People Are Stupid

When I awoke in the loft of my barn the next morning, after another measly two hours of sleep, it was to my phone ringing at the bottom of the ladder. Checking the clock radio, I found it was barely 7am. I hadn’t had a call that early since my father used to ring me from the main house to make sure I got up for work on my holidays from art school. He absolutely hated the thought of having a layabout for a son.

My head was pounding from the lack of sleep, and my stomach was queasy too as I stumbled down the old ironbark ladder. I was in such a state of fatigue I had no choice other than to take my time – I’d gone arse over tit down the ladder once before and had nearly skewered myself on a drying fox skeleton in the process. Rushing my descent has never been worth the risk.

Whoever was on the other end of the line was persistent, so much so that by the time I picked up the receiver I was convinced my old dad had come back to life. I wasn’t prepared to rule anything out after what had been going on in The Sewing Room. Such was my surprise, then, when I heard not my dad’s voice but a very gruff and muffled, ‘Is that you, Noel?’ coming down the line.

‘It is,’ I replied. ‘And who have I the pleasure of talking to at this, shall we say, unprofessional hour?’

‘Don’t shit me, Noel,’ the gruff voice now said, and the penny dropped. It was the aggressive tone with the bonafide hint of violence that did the trick. It was Rennie Vigata from out in the Poorool hills.

‘Rennie. Sorry, mate, I didn’t recognise you. You don’t normally call. How can I help?’

There was a silence on the other end of the phone, a silence so long I thought the line had been gnawed at by a possum, but finally, just as I was about to hang up, Rennie said, ‘Noel, I was wondering if you’d come out here for a visit.’

‘What’s up, Rennie? You normally leave the hospitality stuff to me.’

Once again there was silence, but this time I knew to wait. ‘Don’t shit me, Noel,’ he said again, and this time with even more of an edge to his already scary voice. ‘I’ll see you out here in a couple of hours, okay.’

He hung up, without even giving me a chance to answer. I could’ve been giving the eulogy at a close friend’s funeral that day for all he knew. ‘Shit,’ I said aloud, standing bed-haired at the bottom of the ladder in my T-shirt. ‘That’s all I need.’

By nine o’clock, however, I was dutifully backing out under the pine trees in Kooka’s Brumby, with a can of Choke wedged between the handbrake and the seat. The sun was out and after the night I’d had sunglasses were just not enough protection against the glare. I felt each bump as the Brumby rumbled along, eventually swinging inland from the sealed onto the unsealed Dray Road. All the while I was wondering what the hell it was that’d got up Rennie’s nose so much that it required a visit.

Rennie Vigata’s place is deeply hidden in the hills, in a depression between the two Poorool saddles that back onto the old Victree Pine plantation. You wouldn’t know it’s there until you actually arrive on the spot and begin to notice the elaborate security set-up, which was installed by his friends in the Melbourne underground when he was sent into exile. No one around our parts knows exactly why Rennie had to go live out there, and you can bet your bottom dollar no one’s been game to ask. But when you do finally arrive on the fenceline of his property, you can be mistaken for thinking he’s running a kangaroo farm. And that’s not because there’s mobs of kangaroos hanging around – it’s pretty much all wallaby country out there anyway – it’s because his fences are so high that not even a Big Red from out Broken Hill way could jump over them. Added to that there are cameras and spotlights posted every fifty metres or so and at least three teeth-baring Alsatians just hankering to eat both you and your tyres as you drive up to the gate.

All in all it’s pretty welcoming, which made me even more curious as to why on earth he’d invited me out there. Back when we’d decided upon his Dancing Brolga Ale as our Recommended Loosener, I’d suggested a visit to discuss the fine detail, but Rennie wasn’t keen. He said at the time that he had to come into town anyway, but I got the distinct impression that his place was off limits to your average punter like myself. God knows what went on out there behind the high-wires, with just him, his girlfriend, Lee, and the dogs. One thing was for sure though: Rennie Vigata wasn’t using the seclusion out at Poorool to run an ashram.

