Zen Cleaning Robot
Chapter 2
There is no I, no permanent I, not a person, or anything that belongs to a person, the hair is not I, nor this flesh, the lungs, the nails on my toe. There is no me, nothing belonging to me, no part of me that will live on once I am gone. Bones will turn to stone, dust, or gnawed dogs or vultures. It was one of those few times in life when it was fine to be melodramatic. It was soon time for Christophe to die.
He was disappointed to feel, at this time, that he had no eternal soul. He was kind of hoping that the Buddhists had got it wrong.
The bay shone with the light of the moon. The lighthouse threw its beam across the sky, swinging slowly, quietly, over his head, then lost on the other side of the hill. The town and the bay lit like bubbles bursting.
Christophe thought of a road in Sydney, some road he didn't know the name of and he would never see again, a pretty useless thought given his predicament, but a moment's comfort. The Buddha had said that your mind has to be stable when you die. That's why it's no good jumping off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the mind is too full of pain. When you die you need to be free of pain.
Spend some time by a stream, if you're in a plane and the engines fail, just strap yourself in and see how you go.”
The dark water still managed to give the hint of green. Ripply moonlight rolled south then hit the beach with snail shells and bits of cuttlefish bones. Cristophe tried to evoke some spirit to save him, Ganesh, the elephant god, “lift me up with your many arms,” he said to himself, “flap along the surface of the water with your trunk skimming the water's surface, then pick me up, take me from this nightmare.” He bobbed up and down in anticipation.
Ganesh didn't show up. He was probably off fondling the many breasted god, that Christophe was pretty sure existed in India, and who was probably blue, though he couldn't remember her name, so he just called her Titty. When Ganesh and Titty abandoned him, he turned to a Hopi Indian nature spirit from a Carlos Castenada book about shamans he had read in high school. He imagined the moth, a symbol of wisdom to Hopi shaman tripping out on peyote. The moth fluttered around looking knowledgeable, and then headed to the moon, the stupid insect.
In desperation he turned to his own, unfashionable, Western culture. The West must be good for something, he thought, even though they only had gods with two arms, and their holy people seldom showed their cleavage and didn't spend their days smoking hash out of chillums like Shiva did. “I mean”, he thought, “they had brought us the Enlightenment, rustic French cuisine and Guy de Maupasant.” Surely there was something logical, or even romantic, that could set him free from this predicament. Maybe scientific facts could save him.
Voila! He'd remembered to put a tiny little inflatable raft in his pocket that he could now whip out and inflate, and send some flares up, which were also in his pocket, then drift out into the ocean and catch some tuna with the little fishing kit that came with the raft. No need for sad gods anymore! Alas, when he tapped around his pockets around his wet groin and to his breast the only thing he could find was a soggy tourist pamphlet he'd picked up when he, Johno, Luka and Tanya had been tripping out on acid earlier that day and had ended up going to the tourist centre to try and find Byron Bay souvenir rulers. There was a fact in the pamphlet. Byron Bay had the only north facing beaches in the whole state of New South Wales, and it was also the first place in mainland Australia where someone could see the sun rise. But these facts would not save his life in the same way an inflatable raft might have. His mind bobbed up and down with the waves, many other facts arose and passed away. If only Asterix and Obelix were here, they would be able to pump him full of magic potion and his arms would spin out of control and propel him out of the water and half way up the beach.
An unwanted fact pushed its way into his head. A tourist had been eaten by a Great White here in 1993. Christophe been stoned when it happen, or there was an extremely good chance that he was stoned, as there had only been one or two days in the 1990s where he hadn't been stoned, he was at the main beach pub, or in the vicinity of the main beach pub, he might have been somewhere else, but he needed to to establish a scene for himself so he could be part of the story, he looked out on the main beach, which, if you stand on a table at the main beach pub, you can just about make out, and these Swedish guys, backpackers, as blond as blond can be, with these deep blue manly eyes, that could suck in a woman from any direction, even if they just caught a glimpse of them from the corner of her eye as she was heading around a corner on the way to doing their shopping, and before they knew it, they would be pulled towards them like a rip in the ocean, unable to fight their power, and when they were there they would flicking their hair back flirtatiously and asking whether they had two-man tents, before they were moaning on top of their sleeping bags as other travellers tried to make their dinner. Rather awkward for them as they tried to make small talk.
