When the tenth year was up, Zhuang Zhou took his brush and in an instant, with a single flourish, drew a crab, the most perfect crab anyone had ever seen.
—Italo Calvino
Oracle 8 … Speak like a business man …
It seemed from the word spreading around Praiseworthy, that technically, Aboriginal Sovereignty had only disappeared—just like that, like a spray spurting out of the neck of a bottle into multiple directions. He was all over the place. He was in the flow of hard stories, real stories, in the truth and lies continuously being constructed in the minds of the masses. The truth was that vulnerability had no place in stories constructed through long voyages into the deepest knowledge extracted from country’s memories, not when the journeying grew harder, where to reach pieces of muted joy fetched from beneath the shadowy tessellated surfaces of life, one must first navigate the reckless knotted facts that formed the creepy doctrine orbiting illegally through the mind.
Let’s believe that a sea serpent of the greatest spiritual significance had really taken him away on the rainbow iridescent scales of its back through waves rising higher than the tallest mountains? A thousandfold spirit had lifted him right through the atmosphere in the sea sprays flying with the winds across the ocean? Older and wiser people said differently, that Aboriginal Sovereignty was everywhere, he had not left, he was hidden in his own spirit. They believed he had gone away for the time being to somewhere in the future, but he would be coming back. You won’t find him yet they said. It was too dangerous as long as Aboriginal Sovereignty was not recognised as the true owner of so much power country. He was a long way away now. Hidden in his conscience. You can’t get in there. Nobody can. Not even powerful governments. The fish swirl about where they say he had disappeared in a strange-behaving sea. It would be hard to find him now. Some said that he was reconstructing himself but that he was still somewhere in Praiseworthy, always coming back, even though he was becoming something else. He was not dead. You could feel him. He was there. You could touch him just like that if you wanted. Some of the old ladies reached into the air and said they were touching him. They could feel him there. This was because his spirit was everywhere, like air, and you cannot kill the air. Fingers might reach around and through nothing. They let the air slip through their fingers and said that nobody could kill the atmosphere, and that would be what it was like to kill their Aboriginal Sovereignty, it was as though you could actually see him walking up the road, still feel his presence everywhere in the way of someone always just arriving, always making people feel glad when they thought about him coming home.
The Praiseworthy public broadcaster went to air as normal, at precisely three a.m. The You-must-not-kill show of the Major Mayor, the sometimes public-broadcaster expert Major Mayor, was again, and as usual, about the thou shall not kill mantra laconically stretched through fat lips in his half-dream, the thing about official government business requiring their Aboriginal clientele to not kill any more of their children. He repeated his words very slowly, sincerely, and with all of the conviction he could muster for a man with a plan for killing off all his enemies as soon as possible in order to make the vision work his way. So far, Ice had used his major-mayoral powers to relieve the sky of all blue-sky thinking, and lone operators etc. to be totally subservient to the super shire, which meant regularly firing all of his council workers for having lesser thoughts about what he was worth in the visionary future, and so he could, singlehandedly and without hindrance for a change, get a real job done properly. The total fact being, there was only one job for the chief human being of Praiseworthy, and it was not the construction of endless roads to be constantly maintained with truckloads of tar, nor for collecting the rubbish, nor fixing all the plumbing, leaky taps, and broken septic toilets in overcrowded public housing built cheap by mean-spirited government, nor for constructing a decent clean water supply so nobody had to drink polluted water and get sick, nor fixing the electricity everywhere so no one got electrocuted to a crisp, nor getting one hundred per cent employment instead of none, and ditto child welfare, proper schooling and vaccination, economic development and decent housing to decrease the amount of people living in overcrowded sweatboxes in a global warming and global virus catastrophe situation, or any normal thing you try to get a government to do while swapping all-encompassing treaty rights for a mayorship who advises, and fixes nothing. No. This was not the real work to be done here. Things like being an assimilator, or a sell-out was far too easy. No real excitement and passion here. The job of the Major Mayor of the super shire was simple. It was to get Cause. Get rid of the nuisance. Now Ice knew that he had the accused murderer pegged. Nailed the nemesis. It was not a matter of casual urgency that Ice was talking about here, more like every second in the world counted when you were out to kill off your enemy. This was the reason that he began his daily broadcast to the Praiseworthy super shire with the right feel, it was important to build up as much hate sentiment as he could muster for a brainwash with supreme loathing and things like that, and you could only do that by being totally believable.
