Lonely Gully: Chapter 12
Lizard Blair is in strife again but he can’t guess what’s about to happen next, as an old stranger reemerges. Tim Douglas takes up our tale.
This is “summer reading” like nothing you’ve read before: a diverse field of writers united by their connection to Australia’s national newspaper, collaborating on a novel that will captivate you through summer.
Each author had just three days to write their chapter, with complete freedom over story and style; it’s fast, fun and very funny. Tune in over the summer to see how the story unfolds.
Today, Tim Douglas takes up our story.
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By Tim Douglas
Button charges from the shed and liberates the pistol from the warm, cloistered cleft of Lizard’s arse. Lizard kicks himself. Serves him right for shoving the piece down his plumber’s crack in the first place. Who did he think was? Starsky?
The cop – that’s if he really is a cop; and if he is, he’s as crooked as the Y in Guyra – cocks the hammer on the weapon and rests it against a lump protruding from Lizard’s temple.
“Superficial. Temporal. Artery,” Button says, tracing the pulsating blue slug with the pistol’s barrel. “You’re a walking aneurysm, Jerome. ”
Lizard clocks Deb now and feels his knees weaken. He hadn’t noticed from the car, but she has been gagged, her wrists purpling between cable ties. The folding chair looks like it might swallow her whole. Even with the footy sock in her gob – black and blue; Spud colours – she is beautiful. Lizard has seen Deb in cuffs before, of course. Pink ones. Fluffy numbers. He blushes at the memory.
“You gotta relax, Jerome,” Button says, breaking the spell. “Stress is the biggest killer of males over 40. It’s a bloody epidemic.”
Oh great. Dr fuggin Phil is in the house. And Jerome? Sure, everyone knew he hated his Christian name but this alabaster arseclown really was laying it on a bit thick.
Not for the first time in his life, Lizard cursed his old man. This Jerome bullshit was his fault. The way his uncle Garry told it, Rodney Blair, upon hearing the news he was to become a father, had had an educational epiphany. Between flattening tackle bags at Guyra Showground’s Red Hill and draining schooners at the bottom pub, Rodney had taken to books, particularly those with a scientific, religious and art history bent. In the process, which ultimately would consume him, he had become enamoured with the artist Hieronymus Bosch, and two of his paintings in particular. Firstly, the portrait of St John the Baptist, featuring the titular bonce-wetter and a young lamb, which he later would learn represented Jesus. The painting’s bucolic backdrop was strangely reminiscent of the New England plains and if he looked hard enough, Rodney Blair swore he could see the merino stud on which he’d grown up.
The second painting was Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a morality tale in triptych. Sure it had its bacchanalian bedlam of threesomes and free love, but there was more to it than a few pairs of tits.
Hidden in the work, like some sort of Netherlandish Where’s Wally, were therianthropic figures. Humans and animals so close they might have merged. Transgenesis in brushstroke. Half-man half-plants; humanoid fish; fantastical creatures.
Over a beer and book in the bottom pub, Rodney Blair had seen the future in a 15th-century painting. And so it would be, he announced to Lynda early in her first trimester: they would call their son Hieronymus.
Lynda loathed the idea. What kind of dandy was he planning on bringing into the world; on bringing into Guyra? She rattled off the list of potential taunts: Hieronymus: Hair On My Arse; Anony-mous; Hippo-goddamn-potamus. No way was she having it. It was the local GP Dr Charlotte Dimitrolous, whose parents owned the fish and chip shop in town (locals called her dad Theo the Codfather), who intervened. Eight months before she would cut Lizard’s umbilical cord, she cut a deal between his parents. “How about Jerome?” It was, she explained, the Germanic derivative of the Greek Hieronymus. It meant sacred.
Lynda could live with Jerome. And so she did. Rodney had long since pissed off with his footy boots and his fancy books, and she raised the young man herself with nary a penny to her name and a love the size of The Big Lamb that stood sentinel over Guyra’s main drag.
“You, Jerome, are destined for great things,” his mum would say.
His mum was right. And never more right than right now, because, as Lizard stares down the barrel of the loaded gun, he has one thought: “Well isn’t this great. Just fuggin great.”
“All right, Button, enough of the cardiovascular exam. Hand over Deb, ya chalky bastard!”
Button, Randy and Norton share a furtive smile. The ram is as good as theirs now. Anita shuffles nervously and glances over at Lizard. He doesn’t flinch. Lizard doesn’t give a toss about his temporal artery, superficial as it may be; and he cares even less about the gun pointed at his head. He does wonder whether the previously booty-bound handgun will even work; things had turned pretty humid in that part of the world these past few hours. No, he just wants Deb. To dive back into those emerald eyes. To reacquaint himself with every one of her freckles, contagious sprinkles that seemed to leap from her nose to her chest and across her shoulders. He thinks about that blue tongue tattoo and his heart almost leaps out of his chest. Instead his tongue leaps out of his gob. “She has nothing to do with any of this!”
