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Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle

~ The Home Pub of the Famous Pink Drinks and Trotter's Ale

Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle

Category Archives: Sandshoe

Shoe and HOO and Big Al: Yet Another Episode

12 Monday Apr 2021

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

'Shoe, Big M, Glenda's House of Pain, HOO

HOO says it was out?

Written by Sandshoe

“Y’ can’t be serious.”

“No.”

“What. ‘No’ it’s not possible or y’ don’t believe anything I ever say?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean ‘Yes’?”

“100%”

“Where’s Big M?”

Hoo and Shoe are painting and papering the old House of Pain. There’s a jingle playing in a background sound track. Remember the jingle? Many hours of fun and laughter are spent at Glenda’s after? Everyone whistled it?

Big M puts his head in. He appears to be hiding the rest of what there is of a whole person behind the wall adjacent to the entrance door.

Shoe pronounces “Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig and Whistle” with relish.

“It’s a good trading name that is,” says HOO. HOO slaps his thighs, getting dust off his cover-all, well, his thighs. The Nail Salon’s gowns are none too commodious. Both of their bums (Shoe’s and HOO’s too) stick clear out the back from under the neat cloth ties that guarantee their frontal modesty. Shoe and HOO are saving their real clothes for a real job.

“The Boss wants us all to work harder.”

“Big, that’s ‘Job Description’.”

“Those gowns look better than the one I’ve got on. Not that I am ungrateful. It’s a saving.”

Shoe guesses the distance. She reaches over and throws Big M a gown pulled down earlier from the clothes stand beside Glenda’s wash troughs.

“Ta. I’ll call Big Al.”

“Who, Shoe? Who is he going to phone?”

“Who, HOO?”

We are down to the barest bones of our truth. We are to arrange a meeting of all the characters and plan a revival of business.

Thus Aristotle’s soul, of old that was,
May now be damned to animate an ass,
Or in this very house, for ought we know,
Is doing painful penance in some beau;
And thus our audience, which did once resort
To shining theatres to see our sport,
Now find us tossed into a tennis-court.

William Congreve: Love is Love (1695)

Anyone wanna a fight oops I mean tennis

The Bish Packs It In.

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Father O'Way, Gordon O'Donnell (GOD), Mother O'Way, the Bish

Jesus and God

The Bish Packs It In.

Written by Sandshoe

The Bish arrived with attitude. The good Bish (there are some very bad Bishes) had been a supplicant for a semester at a mind re-training boot camp conducted in the Southern Highlands by the Society for the Restoration of All Bishops of Any Sin. FOW*, still. after all these years resident in the Manse over the road from the Pig’s Arms** carpark had some advantages as a host of his, or her, re-emergence. More important to the Bish than anything was no longer being of a fixed mindset about his, or her, personal gender or about anything at all. If anything, FOW was the perfect host. He was laid back.

The Bish greeted his friend, Sandy O’Way with gushing warmth.

“Mother O’Way, away wit’ y’ lookin’ so bonny.”

Sandy, or as we like to address him on formal occasions, FOW, hesitated.

“I’ll need to put down the suitcases, Bish.’

The suitcases dispensed with at the bottom of the staircase, FOW waited for the onrush of shock into his consciousness to subside. Being seized and hugged in an instant by the Bish was unexpected, nay unaccustomed. He picked up the suitcases again, his two hands firmly gripped on them as if on reality. The Bish filled him in as they walked up the staircase to the upper storey side by side

The Bish had seen where inconsistencies in the mortal and moral fabric tethered him, or her to the old ways in entire indifference to caring. In bondage, the Bish explicated. He waved his hands free of imagined shackles.

“We’re all good then.”

FOW wanted it to be inferred he would be Mother O’Way, MOW if necessary were it required of him. What’s in a name.

“Never been better,” the Bish punched with his fists into the very air.

“I’ll check your prescriptions. Seen Gordy*** lately?”

“Don’t forget Gord, Sandy.” Tears of beatitude and plenitude, rectitude I suspect, gratitude rolled down the face of the Bish. They splashed onto the gold heraldic design on the carpet on the staircase.

