The Highway North, part III

Continuing with the latest installment of Your Correspondent's 2010 NaNoWriMo effort... preceding episodes here and here


Wednesday. The carpark outside the OAK factory in Hexham.

I’d been rumbled. Probably not surprisingly, it’d been JC who’d joined the dots. He smirked at me like Smuggy McSmuggo, Mayor of Smugtown, as I fumbled for a comeback.

“It’s not like that,” I muttered, disingenously. “They lent me the camera, but that’s it… It’s not like it was the driver for the roadtrip.”

Heh, the driver for the roadtrip. See what I did there. I write for Grunt Weekly, fucken.

Look, the idea for the mission came first, I’d swear that to my dying day. What Would Munter Do, and all that. The thought that that a good-old-fashioned blokes-on-a-roadtrip tale could make a story, pitched correctly, which my new employers might want to run as a feature article, and maybe even upgrade me from caption-writing lackey to actual-article-writing-type-staffer, came later. I’d run the idea past the feature editors at the mag and they’d given it their full backing. By which they meant absolutely no support in terms of expenses or any commitment to publish it, but they’d conceded to have a look at it when I was finished, and they’d give me the week off. As leave without pay. Oh, and they’d lent me a camera - my continued employment at the magazine being contingent on its return intact and unscratched. I wasn’t much of a photographer - wasn’t much of a writer either, depending on who you asked - but I didn’t think it’d be a problem given that we were only talking here about shots of cars, pubs, roadside attractions, and men behaving badly. Or Ben behaving madly, as someone very, very funny had suggested for the project’s working title. OK, it was me, and I realise it was shit.

“It’s fine,” JC laughed, “I don’t care. Always wanted to be a clichéd wisecracking gay sidekick... Besides, I want to see how your editors manage the idea of a positive portrayal of an actual gay male person in their magazine without their fucking heads exploding at the cognitive dissonance…”

“Yeah… I considered that. Figured I’d just write you in as a lesbian. Win-win for all sides.”

JC’s face darkened. “You fucker,” he swore. “You would, too…”

“I’m joking,” I said. “Besides, what’s wrong with being a wisecracking lesbian sidekick? You got something against lesbians, you homophobe?”

The dirty look I was getting indicated JC wasn’t really appreciating the humour. I knew why. He would have viewed me changing his identity to suit the profile of Grunt’s readership base much like Google censoring the internet for the Chinese government or education departments conceding defeat to Cletuses with imaginary friends and allowing intelligent design to be taught as science. Do that, and you’re just as complicit in their bigoted, backward bullshit as the fuckwits pushing the propaganda in the first place. I knew that. Agreed with it. Didn’t mean I’d completely figured out how to avoid the article getting flicked courtesy the wisecracking gay dude in the passenger seat terrifying the target demographic. That demographic being 18-30 single white males who were definitely not in any way insecure about their sexual orientation, and bought lads’ mags dripping with bikini-clad tits and articles on blokey blokeyness to prove it.

And look, let’s be clear on this - I held nothing against bikini-clad tits. After six months’ drought you might say I wished I could hold quite a few things against them. Then again, after that same six months of staring at silicon-enhanced, Photoshop-airbrushed ‘perfection’ (under the guise of trying to come up with snappy captions and breakout text for ‘interviews’ with such intellectual giants as these) I’d found the single most attractive thing about a girl was still her humanity. The little things that made her unique, made her real. Made her something that wasn’t the default set of pneumatic curves, pearlescent teeth and perfect hair, template-as-established by our editorial forebears in the British lads’ mag industry, who’d developed the international prototype for what we were doing at Grunt in the previous decade, and in doing, ensured that Page 3 girls all over the UK had gainful photo-work all year round. Ditto for the hacks who made up their answers to interview questions about their favourite place to shag and what they thought of other Page 3 models’ boobs.

A bit north of Hexham I guided the heavily-laden Camira onto the on-ramp for the big Shell servo just south of Heatherbrae, opposite the botanic gardens

“Broken already?” quipped Jules. “Hahaha.”

“Nah, just my cheap-arsed brother never puts any fuel in it,” I replied. “It’s on empty.”

Slight technicality, the needle had been on empty since we’d left. Actually, it’d been on empty since about 2006, according to Mitch. Gauge was borked. He just chucked ten bucks’ worth in every second or third time he drove it, so he didn’t have to get out and push that often. Once every couple of months perhaps.

“Just thought it was that CHECK ENGINE light you were worried about…”

“Nah,” I said, pulling up next to the pump and hearing the handbrake cable SPROING like a dropped banjo as I reefed it on. Hmmm, best leave it gear. “That’s an advanced feature on these models, called a Warning Light Warning Light. It’s a warning light that’s designed to come on to tell you that the warning lights don’t work properly.”

“The TEMP light works on the same principle then?”

“You know how fucken rude it is to read over someone else’s shoulder?”

JC wanted to play another game. He’d gotten over his sulk re the probability of being turned into a lesbian and had white line fever again - no, not a debilitating condition brought on by overindulgence in powdered goods, more the cabin-fever silliness that comes about on roadtrips. For normal people it generally takes longer than twenty minutes of actual travel to kick in, but our JC was a bit special. In all respects.

“Shell Shop Secret Santa,” he declared. “Ten dollar limit. Buy for the person sitting clockwise from you. Go.”

“It’s not Secret Santa if you know who’s buying for you,” Chris pointed out.

“And it’s July,” Jules moaned.

“I said GO,” JC commanded. “Do I have to say it? ‘I have never held done Secret Santa in a Shell Shop in July.’ Happy?”

