The Underwater God

By Randal J. Junior

A collage of conflicted relationships takes shape as two brothers take on the responsibilities of work, love, family and loss. Their respective partners are very different kinds of women, just as Darby and Bro are very different sides of the same coin, still spinning in slow motion as they fall to earth. Their friends, family and their love of cars, football and Friday nights at the pub are the glue that holds them together, even as they push each other away. Theirs is not to cherish and to hold, to love and to learn; theirs is to taste the bitterness of estrangement.
'The Underwater God' is a journey through small-town Australia, a journey through the rolling, green fields of the southern wheat-belt in spring-time, to the kitchen table at Mum's place. It's a journey to an out-back boxing tent in the Dead Heart, and to a nondescript cell in a high-security prison. Poker machines become fantastical creatures of myth as day-time television morphs with Shakespearean melodrama, and the perfect wave is caught and ridden into a hellish miasma of drug-abuse and failed relationships.
This book reflects the true underbelly of modern culture, where gangsters are skinny teenagers wearing Eminem shirts and riding skateboards. Where drug-lords live in council flats, watching pay-tv and eating fat pizza. Bongs, cones, grams of speed, eccy's and trips are now the bywords in a sub-culture that has quickly spread it's tentacles into the daily life of millions of Australians and New Zealanders, who even if they never touch the stuff, will know someone who has. And all this has happened over the last forty years with scarce mention of any but the biggest drug hauls and the most sensational overdoses.
Illicit drug-use is now common from the age of fifteen. Both the fear of sexual predators and that of being 'unsexy' is reinforced on a daily basis by the mass media. No one stops to see if a stranger is okay. We are strangers not only to each other, but strangers to ourselves in this world where the media has become god, shaping our lives, our choices and our future.
And for those who fall through the cracks; the underwater god is waiting...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randal J. Junior
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310739767

Randal J. Junior

As a student of literature for the past eight years, the author has endeavoured to learn the art of compression; reducing the infinite into the barest minimum of words required to hook the reader’s interest, cast doubt within their mind and then dispel it with either an inconclusive twist or an enduring sense of finality. As a failed student of philosophy, Randal J. Junior has been beaten into the school of weary acceptance after finding that all human endeavour is fraught with either idealism or an opportunistic narcissism. But she/he still has faith in humanity and believes that we all learn something new every day.

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The Underwater God

Copyright 2015 Randal J. Junior

Published by Randal J. Junior at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

About the Author

Other Books by Randal J. Junior

Connect with the Author

Acknowledgements

This is an Australian story but what is Australia? Is it really the ‘Great South Land’ peopled by many tribes of noble savages? Or did the savagery come later? The Dutch named it ‘Terra Australis Incognito’ and never explored any further than the North West Coast. Then what was known primarily as ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ became the colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. But it is said that the Chinese were here two hundred years before the Dutch, leaving evidence of early mineral extraction and a mysterious shipwreck off the South Eastern coastline.

This story predates the arrival of European settlement but is set in contemporary Australia, a land that reflects the massive social changes of the 20th century and also the traditional culture that preceded the ancient civilisations of Greece and Egypt by several millennia. The modern age of technological innovation seems to be plagued with more problems than it can solve, and Australia is no exception; beneath the democratic veneer of social equality lays a fractured strata of dislocation, both from the people around us and the land that supports us. The archaic institutions of religion and land-barony have been rigorously imposed upon an alien landscape to that of Europe, which had its own tribal divisions of country before the advent of industrialization.

But the ‘Currency Corps’ have replaced rum with meth-amphetamines and the lash of social media is the new corporal punishment; the ‘land of plenty’ bears the scars of over-grazing, nuclear testing and genocidal politics. But all is not lost, the Australian identity is renowned for both adaptability and endurance in the face of adversity. We have lost some of the English propriety which never did fit well on a land ill-suited to aristocratic conventions, though our political leaders still fawn to historical alliances and pander to new ones. We have embraced our role as a home for many cultures and are beginning to push for an end to the imperial puppetry to which we seem to have a pathological inclination.

But this story does not start with the birth of a nation a hundred years ago. Neither does it begin with the arrival of a fleet of English sailing ships carrying refugees from the post-human experiment of industrialization. This story starts now.

