of feeling, her expression fragmenting as she says, ‘I’m pregnant.’ 259

‘I can’t do this,’ he says to the clerk, slapping the ticket down on the counter. He shoulders his backpack and rushes out the door onto the footpath. Not a taxi in sight. After five or six minutes of frustrated pacing, he discovers a special Swan Taxi phone on the wall near the exit and uses it to summon a cab. A scruffy-looking taxi pulls up four minutes later, the driver a swarthy, rough-looking fellow with a four-day-old stubble. ‘Take me to Jandakot airport. Fast!’ he yells at the cabbie, heaving himself in the back seat after his backpack. The cabbie grunts in what Darwin hopes is acquiescence. As they pull out of the airport he steals a closer look at him in the rear view mirror. The heavy-lidded black eyes and the five o’clock shadow, the scimitar smile, make him look like one of Ali Baba’s cutthroats escaped from the cave. How can he trust this guy won’t take him to a vacant lot and slice out his liver and steal all his gear? Darwin wonders, starting to panic. ‘What’s your favourite movie?’ he asks Ali Baba just to make a connection, to calm his flayed nerves. ‘The Lion King,’ the cabbie tells him. ‘When Mufassa the daddy lion gets killed by the stampeding beasts I am crying.’ ‘I am crying,’ Darwin echoes, smiling, the paranoia ebbing inside him. Twenty-seven and a half minutes later after crawling through cross-directional gridlock, with Darwin fuming and silently cursing, trying to keep his head from exploding, the cab roars up the ramp to the outlying airport, screeches over and dumps Darwin at the small terminal near the private plane tarmac. There are no people among the few Lear jets and 260

Commanches parked on the huge hot expanse of black asphalt. Finally, he sees a mechanic working on a blue and white Cessna. ‘Where’s the Jetstream?’ he bellows, adrenalised by panic and anger. ‘With the Japanese pilot and the beautiful Japanese woman?’ ‘That one’s in the air. Lifted off five minutes ago. It’s long gone,’ the mechanic tells him, fiddling with the landing gear. ‘When’s the next flight to Vancouver?’ Darwin asks the mechanic, fighting to keep his voice under control. ‘Monday morning. There’s no flight on Sundays,’ the mechanic tells him, shrugging his shoulders and putting his hands out in a ‘not my fault, mate’ gesture. ‘You could hire someone to fly you down in a small plane tomorrow, they don’t fly at night.’ The mechanic winces at the stormclouds his words are creating on Darwin’s face. ‘Is there a Hertz here? Budget? “We try harder” Avis?’ Darwin almost screams, seething with frustration, irrationally waving his wallet, pulling his cards out, shoving them under the mechanic’s nose. ‘Sorry, mate, I’m just a mechanic. But the car rental concession closes when the traffic’s outbound. The last plane out was two hours ago.’ His emotions seesawing all over, Darwin moans at the mechanic, ‘Oh, maaayte! I’ve gotta get down there before morning,’ embarrassing himself with his own emoting in front of this stranger. ‘If I don’t get there, it’s all over. I’ll lose her.’ On the off chance, he stalks to the LMT limo in the adjacent carpark, drops to his knees and gropes in each wheel well, hoping against hope. Bingo! His fingers close on a magnetic key case in the last wheel well. ‘Domo arigato, dude,’ he sends thank you vibes in Kenji’s 261

direction for being so compulsively tidy as to hide a spare key. He checks the little clock on the dash, hoping like hell he won’t fall asleep in his advanced state of exhaustion. He hasn’t slept for thirty hours. Normally, it takes five and a half hours to get to Vancouver. Better allow an extra hour. Go a bit slower, get there in the end. He takes a left on the Great Eastern Highway and heads south, muttering to himself, ‘Stay on the left,’ over and over. After an hour of driving, he’s deep into the country with very few lights coming at him. He wishes there was some traffic on the road so he’d have some tail-lights to follow, some point of focus aside from the roil of feelings and thoughts inside him. He knows in his balls, in his soul the moment it happened. You feel so good so good to me. Moaning, she rocked him to the core with a Ground Zero come. His eyes are beginning to blur and he has a nasty headache from staring past the glare of his super-bright highbeams that carve his safe passage though the wild night that commotions around him. He has long slowed down to eighty, on the lookout for roos. He can feel rather than see the tumult of movement in the black dark beyond the bright flat sweep of light pouring out of his headlights. Kinetic impressions, balletic boundings, as kangaroos boingg along in the peripheral greyness outside his vision. Then in a wild explosion of heartstopping movement come flying in out of the darkness, bound in great leaps across the wide arc of his headlights, then hurtle off into the night, leaving him amped up and wired from the too-close-forcomfort encounter. He refuels at the two-bowser town of Bannup at midnight, and yawning, buys a handful of Snickers and 262