We reconvened at the Camira in ten minutes, after refuelling, buying a bunch of quality roadside crap, and JC had featured in his latest episode of Great Moments In Incontinence. The Camira itself was doing a fair impression of JC himself in that respect - I’d forgotten you shouldn’t quite fill it up to the brim as it tended to dribble fuel back out the neck of the fuel tank and puddle under the rear axle. Ah well. So long as JC didn’t take up smoking again.

Shell Shop Secret Santa prizegiving time:

- Chris had bought JC a Living End singles compilation from the bargain bin, because he was a cruel and hurtful man and knew JC hated the Living End with a passion that inflamed his very soul. Largely because we’d used it heavily as return fire in our first year sharehousing sonic warfare every time JC had played Tori Amos of a morning, because we didn’t need noone to tell us what to do, let alone a batshit insane ginger whose folks spent too much on piano lessons when she was a brat.

- JC had bought me the last issue of Grunt and a box of Kleenex. (See what he did there? It’s very subtle I realise.)

- Jules had bought me four litres of pre-mixed radiator coolant, because he couldn’t remember which way was clockwise (was it different in the northern hemisphere or something?) and who he should be buying for.

- Finally, I’d bought Jules a fluoro-yellow high-vis jacket so he could get out and push in safety and comfort when the Camira eventually packed it in. That’d be worth the price of admission… which was fifty bucks, as the bet currently stood. He looked genuinely touched. He put it on immediately, declared himself Plant Operations Manager For Life, and started barking random instructions.

With that, we hit the road. Despite JC’s bitter protestations we put the Living End CD on to cheer Chris up, since noone had bought him a present and the Newy police were still to phone up and tell him they’d recovered the burnt-out shell of his beloved Magna from the bottom of the Hunter. Or similar, as we were discussing, at length.

“It’s probably being used to pick up hitchhikers out west and murder them in horrible ways,” Jules suggested.

“Nah,” I said, “need something with more boot space for that. Got to take the spare tyre out to get more than two hookers in there, it’s just a writeoff.”

“It’s got a tow bar,” JC pointed out. “Like, hello, caravan of death… You’re just not thinking things through at a high enough level.”

“True. I’d just figured it was being used as the ‘Before’ car in a Pimp My Ride Down Under Special…”

“You quite finished?” Chris grumbled.

“I’ve never seen a 1996 Mitsubishi Magna on Pimp My Ride.”

“Is this part of the game… if none of us have seen it, we have to Make It So?”

“Uh, no,” said Jules. “I think it technically has to be in our power to achieve.”

“You mean like taking home young whatsherface from the water polo team last night, Jules?” queried JC wolfishly.

“Ah, no. Don’t know what you’re on about there…”

“Fail whale?” I queried.

“Nothing of the sort. I’m a man true to his prior commitments,” he said. I’d heard there was a girl back in London - there usually had been, just not necessarily the same one - so that joined a few dots. “Besides, she was more interested in your little brother, as near as I could tell.”

“Hmmm… that wasn’t who JC and I had the pleasure of having to listen to through the walls at the Ghetto, I think. Unless she’s a ventriloquist…”

“You can talk,” JC piped up. “Sneezy.”

“What?”

“Ahh… ahhh… aahhhh…” Jesus. He’d recapitulated Caroline’s most urgent, intimate moments with disturbing accuracy. Walls were thinner than I thought at ours. “I kept waiting for the right moment to yell out ‘GESUNTHEIT!’…”

“Mate, I was just glad she even got there,” I replied. “She was harder to get off than a melted wetsuit…”

“Yes, well,” remarked Jules. “No, I think young Kelly ended up disappointed. Her captain pulled rank.”

“Well she ended up with Mitch, I’ll say she did. Can’t pull much ranker than him.”

“What’s at Tea Gardens?”

“Tea,” I said. “In a garden… Dunno. Never been there.”

“Neither have I.”

Neither had anyone. Tea Gardens it was. It was a bit off the highway north of Karuah, another of the hundreds of little coastal towns that were sprinkled along the NSW coast. A pretty little town with a pretty silly name, it sat across the harbour from Port Stephens and Nelson Bay. Across the bridge lay the beachside town of Hawks Nest. You could tell we were still within Sydney weekender territory here, with the smatterings of B&Bs, holiday rentals and shinified cafés. An old-fashioned burger-with-the-lot from a greasy beachfront burger joint looked like a tall order. (Ahem.) Still, it had a bottle shop. And it had a golf course.

“Quick round of stick?” I suggested. It was a gorgeous winter’s morning, the course was empty, we had time, it looked like a quiet country course that wouldn’t mind the lads taking a few roadies with on course, we could hire some dodgy old clubs that’d take the edge off certain peoples’ competitive advantage, and for fuck’s sake, it might actually cheer Chris up. The Living End hadn’t helped. I was going to suggest he sampled a spoonful of concrete and harden the fuck up, but he didn’t need noone to tell him what to do. Oh yes, he was on his own, and there was nothing we could do.

Chris nodded, looked a bit surprised that the offer had come, he was usually the poor sucker agitating for someone to play against out on the links. Jules, who always liked a chance to rekindle old sporting rivalries with the likes of Chris and myself, was in. JC… wasn’t.

“Don’t make me say it,” I said. “I have never played a round at Hawks Nest Golf Club…”

“And I’ve never stabbed someone to death for making me play a round of golf at Hawks Nest Golf Club,” JC retorted. “Drive, bitch. I can feel myself getting more yokel by the minute. Any more so and I’ll end up skolling eighteen bourbon-and-Cokes and bashing myself behind the bowlo.”