Prologue

It is through the path of darkness that I have discovered light.

If there be another way, I know it not.

Pictures in the mirror are like postcards from tomorrow.

What was looming upon the horizon may be a taste of what's to come.

Maybe a stitch in time can save you from much sorrow.

But once the fateful steps are taken, the threads of life will be undone.

Pictures in the mirror and the ghosts of Christmas' past.

We never know which minute may be our very last.

Most don't dwell long upon it, when life gives pause for thought.

But when we start to panic, we breathe in much too fast.

Pictures in the mirror, stretching out forever, an endless road to take.

A hopeless task to ever attempt it, yet none can turn away.

When we fall, we curse the devil, blame him for our evil ways.

Still the blind man sits in darkness and leads the mute to better days.

Darby throws a handful of dirt on Bro’s grave, then turns to find that everyone is gone except for his mother; a grim spectre standing behind her. He moves to both comfort her and steer her away from the chain-smoking cretin but almost immediately finds himself falling from a great height, trying to spin like a cat in his state of terror, falling and falling into emptiness only to land flat on his back on the empty coffin, smashing through the slender timbers of the lid even as the dirt is falling in on top of him, choking and blinding him as it seeks to stop up his every orifice. Another body comes crashing down from a similar height to drive the breath from his lungs. And another and another until his pathetic calls for help turn to desperate screams and scrabbling, then finally, silence.

The backyard is cast in deep, dark shadows, dimly lit by a couple of stars and the barest sliver of a moon, which is playing peekaboo with the clouds. A gentle breeze blows softly on the cool night air and the house is dark and quiet; there is a large tree in the middle of the backyard, it being responsible for most of the garden being cloaked in darkness. As the moon makes a break for it between the scudding clouds, it’s light falls on the figure of a young man standing in the shadows of the tree, looking up into the branches as the tears stream down his face.

His vision is blurred by his tears, he chokes and sobs as he goes about his task, that of throwing the rope up in the air in an attempt to string it from the lowest branch of the tree. The look in his eyes is that of torment and a heart riven with anguish, as he tries desperately to get the rope to fall across the smooth, eucalypt bark of the tree branch, but misses time and time again.

His desperation and his haste make his efforts clumsy, and his young life is drawn out for a short-time longer than he intends. He has to get this thing out his head, this intense pain of a broken dream and the failure to be the man he should be. The sooner he is gone, the sooner his family will be free of him and he will not be able to let them down again. He throws the rope and a loop lands on the branch, but it slithers back towards him and falls through the outstretched fingers that try to catch it. Anger shows on his face and his nose is running as he tries to sniff back his tears.

‘I can’t even get this right!’ he curses softly.

The dark spell of hatred he has cast upon himself is all encompassing, matched only by the hopeless despair it springs from. But he is not to be deterred and he tosses the coiled end of the rope until finally it does his bidding and comes snaking down from over the branch to dangle limply in front of him. He pauses for a moment as the full implications of what he is about to do hit home. He has taken the first step, and now this thing is real, not just an image pictured in his mind. He wants an end to his pain but there is a very real and terrible action to be taken before all is left behind.

Darby’s memories of his dad are those of his childhood, when we all have that view for a short time of a world so much larger than ourselves that we are of little consequence. The last five years, only one and a half years since his father died, have been the formative years, his adolescence, the journey towards becoming all that it means to be a man.

He doesn’t remember his father as a happy person. The short amount of time his father did spend inside the big old farmhouse was for meals and sleeping and a few precious moments watching the news or reading the paper. There was ample opportunity to spend time with his dad outside on the farm, but Bro, his older brother by five years, was his dad’s off-sider. Being a bit too young to be of much help, Darby usually avoided the flashpoint situation that constantly threatened to explode into angry confrontations, fueled by the equal measures of agro held by both of the older men.

Thanks to his mother, Darby always had his own chores to do, making sure that he never had too much time for sitting still. The scraps had to be taken out to the chooks, the lawn occasionally had to be mowed and there was always his room to tidy. But once these things were done, he was free to roam the sheds full of old junk and farm machinery or follow the sheep tracks through the paddocks on his BMX.