“So where have you been travelling to?”
“Oh my god, oh my god!”
“Sydney, Cairns, Fraser Island...”
“Oh my god, oh my god! Yes! Yes! Oh, yes!”
Anyway, the Swedish chic magnets were out kyacking way out in the bay and they were attacked by this 20 foot Great White, but still they were able to drag themselves out of the water, using the broken bits of the kyack as support, and then came along the beach leaving a big trail of blood yelling, “Ulla has been eating! Ulla has been eating!” And everyone on the beach was thinking, you should not go into the water too soon after eating as you might get a stich and drown, and then they realised that they were trying to say “eaten” but because they were foreigners they couldn't speak properly.
And no one knew who Ulla was so they were asking “Where is she? Where is Ulla?” After they first sculled the last of their beers, G&Ts, Rum and Cokes and tequila Sunrises, to make sure no one would take then when they ran down to the beach to see what the commotion was. “No, he is not a she, he is a he, Ulla can be either feminine name or masculine like Peter or Sam”, said the Swedes, “and he has been eaten by Great White shark!”
This was a pretty useless fact. In fact it wasn't a fact but just some bullshit Christophe was making up because he was too cold bobbing around the ocean, and he was still coming down off the acid so reality was a bit blurred around the edges. But then he remembered that it was a bit true, there had been a big Great White that did eat some dude who was scuba diving off Julian Rock in the bay. It was in fact a newly wed couple who had gone diving during their honeymoon and this huge Great White lunged at the guy's missus and just at the last moment he pushed her out of the way, only to be taken himself. How romantic. Christophe hadn't actually seen it, he was at some dude's house watching videos. And the Swedes he had just added because he really liked the movie The Beach which he was pretty sure they were watching on the day the shark ate the tourist, which was quite a freaky coincidence, if it was true.
Artistic licence aside, there was still some mother fucking large creature swimming up and down the coastal channels looking for another easy snack, because no-one had been able to catch the bastard. Some fishermen hooked it but it dragged them half out to sea before breaking the line, and that was true, he hadn't just added in something he'd seen in Jaws. Since then they turned the whole area into a marine park so no-one could go after the monster which was an 'endangered species'. What a bunch of idiots humans were, thought Christophe, it was fine saving pandas, but the only threat they posed was to your bamboo grove, it was like they were going to bite your kyack in half or take one of your arms off.
Christophe wished the 'fact' that sharks didn't like to eat human was true. Fact is it was bullshit. Humans were quiet the delicacy in the shark world. Christophe knew his skinny legs looked just like the tiny frog's legs with get with garlic sauce. Sure, you would not eat it every day, but, occasionally, you like to try something different.
Christophe could see the lights of the town a few kilometres away, and the dark jagged shape of the small island that marked the border between the bay and the deep blue-green sea, where the shark ate the foreigner, and the sounds of the water hitting the island's shores, and the swish of fish dorsal fins breaking the surface of the water. Then the sound of a hundred dorsal fins moving in a hundred directions maybe mackerel, tailor, barracuda, or tuna, after bait fish and the burley that the weird guy in the boat was chucking out. The sharks would be around, that was for sure.
According to surfing legend, the barracuda were worse than the sharks, they'd tear holes in you and leave you floating around with strips of flesh hanging off your bones. He tried to again take his mind off being devoured by sea creatures, he started thinking about a book he read that he couldn't remember the name of. He tried to imagine a second hand book shop on a Friday morning, the book would be there, it would cost $7.50 it'd be written by this guy starting with K, it was about something philosophical, northern European type of stuff that you could only write when it was bitterly cold. Maybe it wasn't a book he was thinking of, it might have been a video. Jaws.