I pulled up at the gate, got out of the car and stretched my limbs. Only a few months ago I’d decided to live with a new lightness in my step and to let my imagination run free, and now I was spending my nights listening to an old man’s dreams being broadcast over a tranny and my mornings visiting my one and only bulk beer supplier, who just happened to live in what resembled the local concentration camp. It was one of those situations where if you stepped outside yourself and looked in, you might go absolutely bonkers. Whatever happened, I wondered, to my quiet simple life drawing the world I knew and loved?

Through a black speaker hidden among gumleaves to the left of the gun-metal high gates I heard Rennie’s voice talking to me from somewhere inside the property. ‘G’day, Noel,’ he growled. ‘When the gates open, take your car up the driveway and park it in the red shed that says “Wood”. You’ll see my beast in the shed next to it. I’ll meet ya there.’

Rennie hung up and sure enough the heavy gates slowly opened inwards onto the property, revealing an innocuous driveway, at the end of which was a two-storey hippy-ish looking timber house with a red Colorbond roof, the kind that was all the rage during the government compensation schemes after the 1983 bushfires. Somehow I’d expected Rennie to have built his own place out there, or to have had it built for him by his gangland philanthropists, but it appeared that once you’d got past the grizzly perimeter of his property, Rennie Vigata and Lee lived on a small Poorool farm just like any other.

I followed his instructions and drove the Brumby up the drive, wondering where the snarling Alsatians had disappeared to. I spotted the red shed, which had a large and very productive looking vegetable patch to one side of it. On the other side of it was Rennie’s black vehicle.

Coming down a short path running through a kitchen garden from the house to the vegie patch were Rennie and Lee, dressed in symmetrical blue and black, followed by a white toy poodle and a tortoiseshell cat. They were smiling and waving hello as if I’d just arrived for Christmas. It was all very odd.

I parked the Brumby in the shed. As I got out, the cat was the first to greet me, with a nuzzle against my ankles and a coquettish meeow. Rennie and Lee and the poodle followed, and their mood was uncharacteristically bright.

‘Welcome to our little patch of paradise, Noel,’ Lee said, extending her long arm and smiling.

‘Yeah,’ said Rennie in his gravelly voice, shaking my hand after Lee. ‘Sorry about the short notice, Noel, but I’m glad you could make it.’

Bemused by all the good cheer, I went straight into my usual polite mode, with plenty of ‘no worries’ and a couple of ‘it was good to get out for a drive’ type lines. We made our way with the cat and the poodle back up the path through the kitchen garden and entered the house through a screen door under a bull nose awning.

‘I’m cooking us all some breakfast,’ Lee said, rounding an island kitchen bench in the far left-hand corner of a big living room. Despite the fact I’d cooked myself some greasy bacon on toast before I’d left the hotel, I didn’t refuse. I wasn’t at all sure my sleep-deprived tummy could handle anything more to eat, but I just couldn’t disappoint Lee, whose enthusiasm was that of a woman who rarely, if ever, had visitors to cook for. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I could do with a bit of a pep-up.’

As the sausages, eggs and bacon fried, and the Poorool field mushrooms were tossed with herbs in a separate pot by Lee, Rennie poured me a strong espresso from a retro Gaggia coffee machine on the bench and bade me sit down on one of two immaculate red leather chesterfield couches that were the centrepiece of the room. He started to chitchat in a way I’d never heard him do before. He talked about a recent burn-off the DSE had done a few miles south of where we sat, and I told him I’d seen the smoke from way back down in the valley. He talked about the bits and pieces of carpentry he was doing around the house and about his ‘fog-fed sheep’, which he had managed to get an organic classification for and was butchering himself in an old limestone signal-house that stood on the cleared spur of his pasture below the house. He had a vacuum-packing machine, he said, and he’d give me some of the lamb before I left, to trial in the hotel. That got him on to talking about self-sufficiency, and by the time Lee called ‘Ready or not’, in a sweet angelic voice from the kitchen, he was properly bashing my ear about peak oil.

