Her Brilliant Career © 1998.

Chapter One
Llust for Fame .....................................................................................................4

Chapter Two
Boudica’s Daughter .............................................................................................12
Chapter Three
Then I was Killed.................................................................................................25
Chapter Four
Driven Mad.........................................................................................................35
Chapter Five
Pork and Children ...............................................................................................41
Chapter Six
Gerald Rebels ......................................................................................................50
Chapter Seven
After Jailing Gerald..............................................................................................58
Chapter Eight
George ................................................................................................................63
Chapter Nine
Daddy’s Vision of the Virgin ................................................................................67
Chapter Ten
Gerald Escapes ....................................................................................................84
Chapter Eleven
Her Head Belongs … ...........................................................................................92
Chapter Twelve
Gerald Shanghaied ..............................................................................................111
Chapter Thirteen
First History Lesson.............................................................................................114
Chapter Fourteen
Hie Thee … .........................................................................................................118
Chapter Fifteen
African Influences................................................................................................129
Chapter Sixteen
Blowing Off! .........................................................................................................143
Chapter Seventeen
Second History Lesson .........................................................................................159
Chapter Eighteen
Gerald and Norman.............................................................................................162
Chapter Nineteen
Third History Lesson ...........................................................................................172
Chapter Twenty
Explosive Events .................................................................................................174
Chapter Twenty-one
Fourth History Lesson..........................................................................................178
Chapter Twenty-two
Chihuahuas.........................................................................................................181
Chapter Twenty-three
Daddy’s Second Vision ........................................................................................183
Chapter Twenty-four
The Fortune Teller ...............................................................................................186
Chapter Twenty-five
Free Speech!..........................................................................................................192
Chapter Twenty-six
Seafaring Literati .................................................................................................196
Chapter Twenty-seven
Daddy’s Demise ..................................................................................................204
Chapter Twenty-eight
Norman Betrays Himself......................................................................................222
Chapter Twenty-nine
Leonie Begins to Learn her Lesson ........................................................................226
Chapter Twenty-nine (again)
A Gratuitous Chapter with an Important Bit at the End..........................................232
Her Brilliant Career. price (UK) IRAp
✬
by Auntie Rhoberta, the Red Dragon.
Motto:
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
- Dorothy Parker.
Chapter One: Llust for Fame1
Daddy exploded, in putrescent rage:3

“Fame? Fame, my girl, we measure in concentric
Celtic circles, like the force of a nuclear blast!”
Shivering, ignoring her fat boofheaded partner
across the breakfast table (he believed amongst other things in
‘ethical businesses’), she recalled the eruption with awe. She was not
well up on geometry4, Celtic or otherwise, but as a household name in
literature (outshining Microsoft Word and Liquid Paper) she felt for
the moment secure. Daddy, despite his head-shrinking tendencies, his
fondness for little girls, and the fact that he was the country’s
principal Patron of the Arts, could hardly bang up in a nunnery the
brilliant novelist Leonie Barmy.
She’d just turned 40 after all. You play with
me at your peril, chorused her off-key Voices. Her Uillean bagpipes,
on a special kiddy chair beside her, wheezed their approval,
eeeeeeeerrr. Their Scotch fillets went untasted.
As she crossed her legs, her knee jolted the
table and her partner received a faceful of his breakfast. She was too
busy listening to her Voices to care. Rather more observant, these,
during her interminable Dark Nights of the Soul, called her house
‘Plato’s cave’ or the ‘Druidic grove’. For the moment she called it
home, but her heart was not in it having gone out to her long-lost
Mummy.
Breakfast of pork steaming and crackling before
her, she raised her teaspoon, licked a finger and smoothed out her
dark eyebrows.
She thought of stirring him to death but the
teaspoon’s bowl cracked. An acidic tear raced down her cheek. She was
1
ps the title of this chapter is NOT intended as some sort of ribald mockery of the South Island accent.
Thet’s more like thus but I won’t carry on wuth ut because ut’s not fear to our Celtic Kiwi readers, eh? Ok,
no more footnotes to Plato.
2
ps the title of this chapter is NOT intended as some sort of ribald mockery of the South Island accent.
Thet’s more like thus but I won’t carry on wuth ut because ut’s not fear to our Celtic Kiwi readers, eh? Ok,
3
no more footnotes to Plato The time-value of punctuation marks in this work has been scientifically
calibrated by Dr Mike O’Gaspottery against the caesium clock at the Siding Springs Observatory,
Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. Eg, a colon indicates a pause of precisely one second; a comma 0.5
seconds, etc. The reader is exhorted to adhere strictly to this regime, and failure to do so will have much
the same consequences as breaking a chain letter.
4
Or the oxymoronic Cornish feminist analysis (by Dr Julie-Mike Traherne) of Scott’s Ivanhoe, immanent
semiotic irruptions in Gaeltacht areas of Morocco, the restoration of Irish antiquities …
Chapter One - Llust for Fame 5
reminded of a rat scuttling down a hawser, and rocked back and forth
sullenly.
As if in response, Daddy slavered and breathed
fire in her head, sipping a Bushmills and puffing on his dudeen of
shamrock leaves. To silence him and his stage Irishness for a while,
she stopped sinking at the circular quay and studied her abridged
Celtic Mafia (CM) version of the Bible (signed by the author and in an
Efficiency class wartime edition in which all the words in the
language are reduced to one, understood by context) with its Good News
of her ancient literary heritage.
Her mind formed guilty questions like ‘What
part did the wily Celt play in the Crucifixion of Our Lord? Held up
the sponge of Jameson vinegar?’, questions which robbed her
momentarily of her minimal confidence.
(She stopped rocking in case her newly-
atheistic husband thought she was praying.)
That morning she’d risen drowsily from her
tangled bed like so many protagonists at the opening of a novel, and
indeed 90% of the population. Having now had a good lie down, a Bex,
and a cup of tea (thus reversing Daddy’s conventional wisdom), she
fumbled, chewing loudly, through the greaseproof pages, and re-read in
a whisper (girl number twenty define a horse) the bit about Dafydd ap
Moses and his only daughter Rhiannon (Exodus 2:6, 26, BINGO!):
Rhiannon woz fownd inn a streem wivinn a hark ov bullrushis

… bINGO?
Leonie’s mind, devoid of stimulus, tried to

escape its present state of crucifixation. (Hey Mr Tambourine Man,
sang her partner softly.) Her imagination laboured overtime (but was
eventually sacked along with the rest of the workforce). Half-asleep
still, drenching him with pork fat, she found it impossible to resist
the acerbic (though musical) commentary of her principal Voice:
Eh, Bwana, look at dis, fach / bach? Blatantly emigratin’ to

Australia! De chicken run never looked so good! Dere be fifteen men on De Dead Man’s
Chest - which sound like a bad case o’ congestion, no wonder Mistah Kurtz he dead! Knees
up Eva Brahn! Forget de moanin’ minnies and pick dem zits and banjoes! Earl Scruggs, de
Stanley Brothers, Peggy and Pete, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, De Tarriers, Woody Guthrie,
de Noo Lost City Ramblers, Samantha Bumgarner, Buell Kazee, Beverley Hillbilly … Ah
jes’ leurve de good ole three-finga pickin’ …
Her unshakeable belief in the Great Chain of

Being was a bit challenged by this anarchic irruption into
consciousness, but she rather enjoyed the naughtiness the Voice
encouraged. Loudly she sang, an old, old favourite of hers, Silver
threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine …
Well, don’t needle me (dat’s off de record) - but Ah’ll be a five-

string General Authority o’ de Mormon Church! Dis vessel ain’t shipshape! She’s listin’
badly and should de Spanish Armada appear over de horizon dere ain’t no amount o’
holdin’ de telescope up to de wrong ah gonna save de dear ole Brish Empah and its
centuries o’ accumulated work experience! Fo’ a start, where de fuck is de parrot? Halfway
up de mizzenmast wid a frisky albatross, no doubt! But Ah clear ye, ancient mariner, you
caint afford Alan Dershowitz OJ.
But hell, it ain’t no time to be singein’ beards and playin’
another rubber - mind you, it not safe not to use ‘em dese diseased days, a heap o’ leprosy
about, unclean, unclean, unclean, three bells why is dat de time? (It were a big mistake
takin’ dat free package holiday to America - a metropolitan powah presently recolonisin’
itself, de Gulag growin’ bigger ev’y day, give us yo’ poor, yo’ tired, yo’ homeless, we ain’t
payin’ for ‘em, two hunnerd years o’ slavery - daylight savin’ come and ‘e wan’ go home -
and you got to have a friend in Jesus, so dey say - but now de sea is in mah blood, me
hearties. Avast ye, brer Ishmael! Lash me to the marst, Mr Christian! Tote dat barge and
lift dat bale! Thar blows Hägar de Horrible off de port bow wid de whole shmeery tribe o’
Lehi! De ship’s biscuits is clearly past dere use-by.)
Leonie muttered and giggled to herself, sss-

sss-sss-sss-sss-sss! Her partner, being a product of the uptight 1960s
Tafia was no doubt pretending not to notice.
Let it all hang out! So welcome to Club Med, lil’ Jack Tar-baby
- Ah’s Long Joan Silverberg and dis is Old Blind Lemon Pew, de well-known hauthors o’
Das Kapital and old enough to remember Booker T. Washington an’ Frederick Douglass
an’ Toussaint l’Ouverture an’ Lenny Bruce Lower (Groucho couldn’t come as he spot de ex
and find de treasure) 5 who oughta be doing better than we is in dis age of freewheelin’
globularisation and international trade in snatch! De Dead Hand o’ de Parst carryin’ Out
de Damned Black Spot and we ain’t gonna take dat, fer ter see our birthright tooked away,
Precious Lord Jim old chap (I thought de bastard6 was Polish)! We gwine been stuck here
for years a-singin’ o’ de Campdown Races over and over while debatin’ de Problem o’
Evil, and it gettin’ borin’ (we also sick to de back teeth o’ Israeli Defence Force Radio) -
could you be givin’ us a lift, by Gor? (Dis Betsy to Heavens, over, scuze my mobile, it goin’
off in temple to mah great embarrassment, but it important to have access to a telephone so
we’s can ring up de Prez and complain about de lack o’ democracy.) We natchrally can
sing fo’ our soul food supper: Old man ribber … Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry
bones … Swing low, sweet f.a. … If I had a hammer … May de sickle be unbroken
…
This was so funny that she snorted and

inadvertently blew an april shower of snot in his direction. The
cruelest month indeed; pity it was December.
Us 100 year old Black Welsh Marxist Sino-Hebrews (direct

descendants of Sammy Davis Jr and Rabbi Jehuda Minz-pai) hates hitch-hikin’ round de
brer of lil’ brain galaxy like dis but it beats bein’ stuck in a dead and alive hole like Tiger
Economy Bay (dat Thatcherism) where’s far as Ah know St Paul Robeson nevah deign to
go (ok, ok, [puke], we were at it till three in de morning, turn off de light, I’ll convoit!),
especially when like we you as tight as a shark’s backside and descended from someone wid
de unlikely name o’ Ham! (Well, it better than de Celtic saint Bacon Butty.) Unpharoah
Remus ap Rees ap Knees-up Caradog II, you and brer BB O’Yahu ain’t gettin’ mah vote,
chile, assumin’ Ah got one wurf de name! Who de fuck outside de Books o’ Ether and
Chloroform evah talked like dis anyhow?
But Ah digress, Rhiannon good girl. Yassum, we prospected
up a storm on de Mormon Trail, boyo - dat ole jewel thief brer King Bumnebula o’
Thailand’s not gettin’ his royal mitts on our hoard, not till Doodah’s Day! No way,
motherfucker! We don’t owe nothin’ to no one, not even great Jesus Caesar’s Holy Ghost
whom - who - whoop - what de fuck? - whose we paid off larst week! Hallelujah and pass de
ammunition, bach! Yo, base-totin’ nigga asswipe, rattle yo’ chains wid Sick Willie in de
nooly progressive Blue Ass of A, Jimmy Crack yo’ Corn, what else have you got to lose,
Lord Jim Crow, in dis free-stealin’ global slave market, do be diggin’ dem holes and
fillin’‘em in again fo’ de sake o’ de Orthodox Taxpayer! Dat de Protestant woik-ethic!
Scots wha ha’e wi’ Wallace bled! Calvin’s in de cold cold … Lawks a mussy, long-lost
Mammy, way down upon the Swanee wid Al Jolson and Shirley Bassey and Bob Dylan
Thomas and de boys from Les Goils wid dere chit’lins, hog jowls, Kentucky fried chicken
and Book of Macaroni cheese … surprise, I’m a Christian … Great day in de mornin’ for it,
5
I wouldn’t join a club that’d have him anyway. They’d certainly never have me.
6
No reference is intended here to the famed Thomas Bastard (1566-1618), author of Chrestoleros, or to the
legendary Fifty Thousand Bastards of the old Transvaal who were so white they glowed in the dark.
G’day y’old bastard, ‘ow yer goin’ mite?
Clementine! Yo, daughterfucker, we thrash you at de gwyddbwyll any day! De

Campdown racetrack five mile long…
She drew her sleeve across her nostrils. Fame,

my girl indeed. He’d never understand - and nor would Daddy. (He
ridiculed what he termed her ‘halfwit Zionism’.) But for the moment
she felt quite metaphysical. Daddy ridiculed what he termed her
‘Zionism’. And was Jerusalem and Ulladulla builded here, among these
dark Satanic mills and boon? What about the famous Light on the Hill?
The Voice grew fervid as Martin Luther King’s, and her messianic
belief in self-liberation began to grow:
Look you, anwylyd, it be a pity about our ole narsty stereotype

Socialism (de Clayton’s religion, we settin’ up Marxist revolutionary temples all over de
place and chantin’ our mantra never cross a picket line and gettin’ tax breaks and
Devonshire teas at St Karl’s, it suited Ernst Bloch an’ Moses Hess) goin’ up de spout, it
were all a Celtic lit’ry hoax, comrade! Like dem Undyin’ Gauls found, you cain’t have
hequality ‘cept in de nex’ world, and maybe not even dere wid dem sheddin’ hangels at a
frightenin’ rate. As Celtic Harpo say, de bourgeoisie cannot exist widout constantly
revolutionahzin’ de hinstruments and bagpipes o’ production, and dereby de relations of
production, and wid dem de whole relations o’ uncivil society … world war three been
1
downsized, it now world war 2 . Uncle Tom never talked.
2
… So, Mistah Hallelujah Rambo de White Prince on 225
times de av’rage shit wage (an’ genwine peace cost as much as WWII at least), it comin’ to
pass dat de old man ribber o’ gold teeth flowin’ from Proletariat to Bourgeoisie dis
American century got hisself Swiss banks, bimeby you learns you can make yo’ deposit but
de likes o’ ole Sambo cain’t make no withdrawal till de Messiah come, brer Profit.
(Anyhow, Ah cain’t Handel one at de moment.) G7 is de world’s favoright poison now,
fuck de ‘free’ market utopian notions o’ subverted democracy and de Greenies Revolution
and de great gay Wales o’ Genesis, de princes is rebellious and companions o’ thieves and
de world splittin’ up mo’ and mo’ into two warrin’ camps so double de Turd World Debt
and raise de hexploitation rate on de hillegal himmigrants, it human nature to pocket
trillions and starve folks to death so Ah hear. Hunger never reach de throne, bach, pass de
biscuits Liz, what all dis about you bein’ de closet white lefty?
But hush, lil’ baby, Mama had to eat de mockin’ boid dis
mornin’ so dere lil’ point in bawlin’ and writin’ letters o’ complaint to de Saxon
Himperialist Murdocherous Press. Dis just de way it are, de seven deadly wankers o’ de
world unitin’ to trample de planet in dere G7 League Boots. Welcome to de mockin’ hinfant
market, boyo, take heed of de signals and keep an ah for an ah on de hark behind, you cain’t
fight de hirresistable market forces o’ de himmoveable object, it a case o’ Occam’s razor
under de pyramid, between me and G-d and Nietzsche and de Debbil and de deep blue sea
history do be mo’ or less bunk as Adam Ceredigiawn-Smith say and we got de HIMF and
de Stealth Bomber to sort y’all out! Dis no rubber o’ whist from de Pickwick Paper, spike
dere Canon, what de Dickens can Ah add to it?
She rocked with rapture.
Why, shuffle mah politburo, what Ah say? Twyll tyn pôb

Sais, as it say in de progressive Welsh Talmud! You may well aks, Olwen fach, why we
hangin’ about doin’ nothin’ an’ apieriently chattin’ up de lil’ waifs and strays in de ancient
Brish tongue. Well it simply dat we caint get decent jobs nowhere in spite o’ havin’ de
PhDs in Marxism-Leninism and ill-tempered and Queer Welsh Studies from Harriet
Tubman College (de universe is queerer than we can imagine) due to our lack o’ de
Himperialist Anglo work experience and de hancestral himprimatur o’ Joseph o’
Haramathea - and we sho as fuck ain’t doin’ no more slavin’ for de brutal plutocrat
patriarchal paleface, Bwana! Dey say get out dere and comb de gas stations but we suffer
from de discouraged voter effect as one lot almos’ as bad as de udder when it come to dealin’
wid de Parasaht Class o’ 1984. It a scandal, sho ‘nuff already, cariad, and we’d write de
Manifesto to de Taliban Times, comrade, but what de use o’ free speech dese days? Lo en
beholes, ain‘t nobody understand us and our pocket Ida B. Wells no more no more. Hit dat
fuckin’ road Jack.
Well, Ida B. happy to show you round cara mia, but de
tourism biz a lil’ hazardous dese days. Anyhow, Jack, ain’t nothin’ doin’ round here but
dese pointy lil’ tombs and a great deal o’ sand, ‘nuff to start a flourishin’ ethical concrete
business but Ah’s better wid abstractions. How de fuck G-d manage to write dat comic
novel I’ll never know (and what was He on at de end) - ain’t much money in writin’ no
matter how good you is, de gatekeepers o’ publishin’ oughta put dere money where dere
mouth is and not between dere legs. But then He sittin’ about for a thousand year cookin’
up boinin’ bush verse and applyin’ for grants and promisin’ de hunemployed hangels dat
He jes’ waitin’ for de hinspiration to knock out de Great Heavenly Bestseller, dat glorious
outpourin’ o’ ressentiment, de Big Lie against de Big Lie …?
Besides, since Abel got de Cain fo’ his mastery o’ de eristic art,
what de shit is heddification wurf anyhow? What use a baby? Folks is never so blind as
when dey wankin’ in de ole closed-shop hexecutive position, sez Pew sezee, handin’ out de
arse grants and givin’ demselves hairs and horgasms over dere confessional status,
Goronwy bach. Ah calls it prostititfortatfitution, pure and simple. It givin’ we de dry grins
all right. A toof fo’ a toof sunk into yo’ backside, aye-aye for an aye Sir! Pipe de Ammiral
abo’d and secure him a fresh cabin boy, Rastus! Dey ain’t nevah gonna give we one, we
talks too much in dese days o’ free speech (actually dat sellin’ currently fo’ $3.56 a
phoneme, dem numbers ain’t got no Cabbalistic significance dat Ah know of). We travellin’
round de hinternational religious lecture coicuit wid Rosabeth Moss Kanter and OJ and a
watermelon and we still forced to sit up de back o’ de hintellectual bus.
Hilliterate bastards. All Ah can say to Lil’ White Rambo: what
mean ye dat ye beat mah people to pieces and grind de faces o’ de poor? What kind
o’ asshole is you, boy?
But what Ah say, what Ah say! Shut mah mouth, don’t look at
mah ass, Eddie, Ah have not found no hanswer in Jesus on de fiery Celtic cross no matter
what de Religious Right or even de Bethany Baptist choich claim, comrade! Jes’ don’t
throw us in de brier-patch, brer mairsydotes, we might nevah see de daylight agin!
Leonie was by now laughing out loud - so hard

that she could barely breathe - and when Rhiannon weighed anchor at
9.2425 kilos and broke out the rum she almost fainted.
Her companion continued to spoon down his
breakfast, clearing his throat repeatedly.
Down de hatch, fach! Too much light darken de mind as Our

Paul knew. (And God said, ‘Let there be light’, but de bulb had gone.) Well I never, it be
poor Ben Gunn, do it? Or do it be Blackbeard? Bluebeard? Pinkbeard? Ah do be he or she
Oi be, bain’t Oi as ole Uncle Tom Cobbley so pithily expostulate on de natchral gas banjo,
arrrr, Modryb Rhoberta, the answer loys its head off in de zoil, when you not writin’ de
deathless cock-and-bull haiku in de peasant tense! We found de treasure too but it had gone
off! Pooh! Is dat you, Pew? No wonder you-alls went blind. Yessir, Arafat, Ah’s a tick tock
trapped in a loaded dog’s body and not in de best suburb either! Not in G-d’s lifetime will
dey let us live in B’nai Brak! Strike me lucky as eeny meeny miney Mo say …
Also we found de henemy, and it was not de Palestinians but
hus on de pogo stick - de Cold War begin and end here, Bwana - bouncin’ rakishly about de
global shanty-town, deliverin’ devastatin’ critiques o’ de late demented aristocrapitalist
Moloch at all de best private graveyards while hangin’ around wid de big transatlantic
stars like Billy Bragg and kd lang and Brian Boru and Wilma Flintstone! And all of dem
blue-eyed crisp-shoited Waffen SS neoclassical econonononomists like Joerg Haider
glancin’ at our Clintonesque mobiles and a-callin’ o’ us ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ or both and
noddin’ sagely while makin’ necessity de tyrant’s plea and discussin’ de possibility o’
sealin’ off de wusser bits o’ de Turd World wid reinforced concrete and abstract razor wire
at so many deutschmarks a ton! Dis heady stuff, buckeroo! Mawga nanny, Bertolt, it what
make de world go round!
But Ah have a Dream! Zzzzzzzzz -
Leonie felt a bit tired by now too. She

stretched sensually and lit a smoke to go with her pork. The sound of
spluttering and choking from across the table was drowned out as the
Voice slowly woke up again.
… (mumble) fuckin’ pork again? Jesus, Ah’ll starve, Ah ain’t

no breathafarian an’ Ah ain’t eaten for 18 months, you got any ferret? First catch your
pelican. Why de fuck should we want to eat beetles, bats, and camels, Ah aksed Moses and
got de shifty answer typical o’ politicians. But, ahem, as Ah was sayin’, don’t dey know dat
it been tried and fail? Look at de Hempress Harridan! Look at Boudica Queen of de Iceni,
boinin’ up 70 000 Roman civilians and associated collaborators! A spectre is hauntin’ de
world - de spectre of de Body Shop. Maybe we can get sponsorship, we tried Decianus
Catus but he’d pissed off back to Rome disguised as Mr A. Ness, vacuum cleaner salesman.
De ethical business to de rescue, ha ha! But dey ain’t keepin’
us down no more no more, Jack. Look at de Great Wailin’ Wall o’ China (de Chinese hold to
dere Marxist Asiatic Mode o’ Production about as much as you lot do to yo’ Christianity)!
Dandy for de tourists, dat about all, (when dey not blowin’ dem away), and de foundations
precarious bein’ sunk in blood as usual, Miss Tairypin. Shucks no, dere ain’t no dingo
fence gonna keep us out, cobbers! We all gwine gonna hop over it like de Skippy de bush
jackeroo, brud! Right into yo’ Big House, Massa, we ain’t gonna shoot up wid de Opiate o’
de Massas, we gonna knock yo’ fuckin’ haid off! De Kingdom o’ Heaven on Oith comin’ to
pass any minute as Ysbaddaden Chief Giant point out to Culhwch son of Cilydd in All-
Bran de Blessed’s bestsellin’ an’ regular Mabinogion.
(You’d think dese people’d have some background, most o’ ‘em
been to hah school and ev’ythin’. I cut mah teef on Maimonides and de Cabbalists (great
rap band dat, better than de geriatric turn-out Many More) in de dear ole tarpaper shack.)
But nevah mind us, my man, we be toys o’ de big boys, hush
lil’ baby and you’ll get all de pretty lil’ horses and we get de horseshit as usual. Look what
dey did to ter Shylock in Othello. Jes’ don’t throw us in dat dialectical briar patch, brer
Faggot, we’s makin’ a comeback on de Hormone Trail as y’all gonna find out soon, cariad.
Well, Imelda, hein, commence to hoist de Blue Peter, kiddleydivyshoe! Weigh, hey, and
up she rises …
To the accompaniment of massed wobble-boards

and didgeridoos, and Leonie’s hysterical guffaws at the breakfast
table, they floated slowly out to sea, through the Suez Canal and
onward to the Antipodes.
“Er, ahem, are you all right, dear?”

“‘Course.” she flounced, clamming up and
squeezing tortured shrieks out of her underfed bagpipes. He had the
musical acumen of a dead koala.
Disturbed by any sign of creative potential in

the Antipodes, but concerned that his only daughter be properly
indoctrinated in the Kinder, Kirche und Küche folkways of the Race,
Daddy in his Tayloristic fashion had taught Leonie a bit of reading,
‘just for the Bible’. It had been his greatest mistake.
Sustained by the memory of Mummy and her
burning desire (when not dwelling musically on herself) to build a
better world, she had painfully gained literacy between the ages of 27
and 34. During that period she furtively taught herself to write as
well (orthography optional). By the time he found out, her literary
career was raging, her friends dubiously included politicians and
university professors (some of whom remembered her mother as a
fractious scholar), and her interpretation of even the CM Version had
grown rather outre.
More recently, she’d found the courage to go

beyond the Good Book.
So (since she’d come across tattered copies of
The Terror of St Trinian’s and Paradise Lost and BA Santamaria’s
little-known Life of Andy Warhol in an op shop) it was now Celia
Bendover, the clinging-vine daughter of the imperialist Saxon King and
North Sea oil magnate Terribly-Terribly G. Terribly III, who had found
Rhiannon in her little unseaworthy ark of bulrushes, while wagging
Deportment Class at St Phoebel’s School for Young Ladies and horsing
about with her horsey girlfriends on the bank of the Gihon in the
glare of the camera crew:
Celia woz playink hoarses wiv her frends. (Moases woz nott
aloan inn serposink hiz toases were roases …) orl ov a suddenn a derty grate pudden caim
flyink fru thee aire. (Whoops, sorry, im imbullshitting. it must be becoz of thee proksimitee
ov brer charltin hestun. Hasn’t G-d gott a ddeapp Voice? Wy dew I wershipp a
swarewerd?) Then not lookin at thee camra shee ternd her ayes the noo tward thee streem.
wots that a plattapuss cride shee boo hoo. Noa thay said dont bee thik as porleen hansin
thiss is thee CM bibel.
Leonie giggled again, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss! (Her

spelling was no worse than Geoffrey Chaucer’s.) But the next bit was
very sad.
… And wenn shee hadd opind itt, shee sore thee chiled: and,
bihoald, thee baib wept.
She rocked back and forth once more, but this

time sobbing bitterly.
Her dopy partner’s jaw fell and he just sat
there dripping with grease, no match for her Voices, gormlessly
staring with his hand flapping limply in mid-air.
Chapter Two: Boudica’s Daughter
She dried her eyes and wiped her nose on the

tablecloth, knowing the story off by heart (and sending saucers
flying). She remembered it from Sunday school, after Mummy ran away.
But Daddy still claimed that her powers of biblical exegesis were
about as effective as twirling the wrong way in a tornado. She took
that as a compliment.
Her heat-seeking eyes (one with a stye that she
kept picking at) targeted her partner’s. He, hating her Boudican (or
as he uneducatedly said, Boadicean) ardour and her Voices, looked
supinely out the window. She tightened her own strong jaw. He, trying
not to slurp at his fortunately lukewarm vegan breakfast of shinkin or
bread-in-tea, was about as inviting as a wet cat on a freshly-shaved
shin.
Leonie felt like Joan of Arc at a barbecue.
(She also did weddings and bar mitzvehs.) People never understood how
much love was going stale inside her. Neither did she.
Sipping an early-morning wine, she did know
that she needed help. Or so he maintained in his mollyish academic
manner (Boudica Queen of the Iceni would probably give him a good
kicking ) . But then he’d been born with a silver spoon in his weak
little Welsh mouth.
Well, the spoon twists, dear, she reflected,
preening again then bending it out of shape, at ground zero. To a True
Celt, success is the best revenge.
ThenN wer thEe peEpOL oV Eyerland dEvidId intWo to parTts (1
Kings 16:21), a shame that magician had been let into the Daíl. The
artistic and wine-bibbing Celtic Race, Daddy assured her, had achieved
so much since those far-off days, having invented the bodhran and the
electric kilt. She fingered the magic Celtic tattoo of interlaced
ribbons on her forearm and touched the much talked-about torc at her
throat. The crucifix hanging behind it glistened with her alcoholic
sweat.
With her gold-plated Zippo lighter she lit
another cigarette, only slightly afraid of bursting into flames. A
mulish paranoia and the gossip of her many enemies made her bestudded
ears burn, and notwithstanding these cliches and her lifelong
inability to have more Celts, her hangover ebbed a bit.She’d been
dragged up in ignorance with only the beacon of fame to sustain her -
she’d even eaten from the same garbage bins as Madonna. (Leonie
admired the efficient American social security system with its ‘green’
emphasis on recycling.) Understandably, she leaned to the right.
Being soft in the head and a man, he espoused
highbrow leftish views which he got no doubt from listening to the
socialist, Sino-Jewish-run ABC, now offshore. The idea of being
radioactively death-dealing was more seductive than any of his wet
blathering about ‘social responsibility’ and the ‘common good’. Leonie
had never even touched a pipe bomb, but Daddy took care of all that.
It was reassuring that failure hadn’t changed
either of them.
Men.
Experimentally, she leaned to the left. It just
gave her a crick in the neck. She poked at her stye instead, and gave
the remainder of her pork to the family mutt with a witty crack about
‘pig styes’ that her partner (who probably got spaced out on golden
eye ointment) was too obtuse to get.
Outside, at the burnished edge of the golden
morning, the golden Saxon sun rose perniciously over everyone. She
wanted to rip its golden Noam Chomskyian hair out by the roots. Let
its colorless green ideas sleep furiously. That sentence was full of
golden meaning for her.
Chapter Two - Boudica’s Daughter 12
She peered at her gold-brick partner with

disdain, her thick-lensed, gold-rimmed glasses teetering at the end of
her prominent nose. The word ‘Wales’, Daddy had assured her, meant,
essentially, ‘Land of the Wogs’. As a result, she hated even more her
partner’s corpulent inertness, the way he, unmoved by the Yellow
Peril , lay about reading all the time. His latest book - he’d never
got round to writing one of course, being so soft with his characters
that they constantly pestered him with their upside-down slides of
their holidays in Brazil - was by the famous author Gemma Wisdom,
whose daddy ran Penguin.
It went through you like mercury through a
duck. She so despised eschatology. Like her nose (and Orlorn’s) there
was no end to it. (People made jokes about that sometimes but she’d
shut them up by threatening to nuzzle them to death.) She could play
‘chopsticks’ with both hands tied behind her back - though not on the
bagpipes. (Aaaagh!)
She cracked her knuckles and glared into his
pitzy little eyes. Even he hadn’t come to her riverside birthday party
the other day, something about being busy.
Couldn’t bear her friends, obviously. For
instance, he kept claiming he intended to meet Gemma. Of course he
never would, the cowardly little deviant. He was fruitily in awe of
the Famous, fawning and delivering unto them lickspittle panegyrics
like ‘what a great book!’ (as he’d fluted to the much-sung poet Les
Miserable the other day).
Leonie, by contrast, Bible-read and Bible-bred,
treated them and all other minority groups with a thinly-disguised
withering contempt. After memorising every page of the dictionary to
gain Total Knowledge (research, like him, was a bore), she’d grown
certain that they occupied a lower sphere of the Ptolemaic literary
firmament than did she. Adscititious sublunary slimebags, she snarled,
the corners of her mouth turning down with a vengeance. Like the
unruly sun she’d warmed to just about everybody (including Elvis) and
maintained a List of them to flash about amongst the paparazzi and
linguine who took voyeuristic piccies of her for the social pages.
Her well-publicised List was more famous than
Joseph McCarthy’s.
Her partner, who’d finished his ‘shink’ and was
now teaspooning down his cockamaimy soup with great delicacy, cleared
his throat of all charges.
“She - Gemma - has the courage to make the main
character a transsexual. She has her tell the whole world about it - ”
he announced in his ‘girly’ voice, still flushed from his 26 kilometre
jog around the American-designed and since Disneylandised Lake Burley
Griffin (upon whose pristine waters they’d been sailing yesterday). He
patted at his rigid lacquered bob. The rings on his podgy fingers
gleamed like knuckledusters.
“Really? Gossipy old bat.” Leonie couldn’t
remember other people’s stuff - or at least she soon forgot that what
she pinched from them was theirs. That’s no lady, that’s my husband
formed in her seething brain.
“Yes,” he continued, trying to adopt a lectury
tone and sounding more like Minnie Mouse on helium, “even though her
knowledge of the subject is, well, limited.” He’d never been the same
since they got that video of Annie Hall.
Leonie, now perusing Deuteronomy 22:5, the
knuckledusters on her fingers gleaming like rings, found such people
off-putting. He saw himself as one, and as a result was downright
embarrassing at the parties she dragged him along to. He’d mingle
glitteringly but his false eyelashes would snag or SNAG in his horn-
rims while his lipstick would smear his Bugs Bunny male teeth and make
them look like they were bleeding to death. He was on her List, all
right.
Her nepotistic friends in the literary

community might appear to accept him, but the things they said behind
his back …
She wondered what they said behind hers. She
looked round for knives.
“A transvestite?” she trumpeted, sharpening her
fingernails on her gold lamé dress, krcz-krcz. (Her command of Czech
was limited.) “A child molester? I think you ought to stop borrowing
those things. And my underwear.” She crossed her stubbly legs
aggressively.
He looked deferential as a guppy. She raised
her eyes devoutly to Heaven and being such a good Catholic crossed her
legs again. Oy vey! She thumped her forehead. Two homoerotic bananas
in striped pyjamas couldn’t have been more twee. ‘What a nice man he
is, B1.’ ‘Well, he is nice, B2.’ The ABC was, she felt, completely
doomed - as Londinium had been.
He always seemed so genuinely nice it was
sickening. His politeness was in such contrast to Daddy’s tempestuous
ravings that she had no choice but to regard him as a despicable toad.
“A transsexual who becomes famous.” he squeaked
poutingly in his ladylike tones, in honour no doubt of his effeminate
idol Felicity Kendall. “About 10 kilotons - same as you.”
She was very thin in reality (whatever that
was) and raised the left corner of her upper lip, an expression he
apparently found androgynously attractive.
“I’m working on a novel like that.” she
retaliated - with many assertive lip-smackings copied from his
favourite ABC women presenters as they sat turning green in the
tossing studios of their pirate broadcasting ships, no doubt fighting
off the Sino-Palestinian ABC and interviewing each other to save
money - as though it were true. (She couldn’t stand Radio Geraldine.)
At 12.30 she was seeing her idiotic editor - a sworn enemy of Daddy -
so it seemed wise to do a bit of rehearsing.
He looked up at her, dewily, resplendent in the
beige chiffon tent that he liked to affect about the house (he was
about as fetching as that gussie the Archangel Michael, but definitely
minus the flaming sword). She picked at the lacerations on her knee
and wondered why she loved towering over him (though sitting down) and
over most people, even Daddy.
“Really?” he said meretriciously. It was not
only beige, it bloomed with not-so-paradisial flowers the colour of
rat-turd.
Disliking vermin like her father, she would
conceal information from him in this information age, then release it
bit by bit till he was totally confused. She’d leave the olive oil in
the fridge then whip it out in company and upturn it over the
Axminster to his general bewilderment.
A wooss, he’d rail futilely against these
practices and carry on about how she’d been systematically lied to all
her life. She’d just make comic flicks of her wrist.
“What is real?” she retorted now with an
intellectual sneer and he looked blank. He was patently a hippie, the
sort who hadn’t washed since May, 1968. Burn, baby, burn.
“B-but - you mean a novel about transsexuals …
?” he whined. She believed that you couldn’t possibly change your sex
because you were born that way.
She began to sing mockingly. I got no job,
there’s rent to pay, and whitey’s on the moon … She couldn’t stomach
Che Guevara’s horrible folk music. A hard rain’d fall on him one of
these fine days.
Back into time she gazed, at her guitar-
twanging hippie ancestors as they wandered down a highway of diamante
into the Promised Land where they developed allergies to lactose and
were attacked by bees. Irish idealism was clearly a waste of time.
An independent woman she was with an ego the
size of Quebec, but ‘revolution for the hell of it’ was anathema to
her, save Boudica’s.
They stripped her and flogged her and raped her
daughters, but look what she did back to them. Ave, St Boudica!
Black liberal helicopters were murdering the
unborn Child of the world with Patriot missiles. We had to have our
femis and siery crucifixes at the ready, as Daddy spoonerishly
thundered, quoting from his blond correspondence with the KKK and
flicking his hair back in a suspect manner. The Druidic Order, he’d
maniacally sermonise at multicultural rent parties for local artists
with his dark ‘Irish’ locks flying (sometimes she thought he was about
as Celtic as the moon), would perish without the fanatical support of
every genetically-pure Celt.7 Celts, he had assured them, were a nice
normal silent majority of lean, mean and clean folks like himself who
were being persecuted everywhere for the crime of wanting to wear the
kilt and pillage their neighbours.
Her partner finished his soup and looked
inadequate.
“I would rather become a Horangeman than see

the artistic Celtic World run into the ground and overmanned by the
nilthy fautical ABC, dat hotbed of Saxon Hilluminati, de Unchosen
People … ” Daddy had frothed religiously at the last CM rally in
Graeme Campbell Square. The brittle memory of his voice made her
shrivel inside.
In the elite front row, composed mainly of
commercial radio talk-show hosts, social fascists and New Labour PMs,
Bruce Ructions dwelt on closed shop selection criteria, self-
strangling corporate hierarchies, the evils of compensating stolen
children, School League Tables, and his denunciation by the
Revolutionary Koori Liberation Front, and applauded. Now - as far as
he was concerned - that Political Correctness had been spiflicated,
people (most of whom according to newspaper and telephone polls were a
bunch of Nazis, so much for ‘democracy’) could express their point of
view freely without being howled down by loudmouthed leftist
busybodies and Trades Unionists who were all in the slammer under the
thumb of people of 10% of their oik intelligence where they belonged.
“Take dat woman they employ just to say ‘Radio
National, 846’ all day long. It’s scandalous overmannin’ - time to
slash their 8¢ a day to zero. Them and Celtic - er, Saxon - spinach
triangle players.
Make ‘em talk like David Helfgott in Shine and
save taxpayer’s money, shouted a film buff. Daddy just sneered.
Leonie had stood at the back of the stage,
draped in an Australian flag and ready to fling flowers at the
audience at the end. Even she knew it was a cart, if not a tumbril.
But as usual, the learnéd condemnations of the CM her partner had
repeated for years - they’re patenting life!, for example - circled
the precipice of her mind like vultures. Suddenly, and for the first
time, one found purchase on a crag, and held on with nothing but
contempt for the splinters of rock falling into the abyss below, its
eyes strangely dewy.
She’d always felt silly in the hot frock of
rayon flowers she had to wear on such jolly occasions in front of
perfect or rather very imperfect strangers, and now her rising nausea
and damp made her rip both the real and fake flowers to shreds. All
her life Daddy had given her lollies with one hand while he groped
7
Rumbustious suggestions that Hitler was a Celt will be blitzkrieged mercilessly.
with the other. She vowed, or tried to vow, praying surreptitiously at

her mobile shrine to the Blessed Virgin who had Mummy’s face - hail
Mary full of grace, save us from the human race - never to collaborate
with her father again.
Daddy’s Head Bodyguard had seen it all but he
was a bit sweet on her, she imagined, and made excuses to Daddy after
she’d snuck away.
Meanwhile, Daddy hectored on and pointed the
bone in his turned-up nose at Ructions.
“T’ank you, True Celt Ructions! Dey should make
you into a fillum star.” He searched his mind for the rest of his
speech, memorised from a book his father had written and published
with the aid of his mother’s life assurance money, The Protocols of
the Elders of the Himalayas, or, Shangri-la on a Shoestring (Shanghai:
1922).
“Er - with their Christian Zionist Tibetan help
- the Dalai Lama’s got a lot to answer for, the mystical Asiatic
bastard, him and that Hindu bimbo St Theresa, both completely round the
oojah - ” He rummaged through his fractured consciousness again,
coming up with his father’s bestselling scurrilous foray, The
Protocols of the Elders of Tasmania, or, Extermination on a Shoestring
(München: 1934). That being of little relevance at the moment, he
turned mentally to his Dad’s 30s classics, The Protocols of the Elders
of Mongolia, or, European Invasion and Monetary Union on a Shoestring
(Ulaanbator: 1938), and The Protocols of the Celtic Hordes, or,
Sacking Rome on a Shoestring While Drunk (Rio de Janeiro: 1945). It
(Rome) never got a job again being over 40.
One day, he thought, his dear daughter might
get into that hallowed league.
Desperate by now, he consulted the notes he’d
had prepared by the Mayor of Port Lincoln or some such backwater.
“Ah, well now … we’ll soon be submerged under
hordes of so-called ‘heconomic’ himmigrants in rusty bathtubs with
slitty heyes from all points of the compass, shootin’ up on falafel
and spying for, er, for Saddam Hussein!” He genuflected and made the
Sign of the Cross.
A tremendous roar went up from the drunken
underemployed ‘Celtic’ claque, possibly due to the long lines of
Mexican refried-bean stalls whose impoverished owners (many ex-ASO
−1 s) who’d freewheelingly taken advantage of the occasion. Cruise
missiles sailed overhead (it being an election year in America) but
everyone had got used to that.
“Because! Er - ” The stench made even him reel
and jig in his little brief kilted authority, hoping he’d not get an
erection. “Er, because what are they, True Celt Butler, but dose
greasy, sex-mad, economic cancer-cells, economic totalitarians,
economic rapists - Wogs!”
He let the word echo round the square. The
audience checked their stalwart visages furtively in pocket mirrors,
careful not to look like poofs. No, they decided, it couldn’t apply to
them. Daddy resumed his harangue, only to be interrupted by a red-
haired fanatic in the audience.
“Nig-nogs!”
“T’ank you too, True Celt Davis the Poetic
Ratbag, peerless redneck that yoy undoubtedly are. An epigraph of ze,
er, the Stakeholder Society.” Paranoid parasite. He could always be
shot later for this impertinent interruption. “I’m sure you agree
they’re all craven, violent, Serbian pinko queers” (he queered his
pitch) “who don’t believe in earnin’ a livin’… arty-farty gyppo
bastards with names like Chanikopitopoulos and Spam - er - dat live in
caravans on the d o l e … on the DOLE! At the EXPENSE O F THE
TAXPAYER!”
The machete-toting crowd, all waving CM Bibles

in the publicly-funded square, showed their appreciation of their
Leader by letting go another collective colonic explosion.
“Why, t’ank you, True Celts!” he gasped,
despising the lot of them sub rosa. It was sadly necessary to maintain
popular support even in these days of Hard Decisions and Unparalleled
National Wealth (whether measured in the aggregate or per capita, per
earlobe, per clitoris etc), to the extent of admitting people whose
Celtic origins were seriously in question. How else could one hope to
get the 30% support necessary to form a government?
“Yoy - yoy all come together very nicely there.
Yoy know of course, True Celt Upanishad
Vimanasinghlisahibabucurripowdaham (love dose lung-burstin’ Cymric
names), dat they’re all after yer job, yer wife, yer kids, yer Pajero,
yer - believe me, I know what it’s - ! I, er, True Celt Barmy
,
employ a few unCeltic hillegals meself in me arts-fundin’ activities,
and they’re a bunch of lazy, ungrateful, dole-bludging curry-munchin’
bums puttin’ us all out of work by Gor! T’ink of the Taxpayer! The
whole t’ing stinks, bach!”
There were deafeningly artful tax-dodging
cheers and a further rearing of perceptive rectal commentary. All was
duly relayed to the CM talk-back radio show Lingering Death to
Migrants! starring True Celt P.H.D.
Economic Nationalism! cried a few and Daddy
thought of his massive investments in the Moribundus Republik
Deutschland and Macau.
“Yes, er - them indigent tribals shive in their
own lit. over there, syphoning our hard-earned wealth from the Flobal
Gynance Sector via the Internet! That’s what the international
Aboriginal Industry is all about, ain’t it, True Celt Irving? Tax ‘em
blind with a Ten, no a Ten Thousand Point Plan, I say!”
Nationalise ‘em without compensation! shrilled
certain of the voices again. Daddy played to this alienated section of
the audience, wondering why they’d bothered to turn up at a CM rally.
Oh, of course, he’d paid them to.
“Yer right! We gotta go back ter rigid autarky
and keep these artistic, ho-mo-sexual, cross-dressin’ pedophile
Protestant Japs from shoiling our sores with their bonsais and sushis
and ikebanas! Australia needs Free White Trash, er, Trade ter generate
wealth through - for our kiddies!” He slavered at that word and hoped
no one noticed. “No goin’ back to the Protection and Autarky and Mass
Homosexual Suicide by Fire on the Steps of Parliament House of the
malignant Buddhist 1960s! We’re not dyin’ out!”
They did interesting if libellous things with
the word ‘poofter’. Daddy wiped his grimy brow in relief.
“Make dese hinfantile poofters do some wookin’
ferk instead of hangin’ about moppin’ shawls and engagin’ in
discursive subcourse on the walls! Move ‘em on! Dey’ve got to realise
times is Tough and knuckle under!”
Someone chundered and chutney and little red
amoeba crept slowly across the pavement.
Daddy turned greener than usual. “Eeer -
without massive government hintervention on behalf of the true
hinternational Wealth Generators dese crossbred self-hindulgent
hunemployable pansies’ll never do the crappy suicidal jobs we’re not
offerin’ dem!”
He paused briefly to check that his pacemaker
and cerebrum were still working, surrounded for a moment by celebrated
heart surgeons who’d recently patched up Boris Yeltsin. At that point,
Leonie stomped off and watched the rest of it from her car, smoking
furiously with the windows closed and downing a bottle of Jameson.
After a few drams of Bushmills, Daddy

(sponsored by various cigarette manufacturers) resumed.
“Dat, er, means goin’ hoffshore like the ABC -
er - and freezin’ out the moolah of the Singapore Stock Exchange like
salt from the Dead Sea. And de, er, the national socialistic Swiss
Banks!” (His own account, opened by his indulgent Aunt Sioned when he
was five, was doing very nicely.) “Me own darlin’ demented daughter
keeps her funds under a Swiss mattress, heh heh.” The joke bombing, he
looked round, failed to see her, and faltered. “Er, nothin’, True
Celts Garland and Powell, must put any pressure upon the haverage
taxpayin’ and Wealth-Generatin’ bauxite magnate-in-the-street! We
gotta put a right-wing John Howard in Parliament and sink the ABC!”
The noisy crowd swinishly repeated his pearls
of wisdom, agreeing sententiously with each other in a way that made
potential dissenters quail.
… ho-mo-sexual Aborigines!
… Flobal Gynandrous autarky!
… right-wing tribal trash!
… pedophile Protestant Internet!
… free white trade!
“Crush them greedy bureaucratic foreign-owned

socialist feminist separatist left-liberal white-slavin’ leonine
Unions! Slash and burn the greenie irreligious gyppos, True Celt
Haider! User Pays! Jobs for all! Cut the dole! Up the pole! Never
forget the Ukrainian Potato Famine!”
He received manic artistic applause and a
further belching and multiple breaking of wind, the well-disciplined
posteriophonica having turned into something more resembling a basso
profundo gamelan orchestra.
… pedophile feminists!
berrp
… feminist pedophiles!
borff
… burn Bob Dole!
frerbb
… jobs for Poles!
jleerbb
… greedy socialist separatist pederasts!
splerrf
… greenie pedophile bureaucrats!
forrp
… what the fuck have potatoes … aargh!
speeefffff
He plainly had goodies to offer almost

everyone, including a thin, cheap Chinese gruel for the cut-off
streetkids (the greatest carver being absent), tanks of nourishing
Cloaca Cola and free crack. Further spewing inevitably occurred. He
gurked and farted back in solidarity.
Australia being officially still a ‘democracy’,
there were a few hecklers (some even Celtic), most of whom were
destined to spend very long periods of intensive torture in CM-owned
hospitals. But the bulk of the crowd was of one very small mind. They
lifted up their besotted voices and the CM song rolled raucously over
the massed banners and Celtic Crosses and out into the terrified
suburbs:
We don’t do things by half-ia

In our Celtic Mafia
Soon no one will laugh-ia
No Welsh thief ere was Tafia.
True Celt Daddy had composed it - having had

some trouble with the last line - and they sang it to the tune of
‘There’s a Hole in the Bucket’, which took some doing.
Indeed, they soon gave up and instead chanted
with much self-flagellation and monstering of unusually-dressed
passers-by (including the author), True Celts! True Celts!
“Yes, er,” Daddy shrieked over them, his
antique voice growing more hard-edged and truculent, “keep the
scoreign fum out, with their dulticultural mivisiveness, their endless
stickening stench of wee seed - seaweed and mussolini and roast beef
and moussaka and prawn dumplings!”
True Celts! True Celts! True Celts!

… Haggis!
… Irish Stew!
… Carrageen!
… Laverbread!
… Welsh onions!
… Leeks!
… Scotch Finger Biscuits!
… Cockamaimy Soup!
… Leeks!
… Scotch Baps!
… Dundee cake!
… shinkin!
… welshcakes!
… stewed corgi!
… Sturt’s desert pee!
… Scotch broth!
… Scotch pancakes!
… Scotch terriers!
… Leeks!

… Highland Queen whisky!
… Welsh whisky!
… Cornish whisky!
… Islamic whisky!
… Have a Bells!
… Scotch eggs!
… drisheen!
… selsig!
… Dunlop cheese!
… Glamorgan sausages!
… Monarch of the Glen!
… neep ‘n’ tattie!
… praties!
… rowan jelly!
… kouign-aman!
… Breton pound cake!
… smoked finnan!
… cream crowdie!
… Manx kippers!
… bashed neeps!
… re-fried sporran!

… Caerphilly cheese!
… Welsh lamb!
… Scotch cattle!
… Silurian pony!
… black bun!
… soda bread!
… Dublin Bay prawns!
… bannocks!
… bollocks!
… ye banks and braes!
… marinated hoots!
… well-salted porridge!
… pâté de merles!
… Napoleon brandy!
Eh?
… poteen!
… farm-fresh brogue!
… grilled Gorbals!
… tiddy oggies, m’dear!
… Scotch mist, laddie!
… Leeks!
… cockles and mussels alive alive-O!
… LEEKS! LEEKS! LEEKS!
”Leeks!” echoed Daddy at this frenetic and

predominantly Celtic Cookbook of chants. Ignoring the porraceous and
blackfaced Aberfanian ex-coalminer at the front, he campaigned for the
Caledonian vote: “… if there’s one thing in bonny Scotland, that I
find rather foreign, it’s a man who wears the kilt, and doesnae wear a
sporran …”
… I’m the Highland Queen of Aberdeen! screamed
a very gilded youth to the rhythm of a Jimmy Shand CD and the others
wolf-whistled lewdly. Sweatingly aghast at the notion of catching AIDS
by inhalation or off a toilet seat, Daddy vowed privately and
enterprisingly to lynch the queer later and ranted on, a suppurating
figure, getting the most out of his imported Laotian PA system.
“Donald, where’s your trousers?” he quipped,
then told the following gag bought for a few hundred from a Taiwanese
joke agency:
Saxon: I say, you there, Scotch chappie, come here!

Scot: Aye, what is it, Sassenach?
Saxon: You see that monster over there in the lotch?
Scot: Aye, the beastie in the loch. I can see her reet fine. What
aboot her?
Saxon: Tell me, fellow, why do you call her Nessie?
Scot: Why do I call her Nessie?
Saxon: Yes, why do you call her Nessie?
Scot: (looking him up and down in contempt) ‘Cos that’s her
bloody name.
The laughs were minimal. Philistines.

“Er, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, look at
California! And dear old South Africa! It’s as if Christ had been
crucified for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried, and
on the t’ird day he arose from the dead, walked out of the tomb and
tripped over the bloody stone and killed himself. Scandalous!” He held
up a placard bearing the withering visage of Eugene Terre’Blanche,
taken as he fell off his horse. There were cheers and the odd snigger.
“Yes, the tolerant True Celts oppressed everywhere! All masterminded

by the cosmopolitan You-Know-Who.”
… True Celts rule! Mes enfants la Patrie …
“Aye! Yer right there, True Celts Le Pen and
Bardot! I seen Torch Song Trilogy on vidier yer know! Disgustin’ sick
stuff. We can expect a decree from President Fierstein any day now … ”
The crowd, apart from the aforementioned Plaid
Cymru representative, went bananas.
True Celts! T r u e
True
Celts!
Celts!True
Celts!
True
Celts!
True
Celts!
True
Celts!
TRUE
CELTS!
TRUE
CELTS!
TRUE
CELTS!
TRUE
CELTS! the twelve of them roared through bullhorns
(their CM music grants were generous) and dispersed - with the
exception of the Taff, who had passed out from too much Cenhinen Malt
- into the surrounding privately-maintained and shabby streets,
hunting out victims.
“TAKE BELFAST! I DON’T

WANT IT! LOOK AT THE SHAMBLES AT
PRESSED PANTIES! THE BATTLE OF THE
GROYNE! THE LEEK SHALL INHERIT THE
EARTH (PUH-SALM 37, VERSE 11)! WE WERE
THE FIRST MASTERS OF EUROPE AND WE WILL
BE THE LAST! ER -”
The crowd had gone. The remaining conscious
member of his audience, a homeless but feisty Scotch terrier wearing a
ragged Tam’o’shanter and bearing a broken football rattle and a half-
empty / half-full bottle of Glenpiddle Whisky, looked up at him
curiously with one eyebrow raised, then turned her back and Celtically
crapped on the road.
And - where was his dear, deluded, gold-digging

daughter? He dug a gnarled hand into his trousers for his gun, but
when he looked up again the un-Pavlovian dog had trotted off too.
Typical fookin’ Prod.
Now safe at home with Gerald, Leonie touched

the torc again, then ripped it free and flung it across the room.
Chapter Three: Then I was Killed
Having ducked and kept his head, her partner

had gone back to his book. She put her own down, wondering why the
Celts in it kept referring to camels and deserts and stuff. Maybe
Ireland had been like that in those days. He said it had been
‘rewritten by the CM’ but apart from that had long given up trying to
explain anything, the sadist. His ideas of truth and justice (and she
supposed, the American Way) meant little to her anyhow.
Lighting a Winfield, Leonie arranged her dress

carefully on her Keltefrei thighs. The bastard wasn’t even watching.
In fact, he was laughing at something.
He wiped his poorly made-up eyes.8 “Such
refreshing honesty.” he chittered snobbishly. She felt shut out,
having little facility with ABC-speak. She cocked a snook at him. He
didn’t notice. She snooked a cock9 instead, with about the same
reaction.
So crass. Best not to expound further.
‘Really’, indeed. He was not up to ontology. (She’d got up to ‘oodles’
and had reviewed her tattered dictionary for AWBR. It had not got off
lightly.)
Censorship, he’d call her tactic - basking in
his sepia memories of Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix’s free speech marches
on Selma - with his deforested doodle tucked between his legs (as far
as she was concerned they hadn’t gone nearly far enough). To his
boring ‘60s imagination, keeping people in the dark was the
‘bureaucratic substitute for intelligence’ - but then he was a
bureaucrat, and according to his own argument, stupid. That meant his
argument was pretty stupid too.
She’d always been good at reflexive logic.
“This one even has a b a b y . ” he cooed
maternally, his knees glued together. Being mother, he poured her
another cup of tea.
She emptied it into the saucer and began
blowing on it, showering him again. He searched about ineffectually
for his umbrella.
Appalled, she grit her impressive and hardly
mesodontic teeth. All the better to eat you with, she apostrophised
silently, snapping at imaginary enemies of the United Ancient Order of
Druids - a bit different from the Order of Lenin which was steak
tartare with mashed beetroot and anchovies - whose ‘groves’ or lodges
she sometimes patronised. His overbearing Welshness made her cringe.
Heaps she’d written for Psychology Today bach about his sexist vagina
dentata phobia which was written like an eisteddfod poster all over
his face.
8
Originally the author had ‘He wiped his eyes and his bottom’ which shows how important re-drafting is.
And his eyes were not poorly made-up by the author.
9
Readers are put on notice that this phrase appears in Spike Milligan’s 1992 novel McGonical., in relation
to a Scotsman. Auntie Rh’s not getting away with this!
Chapter Three - Then I was Killed 25
Tusq-o-kleen*
FOR
BEAUTIFUL
IVORIES
Novels! Anything could happen in one - really!

- though little did in hers so far. Instead the aggrieved heroine
mooched about feeling sorry for herself and ripping her liberty
bodice10 and the wings off butterflies. This put a break on the other
characters, who hadn’t been coming round to her birthday parties much
recently … Leonie had been coming round, mostly on the floor.
But this was as negative as him. As he sat
there so prissily scanning the pages of his stupid book, she dwelled
instead on her favourite Celtic fantasy: the strong-thighed blond
amazon, Tala, tall and dynamic on a field of exquisite gore, pummeling
the heads of her foes with a gold shillelagh and morning star -
Mercury or Venus or Bert Newton she wasn’t sure, being astronomically-
challenged - amid a thousand Celtic Mafia salutes.11
He just went on chuckling nauseously to
himself.
Recently, she’d re-read backwards the book of
her youth, Norma Spinrad’s political classic The Iron Dream (1972).
Its stirring passages had filled her with afflatus for years. Sadly
the author was no Celt, indeed she suspected some sort of squalid
Saxon background. She’d tried to get in touch with her of late, now
being a famous (non pro bono) writer herself, but the silly bitch
hadn’t bothered to reply.
“I’d love to have a baby.” he gushed into her
reverie. Him and his moronic mishegaas, his dreary dreams of ironing
and scrubbing the floor. She made a long nose at him and tried to peer
at it but went cross-eyed in the process.
A hard rainbow appeared over the Flood and Noah
McTavish stopped being sick over the side (think of the stench aboard)
and looked up dewily at it with a skirl of his pipes and a swish of
his tartan.12 This thought and the mystery of what he did with the Ark
afterwards (she could remember only that he got pissed and swore off
ham) engaged in a life-or-death struggle with her existing train but
was soon cowcatchered off the track.
Then, the victory speech … this was the
important bit, winning the coveted literary prize … What would a
10
Calcified fans of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932) will quickly tumble to the fact that the bra-
collecting author is a blatant plagiarist after reading this line.
11
The reader may be wondering what a ‘Celtic Mafia’ salute is like. The matter is controversial, but it is
said to consist of the snappy jabbing at the air of the right arm, palm extended and facing downwards,
while the fingers make the signof the horns (see Dante’s squalid effusion and the references to Cernunnos
below), ie with the ring and pinky extended and the middle fingers clasped by the thumb. A more
controversial claim still is that is possible to tell who is gay or transgendered by the way in which they
perform the salute (not that most would).
The salute was invented at the Battle of the Boyne and originally used by Cromwellites, and later used to
jab people’s eyes out in Bosnia.
12
Thanks to Christopher Bantick, ‘Scots writing gathers force’, Canberra Times, September 22 1996, p24, for
inspiring this immortal line. Auntie Rhoberta deplores plagiarism. Also, keep reading for more exciting
references to Bonny Scotland and the revolution on the fibro frontier.
humourless transvestite, wraith of the night and fog of Darlinghurst,

darling, know about that?
“A baby.” He rocked Gemma’s book in his arms.
His pet cat Flower leapt into his lap at that point and he started
making coochee-coo noises.
“Honey bunny boo”, he went, “what a clever
little sweetie-girl she is … yes, she said … ”
If he did a CM salute it’d be with a limp wrist
for sure.
Leonie, who abhorred chooking, felt like
spitting in his face. Get a job, she thought, opening up the throttle.
She was acutely jealous of even a fictive person receiving acclaim.
And children, she’d heard, were a pain. No longer some male father’s
deferential secretary, she filed her nails so that a spray of the
calcium he probably needed at his age flew into his breakfast. He
grimaced weakly.
Really. She hated his weakness, the way he’d
vacuum the house dressed as a soubrette in 10” heels and a horse
collar. He wouldn’t know genuine work if he fell over it.
He went to switch on Radio Geraldine, which
would be broadcasting ‘Life Matters’ queasily from way past Pitcairn
Island (though never her current favourite group, Der Fuffelsingers).
Before he could get to it she slipped off one of her Nike running
heels and, in a motion concealed by the tabletop, yanked the plug out
with her ill-painted toes. Not being up to postmodernity or toe-
painting he sat there twiddling with a look of perplexity on his
kittenish dial. He hadn’t a clue that now the evil Welfare State had
been vanquished and the CM were all but in power, things had no choice
but to get better in the long run.
She fell back into fantasy.
Tala towered, all eyes upon her, in a circle of
light and a black leather miniskirt. The audience, sardined into the
tiny square before Canberra’s new Art Drecko Cultural Centre - the
latter built and patronised by the CM - roared its approval in its
characteristic way. It didn’t matter what she said upon the
bulletproof balcony, they were at her feet and looking up her skirt,
they would be hers to mould into any shape she liked. Once Daddy died
…
“If only you were interested in babies.” said
her partner, breastfeeding the cat.
Picking13v her nose with etiquette and rolling
the resulting boogie into an award-winning shape, she felt like
rewriting the first page of Genesis. Its author clearly had no sense
of grandeur (quite apart from the fact that He’d put two14 Arks in the
book, highly confusing to the lay reader). Leonie would make Eve a
True Celtic amazon, dashing naked and blue into battle, catapaulting
missiles upward into that astonished bearded face like a slop bucket,
that disgusting demented Daddy.
A crow flew by outside. Ark, ark, it went,
then, critically, oooaaarrrw. Her hermeneutics had been vindicated.
Leonie brushed away tears of joy, sending her
glasses flying. She was in Eden (Sínola, in the mesolithic Celtic).
She’d swing on the gates, her knee-length white hair - copied
ostensibly from a literary hoax a few years back - warping on the
wind. Then she’d sweep out in her scythe-wheeled chariot (a bit
historically inaccurate but that’s history) to ravage the Land of
Noddy and of Big Ears.
13
She’d been born with it of course.
14
Actually three (take Moses’ ark of bulrushes), but maybe Daddy was right about her exegetical powers.
Cf Joshua 6:4.
And then one morning poor Dicky Duck had a

dreadful accident, she warned him, quoting proudly from Enid Blyton
using both French and Indian time-names.
“Er … Um, I’m sure if you had one it’d take
after you, with your, er, lovely hair.” he said, unhooking the
earpiece of the specs from his sacred bleeding heart liberal teeth.
Ha! On bad hair days it was so impressively
stiff from dipping it in Berger Breeze that it stuck out like the tail
of a comet. He was just jealous that his own wouldn’t grow past his
round shoulders.
“Darling - ?” he bleated.
Leonie refused to reply, singing Ta tiffy ta
tiffy ta ta ta and dwelling still in Eden. Where exactly was that, she
pondered, searching for a compass and knocking over her wine. She’d
looked up the place - and ‘Orient Are’ - in her old School Atlas (then
reviewed that for Overland) but diddley-squat was discernable beneath
the pornographic scrawls in blue biro that she’d accumulated since
she’d flunked kindergarten under pressure from Daddy.
“Dar-ling?” he trilled, fussing about
repulsively with a dishcloth.
Why had she married such a wimp, about as
attractive as a home invasion? That drunken game of spin-the-bottle
(well, it was preferable to Postman’s Knock as we’ll see below) had a
lot to answer for. But it was mainly so she’d have someone other than
Daddy to back her up during those creative periods of Unemployment or
anghyflogaeth which might otherwise waken her to the new Australian
Dream, homelessness. Before the rather pointless shotgun marriage he’d
been witty and full of one-liners but she’d knocked all that out of
him. (He revved up the kettle again and flyted ‘I’m boiling some
water, would anyone care to have a baby? Wet the kid’s head? Tar and
feather him already?’, but she made pop-eyes at him for assuming it
was a boy and being new-agey and psychic and he shrank into himself
like a cheap sweater.) She was a woman who believed in herself and no
one else.
Leonie über alles was her motto. She read over
a fan letter in which one of her rural admirers said ‘your writing is
so brilliant I use it to find the dunny at night’. But she recalled
that at her birthday party (berfdee partee) by the Molonglo, pulling leaves
off a shamrock (she loves me, she loves me not), no one had turned up
at all, and she had felt very small and silly and sad.
Yet Daddy said that if God sucked off the world
her name would be all through it like a stick of Blackpool rock.
He was chuckling academically again. She was
smart too, all her imaginary friends said so and each one had more
degrees than a Mason. She’d become an autodidact with the aid of a
thirty year old edition of Odhams Children’s Encyclopedia and was
adept at answering quiz questions about The Beatles and Coronation
Street. (Brought up a strict Jesuit with the occasional Hansonite
influences from the local free vegie markets, her memory15 was already
well-honed. She knew her cataclysm backwards, which is useful in the
southern hemisphere.)
Despite this self-tutelage and her constant
reviewing for the Catholic Weekly of that winsome collection of
Druidic jokes the ‘New Testament’16 - jokes which the fundamentalist
Christians hadn’t yet got after 2000 years - she was surprised to find
it almost the same each time, but her reviews got worse and worse.
He broke in annoyingly again. “Perhaps children
would give you a new perspective on life. Er, I like young people.
Some of the students (and staff) believe we’re on the cusp, that the
15
Her memory had been brought up a strict Catholic? Come on, Auntie Rh+.
16
Eg, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who the hell are you already?’ ’(Acts, 19:15).
tide is turning against the ‘dry’ notions of the eighties and their
apotheosis in the nineties, that the pendulum is swinging back to the
left and I, er, agree with their aims if not their methods … ”
“George Harrison.” she responded with a
disdainful, upward flick of her hand. “Lead guitarist and Hindu saint.
Ee bai goom. Curry powder.”
That shut him up. In reality, whatever that
might be, she had no religio-philosophical perspective beyond anarcho-
solipsism. She had done her PhD on the subject and enthusiastically
posted off her thesis but the University of the ACT (the cretins) had
refused to recognise her ‘chaotic’ contribution so the degree was
never conferred. Clearly they were Philistines or Phoenicians or
Masons who didn’t like dissertations coming ‘over the transom’.
This - like the ads for vestments in T h e
Anglican featuring various coyly-posing vicars that he doted on though
not C of E - quite riled her and she’d posted that tenured slug the
Vice-Chancellor a chocolate-box of seasoned reindeer excrement.
Universities were vacuous places anyway with
everyone stuffing themselves into phone boxes and pinching each
other’s ideas and bottoms. She’d actually attended one once, in anti-
Celtic Rome, and could barely kick her way across the campus for the
goosing antics of the student body, rah rah zis boom bah. That hour
with its lightning visits to the Spanish Steps and the Trevy Fountain
had been horrid but it made her realise that deep inside she was a
genius, never mind what he or Daddy or Auntie Rhoberta said.
As for the thesis (called ‘LayoanEe and Mummee inn
thee Woodds’), although it had been written in her own blood it had never
helped her get a job anywhere, not even as an experienced sandwich
hand. So after sending off a few more dissertations she’d given up on
academia and income, and decided to become a writer.
Her actual work experience she preferred to
forget; it included being a bar useful and shifting nightsoil. On
holiday in California last year she’d got a casual job for three weeks
as State Executioner. But what the hell did that set you up for?17
I’d rather starve than do shit-work, she’d
think while chewing her pork. “‘Why should I let that toad work /
Squat on my life?’ You’re so ahistorical and idealistic.” For a couple
of years she’d lived with or rather off him, submitting her
interpolative and digressive concoctions and doing lots of fruitful
networking. This included three hour international phone calls and
lots of time on IRC Chat.
(It was disconcerting as this digression that
so many on the Net styled themselves ‘transgendered’. She shunned
political correctness and called them queers, though oddly that seemed
politically correct in some quarters, including in the women-only
journals she wrote fascist garbage for. It gave her the irrits the way
they stuffed up the English language, never mind Yiddish.
Once, while fervently raging in that ancient
Celtic tongue, the oldest and finest in Europe as Daddy assured her,
she’d come across her partner’s newsgroup posts, all under his ‘femme’
name. He flattered himself - ‘overbearingly Welsh librarian, Amanda,
30, curvaceous, takes size 38 bra’.
He was 40 if he was a day. And about as
curvaceous as a balloon. Still, a bra would be useful, considering his
embonpoint. She tittered spitefully.
17
To be a model Californian citizen?
And we royally assure the timid reader that she never got to hang anyone in that time due to downsizing -
ropes as a consequence of this grew thin as skeins of wool while the condemned were compelled to diet
furiously to compensate - the whole scheme was shelved in the end as a Stalinistic waste of public money.
So much for government intervention.
Of course, this was early in their marriage

before he ‘came out’ publicly as a screaming queen - a revelation
about as exciting as successfully detecting a cat-fart.)
“Gemma’s had kids, hasn’t she?”
She felt pressured to respond. “Will you stop
bothering me while I’m having a bit of a think?”
“Sorry.” He went back to his book, shaking his
coiffured head. (How Revolutionary Lesbian News had managed to stomach
her last effort he couldn’t imagine.)
Networking was more important than mere
breeding, though Daddy said breeding was everything and that was why
she was never allowed to sully herself by reading books or going to
school or having friends who were beneath her. But networking and her
self-referential repartee at the right venues had at last drawn the
attention of the right people, and the media.
Yet her own colourless green ideas sometimes
threatened to send her right off the rails. Fame steamed down the
lifeline on the palm of her large hand. All metaphors (even mine) now
served her fierce will.
But there was always that one thing …
Her growing profile she was sure she owed to
that morning in the oak woods when she wished with Mummy on the star
racing across the clear sky (the star, that is) in the constellation
of Leo. At that moment she thought the millennial struggle of humanity
against all tyranny - picture if you can a winkle - that Mummy
believed in, so passionately, had at last won out. It was like the
rainbow in the Celtic Bible, a promise from God that would be kept.
When she was five, licking malt extract from
the back of a spoon, swallowing Haliborange tablets in the hazy
fifties …
A rush of tears for her strange childhood
stilled her charging and shaggy-dog brain. They’d been collecting
gumleaves.
I was really happy.
When they got back, Daddy loomed like a spectre
in the doorway, puffing on his pipe, reeling a bit, a look of hideous
self-satisfaction on his wizened face.
Mummy had held her away from him. He’d just
laughed and passed wind.
Then I was killed. Phaloon Devi, famed Bandit
Queen, another Boudica whom Leonie admired no matter what Daddy said,
suddenly enlivened her consciousness. Rage cauterised her from head to
toe.
“ … the most telling test of any system of
justice, in fact, is how it treats the children … ” her partner was
blathering on, chewing on a disgusting sun-dried tomato. Leonie stared
at the edge of the golden pool of sunlight creeping towards her on the
table. She’d never been happy since. Mummy had told her all about the
fate of Antigone.
Not surprisingly, she’d concluded that justice
was liberal crap. Fame was not so much about immortality, it was about
getting your own back.
And she had begun to do so. That chain letter
she’d made 17 000 copies of had brought her luck and prosperity, but
meeting Nigel, first on the Net and then at a party for highly-paid
Stagployment manufacturers, had been the clincher. She still owed lots
of money and sexual favours to those who’d swung her the invitation,
but it had been worth it. Daddy, concerned about his political image
amongst the Lurking Class, left her alone.
Nigel, as PM, recommended her for all sorts of
spots on radio and tv and talking drum over genii who’d been
struggling for 20 years to get their non-CM trash published in C M
Meanjin. He’d developed a fetish for her hair, and all sorts of doors
began to open for her then close in other writers’ ugly faces. She
wasn’t sure which she enjoyed more, climbing the ladder or stepping on
groping hands.
She bent double. Another wine killed the pain.
Pity that with all this nose-paint she wasn’t sure which day it was.
(Neither is the author, who comes to resemble her protagonist more
closely every day.)
See your doctor if pain persists, she snapped
at her invisible detractors. She was now Australia’s most yapped-about
writer (and the only one with a rare gumleaf collection). The Canberra
Tiresome had put her in its hallowed literary and social pages for Six
Days running, complete with frank photo supplied by Daddy.
She opened the paper and draped it over her
partner’s book. He looked slightly surprised, but smiled nervously.
“You’re, er, very photogenic, dear.” he eeked,
gingerly pushing it aside as though it were live. The Courier-Mole,
Herod-Sun, Queanbeyan Age Before Beauty and Illawarra Mercury through
a Duck adorned each chair he’d sat in for the past week. (She also had
the Irish State Papers of 24 January 1656 in which she’d found the
expression ‘Tories and other lawless persons’ to use against Daddy.)
Her photo smouldered everywhere, reflected in the myriad mirrors
cracked from side to side that she collected these days.
She smirked and ate a shalott. Her lust for
fame was essentially an exhibitionist trait. Or so her shrink - an ex-
wharf labourer who claimed to have transcended the proletariat and
founded New Labour through his signing of an individual contract with
Satan and his full immersion in the ‘French’ theory of the Cootamundra
Neo-Baptist Revivalist Movement - had claimed.
“Your trouble is you’ve always had this
irrational notion you’re deluding yourself.” this bearded zealot
verbalised fluently as she lay on his couch, though a muscular
Christian and part-time Rugby League commentator. He scratched his
tonsured head, counted his cash and while puffing on a huge cigar
quoted from his mentor Schadenfreud: “You gotta get out there, baby,
and be lean and mean and hygienic. No pain, no gain. Don’t worry, be
happy.”
Leonie couldn’t understand any of that, as she
did ‘it’ all the time. For years she’d assumed that sex was a rough
and tumble activity akin to sniffing Sarin gas or blowing up railway
stations. But as with Daddy’s ravings she tried to take it as a
compliment, never mind that his horny hand was up her dress at the
time.
He assured her that women were like that,
always given to self-display due to their unconscious yearning to
please their daddies. She protested vigorously at this confusing froth
but he silenced her with the non sequiteur that she was atypical of
women in that she had an Electric complex.
Perhaps it had been a mistake to go to the
Health Centre (rather than Canberra Electricity and Water Ltd) for
free psychiatric counsel, considering the parlous and male state of
public provision these days. Of course she was Electric and Gas too -
again she stretched sensually, broke wind then looked at her husband
and felt sick.
(The wind also moaned outside in a pale
imitation of chapter three of Wuthering Heights, but no one took any
notice of it.
Bastards! They joost think of me as movingg er, joost part of

the fookin’ envahronment, or soom manifestation of the pathetic fallacy. Bastards!
Australians! I’m sick of their artistic jealousies and their antedeluvian system of literary
grants that I never fookin’ get! I can write aeolian poetry an’ all! It’s not fer, especially
considering I suffer from stomach trouble. I don’t lahk fookin’ Australia! I’m not much
good at fookin’ owt nor’ even a drugged Kiwi sheep. Why do I get the only part in dialect?
Racist bastards!)
She ignored this cameo appearance by Alexei

Sayle. Self-display she’d cultivated in some of her horsey girlfriends
and immediately despised in womanoids like him. He seemed to enjoy the
derision she heaped upon him, and she often had to slink back to the
shrink for advice. He drooled “perhaps he needs love, baby” and asked
for his phone number.
Her distaste for psychiatrists quickly became
well known to her parliamentary colleagues.
Recently, she’d won a seat in the House of
Representatives (where she feared being overrun by people from South
East Asia - almost every day in the street she’d come across groups of
dinkum if not fair Aussies with features like her own and, tapping the
side of her nose or tugging the Australian funnelweb spider flag tight
around her, would whisper conspiratorially, “We’re being swamped by
Asians, I’ve never met one but I hear they’re everywhere”).
Fair dinkum. She gave thanks to Nigel and the
Karmic Wheel for the People’s massive rejection of the quaintly-named
Labor Party. Now, after voting for the Abolish Psychobabble bill, to
retire and write full-time, supported by her Parliamentary Pension.
(Better by far than the dole.)
“Leonie, I’m concerned about you.” her partner
blurted out in what he thought was a feminine manner, fighting to fold
up the latest paper. Both actions made her feel sick and fart again,
but fame has its price. She hadn’t bothered to inform him that she was
a (small ‘l’) Lesbian who adored Camille Paglia and Offa’s Dyke18 - but
then he was quite accepting of unconventionality. Pervert!
“Do you think I should dye me hair blonder like
the ancient Celts did?” she parried, tossing the lime-rich body of it
back and leafing through Genesis and the bit about Ada and Eve and
Pinch-Me who had nothing on due to the lack of nightclubs in those
days.
Again, he looked perplexed and dazzled. It
glowed in the dark already. “But it was so nice before …”
She tried to comb it but the comb jammed
halfway down. In embarrassment, she simpered and covered up with a
joke.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
He seemed puzzled. His job at the University of
the ACT’s Evatt Library had not done much for his sense of humour.
“To get - ” she began. Why bother. To get
euthenased by one of those meat vans with a smiling chicken on the
back, obviously, considering its state of abyssal depression after the
years it had wasted as a battery hen. Better than ending up in a
packet of Rice-a-Riso.
He was so obtuse it was scandalous. Rare was
the newspaper editor who hadn’t been bombarded with her articles on
the subject. He had the uptake and personality of an ear trumpet.19
And he actually enjoyed that academic
alternative to prison, the university library. Libraries and their
intimidating loans desks were staffed by humourless females who
couldn’t hack the real world unlike check-out chicks who, outside of
the old USSR, had to stand up all the time sciatica notwithstanding -
essentially, they were sheltered workshops for the incompetent and
feeble-minded.
18
An Offa she could hardly refuse, in fact. (Gags about the old dykes of Amsterdam are of course beneath
this author. )
19
The waxy bit at the end, she insists with compromising photographs that I ‘d add in this footnote if it
weren’t for our horrendous defamation laws.
“I can’t hack these feminists, Daryl.” she’d

complained about the antedeluvian Reader’s Adviser on her last visit.
That woman, and her obvious girlfriend the woggy Deputy Librarian, an
odious moustachio’d hag called Effie Ribena or something with horribly
thick glasses and a hairbun, had taken exception to a talk she’d given
about how minority groups were ruining this great country of ours by
getting to be the majority of the population.
In return she’d searched out the library’s most
expensive incanubulic atlas and smeared her ear-wax and snot all over
the centre pages, fingerpainting an obscene message and signing it
with his name. The incident had been on all the commercial news
broadcasts and since been made into a soapie.
“They’re nice people.” he said spongily as she
raised the matter again.
Nice. Really. She narrowed her bloodshot eyes,
and saw with hope the familiar rainbow.
She suddenly hoped she didn’t look Chinese. She
realised she’d forgotten to insert her contact lenses. They and her
glasses put up a struggle but in no time her black eyes (she regularly
punched herself when Daddy wasn’t doing it for her) glowed icy blue.
She looked up and he blenched.
It was odd that the namby-pamby microbe knew
more about feminism (and everything else) than she did, always with
his vast nose in a book, but then her novelising left her little time
to read and he was a meshuggene woman-hating pig. Even when she wasn’t
bashing away at her grubby computer she had no time to study - people
were always pestering her to do things for them.
“And, yes, if you want …” he rambled above the
range of human hearing, plainly batty.
What was he drivelling about now? Oh, the hair.
She’d totally forgotten about it. Perhaps she didn’t really need to
dye it blonde.
“Darren, you’re a temerarious, unsophisticated
marsupial.” she countered revolutionarily.
Like the insignificant speck of dirt he was he
bristled at this. He put on his worm-turningly ‘public’ one, with a
trace of Swansea accent.
“My nairm is Gerald Dafydd ap Gwilym ap Geraint
ap Idriss ap Jones ap Gwynfor ap Tydfil ap Rhoberts ap Iceberg.” he
prompted testily, using his very full name. (How many of him were
there, anyway? Time he lost weight, the goopy Welsh slob. Most of him
was below the surface, she realised.) He even showed her his driving
licence and birth certificate and the all-important Certificate of
Celticness that everyone had to carry these days, acushla. She gave
them back after checking them with the secret police on her (earthly)
mobile.
“Um - sorry, it’s me time of the month.” she
flounced. It wasn’t, in fact she never had periods, save those of
madness, but she wouldn’t tell him anymore than she’d tell Daddy.
(Daddy would only send her off to confession with a warning not to
talk.)
“Oh. Well, dear, I’d better get changed.” he
yawned limply, giving up the children routine. He held out the tent
and twirled, and she knew that he both regretted having to leave it
behind and cursed himself for not having the spine to wear it outside.
J. Edgar Hoover would have looked better in it, and he wasn’t even a
Woglander.
She instantly leapt up and swished out to the

beige Volvo convertible that he was planning to drive to work. (They
could afford only one car thanks to her voracious appetite for hair-
dye, if we discount their beige Goggomobile which is basically a Vespa
trapped in an Aston Martin’s body.) Ignoring his objections as he
cowered in the doorway and blaring ‘Ten, nine, eight …’ and so forth
she took off at a temerarious speed, toward the centre of Canberra.
Chapter Four: Driven Mad
Leonie loved driving as it gave her the thrill

of absolute power and the ability to undergo significant paradigm
shifts. Torc back in place, she hurtled round bends for the hell of
it, her self-confidence growing superheated on two wheels - not on the
sanme side of the car - and causing vortices of volcanic gas to spout
from weak points in her skull. Thar she blows!, she cried, recalling
Rhiannon and Jehu and indulgently granting land rights to Jonah and
the gay whale. She loved to talk to herself in the car, the trouble
was that she talked with her hands.
“Stop kvetching in the back.” she turned and
yelled at her Voices, who were jigging about with Moby Dick and
demonstrating the Doppler Effect.
Her hair trailed behind her, whipping about and
knocking magpies and ducks out of trees and the pursuing very butch
police officer off her motorbike and into the unsullied lake. (It was
an offence to go under the speed limit and you could be fined $1000
for doing 30 and hanged for 25, and if you didn’t drive a car at all
they threw the book at you.) The old blind woman waiting to cross at
the lights was lucky she had a guide dog (until it ate her due to the
rising price of dog food) - as it was, the crook of her white cane
caught on Leonie’s radio aerial and Leonie snarled and ground her big
teeth in an effort to dislodge it.
Due to the force of her personality it
sheepishly flew off and caused a seven-car pile-up behind. (In the
next paragraph I shall demonstrate an even more cunning use of the
Saxon adverb.)
Rakishly, she squealed in for aviation fuel
(the car was jet-powered at her insistence), flattening the proprietor
who had unwisely decided to go back to full driveway service. As he
limped away gasping she filled up the tank, lighting a smoke to pass
the time. Those around her got strangely agitated.
The Voices died down a bit too, clearly scared
speechless. She ashed her fag in the petrol tank. Fire, the little
person’s private army, she giggled bravely.
“She’s fucken mad!” yelled some triumphal male
voices, and one female - a revolutionary socialite, as she could tell
from the clenched fist and extended pinkie.
Hurling herself back into the car, she sped
off, deeply hurt by such rejection. Ow! The ash had now fallen into
her lap and she found herself hovering three centimetres above the
seat. After an unexpectedly safe landing she got down on her knees and
searched in panic for it. There it was, smouldering in the pile of
grimy free supermarket bags her wine casks came in. Up she clambered,
back to the wheel
Zip! She narrowly missed an overpass pillar and
heard the scythed wheels whine as they clawed abstractly at concrete.
She thought it better to keep her eyes on the road for a while.
“Pipe down, you little horrors! Mummy’s (hic)
trying to concentrate. Let me come up to speed!” She snorted some.
As the speedo came up to the two hundred mark,
toxic smog began to billow from her Volvo (the ‘Spirit of Baluchistan’
and autographed personally by Craig Breedlove). Other cars were
honking impertinently or swerving off the freeway, apart from those
meretricious hotheads with their red and blue flashing lights who
tried to get past her. After putting out the flames with a swift
parable on Gerald’s wetness and a glint of her torc she slowed to a
crawl and weaved from lane to lane, treating them all to a ring finger
and preventing any dangerous accident.
So, she’d forgotten to pay. “All you Saxon
Imperialist nudniks think about is money!” she blared.
Chapter Four: Driven Mad. 35
Having done her bit for the community she

accelerated again and left them for dead.
I don’t want your lonely mansion with a tear in
every room, all I want’s the love you promised beneath the haloed moon
… she sang, briefly happy and sad at the same time.
It was nice to have the road to herself. The
sun was shining, the breeze was buffeting the cape daisies on the
nature strip and God was in His Heaven (albeit as pissed as Boris
Yeltsin) and all was right wing with the world. But to her surprise
some maniac in a four-wheel drive had come out of nowhere and was
passing her on the left.
Sure, the freeway had six lanes and this one
(apart from the four-wheel drive) was quite empty. But such culpable
driving needled Leonie no end. She opened up the turbojet, switched on
the afterburners and yanked back the wheel. In a few hair-raising
moments she’d caught the bugger up. Her rage was uncontainable.
She played a trumpet voluntary on her horn and
brandished her tongue till the other vehicle’s windows shattered.
Barely missing a petrol tanker and a CM explosives truck that were
pulling out into the fast lane, she skidded all over the road in
annoyance, then drew alongside at 250 ks, slightly faster than the
other traffic (rain had begun to bucket down after all).
She shrieked with all the power her magnificent
if moth-eaten lungs could master, considering the g-forces,
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you
greasy little wog?”
The driver, predictably, was some kind of
foreigner, and about three months pregnant. She shouted back something
in what sounded to Leonie like Arabic and waved pleasantly, rather
like the Queen. Egged on by her invisible retinue, Leonie would have
blasted her into orbit in return - but something about that smile made
her Voices go away altogether. The woman, regardless of her golden
halo, little lamb, shepherd’s crook, tumbler of mint sauce and oddly
virginal appearance, was eerily familiar.
Mother most lovable
Mother most admirable
Mother of good counsel …
Astonished, she dropped back, much to the
disgust of the tanker pilot whose vehicle was by now on her tail.
Silver threads and golden needles pounded in
her head. Peter, Paul and Mary sang it in the CM Bible, in Hosea 8:4.
Thanks to her steaming self-esteem and a few

more wines, none of this religious cock really fazed her. She sat
strangling the wheel with her dress flapping angrily in the wind,
singing tunelessly to Nigel’s carefully middle-ground fascist Radio
Irrational at the top of her awful voice. (She’d once won a singing
competition for fax machines.) The talkback host (Nigel’s secret
boyfriend) was spouting something about halting Asian immigration
through the application of the one-child policy to the whole continent
- ie one for the whole continent - and also expelling Turkish Cypriots
and setting up surefire pyramid investment schemes in the spirit of
free market fanaticism. All that seemed a bit harsh, but she supposed
the CM knew best.
Her next song was one she’d learnt at Mummy’s
knee, before Mummy went away altogether:
Leonie
Quaint and bony
Never phony
I love you …
Unrequited was her whole life: she sympathised

with the chicken. She reluctantly slowed as she approached the next
set of lights, singing as lustily as she could manage, which raised a
few eyebrows and penises and other analogous organs and members of the
keyboard family and also the entire woodwind section of the Canberra
Symphony Orchestra can she take it any further, Auntie Rhoberta’s
cultish adherents wonder breathlessly. Probably not.
But this was nothing by comparison to the
reaction produced by her deciding to change into her usual garb of
sloppy joe, bovver boots and shapeless calico skirt.
Unrequited. That was a very sad word so she
intimidated the roof into folding itself about her like Mummy’s arms.
My precious perle wythouten spot, Mummy had once called her in her
learnéd way. Since she was busy Streisanding with her nose in the air
brushing the roof or knocking the space shuttle out of the
stratosphere (red lights winked on the end of it as a warning to
aircraft in case she looked up) she nearly bowled over a bevy of
pedestrians. She stuck her fulminous head out the window to scream
oaths at them, the heel of her hand hard on the horn. The lights
glared back, also red.
Thanks to the happy return to Family Values,
Mummy’s knee was now an approved educational institution. With luck,
she might be able to do her PhD there and get Austudy under twelve
different names (God, Jesus, Uncle Joe etc), even if the fees were
horrendous and moneybags Nigel was about to scrap such middle class
welfare and single out poor people with food stamps and yellow stars
in the interests of Efficiency. She plotted potently, creeping
forward, breaking wind and howling with song.
The lights turned green and she stopped
creeping until they turned red again, much to the infuriation of
motorists behind. Who cares about them, she thought. They don’t care
about me, not one has come over and asked for my autograph.
If only she knew where Mummy had gone. Weaselly
Daddy - she clutched her swollen tummy in absolute misery - always
fobbed her off on that point.
The place grew Miles Davish with car horns and
a section of Nigel’s praetorian guard bounced amongst them on steam-
driven pogo sticks, whoosh whoosh, but did nothing but smile and wave
at her. She keened,
Leonie
All aloney
Seed on stony
Ground that grew …
The lights turned green again (wouldn’t you?)

and she crushed the accelerator mercilessly into the road. She was
nearly in town now, this hokey clutch of shopping malls and planning
disasters the locals called ‘Civic’. Her Voices, like a Greek chorus,
were singing a different song that had nothing to do with Mikis
Theodorakis or his spanakopitic lyricist Yannis Ritsos:
A frog went a courtink and-a she did ride, a-hum, a-hum …

A frog went a courtink and-a she did ride, a-hum, a-hum …
A frog went a courtink and-a she did ride,
And jumped for joy ‘cos her Daddy died, a-hum, a-hum, a-hum
…
Best female vocal in the Eurovision Song

Contest was hers for the asking.
Her chest was a mess but she liked to live

intuitively20 and lit another smoke. Emitting more smoke signals and a
haiku in semaphore, she broke off singing (she remembered murdering
that air with Mummy in the woods) and in spite of her stature began to
feel low.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child …, she
wailed heart-rendingly at the third set of lights, startling
onlookers, in particular the pious members of a gospel choir from
Baton Rouge who were crossing at that point. She realised her head was
still out the window and pulled it in quickly.
That was something she’d get Gerald to do, pull
his bloody head in and stop coming the raw prawn St Jacques with her
since he was basically in his priscillic way a wigwam for a goose’s
bridle and banged about as effectively as a dunny door in a gale, the
drongo. Yairs, she was proud to be a mongrel Australian in these brave
days of Counter-Reform and immiseration, as the Clock shimmily turned
back to the 1920s, boop boop be doop. If a chap wants to be greedy,
why shouldn’t he be? It was enough to make you want to stand athwart
history and shout ‘Stop!’. She puffed smoke in the face of the world.
And as an Australian, that curious product of a
history which included genocide and dispossession, chaining people to
rocks for years in the middle of Sydney Harbour, and hiding
embarrassing things at the bottom of it, she always wrote with a
thumbnail dipped in tar and went a-drovin’ in the Outback with the
laconic Bush Tucker Man on the Land on a regular basis. The myth of
Mateship she lapped up through videos of Bazza Mackenzie and Forty
Thousand Horsemen and spurned Multiculturalism as a Christian Zionist
Tibetan Yuppie plot to force us all to wear black armbands. My
precious pearl, she said to herself,
G’day, bottler, ‘ow yer goin’ mite?, went some of her
Voices. Orright? Yer boomerang still comin’ back? Hung any of them whingeing socialist
ATSIC blackfellers yet? Old Chicka Marx? Vladimir Illych Yunupingu? Never forget the
Australian Dirty War, True Celts Iron Bar and Herron. Maybe it’s time to let your Abos
go loose, Bruce. Maybe it’s time to let Leonie go with ‘em.
Her mind wobble-boarded, and she felt as
empowered as a disabled child in a Russian orphanage.
Waltzing Matilda, Matilda me darlin’, she sang,
proud of the ‘Irish’ version, which she had also learned at Mummy’s
informative knee.
A rush of terror made her undergo a convulsion
or two.
Mummy. Despite her genius, she had been so
poor, so bedraggled, so covered in bruises and scared of Daddy - why?
Her well-trained whip-and-chair memories were
strangely hazy now and perhaps they too needed to do a PhD or go on a
world tour to work themselves out (Bali, home of internecine
massacres, was always inviting, cooed and ticked her Voices) but she
vaguely recalled a terrible incident, one that occurred just after
they came back from the woods.
Daddy held her ankles and Mummy her wrists, and
she, screaming, face down, was being magically torn in two beneath the
moon. On the grey floor, fissured as driftwood, was scrawled a series
of concentric chalk circles.
Then Mummy let go. All she recalled after that
was his holding her so close to his stinking chest that she couldn’t
breathe.
20
Interested readers might like to follow this up and peruse the enlightening, solipsistic tome Living
Intuitively, by Bruce ‘I AM THE’ Way (Sydney: A Springboard Experience Pty Ltd, 1993). Phone (61)(02)
970 6977, Fax 970 6947. The Crypto-Fascist New Age Industry crystals on, beyond all that linear karmic
nonsense on Jesus Television. A-men.
But now she did remember. Yes … he’d muttered

something about King Solomon of Tintagel and how she needed a wash in
his bathwater, and made her do a funny dance across the room.
If you think I could be happy with your money and your name,
silver threads and tum ta tum tum tum will not play your cheatin’ game … the Voices
sang like an angelic choir in her head. He has sown the wind …
A funny dance. But she couldn’t breathe.
Sometimes it seemed she’d never truly breathed
since then. She lit another cigarette - though she had them going all
over the car in various stages of combustion - with a lighter
purloined from the Hyatt.
Stealing was wrong, Daddy told her every time
she saw him (which was less and less these days). She couldn’t help
herself sometimes. Everybody hated her, said she was nasty and bigoted
and bad. My country, ‘tis of thee … She thought of Gerald and began
to sob.
This was no good, her mascara wasn’t waterproof
and it made tracks down her cheeks, till her face grew reminiscent of
a cheetah’s. Mental confusion turned her mind into spaghetti
bolognaise, and she hated tomato.
Sing, she admonished herself with an erotic
slap or two, sing Daddy’s favourite song, a song to which he gave a
classically Irish lilt and could do a trad-jazz version of on the
Uillean drainpipes.
Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht

geschlossen …
Instantly, she felt better - though she had no

idea what these weasel words meant or even what language they were in
(surely not Saxon). Maybe she should e-mail a query off to the band -
Der Fuffelsingers were all the rage these days.
Hazily, she continued:
Ah leurve yew, eh-Peggee-Sew, with a leurve thats rair and trew, uh-
oh Peggee, mah EH-Peggee-Sew-ahew …
It was a song which made her sad, sad, sad (she
thanked God it wasn’t by Mummy’s cherished Buddy Holly), and when she
was sad she got angry. She continued with her own self-composed number
- and it’s one, two, three, what are we fightin’ for - it had turned
out horribly hippieish but what the hell, it had a great tune and she
liked the beat. Next stop is - well, she hadn’t read the news that
morning.
As a consequence of all this breaking into
song, the next civilian she came across (His Excellency Sheik Farouk
Ibn Petrodollah, Ambassador of Kuwait, a man of Sunni disposition)
barely escaped with his life. But Mummy lingered in her mind, and she
wondered academically if there might not be something in
psychoanalysis or anal psychosis after all.
Horseshit! She had a greater purpose, she
reaffirmed, that of attaining legitimacy and immortality and above all
revenge through public adoration.
The idea possessed her as she careened into the
carpark scattering pigeons and schoolchildren. Her rage began to build
again, till she was whizzing about at 80 and issuing forth skriking
noises that were enough to raise the dead who suddenly became an
unexpected niche market for ear-plug manufacturers.
The terrible truth had dawned on her.