Unfortunately for JC, I’d noticed something on Google Maps while sledging a few peeps on Twunter on the Jesus Phone. There was another road north. A road north that wasn’t the highway north, but that linked back up with the highway at Bulahdelah. It went along the coast between the beach and the Myall River estuary, across the lake by ferry, then wound around the edge of the broadwater through the Myall Lakes National Park. It looked a bit fiddlier, but it was exactly the same distance - it was 42 kays to Bulahdelah regardless which way you went. Bulahdelah was your archetypal ugly highway town in amongst a bunch of gorgeous scenery which every bastard traipsing up and down the dual carriageway usually got to see two fifths of fuck-all of - which was kinda the point of this trip, at least as I’d envisaged it. Get off the main roads and out amongst the stuff and the things. Here was a road that went straight through the middle of aforesaid stuff and/or things. And, more to the point, I’d never, ever been on it. I’m a sucker for roads I’d never, ever been on. Mungo Brush Road had me at ‘Hello’.

It was pretty, too. Hemmed in by the banksias and acacias of the heathland, Mungo Brush road was narrow but empty of traffic. Sunlight played through the overhanging foliage on both sides of the road as we pressed on through the green tunnel, serenaded by Chris Cheney requesting politely that we provide him with some form of second solution. For the second time today, which would presumably make it a third solution. It was the only CD we had, and the only AUX cable we had was somewhere in the centre console of Chris’ Magna, currently sitting burnt-out on blocks out in Newcastle’s glorious bogan west. Possibly.

“Don’t pay the ferryman,” JC advised me. “Don’t even fix a price.”

But, as it happened, the price was fixed already - nix, nada, diddly fuckin’ squat - so we pushed on, rolling the overladen Camira onto the ferry and bottoming out woefully on the on-ramp, to the point where we had to jettison some of the ballast, i.e. get Jules and Chris out of the back seats. The sunlight glistened off the lake (and off Jules’ hi-vis jacket, which he’d still refused to take off) as the big diesels roared and the water churned behind us. We were the only punters on the ferry, and the ferry was the only noise for miles around.

“How’s the serenity?” I quipped.

Noone answered, because they couldn’t hear me over the diesels.

What Google Maps didn’t show, however, was that large swathes of Lakes Road - the twisty, fiddly road which led through forest and farm from the ferry off-ramp back to the highway at Bulahdelah - was gravel. Wasn’t too bad, although it was a bit corrugated from traffic, and washed out by recent rain. Which, if you were sitting in the back of an aging Camira wagon with self-ejecting door trims, dodgy door seals and heavily laden, non-compliant suspension, would be a bit crap.

“We’re breaking up,” tailgunner Jules reported grimly. “We’re going down… I ain’t fucking pushing from here, just so you know.”

If you were driving, of course, it wasn’t such a drama. You knew when the big bumps were coming. You could even *cough* aim for them, if you were so inclined, but obviously only a complete prick would do that.

“MY EYES,” Jules wailed. “THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!!”

Yeah, yeah, so apparently the window winder wasn’t dealing with the vibrations too well and his window was rattling open. Not just a bit. Completely to the stops. Then again, if he’d brought something better than those dodgy fucking ‘80s-throwback Wayfarers for eye protection… just saying.

“Can you hear something?” JC mused tartly. “Some sort of high-pitched whine…”

“I’ll be worried when I can’t hear it,” I replied, “means he’s finally choked to death on dust. Bags not telling his mum.”

A glance into my furiously-shaking rear vision mirror indicated I was getting flipped off by Jules’ free hand - the one which wasn’t white-knuckling the overhead grabhandle. Shortly followed by an ‘ARRGH FUCK’ as the grabhandle came free from the rooflining over one particularly nasty thump, resulting in Jules somehow contriving to punch himself in the head, with hilarious results.

“The bet doesn’t count if you dismantle the car yourself, Jules,” I said.

He wasn’t the happiest of campers when we dismounted at one of the big service centres in Bulahdelah to inspect the damage and glue the missing bits back on. While we were there we gave the Camira the once-over too. It was hanging in there alright, actually - nothing a tube of superglue, a roll of gaffa tape, a litre or so of Castrol GTX and a damn good vacuuming out couldn’t solve. Meanwhile we let Jules pick the next CD, i.e. we sent him into the shop to buy one, since he earned in pounds and all. He returned with Club Anthems 2009. Like his hairdo and the beef jerky from the bargain bin, it was at least 18 months out of date. Still, we welcomed all three into Frigmobile, and it gave him something to bond with Jules over - how desperately behind the times Australia’s club scene was, and how by 2009 Armand van Helsing or Transit Van Gogh or Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink or whoever this particular overrated fucking wedding DJ was had already become passé and was very much last week’s fishwrappers in Ibiza or Marbella or Aberdeen or wherever the hard-core clubbists of the UK gathered in their chemically-altered numbers.

“Pub in Forster for lunch,” I suggested. “I know a good one.”

Which was a lie. I hadn’t been through Forster in 20 years. I was just looking for an excuse to avoid the highway. The brief flirtations we’d had with 110km/h on open dual carriageway out of Newcastle had highlighted some fairly grim vibrational characteristics with Frigmobile that I doubted a bloody good shake over Lakes Rd would have improved. The wheel alignment was all over the place like a mad woman’s breakfast and the fronts had clearly taken a few knocks from kerbs and the like around the streets and carparks of Newy - Mitch clearly endorsed the theory and practice of Parking By Braille. Tooling along on gently-twisting backroads - like the Lakes Way which ran from Bulahdelah to near-as-dammit Taree via Forster and Tuncurry - seemed to suit the old girl better, it cornered pretty flat even with all the accumulated mass in it and had always been a nice-handling thing to drive. The kids in the back had cold(ish) Coopers 62s ex-Bulahdelah Cellars to keep them happy and so long as I didn’t press on too enthusiastically through the twisty bits over the range, they wouldn’t end up wearing too much of them. Brakes weren’t enjoying the work, though. Still, that’s what the gearbox is for. Or so I’d always been taught.

