CHAPTER 25
She looked to be a year or two older than me, but her smile was a genuine one, if a little uncertain. It was clearly a set-up, but I didn’t think it would be polite to make a fuss. Have our meeting, poke fun at the photos, and then make a quick exit. Doug was back with the drinks, passing me a pint and his children a coke each before returning for the other adult drinks. Once settled, he passed me a sheet of paper with the day’s ‘specials’ listed.

“Parmo’s something popular up Teesside way, as I said. Now, I’ve had a word with him behind the bar, and he said something about it not being exactly what he expected. Seems there’s a difference between the Aussie one and the one his cook’s banged our”

I had no idea what that would be, so did the dumb-show for ‘And? Explain?’, but Bets was laughing. She turned to her husband.

“Remember Tim?”

“Aye, course”

“He said he tried one once, when he was up in Billingham. Couldn’t decide which smelled worse, the parmo or the chemical works”

Pam was shaking her head.

“You two are really selling this, but I’m still lost. Difference between Aussie and sort-of-local?”

Doug grinned.

“Well, the Aussie one is what was expected, which is chicken in breadcrumbs with a tomatoey pasta sauce stuff on top and a load of melted mozzarella. That’s chicken parmigiana. Parmo starts the same way, with the breaded chicken, but the topping’s a white sauce and melted cheddar. Betcher meal sauce?”

Pam said “Béchamel” and Doug nodded.

“That’s the one. Anyway, orders. Kids?”

Joe and Amy went for burgers, to nobody’s surprise. Betty opted for steak pie and chips, Pam for Cumberland sausage and mash, while Doug grinned at me.

“You know you want to! Go on; I am”

Two chicken parmos. I was feeling more than a little cornered, so my odd brain retaliated by paying for the food. I was just finishing the transaction when the cheesy smell caught my nose. Shaun, our landlord, winced slightly.

“Mate, that is so NOT what I bloody expected, ey? I mean, back home, everywhere, it’s a proper parmigiana and a bucket of wedges, that or fish and chips, and what he’s cooked up, all wrong. Where’s the sauce?”

I was still able to laugh.

“Well, I’ll let you know what I think. Now, if you get a few minutes, we’re actually here to look at some pictures”

“Didn’t think you lot were like that, mate. What’s the prices?”

“What? Oh! Not that sort of picture, you cheeky bugger. Kul’s sent us some from Perth”

“Oh! Ripper!”

“Sorry?”

He dropped his voice a little.

“Mate, sometimes I forget, doing the professional Aussie routine. If you ever catch me saying ‘cobber’ or ‘arvo’, just kick me”

“Will do”

“Food’s going to be half an hour, mate. And we actually have a run on the parmos. I blame that ale you all drink—kills the taste buds! Be over when I get a gap, but wait till after you’ve eaten; keep the grease off the pics”

I couldn’t argue with that last bit, so made my way back to our table.

“That’s the food ordered; half an hour or so till we get it. Compare pictures before we eat? Landlord’ll have a peek afterwards. Here’s my bundle”

Betty waved a similar envelope at me.

“Kul said he wasn’t going to duplicate any of the snaps, cause the cost gets silly.. Very clear that we have to share and compare”

Pam held up a hand.

“Greasy fingers, remember?”

Betty shrugged.

“Got a load of wet wipes in the handbag. Got three kids with me, so got into the habit. Yes I meant you, Doug. I think we do one pack now, then the other after filling our faces. Mike?”

“Okay, then. I’ll try and remember what Kul wrote about them. This is the brewery…”

I worked steadily through the ten pictures, the beach photo bringing a sigh from Betty.

“All that sand, and nobody there! Marbella it isn’t. Every square foot there has someone on it!”

We were on the parrot pictures when Shaun brought our food over, and he pointed at the pink one.

“Galah, that one. Common as, that. So’s the other; it’s a Twenty-Eight”

Pam grinned up at him.

“Why Twenty-Eight? There’s only one in the picture”

“Ah, it’s their call”

He made an odd sort of squeak or rather squawk, with that rhythm, ‘twenty eight’, and Bets snorted.

“You being serious? Noise like that?”

“Ah, you want to hear the magpies when they get going. Who’s got the pie?”

He dished out the food, and yes, the smell of the parmo had an almost solid existence of its own. I simply stared at it for a minute, remembering Sangeeta’s reported comment about developing her own gravitational field. How many bloody calories were in the thing? Sod it: dive in, Rhodes.

It wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t see myself eating it on a regular basis, as the cheese alone would probably fill a week’s allowance of lard, fat, grease, whatever it was Bets had called men’s essential food groups. Doug topped up our drinks partway through, but even with the ale as a solvent, I couldn’t finish the thing.