Great White Sharks, Tiger Sharks, there was no need to go down the list, they were the two big nasty ones, along with bull sharks, which were smaller, but, generally, nastier ones.
Hammerheads wouldn't be that bad, scary, but mostly harmless. They reminded him of the character Hammerhead, who appeared for a few seconds in Star Wars. This was a comforting fact, in the same way that the northerly facing beach fact wasn't particularly.
A wobegong would even be better than a hammerhead. Wobegong was a word from one of the Aboriginal languages which meant something like bearded fish, or bearded shark. They kind of looked like 1970s' carpet design; shades of brown with random swirls and patterns so it blended in with the mud at the bottom of the ocean.
From the moment Christophe was born he was going to die; naturally, as is the case with everyone in the universe. This wasn't a concept that hard to grasp. The difficult thing was that he didn't really exist in the first place. Of course there was this thing, a collection of hair and teeth and skin, bowels and stuff, that for convenience sake he referred to as Christophe, but none of that shit was him. He still wasn't totally convinced of this, and he had kept searching for a bit that he could call his own, that would last forever. He was quite fond of his cock, and he was hoping that at least he could use this to define who he was, but really, as good looking as it was, he had to admit, at times using it for amorous purposes, either alone, or with company, that it was just a muscle, a bit of meat, like a Scotch fillet in a butcher's shop.
He went through the list.
His fingers were not his, his legs were not his, his bone, the urine warming his leg, the heart pumping blood through his body, the muscles shivering with the cold, and it was now very cold. Still he could not hold his fear at bay, keep it at a distance, perhaps he could just drift off into the next life, start addressing the rest of his karmas that he'd only just discovered, like some long overdue electricity bill that had fallen behind the refrigerator, swelling for eternity, waiting to be paid. He must have a long list of them to get through, written on a wild whirl of a length of toilet paper, some weird and perverted shit he'd done like when he was fifteen and his family went on holidays to Byron Bay, and he and his mate Stephen were playing war games in the sand dunes and they come across these two Swedish women sun-baking naked bodies and when Stephen had gone back for the binoculars he quickly jerked off behind a bush. It didn't take long in those days. But who was he kidding? He'd still want to eat melted chocolate from their pussies, no point feeling guilty about that now, might as well just accept it, he was going to go into the next life thinking about vaginas with condiments. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking Buddha.
The shark was going to rip his fucking leg off and he was going to be reborn as a cane toad and get killed by a truck while trying to screw other dead cane toads on the highway. Karma didn't didn't care what the circumstances were. It didn't deliberate and come back to a tense court room with a decision, it just slapped peeping Toms like him in the face then kicked them in the nuts.
A chunk of dead fish landing near his head shook him back to reality. The weird man's assistants had been throwing it from the boat, along with buckets of fish oil, chunks of meat and blood and bone fertiliser to attract the night feeders. He remembered the wise words of a Japanese tourist, Sunsuke, whom he had met up in Cairns when he had spent time living on the dole in kombi the tropics. “Turtle good defence, but shark good attack”. He pretended to be a turtle, then remembered that turtle legs were the favourite food of Tiger Sharks. He was pretty screwed if a Tiger Shark came around as they ate any old shit. He could probably do without a hand, he could just get one of those hook things. Even if it was the right hand he could always learn to pleasure himself with his left.
The weird man was a tranny called Sacha who was sitting in a small boat about 30 metres away. Sacha had deathly cobra eyes that pierced through the darkness and and matched perfectly with the blouse he had on, which had little green triangles on it. He pinched the idea from a 1920s' design he'd seen in a German fashion museum. He was always amazed at how 1920s fashion just never seemed to date.
Sacha was a man who not only knew how to look good, but also how to terrify people. He could get into their psyche – fuck with their heads, as they say. Sometimes it was torturing a voodoo doll in front of his victims, or getting hearing the hiss of a live tiger snake being placed in your underwear whilst blindfolded face. If he actually wanted to kill Christophe, he would have used poisons. But he only wanted to scare the shit out of the skinny hippy.