She couldn’t get a park.
Chapter Five: Pork and Children
Parking is such sweet sorrow. In the midst of

dynamic Civic, at the decaying-honeycomb heart of the soulless
national capital (silver threads and golden needles being of little
use there too), she stamped about beside her machine, boiling with ire
and not feeling at all chipper. People beeped and barracked as she
frenetically kicked in the parked cars which inconsiderately filled
the parking spaces, understandable spumes of abuse frothing from her
lips.
“Motherfuckers! Daughterfuckers! Don’t you know
I’m a famous writer?”
It was satisfying psychologically, but after a
while it became clear to her that it and painting over the red kerbs
with the Berger was doing little good. Coolly, surrounded by fragments
of car and convinced that the owners were drunken Sino-Jewish
Aborigines, she set in motion a sly ruse.
First, though, she sat on her bunti and sang
again, to get her dander up, a few bars of a ditty she’d composed in
her teen heyday as a Secret Admirer. It was a song dedicated to the
beer-swilling Oodgeroo ‘Peggy-Sue’ Ah Cohen, MP (who claimed in her
cups - 38D - to be the first indigenous indigent to see Captain Cook’s
sail come over the horizon, as in Eleanor Dark’s on-the-spot novel):
Ah’m a rootin’ tootin’ cowbor

An’ Ah’m in leurve with yew
An’ when Ah shewt mah sixgern
Ah’ma shewtin’ it at yew
When Ah get erp in the mornin’
Ah allus have a spew
Ah’m a rootin’-tootin’ cowbor
That’s all Ah wanna dew
Yodelee-deedleedleohoo-deedledeedleohoo
Yodeleodleedleodleedleeedleoooo …
Beset by mental rodents, she raised her arm in

a spontaneous CM salute.
Fol-de-reee, fol-de-raaaaaaa …
She reminded herself to send away for that

Linguaphone course in Advanced Norwegian. Also, since she lived in the
southern hemisphere she wanted to learn to yodel in reverse.
Norwegians did it all the time. They called it talking. (Better than
ducks fucking in mercury.21)
Her soulful, melodious Voices - one sang I
wanna be evil just like Eartha Kitt - had been her only comfort in her
bleak and suicidal adolescence.
She’d learned at the time that Daddy had had
people tortured with cigarettes but he’d reassured her that this was
much less cruel than offering them one. It was vital to cultivate a
certain mental balance and live intuitively22, for that gave you a hot
line to God, even if you did always get the answering machine.
Still, the gathering mob no doubt wondered why
she was yodelling so puissantly in a public place and began to serve
21
Those of the younger generation who remain ignorant of these classic pieces of history, such as Peter
Costello, will need to be informed that this refers to an unkind description of the Sino-Vietnamese
language. The mercury has shot up around me after this crack and I may never get a grant again.
22
Readers are reminded to snap up Bruce’s intellectual upside-down cake from remainder outlets across
the land.
fatwahs upon her, but as far as she was concerned they could stick
their heads up their arses and yodel then.
Turning on them with her heart clanging in her
chest, she raised a dangerous finger.
Shvantzes!
They fell back in disarray.
Yodelling sporadically (the moving finger
having moved on) she picked the rattiest vehicle she could find (a
white 1980 Holden Gemini that probably belonged to a dole-bludger or
some other brand of shnorrer) and, stealthily, inserted a strand of
her stiffened hair between the window-glass and the door. Her Voices
belted out Rhyfelgyrch Gwyr Harlech and consumed barrels of leek
whisky. A police officer with his hands behind his back approached her
in the midst of the melee that broke out as more of the car-owners
returned.
“Well now, sure and begorrah Madam, ‘ello ‘ello
‘ello. I’m gonna bust your ass if you don’t spread ‘em.” he said in
his constabular way while doing kneebends. She acted out the part of
the ignorant bystander till it became clear that he was a fan of hers.
She flashed him her Certificate of Celticness
and her knotted knickers and he went away with a broad smile on his
retarded face.
Connections were a grand thing to have. She saw
to it that the rest of the stone-throwing crowd were hosed out of the
carpark with water-cannon. A shame really, as she was in better Voice
than Pavarotti that morning and now she’d lost her bloody audience.
Oh, well, it was better than being censored by
Daddy’s Arts Bureaucracy.
With ease thanks to his training she broke into
the Gemini and swiped the parking permit from the dashboard. The
Voices cheered.
“Fuck off.” she told them and they departed in
some confusion.
Leonie wrinkled her colossal bugle as it caught
a whiff of lingering mace, then seduced an officious and snowblinded
parking inspector whose compulsory nametag read ‘Sphincter’ (another
wog) into getting the thing towed away.
A gallimaufry of Gaulish destruction surrounded
her, but that was the business of Daddy’s Doguevomitté Recycling
Company to clean up along with the going forth and multiplying old-age
pensioners who were eating the country out of house and home. Daddy
believed in the inexorable fiscal arithmetic of pseudo-reform - as he
had ever since his days in the Reformatory - so her glee was
unrestrained - she had shares in it and in the company and in the
Zoetrope Drive-in Theatre (featuring silent films for the deaf in
which elderly Polish microbiologists with speech impediments played
Othello to audiences of blind gay bus conductors) which her broker
(Nigel’s too) assured her was a surefire investment.
Completing her yodelling exercises which she
felt were good for her erratic biorhythms and jagged vocal cords and
her forays into the Albanian pyramid futures market (as recommended by
her futurologist), Leonie slewed the by now graffiti-scarred Volvo
into the parking space, very pleased with herself though having
knocked no Patriarch over. (Archbishop Theo Platypusopoulos had broken
into a run just in time.)
She sat in the car for a while, pondering the
plot, the psychological phenomenon of pseudologia fantastica and the
questions of whether the prevailing epistemological and moral
relativism really made every change one for the best in the best of
all possible intuitive worlds, as the CM-funded ACT Government told us
through its Cultural Centre. Better by far, surely, to have our boots
at the ready. King Caractacus should’ve known that.
Then her powerful mind turned to the Irishman

who went to the Zoetrope Drive-in Theatre (her thinking tended to be a
bit weed-ridden at times) - he didn’t like the film, that
cinematographic gem by Eisenstein The Wild Irishman, so he slashed the
seats. Daddy was like that, a hobbling quasi-Irish joke who’d faked
his accent for years to attract the support of the 70 million strong
Irish Diaspora and who refused to believe he was really Welsh and
descended from the Piltdown Person (she’d had his ancestry researched
meticulously by a starving Belarussian academic) and thus couldn’t run
a chook raffle in an iron lung - not that you’d want to. She was sure,
as she extracted her nails from the upholstery, that it hadn’t rubbed
off on her.
To Gerald, with his sickly ‘60s support for
proportional representation and ‘workers’ self management’ and his
revolutionary and librarian-like rejection of what he called,
Castroishly, the ‘dictatorship of the Zeitgeist’, what the media
rightly called ‘reforms’ were counter-revolutionary and Orwellian
excesses designed to make things worse. Who needs reform when things
are bad enough already? But enough, already - this was too much like
intelligence and posed a threat to Our Glorious Non-Violent Carrollian
Democracy (OGN-VCD) and above all the Global Finance Sector (GFS) upon
which the sacred individual freedom to be arrested of the countless
beggars who made up the thriving underclass community - thriving
rather like grave-worms - depended, according to Daddy.
She saw a few wormy beggars struggle by, their
bowls supplied efficiently by a Mongolian dog-food corporation, and
was compelled to contrast Gerald’s pitiful public salary which had
Stalinistically kept her while she honed her writing skills over the
past few years. Life today was so progressive. She catcalled (“Scabs!
You should all be downsized!”) and threw coins at them. How, she
cried, can I put myself in their shoes when they haven’t got any?
All this high-brow activity and their ominous
refusal to pursue a career of learned helplessness (they chucked them
back) motivated her to get the hell out of the car. The whole thing
was as boring as a civil engineer. After hurving away on foot and
ostentatiously posting her gold-edged letter of resignation, which
drew quite a gaggle of reporters and postmodernist Rabbis advocating
that posties pick up mail as well as delivering it and snotty-nosed
boy scouts who tried to look up her skirt (forgive the double
entendre, it’s late), she did lunch as planned in a salubrious
restaurant with her Reykjavik-born, Muslim editor, George ‘There is
life on other planets’ Björnsendottir, using Gerald’s credit card to
pay for both of them.
(Few literary agents who hadn’t been liquidated
by Daddy would take her on, but she had her publishers in her pocket
anyway, a place where they felt snug and secure and safe from a good
kicking.)
“Leonie, this is the best piece of writing I’ve
ever seen. Your father doesn’t come into it at all.” he gibbered
obsequiously. She gloated at the thought of all the other writers he
was not paying exclusive and truckling attention to at the moment.
He also played footsie under the table with
her. She didn’t like that and thrust a steel-capped toe into his
groin. Breathlessly, he continued to compliment her, tears streaming
down his craggy face (she suddenly remembered to wipe her own on his
tie). Plainly he enjoyed it. Men, they were such shvantzes. Yet she’d
often wanted to be one, not because she was a man trapped in a woman’s
body or vice-versa - she eschewed such anatomical enigmata - but
because she wanted their power and privilege, that of dominating
Mummies in particular - as well as Daddies and those who like
Hermaphroditos aren’t quite sure.
She wasn’t sure why.
Naturally it was the best piece of writing he’d

ever seen. What an incredible prick he was. For so long her work had
been rejected and even censored out of existence, so it was about time
she received proper recognition.
She had also used the credit card to pay a
penniless Famous Writer to knock it up for her. The Famous Writer had
since stopped pestering her to set up a soup kitchen for local poets.
It along with her translation into Pali of Jack
and the Beanstalk was to be published right away. The Famous apart
from herself would howl - I’m with you in Rockland, she growled
spontaneously, much to George’s consternation - as their own books
were put on the back-burner or shredder and with luck burnt along with
their authors (she was all for Public Lending Right, mind you).
Daddy would be pleased. Her boomerang had at
last come back.
They parted amicably after she’d toed him a few
more times. Perhaps there was still a place for her on the Socceroos.
Gerald was not happy when she returned at high

speed in the by now slightly wrecked Volvo, slamming into the gate and
yodelling yet in her nasal and raucous tones about the bizarre state
of the economy.
He’d decided to take a sickie and was still ‘en
femme’. Apparently depressed, though showing little anger, he
complained predictably about all his sick leave - which he’d refused
to trade for a pay rise as she’d efficiently suggested - disappearing.
But the lounge-room looked fabulous, no cobwebs in the chandelier or
in the corners of the ceiling, a steaming dish of roast pork on the
table (Gerald had objected at first, being a health-conscious, Hasidic
Vegan - his recent atheism was too much for her to bear - and
President of Animal Liberation), and her wine cask in pride of place
on a silver platter (he was teetotal too and allergic to silver).
Threads and golden needles, their morganatic marriage was working out
just fine, and she pointed out authoritatively that according to
Leviticus he wasn’t to eat ferrets, pelicans, eagles, weasels or bats
either. He looked blank and sipped at his glass of castor oil.
So secure was the marriage that she’d had
everything in his kitchen engraved with a name, Jerald Wetteks ®, Jerald
Teespewn ®, Jerald Mopp®, Jerald Brewm ®, jerald duspan-and-brush®, Jerald Ovingluv®23, so
she’d be able to tell things apart when laid low by her acquired
insanity or her record-breaking consumption of recreational drugs
(well, no worse than Coleridge quaffing laudanum). Pity her covert
lover Gemma Wisdom, comic crime writer extraordinaire, had dumped her
for that camel-faced Sino-Palestinian woman who looked like a drag
queen. It gave her a bad stomach just to think of it.
She’d spent most of the afternoon at Gemma’s
split-level caravan, ignoring her fourteen screaming kids (as they
experimented with the Internet and a cobalt bomb) and trying to talk
her round or at least into some fashionable shape (blue is the new
pink etc). They’d had a few hundred e-daiquiris and discussed the e-
work of Gemma’s favourite author, Ouida (Louise de la Ramée (1839-
1908)). She was ravenous.
“Er, you’ve had your hair dyed even whiter.” he
brayed, squinting and trying to take an interest as his counsellor had
suggested. The truth was that she’d had an accident with a pair of of
Gemma’s magnesium flares but as a man he’d never understand. Her
blinding barnet was so white now that it increased the earth’s albedo
to the extent that observing e-aliens 300 light years away were almost
23
Your name not Bruce then? But I must say that the famed Wettex Culture of pre-Celtic Britain is not
included in this sally.
blinded themselves as they peered down their telescopes. (Clearly this

outcome was due to their Nelsonian sexual antics.)
She ignored his patently counsellor-inspired
question, waiting for his usual rabid rabbitting about kids and
reciting the rest of Howl fervidly.
The temerity he had, him with the intelligence
of a rice-pudding, to talk over her and her Voices:
“By the way, er, have you ever thought of us
having kids? You’d like them, you know.”
He was such a creeping jesus that she cringed.
”What, apart from a sound career, could be more
precious than children?” he prattled on morbidly. “That’s what life is
all about.”
She was convinced he was a pedophile.
“I can’t bear children. You’re so bourgeois!
What would you know about twisting the dragon’s tail?” she snapped
pettily. The first novel she’d ever read, later stolen by Daddy for
1
the pictures, had been Alice in Wonderland when she was 36 . He’d
4
since discovered the Internet too, and Belgium.
Gerald looked back in dismay, while she looked
forward in anger. One minute he was on about offspring, the next
whining that he wanted a career, and how she wasn’t helping much. Him?
He had no talent at all. How could he hope to rival her in riches and
notoriety when all he did was whinge?
I mean, look what he did for a crust. He ran
(or dashed the hopes of) a university library and whispered acronyms
into her ear in bed - on the rare occasions when they slept in the
same room - while furtively wanking. What a macho dickhead - Onan the
Librarian, as she giggled inwardly on such occasions. And he was
studying - get this - for a PhD in Chinese Librarianship! She laid her
head dramatically on her palm. That just about negated his existing BA
Honours in Information Suppression (Bond), since she knew there were
so many letters to the Chinese alphabet that the resulting catalogue
hid documents better than the average National Crime Authority file.
He should have become a lawyer or a doctor (she really needed a
psychiatrist at the moment).
Tossing her white and shining head, she
revelled in her own qualification - the St Sniddle’s School of
Tribadism and Folk-dancing Needlework Certificate. She’d always been
heavily into body piercing as long as it was someone else’s body. Her
sewing machine never gathered any dust.
“And I’m a genius.” she added, upon the
prompting of the loudest Voice.
He didn’t appreciate true genius, and couldn’t
even pronounce the term, thinking obviously that it was a j-word like
jenie or jenial or jenuine. In keeping with this gibberish he was
mindlessly worshipful of that bolshy sequel to the CM Bible the Welsh
Talmud, and Art, which meant basically Van Gogh and peasants reaping
what they owed.
There were Fisher-Price prints on the walls,
all boring crows and wheatfields, painted with the accuracy of a six-
year-old. Gerald insisted they remain - even though the old Dutchman’s
paintings were basically a form of near-money and she wondered why
they hadn’t been converted into nice tax-dodging computer bytes years
ago - and she had no wish to intrude on his absurd masculinist power
games. She just stood outside those and he ended up playing with
himself. And as far as she was concerned, with Van Gogh it was a case
of ear today and gone tomorrow.24
24
Now, now, is this really worthy of you, Auntie Rh.?
She liked a bit of one of his Modigliani

originals but had cut off the other bit to his chagrin.
Lighting a cheroot (she smoked so much she
couldn’t even afford a coffin and, no doubt as a result, whenever she
came across a Fred Williams painting in the Australian National
Gallery — which to her looked like a cement works — she took out a
texta and joined up the dots), she tucked into her pork, great fatty
slabs of it between luxuriously buttered sourdough bread. (She was
rarely on the fang — though fangs ain’t what they used to be. Yet she
was always hungry — maybe, as Mummy once said, she had worms.)
“Please, Leonie … ”
Like Pharoah, she hardened her arteries.
He poured her a glassful of Bumnebula Red with
Cloaca Cola (a Thai favourite and laced with lime-juice) and she
slurped it up through a crystal straw when not blowing bubbles. Sprays
of pork fat spattered the prints and flew elsewhere as far as Neptune
as she returned ferociously to her meat. She wondered why he’d donned
a raincoat and gas-mask.
She also blew smoke rings, albeit a bit
lopsided. He looked ill from what she could see of him behind the
phalanx of aqualungs. Must be his asthma, a complaint possibly brought
on by the Saharan dunes of dust to be found in the average university
library, notably in the Librarianship section. Several myopic and
hairbunned library students had recently fallen victim to silicosis.
(Most students these days shunned libraries for
the Internet, so the incidence of pulmonary diseases was happily
falling while that of radiation sickness had risen markedly. But I
shall refrain from these learned epidemiological asides and get on
with the novel.)
Leonie was enjoying herself - what else was
there to enjoy, as his other poncing hero Oscar Wilde-thing you make
my heart sing you make everything groovy put it - ingurgitating at
will. She made little roads in her mashed potato with her knife, till
she’d created a real work of art that it seemed a shame to eat. With
her dagger-nailed fingers she arranged a row of peas down the terraces
to indicate people. There was Mummy, there was Daddy, there was - Then
realising with dread that they’d be little g r e e n people she
irritatedly brushed them all off again so that they rolled along the
table and into Gerald’s floral lap. She was Tala again.
Inspiration was an amazing phenomenon, and so
was haute cuisine.
“Gerald, darling, you make such yummy nosh.”
she said, mocking his artsy-fartsy friends. “But a bit more Gravox
would help.” The Voices loved Gravox.
To stave off Gravox withdrawal, she guzzled it
all with lusty greed, making a mental note off-key to ring Delia
Smith, which was lost in her internal filing system till she turned 95
and could do little about it. Ars (or nose) longa, vita brevis, as
George Johnston crudely had it.
Writing rather than the jejune Gerald was her
first love, she reflected, puffing away between porcine gulps and
washing it down with an ardour which would have stupefied Omar
Khayyám. Gerald pretended to write too, fitful, pathetic poems about
how he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body, and other things
like the stars and clouds and garbage of that order. He was always
pressing volumes of verse upon her when all she asked him for was a
decent screw (in a monetary sense).
Pisher! Gemma alone could satisfy her, Gemma
who knew every crevice of her body as only another woman could. The
nosey bint.
She’d be spreading it about everywhere, heaping
calumnies upon her fluorescent head, and on the rest of her shapely
form … Leonie had already come across her article on some very
familiar haemorrhoids in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was right next

to the political cartoon, which - she hoped coincidentally - was of
herself, looking nearly as Sino-Hebey as Gerald. (She once almost did
a course in ethnography, in the belief it was all about drawing wogs.)
She screwed up her face truculently, wishing her eyes weren’t so
narrow and her nose wasn’t25 so conspicuous.
When she turned side on the wind dropped. She
wouldn’t go sailing again, that’s for sure. Capsizing in the middle of
Lake Burley Griffin with only a blubbering Gerald to hang onto was not
her idea of a good time.
He broke into her malignant reverie with a
querelous “Is it nice, dear?”
She was noisily scoffing the crackling, humming
and snorting over her Voices. She knew he loved it, if guiltily. She
offered him a bit but he confined himself to his plate of warm
lettuce, trying to look enthusiastic about it as she sat gobbling in a
fug of smoke. A Welsh rabbit hopping past outside stopped, looked in
aghast, then with a twitch of its whiskers checked its watch and the
briar patches around the house. You’re late, she guessed, hating the
obsessive-compulsive symptoms it exhibited while counting to five in
case she dropped dead. How awful to be led by the nose like that. She
read aloud from the PLO Covenant and the One Nation Manifesto, both
blu-tacked to the wall. He couldn’t see the sense of all that - he was
so up himself that he had a bad case of tunnel vision.
“Children …” he oozed again, rallying.
“Quintuplets. They’d be very small - you could have them quickly and
then you’d have no more to worry about.”
The idea of rapid-fire birth and his general
mastery of Simple Machines held a strange fascination for her. But how
could she give birth when she’d been stillborn herself?
“Me book’s comink out next week.” she showered
him belligerently, as the family pit-bull Puque took out the rabbit.
(They had three cats too and after Deng Tsiao-ping died she called
them collectively, if belatedly, the Gang of Fur.)
Well, you’re late now, she thought.
“Er, we’d love a copy for the library.” he
replied with all the assurance of Worzel Gummidge, registering horror
at the carnage outside.
She grasped his arm with her fingers of steel
as he rose automatically from his chair. Typically, the poon did
nothing, leaving that up to the two-year-old nextdoor, who used her
mother’s mobile to call an ambulance, the police, the fire brigade,
and every MEAA-culpable journalist in the city, as well as New York
and Beijing and the Bomb Squad. You can bet she wasn’t getting any
supper that night. (Leonie commonly didn’t have any either.)
“It’d look fabulous in the New Books section.”
he whinnied on meekly, Conan the vegetarian.
Leonie playfully threw a bowl of fruit at him.
“I’m off to Perth tomorrow on a meet-the-author
tour.” she announced, hoping she wouldn’t encounter any hated and
whiskery feminists with their quasi-racist doctrines. She stood,
dripping with grease, imagining herself to be the Statue of Liberty
only rather more gorgeous. Such a great CM salute.
It was strange that the Yanks hadn’t recast it
as Marge Simpson. Life’s mysteries were fascinating, she thought, her
brain engaging in some curious semblance of ratiocinative activity.
“Why can’t you lose weight like me?” she
scoffed skeletally and irrelevantly, in order to perplex him.
He put on that dopy expression seen at literary
lunches when the distinguished bore gets up to speak. Most of his
25
Or ‘weren’t’. But at this stage the subjunctive seems a little grand for this tawdry bestseller.
spare time he spent jogging and cycling futilely, or doing aerobics at

her insistence. The Ita Buttrose treadmill was flatter than a pancake
on Jupiter and her part-time electricity business was flourishing. But
even fifty push-ups a day had no effect. Perhaps he had a thyroid.
“Just my honey and me, and baby makes three … ”
he carolled, his nauseous love of ‘40s and ‘50s lounge music driving
her up the wall (and she had no desire to paint the ceiling). He could
remember Clutch Cargo cartoons.
“We can talk about children - later.” she
commanded, tone-deaf, and switched on KIX-FM. A wailing and tuneless
guitar solo from Der Fuffelsingers deafened him as she inserted the
ear-plugs she’d pinched from a passing corpse.
“I only want one.” he shouted, pained.
Ha! She knew him better than that. He’d just
said he wanted hordes of squealing brats, all vying for her valuable
attention and quality time. Not content with fantasising about
breastfeeding, he’d once grown a pair of his own. The thought had
almost put her off her meal and she reminded herself to report him to
the Office of the Status of Women but predictably forgot.
“I mean, I can go back onto premarin and grow
another pair - you won’t have to do any of that - er, we could adopt -
” Why must he yell all the time? Such a dangleberry. Time he took a
cold shower.
“I’ll be there for a while.“ she growled
authoritatively, and his disappointment was so obvious that she almost
forgot her own angst for a bit. As always, he began bawling pitifully
and using up all the Kleenex. What a performance!
Meanwhile, the cutlery was vibrating along the
table, and the dish of hot pork slipped off and it too fell into his
lap. Flower flew out of it scalded and hung shuddering from the
chandelier in Warner Brothers fashion, which was better than her usual
trick of spontaneously throwing up all over the carpet since he punily
fed her so often.
Oddly, he got quite mad at her then,
caterwauling effeminately about how it was his best dress and that he
didn’t want meat in the house anyway.
The soppy little welshcake. She couldn’t stand
anyone who kept having tanties about abbatoirs and cruelty to animals.
Perhaps she should try to cheer him up.
“Keep the house nice and neat - there might be
a little addition to our family soon.” She rubbed her tummy
suggestively, though her Voices began to wail, driving her up the
wall.
His brown eyes lit up. He adored housework.
There was quite a lot of cleaning up to do now. She’d go over
everything with a white glove. She had a thing about neatness and
germs; in her last job before turning 40 and joining the scrap-heap
she’d spent most of her day scrubbing and fumigating her desk till
she’d worked out a way to get someone else to do it for her.
This delegational behaviour had made her very
popular with management, who had ‘counselled’ her and swiftly been won
over by her pregnant pauses. Had she not chosen a writing career she
would have been promoted to Managing Director straight away.
Though wary of infection, Leonie opened the
back door and Puque bounded in thuggishly and secured the joint. He
sat blatantly crunching it before them, growling and glaring balefully
with his ice-blue headlamps at anyone who might try to take it off
him. He’d already polished off not only a rabbit but most of the
neighbourhood cats - Flower had enrolled in a karate course - and all
of the neighbours. The last three postal workers who’d dared to call
had been referred by Jack Kevorkian. (Leonie - though never Gerald -
got a lot of peculiarly anti-‘cosmopolitan’ and anti-Chinese hate-mail
- rather singed - from people who signed themselves Virginia Woolf or

TS Eliot.)
But Puque was a good-natured dog and began
panting ludicrously with his tongue hanging out like her husband’s.
Speaking of Gerald, he’d shot out of his chair
for some reason and was grinning and holding out his gravy-splashed
arms like the bibliophilic booby he was.
“Do you really mean that?” he neighed.
This was typical of his lack of subtlety, and
the word ‘nitwit’ formed slowly in her gluggy, aching mind.
“Well, do you? Do you?“ he demanded, seeming
for a moment almost assertive, a trait she deplored in other people.
She simply raised a dyed eyebrow and smiled.
Chapter Six: Gerald Rebels
Perth, imported from Scotland, was fun, once

she’d eluded the gangs of witch-like feminists and jackals of the
press like Stewart Littlemore, running down a previous Media Watch
piece on her which he’d stuffed up, who besieged her as she staggered
off the plane before the steps had been wheeled up to it. A pity the
earth’s rotation had speeded up so much on the way over. The stars
were mere streaks in the sky like something out of her favourite time-
lapse Hollywood epic Jesus, the Foetus (how many first-time expecting
mothers have said that after a night out while the kid is still
carousing Celtically inside them) and the asteroid Ceres floated just
in front of her nose as she shot about the Galaxy with her fellow-
Gaels on this much-observed UFO we call Earth. She decided to go back
on the Very Slow Train.
She was mad as hell. Cornering famous people
and asking them what colour underwear they had on should be banned,
she thought, head spinning at some mystic Tír na Nogian loom, and torc
gleaming. Her see-through dress made the question a little
superfluous, since she rarely wore underwear.
Lots of World Writers and assorted hangers-on
mobbed her that afternoon and she got written up in the W e s t
Australian.
Leonie Barmy, eccentric gourmand …
That was French for writer, she assumed. She
also got called a bon vivant and a Zionist cow, which puzzled her a
bit.
One night, at the quaint, underwear-free hotel
she’d chosen, she had a phone call from him (Daddy had been on the
line the rest of the time), begging her to tell him how the baby was
going.
“Oh, gestating fine.” she said. “Ow! I can feel
the little bugger kick! It must run in the family.” What a putz.
It unsettled her, though. (She scratched at her
knee.) To date, her life had been one of unalloyed misery. (Even she
couldn’t afford the alloyed kind.) She normally tried to share that
pedigreed misery with everyone else, but sometimes her generous offers
were met with a slap in the face.
She’d put on a face that morning and hated to
think what it looked like at this hour, probably like the unacceptable
face of capitalism. She peered at it in the disintegrating mirror and
gave it a slap. This focussed her (though it did little for the
mirror). A short sharp shock was just what she needed. She made funny
faces to try and get herself to laugh but the tears just gushed down
her cheeks.
The high cheekbones (100 metres above sea-
level) were like outcrops. The ribs and elbows stuck out too - Mummy
had called Leonie her ‘skinamalink’. And the nose - it was too much to
bear. She struggled to remember Mummy. Her face, seen from the
perspective of a five-year-old, floated vaguely (like everything else)
in her mind. Yes, it was Mummy’s nose, all right. A real Welsh beak.
She looked … She could barely formulate the
thought. She put it out of her head, leaving that rather deserted and
as entertaining as a spaghetti version of South Pacific. An antarctic
wind wafted through it, and a quake of primordial terror racked her.
Daddy appeared, an untransvestic wraith, his
body alive only with maggots, his gnarled, filthy fingers brushing
back her white hair, probing. She was going to pieces and other sorts
of atomistic entities, which was embarrassing considering her well-
documented devotion to wave mechanics that her Voices gave such good
reviews.
Don’t be so negative she screeched at her
shivering reflection (though living in a negative-sum society), half-
Chapter Six: Gerald Rebels 50
expecting it to come back with some devastating rejoinder. It stayed

smugly silent. She Tala’d on like this for a while, flinging herself
about the room till the hotel staff and all the guests were banging on
her door in a body and she banjaxed the room in response. But they
knew she and their insurance company could pay for the damage she was
doing, tossing the bathtub and Gideon’s bible into the street and the
like, and left her alone once she’d calmed down with a Scotch (being a
True Celt) and valium manufactured by child labour in Macau. A damn
good thing the buggers didn’t charge for her Voices too.Eventually,
barely able to stand, she stuck her head out the flyscreenless window.
“Mummeeeeeeeee! Help me!” she wailed and it
echoed down the deserted street and all along the banks of the Royal
Canal to ruffle in its inexpressible despair the edge of the Indian
Ocean.
Orson Welles had nothing on her. It was just
that she wasn’t eating properly, she told herself, panting, praying,
remembering she was 40. Oo-wah. She had an eating disorder, she drank
too much. The food in this dump was hardly worth eating, mind you, all
lean and healthy rubbish with not a slice of pork fat for miles.
Though it was 2 am she poured herself a Chateau unpronounceable and
felt better right away. She grabbed the phone and in a slurred mumble
ordered a large pizza with The Lot. Then she played her favourite Gobi
Desert klezma music at 110 decibels (she loved the jangle of the
electric pentatonic dulcimer) - and also Susan Ashdown, Tracey
Chapman, Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls and of course Barbra.
The pizza gave her the moxie she needed, since
she hadn’t eaten for a week. She rang her Famous Writer and inveigled
her into doing her a short story for Meanjin. Then she wrote some
heart-scouring poetry:
Roases ar redd
Vilets ar bloo
Jeralds a shvants
And soA ar yoo
Gerald rang her again the next morning. She was

still well-shickered and anyway he was about as exciting as a
dissertation on osmosis. The pointless intricacies of Chinese
Librarianship had clearly turned his brain.
Leonie was in no state to carry on a
conversation. Might as well whisper to a horse, she thought. Oo-wahm.
Her Marie Osmond teeth were chattering poisonously to each other and
threatening an earthquake in Los Angeles, she felt like someone in a
state of shock, but she had another red biddy - it caused her to her
throw up a bit and she wondered if she shouldn’t join Alcoholics Well-
Known - and made him wait till the maid had fixed her a Panadeine and
Berocca. One of her Voices (oo-wahma) quoted from the Rubáiyát:
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Like her hair. Another one who couldn’t get

enough of the Poets Corner.
“I’ve been thinking about adoption.” she
countered, when she returned to the phone and heard Gerald ask after
the progress of the putative foetus. Happy as a slime mould in his
ignorance. She got the maid to pour some rue oil into her ear to kill
the earwigs.
“What?” he went.
“A-D-O- ”
“I do know how to spell it!”
That was comforting. Acronyms were worth
something.
“Adopting it out, I mean.” she stressed with a

leaden tongue and a lesbian rule. One day, the Homeland on Lesbos …
she’d apply for a bit of land right away.
“B-but,” he continued, “our baby!” He was
spluttering, he who often said worshipfully that she ‘looked like a
Lesbian’.26 “You said there’d be a little addition to the f -”
Such a Celtic tosser. Quite truthfully for a
change she replied calmly, “I did not.”
The phone clicked.
She ordered champagne, thinking him completely
shitzi.27 (Some she knew said she was clean round the oojah herself,
but she didn’t believe a word of that.) The rest of the day had quite
a warm glow to it and she was taken out to dinner that night by the
Premier (who at that stage hadn’t been convicted of anything worse
than the usual bribery and tax-dodging and living like an emperor on
taxpayer’s money).
The remainder of her unreproductive stay in
Perth was marked by increasingly hysterical calls from Gerald,
demanding to know the truth and paranoidly claiming that she’d
manipulated him. She fobbed him off by saying “Don’t kvetch at me
across the incontinent! You’re a typical controlling male. Why do you
beat me to pieces?”
The groan of despair he gave at these remarks
almost moved her and her bowels to pity. She was so moved that to get
over it she sloped off to a private and profitable beach to sunbake
swathed in olive oil with a few eminent entrepreneurs and martinis,
till she began to resemble a dolma (though not of course green). She
loved whining and dining.
She also quickly learned that the sun always
rises in the east even in WA, unless of course you stood on your head.
His last call - once she’d got rid of the last
vermouth-sodden risk-jockey and his lawyer - was especially
disturbing. A lifelong pacifist, he was babbling about revenge and
buying an assault rifle.
Revenge, indeed. “Don’t hold it the wrong way
round like you do in bed.” she japed, fantasising gratuitously about
Israeli lady soldiers. He wouldn’t buy one - he hated the things,
having spent the past two summers up to his chest in mozzy-infested
water, protesting noisily against mercury and duck-hunting. She rang
Daddy and he offered her a trench mortar or Katyusha rocket but she
declined. How unprofessional.
The Ambassador of Lesbos had left before she
woke, the bitch. She was short and dark like Sappho and with a similar
poetic style, not Leonie’s type at all.
But everything was fine, she rasped, now on the
phone to Gemma. Gerald was hers to command, her career was taking off,
26
This is derived, obviously, from the following ancient joke:
Father Padraig O’Hara, in mufti, gets on the bus in Belfast to go to the gay discotheque. An old woman
sits next to him, and starts swigging from a whiskey bottle. He tries to ignore her and stares out the
window at the passing burnt-out houses. But he can feel her eyes burning into him, and from the corner of
his own eye he learns she is staring him up and down in a most aggressive manner. Finally he plucks up
the courage to look at her directly. She stares back with hatred and says at the top of her voice, ‘Are yoy a
Catholic?’ He looks round at the other passengers who are all staring too, and he wonders if they’re not all
Prods. But after a protracted inner struggle with his conscience he concludes that he mustn’t deny his
faith. So he looks back at the woman and replies, ‘Y-yes, I’m a Catholic.’, and resumes looking out the
window.
This doesn’t satisfy her. After taking another swig or two of Bushmills she grabs him by the arm and spins
him round: ‘I asked yoy if yoy were a Catholic!’ The other passengers continue to stare. He starts to shake
with terror but feels he must reiterate, ‘Yes, I’m a C-c-c-catholic.’ Then he looks away again. She takes yet
another long draught of Bushmills, spins him round again and bellows bibulously,
‘Funny - yoy don’t look like a Catholic.’
27
Ie, ‘crazy’, in the language of the little-known but fruity Kingdom of Gigglebustería. A restraining order
has been taken out against the author, preventing her from any further contact with out-of-date
Gigglebusterían dictionaries of slang.
her renown had spread faster than AIDS. Gemma sounded guarded, but
what the hell. The woman was Maltese or something.
When she got back to Canberra on Stephenson’s
Rocket at 13 mph (no man can live etc) she found the house in an acute
state of disrepair. According to reliable witnesses, three or four
shaven-headed, middle-aged individuals with safety pins through their
throats and flick-knives and machetes in hand, Gerald had trashed the
place, then (according to rumour) gone mad with machinegun and
slaughtered an entire reading room of undergraduates. (Since then he’d
been promoted to Vice-Chancellor.) She rang the Prime Minister, that
niggling class warrior Nigel Lopsides of the Conservatwang (from the
Chinese kon zher wa twang) persuasion who wouldn’t have a job at all
were it not for the irrational Saxon ‘two party system’, and after
much negotiation and his brushing aside of urgent matters of state
secured a lunch date for the same day.
She indignantly told this darksome statesman
what Gerald had done to her house.
“Don’t worry, now that the boodiful Black Hole
Party is in the state will pay for everything - we’ll just have to
blow out the deficit a bit, chuck a few bludgers off the dole -
nuffin’ to it. Gerald will be found and punished.” He lingered
lovingly over the last word. She put on her useful dumb blonde act,
which to him made her seem dumb indeed and his trousers expanded
faster than the universe. Hard by the kirk, Daddy called it in his
Celtic fashion. She giggled.
“Now, boodiful Leonie, we know you’ve retired
from politics to the point of travellin’ by train,” he added, starry-
eyed, “but we’d like you to become our next Ambassador to Israel.”
She blushed a little, tossing her long white
hair back to reveal her sexy shoulders. Gerald had been after that job
for years, and he couldn’t abide women in uniform. The Prime Minister
reddened in a politically unwise fashion.
“O - k.” she said and Indianapolis-500ed back
home, collecting a few cats on the way and daydreaming, on the advice
of her hyperceltic Voices, about ridding the world of all injustice.
That afternoon, she learned her novel (called
Me First Novel though it was actually her second, her first being the
unpublished One Hundred Years of Ineptitude) had won the South Bowral
Bush Verse Award. She felt sick and had a wine or two, till she was as
legless as certain species of lizard. But there was no stopping her
now. Soon she’d be on the seagoing Late Night Live, shmoozing
intellectually with a seasick and eyepatched Phillip Adams.
There was a screech of tyres outside, then a
scream. She panicked. Hamas? Popular Front (or Unpopular Rear) for the
Liberation of the ABC? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Moments later there came a
savage pummeling at the door. She thought better of opening it but her
desire to share more of her misery with others overcame her
fashionable 90s fear, and anyway it might be Gemma. Or even better, a
roving band of door-to-door radical and diasporised Lesbians
chattering away in ancient Milk Bar Greek lyric verse about the price
of real estate - they could all have a good chinwag about the boys and
their perfidies before she handed them over to the Australian Research
and Security Entity Ltd (ARSE). Don’t worry, be happy. No one cared
about her anyway. No one cared about anyone else any more. The
government gloatingly called this development ‘mutual zero tolerance’,
a handy substitute for martial law.
To her surprise it was Gerald, dressed in a
‘Fun Army’ uniform and carrying an Uzi, all of which clashed with his
stupid sixties hair. The tricycle he’d impulsively bought for their
supposed baby lay on its side in the middle of the road, a little
bowed from his bulk.
“Hello, dear.” he gasped latrinely, his uniform
stained and reeking of vomit and wine. She backed away as if she’d
found a nest of machine-guns crouched brrwking around their eggs. “I

just wondered how you were”, he said, “in your delicate condition.”
Bandy-legged, he fumbled with a fag - held the
wrong way round - and coughed.
She got quite scared. Puque had run away in the
past week’s confusion, and got himself a decent job towing sledges in
Greenland. He’d met a cute if bookish husky who had notions of
becoming First Lady of Quebec and his dreams of puppies and a soul-
crushing mortgage on an igloo were at last coming true.
“Gemma has told me so much about you.”
continued Gerald icily, ramming the barrel with absurd gentleness into
her flabby stomach. She became terrified, since there was drink on his
breath and Gemma was a ball-tearing feminist. She knew that she alone
had the right to tear his balls off (had he any), and pined a bit,
feeling rather jealous.
It was then she noticed that the barrel was
made of plastic.
“Well - I’m glad you’ve been getting some
exercise.” she enthused, cheerily jabbing his own obese stomach in
return. (Perhaps he could have a baby of his own.) He leapt back, as
her fingernails could cause the sort of injuries usually associated
with being mauled by a lioness, or even Rilke’s panther.Nigel had
already ordered his underlings to call her friends the police in
relation to the house and they suddenly arrived in force, flattening
the trike and only six hours late. Woo-woo-woo filled the air, started
a thunderstorm and caused the traffic to obey all the road rules to
the letter for an instant, while a heavily-armoured SWAT team sprinted
about yelling pointlessly and feeling her up. Gerald dropped his toy
weapon and made to run but was cut down by a blizzard of high calibre
bullets.
Due to severe cutbacks in their ammunition
budget28 he was still alive when they flung him into the paddy-wagon.
The intervention of the Vice-Chancellor’s Committee was fruitless: he
was sentenced to 32 years hard labour.
Having run a library he’d never done a stroke
of work in his life, so that seemed fair and dinkum to Leonie.
In court he (bristling with a portable life
support system and shouting against the chants of One Two Three, Le-
on-ie, Hang her from the highest tree! outside) accused her of verbal
abuse and tried to pass himself off as a Normal family man whose wife
was denying him children. Guiltily, with the chant ringing in her
ears, she recalled the bowl of fruit and told them the awful truth
about his furtive and fetishistic wearing of the beige chiffon tent
and his incipient pedophilia. She recounted her tale which by now she
truly believed of the police officer whom he’d almost drowned, the old
lady he’d made into matzohs and the pile-up of drunken Aboriginal
transvestites he’d been involved in on the way to work - that must
have been him because she didn’t even have a licence.
(Luckily she didn’t get the giggles in front of
the Judge or she’d no doubt have got a longer stretch than Gerald.)
The jury, consisting of hand-picked neo-Nazis
(not small ‘n’) from the Foreskins bikie gang - a three-member,
platinum-blond turn-out known as the Harley Trinity - deliberated,
imbibed and raucously reached their verdict. Even Alan Dershowitz
couldn’t have saved him, let alone Noam Chomsky.
Conviction, under Mr Justice Barmy, Daddy’s
brother and a leading member of that CM subsidiary the League of Rats,
was inevitable. (He also handled the divorce.) They carried him out
screaming; his feet never touched the ground.
28
Ok, I would have accepted that this was totally implausible until the advent of John Howard as PM.
Left-wing protesters were divided and their

demo outside degenerated into a small bloodbath as anti-Zionists
fought with members of B’nai Brith. The ratpack of police gathered
together to deal with rising civil unrest and fresh from closing down
Quadrant looked on and smiled indulgently.
Justice had been done in altogether, said a few
politically-diverse detractors (mostly members of the Communist
Brotherhood of St Lawrence, those chardonnays under the bed, and the
Cosmopolitan Board of Koori-Sino-Judaic Stand-up Comics, fresh from
the Gobi Desert Circuit), but being unable to stand up much of the
time she was sure that wasn’t true.
She watched the re-runs on tv, sharing a pack
of Doritos® and a bottle of Kentucky sour mash bourbon with several
Hollywood madams. Guilt still filled her but she drank it away.
It was quite exciting, really. The mob of paid
skinheads and vengeful if unpaid library clerks on the other side of
the street were brandishing nooses and baying for his blood as he was
hurled into the same cut-price paddy-wagon with much unnecessary
beltings with inexpensive Chinese batons. The right-wing mob,
entertained by a drag performance featuring the Head of Foreign
Affairs (Communist tycoon I. Ching from Hong Kong) and some choirboys,
went wild. It was so much cheaper than an air ticket to Los Angeles.
Since the charges were so serious they and even
she were convinced he had to be the culprit. He just looked bewildered
and this very nearly caused Leonie to feel sorry for the poor shlemiel
(as Mummy would have cosmopolitanly called him, being on good terms
with the Red Hand of Ulster), but since the age of five no one had
felt sorry for her, and she wasn’t really sure how to do emotions,
apart from rage.
Gerald was to appeal but his appeal, outsourced
to the Thai Justice System Inc, was later turned down due to not
having enclosed a stamped-addressed envelope.
The PM came on and sputtered about the need for
(cheap) public executions and heads on spikes to forestall the current
rising tsunami of crime and she felt he cut a cute if asinine figure.
“The commoner the Offence, the harsher the
Penalty!”, he sputtered, in line with market forces of darkness and
the Zeitgeist of the 1790s. Truly, the market was a magical in the way
it made moral responsibility disappear and divided the people into two
(or more) parts. Fred West-style murders in tiny Innamincka would be
punished with a small fine, he assured his CM audience of 12 people,
whereas terroristically begging for food or busking29 in Sydney would
of course attract the death penalty or even an interview that animated
letterbox Derryn Hinch.
These exhilarating jurisprudential
breakthroughs - and his ownership of 50 000 shares in a chain of
private prisons - filled him with zeal. He proposed that parents be
jailed for the crimes of their children and children for the crimes of
their parents. Chain-gangs of such prisoners in striped and luminous
dungarees or diapers would be used in concert with computers to put
people out of work, benefiting The Economy.
“Work, obey, fight! Guns before butter! Self-
reliance and short hair!” he bellowed, jugular swollen.
Criminal records or CDs rather would be handed
down the generations. It would become commonplace to see new-born
babies, the sick and vertiginous old-age pensioners (now non-
pensioners) excavating ditches or tripping nimbly along girders as
they engaged in steel-fixing and other low-low-low-paid jobs while the
Budget balanced nicely. Productivity, he claimed, would shoot up
boodifully and that nest of collectivist hippie drug addicts, Nimbin
29
The Association of Musical Beggars, surely not a CM front, has applauded this move. They call
themselves niggers.
(I saw God, man), would be drafted into a punishment battalion and

sent to recolonise the South Pole (he’d conveniently forgotten that
the Americans presently had a good Celtic McLibels there - amongst
other things - run by a descendant of Lucrezia Borgia).
He also suggested - this, Daddy had told him,
had been her notion - that everyone but that paragon of law-
abidingness Leonie Barmy be locked up in case they ever had the
slightest notion of committing a crime, with special attention to
child molesting and making insufficient work effort on Job Search
Allowance. Loose women would be cleaned off the streets (and shoved up
back alleys for a while till they screwed up a bit) and other criminal
types like concrete or abstract Aborigines and sodomites would be
subjected to what he called, using her well-chosen words,
‘indefensible domination’. He’d see to it personally, he foamed
indignantly, that the evil rapists and murderers who made up the bulk
of the Unemployed would have their Activity Test tightened up like a
garrotte. “For evildoers shall be cut off!” he quoted from Psalm 37:9.
When asked by a journalistic feminist whose
hair seemed to have been done by a Van de Graaf generator what plans
he had to deal with domestic violence he smirked unguently and moved
on to his next interview.
The whole experience taught Leonie to be more
cautious, as befitted a freedom-loving, multicultural Australian in
the climate created by Nigel’s new Suppression of Terrorism Act and
hasty suspension of Habeas Corpus. (People were currently in prison
charged with murdering the person in the next cell who was in there
for murdering them. It was the only place where you could get in
without too much work experience, but Nigel would change all that.) At
Gerald’s expense again, she took out full page ads in all the major
dailies pointing out that she was in fact a family-oriented sort of
woman and planning to have ten children to conscript for the next
family war.
She swiftly acquired the fawning support of the
high and mitrey Catholic Bishops Association, the Bring Back Serfdom
League and the Bowral Home for Infirm Finance Cowboys and Backpacker
Murderers and hired a troupe of child actors and a fake husband from
America. She also paid a double to diplomatise in Israel, which meant
missing out on the lady soldiers but was better than risking being
blown to cyrbibion. When asked by the same patently Semitico-Chinese
feminist how she felt about Gerald’s ‘unjust’ jailing, she smiled
unctuously and made an unintelligible reply in some memorised and
slurred Celtic (or perhaps it was Ukrainian, she couldn’t remember).
Oy, gevald, it was hard to put up with all this media attention.
Perhaps she should move to Bougainville.
Barely able to function, she mooched about
ripping her bodice in frustration (there were few butterflies in sight
apart from the swarm in her tum). Her internal clock seemed awry and
she kept waking screaming at 1.30 in the morning. Her suffering was
terrible, almost as bad, she felt, as Phaloon Devi’s, and the
nightmares in which thirty pieces of silver clattered at her pretty
sandalled feet were enough to wake the earplugged dead again and even
Leonie. She reviewed them for Shmooz magazine and won the Book Review
of the Year Award.
Because of her general state of panic and mid-
life crisis, all the details had been taken care of by Daddy, that
perniciously rising Godfather in the Australian branch of the
phallocratic Celtic Mafia (originally a right-wing think-tank set up
by Nigel to look into hi jinx in the pork industry and connected with
the ‘mercenary’ terrorist outfit Executing Outcomes) and a dedicated
opponent of all that disturbed the Druidic Order, such as paying
poets. Free Speech was to his numerical genius the square root of all
evil, since it allowed the lowest forms of life to succeed in the
Arts. He’d set his crack fighting troops, the famed WCs - Private
Virtue! Public Vice! Sah! - against it except that he could never get
them away from their embroidery classes.
Through much febrile bellowing, Leonie
gradually got over her trauma and returned, cold-eyed and Celtic, to
her writing. By this stage, her success was assured.
ps
I think it’s time to crush ruthlessly this

corny infinitive-splitting device of shoving ps’s at the end of
chapters. It’s clearly a ploy to fill up pages. A list of jobs
futilely applied for by the author over the past six weeks would be
more enlightening.
pps So here it is:
ambassador
architect / bee
arts bureaucrat
attitudinal psychologist
aviatrix
born-again biorhythmist
compost manager
flagpole polisher
free slave marketeer
gannet huntress
grant swinger
helot grade 2
hog farmer
ivy grower
jam stirrer
jilleroo
minefield sweeper
nautch dancer
nuclear chemist
panda breeder
Pope
professional darts champion
stamp hinge oiler
stultifying conservative
tabloid journalist
Chapter Seven: After Jailing Gerald
Leonie sometimes felt bad about Gerald, the

cold sore, doing his time along with the repatriated Mordecai Vanunu
in Canberra’s grim and Burmese-owned Quamby Maximum Security
Penitentiary. The place, he wrote to her on the back of a library card
belonging to a library fine defaulter serving an 80 year stretch,
recalled the Dyspepsi Corporation’s crime-busting Pensacola Prison in
Florida30, and every morning they were compelled to sing the Company
Song, Die Fahne hoch etc. But already he’d used his bibliographic
contacts to swing a decent spot in the prison library and presently
pushed a trolley there at great expense to the Burmese polity. She
ground her teeth at such fiscal irresponsibility.
Of course, she really knew he’d been unjustly
jailed for the massacre which she suspected Daddy’s henchcelts had
committed - unless even that fact had been mere propaganda. She looked
in vain for the story in the papers, but all the front pages contained
was sport, the Australian Hermaphrodites’ Croquet team GOLD! GOLD!
GOLD! (there’s no need to shout already) to be precise.
It all seemed so unfair and hardly dinkum, but
then Daddy was simply concerned, surely, that his little girl would
get on in the world. She’d never wanted him to go that far but she
feared his wrath.
Being Voiced-in most of the time she couldn’t
work out the real world of ruthless competition and economic lunacy.
Her attention turned on herself and her hair and burgeoning bracket as
always.
Gerald, she’d learned, only thought he was a
killer, due to post-hypnotic suggestion administered by her shrink -
the lover of his counsellor - and now he was also convinced that he’d
been raped by Jeffrey Dahmer as a baby in a previous life. Not bad for
someone who didn’t believe in reincarnation. She took a nap. Her
principal Voice spoke to her in a daydream:
Eh, Bwana, dis is gettin’ serious, chick-pea. It time to have de

Prophetic dream of de Prophet Eczema, de locusts and wild honey-chile, de jawbone up yo’
ass and all that bach. We, de giant Bendigeidfran, wid Pruderi and Rhiannon, floatin’ to
Australia de land of Grog and Sunnies, ‘ome to de countless refugees and hillegals from all
over de world, popular fo’ 175 000 years at least wid de international shit set. Ain’t
nowhere farther from ev’ywhere else apart from McLibels’ Antarctica where de surf ain’t
the best and de jazz and jug pitiful, de best place to be when de ratbag element take over,
brer Ferret! I do be surprised dat dere ain’t been a mass incursion sooner!
It like a Slice o’ Heaven, so I hear, or is dat de Land of de
Wrong White Crowd? Bit of R&R, lie on de beach wid de Hunemployed, pretty soon you
feelin’ jes’ like de average wog. Dis de life, mon aimless. De Serbs and de Bosnians
splashin’ about happily together! De Turks and de Greeks gettin’ on fine most of de time!
Even de handful o’ Tutsi and Hutu not exactly eatin’ each other, dat bein’ a problem wid
de non-menoric section of de Francophone African populace, look at Oy-Vey-Bey, brer
Rabbi, to hell wid de dietary law. I spect de Multiculturalism dey pinch from Canadia do be
jes’ growin’ whatever its detractors say, all manner of polyglot global trash rubbin’
shoulders and off against de furniture, dis must be de classless society at work apart from
de fact dat it all owned by foreigners! Maybe we woz right after all, de contractions of
cowboy capitalism (we wants our money back), de woikless of de world unitin’, de hethnic
community and de community of women, along wid de Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, lyin’
down wid de lamb kebabs and de mint sauce! Don’t worry about brer Gerald, fach, don’t
worry about de fish and chip shop Movement, dis just a comic novel and not a patch on de
Lord’s! What’s a hill o’ beans to de starvin’ millions?
30
This advertorial has been put in by the Canberra Civic Boosters’ Association and the Bill Clinton
Foundation for Zero Tolerance towards State-created Beggary.
Chapter Seven: After Jailing Gerald 58
Well, de ole Hindian Ocean gettin’ a bit rough, we just passin’

bimeby Sri Lanka de Tamil Economic Tigers basketball team at de top o’ de ladder, Dai
Ffawkes blowin’ up de Parliament fo’ a penny and de ole tea plantations full o’ brer Welsh
darkies a-singin’ of de Hinternationale. Must away, cariad - will send de nex’ message in a
bottle o’ Bundy like de ole salts o’ tequila dat we is (hic). Well, you stay on de piss and you
can expect daydreams like dis, sweet Lay-onie chile. Stuff de Black Muslims.
(Let them and the Scientologists go back where

they came from, thought Leonie even-handedly.)
That night, she did indeed have a prophetic
dream or two, thanks to the Prophet Zhdanov. At first - she knew on
waking - she’d been slipped a shot of horse tranquiliser then taken in
her bed to the middle of China where she got quite a shock when, in
her dream, she woke up and swept open the curtains to behold a crowd
of Buddhist Rabbis. Then she was in Canberra’s famous St Fergus’s
Cathedral, singing in the dark before the congregation, dressed as an
18th century Welsh Baptist nun in pais a betgwn. Out of the darkness
emerged a shambling, hooded figure.
She woke screaming, kicking at complicated
shadows (“I am half sick of shadows”, she cried) till they fell off
the wall.
That morning, at her ash-besmeared computer,
she steadied herself with a bucket of Coolabah Red with a Jameson
chaser and peered groggily at the cracked screen while the 7.30 Very
Slow Clockwork Train rumbled by, each passenger having given the Key a
turn in the interests of Ecology. It had been so easy. (Shut up you
breeder-bar mongrels! she yelled out the window but received only
jeers, along the lines of fucken queer cunt you oughta be stuck in
Cooma Jail.) Prison, she’d been assured by Daddy, who ought to know
and had himself bought debentures from Pelican Bay and other parts of
the US Gulag, was pretty much a drug-free holiday camp anyway, didn’t
even have a chimney. It was a bit of a dilemma, she thought
philosophically with a nod in the direction of Gerald’s collection of
Leibniz’s Collected Works which she’d stolen. Fucken queer lezzo
Zionist cunt, Hitler had the right idea came the ingenious taunts from
outside as rocks and human faesces landed on the roof, but she was too
far gone to notice. All you needed was a bit of chutzpah and you’d go
far, and besides, arbeit macht frei as Daddy said in Celtic. Pushing
her brittle hair back off her careworn forehead she ignored the
drunken policemen urinating and crapping on her lawn and pictured
Gerald, chewing on his grub-infested pork chop and plotting his
revenge.
She suddenly got frightened that he might
escape, and phoned the Prime Minister. The man was in love with her
and she easily got a few decades added to Gerald’s sentence. With a
bit of guile, she thought, memory slipping, she might even get the PM
to re-introduce capital punishment. After she put the phone down she
realised with childlike guilt that she’d been a bit nasty, but another
barrel or two of plonk drove that and all other feeling out of her
head.
Nigel’d had a bit of a turn when she called,
since he was sitting on the toilet at the time and shaking hands with
Unemployed. She felt sure he’d leave no turn unstoned, and sure enough
the next time she saw him he was stoned out of his brain. Fucken lezzo
Zionist - er, just jokin’, Leonie.
The day passed by slowly - the Very Slow Train
was out of sight by noon and made the Very Fast Parliamentary Flagpole
with its CM Horns look pretty sick - and she wrote fourteen whole
words.
Gemma rang in the middle of The Nanny. The
woman she’d dumped Leonie for had turned out to be a drag queen (and
one who secretly dressed up in rugby shorts in the privacy of her own
bedroom).
“I’ve missed you so much.” Gemma burbled in her
artful nasal whine, not a good shot and no paragon of Krishna
consciousness. Leonie, given the brush with death that she’d recently
had, was glad of both.
“Please - tonight …” whimpered the morose comic
novelist as the Very Slow Train returned (the driver having forgotten
his Queer Consciousness pamphlets), who due to her intimate knowledge
of the private and squalid lives of various ‘stars’31 outsold Woody
Allen and God. She’d even got together a glory-box and a trousseau.
Leonie, with her faint but precious memory of
Mummy, ached for intimacy, though she wasn’t quite sure what that was.
It was so lonely ascending meteorically to stardom (and
gravitationally challenging). She agreed, disconcertingly belting out
‘I like Aeroplane Jelly’ being an Australian.
But had she been too hasty, she pondered as she
dropped the receiver. Gemma was such a yenta. Maybe Rose would be a
better choice. Rose was the Filipina maid she’d befriended in WA.
She’d landed her a $2.99 an hour women-only rubbish-job at her
publisher’s (Uillean & Onion), polishing up the manuscripts32 which
came, a bit like her 95th thesis, ‘over the transom’, as George
maritimely put it. (Of course, she had the fringe benefit of wiping
herself out on the tribalistic and revolutionary ‘womyn’s nights’
sponsored by the management but had so far declined.)
She was quite kinky, though, and had begged
Leonie to bind her with saran wrap and hang her from the washing line
(as well as regaling her with educational hijab jokes). Yes, Rose was
a better bet.
Rose had moved to Canberra and lived in a
squalid bedsitter in Turner, without a washing line. She opened the
door, stark naked, as the Very Slow Train pulled out again (outrun by
a snail and a quadriplegic tortoise), and a bit later put before
Leonie a steaming roast. It wasn’t pork, of course - she couldn’t
afford that or breathing hard on the dole which had been reduced to
$2000 a year (and later to $2000 a century)33 - but a friendly Sino-
Vietnamese restaurateur had supplied her with someone’s pet cat (it
had belonged to the child presently howling with grief nextdoor). Rose
had always wanted to be a writer and had given her some poetry to show
to her editor. In a moment of abberation she’d actually done that, but
was so horrified by his positive reaction that she wisely claimed to
have written it herself. It was due to be published next month in the
Christian journal Easterly.
Despite Leonie’s tendency to ring up Paul
McCartney GCMG and her other newly-acquired big-star friends, all of
whom had suddenly taken up an interest in space exploration, they had
lots of fun all day. It was better than anything that had ever
happened at the Hotel Chelsea. Egged on by her Voices, she jammed her
into the washing machine for a while (but only on Gentle Cycle). Rose
started to read her poetry at one point but she soon put a stop to
that.
(It might be said that, over the years, Leonie
had turned into a rather hard woman. Once, an anvil had been dropped
on her head from the top of the U & O building in Sydney and the anvil
31
These included Bjork , John Undonne and the most famous rock bands of Gigglebustería: Dick Trickle
and the Trickledicks, Mawga Nanny, Runny Pee, David Irving and the Irvers, Fred Straininglatrine and
the Heape of Shytte, etc.
32
They soon outshone her hair.
33
Devotees of my immortal cult novel who are laughing 2000 years hence at the ridiculously low sum
quoted ought to bear in mind that it was pretty ridiculous in the 20th century too. But please, keep
laughing.
shattered. An x-ray showed that her head was almost solid bone. The
anvil, by contrast, had been awarded a doctorate of science only
minutes before. This depressed Leonie who felt she was a genius
trapped in an idiot’s body. When this book is dug up in 10 000 years’
time you’ll all wonder what nutcases we were in the 20th century. No,
you’re right.)
The other unspeakable things she did may of
course not be printed in these upright, narrow-minded, Gravoxy times
(1997) but can be slavered over by calling this number: 0055 141776
(there’s no special deal with McLibel-Telstra!). They can also be
accessed in Basic English via the Internet at
http:/alt.censorship/html.34 The vital questions of Internet censorship
and the survival of the Golden Number system of calculating the dates
of Easter (four ‘ofs’ in that one) are matters which may be pursued by
Auntie Rhoberta in forthcoming bestsellers.
The next day, Rose having slashed her wrists -
cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young - Leonie took her
rightful place as Head of the impoverished Australia Council. In their
cardboard box headquarters in Redfern she regaled them with tales of
her near-demise, how three hundred bullets had pierced her magnificent
chest and how she was lucky to be alive. (She also ate all the
nibblies before they could get at them.) These statements of her
personality impressed them no end and so she’d got the job and a six
month holiday in St Moritz, beginning immediately.
The only other contender had been Gemma, but
Gemma had been found dead in a pool of blood (how cliched) the night
before. Leonie thought it was probably suicide due to artistic
jealousy, or something to do with the Death of the Author.
Death, like feminism, can be funny, she told a

terrified Bill Clinton, as long as it doesn’t happen to you. To her
horror, George kept demanding to see her next novel, which she’d long
told him that she’d been beavering away at. And her former arts-
conscious buddies the police - annoyed perhaps at her provocative
driving - were asking unfriendly questions, full of grammatical
solecisms and logical paradoxes, like “why was yew born, girlie, on
the night she was murdered?”. Their shiny instruments of torture (a
musette, a concertina and a swanee whistle) looked pretty fearsome but
they never used them any more than the Inquisitors had on Galileo.
As I was walkin’, all alane, I heard twa
corbies, makin’ mane … she sang inside — with vague memories of
Steeleye Span from the 19th century. It seemed to flummox their
patriarchal bullying. Who did they think she was, Roísín McAliskey?
She feared they’d kill her, which was almost a relief since she might
be reunited with Mummy that way. But due to her fame they let her go
after a bit of feeling up.
Exposed she felt, completely. What about all
those bodies Daddy had buried under the house? Could she sell them to
a dog food company? She stumbled out onto the icy front lawn and got
the paper as the Very Slow Train clattered by. Snow was falling
softly, and the black frost hurt her big fluffy-slippered feet.
Her face on the front page of the Canberra
Tiresome looked haggard. Was she drinking too much? Or perhaps too
little. She believed with Daddy that it was possible to drink yourself
sober. Nationalise the bastards, she thought.
After a couple of drums and a few cones she
felt better - for a while. Abandoning the dreary security of home she
went on a driving tour of local wineries, tasting herself blotto
(Daddy had always said it was rude to spit), till all the free samples
34
This incomprehensible computer crud was contributed by Mmmmmme Avril Foulle of the French
Foreign Legion’s Ladies Auxiliary, in between the lamingtounes and the sconés. poumpkine. Well, what did
you expect from such a hotbed of fascism?
they felt obliged to give their honoured guest put them out of
business.
Now for an archaeological exploration of the
Welsh countryside on a Very Slow Train. The sheep-infested cwm of the
Rhondda, second home to New Zealand expatriates and centre of the
Cymraeg napalm industry and nuclear itching powder program (on Channel
4) to deter the Saxon …
Shit, how did that get there? They might lock
me up for good.
Er … oh, I know where I was. Leonie. She
wrapped the Volvo round a policeman on the way back but she wasn’t
hurt (he had to be hospitalised in the Margot Kidder Medical Centre
for seven deadly months at life-threatening expense due to Nigel’s
wise scrapping of the sickly public health system) and Nigel got her
off and in fantasy got off on her in a carriage of the Very Slow Train
- the latter had been his initiative too. She sat at home, brooding
with both mobiles in her lap (she liked to make nuisance emergency
calls when annoyed) and struggling to come up with a new and literary
ruse.
George was going to be a big problem, the
Icelandic barnacle. She saw him sitting laughing with all his pals
from B’nai Brith, plotting the takeover of the world and possibly Will
Hutton-style spelling reform (all that was her prerogative).
But who cares, here I am, she thought, all
alone as usual and beset by dingbats and pink elephants. I cant spel
perogativ butt I dont cair. LAYoAnEe, orl aloAnee, Daddy pheremoAnee … she rang up her
agents in Tamworth and Nashville and by dint of sophisticated
answering machines soon had a global country music hit on her hands.
But then she loved pheremonial occasions.
It was like her birthday party - no one came
round at all.
“Why is me life all higlee-piglee?” she
wondered disconsolately.
To cheer herself up she folded her arms and did
a Cossack sitting-down dance across the trashed lounge room, with much
hullaballoo. After that her depression returned, and she curled up in
the corner in the foetal position, crying her eyes out.
Let me go! Let me go! Let my people go! I’m
Leonie Barmy.
She started to screech uncontrollably and
didn’t stop till like the flipwreck she tried proudly to be she had no
breath left at all.
Just one more drinkie - she was close to
passing out but her manacled brain and its slurred Voices were so
sluggish and in need of a tune that she hardly noticed and thought
they were simply the din of the Very Slow Train - and she’d have a
plan to fix him permanently.
Chapter Eight: George
George Björnsendottir sat in his office almost

at the cloud-capped pinnacle of Uillean & Onion’s 300-floor William A.
Gold building. This proud erection, dedicated in 1984 to the world’s
Least Successful Author, was located in the heart of Sydney’s renowned
Literary District, near the Ms Biz Tower and the imposing Irish marble
headquarters of Lizz Murphy Publicists Inc. Indeed, half of the North
Shore was littered with multistoreyed Poetry Venues, handsome piles
where a single verse might fetch up to $10 000 000 (merchandising of
gold-leaf replicas of the poet’s dole form excluded).Not that the poet
saw any of this. Satisfied with that, he glanced about at the pictures
of Iceland and polar bears on the walls, and felt homesick. A man of
the uttermost West, he recalled his boyhood struggles with the Edda
and the letter thorn and set the shitty horns of his helmet at a
rakish angle. At this rate he’d get into the Raiders35 easily. Good
thing, the guttery tabloids chiacked, that he abhorred football
(especially Gaelic), preferring the watery thrills of Arctic sea-ice
hockey in summer.
His Magnum Opus gleamed on a shelf above the
graven image of Mohammed by the door, all 22 000 pages of it, longer
than the Bible, Talmud, Mahabharata, Capital, the Collected Works of
Lenin, and the Vedas put together: his cv, a flight of fancy that had
taken him thirty years to concoct and thus which had prevented him
from ever doing much at all. He smiled to himself (using a pocket
epidiascope) and got on with reading the paper.
In the populistic Telegraph (though an
Islamist, he found the Koran trite and preferred comic books), he saw
Gerald’s face, making a rather silly moue - an old shot they’d bought
from the Animal Liberation Gazette for $5000 and one that made him
look like Ginger Meggs’s girlfriend. Next to it was a picture taken as
he was being bashed up on the way to jail, with the atrocious banner
headline ICEBERG LET US DOWN!!! (he’d even driven off the front page
the thunderous story of a former aristocrat-turned-crim who’d been
assigned the immortal ‘Heir Today and Con Tomorrow’). The snap ended
up making more brass than Irises.
George was flummoxed. They were only parasitic
uni students. Clearly the poor bugger had been shafted. We’re fighting
the wrong enemy, he decided, glancing out at the cardboard box city on
the street below.
He read that Gerald’s supporters at the
University and elsewhere had got together a campaign for his release.
“Free Gerald Iceberg!” they cried as they minced down Oxford Street,
brandishing placards and photos of Leonie with a big ‘X’ across her
face. It was preferable to her face, he decided acidly and stirred
himself up some Enosis. Ah, the refreshing plink of bubbles on the
face.
Questions were being stonewalled in the House,
and Amnesty International was calling for an international blockade.
It was a bit of a worry.
George scratched and picked his eminent Grecian
nose and tried to shake off the mental fog that he customarily
cultivated to avoid seeming brash and Icelandic.
To the rhythm of the martial music that
constantly resounded throughout the building, ten goldfish circled on
bicycles in a fetid and tiny bowl on the bookcase - of little interest
to his pet camel who was employed to spit gnats - the last straw - at
recalcitrant underlings like women writers. Herrings with ideas, he
thought poisonously of the latter while reviling the Pharisees. For
the moment, though, he ignored the lot and, adjusting his yashmak,
35
A Canberra footballing ladies’ auxiliary.
Chapter Eight: George 63
dwelt on the sea and tall ships and splicing the mainbrace and
precisely the sort of fishy stuff a man of the uttermost West would
think of. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, he murmured nautically and
received a restraining order from Robert Louis Stevenson. I must go
down to the sea again … he responded rashly. His macaw flew in ever-
decreasing circles while his ABC eyepatch (souvenired in his student
days from Moishe Dayan) was lost for a verb altogether.
But enough of this original vapourising, there
was work to do. He strongly adhered to the Shiite Work Ethic as
expounded by Fil. doktor Lars Willem Testamente of the Royal Goanese
Tap-Dancing Academy who, born to be wild, rode hotted-up motor
scooters in Tokyo with a gang of elk.
George waved to a passing angel and pored
clumsily over Leonie’s collection of short stories and pawed himself.
He’d not been feeling himself for some time so the experience was
reassuring.
(As his stepmother used to say, ‘poor boy, he’s
not himself, he’s actually Gina Lollobrigida’.)
Unlike her first novel they were almost well-
written, and hardly suitable for publication except perhaps by a press
run by that despised and workshy species, volunteers. Fuming inwardly
against the red-ragging UN Human Development Index and the communist
Genuine Progress Indicator, he screwed up the manuscript and stuffed
it into the bottom drawer where he kept his stained copies of Chained
Male.
Sick of literature, he took out his Nintendo
and got quite absorbed in it, getting to Level Ten in no time (there
will be no mention of degreed Masons in this book). Since his many
assistants did most of his work, it was getting harder to fill his
executive void. He threw down the beeping monstrosity after a while,
hating elegant variations, and amused himself by dropping goldfish out
of the cat-door he’d had installed in the sealed windowpane (every
upwardly mobile stray used it). They splattered on the pavement a
thousand metres below or fell into people’s hair and killed them.
(The building was so tall that he never came to
work without a parachute and his predecessor had perished when the
high-speed lift shot through the roof and put him into orbit around
Venus. Only Roger’s office was higher up and oxygen masks had to be
used due to the budget-conscious omission of a pressurised cabin.
Naturally, the windows had to be cleaned by helicopter, which was
hazardous.
Sometimes a chopper got too close and they’d
lose an entire level of staff to flying glass. Still, besides helping
to balance the budget and the CWA’s orgasm deficit it created billions
of interesting jobs, especially for glaziers and morticians.)
After a bit, George got tired of this mindless
activity and thought he’d do something more mindless still. He turned
on the tv.
Unluckily someone had set it to the pirate ABC
and he’d missed Mulligrubs anyway. He was horrified to see Leonie,
patently drunk and spouting vituperative oaths at an ailing Kerry
O’Brien. (She also stole his green pen and lifejacket.)
Something had to be done about that drunken
bitch or she’d ruin the company’s image. Slowly, his nimble brain
formed a plan, and in no time he was chuckling to himself. The crazy
cow would never wriggle out of this one.
Stumbling over a dozen mewling moggies, he went
back to his Nintendo, almost diving under the desk as a chopper passed
windily. (He cursed the ASO O’s in the sub-basement.) In the outer
office, a hundred barely-paid assistants with Laotian PhDs toiled over
teetering piles of manuscripts or rattled in exquisite states of ennui
at their word processors. The scene was almost Dickensian, or more
like a South Korean sweatshop in these Asia-aware days. All of U & O’s
casual employees were illegal immigrants and contributed greatly to

the country’s international competitiveness.
George, a proud legal immigrant himself, felt
good. He, Roger and Leonie were supporting the exciting lifestyles or
deathstyles of the fast-breeding and deplorably unhierarchical
underclasses who could live so close to work. Pity they kept popping
off like Rose - or maybe that they didn’t.
But he was still bored. He thought of indulging
his passion for tinkering with mechanical and electrical devices -
he’d recently invented the battery and the Spinning Jenny and was
making headway with the wheel - but the despotic Roger had warned him
off that after he fused every fax machine in the building not long
ago.
So, for a bit he just twiddled his thumbs, then
other parts of his anatomy. He ate the remaining goldfish and snorted
the speed he’d confiscated from his journalistic daughter that
morning. (‘You’re grounded, young lady!’ ‘But Dad, I’m 34! I’ve slept
with Gemma Wisdom! I won’t wear Full Hijab and that’s final. I hate
the 8 billion rules that apply - not only should no hair be out of
place but they even specify which hair. Can you lend me 50 bucks?’ ‘Go
ask your mother!’ ‘She was so desperate she went back to Saudi
Arabia!’)
He drop-kicked a few of the cats off his desk
(no match for Leonie) and danced a hornpipe on top of it, wishing he
had the courage to wear a burqha to work.
Bored, bored, bored. In a Shetland brogue he
declaimed some of his own excruciating doggerel over the building’s
public address system. He played with his yo yo and started a craze in
the building. He - but it was no use.
Desperate, he called in his Personal Assistant,
a young poetic man with coiffed hair and no testicles who regretted
his soused appearance at Daddy’s rally as the Queen of Aberdeen. Lucy,
about the only True Celt in the CM though no longer a member, which
doesn’t make the author’s job any easier, was a ca’canny, sword-
dancing Scot given to wearing frilly floral tonguetwisting tartan
housecoats from Kwangdong, and together they did ‘it’ (ie, sloppy
kissing) on the desk. The young highlander (fresh from PNG) had never
been kissed before as George and all his previous lovers were safely
into animatronic cybersex (sex workers were all starving). Unlike John
Turing he was also somewhat confused about his gender, having always
dysphorically longed to sport silky-smooth legs and a palmolive
complexion that made him look ten years younger, at least than George
Burns (in particular since he like Nietzsche was at last dead,
gratifying the AMA). His worst habit was smoking as no bee was safe
while he was around. He often had meaningful sexual interfaces with
bees and aphids but drew the line at praying-mantises because they
were too rough.
“Are you a happy little catamite now?” asked
George in between osculations, but the lad was shy and reflected on
the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
His insecterotic life had been marked by bouts
of car-stealing and impersonating Jana Wendt so successfully they gave
him her job for three months but most of the time he was almost
normal, at least when not visiting Kinki prefecture in Japan. In fact
George was thinking of giving him the boot, or perhaps a court shoe
would have been more appropriate and certainly went better with the
bright orange stockings.
Flapping galahs outside gave them both the
bird, the more effective for having learned every expletive George
used when he was dressing down a penitent author.
Fuck you, you little pinhead! I want you to
fucking put your back into it, you puerile little cocksucker!
They ignored it. Dizzy with the height and the

jet stream and the Music of the Spheres that could be heard up here on
2UW they kissed on into the afternoon, unperturbed by the throng of
assistants and subeditors passing through the open-plan office for
this their only thrill of the day, though one that lasted. It takes a
long time to have an orgasm by just kissing alone (or even with
someone else), though George had seen his PA do it by sitting on the
upper deck of a bus with his knees jammed together. How glad he was
that U & O kept people like him off the streets when they could have
done something more satisfying, like streetwalking.
At the very point of climax the phone rang -
George angrily grabbed it and barked “Whattya want?”
Leonie miaowed back “Have I caught you at a bad
time? I usually do. You’re certainly never working.”
“I’m - working - fine - at the moment.” he
gasped, heart pounding. He’d caught one of the moggies fair in the eye
(dinkum - how many comic novelists have used such a line?) The animal
looked about to attack him, so he hastily zipped up his fly. Too
hastily - he was soon shrieking down the phone, something about having
gelded himself.
Ha! she thought. That would never happen to me.
(Though something analogous once had. She’d worn skirts ever after.)
“Forget that dickbrain Lucian. Did you see me
live interview? I told him about how I was shot to pieces with an
aircraft cannon and reassembled and spent three days on a life support
system. It was awful. The blood, the agony, the Priest at the bedside
and I’m not even a Copt, and me miraculous recovery … And tell me how
I can return this bloody pen.”
When he’d got his breath back he said, “Give it
to me. I’m having drinkies with Kerry later.” The woman was off her
head.
He went to the men’s room to clean up. There
was certainly blood everywhere there, and men as well. (Tasteless AIDS
jokes will not be tolerated here.)
The Chief Subeditor Grade MCXLVIII, Prátt, a
short, stocky, socialist, and raven-haired man (his straightened locks
flowing over his round shoulders and at times cawing like a rookery)
who’d just been admitted to the hallowed halls of the Firm due to his
trueness to the Celtic Type and his failed career in motion pictures
(pictures of motion were not intrinsically very interesting), had
looked upon this scene with more satisfaction than he could ever have
felt at U & O, taking into account the Two Cultures gulf between him
and the mechanically-minded George - even boasting loudly to his
colleagues about it - and George really should have noticed that.
But, due perhaps to the incessant blare of
fifes and trumpets, he hadn’t. It was the last straw and the camel
resigned, offended at the reference to this, gnats and herrings, and
fell to its death down a curiously empty lift shaft intended for
Roger. After returning with his AIDS test clear, George chased Lucy
out and, rubbing his palms together with such renewed glee that they
threw off sparks - a complaint he’d had since the hairs had appeared
on them during adolescence - decided to put his plan into action right
away.
Chapter Nine: Daddy’s Vision of the Virgin
♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣
Leonie’s ancient father, whose name,
inventively, was Paddy, rose from a soiled mastodon-hair mattress in
his safe house - located in the Canberra suburb of Salmonella Plains
but having been imported from Ireland and rather egregious amongst the
ex-guvvies - and, muttering oaths against the ‘short-arsed’ and the
Little People, booted his Head Bodyguard, Ahmed, awake. His pipe of
shamrock leaves was still stuck in his mouth; it was his habit to
smoke all night and one of Ahmed’s jobs was to keep the thing alight.
(One of his other jobs was to soothe the Arts-
conscious Paddy by playing Irish jigs on the fiddle, an instrument
that fortunately he’d once learned to play - not that the world’s
symphony orchestras agreed - along with the rare electric gumleaf and
the hydraulic glass harmonica.
Ahmed’s Irish jigs, it’s true, had a certain
Sino-Palestinian flavour (though never a Sino-Germanic one), but Daddy
never noticed as he like his daughter was tone-deaf.36)
Paddy - separating his eyelids with a tin-
opener as he’d forgotten the combination37 while his right arm remained
raised (talons extended) in an ardent CM salute - coughed
paroxysmically. After his arm had been defused by his partially-
privatised and unaccountable bomb squad, and the alcohol drip removed,
he rubbed his shroud-bound hands together, savouring the smell of
death which arose from them. Flies buzzed round him thanks to Emily
Dickinson and clustered on his face but after so many years of
unmitigated filth he never bothered to brush them away. He smelled
like a bait-shop in the height of summer and was about as inviting as
multiple sclerosis (though he eschewed mathematics).
“Ah, well noy, I must ring me dear daughter
again.” he said in an accent not entirely genuine. “The poor girl
must be lonely in her fortified hideaway flowing with breast-milk and
fortified wine. Charity and beating begins at home.”But all he got was
the answering machine. His blood boiled and his ears whistled and
steamed (like commercial radio it played only ‘A Walk in the Black
Forest’ by the Der Fuffelsingers). She’d said something about having
one on the way. He longed for an heir. But then she was mad.
Bugger it. Time for breakfast. Ah, well noy.
Blut und Eisen! Donner und Blitzen! What would he have this morning,
cockroach-in-marzipan again? Magpie nest soup? Braised earwig? (One
had crawled through his ear into his head last night but had had
little trouble escaping out the other one.)
He’d long weaned himself off food, so the
question came as close to being academic as he could manage without a
PhD in economics.
A man of habit who hadn’t exactly laved since
the Flood (and that was involuntary too), Paddy got Ahmed to turn on
the wireless, but apart from hysterical McLibels commercials, talk-
back radio hysteria (often used these days in lieu of opinion polls
and elections) and Leonie’s one hit wonder there wasn’t much on it,
most rock stars having departed for Mars.
Coughing himself while yawning cavernously,
Ahmed, whirling the billy davidically round his head and then pouring
the Pakistani-style tea, had by now realised that the job ad he’d
answered, which spoke of ‘desktop publishing, organising meetings and
performing research’ had been a little misleading. Just another rotten
36
I might point out to the Irish community and fans of Mary Daly that Paddy is in no way typical of the
average Irish person. Just in case they don’t notice. I also apologise in advance to the Palestinian
community for the character of Ahmed who is about as plausible as myself.
37
Clearly this is (again!) ripped off Spike Milligan c. 1968. Grow up or sideways.
Chapter Nine: Daddy’s Vision of the Virgin 67
PA job, the sort no one in their right mind would take if they had a
real choice.
“Would you care for a cup of tea, Effendi?” he
enunciated in what he imagined to be perfect Gaelic. Daddy grabbed the
cup, spilled most of it over himself, and, yelping with agony,
attacked it with a straw which slipped from his greasy lips and stood
up straight.
Ahmed groaned internally. That was embarrassing
so he turned away. How had he got himself into this mess? To satisfy
his case worker and the hard-faced, cropped-headed woman who’d
fingerwaggingly interviewed him down at the SS, he’d kept applying all
over for something permanent but he lacked Australian work experience,
his interlude as an anti-aircraft gunner being of little use here and
indeed there.
Naturally, he’d tried to extend his experience
with volunteer work - except as a dervish since that didn’t fit his
current whirl view - but found that other people were doing the pay-
free jobs he went for (when they weren’t eliminated altogether by
restructuring). The bizarre theory that anyone can get a job if they
reduce their wages sufficiently never had much appeal to him, since
his going market value was about 3¢ an hour.
And he didn’t fancy digging or barricading
roads, since he’d done little else in what he liked to think of as his
own country. (A pity his Nigel-designed Australia Card recorded that
he was a ‘short-arsed, bone-idle Wog’.)
So, with fifty-six boys to feed, and a huge
moustache and pair of bushy eyebrows to maintain, he would stick to
this dreadful job - for the time being.
Not especially tall himself, Daddy stamped his
tinia’d Aryan feet to restore the circulation. The pygmy was muttering
to himself again. Worse than his daughter. Mutter, mutter, mutter, he
muttered, his best friend like Dorothy Parker’s being his mutter.
‘Practising Gaelic’ as the Wog maintained. Practising homosexual, more
likely. Uninterested now in the historically parochial concerns of
contemporary political economy, he cast his powerful if tinia’d mind
back over the ancient history of the British Isles. The Celts, praise
be, had arrived around 750 BCE. Before that … who the hell had built
Stonehenge, then? Who had carved the Blarney Stone? Who raised
Glastonbury Tor? Who rolled the logs to pile up the stones of
Blackpool Rock?
Ahmed kept claiming it was his Woggy lot who’d
paddled there on bum-boats three-and-a-half millennia earlier from the
glorious and at the time (as Ahmed stressed) Protestant Mycenaean
Empire which had spread from Greece to Egypt, a fact which to Daddy -
with his breathtaking ignorance of the usual controversy surrounding
all archaeological claims - meant that possibly little yellow Asian
Genes shaped like crescents or pagodas or menorahs, or worse still, 95
dopy orange Protestant ones resembling Leonie’s theses, floated in his
ancient bloodstream (like most Irish, group O, and hence names like
O’Hara, O’Hallaran, O’Hell etc). Rubbish, he thought, but Ahmed then
had reminded him of the Scottish legend of Prince Gathelus.
Daddy, who’d recently bought the illustrious
titles of Prince of Wales and of Darkness at bargain basement prices,
knew the story only too well. That aristocratic Greek fucker had
dragged his hangers-on from the Peloponnese to Egypt, got the hots for
the Pharoah’s daughter, Scota, imaginatively renamed his followers
‘Scots’ and after embezzling heavily from the National Sarcophagus
Fund migrated first to sunny Spain, then to the north of Ireland, and
finally to Scotland where the whisky was cheaper. A genetic gem of
Celtic Thought it was. Sweat beaded his temples and dripped onto the
formica breakfast table giving rise to plumes of acrid smoke. It had
to be true …
“And the bagpoipe’s from Africa too.” the

stunted one had added. He didn’t need to draw Daddy’s attention to the
fact that Tartan was mentioned in the Bible, twice (Isaiah, 20:1 and 2
Kings 18:17). Isaiah took his holidays in Wales, he emphasised, and
wintered regularly at John O’Groats in the glare of the Midnight Sun.
Hoots! The superstitious Daddy had turned
several shades of puce at what he regarded as wilful miscegenation and
crossbreeding of the Celtic elan vital, which he wished to remain
lean, mean and efficient. He had always believed that there were still
hardy stocks of economically-pure Celts from which a free Market Race
of globetrotting entrepreneurs could be bred, forestalling all further
Chinese-masterminded attempts at Christian Lesbian Zionist Tibetan
Immigration. Racial downsizing and public squalor were inevitable as
we could only afford one sort of Australian due to the crushing weight
of the gargantuan profits being screwed out of the poor these days.
He raked his fingers through his straggly
beard. Not since the tribe of Welsh native Americans from Philadelphia
(called Mandans and led by a Feathered Taff called Prince Madoc) had
arrived on his doorstep - demanding funding for their latest
eisteddfod and cultural exchange visit to Patagonia - had he felt such
consternation.38
Indeed, the thought terrified him so much that
he banished it to a far-off province of his psychic empire. Wogs began
at Calais after all, and who knows where they’d end up if it wasn’t
for the Celtic Mafia.
Unknown to Daddy, Ahmed was muttering that his
PhD in Arabic and Mycenaean Literature hadn’t got him far in this
country as it wasn’t recognised any more than Leonie’s, though not for
the same reason. Much the same went for his sensitive prose-poems
about talking artichokes in Linear B. He almost wished he was Chinese
because then he’d probably be living in a decent house and eating
well. (His conversion to Buddhism and his pitching of a tent in the
middle of the freeway which Leonie had taken into town hadn’t helped
much on that score, but the latter was handy to the camel-feed store.)
Back home in Sabra refugee camp life had been
even more miserable, what with fleschette shells exploding in the
lounge room at all hours of the morning and night and damaging the
classy wattle and dung furniture. But there he’d at least moved in the
highest ever-decreasing intellectual circles. Here in this
multicultural paradise he was reduced to the mere hireling of a
psychotic. Not much had changed. He felt he’d have been better off
being reincarnated as a gnat.
He remained amazed at the dangerous route the
author was taking, and wondered why there were no references to
Nicaragua in this novel, though there is one now, or arguably two.39
“Ah, what a dutiful daughter I have.” the
insert-name-of-downtrodden-minority-group-baiting Daddy coughed and
dribbled to himself, leaning satisfyingly on his crutch and fondling
her picture as he unscrewed the top of his first Bushmills of the day.
“‘Course, I like minority groups”, he went to himself, “there’s the
Rich for a start.” (Not that they were very tasty). He hawked up some
choice phlegm which fell in great viridial gobs all over the picture-
glass, and he lapped it up, not wanting to waste it. He saw the vet
38
Though who can forget his embarrassing public revelations that he had enjoyed the Celtic Cowboy
stories of Zane O’Grady, particularly Hogmanay at Dry Gulch , in which the hero Fergus Llyr McSilly and
the famous Clan of the ‘Silly’ Tartan were worsted several times by the African-American branch of the
Apache Mafia. Since that geronomic gaffe he’d felt that cowboys looked rather silly in kilts and totally
gave up on literature.
39
As Leonie pointed out to the author after the book was completed (whoops), the question of whether the
last clause is a ‘reference to Nicaragua’ or a ‘reference to a reference to Nicaragua’, and therefore ipso facto
a reference to Nicaragua had the potential to keep Western philosophy departments going for millennia,
despite continuing cutbacks to education budgets.
every Friday (it was cheaper though he wasn’t a Muslim like George) to
make sure he remained in the peke of condition.
In the picture she was naked and lying on a
bunnyrug. It had been taken40 ages ago, when she was 28.
“Ah, you look the image of yer mother. I t’ink
you’re a better bonk, but. I wonder why yer vocabulary increased so
much at dat time?” His First Fuck, his Original Sin, had been with his
daughter, he tried to convince himself like a good Christian; his Last
Fuck was in question theologically, and he like Leonie despised
eschatology. You never knew where it led.
His Macgillicuddily reeking countenance erupted
with an apocalyptic mass of noisy facial tics, causing Ahmed to dive
under the table momentarily.
Daddy felt no guilt, since his own short and
swarthy father had been worse.
Or so he told himself as he scratched his
mountainous and knobbled backside and thumbed through the latest child
pornography catalogue from the recently-privatised Child Welfare
Department. His Saxonophile father (Corporal Saddam von Barmy) had
been a monster, making the two year old Paddy drag home drayloads of
snow - horses were expensive though more palatable - in the depths of
an Irish winter to freeze the many corpses he transported about the
world as part of the illicit human organ trade (today it was all
cloned in South China along with Saxon slaves by the CM). At the same
time he lorded it over their village as District Commissioner (for
body odour and the inspection of seagulls) lest boat-people swan in
from the Canary Islands or wherever to bribe the gullible locals with
genuine gold oranges.
His racially-hygienic mother (Sergeant-Major
Ceilidh O’Hoolighan-Mendes ‘George’ al-Hussein O’Yamashta-Bum Suk III
VC DSO MM GCMG FRS), when they were courting, thought he was a
musician, and in truth was too obsessed with her aquaerotic dreams of
North Korean underwater childbirth and the Trooping of the Colour of
the Hermit Kingdom to be critical. Later, he told her he was an import
/ export undertaker (owned overseas). She mysteriously disappeared one
year when business was bad.
Paddy’s dear old dad had buggered and beaten
him from the age of five upward, like his father and his father before
him (all gombeen men and molesting Scout Leaders), and he would still
have been at it today except that Paddy felled him with his trusty,
solid gold shillelagh after he escaped Germany for Argentina in 1945.
His mother, the renowned editor of the official and definitive Taliban
edition of Malleus Maleficarum, had tolerated the abuse, saying that
it’d make a man of him.
She had been right. He’d graduated from borstal
to maximum security prison at the age of 21 (at about the time of the
Russian Revolution) and since then figured that rape and slavery were
things he had the right to experience in reverse.
Bath-time. The best time of the year.
Cleanliness and full immersion baptism were surely next to godliness,
let Sufi mystics say what they would. Though filthy rich, Paddy was
mean and had used the same bathwater over and over for decades.
Lowering his scabrous skinny form into that soup of his own making was
like encountering a familiar friend.
He always peed in the bath and sometimes
defecated in it too, so an amazing variety of pond life had appeared
and the bath had been registered as a wilderness area with the
Australian Conservation Foundation. But they were getting a bit
concerned at the hundreds of dead Murray cod floating on the surface
and the area’s popularity with duck hunters, the Sporting Shooters’
40
He wished they’d return it.
Association, water-skiiers and mountain-goat farmers (obsessed with

