The Diary - April 16, 2010 - A Lot of Stupid Shit Happens for a Change

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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'I'm sure this will help us get Josh and Alex,' said Dave, twenty minutes and two doctor costumes later.

We were standing outside the hospital again. I had a dull throb in my abdomen where they'd taken out my appendix, and my leg felt itchy from the bandages. My arm was still broken and it hung limp against my side like a leg of lamb. All in all, I was in a pretty bad condition; Dave, I'm sure, wasn't much better. His appendectomy scar was red and bleeding a bit, which I was sure was a thing it wasn't meant to do, and judging by his walk his ass was still hurting from the surgery. We looked all the world like two guys who weren't doctors trying to look like doctors.

It occured to me that there's probably people out there who do this for fun. Scammers, con artists, identity thieves and creepers. Dress up as a doctor and get access to patient records. Or then again, maybe there weren't. I doubt anyone would be so stupid as to try it.

Apart from us, that is.

And that was the plan that Dave had finally imparted to me. I didn't know why I was going with it, because 1) it's insane, and 2) it's fucking insane. Maybe I was just feeling adventurous, or maybe it was because I had no other ideas. We could pretend to be Alex and Josh's uncles or something, but neither of us looked particularly avuncular. Also, that was a stupid fucking idea.

So there I was, dressed up in quite obviously fake scrubs that identified me as "Doctor Hunk" on the lapel, preparing to undertake something probably highly illegal.

I hope no-one ever gets to read this stupid-ass diary.

We walked through the doors confidently and into the foyer. The whole crowd from before had departed. A few patients sat, one of them wearing a face-mask. I regarded them with the kind of look that I thought a doctor would regard patients with.

'What do we do?' whispered Dave.

I turned to him. 'This is your plan, dude. Is this really as far as you thought? "Let's dress up as doctors"?'

'Kind of, yeah,' said Dave.

'Alright, let's not panic,' I said.

'I'm not panicking!' cried Dave in a panic-stricken voice.

'We'll go up to the counter,' I said, 'and we'll ask the receptionist or head nurse or whatever she is to see the patient records.'

'And if she says no?'

'We tackle her and we slit her throat,' I said.

'Her throat?'

'Her throat,' I said.

'That's illegal,' said Dave.

'Pretty much everything we've done on this stupid trip is illegal,' I said. 'We might as well sneak some throat-slitting in there.' I walked up to the lady sitting at the reception area. She was a tall lady with drawn skin but sagging eyelids, and she wore a cardigan that looked two sizes too small. She was too thin, almost as if her height had stretched her out, and she towered over the counter that also looked two sizes small like a skyscraper. She wore glasses, too: one of those flashy designer pairs that made you look like a person who actually gave a shit about glasses. Her nametag announced her as Nurse Hetty.

'Hey, Hetster,' I said casually, trying to attempt a leaning-on-the-wall position without an actual wall. 'How's it hanging?'

Nurse Hetty looked up from a long list of numbers with a thunderous look. If her face had been the thunder, the lightning had been the click her rings had made as she snapped the sheet of paper down in front of her. The rain was, I dunno - the ceiling fans or something.

'Who are you?' demanded Nurse Hetty.

'We're doctors here,' said Dave. 'We've always been doctor's here.'

'I've never seen you before,' said Nurse Hetty.

'I've never seen you before,' retorted Dave, 'so I don't know if I can really trust you at all. But I'm choosing to, because I'm a nice guy. A nice doctor guy.'

'I'll look you up in our database,' said Nurse Hetty, looking to his nametag. 'Doctor . . . Sexy?'

'It's German,' said Dave.

'German for what?'

'It's German for "water-tower",' said Dave. 'It's named after where I was conceived.'

'What, a water-tower?' asked Nurse Hetty.

'No, you see, "water-tower" in German means "Alabama",' said Dave.

'So you were born in Alabama?'

'Conceived in Alabama,' corrected Dave. 'I was born in Germany.'

'You don't sound German,' said Nurse Hetty.

'We moved out of Germany when I was three,' said Dave. 'To Water-Tower.'

'Alabama, you mean?'

'No, Water-Tower, it's this nice place in North Queensland,' said Dave. 'So that pretty much explains all the retarded stuff I just said, right?'

'I think it does,' I said.

'Sweet,' said Dave. 'Now give us the patient records.'

'I'll need to check your name first in our database,' said Nurse Hetty. 'Like I said, I've never seen you before. For all I know you could be some psycho who had just wandered in here.'

'That would be bad,' said Dave. 'Trust me, we are not on the side of the psychos. I see a psycho, I report him to the . . . Psycho Watch.'

Nurse Hetty looked up Dr. Sexy and Dr. Hunk in the database. Surprisingly, she found nothing.

'You must have spelled "water-tower" wrong,' said Dave.

There was no Dr. Water-Tower either.

'Are you sure you're not psychos?' asked Nurse Hetty.

'I'm sure I AM a psycho,' I said, 'but that's the first sign of sanity, isn't it? Psychos don't think they're psychos, do they?'

'So you are a psycho?' asked Nurse Hetty. She had one hand on the telephone, and she was watching us warily. No doubt she had the Psycho Watch on speed-dial.

'No, I'm not one,' I said. 'I'm the only sane one here because I recognise I am a psycho. I thought I explained this.'

'I recognise I'm a psycho,' piped up a tiny wizened little man sitting on a seat reading a newspaper.

'See, he's sane too,' I said. The whole thing was causing quite a stir amongst the customers that were listening.

'If being sane means admitting I'm crazy,' said a fat man with a loose shirt on, 'I'm going to have to come out and admit I'm stark raving mad.'

'You're not stark-raving mad,' said Nurse Hetty, and turned to us. 'Look what you've done. Now he thinks he's stark-raving mad.'

'He is stark-raving mad,' said Dave. 'I saw it with my own eyes.'

'He cut me,' I said.

'He was the one who broke my leg!' shouted a woman who had a cast around her arm.

'You've got a broken arm,' said the man who was stark-raving mad.

'You're mad,' said the woman. 'You're stark-raving mad. I've got a broken leg, not a broken arm.'

'I really am stark-raving mad?' asked the man who was stark-raving mad.

'You're not,' snapped Nurse Hetty. 'None of you are stark-raving mad.'

'Prove it,' I said. 'Prove they're not stark-raving mad.'

'I can't prove that,' said Nurse Hetty. 'How could I know? Only yourself would know if you were stark-raving mad.'

'Except you wouldn't,' said Dave. 'Madmen don't know they're madmen.' He turned to the crowd of patients and told them all that if they admitted now they were stark-raving mad they had proven they were completely sane and could leave.

'That's not how a hospital works!' wailed Nurse Hetty. 'Besides, this isn't a psychiatric hospital.'

'I'm stark-raving mad!' shrieked a girl of about 13 from the corner.

'Mad!' said Dave excitedly. 'Stark-ravingly so! You heard it, Hetty! She's mad.'

'She's not mad,' said Nurse Hetty. 'She's just getting caught up in the moment.'

'How do you know she isn't mad?'

'Because she just admitted she's mad,' said Nurse Hetty. 'You said it yourself! Stark-raving madmen don't know they're stark-raving madmen.'

'I know I'm a stark-raving madman,' said a stark-raving madman from his seat.

'Prove it,' said Nurse Hetty.

'He can't prove it if he's stark-raving mad,' said the elderly man from before. 'Stark-raving madmen don't know they're stark-raving madmen.'

'Then if he was a stark-raving madman and so didn't know he was a stark-raving madman, why'd he say he was a stark-raving madman, huh?' demanded Nurse Hetty.

'Stark-raving madmen would say anything,' said the fat man who was a stark-raving madman. 'You can't trust them.'

'You wouldn't know,' said the 13-year old girl. 'You're mad, you are. Stark-raving mad.'

'You're stark-raving mad,' said fat man. 'You said it yourself!'

Just then Ogre-Sloth swept down the corridor, gasped when she saw us and grabbed us both by the elbows. She threw us out, and told us if us dirty politicians came back again she wouldn't pay her taxes at all this year. When we pointed out that was illegal, she pointed out that necromancy was also illegal, and if that was Teddy Kennedy, how had you brought him back from the dead, huh? And they had to concede.

'Alright,' I said, 'your stupid ass plan didn't work.'

'Hey, at least I had a plan,' said Dave. 'What have you got, huh? Sometimes these days I think I should be Dr. Hunk instead of you, you know what I mean?'

'I think I should threaten to shoot them in their face,' I said.

'Exactly,' said Dave, then paused for thought. 'Sorry?'

'I think,' I said, 'I should threaten to shoot them in their face if they don't get Alex and Josh from wherever they are. Before they remove their organs, too.'

'To be fair,' said Dave, 'the appendix isn't really an organ. I mean, it just hangs around there weighing you down. Oh, and yeah, that's an insane idea.'

'Better than inane,' I said. I felt the cold weight of the gun in my pocket. I knew that if push came to shove, I couldn't shoot a person. Well, maybe Hitler. So I guess I could say that if push came to shove, I couldn't shoot a person, unless he was Hitler. But I sure could threaten.

'I refuse to take part,' said Dave.

'If you don't take part, I'll shoot you in your face,' I said.

'You couldn't do it,' said Dave.

'I could,' I said. 'You just watch me. Any face-shootings you've heard about lately? That was me.'

'I haven't heard about any face-shootings lately,' said Dave.

'I haven't been shooting faces lately,' I said. 'You'd know when I've been shooting faces, because you'd have no face. Because I'd have shot it off.'

'This is ridiculous,' said Dave. 'We're not doing this, Dave.'

'Your face is ridiculous,' I said. 'It's so ridiculous I just might have to shoot it off.'

'You know, I'm starting to doubt you've shot any faces,' said Dave.

'You doubt my face-shooting ability?'

'I suppose you could say I do.'

'I see,' I said. I walked back into the hospital, dragging Dave along in my wake. I don't know what had gotten into me. Maybe it was because they'd taken out my appendix, or because they'd taken Alex, or because I had a gun and they didn't. In any case, some faces were about to be extremely threatened to be shot off.