*Father O’Way

**Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig and Whistle

***Gordy O’Donnell, nuclear and unplugged physicist of all things indeterminable in the Cyberverse.

Soul Walk

15 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Soul Walk

Written by Sandshoe

10 March, 2021.

I often reflect on Lehan Winifred Ramsay and what she has meant to me.

Coming out of a University building after a Clubs and Associations training meeting yesterday evening my eye was taken by the sky. I had emerged out of the building into a dark side path I found was not lit as I expected.

Perhaps it really was because I had taken a road less travelled I happened on a friend at an intersection of the path I further took to walk home. My friend Dom is a mature age student whose specialist attention is in IT. I feel we found such important common ground in our shared talk.

I walked further with one of the security staff. He makes a difference in the work he does on campus. He walks a regular beat and recognizes the students who need the warm or plain kind word of a person who listens as another speaks. He walks a path less travelled.

Reading back over shared communication with Lehan, I see later she and I meet at intersections of a sort and I would in some ways too sadly forget if they were not captured on pages of The Pig’s Arms where we met. I wander around online and view her life work, her photography, read what we at the pub here, this wild and romantic blog post, had with Lehan as a contributor, our bold and innovative off-the-wall friend.

The work she sent me is not listed anywhere that I have found. ‘The Lotus Pond’ is one of her most beautiful and possibly significant paintings. Fireflies flash their illumination of magic and dart across the pond surface.

The Bish Unpacks

13 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Father O'Way, Morris dancers, the Bish

The Bishop bats on

The Bish Unpacks

By Sandshoe

The Bish is excited. The Bish is having an episode. The good Father O’Way is excited. The staff at Glenda’s Waxing are excited. The Bish has not attended one of FOW’s At Homes for a good while so we are all excited his Uber turned up at the Manse front gate. One of FOW’s specialties is a rousing ‘At Home’.

FOW’s not above inviting a good dance troupe to perform either on the Manse lawn. He has asked the PA’s Morris Dancers. They have showed good form over the years.

Myself I have never heard of any of them. When I suggest I think they have danced off and away to Morris Dancers’ Dance Heaven in the sky (perhaps that is a bit long winded ha! ha! ha! hiccup!), the Bish scoffs.

“Bollocks, Christina!”

I am of a mind to write him out of this one. I keep a cap on it. I see the juxtaposition as well of the sweary word and my name, my real name, sounds with unexpected resonance.

“This is an opportunity sent from…”

“Shut up,” the Bish demands, interrupts says it mildly, “Shut up.”

He’s not happy I think the Morris Dancers are no more.

Someone dropped their hanky

“No more, the derry-o,” I sing to keep things on the up and up, cheerful.

“We never know who anybody really is,” the Bish opines.

*Father O’Way

**Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig and Whistle

A Stay at Home

08 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Emmjay, Father O'Way, granny, Merv

He said he just wanted to pluck, honest…

(A) Stay At Home

By Sandshoe

“There’s no other way to say it.”

FOW* is mopping the porch. No-one pays him attention. Nobody there.

“I’ll say it anyway.”

Nobody knows what it was. A raucous noise of a band in the Pig’s Arms Sylvia Plath Memorial ballroom sets up. It disappears like a wisp of a fanfare of a concerto.

On the other side of the car park, Merv walking through the Sports Bar is himself in explication with himself.

“She’s not here.”

Where ‘she’ isn’t or wasn’t depends on where in time you want to go with this, let me interrupt and explicate. I’ll do that sometimes. It’s knowing everything that causes everything. Merv was in the cellar of this infamous address, destination of drinkers and jokers all, place of the people, the Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig and Whistle. He’s risen up the cellar stairs to walk through the Sports Bar. FOW is mopping the floor of the entrance hall of the Manse, but not out of mind. Out of frame.

“I know perfectly well she’s not here.”

Merv is confident. Granny had left the building. Merv had watched Granny’s curvaceous arse gyrate and manipulate its way around and between the Sports Bar tables and chairs and it exit.

