'What has upset us is that the DVD cover appears to miss that point [of the film] entirely,'' she said. ''It's disrespectful to the very talented young Aboriginal actors in the film, and it's disrespectful to us as a group.
''But in particular, it's disrespectful to women of colour everywhere who have stood up against this sort of thing all their lives.'' she said.
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| (from left) The Angels' bassist Chris Bailey, and guitarists Rick and John Brewster |
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| The Angels' Dave Gleeson and Rick Brewster |
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| The Angels' Dave Gleeson |
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| Rick Brewster gets... |
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| ....a great idea |
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| Signing stuff |
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| The Angels' bassist Chris Bailey |
Valentines Day Brain Surgery. Sounds like a Ramones song. They gave me general anesthetic and cut a 10cm rectangle at the back left of my skull, took out the offending alien and put the skull piece back. It was over in about three hours.
Two hours later I was in intensive care when the head of the neuro team came in and said
“Good news, looks like it was some kind of infection ”
Holy shit, the relief I felt was overwhelming, not just for me but for my family as well. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in three weeks.
No cancer! Or as Gordy put it “Happy Valentines Day you tumourless fuck.”
So what the hell was it? How did I get an infection in my brain?
I was tested for all sorts of things over a couple of days until finally they got some results back from the lab. Here’s an approximation of the conversation.
“Have you been to Central America in the last few years?” Asked the good doctor from the infectious diseases department.
“Sure”
“We think it could be a parasite”
” Again!? Is this somehow related to Pico the botfly larva I picked up in the same region?”
“No, this is specifically neurocysticercosis, basically the egg from a pig tapeworm”
“A what tapeworm?”
” A pig ”
“A pig?!? I’m fucking vegetarian! How did I get the egg from a fucking pig worm in my brain?!?”
Irate ratepayer Kevin Rudd brought a dead wallaby into this week’s council meeting, leaving blood stains on the floor.
Mr Rudd, who addressed the meeting about a modification to a development application, was halfway through his speech when he went to the door and took a large hessian bag from a person waiting outside.
He threw the bag into the middle of the room and then lifted the dead wallaby from the bag by its tail.
"Is he okay?"
He waited for her to answer.
He couldn't tell her what happened while she was away...
"He's not getting better, if that's what you mean."
How could he tell her, right now? She had more than enough on her mind already.
"I know your dad's not getting better. I meant...does he understand what you say to him? Can you talk to him?"
Down the hall, he could hear his son's sobbing quickly winding down as something in his bedroom grabbed his attention. When his mother had told their son she had to stay in Brisbane tonight, Christmas eve, he'd let out a little shriek, then a plume of tears. He didn't blame his son for crying, he knew he'd have burst into tears as well if he'd been told, at six years of age, that his mother wasn't going to be there when he woke up on Christmas Day.
"I talk to dad," she said, "but...he's off somewhere else. Most of the time, his face is just blank."
He struggled to catch all of what his wife was saying. It was like he was trying to talk to her across a room, while a titanic hailstorm attacking the tin roof above. The static on the line made it seem like wife was even further away than she actually was, sitting next to her father, drifting out his last days in a nursing home that hummed steady silence, punctuated by screams and crying. He knew his wife hated that place, and that she wanted to be home with him and her son on Christmas eve, wrapping presents.
But there were no presents to wrap.
"Are you still there?" she said, her voice grating with frustration. "Hello?"
"I'm here, the...line is terrible," he went to swallow, and couldn't it. His tongue, his mouth, throat, were dry, he needed water. Or bourbon. A decade ago, when he was 24, he would have dealt with the misery of the ruined day he had just endured, and what was still to come tonight, with three double Wild Turkeys and Coke, and then a few more straight from the bottle.
But he didn't Do That Anymore.
Even if he wanted to obliterate himself with bourbon tonight, he couldn't afford it, and he couldn't drive to get it. The car went two weeks ago.
"I know where I'd rather be tonight..." she said, and he could feel her smile."I wish you were here, too."
"We've never been apart at Christmas, have we?"
"No. First time..."
He could delay the inevitable confrontation with his wife until tomorrow afternoon, maybe even early evening, it would take her most of the day to drive back down the coast.
