surely things couldn't get w*rse...

The windscreen wipers could barely cope with the sheer volume of water being deposited on the car. We crept home at a snail’s pace, past flash floods, past urban waterspouts created when the torrents accumulating in gutters would meet an obstruction such as a parked car. It was quite surreal, although the joint we were smoking probably didn’t help make things any more realistic either?
Finally we arrived back at Lane Cove, which is where things began to go terribly wrong again. ‘Scary Bob’ had built his mansion on a highly elevated block, which meant the place had an almost impossibly steep driveway; steep and long. As kids we used to shit ourselves trying to skateboard down it in one piece.
No one had ever made it in one run but plenty of skin had been left on the surface in the attempt. Where the driveway met the horizontal pavement on the street, the angle was so severe that a car would need to come to a complete halt before crossing it or risk bashing the front bumper bar on the upslope.
‘The Brain’, well-rehearsed in this maneuver, did precisely the right thing and we began our ascent. The driveway stretched out before us and after each pass of the wiper over the windscreen, we’d have a brief glimpse of the river of water cascading down the ramp towards us before the whole scene became blurred again. ‘The Brain’ pressed gently on the accelerator and ‘The Scary Bobmobile’ reluctantly started to move forward. No more than five kph could be achieved without the risk of spinning the wheels, so it was going to be a long, slow climb.
We got well past the halfway point, doing just fine, when ‘The Brain’ lost patience and tapped on the gas a little too hard. The old Mercedes, with just one rear drive-wheel, suddenly lost traction and began to slow.
‘The Brain’ hit the panic button and the accelerator all in one smooth move, gunning the engine and causing the drive-wheel to lose whatever little traction it already had. With all the noise from the pounding rain and revving engine, we’d lost our visual bearings and had become totally oblivious to the fact we were no longer moving forward. We had begun to backslide down the driveway, almost imperceptibly at first but rapidly gathering speed as gravity began to act on our two-and-a-half tonne car.
‘Fuck ‘Brain’…use the handbrake!!!’
‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing.’
‘The Brain’ pressed the pedal to the metal and we accelerated even more quickly in reverse, now going faster downhill than we were previously going uphill, so ‘The Brain’ ripped on the handbrake. This eventually slowed us down, primarily because by applying the rear brakes, we effectively had no steering and slewed sideways into the driveway’s side-wall.
‘Fucking great Fingers…now look what you’ve done.’
‘Me? You’re the cunt driving. I told you to hit the handbrake before we started moving too fast. You just locked up the steering, cunt.’
The sandstone blocks did a tremendous job of washing off both our car’s speed and its paintwork; the grinding of metal on rock was excruciating. Meanwhile we were still going backwards. ‘The Scary Bobmobile’ was more of a ‘Scary Bobsled’ now…
Suddenly, to our great relief the car seemed to bounce off the wall, however the relief was short-lived as we began to re-accelerate, gaining speed a lot faster than either of us anticipated.
‘Fuck!!!’
‘Fuck!!!’
We slid all the way to the bottom of the driveway, the rear bumper ploughing into the level footpath as we passed over it, then shot across the roadway before ‘The Brain’ stomped on the footbrake and brought the car to rest in the middle of the street.
‘Are you OK, Brain?’
‘What? Of course I’m OK. It was hardly a high-speed accident, you cunt. The car’s fucked though. We’re fucked. We’re so fucked.’
‘Us?’
‘Yeah…us. You’re part of this too, Fingers.’
‘I don’t think so Brain.’
‘Yeah well we’ll see about that. Fuck…we have to get this fucking car off the street.’
Whilst arguing the blame, we hadn’t noticed that ‘The Scary Bobmobile’ had stopped running. ‘The Brain’ tried the ignition but nothing happened. As we found out later, when the rear bumper bottomed out, the impact had apparently crushed the exhaust pipe flat, much like placing a potato on it and effectively blocking the engine’s airway. We got out of the car and surveyed the damage. It looked as though the ‘Scary Bobmobile’ had been through a carwash equipped with angle-grinders instead of brushes on one side. There were deep gouges in every panel running the entire length of the chassis. The driver’s door-handle had been completely ripped off.
‘Gee, that should buff right out, Brain…’
‘Fuck.’
‘Yeah…it’s over for you, mate.’
In the still-pouring rain we pushed the ‘Scary Bobmobile’ to the kerb, parked its sorry ass, locked it and scurried upstairs to our lair to ponder the catastrophe…


To be continued…

a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it...