Ogre-Sloth was still there, talking to Nurse Hetty. She turned around when I entered, her eyes boggling like a couple of billiard balls.

'Out!' she screamed. 'Get OUT!'

I pulled my gun out and said, 'I will shoot you in your face.' She froze for a moment. Probably considering whether she'd look better or worse after being shot in the face. She apparently decided worse, because she put her head down and her hands up and told me to please not shoot her in her face.

'I won't shoot you in your face if Nurse Hetty gives me the patient records,' I said. I turned to Nurse Hetty, who sat in her seat slack-jawed. 'Nurse Hetty, if you don't give me the patient records, I will shoot you in your face also.'

Dave hung behind me, looking, I realised, a bit sheepish. Not frightened, or excited, but sheepish - as if my threats of face-shooting were somehow embarrasing. Myself, I was surprisingly calm. I'd never been involved in holding up a hospital before. Or any place, really. I'd expected to be sweating profusely like a lizard in the sun, except of course lizards were cold blooded and didn't sweat.

Some of the patients were starting to lie down on the ground; I turned on them, gun in hand. 'I'll shoot you guys in your arses, just to mix things up,' I said. 'Get the hell up. Don't be scared. Just sit in your seats. The only thing you have to be scared about is me shooting you in your arse.' This didn't seem to have the desired effect. They did get up, but they looked as terrified as ever.

'Nurse Hetty!' I shouted. 'Patient records, dammit! If you don't get me the patient records right now, by God as my witness, I will shoot you in your face and your arse! Nobody wants to be shot in the arse and face, Mrs. Hetty!'

Nurse Hetty clicked around with the mouse a bit until she presumably found the patient records. I vaulted over the desk, and Dave followed more mellowly.

'Search for Josh Hatters,' I said. 'And Alex Saules.' Nurse Hetty searched for Josh Hatters and Alex Saules.

'Third floor, rooms 12 and 13,' she said.

'Are there any injuries?' I said. Please let there not be injuries.

'They both have pretty heavy concussions,' said Nurse Hetty.

'So floor three is the concussion floor?' asked Dave.

'No, floor three is the broken bones floor,' said Nurse Hetty. 'Floor four is full.'

'He asked about floor three,' I said. 'Not floor four.'

'Floor four is the concussion floor,' said Nurse Hetty.

'Then whyever aren't both of them on the concussion floor?'

'The concussion floor is full,' said Nurse Hetty. 'I just said that.'

'The concussion floor is full? I'm surprised you've even got a whole floor for concussions anyway,' said Dave.

'You'll be surprised, sir, the amount of concussions that happen around the place. It's quite likely that someone, somewhere, is getting concussed right now, in fact.'

'Who?' demanded Dave feverishly.

'What?' said Nurse Hetty.

'Who's getting concussed right now?'

'However should I know?' said Nurse Hetty hotly.

'Then why would you bring up that stupid fact in the first place, if you didn't know who was getting concussed?' shrieked Dave stridently.

'Anyone could be getting concussed,' said Nurse Hetty. 'You could be getting concussed.'

'I'm not getting concussed,' said Dave.

'Ah, but I said "could," didn't I?' said Nurse Hetty. 'All I'm saying is it's possible that you could be getting concussed right now. It's possible you could be in some autovehicle crash right now, or in a fist fight, or being beaten up in jail, is all.'

'Shut up, both of you, or I'll shoot you both in the face,' I said, interjecting.

'You wouldn't dare,' said both of them at once. I was so stricken with this that I aimed the gun at the ceiling and fired. I'd expected something excitingly explosive to happen, but instead I felt my wrist twist around like it had gears, and a light rain of plaster settled over me.

'See?' I said, trying not to make out that the only wrist of mine that wasn't broken was now twisted. 'That is how serious I am about this.'

'That's pretty serious,' said Nurse Hetty.

'Deadly,' I said. 'Third floor, rooms 12 and 13, right? Right. The broken bones floor.'

'The concussion floor,' corrected Dave.

'No, no, it's the broken bones floor.'

'They've got concussions, not broken bones,' said Dave.

'Yes, but the concussion floor is full,' I said.

'That's stupid.'

'You're stupid, but you don't hear me complaining, yeah?' I said. Dave and I swept past Ogre-Sloth, who was quivering in silent rage. No doubt she was angry that politicians could simply wander into hospitals and threaten to shoot people in their faces. Next thing you know and they'd be ruling the country or something.

We rode the elevator up to the third floor and went into room 12 first. Alex was there, her head lying down on a pillow and her eyes slightly open. She looked dizzy, and pretty out of it.

'Who are you?' said the currently attending doctor, who was about 50 and had a slightly greying beard.

'He's got a gun,' explained Dave.

'That's right,' I said. I took the gun out of my pocket again and waved it around helpfully. I could understand the guy who had tried to rob me now. Waving it around was simply fun. I'd never had so much power in my life as I had now, waving a gun around. People paid attention to a waving gun.

'We need to take the patient,' I said.

'Why?'

'What do you mean, "why"?' I asked. 'I've got the gun, you've got the patient. Pretty simple exchange to understand here.'

'Exchange?' said the doctor. 'You're going to give me the gun?'

'I meant that I'm going to shoot you if you don't give me the damn patient,' I said.

'In your face,' said Dave. 'That's where he'll be shooting you.'

'Yeah, right in your stupid doctor face. I bet you didn't get a degree for not-getting-your-stupid-doctor-face-shot-off, did you? You had to go ahead and get a degree in medicine.'

I pulled Alex out of bed and supported her under my arm. We hobbled along to the next room, where Josh lay surrounded by doctors.

'Cancer,' said one.

'No, acne,' said another.

'I can't see any acne.'

'You can't see unhappiness either, but unhappiness is a thing, yeah?'

'Are you endeavouring to suggest acne is intangible?' asked one.

'I'm endeavouring to suggest your dick is intangible,' said another. A ripple of chuckles ran round the circle.

I pulled out my gun again, my wrist still aching terribly. 'Everybody shut up with the doctor shit,' I said, trying at once to hold a gun with a twisted wrist and support a concussed lady with a broken arm. They all shut up with the doctor shit and turned around to look at me, Dave and Alex.

'Who are you?'

'I'm the guy who has a gun and can shoot you in your face with it.'

'Oh, okay.'

'Give me the patient,' I said. 'We have to leave.' Why we had to leave I honestly have no idea, but what I did know is that, by God, we had to leave.

'But he's a medical marvel!' said one doctor.

'Josh isn't a medical marvel,' said Dave. 'Josh is fat and ugly.'

'Well, yes, but that's just personal hygiene and eating too much,' said the doctor who was apparently the leader. 'It's just, well . . . he has no sicknesses.'

'And?' I said. 'I have no sicknesses.'

'Slight depression,' said one doctor.

'And prone to ear-aches,' said another.

'I don't have slight depression and I haven't had an ear-ache in the last 8 years,' I said.

'Unusual happy mood,' proscribed one doctor.

'Decreased levels of regular ear-ache rate,' said another. 'Possible cancer risk.'

'The other one has jaundice,' said one of them.

'Bullshit he has jaundice. He's got conjunctivitis.'

'He's got jaundice and conjunctivitis,' concluded a third doctor. 'He's got Hepatitis A.'

'Hepatitis B,' said a fourth doctor.

'Hepatitis F,' said the first doctor.

'There's only Hepatitis up to E,' said the second doctor. 'There's never been any cases of Hepatitis F.'

'Yeah, exactly. Until now,' said the first doctor.

'I think we're getting off the point here,' I said. 'The point is that give me my fucking friend.'

'Low anger threshold caused by spousal abuse,' diagnosed the third of the doctors.

'I don't have a spouse,' I said angrily.

'Low anger threshold caused by luck of spouse.'

I swept into the ring of doctors and pulled Josh up and handed him to Dave. We started to steer him and Alex out through the doors.

'Wait!' cried a sixth doctor. 'Don't leave! He's a medical marvel!'

'Just let us get a liver sample,' said one.

'Why the fuck would you need a liver sample?' I demanded angrily.

'So we can sample his liver, god-dammit,' said the first doctor. 'Don't you know anything?'

'He's got not knowing anything caused by high blood pressure,' said the third doctor.

'My doctor says my blood pressure is perfectly fine,' I said. 'If anything, it's a little low.'

'Not knowing anything caused by low blood pressure.'

The four of us swept out of the room, except of course I was the only one sweeping; the other three seemed to be performing some kind of slow ballet, and both Alex and Josh didn't seem fully conscious yet. I herded the four of us into the elevator and we travelled quickly down to ground floor, where Ogre-Sloth, Nurse Hetty, and twenty policemen were waiting.

The Diary - 16 April, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

This is certainly some written words! All together got about 14800 of them.

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'I don't think this'll work, Mike,' said Dave, both hands clasped protectively over his naked crotch.

'It'll work,' I said. 'You just need to pull out your drip and we won't look like patients at all.'

'Yes, but then we'll just look like a couple of naked men in a hospital,' said Dave.

'Exactly!' I said. 'And who in the world is going to pay attention to two naked men in a hospital?'

'Everyone?' hazarded Dave.

'No, no, no. Look . . . remember a year ago, when we went down to your grandma's place, and two men in the same leotard tried to arrest you for public indecency because your top button was undone?'

'Vividly,' said Dave.

'And remember when it turned out they'd been filming us the whole time, and we turned up on some weird-ass Bulgarian reality show?'

'Yeah, that was pretty retarded.'

'Yeah!' I said. 'Are you getting my point? These days, we've got Punk'd, and all these stupid reality shows where people are stuck in a big house, or they're singing at you. I guarantee they'll just let us run out of here, because, one, no one wants to tackle a naked dude, and, two, they'll think we're actors, or pranksters, or we're doing a street theatre kind of thing. And they'll all avoid us. No one wants to be on the camera.'

Dave looked doubtful, but he said, 'I'll go with that.'

'Better than your stupid jumping out the window idea,' I said. 'I mean, there's practically no danger involved in MY plan. Now rip out your drip from your wrist.'

'Are you sure this won't kinda kill me?'