Or he could tell her now. Be honest, and tell her that he left everything to the last moment and that he had well and truly fucked up, that he'd been so absolutely sure there was another couple of hundred left on their final active credit card, but he'd been wrong.
He could tell her how it felt to stand there at the cashier's with a video game for his son in his hand and have his credit card rejected, twice, and to have someone there in the line behind him whisper, with disgust, "fucking loser," and to know that it was ultimately nobody's fault but his own.
He could tell her all that, but it would make her night even more miserable, worrying then not only about her father, and whether he would live to the New Year, but also about her son, who was now going to wake up in less than seven or eight hours to discover that Santa had left him no presents.
The splatter of static faded from their phones.
"No, we've never spent Christmas apart," she said, and he could see the memory movies he knew she was thinking about. "We even saw each other on a few Christmas days before we started going out. When you were still seeing...Sonja."
"You know I only went to all those parties with Sonja because I knew you were going to be there, looking wicked," he said. These were old lines, they both knew the routine and enjoyed it.
His wife laughed, a real laugh, deep and loud. "How do you come up with such bullshit?""That's why you love me," he said. She'd needed to laugh, to get that release, and he'd done it. He'd made her feel better.
"It's not the only reason I love you, but it's in the top three."
How could he tell his wife that when their son woke up he'll think Santa is a liar? And that their son would probably be waving the letter she'd written a month before, on Santa's Workshop letterhead, from the desk of Santa Claus himself, that promised the boy, if he behaved himself, the one present he most absolutely desired, as he'd told his father, "in this whole wide, world wide world."
It was a video game, for PC (a new Xbox system was one third of a monthly mortgage payment they could never afford to miss), a game that put the player in command of the stars and moons of our galaxy.
Before work finished for the year eight weeks ago, he'd watched a couple of previews of the game his son wanted from Santa on YouTube. The game had caught his imagination as well. One of the key missions of the game was to move moons into the orbits of watery worlds to pull life out of the oceans, or to position a star into a rumble of asteroids and dead planets to make a new solar system, where life would eventually flourish if you could protect the planets from massive asteroid and comet strikes. He wanted to play the game, too, with his son. And earlier today, when he'd been walking to the cashier's at the W, he'd imagined an afternoon of connection and absolute joy with his son as they played the game together on Christmas Day.
Tomorrow.
"Are you still there?" she asked.
"Yeah. Are you staying at the nursing home tonight?"
"I have to. The storm's gone crazy. I'm going to drag in a more comfortable chair from the day room when everyone's gone to bed. I think it's only me and the nurses, here, who actually know it's Christmas Eve..."
"That's really sad. They don't even know it's Christmas.."
"I know. Anyway, I'm going to go."
"Okay. Do you want to talk him again? He's still awake, I can hear him ripping up paper in his room."
"Why's he still doing that? No, I'll call him in the morning. Make sure he's up by seven."
"He'll be up by five, waking me up."
"That's true...."
A long pause. He knew that she knew, in the way she always knew.
"So," she said, with a sigh. "Did you get everything?"
He had to end this conversation now. It was time to bail.
"It's all taken care of," he said, quickly. "Everything's cool. I love you. Kiss your dad for me. Merry Christmas. I'll talk to you in the morning."
He hung up, snapping the phone shut. He tossed it on the bed like it had scorched his hand.
He stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it would ring again, then headed for the bathroom and drank water from the tap. Being a deceptive bastard was thirsty work.
"Jamie? What are you doing?" he shouted through the house, from the bathroom.
"Nothing dad!" his son shouted back, from his bedroom. "What are you doing?"
"I'm going downstairs to see what's on TV! You hungry?"
"No!"
"Okay! I'll be back up to tuck you in!"
"Yeah, okay."
He had to get this done, before his son went to sleep. He had to go and tell him the bad news about Santa. And he'd do it, he told himself, in a few minutes, fully aware food and TV were just ways to delay the inevitable.
He walked down the stairs, the rest of the house below, dark, quiet, still. The only noise in the whole house was the steady sound of his son slowly tearing long strips of paper.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw it wasn't completely dark in the lounge room. Pink, yellow, blue and green lights glowed across the street, spilling through the curtains. It was the neon-drenched Christmas display that covered most of his neighbour's house. A remarkably detailed Christmas display that had drawn a steady stream of family-packed cars every night for two weeks. Most had stopped to admire his handiwork for a few minutes, but there were many who'd parked their cars and walked into his yard to explore his Christmas creation, to wander amongst those lights, to see what all the little mechanized figures of snowmen and elves and reindeer were going to do.
