of the bearded, beefy bastard enveloping the couch like a layer of molten mozzarella. Charmingly attired in a blue singlet, yellow Y-fronts and an empty rum bottle, this one was presumably too hungover to go to work.
A bracing aroma, a blend of smoke, sperm and stale beer, drifted out on the early morning breeze. Lighting for this depressing tableau was provided by a set of fluorescent tubes glowing with that ugly pallor they assume as the day dawns around them, sound by a distant bass guitar and a set of hands unseen making mincemeat out of ‘Smoke on the Water’. Duh duh duuh, duh duh duh-duuh, duh duh duuh, duh-duh.
I sat on the steps, head in hands, heart sunk. Christ, I thought. Bluebush!
The town had a population of some fifty million: a thousand blacks, a thousand whites, the rest cockroaches. The cockroaches were on the go early this morning, crawling around blinking at the light of day, their dark brown armour glistening in the sun, their feelers flickering. The weedy geranium bush at the doorstep looked as though it had struggled up through a hole in the concrete, taken a quick look around and was heading back down. Even the dogs yelping in the distance were wondering what canine-karma they’d accumulated to end up in this pissant town.
I was wondering the same thing myself. I stood up to admire the view. Still life in a mining town. Well, not that still, actually: the smokestacks at the smelter were pumping it up and pouring it out, as they did, morning, noon and night. The furnaces were blazing away with enough firepower to blind the angels. The battery was rumbling.
Over to the west, the green mountains—of mullock—were simmering and stinking. Further on was a chemical inferno: the retention ponds, with their hissing blue cyanic waters, their evil green banks, their sagging fences, their odd little toxic rainbows leaching out into the desert.
I’d been to the ponds once. Never again. Skull and cross-bones country. You could feel the cancer stirring in your cells just looking at it.
Food smells began to waft through the air.
Meatworkers and miners were staggering out to tables all over town and getting down to the serious business of making their selection from the enormous smorgasbord of dead animals and their parts which comprised the Bluebush breakfast: schnitzels and mince, chicken wings, red gum, sausages and cutlets, rib bones, lamb shanks, pigs’ heads, bulls’ balls—you name it, it was being battered, baked or boiled in oil, chilled, grilled or charred in lard, filleted, fricasseed, skewered, stewed or brewed and demolished by the ravenous men and rough women of Bluebush.
Driven indoors by the radiant depression, I put on some coffee and some Louvin Brothers, made toast, lit a smoke. Charlie and Ira were singing ‘When I Stop Dreaming’ . Sweet harmonies and sweet aromas filled the room, but did little to ease my mind.
Another mess you’ve gotten yourself into, girl, I admonished myself. Another fine fucking mess.
When I’d thought about coming back to the Centre, the prospect of being stuck in this dirty dust-hole, this monument to red neckery and black despair, hadn’t figured in my calculations.
Like a lot of other people, I’d ended up in Bluebush because I didn’t know what else to do.
I found myself idly scratching shapes in some sugar I’d spilt on the kitchen table the night before. Almost of their own accord, it seemed, the shapes formed themselves into letters and the letters turned into a word: ‘haze’.
Haze. The word was open to a couple of interpretations, and between them they might have been bookends to the state of mind in which I found myself. On the one hand, a haze was what I seemed to have been floating along in ever since I first left Moonlight, years before.
On the other hand, something told me that if there was a way out of the fog, if I were ever to find a home, Hazel Flinders would be part of it. If I were ever to get a foothold in this country,
A bracing aroma, a blend of smoke, sperm and stale beer, drifted out on the early morning breeze. Lighting for this depressing tableau was provided by a set of fluorescent tubes glowing with that ugly pallor they assume as the day dawns around them, sound by a distant bass guitar and a set of hands unseen making mincemeat out of ‘Smoke on the Water’. Duh duh duuh, duh duh duh-duuh, duh duh duuh, duh-duh.
I sat on the steps, head in hands, heart sunk. Christ, I thought. Bluebush!
The town had a population of some fifty million: a thousand blacks, a thousand whites, the rest cockroaches. The cockroaches were on the go early this morning, crawling around blinking at the light of day, their dark brown armour glistening in the sun, their feelers flickering. The weedy geranium bush at the doorstep looked as though it had struggled up through a hole in the concrete, taken a quick look around and was heading back down. Even the dogs yelping in the distance were wondering what canine-karma they’d accumulated to end up in this pissant town.
I was wondering the same thing myself. I stood up to admire the view. Still life in a mining town. Well, not that still, actually: the smokestacks at the smelter were pumping it up and pouring it out, as they did, morning, noon and night. The furnaces were blazing away with enough firepower to blind the angels. The battery was rumbling.
Over to the west, the green mountains—of mullock—were simmering and stinking. Further on was a chemical inferno: the retention ponds, with their hissing blue cyanic waters, their evil green banks, their sagging fences, their odd little toxic rainbows leaching out into the desert.
I’d been to the ponds once. Never again. Skull and cross-bones country. You could feel the cancer stirring in your cells just looking at it.
Food smells began to waft through the air.
Meatworkers and miners were staggering out to tables all over town and getting down to the serious business of making their selection from the enormous smorgasbord of dead animals and their parts which comprised the Bluebush breakfast: schnitzels and mince, chicken wings, red gum, sausages and cutlets, rib bones, lamb shanks, pigs’ heads, bulls’ balls—you name it, it was being battered, baked or boiled in oil, chilled, grilled or charred in lard, filleted, fricasseed, skewered, stewed or brewed and demolished by the ravenous men and rough women of Bluebush.
Driven indoors by the radiant depression, I put on some coffee and some Louvin Brothers, made toast, lit a smoke. Charlie and Ira were singing ‘When I Stop Dreaming’ . Sweet harmonies and sweet aromas filled the room, but did little to ease my mind.
Another mess you’ve gotten yourself into, girl, I admonished myself. Another fine fucking mess.
When I’d thought about coming back to the Centre, the prospect of being stuck in this dirty dust-hole, this monument to red neckery and black despair, hadn’t figured in my calculations.
Like a lot of other people, I’d ended up in Bluebush because I didn’t know what else to do.
I found myself idly scratching shapes in some sugar I’d spilt on the kitchen table the night before. Almost of their own accord, it seemed, the shapes formed themselves into letters and the letters turned into a word: ‘haze’.
Haze. The word was open to a couple of interpretations, and between them they might have been bookends to the state of mind in which I found myself. On the one hand, a haze was what I seemed to have been floating along in ever since I first left Moonlight, years before.
On the other hand, something told me that if there was a way out of the fog, if I were ever to find a home, Hazel Flinders would be part of it. If I were ever to get a foothold in this country,
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