The Highway North, part II

Continued from Part I

Tuesday. To Newcastle.

This wasn’t Chris’ sort of touring, and his vaguely dog’s bum expression made that evident. Chris liked to arc across the countryside like an avenging arrow, never breaking stride, barely breaking sweat, racking up personal-best average speeds and economy figures as he went. He didn’t like to fart-arse around. We did, though. Fart-arsing around was our special subject on Mastermind. We made him stop in Chatswood so JC could pay a surprise visit to the florists’ Belle worked at. (Turned out she was off work that day.) We made him stop at Turramurra because we needed to stock up on beers for the journey down the F3. We made him stop at the Brooklyn exit, crossing the Hawkesbury, because JC needed a slash. We even tried to make him stop at the lookout near the big fuck-off bridges over the big fuck-off chasm at Mooney Mooney Creek because they were cool and I wanted a photo. Never mind the fact the lookout exit had been shut by the RTA for safety reasons, it’s only a chicken wire fence you nonce. Garn.

Pity they shut that lookout, really. That section of the F3 always seemed a hell of a feat of engineering. They opened it in the late ‘80s - years behind schedule - carved into the sandstone of the stark forested hills between Gosford and Sydney, to replace the impossibly sinuous old Pacific Highway which was forced to wind and blunder around at the whims of the scenery, adding hours to the trip. Even from my early childhood I remembered those great dual-carriageway canyons through the hillside that signified to the weary traveller than the long drive down from the North Coast was almost over and the excitement and wonder of the Big City was tantalizingly close. Never really lost that sense of wonder about that stretch of road. Even when they buggered part of it with a stupid 90km/h limit over Mount White.

Anyway, by the time we got to the exit for the southern Central Coast through to Gosford, Chris was a broken man.

“Freeway north of here to Newcastle is dull as fuck anyway,” I suggested. And it was. It basically bloused through farmland and forest, a hundred kays of beige disinterest. “What say we head via the coast?”

That just got a strangled sigh, like the sound of someone drowning a kitten, and a resigned flicking of the indicators onto the off-ramp.

But he cheered up once we finally lost Triple J signal from Sydney and rather than shuffle through the FM band to re-establish linkage with the mothership via the local station frequency, we reluctantly agreed to let him hook his iPhone up to the AUX plug. Given the bagging the Jays had been copping from all concerned, he was a brave man. See if you can match the declaration to the declarer out of the following:
(a) Has [insert trendy British act] only just got on the radio down here? Jesus you guys are soooo backwards
(b) Fuckin’ yo yo bro with mah homies kickin’ it in the fuckin’ Adelaide Hills. Who the fuck listens to this Seppo-wannabe shit? How’s doing bogan fucken beat poetry over someone else’s riff considered new music? Fuck me
(c) This would sound soooo much awesomer mashed up with Ke$ha. Totes awesomer.
(d) Guys, I’m pretty sure Triple M signal would still reach out here, if you’d rather I switched it… guys?

Then again, JJJ is meant to be The Yoof Network. And at 30 plus, we were a lot of things, but The Yoof, we were not. So, it was on with DJ Chris’ mastermix. We were cruising through The Entrance, Tuggerah Lake on our left, the Pacific Ocean on our right. Picture postcard scenery, the sun was out, the beers were still cold (pro tip: the aircon of a TE Magna vents into the glovebox) and all was awesome. I love it when a plan comes together.

“As you’d expect,” DJ Chris declared, “I’ve done this properly.”

“I see what you’ve done there,” I replied. Mainly because I’d snuck a look at the screen of his iPhone. GOLDEN AGE PLAYLIST. Which, surprisingly enough, wasn’t his preferred hair-farmer era of ‘80s rawwwwk - Gunners, Bon Jovi, Van Halen et al - but something that sounded suspiciously like the mid-to-late-‘90s. Green Day. Foo Fighters. Oasis. Chilis. Presidents. The stuff that was getting cranked on the airwaves when we were nearing the end of school, after Triple J reached the Northern Rivers in late ‘95.

“Well,” he said, “I figured since this is basically a high school reunion…”

“…We should be turning up in a convertible Corvette with fabulous hair?” quipped JC. Then got grumpy because noone got his Romy and Michele reference. I did, but I was ignoring it, because it was arse.

“In that case I bags blowing up a convenience store in a gunfight with a midget hitman,” I said.

“Yup, that sounds about right for you. The fuck has that got to do with high school reunions?”

“Grosse Point Blank, you twat.” A classic. A CLASSIC, I tells ya.

“Way to go with the up-to-date pop culture references, Grandad.”

The opening riff from Reef’s Place Your Hands resonated through the Magna’s speakers. ’97, that would have been; our final year in high school.

“Ohhh place your haaaarrnds, upon maaah whole…”

“Upon which hole?”

“Run yo’ fiiiingers… through mahhh…”

“What the fuck is this song actually about?” asked a slightly concerned Jules.

“It’s an educational song,” JC mused. “About the importance of regular prostrate examination.”

“Ah. Explains why they were called Reef.” Jules tried to say REEF in a way reminiscent of a squealing pig, and killed the joke dead in its sleep. It wasn’t mourned.

