The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco Read online

  About The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco

  When JB and his flatmates took in the new guy, they had their doubts. The Celine Dion albums, the fluffy hordes of stuffed animals and the plastic-covered floral-pattern love seat should have set their threat detectors singing. But nobody was paying attention.

  Within days their house had become a swirling maelstrom of death metal junkies and Drug War narcs, stolen goods and hired goons, Tasmanian Babes, karate dykes, evil yuppies, dopey greens and the Sandmen of the Terror Data.

  Now the flatmates have one week to sober up, find two thousand dollars and catch the runaway new guy before Pauline Hanson, the federal government, cops, crims, their landlord and some very angry lesbians tear their house down and stomp them to jelly.

  Can a bunch of hapless losers hope to defeat such an unholy alliance?

  CONTENTS

  About The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco

  Epigraph

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday & Sunday

  Appendix

  Acknowledgements

  About John Birmingham

  Also by John Birmingham

  Copyright

  “And I hope I die in the night time with my tv on and a beer in my hand and you by my side.”

  – Blake Babies

  Monday

  The Fraudulator

  Aristotle said that if you hold your farts in you die. I’m not sure where he said that but some big university guy told me so it’s probably true. Kind of wished I’d kept it to myself though. Our place wasn’t worth living in after word got around and I had to take a long and eventful road trip to get away from it. When I ran out of money and came back I discovered that (i) we had resigned from the street’s fruit and vegetable co-op and (ii) we’d had a spy in the house.

  The co-op had sounded like a good idea, fifteen bucks a week for all the roughage we could handle. Unfortunately the co-op hippies only ever brought around these stupid left wing vegetables that nobody wanted to eat. They piled up in their damp recycled cardboard boxes, gelatinous hillocks of buk choy and witlof and plantains, all mouldy and rotting and just waiting on a lightning strike to zap them into a giant blob of sentient protoplasm which would eat some teenagers and attack the town and so on.

  We were a mixed bunch in this house, which sat just off Swann Road in Taringa, near the two big hill-top high rise towers all my friends dreamed of living in for a while. If you’d wanted to visit us while we were still there you would have navigated by those towers. You can see them from all over the city. You’d drive towards them from Toowong, tracking along beside the train line and turning to cross over the bridge just after Taringa Station. That’s the start of Swann Road and we were the first street on the right, York Street. The house was a nice enough dump, a slumping, tired old Queenslander with all of the verandahs walled in for extra bedrooms and there were … let’s see, ten of us living there to begin with.

  There was Taylor the cabbie and Jabba the Hutt. Taylor had the hot box, the glassed-in sleepout at the front of the house. He didn’t mind the ten degree slope of the lino floor or the fact he had to string an old blanket up to get any privacy. He figured at least he had an actual room in this place and he liked it because he could come and go at all hours without disturbing anyone. Not that he was likely to. With so many folks living there we ran a twenty-four hour facility. Jabba, for instance, did not have a room because he did not seem to need one. Jabba wasn’t like other people. Whatever the rest of us drew from a few hours nightly REM sleep his brain seemed to make up from the radiation pulsing off a warm T.V. screen. So Jabba had a couch, not a room. And he watched so much television his butthair had fused with the mouldering fabric of that brown couch, forcing him to live via the remote control because if he’d ever actually got up he’d have had to walk around with a couple of filthy, rotting cushions stuck to his arse like the post-it notes of a lesser God.