The charm and personality for being believable in a world of believable people suffering a plethora of fools, was absolutely paramount in the way that Ice presented his public persona to the mob. The level of respect that he demanded from his mayoral constituents by insisting that they stop being roll-over pussies, and start feeling real honest hostility in their bones—things like that—was far beyond achievable by the run-of-the-mill ordinary people, which they were not. He thought that more would be achieved if they began thinking of themselves as a pixelated copy of himself, where the entire body was made up of layer upon layer of hostile fragments, for this he proudly asserted, was all he had inside himself, a compassion-free body, where you would be hell-bent finding a shard of decency when you were out to peg a killer on the job. It was a sad thought, that at the end of his advice-giving he always felt disappointed, because he knew that the roll-over pussies remained roll-over pussies with not a shard of hostility implanted in their soul by the miracle of listening to a godlike lecture. They remained without conviction, with no desire to get rid of their enemies. His hope of achieving a good emotional response from the community again was a failure, for there was no response. Even though Ice thought it was only logical to accept the logic of spite, it was beyond Praiseworthy to fathom what that entailed. Why did they not get it? The fact that you should not kill children. No one said a thing. All he wanted at first was total agreement on the logic of this one straight fact that you should not kill your children, that you should love your children like white people, but nothing, all he got was silence. He did not need any liberal-minded people to be on his side, or the country’s “lefties,” which would be like the pot calling the kettle black, nor people who wore their hearts on their sleeves. He only wanted his people, his mayoral majority, the hard-face, hard-nose, hard-core never agreeable for once in their lives to accept one simple idea—his black opinion, that you must love your children, not kill them like the murderer Widespread. Just accept that Widespread was a child murderer was all he asked, and there was really no room for disagreement with this idea becoming dead fact, as far as Ice was concerned. You either believed in this fact because he said so, or else, you were part of the problem—and yes, AH! UN! AUSTRALIAN!—whatever that was, and in this case, if you did not believe him, then you were a child killer too, and this was the point of what he was trying to get into the combined thick skulls about what he called a child killer on the loose in the murdering zone, Cause Man Steel.
Ice never gave up on the broadcastees. He repeated the mantra for the hundredth, thousandth time about roll-over pussies living in the midst of children killers. He challenged: Where’s your soul? Haven’t any of you got a soul? The sound of his voice searching for a soul jarred the brain antennae radiating like flower stamens on repeat mode through the ears of the cultural, the people of the forward plan working to the bone on giving up the very existence of their soul, in preparedness for their adaptation into the Australian way of life by becoming more assimilable than the whitish whiteness. And this business of dumping the soul so you could be embedded in unsavoury messages about accusing a dreamer of being a child murderer at three a.m. was driving his wife Maureen completely out of her mind. She often stayed in bed these days while complaining of a permanent migraine, or some variation thereof, requiring a packet of paracetamols which hardly did the job of eradicating the pain of having her human rights violated by consistent and inconsistent mental torture from being imprisoned with the lies of a husband, and driven brain-dead from listening to the husband’s monotonous voice sounding like a dripping tap, which she knew was exactly the same thing as having propaganda piped non-stop into the ears of political prisoners, which she seemingly had become, and the story was that all the paracetamols she swallowed only dulled her brain into believing its own looped-back whisperings jeered from the sidelines demanding where was her mental toughness, and why did she not run with the counterpunches, for to be truthful, Wife! You have the right to remain silent, but not to step in on a classical Major Mayor of the super shire’s speech-making to his broadcastees.