‘I’ve teed up with this fella over near Beech Forest. He’s got a tourist cafe he runs just near that treetop walk. He reckons I can have all the vegie oil he normally chucks, for nix. Shit, he reckons there’s so many people goin’ through there these days that I’ll have more than enough to run the van. You just boil it up – you don’t even have to mix it with ethanol if you don’t want – and I’ve got the old digger-arm on the bobcat here to make a pit to store the drums. So pretty soon fuel won’t be cheap for me, Noel, it’ll be free! I’ll be able to drive flatchat right through the fuckin’ apocalypse.’

We sat at the dining table talking as Lee brought the plates over, piled high with pork sausages, crispy bacon, toast, mushrooms, and even a little steamed spinach. There was HP Sauce, tomato sauce, apple sauce, French mustard, English mustard, kelp chutney, Woody’s Junction tomato relish, Worcestershire sauce and a selection of home-made jams, marmalades and jellies arranged on the table, all unopened, as if they’d been waiting for my visit.

I said nothing but graciously accepted Rennie’s offer of another espresso from the shining chrome coffee machine. And then we all tucked in.

When they’d last been to the hotel for anything other than a delivery of Dancing Brolga kegs, Rennie and Lee had danced all night in a tight clinch to The Blonde Maria and The Connotations. They’d seemed about as dangerous and hot as a couple could get. No one dared to bump into them on the dance floor and at the time I imagined them out there at Poorool, deep in the fog, locked in that very same clinch for months on end. But now, sitting down with them over breakfast, in their sunny down-home living room, they could almost have been mistaken for a couple running a B&B. That’s of course if it wasn’t for Rennie’s unshaven jaw and the scary glint of his coal-black eyes.

Eventually the pleasant chat died off and we ate in silence for a time, with Rennie grinding his jaw noisily to my left and occasionally spitting out bacon rind onto his plate. Lee didn’t seem to notice this; she was obviously used to it. There was not a word from either of them about the hotel, not even a ‘how’s it all going?’.

I broke the uncomfortable silence by venturing, ‘Nice snags. And beautifully cooked, Lee. You don’t need a job do ya?’

Rennie looked up urgently from his plate and for a brief moment Lee watched him closely. Then she laughed it off. ‘Oh, Noel, can you imagine having to drive over those potholes down to Mangowak every day of the week? Nah. Last time we ate at your pub the food was spectacular.’

‘Thanks, Lee. But seriously, I wasn’t sure if I was hungry until you put this down in front of me.’

‘We have a cooked breakfast every morning up here in winter and right through into spring,’ Rennie said. ‘Warms you up. It’s brass-monkey weather up here most of the year.’

‘Yeah. So I gather.’

Breakfast was finished off with a third straight espresso from the Gaggia, an Amaretti biscuit each but no further clue as to the reason for my visit. Instead, the little tortoiseshell cat was re-acquainting herself with me under the table and finally got up the gumption to jump onto my lap. ‘Marilyn, you naughty little starlet,’ Lee said, as she began clearing away the plates.

‘She’s no starlet, baby, she’s a slut,’ Rennie said, smiling and sucking breakfast dregs from his teeth. And then, ‘C’mon, Noel, I’ll show you the brewery.’

We walked out a door at the opposite end of the room to which we came in and now I was struck by the secluded beauty of the property. With no security fences, cameras or dogs on this side of the house all you could see for miles beyond Rennie and Lee’s sloping paddocks were the tree-clad hills. Even in the clear sunshine the hills retained their fuzzy lines as they rolled away into the west, one after another, going higher and higher off into the Otways where finally they took on a Himalayan, almost mystic cast.

Off to our right and below were the impressive spur and signal-hut where Rennie told me he slaughtered his sheep. And a couple of hundred metres or so to our left was the eastern fenceline of the property, beyond which it was all national park to the sea. Lower down the slope of this fenceline I could see another shed, not an old bush-pole and tin job like where the cars were parked but a recently assembled olive-green kit-shed, quite large in area, nestled with its back edge up against the national park trees. Rennie pointed to it and nodded. I gathered that’s where we were headed.