Shaun appeared at the table, an old pia box in hand.

“Doggy bag?”

Betty’s husband looked up at that, then at me, so I just nodded and Betty herself turned the word from ‘doggy’ to ‘Dougie’ before producing the promised pack of wet wipes. Shaun spotted her move, and pulled over another chair.

“Right, you lot… Ah! Swan brewery. That’s all the Swan river, all that water. Got dolphins in there”

Joe looked up sharply.

“Really? Can you swim with them?”

“Ah not so much there, mate. Better to go down to Mandurah. They come into the shallows”

Both Joe and Amy were hanging on Shaun’s words, and as the rest of us sipped, he worked through the two bundles.

“That’s a magpie, mate! Bloody vicious bastards. Don’t like cyclists; go for your eyes, they do”

Pam looked at the bird, a pied thing that looked nothing like a real magpie, especially not in its long and pointed beak.

“You said about their song, Shaun?”

“Oh! Oh, yeah/ Perth’s a bit odd with birdsong, cause they introduced a lot of stuff without thinking”

Ammy asked, “Like rabbits? I heard about the fences”

“yes, love. Like the rabbits. Mostly in the East, though. Perth’s got Aussie birds that don’t belong there, though. Kookaburra’s one, rainbow lorikeet’s another. Both noisy bastards. Maggies, though, they’re native. Sorry, don’t know your name?”

“Pam. His cousin”

“Pam. Hi; Shaun. You see that Vin Diesel film? The darkness one?”

“Pitch Black? Oh, yes. Bloody scary!”

“Well, maggies and currawongs, which are even bigger bastards, are part of a group called butcher birds”

Betty burst out laughing.

“You are not exactly selling that place, mate!”

He grinned happily.

“Wait till I get onto spiders and snakes, woman. And box jellies, blue rings, salties, white pointers…. Anyway. Maggie song. All the butcher birds like to sing, and maggies are usually in mobs, and it’s like a choir. That noise in the film, where the monsters are waking up? That’s what maggie song is like”

Pam was clearly fascinated.

“That’s… That’s scary!”

“Yup. Some people like it, but it always makes my skin crawl”

“Do the wotsit keets sing?”

“The rainbow lorikeets? No, they just squawk. They’re really Queensland birds, so they’re as thick as those rednecks are. That’s the far North East of Oz. Think hats with corks on strings around them, men in singlets and knee-shorts”

“Singlet?”

“Vest. Think the Yanks call them wifebeaters”

Doug coughed, and Shaun blushed slightly.

“Sorry, mate. Just getting a bit nostalgic. Oh, that’s Maggy River. Think tour cliché Aussie bloke, that’s Queensland. This is Maggy River; think more like Haworth, or maybe Richmond. Culture, right?”

Betty waved another picture at him, with what looked like badly-made cut-outs of Beefeaters and similar non-Australian imagery.

“And this rubbish? This is culture?”

His blush grew stronger.

“Yes, well. Really nice buildings there, honest. That’s London Court”

He spread his arms.

“What can I say? It’s a tourist attraction!”

Doug laughed.

“I ask myself what sort of tourists your city is trying to attract, and why! Given what the rest of the pics show, why on Earth would anyone want this?”

Pam slapped his arm.

“You’re embarrassing him, Dougie! Stop it”

“Okay, but, well! Shaun?”

“Yes, mate?”

“Last question, cause there’s someone at the bar. What the hell is that?

The photo showed a solid-looking lizard with tiny legs, a bright blue tonguing hanging from its open mouth. Shaun perked up again.

“Ah, that’s a bluey! Some people call them stumpies, cause of the tail. Blue-tongued skink. Harmless as, they are”

He paused for a few seconds, then said, in a much quieter voice, “Learned something I didn’t know about them, couple of years ago. I’LL BE WITH YOU IN A MINUTE, MATE!”

He turned back to us with a hint of a grimace.

“We get a lot of roadkill back home, especially in the RFO. Much of it’s roos, and they can do a lot of damage when you hit them. Blueys, though; you find them on the edges of the roads, usually alive, next to a squished one”

He drew a breath before looking directly at me, then quickly away.

“Thing I learned is that they mate for life. When one of them gets squished, the other one stays with the body. You can work out the rest. They don’t move on, just stay there and wait their own turn. Sorry: bit of a downer, that”

He rose abruptly, heading towards his customer, and I caught his train of thought without the need for telepathy.

Was that me, waiting for my own turn?

I looked across at Pam, who was staring towards the bar, and caught her whisper to her cousin.

“Is Shaun single, Dougie?”