Maureen’s accumulated sleep-deprived head pain plateaued in an instant from being awakened in shock by Ice’s heightened mantra extravagancies echoing through the house from where he sat in front of the computer screen, far earlier than his scheduled three a.m. broadcast. Unsuccessfully, she tried to smother herself with a pillow in her bed. She knows he will practise his broadcast of disillusionment-soaked reminiscences and bewilderments to perfection, so that the whole diatribe will appear seamless love-making with his backward broadcastees, as he showers them with umpteen agendas for dealing with their stupidity, in particular, their slow progress towards the march to assimilation. What he was especially aiming to accomplish, Maureen heard in her half-achieved asphyxiation, was how he felt sick of repeating the mantra about how killing children was a crime against humanity. He was not sure how many times one must say something that was completely logical to a moron to be physiologically effective, so his broacastees could get a grip about what was right or wrong. But, then he digressed by making big statements of comparison, by saying, That even Australia has still not done anything in over two centuries about genocide and theft of Aboriginal country. Maureen the scowler had had enough, and tramped up and down with her flip-flops on the loose wooden floorboards. Ice likes haters, and shouts at her: Get breakfast. That was all he wanted her to do. And she paused on the spot right next to where he was sitting at his desk, and shouted at him to go and get whatever he wanted himself.
The story from her point of view, or a word or two about what you might call her con spirito view of her con sordino life. It was not something you would find being talked about in one of Ice Pick’s broadcasts to the super shire on the state of their Indigenous world, nor what you would read in the newspapers by white experts milling in the distant view, trying to shadow box with the limelight that gives them plenty to write about how they saw the dying Aboriginal world, the rich art form that does not require mentioning a word about the self-defined sovereignty of the long suffering Maureens of this country. Nobody would want to know about Maureen, or how she felt about having a decent night’s sleep gained from her own self-governing thoughts. No one said, let’s ask Maureen, and asked Maureen about her mental injuries, by hearing her testimonials of what it was like living with a wobble-lip fabricator who had lost track of the truth, because if they did then everybody would know what it felt like to have a bunch of murdered ghost children being let into her house by the albino husband, and they would know what it was like to hear those little ghost children crying about their lost lives while they were running around her house in the middle of the night with their flip-flops creaking along the floorboard. Maureen knew about the powerful, and she could say how these children were the ones really speaking from inside the snow dome’s head, and how they were orchestrating those pink lips to chip away at what he called changing the status quo about inappropriate parenthood in Praiseworthy. She would tell you herself, the fuckwit husband did not give two hoots about parenthood, or human rights, or sovereignty, or global warming, or global pandemics, because all that he cared about, was himself, of being white as …
The moonlit night dropped tree shadows on the walls, and leaf shiver from the sound of Ice’s voice bouncing from wall to wall in the love-thy-children practice broadcast, while in some corner of the house, the half-deranged sleep-deprived Maureen whimpered in andante con moto mob style, which was a totally inaudible screaming pitch coming from nothing to the pink blob, Haven’t you had enough crucifyings yet? Ice’s ears must be razor sharp, for he heard this and stopped everything—to hell with his rehearsal, for he had to ask himself why she always wanted to attend her own crucifixion, and so he yelled, fuck it, he would have to start all over again. Quivery lips unzipped her self-imposed exile voice, ripped away the sellotape sealing her lips, chucked the sticky piece in the flip-lid bin, and let her mouth swing forth like a Top End river belting it out downstream to the sea in the wet season. The not short for tangled up wicked words in the head waters gushed forth staccato-like, bouncing from wall to wall right across the house. Saliva spuming everywhere, she continued slinging out her mad thoughts about being sick of Ice sitting at his computer in the middle of the night and killing her sleep. Hey! Snowball. Don’t forget. He kills mouths. There was no room in this house for other people’s soapboxes. Such a little thing could create a raging torrent from thinking only of herself, and Ice heard every word, but this did not worry him because he likes a hater, he understands Maureen, that she never knows when enough is enough while constantly looking back over her shoulder in her scurrying to get out of the house quick, without any idea of knowing where she was going after interfering with his broadcast, but hell, that was the story of his life. You can only try but you cannot help the circumstances.
