Cheese

Cheese!

Even the sound of the word excited him. Cheese. Cheeeeeese. Like the whirring of some marvellous contraption, a futuristic machine designed for pure human delight. He could see it in mind's eye: gears spinning, pistons pumping, steam bursting joyfully from the chimney atop the device, whistling to let all know that the cheese was ready; the Delight-O-Tron spitting forth divine hunks of yellow and white, and even blue and green, magical slabs of pungent paradise for all to consume and sate themselves with ecstasy.

This is what he saw. Reality was sadly different, and as the wrappers piled high in the corners of his flat, he knew he must be content with daydreams. In this harsh capitalistic world, nobody else saw cheese the way he did. The other invention he fantasised about was a new kind of nuclear-powered spectacles, attuned to a specific cheese-friendly frequency. When you put them on, your appreciation of cheese would intensify beyond belief. Looking at cheese with these glasses, one would experience such dizzy heights of joy...everyone would know what it was like for him. He had been born with Cheese Specs. He yearned to bring them to the world. Alas, he lacked the technology. The fact was that all the time he could have spent learning of physics and electronics and mechanical engineering had been entirely taken up with the consumption and appreciation of cheese. And so, his love of cheese had robbed him of the ability to fulfil it. This thought could at times reduce him to such despair that he would collapse in a puddle of paradox and lie weeping for hours, nibbling melancholically at a wedge of Jarlsberg.

He knew there must be, somewhere, the answer to that question that had burned inside him as long as he could remember, like a dairy-based blowtorch. It was hard to bear, and even harder to understand: cheese satisfied him, more than man has ever been satisfied by anything, at least as far as he knew. Casanova looking back on his legions of female conquests, Michaelangelo recalling his incomparable catalogue of artistic supernovas, Caesar himself surveying all the lands he had brought to heel before his standard, none could possibly have felt such surges of euphoric content, such electric bolts of all-consuming happiness, as were his at the end of a day getting to grips with a consignment of Gorgonzola. And yet... 

And yet it seemed that satisfaction, so far from being dissatisfaction's mortal foe, was in fact its meek and humble handmaiden. For no matter how satisfied he became, it was not satisfied enough. Always, the gnawing began again...

Cheese was his, and it was glorious. But the glory of his personal affair with the sublime curd was nothing, a speck of plankton in a wall of baleen, when compared to the glory he imagined, saw in the distance, felt tingling at his extremities, heard echoing within his skull, tasted, dancing, on the tip of his tongue...the glory of spreading cheese to all the world and bringing that indescribable joy to the masses, disseminating his love infinitely and watching the whole world rejoice in cheese's benevolent embrace. The glory imagined dwarfed the glory realised by so far that every day he woke up with a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a metaphysical famine that a quickly scoffed Camembert wheel could dissipate only temporarily.

And so, finally, after years of enduring the burning ache, he made a decision. A decision that would change not only his own life, but the very world itself. A decision that in the pursuit of the ultimate goal, he would make the ultimate sacrifice.

He would give up cheese.

He could see, all too clearly, that cheese was standing in its own way. Eating cheese took up too much time; the buying, the unwrapping, the setting out, the savouring of aromas and tender prodding of textures. The long, lingered-over consumption, the reverent afterglow. The recording of details in his dark blue Cheese Log. The agonised composition of words to do justice to the delicacy, lest he someday forget a single bite. It devoured his time, and left not a second for planning and plotting, for devising of schemes to encircle the globe with cheese.

He must, therefore, set cheese aside, and bend every sinew towards his greater goal. Though it would be torture, his reunion with cheese at the completion of his task would be all the sweeter for the knowledge that it was earned.

Torture, in fact, was far too mild a word for what the coming weeks brought him. Every day, as he sketched blueprints, constructed scale models, sat in the library behind piles upon piles of weighty, sombre volumes, he felt the siren song of Lady Mold calling him. Every night, as he sat by the light of an inadequate lamp, scribbling madly in exercise book after exercise book, ruling lines, measuring angles, feverishly tearing pages out of phone books and pasting them in esoteric configurations on huge slabs of cardboard, he felt the knives of cheese-lust hacking away at his flesh.

Oh, he ate, but poor fare. Bread. Butter. Meat. Vegetables. He drank waters and juices, and even milk - O sweet tantalisation, so near yet so far - but cheese passed not his lips. Passed not even his doorway; he knew the limits of his willpower.

And so he worked. He became gaunt and ragged. His clothes grew filthy and began falling to pieces. His eyes assumed a staring, haunted look. His face was pale and pinched. The marks of obsession were stamped upon him like the imprint of Surchoix upon an Appenzeller. Soon, soon, he would waste away to nothing. Soon, the cheese would claim him, as it had his forebears.

Oh, nobody knew of them, of course. It was not widely reported when a lone lunatic fell victim to the ravages of cheese. Felled before their plans could reach fruition, they were anonymous, unloved and unmourned. But he, yes, he knew them. He had read, he had learnt, he had come to know just what a lethal endeavour he had embarked upon. The names floated like ghosts before his weary, bulging eyes. Lippinziger, Rothwell, Gerdell de la Bosconi. Noble men, men who had believed in cheese, who had looked cheese in the face and smiled as it took their lives.

He knew he was destined to join their ranks. Perhaps, then, he would know peace, he would know bliss. He would be transported to Cheese Heaven, where even Brocciu is endlessly available, and the only company would be those other brave men who understood his passion. But one way or another, he was heading down that road. The cheese was coming for him. Fate had drained the whey. The desire for just one wedge, just one slice, just one smear across a cracker...it would overwhelm him. To go without cheese for a day was agony. This...this was the Inferno.

And that's when it happened.

This emaciated shell of a man, this ghoul, this half-crazed banshee, sitting one night, eight weeks past the start of his project, staring at his notes, his blueprints, his maps, his scrapbooks, his models, his painstaking graphs...found the answer.

And when it came it struck him with the force of an Emmental fired from a Howitzer. It had been there all along. He was a genius without knowing it. The Cheese Conundrum had been solved.

And suddenly, that cold night, flickering candle dimly lighting his laughing, dirty, whiskered, madman's face, he knew that the world was his for the taking.

The rest of the night, he sat happily in the doorway of the shop across the street, rocking, a contented smile upon his face, and when they opened, he bought every last scrap of Gruyere in the place, and ate it right there, grinning from ear to ear.

Not that it was that simple, of course. Yes, he had the answer, but the practical work had still to be done. Construction was undertaken. A score of strong men were hired and told of a hefty share of the profits if they bent their arms to the task with all possible vigour. Day and night they laboured in his new makeshift factory, hammering, riveting, bolting, welding, scraping and oiling, but still their hours were as nothing compared to the work he himself put in.

The word went out. Clever men in suits were employed to spread the message, to bring habringers of the coming of the new age. Rumours of the miracle of this fresh invention were carefully and scientifically placed and propagated in all corners of the green earth.

And after months of preparation, it was ready. He rented a suit. He stood nervously on the steps of the Town Hall, dignitaries surrounding him, press confronting him, a crowd hanging on his every word as he stammeringly, haltingly, did the best he could to put into words what he knew words could never describe. His vision, his dream, come to life. The device that would change all of their lives, and so much for the better.

He knew as he spoke that they were there, not to celebrate cheese, or to experience the possibility of altering their lives forever. They were there to capture failure in its first blush. They were there to see him fall. And he prayed, as he prepared to pull aside the drapery, that it was not all for naught. It had been tested...it would work now, wouldn't it? His dream...it was not a foolish fantasy? It really was real, yes?

It was time.

He unveiled.

And...the gasp.

The gasp that was heard around the world. Such a thing of beauty. Of impossible elegance and perfection, yet of such undeniable, irresistible substance and functionality. The first sight of it sent a shockwave of excitement through the crowd. When it was turned on...the thrill went to the core of every human present and struck outwards, like ripples on a stone-addled pond, like an exploding wheel of Brie.

Within a day the world was abuzz. Within a week seven hundred more devices were in production.

Within six months cheese consumption had multiplied tenfold. Within a year, a thousandfold.

Cheese had conquered the world. The plan had worked. Good had triumphed. Now, he could rest. And rest he did. Fabulously wealthy, wanting for nothing, he spent his days reclining in luxury, bringing forth from his vast refrigerated cheese vaults such a cornucopia of wonders as he would never have considered possible for such a poor, unremarkable specimen as himself. Now and then he spoke, he lectured on cheese, its significance, its history, its inimitable beauty and unparalleled mystique. He gained more honorary doctorates than he knew what to do with. He was in demand from social sets the world over. And always, the cheese. Whatever cheese he wanted. Soft, hard, pressed, unpressed, cow's milk, goat's milk. He discovered the exquisite taste of cheeses he had hitherto only dreamed about. Rare cheeses, exotic cheeses. Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, Geitost, Mozzarella, Ricotta, Mascotta, Cheshire, Gloucester, Romano, Edam, Gouda, Colby, Pecorino, Munster, Stilton, Urda, Cas, Neufchatel, Paneer, Queso Fresco, Brousse, Chevre...these were a mere appetiser for the universe he was now wandering through. He had all he wanted, but far more importantly, to him, he had made a difference. He had opened the eyes of the world to cheese and all its possibilities. His goal was achieved, his purpose fulfilled. The world was a better, more fragrant, more joyous and lovely place because of him. People everywhere were happy, and cheese-filled. With this in mind, he could have remained a stick-thin pauper and been happy.