He knew it may be hours before the sharks may bite, they were pretty lazy creatures and would happily munch on the old fish heads for hours, rather than tuck into a leathery, raw, human. You could pretty much pat a Great White on the head when they were full, like when they we tucking into a whale carcass. Sacha just wanted Christophe out there, thinking about things, thinking about what he might know that would warrant a well dressed, evil, individual like himself to throw him out in the ocean with no place to pee but down his leg. Sacha was like a blue heeler, an Australian dog that was part dingo, part some other dog. Like Dingoes, blue heelers never barked, they'd just come right up to you and bite you on the knee, then look you in the face as if to say, 'I bet you're wondering why I did that without first giving you some sort of warning that I was going to do it'.
Christophe was interesting thought Sacha, he had not said anything as he tied him up, not screamed when he threw him into the water, and at no point did he try and sound tough, nor make idle threats. He was most unlike the typical secret service agents who'd say things like, 'you're making a big mistake Sacha Haitana. They know I'm on the job and as soon as I'm reported missing, they'll be onto you'. This was a tough nut to crack, thought Sacha, but he would break, and Sacha would know when he had cracked, like the sound a macadamia nut's shell makes when it is turned just far enough in a vice. Just enough, so the kernel would not be crushed but the shell splits open.
Reality was some great distance from what Sacha had assessed it as. He had wildly, astronomically, preposterously, overestimated Christophe's character and resolve. Christophe he had been very stoned – off his chops in the local parlance – too wasted on acid at the time of the abduction to fully appreciate that some transvestite in vintage clothing, with snake eyes, would be interested in abducting him. Or, more to the point, he had realised that Sacha was abducting him, but he put it down to a bad trip, until he got all wet and salty and realised that reality had come home to roost, at which point he started to try and work out why the dude wanted to feed him to the sharks – when he wasn't philosophising about reincarnation and the nature of existence.
Maybe he was a partner in the dope crop they'd stumbled across in Coorabell, thought Christophe. But they'd found out that was just the personal stuff the swinging Polish theatre guy Skye grew to get guests stoned at the Polish swinging parties he held for all the swinging Poles in the area. and he'd probably be pretty thought they'd just blow his brains out with a shorn-off shot gun, if it was pot growers. But he wasn't likely to get this heavy and they'd only stolen a few ounces – not much more than the possums and wallabies normally took. Without too much further thought, he just thought it must be bad luck.
He reviewed the day's events, it had started with an innocent skinny dip in Green Grass' stream. Green Grass had just killed a giant cat fish with an axe because it had kept biting all the hippies he invited over for a sleep. Cat fish are very territorial. Green Grass had put a giant hook on a 30 pound line and sat there for the whole day until he hooked this four foot long black and slimy critter with a little twirly moustache that would probably have been at home at one of Skye's parties. Green Grass was showing where he'd chopped of the catfish's head, then Sacha shows up and puts Christophe in a potato sack and drags him away.
Christophe was coming to the realisation that his present predicament must have something to do with the Buddhist vacuum cleaner and Bharati, the weird French hippy chick who lived in a shack near Nimbin. She'd been talking the usual hippy shit about changing the world, they type of thing he'd heard a thousand times around beach fires or out the back of some dude's place up in the hills around Byron Bay or in the back of a canoe floating through the tea tree swamp at 2 a.m. after 10 or 15 joints. Crazy freaked out dope talk.
Christophe could hear the swish of the fin as it grabbed at the floating pieces of flesh. For all the detachment he tried to muster, he still couldn't let go of his penis, he realised that he did not want to die, or worse, loose his cock. Instinctively he covered his groin and yelled, “Ahhh!! I'll help you get the hippy chick!”
Sacha ordered the hairy, sweaty, muscly, brutish men to pull in the bait.
As Christophe was being dragged in, he reflected on how simpler life had been when he was just a plain old hippy, just a few weeks earlier.
