"...the breeze like ghosts upon the flesh (homeless and shivering) I could just see his boys, those sultry wingless vultures, glittering dark spat towards the amphitheatres; which even in the moonlight still wore their eyebrows of dried nettles an old man’s bristly white; past the concrete dried out in blobs like those dinosaur shits he’d imagined and over the wire (so stretched and trod upon it had become part of the ground) heading into those man dug cliffs looming lung-like either side of the thin-necked track before the first chamber opened around them, milky black, with a blue veil of stars caught frazzled in the gum leaves; he liked the low ground, knew the creases and crevices there; the complications of stone and wood (and the darkness therein in which to hide) the abandoned quarry had, for him, two different beings; bleary-eyed upon the screen he heard (in the distance) the toilet flush, then the foot thump of someone sleep-walking back to bed; still they hadn’t played the clip (though the ads kept promising) so he waited, sloopy slurping micro-waved instant coffee until finally (finally!) he saw a man in angel wings with a slinky hi-hat snaking slithery through catacombs of reverbed guitar; ahh all done now...but what’s this? (pulling down on the stiff-lipped blind) the sky! not black anymore! rather, a pearlescent grey; and himself en-charged and all light headed; barefoot in tracksuit pants he roused the dog (Poor old Bessie, poisoned and buried under a lemon tree, only to have her successor dig her up and trot into the kitchen with her clay-clad skull in its’ jaws like a grotesque anniversary gift) from her slumber, smacking sluppy-lipped to faithfully follow him into these new side-headed wilds; Adam was born of himself then; in this creamy alien light; light-footed upon the grass surrounded by a mantric arpeggio of chiming birdsong (let us say the earrings of Eos) and it was as though he’d snuck through a secret flap and was now walking upon the true ghost of the world; a keeper of secrets now, and with something to keep; this suffusion of rock (and ghost guard gums, dreamy as the dry grass ghosts and swollen nettles) like a handful of shells, unwrapped (let us say in her hand) from which shone the Foodland Boomerang and the old prison road; Bessie shot off like a golden-tailed rocket into the grass toward some wafer of sound maybe only she and bats could here, leaving him, un-body guarded, to wander towards his epiphany; just there, in the clearing where the two cliffs met, trotted out from nowhere a fox; the two just stood, looking at each other, neither moving, amazed, like the thing was saying what the fuck are you doing here? It sniffed at the air a little and then just trotted off, past the old car wreck, leaving him to it; where was it? Japan? If you see a fox it means there’s about to be a death in the family (maybe that was just in the snow though) fine; he knew who he wanted it to be, and stood now looking at the burnt out wreck ( its’ roof caved-in from the generations of stone hurled upon it) at the base of the cliff that acted as corridor towards the main arena, guarded, hydra-like, by an enormously overgrown aloe vera (even the dark could not disguise the dusty menace of its’ serrated teeth and thick black hard-on) and beyond it; the grandest canyon, from the lip of which the poured forth the fields like Elysian moonlit paint; fukncuntsyeahIwannafuknpissonemfuknfukkersfuknpisstheshitoutofemyeahfuknshitthefukoutathefukncuntsfuknshitanpissonthefukofthecuntsfukthefukkersandshitthecuntoutofthefuknfuckofemfuknfuksshut the fuck up; he’d heard something; that sickening unmistakable crack of a misplaced foot upon a fallen bone dry branch; from our vantage point we had seen them coming, watched them, in fact, the whole way from above as they’d headed east through the widest passage towards the car; was disappointed, almost, in how easy it was; excited too though, because if they got past us now (if we lost them past the plant) then they were lost forever, for he knew the rock beyond as well as his own face, and that lot would have been scrambled up there like monkey shadows on velvet; it was my own ankle that alerted them, snuck down from the control room to say caught! (not just though, you had to actually touch one) and manoeuvring myself for the dash (ha!) to grab a handful of fleeting untucked shirt of victory when I broke it; billy tea (boiled with gum leaves) and the two of us sleepy (half sick on rocky road) staring into the fire; put the tent up in the dark over the squishy nodules of sheep shit felt even through the sleeping bags; Adam spent half the day hacking at a tree, convinced his ability to tie a one-handed sheep shank somehow cancelled out the physical chances of such a heavy green wood being fashioned successfully into a raft; tied in all together and launched it, grunting, into a watery grave so efficiently not even bubbles bothered to come up; cunt!; came back and tossed a desultory malley root into the flames ( we just kept doing it; adding these miss-shaped midgets ((not knowing that they were the bush-fuel equivalent of a nuclear reactor)) got so hot we had to move our tent and when the weather changed could still sit ten or so feet away from it bone dry under a steaming dome of disintegrated rain) this was before that though ( our scout leader, coming back to check, our little China syndrome still warm to the touch he reckoned, two weeks