Lonely Gully: Chapter 9

We meet a new character prone to sticking his nose into all the wrong places: ABC cadet Herbie Bongmire, as Megan Lehmann 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, Megan Lehmann takes up our story.

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By Megan Lehmann

Back up the track in Guyra, it’s raining. Hard enough to make the local ABC forecaster turn the catastrophising up to 11. ­Extreme Weather Event! Meteorological Armageddon! The scrappy little town will be helpless as a lamb before the coming La Nina slaughter, a universe-rattling deluge so ­violent, so unrelenting, that it will surely require the construction of an ark.

Herbie Bongmire flicks off the radio and rolls his eyes. A couple of forlorn raindrops chase each other across the car’s windscreen. Herbie’s ­cadetship is only three weeks old and he isn’t fully on board with the national broadcaster’s we’re-all-gonna-die worldview.

He isn’t even sure about this whole reporting gig. It beats working at the abattoir, but Guyra’s one-man newsroom is a long way from the New York tabloids he’d daydreamed about since watching The Paper. That scene where the columnist brought a cop-issue Smith & Wesson revolver into the office and shot up a stack of newspapers? Extremely cool.

Truth is, Herbie’s lazy. He coasted through to year 12 at Guyra Central School on the back of his mate Dezzie’s prodigious work ethic and frankly inexplicable willingness to let him and Lizard Blair crib off him during exams.

Dezzie is now earning high six figures as a corporate anthropologist at Google in Sydney and steered his old schoolmate into the cadetship. Herbie hadn’t realised they expected him to report on something every day.

Unfolding his great length from the front seat of his Holden Barina shitbox, one ­impossibly long leg at a time, he peers up at a sky the colour of rotten banana.

Rain sends spidery wet fingers down the collar of his best work flanno. It drips from the leaves of sodden stringybarks. Slimy runnels ooze down boulders fuzzy with lichen, and the dank forest floor feels gooey and slick as the inside of a cold curry pie. Perfect.

Herbie loves the rain. He ­especially loves the rain that falls in the tracts of state forest that butt up against the shadowy outpost known as Lonely Gully. That rain is magic rain, coaxing forth blooms of fungi and transcendence. It’s 11am on a workday but Herbie knows no headlines lurk in the forest. The cadet’s here for the ’shrooms.

Herbie first visited a year ago with the Fungi Foragers of New England. He left the group upon realising that their uptight motto – “When in doubt, throw it out” – meant tossing away the only mushroom he was interested in. Panaeolus cyanescens. Street name: Blue Meanie. Bursting with psilocybin, the potent hallucinogenic had escorted Herbie through many a dreary Guyra Central exam. Brain food.

The forest is lousy with Blue Meanies after rain. ­Usually. Today, though, he can’t find a single one. He scoffs a couple of promising frilly gilled beauties. Waits. Nothing.

So he trudges on through the drizzle, edging closer and closer to Lonely Gully’s perimeter fence. This is as near as he’s ever been to the mysterious farm.

Dramatis Personae

LIZARD ‘JEROME’ BLAIR: Handsome truckie, gun shearer and local favourite. Think a young Imran Khan.

DEB THORNBERRY: Lizard Blair's sweetheart and owner of Guyra's best tattoo.

HERBIE BONGMIRE: Guyra’s newest ABC cadet journo and the biggest shroom enthusiast in town.

TICK TOCK TAMMY: The reclusive station owner of Lonely Gully.

RANDY RACHELL: Local troublemaker, crook and former schoolmate of Lizard.

ANITA KUMAR: Molecular biologist and geneticist who grew up in Guyra.

MARY CALIFORNIA: Guyra’s grandest gourmand and judge of the Lamb & Potato Festival.

FURTLE BUREY: Guyra’s best sheep shearer and associate of Tick Tock Tammy.

BUTTON: A fierce-looking cop and suspected boyfriend of Randy Rachelle.

RICHARD ‘DEADEYE DICK’ BALDWIN: Guyra’s notorious glass-eyed sheep shearer.

SAWYER MATILDA: Sydney publishing agent working with Holden-Ford.

PAUL HOLDEN-FORD: Hot-shot publisher and owner of Ratfink Publishers.

RODNEY BLAIR: Guyra’s renaissance man and Lizard Blair’s father.

LYNDA BLAIR: Lizard’s mother, a Gamilaroi woman, who works as a cleaner at Guyra’s school.