‘grazing pressure’) who revelled in calloused heels from hiking
leather-shorted over the pointier bits of the Australian Alps while
yodelling.
Daddy - though superstitious to the point of
mania and like his old chum Adolf a man who abhorred the eating of
animal flesh lest it pollute his sacred genetic endowment - believed
in making a profit. Not for him the safe, liberal world of middle
class welfare and tax-evading - he earned his wealth and sullage
through sweat and blood (if other people’s) and was bloody well going
to hang onto it.
A shame it was (as far as he was concerned)
Friday 13th. Stuff the vet for today, he was appearing in a novel and
his bathwater was getting cold.
He’d get Leonie - when next he saw her - to
soak in it too his one fustian suit, designed at gunpoint by Isaac
Mizrahi, hoping perhaps to sprout it and start a cotton farm worked by
banjo-playing Saxon slaves who were Angles not angels. That was human
nature, he reminded himself.
Ahmed, trying to sneak a bite of lunch and
uncomfortable in his regulation bamboo underpants, felt ill. He knew
he was going to have to scrub his Boss’s scabby and much picked-at
back with the steel-toothed brush and carbolic. It was a distasteful
procedure and there was always the danger of causing too much agony
and getting shot in the head for it. (Paddy always carried a loaded
Luger to reach for at the mention of the word ‘Art’ while bathing,
being inaccurate with quotations.)
Several allegedly Irish bullets had lodged in
Ahmed’s neck and could not be removed, one of them the exploding
variety. He was very careful when on the Very Slow Train (this one -
what identity had a ‘train’ when the carriages and engine were
replaced all the time - powered by a rubber band in a toothed cotton
reel) in case the jolting blew his head off.
The other day in Sydney he’d been hit by a
goldfish from on high - he almost believed the occult stories about
rains of frogs and spontaneous combustion and the like - but while his
neck had concertina’d for a while there’d been no explosion. Perhaps
it was a dud. Then again perhaps it wasn’t.
“Bonk! Bonk! Bonk! Oh yoy are men of stones, if
yoy can’t see how much I love me dear little dusky daughter.”
overacted Daddy, thinking only briefly of his shareholding in the CM
bamboo underwear plantations that now surrounded Canberra.
Ahmed couldn’t resist an upward cast of the
eyes.
“Pshaw! George Bernard! What do yoy think of
this Gerald feller, native chappie?” the scientifically-minded Mafioso
queried, glorying in his vibrant Celtic consanguinity. Illustrious
Gaelic families had gone into his makings, the O’Hoolighans, the
O’Tulles, the Pestalozzis, the Minimatas, the Hiroshimas, the
Nagasakis, the Londiniums, the Shickelgrübers … (he’d learnt his
ancestry off by heart as was the Celtic Way). The prized Celtic Gene,
a legacy of the Druidic Race’s tom-catting alcoholically about Europe
and Asia Minor over the centuries (unlike the Phoenicians, whom he’d
heard had invented the alphabet, the Lebanese takeaway and the
Phoenician blind, they were barred from Club Med and Daddy couldn’t
get over that), twinkled brilliantly green on (he hoped) every one of
his padraigal chromosomes. Had they not spread it all over the world
like a disease?Yes, he was the Staggering Celt, all right. What
fookin’ country am I in Jimmy? What d’ye mean, Turkey - shite! Where’s
the nearest pub?
His Grandfather, Michael ‘Olwen’ Finnegan, had

been a noted Irish bard and football hooligan41, while his great-aunt,
Oliver Cromwell, had spared no one in her impressively bloody campaign
to free Ireland from democracy. She’d had many exsanguinating
agricultural triumphs, such as the Irish Potato Famine. The soil was
in his blood and engrained like Bordeaux mixture in his hide. No
references to pole-squatting or Bordeaux mixture will found in this
novel.
That he suffered from brucellosis (not that he
was an Australian) and sickle cell anaemia of the brain was no
impediment to his genealogical pride. He’d had his Total Descent Chart
drawn up by a cut-price Malaysian genealoger and his resulting rare
pedigree, traced back 2000 or more years so accurately that he knew
the names and addresses of all his gleaming-coated ancestors, what
they had for breakfast, etc, showed him to be a pure arsehole.
It didn’t quite measure up to his own Race
Memory, but as a 200th-great grandson of Partholón and the Morrigan he
was able to hold at least two simultaneously opposed propositions in
mind. Was not his great-great-great-Grandfather Krishna P. de Gobineau
‘Gob’ O’Tulle the very man who’d chased the Armenians out of Ireland
(well there’s no sign of them now)? And had not his 15th-great-Uncle
Finbar Demetrios Weerasooria-Chan, KCMG, First Earl of Cork and
Dauphin of France, been the man to launch the Children’s Crusade?
Actually, no, but there were plenty of Barons and Squires in there and
he knew that he was related (if distantly) to most of the Royal Houses
of Europe and Thailand. All of this could be demonstrated with the
precision of natural science.
Thinking he was half-Chinese, Clan-na-Gael had
sent him all their laundry and he regularly received letters addressed
to ‘Mr B. Wu’, originally of Kowloon, from a supposed great-nephew who
was always begging for money. However, he refused to have anything to
do with this importunate and resumed his dream of meeting personally
the Celtic sorceress Mongfhinn (if you can’t run a meeting wreck it)
and asking for three wishes (when he could think of any).
Ahmed rubbed at his (own) neck cautiously,
having photocopied Paddy’s Chart and then distributed it around the
barracks to general merriment. The consensus of opinion was that
‘Daddy’ descended ultimately from a species of feral pig.
The Chart had been published, too, in a shabby
recycled edition by the Hindu Anthropological Foundation in (oddly)
Lahore. Daddy was also fond of the Physiognomy they practised;
eyebrows which met in the middle and simian foreheads were clearly a
sign of low-grade intelligence if not criminality or chronic lack of
employment, which was why he’d had that makeover and facelift. His
newly-restored Hapsburg Lip subverted the evil anti-Celtic attempts
over the generations to pollute his line. Next up were heaps of
retrospective gene therapy and a go at the next funding round —
hacking into the Australia Council Central Computer which had replaced
all overpaid committees — to pay for it. (He’d leave the breast
implants till later.)
The well-informed Paddy, whose low brow ridges
bespoke a rich prehistoric heritage and whose reign he knew had been
predicted by the combined efforts of Nostrodamus and George Orwell,
gloated. Calculator in hand and nose permanently in the air, he worked
out his quarterings.
In exclusive begorric fashion, his studbook
showed that he’d had 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents,
16 great-great grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents, and so
41
His most famous (if rather autobiographical) ballad will be known to all. It starts out:
‘There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He grew whiskers on his chinnegan …All right, it’s not as momentous as living alone on beans in
a bee-loud glade, but better than waiting for Godot.Well, if you live on beans, you live alone.
on in ruthless Celtic geometric progression. His head spun at the

realisation that 100 generations ago (roughly two millennia) he must
have been kicked off by 1.2676506 x 1030 grandparents of astronomical
greatness, more people than have ever existed on the earth (130
trillion or so) - and each one a True Celt! 42 Celtic domination if not
math overflow was assured (albeit in reverse). Go back a few more
generations and the average Ur-Celt (such as the rice bubble-loving
King Idi Mbene I of Ancient Tanzania, and of course Cheddar Man) would
have more torchlit rally-going, Olympian ancestors than there were
quarks in the universe. The mystery of where Cain’s wife had come from
was now revealed. The Bronx, obviously.
Quod ersatz demonstrandum, he thought
economically. Quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id potius credit.
Through his Faith and commitment to cockpit politics he had since
graduating as a school bully truly cornered the genetic market. Indeed
to goodness, what a lot of bedaddical shagging had gone into producing
him, and him alone!
(He discounted his cousins and his second
cousins and his third cousins twice removed since most of them were
Ojibway. He certainly didn’t have any cousins German. D a m n o s a
hereditas!)
Conversely, he misologically reasoned, alarmed,
it was plain that Celts were disappearing faster than the Great Auk;
there was only one of him and Leonie didn’t look like getting a bun in
the oven.
Ahmed stopped playing (fortunately spared this
impeccable Irish logic) and said he didn’t think much of Gerald, but
that there was a sliver of hope for the Peace Process and it was
always important to get your demographics right.
“Oi loik also get myself off on the Patience
Strong, a great quacksalver for our toim.” he added virtuously,
angling for a promotion as he’d noticed her books on a shelf above the
decaying bed. As Daddy bridled at his mocking pronunciation, the Sino-
Palestinian began to recite with feigned fervour:
You won’t go wrong
You won’t go wrong if you do your best and keep your

conscience clear -
Not far wrong if you do your daily duties year by year - You’ll
get along if
you have a steady star to travel by - something to believe in
when a storm bursts in the sky
You can’t go wrong if you always try to listen carefully - to the
voice that
speaks within wherever you may be .... You won’t stray far orf
the narrow
path if you spare some time each day - to commune with Him
who was the Life, the Truth, the Way.
You can’t go wrong on the zigzag road if you get your values
right - able to
distinguish false from true and black from white ....Life can
never beat
you if you keep your thinking straight - knowing how to judge
between
the first and second rate.
42
Ie, 12676506000000000000000000000000000000. Simply use the Celtic formula F [forbears] = 2 n, where n
= number of generations ago, starting with the parents. All this proved, Paddy believed, the progenitorial
superiority of the Celtic Race. Leonie considered the notion to be the greatest hoax of all time and
remained an unreconstructed solipsist.
Struggling with this foreign tongue (he’d once

made the mistake of calling Daddy ‘English’ and had never forgotten
it), he dried up momentarily, then brightened again:
Something something (how often that came into

English poetry) Roses are red, violets are blue … There’ll be
bluebirds over …
Unmoved since the books had been a sarcastic

present from Leonie and gone unread, Paddy (a lifelong sufferer from
Asperger’s syndrome and a knee) snarled celtically, being unlike
Mordecai Vanunu in favour of a nuclear solution to most conflicts
including that with the monkey on his back. Indeed, his drive to
triumph over others - what he referred to as his Principles - knew no
limits. Many of his nights he spent with the Napoleon brandy and the
pâté de merles playing solitaire with a single card so he always won.
(A good thing it was solitaire as he was an inveterate gambler. Often
he played patchinko or Welsh roulette - leaving only one chamber of
the revolver empty - but had so far been lucky, unlike the rest of
us.)
He also dreamt in his up-to-date manner of
creating through artificial intelligence a Race of electronic and
nanotechnological Celts who would in accordance with the sacred Laws
of Spencerian Evolution and of Supply and Demand eventually replace
the entire workforce of untermenschen (hopefully they’d also be
assiduous consumers) and indeed come to dominate the universe,
exterminate! Before that, the pure semi-Nomadic Celtic Types who were
still to be found in remote, undrowned Cymraeg valleys and remote
Scots Highland crags and remote West Ireland bogs were to be weeded
out with an ingenious system of weighting: fondness for potatoes, +500
points; turned-up nose, +83; red flappy ears, +40; having a leek, +12;
being a Welsh Nationalist, +9; impressive sporran, +45; tendency to
recite Finnegans Wake backward while drunk, +125; being permanently
pissed, +666; correct wearing of the kilt, +2000.
These were the positive features, but one also
had to be alert to the negative ones: Bavarian accent, -
51.56564734736; inability to play the tin whistle, -104; tall, Nordic,
and non-leprechaunic appearance, -1628; belonging to the Welsh Office,
-9000000; fondness for drowning Welsh valleys, -2156; Protestant
proclivities, -31101517; Italian suits, -1000000000000; leather
shorts, - 3562365836382764.2; bowler hat, -152; liking for Roast Beef
and Brown Windsor Soup, -1050505050; delight in being sodomised, -
1.2676506 x 1030.
Laughing supermaniacally, he read over a secret
ARSE report about Leonie’s former partner (complete with ads for that
agency’s cost-defraying subsidiary, ARSE Liquor), annoyed that bits of
his brain were not properly connected to the rest and were presently
humming away in entirely different Weltanschauungen. He exulted,
nevertheless, that his black thumb-prints bred racially pure and
fiscally rectitudinal bacteria by the billion.43
Apparently, this degenerate cross-dressing
crossbreed Gerald was anything but tractable and had taken the moral
high ground several times in prison, at the risk of his own life (he
shared his cell with several Welsh Nationalist members of Hamas). His
non-robotic wit had also become legendary and a book of his ‘Sino-
43
A dissident and secessionary section of his grey matter imagined them preposterously Morris-dancing
insickening girlish Saxon fashion (though Ahmed claimed that his lot had invented even that). They were
all sissy-men, Morris dancers, all dancing with each other. Not many real men would want to wear bells
on their clothes. Boys cross their legs with an ankle or banjo on their knee etc. Typical Wog stuff.
His neurological secret police were sent in but few returned.
Jewish’ jokes had been smuggled out, and U & O were making pots of
money from it.
For instance, Gerald delighted in telling the
following gag to his fellow black prisoners (when they weren’t hanging
themselves), which Daddy now pointlessly read aloud as part of his
participation in a conspiracy to debunk conspiracy theories (and reach
the very bottom of the barrel):
A Sino-Jewish man in medieval Wales gets

tired of all the anti-Semitism, with its quavering
exhortations to ‘please explain’, and wonders if a change of
religion would help. Being disgusted with Christianity, he
decides to become a Buddhist. Unfortunately, most of the
Christians have never heard of Buddhism, so they keep
lionising him in the same way. Finally, in great despair, he
prays to the Buddha, saying, ‘Lord Buddha, when I am
reincarnated, please let me come back as anything but a Sino-
Jew.’ So when he is reincarnated in the late 20th century, he
comes back as a Palestinian.
Hearing it, the seasoned Buddhist Ahmed could

hardly resist a chuckle, the more so since poor ‘demented’ Leonie
thought he was a Sino-Hebrew, a conjecture based presumably on his
proboscistic prodigiousness. He felt glad though that, unlike her, he
didn’t have a drop of Celtic blood in his body, that having emigrated
to Ulaanbator where it set up shop as brain surgeon and did very
nicely on the newly-created stock and pedigree market. Ah, the cunning
of history and all that. 44 His Boss sounded as though he’d learned most
of his from the back of a pizza box.
(As they engaged in all this ethnic flummery,
sponsored by the Association of Rhinologists and the Pauline Hanson
Fraternity for the Revival of the white (rather than red) bits of the
British Empire, Gerald sat in his minute and crowded cell, plotting
his escape to avoid a slow death through radical boredom - and this
from a librarian. He’d written a few political treatises on toilet
paper á la Antonio Gramsci and these were bringing in quite a tidy
income from newly-red Italy. He’d also made contacts with his fellow-
Vegans - the cult having been banned in recent years as ‘unCeltic’ and
formed itself into a merciless underworld movement - and shamed or
bribed the screws into giving him all sorts of privileges, so it was
just a matter of time.
Of course, this was all above board with the
privileges being awarded through the Wagga Wagga Arts Council and
people going out of the room if they had a conflict of interest.
Sometimes everybody went out of the room, though, and things got a bit
bogged down.)
Daddy scratched his nit-rich head. A
fundamentalist Papist amongst other things, he didn’t get it at all.
Was this Gerald a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew, or even a Daoist
Mormon, he wondered aloud in a flourish of hackneyed xenophobia (a
word whose meaning had never been explained to him), fantasising at
the same time (which confirmed to him his ingenuity) about Leonie in
Rabbinical drag.
The point was important because he knew from
childhood that he had to believe in the exact opposite of what the
Prods believed, which had him holding that the earth was flat and the
sun a frozen wasteland. This too was the Celtic Way, though cheeky
Leonie with a toss of her sidelocks called it the ‘monkey see, monkey
don’t’ principle. He laughed patronisingly. Ahmed didn’t see the funny
side of it, clearly.
44
Fans of Hegel will note that the great man has a new book of poems out, published by the redoubtable
Rude Books and edited by the late Alan Ginsberg.
Ah, religion. No humour or vision in that, and

a damned good thing too. Pol Pot Shot had had the right idea, he
thought, for a Choge. For instance, being an expert on History and
World Affairs Paddy was convinced that Jerusalem - being so like
Belfast - should become the capital of Ireland, and posted stone by
numbered stone to the emerald isle for the purpose. (William Blake and
Sid Vicious objected from beyond the grave.) If he ran the Middle East
he’d see them all at Midnight Mass quick smart.
His Faith - based on a rigidly hereditarian
interpretation of the Celtic Bible which placed the superb Celtic Race
of Eammon and Maeve at the origin of all things - meant a lot to him.
He prayed every night in a loud voice (Heaven being quite a way off)
till God angrily threatened in a Golders Green accent to strike him
down for disturbing his Sleep. “I had enough problems with Nietzsche,
who by the way is dead,” He pointed out rather nastily, “Druidic
goddesses in ‘harks’ of bulrushes who put H’s on h- er, oranges, I
gave up on a long time ago.”
Daddy got the message that this Nietzsche
wasn’t exactly sitting at His right hand (who was on the left up there
he wasn’t sure). But then he was a fookin’ German. Still, it was
something to receive any reaction at all from God, so he wasn’t too
miffed by this bad case of mistaken identity. Of course the Guy was
bound to get Irritable occasionally, considering his labrynthine Duty
Statement and his ongoing PhD in Creation Science at the LSE. Daddy
knew all about the weight of responsibility and how much work it took
to understand the Nicene Creed and avoid paying any tax. A pity the
countries of the world (apart from Ireland) looked so stupid on the
map - He’d obviously never taken draughtsmanship or cartography. No
surprise either - Daddy drew on his fearsome knowledge of map
projections from Mercator to Molleweide to Briesemeister Oblique Equal
Area - that the Godless welfare state had broken up like
GondwanalandBut whatever his religion, this Gerald was clearly
something of a brain, by contrast to his sportive daughter who as far
as he was concerned had the intelligence and manners of a cockroach
and a face to match. “Back to the three Rs!”, he announced
dramatically. Ahmed tried to appear interested as he’d put a grain of
rice on lay-by that morning.
Gerald Iceberg!, thought Daddy with difficulty
but exemplary etiquette, irrelevant scenes of demagoguery rioting in
his byzantine head. (Satan rang at that point but had to put up with
Daddy’s wonky answering machine. (It wouldn’t do to appear
discriminatory.))
The prison Governor had vomited to him the
other day at a Celtic Mafia barbie that Iceberg would probably take on
the status of Nelson Mandela if he were kept inside too long. Riots
had already broken out all over the country and Beëlzebub was busy
organising counter-measures.
Nigel was worried too, though his Cypriot
consciousness seemed clouded by his infatuation with Leonie (Paddy
could understand that) and Four X beer - now Three Point Two X due to
cutbacks.45 Best to let the creep break out, said the PM - this would
also please U & O and maybe to Nigel’s joy he’d be shot while
escaping.
The prospect gave Paddy ideas, an unusual
phenomenon.(All his had been pinched by Hitler.)
“I dunno, Bawss. I think he’s Reform Temple.”
Paddy (having almost forgotten his own question
due to the scandalous interpolation made above by the author) began
removing his grease-impregnated trousers, followed by his Y-fronts,
45
Nostrodamus predicted this too.
which were, after six months of continuous wearing, black. The

extended family of anteaters living in them ran for their lives.
As he opened his sooty, toothless mouth to make
a show of replying (‘Reform Temple’ sounded to him like some teetotal
turn-out and better avoided), a rather pregnant woman with penetrating
dark eyes swept somewhat balletically into the room. She made the sign
of the Cross with much ironical shrugging.
Paddy, startled that she had no introductory
jerichotic fanfare as was Normal, turned away and covered his
pendulous parts briskly. With the other hand behind his back, he
directed Ahmed to beat her into submission, but she raised two fingers
in blessing and the hapless Sino-Palestinian (half her size) felt a
great wind blow him out of the way.
“‘Scuse me.” said the flatulent Daddy with rare
politeness, as he had a yen for dark-haired maidens.
“I’m here”, the woman began frostily, “to
introduce more sophisticated humour and safer driving into this
story.”
Alarmed if not alienated by the word
‘sophisticated’, Daddy tried to drag his sweat-stiffened trousers and
braces back on and deliver a dissertation on Jung’s theory of the
Collective Unconscious of Top Management or better still a roll-call
of his myriad Ancestors. But something was stopping them.
Oh, that.Why it was so revered by Mafiosi when
it could be such a damned nuisance he wasn’t sure. Last decade he
caught it in the washing machine while trying to perform some vile
sexual act with Leonie. For a moment there he thought he was finished
- he’d spun round and round, in terror that like a length of weak
elastic it’d snap. Pity he still used a spin drier, though only for
erotic purposes.
Suddenly it came loose and he sailed gracefully
down the hall. He flew yowling through the windowpane and rammed
headfirst into the front lawn. The safe house with its many mansions
was not very safe at times. 90% of his many accidents happened at
home.
By the time he’d extricated himself he found he
was being ogled by Saxon passers-by. Vainly, he tried to hide his
diminutive and speckled pecker - in the thankfully unmown grass - from
the attentions of a rather Mediterranean nun with a magnifying-glass.
(It was all the more embarrassing because he’d inadvertently tied a
knot in it when experimenting at 14 and hadn’t been able to undo it
since.)
He simply couldn’t believe Ahmed’s catty
suggestion that Leonie had done it deliberately.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded now of the
woman, his gorilla-sized penis pounding. He commanded Ahmed to offer
her a Ratsak cocktail while he delivered a fatherly lecture on the
lean and mean econo-biological Efficiency of the CM. She just stared
back in exasperation.
“I’m also here to protect Leonie. She is worth
a trillion ‘True Celts’.” She rubbed at her lower back and wondered if
she shouldn’t have had an abortion.
Her mobile rang (she abhorred The Blue Danube).
It was Satan, rather than Leonie, complaining grandiloquently in his
capacity as God’s agent about the lack of even-handedness in this
book. “Get thee behind me - er, well, don’t just stand there, go
away!” she retorted recklessly, and switched the thing off.
Paddy had dropped the notion of impressing her
with his philosophical, psychotherapeutic and econometric knowledge.
He bawled for his guards instead.
An eerie silence fell upon the safe house.
He bawled again. His voice echoed back,
Guards-ards-ards-ards … and an alpenhorn began playing far away. He was
glad Leonie wasn’t present - he couldn’t stand yodelling or filthy

hunnish leather shorts.
The buggers would pay for this - he’d set up a
razor gang and, by Gor, even a Commission of Audit. He wiped away
polluted tears with his ragged sleeve.
“I’m immune to all that.” she said, wrinkling
her nose and sitting primly in the sole clean armchair, the one his
doberman Beowulf46 slept on. Daddy felt no embarrassment about the mess
the place was in, that’s what Ahmed was paid for. The latter made
vague dusting motions with his Scotch Buy AK-47.2630568, but that was
hardly enough to dislodge the hundred years’ worth of cobwebs and
smirch behind her.
She surveyed the pair and addressed them
crisply like someone reading out a death sentence.
“I’ve been sent by the powerful Readers’
Lobby.” The black cloth fell off her head and she replaced it testily.
“I’ve always had great deportment. Ahem. We’re concerned about some
aspects of this novel. It contains a very negative portrayal of a
Lesbian (‘the Homeland’ indeed), a lot of uninformed allusions to the
Middle East and Thailand, and very few strong female characters.” She
delivered a few apothegms in ancient Spanakopitan then continued in
English. “Ahem. It also lacks suspense and is deplorably linear.” She
sat on the edge of her chair.
(A week earlier, God had set in very slow train
a process that was to put the wind up Daddy very soon.)
Daddy objected smugly that this was hardly
literary criticism, and besides, Celts were not coming across as the
superior beings they were due to the excessively ironical tone being
employed.
“Pshaw!” he cried in Gaelic with a flourish of
his shillelagh, testosterone and alcohol sloshing feebly through his
system. “Dis is not fiction, well not a crucial fiction, not
crucifiction, ha ha - and it’s no more linear than it should be!” He
waited for flashbacks and the like to occur but nothing happened.
“Everyt’ing I do is so immediately plausible bejesus bedad.”
“When Leonie gets to it’ll be fiction,
already.” she countered, finger pointing in his face. He looked
relieved.
“Everyt’ing is to her. She’s never been all dat
bright.” She didn’t know shit from Shinola.47
(Having Ahmed retell all this from Mary’s point
of view would be too much like hard work, especially since he was busy
dialling 0055 11770 to get info. about Open Learning, but from the
point of view of the sofa, thankfully an inanimate object, it meant
little at all. Deplorably linear - well, the idea … on this point
alone I definitely agree with Daddy.)
Daddy was aware that he’d developed what a dim
memory and a convenient label filched from One Hundred Years of
Solitude told him was an erection. He began at first to write an irate
letter to Auntie Rhoberta’s publishers complaining about the ’filth’
and ‘smut’ creeping into the novel but shelved the idea when he
realised that it’d mean siding with this woman or even chucking him
out of it. Taking sides was what counted, after all, not who was
right. (He’d studied a bit of Saxon law and popular culture (= flannel
sheets) in his time.)
Besides, the development was too small and
silly to be of much consequence to anyone but himself. He decided to
lay on the charm on his dirt-spattered side. His allegedly Hibernian
wind, after all, was rising.
46
An oddly un-Celtic name, you might say, but Daddy’s grasp of The Gaelic was a little shaky.
47
The mythological Celtic paradise and also the capital of the world-renowned Celtic Empire in Galatia.
“It would seem to run in the family.” she

interposed across a couple of authorial intrusions, a sheaf of papers
resting on her flawless stockinged knee.
“Now, to the point. The readers are tired of
the vulgarity of this piece and its veiled references to the dated
Hansondenko debacle.”
“Ah, we started dat one too. Red hair or white,
we’re not prejudiced just because Judas had it.”
Mary ignored this. She knew damned well that
that guy had been bald since birth and given to kissing men nearly
every day.
“You, of course, have brought them to the
limits of their endurance.”
“Endurances.” corrected Daddy.
“Pardon?”
“It’s a bloody plural.”
“Tosh.”
“Are you tellin’ me I don’t know t’ English
language?”
“It’s quite unlike Gaelic.”
“I don’t know any bloody Gaelic apart from
‘pshaw’!”
“Nor much English it would appear. If you don’t
shut up I’ll start reading this in Serbian or Aramaic.”
“But the author doesn’t know dem.”
Mary glowered. “Then she’ll have to learn dem -
them! I’m not some weeping Madonna you know. I don’t even like
onions.”
“Ah, but that’ll slow things down a bit too
much. You see, me only daughter, bless her c- soul, is a novelist.
Dere’s such a thing as ‘novel-time’, see, which is of course the time
it takes characters to do t’ings as opposed to dat time it takes the
reader to read the book or the author to - ”
“It won’t make any bloody difference to ‘novel-
time’!” she snapped, no fan of Gerard Genette. “She can take up again
where she left off. Or speed the bloody film up a bit.” She began to
talk very quickly for an instant in an ascending tone and rocket about
the room.
“Whose side are you on?” she squeaked at the
author, who genuflected and read out a defence of singular celibacy
for clerical same-sexers by Frank Brennan and Daniel Mannix, the
latter from beyond the grave and a little to the right. She disagreed
violently.
“Sorry, it was just my inability to control my
own material.” Auntie Rhoberta excused herself pathetically, pouring a
Poets Corner, and once again the Booker Prize seemed elusive.
“Why not just pick a language at random, say
Swahili?” Daddy suggested when the woman had slowed down again.
“Because (pant) - will you and Auntie Rhoberta
stop this childish attempt to introduce further digressions into the
plot!”
Egged on by A.Rh+.’s self-indulgence, he poured
himself a Bushmills and plotted, hoping to get her the sack in the
interests of the instant gratification of major shareholders. “Or
maybe it could be turned into gibberish, you know, sdaefaearyfsg. Then
there’s mirror-writing - , just like with de old
Wabberjocky . Or - or -” he blurted over her increasingly explosive
objections, “even backslang or rather ackslangbay. Or you could start
a whole new genre in Zapf Dingbats, ▲❄❁❅❆❁❅❁❒❙❆▲❇✎✁”
(Crossing a literary barrier of some
significance, Daddy leapt from the pages and elbowed aside the author
for a moment. Hey! This stuff is but dribble upon the Blarney stone,
you twisted ould queer! I’d have more respect for a lady by Gor - but
Auntie Rhoberta, while refraining from tastelessly writing her
androgynous self into the novel, managed to lure him away from the
self-defeating QWERTYUIOP keyboard and induce him back into the book
by threatening to kill him off in the next chapter. She carefully said
nothing about Chapter Twenty-Seven. It was all in his head, he
suspected.)48
The woman sighed, closed her mysterious windows
to the soul and counted to (naturally) three. Daddy got a bit nervous
then, due to a lightning bolt striking very close to the house, and
out of a clear sky at that.
Having gained his attention at last, Mary
continued.
“They - they want fresh comic insights and they
asked me to intercede.” His stench was putting her off a bit. A
miscarriage at this point would be mortifying, she’d never hear the
end of it from Father …
A Rainbow Serpent wandered in, street directory
in hand, and said “Er, excuse me, is this the, er, Garden of Eden, as
presented by Peter Condall? The famed Hortus Conclusus? The Mundus
Alter? The Sacred Grove? Shangri la? El Dorado? The Allotment?”
Even Mary looked blank. The Serpent continued
diffidently, grovelling upon his Belly and eating Daddy’s dust.
“Er, I’m never properly briefed before these
assignments. Management is obsessed with downsizing, all people care
about is profits, the Miss Snake Charmer Award in Sweetwater, Texas,
and the revolutionary child beauty pageants of Belize, and no one has
any time to give - ” The two religious figures went into a huddle for
a bit; then the snake departed with a confident Welsh air and a
picture of a gnome.
In the background, Ahmed, puzzled, flicked out
of habit through the Koran for clues. His sister Naomi would know how
to handle this situation, but the miserable worthless woman with her
breasts like melons must never learn of it. She’d laugh herself sick.
Daddy sat staring basiliskly at the taut
upriding hem of the dusky intruder’s short skirt. On the wall, the
portrait of Eric Butler did the same.
“Forget it, Grandad”, she said, “I’m a dyke.”
“A tyke?”
“A dyke.”
“A kike?”
“A Lesbian!”
“Like every bloody woman I meet.” lamented the
limburgery Daddy, envying her right to a bit of choice real estate in
the Aegean. He cleaned out his narwhalian snorter with his grimy thumb
and raised a furry thigh to allow a tremendous rectal emission to
poison the air. “Don’t women find fellers attractive no more?”
The visitor turned a bit green (an appropriate
colour) but kept her cool.
“Ah, dat’s better.” smarmed Daddy, head
pounding with genetic superiority and virile resolution. “I t’ink you
must be after James / Joyce or Flann O’Brien - our author’s quite
comprehensible by comparison and not half as funny.”
Her eyeballs turned upward. He thought she was
going to pass out. Then he’d have his chance.
She liturgised from an immaculate sheet of
paper.
”Basically, much of the above is childish
masturbatory fantasising. Take me for instance. Is it any coincidence
48
I hate to play devil’s advocate, but do you know how hackneyed this sort of thing is? - Satan.
that I’m one of the few strong woman in this thing and yet I’m dressed
up like a Barbie doll?”
“You are dat.” he jibed, kicking Beowulf who
had just trotted in. The dog, inured to such treatment and engaged in
a course of Marxist study … C-M-C, so as C=c+v+s in Department I &
Department II, ∴the substance of value is labour and all that
economic shit … the dog as I said went to savage her, but she made the
sign of the Cross at him and he fled the country for Oberamagau, later
taking on a lecture tour of Polish universities on capitalistic
European cruelty toward wolves.
”What sort of quasi-racist feminist are you
flauntin’ yerself in dem cripplin’ high heels?” leered the grimy
Mafioso, tinkering with himself and proud he had never read Louis
Althusser.
Muttering something to the effect that he badly
needed a Gamma wash, she flaunted to his side in an instant.
Paddy dribbled into his beard - which to Ahmed
recalled a dead camel’s scrotum - convinced his charm was working. He
thought of his only daughter and his own resemblance to King Lear. The
woman shoved him against the wall and spread his arms.
In the nearest he could get to ecstasy (a
difficult attainment since contracting resurgent Mad Cow Disease), he
arched his arthritic back and fantasised Shakespeareanly in iambic
pentameter - the woman was plainly begging for it.
(In some corner of a foreign field that was
forever Bavaria, Beowulf was puzzling out the distinction between the
machines used to make commodities and the machines that were used to
make the machines that were used to make commodities and the machines
that were used to make the machines that were used to make the
machines that were used to make commodities and so on ad infinitum -
there’s a hole in the bucket - but we won’t slow down the action to
dwell on the dog’s intellectual bouleversements here.)
In a single impossible movement, though (are
you with me?), she rammed her heels through his palms and pinned him
to the brickwork.
He felt unpleasantly powerless and no one, not
even a good Samaritan, rushed to his aid. Ahmed, trying to suppress
laughter (which I hope the reader - the other one - is not having to
do, as it can be dangerous), shrugged and said, “It ain’t my religion,
Bawss.”
She stood calmly surveying him, miraculously in
another pair. He began to mumble, “Eli, Eli …” It seemed the right
sort of thing to say, but a second lightning-bolt shut him up.
He farted again, like Krakatoa, sending a
shiver up his proudly uncircumcised and smegmatic member, which was
too short to reach anything and unlike him not thick either, so it
didn’t do the trick for anybody. Ahmed glanced at it and was reminded
of a rabbit dropping (though he’d never seen one drop). His lunch of
Payless falafel had gone cold but he didn’t much feel like it now
anyway.
The fart brought Daddy back to reality (Leonie
had long since turned the world on its left ear, proving to his
passing chagrin that it was gay). It wasn’t crucifixion he was worried
about. With the dim but growing realisation that he was talking to
some sort of VIP, he strove to avoid another explosion. Little sounds
reminiscent of wet fingers drawn around a glass came from his behind,
and he intoned a number of Hail Marys to cover them up.
“Well”, she spluttered, waving her be-ringed
hand in front of her nose, “I hope I’ve made myself plain.” She rose
majestically, anything but plain, and felt him peering pruriently at
her peerless legs, so titillating, if that is the word - she hoped
with irony that Naomi was ready for them.
Daddy, realising that what he’d just

experienced (including Ahmed’s insubordinate reaction) was due to the
DTs - and he’d never gone for Dylan Thomas - got up and, while
continuing to squeak, laid his contaminated paw on her arm. He raised
his weevily brows a few times - it never failed with the ladies, whom
he with his trillions of ancestors was still convinced he had a way
with.
Though Leonie’s mother had been a handful. Good
thing he’d kept hold of the kid in that chalk circle he’d thought up,
someone to inherit his empire, even if she was a girl, if she was a
girl.
He paused for effect, then gave her the
unbeatable line that had always worked with his shuddering offspring,
“Would you like to share a bath with me?”
As she’d sashayed sensually through the sitting
room, she’d noticed his reedy and acrid bathwater being reheated by
his thugs in a vast, coffin-shaped tin tub on a grandiose open bonfire
of unhappy Saxons. The thugs were simmering dynamite in it to recover
the nitroglycerine for safe-cracking. This seemed to give them the
sort of thrill others (though not Leonie) got from sniffing petrol
while chain-smoking.
She’d paused and looked over their shaking
shoulders. What she could see of its surface bore a skin like that of
overboiled milk and she hated to think what it looked like under a
microscope. It surprised her that he could stand to share it with
himself.
Now, with a sensual flick of her hip and a
retch or two she turned to go.
Daddy started to get hopeful again, remembering
sordid nights of violent coupling, in the days when he could manage it
without laundry aid. He wanted an only begotten Son, after all.
Leonie’s mother - regardless of the forced marriage and the droit de
Seigneur - had never given him one, though he suspected she’d given
one to every other spalpeen in the Celtic Mafia.
The squeaks and his repeated prayers grew
louder (he now included a few Our Fathers and Glory Bes to avert
suspicion).A Son! He flicked wistfully through the Book of Kells which
he’d swiped last year from Trinity College, along with the Brian Boru
harp and 400 cases of Guinness. A Son, to take over the CM in the
distant future (as recommended by his futurologist) when he got too
old and decrepit to run it. A Son - he glanced at the son-blessed
Ahmed, who seemed to be gloating himself, and pictured him exulting in
his sand-blown harem, puffing on a hookah and devouring Kiwi sheep’s
eyeballs and contacts and camel’s testicles while surrounded by
scantily-clad belly-dancers. Misogynistic, sex-mad wog-arab, he
bristled. Torso-tosser! Gnat!
Hadn’t the Uillean bagpipe been invented so the
Celts could conquer the Arabian and Atacama deserts and latterly the
Australian ones? Its moisture-conserving properties were legendary. A
True Celt could be stuck in the middle of the Negev or the Tanami
(which has had its own prophets, most of whom are yet to be
published), dying of thirst if not for a fag. All hope is lost, but
the True Celt would laugh at the good-drying-day glare of the sun and
upend the thing, shlurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp. Gallons - he had no
intention of going Metric, bloody interfering frogs - of shamrocky
spittle would course into his bearded mouth (Daddy raked his fingers
through his greying black whiskers), preserving life and the all-
important trio of limbs under the kilt, though the inebriation that
would supervene was a bit of a drawback if he couldn’t find a pub
pretty quick. But clearly, the frontier-blazing Celt could go anywhere
in the universe, though you couldn’t take him anywhere. He was the
sort of bonhomic, happy-go-lucky chap who’d drink it if he had to
strain it through a shitty rag …
The camel after all - unlike the gnat - is

basically a four-legged bagpipe designed by a committee. (Some
fascinating examples of this species exist, including the zampogna,
the gajdy, the gaita, the pibau cod, the cornemuse and the dudelsack.
None surpass the mouth music of the Orkney fishwives, who imitate a
bagpipe because they’re too mean to buy one - and write in the dark
with a scotograph for much the same reason.)
Daddy was overwhelmed by several thousand years
of ethnic jealousy and much of his dung-coloured hair fell out on the
spot. In future, he decreed to himself, all such grossly non-Celtic
immigrants would be kept out and Australia would revert - he gave a
maniacal guffaw - to being but One Nation, apart from Saxons.
(George, no I haven’t forgotten you dear
reader(s), was meanwhile making his arrangements to bring Leonie to
heel. He lunched with the Prime Minister and Kerry O’Brien - who was
pleased to get back his pen as it was a family heirloom - and they
discussed his plan.
George remained after the other two had left
the restaurant, having got into conversation with a lady ratcatcher
who farmed them for meat and dairy products with much benefit to the
Australian economy in the prevailing climate of (as Nigel put it)
INTERNATIONAL
COMPETITIVENESS.
He was there till five o’clock, since he’d got
onto the subject of how he won every drinking contest at last year’s
Adelaide Binge Festival without succumbing to alcoholic poisoning.
Normally, as a devout Muslim, he avoided alcohol - in his case in
favour of paint thinners.)
Daddy was about to present her with his c.v.
and vet’s report when his sphincter gave out and he shot about the
room like a deflating balloon.
“I’m not part of your reality.” the woman
responded mysteriously, and drifted like mist out the door. They heard
a 10 second sound bite of distant vomiting a bit later.
The Rainbow Serpent returned briefly:
“Er, about those directions …”
Brushing a feasting cockroach from his dingy
lips, Paddy struggled up from behind Beowulf’s chair, threw Leonie’s
atlas at him and yelled stertorously for his guards. They burst in,
hastily doing themselves up. Not one of them had seen her.
“It’s a miracle!” he cried, hobbling on his
crutch into the parlour and lurching into his bath with gusto and the
Lebed-led Mormon Tabernacle Choir who were busy baptising the dead. He
landed on a visiting ichthyologist and a couple of journalists from
Field and Stream who were ready to brave the tub’s bottomless
whirlpools in their anarchistic quest for the Loch Ness Monster
(though Paddy was glad he was no mere spanakopita-49 chomping Scot).
The tub, from the inside, was much larger than
it appeared from without, a universe in itself - in fact it may have
been All-Bran’s life-restoring cauldron. It preserved amongst other
things his earliest Neanderthal ancestor who’d been allegedly dug out
of an Irish peat bog (they didn’t have flush toilets in those days) in
1925. He hoped no one would throw a match into it.
Daddy’s shrivelled mind expanded beyond his
thick brow-ridges as he guzzled the mouldy bread upon its waters and
49
For the culinarily deprived, this is a Greek delicacy used to poison the Persians at the Battle of
Thermopylae. No wonder the Marathonians got the runs.
gazed out to sea. He saw the Mycaenean Prods’ ships sailing jovially
to Ireland for the water that fell out of the sky there and blasted
them and the Beaker Folk out of the sea with a bubbling rectal
broadside. Whales splashed about on the snot-green horizon. Jonah
O’Davey Jones surfaced in one, gurgling “Up Periscope!” to Daddy’s
disgust.
He closed his eyes again, and a Celtic Twilight
was on the face of the deep.
Meanwhile his henchgaels looked as deferential
as they could manage while breathless and itching to laugh.
“Whattya mean, Bawss?” gesticulated a
reluctantly-scrubbing Ahmed in the Brooklyn accent he’d acquired from
too much American television. His gesticulating comrades were always
ribbing him for talking like Jerry Seinfeld.
“What do I mean, effendi?” he cried, sinking
into stagnant and stinking ooze of the shallows and going
▲❄❁❅❆❁❅❁❒❙❆▲❇✎✁ “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! That was Hor. The Virgin
horself! But I never knew she was a Lezo.”
Chapter Ten: Gerald Escapes
Leonie Barmy was again being interviewed live

on international television (the broadcast going deep into outer
space) when she realised she’d missed Christmas being unconscious and
that she couldn’t fake love and talent to Nigel or anyone else any
more.
The hem of her skirt flapped with annoyance in
the breeze of a fan. (She’d shaved her legs that morning for the first
time in ages and wet cats clustered about her.) The purple-pated
camera person, a fan too, smiled at her. She batted her eyelids and
intertwined her legs with gusto at this clearly important and bald
individual50, whom she thought was the anchorwoman, and, after a
rousing rendition of ‘I Like Aeroplane Jelly’ (good thing they weren’t
on the ABC), sprayed at her various Georgelike mariner’s references to
macaws and bracing the mainsplice and belaying pins (while trying not
to think about the weak elastic in her inside-out panties worn
specially for the occasion). Simultaneously, she yodelled and
interlarded her conversation with ‘cha cha cha’ at intervals. She
could wow ‘em when she wanted.
Though it never failed to impress, it (along
with ‘liberal democracy’) was patently a front, just like last week
when she’d harangued a meeting of the Deaf Institute, punctuating her
bluster about ‘building an unjust world’ with impromptu hand-signals
and fingers, or the week before when she’d addressed the Federation of
Asian Immigrants and done hilarious impressions of the Buddha. As a
result of all this valuable PR, she now felt an emotional cripple.51
She’d already put her heel through a cable and come close to burning
the studio down. Why everything always had to be so higlee-piglee she
couldn’t guess; she’d been like this since she’d jumped puddles
unsuccessfully at the age of five. One day, as Daddy had regularly
informed her as an infant, she’d even die, die, die - fugit
irreparabile tempus - and that seemed so unfair when it was taking her
so long to grow up. Gerald at least never said such nasty undinkum
things. A tear worked its way out of her eye, the rat.
It was hard being a middle-aged prodigy.
Don’t let de bastards grind you down, cariad,

advised her principal Voice, then complained to Actors’ Equity and the
European Parliament. The chlamydominis, a predator with biting
mouthparts,she agreed with a yawn and a chirk.
Her magnificent hair stuck up like a

paintbrush, which is more or less what it was (though it had been
mistaken for the Captain Cook Memorial Jet at times). People would
keep asking why she dyed it when its natural glossy black was so nice
but she’d round on them and say ‘nobody ever dyes it mouse’ which shut
most of them up at once. (In her youth she’d dyed it black.)
In truth, it was, as she’d often said to
Gerald, quite in keeping with the grand Celtic tradition. Having
invented the immortality of the soul that they might laugh at danger,
many Celtic warriors dyed and coiffed their hair (some wore fingernail
polish too); Boudica’s (like Tina Turner’s clearly fake) red locks
cascaded to her knees, while Cthun Cthulain - he sounded more like a
fucking Aztec - had a gelled mountain of jagged sable, though it may
have come out of a bottle as his dinner generally did. (He scored a
few defeats against the Romans, probably because they were falling
about laughing at the time.) The Celts were also big on lady soldiers.
50
Where would they have been without a camera?
51
On principle I refuse to make a smutty crack about the disabled and other gimps.
Chapter Ten: Gerald Escapes 85
Remarkable too was the knowledge that the Celts

had been the ones to introduce trousers to Europe, possibly to avoid
getting bashed up on the way back from the gay pub. Such a paradigm
shift was too much to bear when not behind the wheel.
The shmuttery Gerald she intended to banish
from her all-encompassing mind. Though asked a question about her
crucial relationship with the Prime Minister, she made gags about
projectile vomiting and blood-pudding and peat and budget cuts to the
tumour-like Defense Department and had the studio audience in comic
horror. She hadn’t prepared at all, apart from doing a bit of vomiting
herself on the way in.
In the monitor, which began to exhibit a few
hairline cracks, as did most people’s tv screens, she checked out her
face. Her eyeballs she liked to flick at it every so often - a risky
procedure so don’t try it at home - she was gorgeous, so George
claimed, with her wonderful combination skin, a combination which some
detractors described as piebald. But she did look a bit luteous and
run-down, which had nothing to do with the pantechnicon … all right, I
won’t finish that one.
The steady diet of red and Jammo and
intermittent guzzlings of roast pork were dragging her into the gutter
to the point where she considered becoming a Melbourne Truth
journalist, along with the heartstopping holiday in rural Corsica with
one of her many willing sex-slaves, the Rt. Hon. Panda Vanstein MP.
It was also a pain not having that little virus
Gerald to cook her joints of pork for her; her new CM chef, McSludge,
who ran an international chain of ungeraldic McAbbatoirs in his spare
time, was rather careless and frequently served it up raw. Pork
tartare was not to her taste, though thanks to Daddy she had little so
far.
But that curl of the lip did look great. Almost
like Elvis. Jana Wendt (the real one, that is) bent forward in her
low-cut dress and asked her what her latest book was about and she was
instantly lost for words, except for a dated character assassination
of Ena Sharples as with a sharpened nail she levered a scab off her
knee.
“You’ve got a beautiful cleavage.” she added,
eliciting gasps from the studio audience. “I never drink, I’m like a
koala - a live one, that is, unlike that mollusc Da- Gerald.” she
continued confusingly, ignoring Jana’s next boring question about the
CM and amazing herself with her knowledge of wildlife.
Earlier that day, deafened by the creaking of
the plot, George had threatened to back the campaign to spring Gerald
if she didn’t show him her next novel and smarten up her ideas. She
knew that if Gerald ever got out she would probably wind up on the
spit instead of the pig. It made her mad: that sort of thing never
happened to Angela Menace.
She now (desultorily picking her nose and
feeling rather bored with Celts anyway) called the Middle-Earthed
Nigel on her secular mobile and asked him to introduce a compulsory
GST to bankrupt the protesters, mostly pathetic dole diary-faking povs
who hardly deserved to have a say in the running of this wide brown
land of brave new world welfare-haters.
“I love a sunburnt barbie, a pub of flowing
drains, of drugged and softened livers …” 52
She claimed it and economic purity for her own.
Jana looked a bit surprised. Leonie inspected her forefinger and
experimentally tasted the boogie.
“It’s boodiful.” Nigel responded hungrily at
the other end, farting (he was on the bog again as his gastric
52
For the ignorant, as well as non-Americans, this is a totally accurate extract from the money-makingly
famous Dorothea Mackellar poem ‘My Country’ (sponsored by McDonnell Douglas and AWA).
equilibrium was marked by a wild yawing between chronic diarrhoea and

constipation, a bit like the economy) and proceeding to an alimentary
harangue against the ‘parasitic jobless’ (especially actors) and the
‘loquacious’ and leek-prone rivals in his own party. (Secretly, he
couldn’t abide Celts of any description, with special emphasis on the
Welsh - leek whisky, eergh.53)
“I love you, my widdle Lee-onie-pony, wiv your
big sexy teef. Your gorgeous nasal polyps, secreted cunningly wivin
them cute, cavernous nostrils. Your cheeky, curvaceous earlobes that
just pop out and say hello. Your lovingly-bitten fingernails and
phlegmy uvular. Your outrageous Sino-Judaic behaviour at novenas. Even
your brilliant hair. I want you to be our next Greek Orthodox
Ambassador to the UN.” The Bad Sex Award was his that year.
“No!” she cried, quailing at his teethist
attitude and the idea of mingling with all those black people, though
she wasn’t sure why.
“Er - or Head of the Department of
Multiculturalism in Alice Springs. Or maybe ATSIC if we can find their
ARSE file.”
“Well, maybe.” she flounced, angling an angular
shoulder toward the camera. Jana, having landed with much fanfare the
renowned Leonie Lesbia Barmy, looked a bit panicky.
Nigel strained, and there came the satisfying
tumble of ploppity-plops characteristic of a great weight of social
security claimants being offloaded.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. Yes, I’d even sack my fucken
Celtic Treasurer for you. His numeracy’s in question, along with the
rubbery figure he cuts in every dominant dungeon in the land.”
“Nigel!” she hiccuped, a bit shocked at such
fashionable racism and explicit sex.
“I’d go on the dole for you, dear boodiful
Leonie.” For emphasis, he let go a sonorous machine-gun braff. “I know
- you - love it - darling.” he panted, giving himself what he termed
‘a pull’. (Like Lucy he preferred to do it on the top deck of a
double-decker bus and felt seriously deprived as there were none in
Canberra. No wonder he was hardly ever there.)
Ha! she thought. He liked it, the coprophiliac,
always entranced by men in uniform.
When she told him she was appearing live on tv,
he seemed a bit embarrassed by this unadvisable public exposure, and
Leonie simpered at the astonished Jana as he clammed up immediately
and the former collapsed from hyperventilation. Leonie, directing a
Medbhish ‘come hither’ look at the monitor for the hundredth time,
would have given her eye teeth to be the average Unemployed viewer at
home. But she was happy that she hadn’t lost her ability to knock out
the ladies.
Ructions (and Bruce), of course, were
inevitable. The first one was her ejection from the building, by a
large black belt in jiu-jitsu, in case of law suits. She put up a hell
of a fight, biting and scratching and causing several thousand dollars
worth of property damage. As she despatched the black belt, a hundred
people suicidally threw themselves on top of her. Boots bayoneting,
she almost kicked herself free but they managed to drag her down the
corridor, chuck her out and bar the door.
Defeated, she spat and hurled Celtic abuse
(accompanied by fancy fingerings) from the street, but they boarded up
the windows as if expecting a riot. Incensed, she stomped off
muttering and pigeon-toed with her head down and her arms stiff at her
sides, booting sniggering schoolboys and their lascivious scoutmaster
out of the way. Shvantzes.
53
Well, he drank ouzo and retsina by the barrel.
Unwashed underpants threatening to slip down

(why had she worn them?), she burst gunslingerishly into the ethnic
club nextdoor and calmed down with a few Irish coffees (it was a
Turkish club, one Nigel didn’t find delightful). The other patrons
left, shaking and praying or getting stuck into a few passing Anzacs -
who’d once attempted to besiege their City of the Gauls - by way of
restoring their virility. A one-woman street gang, gasped one.
“Economic rationalist!” she slagged back
snidely, her boots still smoking. (They gave up in middle age.) “I
don’t believe in your evil Deficiency! You think you’re lords of all
creation and you’re nothing but international bandits with a toxic
philosophy hanging round public toilets! We should throw you all into
a volcano! I’m a strepitous political Lesbian, and you can’t fight
your friends!” (From the brochures she’d received, Mytilene sounded
inviting - perhaps she should leave right away.) “Rhiannon! Phaloon
Devi! Boudica! You’re all Black Muslims! Go back home!”
Dat’s tellin’ em, O Daughter of Zion. You got nothin’ to lose

but yo’ chains. Maybe you oughta go and preach de Woid in East Jerusalem before Bibi
toins it into a ghetto. Yael Dayan fo’ PM …
She waved away her principal Voice and briefly

contemplated Susan Sontag’s notion that the footprint is to the foot
as the photographic image is to the thing photographed - the boot was
another matter. In the mirror behind the bar - yes, it had to be
replaced - she looked a fright covered in supercool battle-scars, but
you should have seen the other guy: more lifelike specimens had wound
up in the local morgue. The bartender complained about his mirror and
his loss of custom but as he went to pour her one on the house she
grabbed his collar and snarled menacingly, “Don’t you know who I am?”
”Er - Sandra Bernhard?”
This attempt at levity was an error. She
reached over the bar, torc glittering so much that it blinded him,
then stuck her finger under the tap and squirted him with full-
strength beer.
Sodden, he grimly looked up at the tv and the
shots of Jana and the black belt being wheeled into ambulances and
stammered smilingly, “Er, ok, L-leonie.”
She had more important appointments and
refrained from pulverising him on the spot.
Why she never did that to Daddy was something
she couldn’t work out. She suddenly felt very small and inexpressibly
sad. Bugger them all. She ordered a few more schooners of coffee and a
new pair of knickers till she felt ready to venture forth again.
“Leonie, darling, Roger is getting edgy.”

George cost-cuttingly explained over a glass of acetone when they met
for lunch, the latter being a steaming pork roast. To cast off her
depression, she crunched as loudly as possible on the crackling and
stuck her fingers in her ears. When that didn’t work she boomed out
‘Haveh Negila’ and the entire score of West Side Story, all of which
she’d learned (along with a good stock of Celtic swearwords) at the
exclusive private University of Mummy’s knee.
“Leonie!”
Why did people insist on treating her like a
child? She thought of toeing Nigel (we won’t say where)54 and giggled
54
There are so many inventive names for it that Auntie Rhoberta suffered at this point from an embarras de
choix and richesses etc. See if you can add to the following list from the Macquarie Thesaurus and
elsewhere: acre, arse, ass, backside, behind, big A, bot, bottom, breech, bum, bunti, butt, can, cheeks, chuff,
coit, derrière, ding, dorsum, fanny, hindquarter, jacksy, khyber, posterior, rear, rump, seat, slats, tail,
toche, tokhes, tush … We shall say nothing here about the consistency of Coleridge’s liver at his autopsy,
something like steamed mince …
and hewed into the crackling. The slurping, crunching and sucking
noises she made would have put the pig itself off had it not been dead
at the time. George was tempted to block his own ears. He too was a
Vegan (though non-scene).
She’d had a manuscript prepared at the last
minute by two impoverished poet friends who owed her money. One of the
poets, a lyrical wog called ambitiously by her somewhat unmusical
feminist co-mothers Despina, after the ‘knowing’ maid in Così Fan
Tutte (her boyfriend’s affectionate nickname for her was ‘you fucken
whore, where’s me fucken cigarettes, you’re all the fucken same you
fucken bitch’), had since thrown herself off the optimistically-named
Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and landed on the cloverleaf where she was
squashed flat by a gang of sniggering prepubescent Wiccan
skateboarders.
Multiculturalism was such fun. She lit a
cigarette and coughed dramatically.
“Please, Leonie … ”
She pretended for the moment that her novel
still had a long way to go, and gave George a sanitised account of its
progress.
It was turning out to be quite brilliant
(crunch) and destined to win the (slurp) Miles Franklin. Leonie was
too old (chomp) to go in for the Vogel (hum), so she intended to put
down her age (gnaw) and use a pseudonym.
George grew exasperated.
“But all these rumours - Gemma’s bizarre death
- ” George barely maintained his urbane and foggy front.
“Oh (slurp) George, I think (slobber) Gerald
(slaver) did that.”
“But he’s still in Quamby! And he’s got all the
get up and go of creeping paralysis. How could he have got a front-end
loader into her lounge room?”
“B’nai Brith, then (champ).”
“Leonie, I need a manuscript.”
With a sweet greasy smile she reached into her
bag and fished one out.
Taken by surprise and the throat, George began
to read. A rapt expression appeared on his fissured face, which
recalled the surface of the moon. She thought it hideous by comparison
to her own and a ram’s anus.
“Leonie - you’re a genius. You’ve done it
again!”
She hated flattery, though plainly he was
right. She toed him in the genitals till his eyes watered.
Her second novel, written in the form of a job
application, appealed to shnooks and philistines and other inhabitants
of the Holy Land, and soon topped the charts. She attributed its
success to going without panties while writing it. The sacrifices you
had to make as a writer, especially in the winter in the vicinity of a
scout-hall.
Titled Work Experience it became an anti-
Calvinistic cult classic and also proved popular to that idiot the
general reader. It inspired teen dances and yo yo crazes, and glossy
presenters (though not Jana) quoted from it cock-snookingly55 at the
end of their broadcasts. A sugary acid-jazz and jug(s) ballad was made
about it by erstwhile world-famous American rock bands like The Rich,
The Spheres, Psoriasis and The Mindless Christian Fundamentalist White
Supremacists, while its four hundred and ten unsavoury characters (all
rather like Sean Penn in drag) appeared in cigarette and beer
commercials, 80% of which didn’t work. Religious cults like the Old
55
I think we’ve had quite enough gratuitous references to Spike.
Flames of David Koresh and Heaven’s Gatecrashers grew up around it and

a new word entered the language - ‘leonistic’, for anything violently
unintelligent (eg the siege mentality theories of Milton Friedman).
But then someone anonymously claimed via a
singing cowboy film that it was plagiarised.
Leonie snarled at the set, shrieking oaths at

the nauseatingly cherubic Richard Moorishdance (she knew that that
‘quintessentially English’ frolic was actually pinched from Ahmed’s
ancestors). She suspected the other impoverished poet friend, the
tarnished and degenerate homosexual pornographer Rupert da Silvo (also
a leading light in the campaign to free Gerald as he claimed to be a
Celt from Galicia and intimate with Jason Donovan). Rupert also
alleged that her ‘ignorant’ allegations of ‘child molesting’ were
‘maliciously libellous’.
This accusation hurt her profoundly. It forced
her to scuttle back to the familiar certainty of her Celtic
upbringing. According to Daddy, it was too dangerous to have Rupert
rubbed out - he was seen as a modern-day Blake or Whitman or Ginsberg
and lived in a cardboard box on the edge of a rubbish dump crawling
with illegals (at least he wasn’t in it - yet) - and he wouldn’t have
the decency to top himself.
Worse still, he too was in love with her, in
the face of his political ideals and the stench in her bedroom. She
quite liked him, in a way, but he was a man (more or less), after all.
“It’s just a dyed - dead mouse in the air
conditioning.” she’d lied during their last session, so convincingly
that she’d gone to the mouse’s funeral the next day and became the
confidante of its widow.
Rupert would not make love to her, which suited
her fine, he’d just lie beside her playing with his castanets and
moping and squealing. He said his best poetry came that way. (Not much
else did.) None of it, he kept reiterating in his Vegan manner, was
plagiarised. She had to admit that she’d lifted a line here and there
and quite frankly everywhere. How else could you write such a big
thing as a novel?
The Prime Minister - his popularity flagging a
little after an unsuccessful lawsuit - rushed against his better
judgment to her aid. She’d helped him win the election (he held power
by one vote, Leonie’s), being the single most popular entertainment
figure in the country. As well as having a gamin-like appeal to the
fashion industry and chalking up six or seven figures on the catwalk,
she’d also opened a health farm and become its first customer,
excelling in steer-wrestling. Now she shunned drinking (having taken
to shooting up with nail-polish remover instead), and had scored her
own aerobics program on WIN.
“Aj aj aj, I’m lonely.” Rupert had whined into
his paella, and she hated such Iberian nauticality from a person whose
work was so widely-respected and who got poorer the more famous he
became and couldn’t stop writing because it was a compulsion. The
Armada could wait.
“My poems are all I have, and no one will pay
me for them.” he’d gone, his bullfighter’s cape slipping off (Lucy
envied it) and his Spanish fly gaping. He’d done a spot of flamenco
dancing and impromptu bullfighting for emphasis.
As the pesteriferous sun (i t s body was
heavenly?) went down, Leonie wondered, as she watched, why she’d been
futzing around with sexless hill-dago pansies like Rupert, and why she
didn’t have any close women friends. (It may have had something to do
with her fondness for handcuffing them to the ceiling.) A bit
shnockered, she glanced at a mirroring shard of window and saw a very
attractive dark-eyed woman smiling in at her. But no, her nose was too
big.
The woman melted away like snow in a Canberra

winter.
She shook herself, having just passed wind (and
broken the sound barrier). George, she thought of again, married to an
imperious Phoenician tart who wanted to his equal, rather than his
superior as it should be, and with a drug-crazed newshound camel-faced
daughter. Tsk tsk. He was lonely like her, being almost at the top.
One day, he claimed to have seen St Peter peeping in through the
window of his office, so he was clearly at breaking point.
“Don’t fret, Rupert.” she’d said. “I’ve got a
plan.” Given his literary following, Daddy would be happy to be his
padrone, she thought, pleased with herself.
Rupert had turned his face to the pillow, and
made sweet moan. The Nobel Prize for literature seemed so
unattainable.
She chuckled, whistling through her teeth, sss-
sss-sss-sss-sss. Leonie knew that George was covertly a cross-dresser,
and terrified his wife and all the world would find out. By contrast,
Rupert, though openly gay, had a horror of being found out as a
masochist needing domination by literary and pioneering Lesbians (he
liked it so much he never engaged in it). Her buried nous flooding her
twisted brain with motivation, Leonie wielded her studded spanking
paddle. Chain-smoking and gorgeously body-aware in a breathlessly
short skirt, she’d get them together and maybe even convince them to
write to tv soap characters as if they were real people.
Well, she did. At her request, Nigel rushed

round that night, disguised with little difficulty as a bag-lady.
Swallowing his pride and the lump in his throat, he made a show of
fawning, but in reality (which he worshipped as a substitute for any
Sino-Jewish vision of a better world) he was furious at the enormous
political furore and brouhahaha that had blown up around her
interview. His politically-dependent love for her and his childhood
desire for a zazzy career in show-biz after he retired from public
office ruled his life - but it had all got out of hand and now was no
time for masterly inactivity. Paddy Barmy alone, as head of the body
on which almost all Art and Entertainment depended, had the clout to
put all these fuckers in their place.
George’s notion of threatening to expose her
plagiarism - something the stoopid editor would never do, as it would
cause U & O’s massive profits to drop as well as offending the CM -
had not been to his taste, or more to the point Paddy Barmy’s. After
all, any public besmirching of Leonie reflected badly on the CM which
was funding her publisher for a price, and the Barmy name itself was
naturally sacrosanct.
There was also this little smartarsed
cocksucker da Silvo to think of - da Silvo who’d not only never shut
up about plagiarism but also had visions of ‘outing’ gays in high
positions, people like George in fact. (George would have delighted in
outing him.)
On Daddy’s secret prompting, he advised Leonie
to try and make George and Rupert into a compromised unit. That, of
course, was just what she had in mind.
Instantly, the two literary men began boasting
about their respective literary achievements. It was love at first
skite.
She had (she felt) convinced Daddy to make it
clear to them (through some indirect method) that their reputations
would be ruined were any more said about plagiarism or premature new
novels or - she added in a confusion of ideas - if Gerald were sprung.
It was the first time she’d ever used the subjunctive case, and she
became uncontrollably excited, as it were.
Nevertheless, she felt nervous around them

after that. Did they know? Rupert had grown moody and could often be
found mooning by the four artificial streams (all rippling like sets
of muscles along with a brook that, feeling left out as a mere brook,
was babbling like an idiot) she’d had installed for inspiration in the
Edenic backyard, chocabloc with concrete Sino-Jewish Aborigines, of
her home in the Canberra suburb of Gungadin. Often he’d be scribbling
furiously as he downed his sherry and sinutab cocktails. George would
be lying next to him, drearily naked except for his pink-as-a-prawn-
crisp cottontails, dreaming his flabby life away on Ecstasy and cough
mixture. Was this George, the former health fiend who after much
blackmail had got her her own show? She kicked him in the ribs with
her solid gold pump, but he didn’t stir.
Well, he was a clumsy male drip anyway.
She needed a new editor, now that they’d sacked
him. Nigel knew of someone, a ‘vapid pillock’ called Prátt, who
claimed to be of solidly Breton and Cornish background, and a terror
on the treble biniou. She gave the PM a ring - he’d given her a
diamond one the other day - but to her short sharp shock a cold
officious voice answered.
“Your ex-husband has escaped Quamby with the
aid of the Celtic Mafia and is holed up in the new Cultural Centre
with 1978 hostages.” it said. “Don’t worry, he’s keeping them well
entertained with one-liners. He’s better than Dorothy Parker.”
Her face fell at this betrayal. Hadn’t she
cured him of that?
Actually, her face had been falling for years,
but now the process accelerated sharply. She peered at it in the
mirror which promptly exploded. Perhaps it was time to go and further
her career in America - possibly Latin America, or some other place
without an extradition treaty (she kept a continuously updated list of
them on computer using Word 6540).
Albinic hair fluttering impressively, yummy
supermodel legs flashing like swords in the afternoon sun, she
ornithoptered into the back of the platinum-plated limo, and ordered
the chauffeur to drive her to Daddy.
Memories … may be beautiful and yet … she
yodelled, her Celtic Cross earrings vibrating. How dare soppy Gerald
capture such dated hostages!
Chapter Eleven: Her Head Belongs …
On the way (how often I’ve used that phrase

above) she felt her boobs bouncing about. She paid no attention for a
while. Then it struck her that the road was perfectly level and her
chauffeur an excellent driver. She gazed suspiciously down at her
Celtic cleavage.
A weird tinny sound rose up from her
sensationally low-cut and ripped bodice, vibrating her glinting torc.
With mounting terror she realised it was coming from her own body.
It became all too clear that her breasts were
quivering with mirth, laughing at her as she sat putting on all manner
of airs and pretending to be Barbra Yip Streisand. She stiffened,
furious. Their laughter grew so loud that she feared her chauffeur,
Senator Miriam P. O’Shaughnessy, would hear. How humiliating.
The threat of an instant masectomy shut them up
for a while. She hoped they’d stay quiet as she minced invincibly up
to the safe house door, over which was inscribed LASCIATE OGNI
SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE.
Daddy. As a bull’s horn was blown by a red-

faced Ahmed, her faescist father sat stagnating at the far end of his
windswept office (swept by the Föhn, the Zephyr, the Mistral, the
Jerald Broom etc), ensconced potently behind his tall mahogany desk
and flanked by portraits of the Celtic Mafia’s ancestral heroes, Mick
and Pat. She saw with the aid of a hidden theodolite that he was not
in a good mood. Tory. Well, at least he was not likely to boom out
with Land of my Fathers. She loved a sunburnt country, a land of
sweeping plains etc, herself.(Not that she was one.)
Daddy, an imposing poseur whose acromegalic
head recalled the top of the Matterhorn and was almost as solid, had
risen rapidly and rabidly after Gerald’s arrest and was by now the
ludicrously overpaid paramount leader-cum-CEO of the Celtic Mafia (a
Tsar is born!), proving that the characters in this blancmange do grow
as you read, so please keep reading or like the author’s brain they
might shrink.
But to get on with suspending my own disbelief
that I’m writing such shingly trash and return to Daddy (ok, ok, I’ll
deal with Leonie and her jesting boobs in a minute). At least after
reading Lenin’s Who-Whom?, he’d always told himself he controlled the
Celtic Mafia anyway (actually it was a bunch of Melanesian Sukyo
Mahikari ASO3s who pushed decisions up his rectum) and he was good at
self-delusion, which may have run or at least got round in a
wheelchair in the Family 56. In truth, his administrative abilities were
such that had he organised the Siege of Leningrad no one would have
been killed at all. (He had in fact been in line for the Führer’s job
but his plan to invade the North Pole, like Vladmir Illych’s
excursions into English grammar, hadn’t gone down well.)
But what was certain was that though a dust
particle of that Order which forms and shapes the entire universe, he
was a True Celt (who had nothing to do with the Aum Supreme Truth sect
and the Divine Light Mission) - he frequently looked himself up and
down in his two wee crystal balls with a sense of genetic pride at his
military bearing and at the fact that he was totally green, though his
former doctors the famed O’Rees siblings of Queanbeyan kept stupidly
trying to find a cure for it. It’s not easy being green, he thought
kermitly, and pictured himself singlehandedly winning the Battle of
the Boyne and turfing the racially inferior Saxons out.
56
Pressure has been put upon the author to include references to disabled people, and also the Sami
(Lapps) of northern Scandinavia (let them fight that one out). As I just indicated, it’s not easy writing a
novel when bombs start coming through the letterbox (good thing I’ve got a post-office one). Translations
into Shelta and the whistle-language of the Canary Islands are inevitable.
Chapter Eleven: Her Head Belongs … 93
As far as he was concerned, the children of

Hengist and Horsa could go back to bloody Schleswig-Holstein where
they came from. The Celtic Will, gelyn pob dychrindod, surged through
his sclerotic veins, making him fearless and genotypically clean. He
shook his defiled head at the spectacle of the author lifting this
shamelessly from Norman Spinrad, but nevertheless it was icily clear
that mysterious Celtic forces were directing him, a latter-day Finn
MacCool (his spelling), to change the Course of History. Not since the
Year of the Great Stink had the world seen such a bathetic and watery
moment.
Balls in hand and knotted cardiovascular system
strained almost beyond capacity, Daddy looked back into time (trying
simultaneously to remember who invented the bagpipes) at the waves of
pedigreed kilted warriors who crushed their enemies for Holy Catholic
Ireland and the lesser, Saxon-held Celtic lands - a tenebrous Myrddin
(Merlin) passed by at that point, out walking his Red Dragon while
perusing Revelation 12:3 with his kilt on backwards. The rugby-
obsessed magician jeered and yelled Cymraeg oaths in his
characteristic Cambrian singsong, while the heavy WELSH NOT sign round
his neck thumped syncopatedly against his chest.
“Ach y fi, twll peno’l! Independence for Cymru!
O, gwae!” (The magician knew but 25 words of the ancestral tongue and
most of them rude.57)
Leonie, performing a cautious entrechat in the
direction of her father, wished Gerald had had as much gumption. And
where the fuck was Morganna la Fey?
Paddy, reeling and male-bonding under a
poisonous cloud of leek-gas (another gas sprang to mind), was more
interested in Gaelic football and its Australian equivalent Aerial
Ping Pong. Was he not a superior Gladeolic rather than a mere Bryonic
Celt? He stuck out his forked tongue and chanted incoherently,
Taffy was a Welshman,

Taffy was a thief;
Taffy came to my house
and stole a leg of beef.
I went to Taffy’s house,
Taffy was in bed;
I picked up a chopper
and chopped off his head,
then told him to fook off. He was no Saxon

windowcleaner or helicopter pilot, he was sure, hang what that punkah
wallah Ahmed thought.
The ancient Celtic Family Empire which the pan-
Celtic Gauls had soon lost due to chronic alcoholism but which had
once ruled half of Europe and (temporarily) defeated even the might of
Rome (its capital curiously Ancyra in wogridden Turkey) had long
filled Daddy with awe. The famous ‘dying Gaul’ statue and the high
road to Loch Lomond were things he’d modelled himself after for years.
Indeed, shit-a-rivet, it might be time to
revive it - the empire, that is, round tables and King Arthur and
Morganna la Fey and La Téne art and Asterix comic strips and human
sacrifices (though not Stonehenge as it had apparently been put
together by some olive-oily, camel-swallowing crowd) - but in a more
salubrious part of the world, such as the Carribean. Gladeoli,rising
from the ashes of the Forum, would rule again! All ABC-style dissent
would be crushed! Flog the rank and file and fling the ringleaders
from the Tarpeian rock! Fiat justitia et ruant coeli!
57
Apologies to Philip Roth for this thinly-disguised lift from his ancient comedic classic Portnoy’s
Complaint , but I didn’t think anyone would remember it.
93
Any True Celt who lusted after rather more than

