LITMIR.BIZ

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I resented the fact my Xanadu was sullied. I had promised myself it would be a place of good karma. I arranged to drop the Golf in the next day for the tune-up and was almost out of the driveway and onto the road, my right-hand flicker on when a teenage girl rushed up to the window and tapped. The girl asked if she and her boyfriend could grab a ride into town.

      ‘To the Great Northern?’ said the girl. ‘We’re supposed to start work at four and our bomb won’t start. The man said you’d give us a lift. Is that okay?’

      Black pants, white shirts and neat appearances, obviously dressed for bar work, both of them. Almost four o’clock. ‘Fine. No worries. Hop in.’

      The girl took the back seat and the youth came around and sat in the front. As the doors slammed, I remembered I’d flung my handbag onto the floor at the back. I was about to reach around and grab it when the girl handed it through to me. I felt shame colour my cheeks. I must learn to trust. ‘I need these,’ I said, digging out my dark glasses and holding them up before passing the bag back to the girl.

      ‘It’s got a bit or a bad repo, your joint. Drugs ‘n that,’ said the youth as we travelled along Bangalow Road into Byron. I had just finished answering the young man’s friendly interrogations about what part of the world I hailed from, how long I’d lived in Byron and what I thought of the place, of my own piece of the Bay, in particular.

      ‘What do you know? Or is it just rumour?’ I said, looking across at the boy and into the rear vision mirror to catch the girl’s eye.

      The youth hesitated, turning to look behind to his girlfriend. I couldn’t see, but I felt they were exchanging cautious looks. ‘A bit of heavy stuff used to go on there, that’s all,’ he said.

      ‘Junkies ‘n that,’ the girl volunteered. ‘That big garage you got up the front? Grew hydroponics in there. Lots.’

      ‘Bit of heroin dealing went on, too,’ said the boy.

      ‘Where’s the best place to catch some good music?’ I wanted out of this conversation with these strangers. This sure ain’t Kansas, Toto. If I’d landed in Oz then I wanted rainbows. I didn’t want to hear any more about bad things that might or might not have happened around at my new home. Especially not if the bad thing was heroin. Dirty, lay-about heroin addicts didn’t do it for me. I was in the zero-tolerance camp at the time of landing in Byron Bay. Sydney had had a spate of house break-and-enters. I felt the scourge had been around long enough for even the dumbest kid to know the perils of starting down the heroin highway. There had been stories of young nurses and police being stuck with dirty syringes, having to wait to know if they were HIV-positive and likely to die from AIDS some day.

      ‘The Rails Friendly Bar,’ the pair chorused. ‘Best music.’ They seemed relieved themselves to have made it out of the quicksand and onto safer ground.

      ‘Y’know why they call it the ‘Friendly’ bar?’ asked the girl, who went on to answer her own question. ‘It’s because, up till a few years ago ... according to my Mum, that is, when the trains still used the railway and holiday makers got off there at the station ... well, like, the part of the station that was the pub had a band that would come out onto the platform and play music to greet everyone. How cool’s that? The band from the pub welcomes you as you get off the train!’

      ‘Best music’s at the Rails, for sure. No cover charge, either.’ The youth checked his watch. ‘Not like at ours. And Cornie’s pub’s always too crowded. Too many tourists.’

      ‘Everyone gets up and dances at the Rails. That’s what’s so great about it,’ said the girl.

      ‘Don’t matter if you’re on your own, even.’ The boy was looking my way as he spoke. ‘Or old,’ he added before the girl leaned though and jabbed him in his ribs to shut him up.

      I pulled the car up across the road from the Great Northern on Jonson Street and thanked them both for their company. ‘I’ll save it for another day if that’s okay,’ I said when the girl offered to fix a drink for me if I cared to park and come inside.

      ‘See you, then. Toodle pop,’ said the girl as she took her boyfriend’s hand.

      Halfway across the road, the boy doubled back. He came up to the car window and leaned in. ‘Don’t worry about your garage. It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be great. Welcome to the Bay.’

      He straightened up, looked to where his girlfriend now stood in front of the hotel––pointing frantically at her watch––then back at me. He took something from his pocket and put his hand through the window.

      ‘Chill,’ he said, opening the Golf’s glove box and placing something in it. Then the youth, as he crossed the road, gave me a wave over his shoulder.

      By the time I discovered the fat joint, my passenger had already caught up with his girlfriend and the pair had disappeared indoors.

      I shut the glove box on my illegal bounty, took a deep breath and counted to ten as I came to grips with the fact that a Byron Bay welcome seemed not to be the usual polite knock on the door by a friendly neighbour carrying a tray of scones.

      ‘Chill,’ the youth had said and that’s exactly what I intended to do.

      THE ROUNDABOUT

       Fate slowly builds her mute countenance ...

       and the soon-to-be lovers smile on each other ...

      Rainer Maria Rilke

      The Hunter Valley shiraz in its brown paper bag rolled around on the passenger side floor, the Byron Echosat on the seat beside me. Bob Dylan was filling the cabin with Girl from the North Country.

      After dropping off my two young passengers I’d spent a lazy hour in the village, poking around. Now the setting sun was taking some of the heat out of the sweltering day and I was beginning to think about the night ahead, about sleeping on a stranger’s mattress on the floor with only the same stranger’s pink rug for cover. It was crazy! I should have booked in to a motel. But the agent had given me the keys and permission to move in. And in my present state of mind impatience went with the territory.

      What did it matter that I’d be spending the night in a run-down hut, all on my own, in a lonely part of the dunes. In the dark. No electricity. No one knowing where I was. What was I thinking!

      I passed the MITRE 10 hardware store on the corner of Jonson Street and turned into Browning. I was approaching the roundabout when I saw him.

      Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Except for the black hair blowing around his face, the hitchhiker up ahead, trapped in the glow of a violent late-afternoon sunset, could have been mistaken for a civic monument, a piece of zany street art. My first thought: He looked handsome. My second: He looked dangerous. Even from this distance, the man’s aura troubled me, but what did I know about auras? One day, my first, in Byron Bay? Please.

      Under the old linoleum I’d ripped up this morning in my frenzy I’d found sheets of yellowed newspaper. An article on hitchhiking had caught my eye. Seventy-five per cent of all rapes committed in the United States were as a result of hitchhiking, the article had screamed at its 1974 readers. The FBI had issued a poster, a warning guaranteed to scare the Bejeezus out of any woman considering hitching or giving a lift to a male hitchhiker. Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal, a pleasant companion or a sex maniac, a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer? it had asked the American population of the day.

      Not a soul back in Sydney knew of my whereabouts. The disconnectedness felt liberating but it posed challenges; self-preservation being one of them.

      To pull up and invite the stranger into my car, or be just one more uncaring driver who speeds past and doesn’t give a damn? An ethical dilemma wrapped in a roundabout. What was my moral obligation to a stranger in need of a lift?

      I checked the SUV cruising ahead of me. Hard not to be cynical. Its back windscreen was papered with

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