'Pretty sure.'

'How pretty sure?' asked Dave.

'Well, it's all relative, isn't it?' I said. 'I'm not as sure as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm a hell of a lot surer than Jesus was when he said to Ice-T: "Sweet ride, dude." Because Ice-T's ride is shit.'

'That never happened,' said Dave.

'I'm pretty sure it did.'

'How pretty sure?'

'Look, just rip the damn drip out,' I said. 'I took off my plaster cast.'

'You left the bandages on.'

'Yeah, but if I took them off, I'd just be bleeding everywhere and that'd be pretty obvious that I'm a patient here, wouldn't it?'

'How do you know I won't bleed if I pull the drip out?' said Dave. 'And besides, I just had a chunk of my prostate taken out, and my appendicitis ripped out of me like Poland was ripped from the Polish by Hitler.'

'That's a stupid metaphor,' I said. 'And I had my appendix out, too, but you don't see me having any morphine.'

'That's because you were in a mini-coma for three days,' said Dave. I simply raised my eyebrows. He looked from the drip to my eyebrows and back to the drip, then shrugged. 'Oh well, fuck it,' he said, and pulled. The drip came out inch by inch, uncurling like a snake, and then it was out. A drip of blood came to the hole it had left in his wrist and trickled down his arm.

'I'm bleeding!' he shrieked like a retarded banshee. 'Jesus Hannibal Lecter fucking Christ!'

I hit him in the face. Not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to stop his whining. I wiped the blood off his arm and pointed to the door. 'Let's go,' I said. 'Walk slowly, walk calmly. Walk like you own the world, walk like you're the biggest dude in the world.'

'The biggest dude in the world can't walk,' pointed out Dave.

'What?'

'He's some fat-ass Mexican dude. He can't walk. They pick him up in a truck.'

'Well, walk like you're the most IMPORTANT dude in the world,' I said.

'It could be argued that, according to yourself, you yourself are the most important person in the world,' said Dave.

'Well, walk like you're you and you've just had a coffee and you're out to take down a god-damn velociraptor,' I said.

'I can do that,' said Dave. He set his jaw hard, his head high, and opened the door to our room just as the nurse did the same from the other side. He jumped back, turned, then slipped on to the floor, crashing to the tiles in a twist of limbs.

It was the nurse from before. She looked from the bare ass of the prostrate Dave to me, covering my crotch and standing next to Dave's leaking IV tower. 'Get back in your beds,' she said. 'You've just had your appendixes out. And put some damn clothes on.'

'No,' I said. I darted over and pulled Dave up, then tried to pull the IV bag off to throw at her. It was fiddly as hell, though, so instead I just picked up my pants, threw them at her face and ran, pulling Dave behind me.

'Look like you're an actor,' I hissed, slowing to a light jog as we came into the corridor. A nurse coming out of a room stopped and looked at us in shock.

'We're actors,' explained Dave. The nurse immediately set about fixing her hair for the presumed cameras. We jogged past her and into the elevator. A man in a business suit was standing inside, one hand in his pocket, the other idly drumming a beat on his leg. He looked us up and down, his brow furrowing as we stood slightly sweaty next to him.

'Hi,' I said.

'We're actors,' said Dave.

The man coughed. 'Good on you.' He looked around the elevator; maybe he was looking for cameras, maybe he was just uncomfortable. Maybe both.

Dave had long ago abandoned covering his crotch and now stood with his legs slightly apart, leaning against the wall casually. 'Up or down?' he asked, leaning forward suddenly, causing significant movement.

'Up and down,' said the man, trying not to stare. 'I mean . . . uh, down.'

'Cool,' said Dave, pressing the ground floor button, 'we're going the same way. I'm Dave, by the way.' He extended his hand and the man shook it gingerly, as if it were disease-ridden. Which was, considering where it had been, probably accurate.

Dave tried to make small talk, but the man didn't seem very receptive.

We stopped at ground floor and the man got off. We followed him, me trying to look as much like an actor as I could. To tell you the truth, I wasn't very good at it; I wasn't a good enough actor for the task. I think by this point Dave was just enjoying himself too much to care about what our original purpose had been. If we even had one.

A big, heavyset nurse in scrubs and brandishing a stethoscope like it was a sword confronted us in the foyer, her moustache bristling with anger, her ass wobbling about in indignation like a whale breaching the ocean. She looked 30 or so, and she was holding the stethoscope so tightly that her hand was going white. Have you ever seen those statues of Aphrodite, the Greek god of love and beauty? This nurse looked exactly unlike Aphrodite.

'Explain yourself!' she roared. She sounded kind of like Zeus, if Zeus had been a three-hundred pound ogre-sloth.

'We're actors,' said Dave.

'If you're actors,' she said, sounding as if she were pointing out some great fault in our excuse - which, coincidentally enough, she was, 'where are your cameras?'

'They're in the ceiling,' I said. She looked up. There was nothing in the ceiling. I tried to push past her but she blocked my way like she was a mountain and I was a passenger plane. Dave tried to sneak under her arm; she brought her ham-like fist down directly on the crown of his head. He collapsed, groaning, clutching at his head.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I didn't know how it was supposed to go, but it certainly wasn't meant to go like this.

'Look,' I said, 'it's a long story and you wouldn't want to hear it. There's not really many interesting parts, and most of it will just be me recounting conversations about nothing.'

'This is public indecency!' cried a doctor from behind her. Quite a crowd had gathered around us. Dave, slightly dopey on morphine, and very dizzy, was trying to part them with his hands like Moses.

'It's a reality show,' I said. 'Secret hidden cameras are in the ceiling and we film the reactions to, uh . . . naked patients. Or something.'

'You're patients here?' asked Ogre-Sloth.

'We're doctors,' said Dave from the ground, and giggled.

'You're doctors?'

'No, don't listen to him, he's stupid. We're famous actors. I'm Steve Buscemi.'

'He does look like Steve Buscemi,' said someone from the back of the crowd. There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd.

'And who are you?' asked the nurse to Dave. Dave giggled and looked down at his crotch.

'I have a very small penis,' he said, frowning.

'Ah, Carrot Top,' said someone.

'He doesn't look like Carrot Top,' said another anonymous voice. 'He looks more like JFK.'

'No,' said another. 'More like Teddy Kennedy, really.'

'Teddy Kennedy is much older. And dead.'

'I mean young Teddy Kennedy.'

'Now that I think about,' chipped in another, 'he does look a bit like Teddy Kennedy.'

'I'm not Teddy Kennedy,' said Dave, who still hadn't risen from the ground. 'I'm Dave.'

'Ah, yes, but that's exactly the kind of thing Teddy Kennedy would say, isn't it?' pointed out someone. 'Wouldn't want to reveal his true identity, yeah?'

'He's Dave,' I said.

'What do you know? You're only Steve Buscemi.'

'No, he's Dave,' chimed in someone.

'No, no, he's Steve Buscemi. The other guy is Dave.'

'No, that's Teddy Kennedy.'

'Then who is Dave, if that's Teddy Kennedy, and that's Steve Buscemi?'

'I'm Dave,' said Dave, to the concern of no-one in particular.

'No one's Dave,' said someone angrily. 'Who the hell said anyone was Dave?'

'I did,' said Dave, but no-one was listening.

'I didn't say anyone was Dave,' said Ogre-Sloth. She looked around at the crowd accusingly. 'Whoever said anyone was Dave stand up right now.' Dave stood up. Ogre-Sloth turned her brutal, focused rage on him and told him to sit down again, and he did. She once again demanded that whoever said anyone was Dave stand up immediately. Dave stood up immediately, and she was taken with such a rage at him that she promptly kicked us out of the hospital, with an armful of hospital clothes each, charging us with public indecency and being Teddy Kennedy. We put the hospital clothes on and wandered aimlessly out into the Brisbane afternoon. The Suncorp Tower, which had a digital clock on it that was seemingly eternally broken and only ever showed the time on one side and even then sporadically, told us it was half past the bottom line of something that could be a three, a five, a six, an eight or a nine.

Dave looked at his watch instead. 'It's three-thirty,' he said. 'I know a costume place like 10 minutes from here that closes at four.'

'Why are we going to a costume shop again?' I asked.

'So we can get doctor costumes,' said Dave.

'Oh yeah, I remember that,' I said. 'Yeah, sure, let's dress up as doctors, I'm sure that'll help us get Josh and Alex.'

The Diary - April 16, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

12500 words done! That's one quarter. Sweet.

This one actually ends at the end of a scene!

__________________________________________________________________

(Continued from last entry)

We bought a frozen pie for the road, but then Dave ate it so we had to buy another frozen pie for the road. The Polonez was standing up fine, and it hadn't stalled or done anything retarded, but then again we'd only driven for a few hours. I had a stupid feeling that we'd just stop in Brisbane and go to a cafe and then head back to town afterwards, as if the whole road trip wasn't real at all. But maybe that was just hope.

Dave and Josh swapped drivers and we took the freeway through Brisbane and skipped the whole place. By now it was about 4 in the afternoon, pretty much 24 hours since we'd decided to do the whole thing.

Alex still hadn't talked about last night.

Another 20 minutes of driving, another obscure band, this time from Alex. It was a French synth-pop kind of thing, and the singer sounded like he was swallowing a frog.

'You guys have awful taste in music,' I said.

'Oh?' said Dave, who had decided to take off his shirt for some reason. 'And your tastes are so much more REFINED than ours, I suppose?'

'Well, yeah.'

'Sorry if we don't all listen to classical music, Mike,' said Alex.

'Music from the 60s is not classical music.'

'I bet that's what they said about classical music back in the old days,' said Dave. ' "This isn't classical music! This is modern! This is hip!" '

'Well they didn't call it classical music back then, yeah,' I said with authority, hoping authority could compensate for actual knowledge.

'Well what did they call it?'

'They called it music.'

'You're an idiot, Mike,' said Josh. 'You're a piss-idiot.'

'I'm not a piss-idiot!' I protested.

'You're a pretty big piss-idiot,' said Dave. 'Sorry, dude, but you are. Biggest piss-idiot in the whole car.'