And then one day...not long after the unveiling...

He awoke and strode to the kitchen. Days of emaciation and filth long behind him, now sleek and filled with joie de vivre, he felt he would start another wonderful day with a hearty breakfast. His mood was mellow and old-fashioned. He decided on staunch traditionalism, withdrawing a mighty hunk of blazing yellow Swiss magic from its shelf. Seated at his broad breakfast table, he plunged in his knife, and took a weighy slice from the body, biting into it with the enthusiasm of the perfectly balanced. And as he bit, he felt something he had never before felt while eating cheese.

Nothing.

He blinked, confused. He bit again. Still nothing. No thrill, no tingling, no explosion of flavour, no electricity, not even the smallest frisson shooting through his body.

Perhaps, he thought, he had been overdoing the Swiss lately. Returning to the fridge, he withdrew a pungent slab of Limburger, and devoured the whole thing on the spot.

Nothing.

His tastebuds remained stoically indifferent. A sense of unease rising within him, he pulled out a ball of mozzarella, and gulped it down, with no more reaction from his physiology than if he had gorged himself on week-old rice cakes. No pleasure, no fizzing fireworks in the brain.

A wheel of Camembert, a scrap of Edam, a desperate scraping of Monterey Jack, all shovelled down, all with no result but a slightly heavier sensation in the stomach. Unease had turned to panic. Tears pricked his eyes and he fought them. This was cheese, he couldn't be feeling nothing. He simply had to find the right one to spark his old self to life again. Perhaps he had overslept and his system was not yet fully awake. He would perk himself up, and in the blink of an eye, his love affair with the curd and the mold would resume as passionately as ever.

And so, as he frantically boiled and downed a jug of coffee, he hurled as much cheese as he could into a saucepan and turned up the heat. Within minutes, he tipped the pan up and poured the cheese like boiling wine down his throat. The stream of boiling yellow fire scorched his oesophagus, but no more. Gasping, he fell to his knees and rummaged through his stocks some more.

Pulling cheese after cheese out, he tried each one. Yellow, white, blue, red, green...the most exotic cheeses from the most far-flung lands, the most unexpected animals, the most bizarre of homespun and high-tech techniques...and none of it changed a thing. Tears streamed down his face, his burning throat screamed at him, and his heart felt near to melting and running out his pores.

Finally he got to the back of the cabinet and brought forth the last. With wrappers and discarded pieces of cheese littering the floor around him, he sat miserably in the centre of his dairy graveyard and held the chunk of ordinary everyday cheddar in his lap. Cheddar was the beginning of his journey, and now...the end? Of late he had forgotten about good old cheddar, intoxicated by the enormity of his gift to humanity and the seemingly endless variety of impossible rarities hurled at him by the world's grateful cheesemakers. And yet...cheddar was the heart and soul of cheese, was it not? Cheddar. His old friend cheddar. He nursed it against his cheek, enjoying the coolness on his skin and whispering to it as to a secret lover. Cheddar would save him. he angled it wearily towards his aching, exhausted lips, and took a bite.

He chewed.

He swallowed.

And he knew, as the fragment travelled to its final destination, that he might just as well have bitten into the polystyrene packing the fridge arrived in. The truth fell on him like a ton of Parmesan.

He was dead. Dead to cheese.

He threw back his head and howled. All his work, all his striving and passion, returned in the shimmering air before his eyes, taunting and cackling at him.

And he fell face down on the kitchen floor, as the gutted Camembert mingled with his tears.

How I Became Funny

I remember my first encounter with the world of comedy. I was four years old, and a clown came to the door of our house offering to wash our dog for food. I laughed at his funny red nose and bright purple wig, and then my father shot him, and that too was funny in its way. It was then I thought seriously about going into comedy myself, and by the age of five had written an eight-hour one-man show, entitled, "Laughter: The Harbinger of Death".

I performed this show daily in front of my parents for the next six years, and it was, I admit, a source of tension, argument and self-mutilation at the time. Nowadays we laugh about it, but at the time, the comedy was so bitingly real that my mother was at times moved to tears, and at other times moved to Calgary.

I gave up the one-man show at eleven, and began work on my sitcom. Amusingly, my dictionary was missing some pages, and so I gained a false impression of what a "sitcom" was. In fact, rather than working on a sitcom, I began working on a stegosaurus, which was a far more thankless task, and less funny than I had anticipated. It got even worse when the stegosaurus ate our gardener. I had thought stegosauruses were herbivorous, but then I found I had read the instructions wrong. It seemed that every book in the house was missing pages, and later on we found out my father had been eating them. I asked him why and he said he was trying to stop the cravings he had to eat the gardener. I suppose that in the end, my sitcom DID end up being quite successful, though not commercially.

In my teenage years, my love of comedy did not wane, but it did go in exciting new directions. I explored the possibilities of physical comedy, experimenting with comedic sexual intercourse and slapstick ethnic cleansing. But I soon grew tired of the cheap and easy laughs to be had by setting Koreans on fire, and by my graduation year was ready for fresh challenges and strange new worlds of humour.

It was at university that I began devising a surrealist, avant garde brand of comedy, beginning with jokes such as:

Q. What do you call a man with an octopus on his face?
A: Glenn

Q: How many ligtbulbs does it take?
A: Twenty-eight (laugh malevolently)

These jokes found great success among the cafeteria ladies, and emboldened, I set out to expand the themes I was working with, thus:

An Englishman, an Irishman and a rabbi walk into a bar. The Englishman says, I can't fall out of this plane, my goldfish are dead. How did the Welshman know?
A: The surgeon was his mother.

Sherlock Holmes and Watson are out camping, and Watson says, Why the long face, to which Holmes replies, I am a cocaine addict. He then makes Watson lick yoghurt off his violin until dawn. What does this tell you, Watson, he asks. Watson replies, Now comes the viola solo. (laugh malevolently)


Many people loved my new brand of comedy, and I found great acclaim among the Beat Generation, who were by then terribly old and mostly demented. However, the cultural elite did not, and there were calls in several thousand newspapers for me to be banned for life from all sporting events and chemically castrated. Years later I found out all of these newspapers were fakes printed on a home press by my mischievous prankster college roommate Fuzzy Slamwindow. How we laughed. But at the time I was most distressed and went into exile in Tibet, where I learned how to love again.

Upon my return, I set to work rehearsing for my most ambitious show yet, "Breasts: The Musical". The show consisted entirely of me standing on stage in a rubber catsuit showing slides of dead strippers and groaning rhythmically.

The show was a commercial and critical success, described by one eminent critic as "the funniest thing I have ever seen", and by another as "mmmmm". Although box office receipts were huge, I suffered from my poor judgment in signing a contract which guaranteed 80% of ticket sales would go to Richard Branson's Virgin Corporation, in return for which I would have a long needle inserted into my brain. Looking back, I'm not sure what I was thinking.

And so we come to today. I am not resting on my laurels, by any means. In fact, I just published my book, "Not Resting On My Laurels", which is a collection of humorous essays and line drawings of rabbit ovaries. I am about to release "Not Resting On My Laurels Too", a collection of the same humorous essays, but with a foreword by Kirstie Alley.

All in all, I have learnt a lot about comedy in my seven or eight years on this planet. What you need to remember is, it's all about the audience. You're not up there for your own glorification, you are up there to make the audience laugh, and if they don't laugh, to be honest, you deserve all the poisonous gases you get. So the lesson is: make them laugh at all costs. If that means that you have to take off your pants, or eat a small boat, or hang yourself from a tree, so be it.

Laughter is everything, and I assure you, when you hear a roomful of people laughing and clapping and gently tongueing your thighs, you'll know that it was worth it.

Franz Kafka: Grocery Boy

Franz looked up at the shelf stretching away into the upper reaches of the store, and sighed deeply. His only option was to use his pogo stick, and it had only three pogos left before it lost all power and had to be sent to Battery Land for fresh lessons. He scratched his thighs absent-mindedly and found it came clean off. He wept quietly to himself for several minutes, before climbing onto the lower shelf and curling up to weep quietly at others who passed by. A bucket walked past with purposeful gait, and Kafka quick-wittedly tripped it up and climbed inside.

He was instantly transported to a realm of pleasure seldom seen in everyday Budapest. The Bucket-Folk accepted him as an equal, and did not judge him for his views or the size of his bedroom, which was quite small and contained an entire Irish Elk.