Emmjay is calling down into the stair well. It’s his pub. He does as he chooses. Merv careens out of reverie.

“Yes? What do you want, Emm?” Merv calls back from the Sports Bar.

“Merv, did you tell the Flamin’ Crows they could practice in the Ballroom this morning?”

“Don’t know anything about that.”

Of course he doesn’t. He didn’t know I was going to write them in. Viewpoint is everything. The soundscape is deafening. The crescendo is only bettered by the rate of debris falling from the rafters. Chook waste. Dried chook excreta. Chook feathers.

Merv and Emmjay step out into the car park for a breath of morning air unadulterated with reminder the rafters were never mucked out after the last chook was despatched to the WDAPW** Sports Bar counter menu. The sun is risen in a blaze of glory. FOW is at the gate of the Manse directly opposite. A Cyberverse taxi driver is at the Manse gate emptying luggage out of the boot of a Cyberverse taxi. The Bish is back in town.

*Father O’Way

**Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig and Whistle

I’m a priest, trust me…

Never Far From The Truth:

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Sandshoe

≈ 10 Comments

Foodge expelled the breath of a man of all reason – aka Leon Trotsky

Episode One Billion in Some Parts

Written by Shoe – Direction and Photography by Mark.

“Granny can’t be all that deaf,” Mark was remarking. 

“I’m not going as Death,” Granny hollered. The cellar’s a long way. From is even longer by the time Granny climbs the stairs after a few quiet ones.

“Fancy dress,” Algy explained to Big M, “They’re holding an Allusion to celebrate we’re all in a better place.

“There’s a row of them in a big wooden box,” Foodge heard Granny screech as he walked in. 

“I’m all done in, Uncle Merv.”

Merv set down a steaming cup of milo on the bar. Foodge expelled the breath of a man of all reason. Foodge was a season of reason. No-one dared ask. Foodge was likely to recount. He might recount his entire latest judgement.  Foodge never came away from any trial without a good 40-minute obiter. 

“Come to think of it,” Shoe said aloud. She thought she was only thinking it. “Foodge comes away from every trial like a man glued to postal mail.”

She wrote it down. Benj, new proprietor of the bookshop suggested, “Like a George the Fifth?”

So unnecessary. Overstatement of an adhesive. Strictly speaking, it had been used before.

“If we could make them a little less corny.”

Mark was remarking.

“Not again,” Yvonne groaned. Yvonne could barely breathe for fear if she stopped holding her breath in anticipation, Shoe would say nothing more, write nothing, least of all think. 

“Breathe, Yvonne.”

Mark had it in hand. He placed the bar bill down on the, well, bar.

“I can’t read all these zeroes,” Shoe animated.  “You can’t expect me to pay this as penalty. Three quadrillion billion five thousand and thirty two million…”

“That’s a heart starter,” sibilanted Big M. Big sibilanted in the face of all emergencies. He knew where to toss a vowel in for good effect when needed. 

“Here’s a how-de-do,” Veronica Lake said. Ms Lake is new to that beer-soaked chook-squirt-stained establisment. Everyone remembers the Mexican chooks imported from, well, close to the truth. 

“This is what comes of putting drinks on tick in an ever-expanding consciousness series sense,” Foodge interrupted, “I’ll take the case.”

Three Boozers

29 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Sandshoe

 

 

THREE BOOZERS

Worsted Verse by Shoe.

Three boozers being blotto

And sick to death of Keno

Took on themselves entire change

Of course out of their baggies

Into kit less dog-eared

But their prospects were the first to rearrange.

Said the first I am a loser

I have never backed a winner

Not a horse, a game or dog on this life’s track

The second said I’m surer

For my hair’s just like fencing wire

And my teeth are all quite stained from drinking rye

The third said I’m a fibber

The biggest ever hired

I am a proper spinner

I never et my dinner.

It seemed from where they lent

Their trinity bespoken

That could they get some other besots

Lead all to heaven

The chains upon all mortal souls

Theirs, ours, yours, broken

God above, Best On High The Holy

Would smile on their affray

And grant World Sanctimony

Hence back and forth and forth and back

They gathered each to other.

