Suburban Tours

By Will Brodie

Aimless young Ben Kester and gruff drifter Ben Markham combine to run a minibus tour of Melbourne underworld sites. The customers are coming, the unlikely friendship is growing: this could be the making of both of them.

But both men hold secrets which could prove as deadly as the most murderous gangster.

Set amongst the pub sub-culture of inner Melbourne, and the feral back blocks of the outer suburbs, Suburban Tours explores whether your tormentor can also be your mentor.

It also probes the significance of Bryan Adams, punting on old geldings and the terrors of lint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Combiner Publishing
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994244611

Book preview

SUBURBAN TOURS

Second edition (e-book only)

First edition published in 2009 by Freeform Press.

Copyright © William Kendall Brodie 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organizations) in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For permission to reproduce, store or transmit any part of this book, please email [e-mail]

Every endeavour has been made to contact copyright holders to obtain the necessary permission for use of copyright material in this book. Any person who may have been inadvertently overlooked should contact the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Brodie, Will, 1967-

Suburban tours / Will Brodie.

ISBN: 978-0-9942446-1-1

Dewey Number: A823.4

Aerial cover image copyright and courtesy of Photomapping Services.

Disclaimer:

All care has been taken in the preparation of the information herein, but no responsibility can be accepted by the publisher or author for any damages resulting from the misinterpretation of this work. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

www.willbrodie.com

Urban Introduction

To Ben Kester, everything is fascinating on his late night voyage of discovery, his walk home from the pub.

Here’s a grimy silver car ligament, a road trophy.

Here’s a substation which could be a sci-fi outhouse. Its bobbles are like the arms of a vintage pet robot.

Here’s a puzzle of shuffling about in the darkness up ahead, a furtive mystery of minor noises. The sounds of arranging, carrying, stacking, all incongruous activities at this sleeping hour.

Now there is a huge, blatant man staring at him. So close.

The apparition stuns Ben. Reverie interruptus.

A giant rodent-human being, a black stare from sunglasses, the complex never-knowable World of People in one big, odd package.

It’s pillaging the hard rubbish collection. The early scavenger gets the old crap...

Give me a hand will ya mate?

Ben Kester is too stunned to do anything else.

An old TV, huge and heavy. The big stranger takes so much of its weight that Ben wonders why he asked for help. They lump it a few metres to the stranger’s minibus, a rusted fuselage on wheels salvaged from a tropical war zone. Maybe he found it on another hard rubbish night.

Ben says nothing.

The stranger says nothing.

Ben likes how the big guy doesn’t utter expected homilies. He decides that this hulking man, with footy socks pulled over his pants, a second-hand beanie over his ears, a silver-metal torch between his teeth and those guarded eyes too sensitive even for moonlight, is a fellow creature of the night, an honest-to-goodness nocturnal being, which will dissolve into nothingness at the first hint of daylight.

Ben hears himself speak.

What should I do?

Helping lift a discarded TV; asking a significant personal question. That seems a fair and apt transaction between urban strangers in Melbourne, Australia, at 3.39am on a Monday morning. The oracle you get is not a crone peering into a steaming pot, or a wise elder.

Ben Kester’s seer is this enormous, strapped-up, late-night scrounger.

The hulking creature of the night does what you’d expect such a messenger to do.

It eyes the street, the sleeping servo on the corner of Keele Street... Then emits an enigmatic sound.

Riiiiigggghhhhttttt...

Right.

It’s a stoner’s statement, malleable and ambiguous, amiable yet sarcastic, philosophical but meaningless; the perfect full stop to a weird moment between strangers...

But it’s a comma. There’s more coming. The oracle’s computer completes its calculations and meets Ben’s from-below gaze.

What to do...

He was devoting due gravity to Ben’s query, or waiting for a download to complete.

I’d say...

The behemoth was grimacing in concentration, or grinning in parody.

...Keep going.

With a nod to himself, Ben’s massive prophet skips his bulk into the minibus, and, without a glance back, eases its overfilled, rusting, late 1970s torso into Hotham Street.

Keep going.

NB: Ben Kester forgets all of the above.

Start talking

Some days, some moments, you sense something brilliant inside yourself. Life is exhilarating and spot-lit, you’re doing what you should be doing and there’s nothing stopping you.