The common people hanging about the world would say that Ice’s people—like the black queens who stickhandled his balls—would usually call the nauseous looking Maureen, a general cow. Genteel snigger show talk amounting to how much the cow could make them feel sick in the guts. But who isn’t living in a world full of sycophants like these queens waltzing into her house, as though they owned the place?
Now Maureen had almost become lost forever from her deadbeat, and increasingly sleep-deprived life, while tracing the thoughtless and directionless path of her late-night flight far into the world of spirit people. The roosters crowed and a house steeped in silence brought Maureen home where she scurried reverently, on tiptoes, in this dedicated sanctum of the sacrosanct, where sound was either cancelled, or blessed by Ice who knew how the divine lived, how they controlled sound, even mice whispering about where the cheese was, and mousy type of women were not required to speak about cheese at all, or have opinions. But of course, you could not stop the ghosts coming inside the house, and Maureen can hear them discussing Ice’s broadcasts no matter how loudly he speaks, as she walks sideways along the walls, negotiating loose floorboards, each plank she knows intimately from the way it speaks, the subtle difference in the creakiness of each, while anticipating a face-to-face encounter with Ice’s face centimetres from her own saying, It’s over, and she saying, What, the broadcast? And he saying, Get out of here. Nobody can afford idiots ruining their future.
Let’s end this stupidity. Let Ice continuously observe how fearful Maureen had become after she fled in the night and caused a night-bird to screech, for he has all the time in the world to help her build a high-security prison of herself. He likes piloting a few private test cases as a gauge, to see what works in how he utilises other people’s ineptitude to further push fear into the populace. The more frightened she becomes, the stronger and more justified he feels in the growth of his strategic thinking to help save his people from murdering their children. She should not have caused the night-bird to screech, and there should not be dogs barking in the distance, nor wind rattling the leaves, and Ice does not want to hear a prowling cat screech at three a.m., and so, Maureen should sweat, should be frightened of hearing any sound that Ice must not hear when he was preparing his broadcast, for he would be forced to restart again and again, these broadcasts must be perfect, each a piece of art, and this cannot be done when she bumps into things, steps on the wrong floorboard, or touches anything that sends vibrations across the whole house that explode in the crackling of the sun-blistered tin roof cooling in the night air. There is nothing that can make a sound in Praiseworthy at three a.m., when Ice presents his broadcast.
In these nights when Maureen begins another epic journey of preventing forbidden sounds, she would finally muster the courage to cross the floorboards closest to the walls without creating any unwanted sound. She lived in the hope of being permitted to continue living in her home, and so, she reached the kitchen to silently prepare the 3.30 a.m. breakfast and hopes that not one of the hundreds of roosters would suddenly start crowing earlier, and she hopes no one left scraps of food on the ground, a fish head for a dog fight, but it was the kitchen that could not wait to dance with her fear. This was a noisemaking world of dropped plates, clanging pots and pans hiding from her in the back of a cupboard, and cross knives and forks hexing in the utensil drawer, banging as she clumsily tried to find whatever she wanted without wasting a kWh of electricity by turning on the light, while the hammering of Ice beating his words on his keyboard echoing in her brain ordered high-level invisibility. But this did not help at all, for Ice was wondering why she had not stopped the fly buzzing in the light of the computer screen. Nobody needed to hear a fly while reaching for higher levels of honest momentum in their work, and he did not know why she had not dealt with the plague of mosquitoes from the swamp that came into the house every night while he was trying to think straight, nor why she had not made insect-harbouring trees disappear to stop the cicadas screeching, and why owls were now roosting on the roof where he could hear rats chasing each other, and beetles belting over the wood floors that he could hear being eaten by termites every time that woman goes to the kitchen. His eyelids twitch. Where was his golden Christmas beetle that had deserted him until next summer? He wished it was summer again. His upper cheeks quiver. He was losing the purity of voice he had been perfecting for hours to keep a ring of authenticity to it, where even he could believe in himself. He had no idea why anyone could be so clumsy, and had asked himself this question so many times, it became a fucking billboard pinned to his head. He was lost for the life of him why he had chosen this of all women as a wife. No, he knows that was not true. She had chosen him. He had always been too preoccupied to be bothered thinking about marriage, but vaguely understands how he ended up with having such a stupid woman constantly in his life. He could barely resist the temptation to go into the kitchen to sort her out—again, trample her into the ground just by his presence—but he could not be bothered. He knows she expects him to react, to feel his presence. He paused, knowing he was able to capitalise on her sly neediness, by reassuring himself that she would always try to claim his attention, like everyone else, which he thought was a pathetic way of trying to get him to notice her.