Boomed a voice…

“TOO LATE YOU CAN’T COME IN!”

“Wait on! Most Lord God On High Your Honour

We are a protest movement

Bit wobbly, but full of moment

And you all look like DONKIES with the mange!!!”

(It could of ended better).

Charles Smith

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 6 Comments

The Mini

 

 

Charles Smith

by Sandshoe

I recently was handed a box of my papers I have not seen for 30 years, forgotten other than those I thought were lost. The thought process behind writing the partial first draft of this piece came back to me clearly. I was pitching to write out of character. attempting a psychodrama cross horror story with elements of crafted confusion, the surreal and provocation to laugh.

My former position of employment would soon be made redundant by the introduction of technology about to revolutionise the workplace. As an active member of the union and elected to speak for the staff to management, I would never have voiced ‘revolutionise’. I reflected later on the disappearance of a form of employment few would know of and its conduct in a room with a building view overlooking other buildings, from a chair in the room a view that was the colour grey and bleak or of rain or blue and bright at height the length of the external wall, the weather through an industrial warehouse-style window.

The waiter rolled down the stairs.

“Come back here,” I screamed, distraught at the evasive tactics. I don’t suppose you would understand the difficulties involved in having a loose grip on reality. You might seeing in others the potential of their losing theirs.

We are by definition so much better at watching others than ourselves.

My duty is to not assume, but warn. You could even be sitting next to me on a bus.

I warned Noag. He laughed. You can’t afford laughter any more than Noag could. You never met him, did you? No, of course not. I had buried Noag even then in the deepest recesses of recall for so long, my imagination gave him shape and appearance.

You will never find him.

What you will meet with is with yourself saddled with my neuroses as well as your own. You began to read thinking, didn’t you, that you could forget your own for a while your hands clutched around this publication, your fingernails almost sunk in. You sank, instead, into its grateful embrace. You probably started feet up. You sent the kids to Coventry. If you do not have any, you wanted to forget worrying about the ones you didn’t have. Opportunity eluded, time deluded you.

I have never had any children. I never will. I hate children. Children clutter buses at peak-times. They toddle along in harnesson pavements, meander, alarm running red and sweating in gym clothing. So many knees and elbows in school groups and pushing and shoving and teachers blowing whistles.

I thought the driver was never going to stop the bus when it started to scream. I was trapped in a beast, a classic outcome of mythology, its soul emergent as an unnerving high-pitched whine from within, the single note and its harmonics like a buzz saw, a monotone of unremitting frenzy-cross-rational logic attuned to the sorest point that is unknown.

What’s wrong with this bus, I thought.

I didn’t see anybody else thinking the same thing. The aisle was blank with suspense. I did see a round ball of slimed and white chewing gum land on the point of focus of my meditation. A passenger near involuntarily I supposed discarded the material. I imagined the ball projecting through a mouth rounded to permit that habitual exit. I could step on it. What best purpose might I attach to that. I order everything, you see, into good and bad and why.

Would I get to work on time? Stupid question. Buses never get anybody to work on time unless the journey is begun in the hours before sun-up by striking a match. Yes, my subjective analysis. They, the antagonists in all legends, cut off my electricity just as I was about to pay the bill. At least some of it in the hope I would be standing as anticipated in the illumination of the porch light when the landlord came by for the rent. It seems reasonable to assume that where there’s power, there’s hope. A landlord cannot feel confidence in a porch lit in a deepening twilight by a tenant shielding a spluttering match.

I will bruise my brain one day taking public transport instead of the Mini stuck in the garage. The jolting and the shudder of the bus was terrible.

I have high standards. I have high expectations of myself. I am my own standard and hyperbola. I studied Math that did not work out so well. I took on Political Studies. I was busy. Elsewhere. I flunked so I did not get the job of Secretary to my local Member or of anywhere. Instead I am in this business. Publishing and I read. Everything that is put in front of me. Not on my own. We read together, you see. My workplace is a room of babble. No matter the noise pollution. I’ve developed an evasion tactic that, to date, has kept me my job. Just as I am about to deliver a neurosis as finely tuned as a pitch fork, I go to the gents.