“And the way that I feel rahht now, Oh Lord hear me go, PUT YOUR HANDS UP, PUT YOUR HANDS UP…”

“It’s on. Put your hands on.”

“How’s that make more sense? ‘Up’ fits the context of the song better…”

“Yeah but only if it’s the soundtrack to German fistage porn...”

Ah yes. We’d been on the road an hour, and it’d already gotten to German fistage porn. In hindsight it was a surprise and a blessing we hadn’t gotten here already. The tone of the convo wasn’t really thrilling Chris - nor was the fact we were drinking in his car, and more to the point, the fact he wasn’t able to - but at least his carefully-compiled context-appropriate iTunes playlist had met a more receptive audience than Triple J’s yoof-centric mid-afternoon playlist. Largely because JC slyly popped his iPwn earbuds in somewhere around Budgewoi and spent the rest of the trip up to Newy grooving along to Katy Perry or something else profoundly fucking unlistenable.

And suddenly, we were rolling across the bridge at Swansea, heading through Belmont and onward to Newy. Ah, Newy. I like Newy, even though it’s a bit busted-arse and ragged around the edges - like Sydney’s meth-addicted cousin, it can’t hold down a decent job, has the arse out of its trousers and seems a bit confused and shabby, but it knows how to have a good time. The Sydney comparison is a fair one; it’s as though they took all the awesomest, randomest bits of the dishevelled inner west and slapped it down two blocks from the beach. That’s about where you’d find the Ghetto, if you came looking for it: two blocks from Hunter St, two blocks from the beach, a rambling, degenerate shell. It’d been nurses quarters, back in the day - a block from the old hospital campus - but those days were long gone, and its Brutalist brick façade was crumbling and graffiti-tagged now. The lift didn’t work, the amenities were shambolic and the landlord could not be compelled to give a fuck, largely because the place had technically been condemned years ago and would have been a large rubble-strewn hole had the developers who’d planned offices and apartments on the block not gone tits-up in the GFC, leaving both the project and the Ghetto itself in limbo. But for what it lacked in facilities, amenities or any form of habitability, the Ghetto made up for with character in spades. The Ghetto was full of students, artists, creatives, musos, surfers, dropouts and randomists. People with an incredibly diverse kaleidoscopic worldview, if slightly ropey concepts re what constituted acceptable levels of hygiene or whose turn it was to take the bins out.

Needless to say, Mitch loved it.

Mitch was, and is, my younger brother. At the time he was in the fifth year of a three-year design degree at Newcastle Uni - inclusive of a couple semesters of not being arsed and half a year off spent chasing waves through central and south America, just because he could. Ghetto life suited Mitch down to the ground, which at his height was a long way. He surfed of a morning, worked retail or made coffees in daylight hours, played guitar and sang in a four-piece called Unicorn Jism of an evening, had more gorgeous spunky women on the go than anyone this side of Hefner in his pomp and basically was making the most of his 20s in exactly the way I’d failed to do, given I had been trying to become a Serious Journalist at the equivalent time. Yeah. Woo. There was a quality investment of one’s time. Should have fucked off to Airlie Beach or somewhere and become a tour guide/beach bum/professional backpacker-chick shagger.

We didn’t look alike. I’m kinda stubbly and angry looking. Dark hair, dark beard, dark eyes. In the months since I’d put a bullet through my professional writer persona and given up on respectability, I’d been trying to rip off Dave Grohl’s Prince-Of-Rock-Darkness look, just without the greasy mullet (or the batshit-arsehatted HIV denialism.) Questionable success. Mitch, meanwhile, looked like a walnut-skinned Bowie with hair like a Def Leppard roadie circa 1985. He was freakishly tall, thin and angular, burnt brown by the sun, with preposterous peroxided locks that hung off him like the rest of his fashion ensemble - all completely wrong, but somehow just about coming off. This fine Tuesday evening saw our Mitch stretched into a vintage Stones ‘Sticky Fingers’ tour T-shirt, tatty black pleather jacket, acid-wash green girls’ skinny jeans which only reached down to his ankles, and well-worn (if not well worn by him) mustard-yellow winklepicker boots. We soooo didn’t look like brothers.

“You guys soooo don’t look like brothers,” the drunk one said.

See?

“Nah, they do, it’s the eyes,” said the really drunk one. “Check it out.”

“Yeaaahhhh….” said one or more of the even drunker ones.

The really drunk one was right. If you looked, Mitch and I had the same eyes. (You’d like to hope so, unless the mailman was involved somewhere.) The really drunk one was also the one I was trying to remember the name of, because I’d met her once when we were both really drunk. It’d been late-ish 2004, the Strayan Olympic Team had made it back from Athens, and my then-editor at Inside Sport reckoned it’d be amusing to send the new kid out for a night with the all-conquering, all-drinking gold medal womens’ water polo team, whose reputation as hell-raising pissartists preceded them. He thought I’d get a good feature article out of it. All I got out of it was the worst hangover in the history of the world. I wanted to die for two whole days. You’re not supposed to get two-day hangovers until you turn thirty, and I was only twenty-four. In fact, that’d been how the really drunk one had introduced her party to mine - “Hey, I know you, you’re that journo we broke that time…”