We cruised through comedically named localities like Boolambayte and Bungwahl, then wound around the shoreline of Smiths Lake and Wallis Lake. Given the local area’s major culinary export, the topic of oysters was suddenly popping up in pre-lunch conversation. For us it was Kilpatrick all the way, as per the golden rule of manhood (bacon improves everything) - unless you were JC, who liked them raw because he was weird and clearly enjoyed the sensation of slimy things down his throat. For the record, he went there, we didn’t.

By then we were rolling into the southern fringes of Forster. And where else could we have gone for a feed but the mighty Forster-Tuncurry Bowling Club? Well as it turned out, just about anywhere, because the Bowlo was more desperately average than a Nickelback best-of album. But they had Old on tap, and a sly middy of same (to stay well under 0.05) was a cold refreshing reward after chauffeuring this lot of whinging bastards about the lower mid-north coast.

And better still, there was still placename comedy gold to be had, snapped and uploaded to Teh Interwebz (as 3G signal permitted) on the northern half of the Lakes Way - Failford, Darawank and Krappinghat. Technically the last one was Khappinghat but JC misread the sign and we figured it was close enough for a pic. Could always Photoshop it later, it’ll be sweet.

We hit the highway again after that, settling into the cruise. The death-rattle vibes that kicked in at 110 seemed to ease off at 115, like we’d hit the natural resonant frequency of the beast. Jules’ high-NRG dance choonz just became background ambient noise after a while, like the wind rush around the Camira’s roofracks or the occasional groan from Jules as we hammered over an expansion joint a bit too sharply for his kidneys’ liking. The bridge approaches over the Manning River on the Taree bypass were particularly bastard-riffic, because the road had subsided a little over the years from trucks pounding over them. They’d been a prick even in my old low-slung Skyline; in the Camira we almost went into orbit. A ferocious crunch on re-entry indicated there may be a structural issue in our future. That and the fact we now sounded like a squadron of Harleys being broadcast through a mainstage rock-fest PA, as the back half of the muffler skated down the road, ricocheted off the bumper of the B-double behind on the half-volley, and disappeared over the side of the bridge into the Manning.

“Hmmm… is this thing on? I can hardly tell?” chirped Jules.

“IT’S WHISPER QUIET!”

“You got all that juice from that whole bag of oranges?”

And so on. Didn’t wake Chris up though. He’d settled into for the afternoon, a big feed and a few too many beers in the sunshine having done their work. Actually everyone was feeling the effects a bit and had flicked the switch to siesta mode - me excluded, for obvious reasons. Jules was chilling to something or other through the earbuds on his iPhone and JC also had his umbilical link to civilization resolutely plugged into his conscious, though London to a brick what he was doing was work-related, firing through his emails or something. Bloody workaholics. He needed to get a job that didn’t fulfil or enrich him in any way, so he’d be as happy as me to skive off for a week’s pointless roadtripping up the coast.

So we cruised in relative silence, marked only by the occasional bleep-bleep-blurb of whatever it was that Jules had going through his earbuds. The 2009 Annual had long since had its day, the stereo had fallen silent - in no way because the car hadn’t wanted to start back in Forster and I was pretty sure the CD player had been sucking current that the dodgy old alternator wasn’t too flash at recouping. An old car is an organic thing, though. On a drive like this, you get to know its limits, its idiosyncracies. You learn its foibles and figure out work-arounds for its problems. You work together. The electrical system - solved. So long as we didn’t crank shitty dance music on the stereo, we had a sufficiency of volts. The rear shocks were shot, which meant you went porpoising down the highway over serious bumps, but lifting off just before hitting them gave you a touch more travel as the rear end lifted a tad, the same way you lift off the brakes just as you’re approaching a suburban speed bump to make the nose lighten. The right front CV joint had a finite lifespan, judging by the snap crackle and pop in the bowlo carpark, but at highway speeds it wasn’t a problem, just a bit of background noise. The air-con was rooted, but it was July so who cared. And with no muffler from the midpoint back it might have been a wheezy old two-litre four but it sounded like a NASCAR. Awesome.

And best of all, the way we were rolling, I was in line to take fifty bucks off of Jules. Didn’t matter to him - he earned in pounds, as we were being reminded on a relentless basis - but it was handy discretionary pocket money for me.

We must have settled into that sort-of Zen serenity for a while, because when someone spoke it suddenly shook me out of my reverie. We were maybe thirty or forty kays north of Taree, I’d been doing my car-ESP thing trying to work out if the vibration I was picking up on smooth resurfaced bits of highway was the dodgy alignment, the dodgy CV joint, dodgy wheel weights or dodgy tyres, when JC startled me with an exclamation.

“Dunbogan,” he declared. “I want to go to there.”

I was guessing he had Google Maps open on his iPhone. “Where the fuck is Dunbogan? What the fuck is Dunbogan?”

“Near Laurieton, I think.”

I knew Laurieton. By name, not really by experience. Another of those anonymous beachside hamlets which the highway always streeted past, and me with it. I was vaguely aware of a coast road which departed from the highway at Kew or somewhere and followed the coastline to Port Macquarie, twenty kays or so north, tonight’s destination. I was pretty sure that road went through Laurieton. If we were that close to Port, we were actually a lot closer to our intended stop for the night than I’d figured.