As we approached from the high side of the shed, I could see a tall stack of wooden warehouse pallets and the bobcat Rennie had mentioned over breakfast, with a forklift attachment on it. Although he had never delivered his kegs to me on pallets, I thought nothing of this detail and was keen to head inside the shed and inspect his set-up. But when we arrived at the door, Rennie paused rather than heading inside. Again I was too timid to enquire as to what was going on. After all a man could meet his maker on a remote outlaw property like that, and no one would be any the wiser.

Now Rennie stared into the mid distance, back up the slope and past the house, and then dug into the front pocket of his jeans and produced a packet of chewing gum. ‘Want one?’ he asked bluntly. Of course I accepted his kind offer.

‘Now, Noel, you’re not gonna like what you see in here but I’m showin’ you for your own good, okay?’

I gulped, as quietly as I could. ‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Whatever you reckon, Rennie.’

‘It’s just that that cunt Greg Beer’s been sniffin’ around – well, he’s been doin’ more than sniffin’ around actually – and you and me, well, we’re both gonna be affected by this.’

‘How do you mean?’

He muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t make out and then turned and opened the shed door.

For a moment I was confused, as Rennie flicked on the light in the shed. I’d expected to see a brewery set-up, with steel vats, bags of barley, hops, yeast, troughs, hoses, kegs, but instead all I was looking at was a concrete floor covered in pallets full of slab-boxes with the brand XXXX on their sides. Of course XXXX is the traditional beer in the state of Queensland, named in the colony’s early days when the Queenslanders apparently couldn’t spell ‘beer’, but what the hell was Rennie Vigata doing with a shed full of it in the foggy Poorool hills?

And then I twigged, in one blinding cataclysmic flash, to the whole disastrous arrangement.

There must have been sixty slab-boxes on each pallet in the shed, and I reckon there were at least a hundred pallets in there, stacked on top of one another. What I was looking at was not a soulful locavore microbrewery but a black-market XXXX warehouse. My jaw hit the floor as the full significance hit me. I turned to Rennie, who was staring at the pallets, chewing aggressively on his sugar-free gum. I said nothing, waiting for him to start the conversation. He wasn’t forthcoming. So eventually I said, ‘I gather that’s not Dancing Brolga Ale there in those boxes.’

Rennie set his jaw, lowered his dark forehead and shook his head solemnly. He started to explain.

It seemed that I’d been taken for a ride, and not just a short ride round the block but back and forth and up and down the east coast of Australia from Victoria to Queensland, and time and time again over the course of the last few months. Rennie confessed that he had never ever brewed one single drop of The Dancing Brolga Ale that the clientele of The Grand Hotel loved so much. The closest he’d come was watching Lee design a phoney logo for it on her computer back in the house. Rennie had suspected that the existence of the logo would put everyone off the trail, and he’d been right. The power of branding had triumphed over the so-called discerning alcoholic palettes of the whole of Mangowak.

That lovely colourful etching of the brolga in full prance, which Rennie now told me Lee had pinched off the internet, and the Dancing Brolga slogan, ‘Dance your way to the bottom of the glass’, which they’d also nicked off some poor anonymous bush-poet’s website, were a stroke of devious genius. The supposed purity of the marketing had allowed Rennie to take up an opportunity put to him by an old mate, a fellow crook up in Brisbane. Apparently this bloke had found a source of more cheap XXXX than you could poke a stick at. The irony was that due to the boutique beer market and the modern drinker’s penchant for cloudy chemical-free pale ales such as Little Creatures and Coopers Green, there’d been less of a demand for the old fashioned XXXX in the last couple of years. The XXXX brewery had begun production of a few different recipes in order to stay in touch with contemporary tastes but had a little too much of their old staple XXXX in the warehouse as a result. Their solution, and very enlightened it was of them too, was to donate a whole surplus warehouse full of the stuff to various fundraising charities, and in so doing placate a lot of humourless do-gooders left over from the maniacal Temperance Guild days of the colonies’ early years. They shipped this mountain of old-school XXXX, palette by charitable palette, to an off-site pre-fab on the edge of Brisbane, where the grateful and surprised recipients of the company’s visionary largesse were to pick it up.