  In the two rooms directly off the big lounge room lived Thunderbird Ron and Brainthrust Leonard. The T-Bird was a guy who’d gone deep into the cult of body building, so deep that he grew huge and monstrous and now moved around like a badly strung puppet, the way those guys do, like they got so much muscle and bulk on them that their arms stick out from their sides and they don’t seem able to bend their knees when they walk. Next door to him was Brainthrust Leonard, a gawky, third year engineering student with an unrivalled back catalogue of Star Trek fanzines and Australian Playboys. Leonard’s dream room was an airlocked command centre in a geo-stationary spacelab with a fully reclineable Captain Kirk chair, a super computer which spoke in the voice of Jana Wendt and a crew of horny space chicks in revealing Starfleet uniforms to pop grapes into his mouth and dance in laser beam cages. In his real room he slept on a broken army cot beside a huge pile of slightly soiled underpants, a bigger pile of old magazines and an awesome, teetering mass of computer wreckage – TRS 80 monitors, defunct CPUs, tools, wiring, long dead motherboards, disks and cables, all sorts of shit. His turn-ons were Power PC upgrades, hot female newsreaders and eight-packs of Best and Less underpants (one for each day and a spare just in case). His turn-offs were the monolithic dominance of the Microsloth Corporation, oily Internet business gurus and the management of Channel Seven1.

  The old dining room out the back of the house had been partly fenced off with a bunch of carpet-covered vertical dividers bought for ten dollars each at a government auction. They provided a subsistence level of privacy for Missy, our Malaysian nightclubbing queen with poor taste in boyfriends. Five foot three, with big brown Bambi eyes, boobs out to Wednesday and no sense of decorum, she was the secret lust object of most of the housedudes, who all thought they were in with a chance given the sorry sort of loser she generally came home with. We called her fenced-off sub-division Area 51, because of the alien life forms which often landed there mysteriously during the night.

  Past the bathroom and around a bit from Missy dwelled Elroy, who styled himself as the Milko from Acapulco, which was half right. He was a milko, with a van and a milk run, but he actually came from Gladstone. He and Taylor were bosom buddies. They worked the graveyard shift and had a disasterous history of sharing other flats and houses. They’d dined together at every late night greasy eating joint in town and were always neglecting their duties to sneak off to Mt Cootha for a quick spliff. Sometimes after a longer spliff they liked to drag race their work vehicles. Four in the morning on a still, moonlit night, if you’re droning along the Great Western Freeway and suddenly everything explodes as an old cab and a milk van kick in the nitrous and peel out in front of you in a big ball of flame, you know you just met my flatmates. Their all time favourite thing though was to sit and fester in the megamall at Indooroopilly, ranking every female who walked past on the basis of how many beers they would need to drink before they tried to sleep with her.

  ‘Definite six pack.’

  ‘No, maybe a dozen.’

  ‘Never happen.’

  ‘Or a dozen with regrets?’

  ‘Whoa! Lookout! Stone cold sober coming out of Cookie Man!’

  *

  The master bedroom lay across the hall from Taylor at the front of York Street. It was the seat of government for the house. The room of Stacey, who wanted to be a combat photographer but who, for the moment, got all of the life-threatening action she could manage as den mother to our cosy little Gen X community. She wasn’t the oldest or the biggest or even the scariest one in the house, but she was the most grown up and without her to boss everyone around, to collect the bills and make the rules and dole out her harsh brand of frontier-style justice, York Street would quickly have d
egenerated into a burned-up, bombed-out, post-apocalypse landscape of urban destruction and flesh-eating zombies. In that Brisbane way, I had known Stacey (as well as Taylor, Jabba and the T-Bird) for a long time before sharing this house with her. Our paths had crossed when she was padding out her Austudy payments taking happy snaps for the same student newspapers which were paying me for stories in misappropriated food vouchers and handfuls of single shot condiment sachets. We’d worked a few demos and riots together, I’d got drunk and tried to get her into bed, she’d flipped me onto my arse with a satin smooth O-goshi judo throw and now we were friends.