Ben Kester feels this in his gums as the rusty minibus shakes through Pakenham and his mock tour guide monologue enters its 42nd kilometre. It's a day-trip to the races, Bairnsdale in Gippsland, but the destination and the reason for the journey is irrelevant. It is definitely now the journey itself that’s all important, with Ben’s spiel in full flow.

Ben can’t remember when he last felt this excited and confident.

For a nanosecond, he considers this, but he can’t stop and compare and measure and reflect. Not this time. Got to keep doing whatever I am doing... go all the way with it... can’t waste a second of this buzz...

So what is he doing? He doesn’t know. He started mimicking a small-time tour guide for Abbie when they turned onto the Monash Freeway, commenting on the traffic sewer's world-class sound barriers. Then Abbie giggled, or sniggered, and he took it as encouragement. And he got on a roll. Somehow, pretending to be someone else made it happen.

Just past Toorak Road, Janie and Rolly noticed something was going on, Freddie listened in, and Ben had an honest-to-goodness bloody audience listening to his stream-of-freeway-consciousness.

The words just keep coming, and for once no-one is stopping him, not even himself.

Ben feels so different that he wonders if he looks any different. Is the flat, plain canvas of his face painted with enlightenment? Is he no longer ‘of medium build, of medium height?’

He’s in the zone. The famous, the best, the few, spent years there, decades, making the miraculous commonplace. The rest kept practising and trying, hoping that relentless persistence gifted them a glimpse of mastery.

In his usual temper, he would've noted that the poor and not especially talented got abducted by aliens. Their ‘zone’ involved anal probes, not transcendent dexterity. As above, not so below.

But right now under-used instinct is kicking in, like a new reflex, involuntary and shocking. Each heartbeat is surging rivers of unfamiliar adrenaline through Ben, telling him to keep talking. He has a microphone now. They’ve found a skinny old silver microphone...

‘Ladies and gentlemen, on our right you will notice that...’

They're passing a nondescript paddock, but Ben points out that...

...Jack Carruthers of Maryknoll is in a hurry to get back to the farm in time for lunch.

Ben watches his audience lean right and chuckle. A few even leave their seats to view the seventy-year-old farmer wearing a fifty-year-old scrap of sleeveless flannel driving a forty-year-old Ute. In the back, a windblown kelpie. The cockie is talking to himself.

Yairs... I reckon we’ll... pick up the spuds at Robertson’s, then pick up the cow shit down the back paddock...

His ‘Carruthers’ is laconic and pronounces every syllable. Then Ben mimics the voice of the kelpie. Snappy, canny, long-suffering: You stupid old senile bastard. Don’t you know I can’t hear a bloody word you say out in this fucking cyclone? If you wanted to talk to me, you should have let me stay in the cab!

One watches the Ute, and his audience watching the Ute. A sensation flutters across his forehead, the ecstatic opposite of someone walking across his grave.

The dog starts barking.

And whatever you do, don’t forget to pick up the cow shit BEFORE you get your precious spuds, you silly old bastard! Ben translates.

As his friends laugh, One picks his next target, the bland threat of traffic now a parade of potential stories.

Jesus, Shaz, we were shit-faced last night. Like. Shit. Faced. I know. I know. I can’t believe that you pashed those guys! You must have been so out of it...

An erratic, speedy P-plated Datsun 180B with misaligned wheels. A bright pink teen on her mobile, head bobbing. A bumper sticker stating: ‘PORNSTAR’.

So, are you going out tonight? Yeah, I know, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to fucking do... What time? Six?

The big driver seemed the only person on the bus unimpressed by the impromptu floorshow.

Ben asks Abbie about him, holding the mic away. Ben always asked questions of housemate Abbie, the curious ten-year-old to her patient parent. Abbie liked providing answers. Ben liked being a curious ten-year-old.

Frankie met him at that pub on Johnson Street he’s raving about. He hadn’t done anything about getting a bus until yesterday and he saw this one sitting out the front...

That was typical of Frankie, to not worry, then pull it all together at the last minute.