'What the hell is a piss-idiot supposed to be, anyway?' asked Alex.

'Look it up in the dictionary,' said Dave.

Alex took out the dictionary we had in the car and looked it up. 'It's not there,' she said after a few minutes.

'I don't need it, anyway,' said Dave. 'I know the definition.'

'No you don't,' I said.

'Oh, suddenly a piss-idiot thinks he can correct me,' said Dave. 'I'm not having some piss-assed son of a bitch piss-idiot correct me.' He turned around in his seat and threw an apple core I didn't know he had at me. I ducked and it bounced off the seat behind me, hit the roof, then landed in Josh's lap. He swerved with sudden ferocity as the apple landed in his lap that I felt like my bones were being pulled out of my skin. As we skidded sideways across the freeway, I felt my seatbelt go taut, and I slammed forward in the seat, then was slammed back again as something grazed the side of our car and we went spinning off the freeway and crunched sickeningly against the concrete wall. I heard a beep, a scream of brakes and then I was flying through the air as the whole car bounced down the freeway in a way that I definitely thought cars shouldn't move in.

April 16, 2010

There's something extremely disconcerting about waking up in a hospital.

Maybe it's the sterility of it all, or the fact that the last thing you remembered was being whipped around like a yo-yo, or the thought that you, Michael Hockings, should be, by all rights, dead, flattened against the road like a pancake. Or maybe it's the fact that hospitals are fucking creepy.

I'd had my appendix out when I was 15 or so, when my plans to not have a retarded swollen appendix fell through. I remembered, every morning, waking up and panicking before realising where I was. There's something unfamiliar and alien about hospitals, like you've stepped into another world where everything is white and smells slightly like a new car. I'd always wondered about the whole white sheets, white walls, white clothes thing about hospitals. Was white more clean, or sterile than any other colour? They should have an Action Man motif sort of thing. You could be nostalgic about your childhood right before they put you under and cut a tumor out of your brain.

Still, even with that, there's something even more disconcerting than waking up in a hospital, and that's waking up in a hospital with a face an inch and a half away from yours.

I shouted and inadvertently punched the guy in the chest before I realised it was Dave. He wheezed a few times, then laughed and tried to grab my face. I pushed him away and he laughed again.

My arm was in a plaster cast and my whole leg throbbed dully and was bandaged. Apart from that, I seemed fine.

'Hey,' he said. He was in the white hospital clothes and he had a drip in his arm connected to an IV tower, but he didn't appear to have anything wrong with him. He sounded pretty out of it, though.

'Hey,' I said. 'Are you drunk or something, dude?'

'Morphine,' he explained, then added helpfully, 'you've got a pretty mouth, by the way.'

'Thanks,' I said. He giggled.

There was a metal lump under me. I pushed my hand under and extracted it. It was the gun.

'There's a gun under me,' I said.

'There WAS a gun under you,' corrected Dave helpfully. 'Yeah, you had it in the hotel, remember? As the paramedics picked us up, I grabbed it from the wreck and snuck it in here.'

'And no-one noticed sneaking a gun into a hospital?'

'Well, a few people noticed it,' said Dave, 'but they didn't say anything because I had a gun. Anyway, I figured it was yours so I slipped it under there. I hope you don't mind.'

'I don't mind you slipping a gun under me.'

I heard a few footsteps from outside, so I stuffed the gun back under me. Dave hobbled back over to his bed with his IV tower and managed to get inside just as the door to our room opened and an old nurse came through. She looked like an old nurse trying to look like a young nurse, but unfortunately the young nurse she was trying to look like looked like an old nurse.

'Hi,' I said. She looked at me like I was a Cocker-Spaniel that had just tried to engage her in conversation.

'Hi,' she said.

'How are you feeling?' I asked.

'I'm feeling all right,' she said. 'Kind of got a headache, but what can you do, you know? Apart from that, yeah, I'm fine.'

'Don't need any extra morphine?' asked Dave.

'No, I'm good,' said the nurse. 'The scar's healing up fast . . .' She trailed off, looked at us like we had committed some great calamity, then blushed. She coughed and looked at us officially.

'How are you feeling?' she said.

'I'm feeling all right,' said Dave.

'Kind of got a headache,' I said, 'but what can you do, you know? Apart from that, yeah, I'm fine.'

'Don't need any extra morphine?'

'No, I'm good,' I said.

'The scar's healing up fast,' said Dave, smiling. The nurse looked at us like we had committed a second great calamity, and blushed again. I smiled at her, and she blushed a third time.

'Your friend was very lucky,' said the nurse.

'He's not my friend,' I said.

'I thought he was your friend.'

'Well he's not.'

The nurse turned to Dave. 'Aren't you his friend?'

'No,' said Dave. 'I'm Dave.'

'Hi, Dave,' I said. 'I'm Mike.'

'Hi, Mike,' said Dave. He turned to the nurse. 'I think we're friends now, miss.'

'Your friend was very lucky,' said the nurse to me.

'I'd call him more of an acquaintance, really.'

'They said you were in the same car,' said the nurse.

'Dave had been hitch-hiking,' I said. 'So I picked him up. Where were you going again?'

'Greece,' said Dave.

'Greece is a long way from here,' said the nurse.

'I know,' said Dave. 'That's why I was hitch-hiking. It's hardly like I could walk all the way.'

'That's true,' said the nurse. She turned to me once more. 'Your acquaintance was very lucky.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, very lucky indeed,' said the nurse. 'You see, not only was Dave not injured at all in the crash, but in our post-crash examination of him, we discovered he had prostate cancer just starting up, and managed to cut it out before it spread.'

'That's why I'm on morphine,' explained Dave.

'No, that's because of your appendectomy,' said the nurse.

'Dave had appendicitis?' I asked.

'No, Dave didn't have appendicitis. We just thought since we were there, we might as well get out his appendix, too, it's useless anyway.'

'Sweet,' said Dave. He lifted up his hospital clothes. There was a thin red scar across his lower abdomen.

'Hang on,' I said. 'If all these operations were going on, shouldn't I have noticed?'

'You were in a mini-coma for three days,' explained the nurse.

'Why was I in a mini-coma for three days?' I asked.

'Well, we were taking out your appendix, but we accidentally gave you too much anaesthetic and put you in a mini-coma for three days.'

'Why were you taking out my appendix?'

'Well, we were cutting out Dave's prostate cancer and taking out his appendix, and we figured since we were taking out one appendix and you were still knocked out, we might as well take out two, they're useless anyway.'

'I appreciate the gesture,' I said, 'but shouldn't I have given consent first? Isn't that highly illegal?'

'Isn't endangering people's lives by crashing on the freeway highly illegal?' said the nurse. 'I bet those people didn't give consent for their lives to be endangered.'

I had to admit, she had a point, even if she was an old nurse trying to look like a young nurse who looked like an old nurse. After a few minutes of fussing and making sure we weren't dying of any debilitating diseases, she left us alone.

'We should escape,' said Dave immediately.

'I'm fine here,' I said. 'Oh, and where are Alex and Josh?'

'They're in the hospital somewhere,' said Dave. 'That's why we have to escape. To get costumes.'

I knew somewhere in there, in that crazed mind of Dave, that combination of words had made sense. But I wasn't, gladly enough, in Dave's head, so I said, 'What?'

'We have to escape,' explained Dave slowly, like he was talking to an ape, or a Canadian, 'so we can get costumes.'

'Why,' I said, 'do we need costumes?'

'So we can pretend to be doctors, of course.'

'Oh, okay,' I said. 'That makes perfect sense.'

'I'm glad you see from my point of view for once.' Dave stood up and walked over to me with his IV tower. 'So what I'll figure we'll do is this: we jump out the window, then--'

'Hang on,' I said. 'We're going to jump out the window?'

'Yeah. How else are we going to get out the window?' said Dave.

'We could NOT jump out the window,' I said.

'Sorry, you've lost me,' said Dave.

'Why don't we just . . . walk out?'

'That'd just be us walking out of the window instead of jumping out, wouldn't it?' said Dave.

'No, walk out of the whole hospital.'

'How exactly are we going to achieve that?' said Dave. 'It's not like we can go invisible.'

'We can go naked.'

The Diary - April 13, 2010

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

10, 531 words, or thereabouts! Pretty sweet number of words to be on I reckon. Once again, this shit just cuts off right in the middle of a scene.

__________________________________________________________________

Still April 13, 2010

Shit falls through all the time for me.

Like three years ago, when me and Alex had planned to move in together. Strictly as friends, of course. We'd planned for six months, and it took about six minutes for it all to fall through when Alex got fired from her job as a deputy manager for a Coles in town. To be honest, I think she was kind of glad she'd been fired; no-one wanted to be a manager for a supermarket, let alone a deputy.

Or like seven years years before that, when plans for a family vacation fell through because of the not entirely unexpected death of my father. I'd been 12 at the time, just old enough to be sad, not old enough to know how to deal with it all. I'd been told he was an alcoholic and he'd had a heart attack because of the raised blood pressure he had from trying to quit; my mother neglected to mention that it was in fact meth he'd been addicted to and he hadn't been trying to quit at all - the dopey bastard had just overdosed.

I'd moved out at 20, a year after our plans had fallen through, got a job at a hotel and stolidly avoided getting addicted to methamphetamines. Alex moved in with a big group of lesbians, and then I met Dave and Josh after a plan to get tickets to see a rugby match had fallen through. They'd been pretend-scalping at the time; whenever anyone tried to buy one, they'd nod and give them a picture of a horse with Gary Busey's head pasted on. I knew their routine because they did it about once every month and told everyone about how funny it was about once every hour.

I'd been one of their first victims that day. I still had the picture of a horse with Gary Busey's head pasted on.

'This is just a picture of a horse with Gary Busey's head pasted on,' I said.

'No, it's a ticket,' said Dave.

'It looks like a ticket to me,' agreed Josh.

'It looks like a picture of a horse with Gary Busey's head pasted on to me,' I said.

'I think you're not seeing right,' said Dave. 'Maybe you should get better glasses.'

'I'm not wearing any glasses.'

'Exactly,' said Josh.