later) Mr Higganbottom (how could you not remember that!) incarnated now as Akela, in whose burnt-chop-fat-flecked kitchen we sat around the smeared smoky glass of the small round dining table awaiting the screen door bang of his coming with supplies; a bag of flour, some potatoes, sardines and bangers and beans; ohh he winked, slipping a handful of Nescafe sachets into our backpacks, don’t forget this; what he liked to call the scouting spirit; a small jerry can of petrol and three or four matchboxes in a re-sealable sandwich bag; you know the rules lads, only if it rains; un-wived now and waiting (with his plumber’s paunch) for Bagheera to arrive, heralded by the sound of a punctured muffler growling to a shake in the driveway and crept in through the clacky wood of the back screen with those eyes of his and the dark crescents under them like waning moons; acknowledged us with a nod, lighting the same cigarette which always seemed implanted in the breast of the long feathered bird drooping down his cheeks; and we drove for ages, with only the reflected cat’s eyes for company, pulsing, peeling off the miles, the flexuous bitumen eventually giving way to a gravel road that threw its’ looseness in lulling pops against the belly of the ute, then onto dirt (and that tight bladder wheeze of tyres) pinging to a stop; hauled out our backpacks and could just see the over the moonlit skin the smudge of trees down there by the river; descending again into that bite in the calves as we fell (half-puppeted by our packs and jerry can) down the sheep shorn slope waiting for gravity to arrive with Akela’s tail-lights in our hair; we settled back (next night) poking sticks into the embers just to watch the flames fuss from their disturbed sleep; worked out pretty soon too if you throw instant coffee granules into a fire you are rewarded with a moment of phosphorescence, so we burnt the lot, the packets too (most rewarding) that elusive unicorn, a green flame, sputtering before our dirt creased faces; TV of the homos wasn’t it? these shapes appearing magical that drugged the shapes within to sleep; and their skulls gathered in thick mono-browed boulders around the water, the moon glowering upon their opalescent craniums as they peeked, half sunk, through the ghost gums; behind them a cliff face rose a crumbly chocolate red, like this bend in the river was a baked black cherry cheesecake from which someone had just taken a slice; and our bellies so full now; cans of stew (sitting on the orange embers) coughing up gravy through the stabbed slits that sizzled and bubbled on the tin, slices of dropped fried potato sugar-dipped in ash and a charred meteorite of damper that we broke into for its’ still gooey salty innards; fukngrate he muttered approvingly, blowing on the flame engulfing his marshmallow like the recalcitrant eyelashes of a dandelion stuck on the end of a bent twig in his dough gluey fingers; and did seem to me a self-folded crick in the fabric of time and space; born to this; this otherness, of himself from whom the story of the world would unfold rather than be enfolded in, and that perhaps I was just a guest in his imagination; that all of this, where we were; who I was; would simply cease to exist once he stopped thinking about it; I stared into the fire, pulling on the cuffs of my jeans to feel the red heated bronze of them against my shins; Adam snorted and spat some percolated spume into the flames; ha!fuknJohn’sbroteheryeahhereckonsfuknhewasdoingherinfrontofthefuknfireplaceandpullshisshitoutanditfuknshootsinthefirefuknseesitshootfuknoverherfuknheadfukimaginethatseeinyufuknshitsizzlinonafuknlogfuk! the last of it slapped back in echo from the cliff; a game in itself, yelling just to hear the booming ghost of the sound; and from the throats of young titan’s such bizarre and thunderous servants born; shit-legs; piss-nose; cunt-knuckle; Cyclopses, rang back, briefly prowling the waterline, before returned again to silence; made him think of that Aborigine idea of someplace where every sound ever made is collected upon itself forever; again (like the rat) that his flesh was just used like the cover of an already written book; now even the river itself became an object of suspicion; no! the opposite; of recognition; aren’t they just supposed to snake around, changing course like a careering garden hose slowed down over millennia? yet here was this thing, girdled by agriculture, by industry, damned and drained and generally distorted into its’ present moribund shape; that all this land, sighing its’ parasolled pastoral majesty on the back of a postcard was in fact just the healed scar tissue of the hacked-up land before it; another coat, another dream, and that all of its’ past and present and future configurations and him and them and were and is were overlaid like stamps on the passport of the infinite; that everything was silver, with history branded into it, but the metal itself unchanged; we are borrowed, he thought, following me up the slope of the paddock towards the dirt road that delivered us; saw everything as a sort of mercury, the sky and earth and his own skin, the past and the future, saw it all sloshing upon the slightly denser banks of itself; a vision of Venice really, with the skin pulled off; there! (I pointed) it was unmistakable, that eerie suffused glow of distant unseen headlights moving its’ silvered mist between the long low flanks of the paddocks; fuknose he