“Dunbogan,” I mused. “What the hell do you do in Dunbogan?”

“No idea. I think it’s where the readers of Grunt go to die,” JC suggested.

“A must-visit then,” I said. “Since I’m on assignment and all.”

The kids in the back stirred as we peeled off the highway at Kew.

“What are we doing?” Chris wanted to know.

“Going to Dunbogan,” I said. “Ay.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s there,” JC declared.

“How very Edmund Hillary of you,” Jules observed. “Shouldn’t we be climbing mountains or something?”

“Can do that too,” I said. “There’s only that one though,” I pointed out. We’d made the turn right onto Ocean Drive and were headed east, a steep conical projection looming out of the flat farmland ahead of us. “Not much of a mountain. Middle Brother, I think.”

“North Brother,” corrected JC, consulting the oracle.

“Even better. North Brother. I dub thee ‘Mitch’.”

“Not quite tall enough,” Chris surmised.

“Yeah, didn’t recognise him without the Bowie T-shirt…”

“Bowie's in space…” I mused. “Whatcha doin' out there, man?”

“That's pretty freaky Bowie…”

“Is it cold out in space Bowie? You can borrow my jumper if you like…”

“Does the cold of deep space make your nipples go pointy Bowie?”

“You guys quite finished?” remarked Jules.

“Yeah, sorry Jules. How derivative of us. If it’d been Simpsons quotes rather than Conchords, obviously you’d have had nothing to do with it…”

You may have noticed Jules loved his Simpsons quotes. Years back he used to come over and watch VCR tapes of the Simpsons which Mitch - who went through a big phase as a young lad of (a) obsessing over the Simpsons and (b) wanting to be Jules, because his big bro wasn’t cool enough - had recorded off the local Channel 10 affiliate.

“Whatever,” he said. “Still not seeing the point of climbing all over your brother.”

“Unlike your intended from last night…”

“And yours?”

“Touché,” I conceded. “Tou-fucken-ché.”

“I’d figured you’d have done better. Maybe you should read this article about ‘The six steps to seducing any woman you want’…” He had the copy of Grunt in his hand and a smug grin on his dial, indicating he’d seen my teeny tiny byline on the piece, wedged in nano-point font against the spine of the magazine.

“Step one is not reading fucking Grunt magazine,” I said. “Not sure if it says that there…”

“Doesn’t appear to be.”

“Yeah, funny that.”

We were tooling through the tree-lined housing developments of Lakewood and West Haven, hemmed in by the southern shores of the estuarine Queens Lake to the north, and the northern slopes of North Brother to the south. Yeah, that just broke my mental compass too. My moral compass had been on the fritz for years anyway.

“Got to get a photo of that,” JC declared. The brown tourist-attraction roadsign indicated ‘North Brother Lookout’ under larger signage that read ‘Dooragan National Park’.

“Just nick the sign, nail it to his door at the Ghetto,” I suggested. “North Brother At Work, Lookout, Achtung, Schnell, Nailing Tool In Use. Actually,” I added, “fuck it. Let’s climb it.”

“What, on foot?” Jules was incredulous. He didn’t do nature walks.

“Nah,” I said, indicating right. “In this.”

The two-lane bitumen of Captain Cook Bicentenary Drive narrowed to one between the thickening forest of arrow-straight eucalypts, as we began winding up the hillside, the road steepening as it narrowed. Would make a hell of a tarmac rally stage, this, I thought to myself, and the temptation was there to really have at it and see what the old girl was capable of. Traffic was non-existent, conditions were perfect… but then I remembered that grumbling CV joint, the dodgy brakes, the doughy throttle, the temp gauge skyrocketing in synchrony with the tacho needle, and Jules’ oversensitive arse over anything that looked like a bump. Nah. Best take it easy. Besides, the only roadside furniture keeping us from a long plunge down the hillside should one depart from the narrow strip of bitumen were tree trunks, bracken ferns and leaf litter.

“You sure we’re going to make it?”

“You’re starting to worry about your fifty bucks are you…”

“More my chances of surviving,” Jules replied grimly.

“Don’t worry your ugly little head about it,” I replied, trying to disguise the effort required in hauling the overladen Camira through a tightening uphill left-hander. Power steering wasn’t the best. Probably leaking. Probably explained the acrid smell of very hot hydraulic fluid from somewhere under the bonnet. Unless that was brake fluid, of course. “You’ll live to use the return leg of that ticket from Heathrow, don’t worry about that.”

“I’m more thinking about how we’re supposed to come back down…”

“Piece of piss,” I remarked. “It’s all downhill, yeah?”

Soon enough - or not nearly soon enough, if you were Jules, who was starting to look a little pale and peaky in my rear view mirror - we emerged from the trees and crested the final rise up to the reserve at the lookout - picnic area, carpark, viewing platform. And what a view. There were a few clouds about but for the most part it was clear and sunny out to the north, where you could see for miles up the coast, almost to Port Macquarie, disappearing into the saltspray haze. In the foreground was the broadwater of Queens Lake, feeding via a sinuous tree-lined creek into the broadening mouth of the Camden Haven River, Laurieton on the near side, Dunbogan on the far.

“That’s fuckin’ pretty,” I declared.

“Yeah, a lot prettier than the other North Brother,” Chris said.

“Oh, I don’t know…” mused JC.

“Dude. Eeeuwww.”