The thing was, Rennie’s no doubt omniscient mate got wind that there was an unwanted lake of beer in a lonely thistle-bordered warehouse on the edge of Brissy and he decided he could do everyone a favour by finding it a good home. His only problem, or so he reckoned, was that the ‘good home’ needed to be somewhere well and truly out of Queensland. The first person he contacted was Rennie. He knew Rennie and Lee had recently been sent into the Poorool fog to chill out for a while but all he wanted was a lead, the name of someone who could handle it, someone who could get the beer offshore or squirrel it away somewhere lucractive down south. There was a large amount of money to be made, and he didn’t want to muck it up by making a false move in a hurry.

Well, as Rennie told me in the shed, the very day after he’d received the call from Queensland someone told Lee down in Minapre about the new Grand Hotel’s search for the Recommended Loosener. The light bulb went off in Rennie’s head and straightaway he drove the black beast out to the supermarket in Colac and bought himself a few slabs of XXXX. Then Lee designed the logo, they siphoned the contents of the XXXX slabs into two sleek looking Schaefer kegs and entered the entirely fictional Dancing Brolga Ale in our tasting competition.

Well, this was embarrassing. As Rennie unravelled the story for me, I went from pale-faced stupefaction to crimson-faced fury and finally to blushing pink like a virgin. There we had sat, back in the new Grand Hotel dreamtime – myself, Darren, Nan Burns, my brother Jim, Ash Bowen and Joan Sutherland – sipping the very best handcrafted beers Australia has to offer, carrying on with our ‘expert’ opinions, searching quite puritanically for the beer that most resembled the pick-me-up qualities of a fast running Otway brook. And what did we come up with, after we tasted exquisite coriander and ginger beer from third generation brewers in Gippsland, delicious pale ales from Benedictine monks in Western Australia, highly potent and effortlessly drinkable ales and stouts from the eastern Tasmanian riviera, and clear refreshing lagers from Broome and the Top End? Yep, you guessed it. We awarded the semi-lucrative prize as The Grand Hotel Recommended Loosener to a mass-produced chemical-laden XXXX whose key ingredient was the grain of salt you had to take it with.

And not only did we approve of this bullshit furphy beer then, we’d been approving of it ever since. Talk about a bunch of romantics! Each week when Rennie and Lee would roll up in the black beast full of Schaefer kegs with the stylish aubergine rubber rings on their tops and bottoms, my mouth would salivate at the prospect. And I wasn’t alone. The thought of yet another great week in The Grand Hotel drinking beer brewed from the creeks up in the hills behind us was a life-affirming prospect. If anyone had ever cast aspersions on the quality of The Dancing Brolga Ale, either I or Joan Sutherland would’ve banned them for life. But we never did hear anyone complain. Instead we heard the whole gamut of alcoholic accolades, from traditional Aussie ‘you beaut’s and ‘top drop’s to twenty-first-century mumblings about the enigmatic pleasures of umami and terroir. It had gone on for months, night after night, and now I stood with Rennie, despondent and humiliated in the kit-shed source of the sham.

Or should I say ‘scam’? Coz that’s what Rennie had pulled off here, and all at my expense. He had made literally tens of thousands of dollars out of me and my pub. The audacity of it was breathtaking.

Spying a stool beside a workbench on the far side of the shed, where thirty or so of those now pretentious looking Schaefer kegs stood waiting to be filled with XXXX, I said to Rennie, ‘Mate, I think I need to sit down.’ He just nodded gravely and watched as I crossed the concrete floor.