But occasionally his father would see the need for an extra pair of hands and Darby would get roped into helping. More often than not, they were occasions most memorable for the furious arguments between the two. If ever anything got done without a great deal of fuss and bluster about where the fault lay, Darby wasn’t there to see it.

There are always a few distinct memories that remain most vivid to anyone, and one of Darby’s was of helping with the fencing. The task of running out the wire beside the fencepost and then affixing it to the posts by hammering large staples in over top of the wire was tedious but not too difficult. It was straining each wire with the ancient, clawed levering device that always seemed to become a source of frustration. Tempers were strained as tightly as the taught wires, wires that would sing in the wind once tensioned, but could recoil with the crack of a whip if the wire-strainers slipped.

As communication had to be made over a long distance, with one person often a long way down the fence line, their father’s shouted instructions would become garbled in the breeze. Darby would never miss standing out in the freezing wind and rain, while his father and his older brother screamed down the fence line at each other.

‘Ge_ me _ _e Pl _ _ _s!’

‘What?!’

‘GET _ _ TH_ BLOODY _ _ IRES!!!’

‘WHAT?!!’

It could go on like this for hours.

It was only a few short years ago, on a wintry afternoon, when Darby and his older brother got off the school-bus to be met at the farm gate by their father waiting in the ute. They weren’t so much surprised or suspicious as just plain wondering what the hell he was there for. The farmhouse was a good kay’ and a half off the road but the boys weren’t used to being picked up from the gate, it just didn’t happen.

‘Get in, we’re going over to Humphreys’ place,’ growled their father.

The Humphreys were their closest neighbours, friends and confidantes. In a farming community, kids grow up together with those from farms around them, and the nature of farm work and the precious few social occasions make the ties within a rural community grow as close as those of family. Going to the neighbours’ place was usually a cause for joy, but as Darb’ clambered into the back of the ute, his excitement turned to gut-tightening dread as he laid eyes on the fencing gear that was accompanying them. And it wasn’t just left there from a previous job, possibly weeks or even months ago; big, shiny hoops of coiled plain wire lay at his feet, along with nasty little spools of grey barbed’, testifying as to the task at hand. For months they had lain dormant in the shed, as the old canvas tarpaulin that covered them gathered chook-shit and dust. But beneath their shroud, they bided their time, and slowly slipped from memory, until now.

Darby could think of a hundred better places to be as the old yellow ute turns off the road and bumps its’ way up the driveway to their neighbours’ house. As they go past, Darby sees Mrs Humphrey out under the Hills-Hoist where she is bringing in the clothes and bed-linen that hang above the bright green patch of lawn in the backyard of the old stone farmhouse. He waves to her and she smiles and waves back at the blonde-haired little ruffian that she has known since he was a baby.

The lawn is a picture of neatness, bordered by low concrete walls which are painted white and fronted by beds of roses and other aficionados of the gardening world. A Kelpie is barking from its kennel near the back shed but there is no sign of Mr Humphrey nor that of his three boys. Darby watches the tranquil scene of domestic harmony grow small as they continue out past the work-sheds and into the first paddock behind the house.

Grey clouds are looming ahead of them in the eastern sky, heavy with the promise of rain. Today’s brief spell of winter sunshine is nearly gone, driven off by gloom and spitting rain.

Twenty minutes and three gates later, Darb’ jumps out and closes the last gate behind them. He jumps in the back of the waiting ute and they follow the fence-line and it’s windbreak of big old pine trees, skirting the edge of the freshly ploughed back-paddock. Tiny green shoots of wheat are beginning to show amongst the clods of chocolate-brown earth. The ramshackle fence that runs along this side of the paddock is a boundary with their own land. The fence is decrepit, ancient rusty wire and half-rotted posts sticking out of the ground.

In an age-old custom, their neighbour has paid for the fencing materials, and in return their father is doing the work of erecting it. But the wire has been laying there in the shed for months; only now that the old man’s poddy calves have jumped the busted fence to eat the neighbours’ succulent wheat crop, has he decided to put the plan into action; with the help of the boys. Bro and