There is no I, no permanent I, not a person, or anything that belongs to a person, the hair is not I, nor this flesh, the lungs, the nails on my toe. There is no me, nothing belonging to me, no part of me that will live on once I am gone. Bones will turn to stone, dust, or gnawed dogs or vultures. It was one of those few times in life when it was fine to be melodramatic. It was soon time for Christophe to die.
He was disappointed to feel, at this time, that he had no eternal soul. He was kind of hoping that the Buddhists had got it wrong.
The bay shone with the light of the moon. The lighthouse threw its beam across the sky, swinging slowly, quietly, over his head, then lost on the other side of the hill. The town and the bay lit like bubbles bursting.
Christophe thought of a road in Sydney, some road he didn't know the name of and he would never see again, a pretty useless thought given his predicament, but a moment's comfort. The Buddha had said that your mind has to be stable when you die. That's why it's no good jumping off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the mind is too full of pain. When you die you need to be free of pain.
Spend some time by a stream, if you're in a plane and the engines fail, just strap yourself in and see how you go.”
The dark water still managed to give the hint of green. Ripply moonlight rolled south then hit the beach with snail shells and bits of cuttlefish bones. Cristophe tried to evoke some spirit to save him, Ganesh, the elephant god, “lift me up with your many arms,” he said to himself, “flap along the surface of the water with your trunk skimming the water's surface, then pick me up, take me from this nightmare.” He bobbed up and down in anticipation.
Ganesh didn't show up. He was probably off fondling the many breasted god, that Christophe was pretty sure existed in India, and who was probably blue, though he couldn't remember her name, so he just called her Titty. When Ganesh and Titty abandoned him, he turned to a Hopi Indian nature spirit from a Carlos Castenada book about shamans he had read in high school. He imagined the moth, a symbol of wisdom to Hopi shaman tripping out on peyote. The moth fluttered around looking knowledgeable, and then headed to the moon, the stupid insect.
In desperation he turned to his own, unfashionable, Western culture. The West must be good for something, he thought, even though they only had gods with two arms, and their holy people seldom showed their cleavage and didn't spend their days smoking hash out of chillums like Shiva did. “I mean”, he thought, “they had brought us the Enlightenment, rustic French cuisine and Guy de Maupasant.” Surely there was something logical, or even romantic, that could set him free from this predicament. Maybe scientific facts could save him.
Voila! He'd remembered to put a tiny little inflatable raft in his pocket that he could now whip out and inflate, and send some flares up, which were also in his pocket, then drift out into the ocean and catch some tuna with the little fishing kit that came with the raft. No need for sad gods anymore! Alas, when he tapped around his pockets around his wet groin and to his breast the only thing he could find was a soggy tourist pamphlet he'd picked up when he, Johno, Luka and Tanya had been tripping out on acid earlier that day and had ended up going to the tourist centre to try and find Byron Bay souvenir rulers. There was a fact in the pamphlet. Byron Bay had the only north facing beaches in the whole state of New South Wales, and it was also the first place in mainland Australia where someone could see the sun rise. But these facts would not save his life in the same way an inflatable raft might have. His mind bobbed up and down with the waves, many other facts arose and passed away. If only Asterix and Obelix were here, they would be able to pump him full of magic potion and his arms would spin out of control and propel him out of the water and half way up the beach.
An unwanted fact pushed its way into his head. A tourist had been eaten by a Great White here in 1993. Christophe been stoned when it happen, or there was an extremely good chance that he was stoned, as there had only been one or two days in the 1990s where he hadn't been stoned, he was at the main beach pub, or in the vicinity of the main beach pub, he might have been somewhere else, but he needed to to establish a scene for himself so he could be part of the story, he looked out on the main beach, which, if you stand on a table at the main beach pub, you can just about make out, and these Swedish guys, backpackers, as blond as blond can be, with these deep blue manly eyes, that could suck in a woman from any direction, even if they just caught a glimpse of them from the corner of her eye as she was heading around a corner on the way to doing their shopping, and before they knew it, they would be pulled towards them like a rip in the ocean, unable to fight their power, and when they were there they would flicking their hair back flirtatiously and asking whether they had two-man tents, before they were moaning on top of their sleeping bags as other travellers tried to make their dinner. Rather awkward for them as they tried to make small talk.
