Aquatic Grunge Read online




  Aquatic Grunge

  by Chris Johnstone

  Copyright © 2011 by Chris Johnstone

  www.aquaticgrunge.com or www.aquaticgrunge.com.au

  Kindle Edition

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  The Jendaya Chronicle: Part One

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  The Jendaya Chronicle: Part Two

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Stan Dwyer’s Night

  Nathan Punt’s Night

  Chapter Twelve

  The Jendaya Chronicle: Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Neville Lives On

  Chapter Fourteen

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Fourteen Continued

  The Jendaya Chronicle: Part Four

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Jendaya Chronicle: Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Missives of Merpeople

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Missives of Merpeople: Final Missive

  Chapter One

  I lived in a cheap backpackers hostel in Cairns. There was nothing wrong with communal living. Actually, the bunks in the dorm of the Paradise Hostel, on Grafton Street, weren’t too bad—not as good as the name suggests, but not too bad. I had an arrangement with the manager: mop the floors, clean the toilets, do various other unglamorous jobs; and stay rent-free. The manager was a short and wide sort of bloke called Steve. Steve never hesitated to put me to work and I was starting to wonder if the hard labour was worth the twenty eight dollars I was saving each night.

  One Thursday morning, as I was mopping the communal kitchen, I scanned the area. It’s amazing how you can look at a place for ages, months, without even really looking at it. Brown floor tiles, brown walls and a brown ceiling. Resident geckos crawled along the walls, standing out like green glow-sticks at a rave. Despite their luster, the moths usually didn’t see them until it was much too late. There was a massive brown fridge taking up a whole wall. It had four big glass doors and a shit-load of shelves. It was pretty much known that if you put something in there, there was a good chance that you would never see it again. I had a thought of a mature-aged man placing his moaning battle-axe of a wife in the fridge in hope. An A4-size piece of paper was stuck up on the glass. Written in bold purple marker pen was the following note: ‘Please don’t steal from others. Karma, guys. Karma.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s a bit rough,’ I thought. ‘I was just about to help myself to somebody’s Kraft Cheese Singles, but fuck, I hadn’t realised that karma would be onto me.’

  I leaned against my mop for a while, pondering. After eight minutes, I figured that karma would want to reward me for my hard work in the kitchen, so I grabbed a handful of stuffed green olives, straight out of a jar. Someone had left the jar in a very vulnerable position close to the front and in plain view of everyone. It would have been rude not to take them.

  Hmm, I was getting thirsty. What to wash those karmalicious olives down with? And then I spotted it—the find of the century. Some brave (or stupid) soul had bought a slab of VB Gold and stuffed it in the top left-hand corner of the fridge. It was literally a chest of gold in front of me.

  Who would leave an unguarded slab? Bring it on!

  I approached it stealthily, making sure that it was not a trap. He or she had tried their best to hide it behind several browning heads of lettuce and a packet of vacuum-sealed bacon. But my eyes were trained to look beyond these things. As I reached for the Holy Grail, I saw a Post-it note stuck to the side of the cardboard box that read: Two of the bottles in this box have been stuck up my arse. Only I am knowing which ones they are. How are you liking those odds? Horst.

  Which way will karma go? There was only one way to tell. I checked the time. Eleven a.m. I grabbed the whole box and headed for my room, hoping to consume all but the two arse-beers before anybody noticed. I slammed the door shut and quickly opened a stubby. I heard the satisfying ‘sttsss,’ of the twist top coming off. As I put sweet beer to chapped lips, I was rudely interrupted.

  ‘You know what the bleeding time is, guv?’

  ‘Oh, shit, sorry. Didn’t see you there.’

  The pile of whitish sheets and pillows on the bunk bed opposite me had wakened, taking the form of a whitish pom called Neville. We had been sharing the dorm for three weeks. In the world of backpacking, that made us best friends.

  His presence made me apprehensive, not because I was busted, but because I was most likely going to have to share my hard-earned bounty with him.

  ‘What’s this then, ‘ey?’ he demanded. ‘Go on, offer us one.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I mumbled. ‘These belong to Horst.’

  ‘Well maybe I’ll go ask ‘im if I can ‘ave one — know what I mean?’ he threatened.

  ‘No need to do that, mate,’ I said. ‘I’d love to have a couple of quiet ones with you. Can you do me one favour, though?’

  ‘What’s that then, guv?’ He enquired, as he grabbed a stubby from the box.

  ‘Fuck off back to your own country!’

  He wasn’t a bad bloke, but his red hair, bony limbs, pasty complexion, and pure pomminess were just asking for insults.

  We drank. I made sure to check each stubby for any signs of German rectum before deciding which one was for me and which one was for Neville. After a while though, I wouldn’t have cared if the beer was flowing direct to my mouth from Boris Becker’s ginger-lined arsehole.

  After about eight beers and endless hours of Neville crapping on about shagging, drinking, and the 2002 Rugby World Cup final, I fell asleep. I dreamt mainly about drinking beer, good quality beer that I had paid for myself.

