Lonely Gully: Chapter 14
If only poor Herbie Bongmire could have remained oblivious. Even his worst nightmare was preferable to the dire circumstances he now finds himself in. Shankari Chandran takes up the story.
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, Shankari Chandran takes up our story.
-
By Shankari Chandran
Herbie Bongmire wakes to the golden light of a Lonely Gully summer afternoon filtering through the barn’s high windows. He stretches his muscular form, made strong by years of wrestling the fulsome bodies of terrified sheep and relieving them of their heavy fleece. He hears the barn door open and turns as a woman approaches him, her face shrouded in darkness, her body haloed in the same light that woke him. The wind lifts his shirt and tugs at his collar, somehow opening one button and then another. He runs a hand through his thick, dark curls. His senses tell him to move, but he stands his ground, daring this woman to come closer. And she does. Margot Robbie steps into his body’s orbit, drawn by his powerful gravitational pull. She lifts his hand and places it on her face, caressing herself against it.
“Herbie,” she whispers, her voice throbbing with a need that only he can satisfy. “They say you have the softest hands in Guyra.” She leans into him, her moist lips brushing his ear. She tells him what she wants him to do.
He nods, and begins the journey down her body. “It’s all that lanolin,” he says, taking his time.
A sound escapes her. She forces herself to stop him for a moment, and steps back, her eyes large billabongs of longing. Her elegant fingertips linger at the top of her tight shirt, her body urging to be free of its plaid flannel constraints. She smiles as she unzips her clothing and reveals the naked sheep within.
Herbie Bongmire wakes to the gag-inducing smell of warm sheep dung, his heart pounding from the memory of locking lips with Margot-fuggin’-Robbie who turned out to be a fuggin’ sheep; and not even one of those pretty varieties with the long eye lashes that could be considered the Ms Robbie of the ovine species. No, in Herbie’s nightmare, this sheep was as bald and creepy as a certain Minister for Defence whose name he could not remember because that would have required Herbie to take his job as an ABC cadet seriously.
Herbie tries to jerk upright but finds himself tied to a hospital bed inside a barn that has been repurposed into what, based on his extensive knowledge of sci-fi films, can only be described as a state-of-the-art laboratory. His right leg, the one that crazy Tick Tock Tammy put a bullet through for no respectable reason, is numb but intact.
Wires protrude from all four of his limbs, which he notes with disappointment are less muscular in real life. He’s connected to machines like something out of Robocop, another fine film that’s replayed once a year when the Guyra Ritz is temporarily reopened to coincide with the Lamb and Potato Festival. Local parents leave their children at the ageing cinema, in the care of cyborg police Officer Alex Murphy and his vengeful killing spree, while they get smashed under the pretext of supporting regional haute cuisine. “Daytime drinking” as Dasher Lloyd calls it, was always normal in Guyra but since the arrival of Mary California, the food at the Top Pub has wanky foreign names, their coffee has at least three more descriptors (and costs $5.20 a pop) and their alcohol is infused with “complex native botanicals”.
Every sheep farmer now harbours boutique gin distilling aspirations because of her.
Herbie thinks about this as he looks into the curious eyes of said Mary California, the coolly indifferent eyes of Tick Tock Tammy and the remaining wild eye of Deadeye Dick Baldwin.
“‘Tammy,” Herbie says, clearing his throat nervously, shifting as much as his restraints allow him.
“I didn’t see anything, I’m trippin’ on Blue Meanies. That’s all I was doing out there, foraging for medicinal supplies that aid my creative skills. You obviously shot me accidentally, and if you could unhook me, I’ll be on my way. No hard feelings, we’ll call it even.”
Tammy waves her one hand in the air, as if his words are blowflies to be swatted away from a dung-infested sheep’s butt.
“This,” she says, addressing Mary California, with her arm sweeping in a regal arc around her, “is the future. Science is allowing us to amputate the weak.”
Herbie and Mary both flinch at her choice of verb but Tammy doesn’t notice. Her eyes are surveying the new Eden she’s creating.
“After the strategic cull, we take what’s left of this largely brainless species, and engineer the right protein-binding aptamers. By synthesising RNA from the superior nucleotide sequence, we can program any specific function we want in any animal we choose.”
Tammy turns to Mary and smiles, her eyes delirious with the godlike presumption of her plans. “Right now, we’ve created a sheep that can grow its fleece in 24 hours and shed it in 30 seconds, all at the press of a button.”
She lifts a small device that looks like the missing remote control to Herbie’s Foxtel box and saunters over to his bedside.
“In the future,” she says, nodding at Deadeye who unbuckles Herbie’s restraints and frees him from the network of wires and cables inserted into his body, “we’ll be able to do much more.”
She presses the button on the remote control and Herbie Bongmire, reluctant ABC cadet, illicit harvester of psilocybin mushrooms, accidental trespasser and unintentional observer of Tick Tock Tammy’s sheepenstein, jumps off his hospital bed.
Mary’s arms, clutching her designer handbag to her rigid body, relax as she hears the opening strains of Irene Cara’s What a Feeling. Its electronica chords start slowly, almost hesitant, as if Irene is choosing her words while she’s feeling the intense emotions of crying silent tears full of pride. The music quickens and Mary, like everyone who’s ever watched this cinema classic, feels her feet move of their own volition.
She turns to see Herbie, stripped down to his Y-fronts and leg bandage, doing his best Jennifer Beals impersonation, from the iconic final scenes of Flashdance. Herbie, without the aid of magic mushrooms, is dancing the length and breadth of the barn-conversion laboratory, his fists punching the air in time with the music. His routine is part callisthenics, part ballet, part breakdance.
Herbie doesn’t have a black leotard, leg warmers or a 1983 perm, but by God he can have it all, now he’s dancing for his life.
The semi-naked journo attempts the splits that five minutes ago would never have entered his mushroom-enhanced mind. Stalling at the 135-degree angle, but undaunted by the limits of his ligaments, he flips over on to his back and busts out several windmills followed by a Deadman’s Float. In his uplifting finale, Herbie matches Irene Cara’s impressive vocal range with a series of dizzying pirouettes that are so endless they eventually seem robotic to the stunned Mary.
The music ends and Herbie takes a bow. Tammy presses another button on the remote control and his sweat-covered body collapses on the laboratory floor.
“The Chinese already have our lamb, our coal and our port,” she says triumphantly. “This is what they want next.”
Shankari Chandran is a lawyer and fiction writer. Her professional credits include a global social justice program, TV adaptations and her new novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which was published this month. She thinks Lonely Gully could be the beginning of a new Australian literary genre, outback-techno-noir-occasionally-erotic-romance.
COMING UP: Siobhan McKenna continues the story on Tuesday, followed by Claire Harvey on Wednesday.
Read every chapter in the paper, on The Australian’s app and at lonelygully.com.au
Spoiling season: special gifts for him and her
From special scents made to be shared to a seriously cool new watch, spoil your loved one this Valentine’s Day.
Midlife rules: How to hit peak fitness over 40
Yes, you can be as fit as you were in your thirties, you just need to change the way you train.