50
The sympathetic apathetic get energetic
Images of felled, dying kangaroos filled my sleep. As did Toyota utes laden with racks of twitching roos, dozens of them, hung up like pheasants; hunters clubbing joeys; joeys running scared, joeys being stubbed out like cigarette butts beneath Blundstone boots. But most shocking of all, the one image from Killing for Kicks downloaded for eternity – the image of a little, sandy haired boy, perhaps eight, swinging a baby kangaroo against the side of a truck like a sock full of rocks, over and over and over again until it was dead. Then gleefully, triumphantly holding the limp, bloody animal aloft.
I woke with a threadbare tongue and throbbing head, sideways and sweating beneath a single sheet on a large bed in a hot, foreign room. Such had been the dreamtime proliferation of Outback gunfire, dusty Toyota utes and khaki, I naturally assumed I was back in Australia. Yet, despite the many alcohol-fuelled hours I’d spent getting to Australia, all cognitive thoughts I brought into this far from cognitive morning suggested I’d actually gone to bed in North Yorkshire.
Proof of this came soon after, when, perhaps alerted by a smoker’s version of morning sickness – deep, wet hacks that overwhelmed me for minutes – Charlie Chabot appeared through the bedroom door with a breakfast tray of toast and plunger coffee. He was already showered, shaved, Grecianed and immaculately turned out in white trousers and lemon v-neck sweater, sleeves drawn up forearms, face drawn up in a crease-laden smile, Florida tan masking any external signs of very recent alcohol abuse.
He asked how I‘d slept. I looked at my crosswise position in the bed. ‘Like this, apparently.’
I told him about the nightmares and he said ‘Me too.’ I asked him if Simon had had nightmares and he told me Simon had left at about eight o’clock. He smiled, said ‘Don’t you remember?’ I smiled sheepishly, said ‘No.’
Charlie and I spent what was left of that brisk but bright mid-winter morning trailing five assorted dogs around his estate, the still novel sight of a free Danby accelerating my psychological rehabilitation no end. We talked a great deal – of gardens and the merits of trellis and pagodas; of life, loves and losses; bachelorhood and the merits of libraries. We also, of course, talked of kangaroos and Asok as though we hadn’t doused this controversy thoroughly enough in Scotch last night.
Inevitably our thoughts turned to the little, sandy haired boy, fresh faced, joyful and innocent in his sadism. I couldn’t understand such carefree cruelty. I couldn’t understand such parenting.
‘Such parenting is only shameful in the eyes of those who have not had such parenting themselves,’ said Charlie. He smiled at me as we walked. ‘Soft touches like you and I.’
And he was right. I simply wasn’t like these hardened country types to whom death was a livelihood, a hobby and, on occasions, even a toy. I was a death virgin until Duncan and Archie came and went, raised where the bucolic plague came from – the city. A place where I wasn’t so much desensitised to the concept of industrialised slaughter as disassociated from it. In the suburbs, I was at the outer reaches not just of cities but of realities, blissfully oblivious as I topped up the gas bottle, checked the sky and fretted over the cost of eye fillet for ten. In the suburbs, farmers were all old and named McDonald, butchers were all smiley men who gave children free cocktail sausages, and hunters were gentle men in racoon hats who never shot anything. In the suburbs, I could get away with being two faced, because only one of my faces ever faced up to anything. I could thank the tough nuts of the country for this. I could thank them for the smoke screen that was their conscienceless labour. And I could thank the kind folk of the abattoirs who were so dehumanized to the daily production line of death they could whistle along to Charlotte Church while slitting a sheep’s throat.
Suddenly six million twitching kangaroos and their squashed babies were eyeballing me. Suddenly every moral fibre in my being had spun itself into a tug-o-war rope and Team Advertising were all six stone weaklings. Suddenly I was finding it very hard to maintain a healthy set of career-enhancing double standards.
I was changing. Or maybe I already had changed. Maybe this was it. The new one dimensional me; straight and narrow, undeviating…true.
I didn’t know it yet, but the first real test of my newly acquired righteousness was only days away.