Her party, judging by the matching embroidered shirts, were the NSW womens’ water polo rep team. They’d evidently won something. Or not. Water polo chicks didn’t need much of an excuse to get off chops. My party was Team WWMD Roadtrip, plus Mitch’s band on set break (their last for the night). Live music at the Great Northern - where else are you going to be on a Tuesday night in Newy, other than the departures platform at the station, destination Away. The Great Northern’s not much like its Byron namesake - a big old art-deco joint on a corner up the eastern end of Hunter St - but both were strong supporters of local live music. Mitch’s band were as local and as live as they came. They played like they looked - fucking random. Eclectic originals spliced in amongst covers so reinvented as to be practically unrecognisable. Drummer Tojo was a grinning Japanese maniac who beat up on his kit like it’d tried to hit on his girlfriend. Bassist Krang was channelling Lemmy Kilminster; lead guitarist Jonny Zed, Mitch’s childhood mate, shredded with epic self-indulgence like John Frusciante with Eddie Van Halen’s fingertips soldered on; and lead singer/second axe/frontman Mitch… well, Mitch was just fucking odd, as we’ve established. I love the guy, but by fuck, he’s fucking odd.

Still, they were having fun, and so were we. Had no excuse not to - we were paying band prices for beers, for starters. And this being the only game in town on a Tuesday - or pretty much as such - the room was full of colour and movement. Bohemian arty types, fauxhawk-mulleted bogans with Southern Cross tatts under their singlets, old drunks, music scenesters (usually also including a few old drunks) - if they were out tonight, they were out at the Great Northern. By the headcount, Unicorn Jism’s Chilis-meeting-Zeppelin-backstage-at-Woodstock stylings did seem to have a decent following around here, too - they’d been shortlisted for Triple J Unearthed, had been cranked a bit on local student radio, and were heading down to Melbourne to play some shows on the undercard of another indie band Jonny Zed knew through the showboating-lead-guitarist mafia.

The punters, in their number and variance, seemed appreciative. Admittedly it looked like it helped to have consumed quite a lot of drugs, which kinda counted me out, but I repeat: band price beers. Guaranteed to make any evening more funner than previously scheduled. If certainly a bit further towards maximum on the Weirdometer than the last gig I’d been to - which had been Powderfinger’s farewell show in Sydney, with You Am I and Jet on the undercard. It’d been sold out, but we’d scored comp tickets through work. Well, Caroline had. Music journodom having been her first love before the big move upstairs into the editorial offices, she went to a lot of rock gigs on freebie passes, and I’d been her regular plus-one for all of last year. Live music was kind of the soundtrack to our relationship. Our first date had been the ’09 Big Day Out. We’d gone as friends. We’d left as something a bit more… involved. Hell, she’d even convinced me to come and sweat with her in the Boiler Room with the Prodigy at the end of the night - and considering (a) about the only band I’d gone there to see was the mighty Flange Gasket, since they were our local lads from the north coast and (b) I tend to live by TISM’s sentiment that you should never techno for an answer, that was some achievement on her part.

Now, of course, the freebie tickets had dried up the same way everything else had. Somehow actually paying to go see a band play seemed sick and wrong, even when it’s your brother’s band of no-goods and even when they do the most gobsmacking set-ending reggae-funk-metal cover version of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs ever attempted. Pulled off, nearly. Attempted, definitely. And there’s always something kinda awesome about a band who casually say ‘This is our last song in this set’ and proceed to make it last 12 and a half minutes with a freeform jazz odyssey solo in the middle. A bit like Fat Freddy’s Drop, which this was a bit reminiscent of. If they were plugged into Shihad’s nuclear-armed stack of Marshalls.

Water-polo-captain-chick’s name was Amy, I finally remembered. She’d been a junior member of the Australian team at Athens, presumably more senior now. Quite hot in that athletic, muscular, used-to-assaulting-other-women-under-the-waterline kind of way. She led the team in her own image, either that or Rampaging Roy Slaven’s - one-in all-in, win the stink and win the game, and whatever happens on tour, stays on tour. They drank like they played - ferociously. And aiming below the belt whenever the opportunity. Dunno if you remember any of that footage from Roy and HG’s Sydney Olympics show of just how willing it gets underwater in international water polo, but yeah. We ran a story on it at Grunt a while back - because when you have a magazine to fill with shite every week, and you have a reader base like ours, that’s how you roll. Articles about how fit, athletic young women are prepared to rip each others’ swimsuits to shreds, and worse, in order to gain a competitive advantage over the girl marking them - basically bringing serious Olympic competition down to the level of jelly wrestling at a dodgy Kings Cross strip joint - are exactly the sorts of things our target demographic likes to read about, apparently. I say read about, there were maybe 100 words in the entire piece. Four pages of photos, of course. Poolside action shots, freeze-frames from underwater video, and the obligatory reprint of the naked-in-bodypaint group shot of the Australian womens’ team from the Athens Dream photoshoot. Of course, the dudes do much worse than that to each other under the waterline - treating each others’ junk like a particularly recalcitrant doorknob, f’rinstance - but that’s not as much the sort of things our target demographic likes to read about.

