Graeme Wend-Walker

Your Pineapple Fritter Is Ready

 

“Bangy’s comin’!”

 

Fruit shot straight out the front, didn’t he, the screen door slapping behind him and setting off Clock, who went spiraling round the loungeroom in a fit of brindled woofs. Out on the verandah Fruit was all jumping and waving his hat, the boards bouncing and creaking and waking Fe from her banana lounge, which she weren’t too happy about, I can tell you. She swung at the air like some great mozzie beast had come at her but it was just Fruit being a galah and running out into the middle of the road. You could see him through the venetians, all bushy-tailed and leaping under that blaze of morning what gushed over the hilltop RSL down to the beach and the fish n’ chip shop below. He was pivoting this way and that and turning his hat in his hands, peering all about as if Bangy might come round any old corner, at any moment now.

 

Bangy, mate? Aw, yeah! No sooner’n I heard the shout and it shook all me insides like a cracker up me arse. Couldn’t bloody believe it, mate. Been donkey’s we’ve been waiting, and now suddenly it was all on. 

 

“Bangy’s comin’!” came Fruit’s voice from the road, and then he said it again, only this time almost a whisper, words that you could only see, making shapes out there in the opal dawn, in the shimmering world beyond the dust-yellowed blinds. He squatted on his haunches in the middle of the road and chewed on his hat. “Bangy’s comin’,” he breathed through his teeth.

 

‘Course, I followed him right out. Bugger’s dog Clock bounding up to lick me crotch, docked little tail going like a cocktail saveloy at a tomato sauce party. Bloody little footy frank, mate. Me heart was going like that, too.

 

Fe was still waving at her face but with a half a guava now, a bit dried out from overnight but looking tasty again all the same. Rich in antioxidants, they are. Out in the road, Fruit was weeping into his hat now, scrunching it up and mashing it against his brain. He rolled on his side and kicked his legs in the air. Mate, he was going off like a frog in a sock. He was a bit younger, I guess. Missed him more, I spose? ‘Cause of Bangy being more like a dad to him, or something? I dunno mate, but it’s how we were all feeling, I reckon. When a squadron of cockies come out of the blue—in formation, like the RAAF bloody Roulettes, mate—and commenced a run down the street and straight over the young bloke’s head, I thought he was gonna go full bloody troppo. 

 

But Fe took her half a guava out to the middle of the road and gave the lad a big squeeze and sat down with her back against his so they could watch out from both sides, so ripe were they with expectation, and that. 

 

All the neighbors were coming out on their neighbor porches, too, scratching their Satdee morning heads and bums and stretching as they come into the sun and wiggling about in that shiny marmalade air. 

 

Bloody Bev come out with a plate of lamingtons. Yeah, righto, big whoop—you’ve got Buckley’s of getting one, haven’t you. Always for the grandkids, only you never seem to see them. And here’s Des come out behind her. That bastard wouldn’t give you the time of day if it were a blue-tongue lizard with a firm grip on his old fella. But it sort of seemed like none of that mattered now, you know what I mean? Because, well. Because it was all going to be different now. Saw Des’s hand go to her bum and mate, I was overcome by the tenderness of it, and it struck me I had nothing but love in me for them. What’d I been thinking? They both looked a bit dazed, and it seemed like she’d spotted something in the garden, and mate, I’ll be buggered if she weren’t feeding a lammie to that scabby feral tortie what lives behind the Woolies. But I knew what she was about, ay. It was all of us, all just overcome by a special kind of wondrous. I could feel them meridian responses ascending up me chakras, from a tingle in me clacker to the top of me head. 

 

There was Charmaine with the kids, out for an early smoko with the happy little Vegemites all running about and pulling on her skirt, and then her eyes roll back in her head and the durrie falls from her fingers, splayed now and reaching for those good vibrations, that name, iridescent, dancing on everyone’s lips. And there’s Stevo, skipping about in his stubbies and pluggers in front of the bottom servo. He’s shouting something—can’t quite hear it, but. Bugger’s got a paper bag on his head, hasn’t he. Reckon I know what, though. 

 

Satdee’d turned out a bloody ripper, mate.

 

“Bangy’s comin’!” yelled someone down by the butcher’s, and poor old Agosto, he didn’t know what to do, he was checking his mailbox and going inside and coming out to check it again. He had one sock on when I first spotted him, no shoes though, and two when he come back out, and next time he’s back down to one, but now the duffer has three shoes! The Nguyễns were firing up the barbie in the front yard and chucking on some snags while the kids were lining the footpath with chairs they brung from inside. And Davo from across the road, his nose pink with zinc cream, standing there liked a stunned mullet with half a kilo of rissoles on a plate. Everyone was feeling it in their own way, I spose. It was all so beautiful, it just made you want to grab your bloody brushes and plein air the shit out of it. 

 

Clock, meanwhile, took off after the cockies, who were circling the bottle-o now. Every minute you’d see him come round through the drive-through again with his tongue hanging out as seven sulfur crests fell into a rhythm, a sequence like they were beating cosmic frequencies, and that big spot round Clock’s eye the off-center heart of a Mandelbrot equation, pulsing through the air and through the cockies, and probably through all of them stubbies and tinnies wobbling in the bottle-o down below. Pretty bloody speccy, mate, gotta say.