said, problyafarmer, and let the earth pull him in long moon eaten shapes back towards the fire, to his tales of shooting seed into flames, and all our other lies, bundled together, like unlit pyres cocooned around our bodies; I stared in, warm and flaky as that last en-blistered sausage roll left radiated in the school canteen; so many treats! those bogeys, rustling like muscle shells with each draw of air, those little clusters of sebum crunchy like dried sap on the scalp, that rich primal valley between the top of the thighs and the ball bag; so much to be scooped up in the fingernails to sniff and touch and taste! would have to wait of course, for privacy, and was happy to just keep heating them when Adam’s eyes shot into the darkness; wha..? shush! his hand held up, as though upon the lips of the air itself, shushing it, and staring into the rough spun shapes of chopped up caterpillar the spindled branches over there had borrowed from the near midnight wardrobe; both of us staring now, with the hiss and spit of cracklefire playing against a drum of thudding blood; those (what were they?) trees? bushes? a cross-between (where’s Darwin!) some lowdown thick-rooted things with a proper Latin name but known local as jillybarns or beetlebark with their tentacles swept out and curling as though stretched by the wind; and the host of an attention intent upon unthreading from their vespered mass the moonlit gleam of a scabbard say, or a sabre tooth; nothing; but still as statues, staring into the electric black beyond the fire; a rustle (was it?) that car! (I knew it) some yokel crept down to divide us with an axe! wecanhearyucunt, Adam called hoarsely; nothing; stopfuknaround; still nothing, and the nothingness, that passage of tangerine light spread from the fire into the darkness like a magic carpet, studied so hard that teacher and student became confused; I didn’t say move! Or did I? seemingly said to each shadowed blade of grass and black bummed-rock; each beat of the heart dissolving in the vat of acid the stomach had become; I looked at the thick black line of texta the cliff was, behind the trees, against the charcoal canvas of the sky milk smeared with stars remembering from daylight its’ sheer, smooth, unclimability ( and that’s not counting how deep the creek was) it looked deep, had that greeny still of deep waxed upon its’ surface; the fire shuffed and shifted the shadows about like over-packed blackness in a washing machine, and as if in a sort of dream he saw two longnesses within it diverge; the definite and deliberate movement of two legs from together to akimbo; of one stepping forward; then that gut churning crack of a branch maybe the diameter of a ten cent piece; from rock to rock he tiptoe danced, bluey-green (that fuzz on them) with those little pools of conical black encrustations like choc buds in a teacup, the jellious ripple-edged pasta of seaweed too, and the rocks getting slimier, hopping toward that seething fizz and sizzle of the breakers; mind now lad! Akela called from the car park (back still where there were pine trees) a matchstick now, with a little gut and hat; it was the sound he craved (and all that bright and magnificent spray) to stand eagle-footed within, and so sure of it the small jump seemed nothing until it pummelled against his shoulders; like a dick into the arse of the earth he slid; wedged halfway between the sky and the sea; feet dangling like calves stuck in the belly of the rock with his shoulders concertinaed into its’ V-shaped snug like a starling stuck in the frozen scrum of a rugby game; the sea sucked out then rushed a dazzle of bubbly stars about his face; receded and repeated; and seeming to get longer each time; he knew he could hold his breath for a minute ( at a pinch) had proved it just to entertain himself during maths lessons, but the water didn’t wait for him to properly fill his lungs, just rushed up savage as the face that would kill him without even knowing his name; and it was the complete unacceptability of this; his whole being in shock even as he saw the headline Boy Drowns drawn upon his flesh, like shark attack, as some kind of editorial destined for someone else into which he been so outrageously substituted that found him removing from its’ sheath the bone-handled blade upon his belt fetished sharp enough to feel hairy under the thumb, and standing, slowly, with his eyes fixed upon those just moved shadows; each breath was ethanol now, and I swooned, light-headed, leant forward from my still sat legs like a half-drunk gorgon, when my fingers touched a fist-sized branch (supposed for burning) and gripped it while I was away, already swimming and clamouring over the boulders on the other side of the creek when Adam’s eyes met mine, with a slight but unmistakable smile burrowed into the shadows of his cheek; he shook his head slightly, so I dropped the wood, and sat back with a crocheted blanket over my legs, and a bowl of cloggy oats on the plastic-flowered table-mat; withered now, as the tatty curtains, and telling the nurse again that the Prime Minister was a paedophile and that my pee tastes like lemonade; O just finish your brekky Mr she chides with the chortle of the exhausted, flicking my hand away from her bottom, and left alone looked out the window at the gleaming foil of a windswept chip packet car-crashed around a clump of weeds in the concrete; Ferrari; why does that word mean something? sounds like a spotted