It suited Abbie’s crew, this shambolic ‘70s crate, with its odour of split timber and spilt gasoline. Abbie’s mates appreciated the finer things in life, like getting stoned on the way to the country races, and buses with character.

It was time for the ‘Tour Guide’ to speak again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, fellow lemmings, why do we hand over control to this driver, who is no smarter, no braver, no better dressed than us?

It’s not relaxing to have someone else drive—on some level, it’s degrading and scary. We drive so we can avoid public transport's insolent school kids, drug pushers, perverts, serial killers, evangelists, and political activists. In our car, we can talk to ourselves, sing off-key...

Abbie had given him a baseball cap, which somehow felt part of a tour guide uniform.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce your driver.

The big, gruff-looking bloke glared at a benign patch of road as if it was a lethal obstacle course.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Driver Speaking.  On your left, you will notice the former site of the Gippsland Base Hospital. We don’t know why they called them ‘base’ hospitals, but they did, in the bush.

Sure enough: there were pitiful overgrown piles of broken bricks and fracturing cement slabs that must have been a major building. Maybe this monolith was trying to enter into the spirit of the trip after all.

But Ben wanted control.

Now, driver...

Ben Markham.

"Ladies and gentlemen, meet your Driver Speaking, Ben Markham. He comes in at 202 cm, 6 foot 6 in the old. His ranking on the official Australian Tour Bus Driver circuit is a career-high 47. Driver Speaking Ben’s career highlights include taking 57-eccied 17-year-olds on a 47-hour trip to the Gold Coast for schoolies week and living to tell the story after transporting sixteen frocked-up secretaries to and from Oaks Day.

Driver Speaking Ben: Would you say this trip is amongst your finest hours in passenger conveyance?

Mysterious Mr Markham did not answer immediately, his prerogative as the older, less popular male.

Is this your finest hour, Driver Ben?

Finally, the big man said:

It’s right up there.

More laughter from the passengers.

One of them yelled from the back, hardly necessary in the cosy confines of a 21-seat minibus.

Hey Driver Speaking, if this is right up there... Have you had a really fucked life?

Markham all but chewed on a piece of chaff before replying.

Pretty fucked.

More uproar.

Another passenger, Frankie or Churchie, piped up.

Driver Speaking Ben?

It’s Ben. Just call me Ben

Another Ben?

Ben Two, Mel suggested.

If driver Ben Markham was ‘Two’, tour guide Ben Kester was ‘One’. The minibus, Two informed them all, was ‘The Tube’. They let that stand.

One spent his afternoon at the track considering material for the return journey. ‘Material’? He had the lingo down already.

My only day in the limelight. Give me just a little more before it ends, please... One wanted something to savour in the long years of ordinary life ahead. He seized the microphone again. His tone super soothing this time. And a touch ocker, for some reason.

"Ladies and gentlemen... We trust you are having a nice ... Suburban Tour... oh good, lovely."

There, he’d named the venture. ‘Suburban Tours.’  To Ben Kester (now named ‘One’) a title was as good as a patent.

One had called himself an Urban Explorer before today. He'd earned the title by investigating off-limits places like drains and abandoned buildings. Suburban Tours wasn’t urban exploration. It was something else, its own category. Something new? Better still. One realised he'd grown tired of the dark and hidden. Thanks to this bus trip, he wanted to explore the ignored, sunlit obvious.

His feminist housemate Abbie was batting her eyelids at him, or at his tour guide character. A momentous day indeed.

You make a very hot tour guide, Mr...

It’s Mr Norm Alley, Miss. I'm flattered, but I’m afraid there’s a Mrs Norm Alley. And in any case, it's against Suburban Tours regulations for tour staff to fraternise.

Norm sounded like a sprightly 1950s Queensland uncle.

Oh, Mr Alley, ‘fraternising’, that sounds exciting!

Now he had a name for his character as well... Ben marvelled at what was coming off the top of his head.

"Tell me about the lucky Mrs Norm Alley...

Oh, Miss, she’s a true throwback to an era of values. Industrious. Presentable. A bit of a devil around the cribbage board. And she provides an excellent head job...

Abbie didn’t flinch.

Tell us about the head jobs, Mr Alley.

Abbie said this as if asking about for the recipe for orange sponge cake.

