The party continues, with Dorothy explaining her need for an army of immortal cats and a strange end to the engagement party.
“You helped, Bill. I was just experimenting. So I could create an army of immortal cats to do my bidding. Perfectly normal,” insisted Dorothy, far too innocently, at Al.
“That would explain the strange yowling sounds from the displays………” said Al, whose vision of a young Dorothy sending her feline hordes to attack villages was cheering him up immensely.
“Although it is hard to imagine that there would be no megalomania attached to pet food manufacture,” he added. He stood to attention and saluted her helpfully. Carla, Bill, Jane and Joe leaped to attention and followed suit. They stood down unanimously in the light of Dorothy’s grin.
“See, Dave, it works. It’s all in the preservatives, you know,” said Bill.
Dave and Carolyn were now laughing, which obviously cheered her up a lot. The group wandered out into the garden. A strange smell assaulted Al, who almost froze in place with the unfamiliarity of it.
“Wow. What’s that smell? It’s beautiful.”
A very pleased look traveled across the Australians. Carla explained.
“That’s wattle. Aniseed with a touch of infinity. That tree over there.”
A happy looking tree blinded him with a fierce but interesting yellow. The thing seemed to be made of flowers. Next to it a gum tree, he knew that. The gum looked like it was a groundskeeper for the garden.
“They’re the real Australian bush trees,” said Bill, intrigued by someone who’d never seen the trees at home before.
This setting triggered a childhood memory in Al.
“We used to live in a sort of collection of occasional buildings. We’d travel from house to house across the States and it wasn’t until I was eleven that I went to stay at my grandmother’s place in Maine. She lived in a place that backed on to Canada. The first really natural place I’d ever seen. I feel like I’m a kid again. Incredible.”
Joe decided it was time to clarify the Australian hierarchy of things.
“The natural order’s a bit different here. It’s like California. You know, the eighth state of Australia. First the lower flora and fauna, like actors. Then a few actual humans. Then the heavies, some koalas, kangaroos, platypuses and maybe a pet food manufacturer or so. Then the gum trees. Then the dingoes, after their press agents have checked the place out.”
“There’s usually a Hills Hoist planting ceremony with barbecue when a place is colonized,” he went on, playing to Al’s mystified expression.
“Hills Hoist,” explained Carla, pointing to a large vertical tube metal crossbar rotary clothesline with a few small children hanging off it. One of the other kids used a handle to raise the little kids a few feet in the air, with related squeals. The bigger kids rotated the thing like a merry-go-round.
“The Australian centrifuge,” said Dorothy, watching the cultural gulfs wander across Al’s bewildered but smiling face.
A further smell arrived, a sweet smoky and medicinal thing which Bill said was gum tree and gum leaves in the barbecue. Grilling smells pronounced the effect. Vast areas of food materialized on wooden tables. The air seemed to have gone soft. A demure, slow, sunset was trying not to intrude. As family get-togethers went, it was a pretty relaxed sort of evening. A lot of laughter rolled past with some banter. Dorothy looked at Al in some surprise.
“You haven’t said a word, are you worrying about something?”
“I’m………stunned. I haven’t had a nice quiet family gathering in years. I’ve spent the last million years in business with a few meaningless relationships that could have come out of a cereal packet. All…something…now here I am on the other side of the planet, actually relaxing for the first time in my life, maybe. Good food, good company, good weather…All new. It’s a lot to take in.”
“Well, make yourself at home. No need to look the part here, you know.”
That produced their first kiss, a quick, intense and very genuine thing. The rest of the night was a sort of qualifier.
Ashley Whoever-He-Was took center stage. That was the one truly jarring note to the evening. Al noticed that the relatively relaxed and tolerant Aussies didn’t seem to appreciate it much. Even Angela, the fiancée, seemed a bit put out. Ashley reminded Al of one of those early 90s Executive types he’d always found so useless in business. Dave looked as though he was thinking of stepping on someone. Carolyn had the appearance of a hostess with a boor needing to be culled, and soon.
“Y’know, Dave, I think we can make the business really take off. Some heavy exposure to the market, particularly the young market, and we can make it big.”
He smiled like a junk mail catalogue. He also acted like one. A suit, slightly clanging, with a tie, of no obvious parentage, and a hairstyle which needed shooting. A sigh arose from some of the assembly. Angela wasn’t having a bar of it. Al had seen Dorothy talking to her earlier, and they’d been laughing like hyenas, which had endeared Angela to him instantly.
“Must we talk business at our engagement party?” she asked, not at all quietly. All of a sudden she reminded Al of Dorothy.
“Well, family business,” said Ashley, in a way that had even Al wanting to punch him out. That smile needed a boot in it. He noticed that Bill seemed to be turning very stony. That usually meant extreme irritation.