Mars bars, a caffeine-laced Coke, and asks the attendant if he’s seen a big, tall, gorgeous blonde driving a bright yellow Honda Breeze. ‘Nope,’ the attendant replies, then adds with a wistful smile, ‘Wish I had, but.’ ‘Wish I had, but.’ The young man’s words stay with him for the next fifty kilometres, the voice of regret. Heading through the thick forest just out of Walpole, a beautiful little fox trots out of the darkness and freezes in the road before him, eyes wide and startled, stunned by his lights. Slowing, he flicks to the lowbeams. The fox morphs out of freezeframe, and trots off into the forest looking over its shoulder at the incredible strangeness of Darwin. Fatigue seeps through his blood and his bones like a muscle relaxant. He finds himself drifting over to the right side of the road where he’s been driving for all of the twenty years of his history of driving. He swerves back to the left side, clears his throat and starts singing to keep awake, ‘You say pa tah to and I say poh tay to …’ He sees her face before him, happy. ‘You say tah mah toe, and I say toe may toe …’ He will sing her Cole Porter, teasy, looking into her eyes, smiling, turning things right again. ‘Let’s call the whole thing off,’ she will chorus, wryly, her crumpled up face like a baby, swallowing tearsobs. ‘NO! NO!’ he will basso, like Pavarotti … Coming out of the forest at Walpole, he speeds up to a hundred, then a hundred and ten, on the long straight stretch. His heart leaps inside him, the night rockets past him, exhilarating, heading flat out for Zan. A pair of big roos come sailing at him out of nowhere in viscous slow motion. It happens so fast yet so slow, it’s like he’s on Quaaludes. He sees the huge bounding shapes come hurtling at him. Can trace their trajectory before they 263

fly through it lazy and slow. The roos come at him flying, their muscular movements just like the documentary on telly. Whatever you do, don’t swerve to avoid them. Hit them straight on, or you’re dead. He can see the one on the right is a female, the joey folded up in the pouch like a broken kite or a brolly, feet sticking out. His brain freaks in panic. He twists the wheel sharply. The huge flying missiles of meat and muscle soar off to the left as the limo swerves through a long screaming fishtail off the macadam. The wheels hit the gravel. The car rocks up on one side and flips. He feels himself rolling. Over and over. Flapping and flopping like the clothes in a dryer. Something hits his head and his chest with a sickening impact. Fire runs up his spine and flares through his mastoids. Panic napalms his brain and consumes him. He flashes on the last scene in Kaufman’s The Incredible Lightness of Being , the hit-the-wall clunk of the final freezeframe when the lovers, talking and laughing, smash into a truck. Upside down. Hanging. Oozing hot pain. His eyes wet with something. He tastes metallic copper. Smells his own blood. So this is it, he thinks, addressing Phil Kaufman. The end so dark and quiet. So unlike the beginning when it all burst upon him, just like a movie, starring Darwin Brown.

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37 37 ‘Why do I get the feeling that the Japanese are like this beautifully organised army of ants and we Aussies are like these big fat lazy aphids they love to milk,’ Gary Morgan is confiding to Zan as they mount the bunting-hung dias on the edge of the wharf in front of Port Vancouver’s gigantic grain storage silos, overlooking a monumental pile of woodchips two hundred metres away. ‘May I quote you, Gazza?’ Zan looks at him, saucy, and opens her laptop, runs through a quick little riff on the keyboard. ‘Why not?’ Morgan says, giving his co-star Vanessa the knock-out reporter a big rakish grin. He is feeling expansive, sitting there on the special-built dias in front of the whole town of Vancouver, playing himself as the town official. Hey, life is great, he’s in the movies, can’t wait to

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take the missus to see Surfing Antarctica when it comes out. Kenji is up on the high Louma crane with the grip and the focus puller and the big Arriflex camera. Zan smiles and crosses her legs high, flashing her thighs for the camera in her Ally McBeal mini, showing ‘lotsa leg please,’ as Kenji instructed, talking her through the scene. No need to be nervous, she reminds herself. Forty per cent of your footage is pure movie star, as the Great White California Director himself once stated, the bastard. Playing Vanessa the reporter’s a piece of cake. All she has to do to pick up that lovely paycheck is be her own gorgeous self in front of the camera, ask her usual intelligent questions, look extra bright and observant as she goes about her Trendz work for Siegel. A little double-dipping goes a long way when you’re a struggling free-lancer. Today the movies, tomorrow the masthead! The Amex. The Beamer. Does she want a red or a black one? Definitely not the one-notch-above-basic 318is, but a 325e with leather seats and a sunroof that’ll suck her hair out to fly free in the wind. No, black is too common, maybe that deep dark green that looks so expensive, she yammers to herself so she won’t think of Darwin. His name in her head like a breakshot in billiards whacking a racket of bad bruising feelings loose. He couldn’t even write her a personal note, the bastard, instead she gets Kenji’s gobbledygook about something called hara, telling her she should wait please for Darwinsan, he’ll be back in two weeks. Well it’s too late, baby, now it’s too late, Carly Simon pops up on her internal Muzak. Thank Goddess she was a postmodern feminist with a bloody brain. She, Zan ‘Just do it’ McNaughton was running the show here, not some sillyass 266