Button runs the pistol like a comb through his white hair, which now seems to Lizard to feature a tight curl. How had he not noticed that before? Button sucks his teeth. “Jerome, Jerome, Jerome. You really don’t get it, do you? Follow me.”
Deb begins to struggle against the restraints, almost toppling backwards as she screams mute nothings into the woollen muzzle. But Lizard is focused only on Button, who, waving the pistol like a schoolkid with a sparkler, ushers him down to the shed from which he had emerged.
“Some pied piper,” Anita says.
“Too soon,” Lizard mutters. “Bastard already pied me once today.”
The cop fumbles with the lock and Lizard marvels at how a fulla named Button might have such poor dexterity. Perhaps it was one of those ironic nicknames, like calling redheads Bluey or prop-forwards Brains.
Eventually the door to the shed swings open and Button, smile as wide as Guyra’s Mother of Ducks Lagoon, points the gun inside.
That’s when Lizard sees him. A hulking figure, dressed in a filthy white lab coat, emerges from the darkness. Button grabs the man by his shackled arms, and reefs a footy sock out of his mouth. Lizard feels the vein in his temple begin to pulsate.
The figure stares. “Hieronymus, my boy. Ask these heathens to untie me, would you?”
“What’s the difference between a BMW and a cactus?”
Mary California is tired. Too tired for this. She just wants to pay for her petrol and get to Lonely Gully. It’s been a hell of a day. The morning’s extraordinary general meeting with the Guyra Show Society had run overtime, and then she’d endured a three-hour morning tea with the Country Women’s Association. She must have ingested a cubic metre of scones. She’ll worry about how to digest that later. For now she has work to do. Literary agent Sawyer Matilda, has instructed her, with some urgency, to head out to Lonely Gully and investigate a lead. Something about a sheep farm harbouring a top secret biological lab? She giggles at the notion.
The attendant is holding back the eftpos machine, waiting for a response. “So?”
“Sorry,” says Mary, humouring the man. “What is the difference between a BMW and a cactus?”
The attendant’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. “With a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.”
The attendant doubles over in laughter. Matilda feigns a simper and taps her card. “Lovely.”
“Receipt?” he asks, wheezing.
She ignores the inquiry – bogan bastard – and opens the door to her Series X5 Beamer.
She knows Lonely Gully and she knows of Tamara Meadows, its reclusive owner. But the women are not friends. In fact, now she thinks of it, Mary has only seen Tamara twice.
The first time was at the saleyards. The foodie had decided it was a good initiation to country life; Tamara had been there, repeatedly raising her stump – an act both of confidence and intimidation – and clearing out most of the lots at auction.
The second Tamara sighting was in Mary’s natural habitat: at dinner. There was no mistaking Tamara that night two years ago at Guyra’s Fortune Chinese Restaurant. That she was dining there wasn’t, of itself, earth-shattering news. The restaurant’s sweet ’n’ sour pork was the best this side of Shanghai.
No, what had set tongues wagging was the company she’d kept. There, spinning the glass-topped lazy susan and looking deeply into Tammy’s eyes, was Xi Jingye.
Mary knew Jingye. He was a businessman with some land out near Black Mountain. Captain Thunderbolt country. At the Taste of Guyra festival the pair had bonded in consternation over a planned Indian-Chinese-Lebanese fusion restaurant in town to be called The Taj Mao-halal. She’d given him her number. He never called.
Mary smarts and belts down the road at a hundred clicks towards Lonely Gully. Not far now.
As she approaches the Hillgrove turnoff, she clocks a vision, a blur, in her periphery.
She turns her head to see a huge, freshly shorn ram, pink pendulous testicles swinging wildly and seeming to propel the beast towards her.
Terrified, she locks eyes with the animal as it rushes the car from the side of the road.
Mary California grabs the wheel tightly, closes her eyes and braces for impact.
Tim Douglas is editor of The Weekend Australian Review. He has worked as a reporter, features writer and editor on a range of newspapers including The Australian, The Scotsman, The Edinburgh Evening News and Scots national arts magazine The List. He has enjoyed injecting a bit of culture into this tale.
COMING UP: Yoni Bashan continues the story over the weekend, followed by Shankari Chandran on Monday.
Read every chapter in the paper, on The Australian’s app and at lonelygully.com.au
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