  When I woke up, I checked my watch. It was six o’clock, but I couldn’t tell whether that meant a.m. or p.m. During summer, Cairns only knew one way — hot and humid. Morning, night, or afternoon, it didn’t matter. It really couldn’t be too difficult for the local Cairns weatherman. In fact, I reckoned I could do a better job than him:

  Kelvin Daniels here. Today folks, it’s going to be unbearably sticky and hot. That will pretty much continue the whole day, the whole night, and continue in this pattern for fucking months. I’d suggest immersing yourself in water and getting shit-faced until May. Now, it’s back to the anchor-man, who wasn’t good enough to stay on-air in a capital city, so he’s stuck in Cairns pretending he is happy to be here, like the rest of us stuck in this backward shit-hole where bogans
and back-packers roam free.

  At six o’clock, morning or night, Neville was not around. I could hear some masculine cursing in the background. I couldn’t understand it, but it sounded pretty German.

  I’d been living in the hostel for nearly two months. I was an elder statesman of the place. People from all over the world came and went all the time. I wasn’t too worried about Horst, as yet unknown to me. Chances were he’d be gone in a couple of days.

  My decision to live communally was based on sex. I figured if you are living side-by-side and sleeping in dorms with backpackers from all over the world, statistics predict that half of them are going to be women. These women would be forced to talk to me if they lived with me, and some of them might even find me attractive. That was the concept. However, most of the women saw me for what I was: a loner; a useless bludger who used travelling as a way of hiding the fact that I had no prospects, no future, no friends, and no fucking idea. Not that you could call going to Cairns from Melbourne ‘travelling’. I was still in the same bloody country. In the two months I’d been in Cairns, I’d had sex twice—yes, with two separate women, but that’s still not a great strike rate, especially in Cairns. Both encounters involved masses of money spent on alcohol for me and the chicks I was conning into bed. Both women wanted nothing to do with me ever again. I don’t blame them.

  You don’t have to have any special qualities to travel. In fact, you don’t need to have any good traits at all. Most of the backpackers at the hostel were worse than me: boring, self-centred, and fairly humourless until drunk or stoned. They were all, like me, alcoholics.

  Judging by the fact that I could hear voices that weren’t too loud and drunk, I guessed it must be six at night. I wasn’t sure what to do. I decided I should skull the remaining five beers and dispose of them under Neville’s bed. I then heard a voice, or had an internal awakening. Whatever it was, it asked this in a cold, masculine voice:

  ‘What the hell are you going to do with your life, mate?’

  ‘I don’t know. Drink?’ I replied.

  ‘That’s not really much of a goal, now is it?’

  ‘I guess not. But it is achievable,’ I countered.

  ‘You are better than that. Hurry up and do something,’ the voice demanded, ‘the time has come, Kelvin Daniels, the time has come!’

  ‘You are right, mysterious voice, you are absolutely right!’ I screamed, possibly way too loud.

  I resolved then and there to get a job, a title, a life, and some respect. And there was no time like tomorrow. That night, however, I celebrated my new determination and focus by going out and getting absolutely smashed.

  Chapter Two

  My head was pounding. My body was aching. I moved my head and opened my eyes, scanning my surroundings. There were four bunk beds and a poster of Godzilla on the wall. Right place—TICK. There was no evidence to suggest I had vomited, shat or pissed on my property or myself. Important TICK for communal living. There was nobody next to me in my bed—TICK (especially going on my record of what I find attractive after a few drinks). I could see my mobile phone, keys and wallet all neatly flung in the corner on the floor. Bonus TICK.

  The walls were spinning like the firesticks of a crazed hippy. Crazed hippy? That rang a bell. My recollections of the previous night were still fairly vague. I know I was drunk when I got to the Woolshed at about seven. I’m sure the big Maori bouncer only just let me in. I ate a plate of fettuccine. Staying at the Paradise Hostel entitled us to a free, but pretty small, meal every night. The carbs I ingested could not soak up all of the alcohol, as was my plan. For dessert, I had tequila slammers with some lads from the hostel. I recalled:

  Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible.

  Alcohol.

  Crawling around on damp grass.

  Laughter.

  That’s all I could think of at the time and I dozed off again. The next time I woke up I checked my watch and saw that it was eight o’clock. Pretending to myself that I would get up to clean the toilets before nine, I crashed out again. As I was dozing off, I imagined I was riding a flying unicorn into the pink clouds of heaven—a heaven with chocolate and sex and without cleaning and work.

  I woke up again at about two p.m. Fuck. As I was trying to formulate some sort of bullshit excuse that Steve wouldn’t believe, the top bunk opposite me started to move around. This was the bed that had always been empty as long as I’d known it.

  The person in it was a big broad guy. He had a shock of brown hair, brown eyes, and tanned, brown skin. He was the antithesis of Neville, who lay unmoving in the bunk below him. Brown-man looked at me and smiled.