“The Euros are the worst,” Amy reported. “Fuckin’ Serbia especially. I was marking this fuckin’ psycho hosebeast in the semi… horrible Helga…” A squeal of laughter from the girls. Helga the horrible hosebeast’s reputation clearly preceded her. “She’s fucking nasty. She seriously shoved her fucking hand in my togs at one point. Went the reverse Hopoate.”

“What the fuck?” I guessed by that she didn’t mean sticking your bum up someone’s finger. She meant… well, the mind boggled.

“Yeah. Luckily she didn’t account for my pelvic floor muscles of death. One hard squeeze later she’d end up picking her nose with a fucking stick taped to her wrist for a week…”

The sound you heard there was every guy in the vicinity crossing his legs, at once.

“She had a crack at you too Kel yeah?”

Kel, the baby of the team, nodded. She was 18 or 19 or thereabouts, clearly Amy’s protégé - chatty, pretty, blonde, drunk. All good things, if that was what you were into.

“Show the class please Kelly?”

With an embarrassed smile, Kelly stood and tugged her shirt upwards. Her flat, tanned midriff had scratchmarks across it like she’d been gone by a grizzly.

“That was from two weeks ago,” Amy explained. “Now you tell me how the fuck you manage that with regulation length fingernails…”

Kelly nodded. “Not the worst I’ve had, though. That Samoan chick who plays rep for Queensland… Tongan, whatever… yeah, nah. You said Hopoate before…”

“Hopoate’s Tongan.”

“Yeah, figures. The Hopoate, old school, was her killer move. Certainly gets your attention away from what’s happening with the ball…”

“Our Kel got the better of her, didn’t you babe?” Amy mentioned.

“Yeah, pretty much.” A bashful smile. “Told her I was into it, we should meet up after in the change rooms. Gave her a wink. Didn’t go down that well, she’s hardcore Mormon or something. Next quarter she was marking someone else…”

Erm, yeah. Let’s lift the tone shall we? It had all the makings of a fun night, though - after all the bitching and moaning en route, everyone had a few beers under their belts and was having a few good laughs. I was surrounded by people I liked, many of whom I hadn’t seen in ages; there were good tunes on offer - yes even the bipolar eclecticness of Unicorn Jism, they were tight as a fish when it came to actually playing live - I hadn’t paid market price for a beer since we got here, and Amy was eyeing me off as though she quite liked the idea of devouring me whole and spitting out the bones. Or spitting something out, anyway. Still, she liked me. I could tell by the way she picked on me relentlessly, much the same way that little boys communicate their affection towards little girls by calling them names and pulling their ponytails. Most promising of all, I seemed to have a clear run to the flag - Jules was working his ‘I’m from London innit’ magic on young Kelly with intent to cause a disturbance in her pants (as were half the lads in the room, but Jules was clearly backing himself in.) One also felt JC was unlikely to be an issue vis a vis competition for girl action, Chris was counting the hours till midnight when he could sneak off and join Lisa for a sly Skype on her lunch break, and Mitch kinda had his hands full keeping his girlfriend Carmen from meeting the Great Northern's band booker Natasha. Or for that matter Lucy, the girl behind the bar. Natasha knew about Carmen but didn’t know about Lucy. Lucy knew about both of them but was happy to back herself and take her chances. Carmen didn’t know about either of them, and furthermore was half-Italian, so odds were on he’d wake up with a horse’s head in the bed if she did. If not his man-jewels sliced into prosciutto. Still, it’s a hobby. Kept him off the street. And out of my line of sight.

Yup, all was going well - the night, and the roadtrip, were finally coming together. So why the fuck did I feel so fucking miserable?

That was the three-card trick Caroline had played me. One, bye-bye love and sex and all that fun stuff (including the free gig tickets, the party invites and the general social acceptance of being in a couple). Two, bye-bye career. OK, I can accept all that; didn’t have a lot of choice. But three, bye-bye confidence, bye-bye masculinity, bye-bye sense of self-worth. There’s got to be few things more demoralizing than your girl getting screwed by another bloke - particularly the way it had happened with Caroline. I just had nothing. Had nothing to say to Amy but fumbling, mumbling crap. Just this sinking, heavy feeling. You have nothing to gain here. You will fail and it will hurt. Go home to bed, old man.

But I didn’t. I stayed and got loudly and obnoxiously drunk, managed to offend just about everyone with increasingly vicious levels of snark, and finally was shoulder-tapped by Mitch, passing on the word that the bouncers would be removing me from the premises if I didn’t myself. He looked sad. Sad I’d fucked up his night, sad that his old bro had become such a sad, fat, bitter old hack. He couldn’t have been that sad, though. As I reflected later, hours later, being kept awake by the sounds of ambulance sirens and breaking glass five floors down, and Mitch and Amy the water polo chick making with the gymnastic monkey love through the paper-thin walls in the adjoining room.

Yeah. Good times.