Each night he goes through this rigmarole, restarting his broadcast, aiming for perfection: Thou shall not kill your children. No! That’s not right. You should not kill, before diverging into, Fuck you Cause. You should not kill, you arse-hole. Then. Maureen. And forced to restart the public broadcast like he was incompetent. With no idea how to act like a professional Major Mayor of a super shire who cared about something. Stop! Start! The whole idea Ice had of surpassing moral relativity in Praiseworthy, of being released from the forces always gravitating to culture, to dismantle the apparatus of clingy old beliefs, for plucking his true glory from on high, was looking like a right balls-up. And in the midst of all Maureen’s eternal interrupting noisiness of walking on floorboards like an elephant, he felt as though he had become dog meat, and was continuously being ordered to learn a new trick in how to dig its own hole at the bottom of the well to find some walnut-sized shrunken reserve of professional tolerance. Was it too much to ask for a bit of quietness at three o’clock in the morning in this cunt shonky blackfella turnout I have ended up with? Who knows? One could not say enough about the history to explain these things except to say it was the kind of thing that white people expect from Aboriginal people who cannot speak English properly, and just let the pots and pans being bashed around in the background do the talking of English for them.
Thou shall not kill.
The freak Ice took control of himself, even if he could not remember what his initial thoughts were for the broadcast to the broadcastees, because words had escaped him about who you should not kill, since he only wanted to kill Maureen now, while momentarily forgetting about how he wanted to kill Widespread, and why his people should not kill children, but he thought that some words always wanted to mock what was spoken, either blindly, or truthfully, or through a pack of lies.
The work problem Ice faced was that deep in his heart, he was in real deep trauma about his own fakery, of not really knowing how to be a proper collaborator to the multifaceted, the overall population of the continent. He was faking too much, he had forgotten what was real in how he was hell-bent on getting everyone to work together for the common good by reconciling themselves to the relatively short history of colonialism.
Though that was not where it was at all. Listen good now! What could you say about consciousness, if there was a conscience of the new era, and a conscience of inheriting more than one hundred thousand years of existence, and the conscience of all times? You would need to think about where your soul belonged, if it belonged in all three realms at once or none, or one, or the other. How would you know if you had made the right choice about which part of your conscience you should believe, that it wasn’t a runaway train carriage falling into the abyss, or a conscience that attracts wild animals throwing themselves at your mind to tear it apart. This was what troubled Ice in a forked-lightning way of pelting bolts over and over the same brain, his brain in fact, as he worried about which of the three consciences would actually work for his soul, and of course it was hard enough for the best of his humanity to only choose being in the twenty-first-century conscience as a stand-alone-phenomenon for achieving greater whiteness, minus all other known realities rushing at the door. He just did not know. Was the ideology of preaching togetherness a no-brainer of having no perimeter, no periphery, no boundary way of becoming fabulously a world of albinos like himself, but he kept leaning towards togetherness by tying strong knots to get his people through the next century, alive, yep, breathing, hearts ticking, in this sick-in-gut worrying about how to shut the boundaries with an all-openness situation at the same time. When he thought more about his golden beetle, yes, he could see that it observed the boundaries of its conscience, but also moving without boundaries even if boundary bound, but his shadow thought let’s lock everything up anyhow so there was only one way to move, his way to get through the forward plan.