But alas, like all good things, his visit to the Bucket-Folk came to an abrupt end, exemplified by the fierce scarring on his nose, and he found himself back in the grocery store, bouncing high into the air, hurling boxes onto the shelf, and sneezing violently on the manager's hair, an act that brought relatively few short-term reprisals, but would, unbeknownst to him, result in his being banished to the lowest circle of hell and poked with teflon spatulas for several millennia.

As the last box tottered in place, and then tumbled gracefully to the floor, killing the Queen who had popped in for a bag of pepper, Franz felt an unearthly tingling in his immoral regions. He sighed. He was turning into an insect again. And still twenty minutes till his break. That was all he bloody needed. 

Memories of Rockweld

Ah, Rockweld. I can still see his furrowed brow, poring over ancient Sumerian texts in the study we shared for all those years. Come away, let's relax for an evening, I would say, but he would not budge from those parchments. He was determined to find proof that the Sumerians had a widespread potato crisp industry.

"I know it, and I must have the proof!" he would cry, his hair standing on end and his ears rotating slowly. "It is here somewhere!" I humoured him, but was amazed when he proved his theory and published his monograph. It was utterly ignored by the world, but Rockweld felt vindicated, and was content for a while. He even took up pipe smoking, until instructed not to by a plumber.

Rockweld was, in many ways, my alter ego, my mirror image, and certainly the best friend I could ever have. Today I feel quite wistful, recalling those long days spent in fevered debate and discussion, testing our wits and logic against the keen razor of the other's intellect. How fondly I remember those lengthy, jocular sparring matches, as we argued vehemently back and forth over which was "the weird one" in Shakespear's Sister. Happy days indeed, as we lived off our modest stipends, and imparted wisdom to our students and ourselves.

I remember when his first novel was published, Rockweld came bustling into our rooms, delighted and waving the first copy above his head in triumph. We drank long into the night in celebration, and he was quite red-faced later when I informed him that in his intoxicated state, he had attempted to write a thesis on the prevalence of fennel in aviary kiosk menus. How we laughed, as I showed him the ornamental Japanese bread bin he had worn on his head, while standing by the fireplace and demonstrating a new dance he had just invented called "The Menorah Bop"

Unfortunately, Rockweld's joy had quickly turned to dust as his book was an unmitigated failure. He blamed the reviews, and there is no doubt that certain critics had harmed the commercial prospects of the work when they pointed out that the plot was predicated entirely on the (supposedly) fanciful notion that the lead character was a zebra who had managed to convincingly disguise himself as a wealthy stockbroker with a stapler and some felt. If one did not give credence to this idea, claimed the nitpickers, then the book, as a narrative, made no sense at all. After sales plummeted from their already subterranean levels, Rockweld, fixated upon literary respect, embarked on a much-publicised experiment to prove that a zebra could, in fact, achieve this task. He failed in this attempt, too, becoming bitter and retreating to our study to drink heavily and occasionally snort derisively at my interior decorating skills.

Still, there is no doubt Rockweld had a dizzying intellect, and I will forever think of him as the most admirable academic, indeed the most admirable man, of our times. It was only later in life that his wits were dulled to a certain extent, and where once he would dazzle parties with his rapier wit and best any challenger at chess, checkers, or whist, he now mainly went to the cinema and threw jaffas at Chinese people.

At least, in this phase, he was happy, and I think his seventy-third birthday, around this time, may have been the most joyous of his life, especially considering his early childhood, when every year his parents would pretend to be wheeling in an enormous cake, only to pull off the cover to reveal an assortment of huge, venomous spiders, which they would then exhort young Rockweld to "round up and pacify", or he would get no presents. Once he had performed this task, they would chuckle knowingly and give him an Al Jolson commemorative keyring, engraved with the wrong initials. Rockweld later discovered that they were, in fact, laudanum-addicted psychotherapists who had stolen him in infancy to perform mind-experiments on, but the hurt never fully healed, and all his life he looked for these people's approval.

I do remember that awful day, the beginning of the end. Rockweld had been unpredictable in his moods of late, and on this day, the final straw appeared to be placed on the camel.

We were calmly sitting, reading and enjoying the view of the black smoke from the smelting plant across the road, when I passed an innocent remark to the effect that I considered West Side Story to be too heavily stylised for my tastes.

Rockweld instantly flew into a terrible rage, hurling his brandy glass out the window, striking me sharply with the corkscrew, and accusing me of being a crypto-fascist and in league with Hammerskjold. I tried to placate him with promises of compensation and trips to the zoo, but he kept up his abuse, screaming that I was trying to trick him into voluntary organ donation, and then crawling under the rug, biting his fingers and crying out "I'm a linen press, you mustn't look at me!"

Sadly, I had to call a doctor, who sedated Rockweld and took him for the last time from his beloved study. He didn't last long after that, of course, dying peacefully in his sleep after confiding to me that he had never really loved his wife, and in general preferred Italian cheese. It was a sad end for a great man, but I shall always remember him with fondness, respect, and...yes, I should say, love. 

Themroc van Harryhausen, Gnu Buster

The kid looked down at the dirt and spat his tobacco out, killing a passing centipede instantly.
'We movin' out?' the kid asked, trying not to show his impatience.
Themroc van Harryhausen, the greatest gnu-buster the West had ever known, looked up from the fire where he was raking over the embers of the morning, swallowing the last of the toasted marzipan.
'You're too eager, kid. I know, I was once like you.' Themroc looked at the sky, almost blinding in its mixture of bright blue and damnation orange, and felt tears prick the edge of his eyes. He refused to cry. He hadn't cried in nigh-on thirty years, and he wasn't about to start now. Standing up and hitching up his belt, he applied his medicated eyedrops and blinked for an hour or so. Finally, he nodded to his protege, and they made their way slowly to the horses.
They were called horses, but Themroc knew, in that deep, elemental, dry-boned way, that they were horses only in name. In fact, the kid's was actually a dachsund. For himself, Themroc had secured himself a thoroughbred ibex, but as had always been the way amongst gnu-busters, the apprentice rode a dog. Some traditions were worth holding onto.
The weary-faced 'buster allowed a smile to insinuate itself across his face with the memory of his own apprenticeship, when he himself had ridden tall in the saddle on a fiery shih tzu. That had been under the tutelage of the famous Portobello Siffredi, and in some ways they had been the happiest days of his life. In other ways they hadn't, for instance, the intermittent hand-holding and French kisses, but he was willing to forget that for the sake of the gnu-busting secrets Siffredi had vouchsafed him. Those days were long gone now, and Siffredi's mantle had been quietly devoured by Themroc himself. Some days, though...he wondered...
The kid was looking at him strangely. It took a few minutes for Themroc to realise that this was because he had been captured by a lynch mob and hung from a tree during his previous musings. Shaking his head at the kid's bulging eyes and throaty gurgles, Themroc cut him down with his shiny gnu-machete, laid him gently on the savannah and kissed his eyelids tenderly.
'Gotta watch for the mobs in these parts, kid,' he said after the young fellow had recovered and they were mounting up. 'Some people don't take too kindly to gnu-busting. Post-modernists and such. City folk. Russians. Franciscan monks.'
'But gnu-busters built this land,' protested the kid, outraged at such goings on and suspecting, as always, that it was all Jack Kerouac's fault.
Themroc sighed and stabbed his ibex in the neck to get it moving. 'Times are changing, kid,' he said wistfully and with a touch of lavender. 'The ranges ain't so open no more, the grass don't grow quite so tall, folks ain't free and easy with their vittles, the towns have swallowed up the prairie, the hippo's gone a-lookin' for greener pastures, and the nabob, we he just up and scuttled, y'all.'
The kid was silent. He looked down at the neck of his dachsund, and stroked it thoughtfully. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering in his heart of hearts what Themroc was talking about. Sometimes it seemed they spoke a different language. Sometimes they did speak a different language, and it was Urdu. Some days all that was ahead of them was grass, heat, a herd of giraffes and an overdraft, and if it wasn't for his faith in gnu-busting as a man's pursuit, he would crawl into the bottom of a whisky bottle and make a model ship.
Themroc noticed his partner's taciturnity. he reached over with the gnu-prod and shocked him with concern.
'K, kid?' he asked, with the lazy southern drawl that he had picked up last week in a saloon. 'The gnus'll be comin' up by an' by.'
'I'm fine, sir,' said the kid loyally as his arm slowly slipped from its socket due to a congenital disorder. 'Just doin' a mite thinkin''
'Better wrap it up, son,' said Themroc, smiling evilly for the hell of it. 'Them gnus be comin' over the horizon, and there's bustin' to be done.'
He spoke the truth. In two minutes time, they were the centre of a heaving, sweaty tornado of hoofs, horns, wild, unbridled grunting and whispered murmurings of romance and indiscretion. At the end of it, seventy fine gnus had been busted, and many hundreds more were dead. The kid, screaming wildly, was feasting on the remains, face covered with blood and pale as a midnight hamster. Themroc laid a weatherbeaten glove on his shoulder.
'None o' that, son,' he said. 'We came to bust these gnus for Mister Gramboko, and we done busted 'em. Now we bring 'em in, but let the rest bury their loved ones. Never step on a gnu' religious traditions, it shows disrespect. And out here, sometimes, respect's all a body's got to stop him becoming sexually confused.'
'They're just gnus,' the kid protested, mouth full of the peculiarly sticky mass you get in gnu bladders. 'And ain't we gnu-busters?'
'A gnu-buster don't despise the gnus he busts, kid. That's a lesson you gotta learn if'n ever you wanna get offa yer dachsund. We fight 'em, we bust 'em, we even kill 'em, but we respects 'em. We're like brothers. Who kill each other. Man and gnu gotta be able to look each other in the face, or else, there's no point to this crazy ol' world, and we may as well just go pick up whores in Nairobi. Treat 'em with honour, kid, it's the only way. It's the gnu-buster's code.'
'What's the gnu-buster's code?'
'3X-ZQF-40.'
'And what does that mean, huh?'
'You'll find out, son, you'll find out.'
'And Themroc, with a dig of his heels and a vibration of his thighs, wheeled his ibex around and headed for home. but in his heart he remembered the day he found out what the code meant, and the way his life was never the same afterwards, as family, friends, and motor function left him and he found himself out on that lonesome savannah, busting gnus, bedding women, eating spinifex and playing practical jokes on slow-witted zebras. Life could never stay in one place for a gnu-buster, not even the greatest the world had ever known. because that world was changing, and no matter how many times he busted a gnu, trained an apprentice, married a Filipino or rode that long, lonesome trail from Cairo to Cape Town, the aching would remain. The aching that said...Themroc, your time has passed...
He felt the pricking again. He wiped his eyes, dug his heels in, and rode...away. 