I woke at first light, still drunk, on a dirty old inner-sprung mattress that had seen better days and grubbier lays. The room was bare, save for JC sprawled like splattered schoolies sick on an old lump of foam on the floor across the way. His late-night mission into the gay bars of central Newy - where he was headed as I was stumbling back to the Ghetto, alone and in exile - had obviously not yielded gold in terms of his primary mission objectives, i.e. male box. Either that or he’d already came, saw, conquered (in whatever order you prefer) off-site, and then fucked off back here to bed. For their part Chris and Jules had taken one look at the Ghetto yesterday arvo and had checked into the YHA around the corner. When a scabby flea-bitten youth hostel has you covered for facilities, you know you’re operating at the ‘bohemian’ end of the accommodation market.

The sun was out, the dawn chorus was ablaze and it was a new day with all the promise that entailed, but I was still a sad, fat, bitter old hack. To which you could add ‘embarrassed.’ I’d made a cock of myself. I’d done it before and I’d probably do it again. I’d sunk too much piss and talked too much shit, as always. So I did what I thought was appropriate under the circumstances. I dragged myself down to the beach, wandered down to the surf, and threw myself in.

It was cold. It was July, for fuck’s sake. Who goes swimming in July? At dawn? I’ll tell you who. Fucking nobody, that’s who. But eventually my heart stopped racing and my limbs stopped screaming enough for it to feel… if not OK, then manageably Antarctic. I duck-dived out past the shorebreak, and lay there, floating on the swell, face down. Face up was too bright, it hurt even through shut and salty eyelids. I did remember to surface and breathe occasionally, so I hadn’t completely given up on life, if you were wondering. But beyond that, I was content to drift, leaving direction up to the prevailing swell. If it meant I’d shortly end up being love-tapped by a coal tanker off Stockton, so be it. I can go with the flow.

I got tapped alright. But by something sharp. Something sharp, with a fin. I surfaced, and cautiously opened my eyes. Salt, light, and some sort of bronze-limbed, Farrah Fawcett-haired space alien in a wetsuit, straddling a Dahlberg 6’1” thruster. That’s a surfboard, kids.

“Hey bro,” said Mitch, “you alright?”

“Yeah, just catching up on sleep,” I said, looking up. “Bit fucking noisy at yours...”

“You heard that?” he laughed. “Yeah, sorry. She’s… feisty. Actually she’s fucking psycho. Should see the bite mark she left in my neck.” He rolled down the neck of his wetsuit. Yep. Fucking ouch. That’s gonna hurt. Particularly when Carmen sees it, as I pointed out.

“Yeah… I’m hoping to find a bluebottle or something I can put down there and sting myself with. Cover up the evidence.”

“That’s dedication,” I nodded. “Hey look mate, sorry about being a mouthy cunt last night. It wasn’t the best.”

“Nah, it’s alright,” he waved me off. “Been having a rough time of it. Everyone knows.” Great. Everyone knows I’m a fucking shambles. May as well take out an ad in the paper.

“Any surf?”

“Nah it’s shithouse,” he grinned. “Keen for a feed? I was gonna do this bacon, asparagus and fennel gnocchi for breakfast…”

I knew Mitch fancied himself as a chef, always had done. It was one of his trump cards when wooing the ladyfolk. Hell, he’d ripped it off me, that was one of my only trump cards. But still, I had my doubts.

“You were gonna do it?”

He laughed. “Yeah… might come out of a plastic container, but yeah…”

One of the many denizens of the Ghetto - Jonny Zed’s girl Chantelle - worked at a flash restaurant in the city. They had a great rep and did good business, even though they were lousy at doing their numbers on how many meals to prep, so they were usually stuck with leftovers as of closing, which wouldn’t keep till next night. In unrelated news, Chantelle was chief procurement officer and logistics specialist for said restaurant. The Ghetto ate well.

The great unexpected secret about my brother Mitch is that deep down, he’s actually (whisper it) quite normal, pleasant and well brought up. Sure he writes song lyrics that even Coleridge on opium would consider a bucket of random, and sure he looks like a Roswell escapee with a dirty floor mop stapled to his head, but he’s also bewilderingly modest polite and pleasant. And has very good manners.

“Um, may I please have two flat whites to take away?”

No idea where he gets that from. “Yeah two flat whites cheers champ” usually works for me. If I didn’t want them to take away I probably wouldn’t be standing here at the take-away coffee cart.

We were wandering back up the hill (literally, The Hill is what the area of Newy between the beach and the CBD is called) with takeaway coffees in our hands and frigid saltwater dripping off our skin. A towel hadn’t been in my forward planning, nor Mitch’s. Still, he had a wetsuit on, so he was one-up on me in the thermal retention stakes. One lanky arm was draped around his board, the other spidery hand almost dwarfed the blue Lavazza cup between its fingers. He looked… pensive. Mitch didn’t do pensive. Which meant he wanted to say something he wasn’t quite sure about. Which meant he was going to ask me about…

“So, this Caroline thing… like, what’s the go with that?” He chuckled a little at the end, as he always did when he was nervous.

“No go,” I said. “Over.”

“Yeah?”

“Dead and buried.”

“For real,” he nodded. “In that case, why are you still so angry about it?”

I realised what this was. This was Mitch doing pastoral care. Mitch, bless him, didn’t do pastoral care. And to be in the situation where your little brother thinks he needs to bust out the pastoral care because you’re that far gooorrrne… yeah, it ain’t all good.