“So where have you been travelling to?”
“Oh my god, oh my god!”
“Sydney, Cairns, Fraser Island...”
“Oh my god, oh my god! Yes! Yes! Oh, yes!”
Anyway, the Swedish chic magnets were out kyacking way out in the bay and they were attacked by this 20 foot Great White, but still they were able to drag themselves out of the water, using the broken bits of the kyack as support, and then came along the beach leaving a big trail of blood yelling, “Ulla has been eating! Ulla has been eating!” And everyone on the beach was thinking, you should not go into the water too soon after eating as you might get a stich and drown, and then they realised that they were trying to say “eaten” but because they were foreigners they couldn't speak properly.
And no one knew who Ulla was so they were asking “Where is she? Where is Ulla?” After they first sculled the last of their beers, G&Ts, Rum and Cokes and tequila Sunrises, to make sure no one would take then when they ran down to the beach to see what the commotion was. “No, he is not a she, he is a he, Ulla can be either feminine name or masculine like Peter or Sam”, said the Swedes, “and he has been eaten by Great White shark!”
This was a pretty useless fact. In fact it wasn't a fact but just some bullshit Christophe was making up because he was too cold bobbing around the ocean, and he was still coming down off the acid so reality was a bit blurred around the edges. But then he remembered that it was a bit true, there had been a big Great White that did eat some dude who was scuba diving off Julian Rock in the bay. It was in fact a newly wed couple who had gone diving during their honeymoon and this huge Great White lunged at the guy's missus and just at the last moment he pushed her out of the way, only to be taken himself. How romantic. Christophe hadn't actually seen it, he was at some dude's house watching videos. And the Swedes he had just added because he really liked the movie The Beach which he was pretty sure they were watching on the day the shark ate the tourist, which was quite a freaky coincidence, if it was true.
Artistic licence aside, there was still some mother fucking large creature swimming up and down the coastal channels looking for another easy snack, because no-one had been able to catch the bastard. Some fishermen hooked it but it dragged them half out to sea before breaking the line, and that was true, he hadn't just added in something he'd seen in Jaws. Since then they turned the whole area into a marine park so no-one could go after the monster which was an 'endangered species'. What a bunch of idiots humans were, thought Christophe, it was fine saving pandas, but the only threat they posed was to your bamboo grove, it was like they were going to bite your kyack in half or take one of your arms off.
Christophe wished the 'fact' that sharks didn't like to eat human was true. Fact is it was bullshit. Humans were quiet the delicacy in the shark world. Christophe knew his skinny legs looked just like the tiny frog's legs with get with garlic sauce. Sure, you would not eat it every day, but, occasionally, you like to try something different.
Christophe could see the lights of the town a few kilometres away, and the dark jagged shape of the small island that marked the border between the bay and the deep blue-green sea, where the shark ate the foreigner, and the sounds of the water hitting the island's shores, and the swish of fish dorsal fins breaking the surface of the water. Then the sound of a hundred dorsal fins moving in a hundred directions maybe mackerel, tailor, barracuda, or tuna, after bait fish and the burley that the weird guy in the boat was chucking out. The sharks would be around, that was for sure.
According to surfing legend, the barracuda were worse than the sharks, they'd tear holes in you and leave you floating around with strips of flesh hanging off your bones. He tried to again take his mind off being devoured by sea creatures, he started thinking about a book he read that he couldn't remember the name of. He tried to imagine a second hand book shop on a Friday morning, the book would be there, it would cost $7.50 it'd be written by this guy starting with K, it was about something philosophical, northern European type of stuff that you could only write when it was bitterly cold. Maybe it wasn't a book he was thinking of, it might have been a video. Jaws.