pre-programmed female hormones that had decimated her childhood girlfriends, turned them into dumb clucky chooks. She wasn’t going to end up sitting around on her dimply butt in a domestic coma like Leanne and Sue and Jodie and Glenda. No way! Lights, action, camera, Babe, she psychs herself out of giving in to her sodden feelings and smiles right into Bobby Takahashi’s big steadicam which is now up and running, set up to catch the dignitaries’ spontaneous Real Life reaction to the big protest scene. A large group of Greenies has marched along the main street this morning down to the port where they are creating a big hurly-burly, dancing around with passionate abandon near the pile of woodchips, chanting and drumming, waving home-made patchwork banners which protest SAVE OUR OLD-GROWTH FORESTS! terrorising the locals with their dreadlocks and multiple piercings, the nipple rings glittering underneath their gauzy Indian motley. A small group of about forty locals is quietly gathered behind the cordoned-off site on the open sweep of the foreshore, waving protest signs that say SAVE OUR FORESHORE. Smiling, she scans the big mob of Greenies, estimating the head count at over four hundred, a huge turnout for a rural venue so far away from the capital city. If Darwin dares to act disappointed at these outstanding numbers, she’ll just have to tell him to put it in context and shove it, the bloody hegemonious Yank. Or is it ‘hegemonic’? she thinks wryly, bowing her head over her laptop, getting into her work. The crowd gathering on the wharf for the opening ceremony of the 267

joint Japanese-Australian woodchipping facilities can only be described as Cecil B de Mille epic size for such a small country town. The Japanese cargo ship Kobayashi Maru out of Kobe, hulks at the wharf, its holds gaping open ready to gobble up the massive three-storey-high pile of woodchips. Japanese flags bearing black graphic writing and ceremonial bunting flap in the stiff breeze. The soundtrack is the rhythmic slap of waves against wood and concrete. The creaking and groaning of hawsers. The atonal tuning up of the Salvation Army band squealing and squawking like an out-of-tune bagpipe. The smelltrack is fishy barnacle saltwater sea smell– Tired of virtual reality verbiage, Zan saves and exits, closes her laptop with a crisp little snap and eyeballs the noisy throng of townspeople jamming the carpark. Ninetyfive per cent of them scrubbed and spiffily-dressed breeders and little old doilies. Retirees. A clutch of slow learners holding hands, gawking, some rocking, one of them making ape bellows, excited, high on the vibes. Clean-cut young boys in Hot Tuna boardies and Billabong T-shirts and girls in Levis and crop tops. Here and there the town toughs in black Prodigy and Metallica T-shirts ripped out at the shoulders glare with in-your-face aggro. Zan shivers, in spite of the late morning sunshine, remembering how high and excited she was at Burswood Casino, getting the inside-out POV down, the heft of the heavy Sony so real on her shoulder, the pulse of her womb then like a mini-orgasm, still pulsing from Darwin. Darwin … Darwin … Behind her facade of bravado she feels horribly empty. Disconsolate. Her heart isn’t in it. Mooning over the past won’t pay the rent, Chook. She forces 268

herself to focus on the here and now scene around her. ‘The scale of the structures that squat on the wharf is so monumental, they dwarf the big crowd of humans,’ she talks into her Sony, distracting herself with the sound of her own voice. ‘The grain silos loom like five-storey-high round oatmeal boxes, lined up in a row, a big colourful rainbow whooshed all across them. The huge brownish-red pile of jarrah woodchips sits on the concrete pad at the base of the silos, enough to load this huge cargo ship with 30,000 tonnes and have lots left over for the next ship. It makes this reporter at least wonder, “How many trees died to make that big pile?” ‘Whose idea was this anyway?’ Zan asks, turning to Gary Morgan, indicating the woodchips, but Gary thinks she means the site on the foreshore. ‘I’m afraid I’m to blame,’ he says, proudly, giving the ends of his moustache fond little tweaks. ‘I took the wife and two veg to Disneyland last year and I got inspired. This land was just sitting around lying fallow. Why not put a theme park on the foreshore? Bring in the tourists, create jobs for our children. So I did the usual trade mission trips to Osaka and Hyoshu with the town planner looking for a buyer, I mean a partner. And the rest’s history!’ As if on cue the Salvation Army Band erupts in a ragged atonal oompahpaah version of Advance Australia Fair. ‘No doubt about it, this is a great day for Vancouver,’Gary shouts over the blat of the tuba, preening, puffing his chest out, waving his arms at the jabbering crowd, the Japanese cargo ship. ‘It appears not everyone here would agree,’ Zan interjects, following the script. ‘What about that large group of protesters gathering over there by the woodchips?’ she 269