“I’m just angry about everything, mate.” It was an honest answer. We’d got through most of our 24 years together as good mates - not just brothers, you don’t get a choice over that part, but you do about whether you’re mates or not - by not bullshitting each other. “Everything pisses me off at the moment. Work, home, relationships, politics, music, sport… it’s just all so fucking futile.”

“It is if you say it is,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said, “pretty much.”

“Whatcha gonna do about it?” Then added “Punk?” with a sly grin.

I shrugged. “Get in Dr Chris’s car and drive till we get to where we’re going. Then see what’s at the end of the road.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Man,” Mitch said, “that’s fucking profound.”

“You still drunk?”

“Yeah, I am a bit,” he said, and laughed.

Minor problem with that get-in-the-car-and-drive-to-the-end-of-the-road concept, however. The get-in-the-car bit. Or even just the car bit, as we discovered back at the Ghetto. Jules and Chris had turned up, but the Magna wasn’t with them. Admittedly it was only a block, they could have walked, but the Magna wasn’t back at the YHA either. The space in which it had been left to dwell over the evening was as vacant as a Kardashian’s glazed smile. Chris, whose reservations about leaving his car out overnight on the mean streets of downtown Newy had been filed and registered since he’d started making them heard as of about 2pm yesterday, was deathly white and not talking. Jules was looking bored and put-upon in the corner, like all of this had been dreamed up just to inconvenience him on his holiday, while JC was in full super-efficient war-room mode, barking instructions and interrogating hapless Ghetto residents about what they’d seen and where they’d seen it.

“Goneski?” I queried.

Chris nodded, looking sick.

“Bugger,” I observed. Judging by the bleak look I got from that, I clearly wasn’t expressing the correct level of concern, so I furrowed my brow and harrumphed more enthusiastically. “Insured though yeah?”

“Yes,” he sighed, “it’s insured.” As if to illustrate the sheer pointlessness of trying to replace a creation as precious as his Magna with mere money. “Only for five thousand though. Hardly replacement value.”

“Erm, it’s not gonna be worth much more, mate. I mean, it was in lovely nick, and you looked after it like…” I wanted to say ‘like one of your own children’ but I didn’t want to make him burst into tears. “But it’s still nearly 15 years old. And it’s still a beige Magna. With two hundred thou on the clock.”

He shrugged, as though to acknowledge the point was valid, if immensely hurtful.

“…And a flat spot.”

I didn’t get a smile, more a grimace, but I was claiming it.

Ah, the flat spot. Bloody hell. This story is more about Chris’ belief that if a story’s worth telling it’s worth overtelling repeatedly. Chris loved his Magna. It was a three-litre V6 Advance model with twin airbags, ABS, cruise control and all the creature comforts. He’d inherited it off his folks as a PhD student, they’d inherited it back when he’d jaunted off overseas, and it’d still been in polished enough nick when he got back (the Bellamys were meticulous about how they looked after their cars) that he couldn’t dream of buying anything else. It’d been in the family for almost 15 years. They’d had pets which had died younger than that. It meant a lot to him and he was very proud of it. The problem was, he knew everyone else knew how much it meant to him, so he kept trying to overstate its faults. Like the Flat Spot. Head off on a highway mission with Chris in the Magna - or, should hell be in hoar frost, actually get thrown the keys for a driving stint - and the caution would come: “You notice there’s a bit of a flat spot between about two and three thousand rpm? Compared with the three and a half…” What he meant was the torque curve kind of dipped there whereas in the larger 3.5 litre V6 models such as his old man had since scaled up to, there wasn’t. It was an interesting observation, the first time it was made. The fifth - somewhere in amongst kicking down into a passing manoeuvre on an anonymous stretch of overtaking lane somewhere in NSW - not so much. Next time we got in the car, JC was sure to warn me - “You know Norco, just watch out - I hear there’s this flat spot around two thousand rpm. Compared to the three and a half…”

And as of that moment, the Flat Spot entered roadtrip lore.

“I’ll flat spot you in a minute,” Chris mumbled.

“I don’t go to two thousand rpm at the best of fucken times,” I told him with a sardonic grin.

But the Magna (and its flat spot) really was properly gone, missing, not-here-anymore, fucked-off-someplace-else. Stolen. Reported as such, which meant hanging around the cop shop while Chris filled in forms - and missing out on that gnocchi, dammit - and then listening to a bunch of misery and woe on behalf of Jules and Chris the whole walk back up The Hill about how fucking pointless the whole trip had been and how it was always a shit idea and how we should have flown and how we’d just have to pack up and go back home now. By train, for fuck’s. Then fly to Brisbane, paying fucking ludicrous last minute airfares…

“When’s the trains go?” I asked.

“What, up to Brissy?” Mitch furrowed his brow. His peroxided locks were looking especially bouffant this morning after their saltwater rinse.

“Nah, back to Sydney,” I frowned, indicating the grumpy buggers behind me with a flick of my thumb.

“What, the shitkansen? Don’t tell me you’re bailing on the roadtrip?” Mitch shook his head in disappointment. “Lame. Mum’s car is in Mereweather, at Uncle John’s - take that.”

Uncle John was a lecturer at the uni - town planning, urban development, something along those lines. He was the one academic success of the family. Unless you counted me, and even I didn’t do that.