Well, one of us reads out loud and the other listens, the pairs rostered to minimise the blood shed, close on 40 people at desks, four supervisors and a Head Reader seated at a side-on desk out front left. The content of the daily newspaper and other publications is read thus every day, all day and more from the time you leave your work and go home into the dark of night that is the night of our despair.

Readers do. Have a loose grip on reality.

The bus slowed. Not ‘slowed’ as if coming to a stop. The bus slowed yet progressed forward as if the driver had formed no intention to stop. The passengers might have to jump the driver, take control. We were not in a democratic accident inclining to equity, but hapless dependants. We can only imagine ourselves on a level playing field where there is hope, not haphazard luck and its opposition, mishap. The screaming bus sounded as if it was climbing a hill where there was no hill. The floor of the bus shuddered.

A reader would begin reading the text of a paragraph such as I have written above thus: new para cap T definite article space bus space and so on. What is on the page and is otherwise not, designated ‘space’, is vocalised as having entity, place, status or subservience. Everything becomes ascribed purpose and dimension. Commercial ads, lonely hearts pleas, even syndicated crosswords are read. One period down river. Two period across bright. Check the solution. Does the solution match and fit.

Funeral and In Memoriam notices circulate three times which engages the scrutiny of six staffers.

What carminative could I find in reflection we care more for the dead than the living. My bowels gripped in the pain of retention of flatulence. I held my guilty secret forever more against my better judgement weighting good, better and best.

You know, few faux paux and mistaken attributions find their way into print. Each partner holds a copy of the proof. The reader may offer the copyholder they read and the reader listens in the assumed role of copyholder.

What can possibly go wrong.

Imagine the way reflected images in shop windows are seen to change viewed from the window of an inner city bus. Flick flick flick. Readers and copyholders do not stop reading when they walk out onto the street after between 8 and 12 hours a day reading everything given to them including poetry and space. They continue to read. Their eye identifies out of a world of viewpoint anything that can be read, a word, a punctuation mark or more and tests the strength of meaning. Their habitual task in their workplace is an entity of powerful will.

Gathered school children at a stop followed the sight of their scheduled bus passing them without deviating from its forward path. Their faces aghast, they waggled and waved school bags, blazers, outstretched arms. Suddenly the bus clanked and came to screaming rest. Its engine cut out. The screaming stopped. I leaped out of my seat in fear of mayhem and doom, explosion. My suit and shirt collar were sodden in a drench of fear of a colleague literally reading a report of my untimely death to a copy holder: cap c charles spell that out (pause and listen to copyholder) space cap s smith spell that out (pause and listen to copyholder) punctuation comma lower case f formerly indefinite article an employee of…

The fellow next to me who waited tables at The Metropole Hotel dining room and I were first at the exit. I merely pushed him out of my way. He pushed me out of his. As I stepped forward in haste to flee the bus, he pushed me aside again and in retaliation as I grabbed for him and he turned back, I turned and directed the heel of my smart shoe backwards. I felt the impact on his shin bone as the heel connected. My blood up, I was spoiling for a fight as I turned back to land him a blow. He was flailing his hands in the air. His legs were tottering his body helplessly forward as I struck out at him with my readied fist.

After I screamed at him to come back (when he rolled down the stairs), I was pinioned in a citizens arrest and secured to a bus seat with luggage strapping.

…top right column photograph of a man caption under (reader, pause) cap c charles spell that out (reader, pause and listen to copyholder) space cap s smith spell that out (reader, pause and listen to copyholder) punctuation comma lower case indefinite article an employee of…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 16

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by Mark in Sandshoe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Christina Binning Wilson, homelessness


 

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 16
by Sandshoe

The tolerance and creativity of the community on the beach arose out of the empathy travellers feel for like-minded travellers. ‘We’ included domestic refugees seeking other than disposession, happier environments than those that were once home by geographic placement, birth allotment, associations and at odds with conservatism by lifestyle, cast against a background burden of war. R&R deserters found their way to that harbourage. The community knew trauma and acknowledged trauma. The growth of community represented the growth of voice, individual resistence and collective will, a youth movement certainly as more youth gathered and swelled the numbers, but more, a local and universal movement of people of all ages and background that was growing.