JC had been winding me up about Mitch’s prettiness ever since he’d come out, pretty much. At least I hoped he was saying it to wind me up. “Nothing personal, mate,” I’d usually say, “but I don’t really see you as brother-in-law material…”

To be honest, I had no idea how you were meant to react if and when one of your mates decided they were keen on your brother. Were you supposed to go the overprotective route like guys with sisters who were objects of attraction? I’d only heard of that sort of thing anecdotally anyway - none of us had sisters (well, Chris had an older sister but she’d always kept to herself, and JC’s sister alternated between being rational and being part of the Family Brethren and as such was best avoided like the rest of them) so your guess was as good as mine as to what was an appropriate response. However given Mitch’s cheerful philosophy of banging as many girls as were interested in his bony arse, I didn’t feel it’d ever become much of an issue.

And in truth, JC would have made a better brother-in-law than most. Like the one our man Munter was about to end up with at the end of this coming weekend...

Chris and I knew the story, because we’d been there; we’d recounted it enough times in the interim, including on this trip, that JC and Jules knew it too. Basically it involved Munter’s bucks do up in Brisbane a month or two back - myself, Chris, a couple of Munter’s mates from UNE and work, the future BIL, and the future BIL’s bestie, the fucking retard. I say he was a fucking retard - he didn’t look the sharpest tool in the farmshed (he was the farmhand on the parents’ farm back home), been dropped on his head a few too many times at birth, but he was mainly known as ‘the fucking retard’ because that’s what BIL called him. Constantly. Like it was funny. If anyone was a fucking retard it was him, a braying Quoinslaaaaand cunt in a checked shirt tucked into his jeans, looking more belligerently out-of-place than a freshly-laid turd in a pair of Julius Marlows, drinking XXXX Gold and actually liking it. If he was a marker of what the rest of the family were like - and he was, then as now, the only member of said family any of us had met, even with me as intended best man and Chris as BIL’s fellow groomsman - you could understand my doubts re the likely potential for long-term win for the Munter.

Anyway. BIL made it very clear that he was your typical bigoted, homophobic, racist fuck from the arse end of nowhere. And that was well before we’d actually started drinking properly. We kicked off at the Doomben races, kicked on into the Valley - where BIL and his dozy offsider were kind enough to bellow their way through a very loud game of ‘Spotto’ awarding each other points for identifying fags, lezzos, dirty chinks and boat people who needed sending the fuck home - then on a train to Suncorp for the evening’s Main Event, the Reds vs Waratahs Super 15 rugger game. Where BIL decided it was time to start regaling us with stories of his sister’s younger days, in particular those she’d spent being anyone’s and everyone’s after two Stolis. “Fucken hell, even this fucken retarded cunt’s had a crack at her. Three fucken times!”

Anyway, the inevitable happened and security tossed us for language - probably shouldn’t have got us the expensive seats up with the shiny people there Munter - which was just as well as I’d had a fucking gutful.

“We’re off into town,” Munter reported, as we filed out through the concrete canyon of the concourse. “Strip club o’clock.”

I shook my head. “Nah mate. Sorry. We’re done.”

“Too much piss?”

“Nah, too much cunt. That cunt.”

Munter nodded solemnly. He was disappointed, you could see, but he’d figured as much. Probably predicted it in advance.

“Where you off to?”

Chris shrugged. “We’re staying on Coro, so maybe the Regatta, or the RE… yeah probably the RE,” he said, on second thoughts. The ‘Gatta wasn’t what it’d once been. Shiny, superficial and obnoxious. And that was just the clientele.

“You fucken faggots joining us or what?” bellowed BIL, draping an arm around Munter. “Get a faceful of some dripping cunt…”

“Been staring at one of them all fucking day,” I observed.

“Sorry pal?” he said, close-talking all of a sudden. “I didn’t quite hear that.”

“I said, you’re a cunt,” I replied, with the sort of steel only a lot of piss can provide. “And you’ve singlehandedly manage to fuck up my oldest mate’s buck’s night. Fucken kudos to you champ. Now fuck off to your wank palace, we’re off to the pub.”

Needs to be said here and now that I can’t fight. I don’t fight. I talk a much better fight than I ever engage in. Munter knew that, Chris knew that. BIL didn’t. Yet.

“You are a fucking faggot,” he declared.

“I’m a fucking faggot?” I queried. “From the cunt who’s done nothing but spout scared homophobic bullshit all night. You are what you hate, bitch. Transparent as fuck. Your husband know what you think of your secret life together?”

There was a hand in my chest, but it was Munter’s, and his other was pressing against BIL’s. He was trying to keep us apart. Probably saw what was coming next. Me getting my arse kicked.

“What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“Jesus fuck... I’m saying you’re gay. And you’re doing a shit job of covering it up. Go deal with it. Fuck off down the Wickham, get yer fucken shirt off and make some friends. And get the fuck out of my face.”

“Or what?” he sneered. “I’ll have you, faggot. You’ll be laid out with one hit.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “You might. But then the thirty-five security guards within a twenty yard radius will be dragging you off to lockup to get arse-fucked by some six-eight Tongan bouncer. You’ll like that. Or they’ll just save you the trouble and cave your pretty face in out the back. Your Thai rentboy won’t hardly fucking recognise you any more…”

At which point security finally intervened, again, and we were sent on our separate ways. Munter grim-facedly dragged the two yokels, still slurring insults and abuse after us, towards the Caxton St cab rank in search of a Maxi-Taxi, glumly followed by most of the walking wounded from the Tour de Munter. Chris and I, plus a few other rebels from the Armidale contingent of Munter’s mates, headed for the Milton train station. The RE it was. After which point the night improved dramatically. For one thing, we caught the end of the Super 15. BIL’s Reds got fucking annihilated.