  ‘Kelvin, mate,’ said Mr God-Knows-Who-You-Are. ‘How’d you pull up, buddy?’ His Cairns accent was as broad and tanned as he was.

  ‘Not bad,’ I lied.

  I was at that point unsuccessfully trying to insert this person into any memory of mine at all. It struck me that I must have met this guy last night. Fuck, I hope I didn’t have sex with him.

  ‘Yourself, mate?’ It was the best I could do.

  ‘Yeah, sweet, mate, sweet. I’m stoked we steered clear of that trouble last night, ay?’ he said.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘But thanks for letting us crash here for the night. I don’t think I coulda made it back to Trinity Wharf in my state, ay?’

  Silence. Man, my head hurt.

  ‘Yeah,’ I finally said.

  The burly, brown guy jumped down from the bunk bed. Neville let out a little cockney snore.

  ‘What trouble was that again, mate?’ I asked, trying to sound as if I actually knew what the fuck he was talking about.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Youse were pretty smashed, ay?’

  ‘Yeah, I can’t remember much.’

  ‘Well, mate, we’d left the Woolshed and were trying to get back here. I was following youse guys. There was a whole bunch of us. Nobody really seemed to know how to get home though. Somehow we found ourselves on the boulevard, near that big swimming pool, ay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There was a bunch of hippies playing their bongos or something, and youse all were dancing to it like a bunch of poofters. Youse were really getting into it, mate. Youse were so into it that you fell over and crashed into a guy with dreadlocks who was meditating or something, ay?’

  ‘Oh yeah, now I remember,’ I lied.

  ‘Well these hippies went sick and started swinging at everybody. That’s probably how you got that bruise on your face, ay?’

  I felt my left cheek. Ow!

  ‘I was in the background for most of this, so I sorta’ charged them and they shat themselves and left us alone, ay?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, you thanked me enough last night. Youse kept on going, ‘Stan, youse are my saviour and best friend in the world’ and stuff, ay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  North Queenslanders have a different way of talking. They speak in a slow, lazy drawl. It takes them ages to say anything. Once they get to the end of their sentence, they tack ‘ay?’ at the end of it. It turns everything they say into a question. A statement such as, ‘It’s a full moon,’ does not require a response. But ‘It’s a full moon out there, ay?’ does. It makes it impossible to end a conversation because they keep asking fucking questions every time they talk. Stan’s ‘ay’ was the counterpoint to Neville’s ‘innit?’ East-enders had their own way of not ending a conversation.

  I had a brief notion of the two of them locked in an endless exchange:

  ‘Good, innit?’

  ‘Yeah, ay?’

  ‘Good, innit?’

  ‘Yeah, ay?’

  ‘Good, innit?’

  ‘Yeah, ay?’

  And so on, tanned versus white, until one of them died.

  ‘I should head. But if youse are still interested in that job we were talking about, give us a call. The boat leaves in about two weeks. If you get your open water before then, it should be sweet.’

/>   ‘I’ll just get your mobile number, mate.’

  ‘You’ve already got it, ay? Check your phone. Give us a call soon so we can book you in for the course, ay?’

  Stan bounded from the room energetically. Job? See, getting drunk does get results.

  Stan’s standing spot was replaced by Steve within minutes. He was standing in as broad-shouldered a manner as possible: he must have thought that the extra two centimetres of width made him no longer fat, short, or bald. When he stood like that, you knew that he was pissed off with an underling or a customer.

  ‘I want you out of here within the fortnight.’

  His shoulders told me there wasn’t going to be a way out of it this time.

  ‘Okay.’

  He reacted with annoyance. He’d obviously prepared a speech based on my questioning his reasoning. When I plainly accepted his proposal, he was confused and even angrier. He decided to plough ahead with his strategy, regardless.

  ‘Your work is rubbish. You steal food and alcohol from the fridge. You never wake up on time. You are just shit, and it’s time for you to move on.’

  ‘But I’ve got two weeks, right?’

  ‘Yeah, as your landlord I am obliged by law to not kick your sorry arse out for two weeks. In the ‘80s, we would have just run you out of here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I wanted to scream at him that nobody cares about the ‘80s and its occupancy laws. I wanted to tell him that he looked like a special-needs shelf-packer in his shorts, polo shirt, sandals and comb-over. But I knew that the best thing to do was nothing. And he was right. I was shit.

  He stood there lingering, prepared for battle. I slept.

  Chapter Three

  ‘All right, Neville. I need to get a job. This guy told me that I could get a job if I get my ‘open water’. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this, guv,’ replied the lairy geezer. ‘When a woman is about to give birth, right, she gets what is known as her ‘open water,’ right? That’s when you know when to zip her off to the ‘ospital quick-smart, innit? My mother got her ‘open water’ four minutes before I shot out. The ambulance ‘adn’t even got out of the driveway.’