asks, poking him to get his reaction for Bobby Takahashi’s Steadicam, ten metres off to the side. ‘There must be at least four hundred already and they’re still coming.’ Of all of the people gathered on the foreshore the Green protesters are the most vibrant, in restless perpetual motion. A big, handsome blonde bloke in dreadlocks, barechested and barefoot, is beating his big booming kangaroo-skin bongo like a war drum. ‘They look pretty lively,’ she laughs. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ Morgan pooh-poohs, ‘They’re a bunch of no hopers. Hippies and Luddites. Greenpeaceniks. They don’t contribute a thing to the community. The coppers’ll stop ’em if they get out of hand. ‘Aaah, finally the Mayor.’ Morgan looks up with relief as Vancouver’s glamorous mayor, Roma McKinnon, cutting a magnificent figure in red stilettos and a black Carla Zampatti wraparound mini, gladhands her way through the crowd. The crowd cheers as she mounts the platform, followed by a dozen functionaries and clerks from the town and … Ohmigod! Patrick Sheehan. Standing there before Zan in a handsome slate grey Armani, that big shiny square forehead, those polished pink cheekbones, the thick meaty lips. His eyes glare at her like bright blue VDUs, a long list of emotions scrolling behind them. Surprise. Annoyance. Displeasure. Anger. Lust and Affection. The smell of his unique Argentine men’s cologne Besa me Macho wafting off his hot body evokes a yammering murmur of memories. That ‘look what you did to me’ look in his eyes makes her feel awful. Squirming with guilt, Zan scrunches down in her chair, stares at the sweet little puppy fat sitting on top of his 270

collar, trying not to think of the pain she caused him with her rejection. ‘OYEZ! OYEZ!’ the town crier bawls, spitting all over his crimson red eighteenth century waistcoat from the effort to project his voice across this huge open space with the wind gusting in off the water. ‘We are gathered together here this fine morning to celebrate a new beginning,’ the Mayor’s voice rings out over the loudspeakers in the thrilling tones of a gospel preacher. ‘A new and most gratifying historical economic alliance with the distinguished Japanese consortium Lorus based in our sister city of Osaka.’ The Mayor raises her arm in a signal. ‘Oooooohhh,’ the crowd goes as a small old-fashioned steam engine hung with a Lorus Friendship Co-op banner and pulling an open car full of woodchips tootles and chuffs its way down the wharf track, with a half dozen Japanese businessmen hanging out of the cabin, holding on for dear life, their neat navy blue suits from the same Hong Kong tailor, their faces rigid with pleasure. ‘The Japs love hokey gimmicks like this,’ Gary Morgan whispers in Zan’s ear. ‘The friendship delegation from Osaka!’ the Mayor announces, bowing, pushing a button that activates a red carpet unfurling down the ramp of the dias. The crowd bursts into applause at this piece of drama. A rattle of war drums breaks out from the ferals. The Japanese men hop off the train and up the red carpeted ramp, each one in turn bowing deep to the Mayor who ceremoniously returns each solemn bow. ‘Hurts me back watching ’em,’ Gary cracks, sotto voce. Zan closes her eyes behind her wraparound glarefoil 271

Ray-Bans as the Japanese head of Lorus Friendship Co-op, Tommy Tanaka, gives a long unintelligible speech in halting English, punctuated by stiff little bows and solemneyed smiles. She can recognise the word ‘Australia’ every so often along with ‘honourable’ and ‘Vancouver.’ Cute little brogues, she thinks, staring at his neat little feet as she drifts, emotionally drained and exhausted from the wrenching events of the last forty-eight hours. Tommy Tanaka turns to his underlings and snaps his fingers. Bowing, the tall skinny one whips out a mobile and barks a Japanese order into the mouthpiece. The train choofs down the track and stops just beneath the big loader which dips down into the freight car of woodchips and scoops a load up onto the conveyor, dumping the woodchips into the hold of the ship with a skittery rumble, cleaning the car out in less than a minute. ‘That was symbolic,’ Gary stage-whispers. ‘It takes several hours to load a ship that size. ‘After my speech we go have lunch at the Earl,’ Gary tells Zan with a wolfish smile. ‘Have some crayfish from Walpole. Some nice local wines. Then we crack open the sake. Konnichiwa, mate!’ Tommy Tanaka presents a carved wooden doll to the Mayor. Then, selfconsciously smoothing his hair, Gary lanks up to the mike, replacing Tanaka, and rumbles on about how wonderful the Lorus Friendship Co-op is, how thankful the town of Vancouver is to be chosen for the joint woodchipping venture, how grateful for Lorus’s vision in bringing the town its next project, Whale-O-Rama, a brand new $200 million tourism complex, construction to start in the new year, creating many jobs for the townspeople. A burst of applause from the crowd at the good news. The 272

protestors yell ‘Save our foreshore!’ in well-timed unison. Gary ignores them, turns the volume up higher and announces, ‘It is my pleasure to introduce Patrick J Sheehan, architect for the project.’ Sheehan strides up to the lectern in his sexy Armani that ever-so-subtly displays his nice meaty backside. Turning his head away from the mike for a final throat-clear, he catches her eye with a sharp look of triumph then turns back with an earnest expression to the audience spread out before him, his biggest yet. ‘I love this town!’ Sheehan booms and launches off into a speech about his long and happy association with the Town of Vancouver, in his rolling bombastic manner, every sentence a complex peroration, introducing, prefacing, epiloguing. ‘From the moment I arrived in this town as a child I was struck by its natural beauties … its fabled white beaches … its magnificent world class views … blah blah,’ rolling the words off his tongue with self-studied aplomb. ‘And so it is with enormous and deeply felt boundless pleasure that I accepted the challenge of creating a major new world-class theme park in this wonderful town.’ Sheehan pauses, looking out over the crowd like Charlton Heston as Moses. ‘And I congratulate LORUS, which I am honoured to represent here in Australia, and the idyllic Town of Vancouver,’ he makes a deep courtly bow to Her Worship the Mayor, ‘for their exciting go-ahead vision.’ The crowd buzzes in speculation. Sheehan beams, holding his arms out like a conductor, playing the crowd for a full sixty seconds, then begins speaking again. ‘WhaleO-Rama is a wonderful project,’ he glows. Who could dare to disagree with the irresistible Sheehan? ‘Lorus’s $200 million dollar state of the art tourism complex is 273