So yeah, we were most surprised when not only was it confirmed by Munter that Chris and I were still invited to the wedding, but we were starting front-row selections as best man and groomsman respectively, along with Luke, one of his other UNE mates who’d fucked off to the pub with us, and the inevitable BIL. Got the impression that there’d been fearsome diplomatic (and possibly undiplomatic) pressure, sanctions and threats from Bridezilla trying to have our candidacies rescinded and her brother installed as puppet best-man for life, but Munter had held firm. God bless the stubborn bastard. For his part, BIL had sheepishly claimed to anyone who’d listen he’d remembered nothing of any of anything, up to the point of ending up in the watchhouse at the Valley cop shop for groping a transvestite at a club then assaulting them for not being what it said on the tin, as far as he could read - which at 3.40am wasn’t very far.

Yeah, good times. And interesting times to come on the weekend, when we were to be reunited with BIL - and introduced to Munter’s betrothed - at the wedding. On the day. The former would come first, probably - we of the groom’s party had a suit fitting on Saturday morning, then a practice run through the ceremony in the afternoon on site (though not in the actual location intended, much to Bridezilla’s chagrin, due to the whole club championships thing that they’d so rudely scheduled for the same Saturday she’d wanted for her big day, hence having to move it to Sunday). The potential amusement would be in meeting Bridezilla when she was likely to be at her shabbiest - not only deep in pre-wedding logistical fury, but nursing a big fuck-off hen’s night hangover. Two nights out from the wedding. Despite Munter being obliged to have his bucks’ do almost two months out.

Doubts, I had a few.

Anyway, back to North Brother, a good 600 kays from the coming unpleasantnesses of the Indro Golf Club on the weekend. The view from the lookout around the south side - accessible via a short forest loop track, ingeniously called Forest Loop Track, though which earned enemies-for-life out of Jules and his $265 Onisuka Tiger shoes courtesy being a bit too mud-slathered than we’d promised him - was if anything even MOAR awesome. You emerged through the temperate rainforest to views out over the larger Watson Taylor Lake, the southern coast and the jagged volcanic ridgeline of Middle Brother to the south-west.

“How’s the serenity?”

I was saying that a lot. It amused me to. Not sure it was amusing everyone else for me to, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise as I saw it. Before anyone could correct me on my world view, out of the bush and into the sunlight stepped three of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. OK, so I’d been single for six months, so every second woman I saw was one of the most beautiful women I’d seen. But these girls brought the hotness, thermonuclear style. Euro backpackers, I was guessing. Backpackers, because of their tight T-shirts, khaki shorts and (erm) backpacks, and because someone had to be associated with the brightly-muralled Escape campervan in the carpark; Euro, because they had to be from another country because otherwise they’d have had to come from another planet. The tall one with the wavy brown hair - I was going to guess Dutch or Scandie based on her height and the way she carried herself, but that was just supposition - approached with a sweet dimpled smile and gestured towards my camera, a little silver digital one in her hand.

“Please, could you take our photo of me and my girls?”

I’d be delighted. Then she was kind enough to return the favour, getting one on my work camera of myself and the lads overlooking the scene to the south. She asked me about the camera - she was into photography, evidently - and I lied and said it was mine, and we were getting snapshots along the coast for an article I was writing. Because I was a writer. (A job description that to its credit always sounds more impressive than it is. Even stacked up against a postdoctoral research scientist, a financial analyst and a public health advocate, as I introduced the lads to Karolina, Krystyna and Sela, respectively.) Karolina - she with the camera, and yes, she just HAD to be a Karolina didn’t she? - very impressed and asked who I was writing the article for. And I lied and said Men’s Style. Because it sounded better than Grunt, and because lying your arse off was apparently one of the six key steps to seducing any women you wanted. I’d read that in a magazine somewhere. In one of our UK parent mags, in fact, when I was tasked with transcribing the article from Pommy new-lad into bogan Strayan a while back. I got all the glamorous gigs.

JC, who was to his eternal credit an excellent wingman when the mood struck him, engaged full charm mode and asked them about their trip, how long they’d been out here, what they’d seen. Chris was mute and awkward, (a) because he usually was around stratospheric hotness, but also (b) because he didn’t have to bother with stuff like this any more and his relief was absolutely palpable. Jules still looked a bit off-colour from the Rallye de Frére Nord, so he wasn’t much help either. And me, I was giddy and getting headspins, and I doubted it was down to the heady altitude of maybe a few hundred metres above sea level. These girls were dazzling. And when they said they were still making up their minds but they were probably going to stay another night in Port Macquarie… well, I said we’d love to catch up again if we crossed paths in town. Didn’t actually need to lie about that, surprisingly enough.

“Alright who are you and what have you done with Norco?” Jules asked afterwards, as we were filing back into Frigmobile, and I was pretending not to notice the puddle of whatever-it-was spreading underneath the car. If it was coolant from that slightly leaking radiator hose, I wasn’t too concerned. We were carrying spare capacity, after all, thanks to my Secret Santa present. And, after all, it was all downhill from here.

“Taking my own advice,” I shrugged with a grin.

Ah yes, all downhill. Not too bad for the engine. Not too good for the brakes, though. Or the gearbox, as it started being attacked like stirring coal with a javelin to help out the fading brakes. Or the clutch, as the gears began to be hammered. Or the front tyres, as we tried to scrub off speed with teeth-gritted plough-ahead understeer. Or the handbrake, which finally gave way when I went for it just to tighten our cornering line plunging into a sharpening downhill left. Ah well. Hill starts were to be avoided herein.