A Tale Of Men

‘Smoke.’

I looked up from the ashes I was dutifully raking over and shot a quizzical glance at my companion, who was pointing southwest.
‘Smoke over there.’
‘That’s another one gone then.’ I sighed and raked some more ashes. The wind, once arrived, would blow the ashes away, as per the agreement, but for now it was very important to rake them into piles. The piles were very important. But still, my back was starting to ache. I had not been warned about this. I wished I had chosen a lighter rake.
My companion was putting on a hat. For the sun, he said, although privately I thought it was just to make him look pretty. He was not pretty. He had a long nose and his chin was too bony. The hat didn’t help. It made him look like a cow.
I hated him sometimes. But he was my friend, so I kept it hidden.
I sighed, again. ‘It’s always them that blow the cities up,’ I said, ‘and us that have to clean up.’
‘Yes,’ said my friend. I hated how he said that. I raked another pile and wondered where the wind was. The wind was always late. Someone should write a letter.
‘What will they do with the city now?’ he asked. ‘Rebuild it again?’
‘Probably,’ I said, kicking the ashes playfully.
‘That’s what they did last year.’
‘Yes.’
We were silent for a while, enjoying the sunlight and the view of the explosions. He was first to speak.
‘They caught him, you know.’
‘Caught who?’ I was so startled by the sudden speech that I kicked over one of my ash-piles, and inside I cursed the knowledge that I would now have to work overtime.
‘The fellow who did it.’
‘Who was he?’ I tried to sound disinterested, as I didn’t want him to know that his information was important.
‘I’m not sure. A mad bomber I expect. They tend to be.’
‘Well, why would you do it if you weren’t?’
‘Unless it was a sane bomber.’
‘Hm. That’s a scary thought.’
Once again silence as we contemplated the horror of a sane bomber. Eventually I decided that some things are best unthought of, and returned to the issue at hand.
‘Where is he?’ I asked my companion, who had just changed hats. This one softened his chin but made his eyes stick out. I looked at him with undisguised loathing. He blushed prettily.
‘It was a present from Graham,’ he explained. I waved impatiently. I didn’t care.
‘Where is he?’ I shouted, all pretence dissolved.
He pointed wordlessly, with what looked like a finger.
Upon the blasted landscape, I saw a courthouse. A squat brown box, distinguished only by the huge aluminium scales atop it. They were in perfect balance, the iron dagger of justice weighed evenly against the wooden owl of truth. The scales were blindfolded, and I myself could not believe my eyes.
‘How in the world did that survive the explosion?’ I asked in tones of incredulity and anger, mingled with sugared persuasion, for I knew my companion to have little patience for aggression.
‘It didn’t.’
‘What?’ this was beyond all reasonable bounds.
‘It didn’t survive. It was flown in specially.’
‘Well I’ll be damned.’ I was stunned enough to lean on my rake for a full five seconds so as to catch my breath.
‘The wonder of modern science!’
‘Indeed. When I was a boy courthouses had to be taken to pieces and transported brick by brick in vans. They had to be reassembled at the other end.’
We stood in nostalgia for a moment.
‘Shall we go?’ My companion was giving me a roguish grin. He had another hat on, a huge one with a leather brim. It was absolutely revolting.
I decided to play dumb. Pulling a moronic face I slurred, ‘Go where?’
‘To the courthouse,’ he replied, winking.
I had had enough. ‘We have ashes to rake!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t you even care?’
‘Let the wind take care of them,’ he replied. ‘This is a chance for adventure. I’ve never been in a courthouse before. Besides, I’m hungry.’
I considered. He had a point. He was hungry. A man needed food, did he not? And the wind was sure to be along. I looked at my feet, struggling with the moral choice: go and have adventures at the courthouse bistro, or stay and attend to duty, and let my partner starve to death? The latter option was tempting, not least because I hated my friend as much as it is possible for one man to hate another without somewhat disliking him. I stared at my feet a while longer, enjoying the patterned suede, but my shoes held no real answers.
‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘We will go. But first let me do something.’
I gathered all my ash-piles up and poured them into my apron. If I was caught out, I planned to produce them as evidence.
Overhead a helicopter whirred. It was dumping water on the remaining fires left over from the bomb. The pilot looked down on us through huge goggles and waved cheerfully, before releasing several tons of water onto our heads.
‘Do you have a towel?’ I asked my partner, heaving myself back to my feet. ‘I’m wet.’
‘I’m wet too,’ he replied, sobbing quietly to himself. ‘And hungry.’
“You poor thing,’ I said, faking concern, and yawning. ‘We’d better get to the Courthouse. They have automatic hand driers in the bathrooms. We’ll put you under one of those, and buy you some sandwiches. All right sweetie?’
‘Yes,’ he sniffled, miserably, like a filthy drooling coward.
And so we walked to the courthouse, ash in our pockets and water in our hair. And as we walked, the courthouse moved away, and as we walked faster, it moved further, and as we ran, it took flight, and as we cried out for it to stop, we saw that the helicopter had picked it up, and it was flying away again. The trial was over, the bomber had been sentenced, and the courthouse was going home for a well-earned rest.
But my companion and I were lost in the wasteland, and we sat, weeping onto our rakes, eating ashes and mourning what might have been. 

Bernard's Long Night Of The Soul

The candles flickered in the library. The lone figure, bent wearily over his books, shook his head and sighed. He had been there from early morning, and now, in the small hours, he was thoroughly exhaused. Yet he would not rest, for he knew - somehow in his bones he knew - that what he was looking for was somewhere in here.

"Mr Gaynor?" enquired the librarian timidly, approaching the desk. "I really should be closing the library, sir. Perhaps you should go home."

Bernard did not lift his head, but let a light chuckle escape his lips.

The librarian was uncertain of her next move. "Mr Gaynor?"

"Dammit woman!" he exploded, turning his flashing, manly eyes upon her. "Do you think truth and justice run according to your schedules?"

The librarian had to admit, on brief reflection, that they did not. Gaynor waved in her face the hefty leatherbound tome over which he had most recently been poring. It was a dusty volume from the late 19th century, titled "HOW TO DO A SEX WITH LADIES". On the desk lay pages and pages of scribbled notes and a variety of other texts, some similarly aged, some modern, but all of them on related subjects: "HOW OUR BITS WORK" lay beside "RUDE PARTS AND WHAT THEY DO", which lay underneath "ANIMALS DOING IT IN PICTURES". Across the desk was "WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE KISSING" and "WHO SHOULD BE ON TOP ANYWAY?", while tossed in frustration to the floor was a selection including "WHERE WHICH GOES IN WHAT FOR KIDS", "HAPPY TIMES WITH WIVES" and "HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE A BOY".

Clearly the scholar had been studying intently in search of something, but what? The librarian shook her head and retreated. Locking the door behind her, she left him to his studies, all through the night.

Gaynor's eyes darted across the page in the dim light. He knew it was here: the key to all his theories, the one discovery that would electrify the world and prove once and for all that his warnings were timely and correct, and that indeed, the gays were seeking to steal his organs.