15 minutes of Fame - and, he panted, preserved the sacred memory of
how the perfidious Teuton had thrown them out of Baden-Württemberg for
excessive consumption of lager (rather like the Australians at
Oktoberfest) …
Phoenixing and bubbling to himself, Paddy lost
it for a moment and came to a dead stop. Dismissing the leeky magician
whom he guessed (wrongly) was an hallucination which as the Great Bibi
divided the people of Israel into two parts, he theorised at his
reflective and cracked crystals that any True Celt would possess that
manly physique and piercing (if somewhat rheumy) eye. And that noble
leer, that arrogant lower lip, and that lime-green kilt cut very much
on the bias.
He quickly hid his crystal balls as his
sumptuous offspring approached like some starving and sex-mad
ballerina. Sweating putridly and full of God (it was tasteless the
number of times He appeared in His own novel), he had to remind
himself that Virgil was a Celt, along with Cato, Varro, Catullus,
Sappho, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein … and the outcome of
all this Collective Unconscious genius (as also in the case of Mr
Ceaucescu) had been him.
Those who forget the aer cunnilingus of history
are doomed to repeat it, he santayaned hegelianly. The first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce. (This is where the author came in.)
Daddy, she breathed huskily - not that she
sounded like Puque’s fiancée - rehearsing under her breath. Neither
were ready for each other yet. They paused, quivering, each immersed
in her or his own plotting.
Daddy tried to plot, anyway, as does the
author, but his dirty mind like his retroussé nose when not getting
struck by lightning kept going off at a tangent or a cosine and part
of it was engaged in a distance education course in Pratie Cultivation
anyway. What could he think about to appear in total control, in
absolute mastery of the situation? Ah, well now, the answer to that
question was obvious.
The last Celtic Mafia Conference in Derry,
which he’d MC-ed (it was hard not to break into pig-Welsh or Romanian
but he handled it), had been a grand affair full of exciting mass-
debating - what a shame that the laver-bred Cymros had got into a
brawl with the Picts and the Scots, who’d in turn kicked the shit out
of the Manx while the Irish just fought each other. (The Picts seemed
ostentatiously pre-Celtic in their harping virtuoso-like on the faded
glories of the Mycenaean Empire and the Birsay Stone of the Orkneys
but as we’ve seen above it was hard to make up the numbers sometimes.)
It had turned into quite a donnybrook, he recalled, savouring that
glorious Hibernian tradition. The Cornish and the Breton delegates
were a bit much, though. Bloody foreigners.
Hardly worth the Celtic Renaissance of
postfeminist Irish dancing and apple-pie bedmaking they’d engineered
and the new, philanthropic caste system they had in the pipeline, just
like old times. Didn’t anyone care about the Arts any more?
As he sat there surveying his haughty and
simpering daughter and feeling caught up in his own Celticity he
played a few squeaky notes on his terracotta tin whistle which dated
from 750 BCE and to the accompaniment of an amplified wobble-board
reflected on the words of Yeats - words Yeats had spoken to his own
father and his father’s mother’s brother many years ago, without
acknowledging Samuel Beckett … there’s no fookin’ paper in here!
(Presumably he’d had an inspiration.) Then he dredged up Gerald due to
the accidental firing of neuron no.
94
12534266635344343443434344343433635435455645454545454555455, one of
three he possessed.58
His attempt to appear in control had failed,
but she didn’t know that or much else.
Leonie wished he’d stop pausing for effect. He
half-wished she’d stop posing for effect and leaping about like Bruce
Lee. That pash dancing course he’d sent her on the other decade had
been a bad mistake. (Gerald thought so too.)
To remain patriarchally dominant and encourage
more positive and flexible forms of staff development, he tried to
concentrate on the historically convenient scapegoat Gerald instead.
He’d learned that her ex-, encouraged by the protests, had
unCeltically made contacts with the rival Vegan Mafia while in jail.
After much legerdemain he’d got a job with them (the interview had
been a farce but then they usually are). Daddy didn’t like the workshy
Vegan Mafia at all and decided that a bit of healthy competition was
in order.
He’d noted the spalpeen’s determination under
pressure. Yes, by Gor, he wanted him on side.
Having once excelled at a three-day course of
Scientific Management, Paddy Barmy was convinced that ability to learn
and potential and self-motivation meant nothing by comparison with
what you’d done before - which included acquiring hereditarily your
usquebaughn-again Celtic Blood.
The other week, he’d got this workshy type
called Dobina Dolblüdga, oddly from the Latvian Mafia, breathtakingly
incompetent at anything practical being a wordsmith but her cv was
impressive as hell, better even than Daddy’s (and that was forged
too).59 Pity about her in-bred ancestors, and the fact that she’d said
in response to Daddy’s ideologising, ‘would you ask a newborn fresh
from the womb whether it’s breathed before?’
Irish as ever, the maundering Mafioso had
naturally rubbed her out (the price of concrete was skyrocketing). But
in the abstract he approved of such corporate exchanges. He recalled
his life’s most important memory - the time when he made Senior
Omertic Godfather Grade B60 and sculled a whole bottle of Bushmills in
14 seconds - and bruteaucratically laughed - here’s where our all-
important heroine comes in again, for those who haven’t gone to sleep
- Leonie’s problems away.
“How could you do this to me?” she shrieked
bitterly with her knuckledustered fists and steel-capped boots at the
ready, though some calmer part of her mind wondered why an unwashed
yak was making its reeking way across the lounge room, defecating in
the ashtrays and guzzling the maidenhair ferns and hundred dollar
bills handed out by his indulgent henchlechers.
Long live Leonie, she told herself to boost her
flagging confidence.
“I just was trying to shut those two up like
you taught me and …” Her harsh Boudican voice faded as his infected
hand snaked toward her. She whipped the CM Bible out of her handbag
and he desisted and made praying motions. It had worked for years.
The catchy diddly-diddly-di muzak permanently
playing in the 480-square safe house soothed her a bit and as a result
58
This hypernumerate wheeze has been stolen from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.
59
Readers will note that every minority group seems to have a Mafia (or at least a street gang with 120 000
members and cruise missiles etc) in this work of genius. This is due to the Revolution of the 1960s being
sensibly privatised. I mean, why sit about in a draughty hall waffling about redistributing wealth from the
rich to the poor when you can go out and steal it yourself? The Government (with a cv longer than
George’s) does much the same in the other direction.
60
He’d been Junior Paperclip Inspector Grade -1 and a painful square root, which accounted for his well-
hidden fascination for complex numbers and parsnips which never comes into this story but was featured
in one by Auntie Roberta’s arch-rival Spike Milligan (ouch!).
95
she never got round to asking him about the yak. The same went for the
Christian Zionist Science Fiction convention of nude and hairy
Abominable Snowpersons opposite - Daddy did suffer from
hallucinations, but it was a bit of a blow to be seeing them herself.
She speculated as to whether her own consumption of hallucinogenic
substances mightn’t have something to do with it. Nah.
“Child, child.” he said, coiling his
stercoraceous saluting-arm around her bare shoulders and staring
wickedly at her sniggering boobs while performing differential
equations, about his numerous forebears, for sheer pleasure in his
head. “You mustn’t take on so, Princess - dis isn’t an episode of
Glenroe. Who can cast the first Blarney Stone? Don’t forget dat you
did walk out on me rally de udder day. I won’t take no notice of wogs
like al-Fayk.”
Pitiful as a shag on a rock, he thought, and
he’d had quite a few. After casting a wary eye skywards he tweaked her
nose affectionately.
She dropped the Bible and looked straight up
his own piggy nostrils. When she was little he’d make fun of her nose
and what he called her ‘Mediterranean’ features (eg, hairy legs), and
call her strange names like ‘me Mediterranean tart’ and ‘Daddy’s
little shonk’. Now it was as if she saw his for the first time, and
the team of gasmasked leprechaun potholers who were crawling up it.
The experience would have long-term consequences for her.
As for Daddy, he wrestled to think of a decent
lie to tell her, swatting at the leprechauns crawling all over him and
muttering “Ah, the heat, the natives is restless.” He squashed one
with his toe. (The tylwyth teg stopped demanding equal time.)
Convivially, he poured them a Bushmills each.
“Slainte!” he cried, saluted and sculled what was left of it while
chanting the war-cry of the CM and banging a tambourine. (I must keep
that Celtic Style up it worked so well for James / Joyce.)
“But he’ll - ” She stopped crying for a bit,
for she knew Gerald was a wooss at heart and the Snowperson conference
was quite interesting. They were presently discussing the impact of
Organised Nudism on the textile industry of the nextSYDNEY OLYMPICS in
the year 3000, a matter dear to the heart of any shivering yeti who
was into Roger Zelazny or Joanna Russ. Female men were right up her
alley.
“Dat’s right, me oriental poppet.” (She had no
idea what he meant, she just wanted to go home and get drunker.) “He’s
all hot air and the right shape for Balloon Aloft. And I got a
business to run. T’ings are not always as they seem in dis game. We
got to embark upon a whole new structure. I envisage that rouseabouts
in brothels and condy boys should - ” He paused again, trying to
remember how to do an Irish accent as it seemed to be slipping.
“If it geds any more compleecated - ” no, that
was wrong, Filipino was hardly appropriate “- wee, sleekit, cowrin’,
tim’rous beastie - ” shit, these Orientals were everywhere “eh, mahn,
I’s likin’ de ‘erb, is dis Morocco Gold?”, no! “- Här är min familj,
min dotter och jag. Hon är en kvinna, och jag är en man. Man når
källaren genom en dörr i förstugan på bottenvåningen … ”
Damn! He struggled from this unaccountable
Swedish phrasebookese back into English, via a tricky High German
sound shift: “- ahem, ich musst der hyperbolik Logarithm methode studieren.” Fook it. His
Broca’s Area was acting up again.
Leonie (dodging a cloven tongue as of fire)
couldn’t resist a smirk. Mummy had tried to teach her two languages in
the short time they were together, Celtic and Daddy.
Daddy rode out this disorienting Sino-
linguistic crisis, reciting snatches of the Ballad of Reading Gaol
backward in Hungarian, a remarkable feat considering how difficult it
is to translate poetry. As he did so he recalled the Visitation and
96
his teenage trip to the Vatican. His strong if unreliable northern (or
was it southern?) Irish accent grew more Italian (when he was a lad he
could hum and whistle in counterpoint too, while rumbling and farting
in alternating rhythms - a real one-man band).
His normally pugnacious daughter sipped
delicately at her jug of Jameson while the yak disrespectfully gargled
with its own.
Leonie knew his thrumming and managerial brain
was in an advanced state of decay. If only she had the courage to
persuade him to donate it to St Vincent de Paul, though they might
have trouble flogging it. Her pseudo-blue eyes scintillated like
Celtic Genes in her head (though a different colour) and she felt like
yodelling again like Der Fuffelsingers but didn’t dare. Her tears had
already burnt an embarrassing hole in the carpet.
Daddy resisted the urge to toss a bucket of
bathwater over her. It was priceless.
“So - it’s all a hoax?” she said with
unflinching ardour for her own cause of escaping Daddy’s shmutzy
clutches permanently.
He smiled warmly, around 400˚ Celsius, and
stroked her sandpapery thigh while misquoting from Yeats’ Garden of
Eden Guide61 and picking his nose with the same hand:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned in bathwater!
She quailed at this perversion of Ionan

mysticism. To make matters worse, he also cited that misogynistic old
Irish revolutionary Isaiah Behan, that self-styled drinker with a
writing problem:
Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Christian

Zionist Tibet are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton blue eyes and a
bottle of Jammo in each hand …
Never had he been closer to a good kicking (or

spontaneous combustion), but she shrank into herself with shame and
couldn’t bring herself to do it. Woe unto them that call evil good and
good evil, she recalled in Orwellian confusion.
“Santa Lucia, Princess. It is dat.” He recalled
that he was a Celt and a gratuitous contempt for all things
effeminately Latin filled his cranium, at least until he remembered
that he was a Catholic. No way would any door-to-door Druid cross his
threshold. Following his good mate Diocletian, he’d throw ‘em all to
the lions.
She could barely cope with the author’s many
shifts of point of view. Daddy drew closer, perusing Mein Kampf
fervidly and ripping the wings off an intruding Chaos Theorising
butterfly with economic rationalist fervour. “Boudica wouldn’t have
seen it immediately either.”
He traduced her principal role model. She
pulled away and did another seductive pose, knowing he was a fan of
the old Windmill Theatre and a frightening shot with a peashooter.
“You won’t let him do anything awful to me?”
she said, though feeling very guilty and nauseous about it. “Perhaps
you could do something awful to him?” Itching powder in his
bulletproof body stocking sprang to mind, and she giggled along with
her boobs in spite of her anger.
Decaying limbs shaking with unquenchable
Christlike passion, Daddy chucked her under the chin, a habit she
61
This reference may puzzle the overseas reader. Good!
97
found irritating but put up with for the sake of getting her own way
by stealth and sexual blackmail.
“Have you been going to Confession regularly?”
he demanded sternly, chewing maniacally on a shamrock root. The vision
had strengthened his Faith quite a bit, though it had weakened his
spleen and his well-cirrhosised liver. The vet would hear of it.
“Yes.” she lied. They were both Celts after all
(also the Cornish quack, Dr Trepolpen), and even closely related, even
if her own researchers had shown him to be anything but Irish.62 Her
left breast snorted. She felt like dancing round the fire and flinging
shrunken Saxon heads about her. He didn’t appear to notice, being
absorbed she thought in the spectre of the Gallic Grim Reaper in
pantaloons who had just entered, pockets bulging with Mafia-massaging
money. Various other spectres and phantoms floated about working the
room and shmoozing in various brogues (how she hated the
Shmoozoisie). She became concerned that she’d caught schizophrenia or
syphilis off him again. A good thing that she alone was a genius.
The realisation made her think. Vicious
cutbacks were proceeding around her with impunity, severing the very
fibres and sinews and bones of the degenerate, hard-won ‘democracy’ of
dole-bludging welfarites who seemed to want an alternative policy when
they voted. Like Daddy, she had cut her teeth on the exculpation of
greedy trade unions (greed wasn’t so good here apparently) and the
parasitical Unemployed - though suddenly she questioned this, without
getting many answers.
Her colonised brain began to surge forward
haughtily: ah, Nietzscheanomics, that scholastic slap in the ‘60s
kisser, that intellectual 1080, that child-crushing, deficit-finance-
annihilating victory of the shameless. Swaggering over corpses was
quite profitable these days, she understood with horror. There was no
morality left in the world. Like Sandra Bernhard she turned to
Cabbalism instead, for a moment or two.
“Well now, that’s grand. You’re a good girl -
never been up the duff have you?”
“No.” she had to admit. “I’m Leonie Barmy.” she
added proudly, if irrelevantly. Oy, thank God she couldn’t have
children. She didn’t fancy becoming the mother of her own sister or
brother or whatever. Though, as Daddy said, if it was good enough for
the Holy Trinity, it’s good enough for us.
“I know you are! I’m your dotin’ Daddy, aren’t
I, me greedy little levantine lubra?” he snarled licentiously, though
it was her mother who’d given her that proud and feline first name -
he’d wanted Deirdre or (pant pant) Desiree. She fluttered her eyelids
and, fighting down nausea, forced herself to act out the part of
daughter-housekeeper-lover that she’d been made to play for so many
hateful years so that amongst other things he could claim her on tax
in seven different countries in the spirit of international casino
capitalism. (Not that he paid any.)
Meanwhile, her Voices belted out the following
ditty:
Mother’s Lament
[trad.]
A muvva was wawshink

‘er biby one night
the youngist of ten
and an delicate mi-ite, ah …
the muvva was po-or
and the biby was fin
62
Thanks to the Irish Embassy and their solicitors for drawing the author’s attention to this fact.
98
she was nought but an skelinkton

a-covered wiv’ a-skin, ah …
the muvva turned rahnd
for the soap orf the rack
she was only a mo-ment
but-a when she got ba-ack, ah
‘er biby ‘ad gorn
and in anguish she cried
‘Ow where ’as my biby gorn?’
The hangels replied, ah:
‘Ow, your biby ‘as gorn dahn the plughole
Your biby ‘as gorn dahn the plug
The po-or little fing was so skinny and fin
she should ‘ave been wawshed in a jug
- in a jug -
ow, your biby is perf-ectly ‘appy,
she won’t need a bahf any mo-ore
she’s a-muckin’ abaht
wiv the hangels above
not lawst, but gorn befo-ore …
Fank you, we’s de cockney spades.63
(By George I think she’s got it.)

Daddy, of course, knew nothing of this. He was
mouldering over something else entirely. In his heart of hearts - a
sewer - he wished she’d taken her ex-husband’s name as surprisingly he
was quite a traditionalist at heart. Then the Barmy monicker would be
a little safer. At the very least she might style herself ‘Leonie
Barmy Iceberg’. Of course, if her offspring did the same and so on
down the generations his dwindling descendants would end up with more
names than a thievin’ Welshman. It was a tough genetic nut, that one.
A man of action who sometimes fancied that he recalled the Thirty
Years’ War and the defenestration of Prague and who was surprised to
learn that Luther had been an Augustinian friar since he’d always
thought he was a bloody Lutheran, he favoured less rarefied
cerebration.
He took out his calculator again, discovering
with lightning mentation that if Leonie had a child who married a
stout-hearted foursquare Celt and fathered two lusty bearded children
who in turn fathered two more each and so forth, then within a few
generations they’d end up with more strapping offspring than a Welsh
rabbit farm. He sighed with relief; his worries about his Line dying
out had been a bit premature. But it was all a bit confusing
mathematically.
“That greedy rolypoly husband of yours - the
real one I mean - I won’t let him harm you. I intend to recruit him -
er, in the military sense of course.”
“But he’s - ” her adenoidal voice sank to a
whisper, as Ahmed was nearby “- Sino-Jewish, already.” she sneered
with some uncertainty, rubbing her embarrassing shnozzola to make sure
it hadn’t grown.
In turn, it created chaos whenever she turned
her head, bringing down lamp standards and Daddy’s yak-loving thugs
and imparting light relief (as Diogenes passed by with his lantern) to
the assembled and hooting Snowpersons. She vowed to trade even her
precious gumleaf collection, kept in old books like Black Beauty since
she was five, for a nose job. (It took her years to work out that that
63
Perceptive readers will note that this song was once featured on a Cream album (c.1000), recently dug
out of a peat bog in mint condition and hawked at Sotheby’s for $20 000 000.
99
book was written from the point of view of the horse, a

misunderstanding that caused many heads to turn and many lamp
standards to fall when she started Finishing School in Lausanne at 18
and finished them off with a yodel and a Sami yoik 64 at 18 and a
quarter.)
Daddy, used to all this and deeply immersed in
what he saw as the staunchly Celtic Catholicism of Pius XII, which was
something like his bathing facilities, nonetheless had a deep and
peasant-like respect for Gerald’s impeccable background as a
University Librarian and Vice-Chancellor.
“Is he now?” he said measuredly, having known
this vital fact for years. (The man was still some sort of Unionist
member too.) He heard the clangour of 12 gauge roofing nails being
hammered romanesquely into Celtic palms, and seethed. The posh Voices
of his untold billions of ancestors ordered him to rub the bastard out
immediately in return for a bishopric, but he couldn’t find his pencil
case at such short notice and unlike Leonie he knew the man’s worth,
and how dangerous he’d be as a martyr. The putrid gales blowing
through his capacious office and Leonie’s wondrous thighs made him
shudder and drool in counterpoint at the thought.
”Well, sure and he’ll have to sign on as an
honorary yok in dat case.”
“A yak?” Daddy really was going. She hoped he
wouldn’t have another outbreak of St Vitus’ dance like last time she
visited.
“But you can’t …” she began to protest, banking
on her guesstimate that Daddy was in no mood for rough-housing due to
his throat being in its yearly need of a chimney-sweep. As to Gerald,
being annoyingly brainy (possibly owing it to the rigors of the Sino-
Jewish calendar), he’d probably end up running the outfit and her
position might be made more awkward than it was.
“No, child, it must be done, bedad!” he
bellowed, the harsh Druidic edge creeping into his ancient and
patriarchal Voice due to lack of decoking of his vocal cords. “All
this farting about by Nigel and George and Auntie Rhoberta, all these
‘plans’ made by dangerous people who don’t know all of what’s goin’ on
because we don‘t tell ‘em, all this rebellion and treachery and
accusations of plagiarism and going offshore and - it’s got to be
stepped on. Oderint, dum metuant!” He squashed another leprechaun for
emphasis. She shook in terror and almost threw up.
Automatically dodging the zodiacal sweep of her
nose, Daddy dove into his desk drawer. He emerged, gurgling and
dripping as it was full of spare bathwater. “By Gor”, he said as
hungry faecal particles fell squeaking in protest from his wart-
hoggish nostrils, “that’s two baths this year, I’ll end up all
♣♣♣wrinkly ♣♣♣.”
Leonie, despising his existing pachydermal
wrinkles, hastily schemed, screamed and plotted. Not much would come
but little puffs of superheated pink steam which rose from her ears
and clashed badly with the décor. Showers of sugar and spice dropped
absurdly from the ceiling in response.
“ S h v a n t z ! ” she roared back, giving him a
finger. “Er, Gerald, I mean.” A phrase formed in her mind: Gerald
Zwinglianist. (She consulted her dictionary and Bible and Fontana
Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977) along with the Critique of the
Gotha Program which wouldn’t run on Bill Gates’s computer - I suggest
the reader and the author follow her example.) Though her fear was
close to overwhelming her, her anger gave her voice. “G-gerald …
Gerald Historical Parochialist! Gerald Economic Wrecker! Gerald
Reformist! Gerald P e d o p h i l e ! ” (She riverdanced on the spot in
64
Daddy rejected with fury the Sami suggestion that all the people in Europe and Asia were descended
from themselves, and vowed never to eat reindeer again.
100
frustration.) “W-weak … ” - her breath seemed stuck in her sternum and

her heart clattered in her ears like an Egyptian drum - “Weak-willed
Epistemological Relativist! Imperialist Running Dog! Sadistic Semantic
Derogatist! Scaredy Catamite! Gang of fur!” Daddy just looked on in
indulgent bemusement.
She suddenly felt a strange affection for her
ex-partner. Gerald, while no revolutionary, had some friends who were
pretty radical and awesome. One of them, the woggy Deputy Librarian
Euphemia in fact, had yelled, after her celebrated smearing of the
Atlas, “Why did you do this? Is it your way of rebelling? God, better
to shoot a sociopathic capitalist parasite every day, or hang them by
their fucking ties - ” (she gave a slight smile) “- war’d be over by
Christmas, or Hannukah if you prefer.” Leonie had snarled motherfucker
at her but the woman had gone on unperturbed:
“This archaic, atavistic, globetrotting Mafia
and their counter-revolutionary ‘liberal’ government catspaws,
absurdly recapitulating the worst aspects of nineteenth century and
spouting ancient Big Lie in an age of computerised nanotechnology -
no, please listen - wrecking our working conditions, wrecking our
standard of living, wrecking our values, wrecking our environment,
wrecking our democracy, wrecking everything we’ve fought for,
everything we’ve wept blood for - I’d kill or jail them (a year for
every million dollars, maybe), not because I don’t regard them as
human, but because they don’t regard me as human. You know, the Yanks
shot my grandmother - she was a Partisan, she fought against the
Nazis, she’s - Don’t you want to know your place in the world?” A map
of Lesbos and a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg hung on her office wall.
“If you don’t you’re doomed to stay in it.”
This all sounded very violent.
“Leonie, darling,” the woman had breathed,
grasping the great writer’s powerful forearms, “there’s a vast arch of
power over this planet and capitalism - you know, global, democracy-
subverting big business under the protection of life-denying State -
is the keystone, while all other inequalities, gender, gender
identity, race, age, sexuality, etc, underlie it, stone upon stone
upon stone. The point, if you like, is to kick keystone away, but
carefully … ”
It hadn’t made any more sense than her Voices
at the time, especially since this was coming from a Communist
librarian who looked like a cross between a man and a woman and was
Greek-Aboriginal to boot, but she’d done a lot of furtive reading (and
slept with her) since then. Her anger, like a raindrop that was a tiny
part of a vast storm, at last had a centre, a fulcrum …
Her leering shamrock-dyed father, whom she used
to call childishly ‘Daddy Paddy’ when she was younger, about 28, not
that she’d had much of a childhood, brandished the rather soggy,
stream-of-consciousness Application Form with a glint of murder in his
eyes. It looked as though Gerald would find it less irksome to apply
for a literary grant.
101
CELTIC MAFIA
APPLICATION FORM
Name:
Address:
Sex (open question):
Father’s name: Mother’s name:
Grandparents’ names:
Phone no.: PIN no.:

Email address:
Email password:
Website address:
Drivers Licence no.: Engine no.:

Little black no.:
You are 1) Irish 2) Scots 3) Welsh 4) Manx 5) Cornish 6) Breton 7) Other [please circle one only]
Favourite food 1) Praties 2) Haggis 3) Leeks 4) Anything if it’s tax-free 5) Pasties 6) French people 7) Other
If Other, you will have to sign on as an Honorary Celt.
Original Ethnicity:
[Eg, Wog]
Religion: Catholic / Dissenter/Your Mother Looks Like a Zoroastrian (circle one)
Ethnicity Applied For (hopefully Celtic)
Signed (Applicant) (SOG B)

(you may use a Celtic Cross if illiterate)
You must bring this form in to the Celtic Mafia Office early on Thursday every fortnight.
102
“Stepped on!” he continued to roar. “I am the

sole source of Hauthority in this Bath of global financial piracy! No
other watery organisation can defeat the Celtic Mafia, not even the
Tafia - we’re all over the world and off the planet! Our oceanic
Diaspora is invincible, omniscient, luckily … Rule Britannia! … er - ”
He broke off in a fit of coughs, rumbles and farts, then sucked at his
hip flask. The Staggering Celt had no need of an Earth Mother. He
recalled staggering toward Galatia and encountering some curiously-
garbed traders following the skirted Roman legions north:
“Hey, Jimmy, lookit them Eyetie poofters! D’ye
ken where the nearest pub is, then?”
“I only drink at temple already. I go every
day. I’m very religious.”
He was momentarily filled with hatred for his
filthy self, but after a few more sucks it passed.
Leonie took up Rule Britannia, though she had a
bit of trouble with the words:
The worker’s flag
Is red with blood …
(Readers will perhaps note that both Daddy and
Leonie have un-PC views on many matters, which shows how tenacious
such ‘traditional values’ and global freedom of speech can be among
the True Celts. A complete compendium of these countless prejudices
and ingenious racial slurs - published on the Internet by the
Victorian Council for Civil Liberties and edited by Bruce Ructions -
can be purchased on CD at all good bookstores. Amaze your
multicultural friends at parties! Know when you’re being insulted
yourself! Get back at the iritating foreign transvestite hippie
neighbours with their endless pong of curry and rice and Chanel no. 5.
All proceeds go to the Celtic Mafia’s Hollywood
Mansion Fund, administered cunningly on what Daddy thinks is his
behalf, bedad, by Ahmed B. al-Fayk, author of swanky Arabic cookery
books like The Sheep’s Eyeball and You, Camel Custard, and A Hundred
Ways to use Humus (that was a typo, darling).
Bear in mind that it is just as un-PC to laugh
at these gags as it is to - snort snort - tell them.
He also specialised in pyramid selling, sphinx
rentals, halal locust butchery, and scimitar restoration. The fact
that he was not a Celt he got around by claiming, as we’ve seen, that
present-day True Britons were partly descended from pre-Celtic
settlers who he insisted came from his own desertified and camelly
part of the world. Daddy was at first surprised and horrified to learn
that he had roots in the Middle East (and everywhere else except
Tasmania, which he found erotically deficient)65. Ahmed hoped they
never found out or they might all want to move back.)
Spluttering, Daddy recalled all this and was
flattered to learn that he might possibly be descended from Jesus
Christ, or at least Mohammed. He even began to ponder whether he
mightn’t inherit something, perhaps a mountain. Silently, grubby hand
extended, he started to rehearse for the Millennium - “‘How do you do,
Jesus’ - er, that’s a bit familiar - ‘good afternoon, Mr Christ -
welcome back, Sir. A lot of water’s gone under the bridge since you
were here last, but then you hardly need a bridge …’” He almost did
evil in the sight of the Lord, but restrained himself in time.
65
The Celtic tribe, to which the author belongs (the subs are hell), is probably one of the most
mongrelised on the planet, if not off it. This probably accounts for the lack of moral purity and received
wisdom in the book. By the way, the weird archaeological idea that everyone migrated historically to
wherever they are now has the distinct logical drawback that it doesn’t explain where anyone came from
in the first place. Surely someone was autochthonous (I’ve put that word there to show you how clever I
am, I bet Pauline Hanson doesn’t know what it means). The pitifully autochthonous Auntie Rhoberta calls
for the public’s views on this matter. Hey? Where have they all gone?
103
Has your little lion got sick of

+Christians?+
There are many other flavours.
ECUMENICAL PET FOODS PTY

LTD
Ignoring Leonie for the moment due to the

inherent fin de millénnaire digressiveness of the text and also due to
her reluctance to emulate or plagiarise his recently award-winning
Protocols of the Elders of Saxony: or, World Domination on a
Shoestring, he peeked at his crystal balls again and saw a horde of
ancient Britons led by a noseringed Boudica leaning about on shovels
in their sacred groves as a gang of Roman centurions goose-stepped
ashore talking pointedly of woodchipping. Boudica (Buddug in the
Modern Welsh) was blue with woad or cold from defending the Celtic
Homeland (if every True Celt turned blue overnight they’d get a shock)
- the ancient Britons went into battle stark naked which efficiently
saved a heap on uniforms, no knitting of socks for the troops etc -
and gave them a rude sign each (reading This Way to Edinburgh, Wops).
Zamyatin couldn’t have turned a minus into a plus more readily.
But there was much worse. Following close on
their heels came the rampaging Saxons, ready to take over the Island
of the Mighty and then the rest of the world.
Ah, if they’d had the Celtic Mafia in those
days! The truly British Isles would now be a pure Celtic homeland,
complete with The Tiresome in Gaelic and a harp in every home. This
Utopian vision kept him going in these days of artificial stringency
and Saxon mismanagement of the economy. It was in such contrast to his
unpromising birth in a bog in Ballypigswillery.
Soak the Saxon in Londinium’s Bathwater! he
cried, jabbing the air and making Leonie jump. Being ‘Anglo-Celtic’ -
horrible dictu - was something he could never be accused of.
To the stirring muzak she did her much-
rehearsed ‘impromptu’ Irish dance and he looked on at his puppet with
perverse lust. (His leprosy - Daddy had contracted all known diseases
and a few not yet discovered - was playing up again too, unerogenous
scobs of him falling off all over the place. He cavalierly tossed them
into his bathwater, which was never far away.)
Not surprisingly, the sight of the Application
Form had set up a concatenation of ancestor-worship fit to wash the
plate in his head.66 Ah, that he might have some celebrated hi
storical figure as a forebear (as well as the Redeemer), not one of
these boring Irish postmodernist folk heroes like Sinead O’Connor or
Lord Haw Haw or Francis Ford Coppola but somebody classy like King
Nebuchudnezzar. He could see himself lording it over the Cradle of
Civilisation, fighting off American cruise missiles (as we’ve also
seen, they’re good at firing their doodlebugs into a continent
whenever the election comes around) and defending Babylon to the last
Palestinian. Surely he would be called Enteritis the son of Epilepsy
who begat …
Onya, Gazza! The Aberdeenian TV astronomer
permanently housed in the attic, who sought life on distant planets
with the latest in Caledonian optoelectronics and an aerial Schmidt
Camera of stunning proportions, suddenly spied a double-pupilled eye
looking back down the telescope, an eye still blinded by Leonie’s
66
How you can wash anything with a concatenation is beyond this reader - B. Yorage, Terry Hie Hie.
104
hair. She got such a scare that she fell through the ill-maintained
ceiling and landed on top of them.
“Och and you’ll never believe what I’ve just
discovered!” she brogued scientifically, her argyle socks bristling.
“Swinging down Sauchiehall Street on a windy
day?” retorted Leonie acidly, wondering what was worn under the kilt
and picking herself up from the floor in a feat of exemplary
logic. The positivistic Dr Isabel Cheongsam MacStein, a person
committed to overthrowing capitalism and forcing people to listen to
the ABC of Communism (we’re not allowed to say that, man) by way of
re-education, was not her favourite person.
“Every time you donate to Oxfam they fall about
laughing.” she jibed, swigging red wine and turps from her own hip
flask in a sad relapse and making references to chanty-pots and
sportive sporrans and other blood-dimmed literary exemplars of
Highland patois much-quoted since the Battle of Cullodden.
And Glasgae goes roond and roond … she then
sang pointedly.
“Och, I’m from Aberdeen, silly, and stop
picking yer neb. Hoots, comrade, it’s a braugh bricht discovery I’ve
made! Fescinating, fescinating! Fuck Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle and Quantum rude mechanicals and General Relativity and the
Unified Field Theory and Carl Sagan’s lugubrious tv popularisations of
yesteryear! This is a true Copernican revolution, a genuine subversion
of the dominant paradigm worthy of Tony Blair, that spectre haunting
Europe! Laird McBumsuddenness of the Scottish Institute will split his
breeks when I tell him. Clairty clairty m’wee Jock, I must ring up the
prestigious and prestidigital Scottish publication Nurture before some
other momzer scoops me.” the astronomer expostulated in some brand of
increasingly incomprehensible Scientific Gaelic. “Indeed, I havenae
hed so much excitement since I went beck to the Heelands lest week for
a free semple of Glenfidditch and beat ‘em down till they paid me. Oy,
the noo.” She brandished a forked stick. “A true Copernican
revolution! All that is solid melts into air! We have discovered - the
nicketynecketynoonoonoo!”
Leonie, removing her glasses threateningly, was
about to punch her fellow-Celt out when Daddy intervened by
brandishing a spastic ferret at her. It wouldn’t do to set the various
squabbliferous Celtic clans against each other again. Such lager
loutish behaviour was decidely bad for the Corporate Image. He
polished up the nametag he and all his loyal staff wore. A gob of his
green and viscous spittle yo-yoed from it, but he managed to save that
for his bathwater as well.
He returned the ferret to its accustomed
resting-place in his underwear. A faint memory of Gerald percolated
down through his dying brain cells but he dismissed it contemptuously.
By the way, the author apologises for this
degenerate interlude, made necessary by the fact that the book (like
the CM Bible) could not have been published without the sponsorship of
the Celtic Mafia. It won’t happen again.
You can also purchase Daddy’s home-made Irish
pasta sauces in twenty flavours including potato, Irish moss, blarney,
sweaty kilt, shamrock root, leprechaun urine, Uillean pipe breath,
Derry bomb-blast, top o’ the morning, backside o’ the afternoon, de-
de-diddlydiddlydiddlydiddly and licorice from PO Box 171690, Hell,
ACT. As you can imagine, that nifty and Tardis-like tin tub comes in
handy for all sorts of cash flow-generating activities. Daddy could
even have held speedboat races and oceanographic experiments in it (it
was actually tidal), though he was far too environmentally-conscious
to do such things.
[Unfunny pause to catch breath, write letter of

complaint, etc.]
105
“I don’t think he’ll go as far as converting.”

she said, feeling a bit safer. She sniffled toothily as the astronomer
departed for Stockholm and the Nobel Prize.67
Leonie, revelling in international competition,
had never revealed his solidly Welsh origins to Daddy Paddy. That
would be too much - gevald!, a fellow-Celt. Daddy had a thing about
such matters, and flew into a rage when he couldn’t fit people into
the right hereditarian pigeonholes (racial differences, he said, were
put there by God to make us realise that some groups of people were
really dense, otherwise we might reasonably think they were as clever
as we are). So she’d lied and said he came from some obscure and king-
worshipping Eastern European turn-out like Albania whose name she
couldn’t ever remember as it was probably spelt Kxcrsznia.
“Who the hell are you talking about?” went
Daddy, confused.
“Gerald, of course.”
“Oh. Er - I wouldn’t blame him. Ours is a bitch
of a religion.” fondled Daddy with pride, fondly remembering the
years he’d spent futilely memorising his catechism and the names of
all the nuns he fancied as a boy, Sister Perditia, Sister Diabola,
Sister Act, Sister Morphine, Sister Waitertipperary, Sister
Ritewayterbringupadorta … He was struck then with a new notion, one
that he wouldn’t tell Leonie just yet.
She felt a strange jubilation, and tossed her
glowing locks back. A tiny ‘ha ha ha’ arose from her bosom but she did
her best to ignore it. It was great to be not only the centre of
attention at all times but one with Daddy in this glorious Celtic
movement of the Faithful, though in reality (a matter of
epistemological conjecture) she hated his guts.
Suddenly she felt very Celtic herself, and
played hopscotch and hopwelsh while making spontaneous noises like a
highland bagpipe, skirling and droning away rather inappropriately as
she had not a drop of Scottish blood in her veins, only scotch and red
wine due to her professional relapses and retirements and husbands and
a rash tendency to combine the grain and the grape. Wine is a mocker,
strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise,
you might say, but somehow she didn’t see it like that. In truth,
there wasn’t - to patently steal a gag while splitting an infinitive
and downing a glass of beer 68 - a trace of blood or Betty Ford Pills in
her alcohol at all at all.
A bit like Jesus’s really, very Eucharistic
when you thought about it. Tomorrow was another day - and so was
yesterday. Damn the International Date Line.
“Fax dis to our Cultural Centre.” he commanded
Ahmed, who’d been doing his bit standing motionless behind the desk in
a ludicrous leather kilt donated by the Scottish community of Bavaria.
Feeling like a Lesbian, the diasporised Palestinian (who God assures
me was surprisingly descended from a love-child of Joseph of Aramathea
- well, the night-life there was not the best) drew back. Halitosis,
and hatred.
He also felt a prick. The bamboo was a bit
rough in places. For some time, he’d been plotting to knock off his
baneful Boss but it was always too dangerous; he had a wife and kids
67
Shared with Hebridean Professor Laird MacBumsuddenness who on the inspiration of a camera
viewfinder had invented the Ultimate Perspective Instrument, an ultra-minifying telescope which made
everything seem farther away. It was of such power that most objects looked so far off as to be invisible,
while their surroundings were reduced proportionately. The effect was like that of stepping back to take a
better look. Humanity was at last on the verge of seeing the entire universe as it would appear from about
nine trillion light years away. Transport costs of $6 quadrillion would also be saved in avoiding the
otherwise essential ‘stepping back’.
68
Thanks to the Lothian Ventriloquists’ Association for this line.
106
and hippopotamus to think of and had recently put a ridiculous deposit

on a smelly bedsit in Queanbeyan (and they didn’t take pets). On top
of that he was forced every morning to double-park his camel and the
fines and rego were hell. 69 Being a virgin (his sons were all adopted
and the bamboo underpants were rather a turn-off in any case, more
suited to a Mormon), he thought of trading it in for a unicorn. Though
that would be embarrassing if it stalled at the traffic lights. Thank
God he wasn’t a woman.
He took the sheet of paper gingerly and with a
dash of cumin, a sprig of basil and a vat of mustard oil. If only he
had a cooking program on SBS.
Leonie went ‘Hoots!’ and made other
embarrassing faux pas (what is the fucking plural of that?), like
making digs at Ahmed which consisted mainly of seven thinly-veiled
references to bagels and circumcision and sweet`n`sour pork (it made a
change from Daddy’s interminable references in his presence to magic
carpets and Sinbad the Sailor and boiling him in light crude).
Meanwhile, her endless legs were so lovely she got extremely wet and
took polaroid photos of them for later.
“Er, I’m not Sino-J- ” he started to explain
politeley, being a Rhodes Scholar. Forget it. He slapped kittenishly
at the air and out of habit took his notebook from his sporran. She’d
never believe him. Like the author she was playing with fire, but what
was the point of telling her. She had all the comprehension of a
gumnut baby.
Back home, whoever owned it (probably the Sino-
Japanese by now), it was commonplace - in that cradle of anti-
imperialism, earthly paradises and the various sighs of the oppressed
creature - to hear scholarly discussions, sponsored secretly by divers
Sino-G7 countries, in which professors of a certain political tendency
- not generally members of the Hot Tea Party and often impersonated by
Belfast-bred doubles from the Sino-CM - exchanged their enlightening
theories of the ‘craven, violent Sino-Catholic’ for academically
fundamental (CM) hypotheses about the ‘violent, craven’ Sino-
Protestant’. (Plagiarism, theological ignorance and the Asian Century
were clearly rife there too.)
More interested in botany (particularly Bo-
trees) and from a rather mixed background himself, Ahmed Baruch ‘Ni
Hao’ al-Fayk (one of the Jews of Israel, perhaps, though his dyspraxic
great-great-grandmother had been a chapel-Welsh Sino-Hottentot and her
old man a fanatical Methodist from the Isle of Skye) always avoided
that 3000 year old branch of craven, violent philosophy (let the wind
blae hie, let the wind blae low, I’ll tak the hie road and ye’ll gae
and see Trainspotting), but had to fight the temptation to conclude
that in these cases … does your chewing-gum lose its flavour on the
bedpost overnight? ran through his head … that both sides might be
right. Since he was now a Buddhist, the notion of a World Islamic
Republic (very popular in Latin America) filled him with as much
horror as Paddy’s idea of a resurgent and presumably Catholic Celtic
Empire, while the idea of extending Israel as far as Brooklyn,
Szechuan Province (we’ll get them here one way or the other) seemed
just as realtorily heedless.
Indeed, he felt a quickening in his mind … in
it was germinating a General Theory of History. He looked forward to
its efflorescence. There were lessons to be learnt here, even for
Leonie.
He made notes furiously. Much the same applied
to other world trouble spots where folks had so much in common. People
were the basis of human society, he told her in his bad English.
69
Auntie Rhoberta is fooling no one by passing this line off as original, let alone plausible. Have you ever
tried to get one over the pits? Personally, you’re better off driving a gnat.
107
“That’s interestink.” she said, very serious.

“I thought it was earwigs. Daddy has them at night, along with loaches
and crabs.” she went, unleashing a tempest70 of giggles and clowning
around drunkenly in an accent that might have hailed from downtown
Durban.
He shrugged in despair. Philosophers from
Anopheles on had a lot to answer for. Vegetatively-deprived as a lad,
he’d much rather contemplate the supernal beauties of a liverwort (as
against the elephant-eating Venus flytrap).
He considered interesting the violent but
hardly craven Leonie in a series of enlightening lectures on the
subject which were being held in various embassies around Canberra
(the Swedes being especially generous with the knäckebröd and open
sandwiches, and always ready unlike the morose Norwegians to have a
knees-up at the first peep of a Hardanger fiddle), but thought better
of it and visual poetry displays. She might really head for the Middle
East to offer her own forceful scholarly opinion in the spirit of
Turko-Latvian catastrophism. If anything (save economic rationalism)
would precipitate World War Three it’d be that.
Instead, he came up with a few weak anti-Celtic
swerves in self-defence (such as ‘Which Celt hasn’t got a tail?’ - it
was impolitic to have a go at the football team) but this made Daddy
(who occasionally thought he was Manxman trapped in an Irishman’s
body) turn clashingly purple and threaten to set the IRA on him.
It was a mistake being weak with Leonie, he was
to learn. She normally vented her anger over Daddy upon every man she
met, but she couldn’t help thinking Daddy’s Head Bodyguard was rather
cute.
She cheekily suggested he become a Rastafarian
and get a bit of land in Ethiopia where he could perhaps breed
blueberries and experimental varieties of camel (one ugly hump or
two).
Ahmed (a strong man trapped in a weakling’s
body) ignored this infantile nonsense and reluctantly faxed the
document. As he did so he held his nose, to Leonie’s incomprehensible
amusement.
Daddy seemed cloyingly satisfied, and himself
relapsed into the wormily catatonic state that as First Among
Inferiors and excellent compost was his prerogative. (He was not
unlike trade union consciousness these days, which to paraphrase
Ghandi on western civilisation, would have been a good idea.) His
premature rigor mortis allowed Leonie and Ahmed (after a few yodels
and a house-call by an earplug salesman) to get to know each other
better.
The little man tried again to explain.
“An Arab? A M u s l i m ? ” she gawked in
consternation, having been brought up on lurid tales of the Crusades
and images of vaseline-toting, bomb-wielding, slave-trading saracens
who raped their own daughters. She recalled Mohammed’s ‘flight to
Medina’ in 622 and obviously that was rubbish as they’d hardly had an
air service in those days - though maybe he hadn’t needed one. She
could just picture him waiting at the airport (rather than at a
railway station of the Cross), leafing through The Satanic Verses
(“This is a bestseller?”) and grizzling about the bloody inconvenient
pilots’ strike while dying for a fag and waiting for Fatima in the
street outside to raise the fare. Bloody Christian Pontius Airlines
were a bit much.
His own book sold heaps after he died.
70
At the risk of yet another footnote, may I point out that the phrase ‘unleashing a tempest’ conjures up
pictures of storms in halters or waterspouts in leading-strings, which are intrinsically ridiculous and show
the author up to be, if not dead, at least brain-dead. - John Howard, concerned reader and convinced
Burkian.
108
But a more profound part of her brain began to

work now Daddy (like most of the labour movement) was comatose.
Ahmed was an expert on inter-faith dialogue and
hoped Daddy wouldn’t rise from the dead too soon.
“Er, see, I’m a - Buddhist. That is - ”
She looked blanker than usual, not having heard
much about far eastern religions other than that of the hippie fakir
who lived nextdoor when she was little. He’d swallow a tape and
excrete the other end, then floss himself out with it. Yukkier than
Daddy, who washed his insides once every ten years with industrial
solvent.
“Budweiser …?” She knew now that instead of
rewriting Genesis she should either tack her own bit on at the end or
write a sequel. Everyone else did.
Ahmed sighed. Might as well go mountain-
climbing on the bottom of the Dead Sea. God knows what he’d get from
her if she found out his cousin was a Sardinian and his great-aunt
Maltese.
“Sardines?” she went. He blenched. Had he been
thinking aloud?
He tugged down his embarrassing kilt, which was
riding up. It wouldn’t do to get an erection right now. He’d seen what
that had done for his Boss on occasions.
At least he’d avoided thinking of the Hindu
notion that everyone was really a Hindu anyway, but wouldn’t always
admit it.
“Malta has the world’s worst stand-up comics.”
she added petulantly, and began blathering about the superiority of
the Celtic funnybone, citing Spike Milligan and Ian Paisley.
This was too much, since his great-aunt Sophia
was still the best stand-up comic in the whole region. Why, he
wondered irreverently, were these Australians so concerned about where
you came from. All they cared about was what you’d done before, your
‘background’, your lashings of ancestors - never with the future (both
agreed that the present was a pile of shit).71
“A Buddhist.” he reiterated, “a Zen Buddhist to
be precise.” His daily attainment of zazen had held him in good stead
with this job.
“Buddhist? ” A memory of Mummy sprang to mind
for some reason. “But you haven’t got slitty little eyes …” Ignoring
his startled “But you…” she pulled at the corners of her own a n d
chanted, “Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong, money prease. We give slanks
to ow de-ah Chairma Miaow and Paramount Pictures Leader Deng Xi - ow -
ping and the shlang March 72 hair of the Multicultural Revolution … ”
She tossed her shining locks. “Ah, so. Chelly brossom velly pletty,
and the remon frower is sweet. Konitchiwa akachan, little
tleasure flom Japan … She who in the beginning gave birf to

the people, / This was Chiang Yüan …” Tears began to pour from her
eyes.
Ahmed faltered. More at home conversing about
thalluses and hyphae and uncomfortable with Australian ancestor-
worship and his underwear (he distrusted those who raved about the
71
As the poet Stalin maintained, things are middling most of the time, worse than last year but better than
next year. I suppose you lot prefer Philip Larkin.
72
The pun is indeed the lowest form of wit.
109
versatility of bamboo), he’d lost her again. What a slanted outlook

she had, however famous, however much her opinion was sought by the
media on every subject known to humanity (except of course the ongoing
capitalist destruction of democracy), however much she was said by her
followers to be a role model for each member of every women’s
organisation from the Revolutionary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival
Committee to the Girl Guides. Clearly, she was deep in a state of
intense patrifaction (rather than putrefaction), and he no
Schadenfreudian (how the hell did this awful pun stay in?). But in
this country, there was plenty of time and money for everything. God
help them if the world ever found out.
“Heard about the Indian dragon?” she was saying
as she swayed on her flat feet. “Lives on a steady diet of curry
powder and breathes fire at both ends.” She’d got it out of Phillip
Adams’ latest joke book, Laugh Yourself Seasick.
He didn’t laugh at all, so she leaned close,
bathing him in alcohol fumes and smiling conspiratorially while wiping
her fake-blue peepers. “Oy, Ikie Moses, you chinky old shonk, you’ve
got a splendid snifferoo there. Maybe you should open a prawn-shop.
Ching-chong!” She laughed through her teeth, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss, and
put her hand on Daddy’s thinning hair. “Shure, sor, seein’ it was a
good bhoy yez were afther to run errants, it’s meself that has brought
this youngsther for yer inspection. It’s a jool ye’ll have in him.
He’s only 100 years old.”
Ahmed backed away at this sinister plagiarism
and would have launched into an Oum Kalsoum medley had he had the
courage. Giggling, she leapt forward and gave him an unexpected GROW
meeting bearhug which almost broke his spine, not to mention his Sinus
Arabicus. “If you vant buy a boomerang, buy a boomerang, if you don’t
vant to buy a boomerang take your snotty … ” Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss.
“Well, see you later, alligator, in a while, crocodile.” she added in
singsong with a swipe at his hand, using a line she’d just made up.
“I’m not a racist, but … ”
By the beard of the Prophet! Didn’t she
understand the meaning of what she was uttering? Obviously not. Ahmed
groaned and stared up at his flourishing eyebrows which kept catching
in his glasses (noting that her wispy moustache was rather impressive
too). His friends back home would never believe him either.
110
Chapter Twelve: Gerald Shanghaied
Amazed by the offer of a better job in which

his unwittingly-acquired criminal record was actually an advantage,
Gerald released all his hysterical and Dire Straits-worshipping
hostages. He was prised from the underground Vegan cafeteria - where
he was caught in the act of stuffing himself with lettuce smeared
lovingly with library paste - by Daddy’s bogus police, led by a
reactionary buck-toothed printmaker who styled himself the Serif of
Nottingham and disgustingly practised Fletcherism, or chewing food
thoroughly as an aid to good health.
“God, that’s a hell of a lot to load the reader
with.” he protested to an oikish Saxon reporter hired by the CM for PR
purposes (George’s daughter had meanwhile left the country for good).
“I hate these glib bridging passages. And by the way, can I launch the
book?”
Ignoring with Auntie Rhoberta this squalid
attempt at internal literary criticism, and eluding the real cops with
Nigel’s connivance, they took him and the plan-obsessed Leonie, George
and Rupert (both too stoned to object) to Daddy’s offshore
headquarters on a remote Carribean island. Leonie hadn’t actually
consented to come but Daddy had decided to put his foot down (on a
number of little people) after her ‘betrayal’ at his last rally.
“But it’s garbage.” Gerald could be heard
objecting as he was dragged away again. “Even Leonie could write
better, already. And soy vey, why am I being made to sound like some
stagey Sino-Yiddish stereotype? Those sentences should have come out
of her mouth. Clearly the author has no control over her material …”
(That’s what you think, buster. Take these

immortal socialist realist lines:
Gerald: G’day, cobber. ‘Ow yer goin’, darls?
Auntie Rhoberta: Not too bad, mite. Just lorst
me job at the steelworks. Reckon they oughter confiscate the bastards.
Gerald: Bonzer idea. Teach them fucken parasite
shareholders and CEOs some manners, eh. So, you been humpin’ yer bluey
out on the wallaby as a result?
Auntie Rhoberta (laconically): Yairs, reckon
I’ll invest in ammonium nitrate and diesel oil this year. Anyhow,
let’s forget about the Big Arsehole and all these other Thatcherite
shysters who steal from the people with the blessing of the State and
‘ave a bit of a singalong, brud. (holds out skirt, twirls and
screeches) If blood should stain the wattle … When

they jail a man for strikin’ it’s a rich man’s country yet … They lie
the men who tell us for reasons of their own … When Dad got put in
jail … Click go the spears boys … I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok …
Y’know, I’m a bit concerned at the risin’ tide of

bigotry and racism and men in this country. Blood oath, someone orta
write a book about it. What’s that sheila’s name, Manson?
Gerald (screwing out earhole with a finger):
Jeez, that’s a you-beaut mistake you made there, darls. Hang Sen,
innit?
Auntie Rhoberta: Yairs, yer prob’ly right,
mite, even if you never joined in y’old bastard. Anyhow, ‘ave a Chiko
roll. Good bush tucker.
Chapter Thirteen: First History Lesson 112
Gerald (in Australianised Moriarty voice from

the naval ABC’s modern Goon Show): No thanks, I’m tryin’ to give ‘em
up.
Auntie Rhoberta: No worries, bottler. I’m
‘avin’ a dim sim, but.
Gerald: Buenos notches, Memsahib.
Now - apart from that understandable going off
a bit at the end - that’s what I call control.)
“Crap!” retorted Gerald, with no appreciation

of folk music or takeaway food. “And why am I constantly getting
arrested? It seems a bit dubious to me. I could have you up before the
Anti-Discrimination Board on several grounds.”
“Come on, Ger, they sold it off to Mitsubishi
years ago - and how else can you escape dramatically and foil the
flagitious CM?” said Auntie Rhoberta persuasively. “Anyway, you
weren’t really arrested. This is all fiction.”
“Well that’s a good point, of course, I
actually spent the time swanning about the Aleutian Islands gaining
(wait for it) frequent flyer points … but I thought that as a
librarian, I’d lead a nice quiet life, maybe discover one of Wilde’s
long-lost MSS … ”
“No - see, in a satirical tour de force such as
this suspense is central, while CM-funded junkets by the characters
are, like J. Edgar Hoover’s many ‘conferences’ in Bermuda - ”
“Sheesh! Will you two shut up and stop ruining
the story?” snapped Leonie, after taking a shot from her hip-flask.
“You’re as bad as me bloody Voices … and you belt up too already.”
“Nefoedd sy’n Guybod!” gesticulated Auntie
Rhoberta limp-wristedly in a transport of Prydenish by way of spicing
up her queer sillographic project. “Ok, ok, Leonie! I’m getting on
with it. See you, Ger.”
“I never even got a speaking part.” lied the
yak, which believed itself to be a camel trapped in a gnat’s body (or
vice-versa). The wind moaned again but was fired in favour of a dead
calm.
They also took George’s stray cats, knowing

they’d get peckish on the long journey by bum-boat. (Naturally, Daddy
brought along his priceless and explosive bathwater73 in jerry-cans
strapped around his neck for there was nothing else quite like it in
the world; every so often he’d comfort himself by taking a wee sip. De
gustibus non est disputandum.)
The CM cutthroats and their captives passed the
time and the aforementioned International Date Line (Ahmed picked a
few for later) by idly pollinating seaweed and cultivating scurvy.
Gerald tried to make the boat a bit more homey by maintaining a cheery
vase of seaweed-flowers in the bows and and taking up ikebana to
Daddy’s disgust. He also maintained Jerald Gallee at Leonie’s insistence,
serving them all a hearty breakfast of either cawl or faggots and
mushy peas every morning. Daddy, little red carrot thankfully out of
sight, scungily grumbled all the way, saying ‘faggot’ was appropriate
enough.
“All I want is a dair-cent plate of praties,
not this Romanian muck.” It was his hundredth birthday and the message
from the Queen was not welcome. Fucken queer lezzo cunt. He believed
in being trendy.
Rupert spent all his time birching himself in
the sauna and moping, while George grew quite hearty and seafaring.
Leonie was alternately morose and manic, especially when they ran out
73
Yes, this is a running gag.
112
of red wine and she desperately tried to brew her own out of algae and
seawater.
After they got there, Gerald became the
epicentre of endless problems. He refused for a while to become a
Catholic or wear ‘that horribly butch kilt’ (he preferred the beige
chiffon tent which he’d courageously worn all along in prison) and
instead sat munching lettuce and gefilteleeks under a coconut palm
with the bickering Rupert and George, plotting his second escape. He
played endless games of scrabble till Leonie got jealous of his
immense vocabulary and ate the board in a rage. Daddy had become
comatose for a while and not much would happen till he revived. He was
planning his next move but some of his concepts had got lost in the
machinery.
“Don’t you hate me?” asked Leonie to Gerald one
night while the others were all asleep. She really wanted to go home
and do some work but Daddy wouldn’t hear of it.
Gerald had been somewhat stand-offish all
along. “You’ll see.” was all he’d say.
More seriously, he also refused to kill anyone
(Ahmed secretly confessed his sympathy), claiming that a vision of a
strange dark-eyed woman in solitary had shown him that he’d never
killed in his life. The post-hypnotic suggestion was wearing off.
“I respect visions.” stated the methuselic
Paddy as he woke, crawling with grave-worms which had set in (some
camping out all night to get tickets) in anticipation of his imminent
demise. “But we don’t stand for conchies in dis outfit.”
“I’m not changing into any other.” said Gerald
in what Leonie considered to be a chi-chi tone. Daddy was still wary
of having Gerald done in; the mild-mannered librarian had by now a
huge following.
“So do I.” said Leonie sulkily when he
mentioned this to her. At that point, having gagged her uppity tits
and allayed her fears with a great deal of primal screaming and
Japanese smashing of Chippendale furniture, Leonie released a third
novel called Nigel in a Nightie, all about her affair with the Prime
Minister.
This caused relations between them to cool
further. Perhaps it hadn’t been a wise move. Her ASL74 medal dangling
round her neck and Der Fuffelsingers blaring, she yodellingly and
without futurological assistance pondered the future. With Gemma and
Rose dead she had failed to cement a truly stable relationship with
anyone. (And she wasn’t about to take up necrophilia, for all Daddy’s
urgings.) She’d also failed to persuade George to have a sex change,
unlike the drag queen Gemma had befriended and who had since been on
Oprah.
It was time to make a major change in her own
life. If only she had her jet-powered Volvo here. With the third
novel (and her redaction of Pauline Hanson’s latest edition of The
Truth in which the famous Whitean scene of Aborigines eating Pauline
with salt and a splash of vinegar appears), rumours of plagiarism had
reared once more, fuelled she thought by that frowsy Hellenic bitch
Nigel who had decided after much agonising that he hadn’t liked being
publicly humiliated (he loved being privately humiliated). She
published several conciliatory articles which compared him variously
to a sea-slug, a jerboa and a puffer fish, a delicacy in Celtic Japan.
Strangely forgetting for the moment his
obsessive love for her, he grew furious and put pressure on Daddy to
shut her up. She didn’t like the Carribean or Latin America as those
places were short on blondes and lacked in her view not only the Way,
74
Australian Society of Lunacy; not to be confused with the Association of Literary Drunks.
113
the Truth and the Life 75 but also anyone remotely like Tala, so at
Daddy’s prompting and threats of dismemberment she agreed to stop
yodelling and pack in writing and jokes about Ahmed for a while and
(having Buckley’s) to head back to Australia and become a Carmelite
nun.
75
It was also short on paschal lambs which she thought were nice and woolly and delicious with mint
sauce.
114
Chapter Thirteen: First History Lesson
Two hundred years earlier, due to a minor

earthquake of little consequence to the majestic sweep of Leonie’s
nose, human history and the venerable chronicle of Daddy’s bathwater,
of which more later, a significant columnar boulder, with experience
at the sepulchre of Golgotha and in central Australia, began to
tremble atop the hill which would later overlook the world-famous
author’s house. Its balance disturbed like that of her mind, it began
an imperceptibly slow, Pisan fall.76
About that time the Carminative Order of Nuns
(the CM substitute for the Carmelites) was established but it never
could attract anyone famous; so by the time Leonie applied in a
leather bustle and breast amplifier it welcomed her with open legs.
Two hundred years. Those empty colonial
orbitings before she’d met Gerald or indeed been born into domestic
slavery. Two hundred years which had heard the merry rustle of rosary
beads against habits so thick and heavy they might have been
manufactured in the halcyon days of Stalin. The Sisters spent each
shining hour in fervid prayer and recreational consumption of
laxatives, happily isolated from the demands of the workaday world and
generously endowed (less of the smut please) by the godfearing Celtic
Mafia. So productive were they in gobbling spiders and flogging each
other with cows’ clitorises that their Lord smiled on them and crossed
their self-mortifying paths with Leonie’s. Though hardly charismatic
Catholics, they were soon to feel born-again, or at least to wish
they’d never been born.
Reincarnation and the onward march of Magyar
didn’t appeal to her messianic mind but according to her new-agey
shrink (Pastor Bruce Bythewayside) she’d actually been Gerald in a
past life whereas he’d been her, which confused the creaking Karmic
Wheel no end. They’d both kept applying for the same job as a lion-
tamer and neither ever got it due to lack of work experience.
Speaking of Gerald, his birth, afterbirth and
childhood, so absorbing to the educated reader, his birth had not yet
taken place either. (If you find the prose here a little dippy please
leave an erotic message on my answering machine and I’ll give you a
tingle this afternoon.)
His parents, personal friends of B. Dylan
Thomas and Shirley Bassey, came from Aberystwyth some 158 years later,
having sold their kosher leek cannery to take up worm-farming in North
Queensland, till the business failed in the roadside diner crash of
‘86 and his mother got a job as Assistant Tealady with the Department
of Defensiveness in Canberra while his father became a successful
hermit in Tibet.
Gerald had been born in Merther Tydfil and was
barely four when they sailed jauntily to Australia on the dinkum ‘Fair
Fat and Forty’, playing happy games of quoits on the listing deck and
swimming boldly in the shark-infested Indian Ocean.
Since his mother’s relatives - convertees to
the Brynmawr school of Islamic fundamentalism who spurned eggplant on
the grounds it reminded people of sex and Saxons - had been trying to
bump them off at the time, he continually gave thanks to the Assisted
Passage77 and the Convict System, even if it had meant doing his bit in
the rigging and declaiming Alan Gould’s poetry to the waves.
Gerald’s was a ‘sad’ childhood, with the
Canberra boy shaving his legs to a turn and wearing his sister’s gear
76
This paragraph with its clever object correlative describes what seems to be one of the few land-based
outdoor scenes in the novel. It was contributed by the Amish Community of northern Antarctica.
77
The Australian government had of late brought in a scheme to return all such non-Christian migrants
‘voluntarily’ to their respective homelands - Begora called it the Back Passage.
Chapter Eleven: First History Lesson 116
whenever he could find the opportunity. His parents did everything in

their power to try and stop him, till he realised their parental
wisdom in reality (on which he took a Realist rather than
Phenomenological position) was a mass of societal contradictions. His
notions of mother-and-son frocks fell on deaf ears.
Nevertheless, he felt so gorgeous standing in
front of the mirror with his stockinged thighs brushing delicately
beneath the then-fashionable scarlet mu-mu. He would prance and tittup
about in his midnight dishabille like a go-go dancer and wish that a
virile gentleman would waft him away to the Ball and try to look up
his skirt.
His first experience of gentlemanly attention
was rather different to his golden fantasy; he was caught astoundingly
plastered one night in the toilet of the Private Bin and would have
been raped by a bouncer had he not flushed himself down the loo in
desperation. (He was very sinuous in those days.)
Out of the sewer pipe he crawled, boyo78, and
being a tad grubby he was forced to bathe in a nearby stormwater
drain, an unpleasant prospect79 due partly to the licentious gang of
Lebanese street punks using it at the time. He grit his teeth and they
took no notice of him whatever, much to his chagrin.
The moon came out and spread her silvery beams
(he began to croon) about the sleeping city and he stared up
romantically as she cocked a snook at him, which should have been
quite prophetic. Yet without the benefit of hindsight this celestial
sign simply served to bolster his confidence that there was a Meaning
in it all. He never noticed that the Street Kid in the Moon was giving
him a finger too.
Ceres the asteroid and all the satellites of
well-heeled Pluto came by at that point and jeered. Had he habitually
carried a theodolite like Leonie he might have lost his self-esteem
altogether.
But as it was he felt a strengthening of his
resolve. Yes, he would have his revenge. Hitching up his pantihose, he
shinned up a drainpipe till he reached a window half open to let out
the intoxicating shamrock smoke. He could see half-clad female bodies
gyrating surreally in the pulsations of the lightshow, and felt
envious.
Gerald by this stage was sick of living on
dreams. It was time to take action to defend his marginalised status.
The music drowned out the noise of what he did
next. In his frilly and diminutive handkerchief he’d gathered up some
transcendentally odorous ordure from the sewer pipe, and with great
caution he whirled it round his head biblically. With his first shot
he caught the offending and bellowing bouncer full in the mouth.
The stench had them all stampeding for the exit
or the two inadequate loos, mostly with the runs.
Lamentably, at the very moment of his triumph
the drainpipe gave way and he fell onto the soft top of a passing
Volvo convertible. He was driven at a reckless pace all the way to
Adelaide, clinging white-faced and Van de Graaf-haired to the roof. He
thanked God he’d always kept his nails long.
The woman80 who was driving was very nice about
it and he ended up living with her but gradually she got him to wear
78
With all due respect to the Welsh and their ludicrous dialect, it is obvious to all who eat, sleep and
breathe the stimulating obiter dicta of film critics c. 1894 that this scene has been swiped from the zoetrope
hit The Shawshank Redemption, which lost an Academy Award to the Woody Allen classic, Jesus, the Foetus ,
late last century.
79
Daddy often swam there when a nearby cemetery had been washed away.
80
NOT Jocelyn Spumante alias Amanda Flintheart, worm trainer extraordinaire and a close drinking
companion of Margot Kidder.
116
more and more items of feminine apparel, a practice she referred to as

‘petticoat punishment’. She insisted he wear nothing but women’s
clothing, a practise frowned upon by the psychiatrists of his
generation, who also frowned upon the average woman. He was forced to
glitter, and while he enjoyed every minute of it, it could be said to
have moulded him into the bleating figure introduced at the beginning
of the story.
Leonie, by contrast (being the woman in
question), had been an only child in North Queensland who was told by
Daddy that everything she did was right as long as she urinated only
once a day. It gave her something of a complex and a barely-restrained
tendency to butcher small creatures. The Daily Wee became a treasured
occasion, more important than Confession, and holding it for the rest
of the day built her into the strong character we’ve got to know
above. At Daddy’s direction she drank lots of holy water and as on the
bum-boat attempted to turn it into wine, without much success. (It’s
quite easy with the right ingredients.)
Her mother, Ada Bloddwen Mary Hanna Sarah Sian
R e b e c c a E l i z a b e t h A n n e R a c h e l
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychchwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch81 Goldberg
PhD, never known to Leonie as other than Mummy, had left the weeing-
once-a-year Daddy early in the relationship to live with a Chinese
junk varnisher and dentist of Palestinian extraction in Honan province
- there being no room on the mission to Pluto at the time - and thanks
to Daddy’s conniving Leonie hadn’t seen her since. Her new partner was
better than Daddy but she was rapidly growing tired of him.
The junk he varnished, though! Soup cans, beer
cans, used sanitary napkins, broken chopsticks, shower curtain rings …
quite the Andy Warhol, really. He sold them to high-ranking and
toothless Party members in the interests of a level playing field and
made a small fortune which later became a big one and he bought Hong
Kong and British New Labour for their many sons to play with.
The family cat, Twinkletail, also left in
disgust and emigrated to Tegucigalpa.
What will the average reader learn from the
above? It could be said that both families were dysfunctional but in
Gerald’s case his sister was professionally autistic and his parents
were so laid back that he couldn’t distinguish them from casual
passers-by, on the rare occasions they were in, or half the time
decide which was Mum and which was Dad. It got so bad that one day
when he was ravishingly dressed as ‘Amanda’ his father started to chat
him up and later he discovered to his pre-sexual revolution horror
that his mother was a Lesbian (he should have been able to tell by the
accent and the fact that she like Leonie had applied for a hobby farm
on the Sapphic isle). Neither of them ever spoke about the incidents
on subsequent occasions, so he never knew whether it was a cover-up or
whether they genuinely didn’t know it was him.
However, they did have happy holidays at the
coast (it was almost like his days as a foetus when he was the
placenta of attention and ceaselessly trying to escape) but when he
was about thirteen they sort of all drifted apart and he lost track of
them altogether. After that he survived as a latchkey child, mostly on
the front step as they’d had the locks changed.
As if this wasn’t bad enough the house he was
living beside was repossessed a mere three years after it burnt down
and he was forced to find lodgings in a seedier part of town.
Leonie was at the time consumed with the notion
of bribing her minimally micturitional way to fame and being unable to
acquire government funding because of her mental disorder resorted to
letting out a number of mobile slums - one to Gemma - in a caravan
81
Spit. Quite enough Welsh for one lifetime. St Mary’s church in white hazel hollow near swift whirlpool
and St Tysilio’s church by the red cave was in fact where she’d been conceived.
117
park near Canberra bought with money owed to Daddy and the Swiss
banking system. Before they met, Gerald paid an exorbitant rent for
years, financing it mainly through temple prostitution and the
sculpting of erotic aardvarks which never hurt anyone. Later they set
up house together, having in common a North Queensland background and
not much else as far as she could see. She was (surprise surprise) a
petit bourgeois Leo and he was (unsurprisingly) an haut bourgeois
Virgo. (Working class Taureans would be wise to regard this as
classist bullshit.)
When Gerald became a Librarian she gave up her
day job in the Scotch fillet-processing factory. Freedom! She could
begin to write and network full time. Gerald, meanwhile, had been a
writer for many years but never found the time to write much since he
was always working - flogging and disassembling antique typewriters,
selling crossbows, servicing petrol bowsers, keeping lighthouses,
painting ocean liners and the Harbour Bridge, or whatever he could get
through CES Pty Ltd. At least unlike the Minister for Defensiveness he
never lost the Navy to a travelling card sharp.
What he did write was so good that she never
dared show any of it to George, while he was too diffident to think of
that. He published it in obscure literary magazines and his grant
applications were always knocked back since by this time she’d stacked
all the relevant councils. Her own writing had a long way to go before
it got into the league of a three-year-old with Klinefelter’s
syndrome.
Having sold you this essential information (the
bill is in the e-mail) I think it’s time to get back to the story.
118
Chapter Fourteen: Hie Thee …
The Carminative Order was against Lesbianism

and lavender Zionism officially, but that didn’t faze her. It was nuns
(along with the Grameen Bank) that she found unattractive, not being
able to get off on a woman who didn’t wear spike heels and carmine
lipstick. She longed for the late Rose and wished the bitch hadn’t
committed suicide like that. She even threw her sweaty crucifix into
the shrubbery in disgust.
Ow, yelled a rather brer rabbit (it wasn’t even
Easter) and swiftly wrote a letter of complaint to the Canberra
Tiresome in Uncle Remus-speak. With four rabbit’s feet it soon won
Lotto and forgot to post the thing.
Perhaps, she thought, I was too hard on her.
Mocking her love poem had been a bit cruel, to say nothing of the
horizontal bra. Still, no point in crying over spilt blood. Her
imaginary friend Tala wouldn’t.
She was safe here, even though the convent was
in the centre of the capital and the place was crawling with demented
Black Welsh Marxist Sino-Hebrews and other cliques of darksome
thieving leekoholics bent, leek by jowl, on her destruction. Like some
dopy leeklustre beggar she subsisted on maggot-ridden pork chops and
leeks and what she’d brought from her (since-failed) health farm -
mainly shredded leeks. It was tough being a novice, and tougher still
being a leek.
Daddy with his memories of the Hanseatic Leek -
sorry, League - had presumably grown sick of her antics and seen
through the fake priest (Ravi Singh) she’d hired. Siekh, leek, and ye
shall find. Maybe he’d even found out erroneously that Gerald was
Chapel Welsh, one of those who couldn’t swim across the Irish Sea to
escape the invading Teutonic capitalist hordes (since God hadn’t seen
fit to part the waters in that case, perhaps believing they could walk
on them).82
Nigel, she learned through various impecunious
spies and her seances which helpfully raised the ghost of Emperor
Bokhassa, was on his way out politically thanks to her not so divine
revelations (and Daddy’s ire), but still perversely in love with her.
Though not once having seen her naked, he felt compelled to organise a
cover-up of the plagiarism scandal which the Opposition had used to
force another meaningless election. Oy Gott, she was glad to be out of
politics.
All the same, the press snaffled the story and
thanks to Daddy’s proprietorship of all the dailies she was portrayed
as renouncing the world for a life of self-abnegation and poverty like
most writers. The first few days were fun, she found, but after that
the routine of prayer and scrubbing the flagstones with her boobs got
a bit boring. Antigone, walled up in her rock-vaulted tomb, had not
had it harder.
Sister Naomi Xy-lin Svetlana Hanan Calvina al-
Fayk PhD, Ahmed’s redoubtable sibling and the talk of Belfast, was a
big woman with masses of freckles and kidney trouble who liked to
parade about in Rabbinical garments in the privacy of her own cell.
(On first meeting her the heavily-freckled Leonie took her for a
member of the Speckled Race and drew back while demanding to know if
she spoke Celtic, unlike the Lesser Spotted Wog and other Breeds
without the Law; she was now convinced, after her midnight epiphany at
the Gould League Ornithology Institute in Azerbaijan, that they
wouldn’t rub off on her or the furniture.)
Naomi - by the way, to quote Gerald and the
author, the internally half-rhyming and intratextual signifier Leonie
82
A lie! Boudica had stayed to defend the Island of the Mighty.
Chapter Fourteen: Hie Thee … 120
had never met anyone with the surname ‘PhD’ before, clearly a Speckled
cognomen - also tended to sneak83 into Leonie’s bed at night. There was
hardly any room - Leonie was forced to occupy a deep pit beside her
huge fleshy form, wide awake and fearfully keeping watch on the
enormous bulk which loomed above, like Mt Everest, in the half-light.
Her greatest terror was that Sister Naomi might roll over in her
sleep. She even set up a rollover fund.
Suffering from ‘hot pees’ ever since her
honeymoon trip down England’s famous River Piddle PhD on a piddle
steamer (not I think a useful culinary item), Naomi had no interest in
sex at all and preferred French knitting.84 Leonie as a consequence had
to resort to ‘hand relief’. Unfortunately her bedmate greatly
disapproved of this and Leonie got a severe spanking whenever she was
found out. Preferring now to dish it out rather than take it, she
tried to do it very quietly but the vibrator gave her away every time.
“Custody of the vibrator, sister!”
Leonie hated custard.
The day arrived when the good Sister pulled
rank and took her batteries away. Leonie now had an inkling of how
Gerald (and the sex-aid industry) must feel. He’d meanwhile been
faking Catholicism so well that he’d been promoted to First Assistant
Godfather Grade 4 PhD and was now in a position to make policy. His
first policy (he shunned Admin. as something for lesser minds) was to
transfer the entire funds of his section to a Swiss bank account whose
number and mattress he alone knew (awful if he forgot it when you
think about it). Then he used his newfound connections to depart
secretly for Australia.
“What a crook!” Daddy Paddy (BA Calcutta
(Failed)) lamented, and vowed to kill him in the most horrible way
imaginable, a difficult task since apart from Ahmed - who secretly
wrote haiku about camels and blueberries and the boiling frog ranches
of Newfoundland at four o’clock in the morning - the Celtic Mafia had
no imagination.
Gerald’s many spies had flushed Leonie out (it
wasn’t hard considering the monographed star she’d had fixed to the
front gate and the impressions of her chuckling boobs in the newly-
poured concrete step). Disguised as a vibrator salesman, he banged on
that gate one morning and offered to provide the whole Order with a
demo. Sister Naomi, squinting behind her thick glasses (Leonie thought
them deplorably unmodish as she peered through her own), was about to
give him the bum’s rush when frail Mother Superior Fergus Paisley PhD,
swathed in bandages as she was a recent victim of an electric lift
recliner that had hurled her ejector-seat fashion into the tv set (and
into the arms of a startled Jeff Kennett who was being interviewed by
a gasping Jill Singer at the time), overruled her.
Leonie had got tired of the joys of penitent
masochism - poverty, chastity, yes, but obedience, never! 85 - and made
plans to break out. Her new editor, Prátt, she’d contacted covertly
(Daddy’s influence was limited by certain disloyal, ‘non-Celtic’
staff) and seduced and bribed onto the wrong and windy side of the PM.
He had helped her with intelligence - she had little, on the face of
it - in her destruction of George.
Prátt had been persuaded via the Internet to
lean a long ladder, purloined from the privatised Fire Department,
83
How with her bulk she managed to sneak is a mystery to me too. By the - ahem, the smartarsed
reference to ‘intratextual signifiers’ is shamelessly stolen from Gavin Bertram’s story ‘The Arrival of a
Mosquito Virus’, which I impecuniously found in a free review copy of the obscure anthology
Pornography, Heroin and Government (Canberra: Garret Press, 1997).
84
The nun referred to earlier who attempted to examine Daddy’s willy was of course Sister Naomi, who
did have a dispassionate interest in anatomy as we shall see later.
85
Kate McNamara, personal communication, 19.12.96.
120
against the wall. As Gerald approached her door, she hoisted her habit
titillatingly and stepped backward out of the clerestory window. The
ladder, held all morning by a sweating lovelorn Prátt, stayed firm,
but as she lowered her foot onto the first rung, the cell door burst
open and she panicked. Instead of a vibrator Gerald was holding a
trendy nail bomb.
What had he learned in prison, she thought
fearfully. (His testamur, swiped from the University of Crime, hung in
his bedroom, showing that he’d passed Advanced Forgery and
Embezzlement with straight HDs. As a result, he was even thinking of
doing another Honours degree at Boggo Road, even though everyone told
him there was no Honours among thieves. And if you think that joke’s
bad you should see what I’ve held over.)
Her foot slipped and she swung round and slid
splinterily down the ladder, her stiletto heel narrowly missing
Prátt’s infinitesimal brain. As he clawed the heel out of his head she
bolted for the shrubbery while picking splinters out of her palms, for
some idiotic reason reminded of George.
The nail bomb whizzed past her bejewelled ear
and exploded, decapitating several plaster Virgins who were hanging
about nearby, and frightening off the real one who’d been about to
make another Visitation. A crucifix, grazing her ankle, now bristled
with nails in just the right places.
Noting Gerald’s Star of David necklace, Mother
Fergus wailed “They’re at it again!” and began crossing herself and
genuflecting vigorously, an act inappropriate for someone less like a
mother than a mummy.
Dodging the olive branch she was trying to
whack him with, Gerald pointed out umbrageously that they were finger
nails, Leonie’s in fact, indeed the bits that he’d retrieved from his
breakfast in chapter three. He advised her to rise from the dead and
get a life.
The good Mother, one of Daddy’s appointees
(though old enough to be his grandmother and reputed to be a cadaver
extracted from a Danish peat bog), retorted that some of her best
friends were “of your persuasion, young man”. Gerald, vivid in a cream
velour cocktail dress and gloves, wasn’t quite sure what she meant by
that.
Miraculously unhurt but with her expensive
patterned stockings in shreds, Leonie took it shriekingly as a Sign
and dragged Prátt by the neck-hair out of the line of fire. For now,
she needed him.
Daddy dismissed him as a harmless nobody, but
she admired his creative tenacity and minuscule nose.
“Quick! I need another novel published to
mollify the new PM.”
Prátt thought for a moment then recommended in
a hoarse whisper an infamous ghost writer who’d cottoned on to the
rewarding state of posthumous success and wrote Irish Potato Famine
reminiscences from beyond the grave, Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills
Wilde. (Van Gough the potato head was doing much the same, but his
writing was awful, and some philistines would say his painting isn’t
much better. Ears looking at you in wheatfields - how surreal, give us
this day our Dali bread, who are you, James / Joyce?)
“That Geraldy poof! Look, it’s bad enough
having to trust you and Daddy Paddy. We don’t need another hairy male
creep complicating matters, even if he does dress up.” She thought of
showing solidarity with her fellow women writers but the last time she
did that Spinifex told her she’d failed the gender test.
Ha! What did they know, boring manipulative
biddies by Gor (sad she knew so little Celtic).
121
She pressed her lips creatively into a thin

white line and announced, positively and adverbially oh not another
running gag, “I’m going to write me own.”
Prátt went ashen. It quite suited him.
“Yes,” she continued, “a comic novel about -
about - oh, well, best not to talk about your ideas, especially if
they’re as misunderstood as mine.” That early seventies Woody Allen
masterpiece86 - what was it called, something to do with feathers and
arch supports - would do as source material, since surely everyone had
forgotten it by now. Her fillings ached just thinking about it.
Gerald had while they were whispering together
seen the error of his ways and that sort of thing. He decided with
much quotation from the Talmud (The right of the worker always has
precedence! unnerved the Order a bit) to live up to his pacifist and
health-conscious convictions. Violence in all its horrible forms he
spurned, scotching that snake with with much pomp and ritual that
delighted Mother Fergus and her archangelic spirit guides on loan from
Tir na Nóg. She scratched at her hairshirt and smiled reptileanly.
But then he said something that shocked her
(and BA Santamaria) to the core.
“We can have children.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry, I mean me and Naomi … ”
He looked at Sister Naomi and it would have
been love at first sight if he hadn’t suffered from double
astigmatism. She confessed an interest in the cause of Peace too. It
was better for business in the long run. And children … yes, she’d
think about it.
To Leonie, she seemed to grow even huger: “We
might be able to set up a new caring, sharing world.” she said.
“Through an Ethical Corporation!” She enunciated this with
millennarian if oxymoronic fervour, and they both gave each other dewy
looks. Once again, no chiliast she was sure, Leonie felt like throwing
up.
ARSE
Liquor
Surfing by at that point (it had started to
pour with rain and they rushed into the chapel) came the postperson on
86
The publishers offer $40 000 to anyone who can remember the title and the comment that a disgruntled
reader scrawled in biro on page 54. (It was Without Feathers, actually, and the comment was could this man
be a pedophile?, so I get the prize.)
122
her Harley and - being an undercover Catholic priest87 - delivered a

bullish letter from the Pope, Olé! Mother Fergus opened it; her face
also grew pale.
His Holiness
Vatican City 1
Roma.
Good Friday, XIII.VIII.MCLIXIX, sorry MC -

er, 2000?
Dear Mother Fergus
I am writing this to tell you that if you

allow this sort of filth to go on in your Convent you will
all have to take a vow of blindness. Sister Naomi is well-
known to me as the only chaste member of your Order. Don’t
let her leave whatever you do but kick those other trollops
out and get rid of that Commo or I’ll start another
Albigensian Crusade.
- John Paul George and Ringo II.
ps never forget the Edict of Milan.88
Sister Naomi and Mother Fergus (hoping this was

not yet another literary swindle) squared off against each other.
“The Pontiff has spoken.” said the holy Mother,
who’d never had a kid in her life. She recited a list of all the
heretics from the Gnostics to the Modernists and Postmodernists (a
breathtaking intellectual fraud on a par with Von Hayek’s), not
leaving out the Pelagians, the Syrian Jacobites (of Bonnie Prince
Assad), the rebellious Houghers and the Monophysites.
“But I love him - Gerald, that is.” pleaded
Sister Naomi, responding with a chronicle of Holy Roman Emporers and
Anti-Caesars and an elegant summation of a 1962 hovercraft manual
she’d always admired for its spare prose. She realised immediately
that her existence up to that point had been a lie. Thunder and
lightning overhead made them all a little subdued.
Many years ago, she had lived in Traralgon with
a chimney-sweep, there being a lot of chimneys down that way and all
now owned by carpetbaggers from the current Roamin’ in the Gloamin’
Empire. He’d got sick of crawling up them, and quit his job at the
power station to farm oxalis and ringworm at Shepparton. She let him
go (he signed an individual contract with Daddy in the end, unlike
Leonie), raising her ten children on Supporting Parent’s Benefit
through ruthless budgeting (food was out for a start).
When she was 38 she understandably got sick of
Traralgon and went on a world trip which was sponsored by the kids
who’d all found suitable work as sweated labour in the rollicking
imitation Jag and Rolls Royce trades. She met a musical optician
called Jelly Roll Kunz in Spain and they spent the next few years in a
blissful theosophical idyll on the Costa Brava (she would have
preferred a villa). They had lots of soirees with Barbara Ehrenreich
and a number of eminent Black Welsh Marxist Sino-Hebrews, notably the
long-haired layabout and dulcimer-maker Samson ap Dafydd ap Ngberg Jr
who never got a job though having a PhD in Eng. Lit and ended up
87
You didn’t really think I was going to make that unoriginal gag about the Sacred Service, did you?
88
For the ill-educated, atheistic idiots among our readership, this was the edict of the Emporer
Constantine which legalised Christianity in the Roman Empire, in the blessed year 313 (thus introducing
the extremely Common Era).
123
weeding the plastic lawns at Canberra’s Close Encounterish Parliament

House for the dole. Then he turned out to be a female-to-male
transsexual and she began to question her sexuality.
She found it quite an interesting
conversationalist and they got onto some quite rarefied topics.
Several of these interviews she published in the New Yorker and made a
lot of money which she salted away until she became rich again.
After another few years, the lovers parted
amicably and she like Leonie fell (again, as we’ll see) onto the
heaving bosom of the Church. Picking herself up without a word or an
error of logic, she took her vows again, though - fortunately for this
author - not of silence.
Mother Fergus wondered what she was doing,
standing there with a glassy stare on her face.
“You’ve only just met him.” she pointed out,
scandalised.
Naomi continued to stare, imagining wedding
bells and bridesmaids and flying rice till this heterosexist fairy
floss almost put her off the whole idea.Worse than waking in the
middle of the night to the sound of blowflies.
In her spare time she liked to build freeways,
and this she now fantasised about.
The chapel slowly dissolved …
She found the art of the pick and shovel relaxing. She was
resting on her shovel and surveying the scene behind through Leonie’s theodolite. She
wasn’t even breathing hard (but unlike her brother wasn’t on the dole in any case).
Singlehandedly, she’d carved a straight and narrow path
across the lake toward the south coast, and it was sad to think that she was supposed to be
heading for Goulburn (have you been there?). These things happen when you get carried
away. She dwelled on her lazy and diminutive sibling with a mixture of loathing,
amusement and contempt.
She pushed her sweaty veil back and read from Leonie’s novel,
thinking it obsessive, racist crap. She would have to get onto her close friend the Virgin
Mary (if she could tear her and St Bridget away from their favourite sport of nude bungee-
jumping), and maybe overwhelm the said author and Leonie with her indomitable
character. Her snaps of Saõ Paulo were pretty awesome.
“Custody of the reveries, Sister!” yowled