We were diving into corners that hadn’t looked this steep on the way up, without railings on the outside, with JC giggle-swearing, Chris staring out the window with grim determination and Jules releasing a quickfire fuck-fuck-FUCK on every exhalation now that he’d run out of grabhandles to white-knuckle - the door trim had come free when he’d pulled the door shut getting back into the car - and Simpsons quotes to recant (once he’d gone through ‘SAVE ME JEBUS!’ and its corollary ‘I don’t even believe in Jebus!’) Me, I just had the teeth gritted and the eyes on, shuffling my feet like Ari Vatanen in that famous film from the Pikes Peak hillclimp, tap-dancing over the pedals of his late-80s Peugeot 405 rally car as it tip-toed along the precipice of a thousand foot sheer drop. Except, of course, we were headed down. Boy, were we ever headed down. Revs screaming - hmmm, maybe a little harder on the engine than I’d imagined - brakes squealing, the whole car stinking of hydraulic fluid and mechanical stress. But everything was in control.

At least until we finally hurdled within sight of the T-intersection at the bottom, and it became quite clear that one now had no brakes whatsoever to work with.

I invented a series of new swear words - actually I just conjugated all the really offensive ones together in a new order, as was my usual practice - crammed the gearbox into reverse with a sound that evoked the end of the world, and aimed for the softest looking bit of roadside scenery I could, which was the grass verge on the inside of the intersection to our left. Important bits of metal ground to a catastrophic and deafening halt inside the engine and gearbox, matched only by the shrill squealing of some of the less iron-willed members of the touring troupe. We vaulted the kerb and slewed across the grass verge, broadside between a stand of thin casuarinas and the North Brother Lookout sign (narrowly avoiding going through with our plan to souvenir it for Mitch, as it almost ended up directly in the boot of the Camira.) The recent rain had turned the grass verge to bog, and that saved us - we carved four deep muddy scars into the verge, but Frigmobile didn’t tip over, nor did the old girl punch through onto the westbound lane of Ocean Drive into the path of someone best avoided like THAT BIG FUCK OFF TRUCK RIGHT THERE. Instead, we came to rest with a buckled wheel teetering over the kerb, the rest in the field we’d just ploughed for the RTA (at no expense to them, I’d add.)

And suddenly, there was silence. The only sound you could hear was the ticking of cooling metal, the hissing of fluid-under-pressure - brake, gearbox, radiator, all of the above - and the quite difficult-to-reproduce sound made by four grimly clenched bot-bots unpuckering themselves from the upholstery of a 1989 Holden Camira wagon.

“Bro! How’s it goin’?”

“Yeah good,” I said down the phoneline. “Erm, about the car…”

“What about it?” Mitch was stifling a giggle. I think he knew what was coming.

“About the brakes,” I said. “There don’t appear to be any.”

He laughed. “Nah they’re pretty shot, they were on the to-do list.”

“What, you have a to-do list?” The idea that Mitch had any idea of what parts of his car needed maintaining, let alone a list…

“Nah. The blokes who do the pink slip on it. They’re usually pretty good to me, but yeah, fail whale… I did tell you it’s out of rego, yeah?”

OK, that did for me. I just started giggling hysterically. JC, for his part, hadn’t stopped giggling since the stunt had started to go horribly wrong about four and a half kays back up the hill. Jules was being volubly ill behind the casuarinas, while the only sensible grownup among us was putting his NRMA membership to use and was calling for roadside assistance, which would probably involve intensive care.

“Why, what’s happened?”

“Bit of an emergency stop. Bottom of a big hill. Busy intersection. Bit of excitement for a Wednesday afternoon…”

“Endo’d?”

“Nah, not a scratch on it,” I declared triumphantly. “Credit to the skills behind the wheel. Mind you, the gearbox is fucked. And the brakes. And the handbrake. And the suspension, we hit that kerb fuckin’ hard looking at the hangtime before the skidmarks started… and probably the engine, looking at the shit pouring out of it. But nah, outwardly, not a scratch on it…”

“Jesus. Sorry, bro.”

“Mate, I’ve just fucked your car and you’re saying sorry?”

“Nah it was a heap anyway,” he laughed. “Olds’ll be shitted off, but I don’t give a fuck… been trying to sell it for six months.”

“Bit hard without rego.” I’d just seen the sticker in the window. Expiry Feb 10, not Feb 11 as I’d read it as.

“Yeah you reckon?” he laughed. “Gotta go bro. Customers. Boss is getting shitty.”

“Sell sell sell. Talk to you later mate.”

JC had the camera in one hand and what was left of the back bumper in the other - OK when I say there wasn’t a scratch on it, there wasn’t a scratch on any of the bits which had come off when we’d belted over that kerb at still-unpleasant speed. “Road trophy,” he declared. “Pose with your kill.”

“You alright?” He’d been limping a bit.

“Yeah, cracked my knees together. Might not be much use to you on the dancefloor this evening with the dazzling Dutchies. And I think I’m getting an asthma attack from laughing too much,” he giggled. “That was fucking awesome. I want to do that again.”

Chris didn’t. He looked pretty grim. “NRMA should be here in fifteen to twenty.”

“Cool,” I said. “Do they have a flatbed truck?”

“For this?”

“Nah, for him,” I said, indicating Jules slumped on the grass beside the Dooragan National Park sign and what had become of his lunch. Knew he shouldn’t have gone the surf and turf. Priciest thing on the menu. What a waste. Even if you were earning in pounds. “He’ll need carrying out of here on a hoist.”

“I heard that,” he groaned.

I grinned. “You alright old son?”

“I will be,” he said, “once I get that fifty dollars off you.”

We stared at the bedraggled, cock-wheeled, sagging remains of the Camira.

“I dunno,” I said. “Looks OK to me. Should buff right out…”


Continued in Part Three