He flicked through pages and pages of diagrams and photographs and scholarly monographs and graphic depictions. He licked his lips, aroused and stimulated in a philosophical sense. He was so close, so close that he could taste it. Or at least he could taste something. It was salty.

And then...he saw it.

"YES!" he shrieked, his voice echoing around the musty halls of knowledge. All alone, he danced a dance of triumph. "I have it!" he yelled happily. "I have it!"

He leapt through the window, rolling joyously onto the grass amid a shower of broken glass, and rushed off in the direction of Officeworks to have as many laminated copies of his discovery made as possible, for dissemination amongst the media which would be in a few hours assembled on his doorstep.

For there, flapping wildly in his hand like the cape of a great hero of antiquity, was the book that contained the key, that would end the argument once and for all and allow Bernard to usher in a new age of genuine Christian love and well-oriented decency. It flapped and snapped in the breeze created by his great cross-lawn speed, his thumb placed still in the middle, keeping it open on the page which bore the great truth, the awesome discovery he had stumbled upon. For there, upon those yellowing, crackly pages, were the words with which he would change the world:

"PENIS GOES IN VAGINA"

He cackled gleefully. From now on, everything was going to be all right.

Brecht and Coleridge

"Ah, well-played, sir, well-played indeed!" The mellifluous baritone rang throughout the drawing room as Bertolt Brecht, playwright, poet, and champion middle distance runner placed the tray of marzipan delights in front of his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, lover, and foster mother.

"Did you hear that?" said Brecht, a nervous look in his eye as he sank into the deep folds of the comfortable couch.

"Hear what, sir?" boomed Coleridge, reaching for a treat and licking his lips, less in anticipation than in unstoppable nerve spasm.

"I could have sworn I just heard a mellifluous baritone," said Brecht. "It told me 'well-played, sir'"

"Ah, you Germans are a cunning bunch," said Coleridge, lifting his cup and pouring tea down his neck. "That was me, sir, complimenting you on that clever move you performed, placing the tray upon the table at the precise psychological tipping point. Quite an advantage you have over me, I think you'll agree."

Brecht studied the undercover poet intensely, noting well the curve of his neck, the cleft of his chin. In some ways, he thought to himself, man is little more than a cow with an aptitude for algebra. In some ways. He spoke:"It was prophesied that I would be killed by a man with a mellifluous baritone."

"I don't see how," Coleridge punctuated himself by quickly hemming his trousers, "a mellifluous baritone makes a poor choice of weapon. I once attempted to assassinate a Maharajah with my mellifluous baritone. He suffered only a superficial flesh wound and shot me in the knees."

Brecht was silent a moment, contemplating the futility of struggling against the machine. Sometimes he thought things would have been much simpler if he had been born a magical talking cushion. Sometimes. He spoke again:"Erst komm das Fressen," he said urgently, squinting hard at Coleridge, and leaning forward.

Coleridge hesitated. He had suspected this might be where it was all leading. When Brecht had invited him up to his room, he had accepted, not out of eagerness for company, but from respect for the bond they had forged with each other in Korea. But now, with Brecht's hand strongly massaging his thigh, he realised his initial instincts had been right: Brecht had invited him here to speak German at him."What does that mean?" he asked, reaching inside his sweater and removing his brassiere through an armhole so as to keep the mood light.

"It means, 'now we dance, tomorrow we urinate'," replied Brecht, sucking Coleridge's ear.

"FILTHY LIAR!" screamed Coleridge, leaping up and upsetting the marzipan. "It means nothing of the sort!"As quickly as it had come, the flash of rage passed, and Coleridge smiled pleasantly at his companion and took up a seat on the windowsill, contemplating the quadrangle."Do you sometimes feel, Bertie, that we are not doing enough?"

"What do you mean, enough?" replied Brecht, furtively. Coleridge turned from the window and saw Brecht attempting to climb into the kettle. He sighed. This happened so often these days he was beginning to regard it as part of the daily routine. Walking across the room, he yanked Brecht's head from the steaming jug and rubbed his hair with a towel. Brecht gasped. "You shouldn't have done that," he wailed. "Death is the only answer for me, I fear."

"Come, come," said Coleridge. "That's no way to talk. Talk like this instead," and he demonstrated with a low guttural moaning. Brecht tried it, and his mood imediately lifted.

"This IS fun!" he chuckled, capering about like a schoolboy. "Wunderbar!"

Coleridge laughed like a carefree schoolgirl, until he glanced once more out of the window. Ducking down, he hissed, "Stop it!"

"Why?" cackled Brecht. "I've never felt so alive! MOoooooo! MooooooO!" he warbled, twisting his nipples as he scampered onto the top of the bookcase.

"Stop it, man! This is serious!" Coleridge barked. "We've attracted humpback whales! They're in the quadrangle, bumming cigarettes."

Brecht sighed and climbed down. He perched once more on the sofa and mournfully vomited into Coleridge's teacup. "They will only get cancer," he said. "In the end, everyone gets cancer."

"This is true," Coleridge nodded. "I've had it six times this year, and frankly it's getting a bit much." Brecht nodded back, and so they proceeded in this fashion for several hours, bobbing their heads like deranged budgerigars, neither one willing to break down and mention the real cause of their dissatisaction. Deep down, both of them knew that the summer in Lesotho was weighing them down intolerably.

Eventually, the silence had to be broken. The detergent man was at the door, demanding he be paid for this week's detergent. Brecht dutifully slipped him a fifty, and sent him on his way with a tender kiss. Returning to his chair, he mournfully wrote a pessimistic modernist play and ate it without fanfare. In the opposite corner, Coleridge was talking animatedly on his mobile phone. Snapping it shut, he stormed across the floor. "Dammit! The Atkins account just fell through!" he raged.

"What's the Atkins account?" asked Brecht timidly, a pen up each nostril.

"Oh, I've no idea," said Coleridge, so airily that a ballon emerged from his ear. "I just like to occasionally shout that it's fallen through. It's a hobby."

"I thought poetry was your hobby."

"Oh no, poetry is my PASSION," corrected Coleridge genially, taking half an hour to punch Brecht repeatedly in the head for daring to say such a thing. "Poetry is my LIFE. I wrote one just the other day. It's about raccoons. Would you like to hear it?"

"I would rather be raped at gunpoint by a syphilitic anteater while a mountain lion slowly ate my head," said Brecht, with his usual suave Bavarian charm.

"Oh good, here it is then," Coleridge assumed a splay-legged stance, threw his head sideways and took on the facial appearance of a paralysed toad, his normal recitation pose. He began:

I have come, said the spider crab,
To bring you great news
News that will fill you with joy
For unto us a king is born
A great fat ugly dibbly boy

The spider crab proceeded to leap on the rocks
And do an amusing little dance
And all who saw him were sore amazed
And set fire to each other's pants

I have come, said the spider crab,
Not to abolish, but to complete,
To complete the undertakings of yore
Wackle wackle doodle, piffle goggle blee,
Slampitskin greddle weddle CAW!

Entirely spent, Coleridge spun around and shouted, "Lawks!" before collapsing on top of Brecht's meticulously constructed Lego pirate ship.

The next few hours were spent in hostile silence, Coleridge avoiding Brecht's gimlet gaze and Brecht tattooing Persian swearwords on his penis. The first to speak was Coleridge. He cleared his throat, using a catheter, and addressed his old friend in a high, reedy voice, apparently in an attempt to impersonate Glynis Johns.

"I saw Gerard Manley Hopkins the other day," he said.

"Oh yes," said Brecht. "How is he? Still a hopeless old drunk?"

"He's looking very well. Tanned. He just came back from Pakistan. He's got a girlfriend over there. Met her on the internet."

"Mein gott. How did he manage that?"

"Apparently she's morbidly obese, but very creative in bed."

"How so?"

"She makes cheese sandwiches in there. Got a jaffle maker hooked up to the electric blanket. Hopkins says it's divine. Anyway, they were going to be married, but they were caught having sex and she was stoned to death." Coleridge demonstrated how it would have looked like with a short and amusing mime.

"That's terrible," Brecht put on his "sad" hat, to indicate that he was sad. "How's he taking it?"

"Oh, he said c'est la vie."

"He's philosophical about it?"

"No, he just likes to prove he can speak French. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to tell you. Hopkins took me aside in the tavern and told me in confidence that he recently realised he doesn't actually like dappled things at all."

Brecht nearly leapt out of his seat, and then nearly had a stroke, and very nearly exploded. "WHAT?"

"He said, and I quote, Dappled things, they're rubbish, innit?"

Brecht fanned himself with a nearby otter. "I don't believe it, I just...all these years, he's been living a lie."

"He told me not say anything, he said it might ruin the Welsh economy." Brecht nodded. This was typical. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a talented silversmith, a competent monk, and a wonderful lover, but if he had one weakness, it was his obsession with the Welsh economy. If he had two weaknesses, it was the hideous growths the sides of his head which made him look like an eland. But Brecht tried not to think about that. It reminded him too much of the pain he carried inside him every day. On an impulse, he decided to confide in Coleridge.