 

Here comes Raelene; looks like she forgot to put on her pants. And there’s bloody Gav, chasing his chooks, singing them into the air, gathering them in his arms and flinging himself into the sky with them. Gav loves his bloody chooks, mate. Tears streak his cheeks now as he surrenders them and gives them flight. 

 

Bangy! he cries at them. Bangy!

 

The word had me scone all curly inside. Time had been broken, it hit me now. How change comes upon you like a slow-boiled cane toad, eating incrementally at the woody sugar of your very being. One minute, you’re a little tacker bawling ‘cause you popped your floaties in the deep end of neighbor’s pool, and the next thing you know, you’re looking down the barrel at thirty-seven and contemplating finitude and wondering whether that HK Monaro rusting quietly under a tarp marks the extent of your accomplishments, your imprint on this brief world. But now everything, all of a sudden, was up in the bloody air, mate. We was all a-flutter, I’m telling you. All’s I knew was everything was gonna change, now that—

 

“Bangy’s comin’!”

 

Bangy. Good old Bangy! Been gone like bloody forever, mate. Longer even than anyone could remember, I reckon. In darkness sometimes you’d wake in sweat with a stiffy and the sheets round your throat and the walls all withdrawn, the ceiling backed up beyond the outer edges of the cosmos and you’d discover you were crying out for something, and it was only later as you poured your milk on your Weet-Bix that you’d realize what it was. 

 

Agosto’s stopped going in and out. He’s pulled the mailbox up by the roots and he’s waltzing it down the road—nah scratch that, it’s a mazurka, down to the sand and the blue shimmer of girting. Cheeky’s revving her mower at the end of her driveway, standing behind it with her leg muscles rippling and all ready to go. Don’t ask me where. Bev’s waving that plate of lammies over her head now, her body quivering in ecstasy. Clock’s legs still going though his feet barely brush the ground, and the Nguyễns got Davo’s rissoles sizzling on the hotplate. Even Des’s pitching in, sloshing sauce on bread and in between slices sucking that Rosella straight from the bottle. Out in the road mate, I’m telling you, it felt like the postie brung all our Chrissies at once.

 

Bangy, mum always said, came down with the first rains, wild over the breaking mountains and the dark wet of creation. Bangy filled the hollows in the earth and made the oceans and the tides to surge. Bangy was the first orifice and the first thing to go into one. He spilled his proteins in all the corners, splitting them in twain, dividing one from another. Rose the lizards up out of the swamps and breathed into them their first exultation. Played with them in the grassy plains, then rode the rocks down hot and smashed them. He boiled the seas and brought blankets of hot snow to cherish immortal the open-mouthed bodies twisted in awe in the lanes and foothills of the mountain. He gave us light from holy Trinity in the desert and in the forest for miles all the trees laying down to sleep, and in the spring just after sunset a ship of ribs and skin blazing glorious at its tether. Uncle Len says nah, yeah, nah, he’s older than that. Mate, buggered if I know. All I know’s, Bangy’s the best of all of us, he’s the one who’s got your back, who whispers in your dreams and heralds all becoming. Bangy’d never say nah to blowing the froth off a cold one. Bloody beauty, Bangy! Bang sets you right!

 

Well, bugger me dead if that isn’t the Prime Minister coming out of the morning sun, alone and naked, shining sweaty and resplendent, wailing his joy and caressing an example of native fauna! Clock has left the ground now, swept aloft in the swirl of grey and pink, those resonating voices of woof and song sparking lightning sheets across the horizon. Mate, you wouldn’t bloody read about it. Fruit and Fe are now fused at the feet and Trev and Dazza are going like hammer and tongs in the geraniums and we’re all eating the lamingtons of Bev as the sun lurches and goes straight to overhead. We sort of feel it before we see him, a change in the salt breeze sweeping up from the beach, mingling Chiko Roll and butterfish and a bit of a pong brewed up from somewhere moist and chthonic, and mixed into it all, the sour tang of metal.

 

And rounding the crest of our consciousness he comes, old Bangy whom we loved, whose face we knew as if it were the very inside-out of our own. Here he comes, core of our heart, too brightly dark to look upon. Here comes Bangy, propelling the sun far out from us now and squeezing on our souls, Bangy coming all glistening steel, machine-oiled and cartridged, arisen from the bowels of the salty earth to which he had withdrawn, there to wait upon this hour. Here comes the hammer of him, forged in terrible longing and hardened and cocked as our bodies like churches are rounded into one mass, and at the business end of being we feel the cold press of him against our temples. 

 

Graeme Wend-Walker is an Australian expatriate living in San Marcos, in what passes for the Texas “Hill Country.” He is a professor of literature at Texas State University where he teaches science fiction, fantasy, YA literature, and children’s literature. He is currently writing a book on Russell Hoban. His short story “Dirkwood Dane Stays Ahead of the Game” was published by Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror in 2018.

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