I sat on the stool, leant my elbows on the bench and rested my cheek against the palm of my left hand. I was sitting in the exact same position as the figure in the famous Cezanne painting ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’, except unlike that boy there was no hint of a smile on my lips, only a bewildered gaze. And anyway I’m sad to say that this was no time for art, even despite the fact that Rennie had been so creative. I felt like a fool and I was one. After my redeeming vision of the brolga in the old camp in the bush, I simply hadn’t been able to resist a beer by that name. It had all seemed preordained. And now I wanted nothing more than to shut my eyes and for the world to go away: people, beer, paintings, ocean, the lot.

Rennie walked over and feebly, for him, offered me another chewy. This time I refused. I never wanted to accept anything from this hairy-headed gangster ever again. The chewy was probably made from the bone marrow of dead racehorses for all I knew. No, first things first. I had a few questions for him, especially now that I was sitting down and could cope with the potential shock of his answers.

For a start I asked him if he’d ever, at any point in his entire life, had a mother. Automatically his underworld brows lowered at this insult but I could tell he wasn’t gonna whack me. I wouldn’t have cared if he did. He could’ve whacked me and whacked me, like a kookaburra whacks a field mouse over a gum bough. At that moment I quite fancied the idea of becoming human pulp.

‘So what’s this about Greg Beer then?’ I asked him next. ‘Have you been busted or what? Why have you dragged me out here? Surely not just to finally ruin my faith in humanity?’

Rennie chuckled, through what sounded like a wad of phlegm at the back of his throat. ‘People are stupid, Noel. What else can I say? But this Greg Beer bloke ... he’s not a person at all. He’s like a fuckin’ wolf.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He waited, Noel. He waited and he watched. You mad bastards at that pub of yours must’ve really upset him. That’s all I can put it down to. And then finally, by last night, he’d put the whole paperless trail together, from here to my mate’s holding shed on a farm in northern New South Wales.’

‘What? Did he show up here?’

‘No, no, nothin’ that obvious. He started at the other end first. If one more drop of beer leaves my mate’s shed for my joint, he’s gonna nab him good and proper. But that’s not really what he wants to do, is it, Noel?’

I groaned, realising what Rennie was implying.

‘No,’ he went on. ‘He doesn’t even really care about me either. I might be big fry for some, but not for that dickhead. No, we’re talkin’ about something personal here, a grudge, a very old and festering wound. He wouldn’t know the first thing about taking on the likes of me anyway. I’m just collateral here. It’s just you he wants, Noel. And it’s you he’s gonna get.’

‘You know what, Rennie?’

‘What?’

‘Greg Beer might be a cunt but you’re a cunt too.’

‘Watch your mouth, Noel.’

‘Nah. Why should I? What are ya gonna do? Drown me in a watertank? Butcher me like a lamb down in the signal-house on your spur there? Nuh, I haven’t been fed on fog like your dumb sheep, Rennie. I’m even dumber. I’ve been fed on bullshit. Your bullshit. And now I’m up to my ears in it. He’s gonna bust my Grand Hotel wide open, close it down for trading in black-market grog. You and your type might be used to the strip-search every time you go back into the clink but I’m certainly not. Do you hear me, Rennie? Do you realise what you’ve done?’

Rennie Vigata placed his hands on his hips and snorted in contempt. ‘People are stupid, Noel,’ he repeated. ‘What more can I say?’

‘Obviously nothing much,’ I replied scornfully. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Don’t you think that’s one of the reasons my hotel is the way it is?’

‘Well then catch up, dickhead. Come into the here and now. I never brought you out here to confess my sins, mate. I can tell you I’m well beyond needing to cleanse my soul. I brought you out here coz I like you. And more to the point, so does Lee. So I’m giving you the scoop. That prick’s gonna turn up at your pub any minute and blow your talking pissoir and all that other crazy shit away. Do you hear?’

‘Yeah, I hear, Rennie. But if you and Lee like me so much, how come you’ve been selling me bodgy grog all this time?’

Rennie’s swarthy face creased into a smile. ‘Well everyone enjoyed it didn’t they?’

‘That’s beside the point!’ I yelled.

‘Is it? You bought it at a fair price, sold it on for a profit, everyone but Greg Beer had a whale of a time, so who cares? People are stupid.’