The trouble with Ice was that he was always composting his shelf-bought mantras, and this made the ordinary people of Praiseworthy very sceptical, since they did not know what his forebodings were about except wasting their time. So, they prayed for him. They hoped down in the multi-denominational on Church Street, that he would find his conscience and see true light in the end. But buying disposable mantras for the masses was not a crowd-pleaser in their books. They thought having a vision to save culture should be second nature, that any of their superheroes should know how to successfully implement a vision for saving their culture from catastrophic destruction, and here they were, just with another ordinary visionary that nobody liked because he was as powerless as they were as far as they could see, for he had saved nothing, not even them. They wanted to see a killer, a visionary attitude—you see them all the time on TV so they knew what they were talking about when even they could imagine what it meant to take no prisoners, and they wanted to see that, to know thy enemy, instead of killing them off, making all of them his enemy, so what was it to them if he pledged himself to catch the child murderer Widespread, who had remained so far as they could see elusively hard to catch, and which begged the question, of who was the better man. Yet, why not linger a moment longer in the ruins of shelf-bought mantras, when the rules of limitation and common sense possibly applies to all cultures. Who was going to make the haze disappear? Bring the storks? The brolgas that bring the dance that lifts the dust?
If building a man of conscience involved an all-encompassing pain, how do you know when the work is done? How do you recognise this humanity, among others? Where were the eyes resembling a giant magnifying glass, that constantly scan the streets of Ice’s brain to find the loose ends to stitch together into a conscience man with a better plan of how to capture this killer in their midst, for the sure thing was, he was still pursuing the same chase as they were, to be the best of who they were. But there was Ice with his infernal broadcasts, still not getting a Praiseworthy consensus about the hot topic of their killing children.
Say it was the worst of times that you were watching grow exponentially more catastrophic, when it was too bad for anyone wasting a single moment of their lives, but say, Ice was trying his best. He had built a single unblemished reputation. He was a Major Mayor of a super shire constantly kowtowing to a conga line of government politicians running up and down the country, by supplying them with a thriller of a story for the rave of the moment in changing the narrative of the nation-state getting too cosy with Aboriginal rights. And Ice was the man to do it, by accusing his constituents, his Aboriginal people, of being child-killer parents, and the way Ice told the story was an exhilaratingly pleasing way of indoctrinating the nation—built on fiction itself to excite the broader masses. But life happens, even to those who do not know the country’s ancestral creators still lived in the land throughout the entire continent, but who regretted that old wisdom knowledge that makes survival happen in a planetary crisis, for they were rooting for the Aboriginal superhero to get his lethal culture people to toe the line of the majority who were not Aboriginal, by proving to the world that they were not killing their children, and by helping him to hunt down the accused Aboriginal child killer, the parent, Cause Man Steel. What was the problem with that? But why was there no progress? Were Praiseworthy people too dumb to be indoctrinated? It was just difficult to understand for the first world why a man who had them indoctrinated like a human God brayer, could not conquer his own people, to get them to see that you have to kill off a few of your enemies if you wanted to get to the end of time. This was what you saw at the end of the vision, and either Praiseworthy had to be left standing at the end of the century without feeling guilty for the fate of the rest of world humanity uninterested in saving itself, or it wasn’t.
Well desperation was what it was, but Ice knew that he had a nose for something you might call predatory instinct, starving-dog affliction, of being a high-pressure steam cleaner for purifying the populace, and his secret weapon was not his Ice Queens, but the yardstick, the untrainable Maureen, the unconquerable itself.