ecologically friendly. No airconditioning, just the fresh ocean breezes coming in the electronically controlled “smart” windows. I’ve designed it to be minimal impact. ‘That should keep all you Greenie techno-pagans happy!’ he shouts at the protesters who burst out into spontaneous dancing and shouting and crowing, exultant drumming. ‘In closing,’ he adds with a face-splitting smile, his high Irish colour flushing his cheeks, ‘Let this be a lesson to all who suffer from technological hubris!’ What the fuck does that mean? Zan wonders, yawning. ‘Whale-O-Rama will bring a great deal of discretionary spending dollars to the town of Vancouver,’ Sheehan says, nodding his head, serious as an accountant. Uh huh, Zan thinks, especially to its big tall blonde bondage bambis who charge by the hour. For god’s sake Sheehan, sit down and shut up, she ESPs to her ex. She could kick him right up the Armani, the blathering blowhard, so deeply in love with himself and his big fucking ego. She’d take Darwin Brown any old day over Sheehan. The thought hits her like a rock in a pond hitting bottom, sending the silt up, clouding the waters. Mick Jagger jeers in her head, You can’t always get what you wa-ant. The Mayor is giving him frantic eye signals, trying to get him to wrap it. A phone chirrups like a bird near Gary Morgan who dives inside his jacket and pulls out his mobile. ‘It’s for you,’ he announces, impressed, holding the phone out to Zan. ‘I can’t find Hiro,’ Egor’s voice drums in her ear, staccato. ‘She went to the Ladies twenty minutes ago but she hasn’t come back, Zan.’ 274

‘I can’t very well go check the loo for you, Egor,’ Zan tells him, a bit annoyed he’s disturbing her up on the dias. ‘She was supposed to be here at 11:45 sharp,’ Egor complains, as if Hiro’s lateness is her fault by extension, being a woman. ‘The ecotage action is planned for twelve hundred hours.’ Behind his gruff macho front, she can sense he is deeply worried. ‘Where are you, Egor?’ ‘I’m over here next to the blue Kombi van. About fifty metres to the left of the woodchips. At ten o’clock high from where you are.’ ‘Hold on a sec,’ Zan tells him, squinting across the wharf into the sun. From this distance everyone looks Lilliputian, she can’t make anyone out. Inspired, she very politely scooches over a row, whispering, ‘May I please borrow?’ bowing her ass off, gracefully snatches a big Nikon camera with a 200 zoom lens off Tommy Tanaka’s seat, who is far too polite to voice any protest. Scooching back to her seat next to Gary, she looks through the viewfinder. Pulling the group of ferals into crisp focus, she keys on the blonde bloke’s fine handsome head with its cool feral dreadlocks. He is laughing and talking to someone in the background with a video camera, dressed in hippie tie dye and a scarf like a gypsy or pirate tied low on his forehead. Zan twirls the knurled lens very slowly, closing in on its hair-trigger focus. A crisp headshot of the hook-nosed pirate in profile fills up the view. ‘It’s Darwin!’ she gasps, thunderstruck, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. ‘It’s Darwin,’ she gasps again, into the phone. ‘Yeah,’ Egor says matter of factly as though it was 275

normal. ‘He showed up at eleven hundred hours, looking for you.’ Looking for you. Her heart soars then hits the ground hard with a shock of concussion. Sure he’s a liberated male Californian but can he forgive her final decision? Her putting herself first. ‘He’s a bit out of it, but,’ Egor says. ‘He’s got seventeen stitches. Don’t ask me how but he rolled the limo outside of Walpole. Plus the blokes who picked him up gave him some Walpole Wowie to like, dull the pain, man,’ Egor chuckles. ‘He sounds like one of those dopey nobrainer dorks in a dopey Yank movie.’ ‘Be excellent to one another and party on, dude,’ Zan murmurs, looking at Darwin through the big heavy Nikon. ‘What’s going on?’ Gary Morgan is saying, off by her left elbow. ‘Darwin,’ Zan echoes, giddy, willing him to whip-pan his Sony and lock lenses with her Nikon in a some enchanted morning you will see a stranger across a crowded wharf. She rests the heavy camera in the crook of her arm and flashes her legs at Tommy Tanaka and chucks him a dazzling blonde bimbo smile, pats his big camera, semaphoring her honourable august gratitude, so he won’t take it back. ‘As soon as this film is over, I’m taking Hiro to Bali,’ Egor is saying, his voice sounding echoey mobile phone hollow. ‘This morning she said shitsurei shimashita — it means ‘sorry to trouble you’ — when we were synching the timers. And then she actually bowed to me when she poured the tea. I’m worried about her, Zan. I think she’s burned out.’ ‘Uh huh,’ Zan murmurs, only half paying attention to what he is saying, her little me voice babbling Dar-bro-bro276