DASHER LLOYD: Organiser of Guyra’s Christmas light competition and Lizard’s oldest mate.

XI JINGYE: Businessman and financier in cahoots with Tick Tock Tammy.

He’d made up that story about top-secret Chinese chicanery to impress the Sydney publishing bird who’d ­urgently needed a book proposal. He’d assumed – ­erroneously it turned out – that she would accompany him to the annual Lamb and Potato Festival in return.

Herbie likes making up stories. The one he invented about Tick Tock Tammy losing her arm after a fall from a horse spread quickly through the town and is now the accepted wisdom. The truth, of course, is stranger than his fiction.

An excited baaaa from just over the hill sets fire to his lethargic synapses. Where there were sheep there was sheep dung! Blue Meanies love sheep dung! Merry fuggin’ Christmas! Herbie scrambles over the fence.

Before him, the biggest sheep he’s ever seen is chomping its way through a veritable Wonderland of mushrooms. Severed stalks fly. Fountains of dirt erupt from the high grass. “Get away from ’em, ya great woolly mutton-chop!”

At the sound of Herbie’s voice, the giant sheep stops chomping. Tiny black spores freckle the fleece around its mouth. Its slit eyes narrow. Suddenly, it leaps higher than a spring lamb at Easter and ­begins galloping about in mad fractal loops, drilling crop circles into Tammy Meadows’ prized grazing pasture.

Herbie watches slack-jawed as the sheep takes a pratfall off a low stone bridge, clenches a wild daisy in its teeth, lifts the skirts of its outsized fleece and begins flinging one daintily pointed hoof in front of the other. It shimmies suggestively across the neon-green paddock, which is breaking apart and melting into ribbons of ­kaleidoscopic colour. Is the sheep ... dancing?

Not since Deadeye Dick Baldwin won the Top Pub’s Fishing Club raffle and toppled off the stage in lopsided elation has Herbie seen someone enjoy such a good trip. The sheep must have ingested an heroic dose of psychedelics. It’s entered another dimension. For long stretches, it simply stands and stares at a single blade of grass.

Tick Tock Tammy Meadows stands watching the scene from the grand old homestead on the hill. Her left stump is tingling, as it always did when trouble was brewing.

The tingle turns her thoughts towards a certain sheep from long ago. As it ­always does. Baaarnaby Joyce: that asinine ovine. Cross-bred to produce the finest merino wool in the country, they’d also bred its brains right out.

The ringtone on Tammy’s phone had been an in-joke ­between her and her chief shearer, Deadeye Dick, whom she knew to be running a couple of cut-price, under-the-radar side hustles. That fateful day in ’07 her ringer was at maximum volume. And when the pulverising opening riff of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap blared out unexpectedly in the shearing shed, rattling the rafters and jangling the swing gates, Baaarnaby panicked.

Typically a gentle and non-aggressive animal, if a bit dim, it had reared up on its hind legs and charged her. Headbutted Tammy into the rusted maw of a madly munching combine harvester, where she said ­goodbye to her lower left arm forever. She’s hated sheep ever since. All sheep. And, therefore, all sheep must pay.

But now Tammy’s elaborate revenge plot is in danger of unravelling before her eyes. In the paddock below, one of her prototype uber-sheep, key to the entire plan, looks to be short-circuiting. It jerks spasmodically across a lone patch of stubble, twitches once and then freezes. Twitch. Freeze.

She watches as Herbie Bongmire rubs at his eyes and stares. The majestic animal has spontaneously shed its enormous fleece, stepping delicately out of the frothy white mass, and now stands before him wearing nothing but pink skin and goosebumps.

But it isn’t done yet. Again it twitches and freezes. Twitch. Freeze. And sheds another layer.

Herbie stares in even ­greater astonishment – what is this thing, a fuggin’ turducken? – as Tammy sinks to her knees in despair. The pink-skin-and-goosebumps gear lies pooling at the great animal’s feet. The jig is up.

Though its grin is sheepish, the noble tilt of the new creature’s snout marks it as decidedly lupine. Standing before them is a wolf.

Megan Lehmann writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. She has been a journalist at The New York Post, a film critic at The Hollywood Reporter and has written for The Times of London and The Bulletin magazine. She has covered international film festivals, including Cannes, Toronto and Tokyo and has absolutely no idea how this story is going to end.

COMING UP: Fiona Harari continues the story on Wednesday, followed by Tom Keneally on Thursday.

Read every chapter in the paper, on The Australian’s app and at lonelygully.com.au