  I liked hanging with Stacey because she was a take-charge babe who didn’t seem awed or intimidated by anything. We’d caught a bus to Canberra once to cover a huge protest outside the exhibition centre. This military arms fair called Aidex was being held inside and about two thousand deeply offended greenies and lefties had turned up to try to stop it. They were camped in tents and caravans under trees in the car park across from the centre, a really mediaeval sort of scene with a lot of colour – banners and open fires and stuff like trumpets and drums going all through the night. Unfortunately, being the Left, they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery and spent most of the time arguing among themselves, all two thousand of them, in an enormous daily fishbowl conference. Ah, what to do, what to do? Don cricket pads and boxes and storm the police lines? (The International Socialist Option.) Sit quietly in the road and block traffic? (The non-violent, lentil loving generic green/left option.) Build some pyramids out of big pine logs? (The feral forest collectives option.) Or light bees wax candles and chant some Druid prayers? (The two middle-aged weird chicks in white hooded gowns option.) In the end, much to the spastic fury of the I.S., they settled on linking arms in these crop circles of ten or twelve people and sort of merry-go-rounding onto the road leading up to the main gates. They even told the cops they’d be coming onto the road in three minutes and it would be really cool if they didn’t, you know, oppress them or anything. Naturally the police beat the living shit out of everyone. People were screaming and crying and getting their scones cracked by batons. It went on for days. There was no real focus, no centre, just a raw, violent energy. And there, vectoring through it all was Stacey with her camera, following some invisible pattern only she could discern, a high soundless tune which carried her through untouched and unscathed. She was so cool.

  After that, when she said she was going to America to work for one of the big newspapers, I figured she probably would. And it made me kind of sad because back then the only business I’d had with any newspapers was avoiding the accounts guys who were always chasing payment for my backlog of ‘flatmate wanted’ ads. Stacey’s room was the best in the house, befitting her role as Supreme Commander. As you’d guess if you knew her it was also kept the cleanest and most comfortable. A lemon tree grew just outside one window, close enough for her to lean out and pick off the fat yellow fruit as it ripened. But it wasn’t her dream room. I asked her once what that was and she said, ‘Oh a loft, somewhere high up in Manhattan, with a wall of windows and exposed timber and brick everywhere. A bed, a darkroom, a comfy chair and some wall space to hang my pictures. That’d be close I guess.’ At York Street she had a futon and malarial yellow asbestos board walls. And her brother, Gay Phil, camped on an inflatable mattress tucked away in one corner.

  Phil was a virtual rather than actual flatmate. He’d fled from Jeff his last boyfriend, a vicious redhead on methadone maintenance. Just turned up under the lemon tree at two in the morning with a massive cardboard box full of personal effects, a Hot Buttered boogie board and a Sunbeam wok. The house had a loose arrangement where everybody was allowed one refugee per year, six to eight weeks rent free, but I think Stacey was harder on Gay Phil because he was family. She made him cook and clean for us, which was cool because he was a fuckin’ wizard with that wok. He was okay in himself too, loved a cone and T.V. sport, so he slipped sideways into the house routines. Even Taylor coped and he was a back-to-the-wall kind of guy on homosexual issues.

  *

  A Kodak moment: Taylor, tired but wired after pulling an all-nighter. Gay Phil unpacking his big box of tricks in the lounge. CD player, books, runners and baseball cap with Homer Simpson smacking himself in the head going ‘D’oh!’

  ‘You mind,’ asks Taylor, trying the cap on for size. Nope, shrugs Phil.

  ‘Watcha got there?’

  ‘Magazines.’

  ‘All right!’ goes Taylor. ‘New toilet reading.’ And starts sifting through the stack of Muscle and Fitness, Inside Sports, Bodyboarders and Riptides. He grooves on the wave porn in the surf mags and digs into the box to get a few more out. Phil doesn’t care, he just keeps on unpacking. Then Taylor comes up with a quizzical look and a short piece of string. Bobbing about at the end of the string is a small object shaped like a champagne cork, possibly with an internal power supply.

  ‘Hey, Phil, what’s this?’ asks Tayor, with a quizzical frown.

  ‘That, my friend, is a vibrating butt plug.’

  For a week after that everybody went ‘bzzzzz’ whenever Taylor entered the room.