“Yeah, to a point,” said Dave, smiling himself, without an atom of friendliness. This was not a person Al would have given an axe at that moment.
That set off plenty of alarm bells with Al, but not Ashley, who babbled on happily about promotions and sales figures, ignoring Dave. Al was dragged in, very unwillingly, and found himself holding Dorothy’s hand under the table. What did Al think about promos in the hardware business? A tableaux of Dorothy and Angela exchanging looks, a squeeze of his hand, and he was off.
“The pity of it is I’ve done a lot of work for hardware people in the States. I don’t know how much of it would apply here. You’re inevitably dealing with a very diverse clientele, everyone from professionals through to occasional carpenters………”
Dave at least looked interested. Ashley didn’t.
“I think we should go for the mortgage belt. New home owners, young families. People who have a lot at stake in their homes.”
Al disagreed. He’d heard that before, too often.
“Mortgage belt people are tough customers. They have a lot at stake, yeah, but they also don’t want to spend any more than they have to, and they won’t take any risks on doing their own renovations or repairs, because it can affect values.”
That was the abbreviated version. The longer version was a demographic certainty that the mortgage belt doesn’t spend at all if there’s any ambiguity about it. For one thing the money isn’t there. Some things they will do, like tiling. Other things, like big money structural stuff, they won’t do at all until they cost it. Mistakes are far too expensive. It’s also illegal in some cases to tinker about with buildings.
Ashley didn’t like being disagreed with much. He colored, in a school girlish pink. It didn’t suit him at all. The Aussies were by now grinning at him like a lot of happy vultures. Dave was giving Al a very approving look. The people at the party were nearly all mortgage belt people, and some of them were in the hardware business, and Al had said what they thought. Angela was smiling at Dorothy.
“Well, here it’s different. We have a big money thing happening with housing prices, and people buy up big. Millions of dollars………” Ashley was slurring a little, and it was far too noticeable. Angela was now looking more than slightly contemptuous of him. There had been words said earlier in the day about Ashley’s tendency to dictate conversations.
Al and Dorothy exchanged looks. Al became a bit more assertive. The guy was irritating.
“You can make a lot of money playing Monopoly, too. Strangely enough, the more money’s involved, the less stupid people seem to want to be. You don’t throw money at every bit of hardware you see. You need to make the point that your products have a practical application to your clients’ needs. Paint, for example. You don’t buy out the entire paint stock, you buy a paint for a use. Tools are another. Do you really need a lifetime supply of spanners? If so, why?”
Dave was now openly laughing, as was Carolyn. The topic inevitably hit renovation soon enough, Ashley left standing with a beer sodden vocabulary at the point at which Jane chipped in,
“It is expensive. No way would we have done our renovations ourselves. Too time consuming, too complex, even if we knew what we were doing, which we wouldn’t have……”
“Well, no, you wouldn’t have, would you…….?” said Ashley, now looking quite childishly truculent, obscenely brattish. Al grabbed Bill’s arm hard as he started to stand up, while trying to restrain himself by gripping Dorothy’s hand. Jane smiled at Ashley, also without a hint of friendliness. That was an Australian custom which was starting to unnerve Al a little. A silence crashed down. Angela was by now mortified, furious, embarrassed, and about to explode. She looked at Dorothy, open mouthed. She stared at Ashley. In one rather elegant movement, she stood up, took off her ring, and threw it over the fence.
“You bloody pig! Out!” she roared. Her eyes were like blowtorches. She was only little, but she seemed to fill the entire backyard.
Ashley fell over backwards. It suited him.
“Oh, yeah, by the way, Ashley, you’re fired. As of now. Your entitlements will be subject to court action. Don’t even think of arguing. Nick, George…….?” said Dave, conversationally, as Ashley battled unsuccessfully with gravity. Two large “guests”, obviously bouncers, materialized around Ashley, who was now shaking physically. A lot of laughter, cheers, and applause, followed Ashley out the door.
“We are now having an Un-Engagement party,” announced Angela, to more cheers, and the night drifted on as it had been, much more happily. Angela had been having second thoughts anyway, according to Dorothy.
Dave was looking very pleased.
“Want to do some promos for us, Al? You’re overqualified, but I think we can say you know your market.”
Bill emerged from somewhere.
“The Flinger Family strikes again,” he said, grinning, drinking a large beer. Al noticed Bill’s knuckles on both hands were bleeding slightly. So did Carla, Angela, Jane and Dorothy, who’d gravitated over.
“And we’re not alone, are we, Bill?” asked Dorothy.
“No.”
“Saved me the trouble, anyway,” said Angela.
That was apparently that. Jane just said that Bill was a lousy manicurist at the best of times, while cleaning up the results.