Brown nonsense inside her head, her brain running her through a dozen fastforwards trying to figure how to get her feverish body across the crowded wharf, crush herself against Darwin. ‘We can’t go on meeting like this, Egor,’ she jokes, peeking through the lens of the Nikon at Darwin. ‘Hiro’s a tough cookie,’ she reassures him, finally picking up on his end of the conversation. ‘It’s probably her period or something.’ ‘I wish you’d pick me up with the chopper,’ she sighs into the phone at Egor, ‘and whisk me over to Darwin.’ ‘We’re not using a chopper,’ Egor tells her. ‘The wind’s too high. The banners are due to unfurl off the silos in six and a half minutes. They’re radio-operated but Hiro’s got the transmitter.’ ‘I’d like to take this occasion to …’ the Mayor is saying in her fluting voice. All the mobile phones on the dias shrill like dormant cicadas, coming to life in a flashfire heatwave, one after the other. The tall skinny Japanese bloke is already barking into his mobile, his voice gruff with excitement, as Sheehan digs around in the Mayor’s briefcase, extracts the mobile and listens a minute. ‘It’s Security!’ he bassos, pointing at the silos behind them. ‘There’s someone up there on the access ladder.’ Roma McKinnon turns, her hand to her mouth. ‘Bloody hell!’ exclaims Gary Morgan, trying to grab the Nikon from Zan. A concatenation of human voices — shrieks of high-pitched excitement, shouts of alarm — fills the air as the news travels through the crowd in chain reaction. Zan whirls around with the Nikon, scanning the silo, all 277

over the place with the focus. Bright swoops of rainbow whoosh through the finder. Then big empty sections of convex curving-out silo, out-of-focus. Then Hiro, in white ninja kung fu pyjamas. Exquisitely tailored, Zan notes, admiring the flow of the fabric as she climbs higher and higher on the small ladder. Careful, Green Ninja Baby Hello, she ESPs across the high thin air between her and Hiro who must be at least four storeys high and rising. I know it’s bushi and all to do your own stunts, but watch your bum, Hiro. Quickly, she sweeps the crowd with the Nikon. Thousands of black metal lenses bristle like guns in the hands of the crowd, all aimed at Hiro. Without the aid of her telephoto, Hiro looks as small as an origami crane made out of a square inch of paper, stuck onto the silo with a piece of BluTak. ‘She’s lookin’ good,’ Zan reports back to Egor over the mobile. ‘But how is Tomiko going to make her escape if she’s there big as life up on the silo?’ ‘Something’s wrong,’ Egor says, his voice sounding desperate. ‘She’s not supposed to be up there. She doesn’t bloody n e e d to be fucking up there!’ he tells her. ‘The banners are remote controlled, Zan.’ Zan watches with apprehension through the highpowered lens as the tiny figure climbs higher and higher, trying to catch a glimpse of her face, but Hiro’s head is turned upwards, aimed at the top. She is wearing a very wide headband with big angry Japanese letters slashed all over it. On the very last rung Hiro turns and looks over her shoulder. Zan catches her breath. Her lips are slashed with black lipstick. Her eyes are slit with adamant hatred. She looks hard. Asiatic. And graphic. Without thinking, Zan 278

clicks the shutter and captures the image of Hiro’s hard face. Kenji has run the Louma crane to its highest position to capture Tomiko the Greenfighter’s exciting surprise appearance but the Arriflex is still way below her. Zan’s sphincter tightens as Hiro steps off the last rung of the ladder across a five-storey chasm of invisible air onto the top of the silo. She has a loudhailer in one hand up there on the silo, something else in the other. A walkie-talkie. ‘Sssshhhh!’ The signal snake-dances from person to person, the crowd falls deadly silent in a great husshhhhing exhale. Hiro’s voice transmits as small ghostly echos. Disconnected. Rags of sound drifting like ectoplasm, blowing in the wind. Zan strains to hear, disappointed, her heart sinking inside her at the unforgettable look on Hiro’s face. Zan can hear Egor sobbing into the phone now. The sound of him scares her more than the sight of Hiro strutting around on top of the silo. She hears the POP! POP! of two gunshots, sees two puffs of smoke at the top of the silo. Then a giant banner unfurls down the second silo. It looks like a cheque hanging down sideways, at least three storeys high. The writing’s so big and graphic she can easily read it without the Nikon. The cheque is made out in big slashy printing To: For: From: For:

GARY MORGAN $250,000. THE YAKUZA. THE TOWN OF VANCOUVER.