Great White Sharks, Tiger Sharks, there was no need to go down the list, they were the two big nasty ones, along with bull sharks, which were smaller, but, generally, nastier ones.
Hammerheads wouldn't be that bad, scary, but mostly harmless. They reminded him of the character Hammerhead, who appeared for a few seconds in Star Wars. This was a comforting fact, in the same way that the northerly facing beach fact wasn't particularly.
A wobegong would even be better than a hammerhead. Wobegong was a word from one of the Aboriginal languages which meant something like bearded fish, or bearded shark. They kind of looked like 1970s' carpet design; shades of brown with random swirls and patterns so it blended in with the mud at the bottom of the ocean.
From the moment Christophe was born he was going to die; naturally, as is the case with everyone in the universe. This wasn't a concept that hard to grasp. The difficult thing was that he didn't really exist in the first place. Of course there was this thing, a collection of hair and teeth and skin, bowels and stuff, that for convenience sake he referred to as Christophe, but none of that shit was him. He still wasn't totally convinced of this, and he had kept searching for a bit that he could call his own, that would last forever. He was quite fond of his cock, and he was hoping that at least he could use this to define who he was, but really, as good looking as it was, he had to admit, at times using it for amorous purposes, either alone, or with company, that it was just a muscle, a bit of meat, like a Scotch fillet in a butcher's shop.
He went through the list.
His fingers were not his, his legs were not his, his bone, the urine warming his leg, the heart pumping blood through his body, the muscles shivering with the cold, and it was now very cold. Still he could not hold his fear at bay, keep it at a distance, perhaps he could just drift off into the next life, start addressing the rest of his karmas that he'd only just discovered, like some long overdue electricity bill that had fallen behind the refrigerator, swelling for eternity, waiting to be paid. He must have a long list of them to get through, written on a wild whirl of a length of toilet paper, some weird and perverted shit he'd done like when he was fifteen and his family went on holidays to Byron Bay, and he and his mate Stephen were playing war games in the sand dunes and they come across these two Swedish women sun-baking naked bodies and when Stephen had gone back for the binoculars he quickly jerked off behind a bush. It didn't take long in those days. But who was he kidding? He'd still want to eat melted chocolate from their pussies, no point feeling guilty about that now, might as well just accept it, he was going to go into the next life thinking about vaginas with condiments. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking Buddha.
The shark was going to rip his fucking leg off and he was going to be reborn as a cane toad and get killed by a truck while trying to screw other dead cane toads on the highway. Karma didn't didn't care what the circumstances were. It didn't deliberate and come back to a tense court room with a decision, it just slapped peeping Toms like him in the face then kicked them in the nuts.
A chunk of dead fish landing near his head shook him back to reality. The weird man's assistants had been throwing it from the boat, along with buckets of fish oil, chunks of meat and blood and bone fertiliser to attract the night feeders. He remembered the wise words of a Japanese tourist, Sunsuke, whom he had met up in Cairns when he had spent time living on the dole in kombi the tropics. “Turtle good defence, but shark good attack”. He pretended to be a turtle, then remembered that turtle legs were the favourite food of Tiger Sharks. He was pretty screwed if a Tiger Shark came around as they ate any old shit. He could probably do without a hand, he could just get one of those hook things. Even if it was the right hand he could always learn to pleasure himself with his left.
The weird man was a tranny called Sacha who was sitting in a small boat about 30 metres away. Sacha had deathly cobra eyes that pierced through the darkness and and matched perfectly with the blouse he had on, which had little green triangles on it. He pinched the idea from a 1920s' design he'd seen in a German fashion museum. He was always amazed at how 1920s fashion just never seemed to date.
Sacha was a man who not only knew how to look good, but also how to terrify people. He could get into their psyche – fuck with their heads, as they say. Sometimes it was torturing a voodoo doll in front of his victims, or getting hearing the hiss of a live tiger snake being placed in your underwear whilst blindfolded face. If he actually wanted to kill Christophe, he would have used poisons. But he only wanted to scare the shit out of the skinny hippy.