hunter or some terrible wind; unsettles me, the not knowing, so I fart some thick bean from my near useless arsehole; Prometheus; Agamemnon; Aegeus; Persephone; flower names? I never planted them! saw neat trimmed piles of Merlot clippings lined up in all their silvery purple gorgeousness like the knees of exotic schoolgirls on the lush green skirts of grass between the vines, the sky too, spread out like the grey cotton-bobbled bottom of a bed sheet with the embers of some giant cigarette bleeding in the fissures; the ghosts of television, haunting and frantic, heaped up in a frenzy of pixels like ants devouring a log; and from this static mist they emerged (somewhere between M*A*S*H and The Price Is Right) converging like a handclap on the outskirts of illumination; I will gut this cunt like a fish Adam thought, advancing with the knife brandished above his head, the mechanics of his emotion over-ruling the practical necessity of coming from below to effectively achieve this, overwhelmed by an urgent gravity to overpower and reign down upon his foe; to smite from above, and be as like a comet or a bull or a speeding freight train; Thor’s hammer and Excalibur combined not in that well-maintained but still average steel flashing through the darkness ( that had been used, actually, to gut fish (( and that slight sadness, the way they deflate, when the point punctures them)) and shave the sappy crowns of the nettles away from the nutty edible disk at their centre) but in the energy of enemies realised in the forward convulsion of oyster-clean and electroplated young muscle; Saladin sipped his minted tea; before him the prisoner (a bag of bones, in Templar smock) dragged a broadsword erect, as though to pierce the very heart of the sky, which wavered, falteringly, before collapsing like a railway pier still clasped in his skun-knuckled hand; the Sultan unplaced from him his weapon as though it were liquorice and, ensuring he was re-plumped, presented to his refreshment the carcass of a goat and a silk pillow, hanging from a cedar; take back your sword, he said, and cut asunder both these two to be free again; the Knight drew back and swung his trusted justice through the body of the goat as though slicing over a fairway with a nine-iron, with the putter of dripping blood from the ribs onto the severed hindquarters applauding his effort; next he positioned himself for the pillow, and swung at it as though it were the neck of the Sultan himself crying Sigillum Militum Χρisti (in his mind) yet the thing just bouncing off the blade like a miss-hit piñata; seems you will be with us some time yet! the Sultan grinned, glancing by the silk with a nick of his scimitar that left feathers blowing over the sand; like moonbeams now, dropped through the skylight to congeal in a mawkish swamp of green-tinged effulgence on the concrete; Polyphenum (fiddling with an outboard motor) approached from behind by Odysseus; pass us those pliers the monster said, holding out his hand, not bothering to turn around; I could just cave in his head now he thought, looking at the hammer handle turned his way on the workbench; I said pass us those fukn pliers! Claudius and Hamlet (with Gertrude peeling carrots in the kitchen) and Polonius the caged cockie whistling on about the wages of unfaithfulness like a broken record; and how sweet it was to see his tormentor’s confidant nibble ( with its’ gray beak and acorn bead tongue) a sunflower seed just plucked from the eye of his dick; to piss upon the handles of his car and golf clubs and favourite tools; and running now (screaming like a Banshee) towards that shape in the hinterland of the see-able, the knife ready to strike; Fukn Jesus! a voice cried from the epicentre, the treble of it slapping off the rocks; you right there mate! it was the moustache I saw first, dragging the hangdog features behind it (into the light) then the moonstone of his eyes, all glittery with rushed blood; and laughing now, shaking his head, reaching for a cigarette; thought I’d come see how you blokes were gettn on Bagheera winced (lighting it) and this one bloody tries to kill me! slapping Adam on the back, who pulled away from his clasp like a pushed bag of potatoes; soon they’ll sew my arse shut and put a pipe in me like a vacuum cleaner; the days are for dozing in the common room (in my favourite chair) before the wall-mounted plasma screen donated by Old Nanny Parson’s relatives; ha! I could tell you a thing or two about her! Champion in the two hundred butterfly my arse! she’s a honky tonk succubus! her teeth, see, infested with white ant, shocking, you’d see ‘em in her shit if they let you...the power-grid of the whole Eastern sea board run from her toenails (shhh) I’m not supposed to know; I miss the old TV, the static and the flickering grain; it’s not supposed to be alive; not like this new thing, it’s too rich and flat, too unreflective..."
“Shannon Hayes was born in 1968 in the Northern suburbs of Adelaide. After dropping out of drama school, he found employment; first as a camera salesman, then as a cook, which led to a good portion of dissolute and listless wanderings through various share-houses, half-way houses, pubs and backpacker hostels dotting the Western side of Australia. In 2001 he arrived in Melbourne—where he still resides—after being accepted into the Professional Writing and Editing Diploma program at RMIT.”
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