Mother Fergus, sick of holding her fisticuffs out at a rakish angle.
“What? Oh, bugger this.” said Naomi, unwilling
to divulge details of her own surprising double astigmatic life. “I’m
reconverting to progressive Confucianism.” she countered, having
undergone around sixteen religious conversions in her life (except to
Hinduism, since she was really one already). This was her second time
as a Catholic and apart from free accommodation hadn’t much to offer
really.
Perhaps she should never have committed herself
to Family Values. Her children these days were all atheists and not-
so-juvenile delinquents and had set up a kibbutz together in racially
harmonious Alice Springs - where the ivory-hued majority gave
generously to charity on the understanding that the money was going to
the deserving starving millions of India, and were naturally furious
when they learnt it was for the local wine-bibbing boongs and demanded
their money back - and wouldn’t let her in. She shook her head
regretfully. Yes, an Ethical Business again, with Gerald …
“You can’t do that! It’s not natural! Can’t you
see the superior efficacy of worshipping a dying Gaul and eating him
later?” She gave a Silence of the Lambs-style slurp89 and waved to
89
No reference to theophagous comedian Trevor Crook is intended by this remark.
124
Anthony Hopkins as he glided by in his limo. “I’ll fight you.” she

wheezed menacingly, her two incisors poking over her thin lower lip
like those of an angry pekinese.
She strapped on her boxing gloves. Naomi
preferred the bare-knuckle style. They swung at each other but only
Naomi’s punch connected and knocked Mother Fergus flat with a whistle
of ancient breath. The AMA had sent round inspectors and searched in
vain for brain damage but were compelled to conclude that Mother
Fergus lacked a brain.
“Fuck this!” cried Naomi multilingually - even
employing the sputtering tongue of the author’s ancestors - and
renounced her vows in a flash90 as thunder tumbled across the sky.
(She’d almost completed her project of learning the swear-words of
every language in the world, a feat which farther on in the story will
inspire Leonie.)
Leonie, presently not thinking about swear-
words but using them with great spontaneity while feeling up the
postal worker and coughing like Dylan Thomas, looked upon this
polysyllabic and Celtic scene with amazement. A pugilistic conflict in
which she was not included - did such things occur in this novel? Her
background in kick-boxing with George and parked cars was being passed
over entirely. There hardly seemed a point in acquiring work
experience at all.
She blamed it on multiculturalism and the lack
of a White Australia Policy, a reform Nigel was about to make.
“I knew we couldn’t trust anyone called Naomi.”
croaked Mother Fergus as they revived her with a bucket of hell-
freezing water from the font. “It’s such a Jewish name.”
Leonie, hearing this sneering condemnation from
the mouth of the good Mother Superior, was more shocked than she knew.
The silver star she’d seen in the woods, and which she imagined always
to be hovering over her, fell into an abyss.
“So’s Joseph. And Mary. And Jesus.” pointed out
someone and was soundly crucified for saying it, thereby starting up a
whole new religion which swept the world with its vision of an earthly
paradise (unsupported by the Lions Forum and the Parliamentary
Christian Fellowship) and caused no end of trouble for the next 2000
years.
“I’ll change my name to yours.” said Naomi in a
move that would have gratified Daddy, but which was prompted by the
fact that the byzantine Tax Office knew her current name a little too
well.
“You’d like to be called ‘Gerald’. Er,
YLUTBUCUG?” said Gerald, confused but acronymically happy. Leonie
smirked.
“Er, forget it.” Naomi gave him a sloppy kiss
that would have had Lucy in instant ecstasy, but which made him search
through his emotional database for an appropriate bibliographic
response.
Naomi (and the half-rhyming Leonie) raised
their eyes to Heaven. Nevertheless, rather uplifted by the sight of an
supremacist Mother Superior begging for mercy, the happy couple left
immediately on Naomi’s broom to raise a gigantic family in a communal
yurt at Tuntable Falls, though they only ever had two children, and
these emigrated to Aberystwyth to become successful indoor lettuce
farmers.
Leonie, though pleased that he had found
acceptance amongst what she (pace the ‘anti-Zionist’ Daddy) had till
now haughtily termed ‘his own kind’, was very concerned to bolster her
flagging literary career, and racked her compressed and overheated
90
The Institute of Indecent Exposeurs (IIE) has complained, this last-named language perhaps being
unknown to them.
125
brain to find a way of exploiting this development so it’d offend

everyone and keep her ruined visage on the front page of all the
dailies. As they tiptoed through tulips away from the convent, which
by now the secret and not-so-secret police had abandoned since even
they were on strike against Nigel’s reformist policies, she had an
idea - for her forthcoming novel.
She refused to tell Prátt what it was (it
involved the mice running around in her head). Uillean & Onion were
instantly interested, however.
Still the head of the Australia Council, she
swung herself (though out of the room) a huge grant and began to shove
her stuff drunkenly onto the supercomputer (‘Deep Doo-doo’) that she’d
bought from the University of the ACT with the proceeds of her last
novel’s sales – it had 4 trillion Ginger Meggs of RAM - and used for
word processing.
The novel didn’t exactly flow, and she even
thought of ringing her friend Helen in Brissy to help her out. They’d
once shared a mental ward. Helen had had her own successes as a
writer, though they’d long been overshadowed by Leonie’s. Besides,
Leonie’s boosies were bigger and had a better sense of humour.
After several months, she’d still not got past
page one. Prátt tried to talk her out of it, bringing ghost writers
and compromised pseudo-Aboriginal novelists to the safe house-cum-
temple she’d bought through OJ Hookers (its location unknown even to
the author), but she continued obdurately and even threatened to fire
him, in all likelihood out of a cannon. He rang up the CM-owned
Barbimoor Mental Facility (now Cajun-owned and renamed La Bin Lunée)
and tried to get her re-committed for a while but the teapot he spoke
to didn’t seem much interested. Her stay there had been catastrophic
as she’d hooked up the ECT machine to a long-distance transmission
cable and strapped the love-crazed and drugged Hospital Administrator91
into it. He soared trailing blue smoke through the window and was
never seen again.
One day, she keyed in the sentence Jerald Iceberg
likes’ tWo wARE ladees cloathes and after that it flowed, in fact (yawn) got
quite wet. She wished the story was all about Daddy and his many
hypochondriac visits to the vet, but she didn’t dare go that far in
case he added her to his store of bodies under the house. Instead, she
exposed Gerald’s many sexual peculiarities. The first page started out
well:
jerald Iceberg: a novvle

by LAYOANEE Lesbeea BAlMY
Jerald Iceberg likes’ tWo wARE ladees cloathes witch is
shmeggegee and sexiste.
I ware ladees cloathes tWo but I Ham a ladee. Ladees and menn
are diferent.
FoUr a startt they use diferent loos as Mummy has toald me
menny yeers agoa. I luvv Mummy moar thann ennyone in thee hole werld.
She wept for a while, though she wasn’t quite

sure what had brought it on. Somehow, she eventually found the
strength to continue.
Me oan cloathes ar a lott moar taistful ennywai.. I look reel

sexi in them wenn i feal like it. But moastlee peeple doan’t like me and I doant no wy. This
maiks me feal veri sadd.
91
Being a Zoroastrian, he also liked to set his farts on fire.
126
She decided to include some more poetry:
Thee boi stood onn thee burnink dek

off Daddees purling lugga
He scremed and tript and broak his nek
thee silli litl bugga.
Then, feeling more confident in her art and

raising a sharp-nailed finger at the world, she returned to prose:
Sum people, eg WESTAN suberbb sinus pallor stinniens,

woynt stick to the clasification sceme. This is veri diviziv and maiks me wont two screem.
MoAst things make me wont two screem, butt I like Amed evin thoA hee is a SINUS-Joo-
boi (althoA hee woynt admit it).
Oy, I woYnt bee hapee wiv Jerald til hee becums .a reel mann I
carnt stand menn, so thatll bee a longue time comink. Menn ar hary yukkee and cann groa
as mutch bodey hare as thay like unnles thay doant wont two. If they startt waring Ladees
cloAthes and shavink itt of wee woynt knoy whom is who.
But betta I shood get on with thee actionn. GoEink down four
thee third time, theE warTA cloAsed oyva Jerald …
The rest of it was much the same, apart from

bits in leonine verse and her advances into rhyming prose and
epistolary haiku. She was a master of the anacoluthon and played the
harmonium as well.92
Her fourth novel received a less than
favourable response from her publisher, but U & O decided they’d
better try and flog it or they’d look completely spastic. A huge
advertising campaign full of false jollity and weirdly-grinning
bimboes was whipped up by their publicists, S & M, at the cost of
several million dollars. Despite that, it sold less copies than some
obscure community writer’s poetry book, while various ethnic groups
moaned windily about its alleged racism. Leonie, looking up these
words in her tattered dictionary, dismissed such comments as
‘multicultural shit’.
Plagiarism was alleged yet again though she
hadn’t consciously pinched a thing (but was hardly fully conscious
most of the time). And Daddy was predictably annoyed she’d left the
convent. She thought they were all a load of bigots sticking their
knives in her.
In fact, it really put her nose out of joint.
Life without Gerald was not working out to be
as rosy as she’d expected. She, like Dorothy Parker, toyed poetically
with the notion of suicide - but she could never get him to do that.
She thought of creating a fake Literary Hoax - after all, she had
written it this time, as far as she remembered - and also thought of
revealing her unusual sexual status as a pseudo-pseudo-hermaphrodite,
but changed her mind when she remembered what it had done for the
death-dealing Derryn Hinch.
What were little girls made of, she wondered.
Sugar and spice made her feel ill and did nothing for the teeth.
But first she needed to disguise herself. The
jackals of the press were besieging her former home (now the biggest
mansion in Gungadin). She donned an akubra steeple hat with Mickey
Mouse ears and was spotted straight away by a trained steeplejack.
(Welsh national dress in previous centuries consisted mainly of rags,
with the exception of a few puritan affectations got down on canvas by
one Lady Llegover and used by the tourist trade ever since.)
92
And it’s such a stupid instrument, however beloved of the famous late editor of Hegel’s works, Alan
Ginsberg. The anacoluthon, of course, is a Greek bagpipe.
127
Her next foray into disguise was more

successful. She imitated a lamp-post, indeed got quite caught up in
the role. The trouble was that it made travelling from A to B a
problem (it was worse still in Chinese), since she could only get away
with moving at 2 am, and not even then if a literary drunk was abroad.
So in the end she just went about as herself and nobody recognised her
at all, what with her hair now dyed salmon-pink and her immense
tarnished teeth filed to points. This lack of recognition proved very
traumatising.
Though it was 2 am she cowered at home, poured
herself a Chateau unpronounceable and felt better right away. No, she
had developed tremendously as a heroine / Female Hero / Pajero since
then and the author can’t be reasonably attacked93 for this desperate
if imperfect recycling of a previous sentence; indeed, it shows how
enormously and toothily clever the author is, as eminent literary
theorists of note and Stuart Littlemore will observe. But there’s no
time for comfortable cheese and wine debate as I must continue with
the narrative or come across as a burk.94
The humbled PM had been replaced by his even
more corrupt opponent (Transparency International had been banned),
and not being musical or podiatric like Imelda Marcos was busy
applying for a similar position overseas, perhaps President of Mexico
or Taiseoach of Ireland - there weren’t that many vacancies, though,
and he feared that to keep his Pension he’d have to go for something
less attractive, such as Foreign Minister of Trinidad or Head Scout of
Nauru. The selection criteria shut him out every time, specifically
the bits about sound mental capacity and being able to read and write.
If he couldn’t get a decent job as a world
leader he thought he might set himself up in business as a consultant
private government or do a bar course. He hated lawyers (failed actors
most of ‘em) but there was his Activity Test to think about.
The new PM, Sean Begora, was a creased-headed
ex-weightlifter from the Victorian side of Mt Kosciuszko, impressively
cold-hearted and florid with grogblossoms. People questioned his
intellectual lambency and his obsession with increasing the national
savings rate by stationing a wolf at everyone’s door but it was simply
that he’d damaged his brain when the barbel slipped out of his oily
grasp. He owed most of his ideological purity to Ariel Sharon, his
views on homophobia to Robert Mugabe and his money to Mrs Kelly Caine,
a leading three-legged sex-worker of Coonabarabran (on loan from the
Isle of Man TT-racing team) and financial adviser to Lyndon LaRouche.
Begora excelled in being penny-wise and pound-foolish, was addicted to
a traditional conservative recreational drug (cash) that made one
perpetually boring, and thus was just the man for his preposterously-
remunerated job. The largest street-gang in Canberra, with 120 000
members and surface-to-air missiles, could only agree.
There was further controversy as his O’Calcutta
Party had promised to put a woman in the job, but that plan had been
shelved after the woman concerned, Mildred Pylesz, that tireless CWA
magnate, had been implicated in a scandal in West Australia, something
allegedly to do with Rose’s suicide. Leonie smirked to herself,
despite having been snubbed by the general public; if she couldn’t
have the job no other woman would.
In a private communication, Sean assured her
ungrammatically that she’d get ‘a real lot of poetical asylum uh duh’
in a new landlocked African country established by Americo-Liberian
expatriates concerned at the spread of Los Angeles and called, oddly,
93
Unreasonable attacks will be met with autistic shows of force and mindless carpet bombings as inspired
by the world’s most successful governments. I do not rearrange pre-plagiarised phrases with a computer.
Ha! The idea!
94
Those of you who think I do anyway can brace yourselves for a visit from the protagonist.
128
East California (FREE PARKING!). He was on good terms, he said in

between bouts of saxophone-playing, with the disemploying CIA-imposed
gang of economic rationalist thugs that called itself a government
over there but omitted to mention that East California was secretly
bankrolled by Australia through a franchise agreement with the US
government. The idea of paying for it from a broad-based GST on
Unemployment Benefits had been a stroke of empire-building genius.
But mesmerised by phantasms of the moralising
Mrs Caine in her tarpaper stockings, he refused to hold off
prosecution for plagiarism (the penalty was now death or exile and
gangs of plagiarists hanging round on street corners were increasingly
monstered), and she smelt a rat: Daddy. It was possible of course to
smell him from thirty metres or more in a high moaning wind and he had
been approached by the US Department of Defense to become the centre
of a special study on contemporary germ warfare and ‘smart’ stink
bombs.95
Caring little about the Pentagon or the
dastardly plot by the wily Inuit to take over the World Bank she spent
a night in recriminative substance abuse but the cold, dim, religious
light of day96 told her it was time to beat a strategic retreat.
She was getting to know these clichés quite
well, as a matter of fact, and tried for a witching hour (and a rush
hour, a peak hour, a last hour, a happy hour and an amateur hour) or
so to beat the daylights out of the retreat she was ensconced in (what
a predictable reversion to the humour of clichés on my part). She was
in fine feather as she reviewed her Dictionary of Clichés and Mein
Kampf-ing it Up: the Taliban Experience for the Paranormal Fisherman’s
Friend with all its rains of boiling frogs (Mes enfants la … ow!) and
mysterious lights on Salisbury Plain (where I hear the fishing97 is no
better than the talk-back radio and Stonehenge has been abandoned to
the greasy hippies) - the Dictionary had great words for almost any
occasion like ‘open slather’ and ‘cross-media ownership’, and was her
standby as she jumped from the frying pan into the fire and wended her
way crambe repitita through her blooming literary career, sparing no
pains and buttering up no parsnips as she heaped the lioness’s share
of her left-handed compliments upon the swollen heads of her enemies.
As one of her favourite poets, Paul Muldoon, might say, I have blazed
my trail and I must lie in it. A hair of the tortoise is a friend
indeed. Laziness is the mother of all fuckers.
Feigning agreement and promising hollowly not
to write up his lifelong affair with a mid-Victorian chamberpot (Are
you sitting on the side of the fence on which your grass is buttered?)
she flew - assisted by a Llyr Jet and a few tuns of plonk, one swallow
hardly making a summer let alone a camel - out of Australia for a
while. Who knows, while in exile she might meet someone new.
95
He did take them up on the offer but failed the GAA-like entrance exam, coming behind three brain-
damaged meths drinkers and a computerised missile.
96
The author takes no responsibility for the poor quality of Leonie’s prose, which of course is being
reported indirectly here. The fact that she sells more books than Auntie Rhoberta gives rise to no artistic
jealousy whatever, though she is an egotistical wiener.
97
Izaak Walton, personal communication.
129
Chapter Fifteen: African Influences
The steaming legal jungles of Africa not

befitting a writer of her calibre98 (being full of plants so poisonous
that they killed you if you looked at them the wrong way), Leonie
settled into a luxury suite at the Liberian-designed Eastern LA Hilton
(it was chocabloc with splenetic scribblers, new and old, like Linda
Jaivin, Jonathon Swift, Flann O’Brien, Graham Henderson, Simon
Louvish, Gerard Hoffnung, Philip Roth, Dario Fo, Ben Elton and a few
illiterate yet poetic Cymric cowcockies performing pennillion with the
swinging Prophet Jeremiah on telyn and crwth). She had begun her fifth
novel about Sean (tentatively titled Sean Begora: Top of the Pops?, by
Antony Jay) and had also taken up writing plays.
(She faxed the lot to U & O. The Celtic Mafia
also pirated them, and had them printed by prison-labour. They were
selling well in China via a protection racket called the government.)
Now for a bit of allegory. The Sacred Cotter
Pin with its Conqueror’s nose descended genealogically from the City
like a flower with each identical boring floret a suburb which
teetered in orison on a Cloud of Unknowing and builded duodecimo
editions of the New Jerusalem and the New London, Ontario inside ten
green and pleasant bottles - shit, it always gets out of hand but I
guess no allegory is perfect. And nobody remembers the semi-automatic
Sex Pistols. Destroy! Again, back to the story. Revenons á ces
moutons. Baa! Humbug!99
Prátt, on long service leave from U & O after
cooking the system a bit, was forced to appear in most of her
globalising dramaturgical confections as an all-purpose piece of
scenery. He might be a chair, a wainscoting or a lavatory, she didn’t
much care as he was not exactly at the centre of her anxieties.
A self-confessed devotee of 20s and 30s films
(and a child of the sixties to her great eighties disgust), he seemed
- while saying that he thought the eighties was a decade which should
like some others be retrospectively expunged from human history - to
enjoy the theatrics, and on nights when the audience went wild and
pelted him with rotten vegetables he was apparently ecstatic, charging
about with his mouth open and calling for more of his favourite one,
beetroot (she didn’t feed him much). Nothing was cheaper, as Mummy had
once remarked.
Her plays were all period productions set in
19th century England or Sri Lanka with ladies and ladies and more
ladies in all manner of restrictive garments. She devised some
fiendish designs in corsetry that that century had never even thought
of, something which swiftly drew the enraptured attention of the
country’s svelte, dramaturgid and strangely Teutonic Dictator, Norman.
She recalled a face in a mirroring river-pool,
a face not her own though eerily similar, a face in the woods that
belonged she knew to Mummy, and a scream echoing down a street from a
hotel window … but the moment of sanity passed. Norman had rung.
And like a fool, despite her promising affair
with a local postmodernist post-woman (a woman of letters indeed)
who’d written a treatise on the end of ends of history and got as far
as posting it off, she accepted his invitation to visit the
Presidential Palace. She was never one to succumb to Downward Envy.
On this first visit, via public transport which
she succeeded in derailing, his pet cat rushed over to him and
opportunistically rubbed against his well-drilled ankles. He picked
98
About .22.
99
The traditionalist non-literate Tribe who lived in the hills armed to the teeth have since attempted to
write down the foregoing effusion. It can be frustrating: Can’t find a bloody pen! Oh, we haven’t invented it
yet. Have to make do with a 486.
Chapter Fifteen: African Influences… 131
the animal up by the tail and casually - he lacked permanency - flung

it out the window which was closed at the time. Its forlorn screeching
could be heard diminishing as it fell, not unlike Daddy when he got
his whatnot caught in the washing machine. She felt an immediate
affinity with the cat.
(Prátt had got sick of starving and had swum -
a non-swimmer, he had to dog-paddle, being hubristic - back to
Australia.)
“I go through heaps of cats.” Norman laughed
disarmingly at 150 decibels, with a tinge of hearty Bavarian accent as
spoken by the good burghers of Godthaab, as movie hopefuls parked
hundreds of La La cars outside. Without introducing her to his
hundreds of motionless, leather-clad guards, he showed off his African
violet and delphinium collections which made her rare gumleaves look a
bit sick. She lowered her eyes, fighting the dry heaves.
He secretly felt dizzy - sorry to change the
point of view like that, but it engenders an appropriate feeling of
dizziness in the reader and shows off my superb literary technique -
as they were on the top floor of his Palace and he suffered badly from
vertigo, a strange complaint for one destined to spend his life in
Italian suits at the top. (We can all tell that this bit has been put
in to ‘foreshadow’ something Auntie Rhoberta’s arbitrarily stuck in
later, I mean earlier, er, that is … )
Getting wet as Gerald, though it was not
raining and they were inside in any case, she was also reminded of
George and his goldfish for a moment. But no, ailurophobia aside,
Norman was much more of a man than George, Gerald and Prátt put
together (and even Daddy).
Thus began her ‘heterosexual’ phase, though it
didn’t last long. (Her father insisted that her usual proclivities
were the real phase for after all she was only 42 in the shade.)
His chin was the squarest thing she’d ever
seen, having even a hypotenuse, and made her rhinological exuberance
seem unpretentious by comparison. She shivered all over i’ th’ heat.
Perhaps it was his Italian suit that did it, being androgynous as
designed by a member of the Italian soccer team, and she in the
sheerest of shimmy dresses due to Prátt’s transvestic pleadings. What
a thrusting and parrying sort of man, she swooned, enjoying the lustre
of his tight black leather uniform and gold, silver and bronze medals.
(Had she looked closer she’d have noticed that they were made from
worthless Albanian coins encased in milk bottle-tops.) His boots
squeaked in a manly fashion as he swaggered over corpses and shot at
targets (mostly gardeners of Eden) with his pump-action shotgun. His
sole regret, he told her filmically, was that he hadn’t got that
leading role in Stormy Weather - yet.
She had pleasurable thoughts of gazumping and
showering in front of him, and soon wrote this into her current novel
too.
“Ah, my people.” he said blue-eyedly of the
noisy and half-naked crowd gathering outside the Presidential Palace
in a cloud of dust. “Relax, it’s just a shrinking-penis panic.” he
said to her out of the side of his mouth. “Hands off cocks! Up socks!”
he yelled at them through a giant bullhorn, unleashing an epidemic of
deafness.
She wasn’t sure what they were chanting but it
sounded like Food! Food! Food! Oddly, Prátt had said something
similar just before he left.
“They respect a strong leader.” he grinned,
enjoying the sight of his all-white Security Forces of Darkness
(Executive Incomes Ltd) laying into them. “And I know you do too, my
girl.”
He gave her a playful tap on the bottom with
his riding crop. It sent a thrill of strange pleasure through her bony
131
form. As she lay down on the desk she saw a pair of smoky eyes gazing
at her from the balcony. But she blinked and they were gone.
She looked deep into his chilling blue orbs;
where would you expect her to look, up his nose already?
With some expertise, as acid-jazz and jug music
tootled and blurped in the background, he engaged in what he hoped
would the the first act in producing a Master Race, albeit not Celtic.
Ah, this was the life, thought Leonie with some
glee given her confirmed infertility. Norman, no nancy like Gerald and
a man who had rubbed shoulders and bottoms with some of the finest
dictators in the world, such as President Suharto and Deng Tsiao-ping
and Colonel Gaddafi, was so much cleaner than Daddy, bathing in
creosote at least once a week. Their red hot lovemaking - though he
had a fetish for her teeth like Nigel and the guards tended to ogle
surreptitiously - aroused not only her but even the spiders he
unfortunately had allowed to squat in the corners of the ceiling,
great big tarantulas with walkmans glued to their ears and supercool
shades and fangs dripping with poison and human flesh. She vowed to be
on top next time as with her women lovers but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Such a shlang.100
They had a few cartons of cigarettes afterward,
and just talked, rather loudly due to Norman’s powerful lungs (she was
pretty loud herself) and the roar of the bread riot outside. She did
think that using the nation’s entire stock of flour to build the
world’s largest loaf in order to get into the classy Guinness Book of
Records was a touch provocative of him. But, well, that was a
politician for you. Until he’d taken over, bread was hardly a popular
food; now by Presidential Edict they had to obey the sacred Doctrine
of Comparative Advantage and grow nothing but wheat for ever more.
Stuff your weet-bix! yelled a voice in English.
Naturally, the big-screen tv was on all the
time, showing mostly ads and American football. On it, on a slightly
skewed global playing field (a cliff), seven beefy players monstered
the opposing team of medium-sized ones while a myriad midgets on
crutches with terminal diseases crawled about futilely.
“The circuses are fun, but.” she said as CNN
coverage of the latest US election came on and cruise missiles wafted
over the rooftops. She chewed greedily on an imported bread roll worth
$2000000.
She learned that his German mother had long ago
convinced him that he was the outcome of a secret Teutonic experiment
in eugenics. In the teeth of the fact that he was just 38, he
continued to believe this with an ardour Leonie found breathtaking.
Her fake-blue eyes glowed like certain allegedly young stars plotted
on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Norman harboured many other theories, quite a
few of them mutually contradictory. He was convinced that Lyndon
LaRouche was an Israeli spy who wrote subversive messages in invisible
ink on women’s underwear and that there was a hole at the centre of
the Arctic region. He regaled Leonie with these and similar notions,
till she thought him a bit of a fruit loop. She’d always known such
irrationalities were unworthy of a True Celt. When he got onto
subjects like the spontaneous combustion of artists and the crop
circles appearing in his delphinium beds, she realised just how much
cleverer than him she was due to her unremittingly Celtic blood.
Anyone who could trace back their ancestry to galaxies of ancient,
whooping Gaels as well as JC was bound to know more about the Occult
Community.
“But he works for Mossad Bros, old girl.” he
said as they downed spiked martinis. “Fond of a chap’s inside leg.
100
Snakes alive!
132
Disgusting - I’d have ‘em turfed out of Brooklyn. A quaint and

effeminate race they are, and for that reason I’d say Auntie
Rhoberta’s plainly one of them or at the very least embroiled in their
latest international conspiracy.” He winked knowingly and put on
several very hairy, sweaty ‘New Lad’ masculine expressions such as
gritting his teeth while pulling the corner of his mouth to one side
so he looked like a lifer in a 19th century panoptican.
Leonie blew on her sharpened fingernails, at
present a lumpy and fluffy blood-red. “O.- k.” she said sweetly as
though to a tot. Her poured her another.
As he did so, he insinuated that she was not a
real Aryan specimen, but she was at a loss to see why. (He
simultaneously knew she was, and told her so, since had not enigmatic
and intellectual Forces of Blondness brought them together?)
It might have helped had she known what the
word meant, but she’d left her dictionary back home and had never even
heard of Ernst Haeckel. Specimen, she thought, isn’t that what you
give to the doctor? She ached to go.
At least she didn’t get hot pees.
They were just getting to know each other and
the latest controversy in biblical hermeneutics when a revolution
broke out and he was kicked out of the country by the victorious
People. As he lamented that they seemed to despise Inevitable
Efficiency, the two of them and an Archbishop staggered outside and
managed to steal the dusty Presidential Plane, the flying boat Enver
Hoxha - a slave or two had put out a bucket of stagnant ooze for the
purpose of take-off. They headed upside-down in this agit prop jet for
the remote Carribean island (actually Barbados), via Acapulco and
quite a few madly-reeling casinos. Daddy was presently fulfilling his
role as Prime Minister of the island.
Ushered they were101 into Daddy’s presence by a
squad of stubble-headed, jackbooted and retarded ruffians, many
wearing KKK tee-shirts or ones bearing photos of the genial Radvan
Karadzic.
“Hi, Daddy.” she squeaked breathlessly, as she
gave him an elbow-jarring Mafia salute. She was still badly in need of
a wee.
He returned her salute sloppily, his stained
sleeve having caught in his zipper.
“This is Norman.” she breezed on as he brushed
grave-worms out of his eyes. “We got married on the plane.”
The effect was electric and somewhat gaseous.
Her father’s jaw dropped. She stooped, knock-kneed and dancing on the
spot, with her hands jammed between her legs. The desire to punch the
decaying despot’s head in was overwhelming, but something other than
rational fear made her go weak at the knees.
Daddy, fumes of ammonia and methane arising
from his person, drew her aside with an attempt at potency and
whispered,
“Princess! We’re from bloody Belfast for God’s
sake. We only recognise two colours over there, and he’s neither of
them!”
He replaced his jaw and lit his pipe with a
belly-busting cough - a match or lighter would have been more
advisable but after all his expert Ahmed was currently on unpaid study
leave. There was a small explosion but that he took in his stride,
which caused him to double up momentarily.
“Daddy Paddy! You’re Dublin up again and yoy
from Belfast and all.” She mimicked his fake accent and he looked
101
This is an understandable Welshism.
133
daggers at her. “He’s, um - a black Celt.” she went on in a hastily-

acquired Afrikaner brogue, much to Norman’s hearty amusement:
‘E doesn’t dawnce around the fahr

Yew won’t cetch ‘um eating a banawna
Oh, no, ‘E’s very cuvulahsed
‘E’s cawlled thuh Efrikawner.
(Her Voices applauded this facility with

dialect. The wind, a disgruntled ex-employee demonstrating by walking
round and round on the sidewalk outside, moaned yet again.)
Norman stuck out his foursquare Chesty Bond
chin and slapped his thigh, growling Ach du lieber Augustine! and
wishing he was wearing tight ‘Tom of Finland’ leather shorts rather
than a rather crumpled and effeminate Italian suit. Daddy, regardless
of his Principles, couldn’t resist a grin, since he had shares in a
number of private mercenary companies based in Pietermaritzburg.
“Well now, since your fifth novel’s so
rollickin’ly good I suppose I can indulge yoy.” he conceded. With his
shroud-bound claw he gave her right nipple a surreptitious squeeze
through the material of her ripped bodice. (Only the right nipple of
his daughter was squeezed in his household.)
“So whattaya say, Pops?” went Norman suavely,
having heard only a garbled portion of their exchange.
Paddy looked the ex-tyrant up and down, and
couldn’t help but admire his military bearing, so like his own. Leonie
was a bit worried he might fancy him himself, and also about the wee-
tracks that were being laid down her hot dusty leg.
“So, yoy got married on the plane, did yer
son?”
(Just after the ceremony, while Leonie was
unconscious, the Coptic Archbishop had had an unfortunate accident,
yowling hopelessly rather like Norman’s cat as he fell to his watery
death.)
Norman nodded smugly.
Her father peered at him, fearing that he might
be on the Mulatto’s menu. “Well, native chappie, I t’ink we can place
you in the Assassination Department.”
To her surprise, Norman smiled. The two ‘big’
men shook hands.
A crushing, bone-shattering, duel of a
handshake it was. Daddy’s rangy arm swelled to bursting point and
pulsated like a Cloaca Cola sign. They stood eyeball to eyeball
grinning with gritted teeth, fake cleft chins akimbo.
“Condom-man meets Cernunnos, I presume.” carped
Leonie with a tinge of darkest Africa and darkest Gaul in her voice.
Both men ignored that womanish jibe. Daddy
faginishly raked the fingers of his free hand through his beard and
tried to think of a distraction from the unmanning pain, such as the
going market ‘value’ of peat briquettes. Though in agony, he expected
the young man to say something forelock-tugging like Oi’m in love with
your daughter, sor, and sure and we’d loik to raise a fambily. I have
prospects and buckets of work experience and bathwater.
Instead, Norman (lacking a forelock and as
Daddy suspected a foreskin and not blind from excessive tugging at
all) glared back, holding his noble nose Ahmedly, for the stench was
especially bad here in the tropics. Leonie giggled while fighting back
her raging desire to go.
Daddy dismissed this latest vision and made his
grin a bit more fangish, as befitted one who ate with the cognoscenti.
He recalled his intimate experiences in the chicken coop with Heinrich
Himmler and a rooster, just before his imaginary wartime heroics as a
flying ace over Tokyo.
134
As always, he got quite maudlin about World War

II and plotted like a Scotsman102 to revive it. It had helped to make
him what he was today: an evil, psychotic bastard. He started to
mutter tearily about the Celtic Herrenvolk, those brave young men with
powerful kilted thighs, who would retake Europe and America from the
degenerate Latin and Saxon races. As long as they could keep the pesky
Slavs and Turks and Lapps and Australians out …
His Bosnianic nostalgia accelerated the rotting
process and caused him to smell far worse than normal. Over one
hundred years of experience (though not exactly of working) had given
him a unique perspective.
The quasi-African’s smile faded. He could feel
Daddy’s mummifying hand getting squishy. His fanatical faith in Market
Fascism was paying off.
“Listen, ofay,” he glowered in backslang, “I
intend to place you in the Sanitation Department where you belong.
There’ll be little pieces of you all over town - or rather, under it.”
“Now listen n - ”
Paddy, who’d been a professional sewer for many
years, could not argue with the semi-automatic blowpipe that Norman
was holding at his throat.
The scholarly guards debated amongst themselves
whether an ex-tyrant from Africa would make a better leader than a
rotting pseudo-Irish gangster. They couldn’t make up their diminutive
minds (diminutive Ahmed could have done if he’d not been away at Wagga
Wagga Writers Writers Writers Centre studying). It was only fair and
dinkum, therefore, to hold an election.
Norman sat grinning defiantly on a jerry-can of
bathwater, his knees 12 kilometres apart and his jaw thrust out like a
headland. You wouldn’t catch it falling off.
Leonie had got thoroughly sick of men by this
time - in fact she was eyeing off the Lesbian Ambassador - but she
didn’t tell him and indeed the signals took quite a while to travel
across her brain due to the wires in many places being down.
Daddy Paddy’s first speech was a killer but

Norman filibustered back at him, pointing out in a violent and
demagogic way that he hadn’t costed his promises and that now it was
time for “rectal fiscitude so we can impoverish everyone before the
next inevitable downturn takes place”. The campaign was full of
razzamattaz and calls for cut-backs due to off-shore tax fraud and
Daddy Paddy made maximum use of his daughter’s fame and body but the
Great Debate between himself and Norman sealed his fate. Norman made
it clear that he’d known Jack Kennedy while Paddy Barmy had never even
met Dan Quayle.
They stopped shaking hands.
The island’s harried population (they were all
called Harry), consisting mostly of Afro-American costermongers,
showed their revulsion toward Daddy Paddy’s Celtic supremacist and
generally dirty regime and gave Norman - who’d revealed that he was
toying with the notion of becoming a Black Muslim - a landslide.
I ain’t gonna stand for dis brer Saxon rabbit-
shit! cried Leonie in the middle of all this and was generally laughed
at. Her sadness laid her low, though hardly sweet.
Once Norman had got in with a 47 seat majority
(though with only a 2.3% swing) he announced that the Budget Deficit
was far worse than Daddy Paddy had let on and that due to this
infinitely-expanding Black Hole he’d have to make severe cutbacks,
particularly in the number of stray cats, dole recipients and
102
An anti-Caledonian calumny taken from the tired wheeze that everywhere you go there’s an
Englishman who claims to have won the war, an Irishman whose never heard of it and a Scotsman who
wants to start it up all over again.
135
Opposition members. He had them all jailed under dreadful conditions

(but judiciously left Defence alone). He also decimated the fishing
industry and determinedly disemployed the other half of the
population, apart from those drafted to bake an even larger loaf than
he’d bestowed upon his previous domain. Revolution and flour were in
the air.
To mollify building popular resistance, Daddy
Paddy was marked down for public execution by being passed slowly
through a giant privatised egg-slice while shaking hands with Norman.
Due to a mixed-up sense of loyalty and a vast
mental and nasal blockage, Leonie managed to get her doctrinaire Daddy
spared - and also to have a satisfying and no little small tiny wee in
a flowerpot (being literary she would have preferred a tirra lirra by
the river). Her pungent pater was given a banal job sorting rubber
bands in the stationary Stationery Department, a fate she thought much
more severe given his sensitive and multitudinous genetic inheritance
(especially since Norman had spoken boldly of ‘downsizing the lot’),
while she and the patriotic Tyrollean ex-President went on to assume
power over the entire Celtic Mafia. All Norman’s former secret police
had come across on jet-skis to give a crushing hand. As we’ve seen,
most were white, or would have been if they’d washed.
When not busy implementing his Reforms, Norman
nursed without appropriate qualifications the grievance that that the
Australian government had been instrumental and tuneful in securing
his ouster from East California.
Ignoring Leonie’s artistic objections and her
many affairs with local lady soldiers, he planned Zhdanovianly to
explode a truckload of ammonium nitrate in the centre of Canberra. To
that end (being a Philistine or possibly an Amorite or even a
Jebusite) he’d planted spies in the capital’s CM Cultural Centre and
these had come up nicer than the delphiniums and African violets he’d
cultivated back home. They lurked in the office of a half-arsed
reactionary theatre company Daddy had controlled (they did nothing but
Coriolanus), called Spalpeena. The infernal device was speedily built,
and the main problem was how to get it to Australia. Distribution is
always a pain.
Norman made extensive investigations into the
problem, calling on engineering experts like Lucifer’s Consultancies.
Beëlzebub gave him five minutes, staring boredly across his desk while
the phone rang constantly. A sign above his head declared We built
Pandemonium in a day. Fast-tracking for a better future.
“Yeah?” Picking up the phone, Beëlzebub rammed
his Wingtipped heel onto the rim of the desk and rolled backward on
the office chair. “Put 2000 bucks on Pegasus in the fourth. Yeah yeah
I know he’s on steroids, so am I … Listen, asshole, are you tryin’ to
tell me my job? That horse could fuck your grandmother with his eyes
open.
“His granny’s Medusa.” he explained to Norman
as he slammed down the phone and took up his violin. “Now, there is a
place (if ancient and prophetic fame in Heaven err not) another world,
the happy seat of some new Race called Man …”
Seventeenth century English poetry was lost on
the dictator, but not so the spittly cigar butt stuck to the Fiend’s
bottom lip, which jigged up and down as he barked. Its Schadenfreudian
antics and the man’s powerful open thighs fascinated Norman, but not
much came of all this thigh-powered networking in the end, apart from
a manly stench.
All the same, armed with bright possibilities
and blue and gold windows of opportunity, and redolent of the Rugby
pitch, Norman addressed the next Cabinet meeting with great
confidence:
“Ahem. Pass the devil’s food cake would you?
No, not the devilled ham already. All right, the devils on horseback
136
then. Get on with it, asshole. I only come here for the nibblies, heh
heh. Ahem. Powers and dominions, Deities of Heaven, For since no deep
within her gulf can hold Immortal vigor, though opprest and fall’n, I
give not Heav’n for lost!” They looked a bit bemused. “The boomerang
has one singular property or theft; it is a device designed to come
back. And so shall we! Fair dinkum!”
Leonie, tired of board meetings and taking the
minutes while showing a lot of leg, helpfully suggested a helicopter.
She loved to watch the blades go round, and often stood beneath the U
& O building for that purpose. Such frenetic motion was in stimulating
contrast to that of her current torpid cogitational activity.
“Too obvious.” he sneered, which gave her the
irrits no end. He also rejected with astonishing vehemence her notion
that he strap the thing onto his back and deliver it personally.
By contrast, his virile idea was to build a
bridge across the Pacific Ocean.
“Cover youself up, woman!” he bellowed
talibanly, having demanded earlier that she confine herself to tiny
tight skirts and spike heels. She had long grown half-sick of this
experiment in heterosexuality.
She went back into her purdahed bedroom within
the Carribean Palace and after a liberating orgy with the local
Womyn’s Steel Drum Orchestra changed into her more accustomed garb.
“- a pontoon bridge of course. Should be
simple.” he was expostulating to his secret police when she returned
to the loony tune of his captive jazz and jug orchestra. “All we need
is enough pontoons, asshole.”
“But what if one of these cut-price cruise
ships cuts it in half?” she countered, thinking of TOM Cruises or
Noah’s Postdeluvian Package tours with special rates for Orangutans,
Orangemen, Macoucs and Mormons as long as they all went in two by two.
She couldn’t imagine what it’d be like sharing one’s cabin with a
giraffe but some people’ll do anything to save money.
The efficient German half of his mind led him
to snap back the brilliant rejoinder, “Er - Listen up big to de hah
yella rose o’ Texas, men.” He guffawed and she shifted uncomfortably
in her chair, while her anger built like a thunderhead and led her to
suggest, snidely, a bascule bridge. “I’ve got it!” he continued,
ignoring her. “We’ll make it a bascule pontoon bridge.”
‘Bascule’ was a word he’d worked hard for
through his intensive, Spenglerian study of History, the Fall of the
Bascule and all that struedelly stuff. How glad he was that the other
half of his brain, obsessed as it was with war dances and eating the
neighbours, was firmly under Bayernische control.
She kicked his shin under the table and
surprisingly he did nothing but grin like George (who was still lying
with Rupert in a shared stupor beneath the coconut palm). Her
confidence grew - but then his grin became Satanic and he patted his
blowpipe.
His men - some were drag kings spying for

various Lesbian revolutionary organisations based in the newly-
independent Sapphic Republic of Lesbos - again set the unfortunate
populace to work (unlike most of the Australian population). In a
short time they’d run out of pontoons and started commandeering all
the town’s floatables, packing them with dynamite and drums of petrol
so they could happily blow the thing up if need be a lá Carmina
Burana.
Once they’d got to the horizon they tested it
with a few eager Cuban refugees who were under the impression they
were heading for Florida. Then they got a few hundred pre-school kids
to load another truck with rocks so it was the same weight as the
truck-bomb.
137
A hotly protesting Daddy was employed to drive

this vehicle onto it. “Mr Unemployment!” he snarled at Norman from the
cab.
“You’ve got a job, with variety even! Stop
moaning and get on with it, asshole!” retorted the new Leader with a
swagger, making Leonie quiver perversely with excitement. If only she
were the one giving the orders. If this were Lesbos, where ancient
fossil motorbike tracks had recently been discovered … she could go to
TAFE and become a Sapphic artist.
The truck sank to the bottom and Daddy was
dragged out, straggly beard dripping, deeply ashamed and incensed at
having had yet another bath and not in his own sacred water. Leonie
continued to feel a strange exhilaration, one that had nothing to do
with Norman.
The fatherly claw in its rotting wrapping
brushed her left nipple as Daddy staggered by. Her exhilaration
departed. She wanted to rage, but rage wouldn’t come, just a kind of
sickly feeling of defeat.
But they were in power now. Why did she still
feel helpless? She kicked a few chairs and (ship’s) bottoms but
somehow bottomry didn’t help much any more.
Norman cogitated Bavarianly. Why am I
surrounded by assholes, he raged, standing in front of a three-way
mirror. The problem was that most of the pontoons had drifted far out
of sight. The island’s entire stock of objects that would float,
including fat people, was drifting out of radio contact and inexorably
toward Australia.
“Good thing New Zealand’s in the way.” said
Leonie in what she hoped was an obliging tone, chirpier now Daddy was
out of sight though not olfactory range.
“Out of my way, woman.” said Norman and the
shvantz was lucky he was out of range of her fist.
He suggested with sarcasm that she should
publish a sixth novel and have it launched by the new PM of Australia
at the CM Cultural Centre, with a duped double arriving at the
ceremony by truck. But Leonie wasn’t as popular as she’d once been
(especially with the Australian government) and needed a stunt to
boost her career again. Unlike a certain political independent of the
hot-blooded red-haired One Nation Race of Erythrociliacs, she simply
couldn’t think of one.
A year later, ARSE detected the ‘pontoons’
drifting ashore and going up with a bang. Only a holidaying poet was
affected by being blown into a creative state of mind and thus being
rendered unemployable (actually this individual was Leonie’s first
Famous Writer who’d gone bush).
But these events were yet to happen. Norman was
already cooking up a new plan.
“Water wings?” said Leonie, her own harpstring-
taut Celtic mind in full swing, about from here to the next full stop.
Micks, Taffs and Jocks unite!, she exulted. She was getting heartily
sick of Norman and his bogus American accent; in fact, it seemed that
she’d just traded in one Daddy for another.
“Nah, asshole! Look, if we book the whole truck
onto the next Qantas flight - ”
“Or El Al.” she yodelled, rather pining for
Gerald. Fat he might be yet he was so good at housework. She wondered
what he was up to these days. He’d been a whizz at macramé when she
first met him and she imagined him making little see-through outfits
for himself with the knots in strategic places. He could never compete
with her. She was presently wearing a white summer dress which like a
dagguerotype showed everything if you got it at the right angle. And
she had everything to show, the best bone structure this side of
Surfers’.
138
“But won’t they detect it?” she said, A-sharp.

You couldn’t have inserted a shoe-horn between her serried thoughts at
that moment.
The sudden memory of the shooting star, the
star that watched over her even now, made her shudder inside and want
Mummy. One day, she thought, one day this misogynistic terror will all
be over.
Norman, aroused and manly, shook his foursquare
head angrily and sang in his booming bass voice, clearly serrying his
own few but momentous thoughts:
Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht

geschlossen …
She finger-popped along.

“We’ll wrap it in several thicknesses of brown
paper.” he reverberated decisively, no parcel of vain strivings
himself. “No one will question that, not if we address it to Begora.
They’ll just think it’s some group sex-toy for the Parliamentary
Brothel. Naturally our chaps will intercept it before the pollies get
to hear of it.”
Leonie adjusted her position sensually, though
no one but herself was looking. She thought it’d be more in Norman’s
interests to let it be taken into Parliament House itself (now located
five kilometres beneath Capital Hill for security reasons and full of
hot air in any case), but then being a native, she supposed, he wasn’t
all that astute at times.
Anyway, you needed vinegar with brown paper,
otherwise it tasted yukky. Mummy had told her that before
disappearing.
The devilish Afro-Viking scheme worked. Within
weeks the truck was flown to Australia, and driven to Canberra by two
very nervous Celtic Mafiosi.(They were planning to transport it by
ship but a drought had ensued.)
“Look you, it’s careful you want to be, Siobhán

fach. We’re carrying a HUGE BOMB!”
“Sure an’ I never seen dat cliff, Myfanwy.” she
replied, one hand on the wheel. “And we know all about bombs in
Derry.”
She had a dram or two of Jameson. Hadn’t they
found it again each time it fell off and rolled into the valley?
Earlier on they’d even got to it before that hungry flock of goats.
The front wheels bounced over a fallen log.
“Ow, me knock-kers! Peidiwch â gyrru’n rhy
gyflym! It’s the way you go down the hills in angel gear, cariad.”
“It is not.”
The two Strong Women bickered all the way. The
worst part was when they came to the jolly Very Slow Train city of
Goulburn, and went sight-seeing, staggering and yelling abuse at all
the Saxons. They saw the main street, the tower, the jail, the
privatised cemetery - more popular with tourists than the art gallery
and charging $10 a head - and the mental hospital. Almost exciting
enough, it was, to give the earplugged skeleton of Thomas Bowdler an
orgasm.
139
Then they realised they’d forgotten where

they’d parked the truck. If some kid decided to go for a joy ride, the
whole city could be destroyed. Bad things might happen too.
“I know it was here, by gor.” said Siobhán,
playing a ragged and drunken air on her Uillean pipes, hoping that
nobody suggested she have her tubes tied.
“Indeed to goodness, we must find it quickly.
We’re crucial links in the plot.” said Myfanwy, fingers in her ears
and clinking a bit.
Siobhán looked at her and blenched, while
equally staggering Goulburnites and tourists drunk on her breath threw
$2 coins in the hat that Myfanwy had unthinkingly placed in front of
them. “You’re tellin’ me. The CM’s image of lean and racially pure
Efficiency could be set at nought.”
“Eh?” ad-libbed Myfanwy, whose Mam hailed from
Tiger Economy Bay.
The gangly Siobhán repeated this propagandistic
nonsense out of habit as Myfanwy bowed her crwth loudly and gave the
audience an enthusiastic round of pwnc chanting.
“Oh yass.” said the squat Rhonddawoman. Her
sole front tooth ached from the noise they were making and to combat
that she took a trip down memory lane to the reign of Llywelyn the
Last. “And furthermore the author will look a gwyrionyn. Let market
forces rip off, fach. Oh, me twth.” she added, wondering how she, a
native of the One Party State with coal-dust in her bloodstream, had
got into such an outfit as the Celtic Mafia wherein all the top jobs
were held by smooth-tongued Saxons and constitutional thespian lawyers
(though as we know those people didn’t know what was going on most of
the time and -ASO 0.5s had to make all the major decisions). Golf ball
elastic, lacrosse balls or the professional vigaro she played at
school, probably. Surely not mass Unemployment.
She consulted her Swatch wrist sun-dial and a
Jacquard loom and swallowed another nip: “Che sarà sarà”, she sang,
“it’s Doch and Doris Day already. Nothing grows in our garden, only
washing and snakes but not babies, though I sang in my chains like the
sea - kinky old poof, he was, llareggub, though his protest songs had
my feet tapping I must say … ”
“Have you ever thought of speaking in Cymraeg,
ffokcuf? Or even Swahili? Your excursions into yr iaith fain are very
confusing, acushla.” sang Siobhán back, hating musical comedy and
threatening to start up the war against All-Bran the Blessed again.
Myfanwy peered into her steeple hat and
grimaced. All that Japanese currency.
“You should hear yourself, fach! Oh, here’s a
traveller’s cheque for ¥4000.” Thank God it wasn’t lira. She posed for
a photograph. Never had it been like this at Mumbles.
They bickered on into the afternoon.
The crowd eventually dwindled and the two
brilliant musicians shambled on, some ¥50 000 richer.
“… the value of capital is the market value of
capital as determined by the value of capital as determined by the
market, as determined by the auditing firm of Mammon & Moloch, as
determined by the famous law of value, as determined … You know,
Auntie Rhoberta must be pretty smart or at least determined to cook up
dialogue like that.” went Siobhán, suddenly engrossed in economic
matters that were far from the pseudo-Smithian trash churned out these
days. “Ah, there it is.” she added with an ironic turn of phrase at
the second mention of the wholly fictive Auntie Rhoberta (try doing
that on film). “Right outside the cathedral and worth nearly $20 000
to Mammon & Moloch. Bloody free mercantilist utopian prods.”
“I’m a bloody prod! And I don’t need lessons on
bloody architecture. Capitals, Ionic versus Doric columns, Luce
Irigary’s done all that! It’s not what the words mean but …”
140
“Druid! Go back to easter egg clapping.”

“Gwyddelig twit … you’re crazier than Leonie
Barmy!”
Within the hour, this Celtic quarreling in
funny accents notwithstanding, the bomb had been positioned outside
the Celtic Mafia’s Cultural Centre. As they hared away from the truck
in a flourish of Celtic folk music they were deciding independently,
due to their common Celtic genius, that the best idea was to leave the
CM and go a-busking together. They weren’t alone in sharing such
subversive thoughts; internal dissension in the CM was spreading.
Yet everything had gone like clockwork (if very

slowly), replaced entirely by integrated and virtual laser circuits
and the latest in Swiss nanotechnology endorsed by the shadowy
Yodellers’ Foundation.. Leonie, though, was fed up with the whole
scheme. She had written a sixth novel but didn’t want to see it go the
way of her fourth (the fifth had survived an attempted banning in
Australia and was now the most-borrowed book in the Parliamentary
Library). She had progressed from cardboard cut-out characters to
little plastic ones resembling dinosaurs and found in packets of
Special K. She had also dispensed with adverbs altogether, Graham
Greene-fashion, after Norman reminded her what they were. She’d say
‘Mandy stuffed her entire fist in’ instead of ‘Mandy stuffed her
entire fist in punchily.’ It sounded much better, virtually good
enough for a University Wit.
Yet this didn’t seem enough. Her characters
were great but there was not enough gratuitous violence in the book to
please her readers. She added a scene where a busload of university
librarians is eaten by a pack of pit-bull terriers, bus and all.
Disembodied limbs littered the highway from Queanbeyan to the sea. She
had villages falling into volcanoes which erupted like a thousand
kettle drums rolling and a full-to-capacity jumbo jet crashing into
the centre of Sydney at peak hour (apart from the North Shore she’d
never liked the place). She had CM hospitals strafed and imploded,
earthquakes in Melbourne and in real cities too, and a Chernobyl on
almost every page.
Me GloArius korea
by Layoanee Balmy.
Daddee explodid, inn pyoottressant raij:

FAIM? FAim, my gerl, wee measure inn konsentrik celtik
serkls, like thee fours of a nukulea blarst!
Hey, hang on!

She quickly scrawled out the above blatant
plagiarism (not that she saw it that way) and replaced it with:
PEple ar thee bases ov hyoomann societee. (What did Yoo

expect, eerwiks?)
And Orgasms are hadd by orl sortsa peple. welfee banka Ira
o’Tatink had plentee wiv sugry Patsee Pudenda. Sudenlee a hevy, gleming, blak, hard,
huge anvl dropt on his hedd. “Owch, UCHA VEE!”, he squeled in pigg-Welch.
He woz orijanlee from Aberration in Wairls. He endud up bean
sent to jale wear he belongd for bean a borink libarian inn his spair time. He was orlso a
travestite and lovd barskit-weeving and woz no mach for heroik ladee novvlist Tala thee
Amazon …
Norman, an ardent admirer of Ariel Sharon and

his poems, read over this and puked. She was genuinely disappointed,
141
as she felt some sensitive and more authentic part of her had gone
into it.
But she dismissed that, after an aberrant night
of cheap wine (she preferred the expensive variety), and worked on the
sex. The Swedish Caressa ‘My Other Car is a’ Vulva was her favourite
character, always featuring in drug-soaked orgies with sixteen other
young women of 16 with long white hair and - unsurprisingly - no
testicles (foremost of whom was Tala), Fred Nile and a wombat. They -
had they been gay men they’d have been arrested - engaged in lewd and
depraved activities like leg-shaving and nude scythe-wheeled Volvo-
pulling to an extent that when it was published she got a terse letter
from the Anti-Pope Guilty III, and from John Paul George and Ringo II
an order for a copy for each Cardinal. 103 It all got too much for
Norman.
“For fuck’s sake, your work is disgusting and
so is the Pontiff. Both ought to be burnt - the Emporer Ch’in had the
right idea.” He went into a disquisition on the Burning of the Books,
and perorated, “Jesus, I simply can’t imagine a wombat engaging in any
sexual activity, asshole. (A degenerate free-spirited cat, perhaps … )
But don’t add any more - ring up Prátt and get it published!”
Soon it was selling and she carousing
everywhere. It was a greater success than she’d ever anticipated, a
smash hit even in remote parts of Christian Zionist Tibet (Gerald’s
Dad perversely loved it) and all down the eastern Siberian seaboard.
Fan letters were received from as far away as Venus, which showed that
either George’s predecessor was still alive or that Venusians are au
fait with Australian literature, unlike much of the world.
She made squillions in royalties. And it was
all due, said Norman, to Norman’s literary acumen. He tried writing
for a bit but then became a vicious critic and blighted more careers
than Al Dunlap.
(A short sample of Norman’s work, heavily
influenced by Leonie, will suffice to convince the reader of his
talentlessness:
It was then that the Uillean popes had their tubes tied.
[Clearly a documented case of thought transference.]
But the Celtic calendar and its complexity has always
unnerved me. After all, the Celtic Year has 4000 days and all of them called Saturday
night. It comes with a free set of bagpipes which will delight any canny Scot.
Research undertaken by the Cornish Society has shown that
the bagpipe - not known in Scotland till the 15th century, before that they had to make do
with a Hammond organ - comes in several species. Cornish people can’t play any of them.
Their singing voices have also been known to shatter Stonehenge so it’s a good thing it
wasn’t built there.
In short, they have the musical acumen of a dead koala.
But thus it was that the Celtic Fringe became popular in the
18th century when haircuts were rare. Brian Boru fancied the Boston DA style while
Boudica went for a crewcut in summer. The mouse (Trunkus truncatus) is the world’s
smallest elephant. There was once a three-year old radio star in Slovakia with a rumbling
bass voice, while Eugenia Mela (d.1879) went through life as a renowned woman tenor.
On the other hand, Demosthenes it was who invented the game of Helmut cabbage.
Celtic Thought is an amazing thing, especially put next to a
penny-farthing.
As a dictator, I find these assholes repugnant …)
Nevertheless, bitchy articles began to appear

in the press about her and in her more paranoid moments she thought
the entire world was laughing at her. Cartoons of her abounded, all
103
Their numbers since cut back to three and a quarter.
142
exaggerating her nose. She was perplexed at this childish fixation and
protested mightily, to no avail. Once more she dyed her hair, so that
blindness spread about the galaxy to the delight of His Holiness, and
brazened it out. Her fans, the People, were on her side, as she could
tell from the sales figures. Her 47 seat majority on the Australia
Council (an artefact of the bizarre system of voting employed these
days) turned into a rout, but that sort of crap didn’t matter to her
any more.
The day of the launch drew near. It was about
this time that strange explosions began to occur off the coast of
Australia and New Zealand, leading to the notorious animatronic Trans
Tasman War which New Zealand of course won after hiring mercenaries
from East California and bombarding Sydney with rousing hakas led by
Alan Duff and Winston Peters with much whakopahane. (Talks were held
and Australia compelled to trade sheep for peace - the government also
pretended to consider legal ways of redistributing wealth due to the
opportunistic growth of taxation populaire by streetgangs and poets
carrying mouldy loaves on pitchforks and several outbreaks of open
revolution which led in one notable case to the establishment of the
secessionary People’s Republic of Gippsland.)
I set beneath the branches green, end beered my
buttucks et the queen, Leonie wrote on the matter:
Herr eerquerries
boFE reelee meen
ashurd mee thet shee hed Knot seen
Me vyle display, butt sett sereen
Wuthun, end dud not ceer a been …
Though technically she was wanted by the police

for plagiarism and inadvertently inciting a General Strike, the new
Government had grown so accustomed to the improvement in the balance
of payments her book had brought about that they let the matter drop
and had even won the election on the strength of her notoriety while
at the same time throwing six million wogs out of work.
So although Sean was no doubt privately
spitting chips about both her fifth and sixth novels, she was readily
allowed into Australia and at her defamation trial (Barmy v. Begora
(2000) 175 CLR 1) conducted her own defence of Qualified Privilege and
won, while her hapless double (one of many she employed around the
world to bring home the pork butties) was ordered by the CM to
represent her at the Cultural Centre ‘for security reasons’. Norman
was about to get his revenge.
143
Chapter Sixteen: Blowing Off!
‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s

fashions’ — Lillian Helman, 1952
Thanks to the appreciable augmentation of his

salary and a chance meeting with a woman possessing disconcerting eyes
that flashed like galena, the by now strong swimmer Prátt - chastened
by his strange African interlude with the overpowering yet touching
Leonie and unacquainted with fashionable Immoral Rearmament - was able
to buy a disused Poetry Venue (the poetry bubble had burst) and set up
his own ’zine. (He also owned a profitable chain of cable telautograph
stations but that of course like the secret rules of High Cockalorum
and the publicly-funded pillaging of the people by the moneyed
minority, viz, ‘entrepreneurship’ or New Labour - Death Warmed Up in
the Socialist - is commercial-in-confidence.)
No fan, any more than Leonie, of kicking people
when they’re down, he continued to boast and work at U & O part-time,
aiming to gain justice for the oppressed illegals and a name in
history as a social reformer, possibly William Wilberforce. The first
thing to do was to unseat the Norman-like Roger - a neo-Stalinist
entrepreneur of action who believed that the means justify the means
and made his crucial decisions in an asbestos suit (with total
ignorance of what the company actually did these days). Roger, being a
Christian Vietnam War deferree and a convinced believer in the
glorious defeats of the working class, utopian book-burning,
Yankophilia, the ‘Sino-Jewish’ conspiracy to rid the world of glorious
injustice, mesothelioma, y’cantism - y’can’t interfere in the
marketplace or y’ll end up like North Korea - military discipline,
theft and market cannibalism, would brook no criticism in spite of the
many underclass-inspired attempts to beg for food on the street
outside or occasionally burn down the building.
Once he’d overthrown him, at the going down of
the sun and in the morning, the solidly atheist Prátt would merge U &
O with MGM … or was it 3M? … some legal organised crime outfit
anyway.PMT Inc?
Whatever. In the magazine’s walnut-panelled yet
(due to an earlier Efficiency Drive) largely lino’d office he sat,
devoid of acronyms despite having once worked for the UN body UNPAID,
swinging his stumpy legs (he disliked gags like the one about the guy
who was so short that when he fell over in the bathtub he died of the
bends) and scratching away boastfully with his cute electronic pen,
assembled by baby, sick and geriatric labour in the celebrated Chinese
showpiece Gobi Desert city of Wuyuan (home of the Plutocratic Divided
Nations Organisation) in which mouse-catching S o c i a l i s t
entrepreneurship joined hands and mighty thews fraternally if not
sororitally in the wirtschaftswonderful economic crusade of Wild
Western globalisation. A rodomontade by Braggadoccio played softly in
the background.
His monumental obsidian desk, in the very
centre of the room, gleamed like a baguette within an oblong setting
of mirroring Florentine marble that strained a few centimetres beyond
it (he’d never invite Leonie back there). The office, he recalled
(like so many of my characters) with horror, had once been occupied by
1930s public servants of various Levels toiling for the Department of
Fisheries and Racial Hygiene, scribbling incomprehensible bumf into
their handwritten files under the baleful eye of their lordly
Supervisor. They would have been, he reflected progressively, as bound
up in their stultifying hierarchy as Freemasons (!) or the United
Ancient Order of Druids, consumed with their more-royal-than-the-king
ambition to emulate their Dickensian overlords, the private masters.
Having been brought up by two radical lesbian
Marxists, he hated Big Lie ‘liberal’ hierarchy more than anything, and
Chapter Sixteen: Blowing Off! 145
dreamed atheologically and euphemiastically of the Just World which

might be created without it in these technologically sophisticated
times (they could now grow money under fluorescent lights in the
wardrobe and inflation was on 10 000 000% but officially zero), a
world in which human potential at last meant something, where the
people who ran things were the People and didn’t have to be paid two
million dollars to get up in the morning. After all, no one (let alone
the US government) was paying the bloody author.
Of course, he disliked to over-generalise, even
about global fraud and the ‘multinationals’ of metastasising
capitalism which were forcing the nations of the world into something
resembling chronic prostitution. Statements like ‘all human beings are
of equal worth’ were a bit dogmatic. And did those feet in ancient
time …
Street kids shot up and slept rough on the kerb
below (when not doodling Singaporeanly, at the risk of flogging and
branding, on the Berlin-like wall, one no more likely than the one in
Belfast to be broken up and distributed like a saint’s relics all over
the Uttermost West). They were stupefied if artistic beneficiaries of
twenty-one years of baby-booming bean-counting, of a generation that
had declared war on its own children, perhaps - whereas Leonie was his
age, and the beneficiary of rather more years of equivalent paternal
abuse). Despite his compassionate nature, he ignored them when they
weren’t throwing missiles of the anti-aircraft variety.
And did the Countenance Divine …
Mae West’s portrait, along with those of
Bakunin, Blanqui, Goldman, Kropotkin, Morris, Malatesta, Reclus etc,
hung, winking, above his desk. He’d come up and see Her (and Rosa
Luxemburg) any time, if he could just make those important contacts in
Heaven. Messianic thoughts worthy of Leonie distracted him briefly as
he gazed out at the glittering, foreign-owned skyscrapers of Sydney,
which were these days faced with moon-rock and so tall as to make the
earth wobble rather more than it used to. The famous Statue of Rupert
Murdoch carved by sweating illegals out of a comet that had narrowly
avoided rendering the human race obsolete as dinosaurs (though perhaps
as trendy in plastic), stood guard over the harbour, torchbearing arm
raised in an ardent CM salute.
A sign of the horns indeed, Cernunnos and the
Celtic Iron Age be praised (even though the steel industry had
collapsed years ago).
Bring me my Bow of burning gold …
The mag., he mustn’t forget the mag., and its
dedication to that disgusting, homosexual and inefficient perversion,
Libertarian Socialism (and to be on the safe side, the memory of Lord
Beaverbrook). No socialism without democracy, no democracy without
socialism. It was called Blowing Off!, a name Prátt felt well
expressed its truly Celtic tone - as against that fetid fascist fake
Daddy. Its feral fans called it, affectionately, BO!, and were happy
to shell out the 25 bucks it cost every month from their untaxed
ecstacy sales. BO!, sworn enemy of tax-free enterprise and obscene
salaries, was also sponsored by a company he’d come to know about due
to his possession of valuable inside information as befitted his
position as an emergent New Labour-funded CEO.104
Bring me my Arrows of desire …
The company was called Iceberg Enterprises
(whose principals and star pupils and duxes of the school were in fact
Naomi and Gerald) through a $US2 holding company called Grebici Pty
Ltd, but due to an enantiomorphic mispelling on Naomi’s part he hadn’t
yet worked that out. His thermometric Honours degree in Sino-
104
Cunt Eater Ordinaire.
145
Vietnamese Cosmogony from the University of Terry Hie Hie did not
really fit him for his present job.
Bring me my Spear, O clouds unfold!
Blowing Off!, printed for boring reasons of
financial stringency on Home Brand toilet paper by a contemptible
lackey of the fascists who had only a lower third - attacked the
growing importance of criminal funding in the arts and literature,
which the Cornishman Prátt (after meeting the rising truly Celtic
anarchists Siobhán and Myfanwy) regarded as the inevitable consequence
of the domination of the economy by amoral finance pirates with snazzy
supercomputers on Berlin Wall Street, Centre of the Saxonomic Empire.
Al-Fayk's
Halal
Locust
Butchery
ALWAYS CHEAPER
PHONE 000 00000
Internet: alf.halal.www.html
Bring me my Chariot of fire. Leonie with her

fantasies of triumphal scythe-wheeled vehicles and lights on the hill
said sometimes that she supported these seamy international brigands -
with their partiality for dressing right in fiscal drag - and
sometimes that she hated them - but then she had a severe mental
illness.
Poor girl, and so yummily aggressive. But what
could he do? The notion of tender, cossetted non-young Australians
going about in Welsh (or Cornish) national dress in order to beg for
foreign investment didn’t appeal to him.
The mag., don’t forget the mag.! Thoughts of
Moses (all those ideas and just a hammer and chisel) and Leonie
disturbed yet somehow bolstered his unshakeable belief in an
optimistic eschatology - she needed a future herself, but though that
was something her reactionary upbringing had never offered, she
nevertheless surged forward like a higgledy-piggledy tsunami.
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In Oz’s brown unpleasant Land …105
The mag. Prátt had scored an article on the
subject of neo-imperialist banditry from noted literary economist and
Nietzschean-Burkian Roger N. Von Chiack (a swinish number-cruncher and
near-criminal with a moral blind spot as big as Mt Isa 106 and the
solicitude of a cheap Chinese bhodisattva statue) and was now busily
running that down - not being one to ‘lower his expectations’ - in his
editorial.
105
William Blake was Prátt’s favourite poet. Is that my fault?
106
Defined by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest town in the world, since its boundaries extend
billions of light years beyond the built-up area.
146
(It was difficult not to draw the conclusion

that this course of action was rash, since Roger - his boss at U & O -
was also due to put his plan for cutting off Blowing Off!’s measly
government funding before his obscenely rich politicorporate masters.
BO!, after all, was unlikely to get much out of the ostensibly small
government-obsessed Celtic Mafia.)
The past twenty-one years or so, Prátt
maintained scurrilously with Daddy and Begora in his sights, had led
to the decline of social progress and the erosion of the m o r a l
dimension of political economy. The old ‘positive sum’, ‘trickle-
down’, ‘growth’ set-up, inequitable in itself, no longer worked: job-
killing automation had spread right across the unregulated global
‘market’ economy and Old Karl was vindicated. Hence those in power,
convinced that most of their compatriots were even less informed than
they were, had more or less reverted to the methods of their 18th
century aristocratic predecessors, excusing their atavism by deifying
‘the need to compete for foreign exchange to pay for imports’ (but
never import substitution) or ‘the low savings rate’ (at a time when
people were borrowing from gombeen men to keep their children in the
new national cloth-of-gold school uniform - gold was doing well again)
or ‘balancing the budget’ (on the end of whose nose, he wondered,
perhaps Leonie’s) or any other black holes they could magic into
existence. The trick, like hosing down a fire with petrol (also doing
well), was simple: impoverish the ‘lowest’ and weakest 10% (or so) of
the population (forcing them into drug-peddling and thence onto
private prison chain-gangs that mended roads in the rich suburbs while
the infrastructure in the ghettoes fell apart due to the ‘user-pays’
obsession of the drug-baron capitalists), screw down the ‘higher’ 40%
but ‘compensate’ them with moolah stolen from the first 10%, let the
next 40% thieve what they could from the foregoing 50% while the top
10% - and especially the tippy-top 1% - were permitted to oozle from
all and sundry. Voila!
But at some point this cynical and nihilistic
legerdemain had been detected, the conjurer had fumbled. It had become
clear to the people, densified as they were, that things were not
going to get better in the long run: instead, suddenly, it was obvious
(as Leonie, quite the folk-hero though without red hair, never ceased
to remind them) that things were going from bad to worse. There was no
prize to keep one’s eyes on any more, no ‘new industry’ to soak up the
burgeoning reserve army (tourism’s beads and cracked mirrors, for
instance, were increasingly collected by ever more user-friendly
robots and Zairean child labour imported illegally from Belgium) - in
short, the race was run, the dash was done, the game was over.
Bury me under the red star! (The events of

history had to be retold within the unity of a single great collective
story - the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a
realm of Necessity, he plagiarised from Fredric Jameson and Karl
Marx.) People had - perhaps because of a sense of being personally
abused by such no-good-to-gundy social Darwinist econofakery, perhaps
because they retained an age-old utopian vision of a society without
work-or-starvation attainable like jobless growth through human
ingenuity, or perhaps due to Divine (or leonine) Intervention in the
Market - lost their fascination with being deluded. The biggest heist
in history had been exposed for what it was, and the Western World was
on the verge of Open Revolution. We are the masters now! they chanted
in Albanian outside while bearing their buttocks.
Prátt, while verbally spitting in the eye of
Unfree Enterprise and its interchangeable public/private mafias, found
himself gasping. The shouts in the street chilled his wattle-staining
blood nicely. He downed a glass of cheering but not inebriating tar
water and continued:
147
Because of this loss of ignorance … the

aforementioned 90% of the electorate (thanks largely to Leonie who had
she not been so right-wing and racist would probably have been shot)
now opposed the existing order but their votes were all disqualified
on technical grounds - criticality, never having voted before,
Unemployment, cosmopolitanity, sedition, oppositional tendencies,
failing marathon dance contests (we’ll set aside the Battle of
Thermopylae), etc. And therefore …
He stopped writing momentarily and warm, fuzzy
feelings pervaded him, but were soon replaced by a tidal wave of
righteous anger.
What in hell was the economy for? Who was it
for? A central product of any enterprise, he scrawled idealistically,
was the job satisfaction and security and quality of life of its
noseringed and dirty-nailed ‘employees’. The ‘efficiency’ of a social
network like a corporation must never be compared to the thermodynamic
efficiency of a machine, and besides, what about even neoclassical-
style efficiency at the macroeconomic level? Was it efficient to waste
the potential of millions of people? Was it just, to drag the corpse
of neo-liberalism around the earth and infect the multitude? Was it
sane? What was the meaning of all this? What was the point of the so-
called economy anyway? What mean ye …
(By the way, sanity was not very modish these
days. The Barbimoor Mental Facility for the Undeinstitutionalisable
was overflowing with ex-Prime Ministers, all of them gibbering about
Leonie and her laughing boosies.)
Yet because of these ‘errors’, ‘distortions’
and ‘imperfections’, he thundered jeremiacally, because of the
‘downsizing’ dance of death enforced by headless chook competition,
minority groups like workers and transvestites and actors were freely
savaged these days in a quasi-Druidic, human-sacrificial substitute
for social policy pursued by both ‘major’ ‘parties’ (though derided by
the ‘minor’ ones who in turn were ‘denounced’ by the various
‘Anarchist Liberation Fronts’ and ‘street’ gangs of plagiarists that
had sprung ‘up’ all over the place and were kept down by ‘a’
combination of State terror and the privatised CM variety‘)’.
In the scarequoted teeth of Von Chiack’s
bracingly market fundamentalist approach to robbing the poor and
protecting the undeserving rich from them - which in his subversive
way Prátt regarded as smelling of the 1920s (excepting Clara Bowe) and
possibly leading to much the same outcomes - he advocated a spirited
return to the policies set out below:
These measures will of course be different in different

countries.
Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following
will be pretty generally applicable:
1. heavy, graduated, progressive and international taxation,
with especial emphasis on the Greedophile class (whose names will all be published in the
Courier-Mole).
2. a massive levy on sport to support the Arts (including
literature).
3. renationalisation of privatised public property without
compensation to ‘major’ globetrotting shareholders.
4. a high minimum wage (there is presently a compulsory and
complicated system of fines levied by employers for the widespread failure to ‘work’);
5. a 35-hour day.
6. …
Morning glory flowers bloomed in his long,

Marxist and crow-infested hair. It was 1967 again. He got out his
battered, bestickered guitar and strummed a few spleen-venting chords.
148
Oh ye masters of warrrrr …
Yea! Let politicians’ salaries be lowered
progressively as they divested themselves of their social
responsibilities! Unity of theory and practice! Abolish the doleful
and preposterous workfare state! (One could support 3043 unemployed
people for a year on the salary of the CEO of General Motors alone.)
Eradicate the performing seal mentality! Disenfranchise all those with
too much wealth - wealth being political power, they hardly need a
vote! Revoke the citizenship of tax-bludgers! Set up ruthless prah-
vate companies run by revolutionaries to redistribute lucre from the
less-than-eleemosynary Avaricians on a commission basis - that’d
confuse ’em.
The vampiric World Saxon Empire (run according
to talkback by Roísín McAliskey) was, he wrote, richer than it had
ever been in the entire sweep of human history yet the epigonistic
dullards in power were viciously imposing what amounted to a
competitivist, internationalised command economy. To justify that
apparent end (whatever’s going is right, we’re a modern party) they
appealed constantly to the dole-hating, backward-looking Biedermeier
and Poujadist elements of the occupationally insecure and quaintly
Calvinistic Gurking Class (viz, ‘Battlers’, destined soon to be
brutishly toiling for aflatoxic peanuts on the dole, possibly in job-
rich China) and calling for ignoramic ‘sacrifices’ (Jesus had thus far
declined to appear, maybe because He thought we were all equal in the
eyes of God) and the final destruction of the public education system
with its awful tendency to make people slightly critical of such State
Robbery on behalf of the tax-dodging Filching Class.
The Panjandrum rich are richer than us all and
will soon be richer than all of us put together! (Actually, they
already were.) “Wishy-washy ‘social democracy’ cannot hold them in
check! Down with WSE juggernaut Filchocracy! Death to Pseudoscientific
Neoclassical ‘Economics’ and its farcical aping of obsolete 19th
century physics! Drive them all out of the Temple!
A good thing he wasn’t religious.
Blessed are the meek, the weak and the leek,
for they shall inherit the earth, what’s left of it! (He chanted a
little Simon and Garfunkel and proceeded syncretically.) Power to the
people right on! Disinter good John Maynard Keynes, who could be
electronically reconstructed, stuffed and sat, in a glass case - á la
Jeremy Bentham - on the steps of that haunt of all art-loving and
well-heeled politicos and mafiosi, the CM Cultural Centre! If the rich
won’t pay their taxes they should lose their citizenship! Right is
might! El Pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido! All Power to the Soviets!
To Hell with Capitalism!
Prayerfully, he continued,
If they don’t like all that, let the buggers go
and live in Russia!107
A hard rain’s …
Putting down his humming axe, he shook crows’
nests from his Marxian locks and pondered the opposition this reckless
red-ragging would generate among well-heeled members of parliament-
cum-corporate state management (merged a while ago in an obsessive-
compulsive cost-cutting measure), and the Religious Right, the former
whom he met with and harried at the Cultural Centre on a regular basis
and the latter represented heavily in Paddy Barmy’s enormous Family
Firm.
107
Comment from a disgruntled reader: ‘this is too much! Verdon has used this gag already in HIS
degenerate story ‘Cross Purposes’, published in Canberra’s ANU Reporter in 1994 and again (!) in the
anthology HE and Kathy Kattipece edited, Red Cat Country (Canberra: Ginninderra Press: 1997). Faugh!” -
Sir Fred Murder-on-the-Nile, Sydney. Free speech is not dead (yet). (By the way, God only gets a capital
letter.)
149
Indeed, the red-shirted and red-tied Prátt -

who by the way knew nothing of Daddy’s fall from favour - could afford
to think in this fashion, having thanks to economists like Von Chiack
a seven-figure ‘luxury’ salary (in 1984 prices) and a team of
underhanded solicitors to keep it reasonably taxless. But being a
moral sort of fellow and erstwhile Flower Child, he felt guilty that,
should he and his fellow-corporocrats choose to resign tomorrow and
spend the rest of their days soaking up the sun and Campari on
Barbados, supported by their vast private incomes, they would attract
far less odium from the billionaire-owned propaganda tabloids than the
average Jim Beam-swilling, Donohue-watching, heroin-addicted, suicidal
and future-free member of the Youth Unemployed.
Knock knock knockin’ on Heaven’s door … he
burbled, a capella. The times they are a-
A rock bounced off the bulletproof window. He
heard chiacking or chanting in the street below, but again ignored it,
even as rifle-grenades exploded just below his window and dismembered
his Literary Editor. Ah, the youth of today …
(Ignorance, of course, was not - despite the
general state of enlightenment now prevailing - something he had a
monopoly in. Even Norman and Leonie didn’t know that Daddy had swiftly
regained control of Barbados with Begora’s aid. Only Auntie Rhoberta
knew that (she lies transparently), after frantically going back over
the manuscript due to her discovery of great gaffes in the plot.)108
Julius K. Prátt, a Gemini, or Hyundai in the
South Korean astrological system, needed a little light relief after
his heavy philosophising, and again to the sound of jeers took up his
gat.
Don’t think twice, it’s all right …
All this Cornish protest music was exciting in
itself, but the rush didn’t last. But as the Saxon sunlight streamed
cheekily in through the old arched windows, he felt a quiet sense of
achievement. In three hours and with much cursing under his breath, he
had churned out a whole paragraph of the next issue’s editorial.
Prátt doodled little Clara Bowes and allowed
further inspiration to waft down to him like manna. Little did (though
a petrol bomb in the shape of a disintegrating plastic milk bottle
wafted up), and he blamed the exclusionary bureaucracy of Heaven. God
(though a long way off) got to hear of this pretty quickly but had
various wars and rumours of wars on His hands and passed the buck to
Mary, who had morning sickness and wasn’t much interested.
It was tough being an editor. Editors come and
go, talking of Michelangelo. Perhaps he could commission an article on
his own brand of Economic Reform from Naomi and Gerald. Their ethical
stuff, ridiculed by the Prime Minister and dear old Nigel from his
well-padded parliamentary jail cell (despite some calls that he be
lined up and shot all on his own he was affectionately known these
days as El Loco and made Leonie look sane by comparison), always gave
him lots of new notions.
At present, though, there was not an original
idea in his head, save the thought that the Western World would have
been in a very bad way if the most successful Christians (ignoring
lions altogether)109 had been African. How embarrassing for the Spanish
Inquisition having a black Pope, not to speak of the ‘British’ Empire.
108
Note how that plot cunningly evolves in parentheses. Oy, Leonie’s just admitted to me, this is a real
writer at work.
109
Except to observe that it takes four or five Christians per day to keep the average lion happy, as against
three Parsees and a single Baha’i. This is known as the Religious Dietetic Principle, and has led to most
religions that don’t have them enacting Dietary Laws, such as ‘not to be eaten: members of the Faithful’.
Dianetics doesn’t come into it.
150
… with God on their side … He tossed his

iconographic hair about and gyrated his hips. Hey man! Let the sun
shine in … She loovs you yer yer yer …
He was soon jigging about wildly and flailing
at his instrument, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Tiny Tim and John
Lennon combined, wailing soulfully before a huge imaginary crowd.
All along the Watchtower … he screamed, eyes

brimming with tears. Summertime … Tiptoe through the tulips … God is a
concept by which we measure our pain … A working class hero is
something to be …
There was a knock at his own door. His heart
and fingers missed a beat. He flung his guitar with a loud spla-a-ang
beneath the desk, and sat frozen in his chair in an attitude of great
concentration.
But it was just a death-watch beetle in the
mouldering walls. Or a tree-branch scraping in the movingg er at the
window. Or - well, he hoped to God that no one was standing outside
with their ear to the keyhole.
Silence, apart from the echoing chants in the
grimy street below. He gave a mighty sigh and brushed back his
flowing, white-flecked hair with a sweating palm.
Damn this writing game. He found it harder than
Auntie Rhoberta . Metaphors like ‘the moon was a discarded hubcap
leaning against a broken kerb of cloud’ (they are metaphors I assure
you) flooded out of him but were not of much use to his article. Grrr!
There must be some way of dredging up inspiration, some knack to it.
Aha! This word triggered off the notion of
trying word association. He wrote down the word ‘brain’ and then below
that made a list of all the words that it conjured up:
frolic
suck
lick
prick …
No, this was not helpful. He attempted to

meditate instead, focussing on his navel with his third eye and
chanting Om, om, om. Hmmm. Other syllables were even less helpful: Ga
ga ga … Wee wee wee … Bo bo bo … Mi mi mi … Rah rah zis … (at 14 he’d
had three days of acting lessons). Maybe he needed glasses, or at
least a monocle. Or a spell at NIDA.
Bristling with silver needles - silver threads
and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine, as Leonie might
shriek - he did a spot of tai chi and read his tarot cards with
interest. Then it was self hypnosis, but he had the sort of
personality (no old soul he) that would be hard-pressed hypnotising a
chicken. He tried even that, though, chanting errwk, buck buck buck
($3) at the evening meal of Iberoceltic omelette in his stomach. Which
had come first he couldn’t guess.
It worked up to a point, one unfortunately so
small not even an anorexic angel could dance upon it. Hil-ari-ous! he
intoned with impure thoughts of the 46th Pope St Hilarius, but nothing
but the sound of one hand giving a CM salute came to his tiny ears. No
matter how much he struggled, he couldn’t get past Level One, and
indeed had the same problem with George’s Nintendo. (He had no idea
where George had got to but then he had more important things to think
about.)
151
Aaagh! Crystals, yoga, negative ions, positive

thinking, compulsive neutrality, fence-sitting, pole-squatting(uh-oh),
planchettes, ouija boards, Kirlian photography of his aura, E-meters,
pendulums, pentagrams, chieromancy, gyromancy, gastromancy, Œnomancy,
stichomancy, scatomancy , myomancy, tealeaves, horoscopes, dowsing
rods, fiddlesticks, dice, lice, pyramids, sphinxes, shadoofs, Cairo
buses etc, none of it helped (though he had the sharpest razor blades
in town, useful if he ever felt like one of the Youth Unemployed). Not
even his Higher Self could be relied on to get its mind out of the
gutter and onto a mystic plane of Oneness (or Twoness or
64523.754ness) in order to escape the cycle of births, deaths and
marriages - there was another explosion outside, but the police had
arrived woo woo woo (syllables he’d learned from Leonie but hadn’t yet
essayed) and were blowing away the fractious eleven-year-old beggars
below with silenced machineguns, chain-saw missiles and dum-dum
bullets (apart from those offered satisfying compulsory jobs in the
bootlicking industry) - while his efforts to tune into the energy of
the higher vibrational matrices of the earth’s seasons with help from
his Seminole spirit guides proved a lamentable failure.
Throughout this New Age folly, the magazine’s
hopelessly Judaeo-Christian and Sino-Vietnamese mascot, Jacksi, a
sworn enemy of Nietzsche, lay, liberally relaxed and comfortable110 in
alpha on the lino, decrying through this ironically obsequious posture
the abysmal disparity in order of rank and abysm of rank between man
and dog. Looking up from his lotus position and a cat’s whisker away
from Nirvana111, Prátt stared, an expression of Heideggerian dread
stealing over his baby face.
This simply could not be happening.
Jacksi was a typical, well-educated, yappy
doggette (employed like George’s late camel to keep timorous authors
at bay), but when she did take her ease she had a tendency to offend
in another fashion.
You never heard them, of course. Their effect
would creep over you slowly and frog-boilingly, till you were fighting
for breath. Whereas Jacksi would lie unmoving with her eyes half-
opening and shutting, trying to look as innocent as possible.
Such aromatherapy was not to his taste, in fact
it was so chumpy he could carve it. He cursed the fact that the
windows were sealed - actually there was a big bullet hole in one of
them as the office was a favourite with roving psychopaths - and that
he was possibly stuck, covered in cobwebs and without a
physiotherapist, in this position for good. But there was the
consolation that, with the new air-conditioning he’d had installed in
the convict-built ex-lunatic asylum, shortly it’d be all over the
building.
The sound of flogging came to his ears: had
Leonie been alive in those times she’d have been horsewhipped into
oblivion. But as an atheistic lefty Prátt didn’t believe in ghosts. It
was just another subeditor or street-kid being disciplined.
Time to put his New Deal in place, perhaps.
After removing his ankles from behind his neck
with a crowbar and chucking on an ex-Soviet space suit he’d bought at
Sotheby’s, he returned to the problem of Celtic Mafia involvement in
the arts.
This deplorable situation had come about
because of the government’s creativity in slicing grants to the marrow
(and beyond) and making artists work long hours in irrelevant ‘jobs’
like tree-planting, uranium mining and salting and pulling up marram
grass at the beach for the dole (plus the reintroduction of mass-
110
For the historically-minded, John Howard, 1996. One of the great man’s pithier observations.
111
Not the band, you fool (Kurt Cobain is monitoring this guff from Heaven).
152
conscription, the Sandy Hollow Line, workhouses and the Convict