‘Will you stop saying that!’

‘Well they are.’

I groaned again. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said despairingly, looking over at the hundreds of XXXX logos repeating on the pallets in front of me.

‘Anyway, Noel,’ Rennie said, ‘the point is you’ve got an option.’

‘Oh yeah? What, on a time-share in Siberia? You specialise in out-of-the-way places don’t you, Rennie?’

‘Will you stop that cheap shit for a second and listen. I’m serious,’ he said, also raising his voice.

‘So am I.’

‘Okay, fuck ya then!’ Rennie shouted, his temper exploding. ‘I’ve got a semi rollin’ in here tonight to get rid of all this shit, so I’ll be sweet. And because you and I worked on a handshake – coz that’s the way you wanted it, if you remember – they won’t pin anythin’ on me. But you, well, you’ll be rooted. You’ve got this Queensland shit in your pipes and all they’ll have to do is take it off to be tested. And no one around here’s game enough to give evidence you got it from me. So it’ll be your rap. You won’t even be able to plead ignorance, you stupid cunt.’

‘Oh yeah? Well what if I call the cops in Colac and tell them to come up here tonight to intercept the semi?’

Rennie smiled. ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ he said, in a voice as flat as a basalt plain.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it would be pointless, that’s why not. Do you think the Colac police don’t know who I am, Noel? How do you think I got the permits to have all the security lights on my fences? This is all national park round here and my track’s lit up like Bourke Street every night. How do ya think that’s possible? Do you think it was a clerical error or something, mate?’

‘No, I suppose not,’ I said, dejected.

Basically what Rennie was trying to tell me, in his traditionally charming manner, was that the police force was on his side but not on mine. And incredibly enough, it appeared to be true. Either way he was gonna get away with feeding The Grand Hotel hot liquor, so now he was extending an olive branch and offering me protection.

I felt a telltale bead of sweat trickling down my spine. Suddenly this was getting heavy. ‘Okay, I’m listening,’ I said.

Like all the great ideas in the history of Western culture what Rennie Vigata proposed to me over the next few minutes was quite beautiful in its simplicity. Greg Beer would get a call that same afternoon notifying him of his long wished-for promotion to senior sergeant. He’d be posted to Sydney to take up his new job and a ‘friendly’ policeman would be appointed as his replacement. If Greg Beer refused the position, his ambitious little career in the police force would be ruined. What was he going to choose, ruining The Grand Hotel over the advancement of his career? Not likely – not Greg Beer. Then, once he was single-handedly sorting out traffic and graffiti problems in the harbour city, Rennie and I would continue our little arrangement until we’d emptied the shed we were sitting in of its contents. Rennie wouldn’t take any more deliveries from up north and in the meantime I could settle on a new supplier – maybe that South Australian convent beer that The Dancing Brolga Ale had pipped at the post. Rennie’d turn his full attention to his fog-fed lambs and The Grand Hotel could continue on as if nothing had ever happened beyond an unforeseen change of beer in the tap.

‘So what do ya reckon?’ Rennie asked, jawing vigorously on his chewy now that he’d laid out his master plan. ‘I don’t have to do this for you, you know.’

‘No, I know that,’ I said solemnly. ‘And I can’t quite work out exactly why you’re bothering.’

‘Well, put it this way, Noel – it’s because I can. A bloke doesn’t agree to take the pill and come live out here in the fog like I have without being able to ask important people for a few favours.’

‘I see.’

‘So?’

‘There’s no way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s no way I can do it.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nup.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not my scene.’

Rennie blew out hard through his nose and stamped a Cuban heel on the concrete floor. ‘What do you mean it’s not your scene? It is your scene, it’s gotta be now, and that’s what I’m tellin’ ya.’

‘You can stamp your foot all you like, mate, but I’m not gonna do it,’ I said defiantly.

‘Why the fuck not?’ he shouted. ‘You just agreed people are stupid, the world’s fucked up. So what are you? Pure as the driven snow or somethin’?’