It seemed to seduce, you had to pretend you didn’t know what was happening. And you needed co-operation from your prey...

Voices at the nearby back yelled Head jobs!

One let them wait, reeling in his crowd.

Well, you know Miss, I don’t like to give out Mrs Norm’s secrets—she’s very proud of her head jobs...

Tell us!

Head jobs! Head jobs!

He let the chant build a little. 

Well, if you can all keep a secret, ladies and gentlemen...

There must have been something cathartic for well-educated types in yelling like children. Pleasure centre neural circuits caressed by the ‘d’ and ‘b’ sounds in combination...

Mrs Norm likes to use a bit of fresh mint...

He noted the muted response, a couple of half-giggles, and the inhalation of anticipation.

Yes, a little wedge of fresh mint stuck in the coin slot there... that does the trick.

‘Coin slot’ did the trick. They all laughed. 

Yes, she says it increases her efficiency no end. Mrs Norm favours Spearmint, though sometimes she spices things up a little with...

Fruity tingle! Frankie suggested loudly.

He had them again. Nothing like oral sex jokes, he supposed, fantasising about comparing routines in the comedic afterlife with hard-bitten New York stand-ups. 

Ben thought about his entertaining afterlife as The Tube pushed toward Narre Warren, where treeless estates invaded the hills.

Then they veered off the freeway, and the old highway, into Hallam South Road.

Norm Alley took it in his stride.

Ladies and gentlemen, Suburban Tours now offers you an unprecedented insight into the Australian Experience. The spontaneous detour is a secret feature of our exclusive packages. At seemingly inopportune moments, our experienced and expert navigator Two will deviate into the unrecognised heart of our culture.

Two probed the surroundings as if sending gamma rays with his eyes. This unloved place seemed important to him. The bus slowed to walking pace, drifting on to the crunch and slip of the unsealed verges. One, worried, but intrigued, looked at what the older man gazed upon.

It was a landscape changing before your eyes. Orange witches hats guarding high-curbed road-widening works, crime-scene tape crossing the unfinished driveway of an anonymous company’s unopened headquarters, forward-scouting infrastructure making a circuit board of a distant hillside, trucks muddying unborn bitumen.

It was like a disaster area without the rubble, the chaos populated by trucks and Utes instead of ambulances; buildings undressed, or yet to rise, instead of half-destroyed. A region of cranes, graders, bulldozers, poles, sand, and everywhere gravel, the envoy of transition.

Everything was announced, in lurid orange and yellow fluorescence, as ‘now open’ or ‘coming soon’.

This was the frontier of development. Huge simple pieces of cement and steel bolted together to create homes for businesses. Streets with stormwater and electricity and footpaths, lacking the lawns and shrubs of landscaping. One’s Suburban Tours antenna was twitching. Newness of place and idea.

Ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the cutting edge of our economy and society... He meant it, as ‘Norm Alley’, or ‘Ben Kester’, or ‘One’. 

Mesmerised, Two yanked The Tube onto Centre Road, an unsealed, dusty, rutted vestige of Hallam’s rural past.

On the right, the heaped tangle of noxious blackberries. On the left, the foundation slabs of new factories, vast flows of grey smoothness. Then, between the railway and the suburban hills, only scruffy yellow paddocks. Empty, unheeded space.

The crawling progress of The Tube, unsettling after an hour of speed, made One uncertain. The detour had become a major excursion. Two might be a murderous psychopath about to inflict unfunny things upon him and his new best friends. What did he know about this man? He resisted his paranoia and tried to think of his next verbal gambit.

A brief pit stop, ladies and gentlemen, in the unique milieu (he’d always wanted to use that word) of Centre Road, Hallam. Only seven-and-a-half people in the history of humanity have ever voluntarily stopped at this point on the globe.

Two brought the Tube to a stop outside what appeared to have been a house. He wandered out, hypnotised, compelled towards the remains.

One followed Two from a respectful distance for a few strides, then left the taciturn abductor alone with the ruined dwelling. Ben crossed the narrow dirt road and began to wander.

He found himself on a hump of weeds alongside an oily man-altered creek. Hills on every horizon gave the place the feeling of lying below sea-level. Residential suburbia, a massive shopping centre, the highway and the railway line turned their backs on this in-between place.