System). The notion that Unemployment - as Calvin Coolidge once said,
‘when large numbers of people are out of work, unemployment results’ -
and failure to buy were actually to become illegal was, he added with
democratic fairness and dinkumness, a vile calumny perpetrated by the
Vegan Far Left, an infantile disorder that was a major force in the
overflowing foreign-owned capitalist prisons in which castration or
speying of politically correct parking offenders in the interests of
the coming Freemarketopia was common.
(People like Rupert, emulating the late Rose,
tended - when not in captivity - to sell drugs or rum instead, and
thus remained unwavering supporters of their illegality and even
advocates of the banning of stuffed toys, which they made and sold in
craft markets.
Work for the dole?, they chanted at
increasingly-violent demonstrations, and were presently still chanting
below his office, Never! Nicht Arbeitsdienst! Death to True Celts! One
Two Three, Le-on-ie, Hang her from the highest tree!
Apparently, deduced Prátt, they didn’t want to
paint rocks , count shamrock leaves or impersonate wildlife as it
became extinct or patented, especially under chain-gang conditions.
Rum rebellions were being eagerly predicted by all the CM-controlled
dailies, while last week some lunatic had murdered everyone in the
Stock Exchange with a flamethrower.)
Paddy Barmy’s outfit upheld all this delightful
reform, including the promotion of inferiorised ‘work’ in the form of
oppressive US-style rubbish-contracts (the illegal trade unions and
the now-infinitesimal Arbeitsdienst-loving Labor Party were lumbered
with a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy and a commitment to
fostering exploitation - sorry, creating jobs for those who’ve already
got them - of a kind less attractive than suicide), healthy and
uncounted Unemployment (to placate the cardboard industry, perhaps),
and joyfully jobless and growth. Indeed, what was regarded as a ‘job’
these days would have made Simon Legree gasp in horror.
“Creeping fascism! Boiling frogs! Job illusion!
Employment inflation!” he crusaded, scribbling away furiously - no
computers assembled by the modern-day equivalents of the lace-tatters
of the 19th century for him - against the latest below-the-belt attack
in the Class War while puffing on a stylish stogie he’d found on the
sidewalk earlier. Rearranging the dirt! Taking us back to the economic
Ice Age! We need a jihad, a Holy Socialist War against degenerate
‘Economic Rationalist(!)’ plutolatry! Overthrow the unproductive
League of E-Rat tax-bludging rentiers who are living beyond our means!
Sweep away the past twenty-one years of ‘economic’ experimentation
upon human beings! Derail their gravy train! Build a new future!
Repair the world! Fight the Battle for Democracy before the suicidal
System collapses in its final Crisis of Overproduction!
(The police-guarded military despotism,
embellished with parliamentary forms, that had for some years been
Australian society, was hardly likely to respond well to this
subversive proselytising, but hardly anyone read Blowing Off! so they
tended to tolerate it from someone as well-heeled as Julius K. Prátt.)
As he realised that his inspiration had somehow
returned, someone definitely knocked and he went cold all over.
“Come.” he said hopefully, unaware of the
massacre of mostly Aboriginal and Maori youth that was being
perpetrated on the street (had he been he would have gone up to the
gold-plated, diamond-encrusted belvedere he’d had constructed on the
roof by IE and yelled ‘Pigs! Tomorrow’s bacon!’ over the roar).
His malleable PA, coincidentally named Harriet
Beecher Stowe and toting a barge and a wad of papers, entered the
office on her spindly, sinuously-crafted high heels. Prátt rather
153
envied these, and also the hot pink vinyl miniskirt she affected. Had
he known she was actually a boy he’d have been even more interested.
“Barmy - the father not the daughter - has sent
you another three hundred threatening notes, all of them flat. Shall I
call the police?” she enunciated with a charming, practised smile and
in a New Orleans creole accent. He loved her androgynous voice too.
Like Leonie’s, it sliced through newsprint.
“For God’s sake, not the police! They’re all in
the CM these days! Let me see them.”
She handed them over.
These missives consisted of cut-out letters
pasted onto sadly shredded pieces of Home Brand toilet paper. It
infuriated Prátt to know that they’d all been cut out of copies of
Blowing Off! It was desecration.
“Mr Prátt, Sir?” she shredded, and his ear-
drums played the 1812 Overture.
He jumped, and there came a spl-a-ang from
under the desk. He grinned professionally.
Harriet smiled back, thrusting her gorgeous
pelvis in his direction. He glanced at her thighs (not those again)
with something approaching religious fervour.
In truth, she like Leonie was far from being an
efficient and deferential secretary. She was in fact one of Iceberg
Enterprises’ spies, and also spying for ARSE who paid best of all.
Little did she know that he ran ARSE in his spare time. Little did he
know that she ran it the rest of the time. They were discreetly in a
job share position all along on $1 / day, but naturally that was kept
secret from both of them.
(Actually, that’s all ARSE propaganda.)
The spy business - or lurking for the dole as
Secret Agent Grade ? - was about the only one that was expanding
employment these days. No, that’s not true, she thought, there’s gun-
running, drug smuggling and the human organ trade. She told him so,
stepping provocatively onto the hallowed reflective section of floor.
“N-n-no, H-harriet, I think they’re all just
about completely inf-infiltrated by the C-celtic Mafia now by, er -
Pity that Anti-Corruption C-commission was bought out by a Japanese p-
plutonium company based in Hiroshima.”
“So whatta we do, Sir?” Her legs, her thighs
were cunningly encased in taut smoke-coloured nylon, her dear love-
pink skirt stretched from limb to shining limb in numinous mystery.
How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O Prince’s daughter! And such
shoes … His heart leapt and a drowsy numbness pained him - oh, go to
Lethe, you’ll only get corns.Although presently enjoying a frisson of
Biblical delight, Prátt really hated being interrupted by flat-chested
non-literati while he was editorialising. He detested being called
‘Sir’ as well - ‘Madam’ had a more fascinating ring to it, since it
worked as well in both directions and he’d always been fond of
palindromes and other species of gnat-swallowing camel.
“Oh - do what you think is best.” he snapped
breathlessly, hoping to show the photos to his grandchildren one day.
Her thighs - almost as wondrous as Leonie’s - shifted position as she
crisply turned one high-heeled foot about 30° to the left (he wasn’t
sure what that was in radians).
She in her erotic wisdom was practically
running everything as it was. It was a good thing she had a few other
strings to her bow of burning gold, though, enough for that Italian
invention the Welsh harp in fact - the pay was currently lousy, little
better than ‘Job Search’ Allowance. As Daddy regularly spouted
approvingly, forces were at work to further lower that over-generous
pittance so as to encourage the bludgers to take the thighfully
attractive jobs those same forces were offering in such infinitesimal
quantities, while at the same time they jacked up their own colossal
154
taxenfrei salaries every day, patriotically at public expense, to give

themselves the necessary incentivation - they were fond of such rustic
notions of human motivation - to climb the rickety corporate ladder.
Otherwise, the economy would surely founder.
Blowing a fuse in his Keltefrei thigh-detector,
Prátt returned testily to his editorial. She thrust those marvellous
stockinged limbs in his face again and he crossed his own legs with
more alacrity than Leonie, giving rise to loud spl-a-a-angs from
beneath the desk.
What was the use. Sweat dripped into his eyes
though the air conditioning was set at -12° Celsius to save money and
stalactites hung from the ceiling. His own trousered (though shaven)
thighs began to tremble.
“Sir?” she said, with just the faintest trace
of sarcasm.
He gasped for breath, and not because of
Jacksi. It was clearly necessary to gain some support against the CM,
but who could oppose them? He replied haltingly along those lines.
“Very good, Sir.” she pronounced huskily with a
doubtful upward inflection, her ineffable thighs steaming with desire.
Her warning (and thighs) disquieted him. It was
a miracle that his fledgling company thighs, er - was still in
business. Seven recaltitrant magazines had already been burnt out, and
seventeen editors lynched, or roasted at the stake and barbecued
generally. It was a dangerous game, publishing. Yet he had survived
thus far. Perhaps he had anonymous friends out there who were secretly
protecting him.
Thighs! Going on Leonie’s description of him as
an ‘empty-headed momzer’, Daddy had for a time dismissed Prátt as a
watery nothing - unlike Ahmed who had initiated a secret
correspondence with him on the grounds that he was a fellow short
person. But the day the Mafioso read the first issue of Blowing Off!
he became so enraged that he swallowed his false teeth and it took
several expeditions with a boathook before Ahmed could retrieve them
again. (And then he got shot in the back of the head for it, so he was
walking on eggshells for a while.)
Knowing this from Leonie, Prátt remained
unperturbed. He had something up his sleeve, a python named Mucus who
used to work with a stripper in Holy Ulladulla.
By the way, the name ‘Julius K. Prátt’ was a
pseudonym, the valiant editor’s real name being Isadora
Fetachesopoulos (only his parents called him Julius K. Prátt and had
kidnapped his birth certificate to prove it), but he (since the ‘K’
stood for Klutz) used his nickname from his days as an investigative
journalist on 60 Minutes to avoid confusion. Everyone had called him
‘pratt’ and it had stuck.
The foregoing para is of course all lies.
On the pretence of subserviently dusting the
room, Harriet paraded raunchily about it in her Erica Jong love-gear -
oh, those bountiful thighs, oh that holy and hypnotic gait, how brief
the sacred raiment, how near yet how far was her thin-veiled Paradise
- and the vain Tantric hope of getting a decent screw. He kept
grinning in as professional a manner as he could manage, though his
tie caught fire. Eventually she stormed out (Leonie’s reaction, had
she been interested in men, would have been rather more physical)
disappointed in a flurry of superheated steam.
Spla-a-ang, went his ear-blasting guitar.
Prátt, shaken if not stirred, realised that his chin was scorched and
his underpants sodden. The dog was licking itself furiously and
blowing off.
“C-come again.” he stammered at the door, which
was still shuddering in a cloud of dust from having been so decisively
slammed.
155
He changed ruefully in his en suite, vowing to

give up religion.
Eponymously, Prátt continued to bash out his

vitriolic editorial into the night with no concern for the mortar
shells landing in his antique inkwell. (Many people worked into the
night these days, working conditions and wages being not unlike those
of Communist Poland.)
He left the guitar alone for a while and his
mind wandered jauntily back into the recent past. It had been a night
like this when the woman with the disconcerting dark eyes breezed into
his office and introduced him to her short-sighted friend Naomi whom
he remembered from Leonie’s convent days.
The dainty editor was repelled by the woman’s
bulk but agreed to appoint her as an Administrative Assistant. It
wasn’t long before she was also practically running the magazine.
Since she and Harriet worked at opposite ends of the building they had
never met and so the magazine’s finances and even its appearance were
somewhat schizophrenic. No one commented on this as the final say lay
with Prátt.
Prátt paid no attention to this confusing
situation either, and may have been totally oblivious of it. His
interest lay more with writing and commissioning articles about the
Celtic Mafia and their Cultural Centre and the vagaries of a certain
fascist Theatre Company, and also checking each typo out personally
and leaving it in if it ruined a hostile contributor’s article.
“I like the editorial.” Naomi said to him that
night in what he considered a patronising manner. He put down his
guitar and squinted at her.
He didn’t fancy her thighs at all. What could
you do with someone who wore a bile-green dirndl mystical with
astrological symbols, and made it look like a sack of beetroot? Woo
woo woo, he went under his breath. No good either.
She looked at him curiously.
“Of c-course.” he stammered for a different
reason, afraid she was after his job. (Harriet, on the other hand, was
a pushover, being apparently illiterate.)
The best part of it read:
Blowing Off! attracts your attention to the activities of the

vicious hoodlum Paddy Barmy blieved to be secretly a member of the strictly illegal Celtic
Mafia. An, er, religious maniac, Barmy spends his time commuting between Cabnerra and
his remote Cabirrean headquarters, in reality cordinating a billion-dollar trade in illicitt
shamrock seeds. Some of this money has found its way into Arts Bodies. His frunt is
actuarially Spalpeena, largest theatre company housed in the Clutzeral Centre. Or is it
Pink Lace, the company that does ‘alternative’ theatre - audience on the stage, actors in the
pit, the play - Milling Around: a Response to Funding Cuts …
Hard-hitting if slightly inaccurate

journalism.112 The CM was far from strictly illegal, for a start.
“How did you manage to get so many typos in a
handwritten manuscript?” asked Naomi, squinting back through her thick
lenses. (Both lenses were annoyed at not having been admitted to Mensa
though having IQs of 150 plus.)
“Er - I have dyslexia.” he lied, his IQ
dropping to -35, colder than the room.
They squinted mutually.
112
These days, ‘journalism’ was essentially egoistic posturing with no room for the truth or good writing
anyway.
156
“And aren’t you afraid that Paddy will knock us

off?” said Naomi, squinting and thrusting a well-veiled thigh at him
with a complete lack of ardour.
Prátt (IQ soaring) wasn’t sure why he was
taking such risks, and squinted. It was perhaps a desire to
distinguish himself from Leonie and her father. Yes, it was a risk,
but there was that woman with the dark eyes … Could that be hypnotism
(he thought of Harriet)? Or something more?
To his great squinting surprise, Naomi (IQ on
150 khz and buzzing all over the Internet) grabbed him by what was
left of his tie and began to fondle him clinically. Since she took no
interest in sex it was more of an exploratory journey to find out what
the male genitals were shaped like and to acquire general knowledge
that came in so handy at job interviews. Gerald (his IQ around 200)
was shy about showing her his, since he didn’t really want to be a man
anyway, and in her previous sexual encounters she’d either done it in
the dark or kept her eyes defiantly shut. But now she felt a new
woman, or rather Prátt, and burned with the desire to gain extra
information so she could finish her 19th PhD in anatomy - you couldn`t
beat the competition among the working poor unless you had at least
that many.
She kept up a patter to rival a ‘50s Broadway
musical. To Prátt the experience was a bit like holding a conversation
with a lightning bolt. With the skill of a prestidigitator with an IQ
of 250, she whipped open his trousers. He lay back and thought of
England. Drizzly boring country with too many conservatives, ruled
over by a vacuity with 32% of the vote called Major Blare (votes were
so rare they named them). Then, an enormous wobbling and dirndled
thigh cutting off his breathing, he reflected on his first job which
entailed putting strenuous hours into collecting silver and golden
paper for decent English hospitals (which turned out not to need it at
all). Finally, choking, he turned back to the question of why he was
putting his life at risk, as Naomi fondled on. Was it a test of his
Faith? He’d never really had much, and post-Harriet had lost even
that. His lifelong if syncretic commitment to Vulgar Marxism might
have been a factor, for he was at root vulgar. This very slow train of
thought led him to contemplate the similarities between Leonie and
Paddy and a death adder.
All three were deadly but Paddy (IQ zero) was
immoral and depraved as well. Prátt might be cut-throat in dispatching
his literary and editorial opponents, but he was no criminal, except
for embezzlement and insider-trading and other numerate, silvertail
pastimes.
“He’ll sue before he does anything worse. Daddy
likes his respectability.” opined Naomi (also with a stiff upper lip),
her pudgy fingers hooked around his willy. Prátt looked alarmed, and
in fact began to ring out the hour rather like Big Ben. His IQ reached
180 proof, and he said a prayer for kindling the fire in the tradition
of Celtic Christianity:
And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her,
Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and
let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.
Or as Leonie had once put it,
Never forget Jemima Nicholas Puddleduck who
defeated 1400 French soldiers in 1797 with a pitchfork. Ave, St
Boudica!
“I guess I never thought of all this.” he
proselytised good-naturedly, fumbling to shut off the noise and
attempting to put his past and Iona behind him while Rebecca’s
Daughters in Welsh national dresses rioted against the US-supplied
blue-uniformed street gang in the thoroughfare outside in scenes not
out of place in Sierra Leone. He was no fool with a volatile IQ like
that but some times his revolutionary enthusiasm made him careless.
157
Irreligiously (though his secular religion got no tax breaks) he also

prayed that Jacksi didn’t fart again.
Naomi, her dirndl a heaving mass of enticing
wobbles, released his throat and delivered a denunciamento on
Chiackian economics, and also told him not to worry. She and Gerald
were doing quite well these days. She could, she said, set up a
private and tax-sheltered army of incendiary ex-nuns to protect the
building.
“Er, good idea.” he gasped, his mind breaking
the sound barrier and suddenly becoming quite agile. Naomi shook her
head, and his. His privatised part (owned by a faceless financier on
Berlin Wall Street) grew embarrassingly rigid (apparently quite out of
step with the ‘flexibility’ all the rage in the workforce these days)
and little droplets of pre-cum appeared at the tip of the glans,
glistening like the waters of Castaly in the flickering fluorescent
light. He wasn’t very pleased with all that, till it sparked off the
idea of kneeling before a splendidly naked lifesaver with rock solid
pecs and a gigantic sword of love (I came not to bring peace etc),
enveloping with painted lips that tumescent miracle and sucking for
all he was worth. Am I gay, he pondered, patting at his nape and
tossing a few handbags around experimentally.
“So that’s what they’re like. Yccch.” said
Naomi, groping about for a bell, book and candle.
“I - wish they weren’t.” he confessed, erection
wilting. He was tired of his daily contact with the cockaholic males
at U & O and their swiftly-advancing penile dementia.
Jacksi (IQ in base 2) rolled on her back, fixed
him with a happy smile and blew off.
Naomi smiled too, and let him place his head
between her immense, backbreaking breasts. But then the stench reached
her nostrils.
Embarrassed again, he chased the dog out,
hoping his wagging genitalia were not too exposed.
“Poo.” said Naomi. “But let’s do ‘it’,
darling.” she suggested gaily, determined to get something out of him,
like a merger. At that point the underpaid ice-cream person (in eskimo
furs and straight out of the Economic Ice Age) came by and they rushed
downstairs - it took forever and they were exhausted by the time they
got to the ground floor - to get some gelato but when they came back
they were ready for action.
“We should have used the luft.” panted Prátt, a
typo the author left in to make him sound like a Kiwi, due to the lack
of New Zealand representation in the story and an excess of Highland
Queen Scotch. It happened (forgetting to use the lift I mean) with
even greater frequency when he was in the U & O building, which was at
least thirty times as tall.
“You’re right.” lisped Naomi esslessly,
slooping up har geleto. (O.k.! Use the bloody spellchecker!) “You
know, I think this author is a sadist. The gelato is runny. But let’s
do ‘it’ now.”
Stop complaining about the fucking food, went
Auntie Rhoberta. (Oh God, I forgot to make Prátt do up his zipper. My
IQ is clearly slipping.)
“I thought we had.” panted Prátt. Both were
secretly contemplating a political alliance.
She got all earth-mothery and changed her
religion again. “I’ll let you get your breath back.”
When he’d done so, smashing the glass with a
paperweight and climbing out onto the window-ledge ten floors above
the street with the blood-drenched crowd of surviving street-kids
yelling “Jump! Jump! Jump!”, Prátt lay back on the desk, and Naomi
slowly removed his pinstriped lurex trousers. He wished he hadn’t worn
any knickers (and was thankful they weren’t bamboo). She slipped them
158
off and threw them in the wastepaper basket, then gave him ‘French’
knitting at $100 an hour. So this was what it was like. Furtively
perusing Portnoy’s Complaint in the bog during his sheltered youth had
prepared him for nothing, Mr Rude to His Mother, as Harriet can attest
to this day.
“I like to take responsibility in my work.” she
sang, tweaking his tiny nose and switching off the sexometer because
she really liked him. Had Leonie known what was going on without her
in her own novel she would have been furious.
“But the mag. - it’s got to be at the printers
tomorrow.” he gasped, wanting to ‘put it to bed’ as they allegedly say
in the newspaper biz and meanwhile groping blindly (with a hooded
breast in his eye) at her voluminous crotch - a compass and sextant
would have been useful or at least a street directory. Twelve midnight
struck and a carriage which had drawn up outside turned into a
pumpkin, a North Queensland Blue to gain sponsorship for this novel
from the North Queensland Vegetable Farmers’ Federation.
The ex-nun lay on top of him, a writhing
volcano of sheathed but quivering bulk, and the gleaming desk
splintered. They fell through the floor and ended up in the ‘50s
nuclear bomb shelter below the basement. What a waste of money that
had been. The Soviet Union had been revived after Boris Yeltsin
spontaneously burst into flames but they’d been forced to sell all
their warheads to America and Japan to defray the cost of petrol for
their latest befinned line of Zil limousines and repairs to the vodka-
eaten bogs in the Kremlin.
“Shit.” gasped Naomi, looking up at the pit-
toiletish shaft they’d made, dark and dust-clogged with a little
lozenge of daylight at the top. They were doing ‘it’ in the dark
again. It was ever her fate.
“Ow!” yelled Prátt as a rather territorial rat
bit his member. “I don’t like love-bites.”
“It wasn’t me.” protested Naomi, her phlegmy
contralto voice echoing like the late Carl Sagan’s. “We’re not alone
here! Perhaps there are other intelligent lifeforms in the uttermost
depths of the Universe.” Her heart thundered in her ears, so she told
it to get back into her chest where it belonged.
The rat (a committed Baha’i) squeaked viciously
and began to write an irate letter of complaint to Blowing Off! There
was no telling what disease she’d catch now.
“Shit, I wonder if … ” Prátt’s overactive
imagination had conjured up the implausible and Boy’s Own Paper-style
notion of a tunnel leading from here to the Spalpeena office. He stood
and clung to the well-dirndled Naomi, who began to edge forward into
the blackness.
“Where are we going?” he whispered, admiring
her edging skills and picturing her nakedly wielding a whipper-
snipper.
“Shhh.” She grabbed his willy again and led him
on. Her hearing ability had developed a praeternatural keenness after
so many dark nights of passionless love. Water dripped in the
distance, then down his neck. It was really spiders engaged in mutual
micturition.
“It’s - a tunnel.” he enunciated
unnecessarily, his disbelief suspended and his member in an iron
grasp. After begging modishly he managed to get her to relinquish it
and to tuck it safely away. By that stage, it was squirting white
fountains at every rat in the place; law suits were inevitable.
“Let’s follow it.” she said, for there seemed
no other way of getting out of there.
The building, thanks to Mary, was actually

right next to the safe house-cum-chapel used by Daddy during his
159
sojourns in Sydney. Naomi led Prátt by the remains of the tie along
the tunnel, till they came to a small ventilator grating. Beyond was a
bedroom in which the well-travelled Leonie lay, naked and moaning,
with a plastic archaeopteryx and her noisy vibrator (it would have
drowned out a chainsaw) between her thighs. This was enough to
convince Prátt and even Naomi (who preferred pterodactyls and was glad
that unlike two million Americans she wasn’t mutilating herself as
well) to do ‘it’ again.
Once they’d all attained satisfaction, Leonie
began muttering to herself about the Bomb.
160
Chapter Seventeen: Second History Lesson
History, mentioned quite a lot above and in

places with a capital ‘h’, do be more or less bunk, said Henry Ford,
but he’s history now, along with Karl Marx who asserted that history
repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
(well, look at this repetitive book). Naturally, it is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the
contrary, it is their social existence that determines their
consciousness or lack thereof - women are the other way round, of
course. Otto von Ranke wanted to tell you all what actually happened,
and so do I, never asking ‘if’ of history or reading it backward, let
alone forward. We’ll leave Herodotus, Wilhelm Dilthey and George
Santayana for a subsequent masterpiece written from beyond the grave
by La Popelienère. (Those of you who don’t recognise these names are
obviously illiterate and can go and read Bryce Courtney.)
Born in a manger in suburban Bethlehem in 1955,
Naomi was dogged by the boredom of her ahistoriographical parents’ inn
and left at the age of four. She emigrated by tahini tanker to
Australia (one loaded rather above the Plimsoll line with fleeing
Palestinians and a certain Rhiannon ap Dafydd ap Moses), and
particularly enjoyed the crossing of the equator ceremony.
Her early life was marked by a predisposition
to set up ethical multinationals, which amazed her cynical little
friends at the orphanage. While they were playing with blocks she was
buying them up for the headquarters of her first company, the Shoddy
Shop. This she lost, however, in a Japanese-backed takeover bid, after
which she turned to religion.
(Readers, when they get to Chapter Nineteen -
how far away it seems! - may notice a similarity here to George’s
early though rather more marine development but she in reality
couldn’t stand him - so much for received notions about compatability
which infect so many other novels.)
Her squabbling Mum and Dad (Hetchilvah and
Abdul) soon vacated their green-lined hostelry and came over too,
though their ship floundered for most of the voyage with water up to
the gunwales and the Captain standing perpetually on the bridge
saluting as though at any moment she might have to go down with her
ship - and unlike Prátt she couldn’t swim a stroke.
They were somewhat bewildered by their
daughter’s precocity and by now huge debts. She laughed it off and
bought them a very big house on tick near Rushcutters Bay. The
rushcutters complained a bit since it was their house and they were
her principal creditors, but somehow it was all hosed down with
liberal applications of cash allegedly stolen from a peace
organisation. Transferring her wealth into her dolly’s name while
playing with matches and burning the house down, she hotly denied -
though with more class than Leonie - any implications of unethicality
and plagiarism. In any case, they (her petty bourgeois, tax-dodging
creditors) were the sort of people who’d voted for Hitler.
By now a religious ascetic, she swore off
business for life at the age of five and entered a putatively
Marijuana Buddhist monastery (later patronised by Ahmed), which rather
embarrassed the gibbering old fossils who lived in it. They were
forced to put doors on the bog and appreciate the feminine touch that
Naomi introduced by placing a vase of petunias on the dinner table and
making them sweep the bagel crumbs out of their bed every morning.
Most of them eventually set sail for Burma in the hope of regaining a
quiet life if not Nirvana. Their Tantric tub, the Jonathon Swift,
unhappily, sank.
A few months later she consulted her Hamlyn
Dictionary of World Religions, and her Christian Zionist Tibetan and
Egyptian Books of the Brain-Dead by Dr Pauline Hanson - reviewed years
Chapter Seventeen: Second History Lesson 162
hence for The Catholic Weekly by Leonie - to pick a new faith to be

absolutely committed to for life. By the time she was fourteen she had
converted so many times that people thought she was starting a new
religion and some joined it. Fortunately she’d sworn off pyromania.
At and in an age when most people were
renouncing it, she became a Christian Zionist, much to her parents’
consternation since her father was by now the first Arabic Chief Rabbi
of Vanuatu and had daily contact with Chief Sitting Properly (whom we
won’t talk about though everybody else did). She soon dropped
Christianity to take up Catholicism, with the intention of spending
the rest of her years with the Carminative Order. As we’ve seen, her
relationship with the Church was quite fitful after that, but she’d
eventually settled back into it - till disruptive Leonie came along.
Her Uncle Sven, in sexual terms, was not much
better than Paddy Barmy, and one night he was compelled by her to flee
with all his aquavit to Afghganistan disguised permanently as a woman.
Her brother Ahmed, meanwhile, had risen to Head
Bodyguard while doing his second PhD in Descriptive Botany by
correspondence on the side through the Bush University of Yass.
(Though the hippopotamus - Fatima Xiao-Banana - was eating his family
out of house and home and shat all over the tent (ignoring altogether
the ring she made around the bath, worse than Daddy’s) he somehow
scraped together the money for the famine-inducing fees and trial by
ordeal that were understandable prerequisites for entry.) Once in, he
did well, mastering the course materials through speed-reading and an
effective system of mnemonics that entailed the use of street signs
and famous landmarks who were up themselves a long way. (Have you
tried holding a normal conversation with the Sydney Opera House and
other stars of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert ?)
The most astonishing process of self-discovery
began to take place in him, till he’d almost learned to spell
‘desiccate’ in Roman letters and felt confident enough to hold
conversations in English with full professors, generally full at the
dishy boy-rich uni bar of the limestone University of Yass. His first
paper received an HD but he worked unperturbed till he’d attained his
very first F. But things changed once he’d thoroughly mastered the
Roman alphabet, candle and nose.)
Naomi, with her skimpy knowledge of botany,
hailing after all from a land in which plant life apart from oranges
and cedar trees is unknown, proofread his thesis and the degree-
conferring ceremony was a huge success before the university was
demolished by her latest company to make way for the new and famous
Sydney-Melbourne toll-road. (The family was currently in a delicate
stage of peace negotiations but at least the two of them had patched
up their many differences.)
However, it made little difference to her
brother’s employment prospects. He tried, as we’ve seen, a spell of
voluntary work - which was very hard to get and as we’ve also seen he
could barely spell anyway - and went on to become voluntary manager of
the Chase-Manhattan bank, but when a salaried position as an
apprentice toilet cleaner came up they refused to give it to him and
instead it went to the Chairman of the Board’s 16 year old daughter
Rictus who promptly embezzled and slept her way into a decent job.
After that slap in the face he went and did a
bar course, but that only resulted in Daddy (now, as we’ve seen, head
of the CM on Barbados though not Australia due to the Great Schism)
installing a licensed bistro in his own safe house. His attempts to
become a legitimate bouncer were pointless, since he barely came up to
Naomi’s knee and had no muscles at all (though a great cv and
portfolio), and he failed time and again to get bar-work due to his
total abhorrence of alcohol.
Staring at the job ads which all demanded
‘experience’ he didn’t possess, or a bubbly personality he felt he
162
Chapter Seventeen: Second History Lesson 163
couldn’t convincingly imitate being a miserable sod, the nanistic

Ahmed felt he was doomed, but at Naomi’s urgings he began to plot and
make contacts and stuff envelopes and lower Nansen bottles and that
sort of thing. Nevertheless, the glass eye and jaw factory in Bhutan
wouldn’t have him, the Rawlpindi Cricket Protector Works were stand-
offish, indeed bowled him a googly, while the snooty horse milk winery
in Outer Mongolia - recommended by his brain surgeon - didn’t even
bother to reply to his job application.
Criminal activity beckoned - it demanded only
ability and a willingness to learn, so he quickly made headway in
computer crime, literary criticism, and toad programming, and being of
a poetic sensibility rather basked in his fruitful relationship with
the Arts.
Naomi, as she downed her third gin of the day,
smiled (partly over the caricature of Leonie that pouted poisonously
from the front page of the Courier-Mail). She knew the cartoonist
personally - such was her way of knowing people - and in fact
sponsored him in lean and inefficient periods. She also knew things
about Leonie that Leonie didn’t know (well, everyone did) but she
wasn’t going to say anything. Let it dawn on her, she thought, with
the force of a nuclear blast.
163
Chapter Eighteen: Gerald and Norman
Leonie had a change of heart.113
She’d never really had people done in, that had
been Daddy Paddy’s doing. And she had worked out that Norman was a
ruthless monster who out of habit or boredom still had innocent
victims (mostly blue and Celtic) and stray cats dragged off the
streets and foully abused. She tried to shed a tear or two and nearly
managed it after much unseemly straining. Yet deep inside a betrayed
child lay curled up and whimpering, a child with a compassionate and
sensitive soul.
All she’d ever wanted was a literary career and
all the justified fame that went with it. It was the first step on her
millennial path to freedom.
After masturbating (she fantasised about Prátt
having it off with that vilely fat ex-nun Naomi), she stole away from
her own safe house to venture back, puffing on innumerable cigarettes,
toward her former mansion in Gungadin. Perhaps her old life could be
resuscitated, she thought, her mind gasping for oxygen.
She decided to walk as she rarely got any
exercise apart from wanking. Her bodyguards - the bodyguard industry
was expanding too, as well as the bodies of the bodyguards - followed
at as discreet a distance as such capacious and rugged individuals
could manage. White uprushings of stale breath from distant public
buildings and the newly-renamed Nigel Lopsides Sewage Treatment Plant
showed that steam-worship and thighs were still alive in the public
∞
service despite the cutting of staff to , and she breathed in deeply
∞
- cough hack splutter - and for a blessed moment thought life in the
capital was just grand.
On the way, she nodded to a few Amish lamp
posts she’d got to know personally (the economic think tanks had just
come out with the grand if antisocial idea of lighting the darkened
parts of the earth by means of a giant mirror on the moon, thus
effecting a huge saving in global electricity costs as long as she
never looked directly at it). Thank God and his Mafia, she thought,
there are no goldfish falling out of the air, never mind anvils. It
was a leap year after all.
She leaped a bit and shook off the groping
bodyguards and hailed a taxi, having walked as far as one could in
ballet shoes.114
She shook her knuckles too, since they were a
bit sore from punching out the bodyguards.
The taxi driver, a paragon of private
enterprise who worked for a negative wage, returned her innocent CM
salute. He was a surly sort with a nutcracker face and a hairline that
ended at his shaggy eyebrows. He looked like a walking experiment in
plastic surgery (or would have had he not been sitting down). Football
trophies and shrunken heads adorned his pointed shark-like teeth.
Leonie, no oil painting herself in her own
view, was about to suggest nastily that he go in for a postmodernist
sculpture competition. But he grinned lopsidedly and spoke of entering
the Miss Australia quest “now it’s open to blokes”.
The inside of the cab, done out in tasteful
toad-green, reeked of trapped flatus.
What revolted her most was that he - who
questionably believed himself to be a thoroughly distinct creation
113
(The operation was performed by an ageing Dr Christiaan Barnard for a ten-figure fee. She had her
blood changed too, just like Keith Richard.
114
Once she’d tried to run in them, back and forth across the metal tops of a row of beer bottles in
emulation of the old vaudeville contortionist Valentine Napier. The result had been a lifelong commitment
to red wine.
Chapter Eighteen: Gerald and Norman 165
epitomising the author’s genius at characterisation and also espoused

the populist majoritarian view that minority groups like workfarites
were a danger to democracy and should be systematically exterminated
by private contractors - seemed to regard her as some kind of kindred
spirit. His shapeless carcass wouldn’t have passed muster as one of
the more inexpensive Chinese varieties of beanbag. Whereas her bod
rivalled Marilyn Monroe’s - when the latter was alive I hasten to add.
She was about to peek at herself in his rearview mirror but decided
against it.
(A battalion of Australia’s mercenary
outsourced army goose-stepped by shooting randomly at dark-skinned
beggars and students, a panoply of multicultural - US, German and
Japanese - flags floating overhead on the polluted breeze. She felt an
instant of warped national pride, then quite sick.)
She suspected that the man might be one of
Norman’s agents, as he passed on pithy political observations and
military secrets in the age-old manner of cabbies, all to the music of
empty Heinz tins rolling about on the floor. But he dropped her off in
one piece, even saluting cheerily as he drove away to the tune of
You’ll never walk alone.
How did people like that get such jobs? Having
one day’s more work experience than everyone else, and that day a
sickie? But everyone knew you couldn’t get work experience if you’d
never had it. Hmm. Sleeping their way to the bottom? Time to make a
few more cutbacks, maybe to the economics profession.
Her old mansion - plagiarised from Liz Taylor’s

- nestled just beyond a casual clump of dogbound trees. Gaily, a
spring in her step, a bit like the one in George Washington’s false
teeth115, she hurved toward her old home.
UN
REAL
ESTATE
get a bit of land

in a world trouble
spot
rare as hen's teeth
As she came out of the trees she was brought up

short. After ducking back to have a furtive poo (but not wee), she
rushed back, and just glared and glared, on the verge of bursting into
tears.
115
Interested readers might like to investigate this allusion further in their local public library to justify the
public money wasted on that and the dole. The author certainly isn’t going to bother.
165
It had gone! All that was in its place was a

great hole in the ground. A Black Hole, like the one Nigel had put in
the economy and that Daddy had put inside her head.
A sign announced stagily that the gargantuan,
wholly off-shore and socially responsible multinational, Iceberg
Enterprises (whose prospectus read ‘A Company for carrying on an
undertaking of Great Advantage, but no one to know what it is’), were
planning to build an ecologically-sound shopping mall on the site.
(They also manufactured babies’ dummies for adults, horse suits,
buttock separators, estuary fog, Tuscan dunnies, testicle implants,
roofing nails, mouse mats made of real mouse, erotic toothpaste,
magnetic bubblegum, and bamboo underwear.) All the title deeds, said
her dramaturgical lawyer over the mobile, had mysteriously vanished
when his office caught fire last week.
“Sorry, forgot to mention it.” he cackled and
slammed the phone down, then hared away to catch his flight to
Majorca.
Could she apply to the ACT Housing Trust to
refinance the loan of $4 000 000 she’d taken out to help build it? Her
current income was about $158 per week after subtracting debt
repayments, and since she ran those up at a frightening rate her net
income would by mid-June be 1¢ per year, which wasn’t even legal
tender. Another money-making novel was plainly needed. Either that -
or appeal once again to Daddy, whom she naturally imagined to be still
beavering away at his rubber band job. No, she suddenly realised, it’d
have to be Norman now, and he if anything was worse.
Leonie did some quick calculations in her head,
but as she never could refrain from exaggerating things she was
pleased to learn that she could borrow up to $66 trillion and would
then owe $12 656 458.94, some of it to Gerald and some of it to Daddy
and his ancestors and some of it to the new Islamic Republic of
Kuwait.
She outstared the sign. The name Iceberg was of
course familiar, but like her it was quite common and she had no
reason to connect it to Gerald, let alone Naomi. Below it was an
artist’s impression of the new building (essentially shaped like a
lettuce leaf). And - she now noticed - a picture of the radical
owners.
Leonie couldn’t believe her eyes (they were not
known for their honesty). The pair had slimmed down a lot - but they
were definitely Naomi and Gerald.
So, he’d seen reason and chucked in
librarianship. She could only seethe.
At that point she wondered then why she ran
down certain peoples, such as transvestites, hippies, Mormons, and
Gerald’s mob generally (perhaps because she’d never had a driving
lesson in her life). None had ever done her any harm. But Daddy
insisted they might.
“Well, now, Princess, dey’ve all got BIG NOSES
and breathe more air than everyone else. Where would we be without our
dear atmosphere?” he’d rot ever-faster with zeal, hydrogen sulphide
rising from the fetid emulsion which broke out on his skin when he was
undergoing a bout of righteous indignation and sputtering about the
‘evolutionary tree of humanity’, with its peerlessly green Celtic
branch at the 1% tippy-top.
She supposed all that made sense, and yet …
Well, she dinkumly tried to detest everyone else equally to make it
fair. Mummy had said …
The Icebergs were currently in Australia, she
learned after much investigation done by her hired research assistant,
an impecunious writer who survived by eating her way through her many
mouldering and rejected manuscripts. The first sod had been turned
pleasurably by the newly-reinstated Governor-General (Sir Hopalong
166
Hillary-Billary) not long ago, and they’d insisted on being present to

protect their shareholders in Acapulco and Monte Carlo. They’d also
bought the CM Cultural Centre (Daddy wanted the proceeds of the sale
to look like a profit to the shareholders), which she presumed Gerald
fondly remembered from his dissolute forties. She chortled with glee,
resisting the temptation to ring him up and tell him its fate.
But to her surprise Gerald rang her.
“I suppose Naomi’s back home looking after the

kids.” she said with contempt, as soon as she heard his whiny voice.
“Hell, no, we’ve got a f- nanny. Fran Drescher.
Maybe you’ve heard of her. Voice like Jerry Lewis … ? No?” He hummed a
rather gastric Cole Porter medley. Who was Jerry Lewis?
She grit her leonine teeth. She’d once applied
to be her understudy - an interesting role, she’d thought - but what
the hell. Who’d heard of Fran since Leonie got famous? Oy to the world
indeed.
“Put Naomi on!”
“I did that when I proposed.” he said. “But she
took me up on it.” He laughed smugly. Her guilt over his jailing still
tore her apart, whereas he (having had a special relationship with
Nigel too) sounded so nice about it all. She tried to dwell on Naomi
instead.
Those convent nights of hand relief she
remembered fondly, and regularly paid a lady sumo wrestler called
Buddug Harakiri (such a yenta) to lie impassively in her bed while she
furtively wielded her noisy vibrator.
“Well, if you insist.” he relented, with
surprising generosity.
She waited, Voices kvetching, ears straining
with xenophobic paranoia at silence. Then another voice, full and
maternal, almost burst her eardrums.“Hi, Leonie.”
“Sister Naomi!” she went, embarrassed that the
other woman might know what she got up to with her archaeopteryx. She
shivered violently for a reason she couldn’t comprehend.
“R-remember - the spankings?”
“The wankings?” rejoined Naomi, trying not to
laugh and failing.
Leonie felt a fishbone of panic in her throat.
By way of consolation she reminded herself how the other woman, fat as
a wombat, suffered regularly from ‘hot pees’.
“And our nights in bed together?”
Naomi guffawed, horribly confident. “Oh, that.
It’s been a while. I don’t get hot pees any more. We’ve both become
health fiends.”
She had to be fibbing. Health fiends wouldn’t
call themselves that. Leonie, whose system of keeping track of the
world was a bit coloured by her wishfulness and warped mind, felt like
one of Daddy’s grave-worms on a hook.
To violently switch points of view and split an
infinitive, Prátt was at Naomi’s side now, dressed as the sexy Daisy
Duck with his stockinged thighs straining against the material of a
flimsy pink skirt (IE had bought out his membrum virili for $5 000
000). They gave each other knowing looks - they’d escaped the tunnel
by finding the secret door and priest-hole Daddy had installed for
emergencies and he’d been well-bribed to join them in their newly-
conceived plans. (Harriet meanwhile was being bonked by a lifesaver,
but that’s another matter.)
Naomi continued. “Yes, I know what you’re on
about now. I’ve changed my thinking on that. You were just trying to
attain some sort of lonely sexual satisfaction and I was the killjoy
who tried to stop you. I’m sorry, dear. Since that time I’ve become
167
quite the sexual revolutionary.” She ran her fat fingers over Prátt’s
thigh.
“But I loved it.” confessed Leonie, her head
imploding.
“Pardon?”
“N-not being allowed …” She was saying too
much, she needed a (warm) wee, and any minute she’d start blabbing
about the bomb. “Um, p-please put Gerald back on!”
“But I want to talk to you.” Naomi meanwhile
chucked Prátt under the chin, and he responded coquettishly. Gerald
sat smiling avuncularly, expressing himself as Jayne Mansfield (before
her decapitation). Leonie, knowing none of this, just wanted to be
sick.
WE BET
YOU
HAVEN'T
TRIED
CHEWY
BAA
Made in New Zealand from

reconstituted ram's fat
“I recall those nights with great affection.”

Naomi carried on. “You were such a tiny thing, like a little baby.
I’ve always wanted children but the ones I had before were such
disappointments, even Gerald’s. Of course, I can’t have any more being
past the Change but Gerald and I have adopted the sweetest little
Pakistani girl with links to the building industry.”
Leonie became enraged. Tiny? “I want Gerald
back please!”
“It’s a bit late for that, honey.”
Leonie stamped her booted foot, making the
floorboards hum.
“What was that?” said Naomi. ”Celtic colic?”
Prátt covered up his embarrassment by breaking into song. I heard the
news today oh boy …
This woman isn’t insane like the rest of us,
thought Leonie. But how much did they know about her and Daddy? She
couldn’t remember how much she’d let on to Gerald over the years, and
decided to proceed with caution, so in contrast to her driving habits.
“You could have adopted me!” she screeched
pitifully over the phone, batting her eyelids futilely. Anything to
get away from Daddy and the indignities he’d made her submit to all
her shattered life.
There was an awful silence. Then Naomi spoke
again. Her voice sounded very even and controlled.
“We know now that you’ve had a - peculiar
relationship with your father. We’d like to help you. It’s time you
got a proper job - well, you know what I mean - and saw what the
world’s really like.”
168
“I’m a writer!” protested Leonie. Ignorant

philistines were always treating it as a hobby, never mind that she
was so established. Ugh.
“Of course you are, dear. But why not broaden
your horizons a bit?”
Leonie’s world was fast disintegrating. She
became defensive.
“Er - I’m thinking of studying journalism to
get a really good position.”
“Have you got a nose for news?”
Leonie reddened, since she felt it her most
erotic feature. That stint she’d done as voluntary editor of the New
York Tiresome had been an exercise in both exploitation and
incompetence. Presently another hapless double was doing it for her,
and the paper was now flourishing.
“Yes, enormous - er - ” When the conversation
was not about swindling or blackmail or literature, she got quite
tongue-tied.
“O - k ” said Naomi as though to a small child
since she’d once served as a male nurse in a mental hospital though
not at Leonie’s. “I’ll put Gerald back on. He’s about ready now.”
Though he intended it to be husky like hers and
erotic, Gerald’s voice had gone all stupidly fatherly, like that of
her shrink.
“Le on ie. Are you all right? Lying - sitting
comfortably? Good, good. Now, we now know all about the bomb, you see,
and I think it’s wonderful.”
“I’ll tell Norman!” was the first thing she
could think of saying in response. She immediately felt stupid.
“And we’ll tell - Daddy.”
They related to her the dreadful story of
Daddy’s restoration.
Leonie was speechless. And how could they know
about the bomb? The spies crowded about her, disguised as furniture.
She paid through the nose for spies of her own, but they were a
shiftless lot of parasitic and bestial capitalists and never told her
anything helpful.
Humiliated, she managed to croak, Mother
Fergus-like, “W-what do you mean, wonderful?”
“Well, the place isn’t worth much as a
moneyspinner, but we could do with the insurance.
Cooperate with Iceberg Enterprises on this one and we’ll give you a
really good sinecure and pay all your debts.”
To what depths will the human animal sink, she
wondered, intending to feign agreement until she could turn the
situation to her advantage.
“But you’re pacifists! You’re the keystone … ”
She got confused and he ignored the last remark.
“Oh, we’ll give a warning, of course.” he
added, primly. “We’ve already fixed up a codeword with the cops. It’ll
be strictly property damage.”
Norman would hardly put up with that. Leonie
felt very scared. As usual, things were going on around her and she
had no power to control them. No one ever told her what was really
happening. She grew determined to throw off her powerlessness. Fame
was clearly not enough.
Prátt sat carefully next to Gerald. He was to
use his magazine and contacts to promote Iceberg Enterprises’ plan to
build a new Cultural Centre (and set itself up as a Redistributor, a
profitable if illegal affair). Gerald would allow himself to be
arrested but then escape as he had before (the Minister for
Correctional Services was a major individual shareholder placed in his
169
post by the corporation - which no government really controlled - for

the purpose).
Not that they told Leonie any of this.
With much speechifying and oratory, Gerald
reasserted his pacifist commitment. She’d never seen him as a moralist
but he rolled off the names of a milliard philosophers and assorted
religious figures from Mahatma Ghandi to Fred Nile. His eloquence
lifted her to supernal heights and made her deplore her own
unwittingly malevolent life-and-strifestyle. Soaring thus she felt
like a little dove floating above the careworn world, unreachable by
lewd and evil Daddy.
“So that’s my philosophy.” he concluded.
Leonie seemed swayed. They arranged to meet her
with Norman one night.
Better at golden needlework with silver threads

than Leonie, Naomi had made Gerald into a new man.116 To Leonie’s
experienced eye, no trace of his former cross-dressing self remained,
though he was still alarmingly nice to her, even more so than before.
In fact when they met he came across rather more like Norman. Both men
were formidable physical specimens yet intellectually prodigious as
well. Both were apparently attracted to pugilism and army life. It
didn’t occur to her that this might have been an act Gerald was
putting on for the ex-Dictator’s benefit, though it did strike her
that maybe he was trying not to be too campy for fear of ridicule and
rather over-compensating.
Though impressed, Leonie was guiltily nervous.
How had they found out about Daddy and her?
Fat Naomi sat next to her, very close, and
stroked her long hair, then gave it a sharp tug. Her sexlessness had
indeed gone and she was quite rampant with ardour.
“You’re such a lovely child. But your hair’s a
mess. Do you bleach it every day?”
Leonie felt sick. It was again salmon-pink, but
people only saw the image she’d plagiarised.
Still, memories stirred in her loins. She
realised that lying in the pit there with Naomi had been the most
significant sexual experience of her life, sweeter than all Daddy’s
dreadful probings. Lying there, like a blind kitten who might be
rolled on and squashed by its mother, secure in the knowledge that
whatever harm Naomi might do, it was not done with malice
aforethought. She wondered how Gerald put up with it. Of course, Naomi
was a lot slimmer than she used to be, though still of barn-like
dimensions.
The ex-nun said she had since become the first
compromise Prime Minister of Israel (her application was much better
than Nigel’s though he vainly appealed - being very vain - pointing
out that her BA in Political Science had not been held against her).
Grappling with what was left of the Peace Process, she’d had the
brilliant idea to involve their company in it, and supplant the use of
weapons with universal bribery. Her rather mixed-up interview panel of
Islamic Serbs, Republican Orangemen and Greek-Turkish Cypriots was
immediately convinced.
“I have to go back home soon.” she explained.
“Gerald will be your contact until I return.”
116
Yes, of course it’s all a hoax, you twits.
170
iceberg enterprises
in association with the
British Birth Pills Corporation of Gigglebustería
presents
Her
Brilliant
Career
the movie
She’d miss her, but what a well-polished Window

of Opportunity. Here’s my chance, thought Leonie, sick of humiliation,
to set Gerald and Norman against each other.
She arranged a second meeting at her safe
house, fobbing off rambunctious reporters. She didn’t want to be too
obvious and so kept the boxing ring partly hidden in the corner.
Swords and pistols were casually strewn across the coffee tables, and
a list of appropriate racial and religious slurs was pinned to the
door. With much tongue-wagging she got Norman to convert to
fundamentalist Islam then let Gerald into the room.
By the way, the conversion process was an
interesting one. She’d not forgotten his speech about Black Muslims.
She worked wildly on his vanity. It had been little more than a white
lie (if that is the term) but cunningly she implanted the seductive
notion that a conversion to Islamic fundamentalism and an interest in
petroleum would turn up the gas jet of his political image. And she
reminded him that he was an Aryan at heart.
“But I can’t stand the Palestinians.” he
protested. “They’re losers. I admire the Israelis, well the far right
wing anyway. They’re a bit like Smitty. Look at Ariel Sharon, Rabbi
Kehane, St Goldstein … ”
“But they’ve all got big noses.” she skriked,
aglow again with Daddy’s ancient Jesuitical and phantasmagorical
dogmatising though panicking a bit. (She pronounced the word ‘noises’
so he as a loud-voiced man himself was a bit confused as well.) For a
while she didn’t dare turn side on and also dreaded an attack of
rhinorrhoea.
“So have the Arabs, haven’t they?” He searched
his mind for knowledge of those people - all that came was the iron
certainty that they wore teatowels on their heads. Though born in
Africa, he’d barely heard of them due to his Afro-Sino-Germanic
upbringing.
It was dank and dusty inside his head, a bit
like the nuclear bomb shelter at the base of Prátt’s building or
perhaps a chamber in a pyramid or Leonie’s Daddy-colonised mind, but,
yes, he did recall the day he’d come across copies of the British
Imperial Boys’ Annual and Scouting for Boys, secreted in a trunk with
his mother’s mangy collection of German literature. From then on this
171
trunk was the fount, so to speak, of his knowledge, despite the

Trotskyist tendencies of the elephant.
Grimy stereotypes of hook-nosed white-slavers
came into focus and he regained confidence in his omniscience as a
super-hero.
Leonie grimaced, this point of nosology being a
little unclear to her. All she could remember was that everyone,
according to Daddy, could be divided into those with small, medium or
large noses, and those (like Sino-Celts) with The Lot.
“And remember Idi Amin.” she said, changing her
tack a bit and dialling a pizza.
“Oh, I remember him from Dictator College. He
had a jolly decent sort of boko. We used to always come equal top in
pulling the bally 117 wings off butterflies. Once we pulled 6250 and I
got to be Top Seed -”
She interrupted, irritated by his arrogant
maleness, and wondering why as a confirmed Lesbian she was with him at
all and not weeding an orange grove on Lesbos. Clearly the author was
up to something, or so she thought. Perhaps it was time to exercise
her Right of Return.
The pizza arrived and she scoffed it, spraying
with her mouth full, “And he’s Islamic. Don’t you want a really big
nose yourself?”
Norman snuffled and swaggered a bit. His was
pretty prominent anyway, since he’d inherited an elite genetic legacy,
a martial cartilage of exemplary Afro-Prussian prowess. No harm in
enlarging upon it. Leonie, though a bit sickened by the
miscegenational implications (the much-travelled Daddy - she didn’t
know where he’d been - had drummed all this rubbish into her since she
was five), knew she had her man where she wanted him.
So, vibrator in hand and foot in mouth, she sat
back to enjoy the fun.
Sadly the pair got on well together,
discovering that they had a common passion for chess. They pushed all
her carefully-planted weaponry onto the carpet and began a marathon
game that lasted for three days. They would blather on about the
‘Benko Gambit - Fianchetto Variation’ and the ‘Ruy Lopez - Morphy
Defence - Chigorin Variation’ and all this cheesy chessy variety put
her off. She couldn’t care less about cliffhanging pawn endings and
how many knights were worth a queen (none, she was sure, when it came
to Boudica of the Iceni). The fact that both jointly took out the
World Championship that week was of little consolation.
Frankly, Leonie was bored. She took all her
clothes off at one point but that had no effect apart from shattering
the windows and curing the street of hiccups, both men being bent over
the board, deeply immersed in some life-and-death struggle - the
endgame. Leonie was so hopping mad she wrote yet another novel and
published it pseudonymously under the name of Helen Garner, who once
more got into hot water. (Naomi, organising the plot behind the
scenes, read it with interest.)
By this time Gerald and Norman were firm
friends, and rarely apart; they liked to go on long mountain hikes
during which they’d discuss Cabbalist and even Qabalist mysticism and
East African Sino-art and occasionally New Zealand’s finest brew,
four-X sheep-dip. They became so ecumenical that they talked of
setting up a ‘Foundation for Islamo-Sino-Judaic Studies’. The
Foundation would put forward a solution to the Chinese Arab-Israeli
dispute, namely that both peoples emigrate to Australia. (That or
drain the Med. to release more land. It could be transported by oil
tankers to Australia - or a pipeline, added Gerald to a sagely-nodding
117
Thanks to Monty Python, these days a chartered accountant, for this word.
172
Norman, since because Oz was lower on the map it’d all run downhill.
We’ve always wanted an inland sea. All the rich people who currently
swan about the French Riviera would have to come here; the tourist
potential and boost to the flagging Australian fishing industry would
be dramatic. Sean Begora, through Gerald’s covert contacts, was deeply
interested in the idea, although real estate agents on the Riviera and
like places were said to be ‘cautious’.)
The plan, apparently, was then to sieze the
depopulated territory and redevelop it through an Iceberg Enterprises
/ Celtic Mafia joint venture. Leonie could no more understand it than
she’d understood the cuisenaire at school. To survive, she had to
avoid trying to work things out.
For his part, the mendacious Norman agreed to
the warning, saying he’d given up his former murderous ways. Though
confused by his reaction, Leonie was rather pleased at this, as the
idea of mass-killing made her feel ill.
Little did she know that Norman had a much more
realistic sense of Iceberg Enterprises’s power than she did, and also
relished the thought of becoming King of Israel, INRI, even if the
population were to consist only of gnats and camels. He’d soon create
a bunyip aristocracy (difficult with camels and gnats but look at the
bumble bee) and win more battles across Asia Minor than that
Macedonian mugwump Alexander the Great.
Leonie ground her teeth, or perhaps gnashed
them is a better way of putting it. She’d have this couple of
moralising ladyfingers go climbing together - with a sabotaged rope.
The plan almost worked. But Gerald and Norman
bravely saved each other’s lives half way up a chasm by using each
other successively as hand-holds, and thus became closer friends than
ever.
“I wish they were gay.” she growled to herself,
theodolite to her eye at the bottom of the two metre drop. “At least
they might have a domestic.”
But the day of the launch had arrived. She
would put them on hold for a while.
173
Chapter Nineteen: Third History Lesson
Again, let’s throw historical caution to the

winds and really get to know the characters. First we’ll deal with the
still-stupefied George. He was born not as he told people in Reykjavik
but on an Icelandic gunboat at the height of Cod War. The midwife
mistook him for the afterbirth and tossed him overboard. This shocking
experience matured him rapidly. Thrown into the deep end, he (like
Dylan Eil Ton in the Mabinogion) quickly learned to swim. Negotiating
shoals of shell-shocked cod, he made it back to shore. For years he
lived in the inhospitable and near-Celtless wastes of Iceland,
nurtured by a polar bear. He didn’t learn to speak till he was
fifteen, and then only in grudging monosyllables like so many of his
peers. But his life took a turn for the worse when he was discovered
by a Professor of Islamic History at the University of Reykjavik, one
Knut Dingbatt, and exhibited at the famed Dinkum Scientific Fair as a
‘Modern Day Mowgli’.
Professor Dingbatt did educate the boy, whom he
named George after the 18th century monarch. Young George responded to
this challenge and in no time had learned seven languages, including
Neoclassical Arabic, Ricardian Rwandan and Keynesian Serbo-Croat. By
the age of 24 he was Senior Lecturer and Factor of Production in
Economic English at Oxford. Then Professor Dingbatt, pillar of
advanced education and futures market analysis, died of malignant
piles while being examined with a faulty proctoscope.
Ecstatic, George set out for Australia on the
Back Passage because England’s weather reminded him of his Icelandic
exile and because he’d been sacked from his tenured position due to a
liaison with a gnat.
He spent years looking for his parents, but
once he’d found them grew thankful that he’d been brought up by a
polar bear and an exploitative Arabophile.
After reading a Life of TS Eliot by Virginia
Woolf, George got into publishing by applying for a job as a
publisher’s reader and lying with paid referees about his work
experience. Having a monstrous cv he got the job and excelled at it,
frequently rejecting the hard-won manuscripts of brilliant but unknown
writers because the paper was creased or blood and sweat and red wine
had stained the pages.
This high-handedness gave him much-needed self-
confidence. Through various forms of hoodwinking and backscratching he
brown-nosed his way almost to the top. He was safely ensconced when
Leonie came along - but you all know the rest.
Yet now and again beneath the coconut palm he
still had nightmares of his time in the northern wilderness. In them
he might be lumbering across boiling-hot lava, with sharp gusts of
arctic air whistling up his backside and buffeting his shaggy white
fur. His bear-mother would be lumbering ahead, tickling herrings and
looking round archly every so often to remonstrate him on his choice
of fish.
“We don’t need to associate with people who eat
sardines, George. And certainly not with writers.”
Norman, on the other hand, was born in a filthy

public toilet in Bulowayo, in what was then officially called
Rhodesia, later a disease. His father was a small manufacturer of
alarm clocks who was destined to be wiped out by the revolution in
electronics, and his mother played professional football for Germany.
As a first-grader his whole life changed when
he discovered his mother’s well-thumbed copy of Mein Kampf and also
learned that his father’s ancestors had made their malignant piles by
procuring people for the Slave Trade. He became an ardent admirer of
Hitler (whom he thought was still alive) and got himself a pen-pal in
Chapter Nineteen: Third History Lesson 175
Bavaria. The two children corresponded for several years, exchanging

photos of each other in boy scout uniform. The correspondence ended
abruptly when Norman discovered that his opposite number was actually
a lecherous 45 year old scoutmaster.
Brain-damaged due to childhood malnutrition
(his mother rarely fed him to ‘toughen him up’ while his father was
for a time a professional glutton), he came to despise the fact that
he was half-African and as a result lusted after women with long
platinum blonde hair. The news that he was really a product of the
Lebensborn project and a triumph of German technology made him feel
rather out of place in Africa, at least north of Mafeking. He knew
that he was destined to be a dictator, hopefully of the Fourth or even
the Fifth Reich.
With his mother’s blessing, he supposed, he’d
spend months practising the goose-step, and what a great dance it was.
His school-chums thought he was aspiring to become a ballet dancer and
ribbed him mercilessly. But Mutti knew best; she sent the young Norman
off to a military school for gifted children where he was coached in
limbic system seizures and raped continuously. He was a bit unhappy
but soon grew to enjoy the heady freedom of having carte blanche to
commit any atrocity.
At the age of fourteen, the lad was stolen from
his parents who sent word to the kidnappers that he needn’t be
returned. (He always thought his father’s crack 118, to wit that he was
a ‘chocolate Bavarian’, had been very low indeed.) He spent the rest
of his childhood goose-stepping about with the West African Freedom
Army and ballroom dancing team, a sordid clutch of expatriate duck
hunters and ex-Nazis who engaged in terrorism designed to promote
recolonisation. It was owned by a British-South African consortium
affiliated with the CM and also financed by the French and Belgian
Pedophile Party governments.
When he was 22, he transferred his allegiance
to the Smith regime (in emulation of his hero Cecil Rhodes, though he
distrusted his greasy spanakopitic name), but when that was defeated
he graduated magna cum laude from Dictator College, Oxford (not the
snoring George’s I hasten to add), and offered his services as an
itinerant tyrant (he had to fight off sordid untermenschen-inspired
accusations that he was just some sort of Gypsy when at times he
couldn’t even afford to fork out for violin lessons). Various
countries employed him on a temporary and casual basis but he was
never well-liked by their peoples and inevitably overthrown. Lacking
the work experience to get a proper job even in North Korea, he
returned to the WAFA, which succeeded through herculean feats of
terrorism in securing Stormin’ Norman apparent permanency in East
California. Then Leonie turned up and distracted him long enough for
the people to once again chuck him out of office.
In his spare time he attended Slade and for a
while was renowned for his paintings of slaughterhouses; but he gave
up art when he failed his Activity Test at the East LA DSS.
Yet these are merely the shallow details of a
rather tragic personal history. What are the man’s beliefs, I hear you
all clamour. What are his feelings? Well, Norman believed that Africa
must remain poverty-stricken (its population being composed apparently
of poets) and politically unsophisticated, or incompetent, callous
scumbags like himself would never get a job anywhere. As for feelings,
he had few that are worth dwelling on.
His hobbies included at the time arm-wrestling,
torture, and playing the mandolin.119
118
His father wore low-cut hipster jeans at all time and was constantly bending over to do up his
shoelaces.
119
Thanks to Who’s Who and Debrett’s for supplying the above information.
175
Chapter Twenty: Explosive Events
Nuclear blast destroys Cultural Centre.

The headline formed in her head cathectically.
She’d written it in her pretty spittle on the glass of the front door.
It represented everything she hated, Gerald and Norman and all the
other craven, violent men and transvestites and the like she’d had to
deal with all her sad life.
But Naomi lingered in her mind.
She ate her coco-pops and pork in the safe
house, swinging her manicured legs pensively. Norman and Gerald sat
opposite, slurping up weetbix-in-benedictine and chatting animatedly
about East Californian pottery as produced under the auspices of the
True Whig Party and how it compared to that of ancient Canaan. Had she
had some available she could have brained them both. But no longer was
Gerald to have bowls of fruit thrown at him. She’d tried the other day
and he just grabbed her wrist firmly and said, commandingly, ‘That is
a most immature reaction, Leonie. Let’s talk this thing through.” She
would have copied Fran and kicked his tush but it made sense somehow.
The pair had learned each other’s languages and
since they spoke fifteen each (including Esperanto, and she’d never
been to Esperantia) that was quite a feat. Leonie wished they wouldn’t
jabber away like a bunch of foreigners. Would nothing separate them?”
She looked up and there at the window was a
pregnant woman with eyes that flashed like galena and whose raincoats
were rather grubby, a woman who quickly disappeared as Norman and
Gerald turned in the direction of her gaze.
“I - thought I saw someone. A spy. Daddy’s,
perhaps!” she said dramatically. The house of course was full of
them, many of Australia’s 10 000 000 or more Unemployed being forced
into the business120 to survive since the dole had recently been
scrapped altogether and a widespread conversion to Catholicism and
petty crime taken place for the free accommodation. It was hard (here
or in a monastery) to find room to scratch your elbow.
“Ha ha.” said Norman, slapping his muscular and
oft-employed thigh. “I hardly think so. We’re far too much members of
the Aryan academic élite these days for that sort of thing.”
“What ho.” went Gerald confidently.
In short, as far as she could tell, he had
discovered how important to his pacifism was the gentle art of
patronage.
Leonie felt cold and murky at the thought of
being spied upon. All her life had been a skating over a frozen sea in
clammy ankle-deep mist, and she no Messiah. One day she might
encounter a spot where the ice was weak.
The day dragged on.
But at three o’clock she remembered that she
had the bombing to think about. Gerald was true to his word about the
warning. The centre of Canberra was a wasteland (well, what else is
new). Air Force helicopters buzzed about like bees in a swarm, and
Lucy (now a clerk in Evatt Library) was over the moon. Leonie had
regular phone sex with him over her mobile, and never once worked out
that he was a boy.
As a hundred Iceberg Enterprises-supplied
sirens wailed, nuisance call-making Leonie stuck her fingers in her
ears and thought of keystones (a word she’d looked up). Norman, in his
allegedly aphrodisiacal Italian suit, waved in her face the radio
transmitter that was to set off the truck-bomb. It bore a large red
button with ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t!’ emblazoned upon it in Urdu,
though she suspected that was an hallucination.
120
The going rate was 2¢ / day.
Chapter Twenty: Explosive Events 177
She hesitated. But no one would get hurt.

Carefree and skriking a bit (though alert enough not to yodel), she
pressed it with her surgically-remodelled nose (the surgery had given
her the appearance of a silky lemur). Norman had claimed she’d cut off
her nose to spite her face but she wouldn’t listen.
Nothing happened, except that the Celtic
Mafia’s mascot, a female soi-disant greyhound unaccountably called
Maurice, trotted into the packed kitchen and defecated in her
foodbowl.
“Give it here!” Norman snapped (the
commensally-minded Maurice had been about to oblige), and began
jabbing at the button. Still they heard no explosion in the distance,
an experience which can be deafening. (Ear, nose and throat doctors
mobbed the guards on the door.) The conspirators shook their ears like
Daddy trying to dislodge his putrescent and lumpy bathwater. Leonie
was happy to be far away from him.
She glared at the dog, desperate for a
scapegoat (and zoologically challenged). Give it here, indeed - she
sharpened her nails on her skirt. Really.
“I say, dear friend, perhaps you made a slight
error in your design of that device.” went Gerald in his well-
modulated and manly tone.
Maurice tucked into her breakfast.
“I think not, old chap.” said Norman with a
lopsided, suave grin. He had always been a genius with crystal sets.
Gerald smiled back cheesily. He had a go at
pressing the button, with as much success.
He said, urbanely, “Look, old mensch, we all
make mistakes. Take Socrates, Hegel, King Agamemnon … ”
The slobbering shmegegge sausage dog put her
brown-rimmed chin in Leonie’s silken lap and widdled on the floor. The
reference to Agamemnon strangely moved her to tears, tears squeezed
like blood out of her heart, and by a Celtic Mafia fist. Her plans for
revenge through success had got bogged down. Men, they were the
problem. But what to do, she wondered. Why did nothing ever work?
WHY IS it orl higlee-piglee … ?
“I think, dear chum, that you’ll find that my
German design is flawless. But there is the possibility that ARSE and
the CM have seen through a small chink in your own plan.”
“And disarmed the bomb?” she said, pushing the
farting beast away in disgust, beside herself with disappointment.
Maurice bounded off flatulently on silly little legs to renew her
links with the racing industry.
“While that’s a highly unlikely possibility,
pal, I doubt it.”
Leonie heard sirens coming closer, and saw how
sexy she looked in the mirror, which suddenly starred like a
windscreen. This was a time when they needed to maintain a united
front, and more importantly a united rear. What a TL Gerald was.
“I’d say, friend, that the probability is much
greater than you’re allowing for.”
“Look, buddy, it’s clearly your device.”
“It’s not my device, mate.”
“It isn’t my bloody plan, sport.”
“Stop it, you two. They’ll hear you!” shrieked
Leonie, peering round the curtain. “They’re just searching houses. You
hide in the secret cellar and I’ll let them in.” She preened her
gorgeous self, hoping a nice butch policewoman would come to the door,
or better yet one done up like a game show hostess.
Gerald and Norman were confronting each other
potently across the table. With luck they’d shake hands.
177
“It’s your fault, you hymie faggot.” snarled

Norman leonieshly, frothing at the mouth as he recalled his mother’s
insensate rantings.
“Don’t call me that, you fascist Falasha!”
Neither could change their spots.
They began to yell all the insults she’d
inadvertently left pinned to the door.
“Where are those cutlasses?” growled Norman as
they traded blows at 99¢ each. Gerald found a loaded duelling pistol
under the sofa. But like the Australian body politic, he’d long sworn
off guns and violence and all those embarrassing memories of the
Vietnam War.
Norman too felt that a hand-to-hand struggle
was far more manly, a true test of his Aryan mettle.
“Guys, they’re looking across at our house!”
hissed Leonie in terror.
Spurning weapons, Norman and Gerald (after the
latter had donned a velvet kimono) went for the throat.
“Hi - yaaaa!” bellowed Gerald softly, having
always been fond of Samurai films due to the exotic fashions. He
charged at his adversary, yelling, inappropriately, “Bonsai!” (Though
not Japanese himself, Ahmed would have put him straight on that one.)
Norman responded with a snatch of the Horst
Wessel, his dear old mother’s favourite song. The whole family had
been forced to sing it round the breakfast table every morning, though
as his father ‘ate’ at the beerhall he rarely saw any breakfast other
than hers.
“Jesus, it’s turning into a musical - how
bourgeois!” exclaimed the forgetful Leonie in shocked surprise (she’d
never met Siobhán and Myfanwy who were now international superstars)
at hearing Daddy’s Celtic theme tune coming from the mouth of a black
person.
As she looked on, her Daddified grey cells
spinning in fruitless circles once witnessed by Ezekiel in his famous
prediction of the invention of the gyroscope, they dragged each other
all over the house, sending lances and suits of armour clattering and
scaring the departing Maurice back to her native Belgium. Jousting
thus they cartwheeled down the hall and smashed clean through the
glass door. Then they were rolling down the steps tearing into each
other, scattering constables like witch’s hats. A police car that was
rocketing down the leafy street without its siren on swerved and
ploughed through the wall of the local deli. It limped out the other
side festooned with cabanossi and exotic cheeses, siren blaring.
Then the bomb went off.
178
Slaughter
'em
with
McVeigh's
FERTILIZERS
'I wouldn't use anything else'
It was heard all over Canberra, notably by the

Reform-Schooled Calcutta Party who’d recently made savage cuts to the
earplug industry. Alarums and excursions! Leonie, who’d followed them
out, leapt theatrically and leggily for joy - until she realised that
an obese and megarhinic policewoman was staring at her. Not her type
at all. Time to leg it out of here.
“Um, I’m just so glad no one got hurt.” she
smiled, thinking quickly, something that got easier the longer she
stayed away from Daddy.
“My brother’s in the Bomb Squad.” said the
other woman. “He was trying to defuse it.”
“Oh - er, sorry. Must have made a boo-boo -
happens to us all.” She giggled unintentionally.
The brother, or rather bits of him, began
raining down upon them. When the dust had cleared he was by some
miracle sitting there quite whole, still bouncing a little and pained
only by the fact that he was stark naked and not all that photogenic.
Reporters and camera-crews closed in from all sides.
“Oi went to pieces back there.” he panted,
unused to fame and public nudity. “Good thing Oi landed on me bum.”
(His adventitiously-acquired career as a media megastar fizzled after
that unfortunate line.)
Leonie shut the door, glad that she alone would
be appearing on the Midday Show next week. Had she known that Daddy
had done a deal with Gerald to get Norman put away she would have gone
to pieces herself.
She needed to capitalise on the bombing now
Daddy was back in the saddle. Um, um, of course, she could write a
novel about it. Her agent and new team of touring lawyers showed up at
that point and with the help of her knowledge of Begora’s
proclivities, the power of Iceberg Enterprises and the ear of
President Buchanan (time perhaps to return it) she got off scot free.
Ultimately, thanks to IE’s international
network of newspapers and secret links to other Ethical Businesses, it
was Daddy who got the blame.
179
Chapter Twenty-one: Fourth History Lesson
Continuing our essential and

historiographically pathbreaking review of the characters and their
bizarre upbringings, it’s necessary to relate the following character-
building incident which occurred in Gerald’s life when he matriculated
at sixteen like most boys of his age. He was wandering by Lake Burley
Griffin dressed as a nun when he saw a pelican pecking a Tory
politician to death. Wandering on, he came to Blundell’s Cottage and
met his love-who-was-not-to-be, Cynthia Gonad. She disparaged his
outfit but invited him to his first party.
The party was held in a ritzy part of town and
Gerald was understandably nervous that those illustrious putzes
present might penetrate his guise. His clinging evening gown (not very
nun-like but then he wasn’t a cradle or even a lapsed Catholic) barely
concealed the tiny breasts he had grown with the help of petrol
tankers of oestrogen, yet he still couldn’t quite get used to being
called ‘Amanda’ and at one point reverted accidentally to Gerald when
someone enquired. But tonight he didn’t feel like a failed
transsexual, he felt and looked like nothing on earth.
Never far from the crass roots of society, he
wandered about for a while in a state of ecstacy and angel dust,
feeling that at last he’d arrived in the nirvana of stardom. At that
time, he still had, rather like Prátt, his dreams of becoming a rock
guitarist-cum-singer-songwriter and following Janis Joplin and Jimi
Hendrix to millionairehood and hopefully not an early death. Most of
the people present were so gleaming and glossy that they looked as
though they’d stepped from magazines, as many had. The hostess, in an
abbreviated nano-pico-micro-miniskirt whose hemline ended just below
her chin (well, it was a chin to rival Joan Sutherland’s), welcomed
him officially by sticking her purple tongue out rudely - and
proceeding to collapse in an alcoholic stupor.
Gerald moved on, stepping over intertwined fur-
balls called, apparently, hippies (it was the summer of 1967 and dead
flowers were at a premium). These fur-balls were all pulsating with
increasing vigour to the accompaniment of groans and squeals. He had
no idea what they were doing.
Cynthia rescued him as he was about to tap one
on the shoulder and ask.
“Amanda, you’re so - unusual.” said the her
virile real estate agent friend, his skinny, age-spotted hand snaking
up Amanda’s pulchritudinous thigh. For a short while Gerald in truth
became Amanda, and knew the transformation of his personality had at
last begun.
Due to his general lackadaisicalness, though,
he never took any further action and the boobs shrank away to nothing
and he spent all his time in regret, finally lapsing into such
terminal despair that he began to study Librarianship and so got
himself a dismal career at the University of the ACT where he was
never quite accepted by the tenured academics and was always hiding in
the corner practising feminine gestures and mouth movements, a habit
which earned him some well-chosen nicknames among staff and students
alike.
To alleviate the distress this public
victimisation caused he took up macramé but always got the strings
tangled up and one night had to send for the fire brigade to un-knot
him. They laughed themselves silly and he consoled himself that night
by parading like Harriet around town in a cheongsam and patterned
stockings, much to the amusement of his macho school-chums and the
swastika-festooned bikie who tried to pick him up and much later
helped to convict him in court.
He switched to the mouth-organ and drove his
neighbours mad but got confused over when to suck and when to blow,
Chapter Twenty-one: Fourth History Lesson 181
till one day he swallowed all the reeds at once in a disastrous tone
cluster.
He had by now given up the guitar for the
musical saw 121 and learned to play ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ while
dancing Jackson Fiveishly in a circle. His first concert was booked
out and he felt that at last he’d found his metier but halfway through
the performance he realised that he’d inadvertently sawn a hole in the
stage. The audience was treated to a variety of shrieks of disbelief
before Gerald plummeted to what would have been certain death but for
the presence of a trampoline below the stage. It belonged to the
health-fiendish Stage Manager who looked on in panic or amusement as
the popular virtuoso bounced back out of the hole to cheers.
This went on for a while, and Gerald’s next
concert was soon booked out too (as he hadn’t missed a note throughout
the fiasco) but he slunk off discouraged to start all over again as a
bassoon player - he’d never gone for the viola or the daxaphone.* That
career flopped when another member of the orchestra checked her or his
lipstick in a pocket mirror and Gerald saw what he looked like playing
the thing. He gave up the bassoon as well which was a shame since he
played it brilliantly.
For a while thereafter he took up acting but
dropped the skull on his toe during a performance of Macbeth at the
Mumbullabullabillabong CWA theatrette, which he might have got away
with had he not given vent to a stream of uncharacteristic expletives
in three languages. The Blue Rinse Set called together its Committee
for an Extraordinary General Meeting and after an Extraordinary
Suspension of Standing Orders had him banished to extraordinary
Oodnagalarbie where he amused himself by experimenting with the
musical razor blade and recordings of Kate Bush. He escaped (this he
later got down to a fine art, so it was odd he’d ended up in a library
job) and for a time lived in obscurity disguised as Diana Ross.
The only positive aspect of this period was
that he was making quite a good screw (money-wise) as a Ladies Wear
clerk for Myers who doubled on the musical breadknife and this would
have rendered him slightly affluent if he hadn’t carried the cash
about in his pocket and lost it regularly in Woolworths while rapt in
envy at the lovely undulating hips of the check-out chick Agnes who
was a whizz on the musical ladies’ shaver. (Agnes was later to skip
the country for Las Vegas.)
Leonie at this time was deeply into Práttish

transcendental meditation as this enabled her to hold her wee for
weeks at a time. Her bigotry was coming along nicely, so nicely in
fact that Daddy had to caution her against making Irish jokes in
company, especially during the intervarsity meetings with the IRA. She
couldn’t always be dissuaded and this once resulted in the house being
blown off the map and generally showed her character in a strong
light.
She had no brothers and sisters, as we’ve said;
at least none she knew about. (Daddy secretly had given her about
1200, all too black for his liking, before his booze-induced impotence
set in at 68.)
The most formative thing that ever happened to
her, of course, was Daddy’s kidnapping of her when she was just five,
after which Mummy ran away to China (or so Daddy said). She lived in a
state of mortal fear all through her childhood and it profoundly
121
He stayed away from what Spike Milligan (shit!) has controversially termed the ‘Jewish piano’, ie cash
register, and so never made a cent at this point in his life.
*
In this egregiously un-numbered footnote I’d like to add that a ‘daxaphone’ is a bizarre wind instrument
that imitates the human voice better than many impressionists.
181
affected her strifestyle and core values. She’d never quite got over
it and had developed multiple personalities till she met Gerald.
Now and again these CIA-created personalities
all got together and held a counter-cultural Blue Rinse-style
committee meeting, while the sixties pulsated druggily outside.122 They
played with plastic teasets and her doll ‘Leonie’ was always vocal
when she pulled the string. There was much arguing and hair-pulling
about who should chair the meeting and nothing was ever decided except
behind the scenes, about which she knew nothing.
Leonie like most billionaires tired of
democracy after a while and began to dream of Tala and her blood-
spattered victory over men and above all, the depraved Daddy Paddy
(while using her spare time to practise the musical letter-opener).
However, having never experienced periods or much maternal love she
could not quite accept women either apart from Mummy and remained in a
bizarre genderless half-world till coming to the conclusion that the
only way out of this existential misery was up. Thereafter she’d
dedicated her life to attaining fame.
It was a lonely business and sometimes she’d
curl up in a drug-induced haze and weep for hours while round the bed
orbited hooked noses and groping fingers and the faces of all the
people Daddy had murdered, which was roughly the equivalent of the
white population of Los Angeles. (Had it been the white population of
Los Angeles he’d have got a smoother ride than OJ.) She felt like a
human being trapped in a doll’s body and longed to fly up to Heaven
where she suspected Mummy really was and the two of them could lie in
each other’s arms and never be hurt again.
She’d wake the next morning and flit straight
to her filthy computer and write another novel which always seemed to
be accepted no matter how bad it was in retrospect. Yet the lurking
suspicion that she owed it all to Daddy made her feel almost murderous
at times and she could not live with herselves and thought of moving
out. In the end she organised a trial separation but it made life
impossible and also inconvenient, and apart from wild CM hooleys
(parties) and ceilidhs and her towering rages there seemed to be
little in her life but empty quasi-political engagements.
After marrying Gerald and applying for a bit of
land overseas where postal music reigned she tried listening to a
relaxation tape but it made her tense to hear the womanish Californian
voice telling her to ‘relax your bahddy … feel all those little tiny
breezes moving up and down your bahddy …” She threw the tape recorder
at the mirror and fell to her knobbly knees irreligiously, shuddering
- and not due to the Very Slow Train - and throwing up. Suicidal
thoughts gripped her, ground her into the nothing she felt she really
was since Mummy abandoned her. She was making little experimental
grazes on her wrist with a pair of musical children’s scissors when
Gerald came into the room.
Gently, he took her in his weakling arms. For a
minute she thought it was Mummy but when she learned it was him she
clasped herself and howled and howled and howled.
Little more can be said about these two

characters as their other exploits are quite unbelievable, what with
Gerald doing his bit as an air hostess and getting a job as a tester
in a musical gussetless pantihose factory. Before he became a
librarian he had hundreds of jobs, fettler, ostler, sewerage worker,
fan dancer, torch singer, flea trainer, horse psychologist, Very Slow
Train driver, public affairs officer, archaeologist and even
professional pigeon racer but somehow his career path never took off
122
The older reader may care to make sitar noises at this point.
182
with any of them. But they put an indelible mark on his personality
and so he became the well-rounded character we see today.
Oh, and he has a brother in Brooklyn who
refuses to speak to him.
183
Chapter Twenty-two: Chihuahuas
Prátt wrote up the story for both the Sydney

Morning Herald and The Canberra Tiresome, the latter for which he was
now Terrorism Editor. Daddy was blamed for it all.
Leonie was furious that he’d pinched the story
from under her nose but he promised her a full page background
article. She bided her time nail-bitingly and scribbled till she had
enough for another novel. It was cut, musically, to a haiku and
published a few months later buried amid the Neoclassifieds on the
Internet.
A totally different style invaded this novel
then.
It was not suited to the existing characters.
Its humour was not the belly-laugh kind (said the author, hoping the
above has been).
New characters entered for a while. Sandra was
a well-bred middle class Surbitonian (a prestidigital Saxon tribe).
She raised chihuahuas and Mexican hairless walking fish (a tube of
Nair was never far away). They raised hell. She’d forgotten to feed
them. Her dear friend Margaret sympathised.
“The antics they get up to in Awstralia.”
Margaret added.
“Chihuahuas?”
“No, darling, Awstralians. Though I admit there
is a similarity when it comes to scholarly matters. Did you know they
have the slowest train in the world, and like Glasgow it just goes
round and round?” She gave vent to a high-pitched bob major of
laughter.
On the wall was her ‘intellectual tree of the
human race’ with the Irish at the bottom. As far as she was concerned,
all Australians these days had deplorable Celtic, Asian or Semitic
features (and usually all three). Wogs began at Sydney Airport and had
little interest in stage magic. Hairless and hairy fish and Lesbians
were everywhere. We were being swamped. The French National Front had
the right idea - feed ‘em raw pork.
She perused one of Leonie’s novels, Me Glorious
Career in fact.
“Quite appalling.” agreed Sandra quickly.
Margaret ashed her cigarette. Huw Pwyll ap
Cantref ap Cromlech, the butler, closed his mouth. He adored ash. He’d
once given up smoking. That was twenty-one years back, but the craving
persisted.
“But you see, they’re going native.” said
Sandra, thinking of Asia. She liked Asians. Her boyfriend was one and
he was good in bed and evil elsewhere. His name was Lee, which
apparently meant ‘penis’ in Burmese. But nevertheless she preferred
most of them to stay in their own countries rather than polluting the
Saxon genotype. It was neater that way. Fascism and mindless
conformity were so trendy. A shame she was preggers.
“And Barmy is such a scatterbrained harridan.”
“Well, she is a Yid you know.” sniffed
Margaret, tapping her sculpted nose significantly. “And - well,
Indigenous if not Indigent! A true crossbreed, though hardly a
Christian!” Her correspondence with the great David Irving lay strewn
about the coffee table for Sandra’s benefit; she did worry about his
name, though. A jolly good thing he wasn’t Chinese.
Sandra did her best to smile knowingly, while
inside she knew she’d been upstaged, having opined earlier that Leonie
was a fundamentalist Taliban. She’d been on the verge of sending her
an Application Form in the hope she’d join their own delightful
organisation.
Chapter Twenty-two: Chihuahuas 185
“And on the nose, ha ha.” she trilled, as the

yapping intensified.
“Hugh, really!” barked Margaret, and made
sophisticated dog jokes about the Sino-Vietnamese.
Their flat served as the Surbiton Headquarters
of the (Saxon) National Front and the rent was paid by Daddy.
Margaret brushed crumbs from her Laura Ashley
dress. She’d stolen it from a foolishly unlocked cardboard box on the
Embankment. It was a family heirloom and the owner had been about to
pawn it to feed her seven children who had since died of malnutrition.
Thatcherism under Group Captain Blare had not gone far enough, in
Sandra’s view, though it was useful in arguments with visiting West
Indians over their curried bangrimuffin music to say ‘oh, but we have
the same problems here, you know, but that’s the way the world is,
massive inequality is the natural state of humanity, we must attract
foreign investment or my shares in Shell will plummet’. Yet disturbing
elements of democracy still lingered, along with smoke from de ‘erb.
“Odd, that.”
“What is?” asked Margaret.
“Her characters’ opinions sound - well, like
ours. So refreshingly irrational.”
“You’re right - perhaps she really is an
Aborigine.You said they can’t count beyond three. Look at Governor-
General Hanson.”
“God, no. With that glorious white hair?”
“Darling, it’s fake. And not even an original
fake.”
“Oh, of course I knew that.” She wondered what
an ‘original fake’ could be but refrained from voicing her doubt.
“Darling!”
They chattered on like this but since the
conversation of Leonie’s typical readers is not very enlightening, I
think it might be best if we returned to the main story. Attempts to
introduce subplots into this drivel have, I admit, been about as
effective as the Unemployment-reducing strategies of the Calcutta
Party of Australia.
First, though, here is the National Anthem of
the breakaway Gaucho homeland of Tierra del Fuego, in honour of all
sunspot watchers:
We do the hot chilli lambada

From Brazil to the coast of Grenada
We never eat cold enchilada
There are no re-fried beans in our larder!
This, of course was written by Leonie during

her pre-famous period when she illegally operated the heliograph at
Siding Springs Observatory and dropped an ice-cream onto the mirror of
the 150” telescope, and is notable in being the first thing - aside
from a Life of the famed Irish poet Riley - she ever published. It was
quite an embarrassment to observe it splitting ears via radio whenever
the place was mentioned in the news. It had been conquered by Barbados
and the Lesbian Republic and its inhabitants were being encouraged to
sing of their new-found independence every morning, a bit like Norman
did as a child when not dismembering elephants, only partly for food.
185
Chapter Twenty-three: Daddy’s Second Vision
Led by Naomi (who’d lied about being PM of

Israel, having spent most of her time at Tuntable Falls raising
ecologically-correct radishes), the revolutionaries stormed the
headquarters and Daddy Paddy, who was accustomed to commuting, got off
the island at the last minute by rowing a very fat person over the
horizon, gallons of precious bathwater strapped about his unwashed
neck. On the way, he passed Captain Bligh who was also rowing
furiously, furious that he’d lost his ship perhaps.
“You’re a bit out of yer way, mate!” Paddy
cried in his counterfeit brogue, tapping at his watch which said 2000,
and the good Captain yelled back something which the breeze took away,
but it might have been “Bollocks!”.
“Such a charmin’ feller. Dese bloody Saxons
have got no manners at all at all. Dey’re not much at rowin’ neither.
Ach y fi! ” Ah, if only lubricious Leonie were sharing this adventure
with him. When he caught up with her she’d be in for it. His mind
devised fiendish punishments, mostly involving washing machines.
After many months of navigation and a pitched
battle with the Fijian Marines, the non-swimming Paddy made it to
Pitcairn Island, and it being the seventh day he rested. The fat
person stormed off in a foul temper, and later she formed a
relationship with a local girl and through artificial insemination in
Brisbane had fifteen children.
The local girl was named Mary (hardly a virgin,
though) and she had penetrating dark eyes and ran this island’s
airport while playing the erotic cello with Carson McCullers on the
side. Paddy felt a bit uneasy - he was sure he’d seen her before,
perhaps in Canberra. She kept pestering him to have a wash and buck up
his ideas but as she refused to have sex with him he grew as depressed
as his demanding and harried daughter.
Indeed, Paddy again felt rather over-clean due
to his time at sea. He rolled pleasurably in a dead shark, then shook
himself and thought once more of his dear Leonie. Would he ever see
and feel her again? He spent a lot of time on the island for the
inhabitants seemed bent on preventing him leaving. Sean Begora, a
leading ARSE-approved Celtic Mafioso himself, had ambitions in the
areas of foreign policy and job-killing, and he was not happy with
Paddy’s failure to quash the leftist uprising on the Carribean island
nor with Leonie’s book Sean Begora: Top of the Mornin’ or Bottom of
the class?, a revised title which translated ambiguously into Xhosa.
(As to the job-killing, Sean used more subtle
methods, aware that capitalism would increase in popularity with the
masochistic populace the less it delivered the goods. The Anarchist
Liberation Fronts were seduced back into the fold with offers of jobs
and later jailed or hanged or made to slave in the sewers for the
nonexistent dole. Most of the country was meanwhile distracted by
marathon dances and increasingly bloody sport funded by a tax on
poetry magazines.)
It was Cuba or Nicaragua (yet another mention!)
all over again, at a time when the world seemed safe for the
apocalyptic or apopleptic pseudo-science of economic rationalism.
Paddy, being insane and insanitary, knew nothing about that, only that
like Robinson Crusoe he longed to go home and engage in loathsome,
perverse sexual activity and mass murder.
At first he set out to conduct an
anthropological study of the local inhabitants, the little-known
Silibuga123. Armed with measuring calipers and one of Leonie’s lesbian
123
Pronounced ‘silb uga’. They were descendants of the A’Gléannha family of west Ireland - beyond the
Pale themselves - who were shipwrecked in 1632. Naturally, they spoke pure if coarse Gaelic. Any
resemblance to the Tasaday people is purely coincidental.
Chapter Twenty-three: Daddy’s Second Vision 187
rules he soon had them all properly classified as non-Celtic scum. He

also learned their barbarous tongue and drew up charts of their rashly
complex kinship system, juggling cunningly (this is clearly one of the
author’s favourite words) with terms like moiety and matrilineal
descent and incest and the like. He learned that a father couldn’t
marry his aunt’s sister’s cousin’s niece unless she was of the Dead
Shark Totem and there was an ‘R’ in the month. How their descendants
would get on in 2000 years he didn’t know, since there seemed to be so
few of them on the island.
He also learned that for a man to marry his
daughter was beyond the pale altogether. He was aghast, never having
heard of such a radical notion. Rellies were too much for him.
So he began a lone analysis of their attitudes
toward work, which he found distressing, along with the strong
presence of extremely militant trade unions. Almost every individual
Silibuga was a member and had no work ethic or servility at all.
Worse still, he discovered upon observing their
wrist-cracking, finger-strangling, arm-bursting handshakes while lying
at the beach on a banana chair sipping milk stout, they were all free,
enterprising masons and fans of Simon Louvish. They even had their own
Masonic Orchestra which played concertos for curtain rod, hurdy-girder
and orchestra, and a number of jazz and jug bands which made use of
instruments as diverse as the fipple-flute, aerophone, ocarina, basset
horn, kazoo, lagerphone, nail violin, spinet, pedal steel guitar,
Celtic ud, bullroarer, and moog synthesiser at $49.95 from K-Mart.
“Perhaps I should enter the Chorch, dat famous
punk band, and return to me native Ireland.” he mused, disillusioned
and culture-stunned, dwelling on shamrocks and unhygienic blarney
stones and car-bombs and all that a typical Irish gangster holds dear.
(He omitted to recall the fact that his father had been the Burmese
consul.) Luckily he’d brought some shamrock seeds and in a wink of the
eye the entire island was green with them. The dried leaves of course
made for a good smoke, so he was glad he’d saved his pipe too, along
with his grease-trap and Pakistani cricket protector.
The truth, of course, was that he was no more
Irish than I am (φυχκ µε δεαδ!), but instead had faked his accent for so
long that he couldn’t wittingly get out of the habit. He’d been born -
I read from a fax just sent to me from the Russian Embassy along with
an ad for the late Boris Yeltsin’s Home-Made Prune Vodka at $US12000 a
bottle - on Coogee Beach in 1940, the illegitimate son of a Lithuanian
father and an Armenian mother. The pair had later been kidnapped by
aliens leaving Paddy to make his own way in the world. He wasn’t even
Leonie’s real father.
Or was that a false memory, the result of 80
years of dedicated alcoholism (his, I mean, I’m not yet 43)? It was
just that. Or was it?
“Ah, well, dat’s the way it goes.” he said
philosophically, boning up on the local editions of Descartes, Hobbes,
and Diplodocus. There wasn’t a single Irish philosopher available in
the local library or even a book by one, but at least he got to play
with the Internet. His Home Page can be accessed through the following
address: www.daddy.com.au.
It was a lazy life, and he was almost converted
to Post-Trotskyism by a visiting ANU academic elephant who’d just been
given the boot as part of the latest short-sighted Efficiency Drive.
Daddy resisted the temptation to re-join the jobless ‘working’ class,
however, and made email contact with the Pope instead. They had
wonderfully uplifting electronic exchanges, till Paddy felt almost
ready to start all over again at the age of 108.
Then the Pontiff advised him to redouble his
efforts to seek out his pugnacious daughter - for she was truly the
Virgin.
187
Chapter Twenty-three: Daddy’s Second Vision 188
“What:)? Her?” he keyed back, thinking His