The crowd roars. Laughing and angry shouting in wild upheaval. The ABC cameraman is torn between Gary

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Morgan and Hiro, keeps jumping between them to see who’s the best copy. Gary is shaking his head at the Mayor, his face a bright beet red, like a bad boy caught shoplifting lollies. ‘I didn’t,’ he’s saying in a small voice over and over. Two more distant gunshots. Down comes the next banner with a big yellow bulldozer with a prohibit line through it and the beautiful emphatic graphics of Japanese writing. The Japanese men on the dias stiffen with umbrage, their expressions impassive. ‘What’s it say?’ Sheehan blurts, outrageously informal, at Tommy Tanaka who draws himself up with great dignity and snapping his fingers, passes the painfully embarrassing task of explaining to his underling. ‘The sign is one of protest directed at Lorus Friendship Co-op. It is saying in most angry manner “Mother Australia lies bleeding. Rape-men go home.”’ ‘Christ, Zan!’ Sheehan yells, alarmed. ‘What’s going on here? My clients find controversy and public outcry abhorrent. If this gets any worse they’ll pull the plug on my project and start all over in Queensland.’ ‘Maybe you should move to Noosa,’ Zan suggests, still trying to rouse Egor on the phone. ‘Egor, Egor, 10-4,’ but he isn’t listening. He is praying, intoning over his walkie-talkie to Hiro ‘pleaseohpleasenoHiro,’ then back on Zan’s phone he tells her, gasping. ‘She’s on the walkie-talkie to Kenji. Listen.’ He puts the walkie talkie to his mobile phone mouthpiece. Zan can barely make out Hiro’s faint squawky voice, doubly relayed as it is as she talks to Kenji. ‘Be sure you get this footage. Are the cameras rolling? No compromise in defence of Mother Earth! Let all who see my movie be nuked with shame!’ Ohmigod! In a panic, Zan grabs the Nikon and homes in 280

on Darwin. The sight of the top of his head behind his big Sony as he shoulders his way towards her through the crowd is reassuring. Bobby Takahashi, his face in a horrified grimace, is hulking his way through the crowd like a robot with the big Steadicam, dutifully getting it all down on film, Jun Sato the soundman close on his heels with the Nagra. The big Louma crane articulates like a huge praying mantis, slowly stretching towards Hiro. A terrible feeling of dread breaks like an egg inside her, oozing throughout her. She forces herself to look back at the silo where Hiro stands silhouetted against the blue sky. Slowly, she raises her arms skyward in a beautiful yearning gesture, then crosses them slowly in the Greenfight salute. Then she turns and walks away, off-screen. Thank God, Zan thinks, relief flooding through her, she can’t wait to describe the Little Nips’ embarrassed reaction to Hiro back at the Sky House. ‘You should have seen the look on their faces.’ The dark little shape comes hurtling off the top of the silo. ‘NO!’ Zan hears herself screaming as Hiro clears the rim of the silo jumping, launches off into space in the cleanest most exquisite athletic moment of triumph, her head arching back and her arms out like Christ on the cross she flies through a long swooping swan dive … OHIMIGOD, falling falling down and down to what Zan knows in all the terror of her flesh is death.

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38 38 Zan sits slumped over her laptop at the big old oak rolltop, trying to describe the sickening sinking feeling in the pit of your soul when you see a friend dying, still trying to make sense out of what happened eleven months later. She sees Hiro giving her that warm little kitty kat smile over her shoulder. Her hard unyielding face on the silo. The sound of the ambulance siren whingwhanging like a cat wanting to go out or come in still haunts her in the dark dead of night. Green Ninja Baby, Goodbye, she types on her laptop and sits for a long quiet while in sadness, staring at the delicate flowers in the antique Japanese vase Kenji sent her, columbines fresh-picked from the garden this morning, so fragile and wrinkly they look like pale yellow and violet ricepaper blossoms. Thanks to you Surfing Antarctica is a box-office sellout, Zan continues her letter to Hiro. We didn’t have to publicise it at all. 282

How could one not go and see a movie where the heroine actually suicides before your very own eyes? Kendo-san says the Japanese are lining up around the block for it. They think it’s romantic. Richard Corliss called it a ‘cheap stunt,’ akin to a snuff flick, but he wasn’t there. He didn’t know you. You were making a point, calling attention to the global Green crisis, and you made damn sure you got everyone’s attention. It’s no more a snuff flick than any movie which shows one of those holy monks who chose self-immolation to protest the war in Vietnam. Kenji argued for days with Darwin. Darwin didn’t want to release it because he was having a hard time coming to grip with the ethics but Kendo-san convinced him. I wish you could have heard him, dear Hiro. He said, ‘It exists, Darwin-san. You can’t make it be that it didn’t happen, and you must use it because that’s why Hiroshima-san did it, that’s what she wanted. She knew exactly what she was doing, media-wise. It was an inspired act of art on her part to sensationalise the movie and make it a must-see.’ Jesus Christ, Hiro. I keep seeing all of those ghoulish amateur Zapruders converging on your poor broken body, video cameras whirring and zooming, creating their own shockumentary footage to show the neighbours. I heard someone yelling, thrilled, ‘I got her jumping!’ Know this, my dear friend, I will always honour you. The clomp of big cowboy boots on the floorboards behind her, the delicious white iris waft of his trademark Issey Miyake cologne announce Kenji’s presence. ‘Kenji! You made it!’ she exclaims, thrilled, looking up at a beaming Kenji who is bearing two glasses of delicious Cuvaison Chardonnay. He peeps at the words on the laptop and toasts ‘Banzai!’ with a sad little smile. 283