It was only Cause Man Steel who was late to arrive at the theatre, to take his part on the stage, because he was always late, even for his own crucifixion.
Yep! Ice knew how hard it was to kill dreamers.
Can you believe it, the press, the bloggers, the Twitter feed—another zenith, Ice checked the blog, it was all fairytale, exponential 1000K +++ followers, tens of thousands of hits nationwide, each time he delivered a diatribe to the populace, and why stop there? Ice would pant and crawl over bare earth if he had to, if it meant he could convert one more opportunist to his way of thinking, for this man felt he was that ready for higher success by changing civilisation, as he called it, but what was the Australian population after all? A kindred spirit of a mere twenty-two and a half million people minus the Aboriginal world, which was not what you would call a planetary success. But why kill the dreams of a dream-killer? What was happening here was a dream run for an acceptable Aboriginal man of rare conscience that spoke to the populace—eased its conscience, spoke the right words, even though he had stolen less than a handful of hearts in Praiseworthy, but you know, who cared if you could feel a cold cleansing sensation coursing through your blood stream like Ice did by assuming it was his spirituality, even his ancestry sitting in the corpuscles and agreeing with him because this ultimately was what he would like to think his cultural humanity was about. And what a shame, Maureen thought, growing more and more astonished by how needy he was becoming with the white people, and seeing what he was holding back, stockpiling his brain with useless white political junk squirting out in his repetitious mantra broadcasts about his people needing to stop killing their children. But who knew what angle of changing the narrative Ice was using to spirit the mob from culture, and chuck them into a white future deprived of global emergency reality? Maureen knew. She heard the whispering house arguing—wanting him to prove there were people murdering children in Praiseworthy—and she saw that half-smile on Ice’s face while staring at the computer screen, smirking there through the blankness, slyly gesturing in a modest way that even he was not conscious of, by emitting a low whistle instead of his usual wolf whistle when it came to self-congratulation, and in this twilight hour, it was as though he was in doubt, attempting to squash some of his own arrogance as he rechecked his bloggers’ endless opinions about the fact-checked fact that the Aboriginal world of parents killing their own children should not be allowed to happen in the twenty-first century, but nothing as self-imposed as feedback on his own blog would stop Ice from feeling electrified in the end, of feeling the elation of a bullfighter beside the bloodied slain, that further convinced him, he had to be heard. So, of course, he was pumped! He was cornering the bastard Cause Man Steel, which was nothing personal as far as he was concerned, not as though he was running a vendetta about Native Title ownership like it was a war to be won. No—he was not bothered about any of that, or if the dreamer was keeping a pack of donkeys in Praiseworthy—no, not that, what mattered was that he knew his type. The type that kills his own people, like children, with dreams that do not work, and never would.
Like me Ice! Like me the most! The outraged Queens visited Ice more frequently now since he became popular with the government. They come to his place to speak about their hatred for Cause Man Steel at least a dozen times a day in this major moral crisis, after having already established themselves in the mayoral world as the keepers of all government policy for fixing Aboriginal abusive parents who hated their children. They needed to be referred to as the representatives of human exceptionalism above all others praised as praiseworthy in Praiseworthy. These are not ordinary women who sit at the high levee mark of loving Aboriginal children more than their parents, for this was where they looked down at the rest of their humanity wallowing in the murkiness of their doubt. How lonely it was to be on this mountaintop of specialisation, to hurtle hurt down on everyone else from where you were sitting in your abandoned sentry hut to meditate on ways to destroy more of others. Ah! But there goes Maureen sidestepping the creaky floorboards of the inner sanctum, her back against the wall, listening to Ice stewing about how you got to give somebody like Cause enough rope to hang himself, and he tells his audience of Queens while musing, scratching the red welts on his cheek where he slapped himself back into the real world often enough, You want to know what, it looks like I am going to get away with it again. And Maureen wondered to herself, what was he talking about.