'There's no worse glasses than no glasses,' said Dave helpfully.

'What if you've got some real bad glasses?' I asked.

'Well there's no worse glasses than no glasses apart from real bad glasses, then,' said Dave.

'Hasn't really got the same punch,' I said.

'It'd have the same punch if you hadn't demanded we change it,' said Dave.

'I didn't demand.'

'I distinctly heard demanding.' Dave turned to Josh. 'Did you hear demanding?'

'I heard demanding, yes,' said Josh. 'A whole lot of demanding, really.'

'There you go, "A whole lot of demanding," he said,' said Dave. 'Straight from the horse's mouth.'

'He's not the horse in that phrase,' I said. 'I'm the horse.'

'You don't look like Gary Busey to me,' pointed out Dave.

'That's true,' added Josh, 'you don't look like Gary Busey at all.'

'More like a Steve Buscemi,' said Dave.

'That's not a nice thing to say at all.'

'Hey, I'm not the one trying to scalp tickets,' said Dave, and that was that. They asked for my phone number and my autograph because they'd always wanted to be friends with Steve Buscemi, we departed, and two days later they called me and asked if Steve Buscemi wanted to play pool with them. He did.

*

I woke up at 1:30 to the sound of the television advertising soap. I rolled over and on to the floor and it was only when the stench hit me that I realised we'd forgot to clean up the damn bathroom. It smelled like what I would imagine a baby made of shit gestating would smell like.

I rolled over and groaned, then rolled over again and groaned for emphasis.

'Did you know there used to be real cocaine in Coke?' asked Alex above me. I peered upwards. She was sitting on the couch, drinking a Coke, idly watching the television while it advertised soap. She looked . . . calm. She still had the bruise on her head, and she was wearing a long-sleeved jumper but I presumed the scratches were still there. I thought about a way to bring up the subject of last night then realised that was probably a bad idea; Alex would perhaps bring it up herself in time.

Perhaps.

'I know,' I said instead. 'Everyone knows that.'

'That was only a hundred years ago, or so,' said Alex. 'I bet there's still one of the cans from back then still around.'

'It would have biodegraded by now,' I said.

'YOU would have biodegraded by now,' said Dave, and chucked me a bottle of spring water as Josh and him came through the door. 'We tried to get Cokes, but the vending machine was out of everything but spring water.'

'I don't want spring water,' I said. 'Spring water is just normal water, but from a spring.'

'And springs are tasty, dumbass,' said Josh. 'Don't you know anything about spring water?'

'Apparently not.'

'So when are we heading off?' asked Alex.

'What?' I said.

'I said, "When are we heading off?" '

'I know what you said. What I'm worrying about is WHY you said it.'

'I said it because I was wondering when we would be heading off,' explained Alex.

'But what about . . .' I trailed off, with Alex's stare on me. I know now I should have brought it up then, but with the sun shining outside, and a seemingly hour long soap advertisement playing on the television, holding spring water that was just normal water but tastier because it was from a spring . . . I could almost pretend that last night had just been a trifle of an issue, like we'd lost some postage stamps, or we'd misplaced some keys.

'You're probably wondering about the toilet,' said Alex. 'That's what you were about to say, I bet. "But what about the toilet".'

'Yes,' I said. 'That was what I was going to say.'

'Well we mopped it up and then threw out the mop,' said Alex.

'That's good then,' I said. 'I am glad my question was resolved.'

'I'm thinking we'll leave in 10 minutes or so,' said Dave. 'We can have lunch in a few hours at this nice pie place I know out of town.'

'Isn't than an oxymoron?'

'No seriously, it's really great. Honestly. And I've drawn up a route for us to take for this whole thing. I figure we'll drive down to Brisbane then cut across to the A2,' said Dave. I didn't know what the A2 was, so I nodded mutely. 'You can have a look at it if you want. And I've packed all our luggage in the back. You two have told your landlords you'll be doing this, right?'

'. . . Not exactly,' I said. 'Not at all, really.'

Dave and Josh turned to Alex. She shook her head. Dave shrugged. 'They'll figure out eventually. That's everything, right?'

'Just don't forget to pack the spring water,' I said.

*

The pies were pretty good, and Dave didn't forget to pack the spring water.

The place was called Palace of Pies and was just outside of Brisbane. It had a faded old sign and there were no other customers but us. There was a big courtyard outside of it with an artificial pond that was kinda pretty. We made some light conversation about how pretty it was and how much we admired it, not at all talking about last night in a manner that was probably more obvious than just straight up talking about the whole thing.

The place had obviously been designed for whole swathes of customers, and it all looked a bit comical with 20 tables inside, 20 tables outside, and four people in the whole place - not including the guy who worked there, who looked about seventy years old and called me madam.

The Diary - April 13, 2010, In Which A Lot of Serious Shit Happens

Part 1

Part 2

So, it's the end of day 2 of NaNoWriMo and I've written 9000 or so words.

I did not expect to have written this much by now. Or anytime, really, but whatever. And yeah, this bit gets pretty serious towards the end, I guess.

______________________________________________________________

(Continued from last entry.)

'I think you're an idiot.'

'No, think about it,' said Alex. 'What else are we doing with our lives? You wake up at two in the afternoon and lounge around until it's time to work or watch Back to the Future again, then when you get home you lounge around and watch television until you fall asleep. I mean, it's not much of a life. You're not living, you're . . . SURVIVING. And all three of the rest of us are unemployed and living on welfare. Dave and Josh get through somehow, but me . . . if it weren't for the lesbians bailing me out I'd probably be living with my parents.'

The lesbians were a group of 20 or so straight women that lived in the same apartment block as Alex that she liked to call lesbians. They had big parties every weekend; the whole herd of them would flock periodically from apartment to apartment, drinking and making a quiet, focused kind of hubbub that was probably more annoying than would be a louder hubbub. Occasionally they invited Alex, or me, or a temporary boyfriend who had nice hair and a nice body and was ultimately discarded within a week. They were so straight that they were entering lesbianism from the other side.

They'd collectively paid her rent for her two months or so, a year back. Everytime she came to them with money to pay them back, they refused to take it, and eventually got so annoyed with her attempting to give them money and threatened that if she tried to give them money again, they just might take it. She'd never tried it ever since.

'Scissors, paper, rock,' I said. 'I win, we don't go, you win, we do your stupid road-trip.'

'What, all four of us in one game?'

'All four of us in one game,' I said.

'Alright,' said Dave. 'I like it. There's no truer democracy than Scissors, Paper, Rock, after all.'

'Scissors, paper, rock,' we all chanted, pumping our fists like retarded five year-olds. I put down a rock; every single one of the other three put down a paper.

'Best out of three,' I said.

'Alright,' said Dave, and we went again. I put down a rock. Everyone else put down paper.

'I think we win,' said Josh.

'You only won because you outplayed me,' I said. 'It's not like you're better than me or something.'

'Whatever, Mike,' said Josh. 'When are we going on your wack-ass roadtrip, Dave?'

'Four sounds like a good idea,' said Dave.

Alex looked at her pocketwatch. 'It's already a quarter to four.'

'Four in the morning, then. That's when you get off work, right, Mike?'

'Yeah . . .' I said uncertainly. 'Are you sure that's a good idea, though? I mean . . . four in the morning?'

'Okay, okay,' said Dave. 'We'll do Scissors, Paper, Rock. If I win, we go at four in the morning. If you win, we go whenever you wanna.'

'Fair enough,' I said, and we played again. I picked rock. Dave picked paper.

'Four in the morning it is, then,' he said. 'You'll be fine with that, right, Alex?'

'Yeah, sure,' said Alex.

'We'll pick you up after we pick up Mike from work, then. Cool?'

'Cool.'

'Cool.'

April 13, 2010 - Early Morning

'It's all cool,' assured the man pointing a gun at me and wearing a beanie over his face. 'It's all cool.'

'It's all cool?' I asked. I had my hands up, but it was possible that I could twitch my knee up and press the alarm without looking like I had epilepsy.

Possible.

The alarm itself was just a button that sent a message to the police station that the place was being robbed. The police station was halfway across town, so in order to even stop the man robbing the place, I'd have to engage him in a tea party or something.

'It's all cool,' assured the man once again. 'It's all cool.' Just hand over all the money from the cash register and we'll be cool.'

'There is no money in the cash register,' I said.

'What do you mean there is no money in the cash register?' the masked man demanded. He waved the gun threateningly, but there wasn't really any heart in; after all, there's nothing much more threatening than a gun.

'I mean there's no money in the cash register,' I said.

'Don't get smart with me,' he said.

'Sorry,' I said. 'It's just there's no money in the cash register.'

'Open the cash register,' he said. I opened the cash register. There was no money in it.

'There's no money in that cash register!' said the man in surprise.

'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, that's true.'

'Why is there no money in the cash register?' demanded the man.

'Every night, my boss comes and collects the money before my shift. And no-one's tried to sign in all night. Or morning, for that matter,' I said.

The man aimed his gun directly at my face and said, 'Give me your shoes.'

'What?'

'I said give me your shoes!' said the man. 'Give me your shoes or I'll shoot you in your stupid shoe-wearing face!'

I unlaced my shoes and handed them over. They were pretty shit shoes, to be honest. He looked at them scornfully. 'These are shit shoes!'

'Hey,' I said, 'at least I'm not stealing a pair of shoes.'

'If there was any money in the cash register, I wouldn't have to steal your stupid shoes,' he said.

'There is no money in the cash register,' I said.

'I know there's no money in the cash register, you bald-footed son of a bitch,' said the man. He aimed the gun at me again. 'Take off your shirt.'

I took off my shirt. It was my work shirt; an old, slightly faded black shirt with a small crown for Crown Hotel on the lapel. I couldn't see why he would want it. He stuffed the shirt in his pocket and held my shoes in his left hand as he brandished his gun at me.

'Take off your vest,' he said.

'I'm not wearing a vest,' I said.

'Yes you are.' He pointed to my undershirt.

'That's an undershirt,' I said.

'Well give me your damn undershirt, then.'