He knew it may be hours before the sharks may bite, they were pretty lazy creatures and would happily munch on the old fish heads for hours, rather than tuck into a leathery, raw, human. You could pretty much pat a Great White on the head when they were full, like when they we tucking into a whale carcass. Sacha just wanted Christophe out there, thinking about things, thinking about what he might know that would warrant a well dressed, evil, individual like himself to throw him out in the ocean with no place to pee but down his leg. Sacha was like a blue heeler, an Australian dog that was part dingo, part some other dog. Like Dingoes, blue heelers never barked, they'd just come right up to you and bite you on the knee, then look you in the face as if to say, 'I bet you're wondering why I did that without first giving you some sort of warning that I was going to do it'.
Christophe was interesting thought Sacha, he had not said anything as he tied him up, not screamed when he threw him into the water, and at no point did he try and sound tough, nor make idle threats. He was most unlike the typical secret service agents who'd say things like, 'you're making a big mistake Sacha Haitana. They know I'm on the job and as soon as I'm reported missing, they'll be onto you'. This was a tough nut to crack, thought Sacha, but he would break, and Sacha would know when he had cracked, like the sound a macadamia nut's shell makes when it is turned just far enough in a vice. Just enough, so the kernel would not be crushed but the shell splits open.
Reality was some great distance from what Sacha had assessed it as. He had wildly, astronomically, preposterously, overestimated Christophe's character and resolve. Christophe he had been very stoned – off his chops in the local parlance – too wasted on acid at the time of the abduction to fully appreciate that some transvestite in vintage clothing, with snake eyes, would be interested in abducting him. Or, more to the point, he had realised that Sacha was abducting him, but he put it down to a bad trip, until he got all wet and salty and realised that reality had come home to roost, at which point he started to try and work out why the dude wanted to feed him to the sharks – when he wasn't philosophising about reincarnation and the nature of existence.
Maybe he was a partner in the dope crop they'd stumbled across in Coorabell, thought Christophe. But they'd found out that was just the personal stuff the swinging Polish theatre guy Skye grew to get guests stoned at the Polish swinging parties he held for all the swinging Poles in the area. and he'd probably be pretty thought they'd just blow his brains out with a shorn-off shot gun, if it was pot growers. But he wasn't likely to get this heavy and they'd only stolen a few ounces – not much more than the possums and wallabies normally took. Without too much further thought, he just thought it must be bad luck.
He reviewed the day's events, it had started with an innocent skinny dip in Green Grass' stream. Green Grass had just killed a giant cat fish with an axe because it had kept biting all the hippies he invited over for a sleep. Cat fish are very territorial. Green Grass had put a giant hook on a 30 pound line and sat there for the whole day until he hooked this four foot long black and slimy critter with a little twirly moustache that would probably have been at home at one of Skye's parties. Green Grass was showing where he'd chopped of the catfish's head, then Sacha shows up and puts Christophe in a potato sack and drags him away.
Christophe was coming to the realisation that his present predicament must have something to do with the Buddhist vacuum cleaner and Bharati, the weird French hippy chick who lived in a shack near Nimbin. She'd been talking the usual hippy shit about changing the world, they type of thing he'd heard a thousand times around beach fires or out the back of some dude's place up in the hills around Byron Bay or in the back of a canoe floating through the tea tree swamp at 2 a.m. after 10 or 15 joints. Crazy freaked out dope talk.
Christophe could hear the swish of the fin as it grabbed at the floating pieces of flesh. For all the detachment he tried to muster, he still couldn't let go of his penis, he realised that he did not want to die, or worse, loose his cock. Instinctively he covered his groin and yelled, “Ahhh!! I'll help you get the hippy chick!”
Sacha ordered the hairy, sweaty, muscly, brutish men to pull in the bait.
As Christophe was being dragged in, he reflected on how simpler life had been when he was just a plain old hippy, just a few weeks earlier.
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