style="font-size:15px;"> ‘You don’t think he is?’
I hesitated, as though unwilling to speak a painful truth, but then I told him what I really thought. ‘Feargol, he’s a prick! He might be a reasonable lawyer but the department needs a leader … like you. Jock couldn’t lead a Labrador to a bucket of rancid bull’s balls!’
Feargol grinned, back to the overgrown schoolboy.
‘Why do you call him Jock?’
‘Don’t know … I thought everyone called him Jock.’
Feargol just chuckled and started going through his morning correspondence, which meant the interview was over.
Fuck it! So that’s what Mandy was trying to tell me with her raised purple eyebrows — bloody Jock was the new head of Compliance!
2 Panties in the Gutter
Whenever I get the shits at work, I take off early and go for a run. In fact, I hate running, but the plodding, meditative grind enables me to work out my frustrations physically and gets my creative juices flowing. I normally go to the oval near my home in West Lindfield — the dark heart of bourgeois suburbia — but that afternoon, for some reason, I made my way unconsciously further north to Kenley Park — a place I hadn’t been for years — and my guts filled with adolescent butterflies when I realised where I was.
The car park was obscured from the road, which made it a popular trysting place for office infidels, and sure enough, as I rolled into the car park, there were two late model cars parked close together with both drivers engaged in the larger. At the other end of the car park was a pig-magnet — a battered, unregistered and obviously derelict bomb covered with red dust and old stickers. You didn’t have to go any closer to know the inside would reek of dead smoke and bong water, the floors and seats covered with empty bottles, broken CD cases, hamburger wrappers and fag butts. The two tatt-covered mullets that lounged against the sides stared at me with malevolent anticipation — was I a dick or a dealer?
I parked midway between the office lovers and the small-time crims and gazed out over the green expanse of Kenley Park, surrounded on three sides by bushland — one of the many fingers of forest which still groped into the guts of Sydney and led ultimately back to god-knows-where.
It was strange that I’d wound up here.
This was a special place for me — part of the mythology of my childhood. Everything, from the flowering gums and fresh mown grass to the erect penises and phone numbers on the toilet doors, evoked a maelstrom of images and sensations which was too lush, too rich, to focus upon. I felt a small exhilaration as though I was taking a risk somehow, or stirring up some ancient danger.
Still seated in the car, I struggled out of my work gear and pulled on a pair of shorts and some old running shoes, which I always carry in case of emergency. With a surreptitious glance at the angry-looking mullets I hid my wallet under the dash and opened the door.
As I did so, my eye fell upon a pink pair of panties lying on the ground, covered with dust and flattened by rain. There’s always a story behind panties in the gutter, or at least there’s a dark vision of naked flesh, so alien to the bourgeois light of day. No doubt, if I cared to look, there would be a condom wrapper lying in close proximity, and possibly even the used condom itself. But most of us manage not to see these things, in polite company at least.
I locked the car and, clutching my keys, walked out onto the oval. Drawing deeply the spring scent of gums into my lungs I felt atoms of the living earth enter my bloodstream and race joyously into my brain. I closed my eyes and stood there, breathing, the petty disappointments of the office evaporating like dew on a midsummer morning. A few quick stretches and I began to run, immediately falling into the rhythm which takes me off into limbo — where I do my best work.
Counter-clockwise I ran, enjoying the latish sunshine on my back, feeling the sweat begin to bead and my lungs begin to burn — hating the hard work but loving the meditation it brings and looking forward to the sweet endorphins that would flood my system later. As I ran past, a woman entered the toilet block, and immediately the panties in the car park flashed into my mind. Had they been eased down teasingly by the wearer? Fumbled over knees and ankles by some rookie Romeo? Torn off by an impatient lover on the edge of consent?
Flashes of my own adolescent adventures came to me — erotic episodes in dark crannies and the backs of cars. I remembered with a visceral thrill a seminal encounter with a girl from school in a cave only a short distance from Kenley Park. Her name was Barbara Harmer. I’d known her only vaguely (she was a year older than me), but one Sunday afternoon, on one of the few occasions I’d been in the bush alone, I had come across her hiding (almost) naked in the cave — the ultimate schoolboy fantasy. And by (almost) wordless consent, we had settled down to explore each other.
There had been no actual coitus, as I recall, but there had been (almost) everything else as Barbara directed me, utterly without reserve or inhibition, and I did her bidding until I was overwhelmed by an ecstatic white-noise seering all erotic imagery from my brain. Everything but her blond hair was lost to me, but to this day I can never smell gum trees without getting partly aroused.
On the eighth lap, and on a sudden whim, I jumped the fence at the back of the oval and jogged down the old track which led through the bush towards my childhood home, some miles further north, and also led past the sex cave. The vague thrill of danger returned and all my senses were turned up to ten.
Eventually, I slowed to a walk, listening to the whips and twills of native birds and feeling the call of the forest — a thing of dark primordial urges even in the heart of suburbia. The sweat was pouring off me as my heart slowed and my breathing relaxed. The lemony sensual smells of the bush filled my nostrils and went straight to the ancient pleasure centres in my brain. I remembered every twist and turn of the old path and soon emerged from the canopy of trees onto the wide rock shelf above the cave where I had encountered young Barbara in (what felt like) a previous life.
I sat down on the edge of the shelf, my legs burned by the hot sandstone, stewing in my own juices, revelling in the sights and sounds and memories unleashed by my olfactory system.
Then, I became aware of voices in the cave below.
‘Okay … now you have to do it to me.’
‘I don’t want to … it feels weird.’
‘I thought we were friends … and friends do everything together.’
Shit.
My first thought was to get away quickly. Both voices were young and female. I knew, without needing or wanting to look, that they were continuing the ancient tradition of the sex cave, and it wouldn’t look good if we were discovered. With the sheepish guilt of the guiltless, I began to stand — the flesh of my thighs suddenly cool as it lost contact with the hot rock — but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave.
‘Alright … but only for twenty seconds.’
‘Okay … I’ll count, but you’ve gotta do it properly. If you don’t do it properly the counting starts again.’
There was the unmistakeable elastic snap of clothing being adjusted, and then: ‘Okay, starting now … ONE …’
There was a bit of a silence, then: ‘TWO … do it properly!’
‘I