I took off my undershirt, leaving my chest bare to the slightly chilly night. It was just getting into Autumn, so it was cold, but not too cold. Quite nice, really.

I half expected the man to aim his gun at me again and tell me to give him my chest, but he didn't. He said, 'Take off your pants.'

'But they're my pants,' I said. 'I can't take off my pants.'

'Take off your pants or I'll shoot you.'

I took off my pants because if I didn't, he would shoot me. They were earthy-coloured, and drab, like the rest of the uniform. The whole thing didn't really fit the whole crown motif.

And now I was naked to the world apart from my underpants. He aimed the gun at me once more and said, 'Give me your underpants.'

'You've already got the rest of my clothes,' I said. 'Why do you need my underpants? I think I need my underpants more than you need my underpants.'

He shook around my clothes and shoes. 'You think this is gonna sell well? No way! But underpants? Whoo-ee!'

'Who the hell buys used underpants?' I asked.

'You'll be surprised who buys used underpants,' he said. 'You know bums?'

'Never met him.'

'Bums, moron! Homeless people! You'll be surprised the amount of money a bum will pay for used underpants.'

'What kind of bum has enough money to pay for used underpants?'

'The kind of bums that wants used underpants,' explained the man. 'That kind of bum.' He shook the gun around threateningly. 'Now give me your damn underpants.'

'What if I don't want to give you my damn underpants?' I asked.

'Then I'll shoot you,' he said. He shook the gun around to demonstrate that he knew how a gun worked, or he knew how to shoot, or something. Maybe he just liked shaking the damn thing.

He was so busy shaking the gun threateningly that he had forgotten he was only a metre or so away from me, and only came back into focus when I stole the gun from his hands. I aimed it directly at his face. He blanched.

'Give me your shoes,' I said. He tried to hand me back my shoes, but I waved them away. 'I want your shoes. My shoes are shit.'

He unlaced his shoes and gave them to me. They were marginally less shitty than mine.

And the whole bizarre thing began again. He handed over his shoes, then his shirt then his undershirt and finally his pants. I dressed quietly and quickly and soon had all his clothes on. He was down to his underpants, but he just put my shitty shoes and faded uniform on. We looked at each other for a moment, and I could see his eyes blinking through the holes he had cut in the beanie.

'Your undershirt's kind of itchy,' he said.

'I know,' I said. 'Your undershirt's nice.'

'Technically it's a vest,' he said.

'Oh, right. That must have been why you said "vest" when referring to my "undershirt".'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Yeah, that's why.'

There was a beep outside, then a figure came running through the doors. It was Dave, dressed in a wooly jumper and slack pants. He looked from me to the beanie-wearing to the gun, then shook his head.

'Come on, Mike,' he said. 'It's already past four. We've been waiting outside for five minutes.'

'That's true,' said Beanie. 'When I came in to rob the place, they were outside.'

'That was at the least seven minutes ago,' I said.

'Then we've been waiting outside for seven minutes!' cried Dave. 'Come on, Mike, hurry up.'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'd been talking to this guy. Ok, I'll - hey! If you were outside when this guy came to rob the place, why didn't you stop him?'

'We just thought he was very excited about the prospect of staying at the hotel, or something,' said Dave.

'That's not true,' pointed out Beanie. 'When I came inside to rob the place, I waved the gun at them and said, "Don't fuck with me when I'm robbing the place".'

Dave hung his head. 'Sorry, Mike.'

'It's alright, just don't do it again,' I said. Stuffing the gun in my pocket, Dave and I began to walk out, leaving Beanie in the reception area, looking around aimlessly. I turned back for a moment. 'You can probably sit down and pretend you're me. The guy who's replacing me will be here in a few minutes, and honestly he probably won't notice. Just arrive here tomorrow at six o'clock at night and take my shift.'

'Okay,' said Beanie. 'I've never really had a job before, though. What do I do?'

I thought over my nightly tasks as receptionist. '. . . Nothing.'

'I can manage that, I think.'

'Just don't let any scum-suckers rob the place.'

'I won't let any scum-suckers rob the place,' promised Beanie.

'The cash register's empty, anyway, there'll be nothing to steal but your clothes. And what kind of scum-sucker steals a man's clothes?'

'The lowest kind of scum-sucker steals a man's clothes,' said Beanie.

'That's right.'

'Come on Mike, Josh is waiting,' said Dave.

We left. The Polonez was waiting outside, looking like an accident on wheels. I slid into the back seat, while Dave hopped in the driver's seat next to Josh.

'You picked up my luggage, right?' I said.

'We picked up your luggage, yeah,' said Josh. 'Why'd you bring so many condoms?'

Fuck. 'Because fuck you, Josh.'

'Thanks, but no thanks,' said Josh. Dave started up the car, and with a suspicious clunk we pulled out on to the dark street.

*

Scrawled across the front wall of Alex's apartment block was the word bitch in big red letters. The streetlights were still on and they conveniently illuminated the diatribe with gloomy, weak light as we pulled up in the old FSO Polonez. Dave had put on an obscure Finnish heavy metal band called Iso Anukselle - I didn't know what it meant in English; in all likeliness, it was probably something about dancing - a few minutes back, and now we were listening to a Finn girl singing, again, something probably about dancing.

'Someone's a bitch,' said Josh.

'I didn't know your mother lived here, man,' said Dave.

'Yeah, she moved out a few weeks ago,' said Josh. 'She's not feeling the place, though. She's thinking of moving again.'

'Oh?' I asked innocently. 'Where to?'

'Oh,' said Josh, 'just to a little place called up yours Dave.'

We high-fived.

The three of us got out of the car and walked down the smooth concrete pathway. Alex's apartment building was a tall, square, hideous thing that had square balconies and sharp corners and a flat roof. It had been designed by one of the top architects in the country, and it was one of the ugliest buildings in town.

As we got closer, I realised that it wasn't simply "bitch" but written above it was "Macy Flake is a giant". "Macy Flake is a giant bitch," with bitch in giant letters. Clever.

'Who's Macy Flake?' asked Josh.

'Some bitch.'

The whole apartment block had bizarre, intersecting staircases that seemed to be trying to make up for the monotony on the outside of the building by being the most complicated thing in the universe. The architect had got it all the wrong way around: monotony on the inside, interesting twists and turns on the outside. No one wants to walk into a big block of concrete and suddenly be in Wonderland. I guess no one wants to walk into a big block of concrete at all, really, but you get my point.

Scrawled on the walls inside was "Macy Flake is a giant bitch" again. More than twenty times. Macy Flake and her giant bitchiness confronted us in its full glory; the flickering hallway light illuminated the sentences running across the walls and up onto the ceiling, big streams of red paint dripping from the letters. Someone fucking hated Macy Flake.

'What kind of name is "Macy Flake," anyway?' I said.

'Sounds like a bitch name to me,' said Dave.

'Yeah,' agreed Josh. 'A giant one.'

'Just because it's written on the walls doesn't mean it's true,' I said.

'Why not?'

'Well let's say I wrote that Macy Flake was a real good person on the walls right now. Does that make Macy Flake a real good person?'

'No. Macy Flake is a giant bitch, not a real good person,' pointed out Josh. We continued on up through the staircase designed by M.S Escher. At one point we got stuck on some stairs going down and found ourself arriving back at ground floor, where the message of truth was still painted across the walls. We went up again, once again took the same staircase back down again, went up again, this time took a different one and arrived at number 7.

'Alex is at number five,' I said, 'so she should be right next to . . . this one . . .' Number five wasn't right next to number seven. Instead the number 12 was painted across the next door. Not in red paint or anything, like the message downstairs. It looked pretty official, with serifed black lettering edged by gold. Number 12 was definitely next to number seven.

'Number 12 is next to number seven,' pointed out Dave.

'That's retarded and I hate this stupid hotel,' said Josh.

I didn't remember this the last time I had been here. Number seven had definitely been next to number five, with number six on the other side of the hall. That was how hotels worked, right? 'I was here two days ago,' I said. 'Number seven was definitely next to number five, then.'

'Maybe they changed the numbers since then.'

'What, changed it so it went 5, 6, 12?'

'Maybe it's like . . . Arabic,' said Josh.

'No, I don't think that's it.' We walked down the hallway and up it again. Every number apart from number five was 12.

'We seem to have encountered a problem.'

Just then, there was a thump at the 12 in front of us. Like someone was knocking at the door. Like someone was knocking . . . on the inside of their door. Dave and Josh both nodded at me to answer it.

'Come on,' said Dave.

'We're on the outside of the door,' I pointed out.

'And? Don't be impolite. Answer the door, dude!'

I opened the door cautiously. A head slumped out and banged lightly on the floor.

It was Alex.

Shit, I thought, then realised I'd said that out loud. I kneeled down. She was completely unconscious, and when I opened her eyes they were bloodshot and red, like she'd been drinking. She was limp, and there was a quickly developing bruise on her forehead. Down her arms, there was long scratches that were bleeding, just a bit. But any bleeding is blood. I checked her fingernails out. Under them was a bit of blood. She'd . . . scratched her own arms? What?

Music was playing, I realised lastly. It was Paranoid Android, by Radiohead. I didn't know she listened to Radiohead.

'Shit,' said Dave.

'Shit,' said Josh.

'Help me pick her up,' I said. I picked up under her arms and they picked up her legs and we carried her into the room and on to her couch. Her room was messy. Messier than usual, that is. The chair and the coffee table were knocked over and the magazines spilled across the floor. Women's Day, and shit like that. It hadn't been this woman's day. There was a big crack across the east wall, too, and below it, her baseball bat. I knew it was her baseball bat because every time I came over she jokingly told me to get out of her apartment and threatened me with it. The whole joke didn't seem so funny anymore. There was a foul stench that wafted through the place, too, like shit. Exactly like shit, really. I followed the smell to the bathroom, where the toilet had overflowed and thick, brown water spread across the bathroom floor.

Well, that would probably explain the shit smell.

So . . . signs of a struggle, toilet overflowing, Alex knocked out and scratched . . . by herself. Someone had crawled up through her toilet, she'd fought him off, then . . . what? Decided to scratch herself?