One saw the permanent scaffolding of power lines, great A-frame structures with anklets of barbed wire.

He saw the drain curl around itself in the lowland, like intestine. The rarely accessed roadway followed it past abandoned cars, shopping carts, dumped building debris, a mandatory unlaced shoe. The tall reedy vegetation incorporating the oldest dumped rubbish into its topography.

One wanted to explore the meandering watercourse but knew his responsibilities lay with the bus. Here, you were within sight of thousands but removed from anything familiar. It could have been the other side of the world.

Two wandered amongst the wreckage of the small house, an off-white brick veneer plucked from a poor suburb. It was so isolated, so incongruous in these unloved lowlands.

The house itself was an exhibit of decay. A rotted limb thick as a human torso lay across what would have been the front entrance. Its roof was missing in places, its walls were gaps, any fitting of value ripped out, leaving curled plasterboard and drooping wires. Bedrooms naked to each other admitted thick grass.

A remnant of cream brick wall identified it as a modest former family home, a low-ceilinged box earmarked for an anonymous role on a cheap estate.

It was not yet a pile of rubble. It still retained a few beams that mocked the word ‘house’, the idea of ‘structure’.

One found it undignified, dreadful. Dead but not yet buried. Useless but dangerous, left to the vandals and never finished off. It was a display house for destruction, hopelessness, insecurity.

One lurched along the cracked driveway. He had just noticed a sign, still intact on the remaining wall. They had named this house, this property.

One felt his guts twist.

Hundreds had partied and looted here and none had bothered to remove or smash that sign. They had run into the letter box at the unhinged front gate, tilted a telephone pole, burned the chook sheds, but the sign was intact, proclaiming the degraded site to be ‘Springfield’. Cursive script, circa 1975, conservative, but hopeful. This had been a cheap structure, one like thousands of others, but it had been someone’s home.

One wondered if Two shared a taste for abandoned or off-limits spaces like this desolate site. Could the gruff behemoth be a kindred spirit, a fellow Suburban Tourist?

Then Two emerged through the frame of what was once the front door. He was a rage of repression, dark and red. His face was bitter, his fists clenched.

One had intruded. Like all the vandals who had broken this home.

Two stormed back towards the bus, spitting as if in curse upon the sullied Springfield grounds. He knew it was ridiculous, but One felt responsible for Two’s ill-humour. He didn’t much like that feeling, so he tried to think of something else.

Usually, his mind would have turned to an upcoming night out, or a fantasy of curvaceous Mel liking him. But now he had access to the experience of performing; he now had a cherished memory of being good at something. He wished he could feel that way again. Now.

The Tube started up, a startling ‘ahem’.

Standing on the manufactured creek edge, aware of an expanded sky, Ben tried to understand what so captivated him about this wasteland and its ruined house. There was something to grasp from this. Awareness, as always, just out of reach.

Two sounded the horn on the minibus, an impotent bicycle wheeze. One could hear Abbie’s friends burst into laughter at its sound.

One was holding everyone up.

He turned and faced the vehicle. The laughing faces of his new friends urging him back on board with cheerful abuse. 

A surge of sentiment went gliding through his pores; under his fingernails; around his eyes... The cool air of immensity... It went straight to his brain and the insides of his veins. 

It was as clean as anger, this sensation. A full-on bloody rush.

He remembered it from childhood.

A desperate desire for more of life, and the sadness of knowing life was big and full of possibilities that you would never experience or know existed. A sadness of wonder.

He didn’t know if it demanded tears or a scream or crazy laughter, or no response at all.

A feeling of being himself and no other, a thing with a beginning and an end, precariously alive.

The sensation was not wished for, it could not be invoked and he didn’t remember it between occurrences. It was exciting but perfectly useless. You just went with it and then it was gone. There was nothing that explained it, or told you to grasp it or to try harder to remember it.

The sensations could have been growth pangs, his soul fumbling for its boundaries, to learn its shape.

He’d last felt them when he was a boy, walking alone in the bush.  

Since he was that boy, he’d been a combination of opinions, put on like clothes. None of which felt like his. Urban exploration had appealed