Holiness was joking.
“She is secretly working God’s
will.:(:(:(:(:(:(” replied the Holy Father, awash with emoticons if
not swamped by Asians.
“Are you sure about that, Father?” keyed back
Paddy, a shamrock seed sprouting in his nostril. What a primitive form
of communication they’ll find this in a hundred years, he thought, and
if you’re reading this a hundred years hence remember that I
deliberately put this bit in for you, so be grateful.
The Vicar of Christ replied, “Haven’t you heard
about Papal Infallibility? I’ve won the Melbourne Cup three years
running and I’m not even a horse.”
“No, by Dad, I haven’t”, said Paddy, thinking
it must be a new form of contraception to replace the rhythm method,
tum-te-tum, “but I’ll bear it in mind, Father, next time I’m at the
track.” He sculled a bottle of Bushmills. The Reform Temple was
getting out of hand.
“You’d better or we’ll have you
excommunicated.” Il Papa retorted on the screen.Paddy succumbed to a
bad case of the shakes, which had nothing to do with the earthquake
that occurred at the time or the extension of the Very Slow Train to
the island by means of a cantilever and a brass fly button once the
property of James Watt. The pontifical rebuke gave him (a man who’d
once looked upon the face of the Virgin Mary, though all along that
had been a device cooked up by his henchpersons - as far as they knew
- to weaken his criticality so that they could more easily connive
with the leaders of the Revolution for a great deal of money and taxi
plates and stolen sick leave supplied by Prátt and Gerald) the impetus
he needed.
He rallied, gathered together the islanders and
threw a party and tossed a caber. Then, impressing these primitives
with his zombie status, he had most of them locked up for being drunk
and disorderly. Following that, it was a simple matter to bribe the
sole remaining inebriant, Mary, a pilot, to fly him to Australia - to
hell with the VST, he was 108 already - where Leonie in her lurid
luxury waited. Mary took the money with a peculiar smile on her face,
her lovely eyes pulsating with an inner ardour. Of course - it was St
Patrick’s day, the Welsh bastard. He donned the appropriate underwear,
though quickly its colour changed.
When they were over the edge of Canberra, she
floated clean out of the cabin and up into the clouds in a shaft of
light. He saw his money fluttering down like a flock of butterflies.
“Ah, isn’t dat pretty?” he said before he flew
into a religious rage himself.
“Bloody dykes and kikes and t- !” he wept, the
meaningless slosh of his jerry-cans of bathwater his only solace.
The engine cut out as he did so and he was
forced to make a dead-stick landing in a haystack provided no doubt by
God. What the hell. He might not be in Ireland, but he felt he was
home.
The bag needle that had sunk into his bum was a
bit much, though.
188
Chapter Twenty-four: The Fortune Teller
About this time Leonie struggled dizzily from

her tangled bedsheets and again (while playing a Transylvanian Wedding
March on her saxonophone and reflecting on how maybe society was the
basis of ‘the family’) reviewed her life. She decided she’d been a
Very Bad (and Slow) Girl.(She’d even taken to weeing just when she
felt like it.) It seemed that all her success and feminine itching had
been attained under false pretences. She’d just turned 45 and maturity
was elusive. Maybe it was time to get real, whatever that meant.
Gerald and Norman had both been arrested and
she presumed they’d spend the next 4000 years sharing a cell, so she
felt free (though still worried about Daddy and his pal the PM) for
the first time in her life. Somehow she couldn’t take advantage of
this and got no fun out of the sensationalist front page article she’d
been commissioned to write about the bombing (with pictures flown in
from Zaire or somewhere to make it look like the real thing).
The cat-infested days on Barbados had taken on
the qualities of a romantic interlude, as they’d striven together to
transport the diabolical device to Australia. The ideas she could have
contributed. For instance, she’d suggested taking it all to bits,
numbering the parts, posting each by a different route, and
reassembling it in Canberra, by analogy with packet-switching and
Daddy’s plans for Jerusalem and Northern Wangaratta. They’d dismissed
this as silly.
Agamemnons. That Nigellic viper had slaughtered
poor gagged Iphigenia and incurred the wrath of the goddess Insomnia
who’d inspired Clytemnestra to get out the steak knife set they’d been
given by their gay friends Paris and Marseilles on their wedding day.
Leonie’s fury and creative iphigenious had made her weep a blood-
dimmed tide and smash the furniture in a wedding dress till Norman’s
henchmenschen (still at large when not XSSW) had her straitjacketed
for a while. Thinking with the blood was something of a liability.
When they were persuaded by a team of high-
powered theatrical lawyers to let her go she used her many contacts in
the literary establishment and had them sold off to Hezbollah except
for one who elected to join the Moscow Dynamos and later transferred
to Manchester United.
Goal! (The Furies were furious at having been
by-passed, but there was little they could do when Leonie was
rampant.) Gerald and Norman plainly hadn’t taken her seriously, the
unrepresentative, testosteronic swill. For the last month she’d
considered becoming a radical feminist and learning Gaelic.
Her first meeting (held inconveniently in
Portuguese) had been a disaster. She outraged her fellow Comstockings
by proposing that middle-aged and barely literate Lesbian novelists
without children or work experience but with a soppy ex-husband of
convenience called Jerald and a guaranteed place in an Aegean kibbutz
should be paid a special wage financed by a levy on those smartarsed
degreed young bimboes rocketing up the corporate hierarchy, itself
resembling the system of coaches in patriarchal American football. The
possession of arcane knowledge was no substitute for creativity and
potential, she cried against a roar of protest.
Leonie’s outspokenness on this subject (mainly
in Gaeltacht areas of Queanbeyan) resulted in her being smuggled into
a Russian space-shot and very nearly fired into the sun. Vlad the
Impaler could not have rivalled her rage when she got herself rescued
by the Hibernian Society.
(Gerry Adams has not been allowed into this
book due to his tendency to ridicule vacuous Saxons.)
On this gold-rimmed morning, she fantasised
about Naomi again, Naomi whom she heard had lost the election and had
since become a Hindu (well, she was one all along) and champion of
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Fortune Teller 190
Ghandi-esque pacificism in Varinasi. She was presently visiting

Australia once more on sabbatical and leading the latest campaign to
Free Gerald Iceberg; and the current Australian government was on the
verge of falling for not having prevented the Cultural Centre bombing
in spite of having almost everyone in prison including the police. Yet
Gerald himself hadn’t sent Leonie so much as a postcard.
She felt furious and despairing all at once,
which with her mental problems she found difficult to handle. She was
convinced that unlike everyone else she had never really grown up at
all (she didn’t know which way was up most of the time), and that it
was all somehow due to Daddy. Soon she might die and the whole project
of her life would be a failure.
For months, she had agonised and regurgitated
about all this, spending all her time in her bedroom alone with her
comforting plastic archaeopteryx. She dreamt of them locked in a
filthy cell - Norman without the comfort of a cat to push around -
their arms clasped round each other for comfort (though perhaps that
was not likely). She alternated between pity and an increasingly
painful glee. What was to become of her, alone and motherless in a
cruel world.
But none ever trembled or panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
Fuck Shelley. She had tried to find another

lover but these days she was shunned because of her developing crow’s
feet (not lucky) and lack of an 8th novel, and so had taken to booze
again. Meaning vanished from her life and hand relief with crushing
thoughts of Naomi became her only pleasure. She worked out truly
exotic ways of doing it with almost every piece of furniture in the
room.
The bedside table was mildly erotic. She’d lie
naked on the rug with it sitting on her nipples and get the servant
she’d hired (a wizened Anarcho-Syndicalist crone from Tierra del
Fuego) to sit on it. This brought a rush of pleasure superior to
anything she’d ever experienced before, though it was followed by a
shattering sense of emptiness.
(The crone, who had a face reminiscent of a
primate of the Anglican Church, remained impassive, delivering
devastating quotes from the Critique of the Gotha Programme and Red
Emma’s mushy love-letters.) For a while, this was enough. But that
morning while compulsively masturbating - she was even reduced to
paying for it these days - Leonie realised that she had no future
while self-indulgence dragged her down to what would undoubtedly be an
alcoholic grave. There had to be more to life than this.
She’d slept off her depression Gaulishly as

usual. And with that came another chutzpahic dream:
Sorry dat we ain’t writ fo’ a while but de dread El Niño effect
took us off course by Jove. We presently driftin’ off de coast of Hollywood and desperately
bailin’ out de brer Hollywood madams who is financin’ dis venture. Fach, you is
backslidin’ and dere ain’t nothing fo’ it but to take de bullshit by de horns of de dilemma as
de Minoans say accordin’ to Dorothy Porter. Rhiannon is a big goil now and she not takin’
no shit from no man, includin’ her Daddy de Welsh giant de blessed All-Bran. She has
taken up weightliftin’ and is presently devourin’ a spoim whale for de bulk. It a shame she
inherited de Celtic tendency to get totally legless on important occasions. But she also
gettin’ on wid de Mabinogion - unfortunately like de typical foist novelist sufferin’ from
adjectivitis eg de ‘lady on a big fine pale white horse’ and suchlike we tole her no editor put
190
up wid dat flowery autobiologial crap dese days. She respond bimeby wid a revolutionary
attack upon de barbaric Celtic feudal system what still infectin’ de brer world briar patch.
Dis system, she write, it diggin’ its own grave and
disappearin’ up its own asshole quicker than you can say heconomic rationalism. Indeed, it
like somet’in’ outa Darls Chickens. We couldn’t agree more as we sloshed around de
sinkin’ Pacific Islands dodgin’ ABC pirates and havin’ run out of de seasick tablets she
brought, all wid dat funny Biblical writin’ on dem. Dey hard on de molar anyway. All dat
shit goin’ down in yo’ asshole of de universe, baby, it don’t mean nothing to the real world
- shmucks, we’d turn pale and white if it did, fach, and head back to Tiger Economy Bay.
So don’t you let de bastards grind you down like dey did Crazy Horse of de Siouxsie and
the Banshees, Lay-onie. Bite de bullet and de hand dat feel you up, chile, remember de
deliverance of de Celtic Sino-Hebrews (two pints of Guinness and a skim milk please, go
easy on de honey chicken, Seamus) and de Gaza Strip Club (how did dat one stay in?) and
de partin’ o’ de Red Sea I hope it ain’t like my hair it fallin’ out wid my head and dey
gettin’ into a fight bimeby. Kick de bastard to death, dat’s de only language de Patriarchal
Saxon Bourgeoisie understand, extreme situations call for extreme solutions, hang de
bugger from de yard-arm and make him walk de plank.
Anyway, better sign off now as me and Brer Faggot can a-
smell o’ de gefiltechit’lins boinin’. Rhiannon refuse to do de cookin’ so we got de run o’ de
galley. We enjoyin’ dat, poncin’ about in de floral tartan housecoats and de fluffy slippers
and blowin’ kisses at de sun, typical tar(t)s. Scuse me while I hiss de sky, Bwana, dat
fuckin’ mobile goin’ off again. Bein’ from darkest Africa (well, it is at night on account of
de streetlights bein’ smashed by de WAFA) we’s black and comely, as de foot-tappin’ Song
o’ Wise King Solly go, and we’s so glad we’s staunch Sino-Hebrews and never got off on
dat brer bricht moonlicht Christian trip wid de blood and body of de Saviour (yuk! we
prefers de finest o’ Kentucky sippin’ whiskies) and de fancy carpentry, only drawback is we
still get to sit at de back o’ de bus. Maybe we oughta start chuckin’ rocks too.
But de strabismic problems of de ole world ain’t what you
oughta be loadin’ yourself down wid, Lay-onie precious. Wait till we start up our own
branch of de Lost Tribe business in darkest Oz.
Keep yo’ chin up, goil (but don’t let him chuck you under it,
mind)! Land o’ Goshen! Let yo’ hidjus Pappy tremble, baby! You got a Mammy to find and
a world to win.
Heddwch,
Brer Fuchs &

Brer Faggot.
ps Dis may be de last time you hears from us as we just landed

a leadin’ role in de nex’ brer Eastwood divorce opera.
Nevertheless, her depression returned on

waking. What did the future hold? She didn’t know anymore.
So that morning (after getting rather tanked
before the sun had passed the bowsprit, let alone the yard-arm) she
went in disguise to a fortune teller after seeing an ad in the paper.
Her M Theory of Everything held that a physics
of events in a bedroom, suitably over-mathematised, would compete with
quantum theory etc etc as a representative picture of the universe,
Big Bhang and all, though being an allegedly random sample. Eg, she
told passing lamp-posts, chattering to herself from the point of view
of passers-by, fly ‘v’ landing on windowsill ‘w’ equals through subtle
sibylline manipulations a VW, such as might spring fully-armed from a
black hole, while a reflective dust mote dancing
asymptotalitarianistically on a sunbeam that wanted her for a Jesus
would be her very own unshatterable looking glass and she could pass
through this cyberspatial wormhole into the earthly paradise, per
191
aspera ad astra … but none of this seemed to work out in reality,

whatever that was.
The fortune-teller operated out of a modest
styrofoam carton dating from the early Bauhaus period. (The Institute
of Architects she complained to immediately over her mobile.) The
fortune-teller herself, buried in esoteric paraphernalia, was rather
more rococo.
Leonie’s stomach quivered. This brer woman must
have been 90 years old and dripped with junk jewellery and a bad cold.
In fact Leonie could tell she was actually a man dressed up, a man
oddly familiar.
“Prátt!” she exclaimed tipsily, doffing her WWI
German Navy greatcoat, easter bonnet, McLibel’s apron and Salvation
Army drawers. “Did they fire you?”
“Shhh.” he sneezed into his dog-eared tarot
cards, turned on by the memory of the great writer pleasuring herself
while he and Naomi watched from behind the grating. “I’m moonlighting
as Rowena the Gypsy.” He played a few horrific squeaks on his fiddle
(she’d long since given up music herself) and quoted a line or two of
Lee Fühler’s poetry:
Chiriklo adre’ a rukh …
Though tone-deaf and opposed to the thieving
Poets’ Union (and thinking the quote was Irish) she screwed up her
face and threatened to make an emergency call to the New York
Tiresome’s leading music critic, Ludwig van Beethoven and His Ameslan
Orchestra.
Prátt / Rowena put his / her instrument down
in some embarrassment and jokingly stole her wallet. As his diminutive
mother had said all his life, they can’t laugh in your face if you
don’t wear lifts. He was only trying to make enough money to keep
Blowing Off! afloat now its funding had vanished - and with Mary’s
assistance he was succeeding. He crossed his pretty legs saucily,
aware that the Romany Liberation Front and HP Foods were hot on his
tail.
She wondered if she should ever have resigned
from parliament.
An ignorant gaje, he made various astrological
noises, but she knew nothing of her moon being in strine with Jupiter
or barred with Mars, and grinned disarmingly. It was something she did
rarely, indeed once in a blue moon and twice when it was in Scorpio
and there was an ‘R’ in the Brahmic cycle.
Sibyllinely, Prátt read her palm and Louis de
Paor with interest (around 12%). Featuring were a big story about a
Welsh protester baring her buttocks at the Queen of England, in
emulation of the traditional Maori custom, and a think-piece about the
valuelessness of chieromancy and the Graduate Diploma of Journalism at
the University of Southern Queensland. S/he went to peer down at some
tealeaves instead, but realised s/he’d used a teabag.
“Er, I do it for - well, my own peace of mind.”
The Aboriginal Industry was currently paying him a huge dividend.
Not a very big piece in itself, as she
recalled. Pity Gerald was again in jail. He’d fancy you, she thought.
Rowena, indeed.
“I’m expressing myself, Leonie. Time you did
the same. Your father has turned you into a vile person. Have faith in
your good qualities as I do.”
His violin begged to differ and he pushed it
aside with his high-heeled pump. It just got into a dust-up with his
guitar, and spla-a-ang! came from under the table.
“You’re a transvestite!” she howled and skriked
androgynously, then gazed down pityingly at him. He looked peeved in
the eclipsing shadow of her gorgeous nose and predicted a bigger
article next time to accomodate it.
192
“Look”, he coughed tunelessly, the crystal in

front of him clouding and promising showers, “I see that the end of
the book’s coming up124 and I’m soon to become the overpaid CEO of
Uillean & Onion, having masses of work experience. We need a decent
climax.” he added revealingly.
“I thought we’d had some.” she said, staring at
his waxed calves and recalling a few desultory orgasms she’d had with
him on the bottom (whose bottom she wasn’t clear upon).
He seemed momentarily confused. “No! Think of
your brilliant career. For the sake of your own credibility you’ve got
to take out the Miles Franklin with your novel about the explosion and
its thousands of victims.”
“But no one got killed. Gerald made sure of
that.” Just to deny her a good story, she simmered.
Prátt shrugged delphically; he wasn’t about to
enlighten her with the news of what Gerald and Naomi were really up to
in the Carribean.
“Er - it’s got to be a ‘what-if’ story. You
know, what if the area hadn’t been evacuated in time. What if the
thing had been planted in the middle of the Food and Wine Frolic. What
if Jesus had been walking on the water and God had parted the Red Sea.
With my hair there’s no parting … ” He held out his bangled arms and,
adjusting his toupee and dissecting a frozen chicken with his teeth to
see what augured, did an impression of a Saviour screaming. “That sort
of thing.” He shrugged again.
“Oh, right.” She stared at him, recalling her
miraculous dream. There was something about that shrug. “You’re not
Sino-Jewish are you?” she said warily, looking around for knives.
He just raised an eyebrow and smiled.
She faltered. Yet his brer nose was so
pathetically small (almost as pathetic as the author’s, in fact people
pointed him and her out in the street and laughed) that she felt she
was looking down the wrong end of the rhinoscope. And he didn’t say
‘lawks a mussy’ all that often, or have pitzy little eyes.
Well-ingrained racialist cliches clashed and
jousted in her mind. That mind was really extraordinarily intelligent,
but it spent most of its time locked in the mental oubliette which
Daddy since her infancy had excavated in her. Brainlock125 had taken
its toll: every morning, her thoughts tiptoed across a mindfield.
She caught herself mirrored in his farcical new
agey crystal before it shattered and noticed that her own
rhinocerosness had returned. Her nose had grown back to its original
size, if not bigger. There was no escaping it. It grew (to paraphrase
Philip Roth) with every lie she told. Perhaps if her literary career
failed she could find work as a sniffer dog.
And with your knee, she misquoted internally,
that wouldn’t be a picnic. Maybe, she thought lucidly for a second,
the nose job had been a hypnotic delusion, since she’d been referred
to the Ear, Nose and Throat quack by her shrink. A conspiracy! But
that was paranoid.
Missing her precious gumleaf collection, she
sharpened her nails on her skirt out of habit and thanked Prátt /
Rowena for telling the future so accurately. The Miles Franklin. She
was already filthy rich (thanks to the sinecure and the Parliamentary
Pension), but now Legitimacy beckoned. The Miles Franklin! She’d
forget all the derring-do and the obsessive sex and work really hard.
For once in her life, she mustered the
knowledge and experience she’d so painfully gained for years, brought
her Voices into harmony and actually did. The book started out as a
124
And of the author’s reputation.
125
A concept originated by a Dr Schwartz of the Bronx. No, honestly.
193
story about the stupid ‘ethical’ bombing but for the first time ever
she went beyond self-loathing and began to write about her real
oppressor: Daddy.
194
Chapter Twenty-five: Free Speech!
That man made innumerable and increasingly

desperate attempts to contact her, going so far as to send teams of
door-to-door Mormons (with their own curious replica of the CM Bible),
and other Lost Tribes of Ireland about the city, but (with IE aid) she
wisely shunned disguise but kept her true location a dark secret, and
wrote many short stories on the side under the pseudonym of Salman
Rushdie. This anonymity began to change her view of fame.
One night she had a vision: Mummy fell like a
star from heaven and took Leonie in her arms, saying “It’s all right,
darling … it’s all over now.” Brers Fuchs & Faggot had never had quite
this effect on her.
She continued to write, rejuvenated. People who
knew her began to take her more seriously. She withdrew from her
endless round of drinking engagements and worked damned hard.
When she submitted her hard-won manuscript two

months later, U & O sent her the following terse letter.
Uillean & Onion Ltd

U & O Tower
4 Leunig St
North Sydney
NSW 2060
http:www.u&o.Prátt.html
JP@u&0.snot.com.au
02 2273 336466
6 September 2010
Dear Leonie,
This is great, powerful, well-focussed stuff but due to funds

being tight we cannot accept it for publication at this time. Sorry.
Julius.
ps I’m not a bloody Mormon.
The first Rejection Slip she’d ever received!

The bastard!
In black despair that her only authentic work
had been turned down, and having been told over those two months the
truth about Gerald and Naomi’s ruse BY WHOM?, she again came close to
slashing her wrists like poor Rose whose grave she now visited every
day because that was where she grew her marijuana.
“I’ll tell them all you cross-dress.” she
snarled drunkenly in Prátt’s lofty office, waving the Slip in his
face. She’d lapsed into her old habits.
IE had, she knew, taken over U & O thanks to
Gerald’s obsession with acronyms, and the illegals were now in power -
Roger the economist had gone. There were no goldfish in sight and the
cat-door had gone too. While not nautical, Prátt ran a tight ship.
“They all know!” he said boastfully, on stilts.
“People love it actually, especially middle-aged, petite bourgeois
women, and extra-large. It makes them feel good about themselves since
they’re very into drag too. I’ve - started doing it at work.” He
raised his brows a few times and pulled up his pinstriped trouser-leg
to reveal a dainty, stockinged ankle, which was not wise since he fell
off.
Chapter Twenty-five: Free Speech! 196
“How daring and bourgeois.” she sneered as he

dragged himself to his feet, thinking of her old epistolary dreams and
wondering what ‘bourgeois’ actually meant. “So why have your lot
rejected me book? It’s heaps better than the shit I used to write.”
“Mmm, yes, but will it sell?” he gasped. “It’s
not what your readers are, well, used to.” He slumped into his chair
and rubbed thoughtfully at the spot where her high heel had once
penetrated his skull. It had caused him to convert to food stamp
Zoroastrianism, and given him psychic powers, though these allowed him
merely to read the minds of bunyips and caterpillars, which didn’t
really help one up the greasy pole.126
“Of course it’ll sell. It’s good literature,
already.”
He smiled back as a psychiatrist might at a
mental patient, again dwelling secretly on her dinosaural self-
pleasuring while using an elastic band stretched between thumb and
forefinger to shoot pencils at a portrait of Roger. “Precisely.”
“But I can’t get the brer Miles Franklin if
it’s not published!”
He shrugged. He was good at that, and had put
it on his cv during a bout of mid-life crisis. He was sure it was
crucial in getting him George’s job, as George was no good at it at
all. Roger, till his accident, shrugged too. So did his Aunt Esther (a
noted psychic who had contacted the ghost of Captain Cook’s ship’s cat
Sea Mog), but that didn’t seem relevant.
“I’m truly sorry, Leonie.”
“You brer shrugging people are all raving
bonkers. You’re rejecting it because it’s too good? What are you, the
Women’s Weekly? Oy!” She struck her forehead. “This is a violation of
me Freedom of Speech!”
He quailed a bit and hoped she was over her
violent period. She’d acted on Naomi’s advice - it’s time you got a
proper job and saw what the world’s really like, she constantly
berated herself, while dwelling on Samson ap Dafydd ap Ngberg Jr - and
lacking work experience of any validity or interest got herself a
Grad. Sheep Dip. in Librarianship at the University of the ACT. It too
changed her view of the world radically.
She now knew why Gerald was such a brer twat.
“Of course, if you could swing another grant …”
He fired another pencil at Roger and missed again.
She’d long since resigned from the Australia
Council (some people were still convinced she was a terrorist), and
that job had been taken by her current principal rival, Mildred
Pylesz, that politically-seasoned writer of novels about tiresome
middle class marriage break-ups amongst the jazz and jug set. (She
also kept pit-ponies.)
“I’ll never get anything from Mildred.” she
said ruefully. “But I’ll fund it meself. This must be published. It’s
the only chance I’ll get to do something creative with me life.” She
rose from her chair threateningly, a finger raised for emphasis. “This
is me life.”
“We’re not a vanity press, Leonie.”
About to grind her teeth down to powder, she
suddenly had an idea. It was a brilliant idea, one that even Naomi
would be proud of.
“Iceberg Enterprises!”
“Pardon?” Prátt was now a major shareholder and
was gratified to find himself ripping money out of the rich and (for a
small fee) spreading it out among the poor. Robin Hood would have been
proud of him though not of his archery.
126
This is not meant as a racial slur.
196
Leonie broke into his reverie testily. “Gerald

is wimpy and brer enough to give U & O corporate sponsorship.”
Daddy’s fate would be sealed. Feared by the
bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood … she sang
to his consternation.
With IE’s help, she’d by now taken to living in
a Lincoln green caravan and moving all over Australia so he’d never
find her. The Romany Liberation Front was after her too.
(At one point she’d decamped with one of the
rented sites shovelled into the back of a truck. This caused no end of
legal problems, particularly when she tried to sell it to a
reactionary as a block of land in Queensland.)
Prátt looked dubious, but actually the idea
pleased him no end and he was just confused about her injection of the
word ‘brer’ into every sentence, in accordance with the Book of Common
Brer. Going “What the hell!” he ripped off his trousers to reveal a
tight white vinyl miniskirt and a valuable ‘40s suspender belt that if
pawned would keep a family of eight sleeping rough alive for a year,
even under the Taliban regime.
“You see”, he confessed, “I’m really a woman
trapped in a man’s body.” She groaned and looked about for a bowl of
fruit. There was one on the bookcase where the goldfish bowl had been
and she went to grab it but he bent forward as if to impart an
important truth, such as that he was relenting and going to publish
her book.
“My real name’s Rowena.” he continued to her
aggravation. Two months - or maybe more, she hadn’t noticed - had
changed him, but what’s in a name. There was something different about
the valiant Editor, now what was it … ?
He made a confession. “I’ve been taking
oestrogen for two years. At last it’s starting to work.”
Oh, of course! She kicked herself but then
decided that this was no longer in keeping with her maturing
personality as well as being anatomically awkward.
Rowena curled her sinuous shins around each
other sensually (yoga forgotten) and then revealed her large breasts.
Leonie batted her eyelids fetchingly, a trick that was usually
effective.
Rowena / Prátt swooned, for he had a Bawd
meeting and a definitely unwanted erection coming up. Her brilliant
head made the fluorescent lights unnecessary, her brilliant career
shone like a platinum path that zoomed off to the horizon and in the
general direction of Hepatitis B4. All his professional restraint
vanished. He stood, grinning, a child learning to speak before the
grand universe of meaning and all that crap.
”Darling …” he or she said brerly, gorgeous
boobs displayed boldly and mouth in a sensual pout, “We’ll publish it
- for you.”
The trapdoor of her oubliette had been lifted
totally. The culmination of her struggles - a new life lay outside.
(All this of course is meant metaphorically, for those dense enough to
take it literally. And no, I don’t want a forty-page thesis from Bryce
Courtenay on the tendentious minutiae of postmodernist literary
theory, so if you’re that sort of critic you can just piss off.)
They made love, more or less, on the desk. He
generally faked orgasm.
Good old Leonie, she said to herself - nothing
could keep her down for long, other than a creative writing course or
possibly a steamroller.
Life was no longer bleak and torpid - Prátt had
told her future two months ago, and now he or rather Rowena (God this
is confusing, you think you have trouble) was making it come true.
197
Now (being about 30 megatons) it was time to

stop running from Daddy and go after him instead.
ps
if anyone would like Auntie Rhoberta’s recipe

for Brer Cockroach and Boned Maggot Pie, please write to the following
address enclosing $5:
No. 3 La Peste Bubonique St, Queanbeyan, NSW,

2620 (French Consulate). Pretentious, moi?
198
Chapter Twenty-six: Seafaring Literati
And so it came to pass that the book was

published. Prátt himself took time out from shmoozing and brown-nosing
and reviewed it glowingly for Blowing Off! under the assumed name of
Lou de Crass.
The Celtic Mafia had still not succeeded in
blowing up the Blowing Off! office, mainly through the efforts of IE,
divine intercession and a shortage of ammonium nitrate due to the
depredations of Sean’s government. (His party had since been replaced
by the Hole in One Party, convinced believers in the new Index Liborum
Prohibitorum, the curative properties of clepsydrae and the
infallibility of judges.)
Leonie (unlike Lucy, who had to be dragged out
of Evatt Library in a straitjacket due to boredom) was feted by most
of the important Literary figures in the world, and was often on tv,
playing golf with the new President of the United States, Louis
Farrakhan.
George and Rupert made a comeback too, having
been woken by the revolutionary crowds on the Carribean island to
escape on a passing (and unoccupied) Cuban tractor tyre - Rupert’s
father had run away to sea when his son was small so that probably
explained the latter’s proclivities. Thoroughly compromised by their
time in the CM and imbued with resurgent utopian fervour, they
intended to seek a new future together. Leonie would be pleased to see
them, they were sure.
It was all old stuff for the now drug-free
George who genuinely enjoyed the nautical life and danced the hornpipe
every evening with his marlinspike between his teeth, much to Rupert’s
annoyance. He insisted on piping aboard every halibut they caught and
would wile away the days by singing sea-shanties and playfully
belabouring Rupert with a belaying pin.
They both remembered Leonie’s rather
Biedermeier tv broadcast in Chapter Seven (indeed, Alf Garnett too),
and had no idea how much she’d changed. Her senseless right-wing
blathering about mainbraces and mizzenmasts and Moby’s Dick had really
put them off. Their relegation to a sub-plot and the artistic jealousy
this engendered was almost enough to make them both leave the book for
a better outfit such as The Odyssey in which they could swish around
the Lesbian-infested Aegean and anti-Celtically join Club Med and
enhance their careers on a better class of ocean, but their immense
egos and yen for contemporary literary recognition made such a course
impossible to plot, to the relief of the author.
There was little relief for Rupert, despite
liberal applications (external and internal) of that acclaimed
mariner’s fragrance, Sailor Vie (a favourite with ABC presenters). He
spent the entire voyage sea-sick, a malady that never affected that
sea-dog George as he squinted down his astrolabe. Rupert also despised
the way his shipmate would continually spout his awful ‘poetry’ as
they slid up and down awesome swells, bigger than Orson Welles, and
washed past treacherous floral reefs and flowery meadows of Sirens
(Rupert insisted on being lashed to the mast to avoid the temptations
of Eeyore, well he enjoyed that sort of thing), yawing and pitching
and rolling stomach-turningly. White pointer sharks circled them on a
regular basis and popped their briny heads up through the hole in the
middle, so the literary seafarers were forever rigging up jury-masts
or manning the pumps and fighting off fragrant ABC pirates - the
cannon was basically a nuisance the rest of the time.
What did they not do to be rescued?
George tried to harness a dolphin but it bit
him and porpoised off smartarsedly, which was unwise because as it
looked back and jeered it ran into an aircraft carrier.
Chapter Twenty-six: Seafaring Literati 200
Since the tropical sun was beating down on his

head much of the day he got the ‘green’ notion of powering the tyre
with solar energy. (Do you ever get the feeling that this stuff was
written by Leonie Barmy?) The outcome was weeks of tinkering with
passing driftwood and flotsam which Rupert, now suffering from
dysentry, found boring as he curled up dying in the bows. The
hammering and sawing also kept him awake at night and as it made
George forget to read the stars - Rupert (in between the squits)
missed those nightly horoscopes as he like Gerald was still a Virgo -
they got hopelessly lost and so the journey took twice as long as it
should have done.
Sadly, no Saviour had been born in the vicinity
either.
George’s contraption never worked (nor his
invention) but certainly made the tyre more crowded. George could not
be persuaded to throw it away.
“My sweat’s gone into that.” he fumed.
“Aj aj aj, Sir.” Defeated, Rupert stuck his
head over the side.127
George’s next bright idea (apart from his
glowing memory of a tawdry liaison with a bold gendarme just outside
Marseilles in 1983) was to harness the power of the waves. He
constructed what DIY buffs like himself called a ‘pelton wheel’ and
succeeded in getting it to spin and pelt, but despite his scoring of a
tax shelter in Tonga the effort proved nugatory. He’d fashioned a
propellor and crankshaft from a pile of junked and varnished beercans
that had built up so much in this part of the ocean (the Mariana
Trench) that it had reached the surface. But while the pelton wheel
turned the propellor satisfactorily they didn’t make any headway but
just went round in circles.
“I’m sure you must have Welsh blood.” said
Rupert, for the tyre was behaving rather like that perverse slithering
Welsh dinghy, the coracle (cwrwgl if you don’t wear false teeth). Even
an appearance by the Virgin Mary (alias Stella Maris) didn’t help much
though it proved that she could walk on the water too, and in
international waters at that.
“Show off.” jibed George, hotly denying any
Celticness, since Leonie and her father had brought that mongrel
ethnicity into great disrepute. His blood had been imported at great
expense from Morocco in any case, drawn possibly from the scrotal
veins of dropsical camels.
Rupert, by now afflicted with scurvy, said
nothing. He was seeing things, including128 a little ark of bulrushes
containing a baby and two colourfully-dressed shellbacks armed with
banjoes, drop-earrings and yarmulkes. The ark was fitted out as a
man’o’war, and the Jolly Roger in red flapped languidly from her mast.
“Moses?” he croaked in disbelief, wishing he’d
eschewed poetry for his former hobby of training rotifers. A torrent
of abuse in sixth century Welsh (translating as ‘scurvy dog’ etc)
assailed his ears. As a solidly Iberian Celt himself (and possibly a
figment of Leonie’s imagination) he felt quite offended and blew a few
tremulous notes of protest on his gaita. Ignoring him and his
bullfighting, the two hearties began to sing a shanty:
We come from de brer jungle where it’s dark and green

Cain’t see beyond yo’ hand anything marine
But now we can say widout a trace o’ de spleen
Dis the biggest brer river we ever seen!
127
No further explanation is needed, but here it is for those readers who unlike the author couldn’t get
into Mensa. Obviously, he’s talking to a shark.
128
He also saw The Ten Commandments, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Ben Hur.
200
Mazel tov!
Rupert scurved back as best he could.

Noah steamed past too in his refurbished Ark of
85 000 tons (renamed the SS Titanic), on his way to America with the
first Mormons (as per 1 Nephi 18 - see also the Books of Chloroform
and Phenobarbitol, passim), who peered at them curiously from their
deckchairs and talked loudly (when not jumping ship) of India and the
perfidy of their punkah wallahs. Captain Clytemnestra Nemopopoulos of
the Lesbian Navy surfaced predictably in the Nautilus, but was soon
yelling Mon hoots! Dive! Dive! Dive!, while assorted Viking and
Phoenician craft fired pom pom shells over their heads, much to the
disgust of Sinbad who despite his aircraft carrier of rocs was totally
ignored and felt much like Ahmed, till he torpedoed the lot of them.
Next came Jason and the Argonauts - pursued by
female buccaneers Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Pirate Jenny and Iphigenia
23, all grooving (naturally) to the ABC - then the cunningly-wrought
cedar ship of Ulysses, the good ship Venus and the Nina, the Pinta,
and the Santa Maria. His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour was barely noticed
(apart from Sea Mog who was terrified he’d fall in and hid shriekingly
and injudiciously within several coils of anchor rope) whereas on this
occasion Jonah failed to turn up at all, having possibly been made to
walk the plank in the interim. Nevertheless, the sea was soon alive
with historical and mythological voyagers.
The by now very pregnant Mary flounced and
vanished, upward that is. Meanwhile, Thor Heyerdahl padalled past on
the Kon-Tiki, together with a brace of heavily-armed outrigger canoes-
of-the-line bound with live sheep for Aotearoa. With the
predestinarian inevitability of contemporary economic Stalinism,
dreadnoughts, whaleboats, the Spanish Armada, three trim beaked ships
from Syme , the Swiss Fleet, Wiseman’s ferry, a Ship of Fools, a
windjammer or two, a passing moaning wind with Marcel Marceau walking
on the water against it, the Marie Celeste, several varnished junks, a
dhow, a peret-boat, an hermaphrodite brig, a felucca, a jolly-boat, a
curragh, a Berocca, a carvel-built Falmouth quay-punt, a herring buss,
a Humber keel, a water velocipede, a Portland Lerret, a beach-yawl, a
Deal galley, a Shetland sixern with a fucksail, a Ness yole, an
Aldeburgh sprat-boat, a Harwich bawley, a Brighton hog-boat, a plywood
xebec, an indeterminate number of Portuguese carracks, a rotor ship, a
piragua, a jinxed Australian bark dinghy, a houseboat of bonking
hippies, a bedsitboat of bedding beatniks, a toothpick, a corvette, a
torpedo-cruiser, a game of battleships, a logjam, a cruising yawl, six
umiaks, a kayak, a yashmak, Hans Tholstrup in a waterproofed
Volkswagen, the Oseberg ship, various hearts of oak, a feather caique,
a horse-drawn sewage barge, a horseless Taliban burqha, various
breaststroking bluejackets, some butterflying wherrymen, several
commodores and bo’s’ns doing the Australian Crawl, Mr Midshipman Easy
in a desperate dog-paddle, Captains Hornblower and Hook performing
their debut pas de deux in daring gilt water-wings, a quacking army
duck, a team of Sydney swans, Ferdinand Magellan, Jacques Cartier and
Bartholomew Diaz scoffing their shoe-leather, Francis Drake and his
fellow privateers making a killing off-shore, a Viking ship bearing
her dead-drunk warriors into the Uttermost West, all the watercraft
ever lost in the Bermuda Triangle, the ferry from the River Styx
piloted by Davey Jones the Thief and crewed by several carousing dead
leathernecks, Utnapishtim’s barque (which was worse than his bight), a
tartan, a polacca, the Owl and the Pussycat in their beautiful pea-
green boat, the Oxford Rowing Team, mass-debating and carousing
vociferously and way ahead of Cambridge, a corvus, a galleass, a
jackass, a transatlantic packet a bit out of its way, an inflatable
oil tanker, a coble, a drogher, a zabra, a toy plasticine minesweeper,
a dugout ocean liner, a regatta of fibreglass caravels commanded by
Prince Henry the Navigator, the original Rainbow Warrior, a French
201
gunboat full of carousing matelots downing absinthe-and-bilgewater, a

canter, a concrete hydrofoil, an abstract dromond, a blazing pearling
lugger, three men in an icebreaker (Popeye, Jerome K. Jerome, and
Vasco de Gama) , three who made a revolution, three blind mice, meat
and three veg, three’s a crowd, three’s a jolly good fellow, the Holy
Trinity dragged along juggernautically by a straining Mexican hairless
walking fish, a coelacanth, a collutory, a suppository, a mermaid with
finger raised, a trilobite with a diploma in Creation Science, the
South Sea Bubble, the Very Slow Train, suitably waterproofed, the
Flying Dutchman, the Mayflower, the Beagle, the wreck of the Hesperus,
the Scotia, the Moravian, the Narcissus, the dead albatross of the
Ancient Mariner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, rather bloated, the Manly
ferry, the Hispaniola, the Covenant, the Lady Vain, the QEII, the brig
Rebecca flying the Jenkins’ Ear and the tailtwisting Red Dragon, an
escadrille of paddle-steamers, Bilbo Baggins aboard the Gollum, the
great Tey whale, a Canadian birchbark canoe (Canadian-ness was less a
nationality than a mental illness, as Leonie had it, based on her
viewing of re-runs of ‘The Forest Rangers’ - she went round saying
‘eat your grub, Chub’ for days - and other questionable school
programs on pay-tv), a Russian trawler, a Mycenaean frigate with its
crew dead from poison gas, the Royal Barge of Pharoah Tuthmose II, the
Last Fleet of the East California Navy, the Great Harry, the Golden
Hind, the Ark-Royal, the Mary Rose, the Royal Yacht Britannia, the
Fair Sky, the Dinkum Sky, the Arcadia, the Canberra, the Strathnaver,
the Queen Mary, the Celtic (naturally), the Oriana, the Lusitania, the
Arabia, the Olympic, the battleship Potemkin Village, the Shota
Rusteveli, the Exxon-Valdez, the Achille Lauro, the Pueblo, the
Mayaguez, the Liberty, the Eternal Vigilance, the Amethyst, the
General Belgrano, the Emden, the Bismarck, the Deutschland, the Graf
Spee, HMAS Melbourne, the Voyager, a leaf, sixteen psychedelic tramp
steamers chocabloc with Australian ‘60s would-be rock stars working
their passage to Swinging London, a cockleboat containing St Brendan,
a sloop-of-war, a ship of state, a tug-of-war, a tug-of-love baby, ten
prison hulks full of failed ‘80s entrepreneurs, innumerable boat-
people from all points of the compass, a rubber duckie, a floating
dollar, a convoy of Turkmenistanian bathtubs, a chorus of serenading
gondoliers led by the tone-deaf Doge of Venice, The Merry-go-round in
the Sea, a bidarka, a sampan, a trireme, a team of galley slaves (at
82¢ a galleon), and the Cutty Sark yawed and pitched and rolled and
creaked across the wide expanse of the ocean. Rupert, who had no sea
in his blood at all, was shocked at the realisation that only he could
perceive these things.
All in the golden afternoon

Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three …
Rupert began to quote at the sight of these

four literary figures and was rebuked for such quasi-Trinitarian
plagiarism. He deplored Sino-Christianity and had never voted for the
Pope who had no divisions in any case. Had Leonie been with them she
would have committed suicide by fire on the Steps of Parliament House
for sure, a good reason to keep her out of most of this chapter since
the whole novel depends upon her. (Whew.)
Weigh hey and up she rises, shantied George
and Rupert alone heard an echo of this from the little ark, which was
by now almost out of sight.
A voice suddenly came from Above: “Hey, you
three opinionated monkeys! They should have sent talent scouts for a
202
son such as mine - and here I am big with child again. Go watch your
flocks by night, peasants! What use is frankincense and myrrh to me?
(The gold I had to pawn to pay the landlord.) Men!” If life is built
on paradox, there’s no more to be said: we must be dead. God is
watching you the voyeuer
Mary’s last jibe was biologically only partly
accurate as Rupert by the grace of God perhaps had a full set of
female internal reproductive organs, though he didn’t ever find out.
Nevertheless, it was some time before he / she
could convince George (technically-speaking an XX male himself) to
cast off from the tinkerer’s playground they’d found. By that stage
he’d Rube Goldbergly129 built a generator, super-capacitor and an
electric motor and was insisting it would work and filing for a
patent. But Rupert impulsively pushed the tyre away from the mountain
of detritus.
“I only had one more wire to go.” wailed
George, the only time on the trip that he was unhappy.
Loud and boisterous grew the wind, and gurly
grew the sea, as Rupert had it (though rarely paid for it). Och, Mary
gae and call the cattle haim … I’ll call them whatever I like …
“Cusha! Cusha! Cusha!” calling, / Ere the early dews were falling, /
Farre away I heard her song, / “Cusha! Cusha!” all along / Where the
reedy Lindis floweth, / Floweth, floweth; / From the meads where
melick groweth / Faintly came her milking song - What the fuck was the
point of tearing your guts out for poetry when no one would even give
you the price of a cup of coffee for it? The question of why the arts
were regarded so poorly hanging in the boisterous wind, they drifted
onward, weighed down by their irritating cargo and an itinerant
evangelical Cargo Cultist, until lightning struck the new beercan mast
and magnetised it.130
Suddenly they were the centre of attention for
every piece of ferrous metal on the seabed, plus a fast-approaching
garbage scow that had broken away from its hokey moorings in Canadian
waters.
“Quick, toss it overboard!” panicked Rupert,
for they were now floating Naomishly very low in the water. Rupert
pictured himself falling and falling (yes, twice) into depths where
there is only darkness, holding a gurgling conversation with an angler
fish. Bits of metal kept whizzing upward, almost jolting them into the
sea. (Ahmed should think himself lucky he wasn’t present.) Then an
airliner flew overhead and was nearly dragged out of the sky.
“Burks!” yelled the Captain in Tagalog and she
decided that by way of revenge - being as far as she was concerned the
Messiah - she wouldn’t report them to the authorities in Manila or any
other language. It was Passover, and that’s why she was passing over.
But they were sinking! Rupert couldn’t swim and
pestered George to teach him but George folded his arms and
disdainfully refused.
With a struggle they got the mast over the side
and it took all the metal with it, not to say the garbage scow - but
the tyre shot up in the air and they both fell in. When they surfaced
their tyre was moving off into the distance and Rupert thought of the
terrible depth below, a distance greater even than the height of the U
& O building and rather deeper than his own character. He trod water
till he was breathless (a rather pointless exercise when he thought
about it) and then his cardboard head went under. This was the End (I
can hear the reader sighing with misplaced relief), and he wondered
what God looked like in real life and realised that before the
129
Heath Robinson and Gyro Gearloose collaborated on this prolix double-barrelled adverb.
130
Plainly, these were old-fashioned steel beercans left over from WWII.
203
hallucinations it had been Our Lady he’d seen. What a pity he was a
Jehovah’s Witness.
He felt something curl round his neck and knew
it was the hairy tentacle of a giant sea-squid (a sort of squid pro
quo perhaps), as the kraken woke below him. He opened his eyes (they
made most interesting reading), lungs bursting, and saw a craggy face
grinning at him through the water. Convinced it must be Jonah, he said
a quick and silent prayer and prepared to meet his Maker.
The figure grabbed him by the throat and he
felt himself lifted out of the water and with horror and angst and the
fear of another Great Depression he saw that his saviour was George.
Laughing after the fashion of Daddy and kicking
his legs like an electrified or boiling frog, George did the butterfly
stroke and with a sonic boom they moved toward their shabby vessel,
which they’d named the ‘Retread’ and wasted a whole bottle of easy-pop
Bollinger on. (May God bless her and all who sail in her, Rupert had
said in an unconvincing falsetto.)
It was glorious to be aboard the stout ship
‘Retread’ again, but George’s endless reminders that he’d saved
Rupert’s life began to tell on his lover.
To make matters worse, George would keep
yelling “Ahoy!” and “Arrr, Jim Lad!” at every passing oil tanker or
cruise ship or pirate ABC radio station but they never got a lift or
so much as a wave back, or even a ripple. They were compelled to
paddle with their hands much of the way to Australia in the general
absence of boisterous wind apart from that constantly escaping
Rupert’s rear.
They were so desperate in this Irish hurricane
(Mary Robinson has objected) that they’d even made an attempt to use
that (Rupert directing his end at the sail George held up) but they
flew into trouble with ends-means debates and the alleged laws of
physics and after a polemical exchange with Stephen Hawking over their
mobile they grudgingly gave up but never admitted it to Stephen. On
the contrary, they published an account of their alleged success in
Nature. It was hell getting referees, for football 131 was not very
popular in this part of the world.
Mind you, it’s quite a level playing field on
calm days and if Jesus ever gets a team together …
Unfortunately a second rare stroke of lightning
set Rupert’s gas ablaze and for a time the tyre took on the appearance
of a floating oil rig except for its velocity in the wrong direction.
It could be seen for miles at night but received about as much
assistance as Noah’s Titanic did. Good thing they had videos of The
Simpsons, though no VCR.
After seven months at sea, reduced to eating
the shamrock seeds that had sprouted in the treads of their trusty
tyre and getting quite squiffy, they got the idea of using the mobile
to call for help but after a fight over whether to go through Optus or
Telstra the thing was lost overboard. They both retired to sit stonily
at each end of the ‘Retread’, George with his good eye to his
telescope, a mail-order parrot on his shoulder making smart remarks in
early Baltic Javanese, and eyepatchless Rupert, when not throwing up
or squirting streams of noisome diarrhoea over the gunwales or
sometimes at his saviour George, with his head cradled in his hands in
despair.
They’d also been forced by the Taliban Navy to
grow beards when the hormones ran out and this had rendered both of
them unbearable in mood and behaviour. These beards had swiftly become
infested by lice and white ants and once George even tugged out an
anaconda which almost crushed them both to death till they threw it
131
The same is clearly true of netball and other womens’ sports.
204
into the ocean and it was swallowed by a yuppy, mobile-carrying sea-

snake.
Somehow despite the fact that the only decent
wind they got was a force-ten gale blowing the other way (plus several
doorknockers in dinghies peddling Confucian Daoism) they made it to
Australia after two years of what to Rupert was hell and to George an
idyll.
It was a happy day when George, ensconced as
he’d been for weeks in the crow’s nest, called out “Land ho!” It was a
false alarm but after several months of these he yelled “Land ho!” to
Rupert’s eye-rolling abhorrence and it turned out to be true.
The only rescue helicopter anyone had bothered
to send out took them for drug smugglers or boat people and nearly
shot them (to use a leonism) out of the water, so they were not in the
best of humours as they drifted through Sydney Heads, nearly run down
by the tremendous flotilla of vessels. George at first thought it was
their reception committee and stood to take the salute (almost
capsizing their own sturdy craft), but it soon became clear that the
vessels had turned out for the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht
Race. For Rupert this was too much, and he stood in the stern
screaming his lungs out at an eighteen metre spinnakered vessel on
board which a smug blonde woman downed champers with Noah and
Utnapishtim and snarled. Yes, it was Leonie, and she seemed quite
pleased to see them indeed, and laughed herself sick.
After being stopped by water police,
breathalysed and beaten up, they landed some unpleasant hours later
beneath the Gladesville Sewer Outfall. The bottles they’d released at
the party-hearty start of their voyage with hysterical messages and
poetic effusions inside floated in at their stern. Fog closed in and
foghorns went waw-waww and jaw-jaww thanks to the nearby Gladesville
Artificial Fog and Golf Course Works, a profitable private intitiative
to create ‘real jobs’ and staffed entirely by robots.
“Hey, here’s one from Mum.” cried Rupert
(adding gnomically that sex had become something of a crutch to him).
“‘Keep warm at night and don’t wee in the Pacific with global warming
as it is these days’.” he read aloud, then signalled the information
to the world by dog whistle.
George moistened a finger and held it in the
air. Kneeling in the direction of Mecca, he washed ordure out of his
hair and read aloud from a rolled-up postcard he’d got from Leonie:
“‘Serves you right, Cymro pantywaist. Hope you bloody drown.’”
He once more reminded Rupert of how he’d saved
his life by being such an exceptional swimmer. Drown, indeed! But why
did she think he was of the Welsh faith - he who went to the reform
mosque every Friday for the Gin Rummy and excellent digestive biscuits
and jam sessions on the Cambrian ud. Patently she (being tone deaf and
thus no jazz and jug buff) was out of her tree.
“Well, why didn’t you get in the water and push
the thing?” exclaimed Rupert, a-pickin’ a true one-note samba on a
Celtic harp while perusing an ancient Pete Seeger Banjo Primer, both
bequeathed to him by his pipe-smoking and Polk Salad-chewing Galician
grandmother. (Yee-har, get this one down yer, boy! she’d yell as she
sped by in her steam-powered Holden Caramba with the entire Liverpool-
to-Dublin Ferry Ship’s Dance Orchestra on board carousing noisily.)
“We’d have been here a year ago if you had.”
“Never thought of that.” replied George
bashfully, being rather fierce at times. He blew a few down-home riffs
on his hornpipe, a-tootley-spittly-toot-tout-suit. “Maybe you’re right
- I’m the nautical genius but perhaps your idea to head for Florida
was better.” he added conciliatorily with a fond caress and a snatch
of Benny Goodman he’d once heard at Reykjavik’s famed Hot Springs
Club. Rupert responded with a stunning ‘cool’ jazz and jug version of
Nat King Cole’s celebrated burlap rendition of The Rich’s early punk
205
cover of the Indigo Girls’ sophisticated interpretation of the Dutch

Swing College’s manic rendering of Dionne Warwick’s striking satirical
performance of Art Blakey’s bathtime bongo hit Die Fledermaus on the
Andalusian Shepherd’s Carillon.
Hoe-downing thus, they got out of the
‘Retread’, which promptly sank, and onto dry land. It took a while to
get their land-legs and Rupert was violently sick everywhere for quite
a time. His six months on the Mir space station when he was ten had
not prepared him for this, tovarisch.
The place was deserted, everyone being down by
the Harbour, and being penniless and not in the mood for bugle lessons
they had to hitch-hike out of the murk to the Cultural Centre. They
were in for quite a surprise.
The footsore and barnacled pair, borne down by
the weight of the Great Bell of Moscow, trudged into the capital about
two hundred hours afterward, having taken a wrong turn at Campbelltown
and detoured through Coonabarabran without getting a single ride. All
the way George had been irritating and making jokes about backpacker
murders, particularly round Bowral.
This put a strain on their otherwise loving
relationship and Rupert almost called it all off and threatened to
sail back to Barbados on the next tyre. Seeing that he might be left
alone with no one to torment, George suddenly apologised in the most
grovelling manner and Rupert refused to budge till he’d licked him all
over in the full glare of the combined headlights of seven very slow
road-trains.
Nota Bene: the author has taken note (!) of

complaints that there aren’t enough Seventh Day Adventists,
Christadelphians, Scientologists, Swedenborgians and ‘animists’ (with
their respective Religious Instruments) in this story.
206
Chapter Twenty-seven: Daddy’s Demise
George and Rupert were now open about their

hornpipey relationship (although of course it like quilting was
illegal in today’s progressive Australia) and could be seen abroad in
Canberra and Sydney spouting poetry aimed against Leonie and Prátt and
Daddy, all the while cleverly wearing fur coats and tossing goldfish
at people. They lived on the dole (the Swedish dole by a ruse since
that frozen land had become a hotbed of extremist collectivism) and
were ceaselessly upbraided by Conservatwangs and visiting European
Monetary Union evangelists (join Europe? join the lemmings) for living
off ‘my tax dollar’. (Iceberg Enterprises eventually persuaded them to
join their Ethical Business as Management Consultants.132)
Other forms of public provision such as the new
PM’s praetorian guard - they’d graduated from pogo sticks to rocket-
assisted roller-blades - Defence, ARSE and the new anti-thought police
(safer to tell people not to think rather than what to think) escaped
such interest.
Prátt, his superannuation publicly subsidised
by the State Lottery and a crushing tax on ethical businesses, would
watch them from his office, wondering why they were carrying placards
and getting monstered by the cops. He took up a pair of powerful
binoculars and a number of other hobbies and saw that the sign in
George’s hand read, GIVE ME BACK MY JOB YOU QUEER BASTARD. How PC.
(Rupert’s read THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH, SAVE AT WOOLWORTHS as was
all the go in the 1st century.)
George’s finger silently thrust upward in his
field of view as the salt’s boot made groin-kicking and hornpipe
motions in time with a plainly spaced-out St John. Another candidate
for the Venus posting, Prátt thought, glancing at the one polar bear
picture he’d left out of sentimentality on the wall: George’s foster-
Mum. There was a distinct resemblance. He took the spare goldfish bowl
out of the cupboard below the bookcase and emptied the contents onto
his former boss’s distant head. They were repairing the pavement for
weeks afterward because George knew that wile and stepped aside at the
last minute.
(Later Prátt / Rowena learned from the
Telegraph that the goldfish had gone straight through the water main,
penetrated the earth’s crust (generating much scientific interest) and
headed for the planet’s core to emerge somewhat later deep-fried in
Brussels where it was scoffed by Maurice who immediately expelled it
from her system and re-ate it a few times till its bony remains
drifted down the gutter and into the river and across the Atlantic and
down the eastern seaboard of the United States till it reached
Barbados, where it was swallowed by one of George’s old cats - Sea
Mog’s 14th-great nephew in fact - who stowed away in the wheel-housing
of a Jumbo Jet for Australia, disembarked at Mascot and crawled to the
U & O Building and struggled up its sheer and windblown face, till it
could be heard mewing plaintively at the now cat-doorless windowpane
till it was knocked upward by a chopper blade and flew over the roof
and into a ventilator shaft down which it slid helplessly yowling a lá
Norman’s and through this fortuitous method blasted its grateful way
into Prátt’s office where it crapped out a bone or two on his desk.
But this was three years later and has little to do with the story.)
After Sean Begora’s faceless successor (of what
was now called the One Race Party) was thrown out of office for
personally strangling a black Unemployed protester, an act explained
away by the Justice Minister Mr Barmy but one that truly horrified
Leonie and led to him being replaced by a non-Edenic garden gnome (one
132
Those who can’t, teach, those who can’t teach teach PE, and those who can’t teach PE become management
consultants, as the Holy Book of the Gigglebusteríans has it. Never would I pinch a gag from Woody Allen
or Bernard Shaw.
Chapter Twenty-seven: Daddy’s Demise 208
with all the poetry of a tin can which even Andy Warhol couldn’t have
made look good), Rupert was cut off the Swedish dole for his bad
attitude and making fun of Scandinavians and their silly dialects and
forced to live exclusively by selling crack and turning tricks in
Fyshwick. Scandalously, the Greater Heligoland Embassy caught fire the
same evening and he was at last awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
- the first time, in fact, that it had ever been awarded to an
acknowledged Celtiberian.
His alibi - that he’d been out at the time,
exercising his hairless Mexican walking-fish in a nearby stormwater
drain - the police regarded as too ingenious to be untrue.
But onto Daddy. Due to Leonie’s latest novel,

the feculent ‘Daddy Paddy’ almost lost his fight to regain full
control of the Celtic Mafia. It (the novel) told the world that he’d
raped and terrorised his own daughter since she was small. It also
mentioned the bodies under the house which turned out to be a mass of
rotting pork chops put there to delude and terrify her. The government
was racked with scandals and cover-ups and the criminal justice system
collapsed. O happy day.
To his surprise, people deluged his answering
machine, e-mail box and aneroid hygroscope with complaints. Rock
spider! they chanted, and according to contemporary fashion marched
and burned effigies of Leonie in the toll-streets. The Cultural Centre
was blown up again, but few noticed amid the general atmosphere of
wealth not trickling down and revolution for the hell of it that was
abroad.
For unto us a child is born, fulminated red
priests everywhere, opportunistically or genuinely trying to capture
this climacteric moment.
Worse than that, from Daddy’s perspective, was
the revelation that he recycled his holy and ethnically-cleansing
bathwater. That had been handed down by his father and his father
before him and indeed was possibly 2000 years old, which accounted for
why he smelt like an ancient Roman puticulo.
He thought of his teeming ancestry (potentially
ressurectable by advanced Celtic genetic engineering, since all their
remains had been buried at sea in his magical and n-dimensional
bathtub) and tried to glow like his daughter’s hair with pride, but
the embarrassment of having his innermost secrets revealed - with the
resulting blow to the CM’s corporate image - left him a fading,
pathetic, and therefore more dangerous figure despite winning the BHP
Award for the Dirtiest Old Man in Australia and starting up a campaign
of self-hagiography on ACT Milk cartons that had people throwing up at
the breakfast table.
And all of it was the fault of Leonie, t h e
ungrateful commo bitch. He’d hang her with piano wire, but she wasn’t
at all musical.
“And now they tell me she’s a fookin’ lesbo and
all! With a property in the Homeland, the bint! I’ll drown me own
undutiful daughter in dis bathwater!” he assured his guards in his
phoney accent, but they just winced at the rhyme and the awkwardly
sprung rhythm he’d pinched from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Nevertheless, following a bitter factional war
and the odd massacre - he resumed his old position of what he hoped
was absolute power. Leonie and that black bastard, he oozed, were
about to cop it. The purges he unleashed were terrible, had him and
the whole CM running to the bog in Ballypigswillery every fifteen
minutes. But in the interests of free speech he did confess to being
secretly a Welshman like St Patrick after the newly-Communist Irish
ambassador sent a formal protest Note to the Government - no doubt
with Myrddyn’s connivance - condemning his Bringing of the 70 million-
strong Irish People into Disrepute.
208
He knew that his public career, with its strong

commitment to preserving the Treasures of the Celtic World and racial
hygiene, was drawing to its pious close (and thereby winning the Blake
Prize for Religious Art). However, he saw himself as the elder
statesman and wished to run everything Pinochetly from behind the
scenes. Leonie would be his again, his lone white heir - if only he
could find her. He was convinced that the Celtic Mafia’s sole rival,
Iceberg Enterprises, was protecting her.
Daddy made venomous growling noises at Ahmed as
he paced about leaving steaming greasemarks on everything. Glancing up
at Mick and Pat and Adolf on the wall, he rang his bank manager in
Switzerland to fix up his rollover fund.
“I’ll have dem anti-Celtic Tibetan Christian
Zionist Semite bastards and drown ‘em all in their own bathwater!” he
roared. “Crucifyin’ all me 100th-great grandparents like that. Det var
en gång en flicka, som hette Askungen. Hon hade två systrar … Shit!
Dat bloody t’ing’s gone on the blink again.” It went into a number of
Christian languages and savaged him mightily, but luckily for him he
couldn’t understand a word.
Ahmed, spying for IE, said nothing, apart from
belting out with a verse or two of the Sino-Swedish National Anthem,
Du gamla, du fria, du fjällhöga Nord
…
Daddy was 110 today and had by way of a reward
for his endless years of service to the Arts bought himself his first
golden set of false teeth and bra and applied for a KCMG. (Teeth were
not really needed most of the time since he existed solely on
bathwater and Bushmills to remain - as we’ve observed - completely
pure of alien genotypes, aberrant or otherwise.) This Sunday morning -
flexible working hours were all the rage with the CM - he’d retired
from his position of Chief Executing Officer, intending to take up
several hundred directorships and prospective dictatorships winkled
off Norman, and a writing career.
(His first book, about the social significance
of bathwater among the Silibuga, had been published lately by the
impartial U & O - now an IE subsidiary - as Daddy needed, against his
better judgment, to balance the CM’s budget. It had turned out to be a
tremendous flop.)
This gratified him as only the select few would
be able to comprehend it. Warm glow in place, thanks in part to a few
jugs and a sexual liaison with a leprous echidna, he felt it was time
to go to Mass and give thanks. He clutched The Little World of Don
Camillo (Don Camillo would have shot him) close to his chest and
remembered with fondness and a tiny twinge of guilt how all those
years ago he’d kidnapped his own daughter - and now he’d bloody lost
her!
Rottener than ever, he hobbled on his crutch
into St Fergus’s Cathedral (just down the road from the Carminative
Order’s convent where Mother Fergus was buried, having died recently
after a Virgin fell on her head during novenas). His coffin-shaped
bathtub was borne behind him by his nosepegged bodyguards. Paddy
nodded ‘top o’ the mornin’’ to the priest (Father Singh) and
genuflected unsteadily before the tasteless reinforced concrete Virgin
the CM had donated not long ago with the claim that it had been carved
209
by ancient abstract Celts from a section of the Blarney Stone. Flanked

by bodyguards who greatly disliked the body they had to guard, he
settled into his private pew, a much-avoided miasma.
Father Singh began to intone something as
meaningless to Daddy as quantum electrodynamics, in an obsequious
‘religious’ voice. The congregation (apart from Daddy) stood and
antiphonated out of habit. Translated from the botanical Latin it
went:
The lord be with you.
And with you.
A reading from the holy Godspell of Andrew
Lloyd Weber …
Glory to you, O Lord.
He then got stuck into Mark or Matthew or one
of them fellers. There was no revolutionary rabble-rousing in his
church.
“Ah, dis is religion, if someone’d rid me of
this turbulent priest.” Daddy muttered. “Dey need to clean oyt the
foreigners, but. Ein Volk, ein Reich - ahem.” He scowled at some of
the congregation, especially those who weren’t quite white, since
having received his Order of the Bath he didn’t regard them as very
hygienic.
Nodding to his brother, Mr Justice Garfield
Barmy, MP, he immediately circulated the following questionnaire:
1. Do you want dese people in our Holy Cat’olic Chorch?

2. Are your opinions completely balanced or are you some sort
of politically correct liberal, or worse still a libertarian plagiarist of de Abrahamic religions
like de hauthor?
3. Do you t’ink I’m the most interestin’ character in dis novel?
As with most questionnaires, hardly anyone

responded, and he took that as a good sign.
His own skin, newly-dyed, glistened with
something vaguely like brake-oil. He farted a few times to clear his
head and removed the last of the lead from the roof, while his
shillelagh dropped unattended from his lap and rolled beneath his
Hobbit-hairy feet. In a hole in the ground nearby lived a Hobbit, but
the disgusting things it got up to at taxpayer’s expense will not be
dwelt on here.
Feeling with Les Barker an odd sense of déja
vù, Paddy gloated. Calculator in shroud-wrapped hand, he worked out
his quarterings. In exclusive begorric fashion, he’d had 2 parents, 4
grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, 32
great-great-great grandparents … Ah, Roots! He hugged his jerry-cans
of bathwater to his wheezing chest too, and again thought of how he’d
ripped Leonie from her mother’s arms. The sanctuary lamp above the
altar went out and the confessional caught fire through spontaneous
combustion induced by his composty presence. Something, he began to
gather, was wrong.
But this was St Fergus’s on a Sunday. God (as
he’d always told Leonie) was in His Heaven and all was right wing with
the world. What could go wrong? He heaved a great sigh as a hundred
nuns lifted up their sweet voices and tits (while Father Singh put out
the fire by furtively urinating on it, causing great clouds of steam
to roll from under his cassock). Celtic pride shot through Daddy’s
veins like the heroin he’d had for breakfast and brought him to the
point of o’rgasm. Time, he smiled to himself, to kill off a few more
teenage dole-bludging arty-farty addicts and improve the Efficiency of
the economy.
“Ah, dis is religion.” he repeated, having
forgotten that he’d said it before. “If only I didn’t have to talk in
210
bloody Irish dialect all the time bedad. And why do I keep feelin’ dat
I’ve been sowin’ the wind” (there was moaning off and he re-farted)
“and, um, how does it go?”
He twisted his head around, just to check that
no assassins lurked in the shadows. By the Virgin, by Gor, a woman
stood, nursing a baby. Her dark eyes met his own. He shuddered.
Ah, dusky maidens … he, like King Solomon, had
loved some strange women. In the spirit of Pope Martin V he lit his
pipe with several anarcho-syndicalist pages of the Talmud and thought
of all those degenerate Arthur Scargillian cloth-capped black-
puddinged types who’d written it - lens-grinders, organ-grinders,
roadworkers, blacksmiths, carpenters, woodchoppers and the like,
deplorably working class unlike his favourite Wog philosopher Seneca
who (he knew) would have cheerfully lynched any black, mulcted any
Icenian or crossed any picket line. Solidarity forever.
Lacking compassion of any sort he basked in the
glory of his Catholicism and dismissedd Sts Columba, Bridget, Karl and
the like as wishy-washy mystical nobodies, believers in the magical
properties of the harp, the sacredness of Iona and cradle-to-the-grave
welfare. His was a more muscular and self-reliant faith, and he
fantasised about re-dismantling the hypertit of the maternal welfare
state and meeting God (and to be on the safe side, Gosh and Bother) in
the afterlife (after slipping St Peter a few thou).
“Good afternoon, Sor, er, Sir. Oh, t’anks, Ah’d
loov a black puddin’, long as you’ve got the food stamps. Didn’t think
you’d be into ‘em, but. Dis is not Ham or ferret is it? Don’t taste
kosher to me. Oy vey!, as me dear departed daughter’d say, takes after
her mother y’know, on about Rosa Luxemburg and Red Emma all the time,
till I showed her the way of all flesh. Heh heh. Um, can’t stand
blacks meself, ooga booga, aw, Mum, not baked missionary again, we ’ad
missionary last night, shut up, son, it Friday , you’ll eat missionary
and you’ll like it, aw, we sick o’ picking at cold Archbishop Tutu and
various Primates o’ de Dutch Reformed Church, pass de bishops please,
de egg-sliced Mulatto is great dis season, can I grab a slice o’
Pauline matzoh (hold de salt it bad for de blood pressure), dis Sliced
Monsignor great wid parsley sauce, sautéd Methodist Loaf my favourite
yum yum, don’t hog de Pressbutton Butties, hey Rastus does you want
watermelon wid yo’ Unitarian Omelette, no Ah’m a vegie Ah’ll jes’ have
Swedes and Ah gwine run round de tree till Ah turns into butter and
guns, dey dance around the fire and eat folks and shrink heads and
stuff. Ha ha - ” (he chewed) “ - stuff … ahem, it’s a famn dine mess
you’ve made down below, St Ollie, ha ha,” (chew) “a real Barmycide
feast of entropy and Unemployment and self-reliance dat’ll probably
lead to an even Greater Depression and ecumenical disaster and global
warming and … and the famed nooka-lee-ar winter, by Gor!” He searched
with the aid of an abacus for an appropriate quotation. “Hope springs
… Alice … boing … er - but if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Spring aldrig efter spårvägnar. (Not that I’m dat way inclined.) The
End of the World is Nigh, eh? A Good workman never blames his tool,
Mate. It takes wooden balls to play polio. I heard of Time’s Arrow
too, Mate, mine’s a bit bent but. Det var en gång … Hennes systrar
tvingade nämligen att förrätta de grövsta sysslorna och vara ensam
hela dagen i det mörka, otrevliga köket. Some day my Prince will
come.” (I wouldn’t dare say all that in front of a Swede, or even a
turnip.) “(Shut up, you.) Well, guess you’d like a Guinness, Cobber.
Er - like me old Dad always said, the place, dis veil of tears Oi
mean, not Life on Other Planets George of the Argyle Sox, lox and
barrel, is full of fookin’ - er, scuse me” (he looked across at a
group of tittering angels) “ladies present - full of pullulatin’
foreigners, but dese little t’ings (take Death) is sent to try us, heh
heh, ahem. ‘Joy is sadder than death, and dies sooner’” he quoted from
the lugubrious and bizarrely-garbed Canberran poetaster Rabid Virgin,
a friend of the streetwalking Rupert da Silvo. The scents of
211
frankincense and myrrh drifted across the nave and up his piggy
nostrils, causing him to hack paroxysmically. “You - hack - did a gamn
dood job with dem - h a c k - Celts, but. Er, would you -
hackahackuckhack - sign dis copy of your book please …”
As the Lord whipped out His hammer and chisel,
he nodded in fantasy to Jesus and clapped him on the shoulder.
“I t’ink we’ve met before, Dad. You did a -
damn fine job last time, Sor, especially the self-reliant Sino-
Vietnamese water puppetry. No need to part the Irish Sea fer you, eh,
Matey? Heh heh. I guess you’re lookin’ forward to the trip back home
to the old country - ” He tugged at his forelock.
Perhaps due to this vigorous, self-reliant
action, his hypothalamus suddenly packed up and his cerebellum went
into overdrive. Sparks flew across his corpus callosum and his
shrunken frontal lobes started to hum like a transformer. (He’d picked
up a fax machine.)
The Carminative nuns went on singing lustily
and, shaken and stirred, he gawked back at them, self-reliant and
open-mouthed. An abyss seemed to open in the vicinity of his loins,
and his thinking became further impaired. Due to his recent and modish
lobotomy (he was a late convert to cosmetic surgery), he realised
dimly that one of those voices was familiar.His sense that some-
fucking-thing was tmesically awry deepened. Perhaps it was because
what was left of his brain was dislocated. Dislocated was brain his of
left was what because was it perhaps. Er …
The off-key voice ...---... in contrast to his
Wagnerian tintinnitus ...---... was not in his head. A boiling frog
went a-courtink and she did ride, a-hum, it went, in between yodels.
High on a hill sat a lonely goatherd …
Close to apoplexy, he quivered from head to toe
like a flagpole or a nose struck by lightning, and his braces flapped
and clanged. That dread screeching and skriking could come only from
one person, the one he’d been searching for for so long.
Ah, religion! Tears sketted like drops of
sulphuric from his eyes. That person wasn’t Jocelyn Newman or Rolf
Harris or Miss E. Coli of Serborga, and nor was it Maria Callas,
Goldie Hawn, Michael Hutchence, Al Pacino, Blossom Dearie, God or
Suzanne Vega. No, it had to be his dear, if not dutiful, self-reliant
daughter. (It certainly wasn’t Ella Fitzgerald.)
Joy filled his heart (or would have if he’d had
a real one) and his collectible fly-buttons hit the ceiling.
A-hum, a-hum, she belaboured his auditory
centre, hidden as she was somewhere in the crush of penguins up there.
(The others gave a jazz and jug rendition of Kyrie Eleison except for
the temporarily Catholic Sister Naomi who was belting out a West
Indian version of Tie me Kangaroo Down, Sport.) Daddy was so
embarrassed that his green (synthetic) hide turned bright red.
Daddee went a-coArtink and hee did ride, a-humm, a-humm - Daddee
went a-coArtink and hee did ride, a-humm, a-humm … Me Daddee went a-coArtink and hee didd ride,
shagd his oanlee dorta with Celtic pride, a-humm, a-humm, a-humm …
Daddy, wincing at the ‘courtink’, tried to make

himself very small (he was hardly well-hung), for she was drowning out
the entire choir. People were looking across at him now, and
exchanging suspicious glances.
Daddee loves LAYOANEE butt shee dusnt love himm, a-humm, -

Daddee loves LAYOANEE butt she dusnt love himm, a-humm, - Daddee loves LAYOANEE butt shee
doesn’t love himm, he oanlee loves her four her quimm, a-humm, a-humm, a-humm …
212
Daddy, sitting to his chagrin in front of an

Aboriginal family and a couple of same-sex Assyrian Christian
orthodontists from Iran133, did his best to look upright, perusing his
Bible with great sobriety, though his malfunctioning bonce was
pounding from the keg of Bushmills he’d had last night. This was
getting a bit much - he was about to order his guards to shoot the
lot, but then they were good Celtic nuns, and Father Singh a man of
the cloth and an expert on the textile industry of 1930s Lancashire
and 1920s USSR. They went into a medley of Byzantine chants and he was
turned on briefly by the thought of the glorious Celtic Empire and the
Epistle to the Galatians. But nothing could shut out that voice.
LAYoAnee loves know one soa thay say, a-humm, a-humm -

LAYoAnee loves know one soa thay say a-humm - LAYoAnee luvs know one soa thay say butt shelE gett
Mummee bak one day, a-humm, a-humm, a-humm …
Daddy could stand it no more. The sizzling

tears were rocking and rolling down his cheeks. He struggled to his
wormy feet and bellowed, “Bejesus! Can’t someone shut her up? La plume
du ma Tante … No Popery and wooden shoes, er … ”
The nuns kept on, but the congregation had gone
deadly quiet. Death he had courted for so long, but it had never taken
to him. How could it - he’d never died before and so had no work
experience at it (nor did anyone else so immortality was imminent).
From his hip flask, he swigged a furtive litre or two of bathwater. He
became quite maudlin, having bathwater taken.
Derty Daddee Paddee loves thee woshing masheen, a-humm - derty

Daddee Paddee loves thee woshing masheen, a-humm - derty Daddee Paddee loves thee woshing masheen,
butt nothink wil never gett himm cleen, a-humm, a-humm, a-humm …
“I’m leavin’!” Paddy febrilely sprayed and

miaowed, to jeers. “Come on, you bunch of spastic spalpeens. Die Mädel
ist schrecklich. Es gibt Blumen im Mai.” His ferret had left long ago
for a better life in the Outback.
The other nuns stopped singing. Her harsh voice
seemed to fill the universe.
Safe in her invisibility and shaking a wobble-
board, she began to croon a la Gerald of the delights of his
bathwater. Fingers in his ears and a ring around his much-bathed neck
that was not one of confidence, he scat-sang in retaliation what she
called the Horse Vessel as loudly as his perished lungs allowed, but
was barely heard over the din. The sheer weight of his knobbled
buttocks caused him to fall back into an odoriferous sitting position.
A boomerang lodged mysteriously in his head and he turned the air
around him blue, rather than the usual coffin colour (he wasn’t one of
those tasteless degenerates who wished to be buried in a pink one with
a snap of Elvis on it).
There sat a girl in a pale pink coater …
His bathwater began to boil.
There was a collective gasp, and he despised
collectivism. A tall and magnificent nun had broken from the choir.
The organist struck up with ‘I like Aeroplane Jelly’ but was booed
into silence.
He quailed. It had to be her. The Cathedral
doors burst open and those jackals of the press who’d been tipped off
by Ahmed swarmed everywhere.
Paddy swallowed, a disgusting experience which
he resolved not to repeat. It was him or her. Recalling his heroic
part in the My Lai massacre, he did his best to look fatherly and
133
All Christian sects were compelled to use the same church due to rationalisation.
213
dominant, while his forebrain underwent a massive restructuring, his

