7:57 p.m. 'I just want to watch it one last time,' I said.
'You can but it'll mean we don't get it in by eight. Which might actually be a good thing,' Paul said.
We were surrounded by a bunch of backpackers with dirty hair and tie-dyed T-shirts in the Arts Estate web cafée. Paul had cut our first piece on iMovie. He was trying to make up for totalling the organiser/phone thing. A German guy next to us said, 'I see it is looking pretty good, ja?'
'Mac, I'm going to need that computer at eight,' said Mr Kim, walking past with a coffee order.
'Yeah, all right,' I said. 'Do it.'
Paul hit 'upload'.
I covered my face with my hands and peeked through a crack. There was me onscreen, standing on the beach with the lighthouse in the back-ground. 'It's a world capital of cool. Home to ...'
As if the lighthouse was cool. And then we had footage of all these kooks on the beachfront with strips of eyebrow hair missing and chicks wearing knee-high biker boots in the middle of summer. Some American guy had 'Mom' tattooed across his arm and we shot that and stuck it in. I mean it was kind of funny-cool and I think he meant it as a joke, but who knew? There was a Japanese girl wearing a Nike hoodie, Gucci sunnies and a crown on her head. An old dude with curly grey hair, a straw hat and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. A border collie leaping a metre into the air to catch a festy pink tennis ball and a homeless guy sleeping on a canvas bag with a lemonade bottle leaning against a post next to him. None of it was cool to us but it's what we saw. It was just the reality.
Then suddenly it was all over. I was tired and hungry and I felt even less cool than I had before I became a coolhunter.
'It'll be right,' I said, lying.
'Rockin',' said Paul. 'Three of the lamest minutes of video ever committed to the web.'
I looked at him. Even that word – rockin' – was so 2001. Man, we sucked.
We grabbed our things and an Indian chick with a little bindi between her eyes nabbed our seat and started Bebo-ing. We walked off down the path towards the bus without saying a word.
Paul grabbed a scooter that was leaning against the side of our workshop.
'I don't know if I'm gonna come tomorrow,' I said.
'You'll be there,' he said. 'It's like roadkill. How can you not want to see it? Meet me, ten to eight at the corner.'
And he rode off along the wooden walkway that cut through the ti-tree lake, and into the night.