I felt tired, and stupid. This whole thing was a retarded idea. I went out to tell Dave and Josh. They were sitting on the couch next to Alex, staring at nothing. I looked up at the clock on the wall. 4:40 AM. It was too damn late, and not one of us looked like we could drive.

'I think we should stay here for the night,' I said. 'We'll take shifts watching her. Obviously something's happened here.'

'Maybe it was Macy Flake,' said Dave, and we all laughed, not because it was particularly funny, but because it was something we could laugh at.

'I like that idea,' said Josh. 'We'll stay here for the night.'

'Yeah,' said Dave. 'That's a nice idea.'

And I couldn't fail but notice that neither of them had mentioned the road trip at all. Maybe we weren't going on the stupid thing after all. Personally, I couldn't care less either way. Work graveyard shift at a hotel, take a road trip to the centre of Australia: it was all the same in the end.

Well, kind of.

We had enough energy to drag out a few mattresses and sheets and lie down on them. It was terribly haphazard. 'I'll take first shift watching her,' I suggested. 'After all, I am the one with the retarded sleeping schedule. I'm used to being up around now.'

'I'll take second,' said Josh and Dave at the same time. They Scissor, Paper, Rock-ed it. Dave won, and decided to take the third shift, the one he hadn't wanted to take in the first place.

'I'll wake you up when my shift's over,' I said to Josh. Both of them rolled over on their mattresses and pulled their sheets over them.

When I was sure they were asleep, I locked the door with every lock it had, closed the windows and locked them, and drew the curtains shut, so it was just the four of us, safe in a little world outside of the big, scary one. I grabbed the baseball bat and held it limp in my hands, and slumped on the couch next to Alex. I felt like a knight guarding over a sleeping princess, except the princess was a girl covered with scratches with slight body image issues, and the knight was a guy who didn't have armour, didn't have a sword but did have a baseball bat, was 5"10 and skinny and was scared out of his mind. So not really like a knight at all, I guess.

I tried to ponder over the question of the 12s, and the Macy Flake shit, and the whole thing, but that didn't work, so I tried going over each one individually, and managed to be confused and bewildered about each one individually. At some point I realised we hadn't organised when the shifts would start and end, and soon after it was 6:40 and the sun was rising. I watched it out the window, lighting up the world, making it seem a little bit safer. My shift was probably over, so I shook Josh awake and collapsed into my own mattress. The last thing I remembered seeing before falling asleep was the crack running across the wall where Alex had beaten the wall with a baseball bat for unfathomable reasons.

The Diary - April 12, 2010, Later That Day

Here is the first bit of writing!

More writing done! That's 5400 or so words done today, which makes me ridiculously ahead of schedule for NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately, tomorrow is NOT the weekend anymore, so, you know, I doubt I'll be as productive as this.

And yes, I am aware that it just kind of cuts off, but I'm pretty much done for the night and I'm just exhausted of writing right now.

____________________________________________________________________

April 12 2010 - Later That Day

I was a goddam moron at night.

I'm not the kind of dude who believes shit like that. I kind of pride myself on the fact. Michael Lincoln: Guy Who Doesn't Believe Shit Like That. I was a skeptic. I was so much of a skeptic that I was skeptical of other skeptics. If they made a show about my life, it'd just be me sitting on the couch, not believing in shit for half an hour each episode.

But still, no harm done. I just hope no-one ever finds this diary.

There was a sharp ringing below me from inside the work-clothes I had left sprawled on the floor. I scrabbled around inside and picked up my phone. Dave. Why was Dave ringing me so early? It was only 2 PM. Dammit, I hadn't even had breakfast yet.

'Dave?'

There was a crackle from the other side of the phone. Then, 'Mike? It's me, Dave. What's up?'

'Uh . . . not much,' I said. I always felt uncomfortable when people asked what was up, because most of the time, nothing was up and I was afraid they'd just get bored of me saying 'Uh . . . not much' all the time and start yelling at me.

'Me and Josh have got some big news. You gotta meet us at Timmy's. Ring Alex, tell her to come too. I know you two are like a couple or something.'

'Friends,' I corrected. 'Well, I guess you COULD classify us as a couple, but only as a "couple of friends".' I chuckled.

'Yeah, whatever, Mike. Anyway, meet us at Timmy's in half an hour. We've got this tape. It's real interesting, you'll like it. We've got this big plan.'

I sighed inwardly. Dave and Josh always had some big plan. If they didn't have some big plan, they wouldn't be Dave and Josh. 'Okay, okay, I'll come. You're paying.'

'Nuh-uh. No way. We'll play Fruitsies. I've already got a fruit in my hand right now, Mike. You are going down.'

I cast around, and picked up an old apple. 'Alright, alright. I'll see you there.'

'No grapes,' said Dave, and hung up.

I dialed Alex's number, waited for the answer. She picked up after three rings, like always. She said it gave the caller "time to prepare".

'Alex?' I said. 'It's me, Mike.'

'Hey Mike. What's up?'

'Uh . . . not much,' I said. 'Dave and Josh are doing this thing-'

'Dave and Josh are always doing things,' said Alex. 'You wanna come over and watch Back to the Future with me?'

'We're always watching Back to the Future. Marty's kissed his own mother so many times I'm surprised he hasn't formed NAMMLA.'

'North American Man/Mother Love Association?' said Alex.

'You know it.'

'I suppose I'll go, though,' said Alex. 'Van Helsing is no fun alone.'

'Be at Timmy's in half an hour, then. Oh, and bring a fruit,' I said.

'Fruitsies?'

'Yeah. And no grapes.' I hung up. I stuffed the apple in my pocket, stuffed my phone in the other pocket, stuffed my wallet in my back pocket, and slipped on a black shirt. It was dirty, but that was alright, because everything else was too.

*

Timmy's was Timmy's Diner, on the corner of Eucalypt Street, which was so named because of the growth of Eucalypt trees that had been cut down to build Eucalypt Street. It was supposed to be a tribute, I guess. Like killing a man and then naming your firstborn child after him.

Timmy's Diner was the kind of place that excelled in mediocrity. It served cold food hot, hot food cold, and everything else in between lukewarm. The pies didn't have any meat in them, but that was alright because no-one else's did either. All of the food was shit, it was just that sometimes that could be concealed by the sauce, which was slightly less shit. The coffee tasted like battery acid and urine - apart from the mocha, which tasted like battery acid, urine and prepackaged chocolate powder.

It was the best place in town. It was the only place in town.

Dave and Josh were already there. Dave had an orange; Josh a lemon. I brandished my apple.

Dave and Josh were the kind of men, to put it bluntly, you expected to be homosexuals. They went everywhere together, apart from the toilet, but that was probably only because they both couldn't fit in the same cubicle. They rented a room out in the centre of town. Just the two of them. Neither of them had jobs, but they both had cars, and they both managed quite well. How they did, I will never know. Alex had a theory that they were both secretly dark wizards on the run from the wizard law. Alex had a lot of theories.

I slid into a plastic seat bolted to the ground beside them. 'I haven't had breakfast,' I said. 'So this better be worth it.' I never liked breaking fast at Timmy's. Breakfast was apparently the most important meal of the day. Having it at Timmy's was like being baptised at a drinking fountain.

'It's worth it,' said Josh. 'But let's wait for Alex.' He looked from side to side, made sure no-one was watching, then rolled the lemon across the floor. It skidded on the slightly dirty tiles, bounced a few times, and came to a stop in the middle of the floor.

'Nice shot,' Dave observed. He rolled his own orange across; he threw it too hard and it bounced over into the corner and settled there. 'Shit.'

I concentrated. This could mean twenty, thirty dollars. I picked up my apple, rolled it around in my hand, then threw. It bounced once, rolled, and hit Josh's lemon directly, knocking it away into the corner with the orange. I smiled across the table.

'It's not over yet,' said Josh. 'Someone could . . . walk right into the corner and just stamp around. Anyway, Alex isn't even here yet.'

'Yes I am,' said a voice behind me, and I felt two soft arms wrap around my neck. In a friendly manner, of course. Like a friend.

Alex sat down next to me, holding an old, wrinkled peach. Alex had short brown hair that managed to layer and intertwine in bewildering, exciting ways, and a face like a mouse, except she didn't have whiskers and she wasn't a flea infested rodent. She had a full figure that she thought was a little on the chubby side; I thought it was a little on the beautiful side.

In a completely friendly manner, of course.

She was the kind of person who knew facts about history, and knowledge on how to train dogs, and knew how planes worked. She was also absolutely, without a doubt, socially retarded.

'Hey,' she said.

'Hey,' I said.

Steamy.

'Roll your fruit,' said Josh. Alex threw the wrinkly peach across the floor. It hit the two in the corner head on and scattered them across the floor just as a flock of ten or so teenage girls came through the door. The swarm of chattering, laughing, short-skirt wearing animals entered, engulfed the four fruits in their wake, then sat down at a few tables opposite us. I tried to pay attention to the fruits as 20 or so feet stamped across them, but realised that looked creepy, so I looked away at a kid eating a burger. Equally creepy, really, so I looked intently at the tablecloth, and not at all at the delicate little ring on Alex's left hand. Not at all.

When they had settled in their seats, still talking about, as far as I could make out, how small shoes were these days, I looked over at the fruits. All four of them were pulverised, squished to a pulp.

'We'll call it a tie,' said Dave.

There was a sharp cry from the kitchen. Timmy, the owner of the whole place, had spotted the fruit smeared across the floor. Timmy was a perpetually angry, balding man of the kind that laughed at pictures of balls hitting people in the forehead. He maintained that everyone was a dirty son of a bitch that needed no attention payed to them, so hired no cleaners for the diner, on the basis that the whole place would be instantly dirty afterwards, anyway. He'd told me this a few nights ago, drunk off his ass with a fifty year old woman with a boob job and hair dyed pink, checking into the hotel I worked at as a doorman. She looked kind of like an angry gargoyle, even when she was smiling; when she was smiling, she only looked like a smiling angry gargoyle. He'd called me Sam, slapped me on the back and signed in to the hotel, then stumbled into the elevator with her. This was about one in the morning, when the kind of people like Timmy and Gargoyle Woman checked into hotels.