Higher Self responding to the crisis with forced casualisation and the
banning of sympathy strikes. Brain cells were thrown out of work
everywhere and only a few who voted Hole in One were rewarded with
management consultancies. He gave a necrophiliac chuckle: in the long
run we’re all dead in the bathwater.
Down the long and windswept aisle she sashayed,
wildly sharpening her fingernails on her habit. A silver star, he saw
now, shining above her head and pursued by three wise men of swarthy
aspect. Gusts of mortal fear drove out his lifelong bravado for an
instant.
Was this Leonie, he wondered academically, his
scholarly brain short-circuiting and doing cartwheels inside his
racially correct skull, a skull measured before he got it second hand
by the famed American craniologist Samuel Morton and declared to have
belonged to a rickets-ridden silky loris with Downs’ Syndrome.
Indeed, was he not on the Church’s Cephalic
Index? Again, buoyed by the thought, he rose arthritically from his
pew. This time, his bodyguards, directed by Ahmed who had gained
genuine supervisory experience at long last, did the same.
The star glowed brighter.
This bride of Christ (he gathered that bigamy
was all the go in Heaven but was at a loss to understand why the nuns
were all feeling each other up instead of falling at his feet, though
that may have been an hallucination) tore off her wimple. He waited
for the long white hair to tumble about the dangerous shoulders. With
dismay, he saw that she had stopped dyeing it, and it was an alien,
glossy black (much like his own in his misspent youth but he’d
forgotten all that). With that star - she couldn’t be … she must be …
It came to him like an earthquake then: the
awful fact that his theorising had contained a fatal flaw all along.
He realised he was no intellectual and that his whole life had been a
lie.
“Princess!” he roared recklessly in church, his
lack of reck being by now legendary. “It is yoy! Get yer hair ready!
Come to Daddy and fall at his feet - ”
He poured and held out a steaming bucket of
bathwater so she could gratefully wash his plates of meat, and
welcomed her back to earth with open arms, Christ-like. (A hazy memory
made him drop the arms quick.)
Then he saw the detestation on her face. He
shrank back in primordial terror.
The liberties he’d taken, the shame of it all,
of being found out … a spurt of self-pity shot up from his labrynthine
subconscious and paralysed his mouldering cortex. It wasn’t fair, let
alone dinkum. Flicking his wild hair back with his index finger, he
wanted to thunder out his sham Celtic doctrines but his voice, when it
escaped his bearded lips, came out sounding almost like a little
girl’s.
“P-princess? C-come to yer dear old Daddy, me
little shonky-poo.”
She wasn’t stooping now, nor were her hands
between her legs. Toward him she stomped making the Cathedral echo,
till they faced each other, eyeball to eyeball and nose to nose.
“What have you got to say for yourself, girlie?
Are you up the luff - er, duff at last?” He gave off toxic smoke
spontaneously, even now half-anticipating a crescendo of descendants.
The terrible hush continued. He almost wished
she’d break into yodels again, but she merely returned his patristic
interrogation with an icy stare. The star blinded him.
“Cat got yer tongue?” he managed all the same.
“I’ll have it sold off to the Sino-Vietnamese restaurateur in Chapter
Seven. Er, the cat I mean … ”
214
She said nothing but ripped off her habit. He

slavered, expecting incestuous nudity, but she stood before him in her
accustomed garb of sloppy joe, bovver boots and shapeless calico
skirt. Recognising her, the congregation gasped. The international
media lapped it up.
“It’s Leonie Barmy, Leonie Barmy, here in our
dear St Fergus’s!” gushed Father Singh in autograph-book proferring
awe, almost as surprised as if God had made an appearance (though he
was there all the time, having been forced to get a $4 an hour job
caulking the bell-ropes).
“Me darlin’ melanochroic daughter, for God’s
sake, say somet’in’.” Paddy implored, blinded by camera-lights, while
his two wee crystal balls dropped off one by one.
She raised a finger in his aromatic face. He
went cold all over and began to attract fridge magnets.
Father Singh’s cassock began steaming again for
altogether different reasons.
Daddy started to gibber and drool, hurt most of
all by the total rejection he felt emanate from the solidly Irish
majority of the congregation. “Princess! Don’t you know who I am?”
The next word she uttered was heard round the
world.
“Shvantz!”
Stained glass windows vibrated; the baby Jesus
began to howl.
“Ah, well now, a-hum, d-dat was yer d-dear
departed mother’s favourite expression! I never did find out what it
meant. Let’s, er, t-talk dis over … ”
Out of lifelong inclination he reached out for
her thigh but she almost bowled him over with the sheer power of her
lungs. Had Norman been there he’d have taken a vow of silence.
“I’m not your slave any more, Daddy Paddy. And
Mummy’s not dead!”
The statue of the Virgin began to teeter from
the vibrations. Leonie had been rehearsing this moment for almost two
years, in this very Cathedral (a fact wisely kept from the reader till
now, Auntie Rh+.).
Daddy’s ever-present pipe dropped from his
tarnished lips and he retrieved it and clutched it like a daughter to
his rancid chest. His bodyguards were held in check by Ahmed - and at
present it wasn’t wise to be too loyal, since Paddy might be out on
his brown-eye any minute. They confined themselves to making
aggressive motions toward the ultrafamous, tumultuous writer.
His medulla collapsing, he began to wheedle. He
even took notice of Ahmed. “Me darlin’ daughter, me darlin’ little
drunken Sino-Aboriginal [etc etc, a Sino of the times perhaps, better
than being a Wino of the times - ed] daughter, have a heart for yer
poor old Dad who lost that good job taking dictation in the SS and was
forced to turn to crime in Bosnia. Have a heart! ”
“You’re not taking mine.” she responded evenly,
though his confirmation of Mummy’s death had already done so. Her star
became a globe of white-hot rock hurtling toward the centre of his
banal and villainous universe, and for an instant fame didn’t seem to
matter any more.
“But - but - ” he blubbered, “I couldn’t help
meself … It was the same with Hypatia … Look at you - you
propositioned me, girl. I was only 67 … ” He looked round for his
brother the good Judge who readily let off people who slit the throats
of queers and the like, but he had bolted.
The congregation gasped anew. He soon found out
why, even though his neural pathways were clogged by over a century of
racist, misogynist garbage. All hope gone, Leonie leapt Bruce Lee-like
215
into the air, catching him full in his blackened mouth with her steel-
capped toe. The star glowed red as blood.
In a fountain of green and stinking fluid, the
antique gangster fell back against his bodyguards, who were all (apart
from Ahmed, who had suddenly been filled with inspiration for his
almost-completed General Botanical Theory of History and was furiously
scribbling an article about the CM for Blowing Off!) hiding behind him
and quaking with terror. Daddy yanked out his ancient Luger with some
damage to his genitals but she swiftly toed it out of his tremulous
hand.
Bah! Baa!, theorised the shamrockised Paddy as
someone mentioned ‘Art’, the only meaningful thought he’d had in his
long life. Trefoiled again.
“Child, child … ” he gassed on, dying for a
puff, as she rained blows and scratches upon every part of his
disgusting anatomy. “Princess! I’ll pay yer way through Rabbinical
school! You can have a synagogue all to yerself! Or Uluru even. A
Chinese restaurant! Your own pub! I only wanted you to inherit me
millions and run the Celtic Mafia! You’re the whitest kid I have!
Don’t you know I’m your dotin’ - ”
Coolly, she used her immense strength to drag
him to his feet. Boudica herself would have been proud to have had her
as a daughter.
“You demonic, filthy old man.” she cried. The
font splintered. “People think you’re harmless or nonexistent, a relic
of ancient history. But you’re still here. You’re still here and Mummy
…” She began to sob, but continued to hold his reeking lapels in a
grip of steel.
“No, no - I wouldn’t - I’ve a way with the
ladies. Always polite, I am, always really nice. ‘Top o’ the mornin’
to yer, Madamoizel. How’s yer shemozzel? How’d ye like me t’ open dat
door for yer?’ See what I mean?” he beamed round at the congregation,
imaginary topper raised.
“ M u m m e e e e e ! ” she screamed till the spire
(designed by William Golding and the highest on the planet) quivered
and the sanctuary lamp dropped from the ceiling and onto his head. She
spat in his face.
The scream exhausted her momentarily. She had
chest pains and her head ached dreadfully. Why must her life always be
in such disarray?
She took a deep breath, also craving a smoke.
Fortunately, Daddy was doing the same, sucking in the earth’s
atmosphere as if it was going out of fashion, which was probably true.
Why?
Suddenly, she felt she knew.
“You - it was you who made my life all higlee-
piglee! All higlee-piglee … so I couldn’t think or feel or breathe or
know what was going on! You - I even sold my g-gumleaf collection …
You - all higlee-piglee like yours!” She began to shake with violent
sobs and almost bent double in anguish, yelling at her own father in
this impious way, Honour thy Father and Mother, and in a Cathedral of
all places, but the memory of Mummy gave her the strength to carry on.
Daddy smiled reptileanly, and she saw Mother
Fergus’s face. Of course, she had been his grandmother, albeit a
virgin. Thunder rumbled above and God looked on in fear. This time she
was centre-stage.
“You! You might as well have locked me in a
hole and forgotten me! As if I was some - Celtic treasure that you
could store up and use later. As if I was not human.”
“Never … ” He knew at last that she was rather
more than human.
“No? So what did you do to me when I was only
five? What was I to you ?”
216
Daddy made feeble squeaking noises,

disconcerted by the tv cameras pointing at his frothing nose.
“Tell them, ‘Daddy Paddy’. Tell them how you
dragged me out of Mummy’s arms and … crucified me.” Tears coursed
down her cheeks.“No - ” Like mouldy gorgonzola on a hotplate, his face
almost melted with embarrassment. “A block of flats would bring in a
dair-cent income - all you need is a shonky accountant and a high-
powered melodramatic lawyer - no trouble gettin’ dat sort of t’ing in
Israel or fookin’ Lesbos or wherever … ”
Ahmed , flanked by his fellow-dwarf Prátt and
the good Dr MacStein, couldn’t disagree with any of that.
“Wasn’t I your ‘pretty little shonk’ - your
‘darlin’ little boong … ” what does all that mean anyway? - to be - to
be pawed at and screwed and beaten up and locked in cupboards and
denied an education and friends and - ?”
“NO!” he thundered, almost drowned out by the
storm, amazed at how much her vocabulary had expanded. “Not in front
of dem! The jackals … I’ll give you a pig farm. The one I bought off
Paul.”
Daddy had a way of putting his foot in it, and
she already had a Homeland. Astonished viewers all over the world
jammed the switchboards.
“How about a truckload of kiddy porn?” she
retorted, and the good priest looking on reddened and edged away from
his pulchritudinous choirboys.
You tell dat brer motherfucker, Lay-onie chile!
He ain’t no Pappy o’ yorn. came a stirring Voice from the pulpit. A
huge and mild man stood there, earrings glittering and bright Ghanaian
clothes filling the cathedral with light. Only she (and Rupert) could
see him. She tipped him a wink and he returned it, beaming. You’re
doing well, Leonie fach. Cocking his head slowly, he vanished with his
Cheshire cat.‘
“B-but - How can you turn down a pig farm in
Israel … ?” babbled on Paddy religiously, Belfast accent for the
moment in place as he emitted fire and brimstone and fleas. “I mean,
your mob wiped out me trillions of 100th-great grandparents - I never
touched yer Ma - she was THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE
EARTH and had bad breath and her Dad was a drunken chink-Islander
crossbreed shit, she wanted to do ‘it’ every day and I’m a once-a-year
man, descended from the Lost Tribes of - Good God, girl, t’ink of yer
filial duty … you ain’t got no genuine work experience or a hope of
goin’ to Shinola, you just ain’t worth nothin’ to a small business
like the CM … ” He grabbed his nose between thumb and finger and blew
out a long stream of gore and leprechauns. “Jesus, kid, don’t yoy know
dat yoy stink? ”
This was so audacious she almost lost it. Her
Chanel No. 5 (applied externally and internally) was almost overcome
by his pheremonal presence, but she stood her ground.
Sending deadly gusts of dyspepsic breath around
the Cathedral which saved them the trouble of fumigating it that year,
he looked about at the hostile congregation. Thinking on his feet, or
with them perhaps, he expeditiously made a Japanese-style apology (see
footnote number 142). People were beginning to chant “Ped-o-phile,
ped-o-phile! ” (a little tactless, considering where they were) and
throw things. Respectability had deserted him. His soiled Bible
clattered to the floor and a condom fell out of it.
Daddy was deeply mortified. He’d never use one
of them things, not with AIDS around.
“She’s makin’ it up - I ain’t never been no
rock spider!” he yelled, withered arms protecting his giant, solid
head and fustian underarms reeking with poison gas. “You know what
kids are like! Always makin’ t’ings up. Look at her filt’y ‘novels’,
217
all sheilas pawin’ at themselves and tyin’ each other up. I’m a
respectable Fambily man and chicken farmer.”
Once more he automatically reached out for her
breasts. They weren’t sniggering now.
“Dear little Leonie - aren’t we both Celtic,
and right wing as pig-shit?” He loved to wallow in it and self-pity.
Suddenly his hindbrain dropped off and slipped down his spine. The no-
go areas in his head broke out in riots with neural gunships
perpetrating massacres.
She kneed him in the groin and he doubled up.
“Dublin up are we?” she said icily. “And yoy are the keystone, you
vile fake-Irish bastard!”
“Ah, no, no, no, me only daughter … leave such
horrible puns to the author … remember our baths baden baden together
- mein Yiddische tochter … mein Asiatische fisch-und-chip … mein Leek
aus Rechts … baden baden baden baden baden baden …” he spluttered,
haltingly and incontinently breaking into song, and wind that erupted,
Hospital Administrator-like, into blue flame.
His bodyguards opined that this too was a
politically reckless statement. Robert Manne had already written a
scathing critique of it.
Leonie was having no more of this. She took a
deep breath from the aqualung Gerald had leant her, tossed her own
hair out of her eyes and caught him fair in the nose with her trusty
and dinkum boot. His nose turned up a bit more after that.
“Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!” was
about all he could explode in response as he collapsed, nursing his
bruised and bleeding snout.’ “Id’s nod just. I brought yoy up to be a
good girl. Yoy’ve durned into a nonster! Yoy’ve hissed all me mystery
lectures and yoy can leave by the Ted drain! A centipede was happy
quite until a toad in fun … ”
This nuclear blast was measured in concentric
Celtic circles by some Farrakhanians from the galaxy in Andromeda
who’d got onto the Fred Hollows Foundation. Small stones were dropping
like meteorites from above. She thought of Samson ap Dafydd ap Ngberg
Jr.
His bodyguards had raised their weapons and
their doubts about his oral communication skills but Ahmed once more
ordered them to desist. (At last, his Certificate of Celticness had
come through, emblazoned with Celtic Crosses and interlaced ribbon
patterns, and he tore up this travesty of La Téne in Daddy’s
disintegrating face.) Fearing a new purge, they obeyed and deserted
their decomposing leader. With a roar the hundred nuns - all with Uzis
under their habits and led by Naomi - and half of the congregation
pursued them.
“And we found out that you’re not even a True
Celt!” she added triumphally, barely controlling her shakes. “Your
mother was half-Spanish! Your father was German! Your grandmother was
a globetrotting Saxon, born and bred - with fair dinkum hair and blue
eyes and a huge Swiss bank balance - in Pasadena! That makes you a bit
of a half-caste, Daddy, a Latin-Germanic cross! She resumed kicking.
“No … ” he whimpered, and the star, wreathed
now in gumleaves, turned a shimmering gold against a background of
deep blue. “Are yoy … the Messiah?”
She ignored this, afraid of bad puns from the
author and suspecting that her putative father might be right.
“I - don’t know. But there’s worse. All along,
without knowing it, you’ve been a Protestant! ”
“Aaagh! Aieee! I’ve bought it, chaps!” he went,
having been brought up on war comics.
Leonie felt herself filling with unbounded joy.
Daddy, though jerking uncontrollably on the
dusty floor at these dreadful ethnic and religious revelations, had
218
spied his fool’s-gold shillelagh under the pew. His fuming and
tremulous hand managed to grasp the heft. As Leonie, surrounded by
reporters, turned and went into interview mode (though feeling hollow
again at the thought of her mother lost to her forever), he grabbed
his crutch and hauled himself agonisingly to his flat and bunioned
feet. Further flames shot up from his allegedly Celtic temples.
A skunky stench rose from his feet and he
attempted to savour it, his very own grand Tradition. (Whale-flensing
in the tropics would seem an odourless occupation by comparison.) That
was the sort of quality inheritance which went into his bathwater.
Despite being a physical wreck and half-dead (or three quarters after
Leonie’s attack upon him and surrounded by sales reps from a dozen
ear-plug companies), he swelled with an overweening racial pride.
Just one little bonk and he’d have his
submissive little Property back. Not a True Celt, not a Good Catholic
- the ultimate in Heresy.
With an immense and desperate effort, his
tendons and sinews snapping, he raised the shillelagh high above his
head. At that point, Leonie’s mobile beeped out The Blue Danube. It
was a viewer from Hanoi.
“I think there’s something you ought to know …
” Daddy didn’t catch the rest. Dog-eating scum, he thought nastily
(hard indeed to think it any other way).
She whirled round. He saw that bloody Wog woman
again, floating behind her.
He hesitated. “No, me only white heir… ”
To encouraging cheers, Leonie, utterly bereft,
closed in again, boots and nails striking at Daddy’s few sensitive
places. People were heartily sick of the Celtic Mafia and apart from
those taking bets they saw this conflict as crucial (if Christian
readers will pardon the expression) to the future of Civilization as
they knew it, which seemed hardly worth thinking about really.
Undeterred and looking disinterred, Daddy swung
his shillelagh round and round his head, perhaps hoping to take off.
The blows merely bounced off her strong-boned form.
“Yoy won’t take me alive! To t’ink I was goin’
to bequeath yoy the CM! Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes
the questing vole. Yopyu’ve betrapayed de frei korpses ei
fuiyhfoxjhgidfjsoje viujnjrgvjolrgop!” His Broca’s Area had gone
altogether and a hopeless logorrhea supervened. He wondered if there
was a vet or a garage in the vicinity.
She booted the club out of his grasp too.
“Why the fuck did you think I would want it?”
He regained some control over his speech centre
through draconian neuronal suppression and the withdrawal of food
stamps. “B-because - you’re me own flesh and blood and soil. T’ink of
our ancestors … ah ah ah ah ah …” He was wheezing and sneezing like a
vintage puffing billy and his coiling talons groped wildly at her
ankles.
She kicked them off. “Noli me tangere, you
Catholic pig!” It echoed around the cathedral. “Whatever you say, I
hate you, Paddy Barmy! You’re no father of mine. You’re no longer even
human! Let me go!”
Let her go! echoed the congregation.
Lay off Leonie!
Let her live!
And then to her inexpressible gratitude they
began to chant, Long Live Leonie! Long Live Leonie! Long Live Leonie
…134
134
This line is shamelessly ripped off comic genius Nick Gray (personal communication from his solicitor).
219
Daddy screamed, a high-pitched, childish wail

which was his earliest memory as his own father’s steely ‘Celtic’
prick penetrated his rectum at the age of five. Perhaps he’d made a
few mistakes along the line, but then we all do, don’t we, he thought
decorticatedly. He devoutly wished, though, that he’d taken out life
assurance. Perhaps he wasn’t immortal after all.
One, Two, Three, Le-on-ie, hang him from the
highest tree!
Weeping with grief, Leonie drove her boot deep
into his stomach and rancid, smoking bathwater spewed out of his mouth
and ears. Somehow, though her head rang with the curse from the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, may thy eyes never exist, mayest thou never
exist …, she still could not bring herself to kill him. There hardly
seemed a point to it. Naomi and Gerald and the people at IE, for all
their faults, had shown her kindness.
Obstipui steteruntque comae et vox faucibus
haesit! went Daddy, also in inkhorn terms, unintentionally quoting
from Roget’s Thesaurus 860 and making Jacques Lacan seem
comprehensible by comparison.
He called upon God: “Écrasez l’infâme!” The
chain holding up the sanctuary lamp snapped and the lamp, flaming
anew, fell between his legs. But this couldn’t be real; the DTs had
taken hold again, and it happened over and over, indeed maybe forever.
Swathed in further scratches, bruises and
toothmarks, he was grateful when two immensely fat people pulled her
off, though he feared they might be about to sit on him.
Naturally, they were Naomi and Gerald, the
former now the world’s most well-known ethical businessperson, the
latter a celebrated polymath and poet. Outside, IE workers began
revving up their solar-powered bulldozers.
“Don’t kill him, dear - we’ve got to put him on
trial. We’re not barbarians.” advised Naomi, bristling with law books.
What a lot of woossy crap, Leonie thought at first, but after a few
more stunning goals relented and received the World Cup.
Covered in fetid green blood, Daddy fell back
in his pew muttering about revenge and fresh massacres. There was a
groaning sound and the crass concrete Virgin by the door began to lean
dangerously.
Ahmed grabbed his collar. “Insubordinate short-
arsed Harrab!” he responded, quoting St. Goldstein desperately, but
when the little man began to satirise him mercilessly in Arabic he
finally relented.
“Ah, what’s the use.” he said, breaking into a
thick German brogue, as Ahmed pointed the rusty Luger in his face.
“Zey never did appreciate das Art.”
They and Father Singh dragged him out. They
were near the door when Daddy looked up and saw the Virgin135 falling
predictably in his direction. The others scattered. It collapsed on
top of him with a volcanic uprush of dust and flies.
Miraculously (“Rubbish!” - God), he was not
killed, merely rendered a mass of broken bones. He wasn’t too happy
with God at that point. Nor was God happy when IE demolished the
collapsing Cathedral to make way for a ring road. In fact He made a
few threatening phone calls but then it dawned that since the advent
of monotheism and the economic emigration of aegis-bearing Zeus to
another dimension (Australia) there was no one to pass the buck to. He
considered becoming a Marxist, poring over the Theses on Feuerbach the
Welsh atheist all through the night.
After a spell in an IE ethical private hospital
(the CM owned the ‘public’ system of rat-infested spittle houses),
135
Cf Chapter Nine.
220
Paddy knitted together bizarrely and following a successful exhibition

at the National Gallery was taken to the safe house where a trial had
been convened by the currently illegal War Crimes and Atrocities
Commission. (It was the first bit of business they’d had for a while,
General Mladic never having turned up.) A forced scrub with carbolic
and caustic soda had done nothing to rid him of his ‘nose’.
“You are charged with every crime in the
calendar and a few we’ve had to add to it. How do you plead?” asked
the first Judge, Solomona Le-lin ‘Spud’ Murphy the Wise, PhD (#20),
D.Sc (Harriet Tubman College).
“Not Guilty.” said Paddy, shaking a bit at yet
another Biblical figure appearing (as he presumed) before him and
genuinely innocent of perpetrating the Fourth of July. Since he was
unavoidably defending himself, he grabbed his lapels and made an
elaborate and jury-drenching show of clearing his throat:
Ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-
ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-
ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-Habbakuk-ahem-acka-ackaxhem-
hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-
ackahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-
ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-
ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-acka-
ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-
ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-Hecuba-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-do the
Hucklebuckhackahackuckhack-ackahem-do the Hucklebuck-ahem-acka-
ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-hic-ahem-acka-ackahem-
ackahem-hic Harold-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-
amen-ahem-acka-ackahem-brought up by hand- hackahackuckhack-ackahem-
ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ahem-
acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-
ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-
acka-ackahem-Mirrabook-headless chook-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-
ahem-acka-ackahem-hiccipiccipops-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-
acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-huckleberry finn-
ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hickory dickory dock-hackahackuckhack-
hackahackahacka -ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-
ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-
acka-ackahem-grub street hack-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-
ackahem-odd hack-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-
ackahem-ahem-ahem-acka-ackahem-hackahackuckhack-ackahem-ahem-
ahemackahem?
(Between these great expectorations he relived
the Last Supper, drunkenly pleading with Jesus not to leave, I don’
want you t’ go, Boss - hic - but the jury, by now soaked to the skin,
was less than impressed.)
“Er, True Celts, Oi - ” he tried swiftly to rid
himself of the randomly acquired Peruvian accent for fear of ending up
before a ‘faceless’ beak “ - I t’ink dat quality in de Arts (as well
as dat of mercy) is a bit strained dese days. It droppet’ as the
221
gentle rain from heaven, by Gor. Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut
differemus, rectum aut justitium!” he sprayed, casting a weather eye
at the ceiling. “I never got anywhere through the strength of me
writin’, like dat evil socialist fuckwit Prátt I always found dat
shmoozin’ and fart-suckin’ was more effective. Havin’ a Wame and Nork
Experience helps too, and me uncle’s a leadin’ figure in the Minin’
Industry and knew H. Rider Haggard and me brother’s a Judge - ” (He
looked about hopefully but there was no sign of him in Court as he’d
pissed off to Morocco.)
“Objection!” roared the counsel for the
prosecution, Daddy’s futurologist Rosicrucian aunt and a well-known
Arts Bureaucrat who’d converted to IE and the adversarial system of
Brutish Justice.
“Dis trial is a farce! I don’t like life in the
farce lane.” Daddy Paddy bawled back. “Spalpeens! I remember the
Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six and the Prime Minister’s Eleven
and the 1968 Democratic Party Convention at which I was an agent-
provocateur! I haven’t washed since then I might add.” he added
proudly, pointing out that he was no filthy hippie e-rat baby-boomer.
“Greedophilia and economic racialism is not somet’ink Oi’d have
anyt’ink to do with, Jesus Mary and bloody Joseph, no, no, never, no,
never no more, I’m a respectable family man, just a regular guy, Mr
Average mowin’ me lawn in the suburbs, I keep robin redbreasts in a
cage, normal sort of fellow unlike me dear daughter there! I’ve even
held a conversation with the Pope and WH Auden.”
Each member of the jury wiped sputum out of
their eyes and gasped. Recalling his humiliation in church, Daddy drew
from his waistband a crumpled and flyblown cv, printed on the best
toilet paper. Grinning suavely, he went to read it out - but catching
Leonie’s eye he fumbled and it unrolled like the scroll of the
Recording Angel across the courtroom floor.
The jury, 12 good baby-boomlets and true,
didn’t exactly lap it up.
Daddy consulted some economics textbooks and
Mein Kampf, feeling vaguely that like theirs his future had been
foreclosed on. There was an ominous muttering, just like he used to
get from that little traitor Ahmed. His Dad had a lot to answer for -
he’d see to it that they’d be made to know what it was like, they
would feel his will to power, you punch your friends but you kill your
enemies, life was inevitably freewheeling and competitive.
Throwing the lot at them, he continued:
“Men and women of Australia, I refuse
t’recognise the authority of dis Saxon court!” He gawped pointedly at
the first Judge. “If you’d like a pound of flesh, Yer Honour, I can
get it cheap … ” He pulled a bloody leg of pork from his coat and
gestured exuberantly. “Oy, hath I not got eyes?” (One of them dropped
out and he picked it up swiftly and secreted it in his greasy coat.)
“Hath I not got hands in the till already? I was walking along minding
my own business when this feller made vile homosexual advances towards
me and I was forced to deck the bastard … ”
“I prefer The Nanny. It’s more plausible.” the
Shinto-immersed second Judge and Lesbian sumo wrestler (Ms Justice
O’Suzuki) gavelled, turning up the pressure on her oxygen mask. A
ghostly white rabbit looked in at the window and cried out ‘Silence in
court!’, but only Gerald and Leonie noticed.
“But it’s - The Truth - the fookin’ author’s
noddin’ - it fair shines out like a shillin’ from a sweep’s arse … I’m
no shallow-water sailor.” He paraded around wide-legged like one who’d
pooped himself, as in fact he had, except no one noticed the
difference. “Look, Sor, anwylyd,” he went, quoting from his Port Said
CM Bible, “it’s not as if I’m Adolf Eichmann, we were just good
friends … ” Daddy tugged at his forelock furiously (nothing happened).
222
The third judge, Mr Justice Ibrahim Ibn McMucus of East Jersualem,

contemplated the ceiling fan.
“Fuck! Ha’ ye all got ring-rot” bellowed the
mangy mutagenic Mafioso in frustration. “The Gunpowder Plot to blow up
the Cultural Centre, the vicious cutbacks and massacres by the CM and
its client regimes, the international heistocratic system - it was all
Gar’s and Norman’s and IE’s doin’ - and hers, the disloyal lascivious
Asiatic callet.” He jabbed an accusing finger at Leonie, who thought
of her dead mother and her half-witting complicity in so many evil
deeds - and began to cry.
“She’s a witch! She’s a fookin’ witch! A witch,
a witch, a witch, a witch — burn her at the stake! Burn her at the
stake! True Celts, True Celts, True Celts … ” clamoured Daddy,
arm raised ardently in a CM salute, and he had to be restrained amid
an atmosphere of frosty silence.
The trial dragged on for months in similar vein

(a Hatter, a Duchess’s cook and Alice in Wirtschaftswonderland were
among the thousands of witnesses called, the star witness being of
course Leonie herself) but eventually the gasmasked jury were asked to
go and consider their verdict with a visiting Ricki Lake on prime-time
television.
Just before that, Exhibit B, his relativistic
bathtub full of its vile ‘water’, was brought in on an armoured front-
end loader and placed before the court.
Paddy Barmy (alias B. Wu, Ooflung Dung, Dame
Gadfly Pert, Sir Highball Tweet, Wee Jinny Macgregor, Boris Yeltsin,
Geraint P. Finkleberger, King Thadeus Bumnebula, Doris Day, Dr Who,
the Irish band Oasis, a 1948 Buick, Mt Kosciuszko, Erich von Däniken,
Uri Geller, a Christmas beetle, Barbara Cartland - his real name was
allegedly Hamish von MacMuck and he’d been impersonating Daddy for
years) had been making a morose show of remorse and bribery, but the
sight and stench of the bathwater from which he’d been deprived for so
long set the pseudo-Celtic juices rushing electrically about his
disconnected veins. He was suddenly filled with almost superhuman
strength, due partly to his fervid belief that he was the keystone -
of the Holy Trinity.
Breaking free of the armed nuns guarding him
and ignoring Leonie’s warning shriek, he sprinted arthritically and
bone-snappingly, pursued by those star and moon-crossed siblings Ahmed
and Naomi, toward the fourth dimensional tub. The BBC Radiophonic
Workshop played sci-fi-ily in the background.
As the jury rapidly found him guilty he eluded
his former Head Bodyguard and leapt saluting earnestly into the turbid
maelstrom that had been his countless ancestors. He was never seen or
smelt again. (Of course, all of this may have been an hallucination on
his part.)
Requiem aeternum dona eis, Domine: et lux
perpetua luceat eis, Father Singh was soon intoning, tears of laughter
streaming down his face, though compelled to hire the mosque nextdoor
for the service.
“I’m sorry I made those jokes about you.” said

Leonie to Ahmed as the three stared into the bubbling whirlpool where
Daddy had been. She rubbed his back and he cringed a bit.
Still, the ex-bodyguard had his own cooking
program these days - he specialised in camel-tail and cockamaimy soup
along with large doses of revolutionary Botanical History - and felt a
lot less hapless than he used to. Though when it was translated into
Mongolian the lower working class accent they dubbed his voice in was
faintly ludicrous.
223
“They were a bit inappropriate.” he said,

wielding his leaf-press expertly on the (common) gumleaf and gumnut
she’d given him.
“But funny.” she went, trying not to think of
Mummy. “Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss.”
He joined in uncertainly, but she was soon
blind with tears. (His sister, who’d of course had heard the tale at
length, laughed with especial gusto and kissed Leonie full on the
lips, then went inexplicably off with Gerald. Alone again, thought
Leonie bitterly.) She went to give Ahmed another hug but he had barely
got over the last one and feigned lumbago.
The gentle Ahmed had learned that he’d only
thought that exploding bullets were lodged in his neck due to
hypnotism, and his confidence became phenomenal (meanwhile the court
blew up but only Justice Barmy, there to spy and disguised as an
Edwardian transsexual, was killed). Ahmed swiftly scored a
Professorship in Historical Materialist Botany at the University of
the ACT and was revered by his students. After he isolated a new
strain of virus from the bathwater which attacked only economic
rationalists he attained almost Godlike status, which led to windy
moans from Above.
Naomi was happy to see him succeed in academia
at last because she rightly regarded it as a haven for idiots.
Daddy’s Celtic will said he wanted to be
cremated and his ashes scattered over Belfast, but due to a mix-up he
- or rather his bathwater - ended up being buried in a sewage pond
after a turn or two in a musique concrete mixer. Undaunted, Leonie had
the abstract pink coffin dredged up, loaded aboard a plane (in fact
the trusty Enver Hoxha which she’d kept as a souvenir of Africa), and
pushed out over the city starting up the Troubles yet again when it
landed on Gerry Adams’s head.
And as to her book … well, the Miles Franklin
judges went apeshit about it, saying it was full of searing truths.
The prize was hers. It was little compensation for the lost gumleaf
collection.
She received a bigger reward than she could
ever have anticipated from this success. Her mother sent (via her
publisher) a Congratulations! card from China and also wished her a
Happy Hanukkah. But she got heaps of weird fan and hate mail, and
couldn’t believe it was genuine.
224
Chapter Twenty-eight: Norman Betrays Himself
Leonie now knew how Iceberg Enterprises had

anonymously - if not keystone coppishly - with the help of shadowy
intergalactic powers set up an Empire in the Carribean, an androgyne’s
paradise rivalling Lesbos in which transgendered people were the
ruling class and Rowena / Prátt (after magnanimously giving George his
old job back on the condition that he shared it with Rupert) was the
figurehead President, with a figure modelled after Mae West’s.
She’d learned some of it initially from the
media, then from Naomi (as the diligent reader will learn below), and
finally Gerald revealed all and also told her everything on a
lightning business trip to Australia. It was a shock to learn that IE
had been more or less on her side all along.
To convince her, they’d some time back given
her a job making promotional videos. Seeing how the vast corporation
worked from the inside, she gathered that though it was rather corrupt
(the Icebergs insisted they were ethical businesspersons and friends
of Anita Roddick) it was hardly as bad as the CM.
She also knew that Norman had escaped with
Gerald, but he was not to be taken to Daddy as Daddy had demanded (the
intrigues that went on would take an epic to relate). In the confusion
of the revolution he managed to get out of Gerald’s clutches and
returned to Australia a broken man but hearing that Paddy Barmy was
dead he tried to get the Celtic Mafia to put himself back together
with a fat package and vinegar and brown paper. They regarded him as a
loser and wouldn’t hear of it. And while they wouldn’t admit it, they
were too busy fighting amongst themselves. Shillelagh law reigned
again and the Druidic Order took a battering.
“Certainly you’ve got the work experience” they
said, “but your track record has deteriorated of late. Are you sure
you’re a True Celt?” He put on a tough expression and sauntered out
with his strong, manly hands in his pockets, whistling tunelessly and
screwing up one side of his mouth till it met his eye and the pair
fell in love and got married and raised a family of two neat and
successful children.
Norman could have sunk into obscurity and lived
to a ripe old age, but instead he put an ad in the paper offering his
services as a dictator, given Australia’s forced march back into the
18th Century BCE. It was answered by an African refugee who turned out
to be a relative of one of his victims. With IE backing she hunted him
down.
He led her what his recent Booker Prize
inspired him to call a ‘merry chase’136 up the fire escapes of several
Canberra blocks of flats, eventually fleeing from the roof of one by
hang-glider. She, accompanied by Hosannas, followed him in an autogyro
and he was cornered perching nervously on the tip of the much-
privatised Telstra tower which the Opposition in its eternal cowardice
and modernity would never renationalise.
A high wind was blowing at the time in Jamaica
and the blackening sky reeled as he struggled to keep his balance,
arms outstretched, the webbing holding him to the hang-glider having
come loose. With horror (what else?) he watched the thing spiralling
away to his left.
Well, he thought law-abidingly, at least I’m
wearing a helmet. Now I just hope that if I fall I’ll be lucky enough
to land on my head. (All right, it’s not my gag.)
His cat-fancying nemesis raised her arm and he
got down on one knee and begged forgiveness and proposed marriage and
promised he’d never slaughter thousands of innocent people ever again,
136
Connoisseurs of cop shows will recall antediluvian episodes of the Australian epic ‘Homicide’, in
which the chases were very similar.
Chapter Twenty-eight: Norman Betrays Himself 226
even putting it in writing and signing it with the forged signature he

used at his leading Swiss Bank. She took the stat. dec. and witnessed
it (it’s all right, she was a JP). Thunder rumbled overhead.
Looking up he went dizzy and almost toppled,
then saw a lightning bolt peer out of the cloud with a smug grin on
its face. The Archangel Michael, job on the line and still fuming at
Leonie’s appraisal of his ensemble (you may have to search back over
the text for that one), peeked out too, his flaming sword quite
impressive till he burnt his finger on it.
“Ar, fuck!” rolled over the land.
God poked His head out as well, annoyed at a
certain magazine editor whom he regarded as dangerously eclectic and
telling Michael not to be such a prannet. There was the corporate
image to think of. Michael, a string-bean who towered over his Dad and
coveted the family business, rebelliously lit a cigarette with his
sword and puffed smoke in God’s face.
God shrank back. The little petty-bourgeois
wanker would never land a package now, he’d have to hand in his rapier
and get a real job, perhaps as an extra in some Woody Allen re-make of
Alice in Wonderland, or failing that he can play opposite Martin
Bryant in The Sound of Music.
“From where I’m standing, Jimmy, I can see
right up your kilt.” saith the Lord God of Hosts Pty Ltd. (To the
author, the Author has been known to say the following: “You’ve got
three copies of My comic novel on your bookcase and you still don’t
believe in Me? Sheesh!”)
But had He sent the Messiah or not? He couldn’t
remember, the lines being busier than on Australia Talks Back (not
that He ever listened to the ABC). And it was so long ago. These
people and their weird beliefs he couldn’t stomach - why couldn’t they
hold to reincarnation and eternal return? So much simpler when
everything repeated itself … He’d long ago given up his tawdry
commitment to Central Planning, but his Deng-like appeal to Flea
Market Forces hadn’t been very successful either, something like
Albania.
Yes, anwylaf, Lonely at the Top, it was,
pyramid investment schemes notwithstanding. At the Party of God the
other day He’d gone all shy in the middle of the slam-dancing (there
were traditionalists stuck in the ‘80s in heaven too), having never
quite got over the agoraphobia and drug addiction of His artistic
twenties. He was essentially a sensitive, creative (if unemployable)
sort of Person. Drunken Saxon bikies with no knowledge of onomatopoeia
had assailed him with cries of “Hey, mite, don’t be a fucken piker
bluurrp” and spewed all down His pink lapel.
“Oh, really.” He’d protested, stroking His pet
Siamese. They were a bit onkus, and He gave them an onka.
“Cats the Musical, see it before they ban ‘em,
poofter.” said one, grabbed its tail and whirled the animal round his
head.
Since He lived alone with His Cat most of the
time and hated to be called ‘mite’ (it was so unfeminine), this made
Him more than a little disturbed. He resolved reluctantly to become
more butch.
“Celtic tosser!” cried Michael, having heard
Leonie use the term.
“That’s about all I’m gonna stand from yerw!”
retorted God butchly, his sporran swinging wildly.
The pair began to squabble and in a flash a
fight had broken out. It too turned into a donnybrook (see Revelation
12:7), angels tumbling about the clouds swinging punches at each other
and devilish Engines and fighter-bombers shaking the canopy of the
sky, while John Milton looked on in consternation (he didn’t see much
226
though). Gabriel got Jesus in a headlock and was banging his head
against a cloud when Mary interceded.
“That’ll do, you fuckwits. This is no time to
wrestle with God. Can’t you see that this is a crucial point in the
plot?” She crossed herself despite the fact that some of her best
friends were Yael Dayan.
“Not really.” they responded, watching a video
of the Life of Brian while sipping hot tea.
“Oh, all right. Carry on, then. See if I care -
I’m jack of the scholarly Reader’s Lobby, and of all trades,
especially architects and bees.” There were groans at this Marxian
gag. “Well, they never got back to me after I visited Leonie’s hideous
old man.” (Daddy cried out something lazarous from the flames below
but this time he really was too far away to be heard.)
“But you’re preggers, aren’t you?” went
Gabriel, a child (like Prátt) of the ‘60s, raising his eyebrows
suggestively and giving Jesus’s bonce another wallop. Michael,
ignored, flounced behind a thunderhead and sulked.
Mary stiffened. “Er - you can go ask your
Father about that one.” Both Leonie’s fathers had in her opinion the
comprehension of the average snail, though neither had read Auntie
Rhoberta’s snail-centred history of France, Do Not Pass Escargot.
“Ar, Mary … ”
“Piss off!”
Jesus struggled out of his grasp and yelled,
fingers distending his mouth, “Hail True Celt Mary! My Daddy works in
a shipyard!”
God, tie wrapped dangerously round His neck and
trying vainly to undo the boy scout137 knots which Michael had
practised on His beard, could only agree. They’d certainly get it at
the next Board meeting, just so long as they didn’t find out what he
had rorted.
The angels departed sheepishly (Bo Peep Queen
of the Kiwi has complained about the repetition of this expression),
which Jesus with his crook and bonnet and eidelweissy dirndl thought
appropriate. But Michael, copying Leonie again and now in full drag,
gave Mary a finger and made chiacking noises like “Rotter!” for the
rest of the day.
A moment later, God having recovered his
composure and found the keys to his Bureau of Meteorology which had
been lost in bathwater for 2000 years - he’d picked the lock in the
past - Norman was struck down (which is what will probably happen to
the author).
His pursuer then descended alowly and chopped
him into mincemeat with a machete. His magnetic remains were delivered
by air to a pet food company and so he ended his career in about 25
cans of strangely sparking Whiskas, most of which found its final
unseemly resting place in Puque’s stomach (though the by-now
internationally famous Maurice - had a bit too).
Anastasia Von Chiack, sister of the
distinguished economist, but who never actually appeared above at all,
also did well as soon as she revealed that she’d been paid to double
as all Leonie’s doubles and other tennis matches which were mostly
dead. She won an emunctory holiday for two in Barbados, which itself
had become a workers’ paradise and was presently prosecuting a
pacifist war with precision non-lethal weapons and passive resistance
against the USA, which the latter was rapidly losing, though it had
enlisted the support of the whole of Western Europe and Madagascar and
the last-surviving (Port Lincoln) chapter of the Hitler Youth. The
globe was changing (the new underpants were a bit tight); soon ethical
137
The smoulderingly vicious Leonie was happily not present.
227
Barbados and revolutionary Lesbos would be the combined utopian

conscience of an ever more protean and sartorially resartian world.
Even the Messiah turned up, though whether for the first or second
time no one was saying. But as we’ve seen she looked a lot like
Leonie.
Like Anastasia, Joanne J. Bones (not even an
apprentice Messiah) played no part at all in the story and wasn’t even
related to any of the characters, but features here because her
girlfriend Yolande paid the author a very large sum of money,
something most writers are not au fait with. Joanne is a tireless sex
worker and treats her clients to large doses of group therapy and
drugs in Fyshwick, ladies only. She likes fly-fishing, rhinoceros-
racing and a quart of furniture polish every Friday night. Slim and
bubbly, Joanne seeks a slim, bubbly Yoruba lady under 25 who is into
threesomes and making cottage cheese with junket tablets. Her phone
number is 06 0690WOW.
We mustn’t forget as we roll these credits the
contribution made to the story by the Apple Computer company who
supplied the computer it was written on, though at a price (a virus
has been released to copy Her Brilliant Career to all parts of the
planet, that’s the real Millennium Bug), and Poets Corner Wines and
Whiskeys who helped the author into the right sorts of moods to
complete the tale. And, lastly, thanks to the Department of Social
Security for funding the entire project.
Application forms for any company wishing to
sponsor the author are available at the office of Blowing Off!
magazine.
(Speaking of the author, she is available for
interviews, talks, etc, and could do with the money. Auntie Rhoberta
has a natural tendency to repel cash and so only very large amounts of
it should be given to her. Also welcome would be good reviews,
residencies, ASL medals, and of course the Miles Franklin. Indeed,
prizes of any description - the Booker, the Nobel, the South Karabar
Parking Station Trophy for Doggerel - will be eagerly accepted. She
doesn’t write for money - Heaven forfend - but it’s difficult outside
of a commune to write without it, a fact little-appreciated quite
understandably by the acres of penny-pinching bureaucrats and
godfathers who rightly dominate arts funding around the globe. Clearly
without them the literary biz would become flabby and writers would
abandon their calling to swan off to St Tropez and the Australian
French Riviera where they would soon perish in a martini haze
surrounded by bathing and diving belles and not much apart from this
sort of fizz would ever get written at all.)
If you want a proper dramatic resolution of it
you’d better read the last (yes, the last) chapter. Not that it’s
next.
228
Chapter Twenty-nine: Leonie Begins to Learn her
Lesson
Reading her own account of all these

developments on the front page of the recently-merged Canberra / New
York Tiresome, complete with huge photo of her face with its by-now
humungous hooter, she realised that on Paddy’s scale she was more
famous than 1000 Hiroshimas and that it was much better really to be
simply rich (as long like the latest government you monopolistically
privatise the Taxation Department). She bought a bottle of Jameson
(Bushmills she avoided) on the strength of this.
Her new book, I Was Daddy’s Slave, also
chronicled her adventures complete with lurid piccies since leaving
Gerald. It was the greatest literary success in the history of
Queanbeyan. With ease it won the South Karabar Parking Station Trophy
for Doggerel, a new award she set up herself and which became the most
important literary prize in the world and was later awarded to Auntie
Rhoberta for Her Brilliant Career.
In its beige mirrored cover - which didn’t
crack - she fancied that she bore a close resemblance to Barbra Yip
Streisand (though Leonie’s celebrated protuberance was more like
Pinocchio’s).
That was perhaps fitting, she thought, her
outlook having been shaped and moulded by all her profound experiences
to date.
During the past two months of writing, she, for
reasons not entirely clear to her, had taken to hanging round at the
local Buddhist synagogue, watching the faithful come and go. Whenever
she was there, the memory of Mother Fergus’s wizened face would come
back to her in all its ghastliness. But she’d heard that the old girl
had passed on and was probably now toasting marshmallows with Satan.
Still, she felt somehow marked out and wondered
vaguely if anyone could tell by the way she walked down the street.
(You could with Germans.) At last, still in denial, she went inside
but grew pixilated asking after the garbage-disposing Madonna before
which she naturally desired to genuflect.
The Rabbi, Sir Wole B. Chinstein of Mauritius,
indulged in much cracking of jokes about Jesus, the Foetus and virgin
birth (Mummy once said, perhaps jokingly, she’d been born by that
method). “We found you on the steps once.” he informed her, aquake
with mirth or myrrh (home-grown under fluorescent light). All this led
her to take a bow and depart quickly.
Maybe they knew who she was. The trailing media
crowd and bodyguards were a bit of a giveaway.
A woman with kohl-ringed eyes followed too, but
Leonie didn’t notice her or she would have got a Chinese burn.
She sat in her fundamental loveliness in a
kosher outdoor cafe run by Sino-Vietnamese cat-lovers a bit later,
reading Chuang Chou the Chinese Burns (wee sleekit cowering timorous
beastie the noo etc doesn’t translate all that well as we’ve noted so
I’ll refrain) tucking into a lettucy bacon sandwich she’d bought down
the road, and found herself hiding it when the Rabbi entered with his
family and a set of ritual garden chopsticks.
“I’ll have some pastrami in plum sauce.” she
said loudly to the waiter. She loved Sino-Jewish pasta, especially
with hot chihuahua. (You never got much but dog and rhinoceros horn
these days, wherever you went.)
A devotee of musical comedy and Hollywood
films, the saffron-robed Rabbi glanced across, and grew so astonished
that he almost crossed himself.
“Er, how could I not have known! I love your
songs.” he emoted nervously, ignoring the author’s observation above
Chapter Twenty-nine: Leonie Begins to Learn her Lesson
230
and braving the entourage to come across to her table. He proferred an

autograph book and a chopstick.
Leonie snapped into public mode, putting on
what she believed to be an American accent (it was better than
Norman’s). “Why thank you, pardner. I only do it for the money. I
might even take up singing, baby. Hey, my man! Gimme fahve!” She
shrieked with rib-cracking laughter and upended the bottle of Jameson.
“She’s a wonderful soprano.” said his Shanghai-
bred wife as Leonie grabbed the book and chopstick and scrawled her
name, LAYOANEE L. BAlMY. The woman arranged her dyed curls and sat,
patting the great writer’s free hand with maternal pride and some
ignorance of the music scene.
“Yes”, responded Leonie, radiant and not
wanting to withdraw her hand, “um, I’m half-Italian and my Daddy is -
was a mobster, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss.”
Confused as they, she ordered prawn halvas and
stuffed herself (and ate the halvas). Their ten-year-old son kept
tugging at parental sleeves and trying to explain but they brushed him
aside.
“Er”, went the Rabbi, “I play the shofar
myself, pentatonically of course. My rendition of Teahouse of the
August Moon was the best in the Southern Hemisphere.” He did some
finger-popping. “Yeah, I was on the road with IE for three years,
baby, mostly door-to-door. Perhaps we could get together for a jam …”
“Oh, yum!” Leonie pictured a huge scone
dripping with cream and strawberry conserve. “That’d be real swell.
Peachy keen. Neat-o.”
Mutually deluded, they sat together chatting
for some time, Leonie trying to find out by devious means what he
meant by ‘playing the chauffeur’. It sounded intriguing. She couldn’t
wait to try it on her latest driver, Sir Erasmus Prycke, MP.
“Well, er, we’d better be getting along.” the
Rabbi eventually announced with much reluctance, having apologised
profusely for his wisecracks earlier. In fact he even quoted the
following Saying,
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am for myself only, what am I?
If not now - when?
Then the Sino-rabbinical family (Messiah

material, she thought) departed, each with her autograph and silent
number.
Leonie, feeling suddenly sad, ordered a “great
big scone” with dollops of cream and strawberry jam.
She tucked into it, her whole body shaking.
People always leave when you’re just getting to know them. And he was
black too. That didn’t matter to her, she understood now. It had been
Daddy’s prejudices all along.
Still, the jam made her feel like throwing up,
while Mother Fergus wheezed denunciations at her from the ether. She
sucked at her bottle, a hollow growing inside her, one seemingly
impossible to fill.
Suddenly, an Islamic sort of woman (as Leonie
assumed), dressed in boudoir curtains and magic carpets, appeared
sensually opposite. Leonie jumped. She felt a bit uncomfortable in
case a war broke out or she drew the curtains.
“Hello.” smiled the woman in her sunny accent,
flaunting what Leonie regarded as her full hijab and ordering a G&T.
She waved away the paparazzi and mortadella. Leonie waited for her to
speak, being exhausted and suffering from RSI and writer’s cramp as it
had been a big family. (Groan.)
230
231
“Are you ready to get back to the plot?” said

the woman.
Leonie, the quotation still sinking in, shook
the whiskey out of her ears and nodded.
“Good. Now, I was the one who really talked
Norman out of killing people with that bomb. He thought he was getting
an oilfield in Kuwait, amongst other things. We also delayed the
explosion till the correct comedic moment.”
Leonie scorned most foreign languages (though
perversely she liked the accent), and asked for a Vanquin tequila with
worms. The Korean career waiter, Lee Hot-fuk, a close associate of
Sandra’s as the cunning reader will recall and a leading light in the
Kwang Ju massacre, scribbled conceitedly on his pad and walked away,
laden with dirty dishes, on the balls of his feet. A little later,
much smashing of crockery could be heard from the kitchen.
“Who are you?” said Leonie to the other woman
after another swig of Jammo. “Florence of Arabia?”
“Ah, the original gags.” savoured Mary, who did
a spot as a stand-up comic in Malta on the side since she’d hardly
make much money appearing in one of my stories, indeed most of the
characters receive no payment at all from the author who has been
granted a couple of Bondy’s Van Goghs for her pains.
Mary ignored this egoistic intrusion. ”But
Leonie, you haven’t reacted to my devastating interpolation.”
“What?” demanded Leonie, determined to be
professional and sounding more like a lady prison officer. What had
Interpol to do with it? Her ex-Dad had sewn them up years ago.
“Leonie, I’m Mary - ”
“Queen of Scots? Hoots the noo - ” Leonie was
proud of her facility with the Scots burr and quoted from the Chuang
Tzu, the bit about meeting the skull Yo Lik on the road. “I suppose
you’ll be ordering a haggis then, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss!” Prima donna,
she thought, being now half-Italian. She’d almost finished the Jammo
and ordered another bottle to go with her tequila.
Mary groaned. “You Saxon nudnik, I’m the Virgin
Mary. Jee-sus! Remember how you yelled at me that day from the car?”
She pulled down her veil and shook hands
vigorously, outdoing Norman. Her hands were big and red like Mummy’s
had always been. Leonie shuddered as her own were so soft and smooth
and milk-white from soaking in vintage bottles of Lemon Fab and
bathing in Pine-O-Clean.
Mary grinned boyishly. Her legs were set wide
apart, a squashed rollie butt dangled from her lips and the corks on
her steeple hat twirled laconically in the breeze.
Leonie felt her gender and ethnic identities
challenged, and crossed her stubbly legs swiftly, coiling them round
each other eight times till they looked like a caduceus. Without
warning they unravelled and she corkscrewed upward. It was a bit like
the Assumption of the Virgin except she didn’t go quite as high.138
(The Assumption the Virgin had made she later dealt with in a bumper
issue of the Australian Philosophical Review, repeating some of the
arguments of the Scholastics and winning the Mandeville Award for
anorexic econometric modelling.)
“The Truest Celt of all? You mean, you’re - Our
Lady?” she responded in disdainful disbelief - Mary in her current
incarnation didn’t look like a lady - once she’d landed again, staring
unchecked at Mary’s imposing conk. Should she genuflect? After
drinking all day that seemed a bit wimpish for a big star.
Mary smiled ironically, and expertly rolled
herself another smoke with her right hand, while the other, a non-
138
The Assumption of St Anna Society has condemned this unseemly focus on Our Lady.
231
232
smoker, had no idea what its counterpart was doing. She’d long since
given up religion for revolutionary socialism, which in the spirit of
the Study of Comparative Religions is arguably another religion139 but
we mustn’t even mention that word (socialism!) these days for fear
we’ll be mixed up with Slobodan Milosovic so I’m sorry I said
anything.
“And you - you must be the famous Leonie Barmy.
It’s so nice to be able to put a face to the voice.” She fingered the
Red Star hanging round her neck and brandished every novel Leonie had
ever written, except for the latest. Leonie, torc askew, wearily
scrabbled about in her diamond-spattered handbag for another pen,
thinking she wanted her to autograph them too.
“Um, do you like my writing?” she asked,
flattered, tossing her now-blue and white locks back. Perhaps it was
time to stop dyeing them, she thought. (The rapt attention of the
masses was tedious.) It was so hard to make decisions, especially when
there was more than one option. Where there was one Leonie there were
three opinions (none of which she agreed with), something her off-key
consciousness found hard to cope with. It was a case of three steps
forward, one step back, and it was fortunate for her that she was not
a lemming (mind the step). She yodelled, causing Mary to look as
puzzled as the reader in spite of the catchy rhythm.
The booze arrived, the tray clutched in
lecherous Lee’s steady hand a second or two behind the over-eager
glasses, and with a sponge they all got stuck in and were there for
quite a while (Lee having got the sack for disagreeing with the boss
on the question of the Iron Law of Oligarchy). They chattered on about
world politics and babies, two things that also often went together
explosively, and Leonie felt fully professional and almost part of the
human race again as she sucked on her depleted second bottle. She
readily agreed to sign all the books and the blank cheque Mary waved
under her nose.
Finally, the Intercessor rose (not as high as
Leonie had on this occasion), laughing and tipsy, and by way of
showing her appreciation of the great author’s work, flung the books
into a nearby wheelie bin. It was an experience which Leonie never
forgot. That, and the collapsing crane which demolished the
headquarters of the ACT Legislative Assembly.
“B-but they’re me famous novels - ” she
spluttered, annoyed at being upstaged by a Bedouin, and her drink went
down the wrong way. Mary clapped her on the back. Leonie, as the
bodyguards howled into their Margaritas, felt so unprofessional. Time
to step forward again.
Mary was not as hard as she seemed (though
quite difficult for Leonie to work out).
“Let me give you a piece of advice.” she said,
bringing her face close to Leonie’s. Leonie felt a glimmer of maturity
and let the woman speak.
“If you want to be a real writer, you’ve got a
lot to unlearn. Write from here.” She clasped her heaving and romantic
bosom. “And not from here.” she added, tapping her mighty olfactory
organ which had recently caused several elephants to commit
parliamentary suicide in despair.
A car backfired and she dove under the table
automatically. The incident was one that Leonie would have once made
cruel fun of, but she was filled with a sudden compassion and realised
she was sobbing bitterly. She was getting almost as soppy as Gerald.
Apparently not understanding, Mary crawled out
again, firing Parkeresque one-liners around the restaurant at Leonie’s
expense. The patrons applauded. Leonie stared as she glided off. No
139
What fun this will provoke in the Vatican’s political science department!
232
233
one else had seen her, and Leonie realised that her entourage and
everyone else thought she was mad, but very entertaining.
Feeling like Ahmed, she considered her advice.
That was a funny place to write from. She wrote from quite a different
place. Her boobs began to chuckle again, but she ignored them.
The experience had really thrown her. She felt,
though, that it might be better left for the next story, and besides
it was taxing those vast parts of her brain which still remained
wrongly-wired due to Daddy’s lifelong fatherly intervention. She went
home and practised gesticulating and talking in a Fran Fein accent.
Her life would begin anew with a guest appearance with Ahmed on
S e i n f e l d (the latest President having meanwhile emigrated to
Antarctica and got a job at the McLibels there at the prospect).
She’d make a great comedienne - people laughed
at her all the time. A pity Gemma hadn’t survived to see it.
At that point Gemma knocked at the door, having
faked her own death to create a stir in the literary community and
thereby swing a fellowship or two. (“We have only a little time to
please the living, / But all eternity to love the dead.”, as Mummy
once quoted. Leonie fainted but they were soon on great terms again,
though Gemma had found yet another lover, a shaven-headed, pony-tailed
woman called Christ which Leonie thought was odd since she looked more
like a Hare Krishna and who’d name their kid after a swearword?Rose
too (like Despina, though unlike her boyfriend who died in agony after
his rusty panel-van ploughed into a Woolworths semi) had done the same
thing - Rose from the dead, she kept on - and Leonie, having been
informed that the x-ray photo she’d had taken years ago was really
Daddy’s, had an engaging and engagé coffee with her in a local ashram
the next day (hundreds of saffron-robed people asked for her autograph
on the misassumption she was Bruce Lee). Rose was now published
everywhere and had won the Miles Franklin herself (they were giving it
away free by now with every packet of coco-pops), and Leonie, more
mature than she used to be, refrained from dragging her nails down her
cheek, facial or otherwise. Instead, she stuffed her into a mail box
and stormed off, but then Rose still claimed to enjoy that sort of
thing, being a philatelist, and indeed became notorious for it later
as Ambassador of Barbados.
Like Rose, Leonie was more or less happy,
though the Visitation had unnerved her and the resurrection rate was
getting out of hand. Maybe even Mummy would come back? The thought
made her shake all over again and begin to devour Nietzsche (he was a
bit tough). She’d come a long way since the CM Bible, even having read
the real one and found it a scream.
With Daddy gone her life was beginning to
expand like her body, fattened on lox and cream cheese and cast-iron
bagels which had formerly served as wheels on an El Al airliner and
survived a bomb blast or two during the Six Day War. Though
cheesebound at times, Leonie became reflective (the tasteless
Nietzsche she soon spurned along with Deleuze and Guattari) and deeply
into Solar Energy and considered how to spend the rest of her days in
the enjoyment of simple revolutionary pleasures.
Besides, a flying saucer had landed near her
caravan, the saucy green pilot - she thought of green peas and wasn’t
sure why - handing her a bad review of her first universal television
appearance, printed in the Intergalactic Monitor, a minor alien
tachyonic website. Nigel didn’t come off at all well (and was
presently eking out a minimalist existence as a bin-crawling bag-lady
with newly-impoverished Madonna, ie the singer).
Though the first person on earth to make
contact with aliens and survive to tell what must be the greatest
story in newspaper history, she never got round to writing the article
because she was too busy suing.
233
234
They sued back and soon a process of very long

distance litigation was upon her, made longer than the usual civil
case due to relativistic problems and conflicting advice from leading
physicists and Albert Einstein from The Other Side (a certain medium
called Rowena made a heap of money too). Their lawyers, Sytte & Fink,
and hers, Shytte & Stynk, got quite chummy in the end and together
were able to take out a Shakespearian mortgage on a brave new planet
of their own.
The cost of the phone calls alone was
astronomical, especially over her mobiles, and you had to wait so long
for a reply that you’d forgotten when you got one what the
conversation was all about. (Mind you, even now she often had that
problem on the phone and in her private and competitive reveries.) The
intergalactic legal system was pretty glacial anyway, there being only
one Judge for the whole universe but a hell of a lot of lawyers and
doctors and actors and an architect.
Leonie didn’t care all that much really, for
she knew that there was only one more chapter to go.
234
Chapter Twenty-nine (again): A Gratuitous
Chapter with an Important Bit at the End
She saw Mary a lot after the first Visitation,

and they ended up setting up house in remote Buggeralong.
Leonie at last realised, when Mary revealed her
mission and her Barbadian connections, that life was there to be
embraced, minute by minute, day by day, and that it was not a matter
of thinking in crude stereotypes and manipulating people as though
they were objects. (She even listened to Radio Geraldine on one
occasion, but she was sober at the time.)
One day, Mary told her something that she’d
suspected for a long time. It took her breath away but that was
fortunately replaced by return post. The melody of their conversation
went something like this:
Leonie: scream - blare - yell - screech.

Mary: tinkle - warble - burble - jingle.
A musical score and pianola reel of their

rising and falling tones is forthcoming from Demtel.
The actual words, which may be of more interest
to the reader, included the following:
“No, Leonie, darling, there’s something you
ought to know before you write your next novel.”
She looked at herself in one of her many
mirrors. They never broke any more, and in fact looked perfectly
whole. Her appearance, which Paddy had ridiculed all her life to the
point of giving her Body Dysmorphic Disorder, she found pleasing. She
was beautiful. But a razor of doubt could still cut through her when
she felt happy. Mary had grabbed her hands for some reason. She
shuddered.
“Well, where can I begin? Um - that nose of
yours …”
Mary gradually got to the point of it. There
was no end to its eschatological implications, as Prátt also knew. But
before she’d even finished explaining, Leonie with amazing prescience
twigged what she was getting at. A look of astonishment passed across
her face then headed at high speed for Alpha Centauri.
(Naturally, the reader has no good reason to
believe that any of this fuffle is true, since the author is
notoriously unreliable when reporting the alleged conversations140 of
her putative characters, little better than she alleges Leonie to be
in fact. Leonie is thinking of taking legal action … or at least
that’s what Auntie Rhoberta’s saying. Make of this paragraph what you
will.)
“You mean - I’m S … ?” exclaimed Leonie,
experiencing a mixture of terror and conceit and a sensation not like
a nuclear blast but more like walking across the Red Sea and having
God part the waters. So she’d been right all along.
She was taking her medication now, and felt a
bit silly.
“Everyone else has known for years, while the
readers guessed in chapter one or so.” said Mary, as Leonie tiresomely
fantasised about owning a bit of land in Israel as well and all those
lady soldiers. But Daddy - Paddy was no more.
Suddenly she began to laugh, sss-sss-sss-sss-
sss … sss-sss-sss-sss-sss … sss-sss-sss-sss-sss … sss-sss-sss-sss-sss
… sss-sss-sss-sss-sss! She couldn’t stop for a whole five minutes.
140
Or their gender. Or Auntie Rhoberta’s for that matter.
Chapter Twenty-nine (again): A Gratuitous Chapter with an Important
Bit at the End.
236
“Also - aaaah ha ha ha ha ha - all along you’ve

been a Vegan, an Aboriginal transvestite, a Gypsy and a half-Welsh
hippie and possibly an oxymoron.” guffawed Mary.
“Fuck me dead.” hooted Leonie, realising that’s
what Daddy had tried to do to her. “What a - fool I’ve been.”
Mary smiled and guffawed. “Actually, I’m
pulling your leg now, well a bit. But you get the picture.”
“At last!” Leonie guffawed through her teeth,
pulling her stubbly legs out of harm’s way. “Let’s hope it sells.”
Guffawing, Mary went on to tell her all sorts
of details of her personal history which Leonie had never known,
either because Daddy had concealed it from her or because she’d been
too scatterbrained or vainglorious to remember it. Then on she went to
tell her, guffawingly, about the history of the pre-Cambrian period
before the ‘Welsh’, boyo, but Leonie went to sleep.
Once she’d woken up, this glib epiphany or
anagnoresis was enough to make her pine for obscurity (apart from the
odd appearance hosting the Academy Awards). Mary (and Oprah and Tina
Turner) taught her what love was, something she’d never known in the
past. The knowledge humanised her, whereas earlier in life she’d had
the intellectual capacity of a three-toed sloth and the moral
rectitude of an earwig, that basis of human society. If only Mummy
would turn up - but then, Mummy was probably six feet under if not
three sheets to the wind.
Mary was amazingly kinky but never got into
power games like Daddy, apart from her ‘thing’ about Monopoly and the
fact that she had a smattering of Mah and Erica Jong and a tendency to
rave on about the Great Schism. Leonie, bored by Popes and Anti-Popes
(in the Italian, antipasto) whom if they met exploded in putrescent
rage, kept pressing her to do the Dance of the Seven Veils, and drop
the learned disquisitions on the water politics of the River Jordan.
She also got on well with Naomi and Gerald who
were always dropping in where they were in Australia with Liz Taylor
or whoever. Leonie was overjoyed that all her friends were so well-
connected, indeed they fitted together beautifully. Only Lee Hot-fuk
at the restaurant was pissed off at the lack of East Asian gags in the
book and grew determined to drag them all down in Auntie Rh+’s next
novel.
It was pure, shared and preposterous pleasure
and made Leonie feel like her life was starting afresh.
(Leonie had in fact found Daddy’s stash of
shamrock seeds in his old safe house when she was polishing up the
plaque honouring Leonie Barmy on the outside wall. It twisted and a
secret door opened in the wall with a creak like wind passing through
Daddy’s horrid rear. It led (so she imagined) into another dimension
where white rabbits ate pit-bulls and the latest Hole in the Head
Party handed out vast pay increases to the Unemployed at the expense
of the obscenely rich.)
The decision to circumnavigate Australia by hot
air tandem did not come easily to the couple but they did it and
Leonie’s travel writing rivalled Jan Morris’s. She thought Jan was a
reactionary old cow anyway, after she had taken a week off to study
Maoist Psephology under Albert Langer at Pentridge (sponsored by H & R
Block).
They had fun concocting a spurious account of
their time in Wilcannia via a Tiresome cryptic crossword, with the
Aboriginal population formally in power and whitefellers (rednecks
all) reduced to the status of fringe-dwellers. The garden gnome
government led by the dull and prognathous Mr Unamplojmente ordered an
immediate enquiry at the cost of $800 million and trucked luxury
houses and white goods and TABs and unbanned machine guns and other
essentials of life to these poor suffering people. All this was
236
Bit at the End.
237
mistakenly or IE-ly delivered to the real fringe-dwellers who used it

to take over and secede from off-white ‘Australia’.
Leonie, cheesed off by the boring antics of
that passionless fascist and his ideological quagmire, became
something of a crusader for justice. She championed environmental and
feminist causes, but was most assiduous in combatting quasi- and real
racism and related bigotries since she’d been steeped in them from
infancy. Her one blind spot was the Irish, for as ever she would come
out with Irish jokes in the most inappropriate locales, such as the
Irish Club or at Lizz Murphy’s sumptuous mansion in the splendid holy
city of New Binalong. It got so bad that all the militias in Belfast
got together to blow her up or down (the exact angle being unclear as
none of them being without degrees could use a protractor) - but Mary
interceded again. (That was difficult since she wasn’t exactly neutral
but she managed it, with IE’s brilliant logistic support.)
Naturally, she regularly asked Mary whether
Mummy was dead. But Mary said she didn’t know, only her Dad did, which
puzzled Leonie somewhat. In any case, her Dad wasn’t going to come to
the party, birthday or otherwise, since he too tended to sympathise,
perversely, with the Celtic Mafia. He’d already done the Flood and
promised not to do it again so He vented his anger and vengeance by
causing an outbreak of natural rubber fetishism and a worldwide
shortage of rubber trees.
But one day (after a stunning economic reversal
for the ill-managed CM at the hands of IE) Leonie received another
card. Her hopes quickened once more as the natural rubber industry
boomed. Then came the phone call, one Mummy hadn’t dared make when the
CM was tapping the phones (in accordance with the Hidden Hand it had
desperately moved on to rubber trees). But Leonie wouldn’t believe it
till she saw Mummy with her own eyes.
It was a hot morning in January. Leonie waited

at the airport, having for once eluded the press and the latest plague
of boiling frogs (zut, alor! merde!). (Mohammed - peace be upon him -
was there again too, in a better mood than he was in 622 and puffing
illicitly on a hookah.) She strove to bring Mummy’s face to mind.
Several possible candidates passed by her and her hopes flagged again.
Then a woman in beige appeared out of the
crowd, a woman with features similar to Leonie’s. Yes, that had to be
her.
Leonie watched her dear Mummy bustle through
customs (specifically a rain dance and a Christian Zionist Tibetan
wedding ceremony). Her composure and the steely front she always
maintained just collapsed.
She ran, wailing pitifully, into Mummy’s arms.
A pity indeed that it was the wrong woman (in fact Barbra Yip
Streisand) but they soon sorted that out, Barbra threatening to sue
her for sexual assault and storming off pursued by Leonie’s invective
and an upraised finger.
“I haven’t lost it, you know. I’m still Leonie
Barmy! LEONIE BARMY!” shouted Leonie after her and a plane’s
undercarriage collapsed. “Who remembers Memories these days? Or The
Way we Were? ”
She turned, stomach in spasms, to clench her
big fists and grind her big teeth as always. Then she gathered the
courage to look up again - and there she was.
Mummy.
Standing on the fringe of a group of people who
were exuberantly welcoming a new arrival (not the Messiah), looking
rather bewildered, with her handbag clutched close to her magnificent
bosom, a woman the image of herself but like a walking fish without
the hair (she was elegantly bald). She came closer and Leonie’s heart
237
Bit at the End.
238
leapt and a drowsy numbness pained her (we seem to have heard this
line before) and no doubt the reader whose bum has gone to sleep after
sitting reading this book for so long.
“M-mummy?” She was also reminiscent of the
Virgin, but a bit older, and thick with literary masterpieces.
“L-leonie?”
“Mummy?”
“Leonie?”
“Mummy?”
“Er, Leonie?”
“Mummy - ”
“Leonie?”
“M- oh this is ridiculous! ARE YOU MY MUMMY?”
Mummy checked a famous photograph in a tattered
old copy of the Canberra Tiresome she was carrying.
She nodded slowly.
“Of course I am.”
The great writer charged forward,
“Mummeeeeeeeee … ”, and fell into the still-strong arms of her true
mother.
“Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy …” was all
she could force out as the Madonna-like tears gushed down her ravaged
cheeks. Material Girl blared throughout the terminal in fluent
Lesbian.
“It’s all over, anwylyd.” comforted Mummy,
brushing her hair tenderly off her forehead. “You really should hang
out a ‘wet paint’ sign, dear.” she added in her thick Welsh accent
with barely a trace of Szechuan and no prawn dumplings whatever.141
(Nearby Plagiarist demonstrators brandished placards reading ASIANS
OUT, LYNCH LEONIE and pelted them with yum-chas, but a crowd of Vegans
and revolutionary architects sent them packing.)
“Mummy? Why did you let me go?” sobbed Leonie,
the only time (according to her recall) that she’d ever cried in
public. The media had caught up with them. Flashbulbs went off and
camera lights glared, with Jana pushing through the crowd of
professional mourners till she was flattened by a Vegan tv camera crew
in diamante heels. Mein Yiddische momme, she could be heard emoting a
lá Oum Kalsoum as she went down.
“Look you, Leonie fach, your father threatened
to kill you if I ever came home from out by there.” her mother said,
also in tears, inserting some tragic relief into the book. (She’d just
got a divorce from the junk varnisher after he’d been photographed in
a compromising position with a Mosaic pelican.)
In an instant, Leonie understood, but she went
through such a welter of emotions that she, like a people thrown into
an undending struggle for deplentified resources, couldn’t breathe.
Her monumental artistic ego had shrunk to a boogie, while her Voices
had abandoned her quite some time ago.
All the same, she responded automatically in
her tribal Silurian, which translated roughly as: Nant-y-glo and its
historic iron furnace, Mam! The Dunvant Male Voice Choir performs
nightly in Auntie Mary-Hannah’s cockle shop with a tone-deaf terrapin
from the Welsh Office. Bore da! Auntie Lil stirs the cake mixture with
a bone-handled knife and scratches her back with it while cutting off
the tails of three passing members of the Royal Blind Society. Auntie
C-c-c-Cadi plants cockles in her windowbox. Nothing grows in our
garden, even the washing and babies have withered in the snow while
Rebecca’s Daughters again stalk the Saxon-held land. The Archdruid
141
The Welsh, from which tribe of harp-twanging savages the author partly descends, are of course no
thicker than the rest of the Celtic horde. (Leonie’s had a particularly pernicious influence on me as you
can see.)
238
Bit at the End.
239
wore skirts. Judy Garland collects my CDs in Heaven and records with
the Angels. Come down from that roof, Emlyn, your dill will freeze!
You may have my spoon, I have twisted my tea. Welcome to the
5000000000000th meeting of the Welsh Folk Song Society zzzzzzzzz.
Visit picturesque Wales before it disappears, like the language,
wailing under the Irish Sea - the Welsh Sea - with much h w y l .
Australia’s just crawled out from under the stone of racism and the
Yanks want to shove us back.
Mummy had been in China too long to understand
a word, but she embraced her daughter again, along with the gnarled
Sino-Tibetan customs officer called T. Lobsong Rampa, with his
illustrated copy of the Welsh Bhagavhad Gita and prize rotary
moustaches, who was about to throw them out theatrically for causing a
Sino-Cambrian disturbance. (Two thousand years later, his son became a
Christian.)
She and Mummy went back to the safe house and

she had to lie down in a dark room for a while till she developed a
bit more as a character.
They did normal things together like
quarrelling and competing with each other in the beauty stakes and
pinching Woody Allen’s more awesome gags, but Leonie put up with all
that, even when Mummy converted to Lesbianism and stole her
girlfriends (and received a block of prime land on Lesbos and a free
course in ancient Greek postal music at St Sappho’s School for Young
Ladies, rather more illustrious than St Phoebel’s). It was so nice to
be unconditionally loved and all that parental sop that she mellowed
even further, while turning further leftish in the process to the
point of listening to Radio Geraldine even while pissed and churning
out rembetika music on the colophon and glyph in Phrygian mode. (Her
Uillean pipes had gone for good, having long ago got mixed up in the
Colombian cocaine trade.)
And though around 50 she never of course
experienced any hot flushes, or lukewarm flushes, or indeed any
flushes at all, not even cold ones.
Mummy (flushing badly even at 70-odd) revealed
that IE had acquired her rare gumleaf collection for $US65 million
along with a few swastika-festooned chunks of the Berlin Wall and
Leonie, though overjoyed to get it back, decided fervidly to donate it
to the Vegan Left.
Meanwhile, Ada bought a stake in the rebuilt
and mostly Barbadian-owned Cultural Centre and in a short time had
replaced the garden gnome as Australia’s first woman Prime Minister
(later succeeded by Naomi, to Ahmed’s dismay when he was reassigned
for a while to a weather station on Macquarie Island where he formed a
lifelong relationship with an erudite penguin and later won the Nobel
Prize for inter-species communication). Naomi pushed freeways far into
the Simpson Desert, where after all she felt right at home with
George’s camel who had faked its death to spice up the story a bit.
She was unpopular with no one, save the Greens and the Demognats and a
few hundred other parties and the entire Unemployed majority of the
workforce.
To be fair, IE did try to take up the slack but
everything (even consumption) was done by Welsh trillionaire-owned
robots these days so due to the famed Falling Rate of Profit ( see
Revelation, 18:11) and mass starvation it seemed time to think up an
alternative to the ‘job’ system as hinted in the Grundrisse by Long
Joan Silverberg.
Under Ada’s wise and dinkum rule, the dreaded
Celtic Mafia - 99% composed of disgruntled Andaman Islanders - was
against a background of decorticated hysteria from the Right rooted
out and arrested or given executive positions in the Department of
239
Bit at the End.
240
Corrective Services, so the Arts were freed of criminal money and

promptly collapsed. Leonie wrote a pack of lies about it all but now
she freely admitted they were just that and was proud of her
infinitely expanding nose (which she hoped had outstripped the
universe years ago), so everyone - even Robert Ling Manne - thought it
was all right. And the tremendous proceeds of these writings and joint
ventures with Iceberg Enterprises revived the Arts again (and re-
established the ABC on land), matters discussed on front pages and
websites worldwide. Unemployment grew worse, however, and the Vegan
Mafia was on the rise, supported by the revolutionary junta in
Gippsland.
Unperturbed, Leonie won the Miles Franklin
again, and continued to win it, year after year after year, till it
got quite embarrassing and her ex-friend Helen in Brissy threatened to
scratch her eyes out. (A shame she couldn’t stand Miles Franklin’s
work, especially the horribubble Muddle-Headed Wombat.) She became the
country’s leading author, and felt an affinity with lemmings
everywhere.
Yes, she was bigger than Christ (who was quite
flat-chested really) and everyone was happy with that apart from God
who kept getting into playground brawls in Heaven and people tended to
assume he had a chip or a Piscator on his shoulder.
And so, seeing Rowena and Amanda and all the

quasi-men she’d ever used as actual human beings with agendas of their
own, and thus strictly speaking to be despised more than ever, and
beginning a secret erotic pen-pal relationship with Naomi that lasted
for the rest of her life since her nose had grown to intergalactic
dimensions, she embarked on a pseudo-affair with boring, well-
connected but lubricious and swagger-stick wielding Mildred Pylesz
(whose ‘maiden’ name turned out to be the very Lesbian Lipshitz which
Leonie couldn’t say without giggling, and Mildred had no sense of
humour on this point).
She also began raising psychotic chihuahuas
modelled after Puque and one day ran into Sandra and Margaret at
Crufts - where a tufted John Major took out First Prize - and got into
a heated political argument which developed into a riot that ended
with the razing of the entire conurbation of London in a way that did
Boudica proud (though spearheaded by the National Front). Fortunately
she got out in time and her alibi said she’d been in Rangoon having
tea and pumpkin scones with SLORC all along. (Aung San Syiu Chi is
presently negotiating with the author to have this implausible episode
cut out.)
Having spent a life of suffering or
inadvertently making others suffer, Leonie changed to Good. Her
eleemosynary activities and doorknocking and pointing at Buddhas in
Thailand grew legendary and her commitment to the poor and downtrodden
and poetic the world over (difficult when they were often at each
other’s throats) was unquestioned. Or at least, those who questioned
it had nasty accidents in places like nuclear reactors and underground
rivers which they would have stumbled upon at random, thanks to
certain rogue supporters who’d got out of favour with their former
employers the Celtic Mafia.
She even joined the Minorities Rights Group and
spent her time hanging round with people of every hue and funny
clothing, penis gourds rubbing shoulders (so to speak) with furry
sporrans and the whole thing going off beautifully.
Rowena had a hand in her success, tirelessly
pushing her glamorous activities in Blowing Off! (by this time
Australia’s leading current affairs magazine, though based on
Barbados) and she would send her regular presents of French knickers,
Franglais easy-pop champers and perfume. Rowena, at Naomi’s prompting,
240
Bit at the End.
241
had gone to live with a Kiwi shepherd who made her lie down in green
leased pastures quite a lot - yes, I haven’t forgotten to put a sheep
gag in this, and indeed tried to sneak one or two in before but
probably you didn’t notice, dear reader, you gormless twerp - in a
remote part of that remote island (well it’s remote from where I
live), and they formed a threesome with a mountain goat.
But back to Leonie. Retournons á nos moutons,
mes enfants. Though some said she was mutton dressed up as lamb, she
saucily and mintily intervened in many trouble spots (though not
always successfully, as the Third Cod War between Iceland and Norway
attests) and was made as a result the Secretary-General of the UN,
refinancing it with her royalties till it became an effective and
indeed zealously redistributive World Government and moved into its
new 600 storey megaquarters in Barbados, each office with its own bar
and whisky-watering nightclub and indoor golf course and lake for
fifty metre yacht-racing.
After that, there was only one more thing she
hadn’t achieved, apart from landing on Mars and circumnavigating a
Black Hole and walking on the water like Mary. It was something
antithetical to her ambitions thus far, something which at one time
would have horrified her in its naked audacity.
In complete secrecy, she carefully planned her
transformation this time, instead of the impulsive approach she’d had
in her head-kicking middle years and the reckless approach she’d had
in her youth, which including starting world wars, economic
depressions and church fêtes. Nothing must upset her plans, neither
the intrigues of the men she’d known nor the protestations of any of
the women or the hermaphrodites for that matter.
(The red Gippsland flag on the roof was a bit
of an indiscretion, however.)
It’s all a question of timing, really. Instead
of her former butterfly approach to her art, she would become strongly
focussed upon one goal, as when she’d been writing to win the Miles
Franklin. But in this case the focus would have to be on something
totally unprecedented.
That focus was not to be on becoming an actress
(as the government decreed female thespians be called) or discovering
a cure for dye-induced baldness, though the latter would have been
handy for she was now what Daddy would have called an egg-shell blonde
herself, taking after her mother in that respect too. Nor was it
having any of her previous books made into Hollywood films or taking a
crash course in linguistics at the University of the ACT. Nor was it
learning to pilot a spaceship or win major prizes with her man-eating
chihuahuas. She did all those things, of course, but they were not her
focus.
241
Bit at the End.
242
BALDNESS
embarrassing?
Stick 'em back
on when they
fall with
Smirque's
Scientific
Spirit Gum
What, then, was her focus? This is an excellent
question, and I’m not simply padding this thing out to attain my
desired length when I say that the question has intrigued me since I
introduced it, so I only hope that it has fascinated you too, dear by
now demented reader, for if it hasn’t I think you’re a complete bozo.
I shall ponder this question … hmm, no it’s not
too hard for me … hmmm …
Aha! I have it. The story can continue! Just
when you thought it was safe to shut the book. Shut it at your peril,
for we’ve had it booby-trapped.
Leonie, especially after Daddy’s trial, had
really thought very hard about her past conduct and ridiculous
attitudes and the surprising twist in her fortunes (as well as the
notion of buying equity in the private legal system and shares in the
collective unconscious). Her whole life had been marred by a series of
concatenating libels, and now she realised that more than half of her
perceptions had been clouded by her mental condition. She also began
to wonder how anyone could be mad enough to regard any of the above
imbecility as literature, rather than as the ramblings of a certified
lunatic.
At that she became a serious, sober sort of
person and donned horn-rimmed glasses and lectured in Sapphic Greek
and Mycenaean swearwords at the University of Yass. It was a secure
job of the sort had by the established authors and poets and
242
Bit at the End.
243
fishmongers and interpreters of Maimonides and the Magna Carta she

hung round with. She paid off all her debts and re-memorised the
dictionary so she could properly fit into her new circle of scholarly
enemies.
J'Accuse!
We condemn Auntie Rhoberta for
prostituting her talent with this
self-indulgent ratshit. Attend the rally in
Garema Place this Saturday.
SOCIETY FOR BANNING

Her Brilliant Career
Pty Ltd
“I don’t know about you, but I rarely engage in

floccipaucinihilipilification.” she’d go. “Rather, I am nummularly
deficient and suffer from acute nostomania. As Kant has it,
nuncupatively … ” They asked to see the scars, which confused her a
bit and sent her back to her tattered dictionary (a shame it was in
medieval Friesian). But she the next time it happened she remembered
her new goal and smiled sweetly in return. A few carping detractors
still said she was completely wacko but by and large she felt she’d
found acceptance.
The family cat returned from Tegucigalpa on a
lightning holiday, bringing her entire family and restoring that last
little bit of Leonie’s lost faith in herself. She showed her round
town, pointing out all the new developments that had been built on her
initiative, including the bridge between Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain
and the floating freeway on the lake that had been a joint venture
with IE. Twinkletail was suitably impressed and other cities like
Adelaide green with envy but the cat promised not to breathe a word to
a soul about it all as that would conflict with Leonie’s current
strategy.
Leonie also saw another flying saucer and Santa
Claus squeezing down her chimney (was it really Naomi’s ex?), though
Christmas had long passed and it was daytime. But she wisely told
nobody about these visions or she may have been locked up in a nunnery
again.
They were however seen by others and this
helped the new religion formed by a sect which had broken away from
the Carminative Order to become a force in the land. But that’s
another story, one which is not improved in the telling or the
listening to for that matter, despite it being of earth-shattering
importance to the next immortal Millennium, seeing as God took a great
liking to it.
(God prospered in Heaven once He’d got His
Internet connection and became a finance whizz. He didn’t make
anything any more but money, and churned out ‘products’ like
‘derivatives’ and the like which proved far more profitable than
creating jobs or providing church services and more still than
miracles like raising people from the dead, curing the halt and the
243
Bit at the End.
244
lamé, and propounding utilitarianism and the views of St Mandeville.

Unfortunately everyone else in business was beginning to think so too,
so in the end there was no economic activity to gamble on and the
whole thing fizzled out. At that point He was forced to go on the
dole, except that He found had been cut out totally, so it was a good
thing He was immortal and had joined the Hypostatic Union. It was a
conspiracy against the Deity, He insisted, misquoting Bernard Shaw.)
Buoyed and girled by her new, authentic
experiences, Leonie denounced the human organ and shamrock trades and
all forms of bathwater. She was really nice to Gerald and Rowena and
Effie Ribena and George and Rupert and Gemma and Rose and even Nigella
the Bag-Lady and Sean (but not to the garden gnome). Instead, the
Irish were of course the target of her invective, along with all other
dimwits of mixed Celtic and Egyptian background. That was as it should
be - they’re a lot of kilt-wearing cross-dressers anyway. Meanwhile,
Bibi the Magician claimed that it was his ancestors who had built the
Albanian pyramids and asked for them back in lieu of wages.
Of course there was a scene where all the good
guys sat about drinking bhang and giggling as the sun set in the west
etc but I’m not going to include it in the novel. (Where’s my glass
gone …?)
So it was that with Mary’s fond blessing and
that of Naomi and Mummy who were now in cahoots due to the Barbadian
eradication of all scholarly conflict and jazz and jug music, and
their common interest in making as much gelt for themselves as
possible like all the other freewheeling capitalist parasites in this
apology142 for a novel (nowhere are trombones mentioned in it, um) -
which led in the end to the overthrow of capitalism itself and the
demise of the Very Slow Train which was replaced by a zippy road-rail
vehicle that ran on 14 000 steam pogo sticks manufactured by prison
labour in East Timor - she came at a last supper to believe that
criminality is politics by other means and that politics is
criminality by other means (history till now being the history of
crime and Big Lies writ large) and did her androgynous best to cast
Daddy’s traditional cossack-dancing values aside,143 setting out on her
golden, Gippslandish, eschatological and mercurial quest - in a
Christian Tibetan Zionist Lesbian orange-producing, camel-raising
commune at Eresós - to become totally unknown.
The End
Now read it all backwards.
ps
the fringe-dwelling author, alias Auntie

Rhoberta, who knows exactly what she wants, was dragged gibbering and
mewling from her squalid Saxon-built caravan-and-annexe the ‘Janet
Frame’ as soon as this meandering twaddle hit the bookstores, and is
presently being held incommunicado and straitjacketed in the grim back
ward of the Barbimoor Mental Facility for the Cross-Dressing
Criminally Insane in Goulburn, NSW at the behest of the Department of
Social Security. Please send letters, donations, nail files, etc, to
PO Box 81 Mawson ACT 2607, or fax the author on 61 06 242 9096.
Thank you,
142
Rather more timely than the famous one from the Japanese (and Australian) governments.
143
Leading to the failure of the CD mentioned earlier, not to speak of that of the unsavoury cult of
economic rationalism.
244
Bit at the End.
245
Dr Gerald/Amanda Iceberg
Dr Naomi/Hamish Hanan al-Fayk
Dr T. Lobsong Rampa
Dr S.F. Dinkididenko
Dr Mike Gaspottery (a ring-in to make up a quorum)
Dr Horace Syphilis
Dr Siobhán Macgillicuddy
Dr Hall Caine
Dr Magnus Snaefell
Dr Morgan the Organ
Dr Olwen Orgasme
Dr Gryff Jones the Baker
Dr Taffy Jones the Shop
Dr Gwladys Caerphillipa Jones the LNL-listener and Mary’s Bikini
Waxist
Dr Emlyn Jones the Chapel
Dr Ifan Jones the Town Drunk
Dr Myfanwy Jones the Town Bike and Truckdriver
Dr Boris Jones the Ammunition Dump
Dr Mair Jones the Archaeopteryx
Dr Bloddwen Jones the New Statesman
Dr Caradoc Jones the Welsh Nationalist Tiresome
Dr Nant-y-Glo ‘Lorenzo Ervin’ Jones the Welsh Rabbit (who appeared
in chapter five)
Dr Dafydd ‘Gerry Adams’ Jones the University of Aberystwyth
Dr Goronwy ‘Lenny Bruce’ Jones the Comedian
Dr Dai Bach the Welsh Composer
Dr Iswlyn ‘David Irving’ Jones the Dyed-In-The-’ool Fascist and
Gutless Wonder
Dr Charlotte the Harlot
Dr Goggomobile Jones the Blithering Speech-Impaired Village Idiot
Dr Micah Jones the Underground Exhibitionist
Dr Abednigo Jones the Foot Fetishist
Dr Ahab Jones the Whaling Station (and part-time wall)
Dr Ebenezer Jones the Thatcherite
Dr Jezebel Jones the Nuclear Physicist
Dr Mary ’annah Jones the overpaid CEO of General Motors
Dr Whitney ‘Shirley Bassey’ Mykal Jackson-Jones the Belle of Tiger
Economy Bay
Dr Elle Marilyn Brigitte Jayne McJones the Village Sexpot
Dr Megan Jones the Bloody Mission ’all.
pps
Thanks to the Embassy of Cymru, the Embassy of

Prydeni and the Embassy of the Isle of Person (Ellenvannen) for
supplying silly names for the author to make fun of. Similar thanks to
all the other linguistic groupings whose words I have pinched and also
to all other comic genii whose jokes I’ve pinched (har har fucking
har). It’s a tough business. No thanks at all of course to the buggers
who refused to publish the above or failed to offer me a literary
grant of $300 000, a drop in the ocean by comparison to Jocelyn
Newman’s publicly-funded salary.
ppps
Thanks also to the readers who’ve enjoyed this

brilliant novel (mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur) ; as for the
rest of you unappreciative motherfuckers, you can stick your heads in
a Beijing public toilet for all I care. As Joseph Addison said, ‘Among
all kinds of writing, there is none in which authors are more apt to
miscarry than in works of humour, as there is none in which they are
245
Bit at the End.
246
more ambitious to excel’ (‘True and False Humour’). ‘For as the

crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool’, as
the Great Comic Novel says (all quotes are perversely from the ‘Saxon’
King James version). To laugh 144 is ‘to be malicious, but with a good
conscience’ as the old God-killer would say.
Hopefully I don’t yet qualify for Bedlam, but
the discerning reader and You-Know-Who will each be my judge.
pppps
As to the reviews, I’ve heard better reports

from a dog’s backside (‘offends all standards of decency’ indeed).
This novel was written by the ‘infill’ process, with interpolations
occurring daily at relativistic speeds. No reviewer can keep up with
that, not even Lou de Crass. Bah! Baa! Rotorua!
Disclaimer:
Not one word or letter or phoneme of the above

is true of any persons living, dead or otherwise, and any resemblance
to human beings the characters may have is due to futuristic
electronic technology and artfully-applied makeup. Much the same can
be said of the author, who disassociates herself from them entirely
and is now back on her medication. She is currently engaged in writing
heartfelt letters of apology to all the major ethnic and religious
groups in the country. Please bear with her (ps, she can’t bear
children or Pooh whinnying camels or even gnats through the eye of a
needle).
… but ideas that have overcome our intellect and conquered

our conviction, ideas to which reason has riveted our conscience, are chains from which one
cannot break loose without breaking one’s heart; they are demons that one can overcome
only by submitting to them.
- Karl Marx, 1842.
Sionara!
144
As Catullus the Celt had it, Nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est (For there is nothing sillier than a silly
laugh).
246
Notes
‘a disdainful, upward flick of her hand’
bigotocracy

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Chapter One

Llust for Fame .....................................................................................................4

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Chapter One: Llust for Fame1

Daddy exploded, in putrescent rage:3

Rhiannon woz fownd inn a streem wivinn a hark ov bullrushis

Leonie’s mind, devoid of stimulus, tried to

Eh, Bwana, look at dis, fach / bach? Blatantly emigratin’ to

Her unshakeable belief in the Great Chain of

Well, don’t needle me (dat’s off de record) - but Ah’ll be a five-

Leonie muttered and giggled to herself, sss-

This was so funny that she snorted and

Us 100 year old Black Welsh Marxist Sino-Hebrews (direct

Clementine! Yo, daughterfucker, we thrash you at de gwyddbwyll any day! De

She drew her sleeve across her nostrils. Fame,

Look you, anwylyd, it be a pity about our ole narsty stereotype

She rocked with rapture.

Why, shuffle mah politburo, what Ah say? Twyll tyn pôb

Leonie was by now laughing out loud - so hard

Down de hatch, fach! Too much light darken de mind as Our

But Ah have a Dream! Zzzzzzzzz -

Leonie felt a bit tired by now too. She

… (mumble) fuckin’ pork again? Jesus, Ah’ll starve, Ah ain’t

To the accompaniment of massed wobble-boards

“Er, ahem, are you all right, dear?”

Disturbed by any sign of creative potential in

More recently, she’d found the courage to go

Leonie giggled again, sss-sss-sss-sss-sss! (Her

She rocked back and forth once more, but this

She dried her eyes and wiped her nose on the

She peered at her gold-brick partner with

Her nepotistic friends in the literary

“I would rather become a Horangeman than see

with the other. She vowed, or tried to vow, praying surreptitiously at

The machete-toting crowd, all waving CM Bibles

After a few drams of Bushmills, Daddy

“Crush them greedy bureaucratic foreign-owned

He plainly had goodies to offer almost

We don’t do things by half-ia

No Welsh thief ere was Tafia.

True Celt Daddy had composed it - having had

True Celts! True Celts! True Celts!

True Celts! True Celts! True Celts!

True Celts! True Celts! True Celts!

”Leeks!” echoed Daddy at this frenetic and

Saxon: I say, you there, Scotch chappie, come here!

The laughs were minimal. Philistines.

“Yes, the tolerant True Celts oppressed everywhere! All masterminded

“TAKE BELFAST! I DON’T

And - where was his dear, deluded, gold-digging

Now safe at home with Gerald, Leonie touched

Having ducked and kept his head, her partner

Lighting a Winfield, Leonie arranged her dress

Novels! Anything could happen in one - really!

humourless transvestite, wraith of the night and fog of Darlinghurst,

And then one morning poor Dicky Duck had a

Of course, this was early in their marriage

Bastards! They joost think of me as movingg er, joost part of

She ignored this cameo appearance by Alexei

“I can’t hack these feminists, Daryl.” she’d

She instantly leapt up and swished out to the

Leonie loved driving as it gave her the thrill

Having done her bit for the community she

Thanks to her steaming self-esteem and a few