“What’s it doing there?”

“They lent it to me,” he said, a little defensively.

“No, I know that,” I said. “What’s it doing at his place?”

“Well I’m not dumb enough to leave it out on the streets around here… what kind of stooge you think I am?”

There was a bus route which went down to Merewether - route 201 - if you could be arsed. If you couldn’t, as I couldn’t, it’s at least a half-hour walk, or if you’re lucky, Mitch might double you on his deadly treadly. Which almost went horribly wrong, because we were both older, slower and fatter than the last time we’d tried anything that stupid, and the ‘hipster special’ fixed-gear conveyance Mitch was pedalling didn’t really have the bottom-end punch - or the padding on the bars - of the old Mongoose BMX which I used to double him down the shops with. Still, we made Merewether without further fatality. Although we did almost get hit by a number 201 bus.

The reaction from the boys was about as expected when we rocked up back at the Ghetto. Jules rolled his eyes, shaking his head with you-can’t-seriously-expect-me-to-travel-in-THAT certainty. Chris was sullen, still in mourning. JC just howled with delighted laughter.

“No way,” he cried. Frigmobile LIVES!”

Frigmobile had once been new and shiny. It’d been as-such when it’d been bought new from our local Holden dealer in 1989, a run-out model Camira SL/X wagon in the wanted Arctic White (or, as JC had identified it early in its career, refrigerator white - hence the name, which he’d stolen from a prominent cold-storage road transport firm whose trucks rolled up and down the Pacific Highway in our childhood. Anything with ‘Frig’ in the name is automatically hilarious when you’re 10). From there it’d gone from shiny and loved first car, to slightly less-loved second car, to scabby student runabout parked outside Uncle John’s place in Merewether bringing down his property values. By now it was older than the Simpsons and looked just as tired and past-it. Powdering white paint, a few too many creases and nudges in the perimeter metalwork and bumperwear, and all the usual glitches and idiosyncracies a twenty-plus-year-old car exhibits in spades. But it ran. It drove, it went around corners, and it stopped. What more do you want?

Yes, indeed. Frigmobile lived. As much a surprise as it seemed to everyone concerned. But what better way to charge up Highway One to our old school mate’s wedding than in a car that dated from the same era as many of those good times? And it was a wagon, so all of our bags (read ‘all of Jules’ bags’) would actually fit in the thing, instead of having to stick one of them in between the lads in the back to stop them fighting with each other, like in Chris’ MIA Magna. And it was a two-litre with EFI, and pretty light, and they weren’t a bad car by the time they reached the late ‘80s - what could possibly go wrong?

“We had one of these,” Chris observed thinly.

“Oh yeah, I remember that.”

“Yeah… it was the reason we stopped being a Holden family,” he finished.

“I’d… forgotten that,” I said. “That was an early one, though?” They’d had problems, the early Camiras. You could probably go as far as to say they were a quality-free shitbox. Chris had, and did, often.

Mitch had been caretaker of Frigmobile for a couple of years now. In that time you could see the money he’d ploughed into it to keep it well-serviced and in tip-top condition. None whatsoever. He had, however, had a decent stereo put in. And in his defence, (a) any sort of decent wash would have probably taken the top layer of paint off completely and (b) if it actually wanted clean oil it’d ask for it. It had an electronic engine computer and all. AND sort-of-futuristic digital lettering for the '2.0Ei' badge on the back. Late 80’s FTW.

“No airbags, no ABS, no stability control, and you driving,” Jules noted. “I’d feel safer on a Qantas A380.”

“That’s not fair,” Chris protested. “On the A380. This probably leaks more oil.”

“You want to walk to Brisbane?”

“No, Dad,” Jules smirked. “But I’d like to get there in one piece. Without having to get out and push.”

Chris nodded sullenly.

“Then fuck off to the train station,” I advised, with more edge than I’d intended. “It’s just down the fucking hill, end of the street. Big fuck off brick thing with trains in it. Can’t miss it. See you in Brisbane.”

“You’re not making it to Brisbane in that,” Jules insisted flatly.

“Says you with your all encompassing fucking knowledge of cars?” I retorted. “At least this one [pointing at Chris] has some base of experience to argue his point from. He’s wrong, obviously, but he’s not wrong and ignorant.”

“Twenty bucks says this thing won’t make it to Brisbane,” he said.

“Only twenty?” I queried. “I thought you earned in pounds? That’s, what, four pound ha’penny and fucken sixpence?”

“Well given that you get paid in food vouchers and promo T-shirts I didn’t want to up the ante out of your league… but OK. Fifty then.”

“Fifty,” I said. We shook on it. “You could have washed the McMuffin residue off that first you greasy bastard.”

He struggled to lift his bags over the lip of the Camira’s rear loadspace, the back end visibly sagging with the weight. The back end of the Camira as well.

“What, you’re coming with now?”

“Yeah, how else am I gonna make sure you don’t cheat on the bet? Take these dodgy bastards’ word for it? I think not.”

“Hang on, I never said anything about it making it to Brisbane carrying all your shit. That’s got to be 120 kilos at least. And then there’s your bags as well.”