"Samuel," he said, haltingly, "I have a great pain inside me, and I think it is something you need to know. Es tut mir leid, but I did something a few Jahren back which I am not particularly proud of."

"Is this the Vin Diesel thing again?" said Coleridge, yawning with barely disguised contempt and a completely disguised midget submarine.

"No, no, it's much worse," said Brecht, crying into his cornflakes.

"Where did you get those cornflakes?" roared Coleridge, his anger as sudden and terrifying as a summer's day or a delicate dandelion, perhaps even more so. Certainly more sudden than a dandelion. It is in fact difficult to imagine in what way a dandelion could be thought of as "sudden".

Brecht shrunk into his seat. "I bought them earlier."

"GIVE THEM TO ME!" screamed Coleridge, in a blind, unstoppable rage, hurling books and pot plants at his hapless Teutonic chum. Brecht cried and cried, shrieking for him to stop, promising him everything, and in the end, as always, it ended in a sweaty, passionate embrace, naked on the floor, exploring each other's bodies with remorseful passion. "I'm sorry," sobbed Coleridge. "Cornflakes, they just..."

"I know," Brecht soothed, stroking his hair. "They set you off." Indeed they did. Coleridge and cornflakes had had an uneasy relationship, ever since at the age of six he had watched his mother run off with Will Kellogg, and his father run off with a bag of pears, only to return shamefaced and admit he did not actually know the way to his car. From that day forth, young Samuel's father had forced him to eat cornflakes three times every day, for the next sixteen years. "We must confront our demons!" Coleridge senior would screech maniacally, shovelling more crunchy golden leaves of doom into his son's bowl. "Strength through indomitability! Here, have some milk!" he would hiss, throwing carton after carton at the boy's head. Poetry was Samuel's way of dealing with the nightmarish reality of his childhood. At that stage, he didn't actually write poetry, but he had sneaked a copy of the collected works of Emily Dickinson from the school storage cupboard, and every night, he would take the precious volume from his bedside table and lie beneath the covers, thrilling at the strange new emotions which awoke in him when he rubbed the book vigorously between his thighs. Coleridge often described those times as the happiest of his life, although when pressed further he would crumble and admit that in fact they were unspeakably awful and he wanted to kill himself whenever he thought of them. Eventually, his mother had returned, full of exciting stories about high society in Vienna, flaunting her newly acquired oboe-playing ability and kicking Samuel in the stomach at regular intervals. His father degenerated further and further into madness, until ten years ago he had planted himself in the backyard and begun to produce figs from his armpits.

"Anyway," said the undercover poet, covering his nakedness with his trenchcoat, the warm afterglow making him strangely shy, "what was it you wanted to tell me?"

"Oh yes..." Brecht hesitated. Did he really dare? He thought back to his days in the hospital in Munich. Proper equipment had been in short supply. He hadn't flinched at the thought of using a harpoon to remove a patient's spleen, even when it was completely medically unnecessary. He could not flinch now. He took a deep breath and inhaled a bee.

Five hours later, in his hospital bed, Brecht looked up at the swarthy Adonis holding his hand, smiling and reciting a new epic poem about parsnips, and realised how lucky he was to have found a true friend. Across the ward, some head trauma patients were performing an impromptu rendition of The Threepenny Opera. Bertolt smiled indulgently. Let them have their fun. After all, who's to say Mack The Knife wouldn't be better with several verses concerning a mischievous juggling rabbit? Not he, that's for sure. "Nicht mich," he murmured sleepily. "Nicht mich."

And now, the secret didn't seem so terrible and daunting after all. "Sam," he said, trying to focus on Coleridge, the task made difficult by the poet's insistence on running back and forth past the bed at high speed, squeaking loudly. "Sam, I'm ready to tell you what's been bothering me for so long..." he coughed, for no reason. "You...you remember New year's Eve 1946?"

"How could I forget?" grinned Coleridge, swigging from his Gatorade bottle.

"Yes, well...after the party was over, you'd fallen asleep on the couch."

"Ha ha ha," said Coleridge in an oddly unconvincing manner. "I was so drunk. Whatever possessed me to liquefy those Jessie Matthews records?"

"Yes, well...while you were asleep, I sort of...."

"Yes?" Coleridge was nude with anticipation.

"I set you up on your hands and knees, dressed you as a Dalmatian and took photos of you with Kurt Weill's testicles in your mouth."

Coleridge gazed levelly at Brecht. "I see."

"Then Kurt played the piano and we wrote a song together called Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Big Flabby Girlie Man, Let's All Shove Things Up Him'" Brecht looked carefully at his friend. "It went to number one in Japan, it made us both millionaires. Every night I call him up and we laugh at how much fun it was to humiliate you because you're so stupid and we hate you so much. We did that last night for hours. I hope you're not angry about this."

In many ways, this marked the beginning of the deterioration of their friendship.

Bob and Dave at Home

The front door slammed shut as Bob Ellis, man about town and politico-literary guerilla, announced his homeward return with a hearty, "I have returned! And so it goes!" Placing his ivory-handled umbrella in the stand and doing up his zipper, he went in search of his housemate and best friend.

"I'm in the study," called Dave, "exposing the pretensions of the middle-class!"

Ellis lumbered portentously to the study, where he stood in the doorway, wiping his lips in the manner of man who had written speeches for Whitlam and was a close personal friend of Rodney Cavalier. "What are you working on, Dave, my old friend and sparring partner, man of peculiar talents and even more peculiar flaws, who has profited so mightily from the Australian public even while disdaining them, like a cat insulting the milk it drinks?"

"It's a play!" cried Dave, turning from his brand-new iMac bourgeoisie-processor, eyebrows practically perming themselves with enthusiasm. "It's about how young people don't understand things!"

"Excellent, excellent," murmured Bob, withdrawing a flask of cognac from his hip pocket and taking a long draught.

"Have you had a good day?" asked Dave. "I hope you didn't meet any young people."

"I had an excellent day. I lunched with Bryan and Rachel, then went for ice-cream with Della Bosca and had sex up a tree with someone who may or may not have been Jacki Weaver - I'm not sure, the ice-cream was taking its toll by then."

"Jacki's wonderful," said Dave. "I loved her in that thing I wrote."

"I had a haircut too, do you like it?"

"It's all right, I suppose."

"Robert De Niro said it was the best haircut he'd ever seen. But perhaps you disagree."

Dave sighed. "Come clean, Bob. We all know what this is about. You've always been jealous of my beautiful, thick hair."

Bob scoffed, as he pulled a bottle of Merlot from his jacket and sucked it down. "I would hardly be jealous of that hair, Dave - it's lowest common denominator hair. Your showy, obvious hair has for decades been holding back younger, more vibrant hair. I'm quite happy with my own hair - Jack Thompson likes it for one, as does Sigrid Thornton, and Bruce Spence, Ray Barrett, John Wood, Robyn Nevin, and Rolf de Heer. Who likes your hair?"

"EVERYONE likes my hair!" Dave exploded, leaping from his chair and brandishing a rolled-up Quarterly Essay threateningly. "My hair has embodied the hopes and dreams of middle-Australian barbers for forty years!"

There was a tense moment, as Bob swigged from a jar of rum and Dave absent-mindedly wrote on the wallpaper, "Idea for play - uni students: idiots?" The tension was broken as Bob burped nobly, and announced, in that thunderous voice that spoke of a man who once had tapas with Neil Kinnock:

"It's time for dinner!"

Dave, jolted out of a reverie in which he had been mentally constructing a scene in which some teenagers failed to appreciate the importance of famous writers, nodded. "Yes - I made spaghetti."

"Spaghetti?" spat Bob with the kind of disgust only possible in a man who had written many award-winning films. "Why on earth would you do that? I don't like spaghetti. It speaks to me of nights alone in Pisa, staring up the leaning tower and wondering, when will people learn? When will they learn that capitalism is nothing but a con-job? When will they learn that this pasta they crave is just the device of wicked men in love with their own avarice? When will they realise that while we eat spaghetti, millions of Hazara peasants die simply because of our own failure to pay independent filmmakers enough to ensure we can make films about Hazara peasants dying? Spaghetti? Spaghetti is representative of the whole dirty, corrupt, money-hungry, pestilent, rotting, award-winning filmmaker-hating husk of modern democracy. And it's a pity."

Dave stood, hands on hips, petulant as the youth who still didn't know how smart he was. "Well, spaghetti was in the cupboard, Bob. What was I to do?"