“I haven’t seen that type for a while,” said Al, realizing that if Ashley had made that remark to Dorothy, he’d be in no better condition than he probably was now.
Dave grunted informatively.
“We had him for eight months. All talk. He looked good. Did nothing for sales, it was all being done for him by our reps. Where do these useless bastards come from?”
Angela sighed.
“I was a fool, Dad. I thought it all just happened. He was a nothing disguised as a something.”
“I heard you telling him to shut up this afternoon, before the party,” said Dave.
“He was going on and on about His Career. I knew myself by that time that he was mainly talking himself up. I thought career people were like that, I really did, but ……..he was starting to get on my nerves, I just convinced myself he wasn’t.”
“It takes a while to see through the bull,” agreed Dave.
Police arrived, one male, one female, with a very much the worse for wear Ashley in tow, holding a dazzlingly red pad over his mouth. He looked as though his face had disagreed with itself which way it was facing. Dave met them.
“You the owner of these premises, sir? We’re told that someone here assaulted this man,” asked the male cop, holding up Ashley.
“This…….person…… was ordered out of the house by my daughter, who’s his ex-fiancée. Angela?”
Angela arrived, angelically, in her party dress, a princess, no less, and surveyed the mess. The cops looked very skeptical.
“Yes, Dad?”
“You didn’t do that, did you?”
“No, Dad,…… sorry.”
She looked at them, wide eyed. Both of the police tried not to laugh, and almost succeeded. A group had by now assembled. Bill stepped forward slightly. Jane and Carla winced slightly.
“You sure it was here? Not after you left? You see anyone here who resembles whoever attacked you?” asked Bill, looking hard at Ashley.
“N….o”, said Ashley in a muffled voice. He seemed sober, anyway.
“I don’t think we can help you much, sir, if you’re not sure,” said the female constable to the wreck, with a raised eyebrow at Bill, whose hands were in his pockets.
The male cop also obviously didn’t want to spend all night on the subject, either. They left, taking the inelegant and dripping Ashley with them.
“So this is an Australian party,” said Al to Dorothy, as they sipped a beer together with the various Flingers, Jane and Bill, and Joe and Carla.
“Yeah, this is the basic format,” she agreed.
Joe dragged his eyes off Carla for a second.
“It’s strange; the Australian suburb. This is the typical scenario for Australian society. The whole ethos of the country is based on this sort of gathering. It can be fun, it can be very……. I dunno…….it’s like there’s a sort of natural silence, and you’re intruding, but you’re allowed, like kids at a wedding.”
A breeze rattled the trees. Al had an odd sensation of spirit of place as an accompaniment to the party noises, which had gone from eating to dancing to drinking. A few laughs wandered the night.
“You can’t quite ever really ignore the place. The bush is always near, somehow. One look at a gum tree, in any state of mind, and you know where you are,” said Jane.
“We’re sixth generation. We’ve lived in nearly every state in Australia. The Kooris[1] had it right all along. The place has a soul, and it does have a lot of different characters in it, call them spirits, or whatever, they’re there,” said Dave.
“Something more than just familiarity with where you live, too, it’s a very personal experience,” said Bill.
“That thing up there is the Southern Cross,” said Dorothy. “It’s so obvious that I didn’t even quite register it was there until I was in my twenties. The place is like that; it’s vast, and complex, and hardly anyone ever gets to really empathize with it.”
“There’s a lot of over-soppy stuff. Some people try to make it too cute, others don’t see the fun side of it. Some convince themselves they can pin it down with a few words or a few pictures, and then wonder why it doesn’t work and why someone else comes up with something totally different,” said Carla.
Bill had woken up.
“It’s never all that straightforward. Give you an example; Waltzing Matilda. Firstly swagmen, – that’s tramps, Al – weren’t necessarily all that jolly, walking for miles in the heat and the flies for years on end. Your chances on finding a billabong deep enough to drown in are about the same as winning the pools. You’d get more shade under an anorexic than you would under most coolibah trees……..”
“Not many sheep waltz,” added Joe.
“Even the ones called Matilda,” said Jane. “……I asked,” she explained, to her husband’s raised eyebrow.
“Banjo Paterson sold the rights to Matilda for ten pounds, and is now commemorated on the ten dollar note,” said Dave, helpfully producing a note with a young man in a wide brim hat looking suspiciously intelligent on it.
“Which simply shows that ambiguous songs about Australia can get you to have strange unrealistic expectations of sheep, at a discount,” said Carolyn happily.
“I’m glad you cleared that up,” said Al. “I’m thinking about emigrating.”
“We’ll find you a broadminded sheep,” said Dorothy.
[1] Australian Aboriginals, from one of their dialects; at least the term Kooris has some cultural identity to it, unlike “Aborigines”, which being generic isn’t even good usage.