“Yeah, laugh it up. That fifty of yours is going to look so pretty all framed up on my wall.”

“You’d better frame it,” I pointed out, “it’ll only buy you a fucking icecream and a packet of crisps back in the mother country...”

So the four of us packed our stuff and ourselves into the Camira, said our farewells to a bemused looking Mitch, who tossed me the keys with a grin. “I’ll have it back with a full tank please,” he smirked. At least he was confident it’d be coming back to him intact, on time and under budget. As confident as someone could look in a Diamond Dogs Bowie T-shirt, frayed-hem denim cutoffs like Katy fucking Perry and Jesus sandals from the local op shop. It was just as well those Neanderthal feet of his were tinea-proof. The Camira wasn’t quite bottoming out with the weight of the four of us plus ancillaries, but I was going to make a point of avoiding speedbumps. Or even slightly aggressive highway surface changes, for that matter.

“Shall we?”

“Let’s,” declared JC.

He was ridiculously excited about reuniting with Frigmobile, playing with all the vents and buttons, rifling through the glovebox for lost treasures. He reminded me we hadn’t been in this car since it’d taken us both down to Sydney at the end of year 12 for open day at the Uni of NSW. Chris was still sulking about the loss of the Magna, and would be for some time; Jules was smugly death-riding the Camira’s survival prospects from the back seat. And me… I was trying to pretend I knew what I was doing.

Just between us, folks, I had a confession to make. Forgive me, for I have sinned; it had been ten years since I’d driven a manual car.

Don’t know how it’d come about, actually. We’d always had manuals, I’d learned to drive on one - this one, in point of fact, until the grandparentals’ baby-poo-brown three-speed auto Corolla had been passed on down the food chain. Since then, I’d only owned autos - not through any choice, it’d just been how it’d worked out when I’d been shopping for wheels. That Corolla, the couple of Commodores which followed it (a VL followed by a lowered ex-copper VR), most recently that grey-import R33 Skyline GT - all autos. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to drive a manual… just that I wasn’t entirely convinced I remembered how to. Or when exactly I was supposed to operate that pedal on the far right. Obviously, as I was a MAN who wrote for a MANLY magazine full of MANLY things like BBQs and V8s and who was in a car full of OTHER MANLY MEN - aside from the fact we all hated Manly - this minor glitch of historic fact wasn’t worth noting, and was best hushed up.

“How long’s it been since you actually drove a manual?” Chris asked, within the first five minutes.

Bugger. I hadn’t stalled it once, honest. Mainly because I’d taken to dropping the clutch with enough revs to chirp the tyres at every intersection, because I was terrified of stalling it. I’m guessing that was the giveaway.

“Well, it’s almost a lost skill, on a global scale,” I pointed out. “With CVTs and tiptronic ‘boxes, who drives a manual these days? It’ll be gone inside five years. It’s a dead art.”

“Certainly is the way you do it,” Jules observed.

“Would you like a drive there Jules?” I asked. “We could even get you some L plates from the nearest servo… have you even got your learners licence?”

“Quiet, children,” JC declared. “I have an idea to make this trip awesome. Awesomer, even. It’s called I Have Never.”

“Isn’t that one of those first-year drinking games that usually ends up with people snogging each other?”

“No. Well, yeah. But no. Here’s the idea. One of us says ‘I have never…’ and if noone else has done the thing, we all have to do it.”

“I’m not snogging ANY of you motherfuckers,” I said.

“No, you’ve got enough to concentrate on with the whole bunnyhopping-every-gearchange thing...”

JC was miffed we weren’t buying into his concept. “Why does it always end up in the gutter with you lot?” That was the pot calling the kettle a particularly dark shade of anthracite. “OK, Roadtrip 'I Have Never'. My go first. I have never… stopped for a milkshake from the OAK factory at Hexham.”

Ah, I see what he’s on about with this.

“Have you not?” I interrogated. “Really?”

“Nup,” JC nodded.

This was as akin to roadtrip blasphemy as wanting to take the train. Never having stopped at the OAK factory at Hexham? Makers of the greatest milkshakes, icecream spiders and flavoured milk products in the known universe? Surely not.

“You would have gone past the place as much as I had, you know their reputation…”

“Yes and yes, but nup.”

“Jeez,” I noted. “Me neither.”

“Nup,” said Jules, by way of confirmation.

“Dad always drove straight through from Raymond Terrace,” Chris recalled.

So it was written. Team WWMD cruised into the carpark at the OAK Factory for a milkshake and a photo. Sure it was a fucking Hungry Jacks these days but at least we got the OAK logo in shot.

“Nice camera,” remarked JC. “Though I suppose it saves Grunt sending a photographer along too…”

“Huh?”

“Don’t pretend you’re not writing this up as a feature for the magazine,” he observed conspiratorially. “You care too much about this for it just to be about the call of the open highway, or whatever.”

“Bollocks,” I said. Then quieter, since the other lads were out of earshot visiting the slashers and/or Skyping back to base: “Erm, how’d you guess?”

“Woman’s intuition,” he smirked. “Besides, the fact you’re pointing a very-obviously-not-yours digital SLR at everything that moves is just the teensiest giveaway that you’re on assignment…”


Continued in part three