Bob paused mid-sip of vodka. "You could have done many things. You could have run down the fish and chip shop for some blue grenadier. You could have got some Chinese. You could have called Domino's and had pizza sped to our door like Phillippides's message of old. You could have made a shepherd's pie, ignoring the plutocratic lure of nouveau cuisine. You could have whipped up a chicken curry, like my old friend Don Chipp did the night we found ourselves lost at sea after a drunken carouse with Louis Nowra led to a perhaps ill-conceived plan to sail to Canberra and punch Ros Kelly in the face. You could have written more plays about good, wholesome working man's fare like pies and chips, breaking the stranglehold of Mediterranean culinary entropy that has this whole nation in its grip, even to the point of allowing this snivelling eurotrash harpy Gillard to impose her sniffy big-nosed chicanery on us all. You could have done all, but you did not. And it's a pity."

But Dave was already gone, to the dining room, where he sat beneath the enormous portrait of Ben Chifley giving Arthur Calwell a piggyback ride, weeping into his bolognese. Bob found him there, and sat across from him, sullenly digging a fork into his bowl, even as he drank deeply from a box of warm riesling that he had found in his shirt pocket.

After a while Dave could stand it no longer. "Bob!" he ejaculated. "I will stop making spaghetti when people stop eating it! I don't claim to be a great chef, Bob, but people eat my food, and they seem to enjoy it, and that's not my fault Bob. I don't make spaghetti for you, Bob, but for those little people out there who gain nourishment and enjoyment and a sense of soft-left superiority from it, and I'll be damned if I stop making spaghetti simply because bitter old lefties like you need to vent their spleen at those whose spaghetti always came out better-seasoned than their own. You know full well you'd never even have made spaghetti without a grant from the Spaghetti Council."

"And why not?" Bob roared. "Maybe if the government put more money into funding innovative spaghetti auteurs and less money into drowning brown babies at sea, we'd be in better shape. But I suppose if it were up to you, we'd be eating this bland suburban spaghetti until the day we die, swallowed by an enormous ginger vagina."

The rest of the meal was eaten in silence. After dinner, both men sank deeply into the Jason recliners with satisfied-yet-regretful sighs. The TV was blaring, and for a few minutes they watched in silence.

"This is rubbish," said Dave.

Bob nodded. "It's very poorly written. They should have gotten a marvellous writer in, like Phillip Adams."

Dave nodded. "There is no witty, sparkling dialogue in this programme. It completely fails to show up the hypocrisy of the aspirational classes. Where are the McMansions?"

"This is nothing like the Wharf Revue," said Bob. "Modern television has nothing closely resembling the Wharf Revue, and it's a pity. I watched an entire episode of The Wire the other day, and not once did anyone do a Bob Brown impression. It's disgraceful. Fucking Gillard."

Dave nodded. Bob nodded. They both nodded. They stared at each other. Bob took another sip of the Viktor and Rolf cologne he'd found stuck down the side of the chair. David quickly wrote a play about non-goverment organisation office politics. A commercial for erectile dysfunction came on. They copied down the number. They nodded some more.

"Dave..." said Bob.

"Bob..." said Dave.

"Dave, I find your tired, unrealistic, cliched characters unbearable..."

"Bob, your bloated, self-obsessed polemics have become intolerable..."

"Dave, your contempt for the artistic community is revolting..."

"Bob, your insistence upon your own significance in matters of history is appalling..."

The world held its breath for a moment, and then...they were upon each other, grappling mightily in each other's arms, lips and tongues urgently exploring each other in a conflagration of burning leftist passion. Shirts were rent asunder, pants tugged at with the desperation of second-wave feminists clinging to outdated conceptions of women's place in political discourse.

"Bob..." Dave whispered.

"Dave..." Bob hissed, the desire carried aloft on fragrant bourbon fumes.

"Comrade..." they breathed in unison, as their progressive, influential bellies gyrated against each other, flesh slapping on flesh, and body mingling with body, till finally, they were no longer Bob and Dave, but simply Dob, or Bave, and they became one, coupling and uniting like the perfect synthesis of the Great Man theory of history and Keating-nomics, and their great literary bellows echoed throughout the night until, spent, they collapsed in a pool of sweat and socialism on the fireside rug, gazing into each other's eyes and panting with lust and exhaustion and angina.

"Dave," murmured Bob, caressing his old sparring partner's eyebrows, "do you think they'll ever understand?"

"No," Dave returned, making finger-circles in Bob's grey chest hair and tracing the outline of the tattoo of Kim Beazley's face that resided there. "They never will."

"Ah, me," Bob sighed, "it is hard indeed that in this day and age we find ourselves beholden to such minor, diminutive folk, who fail to appreciate the importance of a good political insult, or a book of essays, or a little-known movie. Hard it is to tolerate being ruled by the petty and the small-minded and the female who do not understand the burden we bear."

"The burden of history."

"The burden of genius."

"The burden of sociological perspicacity."

"The burden of enjoying blow jobs from pretty young women."

Dave stared into the fire, a single tear rolling down his cheek. "Things have changed, Bob."

"Indeed. The world no longer knows how wonderful we are."

"Oh well, what can we do, but keep on complaining?" Dave looked down. "Ready to go again?"

"In a minute," replied Bob, furiously poring over his autographed Kristina Keneally calendar. "In a minute, Comrade."

And so it went.

My Night With The Faceless Men - A Special BPWWOO Investigation

It’s a cold night on Sussex Street. I pull my collar close up around my neck in a futile attempt to shield myself from the freezing, driving rain, one of those peculiarly Sydney downpours, the kind of rain that says, “Yes we have abundant natural beauty, but many people find us more frenetic and materialistic than is strictly necessary”. It’s strange how water falling out of the sky can be so articulate, but then, a lot is strange on this dark winter’s evening, as I head towards a mysterious assignation, with no guarantee I will return.

My shoes squelch in the puddles as I approach the enormous, forbidding oak doors, a squelch that seems to speak of superficiality and petty power struggles, but also of cultural and societal bankruptcy. I stand before those doors, where so many great men – Whitlam, Keating, Fitzgibbon – have stood before, and I hesitate. Do I dare to enter the belly of the beast? Do I dare even refer to it as “the beast” in these troubled times when there is a shell-like ear hiding in every waistcoat? When even our Twitter accounts are not immune to hacking and trickery?

Yes, I must. For journalism. I was employed to shine a light on the practices of the ruling class, and light-shine I will. Summoning up every scrap of courage, I reach for the enormous demons’ head doorknocker and knock, as instructed, three times. The knocks boom and echo through the dark night, attracting odd looks from passing prostitutes and pie-carts. I wait a moment, hardly daring to breathe.

As I wait, I reflect on the path that has brought me to this point. The idea of writing a feature examining the internal workings of the Labor Party. The email to the party executive. The raven arriving on my windowsill in the dead of night, with a cryptic message tied to its leg: “Be at Minto KFC at 11”. The mobile phone slipped surreptitiously into my pocket. The brief conversation with the man who would identify himself only as “Mr Labor”. The instructions to come to Sussex Street, tonight, carrying only a pen, a notepad, and some jam sandwiches. The interminable train ride into the heart of the city, due to trackwork at Westmead. The homeless woman vomiting on my shoes – what connection did she have to all this anyway? It was a tangled web indeed.

As the echoes of the knocker died away, I heard heavy, slow footsteps from within, coming closer, like the beating of some infernal centre-left drum. I waited, distracting myself by reading the engraving on the door. In huge Gothic lettering, it read “PER PATIENTIA, CONSENTIO”. “Through suffering, consensus”. Ah, yes. I felt a shiver run down my spine, as if a salamander were in my shirt. I was just about ready to turn tail and run, when the door suddenly swung open and a tall, pale, emaciated man in a dusty tuxedo was peering at me.

“Yes?” his voice creaked like a mausoleum door.

“Hello,” I stammered. “I…I…” I was at a loss. I had forgotten who I was, why I was there, how I got so wet. Desperate, I thrust my press identification card at him. He studied it intently.

“Ah yes,” he creaked. “They are expecting you. Walk this way.” I followed the pallid retainer, and suddenly found myself walking down a long, narrow corridor, luxuriantly appointed with thick crimson carpet and adorned down its length, on both sides, with foreboding portraits of great Labor luminaries. As I glanced from side to side, I felt almost oppressed by the stern gazes of these giants of the past. Hawke seemed to scold me as his famous eyebrows arched formidably from the canvas. Jack Lang’s bald head took on a disturbingly reproachful air. By the time I came to the final portrait, depicting Bob Ellis energetically coupling with Lenin, I was already wrung out. My emotional turmoil did not take a turn for the better when a bag was suddenly thrust over my head and I felt myself being spun around in circles for what seemed like hours. Finally the rotation stopped, and I was shoved violently from behind, apparently through a door into a new room, where the smell of incense and Belgian chocolate hung thick in the air. I could feel eyes on me, and felt I should say something, but didn’t know what. I shuffled my feet awkwardly. This was a social situation which, as a hard-hitting investigative journalist, I was rarely thrust into. It reminded me a lot of the time I broke one of Gaddafi’s teacups and hid the pieces in my pocket.