The weight given the inference that all resisters were opposed to the welfare of homecoming soldiers is a sad outcome of the Vietnam War. Between ourselves our individual stories struck chords that revealed a common awareness of justice and

War, what is it good for

injustice, but never the pillory of individuals. Nobody either mistreated anybody who expressed a different viewpoint from the mainstream of the beach community opposed to continuing involvement in the Vietnam War.

Instead I reflect on the potential waste of people everywhere who make creative community. attract the best of virtuousity and not to neglect the worst of vice in all its guises. Vice is usury. I have not included in this account the sheerly fantastic of which I know only half stories, of empire builders. The originals of us were innocent of criminal activity albeit cognisant of agency amid the dangers of handing anybody over to authorities, their potential undoing on political grounds, as scapegoats, as undocumented, as simply set up by powerful individual others and the implementation of the Mental Health Act among the possibilities.

We became canny because we ourselves were in danger.

‘Hippies vs Hairies: the early Australian counter-culture in Kuranda North Queensland’, entered in 2013 as an Honours thesis at James Cook University by Rohan Lloyd deserves accolades particularly for his choosing community as a pivotal identifier of history. Rohan describes the beach community as a forerunner of the contemporary

Karunda Hotel

community of Kuranda, which is where this juncture of my attempt to describe the sociology of housing experience leads to. I had written this text in first draft as well before I found and read Rohan’s thesis, all the more interesting from my viewpoint because I am invested in inderstanding the meaning of community. Many different ideological stems and sources however can be traced to Kuranda including Kuranda had a pre-history of ‘alternate’ settlement by individuals and groups.

The beach community, too, found its place in social history because of an enclave of residents tolerant of difference. Holloways Beach that I have not previously identified so as to depersonalise it I read many years ago in popular news media was a gathering place of ‘widgies’ and ‘bodgies’ previous to the Vietnam War-era of ‘hippies’. The same article suggested as well the pre-condition existed that I am calling tolerance of difference (I cannot remember what the article called it) because Holloways Beach was the home of crocodile shooters attributed as ‘community’ and that their origins were European (true). Kuranda albeit identifiable as containing an ‘alternate’ culture or counter-culture is as complex as the beach community was.

Rohan further draws inference in effect the beach community was a hippy community that lost its essence in Kuranda by virtue of ideological conflicts driven by stress

Rohan Lloyd

between attitudes inherent in ‘commune’ and the drive of individualism.

Social movements are complex. Individual and collective experience gained in a period of persecution and resistance has a heart beat. As invisible or seemingly extinguished as a community driver may seem assessed neighbour to neighbour or in members of a once common group divided by circumstances as international refugees are, a common knowledge of a greater reason for living than self drives the same core individuals’ actions and reactions in their respective spheres of influence. What happened on the beach created common considerations that were short term and longer at the point when the beach community was called ‘finished’. Its participants engaged some only solutions that were common including that locations other than Kuranda were eventual destinations whether on the basis of individual choice of environment or presentation of seized opportunities.

The significant factor in the sociology of the beach community was, however that among its members were key enablers of creative conversation for its own sake. The art of conversation created community. The prevalent external factors of disposession

Conversation, I thought you said conversion

and persecution provoked intense discussion of common meaning, of ideology but strategy and migration exactly as villagers of far longer heritage have been documented as doing in the face of threat, settling even in entirety most certainly in a district in another country because of common weal. I lived in Adelaide in a suburb that was home to the inhabitants of a near entire migratory Greek village (I learned from its researcher).

Safety not ideological consideration was paramount.