He knew his neighbour wouldn't be able to pay the astonishing electricity bill for this year's festival of Christmas lights, when it thudded into his mailbox in February, because he knew his neighbour wouldn't be there to get it. His neighbour had already packed up the larger pieces of furniture and valuables and moved them elsewhere, so when the bailiffs turned up and let themselves in some time after New Year's to tally up the assets, they'd find nothing of any real value, all of it long gone.
There'd be no Christmas miracles for his neighbour, and his family, he knew that. There was no government bailout for them. They only owed hundreds of thousands, instead of billions.
And so another family will leave this street, he thought, another set of familiar faces, some friends, who'd lived and shopped and taken their kids to the park and daycare centre in this neighbourhood for six or seven years, would be gone. Another abandoned house would join the twenty or more he'd already found within a few minutes walk. Some were occupied by squatting students who couldn't afford to live in the city anymore, others housed the suddenly homeless who had fled other suburbs, in other states.
His son didn't seem much bothered by the disappearance of his friends from up or down the street.
He didn't understand this at all. When he was five, his best friend's family had packed up and left the street where he'd spent his childhood, and the experience had traumatized him for months.But his son just shrugged when he asked him if he missed the kids he used to play with. By his fifth birthday, his son had said goodbye to nine of the kids who were born to families in the street the same year their family had moved in, their son only a newborn. All his original friends were gone, moved on, leaving behind abandoned mortgages and abandoned homes that few wanted to buy.
For the past three years, the street had seemed like the perfect place to raise a child, surrounded as they were by other young families, people like him and his wife, working families. Everything here had felt familiar, everything had felt right. It had been a safe place, safe enough for the kids to get together in the park after school to kick around a ball, without a fleet of parents watching over them.
But the kids hadn't gone to the park much at all, at least, not as much as he and his friends would have, and did, when they were the same age.
His son, and his friends, were more interested in video games, and teaching their grandparents how to use a computer and get socially networked, than slamming each other into pebble-studded fields of mud in mad pursuit of a ball.
He stood at the bay window, and noticed for the first time, of the many nights he'd stood there, beyond midnight, staring at the lights, just how much the softly-blinding illumination lit up the surrounding houses, his own house, his front lawn. It was something of rare beauty, and he wished he'd spent more time enjoying it, rather than resenting it, because his own home Christmas decoration attempts seemed so futile in comparison.
The thousands of dollars of lights and waving, smiling dioramas and glowing reindeer had cleaned out his neighbour's credit cards over three afternoons of madness in late October. Making something beautiful, if only for a few weeks, had become an obsession for him, as his family came to grips with their financial ruin, as they poised on the brink of fleeing the neighbourhood.
It was only now, tonight, that he realized his neighbour hadn't gone mad. He'd lost everything anyway, but in a final tribute to the neighbourhood, or Christmas, or both, he'd given the people of this devastated street something beautiful, a flood of light, a place to stand and be awed in the night by the dazzling colours. This was his gift to the friends and neighbours that remained, and something free and wonderful for families no better off than them to come and see, experience, share.
When other fathers who visited asked how much it cost to bring their families into the yard, his neighbour grinned and declared, "Nothing!"
His neighbour had nothing left, so he had nothing left to lose.
He wondered, briefly, how long it would be before his family joined the exodus from the neighbourhood. Another month or two, maybe less. He'd lived with this coming reality for so many months already, it no longer made him feel like he vomiting.
From upstairs, the sound of ripping paper ceased. His son would soon be asleep.
From down the street, from one of the abandoned houses now occupied by homeless youth, drifted familiar singing. "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?" A John Lennon song, he remembered most of the words, a choir singing 'War is over, if you want it." The stereo the kids were blasting it from was up loud enough for him to sing along, but he got stuck on the words, "and what have you done?" The words repeated, a broken, taunting record in his mind.
What have you done?
He wasn't hungry anymore. He didn't care what was on TV. He had to get this over with. He walked to the stairs, and started climbing. He had to tell his son the truth.