So anyway…’The Brain’ went off to find some rope, while I foraged around in the back garden for a suitably heavy rock to weigh down the corpse. Ten minutes later we were hovering over the unquestionably dead hooker, deciding how best to attach the rock to her frail, little body. It was taking us a great deal of time to get the rock placed, which was just as well, because as we propped her up to try sticking the rock under her t-shirt…she coughed.
‘Jesus Christ, Fingers…she’s still alive.’
At this point I wasn’t sure whether ‘The Brain’ regarded this as good news or not, half-expecting him to turn into Freddie Krueger any second and produce an axe to finish the job.
‘Fucking hell, Brain…if we’d gone ahead with your stupid plan, we’d have actually been responsible for killing her. If they ever found the body and determined there was water in the lungs we’d be charged with murder, you cunt.’‘
'Well, you’re the one who said she was dead already.’
‘I’m STILL not a coroner, you fuckwad.’
As the wave of relief swept over us, an agreement was reached that the hooker had to leave the house…since neither of us were terribly convinced she wouldn’t die at some stage in the near future. Luckily for all concerned, The Royal North Shore Hospital was just a few minutes drive away. We hatched a meticulous plan to leave her in front of ‘Casualty’ where she’d be safe, so to that end we wrapped her in a blanket, carried the young lady down to the garage and opened the door.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck…I forgot the Jag’s fucked…we’ll have to take ‘The Scary Bobmobile.’
‘Oh brilliant.’
‘The Scary Bobmobile’ was a jet-black 600 SEL Mercedes, with ‘BOB’ number plates and nuclear-flash-white-walled tyres; possibly the non-stealthiest vehicle in the whole of Sydney. Still, we had few options (other than the many obvious, civilized, sensible ones) so we rolled the hooker-in-a-blanket into the boot (she was still at risk of throwing up), drove carefully over to the hospital, past the busy front doors, round the side to an unlit emergency door…and propped the now-semi-conscious body up against the wall.
We then drove out the other side of the hospital grounds, found a phone booth and called the hospital to let staff know there was a patient waiting for them outside. On the way home, ‘The Brain’ and I congratulated each other on taking the honourable course of action; we’d saved a life, we were possibly heroes…perhaps we’d both get a medal some day.
As we drove back to the house it started to rain, gently at first but then all of a sudden it was bucketing down, as only it can over on The North Shore, where it sometimes feels like God is trying to pour The Pacific Ocean on it through a sieve…

To be continued…

a brief interlude...

If I may take a very short break from the story to ask the youth of Australia a question…
Here is an excerpt from Steph’s amazing Big Brother Blog, in which she summarizes the voting rules for household evictions this week.


It is an unauthorized reproduction, much the same as the girl/girl pash photo of Steph that most of my clients now have installed as screensavers across SE Asia.


‘…The public vote to SAVE the HM's they like. At the end of the week, the bottom three HM's with the least save votes, are put up for eviction. The HM's then vote (two points and one point) who they would like evicted, except for the winner of FNL who gets four points and two points to use on evicting a HM, AND also gets to SAVE one HM from eviction. The person with the next least save votes then gets put up to take their place.

In yet another twist, the bottom three HM's also get to nominate each other too and their votes are kept secret until the end.

After this somewhat exhausting process, the three HM's get into "the revolver". Two HM's are put back in the house, and the one with the most eviction points is spun out to "the bleachers" where Jackie-O is waiting to interview them…’

My question: If you can follow this...WHAT THE FUCK WAS SO FUCKING HARD ABOUT THE FUCKING AWAs YOU SEEMED TO HAVE SO MUCH FUCKING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING, YOU DIM-WITTED CABBAGES…

That is all…and now back to ‘The Brain’…

the right thing to do...

If the hooker had looked dead when we first picked her up at ‘Les Girls’, she looked even deader now.
‘Did you kill her, Brain ?’
‘No, she took another shot of smack a while back and then she just collapsed. She’s been like that for a few minutes. Check her pulse. Is she dead ?’


I leaned over the unconscious girl and placed a finger on her carotid artery. She had no pulse whatsoever, although I’ve since learned that the carotid artery is apparently in a different position to where I was pressing, so that may have explained it. Nevertheless, at around 2am I pronounced her dead, which did not suit ‘The Brain’ at all…
‘She can’t be fucking dead.’
‘Well she is…so what are we going to do about it ?’
‘No, no, no…she can’t be. Get a mirror and hold it in front of her mouth…see if she’s breathing at all.’
Now that was a surprisingly good idea from ‘The Brain’, so off I went in search of a suitable mirror. All of them were either attached to walls or simply too large to be practical but eventually I found a shaving mirror in ‘Scary Bob’s’ bathroom, which I unscrewed from its extension arm and brought back into the lounge room. I held the shaving mirror in front of the girl’s face while ‘The Brain’ supported her head gently.
‘Breathe you cunt, breathe,’ begged ‘The Brain’.
There was nothing; no respiratory vapour condensing on the mirror at all. This chick was as dead as she appeared according to our thorough medical examination. Of course, in our diagnostic haste, we had failed to consider that shaving mirrors were specifically designed not to fog up…but that fact wouldn’t occur to me until a few hours later.
‘She’s toast, Brain. We have to call the cops and report this.’
I may not have been a brilliant doctor but as a Year 3 student of the law, I was fairly sure about the correct procedure for dealing with corpses.
‘No way, no cops…’
‘Are you fucking kidding me, Brain. We haven’t done anything wrong yet. The silly cunt O/D’d…it’s not a crime unless we fail to report it.’
‘I don’t give a shit about the cops but if we call them, then they’ll call ‘Scary Bob’ and he’ll know we were here and then we’ll all wish we had OD’d.’
‘So, what do you suggest ?’
‘We have to get rid of the body.’
‘What ? Who the fuck are you…Ted Bundy ? How do we just get rid of a body ?’
‘We can tie her up, weight her down with rocks or something and throw her in the river…’
Conveniently, the house had frontage on The Lane Cove River, with a private jetty and a small dinghy for getting out to ‘Scary Bob’s’ large cruiser, which was normally moored a hundred metres away.
‘Are you completely insane, Brain…I’m not dumping this body in a river. We didn’t kill her; we’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘OK fine but when ‘Scary Bob’ is called by the cops, while he’s on holiday with ‘Snap’…and has to come racing back to Sydney to sort this out…and he asks me who else was here…I’m going to say ‘Fingers’.’
‘Right…you go find some rope. I’ll be in the garden looking for rocks…’

To be continued…