Finally the silence was broken. “Take off the bag,” a deep voice intoned. Suddenly I could see, though as I turned my head I couldn’t see hide nor hair of whoever had removed my mask.

I was in a small, smoky chamber, surrounded by antique furniture, enormous clocks, and the stuffed heads of African game. Before me, in an enormous leather armchair, sat a man in a dark suit, head wreathed in shadow and cigar smoke. That deep, gravelly voice rumbled at me once more.

“Sit down.”

I looked around. I couldn’t see another chair. Should I sit on the sideboard? The rhino’s head? I looked back at the shadowy figure and shrugged helplessly. “There’s no chair.”

There was a pause, followed by a throaty chuckle. “Well done. You passed the test.” Suddenly the man rose, and swept past me. “Follow,” he barked, and I turned and hurried out the door with him, into another corridor, panting as I trotted after the back of his rapidly-receding, smoke-encircled head.

This hallway was different. Less extravagant, it was floored with large stone slabs, and instead of portraits of Labor figures covering the walls, we were instead watched over by the bulging eyes of a cornucopia of historical figures. Here was Cleopatra, signing the Accord. Here was Alexander the Great, nationalising the banks. And perhaps most poignantly, here was William the Conqueror, implementing GroceryChoice.

As I hurried to keep up, I flipped open my pad, hoping to get some insights into the inner workings of the machine I had entered. “Where exactly are we?” was my first question – always a good place to start for a journalist in any situation.

“You’re in the headquarters of the most efficient, effective, and ruthless political organisation the world has ever known,” he replied, without turning. “You are heading towards the nerve centre of the engine room of the inner sanctum of the brains trust of the entire country, and by extension, the world.”

“So this is where the decisions get made?” I gasped, cigar smoke streaming into my nostrils.

“This is where everything gets made,” he growled. “Decisions, policy, lamingtons – EVERYthing comes out of here. Without authorisation from us, no Labor Party branch dares breathe.”

“And with authorisation?”

“Well they do dare breath, obviously”. We walked on for a while in a slightly awkward silence. As turned a corner and the smell of ammonia filled the air, I managed another question.

“Why is the ALP so secretive?”

“Wouldn’t you be secretive, if you knew how determined your enemies were to destroy you?” came the barked response. “Wouldn’t you hide yourself away in a secure fortress, if you knew that the minute you stick your head outside it’d be sliced off, by the Liberals, by the Nationals, by the Greens, by the unions?”

“But the unions are on your side,” I protested, for which I received a short, sharp laugh and what sounded like a spitting noise. I tried again: “So you stay bunkered in here out of fear?”

“Yes! Fear that we shall be forestalled, that the great Labor project will be stymied by the forces arrayed against us.”

“And what is the great Labor project?” I asked, wading through the stagnant water we had somehow found ourselves up to our knees in.

“It’s the Light on the Hill!” he cried. “Justice! Equality! Social cohesion! A fairer future for our children!”

“So you – ” I began, but he was in full flight, puffing from his cigar even as he bellowed and expectorated and leapt lightly from crocodile to crocodile.

“Equitable workplace relations arrangements!” he roared. “Quality education and healthcare for all! Sustainable economic growth! Free trade! Small business! Open markets! Secure borders!”

“I’m not sure – ”

“Family values! Equitable religion for all! Sustainable censorship! Deregulation! Red tape! Green energy! Yellow perils! Fear! Misery! Desolation! ALL SHALL DIE!” He came to a solid steel door, and knocked eight times in a sort of calypso rhythm. “That, Mr Pobjie, is the Labor project. No less than the very re-structuring of society itself into something resembling extremely closely what we already have, but with more solar water heaters. Oh yes, you may call it Utopian, but we believe it is attainable, with a bit of elbow grease.”

There was another awkward pause, and then the steel door swung open, and we stepped into…

A pleasant pastel-hued lounge room, filled with the scent of pine needles and the sound of soft jazz piano coming from a small iPod dock in one corner. On the couch sat three men in long brown robes, hoods hiding their faces. One of them beckoned to me to take a seat on a nearby ottoman. I did so, relieved to be able to rest my feet and to no longer have to shake turtles off my trouser legs.

One of the hooded figures spoke. “We understand you have some questions,” he hissed, in a voice that sounded like a man hissing. I felt a strange emotion I was unfamiliar with, a sort of terror mixed with arousal mixed with overwhelming sadness mixed with a deep respect for party conferences.

“Yes, sir,” I said, opening my pad again. “I want to know why the Labor Party lost its way. When did it stop speaking for the people, and start speaking for a dark cabal of secretive overlords making decisions on behalf of membership without consultation or accountability? When did being a member of the ALP become a pointless exercise? When did the party become less about sharing wealth and opportunity more widely, and more about concentrating as much power as possible in the hands of the unelected and unqualified backroom powerbrokers? When did policy become secondary to the relentless obeisance to focus groups? How is it that a party founded on principles of fairness and social justice has been degraded to an ineffectual rump of political timeservers and careerist machine men, interested only in numbers, internecine squabbling, and consolidating narrow power bases within an insular, delusional party administration without the slightest inkling of, or interest in, the goings-on in the real world beyond their adaptability for purposes of political power-retention, the detachment from reality having exceeded reasonable bounds to such an extent that even possessing control of government now seemingly comes second to possessing control of the tiny minority of citizens still blind or cynical enough to call themselves ‘Labor Party members’” I took a breath. “How, sir, did this happen?”

There was silence for a moment. The jazz seemed even louder, even more relaxing. A small butler offered me a spinach puff. The hooded men seemed to be stroking their chins. Then the middle one stood, and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“These are all good questions,” he said quietly, “but they come from a place of ignorance. If you knew anything of the reality of politics, you wouldn’t need to ask these questions. You would know how things work. You would know the way of the world.”

I gazed up at the hood, and suddenly felt an overwhelming urge, such as I had not felt for many years: an urge to actually learn about politics. “Tell me more, sir,” I said, munching on my puff.

“I will,” he said, “but be warned, your life will never be the same again.”

“So what’s the catch?” I asked, chuckling heartily. The butler joined in, but nobody else did.

“What you have to understand,” began one of the seated hoods, “is that this country is not run by the government, nor by the corporations, nor even – despite appearances – by the Greens. This country is run here, by us, in this room. Here, let us show you.” And with that he reached over the arm of the couch and took hold of the lamp sitting on the small occasional table. He gave the lamp an almighty yank, and suddenly the enormous photo of Stalin that covered one wall swung back, revealing a huge and complex control panel, covered with flashing lights, levers and dials. “Here is where the country is run!”

I stood and walked closer, peering at the controls on the wall. Each button and lever was labelled, with things like “monetary policy settings”, “border security”, “fluoride release”, “law-abiding citizen disarmament” and so on.

“You see,” said the third hood, “we need to keep the Labor Party in a constant state of turmoil, engaging in endless civil war, tearing itself apart with impotent disputation, stumbling from PR catastrophe to policy brain-spasm like a wounded elephant, constantly promising renewal and reform and constantly disappointing, perennially commissioning reviews, and most of all, obsessing interminably about the merits of the factional system; in order that nobody learns that the entire nation is controlled on one vaguely retro-styled wall in a stylish modern lounge room by three men in hoods.”

I was, to be honest, surprised. Although I had long suspected that “something was going on” in this country, I had always assumed it had something to do with Ray Martin. This development was, in about 55% of its details, unexpected. “But…but why?” I sputtered. “Would it really be so disastrous if the electorate knew that democracy was a complete sham and their lives were at the mercy of creepy sort-of-monk guys? I think they mostly suspect that anyway.”

“NO!” shouted the standing man. “They can never know. The result would be anarchy, disorder and tragedy, if the people were to ever discover…who is really in power.”

“Who is really in power,” his colleagues repeated, rising from the couch and taking their places either side of their comrade. They lifted their hands to their hoods. “Prepare yourself,” they droned, in unison, and threw back their cowls.

I stared for a second, and then screamed, the scream of the truly damned. For before stood three ordinary, nondescript men, wearing robes…with no faces. Beneath their conservatively styled hair, the fronts of their heads were utterly smooth and bereft of features.

Still screaming at the horror of it all, suddenly I felt a rough hand on my shoulder, and turned to see my guide from earlier, his face no longer wreathed in smoke. And I screamed again, as I beheld his visage, for his entire head was an enormous nose.

“The interview is over,” snarled one massive nostril, and everything went black.

When I awoke, I was stripped to the waist, bathed in sweat, and lying by the pool on the deck of the cruise ship Dawn Princess. Beside me was a poorly-typed copy of the story you have just read, and yet of which I had no recollection beyond some deep bite marks on both ankles and certain vague ideas about Cheryl Kernot.

Was it a dream? I’ll never be certain one way or another. But still, the story had to be told, and I will leave the Australian people to make up their own minds, about the Faceless Men of Sussex Street.