I sat up straight on the stool. From Rennie’s passionate reaction I was beginning to sense that there was one other thing, one important ingredient in all this that he wasn’t telling me. And something, call it an artist’s intuition if you like, was telling me exactly what it was.

Feeling quite careless and confident now, I opened my arms out wide. ‘What are you getting so upset about it for?’ I asked. ‘You’ll be alright. You’ll get away scot-free. And I’ll look after myself, thanks very much.’

Now it was Rennie’s turn to groan. ‘Yeah right,’ he said. ‘And I’ll be out here in the fog doing exactly the same if you don’t agree to what I’m askin’ you.’

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

‘Well put it this way, Noel – it’s not much fun for a beautiful young girl like Lee to live holed up out here with no friends but a poodle, a cat, and a pack of Alsatians trained by the police dog unit.’

Aha, my little hunch had been right. Somehow or other Rennie was on his last chance with Lee and I was caught in the sandwich.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he said, seeing the realisation of the situation in my eyes. ‘She didn’t want to have a bar of this XXXX shit. The deal was she’d come out here with me and live behind the gates just so long as we made it wholesome. She’s a fuckin’ hippy at heart, Noel. She wanted the vegie patch, the organic farming, and I agreed to do it her way. Well I wasn’t gonna come out here on me own, mate. Besides, I love her, she’s hot.’

He went on, relaxing his grip on the chewy, ‘Anyway, when the first truck of beer arrived one night she went properly ballistic. She’d tricked up the logo for the slab we entered in your competition but as far as she was concerned that was just a bit of a lark. I hadn’t told her what was behind it of course, what was happening up north. I couldn’t. I thought I’d just deal with the problem when it arose, as usual. That’s my way. And I couldn’t refuse the grog, mate. Not once you blokes down at The Grand had decided to put it on tap as The Dancing Brolga. It was too neat. You were a perfect front. And to tell you the truth, it was pretty amusing as well. We’d go down there to listen to the band some nights and everyone’d be carrying on about the beer. I’d be pissing myself on the way home in the beast, but Lee was dark. Real dark. She kept threatening to leave. She said I’d broken the deal we had and, “If that sweet bloke Noel gets in trouble for this, you won’t see me for dust, Rennie Vigata.” So now you can see what I’m on about. I don’t give a fuck about you, Noel, but I give a fuck about Lee. If she left me, I’d top myself, I reckon. Couldn’t live out here on me own. So anyway, that’s what I’m so fuckin’ upset about, mate. And that’s why she’s made me fill you in on what’s goin’ on. She won’t hear of my solution to the problem without you goin’ along with it. That’s why you’ve got to agree to my plan.’

I wasn’t sure whether Rennie was threatening me with that last comment or not, but I knew one thing for certain – I was decidedly uncomfortable about suddenly being the third person in the bed with him and Lee. It felt very cramped. My body temperature was rising rapidly. My skin was beginning to crawl. I wanted out, and pronto.

‘Look, let me think about it for a while would you, Rennie?’ I said, almost gasping for air. ‘All this has come right out of the blue.’

‘Nah, mate. There’s no time. I told ya, the mail’s come through only last night. I rang you first thing. The fuckin’ sergeant’s likely to roll up and bust you tonight unless we do something about it.’

I sighed, running my hand through my hair. The pressure was too much. It was beginning to hit home that if I got busted and Lee left Rennie, then I could be in far deeper shit than losing my hotel. This Vigata character standing there glaring at me in the shed was a murderer; I was sure of it.

‘Look, mate,’ I said, ‘I just can’t decide right here on the spot, in this fuckin’ shed. I need to breathe. What’s say I think about it on the way home in the Brumby and I call you as soon as I get there? It only takes thirty minutes or so. Sound fair?’

Rennie stroked his unshaven chin with his fingers and started hammering his chewy again. He was dubious. ‘Alright then,’ he said eventually. ‘But you make sure you ring me as soon as you get there. Do you hear?’

‘Yep. It’s a deal. Now for pity’s sake can we get out of this bloody shed. I need some air.’