The local Council would in fact soon exclude the campers on the beach from paying fees by non-acceptance. By that virtue that the campers did not pay fees, they had no voice in Council and behind closed doors repealed was the long held right of campers to the esplanade roadside/beach front strip. Announced was the establishing of a caravan park and camp ground at the farther end of the beach considered uninhabitable for its infestations of sandflies that proliferated where they were protected from the wind blowing freely at the deposed camper’s end. Developers and affiliated interests waiting in the wings stood to make immediate profit through sub-division. Without the least consideration of an innovative approach to its community and inclusion, towards only its dislocation as happens more generally everywhere in phases termed local development, the Council went for the quick buck. Notices of eviction were served.

I stood on the beach on the final day with perhaps two others and the couple whose day-to-day living space in an army disposal tent had evolved into a gathering place, a

Nice tent

first aid station, a design studio, ours the last shared moment of witness to history that on its surface was gone, the beach left so tidied there appeared to have never been a community.

The landlord of the property my partner and I lived in had in the same time period decided to sell the beachfront cottage. He offered my partner and I first option to buy. We were not able to buy and would soon be looking ourselves for a new place to call home.

to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson

Hmm, Aussies, always pissing themselves.

Another Screaming Christmas

25 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Sandshoe

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

dead cat

 

 

 

Story by ~ and photograph of Sandshoe (with Mum and Sister)

My sister ran up the back steps and through the open kitchen door. She makes so much noise at Christmas could be all I need to say.  Christmas 2013 I told you she found out one year the turkey laid an egg?

Remember she sobbed and elucidated and screamed at Dad who was the designated executioner?

So many big words. It wouldn’t have fitted into the oven anyway like it was.

She found the cat’s tail this year.

That much of the cat was known of.

She turned and ran back out the kitchen door and down the steps. We all ran out the door and down the steps. We followed her round the house to the front fence. A bony end of a tail and some length of it was hanging from a rusty barb of fence wire where it looped through a post.

My sister wailed and wailed. She was so good at it. I felt faint.

“Dead,” she whimpered, “Cat’s dead.”

My mother and her mother too (of course, never mind my vulnerable years exposed to my ear splitting older sister’s capacity for empathy) whirled towards her. I supposed a gesture of reconciliation of life and death.

My sister screamed and sobbed, “Dead.”

Dad said (he was a scientist remember), “No reason to imagine the cat is deceased.” The ‘r’ of reason as rich as a Scotch plum pudding rolled into the spaces between us all and they were filled. We were a Christmas table scene, stock still, you know like the Wise Men and everybody standing round looking at a holy remnant of baby Jesus with their mouths open.

My sister howled.

All of us were shocked. About the tail I mean. Our two parents, two big brothers (honest they were big), and my sister and me. I was 6.

“Dad, she’s upset,” Mum said.

My sister’s howl pierced my eardrums, as uzh-u-al, memorable for sure, maybe for the neighbours. “Where’s the CAAAAT!!?

I wished she would calm down a bit.

“Leave it there,” said Dad as Mum reached forward.

Mum thought better move it. A bird would peck at it or something. What about snakes. Dad said the cat would come back to its tail. I think Dad didn’t know a lot about cats.

“Yes, yes,” screamed my sister, “Leave it alone. It’s the CAT’S!”

She stalked off across the yard and down the side yard of the house where we had run to see. I followed anyway. The others were running after my sister.

What happened next speaks to me of a post-traumatic group stress disorder pre-condition. The noise that came out of the back yard (the rest of them I was following were only rounding the rain water tank) was blood curdling. She (my sister) was standing looking at the cat on the prowl towards her in the way cats do intent on rubbing themselves on a familiar leg. What was left of the cat’s tail stuck out pretty well behind it. The end was ragged, tipsy. My sister looked terrible I’ll be the first to say.

“She’s not DEAD!”

The assertion seemed factual enough comparing the evidence and weight of probability.

I was happy. I wanted to know if the cat remembered its tail. Would it go back and find it? I got a mop handle and broom and set up an observation tent with an old blanket tied to the fence and a hessian sugar bag for a tent flap. It never.

 

 

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