  *

  We’d lost our downstairs flatmates, the goth mediaevalist crossover couple Elvira and Damien (as in The Omen) when their whole Black Death retro routine spun out of control. Damien was this self obsessed character, hair going everywhere, clothed in nothing but scrappy old black clothes with ‘wanker’ written in whiteout fluid all over his jeans. He used to attach little bells to his black pointy boots – which were the most ridiculously pointy boots you could buy at the time – and the bells would jingle to warn of his approach. Damien really loved Christmas because he had visions of little kids coming down the street, hearing the bells and thinking that Santa was just around the corner. Then they’d be confronted by a horror like him.

  Elvira was a spider woman.

  They kept to themselves in the little flat downstairs, using one power point to run a kettle, a microwave and a vintage Marantz stereo system of dubious ownership. They hardly ever ventured upstairs, coming and going by a well beaten track down Elroy’s side of the house, sneaking in to leave their rent contribution when nobody was looking. It would have been a perfect set-up if only it weren’t for the rest of their merry men. See, Elvira and Damien weren’t just your common variety goths, they were part of this intensely weird mediaeval-revival society. (The Dead Meds as Taylor and Elroy inevitably christened them). Come five o’clock Friday dozens of these people would pull on chainmail and armour and get together for a weekend of jousting and roistering and generally trying to pretend they’d been born as heavy dudes of the Round Table rather than just a bunch of geeks in Brisbane. Without warning, two dozen of them would descend on our backyard and then you couldn’t go out there for fear of losing an arm or an eye as collateral damage during an Agincourt reenactment. I mean these guys really went for it. They were tricked out in full body armour made by their own blacksmith and they did not hold anything back. Sailed into each other with broadswords and studded clubs and the noise would keep you awake for days, especially after they all got fucked up on mulled wine and amphetamines (one of their few concessions to the late twentieth century).

  It was interesting to watch the first couple of times, but it got real old real fast and when a stray crossbow shaft exploded through the back wall and embedded its metal head two inches into the side of the fridge, Stacey decided enough was enough. She’d been deeply suspicious of the way the mediaevalist women embraced the Dark Ages’ primitive gender roles but she’d kept that disapproval to herself, just narrowing her eyes and grinding her teeth as the ditzy Maid Marions ran hither and yon with bowls of fruit for their black knights. When it all came to a head I was sitting in the lounge, half watching Get Smart with Jabba but mostly arguing with Taylor about how and why the coward of the county redeemed himself in the end, and why everyone considered him a coward in the first place.

  ‘Because you know Taylor, it don’t
mean he’s weak just ’cos he turned the other cheek.’

  BOOM!

  A shriek. Then Stacey’s voice pouring out a stream of oaths.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Taylor.

  ‘Exploding buttplug,’ answered Jabba as Stacey’s footsteps came hammering up the hallway.

  ‘This is going to end,’ she said, storming past us to the front steps where she reefed open the fuse box and shut off the power.

  ‘Oh hey now,’ said Jabba impotently as his wide screen Sony winked off and we plunged into semi-darkness. There was also a discernible drop in mediaeval background noise as the Marantz stopped pounding out mandolin music. Stacey marched back to the kitchen. Taylor and I shrugged and followed to investigate, finding her with both hands wrapped around an arrow which was stuck fast in the side of our dying fridge. It was groaning and hissing and clouds of cold steam were rushing out of the wound as Stacey placed one foot on the side and gave an almighty tug. The arrow head came away with a metallic tearing sound. She examined the missile and glared at us. ‘Back me up.’ Well, we knew that glare. That was her liver-frying glare and you didn’t want your liver on the wrong end of it, so we fell in behind as she stomped off downstairs.

  ‘Gonna be some real dead Meds round here now,’ Taylor muttered to me. I just shook my head. There was confusion in the back yard with a lot of Sir Kevins and Lady Tricias milling around the stereo fidgeting with the controls, a difficult operation in heavy steel fighting gloves. They all turned to look as Stacey scoped them out before settling on a couple of suspicious looking archers lurking down the back near a slowly rotating pig-on-a-spit. Off she sailed again, clutching the evidence in a tight little fist, Taylor and I trailing behind feeling very exposed. We strode up to a dumpy, dark haired Lebanese looking guy in a bright yellow tunic, holding a crossbow.