‘May you live a thousand years …’ Zan echoes. Kenji shakes his glossy head, his big dark plummy eyes brimming. ‘Hiroshima Hiroshima had a pure heart,’ he says, and bows deeply to Hiro, holding his glass out before him so he won’t spill his wine. With a start Zan notices he’s missing half of his pinky. ‘Is that what I think it is?’ she gasps, moving in closer for a better look. Not one but two joints are missing, the little pink stump raw with big puckered weals. Wincing, Kenji inspects his cut-off little finger. ‘My surprise-attack banners accomplished much work, Zanchan,’ he says proudly, with a wry little smile. ‘Yamamotosan was so ashamed and angry he couldn’t show his big ugly face in Vancouver. He is building Happi Endo in Queensland, near Cairns where they are used to Yakuza. And he moved the Whale-O-Rama complex to New South Wales, somewhere on the coast where the big boys come to visit. So I, Kendo Kenji can say I saved the foreshore with my naughty banners.’ He thumps himself hard in his lower belly. ‘Onya, mate,’ Zan raises her glass and drains it, gives him a big Chardonnay smile. ‘You better get dressed, Blondie-san,’ Kenji reminds her, himself looking very kako ii in his deep plum coloured crushed velour waistcoat and custom-made lizardskin Tony Lama boots. ‘Just give me a few minutes,’ Zan says, pointing her head at the door. ‘Alone. I want to finish my poem.’ Back at her desk she slips a diskette in her laptop and opens it to her nearly completed collection, ‘A Woman’s Life is her Only Art’, and reads her half-finished poem.

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The women in Japan who’ve had abortions go to shrines and write these little notes of love and sorrow then crisply fold them into crane shapes swans and monkeys stylised chrysanthemums and pin them to the wall. Mommy loves you little lost one oh I love you little lost one Mommy’s sorry say the sorry origami that flutter like a baby’s pulse does in the wind inside the shrine. Sighing, Zan stands in the window, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. The setting sun behind it streaks the sky with bright colours. Persian melon, flamingo, persimmon, papaya, the dusky red-orange of the huge man-made bridge

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which sits on the horizon like a large metal souvenir bank on top of a dresser. She smiles and shivers. I almost lost you, little loved one to inconvenience and encroachment the ultra with-it Feministic gynecologically hip to options swingingly singular me the whole ambivalent assault fear and loathing terror gestalt of the unmarried motherhood thing. He talked me into you, your father threw his head back laughed and shouted puffed his chest out Wow! he bellowed Yes! he bellowed Yes! and 286

Yes! you big fat sweet full bellied He talked me into me. ‘Blondie-san!’ Kenji barks from downstairs. ‘Hurry up! Surfing Antarctica opening is in twenty minutes!’ ‘Come rescue me, Babe!’ Darwin yodels, ‘Before I have tee many martunis!’ I got you Babe. Zan’s internal Muzak kicks in Cher’s golden oldie, as she slips into her slippy slidey leaf-green Issey Miyake and the gorgeous new silver stilettos she got for a steal from the big foot store on Sutter that make her totally awesome, and clip-clops down the stairs, her heart skipping, her eyes kissing the sight of her feisty, grandiose daughter Lolly asleep in the backpack on Darwin’s back. The sight of her on the stairs all ashimmer sends a knife of hot joy slicing through him. Here, now, he feels the magnificent warmth and the weight of his child pressing against him, pushing him into another dimension, feels himself poised on some kind of shapeless diaphanous border, like an amoeba splitting in two, only the film’s running backwards and he and Zan are the two twinned amoeba returning to one.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a novel is a true feat of endurance. I owe a lot to a lot of people for their support and encouragement over the long haul. My deepest love and appreciation to my big gorgeous husband, Robert Siegel, and our big gorgeous children, Lia and Maxwell. Thanks to Bruce Manning for securing my creative space and to Barbara Barclay for helping me fill it! Thanks to Chris Jones for his rock jock expertise and to Dave Taylor of Get Bushed! for letting me play with his bandoliers. Thanks, Peter Pocock, for the generous use of that laser printer. To Steve Pinner of Spinner Charters, for his help with the whales. To Gary Dwyer, for not wincing when cut. To Alistair and Noeleen Holmes, for all their fine sustenance over the years. To John and Angela Treanor, for letting me quit so I could write this book. To Jo Sharp and Andrew Markovs, for the hotness of being cool. To my home away from home, Di Thomson and Jan and Col Stevens. Thanks to Peter ‘Chook’ Hansen for technical support. To my workmates Louise Hillman, Hazel Walker, Jan Waterman and Kay Geldard, for their moral support. With respect and admiration to Mark Pemberton. And last, but not least, to Robynne Siegert, for keeping me grounded. Professional development courtesy of Wendy Jenkins and Ray Coffey. The phrasings on page 207 are based on the writings of Yukio Mishima. The poem on pages 285-7 first appeared in Westerly.