'Shit and damn!' said Timmy. 'Fucking kids!' He screamed and ranted, and followed the fruity footpaths of the girls to their table, and told them they were dirty sons of bitches and they were to get out. He threatened to call security, of which he had none, and when they pointed this out, he threatened to call the cops. When they said he wouldn't do it, he pulled out his phone and shrieked at them they were going down, and rang the cops. There was a frenzied two minute conversation, during which the teenage girls laughed at Timmy and Timmy raged at the teenage girls, and Timmy slammed his phone down on the table in front of the teenage girls and told them once again that they were dirty sons of bitches and they were going down.

He departed into the kitchen, shrieking at his employees that, by God, if they didn't work faster he could fire them all at a snap of his fingers, and snapped his fingers to demonstrate. When a young waitress took this to mean she had been fired and began to walk out, Timmy threatened that, by God, if she didn't start working again he'd hire her at once and make her start working. He grumbled and shrieked tremulously and departed back into the kitchen and as soon as he was gone the ten or so teenage girls raised their hands and began a mass imitation of his tremulous shriek that was, on the whole, quite accurate.

'We should go,' said Alex. 'We should go.'

'We should stay,' said Dave. 'We should stay.'

'It feels like I'm intruding on some private conflict,' complained Alex.

'You only feel that way because you are,' reassured Josh. 'We'll stay. We'll stay and see how it pans out.'

The police arrived five minutes later, one of them a dark-moustached forty-year old man with narrow eyes, the other a young kid that looked around 17 with a thin wispy moustache. Both their moustaches bristled at the injustice of being called out to a diner for a domestic dispute. They went into the kitchen, and came out again with Timmy, his hands cuffed behind his back. When he shrieked that he had called them himself and they were to arrest the girls, they punched him in the midriff and told him he was a dirty son of a bitch and he was going down.

They escorted him out, and the customers around us sat in an awkward silence, until the girls again began to shriek 'You dirty sons of bitches are going down!' in Timmy's tremulous voice, and everyone laughed at the funny joke.

*

We ended up not buying anything at all, and since we'd already decided we'd split the costs four-ways, we each paid our equal parts of nothing and left the diner and went across the street to the park. The park was a wide expanse of grass, occasionally shaded by trees, occasionally populated with an odd bench. People liked to walk along and feed the ducks, or jog in the early morning. It was the kind of place that people had picnics in.

We sat down on the grass by the pond; Alex had bought a loaf of bread and threw it into the pond as whole. It floated, soggy and bloated, like a brick. A duck swam up to it and pecked hopefully.

'I think you're supposed to throw it in bit by bit,' I said.

'Probably.'

'Guys, guys,' said Dave. 'I've got to tell you already. Enough monkeying around.'

'Monkeying?' asked Alex innocently. 'We were monkeying?'

'You were monkeying, is what you were doing!'

'I don't see any monkeys,' pointed out Alex. 'Surely there would be monkeys involved in monkeying around.'

'They are metaphorical monkeys,' explained Josh helpfully. 'You're the metaphorical monkeys.'

'I'm a metaphor?' I asked.

'No, you're a monkey.'

'I don't SEE any monkeys.'

'Shut up, shut up,' said Dave. 'You're doing this on purpose. You two are doing this on purpose.'

'Am not.'

'Am so!' cried Dave. 'Am so!'

'Am no-' I began, but Dave tackled me on to the grass. Dave wasn't exactly a small guy, so my struggles only served for him to weigh down on me more. He ground against me like a horse against a tree.

'I'll keep grinding,' he said calmly. 'I'll keep grinding and you'll just be sitting there and I'll be grinding on you.'

'Fine! Fine! For the love of God, just stop grinding me,' I said. Dave laughed and hopped off. He turned to Alex.

'Time?'

She took out her pocket watch. It had originally been a fake pocket watch that came with a fake monocle, but she'd refitted it so her actual watch sat inside the compartment where the phony workings had lay. 'It's half past three,' she said. 'You're lucky none of us have jobs, Dave, otherwise we'd actually be doing something productive for society right now.'

'I have a job,' I pointed out.

'Graveyard shift at a shitty hotel doesn't count,' said Josh. 'That's more like . . . advanced slavery.'

'I'd rather be an advanced slave than a dog-ass lazy pig,' I said.

'I'm not a dog-ass lazy pig,' said Josh. 'That's harsh, Mike.'

'It's alright,' I said. 'Some guys are dog-ass lazy pigs. Some guys aren't.'

'None of us are dog-ass lazy pigs!' shouted Dave. 'Now can we get on with it?'

'We can get on with it when Josh stops being such a dog-ass lazy pig, maybe.'

'Call someone a dog-ass lazy pig again and I'll grind you, Mike,' said Dave. 'Enough.' And he reached into his pocket and took out his camcorder. His camcorder was a sleek, black thing he'd bought from a friend he knew in the Black Market for twenty bucks and a packet of cigarettes. That same friend robbed him of his laptop, television, and wallet a week later by the cunning method of asking to stay the night then taking all his shit. He left the camcorder, though. Dave liked to think the guy was hiding in Mexico, and that was payback enough for him.

'So, I was up at five or six this morning,' began Dave, and I knew with a horrible dropping certainty what was on his stupid camcorder. 'I was cutting an orange, I think. Or was it?'

'It was an orange,' agreed Josh. 'There was dried orange juice on the table this morning.'

Dave nodded, turned to me and Alex. 'There was dried orange juice on the table this morning,' he explained, 'so it must have been an orange. Anyway, it turned out I'd left the camcorder on.'

'And the television,' said Josh. 'You shouldn't forget the television.'

'I shouldn't forget the television,' agreed Dave. He turned to us once again. 'And the television,' he added. 'I'd also left the television on. Anyway, I turn the camcorder off. And the television, too. Or did I?'

'You did,' said Josh. 'When I got up this morning, the television was not on.'

'When he got up this morning the television was not on,' confirmed Dave. 'Consequently, it must be assumed I did, in fact, turn the television off as I did with the camcorder. So here I am, cut orange in my hand, both television and camcorder off. I look at the camcorder, realise it's on. I am forced to assume I have left it on, accidentally filming the television. So I open it up and look at the video . . .'

. . . And of course he found The Other Side, and the stupid God-interview, and since this was Dave he believed the whole thing without question. I listened as he excitedly told us about the whole thing, how the world was going to end in three weeks, how Jesus was going to do a retarded Sermon on the Mount on Uluru, how God didn't like dudes ditching other dudes for ladies.

'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' I said.

'YOU'RE the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' retaliated Dave swiftly. 'Anyway, I've got the video, and me and Josh are really excited about the whole thing, and I guess what I'm really trying to say is we should take a road trip to Uluru.' He looked at us hopefully, as if he expected he could slip the whole proposal into the end of his little speech without us noticing.

I didn't think it'd be a good idea. 'I don't think that would be a good idea,' I said.

'Well your conception wasn't a very good idea, but that happened, didn't it?' said Dave.

'Please do not compare my conception to your crazy-ass idea to travel into the centre of Australia,' I said. 'Well, not exactly the centre. Kind of off to the left.'

'I think it's a good idea,' said Josh.

'I think I fucked your mother. Oh wait, I don't just think that, I did that.' I looked at them for a moment. 'Just listen to yourselves, you dumbasses. Firstly, how are we going to get to the centre of Australia? And, secondly, why are we believing a show about crazy people? And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly of all, why is your mother such a bad lay?'

'One, we'll use my Polonez,' said Dave. 'Two, what proof do you have they're crazy people? Seemed pretty legitimate to me. And lastly, because she caught it from you.'

Dave's Polonez was the FSO Polonez he'd bought for $700 and a carton of eggs on a whim, and it was so monumentally bad that the amount of money he had spent on repairs over the years had accumulated to more than the money he had saved by getting it instead of a more expensive car. Every three years, without fail, it developed a fresh rash of rust, even if the car was so rusty already that it was rust that was rusting. It guzzled up fuel like welfare payments, and the seats, the suspension, gearbox and dashboard fell apart at regular intervals, and the brakes had to be replaced every year - if they weren't, he'd find himself careening wildly down a steep hill and crashing with a thump into the backside of a semi-trailer; in fact, that had already happened. Most parts for it were obsolete, so these days the thing sat gathering rust like one of those weird old ladies who hoarded tea cups, and occasionally Dave dared to drive it. He had to be sufficiently stupid to even think about the prospect of driving it, though, so this meant the only times he would consider driving the vehicle was when he was very drunk, very angry or both - neither of which were prime moods to be in when driving a vehicle that had a proclivity to stall when you drove too fast.

'I don't think the old Polo could handle it, Dave,' I said.

'She can handle anything,' said Dave proudly. 'Have I told you about the time she saved me from a crash into the back of a semi-trailer?'

He had told me. He told everyone the story about twice every year since it had happened, and every time he managed to gloss over the fact that it was the Polonez that had got him into the crash in the first place. He had been travelling around fifty at the time, listening to a song the title of which depended on whoever he was telling the story to at the time and how drunk he was, when he'd come over the crest of Acking Street, the main street in town, which started on the steep hill and came down all the way through the centre of town. It was, miraculously, empty at the time, due to everyone being parked around the showgrounds at the time, which was hosting the annual Ackingville Show, where everyone met up and got drunk at eachother, so there was no harm done when his brakes failed and he came to a screaming, screeching halt as he crashed into the back of a semi-trailer loaded with furniture. The front of the car had crumpled hideously, he had slammed forward into his seatbelt, which went taut immediately, and the airbags shrieked outwards and engulfed him; he survived the whole crash without a scratch. He often focused on this fact when telling the story, rather than the fact that he had just crashed into the back of a semi-trailer.

Everything worked out with the insurance, and everyone advised him against buying another Polonez with the money he had recieved. He had carefully considered this, weighed in their suggestions, and two weeks later he had driven into town with a brand new - well, as new as it could be - FSO Polonez.

'You've told me,' I said. 'You've told us all.'

'I think it's a good idea,' said Alex.